Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

On White Flight:

White Flight is a cacophonous collage of disparate musical ideas that don’t even try to coexist and make sense together. They simply pile up, one on top of the other, and be the listener the one to make sense of the Babelic confusion. The first two songs are misleading in their melodic simplicity. “Now” is a demented, heavily-arranged aria that sounds like a collaboration between VanDyke Parks and Syd Barrett. “Pastora Divine” is a pastoral psychedelic singalong that Kevin Ayers could have concocted in the 1970s if backed by the Velvet Underground. By the third one, any pretense of logic begins to fall apart. The somnolent sparse blues “Solarsphere” is ripped apart by a roaring hard-rock riff and drowns in ambient-lysergic madness. “The Condition” and the jazz-electronic mayhem of “Timeshaker” evoke the anarchic psychedelic freak-outs of Red Crayola; while the disjointed chant with wah-wah organ of “Oz Icaro” and the brief exotic dance of “Galactic Seed” evoke the acid-folk eruptions of the Holy Modal Rounders, except that Roelofs employs a different generation of devices: breakbeats, digital noise, sound effects, vocal effects, non-rock instruments to conjure a sense of poetic detachment from anything that music is supposed to be. Roelofs ends the album in the tone that is more pensive and philosophical, and musically more convoluted, of “Deathhands” and “The Secret Sound.” His extreme message is the hyper-syncopated drum’n’bass and free-jazz hemorrage of “Superconductor” that ends with a cryptic whistle in a bed of crickets.

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I have a lot of controversial views. For example, I think it’s morally better to help others more rather than helping them less (utilitarianism), that people matter equally regardless of their group membership, location in spacetime, etc. (impartiality), that therefore the most important impacts of my actions are spread throughout the long-run future, where the vast majority of people are (longtermism), and that advances in AI this century will probably have a larger (positive or negative) long-run impact on aggregate welfare than anything else (transformative AI focus).1 Most people strongly disagree with all those views, and often find them offensive.

But not all my views are controversial. One of my least controversial views is that both the US in particular and humanity in general will probably be better off if the US (despite its many deep flaws) remains the world’s leading power, given the available alternatives for global leadership.

Probably the only way for the US to remain the world’s leading power is for the U.S. to dramatically grow its population, especially its high-skill population. As Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias argues in his new book One Billion Americans:

…the big picture idea of [this] book, that America should try to stay number one, already [commands broad consensus in America]. The question is what follows from that.

For starters, it is beyond dispute that there are fewer American people than there are Chinese or Indian people, as is the fact that China and India are trying to become less poor and seem to be succeeding. Maybe they’ll just stumble and fail, in which case we will stay number one. But it would be unfortunate for hundreds of millions of people to be consigned to poverty forever. It’s not an outcome we have it within our power to guarantee. And even if we could, it would be hideously immoral to pursue it.

By contrast, tripling the nation’s population to match the rising Asian powers is something that is in our power to achieve…

…What the various diplomats and admirals and trade negotiators and Asia hands who think about the China question don’t want to admit is that all the diplomacy and aircraft carriers and shrewd trade tactics in the world aren’t going to make a whit of difference if China is just a much bigger and more important country than we are. The original Thirteen Colonies, by the same token, could have made for a nice, quiet, prosperous agricultural nation — like a giant New Zealand. But no number of smart generals could have helped a country like that intervene decisively in World War II.

A more populous America — filled with more immigrants and more children, with its cities repopulated and its construction industry booming—would not be staring down the barrel of inevitable relative decline. We are richer today than China or India. And while we neither can nor should wish for those countries to stay poor, we can become even richer by becoming larger. And by becoming larger we will also break the dynamic whereby growth in Asia naturally means America’s eclipse as the world’s leading power.

The United States has been the number one power in the world throughout my entire lifetime and throughout the living memory of essentially everyone on the planet today. The notion that this state of affairs is desirable and ought to persist is one of the least controversial things you could say in American politics today.

We should take that uncontroversial premise seriously, adopt the logical inference that to stay on top we’re going to need more people — about a billion people — and then follow that inference to where it leads in terms of immigration, family policy and the welfare state, housing, transportation, and more.

Unfortunately, Yglesias doesn’t actually run the numbers on how different immigration and family planning policies might affect U.S. demographics, how that might in turn affect various measures of national power, and what that implies about the likely relative power of the U.S. and China (and India) in different domains and at different times in the 21st century. That would be a difficult and speculative exercise, but I would love to see it done.

In the meantime, I suspect Yglesias is right about the big picture.

(But, on the details, I roughly agree with some of Caplan’s criticisms, along with some points others have made.)

1. For brevity and snark, my descriptions here aren’t quite accurate. [↩]

Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

On Amon Tobin:

Amon Tobin well impersonated the classical composer in the hip-hop age. Instead of composing symphonies for orchestras, Tobin glued together sonic snippets using electronic and digital equipment. Adventures in Foam (1996)… and especially his aesthetic manifesto and masterpiece, Bricolage (1997), unified classical, jazz, rock and dance music in a genre and style that was universal. Tobin warped the distinctive timbres of instruments to produce new kinds of instruments, and then wove them into an organic flow of sound. Tobin kept refining his art of producing amazingly sophisticated and seamless puzzles on Permutation (1998), Supermodified (2000) and, best of his second phase, Out From Out Where (2002). Once he had exhausted the possibilities of instruments and samples, Tobin turned to found sounds and field recordings as the sources for The Foley Room (2007), without basically changing style…

Tobin’s studies on timbre should also not be overlooked. The apparently unassuming “Defocus” is actually a new kind of symphony. Tobin warps the distinctive tone of an instrument to produce a new kind of instrument, and then weaves a few of them (a bee-like violin, a distorted bass, UFO-sounding flutes) into an organic flow of sound. It is, in fact, one of the most significant innovations since Beethoven added a choir to a symphony.

Needless to say, jazz fuels and dresses these compositions. However, Tobin does to jazz what Picasso did to impressionism: it uses only discrete fragments of the image to reconstruct the whole. Furthermore, it is never the only or main element. For example, the sax solo of “Wires And Snakes” coexists with industrial metronomic pulses and with soothing ambient waves of electronics.

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Previously: 1, 2, 3, 4.

On Primus:

A stubbornly alternative group, alien to the commercial route, immune to the lure of compromises, heir of the “freak” philosophy and ethics, and representative of the genealogical line of “neo-freaks” inaugurated by the Butthole Surfers – that’s Primus. Created by bassist and vocalist Les Claypool, Primus was a bright spot among the rock groups of the early 90’s. Each track was like a stylistic puzzle; the group had few predecessors as their style resembled progressive-rock (from Frank Zappa to Rush) but had the feel of hard-core. Listeners can hear echoes of Minutemen and Black Flag, but the smooth progression between tones was anything but punk.

On Rake:

Their first album… contains two lengthy improvisations… driven by a jazz guitarist who listened to John McLaughlin till he went nuts and by a keyboardist who fell in love with the Moog. The sound is an aberration of Albert Ayler and Borbetomagus.

…The first CD [of their 2nd album] contains four lengthy suites… The second [CD] contains 75 brief pieces, whose dementia reaches disturbing levels; a wild collage of abstract sonic miniatures that rarely coalesce in songs. The 4th is a masterpiece of punk-rock, the 11th and the 21st are masterpieces of avantgarde guitar, the 55th and following ones are space-rock at its best, the 64th and following ones are gothic/ambient psychedelia, the 73th and following ones are the childish conclusions of the whole big nonsense. A totally pointless genius, as Dada would have loved.

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Previously: 1, 2, 3.

On Zeni Geva (here):

Zeni Geva indulged in dissonant and gloomy orgies, in the tradition of early Swans and Big Black (but with no bass), on albums such as Maximum Money Monster (1990), Desire For Agony (1993), and especially Total Castration (1992). Null’s solo work, notably Absolute Heaven (1994) and Ultimate Material II (1995), continued to straddle the border between extreme noise and very extreme noise.

On Merzbow (here and here):

Merzbow, the brainchild of Masami Akita, one of the most prolific musicians of all times (not a compliment), was a theoretician of surrealism in music but practiced a form of savage violence that was more akin to a suicide bombing on non-musical works such as Rainbow Electronics (1990), Music For Bondage Performance (1991), Venereology (1994) and Tauromachine (1998).

…Merzbox (1997) is a box of 50 CDs that “summarizes” his career, when he has just passed the record of the 200th album. It includes 30 reprints of CDs, LPs and cassettes, as well as 20 unreleased albums.

…It is difficult to tell Whether Dharma (2001) is a masterpiece or another Merzbow self-parody … but maybe that’s precisely what Merzbow is all about. One of their most savage noise recordings, it includes the massive (32 minutes), gargantuan, arcane musique concrete of “Frozen Guitars and Sunloop / 7E 802,” that after eight minutes turned into a maelstrom exuding a sense of desperation and after sixteen enters an endless free fall, besides the crescendo of “I’m Coming to the Garden No Sound No Memory,” that achieves a screeching intensity, the nuclear carpet bombing of “Akashiman,” and the eight-minute chamber composition “Space Plan For Marimo Kitty” for random piano notes and alien electronic interference.

By the same token, on Frog (2001), a sequence of variations on frogs, Masami Akita seems to make fun of the fans who take him seriously.

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William Rathbone (1819-1902), writing in 1867 about philanthropy:

It is true that there is among the rich much desultory and indolent goodwill towards the poor… which, if properly stimulated by a sense of positive and imperative obligation, and guided to a safe and effectual mode of action, might be made instrumental of much good at present left undone. It is true that a new hospital finds plenty of rich men willing to give money for its establishment and support; that any striking case of distress, calculated to touch the sympathies of the public, which may be recorded in the newspapers, generally attracts a superabundance of charitable donations… Probably, in by far the greater number of instances, the feeling that prompts them is one of genuine compassion. But it would be wrong to ascribe much merit to such emotional liberality; to look upon it as proof that the rich are properly sensible of their duties and responsibilities. The desultory nature of so much of our charity; the stimulus it requires from fancy-balls and bazaars; the greater facility with which a new institution obtains subscriptions for want of which an old one, equally meritorious, languishes; the amount of time and energy which the managers of a charity are so often forced to consume in drumming together the funds required for its support — time and energy which should be devoted to the mere task of efficient management — all these are significant evidence that the manifestations of generosity of which we hear so much proceed not from a strong and clear sense of duty, but from a vague sentiment of compassion; that people give less in obedience to principle than under, a sudden impulse of feeling, less to fulfill an obligation than to relieve themselves of an uneasy though vague sensation of compunction. Few among the rich realize that charity is not a virtue of supererogation, but a divine charge upon their wealth, which they have no right to neglect. They give to this or that family whose story interests them, to this or that institution for the relief of some form of‘ distress which peculiarly touches their sympathies, with no idea that the matter is not one in which they have a right to indulge their caprice; that all the misery within their sphere is an evil with which it is their duty to grapple, to which they are bound to apply the remedial energies and resources at their command, not as suits their taste or fancy, but as may be most efficacious in the relief of suffering… In short, charity is with them a matter of sentiment, not of principle…

…Do the rich give as large a proportion of their incomes, even, as these poorer contributors? They should do much more, for they can afford much more. £50 represents a much larger deduction from the real comforts and enjoyments procurable with an in come of £500, than does £500 taken from an income of £5000. As expenditure increases it is less on necessaries and more on luxuries; even its power of giving proportionate enjoyment to the possessor diminishes. The man who increases his expenditure from £1000 to £2000 may perhaps — though it is doubtful — get a thousand pounds worth of increased enjoyment from the addition. But if so, he certainly does not get an equal increase when he goes on from £2000 to £3000 or from £3000 to £4000. The larger the expenditure, the less the proportion of pleasure derived to money laid out. And therefore, both because the deduction involves a less sacrifice, and because it is just and reasonable to hold that money should be so spent as to produce a reasonable return of enjoyment to some one, it may fairly be urged that the larger the income, the larger should be the proportion spent in charity… Unhappily it is the fact that men of large means generally —for there are exceptions — spend a smaller percentage of those means in charity than do men of limited incomes…

Rhodri Davies (around 22m) adds that Rathbone also grappled with the question of “earning to give” vs. “direct work”, saying:

Margaret Simey’s book… says that Rathbone was torn between… whether he should go into the ministry and help the poor directly or whether he should go into business, and eventually [she writes] “viewing the issue in the light of common sense, [Rathbone] decided that for him, an effective life of public service would depend on his possession of the influence and respect secured by success in business. Accordingly, he set himself doggedly to the task of building up the family fortunes, which had suffered from the devotion of his father and grandfather to public work.” So he took his own self interest out of it — because he probably would have preferred to work directly with the poor — but he thought that actually what [he] should do is go off and maximize the amount of money he could make and [maximize] his political influence and connections, and then use [those things] to do the maximum amount of good.