Thinking back to The Turks in World History the author points out that even the most explicit Islamic of the late Turkic empires, that of the Ottomans, persisted with a customary law similar and cognate to the Mongol yasa. Perhaps then the folkway of the nomadic Turk was sublimated and integrated into the Islamic superstructure of the Ottoman ruling ideology?
I went to a work-related Christmas party thrown by my company’s law firm. There were a lot of VC guys there. Two of them confused me for a blockchain entrepreneur (one of them was asking about a conflict with the CFO). I think I better get into blockchain….
So the website Everyday Feminism has an article, 10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date. I only know about this website because of conservative Twitter. It could be that 90% or more of the hits on this website are through viral “hate-clicks”.
Second, I feel the image that goes along with the article is problematic as fuck. The woman pictured seems to be geared toward appealing to cishet male norms of “attractiveness.” On the other hand, if intersectional feminists typically look something like Josie Maran…well, I won’t go there.
I will observe also that I find out about a lot of far-right movements and individuals through Left and Centrist Twitter (the two groups are interested for different reasons).
As noted in the comments, The Irish DNA Atlas: Revealing Fine-Scale Population Structure and History within Ireland. At this point, I think I can say this: unless it’s ancient DNA I’m done with the historical genetics of the British Isles. We know enough. Period.
Why the #MeToo Movement Should Be Ready for a Backlash. I don’t care too much about Al Franken, but digging a little deeper I think there might be some dirty tricks going on there…. I was rather dim on the prospects for Republicans in 2018, but at this rate, the Dems might “struggle-session” their way into defeat.
India Warily Eyes AI: Technology outsourcing has been India’s only reliable job creator in the past 30 years. Now artificial intelligence threatens to wipe out those gains. When I believed in the End of History and the Last Man this would matter to me. Now it’s all a big shrug.
The ancestral animal genetic toolkit revealed by diverse choanoflagellate transcriptomes.
Another reason that helper-AIs can’t come to medicine soon enough:
A striking example of doctor’s cognitive bias https://t.co/OK68MORKSP
via @BacaMotes (mis)diagnosis of heart attack in the ER d/t age partitioning pic.twitter.com/KCtxOTVmWR— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) December 10, 2017
Chronicler of Islamic State ‘killing machine’ goes public.
As home DNA tests become more common, people must grapple with surprises about their parents:
Until recently, Andrea Ramirez, 43, thought she was part Mexican.
But the results from an at-home genetic test from 23andMe revealed that she is a mix of Northern European, North African and a little Native American.
And not at all hispanic.
There can be no genetic test for being Hispanic because that is a socio-cultural identity. There are Korean, Arab, and Nordic Hispanics. Even the most common genetic profile varies, from mostly European Argentines to mostly indigenous Bolivians to Afro-Cubans and Afro-Colombians.
When I read stuff like this I really wonder what they teach journalists (the Census explicitly declaims the the idea that Hispanic is a racial category).
I spent a fair amount of time this weekend cleaning up scripts that can batch process 23andMe, Ancestry and FamilyTree DNA input files and push them down the pipeline toward generating admixture percentages. I have posted the most current results from the South Asian Genotype Project have been posted.
Two things
1) I’m not happy with the clusters that I used. I may change them (in which case I’ll rerun everything).
2) Once I’ve done that I’ll probably send some of my scripts to Zack Ajmal and he can run all the Harappa individuals with this new cluster.
Finally, people from the “Cow Belt” don’t get genotyped. No submissions from UP or Bihar so far. Very frustrating.
The word problematic is problematic in my opinion. I really want to punch people when they use that word. But I’ve lost that battle.
My friend Chad Niederhuth is starting his plant genomics lab at Michigan State. He’s looking for graduate students and postdocs.
My friend Nathan Pearson’s HLA genomics start-up, Root is out of stealth mode.
Looking at my Kindle stack wondering about which of these five books to tackle next:
- Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. I admire Peter Thiel much more than I did a few years ago.
- To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. I enjoyed reading The First Three Minutes, but generally am out of sync with Weinberg’s full-throated scientism when I hear his public pronouncements. But that’s OK, I read people I disagree with.
- Venomous: How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry. Real biology and chemistry. Sometimes I miss them.
- The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. This has been in my stack for a long time (3.5 years).
- The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War.
Promethease seems to be offering a new service where you can get updated analyses done by keeping your data with them. As far as I can tell it’s free to sign up for until the new year if you’ve already had an analysis done.
I know in the past Razib you have intimated you are pessimistic/fearful about what the “left” will do when it has total control of the government – not so much due to your own right-of-center predilections, but because you are very negative about the movement away from classic liberalism in the academy and the twittersphere and could see it spreading further with political control.
However, it does strike me how different the response between the “left” and the “right” was to Franken and Moore respectively. At this juncture in history, the right is highly tribal and concerned with accumulation of (or, more aptly, retention of) power. Whereas the left is basically an undisciplined mob, as likely to attack “one of its own,” and focused on ideological questions rather than power. It does certainly mean that even if the right is engaged in a medium-term demographic decline, the greater unity of force will mean it can remain competitive. But I still do not see how the fractious American left could be turned into something which fills you with existential dread. Some elucidation here would be helpful.
karl, in the medium-term i’m pretty confident now that we will crush you 🙂 you are diagnosing something real on the left. you might even ‘struggle session’ your way out of winning 2018! #wow
today the left would never have a leon trotsky to lead them, because lev bronstein would be unpersoned for ‘toxic masculinity.’
i’m still pessimistic about liberalism. but i’m much more optimistic about the boot being on our feet (the right) in in 10-15 years. so that’s something….
my concern is the short-term. the left is going to cause a lot of damage all around over the next few years. though thank god it will create a lot of converts to conservatism!
though thank god it will create a lot of converts to conservatism!
See, this is the part I would quibble with. Right now, if anything, we’re seeing the reverse, where a significant number of the members of the former Republican ruling class (particularly neocons like Max Boot and Robert Kagan) are in the process of becoming de-facto Democrats. The whole Moore debacle has driven the wedge further, with Jeff Flake openly donating to his Democratic opponent, and Bill Kristol noting “The GOP tax bill’s bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal.”
Mind you, these “luminaries” are but a small portion of the Republican coalition. And of course the Trumpist Republicans do not equal conservatism. It may well be that the Republicans fully implode, big money totally moves to the Democrats, who ultimately become the conservative party (they arguably already are, in the Burkean sense, when compared to the radicalism of the Republican Party).
In contrast, I can’t really point to anyone who is either on the left or even “the left” who has been pushed by its excesses into the arms of the Republican Party. Obviously a lot depends upon the post-Trump political moment. Past history suggests that Americans’ political beliefs crystallize during their teen years young adulthood, and are in large part based upon which party controls the White House, and whether they are broadly popular or unpopular. So for the country to shift to the right (or rather, identify more with Republicans) we’d either need to see Trump followed up by a competent and successful Republican, or a completely feckless Democrat.
you’re last sentence.
none of the ppl aligning with dems are into intersectionality crap. once a romney or socialist comes on the scene stuff will realign.
i hope.
I would have to disagree with the max boot thing. The second he caught a whiff of invading somewhere he was right back to being a Trump fan for a day. Saw that on twitter a few months ago.
“The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century.”
Pretty much unreadable imo, just dumps a lot of badly organized information on the reader…typical for what German professors do. But maybe you’ll get something out of it.
I would have to disagree with the max boot thing. The second he caught a whiff of invading somewhere he was right back to being a Trump fan for a day. Saw that on twitter a few months ago.
He also just wrote an editoral for the Los Angeles Times a few days ago savaging the Senate tax bill. I’m certainly not going to defend his intellectual integrity, but he’s parted ways with the Republican Party on many fronts, not just because they don’t sufficiently warmonger enough for him any longer. Although, to be fair, many of the neocons were basically fiscal and social liberals who only supported Republican for foreign policy reasons.
Regardless, at this moment I find it more plausible to think that Trump represents the beginning of a new party system than we will essentially see back-to-back realignments that more than cancel each other out. But wild swings can and do happen during periods that moral priors are reconsidered.
I find it more plausible to think that Trump represents the beginning of a new party system
This is my dream.
Everyday Feminism is even kind of a punch line over on the social left side of things. It’s probably not just conservative hate-reads.
If folks are worried that people might be unjustly swept up in the furor over sexual harassment and violence, the best bet would be to push for better official safeguards and policies to ensure that it is handled promptly and punished appropriately. The existing rules obviously are not working well, given folks like Weinstein and Ailes at Fox – legislation needs to be changed.
I shrugged as well at the India bit. India’s got bigger economic problems that AI hitting the outsourcing boom – they’re probably going to miss out entirely on the promise of export-led manufacturing leading to great economic development, among other issues.
I hate both the words “problematic” and “dude”.
Everyday Feminism is not intended as a joke site (although for all I know particular articles might be since they use outside writers). Barry Deutsch has written for it. And as a “blue tribe” person (to use Scott Alexander’s term) I used to see articles from it posted by my friends on Facebook all the time (now I generally don’t follow those people anymore…). I gather as Brett says the more serious leftists may regard it as a joke, but going based on my own experience there’s a pretty big contingent out there of less serious lefties and SJers who don’t.
Can highly recommend Peter Thiel’s book. Strikes me as a Steve Sailer reader. Or rather the type who would read Steve Sailer. A lot of crime think in his household I imagine.
Would love to see your views on it even if the subject matter doesn’t overlap that much.
I share your hatred of the word problematic. Unfortunately, I’ve found myself using it in entirely legitimate ways yet the word has become poisoned in mind now so I feel like I blundered after using it. There is a bunch of these words that are useful but tainted now. They fall into my “Whenever I hear the word x I reach for my revolver” list along with “hegemony” and “discourses”. Recently, you mentioned weaponized which I’m now noticing as well.
@Razib
Razib, I’m sure you have come across the 700, 000 sequences of Americans analysed in Nature Communications that sorted them into 5 “IBD network subnetworks” distributed in a pattern strongly resembling the cultural geography identified in Albion’s Seed. I’m wondering if it is possible, if a person has access to both Ancestry.com’s database, and the database in the Irish genetic atlas and POBI, to correlate the distinguishing IBD segments in each network and the genetic structures in the Isles? A proof of Albion’s seed, in a way. What would you suggest be the methodology here? FINESTRUCTURE? Rare alleles? Extending the IBD network spectral analysis to cover the Isles as well?
Such an investigation would be especially interesting as the gene flow between the clusters defined by the IBD segments is so large, and the clusters are so similar in terms of alleles, that any systematic behavioural differences between persons in the clusters must be cultural in origin, which means that individual-level correlation between ancestry in the clusters and sociocultural attitudes or behavioural measures in persons in the Western US will serve as incontrovertible proof of cultural transmission from the folkways from the East, which in turn, in this analysis, can be traced back to historical factors in the Isles.
The clear chaining of ancestry and attitudes/behaviour, without possible genetic confounding, would clearly demonstrate vertical transmission through genealogical connection and would help to get rid of so many confounders that make cultural economics so controversial.
@Ryu, since that was ancestry.com, and they did cross check against their database of thousands British and Irish samples, shouldn’t they just have been getting a regional signal between their regional UK samples and USA clusters anyway, if there was one to be had? That is, clear more matches in subregions of UK for US clusters. E.g. in https://images.nature.com/original/nature-assets/ncomms/2017/170207/ncomms14238/extref/ncomms14238-s1.pdf – S. Fig 18H/19H. I guess POBI and POI(?) are good cross checks due to increased intentional rural sampling though?
Plus don’t 3 out of 4 of Hackett Fischer’s cultural clusters all originate within the unstructured South East England POBI cluster (East Anglia, South coast, Midlands), so how could you demonstrate anything wrt them?
I recently came across this quote from Gregory Cochran “Bantu are genetically closer to Amerindians than to San” (Context), which immediately struck me as wrong – every global PCA and Admixture I’ve seen split African/non-African first and show San/non-San as a sub-split within African variation.
In a simple tree view what Gregory says makes sense, the first population to diverge will be equally related to all descendants of the other branch, and all of the other branch will be closer to each other than any will be to the first branch… and so San/non-San should be the primary split in modern humans. But this doesn’t this stack up with the genetic data – are there simply too few San samples in the PCAs/Admixtures so they get bundled with other Africans in the first levels?… or has there been significant admixture between San and other Africans groups so that San no longer stand out as the first branch in autosomal studies?
I tried running some DStats but virtually every African group I tried preferred French/Karitiana over any other African group (including Mota), so I’m at a loss as to how to interpret that.
tobus, i think both are an issue. brenna henn has some really good khoisan samples she will do deep sequencing on though, so we’ll know better. but to a first approximation, greg is correct.
the have really old eurasian back-migration. really really old, as in deep in the pleistocene.
also, sometimes amerindians from the amazon get inflated divergence scores because of drift.
“The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. This has been in my stack for a long time (3.5 years).”
So has Seveneves.
“being pro-Palestine and BDS is a necessary part of intersectionality.”
I didn’t know that intersectionality is a synonym for antisemitism, but, it is duly noted.
“There can be no genetic test for being Hispanic because that is a socio-cultural identity.”
In a previous millennium, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, there were many restaurants there that billed themselves as “Comidas Chinas y Criollas”.
“This tradition of Spanish-speaking, Cantonese-owned restaurants serving two cuisines — comidas chinas y criollas — has existed since the Chinese migration to the Caribbean a century ago. Still, these split-personality meals get wacky when Chinese waiters chatter away in Spanish but don’t understand your English.”
I don’t know how they were supposed to answer the census questions.
@Walter
intersectionality is a synonym for anti-Semitism
This is not accurate.
iffen: read the linked article.
“Hooray for Bitcoin (but Don’t Buy It): The price reached $19,000 last week. It is certain to hit zero.” by Lawrence Baxter on Dec. 11, 2017
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hooray-for-bitcoin-but-dont-buy-it-1513035892
… in the long run, the smart bet is against bitcoin, for at least four reasons.
First, bitcoin is too volatile to be a reliable store of value. …
Second, the bitcoin community is using breathtaking amounts of electricity—about as much as all of Denmark, according to one recent estimate. … When environmentalists begin to understand this, there will be a firestorm.
Third, the currency is a vehicle for criminal transactions and for avoiding government restrictions on moving capital. …
Fourth and most important, bitcoin is on a collision course with sovereign states. …
King Philip IV of France once could not repay his debts to his bankers, the Knights Templar. So in 1307 he had their leaders arrested on trumped-up charges and then burned at the stake. No modern sovereign will give up the power of the purse without a similar fight, if perhaps a less bloody one.
At the first serious (and likely coordinated) move by governments to regulate or bank the digital currency, bitcoin’s price will crash to zero. Panicked owners will rush to exit and the bubble will burst. Bitcoin futures and options may just as well be based on pixies and fairies. Nothing will be able to save them. ***
@Walter
It’d be interesting to see a cryptocurrency pegged to a normal currency, like the Argentinian peso was pegged at 1:1 to the USD (although it had catastrophic results for them in the end). It wouldn’t address your points 3 and 4 though, but it would eliminate 1 and possibly mitigate 2.
@Walter
iffen: read the linked article.
Check, re-read the article.
phanmo: Who is going to collateralize the linkage? And, if the value of BC goes up, who will cover the increase?
It can not happen.
Iffen: It is the very definition of modern antisemitism. “I am not an antisemitism, but those Zionists …” If you don’t understand that it is your problem.
RE: the exchange between RK & KZ above, I think they are slightly talking past each other (full disclosure: SFAICT, my political sympathies are much closer to those of KZ than RK, although to be clear, the views below are mine, not his. Also, I am trying to be fair to the right, and hope for gentle correction where I’ve missed that goal). I use “left” and “right” in their conventional or colloquial sense in the U.S.
When those on the left talk about “the right” or people on “the right”, we are referring to those who have political power, power to make, interpret and enforce laws and regulations. Increasingly over the last 2 generations, this has meant the (behavior & expressed opinions of individuals in the) Republican party as seen primarily in DC but also in state-houses and city-halls around the country, and occasionally candidates for major office: Congress, esp. the Senate*, the White House and various governors’ mansions. The left is analogously defined, the Democratic party with illustrative examples found in the same places: D.C., governors’ mansions etc. Within each party, there is admittedly a range, but the focus of the discussion is on wielders of political power.**
SFAICT, on the right, the focus is typically on individuals in academia (both students and faculty), and occasionally on random people outside of academia who seem esp. bizarre or outrageous (e.g., Rachel Dolezal): people who don’t have any power to effect laws or regulations. The asymmetry is striking, at least to me, especially as I expect most college students to change their political beliefs as they age and become more affluent. Noah Smith’s twitterstorm (linked here) strikes me as about right. Why would one worry that because the median (or whatever) belief of a group of students today is offensive or worrying, that it will also be so 10 or 20 years later?
tl;dr; When people on “the left” refer to “the right”, they mean specfic people who have political power. When people on “the right” refer to “the left” they mean various people (typically on college campuses) who rarely or never have any political power.
*The Senate because the House is sufficiently large as to have room for a few cooks on each side of the aisle, individuals who are not esp. representative of the party to which they belong.
**At times, esp. in discussions of campaign strategy, supporters with a relatively large amount of economic power are also considered: Soros, the Kochs, Theil, Steyer, etc. Since Trump’s rise and esp. since Charlotesville, there has been more attention to the far right, esp. the right with explicit Nazi sympathies. Nevertheless, I think the left’s focus is on right-wing politicians.
When people on “the left” refer to “the right”, they mean specfic people who have political power. When people on “the right” refer to “the left” they mean various people (typically on college campuses) who rarely or never have any political power.
this is just false. people on the left never talk about corporate america or talk radio? and you don’t think people on the right didn’t consider people like obama on the left?
@Walter
If you don’t understand that it is your problem.
Actually, I believe that I do understand. Your position seems to fit the accusation that some anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi types make when they say that some Zionists and their supporters try to make a blanket equivalency between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism.
Additionally, the author says that you can’t be her ally unless you support BDS. It’s her intersection so she is entitled to decide who can enter.
Regarding backlashes I think that in America with the polarization that has happened now pretty much every movement doing well can expect a backlash? In a way the Metoo movement already is one. The system looks unstable.
@Ryukendo, re: Hackett-Fischer and “770,000” genomes again, I guess one other thing which I didn’t mention above as well is that Albion’s Seed’s migrations seems to have a separation between a distinct “Tidewater” migration specifically to Virginia and a “Backcountry” migration to Appalachia.
In “777,000 genomes”, though, there’s simply one cluster that spreads west from Virginia (the north), slightly to the south through Kentucky and West Virginia, then spikes north again through Indiana and Illinois, basically avoiding southern Appalachia and further south. Other more southerly regions within Appalachia overlap separate clusters from the Upland South and Lower South. (No pan Appalachian unity here, depending on how the region is defined.)
If there was an initial “Backcountry” and “Tidewater” cluster, it seems like they pretty well merged to the extent that “777,000 genomes” cannot split them.
@Tobus, maybe questions of how to define distances v sharing. f3 sharing for ex. is I think measuring how many variants are shared between two populations / samples relative to an outgroup.
As a measure of distance, may tend towards low distances towards populations who don’t have much genetic variability, so long as there is a common ancestor. I think Europeans often (or at least can) share more variants measured by f3 with WHG than they do with other individuals from the same population, so if you take lower sharing = higher distance, then distance is not high. But we can tell that modern Europeans are largely one population, and WHG largely another, quite different, because modern Europeans are all highly more diverse across the genome in a way that’s similar to each other and different to WHG. In algorithmic terms, it would be a poor model to place Europeans in the WHG cluster. Taking into account population diversity (not sharing) WHG are distant and Europeans close to each other.
In the African context, I guess that the node EastAfrica2, and hence all OOA node descendents, would be somewhat analogous to WHG in my example above https://i.imgur.com/VffSLZk.jpg. When we say Bantu are closer to Native Americans than San, we may be talking about sharing. The rest you can fill in.
Functionally, I guess something like PCA / STRUCTURE is tending to find elements of shared variance to collapse to a dimension or model cluster. Tend to leave Africans together because they lack shared variants, rather than because they have shared variants with each other? Re: PCA it also seems like whatever extra variation West Africans share with Eurasians is sufficiently different in the shared variance of East and West Eurasians against Africas (“world” PC1 factor) that it does not emerge until higher level PCs placing West Africans closer to Eurasians than San / Mbuti. For whatever that’s worth.
If this makes any sense (I’m not sure it does and this sort of a very amateur cobbled together view of things!).
this is just false. people on the left never talk about corporate america or talk radio? and you don’t think people on the right didn’t consider people like obama on the left?
– I haven’t heard people on the left talk about corporate america as part of the right. Particular corporations perhaps, typically because they are seen as important funders of the GOP; but nothing at all similar to what I recall from my childhood in the late 60s-early 70s when corporate america was seen to be a major part of the dreaded establishment. At most objections to Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific & Citizens United. Do I need to get out more?
– Talk radio is one of the major institutions organizing support for and pressure on Republican politicians. So of course lefties focus on talk radio. Since the demise of the union movement over the last 1-2 generations, it’s not clear to me that the left has anything similar. The closest things I can think of are Rachel Maddow or MoveOn*: teachers’ unions? Anyway, small beer in comparison.
– Obama (and Pelosi, Reed, Schumer, … Gillenbrand? Warren?) of course. Politicians with some power to influence law.
People in academia are a sideshow, until you get a large fraction of them involved as happened when conscription was an issue during the Vietnam War. I just don’t get it.
*Recall that in 2007, the Senate, then majority Democratic, voted to censure MoveOn.
marcel –
Related to your comments, I have noticed that the left wing and right wing in America tend to view the other side, organizationally, as mirror versions of themselves, rather than what they are.
For example, the right wing, on the whole, tends to view the left as being much more organized and unified than it really is, along with overstating its impact via elaborate conspiracy theories. In truth, the left has (at least for my entire life) been divided and organizationally weak, with many groups not even liking each other very much at all, let along working together. But because conservatives tend to have a more authoritarian and hierarchical worldview (and have a strong need for an equally powerful “other”), they imagine left wingers to be more powerful and orderly than they really are.
On the flipside, the left wing press absolutely loves “right wing crackup” stories about the tension between the different factions on the right (particularly between “business conservatives” and the religious right, although more recently the alt-right has been added into the mix). The problem with these stories is although there are different factions within the Republicans, ideologically speaking the Republicans have become more, not less coherent over time. The left imagines the right to be a collection of squabbling tribes on the precipice of disaster because that’s the left’s internal understanding of itself.
karl, i think there is truth to what you’re saying. and that’s why i’m anti-left, it seems bent on chiliastic chaos right now. not a positive program of policies which enact a specific vision.
we on the right (mostly) align with the idea that there’s something to defend in the western cultural system, slapdash and incoherent as it is.
Marcel Proust, there is no “demise of the union movement.” Rather, it has moved from the private to the government sector–teachers, prison guards, cops, fire fighters, basic bureaucrats, etc–where it is pretty powerful.
And, yes, they aren’t organized into a nice structure but they all agree that more money to the “public sector” is good, and nobody shrinks the “public sector.”
Division/unity, may depend on contrasting liberal v conservative or right v left. At least some evidence liberal v conservative lands more consensus on liberal end – https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/909379284632047616.
Generally regarding conformity and homogeneity of values, I think one of the replicable findings of social psychology is that group conformity tends to happen regardless of personality or preference for conformity (e.g. https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/909379284632047616 / https://plus.google.com/101046916407340625977/posts/iwiLfrxGNKm – “ethnicity, faith, education, occupation, age, income, moral maturity and political views made no difference”). Conformity endorsement may be like the “Just World Hypothesis” / status quo bias, and conformity rejection kind of an idealized preference practiced mainly in the breach. (Which would make more sense of present day politics?)
New article here may contribute to ongoing debate on “Pinkerization” (falling deaths from violence / war as a proportion of group size) and levels of mobilization of hunter-gatherer or pastoralist groups against agricultural groups – http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/12/07/1713972114.full
Their model is that population scaling and increasing constraints with population size increases reduce size of “war group size” relative to population size, and this mostly explains apparent falls in per capita from violent conflict deaths. This in contrast to the “Better Angels” ideas where scaling is due to improved conflict resolution, empathy and reason, political technology, understanding of positive sum games, and so on (or other ideas where subsistence strategy – herding, farming, gathering – has a significant role to play in constraining war group size relative to population).
Roger Sweeny:
tl;dr In the 1960s, about 1/3rd of workers belonged to unions; in 1983, about 20%; in 2015, about 12% (pretty equally split between public and private sector workers)
I think it’s fair to refer to “the demise of the union movement.”
Check the 3 links below: The last one has a nice animated graph showing the rise and fall of the union movement over the last century.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/23/385843576/50-years-of-shrinking-union-membership-in-one-map
https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf
http://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-charts/
RE: Left vs. Right
1. I am obviously “extremely” rightist. With that caveat aside, here are my observations.
2. The Right appears more “coherent,” because it is on defense. People on the right generally agree on things that should be defended, i.e. religious liberty, traditional moral values, gun rights, etc. that we perceive to be under threat (or about to be extinguished). It is also psychologically much easier to cohere around the idea of fending off an existential threat than it is to be FOR a set of abstractions.
3. The Left appears less coherent, because it is. The common ground among the fractious and very divergent left-wing groups I see in the U.S. is, simply, the attainment of power and imposition of their will on their enemies. They may not agree on much, but they agree on whom to humiliate and rob of livelihood.
4. In politics (and war, too, for that matter), usually the most committed wins. Even though a majority of Americans still harbors center-right sentiments and recoils from the excesses of the left, the left-wing core is far more aggressive and committed and has all but triumphed in the culture wars for that reason. It is for the same reason that the Left and its allies go all out against the so-called “Alt-Right,” even though the latter is a fringe movement at best – precisely because it also displays the kind of shameless aggression and outlandish commitment that the leftist base does.
5. And therein lies the danger of the “Alt-Right” for the Left. Even though it is miniscule in influence, its very existence may normalize rightist violence and ferocity. And given that most Americans are still more right-leaning than not, normalizing rightist aggression could be catastrophic to the leftist base who, until now, had largely monopolized “street theater” and intimidation, through which it has leveraged enormously outsized influence on our society. If both sides were to be equally aggressive and committed, the side with superior numbers wins, and that would not be the Left.
6. The best strategy (the winning strategy so far) for the Left is actually to seek a conditional victory, in which it is the winner, but generously tolerates the loser. If, however, its victory is insufferable to the Right and a Social War results, things look grim for the Left, because the Left usually excels in conditional violence/limited warfare (that is, intimidation and coercion within a civil framework or even guerilla warfare), but the Right tends to be much better in an all-out war/unconditional warfare that takes place intra-society (e.g. the Spanish Civil War).
7. In conclusion, my message for the Left would be: be generous and gracious in your victory. If you stamp that boot of yours too harshly on my face, you are not going to like what happens next.
Woman, 24, born to Indian parents is shunned and bullied because she has white skin, ginger hair, emerald eyes and FRECKLES (and now she wants a DNA test to see if her ancestors are to blame)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5178549/amp/The-Indian-feels-like-foreigner-country.html
Das raciss?
marcel proust, thanks for the links. Union membership percentage has gone down more than I realized. I still wouldn’t call it a demise, though. Rather, a substantial decline–like AM radio or the Big Three television networks.