David Koch was a Good Guy

At some point in the last 20 years, someone on the left decided that "The Koch Brothers" were evil. And ever since, lefty boilerplate has routinely identified "The Koch Brothers" as the very fount of evil and oppressive capitalism.

So when David Koch died, aged 79, after a long battle with prostate cancer, all kinds of lefties expressed their delight.

I'm not really inclined to attack them for that. Most lefties are fools, that have never read a book, and merely spout the hate that they have been carefully taught, from year to year, in their little ears.

The Koch Brothers were exemplary businessmen that inherited a family business from their father and turned a business worth tens of millions into a business empire worth tens of billions.

That means, lefty friends, that they created jobs, jobs, jobs.

But to the New York Times he and his brother Charles were right-wingers.

David H. Koch, an industrialist who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, died on Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y.

It's weird isn't it. The right-wingers that I read are mostly annoyed with the Kochs because they are pro-gay, pro-abortion, and pro-immigration. And they funded libertarian enterprises like Reason magazine. But to the New York Times obituary writers, Koch was "right-wing."

Which meant, of course, that when David Koch stumped up $100 million to help refurbish the New York City Ballet, all the fashionables with the right opinions -- as in correct rather than right-wing -- expressed their horror at allowing this monster a shield of respectability.

Give me a break.

I honor the Kochs for putting so much money into libertarian ideas, although I stop short of true libertarianism. That is because my reductive Three Peoples theory recognizes that the People of the Subordinate Self want protection, not just political protection from pirates and plunderers, but economic protection from the tides of the market. My politics tries to give them that -- or at least an illusion of economic security -- rather than declare that government has no business in the economic safety net business.

But what I honor the Kochs for is their work with dad's business. You don't get much information from the NYT obit, which is heavy in politics and family lawsuits, but I understand that when the Koch brothers inherited the business it was in trouble, partly because of a lawsuit relating to technology that Koch père had developed. But the Koch brothers persevered and made Koch Industries into a thoroughly modern corporation that encouraged its employees to take responsibility -- and even dare to make mistakes.

That is a big deal for me, because I think that the secret of life is to develop the courage -- or what my daughter calls resilience -- to try out ideas, knowing full well that most new ideas end up in failure.

But for our liberal friends the Kochs were all about "dark money" and funding "the right" and being a secretive private corporation. I get it. Private corporations don't have to tell the world very much about their affairs, and lefties hate that. And they also hate people that they can't effectively bully into conformity. It really is offensive to them that the Kochs could live and work and fund their ideas and charities when the Kochs were opposed to everything good and woke.

It's a strange world, isn't it. You take your dad's company, and instead of clipping coupons you expand and deepen it and provide jobs for tens of thousands. But that makes you into cartoon villains for our lefty friends. What is wrong with you guys?

Never mind. David Koch, of The Koch Brothers, was a good guy. Rest in peace.

Innocence and the Three Peoples

Earlier this week I discussed the Culture of Innocence that is defining for the Left. The clients of the Left are always helpless innocent victims being unjustly oppressed by the capitalists, or the patriarchy, or the white supremacists, or the fascists.

Mark Bauerlein in "Deliver Us from Innocence" observes that the nation state partakes of this culture.

Niebuhr saw it at work in foreign policy: “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem, are insufferable in their ­human contacts.”

But Bauerlein goes on, real innocence only applies prior to The Fall.

Before the Fall, Adam and Eve were sinless, ­cognitively ­innocent and morally innocent. But after the Fall, with moral innocence shattered, this other innocence turns into a mode of obtuseness. It is ­sin-blind and self-unaware. It will not and cannot see itself addressed when Jesus looks upon sinners and says with authority, “go and sin no more.”

Or, to put it bluntly, once you have acquired self-consciousness which includes, I think, the ability to sort-of see yourself as others see you, the continued protestation of innocence is an exercise in bad faith. Innocence went out the window once Eve bit into the apple from the Tree of Knowledge.

But. Whatabout the innocence of nations? Whatabout the innocence of the Jews? I think the answer is simple. When you are fearful, when you are living in a dangerous place, then you must regress to a previous place. Because when you are fighting for your life you do not have the luxury or the leisure to start thinking "on the one hand this, on the other hand that." So you regress to a place of fake innocence to help you face the dangers of the times.

Now we apply this to my reductive Three Peoples theory.

It seems to me that, to a considerable extent, the People of the Subordinate Self are not yet self-conscious; they are, in fact, innocents. They experience themselves as helpless victims of the gods, of their lord. They are fatalistic, and do not imagine that they have the agency to do anything about their situation. The left has played on this in a masterful way by offering to take the place of the gods or the lord and lead the subordinates to safety.

The Jews were the guys that put all this together, and why not. They just extended their own situation as an endangered minority and applied it to any non-majority group. Because, I think, the same rules apply. If you are Strangers in a Strange Land then you must stick together, for safety.

The People of the Responsible Self are not helpless innocent victims. We believe in personal responsibility. In a way, of course, this is a mirage, because the truth is that individuals are, to a great extent, the helpless victims of circumstance. You could be caught in a storm at sea; you could be caught in the middle of a bloody revolution or a Great Depression or a war through no fault of your own. But you are still thinking: how do I get out of this situation? You do not lie back and think of England. And even if the worst comes to the worst, you think to yourself, well, I fought the good fight. You do not think how come the government didn't protect me.

The People of the Creative Self, of course, cannot be helpless victims, nor even responsibles. Because the whole point of human creativity is that now, we humans are creating the world, not just living as the subordinates of the gods, or as responsibles living in the world that God created and according to the Law that God set forth. But things are not so simple, as Ariel Levy relates in "The Rules Do Not Apply."

[38-year-old] Levy was married to a woman and five months pregnant, having been impregnated with a friend's sperm, when she lost her baby, delivering it alone in a hotel room in Mongolia, where she was on a reporting trip.

Yes. You can kick over all your middle-class morality and its suffocating rules. You can marry a woman; you can decide to have a baby in your late 30s. You can go on your reporting trip anyway.

But evidently someone forgot to tell you that the creative life is hard, and will likely end in failure. You might have learned that by reading Nietzsche, but of course you have been carefully taught that Nietzsche was a Nazi. Or maybe you would have got a clue from Joseph Schumpeter that wrote about "creative destruction." Or you might have learned that 9 out of 10 business startups end in failure.

Our great global problem is that, like Toad of Toad Hall, the globalist educated ruling class wants to play all the roles from helpless victim to rulemaker for the deplorables, to courageous creative artist and activist. And if things go wrong, it's the patriarchy's fault.

But creativity is hard. That is what all the myths about going into the underworld (of the unconscious) and finding out if you are really up to the mark are all about. And that is why, if you survive your Hero's Journey, it will probably end in a sacrificial death on the border between Order and Chaos.

Our glorious creative class is, right now, on its own collective journey into the underworld of the unconscious. It is a journey of frightful peril and most will not return to the light of day with all their marbles.

If you discover that you are not up to the journey, that you don't have the necessary hardness for the creative life, well then better slide back to a life of Responsibility where The Rules Do Apply and protect you from doing stupid stuff. Or you can become a helpless innocent victim and wait for someone else to tell you what to do to solve your problems.

But don't complain about the patriarchy or white supremacy or America being a racist slaveholding country since 1619. Either suck it in, follow the rules, or fall in line.

What I am saying is that you can't pick and choose. You wanna be a fancy-schmancy creative? Then no fair acting like a victim. No fair saying "but they didn't tell me."

And no fair playing the activist game, pretending to be taking it to the Man when really you are just a regime thug doing the dirty work for the rulers.

Bronze Age Mindset Gets the Michael Anton Treatment

I had no idea that Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) had cracked the top 150 on Amazon. No idea! Right now it is #3,872.

But that is what Michael Anton, of "The Flight 93 Election" tells us in a Claremont Review of Bronze Age Mindset. Anton got his copy from Curtis Yarvin, the software geek that wrote "Unqualified Reservations" as Mencius Moldbug. Of course, Anton has a bit of a struggle with BAPs Nietzschean view of the world. Whatabout a "stable, just, and lasting regime?"

And what exactly does BAP mean by "pirate?" Not, I assume, what they mean in The Pirates of Penzance when the hero got accidentally apprenticed to a pirate instead of a pilot. Hey, accidents happen. But still, this young man discovered, "it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king."

Anyway, I thought a bit about the "pirate" thing, because it really was shocking to read about in Bronze Age Mindset. And then I thought: Elon Musk. There's your modern pirate for you.

Elon Musk is a modern rascal, who is ruthlessly taking advantage of all the government money and investor money going, for solar cells, for electric cars, and even space rockets. But why? I think it is pretty obvious. Musk is from South Africa. If I were a native South African white like Musk I suspect I would say to myself and the world: screw you. Screw you vile hypocritical lefties that pitched me out of my homeland with all your sanctimony about apartheid. Hey, how did that turn out, down the road, with a murder rate at 36 per 100,000, which is positively medieval? So now I owe nothing to nobody. Scew you.

Ditto for any young man in the west today living under the sanctimonious racist twaddle of our globalist educated ruling class.

I was reading a biography of Nietzsche, written in 1940 by a man I respect, Crane Brinton, and it joins the chorus blaming Nietzsche for the Nazis.

And certainly there is plenty in Nietzsche that would suggest things to a Nazi-to-be. So, shall we bury Nietzche because he helped bad people have bad thoughts and so became "the Nazis' favorite intellectual?" Sure, if that's what floats your boat.

But I think that what Nietzsche is saying is that, if you think you can rationally philosophize your way to a stable, just, and lasting political regime you are smoking something. The truth is that the world is a shitshow. There is nothing stable and lasting, and probably if you try to make things stable and lasting you will cause instability. There is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

So, the truth about life, the universe, and everything is that we are winging it, always have and always will.

So, will the pirates of BAP enslave us all and bring on a new Dark Age? Maybe, but I don't think so, and not because I believe that BAP's pirates are any nicer that the pirates of old. It is because the modern era does not lend itself to ruthless political power.

Surely, the lesson of the Soviet Union and Maoist China mean that if they mean anything. The point of Marx was to prophesy that a ruthless movement of political action led by Educated Youth was the one thing needful to smash the bourgeoisie and prevent the "immiseration" of the working class in a new feudalism. How did that work out, Chuck? It was an absolute, pedal-to-the-metal, bloody disaster. Unequaled in history, I dare say.

So what do we learn from the disaster?

I think the lesson is that the modern movement of human rights, of ending slavery, of limiting the power of government and politics says nothing about us moderns being better and moral. It is because all these things assist in human flourishing.

Or, if you want me to get crude, the clunking fist of political power does not pay.

Not only that, but slavery does not pay. It is too hard to supervise, and the slaves don't work very hard, compared to wage labor.

And so, over the last half millennium, in fits and starts, we have entered a new era, where the old rules of power have been replaced with new rules.

Back in the 19th century the Fabians sneered at the capitalists forever asking: does it pay? But, of course they are fools for saying that. All "does it pay" asks is, are you throwing money down a rat hole by doing that? Because if you are, it could be that you are dumb or something.

But that is what the market economy is asking every moment. What is this product, this service worth to you? A lot? A little? More than yesterday? Less than yesterday? And what it means is that most everything can be worked out by the decisions of people to buy or not to buy interacting with other people. No clunking fist needed, but it really helps if you are trustworthy and the people you deal with are trustworthy too.

But that still leaves the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

As men, we can think of it this way. After we have provisioned and protected the women so they can put the next generation on the ground and get it off the nest, what then?

The fact is that men are programmed for adventure. Used to be the adventure of hunting megafauna until we killed them all. Then it was the adventure of protecting our food-growing land from the chaps next door.

So now what do we do? What is there in the world of risk, and adventure, and developing courage, and making a name for yourself?

I don't know and neither, I think, do you. But that is what the young'uns are trying to figure out. When they get it all figured out, I hope that they will go gently with racist sexist homophobes like me. But you never know.

Scott Adams: Four New Types of News

I just took the trouble to transcribe a piece of Scott Adams' daily podcast, where he develops the idea of four new types of news in "The Golden Age of No Real News." Says he:

There used to be a time what news was something like: Hey, some events happened; let us tell you about the events. Then we called that news.

But now things have changed. So Scott Adams comes up with four new types of news.

Fake News. "Something that didn't happen; something taken out of context... In this case The New York Times simply denying that an event happened." Adams is talking about John Harwood and Maggie Haberman denying the plain text of the leaked NYT editorial meeting where they said they were going to go after Trump because of his racism.

Hypothetical News. This probably always existed, but now it is more prominent.Hypothetical news is like this:

If there is a recession, Trump might not get reelected. If the meteor hits the Earth, we're not prepared.

It's like they ran out of real news!

Mindreading the News. It is "based on what we imagine... other people are thinking. Now, that goes well with taking Trump out of context" and substituting your assumption of what people are thinking.

Reframing History News. This, of course refers to the New York Times "1619 Project" keying on the first year that slaves from Africa arrived in North America. Hey, it's great to get beyond the textbooks and look at history again. But this is not an innocent exploration of the past. The purpose of it is to think differently about the present, i.e., Trump Racist.

It is really not hard to understand what is going on here. It is the liberal educated ruling class thrashing around trying to figure out what to do now that the good old narrative that they inherited from their good old liberal parents is not keeping the rubes quiet and respectful.

And of course the big thing is race. For half a century our liberal friends have ruled us and kept us down on the farm with the accusation of racism. But now, the race card is not working very well any more.

Think about it this way. What would you do if the method you used for keeping the peasants quiet no longer seemed to work, and you started getting reports that the natives were restless? Well, the simple answer is that you wouldn't know what to do because nothing in your life had prepared you for this day.

When you are a ruling class the point is to rule. You think up ideas that you decide are good for people and you enact legislation and write regulations and hand down legal decisions about what people may do and not do, about which group is to be privileged and which group is to be marginalized. I've been reading the history of the Brits in India in The British Conquest and Domination of India by Sir Penderel Moon, and it all comes down to the ruling Brits at the time deciding, well, we are going to issue this proclamation; we are going to formulate that regulation; we are going to cut the salt tax in half; we are going to split Bengal into two halves because right now it is too large for one regional government to handle.

That is what our liberal friends have been doing for the last 50 years. Oh, there aren't enough African American firefighters, so we need Affirmative Action. Whatabout women fighter pilots? We should change the rules to increase the number of female pilots in the Navy. There aren't enough women in STEM, so let's change the rules to increase the number of women in tech. All the money in college sports is going to men's sports and that is wrong, so let's force equality in colllege sports.

But, of course, our lords and masters are not thinking about the lives they are wrecking, the injustice they are creating. They merely think, well, here's a racism, here's an oppression, here's an injustice, so how do we fix it?

And then when the peasants rebel they are genuinely shocked. Hey, all they were trying to do was to creat a more just and equal society! How can anyone be against that? Unless they were racists inspired by Trump's dogwhistles!

Well, I don't suppose any liberal is going to listen to me, but here goes.

The reason our Founding Fathers wrote down in the First Amendment that there should be no "establishment of religion" is because people disagree about things, especially morality. So the idea of limited government is to restrict the agenda of government to those things that nearly everybody can agree upon.

Nearly everyone agrees that murder is bad, theft is bad, rape is bad, and that the perps should be locked up.

But what about education? Education of children, nearly everyone agrees, is a good thing. But what should we teach the kids? That's where people start to disagree. Problem with a government education system is that the government tends to limit the range of educations available to children. And there are activist groups with agendas that want to force all children to be educated in accordance with their agenda.

Of course, when you are the ruling class and, say, the natives get restless about Drag Queen Story Hour at the local elementary school, you are outraged! Who do these homophobes think they are!

Hey Fredo! That's what I think about wind and solar power. Who do these watermelons, red on the inside, green on the outside, think they are! But we have to save the planet! Sez who? The scientists getting government grants? The corporate shills getting green energy subsidies? The little rich kid with a family foundation that wants to "make a difference" with activism? You gonna force me to ride a bike to work?

So my judgement about the four new tpes of news, as described by Scott Adams, is that they represent a flapping around in the liberal bubble. They tell us that our liberal lords and masters don't have a clue.

And the big thing they do not get is that there is really very little the government can do outside of keeping us safe that really benefits us.

And the big question is this. After you have created all your wonderful programs, what happens when the world changes and all the conventional wisdom assumptions you made back in the day no longer apply? Are you chaps going to revise and reform all your programs? Or are you just going to tell the rubes to shut up and take their medicine?

And flap around inventing new types of news to muddy the waters and confuse everyone?

More Tlaib: How To Tell a Genuine Movement for Justice

It really is something. We have four Women of Color congresswomen, the Squad, running around the world making like they are helpless victims "fighting racism, oppression [and] injustice" as tweeted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

How do we know they are lying? I will tell you. You know they are lying when there is almost no possibility of them losing their jobs, of getting arrested and interrogated, or sent to a concentration camp as a result of their "activism."

Because real activists, real political opponents of a regime are, in the time-honored phrase, risking their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause.

Like the protesters in Hong Kong right now, protesting against the Communist Party of the Peoples Republic of China. I would say, speaking personally, that they are risking everything.  I'd call that "fighting" of a very different order from the four Squaddies, who are the Little Darlings of the US ruling class, on account of their race, their gender and their lefty political agenda.

The activism of the Squaddies is fake activism. It is political activity endorsed and applauded by everyone from The New York Times to the "studies" professor at your local state university. The Squaddies are in fact the bribed apologists of the ruling class, enacting fake activism just as they have been carefully taught by their Rules for Radicals instructors.

Here's a look into what real activism means. It's a piece from Quillette about the tactics used by the Hong Kong demonstrators.

One of the reasons for the effectiveness of the protest movement is the decision to remain leaderless. 

Standard doctrine is that every political movement needs "strong and charismatic leaders to succeed."

Many resistance movements such as the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King Jr., the resistance to apartheid with Nelson Mandela, and the India Independence Movement with Gandhi benefited greatly from such leadership. 

Yeah. That works well when you are dealing with western democracies, like the US and the UK. Yes, and even the eevil raciss apartheid regime in South Africa. But the Commie bastards in China?

Joshua Wong, the strong and charismatic leader of the Umbrella movement in 2014, was jailed in 2017 for unlawful assembly. With strong leaders present, the authorities can arrest them, fatally weakening a movement.

So today's movement in Hong Kong is "leaderless."

Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse. 

Remember? The whole idea of the internet, when invented by DARPA, was that it was decentralized and could survive having links chopped off.

Now, it is perfectly obvious that the four Squaddies don't have to worry about stuff like that. They are celebrated by our ruling-class media and would never get taken out by the authorities. Because the whole liberal-left universe would rise up with one voice to damn to bottomless perdition anyone that tried.

So you can see that the folks at Google, guys like James Damore and Zachary Vorhies, are the real thing. They got fired from Google for their insolence, their acts of lèse majesté. Not to mention their acts of sacrilege against the sacred objects of the regime religion.

Yes. The whole game of liberal activism is fake. Because it is all conducted with the concurrence of the regime. The purpose of the liberal activist is to gin up an apparent groundswell of support for some lefty agenda item: See! The People are rising up in rebellion. We must Act Now!

Notice that if unapproved groups try a bit of activism and peaceful protest they are roundly condemned by all the right people as racists and terrorists.

But real "activism" is a political movement that sets itself up in opposition to the ruling class, where its activists run the risk of losing their jobs and having their lives ruined.

It has been many a long day since that was true about any lefty activist in the US and Europe.

Understanding Tlaib: The Culture of Innocence

There's an ad that runs constantly at my gym LA Fitness. It has the girl gym employees protesting against stinky gym bags, complete with protest signs and rhyming couplets.

There is something about women picking up on a political meme. It shows that the political issue in question has passed from the phase of a genuine movement against injustice to a fashion statement.

Want to see confirmation of this? Try this piece on "luxury beliefs," where the upper class has moved on from defining itself in terms of luxury goods -- that you can't afford -- to luxury beliefs that you can't afford. Example: "monogamy is kind of outdated," according to a young woman Yale graduate who is from "an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company."

Yes, she personally intends to have a monogamous marriage — but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.

So, the rich and famous can talk about letting it all hang out. But the only thing is that, according to science in Coming Apart by Charles Murray, the rich don't actually do that. Instead they have fabulous careers and merger marriages while the bottom 35 percent don't work much and don't marry much.

Here's another example. Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) declining to go to Israel to see her grandmother if she couldn't do "activism."

I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in--fighting against racism, oppression [and] injustice.

Now, Rep. Tlaib, as I understand, represents a district that includes the Muslim part of Detroit, Michigan. Are the Muslims fighting there against racism and oppression and injustice? I doubt it. I've been to the Muslim area of Detroit, and eaten in a Middle Eastern restaurant there. It looked to me as though the Muslim "community" in Detroit was doin' fine. The black community, not so much.

Are the Muslims in Detroit being denied the vote? No, I don't think so; certainly not if a Muslim woman from Palestine gets to be their representative. Are the Muslims in Detroit unable to get jobs? I doubt it, considering the apparent prosperity of the Muslim quarter around Hamtramck. Injustice? Hardly, considering how much horsepower our ruling class puts into fighting Islamophobia.

I mean. When the ruling class is putting a thumb on the scales of justice in your favor, I don't believe you can cry "injustice" with any credibility.

I am trying to follow the demand that the opera composer Verdi places on his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi to avoid extra, useless words. In fact, how about distilling the whole thing down to "one word!" says Verdi. "Oh yeah," says Piave, rolling his eyes.

So what I am trying to do is distill the whole fake "culture of activism" down to one word, or at least a Nietzschean aphorism. "Luxury Beliefs" is certainly a starter. Then there is the notion of "The Conceit of Innocence."

Here's what I mean by the Conceit of Innocence.

Marx proposes that the workers were helpless innocents. Very good. The workers certainly had it tough in the 1830s, although perhaps not as tough as their ancestors struggling in the breakup of the feudal system. But the activists leading them were usually not workers. They were, like Marx, scions of the middle class, that were doin' fine. So they chose to lead the workers to paradise; it gave their lives meaning.

You can certainly say that Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were the real deal, former slaves. Of course, they were guys that wanted to be not-slaves, to be independent, responsible free men working for a living. Then there was W.E.B. Du Bois. He was a middle-class black from way back. La Wik:

[His mother] Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state.

Du Bois was a lefty academic. He believed that the black population should be led by its "talented tenth."

The feminist movement has always been a movement of the well-to-do, and it remains so today.

Let's return to the "luxury beliefs" above. Marx, Du Bois, and feminists like Simone de Beauvoir were all upper-middle-class intellectuals. They made their bones spinning likely stories about racism, oppression and injustice. Their writing gave their lives meaning.

Now let's talk about a real movement for justice: the Indian National Movement. The story of the Brits in India and the movement for an Indian Nation is almost a stage play about the modern era.

The Brits in India starts with the Brits establishing trading ports at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. They wanted to trade in Indian textiles and spices, but they had a problem: the Indian feudal lord next door. The Brits wanted a nice stable law-governed place where they could do business. But, from the Muslim Mughals to the local Hindu prince, the status quo was a feudal lord and his court. And below that were lesser landowners and the peasantry. For the Brits this was inconvenient and also dangerous, because the feudal lords operated on a loot and plunder system which might extend, with the Marathis, to actual raids into neighboring feudatories. Bad for bidness.

As the Brits extended the sway of their European nation-state market-economy law-governed society it more-or-less forced the princes and a slowly emerging middle class to adapt to it. By the middle of the 19th century you could say that an actual "Indian public opinion" had begun to operate, because of communications, newspapers, and the India-wide regime of peace enforced by the British Raj.

Here's an example of what I mean. Starting in 1770, any time there was a failure of the monsoon resulting in a famine, the disaster became a political scandal for the Brits. The Brits responded by creating government programs of relief and of moving grain to the famine areas which got easier once the railway age got established. Here's my take. Before the Brits came India would have been so fragmented and communications would be so poor that nobody would know about a famine outside the affected area. Anyway, absent modern transportation there was nothing a ruler could do about it anyway. So no news. No scandal. Just an act of God.

The more the 19th century advanced the more that the notion of Britain being a foreign Paramount Power exercising hegemony over South Asia became a scandal: not just to the rising class of educated Indians, but to the Brits themselves. We moderns just experience foreign rule over a subject population as sick and wrong: racist, oppressive, and unjust, in the words of Rep. Tlaib. We cringe at the very thought of it.

So you can see that in India the notion of an Indian National Movement to create an India for the Indians is really an artefact of western European moral and political culture. Before the Brits got there it was unthinkable in the strict sense: nobody would have thought it. And when the Indians did in fact create an Indian national state, they created two of them: one Hindu and one Muslim. That, I propose is according to the logic of human life, that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.

Notice that the Palestinian Question, beloved by Rep. Tlaib, is not quite as simple as the Indian Question. In the good old days of the Ottoman Empire, nominally Muslim, all kinds of different religious communities existed side-by-side. As soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed these religious differences took on a new salience, in which, obviously, the Jewish desire for their own nation state was a big factor. The Jews, being highly intellectual and westernized, were already prepared, without instruction from the Brits, to form their own nation state. The rest of the Middle East, not so much.

In fact, I would suggest that in the Middle East the national idea has not yet really triumphed over the previous culture of religion-and-tribe.

I guess here's my point about Rep. Tlaib and "racism, oppression and injustice." Such notions are western notions that only apply when the idea of nation of laws and the idea that there should be no discrimination by race have captured the culture.

And, I would argue, these notions are, to a great extent, not salient in a fully-developed western nation, where such questions have already been resolved. They are an obsession of upper-class scions looking for "luxury beliefs" to give their lives meaning and enable them to lord it over the lesser breeds without the law such as deplorables.

When you are an upper-class scion wanting to give meaning to your life through activism and fighting "racism, oppression, and injustice" you start, I think, with a Presumption of Helpless Victimized Innocence for your chosen victims. And you go from there.

Actually, I suspect that the Culture of Innocence is a necessary part of the culture of a minority community in a larger society. You have to have sharp elbows to survive, and you have to justify the sharp actions that it takes to survive in a cruel, heartless world. You can't allow yourselves to think about all the deals and compromises and betrayals that it took to survive. That's because you must be mobilized and prepared, at any moment, to fight for your life. So you develop a Culture of Innocence.

Obviously, this situation is the situation of Jews down the ages. The question is: can the Jews in, say, the US relax, and just take their place in our modern multicultural post-industrial society? Or should Jews remain mobilized, because at any moment, the left -- that was invented by Jews -- could turn on Jews in the service of black racists and resentful Muslims? Or maybe, pace New York Times, the threat could come from the right and its resentful deplorables?

You tell me.

UPDATE: See also "Deliver Us from Innocence" by Mark Bauerlein. From a reader.

The New York Times' Problem

Whaddya going to do, if you are the executive editor of the New York Times? I mean, how do you report the news and also cater to the world view of your employees and readers?

I gotta say, reading the inside story of Dean Baquet talking to the folks in his newsroom, that it ain't easy. For instance,

Staffer: Could you explain your decision not to more regularly use the word racist in reference to the president’s actions?

Baquet's answer is waffle-waffle-waffle.

I’m not saying we would never use the word racist. I’m talking about that weekend. You quote the remarks. The most powerful journalism I have ever read, and that I’ve ever witnessed, was when writers actually just described what they heard and put them in some perspective.  

Translation: we are using "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" instead of "racist" these days.

Earth to New York Times bubble. The Civil Right Act was passed half a centuy ago. That was final. So now you chaps are reduced to accusing people of saying racist things. But what matters is racist acts, like, oh, I don't know, the government having racial quotas. The universities having diversity goals. And that includes diverstiy hires at the New York Times.

Rule One. The guy that brings up race is the real racist.

Why do I say that? Science, that's why.

See, science says that the interesting thing about, say, vision, is that the whole point is to decide what to notice. There is a riverful of information coming in through the eyes. But none of us has the time and the processing power to evaluate everything. We need to determine: what is the important information?

For instance that stripey-looking pattern over on the middle-right: how should I interpret it? As a pattern of sunshine through a patch of bamboo? As a rugby player? As a beautful young woman in a fashionable dress? As a zebra? As a man-eating tiger?

You can see that the name of the game is interpretation. It depends what you want to see. Are you a young man full of hormones? Are you a big-game hunter? Are you a tourist in a tiger reserve?

Are you a political lefty obsessed with race fifty years after the Civil Rights Act?

Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson of 10 Rules says that we look at the world through the lens of our values. Which is to say that we are programmed to notice the things that are important to us.

This is why conservatives are wrong to say that "we" use logic and reason while liberals and the left are directed by their feelings. Not at all. We conservatives believe that government should not be in the business of bringing all human life under the supervision of government. We tend to think that, after protecting us from enemies foreign and domestic, the government does not have much left to do. Of course we rely on science -- political philosophy and economics -- for this. But we don't know that our ideas are true. We merely have faith in them. Just as liberals have faith that racism is running rampant throughout our society, and cite events that prove, to them, that racism is still a scourge.

If you are a person that believes, according to the best science known to you and your pals in the liberal bubble, that racism is getting worse, because Trump is dog-whistling racism to his base, then of course you think that the New York Times should be shining the light of truth on Trump's racism each and every day.

If you believe, like me, that government basically did its job on race half a century ago in passing the Civil Rights Act, and that there is not much more that is possible for government to do without messing things up, then you look on liberal interest in racism as ignorance at best, foolishness at least, utter blindness to reality without doubt, and bad faith at worst.

And there is no doubt that if you are a racism-believer then Donald Trump rallying the white working class is a frightening, terrifying event. Why look at the "murder" of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri! Why hasn't the whole police department in Ferguson been sent to jail for racism?  Whatabout Trump and Cummings. How dare, How Dare the president criticize Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for the mess in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hey, it all depends on how you interpret events. Do you think that Michael Brown was a drugged-out thief that was threatening a policeman? Or do you think he was a helpless victim gunned down by a racist white policeman? It all depends on the values filter with which you interpret events.

Do you think that Rep. Elijah Cummings is a corrupt politician or a heroic leader of his people? It all depends how you view the world, and whether you have a Black Lives Matter yardsign in your front yard.

Of course, in my view the problem is that the more people look at the world exclusively through the lens of their values the more, in effect, they are bringing their religion into the public square. There is nothing particularly scandalous about this; everybody does it.

But our Founders, back in the day, thought that religion and the state should be at arms length from each other. Because the larger a society the more likely that it will include people that disagree about the proper value-lens with which people should interpret the world. They thought, a century after the Thirty Years War and Salem witches, that when religious people get to dominate the public square with their values and name and shame people that disagree with them, then they are setting society up for a religious war.

And of course, the bigger the government the more it is using taxpayers money and the votes of the majority to impose one world view upon another.

But if you are a person that cannot see anything except "my values good" and "your values bad" then you will not have a clue about this.

Rather like the chaps that read and write the New York Times.