Transactivism has taken establishment feminism setting up ovaries and mammaries as being incidental to being a woman and made it irrelevant to being a woman.
It is rather startling how much of the public space is being driven by trans activism and trans issues. Trans folk are, after all, a very small proportion of the population whose individual cases are rife with various complexities.
Yet, we are being offered striking simplistic narratives that have to be adhered to if one is going to be of the morally meritorious.
In fact, trans issues in the public sphere provide an excellent example of the more general dynamics of narrative-driven sense of status based on prestige opinions.
Especially the attendant hostility to any discovery processes that might threaten said narratives and prestige opinions. This hostility to open enquiry so as to preserve the status value of the prestige opinions as unchallengeable means that comments or musings that do not conform have to be pathologised. Dissenting views even more so.
Hence the very strong tendency to misrepresent both. Having detected a failure to conform to prestige opinions and narratives, the material in question does not have to be seriously grappled with, it just has to be characterised in whatever conveniently pathologising way is at hand.
Misrepresentation becomes rife, with comments by the divergent being given implications that weren’t there, weren’t intended, or simply have minimal connection to what was actually said.
This is tied to catastrophising, whereby expressing divergent views is characterised in ways that invoke alleged catastrophe. The classic catastrophising in trans activism being “you are erasing my/our/their existence”.
This is, of course, a nonsense at so many levels. Words do not erase one’s existence. They can, however, damage a narrative and if one’s identity is tied to a particular narrative, then the “wrong” words can be very threatening.
Meanwhile, trans-activism seeks to separate the possession of a uterus, ovaries and functioning mammaries from the identity of being a woman.
Where establishment feminism went…
In this, they are pushing at a door that careerist feminism has already opened.
Lots of women do not identify as feminist. A 2015 poll by the UK’s most significant advocacy body for women, the Fawcett Society, found that only 9% of British women identified as feminist. Meanwhile, 81% of women supported equality of opportunity for women (and 86% of men did so).
Explaining the dramatic divergence between supporting equality for women and identifying as feminist is simple: feminism comes with a lot of baggage other than achieving equality. Especially as the most prominent and public version of feminism is dominated by highly-educated career women, who pursue the interests and concerns of highly-educated career women.
Such feminism has blown through seeking equality and is now after various forms of privilege. “Believe all women!” is not an equality claim, but one of privilege. That criticising men is feminism and fine, while criticising women is misogyny and not, is also not an equality claim, but one of privilege.
Careerist, establishment feminism has a clear set of concerns about motherhood. Which is (1) to maximise the ability to avoid motherhood, (2) to minimise the career costs of being a mother and otherwise (3) to mainly positively concern themselves with motherhood when it becomes a stick to beat fathers and fatherhood with.
In this view of women’s progress, the key markers of progress are all concerned to do with women’s participation in the workforce, particularly the professions. This means that women’s progress largely revolves around social markers that are explicitly separated from having a uterus and ovaries. Any attempt to make anything of this separation of women’s progress from having a uterus and ovaries is treated as an attempt to tie women to motherhood: to “force” them to be barefoot in the kitchen; to de-legitimise any other aspiration.
Trans-activism just takes this well-established pattern of separating key markers of being a woman from anything to do with having a uterus and ovaries one step further.
Uneven mobbing
Trans-activists have become notorious for their hostile mobbing of anyone who is seen to dissent or diverge from their preferred narratives. But this hostile mobbing is not evenly distributed. Women who publicly dissent are typically treated much more viciously by trans activists than men who do so. It is not hard to infer why: they envy women whose identity as a woman goes “all the way down” and so is inherent, without expensive hormones and surgery.
But this particular hostility to women who do not go along with the preferred narratives and prestige opinions also has its counterpart in establishment feminism.
It has been a regular finding of honest surveys (those that do not tie feminism to believing in equality for women) that many women do not identify as feminist. Once one realises that feminism comes with all sorts of baggage, overwhelmingly tied to it being dominated by highly-educated career women, this is not surprising.
Nevertheless, a standard feminist response to the mass failure by women to identify as feminist has been the condescending notion that such failure to so identify is a failure of cognitive understanding on the part of non-identifying women. That for a women not to see themselves as a feminist is a sign that they do not understand their own interests and are too weak-willed or ignorant to embrace their “proper” feminist identity.
So, only feminists are “cognitively complete” women, This systematically discounts women — except for those that are so blessed they have achieved the status of feminist.
The flattery of false consciousness
It is also a derivation of the concept of false consciousness in Marxism. (Similar notions to false consciousness have a long history in mystical and occult thought. It is very attractive to see oneself as a member of a knowing, enlightened elite.)
The problem with the concept of false consciousness is not the idea that social circumstances and experience can systematically mislead us. Though it is reasonable to query how much this is compatible with adaptive pressures of biological and social evolution. Patterns of cognitive error arising from evolutionary adaption are much more plausible than assuming systematic error that would get in the way of reproductive survival.
The problem comes when the corollary is added that some particular group is somehow gifted with a superior capacity to apprehend reality. This sets one off on a path that makes it so much easier to discount contrary views. Even if held by folk who one is notionally seeking to champion. Notions of false consciousness were, after all, quite enthusiastically adopted to explain how the working class was so cognitively incompetent that it could not accurately judge its own interests.
Taking other people’s views and concerns seriously is a corrective humility and requires an openness to the discovery processes involved in interrogating, without protective arrogance, why they might have those views. Conversely, adopting a process of systematically discounting divergent views and concerns is conducive to collective arrogance while blocking discovery processes.
This interacts with the notion that activism represents the highest moral good. Not only are activists cognitively superior, in that they see what others do not. They are also morally superior, in that they are working to a better future.
This gives even more grounds to systematically discount divergent views while generating a collective identity based on mutual admiration of what is in their heads. (That is, mimetic moralising — ardently copying each other’s moral views — based on mimetic arrogance — agreeing to mutually worship some common factor they have: in this case, the splendour of what’s in their heads.)
It is very easy for this mutual admiration based around convergent views to be tied to contempt and anathematisation of divergent views. Anathematisation that both recruits (to the self-identified moral elite) and intimidates (by stigmatising and punishing those who dissent).
Prestige opinions only provide prestige if divergent opinions generate negative prestige.
Needless to say, discovery processes that threaten any of the tenets of this process of convergent admiration, of mimetic moralising, are not welcome. Casting such efforts at discovery as representing hostility to the ostentatious good intentions that generate the shared identity based on prestige opinions (and thereby being of the morally meritorious), can provide an easy line of rhetorical attack on those using such discovery processes.
Fear of divergence makes those who seek to be identified as one of the morally meritorious remarkably easy to manipulate. Hence the non-player-character (or NPC) meme, as those who seek to embrace narrative and opinion convergence so as to see themselves, and be seen as, one of the morally meritorious, sign up to accept, or at least acquiescence in, all the prestige opinions and narratives that go with being of the morally meritorious.
In such circumstances, any inconsistency between various prestige opinions marking membership of the morally meritorious is a feature not a bug, as embracing inconsistency becomes a signal of one’s wish to be one of the morally meritorious. Such as the wild inconsistency between the age of sexual consent (usually 16) and the sought age of gender-transition consent.
Betraying women
Establishment feminism increasingly accepts various betrayals of women. Since, under social justice ideology dynamics, the more marginal the group, the higher their moral rating, women, being half the population, are thereby less marginal than any other group except men. So, if it is women versus Muslims, women lose. And it it is women versus trans, women lose.
It is not hard to work out why so few British women identity as feminist. For about half of British women, motherhood is their most important identity. Establishment feminist treats motherhood as an impediment on the road to matching men in all (positive) things. Establishment feminists are highly educated, often from elite institutions, and their class is obvious in their voices and language. Establishment feminists have been conspicuously missing in action when it comes to problems of predatory sexual behaviour from within Muslim communities. Establishment feminists are also conspicuously missing in action when it comes to defending women’s sports and women’s spaces from invasion by people who do not have, and will never have, ovaries and mammaries.
Motherhood, class, Muslim, trans: that’s four strikes and you’re out.
There is a wider cultural consequence. If you don’t have children, or turn them into a career embarrassment and distraction from what really matters, then passage down the generations loses its moral and social force. The connected-to-the-past future of continuing tradition is so much more easily rejected in favour of the imagined future built on worshiping the splendour of what’s in one’s head(s).
We have lots of experience of what happens to societies when they are taken over by people who worship the splendour of what’s in their heads and so claim everything will be wonderful if they control everything. The results of such mimetic zealotry are, uniformly, disastrous.
So, to recap. Establishment feminism treats women who do not identity as feminist as cognitive failures. Establishment feminism measures female progress by how few women concentrate on being mothers. That is, by how well people who happen to have ovaries and mammaries match the social patterns of those that do not. The discounting of womanhood in this has opened the door to people who have never had ovaries or mammaries being declared to be women.
Transactivism has simply taken the notion, that establishment feminism has spent decades establishing, that having ovaries and mammaries is incidental to being a woman and made having ovaries and mammaries irrelevant to being a woman.
A shocking attack on a legislative building can be very useful.
On the 27th of February 1933, the Reichstag, the building where the legislature of the Weimar Republic met, caught fire. At no stage was the government of the Republic in danger. There was no loss of life.
Yet it was a shocking thing, especially as it was immediately presented as an act of arson (which it was; though by a lone arsonist, conveniently both foreign — Dutch — and communist). Such a shocking symbolic affront to the political order was too politically useful. So the new Chancellor of the Republic, who had taken office less than a month earlier, the leader of a coalition government and head of the largest political Party in the Reichstag, used the sense of shock and outrage to have President Hindenburg sign the Reichstag Fire decrees that enabled the new government to ram through a raft of repressive measures through the Reichstag, particularly the infamous Enabling Act. These were deployed to end Germany’s democratic experiment and turn it into a one-Party state.
The Reichkanzler in question was, of course, Adolf Hitler and his Party was the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP). These actions did not take place in a political vacuum. Weimar politics had been wracked by intense political polarisation, street violence by paramilitary groups and much catastrophising rhetoric.
Germany’s economy had suffered greatly from the ravages of the Great Depression, with apparently entrenched mass unemployment. 10 years previously, the Great Inflation had wiped out the savings of the middle class.
So, let us consider the Capitol riot. A shocking and disturbing attack on the building where Congress, the US legislature, meets that at no stage seriously threatened the government. One rioter was shot by police, a policeman was beaten to death with a fire hydrant, the other deaths seem to have been mostly misadventure. The deaths add to the sense of shock and outrage. Even though much of what happened seems to have been copied from the months of “black block” rioting that progressives have cheered, valorised or facilitated.
Just as some accused the Nazis of starting the fire themselves, so some have claimed Antifa activists were involved in the Capitol riot. The attitude to media rather contradicts that. While “black bloc” rioters tend to be fine with corporate media, as they tend to amenable to the narrative the “black bloc” wishes to present, but hostile to independents recording their activities, the Capitol rioters were precisely the opposite, attacking corporate media’s equipment but being much friendlier to individuals recording what was going on.
I refuse to call what happened at the Capitol an ‘insurrection’. Insurrections are not usually unarmed and they attempt to set up enduring control of territory. This was a riot happening in a place of great symbolic significance.
But, like the Reichstag Fire, the Capitol riot is being used to justify a raft of repressive measures. Shocking action from one side of politics being used to justify repressive action by the other side of politics.
If one wants to understand how Hitler was able to use a building being set alight to justify and mobilise support for his repressive measures, then the progressive cheering of the post-riot waves of censorship gives us excellent illustrative insight.
Of course, as we live in a time when Big Tech has attempted to swallow the public square, it is tech billionaires who are using the Capitol riot as their very own Reichstag Fire. To much “progressive” cheering. That the tech billionaires are clearly attempting to complete their swallowing of the public square for their own profit is apparently immaterial as long as they pander to progressive desires to control and censor.
(The natural endpoint of progressive worship of the splendour of what’s in their heads being the notion that everything will great if power is entirely in the hands of folk of such cognitive splendour. The more that is so, the more illegitimate disagreement will be held to be.)
History does not repeat. But we can watch it rhyme very, very strongly.
From our helpless infants to the need to learn and be socialised, the years of effort required to raise human children has shaped our biological and social evolution.
The most important single biological fact in understanding human social dynamics is that we have the biosphere’s most expensive children.
A Homo sapien child does not complete the process of biological maturity until their early 20s. To get them to the stage where they can become parents is at least a 15-year investment, though longer is better.
It is not merely the length of Homo sapien childhood and adolescence that makes our children such orders of magnitude higher level of investment than the children of any other species. It is that our infants are incredibly helpless; that our toddlers need to be fed by their parents; that to be effective at being a Homo sapien, our offspring need years of learning and training. For we are the cultural species, who rely on learning to replace the instincts we mostly don’t have.
Expensive offspring to support expensive brains
All the above is both enabled and driven by us being a big-brained species. The scale of brain needed to be an effective Homo sapien means our brains have to do a lot of growing outside our mother’s womb. As it is, the size of a baby’s brain (and thus head) significantly raises the risks of childbirth for Homo sapien mothers.
Our infants are so helpless because their head is so large compared to their bodies. They need to feed voraciously to grow a body able to move our outsize brain around effectively while also continuing to develop our energy-hog brains.
Our babies have evolved for attention-grabbing cuteness to maximise the chance we will invest in them. We have the strikingly unusual pattern of maternal infanticide, as human mothers have to judge whether they have the social support to raise this child.
While we are, along with chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) the most proactively aggressive ape, we are the leastreactively aggressive ape. This created sufficiently peaceful and cooperative social spaces within which to raise our expensive children.
We generally rely onprestige (bottom-up status) far more than dominance (top-down status) because our forager ancestors spent hundreds of millennia suppressing dominance behaviour. This enabled sufficiently peaceful and cooperative social spaces to raise our expensive children.
It is likely that our female forager ancestors experienced far fewer periods than modern women do, due to spending much more of their lives either pregnant or lactating. That the onset of puberty was probably later (than the more recent tendency for earlier-onset puberty) increased the effect.
As menstruation was a mark of fertility, yet was likely relatively rare, it is not surprising that it tended to be highly ritualised. For women and girls, menstruation and its ritualisation took the role that manhood initiation did for men and boys.
We are the only species whose females have breasts that are enlarged when not lactating. This is likely a signal of having the spare resources required for successfully bearing and raising our (expensive) children. Human males having relatively small testes but relatively large (but plain) penises are likely also connected to pair bonding due to having high investment offspring.
We have a history of presumptive sex roles that predates our emergence as a species because human children require constant attendance, so that human females did low-risk gathering and hunting (e.g. of lizards) that could be done while minding children. Meanwhile human males did the high-risk hunting and gathering (e.g. for honey) that needed to be done away from the kids.
We are a group-living, pair-bonding species — a very unusual combination. We pair bond so that each child presumptively had a mother and father to personally invest in their raising. (In the few societies that did not have marriage, that became mother and uncle(s).)
We are group-living species to better able to handle the risks of expensive children via expanded cooperation. Though it is probably more the case that we remained a group-living species, despite developing pair-bonding, to raise our expensive children, given that all our near-relative species are group-living species, hence our common ancestor probably was too.
None of our near relatives pair bond in the way we do, however. Gorillas are a harem species while among chimpanzees and bonobos, groups of males share groups of females.
So much of these evolutionary outcomes were likely interactive processes, for what enables also permits. Patterns that may have, at least in part, evolved for other reasons persisted because of how expensive human children became.
All these features of being a cooperative cultural species that relied on learning enabled us to become the technological species. We were tool users before our genus evolved, and tool makers before our species evolved.
All these things enabled us to become the cultural species, which required expensive brains which meant expensive offspring. For not only does what enables also permit, what permits can also enable.
Evolutionary novelty
As a consequence of the evolution of our technology, we now live in the first societies in human history without presumptive sex roles. This is an amazing evolutionary novelty for our species.
We also have people claiming that people who have never had, and will never have, a uterus and ovaries are nevertheless women. This is, of course, completely nuts.
This is in no way to deny trans identity. Many human societies have had trans identities. Such identities have thousands of years of history to them. Trans is clearly a human thing. But none of those societies thought a (male-to-female) trans person was a woman, because trans folk did not menstruate and could not get pregnant. Such identities were and are, very much, trans identities. They were crossing identities.
In societies where all or most people lived subsistence lives, who could and could not get pregnant was a desperately important issue. It had to be, given how expensive Homo sapien children were and how profoundly that affected the social dynamics of every human society.
How identity as a woman has come to be notionally separated from having ovaries, a uterus and functioning mammaries is a matter for separate examination. For now, let us simply take note of how important our amazingly expensive offspring are for human social dynamics and how important that has been for our evolution as the cultural species.
Controlling public markers of legitimacy can be a powerful source of social leverage. It is one that naturally rests on devaluing citizenship.
A crucial driver of this process in contemporary society comes from the shifts in social power in modern developed democracies as the so-called ‘professional and managerial class’ reaches a sufficient critical mass to aspire to social dominance.
I do not much like the term managerial and professional class. The term is too specifically modern andso gets in the way of connecting current dynamics to past social patterns.
History does not repeat, but it can rhyme pretty strongly.
I much prefer the term human-and-cultural-capital class. First, because it identifies the group as being possessors of (human) capital, so having distinct differences in interests than does labour. This is particularly strongly so with respect to migration, but that is hardly the only point at which their interests diverge.
Secondly, it connects the contemporary social grouping with past manifestations — notably, every priestly class that has ever existed.
Thirdly, because the phrase more directly identifies their main point of social leverage — controlling, or seeking to control, the public markers of legitimacy.
About elite media
This is particularly obvious with respect to elite (“quality”) media. Once upon a time, journalism was a path for working-class folk to make good. Journalists were overwhelmingly not elite folk, and reported on elite doings in a somewhat interrogative fashion to a mass audience.
Nowadays, the elite media is elite in all senses of the word. It is dominated by graduates of elite universities who very much see themselves as members of the cultural elite and as either talking to other such folk or explaining to the masses what they should think.
While journalism has always tended to be narrative-driven — we humans love stories and having a set of narratives simplifies the presentation of facts and events — contemporary media has become narrative-driven to an increasingly intense degree.
For instance, narratives about the happenings at the US Capitol were being spun by the elite media before anyone who was actually there could have reported back in any serious or informed way.
A media that sees itself as part of the elite, and as controlling or setting the public markers of legitimacy, is a very different beast than a media which sees itself as interrogating elite actions on behalf of the public.
The attacks on Parler, on Gab, on any social media platform which does not go along with the preferred narrative, is this elite-control-of-legitimacy dynamic playing out in front of us.
As Google, Facebook and Twitter (and other platforms such as Discord) have shown themselves to be completely on-board with policing legitimacy, any rivals that fail to “get with the program” have to de-legitimised and closed down.
There is a standard pattern to this de-legitimisation, which is to tie any such platform to anathematised views. So they automatically become “far right” and are persistently labelled as such. Then they are tied to any anathematised events.
Having established that they do not adhere to the required markers of legitimacy, attempts to close them down are therefore also legitimised. (A nice short example of consistent hostility towards the failure to converge is here.)
Networked social credit
Given that so many people have become committed to being seen as members of the morally meritorious, either through genuine belief or through fear of being mobbed and abused as part of the process of anathematising dissent (or a mixture of both), this de-legitimisation strategy generates both active support and passive acquiescence.
Without such willing foot soldiers of conformity and convergence, the strategy would have little hope of succeeding.
In China, the social credit system is being created from the top down, as one would expect in a state run by a Leninist Party. In the West, we can see the equivalent being built in a far more networked fashion. (The Nazis, who pioneered totalitarian control in a market economy, called the process Gleichshaltung, or coordination.)
The meme that popped up after the disappearance from public view of China tech billionaire Jack Ma and Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump touches on this (In China, the President disappears tech billionaires. In the US, tech billionaires disappear the President.)
The Capitol riot and the Twitter ban of Trump provided a field day for Chinese media to denounce US hypocrisy.
Both China’s top-down social credit system and the networked version being constructed in the West are built on the systematic reduction of citizenship to having little status beyond determining which elite gets to control your online life in the name of which legitimating ideology.
The pervasive attack on citizenship is part of a divide-and-dominate strategy.
Citizens of contemporary developed democracies live within an imperial order, but not in the way folk often claim.
There is an historical fable about the history of Western states that goes like this: once upon a time, Western states colonised the rest of the world, but then they morally advanced and retreated from imperialism, becoming welfare states instead.
I would put it slightly differently. Western states colonised the rest of the world because they could. Imperialism is what states do when they can, as more power and revenue is always preferable to less. But territorial imperialism became increasingly costly and the normative support for it collapsed. So, now Western states colonise their own societies (as more power and revenue remains preferable to less): we call this self-colonisation the welfare state.
Within the welfare state, it is useful to distinguish between the income-transfer state and the government-services-and-regulation state. The existence of complex societies generate unearned — I would say emergent — benefits that are wildly unevenly distributed.
It is reasonable for governments to tax those emergent benefits and distribute them more evenly. There are obviously questions about what taxes to levy and what transfers to make, but the underlying reasonableness of some level of income transfer is clear. Universal basic income (UBI) proposals simply seek to do such re-distribution of society’s emergent benefits systematically and comprehensively.
Problems of accountability
The government-services-and-regulation state is a rather different matter to such income transfers. That governments are generally not efficient regulators is clear: they have a general tendency to over-regulate and to poorly regulate.
The bureaucratic imperative is for more authority and ambit of activity, because that justifies bigger budgets, expanded career paths and higher status. (More revenue and authority is preferable to less.) Added to this is the tendency for regulatory activity to favour organised interests over the general interest, as organised interests can target the regulatory process more effectively. Hence the general tendency towards over-regulation and skewed-regulation. (For an amusing analysis of perverse regulation politics, see Bootleggers and Baptists.)
Part of the problem is one of scale. The more government does, the more whatever effective accountability mechanisms are in play are stretched. It is clearly easy for the regulatory state to expand beyond the level of effective accountability. (And the weaker the accountability mechanisms, the more dysfunctional government’s regulatory efforts are likely to be — the history of Latin America in a nutshell.) There is, after all, no automatic feedback from the effects of the regulation back to the regulatory process. Indeed, the tendency to judge regulations by their stated intentions (as that is easy and rhetorically convenient) often impede enquiry into their actual effects.
The same points apply to government services. Clearly, they can also easily expand beyond the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms. The bureaucratic push for more authority and greater ambit of activity is the same as for regulation, with extra incentive to increase revenue (i.e. expenditure). It is important to remember that what is government expenditure to the general public is revenue to the spending organisation. Nevertheless, the tendency to favour organised interests over the general interest applies as it does for regulation.
There is also the general bureaucratic incentive to favour concern for process over concern for effectiveness or efficiency. Process is easy to follow and easy to measure. The ease and regularity involved in rendering social action via regularised processes is why bureaucracy tends to be so ubiquitous. Accountability for efficiency and effectiveness of bureaucratic action is much harder to institutionalise and to measure. Bureaucracies will always tend to favour the ease of process over the awkwardness of accurately and systematically ascertaining effect.
Accountability mechanisms also tend to be centralised, so subject to information bottle-necks. Chinese dynasties tried for centuries to develop procedural mechanisms to achieve systematic accountability for government bureaucrats. They failed.
As economist Douglas Allen explains in his splendid study The Institutional Revolution (his analysis of the incentive structure of the Royal Navy in particular is well worth reading), systematic accountability mechanisms were achieved in early modern England. They were primarily a mixture of feedback from Parliament, hostage social capital (expensive mansions in out-of-the-way places that were investments in wasteful loneliness if no one visited), and duelling (a way of testing for unobserved social capital). Mechanisms that made patronage appointments and purchase of position generally work in the wider interest of the political nation due to the pressure for normative commitment and tests of character operating on office-holders.
Duelling meant that people were prepared to defend their reputation at the risk of their life: it was a test of character and commitment. Building expensive mansions in out-of-the-way places surrounded by unproductive display parks was a sunk cost demonstrating commitment to the norms that generated a good reputation — if no one visited, those mansions and display parks were very expensive investments in loneliness and social isolation.
But these character-and-commitment mechanisms operated for relatively small bureaucracies embedded in extensive social networks with powerful reputation effects and a strong sense of common culture (so a strong framework of norms and expectations). This is not the situation that contemporary developed democracies find themselves in.
Mass production (so standardised products) and greatly expanded measurement capacity resulted in a shift to meritocracy. But, in the absence of pervasive mechanisms to test character and commitment, with serious problems of measuring effectiveness and efficiency, and the centralisation of accountability mechanisms (with resulting information bottle-necks problems), it is clear that the government-services-and-regulatory-state has expanded beyond the point where accountability mechanisms are reliably effective.
It is not good enough to wave the democratic wand and claim that of course government bureaucracies work in the public interest. There is no of course about and it is pure institutional romanticism to suggest that they automatically do so.(Though, very convenient institutional romanticism for the bureaucracies themselves and for favoured interest groups.)
Indeed, we live in the first period in Western history when there are no systematic tests for character and commitment involved in selecting officials, whether elected or unelected. Apart from the minimal test of having sufficient persistence to acquire credentials.
Selecting for the ability to gain credentials is selecting for a very narrow sense of merit that, apart from the aforementioned credential-scoring persistence, does not select for character or commitment. It is hardly surprising that we end up either with spineless officials who capitulate at the first hint they might be called bad words or conformist adherents to the dominant mode of mimetic moralising. Or both. Hence we are increasingly governed by an unfortunate mixture of mimetic zealots and spineless weathercocks, leavened by the odd bombastic demagogue.
Mimetic zealots being folk who copy moral positions off each other, converging on whatever prestige opinions are deemed to make one a member of the morally meritorious. Such mimetic zealotry is typically engaged in by people whose prime (sometimes only) achievement is to collectively worship the splendour of what is in their heads; the splendour of their ostentatious good intentions. A pattern of moralised status-seeking oneupmanship that naturally generates increasingly bizarre and toxic purity spirals.
So, disabusing ourselves of the presumption of government policy and services acting systematically in the public interest, let us take a more clear-eyed view of the way migration, and migration policy, operates. After a slight detour into the social dynamics of democracy and citizenship.
The social dynamics of democracy
Socially and historically, there is, outside frontier societies, only one reason to have a democratic political system: to give the working class a say in the political process. That was true back in Ancient Greece, when democracies were states that gave the demos, the free poor, the vote. (Typically, because they needed them to row the war galleys.) It is true today. There is no deep association between any ideological tendency and democracy that is more powerful than seeking working-class votes.
In the C19th, frontier societies tended to be more democratic because they wanted more settlers and because they needed to be able to mobilise willing upholders of the peace. Needing people to fight, to settle, to work, are all powerful reasons to give them the vote. (Not so much for indigenous folk, of course, as they were the ones being supplanted.)
Concerning citizenship
Deeply tied in with democracy as a vehicle for incorporating the working class into politics is the notion of the citizen. As a general (though not universal) rule, citizenship has generally been strongly associated with political participation: and often armed political participation.
Democracy tied the status of citizen to all adults (well, all adult males originally) and political participation to citizenship. Being a citizen was tied to the right to participate, to speak, to articulate one’s concerns, to vote. To participate in the full range of political bargaining. You were the citizen of a specific polity, tying yourself to its history, its heritage, its institutions, its conventions and social norms.
Bringing new people into a citizenship polity is a fraught business. They potentially dilute the votes of the existing citizens and they may have loyalties and normative attachments that are at cross-purposes with their new place of residence. (The newcomers in the settler societies of the Americas and the Antipodes had very different allegiances and normative attachments than did the indigenous inhabitants.) For instance, if migrants move to a country with a different religious majority, it has tended to increase, rather than decrease, their identification with their heritage religion, at least among pioneer migrants, though patterns can vary among later waves of migrants. The dramatic falls in transport and communication costs also make it easier for migrants to maintain connections back to their communities of origin.
Hence, some period of residence is usually required before one can become a citizen. It is also why public oaths of allegiance — a ritual of adopting a new identity and loyalty — are required of new citizens.
An extra complication is the issue of attachments within a polity. As migrants tend to concentrate in particular localities, notably large metropolises, significant levels of movement of people into a society can affect the political balance within that society. It is very obvious that mass migration into the US, France and the UK is sharpening (and partly creating) a metropolitan-provincial split in those societies, with seriously polarising effects. Not only does it mean people have very different experiences of migration, but it can set up a fear-and-arrogance dynamic where one part of a polity thinks it can ignore the concerns of another part because the numbers are increasingly on its side. Conversely, the side that is facing demographic eclipse may get increasingly desperate.
This is not a theoretical scenario, it is precisely the dynamic that led to the American Civil War, as economic historian (and Nobel Memorial Laureate) Paul Fogel explains in his very revealing Without Consent or Contract. However shameful and abhorrent slavery was, the reality was the American republic coped fine with being partly slave and partly free for decades. It was the flood of new migrants, after the development of steamships and railways enormously reduced transport costs, that set up political dynamic that led to the creation of the Republican Party and the secession of the Southern states. A secession due to the plantation elite staring demographic (and so political) eclipse in the face.
It was not merely that the Republican Party was anti-slavery. There had been anti-slavery Presidents prior to Abraham Lincoln’s election. It was the Republican Party platform of also offering land to landless citizens and improving labour income that was potentially highly attractive to poor Southern “whites”. This threatened a potential alliance between freed slaves and poor “whites”. An alliance that the divide-and-dominate strategies of the Southern plantation elite was structured to frustrate. Indeed, that the politics of Democrat-dominated US cities are still structured to frustrate. (The book that makes the dynamics of Southern secession very clear is Kerri Leigh Meritt’s Masterless Men.)
There is another social divide that overlays the metropolitan/provincial divide, one that is picked up nicely in social analyst David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere. That is between networked elites (David Goodhart’s Anywheres: folk who are happy living anywhere there is a decent cafe culture) and those anchored in dense local connections (David Goodhart’s Somewheres). It is the difference between the transactional Gesellschaft world and the relational Gemeinschaft world.
One of the ongoing problems in social dynamics and political polarisation in contemporary developed democracies is that the highly transactional Anywheres include academics and social scientists. They use transactional techniques of social analysis that are often very bad at noticing dense local connections or their significance. The Anywhere academics in particular, often have very little sense of how Somewheres live, how they view the world and why. Anywhere academics often have startlingly little sense, despite their social science credentials. of what they do not know, do not see and do not ask about.
There really are only two mechanisms for working-class social power. One is unionism and the other is the vote. These mechanisms only have any chance of working in the interests of the working class if they rest on strong local patterns of connection. Without strong patterns of local connections, their unions and their political parties are likely to become dominated by university graduates; by members of the human-and-cultural capital class (aka professional and managerial class).
You can only vote according to choices offered to you, and without those strong local connections, working-class folk are likely to have very little say in what is offered. As political economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, democratic politics has become dominated by the division between human-and-cultural capital (who he labels the Brahmin Left) and commercial capital (the Merchant Right), with working class concerns and perspectives being largely shut out. “Defund the police” may represent a resurgence of the anarchist strain in radical politics but it also represents members of the human-and-cultural capital class attacking the last bastion of working class authority — police forces.
Networks of local connections also provide information and resilience mechanisms. Without such connections, genuinely local community action and control is next to impossible. (So-called community organisers are typically university graduates, working for purposes they find congenial: they are far more local servants of the human-and-cultural-capital class than anything resembling working-class action.)
In two classic studies, (‘The Strength of Weak Ties’, 1973, and ‘The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited’, 1983) sociologist Mark Granvotteer outlined very clearly the importance of these local connections, particularly if locals are to have any effective say over their community. These patterns of local connections provide what economists call social capital and anthropologists call relational wealth. Any social processes that break up these local connections will very much work against the interests of the resident working class. Which brings us to the matter of migration.
Mass migration
Australia and Canada have had a very different experience of mass migration than the US, UK or France. That is because (1) Australia and Canada are highly urbanised societies, without much of a metropolitan/provincial split. (Or, more precisely, the major urban centres are so demographically dominant, that provincial discontent is swamped.) And (2), due to their geography, Australia and Canada can control their borders relatively easily and have no neighbouring source of migrants, so can (and do) very deliberately seek to have a very diverse range of migrants.
In the case of Australia, despite migrants being about 25% of the population (a much bigger share than the 13% or so of the US), the Anglo-Celtic core has remained by far the dominant group, with migrants divided among many groups of highly diverse origins. This means that Anglo-Celtic norms are much more readily picked up by incoming migrants, as none of them have achieved that critical mass that makes it easier to sustain a resistant mass identity. There are attempts to do so within the Muslim community, but as members of that community clearly keep alerting the security forces to would-be jihadis, it is only having limited success. (This is also true in the US and Canada.) Would-be jihadis have much greater success operating within the much larger Muslim communities of the UK and Europe, where resistant identities are clearly flourishing.
The original mass migration policy was one of assimilation. Assimilation as a social ideal is based on democracy, citizenship and attending to the interests of the working class. It prioritises encouraging attachment by migrants to their new home and their integration into a common political culture. It also implicitly promises the working class that there would be minimal threat to their local connections; to the connections that made their communities work as communities and provided them with effective political levers.
The rejection of assimilation and the switch to multiculturalism (now diversity) was a switch to a very different migration policy. It was a switch from a democracy-and-citizenship to a socially imperial migration policy. Any implicit or explicit promise that migration would attend to the interests of the working class was withdrawn. On the contrary, migration policy would now not only be happy to break up the grounded-in-locality social capital/relational wealth of working-class residents, it would also denigrate them for complaining about it. Any attempt to defend local communities, and the connections that sustain them, can expect to be castigated as xenophobic and racist.
Given that the resident working class was overwhelmingly of Northern and Western European origin, even in the Anglo-settler societies, ANY newcomers were likely to be of a different skin colour. Thus it was easy to shut down any attempt to defend working-class communities, and the social capital/relational wealth embedded in them, as “racist! xenophobic!”.
This is an imperial migration policy. Both in the sense of manifesting the social imperialism of the holders of capital and the state apparatus and in the sense of replicating policies of imperial powers. When European empires imported en masse new people into one of their colonies, due to their economic skills or commercial utility, scholars have had no problem analysing such policies as divide-and-dominate policies. Domestic multiculturalism (pursued in the interests of the scholars’ own class) does not get such critical examination. Yet importing people of a different culture or cultures en masse is a divide-and-dominate strategy, whether it is done in Fiji, East Africa, Sri Lanka, the West Indies or in London, Birmingham, Paris or New York. The colonial authorities would even use the same arguments as modern multiculturalists — the newcomers have initiative, they have skills, they work hard, they increase commerce. Often true, just as it was also true that the newcomers made and make excellent vehicles for divide-and-dominate strategies.
Locality-based identities are grounded in lifetime investments in local connections. Thus, importing lots of people who have no prior connection to a locality or its people, lack common experience, lack common norms and expectations and may well have language differences inevitably frays the dense networks of local connections working-class people typically rely on for effective social action. The newcomers are not part of their local pattern of connections: on the contrary, they will fray, undermine and replace them.
Swamping communities with a mass of incoming migrants who are actively encouraged to continue to identify with their existing cultures, with existing residents being expected to make whatever adjustments required for that, systematically undermines the social capital/relational wealth of the existing residents. It makes it easier for members of the human-and-cultural capital class, working through unions, NGOs, government bureaucracies and corporations, to ensure that their perspectives and networks become dominant.
What the shift from assimilation to multiculturalism-cum-diversity has done is to marry the social imperialism of the human-and-cultural-capital class to the bureaucratic imperialism of the government-services-and-regulation state. With a whole lot of knock-on effects.
For example, official support for the existing heritage and culture is increasingly withdrawn, on the grounds it is not the heritage and culture of the newcomers. Meanwhile, the newcomer’s heritages and cultures do get explicit official support, in what political scientist Eric Kaufmann nicely calls asymmetrical multiculturalism.
But the social imperialism of the human-and-cultural-capital class increasingly goes beyond that to, in true imperial style, condemning the heritage of the local working class as being a benighted one. So benighted that their cultural superiors will rescue us all from it and, again in true imperial style, sneer at the locals for being attached to their reactionary heritage. Thereby replicating recurring imperial attitudes to “native” cultures and heritages.
Every imperial order deems itself to be normatively superior to those it rules over. In this case, we can observe a social and cultural imperialism that is justified by the splendour of what’s in their heads: their prestige opinions and ostentatious good intentions that mark them off as the morally meritorious. An internal imperialism that manifests a sense of not only being a cognitive meritocracy, but being the morally meritorious as well. Of being profoundly justified, indeed morally entitled, due to the perfection of their shared visions of the future that, of course, is so much morally grander than the cultural inheritances of a benighted past.
Hence their collective, massive sense of moral entitlement, where everyone must respect and defer to their moral perspectives while they regularly display their contempt for the moral perspectives of anyone who thinks inconveniently differently for their prestige plays (though rather more conveniently so, because of said contempt, for their dominance plays).
The most vivid way one shows oneself to be a member of the morally meritorious is via contempt for those who think differently. Displaying such contempt is also the easiest way to show commitment. A pattern that encourages convergence to avoid censure but also profoundly devalues the status of citizen.
Claiming to speak for, or on the behalf of, designated marginalised groups is easily used to undermine the existing cultural and institutional order. This form of cultural politics has become very obvious in comic franchises and increasingly obvious in movie franchises.
Imperial orders love multiculturalism/diversity: it means more subjects, and more divided subjects, easier to dominate. A unified citizenry, with common norms and expectations activated through dense networks of local connections, is a much harder (and more demanding) to deal with than a populace divided into different identity groups that the imperial bureaucracy and imperial cultural class will arbitrate between.
This was the strategy of the plantation elite of the Antebellum South. It was the strategy of the Southern elite during Jim Crow. It is the strategy of urban elites in contemporary US cities. It is becoming the strategy in “cosmopolitan” London.
The various versions have used very different rhetorics, but the underlying patterns remain remarkably similar. Telling the Euro-American (“white”) working class that you will “defend” them from the violent “black barbarians” is every bit a divide-and-dominate strategy as telling migrants and those of African descent that you will defend them from “white racists” and “white supremacy”.
Race is very, very useful for divide-and-dominate strategies.
As an analytical category, race makes no sense, as it identifies neither breeding populations nor cultural groups. Political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. is quite correct to tell his students “when you hear the word ‘race’ think unicorn, because it is the same thing”. But the physical markers of race are obvious, so it makes it an easy way to divide people.
The recent British Home Office report on group-based child sexual exploitation is a case in point. Sexual exploitation of minors has absolutely nothing to do with race, but by introducing race as a analytical category, inconvenient associations with valorised minorities can be buried, even though we have the testimony from victims of (overwhelmingly Muslim) gangs that their abusers cited religious justifications. But the report is not compiled by servants of the British citizenry, but by officials of the imperial state attempting to minimise discontent among the “natives”.
The Home Office would find identifying a specifically Muslim problem very awkward from a policy perspective and for officials’ membership of the morally meritorious. There is a very clear elite preference to deny any notion of their being a specifically Muslim problem. In such circumstances, as is so often the case nowadays, the analytically useless concept of race can be a very useful distractor.
As David Goodhart outlines in The British Dream, and Ben Cobley discusses in The Tribe, British administrators moved easily from the colonial model of administering multicultural societies to a domestic version of the same, where they do not identify with any group but arbitrate above and between them.
Divide-and-dominate strategies often actively prefer newcomers or minority groups, as they are more disruptive of the capacity to resist domination, and less threatening to the strategy of domination. In the past, that has often elevated the status of market-minorities, sometimes warrior-minorities. Nowadays, it is a range of welfare-, low-wage- and skilled-minorities that are so treated.
Islam is a very convenient weapon to undermine existing heritage, given that heritage is Christian in its origins. (The concerns of Christian migrants, for example, do not get anywhere near such tender attention from progressive possessors of human-and-cultural capital as do Muslim sensibilities.)
As part of the discounting of working-class concerns, it is sometimes claimed that there is nothing specific to migrants demand on welfare services, so complaints about migrants using welfare services are actually cover for complaining about migrants. The reality is rather more complex than that. The argument that migrants, in themselves, make no significant difference to demand presumes that there is no welfare or government services infrastructure, or that such infrastructure responds smoothly to population surges. This is incorrect. There is welfare and government services infrastructure and such infrastructure notoriously does not respond smoothly to population surges. Moreover, different language, norms and expectations increase transaction costs in using welfare systems, putting further stress on them.
The argument also relies on the notion that there are no positional goods in welfare provision and that is simply not so. Social capital/relational wealth is riddled with connections to positional goods.
So, there is a legitimate basis for complaining about migrant pressure on welfare and government services. Particularly in the case of public housing, where need-based criteria often result in family and other connections in a locality being broken up.
The lack of attention to, or concern for, locality or connection creates societies that easier to dominate, but are also less resilient as it frays social bonds and creates mass disaffection.
A pervasive attach on citizenship
In service of this divide-and-dominate strategy, a pervasive attack on citizenship has developed. Partly this is a product of the development of internet technology. As the major tech platforms have come to dominate access to information, a series of private platforms have largely swallowed the public space. One does not interact or use these platforms as citizens but as users. Being private platforms, they are largely outside the protections that have developed to protect the ability of citizens to express themselves in the public space.
In the online world, we are not citizens, we are all just internet users.
But the use of the status as private providers to attempt to “prune” online opinion would not have got anywhere near as far if there was not a much broader attack on the status of citizenship underway.
The imperial nature of this attack shows up in odd places. Such as contempt for the small (e.g. florists, bakers, etc. who fail to conform to the designated prestige opinions and whose services are easily replaced) and worship of the powerful (the tech giants “proper” management of online opinion and whose services are much less replaceable).
More broadly, the previous notion of civil liberties bodies — that even Nazis are citizens too — has been replaced by the pervasive attack on the status of citizenship based on valorised groups and stigmatised opinions. “Punch a Nazi” is a very different approach. One that normalises (political) violence against anyone deemed beyond the moral pale, regardless of their citizenship status. The attempt to drive declared racists, transphobes, etc out of workplaces, business and the public sphere says expressing the correct opinions is much more important than your status as a citizen.
The problem with the concept of citizenship is that has too much status and specific heritage to it, too much cultural depth. The prestige opinions that grant status as being of the morally meritorious are much thinner gruel. Especially given the religion-shaped-hole in contemporary developed democracies. Religion has historically provided a web of rituals, norms, expectations and social connections that tie societies together, ground common norms and expectations, provide frameworks of meaning and purpose. The retreat of religion provides space for something new to fill that space, as the convergent self-worship of a shared sense of moral merit is evolving to do so.
The consequence of the rejection of the cultural depth of our received heritage is that it easily leaves people with a thin, insecure, even paranoid, sense of self. A form of collective narcissism is natural to such a thin sense of self. Words become expressions of, and threats to, this thin, emotional, affirmative-display self. So threatening, that we get the concomitant demands for social purity in any social milieu that those participating in the new faith system of convergent self-worship are in or associate with.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me is a mantra of a robust citizenship culture with robust discovery mechanisms. The constant invoking of being offended, and (highly selectively) avoiding offence, has rather different implications.
From this convergent collective narcissism based on worship of the splendour of what’s in their heads develops mimetic zealotry and purity spirals. With the selective attention and self-serving narratives that are so much a part of narcissism. And the associated hostility to discovery processes. No narcissist wants to be constrained or wounded by the stings of truth.
Inconvenient science is rejected because science requires doubt and the risk of not supporting the narratives of moral merit, of moral purity. Inconvenient speech and intellectual inquiry is rejected for the same reason. As is inconvenient voting.
Protecting conformity to the markers of moral merit is the point. Hence the aforementioned hostility to discovery processes. The mimetic moralisers, in the apt comments of YouTuber Benjamin Boyce, have intentions that are so good that they cannot doubt themselves.
Migration fits in so well with all of this; if done “properly”, which is to say imperially.
To defend assimilation as a policy is to cast oneself outside the realm of moral merit. But imperial orders always hate the idea that the divided-and-dominated might cohere in ways that demand attention to their interests and concerns.
The logic of divide-and-dominate is not a democratic logic. Nor is a logic for good public policy or resilient societies. But it is excellent for those who so dominate the cultural commanding heights.
Meritocracy is not a new social form. It is not specific to Western modernity. On the contrary, one of the key markers of meritocracy — selection of public servants by examination — was pioneered by China centuries ago.
During the Song dynasty (960–1279), examination became the dominant path to official appointment. With the partial exception of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), the subsequent dynasties, the Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (1644–1912), also selected their officials from those who had passed the imperial examination.
The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) was also a substantially meritocratic polity. The basis of Ottoman meritocracy was the boy-tax levied on non-Muslim families, the devshirme. Each crop of boys was sorted according to their apparent aptitudes. They were trained and tested and set upon their various career paths within the state apparatus.
Yet, the Ottoman Empire became “the sick man of Europe” and the Qing Empire failed to deal with the European challenge and the Japanese one, becoming the “sick man” of Asia. Because meritocracy has a considerable history we can examine how meritocracies decay.
Meritocracy is frequently over-rated.
Incentives and feedbacks are rather more important in determining how social systems work than how meritocratic appointment processes are. Especially as there is often a rather narrow conception of merit involved.
Moreover, meritocracies decay. They decay into corruption, spinelessness and cultural arrogance (even zealotry). They decay in these ways precisely because (1) the notion of merit involved is relatively narrow and (2) the processes of meritocratic selection typically do not involve any serious test of character or commitment, apart from the very minimal one of sufficient persistence (and capacity) to acquire the relevant credentials.
Meritocracy became the dominant model of official appointment in Britain by around 1870 (notably with the Cardwell reforms of the British Army) and in the US with the passing of the Pendleton Act in 1883. So, 150–130 years ago, though the transition to meritocracy took place across the C19th. Around 150 years into Chinese dynasties is roughly when the process of regime decay typically begins to become evident.
The core of the Ottoman meritocracy was established in the 1380s and is in decay by around 1600. But the Ottoman Empire was a warlike, expansionary state, whose elite experienced constant tests in battle. The processes of decay did not really begin until after the reign of Suleiman Kanuni (aka Suleiman the Magnificent, r.1520–1566). So, around 190 years or so after the establishment of the core of the Ottoman meritocracy.
China’s switch to a more meritocratic form of Leninism is probably too recent for the decay processes specific to meritocracy to set in. The decay processes specific to bureaucracy have had decades to emerge, but were lessened by the network-disruptions of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and by the shift to a much more market-oriented economy.
Corruption: selling official discretions
Financial corruption is the selling of official discretion (i.e. decisions, both active and passive). Meritocracy can provide cover for corruption, as officials are presumed to be meritoriously selected. The more merit is relied upon, the more official discretion officials are likely to have, the greater the capacity to sell or use those discretions for personal advantage.
Financial corruption among officials can be functional for rulers. It can provide a way for rulers to exercise patronage by providing supporters with income opportunities. Moreover, corrupt officials lack normative reliability as cooperators, as their actions are for sale. This lack of normative reliability translates into a lack of normative standing, retarding the possibility of their participating in any active threat to the ruler. (The lack of normative reliability is why corruption tends to be networked, as failure to “stay bought” rebounds through the network.)
Corrupt officials lacking normative reliability is, however, very two-edged. Their lack of cooperative reliability makes them unreliable in situations of stress in general, not just as potential political conspirators. In a situation of social stress or crisis, rulers can find their instruments of power effectively melting away as the result of corruption making their notional agents unreliable cooperators.
Chinese dynasties experienced a recurring pattern of mounting official corruption as each dynastic regime aged.
We can see ibn Khaldun’s (1332–1406) model of dynastic (or regime) cycles operating here. In his model, a group with very strong normative bonds comes to power. Over time, and in an interactive process, corruption mounts and the normative bonds weaken. By the end, the system of rule is pervaded by unreliable cooperators, and collapses, to be replaced by a new group with strong normative bonds. Then, rinse and repeat.
Eurosphere polities largely avoided the patterns ibn Khaldun identified as they historically had countervailing tests of character and commitment operating on office-holders. Such as the culture of duelling. With the rise of meritocracy, there is a comparative lack of tests of character and commitment. Thus, ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the consequences of the loss of asabiyya or group feeling (what we might call normative commitment) is likely to have increasing bite.
There are other types of corruption than outright sale of official discretions. For example, advantaging those with connections to prominent officials or creating mutual support networks among officials. It was notably how unremarkable so many commentators in elite media found it that, for instance, Hunter Biden was able to score such high-paying company directorships without any obvious talent or capacity, apart from who his father is.
Modern Anglo societies are relatively good at minimising outright financial corruption. Self-serving networking is, however, rather more common.
Without significant tests of character or normative commitment being attached to holding official positions, the various processes of meritocratic decay can be expected to increase over time due to institutional selection favouring those who play such games.
(On the matter of narrow conceptions of merit, a recent study of the traits of CEOs found that non-cognitive traits — we might say marks of character — such as social maturity, intensity, psychological energy, emotional stability, willingness to assume responsibility, being independent, having an outgoing character, demonstrating persistence and emotional stability, displaying initiative, are collectively a stronger predictor of becoming a CEO than are cognitive traits.)
Official spinelessness …
Spinelessness is risk aversion coupled with a lack of normative commitment. Bureaucracies generally select for risk aversion.
Without significant tests of character and normative commitment being attached to holding official positions, the culture of risk aversion can also be expected to increase, as that is what is being selected for and there is no counter-acting selection for character and commitment. Hence, as meritocracies age, the level of spinelessness among officials tends to increase.
We can certainly see this in our own time. The problem with “wokeness” is far less the demands of activists than that officials and executives regularly give in to them. The complaint by commentator Douglas Murray in his online commentary, and his The Madness of Crowds, of the recurrent failure of the “adults in the room” to act against activist purity spirals, and online mobbing, has much to do with this expanding official spinelessness (i.e. risk aversion without normative commitment).
…and mimetic arrogance
The third feature of failing meritocracies is mimetic arrogance. It is, in part, a natural tendency of meritocracy, as the notion that one is appointed on merit has a certain ego-elevating effect. Especially for a shared notion of merit. Members of the meritocracy can furiously agree what splendid persons they all are for having acquired the relevant markers of merit.
Retreat into such mimetic arrogance becomes more attractive the more awkward or threatening the larger social context becomes. We can see this mimetic arrogance in Islamic elites resisting modernisation or liberalisation because the ideas and techniques come from infidels. We can see it in the Chinese mandarins and Eastern Roman (“Byzantine”) officials deeming their rich cultural heritage so outweighing anything the Frankish/European barbarians coming by sea may have come up with.
This sort of cultural mimetic arrogance was also on display in Japanese reactions to the arrival of Commodore Perry’s “black ships”. That Japan had a long history of adopting Chinese ideas, but adapting them to their circumstances, as well as a long history of competing power centres, and consequent overt political bargaining, meant that they (mostly) evaded the downsides of such mimetic arrogance. (I say mostly, because a re-worked form of mimetic cultural arrogance rather disastrously re-emerged in the 1930s and 1940s.)
What we see in contemporary developed Eurosphere democracies is not that sort of cultural heritage arrogance, at least not much among the meritocratic elite, except at the level of unexamined assumptions. On the contrary, a dismissive or contemptuous attitude to the cultural legacies of their own societies has become much more common within the meritocracy. Instead, we see a different form of mimetic arrogance arising. Indeed, one that has spawned mimetic zealotry.
This is an evolution from the development of prestige opinions, adherence to which displays one’s members of the morally meritorious. Apart from a certain attentiveness to shifts in linguistic taboos and “proper” opinion, very little is demanded of people in way of actions to display one’s moral merit via adherence to the relevant prestige opinions. Hence, the most effective way to display one’s adherence to the markers of moral merit is to display one’s contempt to anyone who thinks differently. In other words, to publicly invest in the status-differentiation that drives the prestige opinions=moral merit social strategy. Anyone who disagrees with a prestige opinion is, as Victorian Premier Dan Andrews said particularly clearly, a “bigot”.
Indeed, much of the service that elite (“quality”) media nowadays provides to its meritocratic readers is to indicate who it is proper to despise and why. Hence the endless proliferation of -ist and -phobe terms and other sins against moral merit (such as cultural appropriation). This recruits for public adherence (or at least acquiescence) to the prestige opinions that are markers of moral merit, as people do not wish to be subject to attacks on their reputation or hostile mobbing.
As no one wants to admit to themselves they are acquiescing out of cowardice, there is strong cognitive pressure to fully embrace the prestige opinions. This is part of the more general pattern, due to the wish to avoid cognitive dissonance, for social norms (which are maintained by social expectations with associated sanctions for divergence) to be seen to be moral norms (norms adopted in their own right).
A set of prestige opinions is also useful for bureaucracies (whether government, non-profit, or corporate). They provide simplifying selection criteria (adherence to the prestige opinions). They provide easier coordination within the bureaucracy (by aligning expectations). They provide moral projects to be getting along with (increasing the ambit of bureaucratic action). They provide networks and social dynamics that are coming to pervade institutions as completely as any totalitarian political party, though coordinated through mutual signalling rather than central direction.
What they do not provide is any genuine test of character or commitment. On the contrary, given their lack of serious (i.e. costly-to-the-person) signalling, their embrace of contempt and condescension to those who disagree and their value as social-dominance mechanisms, they actually provide a great deal of opportunity for bad actors. Especially those with Dark Triad characteristics.
So, the prestige opinions as markers of moral merit actually negatively select for character and for commitment to the wider society, This is perhaps most obvious in the widening contempt for the heritage of such societies; a cultural disdain that usefully signals membership of the morally meritorious and (even better) status-separation from the working class in particular.
But it is worse than that, as the prestige-opinions-moral-merit-social-dominance strategy is inherently hostile to discovery processes. The prestige opinions are selected for on the basis of what resonates with the target group. So, what is rhetorically effective, socially beneficial to the meritocrats and status convenient. None of these criteria have any strong connection to truth or accuracy and still less to the concerns of others. (Indeed, they are more selected for hostility for the concerns of others, as that increases their status-differentiation value: moral smugness is a feature, not a bug.)
Any set of prestige opinions operating as markers of moral merit must therefore be hostile to discovery processes; to processes that threaten the standing of the prestige opinions by threatening to throw up contradictory facts or inconvenient concerns.
Hence we can see the burgeoning hostility within the meritocracy to freedom, to democracy and to science, which are all discovery processes and so threaten the use of prestige opinions as markers of moral merit. With the hostility being driven by protection of the prestige-opinions (so evolutionary biology, sex research and psychology are far more under threat than, say, physics).
The threat to freedom has become blindingly obvious, with the development of cancel culture, withdrawal of books, films, blocking of authors, speakers etc. This hostility to intellectual freedom is reaching into mainstream academe, such as philosophy.
The threat to democracy is only a little less obvious with the systematic dismissal of voting for, for instance, Trump or Brexit as being morally (and intellectually) delinquent. As for the threat to science, if the 2+2=5 nonsense was not enough, the attempts to block research and publication of inconvenient papers is pretty clear, for those with eyes to see.
Of course, if you publicly notice any of this, you establish yourself as not being a member of the morally meritorious.
The pattern of establishing moral merit by adoption of prestige opinions (and then using that for various social dominance plays) is a process of social evolution. It has generated not merely a certain form of mimetic arrogance, but mimetic zealotry. One that not only gives folk a sense of meaning and purpose but also elevates and intensifies the attendant social dominance strategies.
The benefit of using cancel culture to sack people is that it generates promotion opportunities. The generation that has recently graduated from universities, courses (and even schools) increasingly pervaded by these patterns can use their greater facility with the techniques and taboos to one-up their seniors, getting them out of the way.
Which, of course, even further ramps up the selection for bad actors, the blocking of discovery processes and the processes of meritocratic decay.
So, expect more self-serving networking, official spinelessness, mimetic arrogance and zealotry selecting against good character, against commitment to the wider society and against openness to discovery processes.
Needless to say, this is no way to run an advanced technological society. Nor free ones. Nor democratic ones.
Welcome to 2021 and history happening.
History may not repeat, but it can rhyme, it can rhyme very strongly. And it is.
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Published on April 26, 2024 10:30 PM GMT
*This is an entry in the 'Dungeons & Data Science' series, a set of puzzles
where players are given a dataset to a...
Whose Leash?
-
Many anarchists hate cops because cops are part of “the state.” True
enough, from one angle. But seen from another, it might be more useful to
think of th...
Odin and Freyr, War and Peace
-
[image: Odin and Freyr, War and Peace]
We choose how we relate to the deities of our tradition. Our choice is not
made for us by ancient poets, modern prac...
“First They Came for the Professors…”
-
“….but I was a university administrator, so I called the cops, egged them
on, and assumed the role of aggrieved victim.” Ironically, Emory
University’s Car...
The Great Breakdown
-
It is time once more to talk about how things go down the tubes. How the
proverbial excrement hits the proverbial rotating object. How the center
cannot ho...
More Good Results from Argentina
-
The most important election of 2023 took place in Argentina, where that
nation’s voters elected the libertarian candidate, Javier Milei, as their
new presi...
New Books and ARCs, 4/26/24
-
As we hurtle toward the end of another April, there’s still time to tuck in
one more stack of new books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound.
Wha...
Neurons Aren't Special: A Copernican Argument
-
In virtue of what do human beings have conscious experiences? How is it
that there's "something it's like" to be us, while there's (presumably)
nothing it...
Today’s Post is brought to you by the letter P…
-
I am just going to do a share what’s in my brain post which I guess could
be counted as a sort of newsletter that people send out so if you are
subscribed ...
Wind Power Scarcity Data Analysis
-
By Paul Homewood One of my regular contacts has analysed wind power data
over the last five years, using the official half-hourly National Grid
data. The...
The WHO’s push for a global pandemic treaty
-
The following is from The Vaccine Reaction. Even as U.S. health agencies
and the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) are being heavily
critici...
Freedom, thy name is... clearly not Canada!
-
A Canadian town has plumbed new depths in the bureaucratic curtailment of
individual rights and freedoms.
A Canadian town in the Gulf of St. Lawrence...
Friday assorted links
-
1. Nandan Nilekani’s vision for the “Finternet” is to enable individuals to
transfer any financial asset, in any amount, at any time, to anyone,
anywhere...
The Quantum Paths Not Traveled
-
Before this week’s post: a former colleague of mine from CEA Paris-Saclay,
Sylvain Ribault, posted a dialogue last week presenting different
perspectives o...
You need $500. How should you get it?
-
The (bad) options for Americans facing an emergency expense.
A 2023 Federal Reserve survey found that a third of Americans say they
don’t have the cash ...
Four new articles on Columbia’s encampment
-
Today we’re having a short warm-up protest at Chicago in preparation for
the Big Encampment that’s supposed to start on May 1. I’ll try to document
today’...
The poor reap what the luxury belief class sows
-
Gradually, Rob Henderson developed the concept of “luxury beliefs,” he
explains (in Troubled), which are ideas and opinions that confer status on
the upper...
Uncooperative Characters
-
It happens to every writer- a character dumps something in your lap and
says, “Here you go! I dunno what you want to do with this, but it’s your
problem no...
Brr...
-
I somehow ended up out from under the covers last night, and just to make
it worse, the legs on my pyjama bottoms had ridden up nearly to my knees.
So I la...
Mini-Heap
-
New links… Discussion welcome. “Which animals have the capacity for
conscious experience? While much uncertainty remains, some points of wide
agreement h...
A Derb Tribute Show
-
Toiling in the fields yesterday, it occurred to me that this weekend may be
the last time I get to hang out with the great John Derbyshire. The only
public...
Spick-and-Spanish
-
I’ve been visiting European capitals for 35 years, and Madrid is one of the
few to have changed so dramatically during this time. And the only one to
have ...
The Political Economy of Populism in India
-
[image: The Political Economy of Populism in India]
Louise Tillin explores the sources of populism in India, its recent
developments, and what this means f...
Weekend Knowledge Dump- April 26, 2024
-
Knowledge to make your life better. If you have some free time, check out
some of these links this weekend. Old Age And Cunning … The most common
demogra...
Back Issue #130
-
This is the heart of “Progressive” thought: force people (via social
engineering, prohibition and criminalization) to only eat, wear, watch,
read, hear, s...
Supersessionism at the Harvard Divinity School
-
“Supersessionism” is the theological argument that Abraham’s covenant with
G-d has been superseded by Christianity. It has been repudiated as
antisemitic b...
The Real ‘Civil War’
-
A moronic liberal president opens up the borders to mass migration in order
to change the nation’s demographics and win an election, but instead
touche...
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave
-
As I was going through my newsletter, realizing it had been neglected for
some time, I decided to jot down a few thoughts here as well, touching on a
theme...
No clear winner in the Solomons
-
The Solomon Islands election held last week has produced a parliament in
which the currently uncommitted appear to hold the balance of power between
prime ...
On the Road with Sasquatch
-
In the summer of 1983 Ted Kaczynski was feeling hemmed in even in remote
Lincoln, Montana. “There were too many people around my cabin,” he later
wrote, ...
Washington Moves On to Plan B, by Mike Whitney
-
Here's what everyone needs to understand about Ukraine: The United States
has already moved on to Plan B. No, the Biden administration has not issued
an of...
This week in research #20
-
Here's what caught my eye in research over the past week:
- Ciancio et al. (open access) study the impact of a randomised
information intervention...
Where Went the Wind?
-
Honestly, I’ve always been considerably conflicted about Gone With the Wind
– both the book and the movie. Yes, best-seller, and loved extravagantly by
mor...
Uralic And Yeniseian Origins
-
New ancient DNA data informs both that origins of the Siberian Yeniseian
peoples, the Native American populations of North America, and the Uralic
people. ...
Invent your own research
-
On March 30, Nicholas Kristof had wrote "Survey data indicates that
married couples on average report more happiness, build more wealth, live
longer a...
Cherokee Heritage: Preservation and Progression
-
There is a wealth of culture, history, and mores that belongs to the
indigenous peoples of America. One of these proud nations is the Cherokee
Nation, po...
The Ghetto-ization of American Life
-
*Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been
ghetto-ized.*
*Consider the defining characteristics of a ghetto:*
1. The res...
Nothing
-
A good response. Probably not what they want to hear, but the right
response. Government is never the answer to any question, frankly and the
[...]
Breathing New Life Into Mass Death
-
W.J. Astore $95 Billion “Supplemental” for More Weapons and War Who knew
mass death was such a growth industry? And by “death” I mean not only of
humans bu...
They Are Defended and Supported by Men
-
Day by day we are told how men, society, nature, and in some cases even
women themselves conspire to keep women down and out. To convince yourself
of thi...
Drought-Buster Wet, Cool Weather Ahead
-
As many suspected, with the rapid collapse of El Nino and the progression
into spring, the weather patterns have shifted, *opening the door to far
wette...
More articles
-
1. Tyler linked to an interesting article on Portugal. This caught my eye:
Then, in 2023, the Immigration Control Agency was dissolved, ostensibly in
respo...
Why Evolution is False
-
Recently deceased philosopher Daniel Dennett called Darwin's idea of
natural selection the best idea anyone ever had, a universal solvent that
melts awa...
Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture
-
Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything
larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a
public, ...
Ignorance, Its Uses and Nurture
-
Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything
larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a
public, ...
Can González Urrutia Win the Venezuelan Presidency?
-
This former diplomat, now endorsed by María Corina Machado, could hand the
opposition a victory in July according to polls. But the road ahead is, to
say t...
Teocintle
-
This is what early domesticated corn (maize) looked like. It was
domesticated from the plant "teocintle" (meaning "grass of the gods" in
Náhuatl), most l...
Quasi-Refusal and Teens
-
by Dominic Wilkinson In an interesting legal case earlier this year, the
court held an emergency hearing about the medical care of a 16 year old,
recentl...
My Passover press release
-
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the
thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across
the Fertil...
My Passover press release
-
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – From the university campuses of Assyria to the
thoroughfares of Ur to the palaces of the Hittite Empire, students across
the Fertil...
Culture As A Cruel Master
-
Thomas Carlyle famously warned against stuff that is “a good tool to have
as a slave, but a bad master to be ruled by." Consider applying this
warning to c...
ANTI-HERO…
-
I do not want to write this. Of all the things I haven’t wanted to write,
this is at the tippy top of the list. Throughout my “commentary” career,
I’ve w...
The Democratization of Crappy Stuff
-
So, fun fact, Amazon blocked this book review from their site. Then they
sent me a nasty email with a ‘warning’ not to do it again. Now, I’m not a
polemici...
From a Persisting to a Raiding Strategy
-
A current overview of changing Israeli fighting doctrine in Gaza 20 April
2024 By: David Brock Katz Overtaking the headlines on 8 April, which stated
that ...
Gould’s Belt
-
29.2 – 27.7 million years ago Logarithmic History has had a lot of geology
and biology lately, not so much astronomy. But all is not peaceful in the
heaven...
The Octave Of Intelligence
-
With a hat-tip to Charles Murray on X: The Seven Tribes of Intellect. (One
has to wonder: what must it have been like to be John von Neumann?)
Specialized Markets
-
The death last week of the pathbreaking comic book artist Trina Robbins
reminded me of an odd bit of history. Before she was a cartoonist, Robbins
owned an...
Sam Harris and Alex O’Connor Debate Morality
-
I was delighted to see that Alex O’Connor recently debated Sam Harris about
whether ethics is objective and, if so, on what grounds.
The post Sam Harris ...
It's complicated
-
Three important manuscripts appeared recently at bioRxiv, mostly dealing
with the origins and expansions of proto-Germanic and proto-Indo-European
populati...
Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)
-
Prominent philosopher of mind, apostle of Darwinism, and New Atheist writer
Daniel Dennett has died. I have been very critical of Dennett over the
years...
Braunstein Play is Fundamental to D&D
-
Braunstein has been framed as being an intermediary form in the evolution
of wargame to roleplaying game. I have demonstrated that Braunstein play is
integ...
My New Paper on Hawtrey Is Available on SSRN
-
Last fall and early winter I posted a series of four blogposts (here, here,
here, and here) about or related to Ralph Hawtrey as I was trying to gather
my ...
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet
-
My essay The Extended Internet Universe, where I coined the term “cozyweb”
(probably in my top 5 most successful memes) is featured in this cute
little col...
The ANES wins AAPOR’s 2024 Policy Impact Award
-
The American National Election Studies (ANES) has been recognized by the
American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) with its Policy
Impact ...
McCarthyism: The long shadow of a false narrative
-
Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade lasted only four short years.
Seven years after the Wheeling speech he was dead. The caricature of the
man e...
Announcing a New Paradigm for Economics and Beyond
-
One thousand critiques of neoclassical economics are not going to be
effective unless the critiques hang together.
The post Announcing a New Paradigm for...
Some defunct economist
-
"To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world
when he was twenty." Napoleon's claim helps explain one of the big problems
with ce...
Fertility and Income: Some Notes
-
*UPDATE: Forgot a section! Added now!*
Pretty much everybody has seen a graph showing that richer countries have
fewer babies. Here’s an example from the...
Dad Joke
-
Since my offspring refused to appreciate it, I will share here for even
more mockery :D See, there's this grumpy woman who lives on the edge of the
city. S...
Why I have an OpenAI subscription
-
It's $20 per month. Here are the features I value and use:
- Others' custom GPTs
- My own custom GPTs
- Integration into email (Thunderbird) a...
The Men Coming Out on Top
-
The “Women can do everything men can do” craze — that’s what it is, a
craze, as in it doesn’t make any sense — started somewhere in the late
1960’s to earl...
The Palestinian “Two-State” Plan: Duping the West
-
One of the great unsolved mysteries of the 21st century is why, given what
a catastrophe it proved to be, anyone, much less a whole phalanx of
politicians,...
My Six-Step Plan for a Two-State Solution
-
Has the time come to implement the two-state solution – that is, to
recognize the semi-sovereign Palestinian Authority (PA) as a state, as
"Palestine," alo...
High Culture and Hyperstimulus
-
What’s the difference between a Renaissance nude and a Playboy centerfold?
Mark Twain sardonically called the painting above “too strong for any place
but ...
Hypatia – Myths and History
-
The story often told about Hypatia of Alexandria was that she was a great
scientist, rationalist and scholar who was brutally murdered by a mob of
Christ...
SOCIOLOGY OF THE GAZA WAR
-
What can a sociologist say that hasn't been said many times about the
Hamas raid and Israel's retaliatory war in Gaza? I will draw on
theoretical gener...
On Whale Carcasses
-
On whale carcasses, parasites and the rot of our institutions There has
been a spate of articles written lately—and indeed of books—by academics
who have b...
February
-
February is one of the most beautiful and painful songs ever written, by
Dar Williams. March is nearly over already, and I didn’t write in January.
But I’v...
Vale, Felix!
-
This plucky little blog began life almost exactly 18 years ago with a
cluster of posts on 26 March 2006 - including one that introduced our
(then) young ...
The Love Of Daredevil
-
I’ve been reading the current run of Daredevil by Saladin Ahmed and have
been pleasantly surprised at how good it is–and how based it is at the same
time. ...
Piece of music
-
A new bill, currently under public consultation, is poised to introduce
quotas, yes, for music: Greek-Language Music Quota Bill Sparks Controversy
(BalkanI...
An arrest raid in Gush Etzion
-
Jerusalem Post, 16/2 “You meet the terrorist at the end of the process, on
the road, but there’s a whole system that leads up to that point, so if you
can ...
The Big Picture
-
It is natural for wars to draw observers into ever-more detailed studies of
their events and potential lessons from them. But the result can be an
instinc...
Let’s just defund the UN and leave it immediately
-
Hidden deep below the headquarters of the United Nations’ aid agency for
Palestinians here is a Hamas complex with rows of computer servers that
Israel’s...
Speaking trip this April
-
I'm speaking at Libertycon in Tbilisi on April 20th, will probably either
go or come via London. Anyone interested in a talk? I'll probably be in
Europe ...
What I’ve been listening to lately
-
A lot of stuff went onto my playlist late in 2023 that I didn’t have time
to digest until recently; many of these could have made my best of the year
list.
Chortle
-
So, the stats for last year’s Hugos in China were recently released. A
number of veterans of the Puppy Wars are passing around the popcorn and
inventing cl...
Tools for Thinking About Censorship
-
“Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of
pressure?” This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks
that any expr...
Amazonian "Garden Urbanism": A skeptical account
-
This new paper in Science is getting alot of publicity, and people are
asking for my views (Rostain, et al. 2024) The paper presents fascinating
new evide...
Iowa Caucas: The Polls Meet Reality
-
Summary: On Monday Iowa Republicans will caucus and vote on the candidates.
The candidates have made bold claims that they are going to win big. By
10:00...
An Unprecedented Crime?
-
In the pursuit of avoiding a repeat of the October 7th Hamas atrocities,
Israel is shooting and bombing among Palestinians, at close quarters and in
an enc...
Uninteresting things
-
Now I deny that anything is, or can be, uninteresting. —G. K. Chesterton,
‘What I Found in My Pocket’ In the noble little essay from which this noble
littl...
Arno Mayer, 1926-2023
-
The historian Arno Mayer, who had such an influence on my work and
eventually became a friend, has died at 97. He wrote books on everything
from the French...
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me
-
1. Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal
connections are how things get started.
2. Cohesive teams, the right combina...
Books 2023
-
You might also be interested in my booklists from
from 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The Balance of
Tomorrow Stirling’s Desert Rai...
Good People Break Bad Laws
-
Topher Field directed 'Battleground Melbourne' and has now released 'Good
People Break Bad Laws' addressing Dan Andrews' insane COVID lockdowns.
I interv...
25 THINKERS FOR A WORLD ON THE BRINK
-
It was most unexpected, but most welcome. I’ve been nominated by Prospect
magazine as one of “25 thinkers for a world on the brink”. “Kenan Malik…
earns a ...
Who Got What, and Why? A Nobel for Claudia Goldin
-
How have women been paid for their work? More broadly, how are different
skills in general rewarded in the labor market? The prices of different
things are...
Recent work
-
The New Labor Antitrust, SSRN The Trump Indictment and America’s Political
Order, Project Syndicate, June 14, 2023 The Revised Merger Guidelines Will
Resto...
#257 – Qing 3: Lose Your Hair, Or Lose Your Head
-
Manchu occupation of the lands south of the Yangtze River proceed smoothly…
right up until Prince Dorgon is convinced by some of his advisors that
everyone...
ASHTON PARKS’ DIRTY “SNACKS” ADDICTION
-
Snacks, aka “Bread” or “The Louisiana Succubus”, is infamous within the
sector.…
The post ASHTON PARKS’ DIRTY “SNACKS” ADDICTION appeared first on
TheRa...
The Tragedy Of Richard Dawkins On What Is A Woman
-
Richard Dawkins has recently written an article in The New Statesman
defending the position that “woman” means adult human female. Dawkins bases
his positi...
On the Dangers of Futile Appeals
-
In 2016, Gary Pavela, a longtime educational consultant and fellow for the
National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA),
referenced the...
New Yorkers are Getting What They Deserve
-
They are paying the just tax for willful self-enstupidation. Vote Democrat,
get more crime. The morally decent should leave NYC, and indeed every
Democrat-...
"Realist Jurisprudence: Selected Essays"
-
A Spanish translation by Dr. Francisco M. Mora-Sifuentes of eight of my
essays on realist jurisprudence and related topics (with a new preface by
me and an...
A pyramid scheme of misery
-
Róisín Michaux at The Critic on the mothers who affirm their children's
trans identities: I’ve spent the last couple of years lurking on their
online fora....
Thatcherism is dead: Thatcherism lives
-
Thatcherism is dead. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet
its maker. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil and
joined the...
A Crusader’s Mom
-
Something a bit different. Early crusaders were volunteers, who took vows
to go on a crusade, rather than members of a professional army. As a
result, they...
U.S. Openly Militarizes Space
-
The media have noticed that the new USSF Doctrine is more focused on
aligning space activity with the twelve principles of warfare as a whole
The post U....
One Day Towards the End of Summer
-
The following is an extract from something I am working on at the moment -
an analysis of the killing of Earl Rǫgnvaldr of Orkney, as reported in
chapter...
Rochester gets burned over
-
Fenster writes: The burned over district: The term “burned-over district”
refers to the western and central regions of New York State in the early
19th cen...
Lionising the lionesses
-
Football has kept me sane during a difficult part of my life. There have
been weeks in the past two years when the only place I’ve left my home to
visit ha...
Author’s notes: Britannia and Beyond - Hibernia
-
If you’re reading this, that probably means you’ve purchased a copy of the
latest *Cthulhu Invictus* sourcebook from Golden Goblin Press: *Britannia
and ...
Russia: Defend Boris Kagarlitsky!
-
News of Kagarlitsky's arrest has sparked anger and empathy among a wide
range of activists. People may perish, but ideas do not, and Kagarlitsky
has done...
"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
-
I am currently reading *The Master and His Emissary*, which appears to be
an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience
literature...
Geoffrey Brennan (9/15/44-7/28/22)
-
Long-time Duke faculty member and friend Geoffrey Brennan died in Canberra,
Australia of complications from acute leukemia.
“Geoff” joined the Duke ...
The persistence of belief and certainty
-
Long thought. Don’t say you had no warning. The explicitly secular
perspective is that there is no proof of a spiritual layer to human
experience,
Continue...
Draco Layer Four: The Anagogic or Mystical Sense
-
Here be dragons. And doves.
Human beings long for transcendence. Such longing is, for the world, always
out of fashion because, of course, it is not a long...
UN Special Rapporteur Releases Guantánamo Report
-
On June 26, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and
Counter-Terrorism Fionnuala Ní Aoláin released her report following a technical
visit ...
Conversations With Cabbies
-
Many a foreign correspondent, sent to an obscure country of which he knows
nothing but which has suddenly drawn the world’s attention to itself by a
terrib...
Moving to Substack
-
Hi all, this is a pointer to direct you over to Substack. I’m moving the
Econ Growth Blog over there, with the hopes of creating a little more
interactio...
A Few Quick Announcements
-
By James As I wrote a couple of years ago, I don’t post here anymore. I
just have a couple of updates for people who subscribe and may be
interested in my ...
Genspect 2023: Transgender as Political Backlash
-
This was my contribution to the Genspect ‘The Bigger Picture’ 2023
conference on Saturday 29...
The post Genspect 2023: Transgender as Political Backlash...
Breaking my Flag
-
For those who missed the previous announcements, please read the previous
posts for the details, but after 18 2/3 years here, I will no longer be
posti...
(How) Do We Talk about Fascism?
-
When the sports presenter Gary Lineker sent a tweet about the Illegal
Migration Bill, comparing some of the language around the policy to 'that
used by...
Hanging Up The Keyboard
-
I wrote this incomplete draft way back in 2019 but never finished or
published it in the mêlée of law school. Posting the fragments now for
completeness....
Hope Springs Eternal...
-
In preparation for a return to active blogging I have torn down this server
to the root and reinstalled everything clean. I am hoping the errors and
probl...
Wrapping things up here
-
I thought I should mention to any long-time readers that I am going to be
letting this domain name lapse at the end of the month. I notice that
certain p...
Understanding the Rise of Transgender Identities
-
The social dynamics of girls’ and women’s friendship groups, including a
desire to fit in and avoid conflict, may make them more susceptible to
social cont...
Heather’s Funeral Service
-
A Service for Heather Hastie will be held at 2:30pm NZ Time on Thursday 9th
February. If you would like to view the service please click on the link
belo...
AI Will Kill Literature, and AI Will Resurrect It
-
The literary novel, as far as genres go, is not that old: novels have
existed in our culture for about three hundred years. If you had a time
machine, you ...
Bitcoin is the Detector of Imbeciles:
-
Bitcoin is the Detector of Imbeciles*On The Cluster of Charlatans, Zero
Interest Rate Virgins, & Crypto Tumors*
*Interview with Laeticia Strauch-Bonart in ...
The British Land Corporation : A Housing Manifesto
-
In recent decades, successive governments have presided over a crash in the
level of home ownership in the UK, coinciding with skyrocketing inequality.
30 ...
-
Year To Date Inflation -- Not the Right Metric
During the Great Moderation, the Fed kept the inflation rate close to its
target of 2%. However, ther...
Subscribe to my Substack
-
For most intents and purposes, this blog is dead. Comments are still
permitted and errors will be corrected if pointed out. Nevertheless, all
new writing w...
Blog Migration!
-
Birds migrate, butterflies migrate, whales migrate, and this blog is
migrating! It's being moved over from Blogger to Substack. The URL is
currently http...
How Eric Hobsbawm anticipated Synthetic Marx
-
I have to admit that I expected some pushback against the thesis of my
paper (co-authored with Michael Makovi) “The Mainstreaming of Marx:
Measuring the ...
Have the Baby Boomers Ruined Society?
-
Introduction.The author is a young energetic historian who has entertaining
and insightful ideas. His exuberance on occasion leads him astray, he can
be to...
As Good As A Rest, They Said
-
Or, The Cause Of All The Banging And Salty Epithets. After close to sixteen
years, this blog has a new home. Come see. Bring cake.
Another one bites the dust.
-
I don’t usually cover the events of the day, because one loses track of the
big picture. The events of the day only reveal their meaning when viewed
months...
Who blew up the Nordscream Popelines?
-
Well, one does have his or her sources … But, honestly, anyone with a brain
can solve this no-brainer. For once – Russia has absolutely no interest do
to s...
10 Predictions for the next 5 to 10 years
-
A friend asked what the big trends in American society over the next five
to ten years would be. This is a fun time frame to think about, because you
don’t...
Getting Down To Basics with
-
Bar Mitzvah Food Catering – Tips For Budget-Conscious Caterers For lots of,
bar mitzvah food catering is a high-ticket item. […]
The post Getting Down To...
Good and bad ways to learn
-
[image: anonymous kid in helmet riding run bike on pavement in countryside]
Learning a new skill is hard. Part of what’s so hard about it is, by
definition...
CSPI is Moving To Substack
-
A couple of months ago, I wrote about why, if you’re a writer, you should
be on Substack. At the same time, CSPI was publishing all of its material
on ou...
Who Cares About Diversity?
-
All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a
condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how
they a...
Moving to Substack . . .
-
The times, they are a changin'. Going forward, I will primarily be blogging
on Substack: https://stevewinkler.substack.com.
Bryan Caplan, who else, convin...
Appeasing the Dead
-
*I’m more…than just…a little curious…how you’re planning…to go about…Making
your amends…to the dead. To the dead* — A Perfect Circle, *The Noose*.
Dea...
My Final Post
-
For various reasons, I have decided to quit blogging. For one thing, my
numbers are down to a level that it doesn’t seem worth it to continue,
though let m...
AdSense became unusable
-
For several months, I have been getting direct censorship requests from
Google AdSense. In recent days, the frequency increased to "several
articles to be ...
RIP, Amy's Blog: 1997 to 2021
-
I have two intense books I'm completing, and I've been increasingly unable
to put the effort into blogging that I have done for years...
Filtering For Truth In The Age Of Google
-
Over the years, I’ve met several individuals of immense capacity for
logical deduction, genuinely impressive education, and sky-high IQ (we’re
talking well...
The shameful silence on the Waukesha massacre
-
Is silence still violence? If it is, then a whole lot of people, from the
Hollywood set to the virtue-signalling left, are guilty of some serious
violenc...
Customer Agent Rendering
-
A customer representative or perhaps buyer broker is the strategy of a
brokerage or property broker symbolizing a client in an financial
commitment transac...
The blog has moved
-
It is now on substack (In My Tribe). There is still no charge to read it. I
am trying to maintain the feel of this blog, including the daily scheduled
post...
Good Chart Checklist
-
Note: this was prepared for my ECON 3403 students, and is a list of all of
the mistakes I commonly see in student charts. Please add your suggestions
for t...
Hotel Bar Sessions, Ep 31: Whose History?
-
The HBS hosts sit down with Dr. Charles McKinney, Jr. to talk about whose
history is (and isn't) being taught.
Following on the heels of a recent and ...
Thank You
-
[image: 11032021Thanks1]
Thank you for supporting my work. As you know, my work is vital,
difficult, and sometimes – well, in wars, dangerous.
There ...
Thank You
-
[image: 11032021Thanks1]
Thank you for supporting my work. As you know, my work is vital,
difficult, and sometimes – well, in wars, dangerous.
There ...
Moved to Substack
-
This post is long overdue.
About a year ago, I copied over all posts from here to Substack, and have
been publishing occasional posts there ever since. ...
A Few Thoughts
-
It occurs to me that not enough people are really looking at the glaring
hypocrisy currently unfolding in our post-pandemic world. The most obvious
one b...
AmoLatina Revisión
-
AmoLatina anuncia los medios de acceso impresionante latinas contactos
mujeres y comunicación usándolos. La cosa es que estas damas son conocidas
como atra...
What does Lisa Birnbach say about preppy cars?
-
I happen to have a copy of The Official Preppy Handbook, and it seems that
preppy cars barely changed at all since the book was written in 1980.
That’s 41 ...
18 Theses on Poetry
-
The principal purpose of poetry is to lay bare the hidden powers of the
language in which it is written. These powers are found both at the level
of the ph...
Today
-
[cross-posted at facebook] Today’s a fine day an especially beautiful day
the kind of day when you know just how you want to spend it but the place
you wan...
Dr. John McAdams
-
*October 26th, 1945 - April 15th, 2021*
Dr. John Charles McAdams passed away on Thursday, April 15th, 2021, at the
age of 75. He was a devoted husband, ...
health care
-
These two graphs really say it all:
A few years ago I got a freak knee infection that landed me in the
hospital. The experience was so smooth, non-st...
A new legend
-
Unauthorized is very, very pleased to announce that MADE BY JIMBOB has
joined the intellectual outlaws of the Internet. Look for his videos on the
Made b...
A handy guide to getting pinged
-
The NHS App could be expanded to help us make ‘informed decisions’ in all
kinds of everyday scenarios. AI algorithms would replace the flawed notion
of ‘wo...
The Sad, Discordant Ballad of Husham al-Hashimi
-
The man who pulled the trigger on Husham al-Hashimi—by first misfiring an
assault rifle and then pulling out his pistol to shoot the victim at
point-blank ...
I’ve moved my blog to Substack…
-
Hello I now blog HERE. If interested in why I did the referendum, read
THIS. In 2019, just before going to No10, I wrote about the likely failure
of UK cri...
I’ve moved my blog to Substack…
-
Hello I now blog HERE. If interested in why I did the referendum, read
THIS. In 2019, just before going to No10, I wrote about the likely failure
of UK cri...
IEA World Congress 2021
-
A few words on the International Economics’ Association online World
Congress, July 2-6, on the theme “Equity, Sustainability and Prosperity in
a Fractured...
“Old Chicago” and the Freiburg School
-
Stefan Kolev and Ekkehard Köhler have published a paper in the Working
Paper Series of the Stigler Center at Chicago University on the history of
the polit...
Still Distracted, But Not Here
-
My online writing goes back to Usenet, early bulletin-boards and the pay
service GEnie, but my public identity as an online writer really began a
few years...
Money “Front & Center”
-
This is a note to my long time readers that I have earlier this year moved
my blogging to Substack. At Substack, posts are called newsletters, and so
no on...
Money “Front & Center”
-
This is a note to my long time readers that I have earlier this year moved
my blogging to Substack. At Substack, posts are called newsletters, and so
no on...
Movie Night – Dry Wind (2020)
-
Marketing a movie in the midst of a pandemic is a tough job. Doubly so when
it’s a piece of esoteric queer cinema. At least one clever person has
figured o...
the future
-
Hey gang, I’m excited to say that Substack approached me recently and made
an attractive financial offer for me to blog over there. Given that I’ve
been ou...
Finito Sic Semper Tyrannis
-
We are done here. turcopolier.com is working now. I have cancelled all
guest author ships here. RSS is enabled on the new blog. Comments will no
longer be ...
‘Feel Our Pain,’ Politicians Demand
-
Congress is increasingly not a place where the average member partakes in
what’s generally understood as legislative activity, but rather engages in
a va...
Mailbag: “Avoidant”
-
I get a lot of good feedback on my attachment books, even seven years after
publication. This one was really touching. I hope you’re well. I read your
book...
Introducing Astral Codex Ten
-
Thanks for bearing with me the past few months. My new blog is at
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/. I’ll try to have a less unwieldy
domain name workin...
We lost. Now what?
-
I was preparing this post, anticipating that nothing would happen on
January 6, that the certification of Biden would go forward with minor
bluster and maj...
Apakah Slot Online Terbaik Punya Banyak Bonus
-
Situs judi slot online kini hadir sebagai solusi ketika banyak orang tidak
bisa mengikuti gambling secara konvensional. Sejak internet mulai menjadi
tekn...
An amazingly short history of philosophy
-
1. In the beginning everyone searching for knowledge was doing
philosophy. There was nothing else.
2. Then, gradually, one scientific discipl...
Noahpinion has moved to a new website!
-
Well folks, it's been a fun 10-year run at this little website. I'm moving
on to a new platform: Substack!
Here's the new Noahpinion:
https://noahpin...
Storytelling: Friday Chart Edition
-
I have not posted here in awhile, so I thought it would be good to share a
few recent charts that tell interesting stories.
*Central Bank Balance Sheets*
F...
‘Test & Trace’ is a mirage
-
Lockdown II thoughts: Day 1 Opposition politicians have been banging on
about the need for a ‘working’ Test & Trace system even more loudly than
the govern...
Review of Rod Dreher’s “Live Not By Lies”
-
Two years ago, when reviewing “The Benedict Option”, I wrote, “Almost all
Dreher’s critics accuse him of crying wolf or being a Chicken Little at
best … Me...
A Letter to TAI’s Subscribers and Readers
-
Dear TAI readers,Due primarily to financing difficulties, The American
Interest is taking a hiatus from publishing new material.We are glad that
there is...
Biotin for hair: what can this vitamin do to hair?
-
What is this vitamin? How does it act on the wires? Does it make hair grow
faster? For more insights jump to: best biotin shampoo
We know that our hair l...
2020 Update
-
Civil Politics remains a free resource and we continue to support some
partners who we previously worked with but due to time and funding
constraints, we a...
Socialism: The Greatest Enemy Of Freedom
-
Every nincompoop who’s been educated into stupidity will define socialism
as state or social ownership of the means of production. Socialism is
basically...
Left Critics and the Biden-Harris Ticket
-
.. . By Darren Barany Unsurprisingly (and sadly), many Americans relate to
campaigns for major elections in ways that reflect the society’s pervasive
indiv...
Humanity’s second “cradle” in Southeast Asia
-
Pleistocene Sundaland
This week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google
Podcasts) Razib and Spencer talk about a topic which they hav...
The spin on the spin
-
There's been something of a triumph of spin on the EU's MFF share-out. Oh I
don't mean the headlines, which we summarised last week, but the rationale.
Spa...
In Memory of Bob Rossana
-
Robert “Bob” Rossana died back in February of this year. I was
inadvertently left off of the university announcement email and did not
hear about it until ...
Migrating the blog
-
It should be back soon. If you really want it find something right now,
it’s all still there, just hiding at a slightly different (temporary)
address: http...
Turkey: 28.5% of Generation Z have abandoned Islam
-
A recent study conducted by Gezici Research Center recorded a massive shift
in social and religious attitudes in Turkey among cohorts of Generation Z.
In t...
The End
-
Back in 2011, a group of academic philosophers started a blog called
“Bleeding Heart Libertarians.” The idea behind that blog was simple, but
also somewh...
A good run: Overlawyered, 1999-2020
-
I published the first Overlawyered post on July 1, 1999, and I expect this
post on May 31, 2020 will be the last. As someone in the entertainment
world o...
Cold War 2 Propaganda
-
So it seems that hostility to China is now official American policy.
Redgov, i.e. the Military Industrial Complex has been pushing it for quite
a while, ...
Recent writing
-
I haven’t written recently on this blog. I wrote for a year at The American
Conservative. All the pieces are available here. I also wrote a piece
Covid-19 ...
One flu over the cuckold’s nest
-
There have been a few articles like this doing the rounds: What It’s Like
to Isolate With Your Girlfriend and Her Other Boyfriend Humiliating and
degrading...
The real problem is also nominal
-
The real problem is also nominal
March 15, 2020
*Confidence level (?): thinking out loud*
If I closed my eyes and completely wiped from my mind the fac...
We need our fear and anger to tackle COVID-19
-
The most important thing that the response to COVID-19 has lacked in the
West, compared to East Asia, is fear. President Xi and his subordinates are
afrai...
Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague
-
[ by Charles Cameron — scientific [precision meets human error in cases of
outbreak — with links to a terrific science thread by Palli Thordarson
@PalliTho...
Steno Majesty
-
This beautiful lady, known as the White Rose, was Queen Consort Geraldine
of Albania in the 1930s. Don’t look closely into her politics – she and her
husba...
Network Behavior and Christian Ethics
-
In designing software for computer networks, the Robustness Principle
states
"Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept"
The firs...
In spite of Brexit…
-
Now that the British exit from the European Union is a legal reality, the
economic situation in the UK has been surprisingly sedate. This will be a
surpris...
Message heard.
-
I’ve been deeply moved and humbled by the overwhelming response to my post
announcing that I planned on shutting down the blog. I’ve reconsidered and
deci...
Is evolutionary psychology impossible?
-
p.caption { font-size: 0.7em; } Subrena Smith recently argued that
“evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is…impossible”
(Smith 2019). I ...
I now blog on the Volokh Conspiracy
-
For the past few months, I have blogged at the Volokh Conspiracy, hosted by
Reason. I had hoped to give to give this blog, which I founded in September
200...
The utility of directly regulating Floor Area Ratio
-
In my last post on the obesity of midrise apartments, I mentioned that one
possible solution to what I perceive as a problem is to restrict FAR (Floor-Area...
Refuge Seeking in Relative Safety
-
There is a common misconception among Christians in particular that I’ve
been mulling over these past weeks. As usual, my thoughts have been
straying to Aa...
The Braais that Bind
-
A brief meditation on the meanings of South African cuisine for Anthony
Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. Excerpt: South Africa’s identity is complicated,
contest...
The Twelve Days of Christmas: An Analysis
-
There was a funny piece on the radio about the song "The Twelve Days of
Christmas," imagining the woman's response to all those gifts. She starts
out thril...
The Cold War Roots of the African Swine Flu Plague
-
*[This is the script of a segment on African Swine Flu that I did for
Newsbud China Watch in July 2018. Things have gotten worse since then,
with the vi...
Sex, Schisms and Pseudo-Scholarship
-
We are seeing open warfare between various feminist and other progressive
factions on social media and in the universities. A key divide is between
so-call...
Giving Credit Where It’s Due
-
The US economy is probably going into recession. Manufacturing production
is down from the late-2018 highs, retail spending growth, wages and payroll
gai...
The CTRL ALT Revolt Controversy
-
The Original Blog Post and some Thoughts on the Crisis of Where We Find
Ourselves As the current culture war escalates into a series of
asymmetrical engage...
Moved to http://nymensactionnetwork.org
-
This site is no longer moderated. Newer posts are at
nymensactionnetwork.org and these posts have been moved there also.
http://nymensactionnetwork.org Ad...
Important: Nintil.com is moving!
-
IMPORTANT NOTICE: I’ve been making changes to the way the blog looks like,
making it load faster, and adding it a much needed feature, browsing by
category...
A Corrigendum to V1.3.2 and a Comment to V1.3.3
-
Preface The publication of the book written by Richard Lynn and me (Lynn &
Becker, 2019) and of V1.3.2 of the NIQ-dataset got a lot of attention and
feedba...
Last Posting
-
To everyone that reads this blog, I want to thank you for following Gavin
Kennedy 's expert insights into Adam Smith from this site. Unfortunately,
Gavin ...
Crypto-Current (064)
-
§5.8612 — Decentralization of the ledger requires massive multiplication,
and thus an effective method of compression. Only in this way does it
become trac...
Blog moving to Spandrell.com
-
***This blog is moving to Spandrell.com ***Please update your bookmarks/RSS
readers. Spandrell.com, two ls. First they banned Youtubers, but I didn’t
say a...
Some news + MMT and endogenous money
-
I know I haven’t posted in a long while, but I thought I’d give some news.
And no it’s not an April fools’! Work and personal matters have taken much
of my...
Why Are Children So Expensive?
-
I wrote this a few months back, but never got around to posting it. Scott’s
post on wage stagnation reminded me to post it, because I discuss some of
the s...
Seumas Milne and the Stasi
-
Spectator Few noticed in 2015 when Seumas Milne excused the tyranny that
held East Germany in its power from the Soviet Invasion in 1945 until the
fall of ...
Diversity’s Dilemma
-
There’s a sort of prisoner’s dilemma now facing a federal judge in the
ongoing Harvard race discrimination court battle. As you know, the
prisoner’s dilemm...
Moghul Emperor Jahangir's Interest in Science
-
*by Salman Hameed*
Growing up in Pakistan, I did hear a lot about the Moghul Emperors, but
rarely about science. In fact, if science was brought up, it wa...
When big data are bad data
-
As archaeologists turn increasingly to the analysis of large, systematic
databases, we need to confront an epistemological problem: How do we
identify bad...
Weekend update: Tedx restored to youtube
-
Apparently the original posting of this (staggeringly brief) talk suffered
from imperfect audio (I never listened to it, so I can't say first-hand
whethe...
IDW Halloween Cards
-
Happy Halloween Folks!
(I'll add the rest below the blogpost)
I thought I’d have some fun with IDW/Classical Liberal Halloween cards.
There's so many more...
Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle
-
Gloria Steinem once famously said that a woman needs a man like a fish
needs a bicycle. Point taken, but let’s play with it a bit. Let’s ask
whether a woma...
Saudi Arabia Lightens Up on Women – A Little
-
Saudi Arabia is about to become slightly less like a Taliban state.
Hardline Sunni Wahhabis have long enforced strict gender segregation and
the veiling ...
Top 100 in Global Economic Weight
-
According to the IMF China is the largest economy in the world and has been
since 2014.
This is on a PPP basis (see here for discussion) and all data is re...
The Power of Positive Persistence
-
Strategies to flip negative attacks by Republicans into positive progress
for Americans Like some foreign dictator, the Republican in the White House
will ...
Assorted Thoughts #1: Applying Averages
-
This series contains some of the key books, studies, papers and events that
I’ve read over the last year. I’ve decided to try to write one of these
posts f...
The Last Jedi AAR
-
The Star Wars movies have never been particularly concerned with accuracy
when it comes to military tactics and strategy. From the start, the movies
are de...
A living fossil, back to GNXP.COM
-
Just a note. I am moving back to the original Gene Expression domain. If
you consume my content through my Twitter auto feed (not my main Twitter
account) ...
New Immigration Blog
-
Long time no see! Just popping in to point toward a new immigration blog
fresh on the ‘blogosphere’ (is that still a thing?). It’s infrequent, maybe
a post...
Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence
-
There used to be more research and debate on the negative effects of labour
resistance on economic development, but that topic has been crowded out by
the ...
Book review: Western Fringes
-
When I read the blurb of Western Fringes – a Muslim man trying to find a
Sikh woman who has run away from home to escape an arranged marriage – I
admit tha...
Dunkirk: A Deliverance Worth Cheering
-
My review of the film Dunkirk and case for celebrating the evacuation:
https://warontherocks.com/2017/08/dunkirk-a-deliverance-worth-cheering/
For Democratic Internationalism
-
Recently while surfing the Twittersphere I came across an incredibly
moronic tweet by the everlasting twit that is Mark Ames, who likes to make
alot of no...
This blog is now closed...
-
...and I'm now blogging at http://www.ecosophia.net. All of the posts that
appeared here during the eleven-year run of *The Archdruid Report* will be
issu...
The Sovereign Myth
-
States have never had full control over their outcomes — a fact we tend to
ignore only while things are going well.
The post The Sovereign Myth appeared ...
Heroic Age Issue 17
-
On behalf of the Heroic Age board and my co-editor, I would like to
announce the first parts of Issue 17!! That will be further explained
below. We are ve...
How the Democrats can Rebuild
-
Appearing in:
Orange County Register
Numerous commentaries from both the political left and right have expounded
the parlous state of the Democratic Part...
Goodbye
-
[image: Snapshot corrected moving to unz]
It’s goodbye to drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk
After 4 years of blogging, and 1,062,720 page views, here i...
The Things You Learn from the Internet
-
The Spiritual Science Research Foundation (“Bridging the known and unknown
worlds”) has discovered the cause of homosexuality for 85% of all gay
people: 4....
Moving house
-
People connected to me have justifiably asked that I move my blog to a more
anonymous platform. Although I’ve made an effort to remove my name from
this bl...
Europe is collapsing
-
A mini Brexit is happening in Italy and socialist policies are slowly going
down, one by...
The post Europe is collapsing appeared first on The Gorka Bri...
Anarchism
-
Anarchisms are highly diverse in their visions of the society to replace
both the State and other forms of social life which they judge undesirable,
inclu...
501 Treasures of Byzantium: No. 41-50.
-
No.41: Troyes casket with emperors and hunters, 10th century, Catherdral of
Troyes, France. This surprising treasure resides in the Cathedral of
Troyes, in...
Teen Wolf – Ranking the Seasons
-
MTV’s hit show Teen Wolf returns this fall for it’s final season. It’s an
emotional time for its fans. So I decided to take a look back at the
seasons and ...
THINGS ARE MOVING - AGAIN
-
The WSJ’s Peggy Noonan checks US election numbers: The polls are tightening
and no one is sure why. A Reuters/Ipsos poll through…
The Redistribution of Humiliation
-
The recent EU referendum in the UK has drawn a great deal of attention to
voters who had previously been ignored. Communities left behind by the 21st
Centu...
My Blog Has Moved Again!
-
My new blog location is www.richardcarrier.info. I will maintain this old
blog as a historical archive as I did before. But every other post I've
blogged s...
Walter Bagehot
-
The distinguished-looking gentleman in the portrait is Walter Bagehot
(pronounced “badget”). Dubbed “The Greatest Victorian”, Bagehot was a
founder of the...
‘Gen Why?’ – Perception Deception
-
“Most days are full of meaningless uninvited interactions with the same
kind of simple minded individuals, that indeed would have definitely
complained abo...
My blog moving to my website
-
I just wanted to give a heads up to readers that I have moved my blog to my
website, which now houses all my work, videos, press coverage, photos and
more....
Posiitive progress for Venezuelan Socialism
-
“We have been impressed by the great effort that your government has taken
to improve the living standards of the majority of Venezuelans. … what
Venezuela...
Along came Phil
-
Gramm, former Senator from the state of Texas to set a few facts straight in
the Wall Street Journal about the cause of the financial crisis. I.e., it
was...
Fiscal Policy and the ZLB
-
I have been doing some reading for my undergraduate thesis, which looks at
the role of credit-supply shocks in the Spain during its housing boom and
bust, ...
Samurai Gifts
-
The book's third chapter examines the role of gift exchange and other
ritual performances in the politics of warrior relations in the late
sixteenth and ...
Where are the “devaluationists”?
-
A Resolution Foundation report on UK monetary policy reminds me of
the near absence of discussion about devaluation. The report has a section
on policy op...
Changing Stations
-
At the beginning of October, I packed up my family and we made the move
‘home’.
The house is fairly new, but the place is old. It has a lot of history...
do france and belgium have a berber problem?
-
i don’t know the answer to that question — i only ask because it turns out
that several of the paris terrrorists (from the recent attacks) are of
berber ex...
Treasure and mystery in Byzantine Cappadocia.
-
Before the Romans, other ancient civilisations, notably the Achaemenid
Empire, once inhabited the mountainous region of central Anatolia called
Cappadocia....
Salvaging the Tatters of the Obama Doctrine
-
When president Obama told George Stephanopoulos only hours before the Paris
attack that his administration had “contained ISIS” he may have been wrong
but ...
We've Moved
-
The Mischiefs of Faction is now located at mischiefsoffaction.com. Here's
how to follow us:
All our posts will appear on our new homepage, here.
You can...
A Koku of Rice
-
Lately, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of a koku (石) of rice: I find
it pretty neat. A koku was a Japanese unit of volume (of rice) in use
especially ...
Book Review: Intelligence (2015) by Stuart Ritchie
-
An Uphill Battle It’s no easy task to explain why intelligence is so
important. The reason for this is oddly enough that many highly intelligent
people i...
A CryptoFiction
-
Here’s a micro-story I started with the Access Crypto Summit flash fiction
prompt in mind, left half done, and then belatedly finished off anyway,
because ...
Canada Day, 2015. Mahsie, Nika Illahie.
-
Further to my Canada Day column Finding the Right Words for Canada’s
History I thought I’d put this up. It’s from Rain Language, a long poem in
translation...
It Is Accomplished
-
As Gandhi never quite said, First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you.
Then they attack you. Then you win. I remember one of the first TV debates
I had...
Why Mothers Are So Special
-
Mothers hold a privileged status within the human experience. I address
some of the foundational evolutionary principles that explain the
mother-child bond...
Obama’s comments on the Great Barrier Reef
-
In the last few days I’ve carefully read comments emanating from the
Coalition government that suggested an undue intervention in Australian
politics by Pr...
Our first virtual Screenwriting Workshop!
-
T woke up on Monday with the idea,
bubbling with notions, and I think it's
a fabulous way to explore the new
media potentials for a virtual classroom.
We c...
Taxation vs. Expropriation
-
What’s the difference between a 50% marginal tax rate on income vs. 50%
expropriation by a kleptocratic ruler or corrupt officials? Some models
might sug...
By: Anonymous
-
Great article, however, I don't see yet a study explaining the effects of
Cannabis being freed completely overnight, lifting all restrictions and
allowing ...
Governance, aesthetics and architecture
-
I have been meaning to write up a few thoughts that came out of a
beer-fueled conversation with a friend some weeks ago. We both lived in
Austin, TX for so...
Norman Geras: 1943-2013
-
I am very sad to announce that Norm died in Addenbrooke's hospital in
Cambridge in the early hours of this morning. Writing this blog, and
communicating wi...
OxcOOd1199 Error
-
Windows Media Player is a great way to view your favorite movie content.
However, with the program comes the risk of the occasional OxcOOd1199 error
occuri...
Jide Who Played Jesus to be Ordained
-
*MEDIA *INFORMATION
*NEWS FROM THE EAST HAM TEAM*
For Immediate Use
11 June 2013
*Jide who played Jesus to be ordained*
The man who played Jesus in the N...
Skill Scores: Re: Nick Rowe
-
But if both forecasters are imperfect, how do we use the data to tell us
which forecaster was better? Or how good each one is on a scale with pure
gue...
An Independent Wild Hunt
-
We at the Patheos Pagan channel bid The Wild Hunt much luck in its new
phase as an independent website. To catch the latest from TWH, please check
out wild...
The myth of “they weren’t ever taught….”
-
A year or so ago, our math department met with one of the feeder middle
schools to engage in a required exercise. The course-alike teachers had to
put toge...
Modeled Behavior’s RSS Feed
-
Hopefully within the next day or two we will be able to get Modeled
Behavior.com to redirect to our Forbes Blog. Yet, it looks as if there is
no way to ge...
Actually, maybe it is the NGDP after all
-
I’ve gotten a lot of really smart pushback on my claims about the UK
economy, and I think I have significantly underestimated what I already
believed to be...
The tax forum as a platform for a grand bargain?
-
In his Challenges of Federation speech we referred to in a previous article,
Prime Minister’s Department Secretary Terry Moran said:
*There are business l...
The satisfaction of learning a new skill
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Today I learned how to do short row shaping in knitting. It's a technique
that is easy to do, and hard to explain. I've tried several times in the
past. so...
The Rand Paul reality for gays
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Some Republicans are trying to brush it off as the kind of debate you have
in you freshman dorm at 2 a.m. Not so for us gays. The objection raised by
Rand ...
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EVEN THE LIBERAL NEW REPUBLIC... (PART II): The cover of the current issue
of the New Republic blares, The Battle for Tora Bora: The Untold Story.
It's a g...