Theresa May redefines Conservatism as Tories move on from Thatcher: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/18/theresa-may-redefines-conservatism-tories-move-thatcher/
Theresa May criticized the term ‘citizen of the world.’ But half the world identifies that way: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/10/05/theresa-may-criticized-the-term-citizen-of-the-world-but-half-the-world-identifies-that-way/

welp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2017
UK 2017 General Election vote examined: income, poverty and Brexit: https://www.jrf.org.uk/report/uk-2017-general-election-vote-examined
- The Conservatives appealed to many lower income voters’ support for Brexit and immigration control. Labour instead appealed to these voters’ economic concerns over living standards, redistribution, inequality and austerity.
- Many voters who are struggling to get by and marginalized may agree with the vote for Brexit and calls to curb immigration, but were more likely to vote for Labour because of their desire for economic redistribution and to endorse Labour’s anti-austerity platform.
- Labour’s pitch to low income voters, and those in poverty, was a key driver of its performance at the 2017 election, but no political party made a major and clear breakthrough with these groups.

lol, this guy: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/jacob-rees-mogg-conservative-mp-north-east-somerset-capital-management-investment-firm-belgravia-a7902951.html
https://streamable.com/yuhyx

The polite extremist: Jacob Rees-Mogg’s seemingly unstoppable rise: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/02/polite-extremist-jacob-rees-mogg-s-seemingly-unstoppable-rise
A Brexit ultra and profound reactionary, the eccentric MP is a strong contender to be the next prime minister. How dangerous is he?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/04/world/europe/france-debate-marine-le-pen-emmanuel-macron.html
http://www.europe1.fr/politique/dans-lemission-politique-de-france-2-macron-rebondit-sur-la-fusillade-des-champs-elysees-3306584
"This threat will be part of the daily life of the next few years," he said, paying tribute to the victim. "The first mission of the President of the Republic is to protect."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2017/04/19/a-youth-revolt-in-france-boosts-the-far-right/
If Le Pen wins, European leaders fear the disintegration of the E.U. after decades spent trying to bind the continent more closely together. And although she’s down in hypothetical second-round contests, Le Pen enjoys a commanding lead among France’s youngest voters in the 11-candidate first round, polls show. One survey has her winning nearly 40 percent of the vote among those 18 to 24, nearly double the total of her nearest competitor, Emmanuel Macron.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/04/le-pen-support-young-voters-170415161404170.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/europe/marine-le-pen-national-front-party.html

http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21715979-fran-ois-fillon-admits-no-wrongdoing-putting-his-wife-payroll-his-campaign
François Fillon admits no wrongdoing in putting his wife on the payroll, but his campaign is faltering
http://www.dw.com/en/fillon-election-favorite-despite-plotting-thatcherite-course/a-37131311
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/20/nicolas-sarkozy-risks-falling-foul-of-left-wing-tactical-vote-as/

Daily chart: The centre can indeed hold in France’s presidential election: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/04/daily-chart-5
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/04/france-s-presidential-election
20% per prediction markets: http://predictwise.com/politics/french-politics

later:
Laurent Wauquiez s'insurge contre «les élites»: http://www.lefigaro.fr/politique/2017/10/25/01002-20171025ARTFIG00363-laurent-wauquiez-s-insurge-contre-les-elites.php
https://twitter.com/epkaufm/status/929011773155442689
New French centre-right contender Laurent Wauquiez follows Kurz model, says elite suppressing debate over mass immigration, Islam, national identity. France for the French
https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/929094212338966528
https://archive.is/xHwZ5
Likely next leader of French Les Republicains @laurentwauquiez positions himself as populist nationalist: denounces the taboo on discussing the nation, massive immigration, identity, values, Islamism

preferences -> place, not place -> preferences (mostly)
Cosmopolitan immigration attitudes in Europe's large cities: Adaptation or selection: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lb3yrsdlhpxprfs/RahsaanMaxwellAPSACosmopolitanImmigrationCities.pdf?dl=0
The myth of London exceptionalism: https://quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-5/ukip-in-london/
London is not as invulnerable to the appeal of UKIP as commonly reported, finds new research from Eric Kaufmann.

Are White British Londoners more accepting of immigration than White British elsewhere? The British Election Study (BES)’s 2015 panel survey asks whether immigration enriches or undermines cultural life. 34.7 per cent of White British outside London say immigration strongly undermines cultural life. But so do 34.4 per cent of White British Londoners. Not much difference there. 44 per cent of White Brits outside London want to leave the EU, but so do 42.3 per cent of White British Londoners. Again, not much in it.

...

Finally, when we control for a fuller range of demographic and attitudinal characteristics, as in figure 4, London and the South East emerge as significantly more likely than the rest of England and Wales to have voted UKIP in 2014, according to the BES.

Cosmopolitan cities and their country cousins – UK in a changing Europe: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/london-voted-leave-or-why-local-differences-in-populist-right-voting-are-overstated/

Even apolitical owners of big, mainstream media outlets typically don’t like to bring up the immigration debate. At the very least it’s “divisive.” More important, reporting on, say, support for a border wall could alienate new, growing blocs of ethnic consumers that businesses (especially newspapers) want to reach. But it’s not easy to write long, important thumbsuckers about Trump’s primary victory without even mentioning the issue that both launched his campaign into prominence and fueled its continued rise. Luckily, America’s premier journalists are up to the job.

The Zeroth Amendment: http://takimag.com/article/the_zeroth_amendment_steve_sailer
https://twitter.com/daveweigel/status/903343502146330625
As we discuss DACA, a reminder that this was the only Q about immigration asked across the three presidential debates.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/19/the-final-trump-clinton-debate-transcript-annotated/
WALLACE: All right. Let's move on to the subject of immigration. And there is almost no issue that separates the two of you more than the issue of immigration. Actually, there are a lot of issues that separate the two of you.

Mr. Trump, you want to build a wall. Secretary Clinton, you have offered no specific plan for how you want to secure our southern border. Mr. Trump, you are calling for major deportations. Secretary Clinton, you say that within your first 100 days as president you're going to offer a package that includes a pathway to citizenship. The question, really, is, why are you right and your opponent wrong?

Mr. Trump, you go first in this segment. You have two minutes.

Foreign Policy: "This Land Is Their Land:" Today's Immigrant Supremacist Ideology at Its Most Blatant: http://www.unz.com/isteve/foreign-policy-todays-immigrant-supremacist-ideology-at-its-most-blatant/
"""
… All hail Western civilization, which gave the world the genocide of the Native Americans, slavery, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and global warming. How hypocritical this whole debate about migration really is. The rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones.

This is how the game was rigged: First they colonized us and stole our treasure and prevented us from building our industries. After plundering us for centuries, they left, having drawn up maps in ways that ensured permanent strife between our communities.

Then they brought us to their countries as “guest workers” — as if they knew what the word “guest” meant in our cultures — but discouraged us from bringing our families. Having built up their economies with our raw materials and our labor, they asked us to go back and were surprised when we did not.

… Now, again, they ask us not to come, desperate and starving though they have rendered us, because the richest among them need a scapegoat.

This is how the game is now rigged. In 2015, Shashi Tharoor, the former U.N. undersecretary-general for communications and public information, gave a compelling Oxford Union speech that made the case for (symbolic) reparations owed by Britain to India. “India’s share of the world economy when Britain arrived on its shores was 23 percent. By the time the British left, it was down to below 4 percent. Why?” he asked. “Simply because India had been governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.”
"""

James Watt stole the blueprints for the steam engine from a Brahmin in Uttar Pradesh.

"""
Tharoor’s speech reminded me of the time my grandfather was sitting in a park in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and wagged a finger at him. “Why are you here?” the man demanded. “Why are you in my country?” “We are the creditors,” responded my grandfather, who was born in India, spent his working years in Kenya, and was now retired in London. “You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we have come to collect.”
"""

Boy, right now I’m really feeling like it would be a good idea to let in more of the Mehta family. It sounds like they have my best interests at heart.

https://twitter.com/hpmacd/status/907649633664552963
I have to say, "we will continue resenting you even after we've assimilated because you and your culture are evil" is not a great pitch

“Who belongs?”: http://www.unz.com/isteve/who-belongs/
Hospitality to travelers is a big theme in the Bible and other West Asian religious traditions. But it’s limited in duration and it’s reciprocal.

The methodology centres on names. Psychologists have long found that people with relatively rare names are more likely to be “unique”, presumably because parents who consciously choose rare names for their children would be more likely to raise them to be nonconformists.

The researchers have access to all the names of people who lived in Norway and Sweden throughout the great migration wave, as well as all the names of the people who left for America. They also have the same information broken down by locality for a more fine-grained analysis.

They found that while “individualism” rose modestly overall, the places with more emigration became relatively more “collectivist” than those regions with less emigraton.

https://ehsthelongrun.net/2017/06/13/the-making-of-new-world-individualism-and-old-world-collectivism-international-migrants-as-carriers-of-cultural-values/
https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/847789231296610308

more on this by Gwern: https://www.gwern.net/Statistical-notes#selective-emigration-and-personality-trait-change
Knudsen 2019 finds that the emigration of 25% of the Scandinavian population to the USA 1850–1920 was driven in part by more ‘individualistic’ personality factors among emigrants, leading to permanent decreases in mean ‘individualism’ in the home countries. This is attributed to cultural factors, rather than genetics. I model the overall migration as a simple truncation selection scenario, and find that in a simple model under reasonable assumptions, the entire effect could be genetic.

good comment: https://www.facebook.com/qiaochu/posts/10154291295275811

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-17/little-to-celebrate-in-the-dutch-elections

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/world/europe/dutch-denk-party.html
“What is unique about Denk is that it’s a party of people with a migration background who completely control the party,” said Cas Mudde, a specialist in European political and radical parties who was born in the Netherlands.

...

Among the Denk party’s stated policy goals are banning from legislative forums a pejorative term often used for Dutch nonwhites, “allochtoon,” and to replace the term “integration” with “acceptance.”

It wants to establish a “racism register” to track the use of hate speech by elected officials and to bar those who promote racism from holding public office.

http://www.euronews.com/2017/03/13/turks-squeeze-oranges-in-anti-dutch-protest

Why the Dutch Turned Against Immigrants: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-23/why-the-dutch-turned-against-immigrants

‘If you don’t get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. You’re giving a huge advantage to everybody else. One of the advantages of a fellow like Buffett … is that he automatically thinks in terms of decision trees and the elementary math of permutations and combinations… It’s not that hard to learn. What is hard is to get so you use it routinely almost everyday of your life. The Fermat/Pascal system is dramatically consonant with the way that the world works. And it’s fundamental truth. So you simply have to have the technique…

‘One of the things that influenced me greatly was studying physics… If I were running the world, people who are qualified to do physics would not be allowed to elect out of taking it. I think that even people who aren’t [expecting to] go near physics and engineering learn a thinking system in physics that is not learned so well anywhere else… The tradition of always looking for the answer in the most fundamental way available – that is a great tradition.’ --- Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s partner.

...

If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies, and never believe what advertising companies tell you about ‘data’ unless you can independently verify it. Physics, mathematics, and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting which satisfies neither of the necessary conditions – 1) enough structure in the information to enable good predictions, 2) conditions for good fast feedback and learning. Physicists and mathematicians regularly invade other fields but other fields do not invade theirs so we can see which fields are hardest for very talented people. It is no surprise that they can successfully invade politics and devise things that rout those who wrongly think they know what they are doing. Vote Leave paid very close attention to real experts. ...

More important than technology is the mindset – the hard discipline of obeying Richard Feynman’s advice: ‘The most important thing is not to fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.’ They were a hard floor on ‘fooling yourself’ and I empowered them to challenge everybody including me. They saved me from many bad decisions even though they had zero experience in politics and they forced me to change how I made important decisions like what got what money. We either operated scientifically or knew we were not, which is itself very useful knowledge. (One of the things they did was review the entire literature to see what reliable studies have been done on ‘what works’ in politics and what numbers are reliable.) Charlie Munger is one half of the most successful investment partnership in world history. He advises people – hire physicists. It works and the real prize is not the technology but a culture of making decisions in a rational way and systematically avoiding normal ways of fooling yourself as much as possible. This is very far from normal politics.

some other stuff from same post:
Generally the better educated are more prone to irrational political opinions and political hysteria than the worse educated far from power. Why? In the field of political opinion they are more driven by fashion, a gang mentality, and the desire to pose about moral and political questions all of which exacerbate cognitive biases, encourage groupthink, and reduce accuracy. Those on average incomes are less likely to express political views to send signals; political views are much less important for signalling to one’s immediate in-group when you are on 20k a year. The former tend to see such questions in more general and abstract terms, and are more insulated from immediate worries about money. The latter tend to see such questions in more concrete and specific terms and ask ‘how does this affect me?’. The former live amid the emotional waves that ripple around powerful and tightly linked self-reinforcing networks. These waves rarely permeate the barrier around insiders and touch others.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/how-ae-housman-invented-englishness
fucking lol:
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/877543510941028352
https://archive.is/uWhkb

- Niall Ferguson

There is cultural refusal to believe EU leaders mean what they say about exit terms

http://www.unz.com/article/iq-or-the-mathverbal-split/
Commenter Gwen on the blog Infoproc hints at a possible neurological basis for this phenomenon, stating that “one bit of speculation I have: the neuroimaging studies seem to consistently point towards efficiency of global connectivity rather than efficiency or other traits of individual regions; you could interpret this as a general factor across a wide battery of tasks because they are all hindered to a greater or lesser degree by simply difficulties in coordination while performing the task; so perhaps what causes Spearman is global connectivity becoming around as efficient as possible and no longer a bottleneck for most tasks, and instead individual brain regions start dominating additional performance improvements. So up to a certain level of global communication efficiency, there is a general intelligence factor but then specific abilities like spatial vs verbal come apart and cease to have common bottlenecks and brain tilts manifest themselves much more clearly.” [10] This certainly seem plausible enough. Let’s hope that those far smarter than ourselves will slowly get to the bottom of these matters over the coming decades.

...

My main prediction here then is that based on HBD, I don’t expect China or East Asia to rival the Anglosphere in the life sciences and medicine or other verbally loaded scientific fields. Perhaps China can mirror Japan in developing pockets of strengths in various areas of the life sciences. Given its significantly larger population, this might indeed translate into non-trivial high-end output in the fields of biology and biomedicine. The core strengths of East Asian countries though, as science in the region matures, will lie primarily in quantitative areas such as physics or chemistry, and this is where I predict the region will shine in the coming years. China’s recent forays into quantum cryptography provide one such example. [40]

...

In fact, as anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed, modern day tech is essentially a California and East Asian affair, with the former focused on software and the latter more so on hardware. American companies dominate in the realm of internet infrastructure and platforms, while East Asia is predominant in consumer electronics hardware, although as noted, China does have its own versions of general purpose tech giants in companies like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. By contrast, Europe today has relatively few well known tech companies apart from some successful apps such as Spotify or Skype and entities such as Nokia or Ericsson. [24] It used to have more established technology companies back in the day, but the onslaught of competition from the US and East Asia put a huge dent in Europe’s technology industry.

...

Although many will point to institutional factors such as China or the United States enjoying large, unfragmented markets to explain the decline of European tech, I actually want to offer a more HBD oriented explanation not only for why Europe seems to lag in technology and engineering relative to America and East Asia, but also for why tech in the United States is skewed towards software, while tech in East Asia is skewed towards hardware. I believe that the various phenomenon described above can all be explained by one common underlying mechanism, namely the math/verbal split. Simply put, if you’re really good at math, you gravitate towards hardware. If your skills are more verbally inclined, you gravitate towards software. In general, your chances of working in engineering and technology are greatly bolstered by being spatially and quantitatively adept.

...

If my assertions here are correct, I predict that over the coming decades, we’ll increasingly see different groups of people specialize in areas where they’re most proficient at. This means that East Asians and East Asian societies will be characterized by a skew towards quantitative STEM fields such as physics, chemistry, and engineering and towards hardware and high-tech manufacturing, while Western societies will be characterized by a skew towards the biological sciences and medicine, social sciences, humanities, and software and services. [41] Likewise, India also appears to be a country whose strengths lie more in software and services as opposed to hardware and manufacturing. My fundamental thesis is that all of this is ultimately a reflection of underlying HBD, in particular the math/verbal split. I believe this is the crucial insight lacking in the analyses others offer.

http://www.unz.com/article/iq-or-the-mathverbal-split/#comment-2230751

Sailer In TakiMag: What Does the Deep History of China and India Tell Us About Their Futures?: http://takimag.com/article/a_pair_of_giants_steve_sailer/print#axzz5BHqRM5nD
In an age of postmodern postnationalism that worships diversity, China is old-fashioned. It’s homogeneous, nationalist, and modernist. China seems to have utilitarian 1950s values.

For example, Chinese higher education isn’t yet competitive on the world stage, but China appears to be doing a decent job of educating the masses in the basics. High Chinese scores on the international PISA test for 15-year-olds shouldn’t be taken at face value, but it’s likely that China is approaching first-world norms in providing equality of opportunity through adequate schooling.

Due to censorship and language barriers, Chinese individuals aren’t well represented in English-language cyberspace. Yet in real life, the Chinese build things, such as bridges that don’t fall down, and they make stuff, employing tens of millions of proletarians in their factories.

The Chinese seem, on average, to be good with their hands, which is something that often makes American intellectuals vaguely uncomfortable. But at least the Chinese proles are over there merely manufacturing things cheaply, so American thinkers don’t resent them as much as they do American tradesmen.

Much of the class hatred in America stems from the suspicions of the intelligentsia that plumbers and mechanics are using their voodoo cognitive ability of staring at 3-D physical objects and somehow understanding why they are broken to overcharge them for repairs. Thus it’s only fair, America’s white-collar managers assume, that they export factory jobs to lower-paid China so that they can afford to throw manufactured junk away when it breaks and buy new junk rather than have to subject themselves to the humiliation of admitting to educationally inferior American repairmen that they don’t understand what is wrong with their own gizmos.

...

This Chinese lack of diversity is out of style, and yet it seems to make it easier for the Chinese to get things done.

In contrast, India appears more congenial to current-year thinkers. India seems postmodern and postnationalist, although it might be more accurately called premodern and prenationalist.

...

Another feature that makes our commentariat comfortable with India is that Indians don’t seem to be all that mechanically facile, perhaps especially not the priestly Brahmin caste, with whom Western intellectuals primarily interact.

And the Indians tend to be more verbally agile than the Chinese and more adept at the kind of high-level abstract thinking required by modern computer science, law, and soft major academia. Thousands of years of Brahmin speculations didn’t do much for India’s prosperity, but somehow have prepared Indians to make fortunes in 21st-century America.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289616300757
- Study used two moderately large American community samples.
- Verbal and not nonverbal ability drives relationship between ability and ideology.
- Ideology and ability appear more related when ability assessed professionally.
- Self-administered or nonverbal ability measures will underestimate this relationship.

https://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-universal-law-of-interpersonal-dynamics/
Every once in a while I realize something with my conscious mind that I’ve understood implicitly for a long time. Such a thing happened to me yesterday, while reading a post on Stalin, by Amritas. It is this:

S = P + E

Social Status equals Political Capital plus Economic Capital

...

Here’s an example of its explanatory power: If we assume that a major human drive is to maximize S, we can predict that people with high P will attempt to minimize the value of E (since S-maximization is a zero-sum game). And so we see. Throughout history there has been an attempt to ennoble P while stigmatizing E. Conversely, throughout history, people with high E use it to acquire P. Thus, in today’s society we see that socially adept people, who have inborn P skills, tend to favor socialism or big government – where their skills are most valuable, while economically productive people are often frustrated by the fact that their concrete contribution to society is deplored.

Now, you might ask yourself why the reverse isn’t true, why people with high P don’t use it to acquire E, while people with high E don’t attempt to stigmatize P? Well, I think that is true. But, while the equation is mathematically symmetrical, the nature of P-talent and E-talent is not. P-talent can be used to acquire E from the E-adept, but the E-adept are no match for the P-adept in the attempt to stigmatize P. Furthermore, P is endogenous to the system, while E is exogenous. In other words, the P-adept have the ability to manipulate the system itself to make P-talent more valuable in acquiring E, while the E-adept have no ability to manipulate the external environment to make E-talent more valuable in acquiring P.

...

1. All institutions will tend to be dominated by the P-adept
2. All institutions that have no in-built exogenous criteria for measuring its members’ status will inevitably be dominated by the P-adept
3. Universities will inevitably be dominated by the P-adept
4. Within a university, humanities and social sciences will be more dominated by the P-adept than … [more]

Jonathan Haidt writing on resurgence of populism

The politics of meaning are swirling into a new configuration. Since the 1960s, “values issues” have defined stable left and right political coalitions. Most people dutifully lined up with one side or the other, and most political questions were forced to align with a fixed left vs. right opposition.

The 2016 American Presidential campaign, and the UK Brexit vote, have split “left” and “right” internally, each into roughly equal halves. A new basic division of political opinion has emerged—in these countries, at least. But what is it?

I suspect the fault line in the new politics reflects the communal versus systematic modes of relating to meaning. This realignment offers both fearful risks and hopeful opportunities—because both modes are partly right and partly wrong. Although a communal/systematic split could be catastrophic, it may also point the way to a new mode that heals the fundamental crisis of meaningness that has plagued the West for a hundred years.

regret for brexit is a media fiction more or less

dataviz confusion wrt brexit

One way to understand the English vote is to compare it to other areas, especially with regard to immigration. If you read Frank Fukuyama, he correctly portrays Japan and Denmark, as, along with England, being the two other truly developed, mature nation states in earlier times, well before the Industrial Revolution. And what do we see about these countries? Relative to their other demographics, they are especially opposed to very high levels of immigration. England, in a sense, was the region “out on a limb,” when it comes to taking in foreigners, and now it has decided to pull back and be more like Denmark and Japan.

The regularity here is that the coherent, longstanding nation states are most protective of their core identities. Should that come as a huge surprise? The contrast with Belgium, where I am writing this, is noteworthy. The actual practical problems with immigration are much greater here in Brussels, but the country is much further from “doing anything about it,” whether prudently or not, and indeed to this day Belgium is not actually a mature nation-state and it may splinter yet. That England did something is one reflection of the fact that England is a better-run region than Belgium, even if you feel as I do that the vote was a big mistake.