Every other male is a potential ally

Saturday, April 15th, 2023

Helen Reddy’s 1971 anthem “I Am Woman” captured the spirit of feminism in that era, Arnold Kling notes:

The mood was optimistic, proud, and spirited. “Nothing can stop me,” the song seemed to say. Once doors were open to women, they would charge through and never look back.

Today, the mood of feminists seems much darker. On college campuses, some seethe with resentment. They look to university administrators to fend off “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture.” They allege that free speech causes harm. They insist that schools ban words and speakers. They want “safe spaces.” It seems as though “I am strong, I am invincible” has been replaced by “I am anxious, I am vulnerable.”

[…]

I would suggest that higher education, once dominated by men, used to cater to men’s warrior nature. Today, with female students the majority, colleges and universities cater much more to women’s worrier culture.

In her book [Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes], Benenson presents extensive empirical evidence for general differences in behavior and temperament between human males and females. These are differences that she and others have found in infants, toddlers, children, and adolescence. They are found in primitive cultures as well as in modern Western cultures. They are similar to traits found in other primates, including our chimpanzee relatives.

[…]

Benenson catalogues numerous differences in temperament and behavior between males and females. These include:

  • Boys are drawn to fight one another, and girls are not.
  • Boys are eager to play on their own, without the authority of teachers, and girls are not.
  • Girls enjoy play that involves acting out scenes of caring for a baby or a person in distress, and boys do not.
  • Women show higher levels of fear and anxiety and lower propensity to take risks than men do.
  • When evaluating same-sex individuals as potential friends or allies, men look for strength, courage, and useful skills. Women look for vulnerability and the absence of overt conflict.
  • Boys tend to have large groups of friends, with loose ties and shifting alliances. Girls tend to form tight cliques.
  • At recess, boys enjoy competitive team sports. They are concerned with formal rules and spend time negotiating such rules. I think of pickup softball games where there are only six players on a team. The rules might be “anything hit to right field is a foul ball,” or “batting team supplies pitcher, catcher, and first baseman” or some other ad hoc modification of normal baseball rules.
  • At recess, girls are less likely to choose competitive team sports, and they lose interest in team games relatively quickly.
  • Men value competition with prizes for those who demonstrate the most skill. Women prefer that no one stand out.

[…]

Benenson claims that what underlies these differences is that women pay more attention to their survival as individuals, while men pay more attention to survival in group competition. In terms of evolutionary psychology, a female needs to protect her own health in order to be able to bear children and to enable them to survive to adulthood. Benenson notes that until recently in human history, 40 percent of children died before the age of two. Increasing the chances of her baby’s survival had to be a major concern for women.

[…]

For men, the ability to pass their genes along is relatively less dependent on their individual survival. It is relatively more dependent on the ability of their group to out-compete other groups, especially in war.

[…]

For a female, every other female is a potential competitor. Women eliminate a competitor by ganging up on the unwanted woman and excluding her. The excluded woman may not have violated a formal rule, but she seems threatening for some reason.

For a male, every other male is a potential ally. You may fight a man one day, and the next day you may join with him to fight a common enemy. Men want to see non-cooperators punished, but subsequently the rule-breaker might be rehabilitated. Permanent exclusion would be a bad practice.

Posted in Education, Policy, Science | 7 Comments »

So began what the Maratha newswriter described as a ‘dance of the demons’

Friday, April 14th, 2023

After his father Zabita Khan led several rebellions against Shah Alam II, the young Ghulam Qadir was captured, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), and kept in a (metaphorical) gilded cage. As an adult, he returned, with his own people, the Rohilla, under the pretense that “this Ghulam Qadir is a child of His Majesty’s house and has eaten his salt”:

‘The Rohillas swore [on the Quran] that they had no intention of doing any harm,’ wrote the Maratha newswriter. ‘They said they only wanted that the Emperor should lay his gracious hand on their heads. After Ghulam Qadir had taken a formal oath swearing he came to his sovereign in peace and as an ally, the Emperor sent his eunuchs to tell him he would admit him to an audience, but only with ten or twenty followers.’107 However, the Head Eunuch, Mansur Ali Khan, who was also the Nazer, or Overseer of the Fort Administration, had saved Ghulam Qadir’s life at the fall of Pathargarh and now wished to reingratiate himself. Against the Emperor’s orders, he opened the great double gates of the Fort and allowed the Afghan to march in all 2,000 of his men.

[…]

Then Ghulam Qadir, in what would at any other time be regarded as an unpardonable breach of etiquette, sat down on the cushions of the imperial throne next to the Emperor, ‘passed an arm familiarly round his neck and blew tobacco smoke into his sovereign’s face’.

[…]

So began what the Maratha newswriter described as a ‘dance of the demons’, a reign of terror which lasted for nine weeks.

[…]

While he was still speaking, the Rohilla summoned Prince Bedar Bakht. Ghulam Qadir stepped forward, and took the Emperor’s dagger from his girdle, then without a word sent the Emperor off to the imperial prison of Salimgarh, and placed Bedar Bakht on the throne.

[…]

While he looted the city and the palace, according to Azfari, the Rohilla, ‘day and night gave himself over to great quantities of various intoxicants, particularly to bhang, bauza [beer-like booze] and ganja’.

[…]

The servants began to be hung upside down and tortured over fires to reveal hiding places of the Emperor’s treasure.

[…]

‘Some maid-servant dancing girls and providers of pleasure favoured by Shah Alam were brought in without veil or covering; they were taken to the daira camp where they were made to pleasure drunken louts.’

[…]

The Head Eunuch Mansur Ali was dragged through a latrine and left nearly to drown in the sewer beneath: ‘Ghulam Qadir called out to his henchmen: “If this traitor (namak-haram) doesn’t produce the seven lakhs rupees** within the next watch, stuff his mouth with excrement!”’120 When the eunuch protested that he had saved Ghulam Qadir’s life as a baby, the latter replied, ‘Do you not know the old proverb, “to kill a serpent and spare its young is not wise”.’

[…]

“Throw this babbler down and blind him.”

[…]

Shah Alam looked straight at Ghulam Qadir and asked: ‘What? Will you destroy those eyes that for a period of sixty years have been assiduously employed in perusing the sacred Quran?’

[…]

But the appeal to religion had no effect on the Afghan.

[…]

Ghulam Qadir Khan jumped up and, straddling his victim’s chest, ordered Qandahari Khan and Purdil Khan to pinion his hands to his neck and hold down his elbows. With his Afghan knife [contrary to the usual practice of blinding with needles] Qandahari Khan first cut one of Shah Alam’s eyes out of its socket, then the other eye was wrenched out by that impudent rascal. Shah Alam flapped on the ground like a chicken with its neck cut.

[…]

Then he called for a painter, and said, ‘Paint my likeness at once, sitting, knife in hand, upon the breast of Shah Alam, digging out his eyes.’

[…]

Just as he may once have been turned into a catamite, so now it was his turn to humiliate the males of the royal house.

[…]

He signed an order to that effect, dismissed his henchmen, and settled down to go to sleep with his head on the knees of the Crown Prince Mirza Akbar Shah, having taken off his sword and dagger and placed them within sight and reach of the princes. He closed his eyes for an hour, then got up and gave each of the princes a violent slap, calling out derisively: ‘You are prepared so passively to swallow all this, and still you delude yourselves that you could become kings? Huh! I was testing you: if you had one little spark of manly honour in your heart, you would have grabbed my sword and dagger and made quick work of me!’ Heaping them with abuse, he dismissed them from his presence and sent them back to prison.

[…]

The same day a number of the younger princesses were stripped naked, minutely searched ‘in every orifice’, fondled, flogged, then raped. Victorian translations of the sources have censored these passages, but the Persian original of Khair ud-Din tells the whole brutal story.

[…]

This was an Irish mercenary called George Thomas, ‘the Raja from Tipperary’, a one-time cabin boy who had jumped ship in Madras and made a name for himself as a talented artilleryman and caster of cannon.

[…]

After almost three months, Ghulam Qadir had finally departed, taking with him everything he had plundered, along with nineteen of the senior princes, including Prince Akbar, as hostages. The badly wounded Shah Alam he left behind in the Red Fort, apparently hoping he would be incinerated by the explosion he set off as a final parting present to the Mughals

Ghulam Qadir did not get away:

They then seized Ghulam Qadir, bound him and locked him in a cage. They despatched him on a humble bullock cart, with chains on his legs and a collar around his neck, to Scindia’s headquarters, ‘guarded by two regiments of sepoys and a thousand horse’. For a while Ghulam Qadir was displayed in his cage, suspended in front of the army, to be jeered at and mocked. Then, ‘By the orders of Scindia, the ears of Ghulam Qadir were cut off and hung around his neck, his face was blackened, and he was carried around the city.’

The next day his nose, tongue and upper lip were cut off, and he was again paraded. On the third day, he was thrown upon the ground, his eyes were scooped out, and he was once more carried round. After that his hands were cut off, then his feet, then his genitals and last of all, his head. The corpse was then hung, neck downwards, from a tree.

[…]

Mahadji Scindia sent the ears and eyeballs to the Emperor Shah Alam in a casket as a congratulatory gift. He then had Mansur Ali Khan, the head eunuch who had let the Afghans into the fort, ‘trampled to death under the feet of an elephant’.

Posted in Policy, War | 1 Comment »

Normal governments can’t deal with such people unless the stakes are existential

Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Alanbrooke — Field Marshal Alan Francis Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke — is one of Britain’s great heroes, Dominic Cummings reminds us, though not nearly so famous as Nelson or Wellington:

Most involved in politics talk a lot about ‘strategy’ but know little or nothing about this crucial strategist of WW2. Other WW2 generals such as Montgomery are much more famous. Alanbrooke was promoted by Churchill to Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) in the dark days of November 1941 as the Nazis approached Moscow. His nickname was ‘Colonel Shrapnel’. His formidable character burst with energy yet he also held himself in incredible control — true leaders, he thought, had to preserve and project self-control (to a degree that would be regarded as ‘unhealthy’ now). He repeatedly deflated Churchill and others, sometimes snapping a pencil between his fingers as he said ‘I flatly disagree’. His relationship with Churchill was stormy. Alanbrooke deeply admired him but the responsibility fell on Alanbrooke, more than anybody, of dealing with Churchill’s flaws and the dangers they risked. In replacing Dill with Alanbrooke, Churchill wanted someone more vigorous to prosecute the war and he got it.

When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes — stiff-necked Ulstermen and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!

It’s greatly to Churchill’s credit that he appointed him and stuck with him despite extreme disagreements and passions exploding amid the incredible tension of world events and their vast stakes, but it’s also much to his discredit that his memoirs vastly underplayed Alanbrooke’s contributions to victory.

[…]

Alanbrooke was one of those extraordinary people thrown up by war to senior roles who then almost always disappear when the war ends and discussions at the top revert to the norm — avoiding hard questions. It’s as if normal governments can’t deal with such people unless the stakes are existential. General Groves was another such extraordinary character who ran the Manhattan Project and was pushed out of the Pentagon after 1945 for being ‘too difficult’.

[…]

While children and students are told they study history ‘to learn from the mistakes’, one of the most fascinating and striking things about our world is how little learning there is from the greatest of errors. You can read analyses of deterring Prussia/Germany in Whitehall that are practically identical and indistinguishable from 1866, 1870, pre-1914, and the 1930s. You can read history after history of war after war. Human nature and the dynamics of large organisations don’t change so the same problems recur from the start of written history, and nobody can find a way of creating institutions that surmount these problems for long. You may reshape the Prussian General Staff and then reshape the map of Europe but before you know it, you’ve gone from the Elder Moltke working with Bismarck in triumph to his nephew imploding in disaster. One minute Bill Gates; the next, Steve Ballmer. Everything has its time of growth and decay. This means that we stumble into disaster after disaster where the details change but the fundamental patterns don’t. Covid and Ukraine are just the latest examples.

On one hand, we can see abstract principles of high performance a) recur constantly in written history we can all read, b) are extremely simple and do not require high intelligence to understand, and c) when deployed are frequently shocking, even world-changing, as well as sometimes bringing power, wealth and fame to those who deploy them.

But on the other, these principles remain essentially unrecognised by roughly 100% of institutions of all kinds, private and public. Instead, roughly all normal large organisations actually optimise for the opposite principles and promote those who embody these anti-principles. If there is some occasional high performing blip (such as PARC or the Vaccine Taskforce), these normal organisations, and particularly the middle managers within them, will move swiftly to close them and push away those responsible as far and as fast as possible.

This reliable feature of our world has many effects. One of them is that government systems are essentially ‘programmed’ to be slow and inefficient in updating. All institutions optimise for certain things based on incentives and culture. Large established organisations almost always optimise for ‘protect established power networks’, not ‘update useful information even if it disrupts established power networks’. And this means that the old parties, old bureaucracies and old political media are necessarily constantly surprised by events far beyond what they need to be — beyond the inevitable surprises generated by the uncomputable complexity of the world. The most valuable information is and will be almost always at the edge. Elite self-deception was critical to the context of WW2 and looking over the centuries it seems only safe to assume it’s a permanent state of affairs, at least without revolutionary experimentation with institutions that optimise differently and will (we should assume) in their own ways be as, or even more, dangerous.

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

The Mirza’s army was joined by a very different class of soldiers

Wednesday, April 12th, 2023

William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy) how the Mughal ruler in Delhi prepared to reconquer his lands:

Mirza Najaf was well aware that the new European military tactics that had already become well known in eastern and southern India were still largely unknown in Hindustan, where the old style of irregular cavalry warfare still ruled supreme; only the Jats had a few semi-trained battalions of sepoys. He therefore made a point of recruiting as many European mercenaries as he could to train up his troops. In the early 1770s, that meant attracting the French Free Lances who had been left unemployed and driven westwards by the succession of Company victories in Bengal…

Steadily, one by one, he pulled them in: first the Breton soldier of fortune René Madec; then Mir Qasim’s Alsatian assassin, Walter Reinhardt, now widely known as Sumru and married to a remarkable and forceful Kashmiri dancing girl, Farzana.

[…]

Soon the pair created their own little kingdom in the Doab: when the Comte de Modave went to visit, he was astonished by its opulence. But Sumru, he noted, was not happy, and appeared to be haunted by the ghosts of those he had murdered: he had become ‘devout, superstitious and credulous like a good German. He fasts on all set [Catholic feast] days. He gives alms and pays for as many masses as he can get. He fears the devil as much as the English … Sometimes it seems he is disgusted by the life he leads, though this does not stop him keeping a numerous seraglio, far above his needs.’

[…]

A little later, the Mirza’s army was joined by a very different class of soldiers: the dreadlocked Nagas of Anupgiri Gossain. Anupgiri had just defected from the service of Shuja ud-Daula and arrived with 6,000 of his naked warriors and forty cannon. These Nagas were always brilliant shock troops, but they could be particularly effective against Hindu opponents. The Comte de Modave records an occasion when the Company sent a battalion to stop the Nagas ‘pillaging, robbing, massacring and causing havoc … [But] instead of charging the Nagas, the Hindu sepoys at once laid down their arms and prostrated themselves at the feet of these holy penitents – who did not wait to pick up the sepoys’ guns and carry on their way, raiding and robbing.’

By August, under these veteran commanders, Najaf had gathered six battalions of sepoys armed with rockets and artillery, as well as a large Mughal cavalry force, perhaps 30,000 troops in all. With these the Mughals were ready to take back their empire.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Why did we wait so long for wind power?

Tuesday, April 11th, 2023

Why did we wait so long for wind power?

The first mention of using wind to generate electricity is credited to William Thomson (better known as Lord Kelvin). In an 1881 address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Thomson noted that a windmill connected to a dynamo and a battery could be used to provide electric power, and speculated that, while wind had largely been superseded by steam generated by burning coal, “When the coal is all burned…it is most probable that windmills or wind-motors in some form will again be in the ascendant”.

It didn’t take long for windmills connected to electric generators to be built. James Blythe, a professor in Glasgow, built a windmill in 1887 that used a generator to charge batteries to power the lights in his vacation home. The same year a similar system was built in La Hève Cape in France to provide power to homes. In the US, inventor Charles Brush built a huge windmill to power the 350 lightbulbs in his Cleveland mansion in 1890. (For context, Edison patented his lightbulb in 1880, and the first central electric power station was built at Pearl Street in 1882). And in 1893, arctic explorer Fridjtjof Nansen commissioned a ship that included windmill powered electric lights for a voyage to the North Pole.

[…]

However, these efforts were ultimately derailed by the steady march of cheaper electricity. In 1882, Edison’s Pearl Street Station operated at a thermal efficiency of 2.5%. By 1920, steam turbines were operating at 20% efficiency, and by 1960 they had reached 40% efficiency. Fuel prices similarly fell — between 1949 and 1965 the real price of oil and coal fell by 20% and 33%, respectively. Larger power plants were able to capture greater economies of scale. Between 1920 and 1970 the cost of coal-generated electricity fell by approximately 80%.

Posted in Technology | 5 Comments »

A diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place

Monday, April 10th, 2023

William Dalrymple shares many stories about India during The Anarchy that could come from Game of Thrones or its sequel House of the Dragon:

The main architect of the Afghan incursions into northern India, Ahmad Shah Durrani, had now returned to the mountains of his homeland to die. He was suffering the last stages of an illness that had long debilitated him, as his face was eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of tumour.

Soon after winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease began consuming his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place. By 1772, maggots were dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and his food as he ate.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

We must be willing to consider what might at first seem absurd and unworkable

Sunday, April 9th, 2023

A recent paper proposes the deployment of volcanic geothermal energy from the Yellowstone Caldera Supervolcano, using a completely new copper-based engineering approach:

The proposed ideas, if implemented, would allow the production of green, 100% emission-free energy for the United States of America and possibly beyond, to last the years and centuries to come, while having the great added benefit of forestalling the Yellowstone Supervolcano from potentially ever erupting again.

To consider such an implementation, the reader is asked to be willing to think big and bold. We must be willing to consider what might at first seem absurd and unworkable, only later to realize that it is absolutely feasible and realistic to implement, with even today’s current technologies, and with some imagination.

[…]

By utilizing thermally conductive copper pillars on an unprecedented scale, this paper proposes a means to draw up this Supervolcano’s mighty energy reserve from within the Earth, to superheat steam for spinning turbines at sufficient speed on a sufficient scale and number, to power the entire USA, from a single, multi-redundant facility that utilizes the star topology in a grid array pattern. In so doing, over time, bleed-off of sufficient energy from the Supervolcano’s magma chamber will potentially forestall this Supervolcano from ever erupting again. In 2017, NASA conducted a study to determine the feasibility of preventing the Yellowstone Supervolcano from erupting. The results of this study showed that cooling the magma chamber by 35% would be enough to forestall another eruption.

[…]

This paper proposes to make a power generation facility on the Yellowstone Caldera, with a satellite view shown in Fig. 1 from Google Maps, capable of generating well over twice the projected electrical energy usage in the year 2050 of 5.5 Quadrillion Watt hours for the entire United States of America. We therefore assume well over 11 Quadrillion Watt hours of electrical energy over the course of one full year used by the USA.

[…]

The Arabelle steam turbines run on high pressure, superheated steam. Steam is made from water and heat. Shoshone Lake is next to the Yellowstone Caldera [37]. This fresh water lake covers over 8000 acres and has a maximum depth of over 200 ft. Water from this lake could be used for the steam production. In the proposed design laid out in this paper, all water taken from the lake would be returned to the lake, cleaner than it was originally, at ambient temperature, and free of any contamination, as all major plumbing in this proposed design is made with copper, a standard plumbing material. As with all plumbing, scaling buildup on the inside of the piping and corrosion resistance on the outside of the plumbing in contact with the Earth are important considerations for the long-term life, water flow performance, maintenance of all necessary thermal conduction and heat transfer capabilities of the piping. To prevent scaling buildup on the inside of the plumbing, the water passing through these pipes must first be demineralized. All extracted minerals will be returned to the lake with the returning water, so as not to affect the lake’s chemistry, and thus the aquatic inhabitance of the lake. External corrosion resistance of the copper plumbing in contact with the Earth will be obtained through minimally adequate gold (with a nickel interface) plating, as gold is nearly impervious to corrosion. By taking these measures, there should be no degradation of geothermal energy extraction over time.

Based on numerous studies, and also reported by the U.S. Geological Survey the temperature in Yellowstone Supervolcano’s magma chamber is approximately 1475°F, and its size is approximately 40 km long by 80 km across, similar in size to the flat, overlying Yellowstone Caldera. The Yellowstone Caldera is large enough for all of the required Arabelle steam turbines and all other required hardware and plumbing to fulfill the proposal set forth in this paper. In terms of depth, the top of the magma chamber is 8 km below the surface, and the bottom of the magma chamber is 16 km below the surface.

In the most general terms, this paper proposes to use metallic thermal conduction as a means to transport the tremendous thermal energy flux of the Yellowstone Supervolcano magma chamber to the surface for utilization. Looking at the selected material of copper, reveals that its melting point is 1983°F, which is well above the internal temperature of the Yellowstone Supervolcano magma chamber. At this temperature, copper has a thermal conductivity value of 350 W/(m x °K). Copper is an excellent metallic thermal conductor, lacking in corrosion resistance. The use of gold (with a nickel interface) plating on copper that may be in contact with the Earth is recommended. This plating has a melting point at or higher than the copper it is meant to protect. Furthermore, this minimalist plating method, used extensively in the electronics industry, provides superior corrosion protection while imposing relatively minimal impact on the facility cost, the overall thermal conduction, and heat transfer performance of the geothermal energy extraction process.

[…]

As the magma chamber is 8 km below the surface, 8 kilometer-long copper cylinders (mostly hollow) would be required for this work. We propose that these cylinders be made in 10 m long segments that interconnect with one another at their ends.

[…]

As water is pumped down the center bore hole under pressure, high pressure, superheated steam would be forced to return up through each of the surrounding smaller diameter bore holes of the copper cylinder. This returning steam would exit the copper cylinders at the top, above the surface of the caldera, and be piped through the Arabelle steam turbines generating electrical power. After exiting the steam turbines, this exhausted steam would then be collected and cooled with a water condensing network. The re-condensed water would be brought to ambient temperature before returning the water back to Shoshone Lake. This entire process would be done in parallel for all 100 of the copper cylinders simultaneously. In so doing, all 1000 Arabelle stream turbines would be generating power at the same time. This electrical power would be put onto the nationwide power grid, supplying electrical energy to the entire USA, and possibly beyond.

Posted in Science, Technology | 9 Comments »

The Boston Tea Party was provoked by fears that the East India Company might be let loose on the thirteen colonies

Saturday, April 8th, 2023

In 1780, the East India Company found itself more than £10 million in debt and unable to pay its own salaries, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), and its poor reputation had global consequences:

In America, the Patriots had turned on the King, partly as a result of government’s attempts to sell the stockpiles of East India Company tea, onto which was slapped British taxes: the Boston Tea Party, an event that built support for what would become the American War of Independence by dumping 90,000 pounds of EIC tea, worth £9,659 (over £1 million today), in Boston harbour, was in part provoked by fears that the Company might now be let loose on the thirteen colonies, much as it had been in Bengal.

[…]

Even as Haidar was pursuing a terrified Munro back to Madras, British forces in America were already on their way to the final defeat by Washington at Yorktown, and the subsequent surrender of British forces in America in October.

[…]

In Parliament, a year later, one MP noted that ‘in Europe we have lost Minorca, in America 13 provinces, and the two Pensacolas; in the West Indies, Tobago; and some settlements in Africa’. ‘The British Empire,’ wrote Edmund Burke, ‘is tottering to its foundation.’

Posted in Policy, War | 3 Comments »

Intelligence correlates positively with wanting more social freedom and economic freedom, but these two political dimensions are negatively correlated

Friday, April 7th, 2023

Conservatives aren’t stupid, Emil O. W. Kirkegaard notes, depending on how you slice the data:

Depending on whether we look at political ideology or political party, the gaps can reverse in the general population, but they aren’t large.

Non-White voters drag down the Democrats, so when looking at only Whites the left has a consistent lead in intelligence, but it’s pretty small. However, it is true that extreme liberal Whites are the smartest group with a mean of 107 IQ versus their counterparts extreme conservative Whites with a mean of 98.5, close to a 10 IQ gap.

[…]

So, intelligence correlates positively with wanting more freedom as in social freedoms (abortions, free speech etc.) and economic freedom (less government involvement), but these two political dimensions are negatively correlated. This brings forth the libertarian high IQ rarity pattern. Because the ideologies are negatively correlated, people who are high in both views are rare, but their IQs are particularly elevated. Noah notes that if you combine the political ideologies into a single component, this correlates .40 with IQ. That’s pretty high!

Posted in Policy | 4 Comments »

A single day’s delay would have allowed the two armies to unite

Thursday, April 6th, 2023

On 25 August 1780, the East India Company’s largest concentration of troops in southern India marched out of Madras and headed south towards Kanchipuram, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), to confront Haidar:

At their head was Sir Hector Munro, the Highland general who fifteen years earlier had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat when he broke Shuja ud-Daula’s lines at Buxar. This time, however, he had only managed to muster 5,000 sepoys – they were unpaid and semi-mutinous – and they were facing a force 100,000 strong.

[…]

Twenty-five miles to the north, another Scot, Colonel William Baillie, had just received instructions to rendezvous with Munro at Kanchipuram with a second force of 2,800, most of whom were local sepoys, accompanied by a few hundred newly arrived Highlanders. If these two small armies were able to join up, they would only be outnumbered ten to one, and might have some chance of taking on the Mysore troops; but divided as they were, neither force stood much chance of success against so well trained and disciplined a force as Haidar had assembled, an army that, according to Ghulam Hussain Khan, ‘covered the plains like waves of an angry sea, and with a trail of artillery that had no end’.

[…]

Munro should have waited for Baillie to join him, but, as impatient as ever, and hearing that there were ample provisions and a full magazine in Kanchipuram, which Haidar might otherwise have seized for himself, Munro headed off with his small force, when a single day’s delay would have allowed the two armies to unite.

[…]

On the evening of 25 August, Baillie camped on the banks of the small river Kortalaiyar, north-west of Madras. That evening, the monsoon broke and it rained heavily and without a break for twelve hours. By first light, the Kortalaiyar had become a raging torrent, impossible to ford. It was eleven days before Baillie was able to move his troops across it, and, by the time he did so, Tipu had managed to interpose 11,000 of his best cavalry between Baillie and Munro.

[…]

The officer in charge of the relief column begged Baillie to move immediately, and to use the cover of darkness to rejoin Munro’s force in the shelter of the Kanchipuram temple, now only nine miles away. But Baillie ignored the advice and did not move off until first light. It proved a fatal hesitation.

[…]

Thirty minutes later, troops in the front ranks reported hearing the distant sound of beating kettledrums and blaring nageshwaram (long Tamil oboes). As the Company troops watched, a great cloud of dust rose up in the distance. This soon resolved into several long lines of scarlet columns advancing steadily towards them.

[…]

The Scots assumed it was Munro coming to save them and gave out a loud cheer. It was only when the columns grew closer that they realised it was actually Haidar’s main army – some 25,000 cavalry accompanied by thirty battalions of sepoys – closing in to seal their fate. ‘We were quickly surrounded by Haidar’s horse,’ wrote one Highland officer. ‘They were followed by his guns which joined a kind of semicircle round us, the number of about 50 at least, which opened upon us by degree.’

[…]

In the course of the following hour, under Baillie’s direction, the Scottish square repulsed thirteen successive charges from the Mysore cavalry. Failing to break the line, Haidar ordered a pause, and brought forward his biggest guns.

[…]

Around 8 a.m., the heaviest cannonade of all began from close range, with grapeshot scything down the ranks of thickly packed redcoats. ‘Our fate was for above an hour to be exposed to the hottest cannonade that ever was known in India,’ wrote Baillie’s younger brother John. ‘We were mowed down by scores.’ Then two ammunition tumbrils were hit and both blew up simultaneously, making ‘large openings in both lines, on which their Cavalry made the first impression. They were followed by the Elephants, which completed our overthrow.’

[…]

After expending all the remaining gunpowder, Baillie tried to surrender and tied his handkerchief to his sword which he held aloft. He and his deputy, David Baird, both ordered their men to ground their arms; but straggling fire from some of his sepoys who had not heard the order meant that the Mysore cavalry disregarded the surrender and refused to give quarter. Instead the horsemen rode in and began to cut down the disarmed and defenceless troops; ‘a most shocking massacre ensued … It was in vain to ask for the quarter they offered readily enough, but cut you down the moment you laid down your arms.’

[…]

According to a lieutenant in the 73rd Highland Regiment, ‘The last and most awful struggle was marked by the clashing of arms and shields, the snorting and kicking of horses, the snapping of spears, the glistening of bloody swords, oaths and imprecations; concluded with the groans and cries of mutilated men, wounded horses tumbling to the ground amid dying soldiers, the hideous roaring of elephants as they trampled about and wielded their dreadful chains amongst both friends and foes.’

[…]

Around 200 prisoners were taken. Most of the rest of the force of 3,800 was annihilated.

[…]

‘They began by pulling the buttons of my coat which they took for silver,’ wrote the wounded John Baillie. ‘They then tore the knee buckles out of my breeches & the coat off my back. One of them putting the butt end of his firelock to the back of my neck pinned me to the ground with it whilst another tried to pull off my boots.’

[…]

He got off one with difficulty and enraged I suppose at not being able to pull off the other, he gave me a cut on my right thigh that laid it open to the bone. Shortly after another fellow, passing by, wantonly thrust his sword into my other thigh … After they were gone, one of Haidar’s sepoys perceiving that I still lived, raised me up, placed me against a tree and gave me some water to drink.

[…]

I lay there by an artillery man with his head shot off, with my face to the ground. By this time my wounds began to grow stiff, so that I was unable to move from the position I was in, or to defend myself from the swarms of flies which, getting into my wounds, seemed determined to suck the little blood that was left in me.

[…]

Eventually, Baillie was brought before Haidar strapped to a gun carriage and made to sit at his feet in a semicircle with the other survivors, as the Sultan rewarded his officers in proportion to the number of heads or corpses of European soldiers they produced. ‘Some had been dragged to his camp, so mangled and besmeared with blood and dust that they were unrecognisable; some had dropped speechless on the road and had been refused any water by their guards.’

[…]

There were so many Company amputees that there were not enough Indian medical orderlies to bear them away from the front lines.

[…]

Of the 7,000 prisoners Tipu captured in the course of the next few months of warfare against the Company, around 300 were forcibly circumcised, forcibly converted to Islam and given Muslim names and clothes.

[…]

Even more humiliatingly, several British regimental drummer boys were made to wear dresses – ghagra cholis – and entertain the court in the manner of nautch (dancing) girls.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist

Wednesday, April 5th, 2023

Our problem, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) explains, is that the world is run by a regime with a long-run structurally leftist bias:

It evolves leftisms. On Mars, the same regime structure would evolve the same ideas. Oligarchy is inherently leftist, just as monarchy is inherently rightist.

[…]

The engineering problem is that when a marketplace of ideas makes final decisions, the marketplace is polluted with power. When the marketplace is polluted with power, its ideas compete not just on their wisdom, but on their ability to generate power—for example, their power to attract (or reject) funding.

This is why leftism always wins: leftism is what generates more power. Leftism always has more energy and more excitement. This is because its ideas generate power—leftist ideas always involve impact on the world. If science is put in charge of science, science will favor ideas which make science more powerful, which will be or become leftist ideas. Leftism at bottom is just the natural and inevitable human urge to matter.

Everything is science, or at least works like science. If diplomats and foreign-policy experts are put in charge of foreign policy, they will want to take over the world. If they can. If we can. Why wouldn’t they? How can isolationism compete in the market for foreign-policy ideas? Isolationism is to foreign-policy jobs as rat-poison is to rats.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | 7 Comments »

Hastings, ever the gentleman, decided to let Francis fire first

Tuesday, April 4th, 2023

Philip Francis was wrongly convinced that Warren Hastings was responsible for all the corruption in Bengal, William Dalrymple explains (in The Anarchy), and challenged him to a duel:

The two duellists, accompanied by their seconds, met at 5.30 on the morning of 17 August at a clump of trees on the western edge of Belvedere, a former summer house of Mir Jafar, which had since been bought by Warren Hastings.

Hastings had hardly slept. He spent much of the night composing a farewell letter to his beloved wife Marian, to be delivered in the event of his death. It began: ‘My heart bleeds to think what your sufferings and feelings must be, if ever this letter be delivered into your hands … I shall leave nothing which I regret to lose but you. How much I have loved you, and how much, beyond all that life can yield, I still love you, He only knows. Do not, my Marian, forget me. Adieu, most beloved of women. My last thoughts will be employed on you. Remember and love me. Once more farewell.’

[…]

It was at this point that it became clear, as Pearse noted, ‘that both gentlemen were unacquainted with the modes usually observed on these occasions’; indeed, neither of the two most powerful British intellectuals in Bengal seemed entirely clear how to operate their pistols. Francis said he had never fired one in his life, and Hastings said he could only remember doing so once. So both had to have their weapons loaded for them by their seconds who, being military men, knew how to operate firearms.

Hastings, ever the gentleman, decided to let Francis fire first. Francis took aim and squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped, but the pistol misfired. Again, Francis’s second had to intervene, putting fresh priming in the pistol and chapping the flints. ‘We returned to our stations,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I still proposed to receive the first fire, but Mr F twice aimed, and twice withdrew his pistol.’ Finally, Francis again ‘drew his trigger,’ wrote Pearse, ‘but his powder being damp, the pistol again did not fire. Mr Hastings came down from his present, to give Mr Francis time to rectify his priming, and this was done out of a cartridge with which I supplied him finding they had no spare powder. Again the gentlemen took their stands and both presented together.’

‘I now judged that I might seriously take my aim at him,’ wrote Hastings. ‘I did so and when I thought I had fixed the true direction, I fired.’

His pistol went off at the same time, and so near the same instant that I am not certain which was first, but believe mine was, and that his followed in the instant. He staggered immediately, his face expressed a sensation of being struck, and his limbs shortly but gradually went under him, and he fell saying, but not loudly, ‘I am dead.’

[…]

They found the wound not dangerous, having entered the side before the seam of the waistcoat a little below the shoulder, and passing through both muscles and within the skin which covers the backbone, was lodged within visible distance of the skin in the opposite side.

[…]

The doctor later reported that Hastings’ musket ball ‘pierced the right side of Mr Francis, but was prevented by a rib, which turned the ball, from entering the thorax. It went obliquely upwards, passed the backbone without injuring it, and was extracted about an inch to the left side of it. The wound is of no consequence and he is in no danger.’

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas — but not in the same places

Monday, April 3rd, 2023

Hydrogen almost never turns up in oil operations, and it wasn’t thought to exist within the Earth much at all, but a 108-meter borehole in Mali yielded 98% hydrogen:

The Malian discovery was vivid evidence for what a small group of scientists, studying hints from seeps, mines, and abandoned wells, had been saying for years: Contrary to conventional wisdom, large stores of natural hydrogen may exist all over the world, like oil and gas — but not in the same places. These researchers say water-rock reactions deep within the Earth continuously generate hydrogen, which percolates up through the crust and sometimes accumulates in underground traps. There might be enough natural hydrogen to meet burgeoning global demand for thousands of years, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) model that was presented in October 2022 at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.

[…]

Critically, natural hydrogen may be not only clean, but also renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas. By contrast, natural hydrogen is always being made afresh, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. In the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished, says Prinzhofer, who has consulted on the project. “Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one,” he says.

[…]

One kilogram of hydrogen holds as much energy as a gallon of gasoline (just under 4 liters). But at ambient pressures, that same kilogram of hydrogen occupies more space than the drum of a typical concrete mixing truck. Pressurized tanks can hold more but add weight and costs to vehicles. Liquefying hydrogen requires chilling it to –253°C — usually a disqualifying expense.

These storage issues — along with a lack of pipelines and distribution systems — are the main reasons why, in the race to electrify cars, batteries have won out over fuel cells, which convert hydrogen to electricity.

[…]

The oil and gas industry has punctured Earth with millions of wells. How could it have overlooked hydrogen for so long? One reason is that hydrogen is scarce in the sedimentary rocks that yield oil and gas, such as organic-rich shales or mudstones. When compacted and heated, the carbon molecules in those rocks consume any available hydrogen and form longer chain hydrocarbons. Any hydrogen the oil encounters as it migrates to a porous “reservoir” rock such as a sandstone tends to react to form more hydrocarbons. Hydrogen can also react with oxygen in rocks to form water or combine with carbon dioxide to form “abiotic” methane. Microbes gobble it up to make yet more methane.

Even if the hydrogen survives, geologists thought, it should not accumulate. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule of all: It can leak through minerals and even metals. If Earth were producing hydrogen, it seemed unlikely to hang around.

And so, historically, when well loggers cataloged their borehole emanations, they rarely bothered to measure for hydrogen.

[…]

Yet the hints were there for those who did look. According to Zgonnik, a geochemist who recently published a review of natural hydrogen, the first scientific discussion of it dates to 1888, when Dmitri Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table, reported hydrogen seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine. Zgonnik, who was born and raised in Ukraine, says reports of hydrogen are relatively common throughout the former Soviet Union — because Soviet researchers were looking for it. They held to a now discredited theory that would have required significant amounts of natural hydrogen to produce oil from nonliving processes rather than from ancient life.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Clive walked out of the drawing room ‘to visit the water closet’

Sunday, April 2nd, 2023

Clive of India was the first British Governor of the Bengal Presidency. He returned to Britain with immense wealth, but he was also held partly responsible for the Great Bengal Famine of 1770. William Dalrymple describes (in The Anarchy) how Clive died:

He had always suffered from depression, and twice in his youth had tried to shoot himself. Since then, despite maintaining an exterior of unbroken poise and self-confidence, he had suffered at least one major breakdown. To this burden was now added agonising stomach pains and gout. Not long after his return to England, on 22 November 1774, at the age of only forty-nine, Robert Clive committed suicide in his townhouse in Berkeley Square.

His old enemy Horace Walpole wrote about the first rumours to circulate around London. ‘There was certainly illness in the case,’ he wrote, ‘but the world thinks more than illness. His constitution was exceedingly broken and disordered, and grown subject to violent pains and convulsions. He came to town very ill last Monday. On Tuesday his physician gave him a dose of laudanum, which had not the desired effect. On the rest, there are two stories; one, that the physician repeated the dose; the other that he doubled it himself, contrary to advice. In short, he has terminated at 50, a life of so much glory, reproach, art, wealth, and ostentation!’

The truth was more unpleasant: Clive had actually cut his jugular with a blunt paperknife. He was at home with his wife Margaret, his secretary Richard Strachey and Strachey’s wife Jane. Jane Strachey later recorded that after a game of whist, which had been interrupted by Clive’s violent stomach pains, Clive walked out of the drawing room ‘to visit the water closet’. When after some time he failed to return, Strachey said to Margaret Clive, ‘You had better go and see where my Lord is.’ Margaret ‘went to look for him, and at last, opening a door, found Lord Clive with his throat cut. She fainted, and servants came. Patty Ducarel got some of the blood on her hands, and licked it off.’

Clive’s body was removed at the dead of night from Berkeley Square to the village church in Moreton Say where he was born. There the suicide was buried in a secret night-time ceremony, in an unmarked grave, without a plaque, in the same church where he had been baptised half a century earlier.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Ozempic and Wegovy do help people lose weight

Saturday, April 1st, 2023

The popularity of GLP-1 receptor agonists, like Ozempic and Wegovy, has skyrocketed, because they do help people lose weight:

Though a certain amount of lean loss is inevitable with significant weight reduction (usually about 25% of total weight loss), the goal is to increase the body’s overall proportion of lean mass – in other words, to improve body composition.

[…]

However, from the information we can scrape together based on sub-cohort data, these “miracle drugs” start to look a bit less miraculous. In 2021’s STEP 1 trial — the first trial demonstrating the efficacy of semaglutide as a treatment for adult obesity — a subset of 140 patients underwent DEXA scans for body composition analysis. Among these patients, lean mass accounted for approximately 39% of total weight loss — substantially higher than ideal. In a substudy of 178 patients from the SUSTAIN 8 trial on semaglutide as a diabetes treatment, the average proportion of lean mass loss was nearly identical at 40%, despite lower doses and less total weight loss than in the STEP 1 trial.

Posted in Fitness, Science | No Comments »

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