Apologies Lorenzo and I haven't been around as much as usual, we're both preoccupied with Christmas stuff at the moment. As usual, loads of good comments, but also a bit of obsession & hobby-horsing. Please keep it civil.
Dec 21, 2023·edited Dec 21, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby
"The politics of the transformational future is both informationally and emotionally pathological. Emotionally pathological in generating angry, intolerant, self-righteous moral entitlement; informationally pathological in treating past and present as realms of sin. The combination of emotional and informational pathology means that anything that transformational progressivism gets hold of turns to various levels of crap."
I was thinking this over and trying to come up with an exception, in an effort to be fair-minded. Is there some institution (culture, govt, etc) where this metastatic crapification hasn't occurred? Even one?
Just spit balling here, but perhaps all or some varieties of religion would fit your criteria. They are already so invested in a glorious future with no need for observational confirmation (along with appropriate obeisance and donations to the priestly class) that they are also emotional responses in spite of or in parallel with our rationality. Essentially a competition between religions? And the real good that is or was done in the name of religion helps override considerations of the tremendous harm that also accompanies their exercise by unbalanced zealots.
No. 'Religion' is Xtian invention. Aside from Xtianity; Islam; and those downstream of them; there are no religions. Previous or parallel in time but not place sacred traditions don't fit; not having descended from either of those. It is a procrustean, reductive endeavour to try and see them as "religions" at all. All Xtianities and Islams were only fleetingly eschatological, fixated on a heavenly future. Since they stabilised into 'faiths' with hiearchies they have all pretty much sought heaven - in practice hell - on earth. Even the seemingly innocuous ones like Memmonite traditions.
There is very little original in Christianity - it is a melange of Levant, Persian and [loads of ] Greek elements. The combination and packaging sold better than the individual components.
Much pagan spirituality/dogma was wrapped around propitiating the Gods for the benefit of life here and now. Which does suffer from reality-testing, so the promise of a better afterlife is a smarter play.
"Which does suffer from reality-testing, so the promise of a better afterlife is a smarter play." Wonderful phrasing!! :-)
But "[loads of ] Greek elements. The combination and packaging..." for Christianity might actually have been more Roman propaganda, in an attempt to quiet bubbling Jewish revolutionary tendencies (both before and after the 70AD sacking of Jerusalem. See Joseph Atwill's book and James S Valliant & Warren Fahy, Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity [2018]. I have been waiting for a suitably qualified historian of 1st century history to rebut Atwill's thesis and so far I have not seen one. But I saw a YT video of Robert M. Price [author of The Incredibly Shrinking Son of Man] looking favorably on the Valliant/Fehy thesis. The clincher for them was the recognition that the anchor/fish symbol commonly used by late Republic Romans was also adopted by early (and high ranking Roman) Christians.
Sounds like an interesting read. I'm no suitably qualified historian, but I have found early Church history to be fascinating. I would tend to question that date, and how much that could anticipate or influence Saint Augustine.
Maybe we are the blind leading the blind, but Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430) is 250 to 300 years after the Nero and Titus/Flavian regimes. Did Augustine question the origins of Christian scripture and Gospels, to the point he suspected Roman propaganda? I am not an expert by any means, but I don't know of anyone suggesting that! He would have been influenced by all of the prior "clergy" resolving the canonical textural selection (Marcion, Eusebius, et al.?) [Per Wikipedia: Marcion published the earliest record of a canon of New Testament books.]
In fact, Valiant/Fehy cite a source (I haven't checked into yet) claiming that even Paul was a Roman "intelligence agent" or instigator (for Nero?), trying to defuse Jewish resistance to Roman rule and their demands to worship the Emperor. That would have been 20 years prior to the (Flavian/ Alexandrian/ Herodian ) propaganda effort they are addressing.
Your first ref is to Henry Davis; Creating Christianity - A Weapon Of Ancient Rome [2018] but his comments about Senator Piso may be flawed, as a separate book by a "descendent" of Piso may be a fake [per an Amazon reviewer], or Piso did not really exist to be the driving force behind any Roman creation of Christianity [i.e., some question there beyond the usual caveats].
Your second ref is to Atwill's 1st book; although checking for this link, I now see he has his follow-up book out [2014]. But reading the Amazon review page, that one may be overreach, so I will tread cautiously there.
The book about Paul as an intelligence agent is here: Thijs Voskuilen and Rose Mary Sheldon; Operation Messiah: St Paul, Roman Intelligence and the Birth of Christianity [2008].
With so many books now exploring this area, it will be tough to keep the players/ motives straight. Some probably do not justify taking seriously. We shall see [sometime in the next 6 months? :-) ]
If religion is defined as believing in a relationship between man (or men/mankind) and one or more divine entities, it then has both a personal level of person-god interaction and communal/congregate-god interaction level. Even if the divine does not objectively exist, believing that it does among a group presumably aided within-group trust, contributing to enhanced cooperation and survival prospects. Thus psychological orientation to "religion" or transcendence continued to evolve in the human brain case.
Are you making a distinction between polytheistic and monotheistic belief systems? And that only the latter were concerned with after life opportunities? The pharaohs and the Celts (Indo-European Greeks, Romans, Hindus) described in The Ancient City would disagree with you. The "realm of the dead" was viewed differently by different cultures - but was still viewed as actually existing.
If I understand correctly, I certainly agree with you that kings and priests used religion as a means of social and political control over their populations (whether at family, clan, tribe, city, city-state, or nation-state levels).
I hope you assemble these essays into a book for sale to your subscribers (if you ever finish, that is). I am going through 39 and counting essays compiling a bibliography for my 2024-202? reading. Thanks much. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Amazing how attuned we are to recognizing facial features, and especially smiling as an indication of positive feelings and affection towards the viewer, that even just a cardboard smiley face initially elicited a positive tinge from me when I first viewed that photo.
It also led me to wonder if the Islamic women wearing burqas with face coverings were to put a smiley face image on them (with or without lipstick on the lips??!!), how the male Islamists would react. Well, we know how they would react, as they are not big on artistic renditions of people, except conquering males. But fun to hold that image anyway.
[Now I will go back and actually read the full essay :-) ]
PS: at first I thought perhaps that photo was going to lead into a discussion of that incident with the boy putting face black under his eyes as part of his allegiance to a sports team.
"However, perfectionist standards devalue human achievement, because all achievement is imperfect. Any failing can readily be construed as a de-legitimising failure."
And yet Marxism is recognized in some circles as one of the least perfect ideas ever promulgated, but remains fully legitimising for some reason.
[You know, if a word has a "zee" sound in it, we really ought to use a "Z" when spelling that word to represent that sound! :-) Or is that just America's illegitimate view of a transitional future??? Or perhaps the result of a dyslexic scribe somewhere? Or is that syllable pronounced more like "sing" rather than a "mis" preceding an "ing"? I.e., "my-sing" or "miz - ing".]
English is an irregular language; your idea [...] is but another manifestation of the same bollocks that produced DIE and Wokism. It ain't broke; bugger off trying to "mend" it. ;-)
Dec 23, 2023·edited Dec 23, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby
There was time when many people failed to see these propositions in their true light.
Madam, you are a bigot, and lest you are "black", be careful, the same broad brush will be painted across your face for being "white". Being a femininst will not save you from the race grifters.
The funny part about this, is that there is no significant difference in average male and female intelligence, certainly not enough to write off any and all members of the sex class "men" as being intellectually deficient in comparison to any or all women.
In fact, your lack of any cogent logic here shows your own personal intellectual deficiences. this must be scary for you and many midwit feminists; a man can earn his pay from hard physical work. You have no such resource. Good luck with that. On your laptop, in your apartment, with your cats and your immutale sex class based hatred and bigotry.
Please stop acting like there is an equivalency between the two. There is none. It's not both sides. Men are the problem.
Male-domination is politics, religion, military, until recently education (they suck so bad at school that they've removed themselves from it)--they are the problem. Afghanistan is what you get when you let men run wild. Women don't marry, rape, and abuse 8 year old boys in countries where they've achieved the most basic human rights, like Iceland or Finland.
Stop making excuses for them.
I'm sick of this. Men are the problem. Their violence is the problem. Stop catering to their egos.
Yes, men commit nearly all rapes. But only a tiny percentage of men have ever committed a rape (unless one redefines the term so that it loses all meaning). Yes, men have and do beat and murder women. But just a tiny fraction have done so.
Muslims commit over 90% of all global terrorist attacks. But someone who declared, “Muslims are the problem,” would be rightly described as bigoted. Reasonable people would correctly point out that a minuscule minority of Muslims are terrorists.
You may be right. Imagine, though, that you live in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. A black man has been murdered and his white killer has been caught and put on trial. You’re on the jury.
The evidence is overwhelming and there’s no question that the defendant did it. You’re ready to find him guilty, but certain people drop hints that you would be wise to find the defendant innocent.
Members of the KKK are known to be on the police force. Probably one or more members of the jury are also Klan members. You have a wife and children. How do you vote knowing that everyone else on jury will vote to convict?
We’d all like to believe we’d do the right thing, but would we?
Muslim terrorists aren’t just terrorizing infidels. Many, perhaps most, of their victims are other Muslims.
Good point of a more recent example. Shows why the Right to Bear Arms is primarily for individual self defense and then to also support resisting domestic or foreign tyranny in some communal fashion. Sad that you might feel the need to fend off your fellow jurors/ neighbors!! Our founders tried to minimize the impact of mob rule on any final governmental actions.
Does such cowardice in the population help explain the cowardice of our elected Congress to address the 3rd rail of entitlements and deficit/debt? And so many other things!
I wonder why this info on Chauvin's trial did not come out sooner? Was some of the police body cam footage not available until just recently? Good grounds for appeal??? Should/might help the other 3 LEO's as well?
Right, once again trying to reply to multiple people and probably failing. There are a few threads falling prey to hobbyhorsing and circling the drain, this one may be heading that way.
Please be aware that Lorenzo & I both have relatives and it is Christmas, so we're not around as much as usual. The last dozen comments have all come from two people (you know who you are) and given the season, it may be time to avail yourselves of some cheese/crackers/chocolates/mince pies/etc.
“Child maltreatment is broken down into two categories: abuse and neglect. Abuse can be further broken down into child physical abuse (CPA), child sexual abuse (CSA), and child emotional abuse (CEA: Park, 2020; Behl, Conyngham, & May, 2003). In considering risk for perpetration of abuse, some notable gender differences have been identified in past research. Females are more likely to be perpetrators of CPA than males, and males as more likely to perpetrate CSA (Behl et al., 2003).”
When women are dealing with a systematically physically weaker population (children) they are more likely to be violent than men are. When men are dealing with a systematically weaker population (women) they are more likely to be violent than women are. No, women are not a purer/better form of Homo sapien.
Also, males are typically more variable than females across a wide variety of traits: which means more males at the extremes. So more male geniuses and more male morons. More male saints and more male psychopaths.
Since violent crime is overwhelmingly a tail effect, a larger tail of low patience/high physical robustness in the physically stronger sex leads men to dominate violence against other adults. Though, unless a society is very peaceable, the majority of the victims of violence are other men (i.e. their competitors).
Creating a decent gender-egalitarian society requires men to police other men. When that breaks down, women suffer.
The feminist attack on chivalry was seriously misconceived. Making maleness the problem strips men of authority to police other men, and problems start compounding. Obviously, making femaleness “the problem” has bad consequences too.
Historically, successful gender egalitarian societies required women to restrain their negative features and men to restrain theirs. At least within the in-group.
We have to be able to have adult conversations about the good sides of males, without folk shrieking ‘patriarchy!’ or ‘toxic masculinity!’, and the down sides of women, without folk shrieking ‘misogyny!’. For the corroding of our institutions is already having serious consequences, which will continue to compound unless we start making necessary adjustments.
Yes, that's why Afghanistan is doing so well, because none of the feminisms took all the chivalries away and the men there are great at policing each other and women are doing great.
There is no such thing as "chivalry." You're talking about a delusion stupid moids like you built in your irrational head.
Shut up. Nobody cares that you can't get a match on Tinder and this is how you spend your time. Unfuckable males aren't owed anything.
Yes, the core free speech issue: countering bad speech with good speech, but that is of no avail when you are only feeding the trolls.
And I just recalled Helen's discussion of your personal trials with libel law in Oz.
Possibly too strict in Australia and GB, but too lose in the USA?
Given the high level of TDS in the US, any attempt that Trump might make to pull the libel pendulum back toward the "reasonable center" will probably come to naught.
Go jerk off to Andrew Tate videos after paying your Hustlers' University monthly fee, then join your fellow logical, rational males in the Ukraine. They're doing great over there.
Dec 23, 2023·edited Dec 23, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby
"Men rape, beat, and murder women. Women can laugh at or gossip about men."
Did you read that on a feminist ceral box?
Women can now end mens careers, deprive them of livlihood and a basic income, get them incarcerated and drive them to suicide, all with institutional means, be it social media, pumping up that "harmless" gossip and innuendo. If anything your maxim above simply demonstrates:
1) women are physically lazy in doing their harms.
2) they require institutions and infrastructire built by men to do their dirty work. Much of which was never designed by men for these purposes. Who knew the microchip would lead to #metoo, "body counts" and THOT culture?
SOME men are the problem.
Please apply your same logic to "blacks" - a disproportionate number of whom are criminals.
Also to the 85% of in home molestation that occurs at the hands of "moms new boyfriend".
100% of those cases are the fault of the man AND 100% could be prevented by mom not inviting him in the household. Mom's "good feelz" does not abrogate the lunacy of inviting a strange, unrelated male into the home. If it is known that "men are bad" why would mom be an accomplice in this harm?
Please also address the phenomenon of color revolutions, carpet bombing and the like by Thatcher, Hilary Clinton and other female world leaders.
Bringing women into the commanding heights has not eliminated wars. Funny that.
Women abuse and kill when they are handed the physical and institutional means to do so. Previously they were limited by their physical strength, but tht ship has sailed with the ease of push button drone warfare. Thay have also engaged in direct physical harm to those weaker than them, for millenia. the latest development is comanderring the surgical means to harm children, combining the previous two vectors; going after those weaker then them with institutional agents at their political command.
69% of left wing white women support gender ideology with 21% veiwing it as neutral.
As a male who works in a female dominated field I see the harms of female aggression daily, resulting in call ins, breakdowns and mental trauma. Whereas 1% of men - we can cede 5% - commit these violent crimes ascribed to an entire sex, I see MOST women participating in these patent aggressions, that are far beyond the "microaggressions" the femininists complain about.
" To deny one’s racism, for example, demonstrates complicity in racism." So 80 to 300 years from now, when interracial marriages have been operative for a while, everyone will have a tan-olive complexion (or maybe a little darker* than that) and some other criteria of "otherness" will have to be developed, right?
*It was interesting to see one of those TV episodes on the history of early mankind, showing a black man/actor portraying the Cro-Magnon equivalent exploring European realms, rather than the usual more brutish looking ragged long-haired white man. Has it been definitively established as to when Europeans actually evolved light colored skin?
When humans migrated to more northerly latitudes, it’s theorized that lighter skin became advantageous and thus selected for, because with less melanin, more of the scarcer UV light could penetrate the skin to permit vitamin D production.
I agree that is the (older?) conventional view, but the question was/is did this process occur slowly over (say) 50,000 to 35,000 BP, in response to the UV aspects you mention, or more rapidly over (say) 10,000 to 5,000 BP based on some other (possibly totally random) driver? I saw something previously about the 5K number but am not sure what consensus, if any, is now believed (or credible).
Good question, but likely unanswerable short of finding anything about melanocytes in the fossil record! :-) For lighter skin to have evolved, it had to have some survival advantage. What factors comprised that advantage will always be a matter of speculation, but the vitamin D hypothesis seems to fit.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency leading to rickets, with all of its bony and metabolic complications, would be a pretty strong “negative selector” against darker skin. Enough to nudge the population towards lighter skin in say, five millennia? Hopefully someone here more knowledgeable than I will chime in on that!
You've wandered onto another continent with diseases you have no immunity to; etc. and you are immediately extremely Vitamin D, vital to the immune systems, deficient. The selection pressure would be enormous and the thing would quickly go exponential.
I don't understand the "immediately extremely ... deficient" part of your reply.
I suspect that the hunter gatherer (or even agricultural) groups migrating into Europe would have done so at a rate of 10 to 100 miles per generation (20-40 years?) Thus both they and the animals cross infecting with them would have had "normal" evolutionary rates of genetic change to accommodate their immune systems to the diseases they encountered. Also that the general level of reduced UV light promoting lighter skin color for increased vitamin D production would have been experienced over several millennia at a minimum.
I agree that if significant issues with their immune systems did develop, the selection pressures would likely be pretty rapidly observed.
I was led to wondering why didn't the Australian aborigines also develop lighter skin if the UV thesis is valid. But checking my globe I see Oz is located between the 10th and 40th parallels in the South, while most of Europe is above the 40th parallel in the North.
I now am curious if the DNA samples from Neanderthal and Denisovan sites provide enough information to examine the genes/alleles associated with skin color. Those species of course preceded homo sapiens by several 100 thousand years.
Thanks for this feedback. Now I suppose I need to track down the source that claimed the skin color change happened more rapidly and recently.
A longer term and time does seem to be more reasonable.
Perhaps you know the answer to the following question? Is there any archeological or other evidence that the interbreeding occurred via consensual relationships vs. via rape? I am skeptical that the relationships were consensual and friendly, compared to the many other expressions of "kumbaya" I have seen or implied. More utopian thinking on someone's part? My suspicion is that the males of either/ both subspecies initiated the genetic transfer without any concern for follow-on protection of any offspring thereby occurring. The family group of the raped female would have had to take on that burden.
Great idea. Maybe someone has explored that avenue already?
But if so I suspect we would have already heard about such a sensitive result. Conversely, I gather if that Y-mDNA characteristic was not observed, no one would think it odd to have neutral expected mixes and would believe consent was typical?
"If constraint is defined as oppression1—in line with underlying perfectionism..."
As an engineer, one of my few contributions to civilization was to recognize that GOOD design requirements are really statements of a constrained activity. E.g., "the IT system shall restrict access [i.e., the activity] to authenticated users" [i.e., the constraint.] In turn, daughter requirement statements would have to address the nature of authentication and how it is accomplished, etc. But the clarity of such syntax helps keep things on track. Requirements are derived from desires and needs, but such desires and needs cannot be used for design until they are constrained to an achievable reality. The requirements also thus become the criteria for testing the result before deploying it more widely: does it really meet ALL of the requirements within their respective constraint values?
So wisely applied constraints are useful, but the "perfect design" can never be expected, often because of competing requirements or constraints.
The same syntax could be applied to documenting the requirements for other domains, such as art, politics, social programs, entertainment, etc.
Dec 21, 2023·edited Dec 22, 2023Liked by Lorenzo Warby
Yes another superb analysis. My take is that it endlessly frustrates me how many opponents of the Progressive mindset - of campus-student-brats, of ludicrous academic 'professors' of nonsense et al - still tend to credit it all with more intellectual substance than it deserves. Yes this disease is extremely serious - even civilisation destroyingly so - but it is not really about anything like a new 'vision', a new 'morality', certainly not a coherent 'philosophy', nor even 'ideology'. It is about a degenerate PSYCHOLOGY.......a shallow, vacuous, up-itself narcissism and self-absorption that has taken hold primarily amongst a well-healed middle class that gets-off on telling itself that it is on the side of 'the oppressed'. Taken hold because Western economic dynamism has freed them from having to grow up and get real. I find myself (as an elderly 'boomer') half hoping for the day when holding these shallow feel-good poses actually start to have painful consequences for the wokeys themselves. Then we'll see. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Only HALF hoping for a day of reconning? I suspect your hope level is closer to 90 or 98%! As is mine.
Then again, I was unjustly paddled in kindergarten for messing with some other kids clay figurine, when I hadn't. Must not have been too traumatic, however, as I never even told my parents. And perhaps this "memory" is really just a dream vaguely recalled, and it never happened?
They say: "revenge [justice] is a dish best served cold".
Half hoping on account of 'careful what you wish for'. I try never to forget how lucky us Boomers have been....never (most of us) having to fight or endure a war. I believe that if and when the woke dam finally breaks, thing s could get ugly.
But thinking about this command/commerce comment, I started to wonder if multi-step commerce essentially required a "government" to establish trust that the chain of transactions and its desired end point would be achieved. If A and C want to trade, but are separated by time or distance, so they use B as a broker/intermediary, how do they come to trust that B will fulfill his "transfer/transport" role (besides recognizing that he will take his cut as part of his justifiable function "in the middle").
Similar to the concern a producer might have if the wholesaler is not active enough to move product to the retail level for final sale? Each party presumably has their own interests and incentives, but if one falls down (thereby reducing the potential for gain by all three), can the others recover their potential loss without a government on the side to help do so?
Going the other direction, the producer is also a consumer of the outputs from his component suppliers. He can't produce if they don't fulfill their obligations first.
Are we now so used to this complex process working so smoothly we almost don't recognize a need for government?
Yes, there is a minor typo: ‘hough’ should be ‘though’.
Libertarians tends to under-rate the need for order because they are so aware of various self-ordering mechanisms. An eye-opening book on how pervasive self-governing systems are is Edward Peter Stringham, ‘Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life,’ Oxford University Press, 2015.
Congruent with your comments, Meir Kohn has written revealingly on the importance and role of commerce: Meir Kohn, ‘An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Economics,’ Cato Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2021).
That being said, state societies are way more complex and capable than non-state societies. One of my current projects is developing the notion of states creating an “institutional commons”. A lot of predation is made more operative because it feeds off creating and maintaining a protective/ordering role. Hence my essay on the paradox of polities. https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-paradox-of-polities
I will put this comment here, even though it relates to your 1/23/23 essay on niches.
It addresses a caution about converting these essays to a book form. The particular sentence that triggered me is: "We can trace the upward and downward march of trade and empire all the way up to the massive increase in trade with the application of steam power to shipping and railroads from the 1820s onward." You have skipped from around 200CE to 1820's, then to WWI and II, etc. My caution is to consider if the "tracing" should have more intermediate steps identified, vs. large time scale skips. I find it disconcerting at times when historians portraying the progression (if not actual progress) of a theme or causation skip to only the events/times that appear to support their thesis, which too often can seem like "cherry picking" in hindsight rather than placing the cause in a stream of time with greater or lesser impact/ influence at various times. I recognize that too much detail here can be as problematic as too little, but if several decades or generations have separated such citations, it seems many other influences might also be at play and they are being ignored. Not a criticism of this or that essay, just a suggestion for consideration while you address these complex topics in greater depth and subtlety.
I have not yet examined the Sringham or Kohn sources, but it seems the discussion with Doctor Hammer had an element of chicken and egg to it. It was mirroring a higher level view as to whether economic prosperity leads to demands for liberty, or the existence of increased freedom and rule of law leads to the ability and incentive to create and then retain more of your wealth output and thus increase your prosperity. Perhaps they work in tandem until some threshold is reached in either domain? I see the tax, surplus, institutional commons ideas as considerations at the next level deeper into this quandary.
Perhaps a fascinating balancing act is necessary that is even more difficult under republican governance, but is very important for us to understand if we are going to retain or regain our recent past levels of both liberty and prosperity/economic benefits. Glad you are playing archeologist in this "great rift".
As I am exploring your references above, I see I have a Word file version of your blog* posting from http://critical-thinker.net/?p=440 Why Anarchism fails, By Lorenzo, on March 17th, 2011!! This post addresses the same core idea of state order vs. anarchy, and explicitly mentions Paradox of Politics!! :-) You have been thinking about this for a long time.
I was just going to capture the Amazon reviewers remarks on the Stringham book, but now I have decided it might just be easier to buy it (used), even if I don't have time to read it. :-(
Now on to the the Kohn reference.
*One of perhaps 10 or 12 such essays I cut and pasted into Word to ensure I did not lose them and to enable my highlighting and personal commentary.
Thus I hope Stringham, or your thoughts on an institutional commons, can answer some of my thinking here: At what point does a private organization establishing rules for behavior and practice become the equivalent of a state or government, even if they can only use exclusion from a desired good rather than violence and fear to avoid undesired actions? A guild or a union, or an association or industry group, etc. can all create sufficient “social” or financial forces to obtain general, if not universal, allegiance and compliance.]
"If you elevate success as sin and failure as virtue, you’ll generate a lot of failure."
So here we see the admonition by (some) blacks to their children not to "act white" by studying and pursuing the other success factors documented by George Will and others.
[You are firing on all 8 cylinders, even though you are only driving a 4 cylinder car!! :-) Today's essay is a lot of fun! Thanks.]
> Cancel culture—where people lose jobs and have careers destroyed by falling afoul of the no-bad-feels discourse taboos—is the extreme end of this threat of shunning and isolation.
In addition to people losing jobs, there are orders of magnitude more who simply self-censor to avoid the same fate. That’s the true power of cancel culture. We simply don’t dare discuss or question statements like “gender and race are social constructs.” This allows fringe theories to appear mainstream. My favorite is how most legacy media write about “pregnant people” and we just go along with it.
We will not win the battle against wokery through logic and reason because the woke reject logic and reason. Nor will we win by becoming Trumpian caricatures of what they claim we are. It may be that in this case, as in many others, laughter is the best medicine. What logic cannot refute, ridicule can. And the task of ridiculing the woke is made infinitely easier because the woke routinely make themselves ridiculous.
For example, here is a sample of what passes for woke “thought”:
• The absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths.
• No culture is better than another. Western Civilization is bad.
• Gender is a social construct; there are no differences between the sexes. All men are bad.
• Race is a social construct; there are no differences between the races. All white people are bad.
• Stereotyping people is wrong. All white people are racist oppressors.
• White people are racist by virtue of their skin color and can never be not racist. At best, they can only endlessly atone for their whiteness and racism.
• Minorities cannot improve their lives or those of their loved ones until white people stop being racist. White people can never be not racist.
• We will continue to attack white people for being racist until they stop being racist. White people can never be not racist.
• White silence is violence. White speech is violence.
• Believing that all Muslims are guilty of terrorism is bad. Believing that all white people are guilty of slavery is good.
• Segregation is bad. Separate black college dorms and black graduation ceremonies are good.
• “White flight” from inner cities is racist. White migration to inner cities (aka “gentrification”) is racist.
• The “bourgeois virtues” of self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility are white traits, and promoting them is racist. The fact that people who reject those traits are more likely to be poor is proof that America is systemically racist.
• Diversity strengthens us by exposure to different viewpoints. Adopting diverse viewpoints is “cultural appropriation.”
• Race is a social construct that has no biological basis. Pharmaceutical companies are racist because they don’t include enough biologically diverse minority subjects in their drug trials.
• Diversity of skin color is good. Diversity of thought is bad.
• Religion leads to conflict and war. Islam is the religion of peace.
• The Left’s violence is free speech. The Right’s free speech is violence.
• Sending police officers to minority areas is racist. Pulling police protection out of minority areas is racist.
• Only racists believe FBI statistics indicating that some minorities disproportionately commit crimes. Enforcing criminal law is racist because laws disproportionately impact minorities who commit more crimes.
• We need more gun laws. Gun laws are racist, so we must stop enforcing the ones we already have.
• We will continue releasing thieves, rapists, and murderers onto the streets until crime is eliminated.
• Noting cultural and racial differences is racist. Not acknowledging the different strengths and contributions of other cultures and races is racist.
• Your thoughts and beliefs are nothing but excuses for dismissing the beliefs of others and subjugating them. We therefore dismiss your beliefs and demand the right to subjugate you.
• Societies are nothing more than endless struggles between oppressors and oppressed. It’s time for a new set of oppressors: Us.
• Merited success condemns merited failure therefore no success is merited.
• We’re leaving blue states because of the mess leftist politicians have made of them, and we’re moving to red states where we’ll vote for the same sort of leftist politicians who made us miserable in the blue states.
• The West is a racist, capitalistic hellscape. We must encourage mass immigration so that we can turn the West into the same sort of statist utopias from which the refugees are fleeing.
• We must focus on the West’s history of slavery and conquest that cannot be changed, while ignoring slavery and conquest currently practiced by non-western nations that can be changed.
• Government must be directed by the will of the people. Government must be directed by a technocracy that is shielded from politics.
• To ensure human flourishing, we must create incentives for people to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need by distributing goods according to the dictum: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
• Raising the cost of cigarettes will discourage people from smoking. Raising the cost of employing workers will not discourage businesses from hiring nor will rent controls cause housing shortages.
• Slavery – an economic system in which people can arbitrarily demand others’ time, labor, and produce – is bad. Social Justice – a philosophy that holds that “the oppressed” can arbitrarily demand others’ time, labor, and produce – is good.
• Monopoly by corporations – which must satisfy their customers to survive – is bad. Monopoly by government – which can use deadly force to survive – is good.
• We must take decisions out of the hands of individuals who understand local conditions, who can quickly respond to feedback, and who will pay a price if they choose poorly and place them in the hands of central planners who have limited knowledge and imperfect feedback mechanisms, and who pay no price for being wrong.
• We care so much about the plight of others that we will gladly give them the shirt off your back.
• The ATF, CFTC, CPSC, DEA, EEOC, EPA, FAA, FCA, FDA, FCC, FDIC, FERC, FHA, FRA, FTC, NLRB, NRC, OSHA, SEC, and Federal Reserve regulatory agencies must be strengthened because unfettered capitalism is failing.
• We are wisely teaching our children that two plus two equals whatever they want. Our bridges are collapsing, proving that capitalism is failing.
• We are banning nuclear, coal, hydroelectric, and natural gas power plants throughout the country. Free enterprise is failing to keep the lights on.
• Our ideas are contradictory only in the light of Western logic - a patriarchal and racist tool of oppression.
Yes Wow! If there was a way to pass a bottle down the Substack, I'd send you a beer for that Grade A rant about doublethink. While I was reading it, some lines kept buzzing in my head....and then I got it....Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? / Well then I contradict myself....." Difference is of course, he was self-aware...he KNEW he was doing it.
Is this list your original work? If yes, how shall I cite you, as I intend to use it? If not, do you recall who/where you got it from? My email is hollymathnerd at gmail if you'd like to contact me directly. Thanks!
Yes, this is mine. Just use my name. I’m not happy with the wording of one of the items. I’ll email you with the revised version once I’ve got it. Thanks.
Me too, Richard. I'd like to mention the items that aren't specific to the US. If you sign up, I'll correspond on which (you can obviously cancel once we've established comms - I don't assume you'll be interested in most of my output).
Apologies Lorenzo and I haven't been around as much as usual, we're both preoccupied with Christmas stuff at the moment. As usual, loads of good comments, but also a bit of obsession & hobby-horsing. Please keep it civil.
Merry Christmas to you both, and thank you for such incisive and thought-provoking writing.
"The politics of the transformational future is both informationally and emotionally pathological. Emotionally pathological in generating angry, intolerant, self-righteous moral entitlement; informationally pathological in treating past and present as realms of sin. The combination of emotional and informational pathology means that anything that transformational progressivism gets hold of turns to various levels of crap."
I was thinking this over and trying to come up with an exception, in an effort to be fair-minded. Is there some institution (culture, govt, etc) where this metastatic crapification hasn't occurred? Even one?
Just spit balling here, but perhaps all or some varieties of religion would fit your criteria. They are already so invested in a glorious future with no need for observational confirmation (along with appropriate obeisance and donations to the priestly class) that they are also emotional responses in spite of or in parallel with our rationality. Essentially a competition between religions? And the real good that is or was done in the name of religion helps override considerations of the tremendous harm that also accompanies their exercise by unbalanced zealots.
No. 'Religion' is Xtian invention. Aside from Xtianity; Islam; and those downstream of them; there are no religions. Previous or parallel in time but not place sacred traditions don't fit; not having descended from either of those. It is a procrustean, reductive endeavour to try and see them as "religions" at all. All Xtianities and Islams were only fleetingly eschatological, fixated on a heavenly future. Since they stabilised into 'faiths' with hiearchies they have all pretty much sought heaven - in practice hell - on earth. Even the seemingly innocuous ones like Memmonite traditions.
There is very little original in Christianity - it is a melange of Levant, Persian and [loads of ] Greek elements. The combination and packaging sold better than the individual components.
Much pagan spirituality/dogma was wrapped around propitiating the Gods for the benefit of life here and now. Which does suffer from reality-testing, so the promise of a better afterlife is a smarter play.
"Which does suffer from reality-testing, so the promise of a better afterlife is a smarter play." Wonderful phrasing!! :-)
But "[loads of ] Greek elements. The combination and packaging..." for Christianity might actually have been more Roman propaganda, in an attempt to quiet bubbling Jewish revolutionary tendencies (both before and after the 70AD sacking of Jerusalem. See Joseph Atwill's book and James S Valliant & Warren Fahy, Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity [2018]. I have been waiting for a suitably qualified historian of 1st century history to rebut Atwill's thesis and so far I have not seen one. But I saw a YT video of Robert M. Price [author of The Incredibly Shrinking Son of Man] looking favorably on the Valliant/Fehy thesis. The clincher for them was the recognition that the anchor/fish symbol commonly used by late Republic Romans was also adopted by early (and high ranking Roman) Christians.
Sounds like an interesting read. I'm no suitably qualified historian, but I have found early Church history to be fascinating. I would tend to question that date, and how much that could anticipate or influence Saint Augustine.
Maybe we are the blind leading the blind, but Augustine of Hippo (13 November 354 – 28 August 430) is 250 to 300 years after the Nero and Titus/Flavian regimes. Did Augustine question the origins of Christian scripture and Gospels, to the point he suspected Roman propaganda? I am not an expert by any means, but I don't know of anyone suggesting that! He would have been influenced by all of the prior "clergy" resolving the canonical textural selection (Marcion, Eusebius, et al.?) [Per Wikipedia: Marcion published the earliest record of a canon of New Testament books.]
In fact, Valiant/Fehy cite a source (I haven't checked into yet) claiming that even Paul was a Roman "intelligence agent" or instigator (for Nero?), trying to defuse Jewish resistance to Roman rule and their demands to worship the Emperor. That would have been 20 years prior to the (Flavian/ Alexandrian/ Herodian ) propaganda effort they are addressing.
Concurrently published: https://www.amazon.com/Creating-Christianity-Weapon-Ancient-Rome/dp/1789265576/ref=sims_dp_d_dex_ai_speed_loc_d_sccl_4_1/140-5966780-1549449
and published several years before: https://www.amazon.com/Caesars-Messiah-Conspiracy-Flavian-Signature/dp/1461096405/ref=pd_bxgy_img_d_sccl_2/140-5966780-1549449
So maybe not so novel?
Your first ref is to Henry Davis; Creating Christianity - A Weapon Of Ancient Rome [2018] but his comments about Senator Piso may be flawed, as a separate book by a "descendent" of Piso may be a fake [per an Amazon reviewer], or Piso did not really exist to be the driving force behind any Roman creation of Christianity [i.e., some question there beyond the usual caveats].
Your second ref is to Atwill's 1st book; although checking for this link, I now see he has his follow-up book out [2014]. But reading the Amazon review page, that one may be overreach, so I will tread cautiously there.
The book about Paul as an intelligence agent is here: Thijs Voskuilen and Rose Mary Sheldon; Operation Messiah: St Paul, Roman Intelligence and the Birth of Christianity [2008].
With so many books now exploring this area, it will be tough to keep the players/ motives straight. Some probably do not justify taking seriously. We shall see [sometime in the next 6 months? :-) ]
The anchor symbol thread is interesting and I have noted that.
I am not sure just what you are saying here.
If religion is defined as believing in a relationship between man (or men/mankind) and one or more divine entities, it then has both a personal level of person-god interaction and communal/congregate-god interaction level. Even if the divine does not objectively exist, believing that it does among a group presumably aided within-group trust, contributing to enhanced cooperation and survival prospects. Thus psychological orientation to "religion" or transcendence continued to evolve in the human brain case.
Are you making a distinction between polytheistic and monotheistic belief systems? And that only the latter were concerned with after life opportunities? The pharaohs and the Celts (Indo-European Greeks, Romans, Hindus) described in The Ancient City would disagree with you. The "realm of the dead" was viewed differently by different cultures - but was still viewed as actually existing.
If I understand correctly, I certainly agree with you that kings and priests used religion as a means of social and political control over their populations (whether at family, clan, tribe, city, city-state, or nation-state levels).
I hope you assemble these essays into a book for sale to your subscribers (if you ever finish, that is). I am going through 39 and counting essays compiling a bibliography for my 2024-202? reading. Thanks much. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
Amazing how attuned we are to recognizing facial features, and especially smiling as an indication of positive feelings and affection towards the viewer, that even just a cardboard smiley face initially elicited a positive tinge from me when I first viewed that photo.
It also led me to wonder if the Islamic women wearing burqas with face coverings were to put a smiley face image on them (with or without lipstick on the lips??!!), how the male Islamists would react. Well, we know how they would react, as they are not big on artistic renditions of people, except conquering males. But fun to hold that image anyway.
[Now I will go back and actually read the full essay :-) ]
PS: at first I thought perhaps that photo was going to lead into a discussion of that incident with the boy putting face black under his eyes as part of his allegiance to a sports team.
"However, perfectionist standards devalue human achievement, because all achievement is imperfect. Any failing can readily be construed as a de-legitimising failure."
And yet Marxism is recognized in some circles as one of the least perfect ideas ever promulgated, but remains fully legitimising for some reason.
[You know, if a word has a "zee" sound in it, we really ought to use a "Z" when spelling that word to represent that sound! :-) Or is that just America's illegitimate view of a transitional future??? Or perhaps the result of a dyslexic scribe somewhere? Or is that syllable pronounced more like "sing" rather than a "mis" preceding an "ing"? I.e., "my-sing" or "miz - ing".]
English is an irregular language; your idea [...] is but another manifestation of the same bollocks that produced DIE and Wokism. It ain't broke; bugger off trying to "mend" it. ;-)
S and Z provides ways of Commonwealth countries differentiating themselves from Americans. So, it is functional.
Fantastic essay (again). It seems to me that these imagined futures almost always are utopian and such dreams ignore human fallibility.
No. We tiptoe around male stupidity. Men are the problem.
There was time when many people failed to see these propositions in their true light.
Madam, you are a bigot, and lest you are "black", be careful, the same broad brush will be painted across your face for being "white". Being a femininst will not save you from the race grifters.
The funny part about this, is that there is no significant difference in average male and female intelligence, certainly not enough to write off any and all members of the sex class "men" as being intellectually deficient in comparison to any or all women.
In fact, your lack of any cogent logic here shows your own personal intellectual deficiences. this must be scary for you and many midwit feminists; a man can earn his pay from hard physical work. You have no such resource. Good luck with that. On your laptop, in your apartment, with your cats and your immutale sex class based hatred and bigotry.
Men rape, beat, and murder women.
Women can laugh at or gossip about men.
Please stop acting like there is an equivalency between the two. There is none. It's not both sides. Men are the problem.
Male-domination is politics, religion, military, until recently education (they suck so bad at school that they've removed themselves from it)--they are the problem. Afghanistan is what you get when you let men run wild. Women don't marry, rape, and abuse 8 year old boys in countries where they've achieved the most basic human rights, like Iceland or Finland.
Stop making excuses for them.
I'm sick of this. Men are the problem. Their violence is the problem. Stop catering to their egos.
A near perfect example of Lorenzo's thesis in this essay!!!! No more can be said of any merit, impact, or value.
Well then.
Some elementary numeracy might help.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969807/
See also
https://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Publications/CJB/cjb89.pdf
Yes, men commit nearly all rapes. But only a tiny percentage of men have ever committed a rape (unless one redefines the term so that it loses all meaning). Yes, men have and do beat and murder women. But just a tiny fraction have done so.
Muslims commit over 90% of all global terrorist attacks. But someone who declared, “Muslims are the problem,” would be rightly described as bigoted. Reasonable people would correctly point out that a minuscule minority of Muslims are terrorists.
You may be right. Imagine, though, that you live in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era. A black man has been murdered and his white killer has been caught and put on trial. You’re on the jury.
The evidence is overwhelming and there’s no question that the defendant did it. You’re ready to find him guilty, but certain people drop hints that you would be wise to find the defendant innocent.
Members of the KKK are known to be on the police force. Probably one or more members of the jury are also Klan members. You have a wife and children. How do you vote knowing that everyone else on jury will vote to convict?
We’d all like to believe we’d do the right thing, but would we?
Muslim terrorists aren’t just terrorizing infidels. Many, perhaps most, of their victims are other Muslims.
Good point of a more recent example. Shows why the Right to Bear Arms is primarily for individual self defense and then to also support resisting domestic or foreign tyranny in some communal fashion. Sad that you might feel the need to fend off your fellow jurors/ neighbors!! Our founders tried to minimize the impact of mob rule on any final governmental actions.
Does such cowardice in the population help explain the cowardice of our elected Congress to address the 3rd rail of entitlements and deficit/debt? And so many other things!
I wonder why this info on Chauvin's trial did not come out sooner? Was some of the police body cam footage not available until just recently? Good grounds for appeal??? Should/might help the other 3 LEO's as well?
Nearly all rapes are committed by men.
Nearly no men commit the rapes.
Feminism converges with anti-semitism in this logic.
It is sexual bigotry.
Ironic, the right has solutions for this, that is being tough on crime.
The poster above has projected her mental illness, perhaps from some personal, very real trauma, on half of mankind.
Imagine the Good German ranting about the "Jew who took his job" and you get it about right.
Feminism of the sort spouted above should be seen in the exact same light.
Right, once again trying to reply to multiple people and probably failing. There are a few threads falling prey to hobbyhorsing and circling the drain, this one may be heading that way.
Please be aware that Lorenzo & I both have relatives and it is Christmas, so we're not around as much as usual. The last dozen comments have all come from two people (you know who you are) and given the season, it may be time to avail yourselves of some cheese/crackers/chocolates/mince pies/etc.
Get a job
Kat may I suggest you start at essay #9 and after a few you'll find yourself.
Also
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825&context=honorsprojects
“Child maltreatment is broken down into two categories: abuse and neglect. Abuse can be further broken down into child physical abuse (CPA), child sexual abuse (CSA), and child emotional abuse (CEA: Park, 2020; Behl, Conyngham, & May, 2003). In considering risk for perpetration of abuse, some notable gender differences have been identified in past research. Females are more likely to be perpetrators of CPA than males, and males as more likely to perpetrate CSA (Behl et al., 2003).”
When women are dealing with a systematically physically weaker population (children) they are more likely to be violent than men are. When men are dealing with a systematically weaker population (women) they are more likely to be violent than women are. No, women are not a purer/better form of Homo sapien.
Also, males are typically more variable than females across a wide variety of traits: which means more males at the extremes. So more male geniuses and more male morons. More male saints and more male psychopaths.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0890207020962326?download=true
Since violent crime is overwhelmingly a tail effect, a larger tail of low patience/high physical robustness in the physically stronger sex leads men to dominate violence against other adults. Though, unless a society is very peaceable, the majority of the victims of violence are other men (i.e. their competitors).
https://www.martindaly.ca/uploads/2/3/7/0/23707972/daly___wilson_1990_human_nature.pdf
The most extreme manifestation of men dominating the victims of violence is the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4381518/
No, though I have read quite a lot of Turchin, including ‘War Peace War’.
More useful reading, ta!
Creating a decent gender-egalitarian society requires men to police other men. When that breaks down, women suffer.
The feminist attack on chivalry was seriously misconceived. Making maleness the problem strips men of authority to police other men, and problems start compounding. Obviously, making femaleness “the problem” has bad consequences too.
Historically, successful gender egalitarian societies required women to restrain their negative features and men to restrain theirs. At least within the in-group.
We have to be able to have adult conversations about the good sides of males, without folk shrieking ‘patriarchy!’ or ‘toxic masculinity!’, and the down sides of women, without folk shrieking ‘misogyny!’. For the corroding of our institutions is already having serious consequences, which will continue to compound unless we start making necessary adjustments.
Yes, that's why Afghanistan is doing so well, because none of the feminisms took all the chivalries away and the men there are great at policing each other and women are doing great.
There is no such thing as "chivalry." You're talking about a delusion stupid moids like you built in your irrational head.
Shut up. Nobody cares that you can't get a match on Tinder and this is how you spend your time. Unfuckable males aren't owed anything.
Go away.
To state the bleeding obvious, chivalry is not an Islamic concept.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/hamas-displays-a-muslim-way-of-war
I suppose I should thank you for exemplifying precisely what I write about in the post.
There is no such thing as chivalry. It's not any kind of concept because it's a myth built into the heads of idiots like you.
It doesn't exist and it never existed.
You don't know anything. I don't care that no one wants to fuck you.
Go away.
Why are you here? Go away yourself, this isn't your bloody blog.
The sad part is this is the group we trusted to counter transgenderism from with their own ranks. We lost a decade.
Yes, the core free speech issue: countering bad speech with good speech, but that is of no avail when you are only feeding the trolls.
And I just recalled Helen's discussion of your personal trials with libel law in Oz.
Possibly too strict in Australia and GB, but too lose in the USA?
Given the high level of TDS in the US, any attempt that Trump might make to pull the libel pendulum back toward the "reasonable center" will probably come to naught.
Demonstrating female superiority in reasoning, logic, and communication skills.
Yes, everything I said is true.
Go jerk off to Andrew Tate videos after paying your Hustlers' University monthly fee, then join your fellow logical, rational males in the Ukraine. They're doing great over there.
"I'm sick of this."
"Go away."
"Shut up."
"Moids."
"Unfuckable"
I think were all seeing what this is: mental illness.
Unsolicited mansplaining from a fellow human.
Everyone sees this.
You are fooling no one.
Feel free to pee in your own pants in public.
We all see it.
Only you feel it.
But please dont ask us to pretend it is anything other than self defilement and obscenity.
That's lunacy.
Everything I said is true.
Your rhetorical skills are nonexistent.
👋🏻 bye 👋🏻
"Men rape, beat, and murder women. Women can laugh at or gossip about men."
Did you read that on a feminist ceral box?
Women can now end mens careers, deprive them of livlihood and a basic income, get them incarcerated and drive them to suicide, all with institutional means, be it social media, pumping up that "harmless" gossip and innuendo. If anything your maxim above simply demonstrates:
1) women are physically lazy in doing their harms.
2) they require institutions and infrastructire built by men to do their dirty work. Much of which was never designed by men for these purposes. Who knew the microchip would lead to #metoo, "body counts" and THOT culture?
SOME men are the problem.
Please apply your same logic to "blacks" - a disproportionate number of whom are criminals.
Also to the 85% of in home molestation that occurs at the hands of "moms new boyfriend".
100% of those cases are the fault of the man AND 100% could be prevented by mom not inviting him in the household. Mom's "good feelz" does not abrogate the lunacy of inviting a strange, unrelated male into the home. If it is known that "men are bad" why would mom be an accomplice in this harm?
Please also address the phenomenon of color revolutions, carpet bombing and the like by Thatcher, Hilary Clinton and other female world leaders.
Bringing women into the commanding heights has not eliminated wars. Funny that.
Women abuse and kill when they are handed the physical and institutional means to do so. Previously they were limited by their physical strength, but tht ship has sailed with the ease of push button drone warfare. Thay have also engaged in direct physical harm to those weaker than them, for millenia. the latest development is comanderring the surgical means to harm children, combining the previous two vectors; going after those weaker then them with institutional agents at their political command.
69% of left wing white women support gender ideology with 21% veiwing it as neutral.
Despite the protestations of the much touted TERFs, affluent white liberal women overwhelmingly are leading the charge on our most vulnerable, in horrific ways. If you would contend that their preferences for this type of harm have been largely ineffective to date, Id counter that that is only becuase they are not being allowed to, and given their druthers, they would. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/02/11/deep-partisan-divide-on-whether-greater-acceptance-of-transgender-people-is-good-for-society/
As a male who works in a female dominated field I see the harms of female aggression daily, resulting in call ins, breakdowns and mental trauma. Whereas 1% of men - we can cede 5% - commit these violent crimes ascribed to an entire sex, I see MOST women participating in these patent aggressions, that are far beyond the "microaggressions" the femininists complain about.
Get a job, psycho.
Dude, you nuked an anthill!
Well done, sir.
LOL male reading comprehension skills ftw.
You moids are fucking worthless. Literally can't argue your way out of a paper bag.
" To deny one’s racism, for example, demonstrates complicity in racism." So 80 to 300 years from now, when interracial marriages have been operative for a while, everyone will have a tan-olive complexion (or maybe a little darker* than that) and some other criteria of "otherness" will have to be developed, right?
*It was interesting to see one of those TV episodes on the history of early mankind, showing a black man/actor portraying the Cro-Magnon equivalent exploring European realms, rather than the usual more brutish looking ragged long-haired white man. Has it been definitively established as to when Europeans actually evolved light colored skin?
When humans migrated to more northerly latitudes, it’s theorized that lighter skin became advantageous and thus selected for, because with less melanin, more of the scarcer UV light could penetrate the skin to permit vitamin D production.
I agree that is the (older?) conventional view, but the question was/is did this process occur slowly over (say) 50,000 to 35,000 BP, in response to the UV aspects you mention, or more rapidly over (say) 10,000 to 5,000 BP based on some other (possibly totally random) driver? I saw something previously about the 5K number but am not sure what consensus, if any, is now believed (or credible).
[BP = years before present]
Good question, but likely unanswerable short of finding anything about melanocytes in the fossil record! :-) For lighter skin to have evolved, it had to have some survival advantage. What factors comprised that advantage will always be a matter of speculation, but the vitamin D hypothesis seems to fit.
Widespread vitamin D deficiency leading to rickets, with all of its bony and metabolic complications, would be a pretty strong “negative selector” against darker skin. Enough to nudge the population towards lighter skin in say, five millennia? Hopefully someone here more knowledgeable than I will chime in on that!
You've wandered onto another continent with diseases you have no immunity to; etc. and you are immediately extremely Vitamin D, vital to the immune systems, deficient. The selection pressure would be enormous and the thing would quickly go exponential.
I don't understand the "immediately extremely ... deficient" part of your reply.
I suspect that the hunter gatherer (or even agricultural) groups migrating into Europe would have done so at a rate of 10 to 100 miles per generation (20-40 years?) Thus both they and the animals cross infecting with them would have had "normal" evolutionary rates of genetic change to accommodate their immune systems to the diseases they encountered. Also that the general level of reduced UV light promoting lighter skin color for increased vitamin D production would have been experienced over several millennia at a minimum.
I agree that if significant issues with their immune systems did develop, the selection pressures would likely be pretty rapidly observed.
What am I missing in your meaning?
I was led to wondering why didn't the Australian aborigines also develop lighter skin if the UV thesis is valid. But checking my globe I see Oz is located between the 10th and 40th parallels in the South, while most of Europe is above the 40th parallel in the North.
I now am curious if the DNA samples from Neanderthal and Denisovan sites provide enough information to examine the genes/alleles associated with skin color. Those species of course preceded homo sapiens by several 100 thousand years.
Thanks for this feedback. Now I suppose I need to track down the source that claimed the skin color change happened more rapidly and recently.
A longer term and time does seem to be more reasonable.
Perhaps you know the answer to the following question? Is there any archeological or other evidence that the interbreeding occurred via consensual relationships vs. via rape? I am skeptical that the relationships were consensual and friendly, compared to the many other expressions of "kumbaya" I have seen or implied. More utopian thinking on someone's part? My suspicion is that the males of either/ both subspecies initiated the genetic transfer without any concern for follow-on protection of any offspring thereby occurring. The family group of the raped female would have had to take on that burden.
Great idea. Maybe someone has explored that avenue already?
But if so I suspect we would have already heard about such a sensitive result. Conversely, I gather if that Y-mDNA characteristic was not observed, no one would think it odd to have neutral expected mixes and would believe consent was typical?
Now you’ve got me curious too! Thanks for a thoughtful discussion.
"If constraint is defined as oppression1—in line with underlying perfectionism..."
As an engineer, one of my few contributions to civilization was to recognize that GOOD design requirements are really statements of a constrained activity. E.g., "the IT system shall restrict access [i.e., the activity] to authenticated users" [i.e., the constraint.] In turn, daughter requirement statements would have to address the nature of authentication and how it is accomplished, etc. But the clarity of such syntax helps keep things on track. Requirements are derived from desires and needs, but such desires and needs cannot be used for design until they are constrained to an achievable reality. The requirements also thus become the criteria for testing the result before deploying it more widely: does it really meet ALL of the requirements within their respective constraint values?
So wisely applied constraints are useful, but the "perfect design" can never be expected, often because of competing requirements or constraints.
The same syntax could be applied to documenting the requirements for other domains, such as art, politics, social programs, entertainment, etc.
Great comment! Lots to chew on for me.
Very well put. I was about to write something similar about my field, the arts, but you have summarised the unifying notions so clearly, 8 need not!
Yes another superb analysis. My take is that it endlessly frustrates me how many opponents of the Progressive mindset - of campus-student-brats, of ludicrous academic 'professors' of nonsense et al - still tend to credit it all with more intellectual substance than it deserves. Yes this disease is extremely serious - even civilisation destroyingly so - but it is not really about anything like a new 'vision', a new 'morality', certainly not a coherent 'philosophy', nor even 'ideology'. It is about a degenerate PSYCHOLOGY.......a shallow, vacuous, up-itself narcissism and self-absorption that has taken hold primarily amongst a well-healed middle class that gets-off on telling itself that it is on the side of 'the oppressed'. Taken hold because Western economic dynamism has freed them from having to grow up and get real. I find myself (as an elderly 'boomer') half hoping for the day when holding these shallow feel-good poses actually start to have painful consequences for the wokeys themselves. Then we'll see. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Only HALF hoping for a day of reconning? I suspect your hope level is closer to 90 or 98%! As is mine.
Then again, I was unjustly paddled in kindergarten for messing with some other kids clay figurine, when I hadn't. Must not have been too traumatic, however, as I never even told my parents. And perhaps this "memory" is really just a dream vaguely recalled, and it never happened?
They say: "revenge [justice] is a dish best served cold".
Half hoping on account of 'careful what you wish for'. I try never to forget how lucky us Boomers have been....never (most of us) having to fight or endure a war. I believe that if and when the woke dam finally breaks, thing s could get ugly.
Ugly; but probably quick. Once a few dozen of the precious snowflakes have been reduced to jammy messes...
Footnote 3: minor typo on last phrase?
But thinking about this command/commerce comment, I started to wonder if multi-step commerce essentially required a "government" to establish trust that the chain of transactions and its desired end point would be achieved. If A and C want to trade, but are separated by time or distance, so they use B as a broker/intermediary, how do they come to trust that B will fulfill his "transfer/transport" role (besides recognizing that he will take his cut as part of his justifiable function "in the middle").
Similar to the concern a producer might have if the wholesaler is not active enough to move product to the retail level for final sale? Each party presumably has their own interests and incentives, but if one falls down (thereby reducing the potential for gain by all three), can the others recover their potential loss without a government on the side to help do so?
Going the other direction, the producer is also a consumer of the outputs from his component suppliers. He can't produce if they don't fulfill their obligations first.
Are we now so used to this complex process working so smoothly we almost don't recognize a need for government?
Yes, there is a minor typo: ‘hough’ should be ‘though’.
Libertarians tends to under-rate the need for order because they are so aware of various self-ordering mechanisms. An eye-opening book on how pervasive self-governing systems are is Edward Peter Stringham, ‘Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life,’ Oxford University Press, 2015.
Congruent with your comments, Meir Kohn has written revealingly on the importance and role of commerce: Meir Kohn, ‘An Alternative Theoretical Framework for Economics,’ Cato Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Fall 2021).
That being said, state societies are way more complex and capable than non-state societies. One of my current projects is developing the notion of states creating an “institutional commons”. A lot of predation is made more operative because it feeds off creating and maintaining a protective/ordering role. Hence my essay on the paradox of polities. https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-paradox-of-polities
I will put this comment here, even though it relates to your 1/23/23 essay on niches.
It addresses a caution about converting these essays to a book form. The particular sentence that triggered me is: "We can trace the upward and downward march of trade and empire all the way up to the massive increase in trade with the application of steam power to shipping and railroads from the 1820s onward." You have skipped from around 200CE to 1820's, then to WWI and II, etc. My caution is to consider if the "tracing" should have more intermediate steps identified, vs. large time scale skips. I find it disconcerting at times when historians portraying the progression (if not actual progress) of a theme or causation skip to only the events/times that appear to support their thesis, which too often can seem like "cherry picking" in hindsight rather than placing the cause in a stream of time with greater or lesser impact/ influence at various times. I recognize that too much detail here can be as problematic as too little, but if several decades or generations have separated such citations, it seems many other influences might also be at play and they are being ignored. Not a criticism of this or that essay, just a suggestion for consideration while you address these complex topics in greater depth and subtlety.
I have not yet examined the Sringham or Kohn sources, but it seems the discussion with Doctor Hammer had an element of chicken and egg to it. It was mirroring a higher level view as to whether economic prosperity leads to demands for liberty, or the existence of increased freedom and rule of law leads to the ability and incentive to create and then retain more of your wealth output and thus increase your prosperity. Perhaps they work in tandem until some threshold is reached in either domain? I see the tax, surplus, institutional commons ideas as considerations at the next level deeper into this quandary.
Perhaps a fascinating balancing act is necessary that is even more difficult under republican governance, but is very important for us to understand if we are going to retain or regain our recent past levels of both liberty and prosperity/economic benefits. Glad you are playing archeologist in this "great rift".
As I am exploring your references above, I see I have a Word file version of your blog* posting from http://critical-thinker.net/?p=440 Why Anarchism fails, By Lorenzo, on March 17th, 2011!! This post addresses the same core idea of state order vs. anarchy, and explicitly mentions Paradox of Politics!! :-) You have been thinking about this for a long time.
I was just going to capture the Amazon reviewers remarks on the Stringham book, but now I have decided it might just be easier to buy it (used), even if I don't have time to read it. :-(
Now on to the the Kohn reference.
*One of perhaps 10 or 12 such essays I cut and pasted into Word to ensure I did not lose them and to enable my highlighting and personal commentary.
Thus I hope Stringham, or your thoughts on an institutional commons, can answer some of my thinking here: At what point does a private organization establishing rules for behavior and practice become the equivalent of a state or government, even if they can only use exclusion from a desired good rather than violence and fear to avoid undesired actions? A guild or a union, or an association or industry group, etc. can all create sufficient “social” or financial forces to obtain general, if not universal, allegiance and compliance.]
"If you elevate success as sin and failure as virtue, you’ll generate a lot of failure."
So here we see the admonition by (some) blacks to their children not to "act white" by studying and pursuing the other success factors documented by George Will and others.
[You are firing on all 8 cylinders, even though you are only driving a 4 cylinder car!! :-) Today's essay is a lot of fun! Thanks.]
"... which means people interact with online slivers of each other."
I like most of the slivers I find here.
> Cancel culture—where people lose jobs and have careers destroyed by falling afoul of the no-bad-feels discourse taboos—is the extreme end of this threat of shunning and isolation.
In addition to people losing jobs, there are orders of magnitude more who simply self-censor to avoid the same fate. That’s the true power of cancel culture. We simply don’t dare discuss or question statements like “gender and race are social constructs.” This allows fringe theories to appear mainstream. My favorite is how most legacy media write about “pregnant people” and we just go along with it.
Another great essay, with too many powerful well phrased statements to highlight them all.
We will not win the battle against wokery through logic and reason because the woke reject logic and reason. Nor will we win by becoming Trumpian caricatures of what they claim we are. It may be that in this case, as in many others, laughter is the best medicine. What logic cannot refute, ridicule can. And the task of ridiculing the woke is made infinitely easier because the woke routinely make themselves ridiculous.
For example, here is a sample of what passes for woke “thought”:
• The absolute truth is that there are no absolute truths.
• No culture is better than another. Western Civilization is bad.
• Gender is a social construct; there are no differences between the sexes. All men are bad.
• Race is a social construct; there are no differences between the races. All white people are bad.
• Stereotyping people is wrong. All white people are racist oppressors.
• White people are racist by virtue of their skin color and can never be not racist. At best, they can only endlessly atone for their whiteness and racism.
• Minorities cannot improve their lives or those of their loved ones until white people stop being racist. White people can never be not racist.
• We will continue to attack white people for being racist until they stop being racist. White people can never be not racist.
• White silence is violence. White speech is violence.
• Believing that all Muslims are guilty of terrorism is bad. Believing that all white people are guilty of slavery is good.
• Segregation is bad. Separate black college dorms and black graduation ceremonies are good.
• “White flight” from inner cities is racist. White migration to inner cities (aka “gentrification”) is racist.
• The “bourgeois virtues” of self-reliance, persistence, reliability, thrift, diligence, honesty, creativity, tolerance, and civility are white traits, and promoting them is racist. The fact that people who reject those traits are more likely to be poor is proof that America is systemically racist.
• Diversity strengthens us by exposure to different viewpoints. Adopting diverse viewpoints is “cultural appropriation.”
• Race is a social construct that has no biological basis. Pharmaceutical companies are racist because they don’t include enough biologically diverse minority subjects in their drug trials.
• Diversity of skin color is good. Diversity of thought is bad.
• Religion leads to conflict and war. Islam is the religion of peace.
• The Left’s violence is free speech. The Right’s free speech is violence.
• Sending police officers to minority areas is racist. Pulling police protection out of minority areas is racist.
• Only racists believe FBI statistics indicating that some minorities disproportionately commit crimes. Enforcing criminal law is racist because laws disproportionately impact minorities who commit more crimes.
• We need more gun laws. Gun laws are racist, so we must stop enforcing the ones we already have.
• We will continue releasing thieves, rapists, and murderers onto the streets until crime is eliminated.
• Noting cultural and racial differences is racist. Not acknowledging the different strengths and contributions of other cultures and races is racist.
• Your thoughts and beliefs are nothing but excuses for dismissing the beliefs of others and subjugating them. We therefore dismiss your beliefs and demand the right to subjugate you.
• Societies are nothing more than endless struggles between oppressors and oppressed. It’s time for a new set of oppressors: Us.
• Merited success condemns merited failure therefore no success is merited.
• We’re leaving blue states because of the mess leftist politicians have made of them, and we’re moving to red states where we’ll vote for the same sort of leftist politicians who made us miserable in the blue states.
• The West is a racist, capitalistic hellscape. We must encourage mass immigration so that we can turn the West into the same sort of statist utopias from which the refugees are fleeing.
• We must focus on the West’s history of slavery and conquest that cannot be changed, while ignoring slavery and conquest currently practiced by non-western nations that can be changed.
• Government must be directed by the will of the people. Government must be directed by a technocracy that is shielded from politics.
• To ensure human flourishing, we must create incentives for people to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need by distributing goods according to the dictum: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
• Raising the cost of cigarettes will discourage people from smoking. Raising the cost of employing workers will not discourage businesses from hiring nor will rent controls cause housing shortages.
• Slavery – an economic system in which people can arbitrarily demand others’ time, labor, and produce – is bad. Social Justice – a philosophy that holds that “the oppressed” can arbitrarily demand others’ time, labor, and produce – is good.
• Monopoly by corporations – which must satisfy their customers to survive – is bad. Monopoly by government – which can use deadly force to survive – is good.
• We must take decisions out of the hands of individuals who understand local conditions, who can quickly respond to feedback, and who will pay a price if they choose poorly and place them in the hands of central planners who have limited knowledge and imperfect feedback mechanisms, and who pay no price for being wrong.
• We care so much about the plight of others that we will gladly give them the shirt off your back.
• The ATF, CFTC, CPSC, DEA, EEOC, EPA, FAA, FCA, FDA, FCC, FDIC, FERC, FHA, FRA, FTC, NLRB, NRC, OSHA, SEC, and Federal Reserve regulatory agencies must be strengthened because unfettered capitalism is failing.
• We are wisely teaching our children that two plus two equals whatever they want. Our bridges are collapsing, proving that capitalism is failing.
• We are banning nuclear, coal, hydroelectric, and natural gas power plants throughout the country. Free enterprise is failing to keep the lights on.
• Our ideas are contradictory only in the light of Western logic - a patriarchal and racist tool of oppression.
wow that list is pretty damn comprehensive...way to go!
now i have to go take an aspirin, all that cognitive dissonance gave me a headache...
How's the head now? See comment below...or maybe above
Yes Wow! If there was a way to pass a bottle down the Substack, I'd send you a beer for that Grade A rant about doublethink. While I was reading it, some lines kept buzzing in my head....and then I got it....Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? / Well then I contradict myself....." Difference is of course, he was self-aware...he KNEW he was doing it.
Is this list your original work? If yes, how shall I cite you, as I intend to use it? If not, do you recall who/where you got it from? My email is hollymathnerd at gmail if you'd like to contact me directly. Thanks!
Yes, this is mine. Just use my name. I’m not happy with the wording of one of the items. I’ll email you with the revised version once I’ve got it. Thanks.
Me too, Richard. I'd like to mention the items that aren't specific to the US. If you sign up, I'll correspond on which (you can obviously cancel once we've established comms - I don't assume you'll be interested in most of my output).
I do not expect to convince any of the “woke”. I wish to arm the motivated and the worried with a better understanding of what we are all facing.