Contrary to our modern therapeutic utopianism, the history of war shows us the unchanging, tragic reality of human nature and its irrational passions and interests that will spark state aggression and violence.
The modern world, in contrast, rejects the notion that human nature comprises destructive passions and selfish interests that will start wars only force can stop. On the contrary, to the modern optimist, humans are universally rational and peace loving, if only the external, warping constraints on these qualities — ignorance, poverty, parochial ethnic and nationalist loyalties, the oppression of priestly and aristocratic elites — can be removed. Then people will progress to the realization that their true interests like peace, freedom, and prosperity will be achieved not by force but by international trade, economic development, democracy, and non-lethal transnational institutions that can adjudicate conflict and eliminate the scourge of war.
This influential belief was famously expressed by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.” In it Kant imagined a “federation of free states” that would create a “pacific alliance… different from a treaty of peace… inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars, whereas the latter only finishes one.” In his conclusion, Kant expressed the optimism that would become an article of faith in subsequent centuries: “If it is a duty, if the hope can even be conceived, of realizing, though by an endless progress, the reign of public right — perpetual peace, which will succeed to the suspension of hostilities, hitherto named treaties of peace, is not then a chimera, but a problem, of which time, probably abridged by the uniformity of the progress of the human mind, promises us the solution.”
Throughout the nineteenth century international institutions were created to realize this dream and lessen, if not eliminate, the savagery and suffering of war. The First Geneva Convention in 1864 and the Second in 1906 sought to establish laws for the humane treatment of the sick and wounded in war. The first Hague Convention in 1899 established an international Court of Arbitration and codified restrictions on aerial bombardment, poison gas, and exploding bullets. The preamble to the first Hague Convention explicitly acknowledged its Kantian aims: “the maintenance of the general peace” and the “friendly settlement of international disputes” that both reflected the “solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.” One wonders how such optimism made sense of the Franco-Prussian War three decades earlier, when two of the world’s most “civilized nations” suffered nearly a million casualties, including 170,000 dead.
Even after the industrialized carnage of World War I showed international solidarity and universal progress to be a fantasy, the Versailles treaty established the League of Nations, the transnational institution intended to realize Kant’s dream of a “federation of free states” that would keep the peace and promote global progress. But within a few years the League had been exposed as ineffective, since the same sovereign nations that had fought each other so brutally in the war continued to pursue their zero-sum interests, frequently with force. No more effective has been the United Nations, a “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” as Churchill feared it might become, that also has failed at its foundational goal of maintaining peace, becoming instead an instrument of the member-states’ nationalist interests, one that frequently supplements and abets, rather than controls or limits state violence.
Familiarity with the history of war should disabuse people of these Kantian illusions. Studying the causes and nature of armed conflict reveals that technological progress, better education and nutrition, global trade, and increased prosperity has not eliminated or reduced wars, but often made them more brutal and destructive. Military history teaches us that war is not a distortion of a peace-loving human nature that not yet has sufficiently progressed beyond such savage barbarism, but rather is a reflection of a flawed human nature, and the necessary instrument for states to protect their security and pursue their interests, whether these are rational and good, or irrational and evil. The study of war, in short, can remind us of the tragic wisdom evident on every page of history: that humans are fallen creatures prone to destructive violence that only righteous violence can check.
Why Should We Study War?
Monday, December 23rd, 2013Media Liars
Friday, December 20th, 2013Ryan Holiday (Trust Me, I’m Lying) recommends 14 books that show you how the media really works:
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism by Upton Sinclair
Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair self-published this muckraking exposé of the corrupt and broken press system in America. It will change your understanding of journalism much in the same way that The Jungle changed your perceptions of industrial agriculture in that era and in today’s times. The title is a reference to prostitutes, which in Mr. Sinclair’s estimation, most journalists were. It’s a fitting indictment even now, when journalists are paid by the number of pageviews their articles get, or worse, churn them out in the digital equivalent of a sweatshop. There is not a page in this book that does not apply as much today as it did back then and every person whose life or career is affected by the media in any way needs to read this book.The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin
Our former Librarian of Congress wrote this book, but don’t let that scare you away. Because in 1960, before talk radio, Fox News or blogs, he was able to successfully predict the false reality and echo chamber that our media culture was going to become. According to Mr. Boorstin, a “pseudo-event” is any event or announcement created solely for the purpose of getting the attention of the media. This creates a kind of unreality, where everyone is performing not for the people but for publicity. Well today, when 99% of the news is a press conference, press release, premiere party, “leak,” “exclusive,” or celebrity tweet, you have to say he was right.Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism by W. Joseph Campbell
Let’s be clear: there was no golden age of journalism. The media has always been bad. And instead of improving, it spent a lot of time and energy making up its own myth. The reality is that William Randolph Hearst and the yellow press did not cause a war with Spain. Walter Cronkite did not end the Vietnam War by turning against it. People did not riot in the streets when passages from The War of the Worlds were read over the radio. And it wasn’t the Washington Post that brought down Nixon. All of that was media myth making. The news is notoriously inaccurate and our memory of it is even worse.
This thinking sounds familiar:
I get that a lot of these books are old. Some are really old. But that’s a good thing. It means they stood the test of time and survived many media — from print to radio to TV to cable to the internet. I’m convinced they will still be relevant fifty years from now, which is why I am hoping you’ll read them and benefit from them.
What you’ll understand from each of them is that the real threat of media manipulation doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from the media itself. They are the real manipulators — not publicists, not politicians or the CIA.
Korean Gamer, Kim Dong-hwan Gets Special U.S. Visa
Thursday, December 19th, 2013Professional StarCraft player Kim Dong-hwan couldn’t get a student visa to come to the US, but he could get an athletic visa:
His manager, Andrew Tomlinson, put together a lengthy application of around 500 pages, including recommendations from members of the gaming community.
Bingo. The U.S. authorities approved Mr. Kim’s application earlier this month, granting him a P-1 Visa with a five-year term.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Securities says a P-1 visa is for someone “internationally recognized with a high level of achievement; evidenced by a degree of skill and recognition substantially above that ordinarily encountered so that the achievement is renowned, leading or well known in more than one country.”
Foreign baseball players joining the U.S. Major League usually enter the U.S. with the same visa.
Peak Parsi
Thursday, December 19th, 2013In 1941, the religious community of the Parsis in India peaked at 115,000, Volkmar Weiss remarks:
This 0.03% of the population of India provided 7% of all engineers and 5% of all physicians in the entire country. Parsi female literacy today is 97%, the highest in India. For generations their women have been educated, they study and marry late and end up having fewer children. Since 1953 their birth rate has sunk below the magic number of two, and may at present be even less than one per family. If this does not change, by 2020 there will likely be only about 23,000 Parsis in India. The Parsis symbolize – even in a more pronounced way than the secularized Jews – the fate of the industrialized society and of its elites. The Parsis, who have been characterized (Kulke, 1974) as “engines of social change”, share their fate with the childless feminists. Because they will have exterminated themselves by failing to reproduce, the culture they represent will be replaced by the culture of those who are more prolific.
Wrestler-Turned-Politician Inoki Plans Trip to Pyongyang
Wednesday, December 18th, 2013Japanese pro-wrestler-turned-politician Antonio Inoki is planning another trip to North Korea:
A nationally recognized professional wrestler known for his protruding jaw and for slapping people to “instill the fighting spirit,” Mr. Inoki is popular in North Korea for being the protege of the late Rikidozan. The legendary wrestler originally hailed from Korea and is considered the founder of professional wrestling in Japan. Coincidentally, Sunday was the 50th anniversary of Rikidozan’s death in 1963.
You may be wondering, so, how did Rikidozan die, anyway?
On December 8, 1963, while partying in a Tokyo nightclub, Rikid?zan was stabbed with a urine-soaked blade by a man named Katsuji Murata who belonged to the ninky? dantai Sumiyoshi-ikka. Reportedly, Rikid?zan threw Murata out of the club and continued to party, refusing to seek medical help.
Another report states that Rikid?zan did indeed see his physician shortly after the incident, and was told the wound was not serious. He died a week later of peritonitis on December 15. It is rumored by Kimura that his murder was in retaliation for when Rikidozan attacked Kimura during a wrestling match, after Kimura delivered an errant kick to Rikidozan’s groin, ignoring a pre-match arrangement and attacking Kimura for real.
Paleo Manifesto Author John Durant
Wednesday, December 18th, 2013“When I’m talking to a libertarian,” John Durant (The Paleo Manifesto) says, “and I make the point that the USDA food pyramid is not God’s truth, they’re like, ‘Oh, right, of course it isn’t.’”:
The talk isn’t really about libertarianism — or even about the paleo diet.
Terracotta Warriors Inspired by Ancient Greek Art
Tuesday, December 17th, 2013The famous terracotta warriors buried near the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor, were inspired by ancient Greek art:
Before the First Emperor’s time, life-size sculptures were not built in China, and Nickel argues the idea to build so many of them, so suddenly, came from kingdoms in Asia that had been created and influenced by Alexander the Great’s campaigns.
Nickel translated ancient Chinese records that tell a tale of 12 giant statues, clad in “foreign robes” that “appeared” in Lintao in what was the westernmost part of China. (The word “Lintao” can also mean any place far to the west.)
The records do not say how this appearance happened, who brought them there, or who exactly the statues depicted; they do reveal the statues were larger than life, rising about 38 feet (11.55 meters) high, with feet that were 4.5 feet long (1.38 m). They so impressed the First Emperor that he decided to build 12 duplicates in front of his palace by melting down bronze weapons that had been used for war.
On each duplicate an inscription was created telling of the “giants” (the original statues) that appeared in Lintao. The inscriptions, recorded by Yan Shigu, who lived around 1,400 years ago and used an earlier written source, said that in the “26th Year of the Emperor, when he first brought together all-under-heaven, divided the principalities into provinces and districts, and unified the weights and measures, giants appeared in Lintao …”
The First Emperor duplicated these statues despite a “heavenly taboo” that “he who recklessly follows foreign models will encounter disaster,” wrote Ban Gu, a historian who lived almost 2,000 years ago. Ban worked for the dynasty that had overthrown the First Emperor’s dynasty and, as such, tried to cast him in a negative light.
These giant duplicates no longer exist, having been destroyed in the centuries after the First Emperor’s death. Because the duplicates were displayed publicly in front of the First Emperor’s palace ancient writers left records of them behind, Nickel told LiveScience. Meanwhile, the Terracotta Warriors, though they survive to present day, were buried in pits out of sight and, as such, no record of them survives today.
The Thought Leader
Tuesday, December 17th, 2013David Brooks describes the Thought Leader:
The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.
He doesn’t have students, but he does have clients. He doesn’t have dark nights of the soul, but his eyes blaze at the echo of the words “breakout session.”
Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.
In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)
Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.
Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”
Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore.
Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.
By now the Thought Leader uses the word “space” a lot — as in, “Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the abject sycophancy space, but now I’m devoting more of my energies to the corporate responsibility space.”
The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.
He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone.
The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.
“Is this the cynical David Brooks?” Tyler Cowen wonders. “The Straussian David Brooks? Both? Something else altogether?”
Minimizing the IQ You Need
Tuesday, December 17th, 2013Civilization is a device for minimizing the amount of fluid intelligence you need to function, Steve Sailer says:
You don’t need to turn military history into a superb epic oral poem like The Iliad anymore: you just write it down. Nowadays, you don’t have to go the library to read it. You can look it up on the Internet.
A huge problem with educational reform efforts is that they are typically designed by people who have high confidence in their own fluid intelligence [IQ] relative to the average. Combine that with the contradictory dogma that students must all have equally high fluid intelligence — Jefferson wouldn’t have written it into the Declaration of Independence if it weren’t true — and you wind up with remarkably little critical thinking about education fads like critical thinking.
In contrast, the military tends to assume that everybody is an idiot who will find a way to screw up massively and probably get himself and large numbers of people around him killed, so it’s best to break things down into simple steps so soldiers can rely upon crystallized intelligence [knowledge and skills] rather than fluid intelligence.
But the notion that the public schools can learn anything from the military has been out of fashion for just under 50 years. The people who took control of education 45 years ago may talk all the time about critical thinking skills, but they sure don’t like critical thinking about themselves and their ideas.
Our Greatest Political Novelist?
Monday, December 16th, 2013When we call literary writers “political” today, we’re usually talking about identity politics, Tim Kreider notes:
If historians or critics fifty years from now were to read most of our contemporary literary fiction, they might well infer that our main societal problems were issues with our parents, bad relationships, and death. If they were looking for any indication that we were even dimly aware of the burgeoning global conflict between democracy and capitalism, or of the abyssal catastrophe our civilization was just beginning to spill over the brink of, they might need to turn to books that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine. That is, to science fiction.
Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.
Kreider makes an excellent point about science fiction addressing big political ideas, but he misunderstands conservatism, which does not see the status quo as inevitable. Rather, it sees the status quo — civilization — as fragile. Don’t mess it up! Many of civilization’s less pleasant aspects exist to prevent even worse things from befalling us.
Kreider suggests that Kim Stanley Robinson may be our greatest political novelist:
In his Mars novels, Robinson uses the Red Planet as a historical tabula rasa, a template for creating a saner, more sustainable, and more just human society. What’s most powerful about the Mars books as political novels is that they envision a credible utopia, one that doesn’t — unlike, say, Skinner’s “Walden Two” — rely on a revision of human nature. Robinson’s characters are cynics, opportunists, idealists, narcissists, drug-dependent, manic-depressive, borderline Asperger’s, and emotionally frozen survivors of abuse, but with all their flaws and conflicting agendas they manage to remake their world in more humane and equitable form.
So far, it sounds almost Moldbuggian. But it’s not:
Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation / ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering — a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new. He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias. The major platform planks these methods lead him to in his books are:
- common stewardship — not ownership — of the land, water, and air
- an economic system based on ecological reality
- divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities
- the basics of existence, like health care, removed from the cruelties of the free market
- the application of democratic principles like self-determination and equality in the workplace — which, in practice, means small co-ops instead of vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations — and,
- a reverence for the natural world codified into law.
Depending on your own politics, this may sound like millennia-overdue common sense or a bong-fuelled 3 A.M. wish list, but there’s no arguing that to implement it in the real world circa 2013 would be, literally, revolutionary. My own bet would be that either your grandchildren are going to be living by some of these precepts, or else they won’t be living at all.
You could argue that, if I didn’t fundamentally agree with his politics, Robinson’s fiction might seem contrived and didactic to me, the way Ayn Rand’s does if you’re not predisposed toward her brand of enlightened assholism. It’s true he likes to write lectures and speeches, but they’re more engaging than some of Tolstoy’s, who nearly succeeded in stomping my clinging fingers off of “Anna Karenina” with his ruminations on Russian agriculture circa 1870.
Robinson’s Red Mars is one of the few books I looked forward to and then started without finishing, so I share neither Kreider’s politics nor his taste in fiction.
It might be interesting to consider some of the same issues through, say, Heinlein’s eyes. On his anarchist moon colony — in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress — common stewardship of the environment means tossing anyone out the airlock who endangers the colony. And roughly nothing is codified into law. If people don’t agree to something, well, that’s that. How’s that for divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities?
On a neo-reactionary colony, stewardship of the land, water, and air would be the duty of the owner of that land, water, and air — the sovereign, probably a corporation — who would have every incentive to maintain its value over the long term, just as a monarch wants to leave his land in good condition for his children and grandchildren. The neo-reactionary point of view, despite its semi-confused reputation for supporting monarchy, also supports subsidiarity, or divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities, just as historical monarchs were rarely totalitarian, and modern mall-management companies rarely try to run shops.
Interestingly, true paleo-reactionaries have pointed to the same cruelties of the free market as Kreider and Robinson and argued that an aristocratic lord protects his peasants, and a plantation-owner protects his slaves, far more than the market protects its free laborers.
(Hat tip to T. Greer.)
Mississippi Slave Narratives
Thursday, December 12th, 2013I don’t know how many Americans have read any slave narratives, but John Derbyshire recently pointed me toward an Adams County, Mississippi slave narrative, from 100-year-old Charlie Davenport:
I was named Charlie Davenport an’ encordin’(according) to de way I figgers I ought to be nearly a hund’ed years old. Nobody knows my birthday, ’cause all my white folks is gone.
[...]
Aventine, where I was born an’ bred, was acrost Secon’ Creek. It was a big plantation wid ’bout a hund’ed head o’ folks a-livin’ on it. It was only one o’ de marster’s places, ’cause he was one o’ de riches’ an’ highes’ quality gent’men in de whole country. I’s tellin’ you de trufe, us didn’ b’long to no white trash. De marster was de Honorable Mister Gabriel Shields hisse’f. Ever’body knowed ’bout him. He married a Surget.
Dem Surgets was pretty devilish; for all dey was de riches’ fam’ly in de lan’. Dey was de out-fightin’es’, out-cussin’es’, fastes’ ridin’, hardes’ drinkin’, out-spendin’es’ folks I ever seen. But Lawd! Lawd! Dey was gent’men even in dey cups. De ladies was beautiful wid big black eyes an’ sof’ white han’s, but dey was high strung, too.
Southern slaves ate surprisingly well:
Us slaves was fed good plain grub. ‘Fore us went to de fiel’ us had a big braskfas’ o’ hot bread, ‘lasses, fried salt meat dipped in corn meal, an’ fried taters. Sometimes us had fish an’ rabbit meat. When us was in de fiel’, two women ‘ud come at dinner-time wid basket’s filled wid hot pone, baked taters, corn roasted in de shucks, onion, fried squash, an’ b’iled pork. Sometimes dey brought buckets o’ cold butter-milk. It sho’ was good to a hongry man. At supper-time us had hoecake an’ cold vi’tals. Sometimes dey was sweetmilk an’ collards.
Mos’ ever’ slave had his own little garden patch an’ was ‘lowed to cook out o’ it.
Mos’ ever plantation kep’ a man busy huntin’ an’ fishin’ all de time. (If dey shot a big buck, us had deer meat roasted on a spit.)
On Sundays us always had meat pie or fish or fresh game an’ roasted taters an’ coffee. On Chris’mus de marster ‘ud give us chicken an’ barrels o’ apples an’ oranges. ‘Course, ever’ marster warnt as free handed as our’n was. (He was sho’ ‘nough quality.) I’se hear’d dat a heap o’ cullud people never had nothin’ good t’eat.
I find his take on the Civil War fascinating:
De marster’s some went to war. De one what us loved bes’ never come back no more. Us mourned him a-plenty, ’cause he was so jolly an’ happy-lak, an’ free wid his change. Us all felt cheered when he come ‘roun’.
Us Niggers didn’ know nothin’ ’bout what was gwine on in de outside worl’. All us knowed was dat a war was bein’ fit. Pussonally, I b’lieve in what Marse Jefferson Davis done. He done de only thing a gent’man could a-done. He tol’ Marse Abe Lincoln to ‘tend to his own bus’ness an’ he’d ‘tend to his’n. But Marse Lincoln was a fightin’ man an’ he come down here an’ tried to run other folks’ plantations. Dat made Marse Davis so all fired mad dat he spit hard ‘twixt his teeth an’ say, ‘I’ll whip de socks off den dam Yankees.’
Dat’s how it all come ’bout.
My white folks los’ money, cattle, slaves, an’ cotton in de war, but dey was till better off dan mos’ folks.
Lak all de fool Niggers o’ dat time I was right smart bit by de freedom bug for awhile. It sounded pow’ful nice to be tol’:
“You don’t have to chop cotton no more. You can th’ow dat hoe down an’ go fishin’ whensoever de notion strikes you. An’ you can roam ‘roun’ at night an’ court gals jus’ as late as you please.”
Aint no marster gwine a-say to you, “Charlie, you’s got to be back when de clock strikes nine.”
I was fool ‘nough to b’lieve all dat kin’ o’ stuff. But to tell de hones’ truf, mos’ o’ us didn’ know ourse’fs no better off. Freedom meant us could leave where us’d been born an’ bred, but it meant, too, dat us had to scratch for us ownse’fs. Dem what lef’ de old plantation seamed so all fired glad to git back dat I made up my min’ to stay put. I stayed right wid my white folks as long as I could.
My white folks talked plain to me. Dey say real sad-lak, ‘Charlie, you’s been a dependence, but now you can go if you is so desirous. But if you wants to stay wid us you can share-crop. Dey’s a house for you an’ wood to keep you warm an’ a mule to work. We aint got much cash, but dey’s de lan’ an’ you can count on havin’ plenty o’ vit’als. Do jus’ as you please.’ When I looked at my marster an’ knowed he needed me, I pleased to stay. My marster never forced me to do nary thing ’bout it. Didn’ nobody make me work after de war, but dem Yankees sho’ made my daddy work. Dey put a pick in his han’ stid o’ a gun. Dey made ‘im dig a big ditch in front o’ Vicksburg. He worked a heap harder for his Uncle Sam dan he’d ever done for de marster.
When did white trash become normal?
Wednesday, December 11th, 2013When did white trash become normal?, Charlotte Hays asks:
Students of Arnold Toynbee, the English historian, will recognize what is going on here. In a chapter of his “A Study of History” entitled “Schism in the Soul,” Toynbee argued that it is a sign that a society is disintegrating when it takes its cues for manners and customs from the underclass. He describes such societies as being “truant” to their own values.
Toynbee is the guide to what we see all around us today.
We modern philistines tell ourselves that rejecting the customs and conventions of a stuffy, old elite will release creativity and bring about a renaissance. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Toynbee, self-expression replaces creativity when disintegrating societies look downward.
Aspiration is replaced by complacency. Shame vanishes. Any criticism becomes “haters gonna hate,” or the White Trash motto: “It don’t make no difference.”
White Trash signifiers have changed of course — the foreclosed McMansion with the mosquito-infested swimming pool has replaced the rusting tractor permanently bivouacked on cement blocks in the front yard. But it’s the same general idea.
Obesity, the product of a lack of discipline, sloppy dressing, loud and intimate cellphone chats broadcast to a captive audience and foul language nonchalantly uttered in the ATM line are all forms of this “self-expression.”
Pre-White Trash, physical intimacy was reserved to private places. Now it’s reserved for the subway. You no longer have to live in a one-room shack to learn the facts of life early. Just walk down the toy aisle at Toys “R” Us for a sexpot Bratz Doll.
Children who see daytime television, broadcast in public areas, are inevitably treated to Jerry Springer reruns. How do you explain “Honey, I’m a Ho,” or “Transsexuals Attack” to a tot? Oh, wait, the tot explains it to you.
Tattoos are form of self-expression that have moved from gangs and prisons to the mainstream.
A 30-something scholar with a respected organization in Washington, DC, recently showed up at a fancy dinner in a little black cocktail dress, her shoulders extensively inked. Further sign of the impending apocalypse: She is a tattooed Chi Omega, once the Southern snob-appeal sorority. My young friend wore a “bespoke” tattoo, which means it was designed in consultation with an “artist.” In my mind, it bespoke volumes.
People in all walks of life used to put forth effort not to be taken for White Trash — in contrast to people today, who risk hepatitis to ape the decorative styles of prison gangs.
Not being White Trash wasn’t a matter of money. It was purely behavioral.
When did we decide that elastic waist bands, convict-inspired fashion and swearing on a cellphone were authentic ways to express individuality?
If we read our Toynbee, things may be even worse than we think. In Toynbee’s view, it’s up to the elites to save a civilization. They must become once again vigorously creative (think: great art, not twerking on TV) and worthy of imitation.
But how to get there from here? We could try saving our admiration for what’s really admirable. So let’s quit pretending that there’s anything charming about stripper-themed fashion and financial irresponsibility. All we have to lose is our inner Honey Boo Boo.
Bring back manners, bring back aspiration, bring back responsibility, heck, bring back the man in the gray flannel suit. We miss you.
Taxing land would solve America’s biggest problems
Tuesday, December 10th, 2013Jesse Myerson argues that taxing land would solve America’s biggest problems:
No need to tax labor and industry at all. Just tax the stuff that humans had nothing to do with creating, and therefore have no basis to claim ownership over at all. You’ll find that almost all of it is “owned” by the fabled 1 percent.
And boy are they sucking a lot of money out of it. By far the most valuable asset form in the U.S. is real estate, and the majority of that is the value of the land, as distinct from the value of the human-made buildings. Economist Michael Hudson has assessed that the land value of New York City alone exceeds that of all of the plant and equipment in the entire country, combined. No one put any enterprise or cost into producing the land’s value – they simply bought it when it was cheap, sold it when it was dear, and waited for the check. “They” are the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, and they capture 40 percent of the United States’ profits, despite the complete passivity of their profit-accumulation method.
This is Henry George‘s single tax, which was too confiscatory for the right and not socialist enough for the left.
Storm From A Clear Sky
Monday, December 9th, 2013We often hear about Nazi super-weapons — there was a whole cable channel dedicated to Hitler, wasn’t there? — but the Japanese had submarine aircraft carriers by the end of the war:
The I-400 subs were the largest ever built until the Ethan Allen-class of nuclear subs in 1961. The I-400 subs not only could travel one and a half times around the world without refueling, they carried three Aichi M6A1 attack planes, which they launched off their bow when surfaced, effectively making them underwater aircraft carriers.
Soon after the war, the US Navy sank the captured super-subs, to test its new top-secret “robot” torpedo — but really to keep them out of our supposed Allies’ hands:
The Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, or HURL, has found the rusting hulks off the coast of Oahu.
Now all they need is a little clean-up and a Wave Motion Engine…
Will the Real Satoshi Nakamoto Please Stand Up?
Monday, December 9th, 2013Wait, Satoshi Nakamoto, founder of Bitcoin, might be Nick Szabo?
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse textual analysis –essentially, searching the internet for highly unusual turns of phrase and vocabulary patterns (in particular places which you would expect a cryptography researcher to contribute to), then evaluating the fitness of each match found by running textual similarity metrics on several pages of their writing.
Which led me rather directly to several articles from Nick Szabo’s blog.
For those who wouldn’t know Nick Szabo and his documented links to Bitcoin: prior to the apparition of Bitcoin, Nick had been developing for several years (since 1998 [1]) the enabling mechanism for a decentralized digital currency, eventually converging on a system he called “bit gold” [3], which is the direct precursor to the Bitcoin architecture.
According to what seems to be a widely accepted origin story of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto was a highly skilled computer scientist (or group thereof) who found about Nick’s proposition for bit gold, hit upon an idea for bettering it, published the Bitcoin whitepaper, and decided to turn it into reality by developing the original Bitcoin client. Nick denies being Satoshi, and has stated his official opinion on Satoshi and Bitcoin in a May 2011 article [1].
I would argue that Satoshi is actually Nick Szabo himself, probably together with one or more technical collaborators.
As I mention above, what originally led me to this hypothesis is that reverse-searching for content similar to the Bitcoin whitepaper led me to Nick’s blog, completely independently of any knowledge of the official Bitcoin story. I must stress this: an open, unbiased search of texts similar in writing to the Bitcoin whitepaper over the entire Internet, identifies Nick’s bit gold articles as the best candidates. It could still be a coincidence, although an unlikely one — since cryptocurrencies were a fairly niche topic in 2008 and earlier (seemingly 3 or 4 people), every contributor to the field was going to be reusing the same shared expressions and vocabulary. Satoshi would have been a reader of Nick’s blog, so you would expect him to describe the same concepts in a similar way. But there’s more.
Running similarity metrics on the whitepaper and Nick’s bit gold articles as well as his paper “formalizing and securing relationships on public networks” [2] indicated an excellent match over content-neutral expressions as well — so either Nick wrote the whitepaper, or it was written by somebody imitating Nick’s writing style.
TechCrunch interviews Skye Grey:
I am not certain it’s Nick Szabo, but I have quite a few independent pieces of evidence pointing in his direction, each one interesting in itself:
- text analysis (only 0.1% of cryptography researchers could have produced this writing style –again, please, attack my methods on this)
- fact that Nick was searching for technical collaborators on the bit gold project (a very similar cryptocurrency) a few months before the announcement of Bitcoin (and then the bit gold project became perfectly silent)
- lack of citation of Nick’s work by Satoshi, whereas he cited other, less related cryptocurrencies
- lack of reaction on Nick’s part about Bitcoin, whereas a decentralized currency like Bitcoin had been a major project of his for 10 years
- fact that Nick deliberately post-dated his bit gold articles to look posterior to Bitcoin, shortly after the announcement of Bitcoin