Fertilizer is not prevention

I very much enjoy reading VDH’s historical works, but I’ve never seen a better historian so completely unable to correctly apply the lessons of history to current events:

The ancient ingredients of war are all on the horizon. An old postwar order crumbles amid American indifference. Hopes for true democracy in post-Soviet Russia, newly capitalist China or ascendant Turkey long ago were dashed. Tribalism, fundamentalism and terrorism are the norms in the Middle East as the nation-state disappears.

Under such conditions, history’s wars usually start when some opportunistic — but often relatively weaker — power does something unwise on the gamble that the perceived benefits outweigh the risks. That belligerence is only prevented when more powerful countries collectively make it clear to the aggressor that it would be suicidal to start a war that would end in the aggressor’s sure defeat.

What is scary in these unstable times is that a powerful United States either thinks that it is weak or believes that its past oversight of the postwar order was either wrong or too costly — or that after Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, America is no longer a force for positive change.

A large war is looming, one that will be far more costly than the preventative vigilance that might have stopped it.

He’s correct that a large war is looming. Where exactly it will start, or which sides the various parties will take, is presently unknown. But VDH appears to have completely ignored the lessons of the Athenian adventure at Syracuse about which he wrote so informatively, and to have ignored that the collapse of the “nation-state” in the Levant was always inevitable due to the artificial and externally imposed nature of their creations; they were never nations in the first place.

That is why we can safely assume that the “nation-states” in Africa will continue to collapse as well. And, of course, that is why the “powerful” United States has been rendered increasingly impotent; it is no longer a homogenous white Christian nation committed to Anglo-Saxon ideals. Indeed, one cannot truly consider it a nation at all, it is best described as an imperial multi-national, multi-ethnic state akin to the Byzantine, Roman, and Austro-Hungarian empires.

The birthrates fall

The US birthrate falls further below replacement level. But it’s okay, because immigration!

The number of women in the United States who gave birth dropped last year, according to federal statistics released Thursday, extending the decline for a sixth year. The National Center for Health Statistics reported Thursday that there were 3.93 million births in the United States in 2013, down slightly from 3.95 million in 2012, but 9 percent below the high in 2007.

According to the report, the general fertility rate in the United States — the average number of babies women from 15 to 44 bear over their lifetime — dropped to a record low last year, to 1.86 babies, well below the 2.1 needed for a stable population. For every 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, there were 62.5 births in 2013, compared with 63 the previous year.

The decline is especially notable because the number of women in their prime childbearing years, 20 to 39, has been growing since 2007. Some demographers said the numbers were not cause for concern.

“Americans haven’t worried much about birthrates in the past, because we
have the faucet of immigration to turn on and off,” said Andrew J.
Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns Hopkins University.

Absolutely. After all, swapping an -1SD IQ Guatamalan immigrant who doesn’t speak English for the native child of +2 SD white parents isn’t dysgenic or dyscivic at all, right? Such an exchange is not going to have any problematic long-term consequences in a world that we’re told is going to be getting more competitive and require more cognitive capacity to be economically productive in the future, n’est-ce pas?

It looks rather like a vicious cycle has been established. The economy drives down birth rates, which results in less educable lower-IQ immigrants being substituted for higher educated, higher-IQ natives, which hurts the economy….

VPFL Week 13

108 Bane Cornshuckers (9-4-0)
52 Texas Chili Eaters (7-5-1)

90 Mounds View Meerkats (8-5-0)
55 Boot Hill Bogs (2-10-1)

95 Favre Dollar Footlongs (6-7-0)
74 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-4-0)

95 King (6-7-0)
62 Clerical Errs (2-11-0)

70 RR Redbeards (8-5-0)
59 Gilbert Gamma Rays (7-6-0)

After a 38-point explosion from the Chili Eaters, I can’t believe that I’m in danger of missing the playoffs while scoring the most points in the league. Again.

IQ is real and reliable

Jerry Pournelle talks about a past predictive program that was terminated because it worked:

I have a number of letters from people who try to account for differences in mean IQ among races – a phenomenon found and confirmed so often that it must be assumed to be true – by various factors, the most common of which is culture. A number of competent differential psychologists who would have wished to find that all those differences can be truly accounted for by cultural (and thus changeable) factors have devoted a great deal of effort to trying to prove that, and to eliminate all cultural factors from IQ tests, but they have not been able to do so….

There is no single item in any IQ test that identifies the race of
the person taking that test. Any such item, if there ever were any, has
long since been eliminated. You may look at IQ tests until you are blue
in the face and you won’t find the “racial code” items, because they are
not there. A lot of very smart people have worked hard to see to that. But IQ tests do predict academic success. And the University of
Washington developed a Grade Prediction Program that did much more. I
worked on it as a graduate student. The experiment was paid for by Navy
Research.

Basically, for all incoming freshmen, we took measures of almost
anything you can think of that might affect academic grades, and
recorded the grades those students achieved in four years of instruction
at the University of Washington. We recorded high school class rank,
and grades in high school subject areas. We gave batteries of tests to
the incoming freshmen. We took ratings and estimates from counselors
(which were not easy to get because counselors are not accustomed to
making numerical estimates, and sure enough, they weren’t much use in
the final predictions). We even threw in height and weight. We did not
record race, religion, national origin, or socio-economic status.

All this stuff went into a huge matrix, one line of a couple of dozen
predictors for each student. Then over time we built another matrix,
one line of grade results for each person. This whole thing then went
into a huge program to find the correlation of each item in the
predictors with each item in the results. This would be a number from 0
to 0.99; actually I think the highest predictor item was about 0.8,
which was IQ. Many of the predictors were near enough to zero that it
could reasonably be concluded that they could be eliminated. There were
one or two predictors that correlated highly with some fields of study
and not at all with others; the formula was adjusted for that so these
predictors were only used in prediction of relevant academic areas.

And lo! After a few years of taking results and honing the prediction
equations, every incoming freshman was given a grade prediction for a
number of academic area. Be a math major and you will be an A student,
but you will flunk out of biology. Actually, of course, that would be a
rare result: people who were predicted to be A students in any area were
likely to have higher predictions for other areas. An A prediction in
engineering would very likely to be accompanied by an A prediction as an
education major. Of course an prediction of an A average in Education
was not necessarily accompanied by the prediction of an A in anything
else.

The program was successful, but it is no longer used, because the
average grades predicted for Black and Hispanic students was lower than
the average grades predicted for White students. There was no single
item in any test that identified the race of the student, but those who
set out to prove this thesis managed to find that out.

The beauty of science is that it eventually calls one’s assumptions and ideologies to account. At this point, one can only laugh at those who claim that human intelligence doesn’t exist, that IQ doesn’t measure anything, that neither IQ nor intelligence has no any link to race, and so forth. IQ is a very powerful predictive model of human intelligence, in fact, it is one of the more reliable predictive models that we have. It may not be fine-grained, it may not account for the full range of human accomplishment, and it may not be deterministic, but so what?

A metric’s failure to be absolutely perfect in every regard does not render it useless.  In fact, conservatives should take note that one of the most useful things about IQ is that it completely undermines the entire equalitarian program and renders it intellectually hors de combat.

If, in the interest of maintaining your belief in unicorns, leprechauns, and human equality, you are still trying to claim that whites are intellectually identical to Asians are intellectually the same as Africans, or asserting that it makes no difference whether someone scores +2SD or -2SD on an IQ test, you are worse than an idiot. You are being intentionally and willfully dishonest with yourself; you are deceiving yourself. And self-deceit is not a sound foundation from which to determine the truth about anything.

That’s a feature, not a bug

In what Ross Douthat laments, I see cause for celebration:

“The eulogy that needs to be written,” Klein argued, is actually for an entire kind of publication — the “ambitious policy magazine,” whether on the left or right, that once set the terms of Washington’s debates.

With the emergence of the Internet, those magazines lost their monopolies, and the debate “spilled online, beyond their pages, outside their borders,” with both new competitors and specific voices (Klein kindly cites my own) becoming more important than before.

As Klein correctly implies, this shift has produced a deeper policy conversation than print journalism ever sustained. Indeed, the oceans of space online, the easy availability of studies and reports, the ability to go endless rounds on topics — plus the willingness of many experts to blog and bicker for the sheer fun of it! — has made the Internet era a golden age for technocratic argument and data-driven debate.

But there is a price to be paid as well. That price, Klein suggests, is the loss of the older magazines’ ability to be idiosyncratic and nonpandering and just tell their readers what they should care about…. The New Republic as-it-was, the magazine I and others grew up reading, was emphatically not just a “policy magazine.” It was, instead, a publication that deliberately integrated its policy writing with often-extraordinary coverage of literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, fine art.

It wasn’t just a liberal magazine, in other words; it was a liberal-arts magazine.

In other words, a small group of people will no longer enjoy the stranglehold they once possessed over politics, literature, philosophy, history, religion, music, and fine art, to “set the terms of Washington’s debates” and tell readers “what they should care about”.

This is supposed to be a bad thing? Are you kidding me?

The New Republic is gone. It would be a good thing for the American Right if National Review followed suit.

Riding this way

Still keeping fingers crossed concerning one more potential contributor, but this is what looks like the final list of contributors to the first volume of Castalia’s new annual mil-SF anthology. We are expecting to make it available to newsletter subscribers next weekend assuming everything comes together as it should. The cover is, well, you’re just going to have to see it. If it’s not quite a murderer’s row of contributors, it is a strong one from start to finish and a variety of national militaries and service branches are represented.

And if you’re a military historian or an established writer of mil-SF and are interested in contributing to volume two, get in touch. We’ve already got two excellent new contributors lined up for volume two.

You got your gay technoculture in my propaganda!

The displacement of liberal New York Jews by liberal Silicon Valley gays is probably a positive sign if it truly indicates that the post-WWII left-wing Jewish establishment is on the decline.

The majority of The New Republic’s masthead resigned en masse on Friday following the owner’s decision to force out the editorial leadership, move the magazine to New York, and rebrand the venerable, century-old publication as a “digital media company.”

Nine of the magazine’s twelve senior editors submitted letters of resignation to owner Chris Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra, as did two executive editors, the digital media editor, the legislative affairs editor, and two arts editors. At least twenty of the magazine’s contributing editors also requested that their names be removed from the magazine’s masthead.

The mass departure came one day after a shakeup that saw the resignation of top editor Franklin Foer and veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier, both of whom resigned due to differences of vision with Hughes, a 31-year-old Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Foer announced his resignation on Thursday after discovering that Hughes had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg Media editor who formerly ran The Atlantic Wire blog….

Those who resigned are senior editors Jonathan Cohn, Isaac Chotiner, Julia Ioffe, John Judis, Adam Kirsch, Alec MacGillis, Noam Scheiber, Judith Shulevitz and Jason Zengerle; executive editors Rachel Morris and Greg Veis; digital media editor Hillary Kelly (who resigned from her honeymoon in Africa); legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen; and poetry editor Henri Cole and dance editor Jennifer Homans. Contributing editors Anne Applebaum, Paul Berman, Christopher Benfey, Jonathan Chait, William Deresiewicz, Justin Driver, TA Frank, Ruth Franklin, Jack Goldsmith, Anthony Grafton, David Grann, David Greenberg, Robert Kagan, Enrique Krauze, Damon Linker, Ryan Lizza, John McWhorter, Sacha Z. Scoblic, Cass Sunstein, Alan Taylor, Helen Vendler and Sean Wilentz.

Many of those who resigned on Friday believe that Hughes and Vidra now intend to turn TNR into a click-focused digital media company, at the expense of the magazine’s strong editorial traditions and venerable brand, according to sources who attended the gathering at Foer’s house.

Whatever will Americans do without this landmark of the neocon establishment telling them what to think and which wars to wage? And wherever will we go for our poetry and dance criticism? It’s good to see some of these old propaganda centers being disrupted and demolished; it’s absolutely ridiculous how much political influence The New Republic had considering that it only had 50,000 subscribers.

The antiwar site Mondoweiss notes: “This is a landmark in the era of the Jewish establishment. It’s petering out in an elite generation of far greater diversity.” Given that Holocaustianity and Hollywood are much more influential in the USA than in Europe, my guess is that it will take at least one more generation before America’s Jews begin following the lead of French Jewry, of whom more than one percent of the total population are expected to have moved to Israel by the end of 2014. What is interesting is the way these developmens indicate that six decades of diligent work to break down European and American homogenuity has gone somewhat agley; it appears that a constant power struggle of all against all may not actually be safer than a single well-disposed majority ruling over diverse minorities with benign disregard.

Having recently read Martin van Creveld’s The Land of Blood and Honey, I suspect there will be some fairly serious cultural clashes in the future between American Jews, who believe they are the center of the Jewish world, and the Israelis, who understandably feel very differently. Those who see “Israeli” and “Jew” as being entirely synonymous really don’t know what they’re talking about; the amusing thing is that Israelis tend to speak more dismissively of American Jews than most Americans would dare.

One important difference that I see is that Israelis are heading rapidly towards a homogenous ethno-cultural state, while American Jews are terrified of Israeli people’s “heartbreaking” embrace of nationalism because they know they are no more a part of the American ethno-cultural state than Israel’s Arab citizens are part of Israel’s, and they have no more desire to move to Israel than the average Israeli Arab has in moving to Egypt or Syria. But their “national homogeneity for me, but not for thee” argument is unlikely to hold water with anyone.

Destroying the community to diversify it

There is no Paradox of Diverse Communities; one horn of the dilemma is simply false. So, the answer to his question is, yes,  we shouldn’t fight against self-segregation, because divisiveness and a lack of community cohesion are intrinsically dyscivic. In fact, we should actively promote racial, cutural, linguistic, religious segregation in the interest of long term peace and harmonious civil relations across various human differences:

Urbanists and planners like to imagine and design for a world of diversity. Diversity, we like to think, is both a social good and, as I’ve argued, a spur to innovation and economic growth.

But to what degree is this goal of diverse, cohesive community attainable, even in theory?

That’s the key question behind an intriguing new study, “The (In)compatibility of Diversity and Sense of Community,” published in the November edition of the American Journal of Community Psychology. The study, by sociologist Zachary Neal and psychologist Jennifer Watling Neal, both of Michigan State University (full disclosure: I was an external member of the former’s dissertation committee), develops a nifty agent-based computer model to test this question.

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

They are correct to point to the “federation” concept as a possible solution, but they are thinking on too small a scale. Neighborwide segregation is not enough. It should be state-wide. People like to point to the Swiss model as being an example of successful integration, what they don’t realize is that religious, linguistic, and ethnic cleansing were utilized in establishing the Swiss cantons; that is why the cantons are still identified as “Protestant” or “Catholic” cantons as well as being on one side or the other of the Franco-German divide.

But more importantly, the federation concept cannot work without decentralized government. There is no point in encouraging Somalis or Nigerians to live in segregated neighborhoods if they are legally held to German or Japanese standards by a higher-level government.

The fact is that diversity is a social ill and it exacerbates rather than reduces racial tensions. I can attest that no one in Minnesota had an opinion about Somalis or Liberians 20 years ago. In only two decades, diversity has caused tens of thousands of formerly indifferent people to actively despise them. It would be interesting to test this hypothesis by using contributions to African-related charities as a metric. I surmise that there is a lower percentage of White Minneapolis residents donating to charities that aid Africa now that diversity and immigration have given them some first-hand experience of actual Africans.

Diversity destroys communities. That is the observable fact. Diversity destroys the common interest. To be pro-diversity is necessarily to be anti-communitarian and against the common interest. There is the real paradox: the progressive who claims to be a pro-diversity communitarian.

The Top Gaming Blogs

As one of their Game and Book experts, one of the things Recommend has asked me to do is to identify and vett various other experts, particularly in fields I am qualified to do so. One of the first experts I recruited was the indefatigable Jeffro Johnson of Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog, who is also one of the two star bloggers at Castalia House, because there are very, very few people who know as much about role-playing games as he does.

Jeffro immediately grasped the utility of the Recommend system, so much so that I have already had to urge him to slow down and pace himself. But among the score of recos he has already posted, he has created an interesting list entitled The Top Gaming Blogs of 2014, which is well worth reading for anyone with an interest in games. Lewis Pulsipher is on there, of course, but there are a number of other sites with which I was previously unfamiliar.

The other new Recommend expert is less known for his excellent game design than for the fact that he is Archon of The Escapist, but regardless, he qualifies as a Game Expert twice over. He’s got his first reco up and it’s a good one on the classic X-Com: UFO Defense.

If you’re not on Recommend yet, or if you’re on it but haven’t really started using it yet, I’d encourage you to give it a go. They haven’t even officially “come to America” yet; but have already achieved pretty solid penetration in their native France. I don’t know if it is going to grow into something Twitter-big once they enter the US next year, but it is going to be significant. They’ve now got the five-rating system in place, which was a needed improvement, and they’ll have the Android app out in the near future. And, in due time, a proper game-style Achievements and Leveling system.

They’re also working on the expansion of the categories; there will be gun categories, among others, and I will be looking for experts in a variety of new categories soon. But we’re only looking for serious and proven expertise, not merely serious interest. For example, Jeffro, Archon, and I are all able to rapidly post recos because we have large quantities of our own previous writings on the subject from which we can draw. But that’s merely an indicator, it’s not an absolute requirement. In any case, if you think you’ve got that kind of expertise in something, then by all means, make your case in the comments here.

Jeffro demonstrates his depth of knowledge in this post, in which he wonders why so many of today’s gamers and game designers are not merely ignorant, but don’t even know they’re ignorant:

Why is it that Gygax had a diet of fiction that spanned more than half a century, but the designers that followed him and the younger generation of gamers that played his stuff did not for the most part? What kinds of things do we fail to see simply because we’ve never bothered to survey the past…? And what the heck happened during the seventies to turn everything upside down? Something happened. The fact of it doesn’t require a conspiracy theory to explain it, but it does make me wonder about what all’s gone on since.

Remember: people that haven’t read from the Appendix N list tend to assume that Gary Gygax was a weirdo for using the term “Fighting-Men” instead of something like “Warrior.” They will even go so far as to say that the reasons for his word choice there are unknowable. It’s a small thing, sure… but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. These people are not only ignorant, but they don’t even know they are ignorant. They are simply not equipped to make an intelligent critique of classic D&D, much less assess Gygax’s contribution to gaming.

That “Wisconsin Shoe Salesmen” precipitated a watershed moment in gaming history. His influence is not confined to tabletop games, but spills over into computer gaming and fantasy in general. While many tropes of classic D&D have by now become ubiquitous, the literature that inspired them has since dropped into obscurity. This is interesting and bears further investigation. 

The deadly danger of the law

Stephen Carter points out how America’s legalistic culture is intrinsically dangerous:

On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.

The obvious racial dynamics of the case — the police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, is white; Garner was black — have sparked understandable outrage. But, at least among libertarians, so has the law that was being enforced. Wrote Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, “Clearly something has gone horribly wrong when a man lies dead after being confronted for selling cigarettes to willing buyers.” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, appearing on MSNBC, also blamed the statute: “Some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive.”

The problem is actually broader. It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law.

This is an aspect of “there oughtta be a law” that is seldom considered. The police can, and will, kill anyone in pursuit of their law enforcement orders. And, as is now eminently clear, it doesn’t matter what that law is. It can be anything from jaywalking to selling Beanie Babies without the proper license.

The law, and law enforcement, are a very blunt hammer, and it’s simply not possible for either to be utilized in the delicately fine-tuned, precision manner that most people envision when they suggest using them for the purposes of petty behavioral modification.