Quotulatiousness

April 8, 2023

“The evidences of history and human nature are very clear: the Enlightenment was a tremendously bad idea”

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton tries to persuade conservatives and libertarians that Classical Liberalism has failed:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The premise for this article might seem surprising to many who are used to believing that the Fukuyaman “end of history”, with its proposed ultimate victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism, is a done deal. After all, we look around the world and see the spread of democracy (even if by military force) taking place, as well as seeing the world seemingly integrated into a global economy characterized by complete fungibility of capital, resources, and labour. Yet, while this may be the façade which we are presented, it is manifestly obvious that most of what is called “democracy” is a sham and most of what is called “capitalism” is merely a cover for cronyism at the highest levels. This is the case even in the United States. We can no longer call our system “liberal” in any sort of classical sense when you can be jailed for referring to someone with the “wrong” pronoun and where the supposedly “free” press is effectively only the propaganda arm of one political party.

All over the world, classical liberalism is being supplanted by socialism and progressivism. This is obvious. What is even more obvious is that classical liberalism has been completely unable to prevent this from occurring. While there are some places where the tide is at least being slowed, this is due to the efforts of nationalists and others calling for stronger government along reactionary and traditional lines, not by those advocating for Reaganism, Thatcherism, or other manifestations of modern classical liberalism. Indeed, the two primary expressions of modern classical liberalism – libertarianism and American-style conservatism – are basically failures in every way. Libertarianism has devolved into a clown show of competing virtue signals, while conservatism (which has yet to actually conserve anything) has fastened onto itself the straitjacket of ideological dogmatism dictated to it by neo-conservatives and K-Street lobbyists.

We should not be surprised, however, that this has been the case. Classical liberalism itself was doomed from its inception. The reason for this is that classical liberalism derived directly from the sort of shoddy and shallow philosophies that drove the so-called “Enlightenment”. The Enlightenment – which we were all told was a good thing by our publik skoolz – represented a marked departure by Western civilisation from traditional realities upon which successful Western cultures were built. In contrast to the traditional values of the West, Enlightenment values represented a very skewed, unrealistic form of wishful thinking. Once these departures began to be codified into practice at the national level, it was only a matter of time before the leftward drift affected even the most morally well-insulated nations.

Below, I would like to discuss four basic areas where classical liberalism as an Enlightenment philosophy was set up for failure from the beginning.

On a somewhat less polemic level, Andrew Potter wonders if the sense of civilizational decline and dissolution many of us are feeling is down to the lack of community:

Here are some charts that were going around the social media the other day:

Boyle — a partner at Andreessen Horowitz — paired these charts with links to a series of reports and studies connecting these declines to a clutch of modern day problems, in particular rising levels of anxiety and depression, despair, most notably amongst the young.

As the boomers used to say, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. The Western world is in a bit of a funk.

Our political systems have become impossibly polarized, our economies stagger from one crisis to the next, and the welfare state is bumping up against the limits imposed by escalating costs and diminishing state capacity. All of this comes as people are losing faith in the institutions that have served for decades as the building blocks of a cohesive society. Our reserves of social capital are depleted as numerous countries report falling levels of patriotism, religiosity, and community-mindedness. Everyone’s more or less given up on having kids, while close to a third of men aged 18-30 haven’t had sex in the past year.

These stats vary from country to country, and some places are obviously doing better than others. But the trends are grim across the board; there’s no question that, in general, people in the West are in a bad way. The debate revolves around the cause or causes of these phenomena. Is it social media? The pandemic? Housing prices, debt and precarious employment?

One possibility is that the problem lies with the modern world itself. That the basket of rights-based political individualism and consumer-driven economic capitalism might provide us with all manner of creature comforts and technological wonders, but it doesn’t give us meaning. At the dark heart of liberalism lies nihilism.

This is not a new charge, it has been around as long as there has been liberalism. Yet there’s a bit of disagreement over exactly where the problem lies. For some, from Dostoevsky to the existentialists, the worry was deeply metaphysical: that in the absence of a god, or some comparable external source of absolute morality, the only alternative is raw moral relativism.

For other critics, the complaint is more aesthetic. The consumer goods and individualistic values that liberalism promotes are seen as terribly shallow and narcissistic, with the vulgar virtues of television and cheeseburgers supplanting the higher arts of opera and the terroir.

But there’s another argument, that sort of splits the difference between the metaphysical and the aesthetic worries. This is the idea that for all its promotion of radical pluralism, liberalism is actually hostile to true difference and diversity, of the sort that permits the flourishing of distinct communities. This was the central complaint of the Canadian philosopher George Grant, whose anti-American nationalism was based not on any sense that Canada was intrinsically worthwhile, but that its more collective approach to public life would foster a communitarianism that was not possible in the United States.

April 7, 2023

QotD: The effluvium of the university’s overproduction of progressive “elites”

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

By the late 1990s the rapid expansion of the universities came to a halt, especially in the humanities. Faculty openings slowed or stopped in many fields. Graduate enrollment cratered. In my own department in 10 years we went from accepting over a hundred students for graduate study to under 20 for a simple reason. We could not place our students. The hordes who took courses in critical pedagogy, insurgent sociology, gender studies, radical anthropology, Marxist cinema theory, and postmodernism could no longer hope for university careers.

What became of them? No single answer is possible. They joined the work force. Some became baristas, tech supporters, Amazon staffers and real estate agents. Others with intellectual ambitions found positions with the remaining newspapers and online periodicals, but most often they landed jobs as writers or researchers with liberal government agencies, foundations, or NGOs. In all these capacities they brought along the sensibilities and jargon they learned on campus.

It is the exodus from the universities that explains what is happening in the larger culture. The leftists who would have vanished as assistant professors in conferences on narratology and gender fluidity or disappeared as law professors with unreadable essays on misogynist hegemony and intersectionality have been pushed out into the larger culture. They staff the ballooning diversity and inclusion commissariats that assault us with vapid statements and inane programs couched in the language they learned in school. We are witnessing the invasion of the public square by the campus, an intrusion of academic terms and sensibilities that has leaped the ivy-covered walls aided by social media. The buzz words of the campus — diversity, inclusion, microaggression, power differential, white privilege, group safety — have become the buzz words in public life. Already confusing on campus, they become noxious off campus. “The slovenliness of our language”, declared Orwell in his classic 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language“, makes it “easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Orwell targeted language that defended “the indefensible” such as the British rule of India, Soviet purges and the bombing of Hiroshima. He offered examples of corrupt language. “The Soviet press is the freest in the world.” The use of euphemisms or lies to defend the indefensible has hardly disappeared: Putin called the invasion of Ukraine “a special military operation”, and anyone calling it a “war” or “invasion” has been arrested.

But today, unlike in 1946, political language of Western progressives does not so much as defend the indefensible as defend the defendable. This renders the issue trickier than when Orwell broached it. Apologies for criminal deeds of the state denounce themselves. Justifications for liberal desiderata, however, almost immunize themselves to objections. If you question diversity mania, you support Western imperialism. Wonder about the significance of microaggression? You are a microaggressor. Have doubts about an eternal, all-inclusive white supremacy? You benefit from white privilege. Skeptical about new pronouns? You abet the suicide of fragile adolescents.

Russell Jacoby, “The Takeover”, Tablet, 2022-12-19.

March 28, 2023

QotD: In praise of aristocracy and monarchy

Filed under: Britain, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Mr. McDonnell, deputy leader of the British Labour Party, which for the time being is in opposition, recently objected to the presence of hereditary peers in the “upper” house of Britain’s Parliament, using the crude and vulgar language typical of populist politicians anxious to demonstrate their identity with the people or the masses. (It is strange, by the way, how rarely leftists who are in favor of confiscatory economic policies are condemned as populist, when they appeal mainly to envy, spite, and resentment, those most delightful of all human emotions.)

Speaking for myself — the only person for whom I am fully entitled to speak — I would rather be ruled (at least in the modern world) by the Duke of Northumberland than by Mr. McDonnell; and this is for perfectly rational reasons and not, as might be supposed, from any feeling of nostalgia for a world we have lost.

Unlike Mr. McDonnell, the Duke of Northumberland does not feel that he has to make the world anew, all within his lifetime — or rather within his political lifetime, a period that is even shorter. He knows that the world did not begin with him and will not end with him. As the latest scion of an ancient dynasty going back centuries, he is but the temporary guardian of what he has inherited, which he has a duty to pass on. Moreover, as someone whose privileges are inherited, he knows that his power (such as it is) is fragile in the modern world. He must exercise it with care, discretion, and consideration.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Appeal of Inherited Power”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-29.

March 26, 2023

Newspeak 2023

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on how our language keeps changing, top-down, whether we want it or not, from 9/11 through to tomorrow:

It was during the war in Iraq that Orwell’s insistence on clear language first came roaring back. This time, the newspeak was coming from the neocon right. We heard the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe what any sane person would instantly call “torture”. Or “extraordinary rendition” — which meant kidnapping in order to torture. There was “environmental manipulation” — freezing naked human beings to near-death and back again. All the terms followed Orwell’s rules for new words “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”. All the new terms were opaque and longer than the original.

And then, in the era of “social justice”, the new words began to come from the far left. Words we thought we knew — “queer” for example — were suddenly re-purposed without notice. Gay men and lesbians, with our very distinct experiences, were merged into a non-word, along with transgender people: “LGBT”. That was turned into “LGBTQIA+” — an ever-expanding acronymic abstraction that, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details”.

Orwell’s insight was that these terms are designed to describe things you want to obscure. Hence one of his rules: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Writing the English that people speak every day is essential for a flourishing democracy.

Which brings me to that old English term “sex change”. Everyone instantly understands it. Which is, of course, precisely the problem. So now we say: “gender-affirming care”. Or take another word we all know: “children” — kids usually up to puberty. Also way too understandable. So “sex changes for children” suddenly becomes “gender-affirming care for minors”. These are the words, again, that are “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”.

Or take the term “transgender” itself. Remember when it was “transsexual”? Or when “sex” was first distinguished from “gender” — and then replaced by it? The usual refrain is that “the community” switched the terms, which means to say that a clique of activists decided that gender would be the new paradigm, and include any number of “queer” postmodern identities, while sex — let alone “biological sex” — was to be phased out and, with any luck, forgotten. Now notice how the new word “transgender” has recently changed its meaning yet again, and now includes anyone, including straights, outside traditional gender roles — whatever those are supposed to mean.

Or check out the new poll from the Washington Post yesterday, in which a big majority of transgender people do not consider themselves either a “trans man” or a “trans woman” at all. They prefer “nonbinary” and “gender-nonconforming” — and distance themselves from both sexes. Less than a third physically present as another sex “all the time”. The vast majority have no surgery at all.

Now read Masha Gessen’s recent interview with The New Yorker, and get even more confused. Gessen denies that transness is one thing at all. S/he says it’s a different thing now than it was a decade ago, and that “being transgender in a society that understands that some people are transgender is fundamentally different from being transgender in a society that doesn’t understand”.

S/he says that there are “different ideas about transness within the trans community … probably different trans communities”. S/he denies a “single-true-self narrative” as some kind of anchor for identity. S/he believes that transitioning can be done many times, back and forth: “Some people transition more than once. Some people transition from female to male, and then transition from male to female, and then maybe transition again.”

If gender is entirely a social construct, with no biological character, why do transgender people want hormones — an entirely biological intervention? Because “being trans is not a medical condition, but it marries you for life to the medical system”. Huh? By the end of the interview, you get the feeling that trans is whatever Gessen bloody well wants it to be, and yet at the same time it remains beyond interrogation.

March 23, 2023

Sometimes, it helps to know how the sausage is actually made

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Apologies to the ghost of Otto von Bismarck for misappropriating his famous quote “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.” In this case, it’s actually quite enlightening to see how video magic helps make the progressive media experience:

Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.

As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news — except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.

It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week — not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.

We’d typically tape on Thursday or Friday mornings to turn around by Friday nights. Being of Bill Moyers’ approximate height, I was tasked with showing up early to fill his chair as gruff union guys set up cameras and lighting. Then, as Bill’s blogger and research assistant, I’d watch live interviews from the control room to highlight quotable moments.

Uncut conversations were eye-opening; it was astonishing how often our esteemed guests hemmed and hawed and got basic facts embarrassingly wrong. And how many came off batshit crazy: one, later an anchor on MSNBC, speculated that Captain Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson — visible from our west side offices — had been God blessing the Obamas.

Drafting the Moyers Blog and promotional listings, I’d sit in with producers and video editors to consult on coalescing broadcasts. They were like wizards, casting away awkwardness and errors to sculpt artful vignettes of the most compelling bits of conversations that often stretched well over an hour or more.

So many of the most rousing clips came from when guests were at their most factually inaccurate, and editors deftly dipped in and out to pull and seamlessly reassemble the very best parts. It was wondrous alchemy, and a privilege to work with super-talented creatives, but the reality of our academic pundits remained the same.

Viewers, or at least those motivated enough to weigh in, frequently testified that their social-democratic faith had been wavering until they’d seen whichever inspiring interview affirming what they’d always believed. I always found that frustrating, wondering if they might have reacted more thoughtfully to the real deal than the perfected package that aired.

By no means were Bill Moyers and team operating with any less than the highest of ethics or best of intentions—from their perspective, we were clarifying what our distinguished guests were truly saying. The problem was that the intellectual scene our show channeled was dwindling, but my colleagues so badly wanted things to be better that it was all too easy to paper over the accelerating collapse of discourse. I remember trying to explain to Bill what a Brooklyn hipster was, or how to click around tumblr, but he didn’t really want to know.

H/T to Jesse Walker, by way of Colby Cosh for the link.

March 22, 2023

California – Embrace the Unicorn! No, the other Unicorn!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on California’s hoped-for path to transition away from fossil fuels:

California has the progressive vision to go all-electric, with laws and regulations that phase out gas water heaters, furnaces, and cars in the near future — while transitioning away from the production of electricity through the use of nuclear and natural gas technologies. Putting the teensy-weensy engineering questions aside and embracing the unicorn, this deep blue vision of the future means the state needs to build wind and solar power facilities in massive quantities, and now. California currently has about half the power it needs to do what it says it plans to do in just ten years.

But President Joe Biden just announced a move that aggressively advances the progressive vision of preserving wilderness and preventing development, naming the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in the Mojave Desert — preventing solar and wind development on 506,814 acres of lightly populated and federally owned desert land. The coalition of tribal and community groups that has worked to get the national monument designated make the anti-solar point explicit on their website:

Where progressive coastal urbanites see the progressive project of decarbonization, people in wilderness-adjacent areas see industrial blight, and express that view in the language of progressive conservationism. To a degree not explored by the false binary of media-defined American politics, in which good people on the left face bad people on the right, California’s future is an increasingly sharp conflict between left and left — and note what kind of permits energy companies have to get to build big wind and solar plants in the desert:

When progressive California builds its progressive energy infrastructure, it’s going to incidentally take a shit-ton of bighorns and tortoises and birds. I assume I don’t have to explain the euphemism.

March 18, 2023

If not “woke”, then what should we call it?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer devoutly hopes for a proper term to use instead of the by-now highly pejorative term “woke”:

As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutral in terminology. However: there is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else. But they do. And their resistance to doing politics is why, three years after a supposed “reckoning”, nothing has really changed. (If there’s no such thing as the social justice politics movement, who made the protests and unrest of 2020 happen? The fucking Democrats?)

The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal”, “fascist”, “conservative”, or “moderate”. And I just don’t think that’s true.

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene — woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

March 14, 2023

Social media, selfies, and depression

Filed under: Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Jonathan Haidt notes the inflection point at which young liberal women started to become depressed at a much higher rate than the rest of the population — a trend that has continued for over a decade:

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the COVID shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.)

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret.

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.

Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19–24, 2020.
Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks — since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens — there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction — Gimbrone, Bates, Prins & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs”. Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major U.S. survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89).

Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g.,

    Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data:

    Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word ‘selfie’ entered the popular lexicon.”

March 11, 2023

QotD: We used to call them “parlour pinks”

Filed under: Education, History, Politics, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Leftists […] were, are, and always shall be nothing more than irritated butterflies. They don’t have to leave their ivy-covered ivory towers, so they won’t. They don’t know anyone who has ever killed so much as a mouse. When it comes right down to it, they find this whole “Revolution” business to be just … so … vulgar.

What’s life like in the Soviet Union? They neither know nor care, until the brute facts of life in the USSR are rubbed into their faces for so long that they have to acknowledge them. At which point they simply switch allegiances. Kolakowski’s essay doesn’t mention Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims, but they arrive at essentially the same conclusion — that instead of becoming disillusioned with Communism (Socialism, “social justice”) itself, the irritated butterflies of the Left grow disillusioned with a particular country or leader. The USSR has failed, yes, but — all together now! — “real Communism has never been tried”, so let’s put all our faith in Mao … and then Castro … and then Chavez, et cetera ad nauseam.

It’s all about maintaining the purity of the idea in the face of disappointing, vulgar, grubby reality. An honest-to-Marx Communist will come into plenty of contact with reality. A Leftist never will, because xzhey have convinced xzhemself that even the mugging they’re currently experiencing is a lofty and noble expression of authenticity. They’re willing to die for the Revolution, certainly — the urge for martyrdom has always been highly conspicuous on the Left. So long as they never feel that base, grubby, vulgar proletarian urge to defend themselves, they’ll be fine.

[…]

“Never cheer for your own.” When you come right down to it, that’s the Leftist motto. Leftists don’t deride “sportsball”, for instance, because they’re un-athletic little dweebs who were always picked last at recess (well, ok, not only that). It’s because cheering for a team, any team, is vulgar. It’s what grubby little proles do. (That’s another way to distinguish a Communist from a Leftist, by the way. Actual Commies love sports; look at all the resources the USSR poured into the Olympics, for instance. That’s because sports are good training for war).

Is Leftism curable? Can they be made to cheer for their own? Experience suggests that the cure will be very harsh indeed … if indeed it’s possible at all.

Severian, “Grubby Little Proles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-05-31.

March 9, 2023

Then: “Never be the first to stop clapping”. Now: “In our culture of exhibitionism, silence is suspect”

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray cross-posted this article by Christopher Gage, who had a painful realization while waiting on hold for a human customer service rep at British Gas:

British Gas has traded the lovely Ludwig van (much too excellent for these advanced times) for a two-chord earwig we once glorified as polyphonic ringtones. Whilst captive to the receiver, British Gas snatches the opportunity to douse you, an innocent and increasingly frozen bystander, in the warm soup of its right-on philosophy.

“British Gas is an inclusive company”, it purrs. “We believe all people, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or background, should be treated with dignity and respect.”

This divination, reader, was news to me. You see, I signed up to British Gas not for warm radiators and gas-lit stoves, but for the surreptitious fascism of a company with “British” in the name.

I assumed British Gas was firmly jackboots, shaved heads, and lumpy knuckles. On hold, I expected not a polyphonic ringtone but the greatest hits of Skrewdriver, with jaunty anthems such as “Keep Britain White” and “It’s All Because of The Jews”.

To my incomprehension, British Gas does not believe that Auschwitz was a holiday camp, nor, like Kanye West, that Hitler had his good points.

The horror. The horror.

Once you notice this culture of Obviousness, this modern theatre in which the captive audience is force-fed a diet of entirely humdrum beliefs shared by absolutely everyone save a few whack-jobs, you cannot unsee it.

A coffee shop I recently and regrettably frequented offered not only espresso and cortado and obscenely priced cheesecake but a syrupy treatise of that coffee shop’s founding beliefs. You’d think a coffee shop’s founding beliefs would be: “Buy coffee. Sell coffee.” No. This coffee shop was against all forms of discrimination.

Relentless is this modern culture of making the most obvious, universal statements and painting them as revolutionary.

When I decide I’d like gas piped into my home, or coffee piped into my stomach, my motivations hover around the middle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Will this gas warm my home? Will this coffee induce a mild, somewhat enjoyable panic attack?

To reveal, like British Gas did, that one thinks all people should be treated with dignity and with respect is like revealing one doesn’t shit on a bus seat in full view of other passengers. That one is anti-shitting-in-public.

Much of the modern world is that episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer joins an AIDS march but refuses to wear the ribbon proclaiming his opposition to AIDS.

In our culture of exhibitionism, silence is suspect.

March 3, 2023

Progressives have steadily transitioned to the movement that denies that any personal conduct rules should apply

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Freddie deBoer challenges his fellow leftists to identify who were the theorists that introduced the notion that personal responsibility is an anti-socialist position:

The woman whose account appears at the top of this picture started a Twitter storm, somehow, by publicly wishing that she could take her child onto the subway without exposing them to secondhand smoke. She was beset by a certain online species of ostensible leftist who is against ever trying to enforce any kind of rule, anywhere, ever. See, rules are the hand of oppression, or something, and since most of society’s rules are meant to be enforced by the police, trying to enforce them (merely wishing that they be enforced) is an endorsement of the police and their violence …

I find this attitude has become inescapable. It’s not just the attitude that the enforcement of societal rules and norms is bad, but that this is the default assumption of all right-thinking people — it’s not just a left-wing perspective but the left-wing perspective. Like so much else in contemporary left-of-center discourse, it demonstrates the total ideological poverty we’re working with. Nobody has read anything, so nobody knows anything, so you’re constantly getting yelled at by self-described radicals who have no solid footing in any systematic approach to left politics at all. Like I said before, we’re living in definitional collapse; the struggle right now is not merely that socialism can’t win but that so many self-described socialists have no deeper ideological moorings than whatever they’ve absorbed from Tumblr and “breadtube”. They think that to be a socialist means to disdain all rules because there is no substance to their socialism at all.

Chris Hayes considered the subway smoking problem last year.

Conceptually, I don’t think these problems are hard at all: the left, the socialist left, has never advocated for a system in which there are literally no expectations on personal behavior. It’s quite bizarre to suggest that this was ever a thing! Only certain extreme forms of anarchism have ever implied that society should have no rules. Go back through the history of socialist theorists and number all of the ones who believed that there should be no laws and no police to enforce them. You won’t find many! Instead you’ll find people who believed in the need for both laws that govern human behavior and constabulary forces to enforce those laws. That’s the solution to the conundrum, my friends — you have rules and you have police that enforce those rules. The belief, and the hope, is that a socialist society is one with far less need for aggressive policing, thanks to far greater economic equality, and maybe someday, after the end of material need, we can consider a policeless society. But not having any social rules or people who enforce those rules is not a socialist concept and never has been. What I would ask Chris Hayes and people like him is … what is the leftist tradition that you’re drawing from that implies that there should be no enforcement of behavioral norms? What thinker? What book? What philosophy? Or, could it be that you’ve developed this totally substance-free approach to basic order because you’ve been habituated to talking this way through exposure to people on social media who know nothing about anything in particular?

Of course, there’s big problems with American policing. Very big problems indeed. So what we do is reform policing. (I address this at length in my next book, coming this fall from Simon & Schuster.) Alternatively, if you’re really committed to this “no rules, no enforcement” thing, you become an anarchist of a very particular stripe — most versions of anarchism have both rules and enforcement mechanisms for them — and you and your compatriots can try to change the system. All twelve of you. In the house your wealthy parents bought for you.

Conservatives keep re-enacting the Charlie Brown “kick the football” scenario

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton on the evergreen Charlie Brown and Lucy impersonations of the conservatives and progressives in western political struggles:

If there is one thing that becomes apparent when you talk to a lot of normie conservatives, it is that they have absolutely no idea how or why they keep getting rolled over by the radical Left. They work and they work and they work to win elections, they invest their time and money to get “their guy” into office, only to find him selling them out on the first important issue within a month of taking office. They pass laws, only to be thwarted in the courts. When they win in the courts, they get thwarted by the bureaucracy. They try and try to force government to abide by the Constitution, but find that this document applies in one direction only. No matter what they do, they simply cannot keep Cthulhu from swimming left.

Why is this?

It’s because they fundamentally don’t understand how power actually works. In a sense, normie conservatives long for a world that never existed. They desperately want to “keep” a republic where politicians work for the public good and where government is truly restrained by its founding document. So it’s something of a bitter pill for them to swallow when they finally accept that such a thing doesn’t exist, and really hasn’t existed in any reasonable form in the United States since the Civil War. America has continued to move left for the past 150 years because the Left has been perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to win. The Left has become adept at “manipulating procedural outcomes,” by which is meant the ability to game the system to make an existing structure which is “supposed” to operate one way bring about outcomes which were never really intended (or even considered possible) by the people who put it into place.

How do you get around constitutional restraints on, say, gun laws or federal encroachments on state prerogatives? Well, one example would be to use fraud and deceit to subvert the Constitution’s provision for elections to get your people in office, who then use the Constitution’s provisions for nominating and approving judges to get friendly judges in power, who then use the (dubiously) constitutional provision for judicial review to decide that whatever laws you want to pass are “constitutional.” Other than the initial fraud (which, since you run the show now, isn’t going to be challenged in any substantive way), everything you did was “technically” in line with the Constitution, even though the results are quite the opposite of what was actually intended. Wanna pack the Supreme Court? Technically, it’s legal! Ban political speech you don’t like? Call it “hate speech” and enforce it under provisions in administrative law that have already been allowed to stand by your judges. The Left has become very adept at appearing to “follow the rules” while working the system to undermine that same system for its own ends.

So that’s “how” the Left always seems to beat conservatives, even when conservatives manage to win an election. But WHY does this happen?

It happens because conservatives ALLOW it to happen.

Let’s be brutally honest here – normie conservatives are saps. They continue to play a rigged game, no matter how often they lose. And they do so because they believe it is virtuous to hold onto “principles” which inevitably lead to failure after failure. They never consider that if “holding to their principles” means the destruction of everything they profess to hold dear, then those principles are terrible principles that should perhaps be reconsidered. If you pat yourself on the back for your virtue in “playing by the rules” even as your house burns down around you and the neighbours are making off with all your stuff, then you’re the source of the problem. Don’t blame somebody else for capitalising on your stupidity.

QotD: What’s the opposite of university? “Diversity”

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That was one of the things that made faculty meetings such joys, back in my professin’ days — no matter how trivial the issue at hand, the meeting couldn’t move forward until everyone had gotten up on xzyher soapbox and delivered xzheyr standard diatribe. “As a post-structuralist lesbian Maoist furry, I feel that …” The outside observer would see a room full of identical freaks, but the people inside saw a glorious rainbow of diversity. Real diversity. God help us, they really did. They really do. It’s one of the keys to understanding them.

Severian, “Advice to Young Dissidents”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-01.

March 1, 2023

Our modern age of “squishy totalitarianism”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the odd controlling habits of our “great and good”, our “moral and intellectual superiors” to urge us to follow their directives “for our own good” (or else):

The anarchist philosopher Crispin Sartwell describes our political culture as one of “squishy totalitarianism”, a term I like quite a bit. (See the third page of this document.) You can disagree and refuse to comply, and the secret police won’t show up at your door (with maybe a growing list of exceptions). We don’t have a gulag. We don’t have the “culture of the disappeared“. You just … maybe find yourself with fewer friends, and some family that stops talking to you, and maybe your employer lets you know that hey, you know what, this doesn’t seem to be working out.

It’s not the Great Terror, it’s just a kind of low-grade grind of social decredentialing that lets you know you’re not making the right choices. We need to rethink Thanksgiving this year, because we’re very disappointed in you. (Don’t you want to be safe?) The way Google searches are working these days is a pretty good example of squishy totalitarianism: Oh, I’m sorry, we have no results for that widely known piece of wrongthink, but here are some results that debunk the conspiracy theory you’re searching for. Wouldn’t you prefer to read a correct search result?

[…]

We can debate the origins and the motive force behind the constant parade of error that has plagued us over the last three years: useless mask mandates, aggressively harmful school closures, insanely damaging vaccine mandates, ludicrous closures of beaches and parks, the pearl clutching over all those conspiracy theories about a lab leak.

You know the terms of the debate: Is the world led by idiots who are screwing it all up, or is this a plan that they’re executing on purpose?

But whichever answer turns out to be correct, one thing that seems extremely clear to me is that this perpetual reign of error couldn’t possibly go on without the unthinking enforcement activity of a distributed commissariat, the slogan-repeating upper-middle-class-aligned cultural apparatus that endlessly lawn signs their compliance. No one has to tell journalists to scold Woody Harrelson: they already know. The moment the Woodster engaged in crimethink, the Rolling Stone writer Marlow Stern started salivating like a trained dog hearing a bell. Vast armies of professors and HR specialists and marketing executives and bureaucrats and Hollywood functionaries and school board wokescolds and on and on and on already know their roles without being assigned to them. It is not correct for you to fail to comply with Current Thing; you are spewing conspiracy theories.

    Doctor, the symptoms began shortly after I received the second dose of the Covid vaccine.

    No, that is not possible, vaccines do not cause injuries. Let us not discuss this conspiracy theory any further. Here are some pills.

We have an enforcement apparatus made up of people who volunteered for the job. In terms of social class, we have the lower class, the lower-middle-class, the middle class, the Stasi, and the upper class.

February 21, 2023

Smart people are at least as likely to fall for false beliefs as anyone else

Filed under: Education, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Gurwinder explains why people well above average intelligence are actually more likely to adopt irrational ideas:

What causes delusion?

The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. This may be true in some cases, but just as often the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.

In 2013 the Yale law professor Dan Kahan conducted experiments testing the effect of intelligence on ideological bias. In one study he scored people on intelligence using the “cognitive reflection test”, a task to measure a person’s reasoning ability. He found that liberals and conservatives scored roughly equally on average, but the highest scoring individuals in both groups were the most likely to display political bias when assessing the truth of various political statements.

In a further study (replicated here), Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as data regarding a polarizing subject — gun control — those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias.

[…]

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”.

What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.

This tendency is troublesome in individuals, but in groups it can prove disastrous, affecting the very structure and trajectory of society.

For centuries, elite academic institutions like Oxford and Harvard have been training their students to win arguments but not to discern truth, and in so doing, they’ve created a class of people highly skilled at motivated reasoning. The master-debaters that emerge from these institutions go on to become tomorrow’s elites — politicians, entertainers, and intellectuals.

Master-debaters are naturally drawn to areas where arguing well is more important than being correct — law, politics, media, and academia — and in these industries of pure theory, secluded from the real world, they use their powerful rhetorical skills to convince each other of FIBs. During their master-debatery circlejerks, the most fashionable delusions gradually spread from individuals to departments to institutions to societies.

Some of these FIBs can now be found everywhere. A particularly prominent example is wokeism, a popularized academic worldview that combines elements of conspiracy theory and moral panic. Wokeism seeks to portray racism, sexism, and transphobia as endemic to Western society, and to scapegoat these forms of discrimination on white people generally and straight white men specifically, who are believed to be secretly trying to enforce such bigotries to maintain their place at the top of a social hierarchy.

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