You might be wondering about what’s it about. You might also be concerned that with three blogs, I might be stretching myself too thin. No worries on the latter account – the Sublime Oblivion blog is very much a side project, and will mostly consist of the occasional sci-fi or fantasy book review. But in the very long-term perspective I think it will assume increasing prominence, because really one of my life ambitions is to be a best-selling speculative fiction writer.

That blog can also be followed on Facebook.

I have several ideas floating around. One of those that is closest to realization is a sci-fi / “Deadly Game” that is preliminarily titled 100 YEARS TO VICTORY. I’m not very happy with it (unlike with DARK LORD OF THE KREMLIN) so it is highly likely to change. It is, essentially, a fictionalization of the Limits to Growth scenarios of industrial development, ecological stresses, and civilizational collapse.

I have written a possible prologue to it here: Rats!. If you are interested, please read it, and comment on it here or there. I am most interested in finding out whether you would continue reading it, or whether I should give up on this fantasy/sci-fi thing straight off the bat so as to avoid embarrassing myself any further.

I’m not disappointed not to see myself there, as I blog about a lot of different things making classification quite hard.

If I had to try to place myself there, I’d probably be somewhere east of the Derb, west of Steve Hsu, and north of Taki. If I had to pick just one school, I probably best fit into the HBD community, but I’m interested in Techno-Futurism (incidentally, I met up with Mike Anissimov last week) and “Masculine Reaction” – or at least its “game” component, I don’t much care for the MRM - as well.

What leaps out at first sight is the sheer extent to which the worst affected countries are Muslim ones. Of the 29 countries with a birth defects prevalence of over 70/1,000 births, only 5 are not majority Muslim. 9 of the worst 10 are Muslim. Furthermore, whereas those five are all very poor African nations, the Muslim ones include very rich Arab states like the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

What explains this? Is it something in the water?

Almost certainly this is due to high rates of consanguineous marriages. As hbd* chick has frequently pointed out, the institution of father’s brother’s daughter is prevalent and commonly accepted pretty much only within the historic borders of the 8th century Caliphate. This is arguably a very regressive custom: While it promotes familial loyalty, the side cost is high rates of clannishness, nepotism, depressed national IQ’s… and, as graphically illustrated above, birth defects.

The country with the least amount of birth defects per newborn is estimated to be France.

(1) The older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, never adjusted to life in the US. “I don’t have a single American friend,” he said. His younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, had an understanding of US teen hood / SWPL culture. He was a 9/11 “truther.” That’s from the Twitter account. That said, he wasn’t too down with America either.

Idk why it's hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job, I mean I guess fuck the facts y'all are some real #patriots #gethip—
Jahar (@J_tsar) September 02, 2012

a decade in america already, i want out—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 14, 2012

(2) I’m not sure if beta male rage had anything to do with this. On the one hand, he does not seem to have been a social recluse. He wrestled. He is darkly handsome, and he has the self-assured gaze of a confident man on his photos. And most tellingly, and to his credit, he went down with guns blazing. On the other hand:

All this talk about the world ending triggered a zombie apocalypse dream last night, weak part was only gettin to 1st base before worlds end—
Jahar (@J_tsar) December 21, 2012

(3) Dzhokhar was a Chechen patriot, but not a raving/rabid one.

chechen dudes holding down russia with all of their gold medals—
Jahar (@J_tsar) August 03, 2012

how i miss my home land #dagestan #chechnya—
Jahar (@J_tsar) April 05, 2012

Tamerlan’s Amazon wish list included a Chechen phrasebook, “The Lone Wolf And the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule,” and “Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition.”

Obviously, they did not like Russian domination of Chechnya and wanted it to be truly independent, but their lives do not seem to have been dominated by it.

(4)  Dzhokhar says he knows English, Russia, and Chechen on his Vkontakte page. In reality, considering that even his older brother had a Chechen dictionary on his to-buy list, it’s unlikely that he knew it to any significant extent. His Russian was fluent in speech, but not in writing (he makes basic spelling errors):

(5) He has a sense of humor (mixed with bitterness). From his Vkontakte page:

“In school they give us a puzzle. There is a car. In the car there is a Dagestani, a Chechen, and an Ingush. Question – who’s driving the car? Maga answers: A policeman.“

(6) He was into Islam (he listed it as his “worldview” on Vkontakte), supported Palestine, etc., but it seems to have a fairly liberal variety. His last entry on Twitter was an RT of a kumbaya-type mufti who now lives in Zimbabwe:

Attitude can take away your beauty no matter how good looking you are or it could enhance your beauty, making you adorable.—
Mufti Ismail Menk (@muftimenk) April 17, 2013

But he definitely was religious, and visited the mosque.

I meet the most amazing people, spent the day with this Jamaican Muslim convert who shared his whole story with me, my religion is the truth—
Jahar (@J_tsar) December 31, 2012

Brothers at the mosque either think I'm a convert or that I'm from Algeria or Syria, just the other day a guy asked me how I came to Islam—
Jahar (@J_tsar) December 25, 2012

His brother  seems to have been a much more hardcore Islamist. His YouTube account  was divided between “Islam” and “Terrorism,” and Russian rap songs.

(7) There’s a few references and hints at trouble sleeping. A sign of mild to moderate depression?

I really don't like it when I have one ear pressed against the pillow and I start to hear my heart beat, who can sleep with all that noise—
Jahar (@J_tsar) April 07, 2013

I can't seem to drift away into the land of dreams #ditty—
Jahar (@J_tsar) January 21, 2013

And when he did fall asleep, the dreams seem to be violent (see also the zombie apocalypse one above) and tortured.

I had the scariest dream last night man when I woke up I was so relieved that it was only a dream—
Jahar (@J_tsar) December 12, 2012

I killed Abe Lincoln during my two hour nap #intensedream—
Jahar (@J_tsar) February 13, 2013

(8) It also emerges that the FBI had interviewed the older brother at the bequest of an unspecific foreign government – almost certainly Russia. Tamerlan had visited it for 6 months in 2011. I wonder if he established links with some of the Caucasus Emirate Wahhabi types while there – and if so, whether US suspicions about Russia’s “assaults” on human rights in Chechnya made them drop their guard on a man who, it is now clear, was by then fast becoming an Islamist radical.

(9) Some tweets were funny, some were ironic in light of what was to come. There are even a few pearls of wisdom there:

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 21, 2013

"Studying" is just a combination of the words student and dying—
Jahar (@J_tsar) February 28, 2013

Being bilingual is da bomb—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 26, 2013

Never try to fork a mini tomato while wearing a white shirt, it will explode—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 13, 2013

Never underestimate the rebel with a cause—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 11, 2013

Taking a shower after watching a scary movie is always exciting—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 01, 2013

Not being able to find the remote to the tv is probably one of the most reoccurring struggles of life—
Jahar (@J_tsar) February 17, 2013

My goal for the 2013 year is to get a girl pregnant and become a daddy #saidnooneever—
Jahar (@J_tsar) December 03, 2012

I was going to make a joke about Hamas but it Israeli inappropriate—
Jahar (@J_tsar) November 28, 2012

Do I look like that much of a softy I got these frail ass kids tryin to come at my neck, little do these dogs know they're barking at a lion—
Jahar (@J_tsar) February 02, 2013

I got these bros that I'd take a bullet for, in the leg or the shoulder or something nothing fatal tho—
Jahar (@J_tsar) January 30, 2013

My roommate talks in his sleep, when he does I respond, that must alter his dreams a lil bit—
Jahar (@J_tsar) January 23, 2013

I don't argue with fools who say islam is terrorism it's not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot—
Jahar (@J_tsar) January 16, 2013

I'm honestly too lazy to eat the things I like, a pomegranate for example takes too much effort—
Jahar (@J_tsar) January 06, 2013

I feel kind of clever at night by putting my alarm far from my bed but I really hate myself in the morning for it—
Jahar (@J_tsar) December 13, 2012

Not being able to find the remote to the tv is probably one of the most reoccurring struggles of life—
Jahar (@J_tsar) February 17, 2013

Taking a shower after watching a scary movie is always exciting—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 01, 2013

guys who allow women to control them and make decisions for them are pathetic #growapair—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 14, 2012

Never underestimate the rebel with a cause—
Jahar (@J_tsar) March 11, 2013

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.

(1) Download the Tor browser. It makes your online comings and goings untraceable (more or less) by bouncing it off multiple proxies. Or something like that. I don’t claim to understand it.

(2) Using it you can access the “deep web.” The deep web are sites that are not indexed by search engines. Its most interesting component are the black markets that sell stuff that is frequently illegal or semi-legal in the real world, e.g. guns, drugs, stolen information, etc.

The central information directory for this deep web is the ”Hidden Wiki.” Its precise .onion address changes from time to time – as with many of the sites there – so I will not bother linking to it. The address as of the time you read this article can be found easily enough by Googling.

As you can see from the screenshot above it’s clear that it’s dodgy as fuck from the very start. And that’s good.

(3) In the list you’ll find a link to the Silk Road. The Silk Road is sometimes called “the worst kept secret on the Internet.”

The Silk Road is to the deep web what the Ragged Flagon is to Skyrim: A massive black market selling all sorts of drugs, “services”, and “lab supplies” (har-har). After undergoing an easy registration process, you open up to this page:

Once you get over the surreal nature of the products on offer, you’ll see that it’s quite civilized, really. The sellers have ratings (as on Amazon or Yelp) which is how they build up reputation. If you find you’ve been undersold your weed, you write a negative review. Enough negative reviews – and the dealer no longer has any customers, and goes out of business. You pay in Bitcoins, no questions asked, and you are delivered the products in envelopes that don’t bear you name – making the transaction much more secure than if you were to make it with a street dealer. The drugs are likely to be purer as well because the guys who traffic online have reputations to protect, and tend to approach it more professionally than street low-life’s anyway. Some even have refund policies if you are unhappy with your product.

In short, it is a truly inspiring and beautiful example of pure, unadulterated capitalism in action – one we should all strive to live up to.

It even has a code of ethics, of sort. Here are “a few words” from the Dread Pirate Roberts, the creator of the site:

“You may be shocked to find listings here that are outlawed in your jurisdiction. That doesn’t mean Silk Road is lawless. In fact, we have a very strict code of conduct that, if given a chance, most people I think would agree with. Our basic rules are to treat others as you would wish to be treated, mind your own business, and don’t do anything to hurt or scam someone else. In the spirit of those rules, there are some things you will never see here, and if you do please report them. They include child pornography, stolen goods, assassinations and stolen personal information, just to name a few. We also hold our members to the highest standards of personal conduct and work tirelessly to prevent, root out and stop any scammers that may try to prey upon others.“

(4) The Silk Road is really quite close to the surface comparing to some of the shadier sites that lurk on the deep web. Here are the main categories of “sleazy” services and products you can find there:

(a) Drugs. Drugs, drugs, drugs. It’s not just the Silk Road of course.

(b) Pornography. This of course means really hardcore stuff that is of questionable legality or child porn which is completely illegal. Obviously purveyors of the latter should all be rounded up and shot, but there is no obvious way to do this. Nobody ever pretended that the “deep web” is a pristine place. Just to clarify, while I saw some links to this stuff on the Hidden Wiki, I did not click on them of course.

(c) Stolen information. Hacked Paypal accounts, credit card details, personal identities, etc. I think how it works is that some “black hat” hackers specialize in stealing all this, and sell them on in these deep web markets to other criminals.

(d) Casinos. Anybody who plays anything other than poker in an online casino is an idiot. But, hey, it’s a free Internet.

(e) Hitmen. Yes, I actually did find a website purporting to offer contract killings from the Hidden Wiki. There was a veritable price menu for different marks: $20,000 is the standard price, while a policeman or journalist costs $50,000. If it’s an EU job it will be $5000 extra. The prices seem to be a bit low, and despite the deep web’s sleaziness,  I *really* doubt that you can find any hitmen for hire on the Internet. Not that I’d know but I would imagine it’s a much more “face to face” kind of business. So frankly, I suspect it’s a scam. Not that anyone should care I suppose, since if so, it couldn’t victimize a nicer bunch of people. Or maybe it’s a sting operation project run by the police. If so, kudos for creativity!

That said, I’m not 100% sure that’s it’s not what it purports to be. Which is why I’m not going to give any specific details.

(f) Weapons. One site accessible from the Hidden Wiki delivers a rich variety of Glocks with scrubbed off serial numbers for $1,500 each (a bit more or a bit less depending on the specific model). They seem to be legit. Highly illegal, of course.

So if you’re the DIY type of guy, you don’t even need the hitman.

Hope you found you found this account of my adventures in the deep web useful. It’s a fascinating world for sure. But there are important caveats.

First, the above is about the “dodgy” part of the deep web. The deep web is much vaster, as it refers simply to websites that aren’t accessible via conventional search engines. E.g., the academic resource JSTOR. The guns n’ drugs account for an infinitesimal part of the “deep web”, which is in turn several orders of magnitude larger than the “normal” web.

The “shady” part of the deep web that you access via the Hidden Wiki is actually fairly small, I think – maybe a few tens of billions of dollars, at most. Yes, the Silk Road is big, but the drug transactions there go into the hundreds of millions, not the hundreds of billions. I would imagine that scales are similar or less for the other categories. If a product is legal, there is no particular incentive to trade it on the deep web, where traffic is much lower than on the normal Internet. I mean I don’t think buying drugs or untraceable weapons at shady sites on the deep web is something most people do everyday. Right, guys? Right??

There there’s money laundering. But while it is easy to imagine that you can do all sorts of creative financial operations with Bitcoin on the deep web, it has to be borne in mind that shady rich people have access to far more established, conventional, and respectable ways of legalizing their ill-gotten gains: Caribbean islands. The deep web strikes me as the poor man’s offshore haven.

But what do I know? An hour’s worth of trolling the Hidden Wiki isn’t going to make me an expert on this stuff.

A much more interesting topic for discussion is: Whither Bitcoins?

There are widely divergent views on them. On the one side you have the Cathedral, the representatives of bourgeois sensibilities, who insist that it is nothing but electrons and government paper is much better. On the other side you have various anarchists, hacker elements, Anon types who insist that it is the future of as people begin to throw off the rusted shackles of the bankster regime / as governments become ever bigger and more repressive control freaks (the contradictions between these two views are rarely pointed out).

My own two cents is much more modest. The future value of Bitcoins as they are currently construed will essentially depend on demand for them as a means of convenient, anonymous online transactions: Period. Say that tomorrow all the world’s governments were to ban online poker. In that case, demand for Bitcoins will soar, and the creators of Seals & Clubs will become very, very rich (at least until they’re thrown into prison). Or take an alternate scenario – say that tomorrow, the US were to legalize all drug consumption, on the grounds that the “pursuit of happiness” really is an unalienable Constitutional right. (52% of Americans already support the legalization of marijuana). In that case, demand for Bitcoins will plummet. Another, not non-negligible probability scenario is that the US will outlaw Bitcoins for being an illegitimate alternate currency. It’s inherent features means that it will survive, at least in the deeps of the deep web, but its value will plummet as it becomes inaccessible to the general public and utterly devalued on legitimate markets.

It’s probably not a bad idea to get a few Bitcoins as a “shits and giggles” type of investment, but I would not at this point – $110 as of the time of writing – advise it as something to sink a lot of your money into. If you *really* want to make money off online currencies, here is another, perhaps more productive idea: “Can you create an online currency based on “mining” big prime numbers? More useful than useless crypto-analytic exercises that produce Bitcoins, and it can theoretically continue forever.“

I don’t want to sound overly demanding, but really, unless a writer is the next Kant or Heidegger, he owes it to his readers to make his prose at least minimally engaging to the reader. With this book on too many occasions I was under the impression that I was reading something from the Postmodern Essay Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/). Here is a totally random quote I just pulled from this book: “As Carr argues, a solution to the problem of experience is provided by the Husserlian idea of retention-protention as a horizon from which the experience of being experienced at the present moment stands out.”

Come again, amigo? About 80% of this book is PoMo-babble, as verbose as it is apparently meaningless – one is under the distinct impression that Xin Liu is padding out a thesis paper with references to thinkers who are not really at all relevant to the putative object of his studies, the Beihai Star Group and South Chinese business culture. It is with this in mind that we come to the actual content, unearthing which expends no small time of energy and sanity.

In this book, the anthropologist Xin Liu argues that “the human experience itself is narrative in character… time is the life of narrative.” By extension, social life is centered around the perception of time as it relates to the past, present, and future, as well as to the sense of “before” and “after”. He analyzes China’s changing society through the prism of its changing conceptions of temporarily as described in three contemporaneous books representative of the time periods in which they were written, as well as his own observations of business life in Beihai.

In traditional society, social life centered around the family,  which in the Chinese word jia carries not only strong implications of materiality but also refers to “not simply a group of biologically connected individuals but a chain of individuals in time.” The family is a rope, its various strands are its various branches, and the single-thread (male) individual is the “personification of all his forebears and of all his descendents yet unborn.” As such, the ethnographer Francis Hsu in his 1948 study Under the Ancestors’ Shadow  characterizes Chinese life as a “continuum of descent”, with all its attendant rites and features like reverence for ancestors. I would further note that even the Chinese language supports such an interpretation, with “before” being coterminous with “above” (e.g., 上个星期) and “after” being coterminous with “below” (下个星期). Or in McTaggart’s interpretation, which is heavily expounded on by Xin Liu, the traditional Chinese concept of time is an “A-series”, in which there is “an equivalence between the chain of past-present-future and that of ancestors-self-descendents” – that is, the self is defined in terms of ancestors, and one must honor them by maintaining filial piety and producing children; in their turn, the ancestral spirits will continue looking after the family line.

The Maoist Revolution kept the A-Series but inverted it, such that “the self was no longer imprisoned by the shadow of the ancestors”; to the contrary, the jiu shehui (旧社会), or old society, was to be decisively rejected in the long march to the Communist utopia.  This process is reflected in Hao Ran’s massive novel The Sky of Bright Sunshine, written in 1964, in the interlude between the millenarian madness of The Great Leap Forwards and the Cultural Revolution. The novel itself has no dates, it is for all intents and purposes timeless. It features a struggle between a dedicated party cadre, Xiao, persuading the people to join collectives, and the reactionary agent Ma, who does all he can to subvert the Smaller Helmsman’s efforts – up to and including sacrificing his own son for the socialist victory. In this secular-Oriental version of the Biblical story of Abraham, Xiao received The Selected Works of Mao Zedong as a reward. That said, I would note that the millenarian element of the Maoist Revolution – the inversion of the A-series – is not unprecedented in Chinese culture, as we see from the Taiping Rebellion; and furthermore, the very concept of an end-time Da Tong (大同) is integral to the otherwise unchanging, “frozen-in-time” essence of classical Confucianism.

The third novel Xin Liu analyzes is A Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi, written in 1995, in which the nature of time becomes a B-series of “before” and “after” from which the self now becomes alienated from.  This is already well into the period of the capitalist roaders, and contemporaneous with the story of the Beihai Star Group that forms the focal point of Xin Liu’s analysis of the self in today’s China. “The total absence of scheduling”, he notes, “is a key feature of South Chinese business practice in general.” The business culture is intensely people orientated, given the importance of building up contacts and grace with officialdom, for the chuzhang is “someone who pleases when pleased.” Now there is no longer either a past orientation or a future orientation. To quote Xin Liu in extenso: “For those whose life is part of A Song of Everlasting Sorrow or is spent on these pleasure trips, the utterance today seems no longer pregnant with either “yesterday” or “tomorrow”; instead, the utterance has become “today’s today.” … It is no longer burdened by the world of ancestors or driven by the promised communist final victory.”

It is here however that we come to the crucial problem surrounding all attempts to reduce the complexities of social life, arising in specific socio-political circumstances, to general sociological theories. One can, like Xin Liu, attempt to situate South Chinese business culture in terms of its perceptions of time. Alternatively, one can note other explanatory factors. Beihai was in the far south, in the mountainous, non-Mandarin speaking Guanxi province – a pertinent point given the realities of high mountains and far away emperors (山高皇帝远). This meant that the enterprising laoban could suborn central officials with “unofficial” holiday trips and the “golden production line of entertainment” at locations far removed from the official scrutiny of Beijing; a matter of overriding importance, as it is these officials who would decide which companies swam or sank.

But apart from that Beihai was also one of China’s fastest growing cities during the transition period. These two factors – the sheer speed of development, and the remote location – strongly incentivize the kind of people-centered, improvisational, and traceless business culture that Xin Liu describes. After all if success depends for the most part on guanxi , not meticulous business plans, then it makes sense to focus one’s efforts on the former. Furthermore, not that many other locations during the transition period fulfilled the two criteria of mega-boom and remoteness. As such, the Beihai story does not seem to have been all that typical,  and the business practices it spawned as such may not have existed in so full and flagrant a form in other Chinese regions.

The final point to consider is to what extent this dissolution of self in the river of time was a specific Chinese experience of the transition – or a feature traditionally common to the Chinese, or to societies caught up in rapid changes. Consideration of these points do not necessarily refute Xin Liu’s thesis but they do give cause for numerous caveats, and the more caveats there are to a theory, the less useful it tends to become in terms of explanatory power. First, in his article Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, David Moser notes that the language’s linguistic idiosyncrasies – namely, the difficulty of remembering less common characters – means that in general, detailed note-taking isn’t as practical; far easier to give someone a call. Second, in his book Future Shock, the futurist Alvin Toffler writes of the impact of modern technology as “too much change in too short a period of time”;  an effect that produces social anomie and “shattering stress and disorientation.” The conditions apply to China what with its turbo-charged transition from agricultural subsistence to the Information Age.

As such, the radical simplification of temporal categories implicit in the transition from the A-series to the B-series – and the attendant constriction of a disembodied self between a “before” and an “after” – may well in part be just a coping mechanism of Beihai executives to deal with the information overload produced by the capitalist, “informatized”, monetized, extensively quantified new world that they are constructing themselves.

So, in conclusion. He does have an occasionally interesting idea, such as the laoban-chuzhang-xiaojie triangle; or his theory of time and narrative as applied to post-Maoist China. And in the spirit of Smith, he is capable of making the occasional poignant observation. But these nuggets are deeply buried under an avalanche of quasi-academic vapidity, aren’t all that universal or profound anyway (certainly not near enough to justify the verbosity expended on their behalf). Yes, hustlers hire call girls to get favors from officials – we get that, it happens in quite a lot of other places too. No need to write 200 pages about friggin’ Husserl to make that point. This book matches neither the wit and flair of Arthur H. Smith’s “Chinese Characteristics”, nor the lucidity and true erudition of Benjamin Schwartz’s “In Search of Wealth and Power.” It is most not recommended for reading.

In Search of Wealth and Power is a very dense but richly rewarding tome by Benjamin Schwartz, a noted China scholar. He focuses on the life of the translator Yan Fu to illustrate the culture clashes that arose when traditional Chinese civilization came into contact with Western philosophies.

Yan Fu was a translator and thinker who was one of the first Chinese to engage with Western thought at a deep level. He rejected contemporary thinkers like Zhang Zhidong, who aimed to integrate Western technics onto Chinese cultural foundations – not for him was the slogan “Chinese learning for fundamental principles and Western learning for practical application.” Nor was he a Marxist, to consider society as a mere superstructure to underlying economic realities. Instead, Yan Fu emphasized that if anything there was “more materialism (in the ethical sense)” among Chinese than in the West, whose own material foundations were built on innovative legal, political, and spiritual foundations. In a nutshell, the purpose of Yan Fu’s lifework was to foster the evolutionary growth of these Western qualities, many of them quite intangible, so as to “enrich the state and strengthen the army.” Yet in so doing this through his translations and commentary he ran into many paradoxes, and grew disillusioned with Western thought in the last decade of his life – as did admittedly many Western intellectuals as well. At the end he (re)turned to a form of Taoist mysticism.

At the start it is important to note that Yan Fu was intimately acquainted with all major strands of the Chinese philosophical tradition. Confucianism had been the bedrock of the Chinese state since the Qin dynasty. It stressed the importance of filial piety, of the ruler setting a virtuous example of the people, and of keeping laws and regulations light; however, Yan Fu and numerous other members of the Chinese intelligentsia during that time were coming to see it as a regressive influence keeping China backward. For his own part Yan Fu has little patience with it, beyond keeping its few good parts – mostly those to do with family organization – and extending it to the masses, the armies and factories (much as he perceived Christianity to have laid the groundwork for English public spirit despite its purported theological errors).

The other strand that he drew on is Legalism, a far more practical doctrine that  contained the Chinese version of balance of power theory and Machievallian ideas about the state. Furthermore, Schwartz writes, “while the immediate aims of the Legalists may be narrowly fiscal, the germ of a notion of economic development is latent within this mode of thought.”

Finally, there was Taoism; although the least practical of the three, Yan Fu was extremely influenced by it. In its attribution of a deep and incomprehensible driving force he found deep parallels with the monist Western philosophers, as well as a metaphysical lattice to hold together the evolutionary process and the “ten thousand things”. It did not proscribe a frozen feudal order like old-school Confucianism, and it was the polar opposite of the crass materialism of Legalism. As such, Yan Fu considered it the ultimate anchor on which Western philosophical concepts could be moored, even going so far as to argue proto-democratic tendencies in the works of Zhuangzi.

Of course while finding a balance between Confucianism,  Legalism, and Taoism seems to be hard enough, meeting the challenge of Western ideas is all the more so. Possible consequences include the very extinction of certain Chinese intellectual traditions, for whereas “one could conceive of wealth and power as an outer rampart for the inner sanctum of essential Confucian values and institutions only so long as the requirements of one were not incompatible with the demands of the other.” But what if it was impossible to build the new fort, bristling with modern weapons, without also “destroying the sanctum”?

This dilemma reflects one universal to all non-Western conservatives who realize their country’s backwardness. For instance, Nikolai Trubetzkoy would lay out precisely this dilemma in his seminal 1918 tract Europe and Mankind, where he noted that whereas Romano-Germanic nations could “move along a well-worn path, looking neither to the right nor left and concentrating its efforts on the coordination of elements from a single culture” and the rest of the world had to manage the culture clash of its own traditions with these European imports. Staying still is not an option because of the West’s military threat; on the other hand, the permanent culture clash involved in copying the West, the so-called “duel logique”, expends precious energy and reinforces the permanent gap between the Romano-Germanic world and the country attempting to modernize. Eventually the situation becomes desperate and the lagging country attempts a “long leap”, covering in a few years what took decades or centuries of organic development in the original countries. But the consequences of these leaps tend to be terrible, according to Trubetzkoy, because it is followed by “a period of apparent (from the European standpoint) stagnation, when it is necessary… to coordinate the results achieved by a leap in a particular area with other elements of the culture.”

Yan Fu stares this dilemma straight in the face. On the one hand, it is necessary to modernize, and – he believes – modernization has to be full-spectrum, and not in just the narrow military sense that he senses will lead to ruin, as with Peter’s Russia.  He is a proponent of Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism, and applying biological laws to that of society; individuals and nations are evolving, competing, progressing… unfortunately, the process hadn’t taken off in China. So paradoxically, China had to kick-start it via Great Men and legislators, a hopeless task according to at least two of Yan Fu’s Western philosophers – the Master himself, for Spencer believed that social evolution was a natural process that was outside human influence; and Montesquieu, who held that riverine civilizations located on great plains have a natural tendency towards despotism. No wonder then that Yan Fu cardinally reinterpreted Spencer to create a kind of “Evolution and Ethics with Chinese Characteristics,” and vigorously argued against Montesquieu’s crude geographic determinism and understandable lack of foreknowledge about technological changes that would shrink the world and make it more generally conductive for the evolution of democracies. It is stressed throughout the book that Yan Fu’s commentaries on these Western philosophers, his attempts to reconcile them with contemporary Chinese realities as well as its own intellectual tradition, were every bit as significant or even more so to the intellectual atmosphere in China than the actual translations that he performed.

Personally conservative and patriarchal; supporter of a strong state, but also one with liberal elements and public spirit – one gets the impression that disillusioned as he was by the 1910’s, Yan Fu would have had his faith restored by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. The state there was not a full democracy, but a managed democracy that maintains fairly strict social mores under a liberal economic environment. He would not have had too many issues with Taiwan either, where a dictator governed until the 1980’s, when – as he might see it – the people had become advanced enough to run the country themselves. As a man who loathed the idea of sudden, jolting changes he would have been aghast at the Maoist model, which developed by Trubetzkoy’s playbook: Importation of a Western ideology (Marxism) in one of its more extreme forms, and its attempted marriage to Chinese cultural traditions (some, like Confucianism, were repressed; others, like Legalism, were not, as Mao indeed was an admirer of Shang Yang’s methods); attempts to “leap forwards” (literally so, in 1959-62); a period of cultural clashes (Cultural Revolution 1966-76) and relative stagnation.

Even so, in a way the Communist Party did introduce important elements of Western thought and habits. There was a real emphasis on development, even if in practice was very inefficient until the late 1970’s. Concepts such as subsistence as the ideal were decisively rejected (in theory if not quite in practice). And one can even argue that the Communists introduced a kind of public spirit with the economic system of rural collective farms and urban danwei system and Maoist songs such as Comrade in Arms and The East is Red (equivalent in some ways to choral songs under Christian civilization). However this sense of community broke up pretty quickly after the 1970’s, people no longer call each other 同志, which formerly meant comrade but now denotes homosexuals in popular parlance, but things such as corruption and greed are also believed to have increased under the new capitalist order. Ironically however a similar process took place in the West, e.g. community life and public spirit is held to have declined since the 1960’s on most metrics both statistical (e.g. wealth inequality, incarceration rate, crime rate, etc) and intangible. So in a sense China and the US are converging towards being richer, more atomized societies. Perhaps Yan Fu would have seen this as a vindication of Spencer’s original vision after all, though then again, it’s not like the “power” part of “wealth and power” is exactly irrelevant today what with an incipient naval race between the US and China in the West Pacific.

What this book exudes in academic dryness it easily makes up in lucidity and erudition. (This is a 1960s Harvard man, writing well before it became widely acceptable to substitute genuine research with meaningless PoMo-babble). Unfortunately the Wade-Giles system is used throughout, but again that’s standard for that time. This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, unlike Arthur H. Smith’s Chinese Characteristics, but definitely recommended for those who wish to delve into modern Chinese intellectual history, China’s “encounter” with the West more general, and the interplay of traditional Chinese philosophies with interloping Western ideas.

A friend on Facebook said it best:

watches with amusement as people who think history is the result of transpersonal economic forces that determine individual consciousness get hung up on the supposed moral evil of one woman

I am personally entirely neutral and indifferent to her. I have British acquaintances who are her fans, as well as those who are very hostile to her. I think both sides overstate her real significance. The coal mines were dead men walking by the 1980′s, and any British Premier would have defended the Falklands. Friendships with dictators who like you and support your policies are entirely normal and within the national interest. Nor did she (or Reagan) have any influence whatsoever on the fall of the “evil empire,” which was governed by almost entirely internal developments.

She was of course no friend of Russia, and associated with some people whom I loathe, like Gorbachev. But as a British PM she of course had no obligation whatsoever to be a friend to anyone or anything but the British national interest – and at that, it has to be said, she was successful.

(1) The thinnest countries are Third World places like Bangladesh and Vietnam where it’s probably more due to malnutrition than anything else. Unless you’re into stick-like peasants in paddy hats, you should probably pass up.

(2) Japan is the best Asian First World country, and France is the best European First World country.

(3) No wonder Roosh is enjoying Romania so much.

(4) The observations about the Dutch and the Scandinavians (okay), and the Brits and the Americans (very fat) tally with my own impressions. And stereotypes. And the influence of gender feminism.

(5) Argentina WTF? Didn’t expect it to be so low.

(6) Also North Korea WTF? One might have expected it to be on the level of Bangladesh or something, if the photos of everybody there who is not called “Kim” are anything to go by. Maybe they only measured North Korean refugees in the South? Or maybe the malnutrition situation there isn’t as acute as we are led to believe?

(7) A consistent pattern is that the women in Muslim societies are consistently a lot heavier than their menfolk. This is what happens, I guess, when societal norms confine most of them to the house all day. It is also a great demonstration of why equity feminism (as opposed to gender feminism) is a really good idea – contrary to some retards in the manosphere who want to counter Gender Studies with jihad.

(8) Russia, virtually identical to Germany and Finland, doesn’t do perhaps as well as the stereotypes of leggy, high-cheeked blondes might indicate. They are forgetting another, older stereotype: That of the babushka.

(9) All the East Asian nations have managed to avoid widespread obesity (although South Korea appears to be a close case). What explains it? The cuisine, the fitness culture, or HBD? One possible explanation I’ve heard (I think on Peter Frost’s blog) is that East Asians have had millennia to adapt to eating rice – hence why they don’t get fat on carbohydrate heavy diets, in stark contrast to their genetic relatives the Native Americans. On the other hand, agriculture did nonetheless first appear in the Fertile Crescent, aka the Middle East, so logically the natives there should be just as adapted to eating bread without ill physiological effects. But they don’t, to the contrary even poor countries there like Egypt, Syria, and Iran are quite corpulent.

(10) One final, general note: A high obesity rate in a place like Mexico or Kuwait is far worse than an equivalent rate in a country like Germany or the US. Why? Because your average German or American is much older than your average Mexican or Kuwaiti, and obesity rates tend to rise with age. In other words, as its population continues to age, I will not be surprised to see places like Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey begin to greatly exceed even the United States (the fattest major First World country) in the size of their girths.

National BMI’s

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.

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.

PS. Here is Steven Pinker’s reply in full:

The rape statistics come from
U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2009. National Crime Victimization Survey Spreadsheet.http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/sheets/viortrd.csv.
which I attach (accessed 2010/5/3). Unfortunately that URL now redirects tohttp://www.bjs.gov/glance_redirect.cfm which apologizes for a BoJ Web site redesign rendering the file unavailable until this summer.
You’ll see in a comment line within the spreadsheet that the survey methodology changed at least twice during the 1973-2008 interval, though the numbers reported in it have been adjusted to make (except for one year) commensurable with one another.
It’s not certain why the numbers you found for 2011 are so out of whack with those in this dataset, and it would take some digging to resolve the discrepancy. But the warning in this spreadsheet about previous methodology changes suggests a likely answer.  Under pressure from activist groups, common definitions of “rape” and “sexual assault” have recently been broadened to include, for example, a man verbally pressuring a woman into sex, and a man getting a woman drunk and having sex with her; even, in some surveys, sex that the woman regrets afterwards. These expansive definitions are the source of some of the incredible claims such as that one in every four female college students has been raped. I doubt that the NCVS uses such a definition which is quite that expansive, but if the question asked in the past few years differs from those asked in 1973-2008, we would have an explanation for the discrepancy. And you may be correct that the restrictive and expansive definitions correspond to “rape” and “sexual assault,” respectively, but it would take some digging into the recent survey methodology to verify this.

* These two measures aren’t strictly comparable, because one person can report multiple instances of rape to police, whereas in any one year someone can only either be raped or not raped in the NCVS statistics. Nonetheless, one would imagine that the percentage of (very unfortunate) people experienced two or more cases of rape per year and reporting them to police would be very low.

It’s a list of all the books I’ve ever read.

Well, not all of them, of course. That’s unrealistic. Since completing it, I’ve remembered a couple more. But I almost certainly got more than half, and perhaps as many as 75% of the real total. And forgetting a quarter or a third of them isn’t a great tragedy anyway, since me reckons that if you can’t recall reading a book, chances are it wasn’t worth your time in the first place.

Some interesting things have emerged out of this exercise. For instance, almost 40% of the books I’ve read have been sci-fi, fantasy, or speculative. Even so, they unfortunately don’t include Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, and the Strugatsky brothers. My familiarity with the classics, especially in Russian, are extremely patchy. Self-help and self-improvement books total almost 10%, of which 2% are about poker. Here are the detailed stats:

Here is the same data, but by total page numbers:

I highly recommend everyone do something similar. It’s easy (Excel and Google suffice), and though it will take some time – two days, in my case – it will pay off by bringing back good reading memories that would otherwise indefinitely remain dormant, as well as provide an incentive to start systemically writing book reviews. If you can’t write a review about a book you’ve read, chances are the time you spent reading it was wasted. But by writing a review of a book, you decant and internalize the best of what it had to offer.

It will also enable you to make some useful macro-generalizations. For instance, this exercise really drove home the point that my classics base is very weak. Many giants of literature are missing entirely. This is something I can start working on remedying. Another advantage is that you can make some observations about what types of books make an impression, and what types don’t. For instance, I observed that the books that tended to garner 5 stars were usually shorter than others in the same series or broader category. I guess brevity really is the soul of wit.

In rich and evocative prose reminiscent of De Tocqueville’s writings on America, Arthur H. Smith lays out what he sees as the core features of the Chinese character and his values. The tone is bold and fearless, making sweeping generalizations and brusque judgments that many today will dismiss as insensitive or “Orientalist,” if not downright racist. I will say from the outset that this is ahistorical and frankly, misses the point. Humans try to understand the world through simplified models, and stereotypes are an intractable part of this process. This was especially true in Smith’s time, when more objective data, e.g. statistical, was severely lacking in China. Thus, while he carefully acknowledges that “these papers are not meant to be generalizations for a whole Empire”, he nonetheless argues that deriving Chinese characteristics by “recording great numbers of incidents,” especially “extraordinary” ones, and setting down the “explanations… as given by natives of the country,” is an entirely valid and legitimate approach for a popular book on that country.

The “Chinese character” that emerges from his account forms a stark contradistinction to what we might call the “Smithian character,” a category that embraces not only the eponymous author but also reflects the values and assumptions of your archetypical fin de siècle American WASP male. The Chinese character goes by nature’s cycles, and does not have a good sense of either punctuality or even his own age; the Westerner, on the other hand, marches to the chimes of the clock. This “disregard of time” is matched by a “disregard for accuracy” – it is mentioned that the real distance of the Chinese li varies depending on terrain, the prevailing weather, etc. Likewise, the real value of the national currency varies from province to province.

Another major element covered by Smith in relation to China is “intellectual turbidity.” This might seem strange, considering that he also talks of how “all the examination halls, from the lowest to the highest, seem to be perpetually crowded”, but one which becomes much more comprehensible after noting that Smith also says that “education in China is restricted to a very narrow circle”. These observations are confirmed by the historical fact that primary enrollment was at just 4% of the eligible school-age population in China in 1900. (This characteristic, incidentally, seems to be alive well to this day, as evidenced by the immense stress that revolves around the gaokao). Nonetheless, the common folks come off as pretty stupid, and unable to grasp the essence of the questions put to them. For instance, in reply to a query about his age, one man’s answer is said to resemble a ”rusty old smoothbore cannon mounted on a decrepit carriage.” Although isn’t asking such a question awkward in the first place? That said, at least we can’t fault Smith for not knowing how to throw in a good turn of phrase!

Another major part of the book concerns Chinese attitudes as regards kin, family, society, and nation. Filial piety is extremely developed; in fact, it is over-developed, to the extent that there have been cases of children willing to sacrifice themselves so as to avoid the death penalty for their criminal parents. (Not exactly a civilization with much in the way of individual responsibility). A less extreme but far more widespread effect of this is the devaluation of the worth of women. While Smith is undoubtedly a man of patriarchal views, he subscribes to the Christian idea of the spiritual equality of the sexes, and supports women’s education. These aims are harder to achieve in a society built around ancestor worship, where the prerogative to maintain the “continuum of descent” is overriding. Social sanctions, such as the ones for harboring criminals or traitors, are collective in nature, and go against the idea of personal responsibility. But it’s not all bad, at least as regards violence: “Human life is safer in a Chinese city than in an American city.” Nor are the Chinese dying out like the French:

“Contrast the apparent growth of the Chinese at any point, with the condition of the population in France, where the rate of increase is the lowest in all Europe, and where the latest returns show an absolute decrease in the number of inhabitants. Such facts have excited the gravest fears as to the future of that great country. The Chinese, on the other hand, show no more signs of race decay than the Anglo-Saxons.”

Although there is a widespread “hatred of foreigners,” – but isn’t that quite understandable, given the circumstances of late Qing China? - it does not translate into a sense of national cohesion or patriotism. In practice, it is the family (jia) which come first, and then the clans around which Chinese villages are built. (This appears to be accurate). Concubinage and soft polygamy are rife. Honesty is absent in general, though not always at the individual level. The bureaucracy is stiff, rigid, and all too frequently, corrupt. In modern parlance, we would call this a lack of “social capital.” While Smith acknowledges that Confucianism is a praiseworthy ethical system, the problem is that it is an elite ideology and does not percolate down to the masses. What China desperately needs is “righteousness,” and this can be attained “permanently, completely, only by Christian civilization.”

If there is one overriding problem with Smith’s perspective, it is HIS characteristic of consistently failing to distinguish between Chinese characteristics and undeveloped country characteristics. It was at the edge of subsistence, as repeatedly mentioned by Smith and confirmed by historical evidence; malnutrition was rife, and various infectious diseases were rife, both factors which have major depressive effects on IQ; and the typical absence of literacy can’t have helped either, as literacy is a necessary prerequisite to the development of logical and abstract reasoning. In this context, Smith’s observations that Chinese arguments “consist exclusively of predicates”, which are “attached to nothing whatever”, begin to seem eminently understandable – but on the caveat that what we are seeing is not a Chinese characteristic per se, but the perspective of a literate cosmopolitan on an illiterate peasant mentality (which he perceives as “intellectual turbidity”). Since China has now solved its malnutrition and illiteracy problems – the latest Census put the literacy rate at 97%, and its performance on international standardized tests is now very respectable - this cultural and cognitive chasm has now closed.

The influence of China’s historical backwardness is also clearly manifest as regards the lack of hygiene, the threadbare poverty, the “disregard of accuracy”, etc. Likewise, while he notes the province by province discrepancies in weights, distances, coinages, and dialects, he largely forgoes to mention that this is all in the context of a weak state that is slowly falling apart – in no small part thanks to Western intrusions. Considering the large stock of Chinese mechanical inventions during the European middle ages and China’s long pedigree as a centralized bureaucratic state, it is strange to consider that such differences could be a specifically “Chinese” characteristic. It is worth nothing that even France, despite the prior legacy of Colbert’s dirigisme, only unified its national market in the late 18th century, while linguistic unification would take an additional half a century.

Another point of criticism is that Smith conflates development with Christianity, which surely at least in part reflects his values as a missionary. Nonetheless, this criticism shouldn’t be overdone. The causes of long-term economic development were still largely unknown in the 19th century. Economics had yet to come into its own as a social science, and there was no agreement between the political economists. As such, the assumption that Christianity was a prerequisite of development was not, perhaps, an entirely unreasonable one, given that up to that point only Christian Powers had grown rich and come to rule over most of the world. And it should be stressed that Smith is no fanatic, and only forcefully makes this argument in the last chapter. He is also not averse to recognizing that in many respects, such as personal safety and filial piety, Confucian China is superior to the West.

In the end, it is up to the Chinese themselves to decide whether Smith was a laowai blowhard or someone worth listening to. For the most part they have come down on the latter assessment. The China discourse in the West a century ago was framed in the rather schizophrenic dichotomy between seeing it is a decayed civilization, about to get eaten up by its predatory neighbors, and the “yellow peril,” ready to disgorge its ravenous hordes upon the Christian world. Smith’s observations far surpassed those (admittedly very low) bars in nuance, detail, and understanding. He heavily influenced one of China’s most influential 20th century writers, Lu Xun. And it’s an undeniable fact that some of the negative characteristics he identified continue to plague China to this day, both in terms of “extraordinary incidents” – as in the recent story of a toddler who got ran over to mass indifference, as well as the more objective realm of hard cold statistics – such as the the soaring male to female ratio, which has arisen thanks to the marriage of sex-selective abortion technology with the traditional Chinese view that by “the accident of sex [the daughter] is a dreaded burden… certain to be despised.”

China during the 20th centuries saw many disappointments, traumatic convulsions, and finally, what appears to be a fairly sustainable takeoff into rising prosperity. The characteristics that Smith ascribed to China more than a century ago became redundant: The sense of nation and community was built up under the father-like gaze of Mao, while the transition to capitalism has imprinted upon the new Chinese man a lot of the basic characteristics of capitalism (e.g. “time is money”) that Smith leads us to believe are specifically Western but are not. And we must also bear in mind that America, too, is not the America of Smith’s time, e.g. public spirit and community life is held to have declined since the 1960′s on most metrics both statistical (e.g. wealth inequality, incarceration rate, crime rate, etc.) and intangible. So in a sense China and the “West” are converging towards being richer, more atomized, and for lack of a better term, “post-Smithian” societies. I would therefore argue that while Chinese Characteristics is of great historical and anthropological interest, its direct relevance to China today is very much limited.

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: This book isn’t for the casual reader. Despite the title, it’s not a “life interest” story with a morass of prurient and scandalous details, nor is it a deep social or philosophical commentary. It is very specifically written for those who want to grind a living from online writing and punditry (especially those who write on controversial subjects like HBD and feminism, as does Matt Forney). If that doesn’t describe you, I can’t in good conscience recommend you buy this book. On the other hand, if you enjoy writing and wish to make a living as an iconoclastic blogger, then this book will definitely add much value and save you a lot of trouble.

Much of the book is taken up with the technical details of setting up a WordPress blog and publicizing it. As someone who has been blogging for 5 years and counting, I can testify that this book has an accurate and succinct summary of all the most important things you need to bear in mind. You can find the same information for free elsewhere, but the problem is that the Internet has a low signal to noise ratio – it will take time, and may well lead you down dead ends. Why not fork up the equivalent of an hour’s worth of a minimum wage job and spend a single evening’s reading time to avoid going through all that?

But at least to me the most interesting and original part was Matt’s (well, not entirely his, but he refined it) concept of “tiered blogging.” I have come to much the same conclusions on my own, if via annoying and costly errors, but it was great to see it so lucidly formulated and systematized. Here’s the lowdown. A Tier-3 blog is an everything-that-interests-me kind of blog, where you post whatever the fuck you feel like. The problem is that unless you develop a cult of personality, like Tucker Max, then you’re not going to get massive amounts of traffic (or money) through that alone. But you will notice that some posts of yours are going to get a much better response than others. Say, to take my own example, while most readers couldn’t care less for my ramblings on Human Biodiversty and dog pictures at AKarlin, a great many of them are interested in reading my ramblings on Russia. So I create a far more narrowly specialized Tier-2 blog like Da Russophile that is specifically about Russia just for them. This audience is much more homogeneous than my AKarlin audience – they, at least, are all interested in Russia at a minimum, whereas the AKarlin folks may be interested in HBD, dog pictures, professionally trolling me, and any combination thereof.

Once you get your Tier-2 hustle going, you can start thinking of making money. But it’s not as simple as putting up a ton of ads and retiring with your laptop to the Caribbean; unless you manage to become a “superstar” blogger, it is extremely unlikely that you will ever make any significant money from running ads. It’s virtually impossible if you are an original thinker and would rather cut off your hands than engage in the vacuous vapidity that passes for mainstream commentary. Getting money through donations and affiliate marketing can be more profitable, but they will (realistically) only get you a modest secondary income – and an unstable one at that. Selling information products is where the real game is at: DVD’s, software, music, and, of course, books. This is Tier-1, the “summit of hustle mountain.” Almost every “professional” pundit does that: Liberals like Glenn Greenwald and conservatives like Steve Sailer, players like Roosh Vorek and “online hustlers” like Matt Forney himself. And for that matter I too will soon be joining their ranks with my upcoming book The Dark Lord of the Kremlin about the Western media’s war against Putin’s Russia.

But at this point, I have to make my own confession. I lied to you back there. In reality, I got the whole “tiered blogging” thing ass backwards. I started out writing at Da Russophile, but did not have the discipline to keep it confined to Russia period, and started mixing it up with unrelated things like peak oil and my shifting political ideologies. That drove away a lot of people. Only gradually over several years did I realize the vital importance of compartmentalizing my interests – which can be fickle as well as controversial – away from “hustles” with dedicated but easily alienated audiences. To illustrate the concept, say my Da Russophile audience consists of 100 liberals, 100 conservatives, and 100 people who care nothing for anything not Russia related. Now suppose that for every post about Russia there I were to also write a post defending gun rights and a post on global warming. I would alienate both the liberals and the conservatives, bore the hardcore Russia watchers, and create three times the work for myself to boot. It’s raving lunacy!

But unfortunately, that’s only obvious in retrospect. I could have saved myself a lot of time and disillusioned readers had I practiced “tiered blogging” from the very start.

This does not mean I agree with everything here. I think Forney’s attitude to regular blogging is too strict and disciplinarian, and may well be part of the reason that writing a new blog post now brings him about as “as much joy as a crack whore sucking off another dirtbag behind the club dumpster.” While there’s no disputing that discipline in blogging is a good thing, is it really worth it if it sucks all the joy and passion from what should really be a hobby? If that’s how you look at it, then how is it any different from your bog-standard, soul-crushing 9-5 job then?

I appreciate Forney’s nods to the Cracked school of writing that intersperses bouts of flippant levity in between paragraphs of actual information. This makes it much more readable than your standard, dry as a nun’s nasty self-help book. (See what I did there?). For all that, perhaps the reader could have done with a couple less allusions to pasty-faced virgins and homosexual orgies, Matt.

The one very substantial issue I disagree with him is on optimal book pricing, especially as applied to e-books. He claims that $10 is an entirely normal price for a Kindle book, and that charging less can even hurt your total sales because customers have learned to associate low prices with poor quality. A nice and plausible enough theory, with only one problem: Actual data doesn’t support it. The “sweet spot” for Kindle books in terms of maximizing revenue has been convincingly demonstrated to be $3-$4 (with a 40% markup if said book is non-fiction).

Self-improvement is a roadmap, not a guided tour. There can be no guarantees of success – as Matt himself, unlike the vast majority of self-help gurus, is honest enough to admit. Nonetheless, it is safe to say that reading this book will appreciably improve your chances of success. And considering that a hell of a lot of money can depend on this – maybe even a new career – this book way more than pays for itself in terms of the additional positive expected value it generates for you. If you wish to make serious money through blogging – well, through writing books and propagandizing them on your blog – then you could do a lot worse than getting hold of Matt Forney’s literary debut and spending a couple of hours digesting the hard-won wisdom in its 120 pages.

At the very least, as Matt himself might say, it would be “healthier than some of the other things people do in their spare time, like going to furry conventions.”

In no European kingdom is the institution of an aristocracy more judiciously designed than in England for securing to the nobility, in their relation to the Crown and the commonalty, individual independence, dignity, and stability; to give them a Parliamentary training and position; to direct their energies to patriotic and national aims; to induce them to attract to their own body the élite of the commonalty, to include in their ranks every commoner who earns distinction, whether by mental gifts, exceptional wealth, or great achievements; and, on the other hand, to cast back again amongst the commons the surplus progeny of aristocratic descent, thus leading to the amalgamation of the nobility and the commonalty in future generations. By this process the nobility is ever receiving from the Commons fresh accessions of civic and patriotic energy, of science, learning, intellectual and material resources, while it is ever restoring to the people a portion of the culture and of the spirit of independence peculiarly its own, leaving its own children to trust to their own resources, and supplying the commonalty with incentives to renewed exertion. In the case of the English lord, however large may be the number of his descendants, only one can hold the title at a time. The other members of the family are commoners, who gain a livelihood either in one of the learned professions, or in the Civil Service, in commerce, industry, or agriculture. The story goes that some time ago one of the first dukes in England conceived the idea of inviting all the blood relations of his house to a banquet, but he was fain to abandon the design because their name was legion, notwithstanding that the family pedigree had not reached farther back than for a few centuries. It would require a whole volume to show the effect of this institution upon the spirit of enterprise, the colonisation, the might and the liberties, and especially upon the forces of production of this nation.

So perhaps Gregory Clark wasn’t quite as original as many make him out to be.

PS. I myself am quite skeptical about the theory. As Ron Unz summarized it, “And I agree that Clark’s evolutionary model for England suffers from similar problems, namely that he’s produced an interesting theory explaining why the English are smarter and longer-time oriented than all the other Europeans. Except they aren’t.”

A couple of months ago, I was walking in a park with my dad. We passed an outdoor gym sort of place and decided, “Why not try out some of the exercises?”

It was quite embarrassing – for me, that is, not my old man. I eked out maybe two or three pull-ups, only the first of which was in perfect form. He did more than a half dozen without problems.

This I found to be strange, as I am not objectively a weak man. Until I stopped going to the gym – I can never be motivated enough to keep going at it for more than a few months without a break – I was doing 75 pound dumbbell bench presses and 50 pound dumbbell shoulder presses. This was significantly more than my dad could do though he doesn’t go the gym at all really. But he whooped my sorry ass at pullups, and even came close on pushups.

I recalled this episode when reading through Convict Conditioning, which had been recommended to me as a good intro to calisthenics. Paul Wade is an ex-con who, by his own admission, spent 19 of the past 23 years in some of America’s toughest prisons for various drug offences. (Some commentators have voiced skepticism as to whether the author is a real person. If I had to guess I’d say he is, but even if the whole jailbird thing was a marketing ploy, I honestly couldn’t care less; my interest is in effective information, not personalities). Most prisons don’t have much in the way of gyms. There are no free weights – for good reason, as you might imagine – while barbells only come in a very limited number of weight categories, which makes progressive training impossible. As such, the cons have to improvise and practice self-reliance to bulk up. And Paul Wade was one of the best at this.

Laocoön and His Sons

His core argument is very simple. First off, it’s not like dudes weren’t getting ripped in the dark ages before we started “pumping iron.” The Ancient Greeks and the strongmen of the late 19th/early 20th centuries alike relied on bodyweight exercises to build up their strength and Davidian physiques. It is only in the past 50 years that weightlifting has displaced old-school calisthenics as the primarily means of building up strength. The old ways survive, of course, but they are now mostly constricted to fairly narrow groups such as gymnasts, wrestlers, rock climbers… and convicts. Which is a pity, argues Paul Wade, because barbells and dumbbells – not to mention weight machines – are highly artificial and unnatural constructs in the context of human evolution, and as such cause far more injuries, irritation, and stress on the joints than calisthenics. At the same time, while he acknowledges that you can get both strength and big muscles with modern bodybuilding, he points out that much of this strength is inflexible – because of the single-minded focus on brute heaving, as opposed to careful body manipulation and balance – and is unsustainably propped up by over-eating and steroid use.

In a sense, we are to believe, calisthenics is to exercise as the paleo-diet is to nutrition. I.e. work with evolution, don’t fight it. (Though it should be noted that Paul Wade doesn’t have a high opinion of the paleo-diet, dismissing it as a fad).

No denying that he has a bee up his bonnet about modern bodybuilding. He calls them “drugged up jerks” and compares them to “Brazilian rent boys” on one occasion. I don’t judge him for that rhetoric, as he’s entitled to his opinion and it is amusing to read besides; but still, I think it might be just a wee bit unfair on the “gym rats.” Still, one is hard pressed to deny the fundamental validity of his points. All I had to do was think back on my superiority to dad in the gym and how it did jack for my in actually useful activities like being able to pullup your way up a tree to escape predators. Chest pressing a 200lb barbell probably wouldn’t do me much good in that situation, whereas the strength my dad had developed decades before with mostly pure bodyweight exercises would stand him in good stead.

So I had to give his books a good hearing, and they did not disappoint.

The basis of Paul Wade’s system are the “Big Six” exercises: Pushups, squats, pullups, leg raises, bridges, and handstand pushups. They are, in turn, each subdivided into 10 steps, ranging from the very easy – which can be productively embarked on even by very weak or obese people, to the extremely difficult – which can only be attained after a year or more of dedicated conditioning. For example, the Pushup series ranges from the wall pushup, through the “normal” pushup at Stage 5 – that is, about the level of most healthy young males – to the insanely difficult 100 reps of one-arm pushup that signifies true mastery of this exercise.

A comprehensive summary of the Big Six exercises. Click to enlarge.

All too many second books are written to ride the money waves generated by the first. One famous example is Pavel Tsatsouline, the guy promoted by Tim Ferriss, who hasn’t really written anything particularly noteworthy after his first book that introduced the Russian kettlebell to the West. Fortunately, this does not describe Paul Wade, whose second book is well worth buying too. In it he goes into a lot more detail on how to exercise other body areas and progression plans for developing grip strength, strong calves, a thick neck, and powerful lats. These exercises can all productively complement The Big Six. It also includes a long section on how to work the joints to keep them lithe, supply, and pain-free. It gets very detailed and I have not yet read those parts seriously. But it’s not a serious priority for now, as some degree of mastery over the Big Six is a prerequisite for many of the more advanced techniques in the second book anyway.

Perhaps the only really surprising (and questionable) advice I found in the book is to take it slow. This is in direct contradiction of the well-known CrossFit program, where you are expected to jump into the thick of things pretty much straight away. Now while perhaps CrossFit is too extreme in that regard – surely, if nothing else, it discourages some novices from even starting on it – I don’t know if the conservative CC approach is much better. Yes, I can understand rank novices with matchstick arms, or people suffering from obesity, beginning with wall pushups and vertical pulls and the like. But for basically fit people who can already hammer out 40 pressups?

I appreciate and take into account Wade’s words about overly arrogant Rambos pushing blithely ahead, running into a wall sooner rather than later, and getting discouraged from the entire program. But wasting a month doing wall pushups, as he seems to suggest everyone embarking on his program should do, sounds rather ridiculous too. I think a good middle-ground compromise for basically fit people here is to start with Stage 1 as he suggests, but to go through to Stage 4 or Stage 5 a lot quicker than his recommendation of three to four months; say, one month should be time aplenty. This will give you ample time to get into the groove of things and build up “training momentum”, while foregoing the apathy that might develop from having to repeat months of basically redundant exercises.

At least, that’s my current game plan. I’m not a professional coach, nor even a convict. You decide what’s best for you.

Now considering the generally positive nature of this review, you might be surprised why I gave the books four stars, not five. It’s not a matter of their cost (more than $20), just to clarify at the outset, though that does not mean that making them cheaper would not be appreciated. The rather banal reason is that I have grown rather cautious about giving such types of books perfect scores before being comprehensively assessing their performance in the real world, as opposed to just the ostensible lucidity and short-term persuasiveness of their theories and reasoning. (For instance, while I initiatially gave Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body a 5/5, I would today lower it to a 4/5 or even a 3/5). This way, I will not disappoint myself or prospective readers of this review. As Wade approvingly quotes the old masters, “The weights aren’t going anywhere.” Neither is the edit function for old reviews; this is a preliminary rating, and it might yet go up – or down – depending on whether I am still getting my ass whopped in pullups at that park in a few months time after I start following this program.

It’s a 4 month old Yorkshire Terrier. We’ve had him a couple of weeks now.

Surprisingly intelligent for a dog of its size. I read on Wikipedia that they were bred to hunt rats and other rodents in the mines, so I suppose it makes sense. He gives small objects very close attention and chases after birds.

The company one of my relatives worked for went bankrupt, so they paid her with the dog instead of money. She has experience with training dogs, but nonetheless, this dog is much quicker to acknowledge my authority than her’s, even though the dog doesn’t live with me and only sees me once every few days. For instance, the dog will sometimes lie down on the ground when she is walking it, as if to challenge her authority.

But the dog never tries that when I’m holding the leash. Is it because he recognizes me as the alpha male of the pack? Do dogs differentiate between human genders? Or do I just give off more of a controlling vibe? Or maybe with some dogs familiarity really does breed contempt?

That said, the dog does love her; when she leaves it for a few minutes, it sometimes even starts mewling after her in distress. That never happens when I’m not around. Maybe the dog is just afraid of me, and toes the line in my presence? Though I really don’t see how I could have given it cause to think that way. Besides, while the dog might not love me, he certainly likes me. He leaps about with happiness when he sees me, and tries to lick my face.

He also readily responds to my commands even though I have spent only a few hours with him – something that took my relative 2 weeks to instill. But for all that, I don’t think he’d be particularly distraught were I to permanently vanish from his life.

Take books. At one point I had about 250 of them, clogging up my storage space. Half of them I hadn’t read, and of the other half, I knew myself well enough that the vast majority would remain unread. What’s the point of keeping them then? I gave away 225 of them to the local library, keeping only the most useful, expensive, and/or sentimentally valuable of them. There are now far more books (150 and counting) on my Kindle library. So long as Amazon doesn’t delete them (but there’s a solution for that) and there’s no peak oil/zombie apocalypse, they’re as safe and permanent as any physical collection. Safer, if anything.

And best of all, they only ever take up the room of a laptop or tablet… if not a USB flash drive.

The fewer-but-better rule pretty much applies to everything. Clothes – yes. Far better to have two good changes of clothing than ten dingy T-shirts and nondescript pants. Cooking – yes; the best chefs tend to rely on a surprisingly limited stock of ingredients and kitchen utensils. Fitness – again, yes. You don’t even need a gym membership. Your own body and maybe a kettlebell will suffice. A bag of rice and a box of cheapish gold jewelry to round things off for the survivalists who worry about worst case of scenarios. Even most of your important documents can now be kept exclusively in an online application like Evernote.

Of course you’ll have other things for your hobbies. For instance, I ski, so I have my skis and ski boots. But as a rule, these things will occupy very little space relative to the general trash you find lying about.

I estimate I’ve disposed of about 75% of my possessions by volume in the past few days. The room is now much less cluttered, there are fewer things to distract me from productive activities. I think the key to actually going through with disposing of many things is to do it quickly, with iron-cast criteria such as, “Have I used this item in the past month? Will I realistically use it the next?” If it doesn’t fulfill them, then purge them ruthlessly like the NKVD. The problem with putting shit on sale is that much of the stuff you are going to sell is cheap and will earn you cents on the dollars you originally bought them with; furthermore, it will stretch the disposal process out to several months. This creates a lot of unnecessary bother over a period of several months and defeats the entire purpose of drastically de-cluttering your life.

I might have missed out on perhaps as much as $500 had I ended up successfully selling all my books on Amazon or eBay. It sounds like a big amount, but then when you think about the process of listing them all and then mailing them out to customers (some of whom may be unhappy and return them), not to mention the opportunity costs on energy and happiness levels such a dull and monotone task would impose, I’m sure the per hour rate would be very low. Probably close to minimum wage. For comparison some of the journalistic articles I’ve written have netted me $350 for the day or so that I spent researching and writing them.

The one place where hoarding is definitely worth it? Your bank account and other financial assets. They are not going anywhere but they will not burden you down either – as long as everything is properly insured and/or hedged.

Any discussion of Chavez must explain why he was (to his detractors) such a terrible man. He was a terrible man because he did a terrible thing. This terrible thing was to distribute Venezuela’s oil wealth to the majority of its people by funding ambitious health, education and social security programmes.

To understand why doing this was so terrible one must understand something about the historic situation not just in Venezuela but throughout Latin America (Costa Rica being the exception). Briefly, political and social power in Latin America since before independence from Spain has been concentrated in a small group of wealthy families who conduct bitter and even violent political feuds with each other using labels such as “Liberal” and “Conservative” but who unite when faced by a challenge to their power. This oligarchy sustains itself through the support of a middle class that sees its social and economic interests as bound up with those of the oligarchy. Concepts of a wider social contract underpinned by shared patriotism and by a sense of social responsibility do not exist. The mass of the population are excluded and typecast as lazy, shiftless, dishonest and violent. This justifies denying them a share in the country’s economic profits, which supposedly neither belong to them or are deserved by them, and which makes any attempt to share these economic profits with them a theft from those to whom these profits supposedly actually belong. All this is underpinned by an ugly strain of racism with the middle class and the oligarchy priding themselves on their whiteness whilst often concealing their mixed origin whilst emphasising or exaggerating the colour of the poor.

The result is that governments in Latin America have historically failed to provide even the most basic services at even a remotely satisfactory level. The only institutions in Latin American that have historically been reasonably funded have been the very highest echelons of the state bureaucracy and the judiciary (which is usually recruited directly from the oligarchy) and the army and police whose main function is not to defend the nation from foreign aggression to keep the poor in order.

In such a system requiring the oligarchy and the middle class to pay taxes to fund say a good system of universal secondary education from which the poor might benefit is an idea so outrageous that it is guaranteed to provoke passionate and often violent anger and resistance. Americans, Europeans, East Asians and indeed Russians find all this very difficult to understand. As a Greek I am better able to understand it not only because it resembles the historic situation in my own society but because a section of my family emigrated to Argentina where they are today members of what was once the country’s oligarchy.

Not surprisingly in a Continent where basic education and health care for the bulk of the population was scarcely provided (though the means to do so was always there) economic development has been disappointing to say the least. However since this is a system that is deeply embedded and which is sustained by often extreme violence all previous attempts to change it have been largely unsuccessful with reformers likely to end up either in exile or dead. I am not going to discuss the role of the US in sustaining this system since it is so well known. I would say that I do think people who blame the US for Latin America’s problems overlook the many internal reasons why Latin American societies have historically been as dysfunctional as they are.

For Chavez to redistribute the country’s oil wealth to the poor instead of doling it out to the rich and the middle class – who have an absolute belief in their entitlement to it – was outrageous enough. What made it made more outrageous still is that he got away with it. Over the time he was President he saw off every challenge the oligarchy and its American friends could throw at him. This included the whole bag of tricks: media campaigns, middle class demonstrations with all the usual colourful paraphernalia (banging kettles etc), economic destabilisation (eg. the 2003 oil workers’ strike), attempted coups (in 2002) and endless constitutional “challenges” and legal and electoral subterfuges rubber stamped by a predictably pro oligarch judiciary.

Chavez’s success in seeing off these challenges was bad enough but what was perfectly monstrous and completely unforgiveable both to his domestic detractors and even more so to their foreign patrons is that he saw off all these challenges whilst remaining a democrat. At no point, even in the face of the most extreme provocations when he would have been fully justified to do so, did he proclaim martial law, round up and gaol his opponents (let alone exile or murder them), impose censorship, ban opposition newspapers and parties (though he had cause enough) or set up a secret police. The result was that he not only deprived his enemies of the single greatest and most convincing propaganda instrument in their arsenal, but he also deprived them of the excuse they needed to blockade or embargo his country, seize its assets and foment armed resistance to his government as a possible prelude to armed intervention and externally imposed regime change.

To see how frustrated Chavez’s opponents are with his survival in office as a democrat just consider the bizarre contortions their media organs engage in to prove that despite holding and repeatedly winning internationally recognised free elections Chavez was a dictator after all. Thus ludicrous claims of Chavez being a “democratic autocrat” and the like, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one, which whatever traction they may have in the west with the prejudiced and the credulous, in Venezuela itself have no traction at all.

Chavez’s greatest victory is that he died in office as President and as a democrat having seen off all challenges whilst persisting with his policies against all the odds. By doing so he has shown to the people not just of Venezuela but of all Latin America that it is possible to take on the oligarchy and the US and their middle class supporters and win without giving up on democracy. This is a momentous achievement, never achieved by anyone else before, which will not be forgotten. Whatever happens in Venezuela now, even if there is a rollback, Chavez will cast a long shadow and his example will remain an inspiration to millions. Far from being a dictator or a despot he was Latin America’s greatest and most important democratic politician since Bolivar.

I would just finish with a few further points:

1. The Economist in its article on the death of Chavez has managed to surpass even itself in its lying and mendacity.

Note specifically the way the Economist describes the 2002 coup attempt

… But he (Chavez) ruled by confrontation and decree rather than by consensus. That triggered severe political unrest. The tensions came to a head on April 11th 2002, when hundreds of thousands marched on the presidential palace to demand Mr. Chavez’s resignation: 19 people died, many killed by snipers who were never identified. When the army refused his order to use force to suppress the protests, the president surrendered his office; his most senior general told the nation he had resigned. But after a conservative business leader proclaimed himself president on April 12 and declared the constitution abolished, the army switched sides again and restored Mr. Chavez to power.

These weasel words to describe a coup planned months in advance fill one with disgust. Chavez never ordered the army “to suppress the protests” (instead he tried to go on television to appeal for calm but his broadcast was blocked), the army never refused to carry out his order “to suppress the protests” since he never gave such an order in the first place, he was in no way responsible for the killing of the 19 demonstrators (some of whom were his supporters), the identity of their killers has never been firmly established but the most likely theory is that it was a provocation planned in advance and carried out by the Caracas police who supported the coup, Chavez never “surrendered office” (whatever that means) or resigned (no written resignation document was ever produced) though this was falsely claimed at the time by the coup plotters and was falsely reported by Venezuelan television and radio (which supported the coup), the army did not “change sides” and “restore” Chavez to power, the army split into pro and anti Chavez factions but the decisive factor in defeating the coup and in bringing Chavez back to power was the massive popular mobilisation in his support by the people of Caracas when they heard over Cuban radio and television (Venezuela radio and television refusing to broadcast it) confirmation from Chavez that he had not resigned.

Reading comments like this clarifies who the true democrats are. The Economist says it champions democracy but calls Chavez an “autocrat”, though he always governed constitutionally and democratically, and falsely claims he ordered his army to fire on peaceful protesters, which he never did. At the same time it repeats the lies of those who sought undemocratically and unconstitutionally to overthrow him and to establish a dictatorship. Here is one instance when the mask has well and truly dropped. Given a choice between a left wing democrat and right wing would be dictators the Economist supports the right wing would be dictators and lies on their behalf.

2. It has become an axiom in sections of the western media that Chavez mismanaged Venezuela’s economy, which supposedly is teetering on the brink of collapse or hyperinflation or both. The facts (discussed in your article) do not bear out these claims. No one would claim of Chavez that he was much of an administrator but his handling of the economy though hardly brilliant was perfectly creditable and to call Venezuela a basket case (as some do) is nonsense.

The point critics of Chavez ignore is that no one else in Venezuelan history has done better. Venezuela’s economy (like the economies of practically all Latin American countries) has been badly managed for most of its existence as an independent country, which is why when Chavez came to power despite its enormous oil wealth it was as poor as it was. By comparison with what came before him Chavez has done well. Many of the people in Venezuela who criticise Chavez for his supposedly poor economic management and alleged squandering of the proceeds of the oil boom are of course the same people who were responsible for Venezuela’s earlier disastrous economic mismanagement and for the squandering of the proceeds of the previous oil boom. To the extent that Chavez invested some of Venezuela’s oil money in providing poor Venezuelans with educational opportunities they might not otherwise have had rather than invest it to build skyscrapers, he has laid a better foundation for Venezuela’s economic future than did his predecessors, who did as it happens invest the money in building skyscrapers (Caracas has plenty left over from that time).

For what it’s worth and contrary to the criticism that tends to be made of him I would say that part of the reason for Chavez’s political success was precisely the modesty and realism of his economic ambitions. He never had any flights of fancy about turning Venezuela into an industrial superpower or world economic powerhouse. His interest was always far more on his social programmes with which he sought to help the poor. The result was that he never succumbed to the disastrous hyperexpansionary policies and economic megalomania of (say) Argentina under Peron, Chile under Allende or Brazil in the 1950s (“twenty years in four”) and during the “Brazilian miracle” of the 1970s.

3. It is another axiom of certain sections of the western media that other Latin American countries have done better or as well in recent years in achieving economic growth and in reducing poverty as did Venezuela under Chavez. To the extent that this is true it completely ignores the fact that the governments in the rest of Latin America that did these things did them in Chavez’s shadow and following his example. This fact is well understood in Latin America itself and has been pointed out repeatedly by say Lula of Brazil even if it is ignored in the west where it is not convenient. If Chavez had not existed or had failed, the turnaround in the rest of Latin America would not have happened. The comparison between what was achieved in Venezuela and what was achieved elsewhere in Latin America is therefore a false one since the one would not have happened without the other.

4. One of the things that has united western opinion against Chavez was his constant use of the “S” word – “socialism”- at a time when “socialism” was supposed to have been discredited and defeated. However Chavez was never a “socialist” in the way that this might have been understood in say the USSR in the 1960s. By his own admission he was no Marxist. He never ran a planned economy or aspired to do so and it seems he never considered the sort of sweeping nationalisations that happened in some other places. It makes far more sense to understand Chavez first and foremost as a democratic politician than as a “socialist” one. As a democratic politician facing constant challenges from an anti democratic opposition Chavez could only survive by keeping his lower class political base continuously mobilised. This explains some of his more eccentric personal habits (intended to connect with his base and to project him as someone larger than life), his anti imperialist rhetoric and his friendship with Castro who together with Che Guevara is an almost talismanic figure in Latin America especially amongst the young and poor (see for example the picture of Guevara stencilled on the main building of the university campus in Bogota in Columbia). It was this need to keep his lower class base mobilised that was also what was largely behind his constant invocations to “socialism”. In Latin America (and many other places) “socialism” is simply political shorthand for policies that favour the poor. This is not to say that Chavez’s “socialism” was insincere. However Chavez was no theorist or ideologue and one gets the sense that for him most of the time “socialism” was simply the word he used to describe whatever it was that any particular point in time he was doing. Keeping his political base continuously mobilised required continuous activity and concentration and must have taken an immense physical and emotional toll and almost certainly contributed to Chavez’s early death.

Chavez rigged elections. Look, I like to think I’m objective here. Some politicians I like rule countries where electoral fraud is widespread. But Venezuela isn’t Russia in this respect. Not only are election results consistent with pre-elections, unbiased polls, but Venezuela’s voting technology makes fraud extremely difficult. See Mark Weisbrot:

In Venezuela, voters touch a computer screen to cast their vote and then receive a paper receipt, which they verify and deposit in a ballot box. Most of the paper ballots are compared with the electronic tally. This system makes vote-rigging nearly impossible: to steal the vote would require hacking the computers and then stuffing the ballot boxes to match the rigged vote.

Unlike in the US, where in a close vote we really have no idea who won (see Bush v Gore), Venezuelans can be sure that their vote counts. And also unlike the US, where as many as 90 million eligible voters will not vote in November, the government in Venezuela has done everything to increase voter registration (now at a record of about 97%) and participation.

Chavez closed down critical TV stations. And yet the old case of the failure to prolong RCTV’s broadcasting license continues to be cited as the main evidence of this media “suppression.” E.g. from the faux-liberal Daily Beast:

And yet Latin America’s new democratic leaders rarely spoke against the excesses of Chávismo, turning a blind eye when he canceled the operating license of independent broadcaster RCTV in 2007…

What typically goes studiously unmentioned is that RCTV gleefully and one-sidedly supported the foreign-backed coup attempt against the legitimately elected Chavez administration in 2002. In many other countries, this would have been considered treason, with the attendant penalties of long-term imprisonment or even execution. In humane Venezuela, however, you just lose your broadcasting license.

Electricity blackouts. Guardianista presstite Rory Carroll, who clearly has an agenda:

He leaves Venezuela a ruin, and his death plunges its roughly 30 million citizens into profound uncertainty.

Because that exactly describes an increase in GDP per capita from $4,105 in 1999 to $10,810 in 2011 (according to his own newspaper). As Craig Willy says:

Something insufferable about Western elites accusing others of "economic mismanagement". Especially when "others" have double digit growth.—
Craig James Willy (@CraigJWilly) March 06, 2013

But particularly hilarious is this statement:

Underinvestment and ineptitude hit hydropower stations and the electricity grid, causing weekly blackouts that continue to darken cities, fry electrical equipment, silence machinery and require de facto rationing.

Because of course they never happen in pro-Western, investor-friendly countries.

Chavez stole $2 billion. These are rumors that keep slithering about in the comments from various neocons, although they rarely pop up into mainstream media texts outright. Apparently this claim comes from some right-wing law firm in Miami that claims the Castro brothers of Cuba are billionaires too. I find it about as credible as claims about Putin’s $40 billion fortune (or is it $70 billion now?), initially made by some non-entity Russian political scientist, and Gaddafi’s $200 billion fortune, probably spread by the CIA or somesuch in the course of NATO’s assault on the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (very ironic, coming from thieves who had seized Libya’s foreign-based assets). Funny how it’s always those who dare stand up to Western imperialism who get accused by their flunkies of massive corruption, no? I wonder if one causes the other?

Oil dependence. A lot of the presstitutes have accused Chavez of increasing Venezuela’s oil dependence, e.g.:

Former minister Gerver Torres points out that in 1998 oil represented 77 percent of Venezuela’s exports but by 2011 oil represented 96 percent of exports. That means today only around 4 percent of the goods that Venezuela exports are non-oil products! The Venezuelan economy relies almost exclusively on the price of oil and the ability of the government to spend oil revenues.

That’s kind of what happens when the oil price goes from being $11.91 per barrel (in 1998) to $87.04 (in 2011)! Funny how they harp on about how rising oil prices “unfairly” helped Chavez but then instantly shut up about it when making THIS particular point.

Higher violent crime. Not a myth. In fact, as I made clear, it’s one of the Chavez administration’s very biggest failings. Then ago, we also have many of the presstitutes claiming he was a dictator – even though the precise opposite happens with real dictators (they don’t tolerate alternate sources of violence, and they don’t bother with legal niceties; they just put all the suspected mafiosi up against a wall – put the two together, and violent crime almost always plummets under the rule of real dictators. The Sicilian Mafia actually provided help to Allied troops against the Mussolini regime).

He was friends with Ahmadinejad. Plenty of Western politicians are friends with Saudi prices. Drop the double standards.

He was anti-American. Well, what can you expect if you plot a coup against someone and then incessantly demonize him for not respecting democracy? Like Castro, incidentally, he actually started out fairly pro-American. It didn’t have to be this way.

He didn’t build skyscrapers. This has to be read to be believed. From AP’s Pamela Sampson:

Chavez invested Venezuela’s oil wealth into social programs including state-run food markets, cash benefits for poor families, free health clinics and education programs. But those gains were meager compared with the spectacular construction projects that oil riches spurred in glittering Middle Eastern cities, including the world’s tallest building in Dubai and plans for branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums in Abu Dhabi.

The author’s agenda speaks for itself. (Not to mention her ignorance – while Venezuela remains fiscally sound, Dubai’s big tower remains 80% unoccupied and needed a $10 billion bailout. Had Chavez listened to people like these then Venezuela would have gone bankrupt for real, not just in their sordid, bitter like imaginations).