Quotulatiousness

November 18, 2024

“The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve ‘always been multicultural'”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Fortissax thinks that the rest of Canada has lessons to be learned from Quebec:

If you are a Canadian born at any point in the Post-WWII era, you have been subjected to varying degrees of liberal “Cultural Mosaic” propaganda. This narrative exploits the historic presence of three British Isles ethnic groups (which had already been intermixing for millennia) and the predominantly Norman French settlers to justify the unprecedented mass migration of people from the Third World into Canada. This process only began in earnest in the 1990s before accelerating rapidly in the 2010s.

The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve “always been multicultural”, as though the extremely small and inconsequential presence of “Black Loyalists” or the historically hostile Indigenous groups (making up only 1% of the population at Canada’s founding in 1867) played any serious role in shaping the Canadian nation, its identity, institutions, or culture. Inspired by Dr. Ricardo Duchesne’s book Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), which chronicled the emergence of two ethnic groups uniquely born of the New World, I delved into the 2021 Census data collected by the Canadian government to explore the ethnic breakdown of White Canadians in greater detail

The evidence is clear. In 2021, just four years ago, 72.7% of the entire Canadian population was not just White, but Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian, representing an overwhelming presence compared to visible minorities and other White ethnic groups, such as the small populations of Germans and Ukrainians.

In the space last night, I highlighted this historical fact and explained to the audience the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Canadian and its significance. While we all recognize that the Québécois are a homogeneous group descended predominantly from Norman French settlers — such as the Filles du Roi and Samuel de Champlain’s 1608 expedition, which established Quebec City with a single-minded purpose — the Anglo-Canadian story also deserves similar recognition for its role in shaping Canada’s identity.

But what is less known is that Anglo-Canadians are just as ethnically homogeneous as the Québécois, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Anglo-Canadian identity emerged from Loyalist Americans in the 1750s, beginning with the New England Planters in Nova Scotia — “continentals” with a culture distinct from both England and the emergent Americans. After the American Revolutionary War, they marched north with indomitable purpose, like Aeneas and the Trojans, to rebuild their Dominion. Author Carl Berger, in his influential work The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, demonstrates that the descendants of Loyalists were the one ethnic group that nurtured “an indigenous British Canadian feeling.” The following passage from Berger’s work is worth citing:

    The centennial arrival of the loyalists in Ontario coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Toronto and, during a week filled with various exhibitions, July 3 was set aside as “Loyalist Day”. On the morning of that day the platform erected at the Horticultural Pavilion was crowded with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries and on one wall hung the old flag presented in 1813 to the York Militia by the ladies of the county. Between stirring orations on the significance of the loyalist legacy, injunctions to remain faithful to their principles, and tirades against the ancient foe, patriotic anthems were sung and nationalist poetry recited. “Rule Britannia” and “If England to Herself Be True” were rendered “in splendid style” and evoked “great enthusiasm”. “A Loyalist Song”, “Loyalist Days”, and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, were all beautifully sung

The 60,000 Loyalist Americans, who arrived in two significant waves, were soon bolstered by mass settlement from the British Isles. However, British settlers assimilated into the Loyalist American culture rather than imposing a British identity on the new Canadians. The first major wave of British settlers after the Loyalists primarily consisted of the Irish. Before Confederation in 1867, approximately 850,000 Irish immigrants settled in Canada. Between 1790 and 1815, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 settlers, mainly from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, also made their way to Canada.

Another large-scale migration occurred between 1815 and 1867, bringing approximately 1 million settlers from Britain to Canada, specifically to Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. New Brunswick was carved out from the larger province of Nova Scotia to make room for the influx of Loyalists. During this time, settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland intermingled and assimilated into the growing Anglo-Canadian culture. Scottish immigrants, who constituted 10–15% of this wave, primarily spoke Gaelic upon arrival but adopted English as they integrated.

All settlers from the British Isles spoke English (small numbers spoke Gaelic in case of Scots), were ethnically and culturally similar, and had much more in common with each other than with their continental European counterparts.

Settlement would slow down in the years immediately preceding Confederation in 1867 but surged again during the period between 1896 and 1914, with an estimated 1.25 million settlers yet again from Britain moving to Canada as part of internal migration within the British Empire. These settlers predominantly also [went] to Ontario and the Maritimes, further forging the Anglo-Canadian identity.

A common misconception among Canadians is that Canada “was a colony” of Britain, subordinate to, or a “vassal state”. This is wrong. Canadians were the British, in North America. There were no restrictions on what Canadians could or could not do in their own Dominion. From the first wave of Loyalists onward, Canadians were regularly involved in politics and governance, actively participating in shaping the nation.

Like the ethnogenesis of the English, which saw Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians converge into a new people and ethnicity (the Anglo-Saxons), Anglo-Canadians are a combination of 1.9 million English, 850,000 Irish (from both Northern and Southern Ireland), and 200,000 Scots, converging with 60,000 Loyalist Americans from the 13 Colonies. These distinct yet similar ethnic groups no longer exist as separate peoples in Canada. Anglo-Canadians are the fusion of the entire British Isles. The Arms of Canada, the favourite symbol of Canadian nationalists today, represents this new ethnic group with the inclusion of the French:

Arms of England, Scotland, Ireland and France in that order.

It’s no coincidence that, once rediscovered, the Arms of Canada exploded in popularity as the emblem of Canadian nationalists. Unlike more controversial symbols that appeal to pan-White racial unity, such as the Sonnenrad or Celtic cross, the Arms of Canada resonate as a distinctly Canadian icon, deeply rooted in the nation’s true heritage and history — a heritage that cannot be bought, sold, or traded away. This is an immutable bloodline stretching into the ancient past. If culture is downstream from race, and deeper still, ethnicity, then Canadian culture, values, and identity are fundamentally tied not just its race, but its ethnic composition. The ethnos defines the ethos. Canadians are not as receptive to the abstract idea of White nationalism for the same reason Europeans aren’t — because they possess a cohesive ethnic identity, unlike most White Americans.

November 13, 2024

QotD: The 1990s

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

Remember The Matrix? It spawned a zillion pop-academic books with titles like The Matrix and Philosophy, and for once it wasn’t just a marketing gimmick. I doubt the filmmakers intended this — given that at least one of the Wachowski Brothers is now a trannie, I suppose their intended message was “let your freak flag fly, because that makes you Secret Jesus” — but all that Baudrillard stuff that inevitably attaches itself to a movie about virtual reality was actually kinda true.

Consider that if we really do live in a computer simulation, then everything the #wokesters are always going on about is actually true. Everything really IS a “social construction”, because “society” was literally constructed. All that stuff about “systemic racism” is true, too, because again, we’re dealing with a design. Nothing evolves organically inside The Matrix, because there’s nothing organic in there at all. It’s ALL on purpose …

… and you, #wokester, are the only one who can see it. Unlike Karl Marx, who was able to see beyond his class situation enough to say that no one can see beyond his class situation, because reasons, you, #wokester, can do it because you’re Neo. That, too, is built into the system. It’s an endless recursion … but one that entails that you, and you alone, are special, on purpose.

That, kameraden, was the 1990s. Even those movies our author mentioned — Beverly Hills Cop III, Lethal Weapons 3 and 4 — weren’t just copies of copies, they were ironic, snarky commentaries on copies of copies. See also Scream, which was a “deconstruction” of every slasher picture ever made. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em … but since both beating ’em and joining ’em entail making a sincere effort and sincerity is forbidden, all you can do is mock ’em. That’s what “deconstruction” is, one long polysyllabic mockery of the very idea of excellence. It’s the perfect philosophy for people who know themselves to be mediocre but have been told from day one that they’re special.

See also the tv show Friends, where five ludicrously attractive people and David Schwimmer all pretend to be just normal folks (who happen to live in 3,000 square foot apartments in Manhattan) — each episode is “the one that’s just like The Brady Bunch, but snarky”. Or Seinfeld, which was deliberately designed to be a grating mockery of stuff like The Odd Couple. All snarky mockeries of the very concept of sincerity.

See what I mean? That’s normal now, which is why the 90s must be dragged into an alley and shot, for Western Civ’s sake.

Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

November 12, 2024

John Carter – “We can all sense the vibe shift”

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter tries to explain the “vibe shift” in western culture:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Underneath the medical tyranny of COVID, the stolen elections, the Internet censorship, the inflation, the hypermigration, the gender psychosis, the polarized rancor of sexual politics, and all of the rest of the symptoms of our decaying mismanagerial order, a countercurrent has flowed through the deep and hidden places of our collective psyche, hot and slow, like a chthonic river of magma rising implacably to the surface.

It isn’t just frustration with the intolerable imposition of Woke into every aspect of our lives, as though we could reset the clock to 90s liberalism and get fresh again with the Prince of Bel Air. It isn’t just anger at the invasion of our countries by the third world, nor is it limited to impatient disgust with the glossolalic babble of an incompetocracy comprised of credentialed midwits who seem to feel that word-shaped noises confer all the legitimacy they need to misrule our countries into oblivion.

It isn’t purely negative.

There’s a sense, somehow, of hope.

Hope, that after decades in which it seemed that history has stalled, that the culture has been frozen in permafrost, that nothing new could ever really be done again, that Nothing Ever Happens, that the only thing we can look forward to is a long, cold decline into technocratic surveillance, demographic implosion, green energy poverty, and final, irrecoverable collapse … hope that maybe this insipid fate isn’t so inevitable as we thought. Hope, that the building tectonic pressure of those buried psychological forces might finally break through and crack the shell of a dead future.

The sudden birth of artificial intelligence and the renewed enthusiasm for the conquest of space are two very obvious signs of this abrupt return of novelty. This is not a purely positive thing – AI is regarded with anxiety by almost everyone, but it is the raw fact of its sudden transition from science fiction to mundane tool of everyday life that is significant here.

There are other signs of this sense of renewal. The proliferation of self-improvement culture amongst many of the youth, particularly on the Very Online Right. The rise of the digital nomad, a modern re-enactment of the Romantic wanderjahr. The quiet birth of the network state, for instance in the form of Praxis. The renaissance of thoughtful, long-form essays right here on Substack. Surging interest in the religious traditions of our ancestors, whether in the form of Orthodox Christianity or paganism. The transformation of warfare by drones, promising a revolution in military affairs every bit as epochal as the firearm. The rise of a contradictorily global sense of national particularism. The steady refinement of 3D printing technologies.

Trump’s victory in 2024 seems a sure sign of this vibe shift. In a plot arc that could have been lifted straight from the original Star Wars trilogy, Trump brought A New Hope to America – and the world – in 2016; his forces were shattered and scattered to the winds in 2020 when The Empire Struck Back; only for the rebel forces, tempered by the lessons learned in defeat and strengthened with the assistance of new allies, to Return With the Jedi in 2024 and once again blow up the Death Star. This time around, Trump represents not simply the desperate holding action of an underground resistance to granny state totalitarianism, but the coalescence of a new and vigorous counter-elite, as embodied most of all by the ambitious hectobillionaire space lord who built auctoritas by buying the digital public square out from under the Empire so he could shitpoast in peace with the chuds.

Each of these has their good and bad aspects – the point, again, is not to dwell on whether any given development will be to our benefit or our detriment. As always, the ramification of second and third-order effects through the social order will result in both advantage and disadvantage. The point is simply that things are changing, that we can all feel it, and that this fuels a sense of nervous excitement that permeates the atmosphere like electrical buzz of a high-tension wire. Perhaps there will be disaster, and we shall drive ourselves to ruin and extinction; perhaps our descendants will walk the stars as near-gods. Either way, we are here, now, at this most interesting of nexus points in the unfolding history of our species. Would you rather be anywhen else?

The pessimism of recent years naturally generated an interest in cyclical theories of history – the empirical Strauss-Howe model of generational turnings, Turchin’s mechanical cliodynamics with its elite overproduction and wealth pumps, Spengler’s mythopoetic conception of cultures as vast organisms whose lifecycles progress through predictable seasons. Hard times make strong men; strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make hard times. Whichever model one favours, the invariable conclusion is that Western civilization is in its terminal winter – fragile, ossified, decadent, corrupt, exhausted, and doomed. Desolation awaits.

“The Course of Empire – Desolation” by Thomas Cole, one of a series of five paintings created between 1833 and 1836.
Wikimedia Commons.

Yet a cycle is not defined by its final product, no more than a symphony is defined by its concluding note, a life by its last moment, a wheel by a single turn, or a circle by a single point. Viewed from another angle, the death of Faustian civilization is also the birth of a new civilization … and even as we are here to live through the death of one, we plant the seeds for the other. With the tempo of history moving faster than ever before due to the global interconnectivity of instantaneous telecommunications and high-speed travel, it may be that our children will live in the savage springtime of that new civilization … perhaps one animated by the Aenean rather than the Faustian soul, which “will go Mars, not because it is hard, but because it is necessary”. You should read the essay at that last link, by the way. It isn’t long, it’s extremely interesting, and it’s new.

November 7, 2024

QotD: Fear of … freedom

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

When Rousseau said you’d need to force men to be free, he wasn’t joking. It’s hard to admit the truth of that statement, especially as Rousseau, like all Leftists, quite obviously pleasured himself to the thought of forcing great masses of people to do things, but he’s right for all that. As Nikolai points out, so many people quite obviously enjoy the COVID madness, because it gives structure to their otherwise stressfully chaotic lives. Everyone, even the most rugged Marlboro Man individualist, has experienced “analysis paralysis”, that rising sense of near-panic that comes from having too many choices. Your developmentally normal person quickly snaps out of it — a mental slap upside the head in the form of “it’s just peanut butter, dummy!” usually does it — but a vast and increasing number of people never do.

Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.

If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small”. If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.

It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.

Severian, “Mailbag Etc.”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-06.

November 5, 2024

QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”

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

A message to trans people:

I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.

I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:

1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.

2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.

3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.

4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.

5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.

The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.

October 31, 2024

Nine Types of Trick-or-Treat Houses

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

It’s a Southern Thing
Published Oct 23, 2018

Halloween is coming. Which one will you be?

#SoTrueYall #itsasouthernthing

October 19, 2024

Changing gender balance in occupations and in higher education

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter ruminates on the likely downward path of many institutes of higher learning as current gender balance changes continue:

An occupation that flips from male to female dominance invariably suffers not only diminished prestige, but also a decline in wages … which, once again, makes sense in the context of sexual psychology. A man’s income is one element (and a big element) of a woman’s attraction to him, but the reverse is not true; if women are paid less, this does not really hurt their value in the sexual marketplace at all, and so they will push back against it much less than men would. This is probably what lies behind the tendency of women to be less forceful when negotiating salaries.

To the point: ever since the 1970s, women have overtaken and gradually eclipsed men within higher education. There is a gap in enrolment, consistent across racial groups:

[…]

Across all programs, at all academic levels, American universities recently reached the threshold of 60% of the student body being female.

This will be a disaster for academia.

Indeed, it’s already a disaster. About a year ago, I analyzed a Gallup poll which revealed that the confidence of the American public in the trustworthiness and overall value of the academic sector had declined precipitously over the course of the 2010s.

In that article I examined several factors contributing to this DIEing confidence in the academy: the explosive growth in tuition fees, even as continuous relaxation of academic standards dilutes the actual value of a degree; the deplorable state of scholarship, with endless revelations of fraud, a seemingly irresolvable replication crisis, and the torrent of psychotic nonsense that passes for ‘research’; the increasingly frigid social environment enforced by the armies of overpaid, sour-faced administrators. Almost all of these, however, are related in some way or another to the feminization of academia.

And it is probably going to get much worse before it gets better.

As discussed in this recent article by Celeste Davis of Matriarchal Blessing, research on male flight indicates that a 60% female composition represents the tipping point beyond which men perceive an environment as feminine, which then leads to a precipitous decline in male participation. Davis appears to be some sort of feminist3, but I want you to look past that and give her article a read; it is very thorough, well-researched, and thought-provoking (and also the direct inspiration for this article).

[…]

Universities are belatedly starting to notice that male enrolment is dropping fast, particularly among white men (I wonder why…), and are starting to make noises about maybe thinking about perhaps looking into ways of trying to recruit and retain more men (albeit, not specifically white men).

This seems unlikely to succeed.

Even if universities are successful in setting up programs to increase male recruitment, they will be fighting an uphill battle against the sexual perception that has already set in. Once something is coded as being a feminine hobby, it is extremely difficult to change that code. While it’s very easy to list examples of professions that have switched from male to female dominance, off the top of my head I have a hard time coming up with examples of the reverse. This suggests that female dominance tends to be sticky. There’s no reason to expect this will be any different with academia, either within individual programs, or across the sector as a whole.

This is an entirely different problem from the one faced by female entryism. In the initial phases of female entry, the primary difficulty faced by women is that it is simply more difficult to compete with men – in the case of athletics, effectively impossible. Women must therefore either work extremely hard, or the work must be made easier for them. In practice, since the 1970s we’ve seen both of these, with “working twice as hard as the boys” predominating in the early years, and assistance from special programs predominating later on.

By contrast, the central obstacle faced by anyone trying to attract men to a female-dominated environment is that men are deeply reluctant to enter. As a third of young men told Pew when asked why they didn’t attend or complete university: they just didn’t want to. It isn’t because they can’t compete with women. They can, usually with ease, but competition is pointless because it will gain them nothing. Special programs to assist men are beside the point; if anything, they work against you, because the implicit message with any special program for men is that they need help to compete with women … thereby making competition even more pointless. “You beat a girl but you needed help to do it”, is going to impress the girls even less than beating a girl unaided.

October 17, 2024

Historian Answers Google’s Most Popular Questions About Ancient Sparta

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

History Hit
Published Jun 26, 2024

Were the Spartans actually the best warriors? Did they really throw their babies off cliffs? Did they … HUNT their slaves? Ancient Greek historian Roel Konijnendijk answers your most googled questions about the Spartans.

00:00 Intro
00:35 When did the Spartans live?
01:00 Were the Spartans Greek?
01:30 Were the Spartans a professional army?
03:00 Were the Spartans the best warriors?
04:46 How did the Spartans train?
06:43 Did the Spartans throw babies off cliffs?
07:42 Did the Spartans practise eugenics?
09:55 Did the Spartans steal food?
10:21 Were the Spartans vegetarian?
11:18 Were the Spartans better than Athens?
12:54 Did Sparta have a navy?
13:15 Why didn’t Sparta have walls?
14:22 Did the Spartans hunt their slaves?
15:30 Did the Spartans get their slaves drunk?
16:42 Did the Spartans have a king?
17:57 Was Sparta a democracy?
19:13 Why did the Spartans fight at Thermopylae?
19:45 Why did the Spartans only send 300?
21:30 Were the Spartans betrayed at Thermopylae?
22:42 Did the Spartans beat the Persians?
24:00 Were the Spartans muscular?
25:40 Did the Spartans have long hair?
26:25 Did the Spartans have same sex relationships?
28:27 Were the Spartan women equal?
(more…)

October 13, 2024

The Soviet Union’s surplus of math nerds

Filed under: History, Russia, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The most recent review from Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf is John Psmith’s musings on Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers by Alexander Zvonkin, and he starts by talking about something the Soviets did better than the west:

To me, one of the greatest historical puzzles is why the Cold War was even a contest. Consider it a mirror image of the Needham Question: Joseph Needham famously wondered why it was that, despite having a vastly larger population and GDP, Imperial China nevertheless lost out scientifically to the West. (I examined this question at some length in this review.) Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?

The puzzle was partly solved for me, but partly deepened, when those of us who grew up in the ‘90s and ‘00s encountered the vast wave of former Soviet émigrés that washed up in the United States after the fall of communism. Anybody who played competitive chess back then, or who participated in math competitions, knows what I’m talking about: the sinking feeling you got upon seeing that your opponent had a Russian name. These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way above their weight, demographically speaking. Today, those same Russians are all over Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Ivy League math departments, still overrepresented in technical fields. What explains it? Are Russians just naturally better at math and physics?

When I related these questions to an Ashkenazi-supremacist friend of mine, he immediately suggested that “maybe it’s because they’re all Jewish”. (I’ve noticed that the most philosemitic people and the most antisemitic people sometimes have curiously similar models of the world, they just disagree on whether it’s a good thing.) My friend’s question wasn’t crazy, since there are definitely times when asking “were they all Jewish?” yields an affirmative answer. But in this case I had to disappoint him with the knowledge that many of these Russian math and chess superstars were gentiles.2 What’s more, by the ’60s and ’70s the Soviets had an entire discriminatory apparatus dedicated to keeping Jews out of the scientific establishment, so it would be impressive indeed if they were the foundation of its success.

Another possible explanation actually hinges on the relative poverty of the Soviet Union. Assume there are a lot of people out there with natural mathematical talent, but who given their druthers would major in underwater basket-weaving instead. The United States, because it’s so wealthy, can afford to “waste” a huge proportion of our talented population on humanities, arts, and other stuff that doesn’t involve you sitting in the school library until 3am. In other words, not going into a technical field is a form of luxury, which America can afford to consume. The Soviets, rather like the Chinese today, were forced by their underdog status to allocate human capital more efficiently (and had the authoritarian means to do so by force if necessary). This theory is related to the curious fact that, on average, the more feminist your society, the fewer women there are in math and science — which makes total sense if you assume that on average women are good at math but uninterested in it.

The thing is, the émigré superstars I encountered didn’t seem at all grudging or resentful about their studies. If anything it was the opposite. I’ve previously complained about how much I hate Russian mathematician Edward Frenkel’s3 book, but one thing it gets across well is just how important passion is to being a great mathematician, and passion was the thing the émigrés seemed to have a surfeit of. In college, the joke was that seminars by American professors would last an hour, whereas seminars by Russian professors would turn into boisterous debates lasting all night. People have been writing for centuries about Russians having a tendency towards “maximalism” — whether aesthetic or ideological or anything else. Maybe a culture-wide commitment to not doing anything by half-measures explains it?

    1. There are scientific sub-disciplines where even at the end the Soviets had a clear lead, including several fields of math. Even crazier, there are sub-disciplines where we have not yet gotten back to where the Soviets were (for instance phage therapy).

    2. Undeterred, my friend pointed out that many modern Russian gentiles have significant Jewish ancestry. The Soviets actively promoted mixed marriages, to the point where in some cities the average urban gentile Russian is as much as 25% Jewish. I still don’t think this explains Soviet scientific prowess, but it’s an interesting data point because the most highly urbanized areas are the ones where most of the mathematicians (and most of the émigrés) came from.

    3. Before you ask, I looked it up and Frenkel is half Jewish, half gentile. I will leave it to you whether you count that as evidence for or against my friend’s theory.

QotD: Portugal as “ADHD with borders”

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

… I often refer to Portugal as ADHD with borders. And it is that. It’s weird, the level of ADD that’s considered completely normal there. (And I was off the charts even for there. Oh, well.) But it took me till this last visit, when I’m almost — to the extent I’m fully acculturated here, or as much as it’s possible to be — to realize how much of Portugal’s inability to organize its way out of a wet paper bag OR maintain anything less durable than a Roman aqueduct (and even those!) is reinforced and driven to eleventy by a culture that goes “The highest virtue is doing things fast, no matter how BADLY they’re done”. And that’s pushed everywhere and by every possible means. And yes, I grew up with it (Anyone making a comment about my books gets put in the corner. Actually they’re worse if I take very long. Yes, I have an explanation, but it doesn’t matter. It is what it is) and internalized it to such an extent it took almost forty years to SEE it was there and it was bad.

Sarah Hoyt, “Culture Clash”, According to Hoyt, 2024-07-09.

October 7, 2024

The demographic impact of modern cities

Filed under: Education, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby touches on some of the social and demographic issues that David Friedman discussed the other day:

US Birth Rates from 1909-2008. The number of births per thousand people in the United States. The red segment is known as the Baby Boomer period. The drop in 1970 is due to excluding births to non-residents.
Graph by Saiarcot895 via Wikimedia Commons

Cities are demographic sinks. That is, cities have higher death rates than fertility rates.

For much of human history, cities have been unhealthy places to live. This is no longer true: cities have higher average life expectancies than rural areas. But they are still demographic sinks, for cities collapse fertility rates.

The problem is not that more women have no children, or only one child, making it to adulthood. Such women have always existed, though their share of the population has gone up across recent decades.

The key problem is the collapse in the demographic “tail” of large families. Cities are profoundly antipathetic to large families, and have always been so. This is particularly true of apartment cities — suburbs are somewhat more amenable to large families, though not enough to make up for the urbanisation effect.

While modern cities do not have slaves and household servants who were blocked from reproducing as ancient cities did, various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. There is also the deep problems of modern online dating. Plus the effects that endocrine disrupters and falling testosterone may be having.

These effects also extend to rural populations: falling fertility in rural populations is far more of a mystery than falling fertility in urban populations. How much declining metabolic health plays in all this is unclear. Indeed, futurist Samo Burja is correct, we do not really understand the “social technology” of human breeding.

Be that as it may, cities as demographic sinks is a continuation of patterns that go back to the first cities.

Matters at the margin

There are factors at the margin known to make a difference. Religious folk breed more than secular folk, though that is in part because rural people are more religious and city folk more secular.

Educating women reduces fertility. This is, in part, an urbanisation effect, as more education is available in cities. It is also an opportunity cost effect — there is more to do in cities, both paid and unpaid.

Education increases the general opportunity cost of motherhood, by expanding women’s opportunities. This also makes moving to cities more attractive. Women having more career opportunities reduces the relative attractiveness of men as marriage partners, reducing the marriage rate.

Strong cultural barriers against children outside marriage can reduce the fertility rate, by largely restricting motherhood to married women. This makes the fertility rate more dependant on the marriage rate.

Educating women makes children more expensive, as educated mothers have educated children. Part of the patterns that economist Gary Becker analysed.

October 6, 2024

QotD: Putting the past on trial

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

If you pass through Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, London, you might happen upon a statue of Virginia Woolf that was erected in 2004. You will already know that Woolf was a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Set, that coterie of artists and intellectuals that included E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. But if you scan the QR code next to this statue you can also learn that Woolf was a vile racist who must be condemned by all right-thinking individuals.

Historical context is all very well. When it comes to Woolf, perhaps a few details about her novels To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway would be appreciated, or some information about her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. But no, instead we are to be hectored about her “challenging, offensive comments and descriptions of race, class and ability which would find unacceptable today”. One wonders what the person responsible for these judgmental remarks has ever accomplished, if anything at all. These petty moralists are like the crabs in the bucket, pulling down the most accomplished out of envy and spite.

The best approach to writers of genius is humility, but this quality seems to be on the decline. We see evidence of this in the self-importance of those who have rewritten books by P.G. Wodehouse, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Roald Dahl. It should go without saying that Wodehouse’s prose cannot be improved, least of all by know-nothing activists who have inveigled their way into the publishing industry.

I recently bought the complete set of Fleming’s James Bond books, but I had to seek out second-hand copies to ensure that they had not been sanitised by talentless “sensitivity readers”. Yes of course, these books include sentiments that are unacceptable by today’s standards. But what’s so wrong with that? “All women love semi-rape” is a shocking sentence – in this case, it’s by the female narrator of The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) – but what purpose does censoring the passage actually serve?

The rewriting of books and the creation of cautionary QR codes are symptoms of our current strain of puritanism. These are the descendants of those religious zealots who shut the theatres in 1642 out of fear that the masses might be corrupted. And while I concede that Ian Fleming’s views on relationships between the sexes may not have been progressive, I don’t feel the need to be berated about it before enjoying the adventures of James Bond.

It’s not as though Bond is even meant to be a likeable character; the man has a licence to kill, for heaven’s sake. This isn’t someone you’d wish to invite to a dinner party. In that regard he’s reminiscent of the hero of George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series, a character based on the bully from Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes. He’s a violent boorish rapist, but the novels are still entertaining because most of us aren’t reading them for moral instruction.

In exploring the gamut of human experience, writers will often feel compelled to recreate the grotesque, the uncomfortable, the outrageous, even the downright evil. Who ever supposed that works of fiction should restrict themselves to rose-tinted idealisations of human existence? Imagine Macbeth without the regicide, or King Lear without the eye-gouging, or Titus Andronicus without the cannibalism. Would Dante’s Divine Comedy retain its power if some “sensitivity reader” excised the Inferno?

Andrew Doyle, “Putting the past on trial”, Andrew Doyle, 2024-07-04.

October 5, 2024

David Friedman on falling birth rates

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

In the west, generally speaking, female employment and economic power has been rising and birth rates have been falling, except among religious minorities. David Friedman provides some explanations:

“Tetra Pak® – Housewife at the dairy counter in a Swedish shop” by Tetra Pak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

One possible explanation is changes in norms and legal rules that make mate search more difficult. An example is a norm against dating fellow employees and a stronger norm against dating someone who has authority over you or you have some authority over.

For many people, their job is the only context in which they routinely interact with lots of other people, the best environment for mate search. The interaction often provides a way of evaluating someone for characteristics such as honesty and competence as well as compatibility, much harder to do in the context of dating, harder still in computer dating. It works better for people who not only are fellow employees but are actually working together, which often means one just above the other in the office hierarchy.

The same issue arises in the university context. Undergraduates are free to date each other — mate search is arguably one of the main functions of college. Junior faculty members, likely to be unmarried, are commonly not supposed to date students, even students not taking classes from them, certainly not students who are. I am not sure what current norms are for graduate student/undergraduate interaction, expect graduate student/faculty romance to be at least somewhat frowned upon, especially if the faculty member has some authority over the student which is likely if they are in the same field, the context in which they are most likely to get know each other.

Another cause for declining birth rates might be changing norms of courtship. I have not been part of that market for over forty years but I gather from what younger people say online that many men believe that making advances that do not turn out to be wanted is not only embarrassing but dangerous, that they risk being accused of harassment or some related offense. In the student context, many men believe that if a romantic partner changes her mind she can get him into a great deal of trouble by taking advantage of a college disciplinary process heavily biased against men. I do not know to what degree that belief is true but many men believe it is, which could be expected to discourage courtship.

Along related lines:

    Also, when I was working for a big time international consulting firm, they tried to come out with a formal rule that said that you were allowed to ask out a co-worker, but only one time. If they said no, you could never ask again. Apparently the Italians howled with laughter and insisted that if this rule was enforced in Italy, no one would ever have kids, as the typical Italian courtship approach involves like a dozen rejections before ultimately the woman finally gives in. (GoneAnon)

That cannot be the full explanation since Italian birth rates are down too. Since birth rates are down in all or almost all developed countries and many less developed ones, it is worth investigating how widespread the relevant norms are.

Housewife Becoming a Low Status Profession

For a very long time, the default system for producing and rearing children was a married couple, with the husband producing income and the wife in charge of running the household and rearing the children. Over recent decades, the woman’s role in that division of labor has become a low status activity, lower status than making a living in the marketplace, much lower than professional success.1 Being an unmarried adult woman used to be, in most contexts, low status, on the presumption that if she could have caught a man she would have. At present, in much of western society, that has reversed — being a married housewife is lower status than being an employed single woman.

    …arguments from the stay-at-home moms I know, who say people are constantly giving them grief about it, and who are often looking for some part-time make-work job they can take just so people will stop giving them grief about being a stay-at-home mother (Scott Alexander)

It is possible for a married woman to have both a job and children or for an unmarried woman to have children, but the former is more difficult than for a full time housewife, the latter much more difficult.

September 26, 2024

QotD: The Asshole License, First Class

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

Here’s the “official” definition of “passive-aggressive”:

    Passive-aggressive behavior is characterized by a pattern of passive hostility and an avoidance of direct communication. Inaction where some action is socially customary is a typical passive-aggressive strategy (showing up late for functions, staying silent when a response is expected). Such behavior is sometimes protested by associates, evoking exasperation or confusion. People who are recipients of passive-aggressive behavior may experience anxiety due to the discordance between what they perceive and what the perpetrator is saying.

There’s definitely a lot of that going around, but it doesn’t describe the behavior of the apple polishers, or the people who have issued themselves the Asshole License. You know the ones I mean: SJWs, of course, but also CrossFitters, vegans, cyclists … basically, anyone who takes up a certain cause or lifestyle seemingly for the sole purpose of being an enormous douchebag about it in every possible social situation. Neither I nor anyone else would have a problem with vegans, say, if they really were doing it for their health, as they so often claim, because if they really were doing it for their health, they’d bring it up once, and then forever shut the fuck up about it.

But they don’t. Similarly, nobody would have a problem with bike riders if they’d just follow the goddamn rules of the road. But they don’t, and the more “cyclist” shit they own — the racing bikes made out of space station parts, the lycra bodysuits, the helmets that look like cranial jockstraps — the less the rules of the road apply to them. Spot one of those fuckers in full kit, and you’re guaranteed to see him weaving in and out of four lanes, turning abruptly without signaling, and blowing through stop signs at full speed, with nary a glance at cross traffic. They’re possessors of the Asshole License First Class, you see, so obviously the rules don’t apply when they’re doing their Official Asshole Thing.

See what I mean? That’s not “passive-aggressive”. But it’s not “active-aggressive” either. They’re not trying to pick a fight. It’s like virtue-signaling, in that you, the audience, are absolutely necessary, but unlike the standard virtue-signal, which is strictly an intra-Leftist competition, this one entails hostility towards the rest of the world, not just toward fellow Leftists …

Severian, “The Passive-Aggressive Society”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-24.

September 20, 2024

QotD: The Matrix, Harry Potter and “The One Pop Culture Thing”

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

Part of the appeal of Harry Potter must be that can somehow be intellectualized, though — at least, if the number of people incorporating it, in all apparent seriousness, into college classes can be believed. Here again, I’m not talking the English Department, which might have a legitimate reason — to study the narrative technique or whatever (for certain stretched-farther-than-Trigglypuff’s-sweatpants values of “legitimate”, anyway). I mean classes like “PHIL 101: Harry Potter and Philosophy”, which started showing up first in goofy California colleges, then all over the damn place, somewhere around 2002.

That certainly seems to be the appeal of The Matrix, and indeed The Matrix stopped being The One Pop Culture Thing very quickly, I hypothesize, because it made “intellectualizing” it too easy. The Matrix is pretty much just Jean Baudrillard: The Movie, and while that’s fun and even useful — Baudrillard did have a point, despite it all — it’s just too clever … by which I mean, The Matrix did too much of the heavy lifting, so that you don’t get too many Very Clever Persyn points for noting that we’re all, just, like, simulations in other people’s minds, dude. Descartes can go fuck himself; Keanu Reeves has solved the mind-body problem with kung fu.

Also, Baudrillard-lite is everywhere now. We’re all Postmodernists, in the same way we’re all Marxists, so even the kids who slept through most of their one required Humanities course has at least vaguely heard of this stuff. A show like True Detective, on the other hand, hearkens back to much older philosophy — as tiresome as the wannabe-Foucaults were back in the late 1980s, as a culture we’ve pretty much forgotten about them, so the brooding wannabe existentialist douchebag seems new now. I just googled up “best true detective quotes”. Here’s a small sampling:

    This is a world where nothing is solved. You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.

Also:

    … to realize that all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream you had inside a locked room — a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, there’s a monster at the end of it.

That “flat circle” thing is a direct quote from Schopenhauer, I’m pretty sure, and the idea of “eternal recurrence” came from Vedic philosophy via him to Nietzsche. Here, for instance, the Manly Mustache Man summarizes the plot of True Detective, season 1:

    What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

    Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?

Here again, I don’t blame the average HBO viewer for having their minds blown by this (or at least pretending to), but people with PhDs should damn well know better. This is existentialism for dummies, but since they spent most of their off hours in grad school reading Harry Potter …

Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.

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