A New US Army Air Corp

Friday, September 12th, 2014

The President has said that he will destroy the Caliphate, but there hasn’t been much shock or awe yet, Jerry Pournelle notes:

Of course one can only send what one has. What is really needed is Delta Force ground units with several squadrons of Warthogs (A-10 Thunderbolt). Actually, P-47 Thunderbolts would do, but we don’t have any of those. Ground units with adequate sir support under and air supremacy umbrella is generally successful in any kind of war, whether the enemy is the Wehrmacht of the North Vietnamese Army of 1972 when it invaded the South. Note that in that campaign, the North Vietnamese lost over 100,000 in killed, disabled, or captured; the US lost under 500 troops total in battles involving more enemy armor than many World War II engagements.

What is really needed is to form a new United States Army Air Corps with a 3-star general in command; its mission would be to design, develop, procure, train, and generally plan operations of air weapons suitable for support of the field army. That structure would provide a career path for those who wish to specialize in air/ground war. Of course USAF will never allow this, although they don’t understand or want the ground support operations mission, even though that is what is decisive in this kind of war.

USAF has one of the world’s best civil engineering capabilities: they build and operate bases. Perhaps the Army could borrow USAF construction units to build bases in Peshmurga controlled Iraq; the Army would have to provide security. Under present USAF/US Army turf treaties, the Army has to use helicopters, which are far more vulnerable to ground based opposition. This gives hot USAF pilots more missions, since air supremacy (which includes elimination of ground based anti-air weapons) is an Air Force specialty and they are very good at it. The problem is that when it comes to any budget crises, it’s the Thunderbolts that go first, leaving the Army stuck with vulnerable helicopters.

An American ground/air expeditionary force with unified command structure sounds like the Marines, but they don’t have optimum ground army support aircraft either.

Four squadrons of Warthogs and a regiment of Green Berets would eliminate the Caliphate in short order, recapturing or destroying the expensive weapons we gave the ineffective Iraqi forces which threw them down in their retreat from ISIS. Of course it would be hard on the areas that must be reconquered, but so is occupation by the Caliphate.

Regarding the President’s speech, in the wake of our operations since Benghazi, I am not sure that the Caliphate has been impressed. Had dawn come up over Iraq to reveal massive air strikes including carpet bombing by B-52’s, along with a maximum effort from Navy and Marine aircraft, the result might be different.

We have Delta Force, the CIA teams, and the Green Beret forces; we have ground support aircraft, and we have an Air Force that, once it is told unmistakably that the mission is to support our Legionnaires who will guide the Peshmerga, can do this job. Of course that is expensive. Perhaps we can take some of the profits from the oil fields we will liberate. I am sure the Kurds will be glad to share that revenue with us. And the sight of a US-Kurdish cooperative venture resulting in victory should provide a salutary lesson to the new Iraqi government – as well as give Iran something to think about.

Of course nothing of this sort will happen under President Obama. One does wonder what Vice President Biden would do if put in charge. At least he has said that we will pursue the Caliphate to the gates of Hell.

Posted in Policy, War | 5 Comments »

Ask Peter Thiel Anything

Thursday, September 11th, 2014

Peter Thiel is doing a Reddit AMA. Some highlights:

  • Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it.
  • The zero-sum world [The Social Network] portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it’s a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood.
  • Start with focusing on a small market and dominate that market first.
  • What did you think when you first met Elon Musk? Very smart, very charismatic, and incredibly driven — a very rare combination, since most people who have one of these traits learn to coast on the other two.
    It was kind of scary to be competing against his startup in Palo Alto in Dec 1999-Mar 2000.
  • Is Palantir a front for the CIA? No, the CIA is a front for Palantir.
  • If technology involves doing more with less, than US health care (like US education) is the core of “anti-technology” in this country: For the last four decades, we have been spending more and more for the same (or even for less).
  • At 22, I didn’t think it was important to meet people.
  • In your view, has the Thiel Fellowship been a success? Yes, on both a micro and a macro scale.
    Micro: the 83 fellows have collectively raised $63 million, and a number of their companies are tracking towards solid Series B venture rounds. Almost all of them did and learned far more than they would have in college.
    Macro: we started an important debate about the education bubble. Student debt is over $1 trillion in this country, and much of that money has gone to pay for lies that people tell about how great the education they received was.
  • I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis; JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge; Norman Angell, The Great Illusion; Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.
  • In the Soviet Union, chess was considered a sport — and I think that’s the one thing the communists got right.
  • I don’t agree with the libertarian description of the NSA as “big brother.” I think Snowden revealed something that looks more like the Keystone Kops and very little like James Bond.
  • Most people believe that capitalism and competition are synonyms, and I think they are opposites. A capitalist accumulates capital, and in a world of perfect competition all the capital gets competed away: The restaurant industry in SF is very competitive and very non-capitalistic (e.g., very hard way to make money), whereas Google is very capitalistic and has had no serious competition since 2002.
  • PayPal built a payment system but failed in its goal in creating a “new world currency” (our slogan from back in 2000). Bitcoin seems to have created a new currency (at least on the level of speculation), but the payment system is badly lacking.
    I will become more bullish on Bitcoin when I see the payment volume of Bitcoin really increase.
  • What is your view on Neoreaction? Sounds like a self-contradiction — if you’re reactionary, why do you need the “neo?”
  • I think there’s been a Gresham’s Law in science funding in this country, as the political people who are nimble in the art of writing government grants have gradually displaced the eccentric and idiosyncratic people who typically make the best scientists. The eccentric university professor is a species that is going extinct fast.
  • If our great expectations about the future are not realized, then we need to save way more than we are doing today. China (with 40% savings) is perhaps more “rational” than the US (with about 0% savings), at least in a world of general stagnation.
  • Sociopathic investor behavior that worked shockingly well in the 1980s and 90s will work much less well in today’s more transparent and founder-centric world.
    As an investor, I think one must always maintain a certain amount of humility. There is only so much we can do to help the companies in which we invest. And because of this, the act of making the investment (rather than the ability to fix things later) remains by far the most important thing we do.
  • A sense of mission is critical, but I think the word “social” is problematically ambiguous: it can mean either (1) good for society, or (2) seen as good by society.
    In the second meaning, it leads to me-too copycat companies. I think the field of social entrepreneurship is replete with these, and that this is one of the reasons these businesses have not been that successful to date.
  • Biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook.
    General lesson: Whenever a tech startup has a strong up round led by a top tier investor (Accel counts), it is generally still undervalued. The steeper the up round, the greater the undervaluation.
  • Yes, I think [Henry] George is a really interesting thinker. The idea that we should tax land heavily (and perhaps not tax anything else at all) is very interesting, since many of the bad monopolies in our society involve the unholy coalition of urban slumlords and pseudo-environmentalists.
  • I think Andreessen is half-right: Snowden is both a hero and a traitor.
    It is really unfortunate that there were no internal checks in our system, and so it took something like Snowden breaking all the rules for us to have a serious discussion about the NSA.
  • Even when one understands that exponential growth and exponential forces are incredibly important, it is still hard to internalize this. PayPal was growing at 7%/day at the time of the launch (Oct 99-Apr 2000, from 24 users to 1 million), and we did not fully fathom the rocket we were riding.
  • I do not find myself fully on the side of any of our political leaders — because none of them are fully on my side.

Posted in Business, Peter Thiel, Policy, Technology | 4 Comments »

Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable

Thursday, September 11th, 2014

While sitting through a lecture on ADHD, Scott Alexander realized that he rejected a popular premise:

There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socially determined, and therefore mutable. And social problems are easy to fix, through things like education and social services and public awareness campaigns and “calling people out”, and so we have a responsiblity to fix them, thus radically improving society and making life better for everyone.

But the Right (by now I guess the far right) believes human characteristics are biologically determined, and biology is fixed. Therefore we shouldn’t bother trying to improve things, and any attempt is just utopianism or “immanentizing the eschaton” or a shady justification for tyranny and busybodyness.

And I think I reject this whole premise.

See, my terrible lecture on ADHD suggested several reasons for the increasing prevalence of the disease. Of these I remember two: the spiritual desert of modern adolescence, and insufficient iron in the diet. And I remember thinking “Man, I hope it’s the iron one, because that seems a lot easier to fix.”

Society is really hard to change. We figured drug use was “just” a social problem, and it’s obvious how to solve social problems, so we gave kids nice little lessons in school about how you should Just Say No. There were advertisements in sports and video games about how Winners Don’t Do Drugs. And just in case that didn’t work, the cherry on the social engineering sundae was putting all the drug users in jail, where they would have a lot of time to think about what they’d done and be so moved by the prospect of further punishment that they would come clean.

And that is why, even to this day, nobody uses drugs.

On the other hand, biology is gratifyingly easy to change. Sometimes it’s just giving people more iron supplements.

Posted in Policy, Science | 17 Comments »

A Tale of Two Charter Schools

Wednesday, September 10th, 2014

Michael Strong tells a tale of two charter schools, both starting their fourth year of operation:

School A is in a precarious position. Started by an uncertified, incompetent administrator, it has received numerous audit findings and has received low performance ratings from the state department of education. State-mandated academic standards were not being taught. Many of the original faculty were unqualified, though that is finally being remedied. Building code violations were a problem throughout its first several years. The school was chronically late turning its data in to the state. Discipline problems were chronic at the school; on one occasion an unlicensed volunteer teacher tried to choke a student in the classroom. At one point the school had to be supervised by the local district because it lacked a qualified administrator; the second one had quit after only one semester. Although it is now led by an experienced, professional, properly licensed administrator, given the school’s history of chronic problems it is not surprising that the school district questions the ongoing independence of the school and has filed a complaint against the school with the state department of education. The school may yet be shut down as the district believes it ought to be.

School B is arguably one of the greatest charter school success stories in the nation. Started by an experienced administrator whose innovative pedagogy had been recognized by leading national experts in learnable intelligence and brain-based learning as well as a McArthur Genius award-winning educator, the school has been dramatically successful at creating a culture of learning in one of the most academically backward regions of the country. In its second year of operation, the school had taken students who had never taken an AP test at their previous school (AP was almost non-existent in this part of the country) and become one of the top 200 public high schools in the country based on Newsweek’s Challenge Index. In its third year of operation, it had moved into the top 100 in the nation. The state AP organization organized a week-long summer AP training so that the administrator and faculty could share their expertise with other teachers across the state. SAT scores increased at a rate double the national average. The federal department of education awarded the school a large grant to replicate its physical education program in charter schools across the state. Several foundations rewarded the school with hundreds of thousands of dollars of grants for its obvious successes. Most of the students love the school and love learning at the school. Teachers moved from across the country to teach at the school. Parents moved from across the country to send their children to this school. Students across a broad range of learning abilities, including highly gifted and autistic students, flourish at the school. Twenty percent of the students commute almost an hour each direction through a dangerous mountain canyon to get to this school. Residents of nearby towns have expressed an interest in having this school replicate itself so that their children can benefit from this school’s unique program.

The challenge facing those who would like to see charter schools lead innovation and thereby improve education for all students? School A and School B are the same school, the first seen through the eyes of the state and the second through the eyes of supporters of the school.

He recommends reading Seeing Like a State to better understand the problem.

Posted in Education, Policy | No Comments »

Taming the Barbarians

Wednesday, September 10th, 2014

Confucian norms and philosophy never caught hold in Inner Asia:

This explains why attempts to “corrupt” the Xiongnu and subordinate the Shanyu to the emperor failed so dismally. The nomads were eager to seize Chinese goods and luxury items, but were never economically dependent on them. Unlike in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the “barbarian” statelets of South China, the economic structure of the Xiongnu empire was radically different than agrarian China’s. There simply was not enough common ground between the two peoples for Chinese lifestyles to be grafted onto the Xiongnu people.

This is a recurring theme of Inner Asian history: nomadic elites could adopt the trappings of Chinese culture, but without moving off of the steppe they could never absorb its substance. The social worlds of the two peoples were simply too different. The ritualized and hierarchical relationships of the traditional Chinese family had no analogue in the egalitarian family life of the steppe. The first recorded Chanyu seized power by murdering his own father. The notion that “filial piety” — or any of the other civilized virtues China hoped to “tame” the barbarians with — could be instilled in the Xiongnu by giving them wives and clothes and toys was a political fantasy.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Minerva Project Business Plan

Tuesday, September 9th, 2014

The Minerva Project has an unusual business plan:

To seed this first class with talent, Minerva gave every admitted student a full-tuition scholarship of $10,000 a year for four years, plus free housing in San Francisco for the first year. Next year’s class is expected to have 200 to 300 students, and Minerva hopes future classes will double in size roughly every year for a few years after that.

Those future students will pay about $28,000 a year, including room and board, a $30,000 savings over the sticker price of many of the schools — the Ivies, plus other hyperselective colleges like Pomona and Williams — with which Minerva hopes to compete. (Most American students at these colleges do not pay full price, of course; Minerva will offer financial aid and target middle-class students whose bills at the other schools would still be tens of thousands of dollars more per year.) If Minerva grows to 2,500 students a class, that would mean an annual revenue of up to $280 million. A partnership with the Keck Graduate Institute in Claremont, California, allowed Minerva to fast-track its accreditation, and its advisory board has included Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary and Harvard president, and Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska, who also served as the president of the New School, in New York City.

Nelson’s long-term goal for Minerva is to radically remake one of the most sclerotic sectors of the U.S. economy, one so shielded from the need for improvement that its biggest innovation in the past 30 years has been to double its costs and hire more administrators at higher salaries.

[...]

Minerva is built to make money, but Nelson insists that its motives will align with student interests. As evidence, Nelson points to the fact that the school will eschew all federal funding, to which he attributes much of the runaway cost of universities. The compliance cost of taking federal financial aid is about $1,000 per student—a tenth of Minerva’s tuition—and the aid wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of Minerva’s students, who will likely come from overseas.

Subsidies, Nelson says, encourage universities to enroll even students who aren’t likely to thrive, and to raise tuition, since federal money is pegged to costs. These effects pervade higher education, he says, but they have nothing to do with teaching students. He believes Minerva would end up hungering after federal money, too, if it ever allowed itself to be tempted. Instead, like Ulysses, it will tie itself to the mast and work with private-sector funding only. “If you put a drug”—federal funds—“into a system, the system changes itself to fit the drug. If [Minerva] took money from the government, in 20 years we’d be majority American, with substantially higher tuition. And as much as you try to create barriers, if you don’t structure it to be mission-oriented, that’s the way it will evolve.”

Posted in Business, Education, Policy | No Comments »

Extorting the Han

Tuesday, September 9th, 2014

One flaw in the co-equal treaties between the steppe-nomad Shanyu and Chinese emperor, T. Greer explains, was that the two sovereigns did not exercise equal amounts of control over their respective empires:

The Xiongnu confederation was an amalgamation of different tribal groups forged together by the Xiongnu ruling line. The Shanyu’s power was proportionate to the threats his people faced or the rewards he could promise them. If he tried to control the tribal autocracy with too tight a hand the inevitable consequence would be flight (to China or to other steppe confederations on the steppe) or open rebellion. If one of his subordinate leaders decided to campaign against the Han on his own accord there was little the Xiongnu could do stop him.

The other reason the Chanyu was willing to turn a blind eye to these attacks (and in occasion lead them himself) was that they strengthened the Xiongnu position at the negotiating table. “Almost each time a new pact was signed something was lost by the Han, and gained by the Hsiung-nu.” Far from being an instrument the Chinese used to sap the Xiongnu elite’s political cohesion (as Luttwak suggests), the treaty system was a way for the Xiongnu elite to extort the Han Dynasty.

That’s an awfully nice agrarian empire you’ve got there. I’d hate to see something happen to it.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Peace Marriage

Monday, September 8th, 2014

Shortly after his disastrous defeat at Pingcheng in 200 BC, Han Gaozu, first emperor of the Han dynasty, introduced the heqin, or peace marriage, system:

The empire was at that time still quite new and the Han did not have the resources to wage large-scale war against the Xiongnu. Gaozu was left with the difficult task of finding a permanent resolution to threat the Xiongnu posed to his realm. The heqin system was the best his court could come up with.

The heqin system had four components:

  • The Han Emperor and Xiongnu Chanyu would address each other as equals and brothers. The Xiongnu would acknowledge Han suzerainty of all people of the plow; the Han, for their part, would acknowledge Xiongnu overlordship of the people of the bow.
  • The Han Emperor would provide an imperial princess to be a wife of every Chanyu (Note: In reality the princess was always a concubine taken from the imperial palace. A multitude of legends and love stories about these concubines have?made this a strong and enduring memory in Chinese popular culture for the last two millennia).
  • The Chanyu — or one of his subordinates — would take regular trips to Chang’an (the Han capital) to pay his respect to the emperor. During these visits the emperor would bestow lavish gifts upon the Xiongnu retinue as a sign of their friendship.
  • Trade between the Xiongnu and the Han commoners would be allowed at select border stations across the frontier.

The benefits of this system for the Xiongnu were obvious. One of the prime motivations behind Xiongnu raids were the economic benefits each raid offered — Xiongnu incursions were almost always marked by mass kidnappings and the theft of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Chinese livestock. Opening trade on the frontier allowed regular Xiongnu to increase their household wealth through trade instead of theft.

On the other hand, the luxury gifts from the capital were distributed among the Xiongnu’s closest allies, retainers, and vassals as a way to maintain prestige and improve loyalty ties among the Xiongnu elite.

Without a system of trade in place the Chanyu faced immense pressure from his impoverished subjects; without a stream of luxury items that could be distributed to the Chanyu’s favorites the anarchic dynamics of steppe politics threatened to tear the Xiongnu empire apart. Thus “raids in China were a profit making enterprise that served to weld the Xiongnu into a single unit”; open plunder was the simplest way to reduce tensions when trade was not on the table. It usually was not on the table.

Sima Qian narrates a conversation that reveals the policy’s hidden purpose:

“If you could see your way clear to send your eldest daughter by the empress to be the consort of Maodun, accompanied by a generous dowry and presents, then Maodun, knowing that a daughter of the emperor and empress of the Han must be generously provided for would, with barbarian cunning, receive her well and make her his legitimate consort and, if she had a son, he would make him heir apparent. Why would he do this? Because of his greed for Han valuables and gifts. Your majesty might at various times during the year inquire of his health and send presents of whatever Han has a surplus of and the Xiongnu lack. At the same time you could dispatch rhetoricians to expound to the barbarians in a tactful way the principles of etiquette and moral behavior. As long as Maodun is alive he will always be your son-in-law and when he dies your grandson by your daughter will succeed him as Shanyu. And who has ever heard of a grandson trying to treat his grandfather as an equal? Thus your soldiers need fight no battles, and yet the Xiongnu will gradually become your subjects.”

Luttwak’s description of the heqin policy’s aim is basically correct, T. Greer notes, but what Luttwak neglects to mention is that the policy was a complete and utter failure.

Posted in Policy, War | No Comments »

Racist Remarks

Monday, September 8th, 2014

The majority owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, Bruce Levenson, announced Sunday he is selling the team because of these “racist” remarks he made in an email two years ago:

Regarding game ops, i need to start with some background. for the first couple of years we owned the team, i didn’t much focus on game ops. then one day a light bulb went off. when digging into why our season ticket base is so small, i was told it is because we can’t get 35-55 white males and corporations to buy season tixs and they are the primary demo for season tickets around the league. when i pushed further, folks generally shrugged their shoulders. then i start looking around our arena during games and notice the following:

– it’s 70 pct black
– the cheerleaders are black
– the music is hip hop
– at the bars it’s 90 pct black
– there are few fathers and sons at the games
– we are doing after game concerts to attract more fans and the concerts are either hip hop or gospel.

Then i start looking around at other arenas. It is completely different. Even DC with its affluent black community never has more than 15 pct black audience.

Before we bought the hawks and for those couple years immediately after in an effort to make the arena look full (at the nba’s urging) thousands and thousands of tickets were being giving away, predominantly in the black community, adding to the overwhelming black audience.

My theory is that the black crowd scared away the whites and there are simply not enough affluent black fans to build a signficant season ticket base. Please dont get me wrong. There was nothing threatening going on in the arean back then. i never felt uncomfortable, but i think southern whites simply were not comfortable being in an arena or at a bar where they were in the minority. On fan sites i would read comments about how dangerous it is around philips yet in our 9 years, i don’t know of a mugging or even a pick pocket incident. This was just racist garbage. When I hear some people saying the arena is in the wrong place I think it is code for there are too many blacks at the games.

I have been open with our executive team about these concerns. I have told them I want some white cheerleaders and while i don’t care what the color of the artist is, i want the music to be music familiar to a 40 year old white guy if that’s our season tixs demo. i have also balked when every fan picked out of crowd to shoot shots in some time out contest is black. I have even bitched that the kiss cam is too black.

Gradually things have changed. My unscientific guess is that our crowd is 40 pct black now, still four to five times all other teams. And my further guess is that 40 pct still feels like 70 pet to some whites at our games. Our bars are still overwhelmingly black.

This is obviously a sensitive topic, but sadly i think it is far and way the number one reason our season ticket base is so low.

And many of our black fans don’t have the spendable income which explains why our f&b and merchandise sales are so low. At all white thrasher games sales were nearly triple what they are at hawks games (the extra intermission explains some of that but not all).

Noticing that southern whites might not be comfortable in an arena or at a bar where they are in the minority is obviously racist.

Posted in Policy | 3 Comments »

Archeofuturist Dune

Sunday, September 7th, 2014

If science fiction is progressive, and fantasy is reactionary, then Frank Herbert’s Dune is archeofuturist, Greg Johnson suggests:

Herbert shows how religion can be cynically used by the powerful as a tool of social control. But he also shows how sincere religious fanaticism can revolutionize societies. For instance, more than 10,000 years before the setting of the first novel, a religious war, the Butlerian Jihad, destroyed all artificial intelligences and banned the creation of thinking machines. Herbert explores how ecumenical ideas — like the Traditionalist notion of the transcendental unity of religions — can be used to promote peace and tolerance, whereas exclusive forms of monotheism lead to intolerance and conflict. Finally, Herbert is very aware of the importance of religion and rituals of hierarchy and initiation in bonding together hierarchical societies, especially secret societies.

[...]

The idea of a Spacing Guild, as well as hierarchical-initiatic orders like the Bene Tleilax and the Bene Gesserit, all of which are medieval institutions which wield what are in effect magical powers, place Dune firmly in the archaic and magical cosmos of fantasy literature.

But there is swordplay as well as sorcery in the Dune universe: the galaxy is ruled by a Padishah Emperor, while many of the planets are ruled by dukes, counts, and barons who form a “Landsraad” — a college of noble houses. (Other planets, like Bene Tleilax, Ix, and Richese are equivalents of the medieval free cities.) It is an essentially feudal system.

Herbert, moreover, did not bemoan this system as repressive and unfair. Indeed, he regarded feudalism as a superior form of government and one uniquely suited for mankind’s expansion throughout the galaxy. Feudalism, unlike liberal democracy, is a highly decentralized system, which is suited to widely scattered planets and high transportation costs. Furthermore, feudalism, unlike liberal democracy, is capable of pursuing grand strategies over the vast spans of time necessary for space travel and colonization.

Because of the decentralization of power and costs of transportation, the different planets of the Empire evolve very different cultures, some free, martial, and gallant (such as Caladan, ruled by the Atreides dukes — who trace their descent to the ancient house of Atreus), others despotic, sybaritic, and cruel (like Giedi Prime, ruled by the Harkonnen barons). But all planets have hierarchical, aristocratic forms of government. Herbert never has a kind word for liberalism or democracy.

In the Dune universe, martial and aristocratic values are dominant, and commercial values, although unavoidable and widespread, are regarded with aristocratic disdain. Great houses compete and ally with each other in accordance with iron codes of honor. Atomic weapons are outlawed. Laser and projectile weapons are seldom used because of the existence of energy shields, which can stop any projectile and destroy both attacker and target when they come in contact with a laser. Shields are, however, unable to protect from slow blades at close range, so high-tech shields are actually conducive to swashbuckling combat with swords and knives. Vendettas are governed by the iron code of kanly and can be settled through treachery or duels to the death.

Now, before I discuss the main characters and plot of Dune, we must pause to ask why these novels have such a powerful appeal on the Right. The answer, of course, is that Frank Herbert was no liberal. No liberal praises feudalism over democracy, hierarchy over equality, and martial virtues over bourgeois ones — but Frank Herbert does. No liberal attaches great weight to heredity, speaks of racial memories, praises eugenics, and explains the Darwinian benefits of subjecting human populations to the ruthless culling of harsh environments — but Frank Herbert does.

Herbert believes in essential differences between men and women, which was uncontroversial when he began writing Dune more than 50 years ago, but today it is considered the height of reaction.

Herbert’s novels are deeply and disquietingly anti-humanist and anti-individualist. He thinks in terms of the evolution of the human race over vast spans of time. He looks at history like a general on a battlefield, coolly sacrificing individual lives for the greater good. His novels are filled with well-drawn individuals, but that just makes it all the more poignant when they go willy nilly to their doom — or are resurrected as gholas to play another part in a larger drama.

Herbert traces the rise and fall of civilizations through great cycles, moving from vital and heroic barbarism to cynical, sclerotic, and decadent civilizations, which are then liquidated by fresh barbarians. (His view of historical cycles is closer to Giambattista Vico and Oswald Spengler, both of whom see vital barbarism as the first phase of history, as opposed to the Golden Age of the Traditionalists.)

For the sentimental and humanistic, the overall effect can be bleak, depressing, and distasteful.

Aspects of Dune do, of course, appeal to the Left. When it first appeared in 1965, its ideas of mind-expanding drugs and sprinkling of Hindu terms found receptive ears in the counter-culture.

Dune can also be read as an anti-colonial allegory. Arrakis produces the most valuable commodity in the universe, but its people — particularly the Fremen of the desert — live in utter deprivation. Yet they dream of one day seizing control of Arrakis through guerrilla warfare and using its wealth to improve their lives.

This leads to a third theme in Dune which is popular with the Left, namely ecology, for the Fremen’s dream is the creation of the Kynes family, both father and son, the Imperial Planetologists of Arrakis who set in motion plans to reclaim parts of Arrakis from the desert and create an earthly paradise.

None of these themes appeal to the Republican or libertarian Right. But the New Right can and does embrace deep ecology, Eastern spirituality, anti-colonialism/anti-capitalism, and even a bit of spice — together with Herbert’s anti-egalitarian biopolitics — in a wider synthesis.

Posted in Media, Policy | 4 Comments »

Adolescents Attacking Artists

Thursday, September 4th, 2014

“Adolescents” are savagely beating “artists” in New Orleans:

As he approached an interstate overpass, the division between St. Roch and his Marigny neighborhood, Martin heard laughter from a group of children, no older than 13 he believed. It was summer after all, and while dark, he didn’t think much of the roving group of middle schoolers, until he was struck from behind.

He was then thrown to the ground as the children kicked and slammed fists into Martin’s head and chest. Eventually, he was straddled by one of the kids and choked out until he fell unconscious.

While Martin is wary of calling the assault a hate crime, he does feel the rapid gentrification happening, in both the St. Roch and Marigny neighborhoods, could have something to do with his beating.

It was gentrification’s fault.

Bill Murphy, a local installation artist, was the second victim assaulted. He, too, was walking home when he was struck from behind, and knocked down. Murphy was then kicked and stomped on, similar to what happened to Martin, by a group of eight children.

“I don’t remember much,” Murphy said. “But when I woke up the next day I had a bunch of sneaker prints on my forehead.”

Another “adolescent” attack:

Coincidentally, he was on his way to support a Roots of Music Fundraiser, a local charity that helps at risk youth through mentorship programs and music education. And for years Brumfield himself had worked with elementary and high school students around that area as an art and ceramics instructor with, the now defunct Recovery School District.

Similar to the other two cases, it was completely dark when Brumfield heard a group of kids laughing, though he didn’t realize how much trouble he was in until he saw the dozen or so middle schoolers were armed with bats and large wooden sticks.

“Luckily I was paying attention and could run,” Brumfield said. “Once they caught me though, I had to crawl into the street to get away. They were hitting me the whole time.”

Brumfield’s pants were ripped down, in an attempt to emasculate him, and his feet and head were stomped on by the dozen or so teenagers, while others hit him with clubs. Before being knocked out, Brumfield even recognized some of his former students, from an elementary school he had taught at, perpetrating the beating. He was forced to crawl into oncoming traffic to get away, and the children only fled once they were confronted by the headlights of a passing car.

Weeks after the assault, Brumfield was still experiencing severe headaches and trauma and had moved to Baton Rouge to stay with family. He isn’t willing to write these children off as lost causes though and feels that poverty and systematic neglect have led to this escalation in violence.

“The real problem is that we’re failing the kids all over New Orleans. We’re failing them socially, educationally, in every way.” Brumfield said. “I’m watching kids in this city not get what they need again. It’s about poverty and it’s about kids and families that don’t have resources.”

We‘re failing them. They don’t have the resources to leave “artists” alone.

Posted in Crime, Policy | 5 Comments »

Not everyone wants to be us

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014

After over a decade of democracy promotion following the 9/11 attacks, the idea that liberal evangelism may not be the best policy after all has hit the West square in the face:

To totally defeat the Islamic State means to leave it not just militarily vanquished, but robbed of support. To do this, we must recognize the simple fact that not everyone wants to be us. To offer economic and political cooperation in pursuit of peace and order in the region means accepting that we are working with a largely Sunni population which embraces traditional Islamic values. They have lived side by side with Christian, Shia, Kurdish, and Yazidi neighbours for literally centuries and most are no doubt glad to continue doing so in peace. The establishment of a Western-style democratic state in Iraq created a situation where these populations are in constant competition to capture and maintain control over the state apparatus. The neoreactionary also understands this causal relationship between liberal democracy and inter-group violence. The average liberal democrat does not.

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

The Establishment

Monday, September 1st, 2014

The Establishment was established in 1955, in Great Britain — or at least the term was established then, by a Tory journalist named Henry Fairlie:

What attracted his attention was a scandal involving two Foreign Office officials, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had defected to the Soviet Union. Fairlie suggested that friends of the two men had attempted to shield their families from media attention.

This, he asserted, revealed that “what I call the ‘establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before”. His piece made “the establishment” a household phrase — and made Fairlie’s name in the process.

For Fairlie, the establishment included not only “the centres of official power — though they are certainly part of it” — but “the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised”.

This “exercise of power”, he claimed, could only be understood as being “exercised socially”. In other words, the establishment comprised a set of well-connected people who knew one another, mixed in the same circles and had one another’s backs. It was not based on official, legal or formal arrangements, but rather on “subtle social relationships”.

Fairlie’s establishment consisted of a diverse network of people. It was not just the likes of the prime minister and the archbishop of Canterbury, but also incorporated “lesser mortals” such as the chairman of the Arts Council, the director general of the BBC and the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, “not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter” — the daughter of former Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith, confidante of Winston Churchill and grandmother of future Hollywood actor Helena Bonham Carter.

The Foreign Office was, Fairlie claimed, “near the heart of the pattern of social relationships which so powerfully controls the exercise of power in this country”, stacked as it was with those who “know all the right people”. In other words, the establishment was all about “who you know”.

(Hat tip to Outsideness, who describes it as so upside-down it almost gets it.)

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

How To Grow a City in Honduras

Friday, August 29th, 2014

Reason looks at how to grow a city in Honduras:

Posted in Economics, Policy, Urbanism | No Comments »

Myths of European Gun Laws

Friday, August 29th, 2014

Gary Mausera and Darrin Weiner debunked two myths about European gun laws in their study “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide: A Review of International Evidence,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, vol 30 (2007):

First, that European gun laws are much more restrictive than American; and second, that Europe has less violence than America.

Now it is true that European gun laws are often different from ours. This is largely because they aim to stem political violence, not apolitical gun crime. But they are not generally more restrictive. [...] Moreover European gun laws generally allow far more extensive gun use against crime than American law does.

[...]

In the 1920s a German farmer was tried for shooting starving children who were stealing from his orchard. Now under our law, which is based on what is deemed reasonable, the farmer was clearly guilty. But he was exonerated by the German court because European law follows the thought of Immanuel Kant: There is the Right and there is the Wrong — and never need the Right yield to the Wrong! The farmer is in the Right and the starving children are in the Wrong. So if the only way to stop their thefts is to shoot them, then shoot them he may.

A later German statute overturned this – but in a way that reinforces it. The statute only overrules the case if children are shot. But the farmer may shoot if an adult steals his fruit.

[...]

A rapist attacks a woman but retreats when she draws a gun from her purse. The woman, frightened and outraged, shoots him anyway. Under our law this is called “imperfect self-defense.” It is manslaughter (not murder) if the rapist dies; assault with a deadly weapon if he does not.

But under Austrian, Dutch, French, German and Italian law the result is entirely different. If she shot him from “outrage” (i.e., vigilantism) at his attack the court can just acquit her.

As to buying and owning guns, European laws are generally as permissive as American. It is true that you need a special permit to buy a 9 mm. handgun in many European nations. What ignorant American gun prohibitionists don’t understand is that this is a special control on “military-caliber weapons.” Similar controls ban military caliber rifles without special permission. But there is no restriction on other rifles or on handguns in, for instance, .380, .38 Super, 9mm Ultra and many more powerful handguns e.g., any of the magnums or .40 S&W, .45 auto, .45 Long Colt, .454 Casull, .460 S&W Magnum, 475 Linebaugh, .480, .500 and other powerful handguns.

Unlike residents of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts or California, law abiding responsible Italians can buy any revolver or semi-auto they want. No permit is required nor is there any waiting period. Though the handgun must be registered, buying it involves less fuss and red tape than Americans face even in Texas.

Austrians require permits for semi-automatic pistols but not to buy a revolver. Moreover law abiding responsible adults have a specific legal right to a permit for a semi-automatic pistol for home defense. Permits to carry are much more available to law abiding Austrians than to Americans in New York, Massachusetts or California. For a population of over 37 million, California has about 40,000 carry permits. For its population of around seven million, Austria has over 200,000 carry permits.

In France and Germany permits (easily available to responsible adult householders) are required to possess a handgun of modern design. But if you are satisfied with a cowboy-style gun, France requires no permit at all to buy a newly manufactured revolver of pre-1895 design.

Consistent with its focus on political crime, European law precludes stockpiling guns. You might be able to own multiple guns in different calibers, but not 10 or 20 in the same caliber.

There are no magazine size restrictions on semi-autos.

Nine European nations have fewer than 5,000 guns per 100,000 population. Seven have more than three times as many guns per 100,000 population. The nine nations’ violent crime situation is disappointing, even shockingly contrary to the myth that restricting guns diminishes murder. Their murder rates are three times higher than those of the seven high gun ownership nations!

We collected many examples: Norway has far and away Western Europe’s highest household gun ownership (32% of households), but also its lowest murder rate. Holland has the lowest gun ownership in Western Europe (1.9%), and Sweden lies midway between (15.1). Yet the Dutch murder rate is half again higher than the Norwegian, and the Swedish rate is even higher yet, though only slightly. Greece has over twice the per capita gun ownership of the Czech Republic, yet gun murder is much lower in Greece and the Greek murder rate with all weapons is also lower. Though Spain has over 12 times more gun ownership than Poland, the latter has almost a third more gun murder, and its overall murder rate is almost twice Spain’s. Poor Finland: it has 14 times more of these evil guns than its neighbor Estonia. Yet Estonia’s gun murder and overall murder rates are about seven times higher than Finland’s.

Posted in Policy, Weapons | 8 Comments »

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