Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2018

Many Americans feel that the elites have “betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

ESR on the fraught subject of US immigration policy:

Crime is a real issue. Legal immigrants have a slightly higher criminal propensity than the native born (the difference is small enough that its significance is disputed) but illegals’ propensity is much higher, to the point that 22% of all incarcerees are illegals (that’s 92% of all jailed immigrants).

But the elephant in the room is the impact of illegal immigration on social trust.

Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.

The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration.

We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already (later in this post it will become obvious why I believe this). There is little doubt that we would greatly exceed it without immigration controls.

Anyway, even if ending border enforcement were a good idea (and I conclude that it is not, despite my libertarian reflexes) it’s a political nonstarter in the U.S. Trump got elected by appealing to sentiment against illegals, and beneath that is a phenomenon one might call Putnam backlash; everywhere outside a few blue-state enclaves, Americans sense the erosion of social trust and have connected it to illegal immigration.

And on the very strong divergence of opinion between the elite (very pro-immigration) and non-elite (becoming much more anti-immigration over time):

One of the major forces currently poisoning our politics is a breakdown in trust between people like you and me – the cognitive elites – and the rest of America. Deplorables. Flyover country. Brexit, and Trump’s election, slapped me upside the head. I’ve been forced to confront some uncomfortable truths.

They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.

They have a point. I’m seeing that now.

I mean, I might still think free trade is a good idea and have lots of arguments for it. But my arguments don’t mean fuck-all to a Rust-Belt steelworker who’s watched his livelihood get exported and the community around him wither and has nothing left but a cheap high on opioids. Nor to an unskilled black or legal-immigrant urbanite who can’t get a job because the restaurants can hire illegals for cheaper.

We owe these people more than we have given them. What we owe can’t mainly be paid in money. It’s compassion; a fair hearing. Respect. Not dismissing them as trash or troglodytes because they don’t love the brave new globalized world that gives us options but – too often – closes off theirs.

I don’t have easy solutions to these problems. But is it too much to ask that people like you and me should stop being arrogant assholes about them?

The Czechoslovak Legion’s Odyssey Through Russia I THE GREAT WAR Special

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Railways, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 26 Feb 2018

The Czechoslovak Legion wanted to return home or continue the fight for independence even when peace on the Eastern Front was declared. But they needed to cross the whole of Civil War torn Russia for this.

The notion of “uploading” your consciousness

Filed under: Health, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Skeptic author Michael Shermer pours cold water on the dreams and hopes of Transhumanists, Cryonicists, Extropians, and Technological Singularity proponents everywhere:

It’s a myth that people live twice as long today as in centuries past. People lived into their 80s and 90s historically, just not very many of them. What modern science, technology, medicine, and public health have done is enable more of us to reach the upper ceiling of our maximum lifespan, but no one will live beyond ~120 years unless there are major breakthroughs.

We are nowhere near the genetic and cellular breakthroughs needed to break through the upper ceiling, although it is noteworthy that companies like Google’s Calico and individuals like Abrey deGrey are working on the problem of ageing, which they treat as an engineering problem. Good. But instead of aiming for 200, 500, or 1000 years, try to solve very specific problems like cancer, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases.

Transhumanists, Cryonicists, Extropianists, and Singularity proponents are pro-science and technology and I support their efforts but extending life through technologies like mind-uploading not only cannot be accomplished anytime soon (centuries at the earliest), it can’t even do what it’s proponents claim: a copy of your connectome (the analogue to your genome that represents all of your memories) is just that—a copy. It is not you. This leads me to a discussion of…

The nature of the self or soul. The connectome (the scientific version of the soul) consists of all of your statically-stored memories. First, there is no fixed set of memories that represents “me” or the self, as those memories are always changing. If I were copied today, at age 63, my memories of when I was, say, 30, are not the same as they were when I was 50 or 40 or even 30 as those memories were fresh in my mind. And, you are not just your memories (your MEMself). You are also your point-of-view self (POVself), the you looking out through your eyes at the world. There is a continuity from one day to the next despite consciousness being interrupted by sleep (or general anaesthesia), but if we were to copy your connectome now through a sophisticated fMRI machine and upload it into a computer and turn it on, your POVself would not suddenly jump from your brain into the computer. It would just be a copy of you. Religions have the same problem. Your MEMself and POVself would still be dead and so a “soul” in heaven would only be a copy, not you.

Whether or not there is an afterlife, we live in this life. Therefore what we do here and now matters whether or not there is a hereafter. How can we live a meaningful and purposeful life? That’s my final chapter, ending with a perspective that our influence continues on indefinitely into the future no matter how long we live, and our species is immortal in the sense that our genes continue indefinitely into the future, making it all the more likely our species will not go extinct once we colonize the moon and Mars so that we become a multi-planetary species.

Australian Prototype Jungle Carbine Enfields

Filed under: Australia, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published on 24 Mar 2017

Shortened No1 Mk3*: Sold for $6,900 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1655-396/
No6 Mk1: Sold for $12,075 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1652-396/
No6 Mk1/1: Sold for $12,650 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1651-396/

In 1943, experimentation began in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia into developing a shortened and lightened version of the Lee Enfield rifle. In Australia, the work was done on the No1 Mk3* rifle, as the Lithgow Arsenal had never switched over to production of the No4 rifle.

We have three experimental prototype carbines from Lithgow to look at today. The first is simply a shortened SMLE, with no serious effort given to reducing weight. This rifle is visually very similar to the commercial SMLE “Jungle Carbines” marketed by a number of companies, although the real one here has several features missing form the commercial copies – most notably a simple rear aperture sight.

The other two are examples of the two types of rifle that were ultimately considered for formal adoption (and a large order for one was actually placed, before being cancelled at the end of WW2). These are designated the No6 Mk1 (with a rear aperture sight) and the No6 Mk1/1 (with a rear tangent sight). Approximately 100 of each were made, half with brass buttplates and half with rubber recoil pads. In this form, slightly more than a pound was removed from the standard SMLE, and the reduced length did make for a handier rifle. The Australian need for this type of carbine was removed with the end of the war, although in Great Britain the No5 Mk1 carbine – the same in practical terms as these Australian examples – would be taken into formal service for several years.

QotD: Anthems

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you were an alien visiting Earth you would quickly conclude from the evidence of your eyes and ears that national anthems probably originate in sport, and were designed to serve it. But even this mistaken conclusion would further befuddle you. If an anthem is intended to stir the blood and awaken athletes to duty in international contests, why are anthems also performed at games between teams belonging to the same country? Is it some sort of test?

Looking at the content and histories of the anthems themselves would not help you much. Some of them are military marches. Some of them are revolutionary street songs that came, over time or through immediate fiat, to represent an entire state. Some are “hymns.” Some are poetry — mostly bad poetry, and mostly by lyricists not otherwise remembered. Some are, like ours, a sort of mashup: poetry grafted onto a march. (The prescribed tempo for O Canada is “alla marcia”, and it is best when performed by the book.)

Every country has to have an anthem, it seems, for circular reasons. An anthem is a feature of a country, and it proves you are a country if other countries blare your anthem in the direction of your supreme leader on state visits. All anthems are performed upon roughly the same occasions everywhere. But if you could take a God’s eye view you, would see one nation warning its neighbours that they will drown in blood if they look across the border cross-eyed. The next nation over is singing about how it is a beacon of peace — particularly to its immediate neighbours, the unreasoning scum. The next nation is asking for God’s blessing on its handsome, wise royal family. The one after that is celebrating the violent overthrow of its handsome, wise royal family.

Colby Cosh, “Let’s talk about anthems”, National Post, 2016-07-14.

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