Paradox of Tolerance

Radical Islamists gather in Hamburg to call for caliphate

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hizb_ut-Tahrir_in_Deutschland

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/10/08/pro-palestinian-protest-erupts-in-frankfurt-despite-city-ban

https://www.rferl.org/a/germany-pro-russia-rallies-discrimination/31795983.html

Germany is failing the Paradox of Tolerance.

While anti-Semites can freely protest in Germany, people calling for freedom in Palestine and an end to the bombardment of Gaza face the full brutality of the law.

Supporters of Putin are allowed to rally in the streets freely while peace activists are tear-gassed.

Calling for Palestine to be free and a peace agreement in Israel/Palestine is not anti-Semitic.

Muslim Interaktiv is an anti-Semitic organization that wants to reestablish a caliphate and has called for the eradication of Jews and denying the Holocaust. This is fundamentally different from calling for a solution in Palestine!

Vladimir Putin wants to reextend the borders of the Russian Empire to include former East Germany at a minimum.

There is a tremendous difference between ceasefire activists and supporters of Putin or a caliphate.

While the far-right AfD is allowed to win seats in the Bundestag and is not outright banned for being Neo-Nazis, Germany has been weak on Ukraine and unhelpful in resolving the crisis in the Middle East.

While Scholz is doing more for Ukraine than Merkel ever did, his Middle East policy has not significantly shifted. There is still a long way to go.

The whole situation is absurd.

I believe it is important for democracies to act as locations where refugees can find peace and safety.

But one of the necessary restrictions needs to be intolerance of hate speech. Supporters of terrorist organizations and mafia states need to be deported if they are aliens and heavily fined if they have only one citizenship.

Most refugees live peacefully in their new homes and do not cause problems. A ban on refugees should never be imposed. It would be immoral and violate international law. However, when anyone in a country demonstrates that they are unwilling to follow the social contract, they must be deported on a case-by-case basis. Hate speech is one of the early warning signs that is now used to catch future terrorists in the United Kingdom, as I described in an earlier post. As a result, there have been no terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom for four years. Anyone supporting Nazism or Sharia law is violating the social contract from which democracies are designed. It is a clear red flag that they will do more in the future. It cannot be tolerated.

Freedom of speech does not mean all speech is free. The paradox of tolerance comes into play. Protesters who call for a caliphate, idolize Hitler, or support monsters like Vladimir Putin are trying to get into power and demolish freedom of speech, among other rights. For this reason, allowing them to demonstrate freely violates the paradox of tolerance and the social contract.

This makes it very easy to determine which protests violate the Paradox of Tolerance. Are they advocating for a system of government that will abolish freedom of speech? That is the key difference between the movements.

Ceasefire demonstrators have never advocated for any organization that desires to abolish freedom of speech. They must be allowed to demonstrate since they do not violate the Paradox of Tolerance. Calling for all Arab Israelis and Palestinians to have equal rights is the right thing to do. It is the opposite of calling for a Holocaust.

Vladimir Putin hunts down journalists and dissenters both in Russia and in other countries. He has all but eliminated freedom of speech from Russian life. If his supporters got what they wanted, freedom of speech would be eliminated. The same goes for anyone who supports a Caliphate. Shariah Law is incompatible with freedom of speech, so anyone advocating for it violates the Paradox of Tolerance.

That’s what Karl Popper was talking about. It’s time for people to listen.

Canadian, Newfoundland, and US elections, 1836 to present

Having some fun drawing maps this morning. I hope this is helpful in seeing long-term political trends in North America.

  • 1836 US: Blue: Democrat, Yellow: Whig, Red: Whig
    Canada: Other
    1837 Newfoundland: Labour

The key to peace

It’s travel and frequent communication between countries.

The way this would work, in order:

  1. Debt-free college. Educated citizens are less likely to fall for populism.
  2. Abolish eVisas between democracies.
  3. Implement eGates for your citizens at airport customs. It will tremendously improve everyone’s speed through airports.
  4. Extend eGate access to other countries where the risks are minimal and criminal records are shared.
  5. Make it easier for people to work between countries. Work visas should be easy to acquire, and they are necessary for tax reasons.
  6. Make airport security fast and efficient.
  7. Join open border agreements like the Schengen Area with other democracies.
  8. Free trade between democracies. Extend the EFTA outside of Europe. Complex interdependence works.
  9. Extend the Schengen Area outside of Europe. Start with the US and Canada.
  10. Make it legal to build dense housing, keeping housing costs low.

Travel and intercultural communication are critical for increasing friendships across cultures.

2024 checklist

Here are the major changes that need to happen in the next year:

  • Ukraine must win the war and be accepted as a full member of NATO. For this to happen, Ukraine needs to be able to strike all Russian military targets.
  • Accept Georgia as a full member of NATO.
  • Israel needs to stop bombing civilian targets. A solution to the crisis in Palestine needs to be adopted. Netanyahu will then go back to court and likely be impeached.
  • Romania and Bulgaria need to be accepted as full members of Schengen.
  • Kamala Harris needs to be President.
  • Priorities for the next congress:
    • Universal health care
    • Add long-term care coverage to Medicare
    • Set the stage for the gradual public buyout of private railroads
  • Reverse the trend of eVisas being implemented globally.
  • Move the War on Drugs from a primarily supply focus to a demand focus through healthcare. This will reduce violence across the Americas.
  • The United Kingdom needs to apply to rejoin the European Union.

 

We need a tourism lobby

I was doing some reading this evening and wondering why the Andean Community and MERCOSUR don’t merge. I thought about the intricacies of that relationship, which led me to look at how Brazil is now going to implement a new visa for “security reasons.” That made me think: What is the actual evidence on visas between democracies deterring crime?

That duckduckgo search led me to this document. https://www.sita.aero/globalassets/docs/white-papers/the-role-of-electronic-travel-authorizations-paper.pdf

Most of what this document says is not important, but what is important is that they boldly claim to their investors that they are the leading global partner of governments in implementing eVisas and, without saying which countries they are operating in, claim to be operating worldwide.

That made me wonder: Who is operating the eVisa systems that have been popping up worldwide? Is it SITA? They claim to be doing so to their investors, but the Wikipedia pages for such systems do not say anything about it.

While I do not know for certain that SITA is why the US and EU are implementing visas on each other, open secrets prove that SITA has been a consistent lobbyist since 2001, when the 9/11 Commission report was written.

SITA operates ESTA in the US and ETA in Canada, among others. This company, without a useful product, is fearmongering politicians to implement its technology so it can collect a stable paycheck into the future by harming relations between allies.

The best part of the entire policy is the database that ETIAS is going to tap, which supposedly will improve security, is the Schengen Information System, which is the database that has recorded entries and exits of the Schengen Area since the agreement came into force. It doesn’t improve security; it just adds another level of bureaucracy and enriches a corrupt corporation.

When it comes to terrorist attacks in Europe, there has not been a terrorist attack in Europe from a citizen from a visa-free country to the Schengen information since… well… it’s never happened.

Is ETIAS necessary to improve the Schengen Information System?

According to the European Union, the Schengen Information System has been continuously improved and updated since its launch in 1995. Its last significant upgrade was in March 2023.

Advocates of eVisas frequently claim ETIAS will allow the EU to monitor travelers’ criminal records. Did they not already do this? What was the point of meeting with a customs agent at the border, then? I have trouble believing this.

The Schengen Information System already does this.

They claim that ETIAS will improve security and speed checks. But when I went through Schengen security in Wroclaw last year, I don’t think the guard asked me any questions. The reason is simple: they already have access to criminal records, and my record is blank. I was through customs in less than 5 minutes while standing in a line from a full flight. I don’t know how you can make that faster. Even an eGate would not speed it up by more than a minute. The process is already extremely efficient, and I do not believe ETIAS will make security faster.

The only thing ETIAS does is require people to pre-register. It does not add any functionality for criminal records that does not already exist, and it also does not automate customs by removing the need for border guards.

The only reasonable conclusion I have is the company that runs the technology behind these systems is a parasite.

Let’s make a testable hypothesis. A country with not just visa-free entry for over 50 nationalities but even eGate access for over 40 nationalities should then see significant levels of terrorism from foreigners.

If visa-free travel and eGates for select foreigners were a common cause of terrorist attacks, we would not have to imagine a country with such a policy. We could just study the United Kingdom. If that theory were true, the United Kingdom would be the most vulnerable country to terrorism in the world. They offer eGate access to over 40 nationalities. If the theory is correct, the United Kingdom should be bursting at the seams with terrorist attacks every second Tuesday blowing up every other apartment in London! The United Kingdom offers us a clear picture of the horrors of visa-free travel and eGate access and the dystopic hellhole such a policy will create. As we can see in the data:

There have been no terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom in 2024.

There were no terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom in 2023.

There were no terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom in 2022.

One person died due to terrorism in the United Kingdom in 2021. The perpetrator is a British citizen.

Three people died due to terrorism in the United Kingdom in 2020. The perpetrator was a legal refugee.

Two people died due to terrorism in the United Kingdom in 2019. The perpetrator was a British citizen.

No one died due to terrorism in the United Kingdom in 2018.

Forty-six people died due to terrorism in the United Kingdom in 2017.

One member of parliament was assassinated by a Neo-Nazi British citizen in the United Kingdom in 2016.

No one died due to terrorism in the United Kingdom in 2015.

If we investigate the attacks in 2017, the first one was perpetrated by Khalid Masood, who was a British citizen. The second and worst attack was by Salman Abedi, and he was a British citizen as well. There were warnings about Abedi, but intelligence ignored them. Khurum Shazad Butt was also a British citizen. Darren Osborne is also a British citizen.

Everyone who has committed a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom in the last ten years was legally living in Britain. All but one were British citizens, and the other one was a legal refugee. None were tourists.

Maybe my hypothesis was wrong? It seems we are being misled that the solution to terrorism is the mass surveillance of tourists. Tourists are not a source of terrorism.

The appropriate methods to counter these terrorist attacks, which appear to now be used by British intelligence, is to listen to tip-offs and follow up on leads. It has worked. There have been no successful terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom in 3 years.

You can be a safe and free society while not just having visa-free travel but letting some foreigners even use eGates, and you won’t see an uptick in terrorism!

We need a new tourism and economics lobbying group to provide a balanced viewpoint on these issues, namely:

  • Visa-free travel needs to be the default. eVisas should only be used when there is a serious security threat, not as a default.
  • Follow up properly on reports that someone is dangerous. Properly following up on tip-offs and using probable cause is the most effective tool we have in fighting terrorism, not unwarranted surveillance.
  • Work visas need to be available so people can work here legally.
  • The reasons behind these false promises are the very real threat of terrorism. Visa-free travel has never been used widely by terrorists to harm democracies. We need a comprehensive policy to fight terrorism with the following planks:
    • Proper funding is needed to counter money laundering globally. Countries that do not comply will be sanctioned. Countries that cooperate will receive massive economic and travel benefits.
    • Severe visa restrictions on countries that are found to foster terrorism. Visa-free travel for countries that cooperate.

I believe there is a lot we can do to fight terrorism more meaningfully, targeted, and efficiently. I am an American, and I believe in the Fifth Amendment. Implementing high levels of security for everyone without probable cause is contrary to American values and fiscally irresponsible. We need a system that accurately targets real security threats without wasting resources on non-threats.

It must be easy for a country to prove it is not a threat, for which it will receive travel and trade benefits.

The punishment for not cooperating by supporting terrorism needs to be severe.

We do not have to choose between security and freedom; we can have both or neither.

End ESTA. It is political snake oil. Implement visa-free travel for our partners.

It’s time to refocus our efforts on methods that work and follow our American values.

The Tax, service, inflation trilemma

Modern democracy is based on the following system:

  • Low inflation
  • Tax rates to cover services
  • Services provided for no additional at point of use

You can have all three of these, and people love having low inflation and services provided for no additional charge. Highways without tolls, city parks without a fee to enter, everyone loves these. It is a good deal.

But the Republican party’s thought process is low inflation, paying basically nothing in taxes, and getting services for free at the point of use. Republicans I know regularly will use the freeway instead of the toll  road as they complain about taxes when there is a choice. If every road is free and the government doesn’t collect taxes, either the service will have to drop in quality or the government will have to print more money to cover the costs. Printing money forever, not just in a counter-cyclical manner, will cause inflation.

Fox News needs to change their tune, either accept that your government services are going to stink, there will be a hyperinflation, or you will have to pay taxes

There is no free lunch.

Quick answers to structural problems

This article by Strong Towns is a good one, read this before reading my commentary on it.

I mostly agree with this article. I do not believe there is a free quick fix to ending the insane housing inflation we are experiencing in this country. We have had restrictive zoning which has reduced the quantity of housing significantly as our population has grown. We see the same pattern in Canada, to an even greater extent.

We do not see the same pattern in Europe. Europe has slower population growth, actually declining in many places, which reduces pressure on housing in the region. They also tend to have more lax laws regarding building which allows housing stock to keep up with population growth.

This has created a structural change in the market for housing. As demand for housing has increased, supply has been unable to keep up, especially in the growing tech hubs around the country. Increase demand, keep supply the same, price will go up.

The article is absolutely correct, relaxing zoning laws is not going to necessarily reduce the price of housing, but we have seen the cities which have done the most to loosen zoning laws have seen the slowest growth in rents, regardless of their job markets. We need an economy which can respond to market demands, and is best done through a free market which is allowed to respond to market pressures.

Everywhere in the country has significantly restricted the market’s ability to respond to changing conditions, leading to supply being unable to catch up with demand, which is why rents have climbed. Only a few places have reversed these policies lately, and that is where inflation has slowed.

There are two ways to make an economy to work, depending on market structure. In naturally competitive markets, like housing, the best thing to do is limit regulation to things regarding health and safety. Do not overly restrict the market, since that will only cause inflation.

Naturally monopolistic markets, markets with high structural barriers to entry such as utilities, however typically work best when they are publicly owned. There is thriving competition between couriers, you have DHL, UPS, FedEx, and many more regional courier companies competing with each other for business. They are able to do this in an open market because the highway system is publicly owned. Anyone can use it. If the highway system however were private they could make deals with one courier or another preventing the market from being competitive, and the industry would devolve into regional monopolies, stifling competition, leading to higher prices for all. That’s how America’s railroads work. So this goes to show that simply making every market as free and private as possible will not necessarily lead to a better economy. It depends on the industry, it depends on the market structure.

In the case of housing, it is clearly not a natural monopoly. The best thing to do is allow developers to build housing, following standard safety protocols, and allow said housing to be built tall to increase the number of people living in a square kilometer. This increases the supply of housing, reducing pressure on housing prices.

While there might be other policies to reduce the price of housing, the best way to do it, the cheapest way to do it is to increase supply.

The one thing you don’t want to do is chase inflation with more money supply. That never works.

References:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-rent-by-state

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI

 

Results of compromise

Chamberlain (left) and Hitler leave the Bad Godesberg meeting on 23 September 1938

The center-right party in Austria has spent the last couple of years doing everything it possibly can to get votes from the far right. They have denied Schengen membership to Romania and Bulgaria and have not been supporting Ukraine with military weapons. They’ve played right into Putin’s hands. Yesterday, the far right still won the most votes and seats. All of that compromise did not save the campaign of ÖVP.

It’s not just in Austria yesterday. It’s across pretty much every election in every country. The most successful parties tend to be the ones who stick by their platform. I wish there would finally be a clenching point where this endless compromise is finally seen as what it is.

We can also look at Chancellor Scholz and President Biden. While I will take them over any conservative, their reluctance to do everything necessary to save Ukrainian lives is not saving their campaigns.

Berchtesgaden meeting, 16 September 1938

Look at the Liberal Democrats in the UK in 2010. They are closer to Labour on social and economic issues but decided to follow the advice of compromise, make a deal, and coalition with the Conservatives. As a result, they were slaughtered in 2015.

Keir Starmer, the Brexiteer in chief, now has an approval rating of -30. It usually takes leaders years to get to such abysmal approval ratings, but it didn’t even take him a year. He has compromised with the Tories at every opportunity on Brexit. It is not working.

Chamberlain in Munich

For an American example, President Biden has made the following of compromise as an end to itself the goal of his presidency. If Biden just compromises with Republicans enough, does not make waves, and keeps a steady, even keel, he will be the most popular president in history and be able to finally bring unity to our country. He is wisely working on balancing domestic political with ideological goals regarding the war in Ukraine, attempting to bring all sides together into one great harmony. He will be the greatest president of…

Wait… what do you mean he’s not running? His approval rating has been hovering around 40% for three years? He has worked so hard to bring unity to the American people, yet he is the second least popular president in history, behind only Jimmy Carter. If the goal of compromise is to maintain power, it has been a colossal failure.

He has arguably succeeded at uniting the country. No other president has successfully made over 60% of Americans agree on a president’s job performance for 3 years running. Mission accomplished, I guess…

Bill Clinton also compromised heavily on many issues, including gay marriage, bank reform, and more. While his approval rating was sky-high in 1996, under his presidency, the Democrats lost the House after holding it almost continuously since 1932. He failed to win a majority of the vote in the presidential year. I believe he would have lost if not for Ross Perot.

What if we did the opposite? What if we stood for our values? I cannot guarantee it will always work. LBJ did everything he could to pass civil rights legislation during his presidency, and a lot of voters still made the Vietnam War the reason why they couldn’t vote for Democrats, even though the Republicans also supported the war.

But then there is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He went full steam ahead and passed policies that pulled us out of the depression and a massive wealth transfer to the Lost Generation in the form of Social Security. He was elected four times, then his vice President, Harry Truman, won yet another election. Except for the Japanese Internment camps, he was a great president on basically every other policy for the people of the time.

Democrats retained control of the House for all but four years between 1932 and 1995.

Ukraine game theory, 2024 edition

I first wrote a game theory tree for Ukraine in January 2022, when I drew out a plan for why Russia would back down if the West responded with a military threat and there wouldn’t be a war.

The foreign policy team (Blinken & Sullivan) at the White House clearly does not understand game theory; we did not act appropriately using the available information, and two and a half years later, the war is still ongoing. They failed.

At this point, we are at a critical juncture for Ukraine where people are talking about how there should be a peace treaty now, having a stalemate, and saving lives, and this is the peaceful option.

Game theory and history demonstrate why a stalemate now, as Ukraine has made some progress over the summer, is the best option for the military-industrial complex and Russia in the long term and the worst possible deal for Ukraine.

We have been in all but one of these situations before. Follow down the tree and see where each path leads. The decision tree makes the only realistic option very obvious.

The only option is to support Ukraine fully; if they win, they will regain all of their territory, be allowed into NATO, and then there can be peace.

There is no other path to peace. The only realistic scenarios we have not been in so far are Russia’s refusal of a peace treaty and Ukraine’s membership in NATO. I do not believe Russia will refuse a peace treaty; we know the other three options do not work.

The only option that leads to peace is supporting Ukraine with enough weapons to lead them to a swift victory and then immediate accession to NATO.

There is no other way.

I have labeled the three options we have already done over the years.

  • 1921: Ukraine was fully absorbed into Russia, followed by a genocide ten years later.
  • 1994: Independent and neutral Ukraine as part of the Minsk Accords.
  • 2014: Stalemate at the line of control. It is unstable and does not solve the problem.

Russia has never demonstrated the willingness to support a treaty voluntarily where Ukraine is free and independent.

The only stable endpoints are a total military victory for Ukraine or a Holodomor. A Holodomor is not an option, leaving only a total military victory for Ukraine followed by NATO membership as the only desirable and possible endpoint.

Slava Ukraine.

Lublin and the formation of a distinct Ukrainian identity

For over two years, Russia has been invading Ukraine, claiming that Ukraine is historically Russian territory. This makes as much sense as claiming Northern Italy is historically German. While this is technically correct, there have been 1000 years between then and now which have sent these two regions on different paths.

Recorded history starts around 900 AD, when the Varangians invaded the region between St. Petersburg and Kyiv and settled it. These Vikings became the Kievan Rus, which evolved into the Rurik dynasty, which ruled Russia until 1598. From 1060 the region evolved into a complex system of duchies, which is beyond the scope of this article. The principalities were absolute monarchies at this point, with a feudal system.

Kyiv was conquered by the Mongols in 1301.

What is now Kyiv was taken from the Mongols by Lithuania in 1362 and turned into a vassal state. It was fully absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1471.

The period under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the foundation of a Ukrainian identity that is significantly different from Russia. The Grand Duchy of Lithuania merged with the Kingdom of Poland in 1569 under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Before this point, they had been ruled by authoritarian kings or by Mongols.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth saw the foundation of the Sejm which balanced the power of a king with more power for local nobles. The economy evolved from a feudal system where slavery was forbidden. It was by no means a utopia. Still, under the Kingdom of Poland, education improved, and a relatively high level of religious tolerance led to Kyiv being home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, just like across all of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It remained this way until the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing from the Soviet Union in the leadup to the foundation of Israel. Ukrainians almost became a third pole in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth under the Treaty of Hadiach in 1658. This was the first time Ukrainians almost had their clearly distinct identity recognized in a treaty. While by modern standards, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was a corrupt serf-powered oligarchy, for the time, it was relatively progressive, especially compared to the strict feudal system of Moscow. It was a center for trade and learning in Eastern Europe.

In 1667, the tide turned after the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost to the Russian Empire, and Kyiv became a border city between Poland-Lithuania and Russia. Kyiv gradually lost its autonomy for the next century.

Following the Polish-Russian War of 1792 and the partition of Poland in 1795 the rest of Ukraine was annexed by Russia.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is very important in understanding why Ukrainians differ from Russians. Ukrainians had more freedom than Russians, so when they were reabsorbed into the Russian sphere of influence in 1795, it moved Ukraine back to a more primitive system. Their language and culture diverged from Russia. This can be clearly seen in the Four Universals, which formed the basis for the first free and democratic Ukrainian state in 1918.  They are worth reading.

While Ukraine enjoyed relative freedom under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth leading to a strong sense of freedom and justice, Moscow stagnated. Moscow was a vassal state of the Golden Horde from 1282-1471, and after that, remained a Unitary Absolute Monarchy. Russia did experiment with legislatures in this period, the Zemsky Sobor was established in 1549 and gradually lost influence before being dissolved in 1684 by the Tsar. Twenty-seven years later, the Governing Senate was established by Peter I to represent the nobles, but it was subordinate to the Emperor. The Emperor always had the final say over the parliament. Russia remained a unitary absolute monarchy until 1906, over 300 years after the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth established a balance of power between the Sejm and the King. Between 1906 and 1917, four Dumas were established, but the Tsar was able to dissolve them on a whim, which he did. Hardly a democracy.

Russia did not experience an independent legislature until 1991. It lasted nine years before Vladimir Putin took over the country, and through corrupt elections, the Federal Assembly has been little more than a rubber stamp for Putin’s will for over twenty years.

I do not believe Russia is destined to be an authoritarian hellscape. The people of Russia have the power to stand up against their corrupt oligarchy whenever they want, but they just simply haven’t. Instead, their oligarchs have brainwashed them into believing NATO threatens them, but the only people threatened by NATO are the people in power. I hope the Russians realize this and turn against their government so they can be strong and free like Ukraine. Russia cannot change until Russians demand a democratic system.

When Ukraine became independent, they have successfully held elections every five or six years since 1994. Each president has been better than the last. Kuchma was very controversial and corrupt, followed by Yushchenko who supports joining the European Union and NATO. Yanukovych presided over democratic backsliding, culminating in mass protests and ousting him in 2014. Ukraine is going to continue to improve after the end of the war. It takes time to unravel centuries of corruption after being occupied by Russia for the majority of two centuries, but I believe once Ukrainian independence and security are guaranteed they will be able to do it.

This is the history of the Ukrainian people, and why it is so important to ensure they win this war.