# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, September 28, 2016

### The Coming of the Postliberal Era

One of the big challenges faced by any student of current events is that of seeing past the turmoil of the present moment to catch the deep trends shaping events on a broader scale. It’s a little like standing on a beach, without benefit of tide tables, and trying to guess whether the tide’s coming in or going out. Waves surge, break, and flow back out to sea; the wind blows this way and that; it takes time, and close attention to subtle details, before you can be sure whether the sea is gradually climbing the beach or just as gradually retreating from it.
Over the last year or so, though, it’s become increasingly clear to me that one of the great tides of American politics has turned and is flowing out to sea. For almost precisely two hundred years, this country’s political discourse has been shaped—more powerfully, perhaps, than by any other single force—by the loose bundle of ideas, interests, and values we can call American liberalism. That’s the tide that’s turning. The most important trends shaping the political landscape of our time, to my mind, are the descent of the liberal movement into its final decadence, and the first stirrings of the postliberal politics that is already emerging in its wake.
To make sense of what American liberalism has been, what it has become, and what will happen in its aftermath, history is an essential resource. Ask a believer in a political ideology to define it, and you’ll get one set of canned talking points; ask an opponent of that ideology to do the same thing, and you’ll get another—and both of them will be shaped more by the demands of moment-by-moment politics than by any broader logic. Trace that ideology from its birth through its adolescence, maturity, and decline into senescence, and you get a much better view of what it actually means.
Let’s go back, then, to the wellsprings of the American liberal movement. Historians have argued for a good long time about the deeper roots of that movement, but its first visible upsurge can be traced to a few urban centers in the coastal Northeast in the years just after the War of 1812. Boston—nineteenth century America’s San Francisco—was the epicenter of the newborn movement, a bubbling cauldron of new social ideas to which aspiring intellectuals flocked from across the new Republic. Any of my readers who think that the naive and effervescent idealism of the 1960s was anything new need to read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance; it's set in the Massachusetts counterculture of the early nineteenth century, and most of the action takes place on a commune. That’s the context in which American liberalism was born.
From the very beginning, it was a movement of the educated elite. Though it spoke movingly about uplifting the downtrodden, the downtrodden themselves were permitted very little active part in it. It was also as closely intertwined with Protestant Christianity as the movement of the 1960s was with Asian religions; ministers from the Congregationalist and Unitarian churches played a central role in the movement throughout its early years, and the major organizations of the movement—the Anti-Slavery Societies, the Temperance League, and the Non-Resistant League, the first influential American pacifist group—were closely allied with churches, and staffed and supported by clergymen. Both the elitism and the Protestant Christian orientation, as we’ll see, had a powerful influence on the way American liberalism evolved over the two centuries that followed.
Three major social issues formed the framework around which the new movement coalesced. The first was the abolition of slavery; the second was the prohibition of alcohol; the third was the improvement of the legal status of women. (The movement traversed a long and convoluted road before this latter goal took its ultimate form of legal and social equality between the genders.) There were plenty of other issues that attracted their own share of attention from the movement—dietary reform, dress reform, pacifism, and the like—but all of them shared a common theme: the redefinition of politics as an expression of values.
Let’s take a moment to unpack that last phrase. Politics at that time, and at most other periods throughout human history, was understood as a straightforward matter of interests—in the bluntest of terms, who got what benefits and who paid what costs. Then and for most of a century thereafter, for example, one of the things that happened in the wake of every Presidential election is that the winner’s party got to hand out federal jobs en masse to its supporters. It was called the “spoils system,” as in “to the victor belongs the spoils;” people flocked to campaign for this or that presidential candidate as much in the hope of getting a comfortable federal job as for anyother reason. Nobody saw anything wrong with that system, because politics was about interests.
In the same way, there’s no evidence that anybody in the Constitutional Convention agonized about the ethical dimensions of the notorious provision that defined each slave as being 3/5ths of a person. I doubt the ethical side of the matter ever crossed any of their minds, because politics was not about ethics or any other expression of values—it was about interests—and the issue was simply one of finding a compromise that allowed each state to feel that its interests would be adequately represented in Congress. Values, in the thought of the time, belonged to church and to the private conscience of the individual; politics was about interests pure and simple.
(We probably need to stop here for a moment to deal with the standard response: “Yes, but they should have known better!” This is a classic example of chronocentrism. Just as ethnocentrism privileges the beliefs, values, and interests of a particular ethnic group, chronocentrism does the same thing to the beliefs, values, and interests of a particular time. Chronocentrism is enormously common today, on all sides of the political and cultural landscape; you can see it when scientists insist that people in the Middle Ages should have known better than to believe in astrology, for example, or when Christians insist that the old Pagans should have known better than to believe in polytheist religions. In every case, it’s simply one more attempt to evade the difficult task of understanding the past.)
Newborn American liberalism, though, rejected the division between politics and values. Their opposition to slavery, for example, had nothing to do with the divergent economic interests of the industrializing northern states and the plantation economy of the South, and everything to do with a devoutly held conviction that chattel slavery was morally wrong. Their opposition to alcohol, to the laws that denied civil rights to women, to war, and to everything else on the lengthy shopping list of the movement had to do with moral values, not with interests. That’s where you see the impact of the movement’s Protestant heritage: it took values out of the church and tried to apply them to the world as a whole. At the time, that was exotic enough that the moral crusades just mentioned got about as much political traction at the time as the colorful fantasies of the 1960s did in their own day.
Both movements were saved from complete failure by the impact of war. The movement of the 1960s drew most of its influence on popular culture from its opposition to the Vietnam War, which is why it collapsed nearly without a trace when the war ended and the draft was repealed. The earlier movement had to wait a while for its war, and in the meantime it very nearly destroyed itself by leaping on board the same kind of apocalyptic fantasy that kicked the New Age movement into its current death spiral four years ago. In the late 1830s, frustrated by the failure of the perfect society to show up as quickly as they desired, a great many adherents of the new liberal movement embraced the prophecy of William Miller, a New England farmer who believed that he had worked out from the Bible the correct date of the Second Coming of Christ. When October 22, 1844 passed without incident, the same way December 21, 2012 did, the resulting “Great Disappointment” was a body blow to the movement.
By then, though, one of the moral crusades being pushed by American liberals had attracted the potent support of raw economic interest. The division between northern and southern states over the question of slavery was not primarily seen at the time as a matter of ethics; it was a matter of competing interests, like every other political question, though of course northern politicians and media were quick to capitalize on the moral rhetoric of the Abolitionists. At issue was the shape of the nation’s economic future. Was it going to be an agrarian society producing mostly raw materials for export, and fully integrated into a global economy centered on Britain—the southern model? Or was it going to go its own way, raise trade barriers against the global economy, and develop its own industrial and agricultural economy for domestic consumption—the northern model?
Such questions had immediate practical implications, because government policies that favored one model guaranteed the ruin of the other. Slavery was the linchpin of the Southern model, because the big southern plantations required a vast supply of labor at next to no cost to turn a profit, and so it became a core issue targeted by northern politicians and propagandists alike. Read detailed accounts of the struggles in Congress between northern and southern politicians, though, and you’ll find that what was under debate had as much to do with trade policy and federal expenditures. Was there to be free trade, which benefited the South, or trade barriers, which benefited the North? Was the federal budget to pay for canals and roads, which benefited northern interests by getting raw materials to factories and manufactured products to markets, but were irrelevant to southern interests, which simply needed riverboats to ship cotton and tobacco to the nearest seaport?
Even the bitter struggles over which newly admitted states were to have slave-based economies, and which were not, had an overwhelming economic context in the politics of the time. The North wanted to see the western territories turned into a patchwork of family farms, producing agricultural products for the burgeoning cities of the eastern seaboard and the Great Lakes and buying manufactured goods from northern factories; the South wanted to see those same territories made available for plantations that would raise products for export to England and the world.
Yet the ethical dimension became central to northern propaganda, as already noted, and that helped spread the liberal conviction that values as well as interests had a place in the political dialogue. By 1860, that conviction had become widespread enough that it shaped thinking south of the Mason-Dixon line. As originally written, for example, the first line of the Confederate song “The Bonny Blue Flag” ran “fighting for the property we won by honest toil”—and no one anywhere had any illusions about the identity, or skin color, of the property in question. Before long, though, it was rewritten as “fighting for our liberty, with treasure, blood and toil.” The moment that change occurred, the South had already lost; it’s entirely possible to argue for slavery on grounds of economic interest, but once the focus of the conversation changes to values such as liberty, slavery becomes indefensible.
So the Civil War raged, the Confederacy rose and fell, the Northern economic model guided American economic policy for most of a century thereafter, and the liberal movement found its feet again. With slavery abolished, the other two primary goals took center stage, and the struggle to outlaw alcohol and get voting rights for women proceeded very nearly in lockstep. The 18th Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the US, and the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote, were passed in 1919 and 1920 respectively, and even though Prohibition turned out to be a total flop, the same rhetoric was redirected toward drugs (most were legal in the US until the 1930s) and continues to shape public policy today. Then came the Great Depression, and with the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932—and above all with his landslide reelection victory in 1936, when the GOP carried only two states—the liberal movement became the dominant force in American political life.
Triumph after triumph followed. The legalization of unions, the establishment of a tax-funded social safety net, the forced desegregation of the South: these and a galaxy of other reforms on the liberal shopping list duly followed. The remarkable thing is that all these achievements took place while the liberal movement was fighting opponents from both sides. To the right, of course, old-fashioned conservatives still dug in their heels and fought for the interests that mattered to them, but from the 1930s on, liberals also faced constant challenge from further left. American liberalism, as already mentioned, was a movement of the educated elite; it focused on helping the downtrodden rather than including them; and that approach increasingly ran into trouble as the downtrodden turned out to have ideas of their own that didn’t necessarily square with what liberals wanted to do for them.
Starting in the 1970s, in turn, American liberalism also ended up facing a third source of challenges—a new form of conservatism that borrowed the value-centered language of liberalism but used a different set of values to rally support to its cause: the values of conservative Protestant Christianity. In some ways, the rise of the so-called “new conservatism” with its talk about “family values” represented the final, ironic triumph of the long struggle to put values at the center of political discourse. By the 1980s, every political faction in American public life, no matter how crass and venial its behavior or its goals, took care to festoon itself with some suitable collection of abstract values. That’s still the case today; nobody talks about interests, even when interests are the obvious issue.
Thus you get the standard liberal response to criticism, which is to insist that the only reason anyone might possibly object to a liberal policy is because they have hateful values.
Let’s take current US immigration policy as an example. This limits the number of legal immigrants while tacitly allowing unlimited illegal immigration. There are solid pragmatic reasons for questioning the appropriateness of that policy. The US today has the highest number of permanently unemployed people in its history, incomes and standards of living for the lower 80% of the population have been moving raggedly downward since the 1970s, and federal tax policies effectively subsidize the offshoring of jobs. That being the case, allowing in millions of illegal immigrants who have, for all practical purposes, no legal rights, and can be employed at sweatshop wages in substandard conditions, can only drive wages down further than they’ve already gone, furthering the impoverishment and immiseration of wage-earning Americans.
These are valid issues, dealing with (among other things) serious humanitarian concerns for the welfare of wage-earning Americans, and they have nothing to do with racial issues—they would be just as compelling if the immigrants were coming from Canada. Yet you can’t say any of this in the hearing of a modern American liberal. If you try, you can count on being shouted down and accused of being a racist. Why? I’d like to suggest that it’s because the affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.
That is to say, a movement that began its history with the insistence that values had a place in politics alongside interests has ended up using talk about values to silence discussion of the ways in which its members are pursuing their own interests. That’s not a strategy with a long shelf life, because it doesn’t take long for the other side to identify, and then exploit, the gap between rhetoric and reality.
Ironies of this sort are anything but unusual in political history. It’s astonishingly common for a movement that starts off trying to overturn the status quo in the name of some idealistic abstraction or other to check its ideals at the door once it becomes the status quo. If anything, American liberalism held onto its ideals longer than most and accomplished a great deal more than many, and I think that most of us—even those who, like me, are moderate Burkean conservatives—are grateful to the liberal movement of the past for ending such obvious abuses as chattel slavery and the denial of civil rights to women, and for championing the idea that values as well as interests deserve a voice in the public sphere. It deserves the modern equivalent of a raised hat and a moment of silence, if no more, as it finally sinks into the decadence that is the ultimate fate of every successful political movement.
The current US presidential election shows, perhaps better than anything else, just how far that decadence has gone. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is floundering in the face of Trump’s challenge because so few Americans still believe that the liberal shibboleths in her campaign rhetoric mean anything at all. Even among her supporters, enthusiasm is hard to find, and her campaign rallies have had embarrassingly sparse attendance. Increasingly frantic claims that only racists, fascists, and other deplorables support Trump convince no one but true believers, and make the concealment of interests behind shopworn values increasingly transparent. Clinton may still win the election by one means or another, but the broader currents in American political life have clearly changed course.
It’s possible to be more precise. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, in stark contrast to Clinton, have evoked extraordinarily passionate reactions from the voters, precisely because they’ve offered an alternative to a status quo pervaded by the rhetoric of a moribund liberalism. In the same way, in Britain—where the liberal movement followed a somewhat different trajectory but has ended up in the same place—the success of the Brexit campaign and the wild enthusiasm with which Labour Party voters have backed the supposedly unelectable Jeremy Corbyn show that the same process is well under way there. Having turned into the captive ideology of an affluent elite, liberalism has lost the loyalty of the downtrodden that once, with admittedly mixed motives, it set out to help. That’s a loss it’s unlikely to survive.
Over the decades ahead, in other words, we can expect the emergence of a postliberal politics in the United States, England, and quite possibly some other countries as well. The shape of the political landscape in the short term is fairly easy to guess. Watch the way the professional politicians in the Republican Party have flocked to Hillary Clinton’s banner, and you can see the genesis of a party of the affluent demanding the prolongation of free trade, American intervention in the Middle East, and the rest of the waning bipartisan consensus that supports its interests. Listen to the roars of enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump—or better still, talk to the not inconsiderable number of Sanders supporters who will be voting for Trump this November—and you can sense the emergence of a populist party seeking the abandonment of that consensus in defense of its very different interests.
What names those parties will have is by no means certain yet, and a vast number of other details still have to be worked out. One way or another, though, it’s going to be a wild ride.

#### 273 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 273 of 273

W. B. Jorgenson said...

  Justin,
  It's not a problem, I just wanted to make sure I was clear earlier. I wasn't entirely sure what the comment was about, so I was merely hoping to clarify if I came across differently from my intention. It's a tough situation to be in, and I wish your cousin well.
  JMG,
  This post gave me quite a lot to think about, so I hope you don't mind me asking a question this late in the week, but if I understand you correctly then having values play a prominent role in politics is abnormal, and normally politics are based largely, or entirely, around interests. Given this, and the way in which the liberal establishment sold out and looks out for interests, while claiming to still be interested in values, how much of the doublespeak about global politics relates to this?
  I'm trying to think of where else it could come from, and it seems likely it's this, since mixing interests and values seems a quick way to produce doublespeak, and I can't think of any other source.
  If it's occurred elsewhere, is this a common outcome of "values" based politics?

  10/2/16, 10:24 AM
234567 said...

  @JMG
  RE your comment to Brigyn concerning young and old and pie shares...
  It wasn't so long ago that it was ok to live with one's parents. It wasn't so long ago that families worked together across generations to better their lot.
  As example, to build our farm, my youngest son is living on minimum wage; I am very frugal and plying money into a farm that I (at best) MIGHT get to retire on. My son-in-law works at the farm to both teach his children the way of things and to get away from city madness. I have a daughter that weaves, and has mentioned the idea of moving to the farm if things deteriorate badly in the city, but for now stays due to better schooling for the kids.
  I had 3 of my 4 children live at home until they were 24 or 25, mostly because the job market was horrible and moving out would cream them financially. We paid for their college education, all four of them, and are essentially left without retirement at this point due to the pension mess made via government and business collusion.
  There are many of us older generation that gave and give up more than we are given. Not worried about it, because you can't take it with you. But assuming all older people are worried about their share of pie is just inaccurate.

  10/2/16, 10:30 AM
John Michael Greer said...

  Dorda, that's an excellent point and thank you for bringing it up. I like to point out by contrast what's implied by the recent habit of renaming the personnel office in a company the Human Resources department. What do you do with a resource? Why, you exploit it!
  Kyle, that's truly funny. I certainly hope it gets plenty of investment from people who deserve to lose every penny! As for the shrinking pie, exactly.
  Justin, not biologically genetic, but culturally genetic -- the habit of taking religion very seriously came here with the religious fanatics who made up so large a fraction of immigrants from Plymouth Rock onward, and it's remained part of our culture ever since. As for restricting the vote to 25% or so, that's been tried -- you might look into who had the right to vote in the US immediately after independence. It didn't work too well. As Churchill pointed out, democracy is the worst political system, except for all the others.
  Pantagruel, exactly -- I'm not disagreeing. That's why it's necessary to challenge the ravings of economists, and point out that interests do not always, or even mostly, equate to dollars and cents.
  Jay, that's certainly my guess.
  Patricia, exactly. I've seen that sort of thing way too often.
  Rebecca, I'm not surprised. Disgusted, but not surprised.
  Patricia, the barbarian conquerors of the Western empire -- Saxon and otherwise -- borrowed the Roman habit of slavery from the societies they conquered, but it largely faded out over the centuries that followed because it makes such poor economic sense. Parceling out real estate to the peasants in exchange for a cut of the harvest and certain services in peace and war -- that is, protofeudalism -- gets you better returns at lower cost, and you end up with a labor force that has a motivation to work other than the lash. In exactly the same way, the household slave gave way to the feudal servant, who was a free person bound by pledges of mutual loyalty, and was much less likely to betray you for a few trinkets or just plain cut your throat in the middle of the night. Historically, slavery is a phenomenon of complex societies and relative prosperity -- for example, it was practiced by those Native American tribes, such as the Northwest Coast nations, who had a great deal of surplus wealth, and not by those who lacked that surplus. As we go through a transition from plenty of surplus wealth to very little, I wouldn't be surprised to see slavery here and there as a transient phenomenon, but over the longer term, some form of feudalism is the normal dark age system.

  10/2/16, 10:57 AM
John Michael Greer said...

  Phil, yep. I've been watching that movement for a couple of years now.
  Yucca, I'm still mulling over that, but it does seem like a plausible way of making sense of the data.
  Vince, you're welcome and thank you!
  .Mallow, it's early days yet, and the nationalists are still constrained by current social norms. I foresee three outcomes -- some countries will simply become majority Muslim by demographic shifts and lose their European identity, others will be in for a period of bitter religious-cultural warfare, with whoever wins defining the national identity for the next dozen centuries or so, and still others will expel non-assimilating Muslim populations and retain their current identities until and unless they are invaded and conquered by Muslim states.
  Patricia, funny! Thank you.
  Sleisz Ádám, thanks for the update from Hungary! If there's a lot of emigration, I may want to look at the immigration policies; if the US descends into civil war or domestic insurgency, as I fear it might, emigrating to a pleasant central European nation (which by all accounts Hungary is) would be a better alternative than most.
  Bill, and yet people were predicting several years ago that Clinton would get the Democratic nomination. Four years is a long time, but not necessarily that long...
  Bicosse, that's certainly a possibility worth exploring. It would also explain why talk about values has generally become doubletalk concealing interests of late.
  Cherokee, yep. I sometimes suspect that the CEOs know perfectly well that the whole thing's going to come crashing down soon, and so they're engaging in an orgy of kleptocratic profiteering to line their pockets while they still can.
  M Smith, yes, but you've got to have the oil revenue to make it possible in the first place.
  Ozark, I don't think there's a "war on science." When they fill out the death certificate for modern science, the cause of death will be suicide. The difficulty I see is that as institutional science destroys its own credibility and cultural legitimacy, we're entering an "anything goes" period where the idea of subjecting beliefs to any sort of critical thinking has been rejected because it was so thoroughly abused, and people will act out whatever emotionally appealing fantasies happen to move them, no matter how ghastly the consequences. I don't see this as being limited to the poor or the uneducated, either -- watch the way well-educated, affluent people buy into the most absurd sort of doublethink (cough, cough, The Secret, cough, cough) and you've got a preview of the antirational era dawning around us.
  Karel, exactly -- and this is why I spoke specifically about Anglo-American liberalism. The words "liberal" and "conservative" do not mean the same thing in Europe that they mean on this side of the pond.

  10/2/16, 11:16 AM
Juhana said...

  There has been some talk about Hungarian political trends in this comment thread. Pejorative term "fascism" has been thrown around like some magic formula, which exposes Dr. Evil and his minions of Evil Evilness. I am personally quite shell shocked by how fast political landscape is transforming right now here in Europe. Yet, I found it little bit ironic how fast persons throw word "fascism" at everything challenging their world view. "Fascism" seems to mean for them anything that challenges Unholy Trinity of current liberalism - multiculturalism, feminism and free trade.
  I am not Hungarian, but I know and have seen as random by-passer how suspicion towards EU took root at that country. Hungary was occupied by CCCP for decades after WW2. That occupation was not known for it's light-handedness. Hungarian uprising in -56 and following devastation were hard to handle for a country which produced proud kings like Janos Hunyadi and proud warriors like "fekete sereg", warriors in cruel and long war against ottomans and Islam for Christianity and magyars.
  Hungarians I have met seem to be very sensitive for any signs of oppression and bureaucratic centralism from foreigners. And tower of Babel known as Brussels EU elite are decidedly foreign. EU has inherited baton of oppression from their ideological successors the Soviets with alarming eagerness. Hungarians, like many other East European countries, have raised against this stealing of national sovereignty. And yes, insane ideology of mass immigration is part of this robbery. There is no reason whatever let total strangers to overrun your country, especially if they are your religion's thousands-of-years old enemies. Frontier between Islam and Christianity, especially along Ottoman borderline, is bloody. There is absolutely no reason to help rapefugees invading Christian lands from Middle East and North Africa. No reason at all. Their problems are not ours.
  I have understood that most Hungarians dream not about national socialism; they just want heel of this bureaucratic behemoth lifted from their necks. They have recent experience what it is to live under foreign, leviathan, corrupt machinery. They don't want to re-experience that.
  Of course there are exceptions. Hooligan firms of Hungarian football clubs seem to be quite active in far-right scene. In that they follow alarmingly common, pan-European trend. In Euro games those Hungarian ultras whose original fealty lies with clubs like Nyíregyháza Spartacus, Újpest FC and Ferencvárosi TC seem to have strong far-right leanings. As I have stated here before, this underground political awakening and networking by young male warrior societies is politically deeply underestimated phenomenon here in Europe. It seems that this working and lower-middle class phenomenon is so far away from the bubble of affluent class that it's future indications go totally unnoticed. But they are still a minority among Hungarians, while anti-EU and anti-immigration stance is clearly majority position there. Still, even if minority,you should see HOW MANY of them there are. You should see. There are couple of videos to describe the feeling of awe as mask of normalcy drops off, but they are NOTHING compared to real experience. Earth trembles under their feet.
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AySWEXSFnGc
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftfFmPtCj9w
  Same goes with most East European countries I have experienced, like Poland. Of course they feel they are Central Europe and Eastern Europe starts with former Soviet states, but let's not complicate things for American readers. In general, those countries which were occupied after the big one by Soviet Army are very much against current version of European liberalism.
  So, using word "fascism" to describe every anti-free trade and anti-free movement stance is quite stupid and boring. If you people want to truly understand world as it is, open for fracking's sake your eyes and see things as they are.

  10/2/16, 11:18 AM
John Michael Greer said...

  Synthase, exactly. As I noted to Ozark, a vast amount of what's driving today's antiscience is the blatant corruption of scientific institutions, which strikes at the heart of the cultural legitimacy of science itself.
  K Sc, "the bullying culture" -- that's a very apt term. I think I've mentioned before that I used to hang out on the fringes of the unknown-phenomena scene, and watched what happened whenever anybody reported experiencing something that isn't part of the officially accepted scientific view of reality. It was always the same. A self-described "skeptic" would show up and behave in a bullying, abusive fashion toward the witness and everyone else, and a believer would show up and be friendly, supportive, and thoughtful. Care to guess whose explanation the witness usually ended up accepting?
  The same thing happens even more dramatically where the medical industry is involved. The MDs and their allies are by and large arrogant, dismissive, and uninterested in anything that contradicts their obvious self-interest, while the alternative-medicine people almost always come across as friendly, supportive, and approachable. This is, to my mind, half the reason why alternative health care has become so prevalent in today's America. (The other half is that so many officially accepted health care modalities have ghastly side effects and are fantastically overpriced, while alternative health care is usually affordable and, even when it doesn't help, rarely causes any harm.) All this is helping to drive the crisis of legitimacy I've been talking about.
  NZ, that's too rigid a distinction. Most people are both part of the power structure and subject to it -- that is, they are subject to power exerted by others, but they also can exert power on certain people, and almost inevitably do so. It's the inability or unwillingness to grasp the latter that gets in the way of learning many of the right lessons!
  WB, right now the doublespeak is primarily a matter of using values to avoid talking about interests. That's not always the case, and there are also times in which people have talked about values and meant it.
  234567, I certainly acknowledge that there are still some people in the older end of the age spectrum who are doing as you are, and I honor that. I've just met way too many Boomers whose attitude can be summed up by the bumper sticker you see on so many RVs: "I'm Spending My Children's Inheritance."

  10/2/16, 11:30 AM
Sleisz Ádám said...

  @Mallow:
  Among other things, the EU itself is constructed to take advantage of countries like mine (in exchange for handouts to the local elite). If they are reckless enough to make it more transparent using either fines or migrant quotas, then I won't intervene. I would argue for our exit even if both of these were empty threats. Actually, in my opinion, they are.
  Otherwise, most of the time I don't really worry about German, French and English problems. My prime minister should not worry about those either.

  10/2/16, 11:38 AM
Patricia Mathews said...

  @JMG - I haven't seen any of those "I'm spending my children's inheritance" bumper stickers for a couple of decades, and I notice bumper stickers and the like. Are they still around where you live? And IIRC, most of them were sported by the tag end of the Greatest Generation.
  However, seen on my daily walks: a vehicle with an American flag on the left of the back windshield, and on the right, the rattlesnake flag, with the Stars and Bars immediately below it.
  Re: the medpros - I'm off all meds except the ones needed to control a lifelong water retention in the legs problem - the meds which after being started on them, I dumped 15# in one month and stayed at the new level, literally peeing it away. Evidence enough for me. All else, bye-bye.

  10/2/16, 11:47 AM
Patricia Mathews said...

  @JMG re Anglo-Saxon thralldom - yes, and thanks. There's a lovely document from that period, during the economic crisis Bishop Wulfstan described so vividly in "The Sermon of the Wolf to the English," in which a landowner who had accepted her peasants selling themselves to her as slaves while the famine lasted, was now setting them free to return to their little farms.

  10/2/16, 11:51 AM
canon fodder said...

  Values-based politics? In this day, it sounds like an oxymoron. Given the historical sketch you present, I can definitely see the arc of values-based liberalism in America. It seems like the liberal elites who ran the movement relished in slaying political dragons: worker’s rights (be they slaves or blue-collar stiffs), women’s rights, black rights, and now, gender defiant rights. One commonality through all of these is the elites proscribing their solution to the masses instead of the masses demanding a particular solution.
  There are a couple things I think exacerbated the fall the values-based liberalism. First, their championship of multi-culturalism as a way of “freeing the oppressed”. One unintended consequence of multi-culturalism is a dispersion or fracturing of common values. How can you get the masses to do something if you no longer have a common set of values to motivate them or justify your actions? Their actions lose their moral imperative and reveal the underlying self-interest. This is where we’re at today - the liberal elite have lost their moral mojo, and we’re left looking at their naked self-interest (a sight I can never unsee!)
  To overcome this they invented political correctness - the moral imperative without the morals. PC actually becomes very convenient to promote just about anything since it isn’t tied to any particular value, just the social censorship associated with being politically incorrect. It’s given the liberal elite at least a little longer on life support.
  The onslaught of multi-culturalism foisted on us by the liberal elite will have several enduring legacies. The one that will have a major effect is the wholesale importation of Islam into western culture. Since current politically correct dogma precludes any real debate of how Islamic and modern western worldviews can integrate without the destruction of either, the actual debate will be held at the fringes by jihadists and nationalistic rednecks. It will not be pretty and it will not resolved in the next generation. Unfortunately, neither the Affluent Establishment Party nor the Deplorable Populist Party have any motivation do solve this since they both benefit from the conflict in the short run. Fortunately, we in the USA will have a bit longer to consider the consequences since Europe has volunteered to be the epicenter of the debate for now.

  10/2/16, 12:02 PM
Sleisz Ádám said...

  @JMG:
  American immigrants in Eastern Europe? Incredible picture... I wish the region can manage quite well but we are on the edge in more than one sense. Some of us will see eventually.
  @Juhana:
  I think you are correct in most of your observations, though the anti-EU sentiment is not very visible at the moment. Mainstream politics allow only carefully controlled, sporadic expression of it. (Side note: I honestly never expected to see the name of my beloved club - Újpest FC - on this page. Even in an alarming context, that is a pleasant surprise. :) )

  10/2/16, 12:18 PM
Juhana said...

  It's curious that VERY large Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Balkan immigrant populations in Germany, UK etc. are good growing platform for tribal thinking, like football hooliganism. This of course is valid observation only among those who have emigrated behind blue-collar jobs. Academics have their own behavior patterns and virtue signalling systems guiding them. So young males of emigrant populations are MORE prone to extreme tribal thinking than those living in their original homeland. And in their fatherlands, blue-collar males are more prone to alienate totally from current status quo than females or white-collars. Same goes with Muslim population. Fracture lines are already visible, only waiting for economic nose dive (driven by resource depletion) into abyss of true break-down.
  Need to belong seems to be more important than need for personal safety. All around Europe young, non-privileged males are ready to take enormous personal risks or die for the feeling of belonging. That is the true bloom of alienation and individualism for those who don't really make it. Ah, one more failure for ideology of multiculturalism, which thinks only in terms of individual.

  10/2/16, 12:21 PM
M Smith said...

  Patricia Mathews, I don't know where you live, but I'm in the USA. Specifically, in North Carolina not too far from Durham, and there is no "one strike and you're out." In fact, they're fighting hard now for the checkbox on job/housing applications that asks about criminal record, to be removed entirely.
  Often, after a criminal kills someone whether by DWI, driveby, shaking his "fiancee's" baby HARD because he's trying to play a video game and it's not his seed anyway, or a gunshot point-blank to the face at a "party", then and ONLY then does it come out that he's got a rap sheet of increasingly violent crimes for which he got probation, if that. In the case of illegal aliens who are caught after they kill someone, it turns out they didn't even show up for their deportation hearings. Letting criminals go unpunished is called "social justice" among those who have lucrative jobs with the Big Victims industry.
  Further, I do not believe that a criminal is just as deserving (a favorite word of the Big Victims leaders who don't pay their own income taxes - hm, seems they stole the commons from the goose and look how successful they are!) of housing or work as someone who managed not to commit crime and/or had backup plans for their hard luck. I prefer to deal with people who are more resourceful and self-sufficient than that, because they're less likely to leave my remains in a shallow grave when Big Victims tells them that I stole their money and land, and anything I have is due not to my skills and hard work, but due to "privilege" and it's noble to "take back what's theirs". Nor do I want to entertain claims of racism or threats of lawsuits, and such "mistake makers" have access to the attorneys on retainer at Big Victims. I don't.
  I didn't read the story about the child with the milk, and do I really need to specify that that's not who I or any other reasonable person refers to when I say "cheats, thieves, frauds and liars"? JMG makes the point repeatedly that just because we choose some elements of a culture, it doesn't follow that we must or do choose all elements. Our laws wouldn't need to be as draconian as in the Middle East. Heck, Welfare to Work in the 90's cut the welfare rolls by 60% between 1994 and 2004. Everyone kept their extremities.
  Sidebar: I just watched a 1961 movie called "After the Fox" and the writer - Neil Simon - was making the same point 55 years ago: Only the little criminals end up in jail. How charmingly true. The IRS comes after little people like me who owe them a few hundred dollars. Al Sharpton goes free, as does Charlie Rangel.
  I have thought long and hard about whom such laws would punish. Let's get started.

  10/2/16, 12:55 PM
M Smith said...

  John Michael, I didn't mean to imply that the oil revenue was unnecessary, and sorry for coming across that way. Count me in among the Asperger posters. Though never officially diagnosed, the only symptom I lack is the manifestation of repetitive movements. One of the trickiest things is the comprehension of how I come across, as well as how I interpret signals.

  10/2/16, 1:08 PM
Scotlyn said...

  Justin, I'm interested in your comments about limiting voting to 25% of the population (however selected). Have you given any thought to how the other 75% are able to give shape and impetus to their interests? And to what would stop them being mad at the 25%? Penny for them.

  10/2/16, 1:09 PM
Shane W said...

  I just wanted to share my experience. From the 90s onward, I very much identified w/liberalism and the Democratic party, and at one time, was a member of the DNC and other liberal organizations. I pounded the pavement and phone banked for Democratic candidates, the last being Barack Obama. Yes, I did fall for "Hope and Change", as this was before I'd encountered the ADR and learned how things really work. I was very disillusioned after that election, and swore off politics, and went into an anti-American funk, whereby I discovered Morris Berman's anti-American trilogy, which led me here after I got bored w/his anti-American rantings and wanted to discover more about peak oil, the rise and fall of civilizations. I simply cannot reward the Democrats with my support with I have absolutely no faith in their ability or even willingness to accomplish what they campaign on. Hillary is mouthing the same things she's been mouthing since she came on the national stage over 20 years ago, and I have absolutely no faith that she means any of it, or will accomplish any of her meaningless campaign promises.
  Right now, I work with the wage class in a bright red state, and I can tell you that they are all over the map with all of their beliefs. To a t, they identify as either "conservative" or are apolitical. Regarding extrajudicial killing of black people, when I bring up JMG's idea of militarization of the police as cannon fodder against an insurgency, many of the "Don't Tread on Me", gun-toting libertarian types are sympathetic and relate their own police experiences. One guy, in politically incorrect fashion, said that once they move beyond rioting and looting into organized violence, it's over. Others are reflexively defensive of the police. I sense an attitude that the status quo is intolerable, and the attitude seems very similar to the one that pervaded Europe in the run up to the First World War, with less of a bloodlust for war. One guy thinks we need a severe Depression as a corrective, others seem to think Hillary would trigger an insurgency/Civil War. Some fear Russia, and respect or admire Vladimir Putin, and think we need that here. One is a big admirer of FDR, and thinks Trump would be like FDR when the next Depression hits. The point is, these people are all over the map with their beliefs, which reinforces what JMG has said about politics undergoing a massive realignment and drastic change.
  Some people, especially the older, Gen X cohort, still espouse beliefs in the "system"--think they will be able to retire, are saving for retirement. Even some of the younger cohort express belief in the system, one twenty something has faith that education will be his ticket to wealth as a Psychiatrist. (I am hopeful that the student loan/education bubble will burst before he saddles himself with all that debt.) The ones that seem the most sane are the ones who are most Retrotopian in their beliefs and attitudes, and interacting with them is like interacting with someone from the past. These are the sanest of the bunch, and the most promising.

  10/2/16, 1:52 PM
Shane W said...

  So many people all over the political spectrum right now have such insane, irrational beliefs, and the collective death wish is so strong right now, that I can't possibly see the US getting out of it w/out some kind of repeat of interwar/Second World War Europe. Americans seem intensely allergic to reality and sanity right now, and will grasp at anything to avoid confronting reality, which does not bode well at all...

  10/2/16, 1:56 PM
Varun Bhaskar said...

  Archdruid,
  In other words the time when interests take center stage over values, and vice-versa, is largely determined by factors outside of any one person's control? I mean, that makes sense if that's what you're saying, but if the transition from value domination to interest domination is currently happening in our society how do we can we help that transition. Like you've said to many other readers, it seems like there's a conversation about interests struggling to get out from under the rug of values. People seem to want to have frank discussions about interests, but no longer seem to know how. I ask because as an aspiring journalist I feel it is my duty to help that process along.
  Also, I totally support the democratic syndicalist idea. Never been a big fan of the anarchists, I'm a statist at heart. I would love to see Lakeland slowly emerge from under the rubble of our current empire.
  Cheers,
  Varun

  10/2/16, 2:04 PM
Shane W said...

  Really, I think the best outcome for the US right now, once our economy goes into free fall and we do penance for a specified time (I'm sure the Russians haven't forgotten nor forgiven us for what we did to them after the Soviet fall) is for President Trump to go, cap in hand (privately, not publicly), to Putin and see what kind of deal he can offer us. Kinda like a reverse Marshall Plan for a devastated and destroyed America...

  10/2/16, 3:30 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...

  Okay, I think this is worth noting: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/insider/the-time-i-found-donald-trumps-tax-records-in-my-mailbox.html?_r=0
  Allow me to say why I think it's relevant: taken at face value, it shows someone inside the Trump Organization is sabotaging Donald Trump. This is newsworthy. A more cynical thought has occurred to me: the IRS is now leaking information to discredit Trump. It's also illegal on the part of whoever did this: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/7213 (section a,3).
  Notably, the way it's worded, it's also illegal for the NYT to have published this. However, anyone want to bet anyone will be charged?

  10/2/16, 3:44 PM
David, by the lake said...

  OT but I'm watching NHK World (Asia Insight) on public TV and the main story is about Russia's homestead law for the Far East of the country, providing 1 hectare of free land for citizens who apply. (Free of charge for 5 yrs, granted to them after that time.) This apparently a move by Putin to boost population in that region, particularly among the younger folks.

  10/2/16, 4:19 PM
Nastarana said...

  Dear Juhana, Americans of good will, in which category I hope I can include myself, find ourselves in a position roughly analogous to that of Soviet dissidents in the final decades of the old USSR. Except for that the Russians were much better educated. The mainstream, AKA lamestream, media is made up of overpaid lackeys who say what they are told to say and ignore what they are told to ignore.
  It is forbidden to say, hint or suggest that any foreign leader, such as Mr. Putin or the current President of Hungary, or General Sissi in Egypt, who conducts policy in the best interests of his own nation is anything other than a loathsome authoritarian whose citizens, that is, suffering subjects, long for American intervention to remove the offending dictator and usher in an era of peace and prosperity for those lucky few who might possibly have survived our humanitarian onslaught.
  I would like respectfully to point out that we have not had the epidemics of rape and sexual harassment from Moslem immigrants in the US. Possibly that is because the immigrants are fairly widely dispersed geographically. Or, it might be because Americans who are not liberal salarycrats tend to be armed, including more and more women.
  I do wonder why Europe is the only possible destination for ME migrants? The Stans have Moslem governments, lots of space and small populations. I would think they might welcome educated Syrians and Iraqis to help them develop their mineral resources without having to give away their whole countries to the multinational companies.
  I am inclined to think that 'fascism' is a word which needs to be retired. It is a subject on which I have not read very much, but it does seem to me to be a phenomenon of a specific time which is now past. In any case, the liberal interventionists who are presently in control are quite good at totalitarian intrusiveness into every aspect of one's private and public life.

  10/2/16, 5:58 PM
birgit said...

  Hi JMG:
  Thanks so much for a sane perspective on our civilization. I'm so glad I now have some framework for understanding current events. I'm replying to your remark on the corrupt medical industry. Being an MD, I am a bit amused by your characterization of arrogant MDs, but it is a laugh-instead- of cry scenario. The medical industry (especially the feds, when formulating laws) now calls doctors and patient "stakeholders", and we are all the little guys in this process. The majority of doctors in the county are depressed (we call it call burnout), and arrogant behavior is mainly passing bullying on down the pecking order. The process being extracting 19% of the GDP, with fond expectations of a bigger cut,as people get less sturdy and more stressed and scared.
  Doctors have been set up as the figureheads of this cynical and rapacious industry, but we are being stealthily replaced with paraprofessionals who are trained to execute industry protocols, not to treat patients as individuals. At some, perhaps most, hospitals and clinics, you are more likely to have your "doctor" be a PA than an MD.
  Of course, there are doctors who are selfish jerks, but most are extremely self-sacrificing, if a little naive about the fate of our profession. The health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, on the other hand, are uncompromisingly evil

  10/2/16, 7:01 PM
Ozark Chinquapin said...

  @JMG
  Won't an "anything goes" period be pretty self-limiting because the beliefs, rational or not, that lead to positive results will win out as their adherents tend to have better lives, and those who aren't so attached to dogma of one sort or another notice that people with certain beliefs and ideas tend to be in better shape than others, and gravitate toward those belief systems. I guess how long that takes will depend on how well people pay attention to reality vs stubbornly cling to ideas in their heads, and paying attention isn't something that mot Americans do too well these days. Are there any historical parallels you know of to this "anything goes" period?
  @Synthase
  I used to be more worried about the rise of Christian fundamentalism, but now I see it as a movement that arose in response to the overall slow trend of declining importance of Christianity in America, and now it has passed its peak of influence. It's possible it will rise again, if JMG's timetable of religious vs political movements is correct then I'd imagine that could possibly happen sometime after 2060 or so. What's interesting to me is that at least for now, the influence of both Christianity and science are delining in America, whatever fills that void won't be anticipated by those who see the only options as scientific materialism or a return to the values of the prescientific era in the western world.
  @K sc
  You ever hear of James Lyons-Weiler? I mention him because he's an insider in the scientific community and works within the scientific medical paradigm, and also an independent thinker who started out believing most of the standard opinions of the scientific community but ended up coming to very different opinions after doing thorough research. He also isn't afraid to stand up to the bullying culture you've mentioned.

  10/2/16, 9:04 PM
Bill Pulliam said...

  JMG -- Oh, I'm afraid the next four years might be veeeerrryyyy long, excrutiatingly so (regardless of the election outcome). Times seems to be getting much too interesting.

  10/2/16, 9:10 PM
Scotlyn said...

  Thoughts on the "anti-vaxxer" dogwhisting which is getting fairly hysterical in trying to silence even the mildest expressions of concern that corporations be better regulated and their data be more transparent (to wit 3rd party candidate Jill Stein)...
  Take the mantra "vaccines are always safe" and express its meaning in more specific (and falsifiable) terms, and its absurdity becomes apparent. Eg:
  1) Immune Activation Agents never cause Immune Dysregulation Disorders.
  2) Viruses & bacteria never evolve in response to biological barriers to their proliferation.
  3) Corporations never hide/alter data, capture regulatory bodies, allow the profit motive to sully the science.
  This is a house of cards...

  10/3/16, 12:30 AM
nuku said...

  @Scotlyn,
  Re being “selfless”: in my experience, this is usually implicitly or explicitly used as the Chrisitan “good“ value in contrast to the “bad“ value of “selfishness”.
  Back in my yachtie days I was once accused, by a charismatic Christian preacher in rural Fiji whose church I visited out of curiosity on a Sunday, of being selfish because I chose not to have any children. I still don’t get it.
  Good on you for cultivating your own sense of self and looking out for your own good as opposed to being conned into “selfless” behavior, as defined by a Church, by the means of the guilt trip.

  10/3/16, 1:17 AM
Maverick said...

  @noroman
  Whole of India has never been under Sunni Muslim invaders, that's a myth. If you want evidence just look at the ratio of Muslims vs Hindus in the country, it's 20:80. That's amazing for a country which was supposedly under Islamic rule for 800 years. The fact is that the pinnacle of Islamic rule was in late 1600's and at that point they controlled about 60% of the land. By 1800's the Islamic rule had been overthrown and a Hindu and a Sikh kingdom combined controlled 80% of the land.
  In fact if the Red coats hadn't turned up our history would have been very different.
  Google Maratha and Sikh Empire.

  10/3/16, 7:59 AM
234567 said...

  @JMG -
  The same argument can be made about any generation, albeit the theme of the argument may differ. I can argue that the younger generations are in danger of "death by smartphone" due to the many orthopedic injuries sustained by people simply walking and trying to use their phones - or accidents caused by texting or watching DVD and driving.
  I encourage you to drop the entire age category, as I used to be classed in a different grouping just a few decades ago, yet I am the same man ideologically. Likewise, millennials will be in the 'older set' soon. I don't think age is the line of demarcation - it is more one of mindset or worldview. It seems to me that the diviner might simply be selfishness or greed, as those have been with us always.
  There is also a growing divide between those who pay lip service to ideals and those who live them, and this divide has grown with the advent of the internet - almost like talking about it endlessly removes the sense of urgency or the compulsion to actually change behavior. Catharsis = Apathy?
  I am glad you have created this little corner on the web but find it disheartening when I see the whole age divide thing simply accepted as normal, when it is common to every generation previous. I think that the lumpen are growing in number regardless of age and thus applying a uniform mindset based on age is highly problematic, as more and more people of all ages roll into the lumpen.

  10/3/16, 8:55 AM
Eric S. said...

  @matthias:
  The relationship between carnal and divine love, and the fine line where one gives way to the other is one of the core themes of the comedia, so it’s pretty thinly dispersed throughout the whole work, but it shines through most strongly in Purgatorio, where the seventh circle serves as the gateway to paradise, and Dante has to pass through the fires himself to purge the last thread of the carnal from his affections before being allowed to finally meet Beatrice. And her entire speech to him when she first meets him is about the way that her earthly beauty, and her death, which should have elevated his eyes towards heaven instead pushed him towards his own damnation. Throughout the poem, the boundaries between divine love and lust are constantly in the balance, and feminine beauty exists on a fulcrum between them. And much of what Dante has on romantic love and sexuality is an exploration of contemporary attitudes towards courtly love, whose fault it is if it crosses a boundary, and just where that line is. Traditionally in courtly literature, the man engaging in the courtly romance was bound by a code, with the woman ever enticing him to cross the line, and many of the great courtly romances are about a man struggling to hold on to his honor and virtue while the woman he is pledged to tries to trick or entice him into violating it, and the two either maintaining the balance or the man falling (and that traditional motif is explored in Inferno), Purgatorio explores Dante’s own relationship to courtly love through Beatrice, and her innocence, her early death, and the unrequited nature of the relationship all serve to allow Dante to transcend the fall. What’s unique about this is that it really does reverse the trend, in that the lusts Dante has burned away in the seventh circle are his own, while Beatrice is idealized to the point of near-divinity, which sets the state for some of the trends you see in renaissance Italian Art and Literature. . One of the more interesting things about Dante is the way that he pushes the envelope on medieval literature and sets the stage for the themes that you see pop up in the Renaissance, between his emphasis on elevating the vernacular in his use of language, his idealization of feminine beauty, his romanticization of the pagan authors, his willingness to criticize and challenge papal authority, the emergence of some early humanistic themes, and some of the echoes of a nascent quasi-universalism you see in his speculations on the nature of Salvation on Canto XIX of Paradiso, reveal Dante as very much a medieval writer pointing towards the beginnings of the Renaissance, to the point that I tend to view him as the first Italian Renaissance figure, especially when you examine his direct influence on Boccaccio a generation later. There’s a lot to Dante, and his writings are pretty impossible to exhaust.

  10/3/16, 9:27 AM
Roger said...

  JMG I've watched my employer offshore high-paying white-collar work to India. This is work typically done by prosperous and highly educated people, people generally identifying themselves as "liberal".
  I heard that offshoring such functions won't work out because the required skill and knowledge doesn't exist over yonder. But, if I had any doubt that Indians could do it, that doubt is gone. I've seen them in action and they are every bit as good as people here. And they do it for a small fraction of what we get. An Oligarch's dream. So if offshoring such work becomes a trend and gathers steam, we'll see what these liberals say about being open to the world and not building walls.
  In any case, I think that "principled conservatism" is going bye-bye too.
  Conservatives tout values ie unfettered capitalism and free trade, as bedrock principles. They tell you if you are a rock-ribbed American, this is what you believe in. But what good is being able to stand tall and have the good regard of all your fellow "principled conservatives" while your job and your community's economic mainstay and everything that isn't bolted down get offshored to China (and India).
  The trumpeting of values was a distraction. Both "liberal" Democrats and "conservative" Republicans were in on it. While people were fighting over creationism vs evolution and gender-neutral washrooms in schools, Bill and Dubya and Obama sold them out. What a con. It was brilliant.

  10/3/16, 9:27 AM
Mister Roboto said...

  Another thing I've noticed about the pretense of "values-only" voting: Those who are from a background of liberal-ish Democratic Party Kool-Aid drinkers know full well that friends and family will frequently regard as their personal business whether or how you voted, as opposed to, you know, your personal business, which it is. And the language with which this socially totalitarian mindset is expressed frequently approaches the quasi-religious.

  10/3/16, 9:33 AM
David, by the lake said...

  John--
  Late in the week for a question, I realize, but when, how, or under what circumstances would you see the national mythology we have of America as the "white knight" of the world finally cracking? (For us the citizenry, I mean -- I know the rest of the world already sees us for what we are.) Not so much from a power perspective as the veneer of morality in which we cloak our actions.

  10/3/16, 10:53 AM
lordberia3@gmail.com said...

  John,
  I am currently reading your book on the decline and collapse of the US global empire. One bit in particular caught my attention, where you note that the hundreds of thousands of Homeland Security solders, policemen and army grunts who take orders from the elite, deeply despise the political class.
  One thing that has struck me in the polls during this election is that the overwhelming majority of the police and a big majority of soldiers, back Donald Trump's campaign. Throw in the armed militias and the millions of NRA citizens, some of them heavily armed, across the country who are strongly pro-Trump, and you have a potential populist armed insurrection on your hands.
  Lets assume, for the moment, that Trump narrowly loses the election to Hilary Clinton. Reports, possibly true or false, emerge of potential vote rigging in key swing states (something that Trump and his allies have already warned off) and Trump declares the election result invalid. Trump, and his key allies, call on his supporters to take to the streets and protect the "rigged election". What happens next?
  Could you see a "March of Washington" by armed supporters of Trump, maybe joined at some stage by police and elements within the Army? I'm not saying it is likely (I don't it is), but it is surely a possibility in this climate. Do you think that this is plausible, and if so, would the ordinary solders/policeman rally to the flag of the Donald "Caesar" Trump and seize control of Washington from a despised political elite?

  10/3/16, 12:45 PM
Shane W said...

  I really think those of us popcorn poppers who want to pop some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show, are going to have to find somewhere else to do it. Americans are taking this collapse thing way too seriously, and I've already gotten blowback for being too serene about it all. If we do get a repeat of interwar/World War II Europe, there will be no neutrality/withdrawal. We'll have to go someplace else to pop our popcorn and enjoy the show.
  I was thinking more about the coming civil war (most of my wage class friends think that it is coming, definitely if Hillary wins, and that the Union will definitely lose this time, since it won't be just the South wanting out) Reestablishing the Confederacy should be easy enough, depending on just how senile our elite are, and how quickly the US implodes. However, the rub will be creating something desirable and worth living in (a la Retrotopia) in its place. I'm not at all convinced of the second, and it's not because I'm worried about caricatures of slavery & lynching, but the crazy, harebrained ideas Americans, Southerners included, have about how the world works...

  10/3/16, 2:14 PM
Timberwolf said...

  Juhana said:
  "As I have stated here before, this underground political awakening and networking by young male warrior societies is politically deeply underestimated phenomenon here in Europe. It seems that this working and lower-middle class phenomenon is so far away from the bubble of affluent class that it's future indications go totally unnoticed. But they are still a minority among Hungarians, while anti-EU and anti-immigration stance is clearly majority position there. Still, even if minority,you should see HOW MANY of them there are. You should see. There are couple of videos to describe the feeling of awe as mask of normalcy drops off, but they are NOTHING compared to real experience. Earth trembles under their feet."
  The cossetted affluent liberals and the campus leftists who like to fancy themselves as revolutionaries are living in dream world. They shall soon receive a rude awakening as ancient forces return to the fore and sweep their ivory tower into the trash heap of history, just like the senile elites of ancien regime France after the Revolution of 1789. They will seal their own fate, because they failed to notice the forces rising from underground they thought were a thing of the past, such as the rise of nationalist backlash against the globalist oligarchy and thought they were untouchable in their gated communities and office towers as the hordes gathered below.

  10/3/16, 4:27 PM
Fred said...

  @Shane I don't see the coming divide being North vs. South (Union vs. Confederate). I see it more being coasts vs. the flyover states, or urban vs. rural. The coasts of the country dictate the values and cultures of the whole country these days. It's hard to pick which is more obnoxious, NYC vs Silicon Valley, or DC vs LA/Hollywood. The cities also can't function without draining water from the rural areas, and then trucking their trash and waste out to the rural area to landfills. The next journalist I see who writes about sustainable cities really needs some lessons in systems thinking.
  I just went to a conference in Bethesda, MD. Wow there is a lot of wealth in suburban Maryland. The roads are all smooth, no trash anywhere, grass is green and trimmed, beautiful trees, any kind of store you could want. I thought suburban Philly was nice. They have us beat by several income brackets.

  10/3/16, 5:33 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  Don't get popcorn for your election-watching food, Shane, agreed. It's not a movie. Get a keg of beer and big boxes of hot wings and the like - you're watching a blood sport now.
  Suzette Haden Elgin once described women fresh out of college in the workplace as "playing tennis on a football field during the game." Any resemblance to some of the old-time liberals who think we know the rules and have wandered into a totally different game, racket in hand (oh, do restrain the urge to make the obvious pun here, friends) and their canvas shoes quite defenseless against the cleats now being worn.

  10/3/16, 7:39 PM
Unknown said...

  (Deborah Bender)
  @W. B. Jorgenson--I don't think the NY Times broke the law. As I understand it, the provider of the information to the paper
  may have broken the law, but unless the newspaper or one of its employees induced the source to commit a crime, the newspaper isn't implicated in the crime and is free to publish. This is true even if the information is classified, as in the case of the Pentagon Papers.

  10/3/16, 11:37 PM
Rebecca said...

  Two other things come to mind that are not discussed.
  First, even though there was a large anti-slavery movement, abolishionists by no means regarded blacks (or native americans and various others) as equals. Most did not and they did not hide this belief. So while they had a moral objection to the very idea of enslavement, they did not have a moral objection to the notion of racial superiority and segretation. This has repercussions to this day and is part of our history which is often swept under the rug.
  Secondly, eugenics. While eugenics was popular, dare I say trendy, among liberals and conservatives, it was liberals who advanced the notion of eugenics most enthusiastically ... to be sure on moral grounds of what is best for all. And they were not necessarily wrong in a dispassionate scientific analysis. However, 'morally' this concept has problems which were acknowledged both at the time and since (so is not an example of chronocentrism).
  These were two large issues that cannot be left out of discussion of our history as they have repercussions today.

  10/4/16, 12:33 AM
latefall said...

  @Juhana re extreme diasporas
  My experiences very much overlap with yours there. I think there are some exceptions to the rule (e.g. Iranians, perhaps because they tended to be more urban elites or because they really wanted something else, not just more money?). But the Turkish population in Germany is very much like that. Fairly recently young German liberals have learned that they are also widely despised in Turkey (among the liberals there). Though extreme turks are more likely to end up with the grey wolves or salafists I think.
  @Timberwolf
  When I hear labels such as fascist or (neo)liberal in my personal environment they are rarely used as self identification but mostly assigned to you with a certain agenda in mind for the discussion. So let me reluctantly step up to that label.
  I think we can agree on the fact that the status quo isn't likely to last and that's a good thing. But if you rush headlong into a revolution and "sweep the ivory tower into the trash heap of history", what then?
  The French Revolution wasn't exactly over on July 14th, nor on the 27th. I would really like to engage more with people like you or Juhana. But I'll probably have to do that in the flesh unless we manage a more constructive debate here. You need to plan ahead unless you want to replace one ivory tower with a pile of bones (pulled from the same heap).
  I saw a good bit of hooliganism in Marseille, and while somewhat impressive in this place and age (especially to the watching Africans), you would do well to remember that the couple of thousand people seen in the videos buy you 1-2 hours on The First Day of the Somme. And that is it. So I would strongly urge people to build a desirable and viable post EU model - now. Nationalism without a defensive superstructure* (including immigration) is unlikely to outlast what is probably ahead of us (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpQTni1wF0E).
  While I don't think the analogy of terrorism with peanuts (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kZsOISarzg - also interesting for a interests vs values exercise) is correct the issue currently ranks far below the negative impact of automobiles on society. I do think that terrorism (really: hostile violence) is an issue that has more in common with Ebola (very loosely though) than with with peanuts. To address this effectively I would address this mostly with birth rates**, narratives, and future perspectives.
  As for Americans moving to Eastern Europe, I do see (hear really) the odd beggar with American accent down here in Marseille already. Of course you get many more tourists but it is enough to challenge the narrative of American exceptionalism a little.
  *Most of my views are fairly well represented in defense-and-freedom.blogspot (with a little more emphasis on the southern arc of instability)
  **Regarding population growth I think the issue has not received the depth of treatment that it merits. Neither here nor in society. I suspect that this is mostly because of the "growth imperative" and because for the most part advice to "reduce" is a little late. Still I would appreciate more discussion on the issue that goes beyond lamb intestines (not that they don't have a role to play).

  10/4/16, 1:58 AM
Cherokee Organics said...

  Hi JMG,
  Aspergers is all very interesting and stuff, but what about the tentacles? That's what I want to know!!! Hehe!!! :-)! I look forward to reading the next few installments.
  Cheers
  Chris

  10/4/16, 2:51 AM
Shane W said...

  @Fred,
  oh no, history rhymes but never repeats. Each region will want to go its own way and separate from the Feds/Union. New England, Great Lakes, Confederacy, Cascadia, etc., and the implosion of the Federal government will allow that to happen. I'm still holding out for a peaceable resolution, like the Con Con option in Twilights Last Gleaming, and hoping that the US will be as rotten as the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, and implode just as easily.

  10/4/16, 3:15 AM
latefall said...

  On values vs interests
  I think that there often is no clear cut boundary. First there is the survival instinct (perhaps not limited to the individual), but once you've covered that it gradually transitions into "survival in style". This transition is not at the same level of effort for everyone. People are more or less capable, and they live in more or less challenging environments* (interestingly the polar ends of the plant, where species apparently go to die, feature relatively liberal attitudes). Perhaps for many of those values there is a hard survival reason behind it?
  I often hear voices critical of liberal ideas and values, who do not seem to work this through its implications for themselves (and I am sure I am guilty of that myself).
  This is the case for much of the Brexit vs Ireland/Scotland, (Brexit vs Poles) vs (Poles vs Muslim Immigrants), Hungarian financial compensation/fine re immigrants vs Germany/EU taking in more poor people**.
  From a German perspective there are a few extra bits to consider: For a good few decades you were a couple of weeks away from living (or rotting) in a (nuclear) battlefield (even if there was very limited escalation). So the option of becoming a refugee (or emigrant) was pretty attractive (and very many went to the USA). The probability of this has diminished - (subjectively) to a large part trough European integration. This is one the one hand the EU, but also things like the German reunification.
  If Germany had not made the impression that a unified Germany would put values before interests - I don't think French or British skeptics would have sat still and let it happen (an incredibly fragile and sensitive process). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_reunification#Foreign_support_and_opposition
  Here it becomes more difficult of distinguishing priority of values and interests.
  So if Germany was return to acting on interests (especially short term) in this context the first two figures I would cite are of course the German per capita contribution to the EU budget (~275 EUR), and the receipt of Hungary (>500 EUR per capita).
  Next, from a German perspective housing refugees in places like Hungary is not only closer to their home geographically, but also culturally and financially. So pretty much Orbans suggestion with North Africa replaced by Hungary. On top of that, abstract fear may be replaced by real life experiences in the host role (more with an eye towards Poland). If that lead to bad situations, it would help German politicians pushing for stricter control, and also bad press with nasty pictures would likely curb the flows of economic migrants (but not of refugees of war or terrorists). Germany could of course put into place an appropriate "golden visa" program to skim the top end.

  10/4/16, 6:29 AM
latefall said...

  I don't know about Hungary, but in Germany it is not at all unlikely that we will at some point again become more desperate migrants or refugees if history is any guide, or sea levels keep up/Netherlands has a bad day. Geopolitically the northern European plain will likely keep its role until the sea claims it. I know Hungary also has a pretty eventful past. Is it not on peoples minds that they may fall on harder times again? Or do the not expect mercy from others in such an event? What do people think of the 1951 refugee convention (I think Hungary adopted in 89)?
  @Mallow can you give a number for the fine regarding immigrant/refugee resettlement? How does it compare to the approx 60 billion that German people will have to shell out if there is no resettlement? Unfortunately I couldn't manage to find much hard data in English or German media.
  What do you think would happen if the German population and Merkel (or her successor) would adopt a stance more along the lines of Erdogan fueling desires of a revival of the Ottoman empire? I have big difficulty imagining this without a lot of strife that makes the worst moments of the EU look like a tea party.
  From a practical perspective though I don't think the EU can be reformed. Unfortunately I assume significant and necessary change will only happen after short (and hopefully shallow) period of chaos. But that means we need to be able to find some consensus, which is a question of values and compromises.
  *For example living on little money in southern Europe is vastly more comfortable than doing this in the north. I don't know if suicide rates make for a good proximate measure but comparing the Greek crisis (as bad as it is) is still a long shot from the end of the Soviet Union, or even the beginning of it. It is difficult to put numbers on these things.
  **I am happy to discuss this issue. I don't have a totally fixed opinion myself. For now I think there is an obligation to help legitimate refugees (morally and by international treaties). But it could be done significantly better, particularly with an eye towards local options, incentives (including in host countries), and root causes. There is a lot that can be improved on a technical level as well.

  10/4/16, 6:29 AM
John Roth said...

  @W. B. Jorgensen
  You make some interesting charges with respect to the leak of three of the Donald’s STATE tax returns - documents that the IRS probably never had. Are you a tax lawyer, by any chance? If not, you might want to read this bit from Talking Points Memo’s publisher, who has had to deal with questions about whether something is or is not publishable. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-few-notes-on-the-times-blockbuster . The material about what a media organization can and can’t publish is about a third of the way down.

  10/4/16, 11:05 AM
John Roth said...

  @K Sc
  I said:
  Anyone who says that vaccines are safe is either uninformed or lying. Vaccines are not absolutely safe. There will always be some proportion of people who have a reaction of some level of severity.
  You responded:
  Firstly I used to have the same world-view on this subject as John Roth, Vaccines are safe and only crazy/ignorant people don't vaccinate.
  Your statement about what I said is a flat-out, unvarnished bald-faced lie. Since you seem to want to shut me up by using one of the standard bullying culture techniques: lying about what someone said and thus what they “have to believe,” this qualifies as an ad-hominum attack.
  I’m going to ask JMG to arbitrate.

  10/4/16, 11:18 AM
John Roth said...

  @W. B. Jorgensen
  Autism is a grab-bag of conditions, which vary from an almost complete withdrawal from interaction at an early age to Aspergers, which is the traditional socially-inept genius type. Like a lot of “medical” issues, putting a name on a group of disparate and poorly understood syndromes to attract funding has unfortunately led people to think we’re talking about one thing, which it isn’t.
  In any case, everything I’ve ever seen on treatment has focussed on social interaction as the one thing that can help the more severe early-onset form from that grab-bag. This is the first that I’ve heard the education bureaucracy has gotten its claws into the matter with its emphasis on improving test scores to protect the school management’s jobs.
  @Armata
  Yes, I’ve noticed the way the Deutsche Bank issue isn’t being addressed here. The US is proposing a fine that will essentially destroy it for its part in the 2008 debacle. Are you aware that this is the only bank that will deal with Donald Trump’s businesses? The other big commercial banks have blackballed him after the way he’s stiffed them for hundreds of millions in losses. That’s just the way business works.
  That fine will probably be negotiated downwards. In any case, I believe that the German government thinks it has a plan which doesn’t involve the loaded word “bailout.” Merkel has got to be sweating.
  That “overwhelming” vote in Hungary turns out to be invalid because voters stayed home. The ones that did turn out voted against allowing refugees, though.
  By the way, I note that Hungary’s quota for settling refugees is 1,294 (source: Guardian). I presume that’s per year. Hardly the millions that some people seem to be fearing. It’s still a billion-euro fine, but it’s hardly the size of Hungary’s GDP, which was 133.4 billion USD in 2013 (source: Wikipedia via Google).
  @ Chris
  Yes, I noticed that OPEC agreed to cut supply. As far as I can tell, that’s going to have almost no effect, because the people who are going to keep pumping regardless aren’t OPEC members, and OPEC’s dictates in the past have been ignored by almost all OPEC members as well. Saudi Arabia has been the only one that will actually change its output to get a higher price. That worked when Saudi Arabia was the biggest exporter and didn’t have money problems. Neither of those is the case any more.
  @Unknown
  As far as “gender-blind” compensation statistics goes, the majority of the difference is that women are preferentially in lower-paid fields. If you ignore that, yes, the difference is relatively smaller, but it’s not zero. See the comments coming out of Silicon Valley at this time on compensation. Since software development is my field (I’m retired) I keep an ear out for what’s happening, and it’s not pretty.
  @Patricia Matthews
  One often overlooked factor in the slavery debate is that slavery wasn’t all that uncommon in the Northern states, and for exactly the reasons you mention: household and shop help.
  @.
  “Sharia” is simply law that’s based on Koranic principles. The attitude seems to be that the Koran has a number of universal principles that are applicable at all times and places - a sentiment that seems to be shared by Christians with respect to the teachings of Jesus and Paul, and the Jews with respect to the Torah.
  Applying those principles to the particulars of a specific country and culture leads to a lot of variation.
  @JMG
  As far as a minimum payment just for being a citizen or permanent resident is concerned, I think that some of that money is being counted twice. Specifically, one fact that’s often glossed over is that what the Federal government pays for health care is essentially what the typical Western European country pays on a per-person basis. That’s one of the bases for Single Payer. However, a lot of that’s part of Medicaid (a welfare payment) and so it’s got to go into one of two different pockets.

  10/4/16, 11:25 AM
Justin said...

  Scotlyn, I would keep the 75% happy by always maintaining a path to voter-hood that is economically possible for anyone to follow. IE some form of paid national service, like yes, Starship Troopers (not necessarily military service). Granted, I haven't really thought about this idea in the context of the long descent.
  The idea is that the sort of person who should have political power should be the kind of person who accomplishes a lot in life (a doctor, soldier, farmer, etc) or someone who has been spit out of the rear end of the system but is still willing to work given the opportunity.

  10/4/16, 11:45 AM
Bill Pulliam said...

  A long-arc view here about all this disolution and civil war and such... spanning time frames of course that none of us will live to see...
  One of the major cultural hallmarks of the industrial era has been the atomization of humanity. Piece by piece, individuals have been separated from their communities and cultural networks, and broken up into individual atoms that can be rearranged for whatever purposes industrial society needs them to serve. This process is continuing rapidly, making each person a self-contained pod plugged into the internet and downright oblivious to the other people in its immediate vicinity.
  But as industialization collapses, so will atomization. It will have to. Only molecular, connected humans will survive in large numbers. Society will reinvent itself, communities will reassemble themselves. They will have to.
  So, any vision of the future that includes autonomous atomic whackjobs continuing to behave antisocially en masse for decades and centuries into the future is fundamentally flawed (like all linear extrapolations of the present into the future).

  10/4/16, 2:04 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  A thought on another source, or at least manifestation, of liberal arrogance and the values regime. I was rereading am old, former favorite s/f novel, Pauline Ashwell's Unwillingly to Earth, which began as short stories in Astounding S/F - or was it already Analog by that time? The feisty colonial heroine attracts the attention of the head of the Cultural Engineering Department of a small but prestigious Earthside university; much discussion of why Cultural Engineering is a Good Thing. Mainly because it's in the Right Hands.
  Long-time s/f readers (others can stop gagging now) will recognize the hand, and the hangups, of the late, memorable John M. Campbell, who could go off on and logically justify as many tangents as any mad scientist (or upset engineer) in the known universe. And had the same ability to be convincing as Robert Heinlein. And Campbell's Astounding was pretty well universally read by those who thought they were Making Our Future. How many absorbed the attitude described above, hook, line, and sinker? Especially reading story after story in which such sanctified meddlers stopped wars, raised native people from barbarism - in one notable case, by making a tribe move far enough out of their territory that they could not farm by their traditional methods, thereby being forced to turn to Scientific Farming.
  BTW, this book, once a favorite because heroines like Lizzie were few and far between, leaves my hands as soon as I can get it out the door. But - just a thought.

  10/4/16, 3:06 PM
Scotlyn said...

  Justin, if the path to voterhood truly IS economically possible for everyone to follow, then what stops it being followed by everyone? ie - it would not BE limited to 25% or so?
  But, what I'm asking really is: are there people whose pursuit of their own interests can, in your opinion, safely be excluded from the political process? And if so, what is the nature of the safety mechanism you believe will protect the political process from the natural frustrations of the dispossessed?

  10/4/16, 4:33 PM
Shane W said...

  I'm just so disappointed that our zombie economy was corruptly jerryrigged in '08. If we'd gone into free-fall/Depression, debt jubilee/default then, then there's a good chance that we might have hit bottom and might be beginning to recover to the "new normal", and have undergone drastic changes as a result. Remember, even the first Civil War only lasted four years. Now, having put off the inevitable, we still have it hanging over our heads. That only benefitted selfish Boomers and Lucky Few, who got a few more (undeserved) peaceful retirement years...

  10/4/16, 5:04 PM
donalfagan said...

  Interesting article on parents dealing with autism: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/09/the-families-that-launch-their-own-autism-studies/502025/
  BTW, I've met a handful of people with Aspergers, one of which is JMG, and they all seem quite different from each other. Even my daughter and her half-brother aren't that much alike, symptomatically. He reads voraciously and remembers everything, she writes and draws obsessively, and taught herself Japanese.

  10/4/16, 5:05 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  And, backing up JMG's remarks on the feudal solution to household help and shop assistants, medieval records are extensive and very clear. Kids and teenagers, on all levels of society. In the towns, boys and some girls went into apprenticeships; the other girls went into service. In the countryside, your hired girl was probably your neighbor's daughter, and your farmhand, your neighbor's son; when manors took over from castles, the village youngsters took service in the manor house.
  Castle staff, apparently, was almost all male; the castle was a fighting fortress, and the men-at-arms or war band lived there. And it was the duty of the lord's wife to protect whatever maids they had. (Renaissance, not medieval, but Catherine Howard was a maid-in-waiting in a holding where this was not the case, which was part of why she got into such serious trouble even before Henry took a fancy to her.)
  The pattern of hiring your neighbor's sons and daughters carried over into America in many regions. One thing that destroyed the system was the coming of the factory - the Lowell mill girls could have money in their pockets to call their own for the first time ever. Though apparently a good many of them were earning enough to bring into their future marriages, if and when.

  10/4/16, 5:21 PM
Patricia Mathews said...

  Justin - the problem with that is that the voice of the common laborer is not heard and their interests are not considered. After all, "they don't count; they're nobody." Here, have a pamphlet; the union guy will be at Moe's Tavern tomorrow after work.

  10/4/16, 5:24 PM
W. B. Jorgenson said...

  Deborah Bender,
  Law has a little quirk, according to a lawyer I know and asked about this, the law is far stricter when the victim of a crime is not the government, so it may still be illegal. In any case, whoever gave the information is still a criminal, and the US government has established the precedent reporters can not withhold sources/information relevant to a criminal investigation.
  John Roth, I'm not a lawyer, however I did get a lawyer I personally know to confirm that the way the law is written it opens the times to potential liability. As for it being a state document, this is news to me, however, it makes sense. I didn't read anything other than the article in my comment, which didn't say (or if it did, I missed it). I'm unsure if the law applies to state documents, and am unfamiliar with the state laws, so I can't comment. Even if there is no criminal liability, there may be civil liability, which could also be quite the spectacle.
  Absolutely, autism is a very diverse thing. It strikes me as doubtful it makes sense to study it as one thing, but that is how it is being handled. And my experience is from a public school in Canada, however given education bureaucracies I think it likely to be widespread. The few other autistics I've asked about it confirm similar things to what happened at my school, but I will admit it is a small sample.

  10/4/16, 5:27 PM
Fred said...

  And Assange announces Wikileaks is releasing documents relevant to the US election each week leading up to the election. Wow. A fiction writer 2 years ago writing a story using what has happened so far this election season would have been told "too outrageous".

  10/4/16, 6:20 PM
patriciaormsby said...

  I want to add my backing to what K Sc has said about vaccination. I am fortunate to live in Japan, where although a certain amount of vaccination has been mandated in children, it is not nearly to the extreme extent I hear about in America, and topic of vaccination has not become a source of hysterical pronouncements. Thus I feel freer to speak up than I would if I lived in America. Greens candidate Dr. Jill Stein has been accused of anti-vax views despite never having espoused them. It has become a weapon in the political gaming.
  The "herd immunity" hypothesis was based on observing disease caused by wild viruses among herd animals. If a certain percentage had acquired immunity by having caught the disease before, it prevented the disease from getting a foothold among the remaining members that lacked their own immunity.
  Which makes sense.
  I suppose we ultimately have Edward L. Bernays to thank for what happened to twist that idea into the grotesque caricature repeated faithfully by at least one commenter above, that a vaccine known to be poorly effective among those who receive it miraculously achieves efficacy only when the magic number of 100% vaccination is reached--and never mind how many kids have to suffer and die for the "common good" (kaching!).
  How handy! You don't have to make a vaccine safe or effective anymore, just blame the dissidents.

  10/4/16, 6:52 PM
K Sc said...

  John Roth. Apologies you are right. In oversimplifying my response I misrepresented your comment.
  I certainly didn't give it much thought and I was genuinely ignorant until it mattered to me.
  You on the other hand certainly made the point you don't believe they are totally safe and there are risks.
  Sorry for the confusion. My bad. I didn't mean to lie about your position or bully

  10/4/16, 7:29 PM
Matthias Gralle said...

  @Eric S:
  Thank you very much for your comments on Beatrice. In fact, I don't disagree with anything you said, and I will be happy to take a new look at the specific cantos you cited. What misled me in your first comment was your remark "...channel that raw female sexual energy into a higher virtue", where I would have said "raw male sexual attraction towards women".
  Regardless, it is a great and rare pleasure to see somebody discuss Dante. I think the last time I learnt something about the Divina Commedia was when JMG corrected an Italian believer in progress that Ulisse's famous last words do not necessarily reflect Dante's own attitude towards limitless "progress".
  By the way, one of my greatest pleasures when reading Dante for the first time was discovering all the places where he is alluded to in the Narnia Chronicles! The giants in a canyon, Caspian's speech to his mariners and so many others.

  10/4/16, 8:19 PM
Joel Caris said...

  Hi Nastarana,
  Sorry for the very late reply; busy week! In regards to regenerative agriculture, absolutely! I've worked on a number of small farms, grown a lot of food via various sustainable and organic methods, and helped raise animals on pasture. I've also thought as much about the food system as I likely have anything else, and done a lot of reading on it. I'll be talking about agriculture on Litterfall, and probably will address it in the Closed System Economics posts. It would make sense for state and federal governments to implement some basic supports for small scale agriculture while reducing and ultimately eliminating the perverse subsidies that encourage large scale industrial agriculture. There's a very clear national interest in having a strong base of competent farmers and a large supply of productive farmland, and there's no reason we can't start filling the agricultural hole we've dug over the past several decades.

  10/4/16, 9:14 PM
ed boyle said...

  Since I recently read divine commedy i was glad to read other's analyses, regarding sexual mores in middle ages. My take was more personal, like instead of analysis from the outside, I experience it directly from the inside, like a 13th century monk undergoing a spiritual awakening, there's the difference between looking at things from the outside and from the inside. The old saw goes 'before you judge a man walk a mile in his moccassins'. We have lots of problems nowadays, strife, as people cannot relate to one another. This is perhaps the ultimate liberalism, true understanding. Few people can do this. This is the deepest magic.

  10/5/16, 12:04 AM
. said...

  @latefall
  It's €250,000 per person who is rejected. I have no idea how that compares to the costs on Germany but such figures are usually impossible to accurately calculate anyway. And that data is always 'politically sensitive' so you can never trust it.
  I don't know what you mean about Germans and Erdogans caliphate dreams.
  By far the most effective and humane way to help as many refugees as possible is to do so in the first safe country they reach. The current migration to Europe in fact has little or nothing to do with Syria.
  Anyone who can: reach Libya, pay a boat owner to take them a few kilometres off shore from Libya where there'll be collected by the European navy ferry services and brought to Italy, destroy their ID papers - can remain in Europe and will be provided with at least basic social welfare.
  The merit or lack thereof of their application for asylum (if they ever make one) is irrelevant. They either disappear then, adopt a new identity or are permitted to remain because deportation is not possible. You can't deport people whose identity you don't know, who receive medical certs from a sympathetic doctor declaring them unfit to travel, whose home country is no longer a functioning state or which refuses to accept them back. Those circumstances cover most migrants arriving in Europe.
  The only reason Europeans aren't up in arms about this is that most have only slightly more knowledge of how the system works than Americans do.
  In fact, anyone from the US who'd like to live in Europe will find that a flight to Libya is a far easier way to do so than jumping through the hoops required to get an actual visa.
  If you're pale-skinned that won't be an issue - European authorities would rather die than suggest that a pale-skinned person might not be from Syria. I'm only half-joking - there are reports that enterprising young adventurers have already spotted the opportunity.
  Mallow

  10/5/16, 4:30 AM
. said...

  @John Roth
  On Hungary: It’s not the numbers they’re asked to take or even the threat of the fine. It’s the principle that they won’t allow their non-EU immigration policies to be dictated by a decision that Merkel unilaterally made and then bullied everyone else into signing up to.
  The low turnout is partly because all opposition parties called for a boycott. But much of it was complacency. Everyone knows that the redistribution plan is dead in the water. The migrants want Germany or Sweden and those few relocated so far have promptly turned around and gone back. Hungarians also know that Orban won’t allow it under any circumstances anyway so they didn’t feel the need to vote.
  72% of Hungarians have a negative view of Muslims in their country. That’s the reality and that’s why it’s safe to assume that most are with Orban on this policy – whatever their other political views.
  http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/07/11/europeans-fear-wave-of-refugees-will-mean-more-terrorism-fewer-jobs/
  On sharia: It’s nowhere near as varied as many of us non-muslims and women might like it to be.
  In a Pew forum survey of muslims in 20 countries who support making sharia the law of the land (not all muslims do):
  28% – 88% support corporal punishments as part of sharia – that means whipping and cutting off the hands of thieves.
  21% to 89% support stoning for adultery as part of sharia (adultery is often defined as all extra-marital sex – that’s why Malaysia whips those accused of such relationships).
  4% to 86% support the death penalty for leaving Islam.
  Out of 23 countries, support for equal inheritance rights for daughters and sons varies from 15% to 88% (unequal inheritance rights are a part of sharia)
  Even the bottom end of those ranges are extremely problematic for anyone who disagrees with them so the variation is not all that relevant. And the lower percentages are generally from places like Bosnia and former Soviet satellites in south Asia. They represent quite small population numbers overall.
  Such views may bear comparison to the views of some fundamentalist Christians in the US but for western Europeans they’re completely out of line.
  The European Court of Human Rights in Refah Partisi was able to get past the cultural variations to conclude that sharia, itself, has a real content, and that that content is incompatible with the Convention on Human Rights.
  http://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Annual_report_2003_ENG.pdf
  http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religion-politics-society-beliefs-about-sharia/

  10/5/16, 4:58 AM
Nancy Sutton said...

  Well, this is too late for consideration, probably, but just another attempt at 'salvation by progress' pile.
  http://voxeu.org/article/advanced-economies-progress-dismal-and-dazzling
  And, btw, a topic for discussion: why won't, don't the majority of folks see through the lies, etc?
  And I just thought of a 'meme' ... 'real black magic is marketing'... can we make it as successful as '1% vs 99%' ? or find a better one?

  10/5/16, 8:55 AM
Fred said...

  I forgot to share this - in the category of stranger than any fiction - the Amish and old order Mennonites came out for the Trump rally in Manheim in observable numbers. 15,000 people requested tickets to the event, 6,000 were let in to the space
  Meanwhile the media reports that Hillary is holding town halls with engaged voters. They cram a hundred people in a small room (probably all campaign workers and volunteers), keep the camera close, and everyone acts like they care.

  10/5/16, 9:39 AM
Bob Patterson said...

  First, the collapse of the anti-war movement can be traced to a single night, that of the draft lottery, along with the assurance that any number over 120 would probably not be drafted at all. I won that lottery, Number 15. The next day at my dorm at Michigan State every door had a piece of notebook paper taped to it with the lottery numbers of the occupants. The most popular to see was the one that listed 364 - 001. Suddenly a majority of male eligibles was not threatened with potential death. The attitude became, why should I risk my head or my future over protesting something that no longer threatens me? In a political sense, it was brilliant.
  Second, liberalism had sort of run amok. High taxation and legal restraints on behaviors. Recently in CA, tax officials handed out tickets fining people at an organic growers festival up to $750 for giving organic apples away without a tasting permit.

  10/5/16, 2:07 PM
Bob Patterson said...

  Most discussions in immigration into the US fail to understand the primary driver of this policy set. With our low birth rate (for some time) our economy must have substantial immigration to allow for growth (until recently). Without a substantial inflow of immigrants, we would be facing the large demographic problems facing Japan. Huge numbers of retirees and not enough people of working age to sustain, let alone grow their industrial base.

  10/5/16, 2:12 PM
M Smith said...

  @ John Roth:
  "Firstly I used to have the same world-view on this subject as John Roth, Vaccines are safe and only crazy/ignorant people don't vaccinate."
  This might be one of the things that I notice in posts all over the internet: disregard for punctuation. If the poster meant:
  "Firstly I used to have the same world-view on this subject as John Roth. Vaccines are safe and only crazy/ignorant people don't vaccinate."
  ..then it changes the meaning 180 degrees.

  10/5/16, 3:17 PM
John Roth said...

  @Rebecca
  Interesting you should mention that many, in fact most, abolitionists were white supremacists. So was Thomas Jefferson. A couple of weeks ago one of our ministers dropped a minor bomb-shell about Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the leading lights of Transcendentalism, which is one of the founding roots of Unitarian-Universalism. He was not only a white supremacist, which would be typical of the time and not otherwise objectionable, but also wrote quite a bit on the subject including, I think I remember, two books advocating the position.

  10/5/16, 5:17 PM
George F Martin said...

  You and Thomas Frank, " Listen Liberal" seem to be on the same Page

  10/5/16, 5:42 PM
Mongo, At The Moment said...

  Bloody hell -- nicely done.

  10/6/16, 6:52 AM

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