- Aug 2022
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Glenn Ellmers, a senior fellow at Claremont, urged readers to “give up on the idea that ‘conservatives’ have anything useful to say,” and called for “all hands on deck as we enter the counterrevolutionary moment,” while asserting that the 80 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden were “not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”
“not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” E.g., voters for Biden were the equivalent of Clinton’s know-nothing “deplorables” that stumped for Trump.
Both sides split America into Us versus Them, but the electoral duopoly leaves no third choice for those who might otherwise resist that division. The President will always be the Warlord for the tribe that brought them to the ball, and the Other tribe would always resist providing succor in the form of productive success.
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On Jan. 6, as Pence was fleeing the Senate chamber for an underground location in the Capitol complex, Jacob fired off an email to Eastman, writing that after running “down every legal trail placed before me,” he concluded that Eastman’s framework was “essentially entirely made up.” Eastman had called Jacob “small minded” and castigated him for “sticking with minor procedural statutes while the Constitution is being shredded.”
The profound problem is that neither side has evil intent (or at least is only minimally nefarious). Both see themselves as champions of what is moral.
How the Constitution was "being shredded" isn't explained here, but that same phrase would be used ceaselessly to attack what these people were doing, too.
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00480d9.netsolhost.com 00480d9.netsolhost.com
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people tend to give over every decision-making capacity to any leader who can wrap himself in the myth fabric of the society. Hitler did it. Churchill did it. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Stalin did it. Mussolini did it. My favorite examples are John F. Kennedy and George Patton.
Ah, I see he got to this.
Still, most of those political figures were inserted at the top of an existing hierarchy they had to work with. I still think Castro is a better example.
Perhaps MacArthur in Japan after WW2 is the best instance of a successful superhero — he knew he was term-limited, so focused more effort on institutions than autocratic dictates.
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Even if we find a real hero (whatever-or whoever-that may be), eventually fallible mortals take over the power structure that always comes into being around such a leader.
Fidel Castro is a clay-footed example. If he had the wisdom and foresight, with possibly could have gradually ceded power to a set of constitutionally authorized institutions.
I wonder if the embargo and U.S. hostility forced him too close to the U.S.S.R. and totalitarian mindset? He didn't have complete autonomy for long.
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- May 2022
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Will we do anything about it?
No.
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A widely discussed reform would end this political gamesmanship by having justices serve staggered 18-year terms so that each president makes one appointment every two years.
Those who don't want reform won't have any problem stopping it: changes to the Supreme Court would require a change to the Constitution itself.
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But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China.
Ironically, what brought China strength was cooperating (mostly) with international commerce. When liberal countries collapse or become authoritarian, they'll lose that.
Authoritarian countries don't cooperate; they're intrinsically mercantilist. So China won't survive the collapse, either.
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It’s Going to Get Much Worse
… and will lead, along with the related Authoritarian Trend and climate change, and the feedback loops connecting these, to a collapse of modern "civilization" and the global economy it permits.
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The new omnipresence of enhanced-virality social media meant that a single word uttered by a professor, leader, or journalist, even if spoken with positive intent, could lead to a social-media firestorm, triggering an immediate dismissal or a drawn-out investigation by the institution.
Maybe this is naive, or because of my restricted definition of "media", but I don't see the journalism I consume become stupid.
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English law developed the adversarial system so that biased advocates could present both sides of a case to an impartial jury. Newspapers full of lies evolved into professional journalistic enterprises, with norms that required seeking out multiple sides of a story, followed by editorial review, followed by fact-checking. Universities evolved from cloistered medieval institutions into research powerhouses, creating a structure in which scholars put forth evidence-backed claims with the knowledge that other scholars around the world would be motivated to gain prestige by finding contrary evidence.
And now people "don't trust" these institutions.
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“Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team.
So, simple tribalism, right?
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Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society.
Back when "everyone" listened to Walter Cronkite, pretty much "no one" listened to the John Birch Society.
Elites (in some form) had heretofore always controlled society's shared narrative; that ended roughly in the '70s, but then became critical “gradually, then suddenly”.
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Edelman Trust Barometer
Check out at least the report's "Top Ten Findings". The number one finding:
Distrust is now society’s default emotion Nearly 6 in 10 say their default tendency is to distrust something until they see evidence it is trustworthy. Another 64% say it’s now to a point where people are incapable of having constructive and civil debates about issues they disagree on. When distrust is the default – we lack the ability to debate or collaborate.
But that's an endless loop: without trust, we don't perceive honest evidence that something is trustworthy.
So those who don't trust "the media" — what on earth would ever make them change their minds?
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deep into Madison’s nightmare
The essay at the link is worth reading.
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The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves.
If you're old enough to recall Talk Radio and the career of Rush Limbaugh, you know there were already "platforms" that attracted those with an unreflective appetite for moral outrage. Social media didn't create this; it is inherent in an us-vs-them social dynamic.
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We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress.
What Wright missed is that non-zero interactions only work when actors can use reputational information. Even the basic tit-for-tat strategy Prisoner's Dilemma requires a player to remember what others did 'last time'. In an anonymous society, this breaks down. Wright's book had a critical flaw.
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- Feb 2022
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Glenn Youngkin, the newly elected governor of Virginia, created a tip line that parents can use to report teachers whose classes cover “inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory.”
Critical thinking can provoke people into "divisive" considerations. Such a tip line makes it pretty easy to disrupt any attempt to 'teach kids to think [critically]'
Just one or two such efforts aren't too worrisome, but this might portend a broad change in the mission of education, from humanistic flourishing to the production of a compliant populace.
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- Feb 2021
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americanaffairsjournal.org americanaffairsjournal.org
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Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia
No Wikipedia entry. Can it really be so widely read?
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Baltzell defines an aristocratic upper class as one which justifies its status and privileges through service to the nation, both by assuming leadership roles and by being open to assimilating the families of new men of merit among the elite. An aristocratic upper class will also be a bearer of traditional values and authority.
Charles Murray in his "Coming Apart" somewhat harkens to this idea. But Murray seems to have an elitist point of view, never questioning whether power and status is earned, and whether "leadership" from those with unearned privilege should be respected.
This essay's concept of justification via service is problematic. Service to who or what? If leadership keeps the led in their places, that is service to the status quo, not the broader populace.
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- Jan 2021
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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The attack led to the deaths of two officers and four other Americans.
Two officers? Who besides Brian Sicknick of the Capitol PD?
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aeon.co aeon.co
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Being caught in an echo chamber is not always the result of laziness or bad faith. Imagine, for instance, that somebody has been raised and educated entirely inside an echo chamber.
Consider how a person's local community is an overwhelming factor in what religion (or lack of one) they follow.
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It must be reasonable for a child to trust in those that raise her. So, when the child finally comes into contact with the larger world – say, as a teenager – the echo chamber’s worldview is firmly in place.
Well, correct in the broad sense, but once someone enters adolescence they tend to look to their peers, not families.
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This is an explanation in terms of total irrationality. To accept it, you must believe that a great number of people have lost all interest in evidence or investigation, and have fallen away from the ways of reason. The phenomenon of echo chambers offers a less damning and far more modest explanation. The apparent ‘post-truth’ attitude can be explained as the result of the manipulations of trust wrought by echo chambers. We don’t have to attribute a complete disinterest in facts, evidence or reason to explain the post-truth attitude. We simply have to attribute to certain communities a vastly divergent set of trusted authorities.
It is common to hear people derisively describe those on the Other Side as ignorant or stupid. This paragraph is key to why that's wrong. The response is also bad because the scorn further alienates the groups.
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- Dec 2020
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outline.com outline.com
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Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is undoubtedly important, but since stupidity has always existed, this doesn't explain why the problem has become worse in recent years.
I think David Riesman hinted at it in his 1959 The Lonely Crowed. Specifically, the transition from a production-oriented economy to a consumption-oriented one has increased the distance between personal experience and expertise that has consequences.
Once there were many workers whose jobs involved listening to and excepting expert guidance. An auto mechanic knew the wrong kind of oil would ruin an engine; a railroad worker knew some steels work better as rails in difference circumstances; a seamstress knew there were important differences between different thread materials. They received expert advice, and saw what happened when it was ignored.
The vast majority of expertise can be denied without any consequence at all to the individual. Even when there are consequences -- such as with the brain-surgeon example from the article -- the denying individual isn't likely to learn any lesson. Honestly, how often can a patient actually see the consequence of that doctor's advice, when alternative narratives are pervasive?
This is a large part of a more general trend towards individualized epistemology, based on each individual's tribal affiliations and social identification.
Education could overcome it, but that requires winning the coordination game that has always crippled education.
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