One Man's Truth is Another Man's Disinformation

I guess that White House Press Secretary Jan Psaki's statement that:

"We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical experts…who are popular with their audience with accurate information. So, we're helping get trusted content out there."

is what they used to call a "bombshell" back in the days of Russia, Russia, Russia.

"Disinformation"? How do you know? How do you know that, say, anti-vaxxers are spreading disinformation rather than government experts? Hey, back in the day Democratic heavyweights like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sending out tweets that were trying to sow mistrust in President Trump's Operation Warp Speed vaccine program.

The whole mania about "fact-checking" during the Trump administration and the notion that he committed 30,573 false or misleading statements over four years, is nothing more than liberals being outraged by the other guy's lies. Liberals don't notice their own lies as lies. If the "fact-checkers" were conservatives doing their thing on President Obama, I'm sure they could have come up with similar statistics.

If you do not understand that all politicians and activists lie, all the time, then you are a fool and a knave.

The funny thing about this is that critical theory, the parent of critical race theory -- that all good people agree is logical and true -- says that you can't trust anyone, can't give anyone the power to determine what is true and what is false. And that goes back to Kant and his dictum that we can't know things-in-themselves. Everything we know is a theory. Actually, it goes back before Kant to Hume, that correlation is not causation. Or to Descartes, "I think, therefore I am." How do you know "I think," René? Got a direct line to God?

So, when we get to the Frankfurt School Horkheimer and Adorno say, critiquing Newtonian mechanics:

Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere objectivity. Men pay for the increase in their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them.

Everything, everything, is a guess, a theory, and when politics is involved, a power play.

And yet now we have gubmint schools using critical race theory as a tool of the ruling class to marginalize the opposition. See, back in the day, the critical theorists imagined themselves as heroic activists battling against the rulers and the powerful.

So the reason we have a First Amendment and the idea "not abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is that one man's "disinformation" is another man's truth. And vice versa.

And when we talk about "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" we are not yet saying anything about whether the grievances are true or just a bunch of people bewitched by some lying political activist.

Surely, after the last 18 months of COVID stupidity, that started with Brit scientist Neil Ferguson's model that turned out to be off by about a factor of ten, that continued with various bureaucratic ukases about lockdowns and masks and not-lockdowns and not-masks, we should understand that everyone, everyone, is playing it by ear.

And, may I suggest, playing it by what will advance the political interest of the player.

For instance, why do you think that politicians all got on the lockdown train? Because Science, or because they needed to be Doing Something? If you think "because science" I gotta bridge to sell you.

Here's a shocking idea. Everyone, everyone, thinks that they have the truth and that anyone that disagrees with them is peddling "disinformation." Especially if they are in the religious or political worlds.

That is why we have the First Amendment. And that is why our lefty friends were First Amendment absolutists back in the day. Back in the day when it was lefties getting censored by eevil McCarthyite anti-Communist rabble-rousers.

Hey, how about this. Right now, if you want, you can go get vaccinated. If you get vaccinated then chances are about nil that you will die from COVID. (But, say the anti-vaxxers, you might die of a reaction to the COVID vaccine. But what are the odds? I don't know).

Here's the deal. 

First, if you don't trust the vaccine and you get COVID and you die of COVID, then it is your fault. You did it.

Second, the COVID virus turns out to be about five times more lethal than the average flu virus. Just between you and me, I doubt if this is a justification for shutting down the world economy. Maybe a year ago it made sense, when we didn't have the epidemic data to tell us what the risks were. (Although we did have the Diamond Princess data that the experts are still busily arguing about whether the fatality rate was 0.6 or 1.2 or 2.0).

Third, the whole idea of modern society is that people are responsible and have the right to make informed judgments. So the government's word is not the last word.

Fourth, all people in politics lie. Because we the people insist upon it.

The basic problem is that all humans think that the other guy, that disagrees with us, is full of it, and should be deplatformed for spreading disinformation.

And that ain't gonna change.

The "Tell" on Election Law, Immigration, and More

More and more I am understanding the political world through the notion of the "tell" in poker, the idea that the other player unconsciously signals the value of his hand in his face and body language.

And so I interpret the behavior of our Democratic friends as desperation, the last mad bet of a gambler about to get cleaned out.

Take the Democratic Texas legislators that left town and headed to Washington DC so they could gesticulate about racist election laws. Really? Are the arcane election laws really that important to you? Why would that be?

Now we read that the Senate Dems are putting immigration law changes into the budget reconciliation package. That's because it is much harder for Democratic senators who might be on the fence about immigration to vote against the juicy loot-and-plunder items in the reconciliation package. But why would you snuggle immigration into the budget package unless you knew it was a vote loser that would never have a chance of passing if it were offered up by itself?

You really want election laws that do not have the imprimatur of a straight-up bill passed by both Houses of Congress with a Moynihanian 70-30 vote in the Senate. If you don't understand that then you don't belong in national politics.

I keep reading my racist-sexist-homophobe friends agonizing about the Democrats setting up a "one-party" state. But you don't even think about a one-party state unless you are afraid that you are about to lose the whole game.

But still.

I get that our educated ruling class has the notion that it knows best, on everything from race relations to mass transit and climate change. What is interesting that it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that the way to advance these ideas is through a free and open discussion of the issues, in which the opinion of the "other" party is at least accommodated in the final result. In other words, to persuade. Instead all opponents to the educated-class agenda are stigmatized as "deniers" and "bigots." What's that all about?

I mean, really. Does our ruling class think it can rule without even a pretense of accommodating the opinions and the world view of the great middle class?

I get that with the current ruling-class ideology of "antiracism" you are either an ally, an oppressed people, or a white oppressor. So, obviously, the only thing to think about are the needs of the oppressed peoples. Otherwise you are not an ally, but a white oppressor.

But, how do you allies know what is best for the oppressed peoples? Done any social science lately? Do you have any ideas that contradict the ideas of Charles Murray that say that the ruling educated class has Made Things Worse for the lower orders starting not later than the Great Society programs of 1965? Other than saying Charles Murray is a racist?

I mean, why all the pedal-to-the-metal opposition to President Trump? Can he really mean the end of everything we hold dear when you Dems won back the House in 2018? How much damage can a president do when he is facing a divided Congress?

Or is the problem the very idea of a middle-class rebellion against your rule? I mean, given that the educated class takes pretty well all the bandwidth of the public square, wouldn't you expect an inchoate revolt of the deplorables every now and again? And wouldn't it be the very height of political wisdom to throw the plebs a bone every now and again?

See, the way I think, it is a "tell" to overreact to the election of a populist nationalist in a normal change election. The "tell" is that you regard the rise of an opposing narrative as a threat to your very being. Really? Is your rule based on such a weak foundation?

And what's with the trillions upon trillions of spending this year? What does it mean? That your supporters demand a huge payoff right now or else they are goin' fishin'? Or what?

For instance, I expect that the inflation and consequent efforts to contain it will fall heaviest upon the lower class and upon the middle class, who will react by voting for Change. Did you chaps think about that before you put your pedal to the metal on the spending accelerator?

And climate change. I read a piece that suggested we need to build a 1.2-gigawatt nuclear plant every month till 2040 if we are going to eliminate fossil fuels. Because certainly wind and solar ain't gonna do it. Yeah. Good luck getting even one nuclear plant built between now and 2040. So what is this climate change thing really about?

Did you chaps think about the effect of your COVID lockdowns on the livelihoods of ordinary American workers? Or that it would toss millions our of the workforce into homeless camps?

I just have this nagging feeling that you rulers really don't have a clue, that you are madly punching buttons up there in the cockpit without a clue what you are doing.

I just hope I am wrong, and that everything turns out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Predicting the Future When the Universe Changes

The ZMan has an interesting take today on the similarity between today and the world before World War I.

This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The Commies, he writes, were the only people back then seriously trying to predict "what happens next."And they said that "the arc of history bent towards socialism."

I think that gives the Commies too much credit. Everyone understood that the industrial age was transforming the world. Everyone, back then, was eagerly proposing plans to improve the world through politics. It's just that the Commies had a full-blown religion that promised Heaven on Earth if only we followed the Prophet Marx's True Prophecy.

More likely, says the ZMan, everyone is reverting to type.

Russia, for example, has kept reverting back to being Russia, despite the changes in political economy. We see this quite clearly with China today, which is a high tech version of the Tang Dynasty. 

In our own age, we are experiencing that the technological revolution is changing everything, just as the industrial revolution changed everything in its time. "The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it." The Commies understood that the industrial order involved a huge movement of people and changed power relationships; "Similarly, technology has created new power relationships and set up a massive movement of people." 

For the ZMan, it is "the dissident subculture in which there is any serious thought about what is driving the ongoing crisis." 

The dissident knows that today is the result of the millions of decisions that have happened up to this moment on the timeline. A man is the sum of the mating choices of his ancestors and a people is the sum of all the choices that made the people.

But the future? "Nothing is inevitable other than the fact that people have always been wrong about the future."

That sets me to thinking, about what we humans are consistently wrong about. And I think that there are a couple things to seriously deal with.

1. Don't prophesy! The temptation of all religions is to try to prophesy the future. Don't do it! We humans are never going to wrap up the future in a comforting -- or a terrifying -- prophecy about what God or Gaia or the arc of history or climate change is going to do.
2. Be ready to adapt. The whole point of humans is that we are pretty good at adapting to whatever God or Nature or out boss throws at us. So let's keep those skills sharpened.
3. Help others to adapt. The problems of the last century, I feel, occur when political and religious leaders teach their followers that there is no need to adapt. The Commies teach their followers to follow them and they will smash the exploiters. Wrong! Teach the workers how to wive and thrive in the new world. The modern educated class teaches its followers to just sit there and they will take care of everything. Wrong! Everyone has to learn how to deal with the future and deal with its challenges.

When you think about it, the prophets are bound to be wrong. They might be telling us that God will provide, or that God will damn us to Hell unless we repent. But, it seems to me, both these approaches are trying to reduce fear by prophesying certainties. And there ain't no such thing.

For there is no way to know what the "unanticipated consequences" of our actions are going to be. We humans are always meddling with things without a clue about what we are meddling with. There is no way to figure out, in advance, what is going to happen when some butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil. Maybe nothing, maybe the end of the world. But we can respond to "unanticipated consequences" and try to mitigate them. I think that, on the whole, we are pretty good at that.

The other thing we can do is help other people adapt. That, I think is the great takeaway from the fraternal associations and mutual-aid societies of the 19th century. They developed a culture of helping and coping and getting on with life. I feel that the dominant movements arising out of the educated class have operated on the conceit that all we needed to do was to follow the leader, the political or intellectual leader, because He Knows!

And to reduce it to my reductive Three Peoples theory, the People of the Creative Self need to get out and set an example of creative adaption to the curve balls that the world throws at us, the People of the Responsible Self need to responsibly adapt within the framework of their culture of doing the right thing. And the People of he Subordinate Self need to up their game, because following along and looking to someone else to pull your irons out of the fire tends not to work when everything is changing. Because when the going gets tough, the tough get going.

Nobody can predict the future. Not God, not prophets, not scientists, and not political leaders and bureaucrats. What we can do is adapt.

Humans Are Evil, But Mostly Just Stupid

What do you think of riots in South Africa, a total mess in Haiti, mostly peaceful protests in Cuba, and anti-vax-passport demonstrations in France?

Frankly, I don't think much, nor do I worry much about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as Suzannah Lipscomb does at UnHerd.com.

What I do worry about is the stupidity of government officials, and their ham-handed actions high and low.

I worry that the shutdown of the economy during COVID will have all kinds of unpleasant effects on the US, stemming in part from disruptions to the lives of marginal people that will never get their lives back together again. I don't say the shutdowns and maskings and quarantines were evil. I just think that they were mostly stupid and will have "unanticipated consequences" that nobody ever thought about.

I worry about the "go for broke" culture in the US ruling class right now, from gigantic spending to excessive unemployment benefits to wholesale voting-law reforms. I don't say that they are evil; I just think they are spooked, and have reacted by doing stupid things.

The Four Horsemen represented Disease, Famine, War, and Judgement. And Lipscomb wants us to realize that those ancient harbingers of disaster are not so ancient or so distant as we like to think in our modern prosperous bubble.

Still, it is sobering to learn of Disease that

It was also bubonic plague that continued to reappear on average every 16 years, with a lethality rate of between 60% and 80%. It killed quickly and horribly.

And of Famine that

Much famine, then as now, was man-made, like the eight-month siege of Sancerre in 1573 during the French Wars of Religion. The inhabitants first turned to eating their horses and donkeys, then cats, rats, and finally dogs.

So a lot of famine was the consequence of War

Warfare is less obvious today. Troops do not get billeted to our homes, nor loot and pillage our food supplies. 

Although, after a century with two world wars and the US meddling all over the world, I wonder.

But whatabout the Day of Judgement? Oh yes, Climate Change,

the news that Canada registered a record, Sahara-desert like high of 49.6°C last month[.]

Hey, I know! Whatabout the absolute disaster of all socialist and national-socialist regimes from Bolshevik Russia to today's Winner, post-Castro Cuba. There's the Judgement of God, if you like.

But I still think that worse than all the evils of the world are the stupidities. You know, like the Great Reset, from the World Economic Forum.

There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.

Oh yeah. That should work.What could go wrong?

Biden, Democrats, Race and Going for Broke

We really are experiencing a weird season right now, as Texas State House Democrats fly the state to go to Washington DC to advocate for the Democrats' plan to federalize election laws, as employers can't find employees, as Democrats are pushing gigantic spending bills. And as President Biden warns us that Jim Crow is only a vote away. Said he:

This year alone, 17 states have enacted -- not just proposed, but enacted -- 28 new laws to make it harder for Americans to vote, not to mention -- and catch this -- nearly 400 additional bills Republican members of the state legislatures are trying to pass.

The 21st century Jim Crow assault is real. It's unrelenting, and we're going to challenge it vigorously.

All of which makes me wonder what Democrats know that I don't know. I mean, if this is a return to Jim Crow then what has been the point of 50 years of positive discrimination in favor of blacks in the United States?

The good old American term "going for broke" seems to apply.

Why would Democrats try to federalize voting laws when the two houses of Congress are about evenly divided, 50-50? Because this is the best it's gonna be for Democrats from here on out? You tell me.

Why would Democrats be trying to pass gigantic spending bills when the Congress is about evenly divided? Because this is the only chance they will get to hand out loot and plunder to their supporters for a while? You tell me.

Why would Democrats keep the unemployment bonuses going when employers are reporting a shortage of employees? Don't they get how the labor market works? How inflation works? You tell me.

Why is President Biden proposing new subsidies to help low-income homebuyers what with home prices soaring out of sight? Don't Democrats understand that it is past subsidies that have caused the sky-high home prices that have priced young people and low-income buyers out of homeownership -- and maybe marriage? You tell me.

Humans don't "go for broke" unless they are about to lose everything. 

Oh, and when the unemployment bonuses stop and the eviction ban ends, and the mortgage forbearance ends, and when gas prices bounce above $5 per gallon and...

What Democrats don't seem to understand -- and why would they as they live in a New York Times NPR bubble -- is that in order to flatter themselves with their noble anti-racism and noble assistance for the poor they have visited a whole basketful of injustice upon ordinary white middle class Americans.

Because I say that almost every government program Makes Things Worse. You can hand out loot all you like, but at some point the gravy train ends. And when the checks stop coming people get really angry.

And I don't think that Democrats have a clue about the mayhem that is coming.

Our lefty friends have taken a fun ride on the Critical Theory train, insisting among other things that everything is a ruling-class narrative, that race is a social construction. And so on.

As Shakespeare might have said: All the world's a narrative, everything from Creation myths to modern physics and everything in between. The critical thing to understand is that some narratives work -- like modern physics -- and some narratives don't, like Marxist economics.

If you are not worried that your narrative may not be the last word in human knowledge then I think you have a problem.

I keep thinking about Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his advice back in the day that when you pass a big piece of legislation in Congress, you need a 70-30 vote in the Senate. He meant, of course, that you need near unanimity when you pass big things. Because if you don't then you just enrage the people on the losing side, and they will be looking for the opportunity to punch back.

Back in the day it seemed like Democrats would rule for a thousand years, what with the FDR coalition and then the 1964 election when Democrats beat Goldwater 60-40. Ever since, I suspect, there has seemed to be a glitch in the Matrix for Democrats: how could Nixon win? How could the B-movie actor Reagan win? Trump? Eeuw! And it is natural for humans to assume that when things go wrong it is the result of malevolence, on the part of the Other or on the part of God.

That is the position of Democrats as they Go for Broke. They cannot believe that their problems issue from their foolish ideas and narratives that Make Things Worse. It must be the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes -- and Jim Crow, Put Together!

It's all such a shame, especially since it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The End, or the Beginning?

I had an email from an acquaintance who'd written a book about the experience of being overrun like the Native Americans. Is that what we are experiencing, we middle-class white Commoners? A few years ago he'd written a book, For All The Marbles, about America being invaded by jihadi terrorists.

In the first part of the book, I tried to write about what the Native Americans might have been witnessing as the "white wave" of settlers swept across the middle of what was to be the United States.  And, I tried to have my protagonist compare that wave, with the coming wave of terrorists in present day America.

It all depends, of course, on whether we are experiencing the conquest by a superior culture or the last desperate flailings of a failing ruling class.

I rather lean towards the failed ruling class narrative.

I think about my forefathers in the early 20th century who were Commoner Brits with small businesses in places like Russia and Japan. They did what they did because they had business skills that the native population didn't have. An ordinary Commoner could make a decent life out of a routine business "out in the colonies" that he couldn't if he were back home in Britland having to compete with all the entrenched interests. 

Yet. One friend of my grandfather in Japan retired early and sold his business because, he said, the Japanese were learning the business culture so fast that he'd be out of business in a few years.

So I believe that what we see is the rest of the world catching up. But what about what comes next?

I don't think that the next thing has appeared yet. So I don't think that we are in the process of being inundated by a superior civilization. Unless, of course, you look at the fact that the top income groups in the US are various flavors of South and East Asians.

Here are the income league tables for 2019 from La Wik:

Race is a Social Construction	Median Household Income	Percent of Black
Indian Americans	$116,793	266%
Chinese Americans	$81,510	185%
Finipino Americans	$79,936	182%
Vietnamese Americans	$68,979	157%
White Americans	$65,777	150%
Latino Americans	$51,404	117%
Black Americans	$43,862	100%

Now I don't know what you think, but I know that the reason that Indian Americans are at the top is straight up "systemic caste-ism." And the reason that Chinese Americans score so high is "systemic Mandarin examination-ism."

Mind you, I don't blame the Chinese. Hey, back in the 19th century there was this kid that flunked his state examinations, decided he was the brother of Jesus Christ and by the time the Taiping rebellion was over, the butcher's bill was 30 million. Give or take a million or two.

Hey, here's the Wall Street Journal writing about "A PTA Purge of Asians." Really? The Parent Teacher Association "is in cahoots with watering down entrance standards" at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology -- "ranked No. 1 among all public high schools nationwide by U.S. News and World Report." And "The percentage of Asian-Americans admitted to TJ dropped to 54% this year from 73% last year."

Now I'm reading all kinds of stuff, from Curtis Yarvin, who thinks that the oligarchy will win, to the whites-only right, and I think this.

It was all very well when the Democrats were allies of the working class, when the working class was probably a majority of the population. Hey, that was a political formula made in Heaven.

So I get where the Democrats think that by playing the race card and reckoning that in a couple of decades America will be majority non-white, and so their over/under political formula will still be a winner.

But I suspect that there is a great big opportunity for populist nationalists to play the class card, to unite the majority Commoner middle class of every "race is a social construction" and mobilize them against the educated class and its AstroTurf BLM and AntiFa thugs.

See I think the middle class doesn't want too much government. It just wants to obey the laws, go to work, follow the rules and wive and thrive and take personal responsibility.

Whereas the educated class gets off on directing traffic.

Hey, everyone likes a traffic cop, except if there's a traffic pile-up. Then people might start to say: why do we need these Keystone Kraffic Kops? All they do is run around and screw things up.

And there is this. Suppose that What Comes Next is a religious and cultural movement that says: "we don't need so much stinkin' politics, thanks very much."

Because that is what I think is the world's Big Problem. The only thing that politics knows is division. The division of the electorate into Us and Them and the division of loot and plunder among the political supporters. Oh, and the construction of monuments: how's that pyramid coming along, Pharaoh?

What has political division and gubmint loot and plunder done for you lately?

Are we about to be overrun? Or will America arise once again, shake itself off, and resume its destiny as the city on a hill, the last best hope of mankind on Earth?

Tribalism: China will Divide, because Politics is Division

One of my maxims is that the only way you create a nation or a tribe or a race is by fighting a war. It is not true that people "of one race" -- whatever that "social construction" means -- are naturally united whereas a multiracial society is naturally divisive.

"Nowt o' the sort!" as they say in The Secret Garden. 

Now here is the Zman on Taki's saying that the Chinese are naturally united, because they are 90 percent Han.

The great chain of causality begins with biology, then culture, with institutions being culture-specific. Asian societies are biologically homogeneous. China proper is almost entirely Han. Their culture of conformity is mostly the result of being a unified people.

OK. So how come China keeps having its Time of Troubles in between dynasties? How come the Chinese willfully engaged in a civil war from 1921, when the Holy Roman Communist Party was founded, and 1949 when the son of a rich peasant, Mao Zedong, took power in Beijing.

And incidentally culturally appropriated the backdrop of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen, its Gate of Heavenly Peace. There are five gates, by the way, and only the emperor gets to go through the center one, peasant.

So the Chinese are all Han and therefore united. So why did Mao decide to do his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution? If the Chinese were all united and stuff? Why bother, old chap?

So here is my philosophy, again.

You create a people -- whether a tribe, a nation, a class, a labor union, by  fighting and winning a war, because the experience of a war unites all the men that served and fought in the war. It's instinctive in men.

Women, on the other hand, do not unite in that way. But they do unite, as they did during COVID, by all being Good Little Girls and wearing masks and keeping social distance and crossing to the other side of the street when someone is walking their dog in the opposite direction. Let's say that women unite for a season in order to be safe.

But once the war is ended then normal politics resumes, and division appears again. Doesn't matter if it is feudal politics where the various barons and counts and dukes all conspire against each other and occasionally besiege each other's castles, or court politics as in the days of the absolute monarchs, or democratic politics where politicians divide the electorate with promises of more spending for the educated class and the underclass and lower taxes for the middle class, or neighborhood politics where the women all complain about each other with "I can't believe she said that."

Once the war is over, then the tribe begins to divide up again. Period.

So the reason why China is united and we can all talk about them being 90 percent Han is that normal politics has not resumed, what with the current single-party rule under President-for-life Xi Dingping.

But it will. I seem to recall that the southerners in China call the northerners wheat-eaters and the northerners call the southerners rice-eaters. I think that these are supposed to be insults, but not being Chinese, I wouldn't know. But, don't forget, there are plenty of dialects in China, from Mandarin to Cantonese. And I seem to recall from the delightful Crazy Rich Asians that the Chinese are as tribal as anyone. And snobbish? You betcha. But look at the Map of Chinese dialects: "China is a large and diverse country." Who knew?

No. No go. All tribes are fake tribes, gussied up to take men to war. And as I say, the tribe of the lower class is the ethnic group, the tribe of the middle class is the nation, the tribe of the educated class in the global educated class.

Notice that the preferred political division of our current ruling class, called "antiracism," posits a division of America between the "oppressed peoples, their allies, and white oppressors."

Notice how there are three lies in the Allyism manifesto.

Lie 1: The so-called "oppressed peoples" are in fact the lower class that is particularly privileged by the rulers with diversity and inclusion and welfare-state loot and plunder.

Lie 2: The so-called "allies" are in fact the ruling class -- oppressors by any other name -- that uses the notion of "oppressed peoples" as a political formula to justify its power.

Lie 3: The so-called "white oppressors" are just ordinary middle-class whites that don't have any particular political power with which to oppress people. They are people that the rulers can cancel in a New York minute as "racist" if they step out of line.

I think that my concept that all tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up in war, is a profound and liberating concept.

Because, you see, in my vision of the good life, if people naturally accept that different classes have different tribes, then the educated Gentry happily lives in its global community of high-minded educated priests all over the world. But the educated class benevolently allows the Commoners to live and wive and thrive in their nations, because in its wisdom it understands that the natural tribe of the middle class is the nation, and the poor dears will never grow out of it. The middle class benevolently allows the Subordinates to live in their ethnic enclaves, but encourages the Subordinates to come out of their ghettos and join the middle-class world of responsibility and trust whenever they are ready.

What a world that would be.

For now, we should start erecting the bleachers so we can watch the Chinese people quarrel among themselves once the Emperor Xi no longer rules a one-party state.