The irony is that two years ago, the situation was almost completely the opposite, with large segments of the media elite either loudly opposing any military interventions in Syria or at least cautioning about our limits and the dangers of intruding upon “complex” Middle Eastern scenarios. Those that did not voice such objections at least stayed silent and noncommittal regarding the decision to use force. Much of the prevailing sentiment seems to be that military intervention back then would risk increasing the scale and scope of the conflict, invite the Iranians and Saudis into a proxy war, or cause chemical weapons to be used, or embolden Al Qaeda or whatever extremists groups out there while further fracturing Syria beyond repair. The problem is, all of these have escalated even with the absence of American/European intervention, though just how much in degree and horror compared to a real intervention back then vs now is another story.

Do we even have a republic? Contra the standard conservative position of a proposition nation it looks to me as if the US is comprised of multiple very distinct peoples. By my reckoning, that makes the US an empire, not a republic.

If the US is really an imperial hegemon then doesn’t it sort of make it necessary to intervene to maintain hegemony?

“RFP under kagame engaged in genocide and mass killings on the scale of hundreds of thousands”

I lost you here, tens of thousands is sound… But hundreds of thousands? I don’t know where you got that from, but I sure want to know more about these numbers.
If anything, you might put the blame on France, if you’re concerned by the death-toll that is.
In fact, pretty much everything which has been happening in the Great Lakes region these last 20 years has to do with the Elysée’s African cell (Kouchner himself mouthed about the whole thing, and he’s the last one you’d expect this from… And then there are the most valuable accounts fournished by Saint-Exupéry ).

Note, I am not saying that Kagame and his RPF have no blood on their hands, though you simply cannot wave aside the fact that they were the only forces stopping the genocide while the French made sure it spilled over with Opération Turquoise & the subsequent refugee crisis.

France is accountable for what has been happening back there ever since, and even decades prior to the 1994 genocide I’ll wager.

The Ituri conflict, itself an extension of the North Kivu feud is also the natural outcome of the “Françafrique” dynamics which have been going on since the 80s in the area.

Have you elaborated on “long history of state sponsored policing of belief and practice” anywhere?
Would it be right to say that “state policing of belief” is a “traditional farmer” practice in the robin hanson framework and, in that relative sense, the alawites are “modernist” reactionaries? I think many modern confucian societies have, similarly, used modernist reactionary sentiment to reach similar social goals – having modern industry while denying “western liberal thought”.
Some of what you write guide me thataway but it would be nice to know where the limits are.

Am not an american so my vote doesnt count in the political discourse. Just interested in the subject matter

for the record, what’s your response on Kristof’s lists of successful interventions?: Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Kosovo, Mali, Ivory Coast.

worth it?

Idk I don’t exactly admire the Swiss for being “neutral” in WW2.

re: risk board – yeah, i assumed that was the deal as it seems even congress is powerless against our military elites but I thought I’d piggyback my “save the brown people” campaign on top of their Master Plan. There will never be a truly altruistic war. As I said before, I don’t much care for islam so it’s not a problem to me if we do nothing (I think that’s what we’ll do anyway) but the gas attack vid reminded me so much of the video of the Saddam gas attack vid it really seems like it couldn’t get much worse…so why not just do it? Like with Rwanda – once you see a FIELD of people chopping up other people it seems like one would pull the trigger. And watching assad’s tanks roll around shooting people reminds me of WW2 footage. It seems so out of control there I feel like you couldn’t “plan” much anyway.
side note – miss you on bheads. I don’t hang there much anymore as Bob banned my IP for swearing but it’d be nice to see you interview some people in some capacity – even if you just emailed them questions to answer at their leisure. I find that interviews provide those juicy nuggets of info you don’t always find in articles and I know you’d ask questions we’d never think of. Start with Turkheimer, Hawks, Hsu, Paabo!

Fair enough but, as Amanpour and Kristof said, Rawanda that was one of Clinton’s biggest regrets.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/kristof-hearing-you-out.html?ref=global&
I don’t think it necessarily has to be perfectly logical against history just as long as it makes sense now (even though I’m not totally confident in it myself but am clearly more open to it than most.)

I said you’d hate it.

You reduce everything to DNA and tribal ethnicities. Which is OK as far as it goes, but only as far as it goes.

You’re not reversing this enough. You have to think from the point of view of Russia, Iran and Saudi and try to understand what their strategic interests are.

Why is Saudi arming the al Nusrah front (Syria is after all not THAT close to Saudi)? Why is Iran supporting Assad? Why (as we now know) is Turkey supporting anti-Kurdish fighting in Syria? Why is Russia supporting Assad?

Now, you might take the view that the ME is a far away place about which the US knows little and it doesn’t matter. But unless the US can be sure of a source of oil that doesn’t rely on the Gulf, i think this is naive.

You are like a man whose only tool is a hammer – every problem is reduced to ethnicity.

FWIW, you’re conclusion is correct, IMHO:

“Isolationists are to a great extent naive. The world is a brutal place. But I also believe at this point that the hawks are ultimately a danger to the republic”

At least you are correct in so far as the debate is currently framed. However, if you move the frame, i.e. think outside the box, you might come up with intervention which might serve US (and Western interests), for example (you’re going to hate these):

– co-opt Assad. That is remove him from Russian/Iranian sphere of influence and make him our ally. That way we mess up Iran AND al-Qaeda. Yeah, he’s a bad buy, but at least he’ll be our bad guy.

– guarantee the security of the Alawites in the Alawite homeland. That way you may destroy a lot of Assad’s grass roots support – as well as recruiting many anti-al Qaeda fighters

– give the Israelis the go-ahead to mop up Hezbollah in Lebanon – thus impairing Assad’s current fighting capability.

There are many more I can think up. Your strategic objectives are:

– degrade al-Qaeda
– reduce Iranian influence in Iraq and Lebanon (long-term objective install US-friendly govt. in Iran as pre 1979)
– reduce Saudi’s destabilizing influence

I can’t see any proper strategic thinking coming out of the current White House. This administration is totally bankrupt (and almost not only intellectually). Like I said, you’ll hate all of this

There’s little naivety in proclaiming a humble stance of ignorance and defaulting to non-intervention. It’s far more profound than the retarded bellicosity and moral posturing of both neocons and liberal internationalists.
Great post.

People who acknowledge their mistakes aren’t guaranteed to not make them again but people who won’t even acknowledge mistakes e.g. over Iraq, are pretty much certain to make the exact same mistakes again.

somewhat related: http://youtu.be/oYsB8cL8_UU

Amanpour seems to be pretty sure. Nick Kristof seems kinda sure
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/opinion/kristof-that-threat-worked.html?ref=global&_r=0

I know you made the point about the NYT but I’m just sayin’ that if I’m agreeing with either one of those people I’m *very* sure that this is an oddly polarizing debate that’s creating unlikely bedfellows. After seeing the entire gas attack vid it seems hard to be completely against bombing.

What’s everyone think about Juan Cole?
http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/americans-theyre-threaten.html
A formidable debater. Would’ve been nice to see him vs. Hitchens on this one.

to JVW, Bin Laden was also a guy who demanded that the US refrain from sexual promiscuity, and drug use in his Letter to America which outlined his reasons for Jihad. He grew pot while supporting Afghan and Pakistani militants that grow opium. He routinely slept with prostitutes and divorced his many wives. His own mother was a concubine. This article is not surprising but very relevant. He was a hypocrite beyond belief.

Guttentag and Secord (1983) theory states that the when men outnumber women , women will be encloed in represive sex roles as ment treat them as scrce goods. Conversely , t0 the extent that females outnumber men (early Christian Society) women will enjoy greater power and freedom. Paraphrased from Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity (p101) referencing Guttentag, Marcia and Paul E. Secord. 1983. Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

I don’t have a dog in the hunt. I just remembered the reference from an interesting book.

#14, Interesting. So Razib thinks abortion for what look to me to be trivial reasons, like eye color, is fine, if I am reading his comment right. But you, who generally are pro-choice, don’t like aborting for choosing an offspring’s sex.

I am trying hard not to turn this into just another internet-abortion thread. I am curious as to what motivates people to choose different places along this continuum.

@8 Tom – yes, both very strong moral and social objections. Which might be confusing of me, because I am generally pro-choice. I can think of several good reasons why a woman might want to abort, but I feel strongly that gender should not be one of them.

Also refer to the “Too Many Women? The Sex Ratio Question” by Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord. 1977 I think, maybe 1983?

Personally, I think public policy should strive for an optimal sex ratio of about 91-95 (males per 100 females). Under such conditions even the lamest of bachelors has a fighting chance of finding a mate, and yet women’s numbers are not so overwhelming that they gain political and economic control and screw up society.

Justin –

I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer with my husband, (we finished our term of service just before Uzbekistan kicked out Peace Corps and a bunch of other Western organizations, due to jitters about the various revolutions around the former Soviet Union in the mid 2000’s). Interesting place – Karakalpakstan is up near where the Aral Sea used to be, and the city of Nukus was a ‘secret city’ under Stalin. Unwanted/slave ethnic groups were dumped there to work in a chemical weapons factory, so about 30 percent of the city is ethnically North Korean. Some of my students spoke German, because their grandparents were prisoners of war from WWII who had gotten sent to the labor camps and never made it back home.

6. Curious, what had you living in Uzbekistan?

Is there any evidence that bride importation has become widespread enough to slow population growth in poor areas? That would be a great way to reach ZPG, from the POV of watching liberal heads explode.

Even in Japan, where the sex ratio is normal, certain classes of men, those in rural occupations and fishermen, have had to resort to importing brides, typically Filipinas. Japanese women choose against men with 3-D jobs, dirty, dangerous and difficult.

It will be interesting to follow events in China. The Chinese women I have known, well-educated and intelligent, were quite strong-willed. At least for this class of women I can see them using their increased value for their own benefit. The poor, uneducated and less intelligent…

A question for you all (if Razib will permit), do you have moral qualms about mass female infanticide/abortion? As opposed to the question of abortion in general.

Bare Branches and Unnatural Selection are the go-to references for sex ratio and social pathology in popular writing, however neither one provides a fair summary of the research literature which supports something closer to the Becker and Posner view: the value of women tends to go up, and men tend to behave better.

Mara Hvistendahl, Valerie M. Hudson, and Andrea M. den Boer are so clouded by the horror of Sexist Genocidal Abortion that they can’t sift through the facts impartially. Or even acknowledge that there are competing theories. Anything outside of DOOOM (War! Crime!) could jeopardize Western resolve against the scourge of (pro-choice) sex selective abortion.

I lived in a region of Uzbekistan for a few years (Karakalpakstan) where the dowry system was reversed – even in the still practiced case of bride stealing (nabbing a girl off the street and forcing a marriage), her family eventually gets compensated. The more educated the girl, the more the man’s family owes her father. So even though boys are still touted as being much more important than girls, families tend to favor girls once they have at least one boy. The boy is expected to care for his parents in their old age, and the girls provide income through marriage. Thus, fathers try to get their daughters at least through university before they get stolen or consenually married.

This is a region that’s quite poor and uses abortion as birth control as a matter of routine, and has done so for a long time (under Soviet rule). Still, you see a pretty good balance of girls and boys, with the girls almost universally being better students, better wage earners, and all around more valuable to a stable society than their brothers, who grow up feeling entitled and being spoiled.

In a society with dowry system of marriage, a shortage of women undermines the system. In a society with a brides price system, a shortage of women strengthens the system. India’s dowry system is dysfunctional and has led to much abuse and suffering by women. I am in favor of undermining it.

Unfortunately I have read stories of poverty stricken married Chinese women with children being kidnapped and sold to new husbands. One husband tracked his wife down after a very long time, but she didn’t want to return as she now had new children she didn’t want to abandon.

“Instead of a rise in the “statusâ€� of women there have been regions of China where women are further commoditized, and turned into an item for purchase and sale. This is probably not what Becker and Posner had in mind, though it might follow the letter of their prediction if not the spirit.”

Expecting a single specific outcome to prevail across a world divided by class and language and nationality, whether commoditization or increased autonomy, was probably foolish. Women who have sufficient capital–cultural, economic, and otherwise–may be able to negotiate better outcomes for themselves within their countries of birth than women who don’t have that. Cross-border migration, women heading from poorer to richer countries to marry men in those countries, may be economically empowering relative to what they might normally expect if they stayed in their homelands (an Economist report describing a Bangladeshi girl’s marriage into a Punjab community comes to mind), notwithstanding the personal shocks of immigration and the apparent relative importance of immigration for marriage in relatively lower-prestige classes and regions (marriages in rural South Korea involved foreign-born women to a considerably greater degree than in urban South Korea, for instance). Women being traficked may fare quite badly. Men with relatively little capital and relatively low status, especially in countries of female emigration, will be hard-pressed to find wives (as opposed to sex partners). Et cetera.

The long-term effect on demographic trends will be interesting. Biasing births so strongly towards male births has the effect of raising the level of fertility required for net population replacement: barring mass polyandry or other unexpected things, ~2.1 births per woman wouldn’t cut it. The feminization of migration, between regions and between countries, has the potential of exacerbating population aging in specific areas. Meanwhile, the implications of high proportions of births in different countries being to foreign-born women is noteworthy. Et cetera.

Completely agree with the bigger point. So much research is centered on the minor point which sadly will not help improve conditions for female babies.

Wise cookie, this one.

Hi Razib, I have a friend who is working on human genetics and need a help in linkage disequilibrium / haplotype analysis. I have the feeling that you can help us out. Please,will you be wiling to help out? I did be glad to hearing from you soonest.

I don’t know, this could be a simple case of wanting the old dictator out and accepting any imperfect replacement so long as the new system is incrementally better than the old.

For instance, did you notice that the NATO allies far exceeded the UN mandate and resolution, even as they insisted that protection of civilians was their sole goal? There was a game of nudge and wink being played there.

Ghaddafi did plenty to make himself hated both at home and abroad. Once a domestic uprising took hold and with the examples of Tunisia and Egypt at hand, the option to roll the dice on a new leadership system starts to look appealing. To outsiders I mean. The counterargument was the almost total lack of profile, visibility, and track record for the opposition forces.

I thought the backlash against Sub-Saharan Africans was rooted in the fact that Ghaddafi hired lots of them as mercenaries? A simple racist or tribal suppression of blacks would obviously be bad. However if the rebels learned to associate a black person in uniform with Ghaddafi, then this is simply retribution against the former dictator and his forces. Sorry but the mercenaries picked the wrong side.

I’m willing to cut the Libyan rebels a bit of slack. They got way farther than I expected and although they have made some mistakes they seem ready to change course when criticized enough. They strike me as a nascent political force, formative and relatively untested.

And the realpolitik equation is, as long as they are better than Ghaddafi, progress has been made.

wow, good info, that is really weird. i’m thinking about the neurological underpinnings of this now. being around large groups of extremely varied people must release the brakes on ones’ inhibitions. you’ve been exposed to more stimuli so fewer things scare you and your fear circuits are less active? agree? i’d never thought about the rural/urban thing outside of the modern context until now but, clearly, it’s probably been happening forever.

yeah, it seems as though libs and neocons don’t quite understand that it’s not just the Arab/Persian governments that are “backward” but that they are backed by a substantial portion of the population they represent. it’s similar to the U.S. in that many cons back the military no matter what – rural areas in these countries are quite conservative as well and fully back Iran or whomever to establish themselves on the world stage or live under Sharia law. we’re dealing with some backward mentalities here that’d be better off left alone. many of the youth want to leave or change to a more progressive nation and we should just let that happen on its own. there’s a reason why the U.S. gov’t is the way it is – because many people here want it that way. the Middle East is no different.

Hi Razib
Does this show an oversell of the intervention rather than lack of foresight ?
E.g. The possibility that a “secular” saddam is replaced and elections bring in an “islamist” party is one nuance too many on campaign trails and news shows. Was the possibility recognised amongst policy/ decision makers? Likely, yes. 
The calculation may be that a participative democracy in libya would be more amenable to international opinion and, thus, marginally better. Am thinking of Fareed Zakaria’s defence of american interventions here : http://m.foreignaffairs.com/articles/53577/fareed-zakaria/the-rise-of-illiberal-democracy

Bin Laden was a guy,he has porn so what?big whoop..wonder what’s the big hype considering that he organized terrorist acts what does a little porn in comparison?just cause this so called “leader” of the islamic movement is into porn and everyone is all oohs and aahhs about it. just cause this so called “matyr” can’t wait for his 72 or 76 or 1 billion virgins so he used his hands as a compromise~ *there’s a joke in there somewhere*

anyways yes i think that does shade him a little grey as a pure hearted soldier of his so called non existent god (as i believe no god will ask you to conduct murder) but let’s keep in mind that bugger got thousands of people killed. he’s a wanker but heck he’s also a killer..and now the wanker’s dead YAY

Ackbark: yes, I am sure bin Laden was buying used thumb drives off of eBay and he got one that previously contained porn. Sometimes files can be recovered from an erased thumb drive, but once a thumb drive is filled with new data, the old data cannot usually be recovered. That’s how programs ‘secure erase’ drives: they write new, random data over the old data several times.

As for certain porn being “much tamer”, porn is porn. Is soft-core porn less sinful than hardcore porn? Is beer less sinful than wine, which is less sinful than vodka, if you believe that any alcohol is a sin? Is cheating on your wife two times OK, since you didn’t cheat on her 20 times? In the age of the internet and freely accessible porn, why would someone limit themselves to looking at a woman in a bikini when he could see her naked? Of course, many peoples’ tastes are different: some people are fine with just looking at softcore stuff (like Playboy) and don’t care for the hardcore stuff.

The thumb drives they found could have been second, third or twelfth hand.

These files could be files recovered after the drive was reformatted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at the very least ‘soft core’ porn. The more self-repressed, especially when it comes to biological needs such as sex, the more a person is likely to lean toward the ‘forbidden.’ After watching “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan” on Frontline (can be viewed on the PBS website), I’m just glad they found only porn and not young boys.

Any chance Osama Bin Laden followed the Hizb-ut-Tahrir fatwa of pornography being legal?

I have a fair number of Orthodox Jewish friends and friends who are former Orthodox Jews. What they think of as pornographic is generally much tamer than the general population.

Going further with the comparison between conservative Muslims and Christians. I had a Shiite friend once tell me that in Islam it is worse to justify a form of sinful behavior than engage in the sin. This is food for thought when discussing the fight between liberal and conservative Muslims, or Christians, for that matter. Something like this is very true for where I grew up in the rural South.

Maybe it is spin, but does that mean it’s necessarily false? It seems pretty consistent with the news we hear about fundamentalist Christians here in the West. Also, didn’t Pakistan recently rank first in sex-related content searches?

I expect someone will find OBL’s membership card in the Democrat Party.

boi-oi-oi-oing!!!

Osama did his waterboarding with his harem – in bubble bath, hot tub and jacuzzi

I’m sure he had some porn. I’m sure he drank alcohol, etc.
He was not a imam, he was a thug who used religion instead of cash to mobilize an army.
His ultimate goal was the overthrow of Saudi Arabia and establishing himself as king.
He’s really not all that different from any common megalomaniac/sociopath/psychopath (Hitler/Manson/Jim Jones, etc).
Yes there will be disinformation, but I wouldn’t ascribe any true Muslim values to him.
It was all a game, and ultimately history passed him by and American never forgot.
Buh-bye!

Like juan, I also suspect spin.

I’m letting the whole Bin Laden story pretty much slide. Anyone who says anything has their agenda, we have no way of checking anything, and there hasn’t been a history of frankness and honesty during this phase of history.

My best guess is that Bin Laden is dead and that he was recently killed in Pakistan by American troops. That’s the official version, and I may be wrong to accept it, but I really don’t think so.

I’m treating everything else as spin.

I kind of assume this is a lie meant to discredit Bin Laden. A lie I fully support. It’s weird reading news accounts of secret raids from the government. I trust they aren’t lying about the big picture (ie OBL dead), but I assume many of the details are lies meant to protect secrets (stealth copter) and relationships (what did Pakistan know).

I’m pretty sure we’ve had confirmation that the US and Pakistan have an agreement on drone strikes, for example, where the Pakistanis pretend they aren’t helping and don’t know anything — and we lie and pretend Pakistan didn’t know anything. Haven’t the Wikileaks releases confirmed that with several Islamic countries — they give us terrorist locations, we blow them up, then they protest our invasion of their sovereignty, yada yada yada.

I probably have too much faith in my ability to know when my government is lying to me, and too much trust that they will only lie to me when it’s really necessary — like not revealing the cooperation of Islamic govts in hunting Islamic terrorists.

Seems to me the US was founded on distrust. Our rather difficult government system was made the way it is because no one trusted politicians. So they made it very difficult to accomplish anything. (Contrast it to a parliamentary system where if you get a sufficient majority you can do nearly anything you want for four years or so) Even movements like libertarianism which form an important constituent of the right wing have that trust element. And there are similar movements within the liberal wing of American politics (see 1968 or much of the period under Bush II)

Ohwilleke (26) makes a good point too. Too much trust is bad. Living here in Utah it’s pretty easy for a sociopath to make hay simply because most people are far too trusting.

I suspect the real question is the tension between trust and distrust. A lot of American business is possible simply because we trust the other person will do what they say so we don’t have to go to court or the like. If that kind of trust dissipates then business interchange grinds to a halt or at least gets saddled with all sorts of extra expenses that reduces our efficiencies. I don’t see any indication that’s the case.

The place I do see distrust is the old conservative canard about regulation. When you have regulation those most interested and powerful are the most likely to have influence on regulation. Which means that regulation gets coerced into supporting the status quo. I think the recent finance regulation passed by congress will end up being an example of that. So you have two kinds of distrust – distrust of business and distrust of government colliding.

“In 1916 the state of North Dakota, then under quasi-socialist rule, established a state bank which still survives and has been highly beneficial to the state.”

It also has a near monpoly health insurer arising from the same ethos that turns out to have some of the best cost control and widest availability of health insurance in the nation.

* Fukuyama’s book is well written and persausive, but it suffers from a serious problem. It basically used Japan’s record of success as an important point supporting the thesis that trust built prosperity, only to come to press just shortly before Japan’s economy fell into a profound and sustained recession from which it has yet to fully recover.

Fukuyama’s book also acknowledges that face to face non-state negotiation based on trust is only one way to get things done; low trust societies compensate with different kinds of institutions (often better than in high trust societies) to adjudicate disputes. Thus, his premise that trust fosters prosperity relies to a great extent on the unstated premise that non-state solutions are more effective than state solutions, something that is less well established than one would expect. States with a more third party regulatory, less trust based approach suffered less from the finanical crisis.

* Another issue with trust is the extent to which it is an intimate bedfellow with “social capital” as expounded by Robert Putnam. Social capital can improve your quality of life, but it can suppress economic prosperity because a focus on high quality networks means that people tend to have deep, small social networks, instead of broad, shallow networks that are more likely to cause the connections necessary for economic innovation to take place. Innovation requires dealing with strangers who may not be as trustworthy.

* One way to think about trust is in a prey-predator cycle. This is a more or less deterministic system (you learn to model them in differential equations) that is naturally prone to booms and busts. As trust rises, so does vulnerability to fraud. As trust plummets, fewer people are taken for fools but more opportunities are lost. Places where religious or other cultural bonds promote long sustained trust (e.g. Utah or immigrant communities) are also notorious for some of the most over the top frauds. More opportunities looks like the better course until people start to get burned.

Hopefully we won’t get into the goldbug argument here. Robert’s point is only significant for someone who buried his money in the back yard in 1910 and dug it up again in 2010. That kind of inflation is a good guard against hoarders, among other things.

The (flawed) public-private* federal reserve was put into effect because the earlier system had led to frequent “panics”. During the depression the nations who left the gold standard recovered more quickly than the ones who stayed on it.

*In 1916 the state of North Dakota, then under quasi-socialist rule, established a state bank which still survives and has been highly beneficial to the state.

“the fed policy of cheap money for large banks is probably more of a big deal. there’s a financial-government complex.”

And it has been explicit for the last 100 years since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank. Our fractional reserve banking system, unanchored either from gold reserves or fixed exchange rates has inflated the dollar to 1/20th of its value in that same century. And it was done all in the name of keeping the action going, through thick and thin, for profitable bank lending and corporate borrowing.

Regarding property market in Ireland. In general there is an obsession with owning property in Ireland. We have the highest rates of home-ownership in Europe. I’ve heard it often described as due to folk-memory of dispossession. This combined with unnaturally low interest rates (from Frankfurt) and Irish banks been able to lend money they had borrowed from other Eurozone banks resulted in a disaster. I’m just happy I didn’t drink the Kool Aid as I couldn’t afford to get on the “property ladder” (with exchange rates I earn $70-$75k dollars a year).

The average 3 bedroom semi-detached house in Dublin was selling for north of $450k dollars at the peak! (House prices increased by over 330% from 1995 to 2006!)

As for immigration, in general it’s only in the last 10 years that you saw substantial immigration into Ireland most of it from Eastern European EU states due to common labour market. (Poland, Lithuania, Czech Republic etc.)

Iceland isn’t out of the woods yet.

You can add Iceland to Argentina to the list of countries that did alright after saying to hell with creditors.

To add to the point about big banks paying back the government, here’s Scott Sumner on where the bank failures were. I’ve heard some claim that the banks were able to pay back loans because they sold their toxic assets to Fannie/Freddie (making some circular flow of public debt), but I haven’t seen numbers for that yet.

Yeah, even from a completely self-interested perspective, it’s rational to treat others fairly, as people will then have less of a reason to kill you. Latin American and Middle Eastern political leaders — and increasingly North American political leaders — don’t seem to have acknowledged the importance of this lesson.

They’re on the high-risk / high-return track, and they don’t necessarily have the option of being nice guys. They’re playing the game they way it is played in those places.

“but is better for the mental health of all for there to be the idea that people can get a “fair goâ€� if they stick to the rules IMO.”

Yeah, even from a completely self-interested perspective, it’s rational to treat others fairly, as people will then have less of a reason to kill you. Latin American and Middle Eastern political leaders — and increasingly North American political leaders — don’t seem to have acknowledged the importance of this lesson. Status should be instrumental to security, but at some point in our past, the desire for status as an end-in-itself appears to have been selected for amongst humans (and maybe non-human animals too?). In a more primitive setting, I can see it being conducive to higher levels of reproduction. In a modern setting, that drive leads to much more self-destructive consequences (e.g., the World of Warcraft player who doesn’t care that he’s broke and unemployed because he’s a high ranking member of his online guild), but considering that it’s not selected against, the human species is stuck with it. The elites would be better off if they were the upper class in a society that made upward mobility possible — if the masses have a stake in society, they have less of an incentive to destroy it by means of either criminality or revolution. I’m sure there are members of the elite who recognize this, but the culture that they are a member of is too intractable to change and they still rely upon it to survive. To the same degree, once you have an anti-intellectual under-class with a low time preference in place, you can’t expect throwing money at the problem to solve anything, so I have no answers.

Immigration just adds one additional layer of distrust to a society to complement the distrust that already exists between and within social classes. It doesn’t help, but is probably not necessary to create the phenomenon.

Fukuyama apparently identified China as a low-trust society, which is 95 percent Han, although I understand that it’s problem to regard the Han culture as a single culture, as it encompasses a diversity of conquered groups that were once not Han.

I also am not sure to what degree corporations are responsible for innovation. The most noteworthy technological breakthroughs (e.g, airplanes, automobiles, personal computers, etc) were pioneered by enterprises that were initially quite small, but corporations do a lot of fine tuning and incremental improvements. Just off the top of my head, I can think of an article about improvements being made to the freight rail network in this country, that involved taking advantage of many new signaling technologies. Also, as you pointed out to me once before, a sufficient number of incremental improvements can yield a technology that appears qualitatively different than what preceded it. Smartphones are a good example of that, all of which that I can think of were developed by established consumer electronics companies.

Nihilistic hedonism (of an intelligent Epicurean variety, not of a short term get drunk-as-fuck and eat junk food type, of course) seems to be my mode of operation these days, and cynical realism my way of perceiving the world.

Philosophies of living similar to Stoicism or Epicureanism will grow more popular with people of an intellectual bent, as will nihilistic hedonism.

Nihilistic hedonism is well-entrenched already.

Do you think large scale immigration to the west has lowered the level of trust society-wide? Both among average people being more likely to cheat each other, and the elite feeling fewer restraints on their behavior? The data I’ve seen suggest so, that a more diverse society is a society with less trust and more abuse.

To what degree do you think technological innovation is dependent upon high levels of trust within a society? Large enterprises are contingent upon a world where strangers are willing to cooperate with each other. Yet, there were periods of history, such as the so-called “Dark Ages”, that weren’t known for high levels of trust which nonetheless oversaw numerous new innovations. However, the production technologies like the stirrup and waterwheel doesn’t require an economic scale of the same magnitude as that required by the production of an iPhone. I don’t know the answer — it’s an open question.

This (from Morgan Kelly, who has good form on predictions) is one of the best things written on Ireland since 2007. The sane thing is to let the banks go bust, and get on with things. Now, wouldn’t it be great if there were any prospect of the politicians doing that.

^ Yes, they live high on the hog while the country goes to shit.

Why is the economy in the dumps? Because of the tricksters and their schemes to profit off the backs of the nation.

Jaime_NYC,

Whether or not the gov’t profited from the bailout is not the issue I think. Rather it’s the moral hazard created when the “too big to fail” banks know that no matter how recklessly they go about their business the gov’t will always be there to save them.

Razib… the life is much, much too complicated for either Polyanish or cynical views to be anywhere close to the truth. One small fact that 99% of people don’t know: US government made money on its bailout of banks. It will not be able to recoup the money it lent to Fannie and Freddie, who were for years effectively lending it to “ordinary folks”. Not a pleasant piece of information to consider.

To me, a very powerful insight on who really holds power in the American society came years ago from reading about the bankruptcy of Orange county. To summarize the plot in two sentences: OC entered into risky derivatives trades that were going for them for a while, and when the tide turned, a sophisticated law firm advised them that they can exercise their “sovereign rights”, and simply refuse to pay, i.e. declare bankruptcy although they were not even illiquid, let alone insolvent. OC promptly ceased all payments, including to teachers and garbage collectors, so, when the media descended and saw the mess (garbage piling up, children not attending school), the Wall St. firm was or course forced, under pressure from public opinion and politicians, to swallow the loss on the contract, although it nominally had the law clearly on its side. The rich and powerful… lawyers (or politicians; or media, or ordinary folks?). Complicated, ain’t it?

Argentina defaulted and after a rough patch it did pretty well.

So far there is little inflation compared to almost any other era and the US’s credit is good. Unemployment and the result of the weakness of the economy are the problems, and the weakness of the economy plus the emergency measures taken by Bush and Obama are the main reasons for the present deficit.

For me the most important question is what’s the best way to not be consumed by envy, ressentiment and pessimism upon this realization. And how to avoid being one of the sheep without becoming a wolf.

For those who never had the chance or the temperament to become one of the wolves the answer, I think, is to find a niche that is as insulated as possible from the inevitable crises they bring upon us. To secure a livelihood that will allow the cultivation of one’s own garden to use Voltaire’s metaphor.

Ideally, for me at least, would be to obtain a secure position in a scientific or technical field where one could mainly focus on the advancement of knowledge and rationalism. Second best (or third or fourth) is to find a career secure from the vagaries of the economy and that doesn’t demand the devotion of one’s every waking moment merely to keep one’s head above water. The least desirable version of this is an unimportant government bureaucrat, numbed to the stultifying nature of his duties, who gets to clock out at 5 pm every day to live his real life and pursue his real interests.

I think philosophies of living similar to Stoicism or Epicureanism will grow more popular with people of an intellectual bent, as will nihilistic hedonism. I believe the popularity of those attitudes in the late Roman Republic and early Empire were a reaction to the fact that amoral careerism became the best way to secure one’s advancement in society. For those who couldn’t stomach that kind of life, disengagement, either actual or emotional, was the best option. Life in Western Civilization seems to be heading in a similar direction.

“I understand and accepted the need to dampen the shocks of the impending financial doom in the wake of the 2008 crisis.”

I’m not sure that letting AIG and their ilk go bankrupt would not have been the best way out. Despite the hysterical corespondent bank, house of cards, financial collapse to 1930’s levels propaganda there was enough bondholder capital in most of the financial institutions to cover those losses. TARP et. al. was government protection of the fat cats from bankruptcy, pure and simple.

“Mrs. Condra agrees that Ireland has to make good on its debts.”

Why? The people who are least able to afford it will be better off if the government repudiates its debts. Even counting losses in retirement accounts, there would still be enough tax revenue still available for basic needs even after a default and the new currency would actually be sounder than the old one without carrying the existing millstone of debt to corrupt foreign bankers that both Iceland and Eire have.

And anyway, the government’s desperate attempt to inflate us out of our debt mess is resulting in horrible stagflation while the action in (30+ to 1 leveraged) swaps is at higher levels than 2008.

In American politics there’s always been a battle between the tough-minded realists and cynics saying “deal with it” on one side, and the populists, reformers, progressives, et. al. who think that wrongs should be made right. Trust is only lost when belief in the possibility of reform is lost; normal honest people expect there to be a certain amount of malfeasance, but they demand that it be punished and stopped.

What Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Strain in American Politics” (title) arose from reformers who had given up, and believed that fraud was in command. The Populists still had hope; they believed that the monopolies and banks could be driven from power.

The realistic tendencies in both parties, most openly in the Democratic Party after 1948, basically separated electioneering from government. You do one group of things to get elected, and then you govern as you see fit. While you’re governing, you make certain concessions to the voters, but as few as possible because that’s “pandering”. There’s little attempt to synchronize the two activities and get elected on the basis of what you actually intend to do when in office, and people who judge policy from a normative point of view are regarded as chumps and morons (because science is truth and science is non-normative).

Both parties do, of course, make moral appeals, but these are just ways of recruiting votes. People like Reagan, Bush, and Cheney don’t care a bit about abortion or gay marriage. Democrats hand out favors here and there for pious reasons, but their real operations are in other areas. (Basically both parties are now errand-boys for finance and big business, and big business is so financialized that it’s really just finance).

Tough-minded cynical realism was OK as long as it worked (delivered the goods, brought prosperity) but when it stops working, and when most people stop thinking that they’re in on the action, you get tremendous anger.

The tough-minded value-free realists were realists in that they got what they wanted for themselves, but their political theory was destructive on the whole. Without public trust, not much good can happen.

This post is an accurate description of the state of the world.

I understand that banks are “too big to fail” and that they must be rescued for the good of the economy and, therefore, for the good of the people.

That is, all citizens (including the poor) must pay for the mistakes of some few bankers. Profits are privatized, losses are made public.

But, if only we saw this bankers in jail… If you steal $1000 you go to prison. If you steal billions of dollars, put the economy in risk and make millions of people miserable, you get no punishment.

If these bankers were put in jail, future bankers would think twice before committing these Ponzi schemes. This is the why the law punishes. To discourage future crime.

But no, these bankers will get away with it. So they can enjoy of their ill-gotten money and live their luxury lives, while scheming the next fraud. After all, there will always be suckers (us) who are here to pay the consequences of their crimes.

BTW, I am not a Kemalist nor an adherent of Ataturk. I am against many of his policies, but I don’t demonize him (that would be childish) and I never refrain from giving him his due when he really deserves it. My thoughts about him wouldn’t be any different if I was a Kurd.

Iran, too, if it hadn’t been secularized and much Westernized during the 20th century shah rules, would now be more similar to Arab countries in its practice of Islam, as was the case prior to the secularization.

By “Arab” I don’t mean just Arabians but Arabs in general (BTW, I don’t regard Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews as Arabs).

Secularization and Westernization have had a very big impact in the formation of the current “Turkish Islam”. Before the secularizing and Westernizing policies of Ataturk (who was an atheist BTW), Muslim religious orders (tariqas) ruled supreme in Anatolia down to the villages. Madrasas were the only educational institutions in most places (again including villages). Imams, sheikhs and faqihs were not only highly respected but were also highly influential in the administration of villages and neighborhoods. So if Turkey hadn’t been secularized and so much Westernized, we could now be much more similar to Arabs in our religious practice (as we were during the Ottoman times) than we are today.

this is false. you don’t know enough about eastern cultures to judge. i know this because we’ve discussed at length your ignorance of the history of eastern cultures.

Razib, I know enough about the traditional Eastern (=East Asia, Indochina and India) religious eclecticism and syncretism. But if you read my lines carefully, I say “Westeners are highly eclectic in their practice of religion, be that Christianity (especially Protestantism), Western varieties of Buddhism or any other religion“, so I am also comparing the Western practice of Buddhism and Hinduism with the Buddhism and Hinduism practices of traditionally Buddhist and Hindu nations respectively and not just counting the Western practice of Christianity when I say “Western”.

As for Christianity, I know that Christianity, by its very nature, is less flexible than both Buddhism and Hinduism, but I make my religion comparisons in a relative sense thus taking into account inherent differences between religions.

Many parties in the West have symbolic religious names such as Christian Democrat, Christian Social Union, etc. (Only very recently Swedish treasury stopped collecting dues for the Lutheran Church. Britain’s Rex or Regina is still the Head of the Church of England). However, these parties have very loose connection with the Church as do church-based universities. This took a long time to happen. For example, IV (Ivy) league universities in the USA Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale are no longer associated with the Episcopelians. Many non-believers are tenured professors in Catholic universities in Europe. (Let us not forget that a Pope in the late 1800 took an axe to all the genitalia of a large number marble statues in the Vatican!)
Will or can (mainstream)Islam ever treat worldly affairs at arms distance and tolerate those who do not necessarily think like them? This question still begs an answer or two and in this connexion I believe next ten or so years are crucial.

You mean eclecticism? No people can surpass Westerners in terms of eclecticism…

You can also call it “flexibility” if you wish.

our islam is closer to buddhism than arabic islam.

You mean eclecticism? No people can surpass Westerners in terms of eclecticism. Westeners are highly eclectic in their practice of religion, be that Christianity (especially Protestantism), Western varieties of Buddhism or any other religion.

Yes, Islam is the primary unifying factor between the various ethnicities of Turkey. But in the long term there is a need for another primary unifying factor as 1) due to secularization more and more people are putting Islam in a low position in their order of priority or completely abandoning Islam, 2) Alevis have no religious common ground with Sunnis in practice, I am not even mentioning Christians and Jews as they are both very small and almost invisible minorities in Turkey.

Turkish nationalism certainly cannot be an alternative to Islam as the primary unifying factor, as Kurds strongly object to that, and so do an ever increasing number of ethnicities.

My proposal is this: Already most of non-Turks of Turkey know and speak Turkish today (most of them as a second language), this opportunity, if used wisely, can be an agent to generate strong bonds between ethnic groups. If we create the social and economic conditions in which people from different ethnic groups interact much more, this can be a good alternative to Islam as the primary unifying factor.

I have an atheist Kurdish friend coming from an Alevi background, and I am an atheist Turk coming from a Sunni background. He votes for the Kurdish party and I vote for AKP. Nevertheless, we are good friends and, more importantly, agree in a lot of areas.

the bottom line is, even though people are not very religious in Turkey, we still see Islam as a unifying factor vis-a-vis Kurds etc. The collapse of our empire because of nationalistic ideas of balkan people, arabs etc compelled us to regard islam as a way to stay together with Kurds and other ethnic groups. i am not saying that islam is weak in Turkey. But i have been to Arab countries, and compared to their brand of Islam, ours is a personal faith issue. you pray, fine, you do not, it is also fine. our islam is closer to buddhism than arabic islam.

one thing distinguishes us from other people. we think our shortcomings, our misfortunes are only because of our deeds. i am living a poor life, and it is my mistake. i can do a better job, get rich, get happy without blaming others.

when somebody talks about muslims in turkey, take it with a grain of salt. we are muslims by birth, humans by conscious and trying to make the world more beautiful than it was when we were born. and yes, like every country, we have crack heads