Category Archives: Culture

Those White-Hispanics Again

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This story is getting the usual suspects very upset for all the usual reasons, but the really interesting part is the guy is called Hispanic. Most people think of Hispanics as the little brown guys riding the leaf blower. The guy in the picture looks like he could be auditioning for a show about World War II. Then again, our elites like their Hispanics the same way they like their black guys. That is superficially diverse, but otherwise white.

Barak Obama is the quintessential black guy because he looks black, but is otherwise a typical white guy from upper class white culture. In the case of Hispanics, the archetype is a Caucasian with three names and a Spanish accent. Juan Pablo fits the bill and that’s most likely why he was selected. It is a terribly shallow and fundamentally inhuman way to view people, but American elites are not too concerned about the feelings of the people.

The weirdness of left-wing identity politics is that it strips people of their identity in order to affirm the identity of liberal elites. They declared this guy non-white, despite the fact he was super-white. Put another way, he has to deny himself in order to properly actualize his full identity within the framework of multiculturalism. The whole thing is insane, of course, but nothing about multiculturalism makes any sense when you examine it.

Retiring Science

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Poor old Steve Sailer is about to go into overload over the latest big question on the Edge website. The question posed to scientists and pseudo-scientists is “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” It is an interesting question for two reasons. One is some ideas in science hang around long after their validity is expired. Despite the philosophy of science stuff that tells us how science is supposed to work, bad ideas still creep in and stick around as truth. Vested interests defend invalid theories for all the familiar reasons.

Most of what makes up psychiatry, for example, is fairly worthless now that we have some understanding of genetics and brain chemistry. The idea that you can talk someone out of being depressed or schizophrenic is ridiculous, but we still have talk therapy. All over America, drug counselors try to talk people out of being addicts, even though it does not work and can never work. There’s money in the old bad idea, so the profession will not let go of it, no matter what’s happening in neuroscience.

The other reason this is a great question is it flushes out the fakers within our intelligentsia. All societies have an intellectual elite. In theory, our intellectual elite is based in reason, so they should always be ready to purge bad ideas. In reality, they are just as superstitious as prior elites, maybe more so. Dumb ideas that support the prevailing secular morality, for example, are protected, while good ideas that challenge it are rejected.

A good example is the second respondent in the list, Nina Jablonski, the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at The Pennsylvania State University. Her idea to retire is race.

The mid-twentieth century witnessed the continued proliferation of scientific treatises on race. By the 1960s, however, two factors contributed to the demise of the concept of biological races. One of these was the increased rate of study of the physical and genetic diversity human groups all over the world by large numbers of scientists. The second factor was the increasing influence of the civil rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. Before long, influential scientists denounced studies of race and races because races themselves could not be scientifically defined. Where scientists looked for sharp boundaries between groups, none could be found.

Granted, anthropology is not science. At best, it is taxonomy. Anthropologists can add to the stock of human knowledge by cataloging, describing and recording human societies, past and present. It is useful to know the daily life of the typical Spartan, for example. That allows us to build a realistic model of Spartan life which can help explain their history as a people and their demise. This kind of information helps fill in the picture of history. It helps us understand why they lived and why they gave way to some other people.

Similarly, detailed descriptions of modern people are useful to real scientists teasing out genetic relationships between collective traits and specific genes. That said, this women should know that race is a real thing and an important aspect the human animal. But, she wishes it were not and would like everyone else to pretend it were not real. She is an example of why many fields are dismissed by the empirically minded. They tolerate and promote unserious people like Nina Jablonski.

The fact is, the modern word is in a race of sorts. One side of the intellectual elite is learning the true nature of human diversity, which increasing looks to be invalidating core beliefs of the ruling elite. The other side of the race is where proselytizers like Nina Jablonski come into the picture. She is trying eliminate any decent from the prevailing orthodoxy before science invalidates it. It’s nice to think that the truth will win out, but the way to bet is the inconvenient science is what eventually gets retired by these people.

The Paranoid Wackos Were Right

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The main problem with conspiracy theories is they require things of government and government people, that you never see in real life. Government is big, ponderous and stupid. It is a sledgehammer when it works at all. The sort of precision needed to micromanage the population has never been observed in government. The Soviets tried the hardest, but failed to do any more than murder anyone who go out of line. Even the North Koreans have found it nearly impossible to granularly control their society.

Then there are stories like this one, which show how even the blunt instrument of government can be turned into a sensitive instrument of oppression. A crazy cop or even a crazy cop department can tap into the vast database of information the state and its agents have about all of us. if they find something they don’;t like, even if it is perfectly legal, they can make your life a living hell. The state and its agents can weaponize information to bully and intimidate even the most law abiding citizens.

This cop did not act on his own. It is the policy of the police in Maryland to harass gun owners. The police will never admit to it, but it is so obvious that it is not a secret. The cops say they are just following procedure, which is true, but many are eager to show their enthusiasm. The cop could never have done anything like this ten years ago. In a decade, agents of the state will be able to pull up your medical history at routine traffic stops. Turning the cops into morality police will be just a matter of changing a policy.

This story from last week shows the way. Linking your DNA to an electronic ID like a Bitcoin would solve a lot of the technical hurdles for the surveillance state. DNA is unique and Bitcoin is unique. You can’t fake either one so it is impervious to counterfeiting if it your official ID. All of your transactions would then require some of your DNA, which could be as little as a few skin cells. The technology is not there yet, but within the decade it will be ready. That means everywhere you go can be tracked.

It turns out the paranoid types were right all along.

Going Left

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Everyone agrees that America has moves steadily to the Left over the last century or so. America in the 1950’s was not that much more liberal than it was in the 1920’s, but it was clearly heading Left. Today’s America is much further Left than it was in the middle of the last century. In other words, the direction has remained the same, but the pace has quickened. As the nation’s rulers have dropped Christianity as their organizing morality, they have embraced the various fads on the Left as a secular religion.

It has not been a steadily increasing shift. It has been in fits and starts, with spasms of radicalism, followed by quiet periods. The period from the assassination of JFK through the Nixon administration was spasm that shifted the country way over to the left compared to the America of 1958. We are in the midst of one such spasm now, which can be dated to the 2000 election. That seemed to radicalize or maybe energize the radicals, who have been on the warpath ever since.

An example is in the comments of a post on Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen mentioned that Peter Schuck is “largely a Democrat.” That’s a subtle way of saying he is a liberal, but not crazy like most of them. He still retains the ability to criticize the actions of his ideological clan, if not his ethnic tribe. That seemed to upset some of the readers, who went into the full purity spiral. Here is a comment from someone calling himself Matt that captures the fevered mind of the modern leftists.

Schuck is “largely a Democrat” in the same way that Joe Liberman is “largely a Democrat”, which is to say, not really. He’s most famous for arguing that children of unauthorized immigrants born and raised in the US should not be US citizens. He’s not conservative compared to, say, the average state senate member from South Carolina, but he’s pretty far outside of the mainstream of the Democratic party.

Notice how Joe Lieberman, a liberal’s liberal for his entire Senate career is now “outside of the mainstream” for the modern Left.  Matt and his coreligionists are now so far Left that yesterday’s liberal is now a reactionary. Cults always need a Trotsky and Lieberman continues to fill that role for those radicalized in the Bush years. It’s not that his position are really outside the acceptable, it’s that Lieberman was willing to associate with the people the Left still considers the face of evil. It’s guilt by association.

That is a feature with all radicals. Because there is no limiting principle to things like anti-racism or opposition to war, they can always out radical the most radical guy, but adopting an even more extreme position. In this spasms of radicalism, the Left lurches further to the extreme, which drags the center with them. The professional Right, of course, chases after them, which only helps drag the center to the Left. When this spasms burns itself out, the new center will be far to the Left and conservatives will defend it as the new normal.

 

Another Black Guy

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Like a lot of people in the bad thing community, I have recently discovered Ta-Nehisi Coates. This means I have not been reading the Atlantic for a long time. I used to be an avid reader, when it was the symbol of educated taste and I was a young guy trying to acquire educated tastes. I lost interest in it at some point, but I did return when Michael Kelly took over for a while. After his death they fell back into the old bad habits and I drifted away. There’s only so much blank Progressivism you can take.

Anyway, I discovered him when he was described as an important new public intellectual in a lefty publication. Looking at his blog, I saw some interesting stuff and read up on him a little bit. There was enough there to see the familiar markings. The Left will start with the idea of the ideal intellectual and then find some guy to dress up like the model and repeat the slogans and sing the songs popular with the Left. It’s like the Left has central casting where they find these guys to plays these roles on TV and their websites.

This bit from the Coates blog jumped out to me:

When I was young man, I studied history at Howard University. Much of my studies were focused on the black diaspora, and thus white racism. I wish I had understood that I was not, in fact, simply studying white racism, but the nature of power itself. I wish I had known that the rules that governed my world echoed out into the larger world. I wish I had known how unoriginal we really are.

Notice it is possible for someone to major in white racism. By the time you are a teenager, you have a pretty good idea how racism works, whether it is white-on-black, black-on-white or any combination that strikes your fancy. America is a big country. Whatever your race, we have someone who hates you for it. The other thing that jumps out here is the conflation of racism, however defined, and power. It is an interesting concept because it explains something of the black view or the Western world and is entirely insane.

people naturally are attracting to people who look like them and share their heritage and culture. This is obvious to anyone who has been outside. That means they are less likely to be a threat. Developed within the evolving social networks of humans over ten thousand years, it is not hard to see how distrust of the other is baked into the cake. It is a useful survival strategy and it is useful as a group survival strategy. This innate sense of trust among similar people is well known to anyone who has traveled.

Notice also that race is not real, but racism explains everything that makes people like Coates angry at the world. It’s a weird contradiction, but these are not people basing their claims in Aristotelian logic. This dualism about race is simply a way to claim they have a right to your stuff and to rule over you. On the one hand, you got yours through racism, which is bad, but blacks can never be racist, as they don’t have stuff. It’s pretty much just a tarted up statement from the black guy who robbed your house.

Those Happy Filipinos

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The term “hot-blooded” has fallen out of favor, as observations about anything outside the gray zone of multiculturalism are forbidden. It used to be a common way to describe people from the parts of the world near the equator. An Italian or Mexican could be described as hot-blooded, to mean emotional or passionate. It was not an insult, as people who were “hot-blooded” were also well meaning, just more emotional than the northern European type. Of course, this is strictly forbidden now, so no one says it.

Maybe there is something else about being hot-blooded. According to Gallup, the Filipinos are the happiest people on earth. Without studying it too closely, it really does look like being excitable tracks with general happiness. On the other end, the people from colder climates are the least happy. Singapore tops the list, but the usual suspects from the cold, Caucasian outposts fill out the top ten. The method for building the list probably falls far short of what most people would call empirical, but it is interesting.

Gallup went out and asked people a series of questions like “Did you feel well rested yesterday?” and “Did you smile and laugh a lot yesterday?” and tabulated the results into this least of most and least happiest nations. Presumably, the more you laugh and sleep, the more emotional you are according to Gallup. That makes sense. You never hear about great Russian comics or Swedish funny men. Of course, laughing is something contented people would do, so getting plenty of sleep makes sense, as well.

That said, the results do conform to what we tend to think about people. Filipinos do seem like happy little people. In fact, most people think of the southern latitudes as relaxed and happy places. It’s not just the weather that attracts whites from the north to places like the Caribbean. They go there to relax, because the culture is relaxed and the people seem happy. That said, Gallup was not going to headline their study “Swarthy People of the South Most Hot Blooded” as that would get them sent to the camps.

The question, of course, is what’s on the flip-side of this coin. People who are emotional are less rational. A great chess player or poker player is one who controls his passions and is clinical in his approach to the game. You really see this in poker these days. The winners are almost always men from STEM fields. They maintain a dispassionate engagement with the game and rely on their opponents to let their emotions get the better of them. In other words, the dispassionate are better at controlling their environment.

Then there is the link between emotion and time preference. A child has a high time preference and throws a fit when they don’t get what they want. To survive in the north means putting off today so you can food in the winter. People are happy and getting planet of sleep don’t have to worry if they put up enough supplies to last the winter or weather their hut is weather proofed. Perhaps the trade-off is you get happiness or you get a lot of civilization stuff done. That really does not sound like a great trade.

Drug War Inc.

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Drug War Inc. is making a stab at fighting back against the wave of pot legalization that is sweeping the country. Fighting drugs has been big business for decades now so the folks profiting from it are mature businesses and institutions. Millions depend on the never ending war on drugs for their livelihood. If the libertarians are correct and close to half our prison population is in the system for drugs, that’s a million people.

It probably takes that many to keep them in cages. You have the guards, their unions, the union bosses and the vast administrative layer. You have the people who build and maintain the cages. Then you have the cops and courts who chase and process the criminals. They have their suppliers and unions. Fighting the drug war is a multi-billion dollar industry that serves another multi-billion dollar industry, the political class. The politicians have been using the drug war to scare up votes for generations.

One way to justify their existence appears to be the claim that legalization will breed a whole new type of crime that must be fought by Drug War Inc. Certainly, these new businesses, flush with cash, will be targeted by criminals. The same people stealing copper pipe so they can sell it to buy meth will try to break into weed shops, rob the customers and so forth. Simply decriminalizing the buying and selling of weed is not going to change the fact that it is a cash business conducted by low-lifes.

That can be reduced by letting the pot dealers open merchant accounts to take credit cards and bank accounts to deposit their cash. They will need to adopt the same security tactics pawn shops and check cashing operations have adopted. Korean liquor store owners in Baltimore and Washington have solved the problem of running a cash business in black neighborhoods so the pot shops have plenty of examples. The above ground nature of it would then draw in professionals who know how to solve these problems

That’s not going to deter Drug War Inc from making their claims. You can be sure they will be rushing to the nearest news studio with any evidence of new crime arising from the weed shops. I don’t doubt that the black market weed dealers will seek some way to keep their business going and that may include attempts to get in on the act. Talk to any cop working narcotics cases and he’ll tell you that drug dealers like crime. If not for drugs, they would be into some other illegal activity. Criminals will always be with us.

The question is whether they will muscle in on the legal weed business. Organized crime has long been into illegal cigarettes. They steal them and sell them at a discount to convenience stores, but that’s a low level crime. The more profitable venture is to get large quantities from low tax states and send them to high tax states, without paying the tax. When Canada imposed a massive tax on cigarettes in the 1990’s, bootleggers set up shop in upstate New York to smuggle Marlboros and Camels into Canada.

Another way they can get in on the racket is through extortion, but that’s not a great crime these days. America is loaded with cops looking to arrest someone. The value proposition of extortion is just not what it was in the old days. Going into a retail joint and telling them to pay or you break their legs works if the cops are not prepared to intercede. That was the case in the heyday of the Mafia. Today the cops are the protection racket and they will not let anyone muscle in on their turf, so this seems unlikely.

Of course, the other side to this is that it is an example of anarcho-tyranny. Tasked with stopping the flow of drugs, Drug War Inc. eventually turned into a business and then a racket. It lost interest in actually stopping the flow of drugs and instead focused on terrorizing local potheads. Maybe what comes after anarcho-tyranny is just a massive set of institutions that consume resources, but do nothing.

Saved By Fraud, Maybe

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Trust is an essential part of human relations and human organization. It is what holds the group together, whether it is a family, a clan or a tribe. The size of the group allows for quickly addressing a breach of trust, but also allows for quickly rewarding the holding of trust. A neighbor helping a neighbor in a small town will get immediate feedback from the rest of the town. This is the foundation of Western civilization. Small groups of related people are bound by trust with our groups into a nation.

In non-Western arrangements it is even more obvious. The complex relationships in the clan or tribe require trust that works like a unit of currency, passed between members in the group. At the center are the high trust members and at the fringes are the low trust members. It is what made the Mafia work for so long. They adopted the Arab tribal system which was impenetrable to western investigative techniques. The core people in the middle were insulated by layers of people bound by trust, like gravity.

Trust does not scale up very well when there are alien elements within the society. For example, the Jews in Germany learned this the hard way. They were used to pogroms and discrimination, as that had been a feature of Jewish life in Europe since the Roman Empire. Jews had been subjected to various forms of persecution, usually for money, but sometimes for vengeance. We should not sugar coat it. Sometimes, the Jews made trouble for the host populations and paid the price for it.

The fact is, trust between people is a function of blood. The closer two people are related,t he more they share in common in terms of ancestors, the more trust they can have between one another. The greater the biological distance and cultural distance, the greater the risk of conflict. Even though Jews lived as a high trust, insulated tribe in high trust societies, there was always friction and open hostility between Jews and their neighbors in the host counties. That often resulted in the persecution of Jews by the majority.

In modern times, Americans are struggling with this problem. Most white people still think the ideal America is one with a small Federal government and local control of their communities. This is based on the assumption of a 90% white country. That’s no longer America. All of those small, homogeneous communities with high levels of social trust are being displaced by a massive state and the invasion of tens of millions of people from non-white countries. As a result, America is becoming a low trust country with lots of friction.

Strangely, what may turn out to help avoid some ugly conflicts are things like this. The people claiming to be good at safeguarding your money are not worthy of trust when they fail in basic ways like this. Even rich people are finding that the system is not as powerful as it claims.  Every day, we learn that the people claiming to have control of things don’t have much control and cannot be trusted. If multiculturalism depends on an all-powerful and competent custodian, then these failures may cause some rethinking of the project.

A whole lot of people who used to say they trusted the government “to keep us safe” during the Bush years are having second thoughts. It may be too late to roll back the surveillance state, but these events will foster a new attitude toward it from the commoners. The Bush years created a lot of skeptics, not just of government, but of the cognitive elite and big business. That doubt, if it turns into a genuine alternative to the dominant politics, could slow the push to create a majority-minority society.

The future is not written and the way to change course is for people to lose faith in the rulers. Regular failures by the folks promising us we can trust them is a sure way to grow skepticism among the people. Even the most gullible get tired of being screwed eventually. Liberals will never lose the faith, but the rest are persuadable. If they are not won over by appeals to reason and tradition, maybe scaring them will work. If the people stop trusting their guardians, maybe they will stop trusting their project.

Modern Witchcraft

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One of the fun parts of reading old books is that you run into things that everyone knew to be true, but was completely false. Medicine is a great example. The worst thing that could happen to a sick person 200 years ago was that they doctor arrived. Up until very recent, medicine killed more people than it cured. Their medicine looks more like witchcraft than science. Strapping people to a gurney and hitting them with high voltage is pretty much barbarism. In its day, however, everyone was sure it was the peak of scientific reasoning.

That said, much of what gets labeled science today will be looked upon as nutty superstition in not so long. It’s not actually science, of course, but the term is so abused that future people will probably assume everyone agreed that things like sociology and economics were science. Most people have always known that psychology, for example, was quackery, but will future people know we knew that? Or will they just read the old books and assume we were that silly?  Will they know this was considered nonsense?

Within American gender norms is the expectation that women should be modest. We argue that violating this “modesty norm” by boasting about one’s accomplishments causes women to experience uncomfortable situational arousal that leads to lower motivation for and performance on a self-promotion task. We hypothesized that such negative effects could be offset when an external source for their situational arousal was made available. To test hypotheses, 78 women students from a U.S. Northwestern university wrote a scholarship application essay to promote the merits of either the self (modesty norm violated) or another person as a letter of reference (modesty norm not violated). Half were randomly assigned to hear information about a (fake) subliminal noise generator in the room that might cause “discomfort” (misattribution available) and half were told nothing about the generator (normal condition: misattribution not available). Participants rated the task and 44 new naive participants judged how much scholarship money to award each essay. Results confirmed predictions: under normal conditions, violating the modesty norm led to decreased motivation and performance. However, those who violated the modesty norm with a misattribution source reported increased interest, adopted fewer performance-avoidance goals, perceived their own work to be of higher quality, and produced higher quality work. Results suggest that when a situation helps women to escape the discomfort of defying the modesty norm, self-promotion motivation and performance improve. Further implications for enhancing women’s academic and workplace experiences are discussed.

First off, biology makes women modest. There’s a reason we don’t have cultures on this planet where the women are aggressive and rowdy. Humans, like all life, have a primary purpose baked into the software and that’s reproduction. Males and females of our species have different reproduction strategies based in large part on our different roles in reproduction. This has nothing to do with “gender norms” made up by the ridiculous people in the oogily-boogily departments of modern colleges and universities..

Second, this nonsense is funded by tax payer and rate payers. Those future historians will no doubt know this and assume that the people of earth in this age really thought this nonsense was real and worth funding it. The reason we have those old books was because rich people were willing to bankroll their production. What that means is the answer to the question about how we will be viewed by future people is probably the same as we view past people. Future man will wonder why we did not progress very much.

Inequality Thoughts

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Jim Geraghty has a post up on National Review Online about the “polarization” of the public over politics. Usually what these guys mean by polarization is that the public is not buying what the media is selling them. When a non-liberal shows up on campus to give a speech and is heckled, he is polarizing. When an abortion fanatic shows up at a Catholic college and is heckled, he is courageous. Anyway, the point of his post is that people are mad and it has nothing to do with politics.  I posted this in the comments:

First off, Frank Luntz is probably a sincere person and all around great guy, but his profession is closer to witchcraft on the empiricism scale than it is to science. He makes his living telling the Sean Hannity audience what they want to hear. I don’t want to call him a charlatan as I think he believe this stuff. If he were not performing on the Hannity show, he would be watching it.

Second, income inequality is not just a leftist fad for the political season. Keep in mind that the Left has embraced the modern tools of crowd sourcing. While far from perfect, they are very useful in defining trends. Americans are increasingly aware that the folks in charge live vastly different lives than the rest of us. There’s also a growing suspicion that the interests of the ruling class are at odds with the middle class. A rich tech billionaire moaning about paying his market rate does not go unnoticed.

Third, this is not the first time America has seen this sort of problem. The new robber barons are different in that they are Davos men, cosmopolitan citizens of the world who got rich from global capitalism. Their loyalty to country and culture is nearly non-existent. That makes them seem <i>alien</i> to the hoi polloi. The robber barons of old were men who embraced country and culture.

Global capitalism is a boon to rich people in rich countries and smart people in poor countries. It is a bane to the middle class of rich countries. As a political matter, the GOP has a choice. It can be the party of the middle class and stop chasing after the favor of the plutocrats. This, I suspect, is a lost cause. Alternatively, they can go back to their historic role as accountants to the ruling class. The Left works on reorganizing society and the Right keeps the books.

The narrative says the GOP represents conservatives, by which is meant middle-class white people, but that’s a myth. The recent actions of Boehner and McConnel make that clear. The early embrace of Chris Christie as the choice for 2016 is another clear sign the party would like to be rid of the Tea Party and the other non-conformists. For half a century, the GOP was about defending the public finances and defending against the communists. Otherwise, they went along with whatever the liberal democrats wanted.

A careful reading of history shows that all ruling elites have these two factions. One side wants to charge ahead with all sorts of schemes. The other side wants to tap the breaks and steer clear of trouble.  Otherwise, they agree on most of the important stuff. In modern times, we are seeing the ruling elites move closer, as they begin to define themselves in opposition to the people over whom they rule. In Europe, this is well under way as formerly ideological opposites are now in power sharing deals. The Tories and Labor, for example

The question is whether the people on the outside will go along with this deal. In America, the slow grinding down of the middle-class is not going unnoticed. Europe has all sorts of weird social unrest. People are unlikely to go along with a new system where everyone is relatively poor compared to the ruling elite. Then there is the question of sustainability, as global capitalism rests on the belief that borrowing rates at the top can always be zero.

This can only work if the elites can control capital almost entirely and even then, it is hard to see how that can be sustained. People will first note that “both parties” fail to deliver, while the wealth gap grows ever wider. Then the people notice that voting has no effect on the process. That’s when people start looking for option, usually at the extremes. The Left will search out screamers who promise to rally the fringes against the middle-class whites, while those middle-class whites tart listening to those promising to defend their stuff.

In the end, gross inequality leads to social unrest.