Book review: The Rise of the Western World

The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History by Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas. First published in 1973, this is a radical interpretation, offering a unified explanation for the growth of Western Europe between 900 A. D. and 1700, providing a general theoretical framework for institutional change geared to the general reader. It looks like you can read it here, or here, for yourself rather than rely on my unreliable summary; it is fairly short, and not hard going.

It describes - in economic and political terms - the developments in the West, well in western Europe, but stops before the industrial revolution, saying "well there you go then: that's what laid the ground for the industrial revolution to happen in England". What it talks about is largely organisation; and how various rulers' desperate need for money in the short term lead them to a variety of expedients for taxation or other equivalent money-raising schemes; some of which were in the long term bad. So for example the Spanish crown favoured the Mestas because they were a ready source of income; but this worked against recognising property rights, and so was unfortunate in the long term.

Here's a quote, to give you an idea of their language and terms:

To understand the background, we must explain the functions of the state against a wider background than would be necessary in dealing with the feudal world alone. Even in our day, the government is primarily an institutional arrangement that sells protection and justice to its constituents. It does so by monopolizing the definition and enforcement of property rights over goods and resources and the granting of rights to the transfer of these assets. In return for this service, the state receives payment in the form of taxes. Since economies of scale in the provision of protection and justice make this transaction potentially worthwhile to the constituents, a basis exists for a mutually advantageous trade between the governed and the government. So long as economies of scale continue, the state's widened protection and enforcement of property rights increases the income of all constituents and this saving is divided in some manner between the constituents and the state. What determines the division of these savings? The citizens are interested in receiving as much of the incremental income as possible; but so is the state, since its very survival during this period often depends on the maximization of present revenues. Let us consider again the historical evidence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as described in...

I find this helpful; it strips off so much of the gunk. But there's also some more fact-based stuff, if you're interested in population, or prices, of the evolution of the manorial / feudal systems.

We end up considering France, Spain (unfortunates) and the Netherlands and England (fortunate); I forget why Italy and Germany fall out of the analysis. But the end result, though they don't say it, is essentially trial-and-error, or Darwinistic: people try stuff, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, places where they do things that work well thrive, others don't. We and the Neds got property rights; the Frogs and the Spics got a strong crown. You may notice a certain vagueness of my part here: although I've only just finished reading it, the details are already fading.

The book is prone to say things like "progress was not possible until the private and societal rates of return were made to coincide". By which it means, that unless entrepeneurs and inventors could capture a significant portion of the return from newe thinges - which required new laws, or new systems -, they would not put in the time, effort and resources - the investment - required to produce those newe thinges, from which all benefit. This is I think a useful overarching perspective; a summary, which makes it easier to order and think about individual events. And yet it doesn't actually explain any of the individual events, obvs.

Disappointingly, there's nothing here on "why the West won": they don't talk at all about why anywhere else, perhaps most obviously China, didn't succeed. See-also The Grand Titration. Put into this framework, the answer is likely lack of competition; a lesson for our times. If you only have one go at getting the right answer, you'll probably fail.

Refs

* 1776 in the US and Latin America.

* We woz wrong about oil, sez El Econo.

* Europe's Weather Losses Keep Climbing; But a new loss normalization finds no trend after accounting for economic growth - guess who.

* The Declaration of Independence and the Case for Non-Ethnic Secession.

* The Causal Effect of Income is (Often) Zero.

* Rich World, Poor World: RCP 8.5, IPAT, and Climate Impacts Reconsidered.

* Why We've Been Thinking about the Fertility Crisis Wrong: Did humans evolve to seek solitude?

* A Conservative Court—Not a Trump Court.

* Airpower Did Not Fail in Iran — Simplistic Thinking Did.

* JD Vance's crusade against GDP is wrong and bad: Making Americans poorer won't make our society better. While I'm here: for me, see GDP impartially consider'd and links therein in particular Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?; and to Limits to Growth comments.

Peace in our time

This was going to be a post about the end of the MM-MMs war, but that doesn't seem to be quite over yet, so instead it is about the hopeful Trilateral Framework Between the United States of America, the State of Israel, and the Republic of Lebanon.

It contains most of the right kind of words and recognises the actual problem: the LAF will restore effective sovereign authority over all Lebanese territory, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure... Lebanon reaffirms its resolute and irreversible commitment to restoring and exercising full sovereignty over all its territory. The Government of Lebanon will rebuild the State’s monopoly on the use of force, achieve the complete and verified disarmament of all non-state armed groups, and ensure that such groups will have no military or security role and no armed capabilities anywhere in Lebanon; you should read it. Sadly the Leb's can't quite bring themselves to say the H-word, though the Kikes can: Israel stresses that its military actions in Lebanon are solely a consequence of the attacks, threat posed by, and hostile intent of non-state armed groups, particularly Hizballah.

With Iran weakened, Syria broadly friendly, and it would seem the Leb's finally prepared to talk sense, maybe there is hope.

Refs

* By the sword you did your work and by the sword you die.

* RIP Judith Curry's Climate Etc (arch).

Mayflies

Another year, another Mays. They flow past like water. 2025; 2024; 2023...

With Inigo and the bucket gone I'm not really sure what image to use; I didn't take many, mostly vidz; but I guess this one of Lance looking bothered will do, photobombed by House. This was Thursday, because LMBC are ahead of Caius; but as anticipation suggested that didn't last the day. It did last a while though; see here; and while that's a long way down the course it is still a few hundred meters to the finish.

So Peterhouse are head and Caius, sadly, did not dent them. On the ladies' side, Jesus rowed over convincingly.

Full playlist here. Due to... errors on my part, and the lack of cannons on CUCBC's part, I dropped my drone in the river on day one; so there are two days of hand-held filming before Amazon delivered the replacement. See here for exciting details.

Refs

* Teachers: Value-Added and Social Desirability Bias.

St Gervais

I'm just back from a trip down to the Chamonix valley for some low level alpine type fun, but being now a retired gentleman of leisure, had time enough to spend half a week getting there and much the same back, visiting more cathedrals than I can remember along the way, as well as Meung.

Anyway, the wildly exciting story is available here, should you be interested.

While I'm here: some people are bad at taking hints. So to be somewhat more heavy handed: "You should ignore it" is a hint that the topic isn't welcome; I will only admit particularly illuminating comments that discuss it.

Refs

* Why Callais Doesn’t Justify Court-Packing.

* When It Really is Racist to Talk About Racial Gaps.

* Bruce Schneier is a fuckwit (see-also Ilya Somin, though Bruce's fuckwittery goes deeper than that).

* An Unconstitutional War Results in a Bad Deal - jumping the gun, in my view, but IS is worth reading.

* Second Amendment Roundup: Gun Ban for Pot Users Unconstitutional.

* Were 250,000 English Girls Raped by Grooming Gangs? Obvs, no.

* Foundations of Public Choice: A Primer by Michael Munger.

* Comedy headline time: Trump Singles Out Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP Over High Gas Prices.

* Europe's Deadly Aversion to Air Conditioning.

* I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.

Book review: The Allegory of Love

I don't have a lot to say about this but want to record reading it. See some Goodreads reviews for things I might have said, if my memory were better. My picture, of the cover (FFS flickr on phone won't let me embed it, so for now I'll just reuse that image), is I see with amusement the picture I used for The Discarded Image; this may have been Hulme's fault. I found this harder going than TDI, perhaps because I do not have the congenial model in my mind. It has however inspired me to acquire The Romance of the Rose (Dahlberg translation), and to begin reading it in Meung sur Loire.

Just as TDI transformed or perhaps just informed how I saw ye olde folkes' views of that aspect, so I found TAOL very helpful in getting at least some initial hooks in... well, the bookes it covers: ROTR, Fairie Queene - which I haven't yet ordered - and others. However I am conscious how much of Lewis's thought slips my mind even as I read it; I am too unfamiliar with this stuff.

Here's a sample of Lewis:

In many periods the historian of literature discovers a dominant literary form, such as the blood tragedy among the Elizabethans, or satire in the eighteenth century, or the novel of sentiment and manners in the last age or in our own. During the years between Chaucer's death and the poetry of Wyatt allegory becomes such a dominant form and suffers all the vicissitudes to which dominant forms are exposed. For it must be noticed that such dominance is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When every one feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it. Thus, even in times that I can still remember, the threadbare motives of the novel were not nearly so obvious as they now threaten to become. The monotony of Augustan satire, on the other hand, is easily felt; that of Italianate blank-verse tragedy more easily still; and that of late medieval allegory unescapably and with resentment. In the second place, a dominant form tends to attract to itself writers whose talents would have fitted them much better for work of some other kind. Thus the retired Cowper writes satire in the eighteenth century; or in the nineteenth a mystic and natural symbolist like George Macdonald is seduced into writing novels. Thus in the fifteenth and sixteenth century we have the Assembly of Ladies written by a poet who has no better vocation to allegory than that of fashion. And thirdly-which is more disastrous-a dominant form attracts to itself those who ought not to have written at all; it becomes a kind of trap or drain towards which bad work moves by a certain 'kindly enclyning'. Youthful vanity and dullness, determined to write, will almost certainly write in the dominant form of their epoch. It is the operation of this law which has given later medieval allegory and hence allegory in general a bad name. A recognition of the law will perhaps liberate our critical faculties to distinguish between good and bad work-between the poetic use and the fashionable abuse.

But there is yet another 'accident' to which dominant forms are liable, and it is one which much concerns the historian. Often, though not always, we can detect under the apparent sameness of such productions the burgeoning of new forms, and find that a tradition which seemed most strictly bound to the past is big with the promise, or the threat, of the future. I half suspect that such a process is going on about us while I write: that the novel, which we saw becoming so biographical in works like Sinister Street and so preoccupied with period in works like The Forsyte Saga, is even now transforming itself-has transformed itself, in the work of Strachey and M. Maurois and Mr. Herbert Read-into the imaginative biography, a genuinely new form standing at the same distance from biography proper as the Chronicle play stands from the 'just' history.

Book review: The Handmaid's Wail

Dead famous, but also dead boring². The surface veneer is tolerable: La Atwood has clearly been to writer's school and learnt how to write words¹, but they forgot the bit about writing an interesting story; or perhaps that bit isn't teachable. There is a colourless cloying pallid dry dusty silence spreading over the prose⁴; this contrasts with, say, Moby Dick - another wildly popular-in-the-lists book that no-one except me ever reads - which at least has some salt and colour to its language and vigour to its speech. Proust can also be boring; but unlike LA, Marcel rewards you in the end with beauty. As well as some fascinating insights into the culture of his times. LA has no interesting insights into culture to offer, because her culture is entirely made up and not at all plausible³.

The woke left lap this stuff up because it is trying to be nasty to the religious right. And yet - as the epilogue obliquely admits - the target is really muslim society, of the Saudi / Iranian type; though naturally LA isn't brave enough to say this out loud: there are no plaudits from the left for saying that kind of thing. And although ostensibly about the evils of patriarchy, in fact most of the oppression is by women.

My edition has an Introduction, nominally by Naomi Alderman, which I hoped might be enlightening; but alas I rapidly discovered that it had been written by a Fembot-type AI given the prompt "say bad but implausible things about the USA and lay it on as thick as you can: these people aren't thinking". Oh, and lastly and trivially: this isn't sci-fi; it is politics.

Refs

* Trump's Iran War Continues to Violate the Constitution - and Now Also the War Powers Act of 1973 (see-also Yanquis and Kikes twat the Mad Mullahs).

* Court agrees to immediately finalize Voting Rights Act decision.

* Applying US Air Warfare Theory and Doctrine to Evaluate the Campaign against Iran, Part II: Iranian Missile Forces.

* Weasels electrocuted by particle accelerator honored in exhibit (via RS).

* IQ With Conscience.

* London by William Blake.

* Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Alvin Roth on Organ Markets.

* An Ode to Low-Skilled Workers: Version 1.

* A Modest Uptick in Supreme Court Popularity.

* European stagnation is real.

Notes

1. But see this review.

2. Confession - with which I had originally meant to open this review - I knew before reading the book that I was going to dislike it; nothing about the reading of it gave me cause to change my opinion. Partly because mainstream writers trying to write sci-fi is always painful; partly because it isn't sci-fi; partly because of the strain I knew would be there.

3. Leading - as this review says - to the reader being unable to suspend disbelief.

4. Towards the end the protagonist apologises for - I forget the exact terms - not being interesting, not being active, enough. This may resonate with progressive female youth-du-jour, if what one reads in the papers is true; though I lack contact with any such and so cannot say from personal experience.

There Is No Progress in Philosophy

There Is No Progress in Philosophy will be an idea familiar to us all; my particular text is taken from an article published in 2011 but brought to my attention by Twatter. And since I haven't ranted about the evils of philosophy for a while now, and nothing much else seems to be happening, I thought I would indulge myself.

Part of the answer is that of course there’s progress in philosophy, we just stop calling those topics that make progress “philosophy”. Although that isn't really progress in philosophy: that is progress in removing things from philosophy - cosmology, physics, most obviously - as they become science. In the same sense we could say there is progress in religion. As time goes by, philosophy is left with all the stuff that people can't agree on, whereas science is what works, bitches.

Part of the answer is that there is genuine progress, but most philosophers aren't interested; as Popper wistfully notes the problem of induction is solved. But nothing seems less wanted than a simple solution to an age-old philosophical problem. Hazlitt on morality provides another example; that he was an economist and therefore from out of field doesn't help. Professional philosophy is about publication count and tenure and talking, not about solving problems; no-one hires a philosopher to actually solve problems.

But a lot of the answer is that much of philosophy is not grounded in reality, unlike science, and so there is no final arbiter. So people are free to disagree, and retreat behind screens of words.

Refs

* Court unanimously sides with oil and gas companies in suit over damage to Louisiana coast (Chevron USA Inc. v. Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana).

* This Be The Verse.

* WHAT DO WE DO IF IT FOSSILIZES?

* The Missing Right-Wing Firms: Hanania's Plausible Resolution.

* Against Attribution Studies.

* United Arab Emirates to quit oil cartel Opec.

* Rethinking Conservative Approaches to Executive Power.

* The Origins and Influence of Zero-Sum Thinking.

* Former US officials criticise Pentagon silence on deadly Iran school attack.

* Anti-Communism and Anti-Racism.

Good news

It is always charming to be the bearer of good news, so I am pleased to reveal to you that Donald Trump is the war’s biggest loser, in the words of the Economist. Since the MM has been at worst mildly inconvenienced, those grieving for the dearly departed, and indeed the very shades, can take comfort that their losses are even less.

If only that were true. Sadly it isn't; instead, it is the sort of drivel people write when only the named people matter. And if you want drivel, there is much much more out there; see-also Yanquis and Kikes twat the Mad Mullahs.

The situation as I write: there is a ceasefire between the aforementioned Ys, Ks and MMs and US-Iran peace talks begin in Islamabad through Pakistani mediators. There is not a ceasefire in Lebanon, and the erstwhile "neutral" (ho ho) Paki mediators are siding with the MMs in asserting that is part of the "agreement". But there is no agreement; both sides have ceased firing for the moment but agree on nothing else.

My expectation, a few days back when this was announced, was that there would be no meaningful negotiation, just a pretence, and things would just stay as-is on the ground, and everything would quietly go back to normal. But the MMs have decided to play rough and keep Hormuz closed, and I'm doubtful that will fly. Or swim. If I was the Yanquis, I would be putting my pieces into place for re-opening Hormuz by force; and that would include non-military stuff like sorting out insurance (and demonstrating how safe it is...). El Econo has a reasonably decent article setting things out.

Based on past experience I expect the MMs to not give any meaningful ground in the talks, and to pointlessly insist on their Lebanese proxies being part of the ceasefire. Meanwhile the Lebs are - stupidly, performatively, but apparently no-one in our idiot meeja can see how dumb this is - refusing to talk until there is a ceasefire there. Brent crude is currently at $94, down from its highs but up from its lows, reflecting everyone's uncertainty about Hormuz; what the MM will do once it becomes clear the talks are a waste of time I don't know. Do you know the future? Then earn kudos by predicting it in a comment.

Most of the meeja seem to feel that the war has been pointless, which is just their disappointment at not getting a clear-cut result that their tiny minds can grasp. That the MMs have been "knocked back"¹ isn't something they can understand.

Update: I'm not sure I fully know how to interpret this chart, but it seems to show the market expecting happiness in the medium term. It will be interesting to see how it changes.

2026/4/12: witty and amusing developement is the US deciding to blockade Iranian ports. Such fun! I don't think that was on anyone's cards. Oil is mildly up, but whether caused by that, or the totally unexpected breakdown of negotiations², I don't know. And sharez iz up.

2026/4/17: the Economist's Mar 28th 2026 Advantage Iran hasn't aged well. Brent currently at $90 and S&P500 at an all-time high.

2026/4/29: Brent at $119 - though the S&P is happy at 7135 - and Trump says No More Mr Nice Guy. Popcorn time? The Economist thinks that Oil markets are still in La La land, though it does say it is loth to second-guess those who have the facts to hand and billions of dollars at stake (2026/07/01: We woz wrong about oil, they confess). UAE quits OPEC.

2026/5/6: Brent hovering just above $100; S+P at 7340; and rumours of peace though such are unreliable, and Aunty notes the problem of who would even approve such an agreement among the factions in Iran's leadership; and U.S. Forces Disable Vessel in Gulf of Oman Attempting to Violate Blockade, which is bound to make the MMs happy.

2026/5/11: The pattern continues: Brent above $100, but S+P rises, and the Iranians prevaricate - well, the MM has now rejected the MMs rejection of his plan; the US blockade continues as does the Iranian one; it is hard to see this ending peacefully. The MMs have nowhere to go; although Iran of course has excellent options, starting with getting rid of the MMs.

2026/06/10: low-level twatting continues, but Trump does genuinely seem to want peace, to the despair of the popcorn class. Hormuz closed seems to be normalised; who cares anymore? And the market cares more about possible AI froth.

Refs

* The War the Arab World Is Watching.

* The goal of the negotiation in Iran should [be]...

* What Iran Won - RH, everyone's favourite pundit - flip-flops like a lightweight.

* U.S. warships cross Strait of Hormuz for first time since Iran war began.

* U.S. Forces Start Mine Clearance Mission in Strait of Hormuz.

* Tis but a flesh wound.

* U.S. to Blockade Ships Entering or Exiting Iranian Ports.

* I've pushed for a blockade for over a month...

* Lead finals | Meishan 2026 (men's boulder; women's boulder).

* You Can't Feed The Poor By Taxing @JeffBezos ' Wealth.

Notes

1. A breadmaking metaphor; perhaps tasteless when applied to humans.

2. Actually I fully expected negotiations to limp along for ages. The breakdown is likely a sign that the USAnians don't want to piss about; good for popcorn futures, bad for Iranian infrastructure.

Book review: The Case Against Education

The Case Against Education is a book written by libertarian economist Bryan Caplan and published in 2018 by Princeton University Press. Drawing on the economic concept of job market signaling and research in educational psychology, the book argues that much of higher education is very inefficient and has only a small effect in improving human capital, contrary to the conventional consensus in labor economics. Caplan argues that the primary function of education is not to enhance students' skills but to certify their intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity—attributes that are valued by employers. He ultimately estimates that approximately 80% of individuals' return to education is the result of signaling, with the remainder due to human capital accumulation, as wiki says. Or you can try Goodreads. As BC himself notes, almost no-one changes their mind as a result of reading the book, so entrenched are everyone's opinions; so I'm not going to make any attempt to convince you he is correct: read the book if you want the details.

His data is almost all from the USA, but that hardly matters, because the same is true world over. Every government happily burbles that nothing is more important than education, and no-one amongst the elite - or indeed, anyone else - will listen to arguments to the contrary. Which is itself a meta-argument: how can so many fools all be right?

Another meta-argument: why is it that education is the only "good" that its recipients try so hard to avoid?

Anecdote: one of the gains to education is a strong societal, and indeed personal, gain at the lower end of male ability, because staying in education, and the minor gains to employability, tend to reduce criminality amongst young men. But there's no similar gain for young women, because so few commit any crime.

There are two sorts of gains: personal, and societal. The personal is improvements in your employability, future earnings, and the care and comfort of your soul. The societal is how much extra you'll produce as a result of what you learn, together with harder to measure stuff like the good of your soul and reduction in crime. If the bulk of the personal gain came from what you actually learnt, then the two types of good would be close to indistinguishable; BC's main argument is that they aren't, because the bulk - his estimate is 80% - of the personal good comes from signalling: completing your education signals to employers that you are intelligent, industrious, and conformist. But signalling has no societal benefit: it merely alters the relative ordering of people, it doesn't make people any more useful.

He produces exhaustive evidence for the effect of signalling, but I suspect this is much like evolution: you don't really need evidence, once the concept has been explained, unless your religion prevents you from believing. An example is that the rewards for education - as measured by earnings, in this case - are not linear with years of schooling; instead, there is a marked jump around graduation, from either high school or college. This would make no sense if the gains came from what you learnt; but makes perfect sense if what matters is the piece of paper saying you hae passed the course.

For what it is worth, BC happily accepts that reading, writing and arithmetic are valuable skills that we all need, and so doesn't trouble himself with junior school. Probably if you pushed him he would quibble that too, but never mind we need not go there. He also accepts that some of what is learnt in some courses - for example, engineering - is useful.

His remedy is austerity: the government should stop, or at least begin to reduce, subsidising useless signalling. He is perfectly well aware that this isn't going to happen.

I think that his arguments-from-future-earnings are unassailable, which means the easiest way round them is to argue for nurture-of-the-soul. This has the great advantage of being very hard to measure, so it is easy to apply wishful thinking, and people promptly do so. I - and I assume you, dear reader - are amongst the cognitive elite; and so our experience of education is rather different to that of the masses, at least I should jolly well hope so. I enjoyed school, and I enjoyed university. And I rather suspect that applies to quite a lot of elite policy and opinion formers out there; this may account for some of the bias. But nurturing the soul, and instilling a love of education, knowledge, and culture for its own sake, is not something that the bulk factory education system is going to do, except by happy chance.

If we were to accept his case, how much does it matter? The waste is then lots of money, but that translates into lots of time: all those people teaching stuff pointlessly, and all the students who could be doing something more productive. So, yes, it matters: the facile govt idea that at least it keeps people off the unemployment rolls for three years is silly.

Refs

* Congress more or less doesn’t exist, except as a social media operation. The institution has abandoned itself.

* The Vast Emptiness of Social Psychology.

* Our Amicus Brief in the Section 122 Tariff Case - Ilya Somin.

Another advancement of science

The classic Science advances one funeral at a time refers; and I swear I have at least one other riffing on the theme. And today brings us Population Doomster and False Prophet of Ecological Apocalypse Paul Ehrlich Has Died. Wiki tells me that "statistician Paul A. Murtaugh says that Ehrlich was largely correct" but that is drivel. Michael Mann says he "was a friend and a hero. He will be greatly missed" and whinges that Julian Simon said Ehrlich was an alarmist purveyor of doom and gloom. Sadly, shortage of electrons - could it be anything else - prevents Mann from noting that Simon won the bet.

I recall in the dim and distant past discussing Ehrlich on sci.env; and, miraculously, Google Groups turns up this thread, started by Baby Timmy. And I find:

David Friedman wrote:

>In article <3cc1...@news.nwl.ac.uk>, w...@bas.ac.uk wrote:

>> >...I get

>> >an estimated world total deaths due to nutritional deficiency

>> >during the 1970s of 5,061,129 or a nice round five million.

>> Well, you've done quite a bit of work on that: thanks.

>> I'll go with 5M, until something more definitive turns up. 

>But those aren't famine deaths. That's coming from an estimate of "deaths

>world-wide due to all nutritional deficiencies." Poor nutrition results

>in an increase in death rates long before anyone is starving to death.

So what. Its an upper bound. If correct, famine deaths were less than 5M,

and Erlich was wildly wrong (on this point).

Well, you've done quite a bit of work on that: thanks.

I'll go with 5M, until something more definitive turns up.

Which I think suffices for the distant past. My recollection of myself, at that time, was of being sympathetic to the kind of stuff the Ehrlich was saying - notice my parenthetical "on this point" -, but perhaps fortunately I was able to read what other people wrote; so many people can't.

I don't think I ever read Ehrlich. I did read the in-the-same-camp Club of Rome, and realised it was all wrong: they simply assume bad things increase exponentially but good things increase polynomially, and so even before the complicated modelling, those assumptions tell you that the bad will eventually overwhelm the good. Inevitably they plot bad-things-happening on a graph with time as the X axis; inevitably people read that time axis as meaningful; their defence is oh-dearie-me-no, the time is just expressive and so of-course-our-predictions-were-not-for-that-actual-time; but that just makes all the modelling even more pointless, because as I've said, the result is baked in from the start¹. David Henderson, in his My 1983 Memo on Population Growth, tells us that "This paper is premised on the idea that reducing population growth hastens economic progress. However, the author simply asserts the premise rather than documenting it" and I have a feeling that's true of Ehrlich's work. Malthus makes a similar mistake: to first order, more people will produce more stuff, so food production, as a first guess, should be assumed to increase in line with population.

2026/3/19: Ehrlich dishonestly claimed that all his work was peer reviewed. He was lying: popular books - indeed, books in general - aren't peer reviewed the way academic papers are.

Refs

* Why did Malthus assume linear increase in food?

* Craig Loehle stops speaking.

* Sherwood B. Idso suffers hard delete.

* Mistah Morner – he dead.

* Another one bites the dust.

* Me from 2023 reffing ACX on Ehrlich.

* The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Karl Polanyi).

* Limited Government as Insurance.

* Fewer Rules, Better People: What Lam Gets Right.

* Why Economic Freedom Matters.

* Adam Smith on the Labor Theory of Value.

* Capital maintenance requires real sacrifice. Under capitalism, private owners do it because they capture the gains. Under democracy? Public infrastructure tends to be neglected in pursuit of votes.

* Freedom of Speech and AI Output.

* Book review: Blitzkrieg.

Notes

1. Somewhere I believe I have a post saying this, but I cannot now find it.

Blue team goes up

We interrupt your war coverage for a struggle of a different kind, the Red team - (minty) Blue team wars. Last year the Reds were untouchable - I'm talking Men here, or rather Open in these Woke days; but one could call Jesus Red I think and they were certainly untouchable - but this year they were definitely Touched. Wednesday the minty Blues knocked the Yellows aside fairly trivially on First Post; Thursday saw the Maroons fly - what else could they do? -, and get within a length before dying on Ditton. So Friday was the day we were all waiting for, but didn't quite pan out as expected; suddenly, before First Post, a bump; close analysis of another video shows six crabbing. This wasn't quite how we wanted it to end; but it was surely no coincidence that this happened on the day the Reds were under most pressure. And Saturday brought no surprises.

This was my first year retired, so that I could watch it all. I found that rather pleasant, and didn't get the effect, as I sometimes have before, of getting a little bored with too much of it.

The full playlist is here.

Yanquis and Kikes twat the Mad Mullahs

So it finally happened: the MM ran out of patience and decided to twat the MMs, though this was perhaps a little late for the tens of thousands already killed by the regime⁴. There is of course a vast backstory on all this, see for example Reflections on recent events in the Middle East, but perhaps recent events in South America are also relevant.

Ilya Somin thinks Donald Trump's Iran War is Unconstitutional⁵;and he is likely to be correct, in principle. However both House and Senate have rejected stop-the-war resolutions, and the armed forces are obeying their commander, so there is no practical constraint¹. And as long as nothing terrible happens - a large number of USAnians killed, or the price of petrol staying high for too long, the horror - I doubt the public cares enough to matter.

I'm in favour of this war, at least, when compared to all other practical courses of action or inaction. Diplomacy was obviously a waste of time, no matter how many highly paid high status elites it kept in lucrative employment. I opposed the Iraq war at the time, by actually bothering to go and protest, but I think far too many commentators are too ready to relearn the lessons of the last war: blah blah quagmire blah vague objectives blah and so on. Richard Hanania suggests that Killing bad people is an achievable goal that the US is good at and probably has positive effects on the world. We should do it more often, and do much less of many other aspects of foreign policy, and that seems reasonable. The most likely outcome is a weakened Iran, left with essentially no missile stockpiles or production facilities for same, and less capacity to export terrorism. The good outcome is the MMs get overthrown. The bad outcome is... I dunno: we take out some more schools, a pile of Iranian drones get through and destroy major infractructure and kill piles of Yanquis, and we retreat in confusion? Perhaps you, dear reader, can think of a plausible bad outcome; da meeja certainly hasn't presented any. Note how convenient it is that the Ivans are stuck in the quagmire of their own creation and are far too weak to cause any mischief.

Doing all this in violation of international law is something I covered in Reflections². But I'd add that coming from the lawyer-heavy UK, where nothing can be done, I feel that the time has come, if not to kill all the lawyers, at least not to leave them in charge.

It becomes ever more obvious to me - as I think I said in Poling Pales - how central the Iranian poison is to the problems of the Middle East and how much better off the region - and of course even more so the people of Iran - would be, if they just settled down to tend their own garden.

Updates

I expect things to continue to evolve...

2026/3/10: The Economist tells us that "Donald Trump must stop soon" and this is the kind of armchair-warrior stuff that is in a way amusing, in its combination of taking-itself-oh-so-seriously and total irrelevance. But it is a good source for the common complaint that Trump needs to "define what you want to achieve". I don't think that's true: the general direction is of course clear, and Trump has said that he'd like to end up with regime change, but I see no reason why that should be a firmly-fixed objective. If it turns out to be really hard, why should he really be obliged to keep pounding away? Continuing, "War aims direct the campaign" and this is true but pointless: the initial aim was to take out the top MM; then destroy Iranian military infrastructure, and so on and so forth; and these aims dictate the current actions, regardless of the final aims. "Strategically, his failure to say what Epic Fury is for is its biggest vulnerability" is bullshit.

2026/3/13: The Iranian regime has been the number one threat to peace and stability in the Middle East for years. U.S. forces continue to try to fix that, by pushing them into the number two spot. Well, that's how I read it on a first pass. Meanwhile, Brent crude is hovering around $100 per barrel, which is regrettable (nb: update: I realise that the thing I am looking at for this, "Brent Last Day Financial", may be futures not actual prices; but regardless, it is something related to the oil price). I think the Yanquis should, and likely will, do something about that. Mostly, twatting the bits of Iran likely to attack shipping.

2026/3/16: The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why (by Al-Jazmagi).

2026/3/18: It’s getting to the point where if you’re an Iranian official and Israel hasn’t killed you yet it’s a bit insulting.

2026/3/23: the YK's are still bombing stuff, but the MMs or their agents are still flinging stuff back, though at a reduced rate. Most importantly, the Straits of Hormuz are not seeing a lot of traffic, leading to... volatility in the price of oil; cue panic from the meeja³. Personally, I go for the MMs running out of ammo before much longer, but perhaps that's an ill-defined time period. Let's say within a week.

2026/3/25: the Economist is sad that markets aren't melting down in the way el Econo thinks they should.

2026/4/8: Just as I was thinking it was about time for annother post, we have a ceasefire. As we see from the Brent price, the market thinks that it will re-open Hormuz, although being at $95 not $70 does indicate some jitters. However the public versions of the two sides conditions differ wildly, so some resulotion is required. If you care, you'll notice that my "within a week" didn't play out; the Iranians were more resilient, missile-flinging-wise, than I expected. And, obvs, were able to keep Hormuz closed, though I think more from intimidation than actual power.

Refs

* The Scientists Who Declared War on Half of America.

* Labor Freedom Is the Best Explanation for the US-Europe Income Gap.

* Cruising to Dubai.

* Liberty Justice Center Files Lawsuit Challenging Trump's Section 122 Tariffs.

* Wealth of Nations: This masterwork is turning 250. It’s needed now more than ever; 250 Years Later, The Wealth of Nations Still Has Lessons To Offer the Political Class; Smith and Jefferson at 250.

* Media Can’t Hide the Truth About Gracie Mansion Bomb Attempt.

* The Anti-War Argument Is Actually a Pro-War Argument: One does not wait to attack an irrational actor while it gets more powerful.

* War and Oil. With nice futures charts.

* Judge Concludes Grand Jury Subpoena to Fed Had Improper Purpose.

* Gulf states press US to neutralise Iran for good as Hormuz crisis deepens.

* Praise is due to all who respect justice more than their position compels them to do.

* How to turn a price shock into inflation.

* The Ugly Path to Peace.

* Miscellanea: The War in Iran - I include this as an unwise overly pessimistic take.

* What Iran Won: They raised the costs enough to make war unthinkable for future US presidents.

Notes

1. See-also "Law Is Irrelevant to the U.S. Attack on Iran," by Prof. Jack Goldsmith (Harvard).

2. Another attempt to "defend" int'l law comes from Alex Tabarrok: but notice his confused defence: Per the Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the United States. International law is not liberal wishful thinking it’s US law.

3. E.g. "Oil back above $100 a barrel..." from Auntie; note that was "Updated 35 minutes ago" and yet they hadn't updated the (false at that point) headline.

4. Wiki insists that "thousands" is better but that is stupid.

5. But I don't notice any interest in whether the blockade is, or is not.

The Foundations of Modern Political Thought

Wiki tells me¹ that The Foundations of Modern Political Thought is a two-volume work of intellectual history by Quentin Skinner, published in 1978. The work traces the conceptual origins of modern politics by investigating the history of political thought in the West at the turn of the medieval and early modern periods, from the 13th to the 16th centuries. It represents the contextualist approach to the history of ideas which Skinner and his colleagues in the Cambridge School had pioneered in the 1960s. The Times Literary Supplement named the Foundations one of the 100 most influential books since World War II. And all that seems fair enough, even if I'm not really sure quite what the "contextualist" stuff is about.

This review is going to be a bit crap, because I finished volume one before the start of last summer, and volume two before winter, but them wimped out of reviewing it, and now of course my goldfish brain has largely forgotten about it. But perhaps the things that survive this late will be the valuable bits.

So, in no particular order:

In volume one, in particular, we get a lot of political commentators, book writers, whatever, commentating on politics and the form of their writing is advice to Princes on their governance, in the manner perhaps of Machiavilli - I'll come back to him in a moment - but from different perspectives. What the book never ever discusses is whether the Princes were listening. It is perhaps possible to argue that, at least in the long term, reverse causation is just as valuable: we know what Princes were thinking about, because it is the kind of thing that commentators were writing about, and they wrote about it because they knew the Princes were interested. But nonetheless it seems a lacuna to me.

There's a lot of useful context here that I'm glad I now know or rather, given my appalling memory, glad that I'm vaguely aware of. Hobbes for example does not come out of nowhere as I'd previously assumed by default; he is part of, perhaps really the culmination of, a tradition of attempts to axiomatise human relations. This paragraph would have been much better written closer to my reading.

It is amazing - to me, an atheist in good standing - how badly these clowns allowed religion to cloud their approach to politics for so long. So many people just couldn't help giving advice along the lines of "oh course you must first be godly: tell the truth, rule justly in all things" and so on. Telling the truth - in important matters - is undoubtedly a part of any moral code (even an atheist one, so in a sense my complaint about religions isn't quite on the ball), but that doesn't make it always a good idea in politics. What these people utterly lack is the concept of iterated prisonners dilemmas, strangely enough, or game theory in general. And indeed I think QS somewhat lacks it too, or perhaps he is just describing what was there rather than judging it. Anyway, a few commentators - like Machiavelli, but he was merely one of a type, we just happened to have picked him as the one to remember because we all have memories like goldfish and cannot cope with complexity and need personalities - did have the intelligence and independence to suggest that actual effective governance, perhaps even for the good of the people², might require being sneaky sometimes.

Part of the religious problem was a quite explicit passage in Paul, Romans 13: Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. I'm sure I could dance this around if I needed to: Paul was writing for the times when Christianity was weak, and he was advising his people to lay low, obey, while they were powerless. It didn't occur to him to worry about being in power. But, by the time we're talking about, nominally Christian rulers were in power, and naturally the church had taken the obvious tradeoff: prop up the civil authorities, in exchange for privileges. So this passage was very well known, unlike the minor parts of Leviticus that tell you not to eat weasels. This then gets you into vast trouble when you have a Holy Roman Emperor - or whatever - nominally ruling over a pile of kingdoms, and your local authorities are obviously despots. Are you allowed to revolt? People then wander around making up "lesser magistrate" rules, and trying to argue that if a local worthy³ offers you a chance to revolt, you can take it. By the time we get to the reformation, the kind of tyranny people are revolting against is more the "I don't like your religion" type than the "please stop torturing me" type, which is unfortunate as it shows you how people will twist words.

Back to volume one, mostly about the Northern Italian city-states, who realised they had problems similar to those of much earlier Greek city-states, and so were interested in the newly-emergent works of Aristotle and so on. They worried about using mercenaries - very convenient, but who might well not bother fight and die when it came down to it - versus arming their own peasantry, but who knows what peasants might do once they had arms and the thought of using them. Volume two shifts North to France and the Reformation, where the issue becomes convincing enough people that your religion is popular enough that suppressing it would be difficult. And so we return to the political pamphlets desperately searching for some way around Romans 13; eventually, if I recall correctly, they start groping towards what Hobbes states explicitly: there can be only one authority; and religious power must be subsiduary to civil. I don't think toleration becomes widely popular though; in all of this, these people remain foreigners⁴, their religion desperately important to them, and so insecure that they cannot help trying to impose it on others. But now I'm imposing my ideas on top of them, so I'll stop.

Notes

1. And you. But I don't care about you :-)

2. To be fair the perspective is always the good of the rulers, or of governance in general. But perhaps those converge, in that even simply stable governance without warfare, sieges and rapine would be an improvement.

3. Obviously, only a worthy; the common folk are not allowed to decide that kind of thing for themselves under any circumstances, just think where that might lead to.

4. See The Go-Between.

Refs

* The Climate Science reference they don’t want Judges to read.

* UK and Renewables - SoD

* Lessons of the End of Trump's ICE "Surge" in Minnesota.

* "The Fallacy Fallacy".

* NYU Democracy Project Article on How to "Strengthen Democracy by Empowering People to Vote with their Feet".

Art for art's sake / money for God's sake

Art for Art's Sake is a song by 10cc, but I prefer the He's Dead Jim version; the original is thin. Although the song is really only one phrase, it's a good phrase.

My excuse for using this is a thought to go with my "William does art" series: The Hunt in the Forest and friends or Lord Ribblesdale and friends: which is that perhaps the old stuff is better because it isn't just done for art's sake. I'm not sure whether that really holds up though.

And to spin out this thin post, I offer you Eliot's Portrait of a Lady. Wiki will tell you what it is about, but perhaps doesn't quite catch it. You know you're in class poetry when it uses words like "velleities" which I had to look up; beautiful; and so fitting to the spirit of the work.

I

Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon

You have the scene arrange itself — as it will seem to do—

With 'I have saved this afternoon for you';

And four wax candles in the darkened room,

Four rings of light upon the ceiling overhead,

An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb

Prepared for all the things to be said, or left unsaid.

We have been, let us say, to hear the latest Pole

Transmit the Preludes, through his hair and finger-tips.

'So intimate, this Chopin, that I think his soul

Should be resurrected only among friends

Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom

That is rubbed and questioned in the concert room.'

—And so the conversation slips

Among velleities and carefully caught regrets

Through attenuated tones of violins

Mingled with remote cornets

And begins.

'You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,

And how, how rare and strange it is, to find

In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,

(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind!

How keen you are!)

To find a friend who has these qualities,

Who has, and gives

Those qualities upon which friendship lives.

How much it means that I say this to you —

Without these friendships — life, what cauchemar!'

Among the winding of the violins

And the ariettes

Of cracked cornets

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins

Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own,

Capricious monotone

That is at least one definite 'false note.'

— Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,

Admire the monuments,

Discuss the late events,

Correct our watches by the public clocks.

Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks.

II

Now that lilacs are in bloom

She has a bowl of lilacs in her room

And twists one in her fingers while she talks.

'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know

What life is, you who hold it in your hands';

(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)

'You let it flow from you, you let it flow,

And youth is cruel, and has no remorse

And smiles at situations which it cannot see.'

I smile, of course,

And go on drinking tea.

'Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the Spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful, after all.'

The voice returns like the insistent out-of-tune

Of a broken violin on an August afternoon:

'I am always sure that you understand

My feelings, always sure that you feel,

Sure that across the gulf you reach your hand.

You are invulnerable, you have no Achilles' heel.

You will go on, and when you have prevailed

You can say: at this point many a one has failed.

But what have I, but what have I, my friend,

To give you, what can you receive from me?

Only the friendship and the sympathy

Of one about to reach her journey's end.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends ....'

I take my hat: how can I make a cowardly amends

For what she has said to me?

You will see me any morning in the park

Reading the comics and the sporting page.

Particularly I remark.

An English countess goes upon the stage.

A Greek was murdered at a Polish dance,

Another bank defaulter has confessed.

I keep my countenance,

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn-out common song

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired.

Are these ideas right or wrong?

III

The October night comes down; returning as before

Except for a slight sensation of being ill at ease

I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door

And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees.

'And so you are going abroad; and when do you return?

But that's a useless question.

You hardly know when you are coming back,

You will find so much to learn.'

My smile falls heavily among the bric-à-brac.

'Perhaps you can write to me.'

My self-possession flares up for a second;

This is as I had reckoned.

'I have been wondering frequently of late

(But our beginnings never know our ends!)

Why we have not developed into friends.'

I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark

Suddenly, his expression in a glass.

My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.

'For everybody said so, all our friends,

They all were sure our feelings would relate

So closely! I myself can hardly understand.

We must leave it now to fate.

You will write, at any rate.

Perhaps it is not too late.

I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.'

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression ... dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance —

Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,

Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;

Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand

With the smoke coming down above the housetops;

Doubtful, for a while

Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ...

Would she not have the advantage, after all?

This music is successful with a 'dying fall'

Now that we talk of dying —

And should I have the right to smile?

Yes I know I missed out the epigraph.

An Irish airman foresees his death

A rare post about climate; I do apologise. But first:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Not, you'll be unsurprised to learn, what I actually wanted to talk about. But there is some vague relation. Full version here, if you need a reminder.

What I actually wanted to comment on was "A climate scientist reflects on 30 years fighting the ‘forces of unreason’" by Benjamin Santer. As far as I know Santer is one of the good guys, so I'm only going to quibble.

Quibble one is Participating in an IPCC assessment is an unpaid, multi-year commitment by individuals with precious and finite stores of time and energy. This isn't really true, in my admittedly limited and out of date experience. Participation is, formally, unpaid, at least by the IPCC: but actually you get to do it on your employer's time, so it isn't really pro bono. I guess he is trying to push back against the idea that he's getting consultancy rates for it, but I think claiming pro bono is iffy. It's also close to trivia, so I think he should just not have mentioned it.

Continuing, we have In 1990, we concluded that “The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.” Put differently, the jury was out on human culpability for climate change. In 1990, it was still too early to tell whether burning fossil fuels had significantly altered Earth’s climate. And this is correct - so much for the fuckwits who claim we knew it all in the 70s, or 80s, or whatever.

Quibble two is But a mere five years later, in the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report, the scientific jury reached a very different verdict... “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”... A human-caused climate change signal had been identified. We could see the signal. It was there in data. Humans were no longer innocent bystanders in Earth’s climate system. As I pointed out convincingly in Who Knew What When, "balance of evidence" is weak, as is "suggests" and "discernable influence". Notice how '90 talked about not-unequivocal, and '95 has definitely not got to unequivocal. Per WKWW, the actual shift - in terms of what was written down - was more gradual.

Santer then continues talking about "forces of unreason". He restricts his discussion to physical climatology, so he can find himself on the side of reason without any difficulty. Had he attempted to discuss economics, he would find his allies guilty of unreason; he knows that, so carefully avoids any such discussion.

Reflections on recent events in South America

We start with a nice little cartoon. Perhaps a good reminder that the left can poke fun at itself, or can't resist doing so.

Anyway: da MM has captured Evil Dictator Maduro, an action generally considered illegal "under international law". This Volokh article by Ilya Somin is a good expostion of the finer points (see also On the Legality of the Venezuela Invasion). However international law is but a weak reed; see this article for that attitude forcefully pursued. Technically, it is probably illegal under US law too, since the US has ratified the UN charter; but unless Congress becomes less supine that is unlikely to matter¹.

Hobbes taught us long ago that Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength; and although many people don't like listening to Hobbes, US foreign policy has⁴.

An argument, much repeated, is that upholding international law is a good thing in itself, because upholding civilised norms is good. There is much to this argument, but what it put into my mind was the thought that a thing that one upholds, voluntarily, for the greater good is more like morality than law. So international law has the forms of law - lots of bits of paper studiously written by serious folk - but not the reality: enforcement. Like Rawl's Justice as Fairness it attempts to mislead you with words; it should drop the word "law".

I think that all sound-thinking folk would agree that within a civilised society, we want Rule of Law and not Rule of Individuals governing relations. Both for theoretical reasons, and for reasons of experience: we see from examples that individuals cannot be trusted with so much power. But the slipperly slope is to extend that to international relations between states, analogising people and countries. There are only, what, 200 countries in the world? Many of which are tiny or of no importance in international relations. So perhaps there are 50 that matter. It isn't quite so clear that in a community of 50 people, we would want exclusive rule of law; we would probably have rule-of-norms, with only informal enforcement. And if some nerd started torturing his cat, he'd get slapped around by the Big Guy.

Having considered this in the abstract, what about this concrete example. Is it good or bad? Trump Finds the Golden Mean in Venezuela finds RH thinking it good. I kinda agree². Removing an Evil Dictator gives the Venezuelans a chance to do better. Promoting the vice-prez, rather than pushing for the winner of the elections, was a bit of a surprise, but might actually make sense in the long term, in minimising disruption. You may also like Regime Change in Venezuela Is a Good Calculated Risk. Doubtless you can find for yourself any number of people saying it is terrible. Time will tell. Arguing that breaking international law is a really bad idea because then the Ivans might invade Ukraine is fuckwitted, obvs; ditto the Chinks and Taiwan. Arguing that removing Maduro is a good idea because it might scare others into behaving better is not implausible.

As an example of performative nonsense that isn't even self-aware I find stoptrump.org.uk/sign-venezuela-letter, which offers the delightful "The UK must support international law, in actions not just words, and vote to condemn Trump’s US". However votes are but words, not actions. The chance of the UK taking actual meaningful action is fortunately negligible.

While I'm on this stuff, I found US seizes Russian-flagged tanker in Atlantic instructive. In that it appears to display near-incompetence on the part of the USAnians. How can the most powerful navy in the world manage to lose a slow unarmed tanker and let it get across the Atlantic before finally seizing it?

And on a slight tangent, consider The Crime Victim's Right to Justice. The UK has some similar stuff about "victims rights". But notice that it is very much a recent add-on; it is in no way fundamental to the justice system. This is because (as I've said elsewhere but sadly cannot now find³; though I dislike rights-based language is close) you don't actually have a "right" to not-be-beaten-up; it is the other way around: the govt promises to punish anyone who might beat you up.

Another: this X post is an interesting example of how just going tut-tut isn't going to preserve your norms.

Notes

1. The Graun and others are excited that Senate advances war powers resolution to stop Trump from taking further military action in Venezuela. But it would need to get through the House, and then not get vetoed by - arf, arf - da MM; so that doesn't look promising.

2. What pathetic weaselly words. I mean I agree with all or most of the individual sentences. I'm still reluctant to agree with the overall conclusion.

3. Found it: Might is Right.

4. As I noted some time ago.

Refs

* The Unbearable Stupidity of Nick Shirley (RH on Somali / Minnesota, not what you might guess)

* Does the Supreme Court Favor the Rich?

* Reflections on recent events in the Middle East.

* Microloans Became Microdeposits.

* Against Recent Events.

* What Kind of Immunity for ICE Agents?

* Venezuelans believe Donald Trump has offered them a better future - the Economist (source for my image above).

* Buckley v. Valeo is Not What Ails American Democracy; see-also this from EV.

* 2026/02: Venezuela frees high-profile opposition figure Juan Pablo Guanipa.

The Book of the Old Year

Or, the Year in Stoats, 2025. Having at last driven away almost all my commentators - sorry about that, and thanks for all that did comment interestingly, but so it goes - I can once again choose a post per month by whatever means I see fit. Happy New Year to all.

* Dec: The Idea of Justice, by Amartya Sen.

* Nov: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.

* Oct: Prospects for Peace.

* Sept: The Hunt in the Forest and friends.

* Aug: A meta review of the no-longer-new DOE report.

* July: Book review: An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy.

* June: Might is Right.

* May: How do we solve moral problems?

* April: Lord Ribblesdale and friends.

* March: Conjectures and Refutations.

* Feb: Return to Sneachda.

* Jan: In a democracy, when and where should majorities rule?

Refs

* 2024, 2023; 2022; 2021; 2020.

* Also available on Substack.