Category Archives: Culture

Feeling the Bern

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A topic that gets little attention but is probably at the core of what is going on in the West is the collapse of the intellectual Left. Not so long ago, at least for men my age, you really could not be an intellectual unless you embraced the economics of the Left, which meant some form of socialism. Even intellectuals well outside political-economy would make clear they were fine with some form of socialism.

It’s how, for example, you could be a good liberal, like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and also a critic of what we now call multiculturalism. The Left in the West started with economics as the core of the ideology. There was simply no way to be a man of the Left and not embrace some form of economic socialism. It was the intellectual engine of the Left. It provided the goals and most of the justification for the great liberal project.

The collapse of the Soviet Union put a stake in the heart of socialism. The stagnation of the 70’s in the West did a lot to discredit socialism. The economic liberalization of the 80’s and subsequent economic boom had socialism on the ropes, but the collapse of the Soviets killed intellectual socialism forever. It still staggers on in the domestic policies of Western countries, but that’s just cultural inertia.

Progressives no longer have a coherent economic ideology. They have accepted global capitalism without thinking much about it. Many of them come close to arguing that economics is no longer in the domain of politics. Instead, it should be left to supra-national organizations like central banks and global trade organizations. The EU is the most obvious example.

Technocratic managerialism has absorbed the political and intellectual Left like an anaconda swallowing a small animal. Through the outlines of the creatures skin, we can still make out Marx, Engels, the old FDR coalition, the Fabians and so on, but each passing year it is more difficult to detect them. What’s left of political-economy is a debate over who has the better spreadsheet skills.

Progressives used to think they were on the side of the angels, because they wanted to bring economic prosperity to the masses. The central argument of the Left from Rousseau until the early 90’s was that the correct economic arrangements would result in surplus and prosperity. The math was therefore simple. The rich had too much and the poor too little so polices that addressed that imbalance were a moral duty of the Progressive.

The collapse of the Soviet Union took with it the economic arguments of the Left. If market capitalism was able to dominate the premier socialist enterprise, it was no longer possible to argue for socialism. Not only that, but the opening of the Soviet Block also revealed the true horrors of socialism. They even managed to rape the very earth on which they stood. Chernobyl, in many respects, came to symbolize the idiocy of socialism.

The problem for the Left was that the road to salvation could no longer run through the economics department. What was the point of massive government intervention in the lives of citizens if economic equality was no longer a legitimate goal? That’s when they lurched into identity politics. Salvation was now about making sure the black guy or the lesbian felt wanted.

The problem here is no serious man of science accepts the claims of the social justice warriors. That’s why the Left is now just a collection of fashion statements. It has no intellectual underpinning. It makes no claims to transcendent truth. It’s just a bunch of people, who think they can gain salvation by harassing other people. Modern liberalism is a cargo cult with no real point beyond salving the emotional wounds of the adherents.

That’s why Bernie Sanders is such a threat to Hillary Clinton. Free stuff from your neighbor is a terrible idea, but at least it is an idea. If you are a young person loaded down with college debt, debt relief sounds pretty good compared to Clinton’s weird howling about transgendered rights. Something always sounds better than nothing, even when that something is just a museum piece brought out of mothballs by a guy who looks like a character from another century.

That said, nuts and bolts commies like Sanders are seen as a threat to the boys and girls running the Cult of Modern Liberalism, because he exposes the core problem of their new religion. If the people start caring about material stuff again, they may not be willing to sign off on the cultural suicide that promises salvation. If politics is once again about material prosperity, the Left has nothing to contribute. That makes old school commies like Bernie dangerous.

The quest to invite the world into Western countries is in many respects an attempt to create a new victim class the Left can defend. In a world where the poor are fat and live long lives, being the champion of the little guy is not so glamorous. When the oppressed have their own cable channels and control the national culture, even the fanatic has a tough time feeling heroic on their behalf.

That I think is what lies at the heart of the open borders fanaticism. Angela Merkel and her coreligionists are inviting the Muslims in so they can be victims in need of protection. It’s Mother Theresa having run out of lepers giving the village a plague so she can tend to them. It’s Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Instead of being a nurse that poisons her patients, Merkel is a politician, who poisons her country so she can cure it.

That’s why guys like Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK are a symptom. The intellectual Left has collapsed. What’s left is the spiritual trappings that have nothing to offer other than short term spiritual relief to the adherent. While there is always a market for crackpot religions and suicide cults, you cannot build a large scale political movement on them. Bernie Sanders is the ghost of socialism past, warning the present they are headed for destruction.

White City Fighting

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I saw this on the wires the other day. South Africa is no longer trendy so the West ignores it, but it offers a glimpse of our future.

South Africa’s University of Cape Town (UCT) was rocked by racially-motivated destruction Tuesday, as a group of students looted several buildings and made a bonfire out of portraits and photographs of white people.

At UCT, a movement calling itself “Rhodes Must Fall” has been seeking to make the university provide more benefits and accommodations for poor students. It has also been seeking to stamp out the legacy of white leaders (in particular Cecil Rhodes) from the era when South Africa was dominated by those of European descent.
The protest movement took a destructive turn Tuesday, apparently prompted by university officials’ request that protesters move a shack they had constructed on Residence Road near several dormitories. The students responded by breaking into several nearby residential buildings, robbing them of portraits and photographs, as well as furniture and other materials, according to News24.

The portraits and photographs, which apparently were mostly or entirely of white people, were piled up and set ablaze.

When I was a young man, one of things that seemed obvious to me was that the fads and tastes of rich people did not scale down to poor people. Seeing communities go from two parent working-class families to divorced mothers and single middle-aged men, it was not hard to see that easy divorce was a terrible idea. Rich people can afford to bust up the marriage. They can carry the cost of a broken home.

Easy divorce was one of the worst things to hit the working classes, but it was not the only rich man fad to wash through the lower ranks. Casual drug use is one obvious example. The sexual revolution is another. These are things that are tolerable when you are immune from the want of money. They are a disaster when you must maintain the delicate balance required of the lower classes.

Not so long ago the rich understood this. They also believed they had an obligation to set a good example for the lower ranks. They also supported laws that backstopped these healthy customs. In fact, a good way to lose your place in society was to fail in your duty to set a proper example.

Today, of course, our elites compete with one another to see who can be the most offensive to decent people. The further down into the gutter they look for inspiration, the more they are celebrated by the culture czars. For instance, black culture is now the high culture, while stodgy old white guys are the butt of jokes.

It’s tempting to think this is deliberate and orchestrated. Guys like Steve Sailer argue that swinging a wrecking ball through the cultural institutions that hold up the middle-class is just part of the war of top and bottom versus the middle. It’s easy to see why people think that. The emergence of a global over-class does correlate to the collapse of middle and working class values in the West.

It strikes me that the root is the weird new religion of anti-racism, egalitarianism and multiculturalism. Even assuming nothing but good intentions, the resulting product is just a ragged anti-white ideology that celebrates every human pathology at the expense of Western tradition, simply because white is bad, meaning non-white is good.

Again, these trends have been a disaster for the working classes and increasingly hard on the middle-class in Western countries. Whatever benefits have accrued to the elites will inevitably be short lived, simply based on math. Rich white countries can afford to indulge in cultural nonsense for a while. Sweden is an obvious example.

In a world where whites are outnumbered even in their own lands, this is a civilizational catastrophe. This brings us back to South Africa. It is a click or two away from facing the same fate as Rhodesia in the last century. Life expectancy in South Africa was 64 when Apartheid ended. Now it’s 56, the same as in Somalia. South Africa is the rape capital of the world, where “corrective rape” is increasingly common.

In a world increasing dominated by Africans, a religion of “hate whitey” is not going to turn out very well for whitey. Since whitey is responsible for the creation of and preservation of civilization, this spells doom for the civilized world. The lesson of South Africa is the lesson for the world. The people in charge need to do what must be done to maintain the pillars of civilization, even when they don’t like it.

Elfin Safety

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The other day I saw that Major League Baseball plans to experiment with a special helmet for pitchers. This is in response to the very rare event of a batted ball hitting the pitcher in the head. The pictures of this thing suggest it is a weird contraption to have sitting on your head. Anyone who has worn a football or motorcycle helmet knows they are not very natural. This thing looks ridiculous in addition to probably being uncomfortable

I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think cricket bowlers wear a helmet. It seems to me that cricket bowlers would be more likely to take a ball off the head than baseball pitchers, but I’m not an expert on cricket. I’m just thinking that the Brits are way over the top with “elfin safety” compared to Americans so if they have not mandated helmets, there must be no risk. As I said, I could be wrong about cricket.

Thinking about it, the number of pitchers that get hit by batted balls is surprisingly small. I can recall a few ugly incidents, over many years of watching sports. If you do the math, there are about 80,000 balls hit by a batter that end up in play every season. In a given year, maybe one or two Major League pitchers get hit hard enough to be a concern. There are some years when it never happens so maybe the odds are 1-in-100,000.

As a point of comparison, there is a 1-in-700,000 chance of being struck by lightning on any given day.  The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1-in-3,000. No one, as far as I know, has been killed by a come backer in professional baseball. I’m sure it has happened somewhere in pickup games or youth leagues. The point being is that you should have a greater fear of lightning, if you are a baseball player.

In my youth playing sports, helmets for batters had been around for a while, but they were crude compared to today. As a catcher, I never wore a helmet, even though they were available, until I was in high school. They became mandatory at some point. They also improved the design around that time so it was not as big of a hassle. Even so, I caught a lot of baseball games and never took a hit to the head.

The fetish for safety is one of those strange things about the modern age that is hard for me to pin down. It’s irrational to make pitchers wear a helmet when they are at no real risk. At the same time, the people arguing for these things make the point that it does not cost anything to be careful in these cases. That’s not really true, but I can see why they think it is true. That and no one wants to see a ball player get seriously injured.

Still, there is something driving this that says something about modern mass media democracies. For the bulk of the 20th century, safety items for sports were rare. Everyone just assumed the risk and did not think much of it. Look at old hockey video and you see guys skating around without helmets, face guards or mouth protection. Goalies did not wear a helmet.

It was not just bat and ball sports. Look at the history of F1. There was a great documentary on the safety issues in the early days of Formula 1 a few years ago. Even if you don’t like car racing, it is a very interesting piece. The near total disregard for the safety of the drivers was just something everyone accepted for a long time. In fact, the danger was part of the appeal for fans.

In the case of F1, safety was forced on the sport by drivers. Guys getting killed every week simply became too much for even the bravest men. That’s an exception. In all other sports, safety is forced on the players. No ball players want to wear those goofy looking pitcher’s caps. Hockey players scrap the face guard as soon as the hit the professional ranks. Boxers would die in the ring if allowed.

Steve Pinker has documented the decline of human violence and the safety revolution probably fits in there somewhere. Violence declines as the respect for human life increases. The revolution in medicine that has extended healthy lives in the West probably means a corresponding spike in the respect for human life. When you’re lucky to make it past 30, blood sports don’t sound so bad. When you live to 80, taking care of yourself makes a lot of sense.

It’s not just sports either. Safety is a whole industry now. Walk around anywhere work is being done and you see all sorts of safety measures in place. Most of these are just in my lifetime. I’ll grant that much of it is driven by government meddling, but a fair bit is driven by a genuine concern for the safety of people in their daily lives. There’s no real push-back from employers and in many cases, the employers sponsor these measures.

There’s a limit to all of this. Safety has become something close to an obsession in the last half century. It’s not a bad thing, but the point of diminishing returns may be upon us, maybe behind us. If we’re down to making ball players wear strange head gear it means we have run out of serious safety concerns. That means the cost-benefit ratios will be turning the wrong way, if they have not already done so.

Indifference

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The ancient Greeks looked up at the sky in search of first principles. In fact, this is the root of Western ontological thought. In the beginning, there are principles, what mathematics calls axioms. The Reflexive Axiom, for instance, states that every number is equal to itself. This is true at all times and all places since the beginning of time. A proof in math always rests upon at least one axiom.

The root of Jewish thought is looking into the silence of the Cosmos expecting to hear a voice, a revelation of something beyond the world. That revelation cannot be discovered with passive indifference. Silence must be broken as it was in the beginning, when God said “Let there be…” To grossly simplify things, silence, indifference and neutrality are the hell of a cosmos without the word of God.

This being a short blog post, the above is a grossly simplified bit of comparative philosophy, but the takeaway here is to understand the two different ways to confront the world. More specifically, the two different ways to confront the unpleasant parts of the world, namely other people. The Christian seeks to bring the immoral back into line with first principles. The Jew will present them with indifference.

The former has a history of running around looking for monsters to slay. Even today, when our rulers have abandoned anything resembling Christianity, they run around looking for sinners to torment. Having run out of sinners worth tormenting, they invented new sins so they could create new sinners. That’s why you suddenly find yourself in trouble because you think men should not wear dresses.

The Jewish approach is to exile those who cannot reconcile themselves to God and the faith. It’s not just a physical separation; it is an emotional and spiritual one. The Yiddish expression “meh” that is usually interpreted as a shoulder shrug is a very serious insult, or at least intended as one. To be indifferent to someone’s point of view, to not even be willing to speak to their arguments, is to relegate them to the hell of silence.

Reading this tantrum on National Review this morning, it occurred to me that the Jews have it right on this score. Ted Nugent is a fool, a horse’s ass, who makes a mockery of himself on TV for money. I don’t know if he is an anti-Semite, but my hunch is he is not because he is too stupid to know the meaning of the term. For the same reason we don’t condemn the retarded to the gallows, we should not call guys like Nugent anti-Semitic.

The writer of that piece is just a hipster dufus with a mullet and a British accent so he added nothing to my thoughts on the subject. His purpose is virtue signaling. “Look at me, I’m a good thinker. The proof is I’m hollering at a bad thinker. See?” This is popular on the Left, but increasingly so on the modern Right, thus proving that there is very little space between the two.

Regardless, the right answer here is to simply ignore people like Nugent, if you are striving for a more thoughtful dialogue about topics under public consideration. If you and a buddy are having beers, deciding on your next hat, maybe Nugent has something to offer on head gear. Anything else, the response should be “meh” and leave it at that. Idiots are the background noise of the cosmos. You’ll never hear the call if you spend all your time listening to idiots.

HBD and Democracy

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The other day, the 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 biologists 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 as well 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.

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 the 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 businessman 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 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.

Letters and Such

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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

The New Normal

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In 1992 I was watching television at friend’s house and Bill Clinton was on denying something about his draft dodging. I forget the details of what he was saying, but I recall being a bit flabbergasted at the answer. Everyone knew he gamed the system to avoid service. Lots of ambitious young men thought that was the way to go. They thought, in addition to being dangerous, the draft was a bad career move. Given what was happening in the country, that was not an unreasonable assumption.

I really could not see how being honest about avoiding the draft was going to be a terrible setback to his campaign. A big chunk of the voters were in his age group so they knew perfectly well what he did as many of them faced the same choices. Plenty of Republicans had done the same thing. More important, most of the press at the time was his age and they too had gamed the system to avoid the draft. Even so, he chose to lie and lie poorly.

Sitting there with my friend watching it, I said something along the lines like, “I just can’t see why he chooses to lie when the truth would be better for him. I can’t believe people will vote for a guy who is such an obvious liar and so bad at it.” We both agreed that there was no way Clinton would win the nomination or beat Bush in the general. That’s not the first time I was wrong about politics, but the first time I was that wrong.

What I did not see back then was that the world was changing quickly. There was a demographic change as the Boomers took over the country. There was also the end of the Cold War. Like everyone at the time, I had grown up with normal being the US and Russia, armed to the teeth, wrestling for control of the world. Frivolous men like Bill Clinton had no place in national politics, because no one would risk it.

The point here is that even when logic and history are on your side, you can believe things that turn out to be totally wrong. In retrospect, Clinton winning in 1992 makes sense, but at the time a lot of people, not just me, thought it was preposterous. On the other hand, a lot of people were sure Clinton would win, once he was the nominee. They turned out to be right, even though their arguments at the time were mostly wishful thinking.

That’s why I have never discounted the Trump phenomenon or the Sanders campaign. Things are the way they are until they are not and you never really know change is happening until it is on top of you. That and a country that would elect and re-elect a ridiculous person like Barak Obama simply because he is black and has a funny name is capable of anything.

Looking at the GOP race heading into Iowa next week, everyone seems to be certain, but no one agrees on who will win and what it will mean. Nate Silver has been calling the GOP side for Cruz, but he has been wrong a lot lately. Silver missed the Trump phenomenon so badly, it is not unreasonable to think it is due to animus. I don’t follow him enough to know, as I find him to be an obnoxious twerp, who needs to be punched in the face – a lot.

The professional anti-Trump faction is sure Trump will lose in Iowa and they are carrying on like it is a certainty. You can be sure the chattering skulls are ready to race off to the nearest TV station to shout, “I told you so!” The National Review special “Trump Lost!” edition is already in the can. Jim Geraghty has been out talking about how the polls must be wrong because Trump is going to lose. As to who will win, they are all over the map.

The thing is, when nothing goes to form, it’s a good idea to start contemplating the unthinkable. Jerry Falwell just endorsed Trump. That’s on par with the Koch brothers endorsing Bernie Sanders. It’s not just a one-off either. Polls show that Trump is doing very well with Evangelicals so I guess the better analogy is the Libertarian Party putting Bernie Sanders up as their nominee.

That’s the other lesson of the 1992 election. When things change in the culture, everything is up for grabs in politics. The other way to look at it is when the politics are suddenly a scramble, it means the culture is undergoing a structural change. After ’92, we saw the rise of global finance, mass migration and a communications revolution. If Trump wins Iowa, it’s time to start thinking about what the new normal is going to be like.

The Crisis of the Modern Elites

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For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, the people in charge have described the great divide as a conflict between those who are future oriented versus those who past oriented. Progressives don’t call themselves “progressive” because they long for a bygone era. They correctly see their thing as being focused on the Promised Land, somewhere over the rainbow. Their opponents are naturally cast as romantics, stuck in a past age, yesterday men who will be thrown into the dustbin of history.

In fairness to Progressives, their thing is mostly a set of highly refined feelings about the ever extending wave of probabilities rippling outward from now. It’s a blend of free will and predetermination and the interplay between the two. Progressives romanticize the future to the point where the only thing that matters is their place in it, which is determined by their role in bringing it about. The moral person is one who works to bring about the eschaton.

For American Progressives, the intellectual tradition from which this springs is different from what birthed it in Europe. In America the roots are in Yankee Calvinism while in Europe the roots are in the French Revolution. As is plainly obvious to those familiar with the development of European fascism, both traditions borrowed heavily from one another. That’s why it is easy to think of Barak Obama and Francois Hollande, for example, as fellow travelers. Critics on the right routinely call Progressives “socialists” even when said Progressive is an undiluted capitalist.

To some degree, this is also why Progressives are so fond of describing their opponents, real and imagined, as the heirs of Hitler and the Nazis. While it is mostly a way for the Cult to tar their enemies, the great divide between the heirs of Rousseau is over orientation. Fascists were “restoration socialists” who imagined they were ushering in a restoration of a utopia rooted in the past. Communists were breaking with the past in all regards, building a new society and new men.

That last bit is a good jumping off point as this is not a post about intellectual history. This “great divide” in orientation really does not exist, outside the imaginings of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, but they have been in charge for so long that their view of the world is the dominant one. Even “conservatives” accept this framing. Twenty-five years ago, when the political Left was reinventing itself, they held “Renaissance” weekends to plot strategy. The political Right held “Dark Ages” weekends.

The fact is, all mass movements are future oriented. Until someone invents a time machine, the only thing we can do anything about is the future. The fascists may have rhapsodized about the past, but they were all about building the glorious future. Similarly, the Bolsheviks may have talked a lot about breaking with the past, but they invested heavily in rewriting it. If they truly thought they were cruising to a glorious future, they would not have spent so much time airbrushing old photos.

The real difference, the real divide, is between those who see a world that is fully integrated, like an organism, versus those who imagine an atomized world where the parts bump against one another. The one side thinks the goal of human social evolution is something close to an ant farm, while the other side does not think social evolution has a goal. Individuals have goals, desires and dreams. Social evolution is just the unpredictable result of all those bits smashing into one another over time.

You see this in Europe and in the US. The European Left is pro-EU integration, pushing for the abolition of national sovereignty in favor of the committees of technocrats in Brussels. The EU will not just coordinate big macro issues like trade. They will make sure your food has the right amount of salt and your neighbor does not say mean things about you. The EU is The Borg.

In the US, the Federal state is The Borg, gobbling up the rights and responsibilities of state and local government. At the dawn of the First World War, it was possible for an American to have no interaction with the national government, outside of the Post Office. His government was the town, village, or city. Even his state government was alien to him. Today, it is impossible to live as an American without rubbing against the rasp of national government.

What we think of as liberalism is just a defense of these arrangements. The doctrines of the Left are contrary to observable reality and are mostly just expressions of sentimentality and resentment.  The obsession with fringe minority groups, the weirder the better, is just a distraction, an argument to kill time. No serious scientist, for example, thinks transsexualism is anything other than a mental illness. Yet, the elites insist we use feminine pronouns when writing about Bob, who now wears a sundress to work.

That incoherence is the reason both American political parties find themselves in turmoil. The voters of both parties, for various reasons, are questioning the rationality of the managerial state. The answer coming back from the elites is a combination of emotive nonsense and threats. The question Trump presents the Republicans, for example, is why is he less qualified for the job than any of the preferred candidates? The answer coming back is “shut up and do as you’re told.”

Every ruling elite needs a raison d’être. In the early medieval period, being the best warrior was enough. Later, having the magic blood was enough. Those reasons to be in charge may seem silly now, but they made sense at the time. They gave the people a reason, other than fear, to respect the arrangements. The modern managerial elite cannot articulate a reason to exist. That’s why they are in crisis.

Art of the Con

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Over the holiday weekend I read a book titled The Art of the Con by Anthony Amore. It is a book about art theft, a specialty of the author, who makes his living protecting art and investigating art thefts. The book is what I call a bathroom book in that it is light reading broken into small sections. I’m a lackadaisical reader and I knocked it out over the weekend.

If you like true crime and are looking for a quick easy read to kill time on a train, plane, or stagecoach, it is a good choice. The author has a good understanding of the world of fine art but is levelheaded about it. For instance, he acknowledges that Abstract Expressionism is easy to fake because it takes so little talent to produce. The writing style is conversational and direct, as you would expect from an investigator.

One of the interesting data points in the book is that close to 50% of fine art is fraudulent in some way. Either it is an outright forgery, a copy or was produced against the wishes of the artist by associates and understudies. The Great Masters, for instance, often relied on understudies to do much of their work so passing off the work of an understudy as that of the master is common.

Of course, art fraud is so common because it is so lucrative. Rich people collect art as a way to display their wealth within their peer group. It not only tells the other rich guys that you have loads of disposable income, but it also suggests you have cultured tastes. Therefore, high demand from rich people, looking for an emotional high, drives up prices for fine art and that means huge potential gains for fakers.

The strangely interesting chapter to me is on lithography where it is suggested that there are more fakes on the market than real art. The reason is “real” is not easy to pin down. As far as I can tell, the difference between authentic and fake in most cases is simply a signature. Even there, the signatures are often done by someone other than the artist. Everything about it feels shady, but people keep spending money on it.

I don’t know if it was intended, but the vibe I get from reading this chapter is the modern artists are so greedy they are fine with opening themselves up to massive fraud, as long as they can make a quick buck. The suggestion is that artists are just a click less dishonest than the con men that sell fake art to suckers. Either way, it’s hard to feel sorry for the artists.

If you are a fan of true crime, the strongest chapters are the first chapters, in fact, the one knock on the book is that it seems like the author ran out of material at about 175 pages and then filled in the rest with musings about the internet and infomercials. I found myself skipping through those quickly. It’s a book that starts strong and finishes with a whimper.

Those strong first chapters are on some of the great confidence men of the modern art world, who swindled millions from people that were savvy about the art game. The thing that stands out in his retelling is that these grifters are biologically driven to deceive people. Whether or not they feel guilt is debatable, but they know what they are doing is illegal and considered to be immoral. Yet, they keep doing it.

Unlike the Hollywood version of confidence men, the real life con-men confess quickly when caught. These are professional liars gifted at reading others. Once they see the cops have the facts, they become very cooperative, trying to earn sympathy points from the court, which often happens. Their skill at manipulating the emotions of others comes in handy in front of a judge.

The thing with con men is they see themselves as the victim so when they are caught, pleading for mercy comes naturally. The same skills they used to win the confidence of their marks are used to win sympathy from their captors. The exception is when they get caught and there’s no deal to be made. That’s when they get as mean as a cornered rat, which is not a bad comparison.

Ultimately what works for con-men is normal people have trust in others. That trust is based on altruism, a concern for the well-being of others. Confidence men lack that quality even within their kin group. It’s not that they hate their marks. It’s that they have no regard for them whatsoever. The mark has what the con-man desires to possess so he employs the necessary strategy to get what he wants.

Anyway, if you’re have an interest in true crime and need an airplane book, The Art of the Con is a good choice.

Insurance Versus Taxes

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You can make the argument that insurance made the modern world possible, because it made risk quantifiable. The insurer is making a bet that the return on his investment of your premiums will exceed the claims on those premiums. In order to make that bet, he has to have some way to calculate the amount he can reasonably expect to payout in claims.

That’s one half of the equation. The other half is the investment. In order to run a profitable insurance company, you have to invest conservatively. The same guys figuring out the probability of your death this year are using the same mathematical skills to find the safest investments. The result is large pools of premiums moving into the safe investments like bonds. [1]

Niall Ferguson in the Ascent of Money gives a great history of the first modern insurance company, the Scottish Ministers Widow’s Fund. Robert Wallace and Alexander Webster figured out a few things that revolutionized capital. One of the consequences of this innovation was that large pools of capital were created from thousands of small premiums. That capital could then be put to work in new businesses, new industries and new technology.

The interesting thing about the birth of modern insurance is even after centuries of experience, we still can’t understand the difference between insurance and taxation. Social welfare programs, for example, work on the principle of pay-as-you go where current taxpayers cover the expenses of current beneficiaries. Back when the Scots were inventing modern actuarial tables, they knew pay-as-you-go could never work in the long run. Yet, here we are.

It’s also why the public sector pension systems are teetering on collapse. The Scotts figured out that a fixed benefit system had to lock in the benefit side by pegging it to the amount of premiums paid into the system. Once you uncouple the premium from the benefit, the system will collapse. The only question is how long it will take, but the boundary always seems to be one working life, as we are seeing in America.

Similarly, insurance only works when it is voluntary. When the state comes in, points a gun at your head and says you have to buy an insurance policy from the companies they choose or from the state, that’s not insurance. That’s extortion. If you want to be kind, it is a tax. When the state takes money from citizens against their will, that’s a tax, regardless of the intentions.

It’s why American health insurance is collapsing. It has none of the features one must have for a successful insurance system. The insurers are forced to take all customers, regardless of risk. They are not allowed to dump reckless customers or even ask about risky behavior. At the same time, the customers are forced to buy insurance. In many areas, there’s only one or two companies and the rates are set by the state.

Of course, what makes health insurance an impossibility is we will all get sick and die eventually. You cannot insure against certainty. A true health insurance system would combine the logic of whole life insurance to cover the inevitable with the logic of term life insurance to address surprises, like getting hit by a bus. Again, these are things we have known for centuries.

Progressives are now talking about using the same nutty ideas to “remedy” gun violence in America. They want gun owners to carry liability insurance that would pay victims in the event the insured’s gun is used in a crime. No insurance company would sell a policy to a gun owner to cover the cost of them shooting someone. There’s simply no way to shoot someone without being negligent (criminally or civilly) or justified. In both cases, insurance has no role.

The point of this, of course, is to drive up the cost of gun ownership and create a gun registry, but even if it was an honest effort, the gun owner is being held liable for the actions of others. That’s just a click away from collective punishment and contrary to a couple thousand years of western civilization. More important, it is confusing insurance with taxation. In this case, taxing millions of gun owners so politicians can hand out tax dollars to the victims of gangbangers.

All of this brings me to something Steve Sailer has been pushing with regards to immigration and that is forcing immigrants to carry liability insurance. Unlike compulsory gun insurance, the attempt here is not to infringe on a natural right. Steve is cleverly trying to introduce the idea in order to help immigration opponents. In that regard, it is clever and I hope it catches on with the chattering skulls.

The problem here is similar to the other examples of compulsory insurance. It’s really just a tax. We already have a sponsor system where people can bring over relatives and employees, as long as they meet certain financial terms. Sponsors cannot be on welfare, for example. They have to have an income higher than the current poverty line.

Where the insurance should come into play is on the sponsor and employer. If Jose wants to bring his family over, he has to either get a liability policy with a million dollar combined single limit or post assets of the equivalent. Employers seeking H1 visas would do something similar. If Jose gets rich and wants to sponsor his relatives, Jose has to carry enough insurance to cover it. Similarly, the employer will have to factor insurance costs into their indentured servant costs.

[1] I know. I know.