Tech in Bed with Left in Bed with Media

What do we do about Big Tech? Just today there are three stories, one about The New York Times getting Facebook data, and another about Amazon getting Facebook data and another about "Google knows where you sleep."

And who can forget Google helping the Obama and Clinton campaigns with big data?

You can see why Big Tech is in bed with the left. Nobody in government is bothering them about monopoly and trust-busting; the system is working. Imagine if the Big Tech titans were being vilified like the Robber Barons of the late 19th century!

Yes, why aren't the Big Tech titans in anti-trust trouble? In a way, their monopoly power is more problematic, because of "first mover advantage," where the first entrant in an industry gets the whole market to themselves.

Well, the reason is that, ever since the Microsoft anti-trust case, Big Tech has advanced a safely "woke" political profile. I don't think it necessarily reflects the genius of the tech titans. I think it is partly that most people in tech are reliably conventional in their politics, meaning that they never made waves in their youth and sensibly subordinated  themselves  to the left-liberal education establishment. Why change now? And there is the fact that challenging the liberal hegemony gets you into big trouble with the lefty activists.

But what do we do about it? Truth is: not a lot, not in the short term.

But in the long term, I believe, we will see a great secular and cultural movement against the left and its various Toadies. Because injustice.

That's the point of my maxim: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. People with political power abuse it, and the victims of their abuse get angry. Then they turn on their abusers.

That is what Donald Trump is all about, and Brexit and les gilets jaunes and all the rising populist movements. The leftist and globalist ruling class is committing injustice against ordinary people every day, but the rulers have no clue. Why would they? They have forbidden anyone from uttering a discouraging word, on pain of social media ban and deplatorming.

If I were Big Tech I would already be trimming my sails. But I suspect that our tech titans will need a bit of encouragement before they see the light. They are human all too human, after all.

Let Us Imagine a New Culture

Writing in National Review, Victor Davis Hanson takes on the demolition of the liberal arts in the university after the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point announced it was shuttering various majors in history and modern languages and art. Not really a demolition, more a suicide, he writes.

I think that I would rather think of the leftification of the university as an opportunity. After all, the lefties have demolished the majestic western canon, for sure, but nobody wants to study the vile totalitarian cult that they have erected on its ruins, where everything is reduced to a binary narrative of victims and oppressors. And so they have flubbed their opportunity to create a real flourishing culture to replace what they have demolished.

Now I think that the western canon has been in trouble for a while anyway, because it has failed to produce a saving religion for creative people. I think we need new religion, culture, philosophy here in the west, and I think that this refounding should be based on my reductive notion of the Three Peoples. The totalitarian culture of the left has foolishly and cruelly politicized and dogmatized politics into victims and oppressors, religion into ideological activism, and culture into a cramped space that makes the culture wars of the Puritans look like a walk in the park.

So, as marine General Chesty Puller said when surrounded, we got the lefties just where we want them.

If young people are abandoning liberal arts majors, so much the better.

But what will replace the liberal University? Well I think the answer is cults. I was reading alt-right Vox Day getting outraged about the cultish nature of the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. He is missing the point. Anything outside the ruling class and its seminaries can't really partake of the teacher/student binary. So the way that culture and religion work is by enthusiasm: prophets and their disciples.

Now I would say that enthusiastic Christianity is the right and proper enthusiasm for People of the Subordinate Self. I think that something like Jordan Peterson's enthusiastic responsibility is the right enthusiasm for People of the Responsible Self.

That leaves the People of the Creative Self. What should their enthusiasm be? Well, I think that Jung and Peterson have a lot to say there too. They argue that there is such a person as the sacrificial hero that acts on the border between Order and Chaos, bringing a boon to society. The key thing, I think, is the absence of power. Whatever the creative person does, it should be beyond power.

Today, our educated creative ruling class thinks that power, political power selflessly wielded by educated activists, is the answer. They are wrong, and until they learn to lose their faith in political power they will spread nothing but misery.

But we are creative too, and it up to us to teach the lefty creatives how to do it.

A Truth Table on Discrimination

A few days ago I read someone that illuminated the current situation on discrimination in the United States. Here, the government discriminates on the basis of race, sex, and sexual preference, but the people are forbidden to do so.

Now, obviously there are four possibilities here, between the government discriminating or not discriminating, and the people being allowed to discriminate or not discriminate.

There is the Jim Crow position, where the government discriminates on the basis of race, and the people are required  to discriminate on the basis of race or the KKK would want to know the reason why. (Yes,  that was the primary role of the KKK: not so much to lynch blacks but to intimidate whites into observing  the letter and the spirit of Jim Crow).

Then there is the Freedom position, where the government is forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race and sex, but the people are allowed to discriminate. Imagine living in a world like that!

Then there is the Original Civil Rights position, where government is forbidden to discriminate and individuals are also forbidden to discriminate. This is what got Barry Goldwater into hot water. He voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he objected to the requirement that private parties were forbidden to discriminate. After all, the whole point of being a free person is having the freedom to use your own judgment where other people are concerned. The Civil Rights Act lasted for about a couple of years until the beginning of Affirmative Action, under which government  was required to discriminate and businesses were encouraged to discriminate if they knew what was good for them -- or forget about government contracts and grants.

Then there is the official Current Position, in which government blatantly discriminates and encourages corporations to discriminate, but individuals may not discriminate. Of course the whole thing is covered with 1984-style lies, where discriminating in favor of liberal "little darlings" is called non-discrimination, and private individuals exercising their God-given rights of freedom are called racist, sexist bigots.

Finally, there is the Real Position, in which the government blatantly discriminates on the basis of whatever is the racist, sexist, -phobic issue du jour, and calls it bending the arc of history towards justice, and demands that all individuals discriminate on the basis of the current issue du jour or face deplatforming and social media banning. Really, this is the same at the Jim Crow Position, only then the mandatory discrimination was by whites against blacks, and now the mandatory discrimination is against white normals by everyone else, led by educated ruling class white liberals.

Do you know what I think? I think that there is a splendid opportunity out there for people to poke the ruling class and their bribed apologists, and tell them, again and again. that they are unjust bullies and bigots that are no better than the Jim Crow segregationists of happy memory. Maybe worse, because back in the day, George Orwell had not yet written 1984.

The Poverty of Power

I was talking to a woman about #MeToo and stuff a day or so ago, and it made me think.

What leads a chap like Harvey Weinstein to reduce sex with actresses to a quick dinner of champagne and caviar followed by a visit to his office and a quick jerk-off? In my sexual fantasies, sex with actresses would amount to a lot more than that.

The answer, I suppose is that Harvey's modus operandi reveals sex as a power obsession reduced to its essentials, when the beauty, the mystery of sex loses all her loveliness. In real life, sex is dressed up with love, and commitment, and a relationship, and children, God, and the whole cycle of life. But if you just want to get it on with the latest applicant for stardom, how much trouble is it worth? Do you do the dance of seduction? Do you wine and dine, and send gifts, and even write a poem or two? Do you visit the jeweler? Do you set your sex object up as your mistress? Do you abandon your wife? Your children? Well, Harvey baby has told us. It is worth champagne and caviar. It is worth an hour up in the office. But it is not worth taking the time for a seduction. So you get it off as though you were watching on-line porn.

Really, for a Harvey, all the extra stuff is not worth it; it has to be slam-bam, thank you ma'am. But you can't expect a nice middle-class girl to come up to the office and get it on in 30 minutes flat. Pretty middle-class girls just aren't trained up like that. They expect to be courted: that is why the hook-up culture requires its practitioners to load up on vodka before heading out for the evening. Middle-class girls need to blank out before hooking up.

Of course, next morning, or next month, they get angry. But that is another story.

So if Harvey is dealing with a nice middle-class girl that wants to be a star, then at least he gets to demonstrate his power by jerking off in front of her. And she probably has the sense to keep quiet. Until the day that #MeToo goes nuclear.

If power can ruin sex, what about the rest of the human experience? This is my point. If it is a bad thing for a Harvey Weinstein to wield sexual power over actresses, and everyone agrees that it is a shocking thing for employers to wield power over workers, then what about political power of politicians and activists over Americans?

The point about power and sex is that we can agree that the injection of power into sexual relationships is a bad thing that diminishes sex and diminishes people -- including both the powerful man like Harvey Weinstein and his various victims. And the point of power and employment is that it is not good for the employer to have all the power and his employee little or no power. Indeed, one of the developments of employment in the 20th century is that it is beneficial to the employer and to the bottom line not to bully his employees but to give them as much responsibility as possible.

So what about politics? Aye, there's the rub, for the woods are full of people convinced that the world waits upon the genius of their political power. But the truth is that political power, like any power, diminishes and dominates. It diminishes the potential of human cooperation; it makes people -- both the powerful and the powerless -- less than they could be, than they ought to be.

Look, this should be a slam dunk. The political regimes of the 20th century that most believed in the saving grace of political power were those of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. So, can we agree that extreme political power, that reduces the people to the status of slaves, is a bad thing?

What about the power of the administrative state and its entitlement programs? Can we not say that there must be a better way than comprehensive and mandatory programs of pensions, health care, and education, programs that dictate how people should save for retirement, how they should educate their children, must be less than optimal? And then there is the power to "deplatform" and prevent ideas from being discussed in the public square. There is the power to name and shame on social media. There is the power to brand people as racist, sexist homophobes.

Is it not true that the use of political power diminishes both the powerful that have the means to swing political power and the people without political power that are subordinated to the power of the powerful? Yet it seems that people are only opposed to political power when someone else is doing it to them.

I think that the next great step in human evolution is to reduce the power of politics and amp up the volume on cooperative relations between humans based on interpersonal trust and faith.

It may be, of course, that the development of blockchain may permit people that trust each other to interact by bypassing untrustworthy and unfaithful people. And especially the untrustworthy and unfaithful people that attempt to get their way with power. I wonder how that would turn out, for it would put additional power into the hands of the trustworthy and the faithful.

Or as Jordan B. Peterson says, the way to get on in the world is making yourself competent. Competent people are useful and beneficial, and people want to interact with them. It is a form of power, but a power that can be used  to help people.

Competence, trust, faith. Surely these can overcome the poverty of power.

It's the Power: Why Ruling Class Liberals Won't Let Us Alone

There used to be a joke about the British middle class requesting "no sex please, we're British."  I suppose the joke was that the married-with-children middle class that we associate with "the Fifties" was not looking to be titillated with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It  has other things on its mind.

You can see the wisdom of that attitude, 50 years after "the Sixties." What was the point of the sexual revolution, now that women are demanding safe spaces from any man and his patriarchal sexual harassment, now that drugs are now coming to mean the white working class dying of despair in the opioid crisis, and peculiarly sexless girl singers bump and grind their wailing songs in an advertisement of availability that is absolutely forbidden by #MeToo.

What the average middle-class American would like today would be "no politics please, we're normals." The promise of middle-class life, after all, is to live free of subordination to some scion of a ruling-class landowner, to be responsible and independent of his power, making your own way  in the city.

But the last two centuries has seen the rise of a new ruling class and a new politics, and a new subordination. Whereas the old ruling class just ruled over a subordinate peasantry that it both protected and exploited, the new ruling class reinvented politics by separating the protection and the exploitation. It would protect its selected classes of victims, "little darlings" that it determined to champion. It would exploit the middle-class bourgeoisie and use revenues from middle-class enterprise to buy the votes of its protected "little darlings."

Thus the middle class is subordinated to the new educated ruling class by constant ideological warfare that makes the middle class into, first, exploiters of workers, and now racist sexist homophobes whose bigotry must be named and shamed into oblivion.

The "little darlings," first the workers, and now women, minorities and the sexual experimenters of the  ruling class, are subordinated as the protected class championed and patronized by the educated ruling class.

If you are a middle-class normal you just want to live your life with a minimum of politics. You feel mildly prejudiced against racial minorities and aggressive feminists and sexual experimenters from a natural and healthy desire to trust only those likely to be trustworthy. 

On this strategy minorities and women would be co-opted bit by bit into the middle class and everyone would live happily ever after. But his obviously runs counter to the political agenda of the educated ruling class for whom living happily ever after is nothing to do with the case, because for the new ruling class the meaning of life, the universe, and everything depends on using ruling class political power to dominate society as every ruling class aims to do.

If you are in politics you need  to "raise awareness;" you need to mobilize your supporters. And you need to cast your political opponents as monsters and bigots. You cannot allow things to settle down and for everyone to just get along.

That is why, 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts, we are obsessed with racism. That is why, with women earning just about the same as men, we are obsessed with sexual harassment in the workplace. That is why, with gay marriage a fact, we must hunt down people that don't bang their heads on the ground in celebration of LGBT. Thus the Trump election "should be analyzed less in terms of what he offered as a candidate and more as a reflection of the public's surly mutinous mood."

Well, yes, per Suzanne Fields. The public would be "surly and mutinous" when the educated ruling class insists on poking and tormenting it with its "monomaniacal intensity of causes" that are all about  the political power of  the ruling class and nothing about the needs of the average middle-class normal.

So that's the state of play today. The  ruling class is obsessed with its political causes, and the middle class is surly and mutinous.

But only because the ruling class wants it that way.

Things May Not Work Out for the Dem Extremists

I know that we are all supposed to be terrified of the totalitarian left, in which nobody in America can say or do a thing out of line, or the liberal enforcers will getcha.

And I know we are supposed to be terrified of the liberal cunning plan to replace the current white majority with an immigrant horde that will vote Democrats into power forever.

I know that it’s all dreadful and terrifying, but I just think that the Democrats will find that their cunning plan will end up just like one of Baldrick’s cunning plans: too clever by half.

I suspect that the first problem with the liberals’ cunning plan is that it assumes that liberals are the ringmasters and all the American people are just trained circus animals completely under the ringmaster’s control. I doubt that the trained circus animals are quite as tame and conformable as the liberals think.

The second  problem I see with the liberals’ cunning plan is that I suspect that there isn’t enough money to keep their clients satisfied. The trouble with their politics-with-everything philosophy is that a  hierarchical patronage system needs a constantly increasing flow of money to reward the supporters. Last year’s handout is just taken for granted: what have you done for me lately? That is why liberals are now reduced to promising Medicare-For-All and free college tuition. These are staggeringly expensive programs and there is no money to pay for that kind of thing without incredibly increased taxes, and if liberals attempt to implement them they will probably experience the wave election of 2010 all over again.

Then there is the problem with the liberal pet projects like climate change and diversity and inclusion and deplatforming anyone that steps outside today’s liberal party line. Climate change is a program by the elite, of the elite, and for the elite, and if you are an ordinary person you just can’t see the point. But if you are an ordinary person you can see that your gas prices are up, you electricity prices are up, and jobs are hard to come by. Because you are an ordinary person you don’t really have a voice in the public square, not until the the whole thing reaches a tipping point and the yellow vests hit the street because they just can’t take it any more. Diversity and inclusion really only benefit liberals and the liberals’ latest little darlings. And anyone that is not terrified by the reign of terror and virtue of today's liberal Jacobins is probably bidding for a place on the liberal Committee of Public Safety.

In his Anatomy of Revolution Crane Brinton proposes that the Reign of Terror period in a revolutionary cycle is necessarily short and sharp. That’s because people cannot be wound up to an ideological ferment for too long. Ideological mobilization can only be temporary; at some point people just become exhausted and want to return to normal. On his view, a revolution begins with moderates, but is then taken over by the crazies when the moderates fail to change the world as promised in the revolutionary prospectus. But the crazies’ Reign of Terror eventually runs out of gas and the Thermidor period returns to a kind of normalcy, although not of course to the status quo ante.

The reason we are in this semi reign of terror is that moderate liberalism has not delivered the promised world of peace and justice. The moderates are forced to up their ante to keep the crazies from taking over the liberal project completely. And, of course, it only makes sense to purge all conservatives out of the academy and social media. That is how a reign of terror works.

The problem of a reign of terror is that in its rage for justice it commits the most appalling and monstrous injustices on an innocent population. That is what my maxim that “there is no such thing as justice, only injustice” is all about. Look at how this works in the so-called  “justice system.” The law courts only respond after a damage has been done, after a person has been victimized by a criminal, after a person has been damaged by a tort. But the legal system can never really deliver justice. It can only try to compensate the victim after the damage has been done. It can never return the victim to the moment before the damage was done.

And that is why I think that things will not turn out the way the liberals think, or that we normals fear. Our liberal friends are playing with fire, and that fire will end up consuming them. Of course, the fire may consume us normals first, before it turns on the liberals and consumes them. Fires are like that.

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going

Salena Zito defines the great divide in America as between the "placed" and the "placeless." By "placed" she means people that want to live and work and stay in their native city. By "placeless" she means the gifted and credentialed that can live and work and move to anywhere, and do.

Actually, I'd say that the great divide in America today is between the "favored" and the "unfavored." The "favored" are the educated elite and their "little darling" victims; the "unfavored" amounts to everyone else, the racist, sexist, homophobic normals.

This is not surprising. The whole point of politics is to reward your supporters with government revenue and favors, and screw everybody else. So the bigger government gets, and the more that outcomes are directed by government, the more you are going to get a "favored/unfavored" division in society.

But I want to challenge the idea of "place" as a good thing. The basic nature of humans is that we are nomads, happy to sojourn in a favored land for a while, but whose survival always depends on knowing when it is time to move on before it is too late.

This is personal for me because my father's family was caught in Russia in 1918 and got out alive, and my mother's family was stuck in Japan in 1940 and got out alive. Then my two parents were stuck in India at independence and got out to England in 1948. Now I live in Seattle; one daughter lives in Connecticut, and the other daughter in Britain.

So, on Zito's definition we are "placeless." Very well. But the point is that we got out in time. And so we continued to wive and thrive.

It is natural for ruling classes to sell the idea that the thing to do is to stay in one place and pay taxes. you see that attitude in Marx: "Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels." Yeah, Chuckie, baby!

In our time the left has encouraged the working class to believe that they could settle down in a place and get good jobs at good wages forever. So they did. And then the world moved on; the good jobs at good wages went away, and the "places" turned into ghost towns.

Was the white working class betrayed? Of course, but not by the corporations that hired and fired them, but by the lefties that sold the working class on the lie that they could work and prosper in one place forever.

The truth is that there is a name for people stuck in one place:  Slaves -- and their kissing cousins, the serfs -- are people that cannot leave their place, whether that place is a slave plantation or a communist utopia. Free men and women are free to get up and go, and they do, before it is too late.

It is nice to think that you can live in one place for generations in one place, but it is not really the way of the world. Something always changes, whether it is the weather, the king, the Mongols, the Nazis, ISIS, or the Communists. And you better be ready to get up and get out before it is too late.

That, after all, is the reality we are experiencing today. All over the world people in the less-favored locations are getting up and getting out of the "shithole countries" that they are living in. They want to get to non-shithole countries so they can wive and thrive. And because air transportation is so cheap, they actually can get up and leave.

Hey, maybe some lefties will even help them move if they agree to become poster children on the TV news for some lefty activist NGO. And that is the trouble with migrants; they seem to be easy marks for the left.

But the lesson of history is: don't be a mark. It doesn't matter what the priests tell you, or the politicians, or the real-estate salesmen. If things don't look good in the months and years ahead you'd better do something about it. If you want your genes to survive.

It's really cool that Donald Trump has arisen to Make America Great Again and give the white working class a chance to get out of the rut they were in. But nobody should think that Trump is going to save their bacon forever. The world moves on; it always has and it always will.

And you better be on board when the last train leaves the station.