Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

  • Comparing Rhetoric on Greece and Iceland

    You entrusted your money to people who eat smoked guillemot?
    You entrusted your money to people who eat smoked guillemot?

    I was in the UK in 2008 and 2009 when the Icesave banking disaster happened, and the UK government rushed to use anti-terrorism legislation to try and protect the money of British investors. There were something like 300,000 “ordinary” British and Dutch investors with money in Icesave accounts, and when the disaster happened all but the first 20,000 pounds or so were not protected by deposit insurance, so the UK government acted to try and protect the full deposits of the savers. I remember this clearly [although, probably not details of dates and money amounts] because one of my colleagues at the time had 120,000 pounds parked in such an account, the proceeds of selling her house, and was looking forward to using the money – inflated by the high interest – to buy her next one, and she was understandably distraught when she woke up to discover it had vanished into volcanic smoke.

    I also remember at the time that there was a lot of anger in the British public, not only at Iceland, but also at the British government for guaranteeing the deposits of people who were basically risking their money to get a higher rate of return. I often heard the refrain “they knew the risks” and many people pointed out at the time that higher interest rates usually correspond with higher risk, and these people could have had their money protected if they had taken more reasonable risks in a UK bank. This rhetoric probably wasn’t based entirely in fact, since British deposits weren’t fully guaranteed, and the UK government had to rush to assure large deposits in Northern Rock after it failed[1], but the general rhetorical principle was correct, British banks were safer than Iceland banks and had a correspondingly lower rate of return. The question was asked: should we bail out people who knew the risks they were taking? (Incidentally, I didn’t actually know at that time that a slightly higher rate of interest in a country that I assumed had good banking laws was a sign of higher risk; as a result of the rhetoric of that period I reassessed my involvement in an ING online account that is now defunct).

    I can’t easily find articles online from the time that say these things, but I don’t think my memory is wrong. This comment by an academic from McGill University (Canada) makes the point that investors should wear the risk; this blog roundup suggests that many economists thought it was right for Iceland to refuse to protect investors, and indeed Christine Lagarde of the IMF thought Iceland took the right approach. I can’t find any articles directly demanding that deposit holders should carry their risk, but I do remember it being a commonly-stated view at the time, and the view that Iceland did the “right thing” by telling investors to take a haircut is well-accepted, I think, as is the view that it has recovered better than those economies that did not. A subsidiary view, that deposit insurance creates moral hazard, is widely broadcast I think and is consistent with the idea that if you want to get a high rate of return on your deposit you need to be willing to accept the risk that you will lose it, pour encourage les autres. So I don’t think I’m wrong about this perspective and how it was broadcast at the time even if I can’t find written evidence.

    The idea that “investors” should wear the risk they take when chasing big profits seems completely reasonable, until one remembers that in this case the investors (and ultimately the creditors) for Icesave included depositors, that is ordinary people who put money in a high-risk/high-return account hoping for a short term gain. It seemed at the time that a lot of people were comfortable with the idea that creditors should just put up with their haircut, and depositors “knew the risks.”

    So it’s interesting to compare this rhetoric with the rhetoric surrounding Greece’s recent troubles. Much of the rhetoric about Greece focuses on its profligacy, the easy-spending nature of the Greeks, their corruption, their crazy ideas that they could just keep taking on more debt and spending it however they want. You don’t see much rhetoric (or at least, I haven’t) questioning why people were willing to lend them all this money, and why their creditors are now so heavily exposed. Remember that for every debtor there is a creditor, and the creditor wouldn’t be lending the money if they didn’t want to, i.e. if they weren’t benefiting from it. When Icesave collapsed the greedy motives of the creditors (and, implicitly or explicitly, the depositors who make up a certain proportion of those creditors) was front and centre in the debate, but it’s strangely absent from the Greek debate. We know that in the early stages of its crisis Greece had to take on a lot of public debt to bail out banks that were in trouble; at the time of writing it appears that private debt constitutes about 60bn euros of Greece’s total, which would have been about 30% of the total debt before the collapse. Why were these people lending money to a country that was cooking its books, had apparently obviously unsustainable pension and welfare systems, and an entire population that we are now told were slurping up ouzo down by the beach rather than working 12 hour days like Germans? These creditors didn’t have to lend this money, they could have bought German bonds or Iranian nuclear futures or something more solid and reliable. They loaned money to Greece because up until the crisis Greece’s economy was growing faster than anywhere else in Europe, everyone wanted a slice of that golden Greek sunshine, and basically they thought they could make their motza[2] and get out before the whole shebang went tits-up. i.e., they were greedy. Yet nowhere do we hear tell of their greediness – even though at the same time as their golden goose was turning barren, Icesave depositors were copping flak in the press and the public for being greedy and reckless.

    Why is that?

    We also shouldn’t stop with these faceless private lenders, who are no doubt lounging around in a gold-plated yacht off some private Greek Island, fluffy white cat firmly en-lapped. We can also wonder why none of this rhetoric of recklessness extends to the dour and responsible Germans. Germany has 60bn Euros sunk in the Greek project, and it is earning a healthy rate of interest. Germany, the country that has never paid its debts, the ultimate trust fund kid, is now strangely insistent on Greece paying its debts, and no one anywhere is questioning why Germany is so exposed to the economy of a country it has deplored as reckless, irresponsible, intransigent and wayward (indeed, worse than Iran if we are to judge by their negotiating results). A handful of eurozone countries have something north of 200 bn Euros sunk into the Greek project, and we now know that they are making a lot of money from this little act of charity: the Guardian’s live blog today tells us that David Cameron is contemplating demanding some of the 1.9bn Euros in profit that the ECB has made from its loans to Greece (though it doesn’t tell us over what period that profit was made). How come this fact – that the eurozone lenders are making fat scads of cash – is not being broadcast widely, as the Icesave depositors’ greedy winnings were being broadcast in 2008? Instead of this morality play, we are constantly reminded that the German taxpayer doesn’t want to have to cough up his or her hard-earned dollars to cover Greek mistakes. Yet right now the German taxpayer is making money from this debacle, so shouldn’t we be instead asking why the German taxpayer tolerates his or her government sinking 60bn Euros into a high-risk, high short-term profit venture in junk bonds? Germany is a responsible country, we’re told, whose taxpayers don’t take risks – at the same time as the media carefully avoids reporting on the big money Germany stands to make if Greece doesn’t default.

    The situations aren’t exactly the same of course, and people could argue that the eurozone nations didn’t have a choice – they aren’t loaning this money because they want to, the poor darlings, they’re doing it to save Greece and the euro project. But they did have choices, many choices: they could have told those (primarily French and German) banks to fail, as Iceland did, back at the beginning of the crisis; they could have rushed through some changes to the welfare transfers in the EU to ensure that Greece received direct payments rather than loans[3]; they could have printed money and handed it to the banks, as the UK and US did; they could have raised debt in their own countries, which are much less financially at risk, and provided it as a grant or something; they could have told Greece to find the money on private money markets. But they didn’t, they chose to lend money to Greece on terms that just happen to deliver them large profits – profits that are likely larger than they could have got from e.g. buying each others’ government bonds, or investing in the kind of low-return portfolios that would be politically acceptable to their electorates. And it just so happens that, since they control the mechanism by which Greece generates the repayments of those debts, they are able to turn the screws to ensure the money keeps coming – unlike those investors in Icelandic banks, who have no direct means of control over Icelandic politics and economy (and anyone from Britain who is old enough to know about the Cod Wars should surely know how hard it is to control Iceland!)

    And all while this was going on, we were being told about how irresponsible ordinary depositors were to put their money in a bank that had a high interest rate. It’s almost as if the morality underlying the rhetoric depends entirely on the people who took the risks …

    —

    Fn1: Northern Rock was then run by famous climate change denialist Matt Ridley, which one should always remember when one is considering how far our modern banks have sunk, and how much one should trust the risk assessment abilities of climate change denialists.

    Fn2: This is a Greek word, trust me, I’m Australian so I know Greek slang

    Fn3: Something you might argue is hard to do, but it appears that today the leaders of the ESMF have been able to magic up 20 billion euros from the Common Agricultural Policy, in order to find a way to provide rapid finance without leaning on the ECB[4]

    Fn4: Which makes one wonder, doesn’t it? Have these people been listening to the Greek government when it tells them how fucked it is? Had they not noticed? They just spent two days arguing with a Greek dude about whether to give him any money, and after they agree they find they don’t have any mechanism to provide the money, and he needs it now and he’s been telling them that for weeks! Perhaps instead of spending that two days arguing, they could have spent it more productively looking for their wallet.

  • A Tale of Two Deals

    At least it's not debt relief!
    At least it’s not debt relief!

    This week the European Union was involved in two major deals that settled two outstanding issues. One involved a long-standing issue that posed a threat to global economic prosperity, with an intransigent and corrupt government that consistently refused to adhere to past agreements, was not transparent about its activities, consistently responded to criticism of its activities with aggressive and nationalist rhetoric, and was suffering serious economic problems that required it to rapidly come to a deal that the rest of the world could agree to. The other involved Greece.

    The first of these two deals is, of course, the Iranian nuclear deal, which sees Iran keep its peaceful nuclear program and the vindication of its claim to a right to peaceful nuclear power, despite 10 years of obfuscation, secret development, and often dangerously inflammatory rhetoric. For much of that time Iran has been actively undermining US foreign policy interests in the region, including those of its allies, and any concessions to Iran are widely seen as both an insult and a threat to the US’s regional allies. But somehow the EU plus Russia and the USA managed to come up with a genuine compromise that respects Iranian sovereignty, allows it to continue to broadly control (and in many ways, expand) its nuclear science program, eases sanctions and gives security guarantees to the whole region. This deal is realistic about the realpolitik of the region, sensitive to the levers required to influence a sovereign nation’s domestic policy, and mindful of the long-term sustainability of the actions proposed. On a first reading it seems like a masterpiece of cooperative diplomacy.

    In contrast, in the same week the EU managed to come up with a completely reprehensible deal that crushes Greek national sovereignty, removes all national control over the key levers of the economy, and doesn’t offer any promise that the problem will go away in 5, 10 or even 30 years. It is both ignorant of the underlying economics of the problem and completely unrealistic about what can be achieved with the policy levers available. On a first reading, it seems like a dog’s breakfast of coercion and wishful thinking.

    How could the EU have come up with two such radically different deals in the same week? Ostensibly the former concerns a much greater threat – nuclear proliferation – from a much less tractable nation that shares no strong cultural, political or even geographic ties with any of the nations involved, while the latter involves an ultimately manageable debt crisis in an allied country with strong cultural, political and geographic ties. The latter problem could have been solved by unilateral EU fiat (debt relief) while the former required cooperation from the other power. Yet the deal on Greece has been forged as if that unilateral action were inconceivable, while the deal with Iran has taken a nuanced approach to the real challenges of securing cooperation from such a belligerent negotiating partner. I don’t believe that anyone negotiating with Iran really believed that Iran has a nuclear weapon, so they weren’t negotiating under such a threat, so it appears that they really, genuinely have just tried to come to good terms. It’s not even the case that oil diplomacy or regional military concerns could have been that influential – oil is losing its importance as a geostrategic asset (and will rapidly drop in value as global warming bites), and although Iran has something to offer the US in dealing with ISIS, it is effectively militarily contained.

    So what drove this difference? My suspicion is that the economic ideologies underlying the politics of most developed nations are now so completely unhinged and divorced from reality that it is impossible for them to negotiate reasonably in a sovereign debt crisis. They don’t (or won’t) understand fiat currencies, and won’t act with the authority and power that proper understanding of fiat currencies gives, so their negotiations have to be conducted in such a way as to carefully skirt around the actual economic facts in evidence. Connected with this is the related problem of ideologies and moralities – about work ethics, deserving vs undeserving poor, leaners and lifters – that are really hangovers from 100 years ago, and have no place in modern economic discourse (whether sub-national or international). In comparison, the nations involved in negotiating with Iran remain very cognizant and accepting of the basic principles of realpolitik and so are able to incorporate them into decision making and policy development. Hence the apparently bipolar mind at work on these two deals.

    An alternative explanation is that negotiations with Greece involved only the EU central powers, whereas negotiations with Iran involved Obama and Putin – who at the moment are looking waaaay saner than the European leadership …

  • Spiral Confederacy Adventure 1: Minor Contractual Disputes

    I didn't want to land there anyway ...
    I didn’t want to land there anyway …

    The first adventure of the Spiral Confederacy campaign starts with just two adventurers, who find themselves looking for work on a Starport above the Remnant planet of Dune. The two adventurers for this first session are:

    • Alpha, a psion with an interest in archaeology who has travelled out to Dune in hopes of exploring its surface
    • Ahmose Inhapi, an ex-pirate who has switched to smuggling and is travelling the Frontier hoping to find adventure, independence and wealth

    The planet they have travelled to, Dune, is under protective blockade by the Spiral Confederacy, enforced by the naval frigates Script for a Jester’s Tear and Garden Party. All congress with the planet is forbidden, even high-resolution film, and no one is allowed on- or off-world. This blockade has been in place since the planet was identified some 30 years ago, but the system itself is rich with asteroid belts and an extensive mining operation is underway. Travel in and 0ut of the system is unrestricted, and the starport was established soon after the wealth of the asteroids was identified by Pan-Galactic Mining, which sounds like a big company but isn’t, under a semi-exclusive lease. The starport is small but high grade, in order to support a large fleet of automated mining vessels and a small fleet of piloted vessels. Dune lies two parsecs from any other planet, and its star system is being exploited ruthlessly before the planet’s residents are uplifted and able to stake a claim on their resources.

    The characters have met with a man called Kong, a slightly effete fixer and broker from a nearby planet called the Forge. He has offered them a very simple deal: he needs them to get an ancient data crystal from a mine on an asteroid in-system, immediately. The crystal is a left-over relic from miners or prospecters who moved through the area a few hundred years ago, and may contain information of value to Kong’s buyer. He arrived in-system five days ago but didn’t have time to find people to help him on the way, so he is hiring the PCs. Because there is a possibility the crystal is guarded by some kind of automated system he wants people with a bit of combat experience to find it, and he can’t take his own bodyguard because the man is a Remnant and very uncomfortable with zero-g. Getting to the asteroid is simple: Kong has a chip that contains access codes for the automated mining ships, which can be overridden and given new flight orders, or even flown manually. If given automated flight orders they will not wait on the asteroid for more than a day, so it is better to use manual flight if possible, something Ahmose is definitely capable of. Payment consists of a single Memory Download Centre access card, valid for one week from date of activation, to be given to the PCs on their return with the chip. A memory download is equivalent to a spare life – it comes with a clone of the user’s body at the time of download – and is usually only available to members of the intergalactic elite, so even a one-time download is a great reward.

    The PCs spent a few hours getting their gear together, and then left on their mission. Hacking the mining ship was no trouble, and so after 15 hours of steady flight they were on the destination asteroid. They set the mining ship to manual upon arrival and emerged onto a small asteroid, perhaps 2-3 km across, rimed in some kind of ice and very far from the small, super-hot white sun that flooded this star system with deadly light. Vacc suits on, they trudged across the landing site, down a slope on the far side and into a gully in deep shadow. Ahmose activated a mining lamp and they moved cautiously down the empty gully, which was cast in deep shadow by 6m high sharp walls, on one side surmounted by rib-like stone arches. After walking perhaps 200 m they came to a small hole in the gully wall, which opened into a smooth tunnel leading down into the asteroid. They followed this tunnel down in a spiral for perhaps 60m before it opened into a small cavern. Here in the middle of the cavern was a small plinth, on which sat their target, a dusty yellow chip in a rough cube shape about the size of a die. They explored the cavern carefully, Alpha’s surveillance drone checking for any radiation or invisible signals, but could find no evidence of automated guard systems. Using a special box provided by Kong they picked up the crystal and left the cave unharmed. Too easy!

    As they returned, slogging up the gully back to the ship, they were ambushed. Two laser beams hit them, one each, and they dived into cover. They were taking fire from a pair of antagonists in a jumble of rocks about 40m away on the far side of their landing zone. Alpha, not being a combatant, slipped back down from cover into the gully, activated an anti-grav belt, and drifted out of the gully further away, out of sight of the shooters, in order to drift around behind them. Meanwhile Ahmose took out her shotgun and returned fire, flattening one of their attackers instantly but taking more damage from the other, who had better cover and seemed to be an excellent shot. Fortunately this enemy’s laser carbine was having difficulty penetrating Ahmose’s combat armour, and she was able to sustain only light wounds while she kept him pinned down. As this battle unfolded, Alpha slid up behind the remaining attacker and opened fire. He hit once but the attacker saw him and returned fire, doing a very light wound. Alpha, terrified of being killed here, teleported out of his vacc suit and back inside the hold of the mining ship, leaving his space suit drifting empty in front of their attacker, who didn’t realize immediately that something so strange had happened and kept shooting. This gave Ahmose time to leap forward into battle, drawing her cutlass and laying into the guy. He was soon beaten by her ferocious attacks, and she was able to tie up both men and drag them back to the mining ship.

    Once there they woke up one – Larry – and interrogated him. He was quite forthcoming, revealing that he and his empathy-linked colleague Barry had been paid by a woman called Orlac at Junction Zero, to come here and take the crystal. They were told that the crystal was a relic of an ancient rebellion that swept through this area 1000 years ago and might hold secrets about the nature of that rebellion, but that other factions connected to that time might be searching for it and they were to kill them if necessary. They were also told to rush the job, and offered shares in a micro-cutter called the Lithium Blade, as well as a safe house on The Reach (a pirate planet). Larry and Barry themselves had come on a small ship called Come as You Are, which was a shifter – a type of tiny ship designed to move very small numbers of people across short interstellar distances. Investigation revealed it had just two staterooms – room for four people – and a small cargo hold.

    Ahmose negotiated with Larry a little and they came to a deal: she would let Larry and Barry live, in exchange for becoming captain on their ship. Larry agreed, and they headed back to the starport together. Ahmose contacted Kong on the way and he met them in the arrival lounge of their ship bay as soon as they arrived, carrying their memory download cards. Larry and Barry passed him and went straight to the medical bay of the starport to tend to Barry’s (serious) injuries, while Ahmose and Alpha negotiated with Kong. They handed over the crystal and Ahmose told Kong about the information she had received from Larry; in exchange she convinced Kong (rather easily!) to give up two more memory download vouchers. He handed them over, thanked the PCs, and left in quite a hurry.

    Ahmose and Alpha were going to return to their quarters and relax a bit but something about the atmosphere in the starport made them change their minds. Things seemed tense and busy, and something had changed. Getting a bad feeling, they both went immediately to the Memory Download Centre, only to find it closed and the remaining staff member directing robots to pack up equipment. When they asked her why she was closed, she told them that the entire Starport was going to be destroyed within five days, and the MDC was evacuating today. Since memory download takes a full day with aftercare, they wouldn’t be able to do the download; and since jumping to another planet with an MDC would take more than 7 days, they would not be able to execute their vouchers. Perhaps they could find an advocate on Junction Zero who would be able to force an extension of the expiry date …

    Had Kong known this when he gave them the vouchers? Had he ripped them off?

    The pair of them rushed to a nearby bar where starport residents were gathered around a screen, to catch up on the news. The starport was due to be destroyed as part of a contractual dispute between Pan-galactic Mining and Soleria, a larger core company, that had been resolved several weeks ago in the Supreme Court. Soleria starships had just arrived with the news, and with the gunboat that would destroy the starport. They had also provided two evacuation vessels, Soleria 11C/1 and Soleria 11C/2, that between them could carry 400 people in cryogenic low berth. Because there were 600 – 700 people on the starport, these ships were sorting through residents and taking only residents who had legitimate business on the starport and were not Pan-Galactic staff, consistent with the Supreme Court’s ruling that they only had to exercise a “reasonable” effort to save starport residents. Everyone else had to find their own way out …

    Alpha and Ahmose rushed down to the medical bay to find Larry arguing with the Doctor, who was refusing to provide medical care to Barry because his condition required several days of care and she needed to get out soon. Unfortunately she was a Pan-Galactic Mining employee, so had no guaranteed way off the ship. Ahmose suggested she could leave on the Come as You Are if she loaded up the medical equipment needed to care for Barry, and any spare valuable gear that would fit. She agreed to this deal very quickly and began preparing to move Barry and all required gear to their ship. They then rushed back to their ship, worried that someone might try to steal it, and indeed found two men arguing about whether to break into the docking bay when they arrived. They scared them off, set Larry to guard the doors, and went down to the main docks to find out what was happening.

    The main docks were a scene of chaos. Only four ships were now docked here – Soleria 11C/1 and 11C/2, a mining ship called the Mineral Dahlia, and a freebooter called the Ride on Time. The Soleria ships had marines out in force herding people into queues for assessment, and the captain of the Mineral Dahlia was looting as much mining gear as she could, loading it all into the cargo hold of her ship – a cargo hold that, if empty, could probably rescue all the remaining citizens of the starport. Meanwhile the captain of the Ride on Time, an odious man by the name of Mithril Carn, was auctioning off berths on his ship. He had enough stateroom space for 24 people to board his ship, and had begun taking bids on the space. Six of his men, thuggish-looking mercenaries, stood ready to quell any dissent, and as the PCs watched the two men they had scared from their own ship sidled up to join that gang. Things in the docks were rapidly taking a desperate and criminal turn …

    This is where the adventure ended. The PCs need to decide whether to try and intervene in this madness to try and rescue everyone on the starport, or to just abandon them to their fate. They have only two or three days to make their decision before the deadline becomes pressing. What will they do …?

     

  • Post-scarcity Traveller

    I have begun a campaign set in a post-scarcity science fiction setting, called the Spiral Confederacy. The setting is a sprawling corner of the galaxy that was once a sprawling human interstellar empire. This empire fell apart in some ancient catastrophe that separated all the planets, and over thousands of years they lost contact with each other. A new empire, the Spiral Confederacy, has arisen and is slowly recovering all the planets of this diaspora, expanding from a central core. The Spiral Confederacy is divided roughly into the core, consisting of planets that have been connected for thousands of years; the Rim, containing planets reconnected in the past couple of hundred years, still recovering from their isolation; and the Frontier, which contains unexplored planets and Remnant planets, civilizations of the Diaspora that have not yet been reconnected. Adventures will start in the Frontier.

    The Spiral Confederacy is close to a post-scarcity society, with so much wealth and resources that there is no need for most people to work or indeed to do anything they don’t want to. A person can live their whole life without working or contributing to society in any way but still have a guaranteed home, food, education, leisure, planetary and interstellar travel, with no conditions. The only limitation on standard needs is the amount of time it takes to procure them. The society is not completely post-scarcity, so although it is based on the principles of Iain M Banks’s Culture, it’s not possible in this Confederacy for a person to simply request a spaceship for themselves and disappear on a galactic tour for a hundred years – that level of resource consumption is still restricted. There are also many legal limits, still, on what people can have – you can’t fly a plane without a license and training, for example. But you can get on a plane and travel anywhere you want, any time. As a result of these restrictions there is still inequality – to have homes on multiple planets, for example, or own a spaceship, one will have to work and contribute and build up the right to this greater level of resource use. It is to achieve these rights that most people begin adventuring.

    The Spiral Confederacy has several important underlying principles, described below.

    • AIs are illegal: The Confederacy has a deep and powerful hatred of AIs, and does all it can to drive them out of economic and social life. As a consequence, AIs are commonly found as enemies of human civilization. They have followers amongst the human population, however, who call on their powers as if they were gods – players can play these PCs as a new Traveller career called Adherents. As a consequence of this attitude towards AIs, all computer systems are heavily secured and hacking is almost impossible; furthermore, the Confederacy has reached the limits of its technological advancement (in Traveller terms, TL17) because further advancement is beyond human computational capacity and requires an AI contribution to science
    • Psionics are the scientific frontier: With scientific research stalled, human effort has turned to the development of psionics and the human mind, in the hopes of using these mysterious and little understood powers to advance human civilization. Psions are an acceptable character career and there is no limit on psionics in society, though it is considered polite for a psion to identify themselves clearly
    • Remnant worlds have “magic”: Many remnant worlds have fallen back into ruin and barbarism, and an interesting consequence of this slide is the development of priests and “magic”, something only observed in these backward worlds. The generally accepted theory is that these primitive worlds conceive of psionic powers as divine intervention or magic, and channel their powers through this mechanism; but interestingly, their powers are different to the standard psionics available to people from Core worlds. Study of these Remnant Priests is an important part of the program to advance psionics, and Priests are a new career available to players.
    • Information cannot travel faster than light: The only way to carry information between star systems is on spaceships, which travel at high speeds through jump technology (the standard Traveller system of moving a certain number of parsecs in a week of jump travel). There is no “ansible” or other method for conveying information without sending it through jump; matter can travel faster than light, but light cannot. Thus information takes weeks to move between star systems, so systems without regular trade routes can be months behind the news, creating a sense of frontier or colonial life, like the 17th century on Earth.
    • Consciousness is required for jump: It is not possible to send automated systems through jump space – for some reason, a consciousness is required to enter and leave jump. Computers can program jump paths and enter jump but they always, without fail, misjump or are lost in jump space. This includes AIs, either because the consciousness must be organic or they are in some sense not genuinely conscious (the argument made by the leaders of the Confederacy). This prevents AIs from spreading their consciousness between planets and forces them to rely on Adherents for this task; it also prevents the Confederacy from sending news between planets without devoting piloted spacecraft to the task, and creates pockets of space where news is patchy and information is not regularly updated. Pirates and criminals thrive in these pockets.

    Against this backdrop the Confederacy is slowly spreading and joining up the planets of the old Diaspora. It fights a low-level war against AIs on its fringes, and occasionally also against Remnant planets who refuse to accept its protection and wealth, or against rebellions from within. As it expands it stumbles upon mysteries from before the first fall, and catastrophes or strange enemies. Greedy for history, it is always looking for brave or stupid adventurers to help with its contacts and conflicts on the fringe of its space – and it is on that frontier that we will conduct our adventures.

    A full description of the Confederacy, and guidelines for house rules, can be downloaded here.

     

  • Character Classes for a Mad Max RPG

    Tyrant, Lancer and captured Rev-heads en scene
    Tyrant, Lancer and captured Rev-heads en scene

    One of the members of my regular gaming group is thinking of running a one-off set in the world of Mad Max, probably hacking the Fate rules. I don’t know how the Fate rules work but I’m very excited to consider gaming in Mad Max’s crazed world. So here are a few ideas for character classes (or archetypes, if that’s too narrow a concept) that might make sense in that world. They’re designed in terms of what might be thier core attributes, skills and types of special powers or feats. The archetypes are all based on people you meet in Mad Max 2-4, and examples are given in square brackets after the archetype name.

    • Road Warrior [Mad Max, Furiosa, Warrior Woman]: The quintessential loner good at everything. A capable driver not great at stunts, the Road Warrior is also a capable melee fighter and shooter. The Road Warrior’s primary trait is her level of comfort on moving vehicles: for a Road Warrior the moving back of a car is as stable a platform for combat as the solid earth of the desert, and she suffers no penalties or disadvantages fighting atop a moving vehicle – the only way to shake her loose is to change the momentum of her car. Because the road warrior has to make it in a wild and dangerous world on his own, he has to be good at a lot of things and often isn’t the match of his opponents at any one of them. He makes up for this with a healthy reserve of cunning and luck, as if the world had a narrative that favoured him …
    • Rev-head [Warboys, Hedgehogs, the Rock Riders]:Rev-heads are the quintessential stunt drivers of the Fury Road. They aren’t great fighters or shooters, specializing in only one form of attack, but this is because their main job is delivery – they get the Road Warriors and Polecats where they need to be. Rev-heads are also technically adept, because they need to fix their rigs on the run.
    • Polecat [Polecats]: Masters of acrobatics and close-fighting, the Polecat forms the boarding party of the wasted future. There is no vehicle too hard for them to get a purchase on, no high-speed chase that can confound their acrobatics, and no height or speed that can scare them. They don’t shoot, drive, speak or think: they leap, they smash, they grab.
    • Lancers [Warboys, some of the hedgehogs, crew of the tanker in Mad Max 2]: Lancers are the stalwarts of the convoy, the men and women at front and back whose job is the gunnery and long-range attack. Masters of heavy weapons, rifles, crossbows and spears, they don’t aim to get in close and fight, but to lay down the heavier defenses of the convoy so that the Polecats can get in and get the prize. Although they aren’t great drivers or athletes, they have a remarkable talent for escaping car crashes, and when they have the enemy in their sights they don’t feel the rough and tumble of the road …
    • Fliers [The Gyro Captain]: Fliers are rare and valued heroes of the future, patrolling the skies rather than the road. They can’t fight but they can fly, they have no fear of heights, excellent perception and an acuity for technology and the weather. Those little gyro-copters aren’t particularly stable either, so Fliers tend to have a great deal of luck…
    • Scamp [The Feral Kid]: People grow up early in the wasteland, and they don’t all get ahead by fighting and killing. Some make it through luck, wits, stealth and cunning. Most of the wasteland’s thieves and spies don’t make it to adulthood, which is why the majority of the ones you see are feral, scuttling kids. They can’t fight, but good luck catching them, or even seeing them …
    • Breeders [The Wives]: Breeders are rare gems in the wasteland, humans of perfect purity and beauty who are somehow immune to the corrupting effects of the Collapse. Perfect in every way, their genetic advantage isn’t just reflected in exceptional beauty: they also have better senses, and their minds are unaffected by decay and deformity, giving them a rare insight into the true nature of the world. They are highly sought after by every community in the wasteland, and they know how to use their beauty to deceive, distract and confuse. Breeders can be male or female!
    • Tyrants [Toecutter, Humungus, Aunty Entity, Imortan Joe, the People Eater, the Bullet Farmer – my, there are quite a lot of these aren’t there!]: Tyrants are the leaders of the wasteland, so-named because there is no nice way to rule in a world without water, food or mercy. They know what makes men and women tick, and they know how to use it to their advantage. They may not be great in battle, or even able to to fight at all, but they have a remarkable ability for channeling others’ cruelty and ambitions to their own ends. Through intimidation, inspiration, cunning and plain old good luck they get everything they want every time … until their luck runs out.
    • Organic Mechanic [The Organic Mechanic]: The doctors of the future, though there is almost nothing in the future that they can prevent or treat, except physical injury. Lacking the bedside manner of modern physicians, they make up for it with a refined taste in cruelty and an ingenuity for the use and misuse of human frailties. In addition to rough and ready methods for preserving the injured, the halt and the lame, Organic Mechanics also have a remarkable talent for jury-rigging primitive cybernetics and bio-enhancements so that their charges can keep fighting and dying. Why waste good organics? Or any?
    • Tech-heads [Master, Mechanic]: They can’t fight, they’re probably physically deformed, and they aren’t usually very pleasant, but you can’t go anywhere without them, so there they are in every messed-up community and hole in the ground between here and the salt flats. Give a tyrant a mechanic and a pool of water, and she’ll have a “community” built on cruelty, pig-shit and petrol within a month.
    • Brutes [Blaster, Rictus Erectus]: Possessed of the two greatest physical attributes one can enjoy in the wasteland – excessive physical strength and dim wits – the Brute is the last line of defense of every tyrant and petty dictator ever to rule the sand. Once the warboys are done, the rev-heads are burning and scattered, and the forces of disaster are closing in, every corrupt has this final suicidal mutant giant to deploy as he or she scuttles out the back door. Slow, stupid, impossibly loyal and invincible – what’s not to like?

    In this list I haven’t included Savants like the children in Beyond Thunderdome or mobile archers like the Vulvalini, either because they don’t seem to be playable or because they’re really just the name for a specific clan of other types of characters. But I think this makes for a fairly comprehensive list of mad archetypes for a mad world. Have I missed any …?

  • When the Supreme Court’s Words Mean Nothing

    The New England Journal of Medicine was released today, with its first assessment of the fallout of the Supreme Court’s decision not to gut Obamacare. Policy analysts writing in the NEJM have been generally supportive of Obamacare, and so of course they’re happy with the result, declaring that it has removed “the largest remaining cloud of judicial uncertainty hanging over the Affordable Care Act” and advocating that now the legislative agenda focus on real improvements to the established law.

    The NEJM article also remarks on the importance of assessing the text of the legislation in its full context, not just the strict text of the specific provision. It argues that this is a well-understood principle of Supreme Court jurisprudence, and gives the following example:

    An earlier example of this principle comes from the Court’s 2000 decision in FDA v. Brown and Williamson, which King cites or quotes several times. Brown and Williamson held that (before more recent legislation) the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lacked authority to regulate cigarettes as devices that deliver the drug nicotine. Despite the FDA statute’s broad literal definitions of “drug” and “device,” the Court concluded that “considering the [statute] as a whole, it is clear that Congress intended to exclude tobacco products from the FDA’s jurisdiction.”

    This past decision also makes perfect sense to me. While tobacco is clearly a drug, the FDA is not charged with monitoring recreational drugs, and tobacco products should be monitored separately or the FDA’s authority extended to them through an act of Congress.

    Interestingly, this is also what the architects and defenders of the King vs. Burwell case thought, back when the FDA v. Brown and Williamson case was decided, and repeatedly since. For example, in a 2007 post the Heritage Foundation cites it as an example of an exception to the trend towards an administrative state. I can’t find any evidence that the legal experts at the Heritage Foundation have decided that this example of the Supreme Court not showing “deference to agencies” must have been wrong due to its willingness to invoke “context,” in which (to quote Scalia) “words have no meaning.” Similarly, the Cato Institute has referred positively to the appeal to context in FDA vs. Brown and Williamson in both its 2006-2007 and 2008-2009 Supreme Court Reviews (see page 201 of the 2006-2007 Review, or a footnote on page 126 of the 2008-2009 Review). The Cato Institute has also issued multiple Amicus Briefs for other court cases where they think that the FDA v. Brown and Williamson case might help to enforce the importance of context. For example, in their Amicus Brief on Texas vs. United States of America (Case 1:14-cv-254) , for example, they argue (citing the case):

    The court must “fit, if possible, all parts [of the statute] into an harmonious whole” and use “common sense” to determine the scope of Congress’s delegation to an agency.

    Interesting how much their opinion of how the Supreme Court should interpret statutes has changed in just a short time: their amicus brief to that case was submitted in January 2015 but by July 2015 they think that reading the law in its overall context

    establishes a precedent that could let any president modify, amend, or suspend any enacted law at his or her whim

    What a difference 6 months makes! Apparently now “common sense” is no friend of liberty, and in following the precedent of laws that the Cato Institute relied on heavily (until this year!) the Supreme Court has made it possible for presidents to do anything they want. I guess words really do mean anything these days …

    But it’s not just the Cato Institute that appears to have revolutionized its view of the role of context and common sense in the past little while. Four of the majority in King vs. Burwell were dissenters in FDA v Brown and Williamson, the common judge of the two cases being Roberts. Indeed, Scalia agreed fully with Roberts back then that common sense was important, but now appears to think it’s “applesauce” – and the Heritage Institute thinks that “liberals” were shocked then, and applauding now. About, presumably, the same thing.

    Where does this leave us? Should there be a common sense test for judges to see if they all agree? Or should we perhaps just roll dice to determine the outcome of Supreme Court decisions where context and common sense are required? Or, perhaps, we could accept that the Supreme Court as it currently works is just an ideological rubber stamp, and the battles in Congress to stack it are way more important than the judges who are on it. It might be of particular value to Republicans to get some bipartisan agreement on this quickly: they’re going to lose the 2016 election after Donald Trump eats a puppy on live TV, and Hilary Clinton is going to get the chance to appoint a couple more judges, which in combination with Obama’s legacy will mean that the nation will be at the mercy of a liberal majority definition of “common sense” for the next 20 years (or 40, if Clinton can find a few young and talented female judges to nominate). Perhaps a move to introduce fixed term limits, and a more objective and less partisan nomination process, might be a good idea. How about 12 year term limits, and nominees for replacement have to be recommended by a consensus of the Supreme Court Bench itself? That would iron out both the kinks in the nomination process and the risk that a single president could dominate the court for years after he or she has gone to the Great Presidential Library in the Sky – a domination, we should note, that will grow over time as life expectancies do.

    Of course it’s not going to happen, so Americans will continue to be subject to the tyranny of a system that is clearly broken, invented by a bunch of short-sighted slave-owners a couple of hundred years ago and completely unsuited to the modern world, and now used as a battleground for political retribution rather than solid constitutional decision. Still, at least the USA is on the way to universal health coverage!

     

  • Democratic Legitimacy and the EU

    In recent days there has been a tiny bit of discussion on this blog about whether a group of 9 unelected philosopher-kings should be able to decide social issues for 330 million people, so it seems appropriate that I turn my attention briefly to the chaos rolling over Europe and the threat of a Greek exit from the EU. From the outside looking in it seems like the three main powers involved in this shit-show (the European Central Bank, IMF and European Commission) have refused to give any serious ground on their demands, even though these demands are obviously not going to help Greece out of its crisis, and have instead decided to essentially dictate to Greece the terms of its fiscal, labour, welfare and banking policies. Given that they are well aware of how much their austerity policies have failed, and know full well that Syriza was voted in on the promise of no more austerity, it’s just ridiculous bloody-mindedness that drives them to force their ultimatum on Greece. The ECB even appears to have withdrawn its standard emergency credit line for banks experiencing instability, without any justification. They’ve basically made clear to Greece that they won’t accept any political options except those that suit their ideology. This is not how politics works, and it’s no surprise that under this pressure Syriza have decided to tell the troika to jump. Paul Krugman (who for some reason I never normally read) has a particularly deft explanation of this referendum decision:

    until now Syriza has been in an awkward place politically, with voters both furious at ever-greater demands for austerity and unwilling to leave the euro. It has always been hard to see how these desires could be reconciled; it’s even harder now. The referendum will, in effect, ask voters to choose their priority, and give Tsipras a mandate to do what he must if the troika pushes it all the way

    This is how politics should work, and giving Greece a week of grace to sort this out and set a clear future path would be a good way to indicate respect for its political autonomy. This is also the reason that David Cameron’s promise of an in-out referendum, though insane for Britain, is politically the right thing to do. Tsipras has taken the chance to make sure that his country’s decision is politically validated, and that he can make his final decision about the euro from a position of democratic legitimacy; the leaders of the EU’s main powers are flabbergasted by this, and the troika are confused. It appears that they don’t understand where their authority ends and the democratic demands of the people of Europe begins, and it looks as if a lot of Greek people are going to have to go through a fair amount of pain in order to teach them. This is disappointing, given the states involved are apparently all democratic, and it gives the lie to what I think is increasingly shaping up as the central fiction of the European project: that it can stop another war in Europe.

    The EU is a fairweather friend

    This isn’t the first piece of brinksmanship that has been deployed by an EU member in recent time. A few weeks ago Italy’s prime minister, Matteo Renzi, threatened to issue Schengen visas to refugees coming from Africa and send them on to other parts of Europe, after it was revealed that not only were other countries doing nothing to help, but German, French and Swiss authorities were turning migrants back at their borders, forcing Italy to manage both the rescue and the housing and welfare of tens of thousands of migrants – even though most of those migrants are hoping to move north to other parts of Europe. Basically Italy had to shoulder this whole burden because the rest of Europe has shown itself unwilling to help its members when they face serious problems. The same could also be said for the UK’s welfare and work problems: it is obvious that the UK is a preferred destination for migrant labour in Europe, because everyone in Europe learns English and the pound is so strong, but the EU has absolutely refused to bend the rules for the UK on welfare and migration issues.

    You may not agree with the specific governments on any of these issues (I don’t agree with the UK, for example) but I should hope it’s obvious what the problem here is: the EU member states are fairweather friends. They can carefully hammer out a compromise agreement on a shared issue like the free movement of labour or the role of the ECB that will enable them to handle the normal, stable times, but they are completely unwilling to compromise their own interests for the greater good when extraordinary circumstances roll around. The free movement of labour is fine but sharing the resettlement of refugees is impossible, and will be left for the country that happens to be unlucky enough to get them first; shared work and welfare goals are fine but they absolutely won’t consider an exception for a country that is bearing an unusual proportion of the effects of those rules; stability targets are fine but no one is willing to risk either their ideological purity or their own taxpayers (Germany’s constant petty battle cry) when a shared financial crisis hits one of their weakest members unusually hard. Basically, the countries of Europe are behaving like fairweather friends who pat you on the back and congratulate you when you have a success, and are happy to split the bill at your Friday pizza-and-beer nights, but would rather you didn’t come if you’ve fallen on hard times and might like to skip paying for the odd Friday night. They’re happy to talk about helping you move house, or minding your pets while you visit a sick relative, but strangely they’re all busy when the time comes.

    This is funny because the regular refrain we hear from the EU’s main sales merchants is that the EU establishes a bulwark against the risk of a future war in Europe. I’m sorry, but if the countries of the EU can’t come up with a mutually acceptable target for distributing 50,000 refugees among a population of 350 million without being threatened with an ultimatum, it’s unlikely that any one of them are going to pause for even the blink of an eye if war is in their interests. Indeed, while the EU rumbles on with its chaotic and obstinate mismanagement of what should have been a complete non-crisis in Greece, certain countries on the eastern edge are entertaining military antics by a non-EU member (the USA) that threatens to involve them in a war so catastrophic that they’ll all be running to Greece. If this is how you construct an “ever closer union of peoples” that will guarantee peace, then peace must be pretty easy to come by.

    The reality is that war isn’t going to happen inside Europe because no one wants it, and the major powers are aging so fast that they are no longer able to field a decent war machine. I think this is great, and one of the many untold benefits of rapid aging, but I don’t think it has much at all to do with the European project, which is looking increasingly like a German/French alternative to colonialism, intended to drive down the competitiveness of the European periphery and ensure the centre gets access to reliable markets and a long-term pool of cheap labour. Students of history might suggest that this is exactly the wrong way to go about ensuring a non-chaotic future: the students of Greece are likely to soon provide an object lesson on the topic.

    If the EU wants to retain any kind of democratic legitimacy, its member states need to think about how to rein in their executive, and start giving more credence to the (disparate) complaints of countries like Greece and the UK, about precisely how governance should work in such a confederacy. Because right now it’s looking like a couple of people from primarily northern and western powers think that they can dictate political terms to entire nations on the periphery. That’s empire, not union, and I think people are starting to notice …

    —

    Addendum: Joseph Stiglitz also seems to think that the EU is behaving poorly, and Krugman has a couple of pieces pointing out that Greece wasn’t as badly off as we are told, and austerity has really done Greece no favours.

  • Reading the Turner Diaries in the Light of History: White Nationalist Terror and ISIS

    This weekend I read the Turner Diaries, a famous and influential right-wing apocalyptic insurrection fantasy written in 1978. I picked up this nasty little piece of racist literature because of the recent events in the US, thinking to get a bit of background on the white nationalist terror threat in the USA, but I was amazed reading it by the similarities in ideology, vision and practice between US white nationalists terrorists and “Islamic State” (ISIS). In this post I want to review the book and explore some of these similarities.

    Background: Don’t try this at home

    The Turner Diaries were written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce, founder of a white nationalist organization called the National Alliance, and quickly became an inspiration for many white nationalist terrorists. The most striking influence was on Timothy McVeigh, whose truck bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma City in 1995 almost exactly mirrors the first major action described in the book, but the Diaries also inspired many other people: the Anti-Defamation League has a page on the Diaries that charts their widespread influence in the white nationalist movement. I first discovered them in my early twenties, when I had a lover who grew up amongst Australia’s neo-Nazis, and although too young at the time to understand their politics was familiar with much of their iconography and inspirations. For many years the book was on sale at a famous alternative bookstore in Melbourne, Polyester, though I imagine it’s unavailable now if the warning on the internet archive version is any guide:

    Ownership of this book might be illegal in the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. You must be at least 21 years or older in order to read this book because of the sexual and violent content. Parental Discretion is Advised!

    Fortunately it’s not illegal in Japan as far as I know, and really easy to read on a smartphone, so a few hours later here I am better educated and definitely more disgusted. I read this book so you don’t have to, kids.

    The book is the literary equivalent of found footage, purporting to be diaries from a revolutionary war in the USA that were found about 100 years later, and cast light on central events of the time through the eyes of an activist who rose to legendary status in the movement through his sacrifice. It is short, and has that property of narrative coherence and good pace that makes it a page turner (or, I guess, in the modern era, swiper) even though its characterization is shallow and its story devices occasionally ridiculous. No one in this story is likable – and trust me, until you read what these people think and are willing to do, you really haven’t plumbed the depths of what unlikable means – but the plot will keep you involved in their horrid schemes and potential successes even while you are mentally urgently in need of serious disinfection. I guess this is why it was popular with the kind of “visionaries” who blow up kindergartens …

    The diaries describe the actions of members of a racist insurrectionist movement called “the Organization” that starts off small and ultimately takes over the US and then the world, using a mixture of terrorism and then nuclear warfare. To give an idea of the vision that this book describes:

    • Once they win the USA they solve “the Chinese problem” by nuking everything between the Urals and the Pacific Ocean, creating what they call the “Eastern Wasteland”
    • They don’t have a racial model based on heirarchies and slavery, as the Nazis did: anyone not white is killed across the whole planet. There are no untermenschen here, just white people and dead people
    • They “win” their battle with the US government by starting a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, leading to the destruction of most major cities in the USA and the death of upwards of 60 million people, but they consider to be a worthwhile sacrifice

    Being found footage, this book has parenthetical notes describing the “past” depicted in the book: this includes a note telling the reader what “negroes” are, since this race has been exterminated from the entire planet. The book also has a couple of chilling asides in which the diarist describes Nazi Germany as good and decries the fact that they were stopped in their project. It also has a vicious scene where every mixed-race, non-black and non-white person in California – i.e. every Asian, every American of southern European descent, every native American and anyone of dubious heritage is marched into a canyon and murdered. This is racial purity of the most extreme form, and make no mistake: this was the visionary novel that America’s white nationalist terrorists were inspired by.

    It also has some ridiculous plot devices, such as the silly idea that the white nationalist Californian enclave is able to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union but doesn’t itself get nuked back to the stone age.  But for analytical purposes, I’m willing to overlook these slips in the interests of understanding exterminationist ideology.

    The Diaries’ Similarities with ISIS

    The Diaries have certainly stood the test of time, in that some of the scenes described in them have been enacted by various terrorist groups over time. Obviously they have a striking similarity with the Oklahoma bombing, since they inspired it, but that is just the start of their inventiveness. Other similarities include:

    • The Organization detonates a huge bomb on September 11th that kills 4000 people and leaves a part of a city burning for several days
    • They attack a newspaper they dislike, culminating in killing its editorial writer [at his house, not the offices, but I think the similarities should be clear]
    • They deploy a dirty bomb to render a major power station inoperable
    • Beheading is one of their favourite tactics once they become operational in the field

    The tactics described in the Diaries also have specific commonalities with ISIS tactics. In addition to the beheadings, they are very fond of filming executions and broadcasting them:

    That’s where we were taking the big-shots to be hanged: the well-known politicians, a number of prominent Hollywood actors and actresses, and several TV personalities. If we had strung them up in front of their homes like everyone else, only a few people would have seen them, and we wanted their example to be instructive to a much wider audience. For the same reason many of the priests on our lists were taken to one of three large churches where we had TV crews set up to broadcast their executions.

    This is a new, very modern phenomenon in mass murder, which we see from ISIS a lot. Government regimes like to hide their massacres, but terrorists need to broadcast them. Note also the choice of targets: not agents, technical staff and those who are implacably ideologically opposed to the force, but people whose actions and lifestyles represent a moral transgression. States kill people who threaten them materially, or fit into a category of useless people conveniently-scapegoated; modern terrorists murder people who have symbolic value, but who might otherwise be valuable. Their ideology doesn’t care whether you could be converted to the cause and used, because it is far more interested in making a spectacle out of punishing you for your transgressions.

    These transgressions, note, are racial, or derive from crimes against race that the “criminals” didn’t even know were illegal until the new order swept over them – just as many of ISIS’s victims didn’t know they were doing anything wrong until ISIS arrived. On Monday you’re a tobacco salesperson, on Tuesday you’re a criminal about to be executed. This is ideological purity at its craziest.

    Descriptions of cities “liberated” from racial miscegenation by the Organization also seem eerily similar to what we have heard of ISIS territory. They are depopulated, full of dead bodies, and struggling to find food and basic supplies, often for weeks, as the Organization is tiny, rules by terror and doesn’t have the manpower to maintain security and distribute food. It has also made clear that it isn’t interested in capitalism or markets, and its activities are completely disruptive of any kind of economic activity. At one point – having nuked much of America – the Organization’s enclaves are so desperate for food that they cannot take in even white survivors. Here is their solution:

    In Detroit the practice was first established (and it was later adopted elsewhere) of providing any able-bodied White male who sought admittance to the Organization’s enclave with one hot meal and a bayonet or other edged weapon. His forehead was then marked with an indelible dye, and he was turned out and could be readmitted permanently only by bringing back the head of a freshly killed Black or other non-White. This practice assured that precious food would not be wasted on those who would not or could not add to the Organization’s fighting strength, but it took a terrible toll of the weaker and more decadent White elements.

    Welcome to your racially-pure wonderland, honky… The similarities between this desperation and the desperation we are told is common in ISIS-held areas is noticeable. These people think they hold the key to the promised land but their millenial rage has so destroyed the world around them that they cannot help their own.

    The “terrible toll of the weaker” alluded to in the above passage is another common element of ISIS and Organization tactics, though it points more to a moral than an organizational failing. Both organizations have an ideology of purity so extreme and powerful that they have developed a position of harsh judgment on almost everyone they are supposed to be helping. It is very clear in the Turner Diaries that the Organization considers the majority of white people to be stupid chumps who have brought about their own decay, and they are responsible for their own bad position through a lack of racial awareness. Although salvation of the white race is their aim, they don’t have any sympathy or compassion for individuals. The Diaries’ putative writer and his girlfriend at one point manage to ambush four black men and two “white sluts” with them, and kill all six, even though two are white, because those two have degenerated – no effort is made to explain to them how they have transgressed against a code they didn’t even know existed. This is early in the book; later this scales to the complete destruction of New York, the white population of which is dismissed because it allowed itself to be miscegenated. There are several passages in the book that justify this in terms of both racial survival and moral laxity: only those white people who can show they are able to “wake up” to the sick and insane racial fantasies of the Organization are guaranteed salvation, with the rest only offered salvation where it is convenient. This is very consistent with ISIS’s extreme ideology, which both punishes people for any kind of minor past infractions against a strict religious standard, and treats Sunni adherents as cheap collateral in its war goals: those who didn’t think to get enlightened and join ISIS are expendable, because they don’t have the purity and commitment that would justify any effort to spare them.

    Finally, there is a similarity in targets. In addition to newspapers and politicians, the Organization targets actors and actresses, supreme court justices, and conservative politicians. There are multiple passages in the book railing against conservative politicians, who are racist but not willing to make the extreme steps necessary to see in the new world order. This is similar to ISIS, who consider Hamas and the Islamic Brotherhood to be apostates for considering the use of democracy or negotiation to achieve their aims. The Diaries have an early scene where a cell member is revealed to be “merely” a conservative: they execute him because he doesn’t support their nihilistic form of revolutionary activity. Later on, too, they have to fight a military enclave in Washington State that is run by “conservative” military folks, who want to restore the constitution: they deal with such anathema in an appropriately brutal way. All rival political ideologies, no matter how similar to theirs in goals, are judged impure and dealt with in the same vengeful and exterminationist way. The battle between the Organization and “conservatives” (and libertarians!) in the Diaries is similar to that between ISIS and al Qaeda. There is also a striking similarity in attitude towards people who share the Organization’s broad beliefs but were willing to compromise in order to get rich – these men get very short shrift, and strike me as very similar to the way some of the Sunni sheikhs were treated by ISIS.

    The eternal terrorist

    This would be simply fanciful rhetoric, except that the Diaries have inspired serious terrorists, and are very popular amongst white nationalists: they represent a real and genuine expression of the vision and goals of the white nationalist movement, which is also the oldest terrorist threat in the USA. The KKK, the original white terrorist movement, formed during the reconstruction era and was around until the end of the civil rights movement, only to be replaced by the network of arseholes that produced Timothy McVeigh. Since then the movement has subsided, and seems to have collapsed into just lone wolf idiots, but historically it was the greatest threat to American domestic security for 100 years. Now a similar movement of nihilistic, destructive purity has arisen in the Middle East, with similarly apocalyptic and violently exclusionary goals, and most analyses of this phenomenon are treating it as if it were unique. My reading of the Turner Diaries suggests that it is not unique at all: it is actually a sadly derivative form of terrorism, just terrorism, with the same ideological framework as white nationalism, and remarkably similar targets. Of course it has been more successful than white nationalism in the USA, but that’s because it sprang up in a situation closely resembling chapter 25 of the Turner Diaries rather than chapter 1.

    I don’t know what produces this apocalyptic vision of society, and this antagonistic understanding of the causes of society’s problems, but it looks to me like a lot of terrorists hold it in common, and that people as vastly different as Baghdadi and Turner can have a very similar vision of who their enemies are and how to deal with them. It must be something very common to the human condition, and I don’t know what should be done about it, but my reading of the Turner Diaries, and my understanding of their influence, tells me one simple thing: ISIS aren’t new, or alien to western experience, although we might like to think so. They share a lot with the dark heart of our own racist past, and maybe if we look back there we can find ways to stop these movements from happening in future. Maybe the enemy really is us.

     

  • The Republican Clowncar Hits its First Speedbump

    Today the Supreme Court found in favour of Obamacare, as I had predicted,and the wheels fell off the Republican clowncar. This is great news for America, as it now means that the law has overcome most of its significant Supreme Court challenges and become settled fact, and the 10 million people who are benefiting from it can continue to have some faith that they can get the healthcare they need. But this is a disaster for the Republican presidential campaign, coming as it does before the primaries, because it means that all 10 riders in the clowncar will now have to rampage through the primaries promising to repeal Obamacare. Whoever wins that hilarious circus of stupidity is then going to have to go to the election with a record of promising to repeal the law – which is going to really worry 10 million people who depend on it, and force them all to vote Democrat.

    My guess is it’s going to be a Clinton-Bush battle, pitting one of America’s most popular politicians (Clinton), with a record of rational policy-making in healthcare, supported by the best get-out-the-vote campaign team in American history, against a man who has to hide his last name and is starting the election with a possible 10 million vote deficit. Even putting aside the deep, cutting irony of a democracy holding an election campaign between the scions of two dynasties[1], Bush trying to worm and squirm his way out of promises to repeal this law is going to be very entertaining. Furthermore, some of the states where people are benefiting most from the Medicaid expansion and federal exchanges are conservative or swing states like Alabama, and those 10 million voters are likely to be disproportionately clustered in them.

    The alternative for Republicans is to – don’t laugh – come up with an alternative health care plan, something they have signally failed to do for the past 8 years, despite repeated complaints about how terrible and ineffective and bad and fascist Obamacare is. Sure, they have a few op-eds on the matter but they haven’t done anything resembling serious policy development and they’re already in the primary stage. Contrary to journalistic silliness in the USA that the Republicans are “tripping over themselves” to make new laws (I kid you not, a journalist from Vox actually wrote that!) the Republicans are not in any way serious about health policy, and no plan they come up with will be anything except terrible, which is why they aren’t trying. Their “plan” for America’s uninsured is to leave them uninsured.

    So what are the Republicans going to do? They seriously threaten their election chances with promises of repeal, but they will look like the idiots and fools they are if they release a plan (can you imagine Trump’s healthcare plan!?) If this decision happened after the primaries maybe they’d be okay – refuse to be drawn on the issue during the primaries because “there’s a court case” and then run for election with the promise of a plan (isn’t that what Obama did?) But it’s hard to win with the promise of a plan when you’ve already made it clear that you’re going to tear away the health insurance of 10 million people. Better the devil you know, and all that. And now any plan they do release will be compared with Obamacare – will it insure more people? Will it cost more? Will it cause millions to lose their insurance? Why should we risk it when we have a plan that is covering more and more people every day!?

    I think the Republicans were assuming that their pet conservatives on the Supreme Court would deliver them Obamacare chaos, and they could then coast home to win the election on the basis that Obama had messed everything up, with vague promises of a plan that “serious” political journalists would pretend to believe. But Roberts was appointed to the Supreme Court by George W Bush, proponent of “compassionate conservatism,” and is probably out of step with the modern Republican movement (I have already read people at patterico claiming he is a closet homosexual who is being blackmailed by Obama![2]) They probably shouldn’t have bet their entire political strategy on the opinions of a couple of old men who might, actually, take their role in politics seriously. But then maybe the Republican political movement has forgotten what it means to take a political role seriously, since they’re mostly just grifters, failure and con artists, and couldn’t imagine that those old men might see themselves as bigger than their party allegiances.

    Two minor side points of this decision are that 1) hopefully US politics will now begin to back away from the ideology of repeal-through-the-courts, which is fundamentally undemocratic (if you don’t like a law, repeal it through politics not the courts!) and 2) I think it’s well past time I retired the use of the word “conservative” when talking about the American right. There’s nothing about their politics, their attitude towards their institutions, or their public behavior that is conservative – they’re radical. The word “conservative” is not very useful in politics generally, but at least in Australia and the UK it refers to two broad streams of political thought that we all understand and (with a few notable exceptions like Tony Abbott) can accept are broadly trying to be responsible and politically rational. It’s no more or less meaningful than “radical” or “liberal” or “left-wing” in those contexts, though all these words are only of limited use. But in the American context it’s just meaningless. The Democrats are the conservatives of American politics and the other side is, broadly speaking, a convocation of clowns and radicals. So what’s an alternative word for the broad spectrum of anti-Democrat politics in the USA that is still meaningful to readers, but not an insult to actual conservatives? I am thinking “right wing” but is there something more evocative? Radical Constitutionalists? Clownsiders? The Idiot Wing? The Grifter Party?

    The primary season hasn’t started properly yet and already the clowncar is overcrowded and looking pretty wobbly. The next couple of months are going to be simultaneously hilarious and deeply depressing. Strap yourselves in, folks, it’s going to be a wild ride …

    —

    fn1: Will Chelsea Clinton run in future?

    fn2: This is interesting, right here. When the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of Aboriginal people in the Mabo dispute, there was a lot of angst but I don’t remember anyone saying that court members were being blackmailed by the government or demanding an armed insurrection (as is happening in comments at Redstate). It really seems to me like the fragmentation of US politics is complete, and there is no more common ground to be found there.

  • Is Health Insurance Really of no Value? (Spoiler: No)

    Today Vox had an article about a new study of health insurance in America that annoyed me in a number of ways, and highlighted both Vox’s patronizing know-it-all style, and the simplistic economics-worship of some of its writers (in this case Ezra Klein). It’s one of those Economics-101 “Yes, you think A but really this [insert shallow confounder] means not A! Wow!” arguments that are beloved of pop economists, and it’s really frustrating to see it being trotted out now by Vox at a time when the USA is going through a major ideological battle over universal health coverage.

    This post may turn out to be a bit long and kind of technical, depending on how frustrated I get reading further on the topic as I write …

    The basic argument

    Klein has taken a new working paper by Finkelstein et al and used a few of its apparently central findings to build up a story around a question. Finkelstein et al analyzed the Orgeon Health Insurance Experiment to find out how much money medicaid recipients were willing to give up in exchange for medicaid, and how much utility they get from their health insurance. As part of this they found that the uninsured actually don’t pay for much of their treatments: only 20% of their out-of-pocket expenses are paid by them, the rest being shouldered by someone else. This is a central part of Klein’s discussion and, in my opinion, a terribly uninformative finding. Klein has a whole section of the article about how the uninsured are actually “kinda-insured,” which is kinda-true but also kinda completely misses the point, in a very important way that, in my opinion, says a lot about the reasons Americans are having so much difficulty with this whole universal health coverage (UHC) thing. He then moves on to a discussion of the findings of the original Oregon Health Insurance Experiment paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that medicaid wasn’t actually that good for a lot of its recipients; there is a lot wrong with this paper and a lot of reasons its findings need to not be over-stated, but Klein doesn’t really consider them, and gives the study findings more weight than (in my opinion) they deserve. He then goes on to one of those discussions that only economists have, which I guess they expect the rest of us to take seriously, that are deeply poisonous in their basic assumptions, and often wrong: “is health insurance worth it?” This is like the classic economics paper on why voting is a waste of time: superficially appealing but absolutely and completely wrong. He finishes with an important statement, that health insurance should be assessed in terms of the value it offers people, but then juxtaposes value with cost-control as if the two things are mutually contradictory. Pretty much everything in this Vox article is superficially right but deeply wrong, and I want to talk about why it’s wrong and what this means for the health insurance debate.

    The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

    The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (OHIE) is at the heart of the findings in this Vox article, but it’s probably not something we should put too much faith in. Basically, the Oregon state government expanded medicaid places a few years ago, but it could only expand to 30,000 so it ran a lottery for the 70,000 potentially eligible people. The 30,000 potentially eligible people then applied for medicaid, with many getting rejected, and Finkelstein cunningly convinced the government to let her study the results. This is a joyous opportunity for health insurance research because it offers a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of access to health insurance: the gold standard of medical research, enabling us to eliminate a whole bunch of confounders and explore only the effect of health insurance.

    Unfortunately there are many problems with the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment and the original paper which launched it to fame. First and foremost, although 30,000 people won the lottery, winning the lottery only increased the probability of accessing medicaid by “25 percentage points” because many didn’t apply or were ineligible, and many non-winners somehow finnagled their way into medicaid. Thus the “Experiment” suffers from massive contamination of the kind that usually renders an RCT ineligible for publication, because most of the intervention group ended up as controls and some of the control group ended up as interventions. While the process of assignment to these two groups was random, the process of transition between groups and final allocation was not, and in fact is decided by a very clear set of factors with a high risk of confounding, such as age, unemployment, etc. The second big problem with the OHIE is that the follow-up period was only 2 years, but lottery winners went on a waiting list, so the actual follow-up time from starting medicaid to study end was less than 2 years, but many of the outcomes they studied (blood pressure awareness, treatment and control, for example) require long follow-up, and key outcomes such as financial catastrophe (see below) are dependent on much longer follow-up times and/or retrospective analysis. Note that the non-medicaiders received a full 2 years follow-up, another minor source of bias. The third problem is that many lifestyle and consumption variables that are crucial to understanding the home-financing impacts of health insurance were obtained from a mailed survey with 15,500 respondents (out of 70,000 in the original study!), one of the most infamous ways of introducing bias into studies (respondents to mail surveys are even less normal than you, dear reader(s)). In contrast, surveys of health financing issues in developing nations (which in my opinion are the gold standard of health financing surveys) routinely get 95-98% follow-up in detailed, complex door-to-door interviews. I have said before on this blog that I think American health finance researchers could learn a lot from what the developing world is doing, and this is another example. The fourth problem is the choice of outcomes: even in systems that are completely free (such as the NHS), health outcomes that can be analyzed over just two years of follow-up are heavily dependent on health-seeking behaviors and non-financial access barriers (e.g. work and time off), and the best measure of health success in a health insurance plan is in serious but often rare outcomes – all-cause mortality, hospitalization, that sort of thing. Also, the OHIE didn’t do much analysis of financial outcomes, which are the main point of health insurance programs. Finally, the study is only ethical if you squint and tilt your head: randomizing people to receive health care is not ethical, and the only reason this study gets grace on that count is that America’s system is insane, but the general ethical view of the medical establishment is that just because the state does something convenient, that doesn’t mean it’s ethical to participate in studies of that thing (see e.g. debate in the British Medical Journal for the Godwin-level examples). Regardless, most people accept the validity of the OHIE, so let’s run with it for now, bearing in mind its flaws: flawed papers often still have a lot to tell us.

    The uninsured are “kinda-insured”

    In my view the central flaw of the Vox opinion piece lies with its uncritical acceptance of the working paper’s finding that only 20% of expenses were paid for by people without insurance, and the implications of this. The Vox article states:

    It’s perhaps easiest to explain this through example. Imagine John breaks his leg. If John is uninsured, his brother, Mike, pays for his medical care. But if John has Medicaid, then the government pays for his care. John got medical care either way. So in this case, Medicaid’s money actually didn’t go to John so much as it went to his brother, because it was his brother who actually would have ended up paying the tab.

    This is the kind of superficial gotcha that economists like Ezra Klein love, and it’s annoying and … superficial. There is a large body of research on the health financing aspects of health insurance, and a key concept used in that literature is distress financing. In developing nations, distress financing is defined variously as using any of the following strategies to pay for medical care: selling assets from the home or family business, using savings, calling on family members for financial support, or withdrawing children from school to work [yes, you read that right: this is what lack of health insurance does]. What John did was distress financing, and one of the goals of universal health coverage is to reduce or eliminate the incidence of distress financing. Sure, Mike is better off if John gets medicaid, but in health financing we don’t care about Mike, Tom, Dick or Harry: we are designing a system that protects John from financial catastrophe and distress financing. This is because it is of no interest to us if Mike spends his money on a plasma-screen tv or his brother’s appendix or indeed his own, the purpose of health insurance is to pool risk, that is to ensure that no person – whether directly afflicted or not – has to spend unexpected amounts of money on health care. No doubt there are people out there whose monthly premiums are paid for by friends, sugar daddies or family. We don’t care. The important point is that we have established a universal risk pool into which everyone pays, and everyone draws. It’s no concern to us whether Mike pays for John or John pays for John or John’s sugar daddy pays for John, and typically health insurance research doesn’t ask about how premiums are paid, so why should we care how out-of-pocket expenses are paid? So Klein’s example completely misrepresents the moral purpose of health insurance, by assuming the wrong things about why we have health insurance, and misunderstanding the tools that are available to understand how health insurance works.

    I also think Klein has misunderstood the working paper on this issue, because I don’t think the working paper makes as big an issue of this distribution of costs as he does. Finally, if John and Mike are sharing the cost of their health care, then really what’s happening there is that they are establishing a very inefficient, unregulated risk-pooling mechanism – a private version of medicaid. When John gets medicaid we aren’t seeing a situation where suddenly Mike is better off because John can pay for his own care, we’re seeing a situation where Mike is better off because John has been drawn into a larger, better-managed, better-regulated risk pool.

    Estimating the utility of health insurance

    The working paper is largely aimed at estimating the utility of health insurance, and it uses techniques from economics that I’m definitely not qualified to critique. I know nothing about utility functions or their optimization, so a lot of the language and techniques are a mystery to me. However, there seem to be a couple of aspects of their analysis that insert strong biases. For starters, their assumption 3 on page 8:

    Individuals choose m and c optimally, subject to their budget constraint

    which is explained as:

    The assumption that the choices [of some functions] are individually optimal is a nontrivial assumption in the context of health care where decisions are often taken jointly with other agents (e.g., doctors) who may have ddifferent objectives and where the complex nature of the decision problem may generate individually sub optimal decisions
    This assumption ignores the possibility that individuals choose not to consume health care, a common problem amongst the uninsured. It’s also a particularly dubious assumption about the poor, who are often not able (through resource constraints and e.g. work situations) to make optimal decisions. A good example of this is abortion: the welfare-maximizing decision might be to have a legal abortion, but there are many states in the USA where this is becoming increasingly difficult for poor people to do for non-financial reasons (travel requiring time off work, the risk of humiliation in small towns, etc.), while for the wealthy it remains a simple utility-optimization decision. A poor person might make the extremely risky decision to have an illegal abortion, which has stochastically-varying risks (mostly none, occasionally many). It’s not enough, in my opinion, to talk about this as a limitation: it needs to be carefully modeled.
    The working paper also uses an unorthodox method for assessing income, basically dividing household income by family members[1], and doesn’t consider the issue of disposable income. Typically studies of this kind use the family’s disposable income (or some similar measure of available consumption) during analysis, because people have other fixed expenses (most especially, a house) that they can’t fiddle with.
    As a result of these assumptions and estimation processes the working paper comes up with a finding that individuals would be indifferent to giving up medicaid or consumption of about $1000 – $1500. This seems to be actually an astounding finding, given that average income in the people receiving medicaid is $3800. Would you give up just under half of your income for health insurance? Is this an indication that the health insurance is of low utility, as Ezra Klein concludes? Note also that there is no assessment here of financial catastrophe, which is important because these people only need to spend about $700 a year on health care to be in the catastrophe zone (usually about 25% of disposable income, which seems to be about $2800 in the assumptions of this study, though I may have misunderstood it). In order to understand the benefits of health insurance properly in this community we need to understand what their risk of financial catastrophe and distress financing is and what proportion of that risk they are protected against by medicaid; but we are instead treated to a completely irrelevant estimate of what amount of money they are “indifferent to”, based on income and expenditure information from a very small sub-sample of the people originally eligible for the trial.
    I’m not convinced that the OHIE is capable of answering the questions we need to know about health insurance coverage, or that this study adds anything except to tell us that poor people will use up to nearly half of their income to purchase health insurance.
    Vox’s conclusions
    Klein concludes that maybe health insurance isn’t that great, and we need to make it more appealing, or something:
    That isn’t to say health insurance is useless, or that medical care doesn’t help. But we’re probably paying too much and getting too little, and now that we’re a lot closer to a world where every American who wants health insurance can afford it, we should be focusing on making sure that all that health insurance we’re buying is actually delivering the health we’re expecting.
    Much of this paragraph is based on the published NEJM paper from the OHIE, which as I showed above is not very informative about the health benefits of health insurance. The subsequent working paper hasn’t told us much about its health insurance benefits either, because it was misdirected. So how can Klein conclude from this study that we’re probably paying too much and getting too little, and why would anyone conclude that from medicaid, which is a specific system for the very poor in America? The reasons why medicaid is ineffective are probably closely related to social determinants of health; the reason why standard health insurance plans (or the Obamacare bronze plans) are ineffective probably has a lot more to do with access issues, arbitrary payment systems, and high overheads. This seems like really weak sauce to conclude with, and as a remarkable economic finding it also seems kind of empty. If you went out to buy a plasma-screen TV, I’d tell you to find the best one you can for the lowest price you can, and definitely make sure it works. Klein’s conclusion in this article is that … the community should buy the best health insurance it can for the lowest price, and make sure it works.
    So somehow Klein has gone from a gotcha based on a flawed study (oooh look! you thought health insurance works but this study showed it doesn’t!) to saying … we need to make sure we spend money on health insurance wisely. While the rest of the world continues with its process of spending less money than the USA on health insurance, and getting better results.
    It’s not really a very helpful conclusion is it?
    What is the relevance of this to America’s health debate?
    Assuming Vox has any relevance America’s health debate, or to anyone anywhere, that is. This whole article seems to me to be a representation of the strange atmosphere of debate about health insurance and health care in America. First of all it is a discussion of a set of studies trying to find out whether health insurance works, something that the rest of the world takes for granted. Secondly, it buys into a strange economists’ logic of who benefits from health insurance that is almost completely ignorant of a large body of research on health insurance outcomes, and also seems to see health insurance as a consumer good rather than a risk-pooling strategy – i.e. it frames the entire health insurance debate in terms of something that people want to buy, rather than something society thinks everyone should have. It’s another example of how America’s intellectual elite seem to be really clueless when it comes to health care, and it’s a real worry that a site that is supposedly informative is publishing articles by a major economic pundit about one of America’s central social reform issues that are largely clueless about the central debates in that issue. How is the general American public meant to understand a fractious, long drawn-out healthcare debate if public intellectuals like Klein are missing the key issues and presenting the framework of that debate in a completely erroneous and misleading way? Healthcare policy is far from simple and there’s no reason to think ordinary people should understand it without help, but here we have a major public intellectual and economist completely misrepresenting the core elements of the debate, running his readers off down the wrong track into a loopy set of conditions on health care (and a really weird definition of who benefits and who we want to benefit) before ending with a completely uninformative and vapid conclusion (we need to buy more for less!) Is this really the standard of public debate on healthcare in the USA?
    Let’s hope the Supreme Court don’t read Vox, and be glad it wasn’t around when Obamacare was first developed!
    —
    Fn1: The correct method is to scale the household size to consumption equivalents using a power law, the value of the power being estimated from a regression model: for the USA the consumption-equivalents scale as approximately the square root of household size. This is perhaps not a very important flaw in the paper but it points to a bigger flaw: none of the standard experts on health financing from the broader health financing field are referenced and Ke Xu, the world-recognized expert on this, is not included in the reference list. Once again: researchers in the USA could learn a lot about the best methods to study health financing from those who are doing very serious work on UHC in developing nations.