Progressives: The Bill of Indictment

I think that there are three basic issues on which the ruling class of our time has utterly failed.

The first is the welfare state that supports the working class. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for the working class. I believe that what we should have done was encourage the mutual-aid aspect of labor unions, set up a legal framework to encourage workers to save for retirement and against sickness and unemployment, and keep government and its heavy hand out of the market economy.

The second is the promotion of feminism and the sexual revolution and abortion. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for women. I believe that the idea that the highest and best thing for women is to have careers is an utter misunderstanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for humans in general and women in particular. We humans are social animals, not economic animals. We only work in the market economy to bring home the bacon. Men have careers so they can acquire high-status women for marriage. The sexual revolution goes against the instinct in almost all women, that sex is something you gladly and freely give to the man you love -- forever. And, of course, sex means children. A society needs abortion only when its women are expected to give themselves to men who can summarily dismiss them after they have won their love, or when women are expected to schedule children to suit the demands of their careers.

The third is the utter injustice of the post civil rights era. I believe that the resort to quotas and affirmative action and diversity and "underrepresentation" and equity in race relations is more than a strategic mistake, it is a vile injustice that has divided society and Made Things Worse for blacks and whites, but great for the administrative class. The point about law is that it is a replacement for the culture of revenge. You gotta problem, you appeal to the legal system for redress, not to your kindred or your race or your class. The whole point of law is that unless you treat everyone as an individual you enter an impossible thicket of special pleading  that will fail to resolve anything. That is the point of saying, in law, that government and businesses may not discriminate on the basis of race. It means that institutional decision makers are expected to treat people as humans, not as members of a particular group. That approach is not perfect, because humans are not just human individuals but people with individual characteristics and history and ability and weaknesses. But any other approach in a large society is doomed to failure and conflict.

Because our ruling class has imposed these three great errors on us and Made Things Worse, and doubled down on its mistakes, it must be removed as a ruling class and replaced with another. I suggest that the new ruling class should be drawn from the ordinary middle class, because the ordinary middle class is not that interested in power, and I believe that human society in the future is a society that needs a lot less political power. That's because, I believe, the last two hundred years of the Great Enrichment has demonstrated that the market economy is a much better way to resolve human differences than the old way of defending food-growing land from the Other.

The only question remaining is whether our present ruling class releases its grip on political power voluntarily or not. The only question, therefore, is the size of the mountain of skulls. It could be zero. Or not.

Tulip Mania in Washington State

Did you know that Washington State is a major tulip-growing region? Yes, in the Skagit River estuary there are tons of tulip farms. And we went to Roozengarde Farms where you can bury yourself in tulips for a mere $15 per person. You can enjoy an ornamental tulip garden, filled with all kinds of exotic tulip variants. And you can stop by the side of the road and enjoy acres of tulips in full bloom. And, even midweek, there are tons of people enjoying the tulip fields.

Crowds and crowds of people, all enjoying the remarkable diversity of the tulip plant. What a glorious thing it is to see people enjoying the magic of Spring. The camera is looking eastward across the Skagit estuary towards the foothills of the Cascade mountains.

Then we went to the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum in La Conner, Washington. We saw "The Quilt Road: Contemporary Korean Quilts." These quilts are mainly quilts-as-paintings-on-the-wall. If you, like me, think that most contemporary art is Sick and Wrong, it is a beautiful and liberating thing to experience these artworks that seem to know nothing of the nihilism of modern art. They communicate a joy in life that you won't find in your average rooty-snooty art museum.

And why not? Why is there no joy in your average rooty-snooty big-city art museum?

Could it be that when you mix art and politics you get politics? You may well think so: I could not possibly comment.

Here's something to ponder. For weeks, as I take a Wednesday walk around Green Lake here in North Seattle, I have been worrying about the clash between flocks of our good old American Widgeon, and marauding flocks of bad-tempered Canada Geese. You see, both widgeon and geese like to graze on the grass at Green Lake. But today the American Widgeon had disappeared, leaving only the suspicious-looking Canada Geese, almost certainly foreign agents of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Mounties. But maybe those American Widgeon have flown north, over the border into British Columbia, there to bring forth a new generation of good old American Widgeon to gladden our all-American hearts. But I fear that up in Canada they will be singing:

American Widgeon, stay away from me
American Widgeon, mama let me be

I just hope that Our Justin doesn't freeze their bank accounts. And the Mounties don't trample them, like they trampled the old woman in a mobility scooter in Ottawa the other day.

Elon Musk is My Man

In the last week Elon Musk announced that he had bought about 10 percent of Twitter. And it looked like he was going to join the board of directors. Until he wasn't. Says CNBC:

Billionaire Elon Musk’s reversal of his decision to join Twitter’s board opens the door to a hostile takeover and could lead to additional volatility in the stock, according to analysts.

God, I love that guy. And all the Twitter employees report being "super stressed" about the prospect of Elon Musk owning a good chunk of Twitter. But why should this be? Surely, the Twitterati are providing us the best in social media "healthy conversations" that educated lefty twerps can deliver. 

By the way, I just added the following maxim to my catalog of Maxims. 

Women: "Shelter in place." Men: "March toward the sound of the guns."

I wonder what that means, cupcake.

Did you see Elon Musk introducing his Starship launch facility "Starbase" in Boca Chica, Texas back in February? The show begins at about 35:00. He begins with the question "why are we doing this... why build this giant reusable rocket?"

His answer is basically, well, you can't be too careful. So it's best to become interplanetary. And really, there comes a point where Jackie Gleason's command "to the Moon, Alice" becomes insufficient. Let's "go to Mars," just to be safe.

Sorry, Elon, we know the real reason. It's the same reason that Edmund Hillary gave for climbing Mt. Everest: "because it's there."

But I had two big takeaways from Musk's show. 

First, that he has made a remarkable improvement in the basic Raptor rocket engine from Raptor 1 to Raptor 2. Raptor 2 is smaller but more powerful, with an improvement from 185 to 230 tons thrust. 

Second, that he figures that he can make reusable rocket travel cheaper than ordinary long-distance jet travel. Hey, If you can travel from the US to Hong Kong by Starship in one hour, you can have a lot more use of your spacecraft than your average long-distance jet plane. And Musk plans a one hour turnaround for booster and Starship between flights. Musk makes the point that reusability is basic. Hey, he comments: Imagine if your average long-distance $230 million jet plane was not reusable.

Yep. Imagine if Musk could bring off the two-fer of reusable space hardware and an end to censorship on Twitter. Talk about Hope and Change!

A History of Lefty Grooming

Our lefty friends seem to be mad as hell about being called "groomers" for grooming our kids in the glories of the LGBT life.

This is something of a breakthrough on the pejorative front. Ever since the end of the worst thing ever, McCarthyism -- imagine, the very idea of Communists in the State Department! -- our lefty friends have been doing the pejorative thing on us. Racist, sexist, homophobe, and all the rest of the -phobes.

Now, all of a sudden, our lefty friends are outraged, outraged, that we evil far-right violent extremists dare to say that schools with "transition closets" are grooming our kids for the LGBT life.

As Cpl. Jones would say in the Brit WWII series, Dad's Army, "they don't like it up them." I have no idea what he meant by that.

But really, isn't it the truth that leftism is groomism, and lefties are groomers. On everything.

Religious Grooming

The whole point of Horace Mann and the "common school" movement was first of all, to groom the children of the more severe Puritan sects away from their enthusiastic Christianity. Because the Boston Transcendentalists knew better. Later on, of course, the idea was to groom Irish kids away from their Catholicism, but the Irish weren't having it and built their own Catholic schools instead.

In my view not only is this vile and monstrous, but it also grooms the children of the lower classes away from the best road to the middle class, that encourages subordinate people to become responsible.

Anti-Capitalist Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids to love socialism or the welfare state is to make them into obedient subordinates. There was an excuse for Marx & Co. back in the day. The dark satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution really did look pretty forbidding. Except, of course, that the workers were getting to live instead of dying out on the land, as they had in England since, say, 1500.

And the market economy encourages people to get out of subordinate peasantry and become an actor in the life not of making just for you and yours, but making stuff for the whole world and accepting its verdict in the wage you get for your labor, or the price you get for your product.

No doubt the market economy has its rough spots, particularly after wars when it is difficult for idiot governments to figure out how to return life -- and particularly the financial system -- to normalcy. But don't ever forget that in the last 200 years the average real per-capita income has gone up by 3,000 percent -- or 30 times. And nobody saw it coming. Oh, there was one guy, Carter Reynell in 1685:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

But really! What did he know? Especially since it was three years before the Dutch invaded Britland in 1688 and installed the Dutch Finance that would lead to Britannia ruling the waves and Britons never, never, never being slaves.

Career Grooming

The whole point of feminism is that upper-class women don't really like to be domestic. So the schools groom girls to want to have careers.

I tend to find this amusing, for it assumes that men pursue careers because careers are rewarding and satisfying. Not exactly. Speaking as a man, a young man understands that he needs to have "prospects" if he expects to attract an attractive woman to his bed. Thus it is that in the lower classes, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

And the problem with grooming women for careers is that it tends to take them out of the baby business in their peak fertile years. You tell me that this is a good thing.

Sex Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids for the sexual revolution is what, exactly? My judgement is that free sex is not good for women at any number of levels. First of all, women are much more at risk from STDs, because of the enclosed nature of their sexual equipment. Secondly, women really do not like serial sexual affairs. It affects their, er, mental health. Or, if you prefer a more universal understanding of women and sex, women really want to cleave to one man and love him forever. Oh, of course, all the men in the world are cads and layabouts and heartless. But a girl can dream, right?

Anti-Family Grooming

The whole point of leftism is to marginalize the family, so it grooms young people away from the mainstream life of marriage and children. No doubt there are people in the world that are marked out to be creative artists, and burying them for thirty years in the work of marriage and children is a waste of their transcendental talent. No doubt there are masculine women that are just the wrong fit for mothering. But for 97.2 percent of people they need to get married and have a family because if they don't they will miss out on the whole point of life. And that is grandchildren.

LGBT Grooming

If you really can't stand a sexual relationship with the opposite sex, well good luck to you, for it's hard to miss out on the mainstream of life. But grooming kids to believe that LGBT is creative, or cool, or deliciously rebellious, or that LGBTs are innocent oppressed people since the dawn of time, is sick and wrong. And to facilitate and groom kids for "transitioning" is not just stupid -- as in good little liberal teachers toeing the party line -- but cruel. Society's message to LGBT should be: do it if you must, but don't frighten the horses in the street. Because the bottom line for human life is babies on the ground, and every child needs a mother and a father: their mother and their father.

I think we need something that rhymes with Groomer. Groomer Doomer? Groomer Broomer? Groomer Fumer? Groomer Puma? Groomer Vroomer?

I will put my unconscious mind to work on it.

A Window into Activist World

There's a poster in the window of the Bainbridge Island Art Museum, just up the street from the ferry dock. This poster says:

#TAKE CARE OF

MUSLIM
BLACK
WOMEN
QUEER
LATINX
NATIVE
IMMIGRANT
P.O.C.
TRANS
DISABLED
L.G.B.T.Q.+
LOW INCOME
ACTIVIST
REFUGEE
UNDOCUMENTED
INCARCERATED

FRIENDS, FAMILY & COMMUNITY

Now, let's unpack this, because there seems to be a victim hierarchy here.

Sex/Gender: 5
Immigrants: 3
Race: 3
Religion: 1
Upper-class: 1

Well, you can see who is really important in Activist America: the various flavors of upper-class sex and gender creativity.

And think about the travails and the discrimination suffered by the humble upper-class activist working away for nothing at some Soros-funded NGO!

Let's see who is missing from this list. First of all, The Jews! Then, of course, the Homeless. You know what: I'm a bit surprised about that. Then, naturally there is no mention of bitter clingers, presently dying of despair from various opioid addictions, armed insurrectionists, and all the rest of the unmentionables.

You know, I'm afraid that I find this amusing, for it confirms what I believe, that our friends in the Activist Community have no room for any reality other than their activism.

I suppose that, for every victim on the list, there is a vitally important "intransigent minority" activist group that lives for its saving truth and spends every hour of every day fighting for justice.

Yes. I imagine that there must even be an NGO out there fighting fearlessly for the rights of Activists!

But really, what happened to good old religion?

Noise vs. Bias

They say that if you ask a bunch of farmers to estimate the weight of a bull, the average estimate will come pretty close to the measured weight of the bull.

But, scientists say, you should not let the farmers know about the other guys' estimates.

That's what comes out of a very useful review of Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein. It's reviewed at Quillette by Rob Henderson.

You need to trick people into making individual judgments, because if people know what other people think then they will tend to agree with them. Thus juries, panels evaluating employment applications.

In other words, if you are the second person evaluating a college application and you get to read the previous evaluator's comments, you will tend to agree with him. So shouldn't a university mask the comments of early evaluators?

The school’s reply: “We used to do that, but it resulted in so many disagreements that we switched to the current system.”

In other words "many organizations consider conflict avoidance to be at least as important as optimal decision-making."

So, if you are looking for "the wisdom of crowds" you need to make sure that crowd members don't know what the other crowd members are thinking. If you want "the madness of crowds" then you need everyone to know what the other guys are thinking. And chances are they will all agree with each other.

In politics, of course, 

The book reports findings indicating that when a group of Democrats saw that a particular view was gaining initial popularity among Democrats, they too would endorse that point of view, ultimately leading most Democrats in the group to support it. However, if they saw that a specific opinion was gaining popularity among Republicans, they rejected it. Republicans behaved similarly.

Not surprising.

There is also the time-of-day factor. Usually, it is best to get a decision from a decision maker early in the day, probably after their first cup of coffee. Later in the day they might not be so thoughtful.

Still, the same person can give a whole range of opinions on the same facts. They have done this with physicians. They are more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day: the quick fix.  But studies show that "simple mechanical rules were generally superior to human judgment."

People tend to be forgiving when a human makes a mistake, and not forgiving when a machine makes a mistake.

If a human driver causes a traffic collision, we are often forgiving, depending on the circumstances. But if an autonomous vehicle causes an accident, people respond with intense suspicion. 

We expect machines to be perfect. Humans not so much. 

Collapsing Three Layers into Two

If you want to understand humans as simply as possible, but no simpler, then, in my opinion and the opinion of Curtis Yarvin, you need to divide us into three parts. Three Layers, he calls it, with his Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Three Peoples, as I call it, with my Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.

That is what you do when you want to survey the human landscape and understand your fellow men.

But if you are playing politics, then, as per Curtis Yarvin, there is no politics without an enemy. So you have to collapse the Three Layer view of human society into the Two Sides of a conflict: "us" and "them." Where "them" is the enemy.

Once you do that then you are embarking on one of four wars.

1. Fight against a small country for a quick win.
2. Fight against a large country for a world war.
3. Fight against a large minority for a civil war.
4. Fight against a small minority for a quick win.

And Grok.

But, there is one other thing to consider: the question of the small minority. You would think that small minorities would keep their heads down, hoping that nobody would notice them. But they don't. E.g., the Jews. 

In fact, small minorities tend to be intransigent, because they feel that they need to be on their guard all the time. Just in case a mob of the majority should come down the street and take them out. Also, they need to remind the majority that nobody better mess with them. Because.

So our modern small minorities like to pretend that, really, they are all powerful and that if you mess with them then you are asking for trouble. Thus the Jews have elevated "anti-Semitism" into the worst thing in the world and if you are guilty of anti-Semitism you will find that the whole world is against you, you bigot you. The same thing seems to apply with the blacks. Anti-black racism is the worst thing is the world and you'd better not be identified as a racist, you racist you.

Our liberal friends practice the "intransigent minority" gambit with their Activism Culture. And all of their activist groups have some sort of call-to-battle slogan. I noticed that the BMW next to me on the ferry crossing from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island had two mini bumper stickers on the back: "Black Lives Matter" and "Stop Asian Hate." Then I went into a nice liberal bookstore and it feels like all the books are playing the activism game, making a case for some helpless minority mired in injustice that only a wise, sensitive activist class can resolve. Yes. Activism is an upper-class, educated-class thing in the modern western world.

Why does the "intransigent minority" gambit work? I think it is because most people are not up for a war, they don't like to get into a pissing match, whether on the national front or on the international front. So, if an "intransigent minority" gets in your face, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class -- and the educated and the media and the universities -- you'd better watch out, pal. 

Thus, an "intransigent minority" often boxes above its weight, particularly if it is supported by the ruling class, because people know that getting targeted by an "intransigent minority" means trouble, right here in River City.

Notice how in the modern era our politics involves collapsing the Three Layers into two. Obviously Marxism did this, by collapsing the three layers of Bourgeoisie, Proletarians, and Communists into two: Communists and Proletarians on one side and the Bourgeoisie on the other.

In the case of the modern Allyship narrative, we have Allies, Oppressed Peoples, and White Oppressors. The Allies and Oppressed Peoples stick together so the White Oppressors are on their own.

It is, of course, a conceit of Marxism and Allyship that they represent the vast majority of the people -- rather than the minority interest of an "intransigent minority" with an appetite for political power. But that conceit provides the opportunity for us ordinary mortals. When it comes to the crunch, does the activist group really represent the vast majority of helpless victims, as their ideology pretends, or not?

I think that for the first half of the 20th century the educated elite and their clients really did represent the majority. But since the 1960s this majority has been whittling away, because the majority of the population, more and more, is the ordinary middle class.

I think that, again and again since the start of the 1970s we have seen a movement of the ordinary middle class erupt in politics. But up to now the educated ruling class has managed to abort each eruption.

At some point, in my judgement, the educated class will fail to abort a middle-class eruption. And then the regime will change.