Exosemantics

2 Comments Posted by on January 18, 2015
  • Voting is political homeopathy.
  • If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.
  • Vote all you want — the government won’t change.
  • There’s an unelected secret government calling the shots.
  • A shattering new study by two political science professors has found that ordinary Americans have virtually no impact whatsoever on the making of national policy in our country.
  • Elections function as a heat-sink in the machine of the American government, harmlessly redirecting the impulse toward political participation and absorbing it into a ritual.
  • Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

    A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

    Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

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Haushofer in America

Leave a comment Posted by on December 14, 2014

Wikipedia:

[Haushofer] justified lebensraum, even at the cost of other nations’ existence because conquest was a biological necessity for a state’s growth.

It is not controversial in this country to say that our growth depended on our expansion into the frontier, or to say that Europe’s growth was greatly aided by the existence of the colonies and the New World.

It should also be noted that exit is impossible without a place to exit to.

Was Haushofer right?

Secessionists and seasteaders take the argument halfway to its conclusion: if greater experimentation leads to the potential for better results, and greater experimentation demands political escape from currently-existing centralized powers, then expansion into new autonomies can grant strength. Even if the acquisitions of land empires would be governed similarly to the capital (which is not necessarily the case, especially if the 山 are 高 and the 皇帝 is 远—as was and is the case in the States, where the imperial capital and the opposite cultural capital are even today separated from the steppe empire by famously ornery ranges of mountains), the settlements of sea empires were not.

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Sweden: a failing state

9 Comments Posted by on November 2, 2014

Translation of this. Not very confident in it; I don’t speak Swedish.

There are now 55 residential areas in Sweden where the police cannot maintain law and order. The National Criminal Intelligence Section has identified the geographic areas where local criminal networks are considered to have a major negative impact on the surroundings. There are areas where confrontations among criminals can result in gunfire on the streets, where residents do not dare to testify and where the police are not welcome.

The report, “A national survey of criminal networks with major impact in the local community” (En nationell översikt av kriminella nätverk med stor påverkan i lokalsamhället), was published last week. It describes areas where “unattended police cars are attacked,” where police officers will be “attacked” and where it is “common for police officers to be exposed to violence and threats.” Traders suffer from vandalism, burglary, robbery and extortion. Narcotics are sold openly, and although/even if (även om) the gangs do not control the territory, “there are checks on cars” as part of the struggle over the drug trade.

The police do not want to talk about these parallel societies, but in some areas residents are seeing that “the ordinary justice system has been partly eliminated“, while police note that “a wider clientele turn to the criminal environment for rightskeeping.” The residents believe “that it is the criminals who control the areas.”

The report covers famous places like Rinkeby (89.1% immigrant background) / Tensta (The open unemployment rate is 43.5% (2009) and the rate of people on social welfare is 40.2% (1999). In 1999 the employment rate was 44%. Immigrants make up 66% of the population and 95%-100% of the children in local schools are of foreign origin.) and Alby (a very high concentration of immigrants) / Fittja (contains the tallest minaret in Europe; 64.7% of the population is of non-Swedish origin, of which 25.1% are not Swedish citizens) in Stockholm, Bergsjön (Over 80 percent of students in Bergsjön have Swedish as a second language) and Biskopsgården in Gothenburg and Herrgården (Generally considered the worst part of Rosengård, 96% of the neighborhood’s population is of foreign background (67% born abroad and 29% born in Sweden to two immigrant parents). 47% of the population is 18 years and younger. The most common countries of origin include Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Somalia. Just 15% of the population is employed. Herrgården is a social-democratic stronghold, with the Swedish Social Democratic Party garnering 82% of votes in the 2006 elections.) / Rosengård (In 2012, the figure for those of “immigrant background” was given as 86%.) in Malmö, but also Koppargården in Landskrona, Araby in Växjö and Brynäs in Gavle, to name just a few. In these 55 locations, the police have little power to curb crime. Police operations are greeted with stone-throwing, and investigations are difficult because people do not want to testify, if the crimes are even reported.

The police do not use the term “no go”-zones. It is originally military slang for rebel-controlled areas. But the question is whether there is a clearer description of the places where “the public, generally understands (allmänheten i flera fall uppfattar) that it is the criminals that control the areas” and where “the police are not able to operate.”

Police are talking about older gangs and younger: the former operate more professionally and are more structured, whereas the latter are loosely-connected networks, ‘‘mayflies” that come and go in different configurations, “where the common denominator is the social context and the geographical area“.

The established gangs –– which are held together by “ethnicity, kinship or friendship” (etnicitet, släktskap eller vänskapsband) –– can probably be countered with targeted efforts against organized crime, while the younger ones can hardly be reached without broad approaches in the local community. Police are now investigating whether there is overlap with what the government calls “exclusion areas” (utanförskapsområden; see here), to possibly identify socioeconomic and other factors behind the development.

And, of course, exclusion plays a role. (Right, of course.) But it may be worth recalling that many so-called exclusion areas do not seem to have lapsed into lawlessness, and that the vast majority of people in isolation are victims, not perpetrators. The 55 identified areas need, first and foremost, safety and security. Only then can the fields evolve in a positive direction. We need a permanent police presence –– well staffed police stations –– to remove criminals from the streets and to regain control of the areas.

The situation is not entirely hopeless, yet. “In most areas, after all, it is experienced that police officers can walk freely and patrol on foot without fear of being attacked.” (But it just said that police officers in these areas will be attacked!)

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The root of the problem

Leave a comment Posted by on October 26, 2014

Standardized curricula and testing necessitated arranging students by age, which made it easy to test students, whose results in turn reflected the skill of the teacher. Arranging by age in grades, coupled with compulsory attendance laws, today result in children as young as five being away from parents and with peers more than eight hours a day and often seven days a week, depending on sports and extra-curricular involvement. Twelve years of daily separation from family leads students to become dependent on peers for emotional support and has ultimately resulted in the development of negative “peer pressure,” bullying and gangs that our schools are now trying to solve. Those attempting to find solutions are doing so without changing the root of the problem: neither families, real life, nor work environments segregate by age.

(source)

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Lawns

6 Comments Posted by on October 22, 2014

Ran Prieur again:

June 23. Zimbabwe bans urban farming (dead link unrecoverable). They make ecological excuses but the real reason is to keep people dependent on the domination system for their food. Police threaten to destroy the crops, and they urge people to plant flowers and lawns! Here in America we have the same rule, but it’s enforced with subtle propaganda associating flowers and nice lawns and clean (dead) supermarket food with higher social status. In a few years when we get desperate, they might have to use the police, or robot aircraft loaded with herbicides.

Lawns take a lot of effort — you have to mow the damned things every week or two, and if you want to get them to be green and free from weeds, you have to put in that effort too — and produce nothing but status. Why do we have lawns?

My father once told me that, one year when he was growing up, his father got it into his head to have the best lawn in the neighborhood, so he set all his children to mowing, watering, and weeding it, which was apparently a lot of work.

Around here, the biggest ‘weeds’ are dandelions — they’re edible (that is, useful) and they don’t look bad, but the status-game says you have to get rid of them.

My mother used to have a cherry tree in her yard. Half of it was dead, but the other half put out some cherries every summer. The thing was ugly, because half of it was dead, but it was useful. She kept it against the protests of her neighbors until her lawn service cut it down — which she couldn’t stop because none of them spoke English.

Lawns are useless, and dandelions and cherry trees are useful. The status-game of the lawn requires burning utility. This is not an uncommon pattern: conspicuous consumption is the same way.

It’s possible to have status-games that protect utility: the old Calvinist status-game of frugality is explicitly oriented against conspicuous consumption. A penny saved is a penny earned, so if you don’t save your pennies, you’re one of the poors. The problem is that there are always forces aligned against this — if you grow your own food, it doesn’t get counted in the GDP, and if you save your pennies, you’re not passing them off to some corporation to let them get the larger profit margins that come from the exchange of money for status* — so it requires a great deal of coordination (and a great deal of coordination-promoting homogeneity) to protect it. The Calvinist virtues are not very popular anymore.

* I’m guessing here; I don’t actually know whether the profit margins are larger. Status is a form of value, so imbuing a product with status means it can be sold for a higher price than otherwise, but maybe it’s made up for by advertising costs or something.

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The web of dependency

3 Comments Posted by on October 21, 2014

Ran Prieur:

Review of a book about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. The best part is about how a large complex society defeats primitive people, when it is no longer socially acceptable to conquer them with violence. Quoting two bits out of order:

Pacification was accomplished through the proffering of Western goods, including machetes, axes, metal pots, fishhooks, matches, mosquito netting, and clothing. The seductive appeal of such things was nearly irresistible, for each of these items can make a quantum improvement in a sylvan lifestyle. Acquisition of several or all of these goods is a transformative experience that makes contact essentially irreversible.
…
With the convenience of matches, one quickly loses the knack for starting a fire. Shotguns decisively outperform bows and arrows, but cartridges must be bought at a good price. Such newly acquired dependencies fundamentally altered the life of the Indians, who were compelled to work for wages instead of spending their days hunting, fishing, and tending their gardens.

This is the kind of thing Ivan Illich wrote about all the time, and it’s still happening today, to you. With the convenience of frozen dinners and restaurant meals, one quickly loses the knack for preparing food. iTunes decisively outperforms radio, but music files must be bought at a good price. To navigate sprawl you need a car, to pay expenses on a car you need a job, and so on. But at the same time, many of us understand this web of dependency and are fighting to get free of it.

Compare:

Right now, almost all genetic modification is being done to make crops that are dependent on industrial agriculture with high energy inputs. The danger is that inevitable biotech catastrophes will serve as the excuse to give central control systems a strict monopoly over biotech, and they will use it to stamp out biodiversity and create life that is dependent on those control systems for its survival.

And:

As long as genetic modification is being done primarily by big agribusiness, plants will be altered to make them more compatible with central control of the food supply.

I’m not sure if he’s right about genetic modification, but if he is, it’s another illustration of the same pattern: “In practice, technologies will be used by control systems to maintain their power and stability.” People subject themselves to the control system for some perceived (and perhaps even real) benefit, and then get bitten by the tradeoffs.

Another example: the replacement of folk culture (decentralized/distributed, varying and variable, illegible to bureaucracies, difficult to control) with mass culture (centralized, impossible to edit, bureaucratic, easy to control) — less effortful and allowing for much higher production values and potentially much more talent, but in practice, buying in tends to mean letting your enemies put thoughts into your head.

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Benjamin Franklin on the increase of mankind

2 Comments Posted by on October 16, 2014

People increase in proportion to the number of marriages, and that is greater in proportion to the ease and convenience of supporting a family. When families can be easily supported, more persons marry, and earlier in life.

In cities, where all trades, occupations and offices are full, many delay marrying, till they can see how to bear the charges of a family; which charges are greater in cities, as Luxury is more common: many live single during life, and continue servants to families, journeymen to Trades, &c. hence cities do not by natural generation supply themselves with inhabitants; the deaths are more than the births.”

…

The great increase of Offspring in particular families is not always owing to greater fecundity of Nature, but sometimes to examples of industry in the Heads, and industrious education; by which the children are enabled to provide better for themselves, and their marrying early is encouraged from the prospect of good subsistence.

If there be a sect therefore, in our nation, that regard Frugality and Industry as religious duties, and educate their children therein, more than others commonly do, such sect must consequently increase more by natural generation, than any other sect in Britain.

…

The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people; unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more Subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country; for such vacancy (if the Laws are good, 14, 16) will soon be filled by natural generation. Who can now find the vacancy made in Sweden, France or other warlike nations, by the Plague of heroism forty Years ago; in France by the expulsion of the Protestants; in England by the settlement of her Colonies; or in Guinea, by one hundred years exportation of slaves, that has blacken’d half America?

Read the whole thing. Don’t miss the punchline.

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Capitalism and bureaucratic modernism

4 Comments Posted by on October 12, 2014

Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices and improvisations that could never be codified. By merely following the rules meticulously, the workforce can virtually halt production. In the same fashion, the simplified rules animating plans for, say, a city, a village, or a collective farm were inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a functioning social order. The formal scheme was parasitic on informal processes that, alone, it could not create or maintain. To the degree that the formal scheme made no allowance for these processes or actually suppressed them, it failed both its intended beneficiaries and ultimately its designers as well.

James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, via Isegoria.

If the informal processes aren’t intuitively obvious to most of the bell curve, they will have to be passed down. If enough new people come into the same place at the same time, the processes are unlikely to be passed down, or even to survive — as happened in Usenet’s eternal September. The same thing applies if there’s no need to learn those processes — why put in the effort if there’s no payoff?

What sorts of informal processes animate a city or a village?

Some of these processes are negatively affected by increases in diversity, as Robert Putnam has shown. And they would be: one process is the existence of homogeneity itself. Thedish homogeneity increases both the ability to coordinate and the likelihood of coordination: ability because less inferential distance, more similar cognitive styles, and greater ability to mentally model others, and likelihood because it fosters a sense that “we’re all in this together”, whereas thedish diversity gives rise to competing factions, a principle demonstrated most vividly by the well-known but rarely-considered phenomenon of the ethnic gang war.

Scott compares capitalism to the high-modernist bureaucratic-totalitarian states of the last century:

Large-scale capitalism is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is, with the difference being that, for capitalists, simplification must pay. A market necessarily reduces quality to quantity via the price mechanism and promotes standardization; in markets, money talks, not people. Today, global capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force for homogenization, whereas the state may in some instances be the defender of local difference and variety. (In Enlightenment’s Wake, John Gray makes a similar case for liberalism, which he regards as self-limiting because it rests on cultural and institutional capital that it is bound to undermine.) The “interruption,” forced by widespread strikes, of France’s structural adjustments to accommodate a common European currency is perhaps a straw in the wind. Put bluntly, my bill of particulars against a certain kind of state is by no means a case for politically unfettered market coordination as urged by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As we shall see, the conclusions that can be drawn from the failures of modern projects of social engineering are as applicable to market-driven standardization as they are to bureaucratic homogeneity.

The high-modernist states often saw community and civil society as threats to their power: consider the Communists’ attacks on the churches, networks of hidden informants and spies, and attempts to incorporate all of civil society into the state in order to control and monitor it.

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Who seeks world domination

1 Comment Posted by on September 18, 2014

You are in Syria to fight–and to win–against Hitler, who seeks world domination. And a big part of your job is to make friends for your cause–because this is a war of ideas, just as much as of tanks, planes and guns.

A Short Guide to Syria, an American WW2-era military booklet

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Deep culture

2 Comments Posted by on September 13, 2014

The New England Watch and Ward Society (founded as the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice) was a Boston, Massachusetts organization involved in the censorship of books and the performing arts from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century. After the 1920s, its emphasis changed to combating the spread of gambling. In 1957 the organization’s name was changed to the New England Citizens Crime Commission, and in 1967 it became the Massachusetts Council on Crime and Correction. In 1975 it was merged with another organization to form Community Resources for Justice, a group that promotes prison reform and rights for ex-convicts.

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