Diversity and Nations of Laws.

I usually try to be at least somewhat timely in commenting on or expanding on an article posted by someone else, but I'm only now getting around to expanding on a few points in the excellent article the Didact wrote.

The Dirt World is one in which the rule of law is considered anything from a quaint anachronism to a bad joke. It is a world in which bribery, corruption, nepotism, and elitist snobbery are ways of life, not exceptions to the rule. It is a world in which there is a vast underclass of peons who labour and live and die at the whims and fancies of a pampered and privileged upper class who want nothing to do with that world and do their utmost to ensure that the muck and filth and squalor of those very lower classes is unseen and unheard.

If you have ever lived in the Philippines, or even visited it, you know of what I speak.

If you have ever flown over Bombay on approach to Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport and seen the vast slums of Andheri, among which sit gleaming tower blocks and apartment buildings of steel and glass, you know of what I speak.

If you have ever visited Mexico, especially near the border with El Norte, and seen the utter breakdown of law and order and the viciousness of the cartels that control places like Juarez, you know of what I speak.

If you have ever lived in or visited Africa, with its abominable hygiene, totally dysfunctional infrastructure, and lawlessness, you know of what I speak.

If you have ever visited Egypt and spent any time whatsoever in Cairo, with its backwardness and incompetence and horrid stomach bugs and unfinished yet fully inhabited housing blocks designed specifically to dodge taxes, you know of what I speak.

Many of the people to be found in these places are charming, hospitable, kind, decent, and morally upstanding. But they live in societies that reward a tribal mentality, and they bring that mindset with them whenever they settle in new nations. That trait is extremely hard to shake and very few people truly manage to do it.

The results of these tribal mindsets can now be seen in the current Daemoncratic caucus, which is "diverse", to be sure - but utterly inept and stupid.

Diversity has a way of ruining organisations of virtually any size, including something as small as a family unit. If any of you boys reading this doubt that statement, then just you try bringing a girl home that your momma don't like, and see what happens.

I want to step back one level.

Rule of law.

Just to be clear, legal and just/right are not the same thing. This is the problem with the crowd saying "but I'm OK with legal immigration", because with the stroke of a pen the laws can be changed, and does that make the issue any better regarding mass immigration?

Rule of law implies that the majority of a community agrees on what the laws, and "proper behavior" are, and they apply to everyone. That as a result, they at least approximate what is "right" (because a tyrannical nobleman changing the law at whim is de facto not "rule of law").

The second they do not have shared standards, you cannot have rule of law, but rule by force. Those who can exert will over the others decide what the laws are, and who they apply to.

Also, as John Ringo so eloquently noted in The Last Centurion, referencing Putnam's study, diversity breaks down trust even within groups. It certainly makes you leery of loaning out your lawnmower, because hey, you'll more likely get it back broken.

Diversity not only makes rule of law impossible, it makes the common standards just laws are based on impossible.

It also causes economic collapse. Nevermind the third-world economy the tech giants are promoting by playing stupid games with their services, dealing with low trust and short-term time preference types who nominally grew up in the culture can still cause massive problems, as a recent Peter Grant post points out. Consider how much the rental car business runs on trust.

April 15, a Monday, should have been sleepy this year for the Chicago team at Car2Go, a car-sharing service that automaker Daimler AG introduced more than a decade ago.

. . .

There was a spike in rentals for Car2Go’s higher-end cars, Mercedes CLA sedans and GLA sport utility vehicles. And these rentals lasted much longer than Car2Go’s average 90-minute ride—in fact, many of the Benzes weren’t being returned at all. Instead, employees at Car2Go headquarters in Austin watched on a digital map as dozens of their vehicles congregated on a few blocks in West Chicago, in a neighborhood right outside the company’s coverage area.

Car2Go sent several workers to retrieve the vehicles, only to find that a group of thieves had claimed them as their own. Some blocked the vehicles in to prevent repossession; others threatened the company’s employees, according to someone with knowledge of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity.

. . .

After its failed attempts to recover the cars itself, Car2Go asked the Chicago Police Department for help. By midweek the company suspended service in Chicago altogether, an acknowledgment that it couldn’t figure out how to distinguish legitimate customers from the group of thieves. Kelton says about 75 cars in total were compromised. All were eventually recovered, though some only after being stripped of doors, seats, and other parts.

. . .

The Mercedes plot owed to one strategy Car2Go’s management implemented to draw in new members: making it easier to sign up. For the past several years, Car2Go has subjected all its users to background checks conducted manually by humans. They take a day or two to complete, a lag that seemed onerous to customers used to the immediate gratification that other mobility services offer. “You see Uber or Lyft, or Airbnb, or all the scooters—they all have instant verification,” Kelton says.

The executive team in Europe, where rates of fraud are much lower, was eager to lower barriers to entry. So in April, Car2Go stopped conducting the manual background checks. The company says that on April 13 about 20 people who went on to orchestrate the Mercedes thefts set up some 80 phony accounts in Chicago, using fake or stolen credit cards as their payment methods. It’s unclear whether the timing was a direct response to Car2Go’s policy change or just an illustration of how often its systems were being probed for weaknesses.

. . .

A coordinated attack on this scale was unprecedented, but there has been a near-constant stream of smaller incidents, according to three people with knowledge of the industry who spoke on condition of anonymity because of nondisclosure agreements ... Car2Go ... quickly reverted to manually reviewing new accounts and says it hasn’t had any serious issues in the two months since then.