Not knowing Englishmen, they had not expected trouble

Wednesday, February 20th, 2019

High Crusade by Poul AndersonI’ve mentioned Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade before, and it recently came up in a comment thread, so I finally bought a (digital) copy and read it. The premise is that advanced aliens land on Earth, prepared to awe the locals, but the locals are a medieval English army, preparing to go to war. They rush the ship and slaughter the crew — save one blue-skinned prisoner:

Soldiers were trained to react when such things happened, not to think. The bow of Red John sang. The foremost demon lurched off the ramp with a cloth-yard arrow through him. I saw him cough blood and die. As if the one shot had touched off a hundred, the air was suddenly gray with whistling shafts. The three other demons toppled, so thickly studded with arrows they might have been popinjays at a contest. “They can be slain!” bawled Sir Roger. “Haro! St. George for merry England!” And he spurred his horse straight up the gangway.

[...]

The crew of the ship numbered about a hundred, but few carried weapons. We later found all manner of devices stored in the holds, but the invaders had relied on creating a panic. Not knowing Englishmen, they had not expected trouble. The ship’s artillery was ready to use, but of no value once we were inside.

Later, when the English army takes the captured ship to an alien-controlled planet, they see the same tactical flaws:

The trouble of the Wersgorix was that they had gone too far. They had made combat on the ground obsolete, and were ill trained, ill equipped, when it happened. True, they possessed fire-beams, as well as force shields to stop those same fire-beams. But they had never thought to lay down caltrops.

[...]

Yet it was scarcely fair. They had no body armor. Their only weapon for such close-in fighting was a knife attached to the muzzle of the handgun, to make a most awkward spear… or the gun itself, clubbed.

Further, the aliens don’t realize how primitive their opponents really are:

Now all the Wersgorix know about us is that we have suddenly come from nowhere and — if Branithar’s boasts be true — done what no other host has ever achieved: taken one of their strongholds! Would you not move warily, were you their constable?

In fact, the aliens struggle to accept just how brash their English foes are:

They could be a punitive expedition, I suppose. For reasons of military secrecy, they could have used one of our own ships and kept their most potent weapons in reserve. It doesn’t make sense. But neither does it make sense that barbarians would blandly tell the most powerful realm in the known universe to surrender its autonomy. Unless it’s mere bluster.

My 50th-anniversary edition opens with multiple introductions. In the first introduction, by Poul’s daughter, Astrid Anderson Bear, she mentions that the story was published as a novel in 1961 and lost the Hugo award to A Canticle for Leibowitz. I have to agree with her assessment: no shame there. (Incidentally, Canticle is not available for Kindle. My mass-market paperback is already yellowing. It seems like the kind of book that needs an acid-free paper edition — maybe the library-bound one?) Astrid goes on to describe her father’s interest in the Middle Ages:

A few years later, in May of 1966, Diana Paxson hosted friends and acquaintances at a small medieval-style tourney in her backyard, about a mile from the Grove Street house. That small gathering became known as the First Tourney, from which sprang the Society for Creative Anachronism, now a world-wide organization with tourneys and events happening most weeks, year-round. [...] And my father was an early and enthusiastic member, earning a knighthood for his fighting and additional awards for his poetry, and spent many happy hours in what is called the Current Middle Ages.

In another introduction, David Drake notes that the thoughtful core of the book is that technology is not intelligence — before he shares some fun “Easter eggs” in Anderson’s work:

It was rare for a magazine to run two stories under the same author’s name in an issue: the novelette was credited to Winston P. Sanders, a pseudonym that Poul used a number of times. The name is a joke. If you’ve read Winnie-the-Pooh, you may recall that Winnie is living “under the name of Sanders.” [...] Notice the name of the monk telling the story: Brother Parvus, a church name which he tells us he took from his nickname as a layman. So: his nickname was Little. He also tells us that he was a younger son of Wat Brown. Very coyly Poul has told us that the novel is by Little Brown, a very upmarket Boston publisher who most certainly did not publish The High Crusade or anything else by Poul Anderson until quite late in his life.

Another key point of the story is that primitive institutions, like feudalism, serve a purpose and have their strengths:

Yet this realm, in theory a republic of freemen, was in practice a worse tyranny than mankind has known, even in Nero’s infamous day.

[...]

The Wersgorix had no special affection for their birthplace; they acknowledged no immediate ties of kinship or duty. As a result, each individual had no one to stand between him and the all-powerful central government.

[...]

In England, when King John grew overweening, he clashed both with ancient law and with vested local interests; so the barons curbed him and thereby wrote another word or two of liberty for all Englishmen.

[...]

The Wersgor were a lickspittle race, unable to protest any arbitrary decree of a superior. “Promotion according to merit” meant only “promotion according to one’s usefulness to the imperial ministers.”

[...]

The Wersgorix had similar weapons, of course, but less determination to use them.

[...]

But the Wersgorix were not a knightly folk. They were more prudent and forethoughtful than we. It cost them dearly.

[...]

Indeed, this race had been supreme among the stars so long that only their soldiers now had occasion to develop a manly contempt for death.

[...]

[W]hile the engines of war may change through the centuries, rivalry and intrigue look no subtler out here than at home.

[...]

Where it comes to intrigue, I’m no master of it myself, no Italian. But the star-folk are like children.

[...]

Well, on Earth there’ve been many nations and lords for many centuries, all at odds with each other, under a feudal system nigh too complicated to remember.

[...]

On our Earth, we’ve perforce learned all the knavery there is to know.

[...]

“They know so little about the detection and use of traitors out here,” he remarked to me, “that I can buy this fellow for less than an Italian city. Our allies never attempted this, for they imagined that the Wersgor nation must be as solid as their own. Yet isn’t it logic, that so vast a sprawl of estates, separated by days and weeks of travel, must in many ways resemble a European country? Though even more corruptible—”

[...]

I was thinking that the Wersgor type of government commands no fealty.

[...]

As I said before, the collapse of Wersgorixan was not unlike the collapse of Rome, and similar problems found a similar answer. His advantage lay in having that answer ready to hand, the experience of many Terrestrial centuries.

[...]

Their central government had always been a distant thing to them, a mere collector of taxes and enforcer of arbitrary laws.

[...]

Many a blueskin found his imagination captured by our rich ceremonial and by a government of individual nobles whom he could meet face to face.

[...]

Having little military tradition of their own, the Jairs, Ashenkoghli, and Pr?*tans did not realize how those cruel years welded bonds of loyalty between native peasants and English aristocrats.

This might make good reading for any high-tech force sent off to a primitive land.

Posted in Media, Policy, War | 8 Comments »

Openly questioning Neovictorian’s Sanity

Monday, February 18th, 2019

Sanity by NeovictorianI recently read Neovictorian’s Sanity. The novel is, in a sense, didactic. It purports to explain how the world really works. For instance, our narrator — and presumably our author — remembers researching the Virginia Tech shooting, where one panicked student kept repeating that “It’s okay, they’re coming, they’re coming to help us!”:

Lesson number one is, They are not fucking coming.

Our hero, Cal — who, rather ironically, goes to Stanford, not Berkeley — finds himself recruited by a “good” conspiracy (the Network, or the Outfit) to fight the “bad” conspiracy (the Order).

The “good” conspiracy seems to be based on — I kid you not — a thinly disguised version of L. Ron Hubbard and his Dianetics — in this case, Heights, the new novel by Phillip Duke, announced in Analog Science Fiction, June, 1974, which grows into the ReHumanism movement.

Cal learns a lot from the Network, as these excerpts suggest:

  • Karsten taught that history wasn’t facts, or trends, causes, war and politics, Great Men or the power of the polis; history was a method of wisdom, the deep contemplation of which enriched understanding of men, women and societies. History revealed the gold and the dross of human behavior, and enabled more effective action in every area of life.
  • For instance, we know about a number of Soviet spies that were caught, working on the Manhattan project and secret military projects and the US delegations to Bretton Woods and the United Nations. But what about the ones that were never caught? I suspect a few spies spent entire careers undercover, retired well and died comfortably in their homes in the Virginia countryside.
  • The perfect crime isn’t the crime you get away with, it’s the crime that no one knows has even been committed.
  • “The ‘unseen,’ Mr. Black, might even be a group, an organization of sorts, but one that is silent. How would we know what effect such a group has had or is having on history? We know a good deal about Templars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons, the Black Hand and so on, but what if there are other groups around, that are operating in a shadow so complete that they might as well not exist?”
  • “Don’t show your cards”
  • “Do you ever get a feeling Cal, maybe you have since you were 12, 13, maybe even younger a feeling that you were almost like an alien observing earth from a distance, that your friends and family were often strange and stupid that everyone’s just acting acting acting all the time?”
  • “Do you feel that if it was necessary and right you could physically stop someone who was doing something bad and wrong, hurting innocent people, starting a war, threatening to use nuclear weapons, something like that?”
  • And put something in there that the herd will think is innocuous, and only the aliens will understand.
  • It’s your future actions and choices and accomplishments that influenced what happened today. Physics works both directions in time — you might consider that.
  • The Outer Church and the Inner Church. It’s universal, everyone from the Greeks and their Mysteries to the Templars and the Masons and the German dueling societies and the Ivy League fraternities use some variation on it.
  • “Because social science is just a branch of the Order, and its purpose is to keep the mass fat, dumb and happy, so the Order can continue to be the Order.” “The Big Order or the Real Order?”
  • Do nothing for one breath. Do nothing, then assess, then take charge.

What Neovictorian really has to answer for is his young protagonist’s decision to carry a 1911 with two seven-round mags.

Anyway, as I read, I like to note interesting words (or phrases) I don’t see every day:

  • peripatetic – traveling from place to place, in particular working or based in various places for relatively short period
  • gloaming – twilight; dusk.
  • so mote it be – “So mote it be” is a ritual phrase used by Freemasons, in Rosicrucianism, and more recently by Neopagans. It means “so may it be”, “so it is required”, or “so must it be”, and may be said at the end of a prayer in a similar way to “amen”.
  • contubernium – The contubernium was the smallest organized unit of soldiers in the Roman Army and was composed of eight legionaries, the equivalent of a modern squad. The men within the contubernium were known as contubernales. Ten contubernia were grouped into a centuria.

Again, the book is didactic, and that means it works in references to other recommended books:

In his afterword, he explicitly mentions his favorite authors:

In some rough chronological order they include Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

L. Ron Hubbard’s Final Blackout always makes me cry.

The late William Patterson Jr.’s fine biography of Heinlein, In Dialogue With His Century, recounts several “mystical” experiences Heinlein had as a boy. I had a few, as well.

Posted in Media, Policy | 28 Comments »

He experienced the war at Division level

Tuesday, February 12th, 2019

Commenter Bruce thought that Glenn Gray’s The Warriors quietly disappeared after Paul Fussell tore it apart:

These troops who cried and cheered with relief [at the dropping of the atomic bomb] or who sat stunned by the weight of their experience are very different from the high-minded, guilt- ridden GIs we’re told about by J. Glenn Gray in his sensitive book The Warriors. During the war in Europe Gray was an interrogator in the Army Counterintelligence Corps, and in that capacity he experienced the war at Division level. There’s no denying that Gray’s outlook on everything was admirably noble, elevated, and responsible. After the war he became a much-admired professor of philosophy at Colorado College and an esteemed editor of Heidegger. But The Warriors, his meditation on the moral and psychological dimensions of modern soldiering, gives every sign of error occasioned by remoteness from experience. Division headquarters is miles — miles — behind the line where soldiers experience terror and madness and relieve those pressures by crazy brutality and sadism. Indeed, unless they actually encountered the enemy during the war, most “soldiers” have very little idea what “combat” was like. As William Manchester says, “All who wore uniforms are called veterans, but more than 90 percent of them are as uninformed about the killing zones as those on the home front.” Manchester’s fellow marine E. B. Sledge thoughtfully and responsibly invokes the terms drastically and totally to underline the differences in experience between front and rear, and not even the far rear, but the close rear. “Our code of conduct toward the enemy,” he notes, “differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP.” (He’s describing gold-tooth extraction from still-living Japanese.) Again he writes: “We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines…,” even, he would insist, to men as intelligent and sensitive as Glenn Gray, who missed seeing with his own eyes Sledge’s marine friends sliding under fire down a shell-pocked ridge slimy with mud and liquid dysentery shit into the maggoty Japanese and USMC corpses at the bottom, vomiting as the maggots burrowed into their own foul clothing. “We didn’t talk about such things,” says Sledge. “They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans…. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane.” And Sledge has added a comment on such experience and the insulation provided by even a short distance: “Often people just behind our rifle companies couldn’t understand what we knew.” Glenn Gray was not in a rifle company, or even just behind one. “When the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki came,” he asks us to believe, “many an American soldier felt shocked and ashamed.” Shocked, OK, but why ashamed? Because we’d destroyed civilians? We’d been doing that for years, in raids on Hamburg and Berlin and Cologne and Frankfurt and Mannheim and Dresden, and Tokyo, and besides, the two A-bombs wiped out 10,000 Japanese troops, not often thought of now, John Hersey’s kindly physicians and Jesuit priests being more touching. If around division headquarters some of the people Gray talked to felt ashamed, down in the rifle companies no one did, despite Gray’s assertions. “The combat soldier,” he says,

knew better than did Americans at home what those bombs meant in suffering and injustice. The man of conscience realized intuitively that the vast majority of Japanese in both cities were no more, if no less, guilty of the war than were his own parents, sisters, or brothers.

I find this canting nonsense. The purpose of the bombs was not to “punish” people but to stop the war. To intensify the shame Gray insists we feel, he seems willing to fiddle the facts. The Hiroshima bomb, he says, was dropped “without any warning.” But actually, two days before, 720,000 leaflets were dropped on the city urging everyone to get out and indicating that the place was going to be (as the Potsdam Declaration had promised) obliterated. Of course few left.

Experience whispers that the pity is not that we used the bomb to end the Japanese war but that it wasn’t ready in time to end the German one.

Posted in Policy, War | 6 Comments »

Dune does neither

Monday, February 11th, 2019

T. Greer recently mentioned Professor Brian Smith’s syllabus for POLS 334-01, The Politics of Science Fiction, which lists these books as required reading:

Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games, Orbit Books, ISBN: 0316005401
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, Tor Books, ISBN: 0812550706
J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books), ISBN: 0803270763
F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Volume I: Rules and Order, University of Chicago Press, ISBN: 0226320863
Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Orb Books, ISBN: 0312863551
Frank Herbert, Dune, Ace Books, ISBN: 0441172717
Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed, Harper Classics, ISBN: 006051275X
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, Harper Collins, ISBN: 0060652942
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, ISBN: 0300078153

Smith also requires students to read the prologue to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and sections 125-169 in The Gay Science (or The Joyful Wisdom).

Smith’s discussion questions often pit one text against another:

  • What hope does Nietzsche place in the coming of the Overman? What obstacles does Nietzsche suggest stand in the way of the change the Overman might bring to the world?
  • Consider the links between the Bene Gesserit plan to create the Kwisatz Haderach described in the Appendix and Nietzsche’s ideal of the Overman.
  • How do the Mentats and the Bene Gesserit appear to differ in their quest for human perfection? Why does the emergence of hierarchies based on the cultivation of extreme human talent lead back to the sort of aristocracy this novel depicts?
  • Why does it matter to Lewis that the authors of The Green Book undermine the idea that moral judgments reflect reason and emotion? What political importance does he think this has? Is Thufir Hawat an example of the sort of “chestless” person Lewis describes in the chapter?
  • How might someone following the literary and moral sensibility that Lewis fears might take root read the events of the novel to this point? The Harkonnen plot relies on the exploitation of the Atreides’ characters as much or more than it does on brute force. In what ways does their understanding rely on an understanding of the virtues Lewis suggests we need?
  • Consider Lewis’ arguments about what leads human beings to sacrifice themselves for a cause. How does this relate to the Fremen? To what degree have the Bene Gesserit and others in the novel embraced the quest for mastery Lewis describes near the end of the chapter?
  • What are the major moral features of Fremen society?
  • How does the Bene Gesserit plot to manipulate religion explain the Fremen response to Paul and Jessica?
  • What does it suggest to you that the Bene Gesserit never really articulated a reason they wanted to create the Kwisatz Haderach?
  • Lewis argues that efforts to “see through” first principles actually result in less understanding of our world than analyses that presuppose the existence of a natural law. Does this help us understand the Harkonnen’s myriad failures throughout the book in any way?
  • To what degree does Paul Muad’dib transcend the efforts of others to control him? In what significant ways do Lewis’ warnings about danger of scientific control over human life resonate in the novel? How does this seemingly differ from Herbert’s intent in writing?

I didn’t take to Dune initially, but it really stuck with me. T. Greer is not a fan:

Just don’t think Dune is that interesting in the questions it poses or deep in the answers it hints at. Really good science fiction tends to excel in the 1st; enduring literature excels in the last. Dune does neither.

Posted in Media, Policy | 15 Comments »

Keeping someone in solitary for more than 15 days constitutes torture

Friday, February 8th, 2019

Professional gambler Rich Alati took an unusual bet:

On 10 September last year, the American was sitting at a poker table at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, when he was asked a question by a fellow professional player, Rory Young: how much would it take for him to spend time in complete isolation, with no light, for 30 days? An hour later a price had been agreed: $100,000.

Young would hand over the money if Alati could last 30 days in a soundproofed bathroom with no light. He would be delivered food from a local restaurant, but the meals would come at irregular intervals to prevent him from keeping track of time. There would be no TV, radio, phone or access to the outside world but he would be allowed some comforts: a yoga mat, resistance band, massage ball, and, appropriately for a bathroom, lavender essential oils as well as a sugar and salt scrub. If Alati failed he would have to pay Young $100,000.

[...]

Dr Michael Munro, a psychologist Young consulted before agreeing to the bet, told Young: “Even if he lasts for 30 days, it will be extremely taxing on his mental health for the short and potentially long term.”

There’s good reason for such caution. Solitary confinement is often used as punishment, most notably in the United States, where inmates in solitary are isolated in their cells 23 hours a day. The United Nations’ Nelson Mandela Rules state that keeping someone in solitary for more than 15 days constitutes torture.

[...]

But Alati was confident. He had practiced meditation and yoga, and was certain his experiences at silent retreats would help him. On 21 November, a crowd of families and friends gathered at the house where the challenge would take place. Alati and Young’s lawyers were there as well as cameramen from a production company interested in buying television rights to the story. For that reason, as well as safety, the entire bet would be recorded. Alati’s father was given the power to pull Alati out at any time should he show signs of not being “in the right headspace,” as Alati puts it.

[...]

Around the 10-day mark, Young started to worry that Alati might make the 30 days, noting he looked “totally fine”. He worried he had miscalculated: Young hadn’t known Alati – a gregarious, fast talker – for long before they had made the bet. “His personality did not reflect that of someone who was proficient with meditation,” Young said.

On day 15, Young’s voice came on over the loudspeaker. Alati jumped out of bed, happy to hear a voice that wasn’t his own. Young told Alati that he had been in for around two weeks and that he had an offer for him: Alati could leave if he paid out $50,000.

[...]

Alati waited for a few days until Young came back on the loudspeaker and asked if he had any offers of his own. Alati said he wouldn’t come out for less than $75,000, to which Young countered with an offer of $40,000. They settled on $62,400. Alati had had been in the silence and dark for 20 days.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Science | 8 Comments »

The Complexity of the World repeatedly makes fools of them

Thursday, February 7th, 2019

Bryan Caplan is a fan of dystopian fiction, but he had overlooked Henry Hazlitt’s The Great Idea (subsequently republished as Time Will Run Back) until last December, because he had feared a long-winded, clunky version of Economics in One Lesson — but he gave it a chance, and his gamble paid off:

I read the whole thing (almost 400 pages) on a red-eye flight – feeling wide awake the whole way.

The book’s premise: Centuries hence, mankind groans under a world Communist government centered in Moscow. People live in Stalinist fear and penury. Censorship is so extreme that virtually all pre-revolutionary writings have been destroyed; even Marx has been censored, to prevent anyone from reverse engineering whatever “capitalism” was. However, due to a marital dispute, Peter Uldanov, the dictator’s son, was raised in an island paradise, free of both the horrors and the rationalizations of his dystopian society. When the dictator nears death, he brings Peter to Moscow and appoints him his heir. The well-meaning but naive Peter is instantly horrified by Communism, and sets out to fix it. In time, he rediscovers free-market economics, and sets the world to right.

Yes, this sounds trite to me, too. But Hazlitt is a master of pacing. It takes almost 200 pages before any of Peter’s reforms start to work. Until then, it’s one false start after another, because so many of the seemingly dysfunctional policies of the Stalinist society are remedies for other dysfunctional policies.

[...]

In most literary dialogues, at least one of the characters has the answers. (“Yes, Socrates, you are quite right!”) What’s novel about Hazlitt’s dialogues is that all the characters are deeply confused. Even when they sound reasonable, the Complexity of the World repeatedly makes fools of them.

The Great Idea was originally published in 1951. Stalin was still alive.

Posted in Economics, Media, Policy | 2 Comments »

Leftist mobs burned convents and churches, while Republican police stood by

Wednesday, February 6th, 2019

Rod Dreher recently watched a 1983 British television documentary about the Spanish Civil War and came away with some scattered impressions:

Maybe it’s an American thing, but it’s hard to look at a conflict like this without imposing a simple moralistic narrative on it, between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. Certainly the received history of the conflict frames it as an unambiguous fight between democracy and fascism — and the evil fascists won. The truth is far more complicated.

In fact, the filmmakers make a point of saying that ideologues and others who project certain narratives onto the conflict do so by ignoring aspects of it that were particularly Spanish. That is to say, though the civil war did become a conflict between fascism and communism (and therefore a proxy war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union), that’s not the whole story. Its roots have a lot to do with the structure and history of Spain itself.

The first episode covers the years 1931-35, which covers the background to the war. In 1930, the military dictatorship was overthrown, and municipal elections across the country the next year led to a big win for combined parties of left and right who favored a democratic republic. (N.B., not all leftists and rightists wanted a republic!) After the vote, the king abdicated, and the Republic was declared. Later that spring, leftist mobs burned convents and churches in various cities, while Republican police stood by doing nothing. This sent a deep shock wave through Spanish Catholicism.

The Republic, in typical European fashion, was strongly anticlerical. It quickly passed laws stripping the Catholic Church of property and the right to educate young people. There were other anticlerical measures taken. Anti-Christian laws, and violent mob action, were present at the beginning of the Republic. Prior to watching this documentary, I assumed they happened as part of the civil war itself. Imagine what it was like to see a new constitutional order (the Republic) come into being, and suddenly you can’t give your children a religious education, and your churches and convents are being torched. How confident would you be in the new order?

According to the film, Spain was still in the 19th century, in terms of economics. It was largely agrarian, with a massive peasantry that was underfed, and tended to be religious and traditional. On the other hand, they were dependent on large landowners who favored the semi-feudal conditions. These landowners were extremely conservative. Their interests clashed, obviously, and became violent when the land reform promised by the liberal Republicans did not materialize fast enough for the peasantry. Mind you, the Republic was declared in the middle of the global Great Depression, with all the political and economic turmoil that came with it.

The urban working class was organized along Marxist lines, though the left was badly fractured, and unstable. There were democratic socialists, but also communists who hewed closely to the Stalinist line. Plus, anarchists were a really significant force in Spain, something unique in Europe at the time. They competed politically, and usually aligned with the left in fighting the right. But they refused to compromise their principles by taking formal power, even when the defense of the Republic required it.

Regional autonomy also played a role in defining sides. When the civil war started, Catholics supported the Nationalist side (the Francoists) … but not in the Basque Country, which was religious, but which wanted more self-rule — something the Nationalists despised. Catalonia also wanted more independence, which meant it was firmly Republican. Barcelona, the Catalan capital, was a Republican stronghold for left-wing reasons, to be sure. I bring up the situation with the Basques and the Catalans simply to illustrate the complexity of the conflict.

Anyway, the 1933 elections resulted in a swing back to the right, with a coalition of center-right and far-right parties winning control, and reversing some of the initiatives of the previous government. Socialists, anarchists, and coal miners in the province of Asturias rebelled against the Republic. They murdered priests and government officials; the military, led by Gen. Franco, brutally suppressed the uprising. All of this radicalized the left even more.

By 1935, left-right opinion had become so polarized that there was practically no middle ground left. Both sides came to distrust democracy because it was the means by which their enemies might take power. And, as one Nationalist interviewed in the documentary puts it, people on the left and right just flat out hated each other. The whole country was a powder keg.

By the 1936 campaign, the centrist parties had practically disappeared. A leftist coalition won the vote, but deadly violence between left and right began ramping up. A far-right fascist militia, the Falange, formed. Mutual assassinations on both sides, and street fighting between Falangists and Republican forces, triggered a military coup against the government. The coup failed to overthrow the Republic, but it did divide the country, and spark a civil war between Nationalists and Republicans. Gen. Francisco Franco quickly emerged as the Nationalist leader.

I give you all that history to show what was news to me: that this was by no means a simple case of right-wing military figures trying to overthrow a democratically elected government — though it was that too!

The series devotes an hour each to the complicated internal politics of both the left and the right. All my life I’ve heard Franco and the Nationalist side described as “fascist,” but it’s not accurate. True, the Nationalist had real fascists in their ranks — that was the Falange — but Franco exploited and controlled them. The Falange’s founder, Jose Antonio Rivera, was killed by the Republicans, and turned into a martyr by the Nationalists. Doing so allowed Franco to embrace the Falange but also to defang them as a political force. In the film, an elderly Falangist complains that Franco was not a real fascist, and he wouldn’t seriously implement the Falange’s program (e.g., Falangism’s opposition to capitalism).

The documentary says Franco ought to be understood as a hard-right conservative authoritarian, not a fascist. Mussolini was a big supporter, and sent troops and military aid, but was frustrated by Franco’s failure to be affirmatively fascist. Hitler sent lots of military aid, which was critically important to the Nationalist victory, but was angry at Franco for not being willing to be more Nazi-like. The truth is, Franco was trying to lead a reactionary coalition of fascists, monarchists, traditionalist Catholics, and others on the Right. The Spanish Right by and large did not trust the Spanish fascists, who were revolutionary modernists. This is an example of the filmmakers’ point that you can’t get a true grasp on what was happening in Spain at the time by imposing a narrative that overlooks particularly Spanish characteristics of the conflict.

Franco managed to unite the right, but the left remained hopelessly mired in internal rivalry. If you’ve read Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia — which I did in the early 1990s, and forgot all about — you know something about how fissiparous and treacherous left-wing politics were in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went to Spain to fight with the POUM, the democratic socialists. They were set upon and betrayed by Spanish communists loyal to the Soviet Union. The Soviets were open supporters, military and otherwise, of the Republicans, but also instructed their Spanish followers to undermine the non-communist left.

Two things struck me about the left. I mentioned earlier the role of the anarchist militias, and how they were both crucial to the Republican war effort — they were fierce fighters — but also an Achilles heel, because they were obstinately principled. There’s a passage in the film in which a Republican veteran talks about how hard it was to get the anarchists to take military orders (naturally!). They would stand around debating about whether or not they should obey an order, while the far more disciplined Nationalists would be making gains. Isn’t that cartoonish, in a herding-cats way? But it happened.

The other thing — and this, to me, was the more important thing — was how off-the-hook crazy the Spanish left was. In 1936, after the start of the war, the anarchists and left-wing supporters led a revolution within the Republic. Here’s Orwell describing revolutionary Barcelona:

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black.

That’s from Orwell, but this is reported in the Granada documentary too. It’s this kind of thing that made me aware that had I been alive then, I would have 100 percent supported the Nationalists. It was truly a revolution, and violently anti-Christian to the core. It was brought low by the communists, on Moscow’s orders, on the grounds that defeating fascism had to come before the revolution. The communists were right.

Posted in Policy, War | 21 Comments »

There is no trace to follow

Tuesday, February 5th, 2019

The Internet is full of commercial activity, not all of it legal. Dropgangs may be the future of darknet markets:

To prevent the problems of customer binding, and losing business when darknet markets go down, merchants have begun to leave the specialized and centralized platforms and instead ventured to use widely accessible technology to build their own communications and operational back-ends.

Instead of using websites on the darknet, merchants are now operating invite-only channels on widely available mobile messaging systems like Telegram. This allows the merchant to control the reach of their communication better and be less vulnerable to system take-downs. To further stabilize the connection between merchant and customer, repeat customers are given unique messaging contacts that are independent of shared channels and thus even less likely to be found and taken down. Channels are often operated by automated bots that allow customers to inquire about offers and initiate the purchase, often even allowing a fully bot-driven experience without human intervention on the merchant’s side.

The use of messaging platforms provides a much better user experience to the customers, who can now reach their suppliers with mobile applications they are used to already. It also means that a larger part of the communication isn’t routed through the Tor or I2P networks anymore but each side — merchant and customer — employ their own protection technology, often using widely spread VPNs.

The other major change is the use of “dead drops” instead of the postal system which has proven vulnerable to tracking and interception. Now, goods are hidden in publicly accessible places like parks and the location is given to the customer on purchase. The customer then goes to the location and picks up the goods. This means that delivery becomes asynchronous for the merchant, he can hide a lot of product in different locations for future, not yet known, purchases. For the client the time to delivery is significantly shorter than waiting for a letter or parcel shipped by traditional means — he has the product in his hands in a matter of hours instead of days. Furthermore this method does not require for the customer to give any personally identifiable information to the merchant, which in turn doesn’t have to safeguard it anymore. Less data means less risk for everyone.

The use of dead drops also significantly reduces the risk of the merchant to be discovered by tracking within the postal system. He does not have to visit any easily to surveil post office or letter box, instead the whole public space becomes his hiding territory.

Cryptocurrencies are still the main means of payment, but due to the higher customer-binding, and vetting process by the merchant, escrows are seldom employed. Usually only multi-party transactions between customer and merchant are established, and often not even that.

Marketing and initial vetting of both merchant and customer now happens in darknet forums and chat channels that themselves aren’t involved in any deal anymore. In these places merchants and customers take part in the discussion of best procedures, methods and prices. The market connects and develops best practices by sharing experience. Furthermore these places also serve as record of reputation, though in a still very primitive way.

Other than allowing much more secure and efficient business for both sides of the transaction, this has also led to changes in the organizational structure of merchants:

Instead of the flat hierarchies witnessed with darknet markets, merchants today employ hierarchical structures again. These consist of procurement layer, sales layer, and distribution layer. The people constituting each layer usually do not know the identity of the higher layers nor are ever in personal contact with them. All interaction is digital — messaging systems and cryptocurrencies again, product moves only through dead drops.

The procurement layer purchases product wholesale and smuggles it into the region. It is then sold for cryptocurrency to select people that operate the sales layer. After that transaction the risks of both procurement and sales layer are isolated.

The sales layer divides the product into smaller units and gives the location of those dead drops to the distribution layer. The distribution layer then divides the product again and places typical sales quantities into new dead drops. The location of these dead drops is communicated to the sales layer which then sells these locations to the customers through messaging systems.

To prevent theft by the distribution layer, the sales layer randomly tests dead drops by tasking different members of the distribution layer with picking up product from a dead drop and hiding it somewhere else, after verification of the contents. Usually each unit of product is tagged with a piece of paper containing a unique secret word which is used to prove to the sales layer that a dead drop was found. Members of the distribution layer have to post security — in the form of cryptocurrency — to the sales layer, and they lose part of that security with every dead drop that fails the testing, and with every dead drop they failed to test. So far, no reports of using violence to ensure performance of members of these structures has become known.

This concept of using messaging, cryptocurrency and dead drops even within the merchant structure allows for the members within each layer being completely isolated from each other, and not knowing anything about higher layers at all. There is no trace to follow if a distribution layer member is captured while servicing a dead drop. He will often not even be distinguishable from a regular customer. This makes these structures extremely secure against infiltration, takeover and capture. They are inherently resilient.

Furthermore the members of the sales layer often employ advanced physical tradecraft to prevent surveillance by the procurement layer when they pick up product. This makes it very hard to dismantle such a structure from the top.

If members of such a structure are captured they usually have no critical information to share, no information about persons, places, times of meeting. No interaction that would make this information necessary ever takes place.

It is because of the use of dead drops and hierarchical structures that we call this kind of organization a Dropgang.

The result of this evolution is a highly decentralized, specialized and resilient method of running black market commerce. Less information is acquired, shipments are faster, isolation between participants is high, and multiple independent sales channels are established.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Technology | 1 Comment »

Pave the muddy paths

Monday, February 4th, 2019

We often think of “law” and “legislation” as synonyms, Mike Munger notes, but Hayek argued otherwise:

Habits that are shared might be called “customs,” informal rules that might be written down nowhere. These are agreements, in the sense that we all agree that is the way we do things, even though we never actually sat down and signed anything.

A while back I wrote about the Pittsburgh left turn as an example of such a custom. It is important that the habit of waiting for someone to turn left in front of you be “agreed” on, in the sense that the expectation is widely shared — and met — because otherwise it wouldn’t be effective in making traffic move faster. These customs can come to govern behavior, however, precisely because they shape expectations, and violating expectations may be expensive or dangerous.

Those customs, if they consistently lead to useful outcomes, are “laws.” They are discoverable by experience and emerge in the form of traditions. But it is useful to write them down so that they can be enforced more effectively and can be easily learned by new generations. Laws that are written down are rules, commands, and prohibitions we call “legislation.”

The problem is that legislation need not arise from law at all.

Hayek was rightly concerned about the conceit that experts know what is best for everyone else:

I often illustrate this with what I call the Hayek Sidewalk Plan. Imagine that a new university has been built, and you are on the committee charged with laying out the sidewalks. What would you do?

You might walk around, look at aerial maps of the campus, and draw lines to try to guess where people will want to walk. Or you might want to have a purely aesthetic conception of the problem, and put the sidewalks in places or in patterns that are pleasing to the eye as you look out the windows of the administration building.

But all of that is legislation. No individual, or small committee of individuals, could possibly have enough information or foresight to be able to know in advance where people are going to want to walk. After all, universities are peopled by broadly diverse groups, with heterogeneous plans and purposes. People are often willing to walk on the sidewalks, if that serves their purpose at that point. But you probably don’t want to build a sidewalk from every doorway to every other doorway on the campus.

What would a law look like, in this setting? No one person, after all, has any effect walking on the grass, and all the different plans and purposes, taken one at a time, contain no information that you can use. But there is a physical manifestation of the aggregation of all these plans and purposes working themselves out over time. I don’t intend to make a path, and neither do you. But if enough of us, over time, find it useful to walk in the same place to accomplish our own idiosyncratic purposes, a visible record of the shared pattern emerges: a muddy path.

So, the law for the Hayek Sidewalk Plan committee will be discoverable if we adjourn for six months or so and then have a drone take some overhead photographs. It is clear now where people, acting as individuals but observable together in the shared result called a muddy path, want the sidewalks to be placed. And the task of the committee is simply to “legislate” by paving the muddy paths.

If we think of the process of discovering law as “looking for the muddy paths,” and legislation as “paving the muddy paths,” we have a simple but quite powerful way of thinking about the rule of law.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 3 Comments »

Affordability has its costs

Saturday, February 2nd, 2019

Besides its obvious shortcomings, Los Angeles has a number of subtle problems that go back to decisions made long ago:

Much of the Los Angeles area would be better today if early city fathers had realized how valuable the property would eventually become. Los Angeles has quite high population density these days, but lacks urban amenities. The San Fernando Valley on the north side of the city of Los Angeles, for instance, was built up under the assumption that it would remain a rural retreat from the big city, but it now has over 1.75 million residents.

In contrast, Chicago was laid out after its 1871 fire by men like Daniel Burnham who took “Make no little plans” as their motto. L.A. wasn’t. And it’s hard to fix urban-planning mistakes afterward.

To take a seemingly trivial example, Chicago, where I lived from 1982 to 2000, was set up with most streets having sidewalks, and the sidewalks are usually wide enough for two people to walk abreast while conversing. In contrast, sidewalks on residential streets in Los Angeles often peter out at the developers’ whims, and those that exist are usually a little too narrow for two people. So pedestrians end up conversing over their shoulders.

One reason for the sidewalk shortage is that Los Angeles was the first major city in America to develop after the automobile.

Another is that much of it was laid out to be affordable after the stock-market crash of 1929. That introduced a more democratic, less elitist ethos. There’s a lot to be said for the remarkable living standards of average people in postwar L.A., but the city is paying the price today for cutting corners back then.

Chicago, in contrast, was mostly built during the era before the New Deal when upscale bourgeois values dominated tastes. For instance, my Chicago condo was in a three-story brick building on an elegant block of other three-story brick buildings. It was a very respectable-looking block, with every building striving to live up to proper bourgeois standards.

This doesn’t mean that everybody can keep up appearances at all times. My Chicago condo had been built in 1923 with optimistic touches like nine-foot ceilings. During the Depression, the owners must have been ruined as the units were split up into two apartments. But a couple of generations later, the building was rehabbed, and the tall ceilings and other generous touches were still there.

Los Angeles, in contrast, reflects an odd combination of mass-market needs and celebrity tastes.

In 1915, Charlie Chaplin, rapidly becoming the most famous man in the world, lived in Chicago a couple of blocks from where my old condo would go up. But in 1916, as filmmakers realized the advantages of sunshine, he moved from Chicago to Los Angeles.

The movies did in the chance of Los Angeles developing physically along bourgeois lines. Film people valued privacy and self-expression. Screenwriter Nathanael West’s 1939 novel Day of the Locust complained of the excessive diversity of Hollywood houses:

But not even the soft wash of dusk could help the houses. Only dynamite would be of any use against the Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles that lined the slopes of the canyon.

One of the most popular architects of celebrity homes was an African-American named Paul Revere Williams whose view, in contrast to the more academically celebrated Los Angeles architects such as Schindler and Neutra, was that his movie-star clients paid him to make their whims come true. So if, say, Frank Sinatra desired a Japanese Modern house with superb acoustics for his state-of-the-art stereo, Williams would figure out how to give the client what he wanted.

Another need celebrities have is privacy from tourists. Not having a sidewalk in front of your house for your stalkers to assemble upon makes sense if you are a world-famous actor.

The peculiar needs of movie stars influence everybody else’s tastes in L.A., with generally unfortunate results. If you are in constant danger of being pestered by crazed fans, it can be a good idea to go everywhere by car. But not being able to walk down your own street without risking being hit by traffic is a dumb idea if you are a nobody.

One lesson from Los Angeles ought to be that it’s hard to retrofit urban-planning mistakes made for reasons of affordability and expedience.

For example, the Los Angeles River, a floodplain that is dry most of the year, almost washed the city away in the 1938 flood. The Army Corps of Engineers were called in and rapidly built the notorious concrete ditch that is now the L.A. River to keep, say, Lockheed from being carried out to sea in the next deluge, causing America to lose the upcoming war.

After the war, newer desert communities like Scottsdale and Palm Springs realized that it makes more sense to convert natural flood channels into parks and golf courses that can absorb runoff. Moreover, the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles demonstrated that putting up apartment buildings on the old sand and gravel riverbed had been a bad idea, as numerous apartment buildings near the river collapsed.

For decades, public-spirited Angelenos have generated countless plans to replace the ugly concrete culvert. But to do that would require a broader channel, which would demand using eminent domain to purchase all the very expensive real estate along the river. And so nothing ever gets done.

Similarly, it’s hard to undo affordable-housing construction, unless it happens to be in a hugely valuable location, such as along the beach. Gentrification is most likely where there’s something to gentrify.

For instance, Van Nuys in the heart of the San Fernando Valley was built as an affordable place for people who couldn’t afford cars. I recall it in the 1960s being a dump.

Driving through Van Nuys last week, it was still the same dump.

Affordability has its costs.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | 1 Comment »

If some idiot from the South tried to be polite, the system broke down

Friday, February 1st, 2019

As you travel the world, some of the local rules you can look up or read about, but often the rules are just assumed because “everyone” knows them:

I described an experience of mine in Erlangen, Germany, in an earlier column, where I didn’t know about the practice of collecting a deposit on shopping carts. No one told me about this, and I thought I recognized the context of “grocery store” as familiar, one where I knew the rules. But I didn’t.

I had another experience in Germany, one that made me think of the importance of what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place.” Erlangen, where I taught at Friedrich Alexander University, is a city of bicycles. There are roads, but most are narrow and there are so many bikes that it can be frustrating to drive.

The bike riders, as is true in many American cities, paid little attention to the traffic lights. Often, there were so many bikes that it was not possible to cross the street without getting in the way. But I noticed that people did cross, just walking right out into the street.

I tried this, several times, in my first time in Erlangen. But being from the southern United States, I’m polite and deferential. So, I would start across the street, but then look up the street, and if a bike was close and coming fast I’d stop.

And get hit by a large, sturdy German on a large, sturdy German bicycle. And then I got yelled at, in German. What had I done wrong? Eventually, I figured it out: there had evolved a convention for crossing the street and for riding bicycles. The pedestrian simply walked at a constant speed, without even looking. The bicyclist would ride directly at the pedestrian, actually aiming at the spot where the pedestrian was at that point in time. Since the pedestrian kept moving in a predictable fashion, the cyclist would pass directly and safely behind the pedestrian.

If some idiot from the southern United States, in an effort to impose his own views of “polite” behavior on people whose evolved rules were different, tried to be polite and stop, the system broke down. Though that idiot (me) was stopping to avoid being hit, I was actually being rude by violating the rules. These rules were not written down and could not easily be changed.

In fact, a number of my German colleagues even denied that it was a rule, at first. But then they would say, “Well, right, you can’t stop. That would be dumb. So, okay, I guess it is a rule, after all.”

More precisely, this rule — like many other important rules you encounter in “foreign” settings — is really a convention. A convention, according to Lewis (1969), is a persistent (though not necessarily permanent) regularity in the resolution of recurring coordination problems, in situations characterized by recurrent interactions where outcomes are (inter)dependent.

Conventions, then, exist when people all agree on a rule of behavior, even if no one ever said the rule out loud or wrote it down. No one actor can choose an outcome, and no actor can challenge the regularity by unilaterally deviating from the conventional behavior. But deviation can result in substantial harm, as when someone tries to drive on the left in a country where “we” drive on the right, or social sanction, as when there is intentional punishment on behalf of other actors if deviation is observed and publicized.

According to David Hume, convention is

a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe that it will be to my interest [e.g.] to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behavior. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition that something is to be performed on the other part. (Hume, 1978; llI.ii.2)

Notice how different this is from the “gamer” conception of laws and rules. For the gamer, all the rules can be — in fact, must be — written down and can be examined and rearranged. For the world traveler, the experience of finding out the rules can involve trial and error, and even the natives likely do not fully understand that the rules and norms of their culture are unique.

One of my favorite examples is actually from the United States, the so-called Pittsburgh Left Turn. In an article in the Pittsburgh City Paper in 2006, Chris Potter wrote:

As longtime residents know, the Pittsburgh Left takes place when two or more cars — one planning to go straight, and the other to turn left — face off at a red light without a “left-turn only” lane or signal. The Pittsburgh Left occurs when the light turns green, and the driver turning left takes the turn without yielding to the oncoming car.

Pittsburgh is an old city, many of whose streets were designed before automobiles held sway. [That means] that street grids are constricted, with little room for amenities like left-turn-only lanes. The absence of such lanes means drivers have to solve traffic problems on their own. Instead of letting one car at the head of an intersection bottle up traffic behind it, the Pittsburgh Left gives the turning driver a chance to get out of everyone else’s way. In exchange for a few seconds of patience, the Pittsburgh Left allows traffic in both directions to move smoothly for the duration of the signal. Of course, the system only works if both drivers know about it. No doubt that’s why newcomers find it so vexing.

The Pittsburgh Left is a very efficient convention. On two-lane streets, turning left can block traffic as the turning car waits for an opening. And left-turn arrows are expensive and add time to each traffic light cycle. Far better to let the left turners — if there are any — go first. If there are no left turners, traffic just proceeds normally, not waiting on a left arrow.

Of course, if some idiot from the southern United States (yes, me again) is driving in Pittsburgh, that person expects to go when the light turns green. I blew my horn when two cars turned left in front of me. And people on the sidewalk yelled at me, as did the left-turning drivers. Once again, I didn’t know the rules, because I was a foreigner, at least in terms of the rules of the road in Pittsburgh.

Actually, it’s worse than that. The Pittsburgh Left is technically illegal, according to the Pennsylvania Driver’s Handbook (p. 47): “Drivers turning left must yield to oncoming vehicles going straight ahead.” The written rules, the gamer rules, appear to endorse one pattern of action. But the actual rules, the ones you have to travel around to learn, may be quite different. Real rules are not written down, and the people living in that rule system may not understand either the nature or effects of the rules. It is very difficult to change conventions, because they represent the expectations people have developed in dealing with each other over years or decades.

Hayek understood this clearly, and argued for what I have called the “world traveler” conception over what I have called the “gamer” conception of rules and laws. As Hayek said in 1988, in The Fatal Conceit:

To understand our civilisation, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection — the comparative increase of population and wealth — of those groups that happened to follow them.… This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution.

Posted in Economics, Policy | 4 Comments »

Standing on the shoulders of jerks

Thursday, January 31st, 2019

Eric Weinstein discusses the origin of the Intellectual Dark Web:

Posted in Policy | 2 Comments »

Widespread use would provide an entire new category for the Darwin Awards

Thursday, January 31st, 2019

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective is a volunteer network of anarchists and hackers developing DIY medicines:

Four Thieves claims to have successfully synthesized five different kinds of pharmaceuticals, all of which were made using MicroLab. The device attempts to mimic an expensive machine usually only found in chemistry laboratories for a fraction of the price using readily available off-the-shelf parts. In the case of the MicroLab, the reaction chambers consist of a small mason jar mounted inside a larger mason jar with a 3D-printed lid whose printing instructions are available online. A few small plastic hoses and a thermistor to measure temperature are then attached through the lid to circulate fluids through the contraption to induce the chemical reactions necessary to manufacture various medicines. The whole process is automated using a small computer that costs about $30.

To date, Four Thieves has used the device to produce homemade Naloxone, a drug used to prevent opiate overdoses better known as Narcan; Daraprim, a drug that treats infections in people with HIV; Cabotegravir, a preventative HIV medicine that may only need to be taken four times per year; and mifepristone and misoprostol, two chemicals needed for pharmaceutical abortions.

[...]

As for the DEA, none of the pharmaceuticals produced by the collective are controlled substance, so their possession is only subject to local laws about prescription medicines. If a person has a disease and prescription for the drug to treat that disease, they shouldn’t run into any legal issues if they were to manufacture their own medicine. Four Thieves is effectively just liberating information on how to manufacture certain medicines at home and developing the open source tools to make it happen. If someone decides to make drugs using the collective’s guides then that’s their own business, but Four Thieves doesn’t pretend that the information it releases is for “educational purposes only.”

[...]

The catalyst for Four Thieves Vinegar Collective was a trip Laufer took to El Salvador in 2008 when he was still in graduate school. While visiting a rural medical clinic as part of an envoy documenting human rights violations in the country, he learned that it had run out of birth control three months prior. When the clinic contacted the central hospital in San Salvador, it was informed the other hospital had also run out of birth control. Laufer told me he was stunned that the hospitals were unable to source birth control, a relatively simple drug to manufacture that’s been around for over half-a-century. He figured if drug dealers in the country were able to use underground labs to manufacture illicit drugs, a similar approach could be taken to life-saving medicines.

This doesn’t seem wise:

Eric Von Hippel, an economist at MIT that researches “open innovation,” is enthusiastic about the promise of DIY drug production, but only under certain conditions. He cited a pilot program in the Netherlands that is exploring the independent production of medicines that are tailor made for individual patients as a good example of safe, DIY drug production. These drugs are made in the hospital by trained experts. Von Hippel believes it can be dangerous when patients undertake drug production on their own.
“If one does not do chemical reactions under just-right conditions, one can easily create dangerous by-products along with the drug one is trying to produce,” von Hippel told me in an email. “Careful control of reactor conditions is unlikely in DIY chemical reactors such as the MicroLab design offered for free by the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective.”

His colleague, Harold DeMonaco, a visiting scientist at MIT, agreed. DeMonaco suggested that a more rational solution to the problems addressed would be for patients to work with compounding pharmacies. Compounding pharmacies prepare personalized medicine for their customers and DeMonaco said they are able to synthesize the same drugs Four Thieves is producing at low costs, but with “appropriate safeguards.”

“Unless the system is idiot proof and includes validation of the final product, the user is exposed to a laundry list of rather nasty stuff,” DeMonaco told me in an email. “Widespread use [of Four Thieves’ devices] would provide an entire new category for the Darwin Awards.”

Posted in Policy, Science, Technology | 3 Comments »

It was the usual horror story

Friday, January 25th, 2019

I can’t say I know much about Mother Jones, but I was surprised to see them publish a “scary” look into the science of smoking pot:

It’s been a few years since Alex Berenson has “committed journalism,” as he likes to say. As a New York Times reporter, Berenson did two tours covering the Iraq War, an experience that inspired him to write his first of nearly a dozen spy novels. Starting with the 2006 Edgar Award-winning The Faithful Spy, his books were so successful that he left the Times in 2010 to write fiction full time. But his latest book, out January 8, strays far from the halls of Langley and the jihadis of Afghanistan. Tell Your Children is nonfiction that takes a sledgehammer to the promised benefits of marijuana legalization, and cannabis enthusiasts are not going to like it one bit.

The book was seeded one night a few years ago when Berenson’s wife, a psychiatrist who evaluates mentally ill criminal defendants in New York, started talking about a horrific case she was handling. It was “the usual horror story, somebody who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment — typical bedtime chat in the Berenson house,” he writes. But then, his wife added, “Of course he was high, been smoking pot his whole life.”

Berenson, who smoked a bit in college, didn’t have strong feelings about marijuana one way or another, but he was skeptical that it could bring about violent crime. Like most Americans, he thought stoners ate pizza and played video games — they didn’t hack up family members. Yet his Harvard-trained wife insisted that all the horrible cases she was seeing involved people who were heavy into weed. She directed him to the science on the subject.

We look back and laugh at Reefer Madness, which was pretty over-the-top, after all, but Berenson found himself immersed in some pretty sobering evidence: Cannabis has been associated with legitimate reports of psychotic behavior and violence dating at least to the 19th century, when a Punjabi lawyer in India noted that 20 to 30 percent of patients in mental hospitals were committed for cannabis-related insanity. The lawyer, like Berenson’s wife, described horrific crimes — including at least one beheading — and attributed far more cases of mental illness to cannabis than to alcohol or opium. The Mexican government reached similar conclusions, banning cannabis sales in 1920 — nearly 20 years before the United States did — after years of reports of cannabis-induced madness and violent crime.

Over the past couple of decades, studies around the globe have found that THC — the active compound in cannabis — is strongly linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, and violence. Berenson interviewed far-flung researchers who have quietly but methodically documented the effects of THC on serious mental illness, and he makes a convincing case that a recreational drug marketed as an all-around health product may, in fact, be really dangerous — especially for people with a family history of mental illness and for adolescents with developing brains.

A 2002 study in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) found that people who used cannabis by age 15 were four times as likely to develop schizophrenia or a related syndrome as those who’d never used. Even when the researchers excluded kids who had shown signs of psychosis by age 11, they found that the adolescent users had a threefold higher risk of demonstrating symptoms of schizophrenia later on. One Dutch marijuana researcher that Berenson spoke with estimated, based on his own work, that marijuana could be responsible for as much as 10 percent of psychosis in places where heavy use is common.

These studies are hardly Reagan-esque, drug warrior hysteria. In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a report nearly 500 pages long on the health effects of cannabis and concluded that marijuana use is strongly associated with the development of psychosis and schizophrenia. The researchers also noted that there’s decent evidence linking pot consumption to worsening symptoms of bipolar disorder and to a heightened risk of suicide, depression, and social anxiety disorders: “The higher the use, the greater the risk.”

Given that marijuana use is up 50 percent over the past decade, if the studies are accurate, we should be experiencing a big increase in psychotic diseases. And we are, Berenson argues. He reports that from 2006 to 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, the number of ER visitors co-diagnosed with psychosis and a cannabis use disorder tripled, from 30,000 to 90,000.

Legalization advocates would say Berenson and the researchers have it backwards: Pot doesn’t cause mental illness; mental illness drives self-medication with pot. But scientists find that theory wanting. Longitudinal studies in New Zealand, Sweden, and the Netherlands spanning several decades identified an association between cannabis and mental illness even when accounting for prior signs of mental illness. In an editorial published alongside the influential 2002 BMJ study on psychosis and marijuana, two Australian psychiatrists wrote that these and other findings “strengthen the argument that use of cannabis increases the risk of schizophrenia and depression, and they provide little support for the belief that the association between marijuana use and mental health problems is largely due to self-medication.”

One of the book’s most convincing arguments against the self-medication theory is that psychosis and schizophrenia are diseases that typically strike people during adolescence or in their early 20s. But with increasing pot use, the number of people over 30 coming into the ER with psychosis has also shot up, suggesting that cannabis might be a cause of mental illness in people with no prior history of it.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a similar piece in the New Yorker, emphasizing how little we know about marijuana compared to legal drugs, and Berenson himself has an opinion piece in the New York Times, where he points out that many of the same people pressing for marijuana legalization argued that the risks of opioid addiction could be easily managed.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Science | 10 Comments »

Few even had wallets

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019

A century ago the market economy was important, but a lot of economic activity still took place within the family, Peter Frost notes, especially in rural areas:

In the late 1980s I interviewed elderly French Canadians in a small rural community, and I was struck by how little the market economy mattered in their youth. At that time none of them had bank accounts. Few even had wallets. Coins and bills were kept at home in a small wooden box for special occasions, like the yearly trip to Quebec City. The rest of the time these people grew their own food and made their own clothes and furniture. Farms did produce food for local markets, but this surplus was of secondary importance and could just as often be bartered with neighbors or donated to the priest. Farm families were also large and typically brought together many people from three or four generations.

By the 1980s things had changed considerably. Many of my interviewees were living in circumstances of extreme social isolation, with only occasional visits from family or friends. Even among middle-aged members of the community there were many who lived alone, either because of divorce or because of relationships that had never gone anywhere. This is a major cultural change, and it has occurred in the absence of any underlying changes to the way people think and feel.

Whenever I raise this point I’m usually told we’re nonetheless better off today, not only materially but also in terms of enjoying varied and more interesting lives. That argument made sense back in the 1980s — in the wake of a long economic boom that had doubled incomes, increased life expectancy, and improved our lives through labor-saving devices, new forms of home entertainment, and stimulating interactions with a broader range of people.

Today, that argument seems less convincing. Median income has stagnated since the 1970s and may even be decreasing if we adjust for monetization of activities, like child care, that were previously nonmonetized. Life expectancy too has leveled off and is now declining in the U.S. because of rising suicide rates among people who live alone. Finally, cultural diversity is having the perverse effect of reducing intellectual diversity. More and more topics are considered off-limits in public discourse and, increasingly, in private conversation.

Liberalism is no longer delivering the goods — not only material goods but also the goods of long-term relationships and rewarding social interaction.

Posted in Economics, Policy, Science | 5 Comments »

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