The F.I.R.E is, perhaps, the new ACLU.

As for the old ACLU these days? A free-speech mission, becoming a legal business, devolving into an anti-speech racket is something to behold.

You stand up for the neo-Nazis right to speak and assemble, because you may need those rights, too.

Did you think you’d just drive-on-by?

Many people, volunteering as our betters in the U.S., have been busy institutionalizing a rather anti-establishment ethos. The problem is, many of these people are now the establishment. Many 60’s boomers (hanging in there, baby) are something like idealists. Holding authority, while simultaneously holding many anti-authoritarian views, is a tragi-comedy.

In my experience, beneath idealists are radicals, and radicals generally hold certain moral goods (ideologically nested) above all else as they drive for disruption. Suppressing the speech of the ‘fascist’ is more important than free speech. Doing violence against the ‘fascist’ is celebrated and much preferable to non-violence. Breaking the law is by far more important than than rule of law.

I personally saw the Antifa violence spread (always here, really) as C.H.O.P came and went. After a while, I saw a small, pro-patriot (kinda New Right) response fill in the void. It was a sad bit of street theater (unserious but very real). Whatever was more civil, respectful and dignified is now less so, and this dynamic would seem to be the new, national normal.

In my experience, along with idealists are also many anti-‘capitalist’, bureaucratic, technocratic, types. The knowledge is available to build brilliant new liberal, inclusive, diverse and global societies. Communitiarian, purely democratic, and ‘equal’ societies are moral goods in themselves, at least in the face of injustice. Political science, the DSM, all the right economics based on deeper math, will free more labor than before and potentially create new political orders.

I’m not sure such glittering enterprises are even possible.

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.’

Many people seem to believe that because the modern world is fallen, it’s easier to blame all the normal self-interest, political corruption and rule-following punishment out there as belonging to the religionist, the racist, and the traditionalist.

The ‘-ist’ tends to see only other ‘-ists’ all the way down. The (C)ause tends to be the highest moral good and this leads to all kinds of dangers.

Still an interesting discussion:

Times come and go: I remember visiting my father’s small, Connecticut hometown. Many factories (spooled-thread, fabric, cutting tools) had become derelict. ‘What did they used to make there?’ we’d ask, driving along, visiting his old haunts. The shallower valleys, stony soil and New England village greens were foreign to me. We’d pass by busted, boarded-up windows and out-of-use smokestacks. ‘Did they actually make these things by hand?’

Most of that industry never came back.

Now imagine losing larger: The rise and fall of automobile manufacturing in Detroit, and all the supply chains throughout Ohio; whole towns dwindling down. Much of that industry isn’t coming back either.

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”

Clive James revisits many quite original, quite accomplished works of Joseph Conrad.

This one’s stuck with me over the last few months:

‘They are, in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terrorism to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organise itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness. Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.’

As for politics on the other side, it’s a mess of anarcho-libertarians, non-anarchic libertarians, the New Right, the Old Right, the never-Trumpers, religious believers, traditionalists and a lot of pro- and anti-establishment vitriol.