So. The FBI is Just Another Dysfunctional Bureaucracy

I have to admit that when I read Charles Dickens' account of the government's Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit I understood completely that many of the employees at that excellent government office would be Barnacles. Of course. The average bureaucrat will hang on like living death to his job and his pension. But I was not so sure about the other race of bureaucrats circumlocuting themselves about their bureaucratic offices: the Stiltstockings. What exactly did Dickens mean by that?

Today, thanks to the FBI and the Inspector General report on the FBI's handling of the Clinton Email Matter, I now understand. A Stiltstocking is the kind of person that would text the following.

Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support . . . 

The Stiltstockings are utterly unremarkable bureaucratic worms that think they are a cut above.  But they are not. They are Barnacles with attitude, bumbling idiots doing nothing in particular except sending each other memos and texts while banking their government checks every month.

And they are living proof of the law of bureaucracy, which progressively does less and less as the years pass until it is just working to ensure its survival and continuance. As Kimberly Strassel writes of the FBI:

A neutral arbiter has found they made a hash of the Clinton investigation, and it is reasonable to assume that those same players made a hash of the Trump probe.

 Of course the FBIers made a hash of things. That is what long-established bureaucracies do. They stumble and bumble around pretending to do serious work. But serious work means taking serious action, and serious action is dangerous: someone powerful might take exception to a serious action, and then what would happen to the Barnacle's job and pension?

Actually, you can't really fault the FBI Barnacles and Stiltstockings too much. What do you expect, given the clear message from the top during the Obama administration that the fix was in? On everything.

If Hillary Clinton had half a brain she would never have set up a private email server. Because suppose the Russkies found out about it; suppose its existence became public, etc.? What is the point of being Secretary of State if the Russkies are reading your emails before you do. If President Obama had half a brain he would have insisted: No Private Email Server in my administration, not no how. If Hillary Clinton had an ounce of honor she would have backed out of the presidential race when her private email server became public knowledge in 2015, because she would have understood what a huge liability such a scandal would be going into the election. Then she wouldn't have needed a weenie like James Comey to kick dust all over the FBI's pro-forma investigation of her private email server and "exonerate" her. Then the angry rank-and-file FBI agents wouldn't have stampeded James Comey into reopening the private email investigation just days before the election.

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is right. Did the FBI investigate Clinton's private email server? "Of course not." So therefore:

At the end of the day, the actions reviewed in this report helped Donald Trump win the election, not the other way around.

Right Chuck. So the right thing for Democrats to do would have been to insist that the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton follow the law and not try to stonewall and make excuses for an act -- transmitting classified material over an unsecured email system -- that would have put anyone else in jail.

It's like the House Bank Scandal of 1992. Your average smelly Walmart shopper may not understand high politics, but they do understand about Congresscritters bouncing checks without penalty.

Only you chaps aren't that smart, and aren't that honest, and generally you chaps can get away with it, because mainstream media.

Yeah. Mainstream media. You guys would be doing your side a real favor if you insisted on your side playing by the rules, and shaming it when it doesn't. If you had then your chap would likely be in the White House today instead of Donald Trump.

As usual, Shakespeare Scott has the last word:

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.

But look on the bright side. The intelligence community tried to wrong-foot Candidate Trump by colluding with the Clinton campaign to convert ordinary oppo. research into a government intelligence product and failed. The FBI tried to whitewash Hillary Clinton on the private email server and failed. Probably the Mueller investigation is going to fail as well.

Thank goodness all these Barnacles and Stiltstockings at the Circumlocution Office are all idiots. Otherwise this country would be in a world of hurt.

So back to the real question. Is Trump an idiot?

Probably, the answer is Yes. But not as much of an idiot as his political opponents and their bribed apologists in the Circumlocution Office and the media.

About That Inscrutable Chinese World Domination

Everybody is worried that the Chinese are going to take over the world. They are beating us hollow by making cheap knockoffs to sell in WalMart and they are stealing all our IP (intellectual property).

All true. And, of course they are also building a global transportation network in their Belt and Road initiative, and they are meddling in Africa.

In other words, China is copying the United States, the current global hegemon. Back in the day, the US had a high tariff policy to encourage local industry against those perfidious Brits. And the Brits, at least around 1800, had all kinds of laws to prevent textile industry technology, which they realized was the basis of their world power, from heading across the Channel or across the Atlantic.

And they may be right. Maybe the future is in a replication of the US ascendancy; maybe the future is in selling cheap manufactures to the US; maybe the future is in the exploitation of current intellectual inventions; maybe the future is in a transportation and trading network organized on the old tributary system of imperial China.

But I start from the position that people in politics are all idiots. I mean: what kind of idiots would have a war in Europe, twice in a century, that killed off the flower of its youth, not to mention liquidate the kulaks, the best farmers in Russia, and decimate the Jews, the smartest kids on the block? What kind of idiots would inflate their currencies so that today's dollars and pounds and whatnot are worth about 5% of their value in 1900? What kind of idiots would mew up 30-40 percent of national income in unaffordable middle-class entitlements?

My point is this. The story of the Miracle of the last 300 years, or if you prefer the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, is that nobody saw it coming. The key to understanding it, in my view, is successive waves of innovation by nobodies that the political elite was too stupid, or too late, to kill in their cradles: textiles, railways, electricity, oil, personal transportation, better living through quantum mechanics, IT.

Now. Do you think that a bunch of Chinese politicians and their hangers-on and their tame scientists have a clue what is coming down the pike, what staggering innovations are about to spring on us? If you do, I've got a bridge to sell you.

Look. I've been a computer guy all my working life. But do you think that I had a clue that today I would have a smartphone sitting beside me here that cost $129 with 16 Gb of memory, with an amazing camera, with all my music on a 64 gig micro card? When I was programming with punch-cards on a 16k IBM-1130 computer I assure you that I had no idea, no idea at all, what was coming.

By the way, do you know what the difference between 16 Gb and 16 Kb is? It is 9 orders of magnitude. In other words, my personal $129 smartphone has not 10 times or 100 times but 1,000,000,000 times more memory that the office $30,000 minicomputer of 1970.

My whole view is that we have entered an era, as Nietzsche says, of the transvaluation of all values. The old tribal culture of defending your patch of food-growing land is over. Because food-growing land doesn't matter any more. What matters are the crazy ideas in the heads of crazy kids and entrepreneurs.

Notice that China is still going down the old path, thinking that the key to the future is to control your trading network, control your people with a political hegemony, to take advantage of your trading partners, to steal other peoples' ideas.

Maybe they are right. But I doubt it.

Bond Bears Start to Worry

A couple of days ago the Wall Street Journal started to worry about the "inverted" yield curve. Go take a look.

What they are saying is that the recent interest rate increases have brought the 2-year Treasuries close to the 10-year Treasuries. Oh no!

So what is the current Treasury yield curve? I am glad you asked, because I am setting it up on my usgovernmentspending.com site.



This is called a "normal" yield curve. As you can see, the interest rate on a 1M -- or one month -- Treasury bill is less than, e.g., a 1Y -- or one year -- Treasury bill. In fact every longer maturity Treasury security has an interest rate higher than all the securities with a shorter maturity.

So everything looks fine. In that case what are the WSJ boys whining about? They are whining about this, the yield curve from late in 2006, at the very end of the 2000s expansion before the Great Crash of 2008.



That, my friends, is what an"inverted" yield curve looks like. In this case the short-term Treasury securities are yielding over 5 percent and the medium and long-term securities are yielding about 4.6 percent.

Why is this a problem? It is a problem because the business that almost all financial institutions are playing, banks especially, is to borrow short (i.e. checking accounts where depositors can remove money immediately) and to lend long (i.e., everything from car loans business loans to home mortgage loans).

When banks are borrowing at 5 percent and lending at 4.5 percent, then they are losing money. The result is a financial crisis.

Obviously we are not there yet, and the yield curve is still normal. But. The Federal Reserve is expected to be raising interest rates three or four times this year. That would bring short term rates from 2 percent to 3 percent. No doubt long-term rates would increase too.

The question is, how many interest rate hikes would it take before the short-term rates start to get bigger than the long-term rates.

That is the question.

But what do you care, if you have a mortgage already? You care because if you have to sell your home, the guy buying it will have to pay a much higher interest rate on his mortgage. And that will tend to lower the price that he can bid for your house.

For those of you with a yen for history, the current situation is similar to the late 1920s. President Coolidge, in association with his Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, lowered income tax rates again and again. It set off an amazing boom. In due course, of course, the Fed raised interest rates, and at some point, the stock market started retreating. Then the market crashed. And the political hacks at the Federal Reserve hesitated to act as lender of last resort when banks started failing.

Fast forward to 2008. In September 2008 Gentle Ben Bernanke hesitated to bail out Lehman Brothers. Then the Dow Jones Industrials started losing 500 points per day, every day.

I  wonder if current Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has the necessary cojones.

Just saying.

Seattle Liberals Meet Reality on Head Tax

All of you racist sexist homophobes that have been sneering at Seattle's head-tax-to-feed-the-homeless just had your wish.

Our tender-hearted super-woke super-activist City Council has decided to have an emergency session to repeal the tax. I guess that when over 40,000 people (in a city of 700,000) signed a petition for a referendum to repeal the tax the politicians finally got their necessary rendezvous with reality.

I coulda told them two weeks ago when I was signing the petition outside a Fred Meyer store in northwest Seattle. I was surprised by the ordinary people coming up to sign the petition, like the 30-ish woman saying "my dad has his own business." Who knew that there was anyone in Seattle that wasn't a fully woke good little liberal girl that had learned her racism-sexism-homophobia studies classes well at her $60,000 a year super-woke college?

How could this have happened? How could the Seattle ruling class so completely have misunderstood what is going on? I will tell you.

You can understand the whole thing from my maxim: "There is no such thing as justice, only injustice."

Of course, the homelessness crisis is nothing new. It tends to happen in the wake of any generational credit crash. After the Crash of 1929 there were Hoovervilles. After the big recession of 1980-81 our liberal friends loved to blame President Reagan for the homeless crisis. And now, unsurprisingly, we have a ton of people cast adrift by the Great Recession that began in the Crash of 2008.

Hey ruling class! Stop mucking about with the credit system!

But then, of course, in the aftermath of the crash, we have to Do Something to help the victims of the recession. It matters not, of course, that almost all crashes are due to government incompetence in running the credit system in the three centuries since the Dutch invented central banking.

The problem is this. Right now, the government in Seattle allows the homeless to break the law by camping under bridges and living in campers and motor homes on public streets. And it allows them to leave garbage around.

This is unjust. The City of Seattle does not allow me to camp on the streets or to leave trash out on the sidewalk. Oh no. The Trash Nazis and the #WeBelieve ladies will see to that!

Why on Earth doesn't the city government arrest the homeless and send them on their way? I'm glad you asked. It's because the courts and the federal government have decided that the homeless have rights. Wrote the Obama Justice Department:

When adequate shelter space exists, individuals have a choice about whether or not to sleep in public. However, when adequate shelter space does not exist, there is no meaningful distinction between the status of being homeless and the conduct of sleeping in public. Sleeping is a life-sustaining activity — i.e., it must occur at some time in some place. If a person literally has nowhere else to go, then enforcement of the anti-camping ordinance against that person criminalizes her for being homeless.

So there. And so the government of Seattle determined that some businesses in Seattle should be forced to pay for the costs of letting the homeless have their rights.

This is unjust. It means that some people are going to be forced to help the homeless while other people get off scot-free.

And thus the whirligig of liberalism brings in xir revenges.

Here is my idea of rights:

When an adequate bank balance exists, individuals have a choice about whether or not to pay their taxes. However when adequate funds do not exist...

It's pretty cute, isn't it. First the courts and the feds say that the homeless got their rights. Then the local governments are forced to let the homeless break the law. Then the local government feels itself obliged to tax the people to pay for the costs forced on them by their lordly masters in the federal courts and the federal government. Only of course they are bound to obey the First Law of Taxation:

Don't tax me,
Don't tax thee.
Tax that fellow behind the tree!

Notice that when liberals don't like what the feds are doing then they have the right to peacefully protest and form a #Resistance and Sanctuary Cities and I know not what and all the Fake News media supports them.

Hey, I know. Why don't the Seattle liberals declare themselves a Homeless-free City and defy the federal courts and the Justice Department. I mean. If it's OK to defy the federal government and refuse to hand over arrested illegal aliens to the feds, how come it's not OK to kick the homeless out of town, whatever the feds say?

That is why I say "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." Because the only way you get to declaring that some liberal little darling has rights is by trampling over the rights of somebody else.

This is not rocket science.

Now I believe that just as Harry Truman had  a sign on his desk: "the buck stops here," every politician and activist should have my maxim tattooed on their forearms for easy reference.

Government is force, and as soon as you start executing on any government program, or glorious human right, then someone else is going to have to pay for it.

That is why, in The Calculus of Consent James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, a Yank and a Brit, determined that the only just way for a legislature to vote a new program is by unanimous consent. Because unanimous consent forces the victorious majority to pay the costs of their glorious program that are imposed upon the reluctant minority. You might call justice. Or at least the absence of injustice.

On Darwin and Escape Hatches and the Will to Power

I am having a grand old time at the moment, reading Nietzsche down at the gym -- did you know that Nietzsche is a philosopher that makes jokes! Is that allowed? --  and a biography of the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein when at home. What a piece of work he was!

And then, on a regular bookstore run, I picked up a remaindered copy of dearly-departed Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech. Hmm. Do you know what I think? I think that Tom Wolfe stole Nietzsche’s writing style and updated it for us Boomers. Jokes in Serious Journalism? Check. Wacky italics and punctuation and overuse of em dashes? Check. Naughty sneers at establishment received wisdom? Check.

The Kingdom of Speech is a jolly old attack on Darwin and Chomsky, both establishment darlings that weren’t above using their establishment cred to marginalize good honest fieldworkers -- or “flycatchers”-- on evolution and linguistics, people like Wallace and Daniel Everett that, you know, actually did, like, fieldwork. Whatever. Plus, Wolfe innocently suggests, Evolution is an unverifiable Theory of Everything just as unverifiable as the current Big Bang Theory.

Hey, nothing wrong with that. Every human needs a Creation Myth, even Atheists and Physicists, although, as we know if The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is anything to go by, physicists demand an additional "rigorously defined area of doubt and uncertainty" that some might regard as unwarranted "physicist privilege." Now go check out the NYT tut-tutting review of Wolfe's book.

All this is to set up none other than our beloved Sarah Hoyt, who penned a blog entry “Escape Hatches” that reminded everyone that your current job ain’t forever. Everything is going down the toilet: publishing --yay! indie -- education, movies. Because online is going to eat them alive.

If you’re in an artistic or communication industry, or one of the subsidiaries, you’re going to get hit.
Keep awareness of what is happening at all times.  Learn what others in your field are experiencing.  Prepare an escape hatch.  Ideally, prepare several escape hatches.

One of the things that really annoys me about our modern world is the universal demand that “they” take care of us. I understand where this comes from: it is the job of the tribe or the feudal lord or the nation state to protect us from the neighboring tribe, the neighboring lord, and the Mongols. That is something a human cannot do for themselves but only by joining a collective and supporting its armed forces.

But then the left decided we had to take care of the working class, and then women and then blacks, making them into little darlings of the neo-feudalist state. Well, the white working class was dying of despair until Trump came along and I dare say that intersectional women aren’t far behind.

But hey kids! Feudalism bit the dust 500 years ago; slavery 150 years ago. Free labor is supposed to look after itself. If you expect “them” to take care of you then you are saying: back to the future of feudalism, and the glorious arc of history is just bending towards neo-feudalism instead of justice.

Here’s the payoff. If you are an independent sort, and you have prepared an escape hatch or two, then you can tell the deep state and the activists and The Man and the globalists to go take a hike.

In other words, there is nothing in this world quite like what the average mansplainer and his buddies like to call F-U money.

If a simple village girl from Portugal can get this, why not well-born special snowflakes? Or ghetto-hardened Bros? You guys don’t believe everything The Man (or more usually The Woman) tells you, surely? Presumably, as the average mansplainer likes to say, you weren't born yesterday.

But as for me, I have a dream. I have a dream that one day a president will get elected to teach the American people to limit their government to protecting the borders from the Mongols. And then teach the American people that, in return for the glorious protection they get from the Mongols and the amazing smartphones they can buy for $129.95 (Apple smartphones for the 1% slightly higher), they ought to take it on themselves to find something useful to do. As in a job. Realizing that jobs don't last for a lifetime.

But of course, this does not apply to people-who-through-no-fault-of-there-own... Well, actually it does. I'd much rather that the wives of billionaires -- I'm thinking of you Melinda Gates --  should be taking care of the people-who-through-no-fault-of-there-own than in foolish initiatives to make venture capitalism more diverse.

(A philosophical point. Women have a Culture of Complaint; men have a Culture of Insult, as we know. Here's another. Women are Foolish; Men are Stupid. If you are not sure what that means, join the club. Neither am I. No wait! Foolishness is doing something stupid after talking it over with all your friends. Stupidity is doing something stupid without telling anyone.)

But what, you might say, does Nietzsche have to do with all this? Honestly, I don't know. The guy with the soup-strainer mustache wrote that asceticism is the way we modern humans deal with the fact that our instinct for cruelty is no longer appropriate for your usual dawn raid on the neighboring village. Or for the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. Maybe I'll be able to tell when I've finished The Genealogy of Morals. But maybe not. Because as I see it, the question is: what does Nietzsche really mean by his "will to power." And I haven't got there yet.

Suppose the chatty chappie never does explain himself?

On Failing to Rewrite My "Three Peoples" in the Light of Lefty "Privilege" Notions

Yesterday I picked up a used copy of Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech. Oh what a naughty boy! He is playing his "Radical Chic" game with Darwin and Chomsky, suggesting ever so gently that there is a lot of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories in the work of Darwin. In other words Darwin in The Origin of Species was writing a "cosmogony," a creation story. That doesn't have much to do with science.

Of course, all these creation stories have a point to make: how we got here, and how God -- or History -- favored us in his grand plan because we are so cool, not to mention how we struggled for ages against the Pharaohs or the Romans or the Mongol hordes or the slave-owners or the patriarchy.

And that got me to thinking. How would I write my reductive Three Peoples theory, which is an attempt to show how cool and noble is the responsible middle class and how unjust and deluded are our liberal masters, if I were a liberal?

Big Problem.

So I started by Googling "white privilege" and "male privilege." These terms, I discovered, were coined by Peggy McIntosh, née Margaret Vance Means, in a 1988 piece: "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies."

McIntosh's idea is that males and whites are running around in a world that was built for them and theirs. In other words all the cultural assumptions, the "taken for granteds" all assume that white males are the default model for life in the public sphere. You can see that this is a natural reaction of a lefty to the post-civil-rights era. The world is not immediately leveled by a laser-controlled so that the road ahead as a feminist lefty college teacher is faces a bunch of bumps and berms.

Cue George Simmel who wrote a century ago that the public sphere was created by men for men, and that the emergence of women into the public square would necessarily result in its transformation to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

Or to use my Culture of Complaint model, women like Peggy McIntosh are running around writing that "I can't believe the way the culture assumes the white male cultural norms!"

In other words, the removal of legal barriers to women and minorities doesn't immediately change the world to suit women and minority sensibilities.

Or, more to the point, the Civil Rights Acts don't clear the road for the Peggy McIntoshs of the world  to immediately cruise through an academic career like an unconcerned seagull.

So the trouble for me is that it would be hard to put the superficial discovery by Peggy McIntosh in 1988 that live is hard into a Just So Story.

But I tell you. If white privilege and male privilege are unearned cultural advantages from being white and male, like:

My odds of being hired for a job, when competing against female applicants, are probably skewed in my favor. The more prestigious the job, the larger the odds are skewed.

Then what about the cultural advantages of "liberal privilege."

1. I am much less likely to be suspended on Twitter.
2. I can confidently complain about Trump when encountering a neighbor in the street.
3. I can have an academic career.
4. I am less likely to get fired for a drug-fueled bigoted remark.
5. I am confident that my choice of an electric car advertises my virtue to the world.
6. I am less likely to get fired from Google.
7. I get to live in a yeasty gentrifying neighborhood and everyone at the artisanal coffee shop agrees with me.

Yes. What a privileged world it is for liberals.

Actually, as a newly turbocharged -- I wonder why -- Kevin D. Williamson writes, politics, media, comedy is all about status, "status-jockeying and status monkeying."

[Tyler] Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.” [my bold]

So that is the game of Peggy McIntosh and all the intersectional feminists and racists. It is not enough to have civil rights in law. What is needed is to lower non-feminist non-minority status. And serve 'em right!

Of course, you might say that this is pretty harmless in unmediated person-to-person games of status. And I would agree.

But that is not what the liberals are doing. Instead they are weaponizing the law to enforce their cultural agenda on "whites" and "males."

There is a word for using the government to enforce your cultural supremacy. It is called "injustice." Hello President Trump.

My Critique of the Left. Again.

Once Upon a Time humans lived in Hell. Exploited and oppressed by earls and barons and growing grain to fund the martial adventures of their lords for whom they worked the land, they were subjected to the droit de seigneur of their masters, and subsisted on slave food, nutritionally deficient wheat and maize, instead of the delicious fatty meats enjoyed by their hunter-gatherer ancestors.

And then things got even worse as absolute monarchs learned how to play the power game without the private armies of the their lords. The monarchs taxed trade and they funded their empires with credit from merchants and bankers. So the earls and barons kicked their peasant-soldiers off the land, learned how to "improve" their estates and get rich, and live it up in capital cities as courtiers in grand houses illuminated by thousands of candles.

Then along came the bourgeoisie and invented the modern market economy. These nobodies created a book industry to allow folk to read holy scripture for the first time in history; created a machine textile industry that provided cheap clothes for the masses for the first time in history; they invented steam transportation that allowed the poor to travel around needlessly for the first time in history; they invented oil for lamps that allowed cheap non-explosive domestic illumination for the first time in history. And that was just the beginning.

Oddly, the sons of the bourgeoisie were deeply alarmed by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Karl Marx, son of a lawyer, and Friedrich Engels, son of a textile baron, saw that the world of their fathers was a cruel and exploitative culture that would lead to the extinction, or at least "immiseration" of the proletarian workers, and that the capitalists would displace the feudal lords at the seat of power and would treat the workers exactly as the feudal lords had treated their peasants.

These noble souls would lead the workers in a glorious revolution against their bourgeois fathers and everyone would live happily ever after.

Only the cruel bourgeoisie woke up to the grievances of the workers and gave them the vote.

Now the workers were inside the system. So no need for revolution.

But the scions of the bourgeoisie still wanted to be relevant so they proposed to replace the mutual-aid societies of the middle class and off-load the welfare services of the workers' labor unions and have the whole thing provided by government bureaucracy, run by educated scions of the bourgeoisie like them. This brilliant plan now costs something like 35-40 percent of the income of ordinary people, and might be regarded as a kind of neo-feudalism with educated bureaucratic professionals taking the parts of the old feudal lords.

So the new feudal lords would not be the bourgeois capitalists, but the soft sons and daughters expensively educated at universities that used to educate the third sons of the aristocracy for the priesthood.

After it turned out that the workers were not going to follow their betters into revolution, and showed themselves as patriotic citizens of nation states in the last hurrah of the old monarchical order in 1914-18, the followers of Marx realized that a class-based warrant for revolution wasn't going to cut it. So they bent their revolutionary sails on new spars, leading traditionally marginalized minorities and women out into an ocean of unjust racist and sexist white male patriarchy.

Good point, said the middle class. Let's give women the vote and minorities civil rights, and let them join the Great Enrichment.

So now women and minorities were inside the system. So no need for revolution.

Oh yeah, said the well-born activists, what about gays! OK, let's give them gay marriage.

Oh  yeah, said the well-born activists, what about Christian bakers that won't bake cakes for gay weddings? And what about illegal immigrants, the homeless, Islamophobia, and climate change?

You can see the point. The well-born leftist culture requires, for its oxygen, the existence of helpless victims outside the system for whom the threat of violence is the only way to get the attention of the "system." And who is to lead these helpless victims but the "woke" sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie? And yet time and again, the "system" responds to the demands of the marginalized, removing the need for the activists and their activism.

A visitor from another planet might consider that, all things considered, the human middle class is not that interested in political power and will listen to any reasonable appeal for a redress of grievances. Unlike our lefty friends that want to shut up and humiliate anyone that raises a peep against their agenda.

In The Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche argues that asceticism is the natural human response to the end of the old world where noble heroes actually enjoyed visiting the most frightful cruelties on their defeated enemies. After the pacification of the world the appetite for cruelty had to find an outlet, and in the event the appetite was turned from the enemy without to the enemy within -- literally to visit cruelty on our own bodies.

Perhaps we can understand our lefty friends in a similar analysis. The essence of manliness is to go out and conquer the world. But what if you are a soft and expensively educated scion of wealth, ill-suited to the rough and tumble of the route of march and the military campaign, or even the mildly chaotic world of the business startup and the third round of financing?  What do you do then? Why, you set out to conquer the inner world, the ordinary people of the nation state going about their ordinary business of wiving and thriving, putting yourself at the head of an army of the dispossessed that have been cruelly insulted by the bigotry of the ordinary people that are too busy wiving and thriving to pay attention to the Real Issues.

Cervantes deliciously satirized the end of the warrior culture with Don Quixote. Where is the modern genius to satirize our present lefty activists into incoherence?

Oh wait. His name was Tom Wolfe, and our liberal friends still don't realize what he did to them.

Anyway, one day the heir to Tom Wolfe showed up, wrote a satire of liberalism so clever and biting that liberals all curled up into a ball of embarrassment and promised never to do activism ever again.

And so the deplorables all lived happily ever after.