Nov 14

Funny, but incorrect

From the November 12 “Kernel Panic”:

Nov 12 2003 strip

In fact, this strip is incorrect. I did not coin the term “open source”;
I only popularized it. It was coined by
my friend Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute. While it’s true that I more or less ran the brainstorming session and fortunately had enough of a clue to recognize a winner when it popped up, the creative leap was all hers.

UPDATE: Yes, it now reads “popularized”. Chris Wright changed it.

Nov 14

Selecting for intelligence

Mike Smith relays an interesting possible explanation for the observed
statistical fact that American and European Jews have a mean IQ a
standard deviation higher than Caucasian gentiles:

During the period from ancient times to modern times, there was a
constant phenomenon of Jews converting to Christianity (there were
many social pressures to do so). In a nutshell, the idea is that the
lower-IQ Jews were statistically more likely to convert, as it freed
them from having to learn to read Torah. During the Middle Ages, it
was not worth the effort for most people to become literate; the
payback was not worth it. Books were rare and expensive, and learning
to read was no guarantee of getting ahead in life. Of course, people
like to do what they’re especially good at, and the higher-IQ’s among
the Jews did not find learning to read to be such a burden. As such,
they were statistically less likely to convert (and statistically more
likely to become fathers of many children in a culture that valued
intelligence.) It is worth noting that in ancient times, Jews were not
stereotyped as especially intelligent; that stereotype arose in the
Middle Ages.

This is a special case of one of my favorite Damned Ideas, originally
developed by John W. Campbell in the 1960s from some speculations
by a forgotten French anthropologist. Campbell proposed that the
manhood initiation rituals found in many primitive tribes are a
selective machine designed to permit adulthood and reproduction only
to those who can demonstrate verbal fluency and the ability to override
instinctive fears on verbal command.

Campbell suggests that all living humans are descended from groups
of hominids that, having evolved full-human mental capability in some
of their members, found the overhead of supporting the dullards too
high. So they began selecting for traits correlated with intelligence
through initiation rituals timed for just as their offspring were
achieving reproductive capacity; losers got driven out, or possibly
killed and eaten.

Campbell pointed out that the common elements of tribal initiations
are (a) scarring or cicatricing of the skin, opening the way for
lethal infections, (b) alteration or mutilation of the genitals,
threatening the ability to reproduce, and (b) alteration of the mouth
and teeth, threatening the ability to eat. These seem particularly
well optimized for inducing maximum instinctive fear in the subject
while actually being relatively safe under controlled and relatively
hygenic conditions. The core test of initiation is this: can the
subject conquer fear and submit to the initiation on the basis
of learned (verbal, in preliterate societies) command?

Campbell noticed the first order effect was to shift the mean of
the IQ bell curve upwards over generations. The second-order effect,
which if he noticed he didn’t talk about, was to start an arms race in
initiation rituals; competing bands experimented with different
selective filters (not consciously but through random variation).
Setting the bar too low or too high would create a bad tradeoff
between IQ selectivity and maintaining raw reproductive capacity. So
we’re descended from the hominids who found the right tradeoff to push
their mean IQ up as rapidly as possible and outcompeted the groups
that chose less well.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Campbell or his sources, but
this theory explains why initiation rituals for girls are a rare and
usually post-literate phenomenon. Male reproductive capacity is
cheap; a healthy young man can impregnate several young women a day,
and healthy young men are instinct-wired to do exactly that whenever
they can get away with it. Female reproductive capacity, on
the other hand, is scarce and precious. So it makes sense to select
the boys ruthlessly and give the girls a pass. Of course if you push
this too far you don’t get enough hunters and fighters, but the right
tradeoff pretty clearly is not 1-to-1.

(This would also explain why humans are designed for mild polygyny,
1 to 3 sexual partners per male. You can spot this by looking at
where human beings are on various physical characteristics that
correlate with degree of polygyny in other primates — disparity in
average size between males and females, for example, is strongly
correlated with it.)

What Campbell did notice is that this theory of selection
by initiation would neatly explain one of the mysteries of human
paleoanthropology — how human beings got so smart so fast. The
differences between H. Erectus and H. Sapiens are not large in
absolute genetic terms (they can’t be, we share over 94% of our genome
with chimps) but they’re hard to credit given normal rates of
morphological change in mammals and only two million years to work
in. Something must have been putting hominids under
abnormally strong selective pressure — and Campbell’s idea
is that we did it to ourselves!

Now, I’m not sure I believe Jews bootstrapping themselves up a
whole standard deviation in less than 2000 years, but if you apply
a similar idea to a longer timeframe it begins to look pretty
reasonable. (And Campbell did suggest that the Jewish practice of
infant circumcision had originally been a manhood rite.)

Within my lifetime, I expect we’re going to have the ability to do
germ-line enhancement of human intelligence. I strongly suspect that that
will set off another arms race — because cultures that suppress
that technology will be once again doomed against cultures that do. And
this time, we’re smart enough to know that in advance…

Nov 14

Communism and the Jews

Uh-oh. I see another identity-politics double-bind coming. Eugene Volokh comments on the anti-semitic canard that Jews were disproportionally influential in the development of Communism. The sides in this kind of dispute are very predictable. One one hand, the anti-Semites, a disgusting crew of racist troglodytes with evil motives. On the other, the good-hearted and right-thinking people in the world exclaiming in horror at the very thought that anyone might say anything veering so close to the classic tropes of anti-Semitic propaganda. (And I am not being the least bit ironic in either description, not this time.)

Unfortunately, the awkward thing about this particular canard is that it happens to be true. And that illustrates a serious problem, an inability to cope that most historians have acquired when questions of history go too near certain forbidden topics and modes of inquiry.

As Eugene Volokh’s sources note, a disproportionately large number of the original Bolsheviks were Jewish. Karl Marx was ethnically Jewish, though his parents had converted to Christianity. It is impossible to study the history of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism without noticing how many Jewish names crop up among the leading intellectuals. It is equally impossible not to notice how many of the Old Left families in the U.S. were (and still are) Jewish — and, more specifically, Ashkenazim of German or Eastern European extraction. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg didn’t come out of nowhere.

It’s not even very hard to understand why this is. There is a pattern, going back to Spinoza in the 1600s, of Jewish intellectuals seeking out the leading edge of certain kinds of reform movements. Broadly speaking, if you look at any social movement of the last 300 years that was secular, rationalist, and communitarian, somewhere in it you would find nonobservant Jews providing a lot of the intellectual firepower and organizational skills. Often a disproportionate share, relative to other population groups.

Communism was one example; there are many others. One of my favorites is the Ethical Culture movement. Today, we have the Free Software movement, not coincidentally founded by Jewish atheist Richard Stallman. There is an undeniable similarity among all these movements, an elusive deep
structure having to do not so much with shared beliefs as a shared style of believing that one might call messianic social rationalism.

Anybody who thinks I’m arguing for a conspiracy theory should check their meds. No, there is something much simpler and subtler at work here. Inherited religious myths, even when they no longer have normative force, influence the language and conceptual frameworks that intellectuals use to approach other issues. The mythologist Joseph Campbell once noted that thinkers with a Catholic background like mine gravitate towards universalizing mysticisms and Protestants towards individualist redemptionism; he could have added that thinkers with a Jewish heritage tend to love messianic social doctrines. (One can cite exceptions to all three, of course, but the correlation will still be there after you’ve done so.)

Thus, assimilated Jews have a particular propensity for constructing secular messianisms — or for elaborating and intellectualizing secular messianisms invented by gentiles. But you can’t say this sort of thing in academia; you get called a racist if you do. And you especially aren’t allowed to notice the other reason movements like Communism sometime look not unlike Jewish conspiracies — which is that the IQ bell curve for Jews has a mean about a standard deviation north of the IQ bell curve for Caucasian gentiles.

In cold and sober truth, in any kind of organization where intelligence matters — even the Communist movement —, you are going to find a disproportionate number of Jews with their hands on the levers. It doesn’t take any conspiracy to arrange this, and it’s not the Jews’ fault the goyim around them are such narrs (Yiddish
for “imbeciles”). It just happens.

But only people like me who don’t give a shit about being castigated for political incorrectness are willing to even whisper these things. Because that’s true, anti-anti-Semites can’t counter anti-Semitic muck-spreading with the truth; instead, they have to pretend that none of the historical patterns around which anti-Semites have constructed
their paranoid delusions have any basis in fact at all.

This is denial, and leaves the good guys in a damn weak position against anti-Semitic racists, who by distorting the record only a little can not only feel they have the truth on their side, but in some nontrivial ways actually be justified in that belief.

Unlike the anti-Semites, I mostly like the cultural traits that led so many Jewish intellectuals to Communism — including one I haven’t mentioned yet, the urge to transcend ethnic tribalism
and order the world according to a Law. But if the road to a Christian hell is paved with good individual intentions, the road to totalitarian hell is paved with communitarian idealism. It’s a tragedy that in Communism Jewish idealism, messianism, and intellectualism nourished a monster that turned on the Jews and killed so many of them.

If the discussion didn’t violate so many taboos, mainstream scholars could start asking even more interesting questions. Like: exactly how and why did thinkers raised in the relatively gentle communitarianism of the Jewish tradition become apologists for the vicious collectivism of Marxism and all its toxic children? And what can we do to keep the like from happening again, to Jews or anyone else?

But these questions probably won’t get seriously asked in my lifetime. Because political correctness has made us afraid to notice that, in some ways, the Jews really have had a special, shaping influence on the reform politics of the modern era, including Communism. About that much, the anti-Semites are right.

Nov 13

The desexualization of the American (fe)male

There’s been quite a blogospheric flap lately about Kim DuToit’s
essay The
Pussification Of The Western Male
. The single feature of the
conversation that surprised me most is that nobody connected it to
Steven den Beste’s equally searing essay Anglo Women are an
endangered species
.

Steve’s point complements Kim’s and amplifies it in some useful
ways. Nobody wants to go back to the days when women were treated as
chattels or second-class citizens. Anyway, attempts to do so would be
doomed for reasons not so much moral as economic; societies that
suppress the productivity and intelligence of 50% of their members are
inevitably going to lose out to societies that don’t. But what Steve and
Kim have pointed out is that Western society often has pursued the
worthy goal of equality in a way that is hamfisted and destructive,
because it tries to remake human nature rather than acknowledging and
working with it.

These essays address two specific problems we’ve been saddled with;
Kim’s with the attack on masculinity, and Steve’s with the attack on
femininity. Among white anglos (especially bicoastal
“progressive” white anglos), it is no longer respectable
for a male person to behave like a man and a female person to behave
like a woman.

In fact, in today’s bien-pensant circles, one can be attacked as a
sexist for suggesting that the phrase “like a man” or
“like a woman” has any meaning at all. Many of us have
become obscurely terrified of sexual dimorphism, apparently out of
fear that acknowledging it will bring back the bad old days.

This kind of attitude has done more damage than most people
realize. Read those essays. There’s something gone badly wrong when
normal boys are dosed with Ritalin for being normally loud and
aggressive, and only strippers have the privilege of hugging a man
they like while at work.

I think our culture will recover from this. Beginning in the
1950s, portions of the kibbutz movement in Israel made the most
fervent try yet at erasing sex differences — they raised kids
in creches and tried to systematically stamp out sex-differentiated
behaviors. They failed; the children of the first generation, despite
intense socialization, gravitated back to traditional sex roles.

We’ll all be happier when we relax enough to acknowledge that
although equality before the law is something every human deserves,
some things naturally fall in men’s country and some in women’s
country — and the fact that minorities of men and women behave
in gender-atypical ways doesn’t change that reality. There will never
be more female soldiers or policemen than male ones, and never more
male nurses and child-rearers than female ones. Men are going to
groove on power tools and women are going to coo at babies; that’s
just the way it is. down to our DNA. Behavioral dimorphism is wired
into us for good reasons that have everything to do with Darwin and
nothing to do with political correctness.

The first stage of recovery is recognizing that there’s a problem
— that men and women find each others’ behavioral as well as
physical sex differences attractive, and that neither men nor women
are well served by efforts to cram us all into a unisex box. My wife
once observed, on behalf of a billion sisters, “What good is a man if
you cut off his balls?” — and she was talking everyday behavior,
not just anatomy or sexual function. There aren’t a lot of men who
will seek out the company of defeminized women if they have a choice
in the matter, either.

That is where essays like Kim’s and Steve’s can help. By waking us up
and pissing us off, they remind us that our sex-linked behaviors and
our preferences for sex-linked behaviors in others actually
matter, that they’re every bit as much a part of our normal
human makeup as having penises or vaginas. People who want us to
forget this for ideological reasons are objectively inhumane.

Nov 12

Yee-ha! W00t! Excelsior!

I got email from Dr. Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog,
about an hour ago. The bad news was, he turned down the short story. The
good news was he accepted the fact article.

I’m going to be published in Analog!

/me does geeky victory dance

OK, so this is one of those things where if you don’t immediately
get why it’s wicked cool, no amount of explanation is likely to
enlighten you. I’ll just say I’ve been a science-fiction fan
for 35 years and Analog has always been the banner-bearer
for my kind of SF, the stuff with the rivets in it. I’ve wanted to
get published there when I grew up ever since I was 11 years old;
this is literally a childhood dream come true.

Oh. And Dr. Schmidt asked me to send him more fiction…

Nov 12

CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell

The CSS designer for WordPress, the successor to the
b2 engine that I may be upgrading to shortly, responded to my previous
rant. In a generally thoughtful and responsive post, he said “But
even if [pixel sizes] are defined for fonts, does your browser not let
you easily resize this?”.

This, I’m afraid, is CSS designer cluelessness in a nutshell.

In particular, I should not have to do an explicit operation every
time to get the font sizes I want. In general, answers of the form
“you can override the designer’s preferences by jumping through hoops”
show the wrong attitude. This attitude clashes with the objective
reality of lots of different display devices out there.

It’s also bad human-factors engineering. As the user, my preferences
should be primary
— in font sizes as in all other things. That’s
how the Web is supposed to work, and CSS and web designers who don’t
get this are doing users a major disservice in order to gratify their
own egos.

Ultimately they’re shooting themselves in the foot, too — think about
what will happen over time as display sizes both average larger and
the size dispersion increases (e.g. cell phones and PDAs get WiFi at
the same time desktop displays go to 1600×1200 and higher).
Fixed-size fonts, in farticular, are going to be a bigger and bigger
lose as time goes on.

To the extent you think of yourself as a servant of the user, rather
than an artist whose job it is to make things pretty, that’s when your
designs will have real and lasting value. This is a hard lesson for
artists to learn, but it’s the only way to avoid filling the web with
designs that are gaudy, wearisome, and lose their utility as display
technology improves and becomes more various.

Nov 11

A rant — Why are CSS designers so utterly freaking clueless?

People who put absolute pixel sizes in CSS layouts should be lashed
with knouts. I’ve tripped over this problem yet again while moving my
blog; I’m using b2, and the default
stylesheet shipped with it was obviously produced by some graphics
designer who has failed to grasp the fact that there are lots of
different display sizes and resolutions out there.

OK, for those of you who don’t see the problem here, it goes like this.
Graphic designer composes his layout on a 1024×768 display. To make the
spacing come out all pretty, he specifies a 10 or 11-pixel font which looks
good on that 72-dot-per-inch display. Now I view it on my 1920×1440 display
at over 120dpi resolution — and the font is 40% smaller and a hell of
a strain to read. There are many other, related errors as well, like
specifying absolute box or table widths when percentage of screen width
would be more appropriate.

The basic error here is overcontrolling the layout rather than
letting the user’s browser choose it in execution of the user’s
preferences. Graphics designers are chronically prone to thinking of
a browser as a device for delivering pixels, rather than information.
But it doesn’t have to be this way — and, in fact, HTML isn’t
supposed to be. You can make your CSS scale to the user’s chosen font
size by specifying box dimensions in units of em, en and ex (which are
evaluated relative to the parent box’s current font size) rather than
pixels. But most CSS designers are apparently either too freaking
incompetent to do this or just don’t give a rat’s ass about
display-independence or the user’s preferences to begin with.

This sorry state of affairs is one of the better arguments for the
proposition, widely shared among my peers, that graphics designers
are basically a bunch of dope-smoking ponytailed
dimwits who need to be smacked upside the head on a regular basis and
not let anywhere near a software or web design without strict adult
supervision by a cluebat-wielding programmer.

Another stupid graphic-designer stunt is changing the colors on
visited and unvisited hotlinks away from the browser defaults (it’s especially bad when they’re mapped to the same color). What make this annoying is that it
discards an important visual cue for web page users by making it less
obvious where the hotlinks are. People who do this should be clubbed
with a chair leg until they stop.

Sigh. Here’s the default b2
stylesheet
and here is the stylesheet I
use
. Notice how much simpler mine is? The more you default
rendering decisions to the browser like Ghod and Tim Berners-Lee
intended, the more error-prone crap your stylesheets can omit, the
faster your pages will render, and the better the user experience
will be.

UPDATE: A reader tells me that part of this is the browser vendors’
fault. It seems that on older browsers, only pixel sizes worked
reliably. He says this has long since been fixed but the damage to
CSS designers’ minds was already done. Another reader pointed me to a
good rant on this topic by Jamie Zawinski.

Nov 11

The sleep of reason

I’ve had a copy of David Frum’s Dead Right sitting on my
coffee table for months. I didn’t buy it, it was landed on my by an old
friend who persists in imagining that I’m interested in reading
conservative political theory. In fact, it’s been years since I
found conservative theorizing other than wearily predictable. and it
would have been a lot more years if I hadn’t been unaccountably
late in grasping Russell Kirk’s argument for the organic wisdom of
institutions.

John Holbo’s smackdown
gives form to all the inchoate reasons I didn’t want to face Frum’s
book. Holbo, by his own account, goes looking for a unifying
philosophy of conservative thought and finds only an attitude, an
aesthetic, a hankering for people and situations to possess certain
qualities without a logically or ethically coherent theory of why
those qualities would be desirable. Holbo makes much of Frum’s
yearning that people should be tough, self-reliant, and
self-disciplined and Frum’s apparent willingness that the order of
society should punish slackness, even if that is not necessarily the
most economically efficient way to arrange things.

Holbo admits that he is loading onto Frum views that Frum would
probably deny. But his argument that those views are logical
extensions of positions Frum and other conservatives do hold
seems basically fair, and so does his charge that Frum-like
conservatism is an incoherent mishmash of emotional desires
masquerading (not very convincingly) as a political philosophy.

What I am left wondering is why Holbo expected conservatives to
have an actual theory in the first place. Or whether he actually
expected it at all — his purported surprise and disappointment
smells a bit disingenuous to me, a bit like a rhetorical flourish we’re
not really expected to believe. Did he really give no thought
beforehand to the implication of the label that conservatives use for
themselves?

The word conservative is an adjectival noun formed from the verb
‘to conservate’ — to keep something from decaying,
to hold it static, to preserve it. Almost all of the core attitudes
of conservatism unfold from that definition. Almost all of
conservatism is a set of rationalizations for a gut-level inclination
to see any sort of change as a threat. Conservatism is the politics
of dread, of people who are god-fearing, change-fearing, and
future-fearing.

I say ‘almost all’ because, by historical accident,

conservatism has got itself tangled up with impulses of a very
different kind — specifically classical-liberal and libertarian
ones. Many people who describe themselves as conservatives are in
fact nothing of the kind — they are in bed with conservatism
only out of a shared loathing of the Marxist/socialist left. The
alliance depends on a sort of folie a deux — conservatives
fooling themselves that free markets tend to freeze existing power
relationships in place, and classical-liberals fooling themselves that
freedom can be reconciled with the love of hierarchy and punishment
wired into the conservative hindbrain.

The parts of ‘conservative’ theory that actually
deserve to be called theory are usually classical-liberal or
libertarian intrusions. Nor is this anything new; before being
shotgun-wedded to classical liberalism by the threat of Marxism around
the beginning of the 20th century, conservatives imported their theory
from Aquinas or Plato or Calvin.

In fact, when you get down to trying, it is remarkably hard to name
anybody who has done a systematic job of deriving conservative
politics from a theory about the nature of good. Especially since the
Enlightenment, conservative thinkers have tended to be critics rather
than theory-builders, and in fact have tended to distrust theory.
Edmund Burke, for example, wasn’t a philosopher so much as he was a
critical aphorist. In our own day, Willam F. Buckley has been a
similar exemplar of the conservative public intellectual — witty
and devastatingly accurate about the failures and hypocrisies of his
opponents, but neither capable of nor interested in producing an
entire philosophy of right action or right government.

Russell Kirk is interesting precisely because he bucked this trend
to some extent. His idea that the forms of institutions embody an
unconscious wisdom about what tends to produce good outcomes is that
rarest of things, an argument for conservatism that is not circularly
bound to conservative, authoritarian, or religious assumptions.

It’s not enough, though. It isn’t sufficient to justify all the
normative things Frum and mainstream conservatives want; you can’t get
opposition to cloning stem cells out of it, for example. Nor does it
stand comparison with the elaborate theoretical edifices produced by
the Left. The core assumptions of Marxist theory were false-to-fact
and its results horrible, but there was a sort of system and logic
in between that conservative thinking never really had.

Left-liberals have no room for glee or schadenfreude at
conservative expense, though; their position is no better. Having
been shown the hard way that Hayek was right and there is no
alternative to the market, modern left-liberalism too is essentially a
bunch of sentiments and attitudes rather than a philosophy. The
practical politics of the left has become little more than a defensive
huddle around welfare-state institutions everybody knows are headed
for insolvency and collapse, and left attitudes increasingly amount to
little more than being against whatever they think conservatives are
for.

The inability to frame a positive philosophy is a serious problem
for both groups. It reduces their politics to a series of gut rumbles
and their conversation to increasingly enraged screaming straight from
the hypothalamus (vide Michael Moore and Ann Coulter). A rational
debate is hard to have when there isn’t any theory to frame and
moderate emotional fixations. Or, as Goethe put it, the sleep
of reason begets monsters.

Nov 10

Dehumanization

A reader, responding to the suggestion that we call the Baathist
holdouts in Iraq
werewolves
, asked rhetorically whether the intent was to dehumanize
them. Lurking behind this question was the theory that war supporters
like me need to make our enemies into un-persons in order to justify
continuing to kill them.

This question displays a kind of self-absorption by a person who
cannot really imagine a moral stance different from his/her own. In
such tender-minded thinking, the world is neatly divided into humans
that one must treat pretty much as though they were one’s next-door neighbor,
and non-humans who are not part of the moral community. The possibility
that a human being could be outside the moral community is essentially
ignored.

But there are human beings who are outside the moral community by nature.
We call them psychopaths. They lack the wiring for empathy and reciprocity
that makes it possible for most human beings to cooperate; they can (and
often do) commit sickening atrocities for pleasure. Fortunately, most
psychopaths have other kinds of neurological deficits as well and are
therefore not very bright.

Some people who probably were not born with psychopathy make themselves
into psychopaths. Consider, as a relevant example, Saddam Hussein and
his sons. They fed living people into shredders for amusement. No semantic
debate over whether that sort of monster is “human” or “dehumanized”
is going to change my judgment that that it deserves a violent
death as quickly as that result can be arranged.

The Baathist holdouts in Iraq are the hench-monsters of the
Husseins — the men who tore infants’ eyes out and strapped women
to tables in rape rooms. Calling them “werewolves” or “orcs” is not
an attempt to dehumanize them; that would be pointless, since they
have already dehumanized themselves.

Nov 07

Call them Werewolves

The blogosphere has shown some ability to change the terms and
terminology of the terror-war debate in the U.S. It’s time for a bit
of meme-hacking. Let’s see if we can displace terms like “insurgent”
or “Saddam loyalist” with one that conveys the true depth of evil we
are facing. I have a candidate to propose.

A little more than sixty years ago, the U.S. and its allies went to
war another psychopathic, mass-murdering dictator — Adolf
Hitler. In 1944, as the Third Reich was collapsing, the SS organized
a Nazi resistance to commit assassinations, sabotage and guerrilla
warfare behind Allied lines. The parallels in organization and
tactics with Baathist-holdout activity in Iraq are very
close
.

It is a matter of record from Saddam Hussein’s autobiography that
he admired Hitler’s ruthless efficiency and sought to emulate it. We
should revive for these remnant Baathist thugs the term, redolent of
willful evil and darkness, that the Nazi resistance fighters used for
themselves.

Call them werewolves. It’s what they deserve.

Blogspot comments

Nov 05

Advice For Democrats (after the November 2003 elections)

Well, the election results are in. The Democratic Party took a

beating yesterday — a worse one, I think, than it has really
assimilated. The Pew Research Center has analyzed
the results. If you guys don’t want your butts handed to you in 2004,
I have a few suggestions.

First, a reminder for new readers or old readers in any doubt. I
am not a Republican. I am not a conservative. There are some people
who are going to think my giving advice to the Democratic Party is
disingenuous or some form of point-scoring. They’re wrong. Politics
is an intrinsically evil game, but it might become at least less evil
if the Democrats cleaned up their act. I’d like to see that.

The most important message the voters delivered yesterday is that
running against George Bush is a fast road to failure. Where
Republican candidates successfully tied themselves to national issues and
ran on a boost-Bush platform (as in Kentucky and Mississippi) they won.
Only where the Democrats were able to divert attention to local issues
(like the FBI bug in Philadelphia Mayor Street’s office) did they
succeeed.

U.S. troops out of Iraq? Jobless recovery? War for oil? Tax
cuts? Halliburton? All these favored taglines of the anti-Bush crowd
got no traction at all. Zero. Zip. Nada. There is no evidence that
they helped and some inferential evidence in the poll numbers that
they hurt. The Democratic incumbant in Mississippi knew this was
a’comin’ — he actually worked at keeping Bill Clinton and the
whole gaggle of Democratic presidential candidates out of his state.
This didn’t save him.

The Democrats had already lost southern conservatives. The Pew
analysis says they’re losing moderates, too. Republicans gained in
every voter stratum except blacks — rich, poor, male, female,
whites, and hispanics. The angry-left pitch not only doesn’t work,
it’s accelerating a long-term tend of Republicanizing the South.

This has direct implications for 2004. The way the regional
arithmetic of the Electoral College works makes it effectively
impossible to take the White House without a strong showing in
the South. If the 2004 elections were held today, Bush couldn’t
lose — and the trends favor Republican gains in the next
year.

So. What can the Democrats do to win?

  1. Support the war.

    The U.S. is at war. We will continue to be at war until there is
    no credible threat from an alliance of WMD-wielding rogue states and
    the Islamist terror network. The American people have accepted this,
    and they will back George Bush’s war policy unless or until it appears
    that he cannot competently execute it. Arguing that we should not
    have a war policy, or should have a less ‘unilateral’ one,
    just lost the Democrats two governorships and will almost certainly
    lose them a third in Lousiana on 15 Nov.

  2. Stop trying to personalize the 2004 campaign.

    The only loser bigger than running gainst Bush’s war policy is
    running against Bush himself. The Bush-is-Hitler/Bush-is-a-moron thing
    has no zorch anywhere outside a set of bicoastal Brie-nibbler
    patches and university campuses that can be counted on one hand.
    The American people like and respect Bush, even when they question his
    policies. (I find this part difficult to understand myself, but the
    evidence is undeniable.)

  3. Actively support gun rights.

    Of all the single-issue blocs, gun owners are both the largest and
    would probably the easiest to pry loose from the Republican base
    (remember, Bill Clinton himself said gun control swung the last
    election cycle). Over 50% of American households own guns and their
    demographics cross over many narrower political classifications. A
    lot of swing voters like me simply will not vote for any Democrat
    without an actively pro-Second-Amendment record, but will give
    Republicans the benefit of the doubt on this issue. If you want us
    back, dump the gun-grabbers overboard.

  4. Drop the prescription-drug entitlement.

    I pick on this one because there is just now no more obvious
    example of domestic-policy fecklessness. The American people said no
    to single-payer health care ten years ago. If you think they can’t
    spot a multi-billion-doller Medicare boondoggle in the making, you’re
    fooling yourself. Passing this turkey will bring no credit on either
    the Democrats or Republicans supporting it. Let it die.

  5. Give us some presidential candidates who aren’t jokes

    I look at the Nine Dwarves and the first thing reaction that comes
    to mind isn’t even disgust but a sort of weary incredulity. I think
    of P.J. O’Rourke’s line: “What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking
    fuck?” A major party in the wealthiest, most powerful, fourth most
    populous nation in the world can’t do any better than these?

    I think I have a lot of company in judging that these guys looked
    better six months ago, before they cheapened themselves with their
    endless indistinguishable yapping and their blatant pandering to the
    silliest barking moonbats on the fringe of the Democratic left. Bush
    has actually gained stature by comparison after every debate.

    Nobody expects these guys to sound like Republicans — but, you know,
    once, there used to be a Democratic position that didn’t sound like
    a petulant “Nyah, nyahhh”. I haven’t heard any credible plan for the
    war or the economy. Clue: Neither “Repeal the Bush tax cuts” or “Hand
    Iraq to the U.N. and the French” will fly to anyone who can string
    three facts together about economics or history. I don’t think these
    characters even believe their own bullshit.

You Republicans out there will be comforted by the thought
that the Democrats are utterly incapable of taking this advice. I am
not comforted by that thought — but you’re probably
right.

(Correction: a reader pointed out that in 2003 the U.S. is
the third most populous country in the world, not the
fourth.)

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Nov 04

The Whig Maneuver

VodkaPundit asks: Is the Democratic Party becoming increasingly
likely to pull a Whig Maneuver and disappear into history? If so, what
replaces it?

The Democrats certainly seem to be trying pretty hard to
self-destruct. But this is not a new story; it’s been going on ever
since the New Left captured the party apparat in the early 1970s. My
first experience of political activism was standing athwart that
particular tide of history, yelling “stop!”, as a campaign worker for
centrist Democrat Scoop Jackson in 1975. I think I already
half-understood that he was doomed. What I didn’t foresee was the
completeness with which the Democrats would abandon their southern and
rural wings to become a party run exclusively by Brie-nibbling urban
elites. Call it the NPRization of the party.

Recently they’ve abandoned the private-sector labor unions as well.
Just before 2000, a key Democratic strategist noted that party’s
demographic power base consisted solely of blacks and the
public-employee unions. Bill Clinton, charming sociopath and perfect
acme of the American political creature that he was, had managed to
paper over that problem for a while. But it keeps getting worse. The
liberal-Democrat lock on the national media is crumbling under
pressure from talk radio, Fox News, and the bloggers. They’re losing
their ability to control the terms of political debate.

Finally, there is the notorious fractiousness of the smaller
Democratic interest groups. While the black establishment has largely
settled into the role of party wheelhorse and the trial lawyers play
financial sugar daddy without demanding much except a complete block on
tort reform, feminists and gays and the hard left continue to cause
the party problems out of all proportion to their voting strength. The
structural problem is that the small factions are disproprtionately
strong in the Democrats’ grass-roots organization; they therefore
exert a big influence on party primaries and tend to pull the
candidate list and the platform to the left.

Ever since the early 1990s, there’s been a tug-of-war going on
within the urban elites that now run the party; the Democratic
Leadership Council versus the inheritors of the New Left. What’s
happening now with the Dean campaign demonstrates that the DLC has
lost its grip. The left is winning. The trend that has taken the
Democrats from solid majority status in my childhood to the point
where it needs a Bill Clinton to win elections, if it continues, might
very well result in it disappearing into history.

The DLC’s most recent effort to reverse this tend — to stop
talking about gun control — only highlights the depth of the
problem. They know, because their own analysts and Bill Clinton have
told them, that gun owners are the swing vote that cost them the 1994
and 2000 elections. And yet, the left, for whom hatred of civilian
firearms is a religious absolute, has such a lock on the party machine
that the DLC can only talk about spin, not about a substantive change
in platform.

I expect the Democrats to lose heavily in today’s elections.
Like VodkaPundit, I expect the loss to change not a damn thing. The
DLC will continue to wring its hands, and the New Lefties, comforted
by convenient rationalizations in the major media, will continue to
march the Democratic Party towards a cliff’s edge.

Suppose they do succeed in self-destructing. What then?

No crystal ball is required to answer that question, just a look at
the minor-party voting statistics. If the Democrats crumble, the big
winners have to be the Greens and the Libertarians. The New Lefties
who run most levels of the modern Democratic apparat would run to the
Greens en masse; in fact, whatever organization emerges would probably
view itself (with some justification) as the Democratic Party’s
successor. They’d probably take the public-employee unions with them.

The interesting question is whether the black establishment would
follow. Blacks, as a voting group, are more conservative on social
issues than Democrats as a whole — heavily opposed to gay marriage,
for example, and more in favor of school vouchers. The strain between
general opinion among blacks and the strident leftism of many of their
public figures has been growing. If the party of Lyndon Johnson were
to disintegrate, it would become acute. I think the most likely
scenario is that the Al Sharptons. Cynthia McKinneys and Carol
Moseley-Brauns would run to the Greens, lose their popular base,
and the black vote would fragment. Blacks would become a normal
ethnic group, not tied to any one party.

The second-order effects on the Republicans would be just as
interesting. The youth demographic Andrew Sullivan and others call
“South Park Republicans” would bolt the GOP in a second if the
Libertarians looked like a credible alternative. So, albeit more
slowly and partially, would more traditional (and older)
small-government/classical-liberal/free-trade types. The big
question, given current pressures, is whether the Libs would remain
isolationist or reluctantly slide into the pro-war camp and start
behaving a bit more like a European party of the center or
center-right.

In either scenario, the effect on the Republicans would be to
resove their split-personality problem in favor of cultural
conservatives and the hard right. They’d become a lot more like a
Tory party. The really entertaining part comes when you look at how
this change would tie in with regional demographics — in this future,
the Republicans would become the party of the old South!

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comments

Oct 30

Great War II

Donald Sensing has suggested that it may have been a bad thing that
the Allies won the First World War, and sketched
an alternate history
. Stephen Green has replied.

Donald, I buy your scenario in the West (Germans go home, keeping
Alsace-Lorraine) but I think Steve is right that your take on German
war aims in the East was too benign. What we’d have been looking at here
is a continuation of the Age of Imperialism, which in our history was
finished off by the exhaustion of the victors after WWI and WWII.

Steve writes:

The situation in 1915 Europe would have been 1942 all over again,
but with one important difference: The United States would never have
gotten involved, never mobilized, and never had the opportunity to get
used to the idea of acting like a Great Power.

Right enough. Let’s carry this forward. As Donald has pointed
out, the drive on Paris revealed serious problems in Germany’s C3 and
infrastructure. There would have been a pause of, I think, about six
to eight years while the Germans consolidated their gains and built up
their road and rail net. Their most serious internal problem in the
short term would have been sporadic anti-German revolts in the eastern
client states.

Meanwhile, after the defeat of the Allies, isolationist sentiment
in the U.S. would have become stronger in the U.S. than it was
in our history. The Wilsonian “War Party” and anyone associated with
them would be completely discredited. American ethnic Germans who in our
history were finished off as a coherent political force by WWII, would
have gained more clout. President Lindbergh, maybe?

With the U.S. neutralized, the big fault line in geopolitics would
have been the British Empire versus the German Reich. One important
thing that would probably *not* have changed would have been the
development of Italian Fascism — but it wouldn’t have taken root in
Germany without the post-Versailles disaster.

The Tsarist regime in Russia was on its last legs. But Germany,
as victory, would have been in a position to turn on its agent
Lenin and back the White Russians just enough to keep Kerensky’s
govenment in power (but not enough for them to actually end the
simmering civil war).

About 1922 or so, the line-up might have looked like this: The
British Empire and a weakened, fractious Russia against a more
powerful Imperial Germany allied with Italy, Austria-Hungary, and the
Ottomans. But there’s something wrong with this picture; it ignores
geopolitical rivalries within the Central Powers themselves. So,
remembering the British grand strategy of sea control and alliances of
convenience with land powers, I’m going to suggest that England’s
course would be to snuggle up to the Ottomans and pry them loose from
the Axis. This would have made sense to the Ottomans, too; they
would want to constrain the rising power of Germany and Austria,
and I can imagine the British Foreign Office handing them back
southern Persia as a sweetener.

So the next confrontation would open with an Anglo-Russian-Turkish
alliance against a Germano-Austro-Italian one. France, even more seriously
mired in defeatism than in our history, would hardly be a player. The
U.S. would be neutral, possibly with a slight pro-German tilt.

Before general war broke out there would probably have been a
pattern of escalating friction on the imperial margins. Germany
would probably have flexed its muscles in Africa, first. Another
leading indicator would be the size of the German fleet. With no
Treaty of Washington in 1921, a serious naval arms race among
Germany, England and Japan would have been pretty much inevitable.

Imperial Japan would have been in a much stronger position than
historically, as well. With Russia weaker and the U.S. isolationist,
her main rival for influence in the Pacific would be the British. So
she would likely wind up on the Axis side, expanding onto the Asian
mainland even more agressively than in our timeline.

So the eequivalent of World War Two would have have been a bigger
and bloodier clash of empires.

UPDATE: Somebody commenting on VodkaPundit’s blog said:

Take your scenario a little further. With France as the
crippled defeated party, internal French politics mirror what
historically happened in Germany. I think you get the rise of French
fascists, who in turn blame French Jews for a “stab in the back”
(Dreyfus redux). The Holocaust has a Gallic flavor. Instead of
Teutonic efficiency, you get spontaneous mass killings by “citizen’s
commitees”. Horrendous to ponder, but anti-semitism is not an
exclusively German trait.

Very plausible. I can take this further still: on their way to
power the French Fascists have an ugly, low-level civil war with
conservative royalists that resembles the Spanish Civil War in our
timeline, except in this one Germany backs the royalists. The Spanish
Civil War itself happens more or less on schedule, but plays out
completely differently, too. Kerensky’s Russians would have had
neither the means nor the motivation to intervene that Stalin did, but
the Germans might very well have still backed Franco in restoring the
Spanish monarchy against the anarchists. So the likely outcome there
was Franco taking power sooner, probably as a generalissimo under a
weak Spanish king in Germany’s orbit, glaring across the Pyrenees
at France.

Where this is leading is that in Great War II, the France that
joins the allies is Fascist…

FURTHER UPDATE: With Bolshevism dead in Russia, the beau ideal of
the world’s anti-monarchist left becomes not “scientific socialism”
but anarcho-syndicalism on the Spanish model. At the extreme end this
movement fuses with what’s left of 19th-century romantic nihilism. As
a result, terrorism becomes an important tool of the fringe left
decades before the analogous development in our 1960s.

The British Labor Party turns increasingly syndicalist; in reaction,
British Tories increasingly link arms with French and other fascist
movements, which in this timeline are often genuinely reactionary
rather than being Marxism with a nationalist/racialist paint job.

In the U.S., trade unions also increasingly turn syndicalist and
anti-German. American conservatives tend to line up with the Bund and
the Kaiser; when Great War II breaks out in 1923. American industrialists
sell weapons to the German Empire. After a bitterly-fought election
in 1924 U.S. policy begins to tilt pro-British, but the change is
slow because many Americans are revolted by Fascist France.

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Oct 29

What Planet does Naomi Wolf Live On?

Naomi Wolf’s essay The Porn Myth strongly suggests that she lives on some other planet. It has been pretty well fisked over at Haight Speech and elsewhere. But so far, all of the people I’ve seen shredding it are women.

Perhaps this is because it’s politically incorrect for us panting, grunting persons-of-testicle to trash-talk a feminist icon like Ms. Wolf or say anything nice about porn. But here at Armed and Dangerous, we are fearless — and, more to the point, we have cleverly prepared our ground by having previously written an essay entitled Why does porn got to hurt so bad? in which we analyzed in detail why most porn is so intensely ugly.

So I’m going to say a few words about Ms. Wolf’s viewing-with-alarm, speaking as a man. A man who is quite in touch with his own desires, thank you, and has studied (yes, I mean studied) the effects of porn on his libido with some care.

In brief, my response to Ms. Wolf is: Haw haw haw har har hee hee hyuck *snort* giggle. Ma’am, you clearly have no freaking idea what you are talking about.

You show a young woman who makes herself sexually available but has trouble attracting the interest of a young man away from porn, and I’ll show you a young man who is either homosexual or stone dead.

Well, OK, I can imagine one exception. If the young woman in question is hideously deformed, the can’t-compete-with-porn insecurity you describe might be justified. But in general, it’s safe to predict that an offer of pussy from any woman who is not aggressively ugly will easily outbid the young man’s hand for the attention of his penis.

This is so not because young men are in any way enlightened, but because they are fizzing with hormones and instincts that are designed for the express purpose of inducing them to fuck…you know…women. Lots of them. Young men are not noted for being excessively discriminating in this regard. A biologist would explain this as r-type strategy — since his energy investment in reproduction is low, promiscuity is optimal.

Show me a young woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn for a man’s attention and I’ll show you one of two things. Either (a), she’s having galloping insecurity for some other reason and doesn’t notice that the man enjoys having sex with real women a hell of a lot more than he enjoys porn, or (b) she’s not having sex with that man.

There is one truth buried, oblique and nearly invisible, in Ms. Wolf’s informants’ reports. Sex with a real woman trumps porn, but porn trumps women who dangle sex in front of men and don’t deliver. Again, this has nothing to do with enlightenment, and whether the dangling is a deliberate tease, a product of inhibition, or simple ineptness at the courtship dance doesn’t matter much either. The most relevant causal fact is that young men get erections a lot, and when they get erections, having an orgasm tends to move to the top of the to-do-list and stay there.

Ms. Wolf, here is some simple advice you can give any woman who thinks she can’t compete with porn. First item on the checklist: is she fucking him? If the answer is “no”, then I regret to inform you that her grounds for complaint against the fact that he likes to jack off while looking at or thinking about pictures of porn babes are nil. Zip. Zero. You might as well try resenting water for flowing downhill.

On the other hand, if she is fucking him, he is not going to swap that for feelthy pixels. Trust me on this. I have a penis. I’ve been fucking women for nearly thirty years, and not once was I even remotely tempted to trade an actual roll in the hay for a fantasy image and my hand. Not even as a confused adolescent, and not even with the ones who were, relatively speaking, lousy in bed.

Any woman who thinks this is happening is evading a problem with the relationship, not with his sexual response. By pointing at porn, she is giving herself leave to ignore real issues. Like: am I joyful in bed? This has nothing to do with facials or Brazilian wax jobs — and, actually, as much to do with the capacity to receive pleasure from that man’s touch as the capacity to give him pleasure.

Here’s another secret about most men, most of the time: given a choice between a buff “porn-worthy” chick with a drawerful of sex toys who’s grudging or unresponsive in bed, or a plain jane with rudimentary technique who orgasms easily and generously, plain jane is the one we’re going to go back to. Again, this has a sound basis in evolutionary bio; orgasm is a sperm-retention behavior that increases the probability of conception, so an orgasming woman is saying pre-verbally “I want your child!”.

Having delivered a smackdown on Ms. Wolf’s silly thesis, I will now thump a number of her critics. Pretty much all of them report this exchange:

“Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

Several of the fiskings I’ve read avoid Ms. Wolf’s dim-bulbed ascription of that response to the insidious effects of porn only by writing off the kid as a callow, ignorant doofus. By doing so, they miss his point as completely as she did.

In fact, the kid is right. There is no mystery to sex. The mystery is in the stuff that is modulated onto sex like a signal onto a carrier wave, Relationships. Love. Intimacy. Mysticism. What this wise child is saying is that he wants to get the purely sexual tension out of the way so that he can get to the mystery.

Shame on Ms. Wolf for being in such a swivet about porn that she failed to notice this. But a greater shame on her fiskers, who had no single axe to grind and time for reflection — and thus, not even a bad excuse for their lack of perception.

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Oct 27

Stupid Like A Fox

For the kind of articulate extrovert who tends to go into politics or the
media, it can be very difficult to believe that a stumble-tongued,
inarticulate man can be other than an idiot. As an articulate extrovert
myself, I’ve had to struggle with this. Like most of our media and
chattering classes, my instinct too was to write George W. Bush as an
idiot who had stumbled into the Presidency through no merit of his own.

Events have forced me to nearly the opposite conclusion. George W. Bush
is no idiot. In fact, he now appears to me to be an extremely cunning man
who makes repeated and effective use of his opponents’ inability to take
him seriously.

Over and over again we’ve seen the pattern. Bush says he’s gaing
to do something. Opponents rant and rave and scream about what an
idiot he is. Amidst all the name-calling, an effective opposition
fails to materialize. When the smoke clears, events unfold pretty
much according to the Bush script.

It’s pretty much been that way on every issue bigger than judicial
nominations. Now, mind you, in this essay I’m not going to express
or even imply a judgment about whether or should be that way.
What I’m trying to point out is that even the U.N. has pretty much
ended up dancing Bush’s tune. All of the Franco/German/Russian talk
of thwarting that mad cowboy has come to this in the end: U.S, troops
in control of Iraq, Saddam gone, and the U.N. formally committed by
resolution to support the U.S. reconstruction without either a timeline
or any U.N. authority over Iraq.

Once or twice could be luck. But Bush keeps doing this.
He is such an effective political operator that his opponents find
that their ability to block him has quietly vanished while they
weren’t looking. The pathological rage now endemic in Democratic
circles is fueled by impotence. They know they were suckered,
swindled, had somehow, but they can’t pin down why or how the
majority voters stopped listening. Bad enough to have Reagan pound
the crap out of them — they thought he was an idiot too, but at
least they could console themselves that he was a glib idiot.
Being shellacked by a Republican who sounds like a moron behind a
microphone is more than their blood pressure can take.

Well, Democrats, I’ve got news for you. Bush is using your rage to
make you into idiots. I think, early in his political
career, he somehow learned how to push this button reliably, and has
been sucker-punching his opponents ever since. Clever of him —
but then, as I belatedly realized when I was thinking this through. he
has to be brighter than he looks. The dude flew fighter
planes! Simpletons can’t do that; the Air Force screens pilots for
intelligence because it has to.

Want to stop Bush? Then, Mr. J. Random Democrat, call Dubya evil if
you want — but accept that, on his record, he is pretty damn
bright. Stop screaming, take his brains seriously, and outsmart him.
That is, if you can.

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Oct 21

Attack of the Malaysian Moonbats

Today, a bunch of prominent warbloggers were hit by a
denial-of-service attack apparently orchestrated by a bunch of
comically incompetent al-Qaeda affiliates in Malaysia — and
I wasn’t a target.

I’d ask what I’ve been doing wrong with my life that I missed out
on the honor of being personally targeted by Osama’s fuckwit brigade.
But alas, I know full well wherein I failed. This is what I get for
going on hiatus for months to finish my book and put multiple spokes
in the wheels of SCO. I didn’t maintain the momentum I had in
2002/early-2003, and fell off the moonbats’ radar.

To all of you who were targeted — Internet Hagannah, InstaPundit,
Steve denBeste, Charles Johnson, and others: you have my respect and
my thanks for what you do every day. The war against terror is a war
of ideas as well as bullets. You do great service by unflinchingly
exposing the lies of the terror network and its apologists in the
West. The Malaysian Moonbats, in recognizing this, have paid you
greater tribute than I can.

Hmmm. Maybe I ought to update the Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto.
Think that’d piss ‘em off enough that they’s try to DDOS me?

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