Shootings, Gun Control, Escaping Arrest

Is it the best of times, or the worst of times? Are mass shootings a verdict on everything from our gun culture to broken families to untreated mental illness? Or on the failure of the liberal welfare/administrative state? Would making guns illegal save lives? Are state patrol officers finding that a lot of drivers won't pull over for a traffic stop?

Are mass shootings a sign of the times, or are they notable because in our modern era, there just isn't as much homicide as in the good old days? Do we expect the government to make us safe, irregardless, whereas in the old days people died. For all kinds of reasons, at any age?

When liberals react to the latest shooting -- but not to the average weekend in Chicago -- are they trying to Do Something? Are they attacking The Enemy, white males? Or are they trying to show women that they, the liberals, are doing everything they can to protect them?

And how about this, from Steve Sailer:

Since January of this year, more than 900 drivers have failed to stop for a Washington State Patrol trooper trying to pull them over.

But this has nothing to do with recent legislation from the Democratic Washington State Legislature.

Strachan and others in law enforcement connect the increase in failures-to-yield to passage last year of House Bill 1054, a sweeping police tactics law that, among other things, barred high-speed pursuits except in very limited circumstances. The law was part of a package of police reforms majority Democrats passed in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other high-profile police killings — reforms aimed at addressing racial disproportionality in policing.

You know. I think that 97.2 percent of all politics is just virtue-signaling and posturing and conceit from the ruling class.

After all, courtiers don't wear silk breeches and silk stockings any more. How then are they going to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate their lofty specialness?

And then there is the larger point, that politics is all about the enemy, so if you are a politician you are nothing unless you are valiantly fighting the enemy. Any enemy.

The enemy can be a foreign enemy, the dastardly Putin. Or it can be a local enemy, the dastardly "gun lobby." Or it can be an existential enemy: climate change.

But "there is no politics without an enemy."

I have this crazy notion that we are in the Autumn of the Political Age, because we don't really have Huns and Mongols and Nazis to fight. We don't really have gangs and criminals to fight, except in lower class Democratic cities. And, really, there is nothing we can do about existential perils like climate change.

But a politician needs an enemy, like a drunk needs a pick-me-up.

How the Next Regime Dishes the Lefties

In the last weeks there have been a lot of "far-right" thinkers pondering about the failure of conservatism. Here's the Zman today up at Taki's. Conservatism is dead. So let's conduct an autopsy.

One reason we conduct autopsies is to better understand what to avoid in the future. The same is true of these debates going on within what is left of conservatism. This dustup between William Voegeli and Glenn Ellmers is a good example.

I did a piece criticizing Voegeli and Ellmers at Amerian Thinker.

One reason conservatism failed, I think, is that it was merely defending itself. But you have to go on offense, for "offense is the best defense."

Or, any politics must have an enemy. And what do you do with an enemy? You go out and defeat it.

This has been the strength of the left since Marx. There's always an enemy. First it was the capitalists and or the bourgeoisie. Then it was Southern racists. Now it is the ordinary white middle class, the white oppressors of which you've heard tell.

So I say that the new politics needs to be an expanding middle. The ordinary middle class are the good guys; the pointy-headed intellectuals and the "experts agree" and the wokey activists are the bad guys. In any politics we must decide who are our friends are and who is the enemy.

In the next regime, our friends are any people that come join us in celebrating the ordinary arc of human life, people who want to wive and thrive, get married have children, work a decent job, and leave a little for the next generation. We say to the lower class: you could be our friends, and we will look after you.

Our enemy is the Cathedral, the educated class that has spent the last 50 years making war on the middle class. They must be beaten, despoiled, and humiliated. And don't forget the lamentation of their women.

How do we beat them? I'd say it starts with demolishing the current education system. First, we replace the government K-12 system with vouchers, so parents send their kids to the school of their choice. Then we attack occupational licensing and credentialism. Then we demolish the universities. Universities used to be the place where the ruling class trained the priests for the state church. Today universities are the place where the ruling class teaches the kiddies to hate their country, hate their history, and hate the middle class.

Let's do the numbers on education. RIght now, total government spending on education is $1.3 trillion. Let's say that the population under 25 is 28 percent of 330 million. If we divvy up the $1.3 trillion that adds up to $14,000 in vouchers per kiddie. Wow, that's real money, especially if the moms in the neighborhood get together to create a group homeschool.

But whatabout the teachers, the professors, the administrators, the DEI specialists? What will happen to them? No problem. They will still have jobs. Providing they teach the kiddies what the parents want them to teach, because vouchers. Of course those educationists that are rabid lefties and LBGT groomers, well, they will have to change the cut of their jib. Maybe they could get jobs at McDonalds.

But whatabout science and research? Perfectly simple. We reward billionaires that fund research with medals and tax rebates.

But maybe we can save a bunch on education by implementing my plan of apprenticeships for everyone that isn't going to be a physicist or a philosopher. The whole point of apprenticeships is for young'uns to get paid for doing something useful while they are learning to be useful.

And whaddya know, there's an outfit called Praxis that's pushing apprenticeship as an alternative to college.

Whatabout dishing the credentialists, from lawyers to physicians? I would say that any organization that issues credentials has to accept unlimited liability for the errors of its credentialees. So law schools and state bar associations and medical schools and medical associations will be liable for the mistakes of the folks that they have declared to be ready for prime time.

Yep, I suspect that these special interests are not too interested in anything more scary than keeping the low-renters out of their sacred precincts.

Yes, but how do we know whether our doctor or lawyer -- or auto mechanic -- is competent? Hey, I know. How about a combination of liability insurance and a ratings system -- like eBay and Etsy and Amazon and TripAdvisor? You think?

Then there is climate change. With President Biden talking about high gas prices as an "incredible transition" and Democratic politicians all over the place putting bans on natural gas hookups for new construction, I'd say we are getting to a place where we can say that climatistas are the enemy of the ordinary middle class: enemies of affordable energy, enemies of personal transportation, enemies of a safe place to raise your children, enemies of comfort: indeed enemies of the ordinary middle class.

We say to the educated class: Go Away, or you will regret it.

Don't Forget, There Must Be an Enemy

It's always annoying when, after a shooting, our liberal friends all line up to blame guns, gun owners, the "gun lobby," and racists and whatever else moves.

Then there are the conspiracy theorists on our side who impute all kinds of sinister motives to our rulers. For instance, it turns out that FEDS were interacting with the Buffalo shooter.

It's easy to imput malevolence in our liberal friends, but I don't think so.  I think they are just stupid, and when you are stupid you naturally try to cover up your mistakes and blame the other guy -- who is, after all, the enemy.

The fact is that when something bad is happening, we expect our governments to protect us from the danger. That applies whether the something bad is a crazed shooter, a crazed Putin, a nasty outbreak of inflation, a failed harvest, or a shortage of infant formula.

Most of the time, our government can't help us.

Where do crazed shooters come from? Do they come from the availability of guns? From the absence of fathers in many homes? From various mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal? Do they come from the media's endless publicity of disasters, showing angry youngsters how to make a name from themselves? Do they come from the collapse of the authority of parents and neighbors over the past century? Is it a consequence of the overabundance of female teachers in the government schools?

And is the government's response ever serious, or just a need to be seen to Do Something?

If you accept my notion, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and from Curtis Yarvin that politics is all about the enemy, then you can see that government is always in a position where it must be seen to be Doing Something about the enemy du jour. Because if the government is going out and defeating the enemy, what's the point?

And if the government failed to defeat the enemy, then what's the use of government?

No. You are not allowed to think such thoughts!

I read Michael Barone today inverting the notion of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Today, he said, we have a situation where politics is the leisure of the theory class, that anyone who is anyone gets their status from some political appointment. And, I would say, any position in the vast universe of government and its satellite organizations is a lot easier to obtain than success in business. In fact, the theory class is almost all courtiers. That's why they are right on with all the hot issues from climate change to systemic racism. Courtiers are nothing if not followers of fashion. And not just in silk stockings.

Maybe we are starting to see the fundamental weakness of the welfare and administrative state. It's one thing when the government is just in charge of repeling boarders, keeping out the Huns and the Mongols. That's a pretty simple concept. But when you have expanded your mandate to include everything from pensions to health care and tasking the police with defending elementary schools then you have a bunch more things that could go wrong. And because we are talking about government things do go wrong. A lot.

But if something goes wrong it must be the politician's fault, right?

You can see why politicians have to be expert at blaming other people for their mistakes. They must do that or resign. And who wants to resign, Nancy Pelosi, age 80? 

The best people to blame are the supporters of the Outer Party. I mean: if they were decent people they would be members of the Inner Party and down with the ruling-class agenda, right?

I take another position. I say that anything the government does is bound to be a mess and a failure. That's illustrated by the Four Laws:

Socialism cannot work because prices.
Administration cannot work because bandwidth.
Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture."
Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

What does this mean? It means that top-down government only works for sending young men to their deaths in battle. Everything else is too complicated for a top-down hierarchy to succeed.

And then there are the Germans. They discovered in WWI that top-down didn't work in the military either. Authority had to be pushed as far down as possible. You didn't just march across No Mans Land with bagpipes playing. You snuck across, from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to be inconspicuous, and you had to rely on some corporal to make it work.

That's my line on government failure. What did you expect, cupcake?

The Fatal Conceit of the Schwabs and Soroses etc.

Yesterday I blogged about dear old George Soros, speculator and funder extraordinaire, and his speech to Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum at the meeting of the private jets in Davos, Switzerland.

Klaus Schwab opened the conference patting the fly-private worthies on the back for their wisdom and excellence.

Our multiple collaborative initiatives will drive progress by strengthening global and regional cooperation; by preserving nature and fighting against climate change; by developing new economic and social policies; by accelerating responsible ESG industry transformation, and by using the disruptive technologies such as AI, blockchain, and quantum computing, for the benefit of society.

The thing about this is that it is word salad, that nicely coordinates with what the rest of the educated global elite is thinking and wants to do. It imagines itself as a benign supervisor of the world, soothing its passions and directing it on the right path.

But Schwab is probably wrong. His ideas will probably die a painful death.

For instance, my guess is that "fighting climate change" is going to turn out as a gigantic mistake that may turf the current ruling class out of power. I am reading a detailed history of the French Revolution -- Simon Schama's Citizens -- and it mentions the critical importance of spiraling bread prices in early 1789. Ordinary people wanted the King to Do Something about it. Hello spiraling gas prices which President Biden calls an "incredible transition" to a post fossil fuel future.

And I think that "developing new economic and social policies" will probably be policies that seem nice and cosy to the global elite, but not to the ordinary punter.

For comparison, in 1787 the Frenchies had an Assembly of Notables to decide what to do about the finances of the French government. All very sensible, but then came July 13, 1788 and a monstrous hailstrom that took out the grain crops in France. Then followed a winter, the worst since 1709. The four-pound loaf went from 8 sous in summer 1787 to 15 sous in February 1789. You already know what happened next.

And I think that "responsible ESG industry transformation" will turn out to be a dead letter as the economy reels from the current inflation and gets completely transformed into something that nobody expected, least of all the fly-private barons of Davos.

It is, as Hayek wrote in his final book, a Fatal Conceit to think that you and yours can design and construct the political and economic order. Let alone the moral order! The world is the result of billions of experiments -- vegetable, fungus, animal, and even human -- that worked. It's odd that the official narrative accepts this with regard to Nature, but not with regard to human society. Let's take Hayek's words at the beginning of The Fatal Conceit.

To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that [it] resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection... of those groups that happened to follow them.

Our world is full of Fatal Conceits, of which the late lockdowns, the recent baby formula crisis, and the airline pilot shortage, and spiraling inflation are merely the ones we can see with our own eyes.

Another way of looking at it is to say that any number of things may go wrong for us humans. Obviously we can't prepare for all of them. And we can't decide which of them really will go wrong, and which we ought to prepare for. Because ten-to-one, the actual thing that goes wrong will be the thing we didn't think of. And all the preparations for the emergencies that didn't happen will probably have taken resources away from the effort to deal with the thing that actually did go wrong.

Another way of saying this is that humans have survived and flourished by adapting to changing conditions. When something goes wrong, we all pitch it to fix it. If we succeed, then we survive to live another day. If we don't succeed... Well, every story is a survivor story. The prisoners that died in the Kolyma goldfields, in the Holodomor, in the Great Leap Forward, in the dearth of 1789 in France: they are gone, and very few of their stories will be told.

For instance, my Dad left Russia in 1918 at the age of 16, just as the Bolshevik revolution was turning nasty. I wonder what happened to his school friends at the German speaking school he attended in St. Petersburg. My Dad's Russian mother escaped to England, and so did her sister. But what about their relatives?

There is a reason why most novels have a happy ending.

The World According to George Soros

One of the questions I have about the modern world is about George Soros. He says he believes in the "open society" described by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies. And Soros was actually a student of Popper back in the late 1940s while a student at the London School of Economics.

My problem is that I don't see how a genuine follower of Karl Popper would be funding lefty activists and "Soros DAs." For instance, according to La Wik:

Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.

So why then does Soros finance so many lefty activists, followers of Marx? I don't get it.

Anyway, George Soros gave a speech on May 24 at the gathering of the private jets at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland and he has thoughtfully provided the text at georgesoros.com. Do his remarks help me understand him? Maybe. He begins thus:

Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening.

Really? The EU was intended to stop Russian aggression? I thought that was NATO's job. He continues.

The world has been increasingly engaged in a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society. Let me define the difference as simply as I can. 

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.

Jolly good show, old chap. Then he continues:

Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. 

Oh really. Notice what he is saying? He just said that the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual, but then tells us that "fighting pandemics and climate change... maintaining global institutions" are almost as important.

Now I would say that if protecting the freedom of the individual is the role of the state then all the fun stuff like fighting pandemics and climate change is a buncha baloney. Because if you are in a fight against a pandemic or against climate change it means that the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to the prosecution of the war. And of course, if we good chaps of the open society are necessarily committed to fighting the closed society -- Russia and China, according to Soros -- then the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to that armed struggle as well.

Soros was there in the 1980s with his Open Society Foundation to help end communism, and the 1990s was a heady time. But then came 9/11.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the tide began to turn against open societies. Repressive regimes are now in the ascendant and open societies are under siege. Today China and Russia present the greatest threat to open society. 

But why? Digital technology and AI. "AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies." You mean like social media censoring anything that challenges the ruling class "narrative" as disinformation and misinformation and the abortive Disinformation Governance Board right here in the good old USA?

And yet, AI is not turning out so well in China, as President XI has locked down the whole country to fight the COVID Omicron variant. Why did he do that? Soros says:

Xi harbors a guilty secret. He never told the Chinese people that they had been inoculated with a vaccine that was designed for the original Wuhan variant and offers very little protection against new variants. 

 Really? But guess what. The whole Ukraine thing is giving Europeean leaders an idea. They see an opportunity to bind their nations into a federated Europe.

They wanted to use the invasion of Ukraine to promote greater European integration, so that what Putin is doing can never happen again. 

Enrico Letta, leader of Partito Democratico, proposed a plan for a partially federated Europe. The federal portion would cover key policy areas. 

In the federal core, no member state would have veto power. In the wider confederation member states could join “coalitions of the willing” or simply retain their veto power. Mario Draghi endorsed Letta’s plan.

Really? Well, bless my buttons. And imagine how the freedom of the individual will fare in this new federated European state. I wonder if there will be elections for the capo di tutti capi in this new federated state.

But it gets worse. Guess what is suffering as a result of the Ukraine war?

While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. That could be the end of our civilization. 

"Experts," you say? 

Well, this has been very helpful for me, in my quest to understand the mind of George Soros. It seems to me that he experiences himself as the monarch of the Open Society. And that this Open Society is, or ought to be, a federated Europe.

This ties with another feeling I have about George Soros, as a Hungarian Jew that grew up in the hell of Nazism and World War II. It is the "never again" idea that we must never allow nation states to have the power they had in the heyday of fascism and Nazism. Thus the EU, thus globalism. Because never again Hitler.

But I am a student of Karl Popper, who went on to develop his Three Worlds theory of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

World 1: the realm of states and processes as typically studied by the natural sciences. 

World 2: the realm of mental states and processes.

World 3: the realm of the 'products of thought' when considered as objects in their own right.

For Popper the "products of thought" are both scientific theories and actual products of scientific theory and technology like jet airplanes and nuclear plants. And, I suppose, the poltiical theories about open societies and closed societies and their actual implementation in actual states.

I have a real problem figuring out how the real Popper aligns with the Soros idea of Popper. But who am I to say?

But, all in all, it looks like Soros is just an ordinary globalist that has signed onto all the "world's gonna end unless we..." stuff. And, when you think of it, any top-down narrative these days needs the lefty activists to enforce the will of the overlords. So therefore Soros DAs to keep the peasants from stepping outside their lane.

Corporations Need an anti-Diversity Vaccine

We all know the vital importance of everyone getting the vaccime. Why, people should be fired if they don't get vaccinated.

But think of America's worst pandemic since the Sixties Kids: Woke Capitalism; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and ESG.

The fact is that any corporation that gets woke goes broke. Just ask Dis-e-ney.

The fact is that any corporation that has a Director of Diversity is asking for Trouble with a Capital T. Just ask State Farm that ran into a buzz saw over the trans books it was shilling into schools.

Any corporation that gets into ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) that focuses on "sustainability" is pointing itself to the exit.

I was thinking of this in particular with respect to the twerps at State Farm. What on Earth did Michael L. Tipsord, State Farm CEO, think he was doing by letting his Chief Diversity Officer Victor Terry get off the bit and get into "a project to push LGBTQ books into schools?"

The answer is obvious. Once a corporation has a Chief Diversity Officer there is no end to the stupidity that the officer and his underlings will get into. 

It's easy for the CEO to think: OK now I've got a diversity officer so that's taken care of the lefty activist NGOs that keep turning up at shareholders' meetings. The problem is that he has introduced a lefty virus into the corporation that, like any virus, will take over the host unless it is kept severely in check. And with a virus, experts agree, nothing less than universal vaccination will work.

It's not just that the diversity guy will go out and hire stupid fools with the right DNA du jour who will degrade the corporation's performance because they are not up to snuff and know that they can't be fired for incompetence. The problem is that -- as with all political and cultural fashions  --the diversity gig will get out of hand. And that, unlike Kansas City, it won't quickly go as fur as it can go, but will metastasize into all kinds of fashionable folly advocated by the Activist Culture that will actively harm the corporation and infuriate its racist-sexist-homophobe clients. Maybe the virus will actually kill the host!

So every corporation needs a high-level officer whose sole job is to put a stop to stupid diversity stuff. And woke stuff. And ESG stuff. And indeed any stupid stuff that has nothing to do with the job of the corporation, which is to keep churning out widgets for the benefit of the customers.

Actually, the problem is bigger than woke and diversity and ESG. As my boss complained 50 years ago, the people working for him were always going off at tangents. And young as I was, I understood what he was talking about. If you are a software engineer, it is always a temptation to work up some cool software tool that improves the elegance of the software. It is always tempting to clean up the sofware mess resulting from years of updates and make it real shiny and cool. It is always tempting to go off and do something that has nothing to do with the job in hand, because it is fun and the project in hand is not fun, but just boring work. If you are an administrator it is much more interesting to introduce some new fashionable idea than just grind away at your real job. Because work is hard. That's why we get paid to do it.

But what should the officer be called? Chief Diversity Veto Officer? Chief Woke Alert Officer? Chief Corporate Vermin Eliminator? Chief Bureacratic Bloat Eliminator?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Democrat Voters Suffer Least from Inflation

Here's a Quinnicpac poll mentioned on Instapundit and Washington Examiner where the respondents were answering the question as to "the most urgent issue facing the country today?" The result that "Everybody except Democrats sees inflation as the big issue." So I tabulated the responses, just to make it fair.

Inflation is the most important issue

Republicans	46%
Millennials	41%
Baby boomers	39%
Men	39%
Independents	37%
White non-college graduates	37%
White people	36%
Hispanic people	36%
White college graduates	34%
Youngsters	29%
Women	28%
Seniors	26%
Black people	21%

I have ordered the folks in descending order of their concern about inflation. The feeling I get is that the more people are exposed to the marketplace, whether in the labor market or prices in general, the more they are likely to consider inflation the biggest issue.

Notice the group that is right up there pretty well with ordinary independents? Hispanics. I wonder if it is because Hispanics work in the market economy, rather than for government, so they are exposed to the marketplace and notice inflation.

Notice who is at the bottom of the list, the least concerned about inflation? Women, seniors, and blacks. So does that mean that women, seniors and blacks are the most protected against inflation? By government, or something else? I suspect so.

Do you see who is missing? Democrats. Their biggest issue is abortion. As below.

Democrats most important issues

Abortion	18%
Inflation	14%
Election laws	13%
Climate change	10%

Really? Right now, you Democrats are more concerned about abortion than in getting gas for your car and diesel for your truck?

And inflation is way down, the most important issue for only 14 percent of Democrats?

It tells me, frankly, that Democrats all work for the government. Where they can say: inflation? That's the sort of racist issue that only ultra-MAGA racists pretend to be worried about.

But really, all this is as it should be. The whole point of being a ruling class is to protect yourself from the weather and, if there's enough money, to protect your supporters. The rest of humanity can go hang.

And when you are the ruling class, religious issues and their orthodoxy are really more important than mere economic issues.

Great Replacement? How About Great Realignment

Everybody knows that the Great Replacement Theory is a racist-sexist-homophobic conspiracy theory of white supremacist Republican monsters.

Properly, Steve Sailer ridicules the idea of a Great Replacement. As he writes:

The Emerging Democratic Majority is a purely natural phenomenon, like the swallows returning to Capistrano.

Yes, back in the day Judis and Teixeira in The Emerging Democratic Majority could confidently predict, in 2002, the coming age of Democratic Party political dominance because of immigration -- and the educated, women and young people.

But, the most significant political move in recent years is the movement of Hispanics from the Democratic to the Republican column. Quinnipac has Biden approval among Hispanics at 26 percent compared to 55 percent last year. And there's this:

Biden is less popular among Hispanics than any other demographic, including age and gender, the poll found. 

Even Ruy Teixeira is jumping the sinking ship. Why is this?

Could it have something to do with the fact that my Hispanic immigrant mailman, who works on his brother's nursery business on weekends, and whose children are the first in the family to go to college, is all work? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the guys that delivered our new freezer were Hispanic? Could it have anything to do with the fact that the Hispanic area of southern Texas along the Mexico border are all switching to the Republican Party?

And by the way, why weren't the guys delivering the freezer weren't black? How come it's always Hispanic roofers not black roofers, Hispanic gardeners not black gardeners?

Could it have something to do with the notion that you don't appeal to Hispanics with identity politics and woke trans ideology but with jobs, jobs, jobs?

It's hard to tell, because as Steve Sailer points out, what everybody knows, that

Republicans are too low IQ to understand sophisticated Democratic concepts like We’re Good, You’re Bad.

The answer to all this is pretty obvious if you have made a comprehensive and mandatory study of my reductive Three Peoples theory -- or have grasped the idea of Three Layers theory. 

The People of the Subordinate Self vote Democrat. They don't feel that they are in control of their lives; they need a powerful lord to be their patron. But the People of the Responsible Self figure that if they live by the rules and work hard then they will get their reward. They don't need no stinkin' federales to help them get ahead.

It seems to me that the Hispanic migration that began, shall we say, with the 1965 immigration act, has been proceeding at battle speed from subordination to responsibility.

And why not? It's the American Way.

Maybe the problem is that Hispanics are too low IQ to understand the truth that Democrats Good, Republicans Bad.

Meanwhile it sure does look like the purely accidental Great Replacement of white oppressors with oppressed peoples is turning into a Great Realignment of ordinary Commoners from Democratic to Republican.

The Idea of Neutrality in Politics

We all know that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. Or, as Curtis Yarvin now puts it:

When we say that the essential political distinction is the distinction between friend and enemy, we say that the military and the political are one.

As he says: "The political war is a cold war." And the military war is a hot one. Then, he adds:

One of my strongest beliefs is that everyone should turn their military emotions off—whether or not they are at war.

Why? Because "the test of humanity is the power to overcome animal emotion." As compared to chimps. In other words, when you are in a conflict you need to think, tactically and strategically. And that means keeping your inner beserker in check.

Except when you are actually fighting in an actual battle.

You may remember, in reading The Last Kingdom books by Bernard Cornwell, our hero Uhtred of Bebbanburg always gets into a battle rage during a battle. Everything blacks out except the fight. But the rest of the time he is strategizing.

Thus there is "neutrality." It helps humans escape the eternal conflict of the friend vs. enemy distinction.

Neutrality made it possible to address the outsider civilly, as neither friend nor enemy, but united under law—owing the due duties and respects due to a stranger under law. Neutrality is the source of all true peace—universal friendship is universal conquest. 

Neutrality. That's the point of law, of prices, of the market, of contracts, of buyers and sellers. You don't think of other people as enemies -- or as friends. That, of course, is one of the reasons why our lefty friends have a problem with law and the market and capitalism. It takes all the emotion and the fun out of things. And if you believe in politics as the road to justice -- really believe in politics -- then every human on this planet is either a friend or an enemy. They are either an ally of the oppressed peoples or a white oppressor enemy. One or the other.

But under neutrality, if a guy kills your wife, you don't make him and all his family an enemy. You just call the cops.

And it makes complete sense that our lefty friends get emotional about everything, whether it's the monstrosity of reversing Roe v. Wade or insisting that trans women are biological males or else. The whole point of logic and reason is to carve out a region in interpersonal dynamics that is free of emotion. The whole point of politics is to classify everyone as friend and enemy. You are either with us or against us. Everyone is either one or the other.

Another thing that Yarvin stresses is that in politics and war today your enemy is not really another human being. The enemy is the system or the regime: a machine, if you like. There is no point in killing people in a rage; they are just servants of the regime, part of the system. So that

the humans who operate this machine may be (and I believe are) entirely innocent and even well-meaning. They are just cogs in it. On the day after it breaks, they will be harmless—like former Stasi officers.

Or former Nazi apparatchiks. Believe me, the day after Germany falls in 1945, just about every Nazi gets it: he realizes he was just a cog in the machine. An he gave the best years of his life away, for nothing.

The point is that all the Sturm und Drang of the liberal race war and gender war and trans war is fake, fake, fake. There is no "essential conflict between black and white, red and blue, rich and poor, male and female, etc, etc, etc."

All these cold civil wars are epiphenomena of a broken political system.

Our liberal friends have to gussy up their identity politics, their armory of pejoratives, because their system is failing, broken. And they can't believe it. And so they regress to the primitive, as described by Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And the fault cannot lie with us. No. In politics the fault always lies with the other guy, the enemy. 

Ain't that the truth about our liberal friends. Bless their hearts.

Washington State Hybrid Electric Car Ferries

My state senator here in the 36th District in north Seattle sent me a nice four-page newsletter cataloguing all the magnificent ways in which he is spending our money.

Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-36) is leaving the State Senate aftar 14 years of service in the state capital of Olympia, and what he's most proud of is "passing this year's $16.9 billion Move Ahead Washingotn -- a climate-friendly investment package that I believe moves our transportation system into the 21st century."

As the greenest transportation package in state history, Move Ahead Washington invests more than $4.2 billion in transit, bike and pedestrian projects. Notable projects include $836 million to build four new hybrid-electric ferries, $2.4 billion for fish culverts to preserve and protect salmon, $3 billion for road preservation and maintenance, and $3 billion for public transportation.

And not a cent for new road construction.

And guess what! There's $440 million for affordable housing, including $300 million for Rapid Housing Acquisition to house "unsheltered individuals as quickly as possible."

"Four new hybrid-electric ferries?"

I wondered about the hybrid-electric ferries -- meaning car ferries. What does it mean? Apparently Washington State plans to get its ferry system to emissions-free by 2050. Right now, the system burns 19 million tons of diesel fuel every year. Based on this promotional video, it seems that hybrid-electric ferry means:

• Charging ferries at ferry terminals between trips.
• "Using your diesels really just as a backup."
• "You can get over 20 percent improvement or reduction in fuel consumption"
• Terminal electric hookup and charging will be really safe.
• In Pacific Northwest a good proportion of power comes from hydro and wind.
• "25 minutes to charge the boat."
• "Cost effective, efficient, and responsible."
• "There's a lot of really cool technical challenges that we'll have to deal with."
• "Hybridizing the largest ferry fleet in the United States is a really monumental task."

You can see the red flags: 20 minutes to charge gigantic batteries? Cost effective, efficient, and responsible? Cool technical challenges?

You know sports fans, if they had Elon Musk in charge, I might believe they could do it. But a bunch of gubmint bureaucrats? And gubmit contractors? Dealing successfully with "a lot of really cool technical challenges?"

Senator Reuven Carlyle. I gotta bridge to sell you. Real cheap.

And of course it's all going to be more cost-effective, etc. And benefit the fish.

You know what I think. I think that Washington State is going to throw a lot of money down the plug hole for nothing in return.

And the idea of a gubmint ferry system doing a successful project to turn its diesel-electric car ferries into plug-in hybrid Priuses? Please! The current Jumbo Mk II diesel ferries each use four diesel engines developing 16,000 horsepower or 12 MW. So you realize what kind of battery is needed to power a ferry like this on a 30 minute ride?

And then we'll have the worst transportation system in the country, and Gov. Inslee (D-WA), or whoever inherits his lifetime position, will blame the failure on "systemic racism" and "right-wing extremism." Because every problem in this world is the result of Republican malevolence.

Oh. And whatabout when the first battery explodes from all the fast charging. Because the batteries will, no doubt, be under the car deck. At least with hybrid buses, the batteries are on the roof.

This is just an example of the problem with the climate change grift. It encourages government to embark on foolish, conceited, useless projects that will be the modern equivalent of the Soviet Union's White Sea Canal, of which La Wik says:

The canal runs 227 km (141 mi), partially along several canalized rivers and Lake Vygozero. As of 2008, it carries only light traffic of between ten and forty boats per day. Its economic advantages are limited by its minimal depth of 3.5 m (11.5 ft)... inadequate for most sea-going vessels.

We will say nothing about the 25,000 worker deaths during the building of the White Sea Canal. At least nobody will die on the hybrid-electric ferry project. Until the first battery explodes.

Buffalo Massacre: Warning to Liberals

The liberal response to the Buffalo massacre -- a white guy killing 8 blacks and others at a supermarket -- is to blame "white supremacy and violent extremism." Well, of course President Biden would say that. That's the standard liberal line on all interracial conflict: The Other Guys Did It.

But I am here to say: No, liberals, You Did It. Your "allyship" politics, your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion politics, your blame-everything-on-the-whites politics. That's what did it.

Hello liberals. Here's a bit of Bible study for you.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." -- Hosea 8:7.

See, liberals, it is a bit cute to say that the perp subscribed to a "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory when not 20 years ago every Democrat was devouring The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book confidently predicted a Democratic majority in America courtesy of immigration plus the young, women, and the educated.

I would say that the difference between immigration as a deep dark replacement conspiracy and a noble and just policy to open America to immigrants is not that big.

And what is an ordinary young man struggling to take his place in the world supposed to think when Democrats oppose any attempt to limit immigration?

I mean, the whole point of labor unions is the limit competition from low-wage non-union scabs. So it was OK for union workers to restrict entry to their workplace, but not OK to restrict immigrant entry to America? Explain.

Now I notice that New York Governor Hochul is telling us that the shooting "was committed by a racist snake who came from under the rocks lifted up in 2016."

And Buffalo, NY

Mayor Byron Brown (D) argued that “False information, hateful information,” and “attempts to indoctrinate people in different forms of hate and violence on the Internet and on the airwaves of this nation should just absolutely be banned.”

Of course. Anyone that disbelieves the liberal narrative on race is a "racist snake" and there oughta be a law to silence the racist-sexist-homophobic practitioners of "false information" and "hateful information." 

 But, as I say following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy."

Anyone and everyone in politics is defending "us" against "them," the enemy. So of course the politicians are coming out and telling us the fear the enemy.

Used to be that the enemy was the bourgeoisie. Then the capitalists. Then the patriarchy. Then the Southern Jim Crow racists. Then the white supremacists. Then the white oppressors. Now the Ultra MAGAs.

But of course. There must be an enemy.

Let's analyze the problem with the notion of "allyship." La Wik.

"Allyship" is an English-language neologism used in contemporary social justice activism to describe efforts by members of a privileged in-group, to advance the interests of marginalized groups[.]

Further:

Its usage has grown especially common in political activism and organizational rhetoric since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the international George Floyd protests in May 2020[.]

But suppose that the "privileged in-group" that is practicing Allyship is not in fact advancing "the interests of marginalized groups" but in fact Making Thing Worse, in part by subordinating rising lower-class groups to the leadership of a "privileged in-group" that does not have their best interests at heart, and in part by enraging ordinary Commoners without any particular privilege who are stigmatized as "white oppressors."

The point is: how would we know? How would we know if the oppressed groups really are more oppressed that ordinary white working-class chumps? Experts and fact-checkers say that George Floyd did not die of fentanyl poisoning. But would the experts and fact-checkers have said that if George Floyd was white. Would they even have cared enough to publish an opinion?

See, in my view, the first thing that a wise ruling class does is recognize that, almost certainly, its power and its policy is creating injustice in the land. Not because the ruling class is evil, but because any government action from taxes to spending programs to regulation is almost bound to have unanticipated consequences that hurt ordinary people.

So if I were in the ruling class I would be saying: wow: there sure are a lot of conspiracy theories on immigration these days. I wonder why?

Instead, our current ruling class says that anyone that disagrees with them is a racist-sexist-homophobe and ought to be silenced for committing "disinformation" and "misinformation."

Sorry ruling class. This ain't gonna end well. Not for you, and probably not for America.

Mourning "Neoliberalism"

Did you know that

The neoliberal order that triumphed on a global scale in the Nineties and 2000s aspired to the free movement of goods, capital, people, and information throughout the world.

Apreed? I'd say: sorta. Gary Gerstle, the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era, says that "international merchandise trade" peaked in 2008. Anyway, he says,

The Great Recession, and the widening disparity between rich and poor that followed, shattered the belief that a global world of free trade was bringing prosperity to all.

Yes yes. Quite so.

But now, what with COVID and Ukraine, it looks like things aren't going to get better.

Establishing outposts of free-market capitalism in countries such as Russia and China, it was hoped, would compel the regimes of those nations to liberalise: to institute the rule of law (if only to protect property and contracts), to embrace a free press and free elections, and maybe even to embrace democracy itself. Open markets, it was hoped, would produce open societies.

But now it looks like

Globalisation has strengthened authoritarianism and illiberalism, not weakened them. We may be moving into a world that is not open, flat or harmonious, but fractured and divided into rival geopolitical blocs: Russia at the centre of one, China, Europe, and America at the centre of the others. 

And so on. For there have been flaws in the regime of neoliberalism:

a toleration of too great a level of economic and social inequality; a reluctance to recognise and assist those who have suffered economically; and a flow of political power away from national legislatures and toward international organisations, private and public. 

All this educated-class conceit and piffle got me to thinking. What really went wrong with "neoliberalism?"

Honestly, I don't know. Partly because I'm not sure what neoliberalism is really supposed to be. Because "everyone" uses it as a punching bag. Who exactly are supposed to be the "neoliberals?" It ain't me; it ain't thee. Must be that fellow behind the tree.

Here's an idea. Neoliberalism has died of its internal contradictions. That's what we students -- but not followers -- of Marx would say.

On the one hand neoliberalism suffers from the conceit of its practitioners --whoever they are -- that they are noble disinterested lords of freedom and justice. On the contrary, I would say that, for the most part, the educated ruling class is merely just another ruling class that has developed a political formula that celebrates itself, bribes its supporters with other peoples' money, and then decides what is best for the rest of the world. Because it is special.

Bottom line is that it uses our money to pay off its supporters, whether they are global corporations, NGOs, lower class subordinates, or Lawfare activists.

So, while the neoliberal order has a magnificent opinion of its magnificence and the justice of its rule, the reality is that, as with all humans, it makes mistakes. It is tied by its need to service its supporters. It cannot admit when it makes a mistake.

And, of course, there is the little problem of my reductive Three Peoples theory that instructs us that different people want a different world. Creative people want a glorious stage on which to strut and fret and exhibit their creative magnificence. Ordinary Responsibles want a fairly predictable world in which to obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules. Subordinates want a world in which they are taken care of in return for their loyalty to their overlords.

Lord only knows what happens next with Russia and China. I'd say, at least, that we were doing better under Trump who played diplomatic games with them, alternating carrots and sticks with respect to international trade and property rights and tariffs and whatnot, and keeping them on the back foot while not actually going to war. 

Hey, it seems to me that the current regime has provoked a war over Ukraine by goading Russia with threats of getting Ukraine into NATO. And today Ukraine might as well be in NATO anyway. The NATO powers are acting as though their job is to defend Ukraine from Russia. As if it were actually in NATO like Poland or Hungary.

If the neoliberal era was supposed to be the 1990s and 2000s, then maybe we can learn from the previous decade, when the US was led by Ronald Reagan and the UK was led by Margaret Thatcher. 

Of course anyone who was anyone sneered at Reagan and Thatcher: the Amiable Dunce and Thatcher the Snatcher. What they did, if you have forgotten, was fix the national economies of the US and the UK after the economic stupidity of the 1960s and the 1970s that had led, by the end of the 1970s, to "stagflation."

That set the stage for the so-called neoliberals to do -- well what, exactly? Mostly strut and fret their hour upon the stage and making pompous announcements and wasting the dividend from the 1980s.

And golly geewillikins, after the glorious two decades of neoliberalism, whatever it was, now we are back to stagflation. How come, geniuses?

I have an idea. Why don't you neoliberal geniuses just Go Away for a while. Come back in ten years when we in the basket of deplorables have fixed the leaks and repaired the engine and got the ship of state back on track.

Then the peoples of the US and the UK and the EU will probably let you come back and mess everything up again. Just for fun.

Is the Nuclear Family to Blame?

 Over at UnHerd.com they have an essay by conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony that's condensed from his new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery.

Hazony argues that the root of our problem is the post-World War II "nuclear family" where the man goes out to work, the wife is a "housewife" stuck at home, and the kids go to school until age 18 when they themselves head out to more school or work until they form a new nuclear family. And in this world "grandparents and other family relations [are]... impossibly distant."

[T]he household is no longer the location of a common business enterprise, of devotion to God and the study of Scripture, of a direct responsibility for the education of the young, of a direct responsibility for honouring and caring for the old, and of significant responsibilities for the establishment and growth of the community and congregation[.]

So why wonder that everything is falling apart?

What's needed is to restore something of the multigenerational family, Hazoni writes.

[Maybe under COVID many] have had their first glimpse of what the family was like when it was a strong political institution, in which generations worked together to create a permanent community, very much resembling a little tribe or nation.

Or is Hazony yearning for a return to an Eden that never was?

My feeling about modern society is that it "just growed." When Hazony writes about the post World War II

world of detached suburban homes connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses [with] a newly rationalised conception of what a family is

I think it is a mistake to think of it as being rationalized. I think that it just happened from millions of decisions of ordinary people including the Levitts that found lots of people willing and eager to move into Levittowns just out of town from big cities like New York.

For instance, in these days we have people building and buying bigger and bigger houses, with childless couples wanting to live in 3,000 to 4,000 sq.ft. homes. What's the point? Well, humans seem to like living in a spacious dwelling. And the more spacious the better.

People like to be connected to grandparents, and grandparents like to be near their children and grandchildren. But humans also don't like other family members interfering and telling them what to do. On balance, it seems like a lot of people have made a decision to live at a certain distance from their extended family. But why? Who knows?

Maybe we humans would be better off living in multigenerational households. But first of all we have to discover that for ourselves, and develop religion and culture that nurtures such a society. And in any society, some people make decisions that benefit them and theirs, and other people make decisions that harm themselves and others. Which happens after the event looking back at a life well-spent, or a life ill-spent.

And what do we do with the drunken sailor that seems determined to mess up his life and everyone else's?

It ain't gonna happen through politics. 

What if This is 1929 All Over Again

Back in 1929, and 1930, and 1931, and 1932, in the Great Depression, a bunch of banks failed every year. Peaking in 3,000 banks failing in 1932. And the Republicans just stood around and did nothing. Even with Andrew Mellon, banker, as Secretary of the Treasury, they did nothing. Mellon, whose father started the Mellon bank as T. Mellon & Co., was used to financial wipeouts, and learned from his father in the Long Depression that started in 1873 that you just ride these things out and make sure that your bank doesn't go under.

Of course, both the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s were both, in my view, a consequence of the deflation that followed the "resumption" of the Gold Standard after an inflationary war. Apparently the high-and-mighty in 1930 weren't reading Walter Bagehot and his commentary on the 1870s financial crash in Lombard Street. In which the central bank is the "lender of last resort" and prevents a collapse of credit. Oh well.

But now we seem to be in a market rout and the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates in a rather tardy response to the money printing of the last two COVID years.

And we have the Biden administration executing on the ruling-class faith that we are all going to die of climate change unless we stop using fossil fuels.

Back in the 1930s the American people sent the Republicans packing and elected New York princeling Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a very Democrat Congress. Of course, they were fools that mucked around with the economy for eight years as it continued to wallow in depression, and only got the economy back on track by preparing for a nice little world war.

Will history repeat itself, with Democrats flopping around as the economy goes to hell, as Republicans did at the start of the Great Depression? And will Republicans take Congress in a mega-midterm, as the Democrats did in 1930. And will a Republican sweep all before him in 2024 as FDR did in 1932.

We Don't Know. 

But I do think that the Democrats have a problem. We saw the problem in the early years of the Obama administration when its stimulus package was mainly devoted to shoveling money at Democratic constituencies and not getting the economy back on track.

And now the Democrats think that the proper economic policy after the COVID stoppage is to shovel money at climate change. Of course they do, because apart from anything else, it will benefit educated Democratic voters.

I do not think it likely that our Democratic friends will wake up one day and decide that their climate policies are an economic and political disaster. Humans, and especially progressives, are not like that. Even when their religious cult leads them into the wilderness they still believe, and they believe what their leaders tell them, that the fault is all those evil monsters.

But ordinary people and ordinary voters just want the economy to work, and if the Democrats can't or won't make it work then the voters will decide it is Time For A Change, and elect the other guys.

And say what you will about dumb Republicans, they do believe that the number one job of a national government is to get the economy on track so ordinary people -- that obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules -- can wive and thrive in this land we call America.

When M2 increases by 40 percent in Two Years...

 I just thought that I would check on the M2 money supply over at the St. Louis Fed's FRED database. Here's what I found.

On March 2, 2020 M2 was $15,493 billion. On March 8, 2021, M2 was $19,727 billion. On February 28, 2022, M2 was $21,712.

So in the year from the beginning of COVID to the start of the Biden administration M2 went up by 27 percent. In Year One of Biden M2 went up 9 percent.

So, President Biden and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and all the ships at sea. What do you think will happen to prices in the wake of all that?

Just to give a little perspective, in March 2010, M2 was $8,599 billion. So M2 expanded by about 6 percent a year during the 2010s.

A decade of M2 increasing by about 6 percent a year gave us 2 percent inflation. What do you think that a year of 27 percent increase in M2 followed by a year of 9 percent increase in M2 will do to inflation?

That's 40 percent increase in money supply in two years.

I'd say we are looking at a couple of years of double-digit inflation.

Oh well. No big deal. Back to normal in a couple of years, no doubt.

Or not.

Politicians Don't Know Nothing About the Economy

President Biden this week is emitting some incredibly foolish things about inflation. Said he:

“They [Republicans] don’t want to solve inflation by lowering your costs,” Biden said at the White House. “They want to solve it by raising your taxes and lowering your income.”

He called inflation the nation's top economic challenge, blaming the twin challenges of a "once-in-a-century pandemic" and the war in Ukraine.

"I want every American to know that I’m taking inflation very seriously, and it’s my top domestic priority," Biden said.

 No doubt. Except that a wise leader would have been worrying about inflation a year ago; he wouldn't be playing catch-up and blaming the opposition a year later. 

In fact, of course, politicians are only interested in the economy if it's tanking and threatening their hold on power -- not to mention the supply of ready cash for distribution to their supporters.

There's no mystery about this, of course. Politicians, like tribal leaders down the ages, are there to defend the homeland against marauders. For that they need to commandeer all the resources of the community in the fight for life or death.

Other than that, the warrior leader is interested in co-opting possible rivals with gifts and manors. Or, for those rivals not amenable to gifts and manors, they are another enemy and must be defeated.

Now comes Steve Sailer wondering about the astonishing European imperialism starting in 1492. As he says:

European ships were showing up all over the world, trading, conquering, and spreading Eurasian diseases, building the wealth of Europe and depleting that of the rest of the world.

 Were they "depleting" the wealth of the rest of the world? Certainly they -- we -- destroyed the tribal cultures of the Americas. But with India and China they were trading. They traded with India so that they could avoid the taxes and add-ons from the overland Silk Road and the spice route, with principalities taking their cut all along the way. China? Something about the price of tea in China and those jolly clipper ships that sailed down the Roaring Forties round Cape Horn and back to Europe.

But the question is: how could the Brits come to dominate India and mess around with China? These two civilizations should have been able to handle any amount of pimply European nobodies and their ocean-going sailing ships.

Maybe, says Sailer, it was the Mongols who conquered pretty well everything from Eastern Europe to northern India to the whole of China.

Maybe the Mongols caused places they’d invaded to get more reactionary? Russia, Islam, China, and India all seemed to lose momentum at inventing new stuff after they got out from under the Mongols or subsequent Asian nomad invaders.

Or maybe the Europeans sailors and merchants were operating under a new kind of economic-financial culture that ran rings around the Asians. In their age they were a rising class of bourgeois merchants and nobody adventurers. In our day with have a rising class of the credentialed educated class.

It makes sense when you think about our august rulers and the clueless way they have handled COVID & Co.

I mean, if I were president I would have been scared to death that the money printing and free-stuff distribution would have messed up the economy something fierce. So I would have figured that unless I got the economy back to normal in six months flat I would be facing a wipe-out in my first midterms. I would have put the experts to work figuring out how and why the Morgenthaus and the Harry Dexter Whites got u out of World War II without an economic meltdown.

Instead we have had a year of pedal-to-the-metal spending and low interest rates. The Fed was saying, hey, the inflation is transitory -- whaat? after you had doubled the monetary base in two years? Not to mention increasing it by 8 times since the 2008 crash?

Can you spell Clue Less?

And now I read that the Fed is proposing to raise interest rates at 0.75% per increment. 

Hoo boy, that will be fun.

All I can say is that, for the "next regime" I want a government that has half a clue on the economy and letting ordinary people live their ordinary lives without having to deal with the consequences of political stupidity every few years.

Civilizing Social Media: Try these Three Simple Tricks

I expect you think, like me, that social media is ungovernable, an automatic descent into hate and bigotry unless wise content managers beat back the baddies. And now Elon Musk is opening up Twitter! The Horror!

But the Zman says otherwise. Back in the day, he writes, social media kept the nasties under control. Not any more.

Most of the complaining, however, is coming from the sorts of people the internet used to exclude. Online culture used to be a haven from the scolds and busybodies who haunt daily life.

In ordinary life, he says, we are pretty good at marginalizing the nasties.

In daily life, no one likes the woman who is always creating drama. People organize their lives to limit their exposure to that person and anyone who enjoys her drama. Further, the guy who keeps talking about Hitler or how much he hates the left gets ignored. They keep this stuff to themselves so they can be included in the community. Social pressure works.

Wat?

First, he says, you need to remove mechanisms for scolds and busybodies to cause trouble.

Removing all of the mechanism to report other users takes away the appeal to the scolds and busybodies. If they are stripped of their ability to rat out fellow users, most of the fun of the platform goes away for them, as well as the people who enjoy taunting them. 

Second, how you deal with the bad actors? Simple. Down-voting.

Similarly, down-voting is a powerful weapon against troublemakers. No one likes to be told they are the problem. It is why booing at public events remains popular. It works, and the down vote works the same way. The reason YouTube removed down-voting is they hated being booed by their own user base. Social pressure is the best way to compel conformity in a community,

Really? I had no idea. What civilizes users is that they get "reputation scores based on the up votes and down votes."

Thirdly, whatabout moderators?

Another lesson from the golden age of the internet is that the sorts of people who want to be moderators are the people who should never be moderators. It is the scolds and busybodies who lust for these positions. The Trust and Safety committee of Twitter is composed of the worst, most petty despots humanity can produce. The platform would improve greatly if Musk just threw these people off the roof of the building.

 Again. I had no idea! You mean that Twitter is actually designed to be a sh*t show?

The main thing is to

select against the scolds and busybodies who make life miserable for everyone. A reorienting of the moral hierarchy that places these people at the bottom, rather than the top, not only fixes Twitter, but sets a positive example for the rest of the public platforms.

And to think that all these problems had already been solved, and I didn't know. Until Twitter came along and unsolved them, because, I suppose, the left wants to reward scolds and busybodies. As long as they are approved lefty activists, of course,

Really, I am kinda shocked by this. I had no idea that with a few simple tricks we can solve the social media problem and everyone can get back to wiving and thriving.

Where Next for the World?

Today Theodore Dalrymple wonders why on Earth we are wedded to the news, when it's almost all bad, and we can't do anything about it anyway.

And I wonder why on Earth the pro-choice mostly peaceful protesters are so enraged about the possibility of reversing Roe v. Wade when all it will do is return abortion lawmaking to the states, and if you are a nice liberal lady your blue state will almost certainly keep abortion legal up to and including the moment of birth.

And a chap at the British Spiked wonders why the Brit Labour Party can't shed it's fashionably lefty identity politics -- especially around trans issues -- and recapture the working class that has drifted away from loyalty to Labour.

And I wonder about rich-kid lefty Kathy Boudin, raised in Greenwich Village among lefties, a Bryn Mawr graduate who protested against the black maids at college being underpaid, and then went on to be an accomplice to an armed robbery in which three guards were killed. Here's a quote about Boudin:

“One thing about that kind of background is that even if you’re converted to belief in social transformation and you’re against upper-class privilege, it’s real hard to overcome your deep training as a member of that class that you have the right to run the world.”

See, I think it is odd that while 500 years ago warrior landowners knew they had a right to run the world, today it is educated activists that know they have a right to run the world. How does that work?

Meanwhile my congerscritter Pramila Jayapal (N-WA) is all a-twitter about forgiving college debt to the privileged while the stock market is going down the toilet now that the Fed has -- finally -- decided to Do Something about double-digit inflation. Where were you, a year ago, Rep. Jayapal, when a wise head would have been saying that maybe now is not the time for super-mega-blowout spending bills.

And now I read that the Biden White House is bragging about helping the Ukrainians sink a Russki ship, killing Russki generals, To say nothing of Nancy Pelosi going to Ukraine to promise additional support.

Hey, President Biden! I got four grandsons that are at or close to military age, and I don't think that your stumbling efforts in eastern Europe add up to a reason to send them to... Yeah, exactly what are we trying to do in Ukraine?

Meanwhile, Jan Psaki is quitting as presidential Press Secretary, to be replaced by Karine Jean-Pierre, the first black and "out LBGTQ person" to serve in that role.

Somehow, I get the feeling that the world is out of joint, and it ain't gonna get back in joint for a while.

Tony Blair's Poltical Revolution in Britain: What Can We Yanks Learn From It?

Officially, the Brits sneer at Tony Blair, the guy that rescued Britain's Labour Party from left-wing lunacy. For a while. But Mick Hume reminds us, on the 25th anniversary of Blair's win in 1997, that Blair reordered Britain's approach to government.

New Labour firmly believed in changing how people lived their lives, and regulating human behaviour. It would be the central new role of government to discourage bad habits, interfering in everything from what we should eat and drink to what we were allowed to say and think.

Back in 1997 Hume was editor of LM Magazine (LM = Living Marxism) and his reaction to Blair's win was:

The Tony Blair Commandments: Thou Shalt Not smoke, drink or eat what you like; have a gun, a knife or a wild sex life; watch, read or download what you want; bring up your children as you see best; use what words, gestures or jokes you choose; or in any other way think for yourself.

In other words, Blair "accelerated a shift in power from elected to unelected and unaccountable institutions", administrative, regulatory, supervisory institutions that continually butt into our daily lives. And the Brit elite is just as eager to police the internet as our noble rulers here in the US.

Mick Hume, a lefty, finishes up with  a plea to "put personal freedom and popular democracy back at the heart of British politics." Doesn't sound all that different from Trumpism, that our President Biden just anathematized:

This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed in American history. Recent American history.

Only, I'd say, as the president implies indirectly, the "MAGA crowd" isn't really an organization at all. It is the cultural-political aura around former President Trump. It is inchoate, organic, supported by ordinary middle class people and nobody in the ruling class really knows what to do about it.

It's interesting to note how Britain and the US tend to echo each other. In the Eighties we had Reagan and the Brits had Thatcher. Both were saying that the old economic regime wasn't working. In the Nineties we had Clinton and the Brits had Blair. Both were saying that the old working-class politics of the mid 20th century didn't play any more. And both proposed the rule of the educated class as wise counselors -- combining, I would say, political power and religious belief. In the 2010s we had Trump and they had Brexit, in which the ordinary middle class rebelled peacefully against its betters.

The simple thing to say is that both the US and UK are experiencing the Woke Meltdown. I think I saw a cartoon recently that showed Elon Musk as Dorothy throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West who is crying "I'm Melting."

But then what?

One thing that's important. I don't think that the "MAGA crowd," as extreme as it doubtless is, wants to burn the place down. And that might make the Great Rebellion relatively peaceful.

Liberal Democracy and the Enemy

The Zman has a couple of posts on the curious aggressiveness of "liberal democracy." 

In "Expansionist Ideology" he notes that everyone agrees that fascism is expansionary, but wow, it wasn't in Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal. Communism was explicitly expansionist, of course. We all know that too. He notes that

communism cannot exist without some new ground to conquer, while fascism is at least capable of operating within national boundaries as a good neighbor.

Whatabout "liberal democracies?" Well, everyone agrees that 

democracies do not go to war with one another... Liberal democracies are dragged into conflict by illiberal systems that only understand force.

Except that 

The United States, the epicenter of liberal democracy, has been at war for over a century. In fact, the reason for the past tense when speaking of fascism and communism is the United States conquered these two systems in the name of liberal democracy.

So what gives?

Fascism was a revolt against modernity. Communism was a revolt against the past. Liberal democracy is a revolt against nature, specifically the natural limits of the human animal.

So, after liberal democracy defeated fascism it went on to defeat communism. "Once communism was defeated, it declared war on the world."

What exactly is our beef with Russia over Ukraine? Good question. And with China over Taiwan? You tell me. So, the Zman says, liberal democracy is the worst.

The limited expansionism of fascism triggered a war in Europe then world war. The explicit expansionism of communism plunged the world into a forty year cold war. The hyper-violent, revolutionary expansionism of liberal democracy now promises something far worse.

He's got a point. 

In "The Violence of Democracy" the Zman reviews the history of democracy, from Athens and the Peloponnesian war to the French Revolution to the United States that was created in war and then had the War of 1812, the Civil War, then war with Spain, then Europe, then Communism, then the Muslims, and now a cold war -- possibly becoming hot -- with Russia.

And why would we be going to war with Russia, "an important part of the global supply chain for things like energy, food and raw materials." Or China, "the manufacturer of many Western goods?"

You tell me.

Of course, the answer is obvious. Curtis Yarvin: "there is no politics without an enemy." Our liberal friends believe that politics is the royal road to justice. But if Yarvin is right then politics, whether or not it is bending towards justice, is always a fight against an enemy.

If politics is a fight against an enemy, then it is always war. That is what it does.

Do you see the problem here? As I like to say, politics makes complete sense when humans are fighting over food-yielding land, in an age when food-yielding land is everything. But in our present industrial, or post-industrial, era when everything is for sale on the market, and can be resolved by buying and selling, and the best land for food is not necessarily a matter of life and death? Maybe we don't need politics.

Now I would say that if you look over the last century in the US, you get the feeling that our Democratic friends are always spoiling for a fight. And Republicans are not. No wars in the Republican 1920s. Winding down the Korean War in the 1950s. Winning the Cold War without a fight in the 1980s. Oh yes: Bush and Iraq. But then no new wars on Trump's watch. But Ukraine on Biden's watch.

And, of course, our liberal friends are always looking for a fight in domestic politics. With the current likelihood that the Supreme Court is going to send abortion back to the states, our liberal friends are rending their garments and threatening to end the filibuster, jam abortion through Congress, and expand the Supreme Court, and I know not what.

Which makes the Zman's point. If our liberal friends can't get their way, they will drive over the rules.so they can get what they want anyway. And a bunch of wags are noting that liberals are suddenly talking about "women's rights" and forget "birthing person;" "child" instead of "foetus." When you are angry you forget your artful circumlocutions.

I say that the Age of Politics, that I define as the era of the rule of the educated class, is in its autumn. We really don't need politics, because we have better ways of resolving our differences, as proposed by lefty Jürgen Habermas.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement. If the rational system of the Enlightenment and its instrumental reason is indeed strategic, a mechanical system that deals only in power and domination, it is only part of the truth. Humans also dwell in a lifeworld of shared cultural tradition. 

Notice that our liberal friends do not accept the idea of living in a "lifeworld of shared cultural tradition" and developing moral agreement with eevil racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacists. Because the Other are the enemy. The idea that liberals share a cultural tradition with the eevil racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacists is anathema to our liberal friends. They will define morality, and we will go along.

Now it is my belief that the ordinary American middle class is really not that into politics, unless jabbed with a stick. On my reductive Three Peoples theory, the middle class is a class of Responsibles that live by obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

An it is my belief that the rise of populist nationalism, here and elsewhere, is a response to the ordinary middle class being jabbed with a stick by the educated class, all over the world.

So, either the ordinary middle class, in nation after nation, will put an end to the Age of Politics run by our educated liberal friends, or we won't.

Stay tuned for next week's exciting episode.

Out, Damned Leak!

OK, so the big story of yesterday is the leak of an apparent early draft of the upcoming Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturns Roe v. Wade. It seems to suggest an upcoming 5-3 decision in favor of returned abortion law to the states with Chief Justice Roberts undecided.

Hey, liberals! Overturning Roe v. Wade does not mean the end of abortion! It means the end of the Supreme Court imposing abortion law on the states. That's why the governors of every blue state today in the nation put out Twitter advertisements for women to move to their states forthwith.

If you are interested in my views on abortion, try my blog post "The World After Roe v. Wade" published a little after the Supreme Court heard arguments last December. It proposes the idea that abortion is experienced differently by different kinds of women. Thus educated women think differently than Commoner women think differently than lower-class women. Who knew?

And I think that the law should reflect that different people have different views on the question of abortion, and that following lefty Jürgen Habermas, we should understand the differences and should work together and try to come to agreement in the Lebenswelt that is the United States of America. My main suggestion is that we should make abortion legal but shameful -- and especially shameful for the would-be father that proposes that the would-be mother "get rid of it."

But my main point here today is that I doubt if the "leak" was really a leak, in the sense of a rogue Supreme Court clerk sneaking the draft out of the Supreme Court in the dead of night.

No, my guess is that this is a planned ambush. Otherwise how come Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) were ready with a joint statement moments after the release of the "leak." Remember, Pelosi just got back from an exhausting trip to Ukraine. How come all the blue state governors were ready with beautifully designed tweets telling women that they are welcome in their states. Etc.

So, what happens next? I see that the Supreme Court is going to investigate the leak. Because this is Very Serious.

And I tell you what I think. I think it is time for Chief Justice Roberts to grow a pair. Up to now, Roberts has been very careful to avoid inflaming the left, on the view I assume, that unless he compromises with the left they will burn the whole place down. And that would not be good.

But I would say that this flagrant breach of trust gives Chief Justice Roberts the golden opportunity to take the high road, to make a speech before the world, and say that in order to protect the reputation, the sanctity, the honor, of the Supreme Court he is honor bound to vote with the majority and send a message to all would-be leakers that it ain't gonna work, that violating the sacred priestly protocols of the Supreme Court is not going to bully principled justices on the Supreme Court. Otherwise this leak is the first step on the road to injustice and Armageddon. In fact low-rent stuff like that will rebound on the low-lifers. So there.

Are you up for this, Justice Roberts?

And another thing. In the past, liberals would have used a Supreme Court decision like this to enrage their supporters and get them out to the polls on Election Day. But, in another proof of God's existence, this is probably not the best year to do this, because the vast majority of women are more directly concerned with rising prices for food and daily necessities than the more abstract question of abortion.

Also, most women believe in strong limits on abortion. Except for liberal educated women. That's because most women experience motherhood as the central meaning of life, while liberal women experience creativity and career as the meaning of life.

That's my opinion. Your mileage may vary.

Voting Our Pocketbooks

Glenn Greenwald has tweeted a table from a recent PBS Marist poll and I was intrigued by the numbers.

Six years of the corporate media adopting as a core narrative the claim that the Trump-era GOP is full-on racist and "white nationalist," only for Latinos to say they prefer the GOP by 52-39%, and 41% of non-whites saying they intend to vote GOP in 2022.https://t.co/BgAC4pVH5b pic.twitter.com/SNGwzL33QR

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 29, 2022

You can find the poll pdf here.

As you can see from the tweet, college educated people and blacks tend to prefer Democrats. Latinos and whites tend to prefer Republicans.

I wonder if we are talking about race politics here, or just pure economic benefit.

Suppose that blacks and college-educated people vote Democrat because blacks benefit from racial quotas and educated people benefit from working in government education and bureaucracy.

Suppose that the non-college-educated and Latinos vote Republican because they are getting absolutely hammered by the double-whammy of COVID and Bidenflation?

Here area a few more numbers from rows just below the cutoff in the tweet.

Group	Sub-group	Dems	GOP
Race and Education	White - Non College Grad	33%	55%
	White - College Grad	51%	43%
Gender, Race, Education	Men - White - Non College Grad	28%	58%
	Men - White - College Grad	46%	48%
	Women - White - Non College Grad	37%	52%
	Women - White - College Grad	57%	38%
Generation	Gen Z/Millennials	45%	46%
	Gen X	41%	50%
	Baby Boomers	45%	48%
	Silent - Greatest	51%	39%

Now, when I look at those party preferences it seems to me that they are explained mostly by the moolah.

Men White Non College Grad? Doesn't get too much moolah from the gubmint. Women White College Grad? Probably working for government education or human welfare or in some sort of job where gubmint spending and/or regulation is intimately involved,

Now, I would say that the key thing about government moolah is that the wider -- and shallower -- you spread it the less that people appreciate it or get much out of it. So it's hard to really spread it out into the non-college crowd and really get them to appreciate it and really have it drive their vote for the big government party.

So, the most enthusiastic supporters of government are, of course, those who are getting the most out of it, whose income is totally, or mostly, from government.

Thus the most enthusiastic supporters of the Democrats are Blacks, Women College Graduates, and Silent - Greatest Social Security and Medicare recipients.

QED.