WND column

The Rise of the East

Supporters of the ongoing Bush-Obama wars have often said that one of the reasons the United States needed to attack Afghanistan and Iraq (and now Libya and Yemen and Somalia) is because failing to do so would exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies. Now that the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is into its 10th year, intrepid supporters of American empire are claiming that American troops must continue to occupy Afghanistan (and Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia) because the post-withdrawal collapse of the indigenous forces presently being propped up by the U.S. military will exhibit weakness and encourage our enemies.

These childish arguments reveal that the bellicose neocons who have been pushing foreign military adventures for more than a decade are not only chickenhawks innocent of any military service, but also know nothing about military history or the military aspects of geostrategy.

Bias in book reading

Is science fiction sexist? Is adventure fantasy sexist? Without bothering to go through all fifteen issues of Black Gate, I’m going to guess that there is not a perfect statistical match between the population demographics and the contributors to Black Gate. Which, by the metric suggested by the woman horrified that Guardian readers have the sexist audacity to prefer male SF writers by a 24 to 1 margin, is ipso facto evidence that Black Gate, too, is a bastion of male privilege.

Is science fiction sexist? A bald, potentially divisive and rather emotive question, there. But increasingly, science fiction and its close cousins, fantasy and horror, are being accused of an inherent downer on the female practitioners of the genre – and the latest offender appears to be the Guardian’s recent online poll to find readers’ favourite SF novels. Earlier this month Damien G Walter asked guardian.co.uk/books users to suggest the best novels in the genre, following on from the Guardian’s special SF-slanted edition of its Saturday Review supplement.

The results went online last week, and displayed a great love for science fiction: more than 500 books, classic and contemporary, were suggested for inclusion. However, according to Seattle-based author Nicola Griffith, who did a bit of number-crunching on the stats, there’s an overwhelming bias towards male authors.

My response to this shocking non-news can be found at the Black Gate. For those who are interested, the column to which various SF/F luminaries such as the Tor editors and the present of the SFWA took such exception can be found here.

Even the bad news errs to the upside

Jammie Wearing Fool points out that last week’s terrible jobs number is even worse than advertised:

Now for the really bad news: that 18,000 gain announced by the government yesterday isn’t real. For one thing, the number of jobs increased in June only because the Labor Department simultaneously revised downward the number of jobs that existed in this country during May. It’s like moving the fences at Citi Field so the Mets players can hit more home runs. It might make Jose Reyes feel better, but it doesn’t actually make him more powerful. Without the fence-moving operation in the May employment report, the June number — yesterday’s number — would have shown a decline of 26,000 jobs.

Then there’s another problem with June’s employment report. Included in the 18,000 headline number is a guesstimate that 131,000 jobs were created by newly formed — and, therefore, invisible — companies. If you want to send your resume to one of these companies, don’t bother. They probably don’t exist, and neither do the jobs the government thinks they are creating. These figments of the imagination of the Labor Department’s computers will probably disappear when the numbers are checked early next year.

The USA is looking more and more like the old Soviet Union, where the workers pretended to work and the government pretended to pay them. The downward revision game is a pretty transparent one, but it’s been around for a while. Play it right and you can always report rising numbers despite a declining trend.

But imagine the costs of drug legalization!

Somehow, I tend to doubt 40 people will be killed every day by hash brownie overdoses:

Battles between the vicious Zetas gang and other drug cartels killed more than 40 people in a 24-hour span, a government official said Saturday. At least 20 people were killed when gunmen opened fire in a bar late Friday in the northern city of Monterrey, where the gang is fighting its former ally, the Gulf Cartel, said federal security spokesman Alejandro Poire.

Eleven bodies shot with high-powered rifles were found earlier Friday, piled near a water well on the outskirts of Mexico City, where the gang is fighting the Knights Templar, Poire said. That is an offshoot of the La Familia gang that has terrorized its home state of Michoacan. He said another 10 people were found dead early Saturday in various parts of the northern city of Torreon, where the gang is fighting the Sinaloa cartel headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

“The violence is a product of this criminal rivalry … surrounding the intent to control illegal activities in a community, and not the only the earnings that come with it, but also with transporting drugs to the United States,” Poire said in a news conference.

It will be interesting to see if all the anti-drug conservatives will start to change their thinking once the Zetas and other drug cartels are shooting it out in Hispanic communities across America, or if they’ll stick with the “no matter how bad it gets, it would be even worse if drugs were legal” approach.

All wars are not created equal

The Mises Institute erroneously conflates the War on Drugs with a hypothetical War on Immigration:

One of the arguments people make against immigration is that immigrants from less-free countries will lead to the adoption of policies that encroach on liberty in the US. I doubt that the immigrants in the US want to recreate the dysfunctional institutions that encouraged them to leave their homelands in the first place, but I also think the consequences of the wars on drugs and terror are instructive. There’s no free lunch, and there’s also no free border fence, either financially or institutionally. I also doubt very much that we could deport even a fraction of the undocumented workers who are already in the US or do “secure our borders” to the nativists’ satisfaction without even more of the kinds of encroachments on liberty that we have endured as a result of the wars on drugs and terror.

I think the case for immigration is pretty solid on its own practical and philosophical merits. Even if immigrants bring with them the possibility of tyranny, I think stopping them would require that we embrace even greater tyranny.

I count no less than four errors in this post. Immigration and open borders is one of the few areas where I part company from the Misean approach. First, it is an observable fact that immigrants from less free countries lead to the imposition of policies that encroach on liberty. For two hundred years, immigrants have regularly favored bigger government and more government intervention in the economy.

Second, the cost of proper border control is far less expensive than the cost of providing free government services to tens of millions of immigrants. Third, as the success of Operation Wetback and the long period of restricted immigration proves, it is not necessary to institute a police state in order to methodically return immigrants to their homes in a civilized manner. Indeed, American society was far more free prior to the opening of its borders.

Fourth and finally, it is eminently stupid to assume that immigrants will be transformed to value American ideals, as the course of history demonstrates that immigrants instead tend to transform the nations to which they migrate, usually not for the better. Indeed, it is not an accident that the architect of the 1986 Immigration Act that led to the present problems was engineered by a fourth-generation Irish immigrant named Kennedy,

In support of free trade

If you can’t trust Obama’s top economic adviser, who can you trust?

The U.S. economy is not facing a double-dip recession, but weak job growth is “a call to arms” for policymakers to take steps to reinvigorate the private sector, a top White House adviser said on Friday.

“This is not a double dip,” Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Austan Goolsbee told Reuters Insider after the government report showed the economy created only 18,000 jobs in June. “This is a reflection and reiteration that the growth rate slowed at the beginning of this year. This should be a call to action,” he added. “We need to take bipartisan action to help the private sector stand up and start growing, hiring and investing,” Goolsbee said.

He cited steps from passing free trade agreements to securing a deal on long-term deficit reduction.

So, the USA is not presently in an economic contraction, it is not facing one, and free trade boosts economic growth and jobs. I’m curious to know how many free traders don’t find support from this corner to be just a little worrisome.

The inevitable drift left

On a scale of one to ten, how surprised are you that David Frum has had a sudden change of heart with regards to homogamy now that New York has legalized it? I’d say minus four. About the only thing less surprising will be Obama’s new position on the topic once he doesn’t have to run for office anymore.

I was a strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Fourteen years ago, Andrew Sullivan and I forcefully debated the issue at length online (at a time when online debate was a brand new thing). Yet I find myself strangely untroubled by New York state’s vote to authorize same-sex marriage — a vote that probably signals that most of “blue” states will follow within the next 10 years.

I don’t think I’m alone in my reaction either. Most conservatives have reacted with calm — if not outright approval — to New York’s dramatic decision.

Frum illustrates what today’s “conservative” opinion “leaders” do. They do their best to march in front of the mainstream media parade in an attempt to appear they’re leading it. What will be amusing is Frum’s desperate attempt to have another change of heart once he realizes that the buying off of a few Republican senators is not the political sea change that he is reading.

Since all politics ebb and flow over time, it can be amusing to watch how the pragmatists’ positions float along with them.

Preemptive surrender

The Senate Republicans wave the white flag:

There has to be another way, and there is. Republicans in the Senate are united in our concern about our nation’s fiscal future. Before we consider saddling our children with even more debt, we must enact significant spending cuts and enforceable caps on future spending. For the long term, to prevent both this Congress and its successors from hijacking the promise of American prosperity, we also need a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution, like the one we and all 47 Senate Republicans have introduced.

Translation: we must surrender before we are defeated. The morbidly amusing thing is that Senator DeMint is outright telling Americans that Republicans fully intend to “saddle our children with even more debt”, but the good news is that first they are going to promise to spend less money 10 years from now. Again. And as a bonus, they will pass an amendment that will no doubt be as respected by future Congresses as the 2nd Amendment presently is.

No Republican who votes to raise the debt ceiling, for any reason, merits a vote in November.

Mailvox: it’s raciss!

Huey Freeman staunchly defends the peaceful, law-abiding non-Asian minoritiesmajority in Milwaukee:

I wonder why he doesn’t post on the fact the crime rate is on the decline since 2006?

Vox is cherry picking by pointing out how whites are not the minority anymore than bringing up one single incident where a bunch of blacks jump some whites, while completely ignoring the fact that the crime rate went down. I don’t know what story vd is attempting to paint, but it seems to me hes is trying say that when whites are no longer in the majority, things like the above will become more and more common, while completely ignoring the fact that the official crime rate has gone down in the past couple years which undermines what he’s trying to say (again, assuming that is what he was attempting to convey). I’m sure if he expended his energy into proper research instead of wasting it using sophist rhetoric in poor attempts to hide his racism he would’ve done a simple google search for the official crime rate.

The reason I didn’t bother to respond to Huey’s inept defense of riotous, but law-abiding African youths is that, as anyone who bothered to read his link would have immediately recognized, the statistics do not disprove my contention that Vibrant America will increasingly bear more similarity to the nations that are providing the vibrancy than they do to historical Western America. But since he kept returning to the point, I will point out the errors of his statement.

Presumably due to his low IQ, Huey claimed that the Milwaukee crime rate had fallen from 2006. But this is only true if one looks at 2006 and 2009; the crime rate actually rose from 2006 to an all-time high in 2007, then abruptly fell 20% in two years. (Upon further research, 23% in three years.) Moreover, there is no discernible trend; the crime rate fell 25% from 1999 to 2004, then rose 44% from 2004 to 2007, then fell 23% again. Note, however, that while overall crime is generally down, assault – which is exactly the sort of crime involving “where a bunch of blacks jump some whites” – has risen 21% since 1999; it was up 67% as recently as 2007.

During that time, the African population has gone from 36.9% to 40% of the population. The European population has gone from 45.4% to 37%. And the Hispanic population has risen from 12% to 17%. Huey’s second error is that he failed to notice that the demographic figures from the article are from the 2010 census and are therefore newer and more accurate than the pre-census statistics he cites from 2009. In other words, he is wrong and whites are no longer the majority in Milwaukee.

However, it should be kept in mind that it is not necessarily pure demographics that matter with regards to crime, but also the demographics of the power structure. For example, South Africa had a fairly similar population mix during the white-ruled Apartheid years that it does now, but its violent crime rate has risen dramatically since the end of Apartheid in 1994.

It is true that total crime in Milwaukee has continued to drop, at least according to the official statistics. “Total violent crime was down 7.1 percent in 2010 from 2009, and decreased 23.1 percent since 2007.” The problem is that, as was reported in the article I linked, it appears that this decline may be attributable to the police refusing to take statements or report crimes. If a mass assault by dozens of African “youths” and multiple thefts show up in the headlines, but not in the police reports, then it is readily apparent that the crime rates not only have no discernible pattern related to racial demographics, but are entirely unreliable. The incredible decline in assault in only two years tends to support the anecdotal evidence suggesting the apparent improvement in crime rates is primarily the result of intentional police under-reporting.

The fact is that it doesn’t matter if you want to describe a hypothesis as vibrant, Correct, or raciss, it will nevertheless be supported or falsified by subsequent events. In this case, we can simply wait and see what happens as Milwaukee becomes increasingly vibrant. If Huey is correct, it will not become less law-abiding and more violent. If I am correct, it will, and Huey will forced to be concede that the “raciss” perspective is, in fact, the correct one. I am not the least bit bothered by insinuations or even direct accusations of racism because I recognize that the objective facts are simply what they are. My like or dislike for any individual, of any genetic type, does not determine Asian IQ ranges, African homicide rates or Arab predilections for rape. They are what they observably are.

The tragedy of the multicultural debacle is that while it is incorrect to prejudge any individual by his genetic makeup, it is absolutely correct to make macrosocietal judgments about groups of people on that basis. This is why one can empathize with the individual man who wishes to move to the suburbs to help his family escape the ghetto while simultaneously recognizing that the man’s rational action will likely bring about the eventual destruction of the very haven he seeks.

Sam Harris once told me that it is tribalism, not faith, that is the cause of conflict. But our tribalism is bred into our very DNA, and cannot be eradicated through any amount of Correct thinking and reality denial. There are only three possible solutions to the problem, each rife with its own terrible costs. The problem is that most people incline towards one solution or another without any understanding of what those costs entail.

The Amalgamation solution, favored by Arthur C. Clarke and other SF fans, will necessarily involve the eventual subsumption and elimination of every historical nationality and tradition and reduce humanity to its lowest common denominator. It is the world of Idiocracy. It is, I would argue, the least likely outcome and the worst for humanity as a whole, as it is the only one that would appear to risk humanity’s survival as a species. Another way to look at it, you see, is a low-IQ world with inherited nukes.

The Separation solution will necessarily involve a tremendous amount of disruption and bloodshed, as the elite of the less-favored groups will actively resist being sentenced to live among their own. But, as China, Japan and other relatively homogeneous countries have shown, this is ultimately the most stable, least violent solution.

And finally, the Elimination solution, which is the one that totalitarian governments usually resort to in the end. This is Stalin and Mao on a scale that is an order of magnitude higher. It may sound unthinkable, but history shows that it is the most probable one. There is no reason to think that the fascists of the EU will be any more merciful to the Africans and Arabs in their midst than the Turks were to the Armenians, the Poles were to the Germans, or the Zimbabweans were to the European Rhodesians.

The Correct view of different but mixed and vibrant is simply not a long-term option. Even the Czechs and Slovaks couldn’t make it work. So, in this case, that which is simply will not be tomorrow.