The EU Mystery

The mystery is why anyone thought the EU is a good idea.

The EU began as a trading club, but the idea that it should develop into a multi-ethnic superstate was there from the beginning.  Only one politically coherent superstate, it was thought, would finally put an end to centuries of ruinous war on the European continent.  This idea developed at the end of WW II, the single most cataclysmic event in Human history, so people were motivated.

The motivation was clear enough, the thinking not so much.  It's not as if multi-ethnic states have not existed before.  To the contrary, there have been multi-ethnic states for millenia, and the experience is not encouraging.

Every empire in history was a multi-ethnic political entity.  They were forged in violence and they were destroyed in violence.  I used to think the USSR was the one great exception to that rule.  The USSR was forged in violence, alright, but on its face it did not fall apart because of some combination of the usual suspects:  civil war, pestilence, and certainly there were no invading foreign armies.

However, the USSR did have an enormous internal security apparatus.  Short of invading foreign armies, there was a great deal of internal violence.  The state waged perpetual war against its citizens.  Mainly because socialism is an irrational way to organize human society, and violence was the only way to preserve the integrity of the state---until people, including the nomenklatura and apparatchiks themselves, just woke up one day and realized they could no longer live in that insane system, anymore.

I now believe the multi-ethnic character of the USSR was another important reason for that perpetual war of the state against the people and, ultimately, for the demise of the socialist empire.  There are plenty of other examples in the modern era.

On the more violent end of the spectrum there was Jugoslavia.  This had been a multi-ethnic state for approximately 73 years, from about 1918 to about 1991.  Three generations were not enough to make  "e pluribus unum" and Jugoslavia exploded into a fratricidal war.

World War I is an object lesson, but not in what you think, necessarily.  A lot of gibberish is written about the causes of WW I, and serious historians throw up their hands, in frustration.  This is amazing to me.  You have only to look around to see war after war after war waged as one ethnos against another:  Arabs against Persians, Arabs against Alawites, Punjabs against Balochs, Tamils against Sinhalese, Burmese against Rohingya.  The horrific Nigerian Civil War (1967-70) was the mainly Christian Igbo against the mainly Muslim Hausa-Fulani.  And on and on and on.

The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was a bubbling cauldron of antagonistic ethnon, and historians can't figure out why, in 1914, it exploded like a super nova?  Seemingly out of the blue?  Who could have seen that coming?  (Come on!)

My very first thought about the Rwandan genocide was disbelief.  When reports first started reaching the West,  I did not believe you could kill a million people with machetes.  I was wrong.  Multiculturalism "concentrates the mind wonderfully", and it turns out that if you try hard enough, you, too, can kill a million people with machetes.  By the way, I couldn't tell a Hutu from a Tutsi if my life depended on it, but there's multiculturalism for ya.

Today, the gruesome multiculturalism of Syria and Iraq and Pakistan are on full display.

On the less violent end of the spectrum there is the confederation of Czechoslovakia.  Oh, wait!  No, there isn't.  The Czechs and Slovaks are my heroes.  Their political divorce, if not amicable, was bloodless.  Bloodless can be a great thing!  Here, too, I couldn't tell the difference between a Czech and a Slovak if my life depended on it.  I can barely even spell Czech, but their differences were enough to drive them apart.

Belgium is a less than idyllic union of Walloons and Flemish, always threatening to collapse.  Even placid Canada experiences some mainly friendly and sometimes not so friendly friction between its English and French constituents, to say nothing of the very real antagonisms between disparate parts of Canada that have more in common, both economically and demographically, with adjacent pieces of the U.S. than with other parts of Canada (Alberta vs the Maritime provinces, eg).  Which brings us back to Great Britain.

Great Britain is its own little European Union of English, Scots, and Welsh (and Northern Ireland).  After 300 years of a common market and political union, an unhappy Scotland wants to trade its union with England, with which it has a great deal in common, for a union with---Romania?  This makes sense how, exactly?

The writer John Derbyshire tells the story of hiking through Wales, as a young man, and encountering villagers who would refuse to speak English to him.  This, in the 20th century.

What a multicultural society, more successful than GB, should look like, I frankly cannot imagine.  And yet, after 300 years, there is the real danger it will fall apart.  And somebody thinks the European Union, as something more than a trading club, is a good idea?

How?

Maybe Brexit, Maybe Not

A number of serious people are worried about the consequences of Brexit.  Nouriel Roubini (aka, "Dr. Doom") and Niall Ferguson come to mind.  Their opinions should be taken seriously and their predictions may well turn out right, but they are not necessarily right.  In other words, their foreboding of doom will prove right if everybody behaves in the worst possible way, but there are strong reasons to think that will not happen.

First, the Rump EU will have to behave itself, politically.  There is already strong and growing anti-EU sentiment in France (the National Front), Germany (Alternative for Germany), The Netherlands (Dutch Party for Freedom), Austria (the Freedom Party), Greece (Golden Dawn), and I don't know where else.  These "nativist" political movements are already much encouraged by Brexit, and Brussels Bureaucrats Behaving Badly would only make things much worse---for the bureaucrats. The EU is already at serious risk of dissolving entirely, Nouriel Roubini's major point, and trying to punish Britain will not go well for the Bureaucrats.

Niall Ferguson makes a strangely personal argument, saying that even if Britain is out of the EU it will have to abide by most or all of the rules that already apply.  This is the Norway model.  Maybe, but maybe not.

Though considerably richer, with a population of 5.2 million Norway is smaller than NYC.  Norway can be bullied.  Britain, on the other hand, is the largest economy in the EU, second only to Germany.  Not so easy to bully Britain.  And, with the political strains already noted, the EU is in no position to bully anyone, right now.  With some trepidation, I think Ferguson is wrong.

Economically, everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to keep on doing business.

So, assuming the divorce goes smoothly, Britain will take a position quite like Norway's, Switzerland's, America's, Japan's, etc.  If all these other countries, can trade with the EU to everyone's satisfaction, so too Britain.

Frankly, it is the EU that will be transformed by Brexit.  Roubini is more likely than Ferguson to be right, and the EU will dissolve.  If that does not happen, it will be because of serious reforms in the EU, itself, the kind of reforms to mollify the National Front, Alternative for Germany---and, maybe, even Britain's UKIP (Nigel Farage's party).

If that happens, if the Brussels Bureaucrats are cut down to size and the EU comes to more closely approximate its original incarnation, the European Common Market, even Britain may elect to not exit.

So, either Britain exits the EU, and it will not matter much, or the EU will be structurally reformed, and Britain may not, in the end, exit.  Either way, the sky is not about to fall, but it will be an interesting couple of years.  And for that alone I am grateful to "BoJo" (Boris Johnson) and Nigel Farage.

Civilizational Collapse

The story of John Oliver buying $15 million of expired medical debt, for pennies on the dollar, then forgiving it,

John Oliver Forgiving Debt

makes me think of civilizational collapse.  Our Overlords are not taking care of business.  I don’t know if they are too stupid or too corrupt, but they are going to kill us all.  Allow me two examples.

The first example actually comes from another recent front page story about antibiotic resistant "superbugs".  If I knew for years this was coming, people who actually know something about biology, pharmacology, and epidemiology must have known it, too.

So, year after year I watched as our society turns itself inside-out about marijuana and cocaine and all sorts of other stupid shit (aka victimless crimes) of no civilizational consequence while, at the same time, our use of antibiotics is simply insane.  Never mind that we vastly over-prescribe antibiotics to people, which is bad enough.  But, what we do with them on the farms is the stuff of nightmares.  Friends, this cannot end well, and the end is coming into sight.

The John Oliver story is actually a story of educational collapse.  Too true, the debt collection industry needs some sorting out, just as John Oliver so brilliantly illustrates, but there is another angle to the story.

Once upon a time, schools used to teach something about consumer mathematics and personal finance.  I distinctly remember being drilled, in elementary school, how to make out a check, how to buy chicken by the pound, and so on.  Not anymore.

The schools could do a whole lot about teaching students to understand debt, but they do none of it. 

Instead, there is heated public debate about evolution vs creationism in the classroom.  Can you imagine anything less relevant to people’s lives?  I doubt there are a million people, in the entire world, to whom it actually matters, in any practical sense, whether creationism is true, or evolution.

It would not make a difference even in the lives of most scientists and engineers.  You could build a perfectly good bridge while believing in creationism.  How many times do you think they considered evolution while constructing the large hadron collider?  It just doesn’t matter.

Would your car mechanic be better at fixing your car if he believed in evolution?  Hardly.  Would your CPA calculate your taxes any differently if he were a creationist instead?  Hardly.  For approximately 99.98% of all humanity, it just does not matter. 

And yet, creationism vs evolution is one of the main elements of contention in the public debate over education while, year after year, young people graduate high school with no coherent thoughts in their heads about debt, or how to read their bank statement, or how to buy a house, or how to handle a credit card, or anything that actually matters in their lives.

They used to say about the famously corrupt political machine in Chicago that at least the garbage got collected and the snow plowed.  In other words, too bad about the corruption but at least they delivered necessary services.

Not anymore.  Our Overlords are not taking care of business.

The Romanian Mindset in America

Why I love debate.  In a recent discussion with a dear friend, about the (de)merits of modern journalism, it occurred to me that we have a sensitive measure of the extent to which our society has become socialized.

Many years ago, I visited Romania while they still suffered under the iron grip of the murderous megalomaniac, Nicolae Ceaușescu and his reptilian wife, Elena.  All media, print and broadcast, were government organs, and I wondered what Romanians could possibly know about the outside world.  I discovered that Romanians, with large lacunae, knew quite a lot.  But, it was the way in which they knew it that surprised me.

Romanians received most of their news about the world from Romanian sources.  They also received some news from the outside.  Much of the outside news came from the Soviet Bloc, but the BBC World Service did penetrate, in Romanian and English, as did Voice of America.

Now, the Romanians knew that government organs lied.  This was easy since, too many times, TV news would report on over-stocked store shelves while the Romanians could see the bare shelves with their own eyes.  They assumed that foreign sources also lied, and yet they could triangulate towards some level of truth.

For example, Romanian and Soviet Bloc sources would report that Russian liberation troops were fighting in Afghanistan.  The BBC and VOA would report that Soviet occupation troops were fighting in Afghanistan.  So, Romanians knew, for sure, that Soviet troops were in Afghanistan.  Maybe they could not be sure of the reasons, but they could be sure of the fact.  There were many other such examples.

With the revelation, in recent days, of the shameless deceit of Katie Couric, so reminiscent of the sleaze ball, Dan Rather, who defended his lies in 2004 with the famous adage, "false but accurate", it seems clear that 21st century Americans must read their news organs with a very healthy dose of skepticism.  Much like the Romanians of a previous century.

Fortunately, there are also many alternative sources of news.  These alternative sources are venemously accused of bias.  There is probably some truth to this accusation.  Maybe a lot of truth.  So, it is left for us to use all our sources and triangulate towards some level of truth.

For example, if one organ tells you that there is nothing to Hillary's email scandal, and another source tells you there is something to Hillary's email scandal, you can safely conclude there is---one more---Hillary scandal.  We may not know the exact parameters of this scandal, at least for a while, but we know there is yet another scandal.

The extent to which we have to adopt the Romanian mindset in reading the news is one measure of the extent to which our society has become socialized.  As Mikhail Gorbachev once observe, "Communism is pure propaganda."