"A Colony in a Nation" is warning to "a Nation"- you cannot maintain tyranny without losing freedom, you cannot own another human being and keep your soul. The bonds that grip black Americans today were put there incrementally and mindfully. They will get Americans if we tolerate them in an incrementally but mindless way.
Black lives matter, and if we deny that black lives matter then we will create a world where none do.
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Review: Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties' Soviet Dream
It isn't enough to deconstruct other people's views of the world to understand the mechanisms that surround us. We must reconstruct their views with as much charity as possible, and sometimes that means imagining ourselves as real or imagined citizens of our country's long gone enemy. We can start building sympathy, then empathy, and then, perhaps, we can know how to love. If we do this and try to hold both the sanitized, atomized, machine-men as well as the living, loving, dying, fucking flesh-men in our heads then maybe we can make sense of it all.
The first step is to realize that there are good reasons to believe in the communist "fairy tale." Sitting inside a communist bubble, or perhaps sitting in a traditional economy not yet industrialized, capitalism seems like an awful deal: companies fight each other in zero-sum games that produce waste while profits are siphoned off to build luxury vehicles and golden apartments so that rich men can feel better about their tiny hands. Meanwhile, the average man is a slave to whatever his market price happens to be, and it is usually just above subsistence level unless he can specialize his way to safety.
These are compelling arguments! The State can force these zero-sum games to come to a halt, reinvest profits directly into product, and keep the average man above a subsistence living by paying him more than what his market value is worth. These are not hard beliefs to have, even when you're the leader of an impoverished country walking down the man-made canyons of New York.
There are four big issues with communism that Spufford describes through his characters' eyes: Stop signaling, misincentives, transaction costs and the moral power and stability of prices. All of these feed each other and work to make a monstrous machine (notice I didn't say "break" the machine).
Prices in the West are popularly seen as a result of events on supply and government policy. When the price of milk rises, we blame Trump. When the price of oil goes down, we shout for join about the new fracking technology. And yet, we have a moral intuition about these prices. We point out, "Why does a man wearing tights carrying a pigskin ball get paid more than teachers or the men that fight and die for us?"
The answer is that the market says so, and that calms most of us down. Yet, in the Soviet Union there was no market to take the brunt of people's moral indignation. When prices on beef go up, they go up because the government says so. If the elite technocrats whip up their linear programming calculators and try to take control of the economy with a computer, it isn't that power is being shifted from "managers" (though it is), it means that the state will be given to the whims of the computer. This means that "Shadow pricing" was impossible. Shadow pricing would have alleviated two strains on the economy by allowing signals that tell the economy to stop and by incentivizing factories to produce the right things.
Incentivizing factories to create the right thing could be as simple as saying, "Make 150k tires or we will shoot you", but if the factory is only capable of making 100k tires, you're incentivizing the manager to destroy the factory. Why can't the manager just say, "Ah, no man, we can't"? Because there are transaction costs for communicating upwards (you get demoted/not fired) and there are transaction costs for communicating horizontally (it's illegal). In other words, the bureaucracy incentivizes weird behavior from a manager's perspective.
These misincentives mean that machines are never told to turn off. Outdated machines are kept running, pulling resources that could be allocated differently. Instead of yachts being maintained, the hulks of yesteryears' industrialization are fed again and again. They produce just to produce, and they crystallize society around them in a paralysis that collapses under its own weight.
These economic ideas are not just explained in Red Plenty, they are lived. When explained why politicians rejected shadow pricing, we already know why: we're scared that price changes will leave a pregnant mother dead in the streets, because we've been there. When its explained that industrial sabotage will propagate through the economy, we can see how 'error' itself can propagate throughout society obscuring truth even more than Stalin's anti-science campaigns.
Red Plenty is a wonderful book that makes you feel and think, which I suppose means to attempt to understand.
The first step is to realize that there are good reasons to believe in the communist "fairy tale." Sitting inside a communist bubble, or perhaps sitting in a traditional economy not yet industrialized, capitalism seems like an awful deal: companies fight each other in zero-sum games that produce waste while profits are siphoned off to build luxury vehicles and golden apartments so that rich men can feel better about their tiny hands. Meanwhile, the average man is a slave to whatever his market price happens to be, and it is usually just above subsistence level unless he can specialize his way to safety.
These are compelling arguments! The State can force these zero-sum games to come to a halt, reinvest profits directly into product, and keep the average man above a subsistence living by paying him more than what his market value is worth. These are not hard beliefs to have, even when you're the leader of an impoverished country walking down the man-made canyons of New York.
There are four big issues with communism that Spufford describes through his characters' eyes: Stop signaling, misincentives, transaction costs and the moral power and stability of prices. All of these feed each other and work to make a monstrous machine (notice I didn't say "break" the machine).
Prices in the West are popularly seen as a result of events on supply and government policy. When the price of milk rises, we blame Trump. When the price of oil goes down, we shout for join about the new fracking technology. And yet, we have a moral intuition about these prices. We point out, "Why does a man wearing tights carrying a pigskin ball get paid more than teachers or the men that fight and die for us?"
The answer is that the market says so, and that calms most of us down. Yet, in the Soviet Union there was no market to take the brunt of people's moral indignation. When prices on beef go up, they go up because the government says so. If the elite technocrats whip up their linear programming calculators and try to take control of the economy with a computer, it isn't that power is being shifted from "managers" (though it is), it means that the state will be given to the whims of the computer. This means that "Shadow pricing" was impossible. Shadow pricing would have alleviated two strains on the economy by allowing signals that tell the economy to stop and by incentivizing factories to produce the right things.
Incentivizing factories to create the right thing could be as simple as saying, "Make 150k tires or we will shoot you", but if the factory is only capable of making 100k tires, you're incentivizing the manager to destroy the factory. Why can't the manager just say, "Ah, no man, we can't"? Because there are transaction costs for communicating upwards (you get demoted/not fired) and there are transaction costs for communicating horizontally (it's illegal). In other words, the bureaucracy incentivizes weird behavior from a manager's perspective.
These misincentives mean that machines are never told to turn off. Outdated machines are kept running, pulling resources that could be allocated differently. Instead of yachts being maintained, the hulks of yesteryears' industrialization are fed again and again. They produce just to produce, and they crystallize society around them in a paralysis that collapses under its own weight.
These economic ideas are not just explained in Red Plenty, they are lived. When explained why politicians rejected shadow pricing, we already know why: we're scared that price changes will leave a pregnant mother dead in the streets, because we've been there. When its explained that industrial sabotage will propagate through the economy, we can see how 'error' itself can propagate throughout society obscuring truth even more than Stalin's anti-science campaigns.
Red Plenty is a wonderful book that makes you feel and think, which I suppose means to attempt to understand.
Friday, November 3, 2017
Review: Death's End
Wow, unfortunately, this book really was sexist as hell. Also, unlike the other books, the main character largely reacts to things around them. There is no proactive decision making. There is just acquiescence to fate. It's dumb. The science is ok, but not nearly as interesting as that posed Three-Body Problem or The Dark Forest.
There are many points when the story could end and nothing would be lost, but instead, it keeps going without a breather. It feels like the story is running faster and faster... but from what? For what purpose? It is not clear.
Also, it ends with some lines about "love" like a pop action sci-fi flick! WHAT?!
There are many points when the story could end and nothing would be lost, but instead, it keeps going without a breather. It feels like the story is running faster and faster... but from what? For what purpose? It is not clear.
Also, it ends with some lines about "love" like a pop action sci-fi flick! WHAT?!
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Review: What Happened
Hillary Rodham Clinton did not lose the 2016 election.
It was stolen.
Had Comey not released his letter a week before the election, she would have a decent margin in the polls. That is clear from the math. It caused a direct fall in the polls that she could not recover or respond to fast enough time time. It really is that simple.
"But that was enough?" is a good question. Shouldn't Clinton have been better than that? Clinton has her own answers: Sexism, the historical wind of parties being unable to hold onto political power for more than two terms, and, of course, the electoral college. These are all good and sufficient answers.
There ought to be something that brings any of the late-millennials a pang of worry: there has only been one election in their lives that Republicans have won the popular election. That is, of 25 years, more than 1/3 of them has seen a Republican, despite Republicans only winning 1/6 of all popular votes. That calls into question the ideas of democracy or republicanism (little r).
Clinton herself is worried: Her writing style is still lawerly. It is still... not good and she often descends into reciting names like the credits at the end of a movie, just like she had in past books. Yet, in between her name dropping and "scene" describing, there is pointed analysis that is worth reading and snark that is worth laughing at.
Read this book for the humor, the analysis, and the pain of reliving 2016. (But don't read it if you expect Clinton to write an emotional memoir that moves you).
It was stolen.
Had Comey not released his letter a week before the election, she would have a decent margin in the polls. That is clear from the math. It caused a direct fall in the polls that she could not recover or respond to fast enough time time. It really is that simple.
"But that was enough?" is a good question. Shouldn't Clinton have been better than that? Clinton has her own answers: Sexism, the historical wind of parties being unable to hold onto political power for more than two terms, and, of course, the electoral college. These are all good and sufficient answers.
There ought to be something that brings any of the late-millennials a pang of worry: there has only been one election in their lives that Republicans have won the popular election. That is, of 25 years, more than 1/3 of them has seen a Republican, despite Republicans only winning 1/6 of all popular votes. That calls into question the ideas of democracy or republicanism (little r).
Clinton herself is worried: Her writing style is still lawerly. It is still... not good and she often descends into reciting names like the credits at the end of a movie, just like she had in past books. Yet, in between her name dropping and "scene" describing, there is pointed analysis that is worth reading and snark that is worth laughing at.
Read this book for the humor, the analysis, and the pain of reliving 2016. (But don't read it if you expect Clinton to write an emotional memoir that moves you).
Review: Sex at Dawn
Humans are probably not super monogamous.
That's the strongest argument you can make with the evidence that Ryan lays out. If you accept the evidence that he lays out, too many things don't add up for monogamy: men and women aren't the same height, women display their bodies at the wrong rhythm, and our genitals aren't the right size for our body. Physically, we're all out of whack. Psychologically? It's worse. We cheat, hate cheaters, seem to be wired to like the wrong thing (novelty and status for women, youth for men), and we seem perfectly capable of living in three different psychological states- romantic love, lust, and companionship- all at once.
On the other hand, Ryan spends a lot of time attacking what he calls the "Standard Narrative" or the idea that humans are naturally monogamous but both males and females have competing sexual strategies that result in them cheating on their significant other. He is right this seems kind of dark and screwed up. And yet, the standard narrative seems to describe an overwhelming majority of civilized human society:
Every society ever recorded has a song or poem or story about love. Hell, the Epic of Gilgamesh starts with Enkidu falling in love. Where are all the poems about group sex? Where are all the stories of vivacious group sex? If Ryan's perspective were true, then something is missing.
It seems more likely that, as I have written before, we are an in-between species: we are not gorillas with alphas and harems, or chimpanzees where females cheat on dominant males, or bonobos where sex is used to solve conflicts. We're a flexible species. Men are a bit taller, but not too much. Our genitals are the wrong size, but too much or too little to be categorized. The same neurological machinery can enable African tribes to have group sex when having trade ceremonies can be used to lightly encourage a hunting band to get food with the promise of sex or even be used to throw one man and woman together such that they energize the cultural production of civilizations.
What actionable items does this book give us? That we should all go out and join polyamorous hippie cults? Answer: That's absurd! There isn't enough evidence (yet) for that to be true.
If we accept that the human brain has given us a fair degree of flexibility in our relationships, then the main takeaway is that we should have sympathy for those that couldn't make it- the broken and the divorced and the single parents. There is an immense cultural baggage around our conception of the nuclear family that is quite clearly not an eternal thing. We shame those that stay or stray outside of these culturally defined guardrails, and this shaming hurts those who tried but couldn't make it.
We're still primates, and even if we're running different hardware and improved software, the kernel inside is 6 million years old, and we should be forgiven for that.
That's the strongest argument you can make with the evidence that Ryan lays out. If you accept the evidence that he lays out, too many things don't add up for monogamy: men and women aren't the same height, women display their bodies at the wrong rhythm, and our genitals aren't the right size for our body. Physically, we're all out of whack. Psychologically? It's worse. We cheat, hate cheaters, seem to be wired to like the wrong thing (novelty and status for women, youth for men), and we seem perfectly capable of living in three different psychological states- romantic love, lust, and companionship- all at once.
On the other hand, Ryan spends a lot of time attacking what he calls the "Standard Narrative" or the idea that humans are naturally monogamous but both males and females have competing sexual strategies that result in them cheating on their significant other. He is right this seems kind of dark and screwed up. And yet, the standard narrative seems to describe an overwhelming majority of civilized human society:
Every society ever recorded has a song or poem or story about love. Hell, the Epic of Gilgamesh starts with Enkidu falling in love. Where are all the poems about group sex? Where are all the stories of vivacious group sex? If Ryan's perspective were true, then something is missing.
It seems more likely that, as I have written before, we are an in-between species: we are not gorillas with alphas and harems, or chimpanzees where females cheat on dominant males, or bonobos where sex is used to solve conflicts. We're a flexible species. Men are a bit taller, but not too much. Our genitals are the wrong size, but too much or too little to be categorized. The same neurological machinery can enable African tribes to have group sex when having trade ceremonies can be used to lightly encourage a hunting band to get food with the promise of sex or even be used to throw one man and woman together such that they energize the cultural production of civilizations.
What actionable items does this book give us? That we should all go out and join polyamorous hippie cults? Answer: That's absurd! There isn't enough evidence (yet) for that to be true.
If we accept that the human brain has given us a fair degree of flexibility in our relationships, then the main takeaway is that we should have sympathy for those that couldn't make it- the broken and the divorced and the single parents. There is an immense cultural baggage around our conception of the nuclear family that is quite clearly not an eternal thing. We shame those that stay or stray outside of these culturally defined guardrails, and this shaming hurts those who tried but couldn't make it.
We're still primates, and even if we're running different hardware and improved software, the kernel inside is 6 million years old, and we should be forgiven for that.
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Review: Energy and Civilization: A History
Energy transitions take time. That's the big takeaway. That's the terrifying takeaway. This should be obvious if you sit down and think about it, but when we describe our economic history with phrases like "agricultural revolution" and "industrial revolution" we start getting ahead of ourselves. These revolutions took millennia and centuries.
And we only have decades before our planet burns. What revolution can we expect?
Smil shies away from those that would try to paint every with the brush of energy- art? war? politics? These are largely independent a civilization's energy usage. Yet, its energy usage and its economy might as well be one and the same. As energy is fed into a civilization, like a rainforest basking in the tropics, the kind of life inside diversifies, extends, and mutates to reach the limits that physics will allow.
The biggest invention in the history of humanity was the slow transition from using wood energy to using coal, oil, and gas. This transition increased the amount of energy available to any individual in the developed world by many magnitudes access to energy. This powered the economic growth following the world wars, and until the 1970s, the efficiencies of American produced cars were going down due to the cheapness of oil.
Of course, it is in the 1970s when economic growth in the developed world went from a joy ride to a car stuck in traffic. The reason: energy prices rose.
We now face an ecological problem brought on by our energy use, that threatens the economy that our energy use props up. There are two broad categories of solution: (1) limit our energy usage and (2) change our energy use.
Smil does not have much faith in the latter: over the course of the last fifty, or even fifteen, years the piece of the energy pie inhabited by renewables has hardly changed. To truly save much of civilization, we must get that number -15%- to near 100% within a few decades. We've never done that before is Smil's strongest argument.
But I would argue that this transition is different. For one, we know we have to make the change. The King of England wasn't telling Watt to invent a steam engine. No priest ever told the hunters and gathers to start domesticating animals. The Green Energy revolution, if we are to have one, is a planned revolution started from the bottom and the top.
Limiting our energy usage is obvious, but more contentious. We have to stop driving so many cars? Eat less meat? Stop building cheaply built McMansions with no insulation? These seem to be an affront to people's basic liberties, and yet every time they make these choices they help dig us a little bit deeper into carbon debt.
Smil's history is broad and deep. It reaches into the tiny fragments of Roman, Chinese and prehistory that you didn't know where out there. It discusses the differences between whether an ox or a horse are best on a farm, and what their energy efficiencies are relative to one another. He uses sharp illustrations makes clear that two 747 pilots control more energy than entire medieval communities would have had at their disposal.
Most of all, he provides the context for understanding today's economic and ecological problems that have resulted from our historical use of energy.
And we only have decades before our planet burns. What revolution can we expect?
Smil shies away from those that would try to paint every with the brush of energy- art? war? politics? These are largely independent a civilization's energy usage. Yet, its energy usage and its economy might as well be one and the same. As energy is fed into a civilization, like a rainforest basking in the tropics, the kind of life inside diversifies, extends, and mutates to reach the limits that physics will allow.
The biggest invention in the history of humanity was the slow transition from using wood energy to using coal, oil, and gas. This transition increased the amount of energy available to any individual in the developed world by many magnitudes access to energy. This powered the economic growth following the world wars, and until the 1970s, the efficiencies of American produced cars were going down due to the cheapness of oil.
Of course, it is in the 1970s when economic growth in the developed world went from a joy ride to a car stuck in traffic. The reason: energy prices rose.
We now face an ecological problem brought on by our energy use, that threatens the economy that our energy use props up. There are two broad categories of solution: (1) limit our energy usage and (2) change our energy use.
Smil does not have much faith in the latter: over the course of the last fifty, or even fifteen, years the piece of the energy pie inhabited by renewables has hardly changed. To truly save much of civilization, we must get that number -15%- to near 100% within a few decades. We've never done that before is Smil's strongest argument.
But I would argue that this transition is different. For one, we know we have to make the change. The King of England wasn't telling Watt to invent a steam engine. No priest ever told the hunters and gathers to start domesticating animals. The Green Energy revolution, if we are to have one, is a planned revolution started from the bottom and the top.
Limiting our energy usage is obvious, but more contentious. We have to stop driving so many cars? Eat less meat? Stop building cheaply built McMansions with no insulation? These seem to be an affront to people's basic liberties, and yet every time they make these choices they help dig us a little bit deeper into carbon debt.
Smil's history is broad and deep. It reaches into the tiny fragments of Roman, Chinese and prehistory that you didn't know where out there. It discusses the differences between whether an ox or a horse are best on a farm, and what their energy efficiencies are relative to one another. He uses sharp illustrations makes clear that two 747 pilots control more energy than entire medieval communities would have had at their disposal.
Most of all, he provides the context for understanding today's economic and ecological problems that have resulted from our historical use of energy.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
"Washington. Davis. Wallace. Clement. Obama. Winfrey. Clinton. Trump..... They're all just spokes on a wheel. First, this ones on top, then that ones on top and on and on it spins crushing those on the ground. I'm not going to stop the wheel; I'm going to break it."
The cycle of racial subjugation in the United States follows a pattern: the black poor and white poor find themselves allied against the rich, the white rich attack and control the black poor to bribe the white poor and employ respectability politics to create an internal hierarchy in the population of the oppressed. Eventually, the system of oppression collapses and is replaced by something else. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, and Jim Crow was replaced by mass incarceration. Each system is different and perhaps less awful... but it doesn't take a slave driver to make a slave, just like it doesn't take a racist thought to make one behave racistly.
What Michelle Alexander does in the New Jim Crow is describe this cycle and its current incarnation. She describes the "birdcage" of laws and practices that have been built and explains how they must be the primary target for any social justice movement. This birdcage- really a literal cage- must be destroyed and the desire for aesthetic justice needs to be replaced with a desire for actual human flourishing.
Something that Alexander does that surprised me is attack "cosmetic" justice or "aesthetic" justice warriors. If social justice progress was actually being made, we'd see that in the statistics- a lower racial wage gap, less black Americans in jail, better educations, etc. Instead, what we see are human biases brought to life: we see actors, athletes, and politicians trotted out to fulfill our confirmation and availability biases.
Two concepts are then called into question- Is affirmative action actually good? Is "black excellence" just "black exceptionalism" by another name? They both have roots in conservative, not liberal, ideas. "If we help make a few black students get into good universities, then they will improve the black community" and "There are loads of successful black individuals!"
The phrase Michelle comes back to is "trickle down" to describe these social justice concepts. It is the idea that these concepts are supposed to destroy racial disparities by allowing the wealth and power granted to a few individuals to seep back into the communities. Liberal alarm bells should be ringing: Obviously, if this isn't true for the entire population, it could hardly be true for a subset of the population.
The spokes on the wheel are not just the supremacists, but the collaborators. The entire wheel has to be smashed with an unrelenting focus and love for everybody, not just a few.
The cycle of racial subjugation in the United States follows a pattern: the black poor and white poor find themselves allied against the rich, the white rich attack and control the black poor to bribe the white poor and employ respectability politics to create an internal hierarchy in the population of the oppressed. Eventually, the system of oppression collapses and is replaced by something else. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, and Jim Crow was replaced by mass incarceration. Each system is different and perhaps less awful... but it doesn't take a slave driver to make a slave, just like it doesn't take a racist thought to make one behave racistly.
What Michelle Alexander does in the New Jim Crow is describe this cycle and its current incarnation. She describes the "birdcage" of laws and practices that have been built and explains how they must be the primary target for any social justice movement. This birdcage- really a literal cage- must be destroyed and the desire for aesthetic justice needs to be replaced with a desire for actual human flourishing.
Something that Alexander does that surprised me is attack "cosmetic" justice or "aesthetic" justice warriors. If social justice progress was actually being made, we'd see that in the statistics- a lower racial wage gap, less black Americans in jail, better educations, etc. Instead, what we see are human biases brought to life: we see actors, athletes, and politicians trotted out to fulfill our confirmation and availability biases.
Two concepts are then called into question- Is affirmative action actually good? Is "black excellence" just "black exceptionalism" by another name? They both have roots in conservative, not liberal, ideas. "If we help make a few black students get into good universities, then they will improve the black community" and "There are loads of successful black individuals!"
The phrase Michelle comes back to is "trickle down" to describe these social justice concepts. It is the idea that these concepts are supposed to destroy racial disparities by allowing the wealth and power granted to a few individuals to seep back into the communities. Liberal alarm bells should be ringing: Obviously, if this isn't true for the entire population, it could hardly be true for a subset of the population.
The spokes on the wheel are not just the supremacists, but the collaborators. The entire wheel has to be smashed with an unrelenting focus and love for everybody, not just a few.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Review: Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
You cannot save the planet with "just a carbon tax". The math of climate change screams that at you. Even if you were able to wipe out $27 trillion in fossil fuel assets, there's already too much carbon in the air. We have created a peak carbon dioxide parts-per-million that humanity has never seen since we diverged from Chimps. We have to- as the title suggests- drawdown the very carbon in the atmosphere.
And yet, the possible solutions are all very politicized, at least in the United States. District heating and insulation regulations? Who cares if it decreases my heating bill, ain't no way the filthy liberal, commies are going to touch my air.
Reduced food waste? Eating more plants? God gave me those animals to eat and throw away as I see fit; ain't you read a Bibble?
There are ultimately two types of solutions: (1) decreasing/eliminating carbon output, or (2) pulling out carbon from the air. Of the former, there are three subtypes. (1.a) become more energy efficient, (1.b) replace carbon-based energy with a non-carbon based energy and (1.c) forgo a carbon luxury.
The solutions the book comes up with are, in general, wonderful. Any reasonable person would look at them and think, "Oh yeah, of course." A three-pronged approach by the government would easily force society to reorganize itself around these lines: You start with (1) a carbon tax to punish energy inefficiency, force people to give up carbon luxuries and replace their carbon-energy systems. You then (2) create a trust or government organization that the government partially funds with the carbon tax and (3) a strong, robust regulatory authority that is able to measure, collect, and analyze the carbon production of companies and other countries.
But the seeming reasonableness of these three over-arching solutions ignores the point: large sections of the population hate them on a moral level. Regulatory agency? Tax? Government trust? These are ideological non-starters. However, without them, there are no other solutions:
Silvopasture is the #9 solution. The tl;dr of it is"put cows into forests". But guess what? That costs money, and that cost is going to be baked into each pound of beef that the silvopasture produces. Then you have to figure into the fact that the entire world simply can't be turned into a cow forest! People will have to eat less meat, which they'll do... because why?
Each solution presented is ultimately the same: there is no reason for mass adoption (which is necessary for the solution to work) unless there is an external force to incentivize adoption. And, given that the market will only begin reacting to most of these forces when it is too late, there has to be an incentive force.... which we've already found to be politically blocked off.
Sure, some of the ideas are hazier and less market based: educate women! give birth control to the developing world! That doesn't save them from the toxic cloud of ideology that hangs over this whole situation though.
That's why Drawdown ultimately failed to be the great hope it was painted as. It's not so much a comprehensive plan as it is an assembly of ideas that would get implemented by the market in reaction to an outside force punishing it. Each idea is presented in a very simple way. A 2-3 page description of the solution and its carbon savings, net dollar cost and net dollar savings... but nothing about it necessarily scream, "This solution will work and pan out!" except for the solutions that were agreed upon before 2016.
This assembly of ideas does have hope. It does have the nuggets of hope. It says what we've always known: "We can fix this. It is possible." But it doesn't give us any hope at all that it is probable.
And yet, the possible solutions are all very politicized, at least in the United States. District heating and insulation regulations? Who cares if it decreases my heating bill, ain't no way the filthy liberal, commies are going to touch my air.
Reduced food waste? Eating more plants? God gave me those animals to eat and throw away as I see fit; ain't you read a Bibble?
There are ultimately two types of solutions: (1) decreasing/eliminating carbon output, or (2) pulling out carbon from the air. Of the former, there are three subtypes. (1.a) become more energy efficient, (1.b) replace carbon-based energy with a non-carbon based energy and (1.c) forgo a carbon luxury.
The solutions the book comes up with are, in general, wonderful. Any reasonable person would look at them and think, "Oh yeah, of course." A three-pronged approach by the government would easily force society to reorganize itself around these lines: You start with (1) a carbon tax to punish energy inefficiency, force people to give up carbon luxuries and replace their carbon-energy systems. You then (2) create a trust or government organization that the government partially funds with the carbon tax and (3) a strong, robust regulatory authority that is able to measure, collect, and analyze the carbon production of companies and other countries.
But the seeming reasonableness of these three over-arching solutions ignores the point: large sections of the population hate them on a moral level. Regulatory agency? Tax? Government trust? These are ideological non-starters. However, without them, there are no other solutions:
Silvopasture is the #9 solution. The tl;dr of it is"put cows into forests". But guess what? That costs money, and that cost is going to be baked into each pound of beef that the silvopasture produces. Then you have to figure into the fact that the entire world simply can't be turned into a cow forest! People will have to eat less meat, which they'll do... because why?
Each solution presented is ultimately the same: there is no reason for mass adoption (which is necessary for the solution to work) unless there is an external force to incentivize adoption. And, given that the market will only begin reacting to most of these forces when it is too late, there has to be an incentive force.... which we've already found to be politically blocked off.
Sure, some of the ideas are hazier and less market based: educate women! give birth control to the developing world! That doesn't save them from the toxic cloud of ideology that hangs over this whole situation though.
That's why Drawdown ultimately failed to be the great hope it was painted as. It's not so much a comprehensive plan as it is an assembly of ideas that would get implemented by the market in reaction to an outside force punishing it. Each idea is presented in a very simple way. A 2-3 page description of the solution and its carbon savings, net dollar cost and net dollar savings... but nothing about it necessarily scream, "This solution will work and pan out!" except for the solutions that were agreed upon before 2016.
This assembly of ideas does have hope. It does have the nuggets of hope. It says what we've always known: "We can fix this. It is possible." But it doesn't give us any hope at all that it is probable.
Wednesday, August 9, 2017
Review: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
The Slave Power was not defeated after the destruction of the Confederacy. It was sublimated. Like a radioactive piece of crust, the Slave Power was pushed under the earth, but it was never vanquished. It remained there, technically illegal, but it would strike on the roads or by the rails, and steal away with the black citizens of the South.
Was it dead? Was it a ghost? Pale. White. Bloodless but bloodthirsty. Having been skinned by America, the Slave Power killed the Law and wore its face; it desecrated its face forever.
Where did it steal away? To Hell. It pulled black souls into the lightless pits of Alabama's heart, into the red hot factories of Birmingham and Atlanta, and back onto the plantations of Florida. What did the Slave Power do? It threw "them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
The Slave Power instituted what Blackmon describes as an "era of neoslavery". The laws were different, but the effects were the same. You had to accept your position on a farm, not get an education, ask a white master for permission to do anything... and if you left your farm or failed to ask your white master for permission, then the next white man to set his eyes on you could pay the sheriff to make you lawfully his.
Perhaps it was different: free blacks could be enslaved, and an enslaved black was an expendable resource to be pushed to the limit, not "capital" to be nurtured.
And yet, they were more differences: industrialization came to the South following the black soot of coal and iron. Imagine the rise in labor prices! Iron, coal, cotton! Imagine how the industrial giants, the plantation lords must have felt competing against one another to see their profits eaten away by the dirty, greasy, tan faces of poor whites and the free, brown faces of blacks.
You must imagine! For rather than facing losing their wealth, potential wealth, and power the Capitalists enslaved the latter group and pit the former against them. And the South helped. In Alabama, 75% of annual state revenue was, at one point, directly from slave buyers' payments. These laws were crafted by Confederate leaders to line their own pockets, build their empires, and to erect monuments to themselves in their capitals. And that is exactly what they did.
The Slave Power hides in plain sight with a tempting bottle of Purel. There is a desire to sanitize history; there has always been this desire. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt had to push back against a wave of revisionist white apathy who wanted to forget the Civil War was a war for and against slavery. In the early 2000s, we have to push back against revisionist white apathy, as well.
"Why has there continued to be wealth, income, and education gaps between black and white Americans into the 2010s?" It's a common question. It's an ignorant question. The answer is very simple: "Your grandmother was probably alive when some Southern blacks were being held in a state indistinguishable from slavery."
Whatever you thought Jim Crow was like, Blackmon shows that it was most definitely worse.
Was it dead? Was it a ghost? Pale. White. Bloodless but bloodthirsty. Having been skinned by America, the Slave Power killed the Law and wore its face; it desecrated its face forever.
Where did it steal away? To Hell. It pulled black souls into the lightless pits of Alabama's heart, into the red hot factories of Birmingham and Atlanta, and back onto the plantations of Florida. What did the Slave Power do? It threw "them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
The Slave Power instituted what Blackmon describes as an "era of neoslavery". The laws were different, but the effects were the same. You had to accept your position on a farm, not get an education, ask a white master for permission to do anything... and if you left your farm or failed to ask your white master for permission, then the next white man to set his eyes on you could pay the sheriff to make you lawfully his.
Perhaps it was different: free blacks could be enslaved, and an enslaved black was an expendable resource to be pushed to the limit, not "capital" to be nurtured.
And yet, they were more differences: industrialization came to the South following the black soot of coal and iron. Imagine the rise in labor prices! Iron, coal, cotton! Imagine how the industrial giants, the plantation lords must have felt competing against one another to see their profits eaten away by the dirty, greasy, tan faces of poor whites and the free, brown faces of blacks.
You must imagine! For rather than facing losing their wealth, potential wealth, and power the Capitalists enslaved the latter group and pit the former against them. And the South helped. In Alabama, 75% of annual state revenue was, at one point, directly from slave buyers' payments. These laws were crafted by Confederate leaders to line their own pockets, build their empires, and to erect monuments to themselves in their capitals. And that is exactly what they did.
The Slave Power hides in plain sight with a tempting bottle of Purel. There is a desire to sanitize history; there has always been this desire. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt had to push back against a wave of revisionist white apathy who wanted to forget the Civil War was a war for and against slavery. In the early 2000s, we have to push back against revisionist white apathy, as well.
"Why has there continued to be wealth, income, and education gaps between black and white Americans into the 2010s?" It's a common question. It's an ignorant question. The answer is very simple: "Your grandmother was probably alive when some Southern blacks were being held in a state indistinguishable from slavery."
Whatever you thought Jim Crow was like, Blackmon shows that it was most definitely worse.
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Review: Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
| It is incorrect to call the forces that injure black Americans, "white supremacy". When you look at the minds, hearts, and habits of the antebellum south, and when you trace a historical line from before the Revolution to the present, then there is only one possible name you can use to describe those forces: The Slave Power. The Slave Power is a dominating force, directly opposed to the individualistic, freedom-loving nature of the American spirit. It is the force that carried Africans over the ocean. It is the force that claimed 3/5ths a vote for an unfree people. It is the force that shoots a black child and plants drugs on their body. It dehumanizes and brutalizes those that challenge it. It is also a pathetic force. It is uninventive, uncreative, and unimaginative. It cannot look forward but instead looks backward. It does not look upward but instead looks outward. In the mind of Slave Power, slavery is an inescapable historical norm. When the Slave Power sees a fork in the river, it sees a plantation, not a city. When it looks at a waste it sees cotton. Give the Slave Power gold for a bushel of cotton, and it doesn't buy a painting, or get a degree, or build a machine. It buys another slave to harvest cotton. In this way, the Slave Power is not the same as "White Supremacy". It leaches and destroys the white people in which it resides. It saps their intellectual ability. It teaches them to be weak, dumb, and dull. Show me a southern Ivy League school. Show me a world-changing Southern scientist. Show me anything culturally interesting about the South. There in the absence of an answer is the chain of Slave Power attached to the Southern white man's soul just as it is chained to the black man's neck and feet. The Civil War is when the Slave Power was brought to heel by the very same forces of Enlightenment that gave America birth: patriotism, justice, liberty, equity, pragmatism, and creativity. Those forces -all explicitly rejected by the Slave Power- are the parts of the Republic's soul that still fight against the Slave Power to this day. Because, again, the Slave Power was never vanquished completely. The cultural trappings and political trends it started continued afterward. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was energized by the Slave Power. The Mexican war was to fulfill the Slave Power's hunger. These two of America's sins- Indian genocide and imperialism- may still have happened had an African slave ship never landed on her shores, but it is hard to believe they would have happened with such ferocity. It is impossible to come away from reading the Battle Cry of Freedom without having a sense of patriotism. When you know that the country that you were raised in is imperfect, it might seem like the opposite of patriotism. But in this beautiful history, you can see America's perfectibility. If Slave Power could be shunted out of office, then it can be driven from our nation's souls forever. |
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Review: Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know
"It is, I promise, worse than you think."
These are the words that David Wallace-Wells used to begin his epic New York Magazine article, The Uninhabitable Earth. In it he paints a picture: vast swaths of the Earth are heated to become inhabitable. Enormous cyclones and snowstorms bury civilization in seas of water. The soil dries up, chokes, and blows away. Mass food riots lead to millions of refugees, and diseases spread up and across the world.
"The basic resources that we rely upon. All of them are adversely impacted by climate change and with a growing global population. So you’ve got more competition over fewer resources among a growing global population. It’s a recipe for a conflict nightmare" David quotes Mike Mann, the bannermen held up as anti-alarmist by climate moderates for quibbling with a single satellite statistic.
In my mailbox was Wallace-Well's first and foremost citation, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. I ordered it pretty much immediately. Wallace-Wells was simply being too poetic, too devasting to simply take him at his word. I knew climate change would be bad. But that bad, this fast? That seemed impossible!
But he literally just cribbed his essay from Climate Change's chapter 3.
Romm walks you through the science. Nearly every line is cited as we go from the beginning logic, "Carbon dioxide makes things warm up" to "These are the list of extreme weather events attributable to climate change" to "Vast destruction will rain down upon us". This overall structure is broken down into units of questions. This turns the book, in essence, into a 280 page FAQ. However, it turns out that it is the most readable FAQ I've ever seen. It became a page-turner as it builds out a sketch of what we can expect from global warming.
When I reviewed Klein's, "This Changes Everything", I pointed out that there was an inexorable logic to climate change:
Estimates of the number of tons of carbon that we can safely burn before we have to stop range from 250 gigatons of Carbon to 500 gigatons of carbon (the conservative answer that Klein quotes). The number of gigatons that we know about. The number of gigatons that we as a civilization have the power to burn in our lifetime? 2,000 gigatons.
Joseph Romm brought to my attention similarly inexorable mathematics: in order to stay below the "safe" 2-degree threshold, we have to stay under 450 ppm. We are currently raising the atmospheric content at a rate of 2ppm/year. We're at ~410 ppm. You ought to be able to do that math for yourself.
Wallace-Wells says, "Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope." He is right. You can reduce the chemistry to numbers or you can reduce the lives of the people endangered to numbers, but its scale is unfathomable.
But Romm's book helps make it a bit less unfathomable.
These are the words that David Wallace-Wells used to begin his epic New York Magazine article, The Uninhabitable Earth. In it he paints a picture: vast swaths of the Earth are heated to become inhabitable. Enormous cyclones and snowstorms bury civilization in seas of water. The soil dries up, chokes, and blows away. Mass food riots lead to millions of refugees, and diseases spread up and across the world.
"The basic resources that we rely upon. All of them are adversely impacted by climate change and with a growing global population. So you’ve got more competition over fewer resources among a growing global population. It’s a recipe for a conflict nightmare" David quotes Mike Mann, the bannermen held up as anti-alarmist by climate moderates for quibbling with a single satellite statistic.
In my mailbox was Wallace-Well's first and foremost citation, Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know. I ordered it pretty much immediately. Wallace-Wells was simply being too poetic, too devasting to simply take him at his word. I knew climate change would be bad. But that bad, this fast? That seemed impossible!
But he literally just cribbed his essay from Climate Change's chapter 3.
Romm walks you through the science. Nearly every line is cited as we go from the beginning logic, "Carbon dioxide makes things warm up" to "These are the list of extreme weather events attributable to climate change" to "Vast destruction will rain down upon us". This overall structure is broken down into units of questions. This turns the book, in essence, into a 280 page FAQ. However, it turns out that it is the most readable FAQ I've ever seen. It became a page-turner as it builds out a sketch of what we can expect from global warming.
When I reviewed Klein's, "This Changes Everything", I pointed out that there was an inexorable logic to climate change:
Estimates of the number of tons of carbon that we can safely burn before we have to stop range from 250 gigatons of Carbon to 500 gigatons of carbon (the conservative answer that Klein quotes). The number of gigatons that we know about. The number of gigatons that we as a civilization have the power to burn in our lifetime? 2,000 gigatons.
Joseph Romm brought to my attention similarly inexorable mathematics: in order to stay below the "safe" 2-degree threshold, we have to stay under 450 ppm. We are currently raising the atmospheric content at a rate of 2ppm/year. We're at ~410 ppm. You ought to be able to do that math for yourself.
Wallace-Wells says, "Even when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend its scope." He is right. You can reduce the chemistry to numbers or you can reduce the lives of the people endangered to numbers, but its scale is unfathomable.
But Romm's book helps make it a bit less unfathomable.
Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Review: The Handmaid's Tail
Most dystopian novels are about the relationship between power, knowledge, and meaning. 1984 and Brave New World are the two heavyweights in this area. In 1984, restricted knowledge gives the Party power and they have the ability to rewrite truth and control individual's ability to perceive meaning. Brave New World describes a world where meaning is annihilated by what we would now understand as unrestricted access to dopamine, and where power is no longer held by any individual: The System controls the world.
What the Handmaid's Tale does is propose a third instrument to orchestra power, knowledge and meaning: The Religion. I don't mean this as actual religion, but specifically as a psychological layer, an interface that exists between all interactions. In the Handmaid's Tale, it is clear that nobody in the novel is actually that devout to the Christian religion created by the Sons of Jacob. Rather, everybody is keeping up appearances.
In BNW and 1984, the main characters don't have that many friends or interactions. There are characters witnessed, and there are characters interacted with. 1984 has what? 3 interactive characters? BNW might have a few more, but in the Handmaiden's Tale there are many possible interactions: the Commander, Serena, the Marthas, Nick, Ofglen, Moira ... and these characters are all interacting with one another.
The Religion sits in between all of these characters managing, stifling and destroying different bonds. It regulates the flow of knowledge between different layers of society, and it acts against characters through these networks. How does The Religion do this despite nobody believing in it? (Literally, no character is unquestionably religious. Indeed, the religious that we do see are those oppressed- the Quakers, Catholics, Baptists and Jews. Anybody who has bought into The Religion, don't seem to have actually bought into all of its rules.)
What The Religion does to operate upon the characters is break down the trust that allows criticism of The Religion. On a societal level, it does this by just ending freedom of speech and shooting Women's Marchers. On an individual level, the Religion creates feelings of mutual distrust. This is most obviously seen in the relationship between Offred and Ofglen when they become aware of their mutual disdain for the Religion. In the eyes of each other and because of their mutual distrust, they were both pious. The Religion is then an n-player Prisoner's Dilemma, where defecting actually means freedom if enough players defect but mutual distrust prevents this defection.
With the Religion able to act on individuals through their networks, it is able to prescribe and deny meaning because ultimately meaning comes from our interactions. Neither BNW or 1984 deny this, despite having fewer important characters. Offred's husband and daughter are her two anchors of meaning, but they slowly dissolve as she forgets them.
Like the System and the Party, the Religion has modern day precedents. Modern day, zealous social justice on campuses certainly has echoes of the Religion as it stifles opposing views. So does corporate culture, where networks are prescribed and interfaced with by cult-like appeals to greater powers. Obviously, the Religion exists in actual religious places like the theocracies of the Middle East or the theocratic towns and cities of the South.
Finally, the Religion also creates itself in a different way: The mold of a lot of dystopian novels has "The Chessmaster" at the end to reveal everything. We see this in not just BNW or 1984, but The Matrix, the Giver, probably the Hunger Games and other novels. The Chessmaster of the Tale isn't the Commander. It's nobody. Every individual in the Tale is swept along the current of all the other individuals. There aren't any master plans, but individuals fighting amongst themselves for power and survival. They create a planned dystopia, but nobody in particular wanted it the way it came.
The Handmaiden's Tale is a great book, and I could get into the "feminist" aspects of it, but I don't think it's actually that feminist. It is most anti-reactionary, and it predicted reactionary thought word for word (read some of the Commander's thoughts and then you'll see them in print, digested by hundreds of thousands, on /r/theredpill). I could also get into the historical precedents of it, but Atwood does that in an afterword for the version I read. I could get into the powerful writing and world building and scene setting and tell you how wonderful they are, but my header should've done that for you.
What the Handmaid's Tale does is propose a third instrument to orchestra power, knowledge and meaning: The Religion. I don't mean this as actual religion, but specifically as a psychological layer, an interface that exists between all interactions. In the Handmaid's Tale, it is clear that nobody in the novel is actually that devout to the Christian religion created by the Sons of Jacob. Rather, everybody is keeping up appearances.
In BNW and 1984, the main characters don't have that many friends or interactions. There are characters witnessed, and there are characters interacted with. 1984 has what? 3 interactive characters? BNW might have a few more, but in the Handmaiden's Tale there are many possible interactions: the Commander, Serena, the Marthas, Nick, Ofglen, Moira ... and these characters are all interacting with one another.
The Religion sits in between all of these characters managing, stifling and destroying different bonds. It regulates the flow of knowledge between different layers of society, and it acts against characters through these networks. How does The Religion do this despite nobody believing in it? (Literally, no character is unquestionably religious. Indeed, the religious that we do see are those oppressed- the Quakers, Catholics, Baptists and Jews. Anybody who has bought into The Religion, don't seem to have actually bought into all of its rules.)
What The Religion does to operate upon the characters is break down the trust that allows criticism of The Religion. On a societal level, it does this by just ending freedom of speech and shooting Women's Marchers. On an individual level, the Religion creates feelings of mutual distrust. This is most obviously seen in the relationship between Offred and Ofglen when they become aware of their mutual disdain for the Religion. In the eyes of each other and because of their mutual distrust, they were both pious. The Religion is then an n-player Prisoner's Dilemma, where defecting actually means freedom if enough players defect but mutual distrust prevents this defection.
With the Religion able to act on individuals through their networks, it is able to prescribe and deny meaning because ultimately meaning comes from our interactions. Neither BNW or 1984 deny this, despite having fewer important characters. Offred's husband and daughter are her two anchors of meaning, but they slowly dissolve as she forgets them.
Like the System and the Party, the Religion has modern day precedents. Modern day, zealous social justice on campuses certainly has echoes of the Religion as it stifles opposing views. So does corporate culture, where networks are prescribed and interfaced with by cult-like appeals to greater powers. Obviously, the Religion exists in actual religious places like the theocracies of the Middle East or the theocratic towns and cities of the South.
Finally, the Religion also creates itself in a different way: The mold of a lot of dystopian novels has "The Chessmaster" at the end to reveal everything. We see this in not just BNW or 1984, but The Matrix, the Giver, probably the Hunger Games and other novels. The Chessmaster of the Tale isn't the Commander. It's nobody. Every individual in the Tale is swept along the current of all the other individuals. There aren't any master plans, but individuals fighting amongst themselves for power and survival. They create a planned dystopia, but nobody in particular wanted it the way it came.
The Handmaiden's Tale is a great book, and I could get into the "feminist" aspects of it, but I don't think it's actually that feminist. It is most anti-reactionary, and it predicted reactionary thought word for word (read some of the Commander's thoughts and then you'll see them in print, digested by hundreds of thousands, on /r/theredpill). I could also get into the historical precedents of it, but Atwood does that in an afterword for the version I read. I could get into the powerful writing and world building and scene setting and tell you how wonderful they are, but my header should've done that for you.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
Review: A People's History of the United States
Zinn's book could be split into two: "A History of American Atrocities and the People That Fought Them" which would be an exhilarating, if sobering, read about the violence that made America, America. The other section would be "Boring Chronology of Protests and Strikes without Context." When Zinn tries to describe different strikes and protest movements, he simply states the absolute numbers and absolute history. He doesn't set the context. For example, he describes a protest of 200 people in Boston (I think). Sure, that's great. But I see a protest of 200 people every single time I go to get Indian food in Washington, D.C. These protests never appear anywhere in popular culture afterward.
The first book would be better, shorter, and more powerful. The second would be a good Wikipedia page.
The first book would be better, shorter, and more powerful. The second would be a good Wikipedia page.
Friday, April 21, 2017
Review: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
When David talks about anthropology and sociology, he is sort of interesting. When he talks about anything else, eyes will (or, at least, should) roll. I don't really know what this book is about. Debt, obviously. But what about debt? That sometimes it's useful (builds community, helps the poor when they don't have anything) but sometimes super shitty (when it helps invent slavery/when it forces people to join the rat race of society)?
I read it like this: "Here are a bunch of interesting facts... also, we should be socialist." Or anarchist? Or we should celebrate the "non-industrious poor"? I don't really know.
There seem to be a lot of interesting ideas in here. Like, there is a deep connection between feminism and slavery (the dehumanization of women by patriarchal societies turns women into slaves, which then allows men to become slaves). Pointing out how the backlash against the patriarchy and slavery essentially happened in the same historical moment would be useful, but he doesn't touch on it.
This is a book of muck with a few gems, and I don't think you should treck through the muck to get to the gems.
I read it like this: "Here are a bunch of interesting facts... also, we should be socialist." Or anarchist? Or we should celebrate the "non-industrious poor"? I don't really know.
There seem to be a lot of interesting ideas in here. Like, there is a deep connection between feminism and slavery (the dehumanization of women by patriarchal societies turns women into slaves, which then allows men to become slaves). Pointing out how the backlash against the patriarchy and slavery essentially happened in the same historical moment would be useful, but he doesn't touch on it.
This is a book of muck with a few gems, and I don't think you should treck through the muck to get to the gems.
Monday, April 17, 2017
Review: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
Shits fucked and it’s your fault and that's why Trump won.
Tyler's thesis is fairly straightforward: the modern liberal theory of ever-increasing economic peace, prosperity and freedom might not be right. Instead, society tends to be cyclical with periods of social stability and social volatility feeding off one another. This isn't a new theory, just a new application of old logic. George Modelski in Long Cycles in World Politics describes how cycles can describe the rise and fall of hegemonic powers. Economists describe business cycles and credit cycles. The idea of "named generations" like "Baby Boomer" and "Millenial" comes from a generational cycle that had four rotating archetypes.
To Tyler, the peace and stability of the 80s, 90s, and 00s was a reaction to the violence and rebellion of the 70s and 60s (whose seed were sown in the stable, pseudo-idyllic 50s).
Tyler's weight of evidence behind his thesis is what he calls "canaries in the coal mines" and he means to use them the same way rising foreclosures would have been canaries in 2007 preceding the Great Recession. These canaries are rather simple: shits fucked.
But shit isn't just fucked at an economic level, it's fucked at every level. It is culturally, morally, economically, politically fucked. People have stopped moving, racism has to stop receding, the economy has stopped innovating, and Americans have lost their spiritual drive to get out of bed, much less change the world around them.
Tyler leaves some explanations on the floor: maybe technological growth has decelerated because we’re literally at the physical limits of the universe? Maybe economic growth has slowed down because we have a bunch of old white people who want nothing more than to retire and take benefits? Maybe interstate mobility has decreased because it doesn’t really matter where you work anymore?
He also fails to mention that despite the torrent of rain, dust, and sun that is heading toward us, our society has been inexorably quiet with regards to climate change.
But other than these oversights, the effect is a book of dark statistics with little in the ways of solutions. Worth reading if you want to see the web of shit that overlays society.
Tyler's thesis is fairly straightforward: the modern liberal theory of ever-increasing economic peace, prosperity and freedom might not be right. Instead, society tends to be cyclical with periods of social stability and social volatility feeding off one another. This isn't a new theory, just a new application of old logic. George Modelski in Long Cycles in World Politics describes how cycles can describe the rise and fall of hegemonic powers. Economists describe business cycles and credit cycles. The idea of "named generations" like "Baby Boomer" and "Millenial" comes from a generational cycle that had four rotating archetypes.
To Tyler, the peace and stability of the 80s, 90s, and 00s was a reaction to the violence and rebellion of the 70s and 60s (whose seed were sown in the stable, pseudo-idyllic 50s).
Tyler's weight of evidence behind his thesis is what he calls "canaries in the coal mines" and he means to use them the same way rising foreclosures would have been canaries in 2007 preceding the Great Recession. These canaries are rather simple: shits fucked.
But shit isn't just fucked at an economic level, it's fucked at every level. It is culturally, morally, economically, politically fucked. People have stopped moving, racism has to stop receding, the economy has stopped innovating, and Americans have lost their spiritual drive to get out of bed, much less change the world around them.
Tyler leaves some explanations on the floor: maybe technological growth has decelerated because we’re literally at the physical limits of the universe? Maybe economic growth has slowed down because we have a bunch of old white people who want nothing more than to retire and take benefits? Maybe interstate mobility has decreased because it doesn’t really matter where you work anymore?
He also fails to mention that despite the torrent of rain, dust, and sun that is heading toward us, our society has been inexorably quiet with regards to climate change.
But other than these oversights, the effect is a book of dark statistics with little in the ways of solutions. Worth reading if you want to see the web of shit that overlays society.
Sunday, March 19, 2017
Review: Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
There is something scammy about Tim Ferriss. It might be how he made his initial windfalls: selling BrainQuicken and the 4-Hour Workweek. The former is essentially snake oil, and the latter is about using loopholes in the global economy to push work to others (IOW, it fails the business version of the moral imperative.)
But there is also something authentic about Ferriss. His desire to learn and to share his learnings is obvious. I think he would probably be doing the same things he's doing now if he lived in a post-scarcity society. Tools of Titans is a distilled version of the learning and sharing and while I want to skeptically say it is just a money grab by skimming Ferriss' podcasts, it is more than that.
The book can best be read like a daily devotional. Each podcast guess has 1-10 pages devoted to their best ideas and thoughts or their "tools". These can be trite, but as you will likely note, a lot of "trite" advice turns out to be the best. As Sam Harris points out, "On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice." If nothing else, Tools of Titans will be a guide to figuring out how to take your own advice.
At times, some of the advice is contradictory- wake up at 4:45, wake up whenever you want to, wake up early, wake up early and stand out in the sun nake. Use the Inbox Zero principle, use social media to make 1000 hardcore fans, but also never check your email and get off social media. This contradiction might be helpful, though: you don't have to emulate all of these "titans" if you want to find some modicum of happiness or success.
Instead, the questions Tim asks of his friends and peers get turned around to the reader: What would you write on a billboard in a major city? What are you doing to be healthy? What books do you suggest or give? (do you suggest or give books?) What would you tell your 20, 30-year-old self?
Why are you still drinking Coke? You know that shit is awful for you.
But there is also something authentic about Ferriss. His desire to learn and to share his learnings is obvious. I think he would probably be doing the same things he's doing now if he lived in a post-scarcity society. Tools of Titans is a distilled version of the learning and sharing and while I want to skeptically say it is just a money grab by skimming Ferriss' podcasts, it is more than that.
The book can best be read like a daily devotional. Each podcast guess has 1-10 pages devoted to their best ideas and thoughts or their "tools". These can be trite, but as you will likely note, a lot of "trite" advice turns out to be the best. As Sam Harris points out, "On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice." If nothing else, Tools of Titans will be a guide to figuring out how to take your own advice.
At times, some of the advice is contradictory- wake up at 4:45, wake up whenever you want to, wake up early, wake up early and stand out in the sun nake. Use the Inbox Zero principle, use social media to make 1000 hardcore fans, but also never check your email and get off social media. This contradiction might be helpful, though: you don't have to emulate all of these "titans" if you want to find some modicum of happiness or success.
Instead, the questions Tim asks of his friends and peers get turned around to the reader: What would you write on a billboard in a major city? What are you doing to be healthy? What books do you suggest or give? (do you suggest or give books?) What would you tell your 20, 30-year-old self?
Why are you still drinking Coke? You know that shit is awful for you.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Review: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
It is really tempting to explain things in terms of one or two factors, especially politics. I've been guilty of it myself; I've written "it's geography, stupid!" more times than I'd like to say. Yet, simplifying explanations of history, society, and government tend to be tools of evil (or stupidity). In the past, Christianity and Catholicism were used to explain imperialism under the guise of the White Man's Burden. The Nazi Reich based their explanations of the history of the world through racial differences and genetics. And today, we see the rising spectre of religious and racial hatred in the alt-right movements in Europe and the United States. We see people (close to our President!) putting history as a battle of "Christianity" versus "Islam" and "the White Man" versus "The Colored Man".
You also see some simple, not evil answers too. For example, somebody somewhere said something about guns and germs and steel explaining why some societies developed while other failed to. And while that certainly seems like a reason that the Americas failed to develop while Eurasia had millennia old states, it doesn't explain why some states became modern since they were freed from imperialism and while other states simply fell apart.
Fukuyama, in The Origins, is described the origin of the state and political order to set context for his book... Political Order. To do this he brings out all the major social sciences that he can: anthropology, sociology, demography, geography, economics and, of course, history. This makes what is essential/The best AP World History book (that won't get you a 5) ever/.
The history starts some six million years ago, while humanity was breaking off from our primate cousins, continues with the increasingly complicated relationship between families, tribes, and clans and ultimately culminates in the first state: imperial China. From Imperial China, we move west, to India, and then the Middle East, where we finally get to Europe to explore how the different histories of democracy unfolded until we get to the French Revolution.
In each location, we get another piece of the puzzle to what makes a state a /good/ state. China, for example, was the first that was able to subdue the social human animal:
Fukuyama considers a major factor and signal of political decay to be "Patrimonialism", or the genetic predisposition we have as humans to favor our families (through kin selection) or those who have allied with us (through reciprocal altruism). We might, as non-scholars, simply call it "nepotism" or "letting your daughter hang out with you and foreign leaders." Time and time again, it becomes the state societies revert to, whether by weak political structure or overt attempts to build such a society.
However, some societies, like India never get past patrimonialism. India's caste system is hyper-patrimonialism, where the entire structure of the universe is devoted to making sure that resources stay within a family line. Meanwhile, patrimonialism is subdued by religion in the eruption of Islam and the concept of the umma, or in the Catholic Church's insistence on her marriage laws being taken seriously (which, incidentally, meant the Catholic Church would acquire more and more resources).
At the same time, religion allows there to be a highly developed rule of law: India, Western Europe, and the Muslim world all have a highly developed sense that their leaders are below God's law. Yet, in China or Russia (influenced by the Hordes) religion was subservient to the leader. Indeed, in China the religion never developed past ancestor worship!
This rule of law is necessary for a state to be both powerful and to be checked. It means that the state and its ruler is beholden to something greater than itself. That means, depending on the era, religion but it also means literally just legal constitutions. It is powerful enough to bind the warriors of India to the brahmin religious class above them... but also keep kings from massacring entire towns.
The third piece of political order is accountability. Accountability is built into our primeval social structures: if the Chieftan fails to be good, we just make somebody else Chieftan. You can literally look at the person while you do it. But as societies grow large, accountability disappears. It may arise, like in Eastern European kingdoms, where only certain portions of the noble class have any power over the ruler. Or it might fail to arise at all, as it did in China. Or even noble accountability might be squashed, as it was in France and Russia.
The balance of these three- rule of law, accountability, and a modern meritocratic state- are what make political order. They, in turn, are embattled and bolstered by a constellation of religion, patrimonialism, and secular values. What made Europe explosively imperial? Guns, germs and steel!
But other stuff, too.
You also see some simple, not evil answers too. For example, somebody somewhere said something about guns and germs and steel explaining why some societies developed while other failed to. And while that certainly seems like a reason that the Americas failed to develop while Eurasia had millennia old states, it doesn't explain why some states became modern since they were freed from imperialism and while other states simply fell apart.
Fukuyama, in The Origins, is described the origin of the state and political order to set context for his book... Political Order. To do this he brings out all the major social sciences that he can: anthropology, sociology, demography, geography, economics and, of course, history. This makes what is essential/The best AP World History book (that won't get you a 5) ever/.
The history starts some six million years ago, while humanity was breaking off from our primate cousins, continues with the increasingly complicated relationship between families, tribes, and clans and ultimately culminates in the first state: imperial China. From Imperial China, we move west, to India, and then the Middle East, where we finally get to Europe to explore how the different histories of democracy unfolded until we get to the French Revolution.
In each location, we get another piece of the puzzle to what makes a state a /good/ state. China, for example, was the first that was able to subdue the social human animal:
Fukuyama considers a major factor and signal of political decay to be "Patrimonialism", or the genetic predisposition we have as humans to favor our families (through kin selection) or those who have allied with us (through reciprocal altruism). We might, as non-scholars, simply call it "nepotism" or "letting your daughter hang out with you and foreign leaders." Time and time again, it becomes the state societies revert to, whether by weak political structure or overt attempts to build such a society.
However, some societies, like India never get past patrimonialism. India's caste system is hyper-patrimonialism, where the entire structure of the universe is devoted to making sure that resources stay within a family line. Meanwhile, patrimonialism is subdued by religion in the eruption of Islam and the concept of the umma, or in the Catholic Church's insistence on her marriage laws being taken seriously (which, incidentally, meant the Catholic Church would acquire more and more resources).
At the same time, religion allows there to be a highly developed rule of law: India, Western Europe, and the Muslim world all have a highly developed sense that their leaders are below God's law. Yet, in China or Russia (influenced by the Hordes) religion was subservient to the leader. Indeed, in China the religion never developed past ancestor worship!
This rule of law is necessary for a state to be both powerful and to be checked. It means that the state and its ruler is beholden to something greater than itself. That means, depending on the era, religion but it also means literally just legal constitutions. It is powerful enough to bind the warriors of India to the brahmin religious class above them... but also keep kings from massacring entire towns.
The third piece of political order is accountability. Accountability is built into our primeval social structures: if the Chieftan fails to be good, we just make somebody else Chieftan. You can literally look at the person while you do it. But as societies grow large, accountability disappears. It may arise, like in Eastern European kingdoms, where only certain portions of the noble class have any power over the ruler. Or it might fail to arise at all, as it did in China. Or even noble accountability might be squashed, as it was in France and Russia.
The balance of these three- rule of law, accountability, and a modern meritocratic state- are what make political order. They, in turn, are embattled and bolstered by a constellation of religion, patrimonialism, and secular values. What made Europe explosively imperial? Guns, germs and steel!
But other stuff, too.
Saturday, March 4, 2017
Review: Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel
Wainwright skirts the topic throughout the book, but when he finally gets to the conclusion, it seems like it is just a formality: we need to fix the demand-side of the criminal drug industry in order to make any meaningful progress. He does this by laying out how drugs get from the Andean mountainside to the concrete jungle street corners and explaining the economics of each step in the process.
The book is kind of like one long Freakonomics podcast: here is a story of cocaine farmers, here is the story of an American heroin addict, and here is a story of why New Zealand has the best party drugs and so on. This is good! And every story has the subtext beneath it. When discussing government efforts to destroy the different plants that go into drugs, Wainwright points out that cartels act like monoposonies- like Walmart- and they push the new cost of government interference onto suppliers. This is a pattern we see throughout the book: here is an area of the drugs trade, here is what government is doing to limit supply, and oh look it doesn't matter.
Many of America's problems (illegal immigration, gang violence, racial disparities in imprisonment, and the heroin epidemic) can all be solved by comprehensive drug reform. Unfortunately, Wainwright doesn't give the public much advice on where to go.
Bernie 2020.
The book is kind of like one long Freakonomics podcast: here is a story of cocaine farmers, here is the story of an American heroin addict, and here is a story of why New Zealand has the best party drugs and so on. This is good! And every story has the subtext beneath it. When discussing government efforts to destroy the different plants that go into drugs, Wainwright points out that cartels act like monoposonies- like Walmart- and they push the new cost of government interference onto suppliers. This is a pattern we see throughout the book: here is an area of the drugs trade, here is what government is doing to limit supply, and oh look it doesn't matter.
Many of America's problems (illegal immigration, gang violence, racial disparities in imprisonment, and the heroin epidemic) can all be solved by comprehensive drug reform. Unfortunately, Wainwright doesn't give the public much advice on where to go.
Bernie 2020.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
Review: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Essentialism is an answer to the Multiarmed Bandit problem: how are we supposed to do real meaningful things when our time and bandwidth is being sucked by everyone around us? The answer is a three step cycle: Explore, Eliminate and Execute (or to put it in non-businessy, corporate terms to become effective Explore-Exploiters).
I. Explore
Exploring means to look through a wide variety of options of tasks, jobs, and experiences. It is why colleges have introductory classes, corporations have rotational programs, and drinkers get flights. The advantage of exploring is that it is a focused process. Whereas often times exploration is something that we do reactively (saying "yes" to new options), when we do it proactively we can cover ground a lot faster.
Exploration is made up of two substeps, escaping and selecting.
I. 1. Escape: in order to figure out what options to select, one must create and defend time and spaces where exploration is possible. This should be a scheduled period, where interesting topics and ideas can be quickly breezed through. I almost want to say "This is your Wikipedia time directly countering your [Social Media Cancer of choice] time."
I. 2. Select. Once choices- projects to work on, goals to pursue, schools to apply to- have been brought for, they must all go through an important sieve: "Does this actually matter to me?" To determine that you can start by setting minimum specifications, and then ramping them upwards until you have a set of the best possible options.
II. Eliminate
Once options have been assembled, they need to be eliminated. But not only eliminated in a way to make a choice, but the final choice itself has to be whittled down. The final choice needed to be edited, revised... to be made essential! It needs to have clarity, and be obvious to you now and in the future what it means for that goal or desire to be achieved.
The process of eliminating also becomes a giant shield: asks will bounce off because you've already committed to some course of action. It gives you an excuse (mostly to yourself) about what you cannot do because you can literally not do it.
III. Execute
The final step of the cycle (which is really a concurrent step with the other two) is to execute. With the design chosen, and the final specs laid out, this is rather easy: break the goal into a bunch of tiny, constituent parts and do them one after another in a way that gets you a lot of "small wins".
IV. Review
This book reflects a lot of thought that I've had in my own life. I used to be very much a "minimalist" college student (probably because I didn't have any money) but I still have a revulsion to 'clutter' in terms of "owned objects" that don't have any value. I also see the "nonessentialist" worldview in a lot of high school/college classmates. These are the students who never have any time to just chill because they're doing research, in CRU, leading a club, founding a new club and taking 18 credits worth of classes and they're not even doing any of it very well. I've also seen the opposite in some of my classmates: everything they're doing points in the same direction and though each individual component is small the sum of tiny undirectional efforts is something that launches them to Princeton or Stanford.
The book is filled with lots of self-help, rah-rah business filler. "Make sure you sleep", "Don't fall into the Sunk-Cost fallacy," and a whole host of other Daniel Kahneman inspired nuggests of information. But if you're prepared to skim through those parts and try to figure out the best parts to have a happy, leaner life, this is a good read.
I. Explore
Exploring means to look through a wide variety of options of tasks, jobs, and experiences. It is why colleges have introductory classes, corporations have rotational programs, and drinkers get flights. The advantage of exploring is that it is a focused process. Whereas often times exploration is something that we do reactively (saying "yes" to new options), when we do it proactively we can cover ground a lot faster.
Exploration is made up of two substeps, escaping and selecting.
I. 1. Escape: in order to figure out what options to select, one must create and defend time and spaces where exploration is possible. This should be a scheduled period, where interesting topics and ideas can be quickly breezed through. I almost want to say "This is your Wikipedia time directly countering your [Social Media Cancer of choice] time."
I. 2. Select. Once choices- projects to work on, goals to pursue, schools to apply to- have been brought for, they must all go through an important sieve: "Does this actually matter to me?" To determine that you can start by setting minimum specifications, and then ramping them upwards until you have a set of the best possible options.
II. Eliminate
Once options have been assembled, they need to be eliminated. But not only eliminated in a way to make a choice, but the final choice itself has to be whittled down. The final choice needed to be edited, revised... to be made essential! It needs to have clarity, and be obvious to you now and in the future what it means for that goal or desire to be achieved.
The process of eliminating also becomes a giant shield: asks will bounce off because you've already committed to some course of action. It gives you an excuse (mostly to yourself) about what you cannot do because you can literally not do it.
III. Execute
The final step of the cycle (which is really a concurrent step with the other two) is to execute. With the design chosen, and the final specs laid out, this is rather easy: break the goal into a bunch of tiny, constituent parts and do them one after another in a way that gets you a lot of "small wins".
IV. Review
This book reflects a lot of thought that I've had in my own life. I used to be very much a "minimalist" college student (probably because I didn't have any money) but I still have a revulsion to 'clutter' in terms of "owned objects" that don't have any value. I also see the "nonessentialist" worldview in a lot of high school/college classmates. These are the students who never have any time to just chill because they're doing research, in CRU, leading a club, founding a new club and taking 18 credits worth of classes and they're not even doing any of it very well. I've also seen the opposite in some of my classmates: everything they're doing points in the same direction and though each individual component is small the sum of tiny undirectional efforts is something that launches them to Princeton or Stanford.
The book is filled with lots of self-help, rah-rah business filler. "Make sure you sleep", "Don't fall into the Sunk-Cost fallacy," and a whole host of other Daniel Kahneman inspired nuggests of information. But if you're prepared to skim through those parts and try to figure out the best parts to have a happy, leaner life, this is a good read.
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
I am drained.
Two months of free, uninterrupted time immersed in the history of a singular, totalitarian culture and civilization is draining. It sucks the soul from the reader while binding them to the words by inspiring a sick fascination. "How did they do this?" "Why did nobody stop them?" "What atrocity comes next?"
And among all these thoughts, there is the ultimate question pounding at the back of the mind: "Can it happen again?"
How did they do this: Hitler was the right man, at the right time, in the right place to take power. He alone had the experiences of being an "Austrian waif" along with the single-mindedness and background that would allow him to rise above his fellow German soldiers. Germany was broken, not just militarily or economically, but psychologically. Collectively the hopes of an entire people were crushed under Allied artillery fire.
Why did nobody stop them: Lots of people tried. The police fired on the Nazi Party's Beer Hall Putsch. Churchill tried to rally the British Parliament. The central European countries called out for help again and again. The generals and officers of Valkaryeie tried blowing up Hitler numerous times.
The most consistent thread of failure is this: division amongst Hitler's enemies allowed Hitler to conquer them.
* Hitler rose to power due to an alliance with conservative factions who thought they could control him. Social democrats and communists were too divided to combine their efforts against him.
* Poland would not allow Russian troops through her land, making an agreement between Britain, France, and Russia impossible.
* Chamberlain had an extreme reluctance towards dealing with the Russians, and preferred to manage the constellation of central and eastern European states... but those states distrusted each other and wanted the lands of their neighbors!
* Once Hitler had finally been nearly successfully killed, the officers of the Wehrmacht who had joined the conspiracy failed to rally to the conspiracy and attempted to slink away.
By playing his enemies off each other, or by their own mistaken divisions, Hitler was able to destroy them one by one by one.
The second reason why nobody stopped him was simpler: nobody believed him. He wrote it all out. Mein Kampf was literally Hitler's primary source of income before he achieved even a hint of power. It spelled out every goal he had and was the source of German grand strategy from the rise of the Nazi party to his suicide in the Berlin bunker. When a man says he is going to expel an entire group of people from your country, that they're the reason your people are suffering, and that he will use violence against them, you should believe that man.
What atrocity comes next: a dizzying array. While reading, I lurched from historical marker to historical marker with my preexisting knowledge. I knew he rose to power in 1933. I knew he purged out the SA with the more elite SS. I knew the slow motion escalation of terror that led to the Holocaust. I knew he declared war on Poland in 1939, that America would join in 1941, and he would fall in 1945.
But what I didn't know is how slow it was. "One day Germany was the Weimar Republic, and the next day it wasn't" is a naive way of thinking about it, but that's how I thought about it. Instead, Nazi power grows like a weed. First, it's an election where they have a viable minority. Then they gain a couple million more votes in the next. And then they're allied with the conservatives. Hitler is ruling. They've begun purging the violent radicals (who they framed)... they've begun purging the moderates. Hitler and the Nazi legislature are in absolute control. Hitler is now in absolute control. Hitler is now the final and total arbiter of life and death.
But within those steps are weeks and months. Death did not come for the world with a knock at the door; it came for the world with its robes loudly shuffling.
Can it happen again: Obviously, yes. It has happened again. The world has sat by while tyrants destroy those that make a mess of their pure dystopias. The world has sat by as mobs bring machetes, sticks, and stones across the faces of children. But could it happen in a rich country? Could it happen in a country that is richer than modern day South Africa or Indonesia (which have a similar GDP per capita to pre-war Germany)?
Certainly. All it takes is:
* An economic crisis. [✓?]
* Racial and class resentment [✓]
* A demagogue to inspire the people to violence [✓]
* A demagogue who pursues societal purity [✓]
* A demagogue that consistently repeats calls for international war [✓]
* A divided and broken opposition [???]
Since finishing the history, I have one question in my mind now: Are we divided and broken?
Two months of free, uninterrupted time immersed in the history of a singular, totalitarian culture and civilization is draining. It sucks the soul from the reader while binding them to the words by inspiring a sick fascination. "How did they do this?" "Why did nobody stop them?" "What atrocity comes next?"
And among all these thoughts, there is the ultimate question pounding at the back of the mind: "Can it happen again?"
How did they do this: Hitler was the right man, at the right time, in the right place to take power. He alone had the experiences of being an "Austrian waif" along with the single-mindedness and background that would allow him to rise above his fellow German soldiers. Germany was broken, not just militarily or economically, but psychologically. Collectively the hopes of an entire people were crushed under Allied artillery fire.
Why did nobody stop them: Lots of people tried. The police fired on the Nazi Party's Beer Hall Putsch. Churchill tried to rally the British Parliament. The central European countries called out for help again and again. The generals and officers of Valkaryeie tried blowing up Hitler numerous times.
The most consistent thread of failure is this: division amongst Hitler's enemies allowed Hitler to conquer them.
* Hitler rose to power due to an alliance with conservative factions who thought they could control him. Social democrats and communists were too divided to combine their efforts against him.
* Poland would not allow Russian troops through her land, making an agreement between Britain, France, and Russia impossible.
* Chamberlain had an extreme reluctance towards dealing with the Russians, and preferred to manage the constellation of central and eastern European states... but those states distrusted each other and wanted the lands of their neighbors!
* Once Hitler had finally been nearly successfully killed, the officers of the Wehrmacht who had joined the conspiracy failed to rally to the conspiracy and attempted to slink away.
By playing his enemies off each other, or by their own mistaken divisions, Hitler was able to destroy them one by one by one.
The second reason why nobody stopped him was simpler: nobody believed him. He wrote it all out. Mein Kampf was literally Hitler's primary source of income before he achieved even a hint of power. It spelled out every goal he had and was the source of German grand strategy from the rise of the Nazi party to his suicide in the Berlin bunker. When a man says he is going to expel an entire group of people from your country, that they're the reason your people are suffering, and that he will use violence against them, you should believe that man.
What atrocity comes next: a dizzying array. While reading, I lurched from historical marker to historical marker with my preexisting knowledge. I knew he rose to power in 1933. I knew he purged out the SA with the more elite SS. I knew the slow motion escalation of terror that led to the Holocaust. I knew he declared war on Poland in 1939, that America would join in 1941, and he would fall in 1945.
But what I didn't know is how slow it was. "One day Germany was the Weimar Republic, and the next day it wasn't" is a naive way of thinking about it, but that's how I thought about it. Instead, Nazi power grows like a weed. First, it's an election where they have a viable minority. Then they gain a couple million more votes in the next. And then they're allied with the conservatives. Hitler is ruling. They've begun purging the violent radicals (who they framed)... they've begun purging the moderates. Hitler and the Nazi legislature are in absolute control. Hitler is now in absolute control. Hitler is now the final and total arbiter of life and death.
But within those steps are weeks and months. Death did not come for the world with a knock at the door; it came for the world with its robes loudly shuffling.
Can it happen again: Obviously, yes. It has happened again. The world has sat by while tyrants destroy those that make a mess of their pure dystopias. The world has sat by as mobs bring machetes, sticks, and stones across the faces of children. But could it happen in a rich country? Could it happen in a country that is richer than modern day South Africa or Indonesia (which have a similar GDP per capita to pre-war Germany)?
Certainly. All it takes is:
* An economic crisis. [✓?]
* Racial and class resentment [✓]
* A demagogue to inspire the people to violence [✓]
* A demagogue who pursues societal purity [✓]
* A demagogue that consistently repeats calls for international war [✓]
* A divided and broken opposition [???]
Since finishing the history, I have one question in my mind now: Are we divided and broken?
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Review: The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership
The Virgin Way reads like a rule book or guide book for a conglomeration of companies that would claim to eschew from the stuffy rule books of more uptight corporations. That is to say, if you work at a Virgin company I would bet that you were nudged to read this book and maybe put the chapter titles to heart. It feels like it would be a good onboarding tool.
The contents of the book can be split into two parts: (1) rote business advice and (2)interesting glimpses into Branson's mind. The former is fairly standard leadership advice. "Listen" and "delegate" and "be authentic" are the basic points that a first level manager can probably pull out of their asses for you. There are also numerous examples of well-known companies like Google or Apple that he uses to illustrate points. I could've used them as examples!
The real interesting tidbits come when Richard turns to himself, or when he describes the struggles that he has had to deal with. These include how his battle with dyslexia forced him to pursue tactics that made him a better leader or how he draws (or erases) the line between the Virgin brand and his personal brand.
This is an ok book to read if you want to know more about how Branson himself thinks, (or if you've recently been hired to a Virgin company!) but if you're looking to supplement your MBA maybe go elsewhere.
The contents of the book can be split into two parts: (1) rote business advice and (2)interesting glimpses into Branson's mind. The former is fairly standard leadership advice. "Listen" and "delegate" and "be authentic" are the basic points that a first level manager can probably pull out of their asses for you. There are also numerous examples of well-known companies like Google or Apple that he uses to illustrate points. I could've used them as examples!
The real interesting tidbits come when Richard turns to himself, or when he describes the struggles that he has had to deal with. These include how his battle with dyslexia forced him to pursue tactics that made him a better leader or how he draws (or erases) the line between the Virgin brand and his personal brand.
This is an ok book to read if you want to know more about how Branson himself thinks, (or if you've recently been hired to a Virgin company!) but if you're looking to supplement your MBA maybe go elsewhere.
Friday, January 6, 2017
Review: So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
"So Good They Can't Ignore You" is based off a Steve Martin line. The book has four big points, illustrated by about four chapters each. Each chapter is basically a long blog post (warning: this book is a giant blog post, which makes it super readable in a single setting).
1. People who are happy and successful do not actually follow their passion.
2. People who are happy focus on their work first, and success follows.
3. Focusing on work consists of deliberate practice and building skills.
4. Missions arise naturally from finding out what work you're good at, and doing that work.
One of the big strategies that Cal kind of implies is that taking options that maximize your potential options available is a good place to find happiness. If you learn things that are useful in many areas, or skills that are in high demand in many areas, you will be able to choose. Furthermore, building skills means you have more ability to tell other people what you want and because they need you, you can control outcomes.
I skipped a lot of the story-telling in the books, because I have personal examples from my circles and they are available upon request.
1. People who are happy and successful do not actually follow their passion.
2. People who are happy focus on their work first, and success follows.
3. Focusing on work consists of deliberate practice and building skills.
4. Missions arise naturally from finding out what work you're good at, and doing that work.
One of the big strategies that Cal kind of implies is that taking options that maximize your potential options available is a good place to find happiness. If you learn things that are useful in many areas, or skills that are in high demand in many areas, you will be able to choose. Furthermore, building skills means you have more ability to tell other people what you want and because they need you, you can control outcomes.
I skipped a lot of the story-telling in the books, because I have personal examples from my circles and they are available upon request.
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Review: Group Chat Meme
tl;dr: To endorse the concept that European borders are to blame for developing world conflict is to endorse problematic concepts of nationa...
