Category Archives: Law

Delving Into Bitcoins And The Deep Web

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ragged-flagon-skyrim

Several days ago, the USD/BTC exchange rate soared to dizzying heights, reaching almost $250 for one unit of the virtual, decentralized currency. Then it crashed to $55. But since then, it has gone back up to $100.

I’d heard of them before, but I had assumed it was some sort of pyramid, and that the train had already passed. Pyramids are only good for those at the top. It’s the creators of currencies who get rich, not their users. In short, I was skeptical.

Still, as someone on a perpetual lookout for lazy and socially unproductive ways of making money, I knew I had to check it out.

And I discovered some rather interesting things.

First, Bitcoins can’t be just created out of thin air. Just like gold or other minerals, they have to be “mined” by solving complex cryptographic puzzles. In practice, some users pool their computing power for this task. There is a theoretical limit to the total amount of Bitcoins that can enter circulation: 21 million. So you can’t inflate it like you can with any fiat currency.

Second, they offer real advantages over conventional currencies. There are no banking or transfer charges, because you are your own bank. Your Bitcoins are held in an encrypted file on your hard drive, and can easily be transferred between your own accounts, or “wallets,” and other accounts. These transactions can be completely anonymous, because your wallet isn’t linked to your “true name” (paging Vernor Vinge).

This anonymity means that you can, in relative ease and safety, avail yourself of online black markets selling all kinds of cool shit of dubious legality.

For instance, on April 15th 2011 – since known as “Black Friday” in certain circles – the DoJ flunky Preet Bharara shut down the three biggest online poker companies operating in the US. In the ensuing panic, dozens of others left of their own accord, voluntarily restricting access to US players to avoid any legal ramifications. But a few continue to operate here. Perhaps the most interesting case is that of Seals with Clubs, a site where you gamble with Bitcoins. This is an example of an innovative and dynamic enterprise that has bypassed real life problems to create a product that people enjoy and that is likely to continue to grow, especially if governments start taking a harder line against online poker. (Incidentally, the games at Seals seem to be very soft, even at high stakes – or at least that is the impression I got from observing them for 15 minutes or so. Definitely something to look into if you get some portion of your income from poker).

But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Investigating Bitcoins led me, of course, to the “deep web,” the Silk Road, and even weirder places. I will retrace the journey, should you wish to undertake it yourself.

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The Fraud Of America’s “Rape Culture”

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In my previous post about the real incidence of rape (it is in massive decline! contrary to the claims of the campus rape industry), I said there was a discrepancy in the National Crime Victimization Survey statistics about its prevalence in the past several years. Steven Pinker writes that it was at 50/100,000 in 2008, whereas the only data I was able to access showed it to be at about 94/100,000 in 2011. Since it’s rather unlikely that the incidence of rape has doubled in the past three years, I suggested that either Pinker made a mistake or the NCVS has changed its definitions.

I was pleased to receive a reply from Steven Pinker on this and it seems that the second option is the likely one. The first one is certainly wrong, because he attached a spreadsheet showing the NCVS figures on rape for 1973-2008, and they do indeed show it declining from around 250/100,000 in the 1970′s to just 50/100,000 in recent years.

On the basis of that data I made the following telling chart.

rape-rates-usa-ncvs

It shows that a generation ago there really was something of a “rape culture” in that your average rape was very unlikely to be reported to police. Ironically, it was at precisely the time in history that reports of rape to police started to converge with the number of people who said they were raped in that year that all this rape culture rigmarole got going.

But as we can see, by that point the train had long departed. With reported rapes drawing close to the anonymously reported general incidence of rape*, plus the inherent ambiguity and fluidity around what actually constitutes rape, it is practically impossible to continue to imagine in good faith that a large number of innocent men aren’t getting tangled up in the narrow space between those two converging lines.

(Finally, even within just the modern US, there will be significant differences in rape prevalence between different regions and socio-economic groups. For instance, “rape culture” is considered by feminists to be more prevalent on the nation’s campuses. But considering that the average college student is one S.D. higher in IQ than the national average, and the close correlation between IQ and crime rates, it is in fact quite likely that modern US college towns are some of the very safest places for women in history. Then again it’s much safer to rant about “campus rape culture” from an actual campus than from within some inner city ghetto).

That is why I think that the higher-end (i.e. 25%+) estimates for false rape accusations, far from being the products of MRM chauvinist hysteria, are in fact the most credible ones today.

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I Don’t Care About Bradley Manning

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No matter how you look at it, he is a traitor. He violated the UCMJ. Although he is free to make ethical arguments as to why he leaked Collateral Murder and the US Embassy cables, the US is fully within its rights to prosecute him.

I’m quite consistent about this: Treason is a punishable offense, no matter where and why it happens. I do not have an issue with the US executing the Rosenbergs or the USSR executing Western spies during the Cold War either. It’s part of the risk you take when you choose to sell out your country for a few shekels. This likewise applies when you do it not for money but for “idealistic” reasons.

I agree that in a perfect world, the fact of Manning (1) releasing it out of ethical, not monetary convictions and (2) giving the entire world access to it, as opposed to foreign hostile intelligence services – unlike, for instance, the Russian KGB traitor, Vasily Mitrokhin – should be a mitigating factor. However, as a sovereign nation, the US has no obligation to take that or international left/liberal opinion into account.

The Assange case is completely different. Here the US is trying to extend its jurisdiction to the entire world, so that an Australian citizen can now be found guilty of “espionage” against the US even if he’d never stepped foot inside it. This is called imperialism, and we are opposed to it. What’s more, the methods used to do it are particularly nauseating and underhanded. The probable plan is to extradite Assange to Sweden, from whence he can be quietly renditioned to the US. All based on incredible and patently false rape accusations, questioning which is going to get you blacklisted and smeared by legions of Guardianistas, PC brigades, concern trolls, and sundry useful idiots of imperialism. It would be infinitely more respectable for the US to just whack him.

That is why I support Assange to the hilt, but don’t care for Manning. It’s a very logical and consistent position, I think, but many don’t see it that way. They view it as anti-American, misogynist, and reactionary. I think it is pro-American, anti-imperialist, and pro-rule of law.

Much Ado About Rape: Quantifying A Big Taboo

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The past two days I had the pleasure of observing the blowout over a post by blogger Matt Forney about rape – or more precisely, about “how to rape women and get away with it.” It’s completely satirical, quite funny, and one can’t help but by impressed by the size of the balls (no homo) needed to write that shit in a culture where rape is far more of a taboo than murder. Not very logical that, is it? But it’s true. You can assault people with reckless abandon or even shoot up civilians at a Russian airport in any number of FPS games, but rape is a no-no (so is even normal sex, for that matter). Unless you’re in Japan, but I digress…

Anyhow, I don’t know what set off the tripwire – Mr. Forney had published the article in question months ago – but within a few hours he was getting a flood of Internet hate from assorted Tumblr feminists and their angry beta male orbiters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Director for International Freedom of Expression” expressed the hope he’d get fired; others called for him to be raped and/or killed. The Anonymous brigade also joined in. After a couple of days, they blackmailed him into taking the post down. You can still read the original here at this blog (which is ironically enough dedicated to PUA hate).

As anyone can quite clearly see, the real issue Mr. Forney was addressing was false rape, and more specifically the campus rape industry that has sprung up in recent decades to employ the new legions of Gender Studies majors. According to those moonbats, something like 25% of female university students were raped in the course of their studies (suffice to say pulling down your panties after having had too much to drink and regretting it afterwards qualifies as “rape” in their bizarro-world). One almost can’t refrain from making jokes at their expense, but since that doesn’t tend to turn out so well, I will focus on statistics as is my wont anyway. After all, facts and data are much more difficult to censor out of existence than articles that can be construed – however tendentiously – as “promoting” rape.

The National Crime Victimization Survey is a dataset of interviews with a vast and representative sample of the US population that aims to get an objective picture of the true incidence of crime in America. The graph below is from the book The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker, a dyed-in-the-wool end-of-history type liberal: “It shows that in 35 years the rate has fallen by an astonishing 80 percent, from 250 per 100,000 people over the age of twelve in 1973 to 50 per 100,000 in 2008.” Now one has to give the feminists their fair due; if not for their anti-rape campaigns, the rate of decline would have likely been slower. Nonetheless, it is ironic that the public panic over rape and sexual assault has risen to fever pitch at precisely the moment in history when the real lifetime risk of becoming a victim of rape has never been lower.

incidence-of-rape-us-pinker

Now to be honest again, I do not know if the 50 per 100,000 figure is entirely accurate. Checking the data directly gives 243,800 rapes for an over-twelve population of 257,542,240 in 2011, which translates to a rate of 94 per 100,000 for 2011. Whence the discrepancy? I don’t know. Maybe Pinker made a mistake in his calculations. Or maybe it’s a semantic difference; whereas Pinker refers to just “rape”, the NCVS study linked to above calls it “rape / sexual assault.” Maybe they are treated as distinct crimes? Regardless, it is not even in the same ballpark as the 25% victimization rates – during four years of college – cited by the campus rape industry. It is, in reality, as gauged by a representative sample of the population of whom half will be women, much less than 1%, and probably around 0.1% or 0.2%.

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The Evolution Of Chinese IQ

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In the discussion at the previous post, in which I took exception to Ron Unz’s theory of the East Asian Exception, he alerted me to so additional work on the matter he’d done as a Harvard freshman on Chinese IQ. You can read his summary of Social Darwinism and Rural China as well as Steve Sailer’s commentary on it.

Ron Unz’s Theory of Social Darwinism in Rural China

According to Ron Unz, Chinese peasants lived close to their Malthusian limits for millennia on end. That is correct. Furthermore, Chinese rural life was ”remarkably sophisticated in its financial and business arrangements”, far more so even than in England. I do not have the comparative knowledge to offer informed commentary on this, though I would stop to note that such a system may not have been so much a generator of “selective pressure for those able to prosper” under complexity as a reflection of already high IQ’s. After all on most social, economic, and technological metrics China was far ahead of Europe until the 18th century or so (though there were important exceptions). Furthermore, “virtually all Chinese were on an equal legal footing”, with far fewer of the feudalistic or caste distinctions that proliferate in India and pre-Enlightenment Europe. This is also correct.

This environment included a number of mechanisms that promoted a highly eugenic development path for the Chinese population. Ron Unz says that only the relative affluent could afford their wives for their children. This is not quite correct, or should I say permanently correct, as this issue only heavily manifested itself during times of Malthusian stress, when families opted to kill baby daughters resulting in skewed sex ratios. Otherwise, we should note that Europeans within the Hajnal Line married late and that the poor sometimes didn’t marry at all, so this particular eugenic effect was if anything stronger in Europe.

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Assange Should Have Picked The Russian Embassy

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UK police descend on Assange’s embassy refuge.

According to the Ecuadorians, their Embassy was threatened with a revocation of its status as Ecuadorian sovereign territory in the case that President Rafael Correa offers Julian Assange political asylum. This would clear the way for PC Plod could go in and fish out Assange. Presumably this is to avoid breaking one of the cornerstones of international law, satisfying its letter while raping its spirit. Truly fascinating the lengths and lows to which Britain is prepared to go to satisfy its puppet masters.

My initial thoughts are:

(1) Assange should have chosen the Russian Embassy. Ecuador is small and doesn’t have clout. Russia (or China, for that matter) wouldn’t have handed over Assange either, for the propaganda coup if little other reason, and even as cringingly obsequious a country as the UK would have hesitated to take them on so directly.

(2) A timely reminder that Assange is wanted for questioning (not charged) on a crime that it is not even a crime in the UK itself. I wonder if there is anybody, anybody at all, who is still willing to argue that his case is not entirely political?

(3) One would hope that Ecuador does not tolerate any British violation of its sovereignty and mounts a like response – and that countries like Venezuela, Argentina, and (preferably, though highly improbable) Russia and China join them in solidarity. But either way one of the good things about this is that it will make clear to any lingering doubters in non-puppet countries like Russia that Western rhetoric on human rights and international law only goes as far as it benefits them.

EDIT 8/16: And asylum was granted.

The Death Penalty: It’s Conditional

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User Jennifer Hor writes:

Last time I looked at the financial cost of capital punishment in the US was several years ago and already in the late 1990s – early 2000s, the cost of executing someone was US$8 million in Florida… There are costs involved like the various appeals processes which take up people’s time and hiring and paying juries for several trials that might take weeks or months. Economic austerity may be the one thing that gets cash-strapped states like California to abolish the death penalty.

My highlights. The death penalty is expensive in America only because it chooses to make it so. I’m not much against that because the US is also clearly rich enough to afford the process. The only problem of course is that it in effect nullifies the deterrent value of the DP. I read in Freakonomics that the average life expectancy of a man on death row is actually higher than of a bro selling drugs in the hood. So what kind of deterrent is that? Either go the Singapore/China route of a quick trial and execution – or you might as well cancel it altogether.

But it’s not really an issue I care about much either way. It’s not exactly going to make the US or California bankrupt. As long as the DP applies for appropriate crimes (e.g. premeditated murder, serial murder, national treason during wartime, etc) and not stupid shit like blasphemy or drugs possession then I’m basically fine with it. I’m not a bloodthirsty person but why the hell should I care about the life of some lowlife who derives entertainment from killing people or eating children or whatever?

I submit that in some places and circumstances however the DP would be highly useful. In low IQ / high testosterone countries where violent crime levels are extremely high – and where policing isn’t very effective. Visceral demonstrations are very good deterrents and this is in fact probably the reason why virtually all pre-industrial societies enforced the DP. I submit that the DP would still be highly desirable in places where violent crime is out of control like Venezuela or South Africa.

IQ Is A Social Construct Except When It Isn’t

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That is, when it happens to show that someone is a mental retard and as such shouldn’t be executed for murder.

Just the old liberal hamster wheel logic in action.

I’m actually quite indifferent to the DP. But I’m not indifferent to using mental retardation as a defense. If anything it is more of a reason to execute the murderer as the very dull operate by instinct and emotion, not cost/benefit calculations, and as such cannot be expected to reform and make positive contributions to society even if provided with incentives to do so.

The other reason is shown by the graph above. Stupid people are simply far, far more likely to be criminals than normal people. Making retardation a defense against the DP effectively puts the most criminally prone cognitive fraction of the American population above the law.

Mexico Makes The Right Choice

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Two days ago, Mexicans returned the PRI to power after 12 years in the political wilderness, with Enrique Peña Nieto becoming President. The leftist Obrador as well as PAN’s Mota lost. I don’t know much about Mexico but this is how I interpret things.

(1) The PAN seem to be full of neoliberals, who serve foreign and corporate interests and don’t care much for ordinary Mexicans. They favor a hyper-militarized approach to the War on Drugs, but this hasn’t yielded successes, as the Mexican homicide rate doubled in the past 5 years. The socialist Obrador is a poseur, who does not much like democracy (as per his Orange Revolution-like attempts to overturn the results of the 2006 elections). In general, the opposition to the PRI is quite thuggish while attempting to paint itself as transparent and democratic; much like the Russian opposition to United Russia. See the impudence of the Yo Soy 132 student protesters, rich self-entitled thugs who think it cool to physically threaten their political enemies.

(2) The PAN hasn’t had much success in the past 12 years. While north-bound migration has fallen, this was due to economic difficulties in the US as opposed to Mexican success. It doesn’t seem to have become noticeably less corrupt nor did it achieve significant economic growth relative to the developed world (see right).

I don’t think this was mostly the PAN’s fault. After all, Mexico is pretty much where it should be as dictated by its (very modest) level of human capital or national IQ; its position relative to the US hasn’t budged over the past century. That said the PRI is still the better choice. It is the party of the majority, respectably corporatist but also nationalist and mindful of workers’ interests. The same cannot be said of the PAN, who pander to the interests of foreigners and Mexican elites; their electorate are oligarchs and emigres. As for Obrador he is a dangerous demagogue. Mexico made the right choice.

Modern Britain In Four Extradition Cases

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Imagine you’re a British extraditions judge and you are asked to rule on the following cases.

(1) An oligarch exile who came from a country where he might well have ordered contract murders and is now loudly and implacably opposed to its new President who dispossessed him of his political influence. Although the British establishment considers said country, Russia, a geopolitical competitor, the exile has more delusions than power, and is unable to inflict any damage on it.

(2) A British computer science student who made $230,000 through a website that offered hyperlinks to films and TV shows online; nothing cardinally differentiates it from Google. The US demands his extradition where he can be imprisoned for up to 10 years. What he did is not even a crime in the UK.

(3) A celebrity Australian citizen wanted on sexual molestation charges in Sweden that are not even a crime in the UK, and which were, in fact, previously dismissed – only to be brought up again soon after Cablegate on the initiative of a Swedish prosecutor who happens to have a rich history of radical feminist advocacy. The opacity of Sweden’s judicial system on sexual crimes means said Australian citizen can easily be renditioned to the US where a grand jury has already been convened and issued a secret indictment against him.

(4) A serial pedophile who is an American citizen who is wanted by the US.

Berezovsky lives a happy life in Moscow on the Thames. Richard O’Dwyer was ruled eligible for extradition by the Home Office. Assange’s bail conditions were more stringent than that of a suspected murderer from South Africa, and his extradition has recently been ruled eligible causing him to seek refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy. Shawn Sullivan is protected from extradition by the High Court because imprisonment is a violation of pedophiles’ human rights.

No further comment is necessary on my part. Take from this what you will.

Global Highs

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Via Economist:

This makes sense to me. While cannabis is well-known in Russia, attitudes towards it are mostly disparaging where not hostile even in relatively enlightened Moscow. The druggies there tend to be more hardcore anyway. It is a large part of the conversation in the UK – see the debates over what classification it should get – but actually getting hold of it wasn’t easy (I never managed to at any rate, though in fairness I didn’t try; nor did I ever see a weed circle).

In contrast, weed is ubiquitous in the US – well, at least in California. There are books on cannabis horticulture openly sold on the streets (some go on to put this knowledge into practice in secluded inland forest glades). There is the 4/20 Festival in which thousands of people gather round the Bay to smoke weed. While it is illegal in theory in practice it is almost never enforced and one can easily find dealers with product. Indeed one can buy a medical certificate proving that you have an ailment that required treatment with marijuana from a doctor for a small fee.

Evolutionary Roots Of Homophobia?

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Russia is in something of a homophobic fever. Four regions (including Saint-Petersburg) have banned the dissemination of “gay propaganda” to minors, it may yet go federal, and disassociated itself from a G8 statement on gay rights. It’s obviously not like in many Middle Eastern countries where homosexuality is illegal (as in the USSR) but attitudes do resemble those of the US or the UK in the 1980′s.

This got me thinking on another tangent, however. Why would a straight person be homophobic anyway?

From the POV of straight dudes, more gays means less competition for chicks.  (Lesbians are mostly bisexual so it doesn’t apply in reverse, and besides, homophobia tends to focus on gays anyway). That is one reason why I don’t mind gays apart from my general live-let live attitudes. The incentives for chicks aren’t as clear-cut as for dudes, as they’d have to try harder to find permanent partners, but upside is they are much less likely to wind up with a closet homosexual.

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Race Denial vs. Racism – A False Dichotomy

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This may be the article I’ve hesitated longest over publishing. Its subject matter has always hovered as a specter over my writings on the close relation between human capital and economic growth; an obvious but studiously ignored presence*. I am talking, of course, about race and IQ. Of racial differences in IQ, to be precise.

Why now? First, it’s a propitious moment to raise the issue, what with the recent publicity surrounding the Trayvon Martin case and the firing of John Derbyshire from The National Review (for writing an article in another magazine whose recommendations most liberals follow in private even as they denounce it as incorrigibly racist in public). But my purpose isn’t to get attention as such. On these matters, it tends to come from unwelcome quarters, either from the PC police (who regard any discussion of race other than to deny it as crimethink), or from the reactionary White nationalist crowd, who think they’ve stumbled on ideological soul-brethren (thanks but no thanks, or to quote Robert Lindsay, “We’re never getting a boarding pass. Never!”). I suspect being a liberal race realist is somewhat akin to being a Jew before anti-Semitism went out of fashion. You get fired on from all sides. Not fun.

The second, more substantive reason, is that the issue matters. If it was an irrelevance, I obviously wouldn’t bother (though tellingly, most people have no problem discussing genetic causes for relatively unimportant things, such as the preponderance of Kenyan marathoners, or East Asians’ lack of alcohol tolerance). But there is a mountain of evidence indicating that IQ levels have a very real and direct influence on the world, from the life earnings potential of individuals to the wealth and poverty of nations.

This is a futurist blog, and it has never shied away from inconvenient but pertinent observations that go against Establishment orthodoxy, e.g. that the world is finite, and industrial growth in its current form is unsustainable. As regards its distribution, my views on the sources of prosperity would discomfit both left and right; contrary to theorists from both camps, it is mainly determined by levels of human capital, both within nations and internationally (the two major outlier groups, countries with resource windfalls or central-planning legacies, are exceptions that prove the rule). A corollary is that if there are genetically rooted differences in IQ between races that go beyond the power of racism or exploitation to explain, then there would be variegated ceilings on the extent to which human capital can be developed in different nations and different societies. It would also mean that major inequalities in global development are here to stay.

But first, a much-needed definition of terms to clarify why Race Realism (or “Human Biodiversity”) is not coterminous with Racism.

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What I Believe: 2 Year Update

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I’ve remembered about the article What We Believe I wrote two years back, in the early days when I was still writing anonymously (as “stalker”) and was pretending to be a team. Had fun rereading it, almost like a time machine. My views on Russia have remained mostly unchanged. I’ve grown to become somewhat more positive about the legacy of the Soviet Union; like most Russians, I retain the same ambiguous attitude towards Stalin, whom I have described as “the despotic Messiah who led and ruled [Russians] like the God of the Old Testament”; and I am as convinced as ever of the hypocritical and double standards-laced coverage of subjects like Putin, Chechnya, and Russia’s human rights record in the Western media.

Furthermore, I’ve become much more skeptical about the universalism of liberalism and HR. Two years back I believed the West should be actively involved in cultivating social progress in regards to women’s rights, LGBT rights, etc, in backward areas of the Muslim world; not any more, though I remain a social progressive. It’s just that I’ve recognized that these concepts – liberalism, HR, etc – are but manifestations of a specific Romano-Germanic (Western) culture, and do not necessarily have much resonance with the cultural traditions of other civilizations. In some cases the cultural clash between the two leaves produced nothing but destruction. Other civilizations should be left free to forge their own path into the iron cage of modernity, or not.

Far more interesting was reading my own “General Values” from two years ago, back when the world was so different and global neoliberalism appeared to be at high noon – whereas in reality it is near sunset, in large part due to the imminence of peak oil and the creeping insolvency of Pax Americana. I too have changed a lot. Reading about myself from back then is almost like listening to a highly familiar, but nonetheless different, person. From economic centrism, of the Krugmanite variety, to Green Communism. From atheism to pantheism. Lots more postmodernist claptrap. Etc. Let me outline my beliefs two years on.

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Freedom, Welfare, and the Future

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The welfare state, or what we conceive of as such today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although pre-modern states did perform some pro-welfare functions such as regulating prices and wages, maintaining workhouses for the poor and even a limited form of targeted social support[1], this spending was framed not in terms of the state’s fulfillment of defined obligations to its citizens, but as “wholly-discretionary state charity”. The state’s only incentive to do this, admittedly a powerful one, was to buy off revolt and preserve community cohesion; otherwise, these extremely hierarchical societies harbored no ethical concerns about empowering the individual or ensuring equality of opportunity. This meant that the prime means of social support remained one’s family and clan, friends, and local community institutions like the Church. The modern definition of a welfare state, such as the one provided by Robert Goodin – 1) it a) “intervenes in a market economy b) to meet certain of people’s basic needs c) through relatively direct means” and 2) is “a system of compulsory, collective, and largely non-discretionary welfare provision”[2] – has its early antecedents in Bismarck’s social insurance reforms (1889), the genesis of Swedish socialism in the 1930’s, and the US introduction of social security measures in the New Deal to mitigate the effects of the Great Depression.

Drawing on Goodin’s work, let us clarify the definition of the democratic welfare state. First, welfare states are explicitly market-based (ranging the gamut from America’s relative laissez-faire to Belarus’ “market socialism”) – according to Marshall, it “did not reject the capitalist market economy, but held that there were some elements in a civilized life which ranked above it and must be achieved by curbing or suppressing the market”[3]. Second, it does not (necessarily) aim for radical economic or social transformations; its goals are more modest – “the characteristically welfare statist approach is to opt for readjusting final distributions [primarily to relieve those in the most distress through direct provision of basic needs like food, shelter, etc], rather than altering the pattern of property rights in productive resources that gave rise to undesirable distributions in the first place”[4]. Third, welfare is enshrined in law and viewed as a universal civil right for those deserving of it, in contrast to private charities and the “public charity” embodied in the English Poor Laws (their aid being viewed as gifts and humiliating to have to accept).

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