Author: VD

Mailvox: the irrelevance of raciss

The Left is finally, dimly, beginning to grasp that they have inoculated everyone from the charge of racism by virtue of accusing nearly everyone of it.

I just caught the end of a lefty, high-brow (in relative terms) BBC political show (The Marr Show).  At the end a black guy, a lefty trade union leader sitting next to Nigel Farage said that he was troubled…(my pause for effect)…that the word ‘racist’ had been so devalued as to mean very little any more. And that was a very bad thing.  (Nigel agreed)

Once you can debate without sexist, racist etc being used to shut down everything…where does it end? I mean, you might be able to have adult discussions about issues, which could mean real progress towards tackling the tractable issues.

I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. The devaluation of “racist” was always inevitable, which is one reason that I never feared cretins trying to make it stick.  We see the same thing writ small and large. In the SF/F world, the pinkshirts foolishly thought that by pointing and shrieking and crying raciss would harm me. One Hugo nomination and 10 straight months with at least 100k more pageviews than the leading pinkshirt site has ever had later, it is obvious that their slanderous approach was a complete failure. In the world of UK politics, three straight weeks of every major media institution daily crying racist at UKIP resulted in the first national election in over a century in which neither the Tory nor the Labour party finished first. That is beyond complete failure, it was an epic failure the likes of which have seldom been previously seen.

In a civilized Western world enduring an active decades-long invasion by tens of millions of the half-civilized and uncivilized, it should not be at all surprising that accusations of racism, whether true or false, now tend to do the accused more good than harm. Especially in light of the fact that the core concept underlying anti-racism, the idea that all human beings are fundamentally the same under the skin, has now been completely disproven by genetic science.

Science is always on the side of the realists, no matter their ideology. If your beliefs are in line with both logic and science, truly in line with them, they will eventually triumph in the end, no matter how unpopular they might be today. Prior to the mass invasion of the vibrants, it was possible to claim that the barbarian non-Western populations could be transformed into civilized quasi-Westerners by pretending everyone was the same. A few decades, and more than a few riots, street beheadings, mass rapes, murders, and sex enslavements later, it is no longer possible to credibly claim that multiculturalism, diversity, or anti-racism are intellectually viable positions.

So the Left is beginning to mourn the effective loss of what has been its most important political weapon in the last 50 years. And despite their desperate efforts, I tend to doubt “homophobe” and “transphobe” are likely to serve as adequate substitutes. It would be nice if this meant we could have genuinely dialectical debate, but I tend to suspect it will do little more than change the form of their rhetoric rather than the substance.

World Cup 2014

This is shaping up to be an interesting and wide-open Mondiale. Brazil would normally be the big favorites, as the home countries usually do well, but as one newspaper has commented, the corruption of the Brazilian government and the shameless fraud associated with the construction of the tournament stadiums has actually turned the majority of the Brazilians against the World Cup. This is a staggering achievement and is a testimony to the unvarnished corruption rife within FIFA.

Literally dozens of international friendlies and qualifiers are suspected of having been at least partially fixed; there are even some serious questions about the legitimacy of a number of games leading up to the previous World Cup in South Africa.

A soccer referee named Ibrahim Chaibou walked into a bank in a small South African city carrying a bag filled with as much as $100,000 in $100 bills, according to another referee traveling with him. The deposit was so large that a bank employee gave Mr. Chaibou a gift of commemorative coins bearing the likeness of Nelson Mandela.

Later that night in May 2010, Mr. Chaibou refereed an exhibition match between South Africa and Guatemala in preparation for the World Cup, the world’s most popular sporting event. Even to the casual fan, his calls were suspicious — he called two penalties for hand balls even though the ball went nowhere near the players’ hands.

Mr. Chaibou, a native of Niger, had been chosen to work the match by a company based in Singapore that was a front for a notorious match-rigging syndicate, according to an internal, confidential report by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.

FIFA’s investigative report and related documents, which were obtained by The New York Times and have not been publicly released, raise serious questions about the vulnerability of the World Cup to match fixing. The tournament opens June 12 in Brazil.

The report found that the match-rigging syndicate and its referees infiltrated the upper reaches of global soccer in order to fix exhibition matches and exploit them for betting purposes. It provides extensive details of the clever and brazen ways that fixers apparently manipulated “at least five matches and possibly more” in South Africa ahead of the last World Cup. As many as 15 matches were targets, including a game between the United States and Australia, according to interviews and emails printed in the FIFA report.

Apparently, it’s nearly as bad as the NBA during the David Stern era. As for the tournament itself, Italy’s slim chances just took a blow with the loss of Riccardo Montolivo. Spain is beginning to look a bit creaky and underpowered up front, and both Argentina and Portugal look more like potential semifinalists than potential champions. In the end, I think Germany and Brazil look like the two teams to beat, with a slight nod to Brazil for being the home team. Let’s face it, once the games actually start, the Brazilians are going to rally round their team.

Of the lesser teams, Switzerland looks solid. The USA has a decent young team, (although I would have brought Landon Donovan along in-case-of-emergency-break-glass purposes), but I can’t see them getting out of the Group of Death, not with Germany and Portugal in Group G. Ghana isn’t bad either, so it’s not inconceivable that the USA could go pointless despite playing well. Holland is good, but Van Persie isn’t enough to get them past the second round.

Why rabbits utilize exclusion

Ostracism is actually more harmful than bullying:

The famous quote claims the only thing in life worse than being talked about, is not being talked about – and a new study may have proved this to be the case.  Being ignored at work has been found to be worse for a person’s health than people who are harassed or bullied.

Researchers found that while most consider ostracism less harmful than bullying, feeling excluded is significantly more likely to lead job dissatisfaction, quitting and health problems.

‘We’ve been taught that ignoring someone is socially preferable – if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all,’ said University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business Professor Sandra Robinson, who co-authored the study.

‘But ostracism actually leads people to feel more helpless, like they’re not worthy of any attention at all.’

It would be interesting to learn if the effects of ostracism are similar on men and women, and if they are similar on the r/selected and the K/selected. My guess is that the effects are stronger on women and the r/selected than on men and the K/selected.

Rabbit people obviously find ostracism extremely painful. Years, even decades later, they still speak of being crippled by it. I can’t speak for all non-rabbits, but I tend to find being surrounded by people and being obliged to pretend to take their every inanity seriously much more painful than not having to deal with them. I suspect ostracism is harder on the extrovert than the introvert. I feel drained after spending more than three hours at a social event. Friends are great, but one can always have too much of a good thing.

On the other hand, it would bother me greatly to be expelled from my team or to have everyone ignore me in the clubhouse on game days. So, I suspect the negative effect on the ostracized individual does not come from the intent of others to ostracize, but rather, is derived from degree to which the individual wishes to be part of the group.

So, perhaps it isn’t enough to not be cruel to individuals with lower social status and to leave them in peace, perhaps it is necessary to be civil to them, even friendly if one can find the wherewithal within oneself to make the effort. And, of course, it’s a useful anti-rabbit weapon, as whenever they resort to their usual tactic, one can point out that what they are doing IS WORSE THAN BULLYING and that THERE IS NO PLACE IN SOCIETY for terrible people like them.

Gatekeepers vs the defensor lector

A pair of contrasting views on the Amazon vs Major Publishers battle appear in the New York Times. Joe Nocera writes of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics:

The story really began some years ago, when Amazon began issuing a standard price for e-books of $9.99 — in some cases selling below cost. Publishers feared that they would become locked into the $9.99 price the same way the music industry had been locked into 99-cent songs by Apple’s iTunes service. They fought back by joining forces with Apple, cutting preferable deals to participate in Apple’s e-book-selling service, and then forcing Amazon to go along with the same terms. E-book prices quickly rose.

Unfortunately for the publishers, their brilliant idea turned out to be an illegal conspiracy, and the government forced them to settle on terms that had the effect of boosting Amazon. Although Amazon has not entirely reverted back to $9.99 e-books, it could if it wanted to, and it has in some cases. In other cases — especially with self-published books or romances — e-book prices are down to $5.99 and even $2.99. “There is a strong gravitational pull downward,” said one publisher (who did not want to be quoted, fearing Amazon’s wrath).

The way I hear it, what Amazon is insisting upon is a deal where it would no longer have to bear the full brunt of its discounting — the publisher would have to bear some of it, in the form of tighter margins, or even losses. Hachette, meanwhile, contends that it needs to be compensated for the important things publishers do: editing, marketing, and curating.

This is an argument that may appeal to the cultural elite, but it is unlikely to move Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Publishers, he has been known to say, are gatekeepers. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation,” he wrote in his 2011 letter to shareholders, according to Brad Stone, the author of a recent book about Amazon, “The Everything Store.”

The very complaint that Amazon is selling $9.99 books at a loss reveals that it is the publishers who are the bad guys here. They are desperately trying to retain the outdated model for physical books and apply it to ebooks, which makes absolutely no sense, because that allows them to significantly increase their profit margins at the expense of a) Amazon, b) book buyers, and c) authors. Bezos is correct to dismiss the publishers as gatekeepers, and I very much doubt he considers them to be well-meaning ones.

The other article, a defense of the publishers, inadvertently proves the exact same point:

How did Amazon attain such monopsony power? By providing valuable services? Perhaps, to some extent. But consider that from the moment it introduced its Kindle product, Amazon sold e-books at prices far below what it was buying them for. If Amazon bought an e-book from Hachette for $13, it resold it to a consumer for $9.99, losing $3.01 per e-book. It should come as no surprise that under these circumstances, e-book buyers flocked to Amazon….

So far, Hachette, to its credit, has been unbending. But Amazon still
has its nuclear option. It would appear that unless Amazon backs down —
through public pressure or government intervention — publishers will
have no choice but to employ their own nuclear option: pull all their
books from Amazon and throw their weight behind a law-abiding
alternative. Perhaps the best solution would be an online marketplace
controlled by the publishers — with the 30 percent commission being
split 50-50 with the authors in addition to the author’s royalty.

The ironic thing is that the pro-publisher position is based on the fear of the possibility that Amazon might one day do what the publishers have already done. It is based on the idea that Amazon will eventually jack prices up, never mind the fact that Amazon’s entire business model is based on selling more goods and lower prices. The thing is, even if Amazon QUADRUPLED its average price to the book buyer after driving all the major publishers out of business, retail prices would still be lower than the suggested retail price given by most of the major publishers.

Seriously. The average Amazon price for an ebook is around $6.94. The publishers have been trying to push ebook retail prices up to $27.99; as I pointed out the other day, a new Tor ebook has a digital list price of $27.99, one dollar more than the retail price of $26.99 for the hardcover.

The inept nature of the defense of the publishers can be seen in the proposed solution. The publishers would NEVER be content with such a system; they would fight it even more vehemently than they are fighting Amazon’s attempt to bring ebook prices down below $5. The major publishers want the old system where they sell the book for half the retail price and pay $2.50 to the author. At $28, they get $14 from which they pay $2.50. That is $11.50 gross profit with an 82 percent profit margin; very healthy indeed.

If they set up Publizon, they’d have to reduce their prices to $9.99 to compete with Amazon. They’d pay $2.50 to the author as a royalty, plus another $1.50 as per the suggested model. That means that their gross profit would fall to $5.99 and their profit margin to 60 percent. Still healthy, but far less profitable and probably insufficient to maintain their New York office space and the rest of their expensive overhead. And that’s assuming people are willing to buy books at Publizon; knowing the publishers’ general contempt for the book buying public, it is highly unlikely they can successfully set up a retail operation catering to it.

Meanwhile, they are also competing with Castalia and the other independents, who are selling high-quality ebooks for $4.99. As well as with the self-publishers selling books for as little as $0.99. Any way you look at it, the major publishers cannot possibly survive with their current editorial and distribution structures intact.

Amazon isn’t the bad guy here. Amazon is the defensor lector, the hero of the hour. And speaking of Amazon, fans of a certain fedora-wearing author will no doubt be pleased to know that Castalia will be announcing the release of a new book on Amazon in the coming week, one entitled CITY BEYOND TIME: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis.

Richard Dawkins is a self-described Christian

Of sorts, anyhow. It seems the Pope of Oxford is more than a little disappointed in the direction that Western post-Christianity is taking:

 Richard Dawkins, the prominent atheist and scientist, has admitted that he is a “secular Christian” because he hankers after the nostalgia and traditions of the church.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, where he was presenting the first volume of his memoirs An Appetite For Wonder, the evolutionary biologist claimed that although he does not believe in the supernatural elements of the Christian church, he still values the ceremonial side of religion….

“I would describe myself as a secular Christian in the same sense as secular Jews have a feeling for nostalgia and ceremonies,” said Dawkins.

Other comments Dawkins has recently made make it readily apparent that he’s not entirely comfortable with the ability of atheism to fill in the void that Christianity leaves behind. It will be fascinating to see which of the vocal anti-theists becomes the first champion of cultural Christianity. On the other hand, Dawkins doesn’t seem to be thinking the matter through.

“You do not have to be reticent in what you say. You do not have to look around and say, ‘I hope I am not offending anyone’. You can pretty much speak your mind now in a way that you could not 50 years ago.” 

Oh, can you now? It seems to me that 50 years ago, British people were not being beheaded in the street. Many atheists, and indeed, many Christians, have assumed that although Christianity was integral to the development of Western civilization, it was not necessary to its continuation. And while many people still believe that, an increasing number of people are beginning to realize that is simply not the case.

Of course, there are also those who think that Western civilization is possible without Christianity or people who are genetically Western, but then, they are the modern equivalent of the Green Cheese Society and all that is necessary to refute them is to point out, and I quote: “de de de de de dink, the niggers is not able to survive. Man’s sole “jabringing” object disfigure religion trauma and nubs the inside the trauma of representation.”

And it is very hard to refute that.

A call for permawar

David Brooks openly calls for “constant garden-tending”, or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:

As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.

This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.

This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that “the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one” has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their “democracy” is a sham.

Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. Or the USA, where one of the largest invasions in human history – 50 million strong – was aided and abetted by the three branches of government.

The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It’s hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.

Mailvox: the sterile wasteland

A foreign author observes the pinkshirts running amok in other literary genres than SF/F:

I found your blog yesterday and I just wanted to thank you for what you have done there. I’m a published author in an Anglosphere country, who has really been struggling with the prevailing SJW culture in my local literary community. What is going on here is actually horrifying, to the point where I have indulged in self-exile and given up ever publishing in this market again.

The entire literary community here has been transformed into a horde of politically correct zombies hellbent on sniffing out and crushing the merest hint of intellectual insurgency.

The types of writers arising from this mess are increasingly foisting upon the local and international public derivative works of insipid speculative fiction which amount to remixes of ideas from other better authors.

However, they all seem to be geniuses at networking amongst our small, left leaning liberal elites, and a small, well-networked coterie of these people occupies positions in the mainstream reviewing press, publishing journals and publishers. The result is that unanimous praise is heaped upon everything that is published by anyone attached to this network, and prepared to turn their novels into conduits for speaking power to truth.

One of these authors recently won a major international literary prize for a second novel which was so bad that I actually blushed when I read the first chapter. I have been completely unable to make sense of this, or the way that some big names in fiction have put their weight behind this person, while crowd-sourced reviewing sites have largely given the work the stick it deserves.

Reading through some of your blogs I now have a sense of the behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that must accompany literary awards, and it has helped to develop a sense of what really goes on. I have always suspected that some rather dark Machiavellian maneuvering happens in the backrooms of Big Lit.

At any rate, this whole process is gradually turning our locally literary landscape into a sterile wasteland. Literary forums where writers used to interact have turned into barren wastelands because of the vigour with which any dissent is persecuted.

The people in the community seem oblivious to this fact, and now seem to interact mainly on Twitter where they retweet each others’ blind observations and compete to come up with interpretations of the world that are as thoroughly inverse to observable reality as possible.

I stopped engaging with these people over two years ago and now just observe them, as they make for an interesting study of the decay of Western civilization and values. I find myself coming up with theories in an attempt to make sense of and accept what I see.

One thing I have considered is that many not terribly bright people hold the art of novel writing in incredibly high esteem and consider it the ultimate status position in society.

This gives these people a very strong motivation to write books, and if these books are bereft of quality, those who possess suitable social skills have a strong motivation to use these skills to bring their work to prominence by hook or by crook. The result is that we’re seeing the survival of the cynical, while actual writing ability is coming uncoupled from literary success and renown.

It was a huge relief to find your blog, and to see that not every writer fits this mold. I’ve subscribed to your blog and look forward to participating in discussions on it. Thanks, you’re doing God’s work and beaming a light into the darkness.

It increasingly appears that we are the monks of the Grimdark Age. It is vital that we continue to read, continue to write, and continue to support those who are keeping the traditional literary forms alive, despite the mainstream’s descent into the literary equivalent of Ow! My Balls! and Ass.

Let’s face it, Redshirts, “If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love” and “All That Fairy Tale Crap” are considerably closer to Ow! My Balls! than to Dune, Foundation, or The Lord of the Rings.

I’m clearly not the only one who has picked up a book that has won awards or been given a quantity of rave reviews, then wondered what on Earth the readers were dropping to reach such obviously absurd conclusions. It only takes a few times experiencing this to realize that most reviewers these days are actually worse than useless. Which is why precisely we are in the process of turning the CH blog into the leading site for the review of independently published books.

The unreason of atheism

John C. Wright points to an aspect of atheism I observed myself when I was writing the book that was published as The Irrational Atheist:

There are many brands of atheism, but they all have some points in common. First, one common point is that none have a rational explanation of the objectivity of moral rules.

Not all cultures agree on what priority to place on various moral rules, but one thing that is so obvious about moral rules is that they are objective. When guilt pricks us, it does not say we betray a matter of taste or opinion; the feeling of guilt is the feeling of having offended a law. When injustice rankles, we do not accuse those who trespass against us of having breached a matter of taste or opinion; we refer to a standard we expect the other to know and acknowledge. We cannot help it.

In all human experience, everything is open to doubt but this. No man with a working conscience can escape the knowledge. It is the one thing we cannot not know. And yet atheists are at a loss to explain it.

I do not call atheists immoral, but I note they cannot give a rational reason to account for morality.

In any atheist worldview, moral laws are an invention of man and serve his contingent purposes, or an imposition of Darwinian survival mechanisms that serve the contingent purposes of the Selfish Gene. Such purposes as the preservation of life or the pursuit of happiness are subjective, hence not laws at all. Whether selected by nature or by man, if moral maxims are selected merely as a means to an arbitrary end, they are merely expedient conveniences.

In the end, nihilism is the only rational atheism. And since most atheists rightly shy away from nihilism and its concomitant despair, they tend to trap themselves into philosophical unreason. Which is, of course, is often more than a little ironic due to the oft-heard atheist claim to be a true devotee of reason.

They call conscience an illusion and morality an artificial construct. But if they are not correct (and there is considerable logic and evidence to conclude that they are not) then even the most staunch atheist must admit that he is the delusional one.

The division cycle

It’s interesting to note that the pattern of growing nationalism and ethnic homogenization, reversing the trend of the last 45 years, is global:

Welcome to Myanmar, where tremendous democratic progress is being swamped by crimes against humanity toward the Rohingya, a much-resented Muslim minority in this Buddhist country. Budding democracy seems to aggravate the persecution, for ethnic cleansing of an unpopular minority appears to be a popular vote-getting strategy….

This narrative is absurd, as well as racist. A document as far back as 1799 refers to the Rohingya population here, and an 1826 report estimates that 30 percent of the population of this region was Muslim.

Since clashes in 2012 claimed more than 200 lives — including children hacked with machetes — the authorities have confined Rohingya to internment camps or their own villages. They are stripped of citizenship and cannot freely go to the market, to schools, to university, to hospitals. Tens of thousands have made desperate attempts to flee by boat, with many drowning along the way.

This year, the Myanmar authorities have cracked down even harder, making the situation worse. First, the government expelled Doctors Without Borders, which had been providing health care for the Rohingya. Then orchestrated mobs attacked the offices of humanitarian organizations, forcing them out.

As usual, Kristof fails to grasp the implications of “tremendous democratic progress” occurring simultaneously with ethnic cleansing. And it also demonstrates how the diversity dogma that has permitted more than 10 million Asian immigrants to enter the USA is very unlikely to lead to improved inter-tribal relations.

It’s hardly a mystery why the Burmese do not wish to permit any Muslim minority in their midst; one could ask Lee Rigby’s widow about the potential downside there. No one wants the jihad on their doorstep and the people of Myanmar are obviously exercising their rights of national self-determination and freedom of association.

Because Man is a social creature, mass immigration is the crime against humanity. Those who have advocated and permitted it are the parties who should be held primarily responsible for the eventual bloodshed.

Saladin and diversity

The great Islamic sultan Saladin succeeded his uncle as vizier to the Fatimid caliph before he engineered a largely bloodless coup that allowed him to supplant the Fatimids and establish the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty in Egypt. However, two years before the coup, he was faced with the challenge of dealing with a large foreign army who had been imported by the caliph in order to better control the oft-restive Egyptian and Syrian emirs. From Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land:

In the early summer of 1169, Mutamin, the leading eunuch within the caliph’s palace, sought to engineer a coup against Saladin, opening channels of negotiation with the kingdom of Jerusalem in the hope of prompting yet another Frankish invasion of Egypt to topple the Ayyubids. A secret envoy was dispatched from Cairo, disguised as a beggar, but passing near Bilbais a Syrian Turk spotted that he was wearing new sandals whose fine quality jarred with his otherwise ragged appearance. With suspicions aroused, the agent was arrested and letters to the Franks discovered, sewn into the lining of his shoes, revealing the plot. Saladin curtailed the independence of the Fatimid court, executing the eunuch Mutamin in August and replacing him with Qaragush, who from this point forward presided over all palace affairs.

Saladin’s severe intervention elicited an outbreak of unrest among Cairo’s military garrison.The city was packed with some 50,000 black Sudanese troops, whose loyalty to the caliph made them a dangerous counter to Ayyubid authority. For two days they rioted through the streets, marching on Saladin’s position in the vizier’s palace. Abu’l Haija the Fat was sent to stem their advance, but Saladin knew that he lacked the manpower to prevail in open combat and soon adopted less direct tactics. Most of the Sudanese lived with their families in the al-Mansura quarter of Cairo. Saladin ordered that the entire area be set alight, according to one Muslim contemporary leaving it ‘to burn down around [the rebelling troops’] possessions, children and women’. With their morale shattered by this callous atrocity, the Sudanese agreed a truce, the terms of which were supposed to provide for safe passage up the Nile. But once out of the city and travelling south in smaller, disorganised groups, they fell victim to treacherous counter-attacks from Turan-Shah and were virtually annihilated.

It should be noted that Turan-Shah was Saladin’s brother and lieutenant. Now consider: Cairo was founded in 973 and by 1340 it had a population of “nearly half a million”. If we generously assume the population of Cairo was 400,000 in 1169, this means that Saladin managed to eliminate or forcibly deport an armed foreign population that made up between 12 and 20 percent of the entire populace in a matter of days.

Keep that in mind when you assume that because there are a large number of foreign immigrants in a previously homogenous society, there always will be. Being one of the greatest and most decisive generals in human history, Saladin’s ruthless actions were more efficient and effective than most of their kind, but these periodic ethnic cleansings are the historical norm throughout the world and have reliably followed periods of relative peace and mass immigration.

The point is not to argue that these actions are good, only that they appear to be a predictable consequence of importing large numbers of foreigners. Of course, there is another known historical alternative, such as when the Ayyubid sultan was overthrown by his imported Mamluk slave soldiers 81 years later.

Sometimes the native populations win, sometimes the immigrants do. Saladin himself was a Kurd, after all, not an Egyptian or an Arab, although he was fully accepted by the Egyptians and Arabs over whom he ruled and he remains one of the greatest heroes of both Islam and Arabia. But the one thing that never seems to happen is for everyone to live together in one peaceful, multi-ethnic society. Not for long, anyhow.