London vs. Everywhere else

 Ed West: Visitor From a Dying Empire. I have been hearing for at least a decade that in discussing Britain, the division is not England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland, but between London and Everything Else, with the everything else being divided into the four "countries," further subdivided into North, Midlands, and South England, Cornwall, East and West Scotland on down. I posted the 15 Real Nations of Great Britain twenty years ago, and while much of it remains valid, London is now only half-right.  Or so I hear. In keeping with my recent links to "I thought I knew about (South Africa, Japan) but I didn't," this is fascinating. West's substack is The Wrong Side of History 

In response to a question about the history of the housing problem. 

The 1977 Homeless Persons Act. It was partly a reaction to a TV show. So British elites, they watch a TV show which is fiction, and they think that's terrible, we have to change all our laws because of this TV show, okay? And they change the system.

On Immigration 

If you look at all the data on immigration most immigrant groups are a drain on society, even when you take away, like, the social issues, whatever. Especially true of Middle Eastern groups  ...Denmark is the noticing country. The Danes are kind of unusual in thst they make all this data, which is basically illegal elsewhere. The Swedes have just said, you can't ever make this, and the Germans also...the Danes just do it. They get crime, the surnames, they do ethnic background. They do it. And they're not just foreign born, but where your parents are from and they get all the data, and it's exactly as you imagine. You know, it's like, I think, like the Algerians have, compared to Japanese, are like 5000 times more likely to commit crime...So yeah, the Palestinians, the Danes let them in. A few of them. There's that famous quote,  Elon's mentioned it, and, like, a large portion them ended up -  and Britain's trying to let in loads of Palestinians right now. I mean, it's kind of funny watching it, because it's  like politicians saying, "Oh, this, this is really nice." We're gonna need, and, like no kind of concept of the second order effects that this is gonna lead to chain migration. And, you know, Palestine has had a massive brain drain, like the middle class. 

More things we are not supposed to know. 

Requiescat in Pace, Tom Stoppard

I consider him the greatest playwright of the last hundred years, likely more if I think about it. You will read much reminiscence about him in the next few weeks and I'll not add mine, except that we read "After Magritte" aloud when the boys were young. My father had played Inspector Foote in community theater. What I will give you is the best piece about his use of philosophy, physics, and especially mathematics in both comedy and drama. Order Versus Randomness: What Math Can Teach Us About the Stage. Chaos Theory, The Seven Bridges of Konigsburg, prime numbers, recursiveness, sensitive dependence - lovely stuff.

As I don't see movies, I don't know much except that he rescued several under pseudonyms.  

Two Lovely Black Eyes

Herman's Hermits liked doing old English Music Hall songs

 

State Birds

 New Hampshire's Purple Finch

CF Payne has a fascinating series of paintings:  Every state bird in the shape of the state it represents.

Decorations

 It's nice that people have their traditional Christmas Skeletons up so soon after Thanksgiving.

Post 11,000 - Just the Facts, Ma'am

In the arguments about whether young people have it easier or harder than Boomers financially, people rely on stories, either personal/family anecdotes, or statisticky claims.

In the 1950s you could support a family on a blue collar income, buy a house and a car and send the kids to college.  

People went on zero or one trip to Europe in a lifetime, and going anywhere else (unless you lived near Canada or Mexico) was unheard of.  

Here are the boring statistics you can play with yourself

This is how much people made at every level of society 1967-2022. It does not define poverty, middle class, or rich. 

This is the amount of inflation every year from 1967-2025 It includes purchasing power by sector. Medical is more expensive, apparel is cheaper.

I don't recommend you try and decipher how the Congressional Budget Office figures out poverty,  but it helps to know that the number is different before the county or the feds gave you any money or after. Were you poor before we helped you?  How about after?

They do not include the qualifiers, such as having only one car and no dryer, square footage of houses,  availability of varieties of food, women in the workplace, what taxes were, and whether kids these days even know how to shoe a horse. Those things are helpful in terms of understanding what lives were like then versus now, but I don't cover those here.

The Time Machine

 

Friday Links

High-status boys bully low-status boys; low-status boys bully high-status girls.  An interesting example of this from observing games of HALO.  Also of interest: none of the females spoke during any of the games.

Support for violence to prevent "harmful" speech  Witness the change over the age groups.  The lowest support comes from the oldest and next-oldest liberals.  The highest support comes from the youngest and next-youngest liberals, and even the younger moderates are higher than the others. Whether the generations are different or people change as they age is not measured.

 Gypsies and Jews by Cremieux.  The effects of stereotypes long term. In terms of gypsies passing as other ethnicities in Europe, my Romanian sons had a brother and sister that they were separated from and did not come to America.  They reestablished contact after they got here. They tried to help the sister who did not work and had a boyfriend, then husband who was not honest.  Not only did they not pick up that he was Roma, she did not pick it up until they had been married a few years and she went to a village wedding of his family. 

Also Cremieux The Making of an Elite: Japanese Christians. I had never heard even rumors of this.

Canada's top First Nations writer, Thomas King, reveals he isn't Cherokee after all. 

 

Wednesday Links

I hate to admit it, but Virginia probably did have the first Thanksgiving.  It would be hard for the Pilgrims to have held one before they even got there.  Berkeley Plantation

A Swedish study shows that winning a lottery does not reduce crime in either the winners or their children. This rather undermines economic explanations for crime. Sumus quod sumus "We are what we are."

I asked ChatGPT many questions about this blog.  It made some mistakes of emphasis but was pretty good.  It offered to make me a timeline of the major themes. Not bad.

Capitalism Isn't Responsible for Society's Flaws; You Are.  At an interesting libertarian substack The Black Sheep. The capitalist is controlled by the consumer.

A beautiful use of AI 

Seeing With Fresh Eyes

I am in a book group that will tomorrow start The Everlasting Man by GK Chesterton. GKC is known for paradox, but paradox is only a tool of his to see things afresh. We do not see the amazing things that surround us, but Chesterton shows them to us. I was worried that because the book begins with seeing man with new eyes, especially early man, that the updating of science would render the examples uncomfortable in their wrongness. There is some of that in the book, but I was pleased to find right at the beginning an example that is even more true now that we know more about our ancestors and the domestication of the horse on the Steppe. It was a lucky chance (if chance you call it), for the horse was good food who fed himself even in winter, but was impossible to ride. One of the very few barely tractable ones - perhaps even the only one in a century - was seen by a reckless herder who had a wild idea. Chesterton's paragraph about it was a bit prescient.

Now, as it is with the monster that is called a horse, so it is with the monster that is called a man. Of course the best condition of all, in my opinion, is always to have regarded man as he is regarded in my philosophy. He who holds the Christian and Catholic view of human nature will feel certain that it is a universal and therefore a sane view, and will be satisfied. But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is. But just as seeing the horse as a prehistoric prodigy ultimately led back to, and not away from, an admiration for the mastery of man, so the really detached consideration of the curious career of man will lead back to, and not away from, the ancient faith in the dark designs of God. In other words, it is exactly when we do see how queer the quadruped is that we praise the man who mounts him; and exactly when we do see how queer the biped is that we praise the Providence that made him. 

Cutty Sark

 I understand it completed the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs

 

Rage Farms

The claim is out there that of the foreign sites stirring up anger in America, both tactically and to make money for themselves, were more likely to be conservative than liberal.  That could be. There are plenty of easily fooled conservatives out there. I don't know that to be true.  The claim was in the NYTimes, Newsweek, and Richard Hanania that I saw.  I haven't looked at the numbers myself. I suppose I would have had a mild preference that it was lots of liberals who were taken in, har har. But if it makes gullible conservatives more cautious, I'm all for that. It guess it must be easy, and there is some discussion about imitating tone versus relying on images, which I suppose I could get interested in if I were reading someone I trusted.

But it's exposing frauds.  I'm all for that. It's a win. Bring it on. 

I have seen many reports that pro-Palestine sites are much more likely to come from outside Palestine than pro-Israel ones come from outside Israel, which come primarily from Israel and America. I don't find that surprising, as internationally, the topic is largely about political tribes, with the conflict itself used for examples of fairness/unfairness rather than tracking the results.

Don't Ask "Why Is There Still Poverty?"

Don't ask 'Why is there still poverty?' but why any place got developed at all by Tibor Rutar, University of Maribor (Slovenia)

There is strong evidence that democracies above a certain income threshold – roughly $6,055 of GDP per capita in constant 1985 purchasing power terms – rarely break down, with only a few exceptions. Adam Przeworski et al. first established this pattern in a dataset spanning 1950-1990. Above, the figure shows the pattern still mostly holds from 1990 onward.

Anne Bradstreet

 

2013 Links

 Statistics - Presidential Grades 

Seasons of Friends Includes a link in the comments to a Sarah Hoyt essay about exchange students, which I have recalled many times

The Froude Society In contrast, this idea never caught on with me.  I had completely forgotten about it.  Still interesting, though

QOTD Proof  

When meaning well replaces Research in the church. Not even informal research of "we compared a dozen small groups over a three year period," but just "I talked to other people who think like me and they think so too."

Paul Radulescu - Baritone 

Pervasive Unrest

I had started a post on pervasive unrest, that when discord occurs in a society around one issue it tends to bleed over into others when Cranberry popped in with the news that foreign "rage farmers" were posting a lot of the highly charged political information on X.  Presumably similar things are happening on at least some of the other conflict sites: bluesky, instagram, Facebook, snapchat, TikTok, substack, and whatever else is out there.  Likely all of them.

I wondered what effect this would have on my thinking about the subject and decided it reinforced some of what I wanted to say, but in quite a different way than expected.  So I am just going to put down my bullet notes for now to give you ideas to play around with.

*****

There is a concept of evaporation of groups, analogous to what happens to a liquid as it evaporates.  The elements that do not evaporate off become more concentrated.  Think of salt water left outdoors in a basin for a few days.  When you come back there will be less water, and it will be saltier.  The social analogy is that as fads and fashions "simmer down" (hehe) the less engaged wander off, pay less attention, and bring less energy, leaving a concentration of core believers behind. I don't know how well this has been demonstrated, but the idea at least makes some sense. I had a related post about the SPLC and Hate Groups in 2013.

The people who went online and finally found communities of people who like to collect old license plates or are interested in the War of 1812 mostly found each other 20 years ago. It's one of the benefits of social media, but it's not likely to expand much now.

If concentrated groups encounter each other, whether IRL or online, they are more likely to spark conflict, even if they are surrounded by "mostly peaceful" protests. So the impression that people have that bluesky and Twitter have become crazier may be spot on.  Facebook is for Boomers, community groups, and young parents now, and the residual is a few people with very confrontative politics. Hell's Grannies come to life. I've about had it with a lot of my wife's old sorority sisters and elementary school staff. 

Jesse Singal is a major target for hatred on Bluesky.  Who knew?

*******

Maybe we are less angry than we thought.  If the angriest people we know ratchet down a bit we might all do better. 

Retraction

I linked to a link from Rob Henderson about women recommending more attractive women cut off more hair, which he interpreted as intrasexual competition, sweet sabotage. Bethany picked that up and ran with it and though she found some positive things about the study and its followup, she found that the study mostly did not support the competition idea very well, and actually pointed in the opposite direction in some ways. There was a telltale sign that the authors were prepared to regard any data as supportive of their hypothesis somehow.

That should remind me not to rely entirely on reading only the abstract when I relink a study.  I hope you didn't repeat the claim to a lot of people on my say-so.  If you did, please blame me.  Reading only the abstract is common for me, and it has its dangers.

Ancestors

Ancestor worship is one of the earliest and most common forms of religion. I wonder if the robots will worship microwaves.

Sunday Links

Colin Wright of Reality's Last Stand on the lack of evidence for gender transitioning medicine. Pray that whatever diseases and conditions you get have no political implications.  Doctors do well with those.  But part of succeeding at school is knowing what answers get you good grades.  Medical school selects for many things, but one of them is discerning the fashionableness of an idea, because you need to adjust to that to get through to the next level.

James, can you explain this to us? Or any other scientists I've got aboard here. Is this some superadvanced analogy to casting out nines, where you can get enormous amounts of information out of the way?

Cats Greet Men More Than Women Not at my sons' houses, they don't.

Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond  by Jane Psmith.  Three books, two of which we have discussed here.  I like any arguments against Jared Diamond

Epiphaneia at Cosmos and Taxis In Defense of Free Markets I had not heard of the site before this evening. I clicked on it because of the recommendation "Best defence of free markets I have ever read. I have read Friedman, Hayek, Rothbard and Mises—but this is the best by far." It was worth it.

I also want to mention computational market simulations as a source of evidence that market can self organize to achieve favorable outcomes without needing perfect competition. Gode et al. 2013 find that even when artificial traders use random, "zero-intelligence" bids, they can achieve near perfect market efficiency as long as a budget constraint (i.e., not permitting traders to sell below their costs or buy above their values) is enforced. This indicates that the market structure itself can produce efficient outcomes, supporting the idea that the "invisible hand" can work not only when individual traders are irrational, but also when the traders have zero intelligence. All it takes is a budget constraint.

 We've been wrong about what makes ice slippery

Cliched Lyrics Rock

One of my favorite genres to inflict on people.

David Wyman

As substack has gradually acquired more slop, there has been an informal move for some readers to trust only those using their real names. I think there are places where people should be allowed to be anonymous, and have found the handles people have taken for themselves informative and humorous about them, and human nature in general. Yet I don't mind different platforms having different rules, and prefer social influencing to mandates.  I see their point. A lot of the newer sites coming on board are just copying AI information and trying to get people to follow their links so that they can get advertising money.  So I will remain Assistant Village Idiot in most places, but am signing as David Wyman on substack comments.  David Foster's substack is already well-prepared. 

The Issue is Not the Issue

People say "follow the money" but that is only a specific case of a more general perspective.  People want lots of things other than money: status, mates, predictability, jobs, safety. Looking at our behavior in terms of getting those things can explain a lot. 

Wokeness arose largely because powerful people were in the way of others. They needed to be gotten rid of so that jobs and status would open up. Because they were mostly older, mostly male, and mostly white it paid to put those categories under immediate suspicion at every starting point and watch what they said like a hawk.  Cancelations were more intense in academia, media, and entertainment - exactly those places where young left-leaning people were trying to get in.  So it didn't matter if they were actually sexist, or homophobic or whatever.  Some were and some weren't but that wasn't primary.  What had to happen was a blanket reduction of people in the way, and let God sort them out. This is why there was only some protection for being female or black or gay yourself. 

Connections to the word "patriarchy" may come to mind, here. 

Even though Jews were longtime supporters and powers in the Democratic Party and the left in general, they were also often in positions of power.  Obama's speechwriters and political operatives were predominantly Jewish. That was much less true under Biden. Media, academia, entertainment had powerful older Jews gumming up the works for people who wanted those slots.

If you look at the insane and contradictory support for the Palestinians on the left from this perspective it starts to make more sense. There's no rationality to it.  The Palestinians treat women very badly, as does much of the Islamic world. Gays can be executed, and are certainly not allowed into positions of power, nor are Blacks or East Asians.  (Indonesia is a huge Muslim presence that has almost no influence in the Middle East. Too far away and the wrong color.) There is no natural alliance with the Western left. 

But those Jews have to be gotten rid of somehow, so the alligator eventually came for them too. Being good liberals who had written many books or contributed large sums no longer mattered.  The kids want those jobs in those industries. 

Poilitical Alignment from AD&D

I started a post that turned out to be too clever by half, based on the idea that liberals think of themselves as chaotic good as a leftover from the 70s when people were moving into communes and becoming Jesus people and breaking the marijuana laws and having very different fashions. That devolved into just sticking it to The Man by having different fashions and music.  Ha ha, oldsters! But as they took over the institutions - journalism, education, government, mainstream religion - they are now lawful neutral. They frame Trump as a good-evil axis, but it's the law-chaos axis that really upsets them. I think even a lot of his supporters see him as chaotic neutral, with the chaos part being necessary enough to outweigh other considerations.

That's okay as far as it goes, but it's only half an idea and when I tried to expand it the various branches kept collapsing with counterexamples in quick order.  Play with it on your own if you like.

Fuentes

I watched some of his stuff.  He's is just a troll, not a thinker in any way.  Whether he will have appeal and become important I have no idea. There is chatter about the kids who have grown up online, and where they have migrated to, and the power of short-form video and repetition - all that. I don't know. I no longer trust any short-form video myself. I like seeing the ones with my granddaughters in Alaska are in them, or my son out doing adventurous things in the cold.