The thorny problem of inconstant judges

One 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 well-defined and secure property rights in the state itself. This is a slightly more formalized way of saying "secure power".  I'm certainly not claiming originality in this idea - Moldbug's formalism is what got me started thinking about this.

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 perfectly efficient engine. 

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.

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 engineering problem than a pure science problem. 

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 menshevik, 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).

More importantly, in either case you should care very much about how far away you are from the platonic ideal. Otherwise you're just committing Asimov's Relativity of Wrong. 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. 

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? Lots of things, as it turns out). 

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?

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?

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

At almost no point does it seem to occur to the mainstream right- why do half the Justices we appoint turn out to be traitors? And more importantly, what can we do to stop this happening? 

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

There are a few ways to think about what might be going on.

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.

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.

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?

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. 

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? 

Reader, do you know what it's like to be hated? I mean, viciously hated, smeared in the New York Times, denounced as a stoolie or a rapist or sexual harasser or an Uncle Tom, day in, day out? Publicly stabbed in the back by people you helped and trusted, over and over? Like the pressure brought to bear on people by hostile journalists and the police, this is something that it's easy to sneer at until it happens to you. 

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. 

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. 

To pile metaphor on metaphor, look at the home team advantage in sports. Mosokowitz and Wertheim looked at this. 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. 

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 federal court judge in Hawaii". 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 you, not the machine. 

Look at smiling John Roberts in his confirmation hearing:

Do you think that, before he took on the job, this guy had any experience of being hated? To ask is to laugh. The words on everyone's lips were "looks like nice guy". Good luck with that. He's a nice guy alright.

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 psychological constraints are real constraints. 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 Randall Collins point about violence. Most people also don't like inflicting random violence on people, except in a limited range of circumstances. 

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. 

To solve the problem of the social pressure being brought to bear on Supreme Court Justices is probably a coup-complete or regime-complete 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".

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. 

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.

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?

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. 

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. 

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. 

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? 

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.

Maybe you think this is all old hat. Very well. Here's a simple test. Take the sentence 

"Previously conservative judges are susceptible to public pressure, and probably will end up changing their views to conform to it."

Ask yourself - would this apply to...me? Would I be susceptible to public pressure, and change my views to conform to it?

Ha, no, of course not. Biases for thee, cold-iron robotic logic for me. 

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. 

To paraphrase one half of my nom-de-plume:

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?

On the Toppling of Statues

In the latest round of the imbroglio 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.

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.

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 New York and Portland. The city of Columbus, Ohio, recently took down their statue of Columbus, 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 Norwegian anti-slavery crusaders, Catholic saints, and Cervantes, who was himself a slave. 

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.

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.

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. 

The whole thing is strikingly reminiscent of Godwin’s Law:  “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” 

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.

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.

Eventually, all the statues will get torn down.

If you don’t believe me yet, don’t worry, you will.

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.

But I want to focus on one bit in particular.

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…

…at what point in all this do people realize that there are literally no more symbols that unify Americans as a people anymore?

That there are no more symbols of the general feeling of mutual camaraderie and shared history and purpose as a nation, because there actually is no general feeling of mutual camaraderie and shared history and purpose as a nation?

And if you, like me, think that the above statements already apply, 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.

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.

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. 

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?

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.

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.

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.

You cannot have a nation destroy all the symbols of itself and expect everything to just proceed as before.

On the Recent Looting

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

But even in this grim spot, some contrary perspectives stand out. 

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.  

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. 

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 more than recovered since 2015. 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. 

(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 “Di Great Insohreckshan”, written about the Brixton riots, which I somehow quite like)

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. 

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.

These are massive, widespread riots. Thousands and thousands in the streets, looting, burning, throwing projectiles at the cops. 

But where are the guns?

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 Richard Nixon’s remarks 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. 

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! 

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. 

At one extreme is the thesis I associate most with Randall Collins book, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory. 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. 

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:

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 this video. Watch it, it’s astounding.

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, nobody actually needs to get shot either. 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. 

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 because more looters would come back and try to start s*** with the Latin Kings? 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.

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).

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 almost did, so who knows). 

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. 

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. 

On Ernst Jünger, from WW1 to WW2

I started reading Storm of Steel 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."

(As a side note, I guess we now officially have to start adding "2008" to the words "financial crisis" from here on out.)

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.

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.

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. 

Jünger was one of only eleven infantry commanders in WW1 to be awarded the Pour le Mérite, 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. 

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:

"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."

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.

Karl Marlantes' foreword gives a great summary:

"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."

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.

But as an overall tone, Storm of Steel 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:

"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.

Mindful of our hard time on the previous expedition, I breathed 'Wohlgemut, toss a hand grenade in that lot!'

'Lieutenant, shouldn't we let them work a bit more first?'

'Ensign, that was an order!'

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

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"? 

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:

Lunch at the Morands' on Avenue Charles-Floquet. There I also met Gaston Gallimard and Jean Cocteau.

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.

Cocteau: amiable and at the same time, ailing, like someone who dwells in a special, but comfortable, hell. 

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. 

One can ask advice of a subaltern in a matter, but not regarding the ethical system fundamental to that matter.

The dignity of man must be more sacred to us than life itself.

The age of humanity is the age in which human beings have become scarce.

The true leaders of this world are at home in their graves.

In moments of inescapable disruption, individuals must proclaim their allegiance like a warship hoisting its colors.

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.  

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?

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:

"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."

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.

Indeed, Jünger refers in a number of places to lemures. 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 Faust where the Lemuren serve Mephistopheles as gravediggers." For instance, on March 12th, 1942:

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...

Feast Days of the lemures, including the murder of men, women and children. The gruesome spoils are hurriedly buried. Now there come other lemures 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. 

Or more explicitly on the limitations on what he can say, from August 16th, 1942:

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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, Carl-Heinrich von Stulpnagel, 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). 

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:

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.

Of course, when one does 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:

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.

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. 

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 Celine:

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. 

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."

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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 lemures, he has only contempt.

  

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 On the Marble Cliffs 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. 

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 Midnight in Paris - 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 was 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 normal occupied Paris sounds, which is certainly not how people seem to imagine it. 

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 Storm of Steel, where action was everywhere, death forever one unlucky break away, and the enormous necessity of the job always in front. Here, inaction is everywhere. It's almost like A Bohemian Wehrmacht Officer in Paris. There is no sense of any purpose at all to him being in Paris, other than getting inspiration for his writing. 

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. 

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. 

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:

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."

Outside of the Holocaust, the rest of the Eastern front story is also still full of grotesque suffering. 

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 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

... 

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. 

 ...

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. 

Or in Kirchorst near Hanover:

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.

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 heard 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. 

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 their atrocities, you'd be quite mistaken:

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.

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:

[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.  

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:

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, Spiedel was in the forefront right beside Choltitz. 

And in an eerily correct prediction of 20th century architecture, Jünger saw in 1942 which way the wind was blowing:

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. 

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.

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 Storm of Steel. 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 The Gulag Archipelago, and then follow it up with A German Officer in Occupied Paris. 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 Storm of Steel. 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:

Our Fatherland is like a poor man whose just cause has been usurped by a crooked lawyer.

He never spells out what that just cause was, in his opinion, so I guess we'll never know. 

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. 

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. 

But how could it be otherwise, to thread such a tiny needle hole and come out the other side intact?

The journey from Storm of Steel to A German Officer in Occupied Paris is a strange and grim one. Every time I read these books, especially Storm of Steel, 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. 

 

It is a hugely sad and depressing thought. 

And, indeed, it is the strongest riposte to Storm of Steel itself.

The Covid19 death rate is higher than 2%

I understand why Moldbug wanted to write a post on the coronavirus. As usual, Moldbug was ahead of the curve. The reason is that he reads sources that other people don’t read. If you read the same as everyone else, you think the same as everyone else. This is the main (respectable) reason I’m on twitter, (other than the shitposting which is like terrible cheap carbs of reading material). 95% of it is garbage, but the remaining 5% is stuff you just don’t find anywhere else.

And what Moldbug, and MorlockP, and Loki Julianus and some others have figured out is that there’s a decent chance that this is the start of the shit hitting the fan, but nobody in the west seems much concerned yet. It’s a fascinating insight into how people respond to gradually unfolding disaster. We expect disaster to strike out of the blue. One day, the Soviets nuke us, or an asteroid strikes. Or, failing that, we expect to see a fairly rapid and linear growth of things getting worse, like in a disaster movie where the plot has to unfold in a predictable manner to all be wrapped up in 90 minutes.

What our instincts don’t work well for, however, is exponential growth. It just doesn’t fit people’s casual intuitions about what’s going to happen. The probably mythical story about the inventor of chess is that he asked to be paid as a reward by the king in a grain of rice for the first square, two grains for the second square, four for the third square, and so on. Of course, the point of the story is that the king was an idiot and by the end figured out he couldn’t possible pay. Ha ha ha. Nobody would be that dumb.

Well, here’s some grains of rice accumulating.

If you take the number of coronavirus cases reported, it’s close to an exponential curve. Not quite, however. If you plot things on a log scale, you can see the rate of increase in reported cases slowing down.

By eyeballing the log scale graph, you can see that things started to decline starting around Jan 30^th. If you run a regression of log number of cases on number of days since outbreak, from Jan 30^th until February 13^th, you get a coefficient on time of 0.126, or e^0.126= 13.4% growth per day. If you want to be conservative, and just use the February 5^th – 11^th data, excluding the big jump on February 12^th when they changed reporting standards, you still get an average growth of e^0.078, or 8.1% growth per day. The R2 of this regression is 0.98, by the way, so this is a shockingly good fit. If you use the whole period, you get a whopping e^0.199=22.0% average growth per day. And even with the slowdown, the R2 is still over 0.92.

Since these are only rough data, because God knows how many unreported cases there are, suppose the number of cases is growing about 10% per day. There’s a rule of thumb for turning growth rates into doubling times called the rule of 72. Divide 72 by the growth rate and you get a decent estimate of the doubling time. So in this case, 72/10 = 7.2. In other words, on current trends we expect the number of cases to double every week. Even at the low rate of 7.8%, the number of cases is expected to double in around 9 days. We won’t use this rule exactly, but it’s pretty good for thinking about intuition.

And this causes all sorts of weird mistakes. One, which I think is underappreciated by most people, is wildly distorted estimates of the death rate.

The number that keeps getting currently quoted in the press is a death rate of around 2%. As of February 13th, there have been 1,384 deaths out of 64,473 cases, according to worldometer. This gives a death rate of 2.15%. Which sounds pretty encouraging. It seems like you have to get very unlucky to actually die from it.

But the strange thing is, there’s another, smaller set of people talking about a death rate of 16%. What’s that? Well, it’s the ratio of deaths (1,384) to closed cases (8,566), or 16.16%.

Now, you might look at it be concerned about the definition of closed cases. Maybe they’re just very reluctant to declare someone cured, so there’s lowball numbers here (whereas they’re less reluctant to declare someone dead). Many of the diagnosed will eventually recover, but it takes ages to classify them as healthy again. So no big deal! 16% is too high, and the true number will be much lower.

Well, here’s a pretty strong reason to prefer the ratio using closed cases. From the descriptions you read about the progression of cases in places like Hong Kong, the disease generally takes 2-3 weeks from diagnosis to actually kill you.

Why is this a big deal?

Because the number of cases is growing at around 8-10% a day. And as long as that holds, the number of deaths will always be lagging the total number of cases in the growth phase. The death rate actually ought to be compared with the number of cases from 2-3 weeks earlier, because that’s the number of people who could have reasonably died by this point. It’s also the expectation of the fraction of currently alive new cases who will eventually die. Again, this may seem like pedantry. Except that the number of cases is growing 8% per day!

Let’s start with lower bounds. Assume that average growth in cases is conservatively 7.8%. Also, let’s assume the disease kills you quickly, on average in two weeks (which is optimistic for the purposes of our estimated death rate being on the low side). In this case, the number of cases in the denominator is too high by a factor of e^(14*0.078) = 2.98. So the true death rate will end up being 2.15*2.98 = 6.42%

If it takes 2.5 weeks on average to kill you, the death rate will end up being 2.15* e^(17.5*0.078) = 8.43%.

But we’re using a pretty conservative estimate of growth rates. Suppose you take dates since February 5^th, but include the increase in cases on Feb 12^th and 13^th. Then the average growth rate is 9.75%. Add a 2.5 week average time to death, and the death rate is actually 2.15*e^(17.5*0.0975) = 11.85%. If the disease takes three weeks on average to kill you, the true death rate is 16.67%. Which sounds very close to the death rate from closed cases. Add in growth rates from the earlier period, and the numbers get even higher.

Plug in your own assumptions or data fiddling, and the answers fall right out. There’s obviously big standard errors on this stuff. But one thing is pretty clear. There is more than enough evidence at this point, no matter how you cut it, that the overall death rate is going to be a lot higher than 2%. I’m betting on 5-10%. You ought to be making plans accordingly.

This doesn’t tell you about the rate of transmission, of course, either in China or the US. Maybe we’ll lucky, and it won’t turn into a pandemic outside China. Want to bet on that?

The good news from all this is that most people don’t care about China, haven’t read reports of any major outbreak in the US, and so aren’t really concerned. Which means that if you do think that there’s a non-trivial chance that the porridge may totally hit the propeller in a month or two, it’s still relatively easy to buy at least several months of storable food supplies. Amazon will still deliver them in a few days. Prices will be the same as normal. The guy delivering them has a very low chance of having the coronavirus. Maybe those things will still be true in three months. Maybe they won’t.

For the sake of a few hundred bucks, you’d be mad not to. You want to have a viable strategy in place to be able to not leave your house for an extended period of time. This is just basic finance. You want to hedge left tail outcomes, especially if the outcome is a catastrophe, and the cost of hedging it is very cheap. Surely everyone who understands finance is doing this, right?

Ha ha, no, of course they’re not. We’ve ignored the largest reason smart people don’t do this stuff. It’s unfashionable. It’s for loser, tin foil prepper types. Do you really want to be doing this stuff? Tell your friends you’ve started buying large quantities of canned food and you think they should too, and they’ll look at you like you’re a conspiracy theory loon. They’ll have a good laugh.

So did the King, when they were only up to the fourth chess square.