Think of Activists as "Activistes"

In a recent article proposing to "abolish the Ivy League already" PJ Media founder Roger L. Simon wrote this about the "protest" by climate-changers at the Harvard-Yale game.

In the middle of this year's Harvard-Yale game, the great activistes spewed out onto the field to demand, what else, action on climate change—delaying the game for over an hour.

Yes! "Activiste" it is, for me. Now and forever. But, to go one better, Simon should have written "les grands activistes."

But then, I thought, what about "artist" and "artiste?" Now I had always thought that "artiste" was a bit of a sneer at people that were trying to represent themselves as creative artists but were actually just grinding it out, as in "cabaret artistes." But when I Google searched, it appears that the ironic meaning is not understood. At least not in wokish Googleland. As here.

Artist -- a person whose creative work shows sensitivity and imagination. 

Artiste -- a public performer (a dancer or singer).

Well, blow me down. But I still think I am right. "Artiste" is used as a dig at someone trying to push it a little. Artist is gentry. Artiste is commoner. To use the argot of Curtis Yarvin. And don't you forget it, peasant.

However, the funless meanings could still apply to activism.

Activist -- a graying lefty who genuinely believes that force can save the world. 

Activiste -- a woke college kid who is mouthing rubbish taught her by her college professor.

But never mind about the serious meanings. The whole point is to have fun with it, in a battle of Godzilla vs. Kong. Hey I know, Hollywood! How about a movie of Les Déplorables vs. Les Activistes. Gotta get a bit of French lingo in there. To show that this is an upscale blog.

Seriously, I think it is important to get the idea out that your average activiste is just a chump pretending to be changing the world. A good little girl waving her special protest sign that she created herself in art class. A pajama boy bouncing about between internships arranged by his influential deep-state parents.

Either way, we are talking about a dumb-as-a-post activiste Great Reactionary that still believes that politics can save the world, even after the 20th century with its slave states and 100 million graves has proved that politics-as-salvation is the most evil concept imaginable.

Oh did I mention my Great Reaction notion? Nothing special. It just puts forward the notion that the left is a reactionary movement, a religio moving away from the basic truth of humans, that we are social animals, towards the idea that you can solve all problems with politics and government, when

Politics is division 

Government is force

oh, and here's the short stack on the Great Reaction:

Socialism is neo-slavery; the welfare state is neo-feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism is part neo-knight-errantry and part pro-regime street-thuggery; helpless victims are neo-sacrifice, social justice is neo-plunder.

Only, I think that we need to start calling "activism" as "activisme." Little bit more of your French lingo there. Hmm. I think we better revise that:

Socialism is neo-slavery; the welfare state is neo-feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism is part neo-knight-errantry, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play; helpless victims are neo-sacrifice, social justice is neo-plunder.

But watch it. "Protest" in French is not "proteste;" it is "protestation." And "demonstration" is "manifestation."

But activiste it is. Now and forever. And we could call activism culture "le culte d'activisme."

Think of activists as activistes and you won't go far wrong.

Being Thankful Towards the End of Life

I remember my grandfather -- my mother's father -- at the age of 72. That is, I remember him being 72, and an old man. And that he died in 1965 aged about 85 after colon surgery.

Those were the days when you didn't tell people they had cancer.

But this year, 2019, I turned 73. So that makes me an old man! Anyway, I thought this was a good year to make absolutely sure that each of my daughters had heard from me about what I thought about them. I told them both that I thought they were amazing and that it was hard for me to understand how such women could have come from a guy like me.

It was time to tell them that because, I thought, you never know. I could die tomorrow and I wouldn't want that to happen without having told my daughters how much I honored them.

So I got that one under my belt. Or off my chest.

Of course, we all think this is the worst of times. Because political division, etc. But that is rubbish.

Hey! If Dickens could start his novel about the French Revolution with the maxim: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," then our world today in America cannot be anything but the best of times.

Let's do the full quote from A Tale of Two Cities, just to make it fair.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

What Dickens is saying, I suppose, is that we humans tend to imagine that we, at this moment, are the center of the universe: amazing and special and unique -- and also going to hell in a handbasket.

Which we obviously are not. However, each of us is at the center of our personal world and cannot help but experience our life and our world from that position.

The question is: what do we do about it? And, given that I have been reading Nietzsche over the last year, we should give him his chance to tell us what to do (The Will to Power §55)

Who will prove to be the strongest in the course of this? The most moderate; those who do not require any extreme articles of faith; those who not only concede, but love a fair amount of accidents and nonsense; those who can think of man with a considerable reduction of his value without becoming small and weak on that account; those richest in health who are equal to most misfortunes and therefore not so afraid of misfortunes --  human beings who are sure of their power and represent the attained strength of humanity with conscious pride.

I rather like the notion of loving "a fair amount of accidents and nonsense." Because, you know what? We are all too inclined to want everything serious and tied down and no suprises, thank you.

But the truth about life is that it is full of "accidents and nonsense" and we ought all to accept that.

And be thankful, and stop complaining!

Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: How To Keep the Woke Gentry Onside

What is going on with the whole progressive project? That is what Curtis Yarvin is doing in Part 2 of "The Clear Pill."

But what exactly is he saying in his 7,800 words of exegesis?

Simply, at the end, he says that he is explaining how "progressivism is a way for the ruling class to feel important by supporting the government." And don't they just, the gentry class support the government? Oh yeah.

Yarvin's purpose is to look under the hood of today's governance, and figure out how it is done, how you get all the gentry class, who might theoretically have a whole range of goals, singing from the same hymnal.

How do you get them to take their eye off the truth, and buy into an "aesthetic tilt" that sneaks in the agenda of the ruling class, and gets them all singing the same tune of power?

Obviously, he writes, you do it with anthems, "thymotic anthems," where thymos comes from the Greek with a meaning "somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity." In other words, the job of the ruling class is to compose anthems for the gentry class that appeal to the natural ambition, honor, and vanity of gentry-type people. But... The gentry class is too educated to live a live in the shadow of such base motives. Right? Right!

The other way to rule is with political formulas, "pistoic formulas," where pistos comes from the Greek with a meaning somewhere "between loyalty, fidelity, and servility." The formula demonstrates an emotional bond of loyalty: "I pay my taxes because the money supports good works." Usually, that money supports me, of course, so what's not to like?

And of course, when we observe a loyalty bond out there that does not involve us, we see corruption. Obviously, the climate science of scientists funded by Exxon is tainted, because the Exxon-funded scientists are naturally going to study things that do not hurt Exxon's interest. Obviously.

But whatabout climate scientists funded by NOAA? Huh? They will be saying that they do climate science because it helps save the planet, a political formula that proves their loyalty to the federal government and the climate establishment.

Thus:

Here we see just how blissful the union of thymos and pistos can be. Ambition and loyalty may contrast; they do not conflict; the contrary—they fit together like burger and bun. Most anthems serve power; most formulas imply status. 

An anthem is a way to feel important. A formula is a way to support the government. Therefore, a formulaic anthem is a way to feel important by supporting the government.

Both anthems and formulas are ways to tilt reality and make people feel good about supporting the tilted power reality of the ruling class, especially our beloved gentry class of progressive liberals.

And so we wise and learned deplorables outside the Capitol of Panem can understand how the pompous idiots cavorting in the Capitol are just completely hoodwinked by the anthems and formulas of the ruling class into being proud and loyal foot-soldiers in the ruling class's power project.

What does untilted reality look like, the kind that we, that have taken the Clear Pill, experience?

Unaffected thought will be found wherever no valid thought is anthem or formula. The institution of mathematics can be politicized. The math itself cannot.

The key is that no power is involved. Once power enters in we get titled reality and we start to get anthems and formulas to make us feel good about bowing to power and going with its power project.

Of course, no power project lasts forever. There is a long period cycle that seems to rule western civ. and refreshes the fountain of power.

• The intellectual command economy rules. Public opinion is directed by a dogmatic bureaucracy, rife with pervasive error, systematically incapable of changing its mind.

• An unofficial free market for truth evolves. This market cannot be poisoned by power, because it has no power. It develops a higher-quality product than the official narrative.

• A new epistemic elite arises. The old intellectual bureaucracy, smart enough to sense its own inferiority, hands power to the new truth market. A new golden age begins.

• Dogmatic bureaucracy returns. Slowly and inevitably poisoned by power, the once-vibrant civil society slowly ossifies into a dogmatic bureaucracy, evolving more and more pretty lies until pervasive error is again the norm. 

Oh well.

This has been a monstrously shortened and truncated explanation of Yarvin's notion, which I barely understand. If you want to ponder the deep richness of what he is saying, go read the original, "A Theory of Pervasive Error." Chances are you will end up just as confused as I am.

Curtis Yarvin's Clear Pill: The Uses of the "Political Formula"

Back in the day, smart Jewish kid and software guy Curtis Yarvin made something of a name for himself in a years-long blog odyssey as Mencius Moldbug.

What was Moldbug all about? Just trying to upend the conventional political wisdom. Nothing much.

Who is Yarvin? Let La Wik (as he called it in his Moldbug years) tell the story.

[Yarvin] is an American far-right political theorist, blogger, and computer scientist. He is known, along with fellow "neo-reactionary" thinker Nick Land, for developing the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic ideas behind the Dark Enlightenment. Yarvin and his ideas are often associated with the alt-right.

Yeah! "Far-right!" Scary!

Yarvin proved his importance by getting canceled at a 2015 StrangeLoop software conference. In 2016, his invitation to the conference "resulted in the withdrawal of five speakers, two subconferences, and several sponsors." Note the use of the passive tense.

But now he is appearing on American Mind in a five part series called "The Clear Pill." I'm going to blog about it because that's the best way for me to understand what Yarvin is trying to say.

Yarvin starts by saying that the two turn-of-the-20th-century Italian political scientists Mosca and Pareto, "taught that all states are ruled by elites who subdue their subjects with illusions."

Mosca called these illusions “political formulas.” A political formula is any narrative element which makes [the subjects] prefer actions that objectively stabilize the regime. 

But you are above all that, right? You can see through all the formulas and know the real reality.

Actually not. We all live in a fake reality dome, and we don't know what reality is. All we can do is subject all political formulas to this analysis:

Here is one way to check out any idea you don’t want to believe: assume it’s true, then build a new reality around that axiom. Once you fail, you get to say: I can’t see how this could be true.

That's the Clear Pill. If you can't find a problem with a political formula, then OK. Go with it, for the time being.

But the ideal is to be neutral, to live outside all the narratives, In the perfect case:

You will not be of any use or any harm to any particular cause. You will feel neither political anger, nor political fear. You will neither cause trouble, nor get in trouble. This vacation from politics need not last the rest of your life. But it can.

Now, Yarvin says, our present regime is not like the Hitler/Stalin/Mao regime, "with one person or a small team unilaterally directing the entire state."

Let's call the Hitler-type regime a "one-story state. Everyone has to believe one narrative—one official history of the present." Or else.

But we live in a two-story state. It's really cunning.

When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”

Now maybe both stories are rubbish. Maybe the shared story in the middle is rubbish too. But because there is agreement on some things we humans are inclined to believe the shared story as true. "Stagecraft,"says Yarvin. And the benefit is that a two-story state can maintain itself with a lot less repression than the one-story state.

So how does power operate in our two-story state? According to Yarvin it has a "civic core" and a "political core." Nominally the political core is in charge, as in the voters electing the government. But actually the civic core in in control because it runs the story-making machine.

Public opinion does not direct the civic core; the civic core guides public opinion.

And the civic core is "the permanent civil service" plus "the press, academia, philanthropy, and so on."

If you weren't sure about that before you are now, what with the civic core, from the "deep state" to the MSM to lefty academia doing a 24-7 effort to bounce the peoples' choice, Donald Trump, from office.

And the civic core seems to manage to coordinate itself and its story without any actual Mr. Big in charge. How do they do it?

How does the political core work? Yarvin proposes a three people world, as I do. He calls the three classes: gentry, commoners, and clients.

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Usually the gentry rules using the clients as its clients. "The natural conflict pits commoners against gentry plus clients." This is what I say, that the People of the Creative Self (gentry) combine with the People of the Subordinate Self (clients) against the People of the Responsible Self (commoners).

In a society like ours, the commoners are the majority, so it takes a fair bit of talent  -- and "Jedi mind tricks." -- to keep the commoners divided so the gentry can rule.  The trick is to keep the gentry united.

Everything can probably stay copacetic for the ruling gentry unless an outside "third story" comes along.

The most dangerous outside stories (a) are completely true, (b) aim at rogue gentry, and (c) exalt commoners and/or disparage clients. Any such narrative might be the political formula of the next regime. 

Now you see what President Trump is doing in his political rallies: he is "exalting commoners." Obviously chaps like me and Yarvin are interested in outside stories that would do exactly that. Because? Maybe because the gentry seems to be dissing us, people that actually read a book and write about it. And we don't like being dissed any more than black gangbangers in the 'hood.

Waging Permanent Ideological War

Over at The Federalist Joseph Backholm has some fun with progressive writer John Pavlovitz who writes about how he's not a radical leftist, but belongs in the "human middle."

Then Backholm goes on to show how whacko the left has become in 25 different ways, like:

They went from “coexist” bumper stickers to suing grandmothers who preferred not to decorate a same-sex wedding.

According to La Wik, "Pavlovitz is an American Christian pastor and author, known for his social and political writings from a liberal Christian perspective."

And just today, Pavlovitz has issued a rant about he who shall not be named. You see, someone asked him: “John… what happens if he wins again?” and he gave him a comfortable answer. But he was thinking:

He can’t win again.

That isn’t an option.

It simply cannot be allowed.

If he wins again, November 2016 will seem relatively uneventful; a partly cloudy day in advance of a Category 5 hurricane.

And on and on into a lefty partisan rant.

And here was I thinking that the Trump win in 2016 was just the normal "time for a change" election after 8 years of the other guys. With the innovation that Trump made a connection with the white working class that has been abandoned by the Democrats as the ruling class has pivoted away from class politics to race and gender politics. And all he did was get them to feel that "he cared about people like me." Which is Job One for every politician.

I suppose that Pavloitz belongs to the political tendency that interpreted Barack Obama's two terms as president as a "fundamental change" in American life.

And here I was thinking that Barack Obama was First Black President: been there, done that. We've elected a black president, so we can't be called racists. Now back to your regular scheduled programming. Not.

One of the interesting things about the last half-century is how giving people political rights doesn't solve anything. You abolish government-mandated race laws like Jim Crow and instead of race dropping off the radar you find that the whole of society becomes obsessed with race. The Supreme Court declares gay marriage to be a thing, and gays start running around finding deplorables to cancel and put out of business.

Couple of dozen PhDs there, in my humble estimation. Because more research is needed.

And then you have politicians that don't concede elections. I remember, back in the day, when Time magazine would have a post-election issue about how the election is over, and we are all Americans, and how we all come together after elections, and how, bless their hearts, the losers can content themselves with "wait until next time."

Here's what I think, and I think that the John Pavlovitzes should pay attention.

I think that it is a problem when 90 percent of media articles about a president are negative.

I think that it is a problem when the government schools and universities are almost uniformly Democratic, and where conservative voices get silenced and canceled.

I think it is a problem when corporations are enforcing an ideological line in response to pressure from left-wing activist groups.

I think it is a problem when there is no defence against an accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe.

In other words I think that, whatever your beliefs and certainties, it is a really good idea, from a strategic point of view, to let the other guys have their say. Hey, if nothing else, you get to see what absolute clueless idiots the other guys are. It doesn't get any better than that!

 I also think that we should understand left-wing ideological activist enthusiasms strictly as religious "great awakenings." And sometimes we should think of them as religious cults activated by "prophecy."

And then what happens when "prophecy fails?"

You can think of the leftist frenzy since 2016 as a case of a failure of prophecy. Lefties thought that the world had changed, that progressives like Obama would rule forever. And their prophecy failed.

Which, you might say, is why the Founders decided against a state church, so that prophetic cults would not get mixed up in national politics.

Of course, there is no way to keep prophecy out of it. But you can at least put in roadblocks, to make it hard for prophetic groups to grab a hold of the political power, the way that the Bolsheviks and the Maoists did.

And there is nothing like repeated failure at the ballot box to bring the prophetic urge down to Earth.

That's what happened with the Sixties. The Democrats thought they were going to rule forever. Then they lost four out of five presidential elections in a row, and finally, the New Democrat Bill Clinton got elected as a moderate.

But then, as the Bible says, there came a Pharaoh that knew not Joseph, a rising generation of lefty progressives that did not live through the aftermath of the Sixties.

And so it looks like they will have to learn about politics and ordinary lunch-bucket voters the hard way.

Yeah. Because the guys that wage what seems like permanent ideological war are usually rich kids, scions of the ruling class.

But most ordinary people just want to live their lives and wive and thrive without being jerked around by ruling-class jerks.

I wonder what they mean by that?

Conspiracy Theory and Cancel Culture

One of the things that is clear in the effort to get President Trump is that partisans believe the propaganda that their side is putting out. Did President Trump collude with the Russians in 2016? Or did President Obama direct the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign? Did the Obama administration put pressure on Ukraine to dismiss a prosecutor that was looking at natural gas company Burisma? Or did President Trump get Ukraine to look into corruption as a quid quo pro for getting military aid? Depends whose side you are on.

But right now at least both sides get to put out their propaganda without being canceled.

Then there are the things you are not allowed to say. Michelle Malkin is having a bit of a problem because her visits to college campi to discuss immigration keep getting canceled. And Conservatism Inc. is going after her and 21-year-old far right YouTuber Nick Fuentes.

Now that gay marriage is a thing you are not allowed to fund Christian organizations like the Salvation Army. Because homophobia.

Anyone that doubts the narrative of the Holocaust and 6 million Jews murdered in the camps gets their book shredded and their academic career ruined. And in 1940 a ton of Americans got canceled for opposing FDR's move towards war.

Interested in a canceled and pulped book? Ron Unz at unz.com has put a raft of canceled books online on his HTML Books feature. Also 88 books by G.A. Henty: and to think I only read three of them!

Here's my info on Jews and Nazis, obtained from Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk. Wittgenstein the gay philosopher, author of Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations was Jewish from a very wealthy family in Vienna. He was in England in the 1930s, but his sisters were still in Vienna as the Nazis took over Europe. In 1938 they got fake Yugoslav passports and visas to go to Switzerland but were prosecuted by the Nazis. But, "All four were cleared of the charges brought against them." Then, it turned out that the Wittgenstein family had a lot of foreign currency. After lengthy negotiations -- that included Wittgenstein -- the sisters transferred a ton of Wittgenstein wealth from Switzerland to the Nazi Reichbank, and "Hermione and Helene were able to survive the war relatively untroubled." (p.400) So what's that all about?

We all know about the Overton Window, "range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time," the things that politicians are allowed to propose versus the crazy stuff that everyone agrees is beyong the Pale.

I suppose this suppression of radical ideas is a basic part of humans as social animals. For social cooperation to work everyone has to be on the same page, or nearly so.

But what makes Jewish groups so determined to cancel Holocaust Denial? Or gays so quick to cancel Christians? Or the climate community so quick to brand skeptics as "climate deniers?" Or Sen. McCarthy to winkle Commies out of the State Department? Or priests to winkle out heretics?

One thing I read recently, regarding Jews, is that when you are a small group, as Jews have tended to be, your survival depends on culture of innocence backed up by eternal watchfulness. Put it this way, for Jews to have survived as a tribe and a religion for the 2,000 years of Christianity is beyond remarkable. There must be something about Jewish culture and practice that maintains the Jewish identity through thick and thin.

Obviously, there must be something in humans as social animals that makes it beneficial to name and shame and cancel people that cause trouble. And it makes sense that people with crazy ideas could cause the demolition of the community in which they live.

But I just think it is sick and wrong for me to be named and shamed and canceled.

Pejorative Politics: Nothing New Under the Sun

Are you a racist? Are you a sexist? A homophobe? Etc? It's the thing of the moment, what every fashionable and Woke American does: using pejoratives to shut people up -- or even get them fired from their jobs.

The truth is: everybody does it. It's just that, according to my Law of the Incoming Rounds, we only notice when the mortar rounds are descending upon us and ours.

For instance, the nicknames for the political parties in Britain, Whigs and Tories, were both originally pejoratives. "Tory" was a name for dispossessed Irish peasants and became the name for supporters of the Catholic King James II of England. "Whig" is probably a shortening of the word "whiggamore," the nickname of 17th century Scottish rebels.

When we deplorables talk about "lefties" and "commies" we are using pejoratives; we are using the words as insults.

And here is the real genius. Our liberal friends have to change their name every generation or so, because their normal name turns into a pejorative. Thus the Progressives of the turn of the 20th century reinvented themselves as "liberals" in the New Deal. And then, about 15 years ago they reinvented themselves as "progressives." Because in the hands of chaps like Ronald Reagan the word "liberal" had become radioactive, an insult.

But hey, politics is a game of insults, whatever Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) says about "people don't insult people." Yes they do, Nancy. All the time. Now, as I observe, in my notion of the male Culture of Insult, the insult direct is a male thing. I encountered probably the base experience of this in Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage. The whole thing is about a young soldier wondering if he will have the necessary courage to get going when the going gets tough, and about the bravado and insults uttered by the soldiers as they are hanging around in camp in-between marches and battles.

What Our Nance is talking about is that women do not use the insult direct. In women's culture, insults are made indirectly, when two women have a conversation about a third woman not present: "I can't believe she said/did that." In the women's Culture of Complaint hey complain about her. But the intention and the intended effect is just the same as the insult direct. Isn't it, Nance?

The purpose of an insult direct or an insult indirect is to take out someone. In men's culture you do that directly, basically challenging an opponent to put up or shut up. In women's culture it is done indirectly, by the community of women, in a series of one-on-one convsersations, coming to a collective decision that some targeted woman is to be named and shamed and shunned. Anthony Trollope does a beautiful number on a step-mother naming and shaming and shunning her step-daughter in An American Senator. Of course, her vile actions didn't work because her step-daughter was the heroine of the story!

Ain't I a sexist? As Bugs Bunny might have said.

Back to the use of "deplorable" as a pejorative. The insult was coined by the matchless Hillary Clinton when she said to an LGBT audience during the 2016 presidential campaign:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?

 [Laughter/applause]

The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now how 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric.

Well yeah. Of course I would say that you ain't seen haters until you've been around LGBT activists. And that is why Hillary Clinton talked about deplorables in her speech at the LGBT fundraiser. Because that's what the gays and the lesbians wanted to hear. That's why they laughed. That's why they cheered. Because Hillary Clinton was telling them that they were the good guys and the Other was the bad guys.

But here's the thing. We deplorables loved it! We marched right out and owned that "deplorable" pejorative. So that now, it really isn't a pejorative any more, it's a badge of honor. The next day some wag had culturally appropriated Les Mis and designed a poster of Les Déplorables and the song "Do You Hear the People Sing."

Same thing with Whigs and Tories. Back in the day, the parties in the British Parliament were referred to by all and sundry as Whigs and Tories, and Conservative Party voters are to this day called Tories.

So I say that the only way to detoxify the dread accusation of racist-sexist-homophobe is to own it.

Yes, I'm a racist. What's it to you?

And, of course, if I was dealing with a real sophisticate, I would say that, according to Hegel, the thing and its opposite are really the same. So the racist and the anti-racist are united by their obsession with race. You might even say they deserve each other.

Whaddya think about that, pardner?

Of Course I'm a Homophobe. How About You?

The third worst thing in the world is to be called a homophobe. Or maybe it is the first worst thing. Because the gay mafia is really better at the "cancel" culture than the race mafia.

And I have to say that, thinking about this post over the past day, I thought: Hmm. This is the one that could get me into trouble. Except, of course, that I am nobody, and nobody cares what Chris Chantrill thinks or writes.

Of course, I would say, today, that anyone that is not a homophobe is a fool. Phobia -- or φοβία -- is Greek for fear. But in English, according to Google, it is "an extreme or irrational fear of or aversion to something." Presumably that is the meaning that Freud came up with. So "homophobia" means an extreme or irrational feat or aversion to homosexuals.

Hmm. Again, I'd say that anyone that wasn't really afraid of homosexuals is a fool. Because the gay mafia -- pace the trans mafia -- is a very powerful political weapon that can put you out of a job in 15 minutes flat.

So yeah, I'm a homophobe. Anyone who is anyone ought to be afraid of the gay mafia. But what about homosexuals as individuals and homosexuality in general?

First of all, my experience with homosexuality.

I went to an English public school, and there was a lot of what the Brits would call "wanking" going on. But when I went to university I decided that I'd better stay on the hetero side. My reason? Well, back in those days the left was pretty hard on gays because, they said, homosexuality was all about upper-class "poofters." Better keep my nails clean, I thought.

But then I applied to enter the University Air Squadron at my university. And the officer conducting my physical decided, after I had failed the color pattern test, to check my color vision by having me look at a light source and call the color. So I got in to train as a pilot even though I am color blind. This same officer became my flight instructor, and one day, in the air, asked me if I had ever thought about homosexuality. No, I replied, I hadn't. So he proposed that there was no need to tell anyone about the conversation. So what did I do? I did nothing except continue my flight training.

Here's the thing. If that gay guy hadn't fixed my physical I would never have done flight training at the university, and I consider my flight training in the University Air Squadron one of the more meaningful and satisfying experiences of my life.

So the question for me is: should society gently condone the fact of homosexuals and other non-hetero folk in our society? Should society name and shame and shun them? Or should homosexuality be institutionalized with, e.g., gay marriage?

Let's turn to my pal Fritzi for advice. He observes, in The Will to Power, that Christianity rather overdoes it on the morality front. For Nietzsche, moral rules should be regarded more as common sense than divine commandments. Which is fine, except, as others point out, it is much more effective to propose that God knows everything, and will judge you at the last trump, than to leave the moral ordering of society to earthly moral arbiters like policemen and judges, and God forbid, politicians.

So I would suggest that it is probably best if young people are taught to avoid homosexuality.

Because?

Because of all kinds of practical reasons, starting with the basic function of sexuality, to put the next generation on the ground.

Because it is not true that, hey, you can choose your sexual preference, because human rights, and everybody should be who they want to be. The fact is that if you depart from the main road of life in which you fall in love with a young person of the opposite sex, get married, have kids, and then after 20 years realize that the meaning of life is grandchildren, you are much more likely to end up in the bushes or the wilderness. That is the point of moral rules and cultural guidelines. They are guard rails to point you in the direction that will, hopefully, keep you out of the ditch.

The fact is that kids today are being taught that non-hetero lifestyle is normal, is cool, is exciting. Er, not really. In fact, per Nietzsche, getting off the main road of life is hard to become an Übermensch is challenging, and requires enormous fortitude. Ir is not for the faint of heart.

On Nietzsche's reckoning, to be one of "we free spirits" is the whole point of life. It is creative, but it is hard. Any creative life is hard. And I agree with him.

But that is not how gay activists present the case. For them, it is all explainable in the leftist matrix of oppressors vs. helpless victims. Gays are helpless victims and must be rescued from the homophobic oppressors by law, by diversity and inclusion administrators, and by gay activists.

Sorry Charlie. Like everything to do with the left, this is a lie, including "and" and "the." If you choose to leave the main road of life you will need enormous reserves of courage and energy and fortitude, whatever the law, whatever the D&I administrators, whatever the power of gay activists.

And on top of everything, we have the problem that once the activists get their Civil Rights law or their gay marriage, they don't go home. That's because their identity is their life as an activist. And activists must go out there peacefully protesting every day, otherwise where is the meaning of life?

And there is the peculiar nature of activism that, when you are fighting for your rights, you must act the role of the helpless victim that is just asking for justice. But after you have achieved your goal your meek activist turns into an avenging angel, dispensing justice with fire and sword. What's that all about?

So yeah. Call me a homophobe. I don't care. Because all the vile accusations flying around are merely the crude attempts of political activists to divide people and conquer them. But accusations only work when we cringe. If we do not cringe, then the accusation starts to lose its power.

OK, OK. It's easy for me to say that, because I don't earn my living in the public square: I can't be "canceled."

But right now the accusation of homophobia is an accusation that can hurt your career big time. You cannot say: No I'm Not! Because that won't fly with the safe-space girls in HR.

So really, the only thing to do is to own it. Yes. I'm a homophobe. Because my job as the adult in the room is let the kids know that if you choose live as LGBT you better look before you leap.

Of Course I'm a Sexist, How About You?

The second worst thing in the world is to be called a sexist. Because. But really what is a sexist?

Is it someone that believes that men and women are different? Is it someone that supports the patriarchy or toxic masculinity? Is it someone that believes women should be kept barefoot and pregnant?

Or maybe it is just someone that believes that the Civil Rights Acts mean what they say, that the government shall not discriminate on the basis of sex.

Actually I get it. It is all understood in Eric Hoffer's famous aphorism that "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Or more directly, the problem with every great cause is that after it succeeds it never goes home. But sticks around doing more of what worked to advance in the cause in the days of its innocence. Thus, says Google's Ngram Viewer.
Come on, feminists! You mean to say that we need to talk more about sexism after the government passed a law to make it illegal for government and most private organizations to discriminate against women. I don't think so. I mean: shouldn't we have been having a conversation about sexism before the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s?

Actually, I believe that the government should discriminate in favor of women. Women are peculiarly vulnerable, and not because of millennia of patriarchy, but because women are physically weaker, because women are particularly vulnerable when they are pregnant or caring for young children. And because Oscar Wilde's question about what women want is flat wrong. It is not what women want, but what they expect. And primarily what they expect is to be protected.

Let me give you an example. Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently criticized President Trump for a tweet criticizing impeachment witness Marie Yovanovich. She praised the former ambassador's "strength" and then went on to say that "people don't insult people."

This is, as we say, just like a woman. Guess what: you never praise a man for his strength. You only criticize him in the event of weakness. So our Nance is a sexist. Then the insult thing. It's true. Women don't insult other women to their face. What they do is complain about a third-person woman in an intimate one-on-one conversation with another woman, as in "I can't believe she said that." And at some point the women's culture of name and shame and shun kicks in. And the woman in question finds that she doesn't have any "friends" any more. You tell me which is worse.

Here's more sexist stuff.

I believe that votes for women is a bad idea, because the only valid job for government is protecting us from dangers, and women don't do that.

I believe that abortion is a bad idea, because no man should have the option of saying "get rid of it."

I believe the sexual revolution was a bad idea, because women just don't do hookup culture, not unless they have drunk half a bottle of vodka before the party.

I believe that no-fault divorce is a bad idea, because it encourages men to dump their wives for a newer model; and it encourages women to act on the advice of their friends to ditch the loser.

I believe that careers for women is a bad idea because I think young women should be thinking about marriage and children and married women should be working with other mothers in the community to raise the children together, and that older women should be regulating the neighborhood with their name and shame and shun culture.

I believe that women are learners and carers and teachers, and their instinct is to keep things going. I believe that men are creators, fighters, and destroyers, and their instinct is to march towards the sound of the guns.

I believe that we can see women starting to push back against the follies of the last century, that women can live and work "just like a man." I believe that the reaction against the hookup culture is a start, that the #MeToo hashtag is a realization that women do too need protection in the public square. And I believe that microaggressions and safe spaces are an indicator that women don't do face to face challenge.

And what I think is that men are in the early stages of creating a new men-only culture where courage is expected, insults are just a fact of life, and rebelling against conventional wisdom is a sign of manliness.

So yeah. Call me a sexist. I don't care. Because all the vile accusations flying around are merely the crude attempts of political activists to divide people and conquer them. But accusations only work when we cringe. If we do not cringe, then the accusation starts to lose its power.

OK, OK. It's easy for me to say that, because I don't earn my living in the public square: I can't be "canceled."

But right now the accusation of sexism is an accusation that can hurt your career big time. You cannot say: so's your father, because women don't do face-to-face insult -- the Noble Society of Fish Wives excepted, God bless 'em.

So really, the only thing to do is to own it. Yes. I'm a sexist. Because I'm a man, and a man has to bravely outdare the dangers of the time. Whatever the cost.

Of Course I'm a Racist. How About You?

The worst thing in the world is to be called a racist. Because there is no defense against this pejorative. Oh, you can say: No I'm Not. Good luck with that, pal. Obviously, that answer is not working. So I propose the opposite idea.

Of course I'm a racist. Isn't everyone?

Doesn't everyone prefer their own kind best? For instance, your liberal anti-racist may sneer and be ashamed of his rich-kid whiteness. But that's because his whiteness is not his identity. For a lefty xir leftiness is xir identity. Call him a lefty and he feels the compliment.

I'm a racist because I like my own kind best. As a family I am deeply conscious of how my family dodged the bullets of the 20th century that mowed down tens of millions and enslaved hundreds of millions: how my dad, born in Russia, got out in 1918 just in time; how my mother, born in Japan, got out in 1940 just in time; how I, born in India, got out in 1948 after Indian Independence because the Indians were too busy killing each other to bother about the left-over Brits.

As a man descended from northwest Europeans I am deeply conscious and proud of the remarkable contributions to humanity made by northwest Europeans, from limited government to finance to science to understanding and developing the concepts of the market economy and the nation state, and getting embarrassed about slavery, that ultimate expression of hierarchy, and doing something about it.

As an American I am deeply proud of the Founders, those remarkable men that seized political power and then walked away from it, in part with their separation of powers doctrine and in part with the repeated actions of George Washington, man on a white horse that twice walked away from a kingly crown: first as the victorious commanding general of a revolutionary war; and second as a two-term president.

As a white person I am deeply proud of the civil rights revolution that extended to a subordinate minority, blacks, the promise of equal rights under the law. In what country, ever, has the dominant majority ever extended the hand as the Americans of the 1950s and 1960s extended the hand of equal rights to African Americans, because they thought it was the right thing to do?

Look, I get it. In politics, the whole point is to divide the world up into Us and Them, and we humans are groupish, we identify with groups: with our immediate family, with our kindred, with our city, with our nation, with our identity as educated globalists. I like to say that we are all tribesmen, except that back in the day of the hunter-gatherer the boundaries of tribe were much more flexible than, say, the boundaries of American citizenship.

Every war leader, rallying his people to the defense of the homeland, automatically encourages his people to identify as members of a fake tribe, the community of people that need to band together to defend the homeland. The tribe might be a hunter-gatherer band; it might be a horticultural village; it might be an agricultural fiefdom; it might be a nation state. And in the modern era of identity politics, the war leader may call upon our identity as black, or white, or male, or female or gay. Doesn't really matter. Humans respond to the call to arms, and form themselves by instinct into ranks and files, and believe the things that their leaders tell them. There is no difference between any of these tribes, called into existence to meet the threat. We humans are groupish; we establish our identity with our group memberships, especially in the hour of need.

Our lefty friends, it must be said, have become the world champs when it comes to discovering new ways in which to form humans into ranks and files and set them against each other. And what they have learned from the military leaders, or instinctively stumbled upon, is that you cannot really form a strong group unless that group is experienced as being under attack. Thus, to get African Americans to vote 90 percent for Democrats, you must terrify African Americans into believing that Jim Crow is just around the corner. This is, of course, no different that rallying Americans to fight in World War II by terrifying them about Nazis. Or rallying them to fight the Cold War by terrifying them about Commies. Or rallying them to occupy the Middle East by terrifying them about Muslims. Or rallying rich-kid white activists for the #Resistance by terrifying them about white supremacy and toxic masculinity.

So yeah. Call me a racist. I don't care. Because all the vile accusations flying around are merely the crude attempts of political activists to divide people and conquer them. But accusations only work when we cringe. If we do not cringe, then the accusation starts to lose its power.

OK, OK. It's easy for me to say that, because I don't earn my living in the public square: I can't be "canceled."

But right now the accusation of racism is an accusation against which there is no defense. You cannot say: no I'm not! And you certainly cannot throw the accusation back into the face of an African American.

So really, the only thing to do is to own it. Yes. I'm a racist. Whaddya going to do about it, pal?

Seize the Commanding Heights of Media and Education!

Here's Hunter Hearns telling us in "The Flight 93 Election Crashed" that we are doomed. So long as the left runs the media and the schools.

Trump has changed nothing, he tells us. Next time the Democrats get in power,

we will see universal healthcare, the release of violent criminals, open borders, the stamping out of religious liberty, and a government that sees its citizens less as the American founders did, and more as communist leaders who divided the population into classes of oppressors and oppressed for purposes of implementing policy.

 Why? Because conservatives have not understood the basic lesson of politics, that

most people do not have the time, motivation or inclination to think deeply about political and social issues. They will take the opinions that have been prepared for them by higher status individuals and institutions. If these opinion shapers are liberal, the public will be liberal, and this includes intelligent people naturally inclined to live in accordance with moral ideals.

How do we get to do that instead of the liberals?

There are two major cultural institutions which have generally been used to shape public opinion: the education system, and the media. In America, both have been wholly dominated by the Left.

As Hunter points out, the massive leftward shift of educated women is testimony to this. Women are good little girls and believe what they have been carefully taught. And what they have been carefully taught by schools and media is the left turn and its subjection of everything to identity politics and group explanations. They are not like Bronze Age Pervert of Bronze Age Mindset who celebrates the pirate culture of the Bronze Age and a Nietzschean love for "a fair amount of accidents and nonsense." In fact educated women are horrified by the chaotic nonsense that is the modus operandi of Donald Trump.

OK. So we have to seize control of education and media. Don't tell me how we do this, because I haven't a clue. But what should we teach in the schools and the media?

Now it happens that I've been reading all about the Protestant Revolution, Christianity's Dangerous Idea by Alister McGrath, and the centuries of ideological conflict that went with it. At the same time I am reading Will in the World by Steen Greenblatt and he writes tellingly about how the religious conflicts in England in the 16th century affected the folks on the ground in Stratford on Avon. See, most people were Catholic in their faith, whatever was coming down from Henry VIII and his dissolution (and spoilation) of the monasteries, and then Mary who reverted England to Catholicism, and then Elizabeth I who switched back to Protestantism.

If you were a lowly municipal official -- like Shakespeare's father -- you had to keep your wits about you to stay on the right side of the regime as it swtiched to and fro even if you thought it was madness. Yet, maybe you could do your little bit to hang onto the old ways. For instance, when Shakespeare was in school in the mid 16th century it seems that the schoolmaster was probably a crypto-Catholic even though, in the Elizabethan age, no Catholics need apply.

But meanwhile the non-crypto Catholics were being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, disembowelled, and executed. Just to keep it fair. Yes, you may very well think that a simple "canceling" on the modern Woke agenda would have been sufficient.

OK, so then I got reading a piece in The Tablet by Blake Smith about Émile Durkheim and the Dreyfus affair. Durkheim had begun his sociological career analyzing the capitalist economy and despairing about the anomie of individualism. But then he found hope.

For the next two decades, until his death in 1917, he would devote himself to proving that all societies have a religious basis (in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1913) and to providing French teachers with the courage to embrace their role as priests of the republic.

Teachers: priests of the Republic of France.

They must instill in children a “democratic morality,” built of respect for individual rights and love for the nation.

Well, well, well. Isn't that exactly what chaps like us are all about? Individual rights, as a sacred truth. The nation as the only form of fake tribalism that works "at scale."

History, for example, should be taught as the achievement of the former by the latter: “the child, and later the adult, will learn that the rights that are granted to them, the freedom that they enjoy, the moral dignity that they believe themselves to possess, all of these are the creation … of that personal but impersonal being we call France. 

Meanwhile our liberal friends are teaching The Kidz that America is bad and we -- apart from the toxic white nationalist patriarchs -- are all victims.

So all we have to do is teach the kids to love individual rights and the good old United States of America, the nation.

And never mind the left, the media, and the schools. We will overcome.

Of Course America is Materialistic. Also Nationalistic

Our good friend the Zman is indicting America for its materialism.

This is particularly true of conservative white people, who have been trained their whole lives to define their existence by the amount of stuff their heirs will throw away when they die. Theirs is an entirely materialist existence, so the transition to cultural thinking is going to be difficult.

The great challenge, he avers, "will be re-conditioning people to think culturally, rather than materially."

Well yes, but not because of conservative white people. Our white culture is bound around the notion expressed in the Founding that we want to put a short leash on government and political power through the separation of powers. And that the normal day-to-day acquisition of material goods should be regulated throught the market economy where people labor to provide goods and services to meet other peoples' needs and that the material problem is solved by mutual service.

This is a cultural agenda that works pretty well for people that feel materially secure. But what about the rest of us?

I'd say that the success of leftist politics over the last 200 years is founded on the fact that, for the workers in 1848, and the blacks in 1958, the material question was front and center. As it had been for nearly everybody down the ages.

And really, it doesn't take much of a genius to convert the age-old culture of loot and plunder from looting the neihboring princedom to looting the princes of commerce.

When the lefties have adapted the old loot-and-plunder culture for use in democratic politics, then that is only game in town, until it isn't. We have seen how the polite conservatism of the last 50 years worked out. It didn't. Lefties always come up with a new reason to loot the capitalists and plunder the middle class and divide the nation into Us and Them.

And even if the left left off proposing new ways to tax and loot businesses and billionaires there would always be the backup: protecting the existing loot and plunder in entitlements and government employee pensions and stuff: don't let Republicans take it all away!

The problem -- and it is a gigantic problem -- is not "re-conditioning people to think culturally." The problem is to "condition" the workers and the minorities to think in cultural terms rather than material terms for the first time in history. Now there is a project for the ages!

And what better way to do that than to work on what the Zman in another piece calls the false idea of America as one nation.

The United States was never a nation in the tradition[al] sense. It was always a federation of nations. The structure the Founders created was an explicit acknowledgement of it. The regional difference in the colonies at the time of the founding were not superficial. Those regional differences are still with us today, despite the migrant wave unleashed on many parts by the ruling class. America was always a house with many mansions. 

Therefore, to speak of national character, other than in the most general terms, is to misunderstand the country and its people.

Baloney and balderdash! For sure, the Founders understood that to create the United States they had to condone the various localisms in the various colonies. But that was then; this is now.

In my view all nationalisms and tribalisms are fake tribalisms; they are the cooked up idea that "we," whoever "we" are, are a single People. But nothing is cast in stone. People change, and if you play your cards right you can persuade people to switch from one fake tribalism to another. When are disaparate peoples most likely to be persuaded that they are one People? Exactly, when their leaders unite them to fight a war.

So let us accept the idea that the United States started out as a federation of nations. After the Civil War, it was two nations, North and South. But then in the later 19th century it split up again, particularly on class and ethnic lines. World War II, I argue, united the disparate quarreling parts into a single nation. But in the Sixties the New Left split us apart again.

Let us be clear. The left believes in salvation by politics. But politics is division, into Us and Them. So inevitably everything the left does results in division and splitting. And one thing that our lefty ruling class is always working on is the fundamental Original Sin of America in slavery and racism and now toxic masculinity. It is a world view of division, between innocent slaves and evil racists, between innocent women and monstrous men.

The idea of the Nation is to unite all the peoples in America into a single People. And that is what Donald Trump is trying to do, to make people think of themselves as Americans rather than hyphenated Americans.

The question is whether anyone can unite us from our squabbling tribes without uniting us into a new tribe to fight a war.

Downward Mobility for Graduates with Elite Values

One of my beliefs is that the purpose of universities is to indoctrinate the youngsters of the ruling class, to make sure that, when they rise to rule, they are all on the same page.

And then I go on to say that the Germans doubled down when they invented the research university during the Napoleonic Wars so as to strengthen the German state to meet and beat the French.

But what if there aren't enough jobs to go around for all the eager young elitists? That is the argument of a couple of pieces H/T'd at Instapundit.

The first, from Mary Harrington at UnHerd.com, points out how rough life is for recent graduates in the arts in England, and how the expansion of university education inculcated a whole generation into the culture of "openness," or

the values of equality, tolerance, openness, solidarity, internationalism, rationality and truth.

But there's a problem.

the boom in openness-promoting tertiary education produced not so much a boom in graduate jobs as inflation in the qualification levels required to do the jobs we already had. This has left many young people struggling to service a mountain of debt on salaries that are never likely to show much of the “graduate premium” they were promised.

Part of that "inflation in qualification levels" of course, has to be the entry of women into "careers." And when you talk about "the jobs we already had" you are talking about routine professional jobs in the professions that arts graduates compete for. So, the current culture of "woke" educated youth

expresses the class anxieties of the lower echelons of those supposedly elite “open” classes, provisionally accepted as such via their graduate status, whose access to the perks of the open culture is at best precarious but whose cultural identity depends on it.

The Volokh Conspiracy was talking about this back in 2011. I'd say that this means trouble ahead. Because disappointed would-be elitists have the skills to make political trouble. And our center-left ruling class has a soft spot for lefty activists, ever since it was detected by Midge Decter years ago in Liberal Parents, Radical Children.

And that is to say nothing of the rage of disappointed women, who have been taught by the feminists that they can have it all, etc. There are four lies that women are being told, writes Suzanne Venker, that 1) women don't need men, 2) men and women are the same; 3) ignore the biological clock; 4) career over marriage. And I have to say that disappointed women are a danger to shipping.

But hey, here's a tip from one of the commenters.

I had to give career advice to a younger male relative recently and one of my key tips was, "don't do anything women like to do." The reason for this is simple: if you are competing with women for the job, it doubles the competition, and halves the salary, all else equal. There's a good reason why the labor market today is full of jobs like cell tower maintenance or cable installer which are not particularly complex, yet offer phenomenal compensation: because women don't do them.

There's another version of this: the Rule of the Short Lines. Don't join the line that everyone else is joining. Or the Brit saying: "Where there's muck, there's brass." That is Brit Speak for "dirty jobs pay better."

The truth is that activism, politics, NGOs, non-profits, academia is a small world, and you have to have connections, and have a natural aptitude for networking. Otherwise, get a job.

And the fact is that the reality of our world is that there is a technological revolution about once a generation that opens up a whole new area of business and employment. And that means that the existing areas of employment stagnate and decline.

Put it this way. When all the well-connected kids are flocking into an industry -- today think tech -- it probably means that the industry is reaching its peak.

Go find something else. You'll be glad you did.

And for God's sake try to find something different to believe in than the elite's conventional wisdom.

Hey, maybe the support for socialism in our young generation makes sense. If they think that their future has been stolen from them, because student debt and barista jobs, why wouldn't they want to wreck it all with socialism?

The Big Problem with Politics in the Mature Welfare State

Whatabout those opinion polls that show President Trump behind the leading Democratic candidates? Is Trump in trouble? Dov Fischer, the American Spectator's  resident rabbi, points out the basic problem with such polls. it is this:

The Average American Is Painfully Ignorant, Strikingly Uninformed, and Hopelessly Clueless — Until a Matter Becomes Imminently Personal.

So, the average American is all for Medicare For All when presented by the CJC, the Corrupt Journalist Corps, until she starts to find out what it means to her.

Pollsters find that 70 percent of Americans prefer “Medicare for All” when initially surveyed. “Sure, let’s guarantee ‘free’ health care for everyone — even those here illegally. It’s only right.” Then, after pollsters follow by asking whether the surveyed person would be OK with losing his or her own private insurer option, support plummets to 37 percent. “What? You mean I can’t have my PPO and will have to lose my family doctor or my long-time pulmonary/coronary/neurological/gastroenterological specialist, and will need to go to some clinic where I get whoever they have on duty that day?” And then when apprised that single-payer government health care also will mean enduring substantially increased waiting times just to see a doctor and brutal scheduling delays to undergo an urgently needed surgery, the results suddenly crash to 26 percent. 

Notice the three levels here. First, the abstract unicorns and rainbows level: oh yeah, let's have healthcare for everyone. Second, the "they'd better not take away my doctor/insurance" level. Third, the "waiting in line" realization, what you might call the "imminently personal" stage of understanding.

OK, fine. But let's look at the bigger picture.

The fact is that democratic politics, like politics in any age, is all about what you can get in the world by force. All politics is about loot and plunder, as in my Maxim:

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters.

In hunter-gatherer bands, it's all about the dawn raid on the neighboring band, for loot, plunder, and women. In the agricultural era it's all about invading the neighboring country to loot them of their grain stores and their women. Or, in Hitler's version, it is conquering the East in order to establish the Germans with land to grow their own food supplies and its corresponding Lebensraum.

In our day, during the industrial era, it's "vote for me and I'll give you free stuff."

In the early days of the democratic era this was a real winner, because the state spent something like 10 percent of GDP on government programs and a lot of that was defence. So it was a no-brainer to sell the workers on social insurance and free education because the workers wouldn't appear to be paying for it.

But, as Irving Kristol pointed out half a century ago, there is a catch. If you are a lefty wanting to help the workers or women or blacks or undocumented immigrants, you pretty soon learn that your plan won't fly unless you deal in the middle class. And there is another catch. The wonderful program to help the workers and women and blacks will end up being skewed towards the agenda of the middle class. So free education, beloved by the workers in the 19th century, turned out to benefit mainly the middle class who were already paying for education for their children. Today, it is clear that education works best in middle-class suburbs where the middle-class mothers are running herd on the school system. Social Security benefits mainly the middle class. Ditto Medicare.

So, when you propose to meddle with Social Security, its middle-class beneficiaries immediately start wondering about the security of their pensions. When you propose to expand Medicare into Medicare For All, its middle-class beneficiaries immediately grasp that they are going to be getting worse health care.

So this really creates a problem for the politicians that have got elected in the last century by promising benefits to the workers and the traditionally marginalized. It worked well when the government was still devouring less than 10 percent of GDP. But when, as now, the government is spending north of 35 percent GDP, then the middle class is going to get the feeling that they are not going to benefit. They instinctively realize that any change in government entitlements is likely to hurt them.

So I would say that the loot-and-plunder operations of democratic politics has gone about as far as it can go. If you start looting and plundering beyond our current level at 35-40 percent GDP you are risking a meltdown like Argentina, or Venezuela.

So, in the current election cycle, our Democratic friends are proposing glorious new vistas of loot and plunder with Medicare For All and student loan forgiveness that sound really cool until you get beyond the unicorns and rainbows and start realizing how, at the imminently personal level, it's going to hurt the average middle-class voter.

Now there is another approach to this, that is exemplified by the Green New Deal. This is a quasi-religious program, to heal the world of its vile sludge and make it new again. It sounds wonderful in its unicorns and rainbows aspect, but when it comes to the nitty gritty, with gas prices in the stratosphere, paying for a complete do-over of the electrical generation and transmission system, etc., average people are going to find themselves paying big bucks -- for what?

And yet, it has to be, politics must operate on a basis of loot and plunder, as it has always done.

My question is: how do you do loot and plunder in the digital age? Clearly the loot-and-plunder of the industrial age as reached its limit. But what comes next?

I have to admit that I have no idea. 

Suppose Education is All a Scam?

A month or so I went to Stratford-on-Avon in Britland and visited the schoolroom where William Shakespare allegedly went to school.

The spiel of the guide was that, back in 1570 in Stratford at age 8, the average boy started work. Or he went to a school with 40-50 boys of all ages in one room with a single schoolmaster. And what they learned was Latin and Arithmetic by rote and recitation.

Oh No! Rote learning! But that made sense because there was only one schoolmaster and you had to pay big bucks for paper. Plus, if you had a problem you asked the older kid sitting on the next Form to help you.

But then I got to read Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt. Clearly the guide's spiel came from this book.

But Greenblatt added another wrinkle. Parents liked the idea of their kids not starting work and learning Latin because of the prestige. And the uselessness. Latin wasn't really going to give you any useful skills. But it sure proved that your parents could afford it.

So you tell me. How much of modern education is all about showing "I can afford it." I mean everything from kindergarten through grad school?

Because if we were purely trying to be practical, and save money, I reckon that the practical thing to do would be for the neighborhood women to get together and teach the kids the Three Rs: reading writing and arithmetic. And then the kids would become apprentices at some employer, that would be mandated by the ruling class to teach the kid a useful trade and extend their education, subject to the most frightful penalties for non-performance. And the employer would bear the cost of the training. Of course he would because he would be the beneficiary of the low wages paid to the apprentice and the skills evenutally acquired by the apprentice.

Hey, I think that kids should start work just about as soon as they have completed their Three Rs. Unless.

Unless your parents want to demonstrate their wealth and status and have you learn useless stuff like Latin and French and History and Music and Social Studies and Ruling Class Ideology.

I mean: that was the point of young ladies in Jane Austen novels becoming a "proficient" in the piano and in singing. They were "accomplishments" that a young lady was expected to have if she hoped to attract a husband. To say nothing of that all important dowry.

And, really, isn't that the point of sending today's Woke young activist feminists to college? Accomplisments? Maybe not. Maybe the point is the dowry, that upper-middle-class young men won't marry a woman unless she has a professional credential, worth at least $80k a year in salary. Or is the minimum level these days more like $120k?

See, I reckon that if you are the average white working-class people your goal is a job, a house, a family. But that is not enough for the upwardly bound. That is why the average selective college makes its applicants jump through all the ridiculous hoops writing essays about their experience in charitable work and basically starting their own charitable foundation and planting trees in the Himalayas. Accomplishments. Just like the young ladies of old.

Also, I suspect, it is necessary to gild the lily of the average boring jobs in the administrative bureaucracy of the ruling class -- academia, lawyering, foreign service, foundations, art -- and represent them as creative, caring, compassionate careers. Completely different from the average dead-end job of the average deplorable. Not.

And, of course, the whole point of the big-government administrative state is to provide meaning for the lives of ruling-class scions, so they have deplorable boobs to order aound and punish when they step out of line.

No really. Imagine an America without a big-government state. What would average dull scions of the nobility do then, poor things? No creative careers -- boring jobs -- for people of no particular talent. No opportunities for ordering the plebs around. It would be a very living hell. For dull scions of the ruling class.

I think the opposite is true. I think that nobody has a clue about educating children. I think that nobody has a clue about what teenagers and young adults should be doing. I think that nobody has a clue about how to organize work and career and blend it with the real work of humans, which is wiving and thriving.

But this is what I think. I think that the neighborhood women should get together and cooperate to allow the kids to learn the Three Rs. And I'll bet that the kids of literate parents would automatically learn the Three Rs without too much trouble or much educational expertise in their mothers. As for the children of the lower class, well I'd say that is the job of us, the educated class, to organize on our own without benefit of government monopoly.

I think that skills training should be done by private business, who are probably the folks most likely to know what skills we should be teaching the kids and what skills will be needed around the next corner. And let's put kids to work as soon as possible. And become Really Useful Citizens.

As for the folks wanting to display status, I'd say all power to them. Let them spend fortunes on getting their prestige kids into prestige schools to learn prestige things and accumulate prestige contacts. But hey, if there aren't prestige careers in the administrative state -- that afford the scions of the rulers plenteous opportunities to order the deplorables around and pat the ruling-class Little Darlings on the butt -- then these scions of the rulers will have to get a job and do something useful rather than something prestigious.

That would be an America worthy of the name, and worthy of the American people, and worthy of our beloved Founders.

Sebastian Junger: Why Doesn't He Talk about Hunter-Gatherer Loot and Plunder

Reading Sebastian Junger's book Tribe: Homecoming and Belonging you are treated to the pro-social wonders of hunter-gatherer culture. No beastly inequality and a culture that insists on sharing. As opposed to our dysfunctional rich with their billions and the poor with nothing and millions suffering in loneliness and depression.

But somehow Junger never gets around to discussing the ancient practice of loot and plunder among our noble ancestors. Warriors from our tribe looting and plundering the tribe next door.

Of course, back in the day, there was not much percentage in loot and plunder because the more mobile hunter-gatherers didn't have much to loot.

Oh, except for women. According to researchers, the Yanomamö tribe in the Amazonian jungle did a lot of raiding on each other, and the game was always the same as the Romans and their legendary Rape of the Sabine Women. The Yanomamö warriors were "looting" their neighbors to obatain their women.

In other words, our back-to-nature forefathers were, just like us moderns, intensely interested in the concept of loot and plunder. In Empire of Blue Water by Stephen Talty, about the real pirates of the Caribbean, it appears that the pirates never had an idea bigger than loot and plunder: "they had no faith, no law, no institutions that would hold them together beyond the next raid."

Gosh, I thought. That means they were a couple steps behind our modern lefties, who have built a saving faith and several states that lasted a decade or two on the institutionalizing of loot and plunder, because workers, or women or civil rights.

Actually loot and plunder can last you for a while. The Roman Empire was built on progressive conquest of an ever-larger empire, with each conquest bringing a surge of plunder and slaves to beautiful downtown Rome. This cunning strategy only ran out of steam in the 2nd century AD when the boundaries of empire were so far from Rome that... Well, I wonder what did happen? Did the Roman generals sit on the loot? Did it evaporate on the way back to Rome? Or were potential Roman generals from the senatorial classes no longer interested in the stress and challenge of military conquest in the far east or the far north? More research is needed.

But now! Let's face it, in a democratic society every election is really a market for loot and plunder. Vote for me and you will be richly rewarded. And Republicans play the game too with their tax cut plans.

But do you know? I have no idea how we can move our modern era beyond the modern replacement of actual loot and plunder of the good old days that featured armies paid in plunder with the new method of rewarding voters with free stuff.

I mean, the only issue right now that does not include free stuff for the masses is the Green New Deal. But I am confident that it will fade as soon as average voters get to understand that the trillions in Green New Deal spending and subsidies will go to the educated voters of the mandarin class, not to ordinary middle class voters and workers.

It is comical, really. We make a big song and dance about the glories of democracy and justice and the rule of law. But when it comes to actual elections it is really just an auction of loot and plunder livened up with a bit of three-card monte, or the fooling of the punters into thinking they are going to strike it rich.

Really, if the current administrative state is reaching its sell-by date because there is just not that much more loot that can be promised without crashing the economy, what comes after it?

Is it possible to have a politics without loot and plunder? Is it possible to get beyond my maxim that "government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters"?

Well, all I can say is that no genius has invented that politics yet. But we can certainly hope.

Sebastian Junger: 2008 Crash Was Because US De-tribalised

Back in the day, when we were tribes, writes Sebastian Junger in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, we had a natural solution to bad behavior, such as "tribe members who steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources." It was "group pressure. Not only are bad actions punished, but good actions are rewarded."

But now we have rampant cheating, from Medicare/Medicaid fraud at "around $100 billion a year" to insurance fraud at "$100 billion and $300 billion a year[.]"

All told, combined public- and privtae-sector fraud costs every household probably around $5,000 per year -- or roughly the equivalent of working four months at a minimum-wage job. A hunter-gatherer community that lost four months' would face a serious threat to its survival, and its retribution against the people who caused that hardship would be immediate and probably very violent.

And then there is the real-estate crash and banking bailout and Great Recession of 2006-08. These "illegal and unwise banking practices, cost American shareholders several trillion in stock losses and is thought to have set the American economy back by a decade and a half.

So the solution is to go back to the Stone Age and revive the pro-social face-to-face practices of the hunter-gatherers.

I don't think so, and the fact that a good little boy from elite Boston thinks this should be is, I think, one of the major items in the Bill of Indictment against our ruling class.

Because the whole basis of modern electoral politics is loot and plunder. Vote for me and I'll give you free stuff. (Hello Liz! How yer doin' gal?) If you look at our welfare state and the current financial system it is designed to be used as an instrument of power by the educated mandarin class, the people who have been to the right colleges -- Wesleyan in the case of Junger -- and got the right credentials and intoned the correct responses.

And, being as Sebastian Junger is a best-selling author he'd better toe the ruling-class line or forget his best-selling publishing deals and all the publicity that good little boys get from the fake media.

See, back in the day, Americans belonged to mutual-aid societies like the Masons and the Elks. These voluntary institutions run by their members provided a whole array of social services from employment referrals to job help when moving to a new town to "lodge doctor" medical plans to life insurance, death benefits, and looking after members' widows. They were incredibly pro-social and enacted the "group pressure" on defaulters that Junger praises in the hunter-gatherers.

But then the Progressives came along and replaced the mutual-aid system with government pensions and welfare. And I'll bet you that college-educated Sebastian Junger doesn't have a clue about the old system that florished in the 19th century and to which "everyone" belonged.

Instead what we now have is a full-scale loot and plunder operation that we call the welfare state. Scamming the system is the point, as you can see from the behavior of, e.g., the government employee unions in California.

Oh, and about the real-estate crash. That was a direct result of government policy that forced banks to loan to borrowers with small-to-none down payments and bad credit. Because redlining back in the day.

Anyone that knows anything has read Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street written after the failure of a bank on Lombard Street in London in 1866. Here is Bagehot's big idea.

1. Loans must be adequately collateralized so that, in the event of failure to service the loan, the value of the collateral will be sufficient to liquidate the loan.
2. Borrowers must service their loans -- make their payments -- and be seen to be doing that.

Unless these two requirements are met You Got Trouble, as the song says.

But the US government set up a system that violated both these provisions and they directed the government subsidized mortgage twins, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to have a minimum percent of low-quality loans -- low down payment and low credit -- in their portfolio.

But here was the problem. Your pension plans and other regulated financial institutions were only allowed to buy top-rated bonds. How to enable them to purchase the Fannie/Freddie bonds with low-quality loans in them? The answer was derivatives, that attempted to neutralize the extra risk and thereby "create" highly rated financial instruments. Only it all fell apart in the market meltdown of 2006-08. Sorry Charlie.

Oh, and then Little Ben Bernanke choked and didn't think he had the authority to bail out Lehman Brothers.

Yeah, that's one thing that the hunter-gatherers were big on. Punishing lack of courage.

Do you see what I am saying here? I am saying that it is bootless for Sebastian Junger to complain about widespread cheating and fraud, everywhere from welfare to financial institutions.That's because the whole system has been designed by our modern ruling elite to be a scam. So that they could Divide and Conquer amd distribute the loot to their supporters.

And the worst thing is that we had institutions that replicated the pro-social world of the hunter-gatherer era. But Progressives "canceled" that world. And why? Because they wanted to be the Big Boys. They wanted to rule the new world. And they needed to be able to offer loot and plunder to the voters in order to win political power.

The point about the market economy is that it encourages pro-social behavior. It encourages people to offer products and services that other people want and at prices they are willing to pay. It encourages people to trust anyone that is trustworthy. And it requires everyone, every day, to align their behavior with the price signals of the market.

But the fact is that almost everything in the political sector is involved to some degree in allowing people to scam the system. Because marking your life to market is really hard. And, as Junger says, you need "group pressure" to keep that kind of stuff under control.

Now do you see why I call the left, all of the left, a Great Reaction? Because they have this woolly idea of how wonderful things were back in the day. But socialism is neo-slavery, the welfare state is neo-feudalism, identity politics is neo-tribalism, and so on.

What hope is there when bright young chaps like Sebastian Junger don't have a clue?

Sebastian Junger's View of Tribes

Sebastian Junger, whose breakthrough book was The Perfect Storm, is a guy from privileged Boston. And by the time he got out of college in 1986 he wanted an adventure. So he hitchhiked out West.

On the way, just outside of Gillette, Wyoming, he met a marginal guy who was worried Junger didn't have enough food, and gave him the contents of his lunchbox. He treated Junger "like a member of his tribe." So Junger wrote a book about Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.

This book is about why that sentiment is such a rare and precious thing in modern society... It's about what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty and belonging and the eternal human quest for meaning.

And, most importantly,

It's about why -- for many people -- war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to he a great blessing and disasters are remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.

What people don't like is "not feeling necessary." And these days there are a ton of people that feel they are not necessary. And are alone, and depressed and so on.

Here's something to puzzle over. When the whites first came to North America they started to experience a real problem.

[A] surprising number of [white] Americans -- mostly men -- wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their towns... And the opposite almost never happened: Indians almost never ran away to join white society.

Maybe that's because Indians "lived communally in mobile or semi-permanent encampments that were more or less run by consensus and broadly egalitarian... Anyone who didn't like it was free to move somewhere else."

I was glad to read this because it confirms what I had read from C.R. Hallpike, that hunter-gatherers lived in "bands" and when men got into a row with the other men they would leave and join another band. (Yeah: I'm glad you asked. Whatabout the women? I bet they were being named and shamed and shunned by the other women just like today!)

But, of course, when it came to a fight, the whites rolled up the Indians, starting in 1763 when the Swiss Henri Bouquet rolled up the tribal army assembled by Ottawa chief Pontiac.

Maybe that's the definitive thing about modern man and agricultural man vs. the hunter-gatherers; we industrialist and agriculturalists always beat them in battle. Except at Little Big Horn.

But, I thought, after reading 170 pages of the glories of the North American Indians and our dysfunctional society. Whatabout slaves? Aha! Wouldn't you know, from an internet search:

Indigenous American slavery, rooted in warfare and diplomacy, was flexible, often offering its victims escape through adoption or intermarriage, and it was divorced from racial ideology, deeming all foreigners—men, women, and children, of whatever color or nation—potential slaves.

The Native Americans even got into the plantation slavery business with West African slaves!

In the Southeast, an elite class of Indians began to hold African Americans in transgenerational slavery and, by 1800, developed plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors.

No kidding! But probably, in their Noble Savage innocence, this "elite class of Indians" had no idea about plantation slavery until a racist sexist homophobe white supremacist suggested it.

But aside from this embarrassment -- not covered in his book -- Junger praises the social nature of hunter-gatherer life.

They would have experienced high levels of accidental injuries and deaths. They would have countered domineering behavior by senior males by forming coalitions within the group. They would have been utterly intoleratnt of hoarding or selfishness. They would have occasionally endured episodes of hunger, violence, and hardship. They would have practiced extremely close and involved childcare. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others.

Yes. And they also experienced, according to scholars, 500 violent deaths per 100,000 per year against our 5 per 100,000 per year.

But now, after the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, we have property. And alienation.

The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good. And as society modernized, people found themselves able to live independently from any communal group. A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day -- or an entire life -- mostly encountering complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

Speak for yourself, lefty. I'd say that the industrial revolution birthed a whole universe of communal inventions, from the workplace to mutual-aid societies.

But then along came lefties. They taught workers to hate their bosses. They drafted children into government schools. They replaced the pro-social mutual aid societies with administrative dominations like "social" insurance and government pension plans. And they subjugated the financial system to finance their wars and then their entitlement programs.

Hey! Suppose the men were all "going through the chairs" at the local Masonic lodge or the Elks club. Suppose the women were all involved in home-schooling and cooperative child care with their neighbors. Suppose the care of the poor was delegated to billionaires and millionaires and their charitably-minded wives -- or else! Hey, if that had been allowed to happen everyone would be as happy as clams, living pro-social, meaningful lives.

And that says nothing about the way that employers these days consciously attempt to create the illusion of community in the workplace. And says nothing about the way that the market economy pretty well forces everyone to practice the notion of trusting everyone that demonstrates trustworthiness, or getting along with anyone that demonstrates they will get along with you.

No. I'd say that the reason that people are miserable these days is lefties. Because lefties have harvested all the pro-social roles and said: all social activity is to be controlled and directed by us lefties with wonderful government programs. All you plebs and deplorables have to do is show up to get your benefit. We lefties and liberals and mandarins will do all the thinking and the deciding. Isn't this new world wonderful! (Better say yes, or you will be canceled.)

OK. That's just for a start. More tomorrow.