I’m fond of pointing out that history favors ever larger human organizational units. In fact, nature seems to favor it. Early humans lived in groups no larger than 200, with most groups being under 100. We know this by using some basic math about how hunter-gatherer people live. Once you get beyond the 200 number, managing resources gets difficult because you suddenly need people who only manager other people.

We also have observations of hunter-gatherers in modern times. Even in areas with plenty of resources, the size of tribes ranges from between 100 and 200. The speculation is that in times of plenty when populations could outgrow the natural constraints, groups would split off forming new tribes in new lands. This is the most logical explanation for the migration of humans out of Africa and across the globe.

Human settlement changed the mathematics of human organization. Suddenly, bigger was better. Anyone who has done manual labor knows that the right tools and techniques can allow two men to perform the work of three. Agriculture suddenly made surplus possible. It also allowed for the planned storage of labor in the form of shelters, provisions, trade items, etc. Large groups of people coordinating their efforts was made practical and profitable by agriculture.

Or maybe the desire for larger organizational units drove the transition to settlement. It’s not always easy to know these things. It’s entirely possible that people figured out that different resource allocation methods would allow for big groups. Instead of Cousin Trog and his clan splitting off from the group, Grog and Trog could work together to grow vegetables and raise animals.

Bronze Age people had empires, but running large scale societies was tough due to communications and distance. There was also the fact that Bronze Age societies were largely palace economies. That does not scale up very well. The solution was to have a collection of palace economies under the rule of a dominant clan or city-state. Ultimately, that system proved too fragile. The late Bronze Age collapse was most likely the result of massive inefficiency.

The Romans managed to run a massive empire for a long time, despite the problems of communications and distance. They solved some of this with road building. All of a sudden, they could get word to distant outposts relatively quickly. They also had money, which makes the storage and transfer of wealth possible at a scale impossible in barter economies. Even so, the Romans outgrew the capacity of their organizing model and bankrupted themselves trying to make it work.

After the collapse of Rome, Europe went through a reorganization. Eventually, the new model allowed them to go from scattered tribes, to small kingdoms, to unified nations. The Brits are great example to consider. Under Roman rule they were just tribes without much of an organizational structure. They slowly evolved into small kingdoms after the Romans. Then it was the Heptarchy for a long stretch and finally a unified England.

Europe, of course, is trying to break free of the country model. Many on the Right argue that this can never work due to the vast differences in culture across Europe. The Greeks are not Germans so they cannot make a German economic and political system work. Critics consider the EU an empire disguised as a bureaucracy. Sort of like the Department of Motor Vehicles conquering Europe.

There’s a problem with that critique. The new model has new digital money and new digital communications. Fifty years ago, the single currency could never work. It’s why the gold standards failed. Digital credit money lets central banks adjust the money supply much faster and more precisely. It’s not perfect and may be a fantasy, but is a big difference in human organization.

Rapid communication and mass media also change things. Fifty years ago many people in the West lacked a telephone or television. Today, everyone has a mobile phone and internet access. This allows local governments to coordinate their message across languages and cultures. The fact that the German government runs the German media should come as no surprise. A popular media these days works hand and glove with government.

It’s why there is some reason to think the open borders types are close to right. They imagine a world without borders, but maybe they are just a click too fast. A European border with the rest of the world is necessary, but internal borders are not. Similarly, a border between the US and Canada is pointless, but a border with Mexico is a necessity, for now.

Samuel Huntington imagined a world that would be organized in zones. The West would be one zone. East Asia another. The Middle East another. Future conflicts would be along the borders where zones meet, like Ukraine and Syria. Whether or not it is by design or accident, it does appear to be the shape of things to come. Just look at the political debates. Underneath it all are the basic questions. Who is us and who is them?

Of course, this tendency toward larger organizational units could be a dead end. The dinosaurs would have something to say about it, I bet, if they were still around. It could very well turn out that the EU is no match for young men walking into Europe looking for a good time. It’s also possible that the EU was an answer to a problem that no longer exists. History, however, suggest that bigger is the way to bet.

One of the things I have been looking at in the polling data is the fact Trump seems to have a steady vote share across demographics, excluding race. Despite all the blather from the Conservative Industrial Complex about Trump relying on low-skill angry losers, he polls well with the college educated and he does well with higher income earners. In the GOP field, Trump is the most broad based candidate running.

That said, he seems to be locked into a range from 25% to 35%, with some polls in some places ticking up a little higher. Members of the CIC have started to look at this and cheer, thinking that once the field narrows, their guy will get the other 65% and charge to victory in the later primaries. It’s a comforting thought, I bet, so it is easy to see why they are clinging to it. Whether or not that happens is debatable.

Humans tend to emulate one another, which is why candidates get a “bump” after doing well in public opinion surveys, early primaries and the on-line polls after a good debate performance. If a lot of people like Candidate X, you will at least give Candidate X a look. Trump winning New Hampshire and then winning South Carolina would send a powerful signal to other voters that it is OK to vote for Trump.

Putting that aside, the question no one wants to ask is whether the GOP can win without the Trump vote. If you look at a Trump rally, it looks a lot like the Buchanan and Perot rallies back in the early 90’s. By that I mean there are more garden variety white guys than you typically see at a political rally. No notices that rallies are mostly middle aged women and young people bused in so the campaign can seem hip.

Trumps’ rallies are much more a normal mix of adults, which means more males than you usually see at these things. These are the people Sam Francis described in his essay, Message From MARS, with “MARS” meaning Middle American Radicals. (I don’t have a link for it, but you can probably find if you look for it.) These are normal people who try to ignore politics until they have no choice.

I don’t want to get too deep into the anthropological weeds, but there are a class of men with varying degrees of economic and cultural success, rooted in what we used to call working class values. These are men who get married to one biological women, have kids and do what was necessary to make sure the wife and kids have a good life. They may have been in the service, some went to college, while others went into the trades. These are the Dirt People

In 1992, the GOP pissed off these voters and many either skipped the election or voted Perot. Enormous effort was put into denying this reality to the point where the Conservative Industrial Complex internalized it as part of their dogma. They did not need to be more like Reagan. No, they needed to be more like Clinton! Eventually, Democrats offered up a bad candidate and we got George Bush the Minor, a sort of booby prize for Dirt People sticking with the party.

That’s the real lesson of 2000 and 2004. Al Gore appeared to be having a nervous breakdown during the debates with Bush. That and his loopy policy proposals allowed an otherwise uninteresting George Bush to win the election. In 2004, the Democrats offered up a ridiculous gigolo that no one in their right mind would elect to dog catcher. The fact that it was still a close election says a lot about what people truly thought of George Bush the Minor.

Regardless, the Conservative Industrial Complex drew a different lesson. Seeing waves of little brown guys washing up on our shores, changing the ethnic mix of the nation, they decided that the lesson of the last quarter century was that white guys were finished. Their time had passed. The future of the party and country was a Latin Yugoslavia with as many Africans and Muslims that could make the swim.

The Right concluded that in order to keep pace with the Left, they had to race into the vibrant future where the only pale penis people that matter are the homosexuals. For over a decade they have been yapping about how immigrants are natural conservatives, apparently not understanding the glaring contradiction in that assertion. The result was a push for amnesty, open borders and the whole buffet of multicultural nonsense.

The disaster that is unfolding for the GOP and the CIC is not simply due to getting too far over their skis. Mitt Romney built his campaign around polling and he knew he needed to be against amnesty. He tried to split the difference between what the data said and what the party leaders said. The result was no one believed him and he lost a winnable election.

The GOP concluded, amazingly, that the reason Romney lost was he did not embrace amnesty. Trump, for all his defects, was smart enough to see that the future is not now and America is not yet the vibrant multi-culti paradise. This revolt of the Dirt People is based on the obvious fact that a growing majority of people are thinking it is time to put the brakes on the madcap dash to the vibrant future.

Whatever the long term outcome, some basic math says the GOP can’t win without the Trump vote. Even if 10% of it abandons the GOP, it means millions of votes that never materialize. Given that Trump has enjoyed far more success than Perot or Buchanan, you have to assume that the potential boycott numbers could be quite large if the party screws the Dirt People.

Tonight, the Dirt People have spoke.

One of my favorite gags is to say, “America does not have a gun problem. America has a black guy problem.” It’s bait and inevitably someone calls me a racist. I then go to the statistics that show the staggering disparity between white and black crime rates. Net out young black males shooting other young black males and there’s nothing to talk about with regards to guns and crime.

The thing is, this is something we all know, but the religion of anti-racism makes it impossible to say in pubic. Even liberals know this and work around it. Gentrification of liberal cities is all about ethnic cleansing. Rich liberals force out the blacks so their hipster kids have safe neighborhoods in the city. As Steve Sailer puts it, it’s a game of Old Maid where liberal cities pawn off their difficult populations on unsuspecting suburbs.

It looks like Mike Bloomberg has decided to come clean on his gun nuttery and just say what everyone knows to be true.

Moderator Jennifer Bradley, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Institute, then asked what the U.S. can do to get people out of poverty. Bloomberg responded that conventional wisdom points to education, but education isn’t going to help uneducated adults. Bradley later asked how government can offer basic fairness to the children “who have been failed.”

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said. “They just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

At one point, the former mayor brought up New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices, which gained national attention in 2011. Bloomberg said that during his last year in office, a minister at a Baptist church in Harlem invited him to speak.

“While I’m sitting there waiting for him to introduce me, he said to his congregation, ‘You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn’t have to do it,’” Bloomberg said. “And so I knew I was going to be okay with that audience.”

The usual suspects call guys like Bloomberg a crazy Lefty, but his views are in-line with old school conservatives like Russell Kirk. The people in charge have a duty to defend ordered liberty, not theoretical philosophical concepts. Policies like stop and frisk in black ghettos save black lives, even though they violate the rights of the people in the ghetto. But, you can’t exercise your rights from the grave so it is a necessary trade-off.

In that regard, Bloomy’s sense of obligation is actually quite conservative. It used to be that the Right looked at natural rights as a starting point, a set of ideals to guide the people trusted with political power. The hard limits necessary to prevent tyranny were balanced against practical necessity. Men are not angels so you can’t trust them with too much power, but the people over whom they rule are not angels either.

New Hampshire is a funny primary. They let anyone vote, including people from out of state. They have been trying to fix that problem, but I don’t know how successful that effort has been. Still, the state has a great many Massholes who moved over the border to avoid taxes. They still dream of voting for a Kennedy, just not paying for the privilege. There are plenty of Calvin Coolidge conservatives too, but the state is slowly turning into Vermont.

The party men have figured this to be the firewall for their boys. Back in the fall when Trump started getting attention, they were predicting that he would follow the Howard Dean path. That is, a collapse in Iowa and a final flame out in New Hampshire. Rubio, Bush, Kasich or Christie would be the guy to emerge from the Granite State as their champion. Up until Saturday night, they were banking on Rubio.

The people in charge have already decided to ignore Trump and look at second place as that is the new first place, unless their boy finishes third. Looking at 538, the predicted order is Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush, but the separation is tiny so it is a dead heat for second place. No one is approaching 20% from that group so it will be tough to sell second as a victory. Then again, Clinton sold himself as the comeback kid after finishing third.

At the other end, this is the last hope for Christie, Carson and Farina. Christie needs to finish at least third and probably second. Farina is done, barring a miracle. She and Carson have been mostly decorations for the last few months and their utility has come to an end. Both will drop out this week and most likely endorse the party man. Farina just wants a cabinet job so she’ll do what’s she is told, but who knows with Carson.

From the party perspective, the best case tomorrow night is Trump finishes in the high 20’s and their boy finishes in the 20’s. Trump at 27% and Rubio at 20% can be spun as a great victory for Rubio. If Cruz were to drop to fourth or fifth, that would help to. The narrative out of New Hampshire would be that Trump and the crazies are losing steam, while the good thinkers are consolidating around their man. My bet is that story is written and ready to go.

What will happen is the party will call in their big donors to let Bush, Kasich and the rest know that it is time, for the good of the party, to rally around Rubio. This could also work if Kasich finishes second. He’s a loyal soldier of the party and he hails from a valuable state. He’s a bit erratic, but a strong second is hard to ignore, given what has gone on in the primary thus far. Kasich could plausibly reintroduce himself as the stable, experienced hand in the race.

The more likely scenario is Trump finishes in the high 20’s and the pack is in the mid teens. A four-way tie between Cruz, Kasich, Rubio and Bush is a disaster. Everyone then has a reason to stay in the race and they have a reason to attack one another. It would be even uglier if Trump cracks 30% and the pack is in the low teens. The story out of New Hampshire will be all about Trump and his numbers will jump everywhere. People like a winner.

The world is coming to an end scenario is a Trump – Cruz finish, with the former in the 30’s and the latter in the 20’s. The boys at National Review will be slitting their wrists if that happens. In that scenario, there’s no reason for the party men to stick around as they will have been rejected with prejudice. The race will be about who gets to lead the revolt the rest of the way. If you are a Cruz supporter, this is your ideal outcome on Tuesday.

The other race is actually more interesting for the simple reason Hillary Clinton may start to hear calls to drop out in favor of someone like Joe Biden. The spin will be that Bernie Sanders is the local favorite, but Vermont is not New Hampshire. He’s viewed mostly as a joke everywhere outside of Burlington. If he wins big it is because Democrats would rather lose than see Hillary Clinton in the White House. Go Bernie!

The only way to avoid this, I think, is for Clinton to have a shockingly close finish with Sanders. I mean something like 52-48 where she can then claim a surge of support. Right now, the polling has her under 40% so getting into the mid-40’s is the only way to avoid the inevitable questions about her plausibility as a candidate. With so much attention on the GOP side, this is not far fetched, but I would not bet on it. Again. Go Bernie!

The issue of drugs is one where you can divide sensible people from the unhinged. Sensible people understand that humans will always look for ways to get intoxicated and some of those ways will be deadly. Some kill over a lifetime like alcohol or smoking. Others kill quickly like meth or heroin. There’s often a criminal element around these things, which makes them a social problem, in addition to a personal problem.

Sensible people also understand that while you can never eliminate these vices, you can’t embrace them either. A society full of potheads, drunks and smack heads is not going to last very long. The great challenge of human organization is to reduce the number of people that are a burden on society, without turning men into slaves. The “free rider problem” has been with us since the dawn of time and will be with us until the end of time.

The libertarian obsession with drugs is well known. Libertarians were put on earth to harangue sensible people about the evils of drug prohibition. It’s their calling card and the reason they remain a fringe movement. Their brand of personal liberty sounds good until people think about Walmart having a sale on heroin or meth. No one wants to live in a world where some guy is snorting coke at your kid’s ball game.

That, I think, is the reason for the obsession with drugs. A libertarian society sounds great, as long as the society is full of libertarians able to live as rugged individuals, making no claims on their neighbors. Drug addicts present an impossible problem for libertarians. As soon as you have a decent population of people that make bad choices, you get demands for collective action to address the bad choices.

There’s another problem for libertarians when it comes to drugs and that’s their assumption that people act out of self interest. In the libertarian paradise where drugs are legal and welfare is voluntary, the belief is only a rare few will risk starvation in order to get high. Charitable welfare will provide the additional incentives for those that may choose getting high over food.

That’s the argument. The trouble is drug use makes clear that most people are not rational and they don’t always act out of self-interest. Things like meth would not exist if people were rational. Heck, weed would not exist as it is not a very pleasant form of intoxication compared to opiates or alcohol. Yet, marijuana is the most popular illicit drug in the West. Lots of people smoke pot because their peers do it or they have nothing better to do.

Then there are the drug dealers. If libertarians were right about people, we would have few drug dealers. In a town like Baltimore, the game gets you killed or sent away to prison for a long time. Yet, there are plenty of young men getting in the game. As soon as one dies, another takes up his spot on the corner. The money to be made is small, even by ghetto standards. Young men just like action and some young men just like the violence.

The bad choices drug takers make often lead to them not being able to fend for themselves. You can rely on charity to handle things like drug treatment, but you still need cops to get the junkies off the streets. You need cops to keep the junkies from robbing people to feed their habit. Like it or not, the drug addicted are a societal problem. Like public parks, they are a public obligation.

That does not mean the war on drugs is the answer. By every metric, prohibition has been a failure. The whole point of prohibition is to drive up the costs of making and selling the prohibited product. Make the cost high enough and the number willing to risk doing it shrinks to a manageable number. The price of the product reflects that reality and therefore prices limit the market. Prohibition is basically just cost shifting.

Yet, illicit drugs are cheaper and more potent than ever. There are new and improved drugs and the distribution channels are vastly more sophisticated than at the start of the drug war. Then you have the proliferation of prescription drugs that magically end up on the black market, often through physicians who make more writing scripts than seeing patients. The drug war is just a wildly expensive failure at this point.

I don’t know the answer to the problem. Maybe there is no answer. The number of heroin users in America is quite small according to the CDC. They are 0.3% of all drug takers. Roughly a quarter of Americans use illegal drugs so we’re talking about 300,000 people. That sounds like a lot but in a country of 300 million, it’s a nuisance, not an epidemic. It’s also easily manageable, if there’s a will to do something about it.

I watched very little of the Republican debate last night. These are not designed to inform the voters or challenge the contestants. They are TV shows. Those old enough to remember the Gong Show have to notice the similarities. The only difference is the old Gong Show had more self-respect. Chuck Barris had no illusions about what he was doing.

I caught some bits and pieces on-line, mostly through twitter. The clips I saw of Chris Christie pulling Rubio’s underwear over his head made me lough. I’ve said for years now that Rubio is Miss South Carolina with a penis. The guy is as dumb as plank, but he can memorize his lines. As long as he is not asked to go off script, he sounds convincing. Last night he sounded like every other dumb actor.

Trump supporters on-line were jubilant. I suspect they feared a rally by the open-borders people behind Rubio in New Hampshire. The Conservative media was all prepared to make second place the new first place, just as they did after Iowa, by making third the new first. I flipped on Fox and it looked like they were covering a funeral so I’m guessing they think it is curtains for Rubio.

What’s somewhat interesting about all this is both parties are facing a problem they thought they would never face. That is, the voters picking a nominee off the unapproved list. If Sanders wins big in New Hampshire, it’s hard to imagine Clinton recovering. What’s coming through loud and clear is the voters would rather lose than win with Hillary.

The Republicans are facing a similar problem. If Trump wins New Hampshire, it’s hard to imagine any of the dwarfs surviving the night. Bush, Kasich, Rubio and Christie will have lost badly in the first two tests. Cruz and Trump will be the remaining options. Unless one of the dwarfs has a magical election night and finishes second, there’s no argument for keeping them in the race.

My guess is the old hands in both parties are quietly discussing what they do to prevent these unacceptable options from winning the nomination. The Democrats have changed their system to give the party elders enough of the delegates so they could block Sanders if they choose to do it. That would mean having another option like Biden, Gore or maybe Warren. A Biden – Warren ticket could placate the Sanders people.

On the GOP side, it’s not as easy, but they can still throw a wrench in the works. One way would be to rally around the first dwarf on Tuesday night. Let say Kasich finishes second. The other dwarfs drop out and endorse him as king of the dwarfs and they make an explicit statement that they are doing it to stop Trump.

That crystallizes the rest of the race as the sensible wing versus the crazies. The media will pile on and it could probably be enough to prevent Trump from getting the required delegates. The dwarf league would ignore Cruz, seeing him as a drain on Trump. The trouble with this is it would be so transparent it could very well work in Trump’s favor.

The doomsday scenario for both parties is the Michael Bloomberg option. Bill Kristol has already said he will bolt the GOP if Trump is the nominee. It’s not hard to imagine the Conservative Industrial Complex following him and supporting Bloomberg as the “least bad option.” They could decorate their banners with quotes from Buckley about strategic voting.

At the same time, Progressives would suddenly have an option they could support if they don’t like Sanders. Instead of a blood bath at their convention, they could let Sanders have the nomination, but make clear that real liberal democrats will be backing Bloomberg as the reconciliation candidate. “He’s the only guy who can unite both parties!”

All of this sounds far fetched, but the prospect of a Trump – Sanders election sounded laughably absurd a year ago. We live in an age where the ridiculous quickly becomes the norm. Twenty years ago comics told jokes about men marrying men. Today, they threaten you with prison for even remembering those jokes. Mark Steyn was purged from National Review for repeating an old quip about homosexuals popular in the 50’s.

We are in a great transition so everything is on the table. Just look over at England. One party evaporated. The other is run by a lunatic, leaving them with the Tories and that weird Scottish Nationalist Party. Predicting that five years ago would have gotten you committed. Heck, the smart money five years ago said Labour would return to power.

Some on the Alt-Right think the parties are reorganizing along globalist-nationalist lines. Others see one party being the white party and the other the NAM party, making America something like Rhodesia, I guess. Then there are those who suspect Brazil is the future, where a light skin oligarchy rules over a massive dark skinned ghetto. Maybe some combination of all of those things is the answer.

The simpler answer could be that globalism simply has no constituency in a mass media democracy. Global capitalism outlandishly benefits a very small portion of society. People being what they are, this massive inequality opens the doors for candidates antithetical to global capitalism. That was the lesson 100 years ago and it maybe the lesson today. Of course, 100 years it took a blood bath to drive home that point.

The other day, the great HBD blogger Jayman posed a question on twitter. Can you have democracy and a universal acceptance of Human BioDiversity?

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Human BioDiversity is a catch-all term for the observed biological differences between groups of humans that are most likely tied to genetics. I say most likely because while modern biology assumes more than 90% of what we are is genetic, figuring out what is cultural from what is genetic is not always easy. Some biologist think the number is 99%, so there’s plenty of debate in the field.

The basic assumption of HBD is that like every other living thing on planet earth, humans evolved in response to the particular challenges they faced as a species. These challenges were environmental and cultural. It’s easy to forget that culture is part of our “environment” just like climate and topography. It’s also easy to forget it is still happening.

Humans living in the mountains adapted to mountain life. Their culture adapted too (to,two,too) and may have exaggerated certain traits that are well suited for mountain life. Even though we are just one people, arm in arm on this big blue marble we call earth, those differences remain baked into our genome.

At first blush, this may seem obvious. After all, the humans in sub-Saharan Africa are black, while the humans in Siberia are not black. The humans in the heart of Europe look nothing like the humans in Central America. There are plenty of red heads in Ireland, but you don’t see them naturally occurring in Indonesia. (yeah, I know)

It’s not just appearance. Something like 97 of the fastest 100 meter dash times are held by West Africans, while the long distance records are held by East Africans. There are no great black downhill skiers. Turn on an NBA game and it is obvious that a sport played best by men that are tall and jump high is dominated by Africans.

These differences are so plainly obvious, we are no longer allowed to talk about them in public, but they are undeniable. HBD simply observes that genetic traits are heritable. Tall parents have tall kids. Since cognitive traits are also genetic they must be heritable as well. That means they will show up in human groups, just like physical traits.

If you want something more than a short summary, Jayman has this great primer on his site. HBD Chick has a post explaining the basics of the topic.

That’s enough background. The question is, can a society embrace democracy when it also accepts that there are great variations in cognitive traits between population groups? The assumption I’m going to make is that Jayman means “democracy” in the modern sense of the word. That’s representative democracy or indirect democracy. Similarly, his idea of society is the modern, multi-ethnic, multi-racial variety we have in the West.

To answer the question, it’s important to know that humans evolved in small non-diverse groups. The sort of diversity we see today is an extreme outlier in human history. Up until the last century, when different human groups came into contact with one another, they tried like hell to exterminate each other.

That means there is a better than average chance that we are hard wired, in general, to resist diversity, as currently understood. Reproductive advantage goes to those who are most like the group and have traits most favored by the group. The result is we naturally are suspicious of strangers.

Put another way, it means humans are, to some degree, biologically inclined to distrust those outside their group. We know Africans, for example, evolved into small isolated villages as a survival strategy. Communicable diseases, which Africa has in spades, no pun intended, don’t spread easily across populations that are isolated. Distance and a high level of distrust of outsiders are a natural firebreak to disease.

The other side of this coin is democracy, which is not a universal form of human organization. The Arab world not only lacks it, but actively rejects it. We killed a million Arabs trying to impose democracy on Iraq and it lasted about week after we ended the occupation.

Asia had democracy imposed on it in places, but even in very modern countries like Japan, it is a very Japanese type of democracy, not western democracy. Even in Europe, participatory self-government is a novelty. It’s why they are sliding into a kakistocracy called the EU. The truth is, what we think of as western democracy is really Anglo-Saxon democracy.

The point here is western style democracy as we understand it is a very European-ish thing that evolved among peoples with a high degree of social trust within their ethnic groups. Even so, it was only within the last 100 years that universal suffrage became the norm. Countries like Spain and Portugal finally figured it out a few decades ago.

Where does that leave us?

If you accept that the observable differences between population groups are real and those differences are reflected in the organizational strategies, that means democracy will not work for all people. Arabs and Africans, for example, will never get the hang of it or even want to get he hang of it. This would explain why all attempts to impose it on them have failed.

If you take a bunch of Arabs, a bunch of Pakistanis, some Africans and settle them into England, the result is a sizable minority that is hostile to democracy, maybe even working to subvert it. If the rest of the population, even the Welsh, notice this and come to accept the HBD view of humanity, then democracy can’t last. No one would want it.

The blank slate crowd would argue that these differences are purely cultural and temporary. Since technocratic democracy and materialism are the future, these other groups will, in a couple of generations, get on the democracy bandwagon. This is the argument we hear in America with regards to importing the population of Mexico.

Fundamental to participatory democracy is the assumption that voters will vote their individual interests. The business man will vote for pro-business candidates, even if his kin think otherwise. The working man will vote for the pro-labor candidate for the same reasons. Once a large number of people start voting on tribal grounds, everyone else has to follow suit.

To quote Lee Kuan Yew, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” Once that becomes apparent to the dominant group, they have no choice but to limit popular government and take measures to limit the the numbers of the other groups.

The bottom line here is that HBD is not necessarily hostile to democracy, but it is hostile to immigration, open borders and the whole universalist religion, of which democracy is a small part. The answer to Jayman’s query is that acceptance of HBD can preserve western liberalism, but only at the expense if egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. It’s HBD or diversity, but not both.

About once a month, someone will comment here about my use of language or some typo/misspelling I missed. In some cases, I just fix the typo and move on. I post these jeremiads from all sorts of devices and I read them once before posting. That means some hilarious spellcheck issues from time to time, which I often leave in place, just for yuks. But, the spelling and punctuation are sometimes out of whack.

From time to time I reply and explain why I left “gorilla war” in the text rather than fixing it. C’mon, that’s comedy gold people. I’ll briefly go over my casual writing versus formal writing stance. I guess the readership has grown to the point where most readers simply don’t know my style guide so I thought it might make a worthwhile post. I actually have a strong interest in writing styles and I have strong opinions on the matter.

My first rule of writing is that it has to be readable and clear. I get that the grammar police struggle to read and understand anything with a typo or misspelling, but most people, I think, appreciate clarity and simplicity in their choice of reading material. If you can punch up the copy with some zingers then all the better. Who among us does not enjoy a good dick joke now and then?

The reason anyone writes anything is to communicate information to the reader. That assumes the reader is there to receive the messages you’re sending him. If the reader is here to grade my penmanship or fidelity to the rules of grammar, then that person will enjoy the coded message embedded in this post I cooked up just for him. The key for that is chrysanthemum.

As an aside, the reason academic work is never read is because it is deliberately made unreadable. The ridiculous neologisms and insider jargon are a deliberate barrier to entry. It’s a good way to get published in a “peer reviewed” journal without ever stating anything that can be held against you when the fads change. “Compellingly develop functionalized methodologies” will never get you in trouble, since no one knows what that means.

The second rule for me is that grammar is optional. The purpose of commas, spaces, hyphens, sentence structure and so on is in support of the first rule. The flow of the text should relax the reader so they are more willing to engage the writer through the text. Throwing a comma in that stops the reader’s eye, simply because the style guide says you are required to set off subordinate clauses with commas, strikes me as a violation of rule one.

Just as important, in this sort of writing, is the need for deliberate ambiguity in order to get the reader thinking about the topic. The loosey-goosey use of language to create some confusion, followed by a few well defined points of clarification can really drive your point home, without beating the reader over the head. As with most things in life, form follows function in expository writing, blogging, fiction, signal intelligence, etc.

My third and final rule is that you write for the purpose of the writing. No one wants dick jokes in their how-to books. At the same time, a dry recitation of facts makes for terrible fiction. A blog should be close to being a stream of consciousness thing. I write these posts in about 30 minutes, read over them for obvious mistakes and then post them. I keep a running list of crackpot ideas that came to me on previous trips to the opium den so I pick one and go at it.

No one is coming to my blog for answers to life’s tough questions. I’m not compiling research data on the Zika Virus. More important, it’s free. That means you get what you pay for here. I do this for fun. When I finish my book, I promise I’ll spend more time proofing it than writing it. That’s a different medium with different rules. If you want the Queen’s English, buy her book. Here, it’s whatever pops out of my head at the moment, naked and raw baby!

Finally, there’s the issue of formatting. People read off tablets, phones, desktops and who knows what else. Paragraph and sentence structure needs to respect that fact. That’s why I write some of these on tablets. If I can write it on a tablet, I think it can be read on a tablet. But, that’s something I don’t think anyone has quite unriddled. Writing was much easier when it was printed on paper in a standard format.

What I have developed for my use is a couple of formatting guides. I stick to 800 -1000 word rants. Those Ron Unz 10,000 word essays are too long to read on-line. The other thing I do is try to keep the paragraphs around five lines. Standard length paragraphs that you see in magazines are somewhat dizzying on a tablet. I don’t know if it works, but it forces brevity, at the minimum.

So there you have it, the Z Blog Style Guide.

Chrysanthemum

One of my gags I like to use in the comments sections of “conservative” opinion sites is to point out that the Republican Party is the land of unwanted toys. About a third of elected Republicans are traditional, middle American conservatives. Another third are just time serving barnacles who are in the best job they can ever hope to get. The other third would rather be Democrats, but circumstances put them in the GOP.

Sensible Americans often make the mistake of taking what the Progressives say about the GOP at face value. Who has not been harangued by some madman hooting and bellowing about the extreme right wing extremist Republicans? Turn on MSNBC and that unbalanced lesbian is always carrying on like Ted Cruz is at the door, threatening to fill her uterus with Bibles and sew her legs shut.

Reading the campaign websites yesterday for my screed about Rubio and Clinton, I was reminded of this reality about the parties. If you are a normal, traditional American of any race or religion, the Democrats hate you. Yeah, they hate white men with a purple passion, but they had middle-class black guys and Korean shopkeepers too. Their appeal is exclusively to poor minorities, plutocrats, government employees and the upper reaches of the managerial class.

If you are a mailman, the Democrats are the good bet, even if you are a pale penis person. If you are running a UPS Store franchise, the Democrats are your enemy, even if you are a one-legged black lesbian Elvis impersonator. That’s the thing. Their appeal is really just a relentless assault on an ever widening array of enemies. It’s a party of old rich white people promising to smash up the  while middle class and give the bits to those who vote Democrat.

The point here is that for the majority of Americans, there’s nothing on offer from the Democrats. For a sizable minority, maybe even a majority now, the Democrats are a threat to them personally, professionally and culturally. Strip away the old white people who grew up voting for FDR Democrats and the party probably represents just 25% of the population. Given that 20% of whites are Progressives, 30% is probably the ceiling for the Democrats.

What this means is that for those with anything on the ball, voting Democrat is suicide so they have to find an alternative. The Republicans have nothing much to offer, but at least they are not threatening to pull the roof down on society. GOP majorities in state legislatures, governorships and the Congress are entirely due to there being no third option. When the option is slitting your own throat or voting for the Republicans, most people have no trouble pulling the lever for the GOP.

The problem with being the Null Party is twofold. When the other party has anything to offer, they end up looking magisterial. Bill Clinton was a vulgar clown, but he had an issue and he had a purpose. That was enough to beat an old patrician with no reason to keep his job. The same was true of Obama. Compared to McCain and Romney, Obama looked like Churchill. Something, even something stupid, is more than nothing and in a democracy, that’s what wins.

The other problem the Null Party faces is that when they are in the majority, as they are today, they have nothing but idle time. Since they never had a reason to win the majority, they can’t come up with anything to do with it. Instead of a strategy to roll back the excesses of Obama, for example, they spent years squabbling over trivialities and then finally conceded everything in order to gain some peace during the presidential election.

Given that they have become the default option whenever the Democrats go bonkers, which is often, the Null Party keeps drawing the wrong lessons from each election cycle. There furtive attempts to confront Obama were blamed for their loss in the 2012 election. Curling back into a ball is credited with their stunning victory in 2014. That’s why they gave away the store in the last budget. Like a cargo cult, they just assumed more concessions meant another victory. Instead they have a revolt.

At the end of the last Great Progressive Awakening in the late sixties and early seventies, there was an intellectual counter culture forming that culminated with Reagan winning the White House. The spiritual energy may have been drained out of the Democrats as the New Left burned out, but there were still plenty of sensible people in the party to give it some reason to exist. This carried us into the Bush years when everything fell to pieces again.

Today, there’s is nothing to fill the void now that the latest Progressive wave is receding. The Null Party may fill the seats in Congress, but they have nothing to offer the voters other than platitudes, references to Reagan and technocratic programs that amount to busy work for the bureaucrats. Nature and politics abhors a vacuum, which why the leading candidates in both parties are from well outside the mainstream. Something, even something stupid, is more than nothing and in a democracy, that’s what wins.

On Steve Sailer’s site, I commented upon one of the election threads that the most likely result will be Marco Rubio versus Hillary Clinton. Just for kicks, I went on to point out that this was Clinton – Lazio 2.0 and a suspicious mind might wonder if this was not the scripted result. For those who don’t remember Clinton’s senate run, she used pretty boy Rick Lazio like a Q-Tip and then tossed him away.

I was mostly joking, but it is not an outcome that is beyond the pale. If Rubio wins New Hampshire, he is most likely the nominee. Despite her debacle in Iowa, Clinton is probably going to win her party’s nomination. Democrats have gone around the bend, but there’s no way the brothers and sisters are voting for the old Jewish guy. Think about that. Blacks are now the party ballast for the Democrats.

Anyway, after a long primary for both sides, let’s say we end up with Hillary Clinton versus Marco Rubio. I’m going to assume that most people reading this would not be enthusiastic with either option, but democracy is all about the lesser of two evils, picking between electrocution and poisoning. My guess is most readers face every election thinking both choices are unpleasant. So, how to pick?

My first litmus test issue for any candidate these days is immigration. I’m a squish on the topic, but I think open borders is grounds for commitment to an institution. Here’s what Hillary Clinton says, “We need comprehensive immigration reform with a path to full and equal citizenship. If Congress won’t act, I’ll defend President Obama’s executive actions—and I’ll go even further to keep families together. I’ll end family detention, close private immigrant detention centers, and help more eligible people become naturalized.”

Marco Rubio tried to pass exactly that in the Senate, but he now says, “Our reaction needs to be what we should be doing anyway, which is passing immigration reform, beginning with getting illegal immigration under control.” I guess if you really want make a case for a difference between Marco and Hillary, you can say he is slightly less enthusiastic about granting citizenship to the world, but we’re splitting hairs now.

My second litmus test issue is gun control. Hillary says, “I’ll take on the gun lobby and fight for commonsense reforms to keep guns away from terrorists, domestic abusers, and other violent criminals—including comprehensive background checks and closing loopholes that allow guns to fall into the wrong hands.” While I have no doubt she is a gun grabber, this word salad here says she will do nothing about it.

Marco Rubio has no history of gun grabbing and he said, “It’s not the guns, it’s the people who are committing these crimes.” His voting record here is solid and he has never said anything to suggest he is faking it. Rubio is also from Florida and you go nowhere in Florida politics if you’re soft on guns. This is one of those times where you have to look beyond the position statements and Rubio is the safe choice on guns

I used to put abortion as a litmus test issue, even though there’s not much to be done about it. My view is that while abortion should be legal, but very limited, calling it a natural right tells me you are too stupid to be trusted. I used to hold the same view of homosexual marriage. The fact is, Progressives have won all these battles and it will take a revolution to alter that reality. Most of the GOP is fine with abortion and homosexual marriage so a candidate’s opinion here are irrelevant.

That’s it for the the big philosophical questions. Next on my list would be the smaller issues like taxes, spending and regulation. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds on these things. Look at the candidates websites and they have thousands of words on issues that fall into one of those three buckets. Clinton has a whole section on legal reform, whatever that means. Rubio has a section on common core, a topic that should not even exist.

I’m just going to keep it at the 30,000 foot view. What do the candidates have to say about reducing the size of government? Stop laughing. God help me, but I read everything on Hillary’s site and I have no idea what she wants to do as president. Her whole site is just emotive nonsense about various demographics groups. The only reasonable score here is to assume she would be business as usual, which means steady growth of the state, with some extras for Democrat barnacles.

On Rubio’s site, he has a laundry list of issues organized so the blind and stupid can easily navigate the topics. To his credit he has a section on debt, which is pretty funny given his personal finances. As you can see, there’s nothing there but some platitudes about saving stuff by reducing waste and reducing waste by saving stuff. As with Hillary, there’s no reason to think he has any interest in cutting government spending.

On taxes, it appears both candidates want to move commas around the tax code, which is always great fun. It accomplishes very little, but it makes for great flag waving. Both candidates think social engineering through the tax code is a great idea. Otherwise. there’s not much to distinguish them an they don’t seem to be making taxes a big part of their pitch. That really says a lot when you think about it. It used to be that taxes were the main difference between the parties.

That leaves regulation. Like taxes, you just don’t hear anyone talk about clearing out the regulatory thicket anymore. The Federal Registry is close to 100,000 pages now. There are more than one million regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations. No human can know all of them. Hillary Clinton is promising more regulations for all sorts of nonsense like requiring people to be happy on alternate Thursdays, but her posted positions are, as a I wrote above, emotive nonsense.

Rubio, to his credit, has a section on regulation. Hilariously, he proposes new regulations on the making of new regulations. I miss the days when Republicans talked about cutting departments. It was a lie, of course, but at least they were not talking about altering the space-time continuum. I went looking around for a better understanding of his idea and it is basically a budget that limits the total number of regulations each year, based on some exotic formulas.

The funny thing here is Hillary, the old commie, is showing her age. In her prime, a good statist promised a laundry list of free stuff from the public treasury. Today’s statists  replace laws passed by elected parliaments with administrative degrees ginned up by autocratic agencies. Rubio’s regulatory reform is a complicated technocratic response to the metastasizing technocratic state. It’s unleashing a cobra in your house to kill the mice.

The long and short of it, when you start comparing the two probable contestants for president, is they are not all that different from one another. Unless you have some weird reason to care about how they move some commas around the tax and regulatory code, the only difference worth mentioning is the gun issue. Otherwise, your life will not be any different under the tyranny of Hillary than the tyranny of Marco.

Just in case someone is tempted to mention the courts, just keep in mind that the most egregious decisions of late are from Republicans appointees. The lesson of the last year is that the courts have locked shields with their fellow in the managerial class against any attempts by the dirt people to reign in their excesses. Like abortion, only a revolution will do anything to fix the courts.

We’re doomed.