On Kings and the Accident of Birth

We live in an era with an extraordinarily limited imagination with respect to alternative worldviews.

In the eternal present tense of the liberal mind, the past is not only alien, but almost incomprehensible. Whig history gets imbibed deeply without even understanding what it is. The net effect is that nobody is encouraged to think honestly about why people in the past thought the things they did. Most strikingly, there is no empathy towards one’s ancestors as having genuinely-held beliefs which may have had sensible underpinnings. The only acceptable explanations are those that flatter our own conceit. So the mass of people in the past must either have been evil (by comparison with which we are virtuous), or they must have been naïve dupes who were conned by a small evil elite (by comparison with which we are savvy and worldly).

Unsurprisingly, these absurd narratives quickly run into large obstacles of incomprehension.

Take, for instance, the institution of monarchy.

Everyone who is anyone agrees that democracy is not only the most effective form of government, but the most just.

So why did absolute monarchy persist in so many countries, for so many thousands of years, if it was both unjust (and thus likely to inspire resistance) and ineffective (and thus able to be outcompeted by better forms of government)?

It’s a puzzle, no?

Let us grant something obvious, but not widely appreciated. A system of government that was able to rule France for 800 years, or rule England for similar period, must have had at least something quite significant to recommend about it. How else could it accomplish the task of administering huge countries for so long, with far weaker technologies of coordination, if it was marked only by injustice, incompetence and tyranny? Wouldn’t the people have risen up long before they did?

Here is another possibility that simply cannot be imagined by most people today.

Many absolute monarchs were genuinely popular.

Not because the people were duped. Not because they were afraid of expressing contrary opinions. Because the subjects genuinely liked their hereditary kings. Because these Kings did a good job of ruling. Not all, but many of them.

Such a possibility is highly confronting to modern sensibilities, but surely it must be considered as at least a hypothesis. The historical record is there - something kept them working for a very long time. If we can’t conceive of why kings might have been effective, perhaps this means that they weren’t effective, or perhaps we just have a failure of imagination.

I think part of the mistake comes from misunderstanding how kings came about.

When people think about an absolute monarch in a western country, they think about establishing a monarchy today. And since they don’t know how monarchs came to exist, they substitute the following hypothetical – we take a person in society, and given them absolute power.

Let us put aside for the moment the question of whether kings actually have absolute power.

Even before that, the natural question arises in the progressive mind: who gets to be king? And since this is purely a hypothetical, the answers cover an equally large range of hypothetical figures, namely everyone in society. Giving one randomly chosen person control of everything strikes them, somewhat understandably, as risky and ill-advised.

But kings were not randomly chosen people, and it simply doesn’t make sense to evaluate monarchy as if they were.

More importantly, the ways in which kings weren’t random redound strongly to their advantage.

Who is the king today in a monarchy? The son of the previous king. Phrased only like this, it presents a chicken and egg argument that doesn’t tell us much.

Rather, to get anywhere we need to understand the origins – who was the first king in any given lineage? This is the basis from which the rest stems.

The answer, nearly always, is a great military leader, a commander of men able to unite his people into an army, and successfully coordinate them in battle to subdue their previous rulers. Robert the Bruce became king of Scotland after a ten year period where Scotland had no king. At the Battle of Bannockburn, Robert the Bruce began the battle by fighting Henry de Bohun in single combat, killing him by splitting his head open with an axe. Robert then led the Scottish troops into battle. That doesn't sound like a randomly chosen level of valor, strength, and ability to lead men. 

If I were a Scot, besieged and ruled by the hated English, I would be pretty damn pleased to have such a man in charge of my country. The fact that he wasn't elected in a vote would not trouble me one jot.

When William the Conqueror fought the Battle of Hastings, he had to rally his fleeing troops, and led the successful counterattack against the English forces. Talk about courage and calmness under pressure.

In medieval battles it was very difficult to command an army without personal courage and skill. You don’t get to be miles behind the front line, picking up a telephone and giving orders. You will be in the fray, fighting alongside your soldiers, giving wise orders, and convincing people to obey them through your personal authority. If you're insufficiently good at that job, you're dead, like King Harold. 

A man that can command, inspire and make wise choices in war has at least a decent shot of doing the same thing in peace. At the barest minimum, he has a much better chance of doing so than a randomly chosen citizen at the time.

In the language of economics, Kings are endogenous. It makes no sense to ask what would happen if we elevated a random person to be king. The only person who would ever get to be the first king is someone with enough personal qualities to establish themselves as such.

The person who would have had the greatest opportunity to establish himself as King of America, should he have wanted to do so, was probably George Washington. He had to tell his subordinates to address him as ‘Mr President’, not ‘Your Highness’. His stepping down, rather than ruling on until he died or was voted out, was considered very surprising. King George III said that if Washington in fact returned to his farm and thus renounced power, it would make him the greatest man in the world. One suspects he did not expect to be called on this claim.

Admit it, the prospect of King George Washington is not an immediately frightening one,. And how did he get to have this level of popular support and gratitude? By bravery and military genius. He was an outstanding leader of men long before he won an election. 

In perhaps the most credible alternative universe where America had a monarch, it would not be Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

It would be a descendant of George Washington.

So let’s establish that we’re reasonably happy with King Washington I. How might we feel about his descendants?

If behavioral genetics has taught us anything, it’s that nearly every personality and cognitive trait we care to measure has a significant degree of heritability. George Washington’s offspring will not be the same as George Washington, but they will share many of his traits simply due to genetics.

Not only that, but the environmental factors are also encouraging. The future kings are raised in an environment where they also get passed on to them all the cultural ideas and learning of the previous king, which again tends to reinforce the behaviours that worked the previous time. Moreover, prince regents have been apprenticed from a very young age to the task of ruling, learning the trade from those that came before. All of these factors tend to reinforce the behaviours of kings over time, and encourage whatever caused the first king to be successful to continue to be present in his successors.

But still, genetic advantages wane with mean reversion. This is the major weakness of monarchy. It also applies to family firms, where the brilliant entrepreneur is succeeded by his somewhat less successful son, and his hopeless wastrel grandson.

Acting against this, however, is an opposing force. Kings also tended to marry queens who were themselves descended from other successful bloodlines. This means that both sides of the family tree tend to be selected from people who displayed a capacity for leadership.

So we can’t even just evaluate a hypothetical King Washington X by looking at the current descendants of George Washington. The marriage patterns would likely be different, the education and training they received would be different, and thus so would the descendants themselves.

Does this mean that monarchy always worked brilliantly? No. Sometimes monarchs die before their children are ready to rule, or die without children, or have idiot worthless children. It's not perfect.

Does it mean that it almost certainly worked better than most people today imagine? Absolutely. We at least have an answer to our question at the start - why might  it have lasted so long?

Does it mean we should switch back to it? Your mileage may vary.

But don’t get this far and still ask the wrong question!

“We” will not switch back to monarchy.

Should America end up as a monarchy, it will be because a monarch worthy of the title of king has commanded the country and been elevated to the position.

And at that point, it will probably work pretty well.

What's the value of a Bill of Rights?

The standard mythology of the right is that the constitution established separation of powers and limited government. By restricting the power of the federal government through the enumerated powers and the bill of rights, the constitution thus restricts the ability of the government to tyrannise its citizens.

Well, that's the theory. The first clue that something has gone awry in this theory is that nobody talks any more about the enumerated powers as an obstacle to tyranny. Hey, wasn't the federal government only supposed to be able to legislate on a small number of specific topics? Like, for instance, the following (courtesy of the excellent A Crime A Day)

Okay, so the Federal Government now can legislate on absolutely anything that isn't explicitly prohibited by the Bill of Rights. This may seem to violate the text of the constitution, but that's just because you haven't paid enough attention to the penumbras and emanations.

Part of what we're running into is the problem Moldbug described quite aptly - limited government is a fiction because sovereignty is conserved. Who is doing the limiting? If it's the judiciary, then the judiciary is sovereign.

There are no governments by pieces of paper, only governments by men. If the judges choose to follow what's on the paper, then the paper wins the day. If they don't, then it doesn't.

But to bring the matter full circle, are the judges really sovereign? Can they decide anything they want?

Well, maybe. Judges didn't used to be so sovereign. Back in 1832, Andrew Jackson (apocryphally) said of a Supreme Court decision "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!". This was the Presidential equivalent of 'How many divisions has the Pope?'. Indeed, the similarities between the Pope vis a viz Stalin and the Supreme Court vis a viz the President are striking. There are relatively few federal officers directly answerable to the court across the land, which means that the courts are reliant on other people and branches of government to enforce their decisions. If everyone else chooses to obey, it is partly out of a) convention, and b) a quasi-religious reverence that got attached to Supreme Court decisions after Brown v. Board of Education. 

In other words, if the Supreme Court is sovereign, then it resembles the messy reality of what being King was actually like, rather than the textbook theory of absolute power. To wit, a large part of the skill of being king was knowing what orders would actually be obeyed and carried out, and limiting one's instructions to those. A king who goes too far in his estimation of his subjects' obedience and starts getting openly disobeyed won't stay as king very long.

At the moment, the Supreme Court just gets obeyed, out of a sense of duty. But if they pushed things too far in one go, that sense of duty might evaporate, and with it the whole prestige of the court.

And at last we see where written constitutions, or Bills of Rights specifically, might finally have some effect.

In particular, a statement on a piece of paper can serve as a strong coordination device- these things are disallowed under our system of government. Now, the sovereign is he who decides the exception, and a sovereign supreme court can decide when a particular constitutional provision doesn't apply.

But unlike the medieval kings (who obtained their right to be king by virtue of birth), the Supreme Court is in a bind. A substantial amount of its influence comes from the belief, even if deluded, that the court is actually following the piece of paper. Overrule that too explicitly, and the masses might lose their will to obey.

In order for this to work, however, the issue has to be something that a) people care about enough to challenge the nobility of the Supreme Court, and b) that people can agree on widely when the provision has been breached.

So which provisions might actually have a shot at forcing the court to do something that its individual members might not prefer to be done?

In this regard, 'Equal Protection' will be almost completely nugatory as a restriction on the court's personal preferences. What the hell does it guarantee? What needs to be equal with what? In fact,the very ambiguity lets it get used as a sword, to apply whatever leftist idea is the order of the day.

So what are the two areas that the Supreme Court has blinked on, at least relative to the view that Cthulu only swims left?

The big one was DC v Heller, when the Supreme Court unusually rejected the opportunity to gut the 2nd Amendment by claiming that it only allowed people the right to join a militia. 

This would have quite likely risked a total shitstorm, because gun owners really, really care about their guns, and every single one of them would have gone insane over this. I suspect some justices recognised this, and stepped back from the precipice. 

(Incidentally, this seems to be exactly what John Roberts did with Obamacare, changing his decision at the last minute rather than risking the court suddenly becoming public enemy number one with leftists, the court's natural constituency at the moment).

The other case, curiously, is the First Amendment.

Now, on the face of it, you may think that America has all sorts of restrictions on free speech, and you'd be right.

But you can rest assured that there is nothing on the books as repulsive as Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in Australia, or the loathsome Human Rights Commissions in Canada that Mark Steyn had to battle with for years, or the repugnant British prosecutions of people for racist tweets.

On the issues that the left cares about, America still has fewer governmental prohibitions than nearly all comparable western countries. 

Now, it may be that America is just more conservative on this stuff. But if you look at how rabidly leftists at American colleges treat these issues, or how radioactive accusations of racism are, it's hard to countenance that.

Rather, I think that Congress and the Courts haven't yet had the gumption to make a big push to overturn this, because unlike equal protection, it would be pretty indisputable that the provision had been ignored.

In the case of free speech, I am sadly pessimistic about its long term prospects. At some point, when the hysteria over racism becomes sufficiently widespread, expect the Supreme Court to carve out some unprincipled exception that 'hate speech is different from free speech'.

But they're not there yet, because it would still be a risky move. 

In the rest of the world, however, it wasn't. Without the coordination mechanism of a long-standing bright red line, people just sat there and took it.

In the US, they'll probably end up taking it too, but the piece of paper maybe bought us 20 years or so.

That may not be much in the long run, but it's something.

Making the human race better

Let me ask you, dear reader, a fairly straightforward question.

Suppose that you and your wife or husband are about to have a child. All else equal, would you like your child to be smarter, or dumber? You will love your child either way, of course, so that's not the issue. But if you could take a vitamin supplement during pregnancy that would give them an extra 10 IQ points, would you do it? Let's assume it's a wholly natural supplement. There's a risk of childhood malnutrition without it, which will permanently harm their intelligence.

Taking the supplement would certainly make their life somewhat easier, and increase the chances that they could come up with important business and scientific advances that could benefit society. Lord knows parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on education after the fact to try to achieve exactly the same goal.

So to ask a slightly weaker question - does the prospect of such a vitamin supplement shock, horrify and disgust you? Is it repugnant, equivalent to the Holocaust, for parents to love their children so much that they wish them to be slightly smarter? Is it wrong to wish for these benefits for your neighbour's children, or your friends' children? If you're not an IQ booster, substitute in adjectives like 'taller', 'more attractive' or 'healthier' - the logic is exactly the same.

I am pretty sure the answer to this is 'of course not'.

So now, question number two.

Would society as a whole be better off if all prospective mothers took this pill? If you could make all the children in society smarter, healthier and more attractive, would that be a net benefit to society, or not? Would that be a project that we should undertake?

As it turns out, that project already has a name.

That name is eugenics.

Eugenics is, of course, in the popular discussion on the subject, literally Hitler.

And I personally find this the most unfathomably braindead attitude I can imagine.

In the case of eugenics, the objections to it are especially vague, and seem to descend into Godwin's Law territory even faster than most political issues, because eugenics is often explicitly presented as a motivation for the Holocaust. This is of course yet one more example in a long list that support the claim that "Hitler makes everybody stupid". Hitler butchered 6 million Jews in a horribly cruel manner. Therefore, we should be entirely unconcerned with whether the human race is on net getting smarter or dumber, or whether the prevalence of genetic health disorders is becoming more common or less common. Not quite so compelling when you spell it out now, is it? That's The Magic of Hitler™, that you never bothered to notice this before now.

To begin with a quibble - it's pretty bizarre to claim that the Holocaust discredits eugenics, because the Holocaust seems about the least eugenic policy I can imagine. Ashkenzi Jews have a mean IQ of 113-116 for crying out loud! I can scarcely imagine a more disgenic policy than killing them off wholesale. If Hitler was a eugenicist, he was the worst one in history, save perhaps Pol Pot, who deliberately killed anyone who seemed even vaguely smart. I don't think his monstrous actions teach us anything about eugenics.

Part of the reason for all this nonsense is that the term eugenics came to conflate two quite different concepts. The first is the general aim of improving the genetic stock of the human race. The second was a specific set of policies that got applied to do this.

If you can't change the genes of a population directly, you can still change their frequency. In terms of the existing population, we can't instantly clone adults, but we can kill them. In terms of children, we can either have policies designed to encourage more children from the people we want, or policies designed to discourage having children by the people we don't want.

Now, to give opponents their (very limited) due, a number of the policies implemented to achieve eugenic aims were in fact quite horrible. Killing entire populations is of course repugnant. Forced sterilisations of the disabled, the retarded or the mentally ill are something that we find very troubling and immoral.

Because this is a touchy subject, let me emphasise that I share the above concerns.

So for the purposes of argument, let us specify in advance, to allay any possible fears, that we shall rule out any policy whatsoever designed to specifically discourage anyone from having children, let alone killing anyone.

But what about the last category? What about just encouraging high-functioning, good people to have more children?

What in God's name is wrong with that? Why shouldn't that be something to be celebrated? Trying to bring more happy, healthy capable children into the world is about as far from the Holocaust as I can possibly imagine. So why on earth does it still get tarred with the same brush? Is it really so repugnant to increase tax breaks for rich parents? Is it appalling to run ad campaigns in low-crime-rate areas encouraging people to have more children?

Marketing and associations being what they are, I think we need a new term to describe the specific set of policies that encourage higher birth rates by well-adjusted people. I humbly submit 'progenetic policy' (a play on both genetics and progeny). But any new term would be helpful to sever people's inane association with things like forced sterilisations.

By this point in time, we have an overwhelming body of evidence from behavioral genetics that large amounts of personality traits and behaviors are significantly heritable, and have sizable genetic components. As a result, if you have more children being born with good genes, you will get more good outcomes. Isn't this something you'd want? This would seem obvious to me, but apparently it's not to a lot of people.

And the thing that is most perplexing to me about the current antipathy towards thinking about these questions is that not thinking about these issues doesn't make them go away.

Because the broader side of eugenics goes on whether you think about it or not.

There is no opt-out here. There is only eugenics, disgenics, or stasis.

Either the genetic traits associated with pro-social behavior, or IQ, or anything else, are becoming more prevalent in the population, less prevalent in the population, or they are staying at the same rate. So which is it? Which would you like it to be? When you design a new policy, it will either cause those frequencies to go up, or go down. This seems like something worth thinking about in advance.

You may not be interested in progenetics.

Progenetics, unlike Trotsky's quip about war, is not interested in you either.

But it is very interested in your children.

OMG, did you hear what Trump said yesterday?

Why, exactly, do people spend so much time talking about the US election?

There is an argument that this election is particularly important, that the contrast between the candidates is large, and that the consequences for the US will be important. It's natural, therefore, that people should care.

There is definitely an element of truth to this. The only question is magnitude - how much does this actually explain? In the case of Americans, it's hard to say for sure.

So let's try a related question - why do foreigners spend so much time talking about the US election?

Being back in the old country, conversation over here turns to the subject of Trump with about the same regularity as it did in America. Which is to say, frequently. I have heard far more conversations about Trump than about Malcolm Turnbull, Australia's Prime Minister.

It's hard to argue that the consequences for Australia of the election are particularly far-reaching. Defense links will continue. Trade links will continue. It is certainly hard to argue that the consequences are farther reaching, in the short term, than the actions of Australia's own government.

This is the placebo test. If you take out the factor you think  is really important and get pretty much the same result, it suggests that the factor wasn't as important as you thought  it was.

So why do Australians care about American elections? Well, for the same reason that Australians listen to American music more than Australian music (see here if you don't believe me). Because it's mostly just entertainment, and the US is the cultural hegemon.

In other words, a substantial amount of the interest in politics seems to fill the role of gossip. Nobody knows their neighbours much any more, so we need to find some common ground of people to share titillating stories about what someone-or-other said the other day.

And for this purpose, anyone will do the trick. More importantly, co-ordinating on the same set of gossip topics is useful for facilitating conversation with strangers from lots of places. It's the reason why local politics made way for state politics, and state politics mostly made way for federal politics. Partly this is because of the shift in power, but partly it's just a usefully agreed-on topic to talk about.

And in the case of foreigners, it also fills another useful aspect of gossip - feeling superior to the subject being discussed. Gossip is the revenge of the powerless against the powerful, taking vicarious pleasure in their misfortunes and mishaps. Is it thus surprising that countries which are smaller and subordinate enjoy mocking the leaders of Leviathan, especially those of a conservative bent?

I think that this is one of the aspects of democratic systems that  helps explain why it's been useful to keep the form of democracy even as substantive power gets transferred to the judiciary and the bureaucracy. The Romans knew that you needed bread and circuses to keep the people occupied and in check.

Trump may or may not be a circus you enjoy per se, but that never really mattered, as long as he kept you engaged. Like all gossip, only the unusually honest will admit that they like it as gossip. Mostly it has to get dressed up in more important excuses to not feel tawdry.

The fate of the country depends on it, after all.

The technology-dependence of sexual morality

From the distance of the present, especially for young people, the sexual morality of the past seems very odd. 

In particular, the idea of very strong and widespread norms against sex outside of marriage is something that is hard to actually conceive of.

Progressives find the idea repugnant, and can't imagine why anyone would ever have supported it.

Conservatives and reactionaries can be on board with the idea, but still, it actually stretches the imagination to think of what it would be like for everyone in Europe to agree with the idea.

But this is mostly a failure of imagination, albeit an understandable one.

What would be the minimum number of changes necessary in society that would reverse the change entirely?

You could rout all the current progressive institutions, and replace them with Islam, or the Catholic Church of 100 years ago, but these are not really minimalist changes. We want a societal Rube Goldberg machine, where we set off small changes somewhere else that get us the same outcome. 

There's an assumption buried there that the change might be reversible, of course, and perhaps it isn't.

But if it is, a good starting point is the set of things that might explain why the old regime got replaced by the new.

My suggestion - to understand pre 20th Century sexual morality, all you need to do is imagine a world without any good contraceptives, abortion, or birth control in general.

Which, by the way, was what it was like.

You can talk about the pullout method, or the rhythm method. But do you think these are going to be reliable for a teenage boy having a dalliance for the first time with a maid? Probably not.

And as soon as you do that, suddenly everything becomes obvious. 

Take away contraceptives, and sex leads to pregnancy with high likelihood. Take away reliable abortion, and everyone, rich or poor, has to deal with the the child. Take away modern wealth levels and the welfare state, and an unplanned child for a single woman is a catastrophe.

How would you, enlightened progressive, feel about your 14 year old daughter sleeping with her boyfriend if it meant a good chance of getting pregnant and needing to have the child? 

Suddenly the patriarchy doesn't seem like such a silly idea now, does it? Suddenly 'sex positive' messages to teenagers don't seem like society's number one priority, no?

But to reactionaries, the depressing flip side is also true.

Namely, if the absence of birth control was the the basis for monogamy and chastity before marriage as social norms, it's probably going to be quite hard to put that toothpaste back in the tube. You can't uninvent condoms or the pill.

This is like mass immigration - a social problem that's really a technological problem. 

So I predict that our current sexual free-for-all will go on at least until society degenerates to the point that it can't produce contraceptives anymore, at which point barbarism will restore chastity before marriage.

On the plus side, when this happens, it will also simultaneously solve the most difficult problem of our times, convincing rich, educated, civilised people to have more children. 

Give people the choice, and they will hack their own evolutionary reward systems and have a lot more sex and a lot fewer children.

Like Prometheus, we have stolen fire from the gods.

Like Prometheus, we cannot give it back.

Stop cheering for politicians

At the risk of cementing my place as a curmudgeon, the National Conventions of the US political parties always struck me as thoroughly bizarre. This is an entirely bipartisan feeling - they're a freakshow.

My overwhelming feeling, whenever it shows the crowd shots, is: who are all these people? Don't they have anything better to do do?

To the Australian mindset, there is something quite unseemly about turning up to cheer for politicians, especially in these degraded times. There is a reason that these events don't take place in Australia. They simply wouldn't pass the laugh test. If you built it, no one would come. This includes people who voted for the candidate.

Let the parties sort out their own tawdry affairs in private, and then we'll vote for whichever of the two repulses us less, if we're minded to do so. (In Australia, you legally have no choice on that last point)

If there is one advantage to living in a democratic age, you at least have the freedom to have open contempt for one's notional leaders without running afoul of les majeste laws or the like. This is fortunate, because the system tends to produce leaders richly deserving of the contempt that you're licensed to have.

Why throw that away for this bunch of clowns? Why act like a subject voluntarily for someone whom it is unworthy to be subjected to? Honestly, if you could actually pick a single person to be ruled by, no questions asked, would either of these two candidates be among the top 1000 people you'd pick? The top 10,000?

The rather visceral reaction I have to political conventions is, I will freely admit, a mostly aesthetic response. It seems like obvious pandering and boob bait for bubbas. Sometimes, some of the relevant applause lines strike home to me. Sometimes, they say things that seem true, and even important or compelling.

But even then, not far beneath the surface is the feeling I have during the few times I've had the misfortune to watch romantic comedies. When watching the sad bits, I sometimes feel brief pangs of sadness. But they quickly get followed by a sense of resentment of the fact that my emotions are being manipulated here, for other people's benefit, and in a crude and obvious manner.

Doubt not that this is happening to you. Even if you honestly think it's a good idea to vote for this candidate. In fact, especially if you honestly think it's a good idea to vote for this candidate.

Now, it is possible that these are generally new and interesting times, and genuinely new and uniquely worthy leaders. A lot of people on the right are really excited about Donald Trump. Maybe they're right to be thrilled.

I would caution you with the following though.

If you're honest with yourself, and remember what you felt at the time, did you not feel at least some similar excitement at Mitt Romney's speech? At John Bloody McCain? When you look back now, are you not embarrassed to have supported these shameless, self-promoting fools? One is a Democrat-lite, and the other took the 'Invade the World / Invite the World' idea so strongly that he probably would have started a war with Russia over the sinkhole that is Ukraine.

If you're a Democrat, for an equivalent test, try and summon up now the same enthusiasm for John Kerry that you had in 2004. It simply cannot be done.

With the passage of time, the raw tribalism goes away, and the sheer mediocrity of the candidates offered in democratic elections becomes strikingly clear.

So if you (like me for sure in 2008, and me to some extent still in 2012) felt some excitement at the time for those clowns, you should feel a little chastened. You might reflect that perhaps, indeed, I am one of the rubes after all, or at least am not wholly immune from rube-like tendencies. Perhaps I just like cheering for my team, and this is what I'm actually feeling right now. Perhaps most of what strikes me as absurd about the other party's convention applies equally strongly to my own.

In related news, November cannot come fast enough.

Initial Thoughts on the Coup Attempt in Turkey

It is always hazardous writing about coup attempts before everything is done and dusted, but the recent one in Turkey is notable in several respects. 

Also, unusually for this type of thing, I was watching the updates in real time, so there's a few things that stuck out to me that might not be so obvious if you just read about it the next day.

The most striking thing is the extent to which everybody, myself included, misread the most important moment of the whole proceedings. 

It was this:

That is Turkish President Erdogan, giving a press conference by facetime, assuring people that everything is just fine.

Up to this point, you may recall, there had already been reports on official Turkish State TV that the coup had succeeded (past tense), that a peace council was now in charge of the country, and a curfew was in effect. The reports in the press were tending towards announcing the coup as a fait accompli.

So, given that background, what do you what do you make of this?

The popular response to this was twofold. Firstly, derision. A press conference by phone indeed is farcical. This kind of reaction was typical.

Chortle.

I mock, but I shouldn't. If my response had been fixed publicly in time, it probably wouldn't have looked much more sophisticated.

Second, most people looked at this and saw Baghdad Bob. It's hard to convey the impression that you're in charge of the situation from behind a phone. What it looks like is someone who's already packed their bags and is getting the hell out of dodge.

In other words, it wouldn't matter what he was saying, the real message was that it was over and the leader had fled. The coup had won.

It turns out, people were so focused on the absurdity of the situation that they missed what he was saying. 

He was telling people to take to the streets and protest, focusing on the main squares and airports.

And this was a really, really, important message to get across.

Because he had enough supporters that they really did take to the streets. You're not Baghdad Bob if you still have a massive army of supporters at your disposal, even if you are behind a phone screen.

The next thing that became apparent was something that the War Nerd has noted a long time ago - driving tanks around urban environments without infantry support, which is what the army was doing, is a recipe for disaster. This is especially true when the opponents have RPGs, but even in Istanbul there were rumors of tanks being disabled by people throwing sheets over them, pulling the crews out, etc. Not to mention the photos of civilians lying in front of tanks, daring the military to drive over them. Which it turns out they lacked the gumption to do. The apparently impregnable tanks being taken over by protestors became a really depressing metaphor for the whole event, at least if you  were hoping for it to succeed.

What's really, really important in coups is Schelling Points. Why is a facetime speech still really valuable? For the same reason that controlling State TV (which the coup plotters also did early on, and then lost) is really important, actually even more important. You thought TV was obsolete, didn't you? Not in a coup it's not.

Partly, it conveys a sense of official power. The main information outlet is now owned by the coup. Erdogan is reduced to a telephone, which is not nearly as good. So far, so good for the plotters, at least early on. 

But much more importantly, it conveys the same message to lots of people all at once. And it turns out facetime is just fine for this purpose. What the government forces couldn't do until that point was to coordinate the behavior of their supporters. When they all started hitting the streets at once, everything changed. Suddenly the military had a much bigger problem on its hands.

All security forces exist based on force projection and self-fulfilling beliefs. If everyone committed crimes all at once, the police don't have nearly enough people to arrest them all. Law and order is maintained because for the vast majority of people, each one believes that law enforcement will arrest him, John Q Citizen, if he commits a crime. Hence most people don't commit crimes, the belief in the authority of the police is maintained, and order persists. The only time this breaks is during a riot, when people realise that they can just loot stuff because there aren't enough police to arrest them all, and the police aren't doing anything anyway.

So this problem exists for security forces at the best of times. But it's even more severe during a coup.

In a coup attempt, everyone is looking to see which way everyone else is going to jump.

If people think the coup has succeeded, they will stop fighting, and the coup will actually succeed. This was what  was initially happening, as far as I can tell, in the initial stages.

But the reverse is true. If people think the coup is failing, they will resist it, and some of the soldiers will surrender to the police, and this will depress morale of the rest. Moreover, this starts to happen at the point when you're relying on the soldiers to start shooting ever more of their unarmed countrymen. That takes a lot of martial discipline at the best of times. 

What this tells you is that you can judge a lot about a coup's success just by who is making more official announcements. It doesn't even matter what they are. As soon as Erdogan's official statements started appearing regularly on my twitter feed, I strongly suspected that the gig was up.

As of writing, it's not "over" over. There keep being reports of ongoing fighting, jets bombing Erdogan's palace, jets bombing the airport (whose jets? great question). 

But you're sure not hearing anything out of the coup leaders, and that bodes very poorly for them.

You can also judge a coup's success by the passage of time. The longer it goes on, the worse it looks for the plotters. In the ideal case, it's instant and bloodless. But they're fighting to reverse the default presumption of power. When that momentum starts to falter, it can reverse very quickly.

To slightly modify the great Sun Tzu, though we have heard of stupid haste in coups, cleverness has rarely been seen associated with long delays.

Finally, there is the role of the west in all of this. 

A perennial question in matters of statecraft is the extent to which organised US power is actually running the world from behind the scenes, or catching up as a mostly clueless observer.

I don't think you and I will ever really know.

But one thing I do know is that all the official western outlets were conspicuously silent about the whole affair until after the protesters started hitting the streets. Then came the announcements that we need to support the democratically elected government of Turkey etc etc. Before that were rumors that Erdogan had been seeking asylum in Germany but his plane had been denied permission to land.

It seems that it's not just people in Turkey who are waiting to find out which way the wind is blowing. 

And because it failed, I doubt we will ever really know who was behind it. In the weird three-way war between the 1) secular parts of the Turkish military, 2) the Gulen cultists and 3) the Erdogan supporters, it's not clear whether this was group 2 alone, group 1 alone, or group 1 and 2 in combination. Erdogan is blaming this on Gulen, but he'd be crazy to not use the opportunity to consolidate his power over them, even if he thought it was the secularists.

Successful changes of government have a thousand fathers, but a failed coup is the most despised orphan of them all.

Sing, Muse, of the incompetent rage of the police shooters

To my mind, there is only one genuinely surprising thing about the recent police shootings in Dallas, which is that they were carried out with unusual competence. This is also the main reason you're reading about them. Killing multiple police all at once, at a protest that ensured there was already a media presence, is too dramatic to ignore. You can't just paint it as some 'piece-a-shit' incident gone wrong (in Tom Wolfe's memorable phrase).

This puts the media in a difficult bind, because I suspect that they very much would like to ignore this black on white rage, like they do for most such rage. The only thing that could have made it worse would have been if the shooter had used something other than a gun. In that case, progressives would have been deprived of the opportunity to at least try to redirect the conversation to gun control, and the story would already be in the process of being actively memory-holed.

As soon as the reports were suggesting a sniper from an elevated position, my guess was that whoever was doing this had some formal training with this stuff. Sure enough, the shooter was in the Army Reserves. Initial reports said that it was multiple snipers from a triangulated position, which made it even more likely. Now they're saying that it's a lone wolf, but they would, wouldn't they?

To shoot 12 officers, kill 5 of them, and hit only 2 civilians, is a surprisingly difficult task, especially if the shooter was indeed acting alone.

The typical pattern of black rage against police is far less planned, and far more likely to result in immediate arrest before actually killing many, if any, police. To take just the last couple of police shootings in the immediate aftermath, we had the following:

Authorities say a man called 911 in south Georgia to report a break-in, then ambushed and shot the officer who came to investigate. Both men were wounded in the ensuing gunfire, and both are expected to survive.

That is far closer to what I expect. Point blank, ambush, incompetent, resulting in immediate arrest.

This was his best plan to kill as many police as possible - leave a 911 call with his own voice, calling a single policeman to his own home, just to make absolutely sure the police would know who the prime suspect was in the unlikely event that he actually got away. Moreover, his choice of target was a policeman who would already be slightly on edge due to being on an active call.

And that's what you get with actual forward planning. Without that, it's even more incompetent:

In a fourth attack early Friday, a motorist fired at a police car as the officer drove by. In all, four officers were wounded. The officer wounded outside St. Louis is in critical but stable condition. The wounded officers are expected to survive 

A suburban St. Louis police chief says a motorist shot an officer three times as the officer walked back to his car during a traffic stop.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar says the suspect, who is in his 30s, ``ambushed'' the officer, who is in critical but stable condition. 

Just taking pot shots with a handgun at cops who happen to be in the vicinity. Great way to end up in prison for decades with a low probability of actually killing anybody, you really stuck it to the man.

As Randall Collins noted in his excellent book (first chapter free here), the probabilities of actually hitting someone in a combat scenario with a handgun are very low. Here's some numbers from police incidents, the highest annual police 'hit' probability from a gunfight is 25%, the lowest is 9%. Now subtract out most of the formal training that police receive, and you can see why these clowns have such a low chance of success in general.

We should be thankful to have such imbeciles as enemies.

The reality is that not many people in the west, black or white, are actually ready for the effective suicide mission of shooting at the police. If you start shooting at figures of official authority, the absolute best case scenario in the overwhelming number of cases is life imprisonment. Most pathways just end up with you dead, like this, or this.

At one extreme, I suspect that most of the the low impulse control rage shootings like the above happen because the perpetrators haven't actually considered the consequences much at all. This explains why they're so poorly carried out. In the west, it's easier to find thoroughly stupid people than suicidal people.

Of course, among those that have considered it in advance, hope springs eternal in the human breast. Most people cling to some small probability that they'll actually get away, even if they don't have a clear idea of the end game.

Hence the preference for being a sniper. It was true here, it was true with John Allen Muhammad. Being a sniper allows a mental "out". Perhaps I won't get caught. Perhaps I'll shoot a few, get away, and live to tell the tale.

If you fully embrace the idea that you're going to die, you could kill a whole lot more people. You might become a suicide bomber, and drive a truck bomb into police headquarters. The optics of this are very bad, of course. Suicide bomber goes to crazy terrorist. Not a good way to spread your message, whatever exactly it is.

So America will continue to have black rage shootings. This has happened before, of course. In the 1970s, this stuff was frequent among black power groups. Just look at the Zebra Murders, which nobody much seems to remember.

The worst worry is that more shooters begin to twig onto the tactics that actually work, in which case you don't want to be around to find out what happens to a) the number of police killed, and b) the homicide rate in your city as police retreat to areas of relative safety.

For the moment, the main thing saving us is the fact that people smart enough to carry out a competent mass shooting are deterred by the fact that they're also smart enough to realise that doing so is a death sentence.

Modernity produces both blind rage and suicide in considerable quantities. It is a small mercy that these don't usually coincide in the same person.