The Silence of the Lambs is almost 30 years old. But it is one of those classic films that has entered the general culture so that people who weren’t alive when the film came out can recognise classic lines or moments from the film.
Members of the contemporary American elite, who are too settled and senior in some network or hierarchy to see themselves as Clarice, the plucky young FBI agent played by Jodie Foster, surely would identify with Jack Crawford. The wise, experienced and perceptive defeater of monsters; mentor to the Clarice’s who come into their orbit. Scott Glenn gave the character an engaged and engaging gravitas, who would not want to identify with him?
If the American elite, particularly the progressive elite, were made up of Jack Crawford’s, the US would be in much better shape.
But neither Clarice nor Jack Crawford is the character from the film classic who best describes the typical member of the contemporary American elite. That goes to Dr Frederick Chiltern, played with such wonderfully sleazy arrogance by Anthony Heald.
It is all there. The condescension. The arrogance. The overblown sense of understanding. The destructive careerism. The false sense of being in control, of being able to use the monster of the moment for their own benefit.
And what happens to him in the end? Having let the monster loose through this own self-serving careerism, the last we see of Frederick Chiltern is his frightened flight to a false sanctuary, the monster he let loose wandering, unhurried, after him, toward that fatal consumption that Lector’s line to Clarice (“I am having an old friend for dinner”) moments earlier foreshadows with such delicious menace.
As we have watched US cities burn in nightly riots, and new forms of the totalitarian urge rampage through US institutions, the statues expressing American heritage be torn down, the explicit wish to abolish the American, Western and Enlightenment projects be violently proclaimed, much of the US mainstream media turn itself into vehicles of cult activism, people be intimidated into going along with moral urgency of the moment, for fear they will get the hose of mobbing stigmatisation, the lesson of Frederick Chiltern is there for those with eyes to see. This has all got as far as it has because an army of Fredrick Chilterns thought that the monsters would be useful for their careers, that they would remain in control and so could prosper from letting moralised rage do its thing.
That is not how these patterns play out.
How many will find out that they were not noble Jack Crawford’s but Frederick Chiltern’s, destroyed by their own careerist arrogance? And will they have that moment of self-realisation before the monsters they let loose come for them?
The US is having a very strange election, at so many levels. By all the indicators of enthusiasm, President Trump is way ahead of Vice President Biden. Biden-the-candidate has none of the enthusiasm of Barack Obama in 2008. He seems to have even weaker levels of on-the-ground enthusiasm than did Hillary Clinton 2016. Yet the polls have been telling a consistent story for months: he is going to win the popular vote and the Electoral College handily.
While there are reasons to be sceptical of the polls, for them to be systematically wrong on the level required for President Trump to be re-elected would be truly remarkable. And would say very disturbing things about the state of US politics and institutions. So, what reasons do we have to think the polls might be fundamentally correct?
Peace and Bread: the Peace and Bread equation is a model of US presidential voting developed by economist Douglas Hibbs. It predicts the share of the total Democrat-Republican Presidential vote of the incumbent Party nominee based on the performance of the US economy in the lead up to the election and war casualties.
If we treat the 226,000 or so Coronavirus deaths (682 deaths per million) as war casualties and consider the depressive effect on the US economy of the lockdown measures, then we would predict the incumbent Party nominee (Donald Trump) to be defeated. President Trump is also very poor at the tribal-leader gravitas that US Presidents are expected to provide. Something, in their different ways, both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were skilled at. Which has a great deal to do with why they were the notably electorally successful nominees for their respective Parties.
So, if the US election is decided by relatively low-information voters, you add in economic effects, Coronavirus deaths and not fulfilling Presidential gravitas expectations, and even hope for quieter politics, and it is easy to see how the polls would be correct and President Trump would fail to get re-elected. A plausible reading, moreover, that does not require any hint of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Since the election of President Eisenhower in 1952, the US has had a pretty strong rhythm of two-term Administrations. Eisenhower (1953–61), Kennedy-Johnson (1961–1969), Nixon-Ford (1969–77), Reagan (1981–1989), Clinton (1993–2001), Bush II (2001–2009), Obama (2009–2017) all fulfilled this pattern. The exceptions are Bush I (1989–1993), who was going for the fourth successive term for the same Party: a big ask that economic recession and the third-Party candidacy of Ross Perot put paid to, and Carter (1977–1981).
If Donald Trump turns out to be a one-term President, in a single-term Party incumbency in the White House, that puts him in the same category as President Jimmy Carter and no other postwar President. We can see from the above, that there are reasons to think that he might be so. Though Joe Biden in 2020 seems a very different candidate, at so many levels, than Ronald Reagan in 1980. Then again, President Trump does not look much like President Carter either.
So, the short answer to why we might expect President Trump to lose is the Pandemic. This is ironic at so many levels. Clearly, the economy was going Trump’s way before the Pandemic. Moreover, President Trump has been the least militaristically adventurous President the US has had in decades. He patently would prefer the US to be less involved in overseas military actions. His most notable military action, the drone-strike killing of Iranian general Solemeini, seems to have had a stabilising, rather than de-stabilising, effect on the Middle East.
[ADDENDA: This discussion of results from focus groups accords with the above analysis.]
President Trump has been in office for almost four years. So, he has a record we can examine. What it is clear is the depiction of him as a would-be authoritarian dictator is nonsense. The Pandemic and the riots gave him any number of “Reichstag fire” moments, and he took none of them. Indeed, his response to both the Pandemic and the riots has been notably federalist. Possibly too federalist for his electoral prospects.
Part of what has been going on has been an advocacy economy that desperately needs to identify great social evils to keep the donations and hirings flowing. Between advocacy non-profits, and diversity and similar trainers, billions of dollars rest on characterising US society as pervaded by endless social evils. President Trump, as the Make-America-Great-Again President, has ostentatiously failed to go along with this political economy of moral catastrophising.
Ironically, the desire to have the moral authority of the civil rights movement, and of second-wave feminism, requires that the advocacy economy pretend that the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism were not effective. Which, of course, they were; to striking and startling degrees. But unless the participants in the advocacy economy are still fighting the moral equivalent of Jim Crow and Patriarchy, it is a bit hard to justify those enormous money flows. Having a incumbent President who fails to defer to this advocacy game — on the contrary, pokes at it continually — accounts for much of the animus towards Trump. He threatens both their cognitive identity, as fighters against great social evils, and their income flows. Especially with his Executive Order against critical race theory.
Trump’s defeat would be a great win for the advocacy economy. Even though, if he is defeated, they will probably have had very little to do with him losing.
On the other hand, if it turns out that the polls are systematically wrong, then the advocacy economy is precisely where we should look for the reasons why. The systematic stigmatising and sanctioning of dissenting opinion is a regime of censorship. A regime of censorship there is good reason to think is widely resented. Regimes of censorship create distrustful and dissembling societies. If people are lying to pollsters, systematically not responding to pollsters, or the pattern of voters is systematically different from who the pollsters have been sampling, that will be why.
In which case, Trump being re-elected would not only be a major defeat for the advocacy economy, it would also be a marker of its corrosive effect on American society and institutions. Having billions of dollars of income resting on denying the reality of genuine social progress, and systematically exaggerating or mischaracterising social problems, is not good for the health of any society, or its politics.
The Danish economist Ester Boserup (1910–1999) advanced a clever theory for the origins of farming. The theory was that farming began in fertile river valleys (and wetlands) because the available resources led to an increase in population, and the consequent pressure on food resources drove people to adopt farming to sustain the increased population. This was part of her larger analysis of the long-term effects of rising land/labour ratios on the intensification of land use.
It is a nice clear theory, that allows for the repeated adoption of farming in about a dozen separate places around the world. It is a lovely theory, slain by the proverbial ugly fact: there is no evidence of pressure on food resources. People did not take up farming because they had eaten out alternative resources. On the contrary, the pattern suggests a long period of a mixture of foraging with a little farming on the side, until a tipping point is reached, and we then get settlements committed to agriculture, with foraging on the side.
People move from foraging (taking food from the environment) to some low-level supplementary cultivation, but still mainly foraging, to high-level cultivation, supplemented by foraging. With domestication (selective breeding crop and animal species for human convenience) being a recurring element in the transition to full-scale farming. But the evidence that there was a lack of food resources in the wider environment sufficient to sustain the population, that the transition was driven by pressure on food resources, is just not there.
I want to suggest the Boserup was right about crowding, but wrong about the issue in the transition to farming being crowding putting pressure on food resources. The issue was crowding itself: crowding as a social phenomena. The pressure that drove the transition was the presence of other humans because the food resources were so plentiful. Indeed, sufficiently plentiful that it did not encourage measures to reduce population growth because parents kept judging there was enough to feed that extra child.
The foraging-to-farming sequence in the Fertile Crescent (extending up to Southern Anatolia) is relatively clear. First, we get foragers settling down (sedentism) but still being foragers (with a diet of mainly meat and animal fat, plus some nuts and fruits). This overlaps with foragers constructing ritual centres. Then we get evidence of some small-scale cultivation (grains and legumes) as a supplementary food source. Then we get settlements committed to agriculture as their primary food source, though there is still foraging (especially for meat: they seemed to have eaten anything that flew, walked or swam). Then we get domestication of herd animals (sheep, goats, pigs and cattle). Each stage in the process takes centuries, even millennia, with some overlap. What we don’t have is evidence for serious pressure on food resources.
Foragers generally dislike crowding
The evidence is fairly clear that foragers do not like being crowded by other humans. For instance, when Homo sapiens entered the Americas, they spread southwards at a rate of about 10km a year. That is quite a fast rate of spread.
The evidence also suggests that foragers are capable, if they have a run of good seasons, of quite high rates of population growth. So, we have humans arriving in the Americas and invading a space full of untapped-by-other-humans food resources. They breed like crazy and eat (and kill off) the megafauna. Spreading to chase those disappearing megafauna and because, by foraging standards, it’s getting a bit crowded. Hence that 10km a year rate of spread.
Why would foragers not like being crowded? Women and children: specifically, their women and children.
The general human foraging pattern is relatively straightforward. Women, who are regularly going to be pregnant or having nursing infants, look after the kids and engage in the low-risk gathering (nuts, fruits, other edible plants) and hunting (e.g. lizards, small animals, etc) that you can do while minding the kids. Adult men do the high-risk hunting (large animals) and gathering (raiding beehives for honey) that you can’t do while minding the kids.
So, the result of standard foraging patterns would be that the women and children would often be separate from the men, when the men are out hunting. Having other foraging groups nearby would be enough to make everyone nervous. Hence the tendency, if they can, to move on when the local foraging space starts “filling up”. That would produce a 10km rate of spread through a new landscape quite easily.
(As an aside, the foraging pattern of men building teams based on trust-under-pressure and women building intimate connections, a pattern that continues in many agropastoralist societies, has resulted in socio-cognitive patterns you can see in any school yard: boys form teams and girls form cliques. Both are ways of connecting, but one is centred around physical risk, and use of things, and the other on emotional risk and personal interactions. The more agreeable and neurotic boys join the cliques, including those interested in learning how to attract boys. The less agreeable and neurotic girls join the teams, including those interested in learning how to attract girls. In over 20 years of presenting to schools, I have seen a lot of schoolyards.)
But suppose you are in a relatively enclosed geographical area with lots of food resources. The population starts filling up (by foraging standards) and you get somewhat “hemmed in”.
If moving stops being an option, there is another alternative. Sedentism: having a home base the women and children stick to, and that the men can spiral around when hunting. This can only work in an environment rich enough in food resources to sustain that, typically with overlapping ecosystems that provide year-round food sources, and ideally with the capacity to smoke, dry or ferment food. But if the environment is that rich in food resources, then the physical space will start producing crowding and responses to deal with the crowding.
If there are lots of food resources, but not the range to sustain foraging sedentism, then either some other mechanism would need to evolve to police boundaries, or a rather grim pattern of pre-emptive and retaliatory violence is likely to emerge. Or a mixture of both. As, of course, later became a pattern in various horticultural societies. An elevated protection problem generating warrior elites could explain the very hierarchical nature of Mesopotamian urbanisation.
So, the first response to crowding is to adopt a home base. This is a strategy that is going to work for a while. Perhaps quite a long while. Especially as sedentism probably ups the disease vulnerability, so possibly takes some of the population growth pressure off. Starting to grow some supplementary crops becomes a practical option. Doing so also lessens the need for women and children to wander.
By adopting sedentism, you are also likely to begin to evolve social mechanisms to deal with crowding within the group. But the food resources are still good, so the crowding effect of population pressure continues, though it may take a long time to trigger the next level response.
The power and use of ritual
Ritual centres, probably organised by shamanic networks, can also play a role. (Prostitutes are not the oldest profession, shaman are: the development of shamanic networks could have been a step towards the development of priesthoods.) While ritual centres constructed by foragers are not unknown (they also occur, for instance, in Mesoamerica) Göbekli Tepe is impressive in its age, scale and elevation of human imagery.
To understand the power of ritual, consider the four modes of knowledge: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory — knowledge that, knowledge how, knowledge of and knowledge in. (For those of a Classical Greek bent: episteme, techne, noesis, and gnosis.) Ritual engages all our modes of knowing: you ritually affirm doctrine, you perform ritual, you perceive ritual, you experience ritual. The more it engages all modes of knowing, especially from the reinforcing feedback effect of group participation, the more cognitively powerful the ritual is.
Now consider the uses of ritual. It is a shared experience of common action and participation. Ritual both signals a shared social alignment and expresses it. Moreover, regular attendance at ritual centres provides an opportunity for building connections and developing exchange networks. This would be true if one were still mobile foragers, but even more so if one has started to adopt sedentism.
Participating in common rituals is also a way to manage crowding. Indeed, constructing a ritual centre is itself a somewhat ritual-like experience, signalling and expressing common social alignment.
Fast forward a few thousand years, and we have riverine labour-service autocracies marshalling off-season farm labour to express, manifest and acknowledge the power of the ruler and control the use of “idle” labour through monumental construction. (Modern totalitarian societies are also fond of rituals of mass participation and submission, including ritual elections.) Ziggurats, pyramids, Angkor , Borobudur and similar monumental constructions are annual rituals of power expressed in stone. They are also, in a sense, ways to manage crowding: or, at least, the problems of social scale.
Sedentism to full farming
So, getting back to our crowded foragers, we have sedentism with supplementary farming. At some point, a tipping point is reached, and people shift from a few supplementary crops to a commitment to farming as their dominant plant food source, even dominant food source. Some mixture of the development of mechanisms to deal with crowding within the group, domestication increasing the productivity of crops, and the calorie-production advantage of farming, is reached, and you have become a farming culture.
People have moved, in millennia-long stages, from responding to crowding to finding ways to manage crowding. With the high level of food resources in the local area driving the crowding, and that crowding itself driving the transition to sedentism and agriculture, rather than pressure on food resources being the constraint that drives the transitions. (It is vaguely analogous to Homo becoming the apex predator via tool-using cooperation leading to an evolutionary surge in Homo cognitive development, or at least a shift in the evolutionary pressures, to cope with dealing with a cooperative, tool-using apex predator.)
Once farming is adopted, then crowding on resources is likely to become a factor, as human populations steadily increased. Hence the spread of farming and farmers out from the cradles of farming as those children the existing farm could not support then sought their own farmland.
Anatolian farmers seem to have spread across arable Europe at a rate of about 1km a year, though farming may have spread by cultural diffusion in much of Northern Europe, the Alps and west of the Black Sea. Not being urbanised, Anatolian farmers did not have the “demographic sinks” of Mesopotamian cities to absorb extra population and so they spread across much of arable Europe.
Once the arable land is filled up, Boserup’s processes for intensification of land use become a very plausible social mechanism.
Anyway, that’s my suggested mechanism for why farming developed again and again in fertile areas with lots of available food resources.
Comments welcome.
(A 15 October 2020 Monash University Archaeology Zoom seminar by Andy Fairbairn of the University of Queensland on Cultivating and foraging on Turkey’s Konya Plain from 9500–7,000 BC: insights from Pinarbasi, Boncuklu and Canhasan III was enormously helpful in providing a coherent picture of the foraging-farming transition. Prof. Fairbairn is not in any way responsible for the above hypothesising.)
We Homo sapiens are a much more dimorphic species than people may realise. Men are, on average, only 7% taller than women, and 13% heavier. Women’s bodies have a higher minimum level of fat content than men’s do. So women are generally smaller and have proportionately less muscle.
But women only have on average 66% of the lower body strength, and 52% of the upper body strength, of men. The difference in muscle mass does not account on its own for this striking disparity in strength. Male spines are more rigid than female spines. That makes male spines much better anchors for physical effort. So, it is the combination of more muscle tissue plus a more rigid frame to lever off that makes men so distinctly stronger, on average, than women.
It is also why there are barriers for who can play women’s sports. Men’s sports do not need those barriers. If women attempt to play in men’s sports at an elite or professional level they will lose and probably get hurt.
The point of the restrictions on who can play in women’s sports is to keep male spines out of women’s sports, because those with male spines will win and those with female spines will, if it is a contact support, be much more likely to get hurt.
There is no such thing as sex-change surgery. No surgical procedures give functioning testes to transmen or functioning ovaries to transwomen. There is gender reassignment surgery, which changes the outward physical characteristics to that of the other sex. But the surgery does not provide functioning gonads and certainly does not give transwomen female spines. Nor does any amount of hormone treatment significantly change the rigidity of the spine, though increased oestrogen will tend to effect the operations of muscles in ways that reduce strength.
At this point, it should be obvious that, generally, it is unwise for transmen to play serious men’s contact sports, for their own safety. and that usually (outliers occur) they will not be competitive at professional or elite levels in men’s sport.
It should also be obvious that is unreasonable for transwomen to play in women’s sport. Even after the full operation and hormone treatment, they still have male-pattern spines. The striking success of transwoman athletes in women’s competitions is not an accident and is, of course, what drives the controversy.
But that is not the approved prestige opinion. (A prestige opinion is an opinion, the public affirmation of which makes one a member of the morally worthy while denial of the same makes one a member of the morally unworthy. Prestige opinions become part of a social dominance strategy if those with contradictory opinions are therefore deemed to be subject to legitimate stigmatisation and attendant sanctions.)
In fact, suggesting there are enduring biological differences between women and transwomen, and that these matter, is deemed to be so morally outrageous that it is transphobic.
There are no contrary biological facts when it comes to the rights of the marginalised.
So, how do we get to such self-righteous, dissent-blocking, reality-denial?
No, seriously. The claims above can be straightforwardly expressed in Heideggerian language as that the Dasein of a transwoman encompasses all that there is in, and to, being a woman.
What is Dasein you may ask? Literally, it is being-there, though it is usually understood as being-in-the-world. Heidegger introduces the concept in the Introduction to his magnum opusBeing and Time thus:
This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being, we shall denote by the term “Dasein”.
Hope that is clear. Heidegger makes the centrality of Dasein to, well, everything, very clear. In the first chapter of Being and Time he tells us that:
The existential analytic of Dasein comes before any psychology or anthropology, and certainly before any biology.
When Philosophy first began, philosophers’ status-task (or symbolic boundary task) was to assert themselves against priests, the bearers of revelation and purveyors of other-worldly knowledge. Philosophers presented themselves as providing much surer paths to the knowledge of reality than anything priests could come up with. Indeed, they often made very large claims about the transformational nature of the knowledge they could impart.
Since Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein, the status-task (or symbolic boundary task) of philosophers has to been to assert themselves against scientists. Either in explaining why science is so successful, working out the limitations of science, working out the implications of science, some combination of the preceding, or in finding a more profound path of understanding than science can offer.
Heidegger is clearly in the last category. As are all those who have drunk of his well. Which includes Sartre, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard: the existentialists, postmodernists, post-structuralists and other purveyors of French theory.
Outside France, it also includes Richard Rorty, the postmodern Pragmatist, and Alexander Dugin, he of the fourth political theory. But we can leave them, and their particular complications, aside.
Heidegger also makes a great deal about the concept of authenticity and inauthenticity, noting that (also in Chapter One):
And because Dasein is in each case essentially its own possibility, it can, in its very Being, ‘choose’ itself and win itself. But only in so far as it is essentially something which can be authentic — that is, something of its own — can it have lost itself and not yet won itself. As modes of Being, authenticity and inauthenticity (these expressions have been chosen terminologically in a strict sense) are both grounded in the fact that any Dasein whatsoever is characterised by mineness.
Clear? If you are wondering where Derrida and co., and those derivative in various ways of them, derived their annoying prolix unclarity of language, that is another legacy of Heidegger.
So, if you intellectually front-and-centre Being and authenticity, and claim that your form of inquiry is much more basic in its delving into the nature of reality than biology, then it is not very many steps at all to transwomen being fully, and indubitably, women. That being a woman is the authentic expression of their Being.
Heidegger treats truth as uncovering. He divides logos into discourse (Rede: a fundamental existential phenomenon, the main purpose of which is to ensure a basic understanding of the world) and language (Sprache: a way in which discourse communicates or articulates itself). If discourse is collapsed into language, then it loses its ability to uncover, to reliably find or express the truth. (A useful discussion of Heidegger’s approach to language, from which I took the above two definitions, is here.)
There are some intermediate steps for derivations of what Heidegger published in 1927 popping up in biology-denying identity-affirmation nine decades later. I have gone through some of these steps before, but we will do a quick revisit for those not familiar. Various ideas have been adapted from French theorists into the constellation of ideas that are feeding into current prestige opinions. These French thinkers were themselves responding to Heidegger, in the context of the failure of political Marxism. Key adaptations are:
From Jean Baudrillard: we are trapped in our social bubble, the map is the territory, and you might not be able to get out of our social bubble.
From Jacques Derrida: words are only defined in terms of other words.
From Paul-Michel Foucault: arguments are about jockeying for power, which is the fundamental constituent dynamic of society.
The question is not whether the above are accurate and nuanced adoptions of the thought of these French thinkers, but rather that these adapted takeaways from these thinkers have emerged in the constellation of ideas that feed into the increasingly dominant prestige opinions.
Knowing, not so much
To understand the implications of these ideas, it helps to understand that there are four modes of knowledge: propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory — knowledge that, knowledge how, knowledge of and knowledge in. They each have their own marker of reality: truth, power, presence and something like attunement. (Psychologist John Vervaeke discusses these ideas in considerably more detail in various online lectures and discussions.)
If propositions are deemed to be entirely self-referential, they only refer to other propositions, then truth is thereby eliminated as a marker of reality. That makes power the dominant marker of reality. So speech becomes acts of power and expression of power struggles. Thus, stigmatising and sanctioning people over their speech becomes a righteous act when done in the service of the correct form of social validation.
Human society becomes a structure of power. Experience and participation become self-validating, as they cannot be interrogated by truth. Which makes power, acting in the world, the only social validation of perspective and experience. In the evolved system pushing out prestige opinions, that validation comes from the experience and perspective of oppression.
So, enquiry into Being is more fundamental than biology, biology does not provide us with reality markers and people can act in the world to achieve their authentic Being, grounded in their perspective and experience. For instance, as being “truly a woman”. Moreover, being of a marginalised group, trans perspective and experience has validation that no one who is less marginalised, less validated by oppression, can match.
See how easy it is? How easy to get to identification as being authentically-a-woman trumping any amount of mere biology. Biology, moreover, that if cited against their claims is thereby used in service of oppression by denying transwomen their authentic experience of themselves. The whole thing makes perfect sense.
Well, not really. It is a serviceable simulacra of making sense, but it doesn’t actually. Propositions are not entirely self-referential, propositional knowledge is knowledge, truth is a marker of reality and biology does tell us about reality and it is outrageous for people with male-pattern spines to compete in women’s sports.
So problematic
The notion of social validation of perspective and experience via the lens of oppression has so many problems it is hard to know where to start.
The first problem is this: except when the comparison is with all men, women always lose once this validation-by-oppression calculus is in play. They lose because women are half the population, so any other group (apart from all men) will always be more marginal. So, if it is Muslims versus women, women lose. If it is trans versus women, women lose.
The second problem is that a moment’s thought shows that this validation-by-oppression can easily be reversed. As, in Heidegger’s own politics, it notoriously was. One just claims that authenticity comes from acting more effectively in the world, so the more effectively one acts, the more authentic and validated one is. And who acts more effectively in the world than a master-race? Or indeed, a master-belief-system.
The politics that flow from validation-by-marginalisation are not anti-Nazi politics or anti-Fascist politics, but reverse-Nazi politics and reverse-Fascist politics. Politics with the same obsessions (race, identity, gender, etc) but with reverse polarities. Instead of the problems of the world or society coming out of blackness or Jewishness, they come from whiteness.
It helps to understand the difference between reversal and opposites to remind ourselves that love and hate are just the reverse of each other. The genuine opposite of both is indifference. If you hate your ex, you are not over them. It is only when you can reach indifference, or some similar state of minimal emotion, that you are truly over them.
Thus, keeping with the social centrality of race talk but turning the threat from blackness to whiteness is classic reversing of the polarities while keeping the same obsessions.
Hence Antifa are not anti-Fascists, they are reverse fascists — using paramilitary violence to push racially obsessed politics, but racially obsessed politics with a reversed polarity (whiteness down rather than whiteness up).
The opposite of Nazism (or Fascism) is in not having the same obsessions while just reversing the moral and political polarities. The opposite of Nazism or Fascism is abandoning those obsessions altogether. Such as abandoning race talk.
The third problem comes directly from having a decapitated epistemology, a decapitated understanding of knowledge. Making propositional knowledge impotent by making propositions entirely self-referential, taking out truth as a marker of reality, also hugely increases the possibilities for self-deception. Restricting the capacity to interrogate one’s own experience and perspective, except in terms of whatever type of social-validation-through-the-perspective-of-power one accedes to, impoverishes one’s self-awareness. Worse, it makes it much easier to bullshit yourself through the manipulation of salience, particularly moral salience.
This is excellent for a social dominance strategy based on prestige opinions. It is truly awful for genuine understanding of yourself, the world and others.
As we look around, we can see huge amounts of self-deception. Such as all those folk thinking they are being morally brave and “subversive” in taking stances that are absolutely conventional in their social milieu. The entertainment industry has become rife with it, leading to lots of very annoyed fans as their treasured heroes and franchises are reworked according to the same narrow, increasingly predictable, range of cookie-cutter identity-politics based on the same narrow range of prestige opinions. The combination of smug condescension and relentless conventionality involved in these oh-so-conventional reworkings are exercises in pervasive self-deception. (Or, even worse, very self-aware status-play manipulations.)
Technological trans
Returning to the trans demand that folk with male-pattern spines continue to make a mockery of women’s sport in the cause of expressing their authentic Being, this systematic denial of the facts of the case is clearly not a way to run an advanced technological society.
Ironically, this trans politics of self-validated-authenticity is only possible in an advanced technological society. Plenty of societies have had trans identities. It is clearly a human thing. But in no previous society was it seen as other than a trans identity, a thing in itself.
Until the rise of mass prosperity societies form the 1820s onwards (with the development of steamships and railways), the overwhelming majority of people lived subsistence lives. Who could, or could not, get pregnant was a key, even foundational, social fact. Trans people were not members of the other sex, they had an identity across normal gender boundaries. An identity that was, indeed, trans. The notion that a transwoman was a woman made no sense, because they could not give birth.
It is only with the cushion of mass prosperity, separating actions from consequences, that the notion that transwomen are authentically women in every sense that counts can even pretend to make sense.
But it is a self-deceiving pretence of sense in the service of strategies of social dominance based on prestige opinions. It only gets anywhere because people either buy into the social dominance strategy or are too afraid of the stigmatisation costs to stand up to it. Trashing women’s sports is only a small part of the costs of this noxious combination.
A great writer has an answer to this social dilemma. Let an evolutionary biologist read to you words of genuine perception and understanding. Because what we get when we trash truth is not some higher understanding, but the multiplication of lies acquiescing in bullshit.
Cross-posted from Medium. My essays on Medium are often works in progress and are updated there.
Australia has done relatively well in coping with Covid-19. Our death rate, at the time of posting, of 35 per million puts us 111th out of 201 countries and territories listed on worldometers website. This is well below the world average of 138 deaths per million.
Australia has some obvious advantages. We are an island-continent with a long history of serious quarantine regulations. We pay attention to Asia. We have excellent state capacity. So, that we have done unusually well in coping with Covid-19 is not that surprising.
What is a bit more striking is that, out of 897 deaths from Covid-19, 809 have taken place in the State of Victoria. Victoria is the second-largest Australian State by population, with a population of 6.7m out of Australia’s 25.7m.
There is no mystery about why Victoria (or, more specifically, Melbourne, a metropolis of 5m people) has done so relatively badly. The quarantine of returning travellers in various hotels was screwed up. Very badly. Private security guards were hired to enforce the quarantine. They were not adequately trained or supervised, resulting in a failed quarantine and the spread of the virus.
There has since been a public enquiry into the hotel quarantine failure. The inquiry Judge has not yet released her findings, but the public testimonies by various public servants were, remarkable. A short summary is: no one remembers anything. The decision to use private security guards just sort of happened.
Speaking as an ex-public servant, the parade of not-me and I-don’t-remember testimony was startling. But is perhaps less surprising in the current social context than it might otherwise be.
In the Anglosphere particularly, people very much live in a social situation where social media is mobilised to sanction those who express anathematised opinions. Nervousness about expressing opinions has become widespread: a recent poll found that 62% of US residents had opinions they were afraid to express publicly, with a majority of all political groups except “strong liberals” having such opinions. This is congruent with the 2018 Hidden Tribes report which found an overwhelming majority of US residents (80%) thought that political correctness was a problem, with progressive activists (8% of the population) being the only group a majority of whom did not agree that PC was a problem. Progressive activists were generally highly educated, with high socio-economic status and well above average incomes. The sort of people who go into University administrations, non-profit advocacy groups, HR departments and government bureaucracies generally.
In a situation where divergent opinions are socially sanctioned, social safety resides in going along with the preferred opinions. There is a mixture of implicit and explicit social signalling that goes on to establish and maintain an emergent, and evolving, set of approved opinion.
This is not a deliberative process, in the conventional sense. While there are social milieus where future approved opinions are developed, in the wider society it is much more a matter of network processes of feedback and response. People who want to navigate these social risks (and opportunities) need to develop an awareness, not necessarily conscious, of the relevant social cues.
Now, take that process of social signalling and conformity and apply it in bureaucratic settings. It is not hard to see how decisions could end up being made implicitly through mutual signalling rather than explicitly. As an emergent process rather than as explicit decisions.
The trouble with such implicit decision making is that such implicit decisions are not interrogated. Indeed, much of the point is to not interrogate positions, as asking the “wrong” questions can be an adverse social signal. So there is much less thinking through of implications and requirements.
That is how one ends up with a situation where someone involved in the hotel quarantine gets diversity training, as that is an accepted ritual, but no training specific to running a quarantine.
This is brainless decision making, but one that makes perfect social-dynamic sense in a situation where there is systematic sanctioning of anathematised opinions and even asking the wrong questions is socially fraught.
Especially given (1) the dominant intellectual origins of the approved opinions and (2) how useful having a set of approved opinions is for a bureaucracy.
Bureaucratically convenient convergence
Having a set of approved opinions is useful for a bureaucracy, as it simplifies selection procedures, it simplifies coordination and it generates moral projects. A useful, extra and clear sorting device is established for selecting people — are they “one of us? Moreover, if everyone is operating off the same set of opinions, it becomes much easier to align actions and expectations within the bureaucracy. As a third bonus, given that the dominant (dare one say hegemonic?) set of opinions is highly moralised, and all about social action and transformation, it generates moral projects for bureaucracies to be getting along with.
There is also a lot of social science that such cognitive conformity is bad, even disastrous, for decision-making. But that only matters if there are direct consequences to those involved from such decision-making failures. Otherwise, the bureaucratic convenience will win out. Especially if status payoffs are added in, as they are.
These ideas have adapted aspects of various French theorists (notably Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard), who themselves were reacting, in the context of the failure of political Marxism, to philosopher Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western philosophy. Three key adaptations into the critical social theory constellation were:
discourse is self-referential (it only connects to itself),
society is primarily to be understood as a set of power relations, and
we live in social bubbles from which we may not be able to escape.
The first is adapted from Derrida, the second from Foucault and the third from Baudrillard.
The significance of these adaptations is clear if we realise that there are four modes of knowledge: propositional, procedural, perspectival and participatory. Knowledge that, knowledge how, knowledge of and knowledge in. Each has its own reality marker: truth, power, presence and (something like) attunement, respectively.
If language, if discourse, only connects to itself, then truth is taken out of consideration as a marker of reality. Propositional knowledge is no longer of knowledge of anything except other propositions. Power then becomes our most effective reality-marker. It thus make sense to conceive of society as a structure of power relations, with speech being acts of power, as critical social theory, and its associated ideas, typically do. With our perspectives and our experience being taken as self-validating and only subject to social validation in terms of power.
Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard were all very much critics of Enlightenment thinking and leading figures in the development of Post-Enlightenment ideas. Enlightenment thinking concentrated so much on propositional knowledge (Cogito, ergo sum — ‘I think, therefore I am’ — is classic Enlightenment thinking) that it ended up with a thin and bodiless conception of knowledge. One that entirely abandoned wisdom traditions. (Useful discussions of wisdom traditions in the context of cognitive science are here and here.)
Post-Enlightenment abandoning of propositional knowledge as being entirely self-referential creates a situation where people’s speech and actions can only be analysed in terms of power relations, personal perspective and personal experience. If one wanted to be cruel, one would say the Enlightenment versus Post-Enlightenment clash becomes a dispute between the bodiless and the brainless.
The bodiless epistemology of the Enlightenment may have left no place for the wisdom traditions, but the decapitated epistemology of the Post-Enlightenment, deprived of the reality-testing interrogation of truth, has hugely expanded the possibilities for self-deception. Self-deception through accepting what is congenially salient, such as being socially acceptable or otherwise convenient, rather than what is the case, has always been a recurring human foible. Hence wisdom traditions have perennially put much emphasis on self-awareness, on seeking to eliminate self-deception. Denying interrogation of what is the case as a reality marker by treating discourse as an enclosed structure greatly increases the possibility for self-deception, such as through self-deceiving manipulation of moral salience. As we move from Enlightenment to Post-Enlightenment thinking, the retreat from wisdom becomes even more complete.
Decapitating competence
A view that decisions can only be interrogated in terms of power relations is not a view conducive to interrogating them in terms of their practical effectiveness. Practical effectiveness, aka competence, is all about the connection of statements to reality. In the decapitated epistemology of Post-Enlightenment critical social theory, competence gets trumped by caring. Well, by caring in accordance with approved power-relations of marginalisation.
Returning to the testimony to the Victorian hotel quarantine enquiry, the “don’t remember” and “wasn’t me” process of decisions just happening to be made, but not being interrogated, apparently revealed, fits right in. (Especially as the security guards were disproportionately from “marginalised groups”.)
A very powerful social dominance strategy, based on prestige opinions rather than more conventional patterns of prestige goods or prestige skills, has developed in contemporary societies. The status strategy comes in both assertive — look at me, I am so moral — and defensive — I agree, don’t sanction me — versions. The prestige opinions are based around a set of ideas that systematically undermine decision-making competence. The testimony in the hotel quarantine failure inquiry provides a preliminary case study of the effect on decision-making of this prestige-opinions status strategy. A strategy that has to suppress alternatives views and concerns. First, because the moral prestige the social dominance strategy is based around requires claiming that any contradicting ideas be immoral (in the case of these hegemonic opinions, are -ist or -phobe opinions: racist, xenophobic, etc.), so any proponents thereof must be be sanctioned. Second, because otherwise followers of the strategy will be outcompeted by explicit, interrogated, fact-grounded, competent decision-making.
If you want to know what’s in store as sanctioning of wrongthink by power-is-what-matters conformity-by-social-signalling, with its decapitated epistemology, spreads throughout society and its bureaucracies, the un-interrogated decisions that “just emerged” exposed by the testimony to the Victorian hotel quarantine enquiry, and the hundreds of avoidable deaths that conformity-by-social-signalling led to, are a harbinger of things to come. (Coming to a corporate, non-profit or government bureaucracy near you.)
The US political system provides an unusually clear measure of how strong or weak a major Party nominee for President is: compare their popular vote with the share of the vote their nominating Party got in the House of Representatives election.
On that measure, Hillary Clinton was a mediocre candidate: she received essentially the same share of the vote as the Democrats did in the House of Representatives (48.2% to 48.0%). Obama was a strong candidate: in 2012 he received a significantly higher vote than his nominating Party did in the House of Representatives (51.1% to 48.8%, +2.3%pts).
Donald Trump was an electorally weak candidate: he received significantly lower vote than his nominating Party did in the House of Representatives (46.1% compared to 49.1%, -3%pts). That he won the Electoral College anyway is the basis for my position that almost anyone the Republicans nominated in 2016 would have beaten Hillary.
When we compare an average of the polls in 2016 with the current pattern, we can see that Vice President Joe Biden has a generally larger, and much more persistent, lead in the polls than Hillary did. Not surprising, Hillary was, according to the polling, the most disliked major Party nominee in decades. Apart, of course, from the present incumbent.
For President Trump to be re-elected, he either needs a remarkable late surge in support or the polls have to be systematically wrong to a startling degree.
The polls could be systematically wrong. There are three ways in which they could be systematically wrong.
Who ends up voting systematically diverges from the selected samples. The sampling patterns of the pollsters could be misreading the likely voters, skewing their results, if the error is disproportionately in a particular direction.
Who ends up voting systematically diverges from who is being polled. If non-responders disproportionately support one candidate, that can skew the results.
People responding to the polls misrepresent their voting intentions. If people intending to vote for one candidate disproportionately misrepresent their voting intentions, that can skew the results.
It is certainly possible to posit a scenario where one or more these factors are significant and operate to under-state support for President Trump. Especially in a society with rising concern about digital privacy. Nevertheless, that would have to be true, and true to a startling degree, for, on current trends, the polls to be as wrong as would be required for President Trump to be re-elected.
The US has become a society where people are hesitant to express various views, including support for President Trump. In a society where people are systematically sanctioned for expressing particular opinions, you end up with a pervasively dishonest society with broken feedbacks. Public spaces become dominated by preference-falsification.
If the polls do turn out to be wildly wrong on Election Day, that will likely say something rather unfortunate about the state of public discourse in the United States.
Jared Rubin’s Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not is a perceptive and informative attempt to answer the question of: why did Europe, particularly Northwest Europe, become so much richer than the Middle East? Especially given that Islam, in its early centuries, was comprehensively ahead of Latin Christendom in sophistication and level of commercial activity and in scientific enquiry.
As this shift was a case of a mutual reversal of fortunes — one started behind, but ended up ahead — the answer has to be an historical one. It has to be about unfolding processes over time, rather than some innate characteristic or difference operating in an undifferentiated away across the centuries.
Rubin states that the answer is not to be found in the doctrines of Islam, but in developing institutional dynamics, where one has to pay attention to what happened, and what did not happen. The latter points I strongly agree with, the first is less convincing. Rubin himself is advancing a set of propositions which he claims matter because they allow us to make sense of the world. Claiming that the doctrinal propositions of Islam do not matter, especially if they affect how institutions evolve, seems somewhat discordant.
Rubin’s basic argument is that rulers rely on propagating agents, agents in society who propagate their rule. Rule is propagated by some balance of coercion and legitimation. The more one can rely on legitimation to propagate one’s rule, the less coercion is required. Religious elites can potentially provide cheap (i.e., low cost to the ruler) legitimacy.
Rubin argues that Islamic religious elites provided cheaper and more effective legitimation to Islamic rulers than the Christian Church did to Christian rulers. Over time, that led Christian rulers to rely more on economic elites as propagating agents, so economic elites had more bargaining power, so they were able to push for more friendly-to-commerce rules, including more secure property rights, that promoted economic growth in Europe — particularly, post the Reformation, Protestant Europe. Conversely, the strength of religious elites, and the weakness of economic elites, in Spain and the Ottoman Empire led to commercial and economic stagnation.
Rubin has a nice definition of elites as: anyone who can influence how people whom they do not know act (p.29). I would add: who can recurrently influence, but I otherwise agree. More generally, I agree with his answer but not his analysis. Yes, I agree that the capacity for economic elites to bargain seriously with rulers was indeed crucial to the development of Northwestern Europe. This is a case that John Powellson makes powerfully in his 1994 Centuries of Economic Endeavour: Parallel Paths in Japan and Europe and Their Contrast with the Third World. Yes, the role of religious elites was very significant in Catholic Spain and the Muslim Middle East in explaining their commercial and economic stagnation. Yet, I disagree with Rubin’s structure of analysis.
Social bargaining
My disagreement centres on Rubin’s notion of propagating agents. Agents has a double meaning in economics. Economics is the study of purposeful action by agents in conditions of scarcity. Individuals and firms are all economic agents. But an agent can also be someone acting on behalf of an other, as in principal-agent problems.
Economic and religious elites are not really agents of the ruler, unless they hold some official position within the apparatus of the state. Dividing support for the rule of the ruler into coercive and legitimating agents (p.33) obliterates an important distinction between those outside the state apparatus that a ruler bargains with and those who, at least notionally, are under the ruler’s administrative direction.
As a medievalist, the striking absence from Rubin’s analysis is landholders. An analysis that covers priests (the Church), merchants (economic elite) and the king (ruler) but leaves out the landholding warlord class (knights and barons) is a little odd, to say the least. They are not economic elites, in the sense that merchants are, or religious elites and they are not accurately described as coercive agents, they had too much scope for independent action.
When one examines how merchants were typically incorporated in political deliberations (i.e., in overt political bargaining), it was by adding merchant representatives to the assemblies of nobles and Church hierarchy (bishops and abbots) that already existed. Analogous assemblies that did not exist in Islam. Which might be regarded as a bit of a clue.
Yes, there was a tradition of shura or consultation within Islam, but it was consultation with officials and dignitaries, who were included because of their personal standing, rather than their institutional connection. Occasionally, guild or trade representatives were included, but the entire process was far too occasional, limited and advisory to be comparable to the bargaining assemblies of Christendom.
It is easy to miss the continuity involved in the addition of merchant representatives to consultative assemblies within Christendom, as adding merchant representatives established the representative principle, which clearly would come to have great significance. But paying too much attention to the beginnings of the representative principle misses the continuity of bargaining assemblies.
Indeed, if one was looking for something that both Northwestern Europe and Japan had that Islam did not, it was a landholding warrior class with a clear corporate identity that regularly engaged in political bargaining with rulers. It is demonstrably much easier to add economic elites into political bargaining processes that already exist than to create such processes ex nihilo. Something that adversely affected China’s ability to cope with the challenge of the Eurosphere Powers. Japan which, unlike China, had a long and rich tradition of political bargaining did much better. The Japan-China comparison is a useful test of any general thesis about Islam/Middle East and Christendom/Europe.
As is comparison with Brahmin India, the other civilisation, apart from Islam, where law was dominated by a religious elite. (Hindu is a term I do not much like, as it covers a very eclectic set of religious traditions and obscures the remaking of the Vedic religion in the face of the challenge of Buddhism.)
Both Islam and Brahmin India generated fluid autocracies: autocratic states that came and went but generally left remarkably little enduring effect on the institutional landscape of their civilisations. The reason being that, in both cases, law was based on revelation and overwhelmingly in the hands of the religious elite. While this did not mean law was rigid, it did reduce its flexibility. One can make new precedents, or decree new rules. One cannot make new revelations with remotely the same facility.
Moreover, what can’t be entrenched in law is not likely to have enduring institutional power and it is very hard to entrench new things in law if it is based on revelation, on connection to the eternal. Especially new things that are to operate in one place but not another. The strength of local custom varied within Islam, but that was more about the circumstances of how Islam reached an area, and the strength of the local ulema, the religious scholars, rather than a more explicit process of legal adjustment.
Nor is political bargaining, certainly not explicit political bargaining, likely to be a prominent part of the political and institutional landscape, if political bargains cannot be entrenched in law. Political bargains that cannot be entrenched in law are not likely to be worth the effort and risks to engage in, or agitate for. In Christendom and Japan, political bargaining did not require any overturning or by-passing of the institutional structure of law. In Islam and in Brahmin India, it did.
States such as Wessex->England-> United Kingdom, France, Denmark and Japan have far longer institutional histories than any Islamic (or Brahmin) state. Apart from Denmark, they have longer institutional histories than Islam itself. The first historically attested tenno of Japan being Kinmei (r. 539–571, though he is counted the 29th Emperor), the first ruler of Wessex being Cedric (r.519–534) and of a united France being Clovis (r.509–511). Denmark only claims as far back as Gorm the Old (r.936–958).
It is important to note the difference between bargaining and resistance. The ability to resist the imposition of rules can generate a process of implicit bargaining. As economic historian Timur Kuran has so informatively laid out, there was plenty of implicit social bargaining involved in the evolution of Sharia. Notably in the evolution of the zakat, the Islamic charity tax. Chinese Emperors similarly engaged in implicit social bargaining with the gentry and merchant elites. Such implicit social bargaining has been a normal part of rulership down the ages.
Getting active agreement to new rules requires explicit bargaining. That has been less common. It was not a feature of Islam or of Brahmin India, due to religious elites dominating law, and the provision of mediating services, precisely because law was based on revelation. Nor was explicit social bargaining a feature of China, where the political model was autocracy administered by a meritocratic bureaucracy. The only explicitly hereditary element was the Emperor, the landed aristocracy having been euthanised out of existence during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). Conversely, explicit social bargaining was a pervasive feature of samurai Japan and of medieval Latin Christendom.
This was due to two inter-related factors. The first was that law in Christendom and Japan was explicitly human made. Even the canon law of the Christian Church, though it took revelation as a key source, was explicitly a human thing and possessed no inherent primacy over secular law. Christianity, Buddhism and Shinto are not legislating religions in the way that Islam, Judaism and Brahminism are. This is a doctrinal difference that generates major institutional differences.
The second was that the military elite was a landholding elite. Yes, both Japan and medieval Christendom developed the notion of land as being held in return for service. Over time, however, the landholding became more entrenched, with other levers being used to create a quid pro quo for military service. A landholding elite is an elite worth bargaining with: both because they are in a strong position to resist rules and because their active endorsement has value. Moreover, a landholding elite that is interested in increasing its income from its estates has reason to support effective property rights.
Islam did not develop such a landholding military elite due to the Sharia inheritance laws, which required property to be shared among all a father’s legal children. Yes, sons got more than daughters and older siblings got more than younger siblings. But inheritances still had to be divided. This made creating a landholding warrior elite impractical, given how expensive supporting a mounted armoured warrior was, because a landholding large enough to support such a warrior would not last beyond a single generation. Instead, Islam developed tax fiefs (iqta, timar and similar). A mounted armoured warrior would collect taxes from their land grant as payment for military service.
You don’t bargain with your tax agents in remotely the same way that you might bargain with warrior landholders with castles and military retainers. Nor do tax agents, who might be moved at any time, have anywhere near the interest in property rights that landholders who want their estates to be productive, and to be inherited by their son, do. Which is why Islam did not have the assemblies of nobles and bishops that Latin Christendom had, and could then add representatives of the merchants to. The institutionalisation of the doctrines of Islam had powerful effects on the social evolution of Islamic societies.
It is notable that the most successful Islamic State, the Ottoman Empire, the longest lasting major Islamic state, was a revealingly partial exception from these patterns. That is because the Ottoman dynasty developed the practise of re-issuing the kanun, the decrees, of previous Sultans, at the start of the reign of each new Sultan. This created an enduring body of administrative law that gave the Ottoman state considerably more institutional resilience than other Islamic states.
Muslim rulers were able to issue decrees in the silences of Sharia: mainly matters of state administration. As Rubin and others have pointed out, Ottoman rulers were able to use their ability to appoint and dismiss judges, and otherwise provide favours to the religious elite, to push the boundaries of kanun rather further than other Islamic rulers. But this was a difference at the margin, it did not change the fundamental dynamics. At least, not until late in the history of the Empire, when there were some (largely abortive) experiments with Parliamentarianism.
As what states were expected to do expanded in the C19th, so did the role of administrative law. This gave Muslim rulers a wedge against religious law in the face of the widening, and increasingly obvious, gaps between the capacities of the Muslim world and those of the Eurosphere states.
Sharia inheritance laws not only blocked the development of a landholding warrior elite, they also undermined the development of any merchant elite capable of long-term political bargaining. The wealth of successful merchants also had to divided among all their children. And as successful Muslims tended to have multiple wives, that often meant lots of children. If wealth is constantly being divided, that strongly militates against the development of the merchant dynasties that were such a prominent feature of Latin Christendom. This generated coordination and time-horizon difficulties that reduced the potential value of merchant elites as political bargaining partners. Even if those bargains could have readily been entrenched in law, which they generally could not be.
Sharia has only narrow restrictions against incest — that Muhammad’s first cousin and first convert, Ali, had married Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, rather militated against expansive incest rules, given that the life and example of Muhammad is a fundamental source of Sharia. The consequence of narrow conceptions of incest, and law being based on revelation, was that kin groups were very strong in Middle Eastern Islam, as alternative social cooperative mechanisms were weak or hard to construct. Once the Abbasid Revolution of 748–50 had overthrown the Arab tribal confederacy of the Umayyad and Rashidun caliphate, Islamic rulers faced the problem that locally-sourced troops would be colonised by local kin groups. They therefore turned to slave soldiers, as slaves are separated from any kin connection. This created military elites further separated from the local populace.
By contrast, the Christian Church, particularly the Latin Church, had extremely expansive bars on incest. That, along with other features of Christian doctrine, militated strongly against kin groups. The effect was particularly intense wherever manorialism was adopted, as holders of manors (the Church, princes and the landholding elite) had an interest in not having kin groups interfering with their management of their manors. Both Church and rulers also had a strong interest in not having their organisations colonised by kin groups. The result was that kin groups disappeared from Christendom, except in the Celtic and Balkan fringe. A rich structure of alternative mechanisms of social cooperation developed, mechanisms that could be readily entrenched in law.
This meant that a much richer variety of institutional arrangements developed in medieval Europe, given that bargaining is a path-dependent process, so produced varying institutional patterns in different places. So the selection processes of history had much more to work with in Latin Christendom than they did in Islam. (Or, indeed, any other civilisation.) Social and political bargaining was more entrenched in the society, there were more potential bargaining partners, and more reasons to bargain. With the difference between Christian and Islamic doctrine, and their institutional expression, being a key factor.
The circle of justice
The concept of the circle of justice that Islamic thought adopted from pre-Islamic civilisations — one well known form claimed to be from a letter by Aristotle to his pupil Alexander, another version claim to be a statement by shahanshah Khosrow Anushirvan (r.531–579) — expressed a notion of just order that implies protection and regularity by the ruler, but not political bargaining. In his Muqaddimah (An Introduction to History), pioneer historical sociologist ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) reports the alleged words of Aristotle as:
The world is a garden the fence of which is the dynasty, The dynasty is an authority through which life is given to proper behaviour, Proper behaviour is a policy directed by the ruler, The ruler is an institution supported by the soldiers, The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money, Money is sustenance brought together by the subjects, The subjects are servants who are protected by justice, Justice is something harmonious*, and by it the world persists, The world is a garden . .
(*Franz Rosenthal translates this, ma’luf, as familiar, but notes it may mean harmonious, which works better in context.)
One does not bargain with servants. (Other renditions of Aristotle’s alleged words use the term slaves.) The version ibn Khaldun cites as coming from shahanshah Khosrow is even more direct:
Royal authority exists through the army, the army through money, money through taxes, taxes through cultivation, cultivation through justice, justice from the improvement of officials, the improvement of officials through the forthrightness of wazirs, and the whole thing in the first place through the ruler’s personal supervision of his subjects’ condition and his ability to educate them, so that he may rule them, and not they him.
Of ibn Khaldun’s three stated versions of the circle of justice, the first he quotes is the alleged words of a Mobedhan, a Zoroastrian priest, to Bahram b. Bahram (either shahanshah Bahram II, r.274–293, or Bahram III, r.293):
O King, the might of royal authority materializes only through the religious law, obedience towards God, and compliance with His commands and prohibitions. The religious law persists only through royal authority. Mighty royal authority is accomplished only through men. Men persist only with the help of property. The only way to property is through cultivation. The only way to cultivation is through justice. Justice is a balance set up among mankind. The Lord set it up and appointed an overseer for it, and that overseer is the ruler.
Unsurprisingly, the version put in the mouth of a priest explicitly endorses religious law, and God as the source of authority, but does not explicitly mention the military.
The notion that the ruler sustains his own authority by sustaining rightful order, while long predating Islam, received extra power in a civilisation where law was dominated by the religious elite and predominantly based on revelation.
Ibn Khaldun saw royal authority as the key force giving structure to society, including being the greatest source of demand for goods and services. He wrote that:
Mutual aggression of people in cities and towns is thus averted by the authorities and by the government, which hold back the masses under their control from attacks and aggression against each other. They are thus prevented by the influence of force and governmental authority from mutual injustice, save such injustice as comes from the ruler himself.
For ibn Khaldun, the creation, sustaining, and breakdown of social order was very much about the rise, persistence and decay of dynasties, of royal authority. The fluid autocracies of the Islamic world were very well captured by his analysis.
Islamic dynasties show, over the longer-term, very different patterns than do the dynasties of Christendom, who ruled over much more institutionally persistent states. From 800–1500, the reigns of Christian rulers in Western Europe generally tended to lengthen over time and, with some bumps, tended to have declining chances of being deposed. The duration of their reigns also show no particular pattern within dynasties. Over the same period, the reigns of Islamic rulers generally tended to decline, have a generally increasing chance of being deposed, with their reigns tending to shorten towards the end of dynasties. (The trends in reign length, chance of being deposed and patterns within dynasties is from here.) The difference between rulers whose bargaining could be entrenched in law (i.e., institutionalised), and rulers whose power was more salient (i.e. more apparently dominant), but with much less capacity to make, and institutionalise, supporting social bargains.
Legitimacy
The other feature of having law not dominated by the religious elite, is that law can develop secular discourses of legitimacy. Indeed, as James Franklin points out in his excellent The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal, legal reasoning can be the basis of a wide range of intellectual spin-offs. Especially if it is not constrained by constant referring back to revelation.
Rubin treats legitimacy as a support for rule. Legitimacy is, however, a somewhat fraught concept. As political scientist Xavier Marquez has pointed out, it can be a bit of a catch-all filler as a concept. How do we know X was legitimate? People supported X. How do we know X lost legitimacy? People stopped supporting X. Legitimacy becomes rather like phlogiston: a postulated theoretical entity without independent evidentiary support.
Legitimacy has two senses. The first is doctrinal legitimacy: follows the accepted rules, procedures and other precepts of some normative system. The second is public legitimacy: is within the political (or other) system’s operative rules of deference and authority, it’s public normative structure. Public rituals, public speech, public acts, private and public sanctions, are all means to establish those public norms of legitimacy. Rituals of submission, for example, publicly display that people submit. Failures to follow doctrinal legitimacy becomes socially significant if and when it affects people’s behaviour. That is, if it is an operative social norm, which normally includes effective sanctions. Being able to grant or withhold legitimacy, in a way that affects people’s behaviour, thus becomes a powerful social lever.
It is a social lever based on normative mechanisms. Norms are very much a social phenomena, as Cristina Bicchieri has carefully analysed; notably in The Grammar of Society and Norms in the Wild. Are economic elites purveyors of normative mechanisms? Not remotely in the sense that religious elites are. This is another distinction that the concept of propagating agents flattens.
The question of rival normative mechanisms to those of religious elites does, however, point back to the role of law in establishing norms of legitimacy. But also the processes of bargaining. Parliaments, Cortes, Estates-General, Diets, etc., could be legitimating mechanisms. One that religious elites were represented in, but were far from dominant in.
As previously noted, the incorporation of economic elites in political bargaining within Latin Christendom was not a self-contained dramatic institutional shift. It was an inclusion within, and extension of, bargaining structures that already existed.
If we go back to the break-up of kin groups and the Catholic marriage system (no concubines, no divorce, one wife, strong sanctions against bastardy), the full effect only came about where the secular elites went along with it. Which, anywhere manorialism extended to, they had a strong interest in doing. The Celtic fringe lacked manorialism, and so the Church was never strong enough to impose its marriage system on the Celtic fringe until the English-cum-British state smashed the power of the clan chiefs (Wales, Ireland) or bought them off (Scotland).
Which again takes us back to what the landholding warrior class was doing. The class that did not really exist in Islam, or in China, but did in Europe and Japan. A class that rulers definitely did bargain with, where it existed.
So, I agree with Rubin’s answer concerning the centrality of social bargaining and sources of legitimacy, but not his structure of analysis.
There is, however, much to recommend Rulers, Religion and Riches. Rubin is a very clear writer. He has intelligently and perceptively absorbed a great deal of material. He has thought seriously about the normative power of religious elites. Though incorporation of Cristina Biccheiri’s work on social norms, especially in The Grammar of Society and Norms in the Wild, would have been very beneficial to his analysis.
Rubin is also very good on the telling detail. His discussion of why the Ottoman rulers came to rely more on local notables I found particularly informative and insightful, for instance. Rulers, Religion, and Riches is a very worthy addition to the growing literature of comparative institutional analysis.
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-
Whenever I hear the word “scientism”, I know that there will follow a
discourse about either how science is deficient, or about how “other ways
of knowing”...
The Making of a Wider War
-
+ This week, Israel bombed Beirut and southern Lebanon. Iran bombed Israeli
military bases and intelligence sites. The US and Israel launched
interceptor...
The desperation begins to show.
-
Why are the headline and subheadline nearly identical?
That's Politico, where they seem to have lost their mind.
Democratic operatives, including some of...
Saturday assorted links
-
1. Another meta-study on smart phone use and mental illness. 2. Ross
Douthat has a serialized fantasy novel. 3. Movie Gen, on Meta. 4. “Home to
only arou...
Enby credit report
-
Shit just got real.
Financial services firms have been forced to pay hundreds of pounds in
compensation to non-binary customers over “discriminatory” app...
It’s not just worst than you thought…
-
It’s worse than you can imagine. Large area’s of western NC are destroyed.
The roads are GONE. The power is off, for months at best, years more
likely. Man...
TIME TO BECOME UNGOVERNABLE
-
The ruling elite who run the government have declared war on white
Americans. This hurricane response confirms this as fact, not conspiracy
theory. We are ...
Liberal democracy isn’t an end in itself
-
“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest
of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition
or r...
Automotif DLIV...
-
In 1979 disco was showing signs of its impending demise, and so, by all
indications, was automotive performance.
The big block American V-8, already stra...
Time and Art
-
I am, as I have for the last… you know, I’m not sure how many years in a
row this is? Huh. I’m not even sure if I can figure that out without
serious diggi...
Short Take: It’s Deja Vu All Over Again
-
With the election nearly upon us, a potential regional war breaking out in
the middle east, and a never-ending stream of court decisions, you would
think t...
Saturday Music Post - Love Me Tender
-
"Love Me Tender" was a number one hit for Elvis Presley in 1956, the same
year it was featured in Elvis's first movie, also called Love Me Tender.
The melo...
Radio Derb October 03 2024
-
This Week’s Show Contents 01m52s Hurricane Helene 11m32s Vice-Presidential
debate 19m07s The Israel-Iran War 30m19s Longshoremen strike 33m56s
President Ca...
In the News (#1478)
-
Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the
disposition of which is decided by majority vote. – Judge Robert McBurney
Policing ...
Review: End Game
-
[image: End Game (Will Robie, #5)]End Game by David Baldacci
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Exciting and fast paced, Baldacci delivers. Robie and Reel team up and ...
Writing Mad Science
-
(Copied from my Substack last month.) Mad Science in Easy Mode A Mad
Scientist as an antagonist is easy. He’s a cardboard cutout for your heroes
to knock d...
Jordan Peterson: my message to the Jews
-
Beware your liberal values — those you see as allies are the vultures
waiting for your demise, says author Jordan Peterson. I have been watching
the rising...
The way and the word
-
Over the course of the mid to late first millennium BCE, Greeks and Chinese
developed impressive intellectual traditions that would profoundly
influence la...
Abortion and subsidiarity
-
Ever since the *Dobbs *decision permitted states to set their own abortion
policies, Donald Trump has taken the position that the issue should stay at
th...
When The Bough Breaks
-
I have so far in life been sufficiently fortunate never to have been caught
in a full-frontal weeks-long, totally-life-destroying national disaster.
But I ...
Some Things Really Are Hard To Understand
-
I spent one year and about 30 sessions just exploring the implications of
1:1 time. The entire time my players complained that it was a dumb rule.
Then the...
Ports, Automation, and Progress
-
With regard to the port strike, it is the union’s vehement opposition to
automation that arguably deserves the most scrutiny.
Australian dollar smashed by US jobs boom
-
DXY is on a tear after holding support: AUD is the reverse: JPY has rolled.
CNY is next: Oil is blasting the shorts: Metals have a new enemy in DXY:
Mine...
Adapt or Die, Or...?
-
*Those few who grasp the crisis in its entirety have been marginalized, and
those who are left are drifting downstream, unable to move the mass of
self-int...
The Grim Death Toll in Gaza
-
W.J. Astore Nearly 120K Palestinians May Already Be Dead Ninety-nine
American healthcare workers who volunteered to work in Gaza and who’ve
witnessed the e...
Um, Yeah
-
So? Plant cover across the Antarctic peninsula has soared more than tenfold
over the last few decades, as the climate crisis heats up the icy [...]
"Hard times hiding in plain sight"
-
That's the headline for the latest Global Macro Update newsletter from
Mauldin Economics. I'll include an excerpt from the transcript of a video
inte...
Video: ‘The Truth about the Crusades’
-
A recent interview with ABWE. Video and official description follow: Have
you been taught lies about the Crusades? In this week’s episode, Alex and
Scott s...
The sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969
-
After the Sharon Tate murder, Tom O’Neill explains (in Chaos: Charles
Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties), it wasn’t over:
The next nig...
The Philosophical Rasika Report
-
Interested in getting a PhD specializing in Indian Philosophy? The
“Philosophical Rasika Report” offers some guidance. The report, which you
can find at ...
Inventions in Everything: Glass-Encased Corpses
-
At this time of year, as we get closer to Halloween, there's nothing quite
like a good scare. That's true for at least for some members of the
Invention...
Weekend Knowledge Dump- October 4, 2024
-
Knowledge to make your life better. If you have some free time, check out
some of these links this weekend. The Dark Side of Disasters: Looting and
Crimi...
The Intricacies of Cherokee Language and Syllabary
-
In many respects, communication is the lifeblood of any society. Beyond
simple conveyance of ideas and sharing of experiences, languages and
written scri...
Chechnya And Ingushetia: Brotherly Hate
-
*PSCRP-BESA Reports No 87 (Oct 4, 2024)*
On September 18, official Russian media reported about a shooting in the
heart of the Russian capital, near the ...
Predictive Analytics in Supply Chain Operations
-
Background
The common commercial availability of artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning (ML) technologies has and will continue to have great ...
Podcast Review of “Avoidant”
-
I’ve been trying out AI assistance in marketing. This is an excellent
example of what you can do, and it’s amazingly good at bringing out the
value of th...
A Happy Travel Coincidence
-
Today my book tour event is in Boulder, Colorado (6:30! At the First
Congregational Church! Here are the details), which meant that I would be
flying into ...
#276 – Qing 18: Kangxi Gets Personal
-
The Kangxi Emperor of Great Qing squares off again Galdan Khan of the
Dzungar Khanate in the sociopolitical-religio-military showdown of the late
17th cent...
On Comments
-
A quick review of my comment policy: WordPress, the software I use,
provides a comment-moderation feature that blocks all incoming comments
until they are ...
The Not-So-Silent Generation in Philosophy
-
The Silent Generation (born 1928-1945) is disproportionately represented
among the most-cited authors in the *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy*.
Let's l...
Israel is Likely to Hit Back Hard against Iran
-
Spectator, 2/10 The Iranian launching of 181 ballistic missiles at Israel
on Tuesday night followed a similar pattern to the attacks of April 14.
Israeli ...
Focused on the future
-
During the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump refused to give a definite
answer when asked whether he would accept the results if he lost: as I
recall, ...
(WATCH) NATO
-
The US is one of 32 nations belonging to the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization or NATO. The alliance is 75 years old this year. Because of
the Russia-Uk...
Everything I Learned From Iron Maiden About Life
-
What does Iron Maiden have to do with Stoic philosophy? Nothing really, but
this is my newsletter and it’s what I want to talk about. I’ve been an Iron
Mai...
New Moons Of Uranus and Neptune
-
Astronomers have found a new 7 km diameters moon of Uranus and new 14 km
and 23 km moons around Neptune, which also shed light on the respective
planet-moo...
Murchison Falls
-
As the White Nile powers north through Uganda from Lake Victoria toward
Egypt and the Mediterranean, it roars through a canyon, falling hundreds of
feet cr...
Making the international student caps bill less bad
-
Today is the likely final day of public hearings for the international
student caps bill, ahead of a report due on 8 October. Despite the strong
campaign a...
Motocamping On A PC800: Pics Or It Didn’t Happen
-
I finally did “tame” motocamping on my tame bike. It was everything I
wanted it to be! The Honda Pacific Coast 800 has a huge bedonkadonk. S0me
folks love ...
Harris’s 1922 Paths to Victory
-
Here’s what I want on election night: A complete list of all Harris’s paths
to victory and a complete list of all Trump’s paths. Then as each path
becomes ...
FEMA’s DEI Crippled Hurricane Helene Response
-
“I don’t know that anybody could be fully prepared for the amount of
flooding and landslides that they are experiencing right now,” FEMA
Administrator D...
Sad times for AI safety
-
Many of you will have seen the news that Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed
SB 1047, the groundbreaking AI safety bill that overwhelmingly passed the
Califor...
Sad times for AI safety
-
Many of you will have seen the news that Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed
SB 1047, the groundbreaking AI safety bill that passed the California
legislature...
Launch of the Uehiro Oxford Institute
-
Today we’re launching the Uehiro Oxford Institute – a new interdisciplinary
research institute at the University of Oxford. We look forward to new
collab...
Go Ahead and Discuss Things
-
Regardless of how the election goes, I’m still concerned. Things are good,
but broken. They are good in spite of being broken, and may not remain good
for ...
Time (keeping) in Retrograde
-
I like tech. I like convenience. This isn't anything new - I still remember
working on a TRS-80 and a Zenith microcomputer in the 80's learning this
"perso...
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Fall 2024
-
Each fall and spring, the Brookings Institutions holds a conference with a
set of papers from prominent economists on leading policy topics, with
comment...
Dionysus Against the Daoists
-
*IN WESTERN PHILOSOPHY AND AESTHETICS* a contrast is sometimes made between
the Dionysian and the Apollonian. Made famous by Nietzsche, this schema was
fir...
The Great Myths 15: What about “the Dark Ages?”
-
The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in much
anti-religious polemic. One of the primary myths most beloved by many
anti-the...
Dancing with Whales: The Lore-Fare Twist
-
SEP 05 2024 “Sometimes parts of the [whale] stories are lost. Someone might
get a part of a story but there’s a missing link, then in will come a
fabricati...
Questioning Israel's War on Hezbollah
-
Like any normal person, I celebrate the demise of the evil but capable
Hassan Nasrallah. He headed Hezbollah, the Islamist organization that
dominates Leba...
The Last Days of Mankind
-
Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical
failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and
mor...
De Lamiis et Pythonicis Mulieribus
-
The other day I came across this illustration from the 1489 book "De Lamiis
et Pythonicis Mulieribus" by Ulrich Molitor...It depicts "two witches
conjuri...
Romancing the Rebellion
-
Seems there is a lot of social media chatter surrounding Albert Blake’s new
Afrikaans book on Jopie Fourie. One Afrikaner pundit after reading the book
dec...
Fieldcraft Toolbox
-
Besides the usual knives, axes, and saws of “bushcraft,” sustained
fieldcraft–defined as the art of living skillfully in the field for
extended periods–som...
FAME…
-
What is fame? Have you ever wondered why some people attract the attention
of the masses and some don’t? I have. In fact, it has been a life-long
fascina...
Political choices in choosing growth
-
One of the natural reactions to learning that Labour has a mission to grow
the economy is to sneer. Every government wants to grow the economy! Most
Budget...
Tips For Booking Your Khasab Dhow Cruise Experience
-
Booking a dhow cruise in Khasab promises an unforgettable adventure, but
ensuring you get the most out of your experience requires careful planning.
From c...
McCarthyism: Naming names
-
In the morality play that serves as the history of the "Red Scare" few
crimes rank higher than ex-communists who named their former associates in
the Comm...
Beyond tax rises
-
Most people agree that we need to raise public spending to repair our
damaged public services. Simon Wren-Lewis estimates that it needs to rise
by around 4...
A Farewelll
-
I have been writing this column, off and on, mostly on, for–dear God, can
it be nearly thirty years? Yet nothing lasts forever, neither columns nor
columni...
A Farewelll
-
I have been writing this column, off and on, mostly on, for–dear God, can
it be nearly thirty years? Yet nothing lasts forever, neither columns nor
columni...
China has much to teach us. John Roberts does not.
-
So, I don’t really write here any more. I write at drafts.interfluidity.com
instead. Please follow that feed or subscribe by e-mail. I do still offer
perio...
The Platform of the King
-
As Nate Winchester observes, George R. R. Martin ‘famously said something
about wanting to know Aragorn’s tax policy’. Evidently Martin thinks this
was one...
The end of the great order under the Heaven
-
The very well-written and easy to read book by Gary Gerstle (*The Rise and
Fall of the Neoliberal Order*) makes two key points. First, and continuing
fr...
Free Research Reports
-
Various reports I have written over the years under the auspices of my
consultancy Mayak Intelligence are now being posted on its site, here. So
far there ...
The mental health mess
-
Over the past year or so I’ve read for the first time a bunch of research
into the economics of mental health, along with a little on the early
history of ...
A long strange trip
-
For readers who don’t already know this, my new blog is over at Substack:
scottsumner.substack.com This will be my final Money Illusion post. The
blog bega...
Polio in Gaza: A Jewish Fable
-
You probably have to be Jewish to appreciate the full and bitter irony of
this sentence: Nearly 11 months into a devastating war, a serious new
challenge h...
The Obscenity of Banning Books
-
Granting governments the ability to violate intellectual freedom by banning
books from schools doesn’t help or protect anyone. It is an obscene way of
st...
Annual check-up on global warming/climate change
-
I suspect many people accept passively the climate change narrative because
they are rebutted by the technical aspects of the story and by its
complexity. ...
Interactive PCA of Vector Embeddings
-
Principal component analysis is a way to summarize as much of the variation
in many-dimensional data as you can, using fewer dimensions. For example, a
gen...
Truth-Seeking Modes
-
Been on a Venn diagram kick lately, since being primed to think in Venns by
Harris campaign. This one summarizes an idea I’ve long been noodling on:
The he...
Get Started With Web Hosting Quickly And Easily
-
It may seem daunting or downright impossible to find a suitable web host,
but more often than not, a little research can help you find an answer
quickly! A...
Dear Friends
-
Dear Friends: Ten years after I started this blog, circumstances are making
it impossible for me to continue with it. So I am going to suspend it, at
lea...
Clock
-
Guest post by Sander O’Neil https://sanderoneilclock.tiiny.site/ This is a
follow up to this post
https://mathbabe.org/2015/03/12/earths-aphelion-and-perih...
Sanity Fair
-
*"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019. *
The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cordons at each
end, like dis...
Government Class Gonna Be LIT! (plus a coincidence)
-
The last time I taught US History was in spring 2017, and it was the shit.
Trump had just won and as my readers know, I live and teach in deepest of
blue b...
The Deep-State Strikes Back
-
Biden is out. Kamala is in. Democracy and laws be damned. Biden through
Saturday night was insisting he would stay in the presidential race to the
end su...
A Better Stablecoin on a Perp DEX
-
Creating a stablecoin position on a perp exchange is hard, but it should
be easy. It not only caters to demand, but it also adds liquidity to perp
marke...
Effective Altruism Is Still Bad
-
Scott Alexander (who blocks me on Twitter?) has responded to my prior post
on effective altruism. So has Bentham’s Bulldog. I will here respond.
Scott’s A...
Sitzkrieg?
-
Several People have inquired why I have not written a column for TR in some
time. Let me assure them I am in good health and face no lack of material
as o...
GPT-4o
-
There are two things from our announcement today I wanted to highlight.
First, a key part of our mission is to put very capable AI tools in the
hands of ...
A Few Things We Don’t Quite Get About the Levant
-
(First Draft of the Foreword to Pierre Zalloua’s forthcoming book. For
comments.)
Europa was the daughter of Agenor, king of Tyre
Some people believe tha...
How to Conquer Your Biggest Fear
-
What is your biggest fear? What would it mean if you could overcome that
fear, once and for all?
In this article, I'm going to help you do exactly that b...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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
-
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
-
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...