Coming to America

Wrong Side of History newsletter #63

Howdy! I’ll be visiting Austin, Texas from October 10th - if any subscribers want to meet, get in touch. I will also (provisionally) be in San Francisco before that, and later in the month Washington, Charleston, Savannah, Baltimore and then New York. I also hope to do some Founding Fathers-related tourism in Virginia.

Since the last newsletter, I have written about the thrill of guilt, and Paul Gottfried’s Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. I’ve argued, on many occasions, that the trauma and civilisational guilt over 1914-1945 drives Western leaders to make decisions which border on self-harm, and leave a terrible legacy for their posterity. To paraphrase Golda Meir, the Germans will only find peace when they love their children more than they hate themselves.

I wrote about diversity and trust and why commentators are allergic to citing any actual studies rather than just waffling on about personal feelings and anecdotes.

I did a round-up of more great Trump’s comedy moments. He’s even inspired a new meme this week, with ‘can you turn the lights down?’

I also wrote about the imprisonment of Lucy Connolly for a tweet she posted after the murder of three children in Southport. There were some very interesting and knowledgeable comments under the article - a very ‘high human capital’ readership clearly. (It’s a shame that substack subscriber data only breaks down by country and US state - I’d be curious to see which postcodes/zipcodes are most represented.)

Finally, I wrote about Bess of Hardwick. I did so because my elder daughter is studying the famous Elizabethan for her GCSEs, and was keen that we visited the grand home on our way back from a family holiday. It’s well worth a visit, and Chatsworth and Hardwick were lucky to survive the great destruction of the British Country House, subject of the saddest page on Wikipedia.

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A new Canon Club event will take place next month, with Dr Alexander Lee, author of a highly-acclaimed biography on Machiavelli, talking about the Renaissance. More details to follow.

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A reader of mine, Alexander Strudwick Young, has had a recurrence of cancer and needs advice on medical treatment. I would like to ask if any of my subscribers can help – whether scientists, doctors or anyone in a position to assist. Alexander seems like a nice guy and I’d like to help him. Please get in touch with any advice that might be useful, via email, direct message or in the comments below.

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Elsewhere, Dispatch is a new online magazine, and Fred Sculthorp is writing for them, so they must be good. With an opener like this, you just know it’s going to be fun:

You don’t have a real name. The one you were born with means nothing. It’s a Sunday afternoon in Oadby, a genteel suburb of Leicester, and I’m in a packed room above an empty pub. Standing over me is Sovereign Pete — tall, goateed, and dressed head to toe in black. Everything I’ve ever understood about life as a citizen of the United Kingdom, he is calmly explaining, is an elaborate, centuries-old fiction.

The Sovereign Project is a 20,000-strong organisation related to ‘the freeman of the land’ movement which emerged in lockdown when a lot of people slightly lost their minds. ‘Sovereign Pete’ is its unofficial leader, and a former Ukip candidate. Of course he is.

Then came the incident in Chelmsford in 2023. That spring, a group of self-declared “freemen”, led by a man styling himself the “dominion of all courts”, entered Essex Coroner’s Court and attempted to abduct the senior coroner. They accused him of practising fraud — and, more unusually, necromancy. The leader, Mark Kishon Christopher, was later convicted of conspiracy to kidnap and sentenced to seven years in prison.

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At the Pimlico Journal, on the cost of social housing

We can dig down deeper, looking at the allocation of the £8.8 billion subsidy across London by breaking it up at the borough level. Ranking by subsidy per working age person, we can see that Kensington and Chelsea is the most expensive borough, with nearly £3,943 per working age person to support subsidies of over £1,800 per calendar month for the average socially renting household in the borough.

Southwark represented the largest total subsidy, estimated at £661 million in 2021. To put this in perspective, the total Southwark Council budget in 2020-21 was £874 million; the social housing estate in the borough gave those few lucky enough to hold a tenancy a windfall nearly as large as the amount spent on schools, care and other services. Remember, most people aren’t so lucky: the mean Southwark tenant household gained £12,718 from subsidised rent, while the mean Southwark working age person (implicitly) lost £2,869 to pay for it.’

Truly, the new aristocracy

The allocation of social housing in London is dysfunctional, and in part it has been allowed to continue this way because many people have a completely false idea of who benefits. The theory is that it allows those working in low-paid jobs to live within the city, and so reducing the social segregation that would follow otherwise; without subsidised housing, London might lose its Cockney heart and be left with soulless international bankers.

It doesn’t work that way, and hasn’t for decades, not since the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977 replaced the waiting list with a focus on ‘need’. What this in reality means is that priority is given to the most dysfunctional, and huge swathes of central London are handed over to housing the unemployed, foreigners, unemployed foreigners and criminals. Just this week a man was sentenced for murdering a woman at last year’s Notting Hill carnival, the court reports describing him – and his two criminal brothers – as residents of Kensington. I could maybe afford Kensington if I lived under someone’s stairs like Harry Potter, so how did a family of criminals get to reside in one of Europe’s most expensive postcodes? I’m taking a wild guess.

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Inquisitive Bird on assimilation

The question then is, do immigrants generally rapidly assimilate in human capital? The answer is a clear no. This observation is well-captured by the title of a 2011 article analyzing PISA data: “Why do the results of immigrant students depend so much on their country of origin and so little on their country of destination?”

But it’s not just first-generation immigrants. It’s also their descendants…. there is a very strong relationship between parents’ native country-of-origin scores and second-generation immigrant scores (De Philippis & Rossi, 2020). That is, second-generation immigrants tend to score much more similar to people in their parents’ country-of-origin, and not like the country they were actually born and raised in. In short, human capital persists substantially across borders.

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A fascinating post on Victorian labour migration.

To estimate the parameters of our model, we use rich individual-level data from the 1851 and 1911 censuses, focusing on migration patterns and identity choices—proxied by personal names. We begin by developing a measure for how strongly names reflect regional identities, in two steps. First, we use a data-driven clustering algorithm on surnames in the 1851 census. Without any geographic input, the algorithm recovers spatially distinct groupings across England and Wales—corresponding to recognizable regions like East Anglia, the West Country, and North and South Wales (see Figure 2).

These “cultural clusters” are not only spatially coherent; they also predict meaningful behaviors. Migration and intermarriage are more frequent between districts within the same cluster, even when controlling for geographic distance. Next, we construct an empirical measure of how distinctive first names are to each cultural cluster. We validate this measure in multiple ways, showing that names consistently predict behaviors tied to identity, including spoken language, marriage choices, and migration patterns.

Before the industrial revolution, given names in England and Wales tended to cluster in regions.

What’s fascinating is that one can still see the old borders of Wessex, Mercia and East Anglia, a thousands years after the birth of King Alfred.

Or indeed, the Yankee and Cavalier cultures that went to America.

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Where are the apologies, Conor Fitzgerald asks

For a loser in any conflict, part of the function of an admission of defeat is to convince the winner to settle for less. But the failure to extract such an admission instead prompts the winning side to set revenge and punishment as the goal rather than mere victory. “Looks like they haven’t had enough - let’s see if we can’t make these people feel the discomfort we felt - the cognitive dissonance of having the whole world tell you you're wrong for years on end, while you are forced to sit in that moment like a scolded schoolboy. Why should they get to walk away?” It certainly explains why the start of Trump’s second term felt more like the execution of a plan of personal vengeance than a conventional political administration.

We’re not getting any, but maybe that’s for the best. Sometimes it’s important to give people an offramp.

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When a fertility clinic was bombed in California I wondered if it might be anti-abortion extremists, but it’s even weirder than that, as Katherine Dee writes.

Efilism recasts ongoing life as an emergency whose only adequate remedy is species-wide euthanasia—an ethic that, in Palm Springs, moved a seed from YouTube debate culture to a car bomb on an ordinary Saturday morning.

Some people really need to read less philosophy.

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Phoebe Arslanagic-Little on the miracle of pasteurised milk.

In 1880, 28.8 percent of babies in nearby New York died before their first birthday. The primarycause of this extreme infant mortality rate was infectious diseases, with milk acting as a major vector of transmission. Raw cow’s milk can carry pathogens including typhoid, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis. All of these were significant killers of children and adults in nineteenth-century America.

A contributor to this delay was the origin of Pasteur’s experiments. Pasteur began his work after being called on by Emperor Napoleon III to save the French wine industry because mysterious ‘wine diseases’ were rendering its output undrinkable. Pasteur himself never experimented with pasteurizing milk.

Many major breakthroughs in human history seem to be related to alcohol. For example, it used to be the consensus that beer was a by-product of early civilisations developing bread, but it now seems just as likely that bread was a by-product of our ancestors trying to make beer. That seems more plausible, in my opinion.

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The ‘“Child Penalty” is Mostly Just the “Daughter Penalty’. This is interesting.

‘Using longitudinal data on births in the UK from 2010 onward, the authors found a “striking difference” in the child penalty depending on whether the firstborn is a son or daughter: “Averaged over the five years after birth, we estimate that the earnings penalty is approximately 3% among mothers of sons and 26% among mothers of daughters.” Likewise, the employment penalty is approximately 6% for firstborn sons and 20% for firstborn daughters.

Can this really be true?

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Cockney yiddish (Via Marie Le Conte.)

Linguistics scholars have even theorised that elements of a Yiddish accent may have influenced the cockney accent as it evolved in the early 20th century. Phonetic analysis of cockney speakers recorded in the mid-20th century suggests that East Enders who grew up with Jewish neighbours spoke English with speech rhythms typical of Yiddish.

Similarly to how Lancastrians began to speak with an Irish-influenced accent that became Scouse, and in more recent times we’ve got Jafaican. The distinctive north-east London Jewish accent seems to be dying out; Alan Sugar and Maurice Glasman are the most famous examples I can think of, but I don’t think any young people speak like that. Then, of course, Cockney itself is effectively dying.

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Am very late to this: an interesting piece on the case for conservative urbanism, by Henry Morgan.

It is also imperative for red-state urbanism to promote an affordable cost of living for middle-class families. Anti-density rules are generally counter-productive for this purpose, as demonstrated by the Bay Area and Southern California; reserving land for detached single-family homes may reduce their relative cost, but can increase their absolute cost when apartments and townhomes to satisfy singles, empty-nesters, and small families are scarce. Some on the Right may claim that immigration restriction is sufficient to lower housing costs, but this conflicts with both pro-natalism and building red-state economic and cultural centers receptive to internal migration. Zoning reform, especially mixed-use “form-based codes” like Miami’s that recognize the synergy of commercial and residential uses, in concert with beautification (I like Rio de Janeiro’s sidewalks as a model for Miami) and mitigating the “urban heat island” effect in the Sun Belt, is essential for fostering the economies of scale and scope to challenge the coastal megalopolises.

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Lots of British decline in the news. This week the government finalised the Chagos deal, which involves us handing over sovereign territory to an unfriendly power, and then paying them a huge amount for the use of it, in return for which we get… ????? soft power points?

I wrote about this bizarre story earlier in the year, and I still find baffling. The British seem to get absolutely nothing out of it. Starmer claims that the Russians and Chinese are against the deal, which is just not true. His friend Philippe Sands, who is representing the Mauritius government, has made that clear in his book.

The prime minister venerates the ‘law’ in a religious way - he could only define what a woman was after the UK Supreme Court had ruled on it. So, because an international court made a non-binding judgement over the islands, he feels like he must obey, even though literally any other politician would have just ignored it. This is one of many reasons why Starmer is just very badly suited to his job, especially as we reach a point where the age of activist judges will soon come to an end.

Tellingly, the document does mention ‘decolonisation’, so this is not un-related to campus politics. Decolonisation will certainly be news to the Chagos Islanders, who are 800 miles away from Mauritius, are a different racial group, and have been discriminated against because of it.

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In other decline news, the first nationalised train in Britain will be a replacement bus service.

The small boats commemorating the rescue of Dunkirk had to be diverted because of the small boats bringing over the illegal immigrants; on the same day, the British Embassy in Washington is posting twee.

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Will Storr on substack essays written by AI.

Gruel platforms tend to have vague names such as ‘Poppies and Seeds’ and ‘Notes From N’ and ‘Mia’. They may lack a full author name or bio, or links to works published elsewhere. Their author photo may be a stock shot of a model, an illustration or not actually a portrait at all. Their newsletter’s ‘mission statement’ may be vague and whimsical: “thoughts, insights, scribbles from the margins.”

You’ll have noticed one obvious tic that features in many (but by no means all) of these gruelly essays: “There is a…” It’s emblematic of a voice that I’ve come to think of as the ‘Impersonal Universal’. Gruel doesn’t talk like a real person talks, but like a hammy actor doing ‘wise poetess on the mountaintop’. Whilst saying little about itself, it declaims grandly upon the human condition. There is a white-noise generality to its insights, an uncanny vagueness that makes the mind glaze over. It is never funny. There are no surprises, true confessions or controversial moments. It is a description of the human average.

I find this stuff very alarming, I have to say, and can promise that nothing that appears in my name is AI, mainly because I’m a dinosaur.

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A worrying piece about how stupid everyone is getting: ‘58% of the English majors in the study, cannot differentiate between literal and figurative speech in literature’. People debate whether Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four was the most prophetic dystopia, but Idiocracy seems to be winning.

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Dreams in the Third Reich.

Beradt organises the material into types of dreams, interweaving the accounts with her own trenchant analysis. A man imagines sitting down to write a formal complaint against the regime, but the page he sends in is blank—a dream reflecting his inaction. An eye doctor pictures that he is summoned to treat Hitler because “I was the only one in the world who could; I was proud of myself for that, and felt so ashamed of my pride that I started crying”—a dream suffused with guilt. A young woman envisions having to produce identity papers and she is desperate to prove that she is not Jewish—a dream of racial paranoia.

Many of the dreams are eerily prophetic. The doctor dreams about Nazi militiamen knocking out hospital windows four years before Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” (pictured on previous page), when stormtroopers destroyed buildings including synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. The woman dreams of hiding under “a big pile of dead bodies”. It was the early 1930s, years before the world would learn of the mass murder committed in concentration camps.

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Very sad news about the death of Patrick O’Flynn, journalist and former MEP. Patrick commissioned me many years ago when he worked for the Daily Express, and I would bump into him at parties, where he was always kind, affable and good company. Everyone who knew Patrick had good things to say about him, and his writing was always thoughtful and intelligent. A great loss, and gone way too soon at 59. Rest in peace, Patrick.

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In brief:

Yet another prison guard in trouble. There have been, I think, four more cases, since I wrote about this.

Children exposed to communist indoctrination during schooling had lower incomes as adults.

Studying economics and business in college makes students become much more conservative.

‘Imagine you live in the land of Oz, and the candidates are the Tin Man, who's all brains and no heart, and the Scarecrow, who's all heart and no brains. Who would you vote for?’ Not actually a huge difference between Tory and Labour voters.

A very good video about the Roman Empire.

The Albanian prime minister Edi Rama welcomes Italy’s Meloni, kneeling before her. Rama is an absolute giant, at 6ft 7in, while Meloni is 5ft 3in, so this makes some logistical sense. Rama is even taller than former Montenegrin president Milo Đukanović, at 6ft 6in, who led the tallest people on earth.

Polish elections once again map into the map of the Third Partition.

Meanwhile, Romanians elections point to some interesting diaspora patterns. Diaspora voting is a fascinating topic, which I will devote a post to when I have more data. Foreign-based Turks across Europe tended to vote for Erdoğan, for example, except for British Turks, who still predominantly originate in Cyprus (although probably not as much as they used to).

Across 70 popular professions, LLMs systematically favored female-named candidates over equally qualified male-named candidates when asked to choose the more qualified candidate for a job.’

Understanding America Across 15 Types of Communities.

Someone has digitized the entire East Prussian census of 1905. Very cool!

Almost 5 per cent of the top decile of Danes by IQ are involved in Research and Development. No wonder the Danes came up with the century’s greatest wonder-drug.

Genocide has gone the way of white supremacy. I’d be interested to know which conflicts they specifically apply to; presumably the upsurge in the mid-1990s is due to Rwanda, by far the largest genocide of my lifetime, and I’m guessing that the 2024 surge relates to Gaza.

Thread on mathematicians in Renaissance Europe who partook in academic duels.

A major new poll reveals public attitudes towards the Catholic Church, priests and nuns, Christianity, and the teachings of the Church in Ireland. More people are negative towards the Church than positive.

A new shingles vaccine has been approved which will reduce the rate of heart attacks. In other good news, a new vaccine for gonorrhoea is being rolled out, an almost accidental breakthrough - it was designed to treat meningitis. Truly we live in an age of miracles.

Have a great weekend!