This "Fact Checking" Thing and @jack's Beard

Can we now admit that the "fact-checking" era is over?

Because, let's face it, "fact-checking" was always a liberal grift to avoid publishing conservative attacks on liberals.

No need to go into the weeds on this. It was OK to publish thinly sourced attacks on President Trump, accusations that had political-hit-job written all over them. And to spend tax-payers' money following up every possible false trail armed with Special Prosecutorial powers trying to trap the guy in some shenanigans, no matter how trivial.

But when it comes to Joe Biden and a lifetime of pay-for-play corruption, help! Where are the smelling salts?

Hey, liberals, did you know that being one-person-removed from the actual transaction means you can say "I never took any money from any of those people." Quite right, Joe. It's called "deniability" in the trade of influence politics, of which I am sure you are the Grand Master.

But the fact-check culture means that @jack can reach into his beard and declaim that Twitter is not going to publish "hacked" material. Because principles. I always wondered why @jack sported a beard. Now that he has revised and extended it during the COVID years, I get it.

You could say, of course, that the "fact-check" culture was a political joke by our liberal friends, as in "hey, why don't we tweak the right's noses by using their devotion to facts and logic and reason by subjecting the right to fact-checking?"

Whereas every good lefty knows that everything in this world, from race on down, is a social construction.

As a matter of fact, of course, everyone who has stumbled into Kant knows that. Because if, with Kant, we believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves but only sense impressions, it follows that everything we know about things is a social construction, starting with what George Lakoff calls "basic-level" concepts like cat.

Why do you think little Susie knows that a cat is a cat? Because Mommy told her.

The joke is that -- as with everything the left touches -- our lefty friends have taken a stunning discovery and turned it into a political weapon.

Because, sure, race is a social construction, but humans categorize everything, including different kinds of humans. It is helpful to know that people looking different is significant, and that it might serve to differentiate enemy from friend. For instance, in the current era of mostly peaceful protests, it might be helpful for the average pedestrian to categorize males on the street by their hair: maybe you should watch out for the guy with a man bun, but not the guy with a crew-cut that looks like he just started basic training at Parris Island.

Sure, let's all agree that physical characteristics, as defined by social construction, are not dispositive because, after Kant, we cannot know things-in-themselves. But you never know, it could help.

Facts are what we come up with after applying our received notions about the meaning of life, the universe and everything, usually after a very cursory glance.

(I hesitated before putting in "meaning of life" because even I am something of a facts-and-logic guy. But then I realized that first comes the belief in a meaning of life, then comes everything else, including facts, logic, science, and the universe and everything.)

For instance, I would be inclined to believe any accusation of corruption against a Clinton or a Biden, because my experience, solidified by years of consuming conservative media, leads me to believe that Clintons and Bidens are up to no good. The notion that Clintons and Bidens are up to no good is a social construction.

But the point about a social construction is: does it help navigate the uncertain world of a million sense impressions? Meaning, is it helpful to develop a social construction that Clintons and Bidens are up to no good?

Many of our citizens organize their political lives these days around a social construction that may be summarized as Orange Man Bad. Hey! They have a perfect right to do so, right, @jack?

Hey @jack! Stop mumbling in your beard!

But, the question is, would it be a good idea to use the social construction of Orange Man Bad as a strategy for, e.g., investing your 401K? Hmm.

And would it be a good idea to interpret everything in political life in These United States through the lens of the social construction of Orange Man Bad?

For instance, suppose you were a political pollster and you believed in the social construction of Orange Man Bad. Do you think that your social construction would help or hinder your polling to find out who or what was going to win the presidential election of 2020?

In a way, there is something comical about the notion of "fact-checking." You mean to say, you wise one @jack, that ordinary people are not able to sift fact from fiction and must be protected from the lies of political actors?

For there is a real danger in the "fact checking" culture. If your guys are out busily labeling things true or mostly true, false or mostly false, there is a danger. The danger is what scientists agree is "confirmation bias." There are no facts out there, scientists agree. There are only interpretations.

But you educated liberals already knew that. Right @jack?

President Xi's Greater China Project Will Fail. As Our Elites Greater Woke Project Will Fail

I was reading a piece about China the mega-nation yesterday. How President Xi and the CCP see themselves as building a Greater China -- including, of course, not just Mainland China but Hong Kong, and Taiwan and the Muslim areas of western China,

Of course they do, because the whole point of the left's project, what I call the Great Reaction, is the faith in politics, that politics is the means for Heaven on Earth, led by the educated Gentry trained in the schools and seminaries of the ruling religion of politics and its downstream culture.

But I say that the Age of Revolution, of political transformation of human society with a vanguard of committed activists, is over. Been there done that.

And I say that the Age of Politics, of political management of human society with a priesthood of ideological ministers, of an administrative bureaucracy of carefully trained nomenclatura, of regulatory supervision of the economy and the culture, is in its final stages. Been there, done that.

The salient feature of human society in the Age of Revolution and the Age of Politics is the idea of mobilization for war: religious war, cultural war, political war. Problem is that humans are not programmed for war on a continuing basis. They can respond to the present emergency, but eventually return, instinctively and inevitably, to wiving and thriving, which is the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

So the Great China project will fail, because we humans are beyond all that. And China proved it beyond a shadow of a doubt already in the 20th century.

The Great Leap Forward was a grand plan of the political management of the whole of the Chinese economy, under the charismatic leadership of a Glorious Leader. It failed, of course, with a butcher's bill estimated at 30 million Chinese.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a grand plan of religious and cultural transformation of the whole of society, under the charismatic leadership of a Glorious Leader. It failed, of course, with a butcher's bill in the millions.

Only after the Double Failure did the Chinese ruling class in the CCP decide to try the other way, to allow a market economy  to grow up without the daily and hourly supervision of all economic and cultural activity of the Chinese people by the Party.

But that lasted only a while. Now, under President Xi, China is being forced back into the logic of its lefty ruling class culture. Because that's what lefties do. They cannot imagine a society without political supervision by an evolved and educated progressive ruling class. And the Factory Girls encountered by Leslie Chang in early 21st century southeast China clearly understood themselves as individuals called upon to create their own lives on their own.

Hey, let's be nice about it. The Chinese CCP ruling class is not much different than our Woke ruling class. It thinks, as our ruling class thinks, that it is called by history to bend the arc of history towards justice. And once you are intstalled in power you naturally determine to use that power -- for good, of course.

We see that in our own ruling class, especially in the aftermath of 2016. It is simply unthinkable to our lefty ruling class that anyone other than its own kind is qualified and destined to rule. Orange men? Deplorables? Systemic racists? Eeeuuww!

As I say, I believe our Woke ruling class has completely missed the point. And if they press their power -- whether in stealing the election, using its social media pals to censor the internet, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Electoral College, eliminating fossil fuels -- it will visit disaster on us and on itself.

And I believe the same is true for President Xi and his CCP and his vision of a Greater Nation of China. His plan will fail, because it denies the truths of our age, that religious and cultural and political domination of society do not work. Because human society, and indeed the universe and everything, is much too complex to be so supervised and controlled.

The funny thing, of course, is that it was lefties, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno that clearly enunciated this truth in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Domination and hegemony don't work. And Heidegger confirmed this with his notion of humans being "thrown" into the world. And lefty Habermas contributed with his concept of humans living in a "lifeworld" of social interaction rather than the rigidities of the mechanical world of logic and reason.

As I say. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill on the inevitable failure of President Xi's Greater China project.

As is true of our own ruling class and its Greater Woke Project.

All of these fools and knaves are marching in lockstep in a monstrous Great Reaction that simply amounts to a lurch back to the primitive that resurrects slavery, feudalism, vengeance, and all the rest of our ancient and not so ancient past.

I dream of a better world that has woken up beyond the hellscape of lefty woke Reaction.

I Just Want the Voters to Teach the Ruling Class a Lesson

So Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg had no idea that his election integrity official used to work for Joe Biden. And @jack says that the NY Post can repost its bombshell article about Biden's corruption, but first it has to delete the old one. And none of the social media CEOs had any idea that they are stuffed with lefties.

Well, maybe everything they say has been carefully vetted by the company lawyers. So really who cares what they said? It's all a charade. As I said at American Thinker a week ago, they are all fools and knaves. I suppose that, 1) they think, like all in the educated Gentry, that they are doing God's work in throttling the dumb bunny "far-right," or 2) that prudence requires that they keep their Democratic friends happy.

And at a superficial level, at a tactical level, they are probably right. The Dems and the left are the ruling class and since whenever, the commercial class has needed to keep in good with the ruling class.

At a deeper level, a strategic level, they should really be thinking around the next corner and realizing that going along to get along with the Dems and the left is not going to be good, not for Big Tech and not for the society at large.

Actually I can see a point for social media to protect ordinary citizens from egregious hate and slanderous posts. But, I would say, public figures should be open season.

And hey, there is a good reason why that policy would work. Ordinary private people do not have the resources to protect themselves. But any public figure that's in the arena does have the resources.

Ordinary private people are probably more at risk from being fired from work or shamed by libelous social media posts. But public figures have signed up for abuse.

And yet lefty groups all the time are posting hateful things and everybody seems to shrug. But if the NY Post posts an article about the corruption of a presidential candidate, apparently that is a bridge too far.

Really @jack and Zuck? Don't you think that a presidential candidate can take care of himself without you chaps rushing in to protect him? I mean, if the guy is innocent he can range the big guns of the mainstream media, wheel to wheel, and set off an artillery barrage that would make World War I look like a mere fireworks display.

So I think that the tech moguls are fools and knaves. They are doing what seems to them to be the safe thing, but I suspect that they will be disabused of this in due course.

Don't say I didn't warn you chappies.

But I tell you what shocks me. That the tech lords didn't see the danger in the Trump Car Parades. Good lord chaps: how could you let the deplorables conspire together in their hateful mulitudes to fry the Earth with their hateful and planet destroying Car Parades? Are you dumb or something?

Well, I think it is too late now. The Trump Car Parades have become a Thing, and every Tom Dick and Harry is trying to organize his own parade all across the fruited plain. The thing about Trump Car Parades is that they are social, and humans are social animals. Scott Adams this morning was listing all the ways in which the Trump campaign was firing on all cylinders, doing exactly what a campaign needed to do to get people excited and persuade them to get out and vote.

Maybe Adams is right, and maybe he ain't. Hey, maybe the Dems are playing a deeper game that we think and put Biden in because they didn't want to get blown away in a landslide if Bernie Sanders was nominated.

I guess, for me, with all the sound and fury of the last week before the election, I just want the ruling class and its educated Gentry to be dealt a sharp blow in the pit of the stomach. Just something sharp enough to persuade them all to go back to their mansions and think, wow, maybe we need to rethink this.

Maybe we tech lords ought to think more deeply about who our friends are. Maybe we Democrats need to think about how we got to the point last spring where it looked like far-left Bernie was going to drive the party into the ditch. Maybe we educated Gentry ought to think a bit about how our scorn for the deplorables and white supremacists is exactly the hate that is supposed to have no home in our front yards.

But, the way of the world is that people don't pay attention until someone hits them in the head with a two-by-four. And we ain't there yet.

Pity really, because I think that the future is so bright you gotta wear shades -- after the rule of the educated Gentry for the last century or so gets sharply reduced.

So Yeah. People Believe What Others Tell Them. Wow.

Yes. The Horror. On Quillette, Vincent Harriman and David Kopel worry about "How Availability Cascades are Shaping Our Politics."

Well duh, fellahs! Humans are social animals; we take our cues from our fellows and the people that don't are clinically insane. But, like everything, politicians and culture vultures and priests take advantage of that. They often submit to the temptation for money, power and the love of beautiful women.

When all available information seems to indicate that everyone is falling in line with a certain belief, we may be under the influence of an “availability cascade.” Today, our politics and public discourse are being poisoned by availability cascades. Thanks partly to partisan domination of the media and academia, many people are being pressured into publicly espousing beliefs that are not their own.

Well, bust my buttons! I had no idea!

Look. We humans are social animals. The point of that is that we obtain information and ideas from others -- steal 'em fair and square. That is why, e.g., we how have LED lights in our homes instead of good old-fashioned tungsten lamps. Or good old-fashioned Standard Oil lamps like you see in western movies. Or candles like you see in modern series about the Victorian era using modern low-light video cameras.

But how do we figure out which ideas are good and reliable and which ideas are just lies and clickbait put out in the interest of some political or cultural power base?

We don't. 

Yep, it's tough. We humans lurch from one mistake to another, and if we are lucky, really lucky, the mistakes are small ones rather than catastrophic disasters with a gigantic butcher's bill to pay.

This means that, time after time, we gullible sheep are led into disasters by confidence men and tricksters. And yes, every politician and journalist is a confidence man and a trickster, especially including Donald Trump and Joe Biden and all the media ships at sea. And especially the journalists giving us the latest from the Daily Sewer about how Donald Trump is in league with the Russians, but how a Joe Biden that has actually taken money from Russians and Ukrainians and Chinese through his bagman Hunter is just middle-class Joe.

Yeah! But what do we do about it? Well, we could start by reducing the power of government, dear educated Gentry. Because then the effect of each availability cascade, or media panic, or political campaign would be limited to the fact that politicians and activists had only a limited power to screw up our lives with the latest lie.

Oh dear, I forgot. What would be the point of a government with limited power if it didn't have lots of lovely Jobs for Gentry? Sorry I spoke.

Here's an idea. All these Trump rallies, Trump Car Parades, Trump Boat Parades are also "availability cascades." Someone started a Trump Parade on Facebook months ago and now every Tom Dick and Harry wants to organize a Trump Parade, complete with flags and banners and good cheer and laughter. So are the Trump "availability cascades" good or evil?

I was watching an interview of Trump rally attendees: one was a retired plumber, another a single-mom with a business, another a Hispanic family with a family business.

These people are anybodies, that have created a small world for themselves that works for them and theirs.

But that doesn't work for educated Gentry that have gone through the full education system with advanced degrees. An advanced degree sets you up for some sort of formal job in a hierarchy where specialized knowledge is required. But without that hierarchy with its specialized jobs you are just another educated yokel at Starbucks looking to create a niche for yourself.

Do you see the Horror in the situation of the highly educated person? You are nothing unless the society has provided an abundance of nice comfy Jobs for educated Gentry. God forbid you should have to go out into the world and discover some useful work on your own.

Look at the situation of our latest conservative hero, Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Barrett has always been the model student: top of her class; clerking for Justice Scalia; law professor at Notre Dame Law School; federal appeals court judge; and now Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.

But what if Barrett had had to find her way outside the established institutions, creating a job by her own intelligence, using some instinct that sniffed out a service that wasn't being met?

Something outside the "availability cascades" of politics, established institutions, media, and Daily Sewers?

OK, she would have done fine. But we wouldn't see her name up in lights.

See, my belief is that the real work of the world goes on outside the media and the established institutions, From Zero to One, as Peter Thiel has it.

If you like, the real work of the world is to start a new "availability cascade" inventing something useful that nobody ever thought of before. I think of young Jack Rockefeller the store clerk looking at those barrels of oil out back. Or What Do You Care What Other People Think by Richard Feynman.

Or, like the Trump voter, you can just be a plumber, just start your own little business, that never really amounts to much but does put bread on the table and does give you a certain dignity.

Honest toil indeed. But where is the ambition, the honor, the vanity in honest toil?

The decision is clear. Either start your own "availability cascade" or follow someone else's "availability cascade." You make the choice.

OK, So Biden Blundered on Fracking, But...

It's a good thing that President Trump tripped Joe Biden up on the fracking front last week in the presidential debate on October 22, but.

Yeah. Jobs in Pennsylvania may win the election for Trump next week. So oil stocks will go up. But not for long.

Because the entire global elite is 100 percent behind climate change and decarbonizing. Because science.

And because "the only warrant for government power is existential peril." If there is no existential peril from the Earth heating up and frying us all, why then there is really no need for an educated gentry ready willing and able to to order us around for our own good.

Hey why not? The war on climate change ain't gonna change their status as special people that know better than the deplorables what is good for us. In fact, fighting climate change is going to be great for the educated Gentry. More Jobs for Gentry in climate change research. More Jobs for Gentry in climate activism. More Jobs for Gentry in regulation of the economy to subsidize and promote carbon-free solutions. More Jobs for Gentry in cleaning up the inevitable mistakes and messes. Really what's not to like for the educated Gentry?

One thing is for sure. There will be no wasteful burning of fossil fuel in systemic-racist Trump Car Parades in the future. OMG no! And apart from the waste of fossil fuels in driving around needlessly, whatabout the utter waste in banners and flags! We could save the life of a child with that, and if we only save one life!

I was reading someone today commenting on the new globalist line: "building back better." So the global elite Has a Plan to direct the economy to build it back out of the COVID mess. Oh great.

But you see, this is exactly the fantasy of socialism -- going back to Sir Thomas More and his Utopia. Yeah, let's make sure that the townies get to live in the country every few years to amp up their farming skills. Just like Mao. Let's direct traffic. Let's found the economy on sound scientific principles.

Been there, done that.

The fact is that the way the economy has prospered over the last 200 years of the Great Enrichment is precisely that most the time, for accidental reasons, the overclass did not direct the economy. In the beginning it knew nothing and cared nothing about economic growth, merely playing politics and interstate rivalry. And when the political elite got into the mix on the economy they usually screwed it up.

We have seen what happens when the political elite directs the economy. Just in the last year it decided that the way to fight the COVID virus was the shut down the economy. And the Dems are still doing it, partly, I suppose, to beat Trump over the head with a bad economy.

So here's my question to you elitists. Given the cock-up on the COVID front why in the world should we peasants trust you with the Building Back Better after the end of the crisis? Huh?

The lesson of the last 200 years is that economic growth was driven by folks I used to call "nobodies" and now call "anybodies." An anybody like John D. Rockefeller, the store clerk that built the oil industry; an anybody like Andrew Carnegie, the telegraph messenger that built the steel industry.

Yes, globalistas: You somebodies need not apply. Because, as Curtis Yarvin says, you chaps are in it for the "ambition, honor, and vanity." Y'all really don't care about people like me. You care about your status, your honors, your reputation among the other educated globalistas. And, generally speaking, you screw it up.

But, the problem is, what is it going to take for you chaps to get off your climate change hobby horse? Yep. That's the problem. Because, really, nothing less than utter failure and humiliation will do the job. One day, whether in a couple of months or in four years, Donald Trump will no longer be president, and some Kamala Harris or other follower of the elite conventional wisdom will be president and will return the politics and the economy of the United States to the glonalist conventional wisdom.

And the people will suffer. Unless you chaps screw it up enough that the voters say: Enough.

Presidential Debates as Oral Exams in Regime Orthodoxy

I don't usually watch presidential debates; instead I rely on sites like PJMedia or Breitbart that run blow-by-blow accounts of the debates. And then I read up on the post-debate spin.

But I did watch the October 22 debate between President Trump and former Vice President Biden.

Now when I listen to Republican politicians I am always conscious of the Overton Window of what you are allowed to say today in America.

So it was cringingly obvious to me that President Trump did not answer the question made to him by NBC reporterette Kristen Welker on Climate Change. Trump talked about how he loved the environment. He said nothing about how the whole Looming Disaster on Climate Unless We Act Now is a globalist ruling-class lie. Because he is not allowed to say that.

What I would like is for the president to say, look, climate change is a total fraud, a fake panic ginned up by the swamp to order us around and make big bucks for its supporters. And especially to create lots of Jobs for educated Gentry.

Ditto on the question about Race and "the talk." The president completely avoided the question, instead talking about how he has done all kinds of wonderful things for blacks.

What I would like is for the president to say, hey, whatabout "the talk" white parents need to give to white kids, like "The Talk: Non-black Version" that got John Derbyshire fired from National Review? But he is not allowed to say that.

Lots of people have been complaining that the moderators of the debates are all pro-Biden. And they are right.

But the reason is not that the moderators are biased and/or Democrats and/or swamp creatures, although they are: hey, reporterettes gotta eat too!

The reason is that presidential debates are Oral Exams in Ruling Class Orthodoxy. Let us review the issues and discover the Ruling Class Orthodoxy that you are not allowed to challenge.

COVID: OMG, if we can just save one life!

Climate Change: OMG, we're all going to die unless we act now and get rid of polluting fossil fuels!

Race: OMG, the white supremacists -- or white oppressors, or systemic racists!

Health-care: OMG, we've got to insure pre-existing conditions!

Education: OMG, we gotta have free college!

On each of these issues, which you will note I have framed as an emotional response that you would expect from a young woman, the way that all good Democrats with #WeBelieve signs out front believe is the only moral, moderate, evolved thing to do.

So, when the Democrat in a presidential debate answers a question about one of these issues, he starts with the orthodox moral position that all good people believe and then continues by talking about billions of dollars in loot and plunder for this sub-issue and regulations for that sub-issue. Don't forget the regulations aspect: regulations are Jobs for Gentry.

Whereas the Republican has to do a dance, to avoid contradicting the Orthodox Position directly, but still dog-whistling to his supporters that he is on their side. This is something that President Trump has shown himself to be expert at. He has to be expert at this Ali Shuffle because the default Republican position -- and indeed the reality -- on these issues is not acceptable in polite society.

Here's where I stand on the Big Issues:

COVID: Hey kids, it's an epidemic; let's get through it, protecting old people and the vulnerable, but get on with life.

Climate Change: Hey kids, ever met a snake-oil salesman? Guess what: the Earth is not about to fry; it is in the middle of an interglacial, a brief warm period in the middle of the current Ice Age. That means: cold weather ahead!

Race: Hey kids! Guess what: it is illegal in these United States to commit racial and/or sexual discrimination. Who knew?

Health care: Hey kids! If you try to skate by and don't pay for health insurance, it could cost you.

Education: Hey kids! Ever thought that compulsory education amounts to confinement in government child custodial facilities?

Feeling a bit embarrassed while reading the above? Did you check behind you to see if someone was watching? I understand. You have a job and a wife and kids to protect.

The point is: you are not allowed to say such things. And it could cost you.

We all know what this is about. It starts with the Breitbart Dictum: politics is downstream from culture. As modified by the John C. Wright Proviso: politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion. A modified by the Christopher Chantrill Maxim: politics is downtream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything."

First, you gotta get out ahead on the meaning-of-life question. Everything else is just a mopping up operation.

Reaching Towards an Un-Ally-ism

I've been intrigued for the last few months with the Ally moral political philosophy that I got from Matt Taibbi:

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Mainly, I'm intrigued because of the way that it presents liberals as the noblest, kindest, bravest, evolve-est people that ever lived. What could be nobler than fighting for the oppressed against the oppressors!

But, I tend to think, do you really mean to say that all those middle-average Americans at Trump rallies are really the deplorable "white oppressors" of which we've heard tell? Really? Cross your heart and hope to die? 

I'd believe it if our liberal friends weren't so interested in political power. Because the basic requirement of the Ally paradigm is that we give the Allies the power to hunt and kill the "white oppressors."

In other words, our liberal friends do not propose to do all their ally work for free. Oh no. The whole point of their moral positioning is Jobs for Gentry. Preferably life-time jobs with tenure.

OK. Suppose that I was commissioned by a well-heeled tech billionaire to come up with a counter-Ally moral paradigm? What would it be? Who would be the innocents? Who would be the villains? Who the heroes?

I think I'd like the archetypal notion of the Sacrificial Hero as the good guy, and my notion of the Ego Hero as the bad guy. So there are your "allies" and "white oppressors" taken care of.

So, whatabout the "oppressed peoples?" My little problem is that I don't believe in the notion of "oppressed peoples." The only way you would get that is with a powerful political elite with a monopoly on the levers of power. It takes big-time political power to create a class of "oppressed peoples." Something like a feudal system or a Commie dictatorship. Otherwise the natural jealousy in every human that is instinctively opposed to other people having political power would put a stop to all efforts at oppression. Except that, it seems to me, many Subordinate people are quite happy to see political power used to provide them with benefits. That, after all, is the universal plan of lefty politics. You "oppressed peoples!" Give us political power and we will stick it to the "white oppressors!" In return for free stuff. Hmm. There is something weird about that notion.

It seems to me that the salient characteristic of the "oppressed peoples" is that they don't act; they expect someone else to act for them. And really, that is also true of the supposed "white oppressors." Just what are those notorious "white oppressors" up to this week? Well, back in 2017 there were a couple-dozen tiki-torch bearers around a statue of Robert E. Lee. And the other week Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon was worried by a Proud Boys peaceful protest in North Portland:

“I am incredibly concerned about the increased risk of violence in Portland this weekend,” Brown told reporters.

Ya know, Gov. Brown, when you are nonchalant about months of AntiFa protests in Portland but declare a state of emergency about one Proud Boys protest way out in the northern suburbs, that is what they call, in poker, a "tell."

Just what are all those "white oppressors" actually doing? Apart from carrying tiki-torches and all? Not much. Of course, lots of them are going to Trump rallies, Trump Car Parades, and Trump Boat Parades.

So, I think that the characteristic of almost everyone who is not trying out for a Hero role is that they are the "audience." Think about your average superhero movie. There is the good-guy hero, the Batman or Spiderman. There is the bad-guy villain, the Joker or whoever. Everybody else, including the Gotham city police, especially the Gotham city police, are spectators. They have no action role to play; they are just watching the action, hoping that the good guys win.

So, I say that if you want to understand modern life, it is like a superhero movie. Here goes.

I experience humans as choosing one of three roles on the stage of life: Sacrificial Hero, Ego Hero, or Spectator.

The point is that most of us, whoever we are -- whether ginormous tech billionaires or stupid idiots clearing the shelves of Walgreens in San Francisco just down the street from Crazy Nancy's $24,000 side-by-side refrigerators -- are doing nothing about it. We are just following the rules, going to work, checking in everyday to our social media accounts, or consuming cable news, cheering one side and booing the other side. But not really doing anything about it.

And isn't that exactly what happens in superhero movies?

Is the Trump Phenomenon a New "Awakening?"

One of the ways to understand social change is through the notion of the "Great Awakening." The North American colonies such a religious awakening in the years before the American Revolution.

You might say it is a confirmation of Andrew Breitbart's notion that politics -- the revolution -- is downstream from culture, as modified by John C. Wright that culture is downstream from religion. So,

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.

In other words, a political revolution is the product of a cultural revolution and cultural revolutions are products of religious "awakenings." Another way of looking at this is to say that a Great Awakening is a time when a mob of people suddenly revise their understanding of "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." And so the world changes.

So, the Zman was descanting about Awakenings and wondering if we were in the middle of such an event, that the combination of waking up to the left's race grift, the mass media keeping its creatures in power, the Hunter Biden story, are going to wake people up.

But that made me think of the Trump phenomenon. Even my fairly Democratic Greek friend admits that the Trump enthusiasts are not "white oppressors" but people that have been left behind by the current rulers.

And I have to think that there is something organic, something Jungian and archetypal, in the phenomenon of the Trump rally, the Trump Boat Parade, the Trump Car Parade. I don't mean to say something specific, that it shows Trump will win the election; I am just saying that, if you are a human, programmed like every living thing to "notice" things that don't compute, then you are bound to suspect that something deep and archetypal, something of the unconscious, is going on, as people seem to be coming together in something below the obviously rational consciousness.

Of course, for me, with my mind trained by my reductive Three Peoples theory, it all connects. Obviously, to me, this is a Great Awakening of the Commoners, the People of the Responsible Self, starting to rise up, instinctively, against an unjust ruling class of educated Gentry. But, just as obviously, I could be completely wrong. I could be connecting dots in one way when, in reality, the dots are connecting in another way that will make me look like a complete idiot.

What will it all lead to, continues the Zman? Will it lead to civil war? Insurrection? Revolution? He plumps for "Insurrection, then Revolution." Civil war, to him, is a fight between two sides of the ruling class.

Revolutions, on the other hand, are when a new elite overthrows the old elite, because the old system offers no way for the new elite to join the elite.

So we aren't there because the ruling class is in fact pretty united, at least on the surface. So that means insurrection.

When people begin to sense that the invisible bargain between the people and the ruler is breaking down, that the ruler is not holding up his end of the bargain, that is the beginning of an insurrection.  

For instance, if the state won't let the cops do their job then people will start to police the streets themselves. If the schools don't do the jobs, they start to pull their kids from school.

Actually, he says, there is an insurrection going on in the elite, as liberal cities refuse to keep law and order, and federal judges don't follow the rules, Judge Sullivan. But that is an insurrection within the ruling class!

This is the soil of revolution. On the one hand, you have the people seeing a breakdown of that invisible bargain between themselves and their rulers. Basic things like road maintenance, policing and public order are not being done. On the other hand, you have members of the elite who no longer accept the authority of the system in which they function, causing that system to further breakdown. American is a machine that is breaking down and no one wants to repair it. 

For me, it's all rather odd. You would think that the elite would be smart enough to fob off the Commoners and the Deplorables with some penny-ante action to make the bitter-clingers think that the elite "cares about people like me." But they haven't.

Indeed, with the Ally-ist notion of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" they are proposing that the people you see at Trump rallies are "white oppressors."

Sorry, wokies. For me it does not compute. I'd say that Jeffrey Toobin, he of Zoom fame, is a "white oppressor" cunningly disguised as an "ally," up until the day before yesterday. That would make sense.

Of course, I would say that nothing illuminates a possible Commoner Great Awakening better than my Commoner Manifesto, that begins

A spectre is haunting the liberal elite -- the spectre of the Commoners. All the powers of the liberal establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre...

Ooh. See that word ally-ance? And I continue:

It is high time that Commoners should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of “systemic racism” with a manifesto of the Commoners themselves.

And more of the same. But it's going to get worse before it gets better. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery

Everybody knows that the only thing you need to know about slavery is the Middle Passage and Negro Slavery and plantations and white racism.

I'm sure that's what you were carefully taught, to hate and to fear, in school.

I had my first warning that it ain't necessarily so years ago when I read The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

See, back in the feudal era you could ask your feudal lord to make you a slave. Sure, the most notorious source of slaves was war: "conquest slavery." And you could be made a slave for a criminal offence; of course you could, because prisons are expensive. 

But voluntary slavery? Here's how Lacey and Danziger put it.

People surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress, when they simply could not provide for their families any more... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

Of course, this is not particularly scandalous to me, because my reductive Three Peoples theory understands that a lot of people are Subordinates, or people that believe they need a protector. Just like in 1000:

In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven and you needed a lord on earth. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on the topic in his Skin in the Game. It is covered in Chapter 3: How to Legally Own Another Person.

First, Taleb talks about the roaming monks of early Christianity, that were banned and enslaved into monasteries by the edit of St. Benedict. What was going on? The problem is that the vagrant monks were free, and

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.

But that is not all. Whatabout the corporation and the company man?

Total freedom for your employees is also a very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

Why? Well suppose you have a small airline and the pilots are contracted. Suppose that tomorrow you have a fully booked flight to Munich for the Oktoberfest, and at 5pm your pilot calls you to cancel, because he got a better deal that day from a Saudi sheik. You can see that it would be better to have salaried employees, even if they spend a lot of time sitting around, rather than risk a contract pilot saying, sorry Bob, I got a better offer today. As Taleb says:

People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelop on their desk at the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother's milk.

And so we developed the culture of the "company man" who was guaranteed employment until retirement and then retired with a pension.

The system worked when large corporations survived a long time and were perceived to be longer lasting that nation-states.

But now, Taleb says, in the tech age, the important thing for security is to be "employable," to have skills that employers want.

Here's another curious form of slavery. To employ someone, say in a foreign country, at a salary and benefits way over the market rate back home. "The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status." 

Or suppose you are a high-ranking civil servant. You are terrified of losing your reputation and your sinecure, and so behave exactly as required -- say by the deep state -- in order to keep your status and your perquisites.

Yes, you say, but these examples are not really slavery. Maybe not, but they do illustrate that the dominant narrative -- that back in the old days people were brutally enslaved, but now, in the glorious light of enlightenment those days are gone forever and everyone is free, except for the remaining "oppressed peoples" that we "allies" are determined to liberate -- is a little too simplistic.

And I say, with my Great Reaction notion, that the left, despite its glorious devotion to ending all oppression and domination, is in fact reintroducing subjection: thus I argue that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

In fact, all social animals are hierarchical, not egalitarian. True equality, true freedom don't exist in the real world. Every living thing lives in a hierarchical world and obtains protection from its subordination to the hierarchy and its place in the power hierarchy.

Some people want a lot of protection: at some point the level of protection and subordination approaches what we like to call slavery. Other people want very little protection; they are what we might call "free spirits" after Nietzsche. It ain't black and white, but all shades of gray.

But, of course, we Hegel scholars have always known that. Because, having taken the short cut and read Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we know that the Master and Slave relationship is not as simple as we might like to think. For instance, the Slave knows a lot more about the Master than vice-versa. And knowledge, as they say, is power.

One fine day, I predict, our lefty friends will completely change their minds about slavery. Because their political power will depend upon it. But don't ask me when.

Meanwhile keep your nose in the air, knowing that you know a lot more about slavery than your virtue-signaling Black Lives Matter liberal neighbor.

Lefty Ally-ism, and What Real Allies Look Like

It is a couple of months since I read the definitive word on our current Woke witch hunt and first commented on it. It was from Matt Taibbi's piece on "white fragility." The "antiracism" movement, he wrote, is based on the following three-layer theory of society.

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

Of course, I jumped on it, because of my interest in three-layer theories, which are the typical way that humans understand each other -- that is when they have the sophistication to graduate from a simple Us and Them theory. I lay out the theories in a table here.

I call this meaning-of-life theory "ally-ism." Because, of course, the point of "antiracism" is not being against racism but being an activist force for good, being the ally of "oppressed peoples."

Notice that, like the original Marxism, this ally-ism is not a theory of society but a theory of conflict. In Marx's concept, humans are engaged in an eternal Us vs. Them conflict, feudal lords vs. serfs, and now capitalists vs. proletarians. But there is hope! The Communists, the vanguard of the proletariat, will ally itself with the proles and smash the capitalist domination and hegemony. And then the problem of good vs. evil would be solved for all time.

In the new concept, we have the "white oppressors" dominating and oppressing the "oppressed peoples." But along come the "allies" who heroically insert themselves into this dominatory hellhole and join the battle of the oppressed against the oppressors as the allies of the "oppressed peoples."

Do you see the absurdity of this analysis? That it reduces human society to a war of all against all. Really? So how does the concept of humans as social animals come in?

And by the way, whatabout the notion, that I have advanced with respect to slavery, that some people actually voluntarily place themselves into slavery? Bad boy Nassim Nicholas Taleb updates the notion in Skin in the Game. He suggests that monasticism is a form of slavery. It was invented by St. Benedict to deal with the problem of itinerant monks that were totally out of the Catholic Church's control. Says he (p.96)

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run. Total freedom for your employees is also a very, very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

So, Taleb argues, in this supposed post-slavery age, there are all kinds of dependence going on, especially in the corporate world. By offering security of employment -- and dependence -- an employer buys loyalty. The high-water mark of this was the old lifetime employment deal offered by big corporations in the post-WWII era. That worked when the life of big corporations was sixty years or so. But not in the current era where "firms stay in the top league by size (the so-called S&P 500) for only about between ten and fifteen years."

That's why my maxim about the Great Reaction says that the welfare state is a return to feudalism. It works because a lot of people prefer the life of subordination to the life of responsibility.

In other words, a big chunk of your "oppressed peoples" may be subordinate by choice.

That's why I think that a good three-layer theory is descriptive before it is prescriptive. Who are these "oppressed peoples" these "white oppressors" when they are at home? And who are the glorious white-knight "allies?"

Well, my reductive Three Peoples theory does just that. It describes the Creative people, that want to create something new; the Responsible people that just want to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules, and the Subordinates, that look to someone else to tell them what to do.

Let us try to mesh my theory with the Ally-ism theory. I'd say that the "oppressed peoples" align with my Subordinates. But what if, for many "oppressed peoples," their Subordination is a choice. Nobody, for instance, is forcing you to take welfare. In fact, you demand your welfare and your unemployment check and your Medicaid as a right. Really? You mean that your average "oppressed" person has enforceable "rights?" Oh, I forgot: they would have nothing without the heroic assistance of the "allies."

Whatabout the "white oppressors?" Are these graduates of prestige universities and prestige media or NGO jobs? Certainly not? Are they Tech Lords? Certainly not! Tech Lords are for the people. Are they Trump supporters, the kind that often get suspended and censored on social media and can be found enthusiastically cheering at Trump rallies? I think you have a funny notion of oppressor if the average "white oppressor" can be fired for expressing the wrong opinion, James Damore.

And whatabout "allies?" Are these graduates of prestige universities with prestige media or NGO jobs? You betcha! Are they Tech Lords? You betcha! Are they nice liberal ladies in swank gentrified inner suburbs with #WeBelieve yard signs out front? You betcha.

Hmm. I am getting a sneaking suspicion that the Mary McCarthy Rule applies here. You remember Mary McCarthy. She said of Lilian Hellman:

Every word she writes is a lie, including "and" and "the."

I'd have to agree with Mary, since the day I saw Lilian Hellman's play "The Watch on the Rhine" at the Berkeley Rep. 

Against this putrid philosophy I offer an notion of real Ally-ship. It is based on my Three Peoples theory and recognizes that different people need and want different things. 

I'd say that Subordinates -- or "oppressed peoples" -- need a decent support from society but should be encouraged to lift themselves out of dependency. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Responsibles -- or "white oppressors" -- need to be allowed to just be ordinary people and go about their business without being hassled by credentialed "allies" and accused of being monsters when they are not. But Responsibles also need to be encouraged to rise above mere responsibility and try something new. That's what I think a real ally would do.

I'd say that Creatives -- or "allies" -- need to be encouraged in the courage of creativity, but not if it means running about being white knights and beating up on "white oppressors." True creativity means being willing to sacrifice yourself rather than sacrifice others, to be a sacrificial hero rather than an ego hero, and Creatives need to be told that in no uncertain terms. That's what I think a real ally would do.

Now let us look at the bigger picture. In our era, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, the wages of cooperation have been immense. Take just one statistic: there are 3.8 billion smartphone users in the world today. In a world of 7 billion humans.

Just sayin'. How oppressed can you be if you have a smartphone? For one thing, it means that if you are one of the Factory Girls in southern China you can text with your friends about the best -- and the worst -- employers.

Now I think that the emergence of the Great Reaction, of well-born allies that went to selective colleges proposing to right the wrongs of the world with politics, is a sign that the Age of Politics, the age of using force to make people get along, is coming to an end. It is clueless scions getting the wrong end of the stick. It is a sign that the rule of the educated Gentry is coming to an end. Because we Commoners can get on perfectly well without the supervision of our Betters. Why? Because with smartphones and credit scores and cashless transfers there is a gigantic "nudge" encouraging each of us to be faithful and trustworthy in every life transaction.

In other words if there is a crisis in the modern era it is the crisis of people that are not trustworthy: people that crash their credit scores, that can't keep a job, that get pitched out of the circle of trust because they demonstrate untrustworthiness. The Fools.

Back in the day, the untrustworthy could disappear. A Brit could take a ship to the Americas. A New England Puritan could disappear and head Out West. People could give themselves a fresh start. But today, I'd say, the penalties for untrustworthiness are huge.

Hey, Wokies! How about a program for you guys to go out in the world and teach the "oppressed peoples" how to earn the badge of "trustworthiness?"

But meanwhile, we "white oppressors" will do our thing with the "oppressed peoples" and give them jobs and reward them for trustworthiness. And in the fullness of time they may become rabid Trump voters too. 

That's that I call real allies.

Taleb on the Sacrificial Hero. But Whatabout Women?

I just finished up Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Actually, it's a bit of a hot mess. The key concept, he says, is "ergodicity." What does that mean when it's at home?

Ergodicity: In our context here, ergodicity holds when a collection of players have the same statistical properties (especially expectation) as a single player over time... Absence of ergodicity makes the risk properties not directly transferable from observed probability to the payoff of a strategy subject to ruin...

But he does say something very significant that complements my Good Life philosophy, in which the highest, best person is the Sacrificial Hero, who dies that others may live. He writes that 

Courage is when you sacrifice your own well-being for the sake of the survival of a layer higher than yours.

He has a six-layer hierarchy as follows:

Ecosystem
Humanity
Self-defined extended tribe
Tribe
Family, friends, and pets
You

Now that fits right into my notion of courage being honor among men. The courage to fight a duel, I would say, is not a sacrifice for the survival of the group. Or, as I say, the Ego Heroism of Nietzsche's Übermensch is not the highest form of courage.

But, I thought, all this is guy stuff. Whatabout women, you sexist? As we know from James Bowman's Honor: A History, honor among women is the reputation for chastity: broadly, the reputation for being a good little girl. So how would women fit into Taleb's notion of courage as sacrifice for the bigger community?

I was pondering this in the middle of last night, as I am wont to do. And the answer from my unconscious came pretty quickly. The answer is: Forgiveness. 

If women don't forgive, then the community of women is all bollixed up with destructive Mean Girl competition and the seminal "I can't believe she said that." Because women play-acting at chastity are the first to name, shame, and shun other women as whores. And as we know, women can hold a grudge for a lifetime.

Indeed, I remember distinctly a acquaintance reciting how, whenever he did something wrong, his wife would rehearse The Catalog of all the things he had done wrong since he and his wife first met 40 years ago -- for which she had still, it appears, not forgiven him.

This notion came upon me pretty strongly while watching the Polish movie version of Quo Vadis: a Narrative of the Time of Nero. In the DVD version it is a six-part series. 

Quo Vadis is all about Nero sending the Christians to the lions after Rome burned. The book was originally written by a Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz, so you can see why the post-communist Poles would be eager to do a movie version.

But the big scenes occur when someone does something really bad and St. Peter forgives them in the name of God. This concept of forgiveness absolutely knocks everyone for a loop in good old pagan Rome. They never heard anything like it in their lives.

But that's the highest thing for you, ladies. Forgiveness. But whatabout a recipe for living?

Taleb has a three-point program for a guy to live as if he had Skin in the Game:

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never engage in rent-seeking
3. You must start a business

Obviously, this is a guy thing. But whatabout for women? As a starter, I would say

1. Never engage in virtue-signaling
2. Never say "I can't even!"
3. You must learn to forgive

Whaddya think of that, sports fans?

The Tell: Cheating When You Start to Lose

When do businessmen start cooking the books? Exactly: when they have sustained a horrific loss and need to hide it from the CEO or the stockholders or the bank.

When do politicians start to cheat? Exactly: when their glorious movement, for some reason, starts to fade.

When did the Democrats start their tactic of Borking Republican Supreme Court nominees? Right after they won back the Senate, in 1987, after six years of Ronald Reagan.

When did the current wokey cancel culture really get started? When the First Black President failed to bring in the millennium, and when the Tea Party populist revolt of 2010 indicated that Something Was Rotten in the State of Progressive Denmark.

When did the current social media censorship begin? After the unthinkable election of Donald Trump. And why has social media suddenly decided to censor an October Surprise? Because it targets the Democratic candidate.

Yesterday, I quoted a bit from Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843-44, where Dickens satirizes the New York City press of the day. He comments on that well-known paper, the New York Sewer, and writes of

the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse.

Charles Dickens went on a tour of the United States in 1842. So his experience was fresh in his mind when he wrote Chuzzlewit. But really, after the Brett Kavanaugh nomination fight, with accusations of high-school shenanigans, not to mention the tales of Mitt Romney's high-school bullying antics, you can see that nothing has changed.

But you see, I think all these Supreme Court nomination shenanigans, and social media censorship shenanigans -- not to mention the Democratic attempts to muck around with the voting system -- criminal as they are, are worse than a crime, a blunder. They are attempts to reverse the tide of history. 

But nobody knows the meaning of history, or what it will do next. The only thing we can be sure of is that a high tide is likely to be followed by a low tide.

Progressives have had a pretty good run since the 19th century. They have enacted huge government programs, they have erected huge regulatory bureaucracies, they have turned education into a progressive seminary, they have turned sex against gender and race against race. And yet the millennium has failed to arrive.

Instead, all over the west, populist movements have arisen to counter the rule of the experts and the educated. In general, these populist movements have been rather inchoate: unorganized movements of Commoners, middling sorts of people, that just feel that something is wrong and nobody is listening to them.

But our progressive friends just can't get their brains around this. I remember back in the days of the Tea Party, Nancy Pelosi grumbled about "AstroTurf" groups, fake groups ginned up presumably by right-wing billionaires. Do you see? Nancy had no idea. Nobody had any idea; the Tea Party just happened. Republicans were just as clueless about the Tea Partiers as Democrats.

Whatabout the Trump Car Parades? This NPR story tries to be as negative as possible, but certainly suggests that the parades are spontaneous efforts by ordinary Commoners. Are they? Maybe after the election we will find out who the evil genius is that came up with the idea.

Maybe, despite the best efforts of the social media giants, conservative Commoners are finding ways to organize and find each other.

You can see why the left would be ignoring the elephant in the room. In their simplistic religion of Ally-ism, of "allies" helping "oppressed peoples" in their fight against "white oppressors," there is no existence, no category, of just ordinary people that aren't allies, aren't oppressed, and aren't oppressors.

So, when you have a simplistic world view like that you are simply not going to notice things that don't conform to your expectations.

And yet, one of the things that humans are supposed to be good at is "noticing" when something unexpected happens. But, in part, the whole point of religion is to help people ignore unexpected or frightening things, because, for the believers, everything is all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, Candide. Nothing to see here, move right along.

But should we be cavalier about this, about the damage that the woke left might cause? I think that, a century ago, when the left was fresh and new, we should have been. But now the left is old and corrupt, an ancien régime. I expect the left to stumble and bumble in their efforts to wound and deflect the populist rebellion.

Rather like the efforts of Twitter and Facebook to censor the reports of Hunter Biden's corruption and his father's involvement in his son's shenanigans. Now it's the Chinese!

Unfortunately, as happens when failing businesses cook the books, the efforts to stave off disaster usually make things worse as the cheaters double down.

And so the only question is: How big the butcher's bill?

Victorian "Darker" Novels

Anthony Trollope is the author of the much-loved Barchester novels, about the sweetie-pie Rev. Septimus Harding, cello player, and his bumptious son-in-law, Archdeacon Grantly. And of course he wrote the Palliser novels about another rather sweetie-pie character, Plantaganet Palliser, and his decimal coinage plan for Britain.

In these novels Trollope examined the rights and wrongs of Britain through the lens of comedy.

But there are darker novels, which really take a whack at British society. I am thinking of The Way We Live Now, featuring really nasty characters like the swindler, and probably Jewish, Augustus Melmotte and the worthless young Sir Felix Carbury.

Or The American Senator, in which Trollope cunningly uses a pompous American US Senator to illuminate many unjust corners of British life. But it's all perfectly harmless, because, ha ha, how can you take offence when it's a blow-hard American Senator complaining about Britain!

Or the harrowing Linda Tressel. It is set in Nuremberg, and is about a young 21 year-old girl raised by her super-religious aunt, who decides one fine day that Linda is to marry her long-time 50-year-old lodger. The aunt puts enormous moral and religious pressure on Linda to agree to the marriage so that eventually Linda runs away, gets sick and dies. Again, perfectly harmless, because we are talking about those crazy Germans in Nuremberg. Could such a thing happen in Britain? Never mind.

We all like to criticize Charles Dickens for his overdrawn gargoyles. But maybe there was a method to the madness, that we could happily ignore the brutal reality of life in Dickensian London because his characters were so over the top. Truth is that, compared to the nice comfortable world of middle-class novel readers, life was nasty, brutish and short for most people back in those days.

And don't get me started on Thomas Hardy. His novels are full of the darkness of life, from Jude the Obscure to Far From the Madding Crowd to Tess of the Durbervilles. Then there is The Well-Beloved that is so dark I could not finish it.

But whatabout today's writers? Why am I not engaged in their critiques of society? Maybe it's because I think that, e.g., Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale is rather missing the point. Yes, there might be a time where eevil white Christian men are breeding with handmaid concubines, but I think we could rather go to work on the manifold hypocrisies of our present educated Gentry in religion, in culture, in sexuality, in politics before we get to work on crazy Christian bigots. On the other hand, when Atwood is writing about university culture in Life Before Man, she nails it. 

Somehow, with Tom Wolfe dead, there seems to be nobody around to pick up the torch of satirical social analysis.

(I except, of course, my own daughter, the writer Beatriz Williams, whose oeuvre is a magnificent critique of modern society, but done more in the Victorian style of suggestion rather than modern wokie bludgeon.)

Maybe our modern world will be rescued by Chinese writers. Whatabout Kevin Kwan, of Crazy Rich Asians, a delicious romp that dances around the hole in the middle of crazy rich life? Or the excellent Liu Cixin, whose sci-fi Three Body Problem series goes as deep into modern problems as anyone could wish?

Strictly speaking, what with the current wokie ban on all social critique that goes anywhere near the Holy Sanctuary of left-wing culture there ought to be a burgeoning satirical literature that goes just up to the boundary of canceling, but no further. I suppose if I were younger I would know all about it. There is, after all, an eternal yearning in the young to poke at the hypocrisies of their elders and teach them a lesson.

Instead, I am perfectly happy to twaddle around with Trollope and Hardy. And, of course, My Girl George Eliot.

Meanwhile I am chugging through Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit, written in 1843. Young Martin has just arrived in New York City and is getting to experience its splendid newspapers, from the New York Sewer to the New York Stabber to the New York Peeper, including "the Sewer's exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse." 

Golly. You mean to say that digging up a politician's past goes all the way back to the 19th century? That the practice of digging up dirt on Supreme Court nominees is old hat? "I literally can't even." As the ladies say.

Taleb's Three Layers of "Skin in the Game"

The best-selling writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb is from what he calls "the Levant." That is, I suppose, to remind us that the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean has been a sophisticated trading culture since whenever. Those were the days when Beirut was considered the Paris of the Levant. Alas, no more and so the refugees from the Levant are all over. There is Taleb in New York, and there is Mexican cellphone magnate and New York Times owner Carlos Slim. And many more.

Taleb worked for 23 years as a financial trader, and made the big time with his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The idea was that every now and again a big event occurs that wipes out everyone's expectations. We all expect minor changes in the world, but from time to time a tidal wave obliterates everything. So, he argued, you need to keep that Black Swan event in mind. What would happen to your life and your fortune -- never mind your sacred honor -- if the unexpected happened?

Now he has written Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, the notion that you can't trust people that don't have skin in the game. But tucked away in the book is a three layer table on page 47 labeled "Appendix: Asymmetries in Life and Things." Three Layers? That's where I live.

Taleb's first layer is "No Skin in the Game," meaning the guy that "keeps upside, transfers downside to others, owns a hidden option at someone else's expense."  This includes bureaucrats, consultants, large corporations, scientists "who play the system," centralized government, politicians, bankers. In other words we are talking about a person that

Seeks awards, prizes, honors, ceremonies, medals, tea with the Queen of England, membership in academies, handshake with Obama.

The second layer is "Skin in the Game," meaning the guy that "keeps his own downside, takes his or her own risk." this includes citizens, merchants, businessmen, artisans, laboratory and field experimenters, governments of city states, writers, speculators, activists, hedge fund traders.

The third layer is "Skin in the Game of Others, or Soul in the Game," meaning the guy that "takes the downside on behalf of others, or for universal values," This includes saints, knights, warriors, soldiers, prophets, philosophers (old-time), artists, innovators, maverick scientists, municipal government, "journalists who take risks and expose frauds," activists, dissidents and revolutionaries. in other words the kind of person for whom

Highest -- even only -- award is death for one's ideas or positions: Socrates, Jesus, Saint Catherine, Hypatia, Joan of Arc.

 Of course this is quite a bit different from my reductive Three Peoples theory -- with its Subordinates, Responsibles, and Creatives -- and Curtis Yarvin's Three Layers, with its Clients, Commoners, and Gentry. That's because all three layers of Taleb's Asymmetries refer to my Creative class or Yarvin's Gentry layer.

Still, you can see that the No Skinners are rather like my Subordinates, especially when you read Taleb basically calling them suck-ups, wanting tea with the Queen, etc. And the regular Skin in the Gamers are like my Responsibles: they don't expect other people to pick up their garbage. The highest and best layer, the Soul in the Gamers, are clearly like the Jungian ideal of the Sacrificial Hero, who gives his life that others may live.

Actually, I'd say that Taleb makes an important point:. In every sector of society, from high to low, there are Subordinate Clients who expect to live without having to suck it in on the downside; there are Responsible Commoners, that willingly take the risk of caring for them and theirs; and there are the Creative Heroes, that put their life on the line that others may live.

One thing I would add, because of my notion of Activism Culture. There are a lot of fake Sacrificial Heroes out there. That is why I say that activists are "play-acting revolution." They know that the activist that gives his life for others is the highest kind of person. But if you play-act the Sacrificial Hero then you ain't.

The Accumulation of Liberal Follies

So, today President Trump's nominee for Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, is up before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And, as they say, it is another high-stakes nomination battle, because for liberals everything is hanging in the balance, including abortion and homosexual marriage.

Do you understand, liberals, why having the Supreme Court legislate from the bench is a very bad strategic idea, however cool it may seem from a tactical standpoint?

Do you see how it is rather a bad idea to impose your moral agenda with a Supreme Court majority and then find yourself desperate to maintain that majority by fair means or foul a generation down the road?

No, I didn't think you did.

My standard illustration of this is the Washington State initiative process. Back in the Eighties, if you can believe it, Washington State had a vocal religions right movement that put an initiative on the ballot to restrict abortions. The initiative went down to defeat, and abortion has not been heard from since then in Washington State. Because a vote of the people is dispositive.

It is telling that a cult of personality has grown up around the career of the departed Justice Ginsburg. Really? A cult of personality around a judge? It is telling because in the Anglo-American tradition a judge is a deadly boring crosser of "t"s and dotter of "i"s. Judgeology is about comparing two pieces of legislation and determining how to deal with the contradictions between them. Or about evaluating a piece of legislation in view of the dictates of the Constitution.

Of course, the educated elite always has an inside track in the judiciary. That is understood. But when the educated elite acting through the judiciary imposes its cultural will on the rest of the nation, that is not good.

The point is that when you want to change the law on abortion you need to persuade the nation. Now my belief is that there are two things to consider on abortion. The first is how far the criminal law should go. Is it OK to terminate the life of a newborn child? Nearly everyone will say No. Is it OK to take a drug in the first month of pregnancy to cause a spontaneous abortion? Nearly everyone will say OK.

But whatabout abortion as a moral question? I'd guess that a lot more people would be queasy about abortion as a moral question than as a criminal question.

That is why we have a separation of church and state. The state is all about what we will oppose with police and judges and jailers. The church is all about voluntary moral communities that say Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not, but without the police and judges and jailers to back it up.

As a profound sexist I say that the criminal law is a boy thing: police with nightsticks, judges with the power to send you to jail, jails with doors clanging shut on your freedom. And I say that the moral law is a girl thing, with its naming and shaming and shunning, the "I can't believe she did that," or "Much as I hate to say it..." or "I can't even!" with which women dispose of each other in the community of women.

But I realize that we are a country mile away from my liberal neighbors having even a glimpse of a view of all this. They believe the liberal Zeitgeist and that's all. For them, RBG is a cult figure, because. And, of course, there is the perceived need of a professional woman to control her fertility. If you have a career, you plan your family to fit in with your career trajectory.

But whatabout non-professional women that don't feel the need to control their fertility, that would prefer a moral framework where everyone from husbands to society at large is morally and physically committed to raising every child conceived?

So, the moralization of the Supreme Court is just one in a growing avalanche of liberal errors, liberal conceits, liberal follies, the belief that you can actually plan society like a garden.

I believe that life is much more like cleaning up after mistakes, and that the sooner you realize you made a mistake, the better.

But in real life, as Anthony Trollope shows in his short novel Linda Tressel, the last thing people are willing to do is recognize they made a mistake. Especially when they have strong religious and/or ideological beliefs.

And when you push ahead with your religious or ideological agenda and damn the torpedoes, the only question becomes how big the butcher's bill will be.

Yes, Even the President is Expendable

One of the problems of today's public square is that its conventional wisdom takes for granted the feminine notion of protection.

Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates this in a piece about Trump. The president should not be cowering in basements or masked up to the nines.

It is leadership to go out and, with proper caution, to brave the contagion, on the theory Trump is indeed replaceable while cowering is inexcusable.

Yeah, guess what. There is an Amendment in the Constitution all about presidential succession. If Trump dies, the Vice President becomes president. President Trump is expendable.

That is what various characters opine about in Shakespeare. There is Worcester, in Henry IV Part One. Says he to King Henry IV,

It was myself, my brother and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.

 Then, of course there is the famous speech of the young Henry V at Harfleur:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;

In your average Napoleonic War novel, you run up against the "Forlorn Hope," the volunteers that swarm through the breach in the city walls of the enemy, facing almost certain death as they try to take the city by storm.

The basic fact about being a man is that you are expendable, and you are expected to risk your life as a leader of men or a follower, because Job One of a man is to demonstrate courage. Honor among men is about courage, the willingness to be expended.

But the basic fact of being a woman is that you carry the future within you. You need to stay alive, because it is women that bring forth the future. Thus for women, honor is chastity, doing the proper thing. You do the right thing and your kids survive.

In the old days, it was exclusively men that populated the public square, men that died for their country, men that operated in the culture of courage and fought anyone that dared to question their courage. And women operated exclusively in the domestic sphere, nurturing and "keeping the kids alive."

But when women came into the public square they brought their culture of safety with them. And as women have propagated into administrative positions throughout government and education they have transformed the culture from a culture of courage to a culture of safety.

This is how to understand the current concern about "microaggressions" and "safe spaces." It is the women's culture of safety modifying the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility."

That is why the world's response to the COVID epidemic has gone so solidly for lockdowns and masks. Because women expect to be protected; they instinctively "shelter in place."

But, of course, for every woman that gets to shelter in place, someone else has to boldly outdare the dangers of the time.

Now it is my contention that almost all women are incapable of understanding anything other than their culture of safety. I talked with a nice liberal lady with a gubmint job down the street here in liberal North Seattle, and she expressed how glad she was that our Democratic Governor Jay Inslee was insisting on a tight lockdown. She has #WeBelieve and Black Lives Matter yardsigns at her house. She seems to have no clue that there are millions of people suffering extreme disruption to their lives so that she can live in North Seattle safety behind her social-moralizing yardsigns. She has no clue about this.

And, of course, the whole feminist culture maintains the innocence and helplessness of women. We saw this with the covering for the rather unimpressive debate performance of Sen. Harris (D-CA). It's sexist to interrupt her. It's mansplaining to disagree with her. Of course, because women expect to be protected.

So much for Here Me Roar.

I think that we now know that the lockdowns were a mistake. The school closures were a mistake. we should have done everything possible to protect senior citizens and other vulnerable people, but everyone else should have gone about their business. To say, as Gov. Cuomo did, that "if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy” is rubbish. That is not how the world works. 

But it is how women's minds work. And the modern politician has to cater to women and their expectation of protection.

It will be interesting to see how President Trump's bravely outdaring the dangers of the time works for him in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign.

Do women voters conclude that he has been protecting them by getting COVID and recovering? Or do they decide that he has put them at risk?

Honestly, I don't know. All I can do is listen to the women I know and wait for their judgements.

Race, Identity, and Innocence

According to Shelby Steele, a black intellectual whose father was a black truck driver and whose mother was a white social worker, the whole racism thing is about innocence.

That's what Samuel Kronen writes in "The Prescience of Shelby Steele."

It all started after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

In Steele’s view, the explanation of black underachievement has its origins in the moral fall from grace of the 1960s when racism was first stigmatized out of polite society. For the first time, a critical mass of whites became conscious of their historic privilege and complicity in racism in ways that transformed the larger culture, while a critical mass of blacks came to identify with their historic victimization. 

You gotta admit, it's pretty weird. Instead of feeling good that we put the past of legal discrimination behind us, in a remarkable First in human history, we feel guilty about our past.

Oh wait a minute. Of course we do. Guilt is especially a girl thing, arising out of the woman's experience of honor-as-chastity. And since no woman is really as chaste as she wishes she were...

Ever since, both whites and blacks have developed unconscious patterns to guard their sense of racial innocence. A significant strand of white American culture projects a sense of guilt about the plight of blacks to dissociate themselves from the stigma of racism, and a significant strand of black American culture compels an angry militant pose to win concessions from white society and dissociate from the stigma of inferiority.

Ahem. Not quite, Sammy. Let's put it slightly differently. 

The end-all-and-be-all of white liberal culture is to maintain their white liberal innocence and heroism on the race question and damn the rest of the whites to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains who durst defy th'Omnipotent [educated Gentry] to arms. The beginning and the end of liberal self-image his their heroic stand on racial justice.

That is what all those Black Lives Matter signs are doing all over my upscale liberal neighborhood.  It's not just about innocence. It's about being Saved. Yes. We glorious wokie liberals are Saved, because we have been to racial confession and have been absolved of our sins. Aren't we special!

Now, in my book a culture of innocence is a political thing. If you are organized for political combat you need to develop a culture of innocence to give you permission to do all the dirty deeds that come naturally in any human conflict, and especially in political conflict.

For instance, after World War I the Germans developed a culture of innocence around the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth, that the German Army had not lost the war but had been betrayed by the civilians back home, Jews and republicans, and the like.

I maintain that any small minority will develop this culture of innocence to give itself the courage to fight in the political arena.

You will notice that in the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative beloved by our wokey friends, the "allies" are obviously a small minority of enlightened and educated people innocent of the racial guilt of the "white oppressors" and blessed with the evolved wisdom to save the "oppressed peoples" from the systemic white racism of the "white oppressors." So they are the saved, the lucky ones.

And so blacks need their culture of innocence, as Kronen writes, to deal with "the stigma of inferiority."

But whatabout our liberal friends. Whatabout their culture of innocence?

Hmm. It must be because they do not experience themselves as conquering heroes, but as an embattled minority, the few, the proud, the Marines -- of noble progressivism.

So they have to maintain an culture of innocence, to purge the guilt of the nasty stuff they do to the rest of the white community.

When Government Screws Up: Skid Row Syndrome

When the economy goes south, the result is very often a Skid Row, that Seattle claims for its Yesler Way that was once a hill down which loggers skidded logs down to waiting ships.

But now Skid Row refers to a district where unattached men spend useless lives eking out an existence in cheap flophouses and drink. Only now it's homeless shelters and drugs.

Skid Rows were notable in the Fifties, as the haunts of men thrown out of society by the Great Depression. Then in the 1980s Democrats made a big thing about the "homeless" resulting from Reaganomics -- but probably the economic disruptions of the 1970s when the Good Union Jobs of the Fifties got hammered by the rise of Japan Inc. and inflation changed the terms of trade for millions.

Obviously the Great Recession of 2006-08 resulted in another surge of homeless and people were thrown out of work by the unwinding of the real-estate bubble financed by liar loans and Fannie/Freddie.

And now the forced lockdowns of the COVID era are tumbling another generation of the marginal onto the streets.

Mostly, of course, these people that have fallen out of society are men. That is because, I assume, women are coded to find shelter: somewhere, somehow, they have someone that will give them a roof over their heads. Whereas men... yes what is it about men that they spiral out of the social structure and end up on the street, or living in a Hooverville, or Skid Row, or a homeless encampment around Seattle's Green Lake?

In part, these recurrent crises are the result of the constant economic revolution of the capitalist era: the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the steel revolution, the electric revolution, the auto revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution. All these revolutions tended to transform the labor market for men, and it seems that some men aren't very good at picking up new skills and reinventing their working lives.

But a lot of the problem has been government. Let's leave aside the economic impact of wars, which goes without saying. But we can say this:

• The Great Depression of the 1870s was the result of government deflation getting the dollar back to its pre-civil war parity. A lot of unions got started in the 1870s; I'm not sure how much good they did.
• The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of government deflation after WWI leading eventually to a big stock-market bubble and government failure to act as lender of last resort in the subsequent credit crisis.
• The 1980s homeless crisis was probably a result of the Reagan administration fighting the 1970s inflation. You can call this Reagan cruelty or 1970s inflationary stupidity. Take your pick.
• The Great Recession of 2006-08 was the result of the government encouraging home loans to people that weren't creditworthy and whose loans weren't properly collateralized. All intended to help minority homeowners who were then hardest hit in the subsequent housing crash. And then Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Oh Ben!
• The homeless crisis of 2020 was caused by government lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID-10 virus that particularly impacted low-skilled workers that couldn't "work at home."

Let's admit that, from time to time, we moderns are going to experience economic dislocations in which marginal men will be hardest hit.

What is our 5-point plan for dealing with this recurrent problem?

Because right now, dealing with the problem of dysfunctional men is the last thing on the political agenda of our noble educated Gentry. To President Obama they were "bitter clingers." To Hillary Clinton they were "deplorables." To the wokerati they are "white supremacists."

See, I think that we've got our priorities completely backwards. I think that nine times out of ten women are pretty good at accessing the help that societies deal out. But men are too proud or too stupid to ask for help. They would rather molder away in drink and drugs than admit they have a problem.

And that has clearly been going on for hundreds of years, from the vagabonds and beggars of England in 1500 to the "waste population" that the Brits wanted to ship off to North America in 1600 and Australia in 1800, to the Captain Swing rioters in England right after the Napoleonic Wars, to the workhouse surplus population of the Dickens era, to the "shell-shock" victims of World War I and the "combat fatigue" of World War II and the PTSD of our current era.

Got any brilliant ideas? I certainly don't.

Rebuilding "The Meaning of Life" with 26-year-olds

Everybody is talking about religion. Or not. But whatever they are talking about we are all still concerned about Douglas Adams' recurring theme in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

On the one hand, as I wrote last week, we have our lefty friends with their Original Sin of "systemic racism" and their Apocalypse that global warming that will mean the End of the World unless we act now.

On the other, we have the experience of a young woman acquaintance who found, after her traumatic brain injury, that she couldn't experience God and the divine any more. But slowly, that sensitive part of her brain is coming back.

On the other we have another acquaintance who notes that "The words superstition and religion are synonyms.  Yet everyone claims one and not the other." Whatever I believe it is the truth, and what the other guys believe is a lie.

Then we have the Zman today writing about the "aridity of the intellectual landscape."

Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

But what comes next?

[Conservatism] should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

Yes, but what? Well, here is  Austin Schue, "a 26-year-old American, working-class college dropout who owns and operates a small business" in northern California. Who has read a book. Who has actually had an original thought. Who can actually write an article. And he is writing about his life journey -- on several levels.

He is writing about the necessity of earning a living. And he is talking of the necessity of a meaningful life. And this young man has actually read Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning.

In my private reading, I noticed that the heroes of my favorite books acted on the truth in accordance with their belief systems—as in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein protagonist R.P. McMurphy is lobotomized after he attempts to liberate his fellow insane-asylum inmates from the tyrannical regime of Nurse Ratched. I heard echoes of Christianity, my past faith, in his sacrifice.

He observed the contradictions in the left wing message.

On one hand, they pushed a feminized and pacifistic ideal of society. Yet at the same time, they glorified any kind of violent resistance that presented itself as progressive—a pattern we’ve seen play out in spades over recent months.

How come I didn't think of writing that? 

So what did he do? He learned to become a farrier, shoeing horses! And "ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle." But what about the meaning of life?

As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas. What I really wanted to do was forge a coherent centrist viewpoint—one that can accommodate personal responsibility, the search for truth, sincere compassion for the less fortunate, and a sensible commitment to preserving the Earth’s ecosystems.

 Remember, this guy is 26. Then he began listening to Joe Rogan's podcast. And his lefty girl-friend found out about Jordan B. Peterson.

I was particularly blown away by the depth of Dr. Peterson’s knowledge, and the way he coherently tied together ideas from psychology, history, evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy, and myth.

Exactly. Peterson is trying to construct a new "meaning of life" from all our knowledge, ancient and modern. 

I started exploring his writing. This is the way children feel when they first hear a kind of music that resonates deeply. It was my intellectual Led Zeppelin. Like many of Peterson’s other fans, I implemented his lessons in my own life, and became a more responsible and assertive entrepreneur as a result.

Yes, the world is falling apart like a toxic marriage.

[Yet] most people I meet in the world just smile and say hello, even with a mask on. They seem to find life tolerable and even enjoyable. I see people going out to fish or mountain bike. I see tradesmen hustling. The healthiest people are the ones who picked a real tangible goal in their own life, and are working toward it.

Engaging in that process saves lives. It certainly saved my life. And while it may be too late for my relative, it’s not too late for members of my own generation. Clean your room. Build a house. Shoe a horse. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you aspire to something other than burning down somebody else’s prosperity and happiness.

May I suggest that if there are young men like Austin Shue in the world, then we may concur with George Eliot in Middlemarch, that

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

As everybody understands, we need to conjure up a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the face of an old order that stumbles along, using its power and its domination to keep the old order going, just one more cycle.

It is good to know that good people are working on it.