Social Media

Some Free Thoughts On Disaffected Liberals, Media and Twitter

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For some disaffected liberals, weaning one’s Self from increasingly biased outlets can be liberating. There are diminishing returns within the ‘activist’ and ‘liberationist’ doctrines, constantly centering activist concerns as virtuous and the latest sexual/moral/political liberation as sacred. Sooner or later, within the ‘-Ism’ soup, individuals realize THEIR speech, property, and legal rights can become threatened.

Disagree at your own peril.

We all depend, to some extent, on existing institutions for our freedoms. Freedoms come with responsibilities.

Liberalism requires proper philosophical and moral grounding to claim authority, while the knowledge claims of the sciences/social sciences/secular idealists continually run aground (as all authority does, as we all do) upon human nature and reality. Rationalists can’t plan everything and don’t know everything. The social sciences don’t describe everything and can’t merely be minted into public policy by self-appointed gatekeepers. Liberal idealists keep getting mugged from their Left within the nihilist, postmodern Fog Of The Self.

In terms of media, people want substance, reasonable fact-checking, and a place to mostly suspend disbelief while reinforcing existing belief. Peter Boghossian might be filling some small bit of that need.

Twitter as part of the Public Square: Back when I got a liberal arts education, I concluded something similar: The old guard had pedagogy and structure younger people, for the most part, had trouble accessing. There were systemic issues within the epistemology of a liberal arts education, while fewer and fewer people were actively reading. I figured the same, deeper postmodern philosophical debate would just occur on a delay for publications like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and NPR, and within our institutions (law/politics/media).

It was here long before me.

If the institutions are having systemic issues, then the outlets reporting on them, and leaning upon older technologies, are having systemic issues as well.

I’d have to say I agree with about 90% of the below, because speech means supporting the people you don’t like, and whom you think are dangerous:

Related On This Site:

–Heather McDonald At The WSJ: ‘ The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’

-Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

–Repost-From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘Nietzsche–Aristocratic Radical or Aristocratic Liberal?’

-Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’

– Various Products Of Radical Reason And Reactions To Them- John Gray At The New Statesman

–Repost-Roger Scruton At The New Atlantis: ‘Scientism In The Arts & Humanities’

One of the more solid moral foundations for why you should be liberal still comes from J.S. Mill:

“The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion. And in general, those who have been in advance of society in thought and feeling, have left this condition of things unassailed in principle, however they may have come into conflict with it in some of its details. They have occupied themselves rather in inquiring what things society ought to like or dislike, than in questioning whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to individuals. They preferred endeavoring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular points on which they were themselves heretical, rather than make common cause in defence of freedom, with heretics generally. The only case in which the higher ground has been taken on principle and maintained with consistency, by any but an individual here and there, is that of religious belief:…”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2007), 8-9.

Watch out for the assumption of rational and knowable ends, and the one-stop-shop of modern doctrines promising radical liberation. All that’s left is to implement such knowledge into systems that will lead all men to some point outside of themselves.: -The Englightenment/Romantic tension…the horror of rationalist systems which claimed knowledge of man’s ends, but also a defense of both positive and negative liberties-Appeasement Won’t Do-Via A Reader, ‘Michael Ignatieff Interview With Isaiah Berlin’…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”

The radical and rationalist project, anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism: Repost-From Michael Totten At World Affairs: “Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian”

Propaganda, Speech & Responsibility-Some Links

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-Via Martin Gurri, an interesting discussion about propaganda.

-Via The New Atlantis, an interesting discussion about ‘fixing’ social media. Personally, I have my belief in LLoL ((loud losers online + the blinders worn by rationalist platform-builders + the regression to the mean on any platform (free happens faster) and in any open marketplace)). To hone in a little more on the rationalist issue, I see some social-media problems caused simply by smart people building systems, and the incentives created by building those systems. Other social-media problems come from the blinders worn by secular humanists/idealists, relying upon the radical Left to define key problems, while trusting in global humanist institutions to resolve those key problems (oblivious of the tensions and problems with authority that result). Some social media problems, though, are deeper human nature and reality problems, which is why these technologies are proving so transformative.

-Is this the free-speech center-Left? Centrist-Left?

Because you didn’t ask: I learned to shoot a .30-.30 rifle in the Boy Scouts. The gun and ammunition were kept under lock and key. There was a lot of instruction. The gun was fired only on the range and only under supervision.

My point: There was a culture of responsibility, discovery, and discipline. It was not taken lightly, but it could be fun. This is arguably no longer the dominant ethos in many places. Our politics seems unable to handle the problems of violent, murderous young men right now, with access to the guns but none of the responsibility nor discipline.

Speaking of rationalism vs. honor:

Sam Harris and Tamler Sommers had a discussion.

Old Hickory killed a man in a duel. Behold his exploits.

I don’t expect the people imagining themselves in a perpetual, righteous struggle to gain power even as they wield authority (their enemies potentially ‘evil.’) as understanding the issue.

What worries me most: The spirited part of men, the honor-loving and action-oriented part needs to be constrained and incentivized properly to duty, sacrifice and heroic purpose. The clock is always ticking, from within and without.

If you’re still with me, allow me to a point to a deeper map: Beyond political party and loyalty and the modern maps, lies an ancient one. Within this map is the idea that freedom eventually becomes the highest good in a democracy. Such freedom and rule by the demos is extended to all areas of life (old flattering the young, the differences between men and women erased, the former slaves freed etc.). This makes the demos ever more sensitive to any authority, so much so that popular sentiment becomes antithetical to even reasonable authority. Out of this situation arises a man who is this worst master of his passions. Now, I don’t need you to suddenly align this map with your current political lights (it’s Trump! it’s Biden!). Please be quiet, already.

Just take a look for yourself, think for a while, and move on.

Things fall apart. I suppose we’ll see how much. I’d rather look pitiable and foolish than depressingly accurate.

—

As posted:

The idea of bronze men (appetitive, trading), silver men (guardians), and gold men (philosopher-kings) rings authoritarian to the modern ear. Plato’s Ideal City has a rigid, birth caste system.

Yet, he founded the first university, more or less, and grounded learning away from Homer and towards a different set of truth and knowledge claims. Many of these claims became intertwined within Christian doctrine later on.

Reading Thrasymachus more as a nihilist, too, has its uses (as a counter-balance to Marx, to the radical utopians and to the postmodern power-all-the-way-down theorists).

This blog remains skeptical of the idea that ‘political theory’ and the modernization of new and emergent fields of thought will meet the claims of many political theorists and modernizers.

If you want to acquire or re-acquire a deep map of understanding, and one of the founding doctrines of Western thought, here’s the material presented pretty clearly and knowledgably.

Really, it’s conversational, like a good podcast ought to be:

—

A Podcast From Britain: E30 | Dreaming The Future | Natalie Bennett, Phillip Blond, Roger Scruton

Quote found here——Kraut, Richard. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

“The Peloponennisian War created the sorts of tension in Athens that would appear to support Thucydides’ analysis. Obligations to the community required greater sacrifice and presented a clearer conflict with the self-seeking “Homeric” pursuit of one’s status, power and pleasure. In political terms, people had to decide whether or not to plot against the democracy to bring off an Olgarchic coup. In moral terms they had to decide whether or not to ignore the demands of the community, summed up in the requirements of “justice,” in favor of their own honor, status, power, and in general their perceived interest. Plato was familiar with people who preferred self-interest over other-regarding obligation; his own relatives, Critias and Charmides, made these choices when they joined the Thirty Tyrants.

Arguments from natural philosophy did not restrain people like Critias and Charmides. Democritus argues unconvincingly that the requirements of justice and the demands of nature, as understood by Atomism, can be expected to coincide. Protogoras rejects the view that moral beliefs are true and well grounded only if they correspond to some reality independent of believers; admittedly they are matters of convention, but so are all other beliefs about the world. This line or argument removes any ground for preferring nature over convention, but at the same time seems to remove any rational ground for preferring one convention over another.”

Free Thoughts On An Older Blog-Elon Musk & Twitter

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Horses I pleasurably beat: It’d have been nice if the old liberal guard within our universities had said something like ‘no‘ to many of the radicals roiling in front of them. ‘You are still required to read The Canterbury Tales by the 25th.’ ‘Also, you have to let other people think and speak.‘

This old nag: Many a rationalist, secular humanist, and liberal idealist likely believes that while activists get carried away, the cause is mostly just. Religion is still poisoning everything, and the new fields of knowledge can bear the weight of humanity’s ignorance, suffering and hope. Math + data + new social science research + applied policy + conventional wisdom through the academy and media = sufficient moral orthodoxy. The moral force of change against injustice can be directed into a liberal order all individuals can get behind (and not be ground under).

Progress!

The Appaloosa is a proud breed. I’m skeptical of the view that marginalized people, the meekest and poorest among us, are generally served by the kind of inverse religious logic a radical Marxist employs, even as the Marxist goes too far. The prediction I hear from the liberal mainstream is this: Such malcontents can be kept below deck. (S)elf still comes first, but (S)elfhood will require allegiance to the old/new institutions as long as these are run by the right people with the right moral lights. In the control room, where the sea spreads before the best and brightest, (H)istory is capable of producing the right men to steer the Ship of State.

It’s odd to have those who conserve finding themselves out of conservation, wishing for the roiling and disruption of existing institutions, still while being called ‘Hitler.’

Populism is all around, and for good reasons.

More like a draft horse: The pipers calling are human nature, truth and reality. Can you hear the tune?

Many radical discontents exhibit the chaotic minds, troubled souls and controlling tendencies of the all-too-familiar religious zealot (always there amongst the pews). We still live in a world of limited resources and hard choices where life ain’t fair. Politics calls forth a few 1st-rate men but a majority of ambitious 2nd and 3rd raters who think they’re 1st-rate (a surprising number of scoundrels).

In lieu of an older, more religious American idealism, a new moral and moralizing force forms in the gaps, where old money gets co-opted by new zealots. A lot of change, very quickly, compels towards new rules and new authority.

This is coming from Left and Right, and the newer Lefts and newer Rights.

I guess I don’t trust any one man, (this is why we have our Constitutional constraints and separation of powers).

We’ll see about if my hope for better speech rules have been misplaced…

The previous two cents and two cents more gets you close to a nickel: Twitter as a platform is what it is (especially good at brief bursts of condensed information, data gathering, and disasters). It’s the kind of internal, open chat platform within a company, scaled more broadly. All you need is a device, free software to download, and voila, you’ve become a node on a vast network. This has advantages.

Communication, however, is obviously a pathetic prosthetic for human contact and real conversation.  I suspect the people curating Twitter of playing a dumb, dumb game by favoring their favored biases (like all of us, to some extent) instead of just letting speech flourish.

This creates echo-chambers.

Related On This Site:

–Heather McDonald At The WSJ: ‘ The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity’

-Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

–Repost-From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘Nietzsche–Aristocratic Radical or Aristocratic Liberal?’

-Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’

– Various Products Of Radical Reason And Reactions To Them- John Gray At The New Statesman

–Repost-Roger Scruton At The New Atlantis: ‘Scientism In The Arts & Humanities’

Don’t Worry, Man, This Will All Work Out-Update & Repost-Kay Hymowitz In The City Journal: Child-Man In The Promised Land?

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Full article here.  (Originally posted over a dozen years ago now, and I suspect more people are paying attention to the problems raised).

The basic idea:  Many young and young(ish) American men are free of the social obligations to commit to women, get married, have kids, and thus languish in a suspended state of man-childishness.

How did they get here?  By the radical and excessive cultural changes the last 40 years have brought about:  I’m assuming the excesses of feminism, the excesses of equality, which form a solid part of majority pop culture opinion and have often been institutionalized.

“Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don’t emerge. They’re made.”

Hymowitz is arguing that the culture is failing young men in an important way, and it’s doing so by abandoning certain cultural values and the depth and wisdom those values sustain.

See Also:  Kay Hymowitz In The The City Journal: Love In The Time Of Darwinism

From Will Wilkinson-A Response To Kay Hymowitz: ‘The “Menaissance” and Its Dickscontents’…Kay Hymowitz In The The City Journal: Love In The Time Of Darwinism…Kay Hymowitz In The City Journal: Child-Man In The Promised Land?…Kay Hymowitz At The City Journal: ‘How Brooklyn Got Its Groove Back’

From The Chronicle Of Higher Ed Via A & L Daily: Christina Hoff Sommers “Persistent Myths In Feminist Scholarship”…Wendy Kaminer At The Atlantic: ‘Sexual Harassment And The Loneliness Of The Civil Libertarian Feminist’

Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?

—

Philip Brand Reviews Kay Hymowitz At Real Clear Books: ‘Women on Top, Men at the Bottom’.

Man-children? A war against men? The products of feminism? An erosion of religious values?:

‘The thrust of Manning Up is different. In her new book, Hymowitz puts economic conditions first — along with the increasing professional accomplishments of women. Preadulthood, she says, is “an adjustment to huge shifts in the economy, one that makes a college education essential to achieving or maintaining a middle-class life.”

That’s preadulthood for men:

‘Preadulthood — most common among men in their twenties, though it can easily extend to one’s thirties and beyond — is a consequence of two related economic trends that are reshaping the coming-of-age experience for young Americans, both men and women. The first trend is the extended period of training — college and beyond — deemed necessary to succeed in the modern economy. The second trend is women’s participation and flourishing in the new economy.’

There have been many changes going on in American society, which include getting women into the workforce and into college. I suspect this has partially required the erosion of traditional and religious familial hierarchies and the institutions growing out of them as a model for civil society.

There’s also the ideological radicalism and excesses of a lot of feminist doctrine, and many emerging new rules of behavior between the sexes, often enforced ad hoc, which further erode authority and claims to authority.

Naturally, social and religious conservatives are less happy with this state of affairs, and there is legitimate criticism that the State will fill the role the family they once held as a model for civil society, especially among lower income folks.

Obviously, we’re not going back to 1962, but men are not just born, they’re made, and now that the culture and institutions that made them is receding, what is taking their place?

Some will see these developments as a steps towards a better world, others as clear steps towards a worse one.  I’m just trying to step back for a moment.

In response to Megan McArdle’s post “America’s New Mandarins,” it might be worth revisiting Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. Murray got there first:

—————

Helen Smith, wife of Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, had a then new book out entitled ‘Men On Strike, Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream-and Why It Matters‘ which suggests the old incentives combined with the new culture is incentivizing men to sit on the sidelines:

—————-

Jordan Peterson is pushing back against claims of equality of outcome.  Freedom, responsibility and moral behavior are not tied directly back to the Bible, but through an attention to psychological/social science research data and schools of thought which have emerged and developed during the last one hundred and fifty years.  This, including his own experience as a clinical psychologist.

He’s still persona non-grata amongst many commited to gender equality and group identity:

Via a reader: Heather Heying, evolutionary biologist, and wife of Bret Weinstein, offers reasonable insight.

The sexes obviously can work together collaboratively, but I’m guessing neither a vast majority of women, nor some plurality of men, desire a return to previous traditional and religiously conservative sex roles, especially in the workplace.

After hollowing out much of what came before, some folks make everything rationalistic (rational man) and commodified (technology and the market). But notice liberation is not freedom, nor responsibility. In the hole created, there often just floods in identity politics, the ‘-Isms’, and more space for collectivist and socialistic (State) solutions. Did folks tell you the price of progress, and living in a ‘modern’ society.

Some Links On The Loss Of Civic Virtue, Ideologues In The Humanities & Alas, The New Yorker

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Andrew Sullivan and Antonio Garcia Martinez have a discussion (Judaism vs Christianity, time and distance shortening technologies, the darkness potentially coming as we dissolve our common, civic bonds).

Surely you trust the people in the Federal Government?

Surely!

—

Here’s James Lindsay on the ideologies and ideologues filling many gaps within our institutions. The Humanities is the education where you can actually learn about your own human nature through dialog with the great voices of the past.

It’d be nice if such a defense weren’t necessary, but it is.

Alas, The New Yorker.

Don’t think the postmodern void and the search for meaning won’t suck on your legs as the tide goes out.

It’s okay to like the long-form stuff, high-quality cover art and criticism but…

…you will increasingly find reference to political violence, narrow true-belief and a rigid, cloying moralism. The logic was there, all along, beneath the human rights universalism, secular liberal idealism and profound moral concern for the ‘culture.’

The radicals haven’t changed all that much, but here’s one major difference: The new rules involve mainstreaming political violence and blaming your political enemies for it.

—

As posted, keeping an eye on The New Yorker-

Louise Perry at Unherd:  ‘An Untrue Claim In the New Yorker Speaks Volumes‘

‘One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.’

– Jill Lepore, New Yorker

Perry on Lepore’s piece:

This in a 5,000 word feature on the history of policing in the United States, which draws a link between the early role of police in suppressing slave rebellions, and police killings of Black Americans in the twenty first century.

And:

‘We know that political bias warps cognition, sometimes catastrophically, and this is, I think, an example of that in action. Lepore read Feldman’s research and she misunderstood part of it, despite being an exceptionally intelligent person. Like many other Left-leaning Democrats, she is convinced that police brutality is a huge, under-acknowledged problem in the United States, and she therefore jumped to the conclusion that this wildly inflated ‘two-thirds’ figure was plausible.’

—

Previous links on this site from The New Yorker:

Our sacred National Parks and EPA regions, uniting all races, classes, genders, and species in a non-corporate, environmental utopia, are being despoiled by the dirty masses:

Carefully balanced rock towers make a pretty picture, but the proliferation of cairns, fuelled by social media, has negative consequences for the environment. https://t.co/q4BGmJtAHC

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 23, 2020

—

Judith Butler Wants To Reshape Our Rage (your rage isn’t even your own at The New Yorker, these days, it belongs to the collective).

Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler: ‘The Professor Of Parody‘

‘These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.’

—

Not the ‘right’ kind of emptiness for Richard Brody, at The New Yorker, in Todd Phillips’ ‘The Joker.’

‘“Joker” is an intensely racialized movie, a drama awash in racial iconography that is so prevalent in the film, so provocative, and so unexamined as to be bewildering.’

Brody’s review is as much about historical events (The Central Park Five), and moral judgments surrounding these historical events (racist and nothing else, Trump is horrible) as it is about the movie.

Basic plot, aesthetics, and stylized choices are kind of what I’m after in a movie review, with some of the reviewer’s own expertise and respect for the reader’s intelligence thrown-in (should I see this movie?).

The Boston Evening Transcript

The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.

—
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”

–T.S. Eliot

Mail delivery, Tuesday morning, Upper West Side. pic.twitter.com/nrSCvS52Ch

— Joe Nocera (@opinion_joe) December 13, 2016

—

Ira Stoll here:

‘There was a wonderful article by an editor at the magazine, Mary Norris, about commas. Wonderful, that is, until this passage, “That was during the Reagan Administration, when many of us suspected that Reagan had some form of dementia, but no one could do anything about it. The country was running on automatic.”

Such politicization can make for bad stewardship of the arts, certainly.

Perhaps New Yorker features are increasingly flogged to maintain readership in a competitive marketplace, or are being put to use for other purposes, like reaffirming political ideology and identities to signal the right beliefs and in-group/out-group loyalties. Many of the liberal pieties can be found on display at the New Yorker.

***Who do you trust for discussions of the arts and culture, and would you just rather publications be up front about their ideological bents and loyalties?

Or will this simply take care of itself?

As posted: Maybe some deeper currents from Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism are worth thinking about. As I see things, many people who care deeply about the avant-garde also can bind themselves to ever narrower political and ideological commitments.

The journey of The Western Self bears proper care.

According to some folks at The New Yorker magazine, the only answer to injustice is radical and revolutionary equality.

To be fair, the logic embedded within much radical chic usually reveals itself to be cool at first, the same old murderously bad doctrinaire utopianism a little later on:

From The New Yorker: ‘Writing Powered By Amtrak’

Thanks, reader:

Related On This Site:Appeasement Won’t Do-Via A Reader, ‘Michael Ignatieff Interview With Isaiah Berlin’

A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…

See Protein Wisdom for a discussion about language and intentionalism, and how it gets deployed.

-Daniel Dennett: ‘Postmodernism And Truth’

Related On This Site: Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’ Classical Liberalism Via Friesian.Com-’Exchange with Tomaz Castello Branco on John Gray’

The Same Quote By John Locke On ‘Enthusiasm’-NPR, Liberal Idealism, Activists & Being For ‘The Freedom & Dignity Of Human Beings’-Some Thoughts

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Quote found here:

“7. What is meant by enthusiasm. This I take to be properly enthusiasm, which, though founded neither on reason nor divine revelation, but rising from the conceits of a warmed or overweening brain, works yet, where it once gets footing, more powerfully on the persuasions and actions of men than either of those two, or both together: men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves; and the whole man is sure to act more vigorously where the whole man is carried by a natural motion. For strong conceit, like a new principle, carries all easily with it, when got above common sense, and freed from all restraint of reason and check of reflection, it is heightened into a divine authority, in concurrence with our own temper and inclination.”

If many folks at NPR could be like the CBC, or the BBC (forced licensing fees since WWII), I’m guessing they would.

True Story: Over a decade ago, there was a story on one of the local Seattle NPR stations I haven’t been able to track down (Seattle or Olympia). The topic was toys imported from China; some potential problems with toxicity.

There was one interviewee. She was neither lawyer nor doctor, nor chemist. She didn’t work in politics, nor in trade policy. She didn’t work in the toy business and didn’t know about freight/transport/toy sales. She might have had a child, but that seemed to be about the extent of knowledge. She had some interesting potential facts and information, but that was about it.

‘This is curious,’ I thought, ‘why is she on the air?‘

Dear Reader, she was an activist.

An activist is someone who becomes active.  Activists activate.  Becoming morally and emotionally engaged on some topic or other, for activists, is a good thing.  Virtuous, even.  Activists have had enough.  Activists, of The People, stand up and speak for The People.  Activists are in a kind of war with the world as it is, with injustice, and activists are always busy going to war with the truth and knowledge they have, against their enemies.

Whatever your thinking and/or experiences, Dear Reader, inevitably, some questions arise.

What if the activist is wrong? What if the activist has bad or missing information? Would a such a person as the activist, with the incentives and passion of the activist, ever admit to being wrong?

Do they justify violence in the name of their cause?

A bigger problem at NPR: For all my life, before I was born, back when NPR was created in the hoary mists of time and 60’s Civil Rights idealism, the activist has been at the core of their business model. Interview an activist and a guy in the oil industry. Split the difference. Get some jazz musicians and some good photographers and do a money-losing piece on both (I am grateful for these, thanks, NPR). Get a lady from Code Pink in here along with Senator so-and-so to mainline some pure democracy into the discussion.

Well, the activist capture is clearly catching up with them (along with a failing business model).

As this blog has been arguing for over a decade, there might not be much stable ground beneath liberal idealism, enough to maintain the consent of the governed and legitimate moral authority.

The problems run deep.

Gee & Ursula: Durkan never recovered from CHOP ‘Summer of love’ remark

If you think, as I do, that human nature generally needs to be constrained, that we have a good Constitutional model to do so, and that Christian thinking (to be viewed with profound skepticism) at least prohibits violence in principle, then the activist model is to be viewed with profound skepticism.

Many of the true and good causes have already devolved into rackets (much Black activist leadership, the ACLU, Civil Rights). Look no further than the think-tank and activist Right to see that such devolution is probably inevitable.

If you can’t see that your own idealism is a point-of-view, then you’ve consigned yourself to be surprised and perhaps, attacked, by thought which disagrees.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.’

This is what I think many New Atheists, Men Of System, Men of Reason, Rationalists/Idealists so often miss: A lot of what human nature is, is capable of, even, can’t necessarily be molded by you. At least not in the short and mid-term and not according to many current plans. Where you put your thinking is where your hopes follow. If you find yourself hating what humanity is, then your ideas aren’t good enough to understand humanity.

And they are certainly not good enough to be in authority.

A lot of what motivates those who want change is mobilized resentment against current authority, and this passes for everything that is ‘good.’

You don’t get to speak for all of the public. You don’t get to presume to curate the arts and sciences. You have to survive in a free market, with free speech.

That seems fair to me.

What about you?

Ed West, Theodore Dalrymple & Some Old Links On Cuba

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Ed West at UnHerd: ‘The West’s Cultural Revolution Is Over‘

An interesting take from across the pond:

‘The past 50 years or so have seen a cultural revolution in western society comparable in scope to the Reformation. Most of us have known only that period of transition, when morality and norms were up for debate, but perhaps it is now over. Perhaps we have returned to the sort of world we lived in when England last reached a final, in 1966 – a world of strictly enforced social mores.‘

Perhaps…

Oh, there will be rules.

—

Theodore Dalrymple spends a lot of time in France, and comments on regional elections (Macron vs Le Pen, 2022)

Also, Dalrymple on Haiti.

—

A few years ago now…

Many folks have explained why Communist revolutions begin in violence and end in such misery, and why so many followers cling to these doctrines with a sort of religious fervor, selectively blind hope, and continued loyalty.

Or at least some folks held their ground and documented the mess:

–Robert Conquest At The Hoover Institution: ‘When Goodness Won’

–A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…Appeasement Won’t Do-Via A Reader, ‘Michael Ignatieff Interview With Isaiah Berlin’

Michael Moynihan takes a look at how some in the Western media and in positions of influence have handled the death of what [was] essentially, a brutal dictator:

‘Still Stuck On Castro:‘

‘The preceding days have demonstrated that information peddled by Castro’s legion of academic and celebrity apologists has deeply penetrated the mainstream media consciousness, with credulous reporting sundry revolutionary “successes” of the regime: not so good on free speech, but oh-so-enviable on health care and education.’

and:

‘And how does Reuters describe Castro? After 50 years of brutal one-party rule, to apply the appellation “dictator” seems a rather contentious issue: “Vilified by opponents as a totalitarian dictator, Castro is admired in many Third World nations for standing up to the United States and providing free education and health care.” And again, we return to education and health care.’

Democratic socialism, and social democracy, are often just the distance some folks have migrated from their previous ideological commitments (tolerating market reforms and ‘neo-liberal’ economic policy out of necessity, not necessarily a change of heart nor mind).

For others it may be the distance they’ve unconsciously drifted towards such ideas more recently.

For other brave souls, it may be the distance required to stick one’s fingers into the political breezes which blow over the floor of the EU, in order to ‘stay engaged’:

Remember, this [was] the non-elected President of the EU Commission.

With the death of #FidelCastro, the world has lost a man who was a hero for many. https://t.co/u0ULZoG8Fl

— Jean-Claude Juncker (@JunckerEU) November 26, 2016

Michael Totten relays an anecdote here:

‘He told me about what happened at his sister’s elementary school a few years after Castro took over.

“Do you want ice cream and dulces (sweets),” his sister’s teacher, a staunch Fidelista, asked the class.

“Yes!” the kids said.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Put your hands together, bow your heads, and pray to God that he brings you ice cream and dulces.”

Nothing happened, of course. God did not did not provide the children with ice cream or dulces.

“Now,” the teacher said. “Put your hands together and pray to Fidel that the Revolution gives you ice cream and sweets.”

The kids closed their eyes and bowed their heads. They prayed to Fidel Castro. And when the kids raised their heads and opened their eyes, ice cream and dulces had miraculously appeared on the teacher’s desk.’

Gloria Estefan offers a window into Cuban culture, music, honor, and immigration as it mixes with American culture.

As previously posted:

Michael Moynihan reviewed Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ which praised the Cuban Health Care System.

Christopher Hitchens took a helicopter ride with Sean Penn, and that tracksuit-wearing strongman of the people, Hugo Chavez-Hugo Boss:

It’s a long way out of socialist and revolutionary solidarity, which continually occupies the South American mind. One more revolution: Adam Kirsch takes a look at Mario Vargas Llosa. The Dream Of The Peruvian.

——————

The End Of History? –Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’

Related On This Site: What Will De Blasio’s New York Look Like?-Some Links…Sandinistas At The NY Times: ‘A Mayoral Hopeful Now, de Blasio Was Once a Young Leftist’…Two Links On Diane Ravitch & School Reform

‘Testy-Cool,’ Twitter, Hipsters & The Great American Cultural Iceberg Of Received Opinion

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The chase for cool is always going on, and many people currently chasing cool seem a bit pathetic. Maybe even bathetic and a little lost (why, that could be me). Not enough respect for knowledge, hard work, and tradition, tends to make unmoored people. Unmoored people tend to chase trends, radical trends even, despite often being the square people in the room.

The term ‘hipster’ may not cover the phenomenon, but I suspect enough of the iceberg has flipped that much counter-culture has become culture. Suddenly, some conservative ideas have become counter-culture (some conservative ideas should never be cool). Many liberal ideas are dominant and in authority (pretty uncool, man).

The post 60’s boomer, ‘bobo,’ ‘fauxhemian,’ aesthetic, if there be such a thing, currently strikes me as too-precious. Sometimes ‘Inauthentic’, even, and we all know that authentic and cool strut hand-in-hand.

But, dear Reader, you are more than the sum of the labels I happen to paste over your face.

Let me try and give some examples:

-Paying homage to (A)rt and (S)cience, but in an aspiring fashion. ‘David Attenborough/Neil Degrasse Tyson/Andy Warhol is my spirit animal.‘

–COVID-19 masktaskers. Creeping authoritarianism and stale, bureaucratic rule-following…aren’t so cool. The search for truth, the latest science, and the disease/treatment are real things. So are real medical professionals and .09% of [infected] people actually dying. The geopolitics could become quite consequential, quite quickly. But not over-inflated children claiming to be heroes while demanding attention. Not tech-companies chasing profit-motives while claiming high ideals and ‘how much they care.’ Not a lot of 2nd and 3rd rate people defending their turf and telling other people what to do.

Which reminds me: ALL ARTISTS AND GRAPHIC DESIGNERS ARE WELCOME TO SUBMIT THEIR ‘TESTY-COOL’ DESIGNS BY JULY 31ST!

***Sperm-counts are reported to be at all time lows in the United States. Follow ‘Testy-Cool’s’ cross-country campaign to ‘Stay Cool This Summer.’ ‘Testy-Cool’ is an HHS approved, workshop-focused $18 million dollar new mascot. 38% of teenagers say they’d like to see more of ‘Testy-Cool’.

–Pretty much anything on NPR (the obtuseness of some idealists + the hectoring moralism of most activists + production values from 1968-1996)-Most would love to force you to pay them to talk about ‘culture’ all day while discussing your motives for not liking ‘culture.’

–Anything about Banksy. See this New Yorker piece. ‘I think I’m going to kill myself!’

As to Twitter, this is my semi-functional theory:

–The platform selects for loud ignorance. Twitter has a significant visual component, with some textual elements, and limited characters. Around any topic, a few nodes (popular accounts) will cluster across a larger distribution. For most users, it ain’t really a place to converse, nor think too much, but rather to gain new information through the aggregation function performed by these popular nodes (especially in the political sphere).

The format rewards brevity, pith, and some wit, but also cashes in on selling the idea of influence. It’s quite a cesspool, really, and I usually feel like I’m pissing into the wind; the rewards probably not worth the costs unless one just uses Twitter as a distribution network of one’s own.

Furthermore, the most popular accounts don’t necessarily seem to be the most knowledgeable, thoughtful, nor accurate and truthful (they could be, I suppose), but rather the nodes who use the platorm most effectively, efficiently dominating information distribution; coalescing the public sentiment surrounding their topic.

You get what you pay for, I suppose.

–The biases of Twitter creators and curators lean towards loud activist ignorance: In my experience as a user, I don’t know how firmly activist beliefs are held amongst actual designers and programmers at the top, but ideological capture is likely significant, especially in the administrative and bureaucratic functions.

Thus, some top-end design and aggregation, across all those different topics, pools of sentiment and individual users, is done by people who probably share a particular blend of Left-leaning moral, political and ideological views (creating special rules for special users).

My biases are in view, of course: Twitter’s more about about geekier white kids wanting to hang out with cool black kids.

Welcome to the new wealthy and woke. I suppose we’ll see how some people handle money, authority and influence with the ideas they’ve got: