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 regime. 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 Unconstitutional 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. 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.

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 that I might analyse sometime.

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.

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 hasZZZ.

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.