Useless to Speak of Corruption When Police-Military-Oligarchs Are All Corrupt

evonomics |  People who have lived in corrupt countries will have felt this frustration first hand. There’s a sense that it’s not about bad apples—the society is broken in ways that are sometimes difficult to articulate. But societal norms are not arbitrary. They are adapted to the local environment and influenced by historical contexts. In our experiment, the parameters created the environment. If there really is no easy way to legitimately make money and the state doesn’t have the power to punish free-riders, then bribery really is the right option. So even among Canadians, admittedly some of the nicest people in the world, in these in-game parameters, corruption was difficult to eradicate. When the country is poor and the state has no power, transparency doesn’t tell you not to pay a bribe, it solves a different problem—it tells you the price of the bribe. Not “should I pay”, but “how much”?

There were some other nuances to the experiment that deserve follow up. If we had played the game in Cameroon instead of Canada, we suspect baseline bribery would have been higher. Indeed, people with direct exposure to corruption norms encouraged more corruption in the game controlling for ethnic background. And those with an ethnic background that included more corrupt countries, but without direct exposure were actually better cooperators than the 3^rd generation+ Canadians. These results may reveal some of the effects of migration and historical path dependence. Of course, great caution is required in applying these results to the messiness of the real world. We hope to further investigate these cultural patterns in future work.

The experiment also reveals that corruption may be quite high in developed countries, but its costs aren’t as easily felt. Leaders in richer nations like the United States may accept “bribes” in  the form of lobbying or campaign funding and these may indeed be costly for the efficiency of the economy, but it may be the difference between a city building 25 or 20 schools. In a poor country similar corruption may be the difference between a city building 3 or 1 school. Five is more than 3, but 3 is three times more than 1. In a rich nation, the cost of corruption may be larger in absolute value, but in a poorer nation, it may be larger in relative value and felt more acutely.

The take home is that cooperation and corruption are two sides of the same coin; different scales of cooperation competing. This approach gives us a powerful theoretical and empirical toolkit for developing a framework for understanding corruption, why some states succeed and others fail, why some oscillate, and the triggers that may lead to failed states succeeding and successful states failing.

Our cultural evolutionary biases lead us to look for whom to learn from and perhaps whom to avoid. They lead us to blame individuals for corruption. But just as atrocities are the acts of many humans cooperating toward an evil end, corruption is a feature of a society not individuals.

Indeed, corruption is arguably easier to understand than my fearless acceptance of my anonymous barista’s coffee. Our tendency to favor those who share copies of our genes—a tendency all animals share—lead to both love of family and nepotism. Putting our buddies before others is as ancient as our species, but it creates inefficiencies in a meritocracy. Innovations are often the result of applying well-established approaches in one area to the problems of another. We hope the science of cooperation and cultural evolution will give us new tools in combating corruption.

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Red-Pillers vs. The Cathedral: When Pathetic Ideological Bishes Collide...,

CounterPunch |  The alt-right, Steve Bannon’s Leninist cadre of white nationalists looking to build their base, is one of the most astoundingly ironic things I have ever encountered in my years of studying Marxist theory and cinema. Among all the undeniably well-designed and aesthetically-pleasing elements of this new Nazi cottage industry is the fact that their entire initiation system, so-called ‘red pill-ing’ someone, is a trope derived from THE MATRIX films, one of if not the most successful neo-Marxist series made in history. In other words, so to wage a war against ‘Cultural Marxism’, ‘feminism’, and ‘white genocide’, they literally are using as a vehicle for their wretched doctrines not just a Marxist text but a masterclass on Althusser, Gramsci, Lacan, and Zizek and how their theories are elements of the discourse about praxis and cultural studies, which the alt-right mistakenly call ‘cultural Marxism’.

The irony is so rich it would be the stuff of a deadly diabetic shock if it were not so deadly serious. Bebel’s famous quip about the socialism of fools is totally lacking in this instance. I would argue the alt-right’s use of this film is nothing less than the War Communism of the genocidal lunatics. Certainly one might wonder whether jesting about such matters is appropriate but I respond by pointing to the European pogroms that were flooding newspaper headlines when the German socialist made his remarks. Furthermore I feel inclined to point to the fact that, at least in my own analysis, we are only going to beat these people with humor. For if there is one thing borne out by history, it is that Adolf Hitler felt so threatened by Charlie Chaplin that he banned THE GREAT DICTATOR. By contrast, he found allies in the Communists not once, when the KPD idiotically helped get the Nazis elected in 1933, but twice, when Joseph Stalin allowed for the commission of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact!

My hope here is to provide a basic primer for the non-academic and non-Leftist reader so to build a consciousness that can challenge the alt-right’s use of the films and repudiate it. Putting it another way, I offer a short essay on the true meaning of the films and why it is an important tool for the abolition of the white race. I would argue that our repudiation of the alt-right’s “red-pill” must articulate a brief summary of the notion of ideology, which the films act out, and then a sufficient explanation of what the implications of the much misunderstood and maligned final film are.

The first point to be discussed in such proceedings would therefore be an explanation of the analogy of the Matrix. What is it actually?

The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence

SETI |  Is it time to re-think ET?

For well over a half-century, a small number of scientists have conducted searches for artificially produced signals that would indicate the presence of intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos. This effort, known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), has yet to find any confirmed radio transmissions or pulsing lasers from other beings. But the hunt continues, recently buoyed by the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. For many, the abundance of habitable real estate makes it difficult to believe that Earth is the only world where life and intelligence have arisen.

SETI practitioners mostly busy themselves with refining their equipment and their lists of target solar systems. They seldom consider the nature of their prey – what form extraterrestrial intelligence might take. Their premise is that any technically sophisticated species will eventually develop signaling technology, irrespective of their biology or physiognomy.

This view may not seem anthropocentric, for it makes no overt assumptions about the biochemistry of extraterrestrials; only that intelligence will arise on at least some worlds with life. However, the trajectory of our own technology now suggests that within a century or two of our development of radio transmitters and lasers, we are likely to build machines with artificial, generalized intelligence. We are engineering our successors, and the next intelligent species on Earth is not only certain to dwarf our own cognitive abilities, but will be able to engineer its own, superior descendants by design, rather than counting on uncertain, Darwinian processes. Assuming that something similar happens to other technological societies, then the implications for SETI are profound.

In September, 2015, the John Templeton Foundation’s Humble Approach Initiative sponsored a three-day symposium entitled “Exploring Exoplanets: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Post-Biological Intelligence.” The venue for the meeting was the Royal Society’s Chicheley Hall, north of London, where a dozen researchers gave informal presentations and engaged in the type of lively dinner table conversations that such meetings inevitably spawn.

The subject matter was broad, ranging from the multi-pronged search for habitable planets and how we might detect life, to the impact of both the search and an eventual discovery. However, the matter of post-biological intelligence – briefly described above – or the possibility of non-Darwinian evolutionary processes, was an incentive for many of the symposium contributions.

We present here short write-ups of seven of these talks. They are more than simply interesting: they suggest a revolution in how we should think about, and search for, our intellectual peers. Indeed, they suggest that “peers” may be too generous to Homo sapiens. As these essays argue, the majority of the cognitive capability in the cosmos may be far beyond our own.

-- Seth Shostak

This symposium was chaired by Martin J. Rees, OM, Kt, FRS and Paul C.W. Davies, AM, and organized by Mary Ann Meyers, JTF’s Senior Fellow. Also present was B. Ashley Zauderer, Assistant Director of Math and Physical Sciences at the Templeton Foundation.

What Do You Think About Machines That Think?

netzpolitik |  It is one of the topics about which science and now also society have been discussing, researching, and arguing for decades: Artificial Intelligence. But it begins with the concept. Is not it better to call "designed intelligence"? Because unlike intelligence in humans, an "intelligent" program of a computer has been deliberately designed and created in a certain form. This is one of the suggestions that finds itself in a book that is as stimulating as it is entertaining by John Brockman , which is now available in German: "What should we think of artificial intelligence?"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was initially a scientific research field, which wanted to investigate computer technologies in particular in order to imitate human skills with software: learning, understanding, acting. For more than sixty years, research has already been carried out. The literary professor Thomas A. Bass writes in his contribution "Mehr Funk, more Soul, more poetry and art":

We have numerous problems to tackle and find solutions. [...] We need more artist programmers and artistic programming. It is time for our mind machines to grow out of a youthful period that has lasted sixty years. (Thomas A. Bass, p. 552)

This "youth period" is certainly over. Because since the new millennium, the academic questions, which were usually only academic, have become interesting for many more people simply because they come into contact with AI in everyday life. They help with the information search, the navigation and now also with the creative cooking .

 

The most tangible is the so-called Natural Language Processing (NLP), that is, the processing of human language by software. Of course, "today's computers" do not "understand" what people have said, so they have "not such a competence at human level" (Rodney Brooks, p. 152), but they can process spoken words meaningfully.

 

Brockman's book provides a unique and multi-faceted insight into the field of AI, as a publisher of over one hundred and eighty authors, who illuminate all conceivable aspects of the subject. He raises the fundamental question: What should we think of artificial intelligence? And the authors answer this question in very different ways, each in scarce articles of only two to four pages.

In the introduction to the book, Brockman added further questions:

Should not we ask the question as to what thinkers might think about? Will they want and expect citizens' rights? Will they have consciousness? What kind of government would choose an AI for us? What kind of society would they want to structure for themselves? Or is "their" society "our" society? Will we and the AIs include each other in our respective circles of empathy?

Even this short series of questions makes it clear what Brockman is talking about in the book: it is not only the topics that are being pushed on today, but also far-reaching ones.

Edge: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

Speech as Violence: The Formal Rhetoric of the Psychopathocracy Politics

Makheruspeaks |  And there were basically two forms of support for the Contras. The one was the arms-for-money deal to provide black money to sustain the Contra revolt for the decade that it dragged on. And the other thing was a kind of hands-off approach. There was a DEA operative, a Drug Enforcement Administration operative, in Honduras that was reporting on the Honduran military complicity in the transit traffic of cocaine moving from Colombia through Central America to the United States. He was removed from the country. And then the CIA, because of Congress cutting off the arms shipments periodically for the CIA, the so-called Boland amendment that imposed a kind of embargo upon U.S. support for the Contras, they needed to periodically warehouse their arms. And what they found was that the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras, particularly Roatan Island, was an ideal logistics point right off the coast — it was a major transshipment point for cocaine moving from Colombia across the Caribbean to the United States but it’s also an ideal place for the U.S. to warehouse and then ship its arms to the Contras on the border with Nicaragua and Honduras.

And so, the kingpin, the drug kingpin of the Bay Islands was a notorious international trafficker named Alan Hyde who had 35 ships on the high seas smuggling cocaine from Colombia into the United States. Every U.S. security agency involved, the Coast Guard, the CIA itself, the Drug Enforcement Administration, they all had reports about Alan Hyde being a Class A trafficker, arguably the biggest smuggler in the Caribbean. And to get access to his warehouses what the CIA did was they basically blocked any investigation of Alan Hyde from 1987 to 1992, during the peak of the crack-cocaine epidemic, and so the CIA got to ship their guns to his warehouses and then onward to the border post for the Contras. And Alan Hyde was given an immunity to investigation or prosecution for five years.

That’s — any criminal, that’s all they need, is an immunity to investigation. And this coincided with the flood of cocaine through Central America into the United States. This CIA inspector general in response to protests in South Central, Los Angeles, conducted an investigation also in response to Gary Webb’s inquiries and they released Report 1, they called “The California Connection.” They said that Gary Webb’s allegations that the CIA had protected the distributors, the deal of the Nicaraguan dealers who were brokering the sale of the import cocaine to the Crips and Bloods gangs in South Central, L.A., that that all that was false.

Then they issued, the inspector general in 1998, issued part two of that report, the executive summary said similarly: no case to answer, CIA relations with the Contras in Central America complex, but nothing about drugs. But if you actually read the report, all the way through, which is something historians tend to do, you get to paragraph 913 of that report and there are subsequently 40 of the most amazing revelations, 40 paragraphs of the most amazing revelations stating explicitly in cables and verbatim quotes from interviews with CIA operatives about their compromised relationship with the biggest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, Alan Hyde.

And if you go on the CIA website and you look for that 1998 Inspector General Report, you’ll find a little black line that says paragraphs 913-960 have been excised. Those are those paragraphs. But you can find them on the internet.

Scahill: One of the fascinating aspects of this — it’s a short part of your book, but I think it’s always important to point this out, the name Robert Gates pops up at the time that the CIA had this relationship with Hyde. Gates was the deputy director of the CIA, and of course now is one of the beloved figures in the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. He was defense secretary under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And Gates, his hands are all over this thing as well.

McCoy: Yeah, there’s, how am I going to put it? That illustrates the disparity between the formal rhetoric of politics and the geopolitics of the exercise of global power. And the difficulties, the demands, the moral and political compromises required to run, well let’s call it an empire. A global empire. And, from a pure realpolitik imperial perspective, that Contra operation, by seeking an effective complementation between the flow of drugs north, very powerful illicit economic force, and the Contra guerrilla operations, accomplish their objective. You know? After 10 years of supporting the Contras, the Sandinistas lost power for a time in a democratic election. They were finally pushed out of office. The CIA accomplished its mission.

Now, if you compare that with where we are with drugs and covert operations and military operations in Afghanistan, it was very successful in the 1980s, as a result of the CIA’s alliance of the Mujahideen, provisioning of arms and tolerance for their trafficking and drugs, which provided the bulk of their finance. You know, in 1989, the Soviet Red Army left Kabul, they left Afghanistan, the CIA won. Well today, of course, that drug traffic has been taken over by the Taliban and it funds the bulk of the Taliban’s guerrilla operations, pays for a new crop of teenage boys to become fighters every spring, and we’ve lost control of that. So from a realpolitik perspective, we can see a weakening of U.S. controls over these covert operations that are another manifestation of our, of the decline of the U.S. hegemony.

The President's Speech

indiana |  What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President's speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking. ..

There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal --and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving --but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?

It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.

This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak 'naturally', naturally.

Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave unnaturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues-tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one's expressions, one's gestures, one's entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one's person, and total depersonalisation of one's voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called 'tone-colour' (Klangenfarben) or 'evocation'. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech --somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek-- that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.

Why all this? Because speech-natural speech --does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) 'propositions' alone. It consists of utterance --an uttering-forth of one's whole meaning with one's whole being-- the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs' understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with 'tone', embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal-and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved-and often more: preternaturally enhanced ...

This too becomes clear-often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way-to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true --but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that-at least with emotionally-laden utterance-the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to 'tone' and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of 'feeling-tone' in his ( 1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs. *

Thus the feeling I sometimes have-which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have-that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily. ..

We recognise this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose-to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we --so susceptible to words-- cannot trust our own instincts.

And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. 'One can lie with the mouth,' Nietzsche writes, 'but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.' To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one-this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs-they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give --or remove-- verisimilitude to or from a man's voice.

In this, then, lies their power of understanding-understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President's speech.

Bezos-Post Meditation On the Evils of Wealth

WaPo |  How did we lose sight of the ancient wisdom about wealth, especially given its ample evidencing in recent studies? 

Some will say that we have not entirely forgotten it and that we do complain about wealth today, at least occasionally. Think, they’ll say, about Occupy Wall Street; the blowback after Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent”; how George W. Bush painted John Kerry as out of touch. But think again: By and large, those complaints were not about wealth per se but about corrupt wealth — about wealth “gone wrong” and about unfairness. The idea that there is no way for the vast accumulation of money to “go right” is hardly anywhere to be seen. 

Getting here wasn’t straightforward. Wealth has arguably been seen as less threatening to one’s moral health since the Reformation, after which material success was sometimes taken as evidence of divine election. But extreme wealth remained morally suspect, with the rich bearing particular scrutiny and stigmatization during periods like the Gilded Age. This stigma persisted until relatively recently; only in the 1970s did political shifts cause executive salaries to skyrocket, and the current effectively unprecedented inequality in income (and wealth) begin to appear, without any significant public complaint or lament.

The story of how a stigma fades is always murky, but contributing factors are not hard to identify. For one, think tanks have become increasingly partisan over the past several decades, particularly on the right: Certain conservative institutions, enjoying the backing of billionaires such as the Koch brothers, have thrown a ton of money at pseudo-academics and “thought leaders” to normalize and legitimate obscene piles of lucre. They produced arguments that suggest that high salaries naturally flowed from extreme talent and merit, thus baptizing wealth as simply some excellent people’s wholly legitimate rewards. These arguments were happily regurgitated by conservative media figures and politicians, eventually seeping into the broader public and replacing the folk wisdom of yore. But it is hard to argue that a company’s top earners are literally hundreds of times more talented than the lowest-paid employees.

As stratospheric salaries became increasingly common, and as the stigma of wildly disproportionate pay faded, the moral hazards of wealth were largely forgotten. But it’s time to put the apologists for plutocracy back on the defensive, where they belong — not least for their own sake. After all, the Buddha, Aristotle, Jesus, the Koran, Jimmy Stewart, Pope Francis and now even science all agree: If you are wealthy and are reading this, give away your money as fast as you can.

The Success Sequence: Tard Bidnis Masquerading as Public Policy

nakedcapitalism |  Normally, I would treat this sort of right wing effort at cultural engineering as noise, but upon reflection, that might not be so smart. Not paying attention to persistent right wing messaging was what allowed the intellectually incoherent “free markets” ideology to become ascendant. 

The Success Sequence is back! The ad-hoc anti-poverty process first endorsed by Isabell Sawhill and Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institute has been picked up by Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang at AEI. George Will also recently mailed in a column on the topic by doing a rewrite of the AEI product. I’ve written before about some of the problems with this particular framework, but in light of this new push, it is worth rehashing them here.

The Curious Case of the Different Success Sequences
If you are a long-time observer of the Success Sequence community (like I am), you may have noticed something a little strange about it. Though everyone in this community claims they are interested in the same anti-poverty process, in reality, each publication defines the Success Sequence somewhat differently. And those differences tell you a lot about what actually motivates the folks who push this concept.

For Sawhill and Haskins, the Success Sequence consists of the following five rules (they express them as three rules, but their third rule is a compound rule that I prefer to break up):

1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a full-time job.
3. Get married before having children.
4. Wait until at least age 21 to get married.
5. Wait until at least age 21 to have children.

In their AEI paper, Wilcox and Wang claim to be using the Sawhill and Haskins Success Sequence and even cite to their work. But they aren’t actually. The Wilcox and Wang Success Sequence has only three rules:

1. Graduate high school.
2. Get a full-time job.
3. Get married before having children.

Rules four and five, the delay-marriage and delay-parenting rules, are gone! What happened to them? How could such an oversight have been made?

The answer is pretty obvious. Wilcox dropped the delay-marriage and delay-parenting rules because they do not mesh with his particular conservative worldview. His cultural and religious commitments make him uncomfortable advocating for the delay of marriage and childbirth. So he doesn’t.

What we have in the Success Sequence is not some kind of time-immemorial wisdom about how to live a virtuous life. Indeed, if the Success Sequence were applied backward in time, it would conclude that almost everyone who has ever lived in the world is an immoral wreck.

Instead of providing generalizable guidance about the good life, what the Success Sequence does is offer up a totally ad-hoc set of rules that are plausible enough within the context of contemporary lifestyles to allow conservatives to say personal failures are the cause of poverty in society. When contemporary lifestyles change, the Success Sequence will have to be rewritten because it will sound just as absurd as the current Success Sequence would sound to Americans in the middle of the last century.

Fifty years from now, conservatives will write op-eds saying the real trick to staying out of poverty is a college degree, cohabitation, and delaying child birth to age 30. No Success Sequence will stay around if it stops describing most middle class lives or if it begins to describe too many poor lives. The goalposts will shift constantly but the conclusion will always remain the same: the poor did this to themselves and the rich should be spared from higher taxes.

Is Wasserman-Schultz's Brother in Charge of the Awan Investigation?

squawker |  In what may be one of the most remarkable conflicts of interest that we have seen in a long time, it appears that Steven Wasserman, Assistant Attorney for the District of Columbia who is the brother of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has been tasked with overseeing the investigation of DNC IT employee Imran Awan, who was arrested earlier this week while attempting to flee the US and charged with bank fraud.

Maybe @HouseCracka is on to something:

The #AwanBrothers controlled the BLACKBERRY ENTERPRISE SERVER so they could monitor ALL communications! #SpyRing inside Congress! @potus pic.twitter.com/Gd0gYWjTev

— General Deplorable (@HouseCracka) July 27, 2017

Meanwhile, the attorneys for Imran Awan have released the following statement blaming their clients legal troubles on “anti-Muslim bigotry”. It’s a pretty good read:

This is pretty wild stuff, and I would like to know what the heck AG Jeff Sessions is going to do about this.

The swamp is very, very deep, my friends.

Biggest Espionage Case in U.S. History - GTFOH "Ethnic and Religious Profiling"

rollcall |   Rep. Ron DeSantis told “Fox & Friends” Monday  said Congress should investigate Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s employment of a man charged with submitting a fraudulent loan application and potentially scamming his House employers. 

Asked if Wasserman Schultz should be forced to testify DeSantis responded, “I think it's questionable what they were doing during that time,” referring to Imran Awan and other members of his family. “We would have to investigate that. Of course, they had access to intelligence and House Foreign Affairs Committee members’ personal email and IT accounts. There is some very sensitive information on there. This could be a significant security breach.”

Around February, unnamed lawmakers alleged Awan and other family members, who were employed since 2004 by more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers to provide IT services, were running some kind of scam, the details of which have not been revealed. Awan’s lawyer and congressional staff described the work as fairly low level, including setting up computers, phones, and passwords.

Lawmakers who contracted with Awan cut ties as the investigation went on. Wasserman Schultz was the last to do so, after Awan was arrested last week. She said that until the arrest she had been provided “no evidence to indicate that laws had been broken,” and was concerned about “ethnic and religious profiling” in the case.

President Donald Trump added his support to the story, retweeting an article last week accusing media outlets of “bury[ing]” the “IT scandal engulfing” Wasserman Schultz’s office.

Seymour Hersh: FBI Knows It Was Seth Rich, Not Russians, Who Gave DNC Files To Wikileaks

washingtonsblog |  We’ve noted for many months that the DNC emails were leaked by an insider, not hacked by the Russians.

Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – who revealed in 1974 that the CIA was spying on Americans, who broke the story of the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam and the Iraq prison torture scandal – said in a recent phone interview linked by WikiLeaks:

[The DC police took Seth Rich’s computer, but couldn’t get past his password.] So they call the FBI cyber unit.
***
The Feds get through [the password-protection on Rich’s computer], and this is what they find. This is accoring to the FBI report.
***
What the report says is that – some time in late spring or early summer – he [Rich] makes contact with WikiLeaks. That’s in his computer.
***
They [the FBI] found what he [Rich] had done was he had submitted a series of documents – of emails, of juicy emails – from the DNC.
By the way, all this shit about the DNC, where the hack, it wasn’t hacked …
He offered a sample, an extensive sample, I’m sure dozens of emails, and said I want money. [Remember, WikiLeaks often pays whistleblowers.]
Later, WikiLeaks did get the password. He [Rich] had a dropbox, a protected dropbox, which isn’t hard to do.
***
They got access to the dropbox. That’s in the FBI report.

He [Rich] also let people know with whom he was dealing … the word was passed, according to the FBI report, “I also shared this box with a couple of friends, so if anything happens to me, it’s not going to solve your problem”.
***
But WikiLeaks got access, before he was killed.
***
I have a narrative of how that whole fucking thing began.   It’s a [former CIA director John] Brennan operation. It was an American disinformation [campaign].

My Only Job Was to Keep My Baby Off the Pole...,

Getting ahead of myself here, but fitna jump full back into the turd-frosting that took place on the breakfast club in the Janet Mock interview. Every degenerate and its cousin seeks mimetic cover in the historic respectable negroe quest for civil rights in America.

On a black program that often advocates for the safety and lives of black people, its hosts laughed as their guest advocated for the murder of black trans women who are black people, too!

Nah, not gonna fly. The whole Janet Mock interview flew off the rails when Angela Yee started normalizing stripper culture.  What is wrong with this picture?  

There are tons of reasons why people shouldn't be strippers or prostitutes.  Yet, the breakfast club is having a conversation about the flawed logic of fathers not wanting their daughters to become sex workers with a transsexual former teenaged prostitute and stripper during the commute time for school children?!?!?!?! 

Is the goal to literally induce more young black girls into being prostitutes and strippers? Who benefits from increasing tolerance of our youth being turned into prostitutes, strippers, and drug-dealers because of economics and limited educational and economic access? 

Yvette Carnell told you that Charlemagne the God is a social engineering sock puppet.  I'm surprised Yee didn't say that twerking on the pole is "empowering".  Let me guess... the next interview is going to be Amber Rose explaining why taking money for oral sex makes you an entrepreneur? Just like so many other nefarious social-engineering props deployed to distract, dismay, and confuse black minds addicted to celebrity, who do we find sitting on her fat-ass behind the curtain? Who gave the turd-frosting Janet Mock her initial foot up onto the public stage? Of course you know it was none other than Oprah Winfrey. 

Speech as Violence: Celebrity Peddling Degeneracy to Black Folks is SUCH HARD WORK...,

allure |  Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak directly to their predominantly black and Latinx listeners, who are often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces (which are largely white, moneyed, and concerned with the centering of cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen, heard, and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion, and violence.

My ultimate goal was to be accessible — to not judge, to call in rather than call out, and, above all, to exercise patience as the (straight cis male) hosts processed my existence. It’s rare that I do Trans 101 lecturing anymore, because I’ve already done that work with my first book, Redefining Realness, which was filled with plain speak and explanatory commas about definitions, statistics, and context.

In fact, I’ve turned down thousands from colleges and corporations because I refuse to engage in Trans 101. Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves. Yet I also know that black and Latina trans women often live in communities of color, so outreach to viewers of color, from The Wendy Williams Show and Essence to Desus & Mero, was vital as I set out on my book tour.

I was invited to “The Breakfast Club” because cohost Yee chose my second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, for her book club. It was my last scheduled media appearance after a long, grueling tour in support of Surpassing Certainty, which is about the years in my life I decided to keep my trans-ness private — largely in order to gain access and maintain my safety. These years coincided with my 20s, when I navigated college, graduate school, and my early media career. The interview aired on radio stations across the country (edited and condensed) and in its entirety on YouTube a week later.

Though I have not been able to watch the video of my interview (I have already experienced it and won’t be doing so again), I’m proud of the labor I put forth, and I’m grateful to Yee for her preparation and effort to steer the conversation away from the particulars of my body and instead toward my work. The interview was what it was, and I refuse to re-experience being asked about my vagina in such blatant, irrelevant, and sensational ways. Again, if I am not fucking you, why do you care?

Theft of Palestine Taking Mimetic Cover in Janet Mock's Messy Draws...?

thedailybeast |  Instead, the group of students thwarting Mock’s scheduled lecture—those belonging to SJP—do, in fact, pressure people to conform to their mind-set on the Middle East and quash intellectual diversity.

Sadly, Mock caved to the pressure. Though the petition drew just 160 signatures, Mock canceled days before she was expected to speak on March 21 because, “We feel the focus of Janet’s work was lost leading up to the proposed event,” her representative reportedly told the Moral Voices organizers.

Way to go, student activists at Brown! You succeeded in creating a hostile environment that led to a trans woman of color being discouraged from sharing her voice and opinions. This all helped the Palestinian people how, exactly?

Brown President Christina Paxson expressed disappointment. “I respect her decision to avoid having her talk be overshadowed by an issue unrelated to her work. However, I am disappointed that a valuable learning opportunity was lost,” she said in a Sunday email to the student body.

In that same email, Paxson also referred to campus housing facilities that had been defaced. According to the Brown Daily Herald, “Gay will die” and “Holocaust 2.0” were written on hallway walls.

“I want to emphasize that there is absolutely no evidence that the cancellation of the Mock event is related to the homophobic and anti-Semitic graffiti that appeared,” Paxson wrote. “However, taken together, these two events are deeply troubling. They come at a time when the nation and colleges across the country are grappling with concerns about injustice against individuals based on religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender expression.”

In their op-ed, SJP members defended their group’s “my way or the highway approach” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the initial the petition stressed, the students’ objections were not over Mock but rather her willingness to take part in an event even slightly tied to Hillel. In other words, they wanted Mock to speak—but only as long as she agreed to the terms they dictated. It’s hardly the stuff of international diplomacy; has digging in your heels and refusing to let people share their opinions ever brought about peace or stability?

When Speech is Violence - Weapons Are Meant To Be Felt - Not Seen...,

I'm an aggressor. I have a knife. Knives are never meant to be seen, only felt. Not only can I model my desired aggression toward you in pictures, words, and even movements, I can engage in active deception so that you never see that knife attack coming. I don't believe there are any animals capable of that complex mix of behaviors. Sure there's deception, sure there's aggressive play and practice, but nothing even remotely approaching the complex systematic, formal and premeditated instrumental behavior I'm describing above.

Now if I were blessedly more naive about how such things go, I might model in my mind's eye displaying the knife like a poor simple creature instinctively engaging in threat displays in hopes of scaring you off, which threat displays mask its underlying real instinctual aversion to lethal violence.

Fourteen years ago on the afrofuturism list, I offered the ancient anecdote about Sack's aphasic patients sitting in the common lounge watching Ronald Reagan deliver a speech. To a person, these language-disordered patients were amazed by the paradox of the actor's facial expressions and body language conveying a message totally at odds with what was coming out of his mouth. They could directly observe both the unspoken intention and the contrasting spoken deceptions. We all have this capability to varying degrees. My own liminal acuity (perception of facial or body language contradiction) is off the chart.

So it is with longstanding, consistent, and finely-honed trepidation that I spy out the corner of my eye the most recent speech as violence perpetrations emanating from a longtime, consistent, and influential source the NYTimes: When the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. 

Milo Yiannopoulos is compared and contrasted in the same article as a genuine perpetrator of "speech as violence". That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

With regard to Milo Yiannopoulos and the alt-right - there are few better example of the use of words as "virtue-signal" for collective violence. It's a very good thing that this cohort is demographically composed of untermensch. The alt-right is busily wallowing in the joys of formerly forbidden memetic signification within its demography. Keyboard warriors, one-and-all, these gamma males are living a bronetic Weimar Germany/MS-13 fantasy from the safety of their mothers' basements. Anonymous bad-talk through keyboards is not the same thing as MS-13 face tattoos.

Within MS-13, serial killers openly signify within their community of interest exactly what they're on about. A better example of "speech" as violence with an underlying ethological analog would be pretty hard to find. I would equate that signification to a brightly colored poisonous reptile advertising its venom, with the difference being that the gang-member has agency over its advert while the venomous reptile does not.

Yiannopoulos and Murray are each mentioned in the article, with the former given as an example of an intentional provocateur and the latter as an example of a public intellectual. From the perspective of "speech as violence" the now ruined and discredited Yiannopoulos was never anything more than a D-list gadfly. Murray, on the other hand, falls somewhere between professional political propagandist and un-indicted war criminal - imnsho.

Calling Charles Murray "merely a political scientist" when in fact he was an anthropologist studying, developing, and implementing large-scale counter-insurgency methods in Vietnam, which methods he turned around - and with substantial political backing - promoted aggressively in the U.S. - is more than a little disingenuous. Charles Murray has always both intended and practiced severe rhetorical violence against both real and imagined enemies. The fact that his pseudo-academic deceptions are even more refined and subtle than Ronald Reagan's thespian deceptions - (wonder what the aphasics who saw through Reagan's talk/expression contradictions would make of Murray?) doesn't make them any the less premeditated, systematic, or violent.

Murray has always known full-well that a knife is never meant to be seen, only felt. So did President Reagan or at least his speech writers and handlers...,

When is Speech Violence?

NYTimes |  What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it. 

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering. 

On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy. 

By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

Dangerous Propagandist Deconstruction (REDUX Originally Posted 3/27/13)

shameproject | Author of The Bell Curve; Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

Charles Murray is one of the most influential right-wing ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. His career began in a secret Pentagon counterinsurgency operation in rural Thailand during the Vietnam War, a program whose stated purpose included applying counter-insurgency strategies learned in rural Thailand on America's own restive inner cities and minority populations. By the late 1970s, Charles Murray was drawing up plans for the US Justice Department that called for massively increasing incarceration rates. In the 1980s, backed by an unprecedented marketing campaign, Murray suddenly emerged as the nation's most powerful advocate for abolishing welfare programs for single mothers. Since then, Murray revived discredited racist eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, and today argues that the lower classes are inferior to the upper classes due to breeding differences.

Why Black Families Struggle to Build Wealth

theatlantic | There’s little disagreement about the fact that economic inequality is problematic. But arguments persist over its origins, solutions, and which economic gaps are ultimately the most pernicious.

In his new book, Toxic Inequality: How America's Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future, Tom Shapiro, a professor of law and sociology at Brandeis University, lays out how government policy and systemic racism has created vast gaps in wealth between white and black Americans. Shapiro and his colleagues followed 187 families from Boston, St. Louis, and Los Angeles. Half of the families were black and half white. They interviewed them in 1998 and then again in 2010, to see what had changed: how were their kids faring, how had they weathered the recession—were they any better off in 2010 than they had been in 1998?

I spoke with Shapiro about his new book, how policy impacts racial wealth, and what he makes of current conversations about race and economic pain.

The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Requiem for the American Dream

penguin |  In his first major book on the subject of income inequality, Noam Chomsky skewers the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism and casts a clear, cold, patient eye on the economic facts of life. What are the ten principles of concentration of wealth and power at work in America today? They’re simple enough: reduce democracy, shape ideology, redesign the economy, shift the burden onto the poor and middle classes, attack the solidarity of the people, let special interests run the regulators, engineer election results, use fear and the power of the state to keep the rabble in line, manufacture consent, marginalize the population. In Requiem for the American Dream, Chomsky devotes a chapter to each of these ten principles, and adds readings from some of the core texts that have influenced his thinking to bolster his argument.

The High Costs of Being Poor in America

voxeu  |  Divisions in the US go well beyond the income arena, and in ways that are particularly worrisome. In a new book, I document trends in inequality from the perspective of well-being, starting with standard metrics but also exploring how these relate to non-economic aspects of welfare, such as happiness, stress, anger, and, most importantly, hope (Graham 2017).

Hope is an important channel driving people’s willingness to invest in the future. My early research on well-being work highlights its particular importance for people with less means, for whom making such investments requires a greater sacrifice of current consumption than it does for the rich (Graham et al. 2004). In addition to widening gaps in opportunity, the prosperity gap in the US has led to rising inequality in beliefs, hopes, and aspirations, with those who are left behind economically the least hopeful and the least likely to invest in their futures.

There are, indeed, two Americas. Those at the top of the income distribution (including the top of the middle class) increasingly lead separate lives, with barriers to reaching the upper class being very real, if not explicit (Reeves 2017). Those at the top have high levels of hope for the future and make investments in themselves and in their children’s health, education, and knowledge more generally. Those at the bottom have much lower levels of hope and they tend to live day by day, consumed with daily struggles, high levels of stress, and poor health.

There are many markers of the differences across these two Americas, ranging from education levels and job quality to marriage and incarceration rates to life expectancy. Indeed, the starkest evidence of this lack of faith in the future is the marked increase in premature deaths – driven largely but not only by an increase in preventable deaths (such as via suicide and drug over-dose) among middle-aged uneducated whites, as described by Case and Deaton (2017).

There are even differences in the words that these two Americas use. Common words in wealthy America reflect investments in health, knowledge acquisition, and the future: iPads and Baby Bjorns, foam rollers and baby joggers, cameras, and exotic travel destinations such as Machu Picchu. The words that are common in poor America – such as hell, stress, diabetes, guns, video games, and fad diets – reflect short-time horizons, struggles, and lack of hope (Leonhardt 2015).

Based on detailed Gallup data, we find stark differences across people, races, and places in the US. Remarkably, poor minorities – and blacks in particular – are much more hopeful than poor whites. Poor blacks are three times as likely to be a point higher on the ten-point optimism scale than are poor whites, while Hispanics are about one and a half times more likely than poor whites. Poor blacks are also half as likely to experience stress – a significant marker of ill-being – on a daily basis as are poor whites, while poor Hispanics are about two-thirds as likely.

What Kind of Gamma Cuckold Accepts Murray Rothbard's Lies About Inequality?

alternet |  In the long term, the indirect effect of the Pay ­Machine—​the increase in income inequality—is economically more injurious than the erosion of company earnings or a stock market downturn.

Income inequality in America has risen sharply since 1976. Economists and pundits point to multiple causes—globalization and competition from low-wage​ countries; growing educational disparities that particularly affect men and minorities; technological changes that reward the highly skilled; decline of labor unions; changes in corporate culture that place stock price and earnings above employees; free market philosophy and the rise of winner-take-all economics; households with high-income couples; lower rates of marriage and of intact families; high incarceration levels; immigration of low­-skilled individuals; income tax and capital gains tax cuts and other conservative economic and tax policies; deregulation; and decreased welfare and antipoverty spending coupled with redistribution programs that disproportionately benefit the elderly.

All of the above may contribute to inequality. However, the proximate cause is quite simple. The jump in inequality is due to a small number of people, mostly business executives, who make huge amounts of money. They are the Mega Rich, the top .1 percent in income, who averaged $6.1 million in income in 2014. The Merely Rich are the rest of the 1 percent. It’s the Mega Rich, not the Merely Rich, who drive inequality. (I’m a member of the Merely Rich, so don’t blame me.) Between 1980 and 2014 the average real income of the Mega Rich has nearly quadrupled, increasing by 381 percent. Over the same period, the Merely Rich doubled their income while the bottom 90 percent lost ground, suffering a 3 percent decline.

Children Internalize The Darndest Things...,

theatlantic |  “If you’re in an advantaged position in society, believing the system is fair and that everyone could just get ahead if they just tried hard enough doesn’t create any conflict for you … [you] can feel good about how [you] made it,” said Erin Godfrey, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of applied psychology at New York University’s Steinhardt School. But for those marginalized by the system—economically, racially, and ethnically—believing the system is fair puts them in conflict with themselves and can have negative consequences.

“If the system is fair, why am I seeing that everybody who has brown skin is in this kind of job? You’re having to think about that … like you’re not as good, or your social group isn’t as good,” Godfrey said. “That’s the piece … that I was trying to really get at [by studying] these kids.”

The findings build upon a body of literature on “system justification”—a social-psychology theory that believes humans tend to defend, bolster, or rationalize the status quo and see overarching social, economic, and political systems as good, fair, and legitimate. System justification is a distinctively American notion, Godfrey said, built on myths used to justify inequities, like “If you just work hard enough you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps … it’s just a matter of motivation and talent and grit.” Yet, as she and her colleagues discovered, these beliefs can be a liability for disadvantaged adolescents once their identity as a member of a marginalized group begins to gel—and once they become keenly aware of how institutional discrimination disadvantages them and their group.

“I do think that there’s this element of people think of me this way anyway, so this must be who I am,” Godfrey said, adding that the behaviors—things like stealing and sneaking out—reflect stereotypes perpetuated about youth of color. “If you’re [inclined] to believe that things are the way they should be, and [that] the system is fair, then you’re maybe going to accept stereotypes about you more easily.”

While the sample was relatively small, Godfrey said the findings are informative and mirror prior research. Indeed, previous analyses have found that system-justifying beliefs are associated with lower self-esteem in black adults and lower grade-point averages for Latino college students—though the same beliefs predicted better grades and less distress for “high status” youth.

“I was really interested in trying to think of [early adolescents] as active agents in their world,” Godfrey said, “and as people who can understand and interpret their social world in a way that a lot of research doesn’t recognize.”

Signalling Back At These Untermensch

WaPo |  Growing up, guns were a thing to be feared. They intersected with my life only as characters in narratives of pain: the reason the boy from gym class was in the hospital, the thing that stole the life of a friend’s cousin or father. My life has known no fear greater than in the handful of times my eyes have found the opening of a gun’s barrel.

It’s a fear that is present for many black Americans. That same Pew poll found that 49 percent of us see gun violence as a “very big” problem in our local communities, compared with 29 percent of Hispanics and a fraction of as many whites — 11 percent. While 20 percent of whites and 24 percent of Hispanics say they — or someone in their family — have been personally threatened with a gun, that number jumps to 32 percent for black Americans. And while 43 percent of whites and 42 percent of Hispanics say they know someone who’s been shot, it’s 57 percent among black Americans.

It was a similar fear that in 2015 prompted Stephen Yorkman to launch the Robert F. Williams Gun Club in Prince George’s County, Md., which is named for a civil rights activist who advocated armed self-defense and now has about 150 members.

“For me, it started with the shooting of Tamir Rice,” Yorkman, 48, explained, referencing the 12-year-old Cleveland boy shot by police while playing with a toy gun at the playground of a public park. “We need to create a different, better perception of black people with guns so that in an open-carry state the image of a black person with a gun doesn’t so alarm a police officer. And we need to make it so it’s no longer a sin in the black community to be a gun owner, but that it’s more accepted.”

This new crop of black gun clubs aims to educate members on the history of black gun ownership and the centuries of attempts to suppress it and to host pragmatic conversations about the way their members will be perceived, and the dangers they will assume, as black people who chose to be armed — services often abdicated by the leaders of mainstream gun culture.

Can Pro-Social Institutions Come Into Being In America's Dystopian Now?

evonomics |  The above says: how people in the present value rewards they expect to receive (say) 10 years into the future, is pretty similar across the world — although small differences can make a big difference in the long term through compounding. But the degree to which people want things right now, as opposed to tomorrow, varies quite dramatically.

By the way, Russia’s β is 0.21 !!! If that has nothing to do with low investment rates or insecure property rights for foreign companies, then I will eat my shorts !

The role of patience in cooperation is relevant to the “commitment problem” of the state in solving collective action problems. In theorising about the origins of the state, Mancur Olson gave a famous answer with his dichotomy of roving bandits and stationary bandits. In the world of political anarchy, roving bandits fight one another for opportunities to pillage the productive peasants. But sometimes one of them defeats all the others and establishes himself as a “stationary bandit”. He then acquires a strong intrinsic interest in restraining his plunder — his ‘taxation’ — in order to let the economy grow. It’s the “fatten the goose that lays the golden eggs” principle.

But that depends! If the stationary bandit is impulsive and impatient, he can remain a predator for a very long time.

Political scientist Carles Boix in a recent book pointed out that the reciprocity of stateless foraging societies cannot be sustained when the distribution of resources is too unequal. But even his model depends on ‘patience’, with the implication that uncoordinated cooperation is still possible with more inequality as long as people are patient enough. This is actually true of models using prisoner’s dilemma and stag hunt in general. Even Acemoglu‘s ruling elite with vested interests in maintaining “extractive institutions” would have incentives for “inclusive institutions” if they were only patient enough.

So to answer the question at the head of this post, “where do pro-social institutions come from?” — if ‘bad’ institutions represent coordination failures, then intelligence and patience must be a big part of the answer. This need not have the same relevance for social evolution from 100,000 BCE to 1500 CE. But for the emergence of ‘modern’, advanced societies, intelligence and patience matter.

It’s not that people’s norms and values do not or cannot change. They do. But that does not seem enough. Solving complex coordination failures and collective action problems requires a lot more than just ‘good’ culture.

I am not saying intelligence and patience explain ‘everything‘, just that they seem to be an important part of how ‘good’ institutions happen. Nor am I saying that intelligence and patience are immutable quantities. Pinker argued in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the long-run secular decline in violence may be due to the Flynn Effect:

…the pacifying effects of reason, and the Flynn Effect. We have several grounds for supposing that enhanced powers of reason—specifically, the ability to set aside immediate experience, detach oneself from a parochial vantage point, and frame one’s ideas in abstract, universal terms—would lead to better moral commitments, including an avoidance of violence.

What is the above describing, other than the increasing ability of people to empathise with a wider group of people than friends and family? Intelligence and patience allow you to understand, and weigh, the intuitive risks and the counterintuitive benefits from collaborating with perfect strangers. With less intelligence and less patience you stick to what you know — intuit the benefits from relationships cultivated over a long time through blood ties or other intimate affiliations.

Your “moral circle” is wider with intelligence and patience than without.