tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17643282186115688292024-03-13T19:49:06.872-07:00The Adventures of Shylock HolmesOne pound of inference, no more, no less. No humbug, no cant, but only inference. This task done, and he would go free.Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00446165270035271752noreply@blogger.comBlogger979125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-11359127829966622312024-03-13T07:38:00.000-07:002024-03-13T07:38:49.529-07:00Letters to My Great Grandchildren, Part 1: Obesity and Bewilderment<p>Let me begin with the obvious. I do not actually expect you to actually read these. The dead, as Kipling observed, are only borne in mind for a little, little span. Digital preservation being what it is right now, I don't even really expect it to survive. And even if you do somehow read it, it is hard to know what will strike you as interesting about my time. Assuredly, the things that I find noteworthy about modernity may have nothing to do with what interests you. A lot of your questions will probably relate to things like "what was life like without [indispensable invention X]?". Alas, I cannot tell you - it seems pretty normal to me! One throws this note in a bottle into the digital sea - the modern version of the same impulse that made men once paint on cave walls.</p><p>One thing I can tell you, however. In certain respects, the early 21st century is a bewildering time to be alive. And this is especially so in a respect that I imagine will strike you as especially jarring when you look at photos from this time. Namely, why is everybody so enormously fat and unhealthy-looking? </p><p>The immediate question you are probably wondering is how we didn't figure this out. Didn't they look around and notice there was a huge problem? How could you possibly fail to spot the obvious answer of [cause Y]? </p><p>To take the obvious first - we definitely noticed. Human nature did not change so much that the obese failed to observe that they were obese. Nor did they fail to observe the health and lifestyle costs. Indeed, in the sexual marketplace, the fewer people who are thin and in shape, the higher the payoffs to those traits, making the perception even more acute. </p><p>It is glaringly obvious that, at least in this respect, something has gone very wrong with modernity in the last 60 years or so. Obesity, testosterone, sperm counts, the list is long. But time series changes are incredibly difficult things to parse out. The problem is that dozens, if not hundreds, of things are changing all at once. The curse of knowledge is always a tough one to circumvent. When you know something, it will always seem like it ought to be obvious to people who don't know that thing. But it isn't. It turns out it is more difficult than you think to credibly put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know, in this case, why everyone got so fat.</p><p>To begin with one aspect that makes the problem hard. Across different categories, there is a large difference in regulation about what can occur, and how much data collection and notification goes into it. To take one example, which may or may not be relevant to obesity (which is the most glaring and acute of the modern problems). There are a lot of requirements about labeling the ingredients in food. But there are almost none about labeling the chemicals used the packaging that the food comes in. There is some attention paid to the composition of trace chemicals in the water people drink, but it depends a lot on which chemical. There is little attention paid to the amount and type of radiation people are exposed to. Lack of regulation and lack of interest is strongly correlated with lack of data to test hypotheses well. The hardest of which is not "does this increase weight in controlled settings", but "does this quantitatively explain the world around us?" </p><p>Are any of the examples above actually *important*? That, future reader, is the aspect I most want to discuss. The problem is not the lack of plausible theories, or possible contributing causes, or partial remedies. The problem is the complete surplus of them, and the difficulty of sifting between them. Smart, motivated, curious people live in a world of leaping from one lead to the next. They have a scarce budget of time and attention and effort, but great confusion as to where to allocate it to solve a problem that seems all pervasive. The obvious candidates are things associated with modernity, broadly defined. But which ones? Do you need to be reducing the amount of carbs you eat? Do you need to cut back on seed oils? Less salt? Do you need to limit the hours in a day when you eat? Or perhaps the problem is chemical in nature. Do we need to work to reduce our exposure to polyfluoroalkyl substances? BPA? Microplastics? Lithium? Antibiotics? Glyphosate? Blue light? 5G radiation?</p><p>Or is the problem even thornier - that we were simply evolved for a world of calorie scarcity, and our hardwired instincts are now pathological in a world of permanent calorie excess, moths circling a flame of our own making, consisting of hamburgers and doritos? Because, as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, we can do what we want, but we cannot want what we want? It is striking that the unusual period in history when we consume too many calories is the same period, and same places, that our houses now routinely accumulate junk possessions which occupy much time and effort getting rid of. Both problems would seem bizarre to people a hundred years ago. </p><p>I have no doubt this list will seem comical and insane by the time you read it. But this is the point. To live in 2024, and spend any time pondering not just obesity, but the various other maladies that seem to afflicted us more than in the past, is to have a complicated and uneasy relationship with the modern world. There are many things that are probably in the category that the distribution of effect sizes starts at zero, and includes small negatives and considerable negatives. That is to say, not many people seem to think you should be *increasing* your consumption of microplastics. But is it a small problem, or a large one, or actually not really a big deal? That's the difficulty. You can try to play it safe, as it were. But the precautionary principle breaks down very fast when the space of possible things to avoid is sufficiently large. And many of them carry tradeoffs that only become obvious in hindsight, because some of the things are so prevalent. You might be worried about contaminants in your water, perhaps. So you buy a cheap water filter, except now all your water runs through a plastic container made of whatever as-bad-or-worse BPA substitute they're using these days. You take supplements to try to improve your health. But you buy the easy to swallow ones without thinking about it, and end up consuming a lot of whatever is included in the dubious term "gel caps". One ends up being pushed towards rejecting more and more of the modern world, where the end point is rejecting it wholesale, like the Unabomber, or the Amish, or Boko Haram. We don't want this, of course. We still want to be able to write our essays on the internet. </p><p>You can guess at the outlines, of course. It has to be pervasive, hard to avoid entirely. Every area of every country seems to have gotten fatter. It has to be associated with modernity, probably the 1960s/70s onwards, but also increasing over that time. In the cross section, who is affected more seems to be largely genetic, from the twin studies. But since genes haven't changed much in 70 years, this means either genes are a big determinant of response to a time series change, or genes determine willpower, and the ability to use effort to overcome the force pushing you in the same direction. It doesn't seem to be from cross-sectional environmental exposure. Which is weird, since a large time series change sounds a lot like environment. </p><p>You're probably thinking to yourself, that's it? Well, not exactly. There is lots more specific evidence, but this is much more murky and open to interpretation. If you want to know how to control obesity, you've got a larger set of options, with their own limited success. But, for instance, it seems very unlikely that the rise of obesity in the 1980s came from people abandoning their previous one-meal-a-day keto diet, even if you think that might be a decent remedy for the underlying cause. If people stick to it. The distinction between "this would work, if people actually do it", and "this is a thing that the average person could credibly do" is also surprising blurry in the way matters are discussed. </p><p>The other aspect, which you might not guess, is what the response is to this confusion. You would probably guess at there being a frank acknowledgement of the lack of understanding. But there's not. There appears to be some strange aspect where in the face of intractible problems, people would rather believe vehemently in some theory or other, and that it just hasn't been tried hard enough. People would rather hear a wrong theory, vigorously and persuasively espoused, than to frankly admit that all their theories aren't working, and they're largely out of ideas until big pharma invents the right drug. There is a need for action, even partial or unsatisfactory or pointless or symbolic or improbable-to-be-successful action. And once this has occurred, cognitive dissonance takes care of a lot of the rest, changing beliefs to match the actions already taken. </p><p>People believe passionately in their particular theory of weight loss and weight gain. Their passion is strangely out of all proportion with the actual level of confidence that you could attach to intent to treat estimates. That is, if you think the problem is seed oils, is this the same as making a concrete prediction that everyone who cuts seed oils from their diet by, say, 90%, and makes no other changes, will obtain and maintain a healthy BMI? I mean, it would probably help, at least a little. But that's not the same thing. Notably, they believe this much more passionately than for things where knowledge is straightforward. Nobody is passionate about vitamin C being a cure for scurvy. Hell, nobody is even especially passionate about whether Ozempic tends to produce weight loss, because it does. This is just boring, ordinary knowledge. But why everyone got fat in the first place? The honest assessment, that we just don't really know, is the one you are perhaps least likely to hear. </p><p>So here we are. In these strange times, to admit to this plight, is to have some sympathy for the Carthaginians. Nature abhors a causality vacuum. It is more comforting to sacrifice some children to the gods to try to bring rain, than it is to sit there powerless, day after day, not doing anything, not able to even really know what you should be doing. </p><p>For now, Ozempic has been a small light at the end of the tunnel. Once better drugs get invented, and it perhaps gets fully solved, it might eventually just be a subject of later academic or historical interest as to what it was all about in the first place, rather like what caused the decline of the Roman empire. In the shorter term, if we do find out the answer, the people so strongly clinging to this or that theory of diet will forget that they ever did so. Cognitive dissonance is strange like that.</p><p>In other words, your likely bewilderment looking at photos and videos of us is matched only by our own bewilderment in looking at ourselves. It is a strange time, but alas, we have no other. </p><p>Anyway, I hope to write some more of these soon. Life is busy, not least from looking after your grandparent and great uncle or aunt. </p><p><br /></p><p>With all my love, </p><p><br /></p><p>[Shylock] </p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-12062390496694740332023-08-22T22:46:00.001-07:002023-08-23T08:55:51.839-07:00Bolivar and South American "Limited Success" <p>I continue to work my way through the Mike Duncan "Revolutions" podcast series. I recently got through his series on Simon Bolivar and the revolutions in the Spanish Americas. </p><p>These are excellent, and I highly recommend them. In this post, I'm perhaps going to be a bit harsh on Duncan, but don't let this deter you. Duncan is an excellent storyteller, and exceptional at condensing the disparate strands into an easy-to-follow story that has an amazing amount of useful information per unit time. He has a basic liberal bias, but this is fairly easy to subtract. </p><p>One of the ideals I got out of Moldbug (and also in Ernst Junger's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eumeswil">Eumeswil</a>) is that you should aspire to understand the present as a historian living in on Mars in 300 years time would understand our present situation. That is to say, everybody is dead and gone, the nations and causes evoke no immediately strong emotions. You just want to understand what happened and why, and what it teaches you about how the world works. </p><p>It is hard to do this with much of modern history. Ancient history has this a lot more, of course - the Greeks are utterly alien, for instance. As John Dolan put it, when describing the Iliad - the Greeks enjoyed cruelty. They found cruelty hilarious. And if you don't understand this about them, you'll never get the story. But if the only way you can get the appropriate distance is to travel so far back in time and setting, it's hard to know how much any of it actually maps clearly to the present. This is why the ideal is so elusive - disinterested knowledge of something that the year and place of your birth forces you to take a very active interest in. </p><p>For an Anglo reader, Spanish American independence is well worth studying, because it's almost as close to the Martian ideal as you're going to get in the modern world. It's not your war. Neither the monarch, the colonial power nor the colony are in any sense "your" monarch or "your" country. There is an odd tension people sometimes get from being weaned too much on moronic Manichean versions of history, where one somewhat feels the need to "pick a side" in the story, rather like a foreigner moving to America and deciding on a random NFL team to support (I know several people who did this, incidentally). And while this instinct of picking sides in history not generally useful, I think it <i>is </i>useful to consider the question of who acted wisely, who acted foolishly, who could have achieved a better outcome if they had acted differently, and if you were a random elite civilian at the time, who would you have chosen to support. </p><p>Guiding you in this, of course, are your general abstract principles - in my case, things like support for central authority and skepticism of proponents of radical leftist change. But how much should that commend <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_VII_of_Spain">Ferdinand VII</a> to you specifically? It's not totally clear. I think anyone with monarchist leanings will probably lean towards supporting the monarchy <i>before </i>things go to hell. But what about afterwards? As I said about <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-french-revolution-and-inertia-of.html">the French revolution</a>, at some point the fastest and best path back to strong central authority for France was not restoring the House of Bourbon, but rather ... elevating Napoleon. </p><p>When evaluating the wars of Spanish American independence, it's hard not to judge things in part by the character of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvar">Simon Bolivar</a>. He really is a singular figure in terms of his sheer force of will. He famously swore an oath on Mons Sacer, the location of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_secessio_plebis">Secession of the Plebs</a> in ancient Rome, to liberate his country of Venezuela or die trying. He was not joking. He managed to remain stalwart even in the face of repeated setbacks and failed attempts. It is a little bit unclear how to count the number of times he was exiled after failed attempts at independence, but it is at least three. </p><p>-After he had played a large part in the military victories leading to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Republic_of_Venezuela">First Republic of Venezuela</a>, when it collapsed after the earthquake of 1812 (not just due to that, obviously, but it doesn't help when people interpret it as God's divine wrath for declaring independence), he had to flee to Curacao, and later to Cartagena in New Granada (modern Colombia). </p><p>-He got exiled a second time after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Republic_of_Venezuela">Second Republic of Venezuela</a> was crushed by the Royalists, and the forces he led were massively defeated. He fled to Jamaica, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt there, and moved to Haiti</p><p>-From Haiti, he led a failed attempt to re-invade Venezuela in 1815, but was defeated again in particularly embarrassing fashion, and had to return to Haiti again in exile a third time. </p><p>-And at the end of his life, he was about to be exiled to Europe, but managed to die before this happened. </p><p>Suffice to say, when I reflect on his situation in 1816, after three failed attempts at this thing called independence, it's fair to say that most people might be a mite discouraged. But not Bolivar. It is impressive how much you can accomplish as an organized and brave member of the elite with an absolutely single-minded focus, and a willingness to die in the attempt. </p><p>A lot of this is Bolivar himself, though, and perhaps not something that's easy to emulate. In one of those great <a href="https://definitions.uslegal.com/a/admission-against-interest/">admissions against interest</a>, as the lawyers say, his sometime-ally-and-sometime-opponent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_de_Paula_Santander">Francisco de Paula Santander</a> put it this way:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>His force of personality is such that on countless occasions when I have been filled with hatred and revenge, the mere sight of him, the instant he speaks, I am disarmed, and I come away filled with nothing so much as admiration.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Bear in mind that the narrator here is no wilting flower - he was the hero of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Boyac%C3%A1">Battle of Boyaca</a> and later president of Gran Colombia. It's sort of like how everybody smart was blown away at how smart Von Neumann was. </p><p>Bolivar was so magnetic in his personality that, in Duncan's retelling, his personal insistence was the driving force behind the creation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Colombia">Gran Colombia</a>, a country that was a union of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and parts of other countries too. It seemed like nobody else was much interested in the idea of a grand centralized republic. Everyone else saw independence mostly as an opportunity for the circulation of (local) elites, where some group gets to become the leaders of a smaller new country, rather than being subordinated in a larger one. It's a testament to his sheer force of will that he conjured this country into existence for 12 years, despite most other elites having a very lukewarm attitude to it. But eventually he encountered a problem that he couldn't brute force through will alone. </p><p>As a general, his track record was somewhat hit and miss, and it's not obvious from casual empiricism what his actual wins above replacement would be. He liked reckless and bold assaults, and sometimes these worked extremely well (like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalena_campaign">Magdalena campaign</a>) and sometimes they worked poorly, like in his assault on Ocumare de la Costa in 1816, which wikipedia, not usually one for hyperbole in these matters, describes as "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_career_of_Sim%C3%B3n_Bol%C3%ADvar#Aid_from_the_Haitian_Republic_and_Cura%C3%A7ao">a debacle</a>". </p><p>I think Duncan reads him correctly in the following sense. He is an impressive guy, with huge balls, a broad and far reaching vision, and an absolute willingness to sacrifice everything to achieve it. He left a very large mark forever on his country. Duncan's description at the end of the series, which we'll return to, is this:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>More than any other single man (Bolivar) represents the entire process of South American independence, and without question he is now mostly remembered as a romantic hero of an adventurous age, the details of the man himself little remembered or even needed. And in this way too he is like Washington, mythologized to the point of abstraction. But I hope as we've slogged our way along with him now over the past 27 episodes, across mountains, in grasslands and through deserts and through freezing cold, in the city, in the country, through victory and defeat, aiming for glory, getting it, losing it, and then winning it again, that we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. </i></blockquote><p></p><p>He was indeed. But this much is also true of Hitler, and Stalin, and Pol Pot, and Lee Kuan Yew, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon, and George Washington. It marks him for "greatness" in the sense of enormity, and overall impact on history. But it leaves open the other version of "greatness", of actually doing good. By their fruits shall ye know them. When you are the leader of a country, you no longer get to claim that you meant well. You no longer get to claim that you tried your best, and were mistaken. And you definitely don't get to claim that the fact that you felt you were doing the right thing is an excuse for unforeseen consequences. History's judgment is severe, and rightly so. When millions of lives and whole nations are on the line, you have to be right, and you have to succeed. You also deserve to be judged against reasonable counterfactuals. What else would have happened, absent your choices? </p><p>Let's start with the counterfactual. The obvious counterfactual to independence is ... not independence. That is, the continuation of the Spanish rule in the Americas. Like with the <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2023/04/why-you-dont-hear-about-haitian.html">Haitian revolution</a>, the Spanish American revolutions are very hard to imagine without Napoleon overthrowing the Spanish monarchy. Also as in the <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2023/04/why-you-dont-hear-about-haitian.html">Haitian revolution</a>, a lot of the early revolutionaries establish local juntas in their cities as a way of supposedly declaring their support for Ferdinand VII, against the French monarchy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bonaparte">Joseph I</a> (Napoleon's brother), whom Napoleon imposed on Spain in 1808. This makes it all very deniable, means almost everybody local will be minded to agree with some parts of what you're pushing early on, and also means that it's not clear whether allegiance to Ferdinand himself requires allegiance to the various governments claiming to rule Spain in opposition to Joseph I, such as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Central_Junta">Supreme Central Junta</a> or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortes_of_C%C3%A1diz">Cortes of Cadiz</a>. </p><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">In terms of its relation to the martian ideal, Duncan's re-telling of Roman history was excellent, because it's very easy to have intellectual distance. Duncan's re-telling of the American revolution was mostly lame, because he can't (or doesn't want to) liberate himself from the standard propaganda. In the American Revolution, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence">complaints</a> of the patriots were ridiculous, but Duncan had to repeat them anyway. He never seriously addressed the rebuttal of those complaints by the Loyalists. As <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_15/">Moldbug pointed out</a>, the strongest of these is Thomas Hutchinson's <a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence">Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence</a>. I don't know anybody that has read that document and come away with the impression that the complaints of the Revolution were anything other than a complete joke. </div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">In the US revolution, Duncan knows the actual complaints against the previous colonial order and leans into them as best he can to try and make the case. Whereas in Spain, it seems much more of a required formality to address briefly - it's not his background, there's nothing in there that makes for an interesting story, and he doesn't have a great deal of energy for it. There are the usual problems of enforced monopolies on trade with the mother country, and pro forma stuff about stuffy elites from Europe running the show to the chagrin of local elites. Notably, there <i>aren't </i>the long list of complaints about the evils and abuses of slavery that accompanied his descriptions of the causes of the Haitian revolution. It is left as an exercise for the reader to infer whether this was because a) Spanish slavery in the 18th century was much more humane than French slavery in the 18th century, or b) because, ex-post, the slaves played a pretty minor role in the Spanish American revolutions, and almost none of the action seems to easily fit a narrative of slaves as the central protagonists taking revenge on their cruel former masters. </div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">So there were some problems with Spanish America, but they seem pretty trivial. Even more so than Haiti, it seems that despite the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quito_Revolt_of_1765">occasional uprising beforehand</a>, it's very hard to imagine anything getting off the ground without the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy. </div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">You can say, fine, once it got overthrown though, it's probably not possible to put things back the way they way. And this has quite a lot of truth to it. But Ferdinand VII was restored in 1813, and made a concerted attempt to re-assert Spanish control. It's not hard to imagine that it <i>could </i>have all been restored, even if it's hard to imagine it all continuing along uninterrupted the whole time without it coming from a counterfactual that has nothing to do with Bolivar or Spanish America at all, and everything to do with Napoleon. If the monarchy were restored, it's also easy to imagine gradual and peaceful paths to devolution of power that look more like Canada or Australia, not that this had to happen necessarily. The more important question, though, is would this restoration of the Spanish monarchy have been a good thing? </div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">The most astonishing fact about Bolivar is to look at the system he wanted to impose in his vision of Gran Colombia. He wanted a grand unified country, ruling over large tracts of Spanish America. The whole continent would be divided into perhaps four large countries. He wanted a strong central government, rather than a federal system that devolved power to the local regions. He wanted a strong executive, rather than dominance by an elected body like Congress. And remember, mind you, that he wanted this system so much that he tried to impose this vision against the expressed wishes of most other local elites.</div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">What system is this describing?</div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">It's describing the God damn <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Empire">Spanish monarchy</a>! In <i>every major respect, </i>other than the birthplace and ruling location of the man at the top of the pyramid (and some of his local elite advisors), he is describing the <i>system they previously had</i>. Sure, there is a new lifelong president to capture the rents at the top, and a different process for choosing that person (once! he wanted lifelong appointments) but how much difference does this make? If you personally get to be the monarch, sure it makes a big difference <i>to you</i>. But Bolivar does a better than average job of indicating that he actually didn't aspire to be a peacetime president for life (though plenty of contemporaries doubted these protestations). Sure, even so, let's assume he got the top job. What's in it for everyone else? Who cares if a cat is black or white, <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199539536.001.0001/acref-9780199539536-e-312;jsessionid=38943A88601471C62F1C53FB8F896D78">as long as it catches mice</a>?</div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Bolivar's ridiculous conceit, for which everyone paid very heavily, was that he could smash all the existing institutions and their history and force of inertia, and somehow expect that he could approximately impose the same conditions back up again, except with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsulares">Peninsulares</a>, the Spaniards of Spanish birth, replaced by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Criollo_people">Criollo</a>, the Spaniards of America birth. But it doesn't work that way. Once the <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-french-revolution-and-inertia-of.html">political VIX spikes up</a>, it stays high for a very long time. All of the people you've been leading in this coalition to overthrow the existing order have very different ideas about what they're hoping to get out of the new regime. It's very far from obvious that they'll be contented to be put back into essentially the same circumstances with a new guy in charge. </div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">This is the first damning indictment on Bolivar. </div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><br /></div><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">But this is the realm of hypotheticals - the what could have been. Let us at least stick to the factual, rather than counterfactual. What <i>was</i>?</div><p>I'm going to start here with Bolivar's own assessments at the end of his life, because he made two, a few months apart. On his death bed, he has this to say:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>"Colombians you have witnessed my efforts launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred my reputation and my love of Liberty. They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them. As I depart your midst my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. If my death can heal and fortify the Union I go to my tomb in peace." </i></blockquote><p></p><p>Hmm, it seems to be hinting at some bad stuff going on, but there's definitely an optimistic veneer that warms the heart of anyone raised on stories of the American revolution. What else did he say though, in his letter to Juan Jose Flores, at that time <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Jos%C3%A9_Flores">President of Ecuador</a> (Troy McLure: Hi, I'm Ecuador! You may remember me from such recent polities as the collapsed Republic of Gran Colombia).</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>1. America is ungovernable.</i></p><p><i>2. He who serves revolution plows the sea. </i></p><p><i>3. All one can do in America is to leave it. </i></p><p><i>4. The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color. </i></p><p><i>5. Once we have been devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one, not even the Europeans, will want a subjugate us.</i> </p></blockquote><p></p><p>Or, as he put it elsewhere around the same time:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>"There is no such thing as good faith in America. Treaties are worth little more than the paper they are printed on America. Constitutions are pamphlets, elections an excuse for war. Liberty has dissolved into anarchy, and for me life has become a torment."</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Why would he give such a grim assessment?</p><p>Because the country had been through over 20 years of butchery, chaos and civil war! Duncan has a habit of throwing in one-off lines that are incredibly jarring but then never referring back to them in hours and hours of narrative. One of them (from memory) was that the process of independence killed roughly half the population (I think of Venezuela). That seems like a fact worth emphasizing more! I ran out of energy to track down exactly which line in which of the 27 episodes it was that he claimed this, or what specific region or time he has in mind, or what source. I am lazy. But the flip side here is that this is a fact that ought to be repeated every 30 minutes. "And then, the Second Republic of Venezuela was inaugurated, and by this time historians estimate the cumulated death toll of this experiment to be XXX". Wikipedia is telling me the death toll is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_American_wars_of_independence">600,000</a> for the wars of Spanish American independence, and while this applies to more than just Venezuela, it's a pretty reasonable number compared with the estimated population of Venezuela of <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1067145/population-venezuela-historical/">710,000 in 1810</a>, with Colombia contributing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Kingdom_of_Granada">maybe another 500,000</a>, plus the other regions. So the "half" is looking dicey unless quite limited in geography. But can we agree that this cost of 600,000 corpses and decades of chaos is worse than the deadweight loss imposed by a trade monopoly and the other grab bag of abuses?</p><p>Nor was Bolivar merely an unwitting or accidental contributor to this. His hilariously named "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admirable_Campaign">Admirable campaign</a>" where he led armies from New Granada against Royalist-held Venezuela involved him famously declaring a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_War_to_the_Death">war to the death</a>, where any Spanish-born civilian that didn't support his side was liable to be killed. This contributed mightily to the atmosphere of butchery and brutality that surrounded these campaigns. To take another reading of the atmosphere of these conflicts, consider the "Legions of Hell", the mixed-race Pardo army led by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Tom%C3%A1s_Boves">Jose Tomas Boves</a>. Wikipedia charmingly describes their exploits thus:<br /></p><blockquote><p><i>Most striking to his contemporaries, however, was that he allowed his llanero soldiers to engage in a class and race war against the landed and urban classes of Venezuela, fulfilling the latter's fear, since 1810, that the revolution could devolve into another Haitian Revolution. ... Boves's army became feared for its liberal use of pillage and summary executions, which became notorious even in this period when such actions were common on both sides of the conflict.</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>But don't forget, the Spanish imposed trade monopolies!</p><p>And it's worth emphasizing that none of this <i>was even what got Bolivar depressed </i>at the end of his life. Rather, it's that once all these costs had been paid, and independence actually established, all these political projects kept collapsing into further wars, first against the remaining Royalist forces to drive them out over years and years, but then it quickly devolved into coups and wars between different generals, and wars between the newly independent countries in the region. </p><p>It rather follows the immortal words of Brad Pitt in Se7en:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin.</i></blockquote><p>But Duncan can't quite see it this way. He <i>almost </i>can. He can narrate the individual events just fine. But the sheer scale of the horror is something you need to keep reminding yourself of - that all these glorious civil wars of butchery between previously amicable groups of civilians are in fact monstrous and probably avoidable evils. Instead, the unironic use of the word "liberation" throughout the narrative, and the also unironic use of the word "treason" to describe the actions of generals who rebelled against Bolivar's rule, shows that Duncan just can't help identifying with the revolutionaries. He loves the idea of plucky natives throwing off the brutal yoke of colonial despotism, and so he can't bring himself to ever say cleanly what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion - that all of what we call "the struggle for independence" was in fact an atrocious disaster from start to finish, a horrible decades-long calamity besetting the region, whose disastrous consequences were, if not entirely predictable, then at least highly probable. This straightforward assessment is to be found nowhere in the Duncan description, and you in fact need to work quite hard as a critical listener to piece together this obvious summary.</p><p>I may have some instinctive support for the Royalist side, though I try to not let this sway my read of the story too much. But I don't know if Duncan makes the same attempt, or if he's just not very successful, or if his spin is just more jarring because it fits the modern hysterical and religious love of democracy and anti-colonialism, neither of which I share. His narrative has a strong sense that the revolutionaries are in some sense "our guys", even if they're not really our guys in any meaningful way and the only overlap is an unreciprocated sense of ideological overlap. It's rather akin to the way that Israeli conservatives are "our guys" for American conservatives - their victories don't actually get you anything concrete, but somehow you like them anyway and take vicarious enjoyment in their victories.</p><p>Bolivar, despite having a number of admirable character traits, comes across as someone so conceited with himself and his vision that he never seemed to notice that the carnage all around him was directly attributable to the schemes he was trying to implement. But it is always thus. <a href="https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/06/amy_schumer_offers_you_a_look.html">A narcissist can feel shame, but never guilt</a>. </p><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []">How do you reconcile these aspects of Bolivar's legacy? His force of personality, his revolutionary success, and his total failure to bring about his political vision, other than the narrowest definition of independence? One answer is just that it is easier to break things in war than to build them up. It is easier to tip over the apple cart of the existing order than it is built a nation. Credit where credit is due - it is not actually that easy to tip over the apple cart either, and Bolivar pulled off something that very few men would have been able to achieve. But more importantly, if one is actually a martian and if one actually doesn't care about any of the players involved or the causes involved, the immediate lesson is similar to the one from the French revolution - as your first order concern, all you want is to not have everything go off the rails. You do not want to be around for a revolution. </div><p>Instead, the Duncan reading is that this is a noble endeavor that somehow worked out badly. It is not "I am a bad person". It is not even the narcissist's defensive cop-out when cornered- "I am not a bad person, but I somehow did a bad thing." No, it's even more risible - "I am a good person, and I actually did a good thing, notwithstanding that it led to very bad outcomes". The goodness, in other words, is measured only in the nobility of my convictions, and the warm, airy adjectives that get attached to the whole affair. At one point, he charitably assesses it thus:</p><div data-en-clipboard="true" data-pm-slice="1 1 []"><i><blockquote>Everything in South America always seems to be defined by those words - limited success.</blockquote></i></div><p>Duncan is no fool though, and he's funny and perceptive in describing the outcomes. He just can't see the connection to the rest of the story. I find his summing up at the end great and revealing:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Now there is simply no way to account in any meaningful way for the subsequent 200 years of South American history. But Bolivar's final depressed vision of the future proved prophetic. 'The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color.' And that seems to about cover it. Ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians ensured that the nations Bolivar liberated never really enjoyed stability or unity of purpose. And the same was true across South America as for both the remainder of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, South America was racked by constant strife. Foreign wars and civil wars, annexations and counter-annexations, revolts, invasions, insurrections, repression, bankruptcy, and then let's do it all over again. In a macro way South America mirrors the course of Haiti, with its government and economy unstable, and at the mercy of European and North American merchants bankers and politicians who saw South America as a resource to be exploited not co-equal partners in the project of Western Civilization. </i></blockquote><p></p><p>If this is "limited success", I would hate to see what failure looked like.</p><p>In other words, Duncan can summarize the problems very pithily. But for him, these are problems that occur <i>in spite </i>of the revolution, not <i>because </i>of the revolution. No, they are the result of other forces - "ambitious warlords" and "treacherous politicians" and "European and North American merchant bankers and politicians". The latter being especially hilarious, because they play the most trivial of parts in this story up to now. Instead, they just sound like a cliche designed to appeal to what John Dolan called the liberal version of American exceptionalism - that America is uniquely responsible for all the evils in the world. It never seems to occur to Duncan that if this stuff happens for 200 years, maybe Bolivar himself was setting up the conditions of chaos and disorder into which it was extremely likely would step such a string of ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians and European and American merchant bankers. Maybe, indeed, we should actively fault the man who was instrumental in creating these conditions. </p><p>In the end, Duncan ends up having the same assessment of anti-colonialism that, ironically, one of Joseph Conrad's characters in Heart of Darkness says about colonialism - that the idea alone redeems it.</p><p>At a certain point, however, when all your predictions keep being wrong, and those of all your critics keep being right, maybe your idea was just fundamentally mistaken. This is certainly true for anti-colonialism in the modern era. For the colonialists at the time, their perspectives are, if not lost to history, then certainly lost from the easy-to-find sources. There would be a great and tragic story to be written from the perspective Spanish Royalists, correctly assessing the nightmare that was coming, and watching their chances slowly slip away. But for the most part those men don't have names or stories - they are just the masses of "Spanish forces", where by the end even their leaders aren't considered important enough to describe in any detail. </p><p>And after narrating such a dismal and grotesque tale, Duncan's final description of Bolivar is a great summary of so many of the intellectual pathologies of our time. </p><p><i>I hope that</i>... <i>we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. </i><i>Even if that project in the end only met with those fateful words, "limited success", he had done the one thing he had set out to do. He had liberated his country. </i> </p><p></p><p>He sure had.</p><p>Reader, you should pray, to whatever Gods you believe in, that nobody liberates yours. </p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-37638263358400300362023-06-21T23:57:00.001-07:002023-06-21T23:57:45.662-07:00On Chesterton's Fence and the Imperfect Vision of the Past<p>I have always had an uneasy relationship with political labels. I find that people who enjoy self-describing as having some kind of political belief<i> </i>(especially if they offer such a label unprompted) usually like the idea of themselves as belonging to a group, or movement, or something larger than themselves. In this view, they are tapping into the aspects of political beliefs that are less about a set of questions about the world that one decides on case by case, and more a kind of tribal affiliation. The people interested in such affiliations are usually, in my experience, quite uninteresting. But the Scylla of not wanting to embrace too much of a dumb label must be balanced against the Charybdis of claiming that one's beliefs are so unique, special and nuanced that it would be impossible to put any kind of a label on them. This, of course, is nearly always false, even if other people might pick a label that one finds unflattering. So to balance these aspects, I find myself sometimes persisting in using these labels just as a shorthand - a kind of crude summary of the main principle components of belief-space. </p><p>Among these labels, it has been a long time since I would have described myself as a Conservative (the capital C version, of the explicit political movement). It is hard to have much stock in that in contemporary America (and, indeed, the reasons are exactly the same as R. L. Dabney identified 150 years ago, in his <a href="https://mildcolonialboy.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/quotation-of-the-week-robert-dabney-on-conservatism/">hilarious skewering</a> of Northern Conservatives). But the difference between small-c conservatism, and reaction, is more nuanced. I lean more towards the latter, but the argument for the former is difficult to dismiss. </p><p>The shorthand way I used to describe the difference between these groups was that a conservative primarily wants to keep things as they are. A reactionary, by contrast, actively wants to move backwards. This is usually said as a joke in polite company, for whom the idea of reversing progress is almost unthinkable. Whig history has become so ingrained that the very label of "progress" blurs the "good things are happening" version with "progressivism", the leftist political movement that communists used to use as a euphemism for themselves. </p><p>Of course, Uncle Ted aside, not many people actually want to turn their back on literally everything about the modern world. Nearly always, what it actually means is identifying the problems of modernity that are actually creations of modern institutions and beliefs, mostly by having reference to a wider set of beliefs and ideas from times long past. Among Moldbug's most <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again/">powerful intellectual ideas</a> is to contemplate what people of the past might say if they could actually talk back to you. For instance, if a progressive who loves to smear the founding fathers as all being racist had to actually have a conversation with a resurrected George Washington, how do they think it would go? Bear in mind the first thing you'll have to do is define concretely what being "a racist" actually is, since he won't know. Then you'll have to convince him that there is a moral and practical imperative that he stop being racist, when he doesn't feel any moral valence in the term at all. Are you sure you can anticipate his rebuttals and refute them? This may be harder than you imagine - both the convincing of the hypothetical Washington, and even just modeling the hypothetical Washington. You need to read a lot about the person and think a lot, especially if you actually want a faithful version of the historical person, and not just a lazy strawman ( Moldbug did a great version of several figures <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/08/from-cromer-to-romer-and-back-again/">here</a>).</p><p>In this respect, the point of these hypotheticals is to embrace the observation of G. K. Chesterton (one of the great defenders of conservatism). Tradition, he said, is the democracy of the dead. And his idea of deference to their views was not just an ancestor worship notion. It was based on the idea that man's understanding of things is fallible, and existing structures may well be solutions to problems we don't understand: </p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>When we phrase it this way, however, we can see that the position of a conservative is an easier one to defend in this respect than that of a reactionary. In particular, Chesterton's Fence is an argument for preserving <i>continuous, living institutions</i>. That is, the fence that is still there, and we just don't want it recklessly torn down. The job of a reactionary, however, in some sense the opposite problem. The fence was torn down 10, or 30, or 60, or 150 years ago. There are now cattle wandering all over the road and getting run over. Some factions say that this is actually a good thing that they get run over, or that it's cruel to fence them in, or that fences never did much to stop the problem anyway. Meanwhile, all the people who built fences or knew how to maintain them died a hundred years ago, so it's hard to ask them how it actually worked. </p><p>Which is to say, the reactionary runs into his own version of the George Washington dialogue problem above, where "what would George Washington think" is an easy exercise to state, and a hard one to implement with certainty. That is, the reactionary is trying to reconstruct something from the lessons of the past, but he has only an imperfect understanding of what that past actually was. Even if he gets power (something we're not in great danger of at present), he risks creating a version of the fence that doesn't solve his problems, because it wasn't in important respects the same as the fence that was created in the first place. </p><p>The extent to which this is true depends, of course, on how good the sources are in question. But sources are only ever a tiny snapshot of life - the summation of "who was doing the writing, what they thought was important enough to write down, what parts survived to this day, and which parts you actually read among the many possible sources out there". Sometimes, this will probably be good enough - for understanding major wars, for instance. But other bits you have to work harder to imagine the range of outcomes. </p><p>For instance, consider the question of relations between the sexes. What was the distribution of day-to-day life like for married couples in, say, New York in 1880? In London in 1620? In Rome in 350 A.D.? </p><p>Whig history supplies a ready answer for this. Women existed under "the patriarchy". This was a set of norms that meant that men had enormous power within a marriage to physically assault their wives, to rape them, to make them bear as many children as the man wanted, to prevent them from working or from leaving the home, and to force them to do house work and hard physical labor. It is never quite said that this was the state of <i>all </i>women, but it is usually implied that this was the lot for most of them, for most of history. </p><p>But if this is what modern feminists believe, what do the men's rights / manosphere types believe? Well, at the risk of simplifying the matter, a lot of them seem to agree on nearly all the claims above - they merely want to add at the end "...<i>and that was awesome!!!"</i></p><p>The obvious problem is that very few of them actually made a study of history themselves. Without realizing it, they just took at face value the claims of feminists. Well, do these people strike you as good historians? The first clue that something might be amiss is when all times and places before 1960s America are lumped together as being "basically the same thing". Okay, it's all the patriarchy, fine. Were there any interesting or important variations in that patriarchy across history? Bueller? As Matt Damon said - do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter?</p><p>Reader, it is worth considering the possibility, even just as a hypothetical, that even if you restored everything that feminists describe as "the patriarchy", it might make less difference in practice than most people think. </p><p>So we may need to investigate a bit ourselves, once we realize that we can't just trust this received wisdom. You can start with the legal status, obviously. For instance, here's <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30802/30802-h/30802-h.htm">Blackstone's Commentaries</a> from 1770:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law[l]: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her[m]: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself...</i></blockquote><p></p><p>Okay, that sounds pretty tough. Bear in mind, though he doesn't say it explicitly, this single personhood meant, among other things, that this tended to preclude the possibility of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Common_law_and_the_United_Kingdom">marital rape</a>. But even here, it's a little murky - Blackstone doesn't go into it in detail himself, and Wikipedia's description is:</p><p></p><blockquote><i>Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite a legal precedent for it, though it relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1593–1631), for instance, Hale cite's the jurist Bracton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) support of this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine".</i></blockquote><p></p><p>But even in this seemingly straightforward question, when you actually look up <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mervyn_Tuchet,_2nd_Earl_of_Castlehaven">Lord Audley's</a> case, he in fact got executed for (among other things) rape of his wife! In this case, it was for restraining her while some other guy raped her. (He also sodomized some men, which contributed to the execution too). But it certainly doesn't seem like "do whatever you want to your wife sexually, the law is cool with it" was actually an operating principle of the law in the way you might think. </p><p>But surely he could just beat the hell out of her, no? Well, if you scroll further down Blackstone's commentaries, you find other things like this: </p><p></p><blockquote><i>The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction[h]. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds[i]; and the husband was prohibited to use any violence to his wife, aliter quam ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet[k]. The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife; allowing him, for some misdemesnors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem; for others, only modicam castigationem adhibere[l].-433- But, with us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted[m]: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband[n]; or, in return, a husband against his wife[o]. Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their antient privilege: and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour[p].</i></blockquote><p></p><p>What does this mean in practice? Great question. It seems almost certain that "moderate correction" as understood in 1770 is a lot more coercive than it would be interpreted as today. But still, what exactly could you do, at what points in time? It's not as simple as it might seem. </p><p>Bear in mind that what you are describing is a question of <i>power</i>. And as I've said before, in some sense, <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2022/08/on-rome-and-america.html">all power is informal power</a>. People face lots of constraints on their behavior, not just being thrown in prison. </p><p>Let's take as given that Sir Matthew Hale is right, which seems likely, and if you decided to rape your wife, the law wouldn't care. Well, were there any other constraints? </p><p>If the average man had the option to rape his wife whenever he felt like, how many times per week, month or year, do you think he'd actually be up for this? If your model of male sexual desire is that what is sought is "penis in vagina, plus orgasm", then the answer is probably quite a bit. But this is an absurdly reductionist model of male desire, as I've argued in the case of <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-odd-psychology-of-strip-clubs.html">strip clubs</a> (where people pay more money to not bang strippers than they would to bang hookers). The alternative view, even in the case of a monarch, is still best summarized by Joseph Heller. As I said <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-odd-psychology-of-strip-clubs.html">previously</a>:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>"<i>In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.</i></p><p><i>Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants</i></p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.</i></p><p><i>“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”</i></p><p><i>She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. <b>I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg.</b> But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.</i></p></blockquote><p></p><p><i>Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like."</i></p></blockquote><p>At the risk of sounding ridiculous or insensitive, it is worth considering all the boring and practical ways that marital rape <i>might not actually be that much fun for most men. </i>There's social aspects like that she might complain to her friends and neighbours, which would embarrass you. Okay, let's assume you can stop this with the generous "physical discipline" exemptions you were also granted by the law. But what if she were just <i>really sad and miserable all the time? </i>What's the plan then - beat her some more until she's happy all the time? How's that going to work? What if, once you start raping her, she's just not very horny for you any more, which is probably what you really wanted in the first place? What if, once you start raping her, rape is now the only way you can bang her at all? Was this ... what you wanted?</p><p>And this is even while treating the women as mostly passive in this equation - having no options other than just being sad. What if there's a risk she might poison you (which definitely happened)? What if she's just well experienced at manipulating you into doing what she wants? </p><p>To put all this in stark terms - what fraction of married men in, say, 1700, above age 40 or 50 or whatever, who had been married for some extended period of time, had vaguely unsatisfied sex lives where they didn't bang their wives as much as they wanted, or didn't bang very often, or just didn't bang at all, lax marital rape laws notwithstanding?</p><p>I genuinely don't know. I suspect it was higher than most people think, though probably lower than today, but that you should probably have quite wide confidence intervals over this question. What historical sources would we turn to to answer this question? It's tough. What man is likely to commit to paper words to the effect of "Wife still won't bang me, I'm still annoyed at this fact" given the costs of publishing at the time, not to mention the embarrassment involved in the admission?</p><p>Among the many things you could read, let me point you to just one snapshot to ponder - not for this question specifically, but the related question of daily marriage dynamics. This comes from one of Australia's great poets, Henry Lawson. It's from 1897. If you prefer song form to poems, Slim Dusty wrote an excellent song from it</p>
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<p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Written Afterwards</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>So the days of my tramping are over,<br />And the days of my riding are done<br />I’m about as content as a rover<br />Will ever be under the sun;<br />I write, after reading your letter<br />My pipe with old memories rife<br />And I feel in a mood that had better<br />Not meet the true eyes of the wife.</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>You must never admit a suggestion<br />That old things are good to recall;<br />You must never consider the question:<br />‘Was I happier then, after all?’<br />You must banish the old hope and sorrow<br />That make the sad pleasures of life,<br />You must live for To-day and To-morrow<br />If you want to be just to the wife.</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I have changed since the first day I kissed her.<br />Which is due Heaven bless her! to her;<br />I’m respected and trusted I’m ‘Mister,’<br />Addressed by the children as ‘Sir.’<br />And I feel the respect without feigning<br />But you’d laugh the great laugh of your life<br />If you only saw me entertaining<br />An old lady friend of the wife.</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>By-the-way, when you’re writing, remember<br />That you never went drinking with me,<br />And forget our last night of December,<br />Lest our sev’ral accounts disagree.<br />And, for my sake, old man, you had better<br />Avoid the old language of strife,<br />For the technical terms of your letter<br />May be misunderstood by the wife.</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Never hint of the girls appertaining<br />To the past (when you’re writing again),<br />For they take such a lot of explaining,<br />And you know how I hate to explain.<br />There are some things, we know to our sorrow,<br />That cut to the heart like a knife,<br />And your past is To-day and To-morrow<br />If you want to be true to the wife.</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>I believe that the creed we were chums in<br />Was grand, but too abstract and bold,<br />And the knowledge of life only comes in<br />When you’re married and fathered and old.<br />And it’s well. You may travel as few men,<br />You may stick to a mistress for life;<br />But the world, as it is, born of woman<br />Must be seen through the eyes of the wife.</i> </div></blockquote><blockquote><div style="text-align: left;"><i>No doubt you are dreaming as I did<br />And going the careless old pace,<br />While my future grows dull and decided,<br />And the world narrows down to the Place.<br />Let it be. If my ‘treason’s’ resented,<br />You may do worse, old man, in your life;<br />Let me dream, too, that I am contented</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>For the sake of a true little wife.</i></div></blockquote><p>I find this poem wonderful, hilarious, and above all, utterly credible. It fits the observation I remember from Ben Folds that writing about a character can be a way of writing about oneself without it being lewd. At 130 years old, it still reads as quite fresh - the main things that give away its age are technological references - they ride horses, rather than drive cars, and they write letters, rather than phone or send emails.</p><p>But count the themes that you might not have expected from Australia in the 19th century. </p><p>-The narrator had affairs with women when he was young and single</p><p>-These sounded less like "relationships" and more like "getting boozed with your friends and picking up women" </p><p>Parenthetically, it's also worth wondering who these women were - they might have been prostitutes, but also might just be ordinary girls. Remember, there's an adding up constraint that makes the average number of sexual partners equal at all times. So "men having sex before marriage" has to map to either "regular non-prostitute women also having sex before marriage", "married women having affairs with single men" or "a lot more prostitutes, with these being the only option for single men". For <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/family-life-courtship-and-marriage">reference here</a>, some estimates are that <i>a third</i> of rural New England brides in the 1780s and 1790s were pregnant at the time of marriage, and even the low estimates at that time are around 10%.</p><p>-He is now married, and while overall grateful for this fact, finds it less exciting than single life in some respects, and feels himself somewhat whipped and constrained</p><p>-He endeavors to conceal all of the above from his wife, <i>out of consideration for her feelings</i>. </p><p>The last part is especially worth pondering. He wants to protect her from finding out about his past dalliances <i>because it will make her sad, and he loves her. </i>This is described, over and over, as a constraint on what he can say and do. It doesn't carry any force of law, <i>but it doesn't need to. </i>Power is messy and complicated. Does he have the power to make his wife miserable? Well, sort of, in principle, but don't we all? He's probably not worried about being divorced, but it still doesn't seem like much fun. </p><p>Now, I'm not saying that "this is just like modernity!", or that if we could see their day-to-day lives, we'd think them the same as ours (for one small snapshot, his children refer to him as "sir"). But this is obvious - the ways in which the past was totally different in sex relations are taken for granted. The ways in which they might be basically the same are much harder to see.</p><p>To take one final example that's a good test of patriarchal authority. Let's define the minimum set of conditions that we can all agree a patriarch would want. If you love your wife, and control her sexually, and can threaten her with violence for misbehaving, what is the minimum thing you probably want to prevent?</p><p>You would want to prevent her from flagrantly banging many other men against your wishes.</p><p>Surely this would go triply so if you were a man of wealth, strength and power. Surely, surely, this would apply if you were the most powerful man in Europe, and probably the world?</p><p>Like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte?</p><p>Read this <a href="https://twitter.com/oldbooksguy/status/1664647852579237888">amazing twitter thread</a>. Some especially choice parts:<br /></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>In 1796 Napoleon wrote:</i></p><p><i>“You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.”</i></p><p><i>Joséphine had the GALL to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with. </i><i>And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen:</i></p><p><i>“I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there”</i></p></blockquote><p>How much power did Napoleon Bonaparte have over Josephine? How much did the patriarchy help him here? Lest you think this is an isolated example, King George IV was not able to divorce his wife Queen Caroline despite the long rumors of her infidelity. Which is to say, at a bare minimum he was not able to prevent her acting in ways that generated persistent rumors of her being unfaithful to him, even though this annoyed him greatly, and he was the King! You can find similar rumors (though disputed) about Marcus Aurelius' wife. Obviously, this model doesn't apply to all men either, or even most men either (the model that "all wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity" as applied to several hundred years ago is surely a worse model than "zero wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity"). But these examples are telling you that the reality was considerably more complex than either of these. </p><p>The narrow lesson here is that we don't actually know how much the things we call "the patriarchy" actually constrained day-to-day life for most married couples. It definitely would do some things, maybe even a lot (birthrates were certainly very different, but contraception was probably also a lot less reliable. Divorce rates were enormously different). But there are reasons to think it might matter less in many day-to-day aspects than most people (certainly most feminists) imagine. Even Augustus, with all his power, was unable to substantially reform Rome's sexual morality. </p><p>But the broader lesson is worth pondering - power is often informal, and so the officially written down rules may not always affect things on the ground in the same way. Pushing on "laws" and "policies" may not solve as many things as we think it will. Laws are nearly always buttressed by social aspects whose actual application and level of enforcement in day to day life may be hard to know. If we implement our best idea of what things used to be like long ago, they may work in different ways than we think, or may not work at all. </p><p>Or as the great Samuel Johnson put it:<br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><i><blockquote>How small, of all that human hearts endure,<br />That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!<br />Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,<br />Our own felicity we make or find.</blockquote></i></div><p><i></i></p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-28511077489501321072023-04-05T08:40:00.004-07:002023-04-05T08:40:35.139-07:00Why You Don't Hear About the Haitian RevolutionLet me ask you a question that has both nothing and everything to do with Haiti.<br /><br />How many people do you think died in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War">war in the Democratic Republic of Congo</a> between 1998 and 2003?<br /><br />The most commonly cited guess of excess deaths (mostly from disease and malnutrition) is 5.4 million. Obviously there's some standard errors on that number, and other people put it at 860,000, but it's fair to say that the answer is <i>a shit ton</i>. <br /><br />How much media coverage did you hear about that war? Either now, or at the time?<div><br /></div><div>Would you say that the answer here is <i>approximately zero?</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Weird, no? What exactly is going on here?</div><div><br /></div><div>The standard leftist narrative always used to be that the media doesn't care about black deaths. This seems, uh, shall we say, not exactly operative in the age of George Floyd, where they care about them a great deal, and sometimes seem to care about little else. But fine, this is Sub-Saharan Africans. Maybe people just don't care about black deaths there. </div><div><br /></div><div>But in 2012, the internet got briefly and strangely exercised about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kony_2012">Joseph Kony</a>, trying to get him arrested for war crimes in Uganda. It's not necessarily weird that they should care about war crimes, mind you, but by the time they cared, the crimes themselves were mostly over a decade in the past. And the press definitely got extremely concerned over the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_genocide">genocide in Darfur</a>, which started around the time that the Congo War was wrapping up.</div><div><br /></div><div>Evidently there is <i>some </i>capacity for caring about gruesome mass deaths in Africa. So what happened in this case?</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, to understand it, let's start with Wikipedia's list of belligerents. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBFyNoFXzY6QdoseePc0t0DO5n5NVD1q0_Mbpn364bGB2eemRIFmUGtKd_1BjS9vOBieKSLh61QRupCMc0VEFCcAtni4pBvQ4z5Fycnn2v8399oZHyLgjAKEbl8ST_HaV1soZx9shwOHK-nrnLapJrwoLBMyOlod7wbkxB6VPvLqT-KOHromGVaDXb/s886/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-03%20at%2010.06.43%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="886" data-original-width="668" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBFyNoFXzY6QdoseePc0t0DO5n5NVD1q0_Mbpn364bGB2eemRIFmUGtKd_1BjS9vOBieKSLh61QRupCMc0VEFCcAtni4pBvQ4z5Fycnn2v8399oZHyLgjAKEbl8ST_HaV1soZx9shwOHK-nrnLapJrwoLBMyOlod7wbkxB6VPvLqT-KOHromGVaDXb/w301-h400/Screen%20Shot%202023-04-03%20at%2010.06.43%20PM.png" width="301" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Huh?</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Let me give you the summary. It's a<i> complete, absolute mess</i>. It's notable that the wikipedia entry doesn't even attempt to give you a summary of what the war was about. Not only are there a ton of different nations and militias, but most of them are pretty unsympathetic characters. Seriously, read the wikipedia article and try to make sense of it. </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">The overall attitude seems to just end up being the line at the end of Burn After Reading</div><div><br /></div>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/kCXTq-fWWio" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Simple narratives get re-told, and complicated narratives do not. </div><div><br /></div><div>You can say people are being lazy, but that's not it. The whole war just seems to be an <a href="https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub">anti-meme</a>. (So is the English Civil War, at least to me, although not to the same extent). No sooner do you read one bit than it's slipping through your mind like a sieve. The reality is that people just can't retain everything they read. If you remember it, it's because you remember a compressed version of events, especially one that has the important parts to update your mental models of the world. These events also tend to be remembered more easily when they fit the pattern of familiar narrative structures, stories and plotlines that are satisfying to our sense of how drama should proceed. Modernity, being addicted to fairytales and Manichaeism, likes simple stories between good and evil, and where good triumphs in the end. (If it can't have that, it sells ridiculous versions like Kony 2012 where everything that happened in Uganda is just a prologue for the real hero of the story, you, the viewer, to get justice done by posting links to social media to spread awareness). </div><div><br /></div><div>But if you can't have a happy ending, the closest narrative that people want to fit mass murder into is the Holocaust. Reduced to its barest symbolic components, a large group of innocent and helpless civilians gets genocided for no military reason by a group who personifies evil. It's very hard to hammer the war into this narrative, because it just seems to be everyone killing everyone else, deaths from disease and malnutrition don't have the same grisly industrial horror as mass executions, and there's no simple descriptions of who exactly was getting killed, or who was doing the killing, other than that everyone was black. So what then?</div><div><br /></div><div>Modern readers (ha! Let's say "viewers", to be more honest) dislike simple stories between evil and evil. They have no clue whatsoever about what to do with a 20 sided war where you suspect everyone is pretty nasty, and it's hard to even make sense of what they're fighting over.</div><div><br /></div><div>The Haitian Revolution has a fair amount of this problem. Not as much as the DRC, but a decent amount. You can condense it into a single sentence that would be very popular today. That sentence would be:</div><div><br /></div><div><i>A black slave colony rose up in revolt and secured its independence....</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Sounds great! As long as you ask exactly zero additional questions, this is a heart-warming tale made for modernity. But it's such a great story, we have to hear more. </div><div><br /></div><div>...<i>and immediately <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haitian_massacre">genocided</a> all the white French civilians on the island. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Hmm, that doesn't sit nearly as well. Are the slaves now the bad guys? Did the women and children civilians <i>deserve </i>to be genocided? Avante Garde lefist activists are probably willing to flirt with this line these days, but it still sits pretty uneasily with people. But we'll soldier on regardless. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>The slave armies had fought off the French, but honestly only a small fraction as much as Yellow Fever fought the French...</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>This part definitely isn't fitting the glorious military victory aspect. It's hard to piece together the exact numbers from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Domingue_expedition">Leclerc expedition</a> to retake Haiti, but it seems like at least 2/3 of the French deaths were from Yellow Fever, and maybe much more. One rather suspects that without this, it would have been a pretty short war to reimpose slavery. </div><div><br /></div><div>Honestly, this is one of the maddest aspects of the whole French project there. The French kept turning up at this place that just killed them horribly in a short period of time. It's like nature's way of saying "go somewhere else". But they wouldn't do it. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>Power had also been greatly consolidated after the Slave leaders, principally black leader Toussaint Louverture, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Knives">defeated and massacred</a> the supporters of colored leader André Rigaud, ...</i></div><div><br /></div><div>And at last, no matter how much we try to gloss over it, by about 4 sentences into any possible history of the Haitian revolution, you have to talk about the role of the free coloreds, or the mulattos. The Haitian Revolution was, even in racial terms, a three-sided war, not a two-sided war. Those who had one white parent and one black or mulatto parent, and were thus part black in racial terms, formed a very distinct social group. Their existence is a total repudiation of all of modern, US-centric theories of race. For starters, they didn't see themselves, nor were they seen by others, as straightforwardly "black". They sure weren't white either, but that's not quite the same thing. The US operates on something that's not quite the one-drop rule, but heading in that direction. There are no anguished articles written about whether Barack Obama should be considered black or not. Whereas in Haiti in 1794, there would be no question - he would be a mulatto. (In Kenya, where his father was born, he'd probably be white).</div><div><br /></div><div>And not only do these guys not think of themselves as black, for most of the history of the revolution, they stubbornly refuse to play the part that modernity would want, of showing solidarity with the blacks. Far from it. In fact, many of the mulattos were very strong defenders of slavery. A number of them had wealthy French fathers and had been educated in France (like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_P%C3%A9tion">Alexandre Pétion</a>, who was 1/4 black and later a president of Haiti). In fact, they were often richer than a lot of the poor whites who worked in town jobs and clerical roles (the "small whites", as opposed to the large plantation owners, the "big whites"). Many of the mulattos owned slaves themselves, and were not at all interested in abolishing slavery. What they <i>were </i>interested in, however, was abolishing explicitly racial distinctions, especially for free coloreds themselves, that would see them face legal impediments to citizenship. </div><div><br /></div><div>This leads to some hilarious scenes like when Robespierre is arguing before the Revolutionary government that we need to abolish slavery based on the fundamental rights of man, and then he's followed up by mulatto activist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Raimond">Julien Raimond</a> arguing that France needed to recognize the rights of free coloreds as a way of helping shore up support for the important institution of slavery. </div><div><br /></div><div>The coloreds were also willing to do things like arm slaves in revolt against the big whites with promises of freedom, only to later renege on those promises in part because they didn't actually want to set too many precedents of slaves getting freed en masse.</div><div><br /></div><div>They are a peg that stubbornly refuses to be hammered into either of the "black" or "white" holes that modernity wants. </div><div><br /></div><div>Not that the early black slave revolt leaders were much better, mind you. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Papillon">Jean-François Papillon</a>, when attempting to negotiate with the French for an end to one of the early slave uprisings, was willing to trade the slaves in his army back into slavery as long as the terms included freedom for him and the other officers. </div><div><br /></div><div>If you go back to the very beginnings of the independence movement, it's actually something like a six sided conflict. In addition to slaves and free coloreds (some of whom were fully black in racial terms, but who had been granted freedom), you had different groups of whites. The big whites in Haiti, the rich plantation owners, were big supporters of independence, chafing against trade restrictions imposed by France, and fancying that they could get a better deal running the country themselves. As Mike Duncan notes, they look and act a lot like the liberal nobles in the French revolution, who also ended up getting eaten by the forces they unleashed. This is a lesson that keeps coming up. The small whites were more driven by the importance of racial distinctions, which were their main source of potential status over the free coloreds. But on top of that, you had the Royal authorities in the colony, who often played one off against the other in order to keep their authority. In the early days of the Haitian revolution, this often meant allying most strongly with the free coloreds, who they saw as the most reliable supporters of monarchy. Finally, you've got the revolutionaries back in France, where developments of political events back in Europe ended up determining a lot of the course of events in Haiti. It's only very late in the story that it sounds like the Haitians being the primary drivers of events. And despite the fact that some of the revolutionaries were often big pushers of abolishing slavery, after the French revolution you also had various slave armies originally claiming to be fighting on behalf of the deposed King! This is without even getting into the role of the Spanish, or the English, or the Americans. </div><div><br /></div><div>Like I said - we're not at Congo War levels of confusion, but this is a story that resists simple morality tale narratives, <i>especially </i>if you want these to fit in with contemporary American racial preoccupations. </div><div><br /></div><div>But there is one final large and embarrassing reason why you don't hear much about the Haitian revolution. </div><div><br /></div><div>If you want this to be a morality tale, you have to end it in 1804. Because the other question you absolutely can't ask is "So what happened after that?", because the answer is that it's a horrible depressing dysfunctional mess for the next 220 years. And this destroys so much of the mythical allure of it all. Half the people who "ended slavery" didn't even mean by that term that you were free to walk off your plantation and do some different kind of work in some other locale. Oh no, you were now part of the Louverture Labor Code, which basically reinstituted slavery in all but name, but with slightly nicer conditions and different colored owners. The plantation system only really came to an end when the country was so completely destroyed that there was no infrastructure left to sustain a plantation. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to large welfare improvements for the Haitian in the street. And so the whig history progressive has to spend the rest of the time spinning excuses for why none of this is the Haitians' fault, because the French demanded a large debt indemnity, and the Americans lost interest in trade, and then there were all these coups that nobody could have foreseen, and then the US invaded in the early 20th century, and then there was Papa Doc Duvalier who was a complete monster, and recently they had this earthquake...</div><div><br /></div><div>It's a mess. It's a total mess. If there is anything much optimistic to discuss in the two-odd centuries after independence, it sure doesn't come up in the Mike Duncan brief history. </div><div><br /></div><div>I used to actually use this as a trolling example to leftists. Suppose you have a former colony. It finally gets its independence, and it's got problems. Mostly, we attribute those problems to the legacy of colonialism. But this presumably can't last indefinitely. If the place is still a basket case in a 1000 years time, it's probably not the fault of the British. So what's the Statute of Limitations here? What's the maximum length of time you'd need before you'd be willing to say "you know, this probably isn't due to colonialism?"</div><div><br /></div><div>They will usually start thinking of Africa. They'll estimate how long it's been, then like Sandra Day O'Conner with affirmative action, grant themselves extra breathing room to make sure they're not proven wrong any time soon. "100 years" is a common answer. Maybe 150. </div><div><br /></div><div>Well, Haiti (which is almost never the example they have in mind, because nobody hears about Haiti) has been independent for 220. This is quite awkward. </div><div><br /></div><div>And what's the latest situation?</div><div><br /></div><div>Curtis Yarvin was hilarious and scathing in a <a href="https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-historical-guilt-of-the-old-regime">recent substack</a>:</div><div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>As a monarchist, I can tell you that Haiti could probably use Emperor Jacques back, genocide or no genocide, since it currently has no elected officials and is under the de facto control of a gang leader known as “Barbecue”—whose Wikipedia page notes:</i></div><div><i><blockquote>Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.</blockquote></i></div><div><i>¿Porque no los dos? </i></div></blockquote><div><i></i></div></div><div>And so, this leads to a nagging alternative worry. What if the problem isn't actually just that the Haitian revolution resists summary? What if the problem is that the one sentence summary that captures the full thrust of events doesn't fit the progressive world view at all? What if the shortest summary of <i>all </i>the events is actually</div><div><br /></div><div><i>A nation of slaves rose up in revolt, and after a messy and nasty war, genocided the whites and led to misery and poverty essentially forever.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>I do not assert that this summary is true, by the way. Even aside from the general problem that summarizing any revolution in a single sentence is a fraught exercise guaranteed to miss a lot of important detail, a great deal hinges upon how exactly you define "led to". It was certainly chronologically antecedent to it. Whether it was causal is always a much thornier issue, as with everything in history. This is without even getting into what a full range of counterfactuals would be, because there are surely options other than "Haitian revolution" and "Haitian slavery continues forever". </div><div><br /></div><div>But even to state such a potential summary is deeply disturbing to modern sensibilities, because reading it simplistically it makes it sound like Haitian slavery was thus a good thing. Nobody, as far as I know, is eager to reinstitute slavery. And while there are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_on_the_Cross:_The_Economics_of_American_Negro_Slavery">serious scholarly works</a> arguing that American tobacco and cotton slavery had material conditions close to that of a free laborer, and likely better than a Welsh coal miner at the same time, I have never heard anyone assert the same thing about French Caribbean sugar slavery. It was hell on earth, where you got worked to death over a short number of years under absolutely brutal conditions. Nobody wants to bring it back. And when I say "nobody", I mean "levels of support seem to be minimal even among people who routinely espouse positions far outside the Overton window". </div><div><br /></div><div>Yet the chronological sequence is there, and undeniable. They had a successful slave revolt. They genocided the whites. It has been a complete mess ever since. What you wish to make of those facts is up to you, and there are many other facts you could choose to add to those above, but there are not many good news stories to tell out of it.</div><div><br /></div><div>And so the glorious one sentence successful slave uprising ultimately gets ignored in favor of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853728/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_5_wr">fictional slave uprisings</a> that never happened. Which is a shame. Because the Haitian Revolution is a fascinating story if you have an attention span longer than a summary of three sentences. </div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-19989590054495826172023-04-04T06:50:00.000-07:002023-04-04T06:50:32.770-07:00The Abyss<i>[This was my entry for this year's <a href="https://passage.press/passage-prize/">Passage Prize</a>. Didn't get short listed this time, which either means my poetry is getting worse, or the competition is getting better, or both. The good news is that you now get the poem for free. The bad news is you get what you pay for.]</i><br /><br /><b>The Abyss</b><br /><br /><div><blockquote><i>“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”<br /><br />“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the Dhamma, to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”<br /></i></blockquote><br />Death, like the sun, cannot be stared at too long.<br /><br /></div><div>But death, also like the sun, cannot be avoided entirely,<br /><br />Without ending up withered and emaciated inside. <br /><br />The stunted, rickets-plagued character that results<br /><br />From staying indoors, never facing the world as it is,<br /><br />Subsisting on a diet of saccharine fairy tales,<br /><br />Manufactured junk-food doom-scrolling distractions,<br /><br />And the slippery, seed oils <br /><br />Of the present-tense, oleaginous outrage-of-the-day.<br /><br /><br /><br />Like the Strange Blind Idiot God of Evolution, <br /><br />Creeping and slow, without an agreed upon plan,<br /><br />Society has assumed the role of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Renunciation">Suddhodana</a>.<br /><br />The old man and the sick man still serve some useful purpose.<br /><br />The former as an important marketing demographic,<br /><br />At least until his 401K dwindles,<br /><br />Whereupon he gets shunted to Death’s Waiting Room in Florida<br /><br />Where it’s always 75F, and the phone only rings on Thanksgiving.<br /><br />The sick man is valuable, at least in the abstract,<br /><br />For highlighting the importance of “dem programs”. <br /><br />But the corpse, young Siddhartha,<br /><br />That simply will not do.<br /><br />It is for your own good, you see. <br /><br />(The monk, of course, barely even exists, <br /><br />So needs no concealment.) <br /><br /><br /><br />Reader, having officially reached middle age,<br /><br />I can only remember seeing a corpse <i>once</i>.<br /><br />At a distance, on Santa Monica Beach,<br /><br />A hobo having expired somehow, <br /><br />Lying supine on a bed of concrete,<br /><br />The lifeguard urgently performing CPR,<br /><br />But the paramedics from the ambulance,<br /><br />Ambling without urgency.<br /><br />They knew.<br /><br />Meanwhile, the hero of the play, with only the best of intentions,<br /><br />Kept the show going, lest the tourists get alarmed. <br /><br />He shall be taken to the hospital. <br /><br />Yes, the hospital. That’s where ambulances go. <br /><br /><br /><br />If you escape misfortune, your first introduction<br /><br />Into the Society of Those With Open Eyes<br /><br />Will be when your own parents die. <br /><br />The happier your life is,<br /><br />The later will you learn its most important lesson.<br /><br />And standing over their grave,<br /><br />You shall face Siddhartha’s choice.<br /><br />The heavy oak door swings open a crack,<br /><br />Revealing a strange light,<br /><br />And murmurings that beckon from outside the palace.<br /><br />Shall you walk out into the night? <br /><br />Or stay in the bedchamber?<br /><br />How few, how mad with truth, <br /><br />Those who follow in his footsteps.<br /><br /><br /><br />It is a trick, of course.<br /><br />Everyone resolves to leave.<br /><br />They even walk a few hesitating paces.<br /><br />A few hours later, <br /><br />Nearly all of them go back.<br /><br /><br /><br />But modernity, like Suddhodana, <br /><br />Never entirely succeeds in tossing out nature with its pitchfork.<br /><br />There is a crack through which light occasionally seeps in,<br /><br />When the sun is aligned just right,<br /><br />The Stonehenge gap in the Machinery of Moloch,<br /><br />An ancient monkey-brain relic that can’t quite be erased. <br /><br /><br /><br />As the tarmac rises up to meet your meandering plane, <br /><br />And the engines whine with a different tenor,<br /><br />A chance cross-breeze lifts you up, <br /><br />And for one terrible, glorious second, <br /><br />As the primordial panic knots your stomach,<br /><br />You are aware, acutely, incisively, <br /><br />That you will die.<br /><br />Not just <i>eventually</i>.<br /><br />But maybe <i>right now</i>.<br /><br />The moment, like death itself, is shared with no one,<br /><br />No matter how close by.<br /><br />But everybody knows. <br /><br />And what you think, right then, <br /><br />Has a clarity of vision,<br /><br />Both sublime and prosaic.<br /><br /><br /><br />(It would be very sad if my daughter grows up without a father.)<br /><br />(Christ, I still haven’t gotten the life insurance sorted. That’s incredibly stupid.)<br /><br />* In breath, out breath *<br /><br />(I wish I’d called my parents more.)<br /><br />* In breath, out breath *<br /><br />(If this is it, I am happy that, broadly, I have done my duty.)<br /><br /><br />*Thud!*<br /><br /><br />The wheels touch down. <br /><br />The engines roar into reverse.<br /><br />The world returns.<br /></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-78485860877478741602023-03-12T20:09:00.000-07:002023-03-12T20:09:16.854-07:00The Forever War of Deposit Insurance<p>Serious question. What is the least moronic rationale you know of for why the system of deposit insurance in the US has a cap of $250,000? <br /><br />It is the nature of a lot of government policies that they start out as a proposed solution to a narrow problem. Then, they either fail to solve that problem, or they solve it so well that it threatens the viability of the jobs the program creates. But in either case, new rationales spring up, usually which the policy achieves increasingly poorly. In the end, you get a solution in search of new problems, but the solution itself never goes away. </p><p>At first, we had to go to Afghanistan to kill those bastards who blew up our buildings. Then when we had only limited success in that, because said bastards were quite hard to find, we had to go there to blow up the Taliban, who supported the guys who blew up our buildings, and implicitly the Afghans who supported them. Then we had to stay there to fight terrorism in Afghanistan so we didn't have to fight it in New York. Then we had to stay there to liberate the poor Afghans from the Taliban, and impose women's rights and gay rights on goat herders in the mountains. At some point, nobody knew why the hell we were there, and Joe Biden's few cogent thoughts managed to steel enough resolve to finally get America out, albeit chaotically and humiliatingly.</p><p>Similarly, in the 1960s, we needed affirmative action because blacks were <i>already</i> as competent as whites, and only hostile, taste-based discrimination was keeping them out. Then when that didn't seem to be true on the test scores, we needed to get the first generation of black leaders in as role models for the younger generation to study hard earlier on, so they could see that they would also be able to be doctors and engineers, at which point it wouldn't be necessary. (Hilariously, Sandra Day O'Connor in Grutter v Bollinger actually committed to this principle and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger">put a time line on it</a> - by 2028, it won't be necessary!) Then once that had gone on for a generation, and the test scores still weren't budging, we decided that actually having more blacks in these places was actually an end in itself. Unlike the Afghanistan War, this one shows no signs of going away. </p><p>Deposit insurance has a similar flavor. It is still around, and bigger than ever. But the reasons why keep changing over time.</p><p>Which is to say, there is not much mystery as to why <i>originally </i>there was a limit on account size. The original idea was that bank runs were just a fact of life, and when they happened, we wanted to make sure that small depositors were protected and didn't lose their life savings. But since nobody was much interested in protecting fat cats with enormous amounts of cash, they weren't covered. </p><p>Over time, instead the idea (cemented in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model">Diamond Dybvig 1983</a>) was that deposit insurance was actually important for <i>preventing </i>bank runs. At this point, you might already be starting to wonder whether the cap makes sense. Are there enough large depositors who aren't insured to cause a run? If there are, then suddenly the cap just looks counterproductive. This is especially so since the stated claim (not unreasonably) is that deposit insurance is actually much cheaper in practice than the size of the guarantee, because in equilibrium you don't actually need to pay out the guarantee if you prevent the run. Of course, the massive regulatory apparatus needed to manage the moral hazard created by the guarantee is far from free, but you're already paying that anyway, regardless of what the cap is. But we're still on the idea that the purpose here is protecting the depositors. Maybe the big guys don't get it, and we end up with some costs we didn't need to have, but too bad. We're not here to bail out fat cats. </p><p>By 2008 in particular, the rationale had shifted again - we need to prevent bank runs not because they're bad for depositors (thought they are), but because they're bad for everyone else. Financial crises lead to reductions in the money supply (like in the depression, in the Milton Friedman description), and lead to large asset price declines, and both lead to reductions in real economic activity. We need to make sure that these don't occur - ex ante, we implement deposit insurance and regulation to prevent runs from happening, and ex post we grumblingly bail out systemically important financial institutions if they go under anyway. </p><p>Of course, this new rationale is enormously larger and different in scope than what came before. The list of institutions where investors may have a run is basically anyone dependent on overnight financing, even if they're not a standard commercial bank. Bear Stearns. The Reserve Primary Fund. Lehman Brothers. AIG. And each one that goes down increases the likelihood of chaos elsewhere, even among places like AIG that didn't seem primarily dependent on overnight financing (but had sold credit default swaps to institutions who were). The Fed didn't seem happy about the implications of this. Are they suddenly guaranteeing everybody, everywhere? No, they said. No more bailouts. This policy was announced with Lehman's bankruptcy on the Monday. The policy lasted two days. AIG, which had written credit default swaps on Lehman, was now toast. If they'd gone down, Goldman and Citibank would have been next. So bailouts it was. </p><p>But now you see the problem (especially for values of "you" that includes crypto institutions). Deposit insurance was brought in originally as something that was a reluctant admission to the demands of grateful depositors clamoring for protection. It eventually morphed into something you can't avoid even if you want to. If there's any chance you might have contagion to anything, anywhere, well now you're going to be regulated, notionally for your own good, perhaps for everyone else's good, but assuredly, because every bureaucracy wants to grow its power and influence. </p><p>Parenthetically, I have a friend involved in a bank startup outside the US. I once asked him: "Do you ever think about how much easier it would be to run your entire bank using Tether or USDC, and base it in Yemen or Singapore, as long as you could just get a letter from the United States Government promising to leave you alone?"</p><p>His answer: "Every single day."</p><p>But, of course, like the schizophrenia of Afghanistan policy where we were simultaneously trying to punish and save the Afghan people, the strange carveout exception for depositors over $250K is still there, just hanging in the breeze. It's now one of the proximate causes of Silicon Valley Bank going bankrupt. Like nearly every bank run, the line between solvency and liquidity is blurry. The <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-10/startup-bank-had-a-startup-bank-run">post mortems</a> emphasize their unusual exposure to interest rate risk. If your risk management strategy is "assume the Fed will never meaningfully raise interest rates" ... well, actually, that was a disturbingly good bet for a very long time, until one day it wasn't. Still, don't let this distract you from the additional cause. Whatever problems this would have had, if you didn't have ~80% of depositors being above the FDIC limit, and thus uninsured, you wouldn't have had the run play out in the same way, and may not have had it at all. </p><p>Janet Yellen couldn't make up her mind. Like the "no bailouts" policy, on the Sunday morning shows she was saying that large depositors wouldn't be protected. Whoops. That policy lasted about 8 hours. By the evening, <a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1337">they were</a>. </p><p>And even before this, you'd had these sob stories about how all these hard working startups were totally boned because they'd held their money in SVB. While it's easy to enjoy the schadenfreude of the supposedly brightest investors like Y Combinator reduced to writing petitions begging the Feds for a bailout, there is an actual point here. You can't plan to make payroll each month in any serious-sized firm while holding less than $250K in cash. You can try to minimize the size of your exposure by holding larger amounts in treasuries or money market funds or something, but still, there's going to be a fair bit of straight cash that you need to leave on hand one way or the other, for some large fraction of days. Is it desired policy that these guys just have to eat the bank run risk of wherever they end up? Apparently it is, kinda sorta, unless we change our minds ex post.</p><p>Why is all this so bizarre? </p><p>Because bank runs are a solved problem even without deposit insurance!</p><p>Well, at least for the version of the bank run problem of "where can you safely store your money without the risk of it being lost or stolen, and not have that institution at risk of collapsing on you?"</p><p>In the modern world, your bank has an account with the Fed. You give your money to Citibank. Citibank deposits that money at the Fed. The Fed pays Citibank interest on those reserves. Citibank pays you approximately nothing. To which you might ask - can I just put my money in the Fed directly and earn that interest? No, of course you can't. And a bunch of creative finance types tried for the next best thing - they tried to create something called a narrow bank, whose only purpose is to take your money, give it to the Fed, and pass on nearly all the interest to you. What happened? The Fed repeatedly denied those licenses. </p><p>You may think I'm exaggerating, or being conspiratorial here. But here's John Cochrane, neither a fool nor a conspiracy theorist, <a href="https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/09/fed-nixes-narrow-bank.html">saying much the same thing</a>. </p><p>So why do they do it? Well, there's a few answers. </p><p>One is that the Fed is effectively captured by the big banks. They like the subsidies from interest on reserves. They like too big to fail. They like the fact that you don't have anywhere else you can stick your deposits, and instead you have to give it to them if you just want the lowest chance of losing your money. You may not like it, but that's why you're nobody, and they're Goldman Sachs.</p><p>The charitable explanation, which actually overlaps with the first but gives it a more positive veneer, is that this is actually a tool of monetary policy - we <i>want </i>the fact that your deposits get lent out to small businesses and home buyers, because this expands the money supply, keeps interest rates low, and keeps the economy growing. We don't want you depositing your money with the Fed to just sit there going nowhere. We presumably also don't want the Fed to then have to get into the business of lending the money out directly. Although you may start to wonder why not - we regulate so much else of the lending process, but perhaps it would be a little embarrassing to go mask-off and just have the Fed lend to everyone directly. It would also hurt the shareholders of the big banks - see the previous explanation. </p><p>Now, the first thing to question is whether we really have exhausted the range of possibilities - either a) subsidize Citibank and deny narrow banking licenses or b) money supply collapse and economic catastrophe. Are we sure that there is absolutely no other alternative? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma">Bueller?</a></p><p>But hell, let's be charitable and assume that this really <i>is </i>the whole action space. We're crowbarring people into having their deposits be needlessly risky to keep lending flowing and the economy growing, but in return we protect them from bank runs ... unless they hold more than $250K. If they do, stiff shit! Why is that, under the current reasoning? Herp a derp, great question. </p><p>Of course, in practice, they'll still probably bail them out ex-post, for the same reason they bailed out AIG. They'll just do it it randomly in an ex-post manner that creates lots of uncertainty, sometimes doesn't materialize (like Lehman), and sometimes creates needless bank runs (like this week). </p><p>If you were Doug Diamond, pondering your legacy, it would be disturbing to wonder whether the deposit insurance idea, which actually isn't a terrible one, could turn into something so cumbersome and kafka-esque. But here we are.</p><p>So let's clarify the question at the start to make it more damning. What is the least moronic explanation you can come up with for why deposit insurance has a limit of $250K, <i>and </i>the Fed repeatedly denies licenses to narrow banks?</p><p>I'm not holding my breath for an answer.</p><p>There is a kind of reverse <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you">Gell-Mann Amnesia effect</a> of government policy. Everyone looks at the chaos and inefficiency of government in general, and just assumes that policy is likely to be a shitshow run by clowns. But in the area where you personally have expertise, and especially if you have any conceit of being able to influence policy, you see all sorts of sophisticated rationales for why it might actually make great sense and be a clever balancing of tradeoffs. </p><p>Now, maybe this is actually the right take, and government everywhere is more sensible than you think. But the alternative is worth pondering. If you have some expertise, and <i>still </i>it doesn't seem to make sense, maybe the general perspective is right. Maybe it is just a dumb, historically accidental clownshow. Even if it's the thing you study. Maybe this is true more broadly, and your expertise mostly leads to rationalization. </p><p>The Fed, it is worth noting, is one of the less incompetent bits of the government. They still hire mostly high IQ economists with PhDs from top institutions. This doesn't mean that their assumptions about the world are right, or beneficial, but in general they aren't fools. There are some affirmative action midwits like Lisa Cook, but they are the exception, not the rule. In any case, the Fed is almost shockingly non-partisan. It would be very easy for them to massively jack up interest rates two weeks before the 2020 election to throw things into chaos to get Trump booted out. But they didn't, and they never have. However bad you think current policy is, it could be much, much worse. It probably will get much worse. </p><p>And yet. The external position has a fair amount to recommend. We can see some part of policy that seems crazy, arbitrary, and historically anachronistic. What we are left to haggle over is how much this is tip, and how much this is iceberg. </p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-13636869837229869502023-02-05T11:57:00.001-08:002023-02-07T12:06:21.290-08:00The French Revolution and the Inertia of GovernmentIf I had to summarize in a sentence the biggest common thread between both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, it’s how much all governments are governments of inertia. For good or bad, any government whose institutions and norms have been around for a long time is a pretty stable equilibrium. The biggest problem that its enemies have is simply convincing a critical mass of people that it might actually be possible to achieve major reforms, if not complete replacement. People tend to be unimaginative on alternative institutional arrangements. This applies doubly so towards changes that don’t map to obvious and mentally accessible historical templates. Something like Curtis Yarvin’s <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/12/neocameralism-and-escalator-of/">sovereign corporations</a>, or Robin Hanson’s <a href="http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html">futarchy</a>, are notable because of how rare they are. Even when they get proposed, they have a very futuristic feel – which is to say, one can imagine them somehow, somewhere, far in the future. Imagining a clear path from here to there is much more difficult. <br /><br />The obvious consequence of this, which is everywhere on display around you, is that dysfunctional or substandard government can persist a very long time. This holds true even if lots of people would prefer a change, or sometimes even if lots of elites would prefer some kind of change. But for forecasting the future in the conditional sense (where the stakes are probably highest), the flip side is actually almost as important. Once the revolution <i>has</i> gotten going, the new institutional arrangements have none of the old inertia benefit. Which is to say, revolutions look a lot like the golden rule of affairs – there’s never just one. <br /><br />And this isn’t just the case in France, either. Russia had the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_Revolution">February Revolution</a> (we’ll have constitutional government under Prince Georgy Lvov) and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution">October Revolution</a> (get ready for misery - horrible communist misery). America, after its war of independence, had the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_the_Confederation">Congress of the Confederation</a>, a period so dysfunctional that it tends to get left out of American history altogether, before it had the Constitution and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Federalist_Papers">Federalists</a>. In the English Civil War, it only took 9 years of Cromwell’s dictatorship after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Charles_I">execution of Charles I</a> in 1649 for everyone to decide that they weren’t much interested in extending this after Cromwell’s death, and so King Charles II was installed in 1660. <br /><br />And so it is in France. Actually, France takes this to a new level, because the chaos eventually gets so continual and extreme that you stop counting in terms of discrete events. You may think you’re just establishing a constitutional monarchy under the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Constitution_of_1791">constitution of 1791</a>. But since that’s just some document that a bunch of guys came up with a year ago, why should anyone pay it any particular heed? So next thing you know, King Louis is being executed and you need a new <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Constitution_of_1793">constitution of 1793</a>, since it’s awkward to have the last constitutional document refer to a guy who’s dead. Except that never really actually gets implemented, so then you need the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Year_III">constitution of 1795</a>, which lasts about three months until another coup, and eventually you get the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Year_VIII">constitution of 1799</a>…<br /><br />Constitutions are useful markers here not because they’re sacred, inviolable documents. Quite the contrary – often they’re barely even implemented. But they represent the fervent desire to establish some kind of precedent that will bind everyone else. The alternative, which the French revolution has a lot of, is the endless shifting of power, horse trading and back stabbing that happens when there’s no formal structure and lines of authority to decide who is really in charge. New constitutions are thus somewhat useful markers of when the reality of power has gotten so disconnected from the previous piece of paper that the current mob feel the need to justify the difference.<br /><br />Parenthetically, this reveals the brilliance of the current constitutional order in the US. If the option is available, you are much better off referring to the same piece of paper and saying that you’re totally still the legitimate heirs of 1789. A shockingly large number of rubes will fail to notice that the modern government bears almost no resemblance in any of its practical arrangements to the government of 1789, so maybe, just maybe, you’re not actually governed by the piece of paper after all, and the government can very easily change with the paper staying the same. <br /><br />All of which to say, if politics had the equivalent of a VIX index of implied future volatility, it is going to be high for quite some time after a revolution. Most of the participants at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%AAte_de_la_F%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration">Festival of the Federation</a> in 1790, must have assumed that all the unpleasantness was over. A year after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storming_of_the_Bastille">storming of the Bastille</a>, here was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVI">the King</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_Marquis_de_Lafayette">Lafayette</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Maurice_de_Talleyrand-P%C3%A9rigord">Talleyrand</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette">Marie Antoinette</a>, and everyone else saying what a great outcome it all was and how chuffed they were with France’s glorious new future. Instead, it was actually a great time to be selling your French property and getting out of dodge while nobody was yet trying to restrict you from doing so. Out of the celebrants, Lafayette had fled the country and wound up in an Austrian prison in 1792, Louis and Marie Antoinette were both executed in 1793, and through good luck and good management, Talleyrand skipped town for a few years, slightly ahead of a warrant for his arrest. <br /><br />And this brief list highlights the overwhelming general trend here in both personnel and causes – there is an alarmingly high turnover of both. It is striking how many figures grace the stages early in the story, only to just disappear later on. Take <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Necker">Jacques Necker</a>, Louis’ on and off again Finance Minister over whom so much of the pre-revolutionary controversy centered, but who eventually just gets politely shuffled off stage in 1791 to exile. Or consider the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlement#Role_leading_to_the_French_Revolution">Parlement</a>, whose conflicts with Louis XVI formed such a large part of the initial series of conflicts, but which had already sunk into irrelevance such that by the time it was abolished in 1790, you barely even noticed. The sacred rights of nobles to have a say in legislation was not a concern of long duration. Maybe that’s something worth thinking about before you kick off your list of complaints to the king. Are you on net a beneficiary of the current institutional arrangements, relative to the space of possible things that might come about if everyone starts to believe that institutional arrangements are much more malleable than they seem?<br /><br />My favorite example of this is that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-Louis_David">Jacques-Louis David</a>, who was basically <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Supreme_Being#Festival_of_the_Supreme_Being">Albert Speer with a small side of Goebbels</a>, started doing his masterpiece painting, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tennis_Court_Oath_(David)">The Tennis Court Oath</a>”. Unfortunately, too many of the figures present got purged or executed before it could be finished, and he decided that it would be more prudent to just scrap the whole thing. <br /><br />The grim upside in this monstrous affair is that once the initial round of executions is done, and most of the sympathetic reactionary figures are dead or exiled, it turns into a black comedy where each round of people gets killed for being insufficiently revolutionary. The Girondins, the “moderate” revolutionaries who supported the King’s removal, but argued only that he shouldn’t be put to death, were led to the guillotine still singing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise">La Marseillaise</a>. You’d need to have a heart of stone to not laugh at this, these nitwits determined to not be hit with the clue stick on the way out. Maybe, just maybe, something in our original worldview wasn’t quite right. It’s like the original version of so many modern memes:<br /><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7Be4tiwhnWbNBt412j-lHADWdcQmGVxKAOv7_lGveNpZ6_co0Xh3sOUJe7glXSy7ZJo-4lMJI1gwUVpASMYy_8PJhCv6VRuCHGNwxtWtUVHpnmqBb2fq3Kb8aE-r0qeAJEoStVvytxZkPMMsmyAMzbjkkf4b7YZLzPd3DKb0y0tgLLxy8I5Q9J2Ch"><img height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7Be4tiwhnWbNBt412j-lHADWdcQmGVxKAOv7_lGveNpZ6_co0Xh3sOUJe7glXSy7ZJo-4lMJI1gwUVpASMYy_8PJhCv6VRuCHGNwxtWtUVHpnmqBb2fq3Kb8aE-r0qeAJEoStVvytxZkPMMsmyAMzbjkkf4b7YZLzPd3DKb0y0tgLLxy8I5Q9J2Ch=w640-h152" width="640" /></a><br /><br />“Jacobins are the <i>real</i> reactionaries!”<br /><br />“So much for the tolerant left!’<br /><br /><br />The longer it goes on, the more you have to work to find the “comedy” amongst the “grim”. The most memorable summary of just how far all this changed within a few years, and how much of a shock it would have seemed, comes from <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/11/mr-jones-is-rather-concerned/">Moldbug</a>, quoting <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyte_Taine">Hippolyte Taine</a>, translating <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_de_La_Harpe">La Harpe</a>. La Harpe was actually one of those pro-revolutionary artists who did get hit with the clue stick, becoming both reactionary and Christian by the end. In his fictionalized dialogue from the salons of 1788, he places himself as one of the incredulous guests laughing as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Cazotte">Cazotte</a> (who ended up guillotined himself for monarchist sympathies) prophesies the path of the French revolution. Even without knowing the full biographies of all the characters, the sentiment is quite jarring. <br /><i><blockquote><br />It seems to me, La Harpe says, as if it were but yesterday, and yet it is at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our fellow members of the Academy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The company was numerous and of every profession, courtiers, advocates, men of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had listened to these without recourse to their fans.<br /><br />Hence a deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from ‘La Pucelle,’ another bringing forward certain philosophical stanzas by Diderot… and with unbounded applause… The conversation becomes more serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution accomplished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first title to his fame. ‘He gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the drawing-room.’ One of the guests narrates, bursting with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while powdering his hair: ‘You see, sir, although I am a miserable scrub, I have no more religion than any one else.’<br /><br />They conclude that the Revolution will soon be consummated, that superstition and fanaticism must wholly give way to philosophy, and they thus calculate the probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society which will see the reign of reason. The most aged lament not being able to flatter themselves that they will see it; the young rejoice in a reasonable prospect of seeing it, and especially do they congratulate the Academy on having paved the way for the great work, and on having been the headquarters, the center, the inspirer of freedom of thought.<br /><br />One of the guests had taken no part in this gay conversation; a person named Cazotte, an amiable and original man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the delusions of the visionary. In the most serious tone he begins: ‘Gentlemen,’ says he, ‘be content; you will witness this great revolution that you so much desire. You know that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you will witness it… Do you know the result of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain here?’<br /><br />‘Ah!’ exclaims Condorcet with his shrewd, simple air and smile, ‘let us see, a philosopher is not sorry to encounter a prophet.’<br /><br />‘You, Monsieur de Condorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon; you will die of the poison you take to escape the executioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will compel you always to carry about your person!’<br /><br />At first, great astonishment, and then came an outburst of laughter. ‘What has all this in common with philosophy and the reign of reason?’<br /><br />‘Precisely what I have just remarked to you; in the name of philosophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of reason, you will thus reach your end; and, evidently, the reign of reason will arrive, for there will be temples of reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will be those alone of reason… You, Monsieur de Champfort, you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a razor and yet you will not die for months afterwards. You, Monsieur Vicq-d’Azir, you will not open your own veins but you will have them opened six times in one day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur de Nicolai, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold; … you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.’<br /><br />‘But then we shall have been overcome by Turks or Tartars?’<br /><br />‘By no means; you will be governed, as I have already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will repeat your maxims, will quote, like yourselves, the stanzas of Diderot and of “La Pucelle.” ’<br /><br />‘And when will all this happen?’<br /><br />‘Six years will not pass before what I tell you will be accomplished.’<br /><br />‘Well, these are miracles,’ exclaims La Harpe, ‘and you leave me out?’<br /><br />‘You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a Christian.’<br /><br />‘Ah,’ interposes Champfort, ‘I breathe again; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes a Christian we are immortals.’<br /><br />‘As to that, we women,’ says the Duchesse de Gramont, ‘are extremely fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It is understood that we are not to blame, and our sex.’<br /><br />‘Your sex, ladies, will not protect you this time… You will be treated precisely as men, with no difference whatever… You, Madame la Duchesse, will be led to the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself in a cart with your hands tied behind your back.’<br /><br />‘Ah, in that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered with black.’<br /><br />‘No, Madame, greater ladies than yourself will go, like yourself in a cart and with their hands tied like yours.’<br /><br />‘Greater ladies! What! Princesses of the blood!’<br /><br />‘Still greater ladies than those…’<br /><br />They began to think the jest carried too far. Madame de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a reply to her last exclamation, contenting herself by saying in the lightest tone, ‘And they will not even leave one a confessor!’<br /><br />‘No, Madame, neither you nor any other person will be allowed a confessor; the last of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, will be…’ He stopped a moment.<br /><br />‘Tell me, now, who is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative?’<br /><br />‘It is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the King of France.’ ”</blockquote></i><br />Indeed, when one reads the path of all this, the contemporary French attitude towards the whole thing seems ghastly, glib, and frivolous. To view this as a noble story of the people shrugging off the shackles of a despotic king and implementing freedom and democracy requires zooming out to such a large distance and squinting at what details are still evident that you’re left with a narrative to be told to a small child, and not a very inquisitive child at that. <br /><br />Zoom in any more on the narrative, and it quickly seems monstrous – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Joseph_Westermann">François Joseph Westermann</a> apparently writing to the Committee of Public Safety after ordering no quarter given on fleeing Vendée rebels<br /><br /><i><blockquote>There is no more Vendée, Republican citizens. It died beneath our free sword, with its women and its children. I have just buried it in the swamps and the woods of Savenay. Following the orders that you gave to me, I crushed the children beneath the horses' hooves, massacred the women who, those at least, will bear no more brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I have exterminated them all.</blockquote></i><br />This was somewhat hyperbole, but it was much less hyperbole when, months after any of these rebels still posed any military threat, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Marie_Turreau">Louis Marie Turreau</a> lead his troops through the Vendée and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infernal_columns">exterminated everyone they came across</a>, around 20% of the population, 20-40,000 all told. <br /><br />Or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Carrier">Jean-Baptiste Carrier</a> gleefully <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings_at_Nantes">drowning 4000 people at Nantes</a>, women, children, nuns, priests, in his “Republican Baptisms” (on top of the 2000 odd executed in a quarry, such as by blasting them all with a cannon). <br /><br />The Committee of Public Safety during <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror">the Terror</a> executed tens of thousands of people being suspected of being insufficiently revolutionary, old men, women and children included. When put this way, it all tends to just turn into a blur, where you might imagine that somehow this is just them being the equivalent of a Duterte or a Bukele, executing the equivalent of drug dealers and gangs. But no, focus in a little on the mechanism by which this came about, and it really is horrifying. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_22_Prairial">Law of 22 Prairial</a> was the reform by which the messy process of accusation, trial, and deliberation was massively sped up. Defendants were no longer allowed to call witnesses, nor were they allowed to have lawyers – that is to say, they weren’t really allowed to defend themselves anymore. The line between “accusation” and “conviction” become very thin indeed. The list of crimes was expanded to include new offenses like “seeking to inspire disagreement”, “slandering patriotism”, and “spreading false news”. Only two verdicts were allowed – acquittal, or death. And, finally, citizens were required to denounce these crimes – failure to denounce is also a crime, which, like all crimes, is now punishable by death. <br /><br />It's basically all the crazy untrustworthiness of the Soviet Union, where everyone denounces everyone else, but with the grim discipline of the NKVD replaced with Haitian anarchy. <br /><br />And lest you think that this was all some accident, Robespierre had laid out his vision in a speech on <a href="https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111robes.html">the Republic of Virtue</a>, that this was in fact the aim – terror is an emanation of virtue, and without it, virtue will be weak. <br /><i><blockquote><br />If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.</blockquote></i><br /><a href="https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/">Mike Duncan</a> (from whose Revolutions podcast a lot of this history is taken) does a great job of summarizing the atmosphere shortly before Robespierre met his end:<br /><br /><i><blockquote>“The authorities had already had to move the guillotine of the Place de la revolution, to a spot east of the city, where the Place Bastille is now, and then move it further east again after residents complained of the blood and the stench. Executions were no longer a glorious public celebration, they had become a grim and mechanical daily routine that just wasn’t much fun anymore. No one was enthusiastic when <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9cile_Renault">Cecil Renault</a> and her entire family – mother, father, sisters, brothers, were led off en masse to be killed for their role in this alleged plot to kill Robespierre. And it was really to no one’s great rejoicing when on July 17th, a herd of old pious Carmelite nuns were led off for the crime of living together communally. When a child pick pocket was led up to the scaffold, the sympathetic onlookers started shouting ‘No more children!’.”</blockquote></i>As they say – you executed the King, <i>for this</i>?<br /><br />The one minor note of optimism here is the – well, not even schadenfreude, more like thankful justice, that many of the worst characters here got eaten by the same forces they eagerly unleashed. Westermann was guillotined for being aligned with Danton. Carrier was recalled after even Robespierre found his activities too much, and then executed after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermidorian_reaction">Thermidorian reaction</a>. Robespierre himself was undone by the Thermidorian reaction, after threatening too many people with being involved in a conspiracy that they decided to get him before he could get them. He tried to organize an insurrection, but that failed. He tried to shoot himself with a pistol, but only succeeded in blowing off half his jaw. He lived in agony for another day before being guillotined himself. It’s grisly, but couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke. <br /><br />The other terrible indictment of the project is that the French also want to idolize the man who shortly afterwards did more to undo all the principles of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. And even then, 19th century French history is a complete mess until at least after the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune">Paris Commune</a> in 1871. Seriously, there’s a reason that most people don’t know much about France between the fall of Napoleon and it entering World War 1. It’s a total shitshow. <br /><br />But aside from viewing it as a kind of grotesque cautionary tale that runs counter to the prevailing narrative, I think there is quite a lot to learn by putting oneself in the shoes of a potential reactionary at different points in the story. What exactly should you have been hoping for, anyway? At least before the ending of the story is known, it’s harder than you’d think. One sees a strange tension between supporting monarchical <i>principles</i>, and supporting monarchical <i>tradition</i>. When the king is still in power, there is not much of a contradiction here. But once the King is executed, are you specifically interested in restoring the legitimate heir of the Bourbon dynasty? What if he's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XVII">7 years old</a>? What if, once he’s dead at age ten, it’s not straightforward whose claim you should support? Or are you just interested in solving the Carlyle problem of finding the most able man, and giving him absolute power? Because it’s pretty clear that by a certain point in the story, that man was Napoleon. The question of when exactly you would recognize him as such is not nearly as obvious as you might imagine. It is a funny exercise imagining the leaders of the French Directory, feeling like they’re on top of their game and in charge of France. But when a historian tells the story of that time period, for much of their reign, the actual tale being told is “what was Napoleon doing at this time?”<br /><br />When you look into it, a curious regularity is that many of the great authoritarian leaders came to power <i>supporting the governments they later overthrew</i>. Julius Caesar lead the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimates_and_populares">populares</a> against the traditional aristocratic privilege of the Roman Senate. But did this matter once he’d assumed power? Did it stop his rule from being further right than what came before – monarchy, instead of oligarchy? Not one bit. Same thing with Napoleon. It’s well known that he was willing to use “a whiff of grapeshot” to defeat the mob, which sounds pretty based. But it was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon#13_Vend%C3%A9miaire">Royalist mob</a>, attacking the revolutionary government! Those who just wanted competent authority invested in the ablest man would have been much better off supporting the man shooting at them, though it was very hard for them to know that at the time. Even in modern times, Augusto Pinochet led the crackdown on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet#Military_career">anti-Allende protests in 1972</a>!<br /><br />All of which is to say, that it’s not nearly as obvious as you might think where exactly the next competent authoritarian might come from. It is a mistake to place too much weight in the man’s politics before he seizes power. Those destined to rule seem to instinctively know that the first thing to do is actually acquire the power to rule, by whatever means necessary, otherwise all your grand visions amount to very little. Of course, this adds a pretty big risk component once political opposition is swept away. As Moldbug is fond of pointing out, the Democratic Party platform of 1932 is almost the exact opposite of what FDR actually implemented once he took control of the US government. It can cut both ways. <br /><br />And this tension between supporting the man and supporting the institution can even be extended back to the period when monarchs <i>were</i> in power. King Louis XVI was, in many ways, contemptibly weak, and not up to the task of dealing with the moderate problems he faced. But <a href="https://archive.org/details/BosherJFFrenchRevolution">J.F. Bosher</a> makes a great case, over and over, of all the alternatives Louis XVI had in front of him, whether shaking down the debt holders and effectively defaulting, or sending in troops to arrest the members of the National Convention at the Tennis Court Oath, or a bunch of other options. How much did he deserve your support? <br /><br />Well, he was a hell of a lot better than what came immediately afterwards. Because even with his weakness, the inertia of governing structures kept things sane. <br /><br />This isn’t the only view, though. Thomas Carlyle took the opposite position in <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1140/pg1140-images.html">Latter-Day Pamphlets</a>, when assessing the various revolutions of 1848. You would think that, being a supporter of monarchy, he would be straightforwardly appalled at all these events that overthrew the monarchies of Europe, and offer a strong support of the deposed monarchs. But hating democracy misses the broader point, that nature abhors a weak and fake king:<br /><br /><i><blockquote>[W]e had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors.<br />…<br /><br />These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;—and what were the people withal that took them for real?<br /><br />It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther…<br /><br />Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow,—like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one.<br /><br />Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,—for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease.</blockquote></i><br />One shudders to think what Carlyle would make of the Republican Party in 2023. <br /><br />But what Carlyle has in thundering and principled rhetoric, he doesn’t obviously have in terms of practical strategy. Because outside of the specific sham-monarch question, one of the other practical lessons of the ups and downs of the French revolution seems to be the opposite – holding institutions is useful, even (or especially) institutions that have been illegally purged of one’s enemies. Institutions do two things. First, they are opportunities for co-ordination and concentration of power. Second, they are public-facing sources of legitimacy, a kind of vaguely agreed upon sense that these guys are in charge. Often, it doesn’t even matter what the institution’s exact mandate even was. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Convention">National Convention</a> was voted in in 1792 to draft a new constitution. But just being the convention meant that it operated as a de facto parliament with general powers, which it then delegated most of to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_of_Public_Safety">Committee of Public Safety</a>, which then basically became a dictatorship by committee. None of these aspects, you will note, have anything to do with drawing up a constitution. But it didn’t matter. <br /><br />Even expelling members doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Once the Girondins got purged (admittedly, at the hands of a massive stirred up mob), the rest of the National Convention proceeded just fine. Same thing when the members of the Paris Commune were also expelled later on (this time, for being too leftist). The even more striking version, to briefly switch revolutions, was the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_Parliament">Rump Parliament</a> in the English Civil War. You might think that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride%27s_Purge">shamelessly expelling 180 of the 470 members of a legislative body</a> for disagreeing with you might seriously weaken its legitimacy, but this is probably because you’ve lived under democratic lies too long. A better question is “whatcha gonna do about it?”. Because if you don’t have an answer to that question, then you’ve gotten weaker, not stronger. <br /><br />It is possible to organize from out of power, of course. Mostly this seems to involve building parallel institutions to subvert the existing regime. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Danton">Georges Danton</a> was a great example. If you don’t know his story, read through the section on “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Danton#Revolution">Revolution</a>” and try to work out at what point he actually held a major position in an important public office – it’s surprisingly late. He did most of his early work in the Jacobin club, which operated as a kind of shadow government for the left. He was involved in the local government of the Paris Commune, but most importantly helped organize the mobs that stormed the palace in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_of_10_August_1792">insurrection of August the 10th</a>, which precipitated the King’s removal and eventual execution. In other words, you don’t have to be in the current legislative body (in this case, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legislative_Assembly_(France)">Legislative Assembly</a>) if you can just gin up a massive mob to overthrow the monarch presiding over said assembly. His first real post then came when he was appointed minister of justice, but this was mostly just a reflection of the informal organizing role he already had. Once you can stir up the mobs to carry out the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Massacres">September Massacres</a>, executing all sorts of royalists and suspected Royalists, and effectively get away with it, it won’t be long until you’re finally voted into the National Convention (the new legislative body created after you totally crushed the old one), and ultimately in the big leagues of the Committee of Public Safety. Of course, his whole career looks a lot more like Vladimir Lenin than it does like Carlyle. Say what you will about the tenets of Bolshevik Communism, but they understood how power works. They may not have understood anything else, but they understood that. Danton was acting like a government in waiting long before he held real office, including directing a mob substantially at his command. One man’s mob is another man’s national guard.<br /><br />What you definitely <i>don’t</i> want to do is what the outgoing Constituent Assembly did in 1791, when setting up the Legislative Assembly, and decree that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-denying_Ordinance_(French_Revolution)">none of the members in the current body</a> should be eligible to sit in the new body. Great job! Now everyone who set up the new system won’t be serving in it, and the ones that do will have pretty damn ambivalent feelings about the constitutional structures you love so much. Giving up power, walking out of institutions without a plan of what to do next, boycotting elections – these are all symbolism without a concrete plan, and counterproductive symbolism at that. <br /><br />Indeed, what’s most useful about all this is not so much studying what happened, but thinking about possible counterfactuals to what might have happened, and what they reveal about the general laws of politics and human behavior. The resemblance of the later French revolutionaries to straight-up communism is quite palpable. Especially <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-No%C3%ABl_Babeuf">Babouef</a>, who explicitly wanted to abolish private property (“Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others."). And his idea of this was defending Robespierre and the other executed leaders of the Terror. Babouef, humorously, wrote under the pen name <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi_brothers">Gracchus</a>, which is funny given the role of the rabble-rousing Graccchi brothers in kicking off a process in the Roman Republic that eventually led to … the Caesars. Babouef, who never actually made it to power, is just one more end point of each group deciding they could rile up a coalition of lower ranks who were out of power to overthrow the people at the top. The Parlement organized against the King, then the National Assembly organized against both the Parlement and the King by harnessing the power of the bourgeois citizens, then Danton organized the Sans Culottes into a mob that overthrew the power of the others, until the trend to that point stopped when Thermidor prevented things going further leftward. Religious reforms started out as being making the wealth and role of priests more equal, then it moved to abolishing tithes, then it moved to seizing Church property, then in moved to requiring priests to swear an oath of fealty to the Republic over the Church, then it moved to just abolishing the Church altogether and replacing it with a Cult of Reason. <br /><br />The point is that there is a <i>logic</i> to these progressions. They in fact represent taking the established principles (which blog.jim described as “knocking over the apple cart in order to get the apples”) further each time. Thankfully, it’s not like this process always gets taken to its horrible logical conclusion. Existing elites can sometimes realize that enough is enough, and reverse the current trend to try to cement more right wing changes (Thermidor, the Federalists, the Restoration of Charles II). But there’s also no reason this process has to stop on its own. And to see it taken to its fully logical end point, you get <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Xianzhong">Zhang Xianzhong</a>, who Wikipedia politely refers to as “leading a peasant revolt” that led to “massacres in Sichuan that depopulated the region”. Translation: everyone got killed. Everyone. Like Robespierre’s homage to terror, this doesn’t seem to be an accident. His most famous contribution to literature is his <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Xianzhong#Seven_Kill_Stele">Seven Kill Stele</a>:<br /><br /><i><blockquote>Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.<br />Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.<br />Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.</blockquote></i>Like they used to say about Zimbabwe – it can always get worse. <br /><br />I think the clearest application to the present, if you are a nobody and not an aspiring Georges Danton, is “Be extremely wary of the first revolution.”<br /><br />By way of an example, in June 2020, during the height of the George Floyd mayhem, there had been a bunch of protests during the week, leading up to a big organized event on the Saturday night. There were thousands of protestors banging on barricades outside the White House. As it turns out, the security services managed to keep them under control, just. But what if it hadn’t gone that way? What if the mob had broken through the barricade, and the security services had started shooting them? Or what if they’d failed to shoot, and the white house got overrun and burned to the ground? What if Trump got chased out of office as part of a color revolution, or tracked down by a mob? <br /><br />None of these things happened, of course. Which either means we got lucky, or that the protests <a href="https://graymirror.substack.com/p/donald-trump-the-natural-experiment">were in fact controlled</a> (since the left already holds the levers of power). But what would the French Revolution perspective be on these events? Are you really sure that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi will really stay in charge of a fully unleashed mob that got out of hand? You’d be a bold man to bet that way. Events have an alarming way of taking on a life of their own. You can call up a mob to the front of the White House, but your ability to control it in the heat of the moment may be less than you think. <br /><br />For my part, I had a modest position in VIX call options over that weekend. Nothing came of it, of course. Like every bad trade, when it fails, you can always call it a hedge. <br /><br />I can tell you this, though. If the White House had actually gotten burned to the ground, or Trump got color revolutioned out of power that week, I would have begun planning my life around it being time to leave America. <br /><br />The good news is that, historically, you actually have a decent amount of time to do this. Things don’t tend to go completely bananas in the next day, week, month, or often even year. <br /><br />But after the first revolution, you are much better off being an Émigré, waiting to see whether the next big change is a reaction from the right, or further leftward. High political volatility is great if you’re a young, clever, ambitious man looking to quickly advance up the ranks. It is a disaster for everyone else though. <p></p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-13049274824245417612022-10-29T22:22:00.001-07:002022-10-29T22:22:45.226-07:00The Martian Perspective<p>One of the useful big picture ideas I remember picking up from Moldbug is that one should strive to understand the present in the way that a historian of the future would understand our time. That is, suppose you were living on Mars in 200 years time, so not only would the events not affect you, but all the players are dead and gone, as are the countries and institutions they represent. Maybe even 500 years. The ideal is to imagine a space sufficiently distant that you don't even feel you have an intellectual dog in the fight, rather like an atheist trying to understand the 30 Years War between Catholics and Protestants. You just want to understand the truth, having gotten to the point where <a href="https://www.poemtree.com/poems/MagnaEstVeritas.htm">none care whether it prevail or not</a>. </p><p>This is always an aspirational ideal, of course. You never really know what the future historian will think (in part because they have seen the end of the story, and you haven't), but also because intellectually it's very hard to fully escape the present tense. For one thing, you can never have our hypothetical atheist's indifference when you're actually on the receiving end of things (put an atheist back in time to the middle of the 30 years war, and suddenly they <i>will </i>have to care about religion, or at least act like they do). But there's also a sheer difficulty in perspective. It may be that nothing in the past five years even makes their list of stuff to bother about. It may be that nothing in your whole lifetime does! (You should be so lucky). </p><p>So while this perspective is hard, if you at least <i>aim </i>at this, you are likely to get a better sense of the actual importance of events than if the idea never even occurs to you. And the sense of what might seem important on a 200 year time line may be vastly different to what the newspapers are covering today. It might be something the average person isn't paying any attention to at all (like developments in AI, for instance). But it also might be events from the present that take on a bigger significance than people at the time realize.</p><p>For instance, by now, most of you have probably watched the famous video of Hu Jintao being gently but firmly escorted out of the Chinese Communist Party Congress</p><p><br /></p>
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/QtpGkgabpcU" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
<div><br /></div><div>When Americans watch this video, they have a clarity of vision as to what is going on. A former president is frogmarched out of the room, publicly, by the current president, to God knows what fate. While it may be overblown, the cynical presumption is that he'll end up like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man">Tank Man</a>, never seen again.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's worth noting that there's an alternative reading of all this, that Hu Jintao is kind of senile and either was, or was threatening to, wander awkwardly off script. And, hence, that escorting him out was actually an embarrassing loss of face to everyone involved, rather than a deliberate political flex. </div><div><br /></div><div>But one thing is for certain. Supposing he in fact gets charged and convicted of corruption, for taking bribes back in 2005. The average American will view this as almost entirely incidental to the important facts in the video above. Did he take some kind of bribe during his presidency? Almost certainly. Is that what this is actually about? Not on your life. If he gets charged instead with tax evasion, or murder, or covid violations, would that change anyone's perspective on the matter? Not at all. What he gets charged with is irrelevant. Whether he even broke the law is basically irrelevant. They certainly will not spend much time digging into the details of the allegations. This is a naked power consolidation. This was also considered in America to be big news for what it revealed about China, and how power works there.</div><div><br /></div><div>So far so good. </div><div><br /></div><div>So what does the average American make of <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-fbi-agents-raided-his-florida-home-2022-08-08/">this</a>:<br /><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>FBI searches Trump's Florida home as part of presidential records probe</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><div><i>PALM BEACH, Fla., Aug 8 (Reuters) - Former President Donald Trump said FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday and broke into his safe in what his son acknowledged was part of an investigation into Trump's removal of official presidential records from the White House to his Florida resort.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>The unprecedented search of a former president's home would mark a significant escalation into the records investigation, which is one of several probes Trump is facing from his time in office and in private business.</i></div></div></blockquote><p><br /></p><p>Is this the same thing as what happened to Hu Jintao? Is it a related thing? Is it a totally unrelated thing?</p><p>You'll have to decide for yourself. </p><p>And the answer that lots of Americans come to is that, well, you see, this is actually about the crucial issue of violations of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Records_Act">Presidential Records Act</a>, something that they had literally not heard about until August, but now think is an essential lynch-pin of our whole form of government. It's actually part of a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-fbi-is-raiding-his-florida-estate-what-legal-woes-does-he-face-2022-08-08/">large legal campaign</a> against the former president on all sorts of fronts. </p><p>Which is to say, they look at this and see <i>only </i>the things he's been charged with, from which we need to have a serious debate about whether he did or did not breach said Act. They don't at all see any bigger picture here. The Hu Jintao perspective, for want of a better term, is completely and utterly absent. </p><p>(It is worth pondering whether the average person in China, to the extent that they know about the Hu Jintao story, view it as the mirror image of the Trump story - he obviously broke some important law that the papers will no doubt tell us about soon.)</p><p>But for the Trump story, if the average American does chance to see a bigger point, such as if they're a Fox News Republican, they'll probably just see one more example of the outrages of the Democratic Party, and are apt to list the above event alongside every other regular complaint about how the country is run, from illegal immigration, to woke trans activism in schools, to black lives matter leading to defunding of the police. Or, if they're on the left, one more aspect of the corrupt contempt for the democratic process by the Republicans, like Voter ID laws and the January 6th protests. </p><p>What might the historian of 200 years' time make of this story? Well, here's one perspective. </p><p>The single biggest fact in favor of American democracy, and democracy in general, is not that it selects wise leaders, or leaders who are legitimate in the eyes of the public, or anything like that. The primary thing in its favor is that it allows, nominally, for smooth transitions of power. Within the current sclerotic regime, of course, which outlaws all kinds of views and actions. And if you push it too far, like the South found out in 1865, you'll be crushed militarily. But within the operating envelope that the system is meant to work in, nobody has to be playing for keeps. Because while your guy may be in today, their guy may be in tomorrow, and you're stuck in a repeated game. So you have strong incentives to play nice.</p><p>Which is to say, for 230 years, America has had an unwritten gentlemen's agreement that former presidents are allowed to live out their lives in peace. It didn't matter if they were <a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cu6T_l3W8AAuAvn?format=jpg&name=medium">magnanimous</a> and disappeared from public life, like George H. W. Bush. It didn't matter if they decided to run leftist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-presidency_of_Jimmy_Carter">alternative foreign policy</a> missions, like Jimmy Carter. It didn't even matter if they were impeached for potential crimes, like both Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson. Nixon is the classic here. Sure, Gerald Ford pardoned him for Watergate. But what's the chances that this was the only law he broke during his presidency? That an aggressive Carter White House couldn't have found something else to charge him with, after enough digging? No, that just wasn't how things were done. Former presidents get to live their lives in peace. Even Jefferson Davis was held only for two years, never ultimately charged, and allowed to live out the remainder of his days as a free citizen. </p><p>That agreement is now gone. </p><p>To which the dumb but common answer is that Trump's actions are so flagrant that they breached the agreement first. </p><p>The nature of gentlemen's agreements is that the finer details aren't always written down, so this is hard to say for sure. But to judge this, you need an estimate of what the baseline level of past violations of the same kind might be. And there's decently strong evidence that this kind of thing is pretty common. What Trump did looks, to me, not nearly as bad as what Hillary Clinton did with her <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton_email_controversy">janky private email server</a> while Secretary of State. Or, to take another example, we know that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Berger">Sandy Berger</a>, a Clinton advisor, was convicted of stealing documents from the National Archives after Clinton's term was over. What do you think the probability is that he was the only member of the Clinton White House to have breached some kind of records law, if the FBI were sent around to raid everyone else's house too?</p><p>In other words, to me, this looks more akin to Putin's charges against <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Berezovsky_(businessman)">Boris Berezovsky</a> In that case at least, was he guilty of the illegal things they said he did? Absolutely. Did this distinguish him from any other oligarch? Not at all. The real crime, which everyone knows, was challenging Putin's power.</p><p>In the case of Trump, I really don't know what the sacred text of the Presidential Records Act requires, and whether Trump's actions may be in violation of it. For the purposes of the argument, I am entirely willing to believe he is in breach of it. He does not strike me as a stickler for detailed record-keeping, nor a scrupulous adherent to all kinds of process laws (he's a former New York real estate developer, for crying out loud. If you think there's a single one of them who's never broken any fiddly laws that they thought were getting in their way, buddy, I don't know what to tell you).</p><p>But my strong sense is that this is about as relevant as the question of what exactly Hu Jintao is charged with. Former presidents are simply not raided and arrested like they're some run of the mill citizen who fell afoul of a slightly too aggressive Assistant DA. Charging them is everywhere and always an explicitly political act. Especially in this case - can you imagine the Martian historian in 2222 opining about the crucial question of records storage? I can't. I think they'll say that this was part of an obvious longstanding campaign against Trump by whatever term they'll give to what we unsatisfactorily refer to as "the Deep State".</p><p>Why do I say this?</p><p>Because the FBI already was illegally <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/01/11/795566486/fbi-apologizes-to-court-for-mishandling-surveillance-of-trump-campaign-adviser">wiretapping the Trump campaign</a> during the 2016 election, before Trump was even elected! They procured the ridiculous Christopher Steele dossier, presented it to a FISA court, lied about where it came from, and used it to wiretap Trump advisor Carter Page. Nobody went to jail over that, of course. </p><p>Is this the same thing? Is it a related thing? Is it a totally unrelated thing?</p><p>I think the argument for "totally unrelated" is absurd. So we're only left with the question of how related they are. And even if one forms the view that this time, Trump's actions really were terrible and illegal, we see the same ferocious politically targeted persecution even when there was no crime. Even when he was still just a private citizen.</p><p>This is not a "Can you believe the injustice?" post. Politics is usually ugly, nasty and stupid, and people at high levels play it seriously indeed. This is certainly not a "those disgraceful Democrats!" post. As MiddleEarthMixr <a href="https://twitter.com/MiddleearthMixr/status/1584956748305399809">savagely put it</a>: "And how’s that working out for ya, imagining if the roles were reversed?"</p><p>Fifteen years ago, maybe even ten, I probably would have written something along these lines. But I am long past such perspectives, and <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2022/05/america-december-31st-2021.html">no longer find them</a> remotely useful. They are the furthest extreme from the Martian historian's creed.<br /><br />Rather, this is merely to note that whether you are a fan of democracy, or whether you view it as absurd and past its use-by date, there is a serious reading that the whole campaign against Trump is a dangerous escalation and breach of prior norms, from which further counter-escalations seem likely. <br /></p><p>One of the advantages of living in 200 years time is that events that might be half a lifetime apart are easy to draw threads between, in a way that isn't quite as apparent at the time. It is altogether too easy to imagine future wikipedia articles that read something like this:</p><p><br /></p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i>The Great Unravelling: 1970 - 2035</i></p><p><i>The term "the Great Unravelling" was first used by historian Michael Wallesteimer in the early 22nd century to describe the series of sequential breaches of previous unwritten political norms, in a cycle of escalation and counter-escalation that lead to an increasing distrust between the Democrats and the Republicans, and eventually the Great Breach of 2032 (Main Article). Wallesteimer defined the key events as not just those which were political advances by one party, but specifically changes that would subsequently be re-used by opponents afterwards. Subsequent historians have disputed the original Wallesteimer list, both in terms of charting an original first course, and which events justify inclusion. But the general pattern is now broadly agreed to represent the increasingly fractious civic breakdown. The original Wallesteimer list is:</i></p><p><i>-The Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade. This not only set off a large component of the culture war, but set a new standard in deliberate misreading of constitutional texts for political aims. Robert Axelford disputed the inclusion of this, noting that the court cannot be said to be explicitly part of the political apparatus at this time. But it paved the way for the increasingly Republican Court to overturn both all racial preferences in Wichita State University v Connors, and substantive portions of the administrative state in Rothstein v Gibbons, which even if more textually defensible, were viewed by the left as extreme judicial activism. </i></p><div><i>-The Senate refusing Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination. Up until this point, presidents had mostly gotten their Supreme Court nominations uncontested. This marked a discontinuous shift after which the vast majority of appointments became politically contentious, leading to the eventual packing of the court in 2026.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>-The Kenneth Starr investigation. This set the precedent of open-ended Special Prosecutors targetting sitting presidents - </i>"<i>starting out investigating dodgy land deals in Arkansas, and ending up investigating blow jobs in the White House", in Anthony Reichenford's phrase. Special Prosecutors would be later used both against Scooter Libby, and by President DeSantis against speaker of the House Alexandria Occasio-Cortez.</i></div><p> <i>-The Clinton Impeachment. This set the precedent of impeaching presidents over pure process crimes, where there was no other underlying crime (in this case, perjury over testimony regarding sexual relations, when such sexual relations were not otherwise a crime). This was reciprocated when Donald Trump was charged and later convicted of violations of the Presidential Records act, something Trump described at trial as "chicken shit".</i></p><p><i>-The Trump Russiagate FBI wiretap. This set a precedent of explicit use of the permanent civil service and law enforcement to target a presidential campaign. This violation is considered more notable because of the lack of crimes uncovered by the campaign, which were significantly less than the wiretaps themselves. While the Republicans never succeeded in reciprocating via law enforcement, the subsequent politicization of the military by President Carren in 2031 is viewed as a counterescalation.</i> </p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i>-<a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/12/last-thoughts-on-voter-fraud.html">2020 Election Fraud.</a> Wallesteimer described this as a "shadow breach", because its gravity was only fully appreciated after the fact during the audit of 2025. It is more viewed as part of a continuum of increasingly flagrant election fraud, eventually on both sides, that marked a further step in breakdown in belief in democracy. Relative to the other steps, this was considered more of a notional marker apparent in hindsight than a structural break, but was important additionally for its role in triggering the obvious breach of the January 6th protests. </i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i>-The January 6th protests. While these are now viewed as chaotic and unstructured "acting out" without any serious risk against regime security, they established a precedent that the losing party in presidential elections would respond with mass protests, then with small scale violence, then ultimately with complete insurrection. 2016 is noted as the last of the "peaceful election transitions era". </i></p><p><i>-The Arrest of Donald Trump. This ended the famous "gentlemen's agreement", as Wallesteimer described, that former opponents now out of power would be left alone. He viewed this as the most serious escalation, and an important step towards the arrest of President Carren and the Insurrection of 2034. </i></p></blockquote><p>You will need a little imagination to visualize what other future events might make the list. But the <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2022/08/on-rome-and-america.html">history of late Republican Rome</a> offers some possible guidance. </p><p><i></i></p><p>Or put it this way. Suppose that you were Ron DeSantis. How much would you have updated your belief that, if you got elected president, that you or your family would end up in jail if you lost power?</p><p>DeSantis is a smart guy. I'm not sure he would think the answer is yet "high". But it's certainly a fair bit higher than it was a year ago, and a lot higher than it was seven years ago.</p><p>Indeed, one might easily imagine the conclusion of the chapter above:</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i>As Wallesteimer described the atmosphere in the mid to late 2020s, "From here on out, both parties' leaders began to suspect that if they lost power, they were liable to lose their freedom, if not their lives. After reaching this conclusion, they began to justify their own escalations as being a necessary precaution against the presumed intentions of their opponents. This in turn justified those opponents in their own beliefs, and their own escalations. Once such beliefs became widespread, democracy was not long for this world."</i> </blockquote><p></p><div><div><i></i></div></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-61196091504192272232022-08-03T10:48:00.000-07:002022-08-03T10:48:01.293-07:00On Rome and America<p>I recently finished listening to Mike Duncan’s excellent “History of Rome” podcast series. It left me with a confusing swirl of thoughts that I wanted to put down on paper before they gradually evaporated.</p><p>One of the themes I found myself reflecting on was the <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/08/rotary-management-next-big-thing/">Moldbug point</a> that a government is just a corporation. Moldbug used this argument to note that the difference between how the average westerner thinks governments should optimally be structured (with democracy and separation of powers and an independent judiciary), is radically different than how they think private corporations should be structured (with dispersed shareholders who vote for a board, who appoints and supervises an all-powerful CEO). Which either means that you need to explain what exactly it is about their different tasks that justifies the different form, or if there's no fundamental difference in tasks, at least <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-leader-as-king-leader-as-ceo.html">one of the two is suboptimal</a>. </p><p>When you see the various governing forms that the Roman Empire took over time, it brings to mind the more basic question – if a government is just a special case of a firm, well, what exactly is a firm, anyway? And Ronald Coase (and Jensen and Meckling) has an answer for us here. A government, like a firm, is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm#Transaction_cost_theory">nexus of contracts</a>. That is, a government is a way for various people to coordinate their behavior for some overall purpose. Some of those people are coordinated against their will, which is an odd form of contract, but not a fundamental obstacle to the idea. And secondly, most contracts are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts">incomplete</a>. We either can’t perfectly commit to future actions, or can’t observe other people’s information sets enough to know if they’re screwing us (is their lousy performance because got a bad draw, or because they stopped putting in effort?) or a variety of other problems in contract theory.</p><p>And in this lens, to say that contracts are always partially incomplete is another way of saying that power is always somewhat informal. The org chart can specify who answers to whom over what questions, but unless you can actually enforce action the whole way down the chain of command, there’s always a “run it up the flagpole and see” aspect to any given order. </p><p>So in this sense, the simplest version that solves this incomplete contracts problem is the early Roman Republic – when “the Romans were like brothers, in the brave days of old”, in <a href="https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius">Macauley’s phrase</a>. With enough mutual love and regard, the incomplete contracts problem gets largely solved, through sacrifice, shared understanding, and desire to not maximally exploit everyone else. Government as the expression of self-determination for a well-defined ethnic group with mutual fellow-feeling thus makes sense as a reliable way of solving the contracting problem. </p><p>This is like the highly successful family business. But a firm where you only hire family members is limited in its capital and ability to expand, unless you’re having bazillions of children each generation. This creates incentives supporting the tendency to hire outsiders, but keep control and cash flow rights to the family. So now you go from the family-only operation, to a family-owned firm employing outsiders. This can be quite stable and allow for a lot of growth. But a lot of firms find out that if you really want to expand to take advantage of profitable opportunities, you may need to dilute control by selling shares in capital markets, and hiring competent external managers instead of just your eldest son, or even your most competent son. </p><p>At each step, the challenge is figuring out how to coordinate the increasingly complex nexus of incomplete contracts that holds the whole thing together. And for the case of governments, this is an order of magnitude harder than for private firms, as there’s no larger governing apparatus or courts to appeal to in order to resolve disputes. You can get some progress due to personal loyalty, or traditions being a Schelling Point for behavior, or displays of force making things collapse to a single Nash equilibrium. But if people disagree enough on what the contract requires in a given high stakes situation, maybe the nexus itself breaks, reverting to smaller groups with less ambitious aims who can still agree on things. Assuming, that is, that those groups can actually operate independently of the broken off group. Complexity, like entropy, is easier to add than it is to get rid of again.</p><p>And this sounds a lot like the early history of the Rome. In the beginning, the Romans were literally the citizens of Rome, who were also the soldiers. And their enemies were other nearby cities – the Samnites, the Latins, and the rest. But once defeated, these become subject cities, then friendly allies, and then finally, Italians, the inner core of the expanded polity. The concept of who is “us”, at the core of the high trust solution to the incomplete contracts problem, gets expanded. And you see the genuine aspect of ethnogenesis – what exactly makes a people, anyway? This concept has been so abused by blank slate progressives advocating for open borders (where "there is some flexibility here" gets substituted for "there is thus infinite flexibility here"), that it’s easy to miss that there are genuinely multiple ways to construct identity. And the surest way you can tell this is that the old group names just stop appearing in the stories at a certain point. We stop hearing about the Samnites, then we stop hearing about Hispania, then finally we stop hearing about “the Gauls” (as a people) and just hear about “Gaul” (as a province). </p><p>The flip side of this expansion, however, is that it becomes harder and harder to articulate an operating principle of what and whom the whole thing is for, especially in terms of the question of who gets to be in charge and who gets to enjoy the benefits. The Roman consuls first have to be Patricians, but then that gets discarded, and they can then be wealthy Plebs too, but they still have to be Roman. Then once it moves to emperors, they eventually can be Roman families from the provinces, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan">Trajan</a>, but still <a href="https://historum.com/t/the-national-ethnic-origins-of-roman-emperors.19034/">generally of Roman stock</a>. These expansions prove successful, then you get the series of great <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illyrian_emperors">Ilyrian emperors</a>, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocletian">Diocletian</a>. But then you get peasant emperors like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximinus_Thrax">Maximinus Thrax</a>, and then you get Gothic generals who wield lots of power over puppet emperors, but still do good service to the empire (like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilicho">Stilicho</a>). But then this gives way to barbarian generals like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricimer">Ricimer</a>, who notionally still serve the decaying empire successfully, but historians start to argue whether he’s actually just a King. And finally <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoacer">Odoacer</a> decides to make our lives easy by actually sending the purple cloak back to the Eastern Roman Emperor and saying he’s done with the whole thing, and now is just the King. Which is lucky for us, only because it makes the whole narrative simpler for “when did they meaningfully stop being Roman Emperors”. The Senate kept meeting until the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Senate">7th century</a>, even as it was totally useless and a joke. </p><p>And it’s not just the leaders – by the end, when the western Roman empire is fighting off increasing barbarian invasions, the legions doing the fighting are mostly barbarian too, and there’s not always a lot in the legitimacy stakes to make you prefer the notional emperor(s) from the usurper. It’s certainly not obviously the extent to which they represent “the Roman people” in a Wilsonian sense. </p><p>If all this sounds like it becomes a confusing mess of an org chart by the end, it is. Part of this is because when we refer to this as a nexus of contracts, there really aren’t any actual formal contracts anywhere once the simple ties of ethnic kin aren’t the main driver. The closest we get is clear rules of succession, whose importance becomes very obvious. And when these get ignored, we’re left to the coordination game version of the <a href="https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/melian.htm">Melian dialogue</a> – the strong (and their nexus of contracts) do what they will, and the weak either join the winning team, or get killed. This often happens surprisingly fast, and a lot things that seem like they’re going to turn into massive civil wars end up as a total collapse by one side without a fight, or after a small initial battle, where all the supporters of one side abandon their leader to join the opposing faction, and the losing general either gets killed by his former supporters or commits suicide. Say what you will about the late Romans, but they played politics for keeps. </p><p>If democracy has any virtues, it’s certainly not the wisdom of the people, or even the legitimacy that elections confer, but probably just the well understood rules of succession, whereby power is transferred on schedule, and the losers generally get to live out their lives in peace without being thrown in jail or killed. Then again, this was true in Republican Rome too, until one day it wasn’t. In the early parts of the story, you hear mostly about cities and structures, with the individual Romans playing less of a central role (with occasional exceptions like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipio_Africanus">Scipio Africanus</a>). By the time you’re routinely hearing about individual personalities at high frequency, you’re well on the way to the collapse of the Republic. And at first this takes the form of utilizing factions of Romans violently against other Romans, then it becomes using foreign auxiliaries to overcome Roman legions (who are themselves mixed), then it ends with the foreigners just running the show. </p><p>In this regard, what you’re trying to coordinate with the early Roman Republic is a form of group selection, whereby members of a group all end up benefitting in evolutionary fitness terms because of cooperative action. Like ethnogenesis, progressives love this idea, and abuse the concept mightily to argue for all sorts of nonsense. But it can exist – not only in the case of a termite mound, but also in terms of the cells in your body. They engage in all sorts of group coordination so that their DNA gets transferred on. For a while, so did the Romans, and then later on, so did the Italians (at least in our metaphorical sense, though perhaps in a literal one too). But even inside your body, defection is often locally profitable without strong enforcement mechanisms. When one section of cells starts growing uncontrollably at the expense of the rest, this is called cancer, and has a lot of parallels to a rebellion in civil society. But the metaphor is imperfect, because the cancer of rebellion doesn’t always kill the host. Rather, at some point it starts to look less like the body with cancer and more like a cancer in charge of what used to be the body. The polity, unlike your body, can theoretically absorb outsiders. </p><p>Aside from these curious aspects about the nature of government and its change and decay, the other part I found myself wondering about were the parts of the story being left out. Not as a conspiracy or anything, but just which are the noticeably important aspects that don’t seem to get much emphasis in the Duncan retelling? </p><p>There are two big ones. The first of these is birthrates. Obviously he’s not recounting a continuous census of fertility. But in the days of the Republic, the recurring theme is always that whenever a Roman legion gets wiped out, they just raise another one and keep fighting, refusing to give in. You can see this an indomitable spirit and resolution, but it’s worth pondering the sheer logistics too – there must have been a large excess of tough military age males sitting around at any time, ready to be brought into military service. Where those males all went by the end of the empire is not well explained. The standard view is that they were unwilling to fight, and were kept from service by rich land owners who didn't want to sacrifice their workers. But it also seems quite likely that they might just not have been around in the same numbers. Either way, it’s puzzling. </p><p>The other piece that supports the latter interpretation is that by the time you get to the Empire (where there is much more focus on individuals, so we know their life stories better), you can’t help but notice just how few children the Roman emperors seemed to have. If you’re not constrained by resources, why not have 12 children, or 20? How on earth do you reach the stage that you don’t have enough sons to continue your dynasty, when this is the single most important aspect of succession? Or only one son who's a total muppet? Weirdly, having no children at all is more understandable than only having two, as the former might just be general unlucky infertility, but the latter suggests it's possible, just not done much. I had always viewed the overwhelming knock on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius">Marcus Aurelius</a> as being that he broke the tradition of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerva%E2%80%93Antonine_dynasty#Five_Good_Emperors">Five Good Emperors</a>” of appointing as successor the most competent man, rather than their blood offspring. This is true, but the part that Duncan notes (which I hadn’t known) is that none of the others actually had any blood sons! Which is bizarre, when you think about it. It’s not even like they’re Henry VIII, producing unlucky daughter after daughter. Aurelius appointed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodus">Commodus</a>, who was a disaster, but as Duncan notes, he was rather in a bind. Either he probably had to kill him, or make him successor, since letting him just hang around was likely to lead to civil war, which is much worse. Even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus">Augustus</a>, the most powerful man in the empire, ran out of sons. Like, just get some mistresses! Or bang your wife more! I have a feeling something very odd was going on with Roman birthrates, which I want to understand more.</p><p>The other even less remarked on piece is Roman engineering and technology. Occasionally you get snippets of the story like Trajan building the longest bridge for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan's_Bridge">the next thousand years</a>, or Caesar shocking the Germanic tribes by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar's_Rhine_bridges">building a bridge to transport his whole army</a> across the Rhine before the barbarians knew it had happened. Or the general impressiveness of aqueducts, which managed to slope ever so gradually over miles and miles to deliver water from one place to the other. </p><p>Nobody else was doing that. So how did Roman technology advance? How late in the story did that stop happening (surely an important question to those who judge present civilisational health by the existence of iPhones). And why couldn’t anyone else match it in the same way? You realize that you have such a tiny number of primary sources, and if it wasn’t a subject that people bothered to record the history of, you’re going to have a lot of guesswork. </p><p>Finally, comes the applications to the present. One aspect that stands out is that the ability to forecast the lifespan of the empire is complicated by the fact that battles at that time were still largely tactical and not strategic. That is, there often might be only one or a couple of large encounters that decide who comes off the best in a war between nations. And because these often turn on small decisions on the battlefield, smaller armies can frequently rout and destroy much larger ones, or a small number of surprise defeats can threaten the entire nation (like in the Punic Wars with Carthage). This means that at a lot of places, something going differently could have ended the whole Roman experiment much sooner – the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars">Punic Wars</a>, for instance, or the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century">Crisis of the Third Century</a>. In the age of strategic warfare, you might actually have a better chance at forecasting which structural forces will prove decisive if the two sides just grind it out long enough. Then again, maybe not – there’s been no shortage of American defeats to notionally weaker foes that might not have seemed structurally obvious ahead of time. </p><p>The last one is the surprisingly low correlation between the level of domestic misery at any given time and the actual instability of the whole project. The late Roman Republic was an utterly miserable time for its citizens compared with the previous centuries, with the advent of massive Roman civil wars, proscriptions and deaths of political opponents and their supporters, and general chaos and uncertainty. But all the protagonists at this point are still Roman. You never really get a sense that there’s an Alexander of Macedon equivalent waiting in the wings to crush all the war-weary parties. Instead, Rome still seemed pretty secure from external enemies. By contrast, there are lots of periods during the Empire where the barbarians seemed to be both stronger and more coordinated, and could tip the whole thing over. Even here, it’s not an inexorable decline. By the early 5th century, things actually seem to be looking slightly brighter for a while. Yet the striking thing at this stage is that even a competent Emperor like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavius_Aetius">Aetius</a> isn’t able to actually fully reverse the losses, only slow them. It’s not long then before things go off the rails for good, at least in the west. </p><p>If we look at the level of America’s foreign predation, we see useless and counterproductive wars, and endless third world migration, but there is nothing like barbarian armies forcibly peeling off territory, or menacing the homeland. This calculus is made a little more difficult by the fact that we are highly dishonest about what the American empire actually is, and thus what it would mean to be losing territory if you only rule indirectly. If you defined the American empire crudely as “everywhere that had a George Floyd protest in 2020” (including places like Berlin, London and Melbourne) then maybe the calculus gets a little harder. But still – in physical fights, America loses, but it loses in other people’s backyards, when the stakes for the domestic citizens are mostly pretty low. </p><p>And in a pinch, I find myself thinking that our recent developments seem to map more closely to the late Roman Republic than the late Roman Empire. If I had to guess who Trump most closely matches too, it’s probably the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi_brothers">Gracchi brothers</a>. They started using populism, and in their case threats of mob violence, to get their legislation passed. This isn’t exactly Trump, but the sense of tapping into populist anger to circumvent the normal political process seemed like a good description of his nomination and victory in 2016. And the establishment backlash to unseat him, both from dubious Russiagate investigations from the civil service and Democratic party, periodic deaths and violence in political confrontations and protests becoming more normal, <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/12/last-thoughts-on-voter-fraud.html">unusual levels of election fraud</a> in 2020, and Trump’s final temper tantrum protest on January 6th, all fit the same pattern. A gradual erosion of previous norms, a gradual escalation by each side. The Gracchi brothers both got killed, which I don’t think will be Trump’s fate (though blog.jim still <a href="https://blog.reaction.la/party-politics/a-prediction-corrected/#comments">is betting on this</a>). But the important parallel I see is that they showed a path to a certain kind of escalation that later men like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius">Marius</a>, then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla">Sulla</a>, then finally Caesar and Augustus, would both increase and take to its logical conclusion. At some point, people just realize that the Republic is dead and not coming back. It takes a long time, and a lot of denial, before that point is reached.</p><p>Sometimes, that’s just your lot, and there’s not much you can do. To modify Brad Pitt’s character in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKustWnrGE0">Inglourious Basterds</a> – you don’t gotta be Niccolo Machiavelli to know that you don’t want to live through “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_of_the_Four_Emperors">the Year of the Four Emperors</a>”.</p><p>But America as the late Roman Republic is actually the optimistic scenario. Not because it won’t get worse – if the metaphor holds, it definitely will. But because it might eventually get better. </p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-25228656413881653712022-05-30T10:23:00.000-07:002022-05-30T10:23:54.230-07:00America, December 31st, 2021<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[</span></span><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Editorial Note: I wanted to risk trying something unusual for this blog. This poem was written as my submission for <a href="https://twitter.com/l0m3z">Lomez</a>'s excellent </span></span><a href="https://passageprize.com/" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 12pt;">Passage Prize</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">, which I ordered, and you should too. It made the short list for the finals (yay!), but not the final prizes (boo!), nor the second round selections for the print edition (double boo!). So you might describe this as being among the worst of the worst of the best, which sounds about right to me.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">The following was my introduction to the submission, which I'm not sure if I should get straight to the point and delete, but while I am a confident essayist, I am a nervous poet, so forgive the endless self-effacement:</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"Hey <a href="https://imperialmelodies.substack.com/">Curtis</a>,<br /></span></span><br />Let me begin with an apology of sorts - it has been twenty years since I last wrote a poem, and I never really understood free verse. I kind of think of poetry as divided into either a) regular forms with rhyme and meter, or b) unusually personal imagery-heavy essays broken up to look visually appealing and emphasize certain pauses. I don't know if the latter is your view of free verse, however. To write the following in regular poetic form is probably outside my skill level, would take a very long time and probably would end up worse. Hence the result below. When you describe the meter of your poems, it mostly doesn't register with me, as I just breeze past this and read the sentences, which I really like. All of which is to say – I’m not sure whether this should be a poem at all, or an essay. But it doesn't seem to fit the prompt for the literary non-fiction version. So I figured I'd submit it anyway, if for no other reason than that I very much enjoyed the writing prompt to write something personal that risked being cringe." ]<br /><br /><br /></i><b><u>America, December 31st, 2021</u></b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><b><br /></b><br /><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">America, that
land<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That drew me
in so long ago, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is caught,
pincer-like, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Between the
two great forces<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of decaying
empires. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Scylla,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of the great
deal of ruin in a nation, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And the
Charybdis,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That that
which cannot continue, will cease. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I remember,
when I first arrived, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Having
occasion to observe,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With some
regularity,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That this was
a great country. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At billboards
advertising <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Twenty
Chicken McNuggets for $6.99".<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Partly in
jest, but mostly serious, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I used to
remark:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"These
should have the national anthem<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Blaring on
repeat, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Flag flying
in the breeze.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This country
believes in value!". <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At redneck
engineering videos,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of homemade
trebuchets. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At old
universities, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Taking
classes for free,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With famous
and brilliant professors.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At the wonder
that every band I loved, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Would just
turn up in my town,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And play live
every year or so.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At college
girls that would find<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">My accent
just cute enough, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For that
5-10% boost,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To come back
to my apartment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">America, you
have been very good to me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I had one
such moment recently, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At seeing the
winning entries,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a giant
pumpkin contest,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At a small-town
country fair. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A two-thousand-pound
pumpkin!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Grown simply
for the <i>je ne sais quois</i>!<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There is
still greatness,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wonder and
weirdness,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In odd corners
you can stumble on.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But the next
thought I had<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Was realizing<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Just how many
years it was<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Since last I
had that thought. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Partly, the
desensitization <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of repeated
exposure.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Partly, the
ingrate foreigner, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now
successful and dismissive, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of those that
helped him.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But partly, I
think, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The decline
that is all around us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I used to
joke that America <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Seemed to be
experiencing <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Soviet
time-line in reverse,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Except it was
crumbling, not strengthening. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then some
mental reflex noted<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
multiplying number of epicycles, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And I
wondered how sure I was,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That things
didn't better match,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To the Roman
empire, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or the Roman
republic, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or the French
revolution, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or the
Byzantines,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or to many
others<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of which I
knew less.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(The amateur
historian,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Confident in
his theory,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Would do well
to count<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">How many
Chinese dynasties<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">He can name
at all, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Then exclude
those where<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
mental association maps<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Only to a
diad, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With a name,
and a phrase<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Like
"vase" or "pottery army".)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The confusing
pattern-matching, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Where every
peg is a meteorite, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fractally
weird and irregular, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And endlessly
able to be rotated, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And every
hole is an impact crater, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Blasted into
the earth,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Chaos where a
neat outline should be.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Beware the
advice<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of the
reactionary<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Who only
knows one history<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of decline
and fall. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Decline, in
one form or another,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is on the
lips of almost<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Everyone
these days. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A
Democrat-voting work friend<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Asks me if I
plan <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To
home-school my children, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">With
"Yes" his obvious answer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I responded
that, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I had thought
about this, and<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Concluded
that if there <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is not a
nearby school, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Either public
or private,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That I would
trust to <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Educate my
child, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is this
actually still <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The country I
should be living in? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The answer,
unspoken, lingers in the air.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The obvious
follow-on question, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Also
unspoken, is:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"If not
here, then where?"<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This one has
no easy answer,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As everywhere
turns into America. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But we have
sailed <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Very close to
Charybdis, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And fail to
tack towards<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Scylla at our
peril. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is it really
about to collapse? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Or is this
just<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Twitter
talking? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
outrage-bait machine, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Using my
brain as <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A meat
puppet?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The glowing
square is<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Hypnotic and
smooth, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And out of it
pours <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Misery and
anxiety.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The view out
my window<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is the same
as ever.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
conditional is easy to tell. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2012/06/truly-understanding-what-combat.html">Fussell</a>
understood it well,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Describing
the prospect of death<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For a soldier
in wartime. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If the
porridge hits the propeller:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"It <i>is
going to</i> happen to me, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And only my
not being here<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will prevent
it."<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This
realization, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fussell
thought, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Was what
drove them mad. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As a
foreigner, I can tell you, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Woodrow
Wilson was right<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">About us
hyphenated-Americans<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(For the
first generation at least). <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The man who
would leave<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">His wife for
a mistress, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will abandon
her, too, in turn, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When the
deal's gone sour. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When it is
your country, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You will
fight.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When you are
a stranger, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You will
leave.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That is, if
you can<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Figure it out
in time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One day, just
like<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Niall
Ferguson's bond investors, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">On the eve of
WW1, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You may wake
up and find out<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That the
great deal<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of ruin in a
nation<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Has finally
been exhausted.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is not
going to happen, probably, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This week,
month, or year, though.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The mean
decline is still slow.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The variance
is alarming.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The young man
who once left<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">His home,
carelessly, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Not even
really sure<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Quite what
the plan was, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finds this an
overwhelming question<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Now in middle
age. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what to do
in the meantime?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If now is
not, in fact, the right time?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Relative to
the Soviets,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our mangled
and mismatched metaphor,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We have one
great advantage.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We also have
an NKVD,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But no one is
in charge of it.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Its ad hoc
structure gives<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Only loose
coordination, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And since the
only payoff comes<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the
debased coin of status,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Our own era's
commissars <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Simply cannot
wait<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To announce
themselves publicly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">"In this
house we believe..."</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Solzhenitsyn
would have dreamed<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of foes this
blatant.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I suspect
that as things get<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Inexorably
worse,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The skill
that soon, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will matter
most<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is knowing
whom to trust,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And whom you
can<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Speak freely
to.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have found
just two<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rules of
thumb worth relaying.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you have a<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sense of
humor,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And if you
can <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Debate a
point<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And not take
it personally, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I can likely
talk about<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Almost
anything with you, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If I choose
my words correctly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At least
today. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Maybe one
day, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The
backwards-winding clock <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Will strike
1937,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And then
everyone will be, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Guilty of
something. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Wish as we
might,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We cannot
live <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In any era
but our own.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One must
always try<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To avoid the
uselessness <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And self-pity
in<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-god-abandons-antony/">"The whining, the pleas of a coward"</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, what can
you do with all this?<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Propaganda
succeeds, in part,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When those
who disagree with it,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Are afraid to
say so. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dissenting
openly and publicly, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Especially in
the written word, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is courting
great trouble.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is for the
bold, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you have a
heart and spirit,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As firm as
<a href="https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies">Solzhenitsyn</a>,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An old
testament prophet,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this post
testament world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But speaking
up in private, <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To those you
can trust,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Builds
camaraderie and friendship,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The basis of
all bonds that form <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Incipient
organizations,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Upon which
revival may depend.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps this
adds <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Small brick
on brick,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To the start
of something new,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Empire
that grows,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">From the
ashes of the Republic.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps it
serves only,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As the
intellectual companionship,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of knowing
one is not alone,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In these
dispirited times.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That the
Soviet mental asylum,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We dissidents
are placed in,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is actually
filled with the sane.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I may not
live boldly<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In many
things,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But I believe
in backing one's judgment<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In
estimations of character.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Learn how to
read people,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Judiciously
and carefully,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To figure out
whom you can trust.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But to let
them know<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That they can
trust <i>you</i>,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">To break the
higher order uncertainty,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Someone
generally has to have<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The courage
to say something<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Out of sync
with modernity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Might you get
it wrong? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course you
might get it wrong! <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have got it
badly wrong<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Exactly three
times, so far. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">None were
fatal, thankfully.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Did you
really think that there<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Was some
option, in this morass,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That didn't
come with risk? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reader, you
would go<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A fair way
towards <o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Being conditionally
trusted,<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Knowing not
much more<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Than that you
stumbled across this poem.</span> </span></p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-39051864862818416182022-05-12T22:47:00.001-07:002022-05-13T08:34:00.429-07:00Living History Forwards<p>I have recently been working my way through the excellent <a href="https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/">History of Rome</a> podcast series. I had been meaning to do this for some time as my previous knowledge had been mostly from another excellent series, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/show/4uxl02KkkbvH8kYxWtKs8b">The Fall of Rome</a> , which I've <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-end-of-empire.html">written some thoughts from</a> before. I realized in hindsight that I was doing things in a mistaken order. Perhaps due to my own slightly pessimistic nature and preoccupation with the current political situation, the narrative of decline and why it happened was very appealing. But before you can delve into the big picture forces (which Wyman does well in the Fall of Rome), it's helpful to understand the basic sequence of what happened when. Not only that, but you can't really hope to understand the fall of Rome unless you also understand its rise, and all the times when it could have fallen, but didn't. Going through the story made me want to go back and read all sorts of things again with a better knowledge of the events, from the Asterix comics, to <a href="https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius">Horatius at the Bridge</a> by Macauley, to <a href="https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-god-abandons-antony/">The God Abandons Antony</a> by Cavafy, to Blog.Jim's posts on <a href="https://blog.reaction.la/culture/normality-bias/">normality bias</a>.</p><p>One of the interesting challenges when listening to the narrative is to try to invert the ex post story back into the ex ante perspective at the time - what people would have or should have thought, knowing only what they knew at the time. History is told backwards, but must be lived forwards. The simplest version of history tells things as a story, describing the important events that happened. But quickly students of history want to move from <i>what </i>happened, to <i>why </i>it happened. In the language of statistics, this means fitting the right ex-post model to the data, so you can understand what variation drove what outcome. Even this is hard to do - you might overfit the model, or select the wrong variables (and you don't get to re-run things to find out if you're right.) The causes you identify are probably there, and perhaps even contributed, but are they actually the important ones? This is a lot of the challenge of historians. But from a statistical point of view, the next step is the ex-ante one. If you'd run this same model using only the data you'd observed up to that point, even if you'd thought of the same variables, what relationship would you have estimated? Price to dividend ratios predict market returns reasonably well at long horizons ex-post, if you believe <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2328190">Campbell and Shiller</a>. If you run it out of sample, <a href="https://www.ivo-welch.info/research/journalcopy/2003-ms.pdf">Goyal and Welch</a> say they don't.</p><p>The statistician's version of this is quite easy - just run the same model on less data, and see what it produces. So why is it so hard as a historian to do the same? Because you're not really running models, you're evaluating things according to your own judgment. This isn't a knock on the field, per se. Some bits of history lend themselves to quantification, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fogel">Robert Fogel</a> did, but others (including a number that you really care about) simply don't. When you form your own judgment of things, it's hard not to fall victim to the <a href="https://authors.library.caltech.edu/22171/1/1831894%5B1%5D.pdf">curse of knowledge</a>. That is, when you know something, it is very difficult to credibly put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know the thing. It will always seem like things that you know after the fact should have been easy to forecast at the time, but they often aren't. </p><p>In history, we always know how the story ends, so identifying what counts as a major event, or a turning point, or a transition, is always made with the benefit of hindsight, so as to give the most informative narrative. This leads people to make a significant mistake when translating history into their own lives. They assume that when some major shift occurs, there will be lots of signs to indicate this fact. But there might not be. Maybe what's important won't be obvious until much later. Reading about the last days of the Roman republic, one of the interesting aspects is that what in hindsight seem like important turning points. When the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi_brothers">Gracchi brothers</a> started using mobs of plebians as threats to get their political will, it might not have seemed that shocking. But it draws a line to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Marius">Marius</a> becoming consul seven times and leading an army into Rome to institute a reign of terror, and then <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulla">Sulla</a> being declared dictator for life. Except Sulla stepped down, and attempted to restore the Republic. You can imagine that things might have seemed back to normal then. But instead, this is described as more steps towards empire. Even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus">Caesar Augustus</a>, who consolidated power single-handedly more than anyone since <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Tarquinius_Superbus">Tarquin</a>, kept a lot of the forms of the Republic, and only changed his status quite gradually. There was still a senate, and consuls, and praetors. To someone wanting to convince themselves that things weren't actually that different, it was probably easier than you might think. Indeed, one narrative of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar">Julius Caesar</a>'s downfall is that he attempted to shift power to himself too quickly, and got stabbed to death by the Senate for his troubles, even after all his triumphs. This seems to suggest that the prudent strategy is probably to maintain the old forms, and pretend like they're still in operation, even as they're gradually undermined.</p><p>Which perhaps should make you wonder - has this... happened in America? Almost certainly. As Moldbug describes, America has gone through <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/05/ol7-ugly-truth-about-government/">at least four versions</a> of the Republic since its founding. The main reason people don't notice this is that they all swear fealty to the same piece of paper. But look around! Does the paper actually describe the government? If it does, why is the government so radically different, even as the paper is the same? Try explaining the CIA to <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21/pdf/GPO-CDOC-106sdoc21.pdf">George Washington</a>, or the modern interpretation of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause">Commerce Clause</a> to Thomas Jefferson. (As a party joke, I enjoy asking law students to list as many hypothetical pieces of legislation as they can that they're sure would <i>not </i>be justified by the Commerce clause. There's, uh, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez">gun-free school zones</a>? And ... hmmm, did I already mention gun-free school zones?). </p><p>Is FDR delivering his <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/inaugural-address-8">inaugural address</a>, which basically demanded absolute authority from Congress under threat he'd just take it anyway, and threatening to pack the Supreme Court when he didn't get his desired judgments, and serving an unprecedented four consecutive terms, breaching the 150 year old norm of only two, basically equivalent to a less violent form of a Caesar? The case is at least arguable, but you can be damn sure that you won't read this argument in your high school civics class. Was Nixon a corrupt figure that was justly impeached, or was he stitched up in a deep state coup? Also at least arguable. </p><p>Or, to take one that's not yet a fait accompli in where it will end. You can also observe a gradual breaking down of existing norms and compromises that served to keep the parties' relationships with each other civil. The Democrats breach the previous norm that presidents basically get their Supreme Court nominations, by filibustering the eminently qualified Robert Bork. Republicans targeted Clinton, first with special prosecutors empowered to go on endless fishing expeditions (like starting out looking into dodgy Arkansas land deals and ending up looking into semen-stained dresses), <i>and </i>impeachment over purely process crimes like perjury when the underlying events were not actually criminal. Or the FBI illegally wiretapping the Trump campaign and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_Page">Carter Page</a>. Or Trump calling mobs to the capital to protest what he (<a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/12/last-thoughts-on-voter-fraud.html">and I</a>) saw as election fraud. I happened to think that the January 6th mob was obviously going to be useless for anything other than theater with no coherent plan. But still, it is a notable shift from previous norms. Just like the Gracchi brothers. Maybe this is one more step towards perdition. Maybe it's just rumblings that will eventually settle down, like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_secessio_plebis">secession of the plebs</a>. </p><p>In other words, we expect changes of government to look like America and Russia turning up in Berlin in 1945 - the game is over, and everyone knows it. But even the collapse of the western Roman empire doesn't quite work like this. One might think that when Rome gets sacked, that's basically the end. But Rome got <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Allia#Aftermath,_the_sack_of_Rome">sacked by the Gauls</a> in 390 BC and bounced back. It got sacked by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Rome_(410)">Visigoths in 410 AD</a> which was bad, but things still limped along. It got sacked again by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Rome_(455)">Vandals in 455 AD</a>, by which time things were looking pretty dire indeed, but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoacer">Odoacer </a>declaring himself King was still twenty years away.</p><p>The challenge, in other words, is to be able to estimate the versions of history that could have happened but didn't, and the probabilities one should have attached to them. </p><p>And when people imagine the idealised version of what this could be like if done well, those with a sci-fi bent will immediately think of Isaac Asimov's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)">psychohistory</a>. Imagine a fully worked out statistical model of psychology, sociology, and economics. Asimov's idea was that the perfect version of the social sciences should operate akin to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_laws">gas laws</a>. The behavior of any one person is random, just like the movement of any one gas molecule. But the behavior of quadrillions of gas molecules or people is highly regular, and thus can be predicted quite well.</p><p>I am a huge Asimov fan, and found his writing highly influential in my teenage years. But the more I've pondered it, the more I think the idea of psychohistory has a tendency to lead people badly astray as to what ought to be possible, even in theory.</p><p>The version of psychohistory in the <a href="http://dinhe.net/~aredridel/.notmine/Isaac_Asimov-Foundation.pdf">first foundation novel</a> starts out with a version that presents the science as statistical, in the sense of assigning probabilities. </p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p><i>Gaal said, "Indeed? In that case, if Dr. Seldon can predict the history of Trantor three hundred years into the future -"</i></p><p><i>"He can predict it fifteen hundred years into the future."</i></p><p><i>"Let it be fifteen thousand. Why couldn’t he yesterday have predicted the events of this morning and warned me. -No, I’m sorry." Gaal sat down and rested his head in one sweating palm, "I quite understand that psychohistory is a statistical science and cannot predict the future of a single man with any accuracy. You’ll understand that I’m upset."</i></p><p><i>"But you are wrong. Dr. Seldon was of the opinion that you would be arrested this morning."</i></p><p><i>"What!"</i></p><p><i>"It is unfortunate, but true. The Commission has been more and more hostile to his activities. New members joining the group have been interfered with to an increasing extent. The graphs showed that for our purposes, matters might best be brought to a climax now. The Commission of itself was moving somewhat slowly so Dr. Seldon visited you yesterday for the purpose of forcing their hand. No other reason."</i></p><p><i>Gaal caught his breath, "I resent -"</i></p><p><i>"Please. It was necessary. You were not picked for any personal reasons. You must realize that Dr. Seldon’s plans, which are laid out with the developed mathematics of over eighteen years include all eventualities with significant probabilities. This is one of them. I’ve been sent here for no other purpose than to assure you that you need not fear. It will end well; almost certainly so for the project; and with reasonable probability for you."</i></p><p><i>"What are the figures?" demanded Gaal.</i></p><p><i>"For the project, over 99.9%."</i></p><p><i>"And for myself?"</i></p><p><i>"I am instructed that this probability is 77.2%."</i></p></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>In other words, psychohistory predicts a range of outcomes, and their associated probabilities. This sounds like something I can imagine in the hyper-competent social sciences. But you can already see the tension in the paragraph - how is it that the death of a major figure has a 77.2% probability (three significant figures!), but the model also predicts events in 1500 years without the error bars blowing up to infinity? Admittedly, the project itself was predicted to succeed with 99.9% probability, and that was (in the book) the more important driver, so maybe it's not totally inconsistent, but still.</div><div><br /></div><div>As the books go on, the mention of probabilities barely rates a mention again. Instead, the recurring narrative of the book is how Hari Seldon, the father of psychohistory, has recorded hologram messages for people hundreds of years into the future, explaining to them that the dramatic events that just happened were all foreseen and were part of the plan. The initial tension between probability and horizon gets resolved into the more satisfying plot device of the perfect forecast.</div><div><br /></div><div>Asimov understands the idea of model risk. In one of the plot twists (I won't give much in the way of spoilers), eventually there appears the character of the Mule - a random structural break that couldn't have possibly been foreseen. But the general pattern is that the model works almost perfectly well in forecasting at very long horizons, right up to the point that the world has a dramatic and one-off shift.</div><div><br /></div><div>Asimov later said that he should have actually called his science "psychosociology", not "psychohistory". I actually think this is a very revealing admission, and gets to the heart of the matter. History, in the popular version, is about predicting the ex-post path of exactly what happened. When you conceive of the task as being to predict history, it suggests knowing the precise series of events that the historian could narrate. Sociology, even when it works at all, is much more uncertain in its predictions - the 77.2% chance of death version, not the precise predictions in 500 years time version. The wrong choice of name was not innocuous - it showed an ambivalence, if not confusion, about the scope of the task.</div><div><br /></div><div>Because Asimov's version of psychohistory is fatally flawed for two reasons. One of them he should have known at the time, the other one he probably couldn't have. </div><div><br /></div><div>Where Asimov should have known better is that he reveals himself to be a great storyteller, and an excellent scientist, but a poor statistician. In his conception of the gas laws, he emphasized the importance of there being millions of planets in the galaxy, in order to get a sufficiently large number of humans that he felt his statistical concept would work. But he also saw that democracy simply won't scale at that level, so he imagined the existence of an emperor.</div><div><br /></div><div>The problem is that Asimov misunderstood the statistics behind the gas laws. The crucial factor that enables prediction is not that you have <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avogadro_constant">Avogadro's number</a> of molecules. Rather, the crucial thing is that the molecules are essentially <i>independent. </i>This, not sheer number, is the crucial thing that makes the individual noise cancel out. If things aren't independent, you can keep adding more and more observations, and it won't help you. If one molecule is the emperor, it doesn't matter how many subjects you add.</div><div><br /></div><div>And human beings simply aren't independent. Indeed, his <i>own conception</i> reveals this. If the Emperor has any actual power at all, then they're susceptible to being laid low by a bacterial infection, or killed from falling down stairs, or having a bad night's sleep due to some weird dream on a crucial day, or a thousand other random and idiosyncratic events that no model of psychohistory will ever be able to capture. The only way it can work is if the emperor is in fact not an emperor at all, and 100% of his choices, literally every single thing that matters, are already pre-determined by impersonal forces. If he dies, he will be replaced by someone else who will then do the same.</div><div><br /></div><div>As long as the great man theory of history has even a kernel of truth, which it surely does, your chances of making eerily accurate hologram images for 500 years' time goes roughly to zero. You knowledge will only ever be probabilistic, and its accuracy will decline with time, like almost every statistical model. In many ways, this is the big danger of inferring things from fictional evidence - if your premises are subtly incorrect, you'll still write the whole story as if they were right. </div><div><br /></div><div>All of which might make you wonder - why wasn't this mistake obvious to Asimov at the time? </div><p>I think this gets to the second part, which Asimov probably couldn't have known. Specifically, he was writing in the 1940s and 50s, before the age of cheap computing power and large, easily available datasets. That is to say, Asimov almost certainly had no experience <i>actually constructing and testing statistical models. </i>He couldn't have! Unless he was inverting the matrixes for the OLS estimator by hand. </p><p>And as a result, he missed out on the single most important lesson you get from actually testing quantitative models. Namely, you find out how often your intuition about the world is just completely wrong. Or the effects are kinda-sorta there but much weaker than you thought. Or you start to worry about which of the many variations on some predictor variable you should be coding up, or whether there might be data errors, or whether linear models really are the right choice here, or whether there's reverse causality going on, and a thousand other things. You learn, in other words, that predicting <i>almost anything you actually care about is surprisingly hard. </i>And the work of doing so doesn't look at all like psychohistory, where one mathematical genius comes along, and suddenly you've got perfect predictions. Rather, it's about the slow grind of finding one new variable to improve the R-squared, or some new estimation technique to get the mean-squared error down. Sometimes a new discovery improves things a fair bit. But you never have a sense that you'll get the R-Squared to one, until your number of predictors equals the number of observations, at which point you've played yourself, as the Beastie Boys put it. Indeed, you quickly hit the law of diminishing returns on this type of thing. Initially, you add the large, big picture effects that have the most predictive power. But then what's left over is increasingly random and noise-driven, coming from outside forces and quirks mostly orthogonal to what you're interested in studying. Like Zeno's paradox, you might get closer and closer, but there's no hope of getting to the final goal. </p><p>Even this is in the idealized version! Often you come away just convinced of your own deep epistemic uncertainty about the universe. You'll never really even perfectly explain what happened in a dataset, let alone forecast out of sample, because the world is just a shockingly complicated place. And all the bits you leave out end up in your residual term.</p><p>Nobody who has ever run a regression could really believe in psychohistory, if they thought about it hard. But many, (like me until very recently), suspended their disbelief in the face of the wonderful story, and just didn't think about it. But when you do, you realize it's just not how prediction works. Not in practice, and without independence, not even in theory. Models don't fail just because the Mule comes along. They fail because the task itself can only be statistical and uncertain. </p><p>But if you never actually run these tests, you'll evaluate your theories of history on a heuristic basis, and make all sorts of kludges and exceptions, and be surprised when the world doesn't work out with as much certainty as a history book. </p><p>What does genuine, significant, high stakes predictions actually look like, in the heat of the moment? Before you actually know how it's going to go down? </p><p>When Russia first invaded Ukraine I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what the probability was that this would turn into a nuclear exchange. Because if the probability were non-trivial, it was time to get out of America, for at least weeks, to see how it was going to pan out. The important question is not "was it going to happen". Rather, the better question was, and is, "what would be the trigger events that I could observe at the time that would indicate a significant increase in the probability of dramatic escalation?" </p><p>My guess was that the highest probability path to large scale war between Russia and America (and thus potentially going nuclear) was the US imposing a no-fly zone. Which is to say, shooting down Russian jets. The chances that this might spiral out of control, and quite fast, seems decent. Large overt NATO troop present in Ukraine would also be in the category. Other wild-card events like Poland unilaterally sending troops might also could, but it's harder to know where that goes. </p><p>As it turns out, thankfully none of this seems likely any more. Whether it was ever likely is a separate question, but the identification of trigger events doesn't hinge on this question hugely, except for the question of whether the mental exercise is worth your time. Fortunately, the Biden administration repeatedly said early on that it wasn't interested in a no-fly zone, something we can all be very grateful for. But even if he had declared one, I suspect you probably would have had time to get on a plane out of America within 24 hours if you acted immediately, as things probably don't go nuclear at the first downed plane. On the other hand, it seems highly likely to me that most people wouldn't act, and would just sit there. Which is lucky really - the plane capacity to leave America each day is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population. The plan only works <i>if </i>nobody else acts. But this in turn means that you need to act, and quickly, exactly at the point when everyone else thinks you're weird and paranoid. How else could it work? If you wait until the air raid alerts are being sent out, you will probably just die getting incinerated in your car, stuck in the biggest traffic jam in the soon-to-be-concluded history of the city. </p><p>This is why forecasting things usefully ex-ante is hard. People expect there to be a big glaring sign that everyone will see. But there probably won't, at least until the historians write about you in 200 years' time. </p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-92149145785147479722022-03-02T12:14:00.000-08:002022-03-02T12:14:09.352-08:00The Earthquake at Central BanksIn the past, I had mentally classified arguments <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">in favor</a> <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">of Bitcoin</a> into three broad categories:<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">1. Bitcoin eats gold.</blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">2. Bitcoin eats fiat.</blockquote><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">3. Bitcoin eats both fiat and gold, because something like gold will also eat fiat. </blockquote><br />To summarize <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-economists-case-for-at-least.html">my position</a>, despite being Austrian-curious, I think the first one is right, and the second and third are probably wrong. Over time, I added a fourth<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">4. Bitcoin eats (some of) corporate discretionary liquidity</blockquote><br />This one might also happen under any of the three above. But it seems that I was naively excluding a fifth.<br /><br /><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">5. Bitcoin eats central bank reserves</blockquote><br />Like every aspect of crypto, it fits into the category of things that are obvious in hindsight, but somehow people don’t figure out ahead of time.<br /><br />The proximate cause of all this is the <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-28/russia-s-money-is-gone">decision</a> by the various branch offices of the US Empire to confiscate all the assets they can of the Russian Central Bank. This comes after the <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/canada-unfreezes-bank-accounts-linked-to-freedom-convoy">loosely related incident</a> where the Canadian Primate Minister froze the bank accounts of protestors against Covid vaccine mandates.<br /><br />The theme of both of them is a confluence of various factors<br /><br />-All meaningful money is already electronic, and we operate on what’s effectively a <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2013/11/currency-as-paper-standard.html">paper standard</a>, where the convertibility of electronic dollars to pieces of paper is an increasingly redundant aspect.<br /><br />-Electronically recorded assets are enormously easier for governments to seize, if they own the computers or can pressure the people that do<br /><br />-The declining US Empire, in conjunction with a populace hooked on outrage-bait news stories, seems determined to lash out ever more at enemies foreign and domestic. <br /><br />The Canadian story is more likely to spook the average person, but the Russian story is far more important. <br /><br />Every Central Bank in the world is figuring out very fast that any assets you hold that are denominated in dollars, euros or pounds, are liable to be seized in the event that you piss off USG.<br /><br />Now, what exactly are central bank reserves <i>for</i>? Partly, they’re for propping up your currency in the event of a depreciation. You need to sell some foreign currency and buy your own to keep your exchange rate from plummeting too far. You already have endless ability to print more money to cause your currency to depreciate (subject to how painful it is to cause more inflation). What you don’t have an unlimited ability to do is make your currency appreciate, because for that you need to sell foreign currencies and buy your own. And since central banks like to keep the option of moving their exchange rate up or down, they want to be able to do both. That said, these days competitive devaluations to spur export growth are more popular than trying to have a strong currency or maintain a currency peg, so the desire is likely not for everyday use. <br /><br />Rather, it’s useful in a crisis. You may want to intervene in forex markets to support the currency when it’s crashing, such as to prevent bank runs and retail shortages from panic buying when people worry they won’t be able to import any more. You may also want foreign reserves to be able to prop up important institutions in a crisis. Recapitalizing banks with something other than your own plunging currency, for instance. Or supporting other public companies that might have debts denominated in foreign currencies, in an economic crisis where firms are on the verge of failing. Or even for just showing that the country has hard assets to back its debts. <br /><br />What the current situation in Russia also highlights is that sometimes you get very bad crises where all of these problems happen at once. Your currency is crashing, because investors are fleeing the sanctions being placed on you. On its own, this makes imports suddenly very expensive (even if just the ones that you’re still allowed to buy). Ordinarily this depreciation in the medium term might spur export growth, but you have a tough time being able to export anything under the new sanctions regime. Your banks are failing, because their foreign assets are being confiscated and their ability to interact with SWIFT is turned off. <br /><br />At such ordinary points, you’d start selling US dollars and buying rubles to support the currency. Or you might use US denominated assets to recapitalize your banks and spur confidence in their stability. <br /><br />Well, bad luck for you, because lots of those USD and Euro denominated assets you held are now gone. <br /><br />Oddly, the extra aspect of trade restrictions makes the exchange rate stakes here somewhat lower, because it’s not like you can import or export much anyway. But recapitalizing the banks sure would be handy right now. Well, for the banks that haven’t already collapsed. Too bad. <br /><br />Having seen this lesson once, it becomes apparent that foreign currency reserves are only of any value in a crisis where USG is still firmly supporting you. Otherwise, they may as well not exist. If you’re China, you ought to assume that any crisis might be used against you by USG. Not that it <i>will</i>, but it definitely <i>might</i>.<div><br /></div><div>(As a side note, it's interesting to go back and consider <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2018/12/war-gaming-chinese-nuclear-option-with.html">this post</a> on how China could weaponize its Treasuries. I think most of it still holds, but it now has the wrinkle that Treasuries are like a first strike nuke - you have to use them all immediately, or they're going to get deleted the next hour as soon as the Fed can organize its response.)<br /><br />I suspect China will keep buying treasuries to a certain extent, because they want to keep their currency cheap for everyday export purposes. But if I were the Chinese, I’d be treating this as just a pure expense that results in no corresponding assets. You have them, but when you need them, they’re getting written down to zero. <br /><br />Which is to say, at a stroke, the days of central banks holding large amounts of major reserve currencies for strategic value are probably winding down. Certainly, the days of China holding lots of USD assets are winding down really fast. You would have to have rocks in your head. <br /><br />So what might you hold instead, as assets that might be more useful in a crisis?<br /><br />Well, the question re-phrased is “what electronically transactable asset can you hold that will maintain some likely value, but that is extremely difficult for a hostile government to seize from you in a crisis?”<br /><br />And the most obvious answer here is Bitcoin. <br /><br />Bitcoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, have the singular property of being unusually hard to expropriate, because the record is held on so many computers around the world. This is, rather, the entire point. Unless a foreign government can hack your private key because of bad storage practices, it’s very difficult for them to do much. You might also hold gold, but this is much harder to transact in internationally (unless you all agree to leave your gold at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and just change the record of ownership, which is clearly a disastrous strategy these days). But in a crisis, if you bought Bitcoin with your Renminbi, that’s still going to be there. The treasuries, not so much.<div><br /></div><div>This is the theory, anyway. There are other ways to try and make life hard for particular crypto holders. Pressure exchanges to blacklist certain wallets held by state entities, for instance. You could even pressure or coerce miners to refuse to mine transactions from certain addresses, though it's not clear how feasible this would be. But still. It's a hell of a lot better than having your treasuries / equities / bonds stored on a computer located in the United States. <br /><br />Of course, this only half solves the problem. For trade flows, you care about exchange rates with your trading partners. Can you use your Bitcoin reserves, or other currency reserves, to appreciate your exchange rate with USD? <br /><br />Maybe, but not obviously. If what you care about is the USD/RMB exchange rate, selling your bitcoin to buy RMB mostly is just going to lower the price of Bitcoin, but will probably have the same effect on USD denominated BTC as RMB denominated Bitcoin. You could imagine trying for some tricky indirect effects if you bought third country currencies. In other words, suppose that China could still buy Swiss Francs. In a crisis, it could dump the Francs and cause the Franc to depreciate with respect to RMB, but likely somewhat with respect to other currencies as well. Then maybe the Swiss use their own dollars to support the Franc, so you indirectly end up getting the effect you want (selling USD and buying RMB). Maybe? I tend to find this stuff hard to predict, because the more links there are in the chain, the greater the chance that some other effect that you haven’t fully anticipated comes in and the result isn’t quite what you think. <br /><br />So at the end of it all, my initial presumption that no semi-hostile central bank (think China) will buy a US dollar denominated asset again is likely wrong. They will, but only for normal times currency management, and treat it as a flow expense not an asset. But to the extent that some of the purchases were also because they previously viewed USD assets as useful in a crisis, I expect that aspect to get significantly scaled back. The announcement is a significant blow to the perception of USD assets (and Euro and Pound ones too), and one that is very hard to undo.<br /><br />You can also imagine deleterious effects on US dollar hegemony in terms of currencies for trade flows. This is a big part of the <a href="https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/stein/files/gopinath-stein_qje_2021.pdf">Gopinath and Stein</a> model – the global reserve currency becomes the default for trade flows even between third parties. But if you’re a Turkish company trading with Brazil, how excited are you going to be about keeping your trading profits in USD? Or your treasury account for paying counterparties? Unlike Central Banks, these guys can’t just print up more exports if the US government decides to seize all their assets in a fit of pique. <br /><br />What they end up holding here is less clear. There is still a winner take all aspect to this, and at the moment the winner is still USD, despite this crazy own goal. The question is not “are foreign companies and governments likely pissed off?”. The question is “is there a concrete alternative that they’re going to prefer more?”. The key part of the Gopinath and Stein paper is that whatever currency is used for trade invoices will tend to have a natural demand to be held as assets, in order to hedge future trade obligations. This means that either people will want to switch over currencies in both trade invoicing and holdings at once, or switch neither. Unless you have a strong case that people right now will prefer BTC or RMB (the two biggest alternative contenders) for both the asset they hold and the asset they invoice in, you’re pretty much going to have to lump it. </div><div><br />But it's not clear that they'll necessarily just lump it forever. We do not have good models of how or when exactly the equilibrium gets shifted from one global reserve currency to another (like most games where there are two possible Nash Equilibria). In part, we just have very few observations of reserve currency status changing. Spain to the UK, and the UK to the US. And even the ones we have are in scenarios where all such currencies were backed by hard assets, so the logic may not hold as cleanly when everything is pure fiat.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ironically, the biggest bear case for Bitcoin out of all this is that it may yet end up being an existential threat to the primacy of the US dollar <i>even if it doesn't supplant it for everyday transaction purposes. </i>That is, even if bitcoin only eats gold and not fiat, in the new world, this might be enough to be a serious threat to USG, and thus trigger serious crackdowns. USG may not be able to stop computers around the world storing bitcoin on the ledger, but they have their own version of the <a href="https://xkcd.com/538/">$5 wrench attack </a> - stop trading in Bitcoin (or hand us your wallet password), or men with guns come and lock you in a cage for the rest of your life. <br /><br />Still, it seems increasingly likely that the people at the wheel in the US do not have any sense of the possible fragility of the status of the US dollar as reserve currency and the associated <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege">exorbitant privilege</a>. It is just treated as one of those facts of the universe, not something carefully obtained by sensible economic stewardship (and iron first / velvet glove hard and soft power coercion). Whereas it increasingly looks like something subject to a tragedy of the commons across different time periods. This indeed seems to be a common thread with other policies like Modern Monetary Theory. Nobody really seems to argue that it applies in Zimbabwe. They also don’t seem to argue that it applies globally for every possible amount of spending. Otherwise just send everyone a check for a million bucks! But they also don’t have a sense of where exactly the relationship breaks down, nor how far away we are from that point. <br /><br />One way or another, a lot of people in power seem deadset on finding out exactly what the limits are to being a global reserve currency. I suspect they may not like the answer.<br /></div></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-59131968020480379922021-12-15T08:51:00.000-08:002021-12-15T08:51:22.461-08:00The Biggest Obstacle to Texan IndependenceSuppose you were a patriotic Texan, planning on how to make your state independent. As <a href="https://niccolo.substack.com/p/the-putney-spoons-interviews-malcolm">Tinkzorg</a> likes to put it, in politics (not just in war), the professionals think mostly about logistics. This comprises two parts. First, the grassroots aspect of how do you build up enough internal support to make independence a concrete aim of a sufficient number of Texans. On this aspect, the people you want are (in <a href="https://www.panarchy.org/maine/government.1885.html">Henry Sumner Maine</a>’s phrase) “the wire-pullers”, the successful manipulators of public opinion, and the people capable of building organizations to expand out such messages and grow power. I have no skill nor inclination in that regard.<br /><br />But there is a second aspect that’s more interesting to me. How do you plan in advance for likely hostile responses from USG? If such responses don’t happen once your Texan mob/democratic expression of sovereignty arises, happy days! In that case, the first step of building support is the only one that matters. But since you probably won’t have too many cracks at this, one needs to plan for how to overcome Yankee resistance. <br /><br />I suspect that said resistance initially won’t be military. It may not be military at all. The reason this whole thing is interesting is that the level of committed energy seems so low on both sides. This is true across most of the western world. The number of people in Texas willing to die to ensure their state’s freedom is likely very low. But so is the number of New Yorkers or Californians willing to die to keep Texans in the union. So inertia rules the day at the moment. It’s like a market that’s very illiquid in both buyers and sellers. Small changes in demand or supply can result in large price swings in either direction, which is what makes it a live issue. Sure, the Californians hate the Texans. But this version of “Fuck you, Dad!” could just as easily manifest as “Fuck you, I won’t [let you] do what you tell me”, or “Fuck you, you’re not invited to family thanksgiving anymore”.<br /><br />The default Yankee instinct, however, is probably power and control. It is impossible to have a federal, live-and-let-live model of each state making up their own mind on gay rights, or abortion, or most politically charged issues (including, once upon a time, slavery). And while not every issue resolves itself at the level of the Supreme Court, progressive soft power is directed at solving the monstrous corollary to MLK. That is, if injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then only total global domination of the levers of power is sufficient to ensure my security in the Upper East Side, or Georgetown, or Malibu. It’s for my own safety, and the cause of justice, you see, that I must rule you. <br /><br />If you add this up, the likely USG response is probably to apply unpleasant non-military pressure, and try to make life maximally unpleasant for Texans in a way likely to cause them to either relent, or just blame matters on the independence supporters. <br /><br />So what are those ways, and how might you circumvent them? <br /><br />One guide is to look at what they do to foreign states they don’t like, and want to apply pressure to. Of the toolkit they like the most, it’s sanctions, and especially financial sanctions. In the recent case of Russia, USG threatened to <a href="https://www.rt.com/business/542424-ruble-strong-us-sanctions-swift/">cut off their banks</a> from the SWIFT system. This would leave them isolated from US financial institutions, and force other countries’ banks to effectively decide (presumably on threat of the punishment being extended to them too) whether they’d rather do business with US banks or Russian ones. Whatever you think about the long-term consequences of the Fed’s print-a-palooza, right now, that’s not a difficult decision for a Swiss Bank. <br /><br />(As an aside, if I were the Chinese, I would think about making an explicit threat that if the US cut off Russia, Chinese banks would only do business with Russian banks and not US ones. Let the US find out if it’s actually cutting off Russia from America, or cutting off America from the rest of the world). <br /><br />But assuming the Chinese gambit doesn’t happen, for Russian banks, being cut off from SWIFT would be seriously inconvenient, but probably wouldn’t precipitate a domestic banking collapse. Inside Russia, their customers can still withdraw their rubles just fine. In the Republic of Texas, cutting off all Texas banks would potentially precipitate a bank run / panic, if people worry that their US dollars are about to be replaced with some new currency that’s worth less. Though if withdrawals are simply frozen or drastically limited (as Greece did briefly in 2012 in the run-up to their vote on whether to leave the Euro), things would probably be okay in the short run. <br /><br />Weirdly, things would get funky based on the fact that the concept of “Russian banks” is much more coherent than “Texan banks”. Mostly what you have is Texan branches of national or regional banks. The big question is who controls the computer systems. If you’re, say, Bank of America in North Carolina, and the federal men with guns (or just a furious Fed banking regulator) call up and demand that you turn off all the computers of all branches in Texas, you’ll probably comply (unless the systems don’t make that straightforward to do, which is quite possible). Of course, Texas has USAA and Comerica and the rest of the banks headquartered there, which also operate regionally or nationally. Presumably men with guns will be doing the same thing there, dictating what those banks have to do.<br /><br />The standard way to solve this problem of bank runs in the past was to print up a new currency quickly, and order the banks to start paying deposits only in the new currency, which we’ll call Texars. There is some difficulty in printing sufficient volume of not-easily-forgeable currency in a raging hurry, but presumably you can make do in a pinch. Effectively you confiscate local dollar deposits and forcibly convert them to Texars. People will be pissed, but eventually they’ll adjust. <br /><br />But I think that it’s a mistake to focus on bank runs and bank stability as the main obstacles in the modern era. These are problems, but they’re manageable problems. Rather, what’s harder to actually solve is <i>payment rails</i>. Most money is already electronic, primarily through credit and debit cards. And for anything online, this is the only game in town. A currency is both a store of value and a medium of exchange, but between the two aspects, the latter is a much more acute problem if it starts to fail. Hurt the banks, the banking industry suffers, and people worry about their savings. But if you cut off payment mechanisms, pretty much all business grinds to a halt. People don’t need to access all their savings immediately, but they do need to be able to fill up their car at the gas station. If they can’t do that, this probably guarantees either capitulation, or military escalation. If you’re Free Texas, you don’t want either. You want to be able to maintain business as usual, and dare USG to go kinetic first, hoping that they don’t have the stones. And every day they wait, you can solidify your local control. <br /><br />The single biggest obstacle to Free Texas right now is the hegemony of Visa and Mastercard. The extent of the power that these firms have over everyday commerce is colossal and not widely appreciated. They run your credit cards and debit cards, which have moved from being ways to extend credit to ways to pay for anything, anywhere. Not only that, but the US has past form on successfully pressuring these companies to cut off foreign businesses they don’t like (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg">Pokerstars</a>, <a href="https://fskrealityguide.blogspot.com/2009/01/tradesports-shuts-down.html">Tradesports</a>, etc.). They would absolutely do this with Free Texas, probably as their opening salvo. <br /><br />The challenge is that any electronic payment system needs both a digital currency in question, a mechanism for transferring that currency between buyer and seller, and the technology in each store and consumer’s wallet to make such transfers. When you spell it out this way, you can see why this is incredibly difficult to conjure up in a hurry. Much, much harder than printing up new banknotes and forcing everyone to take them. This also poses a problem even to people who want to use things like Bitcoin. Even if you did everything on the lighting network so there were very low fees and short confirmation times, how long is it going to take for every gas station or website in Texas to be set up to accept this kind of payment? How long is it going to take to get every boomer or retirement home resident to get a wallet capable of spending it at said gas station? How long is it going to take them to get the actual bitcoin to spend? What happens if you're the last grandma in line to convert their dollars over to bitcoin, and the price of bitcoin has gone up 50% from the massive influx of demand?<br /><br />In some sense, you need the incredibly hard ask of a payment system that can be turned on at the drop of a hat once you declare independence. The crude version is just reverting to cash under newly printed Texars. This will probably work for an initial period of emergency, but you need some way of rolling things out, and it’s not clear that the task gets obviously easier after a few weeks. Not only that, ideally the system can be developed with plausible deniability for its true purpose. <br /><br />I have only vague ideas about how to do this, and I don’t know which one is best. But I am strongly convinced that this honestly may be the single most important problem to figure out a solution to. A significant part of the challenge is that many of the initial steps look like a huge needless expansion in wasteful reporting and intrusive data collection. <br /><br />One such component is that you probably need to set up daily reporting requirements for all bank branches in Texas to a parallel system. You could maybe do this through some local institution you had control over (the Dallas Fed, maybe? Probably too converged), or some new regulatory agency. Every day, banks must report their closing balances for all customers to the State of Texas. This ensures that when you declare independence, you at least have a snapshot of what amount to credit everyone’s account with in Texars. You would probably want to also measure people’s equity holdings too – it’s doubtful you can stop USG expropriating these, but at least if you have records, you can figure out some kind of compensation scheme. Most likely, I would reassign expropriated Yankee-owned shares in every publicly traded Texan firm to Texas residents that had lost equity holdings from the Yankee confiscation. People might not be thrilled that their shares in Microsoft have been converted to shares in Texas Instruments or whatever, but it’s sure better than nothing. <br /><br />From there, you’ll need to decide what the payment system is. This is where I’m less sure. There are various options, with their own levels of difficulty. <br /><br />You could try to repurpose the existing Visa and Mastercard networks. The advantage here is that the tech is already out there, both in terms of cards and payment machines. Existing bank relationships with national banks (both cardholder and merchant) could be set up with existing Texas banks. The problem is the Visa and Mastercard networks, which is how the banks communicate with each other. You could create your own one of these and somehow repurpose the machines to transmit through it. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I suspect that reverse engineering this stuff as the State of Texas may be harder than reinventing things from square one.<br /><br />My guess is that the easier setup (though still extremely hard!) is to actually just set up a central bank digital currency from scratch. In other words, the Texas Central Bank keeps a central database of all dollar amounts that people have in bank deposits (which, remember, it has records of already). A “central bank digital currency” in its most minimal form is just a computer at the Texas Central Bank (TCB hereafter) that anyone can open up an account with. If the Fed let you and I open up the same kinds of Fed accounts with it that Citibank has, America would already have a central bank digital currency. <br /><br />In other words, we currently have an extraordinarily cumbersome payments processing system because we launder the entire thing between thousands of banks that all need to communicate with each other, verify balances, etc. But if you were redesigning the system from scratch, and especially if you need a system that you can get up and running quickly, you don’t want to duplicate all this stuff. Just let the TCB store all the accounts. Then payment processing is just transferring trivially from one register in a database to another register in the same database. <br /><br />In this framework, the process is at least simplified – instead of trying to run things through the combination of every bank’s existing legacy IT infrastructure, you just need a way for each consumer and merchant to communicate with the TCB. The simplest way to do this is with an app. Download it, and use the camera to take photos of your Texas drivers license, plus your face next to your ID, plus whatever sequence of random requirements are selected (e.g. take a photo with your ID where you close your left eye, put your right index finger on your nose etc.). Then you’ve got access to your existing bank balance. <br /><br />Want to pay for a purchase? The vendor generates a QR code that contains the amount of the purchase, and the account to have it credited to. You use your phone on the app to take a photo of the QR code. An alert comes up – do you wish to send $12.95 to “McDonalds Plano, TX”? Click yes, take a photo of your face to confirm your identity, and the purchase is complete. <br /><br />In this version, the role of banks is significantly scaled back. You go to a bank if you actually want to deposit your money into a savings product with a higher rate of interest, with the money being lent out to borrowers. If you want an actual credit card, you have some arrangement with the bank where they pay for your stuff at the TCB using their own funds, and you pay them back on whatever arrangement you negotiate with the bank. I suspect the demand for this service specifically is actually quite low, and a lot of current credit card demand is really just demand for easy electronic payments. Sure, there are airline miles and other reward programs, but this is just a roundabout way to maintain the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard by effectively fleecing cash-paying customers by a small amount. If all this nonsense disappeared, the system would probably be better off. <br /><br />In the medium term, you're going to have the problem that taking all this money out of the banking system will likely increase interest rates, by reducing the amount of funds banks hold at any time that they can loan out. That's a problem (unless you're an Austrian economist, in which case it's a feature), but it's not an immediate problem, and can be mitigated down the line with TCB monetary policy or direct lending to banks. There’s nothing to stop consumers keeping more money in an actual bank earning interest by making risky loans. But if you just want to make and receive payments, you can now do it without a bank. There’s also a longer run risk of centralisation of all money in the hands of the new Texas government. I suspect this already exists with current banks, but people just don't think about it much (ask <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/harveysilverglate/2013/01/03/black-whitey-how-the-feds-disable-criminal-defense/?sh=654a724c69c1">Conrad Black</a>, when they froze all his assets before his trial which made it difficult to mount an expensive legal defense). <br /><br />At first, there will be a challenge figuring out the various anti-fraud measures, dispute resolution stuff that banks have worked out for ages. Even getting the whole thing into the hands of consumers is hard, and making sure it scales But it’s at least feasible. The challenges are basically: <br /><br />-Design an app <br /><br />-Design a database that stores all the balances.<div><br /></div><div>-Design an API for stores to generate transactions <br /><br />-Get customers and businesses to download the app <br /><br />Then every transaction just requires two people holding smartphones, which they already have. Figuring this out from the business end might be a little complicated, but the consumer end at least doesn’t require sending plastic cards to every person in Texas, or new payment machines to every business. The minimum viable product is that each restaurant has one guy holding a smartphone that implements all their transactions until they can redesign their IT systems to make it smoother.<br /><br />I mean, this is a several year project! I don’t mean to minimize how hard it is. It's also a long way from the core competency of any government, let alone a future government. It seems likely that you'd need to develop it in secret with some rich, sympathetic Texan fintech CEO or something similar. But the hard work is all doable beforehand. Once it’s go time, you just need everybody to download the app (though you should assume that they’ll also prevent you pushing it to App Store or Google Play, and have plans in place for that). <br /><br />This isn’t the only variant on the plan. I’m sure crypto boosters can imagine some kind of crypto version where you fork Bitcoin and airdrop tokens to all the existing bank account holders. I suspect the challenges of getting this up and running are quite a bit harder than my version, but who knows. <br /><br />I am actually less wedded to the specific solution that I propose than I am sure that the problem is probably the most important problem to be solved. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a new breakaway country that set up in the age of digital finance against the wishes of USG. If you want to be the first, you would do well to ponder the paraphrased version of <a href="http://dailybail.com/home/the-run-upon-the-bankers-poem-by-jonathan-swift.html">Jonathan Swift</a>: <br /><br /><i>“They have his soul, <br />Who have his payment rails.”</i></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-85259760312189442692021-07-25T11:52:00.000-07:002021-07-25T11:52:20.458-07:00Moving Porn<p>[Meta disclaimer: When I look back at some of the posts I've written that I think I got wrong, they're often in the category of what I'd call "therapy posts" - trying to universalise or rationalise some thought process of my own as a general life lesson, especially if I'm trying to convince myself that my actions make sense. I resolved at some point to try to stop writing those. I don't <i>think </i>this is one, but I'm not always a good judge of these matters, at least at the time.]</p><p>As Covid worries seem to fade into the rearview mirror, and life slowly gets back to normal, I find myself reflecting on the the strange way that being at home for a long period of time strongly exacerbated the idea of moving porn. Not as in emotionally touching depictions of sexual acts, but the fantasy, sometimes followed through on, that a better life awaits if only we move to somewhere else. </p><p>This is always a hard one for me to think about. I don't want to say that everyone should just stay where they are. It is obviously, trivially false that every place is as good as every other place. So there really are changes in life happiness to be had for certain people in moving somewhere else. Indeed, I've had at least one myself, that I'm very glad about. </p><p>In my case, after enough months of roaming around the same apartment, I had a strong desire to just get out. Maybe temporarily, but probably permanently. I started writing this post back when these feelings were still there fairly strongly, but already subsiding. From the number of stories about this, I don't think I was alone in this. Covid seemed to really send this urge into overdrive among a certain class of aspirational mobile white collar worker. </p><p>There are two stories that can be written about this. The first, and most discussed, is the role of remote work. Covid made lots of educated people's jobs suddenly remote, so they could now move anywhere, at least temporarily. The big obstacle to moving is generally the coordination aspect - a city you want to live in, where you know people, where you can get a good job, where your husband or wife can also get a good job. Take away two of those conditional statements, and the choice set gets a lot bigger. </p><p>But the second part is the one that I think is more interesting. The professional class were also, as a rule, more likely to comply with lockdowns and general social distancing. The net effect was a whole lot of people who hadn't actually spent any time in person with many (or any) of their friends or relatives, for maybe a year at a stretch. The effect of this was to enormously crank up the background sense of ennui and isolation that seems to be a large part of modernity. </p><p>I remember this being one of the stranger aspects of educated Americans when I first moved here. If you grow up in Europe or South America or Asia, you are generally <i>from </i>somewhere. Your sense of place is typically a city. Whereas I'd meet quite a number of Americans whose story was something like "Well, I was born in Cleveland, and lived there for the first two years, then I was in Chicago until age 8, then we moved to Phoenix, then I went to college in Atlanta...". The typical educated American, by the time they reach graduate school, might be on their fourth set of friends, between high school, college, and first work stretch. Their parents may or may not still be living in the place where they were when they were born. </p><p>In other words, the background feeling for a lot of people in the educated classes is already a vague sense of social isolation. Your friends, even your good friends, might pack up and move in a year or two's time. You have to keep investing in new friendships in order to maintain a steady state inventory. </p><p>I can only guess, but I think this feeling is rather widespread, at least to a certain extent. But if it is, then moving cities to try to escape the sense of ennui you've developed is a very high risk strategy. You feel isolated and unhappy because you don't have enough close friends and family. It might indeed be hard to make friends where you are. But when you move to somewhere new, you go back to square one. Rather like changing lines in the customs queue at the airport, you'd better hope the new one is faster, because you start out at the back. </p><p>I don't know how to balance out these two stories in terms of their prevalence. The first one is just a good news story - people can finally leave San Francisco (a city that is desperate to disprove the Lebowski dictum that the bums always lose) and go somewhere less shambolic, while still keeping their tech job. The latter is much less obvious. If your problem was that being rootless made you unhappy, digging up what shallow roots you currently have is not obviously going to help matters. Ironically, it resembles San Francisco's way of dealing with the homeless - the ameliorative steps to solve the current problem in fact just lead to the problem getting worse. </p><p>In terms of telling these two versions apart, one aspect that is striking is the sense of where all these newly mobile people actually wanted to go. It tended to be the same places. Austin, Miami, or sometimes Nashville.</p><p>Don't get me wrong, I like all these cities! But still, it's striking that these form such a focal point for a large number of people who are all starting somewhere quite different. To hazard a guess, the main linking factor seems to be "better weather, some fun nightlife, increasingly trendy so my friends won't look at me too weirdly, but still cheaper than NY, SF, or Boston." They are always cities that are described as <i>fun. </i>Which seems to be a shorthand for sociable and full of interesting people to hang out with.</p><p>But if the problem you faced in Dallas or wherever is that you weren't able to meet people to hang out with, how exactly do you plan to find your fun circle of friends once you get to Austin? I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that most of the credible plans you would implement to solve this problem in Austin could also have been implemented to some extent in Dallas. </p><p>The only exception to this rule is if the place you're moving to already has more old friends and relatives in it than the place you're at (and they're likely to stay there). To me, I think this is generally the only good reason to move to a place to escape ennui. </p><p>The fact that all these people wanted to move to the same places tends to imply that this wasn't what was at stake. Maybe Austin helped a ton of people suddenly solve the coordination problem of where to live at the same time. But I don't think that's what's going on. </p><p>If I'm right (and I'm not sure I am), I suspect a bunch of these people are going to wind up disappointed.</p><p>How can one tell if this seems like a credible description of one's mindset? I suspect that one telling aspect is the question of how specific and detailed are the ideas of <i>what exactly you plan to do differently when you get to Austin. </i>It's a Saturday. You're in your somewhat larger house, now that you don't live in the Mission any more. You've got the whole day ahead of you. What are you going to <i>do </i>that you can't do in San Francisco? Next day is Sunday. Same question. Then the weekend after. And so on.</p><p>I have a feeling that if you don't have a clear answer to that question, you are probably going to find that Austin does not make you as happy as you imagine. </p><p>I would be delighted to be wrong. Austin, Miami and Nashville are all in fact cool cities. I hope everyone who moved there finds it awesome, and pities us saps that stayed put. But I can't help but wonder about the Last Psychiatrist's <a href="https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/04/the_abusive_boyfriend.html">description of some of how change is often not really change at all</a>: </p><p></p><blockquote><i>The unconscious doesn't care about happiness, or sadness, or gifts, or bullets. It has one single goal, protect the ego, protect status quo. Do not change and you will not die. It will allow you to go to college across the country to escape your parents, but turn up the volume of their pre-recorded soundbites when you get there. It will trick you into thinking you're making a huge life change, moving to this new city or marrying that great guy, even as everyone else around you can see what you can't, that Boulder is exactly like Oakland and he is just like the last guys.</i></blockquote><p>Lest this all sound like meandering, there is a concrete prediction that can be made here. If I'm right, I expect the number of relocations to drop fairly quickly as life gets back to normal. If you haven't packed up and moved by now, I'll guess that you're not going to. Because as people actually start hanging out with their friends again, they'll slowly remember that the place they're in isn't actually as bad as it seemed in April 2020 when it felt like we were going to be locked up forever. </p><p>If you're still on the fence, take advantage of the warm weather to invite all your friends over for a party first. It did me a world of good. </p><p></p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-63929469107485163112021-03-28T20:07:00.000-07:002021-03-28T20:07:13.054-07:00The Lessons of Bitcoin<p>Bitcoin is, without any question, one of the most remarkable financial stories of our lifetimes. Simply by running some code on your laptop back in 2010, or putting a few grand into the earliest bitcoin markets, you could be worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars today. Even quite a bit later in the process, a bold bet that you hung on to could have easily brought you life-changing amounts of money. </p><p>Did <i>you </i>make life-changing amounts of money from Bitcoin?</p><p>I didn't. </p><p>I think about that quite a lot.</p><p>I made good money from it, in the category of "moving some moderate financial milestones forward a couple of years", which is great. I bought it around the time I wrote <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-economists-case-for-at-least.html">this</a>, which still summarises my thoughts on it pretty well. I sold it in February 2018, not long after I wrote <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2017/12/bitcoin-and-inscrutability-of-wealth.html">this</a>, which I also still like. Short run, the sale was a good call. Longer run, it was a catastrophe. </p><p>If I'd played my cards better and more boldly, at earlier times, I could have ended up with "fuck you" money. For someone writing a pseudonymous blog in 2021, that sure would be handy.</p><p>This may sound like a humblebrag, but I promise it's not meant that way. Internally it feels much more like failure. Chances to make life-changing amounts of money do not come along very often. This was one, and I missed it.</p><p>Bitcoin was almost unique in the sense that, to become fabulously rich:</p><p>i) you didn't need to have very much money early on (in fact, at the start, you didn't need any at all, just some kind of computer)</p><p>ii) you didn't need to risk very large amounts of your wealth to make it happen</p><p>iii) everything you needed to do it was publicly searchable on the internet</p><p>iv) chances to wind up happily rich persisted for <i>years</i>, including after you probably first heard of bitcoin.</p><p>Assuming you didn't make fuck you money from Bitcoin, it's worth pondering what the lessons of this are.</p><p>The most obvious instinct, which I fall into from time to time, is essentially just "if only" fantasies. If only I could somehow travel back in time and tell 2010 Shylock to start mining bitcoin! Or to put his life savings into it as soon as possible (and not sell it, and not store it on Mt Gox).</p><p>This is the worst kind of loser mentality, taking nothing but fantasy and daydreams from the story. Imagine I had all the future knowledge! Imagine I won the lottery!</p><p>But, as it turns out, you don't need to actually transform the question very much for it to be profoundly useful. </p><p>Instead, one is much better off asking "what changes in behavior, mindset and reading habits would I have needed so that <i>I would have actually discovered bitcoin on my own early on and invested in it?</i>"</p><p>The reason is that this might actually help you find the <i>next </i>bitcoin. It's possible that buying bitcoin now will still make you rich, but it probably won't make you life changingly-rich (certainly not without risking your whole life savings on it).</p><p>The bad news is that it probably will require some hard work and luck. </p><p>It's useful to break the question into two parts:</p><p>1. What realistic changes could I have made that might have caused me to come across bitcoin-like ideas earlier than I did?</p><p>2. What realistic changes might have shortened the time between first hearing about it and investing (or investing more, or holding it longer)?</p><p>At a high level, the answer to #1 is that you need to be reading weirder, different stuff. If you wait to read about an investment idea in the New York Times, it will be long after all the major gains have been made. </p><p>To have been reading about it really really early, you had to be both technically very adept, and reading widely outside the box. Like <a href="http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/">this guy</a>. Or <a href="https://blog.reaction.la/">this guy</a>. Are your reading lists as varied and out there as blog.jim? Somehow I doubt it.</p><p>Strangely enough, you might have done extremely well multiple times over <i>since </i>bitcoin became popular even if you just learned the rather narrow lesson "I should learn up to the absolute cutting edge of cryptocurrency, so that I can meaningfully contribute to the small group conversations about what might be the next development in the crypto space". You might have gotten in at the ground floor on Ethereum, or Polkadot, or Chainlink, or a number of others. You might still get in on the next shitcoin to explode. </p><p>In my case, the thing that tipped me over the edge for investing was in 2017 I finally got around to reading Moldbug's essays on bitcoin. I'd read through most of his archives starting in around 2013, but to my great regret, looked at the vaguely finance stuff and decided "eh, I already understand finance, I'm going to skip it." Ha! If there's a single lesson from Bitcoin, it's that in 2009 nobody much understood how money worked. As it turns out, Moldbug's description of bitcoin was entirely correct, he just seemed to me (certainly by 2017) to be wrong about the likelihood of the US government shutting it all down. It seems like hard work, and it's easier to just tax it and enforce know-your-customer requirements on fiat exchanges (which is what happened). </p><p>A related lesson is "you should read more Moldbug, and consider investing in things he talks about, though still take what he says with a grain of salt". That still might yet <a href="https://urbit.live/">be a highly lucrative lesson</a> in the fullness of time. </p><p>But I think the real place to improve is actually in #2. </p><p>There are many people who heard about bitcoin back in, say 2013, and thought it sounded pretty weird, and probably likely to collapse. But if they were pushed on the issue at the time, you could have likely gotten them to agree that it was at least worth a punt for a few hundred bucks. </p><p>The question is, how many people actually had that subsequent thought themselves? And moreover, how many actually followed through on it?</p><p>Smart people with all the information in front of them frequently fail at both hurdles. They fail to recognise the investment implications of the things they already know, especially when what they know to be true seems strange and unpopular to most people, and thus less likely to be priced in. And they fail to pull the trigger on it in a timely manner. </p><p>The same is true, incidentally, from <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-covid19-death-rate-is-much-higher.html">Covid</a>. A few days after I wrote the post linked, I bought put options on the S&P 500. The thought process initially was "Huh, Covid could be a huge problem, I should buy N95 masks.". It took a couple of days for the follow-on thought (which should have been obvious) to occur "Wait, why am I hedging extreme left tail outcomes in goods markets, but not also hedging (and profiting from) moderate left tail outcomes in financial markets?". That also made me a decent but not life changing amount of money too, about a quarter of which I lost by holding onto my short positions too long instead of buying back in once I sensed that peak panic was passed (the losses are much larger in alpha terms, since you should include the opportunity cost of not being long in April and May 2020, which was huge). </p><p>The thing that may or may not be surprising to you is that I know a fair number of people who read about Covid in early February 2020 and didn't act on it financially at all. I actually understand this. It took me several days to think of it, and I may easily have not done it, or not had the stones. Even when I did, I did it in a panicked and dumb way, just shorting the market. Not airlines, or cruise lines, or buying Zoom. Or, what would have been even better, credit default swaps (if you were one of the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2020/03/25/billionaire-bill-ackman-100-fold-return-on-coronavirus-hedge-2-billion/?sh=e8fb3726fcce">big boys</a> ) or call options on the VIX if you weren't. I also managed to predict the wrong thing about Covid, namely that it was going to have a massively high death rate, and managed to screw up most of the market timing decisions I made over the course of 2020. One big good decision, managed to outweigh a considerable number of smaller bad ones, but I definitely didn't come out of 2020 thinking that I needed to do more market timing.</p><p>To be honest, the regular reading of weird twitter feeds is one of the things I miss since giving up twitter. It was a complete sewer, a cesspit of aggravation deliberately made to encourage rage-clicks and anxiety, run by people who hate me, and you, and everyone reading this. And yet, there is still material on there that you just can't find anywhere else. </p><p>If you read the same things as everyone else, you will think the same things as everyone else. Not many of those people acquire life-changing amounts of money, except by pure chance.</p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-51277223206473781382021-01-28T15:16:00.000-08:002021-01-28T15:16:24.650-08:00Some Thoughts Occasioned Upon Recent Fatherhood<p>Friends, I’m very happy to report that my daughter and
firstborn child recently arrived into this world. The acute feelings of anxiety
and then great relief at the birth itself slowly become replaced with the
pleasant slight haze of the everyday. But since this journal is as much for
myself as for my readers, I wanted to write down the thoughts I recall before
they slip away.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Most people are more alike than they think. This is part of
the reason why most heartfelt sentiments - whether joy at birth, sadness at the
death of a loved one, celebration of someone’s birthday, and many others – end up
sounding like clichés. The more important something is, oddly the more likely
your feelings are similar to everyone else’s. Because of this, sometimes the
repeated forms are okay for the important sentiments. As a friend’s priest said
about Christmas sermons – if you’re hearing anything genuinely new in it, it’s
probably heresy.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I learned this the hard way when emailing friends about the birth.
I said something about how she’d been sleeping well and eating a lot so far,
and joked that one could obviously extrapolate this out indefinitely. From one
or two slightly snarky responses, I realized too late that, even in jest, this
is a little like the newborn equivalent of those ghastly “My child is on the
honor roll at XYZ Elementary” bumper stickers, but for a much more emotionally
fraught subject. (Which painful door would you rather open? “I’m a bad parent”
or “My beloved child is just difficult, and experiencing misery that I can do nothing about”? Por que no los dos!) I’ve refrained
from bring up the subject since then, and just instead reflect on the ancient
Greek observation that no man should be declared happy until he is dead. You
have a well-behaved child once they’re married with children of their own. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nonetheless, there was one part about my wife’s period of late pregnancy and birth that was quite striking, in a way that I wasn’t
expecting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is a certain level of narcissism and egocentrism that
is inherent to everybody. The way the Last Psychiatrist <a href="https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/02/the_other_ego_epidemic.html">put
it</a> is quite memorable:</p><p class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"></i></p><blockquote><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“The essence, the defining characteristic
of narcissism is the isolated worldview, the one in which everyone else is not
fully real, only part a person, and only the part the impacts you.”</i></blockquote><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I, like a lot of people, always wake up in my dreams just as
I’m about to die. There is some fundamental stumbling block that cannot quite
comprehend a world without me in it. If the only part of everything else that
is real is the part that interacts with you, then your death is literally the
end of the universe.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This much gets commented on quite a lot. One can
intellectualise death, and imagine the world going on without you. But one
cannot really <i>feel </i>it. It just doesn’t
compute.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But the strange part, that I hadn’t really appreciated, is that something similar happens
(at least to me) at the early end too.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Having my own child was literally the first time I’d been
forced to contemplate in concrete detail what my parents’ life might have been
like around the time I and my siblings were first born. The standard way this
is described is that until one has children oneself, one doesn’t quite realise
how much thankless work goes into changing thousands of nappies and not
sleeping properly for months on end.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But at least for me, it’s more than that. I just hadn’t
given much thought to the subject. I have images of my parents’ life before me,
pieced together from photographs, and stories they’d tell with my uncle sitting
around the dining room table after dinner. But these tended to mostly focus on
the period when they first met, before they got married. There were some
stories after that, about their lives, living with my grandmother, buying a
small shack in the countryside and planting trees there, and things like that.
But then there was a large gap, a chunk of the map shrouded in cloud, of <i>what it might have actually felt like when we
children were first born.</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And I think part of the reason for this (at least with me) is
the narcissistic tendency. People are only real to the extent they interact
with you. And the part of <i>you </i>that
counts <i>is the part you can remember</i>.
In my case, the earlies memories are from around age 3. When I’m forced to
contemplate it, I simply have no empathetic concept of <i>me</i> before that time. To consider myself as a one-year old, or as a
newborn breast-feeding, or while in the womb, is every bit as alien to the
actual narcissistic self-conception as to think of myself as being dead. I can
imagine it. But there is simply no capacity to relate. Without memory and capacity for self-conception, the chain of "I"-ness gets broken. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Take away this inherent interest and understanding, and the
parts of the characters immediately before I mentally appear on the scene
simply don’t quite register. The <i>stories </i>my parents explicitly told me register, and those I feel warmly about. And indeed, I can
think about times before I was even an idea, what my parents were like as
children or teenagers. But the part that interacts with <i>me, </i>in the period where “me” is not something I instinctively
empathise with, tends to be a strange and glaring gap.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Until my own child arrives. Then, I'm forced concretely
to imagine all sorts of things I didn’t really consider. The scene of sea and sky suddenly inverts to a dizzying new perspective - one in which my parents are fully real, but I am only partially real, and only the part that interacts with them (since the part that is "me" doesn't yet exist). And one sees the whole path of the same scene repeating again and again. My
daughter, currently totally helpless, having not the vaguest clue of what my wife and I
do to keep her alive, and no real sense of gratitude or even contemplation, until one day, several
decades hence, when (hopefully!) her own time comes to pay it forward with her own children, and the
cycle repeats.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thank you, Mum and Dad. At last, just a teensy bit, I
understand. I suspect you knew this already.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Welcome to the world, little one. We’re so glad to have you.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-71091202353256840992021-01-16T23:13:00.002-08:002021-01-16T23:13:45.320-08:00Tether - risky, but probably not for the reasons they keep telling you<p>I keep being forwarded <a href="https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com/the-bit-short-inside-cryptos-doomsday-machine-f8dcf78a64d3">this article</a> that came out in Medium recently. It poses as a big expose of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency)">tether</a>, the stablecoin that powers lots of cryptocurrency transactions. We learn that it's a scam and a fraud, and about to crash the price of bitcoin.</p><p>The very short tl;dr on tether is that it's a cryptocurrency whose value is kept at a stable $1 USD. Why would you want this? Well, lots of people want to transact electronically in something that's basically dollars, but without the insanely anachronistic mess that is the actual US banking system. But USG has aggressively gone after money laundering by controlling the interface of the banking system and crypto exchanges. In other words, control the fiat/crypto interface tightly, and the rest of legal compliance will follow (apparently). If you as a company anywhere in the world take money from the banking system, you get aggressive demands from USG officials that you comply with US "Know-Your-Customer" (KYC) anti-money-laundering legislation. </p><p>So some exchanges like coinbase specialize in being places that comply openly with the law, where you can hold your crypto and feel like there's a lower chance that it will be stolen, because coinbase is possibly about to become publicly listed, a good hallmark of establishment reliability. And others specialize in the opposite of this - transact there while being less legible to US regulators, take on massive leverage on your trades, pay lower fees due to regulatory arbitrage of not complying with US financial laws. So far, they've been able to do this, barely, because they follow the golden rule of "never touching actual US dollars". Just exchange one digital asset (e.g. bitcoin) for another (e.g. tether), and you never directly interact with the standard financial system. So tether ends up being the numeraire good, the medium of exchange on lots of these platforms. Hence why there's so much demand for it.</p><p>It's important to note that the way tether is priced at a dollar is that tether, the company, will (so far!) redeem them for exactly a dollar. As long as this promise is viewed as credible, they'll trade at $1, and they roughly do. Tether rather speaks out of both sides of its mouth on this - in <a href="https://tether.to/faqs/">marketing materials</a> they tend to emphasize that tethers can be redeemed for the same number of dollars, and in practice they pay out your redemptions, but in the fine print they say that this isn't necessarily, technically, something promised.</p><p>So far, so good.</p><p>Well, what's the <i>claimed </i>problem? Here's the article's summary:</p><i></i><blockquote><i>Tether Ltd. also says one Tether is worth exactly one US dollar. Can they do that? Well they say they can, because <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/why-crypto-traders-are-so-worried-about-tether-quicktake-q-a">they hold $1 worth of assets for each Tether</a>. But are those assets actual dollars? <a href="http://media.kalzumeus.com/tether-docs/bitfinex-response-to-nyag.pdf">No, they are not</a>. So what if the assets go down in value? <a href="https://equity.guru/2020/12/30/the-bitcoin-bubble-is-tether-too-big-to-fail/">Don’t worry; they will not</a>. Okay, but can we at least see the assets? <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/tether-confirms-relationship-auditor-dissolved">No, you may not</a>.<br /><br />Who in their right mind would use something like Tether? Well, the short answer is that many people use Tethers to buy Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The long answer, though, is astounding — but more on that later.<br /><br />Because Tether sounds exactly like a currency fraud, it may not surprise you to learn that Tether Ltd. is <a href="https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2019/attorney-general-james-announces-court-order-against-crypto-currency-company">currently under investigation</a> by the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York. That investigation was announced to the public on April 25th, 2019.</i></blockquote><p>As an aside, the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of New York are a pack of assholes who feel justified in arresting anybody on the planet who so much as looks at a financial transaction in a way they don't like, on the highly compelling theory that a) Manhattan has a lot of banks, and b) Manhattan is the center of the universe. If you are not utterly cynical about their press releases by now, I don't know what to tell you. </p><p>And from there follows a very breathless and interesting read of all the ways that tether has been printing tether coins, and this is pumping up the price of bitcoin, and it's all likely to collapse because it's a giant scam. </p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><i> "Nonetheless, based on this evidence, I concluded my risk was now too great. I was long Bitcoin up to my eyeballs; Bitcoin was clearly correlated with Tether; Tether was clearly being issued at a frantic rate; and that issuance had a high probability of being backed by nothing at all."</i></blockquote><p></p><p><a href="https://crypto-anonymous-2021.medium.com/the-bit-short-inside-cryptos-doomsday-machine-f8dcf78a64d3">Have a read</a>. There are a lot of interesting facts in there. In fact, if you feel yourself well versed in finance, go away and read the article and try and find the big glaring conceptual error in it, then come back. </p><p>I am in two minds about this article. </p><p>On the one hand, the author is likely right that tether has a non-trivial chance of being shut down by USG, that it fuels a large amount of leveraged trades in crypto, and that the loss of tether would likely cause a big deleveraging that would probably be disastrous for bitcoin prices</p><p>On the other hand, the <i>reasons </i>he thinks this will happen are moronic, ludicrous and risible. They are a great example of a certain kind of stupidity that is annoying prevalent in crypto communities. </p><p>What is the first order problem with the whole discussion?</p><p>The gigantic blind spot is that he, like lots of crypto people, seems to not notice the obvious fact that tether is simply a <i>bank</i>. The tether coin itself is a <i>demand deposit, </i>just transformed into cryptocurrency form. It's hard to think of a cleaner example of the hypothesis that money itself started as debt that began to circulate. The company keeps a certain amount in reserves to fund these possible redemptions, and then invests the rest. This is how basically every bank in the world works.</p><p>The reason that so few people spot this is that the world is roughly partitioned into </p><p>-people who like cryptocurrencies and who think that all "fractional reserve banks" are scams, and</p><p>-people who like mainstream banking, and think that cryptocurrencies are scams.</p><p>So as a result, the number of people who are both knowledgeable and agnostic on <i>both</i> fractional reserve banking <i>and </i>crypto is surprisingly few. </p><p>And when you see it this way, a huge amount of the apparent mysteries immediately get resolved. This comparison ought to be obvious, but it’s not, because guys like this tend to have completely moronic ideas about what a bank actually is, and simply think that all banks of any form are “scams”, regardless of how well capitalized they are. He has some huge hard-on of this idea of himself as the narrator in the Big Short, but somehow never learned how a bank actually works. </p><p>Go back to the quote above. Banks are partitioned into two types. Those where every dollar of deposits is backed by 100% literal cash US dollars in a vault, and those where it is “backed by nothing at all.”</p><p>Like…did you consider <i>any other possible bank balance sheets</i>? Are these the only two possible cases? </p><p>His idealized type of bank (assuming he even realizes that this is what he's describing, which I doubt) is called a narrow bank. In practice you should be able to set up a bank that just takes investors deposits, in turn deposits them at the Fed, and earns the interest the Fed pays on reserves. Why can't you do that? Well, the Fed has denied licenses to such banks, with largely spurious reasons given as to why, in ways that smell like corruption, even to very mainstream economists like <a href="https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/03/fed-vs-narrow-banks.html">John Cochrane</a>.</p><p>So since we don't have that option, <i>every bank is a fractional reserve bank. </i>To a banking agnostic, the crucial question is not "is it a <i>scam engaged in maturity transformation?". </i>Rather, the question is "given how well capitalized the bank is, how likely is it that there will be a bank run that causes depositors to not get paid back in full?".</p><p>Suppose tethers are only backed 74 cents in the dollar by actual USD, a claim that’s floated around <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/tether-says-stablecoin-is-only-backed-74-by-cash-securities">here</a>. Here’s the question. They took in 100 cents in the dollar in cash. They now hold 74 cents. What does this guy think they did with the remaining 26 cents? Blew it all on coke?</p><p>No, what they very likely did is <i>buy the exact cryptocurrencies that the guy laboriously shows that tethers are being used to purchase</i>.</p><p>So at the time they bought it, their portfolio was most likely something like 74c cash, 26c BTC or whatever.</p><p>Now, a sensible risk weighting would assign a big haircut to these BTC assets, given how risky they are. Sure. But what this guy does, along with places who should know better like <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/tether-says-stablecoin-is-only-backed-74-by-cash-securities">Bloomberg</a>, is downweight every single asset that's not cash to a risk-weighted collateral value of zero. This is, to not put too fine a point on it, <i>imbecilic.</i> </p><p>And the reason this is even more egregious is the following. Ex post, what happened to the price of that BTC? <i>It went up like crazy. </i></p><p>Assuming this much is roughly true, this would make tether among the best capitalized banks in the world. As a betting man, I’d wager pretty strongly that the value of their crypto is way higher than the missing 26c in the dollar or whatever of liabilities they owe, probably by a factor of 2-10.</p><p>Buddy, if you think tether is a scam, let me tell you about Citibank. </p><div>So what do you do if you’re now a bank who's crazily over-capitalized, and holding a lot of crypto assets? Well, one option is to say “sod it, let’s print some more tether liabilities, and use those to buy more crypto”.</div><p>Absent government regulations, this is an entirely sensible thing to do. The timeline above explains every single “suspicious” fact that this guy points to.</p><p>The risk that tether, left to its own business operations, is about to go bust, seems quite low, as long as they’ve likely been using part of their cash to purchase crypto that’s since risen greatly in price. It's true, there hasn't been a proper audit, so we don't know for sure what they've been buying or holding. Maybe they really have just spent it all on hookers. But the strongest bet to me, for a variety of reasons (including those floated by tether skeptics) is that tether has been buying crypto assets. If they've bought some kind of diversified crypto portfolio before March 2020, happy days. Strongly well-capitalized banks <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2951329?seq=1">do not tend to collapse in bank runs</a>. I would wager quite heavily that, at current prices, they have way more crypto assets than they need to pay off every possible tether holder (even if, as is true, liquidating said assets all at once would cause a big price drop).</p><p>So what’s the <i>actual </i>problem with tether?</p><p>First, while they <i>are</i> a bank, they don’t <i>say</i> they’re a bank. They tend to imply, falsely, that they’re more like a money market fund, just holding cash and cash equivalents.</p><p>Second, if they are a bank, they run the risk of being regulated like a bank, and they sure as hell haven’t been complying with banking regulations, notwithstanding that they’re probably very well capitalized.</p><p>Third, their whole business model smells like know-your-customer violations.</p><p>All of this means that there’s a decent chance of them getting boned by some up-and-coming NY DA, running the same playbook as for Tradesports, and World Star Poker, and a bunch of others. Freeze assets. Destroy your business because you can't access any of your assets. You dip into some of the reserve cash to stay afloat. They declare you a ponzi scheme, improperly stealing customer funds, and say you collapsed for this reason. Whether you were or weren’t (and in the case of tether, there’s good reasons to think they have more assets than they need, not less), the proximate cause of the collapse is government.</p><p>Where this guy is right, is that tether fuels a lot of the levered bets people make on dodgy exchanges. Take away the tether that fuels these exchanges, and you probably get a massive deleveraging. I’d bet on this being a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox">Mt Gox</a> level event for BTC if it happens. If the only demand is now coming from unlevered, KYC compliant bets on Coinbase, that’s a big reduction in likely demand.</p><p>At the end, the big irony is that</p><p>a) he's right that you should be worried about tether, about the prospect of it being closed down, and the likely impact of this on BTC prices, but</p><p>b) the one thing tether gets the most flack for is the one bit that seems least likely to be true - being massively undercapitalized, and unable to pay back depositors. </p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-4097391349763510872020-12-11T23:52:00.011-08:002020-12-13T20:31:44.363-08:00Last Thoughts on Voter Fraud<p>Winston Churchill once observed that a good definition of a fanatic
was someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On the subject of voter fraud, I like to think that I meet
neither arm of the test.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On the first part, I feel like I’m definitely open to having
my mind changed, but not many people engage with the better evidence on the subject,
so I don’t often hear good arguments to the contrary. Then again, every fanatic on
every topic feels the same way, so perhaps this doesn’t distinguish me very
much.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But I can at least make sure I don’t fall foul of the second
arm. Few things in this life, even if true, are worth driving away those near
and dear to you, having friends of long standing view you as some crank and
lost cause obsessive. My twitter feed the past month has been that of a single
issue kook, which has gained me a lot of new followers, but I never really
wrote to build a large audience, and definitely wrote for the sheer joy of
being able to say whatever was on my mind, not for advancing a single cause.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To know if you’ve started to become viewed as a crank, you
have to listen to the silences – the friends that don’t respond to your
whatsapp messages when you send them something on the subject, the people on
twitter who used to engage that you haven’t heard from for a while. You don’t
have to change your beliefs about the election because others don’t agree with
you, but you do need to value your audience, especially when they are friends
and loved ones.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In finance, most trades are essentially neutral – if you buy
a stock, and nothing happens, you stay flat. However, a famous trade in foreign
exchange is the carry trade – borrow in low interest rate currencies, and
invest in high interest rate currencies. There, if nothing happens to the
exchange rate, you win (on the difference in interest rates). This term, “carry”,
gets used broadly to describe any such trade with this property, where you win
by things staying the same. An anti-carry trade is thus the opposite. If
nothing happens, you lose.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Since the Wednesday morning after the election, it has been
quite clear that Biden had a strong carry trade, and Trump had an anti-carry
trade. Something fairly large had to happen to change the answer. The Supreme
Court case with Texas was my last bet on what that something large might be.
Related to my post earlier this year on how Republicans <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-thorny-problem-of-inconstant-judges.html?zx=e1752a05e9eabd5d">can’t
get their appointed judges to stay conservative</a>, the answer was depressing,
if not surprising. The number of ways the outcome can change at this point is small, most of them would be highly alarming if they occurred, and not many of them seem to hinge upon a great new empirical analysis of voter fraud being written by me.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So having written much on the subject, this is my coda to
the past month’s thinking, at least for the time being. Like the <a href="https://youtu.be/Q0OdNY8Aybw">Dylan poem</a> to which the title is an
homage, it’s not that the issue is suddenly dead, it’s just a way of collecting
one’s thoughts and drawing a line under a chapter that seems to be coming to a
close. I will probably have more to say on the subject, like every addict, but the time for being a single issue author is passed. Please bear with me even if you feel heartily sick of the subject. I
have spent an extraordinary amount of time thinking about these issues over the past
month, and I feel confident I may yet be able to tell you something new, the
things that at least I didn’t know before I started out. Without further ado, they are as follows.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The average American believes three things about voter fraud
in his country.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">First, he believes that there is very little of it, perhaps almost zero, and
certainly not enough to swing an election.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Second, he believes that if there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were </i>a reasonable amount of it in general, he would have heard
about it, from experts on the subject.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Third, he feels that if any single election had been
fraudulent, said experts would be able to identify such fraud and bring it to
light <i>before it was able to decide the election outcome</i>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I am not going to have much to say about the first point, at
least not directly. I suspect that by this juncture, the number of people who
haven’t made up their mind about this is very small. My firm belief is that
one’s priors on this should be quite wide, but that’s another subject.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Rather, I want to convince you that the second point, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">especially </i>the third point, are wrong.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While I don’t want to inflate my credentials here, I am one
of those fortunate people (or unfortunate, depending on perspective) whose
skills and training puts them in a good position to actually be able to
empirically study the question of voter fraud. There are few academic papers on
the subject that I would not back myself to be able to read and understand.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have spent almost the entire past month digging into
various ways of trying to find voter fraud. Much of that work has been out of
the public eye, and not all of it was ever released officially to anyone. This
is how data digging works – you do a lot of analysis for everything you
actually write, in the “measure twice, cut once” manner.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And I can tell you, as someone who’s hunted very hard for it
– voter fraud is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">extremely difficult to
prove using only public data</i>, whether it actually happens or not.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To which you might immediately think – that’s because there
isn’t much voter fraud!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On the contrary. It is not at all difficult to find
extremely alarming and weird anomalies in election data.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A good working definition of fraud is “wrong data entered
for malicious reasons”. The big challenge is that a good working definition of
data errors is “wrong data entered for innocent reasons”.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The extremely hard part is thus not finding anomalous and
suspicious patterns in the data, but proving with certainty that these arise
due to malicious intent. Moreover, one has to rule out every possible innocent
reason these errors could arise, where the functional form of errors is allowed
to be incredibly vague. Further still, the counties and election officials are
given almost every single benefit of the doubt. Moldbug is right on this point.
<a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2012/11/adore-river-of-meat/">The
sovereign is he who determines the null hypothesis</a>.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One can very easily find <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">loads
</i>of extremely suspicious things in the data.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One can find 169 updates in the New York Times county-level
election update data where the vote count in one category (in-person or
absentee) actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">decreased </i>in an
update. Here is <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2020/11/explosive-new-data-from-rigorous-statistical-analysis-points-to-voter-fraud-in-montgomery-county-pa/">one
of the most suspicious</a>, in Montgomery County, PA which still hasn’t been
well-explained. You have not even <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">heard </i>of
the remaining 168. Here’s the count by state:<br />
<br />
<br />
<span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="background: white; color: #222222;">
state | Freq. Percent
Cum.</span><span face=""Arial",sans-serif" style="color: #222222;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">------------+-----------------------------------</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> AL |
1 0.59
0.59</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> AR |
12 7.10
7.69</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> AZ |
5 2.96
10.65</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> FL |
3 1.78
12.43</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> GA |
24 14.20 26.63</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> IA |
20 11.83 38.46</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> ID |
1 0.59
39.05</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> IN |
1 0.59
39.64</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> KS |
2 1.18
40.83</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> MA |
1 0.59
41.42</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> MI |
21 12.43 53.85</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> MS |
1 0.59
54.44</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> NH |
1 0.59
55.03</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> NJ |
4 2.37
57.40</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> NM |
1 0.59
57.99</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> NY |
3 1.78
59.76</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> PA |
9 5.33
65.09</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> SC |
30 17.75 82.84</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> TX |
11 6.51
89.35</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> UT |
1 0.59
89.94</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> VA |
15 8.88
98.82</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> WI |
1 0.59
99.41</span><br />
<span style="background: white;"> WV |
1 0.59
100.00</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">------------+-----------------------------------</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Several of the disputed and contentious states are heavily
represented – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania. But so are places you haven’t
heard of. Arkansas. Virginia. Iowa. South Carolina.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">(By the by, through my various digging, Virginia is my bet
for “state with the most election fraud in 2020 that you never read about”, and not just because of the metric above)</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Look at how much work went into the <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2020/11/explosive-new-data-from-rigorous-statistical-analysis-points-to-voter-fraud-in-montgomery-county-pa/">analysis
of Montgomery PA</a>, which covered one of these data points, trying to rule out every possible innocent explanation,
and showing additional evidence that points to fraud. Do you think anyone is
digging that much into the remaining 168? The NYT data can be downloaded in a bunch of places, and it's not hard to find these updates. I've looked at them, about half of them are quite small, less than 100 votes. Some of the rest look like a single set of ballots being reclassified from one category to another. But even after taking out all of these, there's a large number of these where frankly I have no idea what's going on, and I doubt you would either.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One can find vote updates that look like colossal outliers
in terms of the fairly intuitive rule that updates can be either large, or
unrepresentative, but not generally both. Here’s a <a href="https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020">long
analysis</a> of this. The most suspicious, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia (surely a coincidence with the states identified on the metric above!),
also came in the middle of the night, and were large enough to swing the
election. The defenders argue that this is all just normal absentee votes. At
least for Milwaukee, one can also find corroborating evidence in suspicious
patterns in <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/11/evidence-suggesting-voter-fraud-in.html?zx=44829d36ec252811">down-ballot
races too</a>, that at least don’t fit simple stories about mail ballots.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But suppose you don’t believe the New York Times data. That
could all just be errors! Indeed. Couldn’t it all.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">One can find 58 Pennsylvania registered voters born in the
year 1800, 11 born between 1801 and 1899, and 25 born in 1900. Admittedly, these particular cases are more likely just errors - if
this is voter fraud, it’s the stupidest form ever, since it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. But it proves beyond any doubt that errors in this data do
not get checked or corrected anywhere. And indeed, these implausible years of
birth are in fact the mere tip of the iceberg of suspicious patterns in
birthdays, which follow much more <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2020/12/pennsylvania-election-fraud-exposed-by-suspicious-birthdays/">notable
patterns indicating fraud</a> involving round numbered days of the month and
months of the year, plus month distributions that are too smooth. These patterns consistent with fraud are related to counties voting for Biden, including at record levels.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or suppose you don’t believe statistics at all. You insist on hard evidence! In Wayne
County, MI, you can find totally normal scenes from election night, like them <a href="https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/11/05/let-us-in-michigan-voter-counters-cover-up-windows-amid-accusations-of-violations-992983/">boarding
up the windows</a> in the vote counting center to stop observers even seeing
in. In Fulton County, GA, you had the insane spectacle that on election night,
election officials sent all the observers home, telling them that counting was
over for the night. In the press, dubious accounts were circulated implying
that a burst pipe was the cause, although it turns out that <a href="https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/slow-leak-text-messages-cast-doubt-on-georgia-officials-burst-pipe-excuse-for-pause-in-counting/news-story/19176f5113512210517c82debe684392">may
have been from that morning, or may not have happened at all</a>. In any case,
an hour later, they started counting again, with no observers in the room,
using ballots in suitcases under a desk that had been delivered at 8:30am that
day. Oh, and all this was <a href="https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1334741192991502336">caught on video</a>.
As part of this, you can also watch the officials scan the <a href="https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1335218367406477313">same set of
ballots multiple times</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As has been
noted before – if this were happening in a third world country, the State
Department would declare it presumptively fraudulent. This isn't an exhaustive list. This is the ones I managed to remember and write down, while working furiously on other things over the whole period, and where the main allegations were actually caught on video. If you go through everything alleged in affidavits in lawsuit, many are much more shocking, though also harder to verify.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My point is not that you should believe this absolutely
nails down fraud, let along how widespread you should infer the fraud to be based on these incidents. My point is to emphasise how difficult the task is, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">even if there were actually fraud</i>. Fraud
would look exactly like this. People switching votes back and forth to swing a
total, or deleting inconvenient votes from the count. Bringing fake and
colossally unrepresentative ballot dumps in during the middle of the
night. Registering tons of fake voters to flood in mail ballots. Counting happening in secret after
observers are sent home under false pretenses. Reports coming in from whistleblowers in affidavits.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But how sure are you that these aren’t just data errors in
very noisy data? That someone incorrectly entered a vote total in a database,
and later corrected it? That patterns in absentee ballots, while highly weird,
represent odd preferences of mail-in voters? That the ballots in Georgia were
all scanned regularly, and that the machine will never count ballots twice if
they’re scanned twice, and that there’s not some innocent mixup as to why
everyone was sent home? That the witnesses in the lawsuits were confused about what they saw?</p><p class="MsoNormal">If every benefit of the doubt is given to the other side, what's the chances you can ever overcome them all?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Suppose, like a number of readers, you are in the category
of someone who still isn’t convinced. There’s some weird stuff going on, sure,
but it doesn’t rise to the level of “fraud may have decided the election result”.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Three good questions to ask are the following.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">What kind of voter fraud do you have in mind?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span> </span>What evidence </span><i style="text-indent: -0.25in;">would</i><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> actually convince you that there might have been this kind of
voter fraud?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">3. <span> </span>What data is actually available, and based on
this, how likely is it that this evidence might ever conceivably be discovered?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The first question, as it turns out, is actually the most
important. Because fraud comes in many different types, and the likelihood of
catching them varies enormously.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The most egregious type is to make up election returns out
of whole cloth. In this version, the vote totals are plucked from someone’s
head, and don’t correspond to any actual ballots or button presses in the real
world.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This type is actually the most likely to get caught. Totally
fake numbers leave lots of traces that can be studied by things like digit
analysis via <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law">Benford’s
Law</a>. Only the most basket case third world countries do this. I think one
can say with high certainty that, at the conservative end, this does not occur
very often in US elections, and I would wager strongly in America does not
occur at all.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The next category of obvious fraud is when some dictator
reports winning 99% of the vote. Like Theodore Dalrymple observed about
propaganda in communist countries, this kind of election is not actually meant
to convince anyone, but rather to humiliate them, to insist on obvious lies and
dare them to say differently.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But even here, most of the argument about fraud is already
at the level of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">smell test</i>. Suppose
you had to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prove statistically</i> that
it was impossible that these election results in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Cuba#National_elections">Cuba</a>
or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Syrian_presidential_election">Syria</a>
were genuine. How exactly would you do it? I suspect you’ll find it’s a lot
harder than you might think. Bear in mind, in 2020 the “Norristown 2-2”
precinct in Montgomery County had reported mail-in votes up to November 10<sup>th</sup>
where Biden had won 98.7% of the two-party vote, across 150 votes. Please tell
me how you plan to show that this number is genuine, yet Assad’s 88.7% of the
vote is not. Not by digging up the raw ballots (though even here, if Assad can produce his fake ballots, you may still be out of luck). From your computer, which is what nearly all of us have had to do.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Or put it differently. Suppose that Assad in Syria decided
to rig the elections, but instead of generating insane levels of support, he
decided to replace all the genuine ballots with fake ones that showed him
getting support levels between 60% and 71%, with turnout at 70% of the
electorate. He has total control of the vote counting process.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">You know this is bullshit. But that’s not the question. How
would you go about proving it?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Almost anything below the first two cases – making up
numbers whole, or 90% vote shares – is actually extremely difficult to prove,
even if it’s occurring. I mean, he kicked out the observers, which is pretty bad. But so did Fulton County, GA, and kept on counting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Let’s take some scenarios more likely to actually occur in
the US.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">You are an election official who is not being closely
monitored. There is a list of eligible voters in your precinct. Suppose it is a
normal year, with relatively few absentee/mail ballots. You have hidden a genuine
ballot box of pre-filled in ballots, with genuine ballot papers, that you know
contains 1000 votes total, of which 97% are for your candidate. All registered
voters in your precinct are on a list, and get crossed off as they come in. You
wait until polls close, and you can see the list of everyone who hasn’t voted.
You cross 1000 names off the list, and bring in your pre-filled in box of
ballots, mingling it with the main ones.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How do you propose to identify <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that </i>in the data? If you had
periodic updates, you can maybe find batches that look really anomalous, sure. That’s
what <a href="https://votepatternanalysis.substack.com/p/voting-anomalies-2020">this
analysis did</a>! And <a href="https://www.revolver.news/2020/11/explosive-new-data-from-rigorous-statistical-analysis-points-to-voter-fraud-in-montgomery-county-pa/">this
one</a>! The scenario wasn’t exactly the same, but it was similar. Did you find
it sufficient proof?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In this particular variant, every voter is a genuine,
registered voter. Every voter votes exactly once. Every ballot paper is a
genuine ballot. Every vote corresponds to a ballot paper that can be counted and re-counted. No ballot gives any indication it was not cast by a genuine voter.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Let us agree on this much. Unless you catch the person in
the act, this will be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">flat out impossible
to detect </i>just by looking at final election results. I actually don’t know
how you’d prove it with any other data either. Don’t believe me? Propose a
test. I’m all ears. I have heard stories from campaign operatives that this
actually happens, I didn’t think up this idea myself.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But I’m not here to convince you to <i>believe </i>those stories.
Suppose one accepts, as indeed you’re told, that there is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">no evidence of this kind of voter fraud</i>. It’s true. There broadly isn’t.
Now, ask yourself, what’s the signal to noise ratio of this kind of lack of
evidence? If there were no voter fraud of this kind, we’d expect to find no evidence. If
there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were </i>voter fraud of this type,
but we lacked any realistic ability to catch it, we would also expect to
find no evidence. So the lack of evidence tells us almost precisely zero one way or
the other.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Especially germane to the current election, there are many
types of fraud involving mail ballots. It is much easier for a person to send
in mail ballots for someone else, than to turn up at a polling station and
claim to be five different people of different ages. This mail then gets
handled by postal workers, with a crazily weak chain of custody, from the same
people that lead to your Amazon packages being stolen with reasonable
frequency. This leads to a number of stories you can find for the search string
“<a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fbi-investigating-mail-in-ballots-found-in-trash-outside-board-of-elections/ar-BB19p3up">ballots
found</a> <a href="https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/10/07/usps-worker-charged-after-nj-mail-ballots-found-dumpster-north-arlington-nj-west-orange-nj/5910341002/">in
the trash</a>”. Meanwhile, signature verification on potentially fraudulent
ballots got greatly weakened in 2020 in many of the key states, just as the number of mail ballots increased massively, as described in
the <a href="https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/admin/2020/Press/SCOTUSFiling.pdf?utm_content=&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_name=&amp;utm_source=govdelivery&amp;utm_term=">Texas
lawsuit</a>. A discussion I had with a campaign operative (which I haven’t been
able to verify, so I’m just reporting the claim, not asserting it) said that in
Arizona, once the signature was verified on the envelope, the envelope got
thrown away, making it impossible for anyone to verify after the fact what it
said.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Don’t think about “was there fraud”. I’m not interested in the
question of haggling over the specific details here of what precisely happened
in each place, and you can make up your own mind on that. Rather, I care much more about the question of “if there were fraud, would it have been caught?”</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And here’s the crazy part, if you’re sure that election
fraud in general would have been caught. 2020 is actually the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">single best year in history </i>to catch
election fraud. Because unlike in the past, we have periodic snapshots taken by
internet amateurs of the update of counts scraped from the NYT website, rather
than just the final tally. We can also download a ton of stuff from the
internet.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For most past elections, we can get final vote counts at the
precinct level if we’re lucky, or the county level more likely. Votes by
candidate. That’s it. You want to go back and find out if the 2016 election was
fraudulent, that’s basically the overwhelming extent of the data you’ve got to
work with. Oh, and four years later, that data is still riddled with errors,
because it has to get kludged together from 3300 odd counties, with vastly
different reporting systems.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tell me what kinds of fraud you are confident you can
identify from those numbers. Not just you, but “the experts” who study this
stuff.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I understand enough about this data to know that while there
are clearly some tricks one can do if one is clever, there are large and
fundamental limitations to how much fraud you can ever hope to identify from
this kind of data.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And that’s it. That’s basically what you’ve got. Or you can
hope that someone does something dumb and gets caught in the act. But is that
the state of the art strategy? How many would slip through the net for each one
that gets caught, like in Fulton County GA? Not that anything is going to happen to the people in Fulton County, which also is quite revealing. In a year, I predict fairly confidently it will be one more rumored and then forgotten local story, and the videos will eventually disappear. Along those lines, if more evidence does come to light, you certainly can't publish them on Youtube, no matter what you find from here on out, as they've said that their policy is to delete all such videos. Big tech has spoken! The matter is closed. There is no evidence of voter fraud, and also, you had a total of four weeks to come up with any of it, before the verdict is entered for all time. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I think there is a strong case to be made that, for many
types of fraud, catching them is extremely difficult.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And so almost the entire question comes down to one of
priors. We have no reasonable hope of actually identifying it from the data.
Most people are sure it is extremely rare. I am not. The evidence demanded to
budge their priors is enormous. That evidence will never be found, whether
there is fraud, or whether there is no fraud.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And so finally, we get to the last question. Even if fraud <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could </i>be caught, eventually, somehow,
with enough time and analysis and manpower, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">would
it be caught in time?</i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Reader, prepare yourself, because the next sentence may be shocking to you. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The Trump campaign, in many respects, was not very well
organized.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But I have come to have enormous sympathy for the sheer
scale and difficulty of the task in front of them, even if they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">were </i>well organized.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A campaign is not a permanent organization, but a bunch of
operatives coming together for a particular period and task. I suspect, and it
accords with the few anecdotal discussions I’ve had with people who’ve worked
on them, that most presidential campaigns are a shitshow at the best of times,
but some candidate has to win, so we assume after the fact that their campaign
internally must have been great, when it probably wasn’t.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So what happens after the dubious election returns start
coming in in the dead of night on Wednesday after the election?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">You have a small staff. Most of it is lawyers and political
operatives, not statisticians and data scientists. Everyone is absolutely
frazzled. You are trying to put out a thousand fires. You are trying to
coordinate dozens of people and teams. Everyone is demoralised and worrying about their employment future, since most were working on an implicit promise of employment in the administration if they won, which is now looking unlikely. You are trying to keep track of ten
thousand different leads and reports coming in from all over the country. Half
of them will be straight up wrong, either bogus third hand accounts, or claims from someone genuinely concerned but
insufficiently skeptical and not probing into alternatives. Avoiding this is
actually quite hard, to be honest. When one really wants to find fraud (or
indeed any empirical result) it is psychologically difficult to then switch
gears to convincing oneself of all the ways the hypothesis could be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">false</i>, and then trying to find evidence
of that.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of the other half of the leads, perhaps 80% will be plausible,
but either inconclusive, or admitting of multiple interpretations. Of genuine
ones, they may be contained in a two hour video that’s not very well explained,
and you don’t have time to watch the whole thing. They may be written down in
some long technical piece that you don’t have the training to follow entirely, or which doesn't explain clearly what its doing.
Even if you think it seems legit and you understand what it’s doing, you have
to take a gamble that it’s not a coding error or bad data cleaning or some
other screwup. They may be some anonymous whistleblower that you have to spend
resources to try to find out if they’re fake or well-intentioned, if they’re
right or wrong, if their claims are provable or unprovable.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now, you have to figure out, can I get this in an affidavit?
Is this author willing to go public? Will this convince a judge? Can I get an
expert witness to testify, assuming a judge is even interested in hearing
evidence, which often they're not? As far as I can tell, the statistical analyses I liked the most were
all written pseudonymously. It is not a surprise that they didn’t find their
way into the major lawsuits. The Williams professor who did a god damn
confidence interval for the Matt Braynard analysis got dragged in the papers by
his utterly contemptible colleagues. The chances that they would do this if he’d
computed a confidence interval for literally any other survey in history are
zero. Are you surprised that more people aren't signing up to put their professional reputations on the line for what's almost certainly a Hail Mary, and which won't even benefit them personally?</p><p class="MsoNormal">But even if you can find an expert willing to go public, how long do they
have to generate such a report? You need to scramble to scrape and download the data straight away from lots of sources, and start analyzing it.
Find the weird anomalies, dig into them, try to figure out which ones might be
errors. Think of different ways to test them. Think of different data you might
get that would corroborate this. Manually do more gathering, and cleaning, and merging. Think of which things might rise above the metric
of “dubious” to “very hard to explain with anything other than fraud”. Run the
results. Double check the results. Triple check the results, because if you
start making false claims, you’ve actively hurt the cause (and you’ll feel like
a total fool and fraud). Start writing the results up. Refine the writeup to
make it less jargon-y. Try to balance the tension between “easily accessible to
public readers”, “understandable to smart but busy and innumerate lawyers” and
“detailed enough to withstand public scrutiny by hostile experts or readers”.
Also, there’s dozens of different investigative angles you can take. Each one takes a few
days or a week to look into, let alone write up, let alone actually get published. You’re pulling 80 hour weeks, but even so,
there’s not many weeks you have. How many such analyses can you write? Meanwhile, you're working against the clock without knowing quite what the deadline is for "too late to matter", but you know it can't be very long. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now, consider the media environment you are operating in, if
you are the Trump team. The same media that in 2016 was willing to report
uncritically every breathless allegation of Russian interference, that was
willing to circulate as evidence a single anonymous dossier of allegations
about Trump and treat it as a basis for campaign wiretaps and impeachment, now
is loudly insisting that a) the race is over, and b) “experts assure us there
is no voter fraud”. Meanwhile, on the rare occasions they do report on the
matter, they only focus on the most ludicrous witness statements and the most
easily debunked claims. These are sure to circulate widely, so that by the time
previously open-minded readers get around to seeing actual good evidence,
they’re largely exhausted and cynical, and often won't even read it.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Partly for the fun of trolling, and partly just as an
experiment, I started asking the Montgomery County twitter account, and its
commissioner in charge of the election, Ken Lawrence Jr, why it was that their county looked so crooked
on multiple dimensions, both in terms of having the most suspicious vote update
in America, and the third most suspicious set of voter birthdays among
Pennsylvania counties. They never answered. I tried poking newspaper reporters
from multiple papers. Most didn’t bite. Ross Douthat, to his credit, linked to
the Montgomery piece, admittedly in a one-liner in his NYT article on how weird
it is that these kooks believe in conspiracy theories. I asked him in multiple
places – have you, or any other journalist, actually just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">asked </i>these guys in Montgomery County what their explanation is for
it? Even just to get a response on the record? No dice. Nobody was interested. Hell, I couldn't even get a response out of the Pennsylvania Republican Party twitter account!</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I didn’t really expect anything different, so my demeanour
was mostly one of trollish entertainment, rather than disappointment. But at
the end, even I found myself more cynical than I expected.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If you are Republican, and alleging voter fraud by the Democrats,
the media will be actively opposed to you at every single step. How could they
not be? These are the same people that have been writing about how Trump was
Hitler for the past four years. Does any reasonable person expect them to
voluntarily start digging into stories that might make Trump actually get another
four years, when they can just turn a blind eye and end it all? Besides, if
they start being called a voter fraud truther, it will be disaster for their
career.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There is one more piece of the puzzle worth noting.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">How many people do you think there actually were working on
this, total, over the past month? At least on the data side?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The average person probably assumes that there must have
been thousands of highly paid professionals working on it.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I estimate that the number is perhaps 40 at the high end, and maybe as low
as 20. (If the sides had been flipped, it would definitely be more, perhaps a lot more, but I don't know). I’d estimate that nearly all of them were volunteers juggling other full
time jobs. I personally knew about ten of them working on analysis, and there were a number of other excellent people helping enormously with data gathering and processing. </p><p class="MsoNormal">That's it. That's the full extent of resources around the world that have gone into investigating from a statistical point of view whether the 2020 election may have been decided by fraud. With the time and resources available, it's remarkable we found as much as we did.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">At least personally, I never really expected to change the outcome. The task was basically impossible, but damn it, we worked until
the end anyway.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is all one can ever do. </p><p class="MsoNormal">To live not by lies, as Mr Solzhenitsyn <a href="https://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php">put it</a>.</p><p class="MsoNormal">And to fill the unforgiving minute with
sixty seconds worth of distance run, as Mr Kipling <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---">put it</a>.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">To the ten, and to all those I know who helped in the effort – friends, it was a true honour and pleasure to
work with you.</p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-68350947579226085312020-11-07T10:03:00.003-08:002020-11-07T10:03:51.218-08:00Evidence Suggesting Voter Fraud in Milwaukee<p> I posted a version of this on twitter, but a) the writing format there is so ugly, and b) who knows how long that thread might last. So here it is for the record. </p><p>I’ve been looking at the vote counts within Milwaukee, and there’s suspicious patterns in the data that need explaining. Proving fraud is difficult, but there’s a lot of irregularities here that point in that direction. First, the tl;dr, then the main analysis.</p><p>1.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Democrat votes started increasing massively relative to Republicans after Tuesday night counts. This can’t be accounted for by explanations like heavily Democratic wards reporting later. When we look at the changes *within wards*, 96.6% of them favored the Democrats.</p><p>2.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Democrats also improved massively against third party candidates, whereas Republicans and third party candidates showed similar changes to each other. Since there’s little incentive to manipulate third party counts, this implies that the big change after Tuesday night is in Democrat votes, not in Republican ones. </p><p>3.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When we compare different down ballot races, we find that Democrat increases within each ward were larger in races where the Democrat candidate was initially behind in the overall race on Tuesday night – that is, relatively more Democrat votes appeared in races where they were more likely to alter the outcome.</p><p>4.<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This result is easy to explain by fraud, but is much more complicated to explain by other explanations like Democrats mostly voting by mail. Most such theories predict all Democrat candidates should benefit in equal proportions within a ward, not that more votes come in exactly where they’re most needed. </p><p>Ward-level vote counts are from the <a href="(https://county.milwaukee.gov/EN/County-Clerk/Off-Nav/Election-Results/Election-Results-Fall-2020)">Milwaukee County Clerk</a> at 7pm last night and the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201104040300/https://county.milwaukee.gov/EN/County-Clerk/Off-Nav/Election-Results/Election-Results-Fall-2020">archived version</a> from the count as it stood on election night . </p><p>This idea came from Spotted Toad, who’s been doing great work on this too. I’m looking at Presidential, Congress, State Senate and Assembly races. One way to look at what happened is to compare the percentage increase in votes for Republican Candidates versus Democrat candidates within each ward after election night.</p><p>For instance, suppose the Democrat candidate vote total went up 200% from initial counting to Thursday night. How much did the Republican vote total go up? If the distribution of votes before and after is the same, the percentage gains for each group should be similar, regardless of who was ahead.</p><p>This is very different from the normal reason where candidate totals in the entire state might change as counting goes on, as different reports come in from other parts of the city. That just shows that wards differ from each other. Rather, we’re testing whether the *same ward * should continue to find the same distribution of votes before and after Tuesday night. </p><p>In other words, if the before and after distributions were the same, as votes come from the same pool, you’d expect that half the time, the Republicans got a slightly unlucky draw in the early votes, and end up improving their position (regardless of whether they ultimately win or lose). And roughly half the time, the Democrats should increase their votes by more. </p><p>What actually happens? The Democrat candidate vote increases relative to the Republican candidate a crazy fraction of the time. The variable in question is percentage increase in Democrat vote totals for that ward (that is, the percentage change from Tuesday night to Thursday night), minus percentage increase in Republican vote totals. </p><p>So a value above zero means that Democrat totals went up more than Republicans in that ward/race. A value of 500 means that the Democrats went up 500% in excess of the republicans (e.g. D votes grew 600%, R votes grew 100%). Here’s a graph of the histogram. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0prIydYznnUDwVAl3PmUNwXTlJyicAdQBc15LoNuFEvSf1QwIOTBWKJU6iRrimTg4eZvFXYkGgExOnZF4UQdLQnay6tcVMbfxNULqyChX82_P0QBYT5r6Uh0tT8mtubw1jxd2giMiWDo/s1628/Hist_Dem_Rep+-+Copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1184" data-original-width="1628" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0prIydYznnUDwVAl3PmUNwXTlJyicAdQBc15LoNuFEvSf1QwIOTBWKJU6iRrimTg4eZvFXYkGgExOnZF4UQdLQnay6tcVMbfxNULqyChX82_P0QBYT5r6Uh0tT8mtubw1jxd2giMiWDo/w640-h466/Hist_Dem_Rep+-+Copy.png" width="640" /></a></div><p>You see an enormously right skewed distribution –tons of large gains for Democrats, very few gains for Republicans. Not only do Democrats very often increase more than Republicans, but when they do, it’s often by a colossal amount. </p><p>Out of the 1217 ward/race combinations with non-missing early votes for both parties, 1037 saw relative increases for the Democrats, 37 saw relative increases for Republicans, and 143 were ties. Excluding the ties, the D “win” fraction here is 96.6%. A remarkable feat!</p><p>Depending on how you assign ties, if this were a 50/50 coin (i.e. D and R were equally likely to gain relative to the other), the probability or p-value for this is between 10^-147 and a number Excel just lists as “0”.</p><p>So, this proves incontrovertibly that <i>something</i> about the count skews crazily towards the Democrats after 2am Wednesday. But it doesn’t prove what it is. Maybe they counted different types of ballots or something, but only starting at 4am. </p><p>However, there’s one thing we <i>can</i> test – from which party’s votes is the weirdness coming from? We can answer things by looking at vote changes for other candidates – third party races, write-in candidates etc. </p><p>We can be virtually certain that nobody is bothering to manipulate the vote totals for fringe, no-hope write-in candidates. These form a great placebo group – what might you expect the changes to look like for a group where nobody is manipulating the totals?</p><p>So let’s do the same thing as the earlier graph, but compare each part with “Miscellaneous”, which because the count is small, I aggregate together. I also limit the sample here to cases where there’s at least 5 votes for “Misc” in that ward by 2am Wednesday, to make sure that this isn’t coming from rounding (e.g. if you have only 1 vote, the minimum increase is 100%). </p><p>What are we predicting to find? Well, if it’s the Democrat total that’s being wildly inflated, Democrats should also be increasing relative to Miscellaneous. Meanwhile, if Republicans are just being counted as normal, then their changes should look similar to the Miscellaneous Group.</p><p>And that’s basically what we find. First, Democrats vs Miscellaneous. Visually, the picture looks even more crazily skewed than the previous one. In terms of counts, Democrats improve relative to Miscellaneous in 520 ward/race observations. They tie 89 times, and Miscellaneous improves in relative terms just 3 times. That’s not a typo.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwuBtWl_FglrQNDuoRmDpgidJNs0aQud3FpK-2P_rKzljRyXytV7a_MvrCaKhC7gZwMXhshNbYLlOstrnig6AoRyWNfynvGBGrVIwWmF8guCl9kF2Ciuio7YKKd9EY9nq1CZnj3wby1Hg/s1628/Hist_Dem_Misc+-+Copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1184" data-original-width="1628" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwuBtWl_FglrQNDuoRmDpgidJNs0aQud3FpK-2P_rKzljRyXytV7a_MvrCaKhC7gZwMXhshNbYLlOstrnig6AoRyWNfynvGBGrVIwWmF8guCl9kF2Ciuio7YKKd9EY9nq1CZnj3wby1Hg/w640-h466/Hist_Dem_Misc+-+Copy.png" width="640" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>This corresponds to p-values between 10^-73 and 10^-177. The fraction of Democratic “wins” here (520/523), excluding ties, is a ludicrous 99.4%. </p><p>So how do Republicans compare with Miscellaneous? It turns out that while they’re not exactly the same, they’re far, far more similar to each other than either is to the Democrats . Other than a few outliers (because “Miscellaneous” has very few votes in total, remember), the distribution is fairly symmetric around zero. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoVI-0mqlrMkN_gakCGmUgLTTJtKU388qcos0N6PO-_evyaqlJa9SQYgRJn-cBoJ6zYR-7Pyt-tZNeq2zlHUOjZtdIbIIwT_eF73GLxLPuwBDJak8swcvW43mok5Vn0UgSQcMt7P9LYas/s1628/Hist_Rep_Misc+-+Copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1184" data-original-width="1628" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoVI-0mqlrMkN_gakCGmUgLTTJtKU388qcos0N6PO-_evyaqlJa9SQYgRJn-cBoJ6zYR-7Pyt-tZNeq2zlHUOjZtdIbIIwT_eF73GLxLPuwBDJak8swcvW43mok5Vn0UgSQcMt7P9LYas/w640-h466/Hist_Rep_Misc+-+Copy.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p>In terms of counts, Republicans improve relative to Miscellaneous 179 times, Miscellaneous improves 251 times, and there are 74 ties. As a result, which p-value you get here depends enormously on how you allocate the ties. Give them to M, and it’s 10^-11. Give them to R, and it’s 0.55, or almost exactly chance (253 vs 251). </p><p>Excluding ties, the R “win” percentage is 41.6%. So under some measures, they look slightly worse, but this ends up being affected by questions of rounding and the small vote totals for M. What’s incontrovertible is that D looks wildly, wildly different from either of them.</p><p>This is exactly what the null would predict, if votes before look like votes after. So this *does* roughly hold, but only when comparing Republicans vs Miscellaneous. This story is also inconsistent with the driver being something Trump did, like telling all his supporters to vote in-person. If so, why do changes in Miscellaneous votes look about the same? The important difference after Tuesday night, whatever you think it is, is coming on the Democrat side.</p><p>So maybe you’re wondering – are there reasons other than fraud that the ballots might be different before and after? If the ordering is random and they’re drawn from the same pool, no. But if each ward counts different types in a different order (those at 9am versus 4pm, or in-person versus mail-in), then this could happen. </p><p>Whatever is making the vote distributions different before and after, it’s a factor that’s overwhelmingly just impacting Democrats, not Republicans. If you think it’s about in-person versus postal voting, you have to hypothesize that Republicans look kind of similar to Miscellaneous in this respect. This is possible, but not nearly as obvious. </p><p>But there’s another more important aspect we can test here. In particular, if some of these Democrat increases are due to fraud, we would expect that the increases should be larger *when the fraud is more likely to impact the race. And since these include lots of down-ballot races like State Assembly Representatives, we have quite a lot of variation here. </p><p>Sometimes the Democrat is way up after early counting, at which point it doesn’t matter much if they post big relative gains after that. But if the Democratic candidate is down early on, jacking up the total becomes much more important. I’m assuming that if the Party wants to rig votes, they’d also like to win as many races as possible for the least amount of rigging.</p><p>In other words, the comparison is now between two different races at the same ward. A Democrat voter comes to the ballot box or mailbox, and sees a number of races. For some, like President, it’s going to be a close call. For others, it might be a heavy favorite for the Democrat. </p><p>The voter is a Democrat, so presumably he’s inclined to vote Democrat for both. We can compare within a given ward which of the two races showed bigger improvement for the Democrats in that particular ward after Tuesday night. </p><p>Sure enough, the increase in Democrats relative to Republicans (the variable in our first histogram) is significantly higher when the Democratic race-wide vote share is lower during the early counting. In other words, within each ward, late vote counts break more heavily to Democrat in exactly those races where the change in votes is likely to affect the result.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9WsghuMx-tVce1Rjn4a8MyYQXefLMWWryGW3CXKgvOKurMSYyzdbXW_YGou_NL8qqlL-dmGV_a13aRauQBhx-BvOpRNWSTAE8kNSCB2Pb7_5LbAVcmcrhsPCiWqfTWCozx4C5ymRVYAY/s1628/Scatter_DR_VoteShare+-+Copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1184" data-original-width="1628" height="466" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9WsghuMx-tVce1Rjn4a8MyYQXefLMWWryGW3CXKgvOKurMSYyzdbXW_YGou_NL8qqlL-dmGV_a13aRauQBhx-BvOpRNWSTAE8kNSCB2Pb7_5LbAVcmcrhsPCiWqfTWCozx4C5ymRVYAY/w640-h466/Scatter_DR_VoteShare+-+Copy.png" width="640" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>How big is this effect? Well, one way to measure it is to see how many races it impacted. There were 8 races where Republicans were ahead on a two-party basis on Wednesday morning. By Thursday night, half of them had flipped to Democratic. By contrast, there were 19 races where the Democrat was ahead, and not a single one flipped to the Republicans. </p><p>And again, let’s recall what we’re observing here. It’s not that the races flipped because suddenly wards that were known to be heavy Democrat strongholds started reporting in. Rather, more votes started coming in for Democrats relative to the ratio that was coming in for that exact same ward the previous night. Moreover, within each ward, the votes also skewed more for races that the Democrats looked like they might lose. </p><p>Importantly, this finding is surprisingly hard to explain with the commonly cited reasons for Democrats pulling ahead overall. For instance, one of the claims is that mail-in ballots are counted late, and these are more heavily Democrat. In general, this doesn’t explain why within the same ward, some races later skew Democrat more than others.</p><p>The key part is that for each voter, the decision to take a mail-in ballot is common to all races. In other words, a single voter can’t vote for some races by mail, and others in person. So if your claim is that the overall skew to Democrats is a mail ballot effect, most versions of this explanation predict that all races should be equally affected.</p><p>To simplify the logic, consider a stylized example where all Democrats and Republicans vote straight ticket. More Democrats vote by mail, and these are counted late. This would predict that Democrats overall would improve, but the expected improvement is the same for all races, regardless of whether the Democrat is ahead or behind. </p><p>More ballots come in Democratic, they each vote for every Democrat, so all Democrats increase in the same percentage terms. This isn’t what we find. In the data, within a ward, the important races go up more than the unimportant races.</p><p>And this prediction, that all races should be equally affected, holds for a lot of other variations too. Does the answer change if every Democrat voter has a 90% chance of voting for each Democratic candidate, if this attitude is the same between Democrats who vote in-person versus those who vote by mail? No. The increase should be the same in all races.</p><p>The answer doesn’t even change if Democrat voters in general can’t be bothered as much voting for shoo-in candidates, and only cast their votes for tight races. As long as this instinct is the same in Democrats who vote by mail and those who vote in person, there should be no difference across races in how much they break late towards Democrats.</p><p>What you need is something complicated. Democrat voters can’t be bothered voting for candidates they like but who they know are going to win anyway, AND this instinct is somehow larger in Democrat voters who vote by mail than those who vote in person, AND there has to be a larger share of mail voting by Democrats overall. </p><p>This may sound like a confusing and complicated explanation. And it is! That’s kind of the point. We’re now a long way from the simple explanation that Democrats vote more by mail. It’s not impossible, of course, and we can’t rule it out. There are other variants on this story, but if you think this is all about mail-in ballots, there has to be some difference *within Democrat voters* who vote by mail versus in person.</p><p>In other words, the bare fact is that races swung much more towards Democrats exactly for those races where the Democrats were down on Wednesday early morning. To explain this with mail-in ballots needs a very complicated story. To explain it with fraud needs a very simple story – you commit fraud more where the fraud matters more. </p><p>This is why the evidence suggests fraud to me, but your mileage may vary here. I’ve tried very much to stick to the facts, because I don’t have any special ability to interpret the numbers above. Whatever is going in is crying out for explanation, and the simple alternatives don’t do it. To me, it looks pretty suspicious. </p><p>A final question worth pondering. What should our null hypothesis be here? When we say “there’s no evidence of it”, we’re claiming “no fraud” as the null hypothesis. But as <a href="https://twitter.com/shylockh/status/1324191329266651136">I’ve argued</a> (by metaphor), the system of vote counting is so rickety and broken that this is an incredibly difficult null to justify. </p><p></p><blockquote><p><i>A metaphor for the likelihood of voter fraud, for people who insist that it's a conspiracy theory, or there's no evidence of it.</i></p><p><i>Suppose Amazon wanted to know how many packages it had. Packages were kept in warehouses all over the country. The system was different in every warehouse.</i></p><p><i>Some people need to move packages around, and there's a list of who is allowed to do that in each warehouse. But if you go in and say you're that person, nobody checks. If someone else has already done that for you when you arrive, you just get another package.</i></p><p><i>Some packages get driven around by people in their own cars, some get moved around by the post office, some by volunteers or low paid government employees, and in each case they're largely unmonitored - there's no clear record of which ones left or arrived.</i></p><p><i>Packages are, by common consent, valuable for people to take. But nobody investigates closely what happens in each place, and very rarely are package thieves caught.</i></p><p><i>For what package system other than "votes" would this be considered a reliable and acceptable system?</i></p><p><i>For what important corporate outcome, if you proposed this setup as a manager, would you not be fired?</i></p><p><i>If someone told you there was no evidence of package fraud, how plausible would that claim be?</i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>I find the possibility of voter fraud entirely plausible, and that belief has nothing to do which party you think is doing it. At a minimum, I feel strongly that this possibility needs to be investigated more seriously than it is, given the evidence above.</p>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-43874165794056915832020-10-23T19:12:00.002-07:002020-10-25T06:24:47.605-07:00The fate of great researchIn one of the more poignant remarks to come from stand-up comedians, Conan O'Brien once wonderfully observed that, eventually, all graves go unattended. <div><div><br /></div><div>I was reading a while back this fantastic talk by Richard Hamming, "<a href="https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html">You and Your Research</a>". Byrne Hobart linked to it in one of his <a href="https://diff.substack.com/">newsletters</a>, when describing the nature of remote work:</div></div><div><blockquote><div><i><blockquote>[Hamming]: "I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don’t know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, “The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.” I don’t know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."</blockquote></i></div><div><i>[Hobart]: Working remote is a modern analog to Hamming’s closed-door policy: there’s an immediate productivity boost from reduced interruptions, but some of those interruptions are long-term course-corrections, and they’re valuable.</i></div></blockquote><p> Hamming's <a href="https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html">whole talk</a> is fantastic, talking about how to do what he calls "great research"</p><p></p><blockquote><i>And for the sake of describing great research I'll occasionally say Nobel-Prize type of work. It doesn't have to gain the Nobel Prize, but I mean those kinds of things which we perceive are significant things. Relativity, if you want, Shannon's information theory, any number of outstanding theories - that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. </i></blockquote><blockquote><i>Well I now come down to the topic, ``Is the effort to be a great scientist worth it?'' To answer this, you must ask people. When you get beyond their modesty, most people will say, ``Yes, doing really first-class work, and knowing it, is as good as wine, women and song put together,'' or if it's a woman she says, ``It is as good as wine, men and song put together.'' And if you look at the bosses, they tend to come back or ask for reports, trying to participate in those moments of discovery. They're always in the way. So evidently those who have done it, want to do it again. But it is a limited survey. I have never dared to go out and ask those who didn't do great work how they felt about the matter. It's a biased sample, but I still think it is worth the struggle. I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.</i></blockquote><p>So what happens when you do good research, or even great research? Does everything suffer the Conan O'Brien fate?</p><p>Let us start with a simple observation, so basic as to almost be trite.</p><p><i>All knowledge only exists in people's heads. </i></p><p>In the limit, if great knowledge is written down in a book, and then people never read the book, in some practical sense, it may as well not have existed. Sometimes, it has to be rediscovered again and again, after being forgotten. This happened with the cure for <a href="https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm">scurvy</a>, until vitamin C was isolated.</p><p>How does information get into people's heads? Well, they either have to read something, or get told it, or rediscover it themselves. </p><p>So far, so obvious. </p><p>For all the advances in technology, has our ability to read improved, or our ability to listen to conversation? Not obviously. Reading speed may have variation across people, but I've yet to come across anything indicating that it's improving. So let's assume that people's ability to read new source material is no better than in the past. </p><p>Now, as you look out on the world, you see that ever more people are doing research, and writing books and papers. Even if some large fraction of this is junk, and some proportion is active stupidity and anti-knowledge, the amount of genuine new knowledge is surely going up every year. </p><p>The amount of hours of life you have to read it all, even just the most important bits, in order to make advances at the frontier, is a little higher, but not much. And most of the increase happens at ages long past when you're likely to do any of Hamming's first-class work.</p><p>So how do people actually learn enough to advance knowledge? </p><p>Well, one way is to spend longer studying and become more specialised. The number of genuine polymaths making contributions in lots of different areas seems to be a lot less than in the days of the Royal Society. This is not a coincidence. Every now and then you get a Von Neumann or a Frank Ramsey, but they are towering and rare geniuses.</p><p>The other fate of great research, which is less discussed, is that if it is not to be forgotten, <i>it must be summarised. </i></p><p>How much debate and experiment went into establishing that matter is discrete, and made of atoms, rather than continuous? Or that atoms contain protons, neutrons and electrons? These were colossal contributions, made in painstaking ways by very smart people, resolving a debate that had gone back to the ancient Greeks and before. How do we reward such great work? They become the first sentence of a chemistry class. "Matter is made up of atoms". Boom. Next. There simply isn't time. One can go back to first principles, and read the individual experiments of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalton">Dalton</a> and others that established this - that certain combinations of gases tended to combine in fixed proportions, for instance. The Royal Society had the wonderful motto of "Nullius in verba" - take no man's word for it. This is a great aspirational attitude to have, but in practice one can't run all the experiments that make up all of human knowledge. You may well want to know what the experimental evidence actually <i>is</i>. But you probably will end up taking someone's word for it, somewhere, about how those experiments proceeded. How could it be otherwise? How many hours are there in a life?</p><p>For the true giants like Newton, their names stay attached to the principles they come up with. But even this is rare. Knowledge of authorship is additional bits of information that people have to carry around in their heads. Is it crucial to know who established each experiment? Or could the time spent learning this be better spent learning more actual facts or principles about the world?</p><p>In the fullness of time, if you actually do great work, the praise of posterity will sooner or later be that your work becomes a sentence or two in a summary of a textbook, a contribution to the body of research that every scientist must ingest as fast as possible in order to be able to spend the rest of their lives advancing the frontiers of knowledge. Every page you write, every concept you advance, competes for space in the heads of readers, the pages of textbook authors, and the minutes of this short life. The competition is brutal and Darwinian. Knowledge must evolve to get condensed into shorter and crisper forms, or it risks simply being forgotten. As the time increases, and the amount of new work increases too, the probability of one or other of these outcomes goes to one. </p><p>In this respect, one of the great unappreciated works of public service are the efforts of those who do the reading and summarising. <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/">Scott Alexander</a> is extremely high on this list - his summaries of other people's books are fantastic, often way more pithy than the original, and include important editorial judgment on strengths and weaknesses. <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/">Mencius Moldbug</a> did a similarly great service by reading and synthesizing a huge number of old primary sources that you and I would never have come across otherwise. I have a strong suspicion that over 99% of people currently living who have read Thomas Hutchinson's <a href="https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-hutchinson-strictures-upon-the-declaration-of-independence">Strictures Upon the Declaration of Independence</a> are no more than one degree removed from a Moldbug reader.</p><p>I think that from this point of view, one should also not be ashamed about mostly reading the abstracts of papers. You can convert the number of hours left in your life, to a number spent reading, to a reading speed, to a total number of pages of text that you will be able to absorb before you die. What shall that text contain? Every paper and book you read in its original and entirety is taking something from the budget available to other great works. Do budget constraints not bind, even for speed readers?</p><p>The other point that is worth noting is the disparity between fiction and non-fiction. Science can be summarised. History can be summarised. But fiction and poetry largely cannot, except without stripping out all the art and beauty that made them great. The idea of all of us reading only the cliff notes version of Shakespeare is simply too tragic to bear. But the result of this love is that fiction works stand a much higher chance of being forgotten altogether. </p><p>If a man has a genetic mutation that is reproductively advantageous, in the short run, he has more children, and all his traits get passed on. Then his children have more children, and the advantageous gene and the other tag-alongs also get passed on. But roll the tape forward 100 generations, and the only thing left of the original man is the advantageous gene itself. This gets selected on, and the rest gets forgotten.</p><p>So too it shall be with memes. You may bequeath an entire volume, but after 100 generations of re-learning, only the crispest, shortest version shall remain. And that is your final contribution to posterity.</p><p></p><div></div></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-22346869280827626162020-08-19T20:38:00.000-07:002020-08-19T20:38:06.166-07:00The Dog That Didn't Bark<div style="text-align: left;">As with many things in life, it's hard to notice the things that aren't there, but should be.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />I remember my own personal experience of a number of US elections. The way I used to characterize them was that once every four years, people who ordinarily got along with each other pretty well had to scream at each other for a whole year, over things that neither of them could have any control over. Then the election would pass, and people would mostly get on with their lives.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />There was also the inevitable rolling back of the start of the election cycle ever sooner. It kind of became like Christmas in the Anglosphere outside America - without Thanksgiving as a hard constraint on when the celebrations could start, you'd see Christmas decorations going up in November, then in October. Elections worked the same way. The buzz, then the party debates, then the primaries, then more party debates, then the conventions. Lord, how I hated the conventions. Just ghastly cliches aimed at true believer rubes. And then the presidential debates themselves, perfectly triangulated to sound compelling to 103 IQ midwits tuning in, sure that they'd learn important things about policy in America to help them make up their mind. I couldn't watch any of them, from either party, for more than a few minutes without feeling like I was being marketed to in a very obvious fashion, on the assumption that I was a moron.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />When Trump got elected, there was a very temporary deflating on the left, which lasted about a day, mostly due to shock and disbelief. Then it geared up into protest (protesting an election outcome while professing to still believe in democracy? what does that even mean?), and finding a way to impeach him before he'd even taken office. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />And then, the rancor, normally limited to the election run-up, just became 24/7 in perpetuity. If Trump getting elected created a ton of schadenfreude on the election weary outer right, at some point the whole thing started to mostly be draining. All shared goodwill in America seemed to be eaten up by it. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />So given all this, I was utterly dreading the 2020 election.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />And yet, here we are, less than three months out from the election, and instead there is... nothing. You could be forgiven for forgetting most days that it's actually going on. The level of energy devoted to the election itself is insanely low. There is a lot of energy about black lives matter protests, which you can take as a surrogate get-out-the-vote for the left. But there is almost nothing about the election itself.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />To take a simple example - how many "Biden for President" signs do you see around your neighborhood? I'm in a pretty blue area, and the answer is approximately "zero". </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Crucial, basic questions remain unanswered. Will people be voting by mail? Will polling booths be open? Who knows! </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />I don't pretend to know for sure what's going on there, but there are a few aspects to consider.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />One is that this is strategic, a decentralised media strategy to conceal the extent of Joe Biden's mental decline, and just hope that dissatisfaction with Trump will carry the day. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />This might work to a certain extent, but I just don't think they could ordinarily help themselves. There's just too many juicy stories, too much power floating around, too many opportunities to land some exclusive injuring one's political enemies.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />It's possible that Covid is just drawing too much of the energy away. But I think this hypothesis pretty much died around May, when the George Floyd protests kicked in in earnest. At that point, nobody in America even pretended to give a damn about Covid, and once that seriousness passed, it was very hard to get it back again. So I don't think there's a sense that Covid is so deathly important that we can't possibly consider mundane matters like who the president will be in three months' time.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />My best guess, however, is is related to <a href="https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/13457753/TeaParty_Protests.pdf">this paper</a>. If your area had rain on the day of the initial tea party protests in 2009, you had significantly lower vote share for Republicans at the 2010 midterms. In other words, the whole monstrous circus of all the election theatre spectacle actually serves to get people fired up. Covid may not be considered important enough to drown out all other news, but it <i>is </i>important enough to stop tens of thousands people getting crammed into stadiums to host political rallies, or put in auditoriums to listen to presidential debates. Could you host the debate over zoom? Of course you could. Just like you can play NBA games to empty stadiums. Yet for some reason, nobody wants to watch either one. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />Every in-person event that drove the presidential news cycle is canceled. Take that away, and it seems the media just doesn't know what to do. How do you get people fired up? It turns out, it's quite hard. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">A final related aspect that's missing, which is probably even harder to spot, is the absence of lots of casual workplace conversations with people who might be of political opinions. If there's a person in America not heartily sick of zoom calls with anyone other than close friends and loved ones, I'd be surprised. Nobody's turning up to get into pointless arguments with friends and acquaintances, and so the whole cycle of disagreement, fury, righteous indignation, and seeking out new people to vent to / agree with / disagree with is also broken. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />All of this means that my priors on what's going to happen this election are probably wider than in any one I can remember. The most important thing is not the issues, or even the candidates. It's the bizarre, de-energising atmosphere the whole thing is taking place in, and whose voters end up being less lethargic on the day. On that question, I have no idea. </div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-24641995083010389322020-07-26T18:37:00.001-07:002020-07-26T18:37:19.291-07:00The thorny problem of inconstant judgesOne of the periodic themes of this journal is that the reality of power is everywhere and always messy. I have described my conception that the most important high-level problem to be solved is <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2019/11/what-exactly-do-you-want.html">well-defined and secure property rights in the state itself.</a> This is a slightly more formalized way of saying "secure power". I'm certainly not claiming originality in this idea - Moldbug's <a href="https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted/">formalism</a> is what got me started thinking about this.<div><br /></div><div>In viewing matters this way, I think it's important to know what we're studying. Perfectly secure power in a governing regime seems to be somewhat akin to a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_efficiency">perfectly efficient</a> engine. </div><div><br /></div><div>In both cases, it's easy to design one on paper. The process is entirely straightforward! Fuel is mixed with air, then inducted into the cylinder, then the spark plug ignites it. What could be easier than that? There's an absolute monarch, and everyone just follows his orders.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then when you actually implement the thing, you find all sorts of leakages due to annoying complications in details of the machine that you'd largely abstracted away from. Understanding these turns out in many ways to be more of an <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2016/10/on-maine-and-moldbug.html">engineering problem than a pure science problem</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>But even though the perfectly efficient engine or perfectly secure monarch may be a platonic ideal, that doesn't mean that the forces preventing you from getting there should be viewed as mysterious. Indeed, if you do that, you'll have a very hard time improving things. Maybe you can be a <a href="https://graymirror.substack.com/p/persuasion-and-the-mensheviks">menshevik</a>, and slightly improve the design. Maybe you need bolshevism, to start with a new design that doesn't produce these specific frictions (although, of course, it will produce others, perhaps others you hadn't encountered or thought about).</div><div><br /></div><div>More importantly, in either case you should care very much about <i>how far away</i> you are from the platonic ideal. Otherwise you're just committing Asimov's <a href="https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm">Relativity of Wrong</a>. Is your government the equivalent of a nuclear power plant, or a coal power plant? And if the latter, how might you change that? Moreover, the messy world of the social sciences makes things hard. Physicists love to mock the social sciences as being unscientific, but there's no escaping the fact that we have to design this particular power plant based on the computational output of a large number of meat sacks, all designed slightly differently, all interacting with each other. </div><div><br /></div><div>The modern world presents us with very few serious monarchs to examine. This also liberates us from focusing on the specifics of what went wrong in any one case (what could Louis XVI have done differently? <a href="https://www.amazon.com/French-Revolution-Revolutions-Modern-World/dp/039395997X">Lots of things</a>, as it turns out). </div><div><br /></div><div>A lot of people on the dissident right have thought hard about the problem of delegation, which is definitely a first order problem, probably the largest one. No man rules alone, and the sovereign's decisions have to implemented by his subordinates. What are their incentives to implement it honestly, or competently, or not divert resources to themselves?</div><div><br /></div><div>But there is another problem that I think gets relatively less focus. Which is the following: how does the monarch prevent himself from being psychologically manipulated or pressured by those around him?</div><div><br /></div><div>Among the closest modern analogs to an absolute monarch is a US Supreme Court Justice. The analogy is not exact, because there's a very small-scale democracy going on within the nine of them. But this is voting at a level where your vote often might matter, and you know the parties, and it's a repeated game. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the court context, the delegation problem is how to make sure the court's decisions get implemented by lower courts, and by other governmental agencies. This is still challenging - what happens if lower courts routinely ignore your precedent, and you have to slap them down over and over (or just let your decision get undermined)? What happens if people just refuse to follow it? That used to be a big problem but is less so these days. </div><div><br /></div><div>But if you're on the right, the delegation question is not the central problem with the court today. The Republicans have long made a point of trying to get better, more conservative justices appointed to the court. And yet, as night follows day, maybe half of the supposedly conservative justices turn out to become liberals. Maybe if we vote for Trump, we can get some more rock-ribbed conservative justices like Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, John Roberts, or, increasingly, Neil Gorsuch. </div><div><br /></div><div>This problem seems to be wonderfully emblematic of the failures of the mainstream right. They keep losing. They know they keep losing. They are unhappy about the fact that they keep losing. And yet, their state of the art solution is just "push harder!". More of the same should do the trick! More voting. More rallies. More donations to National Review. More Republican Senators and Presidents, so we can get more Republican-appointed judges, just like...the same ones that put us in the unsatisfying position. For republicans, it's basically a coin flip. Appoint the guy to the court, and maybe he turns out to be a stalwart judicial conservative, like Scalia or Thomas. Maybe he turns out to be mushy, like Roberts. Maybe he turns out to be a complete liberal, like Souter. </div><div><br /></div><div>If your best case scenario is a 50/50 chance at being right, congratulations, you getting to appoint every single judge results in a random walk over judicial appointments. Lose a single election, and it's downward drift.</div><div><br /></div><div>At almost no point does it seem to occur to the mainstream right- <i>why do half the Justices we appoint turn out to be traitors? </i>And more importantly, what can we do to stop this happening? </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps, dear Republicans, this is a problem you ought to spend more time seriously studying, rather than just turning the same crank over and over and expecting different results</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>There are a few ways to think about what might be going on.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first possibility is treachery. Everyone has to hew to a narrow set of Overton Window beliefs to get appointed. Prospective Supreme Court Justices are all skilled at concealing their true feelings, if such feelings should be undiplomatic. They're experts at saying the right thing to get ahead. Republican party chiefs will just never know what a person will do until he's finally unconstrained. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton put it. These guys don't get absolute power, but they get enough of it that when you can't force them to do what you want, they do as they please.</div><div><br /></div><div>The main problem with this hypothesis is that it stumbles on the fact that Democrats never seem to have this problem. When the chips are down, and the issue before the court is politically charged, rather than just some arcane matter of trusts law, Democrat appointees always seem to toe the party line.</div><div><div><br /></div></div><div>So if this is our explanation, we've largely just kicked the can down the road a little. Why is there treachery among Republican appointees, but not Democrat ones? Even if the field is littered with sociopath traitors, is there nobody talented enough to get appointed by a Democrat, then drop the mask and reveal their inner Scalia?</div><div><br /></div><div>Let us instead consider an alternative. All these justices started out intending to be conservative, but instead buckle under the social pressure brought to bear upon them. </div><div><br /></div><div>From the comfortable distance of one's armchair, this seems like a small thing. So what if some law school students don't like you? </div><div><br /></div><div>Reader, do you know what it's like to be <i>hated? </i>I mean, viciously hated, smeared in the New York Times, denounced as a stoolie or a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/18/we-cannot-have-a-rapist-on-the-us-supreme-court">rapist</a> or <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/02/the-case-for-impeaching-clarence-thomas.html">sexual harasser</a> or an <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2014/04/30/bennie-thompson-clarence-thomas-uncle-tom/81226252/">Uncle Tom</a>, day in, day out? Publicly <a href="https://www.salon.com/2016/02/27/i_thought_i_could_reason_with_antonin_scalia_a_more_naive_young_fool_never_drew_breath/">stabbed in the back</a> by people you helped and trusted, over and over? Like the pressure brought to bear on people by <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/01/how-to-interact-with-potentially.html">hostile journalists and the police</a>, this is something that it's easy to sneer at until it happens to you. </div><div><br /></div><div>The reality is that most people just aren't good at dealing with being hated in a vicious and public manner. Despite their best intentions, it sways their choices. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's tempting to explain this in terms of concrete quid pro quo arrangements. If you switch to writing liberal judgments, you get invited to better parties and events, or have more fun friends or whatnot. This is definitely part of it. But I suspect there's a pure psychology aspect too. </div><div><br /></div><div>To pile metaphor on metaphor, look at the home team advantage in sports. <a href="https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/18/football-freakonomics-how-advantageous-is-home-field-advantage-and-why/">Mosokowitz and Wertheim looked at this</a>. The main driver of the home field advantage is not that it makes the players perform better. I was always skeptical of this myself,even before this study. These are professional athletes, with huge amounts of money at stake. Do they just not try their hardest without cheering? As it turns out, no, the effect seems to mostly be on the referees. And this is nothing but pure psychological pressure, on people literally selected and professionally rewarded for impartiality. The referee is anonymous. He's not getting invited to any swank parties. Even if he makes a lousy call, it's very unlikely that he's going to be harassed by name. The cost is just fifty thousand angry people yelling at you if you grant the penalty kick, and the same fifty thousand cheering if you just let it slide. </div><div><br /></div><div>And I suspect this is a large part of what's going on with Republican appointed justices too. Most of these people are law school strivers. They've been groomed for success for a long time, told they were the smartest in their class, voted most likely to succeed in high school, all that stuff. Then, they get made into some lower court judge, where they get less power, but almost total deference. Yes, your honor! No, your honor. And if you do something controversial, what happens? You are mostly just "<a href="https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/18/football-freakonomics-how-advantageous-is-home-field-advantage-and-why/">a federal court judge in Hawaii</a>". You are the epitome of the machine - a cog, implementing something, replaceable with another cog. No sense hating the cog! But once you're on the Supreme Court, you are now Chief Justice Roberts, and your choices reflect on <i>you, </i>not the machine. </div><div><br /></div><div>Look at smiling John Roberts in his confirmation hearing:</div><div><br /></div><div><img alt="Roberts' confirmation appears in the bag | News, Sports, Jobs ..." height="320" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/ogden_images/www.ljworld.com/images/2005/09/22223711/na_color_SCOTUS_ROBERTS.jpg" width="312" /></div><div><br /></div><div>Do you think that, before he took on the job, this guy had any experience of being <i>hated</i>? To ask is to laugh. The words on everyone's lips were "looks like nice guy". Good luck with that. He's a <a href="https://youtu.be/0auwpvAU2YA?t=190">nice guy</a> alright.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is part of what soft power is. It's not always just a euphemism for hard power in disguise, the polite note before the US air force crushes your town. The reality is that <i>psychological constraints are real constraints. </i>We can't see them, but that doesn't mean they're not there. Most people simply aren't good at dealing with this pressure, or at a minimum, will be worse at dealing with this pressure than they think they will be if they haven't yet been subjected to it. It's reminiscent of the <a href="https://shylockholmes.blogspot.com/2020/06/on-recent-looting.html">Randall Collins</a> point about violence. Most people also don't like inflicting random violence on people, except in a limited range of circumstances. </div><div><br /></div><div>Most people also don't like being yelled at with curses and hatred, even if that hatred is very unlikely to result in actual violence to them. Monkey brain knows what's going on. Monkey brain knows that an angry crowd yelling at you is highly correlated with you being dismembered. Monkey brain responds, for the same reason that you get queasy when walking on a glass floored skyscraper walkway. </div><div><br /></div><div>To solve the problem of the social pressure being brought to bear on Supreme Court Justices is probably a <a href="https://bioleninism.com/2019/06/18/how-far-is-far-enough/">coup-complete</a> or <a href="https://graymirror.substack.com/p/persuasion-and-the-mensheviks">regime-complete</a> problem - something you can't solve without first changing the government. A good giveaway for such things is if at any point they involve the step "next, we reform or replace the New York Times".</div><div><br /></div><div>But if you were of the menshevik mindset, there is probably still progress that can be made. The petrol engine can be improved, even if we can't yet turn it into a fusion engine. </div><div><br /></div><div>In particular, one useful rule of thumb when judging appointees - what experience do they have with being smeared and hated? And do they have a personality likely to be more resistant to this, inasmuch as it's possible to forecast this. Are they naturally combative and devil-may-care, like Scalia? Do they thrive on having haters? Do they have a history of being outspoken? Unfortunately, this tends to make it hard to get confirmed in the first place these days, so that may not be possible.</div><div><br /></div><div>In an ideal world, they might have some concrete experience with similar jobs. One obvious case - running a medium sized business, and having to fire people. Yeah, you'd better believe that will toughen you up. Can you inflict pain upon people, and deal with their anger and contempt, while keeping your eye on the larger purpose? Have you had to command troops in battle, and know that making the wrong call on whether to breach that door will likely result in either your guys getting shot, or civilians being shot?</div><div><br /></div><div>Ironically, the main pre-job exposure people have to being hated is from Democratic and media efforts during the confirmation hearings. While you have very small number of observations here, I suspect that Clarence Thomas being viciously smeared before he started probably had a searing effect on his choices. It likely made him permanently bitter, as there was basically no worse smears that could be thrown at him than what he faced before he started the job. But he knew what his enemies were like, and exactly what their good opinions were worth, and wasn't going to cave to them after that. </div><div><br /></div><div>An interesting question will be to see what happens to Kavanaugh. I think it's easy to overextrapolate the Thomas outcome, and ignore the possibility that some people overreact in the other direction - they cave harder sooner in order to make the smearing stop, or they rationalise it. I'll show I'm the bigger man by not being the right wing monster they accused me of being, and instead implement this unprincipled exception for liberalism. </div><div><br /></div><div>You may think this doesn't really apply to monarchs. They can just fire the hostile press, or implement lese majeste laws to execute people who insult them. </div><div><br /></div><div>But remember, the pain point is psychology. What if you get a monarch who just really wants to be loved, and can't deal with being despised, or even just with causing necessary pain on citizens? </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't hold myself out as any kind of expert, but that's certainly the description I've read of Louis XVI. He wore civilian attire, rather than military. A man of the people! That worked out well for him.</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe you think this is all old hat. Very well. Here's a simple test. Take the sentence </div><div>"Previously conservative judges are susceptible to public pressure, and probably will end up changing their views to conform to it."</div><div><br /></div><div>Ask yourself - would this apply to...<i>me</i>? Would <i>I </i>be susceptible to public pressure, and change my views to conform to it?</div><div><br /></div><div>Ha, no, of course not. Biases for thee, cold-iron robotic logic for me. </div><div><br /></div><div>If you are certain that the answer is "no", and yet you've never had any firm experience of resisting exactly such pressure, I suggest that there is a large chance that you may be greatly underestimating the forces at work here. </div><div><br /></div><div>To paraphrase one half of my nom-de-plume:</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Hath not a judge eyes? hath not a judge hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you scream in his face, does he not flinch? If you mock him, does he not feel stung? If you slander him, does he not bristle? If you selectively apply pain, does he not learn the lesson?</div></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-31469277388818536202020-07-02T22:50:00.002-07:002020-07-03T10:27:02.143-07:00On the Toppling of StatuesIn the latest round of <a href="https://www.blogger.com/#">the imbroglio</a> involving the death of George Floyd, the focus has moved from looting stores to toppling statues. This probably serves multiple purposes. First off, some of the stores represent actually important economic interests, and blue city mayors still somewhat know who’s paying the bills. Not so much that they’re willing to stand up to a mob in the process of looting, of course. But enough that if rage can be directed towards more socially useful outlets, like destroying statues of people liked by conservatives, then so much the better. It keeps the mob fired up in the leadup to the 2020 elections, but harms no vital interests of anybody important.<br /><br />The initial outrage focused on monuments to the Confederates. It’s 2020, so the Civil War that ended in 1865 is of course a pressing political issue. Among the various ironies is that today’s progressive mob takes a far harsher line than the actual men who fought and died to defeat the Confederacy. Lincoln told the band to play Dixie. Grant let the surrendering Confederate officers keep their weapons and horses. Reconstruction may not have been much fun if you were a civilian in the South, but there’s no doubt that there was a genuine attempt to unify the country after the war finished, and respecting each other’s heroes was a way to preserve a cultural truce. If we’re all going to be stuck together in the Hotel California of countries that you can check out of but never leave, we may as well try to rub along together. This is not a very popular sentiment anymore, it suffices to say.<br /><br /> But as has been obvious to anyone paying attention, the people who wanted statues toppled were never going to stop with the Confederates. Eventually they would assuredly come for Jefferson, Washington, and anyone else who owned slaves. Sure enough, Washington statues have been vandalized in <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/06/30/trump-calls-on-george-washington-statue-vandals-to-surrender/">New York</a> and <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/19/us/portland-george-washington-statue-toppled-trnd/index.html">Portland</a>. The city of Columbus, Ohio, recently took down their statue of <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/christopher-columbus-statue-ohio-removed/">Columbus</a>, proving that the "is this headline from the Onion or the NYT" game gets harder every day. In case you thought this was part of a principled and thought out set of targets, they also vandalized statues of <a href="https://www.newsinenglish.no/2020/06/24/historians-puzzled-after-statue-razed/">Norwegian anti-slavery crusaders</a>, <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/06/22/who-st-junipero-serra-and-why-are-california-protesters-toppling-his">Catholic saints</a>, and <a href="https://www.newsbreak.com/california/san-francisco/news/0POlQ1vV/activists-vandalize-cervantes-statue-in-san-francisco">Cervantes</a>, who was himself a slave. <br /><br />Like many things that seem obvious in hindsight, statues exist in only two types of societies – those with a very high level of trust, and extremely heavily-policed authoritarian states. This realization is only slowly occurring to people as it becomes obvious that America is no longer a high trust society, and all sorts of institutions that relied on this now fail to work. Accurate political polling is another casualty, for instance. “Hello stranger who we just called! You don’t know who we are, but do you support the government? You’ve got no financial incentive to tell us, and we’re recording your answer in a database!”. The amazing thing is that anybody ever answered truthfully at all. <br /><br />A statue in a public space is like the cultural equivalent of a foreign embassy. In the face of concerted domestic opposition, it is completely indefensible from a military point of view. In theory, the domestic government could expend huge resources to police it night and day to stop the mob burning it down. But this is rarely worth it, either for an embassy, or a statue. At the point that you have to do this for any extended period of time, you’re facing a losing battle, and you should probably pack it up and go home. A statue is even worse – an embassy is at least trivially protected against minor attacks, because it has to defend the lives of real people who are important at least to the home country. A statue is physically solid, but socially fragile – an undefended object of art and beauty that can only exist with the consent of a huge majority of the populace. This can be because the person is almost universally revered. It can be because people are tolerant of other people’s heroes, even if they’re not their own. It can be because there’s very strong norms against vandalism. Or, like the statues of Saddam, it can be a flex on the populace under threat of being killed or mutilated for disrespecting the sovereign. <br /><br />Increasingly, none of these conditions hold in modern America. This may seem hyperbolic to say. But let’s put it this way. Suppose you are in charge of an insurance business. Someone comes to you wanting to obtain insurance for their statue. What annual premium, in terms of percentage of replacement cost, would you charge for a randomly chosen statue in America right now? I’d say the lowest would be the Martin Luther King statue in DC. But the rest? If the cost were less than 25% of replacement, I’d be kind of amazed. There'd probably be a considerable number where the premium would be above 100%, on the assumption that if it got rebuilt, it would be torn down again before the year was out. <br /><br /><div>The whole thing is strikingly reminiscent of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law">Godwin’s Law</a>: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” </div><div><br />Every day, the line between frenzied internet discussion and real life gets blurrier. Social media, which has been a complete poison on society, amplifies and shortens the clickbait/outrage/vindictive response/ schadenfreude/retweet cycle. Americans have become addicted to the pleasure of righteous indignation, and the media, traditional and social, happily provides. <br /><br />The literal mob has become indistinguishable from the mob of the Facebook feed. And as outrage porn and mob violence goes on, the probability that someone crazy and motivated decides that a given statue is actually comparable to Hitler goes to one. <br /><br />Eventually, all the statues will get torn down. <br /><br />If you don’t believe me yet, don’t worry, you will. <br /><br />And there are many things one could opine about regarding this. The loss of aesthetics. The loss of historical understanding and tradition. The loss of heroes. <br /><br />But I want to focus on one bit in particular. <br /><br />When the statues of Washington and Jefferson all get removed, and nobody stands for the national anthem any more so they stop playing it, and cities and towns start deciding they don’t want to celebrate the 4th of July because America’s founding was racist back in 1619, and first the loonie fringe then the New York Times start writing articles wondering if we should rename Washington DC to Kingtown… <br /><br />…at what point in all this do people realize that there are literally no more symbols that unify Americans as a people anymore? <br /><br />That there are no more symbols of the general feeling of mutual camaraderie and shared history and purpose as a nation, because there actually <i>is no</i> general feeling of mutual camaraderie and shared history and purpose as a nation? <br /><br />And if you, like me, think that the above statements <i>already apply, </i>then the current governing arrangements and general social compact may be a great deal more fragile and brittle right now than most people give it credit for.<br /><br />People think about governmental collapse like death – something that only happens to other people, but never to me personally. Well, one day, for the nation as a whole, it will. And when it did, for nations in the past, it was generally not anticipated by most of the major parties very shortly beforehand, whether it’s the Fall of Rome, the Russian revolution, or the fall of the Berlin Wall. This doesn’t mean it’s going to happen soon in America, of course. But it does mean that your feeling that it probably isn’t likely now is not actually a strong signal one way or the other, because it never seemed likely, even when it was imminent. So you should revert at least to the unconditional probability, which is low, but not that low. <br /><br />And if you were to start wondering about useful conditioning information, a pretty good place to start would be widespread belief among the elites of the illegitimacy of the governing regime. </div><div><br />Of course, we struggle to see this in America, because we don’t have clear language with which to express what “the governing regime” is. We can say if people disliked Czar Nicholas II, or even the Communist Party. But what would it mean to dislike the US government as a whole? It certainly doesn’t map to disliking Trump – in that case, there’s near universal elite hatred. Are people still sentimental about elections and the democratic process? The attachment seems to mostly exist as an expression of hate – a way to stick it to the other side. It’s been a very long time since I’ve heard the left express the sentiment that, sure, our guy lost, but they lost in a democratic election, and in the end that’s more important. If Trump loses, I don’t expect much of this on the right either, save the obviously useless grifters of the professional Never Trump class. And if not that, then what? The civil service? Don't make me laugh. Our robust economy creating broad prosperity? Bueller?<br /><br />In other words, if there is no substantial opposition to the current governing arrangements, this may simply stem from a) a lack of imagination about alternatives, and b) a lack of clear coordination on what would replace the status quo. In East Germany, you had both. Levis and Rock and Roll were on display on the other side of the wall, and collapse just meant handing over the keys to City Hall to those guys. Now, it’s a little thornier. But if you were to characterise USG as a “regime”, the way that Communist East Germany was a regime, or Czarist Russia was a regime – do you see very much love for the USG regime going around at the moment, on either side of the political aisle? It's hard to see this, because a regime is always "them" - the governing, as opposed to the governed. Americans are trained to see themselves as the governing, due to the absurd fiction about the importance, both practical and spiritual, of the pico-watt of political power they get to exercise at the polling booth every four years. This delusion holds true, notwithstanding that pushing the same button keeps producing the same unsatisfactory results. This delusion, plus sheer inertia, may be the only glue holding this jalopy together. Every year, it gets a little dicier.<br /><br />At the moment, I don’t see anything dramatic happening before the election at least. I was somewhat nervous on the main Saturday night of protests recently, however, notwithstanding my previous post. <br /><br />But let’s put it this way. If there were a VIX index for political outcomes, my estimate of the 5 year value just went up substantially this past month. <br /><br />You cannot have a nation destroy all the symbols of itself and expect everything to just proceed as before. </div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-60462333185262016792020-06-03T00:35:00.005-07:002020-06-03T12:51:35.238-07:00On the Recent Looting<div>After several nights of rioting in the city you live in, you can be forgiven for thinking that law and order has completely broken down, and state collapse is imminent. The spread of the riots has ironically mirrored the coronavirus it replaced in the news - everyone looks on filled with horror and catharsis at the chaos in some other city, sure it won't happen to them...until it does. Now there are riots in Paris. Of course there are. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is jarring to most normal people’s sense of the world though. Both the left and the right agree that the police are powerful, and can mess you up. The right is mostly happy about this, and the left is mostly unhappy. But they both agree that the police are terrifying if you get on the wrong side of them.</div><div><br /></div><div>But here we are, and the police suddenly seem powerless. The coin has both sides. On one side, the riot police are mostly maintaining their ground – keeping organized lines, being disciplined in the face of mobs yelling at them, not giving provocation but mostly not retreating, which would be psychologically much worse.</div><div><br /></div><div>And yet, you wake up the next day, and all the stores are trashed. You listen to the police scanner and it’s a continuous stream of “cricket wireless store has been looted, please send a team to clean it up. 50 kids looting the Macy’s. The bookstore on 5th Avenue has been looted, please send a team to board it up.” And so on, and so on. And you realize pretty quickly that when it comes to property damage, they are being totally responsive, waiting for it to happen, and there is no serious attempt being made to stop the thugs from trashing your store. </div><div><br /></div><div>Actually, it’s worse than that. If you choose to defend with a gun your uninsured store that represents your life savings, and need to actually use it, there’s a 50/50 chance that you’re going to jail for a long time. They won’t be there to stop the looters from trashing your store, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be there to arrest you if you stop them yourself. </div><div><br /></div><div>I know some reactionary friends that have gotten extremely black-pilled over this in the last few days. The only solace is that many of the big corporate stores being trashed are the same ones that have been pushing woke capital so hard for the past decade. Well, what goes around comes around. But this is a pretty grim and ironic schadenfreude beverage with which to wash down the bitter pill that the police aren’t able to protect order, and the forces of disorder and chaos are entirely in the ascendency. </div><div><br /></div><div>But even in this grim spot, some contrary perspectives stand out. </div><div><br /></div><div>First, there have been many riots. Indeed, you’ve lived through them. And for the proper perspective, you need to consider ones that are quite emotionally far removed. For instance, the 2015 Ferguson riots, or the Baltimore riots, are probably things you might have had quite strong emotional responses to at the time, one way or another. So instead think about the 2010 London riots, where (be honest), you can’t even remember what they were all about – some guy got killed while being pursued by police, or something. At the time, you probably thought it was an indication of how pissweak the British cops were, and the complete powerlessness of the British state. Well, the joke's on us, apparently. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the more important question is … what were the long term consequences of those riots for London? Would you say, to a first approximation…nothing? You can’t even connect it to the only thing Yanks know about Britain, namely Brexit – London itself was firmly Remain. Same with the LA riots. We got some policing reforms in LA, I think. We got Roof Koreans memes. Did LA collapse? Did law and order in LA collapse, more than for a few days? Not that I’ve heard of. </div><div><br /></div><div>A simple way to clarify consequences is with real estate. If you bought in Detroit in 1968, yeah, you lost everything. Sometimes, it really is a disaster. But if you bought in Brixton in 1981, or LA in 1992 (maybe not in South Central itself), or London in 2010, you made out extremely well. Even Ferguson has <a href="https://www.zillow.com/ferguson-mo/home-values/">more than recovered since 2015</a>. Paris, I’m not so sure – probably too early to tell, and the protests there seem more chronic than acute. Better yet, what were the consequences for the riots around the WTO protests in Seattle in the late 90s? I bet you didn't even remember those. </div><div><br /></div><div>(An aside I can’t forbear including – I hate idiots glorifying riots, and I generally dislike contemporary free verse, but if you want to learn how to do a Jamaican accent, there is no better source than Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “<a href="https://poetryarchive.org/poem/di-great-insohreckshan/">Di Great Insohreckshan</a>”, written about the Brixton riots, which I somehow quite like)</div><div><br /></div><div>Mostly, these things die down. Mostly, the mob has no actual important political consequences. Mostly, the good deal of ruin in a nation or a city lives to survive another day. </div><div><br /></div><div>And if you want to know why, I think you need to pay attention to the dog that didn’t bark here. Which is the following.</div><div><br /></div><div>These are massive, widespread riots. Thousands and thousands in the streets, looting, burning, throwing projectiles at the cops. </div><div><br /></div><div>But where are the guns?</div><div><br /></div><div>America is absolutely awash in cheap, reliable handguns. They are everywhere. We are told this constantly. You turn up expecting to get in a violent confrontation with armed men representing the state, who have some legal backing to literally kill you if you get violent. To this confrontation, you bring…a frozen water bottle? Fireworks? The conspiracy theory doing the rounds on twitter was that sinister forces were strategically leaving pallets of bricks near protest points for rioters to throw. Whatever you think of that rumor, it’s hard not to be reminded of <a href="https://books.google.is/books?id=nxsmkkIhkqgC&pg=PT61&lpg=PT61&dq=nixon+iran+why+not+eight+thousand+it%27s+not+like+we+don%27t+have+them&source=bl&ots=xzdiG32Mnv&sig=ACfU3U2UWC7XmWOyjtsequ4BjO_-UHP1Nw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjny5TP6-TpAhWGxqQKHY7ZAsAQ6AEwAHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=nixon%20iran%20why%20not%20eight%20thousand%20it">Richard Nixon’s remarks</a> about Operation Eagle Claw, to use eight helicopters filled with troops to rescue the American hostages in Iran. “Eight? Why not a thousand? It’s not like we don’t have them!”. Why not leave a pallet filled with ARs instead? Hell, lots of these guys have their own guns already. Even if Soros is stingy with the funding, it doesn’t cost anything to tell all the rioters to bring their glocks along. </div><div><br /></div><div>Not only that, but the police themselves turn up comically under-armed relative to 99% of their violent confrontations. This was one of the most pointed critiques of police behavior recently. A large and recent libertarian criticism of police deparments has been their increasing militarization in the past two decades or so. Every rinky-dink small town police department now has to have a poorly trained SWAT team and a Bearcat. These things generally get used to implement no-knock raids on local coke dealers, which is bad enough as an overreaction. But still! The one time some actual military force actually might make a big difference to the outcome, and they turn up with sticks! </div><div><br /></div><div>There are various ways to read this, and they seem to lie on a continuum of what you think about human behavior in this context, ranging from fake and pisspoor, to calculating and frightening. I never know how much to weight each one. </div><div><br /></div><div>At one extreme is the thesis I associate most with Randall Collins book, <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691143224/violence">Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory</a>. He basically says that, contrary to what most people think, the average person doesn’t like inflicting violence on others, isn’t good at it, and looks for reasons to avoid or end it. Violent confrontations are typically characterized by fear and tension on both sides. When violence does happen, it fits into a small number of categories – ganging up on the weak, “forward panics” (where a previously evenly matched confrontation suddenly gets resolved in one side’s favor – think a collapse of one army and a rout on a battlefield), ritualized violence like sports, and raucous violence like riots. </div><div><br /></div><div>In other words, most people at the riot aren't really trying to inflict violence on the police or civilians, because they're not really interested in that. His characterizes the psychology of looting as follows:</div><div><br /></div><div><i><blockquote>Looting and destroying property is a relatively mild form of violence that arises within moral holidays, when authority has broken down. … Mass participation in looting is a key device for making a riot last, indeed for building it up into a notable event, getting it political attention in the enemy camp or in the eyes of the wider public. The looters themselves generally lack a political ideology; politicized black civil rights activists in the 1960s race riots were often disgusted with the looting and the attitude of the looters. Tilly (2003) thus categorized these riots as only marginally racial protests that degenerated into opportunistically seeking private gain. But this is to omit the part that looting, along with arson, play in the dynamics of riots: looting is a mass recruiter and a momentum sustainer. Without it, if the riot took nothing but the form of violent confrontations with the police, the riot could be easily dealt with by police withdrawing until the crowd became bored, drifted away, and disassembled; or it could be put down by putting in overwhelming force against the inevitable small group that would actively confront it. Looters are the foot-soldiers of a riot; better put, they are the half-hearted hanging-back, the 85 percent who never fire their guns. Looting is a brilliant tactical invention – so to speak, because no one invented it – since it takes the relatively useless part of the supporters and onlookers of an insurrection and turns them into activists of sorts, keeping alive the emotional atmosphere that is where a moral holiday lives or dies. </blockquote></i></div><div><br /></div><div>In the Collins view, rioting is mostly farce, and people smash store windows because it’s fun. Collins talks about interesting facts consistent with this – much of what people steal is of minimal value, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re going to do with it. Looters generally don’t steal from each other, but mostly are egging each other on instead. And even within the moral holiday, there are relatively few instances of sexual assault, which isn’t what you’d expect if it were a total free for all with no civic order. There’s a particular atmosphere to it. </div><div><br /></div><div>In this reading, the most of the people at the riots just like smashing things and taking stuff. This provides cover for a much smaller group that actually wants to inflict real violence. Even within the violent contingent, a lot of the actual violence has a pantomime, staged aspect. On the side of the rioters, this is mostly like soccer hooliganism. If the Chelsea Headhunters want to get in a biffo with the Everton County Road Cutters, they have to organize when and where they’re going to turn up, and set the ground rules on what weapons are allowed. If the other guys get killed, the cops are going to get involved and then the fun is over, so you can’t have knives or guns.</div><div><br /></div><div>But putting a bullet in a cop's head, even if you could get away with it, just doesn't seem like fun to the average person, even the average person at a riot. Mostly, people don't like inflicting real violence. As Collins notes, at gun ranges, people vastly prefer to shoot at highly stylized silhouettes, zombies, circles - anything but photos of actual humans. And when they do, they mostly want the bad guys on the target to be wearing sunglasses, so you don't have to see their eyes. It's disconcerting, even when it's just a photo. </div><div><br /></div><div>If you take the Collins view, these riots, like most riots, are very unlikely to have any important political consequences, and will likely peter out in a few days at most, as people just get bored. I think this is the way to bet, actually. Social media can sustain things much longer than in previous days, but eventually the momentum of it wears off. </div><div><br /></div><div>The one weak part of the Collins these, however, is that it doesn’t address at all the question of police. How come they’re so restrained? Do they have no other choice? Admittedly, in the 60s they sent in troops to actually shoot the place up, so back then they did feel they had a choice. Collins seems to implicitly think they just get overwhelmed, which is certainly part of it. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the other extreme version of the dynamics is the game theory aspect. Stated briefly, it is as follows – guns are to mobs and police what nuclear weapons are to war. They absolutely affect the strategic calculation, but both sides have strong incentives to make sure they’re off the equilibrium path. </div><div><br /></div><div>Which is to say, the police are not actually allowing anarchy. Arresting business owners that shoot at looters is, on its face, a pretty striking example of anarcho-tyranny. But the other reading is as follows. The police in the riot gear have retreated to a temporary but well-understood revised rules of engagement, which are these. Only minimal resources will get deployed to stop violence against property, and you will likely only get in trouble if you are somehow actually caught in the act. Projectiles will be met with tear gas, and if necessary, with rubber bullets. But if you start shooting real guns or using real knives and real baseball bats, at best you’re going to jail for a long time, and lots of resources will be deployed to find you. If it’s against us (the cops), you’re going home in a body bag. The police not being deployed to protect shop windows are being reserved to make extra sure of this fact. </div><div><br /></div><div>Don't get me wrong, the anarcho-tyranny reading still has a fair bit to recommend. But the chief difference is the claim that this isn't really anarchy - if they stopped preventing people burning buildings, or robbing houses, then you'd see real death and destruction. </div><div><br /></div><div>But both theories beat the hell out of the mainstream explanation for police restraint, which is that city governments are rationally acting to not inflame the mob, because this would risk provoking an even bigger backlash, and they’d lose control entirely. Militarily, this is not a hard problem. An uncoordinated, untrained, and incoherent mob gets slaughtered by a well-armed, well-trained army. Not only that, but the idea of violent counter-escalation is trivially disproved by <a href="https://twitter.com/R0bzit0/status/1267374903398789120">this video</a>. Watch it, it’s astounding.</div><div><br /></div><div>Turns out the Latin Kings gang in Chicago takes a dim view to people turning up to loot their neighborhood. And they’ll pull out a piece and tell you to GTFO, or you’ll get shot. Everybody knows that they are serious. Everybody knows that smashing the liquor store window is not worth it. So the window doesn’t get smashed. More importantly, <i>nobody actually needs to get shot either</i>. In this respect, the Latin Kings are able to prevent property damage, which is a pretty important measure of governance, than the CPD. The comparison is not quite fair, because the Kings just need to defend a small patch of turf, don’t mind beating the wrong people up to achieve it, and there is likely complete organizational support for all this. The CPD has to pacify the whole city, while being instructed by a deeply suspicious city government and legal apparatus that has made clear that they may not protect them from legal consequences themselves if any riot prevention happens to look bad on camera. But still. </div><div><br /></div><div>I seriously can’t get over that video. Is there anyone alive who actually thinks that the Latin Kings shooting a looter would be a bad idea <i>because more looters would come back and try to start s*** with the Latin Kings</i>? To ask it is to laugh. As Keyser Soze said, they have the will to do what the other guy wouldn’t. Not just being willing to shoot the gun. But being willing to do it in defense of a shop window. Firing the nukes is always off the equilibrium path. But it makes a great deal of difference to what happens as to what issues each of the two sides is willing to go nuclear on.</div><div><br /></div><div>And it’s easy to see how the CPD ceding effective authority to the Latin Kings looks like the collapse of late Roman Britain. In that case, a failing state exercised less and less authority over its far flung regions. Local garrison commanders were still in charge, notionally on behalf of Rome. But Rome hasn’t sent any word for a decade, and hasn’t sent any funds in much longer. Taxes are levied in kind on the local populace. And the main guy is able to keep his band of men together, and provide desperately needed defense against the raiding Picts and Scoti. Do this long enough, and now you’re in charge. You can call yourself Warlord, or King, or Centurion, or whatever. It ultimately doesn’t matter. You’re now the government. If the future of America is Latin Kings government, the depressing prospect is that you might get a smaller chance of having your windows smashed (although likely a higher chance of getting shot).</div><div><br /></div><div>But as a gambling man, I don’t think it will come to that. Roman Britain collapsed slowly, but it didn’t collapse from riots (although Constantinople <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots">almost did</a>, so who knows). </div><div><br /></div><div>Randall Collins wrote "Violence" in 2008. Back then it was still acceptable in polite society to say that rioters smash windows because smashing windows is fun to a lot of people. I don't think he'd be able to write that today under his real name with respect to the current protests - he'd be run out of the Penn Sociology Department on a rail. These riots did manage to kill stone dead the endless drumbeat of virus stories, and even if things get worse, I suspect it will be hard to get people to care in the same way as before, once it became clear that it was mostly the elderly dying anyway. Serious social distancing is likely gone for good, whether for better or worse. </div><div><br /></div><div>The bottom line, though, is that I think this will probably fizzle in a few days, without important long term consequences. I might be wrong – if there were a political VIX index, it would be considerably elevated. But not December 2008 elevated, nor March 2020 elevated. Then again, betting that the great deal of ruin in a nation will continue to last is like the carry trade. It works great, but every now and then you lose your shirt. </div><div><br /></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1764328218611568829.post-25716070570699322112020-05-25T21:08:00.003-07:002020-05-27T10:55:26.423-07:00On Ernst Jünger, from WW1 to WW2I started reading <i>Storm of Steel </i>during the first weeks of the lockdown. It was strangely therapeutic to read about the sheer savage carnage of the trenches of World War I. When one is housebound for an extended period of time, there's a peculiar pleasure in reading about problems both wildly different from and much worse than one's own minor inconveniences. It brought to mind Lloyd Blankfein's riposte to a whining Goldman employee back in the 2008 financial crisis - "You're getting out of a Mercedes to go to the New York Federal Reserve. You're not getting out of a Higgins boat on Omaha Beach."<div><br /><div>(As a side note, I guess we now officially have to start adding "2008" to the words "financial crisis" from here on out.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Jünger is a fascinating character. It's fair to say that if you were born in 1895 in Heidelberg, and died still in Germany 1998, you were going to have seen some s*** in the interim. You will have lived as an adult through five pretty wildly different regimes - pre-war Imperial Germany through WW1, the chaos and decadence of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Nazi Germany and WW2, Cold War West Germany, and finally re-unified Germany.</div><div><br /></div><div>Especially early on, successive new regimes put the citizens somewhat in the position of Poles over the course of WW2. Each new army comes marching through, and demands loyalty from you, while lashing out at those who are deemed to have supported the last army. Then the current lot gets tossed out, and the new army takes the same attitude. Repeat enough times, and you're almost guaranteed to be on the receiving end of someone's fury. Just surviving requires a lot of luck.</div><div><br /></div><div>So if you manage to not only survive intact in each regime, but even to be broadly celebrated in most of them, you've pulled off a pretty remarkable feat. You might do it through extreme political cunning and chicanery, trimming your sails just enough in each period. Or you might do it by talent, being someone that everyone wants to have on their side. You obviously also need a lot of luck in either case. </div><div><br /></div><div>Jünger was one of only eleven infantry commanders in WW1 to be awarded the <i>Pour le Mérite, </i>the highest military honors of the German Empire, which doesn't suggest the kind of person noted for just keeping their head down and staying out of needless danger. </div><div><br /></div><div>His attitude to being in the trenches on the Western front seems to approximately be that death might come at any point, often quite randomly, so you may as well be brave and fight well in the meantime, since war is an ennobling, even transcendental experience. This is the kind of attitude that a lot of people probably wish they'd have if they were actually tested, but few of us ever get to really find out. Well, Jünger sure did. As he describes at the end of the book:</div><div><i><blockquote>"During the endless hours flat on your back, you try to distract yourself to pass the time; once, I reckoned up my wounds. Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me with an even twenty scars. In the course of this war, where so much of the firing was done blindly into empty space, I still managed to get myself targeted no fewer than eleven times. I felt every justification, therefore, in donning the gold wound-stripes, which arrived for me one day."</blockquote></i></div><div>Not only that, but almost as noteworthy is the parts left out of the story as being insufficiently interesting. Such as joining up with the French Foreign legion a year before the war, illegally, and then deserting. And then signing up to the German Army almost as soon as the war started.</div><div><br /></div><div>Karl Marlantes' foreword gives a great summary:</div><div><blockquote><i>"It should surprise no one that Jünger's book contains almost no political, moral, or philosophical commentary: Young men generally don't think deeply or philosophize about most things. But the lack of such commentary is not just because of the author's age; it is also because Storm of Steel was written by the type of person I call a "born warrior". Born warriors are interested in war and fighting, not philosophy or politics."</i></blockquote></div><div>And indeed, that is how the book reads. The strongest hint of an explicitly literary bent is that Jünger manages to invent lots of colorful imagery to describe the endless aspects of shelling, bombing, and shooting. When you would otherwise have to say "and there were a buttload of terrifying shells falling at that time" roughly five hundred times during the book, managing to not repeat yourself in this regard is actually quite a feat.</div><div><br /></div><div>But as an overall tone, <i>Storm of Steel </i>manages to tread a remarkable line of being very matter of fact and compelling about the scenes of carnage, but without conveying a false sense of "no big deal" type braggadocio, nor self-pitying complaint, nor adventurism for its own sake. For instance, here's one extended scene of a foray towards British lines, which I picked out at random:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><i>"In quick time, we had crept up to the enemy barrier. Just before it, we came across a pretty stout and well-insulated wire in some long grass. I was of the opinion that information was important here, and instructed Wohlgemut to cut off a piece and take it with him. While he was sawing away at it with - for want of more appropriate tools - a cigar clipper, we heard something jingling the wire; a few British soldiers appeared and started working without noticing us, pressed as we were in the long grass.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Mindful of our hard time on the previous expedition, I breathed 'Wohlgemut, toss a hand grenade in that lot!'</i></div><div><i>'Lieutenant, shouldn't we let them work a bit more first?'</i></div><div><i>'Ensign, that was an order!'</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Even here, in this wasteland, the magic words took effect. With the sinking feeling of a man embarking on an uncertain adventure, I listened to the dry crackle of the pulled fuse, and watched Wohlgemut, to offer less of a target, trundle, almost roll the grenade at the British group. It stopped in a thicket, almost in the middle of them; they seemed not to have seen anything. A flash of lightning lit up their sprawling figures. With a should of 'You are prisoners!' we launched ourselves like tigers into the dense white smoke. A desperate scene developed in fractions of seconds. I held my pistol in the middle of a face that seemed to loom out of the dark at me like a pale mask. A shadow slammed back against the barbed wire with a grunt. There was a ghastly cry, a sort of 'Wah!' - of the kind that people only produce when they've seen a ghost. On my left, Wohlgemut was banging away with his pistol, while Bartels in his excitement was throwing a hand grenade in our midst. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>After one shot, the magazine, had clicked out of my pistol grip. I stood yelling in front of a Briton who in his horror was pressing his back into the barbed wire, and kept pulling the trigger. Nothing happened - it was like a dream of impotence. Sounds came from the trench in front of us. Shouts rang out, a machine gun clattered into life. We jumped away. Once more I stopped in a crater and aimed my pistol at a shadowy form that was pursuing me. This time, it was just as well it didn't fire, because it was Birkner, whom I had supposed to be safely back long ago.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Then we raced towards our lines. Just before our wire, the bullets were coming so thick and fast that I had to leap into a water-filled, wire-laced mine crater. Dangling over the water on the swaying wire, I heard the bullets rushing past me like a huge swarm of bees, while scraps of wire and metal shards sliced into the rim of the crater. After half an hour or so, once the firing had abated, I made my way over our entanglements and leaped into our trench, to an enthusiastic reception. Wohlgemut and Bartels were already back; and another half an hour later, so was Birkner. We were all pleased at the happy outcome, and only regretted that once again our intended captive had managed to get away. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the experience had taken its toll on my nerves, when I was lying on my pallet in my dugout with teeth chattering, and quite unable to sleep. Rather, I had the sensation of a sort of supreme wakeness - as if I had a little electric bell going off somewhere in my body. The following morning, I could hardly walk, because over one knee (over other, historic injuries) I had a long scrape from the barbed wire, while the other had caught some shards from Bartels' hand grenade.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There's nothing worse for a soldier than boredom.</i> </div></blockquote><div></div><div>There are dozens of stories like this. And by the end, one gets exactly the picture that Marlantes describes. If I were in a foxhole, I would want Ernst Jünger there beside me. </div><div><br /></div><div>So it was with quite some interest that I picked up Jünger's diaries from his time as a Wehrmacht officer in World War 2, primarily in Paris. What would such a man have to say about the Third Reich? Jünger was interesting in that he was a reactionary, firmly opposed to democracy during the Weimar period, but also a noted critic of the Nazis. He refused several offers to join them in the Reichstag, and quit the veteran's organization for his regiment when they expelled their Jewish members. </div><div><br /></div><div>Despite this, he ends up in Paris as intelligence officer. On its face, this is strange on two levels. Firstly, if he disliked the Nazis so much, how did he end up in the Wehrmacht under Hitler? This one is easy - he was conscripted. "World War 2, that sucks, if I were in Germany I would have just stayed out of it and quietly minded my own business" is the kind of pea-brained thought that seems to occur to almost every contemporary reader at some point, notwithstanding the obvious difficulty when you pause to contemplate it. </div><div><br /></div><div>And secondly, why an intelligence officer in a cushy gig in the Hotel Majestic in Paris? This may seem strange given how drawn he was to action as a young man, and how little he seemed to care about the side (how else do you describe joining the French Foreign Legion, and then the army fighting the French Foreign Legion a year later?). To end up as, in Gough Whitlam's memorable phrase, "a pen-pusher in Paris"? </div><div><br /></div><div>Reader, if you did not know in advance, you simply would not believe that the two books are written by the same person. Here's a few random samples:</div><div><br /></div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>Lunch at the Morands' on Avenue Charles-Floquet. There I also met Gaston Gallimard and Jean Cocteau.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>Morand epitomizes a kind of worldly sybarite. In one of his books, I found a passage comparing an ocean liner with a Leviathan infused with the aroma of Chypre. His book about London is commendable; it describes the city as a great house. If the English were to build pyramids, they would include London in the decoration of their tombs.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>Cocteau: amiable and at the same time, ailing, like someone who dwells in a special, but comfortable, hell. </i></div><div><i></i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>With intelligent women it is very difficult to overcome physical distance. It is as though they girded their alert intellects with a belt that foils desire. It is too bright within their orbit. Those who lack specific erotic orientation are more assertive. This could be one of those chess moves that ensures the continuity of our species. </i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>One can ask advice of a subaltern in a matter, but not regarding the ethical system fundamental to that matter.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>The dignity of man must be more sacred to us than life itself.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>The age of humanity is the age in which human beings have become scarce.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>The true leaders of this world are at home in their graves.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>In moments of inescapable disruption, individuals must proclaim their allegiance like a warship hoisting its colors.</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>By choosing certain circles in life, such as the Prussian General Staff, one may gain access to certain elevated spheres of inside information but exclude himself from the highest. </i></div></blockquote><div><i></i></div><div>To which you may wonder - how does the man who talks calmly and frankly about fiery death from above, when confronted with the Third Reich, only have the ability to talk about art, and dreams he had last night, and books, and occasional oblique references to the regime?</div><div><br /></div><div>The answer is that in WW1, bombs might obliterate you at any point, but as long as you followed your commanding officer's orders, nobody much gave a damn what you wrote. For the Nazis, even if you were an officer, this was definitively not the case. And that's why there's so few great surviving descriptions from inside the regime (or from communist Russia, for that matter - we were very lucky to get a Solzhenitsyn, and that was decades after the crimes in question had started). As Jünger notes on October 21, 1941:</div><div><i></i><blockquote><i>"I am keeping my personal papers and journals under lock and key in the Majestic. Because I am under orders from Spiedel to process not only the files concerning Operation Sea Lion, but also the struggle for hegemony in France between the military commander and the Party, a special steel file cabinet has been set up in my room. Naturally, armor like this only symbolizes personal invulnerability. When this is cast in doubt, even the strongest locks spring right open."</i></blockquote></div><div>In other words, one had to play a delicate game to get enough political capital to be able to write one's own thoughts freely down on paper, and even then one must assume they will be pored over at some point. This is part of the uneasy relationship between the Nazi party itself and the German military commander in France mentioned above (and officers like Jünger ). Hitler is referred to as Kniebolo, a play on Diabolo, the devil.</div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, Jünger refers in a number of places to <i>lemures</i>. The notes describe these as "vengeful spirits in Roman mythology. E.J. uses the term to refer euphemistically to the executioners and butchers of the NS Regime. His source is Goethe's <i>Faust </i>where the <i>Lemuren </i>serve Mephistopheles as gravediggers." For instance, on March 12th, 1942:</div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>It is said that since the sterilization and extermination of the mentally ill, the number of children born with mental illness has increased. Similarly, with the suppression of beggars, poverty has become more widespread. And the decimation of the Jews has led to the spreading of Jewish characteristics in the world, which is exhibiting an increase in Old Testament traits...</i></div></blockquote><blockquote><div><i>Feast Days of the lemures, including the murder of men, women and children. The gruesome spoils are hurriedly buried. Now there come other lemures</i><i> to claw them out of the ground. They film the dismembered and half-decayed patch of land with macabre gusto. Then they show these films to others. What bizarre forces develop in carrion. </i></div></blockquote><div><i></i></div><div>Or more explicitly on the limitations on what he can say, from August 16th, 1942:</div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>Saturday and Sunday in Vaux-de-Cernay at the house of Rambouillet, as a guest of the commander-in-chief, who is using this old monastery as his summer residence. My stay here has the advantage that I can do and say what I think is right and not be seen by any lemures.</i></div></blockquote><div>And this category seems to include many things - Jünger's repugnance at the deportation of Jews (wikipedia mentions that "he passed on information e.g. about upcoming transports 'at an acceptable level of risk' which saved Jewish lives.), his sense that the war on the eastern front was misguided and bound to fail, and any number of other things. In the presence of a sympathetic commander-chief, you can speak freely. Otherwise, even in your journal, you had better keep your criticism measured. </div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>Jews were arrested here yesterday for deportation. Parents were separated from their children and wailing could be heard in the streets. Never for a moment may I forget that I am surrounded by unfortunate people who endure the greatest suffering. What kind of human being, what kind of officer, would I be otherwise? This uniform obligates me to provide protection wherever possible. One has the impression that to do that one must, like Don Quixote, confront millions. </i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>This shows a side of things that doesn't fit neatly into standard narratives about the Holocaust. Contra the deniers, an otherwise quite conservative Wehrmacht officer (admittedly, a well-connected intelligence officer) knew about the deportations, shootings and gassings at the time. And in his retelling, they were every bit as grotesque and cruel as we understand them today. Jünger even states that he feels that Germany's treatment of the Jews (and other targeted groups like French civilians in retaliation killings, the disabled, etc.) was so repugnant that Germany had enormous collective guilt for it.</div><div><br /></div><div>But contra the standard narrative, he as a senior Wehrmacht officer was actively working to obstruct them in what way he felt he could. Part of the reason he felt able to do this was the fact that the German military officer in charge in Paris, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl-Heinrich_von_St%C3%BClpnagel">Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel</a>, had a similarly uneasy relationship with the Nazi Party, as evidenced by his role in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Modernity tends to write all these people off as "Nazis", but the Wehrmacht still maintained some political independence. If the history of modern America were written by similarly uncharitable future historians, it would be like lumping all military officers in Iraq as being part of "the Republican Party" (under Bush) or even "the Democratic Party" (under Obama). </div><div><br /></div><div>If you're not in the presence of the commander-in-chief, you have to be more careful. On the train back from a trip to the Eastern Front in 1943, Jünger describes how one has to delicately feel out the opinions of one's audience before revealing too much:</div><div><blockquote><div><i>Colonel Rathke, head of the department of military affairs, was on the train. Conversation about the situation in Rostov, which he consider reparable. Then, about the war in general. After the first three value judgments, one recognizes someone from the other camp and retreats behind polite cliches.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div>Of course, when one <i>does </i>find a fellow-thinker, one can talk much more freely. Jünger describes the conversation with General Konrad, commander of the Caucasus front. When I recalled this passage, I was sure these were Jünger's words, but looking back, no, they're him reporting someone else's sentiments, actually without comment. Prudent, as always. But when you realize the only way those sentiments could have been elicited, Jünger's feelings become clear:</div><div><i><blockquote>The pounding suffered by the Sixth Army had shaken the entire southern flank. He was of the opinion that during the last year, our forces had been squandered by people who understood everything except how to wage war. The general continued, saying that neglect of the concentration of forces was especially dilletantish. Clausewitz would be turning in his grave. People followed their every whim, every fleeting idea: and propaganda goals trumped those of strategy. He said that we could attack the Caucasus, Egypt, Leningrad, and Stalingrad - just not all at once, especially while we were still caught up in secondary objectives.</blockquote></i></div><div>This is a pretty damning and astute evaluation of Operation Barbarossa, especially coming from someone tasked with implementing it. If the Third Reich has an epitaph from a purely Machiavellian standpoint, it's hard to beat this one. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>Jünger also shows his skill at negotiating discussions with those more pleased with the butchery, and drawing out people's views without revealing too much. "Merline" here is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Ferdinand_C%C3%A9line">Celine</a>:</div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>At the German Institute this afternoon. Among those there was Merline. Tall, raw-boned, strong, a bit ungainly, but lively during the discussion - or more accurately, during his monologue. He speaks with a manic, inward-directed gaze, which seems to shine from deep within a cave. He no longer looks to the right or the left. He seems to be marching towards some unknown goal. "I always have death beside me." And in saying this, he points to the spot beside his seat, as though a puppy were lying there. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>He spoke of his consternation, his astonishment, at the fact that we soldiers were not shooting, hanging and exterminating the Jews - astonishment that anyone who had a bayonet was not making unrestrained use of it. "If the Bolsheviks were here in Paris, they would demonstrate it, show how it's done - how to comb through a population, quarter by quarter, house by house. If I had a bayonet, I would know what to do."</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>It was informative to listen to him rant this way for two hours, because he radiated the amazing power of nihilism. People like this hear only a single melody, but they hear it uncommonly powerfully. They resemble machines of iron that follow a single path until they are finally dismantled.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>It is remarkable when such minds speak about the sciences, such as biology. Them apply them the same way Stone Age man did, transforming them only into a means to slay others. </i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>They take no pleasure in having an idea. They have had many - their yearning drives them toward fortresses from which cannons fire upon the masses and spread fear. Once they have achieved this goal, they interrupt their intellectual work, regardless of what arguments have helped them climb to the top. Then they give themselves over to the pleasure of killing. It was this drive to commit mass murder that propelled them forward in such a meaningless and confused way in the first place.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>People with such natures could be recognized earlier, in eras when faith could still be tested. Nowadays, they hide under the cloak of ideas. These are quite arbitrary, as seen in the fact that when certain goals are achieved, they are discarded like rags.</i></div><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Contra Walter Sobchak, according to Jünger the tenets of National Socialism as utilized by its worst proponents ultimately did just amount to nihilism, and not to an ethos after all. For the people who glorified in the butchery, the butchery was the point. And remember, this is from a man most famous for glorifying war! But in Storm of Steel, he relishes the fight against worthy opponents. For the <i>lemures</i>, he has only contempt.</div><div> </div><div>But strangely, most of the diary isn't about this kind of political or ethical stuff. Part of this is probably camouflage. But there's a huge amount about dreams he had, or his discussions with artists around Paris (like Picasso) and writers like Carl Schmitt and Celine. Jünger was something of a celebrity writer, having gotten uneasy attention from the regime from his novel <i>On the Marble Cliffs </i>in 1939, which was viewed as being critical of the Nazis. This meant he consorted a lot with various oddballs, artists, writers and freethinkers in Paris. </div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, most of his Paris diary is about little else. Other than the fact of occasional air raid sirens, most of the scenes could be straight out of Woody Allen's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_in_Paris">Midnight in Paris</a> - romantic displays of life during the late Parisian Golden Age. The fact that our main protagonist is an officer of the occupying German army, but also extremely erudite and educated, just makes the whole thing even stranger. Jünger in general doesn't seem to be trying to downplay the brutal parts of the occupation, except to the extent that he can only discuss them obliquely. But if you go to his diary looking for a depiction of the widespread horrors of Vichy France for the average non-Jewish Frenchman, you won't find it here. Of course, in the famous words of Mandy Rice-Davies - he would say that, wouldn't he? Being a high ranking officer in the occupying regime in Paris, cavorting with artists and picking up women who weren't your wife, probably <i>was </i>a pretty good gig. If you were a poor farmer in the countryside, or a leftist artist, or a Jew? Well, that's a different matter. Still, for all that, it's hard not to be struck by how <i>normal </i>occupied Paris sounds, which is certainly not how people seem to imagine it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Part of the reason is that Jünger , for whatever reason, talks very little about his actual military work. Perhaps this is just for military secrecy. But the end result is a crazy contrast to <i>Storm of Steel, </i>where action was everywhere, death forever one unlucky break away, and the enormous necessity of the job always in front. Here, <i>inaction</i> is everywhere. It's almost like <i>A Bohemian Wehrmacht Officer in Paris</i>. There is no sense of any purpose at all to him being in Paris, other than getting inspiration for his writing. </div><div><br /></div><div>When Jünger goes to the Eastern Front, we see the old stoic acceptance of danger and risk of death briefly come back (though again, there still is no sense of what he's doing there, other than just seeing stuff). Jünger is still no coward. Indeed, when the Eastern Front post is suggested, he is concerned that he is genuinely sick and has been losing weight, but he can't just check into the infirmary right before he's meant to be shipped off to the Caucasus. When he trades a Paris hotel for a frigid railway station room in some tiny town in the Caucasus, he describes the privations, but without any sense of complaint. Indeed, he describes how much worse the situation is for soldiers actually on the front. </div><div><br /></div><div>One also gets the sense that combat is very much a young man's game. Because while the war in question has changed an enormous amount (Jünger memorably says that the Eastern Front seemed to more resemble the 30 Years War than WW1), it's also true that Jünger himself is different. Radically so. It's hard not to wonder what a Jünger who had been born 20 years later and ended up as a lieutenant on the Eastern Front would have thought of it all. I guess we'll never know. </div><div><br /></div><div>But the Jünger who actually lived through it is occasionally strident and unsparing. For Anglos, WW2 is the good war, the one Hollywood always wants to portray, whereas WW1 is the pointless butchery. For Jünger , the opposite is true:</div><div><i><blockquote>New Year's Even party at Staff Headquarters in the evening. Here again I saw that during these years any pure joy of celebration is not possible. On that note General Muller told about the monstrous atrocities perpetrated by the Security Service after entering Kiev. Trains were again mentioned that carried Jews into poison gas tunnels. Those are rumors, and I note them as such, but extermination is certainly occurring on a huge scale. This puts me in mind of the wife of good old Potard back in Paris, who was so worried about his wife. When you have been party to such individual fates and begun to comprehend the statistics that apply to the wicked crimes carried out in the charnel houses, an enormity is exposed that makes you throw up your hands in despair. I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much. Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians. Mankind has thus reached the stage described by Dostoevsky in Raskolnikov. He views people like himself as vermin. That is precisely what he must guard against if he is not to sink to the level of the insects. That terrible old saying applies to him as well as to his victims: "This is you."</blockquote></i></div><div><br /></div><div><div>Outside of the Holocaust, the rest of the Eastern front story is also still full of grotesque suffering. </div><div><i></i></div><blockquote><div><i>Detail: Russian prisoners Maiweg had selected from all various camps to work on the reconstruction - drilling technicians, geologists, local oil workers. A combat unit had been commandeered at a railroad station as bearers. There were five hundred men; of these three hundred and fifty died along the roads. From the rest, another hundred and twenty died from exhaustion when they returned so that only thirty survived.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>...</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>I was a guest of the commander...He spoke of police tactics with the attitude of a gamekeeper, for example. "I consider the view quite erroneous that the thirteen and fourteen-year-old youths captured with the partisans should not be liquidated.Anyone who has grown up that way, without a father or a mother, will never turn out well. A bullet is the only right thing. By the way, that's what the Russians do with them too." Citing evidence, he told an anecdote about a sergeant who had picked up a nine-year-old and a twelve-year-old lad overnight out of pity; in the morning, he was found with his throat cut. </i></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Oof. Every bit of that story is grim and depressing. As Gary Brecher put it, even as a War Nerd, it is hard to get excited about the Eastern Front. </div></div><div><br /></div><div>WW1, for all its horrors, was unusually kind to civilians by world historical standards, even those caught up nearby. WW2, certainly by the end, reverted more to ancient type - butchery, extermination, and few distinctions between civilian and military targets. </div><div><br /></div><div>Indeed, just because Jünger agrees with modernity about the evils of the Nazis doesn't mean he agrees on everything else. In particular, the straightforward descriptions of the effects of Allied bombing raids do not make for very edifying reading for those raised on the heroism of the American and British cause in WW2. </div><div><i><div></div><blockquote><div>Schaer also said that the last attack on Western Germany cost sixteen thousand lives in a single night. The images are becoming apocalyptic; people are seeing fire raining down from heaven. This is actually an incendiary compound of rubber and phosphorus that is inextinguishable and inescapable as it engulfs all forms of life. There are stories of mothers who have been seen flinging their children into rivers. This hideous escalation of atrocities has produced a kind of nightmare. </div><div><br /></div><div>... </div></blockquote><div></div><blockquote>Krause was in Hamburg during the bombardment and reported that he saw twenty charred corpses leaning close together across the wall of a bridge there, as if they were lying on a grill. On this spot people covered in phosphorus had tried to save themselves by leaping into the water, but they were carbonized before they could do so. He told of a woman who was seen carrying an incinerated corpse of a child in each arm. Krause, who carries a bullet deep in his heart muscle, passed a house were phosphorus was dripping from the low roof. He heard screams but was unable to help - this conjures up a scene from the Inferno or some horrific dream. </blockquote><div><blockquote> ...</blockquote></div></i></div><blockquote><div><i>We also spoke of phosphorus as a weapon. It seems that we actually possessed this material when we enjoyed air superiority, but we waived that option. That would be to our credit, and in light of Kniebolo's character, bizarre enough. </i></div><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Or in Kirchorst near Hanover:</div><div><i><blockquote>Was in the city in the afternoon. The ruins are new and have been hardest hit; the thrashing has been followed by the scorpion's sting. The southern part of the city was burning. Coal cellars were aglow and roofs were collapsing in showers of sparks in houses on Podbielskistrasse and on Alte Celler Heerstrasse, where I used to ride my bicycle. Nobody notices the fires anymore; they are just part of the scene. On the corners the homeless were packing up their salvaged possessions in bedsheets. I saw a woman come out the door of a house holding a chamber pot in her hand; little more than a fragment was still attached to its handle. Huge craters surrounded the railway station, where the equestrian statue of King Ernst August still stood in front of the bare, empty halls. Two entrances of the great air raid bunker where twenty-six thousand people had sought shelter, had been buried in debris. The ventilation system worked only sporadically, making the trapped crowd start to tear their clothes from their bodies and scream for air in the first stages of suffocation. God protect us from mousetraps of this sort.</blockquote></i></div><div>What? Did you think that, because your granddad heroically risked his life to be a bomber pilot over Nazi Germany, the results would therefore be pleasing to see up close? Why should this sausage factory look any prettier from the inside than any other one? Be honest, you'd never even <i>heard</i> of the bombing of Hanover. In the scheme of World War 2, it just doesn't rate a mention. One way or another, nobody much cares about the suffering of German civilians in World War 2. Collective guilt for thee, but not for me. </div><div><br /></div><div>Jünger understood this perfectly well, and while he doesn't mince his words with the horrendous effects of Allied bombing, he doesn't shy away from German collective guilt either. In this respect, he's like Solzhenitsyn. But if you expected that his frank portrayal of German collective guilt over their atrocities would slip easily into him excusing allied collective guilt over <i>their </i>atrocities, you'd be quite mistaken:</div><div><i><blockquote>We have to keep in mind that this carnage elicits satisfaction in the world. The situation of the German is now like what the Jews experienced inside Germany. Yet it is still better than seeing the Germans with their illegitimate power. Now one can share their misery.</blockquote></i></div><div>The group that gets the most strikingly different treatment from the standard narrative, however, are the Parisians who tried to be friends with individual members of the occupying government. The stereotype of any Frenchman even vaguely supportive of the occupying German forces ranges from "repulsive Nazi sympathizer" to "regrettable go-along-to-get-along coward". Indeed, Jünger is scathing of Frenchmen like Celine/"Merline" who support the Nazis because they're sticking it to the Jews. But he describes a class of Frenchmen who had friendly association with the occupying Germans primarily out of a desire to put behind them the centuries of animosity between France and Germany, and just to take individuals as they found them and be friends with the nice ones. These people of course were treated extremely harshly in the aftermath of the German evacuation:</div><div><blockquote><i>[Dr Gopel] reported that Drieu La Rochelle had shot himself in Paris. It seems to be a law that people who support intercultural friendship out of noble motives must fall, while the crass profiteers get away with everything. They say that Montherlant is being harassed. He was still caught up in the notion that chivalrous friendship is possible; now he is being disabused of that idea by louts. </i></blockquote></div><div>None of this should mean that Jünger is surprised that lots of Parisians loathe him and the government, and he describes such loathing quite honestly. This is inevitable when you're an occupying government that turned up riding tanks. But so were the Americans! How do you think they turned up? That doesn't make them moral equals, but it surely complicates the simple narrative that you should always resist foreign occupation. The main involvement of the Allies for the first several years of his time in Paris is periodically bombing and destroying bits of the city. This anecdote, however, stood out, if you're wondering why Paris is still beautiful today, whereas most of Germany is an architectural monstrosity:</div><div><blockquote><i>Kniebolo's strict order to blow up the bridges over the Seine and leave a trail of devastation behind had not been carried out. It appears that among those courageous souls who resisted this desecration, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Speidel">Spiedel</a> was in the forefront right beside <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_von_Choltitz">Choltitz</a>. </i></blockquote></div><div>And in an eerily correct prediction of 20th century architecture, Jünger saw in 1942 which way the wind was blowing:</div><div><i><blockquote>Today, France still enjoys this advantage of traditions passed down from hand to hand, and will certainly retain these thanks to its largely rational policies. But what is important in this country at the moment is that its old haunts, the cities, will not be plowed under and on its ruins chain stores from Chicago would be built - which is what will happen to Germany. </blockquote></i></div><div>Chain stores from Chicago were indeed built over the ruins of Germany, and the results were every bit as aesthetically unedifying as Jünger predicted. Paris was indeed largely spared.</div><div><br /></div><div>Jünger doesn't describe almost anything about the allied cause, either American or Russian (or the German cause very much either, for that matter). In this respect, it resembles <i>Storm of Steel</i>. The almost total lack of discussion of Communism is an interesting dog that didn't bark, though I'm not sure what to make of it. Admittedly, he wasn't in a position to experience this firsthand. You have to write what you know. As a reader, you have to read both sides. To understand the sides in the Eastern Front, start with Solzhenitsyn's <i>The Gulag Archipelago, </i>and then follow it up with <i>A German Officer in Occupied Paris. </i>Jünger's criticisms of the Nazis on their own are less surprising to a modern audience. The big surprise is just hearing them coming from the author of <i>Storm of Steel</i>. While he doesn't dwell on it, his disgust at Hitler and his regime doesn't mean he feels that Germany as a nation had no legitimate grievances with the rest of Europe. As he describes it:</div><div><i><blockquote>Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.</blockquote></i></div><div>He never spells out what that just cause was, in his opinion, so I guess we'll never know. </div><div><br /></div><div>Once Paris was evacuated, Jünger had the good fortune to be dismissed from the army, partly due to him being viewed with suspicion due to being friends with, and possibly inspiring, a number of the members of the July 20 plot to kill Hitler (even though he himself was not involved). As noted in the foreword, one of his biographers claims that Jünger was scheduled to be called before the Nazi People's Court, which would have been a death sentence, but only the complete chaotic collapse of Germany saved him. </div><div><br /></div><div>Despite being very close to the Nazi chopping block himself, Jünger was denounced at the end of the war as being too sympathetic to the Nazis, and viewed with suspicion for a number of years. </div><div><br /></div><div>But how could it be otherwise, to thread such a tiny needle hole and come out the other side intact?</div><div><br /></div><div>The journey from <i>Storm of Steel </i>to <i>A German Officer in Occupied Paris </i>is a strange and grim one. Every time I read these books, especially <i>Storm of Steel</i>, it's hard not to get to the end and think how many Jüngers from countries all over Europe were standing one foot in the wrong direction, and got torn to shreds with their story untold, on the battlefields of the Somme, and Stalingrad, and Ypres. </div><div><i> </i></div><div>It is a hugely sad and depressing thought. </div><div><br /></div><div>And, indeed, it is the strongest riposte to <i>Storm of Steel</i> itself.</div></div>Shylock Holmeshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01421115441614742339noreply@blogger.com2