Ron Paul's support among the police and military

Audacious Epigone has a post up on the disproportionate donations Ron Paul gets from the military and police, relative to other republican candidates.

Here's the comment I left:

This is very interesting data. Based on their ostensible love of liberty and their anti-authoritarian bent, many wouldn't expect libertarians (Paul supporters) to be found disproportionately in rather authoritarian occupations (military and police).

I'm having trouble understanding how the US military personnel being disproportionately right-wing would explain their disproportionate support of Paul relative to other republicans. Right-wing is not the same thing as libertarian and it seems to me that it would be expected that the military would be more right-wing but not necessarily expected that among the military right-wing, there would be disproportionately many libertarians.

The youthfulness of the military would be expected to skew them in favour of Paul but, as Mikey pointed out, that doesn't work very well wrt Paul's disproportionate support among the police.

That the military supports Paul doesn't necessarily lend credence to anti-interventionism. One could suppose that the troops are merely cowardly and/or selfish and that they want to collect their paychecks without having to risk their life, regardless of whether the mission is just or not.

edit added: When I state that troops might support Paul for "selfish reasons", I am of course referring to irrationally selfish reasons, as it would make no sense for a soldier to donate to Paul if he is truly selfish. He would lose some money and his contribution would be too small to affect his likelyhood of dying.

Political Forums

I would like to emphasize to my readers that there are two excellent forums for discussing nondemocratic, syncretic, and far-right ideologies. The first is a new one called Iron March. The second deals with all ideologies but has a special section called "Paternalism & Corporatism" where the above listed ideologies are discussed. It is called The Politics Forum, or PoFo. I am now regularly posting on these forums.

I would also like to inform those readers who did not already know it that the list of recommended websites is connected to feeds whereby the blogs are automatically listed by order of most recent update.

Fun with Ngrams (part 2): social justice, discriminatory, Capitalism etc.

This post was inspired by two posts at Audacious Epigone's blog: one on discrimination and one on social justice.

The following Ngrams will showcase the evolving meaning of discrimination from being something good to being something bad. It will also be demonstrated that the frequencies of usage of "social justice" and "Capitalism" began increasing dramatically at around the same time as the change in the meaning of discrimination. All the Ngrams are from the American English corpus with a smoothing of 1. To see higher resolution versions click on the images. To see the Ngram viewers from which they were taken, click on the links over the word Ngram.

The first Ngram plots the following words, from 1840 to 2008, in the following order: discriminate,discriminatory,discriminating,discriminated


The second Ngram plots the following words from 1840 to 2008: discriminate,discriminate against,discriminated against,discrimination against,discriminating against,discriminatory


The third Ngram plots the following words from 1840 to 2008: discrimination,discrimination against,discriminatory,discriminating


The fourth Ngram plots the following words from 1880 to 2008: Capitalism,social justice,discriminatory



Analysis of Ngrams will come later.

Fun with Ngrams (part 1): underprivileged, Jewish community, etc.

I decided to make some Ngrams relating to the roles played by antisemitism and German National Socialism in the alteration of the English language in an anti-White direction.

Google Ngram is an interactive tool which tracks the relative frequencies of words or word combinations in published text over time (as a % of all words in the corpus of published text published during the corresponding time interval). All of the Ngrams shown are from the "American English" corpus with a smoothing of 1.

I had to resize the images which made them rather blurry. You can see the full size images either by clicking on the links provided in the highlighted/coloured text, which takes you to the corresponding Ngram viewer, or by clicking on the images themselves, which takes you to the images directly. If you want the links to open in a separate tab or window rather than in the same page, then simply right-click on the link (or image) and select from the drop down menu the "open in new tab" or "open in new window" options.


The first Ngram is from here and charts the frequencies of "Jewish community","underprivileged", and "human rights" from 1920 to 1960.



The second Ngram is from here and charts the frequencies of "Jewish community","underprivileged", and "human rights" from 1700 to 2008.



The third Ngram is from here and charts the frequencies of "minority rights","antisemitism","racist","racism","disadvantaged", and "national socialism" from 1920 to 1960.



The fourth Ngram is from here and charts the frequencies of "minority rights","antisemitism","racist","racism","disadvantaged", and "national socialism" from 1920 to 2008.



What do you think?

I will provide some commentary to go along with the above Ngrams sometime in a new post.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the Whitest of them all?

This post will attempt to rank 13 European countries' relative proportions of non-euro admixture/affinity. I will be using a study which included data on those 13 European countries. Unfortunately not all major countries in Europe were included in the study. Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Greece were not included and neither were any Yugoslavian countries.

The study compares the 13 European countries with each other together with 4 other geographically non-European countries: Nigeria (Ibidan Yoruba, denoted YRI), USA Whites (Utah, self-identified northwest European ancestry, denoted CEU), China (Beijing, denoted CHB), and Japan (Tokyo, denoted JPT). I use the data relating the 13 European countries + CEU against CHB as a proxy for the mongoloid racial type and YRI as a proxy for the negroid racial type. I will use two data sources from the study - Fst statistics and Principle Component Analysis (PCA). Note that the data provided in the study is based on samples (groups of people) from each of the countries and therefore only directly compares these samples. The samples are not perfectly representative of the genetics of each of the countries but can still serve as accurate proxies (with some caveates). All the data used can be freely accessed at:
http://www.nature.com/ejhg/journal/v16/n12/fig_tab/ejhg2008210ft.html

First we look at what PCA can tell us by comparing countries' positions along the first PC in Figure 2. Below is a brief explanation of what PCA is followed by a rough ranking that I constructed based on the data in the figure. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from the figure.

PCA decomposes multi-dimensional data into maximally informative components. The first Principle Component (PC) captures as much of the total variance in a single linear dimension as possible. The second PC captures as much of the remaining variance (variance which isn’t correlated with the first PC) in a single linear dimension as possible. Similarly, all remaining PCs (3, 4, …) each account for as much of the remaining variance (variance which isn’t correlated with any of the previous PCs) as possible. The data from the study covers approximately 10% of the human genome. That is, the same corresponding 10% of each sampled person’s genome is examined by the study. Each dot/symbol in the PCA plots represents an individual as in a cartesian plot/plane.

Legend:
UK United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No Norway
Si Slovakia
Ge Germany
Fr France
Po Poland
Be Belgium
Ru Russia
Ro Romania
Cz Czech Republic
Sw Sweden
Sp Spain
Hu Hungary
CEU Utah, USA

Ranking by most Caucasoid member (PC 1)
1/2. UK
1/2. No
3. Ge
4. Fr
5. Po
6/7. Cz
6/7. Ru
8/9. Be
8/9. Sw
10. CEU
11. Si
12/13/14. ?

Ranking by second most Caucasoid member (PC 1)
1. UK
2. Ge
3. Fr
4. Po
5. No
6. Sw
7. Be
8. Ru
9. CEU
10/11/12/13/14. ?

Ranking by most Caucasoid estimated median (PC 1)
1. UK
2/3. Po
2/3. No
4. Sw
5. Be
6. CEU
7. Ge?
8. Fr
9. Cz
10. Si
11/12. Ru
11/12. Hu
13. Sp
14. Ro

Next we will see the results obtained from an analysis of the Fst data provided in table 1. The Fst is a measure of genetic distance between two samples which compares the average within sample variability to the variability of the aggregation/combination of the two samples. The larger the Fst the greater the between sample/population variance relative to the within population variance. In general the Fst is nonlinear (further information will be provided upon request) but for the purposes of this analysis the Fst is probably approximately linear and will be treated as such. First, the 13 euros + CEU are ranked (by me) from least to greatest raw (unadjusted) affinity to YRI and CHB.

YRI (negroid) Raw Affinity (relative to Norway)
1. No 0.0000
2. Sw 0.0007
3. P0 0.0011
4. UK 0.0018
5. CEU 0.0021
6. Ru 0.0027
7. Cz 0.0028
8. Ge 0.0029
9. Si 0.0033
10. Be 0.0035
11. Fr 0.0038
12. Hu 0.0041
13. Ro 0.0068
14. Sp 0.0071

CHB (mongoloid) Raw Affinity (also relative to Norway)
1/2. UK -0.0015
1/2. Sp -0.0015
3. CEU -0.0014
4. Fr -0.0013
5. Be -0.0012
6. Po -0.0005
7. Ge -0.0004
8. No 0.0000
9. Cz 0.0001
10. Sw 0.0008
11. Si 0.0012
12. Hu 0.0023
13. Ro 0.0034
14. Ru 0.0045

Simple sum of Mongoloid and Negroid affinities
1. No 0.0000
2. UK 0.0003
3. Po 0.0006
4. CEU 0.0007
5. Sw 0.0015
6. Be 0.0023
7/8. Ge 0.0025
7/8. Fr 0.0025
9. Cz 0.0029
10. Si 0.0045
11. Sp 0.0056
12. Hu 0.0064
13. Ru 0.0072
14. Ro 0.0113

There will be more to come later.

13 reasons not to support democracy

Two years ago I started a forum thread at politicsforum.org with the same topic as the title of this post. The link to it is:
http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=95651
It is also available at the FreeMediaProductions website at:
http://www.freemediaproductions.info/Editorials/2009/06/30/13-reasons-to-not-support-democracy/

1. Corruption – politicians receive large sums of money from businesses and other special interests (e.g. unions) in exchange for implementing specific policies. Politicians depend on such contributions for campaign funding.

2. Lack of accountability – because any given politician or party has such limited power for such limited periods of time it is difficult to evaluate their impact. Power often oscillates from one party to the next such that outcomes can easily be attributed to the party currently in power or, similarly easily, to the party previously in power. Power is divided between various branches and levels of government and among numerous politicians such that responsibility and accountability are dispersed and confused.

3. Incoherence – the division of power, both between different levels of government and within each level of government, can lead to an assemblage of policies that are inconsistent in terms of there objectives and implementation.
Example: Division of power requires compromise between those who support the complete ban of a substance and those who favor no restrictions. The compromise reached is to criminalize the production of the substance but not its use, thereby allowing unfettered demand to combine with exclusion of legal production to produce a huge market for organized crime.

4. Gridlock/delay – disagreement within government and so-called “checks and balances” delay the implementation of much needed policy changes. Consultation of “the people” takes time.

5. Fuzziness of the concept – the very meaning of democracy is unclear. Whether a given system of government is more democratic than another is frequently disputed among proponents of democracy.

6. Corporate (etc) media influence – much media is delivered by corporations with their own interests that could influence their reporting. Media depends on advertising for much of its funding and could be compelled to report in ways favorable to current and prospective advertisers. Such reporting heavily influences the voting public.

7. Lack of effective/powerful international/supranational government and impracticality of its formation within a democratic framework – practically precludes comprehensive, substantial, global cooperation and coordination to solve problems.
Example: Two states share a border. One of the states implements a strict ban while the other does not. Consequently, the state with the ban has much greater difficulty enforcing its ban.

8. Instability – governments and policies often change frequently resulting in wastage of resources from starting and undoing programs and lack of sustained long-term policies/projects. Incentives become less effective due to uncertainty.

9. Political myopia – campaigning focuses on short-term goals, accomplishments, and results. Politics becomes overly focused on shot-run outcomes.

10. Superficiality/triviality – voters are unwilling and/or unable to dedicate much time or effort to investigate or analyze political issues. Consequently, politics becomes focused on rhetoric, emotions, trivialities and is overly simplistic. Policies and candidates are selected within the context of the aforementioned state of political discourse.

11. Division/partisanship “democracy fosters division along party lines” people are expected to adopt particular ideological identities (opposition vs government etc) – unity is precluded (granted, Russia may be an exception).

12. Democracy allows good governments to be voted out of office.

13. “Human rights” often promoted as essential components to democracy. Many of these “human rights” interfere with the implementation of good policy.

The Left, the Right, and the Third Position: Prt 2

I decided to make a second post on this topic. The first post addressed the essence of the left-right political spectrum in absolute terms. However, the left, right, and centre are usually thought of in relative terms. That is, the centre is defined as being the point along the left-right spectrum at which half the population (any arbitrarily chosen group of people) lies to the left of that point and the other half lies to its right. It is in this relative sense that the "right" can axiomatically favour equality to a greater extent than inequality, all else equal. The political mainstream in the modern West is thoroughly leftist (equalist/egalitarian) when considered in absolute terms. To be merely axiomatically neutral with respect to equality is generally considered a far-right position. Hence fascism, because it doesn't consider equality axiomatically good, is categorized by many as being "far-right". This categorization is basically correct insofar as one is using the relative definition of "far-right". It should be noted that what is considered far-right today was considered far-left in other times and places (eg 17th century Europe). There have been many places and times for which absolutely right-wing thinking was considered normal. It was believed by many that Feudal lords were meant by divine providence to possess great wealth, power, and privileges. It was thought that they, and they alone, deserved their station in life.

Many people, especially those on the right, contend that the left-right spectrum is ultimately about the extent to which statism or collectivism is favoured as opposed to individualism or classical liberalism. I disagree. The collectivist-individualist and statist-liberal (by "liberal" I mean classically liberal - it makes more sense etymologically and in other ways) spectrums are real, important, and useful, but they do not capture the essence of the left-right divide. For example, so-called "progressive" taxation, which taxes those with larger incomes at higher rates than those with smaller incomes, is considered left-wing. This policy could plausibly be construed as statist and collectivist - so far so good. But, the reverse policy, a "regressive" taxation, which taxes those with larger incomes at a lower rate than those with smaller incomes, would conventionally be considered extremely right-wing. But these opposite policies are equally statist and equally "collectivist". Clearly, those who contend that the left-right spectrum is equivalent to the statist-liberal spectrum have a lot of explaining to do.

I will add to this post with updates later. I will also answer all comments. This blog will explore many different topics - economics, philosophy, politics, HBD, and more.