Category Archives: Culture

Digital Fantasies

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America’s Newspaper of Record brings word that Amazon has opened its first bookstore, as in brick-and-mortar bookstore.

The opening of Amazon.com’s first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really “eating the world,” as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011.

In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote:

“Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company — its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its Web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.”

Retail stores are still not strictly necessary, and yet Amazon now has one in Seattle. That’s because the book market has proved less one-dimensional than publishers and sellers feared in 2010 and 2011.

In September, The New York Times revealed that the Association of American Publishers had registered a 10 percent decrease in digital book sales in the first five months of the year and that the number of independent bookstores was actually growing.

The failure of the Great Pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch and sprinkle the children with free eBooks is hardly surprising. I used to go around and around with moonbat friends about this issue as they were all convinced that we would soon be reading everything from a magic tablet. Physical books were old and stuff so of course they serve no purpose.

As is always the case with Utopians and futurists, they naturally assume that because they cannot see the obstacles to their fantasies, those obstacles must not exist. Full steam ahead! In the case of books, the glorious future of eBooks faced the very real obstacle that they were not a very good replacement for real books. They are and remain, a solution in search of a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I consume most writing off a screen. I read a book or two per month, sometimes more sometimes less. I read a ton on-line. It has been so long since I’ve held a newspaper I can no longer remember when. The other day, I was getting coffee and someone asked if they had a newspaper. To me, it sounded like he wanted to know where to tie up his horse.

The thing I was never able to explain to my moonbat friends with regards to eBooks is that books as we understand them, along with bookstores, publishers, writers, editors, layout men, illustrators etc., did not spring from nothing. They evolved over time to solve the problem of quickly and easily distributing content to as many people as possible in a way that profits the people involved in that process. It is not easily replaced.

Movable type was invented in 1040. The printing press was invented 400 years later. In other words, it took 20 generations for there to develop a need for the mass production of printed material and a solution to be developed. We have another 30 generations to get us to the paperback that you can take to the beach. The point being is there is a lot of trial and error in those bodice-rippers you wife reads.

Utopians never think of these things as they think that their inheritance dropped from the sky. They have no appreciation for what they see around them. All they know is the sleek looking iPad is cool and all the cool kids have them so let’s close down the bookstores and make everyone read eBooks. That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the level of thinking. The people betting on eBooks were betting that 50 generations of work could be replaced in a wave of the hand.

I say all this as someone who reads eBooks. I read physical books too, but I also read eBooks when convenient. I re-read Camp of the Saints the other day off my tablet. The book is terrible and I would not display it on my bookshelf so I saved the money and downloaded it. The thing is, I don’t read a lot of books that suck and I tend to make notes in the margins when I read so the physical book works better most of the time.

Further, if I leave a book on a plane or at the beach, no big deal. If the sun melts my tablet, that is a big deal. If I drop my tablet down the steps, that’s a big deal, while dropping a book off the roof costs me nothing. These are things the Progressive mind can never contemplate as they see no value in them, because they see no value in people. My preferences are immaterial to the material mind.

This blinkered reasoning is standard fare these days so I’m an outlier. The physical book was as good as it needed to be and mail order was fast enough and cheap enough. For something to replace this model it had to be different, offering things you could never get in a book like embedded video or multidimensional plot strictures for fiction where every reader get s a slightly different experience. Instead eBooks are just books that make your eyes bleed.

Busy Work

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Walk around any big company and you will find lots of people that appear to do nothing but busy work. They have titles and responsibilities. They perform all sorts of activities, but it is nearly impossible to figure out how these activities help the company. In tough times, these are often the people who get let go and everyone who is left moans about having to do their work, but in a month or so no one notices anymore.

Government and the academy are loaded with people that do nothing but busy work. I once knew a guy whose mother was a year from retirement from the government. Her department was closed and instead of transferring her elsewhere, they just let her run out her time in an office. She spent her days making scrapbooks of the grand kids. They even gave her an office with a window.

I knew a guy who worked for the city of Boston and all he did was attend meetings. His day would start with a meeting and he would go from meeting to meeting all day with breaks for lunch and answering voice mails and so forth. I had some fun trying to pin him down on what he actually *did* every day. The best I could tell, he’s gift was in never answering the question.

Maybe the reason the workforce participation rate is at all-time lows is because of a side effect of automation. That is, there’s no need to automate busy work. The process of automating essential work is making it harder to add extra people who spend their days keeping busy. As companies automate essential work, there’s less waste, as in the guy in the cubicle who spends all day on Facebook.

The area I notice this most often is in IT departments. Companies of any size will have at least one IT person. Often they have several. One guy handles desktop support, while another manages their software and corresponding database systems. Some other guy is the boss and he usually spends his days in meetings, not actually doing work. All of these people appear to be essential when something goes wrong, but things don’t go wrong very much anymore.

These jobs could be and used to be combined. I’m old enough to remember when there was not much of a need for desktop support because everyone used dumb terminals. This can be done today with things like Citrix and thin clients. Similarly, the IT guy was never in management meetings. Like engineers, these were guys who did work, not talk about it. We’ve created a lot of busy work in IT.

The place where you see endless busy work is the academy and the “think tanks” that have sprouted up like dandelions all over the Imperial Capital. In the academy, the study of the obvious has become a staple of life. Every day we see something in the news feed that can be classified either as the “study of the obvious” or the “study of the imaginary.” The latter pretty much keeps the economics departments around the country going.

I think it is part of what is driving the replication crisis in the soft sciences. Most of these studies are cooked up in order to fulfill grant funding conditions. The government doles out money and part of the deal is a paper on some topic. The result is loads of “research papers” that are simply gibberish.

The old saying that idle hands do the devil’s work applies to busy work. My suspicion is most of the people rattling around the academy are better at fraud than anything academic. Take for example this guy who did a guest post on the Ron Unz site. Ron posted it mostly because it conforms to his view that biology does not exist. Ron is a denier!

Anyway, look at the bio of the writer, Chanda Chisala:

I am from Zambia, Africa. My formal educational background is in Biochemistry, but I have never practiced it or worked in that field. I started my web company immediately upon graduating in Biochem at the University of Zambia. I also formed Zambia Online in 1998 and it is still the most active Zambian web site today (see Zambia Google rank).

“Human Supremacism” is what I call my philosophy. It simply means that man is the highest kind of being possible in reality, and it means that every individual is absolutely the highest kind of being in the universe. This is the only logical foundation for the ideology of human rights. No one has a right to control another human being, not government, not society, nothing, because nothing is above any human being. So, observing human rights simply means that you can’t involve any human being in any kind of interaction without their permission. And this interaction means interacting with any of their property. Governments exist solely for the purpose of sustaining this principle. Anything they do above that is not their duty and it is usually a violation of human rights itself. Human supremacism.

In 2008, I was granted the Knight Fellowship by Stanford University to study “the impact of the internet on the future of African journalism, and the philosophy of human rights.”

In 2009, upon completing my Knight Fellowship program, I was invited back to Stanford by the Hoover Institution as a Visiting Scholar.

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, Mr. Chisala has no business being on a college campus. The reason he has never worked in biochemistry is there is no one in Zambia in need of a biochemist and no one outside of Zambia would hire a biochemist from Zambia. STEM fields are notoriously un-PC because they are right answer fields. Checking the right boxes does not trump getting the wrong answer.

Having figured this out, Mr. Chisala set about a career as a hustler that has taken him all the way to Stanford. His personal philosophy reads like something you see in high school yearbooks, but that’s not what matters. He’s checking the right boxes at Stanford and that’s what matters. He gets to fritter away his day writing nonsense about the Internet in Africa, a topic no one cares about, including Africans. This is busy work.

The assumption by the robot future guys is that we will reach a point where the robots either wipe us out of become our caretakers. We will become Eloi and the machines will be our Morlocks, without the harvesting and eating part. A world kindergarten where humans are free to play like children, while their robot overseers look out for their safety.

Maybe the alternative is a world composed of busy work. The robots will figure out that humans need to feel important and that means performing work. The robots will create a world where it appears all of us are doing important stuff, but in reality we are just spinning our wheels, killing time in busy work, like maintaining blogs.

The Yankee Scold

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In another age, David Brooks would have been a guy standing against the wall at the town hall meeting, where the fate of Esther was being debated. Some would argue that a good dunking was enough. Others would argue that burning at the stake was the only way to make sure the devil was not living in the village. Later, David would make clever and witty observations about the night’s events to his coevals.

Poor Esther, however, would have spent that night looking for David to come to her aid believing he would explain to the townspeople that she was not a witch or possessed by the devil. After all, the well regarded Mr. Brooks had counseled her to trust in the good judgement of the townsfolk and trust in God to carry her through this ordeal. A whole lot of Esthers have gone to the gallows waiting for their David to rise and speak on their behalf.

David Brooks is pitched as a conservative voice at the New York Times, but I can’t think of single right winger who would consider him a fellow traveler. Brooks is what the Left imagines a good and sensible conservative should be, as opposed to those malignant Morlocks on the other side of the wall. For Progressives, Brooks is a good person with some contrary ideas about how best to run society.

As is always the case with the Left, reality is something different. Brooks is a Public Protestant. That is, he is not overly concerned with private morality. He was, for instance, one of the first to dismiss the indecency charges against Bill Clinton. Instead, men like Brooks imagine themselves as anointed by God to carry out God’s work and try to make the world a more perfect and less sinful place.

When men like Brooks think and write about morality, it is not in the context of his relationship to the Almighty. It is about your relationship with the Almighty, which happens to be the managerial class, of which Brooks is a member in good standing. This profile of Brooks provides an example of what I mean.

In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”

Therein lies the difference between the Public and Private Protestant. The Born Again Christian would prefer it if the public square was family friendly, but that has nothing to do with their relationship with God. It’s why we see these folks retreating from politics again. Their salvation is a personal matter, not a political one. Once there is no room in politics to debate issues like abortion and marriage, there’s no point in participating.

For Public Protestants like Brooks, the public square is all consuming. The anointed are not judged by their private relationship with the Almighty. They are judged, along with the society they maintain, on the general morality of society. It’s why they are endlessly meddling in the lives of the people. If they let you fall into a degraded state, it reflects on them so they believe they are obligated to prevent that from happening, whether you like it or not.

The trouble that is brewing in the Republican Party is directly tied to this divide over morality. David Brooks is considered a conservative at the New York Times because he resists the current fads roiling the ruling class and instead adheres to old Yankee sense of public obligation and public authority. The Progressives really don’t disagree with him on these points. They just think he is old fashioned, which is closely associated in their mind with reactionary.

Outside of this ecosystem, where the bulk of GOP voters reside, this dynamic just looks like two sides of the same coin. Paul Ryan hugging Barak Obama as they agree on how much of your money to spend on their public improvement projects strikes many GOP voters as a betrayal. In the room where these two men are hugging, it feels like they are adversaries. Outside the room it looks like they are partners.

That’s because outside the room, most American are Private Protestants. I’m using the term as a non-sectarian, cultural label. Lots of atheists, Catholics and Hindus reject the serve-the-world/save-the-world ethos of the ruling class. These voters are looking from Republican to Democrat, and from Democrat to Republican, and from Republican to Democrat again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

Since the 19th century, America has been dominated by the old Roundhead culture that dates to the founding. The south has been too weak economically and culturally to push back. The middle has thrown in with the winners out of necessity. The choices before the voters since the middle of the 20th century has been between the hair-on-fire fanatic and the prudent scold, with guys like Brooks filling the role of the latter.

Politics is about numbers and the numbers no longer favor the Roundhead coalition and that’s what leaves guys like David Brooks sleepless at night. His role as the sensible antidote to the fanaticism of his coreligionists is of no value when there is a more cavalier coalition to counter the Roundheads. That’s what we are seeing signs of in the Trump coalition.

The space for the Yankee scold to operate is getting small. Perhaps that’s why David Brooks is suddenly struggling with his relationship with the Almighty. He keeps working on that sermon, making weekly improvements, but the number of people in the pews gets smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, all the Yankee scolds will be left searching for a congregation.

Being Wrong

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There’s a genre of expository writing where the author explains in detail how he got something completely wrong. The name for this form is “nonexistent” because no one ever does it. Similarly, you will never hear a lecture from an economist explaining how he got some prediction totally wrong. For instance, Obama’s economic team swore that the stimulus bill would set off an economic boom through the magic The Multiplier. They were wrong and it was a flop, but no one talks about it because it is simply not done.

This is something you see in all fields, not just public policy. You never read about scientists discussing how they screwed up an experiment or fell for some nutty idea that sounded good at the moment. What we expect and what we get is equivocation, denial and when that does not work, an attempt to flush the incident down the memory hole. It usually works too. Paul Ehrlich was hilariously wrong about human populations, but he has paid no price.

The weird thing about this, I think, is we know that being wrong is usually more important than being right. When you are a student learning mathematics, you are required to show your work in detail. The reason is the teacher wants to see your mistakes. In sports, coaches focus on the mistakes even after a big win. The reason is we learn more from our errors than through our successes. It’s an axiom of life that old people teach to young people as they help them get over some difficulty.

I think one reason why public people never admit being wrong is they know that a lot of people really want them to be right. The people telling the public that economic science said the stimulus bill was a sure fire cure for the economy knew that a lot of people wanted that to be true. They voted for Obama believing he was Jesus. Those economists selling the stimulus probably believed it too. They really really wanted to be on the winning side of history. When that did not happen, they could not face it so they did not face it. The dogs barked and the caravan moved on.

Our side of the game is not immune to this either. Read Zero Hedge and you come away thinking the world is about to explode any minute. Every day they have a post title something like “Five Charts Predicting Armageddon.” That’s been a feature every day since it started in 2009 and the world has not exploded. More important, being wrong for six years has not discouraged them. In fact, they are more certain than ever, operating under the theory that they are due, I guess.

It’s not just the fringe weirdos on our side. Reagan was convinced that taking tax hikes off the table would eventually force the welfare state into retreat. His reasoning at the time sounded great. Make tax hikes the third rail of politics and it leaves borrowing as the only way to finance the government. Eventually, the bond markets would force a roll back as the deficits would grow so large that eventually no one would lend. Reagan came into office when debt was at $900 billion. He left with debt at $2.6 trillion. Obama will leave office with $20 trillion in debt.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. In the 1980’s people knew that no country could survive with public debt equal to or greater than GDP. Now, that mountain of debt may one day topple over and take us all down, but it is not happening tomorrow. As it stands, the great day of reckoning over public debt is 25 years late and nowhere to found. That’s important to keep in mind when thinking about the current issues of the day. The odds are, we are all wrong about what’s coming next.

The people in charge, the central planners running the economy through the central banks, are often mocked by people on our side. After all, every effort at central planning has failed miserably so why should this time be different. The thing is, it has been different and it remains different. Say what you will, but the massive debt and real estate bubble that burst seven years did not plunge the world into depression. Maybe it was dumb luck or maybe the central planners are better than we think. I’m not saying they are perfect or that they really know what they are doing, but I don’t see any soup lines either.

It’s possible that the looming custodial state, where the Cloud People rule over the Ground People like game wardens, is going to be wonderful. The Ground People will embrace being cared for like children and accept being pushed around by the authorities when necessary. The sense of looming catastrophe that animates much of the alternative right will turn out to be completely misplaced. Instead, it will be viewed as a great leap forward for humanity.

Or, I could be completely wrong.

Babel

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On Saturday mornings, I go out for a coffee at the donut shop and spend a an hour reading the Interwebs, e-mail, twitter, etc. The shop is owned by Indians (dot not feather) and my guess is they originally came from the northeast of the subcontinent. Their English is good enough to further suggest they come from a higher caste or maybe even spent time in the US as students.

After the donut shop, I head over to the dry cleaner to drop off and pickup. I have no interest in pressing my shirts and trousers so I have outsourced this task for thirty year at least. The dry cleaner is run by a nice Korean lady who speaks very poor English. I’ve picked up some words and phrases from her, but my Korean is strictly for entertainment value. We do our business in broken English.

I then stop at the Spanish market next door and get a coffee. My Spanish is good enough to get by so this gives me a chance to practice a bit, but the people running it speak Mam, which is a Mayan dialect so Spanish is their second language. It makes for an interesting fifteen minutes. The people from that part of the world are a happy people so they enjoy my efforts.

Then it is off to the McDonalds to pick up my regular. I have hot cakes and sausage most Saturdays as a reward for remaining on the sunny side the grass for another week. The McDonalds is staffed by blacks from the neighborhood so that means they speak their brand of ghetto. I speak some ghetto, but only enough to follow popular hip-hop songs. The menu is an amusing mix of Spanish and English. The customers are mostly old white people marking time.

Polyglot, multi-racial and multicultural cities are not a new thing in human history. New York City was America’s first melting pot. The early settlement by the Dutch was a trading port and had a little from each category of humanity. Greater New York had a slave trade with the last slaves being freed in 1827 so even the horrible crime thinkers from the Cavalier side of the family were represented.

Most Americans live in traditional American societies, but this is rapidly going away, while places like New York and San Francisco are becoming mono-cultural. When in the suburbs, I’m surprised by how quickly the old white English speaking world is being washed away. Retail stores are all run by foreigners. Labor is mostly Spanish. The foreign youth adopt the habits of ghetto youth creating a weird blended youth culture that will be “American” culture in a generation.

It’s comforting to think that the people will rise up and put an end to this, but that horse left the barn a generation ago. The time to put a halt to the invasion was in the 1980’s when they passed their last immigration bill. The anointing of Paul Ryan and (most likely) Marco Rubio means the war is over. The battles left to be fought are rear guard actions and the normal mopping up after one side wins and the other is vanquished.

I’m often asked why I live where I live, but the fact is I’m living in the future. If you are a young person today thinking you will live your parent’s life in a white suburb, you’re going to be very disappointed. Your world will be one where you are just another minority in a polyglot, fractured culture that largely depends on a coercive custodial state to maintain order.

The definition of success in a fractured jumble of a world will have nothing to do with social status or economic success in the traditional sense. Being a high status Mam speaker can mean nothing to the ghetto speakers next door or the Koreans down the block. How could it? The Mam speaker will have no way to transmit to the Korean why he believes having a large noisy muffler on his truck is a big deal.

Similarly, financial success will be a zero sum game. It pretty much is now as we have been in a no-growth economic order for decades. The Mam will get relatively rich by beating the Koreans at exploiting the ghetto for government cash. Clannishness will be a pretty good group survival strategy so the Irish will finally have a shot to be something other than the lyrical nitwits of the Anglosphere.

Otherwise, the future is the Babel I see on my Saturday morning. That’s appropriate given the people mostly responsible for it. There’s a generation or two, maybe or three, to secure a place within the emerging cloud cities, but at some point they blow the bridges and close the gates. Plan accordingly is my advice to the young.

No Purpose

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One of my favorite topics around here is the domination of the Roundhead wing of the American ruling elite. In fact, the old Yankees are the ruling elite. It’s not just politics and finance, it is the general culture, but it is most obvious in politics. Southerners, for example, don’t have a prominent role in either party. Appalachia has no role and the southwest may as well not exist as far as Washington is concerned.

This Pat Buchanan column is a good example, I think. Buchanan is no one’s idea of a liberal, but he causally accepts a very Progressive idea that a nation must have a purpose, a spiritual purpose, that gives meaning to each and every citizen.

“If the Cold War is over, what’s the point of being an American?” said Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of the John Updike novels.

A haunting remark, since, for 40 years, America was largely united on the proposition that our survival depended upon our victory over communism in the Cold War.

We had a cause then. By and large, we stood together through the crises in the first decades of that Cold War–the Berlin blockade, Stalin’s atom bomb and the fall of China to Mao, the Korean War, the Hungarian revolution, the Cuban missile crisis, and on into Vietnam.

We accepted the conscription of our young men. We accepted wars in Asia, and, if need be, in Europe, to check the Soviet Empire.

Vietnam sundered that unity.

By 1967, the Gene McCarthy-Robert Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party had broken with the Cold War consensus. “We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism,” said Jimmy Carter.

The Reagan Republicans and George H. W. Bush would pick up the torch and lead the nation to victory in the last decade of that Cold War that had been a defining cause of the American nation.

But when it was over in 1990, America was suddenly at a loss for a new cause to live for, fight for and, if need be, see its sons die for.

This national purpose stuff is playing with fire and something a good conservative, I think, would discourage. A whole lot of mischief has come from men on a mission. But, the assertion that America is a propositional nation held together by a shared national purpose is the dominant belief. Reagan talked about the city on the hill and Obama talked about transforming the world. Bush talked about spreading democracy to the savages.

This is an idea straight out of Puritan America. The religious fanatics that settled New England really thought they were building a new human society in God’s image, a light to lead the fallen world into the grace of God. The South never had these ideas, as the southern colonies were mostly business ventures that grew into colonies. Middle America was settled by continental refugees who just wanted to be left alone.

Of course, the assertion that America is a propositional nation sounds good until you think about it. After all, if anyone can be an America as long as they commit to the proposition, it means any American who does not accept the proposition can be tossed out. In other words, countries are just temporary arrangements that have no connection to biology, history or culture. Any group of fanatics with a goal can be a country!

Putting that aside, the whole idea of a national purpose strikes me as an idea conservatives would be wise to reject. The purpose of the state in a sensible society is to protect the interests of the citizens. It does that through the uniform enforcement of the law, the enforcement of contracts and the protection of private property. If the people need meaning in their life they can take up a hobby or join a church.

That does not mean conservatives should be isolationist or xenophobes. It’s just that the health and welfare of the rest of the world is the business of the rest of the world. No on likes a busy body and that’s what inevitably comes from this national purpose stuff. Americans become the world scolds, running around telling people how to live. That serves no one but the people in charge, who get grace on the cheap because someone else is paying the bill.

The Religion of Open Borders

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I’m fond of pointing out that the main reason Progressives win every fight is that their opponents make the mistake of thinking it is a debate over facts and reasons. The people calling themselves conservative right now are sure that all they have to do is round up the facts and present them to the other side and the Left will throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers.

Reality is completely different. Progressives are religious fanatics and no amount of reality will shake them from their beliefs. Their religion does not have a superior being anymore, but it has lots of supernatural components. Most important, it has a moral component. The adherent is there to receive grace and that comes through social activism. They act locally because they think eternally.

We’re seeing a similar thing with open borders. It’s common to blame the greedy cheap labor lobbies for buying off pols in both parties, but there’s not a ton of evidence for it. The guys doing most of the hiring of illegals are small businesses with no lobbying power. Amnesty actually harms the cheap labor lobbies because it would end the under the table hiring. Yeah, there are cheap labor lobbies, but they are not the bogeymen many imagine.

Steve Sailer has other ideas. In this post about Paul Ryan, he blames black people.

In the early 1990s I visited the Milwaukee fairgrounds on the lakefront a couple of times for various festivals. I recall being struck by how African Americans made up a large percentage of the partiers at the festivals, but a small percentage of the workers. Most of the work seemed to be getting done by Mexicans.

A continuing theme here at iSteve is that Milwaukee and Madison have, on average, close to the worst blacks in the country. Most Northern cities’ blacks are the descendants of people who left the South in the 1940s and 1950s for jobs in the North. But Wisconsin’s blacks tend to be the descendants of people who left Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s for welfare in social democratic Wisconsin.

It’s only natural for Wisconsin whites like Paul Ryan to see Mexicans as better than blacks and thus want more of them in order to demographically swamp the African-Americans who have made life miserable for Wisconsin whites. But it’s also natural for Republicans further from the Canadian Border to be less naive about the poorly thought-through social engineering emotions of Wisconsin politicians.

Steve is fond of this sort of reductionist argument. It sounds good at first, but when you think about how it must work, it starts to sound implausible when you scale up from one guy at the state fair. Imagine Ryan meeting with his team and saying, “We have to do something about our bad blacks and I think we should import a bunch of Mexicans!”

I don’t know. Maybe that’s happening at secret meetings of The Deep State™ and I’m terribly naive, but my sense is exactly no one in Wisconsin thinks like this. I get around a lot and what you always hear from amnesty advocates is one of two talking points. One is that Hispanics are wonderful hardworking additions to the country. The other is they are a necessary part of the labor market.

Frankly, I don’t know if anyone that says these things thinks much about it. They just say these things because that’s what you do. If you are a Democrat, you are for amnesty so you pick from one of the Democrat talking points. The same is true for most Republicans. Libertarians, of course, have their fantasies about the free flow of good and people in a world without government.

My hunch is what lies at the core of the Religion of Open Borders is morality. It’s a manifestation of Public Protestantism. In a prior age, the Yankee religious impulse was focused on the salvation of society, not of the individual. You had men in black clothes making sure you were observant of the Sabbath and not having too much fun. Once God faded from the picture and the world got smaller, this impulse folded into what we call social activism. The moonbat woman next door with the Prius really does think she is saving the planet.

The Religion of Open Borders is the next great cause or perhaps the globalization of Yankee Public Protestantism. Take a look at this article by Tyler Cowen’s flunky, Alex Tabarrok.

Not every place in the world is equally well-suited to mass economic activity. Nature’s bounty is divided unevenly. Variations in wealth and income created by these differences are magnified by governments that suppress entrepreneurship and promote religious intolerance, gender discrimination, or other bigotry. Closed borders compound these injustices, cementing inequality into place and sentencing their victims to a life of penury.

The overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants want little more than to make a better life for themselves and their families by moving to economic opportunity and participating in peaceful, voluntary trade. But lawmakers and heads of state quash these dreams with state-sanctioned violence—forced repatriation, involuntary detention, or worse—often while paying lip service to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

That is a purely moral argument. He couches it a little in economic terms, but he is not shying away from the moral claims he is making in favor of mass immigration.

What moral theory justifies using wire, wall, and weapon to prevent people from moving to opportunity? What moral theory justifies using tools of exclusion to prevent people from exercising their right to vote with their feet?

No standard moral framework, be it utilitarian, libertarian, egalitarian, Rawlsian, Christian, or any other well-developed perspective, regards people from foreign lands as less entitled to exercise their rights—or as inherently possessing less moral worth—than people lucky to have been born in the right place at the right time. Nationalism, of course, discounts the rights, interests, and moral value of “the Other, but this disposition is inconsistent with our fundamental moral teachings and beliefs.

The language used here is right out of the Abolitionist Movement. It is right from the Civil Rights Movement. It’s right out of John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity. God does not make an appearance, but clearly Alex believes that the path to grace is through creating a world where “every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection.”

Crime & Society

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The big hobbyhorse issue for libertarians is America’s incarceration rate. They love the issue because they get to prattle on about weed, while sucking up to the Left, who are always looking for an excuse to release felons into your neighborhood. In other words, they get to sound tough about small government in a way that is entirely safe from the wrath of their Progressive masters.

While I think our prison system is a mess, my response to libertarians over the issue is always the same. “How many current inmates would you like released into your neighborhood? On which corner of your block should we put the halfway house?” It’s a fun bit because no has yet provide an answer. Just as it is easy to be generous with other people’s money, it’s easy to be kind to convicts from a great distance.

It’s even easier if you are insane. This story I saw posted on twitter was getting passed around by the usual suspects, suggesting that maybe I’m too soft on libertarians.

What Lind doesn’t talk about is the way that the vast, vastly profitable private prison industry created and lobbied for legislation that criminalized more conduct and set out longer sentences for violations, operating in opaque secrecy, running forced-labor camps, profiteering from prisoners and their families, bribing judges to send black kids to jail, and producing a system where the rich can launder billions for drug cartels without a single criminal prosecution, but poor people caught with minute amounts of weed go to jail for long stretches.

In other words: that hockey-stick growth isn’t an accident.

If you follow the links, you find the Alex Jones type paranoia that has always been a part of the modern Left. Instead of secret government agencies in league with space aliens, you have secret corporate agents in league with aliens. It’s The Deep State™ run out of a corporate boardroom instead of Langley.

Putting all of that aside, it does raise an important question and that is how were we able to have relatively low crime rates, adjusting for race, age and sex, while having a stable prison population. Something changed in the 50’s and 60’s that led to the sudden upward turn in crime.

The obvious candidate for what changed preceding the spike in murder rates is the Civil Rights Movement. The greatly diminished status of blacks would have suppressed crime rates in two ways. First, the fear of white retaliation would have resulted in high levels of self-policing among blacks. Second, white indifference to black life would have artificially reduced the crime stats.

The trouble with this explanation is that white murder rates did tick up in the 60’s, just off a much smaller base so it was less obvious.

Black-White-Homicide-Victims-1950-2010

The trouble here is getting good data of crime rates by race from before 1980 is surprisingly difficult. I’ve been searching and this is the best I was able to find. Crime rates by race are slowly becoming forbidden knowledge. Even so, it’s hard to honestly tie the spike in black crime to the Civil Rights Movement without better data showing a bigger spike than we saw in white crime rates.

The more politically correct answer is the proliferation of street drugs and the drug trade. Libertarians love this one, but so does the Left because it conveniently avoids talking about race. The trouble with this explanation is that it assumes people suddenly went insane and started taking massive amounts of street drugs. This is one step away from blaming evil spirits.

The Old Right answer is that general assault on traditional culture that started in the late 50’s and accelerated into the 70’s eventually broke down the traditional ways of controlling crime and other social pathologies like drug taking. The result was a rise in social anarchy. Eventually, we evolved a new way to deal with the problem, which was mass incarceration.

The crime issue is a good example of how public policy is always about trade-offs, Swing the wrecking ball through a social institution and something replaces it. It’s also an example showing how American Liberalism will inevitably end in authoritarianism. As traditional institutions are destroyed, the state flows into the void. The existing organic institutions grow weaker relative to the state, making them easier to knock over.

Travelogue: Texas

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Travel is one of the best ways to see the world. I’ve been lucky in my life in that I have had the luxury of traveling quite a bit on someone else’s dime. Business travel is not vacation travel, but I think it is often a better way to see the world simply because you have long stretches with nothing to do so you look around, explore, adventure. On vacation, you have “stuff’ that fills every waking moment, usually within the confines of the Potemkin vacation area.

I’ve been to Texas many times. I used to travel here often for work matters. Thirty years ago when I first visited Texas on the way to Mexico, I thought this is a place I should live. For some reason, it just seems to fit my sensibilities. Every time I’ve come here, I have had the same thought: I don’t think I’m going back. But, here I am nearing my jump into the void and I’m still just a guy who visits Texas.

The funny thing about Texas is it is remains the one place in America that is brimming with confidence. Texas is not a terribly sentimental place. They will knock down an old building for a new building without giving it a thought. In the Northeast, an army of weirdos will be there guarding the old building, even though the weirdos will have no clue why the old building was built. It’s just old so they think it has to be saved.

At the same time, those same weirdos will claw one another’s eyes out to cancel the school Christmas play. There’s the lack of confidence. In most of America, our betters conduct themselves like the ne’er do well grandchildren of a successful man. The kids compete with one another as to who is the most reverent toward the old man, but not a one of them tries to emulate him. The best they can do is have a big picture of him in their house, which he bought for them.

Texas does not have the problem yet. Texans love being Texans and they love being in Texas. There’s really nothing special about Texas. Dallas is a massive suburb that looks like every other suburb in the South, but they are proud of it and you see that everywhere you go. Texas plays Oklahoma today in the Cotton Bowl and tickets are selling for $500 on the secondary market, even though UT is terrible. It’s just a great celebration of Texas football history.

I think that confidence is why Texans are soft on immigration. They are cocksure that if you move to Texas, you will become a Texan. They are right about it too. Vietnamese refugees landed in Houston and are now Texans whose ancestors came from Vietnam.  Of course, Texas has always had loads of Mexicans from the northern part of Mexico. A big part of what makes Texas tick is the blend of Southern culture and northern Mexican culture.

In Massachusetts, there’s zero cultural confidence. If America were invaded, the good thinkers of the Bay State would surrender on day one and begin taking classes in the language and culture of the invaders. That’s why the northeast seems to be leading the charge on the immigration fight. They are scared. A friend here in Texas, who is from Mass, is a rock-ribbed Trump man now and it is all over immigration.

In the South, illegal immigration is an issue, but mostly because it offends the people’s law and order instincts. It’s not seen as a threat to their way of life. In many respects, migrant workers are a part of their way of life. The South would be a very different place without the flow of migrants into the agribusinesses. Go into a poultry plant in Virginia or North Carolina and you see nothing but Hispanics. It’s been that way for generations.

The same is true of Texas. Mexican migration in and out of the state is just a part of the state’s character. The Mexicans who live here permanently came here because a part of what made them Mexican also made them Texan. The transition was easy. Of course, there are Texas families who were here before Texas was a place. The result is most Texans feel they have a good handle on how to manage Mexican immigration.

Finally, kicking around here it strikes me that the Cult hates Texas for the same reason they hated Sarah Palin. In the case of Palin, the idea that dirt people could live the feminist ideal while hanging onto dirt people culture enraged the Cult. Palin was the living negation of the One True Faith. There’s a similar thing with Texas. here, diversity is on display all over, but it’s held together with the dominant Texas culture.

The Cult believes this is impossible. For them, diversity means obliterating all culture by running it through the blender of multiculturalism. The result is the exact opposite of vibrant diversity, but the screaming and bellowing makes it impossible to point it out. A state like Texas puts the lie to the Cult’s blathering about diversity. Texas has boatloads of it without adopting any of the Cult-Marx nonsense.

Now, I’m off to eat my weight in fried food.

Not Funny

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The other day, some one posted a link to this post by the late Larry Auster. I was not a frequent reader of Larry’s while he was alive, but I have read more of his work since his death. It’s a funny thing. I should have been a big fan of his work, but there’s only so many hours in a day and you can’t follow everyone. That and a dozen years ago I was a little wore down by paleo-con moaning about George Bush.

Anyway, his commentary about Jonah Goldberg reminded me that it has been a long time since I’ve read Goldberg. I was a regular reader up until his first book, which I thought was very good. If you want a good primer on 20th century Progressive history, it is a good option. Up until that point, Jonah was an irreverent slacker smart-ass, but after he wrote a book he tried to turn himself into a very serious person, which was a good decision. The money is better.

A couple of years ago he tried to get back to being an irreverent smart-ass again with his G-File columns, but they were painfully unfunny so I stopped reading them. They just felt hackneyed and corny, like seeing an old comic try to do his act after 20 years away from the stage. Tastes change, people change, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on. All humorists have their time and once it is gone, they start to sound, well, hackneyed and corny.

A good example of that is P.J. O’Rourke, who has always struck me as a nasty, self-absorbed d-bag. Maybe there was a time when he was funny, but I’ve never stumbled upon an example of it. I’m told he was hilarious at National Lampoon when he penned stuff like this. There’s no accounting for taste, but there was never a time in my life when that was funny to me, not even as a child when cornball humor goes over well.

The other day the twitter machine was buzzing with this column written by O’Rourke that may be humor or maybe not. I really can’t tell. It just reads like a bitter old man saying nasty things about someone out of jealousy.

Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.

Hilarious. O’Rourke is pointing out that he he very old and has old stuff. That’s a real knee-slapper.

Ann Coulter grew up during the “I-was-conservative-after-conservatism-was-cool” era, helping found the Cornell Review in the early 1980s. She’s noisy and she gives me a headache. But kids are, and kids do. I have several.

Actually, the 1980’s was pretty much when “conservatism” became cool. It’s also when he decided his left-leaning hippy routine was becoming dated so he went with the libertarian shtick.That way, he could make fun of the lefties, but also play the old crowd by mocking the Right. To quote myself, libertarianism is standing on the sidelines and pretending it is on principle.

That last line is a classic insecure old-manism. Coulter is a middle-aged woman so calling her a kid allows the old fart to dismiss her like a servant. It’s a defense mechanism you see with old men who fear they can no longer keep up. O’Rourke is not a dunce so he knows he is a yesterday man and he is bitter about it.

The rest of it is mostly sad. Writing is not a young man’s game, but it is not geriatric man’s game either. Some guys stay fresh well into their dotage or they stick to subjects where being a geezer works well. But, all of us lose our fastball eventually. For a guy that is mostly getting by on shtick, the fastball goes early. If O’Rourke ever had a fastball, it is long gone.

Of course, The Weekly Standard is not trying to send a fastball at Coulter’s head. They just want to let her know to take it easy on the Jew stuff. This brush back was more like throwing behind the batter so you know he won’t get hit, but he’ll get the message. Having the old washed up guy do it is safe because even if he plunks her, nothing is going to come of it.