I started undergrad arts/law in 1990 and perpetrated my hoax 1992-95 (ie, started it before I graduated in either arts or law). There's a limit to what one person can do, particularly a disagreeable one who doesn't play well with others.
It's not that I renounce libertarianism. I never had drug legalization as a cause that I would march for. The issue where we are least appreciated (markets vs. central planning) is the libertarian cause that I most support. When Cato folks point to marijuana legalization and say "See, we're winning," I want to gag.
I still have a hard time with drug prohibition being more acceptable than alcohol, and we quit on that not because Prohibition was immoral but it was just simply unenforceable. Even today, asset forfeiture (and all attendant abuse thereof) exists because of the war on drugs. Maybe not total legalization, but certainly some form of armistice in this war?
All three points from the quote here (economic freedom, free speech and marijuana) are driven by the left becoming more radical. The right, if anything have become slightly more libertarian.
I get the impression that a lot of American libertarians are cultural Democrats, who.have emotional difficulty making common cause with their natural allies on the right.
Just a comment about the preggy brain. Richard’s theory is about the earlier maturation of the female brain.IQ differences mainly come from children and adolescents. These measurements are calibrated to be 100 for both sexes by adding more verbal questions (female advantage) or math/spatial questions (advantage male). However, since male brains mature longer the 4 points happen after most IQ tests like SAT take place. This also matches the high correlation with brain size; men’s brains are 10-15% larger after adjusting for body size.
Since this happens before pregnancy I’m afraid that the preggy effect is cumulative.
When I first heard about that 10+% greater male brain size, my first thought was perhaps 10-15% of that increase was to handle a larger male body, but the rest was probably oriented to obtaining sex and lust. Since sex and lust lead to or precede pregnancy, I suppose we might call this a pre-preggy affect?
I wonder if there is any element of this also related to the observation that women have more cross brain hemisphere connections while men have more front to back connections?
A not inconsequential worry is that if high IQ people marry other high IQ people, even if their children do somewhat revert to the mean, the wealth enhancement from IQ capabilities might still lead to wealth inequalities that can never be leveled in a free society [See Charles Murry?].
I can't agree. On the contrary most opponents of the Left are way TOO charitable because they take the caring egalitarian's self deceiving posture at face value. Hardly any 'egalitarian' has ever truly cared about equality. The psychology of it is the nice self-flattering feeling it gives them whilst they pursue their self interested (albeit self-deceiving) personal agenda
"Fuck in a brothel" is the surprise course in Helen Dale's multi-course meals. I'd be at the table anyway, but that palate cleanser (contaminator?) gives welcome frisson.
People used to describe a centre-right/classical liberal blog (so not even proper US-proof libertarian) for which I wrote many years ago as "the cats that will not be herded".
Pregnancy brain and exhaustion brain are very real. When my toddler only wakes me up twice in a night, I'm fairly bright. When I'm up 3-6 times in the night, I trip over common words, am clumsy, and struggle with arithmetic much more.
The other big, not-progressive-approved thing preventing outcome equality amongst the sexes is choice. I understand when the Professional Feminist types who prefer a career to motherhood/looking after their own children get confused by other women preferring the opposite, but I've also known women who opted to go part-time to be with the kids act shocked that they didn't progress in their careers. But then the progressive argument jumped ahead of "remove barriers" to "rebuild the system in my preferred image". If you can't be a part-time home-working CEO and make it to the PTA meetings, it must be an unfair world still in need of change.
Any company, large or small, that does not have a plan and a process to maximize the talent contributions from its women employees during and after pregnancy is at risk from a competitor that can do so. Not everyone can work from home part time, or be given "longer term focused" assignments that do not need day to day interactions until they are ready to return to work full time, but all can make allowance for the skill set of managing a growing family as having some application to their work scope upon return. Increased maturity, budgeting money and time, etc. are skills as valuable as accounting, law, etc.
Similar mindsets should be applied for those folks (usually men) who work in a factory but also run a farm or other business on their "off time". Talents and skills can come from many venues.
Intellectually, I’m convinced by anarchism-capitalist ideas. But what many people miss there is that an anarchist-capitalist system probably looks very little like minarchism. Most people want a system to impose a more significant degree of public order than that. Anarchism-capitalism would likely provide what the market wants. But I make this mistake all the time. An anarchist-capitalism solution is always off the table, so I tend to default to a minarchist or libertarian perspective, even when evidence supports the idea that anarchism-capitalism would prohibit more.
Marijuana regulation is one such area. I wouldn’t pick a protective association that permitted its members to smoke marijuana in public or while driving. I’d have a conflict with my neighbor if they did. And so the market would likely result in something less libertarian than the current regime in recreational use states.
“I’ve long observed how not a few libertarians actually support similar things to the woke. They endorse ideas that vary from utopian to frankly crackpot—everything from open borders to prison abolition to legalising all drugs.”
This is true but it’s also true that some libertarians do not support these things--for libertarian reasons. Also, libertarians endorse legalizing drugs but other libertarian policies will “neutralize” some of these negative effects (e.g., if the streets are privatized then so much for open air drug markets and sleeping rough).
That Rufo reserves a bit of sympathy for the views of the other side is interesting. Kudos to him. There can’t be any meaningful and productive dialogue without some of that among people who hold different views, as the ongoing controversies and media kefuffles of recent years so conclusively attest. But be careful, sista, about where you tread in characterizing American race relations and development over the decades since the de jure civil rights gains of the 50s and 60s. You would bristle if some impudent Yank spoke out of turn about your point of origin, and for good reason.
Life’s rich pageant landed me in a biracial step family at 14, a few weeks before I started high school (1974). That private situation lasted about 3 years while I made my way through the large, integrated school down the block. An unusual set of circumstances had transformed the ‘All American City’ it served into a tenuously balanced racial melting pot. One of those circumstances was the recent legal demolition of restrictive housing covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to blacks and, in many cases, various other ethnic undesirables. So many of my new classmates were the sons and daughters of families that wanted to escape the ‘hood and had the means to do so. Among them were future MDs, cops, teachers, etc. who made a good account of themselves.
One of the big lies about race relations in the US is that substantial progress hasn’t happened. Take it from someone who knows better: it ain’t so.
You have to be either biased or ignorant to say that American race relations haven't improved in the past 50ish years (and I'm not picking on Helen, she is not American).
I grew up in NYC in the 1970s and race hate was still very palpable, and black Americans were still very much an untouchable caste. Interracial romance was still mostly verboten, and ours was a deeply segregated society (even in NYC where so many ethnicities mixed, black people were usually segregated).
Now of course we still have major gaps and the stubborn issue of inner-city poverty, but we also have a large black middle class and black people throughout the upper rungs of society.
It may still sometimes suck to be black in America, but it doesn't suck nearly as much as it did 50 yrs ago.
I should have clarified, but didn't, so here was the point I was trying to make:
1. The rising tide of prosperity has indeed lifted all boats; there is indeed now a genuine black middle-class and very little poverty.
2. AIUI, the relative wealth gap between blacks and whites has widened or stayed the same (depending on whether one adds recent African and Caribbean immigrants to the existing descendants of slaves).
Note: I used to not care about relative disadvantage, as long as prosperity improved for everyone and absolute poverty went away. However, there is now considerable research showing that relative disadvantage within a country causes all sorts of social problems and discontent.
An irony here for me (which will hopefully shed some light) is also how as black people rise into the middle class, they come into contact with more pessimistic attitudes, esp if they live in cities and among liberal whites, who are deeply negative about America, its past and present (mostly as a way to signal they're not bigoted conservatives).
Just to add more anecdata: I have been close friends with a few black people from my life in NYC, and up to say a decade ago they were happily advancing and integrating (with maybe the big difference being they had more family members to support), but in the Trump era they've all become some version of Black Panther, angry paranoid suspicious anti-White etc, and whether it's MSNBC or the NYT, their media consumption has led them to believe that most whites are secret bigots and that a race war could break out any moment.
I guess my point is that our toxic media ecosystem cannot be helping things, and the more alienated a poor or minority person is, the less likely they are to take steps to integrate into the mainstream.
The paranoia in the black demographic is widespread, and irrelevant.
The race war already broke out, its elite whites vs non elite whites. This is the core racial conflict in America since the 19th century and not understood by outsiders.
That's another bit of brilliant irrationality - not being observant of having it better than you did but supremely aware if you've lost ground relative to others.
Race is still a touchy subject, but many people lack awareness of the particulars, which have changed since the days of MLK, et al. Two of the most significant arenas of integration are sports and the military. In terms of sheer numbers and daily public visibility they both overwhelm the significance of, for example, affirmative action and enrollment at elite colleges. But that's been true for decades and isn't a sexy topic of interest for the commentariat, so it's little noted. Mixed-race relationships are also much more common, as you noted, and that fact speaks volumes about the progress of racial amity. There are still embarrassing instances of racial side-choosing - the recent brawl on an Alabama boat dock, during which a bunch of drunken white boaters embarrassed themselves with their 15 minutes of fame - but bigger trends are afoot. One of the most objectionable threads of commentary I've seen pops up a bit: that black criminality is evidence of some sort of genetic predisposition to violence. Anyone who entertains that notion should read "Ghettoside" by Jill Leovy (sic?). It illuminates one of the most persistent problems faced by innocent people in the African-American communities that are still afflicted by gang crime: a persistent failure by law enforcement to provide adequate protection for witnesses in homicide cases., who are routinely subjected to intimidation. Until that problem its solved no one should make claims about racial genetics, the kind of move which is, of course, textbook racism on its face. Unfortunately, we're a very long way from solving that problem, as the tendency of progressive DAs to minimize prosecution of low-level crime indicates.
I grew up in an urban blue-collar area (Queens, NY) but went to an upscale private college and lived most of my adult life among Manhattan liberals. One of the odd things I've always noticed is that all my right-thinking Left/liberal NYC friends constantly call anyone they dislike "Racist", and this was especially odd (and pronounced) when it came to jocks and guys in the military: we would mock them for being some species of rightwing brute, but then I'd notice that these same "racists" had many black friends where we mostly had none, dated black girls, and went to dinner at the homes of black families, sans ceremony or racial neurosis.
I guess my point is that for both sides of the aisle, but especially for white liberals in the age of Trump, black people have a larger symbolic existence that transcends empirical reality (where in this case they become the literal embodiment of historical oppression and every black-white interaction reiterates all fraught black-white issues), and I think this rich symbolic existence has become heavily politicized and heavily moralized, distorting and counterproductive, and may be causing more harm than good.
I think you just described the essential elements of ‘white guilt.’ Because it’s such a nice fit for so many inhabitants of our ‘elite’ strata it’s never been more...robust? Many moons ago Tom Wolfe dissected a bit of it to hilarious effect; “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” I think. Plus ca’ change...
If I were another man with another life, I'd write a book about white guilt/white saviorism, which I consider one of the last few belief systems left standing, the sacred glue that holds together our progressive aristocracy (just with the White Man's Burden replaced by the White Woman's Emotional Burden), and which is perhaps the great moral litmus test of our time.
Also, for a phenomenon as prevalent and significant as white guilt/saviorism is, there are barely any books or essays about it. Too sensitive a topic, maybe, as I'm guessing just about every Westerner who picks up a pen is afflicted with it one way or another.
The best (maybe only) writer I've seen address these issues is Pascal Bruckner, especially in his "Tyranny of Guilt".
"Until that problem its solved no one should make claims about racial genetics, the kind of move which is, of course, textbook racism on its face."
Anyone who has taken a look at the issue knows that the evidence for genetics is absolutely overwhelming. Asking for further burden of proof at this point is basically saying that absolutely no level of evidence would ever be enough. This kind of tactic was forgivable in the 1960s, but is laughable today.
Whether there could be improvements to the justice system that would help the ghetto *in spite of* genetic pre-disposition to violence is a separate question. There are potential improvements, but they are not politically popular, and most importantly they are not politically popular amongst blacks themselves.
The myth that blacks want policing and white progressives are stopping it just doesn't hold up with election data, polling, or patterns behavior. The fundamental problem is that blacks want less crime without the tradeoffs involved with getting less crime, in part because so many of their extended family are themselves criminals or criminal adjacent that enforcement is going to fall on somebody they know rather then some "other". Every black church lady wants to lock up the criminals but not "my nephew Jamal who is just a kid and made a bad mistake". But all the criminals are someone's nephew Jamal who made a bad mistake.
The pattern in the black ghetto is pretty solid at this point. Crime goes up and they ask for more broken windows policing (90s). Then it goes down and they complain there is too much pro-active policing (BLM). Anyone who says we can get the porridge just the right temperature is delusional. And in both the highs and lows black criminality is way higher than white criminality. The highs and the lows of criminality is heavily black areas are both much higher then your average white middle class person would put up with, so we get segregation.
We could solve the black crime problem if blacks could neither vote nor have extensive legal rights, but it should be obvious why nobody is proposing that.
So we are just going to put up with it and go through this cycle over and over. Hopefully when everyone forgets how bad the BLM riots were and we get another viral video a generation from now we don't have the same freakout, but that will depend partly on a general societal acceptance that this pattern is fixed by genetics rather then something systematic racism is responsible for.
Thanks for your eloquently stated rejoinder. I do find your sweeping generalizations a bit taxing, but perhaps that's just me. By the way, since we're on the topic of genetic predispositions, would you care to weigh in on the Irish? Or perhaps the Italians? Maybe that dust-up that's still underway on the border of Ukraine and Russia? The Argentinian junta and their desperaceidos (sic) of the 80s? Any comment on the Holocaust? I remain perplexed that the bloodlines that produced Goethe, Bach and Beethoven somehow gave rise to Hitler, Goebbels and Goering, and am in need of fresh insight on that nearly century-old mystery. Come to think of it, us Yanks contributed a bit to the shady image of humanity in Vietnam and Iraq. Have any nicely turned phrases to help us digest those affairs? Given your comprehensive knowledge, you may be the best available candidate for illuminating the dark side of human nature.
Caveat: I didn't watch that video or anything, but the fact that those boat dudes were perfectly comfortable entering into a brawl like that, may not be the dunk you think it is. There can be a comfort level between the races in the South that may not manifest how Northerners would like, or can perceive. People in the South are ready to brawl. Of course that goes for blacks too - black women especially - love to brawl. You can't be alive in America and not know that. It is a significant percentage of content on Youtube.
Most of us "genteel" folk, however, even if pugnacious and drunk - would be more likely to actively avoid conflict with the other party if he was black. We would know that way lies social censure. Indeed, we would be more likely, self-consciously - to defer to him. We have been well-schooled.
I found the boat dock brawl a refreshing example of Southerners' greater normalcy.
They were stupid, drunk and misbehaving. The other guy's race was not a deterrent, nor a cause of the thing. Of course it then predictably lined up racially - how else were people going to choose sides? There will always be sides ...
This goes to the writer's point. There can be a realism to people's thinking even if others find it repellent. In the South, with its tendency to let demagogues into power, the worst representatives of the populace made things ... appear worse than they even were, and invited the federal government to do what it (Northern liberals) was itching to do anyway. Civil rights law can have no interest in the ways that blacks and whites accommodated to living together, the things they thought they knew about each other, that generally caused them to live apart (but not far apart - that's one of the funny things about our noble post-segregration world - even when there were black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, in the South, everybody was much more in each other's chili than they are now, elsewhere in the country!). Or: people whom right opinion has deemed bad, can yet know things. They can know what is likely to cause trouble, for instance. They know that "steam is always going to be let off". They might not recognize their part in it, clearly - that's human nature.
They know that everybody is not exactly alike, and it would be a dull world if we were all the same.
What has changed now, is that people who in the past might have had affection for each other, can only be permitted - officially - hatred. Hopefully, in the background, unobserved, more normal relations continue, but it seems there's less and less of that. And those relations are now considered to have been toxic. For me to even utter that there might have been friendship or affection, between black and white individuals in the South, can only draw screams about toxic power imbalances and oppression. These relationships *can't* have happened.
To me this has always been a telling point. You want love to flourish, in theory - but you must deny that it *ever* existed. Again: does that seem like realism?
To hold onto certain ideals (and prejudices, against, as commenter above mentioned, "non-elite whites", many of them no doubt deserved) requires a willful blindness to social breakdown. Libertarians have a good deal of stomach for that, I've learned.
Point well taken. The boating incident, undoubtedly fueled by booze, isn’t much of an example of anything but dumb behavior. The onus for that, though, has to rest with the people who were docked in another boat’s spot.
I’m old enough to remember fist fights being a thing, and had more than one as a kid. The problem now is escalation-by-firearm. The risk of that seems greater, and it’s essentially the root of juvenile gang violence in the ‘hood. My overall point was that no one should invoke genetics and half-baked Darwinian determinism as an explanation for black-on-black crime when local law enforcement is too weak to prevent witnesses intimidation in homicide cases. Until that X factor is eliminated it is wrong to simply assume blacks are inherently more violent than anyone else. Violence is a universal human problem. If it is contained and doesn’t blow-up into homicide it can have a cathartic effect. At one time guys could duke it out after some petty squabble and then call it good, maybe even be friends. Nowadays that seems quaint.
But do you want it to be stronger? Really? I generally see on a libertarian-leaning blog the exact same complaint that I see on uni-brain reddit: the police are too powerful, "militarized", overstepping, heavy-handed, etc.
(I myself dislike the police tendency toward hoodlum caricature you get down where I live, armored police SUVs with Mexican gang-like skulls or snakes and stuff, lending them an air of being much like the thugs they are supposed to police.)
(But I'm generally accused of being an aesthete, with only aesthetic arguments, and aesthetics supposedly is the worst thing to stand upon.)
I have sympathy for the police, who are hated by the very people *who call them the most* (this point should be hit again and again!) and viewed with suspicion, but also are somehow supposed to fix all the holes created in a low-trust, dysgenic society. All by themselves. They are also somehow supposed to be not of that society, somehow - better than it. And we need twice as many. And we need to hate them. And they need to not hate us back. And round and round it goes.
The police are a symptom, they can't be the answer, palatable or no.
Law enforcement will always have to wrestle with the problem of limited resources. No way would I want to afford it carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to satisfy the hyper-elevated desire for safety among the most risk-averse. But witness intimidation isn’t a new or novel problem. It would be good to see a stronger effort to address it. Earlier in the thread I brought up the book “Ghettoside”. It details the problem vividly. Ignoring it is a tacit admission that the law doesn’t apply equally to all, and that’s a deeper issue that shouldn’t be accepted by anyone.
Libertarianism is at its best when it argues people should be free so they can become their best selfs.
Libertarianism is at its worst when it argues they should be free to be their worst selves.
Over time the libertarian movement (especially the intellectual movement) has drifted more towards the latter (as has most of the country and intellectuals/progressives especially).
I still have a lot of respect for Hank Hill/ Mike Judge small L libertarianism but that comes with a heavy dose of personal responsibility and traditional middle class morality.
Rufo is probably sincere, as I am, in acknowledging idealistic and admirable-if-misguided motives on the part of most critical theorists, but make no mistake, he is also ambitious and pragmatic. We need to sympathize in order to sway brainwashed adherents back to reality if only because there are so many of them! They are the majority at the managerial level in most of our institutions now. In my field of education, I know so many well meaning people (men and women) who are true CRT (aka Anti-Racist) believers, and they are generally very good people at heart. If you see that many people as evil, it leaves no chance for democracy or even a functioning society. Rufo wants to right the ship, and you can't do that by demonizing and rejecting half the people on it. I'm not sure if he's a Christian, but anyone who is has to believe in redemption. I hope his example will lead us toward common ground and unity as Americans.
Apart from innate curiosity (why I also read a heap of stuff I found really disagreeable), I'm sure that's what's going on with Rufo. He wants to detach misguided normies from the wrong 'uns at the top.
No, because I think evolution is the missing link (haha) in a lot of this. Building a theoretical scaffolding without considering it is really fraught. This is why I got interested in Lorenzo's essays in the first place tbh.
The evolution of our psychology along with our physical brains and other features is too often ignored, even if many of the claims made under its guise are also "just so" types of assertions, with high difficulty to prove "scientifically".
Thanks for the heads up to be on the look out for evolutionary influences while getting into Lorenzo's 40+ essay sequence and more.
I'm in the process of building this substack up to sufficient size to present a publisher with a fait accompli for Lorenzo's book. That's why I set it up - I have an existing audience, a literary agent, and connections.
I'm planning to write more about this in the next couple of weeks, actually.
A fine plan, but it doesn't answer the question. As opposed to the way you present the Rufo/Caplan divide. One may actually be trying to persuade the persuadable. I may be uncharitable, but I don't think I see many people of the Post-Enlightenment-Progressive-sphere being persuadable.
For all our Tragedies now in view and only beginning here is our freedom now - we don’t have to give a damn about topping the grades or course....
> things change. There’s perhaps still a point to mouthing the platitudes Down Under but I don’t recommend it... here 🇺🇸 I’d counsel the young NO with the urgency of life or death.
It is.
BE LIKE HELEN. We can’t trust Liars anymore or tolerate lies, and the truth and courage are what we need.
PS also we’ll know we can trust you, something most healthy-
"Writing is not the federal parliament or a company’s board of directors. Improving its representativeness will not improve its quality qua literature. There is no guarantee that a novel written about racism by a black author will be better than one by a white author, because “better” in fiction is not a matter of who tells the story but how the story is told."
The more I read of Helen Dale, the more I love.
It's one thing for dreary Marxist racialism to infect philosophy and politics, those are more battlegrounds and are fertile fields for all kinds of nonsense—but trying to strap art onto some Procrustean bed to better showcase your ideology renders the work stillborn and suffocates real creativity.
Fuck the thought police! No segregation of the imagination!
In the Vape pipes 28% THC or I am verbally well informed perhaps 50%?
At those levels you are courting paranoia and schizophrenia and cancer etc...
Fine.
This sort of behavior across the board is why we can’t have universal healthcare, although the other big reasons are 1) we’re an inescapable and eternal Federation in North America from the Iroquois to the Internet* and all arrangements in between,
2) Government and Rule by Heist Film is practiced high and low and yes there’s a huge parasitic middle class, they watch FOX but they’re certainly not small government where their checks are concerned.
I started undergrad arts/law in 1990 and perpetrated my hoax 1992-95 (ie, started it before I graduated in either arts or law). There's a limit to what one person can do, particularly a disagreeable one who doesn't play well with others.
It's not that I renounce libertarianism. I never had drug legalization as a cause that I would march for. The issue where we are least appreciated (markets vs. central planning) is the libertarian cause that I most support. When Cato folks point to marijuana legalization and say "See, we're winning," I want to gag.
Completely understand this. I didn't think you'd renounced it either, but I "felt your pain" in that piece, I have to say.
I still have a hard time with drug prohibition being more acceptable than alcohol, and we quit on that not because Prohibition was immoral but it was just simply unenforceable. Even today, asset forfeiture (and all attendant abuse thereof) exists because of the war on drugs. Maybe not total legalization, but certainly some form of armistice in this war?
All three points from the quote here (economic freedom, free speech and marijuana) are driven by the left becoming more radical. The right, if anything have become slightly more libertarian.
I get the impression that a lot of American libertarians are cultural Democrats, who.have emotional difficulty making common cause with their natural allies on the right.
Anyone who allies with me is always partial and provisional. The tribal/religious devotion to party is alien to me.
Just remember it’s not addictive.
Just Chronic.
Excellent.
Just a comment about the preggy brain. Richard’s theory is about the earlier maturation of the female brain.IQ differences mainly come from children and adolescents. These measurements are calibrated to be 100 for both sexes by adding more verbal questions (female advantage) or math/spatial questions (advantage male). However, since male brains mature longer the 4 points happen after most IQ tests like SAT take place. This also matches the high correlation with brain size; men’s brains are 10-15% larger after adjusting for body size.
Since this happens before pregnancy I’m afraid that the preggy effect is cumulative.
When I first heard about that 10+% greater male brain size, my first thought was perhaps 10-15% of that increase was to handle a larger male body, but the rest was probably oriented to obtaining sex and lust. Since sex and lust lead to or precede pregnancy, I suppose we might call this a pre-preggy affect?
I wonder if there is any element of this also related to the observation that women have more cross brain hemisphere connections while men have more front to back connections?
A not inconsequential worry is that if high IQ people marry other high IQ people, even if their children do somewhat revert to the mean, the wealth enhancement from IQ capabilities might still lead to wealth inequalities that can never be leveled in a free society [See Charles Murry?].
This will level out as degrees become less and less important vs actual skills and accomplishments.
Yes most women aren't pregnant at 15.
we could all stand to be a little more charitable to our political enemies
of course I am one of the worst examples to follow re: this advice
but i am working on it
"Journey of 1000 miles starts with one step" (some mouldy old philosopher, I don't know who).
Laozi, the "Old Master".
I can't imagine his Mum called him that though, must have picked that nick name up a bit later down the line.
Cheers for that.
I can't agree. On the contrary most opponents of the Left are way TOO charitable because they take the caring egalitarian's self deceiving posture at face value. Hardly any 'egalitarian' has ever truly cared about equality. The psychology of it is the nice self-flattering feeling it gives them whilst they pursue their self interested (albeit self-deceiving) personal agenda
"Fuck in a brothel" is the surprise course in Helen Dale's multi-course meals. I'd be at the table anyway, but that palate cleanser (contaminator?) gives welcome frisson.
Jesus Christ, I'm snort-laughing.
One does one's best ;)
Not being able (or perhaps willing) to organize is the best indicator of one's libertarian instincts. Cats are damn manageable comparatively.
People used to describe a centre-right/classical liberal blog (so not even proper US-proof libertarian) for which I wrote many years ago as "the cats that will not be herded".
Pregnancy brain and exhaustion brain are very real. When my toddler only wakes me up twice in a night, I'm fairly bright. When I'm up 3-6 times in the night, I trip over common words, am clumsy, and struggle with arithmetic much more.
The other big, not-progressive-approved thing preventing outcome equality amongst the sexes is choice. I understand when the Professional Feminist types who prefer a career to motherhood/looking after their own children get confused by other women preferring the opposite, but I've also known women who opted to go part-time to be with the kids act shocked that they didn't progress in their careers. But then the progressive argument jumped ahead of "remove barriers" to "rebuild the system in my preferred image". If you can't be a part-time home-working CEO and make it to the PTA meetings, it must be an unfair world still in need of change.
"You can't always get what you want" (Elvis, probably).
Stones, I think ....
Of the rolling variety, that's it. Tune.
Naturally, otherwise I'd be a 5'8 opera singer with perfect skin and manageable hair. "C'est la vie" (B*Witched, definitely).
That was never an option in Harrison Bergeron, and that is the ultimate destination for all obsession with equality.
Any company, large or small, that does not have a plan and a process to maximize the talent contributions from its women employees during and after pregnancy is at risk from a competitor that can do so. Not everyone can work from home part time, or be given "longer term focused" assignments that do not need day to day interactions until they are ready to return to work full time, but all can make allowance for the skill set of managing a growing family as having some application to their work scope upon return. Increased maturity, budgeting money and time, etc. are skills as valuable as accounting, law, etc.
Similar mindsets should be applied for those folks (usually men) who work in a factory but also run a farm or other business on their "off time". Talents and skills can come from many venues.
Sure.
Let’s have a look at these companies and their results?
Just to glean their genius and how it all worked out so well.
I’d ask for their competitions results, but they’re probably in other countries, the ones that want to win.
Here’s what happens every place I’ve been; the work gets loaded onto the men.
Perhaps you can help my company? I’d love to see these companies and their policies and the results.
No Wakandan registered companies please.
Intellectually, I’m convinced by anarchism-capitalist ideas. But what many people miss there is that an anarchist-capitalist system probably looks very little like minarchism. Most people want a system to impose a more significant degree of public order than that. Anarchism-capitalism would likely provide what the market wants. But I make this mistake all the time. An anarchist-capitalism solution is always off the table, so I tend to default to a minarchist or libertarian perspective, even when evidence supports the idea that anarchism-capitalism would prohibit more.
Marijuana regulation is one such area. I wouldn’t pick a protective association that permitted its members to smoke marijuana in public or while driving. I’d have a conflict with my neighbor if they did. And so the market would likely result in something less libertarian than the current regime in recreational use states.
Excellent points. The libertarian philosopher Jan Lester makes similar points. (He just joined Substack.)
How I deal with libertarian thought:
When encountering a libertarian text, perform a search and replace of libertarian with librarian. The result is hilarious.
Now THAT is itself hilarious!
“I’ve long observed how not a few libertarians actually support similar things to the woke. They endorse ideas that vary from utopian to frankly crackpot—everything from open borders to prison abolition to legalising all drugs.”
This is true but it’s also true that some libertarians do not support these things--for libertarian reasons. Also, libertarians endorse legalizing drugs but other libertarian policies will “neutralize” some of these negative effects (e.g., if the streets are privatized then so much for open air drug markets and sleeping rough).
That Rufo reserves a bit of sympathy for the views of the other side is interesting. Kudos to him. There can’t be any meaningful and productive dialogue without some of that among people who hold different views, as the ongoing controversies and media kefuffles of recent years so conclusively attest. But be careful, sista, about where you tread in characterizing American race relations and development over the decades since the de jure civil rights gains of the 50s and 60s. You would bristle if some impudent Yank spoke out of turn about your point of origin, and for good reason.
Life’s rich pageant landed me in a biracial step family at 14, a few weeks before I started high school (1974). That private situation lasted about 3 years while I made my way through the large, integrated school down the block. An unusual set of circumstances had transformed the ‘All American City’ it served into a tenuously balanced racial melting pot. One of those circumstances was the recent legal demolition of restrictive housing covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to blacks and, in many cases, various other ethnic undesirables. So many of my new classmates were the sons and daughters of families that wanted to escape the ‘hood and had the means to do so. Among them were future MDs, cops, teachers, etc. who made a good account of themselves.
One of the big lies about race relations in the US is that substantial progress hasn’t happened. Take it from someone who knows better: it ain’t so.
Thank you for saying this.
You have to be either biased or ignorant to say that American race relations haven't improved in the past 50ish years (and I'm not picking on Helen, she is not American).
I grew up in NYC in the 1970s and race hate was still very palpable, and black Americans were still very much an untouchable caste. Interracial romance was still mostly verboten, and ours was a deeply segregated society (even in NYC where so many ethnicities mixed, black people were usually segregated).
Now of course we still have major gaps and the stubborn issue of inner-city poverty, but we also have a large black middle class and black people throughout the upper rungs of society.
It may still sometimes suck to be black in America, but it doesn't suck nearly as much as it did 50 yrs ago.
I should have clarified, but didn't, so here was the point I was trying to make:
1. The rising tide of prosperity has indeed lifted all boats; there is indeed now a genuine black middle-class and very little poverty.
2. AIUI, the relative wealth gap between blacks and whites has widened or stayed the same (depending on whether one adds recent African and Caribbean immigrants to the existing descendants of slaves).
Note: I used to not care about relative disadvantage, as long as prosperity improved for everyone and absolute poverty went away. However, there is now considerable research showing that relative disadvantage within a country causes all sorts of social problems and discontent.
An irony here for me (which will hopefully shed some light) is also how as black people rise into the middle class, they come into contact with more pessimistic attitudes, esp if they live in cities and among liberal whites, who are deeply negative about America, its past and present (mostly as a way to signal they're not bigoted conservatives).
Just to add more anecdata: I have been close friends with a few black people from my life in NYC, and up to say a decade ago they were happily advancing and integrating (with maybe the big difference being they had more family members to support), but in the Trump era they've all become some version of Black Panther, angry paranoid suspicious anti-White etc, and whether it's MSNBC or the NYT, their media consumption has led them to believe that most whites are secret bigots and that a race war could break out any moment.
I guess my point is that our toxic media ecosystem cannot be helping things, and the more alienated a poor or minority person is, the less likely they are to take steps to integrate into the mainstream.
That's really unfortunate if it's become widespread.
The paranoia in the black demographic is widespread, and irrelevant.
The race war already broke out, its elite whites vs non elite whites. This is the core racial conflict in America since the 19th century and not understood by outsiders.
Helen: Relative Disadvantage = Envy.
That's another bit of brilliant irrationality - not being observant of having it better than you did but supremely aware if you've lost ground relative to others.
Yes but we can’t admit this!
Democracy would be endangered!
Race is still a touchy subject, but many people lack awareness of the particulars, which have changed since the days of MLK, et al. Two of the most significant arenas of integration are sports and the military. In terms of sheer numbers and daily public visibility they both overwhelm the significance of, for example, affirmative action and enrollment at elite colleges. But that's been true for decades and isn't a sexy topic of interest for the commentariat, so it's little noted. Mixed-race relationships are also much more common, as you noted, and that fact speaks volumes about the progress of racial amity. There are still embarrassing instances of racial side-choosing - the recent brawl on an Alabama boat dock, during which a bunch of drunken white boaters embarrassed themselves with their 15 minutes of fame - but bigger trends are afoot. One of the most objectionable threads of commentary I've seen pops up a bit: that black criminality is evidence of some sort of genetic predisposition to violence. Anyone who entertains that notion should read "Ghettoside" by Jill Leovy (sic?). It illuminates one of the most persistent problems faced by innocent people in the African-American communities that are still afflicted by gang crime: a persistent failure by law enforcement to provide adequate protection for witnesses in homicide cases., who are routinely subjected to intimidation. Until that problem its solved no one should make claims about racial genetics, the kind of move which is, of course, textbook racism on its face. Unfortunately, we're a very long way from solving that problem, as the tendency of progressive DAs to minimize prosecution of low-level crime indicates.
Lorenzo (this Substack's other main writer) has written widely about underpolicing in poor urban areas. Genuinely distressing stuff.
I grew up in an urban blue-collar area (Queens, NY) but went to an upscale private college and lived most of my adult life among Manhattan liberals. One of the odd things I've always noticed is that all my right-thinking Left/liberal NYC friends constantly call anyone they dislike "Racist", and this was especially odd (and pronounced) when it came to jocks and guys in the military: we would mock them for being some species of rightwing brute, but then I'd notice that these same "racists" had many black friends where we mostly had none, dated black girls, and went to dinner at the homes of black families, sans ceremony or racial neurosis.
I guess my point is that for both sides of the aisle, but especially for white liberals in the age of Trump, black people have a larger symbolic existence that transcends empirical reality (where in this case they become the literal embodiment of historical oppression and every black-white interaction reiterates all fraught black-white issues), and I think this rich symbolic existence has become heavily politicized and heavily moralized, distorting and counterproductive, and may be causing more harm than good.
I think you just described the essential elements of ‘white guilt.’ Because it’s such a nice fit for so many inhabitants of our ‘elite’ strata it’s never been more...robust? Many moons ago Tom Wolfe dissected a bit of it to hilarious effect; “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” I think. Plus ca’ change...
If I were another man with another life, I'd write a book about white guilt/white saviorism, which I consider one of the last few belief systems left standing, the sacred glue that holds together our progressive aristocracy (just with the White Man's Burden replaced by the White Woman's Emotional Burden), and which is perhaps the great moral litmus test of our time.
Also, for a phenomenon as prevalent and significant as white guilt/saviorism is, there are barely any books or essays about it. Too sensitive a topic, maybe, as I'm guessing just about every Westerner who picks up a pen is afflicted with it one way or another.
The best (maybe only) writer I've seen address these issues is Pascal Bruckner, especially in his "Tyranny of Guilt".
Ghettoside is a fine book. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/100077/ghettoside-by-jill-leovy/#
"Until that problem its solved no one should make claims about racial genetics, the kind of move which is, of course, textbook racism on its face."
Anyone who has taken a look at the issue knows that the evidence for genetics is absolutely overwhelming. Asking for further burden of proof at this point is basically saying that absolutely no level of evidence would ever be enough. This kind of tactic was forgivable in the 1960s, but is laughable today.
Whether there could be improvements to the justice system that would help the ghetto *in spite of* genetic pre-disposition to violence is a separate question. There are potential improvements, but they are not politically popular, and most importantly they are not politically popular amongst blacks themselves.
The myth that blacks want policing and white progressives are stopping it just doesn't hold up with election data, polling, or patterns behavior. The fundamental problem is that blacks want less crime without the tradeoffs involved with getting less crime, in part because so many of their extended family are themselves criminals or criminal adjacent that enforcement is going to fall on somebody they know rather then some "other". Every black church lady wants to lock up the criminals but not "my nephew Jamal who is just a kid and made a bad mistake". But all the criminals are someone's nephew Jamal who made a bad mistake.
The pattern in the black ghetto is pretty solid at this point. Crime goes up and they ask for more broken windows policing (90s). Then it goes down and they complain there is too much pro-active policing (BLM). Anyone who says we can get the porridge just the right temperature is delusional. And in both the highs and lows black criminality is way higher than white criminality. The highs and the lows of criminality is heavily black areas are both much higher then your average white middle class person would put up with, so we get segregation.
We could solve the black crime problem if blacks could neither vote nor have extensive legal rights, but it should be obvious why nobody is proposing that.
So we are just going to put up with it and go through this cycle over and over. Hopefully when everyone forgets how bad the BLM riots were and we get another viral video a generation from now we don't have the same freakout, but that will depend partly on a general societal acceptance that this pattern is fixed by genetics rather then something systematic racism is responsible for.
Thanks for your eloquently stated rejoinder. I do find your sweeping generalizations a bit taxing, but perhaps that's just me. By the way, since we're on the topic of genetic predispositions, would you care to weigh in on the Irish? Or perhaps the Italians? Maybe that dust-up that's still underway on the border of Ukraine and Russia? The Argentinian junta and their desperaceidos (sic) of the 80s? Any comment on the Holocaust? I remain perplexed that the bloodlines that produced Goethe, Bach and Beethoven somehow gave rise to Hitler, Goebbels and Goering, and am in need of fresh insight on that nearly century-old mystery. Come to think of it, us Yanks contributed a bit to the shady image of humanity in Vietnam and Iraq. Have any nicely turned phrases to help us digest those affairs? Given your comprehensive knowledge, you may be the best available candidate for illuminating the dark side of human nature.
So you don’t have an argument, but your prepared to offer some sputtering and snark.
Caveat: I didn't watch that video or anything, but the fact that those boat dudes were perfectly comfortable entering into a brawl like that, may not be the dunk you think it is. There can be a comfort level between the races in the South that may not manifest how Northerners would like, or can perceive. People in the South are ready to brawl. Of course that goes for blacks too - black women especially - love to brawl. You can't be alive in America and not know that. It is a significant percentage of content on Youtube.
Most of us "genteel" folk, however, even if pugnacious and drunk - would be more likely to actively avoid conflict with the other party if he was black. We would know that way lies social censure. Indeed, we would be more likely, self-consciously - to defer to him. We have been well-schooled.
I found the boat dock brawl a refreshing example of Southerners' greater normalcy.
They were stupid, drunk and misbehaving. The other guy's race was not a deterrent, nor a cause of the thing. Of course it then predictably lined up racially - how else were people going to choose sides? There will always be sides ...
This goes to the writer's point. There can be a realism to people's thinking even if others find it repellent. In the South, with its tendency to let demagogues into power, the worst representatives of the populace made things ... appear worse than they even were, and invited the federal government to do what it (Northern liberals) was itching to do anyway. Civil rights law can have no interest in the ways that blacks and whites accommodated to living together, the things they thought they knew about each other, that generally caused them to live apart (but not far apart - that's one of the funny things about our noble post-segregration world - even when there were black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods, in the South, everybody was much more in each other's chili than they are now, elsewhere in the country!). Or: people whom right opinion has deemed bad, can yet know things. They can know what is likely to cause trouble, for instance. They know that "steam is always going to be let off". They might not recognize their part in it, clearly - that's human nature.
They know that everybody is not exactly alike, and it would be a dull world if we were all the same.
What has changed now, is that people who in the past might have had affection for each other, can only be permitted - officially - hatred. Hopefully, in the background, unobserved, more normal relations continue, but it seems there's less and less of that. And those relations are now considered to have been toxic. For me to even utter that there might have been friendship or affection, between black and white individuals in the South, can only draw screams about toxic power imbalances and oppression. These relationships *can't* have happened.
To me this has always been a telling point. You want love to flourish, in theory - but you must deny that it *ever* existed. Again: does that seem like realism?
To hold onto certain ideals (and prejudices, against, as commenter above mentioned, "non-elite whites", many of them no doubt deserved) requires a willful blindness to social breakdown. Libertarians have a good deal of stomach for that, I've learned.
Point well taken. The boating incident, undoubtedly fueled by booze, isn’t much of an example of anything but dumb behavior. The onus for that, though, has to rest with the people who were docked in another boat’s spot.
I’m old enough to remember fist fights being a thing, and had more than one as a kid. The problem now is escalation-by-firearm. The risk of that seems greater, and it’s essentially the root of juvenile gang violence in the ‘hood. My overall point was that no one should invoke genetics and half-baked Darwinian determinism as an explanation for black-on-black crime when local law enforcement is too weak to prevent witnesses intimidation in homicide cases. Until that X factor is eliminated it is wrong to simply assume blacks are inherently more violent than anyone else. Violence is a universal human problem. If it is contained and doesn’t blow-up into homicide it can have a cathartic effect. At one time guys could duke it out after some petty squabble and then call it good, maybe even be friends. Nowadays that seems quaint.
"local law enforcement is too weak ..."
But do you want it to be stronger? Really? I generally see on a libertarian-leaning blog the exact same complaint that I see on uni-brain reddit: the police are too powerful, "militarized", overstepping, heavy-handed, etc.
(I myself dislike the police tendency toward hoodlum caricature you get down where I live, armored police SUVs with Mexican gang-like skulls or snakes and stuff, lending them an air of being much like the thugs they are supposed to police.)
(But I'm generally accused of being an aesthete, with only aesthetic arguments, and aesthetics supposedly is the worst thing to stand upon.)
I have sympathy for the police, who are hated by the very people *who call them the most* (this point should be hit again and again!) and viewed with suspicion, but also are somehow supposed to fix all the holes created in a low-trust, dysgenic society. All by themselves. They are also somehow supposed to be not of that society, somehow - better than it. And we need twice as many. And we need to hate them. And they need to not hate us back. And round and round it goes.
The police are a symptom, they can't be the answer, palatable or no.
Law enforcement will always have to wrestle with the problem of limited resources. No way would I want to afford it carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to satisfy the hyper-elevated desire for safety among the most risk-averse. But witness intimidation isn’t a new or novel problem. It would be good to see a stronger effort to address it. Earlier in the thread I brought up the book “Ghettoside”. It details the problem vividly. Ignoring it is a tacit admission that the law doesn’t apply equally to all, and that’s a deeper issue that shouldn’t be accepted by anyone.
Yea. The woke and the edgier segments of the right seem to agree that race relations are shit.
Libertarianism is at its best when it argues people should be free so they can become their best selfs.
Libertarianism is at its worst when it argues they should be free to be their worst selves.
Over time the libertarian movement (especially the intellectual movement) has drifted more towards the latter (as has most of the country and intellectuals/progressives especially).
I still have a lot of respect for Hank Hill/ Mike Judge small L libertarianism but that comes with a heavy dose of personal responsibility and traditional middle class morality.
Rufo is probably sincere, as I am, in acknowledging idealistic and admirable-if-misguided motives on the part of most critical theorists, but make no mistake, he is also ambitious and pragmatic. We need to sympathize in order to sway brainwashed adherents back to reality if only because there are so many of them! They are the majority at the managerial level in most of our institutions now. In my field of education, I know so many well meaning people (men and women) who are true CRT (aka Anti-Racist) believers, and they are generally very good people at heart. If you see that many people as evil, it leaves no chance for democracy or even a functioning society. Rufo wants to right the ship, and you can't do that by demonizing and rejecting half the people on it. I'm not sure if he's a Christian, but anyone who is has to believe in redemption. I hope his example will lead us toward common ground and unity as Americans.
Apart from innate curiosity (why I also read a heap of stuff I found really disagreeable), I'm sure that's what's going on with Rufo. He wants to detach misguided normies from the wrong 'uns at the top.
Now, Lorenzo's work is anything but sympathetic, because he sees the deeper underlying social dynamic at work. Are you put off at all by that?
No, because I think evolution is the missing link (haha) in a lot of this. Building a theoretical scaffolding without considering it is really fraught. This is why I got interested in Lorenzo's essays in the first place tbh.
The evolution of our psychology along with our physical brains and other features is too often ignored, even if many of the claims made under its guise are also "just so" types of assertions, with high difficulty to prove "scientifically".
Thanks for the heads up to be on the look out for evolutionary influences while getting into Lorenzo's 40+ essay sequence and more.
So it is an interesting thought, who exactly is his audience. The true believers won't see it, and the masses are too disinterested. We happy few?
I'm in the process of building this substack up to sufficient size to present a publisher with a fait accompli for Lorenzo's book. That's why I set it up - I have an existing audience, a literary agent, and connections.
I'm planning to write more about this in the next couple of weeks, actually.
A fine plan, but it doesn't answer the question. As opposed to the way you present the Rufo/Caplan divide. One may actually be trying to persuade the persuadable. I may be uncharitable, but I don't think I see many people of the Post-Enlightenment-Progressive-sphere being persuadable.
I very much admire your candor and courage here HD.
May I ask how much RDX you are using in the Vest you’ve strapped on? Professional Curiosity.
🤣
For all our Tragedies now in view and only beginning here is our freedom now - we don’t have to give a damn about topping the grades or course....
> things change. There’s perhaps still a point to mouthing the platitudes Down Under but I don’t recommend it... here 🇺🇸 I’d counsel the young NO with the urgency of life or death.
It is.
BE LIKE HELEN. We can’t trust Liars anymore or tolerate lies, and the truth and courage are what we need.
PS also we’ll know we can trust you, something most healthy-
"Writing is not the federal parliament or a company’s board of directors. Improving its representativeness will not improve its quality qua literature. There is no guarantee that a novel written about racism by a black author will be better than one by a white author, because “better” in fiction is not a matter of who tells the story but how the story is told."
The more I read of Helen Dale, the more I love.
It's one thing for dreary Marxist racialism to infect philosophy and politics, those are more battlegrounds and are fertile fields for all kinds of nonsense—but trying to strap art onto some Procrustean bed to better showcase your ideology renders the work stillborn and suffocates real creativity.
Fuck the thought police! No segregation of the imagination!
Thank-you kindly.
Cheers!
Legal THC; in the USA...
The weed the 60s smoked about 2% THC.
By the 80s 5% THC
By the 2020s 20-25% THC
In the Vape pipes 28% THC or I am verbally well informed perhaps 50%?
At those levels you are courting paranoia and schizophrenia and cancer etc...
Fine.
This sort of behavior across the board is why we can’t have universal healthcare, although the other big reasons are 1) we’re an inescapable and eternal Federation in North America from the Iroquois to the Internet* and all arrangements in between,
2) Government and Rule by Heist Film is practiced high and low and yes there’s a huge parasitic middle class, they watch FOX but they’re certainly not small government where their checks are concerned.