- Every morality inherently has a doctrine on that which is morally beneficial and that which is morally harmful.
- Under the traditional, absolute, eucivic moral code of Western Civilisation these were termed Good and Evil.
- Under the modern, relative, dyscivic moral code of Progressivism these are called Love and Hate.
- Good and Evil inherently reference the in-group, and seek its growth in absolute capability and glory.  Love and Hate inherently reference the out-group, and seek its relative growth in capability and privilege.
- These combinations form the basis of the Frame through which individuals aligned with those moralities view the world.  They are markedly distinct; although both Good serves the moral directive of absolutely strengthening the in-group and Hate counters the moral directive of relatively weakening the in-group, they do not map to one another. This failure to map, as well as the overloading of terms, is why it is generally (intentionally, perniciously) difficult to discern the differences between the two world views.

You Didn’t Join a Suicide Cult: http://www.righteousdominion.org/2018/04/13/you-didnt-join-a-suicide-cult/
“Thomas Aquinas discusses whether there is an order to charity. Must we love everyone in outward effects equally? Or do we demonstrate love more to our near neighbors than our distant neighbors? His answers: No to the first question, yes to the second.”

...

This is a perfect distillation of the shaming patriotic Christians with a sense of national identity face. It is a very Alinsky tactic whose fourth rule is “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.” It is a tactic that can be applied to any idealistic movement. Now to be fair, my friend is not a disciple of Alinsky, but we have been bathed in Alinsky for at least two generations. Reading the Gospels alone and in a vacuum one could be forgiven coming away with that interpretation of Christ’s teachings. Take for example Luke 6:27-30:

...

Love as Virtue and Vice
Thirdly, Love is a virtue, the greatest, but like all virtues it can be malformed with excessive zeal.

Aristotle taught that virtues were a proper balance of behavior or feeling in a specific sphere. For instance, the sphere of confidence and fear: a proper balance in this sphere would be the virtue of courage. A deficit in this sphere would be cowardice and an excess would be rashness or foolhardiness. We can apply this to the question of charity. Charity in the bible is typically a translation of the Greek word for love. We are taught by Jesus that second only to loving God we are to love our neighbor (which in the Greek means those near you). If we are to view the sphere of love in this context of excess and deficit what would it be?

Selfishness <—- LOVE —-> Enablement

Enablement here is meant in its very modern sense. If we possess this excess of love, we are so selfless and “others focused” that we prioritize the other above all else we value. The pathologies of the target of our enablement are not considered; indeed, in this state of enablement they are even desired. The saying “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” is recast as: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, BUT if I have nothing squeaking in m y life I’ll make sure to find or create something squeaky to “virtuously” burden myself with”.

Also, in this state of excessive love even those natural and healthy extensions of yourself must be sacrificed to the other. There was one mother I was acquainted with that embodies this excess of love. She had two biological children and anywhere from five to six very troubled adopted/foster kids at a time. She helped many kids out of terrible situations, but in turn her natural children were constantly subject to high levels of stress, drama, and constant babysitting of very troubled children. There was real resentment. In her efforts to help troubled foster children, she sacrificed the well-being of her biological children. Needless to say, her position on the refugee crisis was predictable.

I’m going to review David Reich’s new book, Who We Are and How We Got Here. Extensively: in a sense I’ve already been doing this for a long time. Probably there will be a podcast. The GoFundMe link is here. You can also send money via Paypal (Use the donate button), or bitcoins to 1Jv4cu1wETM5Xs9unjKbDbCrRF2mrjWXr5. In-kind donations, such as orichalcum or mithril, are always appreciated.

This is the book about the application of ancient DNA to prehistory and history.

height difference between northern and southern europeans: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/who-we-are-1/
mixing, genocide of males, etc.: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/29/who-we-are-2-purity-of-essence/
rapid change in polygenic traits (appearance by Kevin Mitchell and funny jab at Brad Delong ("regmonkey")): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/rapid-change-in-polygenic-traits/
schiz, bipolar, and IQ: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/rapid-change-in-polygenic-traits/#comment-105605
Dan Graur being dumb: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/the-usual-suspects/
prediction of neanderthal mixture and why: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/03/who-we-are-3-neanderthals/
New Guineans tried to use Denisovan admixture to avoid UN sanctions (by "not being human"): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/who-we-are-4-denisovans/
also some commentary on decline of Out-of-Africa, including:
"Homo Naledi, a small-brained homonin identified from recently discovered fossils in South Africa, appears to have hung around way later that you’d expect (up to 200,000 years ago, maybe later) than would be the case if modern humans had occupied that area back then. To be blunt, we would have eaten them."

Live Not By Lies: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/live-not-by-lies/
Next he slams people that suspect that upcoming genetic genetic analysis will, in most cases, confirm traditional stereotypes about race – the way the world actually looks.

The people Reich dumps on are saying perfectly reasonable things. He criticizes Henry Harpending for saying that he’d never seen an African with a hobby. Of course, Henry had actually spent time in Africa, and that’s what he’d seen. The implication is that people in Malthusian farming societies – which Africa was not – were selected to want to work, even where there was no immediate necessity to do so. Thus hobbies, something like a gerbil running in an exercise wheel.

He criticized Nicholas Wade, for saying that different races have different dispositions. Wade’s book wasn’t very good, but of course personality varies by race: Darwin certainly thought so. You can see differences at birth. Cover a baby’s nose with a cloth: Chinese and Navajo babies quietly breathe through their mouth, European and African babies fuss and fight.

Then he attacks Watson, for asking when Reich was going to look at Jewish genetics – the kind that has led to greater-than-average intelligence. Watson was undoubtedly trying to get a rise out of Reich, but it’s a perfectly reasonable question. Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than the average bear and everybody knows it. Selection is the only possible explanation, and the conditions in the Middle ages – white-collar job specialization and a high degree of endogamy, were just what the doctor ordered.

Watson’s a prick, but he’s a great prick, and what he said was correct. Henry was a prince among men, and Nick Wade is a decent guy as well. Reich is totally out of line here: he’s being a dick.

Now Reich may be trying to burnish his anti-racist credentials, which surely need some renewal after having pointing out that race as colloquially used is pretty reasonable, there’s no reason pops can’t be different, people that said otherwise ( like Lewontin, Gould, Montagu, etc. ) were lying, Aryans conquered Europe and India, while we’re tied to the train tracks with scary genetic results coming straight at us. I don’t care: he’s being a weasel, slandering the dead and abusing the obnoxious old genius who laid the foundations of his field. Reich will also get old someday: perhaps he too will someday lose track of all the nonsense he’s supposed to say, or just stop caring. Maybe he already has… I’m pretty sure that Reich does not like lying – which is why he wrote this section of the book (not at all logically necessary for his exposition of the ancient DNA work) but the required complex juggling of lies and truth required to get past the demented gatekeepers of our society may not be his forte. It has been said that if it was discovered that someone in the business was secretly an android, David Reich would be the prime suspect. No Talleyrand he.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/12/who-we-are-6-the-americas/
The population that accounts for the vast majority of Native American ancestry, which we will call Amerinds, came into existence somewhere in northern Asia. It was formed from a mix of Ancient North Eurasians and a population related to the Han Chinese – about 40% ANE and 60% proto-Chinese. Is looks as if most of the paternal ancestry was from the ANE, while almost all of the maternal ancestry was from the proto-Han. [Aryan-Transpacific ?!?] This formation story – ANE boys, East-end girls – is similar to the formation story for the Indo-Europeans.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/who-we-are-7-africa/
In some ways, on some questions, learning more from genetics has left us less certain. At this point we really don’t know where anatomically humans originated. Greater genetic variety in sub-Saharan African has been traditionally considered a sign that AMH originated there, but it possible that we originated elsewhere, perhaps in North Africa or the Middle East, and gained extra genetic variation when we moved into sub-Saharan Africa and mixed with various archaic groups that already existed. One consideration is that finding recent archaic admixture in a population may well be a sign that modern humans didn’t arise in that region ( like language substrates) – which makes South Africa and West Africa look less likely. The long-continued existence of homo naledi in South Africa suggests that modern humans may not have been there for all that long – if we had co-existed with homo naledi, they probably wouldn’t lasted long. The oldest known skull that is (probably) AMh was recently found in Morocco, while modern humans remains, already known from about 100,000 years ago in Israel, have recently been found in northern Saudi Arabia.

While work by Nick Patterson suggests that modern humans were formed by a fusion between two long-isolated populations, a bit less than half a million years ago.

So: genomics had made recent history Africa pretty clear. Bantu agriculuralists expanded and replaced hunter-gatherers, farmers and herders from the Middle East settled North Africa, Egypt and northeaat Africa, while Nilotic herdsmen expanded south from the Sudan. There are traces of earlier patterns and peoples, but today, only traces. As for questions back further in time, such as the origins of modern humans – we thought we knew, and now we know we don’t. But that’s progress.

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/18/reichs-journey/
David Reich’s professional path must have shaped his perspective on the social sciences. Look at the record. He starts his professional career examining the role of genetics in the elevated prostate cancer risk seen in African-American men. Various social-science fruitcakes oppose him even looking at the question of ancestry ( African vs European). But they were wrong: certain African-origin alleles explain the increased risk. Anthropologists (and human geneticists) were sure (based on nothing) that modern humans hadn’t interbred with Neanderthals – but of course that happened. Anthropologists and archaeologists knew that Gustaf Kossina couldn’t have been right when he said that widespread material culture corresponded to widespread ethnic groups, and that migration was the primary explanation for changes in the archaeological record – but he was right. They knew that the Indo-European languages just couldn’t have been imposed by fire and sword – but Reich’s work proved them wrong. Lots of people – the usual suspects plus Hindu nationalists – were sure that the AIT ( Aryan Invasion Theory) was wrong, but it looks pretty good today.

Some sociologists believed that caste in India was somehow imposed or significantly intensified by the British – but it turns out that most jatis have been almost perfectly endogamous for two thousand years or more…

It may be that Reich doesn’t take these guys too seriously anymore. Why should he?

varnas, jatis, aryan invastion theory: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/who-we-are-8-india/

europe and EEF+WHG+ANE: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/05/01/who-we-are-9-europe/

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/book-review-david-reich-human-genes-reveal-history/
The massive mixture events that occurred in the recent past to give rise to Europeans and South Asians, to name just two groups, were likely “male mediated.” That’s another way of saying that men on the move took local women as brides or concubines. In the New World there are many examples of this, whether it be among African Americans, where most European ancestry seems to come through men, or in Latin America, where conquistadores famously took local women as paramours. Both of these examples are disquieting, and hint at the deep structural roots of patriarchal inequality and social subjugation that form the backdrop for the emergence of many modern peoples.

Changes in Fertility Rate between 2005 and 2015 in European countries: http://mapsontheweb.zoom-maps.com/post/165927655748/changes-in-fertility-rate-between-2005-and-2015-in

The conservatives and center-left suffered huge losses while the right-wing populist AfD became Saxony's most powerful party. We analyzed the data so you don’t have to.

The anti-Muslim AfD just scored big in Germany’s election. What does this mean for German Muslims?: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/09/25/the-anti-muslim-afd-just-scored-big-in-germanys-election-what-does-this-mean-for-german-muslims/

The Germans Turn Right: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-germans-turn-right/article/2009880
- Christopher Caldwell

The German Election—A Conservative Analysis: http://quillette.com/2017/09/28/german-election-conservative-analysis/
As traditional European conservatives were pushed Left-ward by media and academic communities on immigration and social and religious rights, the vacuum was filled by the rise of blut-und-boden far right parties all across Europe. In a Sophoclean twist of fate, the European political center and center-Left is now dying, thanks to the very person that liberals like to portray as the “new leader” of the free world.

later:
The End of German Stability: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_good_fight/2017/11/germany_s_coalition_talks_collapse_threatening_stability.html
The collapse of coalition talks bodes badly for Angela Merkel, and for democratic governments everywhere.

Austrian legislative election, 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_legislative_election,_2017
Austria heads for right-leaning coalition: http://www.politico.eu/article/austria-heads-for-right-leaning-coalition-early-projections/
https://twitter.com/almodozo/status/919662426966118403
https://archive.is/4vkG6
Finally an election where the far right actually did best (barely) among youngest voters: FPÖ got 30% of the <30 vote. SPÖ voters old #nrw17

European Populism Is Here to Stay: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/opinion/european-populism-is-here-to-stay.html

Czech Republic:
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/news/world/populist-billionaire-party-wins-big-czech-republic-article-1.3578312
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-czech-election-farright/far-right-scores-surprise-success-in-czech-election-idUSKBN1CQ0T3

Dealing with the Dignity Deficit: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/04/05/dealing-dignity-deficit/
Are the grievances tearing our societies apart at this hyper-polarized moment insurmountable? A week with some AfD voters and politicians gave me a measure of hope.

More importantly, a generous welfare state appears at best to be an inadequate solution to the problems and pathologies of checker-boarded economic dislocation. The pesky question of dignity remains: Despite what boosters of a universal basic income try to tell us, our modern sense of purpose and identity remains closely tied to what we “do” for a living. Making disempowered people more comfortable does not necessarily make them less frustrated.

...

But since when are openness, cosmopolitanism, and diversity intrinsic to a complete definition of liberalism? They make no significant appearance in any of the foundational texts of liberal political thought. They are merely the product of the demands that globalization and urbanization places upon us “anywheres”, which we in turn try to wedge into the liberal canon in order to erase any discomfort we may feel about change pulling the ideological rug out from under our feet. Historical accounts of earlier periods of urbanization are rightly dispassionate in describing people flocking to cities out of economic want. And they correctly identify the emergence of the middle class and its attendant values as the product of complex factors interacting in these new circumstances. We instead now disfigure analysis into a form or moral self-congratulation.

On the role of radical feminism in the decline of civilization.

Marx provided the model for all subsequent movements aiming to take power. His “make your own tribe” kit was found useful by nationalists, anarchists, and many brands of socialist. Hitler made the most creative use of it by playing down victimization and representing every Aryan as a superior type of person. It took the world in arms to get rid of him. But before long, revolutionaries discovered that a revolution based on the proletarian tribe only really worked if you were dealing with pretty unsophisticated peoples—preferably non-Europeans who lacked all experience of freedom and genuine political life. In socially mobile European states, the workers mostly found better things to do with their time than waste it on revolutionary committees and the baby talk of political demonstrations. Something new was needed.

It was provided by such socialists as Mussolini and Lenin who adopted the principle of the Praetorian Guard: a tightly knit vanguard party, which could use the masses as ventriloquial dummies and seek power on its own terms. This development was part of _a wider tendency towards the emergence of oligarchies ruling through democratic slogans_.

...

In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within and had notably greater success. This was Betty Friedan’s radical feminists. It was a tribe constructed out of women who had taken some sort of degree and were living domestic lives. Technology had largely liberated them from the rigors of beating, sweeping, and cleaning, while pharmacology had released them from excessive procreation. In tactical terms, radical feminists made one innovation that has turned out to be crucial to the destiny of the West over the last half century. They suppressed almost completely the idea that their project involved a transfer of power and operated entirely on the moralistic principle that their demands corresponded to justice.

What lay behind this momentous development? It is a complicated question, but I think that Diana Schaub understood the essence of it in her essay “On the Character of Generation X”: 1

[Betty] Friedan was right that the malaise these privileged women were experiencing was a result of “a slow death of the mind and spirit.” _But she was wrong in saying that the problem had no name—its name was boredom._ Feminism was born of boredom, not oppression. And what was the solution to this quandary? Feminists clamored to become wage-slaves; they resolutely fled the challenge of leisure.

...

The most obvious fact about it is one that we can hardly mention, now that the revolution has succeeded, without embarrassment or derision, because it is a fact which powerful contemporary forces make recessive. It is simply that this civilization is, in the crude terms of creative hits, the achievement of white males. The history of Western civilization is a succession of clever men developing the set of traditions or inventing the benefits which, intertwined, constitute the West. And from Thales and Euclid to Einstein and George Gershwin, nearly all of them were male. They constitute the set of “dead white males” whom the radical revolutionaries in the sub-academic culture have denigrated and vowed to remove from their pedestals. I once heard a feminist put it this way: “There’s no such thing as a great mind.” This doctrine is so powerful that the simple factual statement that it has been men who have created what is commonly meant by Western (and for that matter, any other) civilization seems like an insensitive affront to the equality of mankind. And the next step in my argument must be to deal with this as a problem.

...

_The key to modern Western civilization is its openness to talent wherever found._ The feminist demand for collective quotas has overturned this basic feature of our civilization. The crucial point is that the character of a civilization is revealed by its understanding of achievement. European civilization responded to achievement wherever it could be found. To replace achievement by quota entitlements is to destroy one civilization from within and to replace it with another. We are no longer what we were. The problem is to explain how the West collapsed.

...

This example not only illuminates the success of radical feminism, but also reveals something of the long-term significance of these massive shifts of power. For the real threat to universities came not from students but from government. Students were a minor irritant in academic life, but governments were now bent on destroying the autonomy of the institutions of civil society. Students merely functioned as their fifth column. They had the effect of forcing universities even more into a public domain. Students wanted the academic to become the political and that was the effect they had. _Before 1960 universities largely ran their own affairs. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, they had all succumbed to the state subsidies that destroyed their autonomy._

...

In a few significant areas, however, no such demands are made. These areas are either where women graduates have no wish to go (rough outdoor work) or where lack of ability could lead to instant disaster, such as brain surgery or piloting commercial aircraft. Women are to be found in both, but only on the basis of ability. Universities are obviously a soft touch because the consequences of educational betrayal take decades to emerge. The effect of university quotas for “gender diversity” for example has often been to fill humanities departments with women in order to equalize numbers “distorted” (one might say) by technology and the hard sciences where even passably able women are hard to come by. Many women in the humanities departments are indeed very able, but many are not, and they have often prospered by setting up fanciful ideological courses (especially in women’s studies), _which can hardly pretend to be academic at all_.

What however of areas where women are patently unsuited—such as the army, the police force, or fire fighting? They have in fact all been under attack because although women are unsuited to the rough work at the bottom, these areas have enviable managerial opportunities higher up. They are _one more irresistible gravy train_. The fire-fighting case was dramatized by the New York judicial decision that a test of fitness for the force that nearly all women failed must be discriminatory, and therefore illegal, an extension of the idea of “the rule of law” far beyond any serious meaning. This was the doctrine called “disparate impact.” Similar considerations have affected women in the armed forces. Standards of entry have been lowered in order that women may qualify. One argument for so doing is that the rejected tests looked for qualities only rarely needed in the field, and that may indeed be true. Yet, the idea that soldiers are heroic figures doing something that women generally cannot do has forever been part of the self-understanding of men, even those who have never heard a shot fired in anger. A small boy inclined to cry out at the sting of iodine or the prick of an injection might be told “be a soldier.” Today according to the feminist doctrine he is more likely to be told to express his feelings.

The assault of women on areas such as the church raises similar issues. In principle there is not the slightest reason why women should not take on a priestly role, and one might indeed suspect that feminists may be right in diagnosing resistance in part to an unhealthy attitude to women on the part of some of the clergy. In a pastoral role, women might well be better than men, as some women are in politics. The problem is that women priests raise very awkward questions of Christian theology. Jesus selected only male disciples. Was the son of God then merely a creature of his own culture? Here most conspicuously the entry of women changes entirely the conception of the activity and not for the better. Female clergy have done little to reverse the current decline of the church. Indeed while women as individuals have often enhanced what they have joined, _the entry of women in general has seldom done much for any area previously dominated by men—except, significantly, bureaucracy_.

...

Let us now return to the teasing question of _why the male custodians of our civilization sold the pass_. Some element of _cowardice_ must certainly be recognized, because the radicals were tribal warriors making ferocious faces and stamping their feet. The defenders were white, male, and middle class, and the radicals had long been engaged in a campaign to erode the morale of each of these abstract categories. They denoted racism, sexism, and elitism respectively. Caricatured in terms of these abstractions, men found it difficult not to be written off as oppressors of women. Again, _the defenders were not united_. Many had been longstanding advocates of liberal feminism and from confusion believed that radical feminism was _merely a rather hysterical version of classical liberalism_. Retreat is a notoriously difficult maneuver to control. Each concession could be used to demand further concessions in the name of consistency. Hence the appearance in all English-speaking countries of legislation mandating equal opportunities—and who could possibly be against that? Before long, the movement had taken over the universities, many public bodies, industrial firms and, above all, the media. _Quite rapidly, hiring for status-giving jobs requiring degrees had become closely circumscribed by a set of rules. The dogma was that 50 percent of all jobs belonged to women, though the reality of quotas was long denied._

There are, of course, deeper currents. One of them is that men tended to react to radical feminism with a high-minded feeling that nothing but justice, a notoriously fluid idea, should determine public policy. _The balancing of … [more]

https://visegradpost.com/en/2017/07/24/full-speech-of-v-orban-will-europe-belong-to-europeans/
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/19/15998154/netanyahu-orban-crazy-eu-bashing-hot-mic
https://www.defendevropa.org/2017/population-replacement/orban-plan-declining-population/
https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/08/03/feminist-nationalism/

https://www.lucify.com/the-flow-towards-europe/
http://www.therefugeeproject.org/
http://www.businessinsider.com/maps-flow-refugees-last-15-years-2017-5/

In the past year, Western European politicians often scolded Eastern European governments for retreating from European values, “the open society,” and democracy. And Eastern Europeans on social media just as often threw that rhetoric back in their face. Which looked more like an open democratic society, Paris with its landmarks patrolled by the military — or Krawkow, with its Christmas market unspoiled by the need for automatic weapons?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-elites-seem-determined-to-commit-suicide-by-diversity-1497821665
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/06/london-terror-isis-finsbury-park/530838/
https://www.ft.com/content/022de0a4-54f4-11e7-9fed-c19e2700005f
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/06/hate-preacher-hypocrisy/
http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/23/podcast-slow-death-european-culture-politics-identity/
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/is-this-the-end-of-europe
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/879446562577018880
Convince the upper middle class of a thing, and a whole new world will open up for you
https://twitter.com/nunzioni/status/880445812689571844
https://archive.is/nggjV
There are so many people who are falsely described as "stepping stones" to the Alt-Right, but this label genuinely applies to Douglas Murray

These guys are not very quantitative, so let me clarify a part of their discussion that was left rather ambiguous. It is true that demographic trends are working against China, which has a rapidly aging population. French and Schell talk about a 10-15 year window during which China has to grow rich before it grows old (a well-traveled meme). From the standpoint of geopolitics this is probably not the correct or relevant analysis. China's population is ~4x that of the US. If, say, demographic trends limit this to only an effective 3x or 3.5x advantage in working age individuals, China still only has to reach ~1/3 of US per capita income in order to have a larger overall economy. It seems unlikely that there is any hard cutoff preventing China from reaching, say, 1/2 the US per capita GDP in a few decades. (Obviously a lot of this growth is still "catch-up" growth.) At that point its economy would be the largest in the world by far, and its scientific-technological workforce and infrastructure would be far larger than that of any other country.

- interesting point: China went from servile toward Japan to callous as soon as it surpassed Japan economically (I would bet this will apply to the US)
- conventional Chinese narrative for WW2: China won the Pacific Theater not the US
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/06/world/asia/chinas-textbooks-twist-and-omit-history.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/06/a-story-about-world-war-ii-that-china-would-like-you-to-hear/259084/
- serious Chinese superiority complex overall
- "patriotic education", the fucking opposite of our god-awful ideology
- in Chinese history: each dynasty judges the last, unimpeachable
- ceding control of South China Sea would damage relations with neighboring countries (not enforcing their legitimate claims) and damage international norms (rule of law, etc.)
- next 10-15 years dangerous (Thucydides); of course Hsu criticizes
- suggestions: cultivate local alliances, prevent arms races, welcome Chinese international initiatives
I'm highly skeptical of all but the alliances
- ethnic melting in Chinese history, population structure (not actually as much as he thinks AFAIK), "age of nationalism", Tibet, etc.

Gideon Rachman writes for the FT, so it's not surprising that his instincts seem a bit stronger when it comes to economics. He makes a number of incisive observations during this interview.

---

At 16min, he mentions that
I was in Beijing about I guess a month before the vote [US election], in fact when the first debates were going on, and the Chinese, I thought that official Chinese [i.e. Government Officials] in our meeting and the sort of semi-official academics were clearly pulling for Trump.

---

I wonder if the standard of comparison shouldn't be with the West as a whole, not just the United States?

It depends on what happens to the EU, whether western powers other than the US want to play the role of global hegemon, etc.

The situation today is that the US is focused on preserving its primacy, wants to deny Russia and China any local sphere of influence, etc., whereas Europe has little appetite for any of it. They can barely allocate enough resources for their own defense.

Europe and the US have their own demographic problems to deal with in the coming decades. An aging population may turn out to be less challenging than the consequences of mass immigration (note population trends in Africa, so close to Europe).

If China behaved as an aggressive hegemon like the US or former USSR, it would probably elicit a collective back reaction from the West. But I think its first step is simply to consolidate influence over Asia.

---

interesting somewhat contrarian take on China's girth here: https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/08/03/manufacturing-chinese-history-cheaply/

China Does Not Want Your Rules Based Order: http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/06/china-does-not-want-your-rules-based.html
There is much that is good in this narrative. McCain proclaims that "no nation has done as much to contribute to what China calls its “peaceful rise” as the United States of America." He is right to do so. No nation has done more to enable China's rise than America has. No country's citizens have done more for the general prosperity of the Chinese people than the Americans have. This is true in ways that are not widely known or immediately obvious. For example, the role American financiers and investment banks played in creating the architecture of modern Chinese financial markets and corporate structures is little realized, despite the size and importance of their interventions. Behind every great titan of Chinese industry--China Mobile, the world's largest mobile phone operator, China State Construction Engineering, whose IPO was valued at $7.3 billion, PetroChina, the most profitable company in Asia (well, before last year), to name a few of hundreds--lies an American investment banker. I do not exaggerate when I say Goldman Sachs created modern China. [2] China has much to thank America for.

...

In simpler terms, the Chinese equate “rising within a rules based order” with “halting China’s rise to power.” To live by Washington’s rules is to live under its power, and the Chinese have been telling themselves for three decades now that—after two centuries of hardship—they will not live by the dictates of outsiders ever again.

The Chinese will never choose our rules based order. That does not necessarily mean they want to dethrone America and throw down all that she has built. The Chinese do not have global ambitions. What they want is a seat at the table—and they want this seat to be recognized, not earned. That’s the gist of it. Beijing is not willing to accept an order it did not have a hand in creating. Thus all that G-2 talk we heard a few years back. The Chinese would love to found a new order balancing their honor and their interests with the Americans. It is a flattering idea. What they do not want is for the Americans to give them a list of hoops to jump through to gain entry into some pre-determined good-boys club. They feel like their power, wealth, and heritage should be more than enough to qualify for automatic entrance to any club.

https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/928754578794958848
https://archive.is/NpLpR

Greer is even more pessimistic as of late:
https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/05/are-we-ready-for-what-comes-next.html
That is the political reality of the present moment. We will ride through this conflict not with the people we want, but with the people we have. But that people can be prepared. This is not the first time Americans have stood indifferent to the maneuvers of rising tyrannies. Indifference can be changed. It has been changed many times before.

But not by accident.

We do not face war. But we do face something like unto it. Economic weapons will be drawn and used. We will face a rough time. Before us lies an escalating circle of punishment and counter-punishment. The Chinese people will hurt dearly.

But so will ours.

Victory won will be worth its price. But that price will be paid. The Chinese understand this. They prepare their people for the contest that is coming.

We would be wise to follow their example.

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2019/10/chinas-vision-of-victory.html
This book will not be pleasant reading for some. It is built on a hard foundation of official PRC and CPC statements, white papers, laws, and pronouncements—together these documents suggest that China's ambitions are far less limited than many Americans hope:
> China’s Vision of Victory is a useful antidote to the popular delusion that Chinese leaders seek nothing more than to roll back U.S. hegemony in the Western Pacific—or that they will be sated by becoming the dominant East Asian power. Despite presenting modest and peaceful ambitions to foreigners, the Chinese Communist Party leadership transparently communicates its desire for primacy to internal audiences. By guiding readers through a barrage of official documents, excerpted liberally throughout the book, Ward shows just how wide-ranging these ambitions are.
> To start with, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) already defines its maritime forces as a “two-ocean navy.” Chinese energy demands have led the PLA to extend its reach to Pakistan, Africa, and the disputed waters of the South China Sea. White papers spell out Chinese ambitions to be the primary strategic presence not just on the East Asian periphery but in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Pacific. China’s leadership claims that it has core economic interests as far abroad as Europe, Latin America, the Arctic, and outer space. With these economic interests come road maps for securing Chinese relationships or presence in each region.
> By 2050, the Chinese aim to have a military “second to none,” to become the global center for technology innovation, and to serve as the economic anchor of a truly global trade and infrastructure regime—an economic bloc that would be unprecedented in human history. In their speeches and documents, Chinese leaders call this vision of a China-centered future—a future where a U.S.-led system has been broken apart and discarded—a “community of common destiny for mankind.” That ambition debunks the myth of a multipolar future: China seeks dominance, not just a share of the pie.[1]

Citizenship Rights for Immigrants: National Political Processes and Cross-National
Convergence in Western Europe, 1980–2008: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu.sci-hub.tw/doi/abs/10.1086/662707
Terrorist Threat, Male Stereotypes, and Candidate Evaluations: http://journals.sagepub.com.sci-hub.tw/doi/abs/10.1177/1065912915624018

http://theweek.com/articles/697599/real-existential-threat-radical-islam
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/does-the-us-overstate-the-threat-terrorism-15209?page=show

“Wheel And Fight”—Pat Buchanan’s Nixon Book Provides Road Map For Trump: http://www.vdare.com/articles/wheel-and-fight-pat-buchanans-nixon-book-provides-road-map-for-trump
After The Anti-Trump Coup, What Then?: http://www.vdare.com/articles/pat-buchanan-after-the-anti-trump-coup-what-then
https://twitter.com/avermeule/status/895711695192174602
Best real example of (1) an enduring polity composed of (2) large blocs (3) fundamentally at odds over ideological and cultural premises?
United In Tragedy—But For How Long?: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/united-in-tragedy-but-for-how-long/

Unlike Nixon, Trump Will Not Go Quietly: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/unlike-nixon-trump-will-not-go-quietly/

Mueller obtains "tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails: https://www.axios.com/scoop-mueller-obtains-tens-of-thousands-of-trump-transition-emails-1513456551-428f0b7a-b50e-4d9e-8bc4-9869f93c2845.html
https://act.moveon.org/event/mueller-firing-rapid-response-events/search/

https://twitter.com/netouyo_/status/942187038958333952
https://archive.is/4oKKB
I suspect there is gonna be a big finale for Trump-Mueller before the end of the year, shit goin down

https://twitter.com/netouyo_/status/942201841869312005
https://archive.is/GQKmD
who needs laws/due process when daddy Mueller is gonna save us from the evil Russians?

One dynamic to note is that once these communities relocate to abroad they will change in fundamental ways. The author of Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East wanted to record the lives of minorities in their traditional environments because he understood once they were transplanted they would transform, and eventually assimilate into the majority if the record of Arab Christians in the West is any precedent.

baizuo
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/05/baizuo-libtard.html
https://twitter.com/menangahela/status/863840301785526273
this is the right wing intellectual equivalent of getting off to bbc porn
big asian iq/temperament shaped by thousands of years of malthusian capitalism & intensive agriculture DESTROYS white enlightenment morality
https://twitter.com/dkpseudo/status/864391296911163392
http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000477/white-left-the-internet-insult-the-west-has-gotten-wrong
One of the key texts of the anti-white left is an online essay by a Weibo user named “Fantasy Lover Mr. Liu,” titled “The Road to Spiritual Plague: The History of the Evolution of the White Left.” The abrasive text begins: “Trump’s victory is only a small stone flung from humanity’s sling against the giant we face: the spiritual plague.”

Liu’s essay is, essentially, a somewhat unhinged history of the white left. He identifies several waves of the white left, the third wave coming with thinkers like Michel Foucault and the Frankfurt School, whom, he writes, were so traumatized by the horrors of the Second World War that they sought to deconstruct Western culture without actually considering an alternative.

The fourth and final wave, Liu says, was led by the students of the professors who had staged protests against the Vietnam War and had succeeded in ousting established academics on both the left and the right. He argues that academic curiosity was lost as the New Left demanded ideological purity on the questions of identity politics. To Liu, intellectual shallowness, isolation, and violence constitute the main features of the modern white left. Its advocates created a hive-mind in academia, which allowed them to spread white left values through Western society. The riots and protests that followed the election of Trump are the best evidence of this.

Chinese Social Media Notices US Cultural Revolution: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2017/08/chinese-social-media-notices-us.html
http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/23/american-anarchy-parallels-chinas-cultural-revolution/

Air China magazine warns London visitors to avoid ethnic minority areas: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/07/air-chinas-safety-tips-for-london-visitors-may-raise-eyebrows.html

Sinic culture warring:
Singapore: https://medium.com/chinese-privilege/to-my-dear-fellow-singapore-chinese-shut-up-when-a-minority-is-talking-about-race-48e00d7c7073
https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/871821559215923200
https://archive.is/Uxco6
The virus has reached Hong Kong (April 2017).
http://www.soh.hku.hk/docs/SOH_Inclusive_Language.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singaporean_Chinese_privilege

https://twitter.com/menangahela/status/914915192873644032
https://archive.is/ECBS6
china will beat us because making money reliably gets you pussy there
this is what Nick Land was trying to get at with the whole 'libidinal materialism' idea
So you're saying James Damore is the harbinger of the failure of "capitalism with American characteristics" for this reason.

https://twitter.com/menangahela/status/914905587489607680
https://archive.is/KftzV
people dont really make money for explicitly instrumental reasons anymore

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/elon-musk-inventors-plans-for-outer-space-cars-finding-love-w511747
https://twitter.com/NoamJStein/status/930884963657957376
https://archive.is/yw0j8
Surreal to read several paragraphs of “tfw no gf” from a guy worth 10 figures

https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/the-white-left/

https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/952378865606938624
https://archive.is/a3zAH
Saving the Baizuo from his own stupidity is a important task. But very difficult and thankless.

https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/952685733847949313
https://archive.is/PKcOz
I feel like I can predict how the Baizuo will behave, and the arguments he will give. But for the life of me I can’t understand his perspective.

https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/952755125969354752
https://archive.is/6Jv31
The best places to live are inhabited by the Baizuo. The Baizuo makes for a good friend. And yet... he is a Baizuo. 😓

https://twitter.com/RoundSqrCupola/status/952687872557092864
https://archive.is/0hznI
Can the Baizuo be saved from his own stupidity?

83% too far gone...:(

https://twitter.com/HappyHectares/status/954396128111247361
https://archive.is/aEi0B
Multicultural America
I'm privy to a Chinese family having a meltdown because father was assigned an Indian doctor - eldest son is flying in - they want "a white doctor", not an affirmative-action doctor - a matter of honor & duty
--
Do Chinese see whites as dumb or misguided or both? I've heard mixed comments on this?
--
They see us as "too nice" - a beautiful but short-lived flower

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/20/coming-century-migration-africa-will-make-refugee-crisis-look/
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/30/opinion/the-algerian-exception.html

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

- Table 1 is a good summary, but various interesting tidbits throughout
main points:
- latrones reminds me of bandit-states, Big Men in anthropology, and Rome's Indo-European past
- started having trouble recruiting soldiers, population less martial
- Church opposition to State violence, preferred to 'convert enemies by prayer'
- a Christian could use violence 'only to defend others and not for self-defense'
- Altar of Victory was more metaphorical than idolatrous, makes its removal even more egregious

http://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2010/07/roman-state-and-genetic-pacification.html

should read:
Pax and the ‘Ara Pacis’: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/article/pax-and-the-ara-pacis1/1EE241F03F65C42B09AB578F83C7002C
PAX, PEACE AND THE NEW TESTAMENT: https://www.religiologiques.uqam.ca/no11/pax.PDF
BANDITS IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE: http://sci-hub.tw/http://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/105/1/3/1442375/BANDITS-IN-THE-ROMAN-EMPIRE
Bandits in the Roman Empire: Myth and reality: https://historicalunderbelly.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/thoma-grunewald-bandits-in-the-roman-empire-myth-and-reality-2004.pdf

What Difference Did Christianity Make?: http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4435970
Author(s): Ramsay Mac Mullen

The extent of this impact I test in five areas. The first two have to do with domestic relations: sexual norms and slavery. The latter three have to do with matters in which public authorities were more involved: gladiatorial shows, judicial penalties, and corruption.

Clark/Frost Domestication: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/clarkfrost-domestication/
Thinking about the response of the pacified and submission Roman population to barbarian invaders immediately brings to mind the response of contemporary North Americans and Atlantic Europeans to barbarian invaders. It reads just the same: “welcome new neighbor!”

What about the Eastern empire? They kept the barbarians out for a few centuries longer in the European half, but accounts of the loss of the Asian provinces show the Clark/Frost pattern, a pacified submissive population hardly contesting the invasion of Islam (Jenkins 2008, 2010). The new neighbors simply walked in and took over. The downfall of the Western Roman empire reads much like the downfall of the Asian and North African parts of the empire. It is certainly no accident that the Asian provinces were the heartland of Christianity.

This all brings up an interesting question: what happened in East Asia over the same period? No one to my knowledge has traced parallels with the European and Roman experience in Japan or China. Is the different East Asian trajectory related to the East Asian reluctance to roll over, wag their tails, and welcome new barbarian neighbors?

gwern in da comments
“empires domesticate their people”
Greg said in our book something like “for the same reason that farmers castrate their bulls”

Millennials with college degrees don’t favor censorship: http://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/05/03/millennials-with-college-degrees-dont-favor-censorship/
Free Expression on Campus: A Survey of U.S. College Students and U.S. Adults: https://www.knightfoundation.org/media/uploads/publication_pdfs/FreeSpeech_campus.pdf
some scary attitudes toward "hate speech" and anonymous speech
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/future-for-aclu-children/
Ironic joking and SJW meltdowns over photos of White children aside, the politically correct peeps at ACLU (who apologized for their social justice faux pas soon afterwards) were actually far more to the point than they could have possibly imagined.

Opinion polls have shown that in the US, Whites tend to have the greatest respect for freedom of speech.

asians quite low across the board

YouGov | Half of Democrats support a ban on hate speech: https://today.yougov.com/news/2015/05/20/hate-speech/
Americans narrowly support (41%) rather than oppose (37%) criminalizing hate speech

http://www.integrationsfonds.at/publikationen/forschungsberichte/forschungsbericht-muslimische-gruppen-in-oesterreich/
A majority of Austrian Muslims believe making fun of Islam shouldn't be allowed. Somalis, Chechens, Afghans & Syrians feel most strongly (9)

Most Liberals And Smart People Want Racists To Be Allowed To Speak: https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/08/25/189066/
But whenever I look at the General Social Survey I see no great change in support for free speech in terms of the patterns. Perhaps something has changed in the year 2017, but I think what we are seeing are vocal and motivated minorities who are drowning out liberal (in the classical sense) majorities.
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/08/25/the-less-intelligent-and-uneducated-really-dont-tolerate-unpopular-views/

Freedom Of Thought As A Perpetual Revolution: https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/09/13/freedom-of-thought-as-a-perpetual-revolution/
I mentioned offhand on Twitter today that I am skeptical of the tendency to brand the classically liberal emphasis on freedom of thought and speech as “centrist.” The implicit idea is that those on the Right and Left for whom liberalism is conditional, and a means at best, are radical and outside the mainstream.

This misleads us in relation to the fact that classical liberalism is the aberration both historically and culturally. Liberty of thought and speech have existed for time immemorial, but they were the luxury goods of the elite salons. Frederick the Great of Prussia had no use for religion personally, and famously patronized heretical philosophers, but he did not disturb the conservative social order of the polity which he inherited. For the masses, the discourse was delimited and regulated to maintain order and reinforce social norms.

The attempt to position the liberal stance as a centrist one is clearly historically and culturally contingent. It reflects the ascendancy of a particular strand of Anglo-American elite culture worldwide. But it is not universal. In the Islamic world and South Asia free expression of skepticism of religious ideas in public are subject to limits explicitly to maintain public order. The Islamic punishments for apostasy have less to do with the sin of individual disbelief and more to do with disruption to public norms and sedition against the state. Similarly, both China and Russia tap deeply into cultural preferences for state and elite paternalism in regards to public freedom of thought.

A chilling study shows how hostile college students are toward free speech: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-chilling-study-shows-how-hostile-college-students-are-toward-free-speech/2017/09/18/cbb1a234-9ca8-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/22/college-free-speech-violence-survey-junk-science

http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2017/09/its-so-pc-its-killing-me.html
Americans chafe under PC oppressiveness. True across all demographics. Alt right can't emphasize free speech enough

A Run on Liberalism?: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/09/20/a-run-on-liberalism/
- Jason Willick

It’s also about taking a long view of our own self-interests—that is, recognizing that if we agree not to suppress the other tribe, then the other tribe just might agree, as a general rule, to not suppress us. If adhered to, it can be positive sum transaction—the free exchange of ideas ultimately makes life richer and more prosperous for everyone. Liberalism is a bargain between elites to set up institutions that allow this positive-sum process to take place despite all the forces working against it.

https://today.yougov.com/news/2017/10/02/americans-support-free-speech-college-campusmost-t/
In fact, Americans prioritize exposing students to all types of speech on campuses, even if that speech is biased or offensive, to providing a positive learning environment for all students at the risk of barring some types of speech. Sometimes this type of question generates a politicized response, depending on the speech that respondents think may be restricted. The most recent and most publicized college incidents involve conservative speakers who have been shouted down or have had speeches on campuses canceled. On this question Democrats and Republicans may be on different sides, but liberals and conservatives agree.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/04/black-lives-matter-students-shut-down-th

http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/09/12/poll-most-california-democrats-want-to-restrict-free-speech-from-white-nationalists/
Poll: Most California Democrats want to restrict free speech from white nationalists

40% non-Hispanic White, 51% Latino, 58% Af-American, 59% Asian-American

America's Many Divides Over Free Speech: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/a-sneak-peek-at-new-survey-data-on-free-speech/542028/
A new survey explores Americans’ views on hate speech, political correctness, Nazi-punching, job terminations for offensive speech, and much more.
- CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/925458956239110145
https://archive.is/ZeY18
Well this explains a lot

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/925504773222293505
https://archive.is/oSjru
Democrats..... lmao 😁

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/925507818802810880
https://archive.is/vSdrZ
> CATO releases its own report showing that blacks & Latinos have the least attachment to libertarian ideas
> they will change nothing

The State of Free Speech and Tolerance in America: https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/state-free-speech-tolerance-america

Free speech and the Coalition of the Fringes: http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2017/11/free-speech-and-coalition-of-fringes.html

Epigonian aesthetics: http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2017/11/epigonian-aesthetics.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/us/college-students-free-speech.html

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/973340678104199168
https://archive.is/PMp5S
European-style hate speech laws, and a SCOTUS favorable to them, will increasingly be a key goal of the left

http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/future-of-the-global-muslim-population-regional-europe/
http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/#the-americas

Europe’s Growing Muslim Population: http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2017/11/30/crescent-over-the-north-sea/
Pew has a nice new report up, Europe’s Growing Muslim Population. Though it is important to read the whole thing, including the methods.

I laugh when people take projections of the year 2100 seriously. That’s because we don’t have a good sense of what might occur over 70+ years (read social and demographic projections from the 1940s and you’ll understand what I mean). Thirty years though is different. In the year 2050 children born today, such as my youngest son, will be entering the peak of their powers.

[cf.: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/12/population-projects-50-years-into-the-future-fantasy/]

...

The problem with this is that there is a wide range of religious commitment and identification across Europe’s Muslim communities. On the whole, they are more religiously observant than non-Muslims in their nations of residence, but, for example, British Muslims are consistently more religious than French Muslims on surveys (or express views constant with greater religious conservatism).

People in Western countries are violent (yes) 29 52 34
lmao that's just ridiculous from the UK

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2006/03/03/poll-of-british-muslims/
In short, read the poll closely, this isn’t an black & white community. It seems clear that some people simultaneously support Western society on principle while leaning toward separatism, while a subset, perhaps as large as 10%, are violently and radically hostile to the surrounding society.

Watching the European Model Implode

The simplest way in which the advanced welfare state will lose attractiveness is the looming bankruptcy of the European welfare states.

The financial bankruptcy is not anything that even the cleverest planner can avoid. As publicly financed benefits grow, so do the populations who find that they need them. The more people who need benefits, the more government bureaucracy is required. The more people who rely on support from the government and the larger the government, the fewer the people in the private sector who pay for the benefits and for the apparatus of the state. The larger the number of people who depend on government either for benefits or for their jobs, the larger the constituency for voting for ever-larger government.

These are arithmetical realities that have become manifest in every advanced Western country. They have brought some European welfare states within sight of bankruptcy as I write. Fertility rates that are far below replacement throughout western Europe ensure that the productive native-born population will fall still more in the years to come.

There is no permanent way out of the self-destructive dynamics of the welfare state, but Europe has a tempting palliative-encouraging large-scale immigration of younger populations who work in the private sector and pay taxes that make up the revenue deficit. It won't work forever-sooner or later, the immigrants, too, will succumb to the incentives that the welfare state sets up. But the more immediate problem is that most of the new workers come from cultures that are radically different from those of western Europe. In some cases, those cultures despise the values that led to the welfare state. The United States will have a chance to watch these events unfold before our own situation becomes as critical, and the sight will be a powerful incentive to avoid going down the same road.

mad danes in the comments lol

...also, jfc:
Samantha Ruth Brown is a recent graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s master’s program whose main research interests involve how racism and xenophobia manifest in Scandinavian politics, especially refugee policy.

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

hence why Cato loves mass migration
https://medium.com/@MattBruenig/liberals-and-diversity-85c169580d14
jfc, by the book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORWM0ukT-Xw
"If we broke up the big banks tomorrow would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/13/clinton-in-nevada-not-everything-is-about-an-economic-theory/

The End of Liberalism - Samuel Bowles: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/06/19/the-end-liberalism/GLVtC7fExhFPwhOx31fXrN/story.html
The progressive's immigration dilemma: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/international/the-progressives-immigration-dilemma
Poor people's lives are made enormously better off by moving from poor countries to rich countries. Thanks to remittances, migrants also may have a significant positive impact on their home countries. For any progressive who wants to improve human welfare, facilitating more immigration from poor to rich countries should be an overriding priority.

Not only does a big welfare state reduce the number of immigrants that are politically accepted, a heavily regulated labour market seems to be associated with immigrants having a worse impact on natives. Even policies that seem like they would be good for Britons might still do much more harm than good if they make Britons less willing to accept higher levels of immigration.

This is a serious dilemma for any progressive who wants all humans to live good lives, not just ones of the same race or nationality. It means that these political concerns alone may demand a low regulation, low redistribution state.

fucking traitors

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/882982045714194433
https://archive.is/o1gUM
Essential liberal values:
You: My countrymen get to speak, think, commerce, associate freely.
Vox: Here are some new countrymen. Enjoy!

So while Le Pen probably faces longer odds at this point than Trump did last October, she has one advantage to add to whatever strange assistance providence might send her way: She might actually deserve to win it.

I think some of these are "good enough for govt work"..., but definitely some interesting stuff, especially about China

nukes:
Litigation Release - Assessing Nuclear Competitions in the 21st Century 2010.pdf

China:
Litigation Release - China Military Strategy 2014.pdf
Litigation Release - China's Perception of Strategic Advantages of First Strike, Preemption, and Preventive Wars 201406.pdf
Litigation Release - China- The Three Warfares 201305.pdf
Litigation Release - How is Chinese Society Affected By Shrinking Family Size 201208.pdf

Americans (and China I think):
Litigation Release - On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People Workshop Report 200904.pdf

tech:
Litigation Release - Technological Innovation During Protracted War Radar and Atomic Weapons in WWII 201504.pdf
Litigation Release - Technology Transfer Net Assessment Workshop Report 201201.pdf

China again:
Litigation Release - The Future of Africa The Future of China in Africa 2035 201406.pdf

Russia and climate change:
Litigation Release - The Kremlin's Arctic Dreams.pdf

China again:
Litigation Release - The Neurocognitive Divide 201412.pdf

demographic trends mostly:
Litigation Release - The Next 100 Years Workshop Report 200903.pdf
Litigation Release - The Next 100 Years Workshop Report Part II 200908.pdf

more China:
Litigation Release - The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism 201301.pdf

Americans:
Litigation Release - Trends in Elite American Attitudes Toward War Workshop Report 201009.pdf

more China:
Litigation Release - Why China Seeks Confrontation with the U.S. 201108.pdf

reflection:
Litigation Release - Why is Strategy so difficult 201102.pdf

The United States not only does poorly on education benchmark PISA, but each decile of wealth also does poorly compared to equivalent deciles in other countries. I find this surprising. Does this torpedo the theory that each US ethnic group does as well as its foreign counterparts, and US underperformance is a Simpson’s Paradox on ethnic distribution?

Twitter: @EveryoneIsDril.

New Study Finds Performance-Enhancing Drugs For Chess. Okay, fine, just modafinil, which we already knew about, but the exact pattern is interesting. Modafinil makes people take longer to make their moves, but the moves are ultimately better. That suggests that its advantage is not increasing IQ per se, but in giving people the increased attention span/concentration to work harder on finding good moves. I think this elegantly ties together a lot of stuff into a good explanation of modafinil’s cognitive-enhancing properties.

New Zealand Wants To Know How Peter Thiel Became A Secret Citizen. Give up, New Zealand; Peter Thiel is a citizen of any country he wants to be a citizen of. Also: Peter Thiel Denies California Governor Run Despite Mysterious Group’s Backing.

I was going to link to the paper Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth, but the part that actually interested me is small enough that I’m just going to include it here as a jpg (h/t Julia Galef).

Nature: Prevalence And Architecture Of De Novo Mutations In Developmental Disorders. There’s been a lot of debate over paternal age effects, and this paper helps clarify that by actually counting people’s de novo mutations and finding that children of older fathers (and to a lesser degree older mothers) have more of them. I am not sure to what degree this answers the objection that fathers with worse genes will tend to get married later; my impression is that it’s circumstantial evidence against (de novo mutations are more specific to paternal age than just bad genes) but not complete disproof.

Psssst, kid, wanna buy a parasitic worm? Key quote: “Those who experience the ‘hookworm bounce’ tend to describe it as ‘feeling as if they are teenagers again'” (h/t pistachi0n).

New paper in Crime And Delinquency: “We find no evidence that the number of fatal police shootings either increased or decreased post-Ferguson. Claims to the contrary are based on weak analyses of short-term trends.” This is especially surprising in light of claims that increased inner-city crime is caused by police withdrawing in order to prevent further fatal shootings; if that’s the police’s plan, it doesn’t seem to be working very well.

Intranasal ghrelin vaccine prevents obesity in mice.

Gene drive testing thwarted when organisms quickly develop resistance. There goes that idea.

New poll: Majority of Europeans support banning Muslim immigration. It’s an Internet-based poll, which is always cause for suspicion, but they seem to be a reputable organization and not the sort of group whose results are 100% due to trolling by 4chan, plus it’s consistent with some other results. Still pretty shocking and an existential-terror-level reminder of partisan bubbles. Also: Rasmussen finds most Americans support Trump’s refugee ban order.

Closely related: M.G. Miles makes the case for banning Muslim immigration. Maybe the first person I have seen make this case in a principled way; everyone else just seems to be screaming about stuff and demanding their readers reinterpret it into argument form. Also, he uses the word “terrorism” zero times, which seems like the correct number of times for a case of this sort. This is what people should be debating and responding to. Rebuttals by Americans would probably want to start with the differences between Muslim immigrants to Europe and Muslim immigrants to the US – Miles discusses the European case, but by my understanding these are very different populations with very different outcomes).

Second Enumerations podcast: Grognor reading interesting essays.

SSRN: Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support For Social Movements: “We find across three experiments that extreme protest tactics decreased popular support for a given cause because they reduced feelings of identification with the movement. Though this effect obtained in tests of popular responses to extreme tactics used by animal rights, Black Lives Matter, and anti-Trump protests (Studies 1-3), we found that self-identified political activists were willing to use extreme tactics because they believed them to be effective for recruiting popular support.” Cf. The Toxoplasma Of Rage. (h/t Dain)

The Cagots were an underclass of people in medieval France whom everyone hated, with various purity laws around how decent people weren’t allowed to associate with/marry/touch/go near them. In the 1500s, the Pope personally intervened to tell the French to stop persecuting them, but the French ignored him and persecuted them more than ever. As far as anyone can tell, they looked, spoke, and acted just like everyone else, and exactly how they became so despised is one of the minor mysteries of medieval history.

“Sadly, the risk of terrorism hasn’t gone away,” deputy mayor Jean-François Martins said at a Paris press conference. “It’s not a wall, it’s an aesthetic perimeter.”

- majority of population wants complete moratorium
- 48% of college graduates as well
- 44% for 18-29
- UK and Spain the only ones <50% overall
- no Scandinavian countries surveyed

http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/07/11/europeans-fear-wave-of-refugees-will-mean-more-terrorism-fewer-jobs/
Relatively few Europeans believe diversity has a positive impact on their countries. At 36%, Sweden registers the highest percentage that believes an increasingly diverse society makes their country a better place to live. In many countries, the prevailing view is that diversity makes no difference in the quality of life.

https://global.handelsblatt.com/politics/looking-to-germany-to-protect-the-world-order-779939
fundamental incompatibility >50% in Germany, etc.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/files/chathamhouse/publications/research/2017-06-20-future-europe-attitudes-raines-goodwin-cutts-final.pdf
ridiculously out-of-touch
https://necpluribusimpar.net/publicelite-divide-immigration/
It’s as if people in the elite were mostly protected from the bad consequences of immigration, but not from its benefits, while the opposite were true for most people in the public… (A study showed a similar phenomenon in the US, although there is less opposition to immigration overall here, which is not saying much given how much opposition there is to immigration in Europe.) What is really striking is that, on every single point raised in that poll, people in the public are right and people in the elite are wrong. At least, they are if we’re talking about the immigration of poor, unskilled and non-Western people, but this is what people have in mind when they complain about immigration. In fact, not only is the public right, but it’s obviously right.

Of course, the sophisticates don’t know that, because they haven’t actually read the literature which they claim shows the public is mistaken about immigration. So they ascribe the hostility to immigration among the public, which is off the charts, to bigotry and ignorance. As soon as I have more time, which probably won’t be until a few months from now, I plan to publish a series of very detailed posts in which I discuss the literature on the effects of immigration in the West. In the meantime, if you are convinced that the elite is right and that immigration is great for Europe, you should ask yourself why, if members of the elite are right, they have to lie all the time about this. For instance, you should ask yourself why, if immigration really doesn’t make crime worse, the French government under Jospin gave instructions to the police not to release any names when communicating to the press or why journalists systematically replace non-French names by French names when they write on crime. Similarly, you could ask yourself why both the authorities and the media covered up the sexual assaults perpetrated by migrants in Cologne and many other cities throughout Europe in 2016, before the truth finally came out. If these were isolated incidents, you couldn’t conclude much from them, but the cover-up is systematic. Maybe it’s just me, but when I think what I’m saying is true, I don’t have to lie about it.

https://twitter.com/phl43/status/889570666327965704
https://necpluribusimpar.net/quick-look-immigration-crime-germany/
Of course, this is not surprising in the least, what is surprising is that so many people were stupid enough as to think it wasn’t going to happen. But the most amazing thing is that you can be certain that, despite this fiasco, the sophisticates will continue to treat anyone who voice skepticism about the benefits of mass immigration in Europe as a bigoted cretin. To be convinced of your intellectual and moral superiority when you are making claims that are manifestly absurd is perhaps the worst kind of stupidity.

lawlz from NYT: https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/884829474445029376

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/07/the-public-vs-the-politicians/

ick source but whatever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SE6x_I7yYE
'I would do it again’ Defiant Merkel has no regrets about opening Germany’s borders: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/846397/german-election-2017-angela-merkel-migrants-germany-borders

https://www.ft.com/content/23e02b76-7074-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9
A recent poll by the University of Mainz, cited in the study, found that 55 per cent of those asked felt “systematically lied to by the media”. Some 26 per cent agreed with the statement that “the media and politicians work hand in hand to manipulate public opinion”.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.welt.de%2Fpolitik%2Fdeutschland%2Farticle167673517%2F7-von-10-Deutschen-wollen-Mittelmeerfluechtlinge-zurueckschicken.html&edit-text=&act=url
7 out of 10 Germans want to send Mediterranean refugees back
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.welt.de%2Fpolitik%2Fdeutschland%2Farticle168016985%2FGrosse-Mehrheit-findet-Muslime-in-Deutschland-schlecht-integriert.html&edit-text=&act=url
Despite this strong connection, a large majority of the Germans sees the Muslim immigrants here as badly integrated. 65.6 percent of the Germans would generally call Muslim immigrants in Germany as rather poor or very badly integrated. This was the result of the WELT-Trend, a representative survey which was exclusively made by the opinion research institute Civey.

Tribes of Europe: https://tribes.chathamhouse.org/the-tribes

Australia and Muslim ban: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/half-of-all-australians-want-to-ban-muslim-immigration-poll-20160920-grkufa.html
Report: Voters Say Country Is Full, Support Partial Muslim Immigration Ban: http://www.breitbart.com/jerusalem/2017/10/26/report-voters-say-country-full-support-muslim-immigration-ban/
New Zealand's Refugee Policy is Closer to Trump's 'Muslim Ban' Than You Might Think: https://www.vice.com/en_nz/article/aej3aj/is-new-zealands-refugee-policy-closer-to-trumps-muslim-ban-than-you-think

December 1994

"Now, stretching over that empty sea, aground some fifty yards out, [lay] the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe, the rusty, creaking fleet that the old professor had been eyeing since morning. . . . He pressed his eye to the glass, and the first things he saw were arms. . . . Then he started to count. Calm and unhurried. But it was like trying to count all the trees in the forest, those arms raised high in the air, waving and shaking together, all outstretched toward the nearby shore. Scraggy branches, brown and black, quickened by a breath of hope. All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. . . . thirty thousand creatures on a single ship!"
--The Camp of the Saints

Welcome to the 300-page narrative of Jean Raspail's disturbing, chilling, futuristic novel The Camp of the Saints, first published in Paris twenty-one years ago and translated into English a short while later. Set at some vague time--perhaps fifteen or twenty years--in the future, the novel describes the pilgrimage of a million desperate Indians who, forsaking the ghastly conditions of downtown Calcutta and surrounding villages, commandeer an armada of decrepit ships and set off for the French Riviera. The catalyst for this irruption is simple enough. Moved by accounts of widespread famine across an Indian subcontinent collapsing under the sheer weight of its fast-growing population, the Belgian government has decided to admit and adopt a number of young children; but the policy is reversed when tens of thousands of mothers begin to push their babies against the Belgian consul general's gates in Calcutta. After mobbing the building in disgust at Belgium's change of mind, the crowd is further inflamed by a messianic speech from one of their number, an untouchable, a gaunt, eye-catching "turd eater," who calls for the poor and wretched of the world to advance upon the Western paradise: "The nations are rising from the four corners of the earth," Raspail has the man say, "and their number is like the sand of the sea. They will march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city. . . ." Storming on board every ship within range, the crowds force the crews to take them on a lengthy, horrific voyage, around Africa and through the Strait of Gibraltar to the southern shores of France.

But it is not the huddled mass of Indians, with their "fleshless Gandhi-arms," that is the focus of Raspail's attention so much as the varied responses of the French and the other privileged members of "the camp of the saints" as they debate how to deal with the inexorably advancing multitude. Raspail is particularly effective here in capturing the platitudes of official announcements, the voices of ordinary people, the tone of statements by concerned bishops, and so on. The book also seems realistic in its recounting of the crumbling away of resolve by French sailors and soldiers when they are given the order to repel physically--to shoot or torpedo--this armada of helpless yet menacing people. It would be much easier, clearly, to confront a military foe, such as a Warsaw Pact nation. The fifty-one (short) chapters are skillfully arranged so that the reader's attention is switched back and forth, within a two-month time frame, between the anxious debates in Paris and events attending the slow and grisly voyage of the Calcutta masses. The denouement, with the French population fleeing their southern regions and army units deserting in droves, is especially dramatic.

Garett Jones tweet:
https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/816317590934982656
https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:3ef60384a422
the West may have developed structural weaknesses in its core value systems and institutions

https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/944328292928294912
https://archive.is/K5wVI
Museum game I often play:

Walk into a gallery, ask my friend, "If the gallery caught on fire right now, and you and I could only save one painting in this room, which should it it be?"

Inspired by a related game I attribute to Tyler Cowen:

If you have a set budget to spend in this room of the museum, which paintings would you buy?

I think the differences in the game are, um, signs of deeper differences in our intellectual interests! :)

When I solicited bets on Western civilization, my former co-blogger Garett Jones zeroed in on economic freedom.

In short, I think the most wild-eyed predictions of the open borders optimists will come true, and to spare, but I think a lot of the forebodings of the grimmest open border pessimists will also prove more than justified.

All these forecasts are so tentative that I’m embarrassed to write them down at all, but they are necessary to help readers to understand what I mean when I doubt that the American polity can endure and flourish under open borders. It’s not that I’d expect a complete civilizational collapse, or a revolution. On the contrary, I’d expect superficial continuity. But an open-borders America of a billion people would, in substance, be as different a polity from the polity that the United States of America is today, as the Roman Empire of the 2nd century AD was from the Roman Republic of the 3rd century BC. At the end of this post, I’ll write a bit about whether the end of the American polity as we know it should be regretted or welcomed. But first, would billions really migrate under open borders?

vision:
- praetorian guard, latifundia
- non-democratic institutions
- total freedom of association, gated communities
- anti-egalitarian

- some history of Britain and US
- interesting, vituperative take on constitutional law:
I’m not so fond of democracy that my loyalty to a regime would depend very greatly on its democratic character, but I am very, very fond of telling the truth, and I can have no respect for, and no loyalty to, judges who, in decreeing gay marriage, pretend that they’re interpreting the Constitution. Modern constitutional law is a lot like the Catholic Church’s theology of indulgences in the 15th and early 16th centuries. It makes very little sense, and every critical thinker more or less feels that it’s a disgraceful travesty, but people are afraid to challenge it as aggressively as reason demands, because it underpins the order of society. Reams and libraries are dedicated to rationalizing it, precisely because it’s rationally indefensible, yet is a crucial currency of power. And yes, I’d like to see modern constitutional law immolated in a kind of Lutheran Reformation, and would gladly pay a high price in chaos to see the dragon slain. Thanks to my low opinion of the US constitutional regime as it currently exists is one reason, I can contemplate with very little distress the immigration of a billion or so people from all over the world, unschooled in the peculiar mythology of early 21st-century American democracy and its ever-more-irrational cult of equality.

cf: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/02/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html

the things he doesn't take into account:
- social cohesion/trust, especially for war
- crime/invasion (sort of)
- American South-style stagnation of tech and productivity improvements in face of cheap labor

https://openborders.info/blog/robert-putnam-social-capital-and-immigration/

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160304-us-mexico-border-fence-wall-photos-immigration/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-01/israel-s-magal-eyes-trump-wall-boasting-gaza-tested-smart-fence
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-immigration-idUSKBN1591HP
this is great lol (convos w/ Turnbull+Mexican president):
‘This deal will make me look terrible’: Full transcripts of Trump’s calls with Mexico and Australia: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/politics/australia-mexico-transcripts/
TRUMP
Why haven’t you let them out? Why have you not let them into your society?

TURNBULL
Okay, I will explain why. It is not because they are bad people. It is because in order to stop people smugglers, we had to deprive them of the product. So we said if you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Noble [sic] Prize winning genius, we will not let you in. Because the problem with the people —

TRUMP
That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.

TURNBULL
This is our experience.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/09/wall-what-wall/

this angle

Berlin’s Zero Hour Is Also Angela Merkel’s: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/12/20/berlins-zero-hour-is-also-angela-merkels-germany-terrorism/

All over Europe, ageing populations threaten nations’ financial sustainability. In this paper we examine the potential of immigration to strengthen financial sustainability. We look at a particularly challenging case, namely that of Denmark, which has extensive tax-financed welfare programmes that provide a high social safety net. The analysis is based on a forecast for the entire Danish economy made using a dynamic computable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations. Net contributions to the public purse are presented both as cross-sectional figures for a long time horizon and as average individual life-cycle contributions. The main conclusion is that immigrants from richer countries have a positive fiscal impact, while immigrants from poorer countries have a large negative one. The negative effect is caused by both a weak labour market performance and early retirement in combination with the universal Danish welfare schemes

In Denmark, 84 Per Cent Of Welfare Recipients Are ‘Non-Western Immigrants: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/03/17/in-denmark-84-per-cent-of-welfare-recipients-are-non-western-immigrants/

Time favors them not: Some migrant groups have low employment rates even after 25+ years of residence: https://medium.com/@afn/time-favors-them-not-some-migrant-groups-have-low-employment-rates-even-after-25-years-of-3c3e36094108
In Britain, for example, social problems that may point to religious and ethnic divides are treated as mostly taboo, and the Office of National Statistics has decided on an categorization of ethnicity which admirably combines almost every category error one could come up with: it juxtaposes races, cultural groups, single national origins, and a continent as supposedly mutually exclusive categories. In France, ethnicity is largely absent from national statistics as everyone with a passport becomes a citoyen and hence a Frenchman by pure principle. Once again, Danish data becomes helpful. The Danish state has no qualms about analyzing the connections between national origins and other aspects of its citizens’ lives. It does so in population-wide registry databases that links everything from tax records over medical journals, criminal records, school records to civil status (the data contain no information on subjective measures such as sexuality, religion, or politics). I analyzed some of these aggregated labor market data to show how specific national-origin groups do on the Danish labor market. They show considerable differences in outcomes.

THE FISCAL EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION TO THE UK*: http://www.cream-migration.org/files/FiscalEJ.pdf
Our findings indicate that, when considering the resident immigrant population in each year from 1995 to 2011, immigrants from the European Economic Area (EEA) have made a positive fiscal contribution, even during periods when the UK was running budget deficits, while Non-EEA immigrants, not dissimilar to natives, have made a negative contribution. For immigrants that arrived since 2000, contributions have been positive throughout, and particularly so for immigrants from EEA countries. Notable is the strong positive contribution made by immigrants from countries that joined the EU in 2004.

Table 1 has population numbers, Table 6 has fiscal impact

Only 13 percent of recent refugees in Germany have found work: survey: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-survey-idUSKBN13A22F
Most refugees to be jobless for years, German minister warns: https://www.ft.com/content/022de0a4-54f4-11e7-9fed-c19e2700005f
Up to three quarters of Germany’s refugees will still be unemployed in five years’ time, according to a government minister, in a stark admission of the challenges the country faces in integrating its huge migrant population.

The Welfare Magnet Hypothesis: Evidence From an Immigrant Welfare Scheme in Denmark∗: https://www.henrikkleven.com/uploads/3/7/3/1/37310663/agersnap-jensen-kleven_welfaremagnets_oct2019.pdf
We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using a series of large
changes in welfare benefits for immigrants in Denmark.
https://twitter.com/DurRobert/status/1190976044238540801
https://archive.is/FNNFD

in Denmark, immigration into given municipalities -> anti-migrant votes there (some conditions apply)

Does Exposure to the Refugee Crisis Make Natives More Hostile?: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3042936
We provide evidence from a natural experiment in the Aegean Sea, where Greek islands close to the Turkish coast experienced a sudden and massive increase in refugee arrivals while similar islands slightly farther away did not. Leveraging distance as an instrument for between-island variation in exposure to the refugee crisis allows us to obtain causal estimates of its impact. In our targeted survey of 2,070 islands residents, we find that immediate exposure to large-scale refugee arrivals induces sizable and lasting increases in natives’ hostility toward refugee, immigrant and Muslim minorities; support for restrictive asylum and immigration policies; and political engagement to effect such policies.

Does Immigration into Their Neighborhoods Incline Voters Toward the Extreme Right? The Case of the Freedom Party of Austria: http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/jkueconwp/2012_5f05.htm
- immigration did affect FPO vote share at neighborhood level
- heterogeneous wrt skills
- high-skilled -> lower (spillover benefits), mid-skilled -> higher (competition), low-skilled -> little effect

The BfV estimates there are about 40,000 Islamists in Germany, including 9,200 ultra-conservative Islamists known as Salafists, Hans-Georg Maassen, who leads the agency, told Reuters in an interview earlier this month.

more on the guy: http://www.wsj.com/articles/germany-arrests-suspected-islamist-mole-in-spy-agency-1480509521
Spanish former gay-porn star, lol

“I see very little reason to think secularism is going to win out in the war of ideas.”

A Skeptic Interviews Shadi Hamid about His New Book, “Islamic Exceptionalism”: http://muftah.org/skeptic-discusses-islamic-exceptionalism-shadi-hamid/

Country of origin and use of social benefits: A large, preregistered study of stereotype accuracy in Denmark: https://openpsych.net/paper/49
pretty minute predictive validity, but there

last line reminds me of Nassim Taleb's article

later: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/an-immigration-order-as-stupid-as-it-is-counterproductive/514847/
- David Frum

When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do. This weekend’s shameful chapter in the history of the United States is a reproach not only to Trump, although it is that too, but to the political culture that enabled him. Angela Merkel and Donald Trump may be temperamental opposites. They are also functional allies.

America's Immigration Challenge: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/refugees/419976/
Coming to the United States would benefit millions—but policymakers seldom ask whether their arrival would benefit the United States.

Refugees cannot solve Europe’s demographic woes

- nice case studies from Turkey
- arguments mostly bad tho

How a Suicide Bomber Made His Way From Syria to Strike in Ansbach, Germany: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/world/europe/germany-refugees-terrorism.html

Jonathan Haidt writing on resurgence of populism

Like most satirists worth reading, Houellebecq is a conservative. “I show the disasters produced by the liberalization of values,” he has said. Satire depends on comparing the crazy place we’re going to with the implicitly sane place we left behind. That’s why satirists are often nostalgists, like Tom Wolfe, who longs for the wild and crazy American past, or Evelyn Waugh, with his ascendant American vulgarians and his idealized lost Catholic aristocracy. Houellebecq despises contemporary consumer society, and though he is not an enthusiast, merely a fatalist, about its possible Islamic replacement, he thinks that this is the apocalypse we’ve been asking for. What he truly hates is Enlightenment ideas and practices, and here his satire intersects with a fast-moving current of French reactionary thought, exemplified by “The Suicide of France,” a surprise best-seller by the television journalist Éric Zemmour.

...

Imagining that what’s happening now will keep on happening is what satirists do. It is also what simpletons do. Every huckster on television tries to sell gold by pointing to an ascending price line and insisting that it can go only ever upward. In the real world, a vector never keeps going in a straight line. It meets a countervailing force or splits in two. We never got to 1984, or to boiling Irish babies. Other forces intervened.

another review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/04/02/slouching-toward-mecca/

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.