Yes, Even the President is Expendable

One of the problems of today's public square is that its conventional wisdom takes for granted the feminine notion of protection.

Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates this in a piece about Trump. The president should not be cowering in basements or masked up to the nines.

It is leadership to go out and, with proper caution, to brave the contagion, on the theory Trump is indeed replaceable while cowering is inexcusable.

Yeah, guess what. There is an Amendment in the Constitution all about presidential succession. If Trump dies, the Vice President becomes president. President Trump is expendable.

That is what various characters opine about in Shakespeare. There is Worcester, in Henry IV Part One. Says he to King Henry IV,

It was myself, my brother and his son,
That brought you home and boldly did outdare
The dangers of the time.

 Then, of course there is the famous speech of the young Henry V at Harfleur:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;

In your average Napoleonic War novel, you run up against the "Forlorn Hope," the volunteers that swarm through the breach in the city walls of the enemy, facing almost certain death as they try to take the city by storm.

The basic fact about being a man is that you are expendable, and you are expected to risk your life as a leader of men or a follower, because Job One of a man is to demonstrate courage. Honor among men is about courage, the willingness to be expended.

But the basic fact of being a woman is that you carry the future within you. You need to stay alive, because it is women that bring forth the future. Thus for women, honor is chastity, doing the proper thing. You do the right thing and your kids survive.

In the old days, it was exclusively men that populated the public square, men that died for their country, men that operated in the culture of courage and fought anyone that dared to question their courage. And women operated exclusively in the domestic sphere, nurturing and "keeping the kids alive."

But when women came into the public square they brought their culture of safety with them. And as women have propagated into administrative positions throughout government and education they have transformed the culture from a culture of courage to a culture of safety.

This is how to understand the current concern about "microaggressions" and "safe spaces." It is the women's culture of safety modifying the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility."

That is why the world's response to the COVID epidemic has gone so solidly for lockdowns and masks. Because women expect to be protected; they instinctively "shelter in place."

But, of course, for every woman that gets to shelter in place, someone else has to boldly outdare the dangers of the time.

Now it is my contention that almost all women are incapable of understanding anything other than their culture of safety. I talked with a nice liberal lady with a gubmint job down the street here in liberal North Seattle, and she expressed how glad she was that our Democratic Governor Jay Inslee was insisting on a tight lockdown. She has #WeBelieve and Black Lives Matter yardsigns at her house. She seems to have no clue that there are millions of people suffering extreme disruption to their lives so that she can live in North Seattle safety behind her social-moralizing yardsigns. She has no clue about this.

And, of course, the whole feminist culture maintains the innocence and helplessness of women. We saw this with the covering for the rather unimpressive debate performance of Sen. Harris (D-CA). It's sexist to interrupt her. It's mansplaining to disagree with her. Of course, because women expect to be protected.

So much for Here Me Roar.

I think that we now know that the lockdowns were a mistake. The school closures were a mistake. we should have done everything possible to protect senior citizens and other vulnerable people, but everyone else should have gone about their business. To say, as Gov. Cuomo did, that "if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy” is rubbish. That is not how the world works. 

But it is how women's minds work. And the modern politician has to cater to women and their expectation of protection.

It will be interesting to see how President Trump's bravely outdaring the dangers of the time works for him in the remaining weeks of the presidential campaign.

Do women voters conclude that he has been protecting them by getting COVID and recovering? Or do they decide that he has put them at risk?

Honestly, I don't know. All I can do is listen to the women I know and wait for their judgements.

Race, Identity, and Innocence

According to Shelby Steele, a black intellectual whose father was a black truck driver and whose mother was a white social worker, the whole racism thing is about innocence.

That's what Samuel Kronen writes in "The Prescience of Shelby Steele."

It all started after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

In Steele’s view, the explanation of black underachievement has its origins in the moral fall from grace of the 1960s when racism was first stigmatized out of polite society. For the first time, a critical mass of whites became conscious of their historic privilege and complicity in racism in ways that transformed the larger culture, while a critical mass of blacks came to identify with their historic victimization. 

You gotta admit, it's pretty weird. Instead of feeling good that we put the past of legal discrimination behind us, in a remarkable First in human history, we feel guilty about our past.

Oh wait a minute. Of course we do. Guilt is especially a girl thing, arising out of the woman's experience of honor-as-chastity. And since no woman is really as chaste as she wishes she were...

Ever since, both whites and blacks have developed unconscious patterns to guard their sense of racial innocence. A significant strand of white American culture projects a sense of guilt about the plight of blacks to dissociate themselves from the stigma of racism, and a significant strand of black American culture compels an angry militant pose to win concessions from white society and dissociate from the stigma of inferiority.

Ahem. Not quite, Sammy. Let's put it slightly differently. 

The end-all-and-be-all of white liberal culture is to maintain their white liberal innocence and heroism on the race question and damn the rest of the whites to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains who durst defy th'Omnipotent [educated Gentry] to arms. The beginning and the end of liberal self-image his their heroic stand on racial justice.

That is what all those Black Lives Matter signs are doing all over my upscale liberal neighborhood.  It's not just about innocence. It's about being Saved. Yes. We glorious wokie liberals are Saved, because we have been to racial confession and have been absolved of our sins. Aren't we special!

Now, in my book a culture of innocence is a political thing. If you are organized for political combat you need to develop a culture of innocence to give you permission to do all the dirty deeds that come naturally in any human conflict, and especially in political conflict.

For instance, after World War I the Germans developed a culture of innocence around the Dolchstoßlegende, the stab-in-the-back myth, that the German Army had not lost the war but had been betrayed by the civilians back home, Jews and republicans, and the like.

I maintain that any small minority will develop this culture of innocence to give itself the courage to fight in the political arena.

You will notice that in the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" narrative beloved by our wokey friends, the "allies" are obviously a small minority of enlightened and educated people innocent of the racial guilt of the "white oppressors" and blessed with the evolved wisdom to save the "oppressed peoples" from the systemic white racism of the "white oppressors." So they are the saved, the lucky ones.

And so blacks need their culture of innocence, as Kronen writes, to deal with "the stigma of inferiority."

But whatabout our liberal friends. Whatabout their culture of innocence?

Hmm. It must be because they do not experience themselves as conquering heroes, but as an embattled minority, the few, the proud, the Marines -- of noble progressivism.

So they have to maintain an culture of innocence, to purge the guilt of the nasty stuff they do to the rest of the white community.

When Government Screws Up: Skid Row Syndrome

When the economy goes south, the result is very often a Skid Row, that Seattle claims for its Yesler Way that was once a hill down which loggers skidded logs down to waiting ships.

But now Skid Row refers to a district where unattached men spend useless lives eking out an existence in cheap flophouses and drink. Only now it's homeless shelters and drugs.

Skid Rows were notable in the Fifties, as the haunts of men thrown out of society by the Great Depression. Then in the 1980s Democrats made a big thing about the "homeless" resulting from Reaganomics -- but probably the economic disruptions of the 1970s when the Good Union Jobs of the Fifties got hammered by the rise of Japan Inc. and inflation changed the terms of trade for millions.

Obviously the Great Recession of 2006-08 resulted in another surge of homeless and people were thrown out of work by the unwinding of the real-estate bubble financed by liar loans and Fannie/Freddie.

And now the forced lockdowns of the COVID era are tumbling another generation of the marginal onto the streets.

Mostly, of course, these people that have fallen out of society are men. That is because, I assume, women are coded to find shelter: somewhere, somehow, they have someone that will give them a roof over their heads. Whereas men... yes what is it about men that they spiral out of the social structure and end up on the street, or living in a Hooverville, or Skid Row, or a homeless encampment around Seattle's Green Lake?

In part, these recurrent crises are the result of the constant economic revolution of the capitalist era: the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the steel revolution, the electric revolution, the auto revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution. All these revolutions tended to transform the labor market for men, and it seems that some men aren't very good at picking up new skills and reinventing their working lives.

But a lot of the problem has been government. Let's leave aside the economic impact of wars, which goes without saying. But we can say this:

• The Great Depression of the 1870s was the result of government deflation getting the dollar back to its pre-civil war parity. A lot of unions got started in the 1870s; I'm not sure how much good they did.
• The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of government deflation after WWI leading eventually to a big stock-market bubble and government failure to act as lender of last resort in the subsequent credit crisis.
• The 1980s homeless crisis was probably a result of the Reagan administration fighting the 1970s inflation. You can call this Reagan cruelty or 1970s inflationary stupidity. Take your pick.
• The Great Recession of 2006-08 was the result of the government encouraging home loans to people that weren't creditworthy and whose loans weren't properly collateralized. All intended to help minority homeowners who were then hardest hit in the subsequent housing crash. And then Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Oh Ben!
• The homeless crisis of 2020 was caused by government lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID-10 virus that particularly impacted low-skilled workers that couldn't "work at home."

Let's admit that, from time to time, we moderns are going to experience economic dislocations in which marginal men will be hardest hit.

What is our 5-point plan for dealing with this recurrent problem?

Because right now, dealing with the problem of dysfunctional men is the last thing on the political agenda of our noble educated Gentry. To President Obama they were "bitter clingers." To Hillary Clinton they were "deplorables." To the wokerati they are "white supremacists."

See, I think that we've got our priorities completely backwards. I think that nine times out of ten women are pretty good at accessing the help that societies deal out. But men are too proud or too stupid to ask for help. They would rather molder away in drink and drugs than admit they have a problem.

And that has clearly been going on for hundreds of years, from the vagabonds and beggars of England in 1500 to the "waste population" that the Brits wanted to ship off to North America in 1600 and Australia in 1800, to the Captain Swing rioters in England right after the Napoleonic Wars, to the workhouse surplus population of the Dickens era, to the "shell-shock" victims of World War I and the "combat fatigue" of World War II and the PTSD of our current era.

Got any brilliant ideas? I certainly don't.

Rebuilding "The Meaning of Life" with 26-year-olds

Everybody is talking about religion. Or not. But whatever they are talking about we are all still concerned about Douglas Adams' recurring theme in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

On the one hand, as I wrote last week, we have our lefty friends with their Original Sin of "systemic racism" and their Apocalypse that global warming that will mean the End of the World unless we act now.

On the other, we have the experience of a young woman acquaintance who found, after her traumatic brain injury, that she couldn't experience God and the divine any more. But slowly, that sensitive part of her brain is coming back.

On the other we have another acquaintance who notes that "The words superstition and religion are synonyms.  Yet everyone claims one and not the other." Whatever I believe it is the truth, and what the other guys believe is a lie.

Then we have the Zman today writing about the "aridity of the intellectual landscape."

Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

But what comes next?

[Conservatism] should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

Yes, but what? Well, here is  Austin Schue, "a 26-year-old American, working-class college dropout who owns and operates a small business" in northern California. Who has read a book. Who has actually had an original thought. Who can actually write an article. And he is writing about his life journey -- on several levels.

He is writing about the necessity of earning a living. And he is talking of the necessity of a meaningful life. And this young man has actually read Jordan B. Peterson's Maps of Meaning.

In my private reading, I noticed that the heroes of my favorite books acted on the truth in accordance with their belief systems—as in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, wherein protagonist R.P. McMurphy is lobotomized after he attempts to liberate his fellow insane-asylum inmates from the tyrannical regime of Nurse Ratched. I heard echoes of Christianity, my past faith, in his sacrifice.

He observed the contradictions in the left wing message.

On one hand, they pushed a feminized and pacifistic ideal of society. Yet at the same time, they glorified any kind of violent resistance that presented itself as progressive—a pattern we’ve seen play out in spades over recent months.

How come I didn't think of writing that? 

So what did he do? He learned to become a farrier, shoeing horses! And "ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle." But what about the meaning of life?

As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas. What I really wanted to do was forge a coherent centrist viewpoint—one that can accommodate personal responsibility, the search for truth, sincere compassion for the less fortunate, and a sensible commitment to preserving the Earth’s ecosystems.

 Remember, this guy is 26. Then he began listening to Joe Rogan's podcast. And his lefty girl-friend found out about Jordan B. Peterson.

I was particularly blown away by the depth of Dr. Peterson’s knowledge, and the way he coherently tied together ideas from psychology, history, evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy, and myth.

Exactly. Peterson is trying to construct a new "meaning of life" from all our knowledge, ancient and modern. 

I started exploring his writing. This is the way children feel when they first hear a kind of music that resonates deeply. It was my intellectual Led Zeppelin. Like many of Peterson’s other fans, I implemented his lessons in my own life, and became a more responsible and assertive entrepreneur as a result.

Yes, the world is falling apart like a toxic marriage.

[Yet] most people I meet in the world just smile and say hello, even with a mask on. They seem to find life tolerable and even enjoyable. I see people going out to fish or mountain bike. I see tradesmen hustling. The healthiest people are the ones who picked a real tangible goal in their own life, and are working toward it.

Engaging in that process saves lives. It certainly saved my life. And while it may be too late for my relative, it’s not too late for members of my own generation. Clean your room. Build a house. Shoe a horse. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you aspire to something other than burning down somebody else’s prosperity and happiness.

May I suggest that if there are young men like Austin Shue in the world, then we may concur with George Eliot in Middlemarch, that

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

As everybody understands, we need to conjure up a new "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the face of an old order that stumbles along, using its power and its domination to keep the old order going, just one more cycle.

It is good to know that good people are working on it. 

Why Does the Left Insist that Race is a Social Construction?

I just got through Ron Unz's review of "White Racialism in America, Then and Now." A large part of his article related to the fact that you are not allowed to say or write that race is real and has an impact on IQ.

I wonder why?

Is it because the left's power depends on the notion that everything especially intelligence, is culture driven, and therefore malleable by education and therefore by a wise and educated and evolved elite?

I had a discussion with a liberal friend about this. She said that race was a social construction, and I said so why does 23andme.com purport to be able to tell your ethnic origin by testing your genes? 

In other words, if we said that humans are what they are, mostly defined by their genes, and then by their peers, and then by their parents, could there be an intellectual foundation for the current religious doctrine of All Power to the Educated Gentry? Or should we just give up on the progressive project and let people be who they are.

By the way, some researchers have done research that says that a population's IQ goes up as they become more prosperous, or, I imagine, integrated into the modern market economy.

But you have to wonder. What does it mean when an idea is so scandalous that you are not allowed to hold it and publish it? Obviously, I would say, it says more about the cancelers than the canceled.

What I wonder is: how much does it really matter if blacks have a lower IQ than the average white American? For instance, I have read recently that East Asian Americans have a higher average IQ than Jews. And, as we know, American Jews have a higher average IQ than white Americans. But does it matter?

Suppose it does matter. Does it matter enough that any discussion of IQ by race is forbidden and anyone that publishes an argument that IQs really do vary by race should be canceled? Does it matter enough to cancel the heretics?

I get the notion that there is a political dimension to this, that educated Gentry power to some extent depends on the right of the Gentry to order us all around, and this is helped by assuming that race is a social construction.

But why does this practical consideration get elevated into Holy Writ? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

OK, I get the need to rile up blacks at election time, because without blacks voting 90% Democrat, Democrats lose power.

I get the need to insist that the argument for equality -- and the need for educated Gentry power -- depends on all humans being alike and all differences in outcome the result of oppression and exploitation.

I get that for small minorities like Jews and blacks, there is a need for unity, and a corresponding need to divide the majority.

Wait: I would say that for the leaders of small minorities there is a need to flog the members of the minority community into unity and the way to do this is to create a culture of danger, of possible attack by the majority culture. Therefore the leaders of the minority should be strive to maintain a culture of unity; therefore it doesn't hurt to try and divide the majority.

But I wonder why, say, Jews are still organized in a culture of unity and innocence after a century in the US. And why blacks have a culture of unity 50 years after the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s.

All this, to me, is matter of fact and by the way.

I still don't really understand why the issue of race and IQ has to be radioactive. I suspect that I am missing something, but I don't know what it is.

The Problem of the Left's Woke Religion

It is a fundamental part of my faith that every human has a religion -- especially the people that insist they don't.

In the writings of Nietzsche he maintains that now that God is Dead we are going through decadence and then nihilism in a process that will end in the Revaluation of All Values.

But surely he is wrong. The decline of Christianity as the faith of the educated class immediately prompted replacement religions, most obviously Marxism and Communism. In fact what is interesting about the Left is how it has picked up the essential content of the Axial Age religions. 

First, there is Original Sin, the idea that there is an essential flaw in human nature that humans must work to repair. Obviously, the new Original Sin is racism. Or, in the words of a journalist supporter of Britain's lefty Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can build a world free of injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence”

Yep. There's a lot of Original Sin crashing around these days.

Second, there is Heaven on Earth. The cunning of Christianity is that is does not promise Paradise except after death. But the modern religions promise Heaven on Earth, just like the quote above: "a world free of injustice, oppression," etc.

But I think that the old Sin of inequality and oppression is clearly in the process of being replaced by Climate Change, which also includes both Original Sin and Eternal Redemption.

In Climate Change the Original Sin is the "carbon pollution" of the Earth with the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This is peculiarly similar to the original notion of Original Sin with Adam and Eve becoming conscious of their nakedness, their sexuality. For sexuality is central to living things, just as carbon is central to all life on the Earth.

In Climate Change the attainment of Eternal Redemption is obtained, just as under Christianity, by enormous acts of penitence and denial, to retreat from lives of consumption and luxury and instead live a Buddha-life of contemplation under a Bodhi tree.

So nothing has changed.

What Climate Change provides, of course, apart from the penitence of the Commoners, is a magnificent scope for heroic deeds for the activist class. Just as in a world war, the rulers get to direct traffic and conjure forth prodigious efforts and march enormous armies across the world.

OK. So far so good.

Now I think our educated Gentry believe in a false religion. I just don't believe that any true religion can possibly be constructed to encourage a ruling class to admire itself in the mirror for its eternal fight against oppression and climate change. There is a word for that: self-conceit.

But what will it take to explode the conceit and the self-delusion of our ruling class and its educated Gentry supporters?

I have two analyses I use to help me on this. The first is Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. He says that the frenzy of heretic-hunting peculiar to Inquisitions and Reigns of Terror and Great Purges tends to collapse after a season because humans cannot live at that level of frenzy for too long -- any more than people can live in a perpetual sexual orgasm. At some point the frenzy collapses and normal life resumes.

So, we can say, eventually the present cancel culture will burn itself out. The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

The other analysis is from When Prophecy Fails, by Festinger et al. This is an examination of a small cult in the US that flourished shortly after World War II with people that believed that they were going to be visited by UFOs on a certain day and carried away to Paradise by the aliens in their UFOs. So what happens when the prophecy fails? Initially, the believers amp up the intensity of their belief. But then, eventually, the members of the cult start to fall away and the cult breaks up.

Yes. And then there is Jim Jones in Jonestown, where the leader gets the whole cult to commit suicide.

The problem that I see is that it is not clear to me that we can ever get past the modern Original Sin of racism. Lefties will be descanting on "injustice, oppression, exploitation, bigotry, racism and violence" till the end of time.

Maybe the answer on this front is for Blacks to start voting Republican. Could it happen? Who knows?

And whatabout Climate Change? What would it take to discredit the prophecy of runaway climate change? Would it take a collapse of electrical generation when it is all wind and solar and a day dawns when there is no wind and precious little sun? Or will it take a sharp drop in global temperature in association with the current solar minimum?

Or will Woke Hegemony collapse in the face of the current surge of "populist nationalism" which, I would judge, is a revolt of the Commoners against their educated Gentry rulers?

Or perhaps, like the Roman emperor Constantine who switched Rome from paganism to Christianity, the day will come when the educated ruling class decides to lead the Commoners rather than oppose them. I wonder what that would look like.

The problem, of course, is encapsulated in Ben Franklin's maxim, that "Experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other." Our rulers will not change until they have experienced a very nasty knock on the head. Unfortunately the knock on the head will not be confined to the conceited educated Gentry but will also affect the lives of ordinary Commoners. And, I dare say, women and minorities, the "oppressed peoples," will be hardest hit.

The only question is the size of the butcher's bill.

Oh No! I've Been Banned By Google!

Yesterday I got an email from "Google Publisher Policy" telling me that my page christopherchantrill.com had been in violation of its "Google Publisher Policies." As follows:

• New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found. 

Who, me? I thought? Let's look at Google's "Google Publisher Policy." For instance: "We do not allow content that:

• incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.

Examples: Promoting hate groups or hate group paraphernalia, encouraging others to believe that a person or group is inhuman, inferior, or worthy of being hated

I think that what Google didn't like was my blog post "My '1584 Project'" from a couple of days ago. In that post I made the argument that, if Nikole Hannah-Jones was going to push her "1619 Project" that dramatized the arrival of the first slaves in North America as the true founding of the US -- Talk about inciting hatred! -- then I had the right to come up with a counter-narrative.

If NHJ was going to represent 1619 as the true founding, how about 1584, which was the date that the Roanoke Colony was founded. And what was the Roanoke Colony all about? It was all about cleansing England of its "waste population," according to scholar Nancy Isenberg in White Trash. So you tell me which is the true founding of America? Sending the waste population of Europe to the Americas or sending slaves to North America? Both pretty shameful if you ask me.

But here is what I think triggered Google's hate speech AI thingy. I included a paragraph from Isenberg's book that listed all the pejoratives used over the years to describe White Trash:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [N-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

[My bold]. In the original I did not use "N-word." I used the original unredacted text -- once used by white supremacists and now by black rap artists -- in the interest of scholarly accuracy. But, of course, Google's Department of Ideological Conformity would have found [N-word] and flagged it as an example of "incites hatred..." and so forth.

Truth is, of course, that the noble task of purging our society of hatred and all the rest is not quite as simple as flagging banned words, Google. And I suggest to you, Google, that you are starting down a rabbit hole that will end in nothing but hate and violence, and you will find yourself, Google, in the middle of the cross-fire.

Indeed, as we hurtle into what seems like a revolutionary and inquisitorial maelstrom, with defenders of the establishment like Google trying to push back on the barbarian hordes, the only question to me is the size of the butcher's bill.

But, of course, the midwits operating the Google Publisher Policies have No Idea about this. Defending the ruling class and its orthodoxy and its perquisites is just what a good Googler does, instinctively, because that is what he or she has been carefully taught, from year to year, in his or her dear little ear.

The only good thing about this, I reckon, is that the folks at Google and elsewhere in tech are flying blind. Or, to change the metaphor, they are like a colonialist army marching up some mountain valley in Afghanistan, utterly blind to the unseen bandits watching from the heights.

The Google guys really do not know what they are getting into. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else.