AI Debates The Existence Of God

There was a time when human capabilities formed a continuous landscape. Rising from the plain were such towering prominences such as language, art, reason, literature, musical composition, science, mathematics, and so on. Now, however, artificial intelligence is like a rising tide, inundating the terrain. Even now, with AI only in its infancy, the lower elevations of the continent are almost submerged; what we see all around us is already mostly sea and islands.

What peaks still rise above the flood? One, we might have thought, is philosophical debate, especially about the deepest questions of existence and metaphysics.

Perhaps not. Have a look at this:

We see here many of the old familiar arguments, on both sides of this ancient question. But, as noted, AI is still a baby in diapers. What will this simulated debate produce five, or ten, or twenty years from now? Will it still be the same old stalemate, or will it shock us with arguments or insights we’ve never imagined? Is there some reason for us to believe, in principle, that it cannot?

Wormtongue

This is what we’re up against, folks. (You can almost smell the sulfur.)

No matter how much you think you hate “journalists”, you don’t hate them enough.

P.S. Here’s the remarkable Mr. Vance once again. I’m beginning to wish we could flip the ticket.

Recommended Reading

I’ve just finished an excellent book by Auron MacIntyre, an up-and-coming voice on the Right. It’s called The Total State, and it is well worth your time.

MacIntyre is emerging as an influential political analyst and public intellectual, with a job at The Blaze and a regular output of podcasts and videos. (His YouTube channel is here.) His book, which is a remarkably concise summary (not an easy thing to do) of the political theory of Bertrand de Jouvenel, Carl Schmitt, Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Curtis Yarvin, James Burnham, and others, examines the growth and consolidation of power in expanding polities, with particular attention to the effects of scale on the growth of managerial bureaucracies.

There is no substitute for reading and understanding the primary sources that MacIntyre draws on for this book, but this relatively slim volume is, for the uninitiated, an excellent digest of what you need to learn to begin to understand the laws of power that shape the cycles of political history, ancient and modern (and to understand why we’re in the mess we’re in). I’m very impressed indeed by how much meaty and accurate analysis Macintyre has managed to provide in his succinct overview of these complex ideas.

The book is more descriptive than prescriptive; the final chapter, entitled “The Only Way Out Is Through”, correctly explains that the ratchet that centralizes and bureaucratizes State power is not reversible except through inevitable collapse. (This appears to be well underway.) But it’s important, at the very least, to understand why, in order to think clearly about what we might do to survive the deluge.

You can buy MacIntyre’s book here. He’s doing good work, and he deserves our support.

On Comments

A quick review of my comment policy:

WordPress, the software I use, provides a comment-moderation feature that blocks all incoming comments until they are approved by me. I’ve never switched it on; I’ve been fortunate, over the decades, never to have felt the need. After 6,766 posts, and 28,888 comments, I’ve only ever removed a couple of dozen.

That said, this is a personal website, and I am its absolute despot, ruling entirely by whim. I am under no obligation to provide publication to anyone.

Oscar Wilde once said: “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” I have no problem with commenters who present contrary opinions, or who seek to correct me on some point of fact; indeed I welcome them, and have even had my opinions changed by them on several occasions. But if you are vulgar, or abusive, or excessively long-winded, or incivil, or present yourself in some other way that makes engaging with you unpleasant, and more trouble than it’s worth — or if it’s obvious that you’re just here to be a blowhard on a soapbox, and that no amount of conversation with you will offer the slightest chance of any give-and-take — then I will show you the door.

All I ask, really, is this: be charming. Don’t be tedious.

Falling Down

Last weekend we went to Chicago for a wedding. We flew round-trip from Boston, on American Airlines.

Our departing flight was scheduled for 2:13 p.m. on Friday. We checked a bag and went to the gate, but just before we were to board, we were told that our aircraft, a Boeing 737, was having some sort of problem with its engines, and that the maintenance crew were taking a look. The flight was delayed for an hour, then for another hour, and then again. The gate agent reserved us tickets for a flight early the next morning, but the airline offered us no voucher for overnight accommodations, because we live in Cape Cod, two hours away by car. (A room at the nearby Hilton would have cost us about $600.) We worried that sooner or later the flight was likely to just be canceled, but weren’t sure whether we ought to wait and see if it was eventually going to go, or try to get on another Friday flight (and sort out refunds, etc. later).

After waiting a bit longer, we spoke to a different AA agent at the service desk — a fat and sullen fellow — who told us that we had in fact actually been taken off the original flight, that our bag had been removed from the aircraft, and that in order to retrieve it we’d have to leave the security area and go to the baggage claim. When we got there, we were told that our bag hadn’t been removed at all, and so we’d have to request it. I waited by the baggage claim for 30 minutes or so, where it finally appeared.

We then learned that the flight we were originally booked on still hadn’t been canceled, and that we were still booked on it. So we re-checked the bag, and went back through security, and back to the gate, where the flight was now listed as departing at 9 p.m., using a different plane. It did indeed get going (at around 9:30 or so, as I recall), and we finally made it to our hotel in Chicago at about half-past midnight.

Our flight back on Monday was scheduled for 4:48 p.m. — another American Airlines 737. At 4:15, again just before boarding, we were told that the aircraft was having some maintenance issue, and would be delayed. We boarded a little over an hour later, then sat in the plane at the gate for another 45 minutes or so, at which point the pilot explained that the problem was with the system that pressurizes the toilets. We had two choices, he said: we could wait for a new plane, or take advantage of the fact that above 16,000 feet, the differential between the cabin pressure and the ambient pressure makes it possible to flush the toilets without the onboard pressurization system. (This would mean locking the lavatories for a while at the beginning and end of the flight. By unanimous voice-vote, we opted to fly, and so we did.

So: two American Airlines flights, two Boeing 737s, two mechanical issues, two inconvenient delays — a small sample, admittedly, but a 100% failure-rate. The previous time I flew, a couple of months ago, I was delayed by a software failure that affected flights nationwide. When our son came to visit over the summer, his flight to Cape Cod from NY was delayed for seven hours due to mechanical problems, and when he flew home a week later, his flight was delayed for hours and finally canceled, and he ended up taking a bus from Hyannis to Boston, and then a late-night bus back to New York.

I’m old enough to remember when we used to be pretty good at this stuff, with far more primitive technology. I’d ask “what the hell is going on??”, but really I guess I know the answer, and I suppose you do too.

Snitches Get Stitches

By now you have probably heard that Eric Adams, the glabrous black ex-cop who is (for now) Mayor of New York, is under multiple indictments for various acts of political corruption involving bribery and foreign influence, the culmination of a probe that has over the past couple of months swept up a number of his cronies and subordinates.

“But wait — Adams is a Democrat, and a POC to boot! How can this be happening?”

If we draw Ockham’s Razor from its sheath to slice the question open, the simplest answer readily appears: with his recent and voluble criticism of the Party’s immigration policy — which, he rightly pointed out, is wrecking New York — he had got dangerously out of line. Lawfare ensued. His political career is likely to come to an end, and perhaps even his personal liberty as well — pour encourager les autres.

“Well, if he’s guilty, what’s the problem?”

I would hardly imagine that he isn’t guilty. (Given the crimes he’s accused of, it would be no surprise at all.) But that isn’t the point. No, the problem is that others — a certain family out of Delaware comes to mind — have been flamboyantly, ostentatiously guilty of the same things for ages, entirely without consequences, even as political opponents of the Democrats have been punished with the harshest severity for the mildest of offenses (and often for crimes that didn’t exist at all).

The charges against Hizzoner go back a long way — some of them even predate his reign as Mayor — but he was a “made man”, so they were kept on ice. But now, having disrespected the Family, he is dead to them, and he will sleep with the fishes.

As Lavrentiy Beria once said: “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime”.

My Days Are Numbered

As are all of our days. (Woody Allen once asked why they should be numbered, and not lettered.)

Today, though, as it happens — on September 23rd, 2024 — the number of my days is a nice round one: exactly 25,000.

It’s been a bit of a slog at times, and I’m well out of warranty at this point, but I’m glad I’m still buggering on. Better to be over the hill than under it!

By Other Means

Here are the results of a recent survey conducted by Scott Rasmussen’s Napolitan News Service:

Seventeen percent (17%) of voters believe America would have been better off if former President Trump had been killed in last week’s attempted assassination.

That figure includes 28% of Democrats who say that America would have been better off if Trump had been assassinated. Another 24% of Democrats were not sure. Fewer than half (48%) of Democrats could bring themselves to say that America would not be better off if the opposing party’s candidate for president had been assassinated.

Let that, as they say, sink in: “Fewer than half (48%) of Democrats could bring themselves to say that America would not be better off if the opposing party’s candidate for president had been assassinated.”

I know I’ve been mentioning Carl Schmitt a lot recently, but for anyone familiar with his work it is impossible not to see current political events through a Schmittian lens. Here’s a relevant passage (my emphasis):

The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not the foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. The ever present possibility of conflict must always be kept in mind. If one wants to speak of politics in the context of the primacy of internal politics, then this conflict no longer refers to war between organized nations but to civil war.

For to the enemy concept belongs the ever present possibility of combat. All peripherals must be left aside from this term, including military details and the development of weapons technology. War is armed combat between organized political entities; civil war is armed combat within an organized unit. A self-laceration endangers the survival of the latter. The essence of a weapon is that it is a means of physically killing human beings. Just as the term enemy, the word combat, too, is to be understood in its original existential sense. It does not mean competition, nor does it mean pure intellectual controversy nor symbolic wrestlings in which, after all, every human being is somehow always involved, for it is a fact that the entire life of a human being is a struggle and every human being symbolically a combatant. The friend, enemy, and combat concepts receive their real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing. War follows from enmity. War is the existential negation of the enemy. It is the most extreme consequence of enmity. It does not have to be common, normal, something ideal, or desirable. But it must nevertheless remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid.

– Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition (p. 33). The University of Chicago Press.

Politics and war are not different things; they are a continuum. The very concept of the political necessarily includes the distinction between “us” and “them”, the possibility of escalation, and the willingness to fight.

Where are we on that continuum today? What will happen in November?

Who Laughs Last

This aged well.

Any Questions?

Another day, another insane violent leftist bent on partisan violence. (I refer, of course, to today’s foiled attempt to assassinate Donald Trump — the second in two months.)

Say what you like about Carl Schmitt, but the man had a keen eye for the truths of human nature. I’ve posted this quote before, but it seems apt to do so again:

Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and of what it consists. The nature of such a political distinction is surely different from that of those others. It is independent of them and as such can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

The Concept of the Political (1932), p. 26

Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.

Ibid, p. 37

That’s from a post I wrote back in April, prompted by a neighbor who referred to me as a “Trumper” (which is slightly more neighborly than “MAGAt”, I suppose, but in a Schmittian sense, hardly at all).

An excerpt:

In healthy and cohesive societies, with high homogeneity and trust, and the commonalities of culture, heritage, language, folkways, philosophical axioms, and moral principles that bind mobs into nations, the realm of the political can remain relatively small, confining itself to questions about which policies will most effectively implement generally agreed-upon goals. When, however, these commonalities break down, the sphere of the political expands to include almost every aspect of life, especially in large, managerial states, such as the United States has become, in which power once largely distributed to local communities has mostly been surrendered to the central government.

This has two important consequences. First, because decisions that affect everyone are now administered by the central State, control of that governing apparatus matters far more than it does in more subsidiarian societies. Second, as more and more of civic life is forced into the realm of the political, the essential characteristic of the political — the “friend-enemy distinction” — comes increasingly to the fore, and those with whom you might once have simply disagreed about, say, highway-budget priorities or zoning bylaws now become your enemy.

This in turn has further consequences. It’s in the nature of how we think about enemies that we seek to simplify them, to reduce them, to boil off their human complexities in order to avoid the natural tendency, in decent human beings, to have qualms about wishing others harm and ill-fortune.

So, this is where we are. It seems apt, also, to quote Clausewitz’s best-known passage:

War is a mere continuation of policy by other means… War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.

As I’ve said elsewhere, nobody should hope for civil war. But since the shooting has started anyway, I guess we’ll just have to see where it goes from there, and hope for the best. But remember:

Si vis pacem, para bellum.”

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure I’ll be voting for the guy these people keep trying to kill.

What’s The Matter With Haiti?

Steve Sailer’s latest over at Substack is a look at why Haiti is so stubbornly dysfunctional.

Steve mentions in passing a thing that is surely an important factor, rarely mentioned over here in discussions of U.S. immigration policy: when a place falls below comfortable levels of safety and prosperity, those who are able to — the best and brightest — emigrate to nicer places where their prospects are better, taking their virtues (and genomes) with them. This steady “boiling off” leaves behind an increasingly inspissated, incapable residue, further increasing the incentive to leave. We see this happening both in places like Haiti and in our own inner cities (which were far healthier places when social mobility was more difficult).

Editorial Note

I have taken down yesterday’s item — a thing I’ve only ever done once or twice in the twenty-year history of this blog — about the effect of a rapid influx of Haitians to the small town of Springfield, Ohio. Although I stand by the gist of the post, which was that mass immigration from profoundly alien (and often dysfunctional) cultures, as deliberately encouraged and promoted by our current administration, is suicidal folly for any nation, and often terribly destructive for local communities subject to overwhelming influxes of needy migrants, my language, as commenter “Martin” angrily pointed out, was careless and intemperate, and perhaps even somewhat loose with facts — though his comment, it should be said, was also larded with some of the same. I’ll admit, though, that the post was not one of my best, and so rather than edit it in place, I’ve removed it, perhaps to rewrite it sometime soon. (Or not.)

Meanwhile, I will refer readers once again to this post, from 2013, about the corrosive and irreversible effects of reckless (or, in the present case, willfully malevolent) immigration policy.

Douglas Murray On Hamas

This, folks, is moral clarity. Good commentary also by the Tweeter, @orenbarsky.

See You In September

Well, August is over, Labor Day has come and gone (and with it the annual four-day gathering and concert series of the Shoal Survivors, the musical collective I’ve been a member of for a decade now), and I really should try to get this blog up and running again. I’ve been in a slump for too long now, and enough is enough. For today, I’ll link to two items that I think will be of interest.

The first is a fine essay by professor J.M. Smith of the Orthosphere, on seeing one’s nation through “alien eyes”. In this post he writes about an essay by “a Japanese gentleman who visited Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, and who was curious about Western civilization because his own civilization had undertaken to Westernize itself. He was an old man, a philosopher and student of history, and the Westernization of Japan filled his mind with doubt and dark foreboding.” This gentleman, in what today would be the darkest of heresies in the epicene and self-loathing West, writes about his dread of the accelerating Westernization of Japan, for the reason that cultures are not one-size-fits-all garments that any nation can simply slip on or off, but are, rather the natural expression of a people’s distinct and essential natures. One might say, as I argued here exactly nine years ago, that cultures are what Richard Dawkins called “extended phenotypes”, and that “the fashionable notion that “race is a social construct” probably has things exactly backwards.”

The second is a response at Substack by my friend, the philosopher William Vallicella, to a letter I had sent him a while back suggesting (as I have done many times in these pages) that the Enlightenment’s enshrinement of doubt as a supreme guiding principle has led us, centuries later, to cultural and civilizational disaster.

You can read Bill’s post here. I will be posting a response of my own, but not before I give it some thought.

Back soon.

VDare Succumbs

I note with sorrow and anger that Letitia James’ brutal and villainous campaign of lawfare against VDare has succeeded at last, with Peter and Lydia Brimelow, despite mounting a heroic effort that cost them millions, now having suspended the patriotic website’s operations.

It should be increasingly obvious to all by now — given the suspicious assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the intra-party coup against Joe Biden to install the flamboyantly incompetent imbecile Harris (and the astonishing, Orwellian, all-hands-on-deck propaganda blitzkrieg and wholesale memory-holing that followed), the demonic opening ceremony of the Olympics, and a thousand other indications — that we are in a struggle for the very soul of America and the West, a great contest not only between political factions and ideologies, but between good and evil.

Do not despair! — but do not underestimate the gravity of these times.

Interesting Times

“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” – Lenin

As I write, Joe Biden has yet to be seen in public following his fishy letter of abdication. Rumors are spreading that he may be dying, or even already dead. As Moldbug remarked in a post today:

There is simply no good reason for the President not to be able to talk to the press. Especially if he is staying President! But.. there are… plenty of weird reasons…

If they are ready to lie about his Parkinson’s, or whatever—could it become—long Covid? Could the President—die of Covid? People die of Covid… Could the President… die? Take a sudden turn for the worse? A tragedy! The thing is—people already feel a little… misinformed… about his health—why not be hanged for an ox? Weirder and weirder. Scalia’s pillow is already hanging on Chekhov’s wall…

Meanwhile, Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle has been doing a very poor job today on Capitol Hill answering questions about the failed attempt on Donald Trump’s life a few days back (an attack about which we have an awful lot of good reasons to be deeply suspicious).

As Moldbug says in the linked post, what’s happening right now is history — reality — leaking into the little movie we’ve been living in. Great forces are at war for Power. And you, dear Voter, are nothing.

How’s that Democracy going, friends? Are you still feeling “sovereign”?

As I Was Saying

In light of today’s events it seems timely to repost this item from January.

Still almost half of 2024 to go, folks, and the caldera is rising.

P.S. Having now seen footage of Mr. Trump’s female Secret Service detail dithering in panicky confusion (and seemingly unable, in their agitation, even to holster their weapons properly), I am reposting this item as well, from ten years ago.

Happy Warrior

I know I said I wasn’t likely to be posting for a bit, but this clip of Tucker Carlson tossing and goring Australian media soldiers was too good not to share.

Service Notice

Note: I’ve just edited this post; what I’d written here yesterday was way too dark.

It’s probably going to be very slow here at the blog for the next few weeks. I’ve got kids and grandkids about to arrive who will be with us through July, and I won’t have much time for brooding and writing.

I’ll get back to posting later in the summer (or whenever something comes to mind that I really feel the need to write down), but for now I think I’ll just give it a rest, and focus on things closer to home. Thanks to all of you as always.

Whither Hence?

Pressure is building as we head into the summer and fall. I wonder what’s coming. Some possibilities:

1) Despite Joe Biden’s now-undeniable caducity and incapacity, the people running the show keep him on, and do what’s necessary to claim a victory in November. (We know they will do whatever they think they can get away with.)

2) Biden is dropped, and replaced by… Michelle Obama? Josh Shapiro? Gretchen Whitmer?

3) Trump is sentenced to prison.

4) Trump is “taken out” in some other way.

5) A new pandemic, such as H5N1, creates an emergency that overrides everything, including the election.

6) Some other “Black Swan” event: a world war, a terror attack, a technological failure, or something even harder to imagine.

I think #2 is highly likely (though there might be complications as regards Michelle Obama). I expect #3 to happen. (I certainly hope #4 doesn’t, but as noted above, they will do anything they think they can get away with.)

I give #5 a 50/50 chance; maybe higher. Same for #6.

Sowing The Wind

In his “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940 — eighty-four years and two days ago — Winston Churchill warned of “the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

With news now appearing of the widening spread of the deadly H5N1 virus, there’s a timely article at The Blaze about the remorseless, decades-long perversion of science by a man who, it seems increasingly apparent, may well be this new century’s avatar of “Death, destroyer of worlds”.

Read it here.

Gloria Patri!

Happy Fathers’ Day to all you dads out there.

The question often comes up: “what is best in life?” When Conan the Cimmerian was asked this, he gave what is certainly a plausible answer:

“To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”

While perfectly reasonable, this is a young man’s outlook. If someone were to ask me, however, as an older and wiser man, on a lovely morning in June, I think my own answer would be “a leisurely breakfast”.

Anyway: enjoy the day, as you see best.

Service Notice

The Muse is silent for the moment, I’m afraid. (There’s plenty to comment on — this outrage, for example — but I’d have little to add but splenetic grumbling, so I won’t bother.)

Back soon. I’ve been digesting some substantial reading lately, and expect I’ll have something to say about all of that.

Lamps Switching On In Europe?

Fans of Western civilization got a bit of heartening news today: huge electoral wins all over Europe for “far-right” parties. (In case you aren’t familiar with the lingo, “far-right” means, among other things, “in favor of preserving the ancient cultures of Europe against the mass invasion of their homelands”.)

In particular, Macron and Scholz took a serious licking.

It may well be too little, too late — demographic replacement is very far advanced in many of these places, and much of Europe is already a “cut flower” at this point — but it’s good to see some signs of an immune response (and vestiges of vertebrae) in what had seemed to be nothing more than a tottering corpse.

Perhaps we can even show a little backbone over here in the months ahead. You never know.

In Case You Hadn’t Noticed

In a recent essay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains Yuri Bezmenov’s theory of subversion, and calls our attention to how advanced the disease is here in the West. (Hat-tip to BV.)

I expect Bezmenov’s analysis, and the diagnosis given in this essay, will be old news to most of my readers, but it’s a good essay, and worth sharing. Read it here.

Dhimmitude

I see in the news today that New Jersey is now certifying businesses owned by gay and transsexual people, in order to privilege them for grants of taxpayer money, give them favored status for state contracts, and bestow other preferences. (The same thing is also routinely done for non-whites, as well as females, in most jurisdictions these days.)

Leaving aside the question of what one must demonstrate in order to acquire “LGBTQ+” certification, I should imagine that historically literate white males seeking advancement in the workplace these days, or those trying to run a business, must be finding it hard not to be reminded of the treatment of the dhimmi: a term that refers to those infidels, mostly Christians and Jews, who were tolerated to live as second-class inhabitants of areas under Muslim rule (the dar-al-Islam). They were not killed, expelled, or forced to convert, but they were compelled to pay a special tax to the state, a tribute called the jizya.

(The comparison, by the way, is not a favorable one: at least the dhimmi weren’t forced to bow to the Muslim faith itself, which is arguably more than one can say regarding the modern-day religion of the West.)

What’s So Great About Democracy?

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, I’ve expressed in several comment-threads my increasing lack of enthusiasm for democracy — a disaffection that has increased in proportion to the fetishization of “Our Democracy!” in political discourse and propaganda.

To listen to it all, you’d think that Democracy is somehow an end in itself, the founding principle of the United States, and the basis of all that can possibly be good and decent in public affairs. Democracy properly understood, however, is none of those things. It is a mechanism of government, and nothing more; indeed we might more accurately say that it is simply a kind of frame into which various systems of government can be placed, including the severest forms of tyranny. It is also a mechanism that can be used, and commonly has been used, to destroy itself (as, for example, in the rise of the Nazis). It guarantees neither liberty nor order, and in particular it makes no guarantee of good government; indeed, in its purer forms, at national scale, it virtually guarantees the opposite of all those things.

H.L. Mencken described democracy as “a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Benjamin Franklin described it as “two wolves and a lamb deciding on what’s for dinner.” The Founders, educated men who understood both history and human nature, knew that democracy had been, again and again, a buttered slide to tyranny, and sought desperately to find a way to find a way to implement a strictly limited version of it that would allow Americans to attempt some kind of self-government without the experiment immediately going completely off the rails, and descending into bitter and lawless chaos. (And they succeeded surprisingly well: as things worked out, it took over two hundred years for America’s experiment in self-government to go completely off the rails and descend into bitter and lawless chaos — with only a single civil war along the way.)

I understand the attraction of the idea, however illusory, that we somehow rule ourselves, rather than being ruled. But before going any further, let me put my cards on the table: I don’t give a hoot about democracy as an end in itself, and its perils and liabilities are so overwhelmingly obvious that I think we should all be wary of it.

I think the right way to look at governance is as an engineering problem, in which you start by imagining what your specs are — and to do that, we should ask why we want government in the first place, and only then start thinking about what kind of solution we might build.

So: what do we want from a government? Presumably, above all, we want a good one, and not a bad one. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say we want the very best government we can have, one that does all the things we want it to, and does them as well as possible, and doesn’t do any of the things we don’t want it to do. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it, really, and I have no prejudices about what kind of system — what kind of engineering — we should apply. If it maximizes what we want a government to do, and it minimizes what we don’t want, then that’s the system I want.

Well, what are those things? What do we want our government to do? Here are some of the things I’d put in the spec-sheet:

1) We want it to safeguard basic liberties. Among those are freedoms of political opinion, of movement, of religious belief, of association, of peaceable assembly, of self-defense, the pursuit of happiness, and various others.

2) We want it to provide security for property, for national borders, for personal and civic safety, for the enforcement of contracts, etc.

3) We want it to maintain public order.

4) We want it to provide stability, and to consider long timeframes. (What I mean by that is that I want it to guarantee that the rate of change will be damped sufficiently to enable confident investment in the future and to incentivize “low time-preference”, which is the bedrock of civilization.)

5) We want it to put the interests of its citizens above those of other people and places.

6) We want it to provide a system of law that is as small, consistent and comprehensible as possible, to be administered as transparently and justly as possible.

7) We want it to be as local and subsidiarian as possible, with each higher level of government addressing only those tasks and duties that can’t be administered closer to home.

8) We want it to provide reliable means of exchange, and consistent weights and measures.

That’s a brief list; I’m sure it can be expanded, but you get the idea. We should also ask: what do we not want our government to do? Here are some thoughts:

1) We want it not to arrogate powers that it doesn’t need for the list above.

2) We want it not to waste our resources, seize our property, tax us unnecessarily, or interfere with us any more than necessary.

3) We want it not to engage in foreign adventurism.

And so on.

As with any engineering problem, you have to consider what tools and materials you have at hand. In particular, for this problem, we must ask: what sort of people are we? How much do we have in common? How tribal or fractious are we? How virtuous? How capable are we of the individual self-discipline that is what makes lighter external government possible? What are our metaphysics? What beliefs and customs do we share? How much do we care about each other, and trust each other? Different answers to all of these questions make a critical difference to what sort of government is required. A small and homogeneous population, with high public trust and shared traditions and values, will be amenable to a lighter form of government, while a congeries of rival tribes and factions with nothing in common can only be held together by an iron hand.

My opinion, then, is that whatever system of government optimizes our spec-sheet within the constraints and conditions of our particular place and people is what I want. No form of government is best in itself, because no form of government exists in an ideal, abstract space.

In our last interaction, Bill asked me the following, in defense of democracy:

My question is a question in political philosophy.”The question is whether a just form of gov’t can exist that allows the governed no say in their governance.”

I say No. I am trying to get you to concede a very obvious point. Abe Lincoln: a just govt’ is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Now focus on “for the people.” Will you concede that a just gov’t exists for the benefit of the governed, and not for the benefit of the governors — except insofar as they too are part of the governed?

I replied:

If I understand you correctly … you are separating the philosophical question of justice in government from the messy practicalities of real-world politics. But shouldn’t any useful political philosophy include in its premises the actualities — the “crooked timber” — of human nature? (The political philosophy of the Founders certainly did.)

I will, of course, agree that a just government exists for the benefit of the governed. What I’m trying to get at is that the benefit to the governed is what ought to be maximized, and whatever form accomplishes that is arguably what is most just.

“Of the people”: yes, of course. “For the people”: yes, that should be paramount. But “by the people” is where it gets tricky, because “by the people” can (and often does) end up flushing “for the people” down the loo.

Earlier in that thread I had said:

I agree that “just” is nice, but it’s not so easy to pin down exactly what that word means, when it comes to government. Is it “just” to give imbeciles a say who will bring the whole thing crashing down on everyone’s head, including their own?

Regarding democracy, then: given the eight-point list of desiderata above, how are things looking these days? Is our government getting closer to achieving them, as we relentlessly expand the franchise, or farther away? Is it really such a good idea to connect the fulminating and mercurial passions of the mob directly to the drive-train of government?

In Leftism Revisited (page 144), Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn quotes Jules Romains:

“Hitler and Mussolini … are despots belonging to the age of democracy. They fully profit from the doubtful service which democracy has rendered to man in our society by initiating him into politics, by getting him used to that intoxicant, by making him believe that the domain of catastrophes is his concern, that history calls for him, consults him, needs him every moment.”

Also, from another exchange with Bill V.:

It seems that there is a “solution” to the game of democracy, a consistent winning strategy (described persuasively by Bertrand de Jouvenel) in which the high (the oligarchy that exists unavoidably in any form of government) buys off the low to expropriate the middle. The power of the resulting coalition is unstoppable.

The key to this is a constantly expanding franchise that is easily persuaded to vote for redistributed largesse. (Do we not see this happening before our eyes?)

This appears to be a permanent, exploitable vulnerability in the nature of democracy itself. The Founders were well aware of it, which is why they did whatever they could to limit the franchise. (And once you get the pathologically altruistic cat-ladies and spinster aunts of the middle-class itself to join the cause, it’s “game over”.)

This is getting long (and rambling), so I’ll leave it there for now. But at this point, you might well ask: “OK, then, after all that, what does an ideal system for the current-day United States actually look like? How do we get there from here?”

My answer: I’m not sure that the United States, as it now is, can be well-governed under any imaginable system. It is too big, too diverse, too dumbed-down, too polarized, to corrupt, too divorced from any stabilizing metaphysics, and generally just too sick and broken. But this I do know: the bloated, fly-blown corpse of the system the Founders put in place for the American people of their long-gone era is utterly, hopelessly insufficient for the governance of what America has since become. I think some kind of collapse and breakup is almost inevitable, after which something new might arise, hopefully carrying forward some of the best of what we had. But if that doesn’t happen, then I believe we’re looking at a long, sad epoch in which everything just … rots.

Comments welcome.

Service Notice

I’m away for the weekend – a recording session and live gig with the Shoal Survivors. Back soon.

Trump “Guilty” On 34 Counts

Insane. Sickening.

Buckle up, folks. The earth is shaking. The rest of this year is going to be very lively indeed.

Also: this is a carefully calculated provocation. They’ve done this flamboyantly, daringly, pugnaciously, right before our eyes, as if to say “well, what are you going to do about it?” Any jacquerie that results will be further justification for stern measures.

This is a fraught and dangerous moment. America today is a tinder-box, and summer’s just starting.

What’s Going On Here?

The comment-thread to my recent post about Joe Biden’s fawning tribute to the deceased thug George Floyd turned in some interesting directions.

Among them was the observation that Christianity was no longer able to serve as the scaffolding that once built, and braced up, Western civilization. Was this a failing of Christianity itself?

I remarked that I was not convinced of this:

Was Richard Coeur de Lion weakened by Christianity? Was Charlemagne? Was Martel? Was Joan of Arc? Was Eisenhower? Were they fighting for what Nietzsche called a “slave morality”?

What I see is the late stage of a corrosive process, beginning in the Enlightenment (or perhaps even with the early Nominalists), of a radicalization of doubt that slowly became a “universal acid” that has now eaten away all belief in any transcendent metaphysics and objectively existing order. Every tradition, every moral intuition, any natural understanding of category and hierarchy, now must be hauled into the dock to justify its existence. This is a thing that cannot be done; it is an endless, regressive quest to prove, not our theorems, but our axioms themselves.

Christianity with its axioms removed turns the great civilization of the West into nothing more than a rotting “skin suit”, worn by savages who have nothing else to clothe themselves with. The stench of its decomposition reeks in our nostrils.

Our friend and commenter “Jacques” then joined in with a penetrating question of his own:

I agree that we’re in a late stage of a corrosive process, but there’s something else going too. The corrosive doubt is close to universal but not fully. And, in some weird way, it’s accompanied by a perverse creativity. A new system of fanatically held beliefs has been developing. They’re never doubted. It’s basically illegal to doubt them.

Take the example of Biden’s disgusting little sermon about “George Floyd”. The message is that the most obviously worthless and evil people in society are not only entirely blameless victims of oppression, but positively angelic; they’re the most noble, beautiful, inspiring people. Whatever they do (including the worst violent crimes) is acceptable or even good because they do it. And behind that message is the axiomatic belief in some lunatic concept of “equality”. Since Floyd is a thoroughly despicable person, we have to now believe that despicable things are good, or no worse than good things. (Otherwise, we’d have to think that some people are inferior to others.)

We’ve now reached the point where our sick commitment to “equality” leads to an explicit celebration of obvious evil and degeneracy and condemnation of virtue and decency. (We can’t level up but we can always level down.) In effect, Biden is telling us to accept murder, assault, theft and arson so as to avoid drawing any unflattering conclusions about certain special groups of people.

I don’t really understand it but this seems to be part of what’s happening. For some reason, the universal acid has no effect on the “equality” axiom. Everything else dissolves, but this one belief is never questioned or even acknowledged. And that one axiom, unconstrained by any others, seems to be a big factor in the corrosive process. Every sane belief is eventually denied because it conflicts somehow with the belief in “equality”.

But why is that? Why didn’t the Enlightenment destroy the belief in “equality”?

It might have something to do with Christianity. Or maybe “equality” is just a very useful meme in the high-low coalition you describe.

This is a terrifically important question, and I thank you, Jacques, for putting it to us. Why indeed? Here are some thoughts:

Yes, the axiom of “equality” is a powerful tool for powerful “wire-pullers“, who have no real illusions about equality, to use to gather up the masses, and the useful idiots, in their Bioleninist coalition-building. Those who seek to mobilize the mass of men in all ages of history have always known how to use envy as a weapon, and the mob is easily persuaded that they’re just as good as anybody else and nobody deserves to have it better than them.

It can also be argued that there was a radical egalitarian backlash in all Western institutions after the horrors of World War Two; a backlash that spread very deeply and rapidly.

It’s also in the nature of liberalism (as Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn has pointed out in his writings) to see the specter of illiberalism (i.e., intolerance) in any form of strong affirmation of particularity, of specific convictions, of natural discrimination or hierarchy. We can see already that anyone who expresses such things, from an NFL player expressing support for traditional sex-roles, to people who “notice” stubborn differences between human groups, is quickly attacked as a “Fascist” or a “Nazi.”

Finally, it could be that there is some sort of “conservation principle” at work here regarding human nature: something that simply makes it impossible for us to live without fundamental axioms, and means that when we drive the old ones out, new ones necessarily tumble in to take their place. If this is so, and I rather think that it is, then given the points above — the usefulness of egalitarianism in manipulating mass movements, the post-Holocaust backlash against the eugenic ideas that dominated the intellectual life of the progressive prewar West, liberalism’s aversion to hierarchy and qualitative discrimination, and the destruction of transcendent metaphysics by the acid of post-Enlightenment rationalistic skepsis, — then it would make sense, perhaps, for a deracinated civilization wearing the hollowed-out “skin-suit” of Christianity to seize on a familiar, but now misshapen, fossil of Christian egalitarianism and make that the tent-pole of its new and shabby “church”.

I’ll leave it there for tonight. As always, civil and thoughtful comments are welcome. Jacques?

P.S. Another, perhaps the simplest and best, explanation is this: if the fundamental principle of your worldview is radical doubt, and the obliteration of all objective categories and criteria for discrimination, then of course everything must be equal to everything else, because any inequality presupposes the existence (and use) of some objective standard by which it is to be measured, which our worldview forbids. (As I’ve said elsewhere, leftism is entropy.)

And Now For Something Completely Different

Here’s a splendid little video (found on X) on how energy moves through and around an electrical circuit.

“You Are A Slow Learner, Winston”

Today the White House posted this audacious tweet:

A few minor corrections:

— George Floyd did not “deserve better”. He was a brute, a drug addict, and career criminal who, among other things, beat a pregnant woman while robbing her, and pointed his gun at her belly to threaten her unborn child.

— George Floyd was not murdered. He died of a massive, self-induced drug overdose while resisting arrest. The police who subdued him were acting according to Minneapolis Police Department guidelines. His death was nether tragic nor unjust; indeed, it was entirely the opposite.

— The “civil rights movement he inspired” was nothing more a nationwide spree of looting and arson, egged on by a corrupt cabal of Marxist grifters and race-baiters calling themselves “Black Lives Matter”, abetted by Democrat oligarchs at all levels of local, state, and federal government. That orgiastic summer of riots, which caused billions in property damage and countless injuries to civilians and police, took place while everyone else was ordered, by the arbitrary power of mayors and governors, to stay home, to give up their livelihoods, not to go to school or church, and even to forgo their final farewells to dying loved-ones.

I’m pretty jaded at this point in my life, and very little in the way of corruption, degradation of principles, and naked power-grubbing surprises me any longer. But even to me, this tweet is shocking: not because Biden’s handlers would try it, but because there is still anyone out there — that is, anyone capable of critical thinking and moral judgment — who would buy it. I know there is a sullen and resentful mass out there, the fat end of the dumbbell-shaped “high-low coalition”, whose easily bought votes and flammable emotions are being whipped up here. But I know also that there are a great many college-“educated” white, left-leaning voters who will be taken in by this as well, and the idea that we are to be ruled by such idiots is perhaps the strongest of all possible arguments against universal suffrage, and perhaps more generally against democracy itself.

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.”

– Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs

Court Of Last Appeal

“And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.”

— John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Comments welcome.

By Their Fruits

Today I learned that the Biden administration has been holding secret talks with Iran to discuss how to bring Israel to heel, starting with toppling Israel’s government.

To my many left-leaning Jewish friends: have you seen enough yet? Are you still voting Democrat?

The God-Shaped Hole

Bill Vallicella has just published a sharp, brief post about the confusion that atheists and many leftists (a Venn diagram with a large intersection) share about the nature of religion, and the nature of the human need for it — which ultimately cannot be satisfied by material or social goods.

We read:

Leftists, and atheists generally, typically have a cartoon-like (mis)understanding of religion.

No higher religion is about providing natural goodies by supernatural means, goodies that cannot be had by natural means. Talk of pie-in-the-sky is but a cartoonish misrepresentation by those materialists who can think only in material terms and believe only in what they can hold in their hands. A religion such as Christianity promises a way out of the unsatisfactory predicament in which we find ourselves in this life. What makes our situation unsatisfactory is not merely our physical and mental weakness and the shortness of our lives. It is primarily our moral defects that make our lives in this world miserable.

We lie and slander, steal and cheat, rape and murder. We are ungrateful for what we have and filled with inordinate desire for what we don’t have and wouldn’t satisfy us even if we had it. We are avaricious, gluttonous, proud, boastful and self-deceived. It is not just that our wills are weak; our wills are perverse. It is not just that our hearts are cold; our hearts are foul. You say none of this applies to you? Very well, you will end up the victim of those to whom these predicates do apply. And then your misery will be, not the misery of the evil-doer, but the misery of the victim and the slave. You may find yourself forlorn and forsaken in a concentration camp. Suffering you can bear, but not meaningless suffering, not injustice and absurdity.

Whether or not the higher religions can deliver what they promise, what they promise first and foremost is deliverance from ignorance and delusion, salvation from meaninglessness and moral evil. No physical technology and no socio-political restructuring can do what religion tries to do.

Describing the horrors of 20th-century Utopian schemes in his book Leftism Revisited, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn quotes (indirectly) Vasily Rozanov:

“The deeper reason for all that has happened is that vanishing Christianity has created enormous cavities in the civilized world and now everything is tumbling into them.”

Read Bill’s piece here.

Service Notice

Away in NYC for a couple of days. Back soon.

Why Sex Is Binary

Having had, last night, a lively conversation over dinner with a woman who chid me (and sought to correct me) for insisting that sex is indeed binary, I think a clarifying post is in order.

Before I begin, I’ll pause to express surprise and dismay at how stubbornly fashionable, and how prevalent, denial of the fundamental dualism of sex has become, and remains; it’s a distressing symptom of the radical deconstruction and obliteration of all objective principles and categories that has grown, from small clouds of doubt at the beginning of the Enlightenment, to the ruinous tempest now smashing everything in the West to rubble. To insist, in these times, on the objective reality of the sex binary is to make oneself (as, for instance, J.K. Rowling has done) a heretic and a pariah. Nevertheless, there it is.

What is sex? Why does it exist? Why does it seem to be, in all species, a driving force whose urgency is second only to — if not primary to — the will to survive? Why does every human tradition always and everywhere, without exception, distinguish between male and female, not only as essential biological types or social categories, but as fundamental — and binary — divisions of transcendent metaphysical order?

The universal (until five minutes ago) human consciousness of the centrality of sexual duality, and its inclusion in the traditional systems of every culture, surely indicates something vitally important. I want to make this case as simply as possible, though, with the broadest possible appeal in this secular era, so I’m going to leave tradition and metaphysics out altogether — but not before I point out that duality and polarity are the very essence of sex; it is only the existence of the twin concepts of male and female that give the idea of sex any meaning at all. That said, though, we can imagine all sorts of binary concepts — hard and soft, black and white, awake and asleep, tall and short, loud and quiet, beautiful and ugly, friend and enemy, etc. — that are extremes of continua, and allow for the existence of intermediates. Biological sex, however, is not like that.

Why does biological sex exist at all? The answer: it exists, simply and unambiguously, as a mechanism of reproduction. It is how most multicellular organisms, and some unicellular organisms, reproduce. The mechanism involves the fusion of two sex cells, or gametes, each carrying half of the complete genome of the newly created organism (which before subsequent division is now a single, fertilized cell called a zygote).

In all multicellular organisms, with the exception of some yeasts and fungi, gametes come in two (exactly two) strikingly different forms. This is called anisogamy, and it is probably at least a billion years old. The male form is sperm; it is small (too small to see with the naked eye, and first observed by pioneering microscopist Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1677), and it is motile. It has a tiny head, and a long whiplike tail that it uses to swim. The female form is the egg, or ovum; it is one of the largest human cells, and is large enough to see with the naked eye. It has a volume ten million times that of a sperm cell, and unlike the sperm, it is unable to move on its own.

These two kinds of sex cells — the two complementary components of human sexual reproduction — are all there is. There is no intermediate form, or mixture, or chimera, nothing halfway between a sperm and ovum. All human gametes are one or the other, and in biological terms, the combination of sperm and ovum to create new life is what sex is. There’s nothing cultural about any of it, and nothing that is a matter of opinion. As far as objective scientific facts go, this is as solid as it gets.

Those claiming that sex is nevertheless non-binary will now point to the indisputable existence of hermaphrodites, both human and animal. There are people with all sorts of ambiguous sexual characteristics, and there are animals that switch sexes during their lifespan, or even instantiate both sexes at once. Doesn’t that mean sex is a continuum?

No.

It’s important at this point to reiterate, and keep in mind, what sex is: a mechanism of reproduction involving the fusion of male and female gametes. The embryonic development, morphology, and life-cycle physiology of animal bodies can vary, and be disrupted, and make errors, in various ways, but the underlying mechanism of sex itself never changes at all.

Biologically, there are three forms of hermaphrodites — comprising two forms of “true” hermaphrodites, sequential and simultaneous, and what are called “pseudohermaphrodites”.

Sequential hermaphrodites are animals that produce female gametes at one stage of life, and male gametes at another. Protogyny is when they start out as female and become male; the opposite is protandry. Some species go back and forth! (All three of these sequentially hermaphroditic forms can be found among reef-fish such as clownfish and wrasses; sometimes the changes appear to be induced by social-dominance hierarchies. The details are fascinating.)

Simultaneous hermaphrodites are animals that can produce both male and female gametes at the same time. This is mostly found among snails and slugs, but there is one known vertebrate species — the mangrove killifish, Kryptolebias marmoratus — that pulls off this trick. Animals that can do this can do sexual reproduction all on their own.

Pseudohermaphrodites produce only male or female gametes, but exhibit secondary morphological characteristics of the other sex. The example usually given is the female spotted hyena, which has what appears to be a penis, but is in fact an enlarged clitoris that functions as a birth canal.

Regarding humans: nearly every instance of “intersex” morphology is pseudohermaphroditic. Sequential hermaphroditism does not exist in any terrestrial vertebrate (and so not in humans), while simultaneous hermaphroditism — known formerly as “ovotestis” — is vanishingly rare; only 500 cases or so have ever been reported, and the bulk of those merely involve the presence of both male and female gonadic tissue, with actual production of both sperm and ova being even rarer (I haven’t yet to be able to determine if any examples of that have ever been seen at all).

What should be clear after looking at all of this is that even the various forms of hermaphroditism — even having both ovaries and testes — provide no counterargument to the underlying duality of sex. They offer no examples of any sort of intermediate, hybrid components of the essential, binary mechanism of sex; they are merely various ways of producing one kind of gamete or the other (or both). This stubborn duality means that biological expression of the mechanism of sex only exists in four, clearly delimited forms:

1) The production of male gametes;
2) The production of female gametes;
3) The production of both;
4) The production of neither.

If sex were truly “non-binary”, there would be a vast continuum in between all of this, a vague and fuzzy biological domain in which sexually reproducing beings used something other than sperm (male) and ova (female) — some spectrum of gametes that are neither wholly one nor wholly the other — to create new life. But in the billion years of sexual life on Earth, such a thing has never existed, and it doesn’t exist now.

Sex is binary.

Pier Review

About that pier we built in Gaza: don’t be surprised if it later turns out to have been built not to bring supplies to Gaza, but to evacuate Gazans to the West.

David Sanborn, 1945-2024

I note with deep sadness the death of saxophonist David Sanborn, who died on Sunday at the age of 78. I’d known Dave for decades, and worked with him often (including having engineered much of his Grammy-winning 1999 album Inside).

David was a towering musician — one of the most influential players of his era — and a smart, funny man. I can’t believe he’s gone. (It’s also hard to believe he was already seventy-eight. How did we all get so old?)

My dear friend Steve Khan has written an eloquent tribute, here.

Rest in peace, Dave. You were a gift to this world, and you will be missed.

The Forbidden Conclusion

I missed it, somehow, when it happened back in April, but I’ve heard it now (h/t to Radio Derb): the Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s rousing speech at CPAC’s convention in Budapest.

Her message to the ancient peoples of the West?

“Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for us to put on the full armor of God, fight back, and win.”

Full transcript here.

PS: by 2009, when I still leant toward atheism (I no longer do, as described in the series of linked posts beginning here) it had already become clear to me that secularism is maladaptive, and a source of weakness. Fifteen years later, its corrosive effect has progressed to the point that Europe is now on the verge of complete cultural and demographic collapse. So to those of you who agree with Ms. Vlaardingerbroek’s message, but flinch at her call to “put on the armor of God”, maybe it’s time to “update your priors”. You won’t get many more chances.

Tip

To live more consciously begins with reversing the direction of the arrow of attention between awareness and the senses.

President, My Foot

The State of Georgia’s Election Board is grilling Fulton County over missing 2020 ballot records, in particular ballot images and .SHA files (these are digital fingerprints more generally known as hash-files, which are widely used in information security). We’ve known since the night of the “election” that things were awfully fishy; the stink is now getting harder to ignore, even for those who’d prefer to.

The investigator here, Dr. Janice Johnston, is patient, methodical, and relentless. I don’t think she’s going to let this one go.

On Israel And Hamas

In my previous post I commented on the spectacle of pampered students and faculty at our elite colleges and universities cutting class, donning keffiyehs, LARPing as oppressed Palestinians (at the top of their lungs, and as disruptively as possible, which is always fun and exciting), and calling for the extinction of the Jewish state. (As far as I can tell, the extinction of the Jews themselves, as long as we’re at it, wouldn’t bother them much either: nobody’s saying much about where the Jews themselves are supposed to go, once the area is Judenrein “from the river to the sea”, but from what I’m hearing I get the impression that if they just kind of ceased to exist it would be a not-unwelcome lagniappe.)

We white males are by now well-accustomed to calls for our erasure, of course, but I think that suddenly a lot of blue-state American Jews — of the type for whom not voting Democrat would be a far greater offense to their faith than a bacon cheeseburger with a side of fried clams — are aghast to behold the monster they’ve nurtured. My post was, for the most part, a comment on watching this coalition on the Left fracturing and beginning to eat itself, along with some remarks about how the protests were obviously well-funded and highly coordinated, with the stroppy students acting as little more than an easily biddable mob, their excitable young brains washed clean of everything other than “Who?” and “Whom?“.

Although I hadn’t said much about the conflict in Gaza itself, our friend and always-insightful commenter Jacques joined the conversation, to focus on which side in that war might in fact hold the higher moral ground — which is of course relevant to how we should react to the protests.

As a thought experiment, imagine that no western kids had ever been subjected to woke indoctrination. Imagine that all of them were ideally rational and moral young people. How would we expect these kids to react to what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians? Would these rational and moral kids just shrug? Would they think it was entirely moral and decent to exterminate tens of thousands of civilians, including children, in the hope of killing a much smaller number of guerilla fighters? Would they have no objection to Israeli politicians referring to Arabs as “Amalek”? I think some of these imaginary ideal kids would be protesting too.

Jacques, is several places, indicts Israel for the severity of its military response. For example (my italics):

I don’t agree that the Israelis are doing much to avoid “unnecessary” civilian casualties. It looks like their goal is maximal civilian casualties. (As you’d expect when Israeli leaders openly invoke “Amalek” and the genocidal moral code of the Jewish bible.)

Is this true? Israel is at war. How does its conduct compare to other historical examples of warfare, especially urban warfare? It certainly isn’t hard, throughout the ages, to find examples of cities being totally annihilated — men, women, young and old — in the fury of war. It is also difficult — and I’ll come back to this — to draw a bright line, either in military or ideological terms, between civilians and Hamas; it could easily be argued that Hamas itself cares far less about the safety and well-being of Gaza’s civilians than Israel itself does, and that Hamas knows very well that every image or account of civilian victims is potent ammunition against Israel in the court of world opinion. (In the comment-thread at the previous post, I linked to a thread on X arguing that Israel is, at the very least, certainly not trying to maximize civilian casualties. I’ll link it again here; make of it what you will.)

Regarding “Amalek”, the term refers to an ancient people who were implacable, mortal enemies of Israel. Is the term inaptly applied to Hamas, who marinate their children from birth in the belief that the greatest possible good is the destruction of Israel and blood-vengeance against all Jews?

I should probably at this point make some sort of summary of my own thoughts about this war, and more generally, about the intractable conflict in the region that has festered since before I was born, and even more generally than that, about war and conflict as a whole:

First, I’ll say that I generally support the idea of distinct, cohesive and homogeneous peoples having homelands. The kind of Diversity worth wanting, I think, is the kind where one culture or ethny does things their way over here, and another does things differently over there, and every people gets to have a place where they can feel at home, create as much civic trust as possible, and let their commonalities of folkways, language, religion, cuisine, art, history, and myth shape their shared public life as much as their private lives at home. (I’ve written about this for years; see for example, my brief essay Simple Common Sense About Diversity And Immigration, from eleven years ago.) This arrangement preserves all the fascinating, distinctive characteristics of each culture in its own fertile soil, rather than throwing them all together into a gigantic global grinding machine to pulverize them into dust. The right way to experience real, “enriching” diversity in a healthy world is to travel. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Unlike the “Palestinians”, the Jews constitute an ethnically distinct people, with a specific (and highly influential) cultural history originating thousands of years ago in the land they now occupy. I endorse their wish to have a national homeland. (I won’t call it a “right”, because most talk of “rights” is just a mess of conflicting opinions, but I’m glad to see them have a place of their own.)

The land area of Israel is smaller than New Jersey, and it is surrounded by neighboring Arab nations compared to whose vast expanses Israel is a tiny speck. These Arab homelands — Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and others — could easily have absorbed the displaced Arabs from what became Israel; there were fewer than a million in 1948. But none did, not then or in the following 75 years; the answer, instead, was war, in 1948, 1967, and again in 1973. After that, the interests of the pan-Arab cause, apparently, were better served by maintaining Gaza and the West Bank as a festering wound, as a bloody shirt to wave, and as a sensational public theater of oppression, than by succoring, resettling, and assimilating the fellow Arabs living there.

In 2005, Israel ceded control of Gaza to the Gazans, who found themselves with twenty-five miles of prime Mediterranean seacoast, a seaport, abundant international aid, and the political freedom to arrange whatever sort of government they liked. In the election of 2006, they chose Hamas, a creation of the Muslim Brotherhood whose charter is essentially a manifesto for ceaseless, exterminationist jihad against Jews, and against the state of Israel. There were no more elections after that.

With its natural assets, international aid flowing in, oil and gas resources, and assistance from Arab brethren around the region, Gaza could have become a solvent, even prosperous place, with a healthy tourist industry. But having Hamas in charge meant that the bulk of whatever assets became available would be diverted, not to the prosperity of the Gazan people, but to the jihad against Israel, in the form of weapons, tunnels, and of course the personal enrichment of the party elites. And because there’s nothing that unifies a people as well as an external enemy, millions of Gazans were raised to think of little else than their bitter anger against the Jewish nation next door. Israel now “had the wolf by the ears”; for it to relax its vigilance would be catastrophic.

And so it was. On October 7th of last year, Hamas launched an assault of almost unspeakable horror — indiscriminately and mercilessly attacking, raping, slaughtering, torturing, mutilating, and kidnapping Israeli civilians, male and female, from infants to the elderly. Picture the most gruesome and bestial atrocities you can imagine anyone unrestrained by conscience or decency carrying out upon another human being, and you likely will not have imagined half of what happened that day.

It is hard to imagine that any nation in history, so attacked — especially given that Hamas has steadfastly refused to give up the hostages it took (who include, by the way, several Americans) — would fail to rise up in incandescent fury, considering also that nearly three-quarters of Gazans stand in support of what happened on that day in October. And so Israel has. They will not tolerate the existence of this threat on their doorstep any longer, and they will not cease until Hamas is destroyed. (I think, honestly, that if any one of us were in Israel’s place, we would feel the same way.)

Hamas asked for a war, and so they have got it — and in Gaza, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of daylight between the combatants and the civilians. There is no plausible scenario in which Israel relents before this hydra is slain. The suffering is Gaza is awful, but war is war, and this is war. Had Hamas not done what they did in October — a truly monstrous eruption of the blackest cruelty and evil — this would not be happening.

Having said all that, however, my own feeling is that this war is not our war. Israel is rich and technically advanced, and has a top-tier military — its Iron Dome, for example, appears to be a better anti-missile system than our own. It also has access to a worldwide network of very wealthy people and institutions. It has been our stupendous folly to invite the world’s ancient feuds and grievances to play themselves out in our own cities and institutions, and we are now seeing right here at home the strife and disintegration that were the inevitable result.

Between our shameful meddling in Ukraine, the disastrous result in Afghanistan, and widening war in the Near East, this hasn’t been — to put it mildly — a very good few years for U.S. adventurism abroad. Perhaps we might, before further hell breaks loose, take a moment to reflect on the advice John Quincy Adams (then Secretary of State under James Monroe) gave the nation in 1821:

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and
her prayers be.

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence,
she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy,
and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Over to you, Jacques. Am I seeing all of this wrongly?

Chaos On Campus

The spectacle unfolding at elite universities these in these last weeks has dominated the news.

On one hand, it’s been gratifying to watch the coalition of the Left coming apart, and to see factions that used to march in step now turning against each other. Writing seven years ago, I compared the tensions that would form within the Left as they spiraled deeper into their ideological gravity-well to the tidal effects that rip moons apart as they get too close to the planets they orbit:

I (and others) have argued that because of the radical skepsis at the heart of the modern Left — the legacy of the Enlightenment, in which nothing is exempt from the most withering and critical scrutiny — that there is no limiting principle, no bedrock, upon which this implacably descending ideological movement can ultimately come to rest.

(Two years ago I likened this to the collapse of massive stars. We might also borrow a different astronomical metaphor: it’s as if the Left, as it approaches its own singularity, is now crossing its Roche limit, where tidal forces begin to tear it to pieces.)

If, as the process accelerates, the Left continues to delaminate and disintegrate, perhaps only a smaller and smaller core will tumble into the abyss — as others … find bedrock, at last, below which they cannot descend.

I also wrote about this using a different metaphor — that grievance is “fractal” — back in 2014:

You start with the most basic grievance of all: everybody else against white males. That works for a while, but soon the fractal process gets to work, and next thing you know it’s blacks and hispanics against homosexuals — and if you let the algorithm run for while, and crank up the magnification a bit, before you know it you’ve got black women vs. gay men.

So yes, it’s nice to see dissension in the enemy’s ranks. (Auron Macintyre argues that the Right should just stand back and let the campuses fester, as an example for all.) On the other hand, though, the murderous anti-Semitism nakedly displayed at these events is horrifying, and I can hardly blame local authorities for using actual force to quell these disturbances. (It would have been nice, and might have prevented billions in property damage and a good deal of injury and death if they had also seen fit to do so in 2020, but that’s water over the dam at this point.

It’s important to understand what these kids are doing. Having grown up under the spell of our contemporary secular cryptoreligion, they have a gaping hole where all previous generations had a sense of a transcendent order to which they are connected — and because human nature, like Nature itself, abhors a vacuum, they needed something else to take the place of the sacred, and a way to order the world into good and evil. In this truncated, Earthbound universe, then, evil becomes Oppression, good becomes The Struggle, and the Victim the holiest of beings.

Just as in other religions, in this one the path of spiritual advancement is to move toward the sacred. And lacking anything genuinely transcendent to offer as a model, the shabby, sawn-off “religion” these crusaders follow impels them to become one with the sacred Oppressed. And so this is the posture they must adopt. On with the keffiyehs, comrades!

Donning the mantle of the Oppressed really takes some doing, though, if you’re a pampered student at one of the world’s most prestigious universities; in your heart you know you aren’t the real, sacred thing at all — and so you have to LARP with extra ferocity. (You have to do things like, having taken over a college building, start demanding that people provide you food as a matter of “humanitarian aid”.) This is why all of this zealotry is burning its hottest in citadels of privilege like Columbia and Harvard.

I have to say, though, that despite the outpouring of disgust from every corner of the Right, I actually feel kind of sorry for these kids. It isn’t their fault that they were brought up in such an educational, spiritual, moral, and political dung-heap; they’ve had nothing to guide them toward anything real or true or lasting or genuine, nobody to teach them how to be adults instead of spoilt children, and they’ve had none of the social and behavioral scaffolding that helped all previous generations find their place in a harmonious social order. How can we really expect them to behave like civilized men and women, if nobody’s ever shown them how?

“It Can’t Happen Here”

Oh, yes, readers: it can happen anywhere. Wake up.

Slow, I Know

I must apologize for not writing much these past few weeks; we’ve had personal matters to attend to, and have had to travel back and forth between home (the far end of Cape Cod) and New York several times (300 miles of driving each way).

There’s a lot I want to write about when I can find enough quiet time to do so; in particular I want to discuss a couple of books that I’ve just read. I also owe Bill Vallicella a response on a political topic that came up some weeks ago. But all of that will have to wait a little longer. I’m hoping to have some quiet time this week.

Meanwhile, I will comment on something I’ve been noticing for a while, but which, on my recent trips along Route 95 this past couple of weeks, seems to have gotten sharply worse: the collapse of proper driving on the highways.

The principles of driving on multi-lane highways are few, and they are simple. One among them is paramount, namely that you keep as far to the right as you can, moving to the leftward lanes only a) to overtake a slower vehicle or vehicles; b) to let vehicles enter the right lane from on-ramps; and c) to give a wide berth to cars and people stopped in the breakdown lane. It’s a simple system, and done right, it keeps things moving along as well as possible.

If you drive in Europe, you’ll notice that everybody there seems to understand how this simple system works. It’s never been adhered to as well here in America, but over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that it seems to have broken down completely. On my last two round trips to New York I was really shocked (and more than a little irritated) to see how often I ended up having to go around slow drivers by passing them on the right — and even more annoyingly, how often people would sit in the left lane going exactly as fast as the vehicle next to them in the right lane, thereby creating a rolling blockade, with blithe indifference to being flashed at from behind. Even big-rig truck drivers, who generally used to drive more competently than the average civilian, seem to be doing this all the time now as well.

What the highway pattern looked like on these last couple of trips was a great sea of dozy, incompetent drivers drifting along like floating clumps of seaweed in whatever lane they happened to find themselves, while a smaller subgroup of agile and frustrated drivers (like me) did their best to flit and dart in and out of whatever little temporary gaps might appear in the slowly shifting pattern. There were also always a few who were obviously at the end of their patience — tailgating, weaving through tiny openings at top speed, and often taking really audacious risks.

I’ve been driving on American highways for fifty-two years now, and it’s never been like this. What’s going on? Is it just part of the overall collapse of competence in every aspect of life? Is it just another aspect of the Great Enstupidation? If so, it’s a particularly annoying one.

The Octave Of Intelligence

With a hat-tip to Charles Murray on X: The Seven Tribes of Intellect.

(One has to wonder: what must it have been like to be John von Neumann?)

Blatant Discrimination!

… and rightly so. We should be pushing back as forcefully as we can against this: we should be creating a climate in which whatever demonic influence corrupted this poor woman into such hideous self-mutilation can no longer gain a foothold on weak minds and vulnerable souls.

Daniel Dennett, 1942-2024

I note with sadness the death of Daniel Dennett — who, whether you agreed with him or not (I did some of each over the years), was a brilliant thinker, a tremendously gifted writer, and a man of insatiable curiosity and outsized personality.

In five different areas — philosophy of mind, free will, scientific materialism, evolutionary theory, and religion — Daniel Dennett was a huge influence on my own intellectual development. This was not because I ended up persuaded of the truth of his positions (for years I was, regarding some of these topics, though not any longer) — but because he always did such a splendid job of defining, framing, sharpening and clarifying the essential questions, which is exactly what philosophers are supposed to do. I, and many many others, owe him a substantial debt of gratitude for that. (My first encounter with him was his book Consciousness Explained, which I read when it came out in 1987, and I subsequently read most of his other books, and many of his published papers.)

Dr. Dennett had been on my mind just this past week, because he had very recently given an interview to Jordan Peterson that I’ve been meaning to watch. You can find it here.

P.S. I’m sure my friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, will have something to say about Dennett’s passing, and I’ll link to it here when he does.

P.P.S. I just ran across someone on X called “Zoomer Alcibiades” who remarked that “Daniel Dennett has died, but as he had no qualia in the first place this is a relatively minor change for him.” (Harsh, but fair.)

Nothing Much Happening

Well, actually there’s rather a lot happening — among other things, Israel attacking Iran (on Ali Khameni’s birthday), jurors seated in the unbelievably outrageous show-trial against Donald Trump, the death of Dickey Betts, and the impending arrival of trillions of zombie cicadas. But I thought I’d just post this instead: