Some 4,900 years ago, during the Copper Age, a group of humans constructed a formidable fortress on a hill in what is now the Spanish city of Almendralejo in Badajoz province. This stronghold was protected by three concentric walls, 25 bastions or semicircular towers, and three deep ditches measuring up to four meters wide and two meters deep. Spanning 13,000 square meters, the complex featured robust stone and adobe walls, with a single entrance just 70 centimeters wide — designed to make it virtually impregnable.
Yet, despite its formidable defenses, the fortress was ultimately destroyed, burned, and razed by enemies, then abandoned 400 years after its construction. . . . Archaeologists have found evidence that Cortijo Lobato suffered “a widespread fire that affected key areas of the settlement. One of the strongest indications that this was an intentional act is the burning of wooden doors embedded in the adobe walls. These doors were far from other flammable materials, which suggests that the fire was not accidental, but rather the result of an assault on the fortification — a scene of violence and destruction in which the settlement was attacked, its defenses breached, and the structure ultimately set ablaze.” Among the remains, researchers uncovered numerous arrowheads.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
A Copper Age Fortress Unearthed in Spain
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Antisemitism Rising among Young People in the US
Multiple polls lately have said that young Americans are more antisemitic than older Americans. Young conservatives are somewhat more antisemitic than liberals, but the dramatic difference is by age.
Some possible explanations:
- Is the online antisemitism I consider rather silly actually having a huge impact?
- Is it largely about the changing status of Israel, from small, threatened nation to powerful bully?
- Is it anti-globalism, anti-international finance attitudes?
Other thoughts?
Jason Furman on "Bideneconomics"
Serious analysis of economic mistakes by the Biden administration, at Foreign Affairs but free for now.
Basically, Jason Furman argues that overspending led to inflation, and trying to pre-empt market choices about what to manufacture etc. led to monstrous inefficiencies:
Biden arrived in office in 2021 with what he understood as an economic mandate to “Build Back Better.” The United States had not yet fully reopened after nearly a year of restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had suppressed activity in the service sector. Biden set out to restructure the country’s post-pandemic economy based on a muscular new approach to governing. Since the 1990s, Democratic economic policy had largely been shaped by a technocratic approach, derided by its critics as “neoliberalism,” that included respect for markets, enthusiasm for trade liberalization and expanded social welfare protections, and an aversion to industrial policy. By contrast, the Biden team expressed much more ambition: to spend more, to do more to reshape particular industries, and to rely less on market mechanisms to deal with problems such as climate change. Thus, the administration set out to bring back vigorous government involvement across the economy, including in such areas as public investment, antitrust enforcement, and worker protections; revive large-scale industrial policy; and support enormous injections of direct economic stimulus, even if it entailed unprecedented deficits. The administration eventually came to dub this approach “Bidenomics.”
Biden’s advisers and some prominent economists proclaimed that the Build Back Better agenda would herald the beginning of a post-neoliberal era in which massive public investment in infrastructure and the domestic economy would better position the country for inclusive growth and the clean energy future. In their view, they were turning the page on the economic policies pursued by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, which the Biden team implicitly argued were too focused on free trade, too timid on deficit spending, and too reliant on the welfare state to fix the gaps left as a result. Instead, in order to gain an edge in the competition with China, the United States needed a transformative agenda to revive domestic manufacturing and power the transition to green energy. . . .
Ultimately, the administration’s plans to transform the United States would be waylaid by a punishing bout of inflation.
All my leftish friends hate to be told that we can't do better than capitalism. They and I generally agree that capitalism is pretty good for most folks but bad for many; the difference is that they think we could do much better but I am skeptical. The same goes for Trump and other economic nationalists; they think we could do much better for Americans by telling the rest of the world to go to hell, but I doubt it.
All attempts to tinker with the market machine have risks. I think some of the risks we have taken have turned out very well, for example the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. We can, and are, accelerating the move away from a fossil-fuel based energy system. But so far as I can tell we do not know how to do the thing many on both the left and the right want: to create an economy that does better by ordinary workers rather than enriching global capitalists, and that leaves most families feeling less economically stretched. We do know a few things that could help, like building a lot more housing, but all of those things also come with costs; in the case of building housing, it means changing neighborhoods in ways the existing residents hate, or bulldozing green spaces to build on; making traffic worse for everyone; bringing in immigrants to do the work; and enriching sleazy developers. I think national health insurance would be great, along with an expanded national retirement system. Politicians in Denmark and Norway often say the the existence of the strong social safety net is part of what makes their citizens free, since they can change jobs or start their own businesses without worrying about that stuff. But to implement those things in the US would mean raising taxes a lot, and nobody has been able to get Americans to agree to that.
If our problems were easy to solve, we would have solved them by now. We have not solved them because they are hard. I give Biden and his allies credit for trying, but the result was massive inflation and a second term for Donald Trump.
Addendum
Interesting thought from Matt Yglesias, who notes that Biden's attempt to blame higher prices on business failed: "We just had a live trial during the Biden years of the theory that being more hostile to business would rally working class voters to the Dem banner and it clearly didn’t work."
Sunday, February 9, 2025
Antilogies
From a weird little book by John Train, words and phrases that can mean their opposites:
Bag: capture or discard.
Horned: having horns, or having had the horns removed.
Cleave: chop apart or stick together.
Let him have it: give in to him, or kill him.
Apparent: clearly so, or illusory
Dust: as a verb, can mean either to remove dust or put it on, as in cooking
Fast: moving quickly or not moving
Trim: cut down, or embellish
Temper: harden or soften
Oversight: supervision or failure of supervision
Friday, February 7, 2025
Links 7 February 2025
Freaky, depressing essay about the AI dominated future.
The founders of the Luddite Club, an anti-smartphone, anti-social media group of teenagers from NYC, are in college now, some still spreading their message and others back in the social media world. (NY Times) One complains that she has to carry a smartphone because all the university's systems use two-factor authentication.
Serious look from Perun at what the recently revealed Chinese warplanes might be and where they might fit in China's overall military planning and global military competition, 1-hour video.
Highly regarded translator Damion Searls has a new book called The Philosophy of Translation, and translator Lily Meyer has an interesting review. Meyer says the book "is a meditation on what it means to read like a translator, which means, really, that it’s an ode to close reading." I still read some online stuff in German and French because I am fascinated by the mental exercise of reading through the dark glass of another language.
New study identifies the first speakers of the Indo-European languages as those living along the "Caucacus-Lower Volga Cline", or the CLV people. (Abstract at Nature, popular summary) This is essentially what the blogger Davidski has been saying for a couple of years. One of the big remaining questions is whether the speakers of early Anatolian Indo-European languages, like the Hittites, entered Anatolia from the east or the west.
What is "ordo amoris?"
Review of a new book on the color pink. I find pink interesting because light blue looks to me like light blue, and light green looks like light green, but pink does not look to me like light red. Especially in the shocking variety it looks to me like a completely different color. Is this just because I grew up calling it by its own name?
Spitalfields Life tours the old Smithfield market and the surrounding streets, with a brief history of the market.
Scientists are working on a strontium map of Africa to help determine the origin of enslaved people brought to the Americas. I still think archaeologists put too much faith in strontium, which is a great clue but not as certain a market as some people seem to think.
Paleontologists have found a bona fide waterfowl with fully modern bird anatomy that predates the Cretaceous mass extinction, which appears to settle an old argument about whether modern birds shared the planet with dinosaurs.
Alex Tabarrok, Three Simple Principles of Trade Policy.
Katherine Rundell on the importance of children's books.
The obscure question of where Thomas More was born, which some modern Brits seem to care a lot about. Here's a piece of advice for navigating the world of thought: learn to enjoy saying "I don't know."
Scott Siskind and friends will tell you who the latest Trump medical appointments are, along with a few issues they hope each might work on.
Tyler Cowen on the costs and benefits of USAID. My personal view is that for an agency created as a soft weapon in the Cold War, it has done a fair amount of good. But I consider that western aid to poor countries is a complicated topic, and that there are lots of costs, viz., the African textile industry being ravaged by donated clothes. I read a major study a few years ago which concluded that if you exclude the single case of South Korea, US aid strongly correlates with worse economic outcomes in the countries we are trying to help. Partly because so much of it goes to the American people and institutions that handle it, and also because corrupt leaders steal so much of it: "This paper documents that aid disbursements to highly aid-dependent countries coincide with sharp increases in bank deposits in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management, but not in other financial centers."
Sunday, February 2, 2025
Romanico Aragones
Many wonders. Sorry the images are so small, but I have never seen most of these before, so I still marvel at the riches I have found.
The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Cold
His personality is very much like a yellow Lab, since he thinks the whole world is his best friend and all the people and dogs in it want nothing but to play with him all the time. But he kind of sucks as a retriever; he will run and get a ball or stick but he would rather play keep-away than bring it back to you.
Kidu does not have very thick fur, and no fat at all anywhere. So when the weather turned very cold last month I wondered how he would react. We had little cold weather last year, and nothing like the week of single digit nights we recently endured. Stepping out into the pre-dawn dimness at 6 degrees (-15 C), I thought maybe he would walk fifty yards and then want to turn around and come back.
Not a bit. So far as I can tell, he does not in any way notice the cold. He has this way of looking at me when I put on my boots and gloves and heavy coat that seems to say, "How did I end up in a family of such pussies? Let's just go!" And so we go, and he runs and plays like usual. One day while walking in the neighborhood we passed a Husky with its thick coat all puffed up against the cold, and I marveled at the contrast between them. That, I thought, is what a dog bred for living in the cold looks like.
Kidu, of course, just cursed the leash that kept him from running over to play with this stranger.
I should note that Kidu does not sleep outside, so he never experiences cold air except when he is active. And as a description of Kidu in the woods, "active" is a monument to understatement. His manic charging from place to place must burn calories at a staggering rate, and I imagine that is why he is so thin despite being fed half again the recommended amount for his weight.
If I want to skip the early morning romp in the woods because of the cold, that is entirely on me; I will get no support from the dog, only contempt that a man in several layers of clothing wouldn't want to face temperature that he cheerfully blasts into wearing nothing but his thin fur and burning desire to run free.
Friday, January 31, 2025
Bernard Cornwell, "The Last Kingdom"
The known facts of history can only get you so far toward understanding it. If you are interested in, say, the Vikings in Britain, what evidence can you find? You have contemporary writtern sources like saints' lives and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a small body of Old English poetry. You have a larger body of Norse verse and prose that purports to describe this period, but most of it was written down centuries later. You have artifacts like swords, cooking pots, and jeweled reliquaries. But for me, at least, these words and things do not build a complete picture. For that, you must imagine. You must leap beyond the words and things to create in your mind a vanished world, calling up all that you know of this time and other times and what you think you know about humanity and the world, filling in the outlines drawn by what you can learn with what you feel must be true.
Which is why I believe there is a role for historical fiction in understanding history. If you ask me what was life like at the court of Henry VIII, my first recommendation would be Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. If you want to understand the strange Viking colony on Greenland, I suggest starting with Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders. And if you want to understand Viking Britain, my new choice is Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom (2004). Cornwell is not factually perfect, but to me this book both conveys the life of a noble warrior in that age better than any non-fiction work I know, and it offers a clear explanation of both why the Danes were victorious in so many battles and why they ultimately failed to hold onto what they conquered.
(The Last Kingdom has been adapted for television, but I have never seen it.)
The Last Kingdom has some problems as a novel: the plot feels contrived, some of the characters are unconvincing, and it might be the most masculine book I have ever read, with women appearing only as sex objects or strange, fey creatures beyond masculine ken. But some things about it are wonderful. The battle scenes are among the best I have read, drawing on the vocabulary of Norse and Old English poetry to convey the horror of the shield wall and the feelings of the men who stood face to face with their enemies and died or killed. On the model of Homer, Cornwell uses familiar imagery drawn from nature or home life to invoke the strange, brutal world of battle. And as I just hinted, Cornwell has delved deep into the lore of war to explain the Vikings, who were so often triumphant in battle against enemies with more men and more money but ultimately failed to hold onto their conquests.
The narrator of The Last Kingdom is a Saxon nobleman whose father was killed by the Danes when he was young, and so ended up being taken in by a Danish warlord and raised as a cross between a hostage and a foster son. He comes to admire the Danes and to love their company; they are brave and free, taking what they want by force, loyal to their friends and lords but deadly to their enemies. They seek joy in life and feel no shame in loving sex, drink, and war. Their great enemy King Alfred of Wessex, on the other hand, is surrounded by monks and prays for hours every day to be freed of sin, and Christmas at his court is a dismal affair of fasting and prayer, nothing like the drunken revelry of Danish Yule. But as the narrator passes back and forth between the two sides of this war, he comes to understand that while the Danes are close to invincible in battle, they have no plan for winning this war and completing their conquest. It is pious, sickly Alfred who has a plan, and the resources to back it up.
If you are interested in this period, or in how warriors felt and thought about war in a warrior age, I highly recommend this book. It might not be right, but to get to the heart of most things you must make a leap across the chasm of what we do not and maybe cannot know. This leap lands very well indeed.
Glory in battle!
The fight was near, the time had come
when men who were fated should fall on the field.
A great warcry arose, the ravens wheeled,
the eagle was eager for corpses; there was clamor on the earth.
– The Battle of Maldon, c. AD 991
The best summary of my thoughts on the Viking phenomenon is probably this post on the Berserks.
Beaver Ponds and Other Things in the Woods
Views of the dam. This is an old dam; you can see it on aerial photos from 15 years ago, and notice the willow trees growing out of it. So several generations of beavers have lived here.
Startled ducks flying up from the pond.
Links 31 January, 2025
Tyler Cowen likes to ask British economists, "why is northern England poor?" Tom Forth has an answer for him.
Big push among MAGA folks right now to out universities and non-profits for blatantly pushing to hire minorities. Remember that under past Supreme Court rulings it was ok to make minority status a factor in hiring, but except when past discrimination had been proved it was illegal to set quotas or set aside certain positions for minority candidates. I see lots of lawsuits and big money settlements coming.
Large language models are mostly moderate democrats. (Twitter/X) Moderate Democrat Matt Yglesias says this proves they are already smarter than most people.
Oz Katerji, "Hope Won in Syria," free for now at Foreign Affairs. Katerji: "As a war journalist, I have never reported on a good news story in my entire 15 year career, until now." Thinking it over, the wars of the past 15 years have mostly been dismal and inconclusive.
Make Sunsets is a private venture dedicated to cooling the earth by spreading sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere: company web site, news story.
Here's an academic paper that seems related in key ways to the current American situation: Falling racial inequality and rising educational inequality in US prison admissions for drug, violent, and property crimes. The paper claims that educational inequality (the gap between the college educated and others) is now much greater than racial inequality. If you wanted to put a positive spin on Steve Bannon-style populist nationalism, you could say that they are desperately worried about the collapse of morals, self-discipline, and economic prospects among working class Americans and they believe that importing foreigners to keep the economy booming is just going to shove those people farther out onto the margins.
Italian archaeologists uncover the footprints of people who were fleeing a volcanic eruption ca. 2000 BC.
In eastern Kentucky, there's a plan to move people from flood-prone valleys to the only other flat ground available: old mountain-top removal coal mines. (NY Times)
A weird argument that advice has become useless to us because we are too wrapped up in our own thought worlds. The piece takes off from Walter Benjamin's statement that characters in novels are "sealed off from society and tradition." The protaganist is "the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none." I don't think modern people are "sealed off from society and tradition," but I agree that many modern people seem to think they are.
CNN has some new results on the bead-covered Copper Age burials from Montelirio; most post on these finds is here.
A claim that the parts of Germany conquered by the Romans are still different from the parts that weren't. A counter argument might be that they are basically talking about the Rhine valley, and maybe that is just geographically more international and outward-looking than Saxony or Prussia.
A Roman miniature lock made of gold and iron found in Germany, with a detailed view of the mechanism. The Renaissance surge in clock-making is often cited as an important precursor to the industrial revolution, because it created a class of people with mechanical skills that could be applied to making other machines. But it seems to me that the Romans also had a lot of people with mechanical skills; locks and keys were very common in the Empire, and there are occasional hints in the written sources of much more elaborate devices. (Plus the Antikythera mechanism)
The people who have gone "AI Native" and make AI a constant companion of their research, business, and even their pleasure reading. Via Marginal Revolution.
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has offered a $1 million prize for deciphering the Indus Valley script.
Agnes Callard, who has lately been on a crusade against contemporary parenting, now writing against encouraging children to be weird. I agree that this is imposing our own, adult fantasies on children, but then again maybe some degree of weirdness will be essential to success in the AI age.
More on the lost civilizations of the Amazon basin, this time evidence of elablorate irrigation systems for year-round maize cultivation. The long-running argument over whether the pre-Columbian Amazon supported large human populations is now pretty much over, with the "lots of people" faction winning in a rout.
A note on Twitter/X that the current MAGA crowd are praising RFK Jr. for wanting to make school lunches healthier, which is exactly what Michele Obama said back in 2010 only to get savaged by conservatives for being "anti-American." Puzzling world.
The history of Devil's Island.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was a French philosopher who founded a school of thought he called Positivism. He has been mostly ignored over the past century, but in the later 1800s he was hugely influential. This was especially true around the periphery of European civilization, such as in Latin America (Brazil has a Positivist motto on their flag) and in Turkey, where the "Young Turks" who created the new, secular state after World War I were big fans.
Comte was a mathematician and something of a scientist, but Positivism is not a philosophy of science. It purports to be a philosophy of everything. Comte laid out the stages of human civilization and the corresponding stages of human understanding, (animism = primitive, monotheism = medieval, etc.), provided a biological basic for morality, developed lists of the things needed for human happiness, even tried to produce a scientifc model of romance.
But mainly Positivism is a philosophy of society and governance. Comte was obsessed with the question of how societies could be run, since the Revolution had swept away everything that depended on God or inherent respect for royal or aristocratic authority. Comte posited that: 1) science (broadly defined) is the sum total of human knowledge; 2) therefore, society and government should be remade along scientific lines. His major work was called the Plan for the Scientific Work Necessary to Reorganize Society, otherwise the First System of Positive Polity. He coined the world "sociology" for this new discipline of applying scientific principles to social questions. He thought he had proved that sociology was the culmination of all human thought – since the scientific is the highest stage of knowledge, and human society the most complex and important thing to which we can apply science – and that applying his principles to social questions would lead to human perfection.
Later in life Comte changed gears and decided that his newly remade society needed religion. Since all god-based religions had been smashed by science, the new religion had to be based on real things, in particular science and human nature. Many people who had admired Comte's early work (such as John Stuart Mill) thought he had gone mad and denounced this turn toward scientific spiritualism, but the new humanistic faith did gain tens of thousands of followers. Later in life he really did go mad, and he died before he turned 60, leaving behind notes for several unfinished books.
It is hard for a 21st-century person to take Comte seriously, but it is also hard for us to refute his basic principles. If you agree that science is our most impressive system of knowledge, and that we should organize our society along the lines that will most promote human happiness, what's not to like?He does not seem to me a malicious man, but he does seem to have lost a sense of proportion. Yet that is perhaps a tragic result of making a Faustian bargain. Those people in the western tradition who are really under the misapprehension that they have the capacity to unify all of knowledge and to account for all previous logical and historical developments leading up to them have made a pact with the devil. It is literally insane to believe that you can do that. And to attempt to do it is in some ways noble and heroic in the Greek sense, in the sense that it is full of hubris and there is a certain sort of sin or pride in that, and at the same kind there is a kind of tragic nobility to it. He is trying to do more than anyone could possibly do. He has constructed a cold and austere and harsh Cartesian universe, and at the same time he longs for a sort of Pascalian moral order, and the problem is that the human mind just isn’t big enough to do that. So you see him in a kind of tug of war between his desire for moral order and his desire for logical clarity and the problem is that he pulls so hard in this tug of war that the rope snaps, and alas we have here a tragic, Faustian figure who might have been a great man intellectually but never realized his tremendous potential because of his unfortunate lapse into madness.
Good article on Comte at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Friday, January 24, 2025
Links 24 January 2025
Emvolon, a new company founded by two MIT grads, says their technology can affordably convert methane from dispersed sources such as dumps, farms, and sewage treatment plants into methanol for industrial use. (Company web site, Engine Ventures, news story)
AI can predict human brain states five seconds into the future (Twitter/X) Tyler Cowen says this makes determinism more likely, but I think almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable.
Mass sacrifice of animals within the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.
The amazing enameled chest of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri (ca. 1160-1227).
A report that Vietnam is pursuing radical reforms aimed at greatly shrinking the government.
Suicide note of AI leader Felix Hill, who took Ketamine to deal with minor mental health issues, went psychotic, had to be hospitalized, and emerged with a horrible depression he was unable to shake. "Ketamine, and the consequent psychosis, converted me from someone who has learned to live with depression on-the-whole pretty successfully to someone who is dead." Summary from Scott Siskind in his monthly links post. One of the weaknesses of the Rationalist movement is that their emphasis on thinking for themselves leaves these guys feeling qualified to prescribe drugs based on their own research. Like Felix Hill. In the same post, Siskind wonders if Elon Musk's personality change has to do with his own Ketamine use, or else steroids.
Tyler Cowen takes an economic approach to The Odyssey.
A tour of Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of London, constructed in 1739.
From the geography blog at the Library of Congress, maps and other documents from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
As they marched from Boston to Yorktown, the cartographers of Rochambeau's French legion made a map of every camp, including the ones at Philadelphia and Baltimore, giving us a set of 46 wonderful maps of America in 1781. Description here.
The fastest-growing major metropolitian area in the Americas is Toronto.
Alex Tabarrok attacks Curtis Yarvin's authoritarianism from a different angle than I did, emphasizing that capitalism works because of the market, not because individual firms have strong leaders. And it only works because we let firms fail, which is not how we usually treat nations.
The DOGE account on Twitter/X complains about the cost of pennies. If Musk can abolish the penny, that would be an achievement worth celebrating.
Richard Hanania reviews Trump's Day 1 Executive Orders. I may write something soon on Trump's ambition to end NEPA review of energy projects, a topic I know something about. I agree that NEPA is now being implemented in ways the people who voted for the law did not imagine, and I would like to see it cut back. Also, I think it is crazy that solar energy projects are regularly delayed so their environmental impact can be assessed; if climate change is a real concern, as everyone I know involved in the NEPA process agrees, then the environmental benefit of solar projects is always going to be positive and requiring them to go through NEPA is stupid.
The current vogue for online influencers reading classic novels. Via Marginal Revolution. As I said a while back, I think in some ways we have reached peak internet and we are going to see a lot more of people turning away from the social media whirl, at least in small doses.
Biologists think they know why mantas and other rays have such long tails: they are sensory organs. (NY Times, phys.org, original paper)
Noah Smith on the Trump and Melania memecoins.
At the Millersville Normal School, the (female) students who broke the rules had to produce hand-written notes to the administrators explaining their sins. JSTOR Daily has a collection.
Classical scrap yard full of statue fragments excavated in Turkey.
How one German intellectual thought about the Little Ice Age, a mixture of Christian apolalypticism and hermetic philosophy.
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Curtis Yarvin, Still Wrapped Up in Monarchist Fantasies
The NY Times interviews Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, who thinks democracy has "failed."
He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
He sees his role as "demystifying," by which he means that most people have an irrational reverence for democracy that they would shed if they thought harder. He defends his view like this:
It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.
No, you're not. I was going to write a response, but I discovered that "Hadur," a commenter on Marginal Revolution, already did it for me:
I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930's were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades.
The result? For a while they owned the libs but eventually their countries just stagnated. Badly. To stay in power, Franco and Salazar had to systematically defang any organization that could in theory threaten their rule. Yes this meant left-wing universities and pro-democracy groups, but it also meant the church, the military, etc. Salazar in particular tried to strip these of power and resources so they could never threaten his rule. A damning incident in the Franco biography was that near the end of Franco's rule his Prime Minister was assassinated by Basques and Franco couldn't find a replacement for him. A country of tens of millions of people and nobody qualified to be PM. That's what decades of suppressing the production of new elites does. To a dictator, any young ambitious person is a potential threat and must not be allowed to blossom too much.
Democracy has many flaws but having rival teams of elites is something you don't appreciate until you lose it.
It's the "rival teams of elites" that Yarvin misses. I agree that populist democracy, which I would define as the belief that elites have no special knowledge and "expertise" is a pretext for taking power from the people, is a disaster. But that is not what we have; our system has a huge role for elites and experts.
Yarvin calls himself a "historian," but as I already complained on this blog he knows nothing about history. He grabs the odd fact or statement, cites them entirely out of context, and then pretends to have done history. He might have noticed that all his questions about democracy vs. elite rule were fought over throughout the 1700s and 1800s by people who did not have any kind of special reverence for democracy. Including the founders of the American Republic; I suggest the Federalist Papers as a good place to start reading some serious discussion of how to set up a government that respects both popular will and elite expertise. But there were similar debates in Britain and France at least, and I assume other European countries. These are hard problems. But so far as I can see, Yarvin has nothing to say about them.
Here is the question I would ask Yarvin: "Can you name a dictatorship where life is better than in the US or the European democracies?"
I can't. I certainly don't think that representative democracy in either the Parliamentary or Presidential form is always the best system for everyone. In some parts of the world it has failed disastrously. Some Asian countries, such as Singapore and post-WW II Japan, got good results using a one-party pseudo-democracy. But on the whole the record of modern democracy is just far better than anything else, and only a deluded fool could believe otherwise.
Monday, January 20, 2025
Imaginary Architecture of the Revolutionary Age
Delightful essay by Hugh Aldersen-Williams on the unbuilt fantasies of French architecture in the revolutionary period, at Public Domain Review. Aldersen-Williams focuses on the work of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, two dreamers who must have been very frustrated that the work they actually built fell so far short of what they imagined. Above, exterior and cross-section of Boullée’s famous design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784. This would have been enormous; those are mature trees growing on othe terraces.
Saturday, January 18, 2025
The Almost Unbelievable Weirdness of Life with Alice Munro
When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, the committe wrote,
You, dear Alice Munro, like few others, have come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart.
Munro became a famous author because of her relentless interrogation of emotion, and especially the ambivalence of emotion. In her stories there is no pure feeling. Every emotion is undercut by contrary emotions, every pleasant moment shadowed by dark thoughts. Munro was often considered a sort of hero by other female writers, and some felt that Munro's Nobel was a validation of their own work, because their obsessions were the same as Munro's. One said,
We had won something, too, because of the generosity, the frank respect for the smallest and largest aspects of the female experience that she bequeathed to us all in her stories.
To Munro's biggest admirers, she captured better than any other writer the experience of women's lives in our age. Or, at least, sensitive, educated, middle-class women's lives. Which are, an outsider must suppose, all on fire with emotional ambivalence and weighed down with the toll it takes. Motherhood, in particular, came often into the range of Munro's artillery, and her mothers always resent their children nearly as much as they love them. She was equally ambivalent about romance. The men in her stories always pose a threat to the women, sometimes a direct physical threat but more often a more metaphorical one, to their emotional independence or their sense that they are capable of living alone. A man who does not pose some kind of emotional threat, it seems, was of no interest to Munro or the fictional women she imagined. Other fodder included the attitudes of children toward their parents at every stage of their lives, of friends toward each other, of people toward their home towns, and so on.
Lots of people wrote about Munro's family when the news broke last year that she had stuck with her second husband, Gerry, after learning that he abused her younger daughter, Andrea. Those stories were all rushed and vague and not very interesting, and I mostly ignored them. But now Rachel Aviv has written (for The New Yorker) a chronicle of Alice Munro's family life that is among the most amazing things I have ever read. The Munro clan, it turns out, were a whole tribe of over-thinking, over-analyzing people who wrote and talked constantly about their weird family. Aviv also makes plain how much of Munro's fiction was drawn directly from her family life. Between the stories, the letters, the interviews, and everything else we have a breathtakingly detailed record of their lives.
To me the strangest part of the story is that Munro's children and husbands all understood perfectly well that she constantly translated her every experience to fiction. Anything they said or did was likely to end up in a story, sometimes altered but often not changed at all. As one of the daughters put in (in one of those many interviews), her mother was "putting every difficulty in her life through that machine that turned things into gold." Once she read her daughter's private journal and put those thoughts into a character's head – typical of the family that the daughter said, in another interview, "I thought my version was better." One of the children once described being on a family outing and noticing that her mother's lips were moving as she composed a story about their day.
When Alice introduced Gerry to the family, she noticed that her daughters responded differently to him. Of course, she put this in a story; "Roberta" stands in for Alice and "George" for Gerry:
Although Roberta's older daughter can't stand George, the younger one – "an acrobat, a parodist, an optimist, a disturber" – seems to have a special connection with him. "I know how be jokey," she says. "I understand him." Roberta shivers at this remark: "It seems to her that she has instructed them, by example, that he is to be accommodated, his silences respected, his joking responded to. What if he should turn, within this safety, and deal them a memorable blow? If it happened, it would be she who would have betrayed them."
This was years before Gerry abused that younger daughter. Did Alice see it all unfolding in those first weeks? It would not surprise me that she at least imagined it, nor that if she had that would not have led her to renounce Gerry.
When she discovered that her husband had sexually abused her daughter, she did not throw him out; instead, she used the incident and the emotions it inspired as fodder for at least three stories:
When Andrea was about eleven, Alice told Jenny that she was troubled by an interaction she'd witnessed between Gerry and Andrea in the back yard. "She said that Gerry was using a hose, like he was pissing, and Andrea was laughing, and she would grab the hose and do it, too," Jenny said. "And it just seemed off. It seemed wrong."
In "Soon," published more than twenty years later, a woman named Juliet dreams that, when she looks out her window, she sees her father and a girl playing with a hose. She can see that her father "held the hose low, in front of his body, and that it was only the nozzle of it that he turned back and forth. The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind the curls through the narrowest paggages of your blood."
So Munro hoarded that troubling memory and, when she fully understood what was behind it, put it through the story machine. Around this time she conceived the notion that Gerry was responsible for an unsolved rape/murder case in their town, and wrote a story in which a man very much like her husband commits the killing. (The police say he can't have done it.)
(The abuse of Andrea, as recounted by Aviv, involved lots of inappropriate play, some exposure, and a bit of masturbation, but no penetration; when Andrea reported it to the police, years later, and Gerry confessed, the courts did not take it very seriously and Gerry got two years' probation. I didn't find it shocking. But of course one of the things about child abuse is that the impact on the child varies hugely and many have been undone by acts well short of rape.)
The tabloid version of these events is that Alice "stood with" her husband rather than her daughter. That seems to be how Andrea sees it. But others who knew Alice cut her some slack because by that point she was already ill and losing her memory. She and Gerry depended on each other for practical support. They also came from the generation that gave us "sexual liberation"; it was not at all uncommon in the 60s for people to defend sex between adults and children as part of that liberation. Between this moral confusion and the constant psychologizing, it seems to have been hard for Alice to draw any hard lines through the world. She started from the assumption that all men are dangerous, all commitments perilous, and those closest to us who hurt us the most; from that position, how does one decide which acts are unforgivable? Munro's characters struggle over whether to forgive their parents for how they were brought up; she was regularly beaten by her own father, and she wrote a story about a girl who is beaten by her father but then lured back out of her room by her mother offering cookies. Did she forgive her parents? I can't say. All I can say is that she put those beatings into the machine, and out came a story.
In one of her last stories, Munro wrote.
We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.
Friday, January 17, 2025
Links 17 January 2025
Exhibit at the Morgan Library about their first librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, a fascinating character who was also born black but passed for white. (Morgan Library, The New Yorker, wikipedia)
Alex Tabarrok reviews "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin," a documentary about a young man with muscular dystrophy who had an amazing life online.
Zvi takes a detailed look at the first week of congestion pricing in Manhattan.
Sometimes people in the Roman empire poured liquid gypsum over burials; one of these was recently excavated in England.
Documenting the hidden 13th-century murals in Angers Cathedral.
Sex education in the early nineteenth century.
Interview with a scholar of Theodore Adorno, much about why thinkers from the early 20th century were pessimistic (gee I wonder) and what sort of hope they nonetheless retained. I was struck by this: "The norms that we must invoke for the purposes of criticism are as damaged as the damaged world."
Sabine Hossenfelder on Jeff Bezos' space plans, 7 minute video.
Fascinating genetic findings from Britain, where one Iron Age Celtic community seems to have been dominated by a multi-generation female lineage.
The politics of declaring a species "invasive."
Is it true that men don't read?
A history of the concept of entropy, and doubts about it. Lots of big-time physicists don't accept the Second Law.
"Net neutrality" was fought over with millions of words, but Tyler Cowen says its disappearance in the US has hardly been noticed. On the other hand what people worried about was what internet providers would do in secret, so it might be having impacts we can't see; the end of net neutrality could might be one of the reasons we are shown some things on the internet but not others.
Literary critic Joseph Epstein always said his life was too boring to ever write a memoir, but in the end he did write a memoir about his boring life.
Writer Kevin Killian wrote a lot of reviews on Amazon, and they have now been published as a 697-page book.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Lev Grossman, "The Bright Sword"
I enjoyed this book, and was at times delighted by it. Lev Grossman is best known for the "Magician" series, which I did not like at all, but this book is something very different and much more fun.
Imagine taking all the versions of the King Arthur story that you know – the high medieval knightly quests, the late medieval tragedy of Arthur's betrayal and fall, the "historical" Arthur defending post-Roman Britain against the Saxons, The Sword in the Stone, the feminist Arthurian books of the 1970s with Morgan le Fay as the protagonist, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – mashing them up together, and trying to set a story in that world. It's mad, but it worked well enough to hold my interest all the way through.
I especially liked two things about it. First, Grossman has done enough reading to have a real familiarity wth all the Arthurian worlds he invokes, not just the names and narratives but something of the style and attitude, and I very much enjoyed recognizing where all the patches in this quilt came from. Second, I thought Grossman's tone was perfect for a book like this. Mainly it was light, but it was serious enough when it needed to be to convey the wonder and high stakes of the story. Most of the story takes place after Arthur's death, and I felt the characters' struggle to figure out what the new world would be like. Camelot had been, they all recognize, a very special place and time, and they would like to go back to it but know that they cannot.
Quite a few reviewers declared The Bright Sword to be one of the best books of 2024, and I understand why.
Sunday, January 12, 2025
DEI is Power
All the leftists out there who thought DEI policies were a weapon for their side only should pay attention to some recent events. Columbia University fired law professor Katherine Franke, a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights among other causes, because of comments she made to a radio show that had nothing to do with the university. Officially, Franke was fired for "discriminatory harassment in violation of our policies." (NY Times, Inside Higher Ed) The most offensive of her comments seems to have been saying that she had doubts about taking Israeli students right out of military service because they often harassed Arab students.
Various people on Twitter/X have said that this wasn't the real reason, which was, depending on which questionable source you prefer, either desire to crack down on somebody, or second-hand reports of statements by Franke that sound a lot worse than the ones she made on the radio. But it was the alleged "discriminatory harassment" that provided the legal cover for the dismissal.
Columbia's policy in these matters is posted online, so we can consider it. The act is defined like this:
Treating individuals less favorably because of their actual or perceived membership in, or association with, a Protected Class, or having a neutral policy or practice that has a disproportionate and unjustified adverse impact on actual and/or perceived members or associates of one Protected Class more than others, constitutes Discrimination. Discrimination includes treating an individual differently on the basis of their actual or perceived membership in, or association with, a Protected Class in the context of an educational program or activity without a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason so as to deny or limit the ability of the individual to participate in or benefit from Columbia’s services, activities, or privileges.Most of this is pretty standard legal verbiage, and some of the vague-sounding terms have been litigated. But Columbia's policy omits one of the standard items in US sexual harassment law, which is that there has to be a pattern of behavior and you have to request that it stop; only if it then does not stop do you have a harassment case. At Columbia, as happened to Franke, you can be dismissed for a single sentence from just about anywhere, including social media or text messages.
Discriminatory Harassment may include, but is not limited to, the following acts that denigrate or show hostility or aversion toward one or more actual or perceived members or associates of a Protected Class: verbal abuse; epithets or slurs; negative stereotyping (including, but not limited to, stereotypes about how an individual looks, including skin color, physical features, or style of dress that reflects ethnic traditions; a foreign accent; a foreign name, including names commonly associated with a particular shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics; or speaking a foreign language); threatening, intimidating, or hostile acts; denigrating jokes; insulting or obscene comments or gestures; calls for genocide and/or violence; and the display or circulation of written or graphic material in any form, including but not limited to social media.
Here is an interesting wrinkle:
Speech or conduct expressing views regarding a particular country’s policies or practices does not necessarily constitute Discriminatory Harassment based on national origin. However, if harassing speech or conduct that otherwise appears to be based on views about a country’s policies or practices is directed at or infused with discriminatory comments about persons from, or associated with, that country or another country, then it may constitute Discriminatory Harassment.
Under this rule it would be ok to criticize the Israeli government so long as you make absolutely clear you are not attacking all Israelis. Which is just the kind of rule that gets broken all the time in angry confrontations like we just saw over Gaza. My Ukraine war feed is full of statements about "Russians" that I am sure violate this policy.
There is much language in the policy about creating a Hostile Environment, which
can be created by unwelcome conduct that, considering the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from any of the University’s educational programs or activities.
We have seen cases in recent years in which students claimed to have been made so upset that they couldn't study by a whole range of things, including, famously, the appearance at Brown of a speaker who denied the existence of "rape culture." If Jewish students say that the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus makes it impossible for them to study, do they have a case? Could a pro-Palestinian student make the same argument about a Jewish student wearing a provocative button or T-shirt? (Like, "Genesis 12:7")
Who decides which speech acts violate this policy? As the firing of Franke shows, the President and Board decide. Without any kind of public hearing or any of that weak stuff. If they decide to get rid of anyone who has ever waded into a political controversy, they can probably find a reason under the "discriminatory harassment" policy.
If you want freedom of speech, you need to stand for everyone's freedom to speak. Whatever limits you accept on your enemies will eventually be used on you.