[part 2]
(edit: changed title as per Cev’s recommendation; there ought to be a standard term for these)
Some languages have contrastive phonemes that appear in only one root: for example, Norwegian /ʉi̯/ only appears in the word /hʉi̯/ hui and the derived verb huie; Arabic /lˤ/ only appears in /alˤlˤah/ ‘Allah’; Spanish /ui̯/ only appears in muy; and in standard American English, unconditioned /eə/ only occurs in the interjection ‘yeah’. (Interjections, of course, often have expanded phoneme inventories relative to the rest of the language—see English oink and boink, which have /oi/ before a non-coronal cluster—but these other two examples are of ordinary roots.)
According to Wikipedia, Dahalo has five such phonemes: /ⁿd̠ʷ/, /ᶮdʒ/ in /kípuᶮdʒu/ ‘place where maize is seasoned’, /ᵑɡʷ/ in /háᵑɡʷaraᵑɡʷára/ ‘centipede’, /ɬʷ/, in /ɬʷaʜ-/ ‘to pinch’, and /j/, in /jáːjo/ ‘mother’.
According to Blust’s Austronesian Languages, unconditioned nasal vowels only appear in one root in Bintulu and Miri: Bintulu has the negation marker [ʔã] ã and Miri has the minimal pair haaw ‘rafter’ : hããw ‘2sg’, but no other unconditioned nasal vowels are known in either language.
Mako /ə/ only appears in the past-tense suffix -tə, but it’s fully contrastive: every vowel can appear word-finally after /t/.
Qiang /ɦ/ only occurs in the interjection /ɦa/ and a directional prefix. (There are many other hapax phonoumena in the Qiangic languages; I won’t list them all.)
Hoyahoya /s/ only occurs in /sa/ sha ‘bone’. (/s/ is written sh because the other fricatives, /ʁ/ and /h/, are written gh and h.)
The Amuzgo syllabic velarized prenasalized bilabial trill only occurs in the word [ʃa˥m̩ˠʙˠ˥] ša1ṃb1 ‘antlion’.
Mianchi /ɬ/ occurs only in /ɬə̀/ ‘moon’ ( < PTB *s-la), and only for some speakers; others have /l/.
In some dialects of Mandarin, the final -iai only occurs in 崖 yái ‘precipice’.
Sometimes these phonemes are supported by loanwords.
Japhug /y/ occurs in Chinese loanwords, but only in one native root, /qaɟy/ ‘fish’.
Yadu /æ/ occurs in Chinese loanwords and one native root, /tsæm/ ‘girl’.
In Longxi, /h/ occurs in two loanwords, an onomatopoeic form, and /hàN háN/ ‘corridor’; and /v/ occurs only in words derived from Proto-Qiang *u ‘you’: /vù/ ‘you’ and its compounds, /vú lià/ ‘we (incl.)’ and its dual, and /vé ì/ ‘yourself’ and its dual and plural; however, /v/ may also be analyzed as an allophone of /u/ in word-initial position (pure [u] never appears word-initially), making these forms /ù/, /ú lià/, and /ué ì/, with a u-deletion rule for the reflexive.
Sierra Miwok /š/ occurs only in English loanwords and the exclamation /ʔiš·o·/ ‘Scat!’.
Sometimes they occur in several roots. Chechen /r̥/ only occurs in /vuor̥/ ‘seven’ and /bar̥/ ‘eight’. The closely related language Bats has /vorɬ/ and /barɬ/.
Sometimes they are supported by the morphology. In Finnish, the diphthong ey merged into öy except in the verb leyhyä, but it can still occur in derived words, when e- is adjacent to -U in a front-harmonic context.
Here’s what might happen if progressives hold the Supreme Court for long enough.
Start with Trop v. Dulles, which illustrates the theory of the ‘living Constitution’:
The exact scope of the constitutional phrase “cruel and unusual” has not been detailed by this Court. But the basic policy reflected in these words is firmly established in the Anglo-American tradition of criminal justice. The phrase in our Constitution was taken directly from the English Declaration of Rights of 1688, and the principle it represents can be traced back to the Magna Carta. The basic concept underlying the Eighth Amendment is nothing less than the dignity of man. While the State has the power to punish, the Amendment stands to assure that this power be exercised within the limits of civilized standards. Fines, imprisonment and even execution may be imposed depending upon the enormity of the crime, but any technique outside the bounds of these traditional penalties is constitutionally suspect. This Court has had little occasion to give precise content to the Eighth Amendment, and, in an enlightened democracy such as ours, this is not surprising. But when the Court was confronted with a punishment of 12 years in irons at hard and painful labor imposed for the crime of falsifying public records, it did not hesitate to declare that the penalty was cruel in its excessiveness and unusual in its character. Weems v. United States, 217 U.S. 349. The Court recognized in that case that the words of the Amendment are not precise, and that their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.
Under this theory, certain phrases in the Constitution—”cruel and unusual punishment”, “just compensation”, etc.—are to be interpreted according to the standards of the day, i.e. the standards of whoever or whichever institutions can convince enough people to agree with them that the Court can plausibly claim them to be the standards of the day.
Certain persuasive institutions have decided to start convincing their audiences that ‘hate speech’ is not free speech.
In one definition, a culture is a set of traits establishing continuity between an individual member of that culture and the past and future. In another, a culture is a phyle.
A phyle, a heritable thede, is necessarily a continuity between its members and the past and future; but a phyle is defined by identity, not cultural traits. A phyle can change radically over time and still remain the same phyle; a set of traits establishing continuity cannot.
The first definition seems to be associated with the left, and the second definition with the right. The leftist will reduce culture to fiddle music and Arthurian myth; the rightist will reduce culture to national identity. Defining culture as sets of more or less ‘authentic’ artifacts makes it difficult to speak of the natural tendency of geographic or political multiculturalism to lead to conflict; defining it as purely identitarian makes it difficult to speak of establishing legitimate historical continuity on an individual or communitarian level.
But these definitions refer to different things. A third-generation Albanian, Chechen, etc. immigrant who becomes a Wahhabi and doesn’t speak Albanian or Chechen has lost continuity with his ancestors; but, insofar as he still identifies as an Albanian, a Chechen, a Muslim, etc., he maintains the same phyletic identity. So a difficulty in translation arises in discussion of multiculturalism. If ‘culture’ is read according to the first definition, multiculturalism mostly raises difficulties for minorities, who are cut off from their native continuities and thrust into environments shaped by and containing others; but if it’s read according to the second, multiculturalism mostly raises difficulties for the majority, who are suddenly forced into bloody and avoidable phyletic conflicts, sometimes (as today) with enemies backed (or fought ineffectually enough that they may as well be backed) by their own governments.
Both of these consequences are real.
The next thing I knew, the discussion was onto the subject of fascism in America. Everybody was talking about police repression and the anxiety and paranoia as good folks waited for the knock on the door and the descent of the knout on the nape of the neck. I couldn’t make any sense out of it. I had just made a tour of the country to write a series called “The New Life Out There” for New York magazine. This was the mid-1960’s. The post-World War II boom had by now pumped money into every level of the population on a scale unparalleled in any nation in history. Not only that, the folks were running wilder and freer than any people in history. For that matter, Krassner himself, in one of the strokes of exuberance for which he was well known, was soon to publish a slight hoax: an account of how Lyndon Johnson was so overjoyed about becoming President that he had buggered a wound in the neck of John F. Kennedy on Air Force One as Kennedy’s body was being flown back from Dallas. Krassner presented this as a suppressed chapter from William Manchester’s book Death of a President. Johnson, of course, was still President when it came out. Yet the merciless gestapo dragnet missed Krassner, who cleverly hid out onstage at Princeton on Saturday nights.
Suddenly I heard myself blurting out over my microphone: “My God, what are you talking about? We’re in the middle of a… Happiness Explosion!”
That merely sounded idiotic. The kid up in the balcony did the crying baby. The kid down below did the raccoon… Krakatoa, East of Java… I disappeared in a tidal wave of rude sounds… Back to the goon squads, search-and-seize and roust-a-daddy…
Support came from a quarter I hadn’t counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.
“For the past hour I have had my eyes fixed on the doors here,” he said. “You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, “You really don’t have so much to worry about.” He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
Not very nice, Günter! Not very nice, Jean-François! A bit supercilious, wouldn’t you say!
In fact, during the 1960’s American intellectuals seldom seemed to realize just how patronizing their European brethren were being. To the Europeans, American intellectuals were struggling so hard (yet once again) to be correct in ideology and in attitude… and they were being correct… impeccable, even—which was precisely what prompted the sniggers and the knowing looks. European intellectuals looked upon American intellectuals much the way English colonial officials used to look upon the swarthy locals who came forward with their Calcutta Toff Oxford accents or their Lagos Mayfair tailored clothes. It was so touching (then why are you laughing?) to see the natives try to do it right.
I happened to have been in a room in Washington in 1961 when a member of Nigeria’s first Cabinet (after independence) went into a long lament about the insidious and seductive techniques the British had used over the years to domesticate his people.
“Just look at me!” he said, looking down at his own torso and flipping his hands toward his chest. “Look at this suit! A worsted suit on an African—and a double-breasted waistcoat!”
He said “double-breasted waistcoat” with the most shriveling self-contempt you can imagine.
“This is what they’ve done to me,” he said softly. “I can’t even do the High Life any more.”
The High Life was a Low Rent Nigerian dance. He continued to stare down at the offending waistcoat, wondering where he’d left his soul, or his Soul, in any event.
Perhaps someday, if Mr. Bob Silvers’s Confessions are published, we will read something similar. Silvers is co-editor of The New York Review of Books. His accent arrived mysteriously one day in a box from London. Intrigued, he slapped it into his mouth like a set of teeth. It seemed… right. He began signing up so many English dons to write for The New York Review of Books that wags began calling it The London Review of Bores and Don & Grub Street. He seemed to take this good-naturedly. But perhaps someday we will learn that Mr. Bob Silvers, too, suffered blue moods of the soul and stood in front of a mirror wiggling his knees, trying to jiggle his roots, wondering if his feet could ever renegotiate the Lindy or the Fish or the Hokey-Pokey.
O how faithfully our native intelligentsia has tried to… do it right! The model has not always been England. Not at all. Just as frequently it has been Germany or France or Italy or even (on the religious fringe) the Orient. In the old days—seventy-five-or-so years ago—the well-brought-up young intellectual was likely to be treated to a tour of Europe… we find Jane Addams recuperating from her malaise in London and Dresden… Lincoln Steffens going to college in Heidelburg and Munich… Mabel Dodge setting up house in Florence… Randolph Bourne discovering Germany’s “charming villages” and returning to Bloomfield, New Jersey—Bloomfield, New Jersey?—which now “seemed almost too grotesquely squalid and frowsy to be true.” The business of being an intellectual and the urge to set oneself apart from provincial life began to be indistinguishable. In July 1921 Harold Stearns completed his anthology called Civilization in the United States—a contradiction in terms, he hastened to note—and set sail for Europe. The “Lost Generation” adventure began. But what was the Lost Generation really? It was a post-Great War discount tour in which middle-class Americans, too, not just Bournes and Steffenses, could learn how to become European intellectuals; preferably French.
The European intellectual! What a marvelous figure! A brilliant cynic, dazzling, in fact, set like one of those Gustave Miklos sculptures of polished bronze and gold against the smoking rubble of Europe after the Great War. The American intellectual did the best he could. He could position himself against a backdrop of… well, not exactly rubble… but of the booboisie, the Herd State, the United States of Puritanism, Philistinism, Boosterism, Greed, and the great Hog Wallow. It was certainly a psychological wasteland. For the next fifty years, from that time to this, with ever-increasing skill, the American intellectual would perform this difficult feat, which might be described as the Adjectival Catch Up. The European intellectuals have a real wasteland? Well, we have a psychological wasteland. They have real fascism? Well, we have social fascism (a favorite phrase of the 1930’s, amended to “liberal fascism” in the 1960’s). They have real poverty? Well, we have relative poverty (Michael Harrington’s great Adjectival Catch Up of 1963″). They have real genocide? Well, we have cultural genocide (i.e., what universities were guilty of in the late 1960’s if they didn’t have open-admissions policies for minority groups).
Well—all right! They were difficult, these one-and-a-half gainers in logic. But they were worth it. What had become important above all was to be that polished figure amid the rubble, a vision of sweetness and light in the smoking tar pit of hell. The intellectual had become not so much an occupational type as a status type. He was like the medieval cleric, most of whose energies were devoted to separating himself from the mob—which in modern times, in Revel’s phrase, goes under the name of the middle class.
Did he want to analyze the world systematically? Did he want to add to the store of human knowledge? He not only didn’t want to, he belittled the notion, quoting Rosa Luxemburg’s statement that the “pot-bellied academics” and their interminable monographs and lectures, their intellectual nerve gas, were sophisticated extensions of police repression. Did he even want to change the world? Not particularly; it was much more elegant to back exotic, impossible causes such as the Black Panthers’. Moral indignation was the main thing; that, and a certain pattern of consumption. In fact, by the 1960’s it was no longer necessary to produce literature, scholarship, or art—or even to be involved in such matters, except as a consumer—in order to qualify as an intellectual. It was only necessary to live la vie intellectuelle. A little brown bread in the bread box, a lapsed pledge card to CORE, a stereo and a record rack full of Coltrane and all the Beatles albums from Revolver on, white walls, a huge Dracaena marginata plant, which is there because all the furniture is so clean-lined and spare that without this piece of frondose tropical Victoriana the room looks empty, a stack of unread New York Review of Books rising up in a surly mound of subscription guilt, the conviction that America is materialistic, repressive, bloated, and deadened by its Silent Majority, which resides in the heartland, three grocery boxes full of pop bottles wedged in behind the refrigerator and destined (one of these days) for the Recycling Center—that pretty well got the job done.
—Tom Wolfe, The Intelligent Co-Ed’s Guide to America
Mencius Moldbug’s concept of formalism runs roughly as follows: since politics is violence at a remove and violence is conflict plus uncertainty, both can be eliminated via the elimination of uncertainty. Since democratic politics necessarily creates uncertainty in government, democratic politics should be replaced by a feedback mechanism that doesn’t, i.e. neocameralism: a patchwork of sovereign corporations.
The obvious problem with this is that Strange Loop is not the government. In fact, very few political controversies today involve the government—GamerGate doesn’t, the censorship issue doesn’t, tech conferences don’t, the endless bickering over which demographic groups are inherently deserving of more status than which other demographic groups doesn’t, and so on. When the government enters into political controversy at all, it’s usually because either it’s an election year (see: Trump) or some political actors have proposed making the government pass a primarily-symbolic resolution bestowing some status upon some group or other, as with gay marriage and the bathroom bill. The government—of USG or of North Carolina; it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a government—has become the chief celebrity of the nation, and not much else.
Given that most politics today is about culture and most political issues today are symbolic (tech conferences, the bathroom bill, arguably GamerGate), argued about for fun by people who only care because they don’t have better hobbies, how much of a difference does it really make what the government does?
(See also: fandom wars. Fandom wars can get big.)
Compare Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump.
Ted Cruz was a champion debater in college, and went on to edit the Harvard Law Review. Alan Dershowitz called him “off-the-charts brilliant”. The New York Times described him as an “intellectual force” who “stood out even among his Ivy League peers as ‘intellectually and morally serious'” and could’ve been a professor. And now he’s that guy who 38% of Floridians think might be the Zodiac Killer.
Hillary Clinton has a relatively well-known intellectual trajectory for a politician: she was a Goldwater conservative, but converted to progressivism in college because of some Christian theological jabberwocky that probably involved Germans with alphabet-soup names and then wrote her thesis on Saul Alinsky. And now she’s a reptilian who’s running for president because her serial rapist husband was one in the ’90s.
Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton are fairly successful. But what about Donald Trump?
Donald Trump is a reality TV star and minor pro wrestling celebrity who got unfathomably rich by, as the kids say, monetizing his personal brand. Then, against all odds, he won the Republican primary. Donald Trump, unlike Cruz and Clinton, does not have an academic pedigree. He has a bachelor’s degree from a business school. Donald Trump, unlike Cruz and Clinton, is not a nerd. How many books do you think he’s read?
The most unusual thing about Trump, aside from the fact that he’s a reality TV star who came out of nowhere to win the Republican primary, is his rhetorical style. Here’s an example. Geoff Pullum, a professional linguist, thinks Trump can’t even form a coherent sentence. Since linguists have known for decades that speech often looks incoherent when written out—and, as a point of historical interest, the main thing that made them realize it was transcripts of the Nixon tapes—something must have happened to confuse Pullum.
Well, the most unusual thing about Trump’s rhetorical style is that you can’t punctuate it. He’s not reading from a text. He’s not composing a text on the fly. Mark Liberman compares Trump to Elmore Leonard’s lower-class characters, who speak perfectly grammatical vernacular American English that looks wrong when it’s written out in a book. To demonstrate the point, I’ll write the rest of this post in the relevant style.
the interesting thing about that is
the way Trump talks comes off as lower-class
he’s from New York, he can deal with high society
he can write letters
we know he can
he writes letters to the New York Times
some of them have been published, they’re in the news
writes letters to the New York Times, has the style down
but he doesn’t do that on the campaign trail
he doesn’t speak like he’s reading
he doesn’t speak like he’s composing a text
and he comes off as lower-class, of course he does
upper-class culture is more literary than lower-class culture
lower-class culture is more oral than upper-class culture
you talk like a book, you sound upper-class
you talk like you’ve never read a book, you sound lower-class
and oral culture works differently from literary culture
so when Trump talks
and this is what sets him apart from other politicians
when they talk, they sound like books
complete sentences
complex syntactic structure
no parentheticals
I remember reading a paper once
I can’t find it now
but there’s a paper somewhere about
one of those Eskimo languages
after writing was introduced
and as writing started to spread
people started using more complex syntactic structures
so when Trump talks
he doesn’t use these complex structures
he has a lot of parentheticals
a lot of false starts
a lot of missing words
well, ‘missing’ compared to written English
and a lot of—
you know
you can’t punctuate it
that’s the interesting thing, that’s what sets it off
you can’t punctuate it
for Obama, Bush, Ted Cruz, whoever, they give a speech, you can punctuate it
they say something, you write it down, it looks fine
Trump gives a speech, you can’t write it down
you can’t punctuate it
it looks like garbage
it looks like he can barely speak English
but that’s how people talk
people talk normally, you can’t punctuate it
you can barely read it
lot of false starts, lot of parentheticals and so on
and it comes off as lower-class
so Trump comes off as lower-class
ultra-rich guy from Manhattan, he comes off as lower class
what?
because he sounds like he’s from an oral culture
and that makes sense
you’re in New York, you have to talk to a lot of people
make a lot of deals
give a lot of speeches, whatever
you’re on reality TV, you have to talk all the time
you have to talk for the cameras
make it sound natural
make it sound unscripted and so on
so Trump
ultra-rich guy from Manhattan
doesn’t sound like a book
comes off as lower-class
and it must be deliberate
he can write letters
all that high society stuff
he doesn’t do it on the campaign trail
and it works
now, nerds
very literary culture
and I was talking to a friend of mine a while back
linguist
started talking about nerd speech patterns
the characteristic nerd intonation, nerd voice, whatever
and one of the things she said was
nerds talk in complete sentences
commas, punctuation, all that
and most people don’t do that
but nerds
very literary culture, you know
reading books all the time
reading papers
whatever
complete sentences
you read a lot of books
you know
whatever you take in
you start sounding like that
a lot of people have started sounding like Trump
they watch Trump
they listen to his speeches
they start sounding like Trump
whatever you take in
that’s how you talk
and if Trump—
if the way he talks helped him win
you know
you can’t learn that from books
you can’t learn a lot of things from books
you have to go out into the real world
go out and get practice
if you want to sound like Trump
you can’t learn that from books
and there was a comment over at SSC
asking about what books a god-king would read
a very successful person
imagine that
somebody who rises from obscurity to become the most powerful man on Earth
what books has he read?
and this seems like the wrong question
you can read Hobbes
you can read Machiavelli
whatever
you get all this book learning
Ted Cruz had book learning
Hillary Clinton has book learning
and what good did it do them?
they’re robots
you know
social skills
you can’t learn that from books
if you don’t have any social skills
you can get some basic principles
read things, whatever
but you have to go out and apply them
practice in the real world, all that
you can’t just read a book and say
OK, I have social skills now
I read this book
no
that won’t work
you can only get that from the real world
so you have this god-king
how did he get there?
the most powerful man on Earth
how did he get there?
what books did he read?
this seems like the wrong question
what books—get out
like a proper understanding of fucking Leviathan is going to help you take over the world
you have to go out and do things
so a more productive question—
a more useful question would be
what did this god-king do to get there?
sure, maybe he read books, whatever
but
you conquer the world
you have to have skills for that
practical skills
you didn’t get them from reading books
you can’t have gotten them from reading books
some of these skills
you have to have gone out into the real world
so it’s—
nerds like books
all this intellectual stuff
nerds love that
but where does it get you?
Donald Trump doesn’t have an intellectual bone in his body
sure, he went to Wharton, whatever
very smart, all that
how many books do you think he’s read?
not many
but he seems to be doing alright
On May 6, I predicted that Clinton would win New Jersey, California, New Mexico, and Kentucky and Sanders would win West Virginia, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana.
On May 10, Sanders won West Virginia.
On May 17, Clinton won Kentucky and Sanders won Oregon.
The other six primaries were held yesterday. Sanders won North Dakota and Montana. Clinton won New Jersey, California, New Mexico, South Dakota, and New Mexico.
Eight out of nine isn’t bad.
Now that all states have voted, we can complete the chart.
| State | % black | Winner |
|---|---|---|
| Mississippi | 37.3% | Clinton |
| Louisiana | 32.4% | Clinton |
| Georgia | 31.4% | Clinton |
| Maryland | 30.1% | Clinton |
| South Carolina | 28.5% | Clinton |
| Alabama | 26.4% | Clinton |
| North Carolina | 21.6% | Clinton |
| Delaware | 20.1% | Clinton |
| Virginia | 19.9% | Clinton |
| Tennessee | 16.8% | Clinton |
| Florida | 15.9% | Clinton |
| Arkansas | 15.8% | Clinton |
| New York | 15.2% | Clinton |
| Illinois | 14.9% | Clinton |
| New Jersey | 14.5% | Clinton |
| Michigan | 14.2% | Sanders |
| Ohio | 12.0% | Clinton |
| Texas | 11.9% | Clinton |
| Missouri | 11.5% | Clinton |
| Pennsylvania | 10.8% | Clinton |
| Connecticut | 10.3% | Clinton |
| Indiana | 9.1% | Sanders |
| Nevada | 9.0% | Clinton |
| Kentucky | 8.2% | Clinton |
| Massachusetts | 8.1% | Clinton |
| Oklahoma | 8.0% | Sanders |
| Rhode Island | 7.5% | Sanders |
| California | 6.7% | Clinton |
| Kansas | 6.2% | Sanders |
| Wisconsin | 6.1% | Sanders |
| Minnesota | 4.6% | Sanders |
| Nebraska | 4.5% | Sanders |
| Colorado | 4.3% | Sanders |
| Alaska | 4.3% | Sanders |
| Arizona | 4.2% | Clinton |
| Washington | 3.7% | Sanders |
| West Virginia | 3.6% | Sanders |
| Hawaii | 3.1% | Sanders |
| New Mexico | 3.0% | Clinton |
| Iowa | 2.7% | Clinton |
| Oregon | 2.0% | Sanders |
| Wyoming | 1.3% | Sanders |
| Utah | 1.3% | Sanders |
| New Hampshire | 1.2% | Sanders |
| South Dakota | 1.1% | Clinton |
| North Dakota | 1.1% | Sanders |
| Maine | 1.0% | Sanders |
| Idaho | 1.0% | Sanders |
| Vermont | 0.9% | Sanders |
| Montana | 0.7% | Sanders |
The four states in orange are marked based on this map.
This very simple model—Clinton wins states with plurality Mexican ancestry and states that are over 8% black, and Sanders wins all other states—predicted the outcome of every state but Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and South Dakota.
In Michigan, Clinton won the Detroit-Flint area and Sanders won most other counties. In Indiana, Clinton won the southern border of the state and the counties containing Indianapolis and Gary and Sanders won most other counties. In South Dakota, Clinton won the eastern half of the state and Sanders won the western half. Only in Iowa does the distribution of Sanders and Clinton victories look random.
There are obvious demographic factors in Michigan. What happened in Indiana and South Dakota?
Le Maistre Chat asks, on a SSC open thread:
What do y’all think is the central conservative insight, the idea with the most explanatory power that an autonomous rational person could easily overlook and be left with a bad map of the world?
Is it “a culture is a cult”? Chesteron’s fence? I’m going to say it’s not “heredity matters” as A) neither Burke nor Maistre espoused racism and B) that’s a question for science, which rationalists are predisposed to regardless of politics.
Some answers follow.
“To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the impossible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, the present laughter to the utopian bliss.”
The central American conservative insight is found in Federalist 51:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The government is just as fallible as all other organizations. Most people, when imagining solving some problem through “regulation,” are basically imagining the government as God, an all-knowing, omnibenevolent entity.
The conception of this I like is Mike Munger’s Unicorn:
“Problem: “the State” is a unicorn
When I am discussing the State with my colleagues at Duke, it’s not long before I realize that, for them, almost without exception, the State is a unicorn. I come from the Public Choice tradition, which tends to emphasize consequentialist arguments more than natural rights, and so the distinction is particularly important for me. My friends generally dislike politicians, find democracy messy and distasteful, and object to the brutality and coercive excesses of foreign wars, the war on drugs, and the spying of the NSA.
But their solution is, without exception, to expand the power of “the State.” That seems literally insane to me—a non sequitur of such monstrous proportions that I had trouble taking it seriously.
Then I realized that they want a kind of unicorn, a State that has the properties, motivations, knowledge, and abilities that they can imagine for it. When I finally realized that we were talking past each other, I felt kind of dumb. Because essentially this very realization—that people who favor expansion of government imagine a State different from the one possible in the physical world—has been a core part of the argument made by classical liberals for at least 300 years.”
“Conservative” as opposed to what?
My wife is an intelligent, rational and successful person, but before I met her, she’d never been exposed to a right-wing idea in her life. She simply wasn’t politically engaged, and you have to seek out conservatism to find it, so she just wandered in the normal fog of unconsidered leftism. An autonomous rational person can have a terrible map of the world in political terms, because having undeveloped ideas won’t hurt you, whereas having unpopular ones might. The ideas that have most transformed her politics are the standard ones – that incentives matter, that secure property rights matter, that supply and demand aren’t optional, that decisions involve trade-offs, etc – ideas so obvious that we can’t deny them in our everyday lives. So I encouraged her to apply them to politics, and of course she felt like the scales were falling from her eyes and quickly became a Conservative. Let’s sum up this insight as “free markets.”
But although this is the central insight of the political right as opposed to the political left, would a user named “Le Maistre Chat” call such a politics particularly conservative? Maybe we’re assuming that the “autonomous rational(ist?) person” is already familiar with libertarianism. Well, the central insight of conservatives as opposed to libertarians is that “each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.”
My own personal view is “Things – like laws – happened for a reason”, though I’m not sure if that comes under the ambit of Chesterton’s Fence.
The simple idea that it’s highly unlikely someone woke up one morning and thought “Yeah, today I think I’ll write a law about [thing] just to piss everyone off!”
There is usually a reason. You may think it a bad reason. It may even be a bad reason. But laws and rules don’t fall out of the sky or leap up full-blown like the Spartoi; somebody, indeed several somebodies, had to make them. And usually they were made in response to what was perceived as a need, a lack, or a danger.
That’s something I’d like to see appreciated: “Aw, why do we have these dumb ol’ rules? The only possible reason is because old people hate fun (or it may be, white people/white men hate love/equality/niceness)!” And everyone applauds and agrees that indeed, the only reason for this is mean-spirited trying to stop people enjoying themselves.
No, it’s because there was deemed a need for such a law for the general good.
However, “white men hate fun” would be more accurately rendered as “white men are willing to orchestrate the suffering of others in exchange for some benefit”
And black, brown, yellow and red men never did so themselves in their own native cultures?
Perhaps I should propose as a conservative notion the idea that what is outside your door this o’clock is not the universal experience through all time and the geography of this globe.
“White men the oppressors” is true, of course; but they have also oppressed other white men. And brown men have oppressed brown men, and black men (e.g. Arab slavers selling black Africans to white traders) and so have all humanity in all times and places.
Maybe “it’s not local, it’s human” or “Original Sin – the explanation” would be what I’m trying to get at here 🙂
Not central, but close to it, is “incentives matter, even when you don’t want them to”. A great deal of conservative thought is based around avoiding moral hazards due to incentivizing undesired behavior, and on not disincentivizing desired behavior. And the reflexive “that’s stupid and won’t work” to just about every new progressive idea is often based on looking at the unintended incentives being offered.
It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
If we are talking specifically about the Anglo-American brand of “right wing” conservatism I would say that the key insight is Hobbes, Burke, Kipling, et al’s concept of natural law. As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!.
However, in the general case I think Chesteron’s Fence has the stronger claim.
“You are not smarter than the entire past.”
..are outlined in this bizarre post. Apparently, anything outside mainstream economistic liberalism is “neo-reaction”, which he says can be summed up in these six points:
1. “Culturism” is in general correct, namely that some cultures are better than others. You want to make sure you are ruled by one of the better cultures. In any case, one is operating with a matrix of rule.
2. The historical ruling cultures for America and Western Europe — two very successful regions — have largely consisted of white men and have reflected the perspectives of white men. This rule and influence continues to work, however, because it is not based on either whiteness or maleness per se. There is a nominal openness to the current version of the system, which fosters competitive balance, yet at the end of the day it is still mostly about the perspectives of white men and one hopes this will continue. By the way, groups which “become white” in their outlooks can be allowed into the ruling circle.
3. Today there is a growing coalition against the power and influence of (some) white men, designed in part to lower their status and also to redistribute their wealth. This movement may not be directed against whiteness or maleness per se (in fact some of it can be interpreted as an internal coup d’etat within the world of white men), but still it is based on a kind of puking on what made the West successful. And part and parcel of this process is an ongoing increase in immigration to further build up and cement in the new coalition. Furthermore a cult of political correctness makes it very difficult to defend the nature of the old coalition without fear of being called racist; in today’s world the actual underlying principles of that coalition cannot be articulated too explicitly. Most of all, if this war against the previous ruling coalition is not stopped, it will do us in.
4. It is necessary to deconstruct and break down the current dialogue on these issues, and to defeat the cult of political correctness, so that a) traditional rule can be restored, and/or b) a new and more successful form of that rule can be introduced and extended. Along the way, we must realize that calls for egalitarianism, or for that matter democracy, are typically a power play of one potential ruling coalition against another.
5. Neo-reaction is not in love with Christianity in the abstract, and in fact it fears its radical, redistributive, and egalitarian elements. Neo-reaction is often Darwinian at heart. Nonetheless Christianity-as-we-find-it-in-the-world often has been an important part of traditional ruling coalitions, and thus the thinkers of neo-reaction are often suspicious of the move toward a more secular America, which they view as a kind of phony tolerance.
6. If you are analyzing political discourse, ask the simple question: is this person puking on the West, the history of the West, and those groups — productive white males — who did so much to make the West successful? The answer to that question is very often more important than anything else which might be said about the contributions under consideration.
These six points, apparently, form “a (the?) significant ideology in China, India, Russia, and Japan”, and are represented by Donald Trump. Cowen continues:
Already I can see (at least) four problems with this point of view. First, white men in percentage terms have become a weaker influence in America over time, yet America still is becoming a better nation overall.
This is clearly and obviously false, at least to anyone who can take the obvious step of distinguishing between the technological and the sociopolitical, and between goodness and adherence to the pseudo-religious dogma of the day. Unfortunately, this claim is often loudly made and quietly retracted (see: Scott Alexander’s anti-neoreaction FAQ and the resulting debate), so the bizarre idea that an atomized, depressed, directionless, and childless America that for the past few decades has been burned over by drug epidemics is “becoming a better nation overall” continues to spread.
Second, some of America’s worst traits, such as the obsession with guns, the excess militarism, or the tendency toward drunkenness, not to mention rape and the history of slavery, seem to come largely from white men.
This is about as reasonable as flat-earthism. Slavery is historically and cross-culturally normal and drew an unusual amount of opposition from European civilization, which eventually abolished slavery (and human sacrifice) worldwide; it’s ridiculous to claim that rape “seems to come largely from white men”; and the “obsession with guns” and “excess militarism” are perfectly ordinary traits of a culture that people like Cowen despise. Maybe Cowen would prefer to live in a country with a strong culture of pacifism, like France right before the Second World War. Oops.
Third, it seems highly unlikely that “white men” is in fact the best way of disambiguating the dominant interest groups that have helped make the West so successful.
This is reasonably accurate, since there are countries with lots of white men that haven’t done as well, and a few non-white countries that have used outside influence to become successful, such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. These countries, of course, have nothing in common with each other.
Fourth, America is global policeman and also the center of world innovation, so it cannot afford the luxury of a declining population, and thus we must find a way to make immigration work.
If immigration is so important, Cowen ought to push for a bipartisan solution to it: a plan that, for example, relies mostly on immigration from Eastern European countries (especially our geopolitical enemy, Russia, which we could potentially hurt via brain drain) and refugee status for white South Africans, who tend to be religious and would therefore probably have a higher fertility rate. There’s also the possibility of using the large institutions that can influence our popular culture to push ideas that would raise the American fertility rate, instead of pushing ideas that lower it, as most of them do now. Can you imagine the Ford Foundation agitating for a religious revival?
Epistemic rationality is about collecting accurate beliefs about the world. Instrumental rationality is about achieving your goals.
Certain sects, such as the rationalists, believe that epistemic rationality is always instrumentally rational: that is, that holding accurate beliefs can’t hinder you from achieving your goals relative to holding a contradictory inaccurate belief, and that holding inaccurate beliefs can’t help you achieve your goals relative to holding a contradictory accurate belief, and therefore that people should believe things that are true and not believe things that are false. (This of course can’t be true in principle, since there’s no reason in principle why an agent that terminally values believing false things couldn’t exist; but it’s assumed that humans don’t terminally value believing false things.)
Certain other sects, practiced in various Caribbean islands, believe that it’s possible for someone in a certain sort of religious rite to be possessed by spirits that fly over the ocean from Africa. This came up recently when I was talking to a rationalist, and he said that the practitioners of these sects should stop believing that, because it’s not true, because (for example) if you built a big net over the ocean, you wouldn’t catch the spirits in it. The effects of spirit possession could simply be due to hypnosis.
The interesting question that falls out of this is: is there anything analogous to the case where spirit possession is due to hypnosis or some similar natural mechanism, but where only people who believe in spirit possession are susceptible to the form of hypnosis that causes the effects? (I’m assuming that spirit possession is a positive state.)
If there are things that a human could want to do that can only be done by believing false things, the statement that epistemic rationality is always instrumentally rational seems much less defensible: its proponents would have to either give up or argue that the negative side-effects of holding false beliefs must always outweigh the benefits of being able to do the things they need the beliefs for.
It would, however, also be possible to distinguish between epistemic beliefs and instrumental beliefs. The rationalist account of belief seems incomplete: beliefs aren’t merely about correspondence with the world, but also about thedish signaling and social strategies (which most rationalists acknowledge), as well as myth, action orthogonal to the substance of the belief, aesthetic and conceptual associations, etc. That is: beliefs, like most social phenomena, are complex social technologies. For example: the rite is motivated by the belief in spirit possession, but presumably has some social functions, which of course rely on the belief; the spirits fly over from Africa because the culture that practices these rites was brought to the Caribbean from Africa; etc.
There’s surely a culture somewhere in the world that could be experimented on—a culture where people are socially required to believe something that’s demonstrably untrue…
nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst 
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