Quotulatiousness

June 18, 2024

“If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites … then you have primed them for mass murder”

Lorenzo Warby on the malign influence of Karl Marx:

Despite — in some ways because of — all his Theorising about “capitalism”, Marx made no serious attempt to understand the actual dynamics of commerce, creating a (false) theory of economic parasitism (“surplus value”) that — both predictably, and in practice — motivated mass murder. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites — and you and your society is better off without them — then you have primed them for mass murder. Hence, Marx’s theory was used to justify actual Marxist mass-murders, starting with Lenin’s infamous hanging order.

Marx’s economistic systematising created a pretence of being social scientist — to himself and even more to Engels — that many people have maintained ever since. Hence a pre-Darwinian metaphysician is even now regularly treated as if he was a social scientist. This despite being wrong about more or less everythingclass, commerce, surplus, immiseration, the state, patterns of history, commodification, division of labour, foraging societies …

As I have noted elsewhere:

    To have a state, farming niches have to be sustainable after taxes are extracted. That means resources are extracted before they turn into extra babies. This means that states create surplus (income above subsistence): indeed, they dominate the creation and extraction of surplus.

The perennial dominance of the state in extraction of surplus — and hence the creation of class structures — is nowhere more obvious than in Marxist states.

Philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out the tension between the claim to being science — and the causal determinism that goes with that — and the messianic vision that motivates Marx’s and Marxist activism. In any tension between the two, the latter wins because it is so powerfully motivating. This includes with Marx himself, which is why his “science” is so profoundly wrong in fact. It exists to justify the messianic vision.

No political (or religious) movement has killed and tyrannised more people than revolutionary Marxism. A Marxist is someone for whom no amount tyranny and mass murder will stop them worshipping the splendour in their head. This testifies to the power of the messianic vision.

Marx was the original launderer of ideas. Over decades of wrestling with the economics of Smith and Ricardo, he laundered — via economic reasoning — the metaphysical conclusions he reached in the 1840s to create a system that would “scientifically” generate and justify those conclusions. That those conclusions went mostly unpublished in his lifetime — with the most dramatic exception being The Communist Manifesto (1848) — does not belie this. Marx himself insisted on the centrality of this period of “self-clarification”.

Nothing he published later significantly contradicted those conclusions. Marx is the archetypal activist scholar, whose activism drives, and so degrades, his scholarship and analysis. He is the key formulator of the Dialectical Faith, that has generated various disastrous spin-offs, from his own economism to Lenin’s Jacobinising of Marxism to the Cultural Marxism of Lukacs and Gramsci, Critical Theory, and all forms of Critical Social Justice.

No form or derivative of the Dialectical Faith have ever generated a net positive contribution to human flourishing, or understanding, compared to available alternatives.

Ibn Khaldun was a far more acute analyst of the role of the state in the economy, and patterns within history, than Marx. Ibn Khaldun sought systematically to understand what he observed, participated in and read about. He was not laundering ideas, not justifying pre-set conclusions, nor judging evidence by his Theory.

Ibn Khaldun was a social scientist (arguably the first). Marx was not, he was pretending to be one (including to himself).

The Dialectical Faith holds that history is driven by dialectical process that transforms society from an oppressive past to a future liberated from constraints, if the oppressive elements of society are suppressed or abolished. As Marx tells us, our productive capacity will be so great, that we will so humanise the world, that division of labour will end for:

    In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx was not engaged in scientific enquiry but pseudo-scientific, or scientistic — the form of science without the substance — justification of already reached conclusions. He regularly judges and chooses evidence based on Theory, a pattern that has become endemic within all forms of Marxism and its spinoffs (such as Critical Theory). Marx exemplifies the activist principle that “what I can imagine — however self-contradictory — is so much better than what others have struggled to achieve”.

Marx’s picture of the evils of division of labour is metaphysical twaddle flatly contradicted by any serious study of the role of division of labour — and, for that matter, commodification — in production at scale. How can division of labour be such an alienating evil when it is built into sexual reproduction, into every eusocial species, even into the cells of every single complex organism?

The answer is via a ludicrous quasi-theological metaphysical inflation of human consciousness and creativity. Marx collectivises — through his notion of species-being — the Romantic notion of human fulfilment through self-expression.

Freddie deBoer contra J.J. McCullough on Conspiracy Theories

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I saw JJ’s latest video pop up on my YouTube subscriptions page, read the headline and winced slightly. I generally like JJ’s videos even when I disagree with his presentation or interpretation and from the title, I thought “No, ‘many conspiracy theories’ did NOT ‘turn out to be true'” would require a fair bit of, uh, curation of the theories that get discussed. Freddie deBoer — who I disagree with much more than I do with McCullough — had a similar reaction:

The latest video from conservative Canadian YouTuber JJ McCullough displays many of the attributes that make his perspective unique — he’s genuinely a right-wing figure but an arch institutionalist, a gay Millennial with the kind of vague social libertinism common to a lot of libertarian-leaning conservatives but something of a scold, a Canadian patriot who relentlessly defends the United States from the kinds of criticism of Americanah that you might associate with Europe or, well, Canada — critiques of our provincialism, our consumerism, our boorish tendency to shove the rest of the world around. McCullough likes all of that stuff, more or less, while living a cosmopolitan and vaguely-arty lifestyle in groovy Vancouver. He’s perhaps best known for his war with Montreal, Francophone Canadians, and the entire province of Quebec, which fits his general esteem for a certain kind of capital-R Reasonable Anglophilia.

He reminds me, strangely, of a certain kind of secular anti-atheist, the type who still gets mad about the New Atheists despite the complete collapse of that subculture and whose own lack of belief doesn’t prevent them from waxing poetic about the glories of religion. I have a friend from grad school who grew up in an extremely repressive Christian community when she was young, and who describes leaving as an “escape”. (The kind of community where she and her sisters wore wrist-to-ankle dresses every day of their lives no matter the Oklahoma heat, weren’t allowed TV or radio, absorbed lots of corporal punishment, that sort of thing.) She has very, very little patience for people who are so annoyed by internet atheists that they become in effect advocates for religion; as she says, this kind of vague fondness for religion among the irreligious could only occur to someone who never had to live the way she did. I sort of see the same thing in McCullough — he idealizes certain aspects of America’s ethos because he has never had to live with the consequences of being surrounded by people who believe in it, who consciously or unconsciously demand that everyone else believe in it.

Anyhow, this new video is about conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are a good topic for understanding McCullough’s very particular ideological makeup. Conspiracy theories are famously a cross-ideological phenomenon, with both left conspiracy theories and right conspiracy theories but also conspiracy theories that don’t fit neatly into either, like 9/11 trutherism. As I said, McCullough is an institutionalist, a small-but-good government sort of guy (or so I take it) who places a great deal of value in official claims, institutions, and experts, and so he’s naturally distrustful of conspiracy theories. And he demonstrates that antipathy in this video through poking holes in a few clickbaity articles listing conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. This all amounts to feasting on a banquet of low-hanging fruit, but it’s not an illegitimate way to approach the question. I just don’t like his conclusions.

The key to McCullough’s bit here is that he doesn’t dispute that the named conspiracy theories (or “conspiracy theories”) that are asserted to be true are true. Rather, he operates by insisting that every identified conspiracy theory is in fact not a conspiracy theory according to his preferred definition. It’s not sufficient for a conspiracy theory to be broadly thought of as a conspiracy theory; it has to comport to specific rules he has devised for what a conspiracy theory entails. Effectively, that means that a conspiracy theory is only a conspiracy theory if it satisfies criteria endorsed by no one but JJ McCullough. I can’t decide if this is an isolated demand for rigor or a No True Scotsman, but either way, McCullough is here insisting on an unusually stringent definition of a conspiracy theory for the purpose of dismissing the idea that any conspiracy theories are true. And there’s a version of this that isn’t entirely wrong; there’s a tautological sense in which all conspiracy theories are false because being false is part of that definition of a conspiracy theory. But McCullough isn’t using that definition, just a particularly odd one that makes his task easier.

So the fact that cigarette manufacturers knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health but conspired to hide this fact from the public is not a conspiracy theory, according to McCullough, because other people of that era suspected that cigarettes caused lung cancer. (Actually proving that took a very long time, at least according to modern standards of causality.) I find this argument powerfully strange! You had a group of powerful people, they indisputably knew that cigarettes were very bad for your health, they indisputably conspired to suppress that information, they were fairly effective at that task. The fact that some early whistleblowers tried to raise the alarm is simply irrelevant. Check out my own proprietary formula.

Group of Powerful or Influential People + Nefarious Intent + Secrecy + Active Conspiring + Negative Consequences, Real or Potential = Conspiracy Theory

That’s a conspiracy, brother, and the tobacco company bad behavior fits. Long before information about their coverups became public knowledge, people were talking about the possibility that the tobacco companies were up to that exact bad behavior. Theorizing, you might say.

US “birthright citizenship”

Filed under: Government, History, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton argues against the legality of “birthright citizenship”:

“American Flag” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

One of the benefits of Donald Trump’s involvement in politics over the last ten years has been that it opened up a robust national discussion about an issue that up until recently had been largely ignored by the political class. This discussion is about so-called “birthright citizenship”, the idea that whenever a foreign national (regardless of legal status and with a very few exceptions) has a child on American soil, this child automatically becomes an American citizen from birth. This approach to citizenship has been the de facto (though not de jure) approach to the issue of “anchor babies”, the children of illegal aliens who come to the United States so that they can have their children here, thus allowing the parents to remain as well, usually helping themselves to generous American benefit monies.

Defenders of unrestricted birthright citizenship – primarily found among liberals, establishment GOP types, and the more uninformed types of libertarians – adamantly argue from the 14th amendment’s Citizenship Clause that birthright citizenship is not only legal, but is in fact constitutionally protected, and is what the 14th amendment has meant all along. They often try to buttress their arguments by appealing to English common law with its historical provisions for birthright citizenship. However, is this sort of “swim a river, fill our quiver” approach really what the 14th amendment meant? Is it really what English common law, which forms the basis for much of our own law and constitutional interpretation, historically upheld? The answer to these questions is, “No”. Let’s look at some of the history behind this issue.

The crux about which the discussion revolves is the Citizenship Clause found in the 14th amendment, Section 1,

    All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

More specifically, what is at issue is the phrase, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Clearly, the clause was not intended to convey American citizenship to an unlimited pool of children born to aliens on American soil. If this had been the case, then the phrase under discussion would not have been included. Obviously, some limits were intended, those circumscribed by the intent of being “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.

So what were these limits? Typically, it will be pointed out that the limits due to this jurisdictional issue were that citizenship was not being conveyed to children born of ambassadors and others aliens employed by their foreign governments, nor was it being conveyed to members of various Indian tribes which exercised sovereign powers within their own territories (this latter was rescinded by an act of 1924 which granted Indian tribes full American citizenship). Were these the only restrictions on birthright citizenship intended by the author and debaters of the 14th amendment?

No, actually. Let’s understand what the original intention of the 14th amendment was, which was to grant American citizenship to former black slaves and their children, and to prevent these newly freed citizens from being denied citizenship rights by certain of the southern states. That’s it. This was made clear by Sen. Jacob Howard, who authored the amendment in 1866, who clearly provided the intent for this section of the amendment,

    Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is, by virtue of natural law and national law, a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great issue in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.

Clearly, other classes of foreign citizens were intended besides the children of ambassadors and other diplomatic personnel. Indeed, Howard’s statement appears to be quite all-encompassing – if taken at face value, it would appear that he did not even intend the 14th amendment to grant citizenship to the children of foreign nationals here legally, much less to those here illegally.

Spice: King Of The Poor Man’s Kitchen

Filed under: Americas, Books, Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published Mar 3, 2024

One of the questions we seek to answer on our channel is that of the plight of poor folks in American history. What did they eat? How did they dress? Did they have enjoyment in life? They didn’t have the best cuts of meat or the most sought after ingredients. What they did have was plenty of flavor! Spice is the king of the poor man’s kitchen.
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QotD: The peoples incorporated or “allied” to Rome in the Republic’s Italian expansion

In one way, pre-Roman Italy was quite a lot like Greece: it consisted of a bunch of independent urban communities situated on the decent farming land (that is the lowlands), with a number of less-urban tribal polities stretching over the less-farming-friendly uplands. While pre-Roman urban communities weren’t exactly like the Greek polis, they were fairly similar. Greek colonization beginning in the eighth century added actual Greek poleis to the Italian mix and frankly they fit in just fine. On the flip side, there were the Samnites, a confederation of tribal communities with some smaller towns occupying mostly rough uplands not all that dissimilar to the Greek Aetolians, a confederation of tribal communities and smaller towns occupying mostly rough uplands.

In one very important way, pre-Roman Italy was very much not like Greece: whereas in Greece all of those communities shared a single language, religion and broad cultural context, Roman Italy was a much more culturally complex place. Consequently, as the Romans slowly absorbed pre-Roman Italy into the Roman Italy of the Republic, that meant managing the truly wild variety of different peoples in their alliance system. Let’s quickly go through them all, moving from North to South.

The Romans called the region south of the Alps but north of the Rubicon River Cisalpine Gaul and while we think of it as part of Italy, the Romans did not. That said, Gallic peoples had pushed into Italy before and a branch of the Senones occupied the lands between Ariminum and Ancona. Although Gallic peoples were always a factor in Italy, the Romans don’t seem to have incorporated their communities as socii; indeed the Romans were generally at their most ruthless when it came to interactions with Gallic peoples (despite the tendency to locate the “unassimilable” people on the Eastern edge of Rome’s empire, it was in fact the Gauls that the Romans most often considered in this way, though as we will see, wrongly so). That’s not to say that there was no cultural contact, of course; the Romans ended up adopting almost all of the Gallic military equipment set, for instance. In any event, it wouldn’t be until the late first century BCE that Cisalpine Gaul was merged into Italy proper, so we won’t deal too much with the Gauls just yet. I do want to note that, when we are thinking about the diversity of the place, even to speak of “the Gauls” is to be terribly reductive, as we are really thinking of at least half a dozen different Gallic peoples (Senones, Boii, Inubres, Lingones, etc) along with the Ligures and the Veneti, who may have been blends of Gallic and Italic peoples (though we are more poorly informed about both than we’d like).

Moving south then, we first meet the Etruscans, who we’ve already discussed, their communities – independent cities joined together in defensive confederations before being converted into allies of the Romans – clustered on north-western coast of Italy. They had a language entirely unrelated to Latin – or indeed, any other known language – and their own unique religion and culture. The Romans adopted some portions of that culture (in particular the religious practices) but the Etruscans remained distinct well into the first century. While a number of Etruscan communities backed the Samnites in the Third Samnite War (298-290 BC) culminating in the Battle of Sentinum (295) as a last-ditch effort to prevent Roman hegemony over the peninsula, the Etruscans subsequently remained quite loyal to Rome, holding with the Romans in both the Second Punic and Social Wars. It is important to keep in mind that while we tend to talk about “the Etruscans” (as the Romans sometimes do) they would have thought of themselves first through their civic identity, as Perusines, Clusians, Populinians and so on (much like their Greek contemporaries).

Moving further south, we have the peoples of the Apennines (the mountain range that cuts down the center of Italy). The people of the northern Apennines were the Umbri (that is, Umbrian speakers), though this linguistic classification hides further cultural and political differences. We’ve met the Sabines – one such group, but there were also the Volsci and Marsi (the latter particularly well known for being hard fighters as allies to Rome; Appian reports that the Marsi had a saying prior to the Social War, “No Triumph against the Marsi nor without the Marsi”). Further south along the Apennines were the Oscan speakers, most notably the Samnites (who resisted the Romans most strongly) but also the Lucanians and Paelignians (the latter also get a reputation for being hard fighters, particularly in Livy). The Umbrian and Oscan language families are related (though about as different from each other as Italian from Spanish; they and Latin are not generally mutually intelligible) and there does seem to have been some cultural commonality between these two large groups, but also a lot of differences. Their religion included a number of practices and gods unknown to the Romans, some later adopted (Oscan Flosa adapted as Latin Flora, goddess of flowers) and some not (e.g. the “Sacred Spring” rite, Strabo 5.4.12).

Also Oscan speakers, the Campanians settled in Campania (surprise!) at some early point (perhaps around 1000-900 BC) and by the fifth century were living in urban communities politically more similar to Latium and Etruria (or Greece, which will make sense in a moment) than their fellow Oscan speakers in the hills above, to the point that the Campanians turned to Rome to aid them against the also-Oscan-speaking Samnites. The leading city of the Campanians was Capua, but as Fronda (op. cit.) notes, they were meaningful divisions among them; Capua’s very prominence meant that many of the other Campanians were aligned against it, a division the Romans exploited.

The Oscans struggled for territory in Southern Italy with the Greeks – told you we’d get to them. The Greeks founded colonies along the southern part of Italy, expelling or merging with the local inhabitants beginning in the seventh century. These Greek colonies have distinctive material culture (though the Italic peoples around them often adopted elements of it they found useful), their own language (Greek), and their own religion. I want to stress here that Greek religion is not equivalent to Roman religion, to the point that the Romans are sticklers about which gods are worshipped with Roman rites and which are worshipped with the ritus graecus (“Greek rites”) which, while not a point-for-point reconstruction of Greek rituals, did involve different dress, different interpretations of omens, and so on.

All of these peoples (except the Gauls) ended up in Rome’s alliance system, fighting as socii in Rome’s wars. The point of all of this is that this wasn’t an alliance between, say, the Romans and the “Italians” with the latter being really quite a lot like the Romans except not being from Rome. Rather, Rome had constructed a hegemony (an “alliance” in name only, as I hope we’ve made clear) over (::deep breath::) Latins, Romans, Etruscans, Sabines, Volsci, Marsi, Lucanians, Paelignians, Samnites, Campanians, and Greeks, along with some people we didn’t mention (the Falisci, Picenes – North and South, Opici, Aequi, Hernici, Vestini, etc.). Many of these groups can be further broken down – the Samnites consisted of five different tribes in a confederation, for instance.

In short, Roman Italy under the Republic was preposterously multicultural (in the literal meaning of that word) … and it turns out that’s why they won.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.

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