Is Google "Thinking Strategically?" I Doubt It

Yesterday I wrote about Google's suppression of the Claremont Institute as an example of foolishness. But Glenn Elmers at American Greatness sees a Google strategic vision at work.

A military mindset is at work behind Google’s action—which represents the censorship and propaganda agenda of the whole social media conglomerate...

Google’s claim that it had made a “mistake” is a transparent falsehood. They were testing the perimeter.

Well, maybe.

See, I don't think that Google really knows what it is doing. Actually, I don't believe that the identity politics Left really understands what it is doing.

I think that the Left is merely executing on the 150 year-old playbook invented by Marx. He ginned up the notion of smashing the bourgeoisie by riling up the working class. Today's left is merely executing on new plays to smash the bourgeoisie. Real original, guys and gals.

I explain that by reference to my reductive Three Peoples theory, where I propose that the whole game for the Left is to form an alliance between the People of the Creative Self with the People of the Subordinate Self against the People of the Responsible Self.

The People of the Subordinate Self are people that want someone else to solve their problems for them. And that is what the left proposes to do. For the workers: Yeah! It's the bosses' fault! For women: Yeah! It's the patriarchs' fault! For black: Yeah! It's the whites' fault! For gays: Yeah! It's the straights' fault!

And so on.

And it is all a lie, including "and" and "the." The workers? Hey, workers, you need your employer more that he needs you. Hey, women, you need a husband to keep the resources coming so you can care for your children. Hey, blacks, you need the modern economy that whites invented so you can take advantage of its blessings. Etc.

Now, it my view that we are now in the terminal stage of the left's 150-year war on the People of the Responsible Self. I think that the folks on the left are now dull routinists, trying to slot into the concepts that Marx invented and trying to give them one more college try.

So the young millennials operating the controls at Google's social media supervision control room? They are ignorant fools that are just doing what they have been carefully taught. And I think that goes all the way up the administrative chain to foolish women like YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.

Look: these tech billionaires have been doing tech. They have not been studying the classics, or the importance of Kant, or even the notion from lefty Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that

Enlightenment behaves toward things as dictators toward men.

I wrote all about it in "The Twilight of the Educated Gods" a while back.

These people do not really know what they are doing; they are just reciting what they have been carefully taught.

At least, that's what I think.

No, I think that everyone, up and down the lefty supply chain is just doing what they have been carefully taught, and really don't know what they are doing.

It's just like the world stumble-bumming into World War I: They were idiots: from Kaiser Wilhelm to sir Edward Grey.

I believe that the Googles and the Facebooks and the Twitters are just taking the easy way out, for now. They know that they need to keep the lefty activists and peaceful protesters down to a dull roar, so they supinely go with the flow.

Indeed, since all they have ever been carefully taught is some diluted and easily-digested leftism, they might even think they are doing the Lord's work by purging social media of the "far right," or whatever the pejorative term of art is this week.

But in my view they are fools and knaves, as the sequel will prove.

What Does Google-the-Censor Think It Is Doing?

In the growing catalog of tech deplatormings of ordinary conservative discourse, the late great deplatforming of the Claremont Institute by Google is merely ordinary in its mindlessness.

Claremont has been advertising to its supporter base

the danger to the republic posed by multiculturalism, identity politics and politically correct speech restrictions. Google decided that our writings violated the company’s policy on “race and ethnicity in personalized advertising” and prevented us from advertising to our own readers about our 40th-anniversary gala dinner this Saturday.

Well, now, after an article in the Wall Street Journal, Google has reversed its ban.

Google’s Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach got in touch with the Claremont Institute to notify us that the labeling of The American Mind as a “racially oriented publication” was a mistake. 

What is going on here?

I will tell you, based on my own experience with millennials in tech.

They know nothing! Except what they have been carefully taught, to hate and to fear, by their lefty teachers in school and their lefty instructors in university. They have absolutely anodyne opinions that conform eerily to New York Times conventional wisdom.

Correction. I was talking to a millennial yesterday who had actually taken some philosophy courses. He sounded like he had his head on straight. Or maybe he was just being nice to an old geezer.

So when these foolish, uneducated millennials are given jobs to moderate internet speech they have no understanding of politics except what they were carefully taught by their lefty instructors.

So of course, the uneducated millennials are outraged by a chap like James Damore that produces an anodyne essay on women in tech. How dare he? Really, how can any man produce stuff that goes against the narrative that they have been carefully taught? A la lanterne! As the French said during the revolution.

And of course the uneducated millennials are outraged by an outfit like Claremont that exists to challenge the lefty conventional wisdom, and particularly the lefty conventional wisdom on sex and race.

Because the whole point of the "education" they received from their lefty instructors from K thru grad school is to make them into ideological foot-soldiers for the lefty march through the institutions.

Just saying. The whole point of classical studies in the university, what they used to call "Greats" in Oxford and Cambridge in Limeyland, was to educate the scions of the ruling class in politics and philosophy and the Greek and Roman classic texts so that they knew all the angles of governance before they entered the political arena. The ruling class of that era knew that to merely indoctrinate their young scions of privilege in ruling class ideology wouldn't do the trick -- wouldn't keep the ruling class in power. The next generation had to know the ground. Of course, come the day they would know how to advance the agenda of the ruling class. That goes without saying. But they also knew how the world worked.

Now I believe that the purely ideological training -- what you might call ideological boot camp -- that the left propagates in the university and in the tech censorship bureaus -- is a strategic mistake.

See, I think the reason for free speech and the tolerance for crazies on the other side of the political spectrum is that if you censor and deplatform the opposition you are merely creating a head of rebellion that will eventually come and bite you.

That is the meaning of my maxim: there is not such thing as justice, only injustice. To put it another way, justice is merely the situation after the removal of an injustice. Until the next injustice comes along.

But the young millennial good little boys and good little girls at the tech censorship bureaus know nothing about that. Because all they know is the moral and ethical rightness of erasing all "hate speech" and racist sexist homophobic horror from the world. To make it a safe-space. As they were carefully taught.

And apparently it takes the intervention of a quasi-adult "Acting Director of Political and Stakeholder Outreach" to stop the millennial crazies in the tech censorship bureaus from their mindless Inquisitions and auto-da-fés before they get the tech parent into serious trouble.

But it shouldn't take an article in the Wall Street Journal to get the tech censorship bureau to curb its enthusiasm for ideological totalitarianism.

Unfortunately, it is getting to be pretty obvious that we are not going to put an end to this foolishness, these cadres of mindless millennial ideological shock troops, without a train wreck.

And that's a shame because it means that tons of people are going to go over the side before we get to right the ship of state.

And I think I may be finding a helpful angle on it from John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. He proposes an opposition between reason and Heroes. I think he means that the suppression of of human agency in the notion of reason, a flatland of calculation and logic, brings forth the egoistic Hero -- the Napoleon, the Marx, the Marcuse, the activist -- as its Hegelian antithesis.

And that is a bad thing, because in the land of myth that has been revived in the last 100 years by Jung and others, the Hero is supposed to be a sacrificial hero, who goes down into the underworld of the unconscious to learn about the borderland between Order and Chaos and only returns to the everyday world when he has become sadder and wiser.

It is clear to me that our peaceful protesters and activists are Egos that have not experienced the necessary descent into the underworld. And therefore they are monsters that threaten to destroy everything good and true.

Because they are dumb and stupid.

Poor China. It Is Stuck Playing Yesterday's Game

Hey, even the New York Times is publishing a piece that says President-for-life Xi of China has missed the point. "Xi Jinping Wanted Global Dominance. He Overshot."

Back in the day, even under Mao, China wanted a good relationship with the US. But Xi thought he could play superpower.

Mr. Xi has been aggressively hard-line. Under him, anti-American rhetoric has spread in official media. The Chinese government has been explicit about wanting to challenge the United States’s military presence in Asia. It has made aggressive moves toward Taiwan and in the South China Sea.

Then Xi has tried to "co-opt members of China’s vast diaspora, hoping to develop a network that will facilitate political infiltration into other countries and high-tech transfers out of them."

And now it looks like China will have to agree to a trade pact with the US that represents a loss of face to President Xi.

Then there is the attempt by Russia, China and some bit players to keep President Maduro in power in Venezuela. And your point is? To show the US that you can play the game?

Look, I get it. All these second division players have watched the US global hegemony over the past century and dearly want to play that game too. They want a navy like ours. They want to tell tin-pot dictators whether to come or go. They want to sit by the energy spigot and make a mint out of energy production.

'Cos that's what great powers do! Yay!

One little thing, fellahs. The whole idea of the US imperium was to push back at totalitarian players like Hitler and Stalin, and the tin-pot versions like Castro and Chávez, who didn't believe in a world of commercial reciprocity, but in political and imperial dominance and hegemony. Because equality.

But that was the old world, and that is the world that the left has been trying to revive for the last century in its Great Reaction: socialism as neo-slavery, welfare state as neo-feudalism, and identity politics as neo-tribalism.

Thing is: the military domination of land doesn't matter any more, not much. What matters are the monster 200,000 ton container ships plying their trade across the oceans of the world. Great nations are no longer interested in conquering and plundering their neighbors for riches and for slaves. Why? Because there is no money in it!

What good did it do for the Stalinists to conquer eastern Europe? It just made the eastern Europeans as poor as the Russians. What is the point of China colonizing Third World countries with unpayable Belt and Road debt? Because the West did it 150 years ago? And Robert McNamara did it with the World Bank 50 years ago?

And what good will it do to keep Maduro in power in Venezuela so the Venezuelans can starve a little more.

What is needed is for the great nations of the world to do what the men of the West did in the 19th century: trade the warrior's sword for the sportsman's trophy.

That's the remarkable thing about our age. Just when men stopped being combination peasants/medieval soldiers along came football and tennis and cricket. And basketball and baseball. So now men could compete for the honor of the city, and teach the guys in that other city with the lousy team a lesson.

And very delightful and harmless it is. Same goes for careers. What better use is there for male aggressiveness than to challenge your fellow corporate road warriors into a fight to the death -- for market share?

What is needed is for the natural competition between nations to be channeled into equally harmless pursuits. But what?

Well I have an idea. Remember the race to the moon? Yeah. That was a harmless way of channeling the Cold War into harmless pursuits.

I propose a global competition, A Race to Mars.

Which nation will be first to put a man on Mars? It goes without saying that the first nation to put a man on Mars has hair on its chest. Its people are clearly the wave of the future.

And all the rest are cry-babies.

Starting into "Voltaire's Bastards"

 I ran across a reference to Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul a week or so ago and thought I ought to read it. Now I'm about 70 pages in and the bastards seem to be "reason" and the "Hero."

This is comfortable for me because I have been influenced by the Jungian movement for which the "unconscious," the pre-rational, is the basis of human life -- even in an age of reason -- and the proper kind of hero is the sacrificial hero, living on the boundary between order and chaos and bringing an understanding of chaos to his fellow humans even at the cost of his own life.

That is not to say that reason is not a remarkable and beneficial tool for humans to understand the universe, and that heros -- Saul means the egoistical Hero like Napoleon and Hitler -- can't make a contribution to life.

But the point is to understand that reason takes you only so far, and does not answer the questions we really want to ask, which is the meaning of life the universe, and everything. Likewise, the hero is an equivocal human. His creativity can be a force for good or a force for evil. The wise and noble hero understands this, and it reluctant to impose his creations upon the world. The egotistical hero is bound and determined to show us the brilliance of his creations, even at the cost of millions of dead.

So then I thought that the combination of overweening reason and the Hero is the lefty activist. Empowered by his faith in reason -- actually the theology of progress -- our lefty friend confidently leads his "peaceful protest" against oppression and inequality, secure in the knowledge that he is pushing the world one step closer to its destiny as a realm of peace and justice.

But it is all really about him, the progressive Hero, and his Ego.

On the other hand, Saul has some curious notions, such as, writing in 1992, that we had been through a 20-year depression, masked only by credit expansion. OK. I'd say that more important were the tax-rate cuts and deregulations and de-feudalizing and de-unionizing of the economy under Reagan that launched the start-up age that continues to this hour.

But then Saul writes about Pascal Paoli, the leader of Corsica in the 20 years between its freedom from Genoa and its conquest by France. Napoleon Buonaparte was one of the young Corsican lords sent to France after the French invasion who, we may say, learned his Age of Reason lessons to a T.

Saul likes Washington, dislikes Hamilton, and likes Jefferson. But it's early days in a 600 page book.

NYT Writer: "Women Did Everything Right"

Back in the day I had a boss that complained about his underlings "going off at tangents." Instead of putting our shoulders to the wheel, and getting on with the job at hand, we would annoyingly engage with side issues. In software, of course, there is always the temptation to polish up the code and make it more elegant.

Of course, there is one little problem with polishing up code. You introduce new bugs into the code. Not good.

So now a good little girl at the New York Times is writing about a 35-year-old lawyer married to a 35-year-old lawyer that is now lawyering 21 hours a week and looking after the kids while hubby works insane hours, 60 hours a week. Says the headline "Women Did Everything Right: Then Work Got Greedy.'"

Then follows a thousand words of feminist conventional wisdom.

Let's put the whole thing in black and white.

The job of women -- human females -- is to put babies on the ground. Everything else is "going off at tangents."

The job of men is to protect a woman and her babies until the babies leave the nest. Everything else is "going off at tangents."

And boy, do we moderns go off at tangents these days. We do it, of course, because we are rich and can afford it.

What sort of tangents? Oh, women like the idea of careers. Men like the idea of a creative life. Women imagine themselves as politicians; men imagine easing off from work. Women like to fluff up their nests; men like to have hobbies. And both sexes are learning to mess about with sex.

All of this stuff is a distraction. Because if women don't have babies, then humans go extinct. If men don't protect their women and their children, then the little ones don't survive to adulthood.

If the last few days I have seen a couple articles about how the decline in religion goes hand in hand with decline in fertility. I wonder if humans need religion to keep them from going off at tangents?

I was talking with acquaintances the other day and one of us was talking about women and careers as if it was the default thing for women to do, and that to hinder a woman in this interfered with the whole meaning of her life.

I said nothing, because what can you say? Folks living in the liberal bubble have no idea. And they won't appreciate someone popping the bubble, especially a racist, sexist, homophobe like me.

I dare say it will all end with a movement of well-born women going back to religion and children and family.

Because even though we humans have a constant itch to go off at tangents, we still know in our heart of hearts what we should be doing.

Notice the headline "Women Did Everything Right." Does that not exactly align with my notion of the woman's Culture of Complaint? For the instinct in every woman is that if she does everything right then, of course, her life should be happy and perfect; and if it is not, someone is to blame.

Yes, Secularists Do Too Have Religion

Over at the Australian Claire Lehman's Quillette they are having a set to about whether secularism is a religion. John Staddon says they sorta do.

My argument is simple: religions have three characteristics: spiritual, mythical/historical, and moral. Secular humanism lacks the first two and is often quite critical of these aspects of religion.

See, I think that the secularists do too have the spiritual and the mythical/historical.

Oh sure, the secularists don't have a "god" but they certainly have sacred objects. Principally, the sacred object is the Victim. The point about the sacred is that it is beyond criticism, and analysis, at least not by you, chum. Now, you tell me that, for the Communists, the "worker" was not a sacred object. Or that the suffering woman is not a sacred object for the feminists, or the African slave for the blacks. Etc. In addition, the prophets of secularism have attained almost to the status of saints, as a first step towards identification with the immortal. Think Lenin's tomb. Or Mary Wollstonecraft. Or Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is not stretching things too far to suggest that the secularists worship The Victim.

And as for "mythical/historical!" The whole point of the secular left is to construct likely Three Stage stories about the Victims. Back in the day humans were innocent and equal. They lived, you might say, in a veritable Garden of Eden. But then came the Fall. Once innocent humans fell upon each other, stripped of their innocence, and became divided into Exploiters and Victims. Or Patriarchs and sex objects. Or Lords and Serfs. Or Masters and Slaves. Or Capitalists and Proletarians. But now, with the blessings of activism and the holy sacrament of peaceful protest there is dawning a new age that will save us from oppression and exploitation and we will enter into a new Eden of Heaven on Earth.

I am not making this up.

Of course, I come to this from an appreciation of chaps like Jung and Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson. They are saying that myth is universal, and just because we moderns say we have "grown" beyond religion doesn't mean that we aren't lying to ourselves. Jung, of course, was consciously trying to found a new religion, and for that got criticized by chaps like Richard Noll in The Jung Cult.

I believe that it is essential to establish that modern secular beliefs are religion in everything but name. There is a very good practical reason for this, that if modern secularism is a religion then the dicta of the Bill of Rights apply, that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." If secular cults are religions then they should not be privileged as science and should not have the power to deplatform people that disagree with their expressions of faith and their orthodoxies.

We can expect that our lefty friends will insist, to the last faggot on the auto-da-fé, that their systems and their ethics and their programs are not religious, no sir, not nohow.

Because under the current regime lefties hold a huge tactical advantage. Their ideas and proposals are noble "issues" and "settled science" rather than the crazed doctrines of a whacky religious cult.

If Not Progress, Then What?

After reading of the deplatforming of Polish intellectual Ryszard Legutko at Middlebury College I thought I should buy his book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.

Demon starts with the argument that both communism and liberal democracy have a progress theory of history: we are progressing towards a better world. Thus more communism, or more liberal democracy, equals more progress.

Obviously this doctrine is pretty reductive. How do you know, lefties?

Obviously, they don't. They have a religious faith, and their faith is faith in progress, as defined by them.

In fact, we all believe in some version of this faith, whether it is faith in economic growth, in more freedom, in more creativity, in more godliness.

In fact, returning as always to my reductive Three Peoples theory, we could say that the People of the Subordinate Self believe in progress towards a level playing field in which the government distributes free stuff more equally; the People of the Responsible Self believe in progress towards a world that rewards people that lead responsible lives obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules; the People of the Creative Self believe in progress towards better opportunities to live a creative life.

What do I believe in? I believe in a government that defends us from enemies foreign and domestic. I believe in social institutions such as churches, and civic associations in which we can develop our faith in the meaning of our lives.

The problem with the faith in progress is that it combines the need for safe spaces against invaders and robbers with the need to act according to a faith in the meaning of it all. "Progress" is, after all, a thing that armies do, as in advancing towards our inevitable victory.

There is a name for this sort of belief system that conflates the political and the moral: totalitarianism.

But, hey, everyone of us is tempted by the opportunity to use force to advance our notions of the just and true, and the meaning of life. There is, after all, no fixed, sure boundary between the need to repel boarders and the passion to elbow all the competing visions of the meaning of life to create breathing space for our own vision.

I suppose it comes down to drawing the line between "must haves" and "nice to haves." We must have protection against what I call existential perils. But not so much against things that would be nice to have, like bike paths that are separate from roads with cars on them.

But what about welfare for the poor? You could argue that it is a "must have" because it keeps the poor down in the ghetto and not peacefully protesting in the streets in what used to be called "bread riots." Or you could argue that it is better for our souls for each one of us to be engaged in relief of the poor instead of letting the government do it.

Here's a notion. Let us insist that nothing the government does relates to progress or the advancement of humanity. Let us merely say that government is there to protect us from existential perils, and it usually and probably forever will do the job badly. But as to progress, to the improvement of the race, to the question of justice, of enlightenment, of creating a better world, that is up to people in their voluntary social groups to work on. And it is up to each one of us to persuade other people to join our voluntary community, rather than force them by government edict or by naming and shaming.

Of course, the problem is that people instinctively know this, and so they cheat. They invent existential perils so that they can get the government to force each of us to enlist in the government's war on whatever: poverty, ignorance, climate change.

And as for curbing the naming and shaming: good luck with that, pal.