The Small Minority Gig and the Ruling Class

In his NY Post piece on "To beat woke tyrants the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are," Instapundit Glenn Reynolds invokes the Chapter 2 in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Skin in the Game: "The Most Intolerant Wins." He starts by noting that almost all prepared drinks have a "U" symbol on them that establishes the drink as Kosher. Even though full kosher eaters are less than one percent of the US population. Taleb writes that

It suffices for an intransigent minority -- a certain type of intransigent minority -- with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to submit to their preferences.

Not quite. It requires an intransigent minority supported by the ruling class to force the entire population to submit to them. If the ruling class doesn't care about them, or actively wants to use the small minority as a punching bag, well, keep your heads down fellahs. 

Because unless the ruling class encourages a narrative, and publicizes it, and teaches it in the media and the schools, it didn't happen. Case in point, The American Spectator's Dov Fischer, who is a Jewish lawyer and an orthodox rabbi. Says he in "Let's Play Holocaust:"

I grew up in the 1950s and much of the 1960s relatively unaware of the Holocaust.

See, the Holocaust didn't become much of a thing until the Seventies. And before World War II our national savior FDR wasn't in too much of a hurry to let the Jews of Germany into the United States.

You can see that this is the key to our ruling class's brilliantly successful campaign of championing small minorities against the rest of America to maintain its domination and hegemony. First it was blacks, because slavery and Jim Crow. Then it was women, because the patriarchy. Then it was gays, because of centuries of homosexual persecution. Then transsexuals -- sorry, transgenders -- because.

If it weren't for the ruling class championing these chappies, they would all keep a low profile and make sure to keep below the radar.

As you probably know, because of your eevil habit of consuming far-right media, a trickster has turned this game on its head by championing the idea of "Super Straights" as a helpless minority that demand their rights not to date transgenders.

But naturally, our ruling class has swung into action to censor this dangerous and "far-right" and transphobic movement.

See what I mean? If you are a small minority, be you ever so intransigent, and the ruling class don't like you, better head for the hills.

Because while the ruling class can use small minorities to solidify its power -- as our ruling class does today -- it can also turn on a dime and crush small minorities as the very agent of the Devil. That's what Literally Hitler did.

I maintain that all minorities maintain themselves using a Culture of Innocence. We, whoever "we" are, are innocent. Everything that goes wrong with us is the fault of the big guys, so we'd better all stick together. That is the point of the Culture of Innocence. It is the means for our community to stick together united against the world.

But the Culture of Innocence is almost always a lie. I had a serious confrontation with the lie of America's innocence lately, reading Flyboys by James Bradley, about the naval fliers in World War II. The Japs were inhuman killers, right? Well, the US treated Filipinos in the Spanish-American War rather similar to the way that the Japanese treated the Chinese in the 1930s. And the first thing the US did in WWII was the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, which outraged the Japanese as an attack on civilians. Then, towards the end of the war was the firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities, culminating in the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And never mind about carpet-bombing German cities. Hey, but we were the Good Guys, remember?

Yes, and so it is with our Woke Ruling Class today. All the Wokies are doing is fighting the "white oppressors," as the noble "allies" of the "oppressed peoples."

Akshully, this game of innocence occurs wherever politics is found. If you want to get the people off their behinds to fight a war for you, whether hot or cold or woke, you need to scare the people out of their wits with talk of a frightful danger, real or imagined. They, the enemy, are the worst thing since Frankenstein invented fossil fuel, and we, the helpless innocents, are the most oppressed and ill-treated since the invention of the patriarchy.

But, of course, one fine day, the world changes, and today's ruling class becomes yesterday's ruling class, and a new company of innocents takes the stage.

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

Who is Getting Screwed in Post COVID?

As I was taking leave of my Greek friend yesterday I asserted that we are going to see angry people in the months and years ahead.

But what people? Honestly, I have no idea. But, based on my infallible knowledge and instinct, I predict that there are tens of millions of Americans that got totally shafted by the year of COVID.

But, at this stage, we have little idea who they are and exactly how they got shafted.

But I bet you that by the time of the presidential nominating conventions of 2024 we will know exactly who they are.

Will it be the homeless? I don't mean the regular homeless but the people that got pitched out of their lives by the COVID shutdowns and didn't have the moxie to know how to find a new gig. Because welfare state.

Will it be the lower-middle class, people that don't quite make the cut to qualify as genuine victims, but who have suffered mightily over the past year?

Will it be the folks that stopped paying rent or their mortgage, because they could, and are now in a deep hole and they can't dig out?

Will it be the folk that got involved in the BLM-Anitfa riots last year and have now obtained finely-honed trouble-making skills?

Will it be middle-class women who "can't believe" how the police don't arrest and the courts don't prosecute thieves and thugs?

Will it be ordinary people outraged by the loot and plunder of the $1.9 trillion "stimulus" because they didn't get a share of the loot?

Will it be people that I just have no clue about?

My point is that the ruling class is clearly in a bit of a panic. That's what the reaction to Trump was all about: It Can't Happen Here. To coin a phrase. That's what the staggering overreaction to the January 6 riots was all about. Whereas the BLM-Antifa riots went on for six months to a "nothing to see here" chorus from the ruing-class media.

When people get into a panic, it means that they have encountered something unexpected, something that does not compute according to their world view, something that threatens their existence. Jordan B. Peterson deals with this rather nicely in his Beyond Order. Suppose you get a letter from the IRS.

If you receive an official piece of mail from [the tax] agency, your blood pressure will increase (or drop precipitously), your heart will pound, your palms will sweat, and a feeling of intense fear, even doom, may sweep over you. That is the instinctive response, associated with preparation for action, that accompanies exposure to danger.

Are you going to face the monster, or "suffer like a scared animal confronted by the predator's vicious eyes in the pitch of night"? Are you going to accept that your understanding of the world was flawed, and that you need to revise your world view?

Or are you, dear ruling class going back to same-old same-old and just do more of what comes naturally?

All I know is that I am going to be scanning the horizon to see how the American people deal with the aftermath of the COVID disaster.

And I think that our Democratic friends, in taking care of their supporters and thumbing their noses at the rest of America, have just made a huge strategic mistake.

But it could be that the opposite is true.

Changing America on a 51-49 Vote

Back in the day, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, onetime White House aide and later a Democratic Senator from New York, had some advice on big legislative bills like Obamacare in Congress, according to Politico in 2013: 

Twenty years ago, when he was trying to persuade Bill and Hillary Clinton that universal health care was a politically unrealistic goal, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan repeated one insistent warning: Sweeping, historic laws don’t pass barely. “They pass 70-to-30,’’ he said, “or they fail.”

What did he mean by that?

He meant that if you want to do big changes, you can't just ram it down the throat of the opposition. You have to find some sort of common ground. Otherwise you stir up a head of rebellion.

Read The Calculus of Consent by Buchanan and Tullock. Here's one of my takes on it. They say, by the way, that the only way to have just government is to require unanimous consent for every legislative bill. Why? Because that forces the majority to pay for the losses to be paid by the minority. Science™.

The need for a 79-30 vote probably explains why the Republicans were so hesitant to repeal Obamacare. It was because they knew that ramming it down the throats of the Democrats would just make them mad. Of course, partisan conservatives like me hated their timidity.

But now the Democrats just passed a $1.9 trillion blue-state bailout bill with no Republican votes in the House.

The bill passed the House by a 220-211 margin without a Republican vote, as the GOP argues the job market has recovered enough to warrant little or no new stimulus spending. One Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, opposed it. 

Also, Democrats with their H.R.1 bill are proposing to completely revamp election law in the United States. Again with no Republican support. And they want to ram down statehood for the District of Columbia.

And they are threatening to expand the Supreme Court.

Look, there is no mystery about this. Ever since Trump, Democrats have been looking at the political situation and they can't believe it. They can't believe that ordinary middle-class Americans are turning against them. 

So they are getting desperate. So they are queering the pitch of the electoral system. So they are pulling stunts like the BLM-Antifa summer. So they changed the rules for last November's election to make it easier for their operatives to find votes. So they overreacted to the January 6 riot. So they damned the whole of American history with their 1619 Project.

Hey, Nancy! What are you afraid of, honey?

And so we must go back to Politics 101.

What is the point behind Moynihan's remark about 70-30 votes for sweeping, historic measures?

I will tell you. The reason for elections and legislatures and reform bills is not to bend the arc of history towards justice or fight "systemic racism."

Not at all. The whole point of politics is to discourage the losers from deciding to opt for civil war.

See, when you pass a bill for $1.9 trillion with no Republican votes in a 50-50 Senate, and you pass the bill 220-211 in the House with no Republican votes, you are saying to the opposition: "Eff you!" You are basically saying to the minority: You are nothing! We can do anything we want and you will shut up if you know what is good for you.

Same thing with the big-tech censoring of right-wing voices on social media.

All one can say about such behavior by the majority party is this. It will not end well.

The whole point of the First Amendment and free speech and the right to "petition the government for a redress of grievances" is so that people with a chip on their shoulders will petition government rather than say, with Shakespeare's Cassius, "speak, hands for me" as he plunges his dagger into Julius Caesar.

Do the Nancy Pelosis and the Chuck Schumers not know this?

What do they think they are dong? Teaching the "systemic racists" a lesson? Teaching the Republican voters to never vote for a Trump again? Teaching their Republican colleagues in Congress that they are nothing?

Or are Nancy and Chuck running scared before the advancing horde of AOCs and the growing "coalition of the fringes?"

All I can say is that I must be missing something. Because for me, as a student of philosophy and politics and economics, this does not compute.

Google's Little Race Problem

Google is in the wokey headlights just now because it doesn't think that the graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) meet its exacting standards. Paul Mirengoff has the whole procedure.

See, Google has ranked colleges as follows: "elite," followed by "tier 1" and "tier 2." But HBCUs don't make the cut for "tier 2." So they are ranked as "long tail."

Racist! Google is racist!

Now I have a classification system for liberal bad behavior: Left's Conceits, Left's Crimes, Left's Errors. Well, why not? And I think that this siti-yation -- as they say in Treasure Island -- contains all three. And I'm not sure that this doesn't always apply.

Left's Errors aspect: Back in the Sixties, a second after the Civil Rights Act was passed, liberals decided that merely criminalizing racial discrimination wasn't enough. That was their first mistake. Why? Simply because it is one thing to judge that, say, having a whites-only fountain is discrimination; it is another to say that, because a particular corporation does not have a racial makeup that matches the racial proportions in the community, this represents discrimination.

Left's Conceits aspect: The second problem is to imagine that we evolved and educated liberals could, with politics and government, right the wrongs of yesteryear with top-down liberal-led programs of racial discrimination that we call quotas, or affirmative action, or diversity, or allyism, or fighting "systemic racism." It is a conceit, often found around ruling classes, that any political program it advances will achieve the results expected. Unfortunately there is Science™ that shows that this is not so. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even La Wik recognizes the Law of Unintended Consequences as a Thing.

Left's Crimes aspect: As the Paul Mirengoff article articulates, the whole quota/affirmative action thing has seriously hurt Blacks. it goes like this:

1. "Elite" universities tend to recruit black students with qualifications somewhat below the white and Asian students -- good but not great credentials -- in order to meet their racist diversity goals.
2. "Tier 1" and "tier 2" universities are forced to accept "mediocre black students" to meet their racist diversity goals.
3. "Long tail" universities like "HBCUs are left to select from a pool of applicants with credentials insufficient to warrant admission to good non-HBCUs even with the benefit of racial preferences.

"Expert agree" that the mismatching of black applicants to university results in lower overall achievements for blacks. Google finds that “HBCU computer science students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures.”

I think that the "mismatching" problem is a crime. But that's just me.

Of course, this also comes under my Little Darlings problem. When you accept the overlordship of the ruling class, and become its Little Darlings, as "the workers" once did, and then women and minorities and now LGBT+, you will thrive under the sponsorship of the ruling class until the day that you are no longer politically useful. Then, like the soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army that invaded Russia, you will be left by the roadside, probably to die of hunger and disease, certainly of despair.

And it is notable, I would say, that the abandoned Little Darlings don't really ever cotton to the reason for their despair.

Do the white working class today blame the 19th century reformers for their plight? Or FDR for eight years of top-down failure in the Great Depression? Or the compulsory unionism that made US steelworkers and autoworkers uncompetitive with the world market in the 1970s?

Anyway, it hardly matters. The damage is already done. As I say, the only question in the aftermath of lefty conceits, crimes, and errors is the size of the butcher's bill.

Will it be a butcher's bill on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao, or simply the abandoned folks "dying of despair" in rural America?

We can only hope.

Peterson's "Beyond Order"

I only realized that Jordan B. Peterson's follow-up to 12 Rules was to be published March 2 on the day before publication date. So I ordered my copy of Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life right away. For some reason the book is not yet banned on Amazon.

Hey, you good little girls at Penguin: how come I didn't know about the publication date? Are you still too triggered that, well, everybody knows that Peterson is a... well... something Eeeuww? 

But now I am half way through Beyond Order, and I'll tell you what surprises me. There's a lot of Nietzsche and Jung in it. And Dostoevsky. And then he tells the Mesopotamian myth of Tiamat and Apsu and Marduk. And when he is done with that it is on to the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, and Horus. And how Harry Potter fits exactly into the myth story arc. 

I would have thought all that would be a bridge too far for a best-selling self-help author. Anyway, the book is #8 on Amazon right now on March 8, 2021.

If the theme of 12 Rules was to get started in life, to get out of that proverbial parents' basement, the theme of Beyond Order is really more for mid-life adults that are afraid to take the next step out of a dead-end career. Or don't know what to do about the wokey co-workers at corporate HR. And Peterson recommends a blend of creativity, courage, and responsibility, and stick-to-it-iveness.

Of course, if you read Helen Lewis's review of Beyond Order in The Atlantic you won't be any the wiser about who Peterson is and what he is trying to do. Lewis is a Brit feminist lefty, that went to a private Catholic high school and then Oxford, darling, and you can understand that she would have No Clue about what Peterson is about, and what his ideas mean to his readers. To give you a hint, here is Lewis on Maps of Meaning, Peterson's 1990s book.

Maps of Meaning, published in 1999, built on the work of academics like Joseph Campbell, the literature and religion scholar who argued that all mythic narratives are variations of a single archetypal quest. (Campbell’s “monomyth” inspired the arc of Star Wars.) On this “hero’s journey,” a young man sets out from his humdrum life, confronts monsters, resists temptation, stares into the abyss, and claims a great victory. Returning home with what Campbell calls “the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” the hero can also claim the freedom to live at peace with himself.

Know what I think? I think that Lewis hasn't read Maps of Meaning. But, of course, it is trite to call Peterson's work a rehash of Campbell, just as it is right out of the lefty catechism to refer, as Lewis did in her famous GQ interview with Peterson, to Nietzsche as the "Nazis' favorite intellectual." Earth to Lewis: Nietzsche was a pro-European and an anti-nationalist.

The message in Beyond Order is that if you are stuck in a rut, it isn't going to do any good to hide from your problems. And it isn't going to do any good to burst out into the stratosphere, and it isn't going to do any good to pick up on one of the modern isms. Lewis:

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism. 

Ahem. Do not all the most advanced minds agree, Helen Lewis, that postmodernism is the grand narrative that all other grand narratives are, to use a Brit word, bollocks, and apologies for power. But postmodernism is pure as the driven snow.

Odd, isn't it, that postmodernism is a favorite with lefties for whom political power is not just the best thing but the only thing.

Here's an interesting moment from Beyond Order. Peterson talks about the 160 city speaking tour for 12 Rules. He mentions the need to keep the audience's attention, and how he learned to focus on one or two people in the audience.

What you want to see from the person you are facing is silence. What you want to hear from the crowd is dead silence. You want to hear nothing.

Because when people stop paying attention they shift their weight; they whisper to their neighbor; they think about tomorrow.

I became increasingly aware that the mention of one topic in particular brought every audience... to a dead-quiet halt: responsibility[.]

Well I never. Odd, isn't it that the one thing that our lefty friends are against is the notion of individual responsibility. Responsibility for lefties is all about the responsibility of the patriarchy or white supremacy for the misery of the oppressed peoples.

But responsibility for lefties is never about each individual, be xhe never so humble, seizing the nettle of life, overcoming adversity and fear, and just getting on with it.

Given how the ordinary People of the Responsible Self respond to Peterson's work, I would say that folks like Helen Lewis should spend a little more time trying to figure out why, and a little less time back-handing Jordan Peterson.

For me, the reason for Peterson's success is obvious. Peterson is laying out the road to creativity from rote responsibility. And it is a road that a lot of people in the world are ready to hear.

At the Intersection of Math and Politics

There's terrifying piece at Quillette about the intersection of math and leftism by Greg Ashman: "Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-old Conflict." It is, if you like, the argument between people that want to teach kids to understand math, and "those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization." And never mind what it means.

Now, of course, the "understanding" crowd are saying that forcing kids to memorize and practice is, as my cousin says, "colonizing the curriculum," and marginalizing the human way of learning, especially the non-western approach to knowledge.

The point is that, if things like learning to talk can be achieved without explicit teaching and rote memorization, why not math? Ashman:

Humans have been speaking to each other for a long time and long enough for evolution to act on the process of children learning their mother tongue. In contrast, writing and symbolic math are only a few thousand years old at best and for much of that time have been the preserve of only a tiny proportion of the human population. There simply has not been sufficient time for us to evolve natural ways to learn to read or do math through immersion.

In other words, little babies are programmed to learn to speak; they are not yet programmed to learn math. 

The article made me think about things we learn where explicit teaching and practice are required and just accepted. Let me count the ways:

1. Learning a musical instrument. You have to practice to make perfect. Unless you are Mozart.
2. Learning to dance. It takes about two years to learn Argentine Tango so you can just lead it unconsciously. And you practice it till it becomes second nature. Then you can wow all the girls.
3. Learning to fly. Pilots are taught to practice emergencies, because you do not have time to think when something goes wrong.
4. Boot camp. Soldiers need all kinds of skills to be second nature. To stay alive.
5. Acting in a play. You need to learn your cues, your lines, your blocking, and it needs to become second nature.
6. Mental arithmetic. It helps to know that "1 minus 4 is 7 carry one" -- instinctively, never mind why. Much faster than counting on your fingers.

Need I go on?

Maybe this explains "white privilege." Whites -- i.e. everyone except Africans -- have been doing writing and math rather longer than Blacks from West Africa. And it shows. No fair!

Note, by the way, that Brahmins from India and the Chinese seem to have no problem in the math department. In fact, I'd say that the Chinese people are probably better at math than your average pimply white soyboy. And I explain that by a couple thousand years of Mandarin examinations.

Or, as a guy from Taiwan explained to me, on the subject of teaching literacy in the East Asian character system: the way they teach literacy is that each student has to learn 20 characters a day. Or they get beaten.

What I wonder is what will happen, One Fine Day, when the clients of the liberals wake up to the fact that lefty politics is all about lefty educated gentry feeling good about themselves. Lefty politics has almost nothing to do with helping minorities and "oppressed peoples."

Do you think they will descend into a rage that outdoes the Viking "beserker" rage? Or just say: "much as I hate to say it, my liberal patrons just aren't as caring and compassionate as they like to think."

What? Me Worry? Advice to My Liberal Neighbors

In his seminal Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Joseph Schumpeter marvels that democratic governments ever get anything right. Says he in Chapter XXIII:

[D]emocracy does not mean and cannot mean that people actually rule... Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule over them... [D]emocracy is the rule of the politician.

Thus:

[T]he democratic method produces legislation and administration as by-products of the struggle for political office.

That H.R.1, the first legislation proposed by the current Congress, is all about rejiggering the rules for elections to favor the majority party, the Democrats, is thus not a bug but a feature. 

It is thus perfectly normal that the current $1.9 trillion stimulus package in Congress all about rewarding Democratic constituencies and very little about getting the economy back on course.

There are, by the way, some storm signals flying:

The American Spectator: "Inflation will destroy the middle class." The stimulus bill will stoke inflation and "a prolonged inflation will destroy the already weakened middle class and worsen the widening wealth gap in America." Is there any indication that the people in the Biden administration or that Nancy and Chuck have the least bit of interest in this?

National Review: "The Mother of all Stock Market Bubbles." The ratio of stock market valuation to GDP is right now 25 percent above the previous high at the peak of the NASDAQ bubble of 2000.

Powerline: "Storm Clouds for Biden." The Washington Post's business and economics columnist, Steven Perlstein, is retiring, and his last column basically tells the Dem faithful that their economic agenda will end in ruin.

And the politicians aren't paying attention because their trade is not fixing the economy but getting elected. And after you get elected you reward your supporters. And you think about ways to make it easier for you to get elected in the future.

Yes, but how do I protect myself? First, don't think you can completely protect yourself. But obviously you don't want to have too many dollars. You don't want to get sold out with an underwater mortgage.

And don't sell out at the bottom!

Meanwhile, a message to my liberal friends with the BLM and the #WeBelieve signs.

If you beat up on the police, what you get is fascism.

If you let your anti-fascist mostly peaceful protesters run wild, what you get is fascism.

If you permit runaway inflation, what you get is fascism.

If you beat up on the commoner middle class, what you get is fascism.

If your administration just caters to gentry-liberal virtue signalling, what you get is fascism.

This is actually not that hard. The tribe of the commoner is the nation. When the commoner is afraid, he rallies to the nation.

So, if you are a member of the Cathedral with all the perks and the power that go with it, the one thing you want to take care of is to keep the commoner sheep safely grazing. Don't sicc wokey wolves on them; and don't wipe out their modest jobs and their modest savings and their kids' education.

Do that and you will rule forever. The alternative is Literally Hitler.