Here - here's a great case study, ripped from the headlines: Bobby Brown. I quote: 
 
The most serious crime on his record dates to July 13, 1999, when police said he shot at a Noe Valley man who confronted him for knocking on a woman's window at 11 p.m. 
 
The man told him to leave but Bobby Brown fired at the man and fled, officials said. Bobby Brown was arrested on attempted murder charges and pleaded guilty to charges of assault with a deadly weapon. 
 
He was given a three-year suspended prison sentence but was later sent to prison for violating his parole. 
 
You will find no other system of government in history that has ever chosen to terrorize its citizens by unleashing Bobby Browns on them. This regime of stable low-level anarchy is a new thing. Is it a good thing? It's certainly an American thing, a 20th-century thing, and a democratic thing. 
 
With this context, perhaps we can continue this important discussion of why there are all these elephant turds in our living-room. Could someone have catapulted them in, perhaps, with a ballista? Ouch! Why, yes, Dumbo, I'm sorry. That is your tusk. Now, where were we?

If anyone these days was literate enough to read and understand Carlyle's Model Prisons, they wouldn't be asking these questions. Readers more interested in current sources may consult Peter Hitchens or Theodore Dalrymple. 
 
And as I've said before, it's absurd to compare the American crime wave of the '20s to that '70s, or even that of today. The standard of reporting was completely different. The bar was much lower. 
 
In the '20s something like the Knoxville Atrocity, for instance, would have been front-page news for a whole summer. Not to mention Anne Pressly, Lauren Burk, etc, etc. Incredible savage crimes by unbelievably debased and inhuman bipeds. Now? No one cares, and if they hear they yawn. That's training, my friends - not nature.  
 
agnostic, I'll bet you've never even heard of any of these heinous crimes. That's because it's not the '20s. (And because you're not a Larry Auster reader.) Also, what was the last book, newspaper or magazine written in the '20s you read? Or any prior decade? Some of us are interested in the past. Others aren't...

If Turchin wants to use his mathematical mumbo-jumbo to rediscover the conclusions of Oswald Spengler, not to mention just about every Greek or Roman historian in the building, more power to him! All I suggest is that, after reading Turchin, people read Spengler (and his ilk) as well. 
 
Actually, Mommsen is a lot more readable than Spengler, and applies more or less the same lessons to Rome. He also won the Nobel Prize - for literature, not numerology. Also, Mommsen is free on line (in English translation). The transition from Mommsen to Turchin is really a snapshot of the Western intellectual tradition in apparent terminal decline. Intellectual elites, it seems, need to be replenished by a stream of barbarians as well...

razib, 
 
I fear you dismiss Tenney Frank's "waters of the Orontes" argument a little too easily. He had evidence - do you? (The reference is to Juvenal, who said that "the waters of the Orontes had muddied the Tiber.")

BTW, I feel the Occasional Discourse is a much more aesthetically satisfying experience in Google Books (preceding link) than the electronic transcription. 
 
If you haven't read it yet, you're in for an explosive, intestine-churning treat. Follow with the Latter-Day Pamphlets, then Shooting Niagara. Print out all three, and take 'em for a long weekend on acid in the desert. Your medulla will be a whole new medulla - I promise.

Yeah - it's pretty funny that Peart and Levy wade into the Carlyle-Mill debate, 150 years later, without bothering to spend 5 minutes on teh Interwebs and ascertain who was actually right. 
 
I mean, it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. Or sad if it wasn't so funny. Or something like that.

razib, 
 
It's a rarity to see you discussing this subject and not see anything I want to argue with! 
 
However, I second ben g's point. I suspect your low opinion of political religion may have something to do with an instinctive reluctance to include Western progressivism, or even more broadly democracy, in this category. Sure, political religion tends to fail, if your sample only includes the failures! 
 
At least from a purely diagnostic standpoint, progressivism strikes me as quite healthy and vigorous. But you may have a different opinion. Do you see it jumping the shark in some way? For example, do you see environmentalism (as a political religion) as something with centuries, or decades, or years to live? Is it a permanent occupant of the brain's religion module? Or will something else displace or replace it?

It is *always* the case that when a number is found to be misleading, there is an erroneous, unrepresentative, or fradulent calculation behind it. 
 
Exactly right. But this point is often of more theoretical than practical use - because it is often very difficult to find the bad calculation, which is often intrinsic to the design of the experiment itself. Often (as in global climate modeling) it's intrinsic to the entire academic department performing the experiment.  
 
For example, without invalid calculations, you basically don't have global climate modeling - for much the same reason that without invalid calculations, you don't have earthquake prediction. Fortunately, earthquake-predicting models are quite falsifiable due to the structure of the problem. So they get falsified, and they don't get funded. 
 
Obviously, I feel many methods that are conventional in the "social sciences" today are in this category. Often the mentality behind them is the mentality of the man who looks for his keys under the streetlight - this may not be perfect, but it's the best we can do. As a hard-liner, this cuts no ice with me. If it pretends to be a rigorous calculation and it isn't, don't do it.

geecee is quite right to focus on the effects of crime. After all, we all do. 
 
There are certain individual murderees that everyone reading this knows of: Emmett Till, for instance. Why is the case of Emmett Till important? Because it was a political murder. The killers had a political motive, ie, intimidating blacks to maintain white social domination. 
 
Well. One reason for the decline in murders from the '70s through the '90s is a simple matter of causality: after white flight, certain kinds of social interactions were much less common.  
 
Can you say ethnic cleansing, boys and girls? I knew you could. If you put a link from the first page to the second, how long do ya think it'd last? Perhaps you could quote E. Michael Jones as your source. 
 
This is a good illustration of why literary methods in history are so superior to the pure quantitative approach. If you look at an ethnic-cleansing event by measuring the number of actual murders, you will get wildly varying numbers, which depend on completely irrelevant details in how the cleansing is carried out.  
 
Whereas the basic sequence in an ethnic-cleansing episode is always the same: the displaced population flees its homes and neighborhoods, because it fears for its personal safety. These homes and neighborhoods are taken over by the population which performed the actual intimidation. Still a third party is the set of people who actually caused the event. 
 
In "white flight," itself a euphemism (wouldn't it be more interesting to know who did the pursuing?) the displaced populations were generally American Catholics and other white ethnics, the people TR called "hyphenated-Americans" - even including many downscale, Yiddophone Jews. And of course tike the Irish and Italian populations of the former quaint fishing village in which I live. All around the country, populations of this type fled because they feared for their lives. Read Anthony Lukas' Common Ground, about what happened in Boston - an impeccable work of mainstream journalism.  
 
So basically, agnostic, this is the real past behind your little graph with the two humps. At least, this is the real past I see. What real past do you see? Do your data, at least your late 20C data, contradict my perspective in any way? I don't think so - and this is my complaint with quantitative history.

pconroy, 
 
Sadly, my substitute for a TV is Google Books. Don't explain, though - perhaps it's better that I don't know. :-)

agnostic, 
 
I can't read the Eisner paper. It's behind a firewall. Not that I could be more interested in your data than you are in mine. You'll note that this is the problem with arguing in terms of spreadsheets: either you agree to disagree, or you say nothing, or you pop each other like Biggie and 2Pac. 
 
Simply put, I don't trust your homicide data. It conflicts with what I know of the time and place. It also conflicts with those robbery numbers I gave - which I'd love to see you check out. 
 
You know how this feels, of course, because you don't trust my data. I don't trust my data either. I mention it because it confirms my historical understanding of the time and place, and data - in the sense of statistics - seems to be what you want to hear. 
 
Victorian England was simply not a hotbed of chronic violence, social degeneration, and organized crime. It did not have 2800 criminal gangs, for instance. Granted - when you read books from the period, you will constantly see people complaining about chronic violence, social degeneration, and organized crime. You will also note that the actual magnitude of their complaints is hilarious by "Gang Leader for a Day" standards. 
 
For the US equivalent, if Steevens does not convince you, check out Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives sometime. Riis is an early progressive propagandist, and his goal is to convince you that the life of the urban poor is incredibly squalid, etc. For example, the sidewalk outside their houses isn't always swept. Or whatever. 
 
From the perspective of someone who spends a good bit of time with primary sources, your approach to data is remarkably open-minded. Even when data is technically accurate, it can be massaged in many ways that causes it to present a totally misleading picture. For example, I'm quite confident that this is why you always see homicide rates, and never robbery rates - which  
 
When I read a paper like the ones you cite, I simply assume that the data is telling whatever story the author wants it to tell.Within this limitation, data can sometimes be interesting - but they should be drunk as single-malts, not vast industrial blends across all time and space. Every time you blend, splice a curve, merge spreadsheets, etc, you have an opportunity to massage. (See under: paleoclimatology.) Many, if not most, will take it.  
 
God himself only knows what has gone into Eisner's model. Do you? If not, why would you cite him?  
 
As someone who considers himself careful with sources, whether textual or data, I would rather see the crime rate for Lambeth than that for London, and that for London than that for Great Britain. I would rather see snapshots of 1909 and 2009, than a curve connecting the two. Etc. Etc. 
 
But I think I have made a real effort, here, to play the
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BTW, TGGP's wolf link is majorly cool. Check it out. Exactly what I'm talking about - except with four-legged wolves, not two-legged...

Okay, I found my source: 
 
In 1893 the annual number of recorded robberies in England and Wales fell below 400. There were then never as many as 400 recorded robberies a year in the whole of England and Wales until 1941. In stark contrast, from February to December 2001 there were never as few as 400 recorded robberies a month in the London Borough of Lambeth alone. 
 
There's a 200-page study behind the link. Knock yourself out, Excel.

And, not to eat up the bits or anything - but I'd assume any reader of GNXP is familiar with Sam Francis' concept of anarcho-tyranny. Maybe I assume too much.

Also, see this comment - from the coal face, as it were - on contemporary US crime reporting. I find it quite credible. Your spreadsheets are working upstream against Goodhart's law...

For an example of what Seiyo is talking about, see the Wikipedia article on Crime in Japan: 
 
In 1989 Japan experienced 1.3 robberies per 100,000 population, compared with 48.6 for West Germany, 65.8 for Great Britain, and 233.0 for the United States. 
 
Robbery is a much better metric for the overall level of systematic criminality, I think, than murder. Many murders are committed by people who are not career criminals. Few robberies are. 
 
My unscientific impression is that these levels are roughly comparable to those in a civilized European country of a century ago. Unfortunately I forget the source, but I recall reading that the UK in 1900 had about one robbery per day, which puts it at about Japanese levels. Perhaps you could dig up this number for the US, or for the UK. I'd find the 1850-1950 trends quite interesting in both cases. 
 
Of course, you could blame reporting, but the lower the level of crime, the more likely crime is to be reported, n'est ce pas? And, of course, with improvements in technology you'd expect these numbers to get better, rather than worse. The Scotland Yard of a century ago didn't have DNA analysis, CCTV, etc, etc... 
 
And yes, there's an HBD variable. But whose fault is that? There are many explanations for the decline in Western public safety over the 20th century - but they all come back, in the end, to a case of government failure. 
 
Perhaps it's a coincidence that the 20th century was also the century in which it was thought that government policy should and could be planned by statistics, rather than phronetic decision, common sense and tradition - "by steam," in Carlyle's phrase. Or perhaps it's not a coincidence. I'm afraid you'll have to apply your judgment on this one.

Look at the graphs I provided -- crime rates are going down while crime reporting is going up. Make any sense, or no sense? 
 
Makes perfect sense. Crime is still insanely high. Crime reporting is still insanely low. The situation is not one of hysteria, but of anesthesia - not overhyping, but self-coordinating censorship. As usual, reactionary reality is seeping back into the system a little, which accounts for the transition you see. 
 
Do you know anything of how the journalism profession looks at "sensational" crime reporting? Again, if you look at the attitude of the 2009 journalist to the 1909 journalist, this is one of the greatest sins the former sees in the latter. 
 
This meme of "overhyped" crime reporting, which you obviously did not invent, is exactly the means by which said censorship enforces itself. Poland must always be invading Germany. 
 
I keep reading that you don't know any history 
 
Hey, I thought you were all about data, not anonymous hearsay! :-) 
 
The 1920s and early-mid 1930s are famous for their levels of violence, corruption, depravity, drug use, and so on. 
 
Yes. Which were unprecedented at the time and would barely raise an eyebrow now. Also, this is why I mentioned 1909, not 1929. 
 
Notice the left end of that curve in your GIF? Notice the way it starts spiking up around 1905 or so? Do you think the pre-1905 area is a glitch? What do you think the pre-1900 statistics look like? What you're seeing at the start of this curve is the breakdown of social order in 20th-century America - eg, the development of organized crime in immigrant ghettoes. 
 
Also, you continue to betray your presentism and parochialism - you're talking about a period in American history, ie, that of Prohibition. While civic order was declining in every nation in the 20th, America in general and the "Chicago gangster" were bywords for these qualities worldwide. 
 
This is why I recommend the UK as a case study of the transition from 19th-century standards of government to 20th-century standards. 100 years ago the UK was the least Americanized of nations; today it is arguably more Americanized than America. To see the transition described, have a look at Peter Hitchens' Abolition of Britain. You might also find yourself engaged by his Brief History of Crime. 
 
Can you do me a favor? Or yourself, possibly? Pull yourself out of the spreadsheets for a moment, and have a look at the America of 100 years ago, courtesy of this English reporter.  
 
The entire book is interesting. But for example, look at page 144, in which he considers it remarkable that the streets of Chicago are not entirely safe at night. Page 150: "The police force is so weak that men and women are held up and robbed almost nig
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agnostic, 
 
No offense, but you're on crack. Read this and search for "bicycle": 
 
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3338 
 
In a civilized modern society, the risk of suffering human-on-human predation should be only slightly higher than the risk of being attacked by, say, a grizzly bear. And yes, you should be able to park your bike without locking it. 
 
The basic problem is that your reference frame (US, 1981-now) is very narrow and very bizarre. Relative to Somalia, or Manhattan in the '70s, sure - crime in the US today is not a problem. Relative to Japan at any period, it's a tremendous problem. Relative to the UK a century ago, it has gone up by about 5000%: 
 
http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf 
 
Here's another suggestion - go through American or British newspapers of 100 years ago and look at how they reported crime. A friend of my wife's was attacked in downtown San Francisco at 10:30 in the evening a few weeks ago. She needed stitches in her face.  
 
A century ago, this would have been front-page news. Today there is no question of that. It might be mentioned in a police report column. If she'd been killed, it would have been in the papers, I'm sure - probably a few stories. If she'd been killed in 1909, it would have been a cause celebre. 
 
The fact that, in any major American city in 2009, there are go areas and no-go areas, places you can go in the day but not at night, places you can't go at all - this would astonish and appall our great-greatparents. So, please, let's not hear it about "hysterical" fear of crime. You'd need to ramp it up about five orders of magnitude to get to the hysteria level.

gcochran, 
 
Nice to chat with you as always. What's the last pre-1914 book you read? Any recommendations?

waggoner, 
 
What is astonishing to me is that the likes of McDonald, who has devoted his life to Jewology, cannot recognize the sectarian difference between an actual, tribal Jew like Moshe Feiglin and an assimilated post-Semite like "Punch" Sulzberger, or imagines that they are somehow in cahoots.  
 
His thesis is that tribal Jew behavior is the root of all evils. He then traces these evils, quite accurately, to the most detribalized of Jews. And not only are assimilated Jews nontribal - they tend to be actively anti-tribal. For of course to succeed they assimilated the cultural tropes of America's highest status caste - the Boston Brahmins, basically. For every "Punch" Sulzberger, there is an Alger Hiss. No, he was not born "Hissjewsky." 
 
On Lee Kuan Yew, you seem to speak like a man who knows something, but you're not telling me what it is! Do you have a reference for this weird inspiration from the BUF to the PAP? I will believe anything I see, but only if I see it. 
 
The idea that there is any daylight to be found between a Fabian socialist and an outright Stalinist is a nonsensical hallucination of the anti-McCarthyist period. The difference is entirely a matter of geography. Who, pray tell, were Stalin's biggest boosters in the West? Not the pitiful and marginalized CPUSA, but the likes of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Harold Laski, Harry Hopkins - in short, the Fabians and the New Dealers. These were not Stalin's clients - but his patrons. The "liberals." Slippery as the liberal is, there is no way for him to escape from this great crime. 
 
For instance: if you've never read the Webbs' essay Is Stalin a Dictator?, from their epic Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, you are definitely missing out!

I sometimes wonder if McDonald would consider a pro-Jew piece if I submitted one to TOQ. Something about Moshe Feiglin, perhaps - my own personal favorite Jewish Nazi. (Seriously, Feiglin is my favorite working politician.) Is it worth wondering? Who knows...

I'm sorry - I of course didn't mean the PAP were Communist in the strict sense, ie, officially part of the Comintern. Any party in this class in the English-speaking world will have the word "Communist" in its name, rendering it easily distinguishable!  
 
I just meant the PAP were originally a leftist party of fellow-travelers, as their name clearly demonstrates. La Wik: 
 
Initially adopting a traditionalist Leninist party organization together with a vanguard cadre from its communist-leaning faction in 1958, the PAP Executive later expelled the leftist faction, bringing the ideological basis of the party into the centre, and later in the 1960s, moving further to the right. 
 
And considering that the PAP was founded in 1954, any influence from the British Union of Fascists would be very unusual! You might find a few members with Subhas Chandra Bose type backgrounds, however. Fascism was not unpopular as an anticolonial ideology in the '30s. Mind follows power. And since mind follows power, anyone who was a fan of Oswald Mosley in 1954 was keeping it deep in his trousers. 
 
National Socialism proper, as opposed to the buffoonish neo-nazis, was a very unique phenomenon which could exist only in an environment containing large undigested pieces of the Wihelmine ancien regime. It was considerably assisted in its rise to power by many of those pieces, who saw it as the lesser evil compared to democracy. 
 
However, the core political base for the Nazis was by no means the old aristocracy. Rather, the NSDAP under Weimar was a party of the petit bourgeoisie. This is exactly why Sarah Palin reminds so many people of Hitler - they are thinking, quite sensibly, on a Leninist "who - whom" basis.

There are plenty of progressive geniuses. There are few reactionary buffoons, because all the buffoons are progressive these days. In other, better, ages, you will find no shortage of them.  
 
This is a unique benefit enjoyed by reactionaries alone. Furthermore, there are almost no living reactionary intellectuals. This scholarly niche is entirely virgin - and not at all small. No grants, however, are available! 
 
Reaction is the reconstruction or restoration of the civilized mind, through political power, from any form of progressive or revolutionary degradation. In order to be a great reactionary leader, you have to have made your subjects more sane through the exercise of force - probably through the drastic, but effective, method of curing them entirely of politics. 
 
The quality of reaction is measured by (a) the number of brainworms removed, and (b) the number of brainworms introduced. For true reaction, (a) is very high, (b) is very low. 
 
Augustus succeeds under this metric. So does Lee Kuan Yew. So does Deng - consider the starting position. Both men were of course Communists in their youth - the Singaporean ruling party is still named the "People's Action Party." Similarly, Caesar, whose plan Augustus more or less carried out, was a figure of the populares. Reaction is more often a result of this process than of straight-out counterrevolution, Sulla style. 
 
Reaction is rare in our period, but the true feeling of it is conveyed by this Foreign Service Officer's memoir. Search for Raja'iyah. You may compare the tone to Daniel Defoe's Shortest-Way With the Dissenters...

TGGP, 
 
I agree that the Mafia state is more right-wing than government by Kumbaya, because it relies on a strict if informal command hierarchy. It's just not right-wing enough. I just don't think the Mafia (or Hitler) gets all the way to "reactionary."  
 
"Reactionary" was a curse-word for the Nazis - check out the Horst Wessel Song. "Reactionaries and the Red Front." By the former is meant figures like Fritz Reck-Malleczewen, Ernst von Salomon, and in general the whole Tom Cruise Junker crowd. 
 
There's a goddamn big difference between Deng and Brezhnev. Brezhnev was a buffoon. Deng was a genius. 
 
I know I should read the Jew-haters, but they hate me so compulsively that I always find better things to do. I prefer dead Jew-haters, like Henry Adams - many of whose letters read like Julius Streicher woke up on the wrong side of the bed. I exaggerate. Slightly.

It's interesting to see how easy (and prudent) it is to fear the political implications of HBD. If HBD is an evil lie, as the government requires everyone to believe, "affirmative action" is one thing. If HBD is true, it is quite another. 
 
Not that I give a rat's ass about "affirmative action." By the standards of 20th-century criminal government, it is not really all that criminal. The sad thing is that, if you are unwilling to examine the political consequences of HBD, there is no way to get past the mere present and understand the historical consequences. 
 
The consequence of this kind of thinking is that the bandwagon of the public intellectual goes in one direction, and reality goes in another. Very reminiscent of the late Roman Empire - at least if Peter Frost is right.

TGGP, 
 
Sorry, but nothing corrupt, criminal or mendacious can be described as reactionary. I agree that the institutional structure of the permanent revolution is an unlovely and sclerotic beast, having lost its supple sable youth (I too once much enjoyed "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," whoever wrote it and whatever its percentage of truth), but you are simply describing the lifecycle of leftism.  
 
You might as well describe Brezhnev's Russia as "reactionary." It is simply making an insult of the term. The English language already contains quite enough political insults, especially as directed toward the right. 
 
The gap between "responsible" and "irresponsible" black nationalism is a complete invention. If you actually read MLK's speeches (not the speeches he wrote, but those he read, for he was merely a political reality-show actor - his speeches were written by his Communist handlers) what he's saying is: I deplore violence. Give me money, or I'll have to burn your cities down.  
 
Arguing eloquently against violence, as so many of these terrorist front groups in 20th-century history do, is simply a way to imply and thus enable a violent fringe. When you argue, you must be arguing with someone. What we are looking at here in the Great Leader is simply the normal tactics of 20th-century criminal government, spread with a rich layer of personality cult. 
 
The result of the entire movement: massive permanent money drain, cities made uninhabitable by ideologically-motivated crime, complete moral degradation of the majority of the population. All this was well known to the movement's opposition at the time, who are now derided by all and sundry. (Razib, have you ever read Carleton Putnam? I'll bet you $10 that if you read Carleton Putnam, you'll change your mind about Carleton Putnam.) 
 
If I'm responsible for everything that can be done to my posts with a search-and-replace, I'm responsible for everything indeed! Just call me the universal thought-criminal.

razib, 
 
An excellent policy, I must say. But do you have a definition of "netnazi?" For many, including myself, it includes only Jew-haters (and all Jew-haters).  
 
I haven't seen Hoste hating on the Jews - at least, not any more than Sailer. At most he submits to publications that publish Jew-haters, which I must say is a rather McCarthyist way of defining "netnazi." Thus I rather hate to see this thread staining his rep, if only by association. 
 
Of course, if you mean "everyone to the right of John McCain," that is your semantic prerogative as well. Keep in mind, though, that by this definition just about everyone 100 years ago was a "netnazi," albeit without the "net."  
 
Also, to have a principled policy of not associating with white nationalists (of the non-Judeophobic variety), you need a principled policy of not associating with black nationalists as well, which means you can't link to Harvard or the NYT. Which would be a little silly, n'est ce pas?  
 
Of course, there are excellent practical reasons not to associate with white nationalists, racists, etc. It is just hard to derive them from any abstract principle, which may or not be a concern. What makes the Jew-haters different, at least for me, is that they are genuinely paranoid - ie, afraid of a conspiracy that does not exist. If there is a line, I feel it should be the line between sanity and insanity. If you find white nationalism insane, so be it - I certainly don't find it sensible. But it is hard to find white nationalism insane without also finding other forms of ethnic nationalism insane, and that quickly gets you into calling many entire populations insane...