"Love and Marriage"

Headline: "New Viking Study Points to “Love and Marriage” as the Main Reason for their Raids."

Umm... well, let's hear him out.

The practice of marrying more women allowed the eligible bachelorettes to have high expectations about their future husbands, and impoverished or underprivileged men didn’t fit the criteria.

So it's the poorer, less powerful men who need women.

In order to raise their chances of getting married, young Viking men joined the raids, hoping to enrich themselves. Sometimes, they even kidnapped Celtic women on their warrior “voyages.”

"Sometimes" to such a degree that Iceland's population descends, according to recent genetic studies, from "Norse men and Celtic women."

Well, I do keep reading arguments, both by men's rights activists and certain kinds feminists, that marriage is a form of slavery...

No, look, this is simple. Slaves were one of the main things raiders of this era -- not merely Vikings -- wanted. Unlike the slavery we think of in American history, however, pre-modern and ancient slavers -- like ISIS today -- wanted female slaves. Males were typically killed, although men caught young enough were often castrated and sold as eunuchs in certain parts of the world (the Muslims in Spain did a huge trade here).

One of the underappreciated qualities of the Western European High Middle Ages is that it eliminated chattel slavery, though not until after the Viking Age (but around 1300, even in fringes of Medieval Europe like the Scottish Highlands). Unfree labor persisted, as for example in serfdom, although that too diminished as the feudal system began to give way to town-based market economies over the period. The driving force wasn't economics, though, it was Catholic moral arguments against enslaving fellow children of God. The idea was that there was a pure equality at work among all our fellow human beings: God had made each of our souls, after all, and loved them each equally. It therefore could not be moral to enslave another.

Chattel slavery was reintroduced in the Renaissance, as Portuguese sailors captured and discovered trade routes to Africa that allowed them new opportunities for rich trade as long as they were willing to trade slaves on one leg of the voyage. The whole apparatus of color-conscious racism was built out of a desire to avoid the Medieval arguments against enslaving fellow children of God by trying to create a middle category between humans and animals (who could of course be owned).

But if we are talking about the Viking Age, we're talking about the pre-Christian period in the north. The later Catholic arguments had not been developed and wouldn't have been persuasive to a non-Christian people in any case. They were still doing what the Greeks had done at Troy, and as ISIS does today: take what your right hand can control, and rule it.

Is That A Debt, Or A Gift?

Mike helpfully calculates in the comments to the last GND post, "$94 trillion comes out to about $261,111 per person in the US." For a household of three, then, you'd be on the hook for $783,333 -- and American household net worth was only $81,850 in 2014 according to Census data.

"But we're going to take from the rich, not the average!" No, that data includes the rich. Once you've taken everything they have, and everything everyone else has, you're still not anywhere near where you'd need to be. You're around ten percent of the way there.

The new slogan, though, is that the idea shouldn't be that this spending will create a debt of $261,111 per individual. It is that this spending represents a gift of $261,111 per individual. They're going to make us all rich! Well, richer.

Inflation occurs when more money chases the same amount of goods. The argument here is that, yes, there will be more money -- we're going to print vast amounts -- but that it will also be chasing new goods: railroads, power plants, wind farms, batteries, refurbished houses. Inflation won't be a problem because the new money won't drive up the price of existing goods. It'll all be spent on the new stuff.

That's clearly wrong for elements of the deal like Medicare For All, which is going to be massive new spending on the same health care stocks that are available now. But it isn't clearly wrong for a lot of the GND's spending, which really does seek to create vast quantities of things that do not currently exist. Indeed, one of my major criticisms of it has been that it cannot possibly attain its goal of reducing emissions because we'd need to run the factories day and night to create the stuff they'd need -- cut down millions of trees for railroad ties -- boil millions of gallons of tar for creosote -- build new diesel plants -- vastly increase production of steel and aluminium for trains and windmills -- etc., etc. Carbon production would be through the roof precisely as a result of this plan.

Where, though, is the inflation? Factory workers are going to have new wages from all this overtime, and they're going to be using that wealth to chase existing goods; but maybe not the same goods. Maybe they'd like a new car -- one of the electric ones, no doubt, assuming they can get a government permission slip for it. Maybe they'd like new, more luxurious clothes. (Still not reducing emissions, are we?) It could be that new economic growth would occur rather than inflation, or more likely 'in addition to inflation,' but less than we imagine.

Inflation, such as did occur, would reduce the sting of any debt anyway.

That's the argument that's being made. We should think carefully about where it goes wrong, and how to counter it.

Nullification

NPR is very upset that Washington state sheriffs are flatly refusing to enforce a raft of new, unconstitutional gun control laws.

"It dates back to a movement from the '60s and '70s called the Posse Comitatus movement, that itself came out of the Ku Klux Klan," he says. "That isn't to say that there's a moral equivalence to the Klan and these constitutional sheriffs."

Oh, heavens no! We're just going to mention them in the same breath a few times.

Sheriffs shouldn't enforce unconstitutional laws, and if they do, juries shouldn't convict anyone of violating them.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Stop asking the wrong questions about that Green New Deal, says HuffPo. Ask the right questions.

The Benefit, Not The Cost
Sure, it’ll cost a lot of money. That’s likely to rattle the nerves of self-proclaimed deficit hawks, Democrats and Republicans alike, who will ask the same tired questions: “How will we pay for it?” “What about the deficit and debt?” “Won’t it hurt our economy?” ...

Politicians need to reject the urge to ask “How are we going to pay for it?” and avoid the trap when it’s asked of them. A better question is: What’s the best use of public money? Giving it away to the top 1 percent who don’t spend it, widening already dangerous wealth and income gaps? Or investing it in a 21st century, low-carbon economy by rebuilding America’s infrastructure, bolstering resilience, and promoting good-paying jobs across rural and urban communities?

I notice that this article never actually floats a number for how much this would cost. Money is no object!

But just in case you were curious what the HuffPo economist thinks "we" can afford:

Study: Green New Deal Would Cost Up to $94 Trillion

Justice Does Not Equal Fairness

A group of morons men's rights activists has convinced a judge to make women register for the draft that we don't even have.

On Friday, a Texas judge ruled that the Selective Service System (SSS) violates the Constitution by requiring only men to register for the draft. The court ruled with the National Coalition for Men (NCFM) in a lawsuit claiming the male-only draft constitutes discrimination against men. NCFM's lawyer told PJ Media that even if the SSS appeals, they are likely to lose again. He also suggested the Pentagon will not end the draft, so women may have to register.

If we had a war large enough in scale to require a draft, it would be the kind of major war in which a lot of people die. The way a civilization replaces its dead is through young women. This is, in fact, the only way it can be done. You don't need many men to make the babies, but you do need lots of women. Each woman can only produce one new person a year, excepting twins and so forth, and there's no other way to do it.

For this reason, it is completely irrational to draft young women and send them to war. Is it "fair" that only men have to register? Who cares? In spite of John Rawls and his followers, justice does not simply equal fairness. It has an important rationality component. It cannot be just to require our civilization to do suicidal things. 'The Constitution is not a suicide pact,' but even if it were, that would be a great reason to return to the Declaration model and 'alter or abolish it.'

Somehow the draft existed for the whole history of this country without violating the Constitution, but now once again a judge has 'discovered' that an institution as old as the nation is somehow forbidden by our basic laws. This insanity has to stop.

Judge Strips North Carolina of the Power to Amend its Constitution

A judge has just ruled that North Carolina's legislature is so gerrymandered that it may not place constitutional amendments on the ballot.

Well, actually, he only struck down two amendments on this score. The recent ballot had quite a few, but the only two he struck down were Voter ID and a constitutional limit on how high income taxes can go.

The amendments were backed by Republican lawmakers, and on Friday N.C. GOP Chairman Robin Hayes said in a written statement to The News & Observer that he thinks the ruling should be overturned.

“These amendments were placed on the ballot and passed by an overwhelming majority of North Carolinians,” Hayes said. “This unprecedented and absurd ruling by a liberal judge is the very definition of judicial activism.”

The voter ID amendment passed with 55.5 percent of the vote while the amendment to cap the state income tax received 57 percent of the vote.

This judge, by the way, is very highly rated by Ballotopedia. His "Integrity and Fairness" score is 4.67 out of 5.

This is a hell of a ruling. By an exactly similar argument, no act of the legislature can be valid. The amendments are actually the most probably legitimate expressions of the will of the people, because the people have to approve them in a direct referendum. Even if you accept that the state's legislature is too heavily gerrymandered to be valid, if an amendment gets 55-57% of the popular vote, presumably it might pass a properly constituted assembly too.

Practically, of course, the judge isn't taking away the ability of the legislature to amend the constitution in ways that judges approve. He's allowing the numerous other amendments to stand. He's not even striking down the laws, which were only passed by this presumptively-invalid assembly.

This judge should be removed from office. However high his ratings, this is an unacceptable act of judicial supremacism. We do not have the right to govern ourselves as a people 'if and only if our superiors approve of how we do it.'

Popular Votes

In all but six states, conservatives outnumber liberals. California is not one of those states: it has fewer conservatives than average, but still more conservatives than liberals.

All six states are in the north, and all of them except New York are relatively non-diverse.

Suddenly the concerns about the Senate and the Electoral College make more sense, eh?

Bern

Potential Viking Settlement Found in Canada

You can read about it here.

Reparations

Having had so much success with the Green New Deal's plausibility, two of the Democratic candidates for President -- both of whom endorsed the GND -- have decided that they'd like to endorse another big program, reparations for slavery, too.

I'm not in principle opposed to the idea. In principle, in fact, I think it is plausible. This sort of payment-for-injury-suffered-by-relatives exists in several traditions, including our own: the wergild of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons, the diyya of the Arabs (still in use today in some places). The basic approach is well known and works. We would need to do two things:

1) Determine a fair price for inflicting slavery on someone;

2) Agree that, in return for the paying of that price, we would reconcile completely and never return to the issue again. Compensation is complete and the matter is settled; the agreement is that no more compensation will ever be due.

In principle we could do that here, too. Say we decided that a fit price for stealing a man's life via slavery was a million current-day US dollars. That's a non-extravagant figure that a court might award in a wrongful death lawsuit against a corporation, and it's an amount of money that a hard-working individual might earn in his or her lifetime with careful investment. So, we assign a million dollars to each and every person who was a slave in the USA; that number grew from 400,000 to 4.4 million over several decades, so we figure 4.4M + 2.2M. + 1.1M + 400,000 = 8.1 million total slaves. At a million dollars each, $8,100,000,000,000 (8.1 trillion dollars).

Heck, that's cheaper than the GND by far. So far, so good.

Of course, you've got to divide that money among all the descendants of all of those people. And if you're related to two of them -- or, across generations, to six or eight of them -- then you should get a part of the payment for each of them. My guess is that no records exist that would make that possible to calculate reliably.

Now, assuming that all black Americans have at least one slave ancestor, and that no other Americans do, the payout would come to $170,000 per person. (If you had two or more, more.) America could pay this off on a rolling basis, too, rather than as a lump sum; if we used actuarial tables to contribute life expectancy, and divided your payoffs by your expected lifespan, some people would need to be paid in 5 years but some could be paid over 50.

Again, compared to the GND, this is relatively cheap. Heck, it's cheap compared to Medicare for All, which is $3.2 Trillion every year. In three years it would cost more than this one time payout. So, in principle, it might make sense.

I think there are practical details that would make a program like this very difficult to get everyone to agree to, however. Many Americans' ancestors weren't even here when slavery was a thing; they will object to paying the taxes to fund this reparations payment for something their ancestors had no part of. No living Americans own slaves, and they might object to being forced to pay for someone else's wrongdoing. And on the other side, too, even a large payment may not allow people to accept that the debt is really settled. Plus, there's another issue: Say that you've got five people in your family, but the week after the payments begin to go out, one of them gets pregnant. Each of you gets $170,000, but the child gets nothing just by virtue of being born a little too late. Over time, that's going to create a bulge of resentful young people who got left out of the payments by accident of fate.

Also, it won't turn out to be the case that -- per assumption -- no non-black Americans have slave ancestors (nor that all black Americans do -- look at Barack Obama). There's no way of resolving that without causing problems.

Very often the practicalities are what kill things, and I don't think this one is going anywhere. But I can see a case for it. Maybe somebody else will come up with a model that might work.

UPDATE: Warren complicates the plan substantially when she says it should cover Native Americans, too. That's much harder to do on a wergild basis because the issue isn't the deaths per se, it's the elimination of whole civilizations and ways of life.

Another Act of Political Violence

I'm writing this less to draw attention to the activist getting punched, than to make a point about language and the culture of risk aversion.

Another conservative student was assaulted on @UCBerkeley's campus. I just spoke to the survivor of the attack who is a dear friend of mine. He is in good spirits and plans on continuing to fight for conservative values on campus once his black eye is gone! What a bad a**!

"Survivor"? C'mon. He got punched in the face. If he gets knifed and doesn't die, OK, sure, his life was in danger and he survived. You'd have to be extremely unlucky in how you fell, though, for a punch to be a thing you 'survive' rather than just a thing that happened.

The occasional scuffle used to be an ordinary feature of life; when I was a boy, "Dagwood" and his neighbors got in brawls almost every week. I'm not saying that we should all start beating people up, but I am saying that you should toughen your heart a little here.



We've got a whole society full of people going to "therapy" to heal their "trauma," by which they mean life. Now you've got even conservatives talking about being a "survivor" for taking a punch.

Harden up, people. Show a little self-respect.

TINA

We've discussed the huge problem of the national debt here many times. The issue is that, right now, there is no alternative.

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans gave Americans a sizable tax break, a perfectly appropriate means of jolting the economy — if it came with offsetting spending cuts. But spending increased. So in the most prosperous stretch we've enjoyed in decades, revenues still lag expenditures by $1 trillion a year.

That fiscal recklessness should buy the GOP a ticket out of Washington. But those who would replace Trump are campaigning on even more gluttony.

Nearly every Democrat has signed on to the Medicare for All plan.... a promise of universal child care... putting free college on the table....

And then there's the Green New Deal, which would blow the gates to socialism wide open. Implementation would require a doubling to quadrupling of federal expenditures.

I'd be surprised if it were as small a figure as quadruple. As we discussed recently, just two of the items -- refitting or replacing every building in America, and building a giant new high speed railroad network -- would require running the factories and lumber mills and diesel fuel refineries day and night all decade just to get the materials to do the jobs. If, indeed, it could be done even then.

"No Reasonable Prosecutor"

And by "reasonable" we mean "someone we can reason out of it."

Why Should That Be True?

Feminists in Sweden want a ban on sex robots, although the language they're using suggests to me that it would be a much bigger ban than that practically.

They're demanding legislation targeting technology that "reproduces ideas about exploiting women's bodies".

Three Swedish feminist organisations, Sweden's Women's Lobby, the National Organisation for Women's Shelters and Young Women's Shelters (Roks) as well as the empowerment organisation Unizon have published a joint appeal in the newspaper Expressen, in which they demand a state ban on "dangerous" sex robots for men.

The debaters noted that today's sex robots often have the "appearances and attributes typical of the objectifying, sexualised and degrading attitude to women found in today's mainstream pornography".

"Why are men willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a robot that obeys their smallest command?" the feminists asked rhetorically. "A female robot cannot say no to something that the man wants, if she is not programmed to do so", the feminists complained.

"Technology that reproduces ideas" is not just "robots." That's properly speaking a ban on the printing press, for example; the internet, especially given its role in forwarding pornography; television, movies, etc.

However, what strikes me immediately is that the thing might go the other way. They seem to think that people (well, "men") won't be able or willing to make a distinction between women and robots that look like women. It may very well be that people do make the distinction, though, just as they make the distinction between reality and make-believe. In learning what you can do to a robot that you can't do to a real person, the distinction that women are real people who can't be mistreated is reinforced.

Japan seems to do something like this with its manga cartoons, which are hideously violent. Japan's real life, however, is not hideously violent at all. It's stressful and competitive, and these intense violent fantasies manifestly do arise in that context. But they put them in the make believe space, and the society remains mostly peaceful (though suicide is an issue).

I'm not advocating the reading of manga, and I suspect many people will reject the idea of sexbots as disgusting (as, frankly, is the manga). However, I do think that pushing the bad stuff into the world of make believe can be a stopgap measure during times when whatever is producing 'the bad stuff' can't be fixed. Japan also has Buddhist monasteries where you can go and leave the stressful society behind you, but if you aren't ready to do that -- if you feel compelled by the pressures of family and society to keep up the rat race -- pushing the anger and such into the make believe space may be better for everyone than acting it out on real people.

Of course, I don't know that it would work that way -- but neither do these Swedish women know it'd work out the other way. The idea that we should ban something in the absence of any demonstrated actual harm should be rejected, even if we find the conduct disgusting. Let people be free, even if they do things you may not like.

There remain other ethical issues, of course; obviously unless these things are made to be able to reproduce, they'd be indefensible according to Catholic theology (and likely even then, though I haven't worked that argument out in my head).

UPDATE:

Locating your violent fantasies in make believe isn't just for men! From FB:

Why the long face?

A Quillette article examines why technological and other progress is so often seen as stalling. My first thought was "risk"--we've developed a bizarre approach to it.  We're doing everything we can to uncouple risk from reward, and we're increasingly willing to accept paralysis rather than suffer risk.  A few paragraphs down, I found this:

The last 200 years have seen a shift from what moral sociologists have described as the ‘honour’ or warrior culture pre-dating the 19th-century—to the ‘dignity’ culture of the 20th-century—to the emergence of a ‘victimhood’ culture in the 21st.

Part of this shift includes the increasing adversity to risk.

Turning a Corner?

A few weeks ago we discussed a Houston police raid in which the police killed two fellow citizens, with five police officers shot. The description of the event suggested, even then, that the police had shot each other while killing the citizens. Now, it turns out, the alleged 'drug buy informant' lied, the investigating officer lied, and there was no reason to run the raid at all.

The police seem to be responding to this better than previous suspect events. First, they've declared an end to no-knock raids.

Second, they're preparing charges against 'one or more officers.'

Good. Discipline is the soul of the army, and while police are not properly an army, they're increasingly trained and acting as if they were.

The Devil Hates a Sleeping Bag

Willie Nelson this time.



I always think of The Quiet Man when sleeping bags come up.

Negative, AZ, FBI

Arizona would like its citizens to be forced to give up their DNA for a massive state database, and pay $250 for the privilege.



American governments have gotten to big for their britches. Especially the law-enforcement branches, to include (as that essay does) the FBI and DOJ.

We need to break them to saddle.

You can't fire me!

It's a cry you hear from union workers, civil servants, and people with ironclad employment contracts.  Usually not so much from restaurant workers.  New York is out there on the cutting edge, considering laws to prevent restaurant operators from firing a worker when they conclude they can't stay in business if they have to pay him the new minimum wage.  Will New York force the restaurants out of business?  Will we then learn that the market has failed, so the government has to step in and supply this essential service?  At least that way the worker can get civil service protection.  Of course, the restaurants may be about as good as the DMV and siphon off a lot of New York tax dollars, which will spur Cuomo to complain even more bitterly that Florida is stealing his citizens.

MAGA Hat Threatens Armed Man

It's perfectly understandable self-defense given such a provocation.

Police in Bowling Green, Kentucky, say James Phillips was arrested after witnesses said he pulled a gun inside a Sam’s Club outlet because the victim was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat.... Police reported that store surveillance video substantiates Phillips’ story and that he never laid a hand on the Trump-hating assailant.

Officials said that when he was arrested, Phillips had a .40 caliber Glock handgun with a bullet in the chamber sitting in his pocket . He also had two extra loaded magazines on his person.

I have seen people wearing MAGA hats on rare occasion around here, but they're not common. I suspect the sense that you might get shot for wearing one -- or beaten, or robbed, or become the subject of a nationwide Three Minutes' Hate -- is one reason they are not all that popular even in the rural South.