Bloody Shovel 4

There's an old saying, that Paris would be lovely without the Parisians. I don't actually agree with that. They can be a bit arrogant, sure, but on the whole I find Parisian men quite civil and Parisian women classy and sexy. So I hope they stay.

There is one place though where that saying absolutely fits. Hong Kong. HK is a very cool city. It is a first world city built on a landscape of high tropical mountains, and you can see how the force of modern industry has made humans conquer the environ...

A while ago I wrote a post on tax law, proposing some ideas that I thought could plausibly make for a better existence if implemented by a sane government.

Reactions to that were mixed. It was, admittedly, an uncharacteristic post. I am not a "policy wonk", I'm usually more interested in deeper questions of history and human psychology as it applies to our political environment. As such, some people said that that sort of piece, proposing some tweaks to tax policy or this or that law is not just ...

After some lazy Youtube pastes, I guess it's time to write something interesting about Brexit. You'll have to forgive my delay as I was too busy getting drunk in celebration. Or in despair. I don't know.

The ghastly forces of nationalism are sweeping now across Europe, liberals say. "Racism is out of the bottle", they say. The European project, the liberal world order is in danger, they say. Oh yes, yes it is. And they are right to be frightened.

Perhaps people out of Europe don't know, but in Eur...

Donald Trump has swept the American political establishment by promising to kick out 10 million immigrants and forbidding Muslims from entering the US. The refugee crisis in Europe has turned awry so fast and so dramatically (assaulting young women in New Years has to be the worst PR ever in leftist history), that nativists all over the West are ecstatic and full of energy. The time has come, it almost appears. Everybody is running to Twitter and making small scale demonstrations all over the W...

So there's a million or so migrants, apparently many of them from Syria, who are trying to push their way into Germany. Germany is apparently willing to accept them, but they're trying to send a bunch of them to other EU countries too. The Daily Mail is doing a masterful coverage, both inciting outrage at how the onslaught will drown us all, and inciting compassion by showing little children being drowned and starved by those meany Europeans who won't pay them a plane ticket to Munich. One has t...

I dig linguistics, and I dig HBD, so how do you join them both? I've had this idea for some time now, but I hadn't written about it lest some guy stole it and wrote a book before I did. 

It seems I'll have to give up on that, as science is fast catching up with my awesome blog (see, I just pulled a Half Sigma here). Razib Khan quotes a recent study in Northern Australia that documents how some Abo kids came up with a new language just for the kicks. It fast became cool, and now the young kids of...

There's this idea that Cathedralist universalism is a by-product of wealth. Affluent societies lose sight of what made them wealthy, they become complacent, life is easy so the energy they aren't spending in surviving, they spend in zero-sum status whoring to see who is holier than who. Affluent people are also proud, disobedient, hard to employ in hierarchical corporations. That serves to incentivize the import of cheap labor to fill the menial jobs that their parents used to do happily, but th...

You know time differences suck when you see an interesting post such as this, but by the time you wake it already has tens of comments. As I'm late to participate in that thread I might just as well write a post of my own. The topic does merit a long one. I'll try to play Arnold Kling on this one.

If there's anything to the reactosphere, it is two pillars: HBD and evolutionary psychology. Both argue strongly against multiracial societies. The latter tells you that humans are tribal, and all socie...

Steve Sailer's commentators are usually one of the best in the web, if only for the impression they give of being normal people who have just woke up to the fact that their culture is collapsing, and all they ever thought they knew is false. See this comment at a recent post on Sailer's.

Anonymous

Indeed ethnic conflict is old as sin, and the dynamics that regulate it are also paleolithically simple and boring. But that's our curse, and I digress in the fact that there's a simple way out. Ethnic c...

Shanghai Airlines just announced that from New Years on, it will start to make its announcements in Shanghainese, then Mandarin and English, in its flights to Shanghai. Original news link here.

They are doing this allegedly to "give native Shanghai people the feeling of getting back home". Shanghai's topolect is utterly unintelligible to anyone not in the immediate vicinity; and China had been imposing the standard language, Mandarin, with quite a lot of force for some time. So this is big news.