Usually the Pessimists Are Right

Our age is an Age of Progress. We all live in the confident hope that things are getting better. But, as Nicholas Phillips argues in "The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism," progress is the rare moment of calm after a storm of failure. Great products do not appear by magic; they are the net result of many failed experiments.

Ninety percent of startups and 70 percent of small businesses fail. Just 56 percent of patent applications are granted, and over 90 percent of those patents never make any money. Each year, 30,000 new consumer products are brought to market, and 95 percent of them fail.

Actually, we should rather say that we humans are the complete slaves of prophecy. We are either predicting the End of the World, or the Beginning of the Millennium. In fact, what really happens is that we muddle through, with "we" being the survivors. What happened to the failed businesses, the 95 percent of new consumer products? The soldiers of the defeated empire? They disappear into the void.

What is interesting, I have come to believe in the last few weeks, is "disconfirmation." What happens as you are running a business startup and the numbers just aren't adding up? Initially, you redouble you efforts. What happens if you are predicting runaway global warming and the global temperature readings fail to confirm the predictions of your climate models? Initially, you damn all doubters to hell as "climate deniers."

But at some point...

I think that is the way to understand our liberal and lefty friends. They have been taught, from an early age, to believe in the progressive arc of history, that their political ideas -- all of them -- would inevitably lead to a just and peaceful society. But of course they haven't, for that is not the way of the world. It may be, indeed, that hidden in the pile of lefty doctrine is a good idea that will save the world. But probably, if we apply the lesson of "70 percent of small businesses fail," it is likely that there is only a small chance that leftism will really redeem the world.

Probably, the real outcome will be that a couple of lefty ideas get to be permanent and the rest of its ideology gets thrown out and forgotten. After a bloody and vengeful transition.

But meanwhile our lefty friends are living in the throes of "disconfirmation." The workers aren't living happily ever after, despite a century of the welfare state. Women aren't happy campers, despite the vote and abortion and the sexual revolution and careers. Blacks aren't vaulting into the middle class, despite a half-century of quotas and preferences since the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. And now Trump.

What would you do if you were a lefty? It's easy for a conservative to say that the only sensible thing to do is "give it up, lefty." But, according to the notion of prophecy, people don't give up on their cherished beliefs. Not yet. And so our lefty friends are running around blaming Russia and "hate" and "extremism" and racism, sexism, homophobia and every other -ism and -phobia they can think of.

And of course they are covering their ears, shouting I can't hear you, and deplatforming people they don't like. Of course they are. That is what humans do when things start going wrong.

The one thing they are not ready to do is give it up. And they are right not to. After all, when you don't succeed, try, try again. And so urges every prophet, every startup CEO, every general exhorting his troops, every hopeful inventor.

But if you redouble your efforts, and borrow more money to get across the finish line, and finally send the Old Guard against the British squares at the Battle of Waterloo, and then you lose, the failure is complete and all hopes die in the maelstrom of defeat.

Notice that all the old rules, about not using police power to spy on the opponent's campaign, about conceding elections, about not gaming the voting system, about avoiding insults, are all devices to keep the natural human prophetic and conspiratorial instincts in check. Because the prophetic style ends in witch hunts and Inquisitions and massacres, and we don't want that.

Easy for you to say.

Always Celebrate Our Soldiers on D-Day

Rule One for me is always celebrate the soldiers that we sent into our wars. So President Trump exactly hit the spot in Portsmouth and in Normandy when he eulogized the brave men that did their bit in that remarkable seaborne invasion.

Doesn't matter if they were conscripts or volunteers, men or women, black or white, good or bad. We honor our veterans and we especially honor the fallen.

But what gets obscured in the celebration of the ordinary soldier and his extraordinary sacrifice is the bigger question. How come you ruling-class geniuses screwed up?

We elect and then put up with political leaders because we need them to keep us safe. So, whenever there is a war, especially in the modern era, it is because the leaders screwed up.

How come World War I? If the Brit and French leaders had an ounce of sense they would have accommodated the rise of Germany without a stupid bloody war.

How come World War II? If the Allies hadn't humiliated and plundered Germany, and if the US Federal Reserve hadn't blundered in 1929-33 in its first outing as "lender of last resort" then the Germans would never have turned to an Adolf Hitler.

Like I say. Hitler -- and Literally-Hitler in his various GOP incarnations -- is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have failed. And do they ever!

Hey kids! Notice that Germany is now the hegemon of Europe, with France as its comical sidekick, for "there is no slander in an allowed fool." So what were all those wars about? We could have had Germany as the hegemon in 1920 and there is no telling what the Germans might have invented after Kantian and Nietzschean philosophy, modern chemistry, relativity, and quantum mechanics. And don't forget Wagner, the guy that invented movie music.

We properly remember those brave Americans that gave their youth, and often their lives, to the nation's wars. But I also want to remember the millions of others that suffered and died. The millions of poor bloody Germans. The tens of millions of poor bloody Russians. The millions of Jews.

Because all the ordinary people, good, bad and ugly, anywhere, have no option. They get swept up into the power projects of their leaders and they are the ones that suffer and die.

And if they die, it is curtains, the snuffing out of all that might have been.

AirPods, EarPods: Can You Spell Privilege?

Up until a month or two ago, I had no idea about the modern world, that you are nobody unless you have AirPods, those skinny white Bluetooth earbuds from Apple that seem to cost about $139.99 on Amazon. And that say so much about you and your impeccable taste.

As opposed to earbuds for ordinary mortals that seem to range from $19.99 to $49.99. Really! I had no idea.

And then yesterday I was driving in Seattle's yeasty Capitol Hill, where all the gays and lesbians hang out -- and the millennial wannabees wearing artistical black. And there was this guy, wearing an artistical black tee-shirt with "Equality." in big letters across the front.

And guess what! This young man, mad for Equality, was wearing AirPods. (Or maybe he was wearing fake AirPods. You never know.)

I almost rolled down the window to shout "Hey, pal. AirPods have nothing to do with Equality."

Now I like to say to all my liberal friends that Only Use Apple, that I know my place, and that Apple is Not for the Likes of Me.

Because the whole point of Apple, whether iPhones or MacBook Airs -- which have those discreet illuminated Apple logos on the back -- or Apple TV, is that You Can't Afford It.

$1,000 for an iPhone? How about $200 for my Moto 6?

$1,000 for a MacBook Air? How about $139.99 for my Dell Chromebook?

$200 for an Apple TV? How about Amazon's Fire Stick which was $50 and has just dropped to $27 "which is completely unheard of."

$1,000 for an iMac? How about $115 for a refurbished Windows PC?

And now some babe has written a girly article in The Atlantic about "Airpods and the Case for Constant Wear" in case some guy ejaculates in front of you on the subway. It seems that the white Beckies are using their AirPods to avoid interacting with the POCs. Who Knew?

I know. My thought exactly. Talk about White Privilege, darling. You Beckies have No Idea. None.

But the most delicious thing is that these liberal snobs have No Idea what utter snobs and shallow conventional-wisdom repeater stations they are. They think they are the Special People on the cutting edge. Why, all the best people think like them.

Really, all this is good. It shows that our liberals friends have No Idea.

But we already knew that.

Hmm. I just checked on the Apple site. AirPods are $159 with the regular charging case and $199 with the wireless charging case.  Who knew?

OK, I know. There is such a thing as Reverse Snobbery. To tell the world that you are not one of the Special People that wear all the right brands, but an even more Special Person that takes care not to wear all the right brands..

But that is another story.

How Do We Push Back: Left, China, Germany?

I just saw a piece by Victor Davis Hanson, basically arguing that Germany was up to its old tricks. He quotes Angela Merkel:

She insisted that Germany views the democratic United States as not much different from autocratic Russia and Communist China: Urging Europe to present a united front in the face of Russia, China, and the U.S., she said, “They are forcing us, time and again, to find common positions.” And Merkel concluded that therefore Germany must find “political power” commensurate with its economic clout to forge a new independent European path.

Or China. Stephen Hayward wonders whether the cool way to stop China would be to ban its students from US universities, rather than by tariff wars. This would also hit elite Chinese who like to get capital out of China by getting their student children to buy expensive houses and cars in the US. Oh, and

This would have the added bonus of depriving many liberal universities of revenue, since they love Chinese students because they pay the full tuition sticker price.

 And what about the left? Funny, isn't it, how the left is everlastingly peaceful protesting all and sundry -- right now Trump in the UK -- yet yells "hate" and "white supremacy" when some rightist nobodies march with tiki torches around the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville.

Hey, lefties! How come you guys get to have "mostly peaceful protests" but the white nationalists are always rioting?

See today we are celebrating the 77th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, which the US won due to staggering luck and staggering initiative from a couple of flight leaders. And also the 75th anniversary of D-Day. And the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres. But I argue that the way to deal with today's frenemies like Germany and China probably should not include actual armed conflict.

Why? My argument is that the good old days of conquest, loot, and plunder are over, because laying waste to Germany and China doesn't help us. We can't loot the only thing that matters, which is the "intangible capital" in those countries, the capital that exists between the ears of the German and the Chinese people.

And the same thing applies to our frenemies here at home. Some people are proposing to end universities as we know them. Then there is the question of what to do about abortion. And really, what is the point of looting the market economy of 35 percent of GDP to fund old-age pensions and health care, something that average people should be doing for themselves? OK. But how do we push back against the lefty idiots?

Honestly, I don't know what we should do. But there is my maxim: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. I take that to mean that the trouble with politics and government is that they are always mobilizing against enemies, because that is what political leaders are for. But all government action, in my view, is creating injustice, because government is force.

Now right now our Chinese friends imagine that they can dominate the world with Huawei dominating g5 and dominating Africa with port and infrastructure deals. The Germans are dominating Europe, because their alter ego, France, doesn't have a clue. And the left in the US is mounting a reign of terror and virtue against "hate" and "toxic masculinity"as their cultural revolution seems to be falling short of its promise.

I guess that my notion is that it is the injustice that the Chinese and the Germans and the left here at home deal out that creates the movement of rejection. And the more that they think that power is the answer the bigger movement of rejection they inspire.

The point is that in the interaction of power politics and market economics we have two opposing notions. Politics is all about domination and hegemony and loot and plunder. Economics is all about cooperation and trust and finding out how to serve the other guy with products and services.

Actually, they are not really opposites, in the sense that Hegel uses when talking about the opposition of the two poles of a magnet. Politics and economics are really orthogonal, operating at right angles. One says that there gotta be an enemy out there. The other says there gotta be a customer out there.

So I think the strategic thing to do is to highlight the monstrous injustice that, e.g., Germany, deals out in Europe; that China deals out to its people and its trading partners; that the left deals out in its domination of media, education, and culture.

But some people will have to go to jail or exile, courtesy of the ruling class, just like the Voltaires did in the waning days of the ancien régime. And in China, per the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, there will probably have to be actual martyrs. That's just part of the experience of injustice.

Maybe there's a better way. But not yet.

Prophecy, Prophecy: All is Prophecy

I used to be a proper modern, believing in logic and reason. But now I believe in prophecy.

Well, not exactly. It's just that now I get the point of prophecy.

Back in the day, before science, humans had very little idea of how the world works, and very little ability to predict what other things and animals and people might do to them.

So humans imagined everything animated by its familiar spirit. Including rocks and rivers. When you think about it, it makes sense. There is no predicting what the folks in that village on the other side of the hill might do next. Nor is there any predicting when the river will suddenly drown half the village in a flood and leave rocks behind the size of lions and tigers and bears.

But it sure would be nice to know what the rocks and the rivers and the guys in the village on the other side of the hill might get up to next. Enter prophecy.

Today, of course, we have science, and it is real good for the design of bridges and cars and jet airplanes. But we still don't know what we really want to know, like will it rain next week. So yeah. There's a real demand for people who can predict the future. And like in olden times, these prophets often get their secret knowledge from divine sources.

I've found it really helpful to read When Prophecy Fails, a scientific study of a group of ordinary Americans by three social scientists, Festinger Riecken, and Schachter. These ordinary folks received information telling them that the world was going to end in a great flood, but that they would be saved by extraterrestrials that would fly them away in their flying saucers.

It seems to be a common theme: end of the world; a big flood; only the chosen will be saved. I suppose that, down through history, the world has indeed ended for many small communities in a flood. And only a very few, a chosen few, have survived.

We have the same thing going on right now. End of the world due to climate change; rise of the oceans and coastal flooding; only the few will be saved. If we act now. And like in olden times, the science is pretty skimpy, because we just do not know very much about how the climate changes. It might be due to carbon dioxide levels; it might be all about the level of cosmic rays seeding clouds. It might be the precession of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Or something else, about which we are totally ignorant.

And then there is the whole question about the nation's future: Trump or No Trump. Or children: will they grow up to be healthy and wealthy and wise? Or that tall handsome stranger.

It's comical really. Even with all our science and logic and reason we still do not have knowledge of the really important things: the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. We do not know why there should be a universe rather than no universe; we do not know why there is life rather than no life. We really don't even know how life works, even though our bodies and our minds are coded to create and continue life.

I mean: how come scientists haven't yet strung a bunch of DNA together to create a new virus, from scratch?

And so, we are tempted to take the short cut to knowledge, and fake it with prophecy. Everybody does it, so don't be ashamed. We would do anything to reduce the uncertainty in life and know what the future will bring.

But the truth is that life is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma. And nobody knows nothing, at least not about the future, which is the only knowledge really worth having.

Meanwhile, we can at least fake it, and prophesy. And how.

Abortion: Career is Not The Meaning of Life

In the New Yorker Katha Pollitt writes about how abortion has changed the arc of women's lives.

Access to legal abortion, whether as a backup to birth control or not, meant that women, like men, could have a sexual life without risking their future. A woman could plan her life without having to consider that it could be derailed by a single sperm.

Most women don’t enter fields that require years of graduate-school education, but all women have benefitted from having larger numbers of women in those fields.

See, I think that the idea of women "having a sexual life" is a lie. It is only men that can separate sex from love and marriage and children. I'd say that the more that a woman has a sexual life the more miserable she is likely to be.

See, I think that the idea of a woman "plan[ning] her life" free of the derailleur "single sperm" completely misunderstands what life is all about. Any woman with half a brain is going to steer clear of rogue "single sperms."

See, I think that the idea that "all women have benefitted" from having more women in fields that require graduate-school education is a ridiculous conceit.

So I think that Katha Pollit is full of it.

Of course, I understand where she is coming from. I get that from German sociologist Georg Simmel and his talk about women coming into the public square and adjusting it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

I think that the fact of men being perfectly happy with "having a sexual life" and using women as masturbatory appliances is the reason we have marriage laws and that we used to regard abandonment and divorce as scandalous and disgraceful. Before the glories of the sexual revolution.

I think that any plan of life that does not include the generation and raising of children at its center is a foolish plan of life, and a plan for misery and despair.

I think that any notion that more women in certain educated fields is a Good Thing misses the point. What we observe about the work force is that women tend to enter and dominate fields that involve person-to-person communication and caring. Men predominate in fields that involve danger and things. Doesn't mean that the opposite can't happen, but certainly it should give us pause before applying government force to direct outcomes.And men have careers because that is how you get laid and get to marry high-status women.

I'm watching 56-Up, the latest in the TV documentary Up Series following the lives of 14 Brits born in 1957, and checked up on every seven years since. The lefty BBC producers picked a diverse bunch of youngsters from children abandoned in a orphanage to total rich kids with plummy accents. You could tell that the BBC thought they were getting ready to celebrate the wonderful lives of working-class kids that were in the process of benefitting gloriously from the wise and compassionate post-War welfare state. Only it didn't turn out like that.

And, after watching 56-Up, which looks at the kids that are now 56 years old, I'd say that abortion and contraception and the sexual revolution have played merry hell with the lives of pretty well all the kids except the richest ones. But that's just my opinion.

And the richest ones did well not because of their parents' riches but because of the upper-middle-class culture they inherited and breathed into their very souls.

However, in 56-Up almost all the kids are now entering a dignified late middle age, even the ones that went through what I would call welfare-state-hell for years.

See the difference between the right and the left is that we righty racists, sexists, and homphobes think that the folks migrating into the city from the country should be taught the culture of the middle class and its responsibility culture. They should not be encouraged to remain in a working-class or lower-class ghetto, or the neo-feudal culture of the welfare state, because that is not the way to wive and thrive in the city and the market economy.

So I think that Katha Pollit is clueless, and ought to watch the Up Series from start to finish and then answer the obvious question: why are we spending political and cultural bandwidth worrying about high-class women like her when the white working class is dying of despair? And the black community is marinating in self-pity. And gays are the worst bigots on the planet.

But others may differ.

What All Rulers Do

Every political project is a project of force. Every political leader is summoning supporters to war. And the reward of the war is loot and plunder.

Generally, of course, the leader does not put his project in quite those terms. Usually his justification for war is that we must act now before the enemy strikes us. He must arouse in his followers the natural fear of the tribe next door, that they might suddenly strike us in a dawn raid, kill all the men and rape all the women.

Another casus belli is that the other guys are robbing us blind. You can see that at work in everything from the justification of taxing and regulating corporations to the renegotiating of trade relations with China.

And what about the workers! They are being screwed by their greedy employers! And what about women that only earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man. And blacks, cheated since forever by racism.

And always, if "you join in our crusade" as the Les Mis chorus sang, there will be rewards: loot and plunder.

In domestic politics with an established ruling class, this program is effected by the tactics of "divide and conquer." You set different groups against each other, all the better to tax and dominate them. For imagine what would happen if men stopped fighting with women, and blacks with whites? Why, they, er, we might all join up and decide that it is time to loot and plunder the ruling class and put them all in jail! Yay!

Notice that if a government does not have much spending, then the people need not be too concerned about getting their share, because there is not that much to share out. But if the government spends as much as ours, in the neighborhood of 35 percent of GDP every year, and taxes each of us to the tune of 30 percent of GDP, then every citizen has a vital interest in making sure that he gets his share of the loot and minimizes his share of the taxes paid. So a big-spending government is dividing and conquering by supervising the squabbling over who gets what out of the government goodies. What a concept!

My question is whether it is possible, short of a complete meltdown, to get humans to dial down their demands and refrain from trying to blame other people for their problems, and making them pay!

The only possible strategy seems to be indirection. President Trump is a master of this. He has run on Making America Great Again, making Mexico pay for the wall, stopping China from robbing us blind. But all the while he has been lowering tax rates -- on corporations! -- and cutting regulations -- on businesses!

Whaat? So President Trump has been putting Our Money into the hands of eevil corporations and rich investors! There oughta be a law!

Maybe there is genius in the Impeach Trump thingy. Because if the Dems and their willing accomplices in the media are filling their channel with Trump Orange Head Bad, then they have no bandwidth left for attacking his economic policies. And politics only has enough bandwidth for about one-and-a-half issues.

What I want to know is if there is a possible politics that would be able to reduce the power and looting of government, whether we could persuade ordinary people that their economic interests lie in smaller government, and that it does nobody any good if we are all concentrating on making the other guy pay.

Maybe the only way is the Trump way. The only way to bring America together is to stop scapegoating each other and scapegoat somebody else. Anybody else, from the Mexicans to the Chinese to the Iranians. And don't forget the Fake Media.

But let's try to keep it short of a shooting war, OK fellahs?