Progressivism - A Motte and Bailey Approach to Politics.

Video reference - Nicholas Shackel

The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).

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A motte-and-bailey castle is a European fortification with a wooden or stone keep situated on a raised area of ground called a motte, accompanied by a walled courtyard, or bailey, surrounded by a protective ditch and palisade. Relatively easy to build with unskilled labour, but still militarily formidable, these castles were built across northern Europe from the 10th century onwards, spreading from Normandy and Anjou in France, into the Holy Roman Empire in the 11th century. The Normans introduced the design into England and Wales following their invasion in 1066. Motte-and-bailey castles were adopted in Scotland, Ireland, the Low Countries and Denmark in the 12th and 13th centuries. Windsor Castle, in England, is an example of a motte-and-bailey castle. By the end of the 13th century, the design was largely superseded by alternative forms of fortification, but the earthworks remain a prominent feature in many countries.

“I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument,’” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper some of them- particularly verbs: they're the proudest- adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs- however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

-Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass" (Ch. VI)

 

Covid Data Manipulation and Propaganda "DNC-CDC Style"

From Sundance

It’s all a strategic Alinsky move once you connect the dots.

Earlier today New York City Mayor De Blasio announced mandated vaccinations for all 340,000 city employees.

Hours later Joe Biden announced mandatory vaccinations for all 115,000 front-line employees of The Veterans Affairs department.

Immediately thereafter, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced all state employees and healthcare providers will be forced to vaccinate. None of these events are disconnected.

Keep in mind just a few days ago the Federal CDC announced all U.S. healthcare providers must switch to new rapid response tests for COVID-19. The reasoning? The current PCR test does not differentiate between COVID and the flu. The new tests will distinguish between the flu virus and the COVID virus.

Can you see the strategic move now?

The new CDC approved rapid response test will cull the flu cases from false positives; that approach will automatically drop the number of new COVID cases identified. The Biden regime will then say the drop in new COVID cases is because of the forced vaccinations in major populations (VA, NYC and CA). As a result, everyone must get vaccinated because the added vaccinations are lowering the COVID cases, and the statistics will prove it.

How Influenza Deaths became Covid Deaths in 2020...

Democrats: The Moral Licensing Effect Run Amok!

 Moral Licensing – How Your Good Deeds Make You Bad

Moral licensing is a tendency to justify our current poor actions using previous good behavior.

“I will definitely stop partying often starting next month”, said Amy. Now since the next month was 1 week away, Amy decided she must party every day before giving up on the fun in a few days.

Whether Amy stopped her partying habits in the next month is a different question altogether. But have you justified your current bad behavior or actions based on past or future good action?

Such behavior is common for new year resolutions such as quitting smoking or drinking and working out. Such a human thought process is called moral licensing.

What is moral licensing?

As per psychology, moral licensing is the process of fooling ourselves to justify bad behavior using other good behavior. The effect causes people who exhibit good behavior initially to later perform dishonest, unethical, or bad actions later on. Some call the behavior self-licensing.

As per the theory, the phenomenon manifests in two ways:

1. Your past good actions warranting current bad actions:

After completing a positive action, you feel you have the license to do something bad. For example, if you started working out today, you believe you can eat a pizza for dinner. Your good behavior prompts you to do something problematic because you believe you deserve it.

2. Your future plans justifying the current behavior

When you make a plan to stop a bad habit or cultivate a good habit, you believe you can over-indulge in bad behavior until you begin.

For example, if you plan to start eating healthy next month, you believe you can binge eat till then. You find yourself worthy of a treat because you assume you will burn all the calories soon.

The future plan of adhering to good behavior turns into a license to indulge in bad behavior right now.

American Victimology Socialism

Who's Side is America On?

Globalists Contra Adam Smith...

 

Connor Harris, "A Nation of Rentiers: The notion that homeownership should be a primary tool for building wealth is mistaken."

A recent Wall Street Journal report that institutional investors were buying single-family homes as rental properties spurred outrage from populists across the political spectrum, from conservative author and Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance to socialist magazine editor Nathan J. Robinson. One common phrase appeared in many of these condemnations: that institutional investors were depriving the working and middle classes of a chance to “build wealth” through homeownership.

This conventional wisdom that homeownership ought to be a chance to build wealth deserves scrutiny, along with related notions, such as that renting a dwelling means throwing money away. The prevalence of such ideas itself illustrates a disordered investment marketplace. In a free market, asset prices adjust so that no asset remains a clearly better investment than another for long. If buying a house consistently offers better returns than, say, renting a dwelling instead and putting the money saved into the stock market, this can be due only to market distortions.

Owning a home has long been a worthy investment in the sense that house prices were generally stable and less volatile than stocks. And the idea that homeownership makes for better citizens—the justification for homeownership subsidies, such as federal subsidized mortgages—has some empirical support. Several studies have found that homeowners are more likely than renters to vote, join civic organizations, or be good citizens in other ways (though nations such as Switzerland and Germany that don’t lack for civic order and bourgeois virtue have far lower homeownership rates than the United States). Economist William Fischel’s work on what he calls the “homevoter hypothesis” explains many facets of American local governance, such as how state funding of schools tends to produce worse education than local funding. Homeowners must take an interest in local governance, Fischel argues, to protect their property values.

The Bourgeois own.  Proletariats rent.   For they must follow their work like the Romani...

Covid Experimental Vaccine Related Deaths Outnumbered Actual Covid Disease Deaths Last Week...

 There are currently 463,456 Adverse Events reported on the VAERS website .  There are 10,991 reported deaths from the COVID-19 vaccines listed at the CDC’s VAERS database.

Two weeks ago VAERS reported 6,985 deaths due to the COVID vaccines.  Last week that number jumped to 9,048.

This past week: There were 2,092 deaths from the COVID Vaccines —  According to the CDC-linked VAERS website.

Last Week: there were 1,918 total COVID-19 deaths in the United States.

Source

...and the White House claims that the Anti-Vaxxers are spreading misinformation responsible for killing people?

CDC Crumbles Under the Burden of Policing Covid Truths

Let's see... who's 1st Amendment Rights should we violate today....

...asked the Fascist Press Secretary.

South Africa Crumbles Under Weight of Government Corruption

Andrew Meldrum and Mogomotsi Magome , "Sparked by Zuma's arrest, unrest in South Africa escalates"

South African protesters have taken to the streets following the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma. Current president Cyril Ramaphosa said the rioting is rooted in discontent with high poverty, inequality, and unemployment and urged peace.

JOHANNESBURG
Rioting triggered by the imprisonment of former South African President Jacob Zuma escalated Monday as shopping malls in Johannesburg were looted, major roads were blocked by burning tires, and the police and military struggled to contain the violence.

President Cyril Ramaphosa, in a somber address broadcast to the nation Monday night, vowed that the police and army would restore order, and he appealed to all South Africans to work together for peace.

The unrest started last week in KwaZulu-Natal province after Mr. Zuma was imprisoned for contempt of court. What began as fairly small-scale blocking of roads in Mr. Zuma’s home area intensified and spread to Gauteng, South Africa’s most populous province, including Johannesburg, the country’s largest city.

The South African National Defence Force has been deployed to help the police.

At least 10 people have been killed and more than 490 arrested “in acts of public violence rarely seen in the history of our democracy,” Mr. Ramaphosa said.

Without once mentioning Mr. Zuma, Mr. Ramaphosa said that the “violence may indeed have its roots in the pronouncements and activities of individuals with a political purpose, and in expressions of frustration and anger ... However, what we are witnessing now are opportunistic acts of criminality, with groups of people instigating chaos merely as a cover for looting and theft.”

He said the root cause of the rioting is South Africa’s high rate of poverty and unemployment.

“This moment has thrown into stark relief what we already knew: that the level of unemployment, poverty, and inequality in our society is unsustainable,” Mr. Ramaphosa said. “We cannot expect a lasting and durable peace if we do not create jobs and build a more just and equitable society in which all South Africans can participate freely and equally.”

He urged all South Africans to refrain from violence.

“Together, we will defeat those who seek to destabilize our country,” he said. “We will stand as one people, united against violence, unanimous in our commitment to peace and to the rule of law.”

Earlier Monday, the looting of retail centers broke out in several of the poorer areas of Johannesburg, including Benmore, Jeppestown, Vosloorus, and Soweto, where the Jabulani and Dobsonville malls were hit.

Retail stores in Alexandra, east of Johannesburg, were also affected, and journalists covering the riots for the public South African Broadcasting Corporation and news channel Newzroom Afrika were robbed of their equipment.

Several malls, car dealerships, and retail centers in more affluent areas of Johannesburg, including Rosebank and Kempton Park in eastern Johannesburg, closed early even though they were not directly threatened.

In KwaZulu-Natal, people took appliances, including microwave ovens, television sets, and clothing from stores in the Mariannhill and Umlazi areas.

The violence began last week when Mr. Zuma began serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court. He defied a court order to testify before a state-backed inquiry probing allegations of corruption during his term as president from 2009 to 2018.

The Constitutional Court, the country’s highest court, began hearing Mr. Zuma’s appeal on Monday.

Police were investigating the deaths – four in Gauteng and two in KwaZulu-Natal, said police Col. Brenda Muridili. The police and national security forces expanded their presence in both provinces to help quell the violence, authorities said.

Police have warned that anyone using social media to encourage rioting may be arrested and prosecuted.

The way the political protest against Mr. Zuma’s incarceration turned into wider rioting and looting highlights South Africa’s widespread poverty, unemployment, and economic disparity, analysts said.

Many rioters were just poor, said Susan Booysen, director for research at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.

“It is such a mixed bag because some other people are just taking advantage so they can grab things they could not have before,” Ms. Booysen said.

“There is poverty and inequality. We also know that some are criminals looking to benefit. Often legitimate protests are exploited for that purpose,” she said.

Ralph Mathekga, a researcher at the University of the Western Cape, agreed that the political demonstration had been overtaken.

“South Africa is a very complex nation, and [when] there is protest action, there is no doubt that those will be used opportunistically by criminal elements,” Mr. Mathekga told the News24 website.

“We have to recognize the socio-economic situation of the country. Almost the majority of the country is unemployed,” Mr. Mathekga said. “Protest action in South Africa, without some form of criminality, is very rare.”

 

The IYI

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Intellectual Yet Idiot"

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI). Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.

The Blind and the Very Blind

Let’s suspend the satirical for a minute.

IYIs fail to distinguish between the letter and the spirit of things. They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics[1] without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality. You would laugh at the doctor who nearly kills his patient yet argues about the effectiveness of his efforts because he lowered the latter’s cholesterol, missing that a metric that correlates to health is not quite health –it took a long time for medicine to convince its practitioners that health was what they needed to work on, not the exercise of what they thought was “science”, hence doing nothing was quite often preferable (via negativa). But yet, in a different domain, say foreign policy, a neo-con who doesn’t realize he has this mental defect would never feel any guilt for blowing up a country such as Libya, Iraq, or Syria, for the sake of “democracy”. I’ve tried to explain via negativa to a neocon: it was like trying to describe colors to someone born blind.

IYIs can be feel satisfied giving their money to a group aimed at “saving the children” who will spend most of it making powerpoint presentation and organizing conferences on how to save the children and completely miss the inconsistency.

Likewise an IYI routinely fails to make a distinction between an institution (say formal university setting and credentialization) and what its true aim is (knowledge, rigor in reasoning) –I’ve even seen a French academic arguing against a mathematician who had great (and useful) contributions because the former “didn’t go to a good school” when he was eighteen or so.

The propensity to this mental disability may be shared by all humans, and it has to be an ingrained defect, except that it disappears under skin in the game.

[1] Harm done by the healer.

Postscript

From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal.

PostPostcript

The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). (For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)

Post-Post Postscript

(Written after the surprise election of 2016; the chapter above was written several months prior to the event). The election of Trump was so absurd to them and didn’t fit their worldview by such a large margin that they failed to find instructions in their textbook on how to react. It was exactly as on Candid Camera, imagine the characteristic look on someone’s face after they pull a trick on him, and the person is at a loss about how to react.

Or, more interestingly, imagine the looks and reaction of someone who thought he was happily married making an unscheduled return home and hears his wife squealing in bed with a (huge) doorman.

Pretty much everything forecasters, subforecasters, superforecasters, political “scientists”, psychologists, intellectuals, campaigners, “consultants”, big data scientists, everything they know was instantly shown to be a hoax. So my mischievous dream of putting a rat inside someone’s shirt (as expressed in The Black Swan) suddenly came true.

Note: this piece can be reproduced, translated, and published by anyone under the condition that it is in its entirety and mentions that it is extracted from Skin in the Game.

Publications banned from republishing my work without explicit written permission: Huffington Post

 (all languages).

Protestas Para Un Cuba Libre!

Andrew Sullivan, "White Supremacist!"?

Andrew Sullivan, "What Happened To You?: The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism"

“What happened to you?”

It’s a question I get a lot on Twitter. “When did you become so far right?” “Why have you become a white supremacist, transphobic, misogynistic eugenicist?” Or, of course: “See! I told you who he really was! Just take the hood off, Sully!” It’s trolling, mainly. And it’s a weapon for some in the elite to wield against others in the kind of emotional blackmail spiral that was first pioneered on elite college campuses. But it’s worth answering, a year after I was booted from New York Magazine for my unacceptable politics. Because it seems to me that the dynamic should really be the other way round.

The real question is: what happened to you?

The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.

But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.

Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?

What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.

We all know it’s happened. The elites, increasingly sequestered within one political party and one media monoculture, educated by colleges and private schools that have become hermetically sealed against any non-left dissent, have had a “social justice reckoning” these past few years. And they have been ideologically transformed, with countless cascading consequences.

Take it from a NYT woke star, Kara Swisher, who celebrated this week that “the country’s social justice movement is reshaping how we talk about, well, everything.” She’s right — and certainly about the NYT and all mainstream journalism.

This is the media hub of the “social justice movement.” And the core point of that movement, its essential point, is that liberalism is no longer enough. Not just not enough, but itself a means to perpetuate “white supremacy,” designed to oppress, harm and terrorize minorities and women, and in dire need of dismantling. That’s a huge deal. And it explains a lot.

The reason “critical race theory” is a decent approximation for this new orthodoxy is that it was precisely this exasperation with liberalism’s seeming inability to end racial inequality in a generation that prompted Derrick Bell et al. to come up with the term in the first place, and Kimberlé Crenshaw to subsequently universalize it beyond race to every other possible dimension of human identity (“intersectionality”).

A specter of invisible and unfalsifiable “systems” and “structures” and “internal biases” arrived to hover over the world. Some of this critique was specific and helpful: the legacy of redlining, the depth of the wealth gap. But much was tendentious post-modern theorizing. The popular breakthrough was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations in the Atlantic and his subsequent, gut-wrenching memoir, “Between The World And Me.” He combined the worldview and vocabulary of CRT with the vivid lived experience of his own biography. He is a beautifully gifted writer, and I am not surprised he had such an emotional impact, even if, in my view, the power of his prose blinded many to the radical implications of the ideology he surrendered to, in what many of his blog readers called his “blue period.”

The movement is much broader than race — as anyone who is dealing with matters of sex and gender will tell you. The best moniker I’ve read to describe this mishmash of postmodern thought and therapy culture ascendant among liberal white elites is Wesley Yang’s coinage: “the successor ideology.” The “structural oppression” is white supremacy, but that can also be expressed more broadly, along Crenshaw lines: to describe a hegemony that is saturated with “anti-Blackness,” misogyny, and transphobia, in a miasma of social “cis-heteronormative patriarchal white supremacy.” And the term “successor ideology” works because it centers the fact that this ideology wishes, first and foremost, to repeal and succeed a liberal society and democracy.

In the successor ideology, there is no escape, no refuge, from the ongoing nightmare of oppression and violence — and you are either fighting this and “on the right side of history,” or you are against it and abetting evil. There is no neutrality. No space for skepticism. No room for debate. No space even for staying silent. (Silence, remember, is violence — perhaps the most profoundly anti-liberal slogan ever invented.)

And that tells you about the will to power behind it. Liberalism leaves you alone. The successor ideology will never let go of you. Liberalism is only concerned with your actions. The successor ideology is concerned with your mind, your psyche, and the deepest recesses of your soul. Liberalism will let you do your job, and let you keep your politics private. S.I. will force you into a struggle session as a condition for employment.

What happened to me? You know what I want to know: What on earth has happened to you?

I have exactly the same principles and support most of the same policies I did under Barack Obama. In fact, I’ve moved left on economic and foreign policy since then. It’s Democrats who have taken a sudden, giant swerve away from their recent past.

At the moment, I’m recording an audiobook for a new collection of my writing, from 1989 - 2021, “Out On A Limb,” to be published next month. (More to come on that next week.) It covers the Obama years, including my impression in May 2007 that he’d be the next president and why I found him so appealing a figure. It’s been a shocking reminder of how our politics has been transformed since then:

My favorite moment was a very simple one. He referred to the anniversary of the March on Selma, how he went and how he came back and someone (I don’t remember who now) said to him: “That was a great celebration of African-American history.” To which Obama said he replied: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.”

How much further can you get from the ideology of the 1619 Project — that rejects any notion of white contributions to black freedom? In his Jeremiah Wright speech, the best of his career, this is what Obama said of Wright’s CRT-inspired words, damning America:

They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above

all that we know is right with America... The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country — a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

This is what I still believe. Do you?

A plank of successor ideology, for example, is that the only and exclusive reason for racial inequality is “white supremacy.” Culture, economics, poverty, criminality, family structure: all are irrelevant, unless seen as mere emanations of white control. Even discussing these complicated factors is racist, according to Ibram X Kendi.

Obama was a straddler, of course, and did not deny that “so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t deny that either. Who could? But neither did he deny African-American agency or responsibility:

It means taking full responsibility for own lives — by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

To say this today would evoke instant accusations of being a white supremacist and racist. That’s how far the left has moved: Obama as an enabler of white supremacy. You keep asking: what happened to me? I remain an Obamacon, same as I always have been. What, in contrast, has happened to you?

Check out this really insightful interview of Wes Yang by Matt Taibbi. Yang beautifully explains the radical shift in elite opinion. He notes the ascending rhetoric: “So there’s a line in an n+1 essay, where the person is saying, ‘Oh, we are now menaced by whiteness and masculinity.’ Whereas in the past, we would have said, ‘Oh, we’re menaced by racism and sexism.’” He sees what this movement is about: the end of due process, the rejection of even an attempt at objectivity, a belief in active race and sex discrimination (“equity”) to counter the legacy of the past, the purging of ideological diversity, and the replacement of liberal education with left-indoctrination.

Yang sees the attempt to dismantle the entire carapace of liberal society and liberal institutions: “[The proponents of the successor ideology are] not trying to be malicious, but they are trying to basically annihilate a lot of the foundational processes that we depend upon and then remake them anew. You operate from the starting point that all the previous ideologies, methods, and processes are untrustworthy, because they produced this outcome previously, so we’ve got to remake all of them.” Precisely. This is a revolution against liberalism commanded from above.

Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone.

Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Non-violence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Color-blindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.

It is absolutely no accident that this illiberal ideology has no qualms whatever with illiberal methods. The latter springs intrinsically from the former. Kendi, feted across the establishment, favors amending the Constitution to appoint an unelected and unaccountable committee of “experts” that has the power to coerce and punish any individual or group anywhere in the country deemed practicing racism. Intent does not matter. And the decisions are final. An advocate for unaccountable, totalitarian control of our society is the darling of every single elite institution in America, and is routinely given platforms where no tough questioning of him is allowed. He is as dumb as Obama is smart; as crude as Obama is nuanced; as authoritarian as Obama is liberal.

Or check out Kevin Drum’s analysis of asymmetric polarization these past few decades. He shows relentlessly that over the past few decades, it’s Democrats who have veered most decisively to the extremes on policy on cultural issues since the 1990s. Not Republicans. Democrats.



On immigration, Republicans have moved around five points to the right; the Democrats 35 points to the left. On abortion, Republicans who advocate a total ban have increased their numbers a couple of points since 1994; Democrats who favor legality in every instance has risen 20 points. On guns, the GOP has moved ten points right; Dems 20 points left.

It is also no accident that, as Drum notes and as David Shor has shown: “white academic theories of racism — and probably the whole woke movement in general —have turned off many moderate Black and Hispanic voters.” This is why even a huge economic boom may not be enough to keep the Democrats in power next year.

We are going through the greatest radicalization of the elites since the 1960s. This isn’t coming from the ground up. It’s being imposed ruthlessly from above, marshaled with a fusillade of constant MSM propaganda, and its victims are often the poor and the black and the brown. It nearly lost the Democrats the last election. Only Biden’s seeming moderation, the wisdom of black Democratic primary voters, and the profound ugliness of Trump wrested the presidency from a vicious demagogue, whose contempt for our system of government appears ever greater the more we find out about his term in office.

But as Wes Yang notes, Biden has also aided and abetted and justified this radicalism. He has instituted a huge program of overt government race and sex discrimination throughout every policy and area of government; he backs decimating due process for sexual accusations on campus; he favors abolishing religious freedom as a defense of anti-gay discrimination; he believes that gender identity should replace sex as a legal category, and gender identity should rest entirely on self-disclosure; he favors expediting and maximizing mass immigration, not stemming it. In Yang’s rather brutal assessment, for the hard left, “what they saw is that with Joe Biden, who’s this throwback figure, the activists could all rush to him and get most of what they wanted from him anyway.”

Does that mean we should support an increasingly nihilist cult on the right among the GOP? Of course not. Does it mean we should ignore its increasingly menacing contempt for electoral integrity and a stable democracy? Absolutely not. But one reason to fight for liberalism against the successor ideology is that its extremes are quite obviously fomenting and facilitating and inspiring ever-rising fanaticism in response. I fear the successor ideology’s Kulturkampf is already making the 2022 midterms a landslide for a cultish, unmoored GOP. In fighting S.I., we are also fighting Trump.

But I am not making a tactical argument here. I’m making a deeper moral argument. We can and must still fight and argue for what we believe in: a liberal democracy in a liberal society. This fight will not end if we just ignore it or allow ourselves to be intimidated by it, or join the tribal pile-ons. And I will not apologize for confronting this, however unpopular it might make me, just as I won’t apologize for confronting the poison and nihilism on the right. And if you really want to be on “the right side of liberalism,” you will join me.

Will Transracialism Finally Expose the Identity Politics Hypocrisy?

...as those who were once "socially oppressed" historically reject and oppress their new surgically-minted "trans" wannabe members to prevent them from sharing in their current 'inter-sectionally determined' social privileges?

And perhaps answer the more important question, "Does/Should history confer "rights," social, moral, retributive, or "other"? 

"If identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think... that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is "Does this thing conform to my identity?" then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility." 

"...the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation." 

- Michel Foucault

---

"I'm not at ease with "lesbian theories, gay theories," for as I've argued elsewhere, identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes" 

"Is it not a sign of despair over public politics when identity becomes its own policy, bringing with it those who would "police" it from various sides?" 

"And this is not a call to return to silence or invisibility, but, rather, to make use of a category that can be called into question, made to account for what it excludes"

 - Judith Butler

---

"The dangers of identity politics... are that it casts as authentic to the self or group an identity that in fact is defined by its opposition to an Other. Reclaiming such an identity as one's own merely reinforces its dependence on this dominant Other, and further internalizes and reinforces an oppressive hierarchy.


While the charge that identity politics promotes a victim mentality is often a facile pot-shot, Wendy Brown offers a more sophisticated caution against the dangers of ressentiment (the moralizing revenge of the powerless). She argues that identity politics has its own genealogy in liberal capitalism that relentlessly reinforces the "wounded attachments" it claims to sever."

- The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy 

The "Moral Society" or the "Moral Individual"...

...where should we establish the balancing point?

"Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet - and this is its horror - it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world.

 
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

- Hannah Arendt, "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil"

Why do so Many White Intellectuals Infantilize Black People?

John McWhorter, "WHY CHARLES MURRAY'S NEW BOOK IS HIS WEAKEST
.. despite that he is 1) brilliant and 2) not a bigot."

I come not to bury Charles Murray, but not to praise him, either.

He has a new book out, Facing Reality. It’s a doozy.

His books have a way of being doozies, going up against ideas sacred to the American intelligentsia on race as well as class.

He is also one of America’s most brilliant thinkers.

To many familiar with Murray’s work, I have already revealed myself as a “racist” in engaging his work at all, and/or not calling him one.

However, Murray’s work is too carefully reasoned and too deeply founded on scholarly sources to be dismissed as “racist,” except by people whose definition of “racist” is “That which people of the black American race don’t like for any reason.”

Rather: I salute Murray’s brilliance while being disturbed by many of his arguments. What many will call racism is what I call being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

* * *

Yet Facing Reality is seriously disturbing. Murray gives a great deal of evidence for two points. One is that black people aren’t, on the average, as intelligent as other people. The other is that black people in America are more violent than others.

Those who on some level celebrate the latter as black people getting back at the white man in the only way they can, should know that the facts don’t lend themselves to that vigilante justice analysis. More specifically, black people kill each other more than members of other groups kill each other.

I find the violence point relatively unsurprising. Murray stays agnostic as to what the cause of it is; he proposes no genetic analysis, for example. And really, let’s try this. In the 1960s, a new and powerful fashion in black thought, inherited from the general countercultural mood, rejects championing assimilation to proposing that opposition to whiteness is the soul of blackness. Meanwhile, white leftists encourage as many poor black women as possible to go on welfare, hoping to bankrupt the government and inaugurate a fairer America. Soon, being on welfare in poor black communities is a new normal – hardly the usual, but so common that people grow up seeing not working for a living as ordinary. Then at this same time, a new War on Drugs gave poor black men a way of making half of a living by selling drugs on the black market, amidst a violent culture of gangland turf-policing. This feels more natural to them than it would have to their fathers because 1) the new mood sanctions dismissing traditional values as those of a “chump,” 2) it no longer feels alien to eschew legal employment, and 3) the Drug War helps make it that most boys in such neighborhoods grow up without fathers anyway.

The question might be just how black men amidst these changes would not have embraced violence in a new way.

* * *

The point about intelligence, however, is tough reading. Many will try the usual arguments – that race is a fiction (but while there are gray zones, humans do divide into delineable races genetically), that all races have a range from genuises on down (but the issue is that some races have more geniuses than others), that intelligence tests are “biased” somehow (but no one will specify just how, and this sort of bias is decades gone now).

The data, unless Murray is holding back reams of data with opposite results, cut brutally through all of this. It isn’t that black people are on the bottom on one big test in one big study, but that a certain order of achievement manifests itself in one study after another with relentless and depressing regularity. Asians on top, then come the whites, then Latinos, and then black people.

People will insist that none of this has anything to do with intelligence, but one thing cannot be denied – whatever it signifies, black people have a big problem performing on intelligence tests. The consistency of the results, if it is unconnected to intelligence, is clearly connected to something, or the results wouldn’t be so damnedly consistent.

I suspect, in my gut, that the issue is cultural, for reasons I discussed here. Abstract tests are a highly artificial thing, requiring a truly weird – or WEIRD, in the sense of Professor Henrich – way of thinking. Black American culture may be less consonant with that way of approaching things than white or Asian culture, and a fundamental sense of that way of approaching things as “not us,” which would have been encouraged amidst that oppositional mood I mentioned, could subtly discourage black kids from mastering the knack of jumping through the hoop.

I openly admit, though, that this is also the way I hope it is, and that’s not science. And Murray’s point is that this lower performance on tests suggests lesser cognitive ability, with all intraracial variation acknowledged.

Here is where most who are likely to know of Murray and the book will just sniff “racist” and walk on. But whether black people’s consistently lower placement on these tests is due to the intelligence factor g or to subtle cultural resistance to demonstrating it, the idea that it makes you a bigot to spell out this data is incoherent.

That is, many will suppose that either the data must be wrong – but without showing how – or that Murray shouldn’t have aired it because airing something that shows black people in a bad light “is racist.” As if we are the only group of humans in the world with only positive cultural traits? If the answer to all of this is an eye-roll and a cluck of the tongue, then there has been no answer.

* * *

Yet it’s reasonable to ask of Murray: Why are you airing this information? To what end? And it’s here that I find Facing Reality weak.

Charles Murray knows how to make a point. Anyone in the line of fire to the extent that he has been makes sure to argue on a lawyerly level – he anticipates every possible counterargument, refuses to raise his voice, acknowledges historical factors. Facing Reality’s footnotes are almost a book in themselves, for example – and yet, only cover the six chapters laying out the data.

Murray explains why the data he has given us are significant in the final chapter, but it is a mere hiccup compared to the others, and is backed by no footnotes at all. We read the first six chapters and internally ask, “Okay. Let’s say these things are true. What now?” and Murray has exactly three observations. None are up to his standard.

One is that Affirmative Action too often puts semicompetent people in government jobs. However, I have a hard time seeing this as precisely a national tragedy, and would be more moved to consider otherwise if Murray provided any data. Instead, he tosses off the point as if he were answering a question after a talk.

Another point is that identity politics – as in racial set-asides and a tacit media conspiracy to keep disproportionate rates of black crime under wraps – is about to create a revolutionarily inclined white identity that will plunge America into a race war. I know that many find that easy to imagine after what happened at the Capitol last January and reading about groups like QAnon. It also makes for a good editorial. But again, here Murray is just guessing. We must eliminate Affirmative Action to ward off a transnational mob of yahoos of a sort we have been warned about endlessly for the past twenty years – anybody remember this book making the same argument and the attention it got for bit 15-plus years ago? -- whipped up into a bizarre stunt by an unprecedentedly unqualified brute of a President who is now safely out of office? This is an argument to which one must bring one’s proverbial A-game. Murray brings his C-game here at best, despite having brought his A-game for the past 100 pages.

Finally, Murray urges that we open up to thinking of black people as less intelligent – on the average, mind you, but still – but approach each black person as an individual. To wit, one is to be as ready for a black person to be brilliant as we are for an Asian or white one to be, despite a baseline assumption that black people are generally less intell…

See how this doesn’t work? It’s a homily – the way we would like it to be even though it never will. “Black people aren’t as smart. But this one might be a genius!” A brave new world indeed. Of course, the idea is that there are other ways of being valuable to a society than braininess, and our job is to remember – perhaps on the other side of that doily with Black People Can Be Geniuses! on it – that people can also be brilliant artists, athletes, and such, that empathy is valuable, that maybe we can even start celebrating not just grit but “spunk” … (?). Smart’s Not The Only Good Thing!

Aw. I have known good people who truly believe in this argument, but it doesn’t go through for me. This is why: in the end, Murray avoids stating too directly what the obvious implication of his argument is. He thinks that we need to accept an America in which black people are rarely encountered in jobs requiring serious smarts. We need to accept an America in which almost no black people are physicists or other practitioners in STEM, have top-level jobs in government, or are admitted to top-level graduate programs at all. Black people will invent little, there will be many fewer black doctors and lawyers, and many fewer black experts in, well, anything considered really intellectually challenging.

In other words, Murray thinks – although I doubt he conceives of it in just this way – that beyond entertainment and sports, we need to go back to the level of achievement that American society allowed black people in roughly 1960 — except now, we are to consider this level of participation the best black people can do anyway.

We don’t need to consider only how this sounds as the counsel of a white person. This article interviews a black valedictorian recounting being told by black kids that advanced placement classes are “for white kids.” Or, watch here how gruesome it is to see a black schoolteacher openly espousing the idea that black people aren’t analytical thinkers as her colleagues nod warmly.

Now, her idea is that black people are “communal” or “holistic” thinkers and that this is the equal of being an analytic thinker. But most of us know damned well that “analytic” thought – as in abstraction, detachment, separating the head from the heart – is, well, intelligence. This black person, in her soul-deep suspicion of “whiteness,” buys in to the idea that black people aren’t supposed to be smart in the way that those white people are.

Murray’s book is arguing that we need to agree with her.

Even as someone who tries very hard to put myself into other people’s heads, to imagine ways of seeing things beyond what is congenial to me, I would have to work very hard to come up with a way of accepting that world as the one we need to seek. I’m also afraid that Murray has not worked terribly hard to convince someone like me of the wisdom of his counsel.

Maybe he just feels that the facts are what they are, that their implications for society are what they are, that strong people face unpleasant truths, and that having done his job, he wishes us our best.

Okay. But while I will not join the bandwagon of people who can see nothing but “racism” in his presentation, neither will I join the other bandwagon cheering that “somebody needed to finally say it” and leaving it there.

If “it” is that black people should be satisfied with getting little further than being America’s middle managers, grunt workers, athletes and singers, then I’m not with it. I dearly hope we can do better.

The question McWhorter asks, "What are Murray's motives?" is answered in the video above (@5:42).

The real problem with Murray's book is that it needs reframing as a discussion between the virtues and defects of IQ AND AQ (Athletic Quotient) measures... because the probability of Human Survival (pS) pS=IQ*AQ.