Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2018

The economic damage of tariffs

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

Tim Worstall fisks a recent Pat Buchanan brain fart article on the glories of erecting tariff walls against foreign trade:

Pat Buchanan has been going on for decades about how wondrous tariffs are and if only they were brought back then things would be just peachy. Sadly, this all seems to be based on his not understanding trade, tariffs, nor apparently even history. That’s not a good set of recommendations for a policy about trade and tariffs, one that has been tried many a time in history.

Now, it is entirely true that if we returned to a more Hamiltonian policy era then we’d all be richer. But that wouldn’t be because we had tariffs which paid for government rather than an income or corporate tax. It’s because government would be confiscating a very much smaller portion of what we all produce to pay for itself. If the Feds took 3% of everything we do instead of the current 18% or so then sure, we’d all be richer. But that’s true however that tax is raised.

[…]

His argument is that, protected from foreign competition, American business was able to develop and grow into being world beaters. No, I don’t think this is true – I insist that behind tariff barriers companies stagnate. Indeed it’s standard economics that the medium to long term effects of trade are that the competition from foreigners is what makes the domestic companies stronger and more productive. But put that argument to one side. Assume that Buchanan is correct.

For his conclusion to be correct then it must have been true that the total costs of trade were rising in that time period. Total costs being tariffs plus transport. Only if the total costs were rising was protection rising. The tariffs are only part of the story. And as it happens total protection was falling over this time period. The falls in the costs of transport – for the US externally primarily the steam ship – were greater than the rises in the tariffs. Thus the US was becoming more open to trade at this time when industry was booming and growing to world class levels.

That’s not an argument in favour of trade protection now, is it?

    The U.S. relied on tariffs to convert from an agricultural economy in 1800 to the mightiest manufacturing power on earth by 1900.

Well, it’s also true that what the US was inside those tariff barriers was the largest free trade area in the world. I’m the guy insisting that free trade makes places grow, Pat the opposite. And the place with more free trade among more people than anywhere else grows fastest? That’s a point in my favour, no, not Pat’s? Remember, the US Constitution expressly forbids the individual states from having tariffs between them…..that regulation is left to the Feds who have never imposed them.

    How have EU nations run up endless trade surpluses with America? By imposing a value-added tax, or VAT, on imports from the U.S., while rebating the VAT on exports to the USA. Works just like a tariff.

No, a VAT does not work like a tariff. In no manner at all does it do so in fact. As every economist keeps trying to point out. Within the EU all goods and services, no matter where they’re made, pay the exact same rate of VAT. Well, OK, ladies unmentionables pay a lower rate than motor cars, that’s true, but all unmentionables pay the same rate, all cars. There is no difference made between domestic and foreign production. It’s entirely unlike a tariff therefore, the crucial component of which is that distinction made between home and foreign production.

Stuff made in the EU and sold in the US pays no VAT. Stuff made in the US and sold in the US pays no VAT. Again, we’ve no distinction by source or origin, this is entirely and completely unlike a tariff.

QotD: Pushing the Confederacy down the memory hole

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lately, I have been mightily irritated by the politically-correct campaign to permanently banish the old Confederate flag, and all music associated with the Southern cause, or any symbol that it once existed, before it was comprehensively defeated a century-and-a-half ago. Memorials of Robert E. Lee are being treated as memorials of Adolf Q. Hitler.

It strikes me that even under the old lamentable cotton-plantation slave system of the South, people mixed and got to smell one another — rich and poor, black and white, genteel and grotesque. That, the most forgotten slogan of the Dixie Land was her war cry: “Down with the Eagle, and up with the Cross!” That, it is the Cross of Saint Andrew astride the old Confederate flag that is most galling to the hyper-secular, liberal mind. That, the greatest triumph of the Union propaganda was to tar all those flag-bearers in the way our contemporary media demean all dissenters from the current party line as “racists,” “sexists,” “phobes,” and nothing more. That, the principal crime of the South was to stand by the wording of the U.S. Constitution, and from the beginning, to get in the way of a grand national scheme for social engineering, which triumphed with Lincoln (though hardly a liberal by the standards of today). That, in the Southern view, the eagle swooped down on them, with claws.

Something similar is now happening in the division of “Red States” and “Blue”: in an America from which the Christian conception of the “common man” is being systematically expunged. All who resist the categories to which they have been assigned are instinctively rebelling; “victim” and “oppressor” alike. This is what “common men” will do, when tarred and pressed, often without fully understanding why they rebel. They remember, however obliquely, whose sons and daughters they are. That, no matter how low in social station, they are Christ’s, and not the segregated chattels of some malicious and incompetent — and intentionally divisive — Washington Nanny.

The recovery of USA, and more largely, the recovery of Christendom, turns on the recovery of this conception of the “common man” — as Man, not as member of a client group. This has nought to do with “equality,” for it is none of a government’s business to help one group get even with another. Rather it is to serve man as man. This is a matter that goes deeper even than slavery, as Saint Paul explained. It is an unarguable, even mystical point. Where that conception survives, of the common in man, Christendom persists, and can potentially flourish.

David Warren, “The common man”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-29.

June 1, 2018

50 Miles To Paris – Third Battle Of The Aisne I THE GREAT WAR Week 201

Filed under: France, Germany, Greece, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 31 May 2018

The German spring offensive has lost some traction over the past few weeks but the Allies are still under pressure. With Operations Blücher and York, the Germans are getting within 50 miles of Paris again, just as they did in 1914.

QotD: Travelling with a political campaign

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times. Every presidential campaign has its own fearful litany of horror stories about reporters – and, occasionally, even a key staff member – who thought they had plenty of time to “run across the street for a quick beer” instead of hanging around in the rear of some grim auditorium half-listening to the drone of a long-familiar speech, only to come back in 20 minutes to find the auditorium empty and no sign of the press bus, the candidate or anybody who can tell him where they went. These stories are invariably set in places like Butte, Buffalo or Icepick, Minnesota, on a night in the middle of March. The temperature is always below zero, there is usually a raging blizzard to keep cabs off the street, and just as the victim remembers that he has left his wallet in his overcoat on the press bus, his stomach erupts with a sudden attack of ptomaine poisoning. And then, while crawling around on his knees in some ice-covered alley and racked with fits of projectile vomiting, he is grabbed by vicious cops and whipped on the shins with a night stick, then locked in the drunk tank of the local jail and buggered all night by winos.

These stories abound, and there is just enough truth in them to make most campaign journalists so fearful of a sudden change in the schedule that they will not even go looking for a bathroom until the pain becomes unendurable and at least three reliable people have promised to fetch them back to the fold at the first sign of any movement that could signal an early departure. The closest I ever came to getting left behind was during the California primary in 1972, when I emerged from a bathroom in the Salinas railroad depot and realized that the caboose car of McGovern’s “victory train” was about 100 yards further down the tracks than it had been only three minutes earlier. George was still standing outside on the platform, waving to the crowd, but the train was moving – and as I started my sprint through the crowd, running over women, children, cripples and anything else that couldn’t get out of my way, I thought I saw a big grin on McGovern’s face as the train began picking up speed….… I am still amazed that I caught up with the goddamn thing without blowing every valve in my heart, or even missing the iron ladder when I made my last-second leap and being swept under the train and chopped in half by the wheels.

Ever since then I have not been inclined to take many risks while traveling in strange territory with politicians. Even the very few who might feel a bit guilty about leaving me behind would have to do it anyway, because they are all enslaved by their schedules, and when it comes to a choice between getting to the airport on time or waiting for a journalist who has wandered off to seek booze, they will shrug and race off to the airport.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 31, 2018

Megan McArdle’s tweetstorm explaining the Reagan coalition to under-35s

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

I’d embed all of these, except it would take a week for the page to render, so here’s the start of the thread, and the rest will just be copy-pasta’d text:

Fear not, my little chickadees, there will be no spoilers. Except that, as Woddy Allen once remarked of “War and Peace”, “It involves Russia.”

Oh, heck, obviously this tweetstorm is going to be typo-tastic. I think we’re just gonna have to roll with it, folks.

Actually, most of this Tweetstorm is going to be about one small point that I raised in the column, but didn’t have space to explore.

Which is the extent to which those on the left who are under 45, and particularly those who are under 35, fundamentally misunderstand the Reagan coalition, because they don’t remember communism.

There’s a phenomenon in cognitive science called “hindsight bias”. People wildly overestimate their ability to predict events when they know what the outcome was.

Indeed, if you ask them to predict an event, then tell them the outcome, and then ask them what they predicted, some of them will misremember having correctly predicted the outcome.

They will also think they could have predicted an outcome that was designed to be random. Don’t think that you are not one of these people. All of us are, at least to some extent, plagued by hindsight bias. It takes conscious effort to overcome, and you never will, fully.

So once you know that Soviet Communism was doomed to the ash heap of history, because it is an infinitely inferior way of satisfying your society’s basic material needs, you become nearly incapable of imagining what it was like to live in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.

Unless you actually did.

Nonetheless, let me try to explain what it was like to our younger viewers. When I grew up, the Soviet Bloc was just one massive red blob on the map. One that the Soviets had repeatedly demonstrated an interest in expanding.

Whatever you think of American foreign policy post-1945, Soviet foreign policy was like that too, except with nastier. Our client regimes were terrible. Their client regimes were terrible. But we didn’t shoot people to keep them from leaving, or run a totalitarian police state.

It obviously, in hindsight, was not plausible to think that they were going to take over the whole world. They didn’t have the resources. But alas, we did not get the benefit of hindsight when it was happening. Almost until the Wall came down, people were predicting convergence.

There was a large, expansionist power. They were basically singlehandedly keeping Cuba afloat, subsidizing actual, honest-to-God communist groups that wanted to bring the rugged splendors of life without consumer goods to America, and oh, had a history of invading their neighbors

And then there were the nukes. So true, funny story–they were phasing out nuclear drills when I was in grammar school, because someone in the NYC Department of Ed had realized there’s not much point in drilling to become radioactive vapor. Pretty much just happens naturally.

But I had an older teacher who insisted on telling us to get under our desks if the Bomb hit. Also, inexplicably, to tuck our pants into our socks to protect us from fallout.

“I’m afraid your daughter is dead, Mrs. McArdle. But just look at those pristine ankles!”

Were Red Dawn and Top Gun over the top and a little silly? Yes. But folks in the 1980s (at least those of the appropriate age for viewing such things) didn’t watch them *ironically*. They believed the Soviets wanted to bury us. Because they had said stuff like “We will bury you”

We grew up actually afraid that the Soviet Union was going to turn our country into a sheet of radioactive glass. In hindsight, seems obviously overblown, but again: *we didn’t have hindsight*.

Also, even in the 1980s, there was a delusional portion of the left that actually thought life was better for ordinary people in the Soviet Union. That portion had, thankfully, gotten smaller after Hungary. But there was a larger portion that thought maybe it wasn’t really worse.

To be clear, I’m not talking about “Democrats”. I’m talking about hard leftists who I grew up with on the Upper West Side. They existed, and were kind of noisy.

And then there was a larger still part of the left that wasn’t Marxist, but thought that the things they were concerned about, like gender inequality and racism, didn’t exist under communism, or were better.

(NARRATOR: they existed. They weren’t better)

They thought these things because it’s hard to get good information about a police state. People saw America’s oppressions being reported on the front pages of American newspapers, and concluded that they must be worse than places we had no information on.

The existence of various sorts of at least vaguely communist-sympathetic folks inside the country, and an eerie background expectation that at any moment, a large, Imperialist communist power outside our borders might vaporize you, made this a very, very politically salient issue

If you are trying to interpret the Reagan Right without understanding the large emotional impact that this had on voters, you are getting it badly wrong.

As an aside, as I also mentioned in this column, this is *ALSO* true of people who aren’t old enough to remember urban crime in the 1980s.

I was mugged for the first time at the age of 8. In the girl’s bathroom of my grammar school. Which was supposedly the safest on the UWS.

A kid in my high school class was hospitalized after a gang of boys his own age beat and mugged him. At 10 in the morning. Off of Park Avenue.

It’s easy to have a complex, nuanced, high-level response to crime when you’re reading about crime statistics. When you are actually personally, viscerally afraid of being hurt or killed every time you walk out of your front door, your reaction tends not to be so measured.

Was there a racialized aspect to politicians talking about crime? Absolutely. That was not, however, the only thing driving it. When politicians ranted about crime, what they were often really actually talking about was … crime. Which was genuinely scary for everyone.

Which is why, as the excellent “Locking Up Our Own” documents, so many “tough on crime” laws that did huge and disproportionate damage to young black men were originated or supported by the black community. They were most at risk from law enforcement, but also from crime.

We can argue over how important “the Southern Strategy” was to the GOP’s rise. But you can’t argue that race was the whole story. Or even the overwhelming majority of the story. There was a lot going on.

But some of those problems faded, largely of their own accord. And the generation that doesn’t remember them first-hand tends to discount those problems that faded, leaving only the problem which is still with us, to which they overattribute Reagan’s success.

The left frequently suggests that conservatives are insufficiently imaginative when discussing the problems of the poor, leaving out huge areas of complexity and nuance. They’re right. I see young lefties making the same error about the problems of their parents & grandparents.

It’s one part hindsight bias (“*I’d* have known this wasn’t that big a threat”) and one part the simple difficulty of imagining how something feels if you haven’t lived it.

May 29, 2018

“[T]here’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without [legalization]”

Filed under: Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall reports on a recent Nebraska drug bust involving enough fentanyl “to kill 26 million people” (that is, about 120 lbs of the stuff) and explains why the current enforcement regime is going to have to change:

Now, I’m in favour of all of these drugs being legalised anyway. It’s the idiot’s body, up to them what they ingest in whatever manner. If it kills them, well, their choice. The argument that they shouldn’t therefore we must prevent them doesn’t cut much ice with me.

But put that aside and think in a utilitarian manner. If we can prevent overdoses and wasted lives then we should. But only if how we’re going to do it is better than the results of either not doing so or even using some other manner of dealing with the problem.

It’s arguable that clamping down on certain illegal drugs does at least limit their penetration of the market. I don’t think this is true of heroin but perhaps it is potentially true. It’s absolutely not true of fentanyl. For that’s a synthetic opioid. A decent chemist can synthesise it – a good one can make the precursors as well. There is no need to get opium, morphine or any other poppy related product that we already control.

It’s also, as we can see, alarmingly cheap already. Easy to smuggle in vast quantities of doses.

There’s another problem with it. The difference between a dose that gives a high and one that kills is pretty narrow. And it’s an extremely potent drug as well. Quantities for either are small – smaller than can generally be measured by users with candles and teaspoons.

It’s cheap, easy enough to make, has no precursors we can control, kills easily enough and dosage is alarmingly difficult to get right. So, what do we do?

We’re not going to get rid of it for all of the above reasons. So, we need to do damage limitation. Stopping people from dying from it sounds like a pretty good idea actually. And that means that we need it to be pure and in known dosages. That is, we need it to be legal.

I think all drugs should be legal, hey, your body and all that. But even if you think that harm reduction is a more important goal there’s just no way that we’re going to get to fentanyl harm reduction without legality of it. For that’s the only way we will get it in known doses which don’t kill people. And we’re most assuredly going to keep getting it even if we don’t legalise it. Our choices are people tooting on illegal fentanyl and dying or people tooting on legal fentayl and not dying. Not such a toughie that question, is it?

May 27, 2018

Woke-ism, the new religion of progressives

Filed under: Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John McWhorter notes the strong parallels between Christianity and woke-ness:

Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

[…]

The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions — other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

May 26, 2018

Remy: The Longest Time (TSA Version)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Humour, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 25 May 2018

Remy prepares summer travelers for groping season.

“The Longest Time” parody written and performed by Remy. Background vocals and Mastering by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced and edited by Austin Bragg.
—–
LYRICS:
Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time
If you book a ticket for a flight
Stow your baggage and some of your rights
Travel, you’re hoping
But first you’ll get a groping
And you’ll be waiting for the longest time

My last job? I guess it paid the bills
This pays more for using the same skills
At first we hound you
Then we put our arms around you
And you’ll be waiting for the longest time

Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time

Supervisors try to sneak bombs by
Of 100, 80 make it by
I like those chances
I forgot how nice your pants is
I haven’t touched them for the longest time

I had other jobs at the start
I said to myself “just follow your heart”
Now I know the woman that you are
I’ll swab your Magic cards
And you’ll miss your connection…

Who could guess what consequence this brings
We have issues keeping nicer things
Our record’s so bad I think you ought to know this summer
you’ll be waiting for the longest time

Whoa-oo-aa-ooah
For the longest time

May 24, 2018

Tank Chats #30 M3 Grant | The Tank Museum

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 27 Jan 2017

The thirtieth in a series of short films about some of the vehicles in our collection presented by The Tank Museum’s historian David Fletcher MBE.

Tanks of this type were first used in Western Desert in 1942. The M3’s were mechanically reliable, but soon superseded by Sherman.

May 22, 2018

The Fightinest Marine – Dan Daly I WHO DID WHAT IN WW1?

Filed under: Americas, China, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 21 May 2018

Dan Daly was one of only two Marines to be awarded Medals of Honor in two separate conflicts. The first, for his actions in 1901 during the China relief. His second, for his actions during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915. But he wasn’t done yet and after the U.S. entry into WW1 in April 1917, he was close to receiving his third one on the battlefield of Belleau Wood in France.

May 21, 2018

“Civil War Uniforms of Blue & Grey – The Evolution” Volume 2

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

LionHeart FilmWorks
Published on 29 Apr 2018

http://www.lionheart-filmworks.com

Volume 2 of 4… A display of some of the more unique and important uniforms to represent the evolution of the American Civil War “Blue and Grey” from just before the spark of the war in 1861 to Union victory and occupation in 1865.

This project is meant to honor men from both the north and the south — now together forever in eternity — who served their countries, their states and their comrades while wearing these uniforms, weapons, and accouterments — during some of the most brutal battles Americans have ever faced. Shot in 4K and featuring nine of the best Living Historians in the country.

As accurately as we possibly could, and one uniform at a time.… telling the story of the 2.75 Million soldiers who once wore these sacks coats, shell jackets and kepis with pride — each soldier earning a debt we should all be duty-bound to continue to honor.

Directed/Produced: Kevin R. Hershberger
Cinematography: Hugh Burruss
Costumers & Featuring: Tyler Grecco, Nathan Hoffman, Connor Timony, Brennan Wheatley, Guy Gane, Eric Smallwood… as well as Mark Aaron, Tr’waan Coles & Justin Young.
Grip / Electric: Brian Lyles
Costumes & Props: Historical Wardrobe – Richmond, VA

May 17, 2018

Tom Wolfe “would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal”

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post Colby Cosh explains why Tom Wolfe was so significant in the literary world almost from his first published work:

… Tom Wolfe was an educated man: unlike any of the macho novelists he was sparring with, he was entitled to adjoin an honest-to-God PhD to his byline. In the end, he could not escape the prejudices imprinted on him in youth. It is a truth universally acknowledged: a prose artist must excrete a novel to demonstrate his true mettle.

Wolfe described it this way himself in a 2008 interview. “Originally, I was only going to write one novel, to prove to myself and any random doubters that I could do it.” “Random doubters” sounds so dismissive and calm until you remember the amount of work Wolfe was proposing to undertake in order to impress them. He continued: “But that novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was such an astounding success… I’m afraid I got swept away.”

Wolfe, I suppose, was too well-raised to utter the word “money” in front of an interviewer. (The explicit subject of all his work, his journalism and fiction, is social status: but social status and money do travel together mighty closely.) Bonfire (1987) became one of the publishing events of the epoch, and he would spend the rest of his days in a golden cage of a book deal. The dabbler in the novel had proved too much: he had proved that the novel really is still in a class by itself as a social phenomenon.

More novels in the vein of Bonfire — deeply researched, socially prescient, full of truculent conservative squareness — followed. I myself would not trade The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s 1979 nonfiction book about the Mercury astronauts, for the whole pile, Bonfire included. (And I say this knowing full well that there is some quantum of sheer bull in The Right Stuff.)

Wolfe continued to insist, returning to the interview already mentioned, that “Nonfiction remains the most important literary genre in American literature of the past 60 years.” He still, 20 years on from Bonfire, felt the need to half-apologize for abandoning non-fiction. My instinct is that it was indeed a mistake, but I am only a consumer of Wolfe, looking back at the corpus from without: none of us readers had to meet Wolfe’s dry-cleaning bills.

May 16, 2018

Why Hawaii’s volcano is so UNUSUAL

Filed under: Science, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Physics Girl
Published on 16 Mar 2017

Hawaii is known for its volcanoes, but most volcanoes on earth exist along tectonic plate lines. Hawaii does not! What causes Hawaii to form, and how is it related to the mystery of a magnetic bar code across the Pacific Ocean? Host Dianna Cowern chatted with geologist Noah Randolph-Flagg from UC Berkeley while hiking on the island of Kauai.

QotD: The presidency and the Supreme Court

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I also like Jerry Jeff Walker, the Scofflaw King of New Orleans and a lot of other people I don’t necessarily believe should be president of the United States. The immense concentration of power in that office is just too goddamn heavy for anybody with good sense to turn his back on. Or her back. Or its back…. At least not as long as whatever lives in the White House has the power to fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court; because anybody with that kind of power can use it – like Nixon did – to pack-crowd the Court of Final Appeal in this country with the same kind of lame, vindictive yo-yos who recently voted to sustain the commonwealth of Virginia’s antisodomy statutes……. And anybody who thinks that 6-3 vote against “sodomy” is some kind of abstract legal gibberish that doesn’t really affect them had better hope they never get busted for anything the Bible or any local vice-squad cop calls an “unnatural sex act.” Because “unnatural” is defined by the laws of almost every state in the Union as anything but a quick and dutiful hump in the classic missionary position, for purposes of procreation only. Anything else is a felony crime, and people who commit felony crimes go to prison.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

May 14, 2018

Progressophobia

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

Coleman Hughes discusses the inability of many progressives to accept that progress actually has been made in many key areas:

The prevailing view among progressives today is that America hasn’t made much progress on racism. While no one would argue that abolishing slavery and dissolving Jim Crow weren’t good first steps, the progressive attitude toward such reforms is nicely summarized by Malcolm X’s famous quip, “You don’t stick a knife in a man’s back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you’re making progress.” Aside from outlawing formalized bigotry, many progressives believe that things haven’t improved all that much. Racist attitudes towards blacks, if only in the form of implicit bias, are thought to be widespread; black men are still liable to be arrested in a Starbucks for no good reason; plus we have a president who has found it difficult to denounce neo-Nazis. If racism still looms large in our social and political lives, then, as one left-wing commentator put it, “progress is debatable.”

But the data take a clear side in that debate. In his controversial bestseller Enlightenment Now, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes a steep decline in racism. At the turn of the 20th century, lynchings occurred at a rate of three per week. Now, racially-motivated killings of blacks occur at a rate of zero to one per year. What’s more, racist attitudes that were once commonplace have now become fringe. A Gallup poll found that only 4 percent of Americans approved of marriages between blacks and whites in 1958. By 2013, that number had climbed to 87 percent, prompting pollsters to call it “one of the largest shifts of public opinion in Gallup history.”

Why can’t progressives admit that we’ve made progress? Pinker’s answer for what he dubs “progressophobia” is two-fold. First, our intuitions about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what we can easily recall — news items, shocking events, personal experience, etc. Second, we are more sensitive to negative stimuli than we are to positive ones. These two bugs of human psychology — called the availability bias and the negativity bias, respectively — make us prone to doomsaying, inclined to mistake freak news events for trends, and blind to the slow march of progress.

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It’s a sign of the poverty of our discourse on racial progress and inequality that the rarest findings are thought to be normal, and the most common findings are thought to require special explanation.

Indeed, it is rare to find any two ethnic groups achieving identical outcomes, even when they belong to the same race. A cursory glance at the mean incomes of census-tracked ethnic groups shows Americans of Russian descent out-earning those of Swiss descent, who out-earn those of British descent, who out-earn those of Polish descent, who out-earn those of French descent in turn. If the disparity fallacy were true, then we ought to posit an elaborate system that is biased towards ethnic Russians, then the Swiss, followed by the Brits, the Poles and the French. Yet one never hears progressives make such claims. Moreover, one never hears progressives say, “French-Americans make 79 cents for every Russian-American dollar,” although the facts could easily be framed that way. Similar disparities between blacks and whites are regularly presented in such invidious terms. Rather than defaulting to systemic bias to explain disparities, we should understand that, even in the absence of discrimination, groups still differ in innumerable ways that affect their respective outcomes.

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