Even for consumers who value flash more than I do, I’m not sure anyone can turn the dishwasher into a sexy appliance. The reason the dishwasher gets so little attention is not that no one has thought it through carefully enough; the problem is that the dishwasher already works too well.
Dishwasher technology is already pretty good. Yes, we haggle over which things should be loaded where. And then we close the door, and some time later, open it again to find our dishes clean. It’s a miracle. Miracles are not ordinarily subject to major technical advances.
But there’s another sense in which dishwashers are too good to be made sexy, a more important one: Dishwashers do the whole job of, you know, washing dishes. There is no scope for the chef’s skill. Your refrigerator holds your culinary creations as they await unveiling; your range midwifes the moment of transformation under your careful control and with your vigilance. Even those who don’t spent a lot of time putting fabulous meals together often entertain extensive fantasies about being the sort of person who does. And express those fantasies through a $10,000 steel box.
No one fantasizes about being the sort of person who puts plates away. And because even basic dishwashers are so efficient, they kill any fantasies we might develop about buying a lavish model so that we can be known for our sparkling-clean tableware. The dishwasher offers us many hours of extra leisure, but no scope for imagination. And so after the argument is over, and the dishes are put away, it retreats to the back of our mind. It can stay there.
Megan McArdle, “A $2,000 Dishwasher Will Never Impress Me”, Bloomberg View, 2017-05-25.
June 30, 2019
QotD: The humble dishwasher
May 30, 2019
Doug Ford versus the Ontario neo-prohibitionists, progressive temperance snobs and other social control freaks
During the last Ontario election, it was common to disparage Doug Ford as being “Trump-like”, and now that he’s the Premier, it turns out to be true in at least one aspect: Ford does have a Trump-like ability to induce a form of hysteria in his opponents. Ford’s crusade to liberalize Ontario’s alcohol market is a case in point. In the Toronto Star, all the old arguments against liberalization — usually portraying Alberta’s long-since liberalized market as a dystopian hell-hole of alcohol-shattered lives — are being dragged out again:
The key is that the Ford team doesn’t actually care about wine that will be sold in corner stores and more supermarkets. It’s a sop to tourists, which seems reasonable.
No, it cares about beer because beer is a social marker, a shorthand. Wine is considered urban but buck-a-beer is rural/semi-urban. Men drink it. Men with beerbellies drink it. To a government mysteriously seeking a vote that it already has, drinking beer is a signal that a man is a regular guy. But Ford is not a regular guy. He doesn’t drink. He’s not anxious. He’s not renting.
It is very much a problem that any government in power would believe this of the regular guy vote. Alcohol causes hospitalization, crime and early death. It destroys families and jobs, and eventually its victims drink to block out what they lost by drinking.
[…]
They may not know it, they may be doing it instinctively, but it is still madness. Alcoholics are costly to treat and they suffer terribly. Courting their vote comes courtesy of a report by a former health minister in Alberta where booze is sold in private liquor stores.
The problem, as Albertans know, is you’re too afraid to buy it. These stores are often shabby places that are magnets for violence. Watch out, Premier Ford, it’s Ontario and there’s going to be NIMBY.
I am aware that I’m writing like a preacher. Preach on, sister. Anyone over 30 learns to distinguish between people who drink for pleasure and those who cannot cope with it. We are horrified. We offer help.
Back in 2013, Colby Cosh neatly summarized the Ontario neo-prohibitionist rhetoric:
Albertans find it instructive to watch Ontario politicians debate the privatization of liquor retailing, which Klein’s cabinet bulldog, Dr. Stephen West, executed almost overnight in 1993. It was perhaps the representative policy move of the Klein era, the best symbol of his approach to government. Today one will hear Ontarians telling themselves the most bizarre things about Alberta in order to support the idiot belief that booze is a natural monopoly. “You can’t even get red wine there! All they have in the stores is various flavours of corn mash and antifreeze! The streets resound with the white canes of the blinded!” Talk to the saner residents and you rapidly discover the real root of Ontarians’ positive feeling for the LCBO, which is esthetic. It’s just nicer to buy a handle of Maker’s Mark from someone who makes a union wage and has a vague halo of officialdom. You leave the shop feeling okay about your vice.
Klein was liked by Albertans, not because of some mythic popular touch, but because there wasn’t an ounce of tolerance for this sort of thing in him. Alcohol was something he understood very well. (Too well.) People do not need liquor to be flogged to them any harder than the manufacturers already do; put a man in prison and he will make the stuff in the toilet starting on day two. What the old ALCB was really marketing to the public, and what the LCBO markets now, was itself — its own role as social protector/moral approver/tastemaker. Klein identified that part of the system as a parasitic growth, a vestige with no function but its own preservation; and he had West ectomize it with the swiftness of a medieval barber.
May 12, 2019
QotD: The British Army between the wars
In the nineteenth century the British common soldier was usually a farm labourer or slum proletarian who had been driven into the army by brute starvation. He enlisted for a period of at least seven years – sometimes as much as twenty-one years – and he was inured to a barrack life of endless drilling, rigid and stupid discipline, and degrading physical punishments. It was virtually impossible for him to marry, and even after the extension of the franchise he lacked the right to vote. In Indian garrison towns he could kick the “niggers” with impunity, but at home he was hated or looked down upon by the ordinary population, except in wartime, when for brief periods he was discovered to be a hero. Obviously such a man had severed his links with his own class. He was essentially a mercenary, and his self-respect depended on his conception of himself not as a worker or a citizen but simply as a fighting animal.
Since the war the conditions of army life have improved and the conception of discipline has grown more intelligent, but the British army has retained its special characteristics – small size, voluntary enlistment, long service and emphasis on regimental loyalty. Every regiment has its own name (not merely a number, as in most armies), its history and relics, its special customs, traditions, etc., etc., thanks to which the whole army is honey-combed with snobberies which are almost unbelievable unless one has seen them at close quarters. Between the officers of a “smart” regiment and those of an ordinary infantry regiment, or still more a regiment of the Indian Army, there is a degree of jealousy almost amounting to a class difference. And there is no question that the long-term private soldier often identifies with his own regiment almost as closely as the officer does. The effect is to make the narrow “non-political” outlook of the mercenary come more easily to him. In addition, the fact that the British Army is rather heavily officered probably diminishes class friction and thus makes the lower ranks less accessible to “subversive” ideas.
But the thing which above all else forces a reactionary view-point on the common soldier is his service in overseas garrisons. An infantry regiment is usually quartered abroad for eighteen years consecutively, moving from place to place every four or five years, so that many soldiers serve their entire time in India, Africa, China, etc. They are only there to hold down a hostile population and the fact is brought home to them in unmistakeable ways. Relations with the “natives” are almost invariably bad, and the soldiers – not so much the officers as the men – are the obvious targets for anti-British feeling. Naturally they retaliate, and as a rule they develop an attitude towards the “niggers” which is far more brutal than that of the officials or business men. In Burma I was constantly struck by the fact that the common soldiers were the best-hated section of the white community, and, judged simply by their behaviour, they certainly deserved to be. Even as near home as Gibraltar they walk the streets with a swaggering air which is directed at the Spanish “natives.” And in practice some such attitude is absolutely necessary; you could not hold down a subject empire with troops infected by notions of class-solidarity. Most of the dirty work of the French empire, for instance, is done not by French conscripts but by illiterate Negroes and by the Foreign Legion, a corps of pure mercenaries.
To sum up: in spite of the technical advances which do not allow the professional officer to be quite such an idiot as he used to be, and in spite of the fact that the common soldier is now treated a little more like a human being, the British army remains essentially the same machine as it was fifty years ago.
George Orwell, “Democracy in the British Army”, Left, 1939-09.
May 1, 2019
The Wine Lover Meltdown that Changed the Wine World Forever
Today I Found Out
Published on 26 Mar 2019Check out my other channel TopTenz! https://www.youtube.com/user/toptenznet
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Why Does the Yolk of an Overcooked Hard Boiled Egg Turn Green
https://youtu.be/ytqpeHcFT3YWhat’s the Difference Between Brown Eggs and White Eggs?
https://youtu.be/je44qy-_MHYIn this video:
Outside of wine snobs, I think we can all agree that wine snobs are just the worst. This is not because virtually every study ever conducted into the field of wine tasting as a whole has concluded that it’s ridiculously easy to convince even the top sommeliers that $5 boxed white wine is the finest red wine ever bottled. Nor is it because wines they would happily sacrifice their first born to have a glass of and would have otherwise raved about, when told the glass contains a variety of some cheap wine they are to identify, are more than likely to claim it tastes akin to horse piss.
Want the text version? http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p…
April 20, 2019
QotD: They used to be called the Jet Set, but now they’re the Transnational Elite
… there is a certain level of pride that attaches to being ignorant of those one considers his inferiors. After all, it’s the natural duty of the simple shopkeeper to know the names of the Great Lords, but it is not the duty of the Great Lords to know the names of the shopkeepers. In fact, it’s the Great Lords’ class obligation to go out of their way not to know the names of the shopkeepers, because this Duty to Know flows in one direction — upwards — and hence ignorance of one’s lessers tends to solidify and reify the assumptions of certain castes being superior to others. It makes certain that everyone understands who’s important, and who’s not.
(I know, I sound like a communist — I can’t help it. I have to agree with Dennis the Peasant — “I mean, class is what it’s all about.” I guess I would say I’m agreeing with the communist critique of the rigid reification of class structures, but I happen to think the communists and their pink fellow travelers have largely captured the upper classes. I guess by my theory they’re so good at this because they’ve spent so long plotting vengeance for the exact same slights (which they largely imagined). In a similar way they’ve gotten quite good at blacklisting and guilt-by-association, eh?)
At any rate, it is your duty to know the values and customs of living of Piers Morgan, but due to his high station (ahem) he is proudly ignorant of yours. As is so often the case in our increasingly dysfunctional and nasty politics — in which certain parties refuse to even admit that their opponents are free citizens entitled to have beliefs at all — the Out-Classes are deemed all-but-officially Beneath Notice.
Michael Totten has written a crackerjack piece — or at least I think it is — about this principle in action among our foreign policy sages, the internationalist “elite.” He detects the exact same sort of phenomenon going on when the International “elite” visit foreign nations — because anyone who doesn’t share 90% of their cultural values (and the wealth that permits/encourages these values — the International Elite is not middle-class!) is beneath notice and not worth knowing about, they don’t bother asking anyone but the 3% of the population which largely shares their beliefs and cultural inputs about their intentions and their political agenda.
Which means, in Egypt, they only ask the jet-setting wealthy Westernized elite about the prognosis for Egyptian democracy. And in Lebanon, they only ask the educated, urbane population of Beirut about their desires for the country.
And they ignore all the “Dirty People,” the low people who aren’t worth networking with and probably wouldn’t be any fun to have a sexual affair with. Unfortunately — and this has huge consequences for American foreign policy — it turns out those Dirty Poor People greatly, greatly outnumber the small coteries of educated elites that cluster in every capital country.
And so our “elites” — and honestly, we need to start looking for a more accurate discriptor — come back with completely-wrong information about foreign countries.
Why, as Totten says (changing the words a bit), “All of these Egyptians are swell, educated, moderate, sexually-loose cosmopolitans! Why, democracy has a smashing chance of working out here!”
Yeah, not so much. Not so much.
Ace, “The Unburstable Bubble of Willful Ignorance of the International Self-Purported Elites”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2013-01-09.
March 23, 2019
17 Million F*ck Offs – A Song About Brexit
Dominic Frisby
Published on Mar 5, 2019Please help take this song to number one by buying a copy of the single at iTunes/Amazon etc
Amazon – https://www.amazon.co.uk/17-Million-F… ITunes (ignore Apple Music and go to the iTunes store) – https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/17-…I’ll put in other links as and when they come in.
Written and performed by Dominic Frisby
Music composed and played by Martin Wheatley (based on a traditional Devon folk song)
Video directed by anon
Audio mixed and recorded by Wayne McIntyre
Assistant director Mark “Yeti” CribbsLyrics
On the 23rd of June, 2016
The people of the United Kingdom – and Gibraltar – went to vote
On an issue that for some had been burning for years
The question in full – and unaltered – was – I quoteShould the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union
or leave the European Union?It was the greatest democratic turnout in British history, I do not scoff
And when the time came to speak the British said f*ck off.
F*ck off.Campaigning had gone on for many a month
With debate and discussion on many a front
They’d argued they’d fought they’d smeared and pulled stunts
There was David Cameron. Theresa May. George Osborne.
Tony Blair. John Major. The BBC.
The British told them to f*ck off. The British told them to f*ck off.If you vote to leave, you’ll lose your job
Vote to leave, you’ll lose your home.
The ensuing recession will last for years
Said David Cameron. Theresa May. George Osborne.
And the Treasury. Tony Blair. John Major. The BBC.
The Bank of England. Mark Carney. The EU. The IMF. The US president. Saint Obama. Back of the queue. Loads of celebrities. Gary Lineker. JK Rowling. Benedict Cumbertwat. Lord Adonis. Who the fuck’s he anyway?
The British told them to f*ck off. Seventeen million f*ck offs.They wheeled in the experts to tell us what’s right
They gave us the benefit of their foresight
To leave is calamitous, that’s definite.
Food shortages. No medicine. Planes grounded. House price crash. ½ a million jobs lost. Cost of £4,300 to every home. Stock market collapse. Riots. No sandwiches.
There’d be an outbreak of super gonorrhea. They seriously said that. Donald Tusk at the EU said it would be the end of Western civilization as we know it. I’m not joking. And one more thing. If you vote to leave, that makes you racist.
The British told them to f*ck off. Seventeen million f*ck offs.The vote is final, there’s no going back
Although now they want to go back and re-vote
I think we know what the answer will be
To Gary Lineker. Alastair Campbell. Dominic Grieve. Chuka Umana. Keir Starma. Vince Cable. Anna Soubry (not a Nazi). Rory Bremner. Armando Ianucci. Delia Smith. Steve Coogan. David Lammy. Lord Adonis. Who the fuck’s he anyway?
The British will tell them f*ck off. 17 million f*cks offs.ISRC#: TCAED1904492
March 19, 2019
QotD: Celebrity intellectuals
Tyler Cowen posted his latest Conversations with Tyler. His guest was Malcolm Gladwell, the famous gadfly and popularizer of the blank slate. Of course, Cowen slobbers all over him, because that’s what good thinkers are supposed to do when they get to meet someone like Gladwell. It’s a way of letting the other good thinkers know you are not the sort that colors outside the lines. Gladwell is one of those guys who is more famous for what he represents than anything he has said or written.
Celebrity intellectuals are not famous because they have offered up a great insight or discovery. There’s no money in that. New ideas challenge the orthodoxy. The people with the money to help an aspiring celebrity intellectual live the sort of life they deserve tend not to like challenges to the orthodoxy. Instead they gravitate to people who confirm that the current arrangements are as the heavens ordained. That’s Gladwell. His celebrity is rooted in his ability to flatter the Cloud People.
The typical path to celebrity for these guys is not much different than the way mediocre comics get rich and famous. The game is to flatter the right audience. Making a bunch of bad whites in the hill country feel good about themselves is not a path to the easy life. You can make a nice living, but you’re not going to be doing Ted Talks or getting five figures to do the college circuit. Figure how to let the Cloud People on the Upper West Side feel like champions and you have the golden ticket.
The Z Man, “The Fading Star”, The Z Blog, 2017-03-16.
February 6, 2019
Yes, Minister – The North
Greger Tomasson
Published on 9 Oct 2012
October 8, 2018
Debunking state education rankings
In the latest issue of Reason, Stan Liebowitz and Matthew L. Kelly explain why you should ignore those “authoritative” rankings published by U.S. News and World Report and others:
You probably think you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong.
The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education system. If skinflint voters would just lighten up, the story goes, they too could become erudite and sophisticated.
Paul Krugman rehashes this narrative regularly in his New York Times column, frequently bemoaning the country’s purportedly miserly education budgets. Increasingly, he perceives libertarian barbarians at the gates of state governments, brandishing axes for dreaded spending cuts. In April, he wrote that “we’re left with a nation in which teachers, the people we count on to prepare our children for the future, are starting to feel like members of the working poor.… One way to think about what’s currently happening in a number of states is that the anti-Obama backlash, combined with the growing tribalism of American politics, delivered a number of state governments into the hands of extreme right-wing ideologues. These ideologues really believed that they could usher in a low-tax, small-government, libertarian utopia.”
In Krugman’s view, which reflects the education establishment’s view as well, those attempting to keep the size of government in check are a danger to your child. To support this claim, education wonks and activists point to state rankings in U.S. News, Education Week, or WalletHub — outlets that grade states according to a few key measures, such as graduation rates, education spending, and test scores. When education is discussed in the news, these rankings are often cited to illustrate the havoc that restrained budget growth and right-to-work laws can wreak.
Indeed, such rankings do seem to show that the highest-quality state educational systems tend to be in big-spending states in the Northeast or Upper Midwest. These places apparently honor and respect teachers, while Southern states inexplicably abhor them. But the cheapskates in cheap states get their just deserts: Sophisticated northern jurisdictions grow ever smarter, while stingy conservative backwaters sink into ever-lower depths of ignorance. The solution is obvious: Pay up or your kids will suffer.
There’s just one problem with this narrative: Traditional rankings are riddled with methodological flaws.
September 22, 2018
June 12, 2018
QotD: How to create and perpetuate an apartheid state
The usual way to remove inferior races from public spaces is to price them out. Municipal and regional governments are the guiding hand, through their planning departments. The “gentrification” process is done overtly through tight by-laws, licencing, and commercial regulation, all arranged on the Clintonian principle of “pay to play.” This makes the respectable zones too expensive for the lesser breeds, and assists in the development of their underclass-consciousness.
On the other side, more subtly at first, it is done by such as public housing projects, which remove the poor to a greater distance from respectable neighbourhoods, and confine them in camps, where their criminality and poor table manners can be offensive only to themselves. They become, by increments, wards of the state — and may be easily manipulated to provide voting blocks for the “progressive” parties, on whom they now depend for their rent, food stamps, and modest cash doles.
Compulsory attendance in state schools seals the bargain, by which the young of the underclass species are indoctrinated and trained to know their place in the social and political order. They can see that they are victims of “discrimination”; their resentments can be shaped in the interest of the governing liberal elites, and directed instead at people who have no idea what they are yammering and rioting about.
Who do not see that the poor have been “unpersoned.” And that, having little to lose, they are now playing the unpersonable part.
The superior races principally benefit from this system of apartheid, in which the unwashed are kept out of view, except through the selective camera angles of the media voyeurs. Without this isolation, the liberals’ smugness would be hard to maintain, and their commitment to various hygienic and environmental causes would suffer. They, for their part, are taught in their much better appointed government schools that the welfare-state redistribution of income exists to promote “equality”; when in fact it exists to promote the division of society into manageable cells, walled both visibly and invisibly to prevent the respective inmates from mixing and meeting. Now, even if they see, they cannot smell each other.
David Warren, “The common man”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-29.
April 2, 2018
African-American history
At According to Hoyt, Amanda S. Green is doing a deep dive on Thomas Sowell’s book Black Rednecks and White Liberals. In this installment, she discusses the history of African-Americans from first arrival in the early 1600s to the post bellum exodus from former slave states to the northern cities:
If you were to ask most anyone how African-Americans first came to the United States, you’d be told they came as slaves. Thanks to our schools and public misconception, we are not taught about those who came as indentured servants. Of course, we aren’t taught about the whites who came over in similar circumstances. To be honest, it is something I learned the hard way when I was in school too many years ago to count. I made the mistake of asking about indentured servants in a history class and being told such things hadn’t existed here in the States, at least not for whites. Funny, I have the original handwritten advertisement that had to be published notifying the people of New Jersey that my own ancestors had fulfilled the terms of their indenture and were now free persons.
That is a part of our history, be you speaking about black or white history, we have chosen to forget. Unfortunately, that has led to more than a little “confusion” about our nation and problems we still encounter today.
The first misconception that needs to be shattered is that blacks first came to America as slaves. That’s wrong. The first Africans brought to Colonial Virginia in 1619 came as indentured servants, a status shared by a number of whites. (BRAWL, pg. 41) This status of being “indentured” meant they could work off their indenture or buy it out. Once they had, they became free persons. The first law recognizing perpetual slavery was passed in 1661 in Virginia. (Note, this is part of the “red neck” sector of what would become the United States. More on that later.)
[…]
Many of the issues caused by this mass migration to the North came about because of the differences between the “free people of color” native to the North and those moving there. The northern “free people of color” were more literate and more urbanized than their Southern counterparts. In 1850, most free people of color in the North were literate while most slaves were not. It would take 50 years for most people of color to become literate or, to put it into context, two generations. Urbanization didn’t really occur until 1940. As Sowell notes, the “size of the free black population increased after the United States came into existence as an independent nation, as the ideology of freedom associated with the American revolution led most Northern states to abolish slavery, and even in the South, enough white slave owners freed their slaves to cause the free black population there to nearly double and then redouble between 1790 and 1810.” (BRAWL, pg. 41)
Among the consequences of the extreme range of education and acculturation within the Negro community has been the larger society’s erection of racial barriers provoked by black rednecks, which barriers then deeply offended those individuals at the other end of the cultural spectrum … That internal social barriers within the black community became more pronounced at the same time as white barriers against blacks in general suggests that more than coincidence was involved, since both occurred in the wake of the mass arrival of black rednecks from the South. (BRAWL, pg. 44-45)
These barriers prevented the “cultural elites from separating themselves as much as they would like from the lower class blacks”. It forced them to live close to those they wanted to be set apart from. It forced them to share schools, churches and other institutions essential to their way of life. This led to a hypocrisy Sowell notes – one where these elites protested against the social and economic barriers raised by the whites while, in turn, wanting to erect those same barriers between themselves and the lower class blacks.
Another thing Sowell points out is that it took more than a light complexion or money to become an elite in this society. There was a behavioral aspect as well. One illustration of this behavior is the more stable family life the black elites enjoyed. Stable families with few separations or divorces marked this black elite society, unlike its counterpart.
So what changed? What curbed the social freedoms the “free people of color” enjoyed in the North prior to the Civil War?
March 6, 2018
QotD: Baseball versus modern art
By now I hope the problems here are obvious. Hessenius notes at the linked essay that “The heart of the sports complex support over the past fifty years has been the farm team system,” and that the arts have lessons to learn from that fact. I can only speak for visual art, but there the continuity between the creative acts we engaged in as children and what goes on in the lofty regions of the professional world, by design, have little or nothing to do with each other. A painter I know in grad school — someone deeply thoughtful about materials and surfaces — was told by his department head a couple of months ago that she thought it was important to transcend the romantic idea of the artist working alone in his studio and contemplate how to become a better global citizen. Art that succeeds in doing this sort of thing, or appearing to do this sort of thing, wins praise for raising serious questions about this issue or that one.
Baseball hasn’t spent a hundred years smashing its own conventions. Baseball players don’t endeavor to turn hitting into a critique of late capitalism. Baseball doesn’t call upon fans to comprehend discussion full of coinages by PhD students trying to impress their dissertation committees, or implicitly punish them for having bourgeois values. Audiences instinctively and rightly hate this kind of pretentiousness.
Franklin Einspruch, “Why Sports Are Surging But the Arts Are Not”, Artblog.net, 2016-07-15.
February 27, 2018
Many Americans feel that the elites have “betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing”
ESR on the fraught subject of US immigration policy:
Crime is a real issue. Legal immigrants have a slightly higher criminal propensity than the native born (the difference is small enough that its significance is disputed) but illegals’ propensity is much higher, to the point that 22% of all incarcerees are illegals (that’s 92% of all jailed immigrants).
But the elephant in the room is the impact of illegal immigration on social trust.
Diversity erodes social trust, trust being that extremely valuable form of social capital that enables people to make handshake deals, leave their doors unlocked, and trust institutions to treat them fairly. Sociologist Robert Putnam was so shocked to discover this that he sat on his results for seven years before publishing. In diverse communities trust drops not only between ethnolinguistic groups but within them. It’s insidious and very harmful – low-trust societies are bad, bad places to live.
The U.S. has a proud tradition of assimilating legal immigrants into a high-trust society, but it succeeds in this by making them non-diverse – teaching them to assimilate folk values and blend in. Putnam’s work suggests strongly that without the ability to rate-limit immigration to be within some as yet undetermined maximum, the harm from erosion of trust would exceed the benefits of immigration.
We are probably above the optimal legal immigration rate – the highest compatible with avoiding net decrease in social trust over time – already (later in this post it will become obvious why I believe this). There is little doubt that we would greatly exceed it without immigration controls.
Anyway, even if ending border enforcement were a good idea (and I conclude that it is not, despite my libertarian reflexes) it’s a political nonstarter in the U.S. Trump got elected by appealing to sentiment against illegals, and beneath that is a phenomenon one might call Putnam backlash; everywhere outside a few blue-state enclaves, Americans sense the erosion of social trust and have connected it to illegal immigration.
And on the very strong divergence of opinion between the elite (very pro-immigration) and non-elite (becoming much more anti-immigration over time):
One of the major forces currently poisoning our politics is a breakdown in trust between people like you and me – the cognitive elites – and the rest of America. Deplorables. Flyover country. Brexit, and Trump’s election, slapped me upside the head. I’ve been forced to confront some uncomfortable truths.
They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.
They have a point. I’m seeing that now.
I mean, I might still think free trade is a good idea and have lots of arguments for it. But my arguments don’t mean fuck-all to a Rust-Belt steelworker who’s watched his livelihood get exported and the community around him wither and has nothing left but a cheap high on opioids. Nor to an unskilled black or legal-immigrant urbanite who can’t get a job because the restaurants can hire illegals for cheaper.
We owe these people more than we have given them. What we owe can’t mainly be paid in money. It’s compassion; a fair hearing. Respect. Not dismissing them as trash or troglodytes because they don’t love the brave new globalized world that gives us options but – too often – closes off theirs.
I don’t have easy solutions to these problems. But is it too much to ask that people like you and me should stop being arrogant assholes about them?
February 23, 2018
QotD: Cosmopolitans, as viewed by non-Cosmopolitans
… it’s a problem that our tribe of self-styled cosmopolitans doesn’t see itself clearly as a tribe: because that means our leaders can’t see themselves the way the Brexiteers and Trumpistas and Marine Le Pen voters see them.
They can’t see that what feels diverse on the inside can still seem like an aristocracy to the excluded, who look at cities like London and see, as Peter Mandler wrote for Dissent after the Brexit vote, “a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations.”
They can’t see that paeans to multicultural openness can sound like self-serving cant coming from open-borders Londoners who love Afghan restaurants but would never live near an immigrant housing project, or American liberals who hail the end of whiteness while doing everything possible to keep their kids out of majority-minority schools.
They can’t see that their vision of history’s arc bending inexorably away from tribe and creed and nation-state looks to outsiders like something familiar from eras past: A powerful caste’s self-serving explanation for why it alone deserves to rule the world.
Ross Douthat, “The Myth of Cosmopolitanism”, New York Times, 2016-07-03.
