The War On Noticing

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* That is so funny. The researchers didn’t think that what non-whites think would be of any importance and so didn’t even bother to interview them. They automatically bypassed them as though they were invisible.

* The left/academic label of “racist” is a slur only directed at whites. They would never call South African blacks or Gulf Arabs racist, even though they meet their definition.

* Lots of pushback in the comments. And this is The Atlantic! The cultural winds are definitely shifting. Can anyone envisage what a politically incorrect yet liberal future might look like?

* According to many liberals, it would look like Rwanda. That is the conclusion that many liberals jump to: equality or genocide – there is no middle ground. What does that tell you about them?

* Rawlsian arguments: African Americans didn’t choose to be born with lower median IQs, and they are still our fellow citizens, so they deserve our support and help. A recognition of IQ differences would support segregation by IQ in schools (it wouldn’t be strict segregation by race, since an African American with an IQ of, say, 90, would attend the same schools as a white American with an IQ of 90). Low IQ schools would be focused on basics – the three R’s – using simple rote learning methods, followed by vocational training with a pipeline to skilled trade jobs. This would be combined with a revival of the union movement to support higher wages for blue-collar Americans, as well as a reduction in immigration and targeted increases in tariffs and trade barriers to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. (much as Reagan did with the Japanese car industry in the 1980s to convince them to open American factories).

Meanwhile, we would embark upon a massive, Manhattan-Project-scale campaign to find a method of increasing genetic IQ. This could conceivably be done in a decade or two with enough resources, though you’d still have lower-IQ older people around for a while even afterward. We would also do everything possible to remove any environmental hazards that can lower IQ, such as lead-contaminated soil.

* Study out today showing 42 of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in Latin America, based on murder rate per 100,000.

There are four cities in the US (you know which ones) and four in South Africa on the list.

21 are in Brazil, the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics!! Eight in Venezuela and five in Mexico.

Mexico somehow got lucky and had five cities fall off the list from last year, even though homicides were up in Mexico for 2015 over 2014.

* SJWism is the last respectable refuge of white supremacism.

I’ve had exactly the same thought: that when looking at the spectrum of ideologies, modern liberalism belongs as a sub-set of white racial supremacism.

It’s telling that liberals are obsessed with the Nazis, as political groups often despise the very groups they are politically closest to–the ‘Judean Popular Front syndrome’ if you like, because they are competing for the same support.

In an era when whites are denied any way of understanding their own history, or any kind of racial/historical identity, consciousness, or sense of destiny, is it outlandish to suppose that for some liberals White Guilt offers them the only acceptable way for them to have a racial sense of belonging–albeit and entirely negative one? One in which the Master Race willingly dissolves itself–imagine Angela Merkel as Arnie at the end of Terminator 2, lowering herself into the molten metal–for the sake of creating an Equality of Untermensch at some future date?

* Yeah, you should hear what they say on Spanish language talk radio. One of my favorites (on a San Francisco station) was Hispanics complaining about Philipinos snarfing up Affirmative Action jobs meant for Hispanics (in particular how they’ve established a lock on Postal Service jobs).

* Just flipped the channel to Supergirl … Strong, smart, sexy, competent black man (who apparently is a Martian in disguise) talking about how the WHITE martians brutally slaughtered his people, the green martians back on Mars ….

The good news is, the ratings are starting to drop for this sh*t show.

* Barrons: SAT Integrity Falls Victim to China Cheating Scandal
College Board under fire amid security breaches and calls for the test to be optional in U.S. college admissions.

* “I think it was Vonnegut who pointed out that, for human beings, ideas are more badges of group identity than attempts to understand reality. It is indeed the same thing for both religious believers and leftists.”

I’m with Vonnegut. That’s far more of a human flaw than a quirk of the religious or the left. The right and secularists (and libertarians, wishy-washy middle-roaders, etc…) are certainly not immune.

In fact, that kind of twisting is arguably more dangerous among those who insist that their faction is intrinsically less susceptible to it, but that, too, is a flaw that extends to most all of humanity.

* The Martians come to Earth, and, feeling superior to Earthlings, grant, say, Minnesotans a permanent sense of grievance and a permanent sense of virtue, despite evidence that both grievance and virtue are unearned and undue. Swap Martians for whites, often the offspring of wealthy industrialists, and Minnesotans for blacks.

The left-liberal/SJW mindset has, I think, more complicated antecedents, but respectable white supremacism seems to me at first glance to lie among them. The idea needs more work than I can offer.

* The moderators here should help out by pressing a heavier boot on the anti-Semitism. The simple fact of racial IQ distributions means that no intellectual operation can get moving in the modern world that systematically excludes Jews.

Incidentally, I reported some comments at a popular news website that uses Facebook comments for egregious anti-Semitism. Facebook says such comments are just fine with them. Offend Palestinians and your account is liable to be locked out permanently but that was fine. It’s no wonder we need ADL. And with mass migration from the most anti-Semitic populations of the world into the West, it’s going to get worse.

* The ACT publishes a national report each year showing how people do on that test. Up until 2013 they published separate reports for every minority group. I took these numbers and put them into a spread sheet and backed out the races to leave a white distribution.

Anyway, I think a reasonable standard of someone being “really smart” is to have made a 30 or higher on the ACT. We could use different cutoffs, but this will suffice.

Three-tenths of one percent of blacks score a 30 or higher on the ACT. (Roughly 1,100 in the entire country).
1.46 percent of Hispanics score a 30 or higher.
Eight percent of whites score a 30 or higher (this includes Jews and American Indians; the former I couldn’t back out, the latter I was too lazy to).
Eighteen percent of Asians score a 30 or higher.

So there are roughly 24 times more smart whites than there are smart blacks, and 60 times more smart Asians than there are smart blacks. It’s certainly amazing how those college kids will notice things!

2014 stats.

* The ACT benefits from not being paid as much attention as the SAT. The ACT folks probably want to keep it that way.

* One must also remember that in 2016 Trump is now mainstream.

Or rather, Trump represents opinions that are now mainstream. Alt-right opinion has been building for a long time now. Every year it has been gaining strength, building exponentially. Few people notice that when you lop off the end of the hocky stick curve and zoom in, it’s another hockey stick. The growth rate of the curve is the same, but when it builds from 10% to 50% of the population, it’s a lot more noticeable than the 2 to 10% jump.

Put it this way: If Trump had tried to run for president 4 years ago with the same campaign, would he have had the same success? Maybe, probably not. 8 years ago? Doubtful. 12 years ago? Would have been dismissed as a loon.

* Middle Eastern Muslim cities like Cairo have tended to be relatively safe to walk around, except during political turmoil.

Things change.

Mexico, for example, was fairly low crime in the 1960s-1980s. The mirror on my dad’s rental car got busted while we were playing golf outside Veracruz in 1974. That’s about the only crime I can remember in about 30 days of wandering around Mexico over the decades with my father. My dad was convinced it wasn’t just a minor hit and run accident, that it was done intentionally by the golf club members who didn’t like outsiders at their country club. I didn’t believe him then. Now I don’t know what to think.

* Just as a rampaging idiot like George W Bush made it possible for a culturally Marxist, anti-American black man like Obama to be elected, Obama has made it possible for a nationalistic, non-pc candidate like Trump to have a chance.

* Steve, it looks like Denmark may be picking up on your idea to have immigrants require insurance, or at least a deposit:

Denmark is expected to adopt a law on Tuesday requiring police to seize cash and other valuables from some asylum seekers as they enter the country. The seizures, which would go toward defraying the cost of refugee care, are being widely criticized as a violation of human rights.
Mehran Ziai, a Kurd, …. says if he’d known about the proposed law when he came from northern Iraq five months ago, he might have gone elsewhere. “I had no choice but to come to Europe,” he says, “but maybe I wouldn’t have come to Denmark, because I see now they don’t like refugees here. Maybe I would have gone to Sweden or Norway or another country.”

Bingo.

* This was my problem with the new Star Wars – that every casting choice was so clearly laden with 2015-era political significance. The whole point of sci-fi and fantasy is escapism from our current cultural milieu, but in spite of some good scenes, the movie kept telling me the galaxy far far away was engaged in a titanic battle of Hillary’s Democratic Party versus the Space Nazis.

* Marty Peretz: “Well, I am extremely pessimistic about Mexican-American relations, not because the U.S. had done anything specifically wrong to our southern neighbor but because a (now not quite so) wealthy country has as its abutter a Latin society with all of its characteristic deficiencies: congenital corruption, authoritarian government, anarchic politics, near-tropical work habits, stifling social mores, Catholic dogma with the usual unacknowledged compromises, an anarchic counter-culture and increasingly violent modes of conflict. Then, there is the Mexican diaspora in America, hard-working and patriotic but mired in its untold numbers of illegals, about whom no one can talk with candor.”

The first thing that came to mind was my pet term that shows absolutely no sign of catching on: liberal white supremacy. Not Peretz, obviously, but his detractors at JournoList. I haven’t read the Two-Minute Hate yet, just Lying Eyes’ set-up, and the quote. But I don’t have to. I know what’s coming next; Liberal White Supremacy, which is the only way I can explain the absolute refusal on the part of liberals to take sentiments like Peretz’ seriously. The Great Big White Man can never be harmed by anything the little brown man does, so liberals are secure to play their insipid status games, where they prove they aren’t the kind of white trash threatened by LBMs. Of course, like everything else in liberalism, Liberal White Supremacy is a perversion of an underlying truth.

* By definition, since I only considered Caucasian girls when dating and courting, I must be racist. Good enough for me.

When someone calls me a name that I openly embrace, they’ve lost their little magic power (of incantations), haven’t they?

* Mexico’s recent murder wave is an initiative of the Presidente Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) administration. After years of cooperation with the drug cartels, Calderón — a recovering alcoholic — decided that the Gringo drug war had to be fought in earnest.

Since Gringos spend more on drugs than the entire Mexican military and police budgets by several times, the government forces were heavily outgunned. About half the Gringo drug money eventually makes its way south of the border to pay for smuggling the drugs north and the Gringos are willing to pay whatever it takes to keep the drugs flowing so cartel funds are effectively unlimited. Of course, much of the price of the impossible dream to stopping cartels is paid in blood.

Before Calderón, the anti-drug forces simply took cash from the cartels and distributed it among themselves under the table. Then the cartels set up friendly busts from time to time where the police would put on a big show for the occupying Gringo advisors pretending to collaborate with them by seizure of guns and powders and cash. It was peaceful and safe. Stupid Gringo bureaucrats didn’t know any better.

But Mexico is still safe to walk around in, except for a few northern cities. It would be astonishing if a 30-day visit resulted in any kind of contact with crime at all. Just stay out of places like Ciudad Juárez.

So I don’t know how dangerous many Arab cities are, but I expect a lot of them are dangerous. We simply don’t know much about places like Yemen or Gaza or ISIS. The Sub-Saharan and Afghan Moslem cities seem very violent from stories, but that isn’t data. I expect Sudan, Afghanistan, and the like might dominate a list of really murderous places with enough documentation.

Central America has always been both extremely violent — since Maya times — and good at orderly record keeping. That’s why the numbers there are so extreme. Unlike Mexico, the Mayans were never conquered by a European power and pacified. The Maya’s Guerra De Las Castas was bloody and horrible into the twentieth century and was resolved only by accepting democratic Maya majority rule. Then the Communists brought mass bloodshed again driven by Maya identity disguised as class conflict.

* if Leftists embraced HBD they would try and impose rules to encourage inter-racial mating. IQ is just one aspect of HBD and genetic engineering will first be available to the wealthy and too costly for use among the masses.

Leftists who embrace HBD would actively promote inter-racial mating. Just as the Left today fights against income inequality via taxes and quotas , they would use the same tools to wage battle against genetic inequality…..the government would subsidies a sperm donor program, so black females could get free sperm from East Asian donors….white and Asian females who have mulatto offspring would be given tax incentives , stipends , grants etc…to encourage miscegenation.
Most schools are already segregated, to encourage racial mixing leftists would work even harder to desegregate our schools, to encourage inter-racial mating. Schools which are less than 10% black would lose all government funding and no public school would exceed 20% black.

Posted in America, Blacks, Race | Comments Off on The War On Noticing

Betting & Sports

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* The only purpose of a point spread is to ensure that a roughly equal amount of money is best on both teams.

Well, usually that’s what a book wants, and sometimes not, and how often a particular book wants that varies from book to book.

The advantage the bettor has over the book is that the bettor doesn’t have to play every game, while the book attracts a large clientele by offering odds on a lot of games in a lot of sports. When Jacksonville State plays Tennessee Tech in college hoops, most or all of the books are simply going to want to split the action. It’s a D-1 game, and they have to put up a number, so they do. They might have 100 college games plus 7 or 8 NBA games and 8 or 9 NHL games on the same Saturday (plus maybe pro tennis and European soccer and who knows what else). They’re unlikely to take a side, as they’re well aware that some people in Jacksonville, Alabama, may have a much better handle on what the line ought to be. However, in other cases, books will take a side.

First, the guys running the show generally like to gamble. I watched the Panthers-Pats Super Bowl with a party that included a former sportsbook director. He had 55 dimes on the side and 33 on the total. At one of the forums I frequent, we have posters who are inhouse at books in Costa Rica and other points south. They have opinions, and they shade lines to get uneven action. Not that long ago, when the Stardust used to put out the first numbers each Sunday during the football season, Roxy was always presumed to be inviting action on the favorite when he would make a team a 2,5-, 6.5-, or 9.5-point favorite or on the dog at +3.5, +7.5, etc.

Second, taking a side maximizes profits where the book is better at determining the true line than the public is. The Kelly Criterion remains applicable when you’re a sportsbook betting at +110 instead of -110, and you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t set the number somewhere between the true line and the split-the-action line. If your competitors do this (successfully) and you don’t, you may “conservative” yourself out of business.

* Kobe Bryant by himself never showed any ability to make his team better during his career. He won three titles with Phil Jackson and Shaq and Shaq was the MVP of all three championships. After having the streak stopped by San Antonio, the Lakers signed Peyton and Malone to push for a fourth one which despite being huge favorites they lost to the Pistons 4-1, largely because Bryant wanted to be “the man” more then in winning the title.

He pouted afterwards and got Shaq traded on unfavorable terms to Miami and de facto got Phil Jackson fired despite his then nine titles. The next three full seasons without a big man ( and with Jackson without a big the last two after being rehired after season one ) Bryant’s team missed the playoffs the first year and then had back to back first round exits. After this he pouted and demanded a trade from the Lakers because they couldn’t win with the team he demanded from Buss.

They were likewise going nowhere the following season when they got former Laker star and GM Jerry West who was know the Grizzlies GM to trade them their best players for gum and comic books and, lo and behold the Lakers became contenders again, winning the Western Conference, but losing to Boston 4-2 largely due again to Bryant’s inability to share the limelight with his teammates including the one that got him a new lease on life.

Now with a legitimate big man with passing skill the Lakers won two more titles the next two seasons after Bryant got Gasol for a full season for the first time. Eventually he got tired the little attention that Gasol got and eventually blew up that team as well, Jackson included, and have done absolutely nothing since. These last two seasons where the Lakers are one of the worst teams in the NBA are fitting end to career marked selfishness and an inability to play well with others.

* It’ll be interesting to see, btw, when the steroids revelations finally come out about the NBA. Clearly many of the players have been on them (check out the physiques in the 1990s!), and I think Lebron was one of them—his physique has been far too muscular compared to forwards of days gone by.

I usually judge physiques of baseball and basketball players by pre-1990s standards, since the late 1980s seems to be when athletes started to, en mass, drop the old superstitions about “weight lifting making you too tight to move”, which was probably due to the introduction of steroids, which offered bulk/strength without the loss of flexibility/agility ascribed to weight lifting. (Jose Conseco admitted being a sort of Typhoid Mary of Steroids in the late 1980s in baseball).

Anyway, Lebron took off his shirt once during an NBA game at the behest of his agent to show off for the crowd, and he was far too bulky and sculpted compared to pre-1990s power forwards/small forwards. Then you remember he was carrying that extra bulk down a hardwood floor 80-100 times a year, and it was clear the only way he could do so and remain that fast and agile was some sort of juice. Compare his body to, say, Tim Duncan, and he looked like Arnold.

Anyway, when the NBA thing hits, it’ll be great. Another circus.

* Both Newton and Russell Wilson were outstanding over the second half of the season, while this year the leading white pocket quarterbacks seemed to get dinged up and their effectiveness diminished as the season dragged on and weather got worse.

Here’s an interesting hypothesis that could easily be tested: white pocket passing quarterbacks tend to be better in the first half of the season before it gets cold and wet, while black running quarterbacks are better over the second half of the season.

I haven’t noticed this before 2015, so it’s probably not true in general, but it seemed to be true in 2015.

Or maybe it’s becoming more true as more rules get enforced to prevent quarterbacks from getting injured?

* They should do more to provide placekickers with opportunities to be heroes as well as goats.

Here’s a vague idea: put a 10 foot tall net between the crossbars between 20 and 30 feet off the ground. Kick it into the net you get two points, below the net one point, over the net zero points. That would encourage low kicks, which would make blocking kicks more feasible.

Blocked kicks are great.

My son’s JV team won their league on last play of the season blocked field goal run back 95 yards for a touchdown: it was the single most exciting play I’ve seen in 50 years of watching football.

Posted in Basketball, Football, Gambling, Steroids | Comments Off on Betting & Sports

How Did Nate Silver Miss The Rise Of Donald Trump?

Comments to Steve Sailer:

* It’s really very simple! Best forecasting is able to remove most personal biases. Nate knows it very well. Alas, it is very hard to do in practice. There is no defending him on this: he totally blew it. Whether Trump will ultimately be nominated or not, last fall forecast of Trump’s nomination probability at about 2% was very wrong. The true probability, even back in the fall, was always in double digits. For anyone not personally invested in massive media Trumpophobia, that was obvious then, and very certain now.

The particularly damning thing for Nate is that he had such a hard time facing reality and admitting his mistake. Shit happens, everyone makes mistakes but being in active denial for so long is a bad sign for someone who makes a living as a forecaster.

* The prediction models are probably fine, the problem is Nate Silver personally, and the rest of his sycophants at 538.

He desperately loathes Trump and has been talking himself into ever more elaborate rationalizations of why Trump can’t win. He’ll do this for the general election, as well.

Seriously, Trump has been leading since he announced his candidacy, for 7 months now. Any reasonable prediction model would assume his victory a mere formality.

And if it were a pro-immigration candidate, Silver would have already coronated him.

* Every supposed expert was wrong about Trump. Right now the betting odds are not what i would suspect. At 5 Dimes as of January 25th the odds are Trump -125 Rubio +205 and Cruz a distant third at +500. It changes radically week to week. Why the betting books think Rubio is far more likely to win than Cruz is beyond me, but they do. The bookmakers in Vegas are no dummies, I trust their odds far more than I do any “expert.” I think Trump surprised himself.

* It would be tremendously interesting to force Nate Silver to publicly commit to Tetlockian bets on all of his pronouncements, and not just some of them.

I recall that Nate Silver publicly bet hard money on Obama winning in 2012, against Joe Scarborough. But Nate just happened to not repeat that honest, accountable practice with Trump. He happened to make predictions about Trump which didn’t happen to come true. But this time, he didn’t put money on the table. He even sought to crowd source a bet from his readers, so that he wouldn’t have to bet anything himself!

Maybe this isn’t pure coincidence. I’ll just insinuate that there’s a reason why he didn’t bet his own money against Trump this time: like any other pundit, he was using his soapbox dishonestly, to craft a narrative, and cause events to happen. Not to give his Spocky, honest evaluation of the truth.

Next time: be honest, and put money on the table, Nate.

* This Presidential election is the USA’s last chance to resist massive illegal immigration. If Trump turns out to be the only candidate who might resist it, then we should ignore all his faults.

I was supporting Walker, but when Trump posted his position paper about immigration — saying they he opposed even birth-right citizenship! — then I switched from Walker to Trump immediately.

I was appalled by Trump’s rambling rhetoric, his incoherent political philosophy and his gratuitous insults, but I had become a one-issue voter.

Since then, however, Cruz has adopted enough of a hard line on immigration that I have switched from Trump to Cruz.

However, I have come to understand that — whereas Trump intends to build a barrier along the entire USA-Mexico border — Cruz intends to complete merely the 700 miles that Congress has funded. Since 620 miles of the 700 funded miles have been constructed, only 80 funded miles remain. Some interviewer should challenge Cruz publicly about this point. Cruz has created a false impression that he will extend the barrier along the entire border.

Although Trump is much better than Cruz about building a border barrier, Cruz is good enough on immigration for me — considering Trump’s many faults.

Trump is much better than Cruz also about promising to bargain more effectively about international-trade agreements. Trump’s promises might cause all the Rust Belt states to switch from Democrat to Republican in the Presidential election. However, I believe that free trade is more advantageous to the US economy in the long run. If such promises help Trump to win the Presidential election, though, then I will be happy to reconsider my position on that issue as I watch a President Trump bargain.

I think that a huge portion of the electorate has — like me — become single-issue voters on immigration, and that is the reason why this election is so unusual and difficult to predict.

* Silver is at best a second rater promoted as some guru. I was less than impressed by his Excel spreadsheet models — using Excel for things it is not good at — handling lots of complex data — is the mark of a second rater. Had the man used a MySQL database and R, well I would have at least respected his technical ability.

When people use Excel for things beyond simple business analysis, for database replacements or complex statistical modeling for large data sets — its a mark they are not smart and adaptable enough to teach themselves MySQL and R. Its not that hard to learn them, either. O’Reilly has a plethora of how-to books.

Basically Silver with no statistical evidence felt party bosses could squash Trump. Often Party bosses do squash insurgents, but often they don’t: Reagan, Ike, Nixon, and Goldwater all are evidence of failures to do so on the Republican side, and Carter, Obama, and Clinton arguably started as insurgents not blessed by Party bosses there.

Silver wanted Trump to be a non-factor, to keep his comfortable universe of donor class domination and the Managerial Elite in charge of everything. Not grasping that globally in First World Countries, mass Third World immigration meant bringing the Third World in massive quantities including violence, poverty, and awful cultural mores straight into conflict with ordinary First World peoples; like rubbing their noses in dog poop every day. Guaranteed to raise a revolt.

Silver particularly objects to Trumps idea of banning Muslim immigration until we can figure out how to avoid more Tafshin Maliks, Syed Farooks, and Tsarnaev family bombers. He seems to believe as an article of faith that everyone in the world has a right to come to the US and receive preferential treatment to those descended from the people who fought for it over generations.

And that was essentially his analysis.

Silver is evidence sufficient in itself to prove the elites are a bunch of incompetent people who rely on connections and cronyism not ability, courage, and shared sacrifice to lead the West. No wonder they are witnessing a revolt by their people.

* The website Hillary Is 44 has a very good suggestion for Trump.

Trump should use Megyn Kelly is an excuse to refuse to participate in the next Republican debate.

Instead, Trump should debate Sanders on another television channel at the same time as the Republican debate.

Such a competing debate between Trump and Sanders would attract an enormous number of viewers — dwarfing the Republican debate.

* The big story of the week is the National Review Pharisees condemnation of Donald Trump as a heretic. American nationalism lacks the institutions to challenge the rot in the Republican and Democratic parties.

* Anybody who is familiar with the stock market knows full well that the record books are full of guys who are one-hit wonders. They have a marvelous year, and everyone, including themselves, think they are the next coming of Warren Buffett. There aren’t a whole of people like Stanley Druckenmiller who had a winning record with marvelous returns for a 30-year period. Silver got lucky in 2012 and started believing his own press clippings. He is no Stanley Druckenmiller. (I have mentioned several times on this site the remarkable record of Gerald Strine, a sports writer for the Washington Post who covered horse racing. Strine had a weekly column in the Washington Post back in the 70′s in which he picked a handful of winning bets in NFL games against the spread and wound up with a winning record for 10 straight years, thereby winning an undisclosed bet of $1 million from some unidentified person who said he couldn’t do it. Now, if he had done that for just one season, it would have been a nice accomplishment, but to do it for 10 straight years is a memorable achievement.) I was always a bit skeptical about Silver’s pronouncements in 2012 since he was largely aggregating poll results. He wasn’t doing independent polling of his own.

Secondly, there is the indisputable matter than the MSM have clearly attempted to demonize Trump on every occasion and that has to be affecting the poll results, by understating Trump’s actual numbers. Byron York alluded to this unintentionally in his piece yesterday in the Washington Examiner (carried by RCP) describing his visit to New Hampshire and not finding any Republicans who are Trump supporters or “know of any Republicans who are Trump supporters.” Trump has been made so toxic by the MSM people are embarrassed to admit they are voting for Trump:

“An exception: I talked to two party officials, one county and one regional, who said they knew a lot of Trump supporters. “They’re not Republicans,” one told me, explaining at length that the Trump fans she knows are inexplicably devoted to him — unfazed by Trump’s lack of policy specifics or any of his controversial statements. The two officials described having conversations and asking which candidate a voter supports, whereupon the voter quickly glanced left and right, to see if it was OK to talk, and then said, “Trump.” That happens a lot, they told me.”

The dishonest MSM attempted to do the same thing with Romney in 2012 and succeeded. Obviously, Romney does not have the outrageous personality of Donald Trump, and he allowed himself to get steamrolled by the Obama forces and the MSM. (Witness the totally outrageous performance by Candy Crowley at the second Obama-Romney debate where she blatantly injected herself into the debate and pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire on the Benghazi matter.)

Finally, as a number of commenters have touched on, Silver allowed his own biases to affect his pronouncements this campaign season (which have been consistently dreadful). He clearly doesn’t like Trump’s message on immigration and possibly foreign policy. This favorite of the MSM, who was lionized by the MSM in 2012, apparently swallowed the BS of the MSM that was lauding him as a genius because it accorded with his views. By consistently downplaying Trump’s chances, Silver obviously was hoping to affect the outcome, just like the MSM.

* Scott Adams called it way back in August: “Trump brought a flame thrower to a stick fight. Since the beginning of time, every winner of every stick fight was a guy with a stick. So you’d expect that trend to continue. Until someone shows up to the fight with a flame thrower. I’m betting on the guy with the flame thrower.”

* Walker has a reputation as a warrior for the conservative cause, but to me it always seemed pretty clear that the only conservative causes he was willing to go to war on were those – like fighting public sector unions – that the oligarchs were willing to back him on. So far as I’ve seen, he never has gone to battle over illegal immigration, affirmative action, or any other “cultural” issues, and he never planned to.

* The caucus format encourages the most intense and persistent supporters. This ends up being an Achilles heel for insurgent candidates. In 2012, Ron Paul had intense supporters and finished 3rd in Iowa, but his campaigns hope’s for victory were dependent upon getting Democrats to cross over and vote in the R caucus for him.

Since a portion of Trump’s support is from crossover Ds, they are unlikely to vote in a caucus format. They will be more likely to show up in NH, a primary state.

I doubt that Cruz will win Iowa, because of the presence of three socon candidates, Huckabee, Santorum and Carson. But also note that Iowa is a late breaking state, Santorum rose rapidly in the last week.

The narrative will be interesting. A Trump victory ends the hopes of Ted Cruz. A narrow Cruz victory may boost Cruz in NH and torpedo Rubio. Trump would win NH but by a smaller margin. Trump wins SC in any case, unless there is a massive Cruz victory in Iowa. But it would be dismissed as “racists”.

IMO, Trump sweeps the first four contests, and everyone drops out. The D contests become a crazy train of crossover voters, and Sanders is robbed by the superdelegates.

* I know that most Americans here will support Trump on domestic issues of immigration. But for me as a non America there is an even bigger issue that makes Trump appealing compared to everyone else – his foreign policy views. The rest (both Republican and Democrat) are outright warmongers, they openly propose having no fly zones against Russians in Syria, arms races in the South China sea, escalating things in Ukraine, having army bases in every corner of the world, spying on everyone person on the planet etc. Trump is not perfect, but at least he would be more practical regarding dealing with the world, he seems to be more of a “don’t invite the world, don’t invade the world” type.

* As an election pollster, I predict that the polling industry is headed for a crack-up, and that this is the year. The whole industry has been crossing its fingers for 10 years that plummeting response rates, the switch to cell phones, and the further switch to Internet, which destroyed the validity of all its theoretical models, would not introduce systematic biases. The way that polls are all over the map this year is very telling.

Nate Silver did a great job in previous years, but his screwup over Trump is a monumental case of hubris. Even if Trump doesn’t win, he can’t justify his probability estimates. The only possible defense is that until people start actually voting, predictive models can’t be recalibrated to deal with changing factors and trends, but that only excuses erroneous predictions, it does not excuse overconfidence in one’s predictions.

Silver’s insistence on providing probability estimates and not just predicted vote margins was a brilliant advance (I had wanted to do that 10 years ago after completing my own historical meta-analysis of American election polls, but there was no market for it; he went ahead anyway and did it so well that he forced everyone else to accept the validity of his methods). However, he fell into traps he should have seen coming a long way off: he lost his objectivity.

It’s a shame, but the work of modern thinkers like Kahneman, Taleb, Tetlock, Yudkowsky, Chabris, and others on improving human rationality by overcoming cognitive biases and extending Bayesian techniques is a scientific revolution that will survive tragedies like Silver’s.

* Trump has won over a lot over people because of his sane, if not very constructive, foreign policy. But his foreign policy didn’t come from lots of study and thinking. Trump has an unbelievable ability to size up a situation hyper-quickly, make a decision, and hold an almost metaphysical confidence in his correctness. When Trump is up against politicians, you get a glimpse into how much more of a high-level game business is compared to politics. While they say politics ain’t beanbag, you are left thinking that business at Trump’s level is like MMA without taps outs and timed rounds.

* Okay, but what if Trump is that self-confident when he’s wrong?

The one real estate project of Trump’s that I know much about is his oceanside golf course in SoCal. I had lunch with the guy who went broke building it and sold it to Trump, and I wrote a long article about the intersection of environmental regulations and the golf course. I don’t know anything about how it has worked out financially for Trump, but I suspect that it hasn’t been the gold mine he expected for a variety of reasons. The golf downturn went on and on, but also the course didn’t turn out to be very good for tournaments. Trump hosted an LPGA event there once, but it turned out to be a bust because the course is bad for spectators because the EPA made them keep sagebrush between each fairway for the endangered California gnatcatcher. Also, there’s not much room for all the corporate tents that accompany a US Open. And now LA Country Club is inviting back the Open, so it’s unlikely that Trump Los Angeles will ever get the Open. My guess is that if Trump took off his Always Be Closing hat for once, he’d admit that if he knew then what he knows now, he wouldn’t have bought this golf course.

This is not to say that Trump is bad at owning golf courses — he seems to be getting steadily better at it over the last ten years, but that he has a learning curve.

* “The surest way to get rich is to enable white people to feel more intelligent than other white people without making any real effort.”

Once your know this you see it everywhere. Richard Dawkins (before he fell out of grace for being consistent), Daily Show, Neil Degrasse Tyson, TED. TED especially.

Silver fills this niche a little too perfectly. He gives moderately intelligent young white people with a chip on their shoulder about Christianity, Fox News, etc a way to feel superior to unfashionable white people because Science (not to mention History) Is On Their Side. He writes simple enough for anybody to get the gist, and anyway it’s enough to read the headline.

Anybody wiling to think about it for a second could have come up with questions like how “people will just tire of Trump in to months” could ever be based on statistics of any kind, but it’s best not to question Science.

* It’s a little mystifying. Why is Silver — a fairly typical SWPL Democrat — so hostile to Trump in particular? Trump is very close to Hillary in all but a very few issues and probably the most Democrat-friendly Republican candidate with serious chances at nomination since Nixon. On foreign policy Trump is the most Democratic candidate in the field, even recognizing the folly of Iraq and the lunacy of destabilizing Libya and Syria far before Clinton.

And yet Silver is clearly unhinged writing constantly about how Trump is a ‘disaster’ for the Republican Party, for downballot candidates, and for the country.

I understand hating Dubya Bush. I’m a little confused about Obama-hate but I can see why some Republicans don’t like him. But candidates like Trump and competent centrist presidents like Bush pere and Clinton should appeal to every part of the spectrum reasonably well. Reagan went on an anti-Clinton speaking tour in 1993 and accused Clinton of ‘grand larceny’ stealing his ideas; that’s a good thing when the other side apes your ideas. Nevertheless some large group is fanatically angry about something Trump represents.

* Nate can evaluate polling data to predict election outcomes as well as anyone can predict election outcomes using polling data, but he doesn’t seem to have any insight into the underlying social processes that generate the data. Since the political atmosphere of the US in 2016 is fairly unique, without easy historical analogies, his poll-based predictions offer negative knowledge. His models don’t apply. You can’t really blame him.

* In his writings Silver clear that he would use endorsements as an indicator of future success as endorsements were from knowledgeable people and the establishment controls the rules by which delegates are awarded which could make a big difference if there was a dispute. He got that idea from a book he mentions in his article about how elections are won.

Winning is 50% but Trump is stuck at 40%. In France Le Pen had 40% while the 2 establishment candidates had 30% each. The establishment figured out a way to combine the 2 30%s, which is the advantage that the establishment has. I have noticed that after the close call France seems to be doing something about the giant migrant camp in Calais.

Silver also claims that while the establishment wants Hillary, Sanders is minimally acceptable.

Posted in America, Donald Trump, Immigration | Comments Off on How Did Nate Silver Miss The Rise Of Donald Trump?

Sweden in shock as Somali muslim ‘refugee’ rapes girl to death, then continues after she died

(via JewsNews) — A 34 year old immigrant from Somalia was arrested for savagely attacking a woman next to the parking garage of a Sheraton hotel in Sweden.

The woman died while being raped. Police say the perpetrator continued to rape the woman’s corpse well after she had died. The Somalian was apprehended by police while still in the act of raping the murdered woman.

Sweden and Norway are in the middle of a massive epidemic of violent rapes. Crime statistics show that rapes in both countries are overwhelmingly perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.

2013 figures were given in a recent report by Swedish Public Radio. In the first seven months of 2013, over 1,000 Swedish women reported being raped by Muslim immigrants. Over 300 of those were under the age of 15. The number of rapes is up 16% compared to 2012 numbers.

Paul Ciotti: That monologue by that 16 year old German girl is a real eye-opener. She says she is afraid to wear summer dresses, T-shirts or go shopping after dark. She is astonished by the notion (pushed by one government official) that all she had to do to protect herself was hold up her hand and tell Muslim men bent on rape to stay a meter away. Most of (and this is really sad) she wants to know why German men haven’t done anything at all to protect their wives, their daughters and girls like her from Muslim “refugees.”

Posted in Immigration, Islam | Comments Off on Sweden in shock as Somali muslim ‘refugee’ rapes girl to death, then continues after she died

Feiglin: Europe inviting Muslim savages to rape it

Gil Ronen writes from Israel:

Ex-MK Moshe Feiglin, who heads the Zehut party, thinks the large scale New Years’ Eve sexual attacks by Muslims in Europe are part of a much larger cultural upheaval. The simultaneous attacks, he said, were met with indifference by local police forces, media and politicians.

“Western Europe is kneeling and inviting the noble Muslim savage to rape it,” wrote the maverick politician on his Facebook page. “What is the meaning of this phenomenon? Were there only German women at that train station in Cologne? Where were the men?”

The Muslims who leave their home countries seek Germany, Sweden and Finland not just for financial reasons, he speculated. “There is something much deeper at play here. Western Europe is actually the most secular place in the world. Most of humanity believes in God – the US, too, is mostly populated by believers. Western Europe is an island of atheism; the situation there is reversed.

“This is a culture that has removed God from its consciousness. It took God out of the game and locked Him up in museums,” Feiglin theorized. “The pressure of the Allahu Akbar culture bursts naturally into the irreligious vacuum – it is a matter of physics, really. Of intercontinental maleness and femaleness.”

“Generations of denial of God have engendered a craving for authority and meaning,” the philosopher-politician explained. “The police does not attempt to prevent the rape just as it did not attempt to prevent Kristallnacht, because in truth, it is desired. The battered woman syndrome, the subconscious, the political correctness of Merkel and those who invite in the immigrants, actually desire it.

“Mein Kampf, too, is making a huge comeback, and has turned into an overnight smash hit – and for the same reason. A hunger for absolute, violent authority. ISIS is hypnotizing the West. Europeans are converting to Islam in droves. London is wearing a veil (It’s a lot like the complacence with which we accept the knife attacks).

“The circle closes with crazy speed,” Feiglin observed. “Women’s liberation disappears. The State will not protect you – get used to it. Your Godless religion has evaporated. Find yourself a man – a Muslim one, of course – to protect you. There is no other masculinity.”

Posted in Europe, Immigration, Islam, Israel, Rape | Comments Off on Feiglin: Europe inviting Muslim savages to rape it

Men Invade, Women Invite

From the Chateau:

If you look hard, there are outposts where Shitlords and Realtalkers feel free to speak unassailable truths. One reader passed along this quote from an Israeli politician who was offering an explanation for Europe’s open borders madness and supine welcoming of their rapefugee replacements.

Israeli politician agrees with your observations on the women of Europe + Migrants.

“Western Europe is kneeling and inviting the noble Muslim savage to rape it,” wrote the maverick politician on his Facebook page. “What is the meaning of this phenomenon? Were there only German women at that train station in Cologne? Where were the men?”

The Muslims who leave their home countries seek Germany, Sweden and Finland not just for financial reasons, he speculated. “There is something much deeper at play here. Western Europe is actually the most secular place in the world. Most of humanity believes in God – the US, too, is mostly populated by believers. Western Europe is an island of atheism; the situation there is reversed.

“This is a culture that has removed God from its consciousness. It took God out of the game and locked Him up in museums,” Feiglin theorized. “The pressure of the Allahu Akbar culture bursts naturally into the irreligious vacuum – it is a matter of physics, really. Of intercontinental maleness and femaleness.”

“Generations of denial of God have engendered a craving for authority and meaning,” the philosopher-politician explained. “The police does not attempt to prevent the rape just as it did not attempt to prevent Kristallnacht, because in truth, it is desired. The battered woman syndrome, the subconscious, the political correctness of Merkel and those who invite in the immigrants, actually desire it. […]

“The circle closes with crazy speed,” Feiglin observed. “Women’s liberation disappears. The State will not protect you – get used to it. Your Godless religion has evaporated. Find yourself a man – a Muslim one, of course – to protect you. There is no other masculinity.

“The battered woman syndrome” is just another way of politely saying “generic female sexual nature”, because all women, to lesser or greater degree, desire their submission to a powerful and dominant alpha male. And the dominant alpha male needn’t be manifest through the individual man; the strict orthodoxies of patriarchal religions like Islam also fill the role of authority that people, but particularly women, deeply and profoundly crave, beyond even conscious apprehension.

This is an important topic, because it befuddles not just equalist leftoids (who were never going to be un-befuddled) but also race-aware white knights who despite their willingness to grapple with many ugly truths that frighten mass media and the culture gatekeepers, nonetheless exhibit a strong allergy to thinking clearly when the subject is (White) women and their peculiar habits of mind. (These alt-white knights also co-opt a rhetorical crutch preferred by the shitlibs they hate: glib and snarky ad hominem against those who do speak truthfully about female nature.)

Men invade, women invite. The essential sex distinction is the male disposition to conquer and acquire power and the female disposition to accede and acquire the charity of the powerful. All real world evidence points to these diverging male and female essences. It would be funny if it weren’t dead serious that every single global crisis contradicts the feminist (and lickspittle manlet) worldview.

Today, a Swedish woman was stabbed to death by a Muslim refugee. Add her body to the running count of White female victims of rapefugee runaway entitlement. It has been three weeks since the Cologne mass sexual assaults on German women at the hands (and groins) of Middle Eastern men. It has been two months since the Paris attacks when Muslims killed hundreds of White Frenchmen and -women.

Dwell on recent history. Now consider this: two days ago, a German poll revealed glaring sex differences in male and female support for various German political parties. “Frauen” are women. The “AfD” is the anti-immigration party.

frauen

I don’t think you’ll see anything more shocking than this snapshot of the German female id. It calls to mind that Plath pith, “Every woman adores a fascist”. What’ll it take to convince White women that it’s in their best interest to shut the borders to hordes of nonWhite orcs?

“Best interest”? Maybe that’s the problem. Women’s best interest isn’t necessarily aligned with their men’s best interest. That Israeli politician quoted above is onto something dark and ominous when he accuses the West of assuming the role of intercontinental femaleness — the psychological condition responsible for civilizational ennui and exhaustion and prostrate submission to invading foreigners. Western men have become their women — gelded freaks who dress in mini-skirts to “support” victims of the Cologne sex attacks — and into that masculinity void unapologetically patriarchal Muslim migrants rush to provide that “other masculinity” which animates the hindbrains, and the ginewaves, of so many young fertile WHITE women.

Because who is going to protect these White women? White men in mini-skirts? It is to laugh. And though many women will claim otherwise to reporters holding microphones and even to themselves when uncomfortably alone with their thoughts, their actions expose a different motivation.

I call this sex-disparate phenomenon “The Feminine Mistake”. It was a mistake to hand to women inordinate power – at 51% of the population, women hold the levers in democratic societies – over public policy and the nation’s constitution. Women are who they are; they can’t help themselves when they vote for equalist leftoid nation-destroyers.

If the White West is to save itself from its worst instincts and sentiments, it’s going to take something that most cucks, manginas, and male feminists are loath, or scared, to do: tell women to step aside, because they are royally fucking up the place.

Posted in Feminism, Immigration, Rape | Comments Off on Men Invade, Women Invite

Is Ethnic Conflict Inevitable?

Yes. Different groups have different interests and they will inevitably compete with each for scarce resources such as land and water and power.

Professor Jerry Z. Muller responds to his critics in Foreign Affairs magazine in the July/August 2008 edition:

My essay is not agenda-driven or prescriptive. It is meant to suggest that the power of ethnic nationalism in the twentieth century has been greater than is generally recognized and that
the probability of its ongoing global impact is greater than is generally appreciated. I argue that Americans often have a distorted sense of substantial areas of the world because they
tend to generalize on the basis of their own national experience or, rather, a truncated and idealized version of that experience. Of course, ethnicity (and its conceptual cousin, race) has long played a role in American life and continues to do so, as reflected in everything from residential patterns to voting behavior.

But by and large, ethnic identification in the United States tends to erode across generations, and the notion that different ethnic groups ought to have their own political entities is marginal. (Voting districts drawn along racial lines echo conceptions of ethnic nationalism. And the Chicano vision of the reconstitution of Aztlán — a lost nation of indigenous Americans said to include Mexico and much oF the American Southwest — would qualify as ethnonationalist but seems to have limited appeal.) Thus, Americans have a hard time imagining the intensity of the desire that many ethnic groups abroad have for a polity of their own or the determination of others to maintain the ethnic structure of existing
polities. If Poles and Ukrainians get along tolerably well in Chicago, why not Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and Turkmen in Kirkuk?

I further argue that this misperception also occurs among educated western Europeans, who project the cooperative and pacific model of the EU onto the rest of the world while losing sight of the history of ethnic disaggregation that seems to have served as a precondition for the comity of contemporary Europe. The propensity to impose on the rest of the world one’s own categories and idealized conceptions of one’s historical and current experiences leads to a kind of misleading universality, apt to result in misunderstanding and miscalculation.

There are categories of self-definition that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable to some people’s sensibilities — including ethnonational identity, caste (common in India), or tribe (common in
much of Africa and the Muslim world). But the fact that some people may find these categories unreal (since they know that beneath the skin humans are ultimately the same: put them in a room together with a game to play, and see how little they differ) does not
make them any less real to those who do believe in them.

The problem of taking seriously the diverse ways in which people in different parts of the world define themselves is exacerbated by the universalizing and scientistic pretensions of some streams of academic political science. “Scientism” refers to the endeavor to apply the methods and criteria of the natural sciences to all realms of human experience — although for some they are inappropriate. This includes the effort to explain all phenomena with simplified theories of human motivation and the attempt to replicate the hard sciences by using laboratory conditions to study political science. History provides a useful source of data with which to study the range and complexity of human behavior. It is a highly imperfect
laboratory, where both the data and their interpretation are influenced by the methodological and ideological predispositions of the investigator. But it is often superior to the alternative: apparently scientific forms of explanation.

My claim is not that the violence of the European experience will repeat itself but a more modest one: that ethnic tensions are likely to be exacerbated, rather than eliminated, by the occurrence of similar processes of modernization in other parts of the world. Contrary to what James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein claim, nowhere do I argue that “ethnic divisions inevitably generate violence.” And while I quoted Churchill, I did not endorse his views as a general policy prescription.

What I actually wrote, toward the end of my article, was this: “Sometimes, demands for ethnic autonomy or self-determination can be met within an existing state…. But such arrangements remain precarious and are subject to recurrent renegotiation. In the
developing world, accordingly, where states are more recent creations and where the borders often cut across ethnic boundaries, there is likely to be further ethnic disaggregation and communal conflict. And as scholars such as Chaim Kaufmann have noted, once ethnic antagonism has crossed a certain threshold of violence, maintaining the rival groups within a single polity becomes far more difficult.

“… When communal violence escalates to ethnic cleansing, moreover, the return of large numbers of refugees to their place of origin after a cease-fire has been reached is often impractical and even undesirable.
“… Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts.”

Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner, and Weinstein continue their misrepresentations by claiming that I attribute ethnic tension merely to “enduring propensities of the human spirit”; in fact, I attribute ethnic tension to “some enduring propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation.” My explanation, drawn largely from the sociologist Ernest Gellner, is actually echoed by the four co-authors, albeit in a different
vocabulary, when they write that members of the same ethnic group tend to come together because “they speak the same language, have access to the same types of information, and share social networks.” As so often happens in the social sciences, here is an attempt at
product differentiation through rebranding — recasting known insights in a new vocabulary.

More novel is the authors’ belief that their quasi-scientific experiments in Uganda provide useful new avenues for public policy. They say that their game-playing experiments provide insights as to how the diverse ethnic actors would behave when freed of the social and political contexts in which their actions are known to others. Perhaps, but it is precisely the nature of the real world that this would never be the case.

Moreover, their conclusion that the problem lies in a weak institutional environment characterized by an “absence of functional and impartial state institutions” is both true and misleading, for it fails to consider that the very multiplicity of ethnicities is among the major sources of this institutional environment. A reading of Chinua Achebe’s 1960 novel, No Longer at Ease — about the plight of an idealistic young civil servant who tries to embody the
ethos of impartiality in a setting in which such norms are at odds with the understanding of his co-ethnics, who regard his bureaucratic position as a form of group property — would
cast more light on the situation than hundreds of experimental games.

This is not the place for a full critique of the much-cited calculations of Fearon and Laitin on the incidence of interethnic violence in Africa from 1960 to 1979. If one lives in a
neighborhood where three in a thousand interactions result in violence and one has three interactions per day, one is violently attacked only three times a year. But is that a safe neighborhood or a dangerous one? The assertion that “with few exceptions, African state boundaries today look just as they did in 1960” is also both true and misleading. It attests as much to the ability of the dominant ethnic coalitions to suppress attempts at rebellion as to the absence of ethnic conflict.

The Biafran War (1967-70) counts as only one incident of interethnic violence in Fearon and Laitin’s data and resulted in no change of borders. The million or so lives lost do not register in their calculations. Had Fearon and Laitin repeated their computations for the years since 1979, the murder of some 800,000 Rwandans (mostly Tutsis) would also have appeared as a matter of small statistical consequence.

The claim by Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein that the ethnonationalist ideal of a separate state for each cultural unit has been a source of instability is true or, at least, a half-truth. That is what a good part of my article is about. But the fact that ethnonationalism is destabilizing has not diminished its appeal or impact. The other half-truth is that the fulfillment of the ethnonationalist ideal has had a stabilizing effect, at least for large groups.

However, as my article notes and as Rosecrance and Stein emphasize, not every ethnonational aspiration can be realized, and ethnonational aspirations for autonomy and self-determination can be realized within larger political units through federalism — the
devolution of power and income to subnational units. As such, federalism represents a form of “semi-partition,” as the political scientist Donald Horowitz has noted. It has the very real advantage of permitting participation in larger political and economic units. But, as Horowitz has also noted, “federalism is not cheap. It involves duplication of facilities, functions, personnel and infrastructure” and often entails jurisdictional disputes. Moreover, “states that could benefit from federalism typically come to that realization too late, usually after conflict has intensified.”

Rosecrance and Stein may be right that a greater pool of income can alleviate ethnonational aspirations. But it is worth recalling that the governments in a position to distribute sums equivalent to 50 percent of their GDPs are in Europe, whereas the ethnic groups in potential conflict are in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where there is less wealth and so less GDP available for redistribution. Moreover, massive government redistribution through taxation
may itself inhibit economic growth or make capturing the state apparatus too enticing a prize compared with other pursuits.

Various claims by Rosecrance and Stein are questionable, if not clearly mistaken. The authors assert that mass emigration can serve as an “alternative to secession when the home government does not sufficiently mitigate economic disparities.” First, this assumes
that all discontents are ultimately expressions of individually conceived economic interest, a radical simplification of human motivation that ignores the desire of some people to share a
common culture and their perception that protecting that culture requires political autonomy.

For example, throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, French Canadians emigrated from Canada to the United States, where over time they assimilated into the larger population. Québecois nationalism represents a rejection of that path.

Second, the authors’ emigration-as-safety-valve strategy ignores the fact that in contrast to the earlier era of globalization (from the late nineteenth century through World War I), the current era of globalization is characterized by governments better able and more inclined to police their borders and, hence, by the comparatively limited mobility of people across national borders. Moreover, discontent in the relatively wealthy states of the West with some
recent streams of immigration has already led to pressures for governments to exercise greater control over the movement of people from particular regions. It is far from clear that emigration from the Maghreb to France, for example, will be allowed to continue indefinitely.

Rosecrance and Stein’s assertion that a new era of bigness in international economic affairs is here is truer than the implications they draw from it. The economic advantages of the
division of labor do expand with the extent of the market, as Adam Smith explained over two centuries ago. But it is simply not true that “to keep up, states have to get bigger.” States can negotiate treaties and other forms of association that allow for freer international trade. As the authors note in passing, smaller nations have opted for inclusion in transnational markets and have often prospered as a result.

In short, Rosecrance and Stein assume that a rational economic calculus governs international activity. This simplification of human motivation has the advantage of methodological elegance. But their predictions conflate three very different circumstances:
what global actors would do if they rationally calculated their utilities based on a set of preferences much like those of American professors of political science; what global actors would do if they rationally calculated their utilities based on their actual preferences, which may diverge substantially from those of American political scientists; and what may actually happen given the unlikelihood that either American political scientists or global actors would rationally calculate their utilities. That is to say, Rosecrance and Stein have purchased methodological elegance at the expense of explanatory power by radically reducing the range of relevant motivations and interactions.

For a historian, the authors’ assertion that “international economics increasingly dwarfs politics” — like so much of their response to my essay — is eerily resonant of a British
bestseller of a century ago. In 1910, Norman Angell published The Great Illusion, which explained on economic grounds why an extended war between great powers was impossible under the contemporary economic conditions. His argument was logically compelling but wrong. In 1933, Angell published a new edition of his book, in which he suggested that nations could not enrich themselves by conquering their neighbors and that war was therefore futile. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, but his message seems not to have reached all the relevant parties. I fear that the predictions of Rosecrance and
Stein about the future of ethnic nationalism will meet the same fate.

Still, Rosecrance and Stein do raise an important issue that I did not explore in my article: the question of external recognition and support for potential new states. What ought to be the response by external countries, such as the United States, to ethnonationalist claims for independence? If one takes seriously the forces leading to the enduring power of ethnonationalism — rather than dismissing them as archaic, illusory, or subject to elimination by good governance conjured out of the blue — the implications for policy are by no means self-evident.

I leave aside the purely legal and philosophical issues, since the “right” to self-determination, like so many others, often conflicts with other purported rights. Representatives of existing states are strongly disposed against the redrawing of borders and the formation of new states. They see self-interest in maintaining the international status quo, which may or may not be justified by prudence. To recognize that national self-determination does provide satisfactions of its own and may well result in viable states is not to say that the endless creation of new states is either viable or desirable. Yet there are dangers both in supporting ethnonationalist claims and in denying them prematurely.

One danger of the international recognition of insurgent ethnonationalist claims to sovereignty is that it may lead to unilateral secession (as in the recent case of Kosovo) as
opposed to mutually agreed separation. Secession without ethnic partition usually means that the new political entity will include a substantial minority of people whose co-ethnics dominate the state from which the new state has seceded. This provides a ready source for new ethnic tensions within the new state and international tensions between the new state and the old. Mutually agreed partition that separates the rival ethnic groups may be preferable in order to minimize the likelihood of future conflict. Another danger of a greater international willingness to recognize ethnonationalist movements is that it may create an incentive for the governments of existing countries to violently crush incipient ethnic political movements before they can organize.

There are perils, however, in a blanket refusal of the international community to recognize the claims of legitimate ethnonationalist movements. For having deemed secession an impossibility, governments may feel no incentive to respond to the desire of ethnic groups for
greater power and self-determination within the confines of the current states. To recognize the enduring power of ethnic nationalism is not to support it or provide a ready recipe for
action but to offer a more realistic appreciation of the dilemmas that will continue to arise in the twenty-first century.

Posted in Jerry Z. Muller, Nationalism | Comments Off on Is Ethnic Conflict Inevitable?

The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservation by Jerry Z. Muller

From Amazon.com: “Why did some of the “best and brightest” of Weimar intellectuals advocate totalitarian solutions to the problems of liberal democratic, capitalist society? How did their “radical conservatism” contribute to the rise of National Socialism? What roles did they play in the Third Reich? How did their experience of totalitarianism lead them to recast their social and political thought? This biography of Hans Freyer, a prominent German sociologist and political ideologist, is a case study of intellectuals and a “god that failed”–not on the political left, but on the right, where its significance has been overlooked. The author explores the interaction of political ideology and academic social science in democratic and totalitarian regimes, the transformation of German conservatism by the experience of National Socialism, and the ways in which tension between former collaborators and former opponents of National Socialism continued to mold West German intellectual life in the postwar decades.”

Posted in Communism, Germany, Jerry Z. Muller, Jews | Comments Off on The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservation by Jerry Z. Muller

Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller

From Amazon.com:

The unique historical relationship between capitalism and the Jews is crucial to understanding modern European and Jewish history. But the subject has been addressed less often by mainstream historians than by anti-Semites or apologists. In this book Jerry Muller, a leading historian of capitalism, separates myth from reality to explain why the Jewish experience with capitalism has been so important and complex–and so ambivalent.

Drawing on economic, social, political, and intellectual history from medieval Europe through contemporary America and Israel, Capitalism and the Jews examines the ways in which thinking about capitalism and thinking about the Jews have gone hand in hand in European thought, and why anticapitalism and anti-Semitism have frequently been linked. The book explains why Jews have tended to be disproportionately successful in capitalist societies, but also why Jews have numbered among the fiercest anticapitalists and Communists. The book shows how the ancient idea that money was unproductive led from the stigmatization of usury and the Jews to the stigmatization of finance and, ultimately, in Marxism, the stigmatization of capitalism itself. Finally, the book traces how the traditional status of the Jews as a diasporic merchant minority both encouraged their economic success and made them particularly vulnerable to the ethnic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, Capitalism and the Jews will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modern fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.

From Publishers Weekly: “In four fascinating essays, Muller (The Mind and the Market) sensitively examines how centuries of nomadism and diaspora have shaped Jewish financial life. Particularly intriguing is his essay The Long Shadow of Usury, which traces the roots of Jewish financial life to the time when Christians were banned from lending at interest, but Jews, following the law in Deuteronomy, were allowed to charge interest to gentiles (but not each other). Farmers and laborers could not understand the value—economic or social—of gathering and analyzing information, and Jewish usurers were cast as suspicious and parasitic figures. Muller explores why Jewish populations have been both disproportionately successful in capitalist societies and the system’s loudest critics. Of paramount interest is his portrait of a people driven by exile and oppression to emphasize strong social networks, self-sufficiency, and higher education. Muller backs up his bold assertion—that capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world—with elegance and care.”

“In his slim essay collection Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller presents a provocative and accessible survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success and why that success has earned them so much misfortune. . . . While this book is ostensibly about ‘the Jews,’ Muller’s most chilling insights are about their enemies, and the creative, almost supernatural, malleability of anti-Semitism itself. For centuries, poverty, paranoia and financial illiteracy have combined into a dangerous brew–one that has made economic virtuosity look suspiciously like social vice.”–Catherine Rampell, New York Times Book Review

“In four fascinating essays, Muller sensitively examines how centuries of nomadism and diaspora have shaped Jewish financial life. . . . Muller backs up his bold assertion–that capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world–with elegance and care.”–Publishers Weekly

“It’s a subject rarely given its due in respectable circles. Yet an appreciation for market economics does run deep in Judaic tradition and helps explain the prominence of Jewish bankers, from Mayer Amschel Rothschild to Lloyd Blankfein. In concise prose free of academic jargon, Muller ticks off factors that gave Jews what he calls ‘behavioral traits conducive to success in capitalist society.'”–Calev Ben-David, Bloomberg

“Muller, a noted historian, takes a fascinating look at how Jews have shaped capitalism and how capitalism has shaped the Jewish experience from medieval times to today.”–Fareed Zakaria GPS

“Muller is keen to rescue from apologists, ideologues, and anti-Semites the exploration of what he describes as the Jews’ ‘special relationship’ with capitalism. . . . This book is both scholarly and speculative, analysing the sociology and the anti-Semitic pseudo-sociology of the Jews’ participation in capitalism. It will not be the last word on the subject, but it is a genuine contribution to it.”–Anthony Julius, New Statesman

“A work of intellectual history. . . . Muller is acutely aware of the irony that Jews have been attacked sometimes for being the quintessence of capitalism and sometimes for being the quintessence of anticapitalism. The merit of his book is that it takes seriously the need to understand how historical circumstances bring this about.”–Robert Solow, Moment Magazine

“According to Jerry Z. Muller, professor of history at Catholic University, capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. . . . Muller focuses squarely on the relation between them in four interlocking essays that explore, respectively, Western thinking about Jews and capitalism, the Jews’ own responses to capitalism, Jewish involvement in Communist movements, and the rise of ethnic nationalism that came about as a response to capitalism’s relentless march in the 19th century and onward.”–Steven Menashi, Commentary

“A model of clear thinking and useful information about how accurately to understand the long and complicated relationship between Jews, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. A valuable read.”–Ira Stoll, The Future of Capitalism blog

“In a 1972 lecture, ‘Capitalism and the Jews,’ Nobel laureate Milton Friedman presented a paradox: Jews ‘owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,’ he said, but ‘for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.’ According to historian Jerry Muller, Friedman’s paradox may make for a great headline, but it cannot be substantiated. Only the first premise is true–there is little doubt that capitalism has benefited Jews. And as Muller shows, there is equally little doubt that Jews have excelled at developing capitalism in the West.”–Guy Sorman, City Journal

“Taboos can’t last–and now, a real historian has broken this one. Jerry Muller, himself Jewish and a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, has published a book of four essays, Capitalism and the Jews, that sets out to explain why Jews have enjoyed such exceptional success in modern capitalist societies such as ours.”–Tim Colebatch, The Age

“Muller, a historian at Catholic University, has given us four lectures on economics aspects of Jewish life in the modern world. . . . [T]hey are thoughtful and occasionally insightful.”–Peter Temin, EH.net

“Capitalism and the Jews is a work of scholarship, but it’s an especially accessible and illuminating one. It is a book that every Jewish capitalist, actual or aspiring, out to read and ponder.”–Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal of Greater L.A.

“Muller (history, Catholic Univ.; Adam Smith in His Time and Ours), a well established historian of capitalism, is brave to tackle this subject, laden as much with the place of Jewish people in the markets as with the trappings and traps of anti-Semitism. . . . Stimulating.”–Scott H. Silverman, Library Journal

“A stellar work of intellectual history.”–Sheldon Kirshner, Canadian Jewish News

“A well-documented, historical investigation into an often hidden subject that the author makes easily accessible.”–Abe Novick, Baltimore Jewish Times

“If you want to understand why Jews have done phenomenally well in capitalist societies and at the same time have been some of capitalism’s harshest critics, this history will help you understand.”–Nick Schulz, National Review

“A great book.”–William Easterly, Aid Watch blog

“Jerry Z. Muller’s recent book is neither a polemic nor a setup for a bad lounge joke but is instead a compelling, sober essay about an elephant that has been sitting in the middle of Western history for the past two centuries at least: Jews have been inextricably woven into the history and evolution of capitalism. . . . A fascinating history.”–Zachary Karabell, Truthdig.com

“[T]his book introduces some basic issues and ideas about Jewish economic history and can serve as a provocative starting point for learning more about the subject.”–Choice

“[A] short book, which could be said to provide the economic background of the Jewish catastrophe of the 20th century. Muller’s work, though focused on cultural and not environmental differences, might remind some readers of Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ (1997), which explains the basis for the gaps in material success among regions around the world. In both books, the authors, in laying bare the historical processes, help to disabuse readers of their prejudices.”–Steven Silber, Haaretz

“In the meantime, in a lean and compact volume, Muller has offered a rich and valuable history filled with insights about the character of capitalism and the sources of anti-Semitism–both of which could hardly be more timely subjects.”–Yuval Levin, Jewish Review of Books

“Muller provides a refreshingly frank account of the major role of Jews on both sides of capitalism’s ideological barricades. His brisk and lively book is a welcome sign that historians are moving beyond a stale preoccupation with challenging stereotypes, and are now more willing to engage candidly and directly with the economic dimension of Jewish history.”–Adam Sutcliffe, Jewish Quarterly

“Although Muller examines mostly European areas, he occasionally cites examples from the United States. His book can be thus read as an attempt to deepen the mutual understanding of historical realities in Europe and North America. The strongest point of Capitalism and the Jews lies in Muller’s multifocal perspective and interdisciplinary erudition.”–Pnina M. Rubesh, European Legacy

“[T]his small book is filled with interesting material and presents its subject in a clear and lively fashion.”–Marty Roth, Outlook on Books

“The book offers an interesting and new perspective into the economic history of the Jews, which is a by-product of their religious and cultural history.”–R. Balashankar, Organiser

“Capitalism and the Jews is an important study that affords readers a lucid and extremely accessible analysis of what is no doubt a central topic in Jewish and western history. It is a welcome addition that joins recent efforts to make us more aware of the significance of the economy for our understanding of the modern Jewish experience.”–Gideon Reuveni, Enterprise and Society

“Providing a fresh look at an important but frequently misunderstood subject, this book will interest anyone who wants to understand the Jewish role in the development of capitalism, the role of capitalism in the modem fate of the Jews, or the ways in which the story of capitalism and the Jews has affected the history of Europe and beyond, from the medieval period to our own.”–World Book Industry

“Muller’s book can be highly recommended. Stylistically polished, accessible, informative and provocative–it is a little gem.”–Jeremy Leaman, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies

“Capitalism and the Jews is a must book for our times.”–Betty Mohr, Le Bon Travel & Culture

“[P]rovocative and inspiring essays. . . . Muller’s approach is far reaching.”–Franziskus von Boeselager, Moving the Social

Amazon reviews:

* With columnists for major newspapers denouncing banks as “blood-sucking,” the financial industry as “parasitic,” and one big bank as a “vampire squid” – well, what exquisite timing for the release of the book Capitalism and the Jews.

Mr. Muller’s work is, on the whole, a model of clear thinking and useful information about how accurately to understand the long and complicated relationship between Jews, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. It’s a valuable read for anyone who wants to understand why all the talk about the difference between the “Wall Street” economy and the “Main Street” economy isn’t necessarily as benign as it might seem.

The book by Mr. Muller, a professor of history at Catholic University, consists of a short introduction and four chapters. It’s the first chapter, “The Long Shadow of Usury,” that’s the most enlightening.

“Usury was an important concept with a long shadow. It was significant because the condemnation of lending money at interest was based on the presumptive illegitimacy of all economic gain not derived from physical labor. That way of conceiving of economic activity led to a failure to recognize the role of knowledge and the evaluation of risk in economic life,” he writes. “So closely was the reviled practice of usury identified with the Jews that St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the leader of the Cistercian Order, in the middle of the twelfth century referred to the taking of usury as ‘Jewing'” says Mr. Muller, noting that the interest rates charged by Jews, “in keeping with the scarcity of capital in the medieval economy and the high risks incurred by Jewish moneylenders, whose loans were often canceled under public pressure, and whose assets were frequently confiscated,” ranged from 33% to 60% a year.

It was Karl Marx, who was converted to Lutheranism as a child by his parents, who managed to combine the old blood libel against the Jews with an attack on capitalism. “Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” Mr. Muller quotes Marx as saying in Capital. Mr. Muller goes on, “When Lenin later referred to the necessity of eliminating capitalists because they were ‘bloodsuckers,’ he was merely heightening Marx’s own metaphor.”

It is a short leap from this to the work of the Nazi economic theorist Gottfried Feder, who, Mr. Muller writes, “distinguished between Aryan and Jewish forms of capitalism, the former industrial and creative, the latter financial and parasitic.”

In subsequent chapters, Mr. Muller describes Jewish contributions to capitalism and speculates about some of the reasons for Jewish prominence and success. Americans may know that Jews founded Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, but Mr. Muller reports that Jews helped to establish Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank in Germany, as well as Credit Mobilier in France. Some of this is because of values contained in the religion of Judaism itself. “Unlike Christianity, Judaism considered poverty anything but ennobling,” Mr. Muller writes.

Mr. Muller rejects the claim made by Milton Friedman in 1972 that “for at least the past century the Jews have been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.” Mr. Muller calls that “at best a half-truth.” In fact, he writes, “many of the foremost theorists of capitalist activity have been Jews,” or of Jewish origin, pointing to Milton Friedman himself, Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand, Ludwig Von Mises, Irving Kristol, and Margaret Thatcher’s advisers including Keith Joseph, Leon Brittan, and Nigel Lawson.

The author does not flinch, though, from describing Jewish involvement in Bolshevism.
Mr. Muller gets out onto the thinnest ice when he blames Jewish involvement in revolutionary activity and communism for inflaming European anti-Semitism. Sometimes, he frames this claim cautiously: “To be sure, in much of eastern Europe anti-Semitism long antedated the Bolshevik Revolution, and would have been a substantial factor in interwar politics even without the prominence of Jews in the Communist movement.”

Other times he is more assertive: “In Germany, where political anti-Semitism had been on the Wane before 1914, the role of the Jews in the postwar revolutions was the key element in the revival of anti-Semitism on the right.”

That the Jews were being denounced as greedy capitalists at just the same time as they were being denounced as dangerous Communists suggests to me that the denunciations were, at bottom, more about hating Jews than about hating either capitalists or communists.

For most of this book, though, Mr. Muller is a sensible guide to the way that views of capitalism and views of the Jews do have a way of overlapping and influencing each other. As he puts it, “An affirmative approach toward capitalism often went together with a measure of sympathy toward the Jews, while antipathy to commerce and antipathy to the Jews typically went hand in hand.” Mr. Muller mostly leaves it to readers to think about how these precedents apply to the debates of the present day, but there is plenty to think about.

* Professor Jerry Muller makes a compelling case in showing that the attitude of Jews towards capitalism was overshadowed by the contemptuous view that Christianity held about trade and commerce for a long time (pp. 33; 158). Until the 19th century C.E., anti-Semitism was predominantly religious in nature, grounded in the sympathy that the Christian churches had for peasants and artisans, the sources of “sweat” labor (pp. 18; 28; 54; 70; 116).

At the same time, these churches failed to understand the economic value of gathering and analyzing information (pp. 19; 116; 205-206). Christianity officially regarded trade and money lending as “unproductive,” “parasitic,” and “usurious” best left to those outside the community of the faithful, i.e., the Jews (pp. 8; 15; 23-25; 27; 37-38; 43; 116-117).

The “cultural capital” of Jews positioned them well to play a disproportional role in (early) modern capitalism for the following reasons (pp. 4; 9; 209; 213):

1. Judaism was more favorably disposed toward commerce than Christianity which was inclined to glorify poverty (pp. 5; 77; 81-85; 110-115).

2. Jewish culture prized “religious intellectualism” which was easily transferred from religious to secular learning (pp. 70; 87-89).

3. Judaism favored a lifestyle based on discipline, the conscious planning of action, and the avoidance of intoxication (p. 88).

4. Jewish success in the market was based upon longer time horizons. Success for those Jews starting at the low end of commercial life required a willingness to work long and hard and to save in order to accumulate capital (pp. 58-59; 61; 88-89).

5. The propensity to develop social networks was due, in part, to the exclusion of Jews from the larger, gentile society, which provided both a form of collective self-policing and a proto-social security system (pp. 7; 53; 91-92).

6. Jewish culture put much emphasis on high familial investment in children (pp. 92-93).

With the industrial revolution firing on all cylinders, anti-Semitism shifted its emphasis by attacking the Jews as capitalists bent on destroying and despoiling the traditional society (pp. 41; 44; 56-57; 158). The social and economic stratification in which Jews were placed made many of them economically successful, which created resentment among social losers in a given capitalist society (pp. 65-66; 129; 189; 204-205; 213-214). To reduce the resentment created by their success, Jews supported 1) tzedakah (= philanthropy) whose beneficiaries also included non-Jews and 2) income redistribution through governmental income transfers (pp. 126; 130-131).

After WWI, anti-Semites came to the outlandish realization that Jewish capitalists would participate in their own destruction by cooperating with their communist counterparts to topple Christian civilization (p. 161)!

To his credit, Professor Muller brilliantly shows why Milton Friedman’s argument, that Jews played a prominent role in disparaging capitalism while profiting from it enormously, clearly lacks nuance (pp. 73; 124). To come to this conclusion, Professor Muller looks at the range of Jewish political responses to capitalism that he labels integrationist, isolationist, socialist, and nationalist, respectively (pp. 10-12; 104; 190).

1. The majority of Jews in Europe and North America opted for integrating themselves into the broader capitalist economy without repudiating their distinct Jewish identity (pp. 39; 104; 109; 115; 215).

2. The isolationist (or Orthodox) Jews found niches in the capitalist economy that would reduce, to the strict minimum, their social interactions with gentiles and less orthodox Jews (p. 105).

3. The socialist Jews believed in the substitution of the untried communism to the failing capitalist system for the same reasons that non-Jews espoused this ideology (pp. 35; 80; 105-107). Furthermore, these Jews naively hoped that abolishing capitalism would take care of anti-Semitism which was often linked to anti-capitalism (pp. 42; 133). The disastrous role that some Central and Eastern European Jews played in different communist revolutions in the wake of both WWI and WWII, reinforced the prevalent anti-Semitism that did not need additional oil to burn brightly in the hearts of anti-Semites (pp. 124; 140-141; 151; 158; 165-170; 174; 183; 188). The identification of Jews with communism was based upon a distortion similar to the exaggeration of the reality that Jews were more successful capitalists (pp. 135; 147; 152-153; 163; 175-177). Most Jews did not embrace communism because of its atheism and its economic policy (pp. 140; 174). Most communists were not Jews (p. 160). To their credit, these socialist Jews, however, debunked the stereotype of the Jews as “greedy” and “materialistic” (pp. 126; 137).

4. The nationalist (or Zionist) Jews emphasized first and foremost the need for a homeland over which Jews would exercise sovereign power without coming to an agreement on the prevailing economic system (p. 106). Zionism was a reaction to the rise of ethnic nationalism that had a basis in the politics of capitalist economic transformation of others (pp. 190-191; 194-199; 202; 208-210). These nationalist Jews faced two unique and formidable obstacles compared to most other ethnic groups: 1. Re-(acquire) a territorial base on which to form a nation-state and 2. Transform themselves from an economically and socially specialized stratum into a combination of “peoplehood” and “statehood” needed to re-(acquire) sovereignty over a distinct territory (pp. 215-218). Professor Muller observes on this subject that the Israeli economy transitioned much faster from its agrarian, socialist beginnings to its present-day highly commercial nature than older Western capitalist economies did (pp. 122-123). The recently published book “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer is illuminating on this subject.

Professor Muller acknowledges that the high representation of Jews in intellectual professions makes them stand out as standard bearers of almost any political ideology (p. 125). The concept of “tikkun olam” (= repairing the world) in Judaism is not alien to this development.

In summary, Professor Muller realizes a tour de force in remaining as objective as possible in his examination of the multidimensional relationship that Jews have had with capitalism.

* Professional historian Jerry Z. Muller’s new book on Capitalism and the Jews is a collection of four essays covering four various topics concerning capitalism and Jewish and European history. The first essay covers medieval European history into modern European history. Ever since the Middle Ages in Western Europe, Jews were associated with the handling of money. It was more than just money lending, however, Jews were lenders of money with interest: a practice that was seen as sinful and “blood-sucking”.

Usury was considered a base practice for several reasons. For one, writers from classical antiquity saw no justification for deriving money from money; “Money does not beget money,” the old proverb went. The most influential of these classical writers was Aristotle, whose works were disseminated to the Christian West in the High Middle Ages, and whose philosophy worked its way into the thought of Catholic theologians. Interpreting the passage on interest from Deuteronomy (Deut. 23: “You may lend with interest to foreigners, but to your brother you may not lend with interest”) liberally such that “brother” meant all people, usury became sinful in Catholic lands in the 12th century. Indeed, the Second Lateran Council expressly forbade the practice in 1139, and Dante’s Inferno would place usurers along with murderers and blasphemers in the seventh ring of hell.

Yet from about 1050 to 1300 “new agricultural surpluses in Europe made greater commerce and urbanization possible, and that made the economic function of lending money more important”. As the Italian wit Benvenudi de Rambaldis da Imola put it, “those who engage in usury go to hell; those who fail to engage in usury fall into poverty”. The church solved this dilemma in the early 12th century by allowing Jews to practice the sinful activity, since, they reasoned, Jews were not subject to canon law and were condemned to hell anyway because of their repudiation of Jesus Christ. Medieval Kings saw benefits to this rule, since they were able to exact heavy taxes from Jewish usurers (essentially) in exchange for their existence. Thus the rigid connection of Jews with usury began.

Loaning money at interest was indeed a most ignoble profession. Yet in most cases many Jews had no suitable alternative. In the words of Rabbi Eliezer ben Nathan of Mainz (died c. 1170), the Jews had to loan money at interest because they “own[ed] no fields or vineyards whereby they could live, [therefore] lending money to non-Jews [was] necessary and therefore permitted” (quoted in Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present). Jews in Western Christendom thus served as a “metaphor-turned-flesh” for money lending, usury, and proto-capitalism. Muller writes, the image of usury “was closely connected to that of the Jew, who was regarded as avaricious, and as an outsider and wanderer, able to engage in so reviled an activity as money lending because he was beyond the community of shared faith”.

The second essay focuses on Milton Friedman’s lecture “Capitalism and the Jews” and challenges Friedman’s main presumptions and conclusions. In this lecture (Muller tells us) Friedman said that Jews have historically benefited from capitalism, yet they (modern and contemporary Jews) have tended to oppose capitalism. Muller responds by showing that although many prominent communist/socialist leaders were Jewish (e.g. Trotsky, Luxemburg, Kamenev, Zinoviev), it is simply a false oversimplification to say that most Jews have opposed capitalism.

The third essay titled “Radical Anti-Capitalism” examines Jews that indeed have opposed capitalism. In the same vein as Friedman’s observation, popular imagination saw European Jewry as supporters of communist and socialist parties in post-WWI Europe. This had some truth, but, Muller shows, it was not as if most or even a large plurality of European Jews supported communist revolution. Rather, many communist parties had Jewish members in prominent roles. Moreover, the promise of anti-nationalism and equality led many young Jews to join communist parties; this caused fascists, conservatives, and other right-wingers to conclude through a jaundiced eye that “Judeo-Bolshevism” was a real spectre that was infiltrating their respective societies. One cannot help but think of the most menacing case of anti-Jewish sentiment: the Nazis.

After WWII the trend seemed to continue as many Jews held high positions in post-WWII Eastern Europe under the shadow of the Soviet Union. This was because many Jews saw the soviets as liberators in Poland and elsewhere, and wanted to help the battle against nationalism–a nationalism(s) that had often relegated Jews as second-class citizens, or denied Jews citizenship entirely. Interestingly, Muller suggests that this (Jews joining the communist cause after WWII) was nourished because Stalin and the Kremlin feared the possible spread of Titoism and felt that communist Jews were unlikely to go the way of the nationalist-communism of Tito after what the Jews experienced in WWII. Muller writes, “communists of Jewish origin seemed the least likely to form an alliance with the local populace against the hegemony of the Soviets.”

Yet Jewish communists were later to be persecuted and purged in Eastern European communist politics. The “Doctors’ Plot” was one prominent example of the embodiment of anti-Jewish sentiment in post-WWII politics, as were purgings of Jews from the governments of Czechoslovakia and Poland and elsewhere.

The final essay in this volume summarizes Ernest Gellner’s thesis on nationalism and applies it to Jewish nationalism: nationalism developed when agrarian society transformed into industrial society because the state/government needed to teach potential industrial workers how to read and communicate in a standard national language. Some communities were of course outside of the newfound nationhood-ness (for example Greeks, overseas Chinese and Indians, Armenians, Parsees, and Jews). These stateless nations could assimilate or create their own nations, which is what Jews did in time.

Muller’s short volume on capitalism and the Jews was a pleasure to read, and contained many insightful observations. I found the first and third essays to be very valuable, and the truly interested reader will find the entire volume valuable as well. Muller necessarily paints with a broad brush, but the end product is neither blurred nor affronting. I highly recommend this book to readers of both Jewish and European history.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Europe, Jerry Z. Muller, Jews | Comments Off on Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller

Jeff Sessions: ‘Clarity of Donald Trump’s Position’ on Trade Is ‘Right’ as Americans Lose Jobs Overseas

Within ten days, the politicians will be lining up to endorse Donald J. Trump for president.

Breitbart:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)80%, the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement and the catalyst behind much of the rise of nationalist populism in this election cycle, told Breitbart News exclusively that he thinks there’s much about 2016 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump for voters to like when it comes to the issue of trade negotiations.

While Sessions is, again, not officially endorsing anyone in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, his top aide Stephen Miller, the Washington Post reported on Monday afternoon, is joining Trump’s presidential campaign as a senior policy adviser.

Miller has been critical to Sessions’ efforts fighting open borders immigration plans and amnesty for illegal aliens pushed by the political establishment, and equally critical to Sessions’ key role in the war against open borders trade policies pushed by political elites.

The issue of trade roared to the front of the political mindset last year when President Barack Obama joined forces with Speaker of the House-to- be Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)56% and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)79%
to ram through Congress Trade Promotion Authority (TPA)—which is a fast track program that greases the skids for easy passage of a multitude of globalist trade deals critical to Obama’s legacy.

Those trade deals include the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), and the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). The TPA plan helps the establishment’s efforts to ram the deals through, as it lowers the vote threshold in the Senate from 60 votes to 51 votes and kills the ability for Congress to amend deals. If ratified these trade deals, collectively, along with fast track authority known as Obamatrade, would bind the United States to several new global commissions, effectively barreling the U.S. away from sovereignty when it comes to economic plans, Sessions says, towards a European Union-style global leadership.

Sessions, who is standing up for American workers on this issue, told Breitbart News that the reason nobody on Capitol Hill or in the political class—save for Trump—really seems to be fighting this is “complicated,” because the polling data so clearly shows Americans are widely opposed to these types of trade deals. Sessions said:

“It’s complicated but fundamentally the United States—and Wall Street, and the Wall Street Journal and the trading centers and like London and Tokyo and Hong Kong—they have this ideal of ‘free trade. They has never been a trade agreement they haven’t supported. It’s sort of become conventional wisdom that Republicans push for free trade agreements, although Republican voters are more hostile in general to it than Democratic voters are according to polling. But we think we know better. What our trading partners—particularly our allies, but our aggressive pacific trading partners—they have aciduously worked to use to those rules to gain an advantage and to increase their exports to the United States while decreasing our exports to their country. And we’ve done nothing about it. We’ve not responded in any effective way. Working people get it—and they’re not happy. That’s part of the clarity of Trump’s position on all this—although I don’t think I would share everything he says about trade, but fundamentally the fact that we’re being taken advantage of is costing Americans jobs and weakening America. [On that, Trump] is right on. I think people have instinctively felt that and that’s been a source of his support.”

One of the key areas of trade policy on which Trump has particularly zoned in is currency manipulation—where other nations proactively devalue their currency to increase exports and decrease imports, therefore artificially creating an employment boom in their country while driving unemployment up and wages down in the country on the receiving end of their economic abuses. Sessions noted that the United States has certainly not been doing enough to fight back against this on the world stage.

Sessions told Breitbart News:

“There is absolutely no doubt that if a nation acts to devalue its currency, contrary to what market forces would allow, then that country can export more products to the United States and the United States is going to be able to export less products to that country. In other words, it makes their products cheaper in the United States and it makes our products more expensive when they’re exported. This is a known and indisputable fact and if you watch financial pages regularly they talk about the stocks of companies falling because they’re facing wayward currency—stock values of American companies falling—because they’re exporting in a market where our currency is rising and other currencies are falling. China has already devalued its currency 6 percent this year and I’ve heard people say they may do 20 percent or more. When you do that, when you increase your ability to export, then you create employment in your country and you export unemployment to the United States.”

When TPA was being rushed through Congress last year—originally with the support of both Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)97%, although Cruz later turned against it on a second go-around in the Senate—Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH)50% put forward an amendment that would have blocked currency manipulation by China and Japan and other nations in trade deals. That amendment was crushed by pro-Obamatrade forces. Sessions says that means there are no “protections of reality” when it comes to currency policy, putting Americans at grave risk, depending on the outcome of the presidential election.

Sessions went on to say:

“So this is a very real matter and we fought and it was debated and it came up and the currency language that would bar this currency manipulation was blocked and never passed. It passed, but it passed on a bill that the president could veto. It never passed on this legislation. So we don’t have any currency protections of reality. The Portman amendment would have really been helpful against currency manipulation but it was defeated. So in effect we have a unilateral disarmament. They can manipulate their currency, they can subsidize their businesses, they can target American manufacturing and our government throws out ‘free market, free market, free market’ while our determined mercantilist competitors are calculatedly damaging America, American workers’ families and their ability to have a job.”

The decision that lays before voters in Iowa in just seven days, voters in New Hampshire eight days later, and South Carolina a couple weeks after that, couldn’t be clearer according to Sessions—who, again, just had his top aide Stephen Miller join the Trump campaign. Sessions noted that Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 GOP presidential nominee, fought for American workers on this issue in the 2012 GOP presidential primary but abandoned it in the general election. That’s why he believes it’s so important that Trump – should he or anyone else who’s tough against currency manipulation win the nomination—continue to discuss the matter when they face off against whomever the Democrats nominate, which is still expected to most likely be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Sessions said:

“We have got to decide: Are we going to have manufacturing in this country or not? If these economies can manipulate currency, and otherwise block our exports in non-tariff ways to their country then we are on a path to unilateral disarmament,” Sessions said. “Now, Romney laid it out in the primaries when he ran—and he failed to talk about it in November when it could have led him to victory unconvinced. But he said in the primaries that we’re in a trade war, we’re just not fighting. If you don’t stand up to China, they’ll run over you. They say if you stand up to China it’ll cause a trade war. But we’re in a trade war, we’re just not fighting. One more thing that Romney said that was critically important and he said that anyway, they have more to lose than we do. When we negotiate with our trading partners, we’ve got the leverage. They lust for our markets. They desire above all else to export to the United States and get high dollar in return. If they don’t play by the rules, we can buy products from other places—we don’t have to buy them from China or Japan or any other country for that matter if they’re not playing by the rules. Now if you get in a big trading agreement, we can’t make that decision. We’ve got to take it to this commission, and every country has the same vote. Japan or China, if they’re in it, or Korea’s in it or Vietnam’s in it, they can vote and block us from being able to confront and push back. The United States cannot put itself in a position where it is unable to retaliate against countries that deliberately and systematically violate trade rules.”

This is the second part of Sessions’ 45-minute-long exclusive interview on trade policy with Breitbart News ahead of the Iowa caucuses. In the first part, Sessions laid out how Republicans must nominate a presidential candidate who can “negotiate better” on the world stage. More from the interview is forthcoming.

Again, Sessions hasn’t formally endorsed any candidate, but he has appeared with Trump at a rally in his hometown in Mobile, Alabama, and helped Trump craft his wildly popular immigration reform policy paper.

Posted in America, Donald Trump | Comments Off on Jeff Sessions: ‘Clarity of Donald Trump’s Position’ on Trade Is ‘Right’ as Americans Lose Jobs Overseas