Well, if by indigenous we mean “the minimally admixed descendants of the first humans to live in a place”, we can be pretty confident about the Polynesians, the Icelanders, and the British in Bermuda. Beyond that, probably also those Amazonian populations with substantial Population Y ancestry and some of the speakers of non-Pama–Nyungan languages in northern Australia? The African pygmies and Khoisan speakers of click languages who escaped the Bantu expansion have a decent claim, but given the wealth of hominin fossils in Africa it seems pretty likely that most of their ancestors displaced someone. Certainly many North American groups did; the “skraelings” whom the Norse encountered in Newfoundland were probably the Dorset, who within a few hundred years were completely replaced by the Thule culture, ancestors of the modern Inuit. (Ironically, the people who drove the Norse out of Vinland might have been better off if they’d stayed; they could hardly have done worse.)
But of course this is pedantic nitpicking (my speciality), because legally “indigenous” means “descended from the people who were there before European colonialism”: the Inuit are “indigenous” because they were in Newfoundland and Greenland when Martin Frobisher showed up, regardless of the fact that they had only arrived from western Alaska about five hundred years earlier. Indigineity in practice is not a factual claim, it’s a political one, based on the idea that the movements, mixtures, and wholesale destructions of populations since 1500 are qualitatively different from earlier ones. But the only real difference I see, aside from them being more recent, is that they were often less thorough — in large part because they were more recent. In many parts of the world, the Europeans were encountering dense populations of agriculturalists who had already moved into the area, killed or displaced the hunter-gatherers who lived there, and settled down. For instance, there’s a lot of French and English spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, but it hasn’t displaced the Bantu languages like they displaced the click languages. Spanish has made greater inroads in Central and South America, but there’s still a lot more pre-colonial ancestry among people there than there is pre-Bantu ancestry in Africa. I think these analogies work, because as far as I can tell the colonization of North America and Australia look a lot like the Early European Farmer and Bantu expansions (technologically advanced agriculturalists show up and replace pretty much everyone, genetically and culturally), while the colonization of Central and South America looks more like the Yamnaya expansion into Europe (a bunch of men show up, introduce exciting new disease that destabilizes an agricultural civilization,1 replace the language and heavily influence the culture, but mix with rather than replacing the population).
Some people argue that it makes sense to talk about European colonialism differently than other population expansions because it’s had a unique role in shaping the modern world, but I think that’s historically myopic: the spread of agriculture did far more to change people’s lives, the Yamnaya expansion also had a tremendous impact on the world, and I could go on. And of course the way it’s deployed is pretty disingenuous, because the trendier land acknowledgements become, the more the people being acknowledged start saying, “Well, are you going to give it back?” (Of course they’re not going to give it back.) It comes off as a sort of woke white man’s burden: of course they showed up and killed the people who were already here and took their stuff, but we’re civilized and ought to know better, so only we are blameworthy.
More reasonable, I think, is the idea that (some of) the direct descendants of the winners and losers in this episode of the Way Of The World are still around and still in positions of advantage or disadvantage based on its outcome, so it’s more salient than previous episodes. Even if, a thousand years ago, your ancestors rolled in and destroyed someone else’s culture, it still sucks when some third group shows up and destroys yours. It’s just, you know, a little embarrassing when you’ve spent a few decades couching your post-colonial objections in terms of how mean and unfair it is to do that, and then the aDNA reveals your own population’s past …
Reich gets into this a bit in his chapter on India, where it’s pretty clear that the archaeological and genetic evidence all point to a bunch of Indo-Iranian bros with steppe ancestry and chariots rolling down into the Indus Valley and replacing basically all the Y chromosomes, but his Indian coauthors (who had provided the DNA samples) didn’t want to imply that substantial Indian ancestry came from outside India. (In the end, the paper got written without speculating on the origins of the Ancestral North Indians and merely describing their similarity to other groups with steppe ancestry.) Being autochthonous is clearly very important to many peoples’ identities, in a way that’s hard to wrap your head around as an American or northern European: Americans because blah blah nation of immigrants blah, obviously, but a lot of northern European stories about ethnogenesis (particularly from the French, Germans, and English) draw heavily on historical Germanic tribal migrations and the notion of descent (at least in part) from invading conquerors.
One underlying theme in the book — a theme Reich doesn’t explicitly draw out but which really intrigued me — is the tension between theory and data in our attempts to understand the world. You wrote above about those two paradigms to explain the spread of prehistoric cultures, which the lingo terms “migrationism” (people moved into their neighbors’ territory and took their pots with them) and “diffusionism”2 (people had cool pots and their neighbors copied them), and which archaeologists tended to adopt for reasons that had as much to do with politics and ideology as with the actual facts on (in!) the ground. And you’re right that in most cases where we now have aDNA evidence, the migrationists were correct — in the case of the Yamnaya, most modern migrationists didn’t go nearly far enough — but it’s worth pointing out that all those 19th century Germans who got so excited about looking for the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat were just as driven by ideology as the 21st century Germans who resigned as Reich’s coauthors on a 2015 article where they thought the conclusions were too close to the work of Gustaf Kossinna (d. 1931), whose ideas had been popular under the Nazis. (They didn’t think the conclusions were incorrect, mind you, they just didn’t want to be associated with them.) But on the other hand, you need a theory to tell you where and how to look; you can’t just be a phenomenological petri dish waiting for some datum to hit you. This is sort of the Popperian story of How Science Works, but it’s more complex because there are all kinds of extra-scientific implications to the theories we construct around our data.
The migrationist/diffusionist debate is mostly settled, but it turns out there’s another issue looming where data and theory collide: the more we know about the structure and history of various populations, the more we realize that we should expect to find what Reich calls “substantial average biological differences” between them. A lot of these differences aren’t going to be along axes we think have moral implications — “people with Northern European ancestry are more likely to be tall” or “people with Tibetan ancestry tend to be better at functioning at high altitudes” isn’t a fraught claim. (Plus, it’s not clear that all the differences we’ve observed so far are because one population is uniformly better: many could be explained by greater variation within one population. Are people with West African ancestry overrepresented among sprinters because they’re 0.8 SD better at sprinting, or because the 33% higher genetic diversity among West Africans compared to people without recent African ancestry means you get more really good sprinters and more really bad ones?) But there are a lot of behavioral and cognitive traits where genes obviously play some role, but which we also feel are morally weighty — intelligence is the most obvious example, but impulsivity and the ability to delay gratification are also heritable, and there are probably lots of others. Reich is adorably optimistic about all this, especially for a book written in 2018, and suggests that it shouldn’t be a problem to simultaneously (1) recognize that members of Population A are statistically likely to be better at some thing than members of Population B, and (2) treat members of all populations as individuals and give them opportunities to succeed in all walks of life to the best of their personal abilities, whether the result of genetic predisposition or hard work. And I agree that this is a laudable goal! But for inspiration on how our society can both recognize average differences and enable individual achievement, Reich suggests we turn to our successes in doing this for … sex differences! Womp womp.
Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.
1. aDNA works for microbes too, and it looks like Y. pestis, the plague, came from the steppe with the Yamnaya. It didn’t yet have the mutation that causes buboes, but the pneumonic version of the disease is plenty deadly, especially to the Early European Farmers who didn’t have any protection against it. In fact, as far as we can tell, in all of human history there have only been four unique introductions of plague from its natural reservoirs in the Central Asian steppe: the one that came with or slightly preceded the Yamnaya expansion around 5kya, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, and an outbreak that began in Yunnan in 1855. The waves of plague that wracked Europe throughout the medieval and early modern periods were just new pulses of the strain that had caused Black Death. Johannes Krause gets into this a bit in his A Short History of Humanity, which I didn’t actually care for because his treatment of historic pandemics and migrations is so heavily inflected with Current Year concerns, but I haven’t found a better treatment in a book so it’s worth checking it out from the library if you’re interested.
2. I cheated with that “pots not people” line in my earlier email; it usually gets (got?) trotted out not as a bit of epistemological modesty about what the archaeological record is capable of showing, but as a claim that the only movements involved were those of pots, not of people.
April 4, 2024
QotD: What we mean by the term “indigenous”
April 2, 2024
Publishing and the AI menace
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte fiddles around a bit with some of the current AI large language models and tries to decide how much he and other publishers should be worried about it:
The literary world, and authors in particular, have been freaking out about artificial intelligence since ChatGPT burst on the scene sixteen months ago. Hands have been wrung and class-action lawsuits filed, none of them off to auspicious starts.
The principal concern, according to the Authors Guild, is that AI technologies have been “built using vast amounts of copyrighted works without the permission of or compensation to authors and creators,” and that they have the potential to “cheaply and easily produce works that compete with — and displace — human-authored books, journalism, and other works”.
Some of my own work was among the tens of thousands of volumes in the Books3 data set used without permission to train the large language models that generate artificial intelligence. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or disturbed. In fact, I’ve not been able to make up my mind about anything AI. I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other models to see how they might be useful to our business. I’ve found them interesting, impressive in some respects, underwhelming in others.
Unable to generate a newsletter out of my indecision, I called up my friend Thad McIlroy — author, publishing consultant, and all-around smart guy — to get his perspective. Thad has been tightly focused on artificial intelligence for the last couple of years. In fact, he’s probably the world’s leading authority on AI as it pertains to book publishing. As expected, he had a lot of interesting things to say. Here are some of the highlights, loosely categorized.
THE TOOLS
I described to Thad my efforts to use AI to edit copy, proofread, typeset, design covers, do research, write promotional copy, marketing briefs, and grant applications, etc. Some of it has been a waste of time. Here’s what I got when I asked DALL-E for a cartoon on the future of book publishing:
In fairness, I didn’t give the machine enough prompts to produce anything decent. Like everything else, you get out of AI what you put into it. Prompts are crucial.
For the most part, I’ve found the tools to be useful, whether for coughing up information or generating ideas or suggesting language, although everything I tried required a good deal of human intervention to bring it up to scratch.
I had hoped, at minimum, that AI would be able to proofread copy. Proofreading is a fairly technical activity, based on rules of grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc. AI is supposed to be good at following rules. Yet it is far from competent as a proofreader. It misses a lot. The more nuanced the copy, the more it struggles.
March 5, 2024
QotD: Begging the question
Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.
February 17, 2024
The pronoun police claim another scalp
Brendan O’Neill recounts the very sad tale of a 90-year-old woman who has been cancelled by the charity she’d volunteered for over 60 years for questioning mandatory “preferred pronouns”:
Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.
This strange case tells us so much about our times. It confirms that pronounology is tantamount to a religion among the godless new elites. Showy declarations of one’s pronouns play an entirely doctrinal role. They’re the means through which the new establishment – and those who aspire to enter its rarefied ranks – signal their fealty to the god of political correctness, and to that especially angry god of transgenderism. This is why anyone, like Mrs Itkoff, who questions the faddish mumbo jumbo of putting “he / him”, “she / her” or “they / them” after one’s name must be dealt with severely – because they’re not only querying a way of speaking; they’re blaspheming against the entire cult of correct-thought that the new elites have built in order that they might distinguish between good people and bad people, between in-group folk and out-group folk.
Ostentatious pronoun declaration serves no practical purpose. Consider that even Joe Biden has declared his pronouns. No one is going to mistake this 81-year-old fella for a she / her or they / them. We know dozy old Joe’s a bloke. No, he says “he / him” not to be helpful but to signal his unswerving allegiance to elite opinion, to demonstrate his devotion to the new ruling ideologies. This is why the political class, the corporate world and sharp-elbowed youths who want to get their hands on those levers of cultural power make such a big deal of declaring their pronouns – because they know this religious incantation is a door-opener par excellence.
The reason I never use “preferred pronouns” is simple: I don’t subscribe to the neo-religion of gender ideology, which would have us believe that there are two you’s – your mysterious inner gendered soul and your outward biological appearance. Every time we declare our pronouns, or genuflect to someone else’s “preferred pronouns”, we are implicitly buying into this very modern delusion, this woke hocus pocus. I’m with Mrs Itkoff – the idea that people can choose their pronouns, rather than being allocated pronouns that accord with the truth and reason of their biological sex, doesn’t “make sense to me”.
The Itkoff case also confirms how cavalierly despotic woke has become, especially its post-sex, post-truth trans wing. The trans ideology has enacted numerous cruelties on women. Rapists in women’s prisons, men in women’s domestic-violence shelters, women’s sports almost entirely upended by an invasion of mediocre blokes who’ve changed their name to Crystal or whatever – there is no female right, no basic tenet of decency, that cannot be sacrificed at the altar of gender validation. Now, even the charitable urges of an elderly lady can be thrown on to the bonfire of the cruelties – goodness erased in the name of never offending men who think they’re women. That so-called progressives back this sacrifice of women’s right to organise and speak as they see fit in the name of appeasing delusional men is concerning in the extreme.
Then there’s the ageism. We need to talk about the searing hostility of the woke towards older people, especially older women. You don’t even have to be 90. Witness the ceaseless haranguing of “Karens”, a derogatory term for middle-aged, mostly white women who dare to stand up for themselves in public. They’ve become the hate figures of our time. The author Victoria Smith refers to it as “hag hate”, an “ageist misogyny” aimed at women who are perceived not only to be past their supposed sell-by date, but also, even worse, to be possessed of “incorrect” beliefs. The old ducking of hags in open water has been replaced by the shaming of hags on open web forums.
Partly, it’s just old-world ageist sexism rehabilitated in PC lingo. It should not be surprising that the cult of transgenderism – an ideology that indulges men’s jealous coveting of the hyper-sexualised female body – should be so staggeringly hostile to older women. To women who have “sagged”, whether physically or morally, and thus put themselves beyond the cravings of trans activists who seem to value only the young, the pert, the sexualised. That women are human beings, who go through every stage of human existence, seems to be beyond the moral grasp of trans ideologues for whom womanhood is costume and little more.
But there’s something else going on, too. Today’s fashionable ageism is not only misogynistic – it’s Maoist. When I read about the case of Fran Itkoff, it was Maoism that came to mind. For wasn’t that also a crusade against “the old”? Those hotheaded cancellers of 1960s China openly declared war on the “Four Olds” – old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. They demonised and tortured those who gave voice to “old” ideals. Are we not witnessing something similar today? Statues of “problematic” historical figures are torn down, “offensive” old literature is rewritten, old people – like Fran – are sent into social oblivion. Wokeness is Maoism with better PR. We need to do something about it before we arrive in a world where people like Mrs Itkoff are not only cancelled but are also made to stand in public squares with placards around their necks identifying them as rancid old wrongthinkers. It is time to defend “the old” from the crazed young of the woke crusade.
February 1, 2024
QotD: English hypocrisy, spoken
Alas, this indirect way of speaking, always tinged with irony and humour, has almost disappeared in favour of a cruder and less amusing manner of communicating. Literal-mindedness has replaced subtle codification, and with it, a people who were once subtle, if sometimes perfidious, have become crass and often aggressive. Irony, which the whole population once both understood and employed, and was so strong an aspect of the national character, has now disappeared, replaced by a disposition to querulousness and indignation.
Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.
January 17, 2024
QotD: Did Hari Seldon live in vain?
Such complex causation defies general laws (even before we get into the fact that humans also observe history, which creates even more complexity) with such tremendous import from such unlikely events in an experiment which can only be run once without a control.
The other problem is evidence. Attempting to actually diagnose and model societies like this demands a lot of the data and not merely that you need a lot of it. You need consistent data which projects very far back in history which is accurate and fairly complete, so that it can be effectively compared. Trying, for instance, to compare ancient population estimates, which often have error bars of 100% or more, with modern, far more precise population estimates is bound to cause some real problems in teasing out clear correlations in data. The assumptions you make in tuning those ancient population figures can and will swallow any conclusions you might draw from the comparison with modern figures beyond the fairly obvious (there are more people now). But even the strongest administrative states now have tremendous difficulty getting good data on their own lower classes! Much of the “data” we think we have are themselves statistical estimates. The situation even in the very recent past is much worse and only degrades from there as one goes further back!
By way of example, I was stunned that Turchin figures he can identify “elite overproduction” and quantify wealth concentration into the deep past, including into the ancient world (Romans, late Bronze Age, etc). I study the Romans; their empire is only 2,000 years ago and moreover probably the single best-attested ancient society apart from perhaps Egypt or China (and even then I think Rome comes out quite solidly ahead). And even in that context, our estimates for the population of Roman Italy range from c. 5m to three to four times that much. Estimates for the size of the Roman budget under Augustus or Tiberius (again, by far the best attested period we have) range wildly (though within an order of magnitude, perhaps around 800 million sestertii). Even establishing a baseline for this society with the kind of precision that might let you measure important but modest increases in the size of the elite is functionally impossible with such limited data.
When it comes to elites, we have at best only one historical datapoint for the size of the top Roman census class (the ordo equester) and it’s in 225 BC, but as reported by Polybius in the 140s and also he may have done the math wrong and it also isn’t clear if he’s actually captured the size of the census class! We know in the imperial period what the minimum wealth requirement to be in the Senate was, but we don’t know what the average wealth of a senator was (we tend to hopefully assume that Pliny the Younger is broadly typically, but he might not have been!), nor do we know the size of the senatorial class itself (formed as a distinct class only in the empire), nor do we know how many households there were of senatorial wealth but which didn’t serve in the Senate because their members opted not to run for public office. One can, of course, make educated guesses for these things (it is often useful and important to do so), but they are estimates founded on guesses supported by suppositions; a castle of sand balanced atop other castles of sand. We can say with some confidence that the Late Roman Republic and the Early Roman Empire saw tremendous concentrations of wealth; can we quantity that with much accuracy? No, not really; we can make very rough estimates, but these are at the mercy of their simplifying assumptions.
And this is, to be clear, the very best attested ancient society and only about 2,000 years old at that. The data situation for other ancient societies can only be worse – unless, unless one begins by assuming elite overproduction is a general feature of complex, wealthy societies and then reads that conclusion backwards into what little data exists. But that isn’t historical research; it is merely elevating confirmation bias to a research methodology.
As noted, I have other nitpicks – particularly the tendency to present very old ideas as new discoveries, like secular cycles (Polybius, late 2nd century BC) or war as the foundation of complex societies (Heraclitus, d. c. 475 BC) without always seeming to appreciate just how old and how frequently recurring the idea is (such that it might, for instance, be the sort of intuitive idea many people might independently come up with, even if it was untrue or that it might be the kind of idea that historians had considered long ago and largely rejected for well established reasons) – but this will, I hope, suffice for a basic explanation of why I find the idea of this approach unsatisfying. This is, to be clear, not a rejection of the role of data or statistics in history, both of which can be tremendously important. Nor is it a rejection of the possible contributions of non-historians (who have important contributions to make), though I would ask that someone wading into the field familiarize themselves with it (perhaps by doing some traditional historical research), before declaring they had revolutionized the field. Rather it is an argument both that these things cannot replace more traditional historical methods and also that their employment, like the employment of any historical method, must come with a very strong dose of epistemic humility.
Psychohistory only works in science fiction where the author, as the god of his universe, can make it work. Today’s psychohistorians have no such power.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.
1. For those confused by the causation, the Mongols are considered the most likely vector for the transmission of gunpowder from China, where it was invented, to Europe. Needless to say, having a single polity spanning the entire Eurasian Steppe at the precise historical moment for this to occur sure seems like a low probability event! In any event, European mastery of gunpowder led directly into European naval dominance in the world’s oceans (its impact on land warfare dominance is much more complex) which in turn led to European dominance at sea. At the same time, the English emphasis on gunnery over boarding actions early in this period (gunpowder again) provided a key advantage which contributed to subsequent British naval dominance among European powers (and also the British navy’s “cult of gunnery” in evidence to the World Wars at least), which in turn allowed for the wide diffusion of English as a business and trade language. In turn, American and British prominence in the post-WWII global order made English the natural language for NATO and thus the ICAO convention that English be used universally for all aircraft communication.
December 3, 2023
Doctor What-are-your-pronouns
I don’t watch Doctor Who although I have fond childhood memories of watching William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s respective “Doctors” and I caught one or two episodes of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in the role. That the show is still running on British TV is a wonder … but it got headlines for a recent installment that had the Doctor being told off for “assuming” an alien creature’s pronouns:
Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.
A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, “The Star Beast”, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?
It is this sort of banal plot line that encapsulates the shrivelling ambition of science fiction. Once the genre dared to hold up a provocative mirror to contemporary society. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, sci-fi challenged lazy assumptions. Now it revels in groupthink that feeds the collective self-righteousness of indolent teenagers and adults with teenage imaginations.
This matters, because at its best sci-fi can dazzle and even inspire us with the potential strangeness of the imagined future. A few years ago I made a series presented by William Shatner tracing the cultural and technological influence of Star Trek. In one episode, the inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, told director Julian Jones how he had been inspired by the example of Captain Kirk’s hand-held “communicator”. Will anyone invent something inspired by the new Doctor Who? A new set of guidelines for pronoun use, perhaps?
You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its “progressive” radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.
I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.
Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.
December 2, 2023
NATO’s Ostfront
CDR Salamander doesn’t like the misunderstandings that cause commentators to identify NATO’s primary (but thankfully not militarily active) front as a “flank”:
For those who follow me on twitter/X, you are quite familiar with the meme I’ve been posting since long before the Russo-Ukrainian War, all the way back to at least 2018.
This misuse of the King’s English soon became a bur under my saddle as this error continued to be made. Seeing a trend, the following meme was generated by a friend;
This is not a new problem, and I know exactly where it comes from. In my years as a NATO Staff Officer, it did not take long to notice a twitch in the eye of many, not only Germans, to the mention of an “Eastern Front”. It seems silly, and in the 21st Century is it, but it is a reality.
I refused to play along. Yes, I understand how a very few highly emotional people can’t let go of their grandfather’s nightmares, but it is time for the adults in the room to just go around them. Anyway, this is the English language, and while there were French and Walloon Waffen SS units along with Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, and a few volunteer Spanish and others now on the NATO bench that fought on the Eastern Front in WWII, it doesn’t have the same impact with them as we don’t discuss such things in polite company.
Eastern Front, Front de l’Est, or Ostfront, we should all have moved along. History — and proper military terminology — have been around for centuries. In any event, it doesn’t bother the Russians one way or the other and you are fooling yourself if you think it does.
The use of “Eastern Flank” instead of “Front” where referring to real military threat to NATO, the Russian Federation, is just childish.
November 25, 2023
QotD: Political language mirrors the ritualized nature of political life
In a crisis, they recite. We’ve all watched them do this. “This is not who we are.” “Let me be clear: Hate has no home here.” You know what they’re going to say before they say it, and you know the tone before you hear it. The current mayor of Los Angeles is very fond of “our message has been very clear” and “we’re going to link arms and stand together”, so you’re not surprised to hear her respond to a question with something like, “Well, Maria, thank you for that great question. Our message has been very clear: We’re going to link arms and stand together.” Listening to elected officials speak is qualitatively different than listening to people speak. They perform the ritual behaviours of their status group.
[…]
They become debilitated by a lifetime of ritual language. If a staffer hasn’t told them to look somber and say “I’m sorry for your loss”, they don’t know how. It isn’t a line they’ve been equipped with for the event. Hey man your kids burned to death I almost lost my Corvette once, man. All kiddin’ aside, man!
[…]
They aren’t people anymore. They can’t talk like people. They don’t have normal human affect. What’s particularly interesting is that this learned inability to read human cues is recent and narrow. Bill Clinton, as much a politician as anyone who has ever lived, had a well-known ability to see people and signal his empathy, or at least to do a brilliant job of faking it. Similarly, Donald Trump is obviously very very fond of Donald Trump, who is amazing, trust me, everybody says so, but he has a normal human ability to spontaneously bullshit with the normals. Elite disconnection isn’t inevitable.
The broken personal thing behind all the broken institutional things is a loss of basic human connection and behavior. It’s a learned disconnection, and they can’t hide it.
Chris Bray, “The Mask Becomes Your Face”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2023-08-22.
November 24, 2023
It sometimes seems that the only thing that isn’t “violence” these days is actual violence
David Sedaris at The Free Press:
“Gen Z” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Words, we are now regularly reminded, are violence. So too is silence. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying them attention. A friend recently called on one of her assistants to deliver a statistic during a business meeting and was later charged with “casual violence”. Apparently Deborah needed to give advance warning that she was going to ask a question, one that might possibly put her employee — someone who was well paid to know stuff and be able to spew it forth — on the spot.
Who are these hothouse flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded? People whose parents never hit them, that’s who. People who don’t know what real pain is, but still want to throw the word around. When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as “casual violence”. It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up. It never hurt all that much; what stung was the swiftness of it, the surprise. Who knew my mother could move so fast, like someone belted in the martial arts. I don’t feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little. Blood was rarely drawn. No limbs were broken. Could my parents have made their point without resorting to violence? Probably, but it would have taken more time, and with six kids to dress and get out the door that was a precious commodity. I see parents now who worry they’re being abusive if they don’t spend at least an hour putting their child to bed. An hour! I said to my sister, Amy, “Do you remember ever once being tucked in? Can you imagine Mom and Dad reading to us, or singing? Can you imagine them kissing us?”
“Ugh,” she said. “Stop!”
And look at us! We’re fine. We can handle stuff. We never get offended by anything.
Our parents thought we were okay, at best, and I think that really helped us in the long run. Ask someone now if they have kids, and they’re pretty much guaranteed to use the word amazing, as in “I have an amazing six-year-old daughter.”
“Amazing because she just discovered a cure for herpes or because she speaks three words of Spanish,” I always want to ask. “I mean, just how low have you set that bar?”
One of the worst things that’s happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer children — 1.8 as opposed to five 50 years ago. Sure, it’s good for the environment — fewer people means less demand for resources. The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least twelve times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated, and it gives them an outsize sense of their own importance.
The solution isn’t for every couple to start having five kids again, but maybe for one chosen couple to have five, and the other four couples to go without — either have a full litter you can’t pay that much attention to, or nothing at all.
If our schools are a mess it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away. Had one of my teachers told my mother that I was acting up in class, she’d have said, “Thank you so much for letting me know.” Then she’d have come to wherever I was — in front of the TV, or at the side of the TV making my way to the front of it — and slapped my sister Gretchen so hard her eyes would have crossed.
“What was that for?” Gretchen would have asked.
“Oops, wrong kid,” my mother would have said. Then she’d have slapped me twice as hard to make up for her mistake.
November 21, 2023
QotD: Collabortage
Collabortage always looks accidental, like a result of exhaustion or management failure. Contributing factors tend to include: poor communication between project teams on opposite sides of an intercorporate barrier, never-resolved conflicts between partners about project objectives, understaffing by both partners because each expects the other to do the heavy lifting, and (very often) loss of internal resource-contention battles to efforts fully owned by one player.
Occasionally the suspicion develops that collabortage was deliberate, the underhanded tactic of one partner (usually the larger one) intended to derail a partner whose innovations might otherwise have disrupted a business plan.
Eric S. Raymond, “Collabortage”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-16.
November 19, 2023
QotD: Defining “social justice”
As you say, “social justice” entails treating people not as individuals but as mascots and categories. And judging a person and their actions based on which Designated Victim Group they supposedly belong to and then assigning various exemptions and indulgences depending on that notional group identity and whatever presumptuous baggage can be attached to it, with varying degrees of perversity. And conversely, assigning imaginary sins and “privilege” to someone else based on whatever Designated Oppressor Group they can be said to belong to, however fatuously, and regardless of the particulars of the actual person.
Which is to say, “social justice” is largely about judging people tribally, cartoonishly, and by different and contradictory standards, based on some supposed group identity, which apparently — and conveniently — overrides all else. It’s glib, question-begging and instantly pernicious. Morality for the mediocre. As you say, viewed rationally, it’s something close to the opposite of justice. And yet, among our self-imagined betters, it’s the latest must-have.
In much the same way, “equity” — another word favoured by both educators and campus activists — is defined, if at all, only in the woolliest and most evasive of terms. And which, when used by those same educators and activists, seems to mean something like “equality of outcome regardless of inputs.” Inputs including diligence and punctuality. And that isn’t fair either.
David Thompson, commenting on “Everything It Touches”, davidthompson, 2019-04-22.
November 12, 2023
“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean”
Andrew Sullivan on how our “elites” now live in a world that the renowned Oxford academic Charles Lutwidge Dodgson1 predicted in his writings a century and a half ago:
“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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The word “genocide” may be the one rendered most meaningless in our discourse. It has some steep competition, of course. “White supremacy” now means asking someone to show up on time. “Trauma” means being referred to with the wrong pronoun. And “genocide” can, among other things, mean debating experimental sex reassignment procedures for children. (Go look up #transgenocide on Twitter and weep.)
But the supporters of Hamas and of the Palestinians have seized the g-word with particular zeal. And who can blame them? There’s a real, adolescent frisson in accusing the victims of the worst genocide in modern history of being genocidal themselves. “Israel, we charge you with genocide” is a common chant in many of the pro-Palestinian protests. “Genocide Joe” has been trending on Twitter. Eight hundred artists signed an open letter calling the Israeli counteract in Gaza “a genocide”. Yale professor Zareena Grewal channeled much of the “decolonizing” left: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”.
It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide”, and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria. A State Department official tweeted that Biden is “complicit in genocide”. A UN official just quit his post, adding:
In just 4 weeks, Israel with US backing has cut off food, water, power & then brutally exterminated more than 10,000 imprisoned civilian men, women & children in Gaza, destroyed their homes, churches, mosques, schools & hospitals because they are Palestinians. Name it? #Genocide.
The devastation in Gaza is horrifying to watch, worse than horrifying. Anyone who isn’t deeply troubled by the mass death has lost humanity. But the UN official, and all those echoing him, are full of it. The basic definition of “genocide” provided by the State Department is “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
The key, defining thing here is the aim. Horrifying massacres may or may not be genocidal, depending on the intention. The Hiroshima bomb, for example, was devastating, but it was aimed at ending the war, not obliterating the Japanese people as a race. And if Israel were interested in the “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, it has had the means to accomplish it for a very long time. And yet, for some reason, the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories has exploded since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel proper have voting rights, and a key presence in the Knesset.
This is not to exonerate Israel entirely. I’ve had strong words for the Netanyahu governments over the years. And Israeli politicians, on the far right, have used foul rhetoric and deemed the Palestinians subhuman in some respects. Bibi swiftly suspended a rogue minister for saying a nuke could be dropped on Gaza. There are anti-Arab maniacs among the West Bank settlers and in Bibi’s cabinet. But a policy of Arab genocide? Please.
The only people actively and proudly engaged in genocide are Hamas. The marchers on the streets this weekend will not be opposing genocide; they will be defending its perpetrators. It’s right there in the Hamas founding charter:
[All of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. … The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
This is not mere rhetoric. On October 7, we saw what genocide is in practice. Hamas didn’t kill civilians as a tragic consequence of attacks on military targets. Its torture and murder of Jewish civilians was its core mission. And if Hamas had the capacity, they would gladly enact a second Holocaust, and they have proudly said so, with even more sadism than the Nazis. They would kill every Jew they could.
1. Lewis Carroll, “an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ‘Jabberwocky’ (1871) and ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.” (Wiki)
QotD: Archaeological evidence on the foundation of Rome
Rome itself, a cluster of hills situated at an important ford over the Tiber (and thus a natural trade and migration route running north-south along Italy’s Western side), was already inhabited by the close of the Neolithic with small settlement clusters on several of its hills. As you might well imagine, excavating pre-historic Rome is difficult, due to the centuries of development piled on top of it and the fact that in many cases pre-historic evidence must exist directly below subsequent ruins which are now cultural heritage sites. Nevertheless, archaeology sheds quite a lot of light. That archaeological evidence allows us to reject the sort of “empty fields” city foundation that Livy implies. Rather than being “founded”, the city of Rome as we know it formed out of the political merger of these communities (the technical term is synoecism from Greek συνοικισμóς, literally “[putting] the houses together”). There is, importantly, no clear evidence of any archaeological discontinuity between the old settlements on the hills and the newly forming city; these seem to have been the same people. The Palatine hill, which is “chosen” by Romulus in the legend and would be the site of the houses of Rome’s most important and affluent citizens during the historical period, seems to have been the most prominent of these settlements even at this early stage.
A key event in this merging comes in the mid-600s, when these hill-communities begin draining the small valley that lay between the Capitoline and Palatine hills; this valley would naturally have been marshy and quite useless but once drained, it formed a vital meeting place at the center of these hill communities – what would become the Forum Romanum. That public works project – credited by the Romans to the semi-legendary king Tarquinius Priscus (Plin. Natural History 36.104ff) – is remarkably telling, both because it signals that there was enough of a political authority in Rome to marshal the resources to see it done (suggesting somewhat more centralized government, perhaps early kings) and because the new forum formed the meeting place and political center for these communities, quite literally binding them together into a single polity. It is at this point that we can really begin speaking of Rome and Romans with confidence.
What does our archaeology tell us about this early community at this point and for the next several centuries?
The clearest element of this early polity is the Latin influence. Linguistically, Rome was of Latium, spoke (and wrote their earliest inscriptions) in Latin and it falls quite easily to reason that the majority of the people in these early hilltop communities around the Tiber ford were culturally and linguistically Latins. But there are also strong signs of Etruscan and Greek influence in the temples. For instance, in the Forum Boarium (between the Tiber and the Palatine), we see evidence for a cult location dating to the seventh century, with a temple constructed there in the early sixth century (and reconstructed again towards the end of that century); votive offerings recovered from the site include Attic ware pottery and a votive ivory figurine of a lion bearing an inscription in Etruscan.
Archaeological evidence for the Sabines is less evident. Distinctive Sabine material culture hasn’t been recovered from Rome as of yet. There are some clear examples of linguistic influence from Sabine to Latin, although the Romans often misidentify them; the name of the Quirinal hill, for instance (thought by the Romans to be where the Sabines settled after joining the city) doesn’t seem to be Sabine in origin. That said, religious institutions associated with the hill in the historical period (particularly the priests known as the Salii Collini) may have some Sabine connections. More notably, a number of key Roman families (gentes in Latin; we might translate this word as “clans”) claimed Sabine descent. Of particular note, several of these are Patrician gentes, meaning that they traced their lineage to families prominent under the kings or very early in the Republic. Among these were the Claudii (a key family in Roman politics from the founding of the Republic to the early Empire; Liv. 2.16), the Tarpeii (recorded as holding a number of consulships in the fifth century), and the Valerii (prominent from the early days of the Republic and well into the empire; Dionysius 2.46.3). There seems little reason to doubt the ethnic origins of these families.
So on the one hand we cannot say with certainty that there were Sabines in Rome in the eighth century as Livy would have it (though nothing rules it out), but there very clearly were by the foundation of the Republic in 509. The Sabine communities outside of Rome (because it is clear they didn’t all move into Rome) were absorbed in 290 and granted citizenship sine suffrago (citizenship without the vote) almost immediately; voting rights came fairly quickly thereafter in 268 BC (Vel. Pat. 1.14.6-7). The speed with which these Sabine communities outside of Rome were admitted to full citizenship speaks, I suspect, to the degree to which the Sabines were already by that point seen as a kindred people (despite the fact that they spoke a language quite different from Latin; Sabine Osco-Umbrian was its own language, albeit in the same language family).
The only group we can say quite clearly that there is no evidence for in early Rome from Livy’s fusion society are the Trojans; there is no trace of Anatolian influence this early (and we might expect the sudden intrusion of meaningful amounts of Anatolian material culture to be really obvious). Which is to say that Aeneas is made up; no great surprise there.
But Livy’s conception of an early Roman community – perhaps at the end of the sixth century rather than in the middle of the eighth – that was already a conglomeration of peoples with different linguistic, ethnic and religious backgrounds is largely confirmed by the evidence. Moreover, layered on top of this are influences that speak to this early Rome’s connectedness to the broader Mediterranean milieu – I’ve mentioned already the presence of Greek cultural products both in Rome and in the area surrounding it. Greek and eastern artistic motifs (the latter likely brought by Phoenician traders) appear with the “Orientalizing” style in the material culture of the area as early as 730 B.C. – no great surprise there either as the Greeks had begun planting colonies in Italy and Sicily by that point and Phoenician traders are clearly active in the region as well. Evidently Carthaginian cultural contacts also existed at an early point; the Romans made a treaty with Carthage in the very first year of the Republic, which almost certainly seems like it must have replaced some older understanding between the Roman king and Carthage (Polybius 3.22.1). Given the trade contacts, it seems likely that there would have been Phoenician merchants in permanent residence in Rome; evidence for such permanently resident Greeks is even stronger.
In short, our evidence suggests that were one to walk the forum of Rome at the dawn of the Republic – the beginning of what we might properly call the historical period for Rome – you might well hear not only Latin, but also Sabine Umbrian, Etruscan and Greek and even Phoenician spoken (to be clear, those are three completely different language families; Umbrian, Latin and Greek are Indo-European languages, Phoenician was a Semitic language and Etruscan is a non-Indo-European language which may be a language isolate – perhaps the modern equivalent might be a street in which English, French, Italian, Chinese and Arabic are all spoken). The objects on sale in the markets might be similarly diverse.
I keep coming back to the languages, by the by, because I want to stress that these really were different people. There is a tendency – we will come back to it next time – for a lot of modern folks to assume that, “Oh well, these are all Italians, right?” But the idea of “Italians” as such didn’t exist yet (and Italy even today isn’t quite so homogeneous as many people outside of it often assume!). And we know that the different languages were mirrored by different religious and cultural practices (although material culture – the “stuff” of daily life, was often shared through trade contacts). Languages thus make a fairly clear and easy marker for a whole range of cultural differences, though – and we will come back to this as well – it is important to remember that people’s identities are often complex; identity is generally a layered, “yes, but also …” affair. I have only glanced over this, but we also see traces of Latin, Etruscan, Greek and Umbrian religious practice in early Roman sanctuaries and our later literary sources; Phoenician influence has also been posited – we know at least that there was a temple to Uni/Astarte in Pyrgi within 30 miles of Rome so Phoenician religious influence could never have been that far away.
We thus have to conclude that Livy is correct on at least one thing: Rome seems to have been a multi-ethnic, diverse place from the beginning with a range of languages, religious practices. Rome was a frontier town at the beginning and it had the wide mix of peoples that one would expect of such a frontier town. It sat at the juncture of Etruria (inhabited by Etruscans) to the north, of Latium (inhabited by Latins) to the South, and of the Apennine mountains (inhabited by Umbrians like the Sabines). At the same time, Rome’s position on the Tiber ford made it the logical place for land-based trade (especially from Greek settlements in Campania, like Cumae, Capua and Neapolis – that is, Naples) to cross the Tiber moving either north or south. Finally, the Tiber River is navigable up to the ford (and the Romans were conscious of the value of this, e.g. Liv 5.54), so Rome was also a natural destination point for seafaring Greek and Phoenician traders looking for a destination to sell their wares. Rome was, in short, far from a homogeneous culture; it was a place where many different peoples meet, even in its very earliest days. Indeed, as we will see, that fact is probably part of what positioned Rome to become the leading city of Italy.
(For those looking to track down some of these archaeological references or get a sense of the source material, though it is now a touch dated, The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol 7.2: The Rise of Rome to 220 B.C., edited by F.W. Walbank, A.E. Astin, M.W. Frederiksen, and R.M. Ogilvie (1990) offers a fairly good overview, particularly the early chapters by Ogilvie, Torelli and Momigliano. For something more suited to regular folks, when I teach this I use M.T. Boatwright, D.J. Gargola, N. Lenski and R.J.A. Talbert, The Romans: From Village To Empire (2012) and it has a decent textbook summary, p. 22-42, covering early Rome with particularly good reference to the archaeology)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-11.
November 7, 2023
Potentially killing off Quebec’s English-language universities isn’t a bug, it’s a feature
Chris Selley on the Quebec government’s vindictive decision to massively hike tuition rates for out-of-province students of the province’s three English-language universities:
“McGill University Montreal 3” by Laslovarga is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 
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McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s universities have begun to budget for the nightmare Quebec Premier François Legault’s government has imposed on the English-language schools by doubling out-of-province tuition fees — a way to keep socially corrosive anglophones out of Montreal, the premier has said in so many words.
In an open letter Thursday, McGill principal and vice-chancellor Deep Saini suggested the policy might lead to a $94-million annual shortfall in revenue, necessitating the layoff of 700 staff and closure of certain programs (notably the Schulich School of Music) and fewer athletics teams. It depends how many international students they can recruit to replace out-of-province Canadians unwilling to splash out $17,000 a year. (Yes, those international students would also speak English. No, Legault’s plan doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.)
Concordia president Graham Carr said much the same in an internal university memo on Tuesday, estimating the Coalition Avenir Québec’s latest attack on English could cost it 10 per cent of its total budget. As for Bishop’s, a small 180-year-old liberal-arts college near Sherbrooke: “I don’t believe that Bishop’s can survive under this policy,” former university principal Michael Goldbloom said bluntly this week.
Premier François Legault says he’s willing to meet with officials from all three universities. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice. The provincial Liberals, what’s left of them, have spoken out against the tuition grab, as has Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante.
But opposition to this in Ottawa remains utterly pathetic. “Quebec makes its own decisions, but I don’t necessarily think this is the best one,” is still the best Pablo Rodriguez, the prime minister’s Quebec lieutenant, has managed to muster. Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia, who represents a riding on Montreal’s West Island, is the only MP to have mentioned it in the House of Commons, calling it “an improvised and populist policy that is not justified.”
