O-Kay! "Investigating" is not "Spying"

Thank goodness former Attorney General Eric Holder has 'splained the whole procedure to me. See, when Attorney General Barr replied to a senator's question.

"I think spying did occur," Barr said during the explosive hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. "The question is whether it was adequately predicated. …Spying on a political campaign is a big deal."

No, no, no, tweeted Holder.

When there is a predicate, a legitimate basis, it's called "investigating" not "spying."

O-Kay. But it is amazing, is it not, that a whole wall full of Democrats erupted onto Twitter saying what a monstrous thing it was for Barr to talk about "spying."

Hey kids! Isn't that what intelligence agencies do for a living? Spy on people? In fact isn't the fact that we call them "intelligence agencies" just another Orwellian lie? Because what they do is spy on people. S-P-Y. With a capital S.

What the spy agencies are supposed to do is spy on the nation's potential enemies, so we have an idea about what said enemies are up to.

But there is always that little problem, sports fans, that a spy agency might get used for the partisan political interests of the party in power, or the general interest of the ruling class, rather than in the national security interest of the nation.

'Cos it's all so easy to imagine that your own particular interest is the interest of the nation, particularly when the candidate of the Other party has yellow hair.

Of course we have laws and regulations and procedures to prevent the improper use of national spy assets for partisan political purposes. But the truth is that the system is no better than the folks operating it. And if you have the worst ruling class in living memory, full of knaves, crooks and people that got their political education in Chicago...

The point is that, back in 2016, there was nobody that said: "hey, wait a minute guys! We are getting awfully close to spying on the Republicans with this surveillance! Maybe we should just send a word to Trump Tower, word to the wise, and all that, that some of their campaign chappies are getting a bit too close to the Russkies, and maybe they better be careful in case they get compromised." Maybe there was someone that tried to hit the alarm. If so, we deplorables would like to hear from him.

I mean, that is how people of good faith would act. Because we are all Americans, all in this together, right? And we don't want to flush our nation down the toilet, not even by accident.

Only that is not what the Obama spy guys did back in 2016. That is not what the FBI/DOJ did in the presidential transition. That is not what the Democrats and the media and the deep state did in the two years of the Russian Collusion inquiry.

No, instead it was pedal-to-the-metal hysteria that Trump was a traitor. And should be removed from office! Impeached! Imprisoned!

And now all the Democrats in unison are tweeting their outrage that Attorney General Barr should compromise himself with a remark about "spying."

Hey kids! I think it is a bit too late for that. You guys started this whole spying thing.

And the question that lingers in the minds of all patriotic Americans is: what in Sam Blazes was going on in the Obama administration that they were "investigating" peripheral figures around the Trump campaign? Because it sure looks to many of us that there was some dirty pool going on. Not quite cricket, old chap. What do we do about it? As the Mikado put it, so elegantly:

The billiard-sharp whom anyone catches
His doom’s extremely hard—
He’s made to dwell
In a dungeon cell
On a spot that’s always barred.
And there he plays extravagant matches
In fitless finger-stalls,
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue
And elliptical billiard balls.

It just seems to some of us nerds that there was something rotten in the State of Denmark, Obama administration version, and it might be a good idea to give a few bad apples in the Deep State a real going over -- kinda like the two year pursuit of Trump -- pour encourager les autres.

Nothing personal, you understand.

Imagining "No Left Left" in the US

Over at This Week, sorta-centrist Damon Linker is writing, after the Israeli elections, that "There is no left left in Israel." Says he:

Center-left social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years across the Western world. But nowhere has the collapse been more stunning than in Israel, whose founders and ruling class for the first 30 years of the country's existence were very deeply linked with the labor movement. Labor has been in retreat ever since the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians in 2000. But its showing on Tuesday was truly astonishing: With 5 percent of the vote, the Israeli Labor Party is now less than two percentage points away from failing to clear the minimum threshold (3.25 percent) for winning seats in the Knesset. The party is approaching the possibility of extinction.

Oh no! How could that be? Never mind.

[The left] exists now primarily in the minds of the right — as an existential threat, a sort of suicidal impulse toward surrender to Israel's many blood-thirsty enemies that must be resisted at all costs.

Sounds delicious to me, but what do I know?

But "It Can't Happen Here," to coin a phrase. Or could it?

Of course, it makes sense that "social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years" because, after all, the average voter is no longer a "woiker," of eternal memory. The average chap or chapette is an office worker, or a retail worker. He or she is no longer a factory worker that experiences the world in class terms. In fact today's average person probably owns a home -- in partnership, of course with the bank -- and a car and expects the kids to go to college.

So what? Well, I suspect that despite the effort of today's ruling class to panic us all into either climate crisis or intersectional crisis, the fact is that most people want a government that keeps the trains -- or rather the jobs -- on time, and the mortgages available and the SUVs on the dealer's lot.

On this view, the woke left in the academy and the media is a frantic effort to keep the old system going, and the more it seems like Trump is winning the more frantic the woke left gets.

Or what about the House Judiciary Committee hearings yesterday on “Hate Crimes and the Rise of White Nationalism." Huh? What is all this about? Maybe, as the Zman suggests, it is just

that our political class is simply consumed with rage to the point where they are defined by it. Who they are is entirely dependent upon how much they hate heritage America and native stock Americans.

There is the notion that, ever since World War II, the western elite has been obsessed with a "never again" attitude towards Nationalism. Because Hitler. And now the whole anti-nationalism culture is starting to break up. There is, after all, a "the Russians are coming" aspect to the ruling class marginalization of nationalism, as in "the fascists are coming." Really, you mean like those tiki-torch bearers of Charlottesville? The horror of peaceful protest Walmart-style?

Look, all politics is based on some version of "the Russians are coming." It might be "the capitalists are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants off the workers. It might be "the patriarchs are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants of women. It might be "the lynchers are coming" if you are trying to scare the pants off blacks.

The problem for our ruling class is that Trump has opened a pretty useful front with his Make America Great Again, where he is doing quite a good job of scaring the pants of us deplorables with "the illegals are coming," not to mention "the Chinese are coming" to take our jobs.

Hey what's yer problem ruling class? You've had a pretty good run with "the capitalists are coming" and "the racists are coming" and "the sexists are coming" and "the homophobes are coming." You think your game is going to last forever?

The point about all these political memes is "if it takes." If it takes, then you get to win the election and pass out the goodies to your supporters. If it doesn't take, then it is time for you to think again, and find some other meme to scare the pants off the voters.

But you can imagine that any ruling would get into a fine old rage when the good old memes don't seem to be working any more. How dare the peasants do a thing like that!

I always like to use the World War I notion of the next Big Push. That's how they represented the Battle of the Somme and Passchendaele. Quite so, chaps. Only they were bloody useless and stupid, the products of minds without a strategic vision. And they killed off a generation of young men. Anyway, what on Earth were the European nations doing having a Great War?  To do what, exactly?

Yeah. So these days our ruling class is obsessed with another Big Push to stamp out White Nationalism, or Hate Speech, or whatever. Because they don't have any better ideas.

But what, dear leaders, does White Nationalism and Hate Speech have to do with the concerns of the average person, who is probably more interested in jobs, the price of health care, and the ruinous cost of college?

Nothing, but politicians gotta politick, and what the ruling class has succeeded in doing, over the last century, has been dividing people first by class and then by race and gender.

Obviously that works until it doesn't work.

As I say, humans are tribal, and so politics is all about which tribes we are going to be this week. Tribes can be anything: nations, families, races, religions, language speakers. The only question is which tribal notion is going to win the election this week.

Now I would love a world in which there is no left left in the US. But, I have to say, there is no telling if the replacement will make me yearn for the good old days when lefties ranged across the Earth like the dear old dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs seem pretty cute to us moderns; but I wonder what life was like with those chaps romping around needlessly. It might very well have been nasty, brutish, and short.

You Want Conspiracy?

In a recent piece Victor Davis Hanson went through all the anti-Trump plots of the deep state -- "All the Progressive Plotters." So I think I should list them. Because. Because I want to get them straight in my mind.

1. "Green Party candidate Jill Stein... sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College."
2. "B-list Hollywood celebrities mobilized... to shame electors in Trump-won states into not voting for the president-elect during the official Electoral College balloting in December 2016."
3. "[M]ore than 60 Democratic House members voted to bring up Trump’s impeachment for vote. Trump had only been in office a few weeks."
4. "[C]elebrities and politicians hit social media and the airwaves to so demonize Trump that culturally it would become taboo even to voice prior support for the elected president.
5. "[D]uring the president’s first year in office, the Democrats and the media at various times sought to invoke the 25th Amendment, claiming Trump was so mentally or physically impaired that he was not able to carry out the duties of president. "
6. "200 congressional Democrats in late 2018 sued in federal court to remove President Trump, claiming he had violated the esoteric Emoluments Clause of the Constitution."
7. "[T]he ongoing “Resistance” both covertly and overtly sought ways to retard or destroy the Trump presidency—often by leaking presidential memos, conversations, and phone calls."
8. "Michael Avenatti reintroduced pornographic film star Stormy Daniels to the public [because] supposedly improper and now invalid non-disclosure agreement."
9. "[F]ederal law enforcement officials stormed the offices of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, in search of incriminating materials."
10. "Russian collusion hysteria continued to sweep the country. The moribund phony Steele dossier... was reignited by the media and progressive politicos after the firing of FBI director James Comey,"
11. "[C]ongressional committees and the left-wing mob next went after William Barr, Trump’s “hand-picked” attorney general... Barr’s crime was that he had followed the law to the letter."
12. "[C]ongressional committees mobilized to sue and force Trump to release at least six years of his private income tax records, elements of which already in bits and pieces had been leaked."

Just sayin'. Of course, Hanson leaves out Brennan's use of the intelligence community to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. Never mind, we will get back to that in good time.

Perhaps this little item tells us something about the whole procedure. That Donald Trump is now a survivor. He has been through political hell and lived to tell the tale. Dov Fischer, in The American Spectator told, back in January of his own experience as a survivor after three years of being attacked as a rabbi.

That vicious and despicable experience was so jarring, so disruptive to my core, my soul, and my essence — and also to my wife and my still-innocent then-adolescent son, both of whom personally were subjected directly to behavior that only G-d could punish — that I have not been the same person since... In short, the persecution and sustained three years of public efforts to destroy me — even to ruin my family — actually resulted in the opposite: they liberated me, and they persuaded me that there is no compromise with evil.

Then he goes on to list three other survivors: Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Donald Trump. As he says, after you have been through an experience like that, and are now a survivor, you learn to say about your tormentors: To heck with you.

And there is also the lesson of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. He describes the typical arc of a political/cultural revolution, from extravagant hope, to disappointment, to enraged determination in a reign of terror and virtue, to the dénouement in a "Thermidorean Reaction."

The reaction comes, he asserts, because you cannot keep everyone living at fever pitch forever. At some point the vast majority of people just want to get back to normal life: wiving and thriving and all that. That is something that the committed activist -- Puritan, Jacobin, Bolshevik, intersectionalist -- does not understand.

Just sayin'.

Hallpike: Human Tribalism is only 12,000 Years Old

I just finished C.R. Hallpike's book of essays On Primitive Society: and other forbidden topics. The essays are all about whacking other anthropologists over the head for a variety of sins, and asserting Hallpike's notion that we should apply Piaget's stage theory of cognitive development and Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development to primitive societies.

And his main assertion is that primitive societies -- meaning societies that are not states and do not yet have central governments -- usually do not operate beyond Piaget's Stage 2, the "pre-operational" stage.

Why? Because in hunter-gatherer and agricultural village life the "higher stages" aren't necessary. Hallpike proposes the notion that humans are lazy.

People do what is easiest or most attractive for them to do in the circumstances, and what is easiest to do is unlikely to be very efficient or even very sensible. It is easiest for most people to follow the crowd, to go on doing things in the same old way, to be lazy, gluttonous, and revengeful... Once people have devised something that works better than nothing, the natural temptation is to rest on one's laurels and go no further, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.(p.89)

Hallpike calls this the "survival of the mediocre." And I don't things have changed much on the mediocre front.

For people raised on the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" and the Great Reaction that insists on our right to be lazy, this is shocking. It means, by the way, that "primitive" people are not, necessarily, dumber than we are. In fact, Hallpike writes, young men from tribal villages in New Guinea go to mechanic school and become perfectly competent auto mechanics.

The point is that, since agriculture is probably no more than 15,000 years old, we humans are still genetically the same as hunter-gatherers, with the same intellectual horsepower. It's just that, in the old days, people didn't bother to exercise their full intellectual faculties. Because they didn't need to.

One of the things we didn't need to do was live according to what we think of as a moral sense. We are talking about guilt, the internal feeling of being in the wrong, versus shame, the horror of appearing wrong to our fellows. Let's set forth a table of values from Hallpike's book.

	Piaget/Kohlberg Stage 2	Piaget/Kohlberg Stage 3
What is right (p.370)	Following rules only when it is to my immediate advantage and need. Right is also what is fair, and what's an equal exchange, a deal, an agreement.	Living up to what people who are close to you or what people generally expect of you in your role as son, brother, friend, etc.
Reasons for doing right (p.378)	To serve one's own needs or interests in a world where you have to recognize that other people have interests too.	The need to be a good person in your eyes and those of others. Your caring for others. Belief in the implicit Golden Rule. Desire to maintain rules and authority which support stereotypical good behavior.

The point that Hallpike is making is that humans don't need to think about what someone else is thinking -- as in Stage 3 -- when they are living in an agricultural village. So they don't. But when they start living in bigger societies, then the whole question of hierarchy and self-conscious rules and feeling good about yourself -- the internal life -- become necessary for a functioning society.

And if we apply Hallpike's notion of the "survival of the average" notion then we have to take very seriously the idea that the development of the idea of being "a good person in your eyes and the those of others" became a necessary part of human society when real cities started appearing 3,000 years ago.

And here let us insert Nietzsche and his complaint about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves, whereas in the good old days we hated our enemies as we should. On Hallpike's theory I propose that the reason that the Axial Age religions came up with sin and salvation was because in the larger-scale societies of 3,000 years ago it was no longer OK for men to get mad with some other chap and whack him with a club. How do you stop the fellas from fisticuffs outside the tavern at night? Sin and guilt.

One other thing. I had always thought of "tribalism" as an instinctive thing that went way back into the mists of time. But Hallpike insists that hunter-gatherers are not tribal. Their groups are small enough that they don't really experience anything bigger than family. And when they get annoyed with each other they go their separate ways, and maybe join another band.

So if tribalism developed with the agricultural village, before the birth of the agricultural state, it means that all tribalism is what I call "fake tribalism." It is not an ancient and immemorial human instinct, but a new cultural adaption to the problems of living in villages of up to 3,000 people where you do not know everyone and everything about them. Tribalism as we understand it is not more than about 15,000 years old, pal.

Let us make the whole thing outrageous. Tribalism is like modern "branding;" it helps you know what to think about something without having to think. Oh that's a Honda: good solid Japanese engineering. Oh that's a Whatsit tribal member: one of them. And in fact that is the way we all live; we make snap judgments about everything all the time, unless a particular situation forces us to step back and rethink things.

This means that all tribes, from extended families to clans and feudal lords to cute little German princedoms to the modern tribalisms of class and race and nation, are all modern adaptations to the modern facts of living around a lot of people that you don't know, but with whom you have to interact anyway.

And capitalism does the same thing. We work in neo-tribes called corporations; we vote in neo-tribes called political parties; we get educations in neo-tribal universities complete with their tribal colors and mascots; we buy our preferred brands.

And then there is the tribiest tribe of all; the modern tribe of educated and evolved lefties and their activisms and intersectionalisms. Why do they do it? To differentiate themselves from the common herd, darling.

Liberals Don't Have In-group Bias. Are You Kidding?

Here's a puzzler, reported in his regular Friday piece by Christopher DeGroot. According to a study by GenForward at the University of Chicago, of the four major racial groups in the United States -- white, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians --  whites have the least "in-group bias" and white liberals the least in-group bias among whites.

Oh dear. Why do I have to 'splain everything to the fools of the world?

Whites have the least in-group bias because that is what we have been carefully taught by our liberal teachers and professors. And most people believe what they have been carefully taught in their dear little ear from year to year.

But to speak of white liberals having the least in-group bias of all misses the point. For liberals the "in-group" is not their racial identity. Or ethnic identity, or whatever we call it this week. For liberals their ïn-group" is their cultural and political identity. That's why the #WeBelieve signs went up in my rich liberal neighborhood after Trump's victory in 2016. And the You Are Welcome signs. And the Hate Has No Home Here signs. Talk about in-group identification! Educated liberals are the worst! That's why liberals ended years-long friendships with conservatives after Trump's victory.

Think of this: If liberals are so low on in-group bias how come no conservative can get a job at a liberal university?

The whole point of liberalism and leftism and the like is to provide religion and identity and the meaning of life to post-Christian educated people.

Unfortunately, religion is a curious human artifact. Reading H.R. Hallpike about primitive peoples it is clear that religion is and always has been crazy-cakes. I mean that people believe crazy things that completely misinterpret the world, but that the net cultural result of the crazy-cakes beliefs can still be beneficial to human social cooperation. Or not, as the case may be.

This explains why post-Christian religion has been complete crazy-cakes; it has been one crazy notion after another. Religions always are.

Think about it. First the Enlightenment that said everything should be understood as the operation of mechanical reason, or something. Then the Romantics said that can't be true, because that is not the way that humans, even Rationalists, actually live: whatabout Art? Then the Marxists mashed Reason and Romanticism in a apocalyptic combination of Reason and Rage that thoughtfully killed 100 million people in the next century. Then you have Freud imagining sons wanting to ravish their mothers. Really, Siggy? Speak for yourself! Or you have Jung mashing Freud and Romanticism together with all his personal unconscious and collective unconscious and individuation stuff. Then you have the cultural Marxism (don't you know that is a conspiracy theory now, according to Google?) proposing that meaning comes in our ethnic and gender identities. And so on.

Now I believe, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, that each of the three peoples properly believes in a different religion. The People of the Subordinate Self believe in a powerful god or gods that, if in a good mood, will shower them with benefits. The People of the Responsible Self believe in a God that sets up the world and tells them to get on with it, get out there and love one another, remembering that at the end of life there will be a spot of divine judgement. So watch it, pal!

Now all this religion so far is right and proper. The question is: what religion is right for the People of the Creative Self. Thus far, in the last century or so, our creative friends have gravitated towards a religion where the god-is-dead god has decided that the People of the Creative Self are the gods, the creative wonders of the world, and should be the wise and compassionate rulers of all the rest of us.

I believe that this religion of the People of the Creative Self is sick and wrong. I believe that the best word on religion for creative people was already written over a century ago by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra. According to Nietzsche the right an proper thing for a creative genius to do was to go up into a cave in the mountains. And when people started to show up and want to be devotees and cult members and creative worshipers the creative genius tells them to get lost.

Notice how my three religions notion understands "in-group bias." The People of the Subordinate Self are pretty tribal; they have strong in-group bias. That's OK, because that's how the humans of the village wived and thrived. The People of the Responsible Self are not that tribal. That's because they have been taught by Christianity and Judaism not to be so tribal. That's because Christianity and Judaism are religions of the city where in order to wive and thrive you have to trust the stranger -- providing he proves to be trustworthy: Trust but verify, as St. Ronaldo once said.

But the foolish People of the Creative Self think of themselves as gods; this is what happens after you decide that God is Dead. Now this is a curious thing: after deciding that God is Dead they have immediately determined that they are the new gods. But here is another curious thing. They have not decided, like the gods of the Axial Age, to set up the world, publish divine law from some convenient mountain, and then let humans get on with it. No. They are gone all the way back to the Homeric gods that were knee-deep in micro-managing human affairs 24-7. The neo-Homeric creatives have become obsessed micro-managers and have proposed one disastrous thing after another and sent their policemen out with billy-clubs and worse to enforce their tiny-little-minds wisdom. I call this movement the Great Reaction. These neo-Homeric gods have turned nations into slave plantations with their socialism; they have turned citizens into serfs with their welfare state; they have turned citizens into tribal members with their identity politics.

They are fools, knaves, and monsters.

And, they are the most obsessed with in-group bias. Because boy, they sure adhere to their own particular tribe, the tribe of educated progressives.

Today's K-thru-grad-school Sucks. But What Do We Do About It?

Polemicist Kurt Schlichter does a grand job today reaming out our government and elite education system. Says he: "The Admissions Scam is Another Reason to Destroy Academia as We Know It."

Well, yes, Kurt. But what do we do about it? You can't beat something with nothing, old chap.

Fortunately I have been thinking about this in my usual destructive free-spirit style. Because I certainly agree with Kurt that we should burn the whole thing down.

Now I think that the answer for K-12 is pretty simple. First, the little kiddies should all go to home school, run by the neighborhood mothers, and any neighborhood woman that doesn't kick in would be named and shamed in the usual way of the community of women down the ages, featuring the eternal complaint: "I can't believe she is so stuck up that she won't help out." We could have a government program -- or better a billionaire funded program -- to school the children of pre-literate parents. But every other mother should get with the program of educating their own kids, and get the hell out of their job in corporate HR.

Then, I think that we should re-introduce child labor. Really, what is worse: having a kid help around a business or sit still drugged to the nines, because ADHD, in a government child-custodial facility?

Oh and forget the minimum wage, which is Baldrick's cunning plan to make young people unemployable.

Anyway, after age 12, kids should be allowed to work full time. Period. Maybe they start with unpaid internships. But hey, if a kid doesn't have the sense to learn to be useful and to get paid for his labor after a few months, well...

Now, in my view, schooling for a lot of teenagers is a waste of time. For them we should have a comprehensive and mandatory apprenticeship scheme. Call it Apprenticeships For All. This should appeal to our liberal friends because it would be a way to force employers to provide free services to their employees, and it could be a wonderful source of investigative reporting on employers that scam their young employees by short-changing their education obligations.

For, back in the day, the indentures for an apprenticeship usually included an obligation for the employer to pay for education for the young apprentice. I dare say that this could be done by outsourcing to community colleges or even private apprenticeship schools -- modern day mechanics institutes -- or it could be just a computer in the back room at which a kid could take on-line courses, the way they do it at Wal-mart.

Personally, I think that the government should be forbidden to run schools, except for the armed services, because no government that I know of refuses the temptation of teaching the little kiddies ruling-class ideology.

But what about universities? Really, the technical subjects: science, engineering, medicine, law, ought to be free of the university system. Abraham Lincoln learned his law by clerking in a law office. And many employers seem to be eager to help their employees increase their knowledge and skills.

But, down the ages, the university has been a device for ruling classes to teach ruling-class ideology. and to teach the scions of the ruling class how to run the government and continue the blessed rule of the enlightened and the better sort. I think this is a bad idea in the long term because it creates a deep state that knows nothing except ruling-class ideology and so sets itself up for rebellion by the disaffected plebs. When you get rulers that have half a brain -- chaps like the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, Bismark, Lincoln, Thatcher, Reagan -- they rose to greatness by rising above the mundane and the ordinary ruling-class ideology.

So I would argue that no university should be allowed to teach ruling-class ideology, on pain of admitting 20,000 deplorables a year and paying them to attend. The only politics and philosophy that a university should be allowed to teach should be critiques of the current system.

This means, dear liberals, that no university should be allowed to teach "activism." Activism, we know, is a conceit that the obedient scions of the ruling class are in fact root-em toot-em revolutionaries. No, chum, they ain't. Just about every activist marchin' and protestin' today is a good little boy or good little girl doing exactly what they have been carefully taught by government-paid teachers in school. Real activists get put in jail for disturbing the peace, and when did you last see that happen to a lefty protester?

Can we do without schools? I don't know.

Reading C.R. Hallpike, I realize that literate human society needs a different way of raising children from the old days of pre-literate society. Says he:

Bruning suggests that the factors in childhood experience making for difference in cognitive development are, apart form literacy itself, the extent to which children are surrounded, as in a modern urban environment, by the works of man; the degree to which they are reared apart from the rest of the community and from which their schooling is in subject matter a separate world; the degree to which children have imparted to them the rules of their society verbally and explicitly by their parents instead of learning them by participating in social life[.]

 He reports that young children in primitive society rarely ask "why" of their parents. That is because "much of their learning occurs in real situations"  in a "normal environment" whereas our way of "instructing the young [is] based heavily on telling out of context rather than showing in context."

There is an interesting consideration here. On the one hand it is clear that modern raising of the young requires getting them out of the house so they can transcend the limitations of their parents. But on the other hand children away from their parents are vulnerable to the power agenda of teachers that may have nothing to do with the welfare and the interests of the child.

So how much of a child's education should be supervised by family and neighborhood, and how much by "a separate world" of e.g. teachers and classrooms?

I don't know, but I think we need to find out.

Great Reaction: Reparations is Neo-Vengeance

Because I am reading a book of essays about "primitive peoples," On Primitive Peoples: and other forbidden topics, by anthropologist C.R. Hallpike, I am experiencing the critical border between the world of pre-literate peoples and post-literate peoples.

And one of the critical differences is the emergence of law, meaning the disposition of interpersonal conflicts by means of courts and judges, rather than what I believe is called the lex talionis, or an eye for an eye, or, more prosaically, Vengeance. Hatfields and McCoys, and all that.

Now, I was also reading extracts from Frederic Bastiat the other day. And he was expatiating on the whole point of law: that it resolves disputes without the use of force. For, he repeats again and again, when you are talking about force you are talking about plunder. Says Walter E. Williams:

Bastiat observed that "when plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

Only, when you do that you do not have a legal system any more. You just have loot and plunder.

So when our Democratic friends running for President talk about "reparations" they are talking about plundering their fellow Americans in pursuit of vengeance for African Americans.

I am not going to go into the question of whether blacks are owed something, or whether it is impossible to determine who owes what to whom a century and a half after the freeing of the slaves, or even whether, since slavery was ubiquitous two hundred years ago it makes sense to draw a bright line between the villains and the victims today. No. I prefer simple-minded stuff.

So that is why I say: Reparations is neo-vengeance.

The point about the lex talionis is that there is no end to it. There is no end to the fight between the Hatfields and the McCoys until all the men on one side are dead. Right now I am reading the second novel in the By the Hands of Men series by Roy M. Griffis. He's writing about the Russian WWI nurse returning to Russia during the Red-White civil war. When a town is captured by the Reds the Cheka, the first iteration of the Soviet secret police, moves in next day and starts shooting all the bourgeoisie: you can tell who they are by their clothing and their soft hands. Teach 'em a lesson.

See why I say that the Left is a Great Reaction? What a grand idea, to wipe away the accretion of centuries of written law -- going back to Hammurabi or earlier -- and replace it with the good old ways of murder, rape and plunder. And Vengeance, because it is time someone taught those guys a lesson.

As I say, it is really not surprising that, in the aftermath of the most astonishing cultural revolution in human history and prehistory that a movement of rejection should appear: a Great Reaction.

For when I say that socialism is neo-slavery, that the welfare state is neo-feudalism, that identity politics is neo-tribalism, that activism is neo-knight-erranty, and now that reparations is neo-vengeance, it all connects. If you are trying to gussie up a political movement the obvious thing to do it to appeal to some instinct deep in what we now call the unconscious.

Slavery, you ask? Well, back in the day, 1,000 years ago, serfs could go to their lord, place their hands within his, and become slaves. Hey, what's not to like? You get three squares a day, or at least the promise thereof. And slaves, they tell me, do very little work.

Feudalism, you inquire? Well, it is clear that most of us are more comfortable working for wages for an established business than founding or going to work for a tech startup. What is a corporate employee but a gussied-up serf?

Tribalism, you ask? What else explains the multitudinous tribes in the leftist Coalition of the Fringes? Yes, you can organize humans into tribes every which way from Sunday, on any basis of affinity. Used to be that this affinity would be blood relationship, but even then it was possible to get adopted into a tribe as an honorary member. The point of the tribe, of course, is to have an implacable enemy. Thus all the neo-tribes of the left have frightful enemies that are about to commit hate crimes without number. Christian bakers, for example: better keep a sharp eye on those guys. But everyone has an enemy. The workers have the bosses. The feminists have the patriarchs. The blacks have the KKK. Of course, back in the day, we Americans had the Commies.

Knight-errantry? What else do you call the ruling-class-approved culture of activism, traveling the world on your faithful nag Rocinante in the search of the next helpless victim?

So what, you ask, is the point of all this?

Imagine you are talking to you liberal friend about the new crop of democratic socialist politicians. Suppose you say, well, this is all very well, but let's face it: socialism is nothing but neo-slavery.

You lefty friend will not really know how to respond to this. After all, nobody talks like this on MSNBC; nobody writes like this at The New Yorker.

Good point. So, you should get out more, lefty. You might learn something.

Then you add, just for an encore, that of course the whole leftist project is a return to the primitive culture of vengeance.