#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Perhaps it’s not the biggest bestseller list to top, but one can’t help but regard this as an encouraging start to Castalia House’s entry into multilingual e-publishing. We may be small, but we’re already massive in Portugal. How do we profit from these bestselling free ebooks? The answer is simple. Volume.
Switzerland rejects the EU-imposed free movement of peoples required by Shengen:
Voters in Switzerland have
narrowly approved a rightwing proposal to curb immigration. It imposes
limits on the number of foreigners allowed in and may signal an end to
the country’s free movement accord with the European Union. The initiative was approved by just 50.3% of the votes and was passed by a majority of cantons.The
move by the Swiss People’s Party – known for its anti-foreigner and
anti-EU agenda – will see the reintroduction of quotas, as well as a
national preference when filling job vacancies and restrictions of
immigrants’ rights to social benefits.Critically, it also
stipulates that Switzerland will have to renegotiate its bilateral
accord with the EU on the free movement of people within three years or
revoke it. This in turn could threaten other bilateral agreements with
the EU.
This should mark the high water mark for mass immigration madness and perhaps the much needed reawakening of nationalism across the West as well. Switzerland is an excellent barometer in this regard because it is the only Western nation where the people have the ability to democratically overrule its representative leadership and the political games that allow the Western governments to ignore the democratic will of the people.
In which Toni corrects me concerning my observations concerning the Reconquista of Spain and the current invasion of European America:
You mention the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 AD. You say: “Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was,” after mentioning a force of no more than 15,000 men.
Of course, those populations were smaller. But it was not a one-time event and that number greatly underestimates the whole inflow. The Muslims sent wave after wave against the peninsula. You also mention that “the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them”. That’s not exactly the case. In a way, it’s worse than that.
In 711 AD, the peninsula was under Visigoth rule. Even before the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, several Germanic tribes had invaded the peninsula (Suebi, Vandals, etc). Eventually, around 410 AD, one of these, the Visigoths (the Western Goths), managed to retain the control of the territory. Rome actually encouraged the Visigoths to pacify the peninsula against the other Germanic tribes.
But the Visigoths were a foreign minority (not more than 200,000) ruling over a larger and already diverse population. A demoralized and tired population that had recently gone through the fall of ‘their’ Empire (a few Roman emperors were actually from Hispania) and through successive invasions.
The Visigoth ruling elite was plagued by constant infighting. They had an elective monarchy and in late 710 AD they elected Rodrigo as their king. However, some Visigoth noblemen chose to side with Agila II instead. Agila II did effectively rule the Visigoth provinces of Iberia and Septimania, that is, the former Roman provinces of Tarraconense and Narbonense (northeastern Spain and southern France). Rodrigo ruled from Toledo, the Visigoth capital in the center of the peninsula.
The pro-Agila II faction sent envoys to North Africa to get military support in their fight against Rodrigo. In early 711 AD, Arab, Syrian, and Berber mercenaries crossed the Straits of Gibraltar from Africa to fight for Agila II. These Muslim forces broke their agreement with Agila II and decided to stay in the peninsula.
It is not that the locals couldn’t tell the difference between trading ships and an invading army (one has to admire Muslim historiography). It’s that the invading army was originally fighting for one of the ruling factions. And most importantly, all ruling factions were made up of foreigners anyway. So:
- The locals had little to no attachment to their leaders.
- The leaders were too busy fighting among themselves to care for the people (they were not their people after all).
- The invaders were disloyal to the “king” that had hired them—a king who had been disloyal to his own rightful king. Compare this to the Roman attitude “Rome does not pay traitors who kill their chief”.
About the size of the invasion:
The Muslim invasion received wave after wave of new blood both from Africa and Arabia. It usually went like this: some new Muslim leader appeared in North Africa advocating a purer observance of Islamic law. They set their eyes on Al-Andalus (the Muslim invaded Iberian Peninsula, present-day Spain and Portugal), a land of wealth, were the Muslim leaders often lived in decadence, corruption, and infighting in a soup of racial tensions between Arabs and Africans. The new sect got plenty of followers in North Africa and easily overthrew the Muslim elite in Al-Andalus, only to repeat the cycle… The newcomers were always numerous and ready to fight and far more fanatical.
In 1162, for instance, Abd-al-Mumin launched a new campaign from Africa to purify Al-Andalus and fight the Christians. Ibn Abi Zar says there were “300,000 horsemen, 80,000 volunteers, and 100,000 infantrymen.” In 1184, Abu Yakub Yusuf also crossed the Straits attempting to attack Lisbon with 100,000 men. In 1195, Yusuf II crossed the Straits with 300,000 men (mostly Berbers and black slave foot soldiers, archers, and Arab horsemen) and marched towards Toledo, Alfonso VII tried to stop them with his heavy cavalry of 10,000 men while reinforcements from Leon and Navarra were on their way. (That’s just a sample of about one million ‘”immigrants”” in less than 40 years in a context of almost 800 years). Etc…
When the Muslims crossed the Pyrenees, the Franks led by Charles Martel very soon managed to stop them at the Battle of Poitiers in 733 AD. Then the Muslims had to abandon their goal of crushing the Christendom from the Western front and retreated back to the Iberian Peninsula. The Franks set a protectorate north and south of the Eastern Pyrenees, the Spanish March, in present-day Catalonia and southern France (roughly, what Agila II had controlled, and would later become the Crown of Aragon, one of the founding kingdoms of Spain). And ‘Europe’ forgot about the peninsula. Indeed the peninsula looked like a lost cause to the European Christians, as local Christians retained only a few microscopic kingdoms up north in the cold mountain ridges that used to be Celtic.
So Europe, unlike Africa and Arabia, did not send wave after wave of new blood. Only when the Spanish and Portuguese Christians had managed to reconquer a significant size of the territory did some fellow Europeans join the fight, in Almeria and Lisbon, for example, but never in the overwhelming numbers of the relentless Muslim tide.
By the way, it is because of these difficulties that feudal serfdom never took root in Spain and Portugal. (Medieval Europe and Feudalism are not synonyms). Most of the Reconquista was actually achieved by dirt poor free men who rode southward to retake the plains and the towns, founded free cities and charter cities, years ahead of the royal armies, the religious orders, and even the hidalgos, who were exempt from paying taxes and had a right to bear arms because they fought.
Three final notes,
- A recurring topic in the history of (and prelude to) the Reconquista is infighting (first among the Visigoths, and then among the Christians Kingdoms and in Muslim Taifas). This is commonly referred to in Spain as “Reinos de Taifas”. As soon as 740 AD, the Muslims in the peninsula were fighting among themselves. (The Musa you mention was condemned to death by his superiors for taking too much booty for himself, the death sentence was commuted, but eventually he was murdered in a mosque in Damascus anyway in 716. His son married Rodrigo’s widow, converted to Catholicism, and was also murdered, his head sent to Damascus. Musa’s lieutenant, Tarik ibn Ziyad —Gibraltar is named after him, Jabal Tarik, Mountain of Tarik—was also murdered by his own people.)
- In 1492, when the Reconquista was completed with the liberation of Granada, the plan was to take the fight all the way to Mecca and rid the world of Islam. But in that same year the very same kings who rode into Granada also funded an expedition that stumbled into a New World, and then Christians decided that Islam was not such a big deal after all and that there were more exciting adventures ahead.
- As late as 1756, the Spanish navy was still fighting off Muslim pirates raiding the coast, without much help from anyone as usual. A thousand years had passed since the invasion of 711 AD. Fifty years after that, an American president refused to pay the ransom that the Muslim African pirates were demanding to free the enslaved American mariners. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War.
So there was a large native population being politically dominated by a small immigrant elite that encourages an invasion by a much larger group of immigrants that turns out to be disloyal to that elite. The historical analogy between 700s Spain and 2000s America may not be precise, but it is even more similar than the one I had previously drawn. In either case, it should be encouraging to traditional Americans to know that after 780 years of invasion and occupation, Spanish Christians were able to reconquer their own country.
Perhaps this ruling will help the police eager to dress up and play soldier to remember that it’s perfectly legal to shoot and kill anyone breaking into your house without warning, even SWAT team members:
In an astonishing ruling, a Texas grand jury declined to press capital murder charges against a man who shot and killed a law enforcement officer executing a no-knock raid on his home. A Burleson County SWAT team raided the man’s home near Snook on December 19th of last year.
28-year-old Henry Goedrich Magee said he shot and killed Burleson County Sgt. Adam Sowders, 31, because he thought he was being robbed and acted to protect his pregnant girlfriend and children.
“He did what a lot of people would have done […] He defended himself and his girlfriend and his home,” said Dick DeGuerin, Magee’s lawyer. The jury agreed, citing a lack of evidence Magee knew the invader was actually a law enforcement officer, they neglected to charge him despite his being a “cop killer.”
Warrants and procedural limits on police actions aren’t merely there to protect the innocent. They will also tend to protect the police from their own militarization.
7. Thou shalt know who thou art as a writer
Just as there are various types of athletes, there are various types of writers. Some writers are prolific and can produce thousands of words a day for months on end. Others find it difficult to crank out a few hundred words a month. Some writers have a natural gift for prose and can make a shopping list read like a work of art. Others have a gift for mimicry and can rip off Shakespeare or Dashiell Hammett with equal ease.
The problem is that many writers have goals that are not in line with their talents or their experience. The results seldom work out much better than positioning a point guard in the paint, or lining up a 400-pound nose tackle at wide receiver. As an educational aside, I once saw the Minnesota Vikings attempt to execute a spectacularly ill-designed play that called for Cris Carter to block Reggie White as Randall Cunningham rolled out to his right. Carter was not small for a wide receiver, but White shoved him and sent him flying five yards backward in the air, right into Cunningham. Needless to say, we never saw that play called again.
If plotting is not your strength, don’t try to write murder mysteries. If you struggle to write more than a sentence or two on a daily basis, don’t even think about attempting epic fantasy. If you’re not interested in characters and how they feel, writing romance is probably not a good idea. If you have no idea how the magic phone in your pocket does all the amazing things it does and you have no interest in science, science fiction is not your ideal genre no matter how much you enjoy reading Asimov and Heinlein.
One of the biggest mistakes I see writers making is attempting to write books on the basis of what they enjoy reading rather than on the basis of what their literary strengths are. This makes no sense. It is rather like deciding that you’re going to write music like Van Halen even though you play the fiddle instead of the electric guitar. If you play the fiddle, you need to write music like Charlie Daniels or music that actually involves fiddles.
When I first started writing, my long-term objective was to write books like Umberto Eco’s books, because Umberto Eco was my favorite writer. There was one very significant problem there. Umberto Eco is a trained and accomplished medievalist. I am not. And it turned out that there is an even bigger problem. Umberto Eco is committed to an excruciatingly high level of detail and will devote an entire year to doing nothing but research before he starts writing a book. I can’t bother to put a basic outline together and prefer to approach a novel as a series of vignettes that are loosely arrayed in my imagination. So, what I have learned is that any attempt to write books in the Eco vein are doomed to certain failure.
But just because I don’t have Eco’s strengths doesn’t mean that I don’t have certain strengths of my own. I was raised in a military family, I am a lifelong wargamer, I read military history in two languages, and I have hundreds of hours of full-contact fighting experience. This permits me to provide considerably more strategic and tactical verisimilitude to the combat scenes in my book as well as what leads up to them; my first editor at Pocket Books successfully deduced I was a martial artist after having doubts about the description of one of the fight scenes from The War in Heaven and trying it out on her husband.
Recall this comment from a review of A Throne of Bones: “The final battle in the book was the end result of a chain of
dominoes first tipped over right at the start of the book. Kudos on
that, because it definitely has more impact when the battle literally
couldn’t exist without the prior 600+ pages setting it up.”
I can’t do pretty prose. I can’t do police procedurals. And I can’t do technical mysteries that involve complicated puzzles. But how many authors can successfully pull off a stunt like that? And if I lack literary artistry, I am fortunate to have a considerable amount of literary stamina. I can crank out 400,000 words in a year without it exhausting me in any way. I also have a reasonable knowledge of history, economics and political science. This all lends itself to writing epic fantasy, which is not actually one of my favorite genres to read, in part because it is so seldom done well, but has turned out to be one that I rather enjoy writing.
Another review, this one of A Magic Broken, mentioned that the story started slow and the opening line was considerably more bland and unexciting than the story turned out to be. A fair point, without question. But how misleading would it be to present what is essentially a 20,000-word short story with a noir-style start?
So, my conclusion is that the idea one should write what one loves or write one one knows is, for the most part, misguided. The author should instead write what is best suited to his talents. Now, it will obviously take some time for an author to learn what his literary strengths and weaknesses are. And it will take an amount of brutal self-honesty to admit that one’s abilities are not necessarily linked to one’s preferences. But this is a process that may actually be an integral part of the apocryphal quote concerning the need to write one million words of crap before one can expect to write anything worthy of public consumption.
The strange thing about writing is that many of those who dabble in it expect to find themselves to be accomplished writers without ever practicing. But the practice is necessary, not only so that one can develop one’s skills, but so one can discover the specific nature of those skills as well.
As for those who manage to hit one out of the park on their first effort, there is a word for such novelists: pseudo-biographers. It’s not an accident that so many first-time successes struggle to ever write anything that even approaches their debut work; if one is writing about oneself, one is not a true storyteller and it is a very rare individual whose life is so compelling that it merits more than one book about it.
Regardless, whether one is a pseudio-biographer, a storyteller, or a pure stylist, one’s chances of writing something others consider to be worth reading is considerably enhanced by knowing what you are, and then making your decisions on the basis of that knowledge.
This sounds rather like an Arkansas suicide:
The founder and CEO of American Title Services in Centennial was found dead in his home this week, the result of self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun, according to the Arapahoe County coroner.
Richard Talley, 57, and the company he founded in 2001 were under investigation by state insurance regulators at the time of his death late Tuesday, an agency spokesman confirmed Thursday. It was unclear how long the investigation had been ongoing or its primary focus.
A coroner’s spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head.
As Zerohedge points out, this “suicide” follows “the jumping deaths of 2 London bankers and a former-Fed economist in the US”. This seems a little strange considering how the financial companies are presently sitting very fat and happy. There have also been two suicides in Switzerland; the CFO of Zurich Insurance and the CEO of Swisscom.
It is remarkable how evolution enthusiasts can’t seem to reach the logical conclusion concerning their repeated inability to successfully debate creationists. Then again, if they had as solid a grasp on logic and statistics as they do on the various epicycles of their ever-evolving “theory”, they would not be evangelical evolutionists in the first place:
In a much-hyped showdown, “the Science Guy” tried to defend evolution against creationist Ken Ham, and proved how slick science-deniers can be. How did the guy who’s right go so wrong?
On many mornings, I wake up and think, “You know what this country needs? More culture war.” As I scramble up a couple eggs, I find myself wishing—fervently wishing—that we could spend more time reducing substantive issues to mere spectacle. Later, as I scrub the pan, I’ll fantasize about how those very spectacles might even funnel money toward some of the country’s most politicized religious groups.
Fortunately, Bill “the Science Guy” Nye has heard my wish—which, really, is the wish of a nation. Why else would he have traveled to Kentucky this week in order to debate Ken Ham, the young-earth creationist founder of Answers in Genesis, about the origins of the world?
Actually, there are two other reasons that Nye might have done so, and I’ve given both possibilities a great deal of thought in the past few days. The first is that Nye, for all his bow-tied charm, is at heart a publicity-hungry cynic, eager to reestablish the national reputation he once had as the host of a PBS show. When his stint on Dancing With the Stars ended quickly, Nye turned to the only other channel that could launch him back to national attention: a sensationalized debate, replete with the media buzz that he craves.
Possibility number two is that Nye is clueless—that, for all his skill as a science communicator, Nye has less political acumen than your average wombat.
After watching the debate, I’m leaning toward that second possibility. Last night, it was easy to pick out the smarter man on the stage. Oddly, it was the same man who was arguing that the earth is 6,000 years old. It was like watching the Broncos play the Seahawks. Nye never had a chance.
I didn’t watch the “debate”. I had no interest in it, surmising correctly, (as it turns out), that neither side would actually be debating, but were instead engaged in mutual preaching to their own choirs. And it is amusing to observe the wrestling with the temptation intellectual dishonesty poses to the evolutionists as a result of their frustration with their own inability to successful defend their faith
For example, the writer claims it is bullshit to distinguish between scientific evidence and historical extrapolation. He asserts: “We can use evidence from the present to extrapolate about the past.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t disprove Ham’s point, which isn’t so much a point as a basic fact. An extrapolation is not, by definition, an observation. Nor can a historical extrapolation be tested.
For some reason, science fetishists who understand very well that it is impossible to use science to prove that Abraham Lincoln succeeded George Washington as president do not understand that it is equally impossible to use science to prove that species X transformed into species Y. Extrapolation only takes us to the hypothesis part of the scientific equation, it does not get us past the necessary testing and observation aspects. Barring a time machine, it is history, not science.
And in the end, the author throws in the towel, admits defeat, and advocates a full-blown retreat:
You don’t need to be Sun Tzu to realize that, when it comes to guys like Ken Ham, you can’t really win. If you refuse to debate them, they claim to be censored. If you agree to debate them, you give them a public platform on which to argue that, yep, they’re being censored. Better not to engage at all, at least directly.
Needless to say, the side that dares not directly engage is the side that knows it cannot successfully make its case. And the more the evangelical Darwinians appeal to an increasingly threadbare scientific authority, the weaker their case is observed to be by all impartial parties. When they’re saying: “you don’t understand the biology” and their critics are saying: “you don’t understand the math”, well, as it turns out, we have an excellent means of determining whose claims are founded in fact and whose are not.
And what we can readily test and observe with these two competing hypotheses is that the scientific evidence here does not favor those appealing to scientific authority.
George Jonas castigates the new type of Canadian immigrant: the cultural invader:
Canada, along with some other great immigrant societies, such as America or Australia, evolved into a coherent whole by welcoming new arrivals from the four corners of the Earth, offering them a chance to become a Canadian, American or Australian as they desired or managed to be, and then rewarding them according to how close they’ve come. In the process immigrants suffered casualties, but generally enriched the societies that enriched them, often within a single generation.
The assumption, unspoken but taken for granted until the 1960s, was that immigration was beneficial as long as it was designed to serve the interests of the host society first. The immigrant’s own interests would be served by the opportunity to eventually join the host society. For this to have any meaning, of course, the existence and desirability of a host nationality had to be taken for granted. If there had been no “Americans” or “Canadians,” there would have been nothing to join. Inherent in the American model of a “melting pot” as well as the fussier Canadian model of a “cultural mosaic” was the pre-existence of a nation to which the immigrant was applying to belong.
Until recent times, the West has been spoiled by the loyalty of immigrants, even from hostile regions or cultures…. It was in the past 40 years that the immigrant of dubious loyalty
emerged, followed by the disloyal native-born, sometimes of immigrant
ancestry, sometimes of Islamic conversion. The new immigrant seemed
ready to share the West’s wealth but not its values.In many ways he
resembled an invader more than a settler or an asylum-seeker. Instead of
making efforts to assimilate, the invader demanded changes in the host
country’s culture. He called on society to accommodate his linguistic or
religious requirements. In 1985, a Sikh CNR railway worker refused to
exchange his turban for a regulation hard hat. This was innocuous
enough, but in 1991, less innocuously, a newly appointed Toronto police
board commissioner of Asian extraction declined to take the traditional
oath to the Queen.
Those who uphold the values of the traditional West should not despair. The Ummayids who immigrated to Spain and imported their cultural values there were eventually expelled after 781 years of Reconquista. The West will win here too, but not until a sufficient number of Westerners realize that there will be no peace and their way of life cannot survive until the immigrants are returned home to their native lands.
Consider how small, in comparison to the present number of invaders, the earlier immigration was. And notice that the people invaded at the time also did not realize it was an invasion that was taking place around them:
In 711 a raiding force from North Africa approximately 1,700-strong led by Tariq Ibn Ziyad landed south of present-day Spain. Ibn Abd-el-Hakem reports, one and a half centuries later, that “the people of Andalus did not observe them, thinking that the vessels crossing and recrossing were similar to the trading vessels which for their benefit plied backwards and forwards.” Tariq’s forces were thence reinforced by those of his superior, the wali Musa ibn Nusair, and both went on to take control of most of Iberia with an army estimated at approximately 10,000–15,000 combatants.
Mint Wilson, the lady responsible for the Indonesian translation of Mantra yang Rusak, which was published today in epub format since Amazon does not sell books published in Bahasa Indonesia, has been maintaining a blog about the translation process. It makes for interesting reading for anyone with an interest in languages:
As I translated A Magic Broken, I tried to translate VD’s word choices as close to Indonesian root words as possible. It’s not hard but it is sure often to find that I translated words into its Indonesian form only to realized Indonesian has borrowed it from English word. For example:
With the precision born of many hours of practice, the sleeve knife slid into his hand as he stepped behind the man rushing past him.
precision – presisi
practice – praktikIt will be all right using these loan words to translate the English ones, but Bahasa Indonesia also has some of the same meaning words that are not any where close enough in form to their English counterparts. Though I suspect they are also loan words.
precision- presisi- ketepatan
practice – praktik- latihanBahasa Indonesia has many loan words from other languages. The origin of Bahasa Indonesia is Malay Polynesian that has been used as lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Bahasa Indonesia underwent several developmental process before becoming a modern language; the most influential of these was it’s contact with other languages. Such language contact influence language system lexically, phonologically, and grammatically.
The languages that influence Bahasa Indonesia are :
- Sanskrit, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms that reigned in Indonesian archipelago brought by Indian results in many Sanskrit words in Bahasa Indonesia.
- Arabic, Persian and Arabic traders introduced the religion and as Indonesia became the country with largest muslim population in the world, over the centuries results in an extensive Arabic loan words.
- Dutch, Dutch colonization and administration, lasting from the 17th century to the 20th, had an extensive impact on the vocabulary.
- Portuguese, The Portuguese were among the first westerners to sail eastwards to the “Spice Islands” in the 16th century as they traded and then colonized later.
- Chinese, Chinese traders and significant number of immigrants made their contributions on Bahasa Indonesia vocabulary.
Some interesting fact: for ‘god’ Bahasa Indonesia Bible translate it with 4 loan words: ‘Tuhan’, ‘dewa’, ‘ilah ‘and ‘Allah’. I think ‘Tuhan’ and ‘dewa’ are from Sanskrit, ‘ilah’ and ‘Allah’ are from Arabic. For God Creator Bahasa Indonesia bible translate ‘God’ into TUHAN (when the origin mention Jehova or Yahwe) and Allah (when the original word might be ‘ADONAI’). ‘Dewa’ and ‘ilah’ are for lesser gods.
There is a scene in A Magic Broken, where the word ‘gods’ appear when Nicolas the main character trying to get pass the gate guard:
The friendly smile suddenly disappeared from the man’s face, and the guide was staring at him as if he’d suddenly turned into an orc. “You some sort’o wizard?” the guard demanded, even as he stepped back a pace and put a hand on his sword handle.
“Gods, no, I’m a soldier,”Nicolas lied easily. The guard wasn’t the problem. It was the red robe he had to worry about.
Here, I translated the word into ‘dewa’ as I don’t think ‘Allah’ will fit nor the original meaning permit ‘Allah’ in a plural form.
In addition to publishing Mint’s first translation, I’m pleased to be able to say that Castalia House has another 11 translations currently in progress. The Blue SF revolution continues.
James Taranto correctly points out that the solutions to past problems may turn out to be even more severe problems in their own right.
The decline of marriage among poor and working-class Americans is a result of a variety of social and economic changes. Among them, as Lowrey notes, are “tidal economic forces,” namely “globalization, the decline of labor unions [and] technological change.”
She ignores the tidal social changes that have also contributed, namely the sexual revolution and the expectation that women will spend most of their adult lives in the workforce, which, as we’ve argued, reduced the incentives for both men and women to marry. It is no more feasible to turn the clock back on globalization or automation than on contraception or female labor-force participation. All of these developments represent progress, in that they were solutions to the problems of the past. All of them contribute to the problems of the present.
This is an interesting point, especially in light of the fact that female labor-force participation has been dropping steadily ever since it peaked at 60.3 percent in 2000. It has dropped 6.4 percent to 56.9 percent, a level not seen since 1988.
Those who argue that the clock cannot be turned back are simply in denial. Not only can the clock be turned back, we can be certain that the clock will be turned back whenever the progressive developments lead to an unsustainable situation. Globalization will end as soon as people in the wealthier countries understand that free trade necessarily means impoverishment and a decline to global norms.
(Remember, we haven’t seen any changes in perceived wealth as yet because people have been spending through their savings and maximizing their debt in order to maintain their current levels of consumer spending. Once the consumer spending begins to contract, the credit disinflation will give way to full-fledged credit deflation.)
Contraception was outlawed before and it will be outlawed again in some countries once it becomes clear that not only is the societal price for replacing children with semi-civilized immigrants too high, but such replacement policies are correlated with net economic losses rather than the long-assumed gains. All actions and policies have unintended consequences, which is why the simplistic notion of progress as an inexorable clock is simply misguided.