On BLM: In The Academy, Dissent Must Hide Its Face

June 17, 2020 – 1:18 pm

With a hat-tip to my e-pal David Duff, here is an open letter written by a black professor at UC Berkeley urging us not to be taken in by the infantilizing Democrat race-hustle known as Black Lives Matter.

The writer makes the essential points: that BLM promotes a malignant, paternalistic ideology that “strips black people of agency”; that explaining American black dysfunction in terms of white-supremacist oppression is absurd on its face, given that other groups — even other black groups — often outperform American whites in socioeconomic success; that the narrative of black helplessness, and dependence upon whites to alleviate their condition, is not only in itself a pernicious form of racism, but is deeply dispiriting and demoralizing for blacks, and that to teach black children this lesson of their own inadequacy predisposes them to a life of failure and sullen resentment.

The writer also points out that money given to BLM flows directly into Democratic Party coffers, and so works to preserve the political ascendancy of that party in precisely those places where black misery is at its worst — cities that have, in many cases, been under total Democrat hegemony for a half-century or more.

Black Lives Matter is a transparent affront against human dignity, and against the founding natural-rights principles of the American Founding. It is a Machiavellian scheme that, in a ruthless struggle for political power, pits one group of whites against another; the black people it purports to stand for are merely pawns on the chessboard. It is the tactical endgame of a decades-long strategic battle that began in the universities in the postwar era, preparing the ground for this final assault by conditioning generations of students to despise themselves, their nation, their history, and their culture.

I have reproduced the letter in its entirety, below. Thanks to Zero Hedge (itself under withering assault just now) for publishing it.

Read More »

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (9)

The Conversation We Aren’t Having

June 16, 2020 – 7:27 pm

Here are two black voices that have very little chance of being heard above the din. Both are tenured professors at Ivy League universities: Glenn C. Loury of Brown, and John McWhorter of Columbia. (Given, by the way, that Brown University was founded on slave-trade wealth, and Columbia was named after noted unperson Christopher Columbus, one wonders how much longer those institutions will keep their names.)

In this video the two men make a critical examination of the mass psychosis regarding race now engulfing America (and even Europe). Professor McWhorter also notes that this social convulsion is quite obviously religious in its nature, a point I’ve been hammering on in these pages for many years now. (There is some gratification, for those of us who have been writing about this for so long, in seeing this understanding — which is necessary for an accurate diagnosis of the disease that has been slowly wasting our civilization for decades now — gaining traction at last.)

The video is an hour long, but it is well worth your time. It must take a good deal of courage for these two men to speak such heresies as they do in this video, and go back to work every day right in the “belly of the beast”.

(A hat-tip to the indefatigable JK for this link.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Et Tu, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Roberts?

June 16, 2020 – 1:10 pm

It was a busy day yesterday at the Supreme Court — and from over here on the Right, a disappointing one as well. I haven’t read the opinions, so I should refrain from analysis, but the results — in particular, blows against freedom of association, the Second Amendment, and enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws — are deeply dispiriting.

Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz comments here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Law | Comments (2)

Matt Taibbi On The Death Of Journalism

June 14, 2020 – 1:10 pm

I wrote a while back about the tidal forces straining the Left as it falls deeper into the gravity well surrounding an all-consuming singularity. In a sharp essay just published, Matt Taibbi looks at the disintegrating American press.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Let It Go

June 11, 2020 – 5:29 pm

I’ve long supported subsidiarianism – the idea that government should be as local, and locally accountable, as possible. I’ve also been saying for years that the U.S. has become so large, and so diverse, as to be ungovernable by central authority. What’s worse, the power held by that central authority is so pathetically insecure that everyone imagines that if they try hard enough they can bite off a chunk of it. If sovereignty cannot secure its inventory of power, then public life becomes a feeding-frenzy, in which we end up biting pieces out of each other. In 2020, the water is dark with blood. (Simply put, we are watching sovereign power itself being looted.)

So if Seattle, etc., feel that they have so little in common with the historic American nation that they are unable to accept our traditions, mythos, and way of life, and unable to live an ordinary life in the United States without feeling driven at every moment by the need to bite off more power — then it would be better for everyone if they simply broke away. (Which they seem already to be doing.)

This isn’t a happy prospect, of course, for the people inside these places who still wish to live in the previously existing USA. We should do whatever is necessary to protect them as they depart, and – this won’t be easy – to make some arrangement in compensation for their property.

But it should by now be obvious to all that the United States as currently constituted simply isn’t working. It is a violently dysfunctional marriage, and the only hope is some sort of divorce. There can be no comity without commonality.

As for the brand-new nation known as CHAZ, it will be interesting to see how this little experiment in sovereignty plays out. I wonder if Mr. Raz Simone can chew what’s he’s bitten off.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (6)

Kandahar On The Puget

June 11, 2020 – 1:44 pm

Well! As I write an ISIS-style warlord, a rapper named Raz Simone, has declared a portion of a major American city — Seattle, Washington — to be an autonomous region no longer part of the United States of America. He is enforcing his rule over the Capitol Hill neighborhood of that city in the usual way, with violence and intimidation. Within this new nation are thousands of residents (I suppose they are now ex-pats), and dozens of businesses. Mr. Simone, who patrols his newly acquired fiefdom carrying an AK-47 and a sidearm, has already begun demanding “protection fees” from businesses within the occupied zone.

The new Marxist caliphate has the enthusiastic support of Seattle’s political class. From a recent item at City Journal:

Politically, the Seattle City Council has already begun to champion the protesters’ demands. Socialist Alternative councilwoman Kshama Sawant declared the takeover a “victory” against “the militarized police force of the political establishment and the capitalist state.” Three councilmembers have signaled support for a 50 percent reduction in the police budget, with additional councilmembers likely to support a similar policy in the coming weeks. Sawant also opened Seattle’s City Hall—which had been closed by the mayor—to protesters, who immediately occupied the building.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone [CHAZ] has set a dangerous precedent: armed left-wing activists have asserted their dominance of the streets and established an alternative political authority over a large section of a neighborhood. They have claimed de facto police power over thousands of residents and dozens of businesses—completely outside of the democratic process. In a matter of days, Antifa-affiliated paramilitaries have created a hardened border, established a rudimentary form of government based on principles of intersectional representation, and forcibly removed unfriendly media from the territory.

The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is an occupation and taking of hostages: none of the neighborhood’s residents voted for Antifa as their representative government. Rather than enforce the law, Seattle’s progressive political class capitulated to the mob and will likely make massive concessions over the next few months. This will embolden the Antifa coalition—and further undermine the rule of law in American cities.

“A victory over the capitalist state”, says councilwoman Kshama Sawant. (Ms. Sawant, by the way, is an immigrant from India. How lucky we are to have her, and the blessings of her gratitude toward her adoptive home. Diversity is our strength!)

Imagine being a resident or business-owner in this place. Armed thugs come round to extort money. Shall you call the police? Well, there’s this:

Simone was filmed allegedly assaulting multiple protestors who disobeyed his orders, informing them that he was the “police” now.

He’s right. The Seattle police won’t be going into CHAZ anytime soon, if ever, so I guess you’d better pony up. (“Who ya gonna call? NO-BODY!”)

If I had told you a few years ago that in 2020 the heart of an important American city — an area home to thousands of American citizens — would have been captured and occupied by a swaggering Marxist black-separatist warlord, while the city, state, and federal governments looked on with bemusement, or outright enthusiasm, you’d probably have said I was off my rocker. But here we are.

And… where is Seattle, anyway? Why, it’s in the state of Washington, of course. How about if I told you today that in a year or two the name of George Washington would be stricken from polite society, and expunged from the thousands of places across America whose name honors his memory; that his statues and monuments will torn down and broken to rubble, and his image expunged from our currency?

Crazy, right?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (5)

Repost: On Our New Religion

June 9, 2020 – 12:38 pm

I’ve said for years that the missionary Progressivism now in control of every aspect of our civilization can only be properly understood as a religion. And just as the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century were attended by great waves of repentance for our sins, and the fear of Hell, exactly so is the “Great Awokening” of recent years characterized by guilt and the horror of damnation:

 

Below is a repost of a piece on this topic, from 2017.

 

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Can Progressivism Really Be A Kind Of Religion?

 

William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, having read my own recent item on William Deresciewicz’s article about Progressivism-as-religion, has just offered a post expressing his disagreement.

Bill writes:

It is true that leftism is like a religion in certain key respects. But if one thing is like another it does not follow that the first is a species of the other. Whales are like fish in certain key respects, but a whale is not a fish but a mammal. Whales live in the ocean, can stay underwater for long periods of time and have strong tails to propel themselves. Just like many fish. But whales are not fish.

I should think that correct taxonomies in the realm of ideas are just as important as correct taxonomies in the realm of flora and fauna.

These are fair points. I think, however, that a historical study of Progressivism reveals a much closer cladistic relation between the modern Left and a certain strain of American Protestantism than exists between whales and fish: it is more, I think, like a lungfish that has learned to live out of water. The question “at what point is such an animal no longer a fish?” is an interesting one, and Bill would likely insist that living in water is essential to being a fish; but I’ll say that if the move is recent enough that the critter still has its scales and fins and gills — and if its mommy was a fish! — then the distinction is much less clear.

Bill continues:

Leftism is an anti-religious political ideology that functions in the lives of its adherents much like religions function in the lives of their adherents. This is the truth to which Prager alludes with his sloppy formulation, “leftism is a religion.” Leftism in theory is opposed to every religion as to an opiate of the masses, to employ the figure of Karl Marx. In practice, however, today’s leftists are rather strangely soft on the representatives of the ‘religion of peace.’ (What’s more, if leftism were a religion, then, given that leftism is opposed to religion, it follows that leftism is opposed to itself, except that it is not.)

Or you could say that leftism is an ersatz religion for leftists. ‘Ersatz’ here functions as an alienans adjective. It functions like ‘decoy’ in ‘decoy duck.’ A decoy duck is not a duck. A substitute for religion is not a religion. Is golf a religion? Animal rescue?

My quibble with this is that it appears, implicitly, to assign all of the taxonomic distinction to the single feature of religion that modern secular Progressivism explicitly rejects: theistic metaphysics. For this reason Bill applies the alienans adjective ‘ersatz’. I would, instead, describe Progressivism as a ‘non-theistic’ religion, or a crypto-religion. In this sense the adjective functions more in the way ‘electric’ does in ‘electric guitar’. The electric guitar is a cladistic descendant of the original ‘acoustic’ form of the instrument, and has so many features in common with it that it seems wrong not to think of it as a kind of guitar, despite its not having a hollow body shaped and braced to amplify and project its sound.

As for Leftism being ‘anti-religious’, it is of course overtly so, but with a peculiar fervor that is, I think, strongly reminiscent of the bitter sectarian enmities we see among conventional religions. If you see the secular Left as being itself a masked religion, then one begins to see it as anti-‘religious’ in the same way that Protestants are anti-Catholic, Sunnis are anti-Shi’ite, etc.

We might say that there is in the human cognitive apparatus a religious module that can handle a variety of inputs, but which produces similar output, and that there is a universal tendency for it to want to latch onto something.

Bill writes:

Now let’s consider the criteria that Deresiewicz adduces in support of his thesis that the elite liberal schools are religious. There seem to be two: these institutions (i) promulgate dogmas (ii) opposition to which is heresy. It is true that in religions there are dogmas and heresies. But communism was big on the promulgation of dogmas and the hounding of opponents as heretics.

Communism, however, is not a religion. At most, it is like a religion and functions like a religion in the lives of its adherents. As I said above, if X is like Y, it does not follow that X is a species of Y. If colleges and universities today are leftist seminaries — places where the seeds of leftism are sown into skulls full of fertile mush — it doesn’t follow that these colleges and universities are religious seminaries. After all, the collegiate mush-heads are not being taught religion but anti-religion.

On the view I’m offering above, Communism simply hijacked the religion module with some novel input. And while Bill is right that “if X is like Y, it does not follow that X is a species of Y”, it also does not follow that if X is like Y, X is not a species of Y. It may or may not be.

Bill mentions environmental extremism:

Pace Deresiewicz, there is nothing religious or “sacred” about extreme environmentalism.

No? I took up this point two years ago:

The mythos, from Genesis to Redemption, has been transplanted almost entirely without alteration:

In the beginning, there was only God.

From God arose Man.

Before his Fall, Man lived simply, and in perfect harmony with God. It was a Paradise on Earth.

Then a disaster happened. Man acquired a new kind of Knowledge: knowledge that he did not need, but that conferred upon him enormous temptation. In his unwisdom, and against God’s wishes, Man succumbed. His new Knowledge gave him great power, but at a terrible cost: he had turned his back on God, and his Paradise was lost. In his exile, he would wield his ill-gained power in prideful suffering and woe.

But then came a Messenger, offering the possibility of Redemption: if Man were to renounce his awful Knowledge, and learn once again to surrender himself to the love of God, he would be forgiven, and could find his way back to Paradise. It would not be easy ”” it would require that he make terrible sacrifices, atone for his many sins, and give up his worldly comforts and much that he had come to love ”” but if his faith was strong, his Salvation could become a reality, and he could once again live in Paradise, in sweet communion with God.

In order to move from the old religion to the new one, we need only substitute “Nature’ for “God’ in the passages above. That the two conceptions are almost perfectly isomorphic, and that both are manifestations of the same underlying impulse, should be plainly evident. But perhaps one must be a heretic oneself to notice it.

Very shortly afterward, I had further confirmation from a top-tier environmentalist, Rajendra Pachauri, the director of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said the following thing:

[T]he protection of planet earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.

Pace Bill, that seems pretty religious to me.

But the objections raised are good ones. If I want to say that X is a species of Y, then I should have some good reasons for doing so. Here are some that I had just offered in a response to our commenter Jacques, just before I saw Bill’s post:

In characterizing Progressivism as a religion I have in mind several things, for example:

1) The sacralization of various objects and concepts, such that an insufficiently worshipful attitude toward them is considered blasphemous;

2) The soteriological aspect of Progressivism, which aims always at some unattainable Utopia that is forever just out of reach;

3) The characterizing of dissenters as not just intellectual opponents, but as sinners and heretics embodying actual evil;

4) The important role of faith;

5) The suppression of factual inquiry in areas where articles of faith may be threatened;

6) The extent to which political and cultural norms and aims are expressed in terms of sin and atonement;

7) The historical (and behavioral) continuity of modern Progressivism with early American Protestantism, in a traceable sequence that retains the Puritan “mission into the wilderness’ while gradually becoming more and more secularized and worldly.

I would agree that the religious impulse is well-nigh universal, and in that sense a great many outwardly secular worldviews might be seen as religious. I think, however, that Progressivism needs “outing’ as such, especially given how many of the features of religion it instantiates, and how often it manifests outspoken hostility to traditional religions. (If nothing else, once you see it clearly as a crypto-religion the whole thing makes a lot more sense, and I like to help make sense of things.)

Finally, Bill lists some individual qualities that he considers essential to religion. They are:

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an “unseen order.” (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53) This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions. It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection. It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents. So it lies beyond the discursive intellect. It is a spiritual reality. It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience. An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

I’m not sure that Progressivism fails to meet this criterion. In particular I think that the Progressive belief in a kind of supernatural moral telos is plainly evident in phrases like “the right side of history” and “the arc of the moral universe bends toward Justice”.

2. The belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that “our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves” to the “unseen order.” (Varieties, p. 53)

See above. See also where failing to “adjust” will get you on a college campus these days. (Or ask Charles Murray.) If adjusting to the unseen order is the supreme good, then willfully refusing to do so is to choose evil. This is clearly consistent with the way heretics like Murray are treated.

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order. Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order. His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences.

Is this not plainly evident, for example, in the ethnomasochistic self-abasement of liberal whites for their own racism? Is this charge of moral deficiency not made on every page of Howard Zinn’s Progressive Bible, A People’s History of the United States? Is it not at the core of radical environmentalism, as noted above?

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

This is exactly, for example, what whites are now told about their racism: that no matter how hard they try, they will always be racist, in ways they can never see or fully understand, simply because they are white.

5. The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

Such as this. Or this.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

Well, God is off-limits. But we can get pretty close.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative. It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

I don’t think you could speak seriously about “the arc of the moral universe” without believing something like that.

In sum: the only salient difference, as far as I can see, between 21st-century Progressivism and conventional definitions of ‘religion’ is the absence of an explicit and supernatural concept of God — a concept that, if we look back at the centuries-long evolution and mutation of New England Protestantism in America, was gradually leached out (and, I would say, did not die, but went underground), leaving the sense of a sacred and urgent “mission” completely intact.

While we may dispute what does and doesn’t constitute a correctly defined “religion”, Progressivism is, in effect, a religion to the people who espouse it: it activates all the same behaviors, dispositions, and cognitive postures. What we might call the “religious stance” is, I believe, the most accurate way for the rest of us to confront it.

I doubt I will change Bill’s mind here (never an easy thing to do!), but I hope I’ve at least shown that there’s room for reasonable disagreement.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Religion | Comments (3)

My Mind’s Made Up. Please Don’t Confuse Me With The Facts.

June 8, 2020 – 1:59 pm

We hear a lot these days (possibly the understatement of the year) about bias; in particular “implicit bias”. In a recent article about racism, though, a young black writer mentions some other kinds of bias:

First, our intuitions about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what we can easily recall—news items, shocking events, personal experience, etc. Second, we are more sensitive to negative stimuli than we are to positive ones. These two bugs of human psychology—called the availability bias and the negativity bias, respectively—make us prone to doomsaying, inclined to mistake freak news events for trends, and blind to the slow march of progress.

“News items” tops the list for the first category. It should go without saying — I’ll say it anyway — that what becomes a “news item” and what doesn’t is a very selective process; the press has, perhaps, no greater power than deciding what it will ignore. (How many people know the name, for example, of Justine Damond?)

You can read this article — “The Racism Treadmill” — here. (And on a related note, see also this, about the ongoing mass slander against law enforcement.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (0)

Rear-View Mirror

June 7, 2020 – 11:59 am

The late Yuri Bezmenov explains. (To bring this fully up to date, we would swap out “Marxism”.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (12)

America, 2020

June 2, 2020 – 7:38 pm

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (3)

Repost: Death Of A Nation

June 1, 2020 – 12:26 pm

I’m browsing my old posts, to see how much of our current state of affairs was visible in prospect years ago. Here’s a long excerpt from something I published back in 2012.

 

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… Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation is young and virile enough to value opportunity over security, and while its people can muster up enough self-confidence, social cohesion and unity of purpose to agree upon national goals, and to make a serious effort to achieve them.

We are not such a nation any more — lean, athletic, vigorous and hungry. No, we are now in late middle age: weary, obese, weakened by cultural self-doubt and existential guilt, too fond of comfort, too wary of risk, exhausted by corrosive metabolic disease and the collapse of our immune system, sapped by parasites, and all but immobilized by all the clutter we’ve created and accumulated. We can hardly get off the couch even to look after our own most basic needs, and resent the idea that we should have to. We can hardly bear to look in the mirror.

What are the exceptions? They are to be found in small, agile, self-organizing entities that are lightweight enough, and focused enough, and cohesive enough, and intelligent enough, to move, to act, to create, to <em>do</em>. They must be nimble enough to live in the shadows of tottering behemoths without being trampled, or eaten — but the great, slow beasts are dying now; their time is nearly over.

When I visited Singularity University in April, one of the speakers (I think it was Paul Saffo) said that he thought that modern nation-states were becoming obsolete, and wouldn’t be around much longer. I can’t recall if he mentioned that this is particularly true of democracies, but to me it seems it must be. Will there still be a United States of America, as presently constituted, thirty years from now? How? Why?

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

How’s It Going?

May 31, 2020 – 10:32 pm

Haven’t looked at the news much for a week or so. Did I miss anything?

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (12)

Going Green

May 30, 2020 – 12:32 pm

Next time you hear someone refer to carbon dioxide as a “pollutant”, mention this:

Carbon Dioxide Fertilization Greening Earth, Study Finds

Carbon dioxide is plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide, make human food, and release oxygen. Humans breathe oxygen, eat plants, and release carbon dioxide. Simple and elegant.

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Global Warming | Comments (0)

A Fate Worse Than Death

May 28, 2020 – 8:58 pm

From John Hirschauer at National Review: “More Men Die, But Women Bear The Brunt“.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (6)

There Is Security In A Jail-Cell

May 27, 2020 – 12:17 pm

This Corona-chan crisis has been an excellent experiment in determining just how much we are willing to imprison and fetter ourselves to avoid danger.

Our prolonged interval of peace and prosperity since the Second World War — our isolation from the hormesis of what, throughout history, have been regular calamities and stresses — has made us unaccustomed to hardship. We recoil from it, and will make almost any sacrifice to avoid it.

What this crisis offers, to those who seek it, is a route to the most perfect of all systems of social control: the maintenance of a chronic sense of peril amongst a timid people. It becomes unnecessary to impose stifling restrictions; all that’s needed is to create the climate of fear, and the people will subdue and confine themselves. Outliers and dissidents are then easily controlled by shaming — or, if necessary, by the action of the State, with the grateful acquiescence of the general mass of the people, guided by a compliant (and complicit) press.

The image for this — if I had artistic skill I would paint it — is a frightened man sitting in the corner of a jail-cell, wearing a face-mask. The door is open.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (8)

Scary Vs. Dangerous, And The Madness Of Crowds

May 23, 2020 – 7:56 pm

Here’s a sharp little item on the miscalculation of risk.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Ye Have Been Weighed

May 21, 2020 – 8:58 pm

Over at American Greatness yesterday, Mackubin Owens has written a short piece entitled ‘Pandemic Is Shining a Light on the American Character‘. Indeed it has.

There have of course been many Americans who have shown great courage in manning their stations, and keeping necessary infrastructure working, despite personal risk. Had it not been for them, we’d rapidly have descended into real darkness.

Mr. Owens, however, points out three aspects of our current national character that this crisis has brought to view. They are of course generally human characteristics, but to take a purely essentialist view leaves out the ebb and flow of civic virtue in the life-cycles of civilizations. Much of what we have seen is due more specifically to the qualities of this society, at this late stage of its life.

We read:

The first is the predisposition of too many political leaders to tyrannical behavior. Theirs is real tyranny: the imposition of a one-size-fits-all, arbitrary, sweeping, draconian approach to the virus, which has caused massive — and mounting —collateral damage. It is the imposition of regulations that violate the Constitution itself by many governors and mayors.

Those who have revealed their inner tyrant include New York mayor Bill DeBlasio, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The essence of the will to tyranny was best summarized by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who said in response to unauthorized gatherings in her city, that to “save lives … we will shut you down, we will cite you, and if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.”

Of course, we are assured that those who issue these edicts do so for our own good. But as C.S. Lewis wrote in “God in the Dock: Essays on Theology”: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.”

Quite so, but there’s more to despotism than imposing harsh rules upon others: there is also the exemption of the despot himself from those rules. So we have Bill DeBlasio cracking down on “non-essential travel” while taking a motorcade from Gracie Mansion to Prospect Park to have a stroll, and Lori Lightfoot closing Chicago’s hair salons, then going off to get her hair done because she “has to be on TV”.

Second is moral narcissism:

…the tendency of many Americans to denigrate those who disagree with the draconian measures that have been deemed necessary to combat the virus. Moral narcissism goes beyond old-fashioned “virtue signaling.” The latter is a way to demonstrate one’s own moral superiority; the former requires one to shame those who don’t agree.

This was already in full view before the virus; it is nothing more, in this era of cryptoreligious zeal, than the shaming of heretics. It is no different from what we have already seen regarding “climate deniers”, “xenophobes”, and “deplorables” generally. We’ve seen it before, too: in the America of the 1850s.

Third is snitching:

The third negative feature — and perhaps the most troubling — is that this moral narcissism pits Americans against each other in a very dangerous way by inviting them to inform on their fellow citizens if they are not following the “rules.” Indeed, some states and cities have set up “tip” lines to allow informants to anonymously rat out their neighbors. Do we really want to set out on the path to becoming a surveillance state? Watch “The Lives of Others” if you really believe that this is a good idea.

I was expecting to see another item on the list: our ovine submission to overweening authority, our willingness to yield ancient and essential liberties at the first whiff of fear. I saw a meme recently featuring Junius Stearns’s painting of Washington addressing the Constitutional Convention, with text that said “JUST TO BE CLEAR, NONE OF THIS MATTERS IF THERE’S A VIRUS”. Yes, of course outbreaks of disease require some reasonable accommodation — but I think we were made, once upon a time, of sterner stuff.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Motive And Opportunity

May 17, 2020 – 2:09 pm

Two motives must be kept in mind as we debate public policy regarding this lockdown:

First, elected politicians have one universal and overriding priority, which is to preserve their seats, and so to minimize short-term public risk. If they are faced with a choice between, say, liberty and security, they will consistently, and quite naturally, choose security. They will always find it easier, in retrospect, to defend “an excess of caution” than a reasonably taken risk that went the wrong way. This is especially true in a society such as ours, which is far beyond its advancing era of vigor and conquest, and is now in a senescent stage of addiction to ease and comfort.

The second is inherent in the nature of our dominant “progressive” cryptoreligion — the truncated soteriology that has collapsed the hierarchy of heaven and earth, and so must work, for salvation, to do the impossible: to build a perfect world from imperfect matter. This combines beautifully, and symbiotically, with the nature of electoral politics. Because the goal is always out of reach, there is always more that must be done — and because the framework is in fact a religious one, involving what passes in a secular cryptoreligion for actual salvation, and therefore the only correctly oriented aim of the faithful, it becomes the foundation of correct moral choice as well. To resist the grant of power to the State that is necessary for our collective atonement and redemption is to be a limb of Satan — and the abstract State, in its actual instantiation, is simply our government officials. And what better job security can there be than an open-ended warrant to solve a problem that can’t be solved?

So far we have had a succession of such crusades in American life: the Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the First World War, the expansion of the voting franchise, Prohibition, the civil-rights movement, environmentalism, “climate change”, and now the constellation of intersectional-grievance “justice” movements that have gripped every stone in Western civilization like a strangler fig.

 

The Wuhan Red Death fits into this sequence perfectly: it provides an opportunity for collective, sacrificial atonement, while at the same time giving a plausible predicate for consolidating government power, and increasing the authority of officials at every level. Moreover, it does something else that is very attractive indeed: it reorients all of society from the horizontal to the vertical, by suppressing all horizontal interactions: individual economic activity, private and civic associations, and even the physical connections between families and friends. In doing so it changes, almost at a single stroke, the social system from a “peer-to-peer” arrangement to a “client-server” model — with the State, and therefore your elected “representatives”, as the “server”.

There is, then, an overwhelmingly powerful motive to make this crisis as deep, and as lasting, as possible. At first the ostensible goal was merely “flattening the curve”, so as to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed. We obeyed, and the goal was achieved. Now we hear, though, that the tourniquet must stay in place until there is a vaccine, or a cure, or the virus is eradicated — things that, just like the end of racism, or complete equality of outcomes, may never happen at all. It’s all for our safety and security, of course, whether we like it or not, and the proposition that ruthlessly locking everything down was the right policy is almost perfectly unfalsifiable: if the death toll turns out not to be particularly catastrophic after all, then of course we have the lockdown — and the officials who imposed it — to thank.

If all this were merely a question of public policy, it would be open to debate. That it has become instead a matter of morals — and therefore, under the hood, a matter of religion — is demonstrated by the extent to which dissent has become heresy. That dissent has in fact become heresy is shown, in turn, by the censorship of people like Dr. Knut Wittkowski, who thinks we have gone mad to be responding as we have, and whose video making this case was taken down by YouTube. (You can watch it here.)

So: motive and opportunity. The motive has been there for centuries. Rarely, though, has there ever been such an opportunity.

By Malcolm | Posted in Religion, Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (3)

Zhi Lu Wei Ma

May 12, 2020 – 12:06 pm

In a press-conference today Governor Andrew Cuomo twice referred to the current pandemic as “the European virus”.

I am old and experienced, and expect nothing but lies and deception from politicians generally, and Democrats in particular, but even by contemporary Blue-Team standards this is stunningly audacious. Everybody — everybody! — knows this thing did not come from Europe, so to say that it did is a transparently obvious test of power and allegiance.

Theodore Dalrymple once said:

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

A far older example: “Point Deer, Make Horse”. Spandrell explains.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (8)

Do They Still Make Tumbrels?

May 11, 2020 – 12:37 pm

We owe a debt of gratitude to a handful of journalists who have worked for years now to keep the true story of the Russiagate scandal (now trending as #Obamagate) in public view: Mollie Hemingway, Andrew McCarthy, Lee Smith, Sharyl Attkisson, John Batchelor, and a few others.

Over the last several days new information has come to light about the coordination and synchronization, from the highest levels of the Obama administration down to their compliant mouthpieces in the media, of the plot against the Trump presidency. Yesterday Ms. Hemingway published a summary and timeline of the operation, with particular emphasis on a meeting in the Oval Office on January 5th, 2017. You can (and should) read it here. You should also read Mr. McCarthy’s May 9th account of this disturbing series of events, here.

Presumably none of this is news to Messrs. Barr and Durham. It is now abundantly clear that the first years of the Trump presidency were methodically sabotaged by a ruthless, malevolent cabal whose controlling hierarchy extended to the very pinnacle of governmental power. Let us hope the worm is turning.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)

Tied Off

May 10, 2020 – 7:09 pm

The apt metaphor, I think, for what we have done to ourselves in response to this virus is the tourniquet. Leave it on too long and gangrene sets in. You can watch your own body begin to die and rot and stink.

“Ah, but it’s just a limb,” you say. “It’s worth losing a limb to save a life!”

Is it? What sort of life we are saving? Will the body so maimed still be able to walk, to run, to hunt, to work, to fight, to live? America even before this crisis was a nation grievously ill, sick with internal strife and disorder; its organs and parts attacking one another in a spreading collapse of harmonious function. If the cells and tissues of the body cannot even make the most basic discrimination of organic life — that between “self” and “other” — and if they cannot maintain the fundamental unity of purpose that must exist for any creature to sustain life, how can the body as a whole survive a shock as terrible as the one that has now set us reeling?

Anyone who has ever suffered a serious wound knows that you don’t really feel it at first; the body knows to suppress the pain long enough for us to try to stumble (or fight) our way to safety. It is only later that the real pain and shock and sepsis set in. I think we have not yet begun to understand the terrible scope of this injury — or how much of it we have, in our fear, inflicted upon ourselves.

Meanwhile: all around us, and within us too, are opportunistic pathogens. They will not fail to see their chance.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Gone, But Not Forgotten

May 10, 2020 – 1:21 pm

It’s Mothers’ Day. Here was mine. I miss her.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Service Notice

May 9, 2020 – 10:51 pm

Longtime readers will have noticed the lack of substantial content here recently – just little odds and ends, mostly.

It’s mostly the Groundhog-Day monotony of this new life: the days, and the news they bring, never vary much. There is very little vitality or energy in the air, or on the air — just the great battle of our era grinding on, Red vs. Blue, with this damned virus merely the latest battleground, and all clarity lost in the fog of war. I have no idea how this will end — what will be restored, what will be changed or lost forever, or what the balance of forces will be, when the smoke clears. Nor does anyone else. Any attempt I might make at analysis or prediction, beyond what I think should be clear to any intelligent, observant, and historically literate adult (and therefore not really worth writing about), seems pointless.

I’ve had personal projects — music, study — to work on. I take long walks around Wellfleet, and on the hilly trails in the woods. I cook. Etc. None of it makes for very interesting blog-fodder. It’s increasingly hard to find things to say that I haven’t already said, or to find new ways to say the things I have said.

This ennui will pass; it always does. Do forgive me.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (2)

Kung Fu In 4-D

May 9, 2020 – 12:18 pm

Here’s something beautiful, from a visual artist by the name of Tobias Gremmler. Watch in full-screen.

By Malcolm | Posted in Martial Arts, Curiosities | Comments (1)

Code Review

May 7, 2020 – 4:31 pm

Here’s another item over the transom from our e-pal Bill K. — a software engineer’s look at the modeling software that was relied upon to shut down the West. (As a former C++ developer myself, I can say that it sounds awfully bad.)

By Malcolm | Posted in Science, Rubbish | Comments (7)

Another Small Victory

May 7, 2020 – 4:27 pm

The big news today is the vindication of General Flynn, but there was another heartening local item as well: a federal judge has blocked Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker’s executive order keeping gun shops closed.

Today, U.S. Judge Douglas P. Woodlock issued a preliminary injunction to prevent Massachusetts from enforcing the unlawful order. “We don’t surrender our constitutional rights. These plaintiffs have constitutional rights that deserve respect and vindication, and it becomes necessary for a court to do that rather than the executive when the executive declines,” said Judge Woodlock.

Judge Woodlock’s remark that “We don’t surrender our constitutional rights” may be a bit of an exaggeration — lately, it seems, we gladly surrender them at the first whiff of fear, so far have we fallen — but it’s nice to see a little vestigial backbone.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Law | Comments (1)

Some Good News, For A Change

May 7, 2020 – 4:16 pm

Wonderful news, just in: the DOJ has dropped the case against Michael Flynn. The prosecution, which had no basis in law and will be judged by history as part of a political scandal without rival in the modern era, began to fall apart last week after recently revealed documents revealed the enormity of the FBI’s malfeasance.

Now, I hope, General Flynn — whose dignity under conditions that would have broken most men is a tribute to military tradition — can begin his counterattack. He has a great deal to recover: his despicable persecution has cost this patriot his home and his job, besmirched his name, and reduced him to penury. Perhaps now all of this can be restored. I hope against hope that those who participated in this vile cabal — this viper’s nest of corruption, and abuse of the highest public trust — may be brought at last to justice, and made to walk in shame before the eyes of all the nation.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics, Law | Comments (0)

The Burnt Fool’s Bandaged Finger Goes Wabbling Back To The Fire

May 4, 2020 – 12:41 pm

Our e-pal Bill K. sent along the following updated parable this morning:

 

 *  * *  *  *  *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

The ANT AND THE
GRASSHOPPER

This one is a little different …


Two Different Versions …
Two Different Morals

 

OLD VERSION

 

The ant works
hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper
thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the ant is warm
and well fed.

The grasshopper has
no food or shelter, so he
dies out in the cold.

MORAL OF THE OLD STORY:

 

Be responsible for yourself!

 

MODERN
VERSION

The ant works hard
in the withering heat and the rain all summer long, building his house
and laying up supplies for the winter.

The grasshopper thinks the ant
is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper
calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be
allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving..

CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN,
and ABC show up to
provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper
next to a video of the ant
in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
America is stunned by the sharp contrast.

How can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper
is allowed to suffer so?

Kermit the Frog appears
on Oprah
with the grasshopper
and everybody cries when they sing, ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’

Occupy the Anthill stages
a demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the

Black Lives Matter group singing, We shall overcome.

Then Reverend Al Sharpton
has the group kneel down to pray for the grasshopper
while he damns the ants. He later appears on MSNBC to complain that rich people do not care.

Former President Obama condemns the ant
and blames
Donald Trump, President Bush 43, President Bush 41, President Reagan, Christopher Columbus, and the
Pope
for the grasshopper’s
plight.

Nancy Pelosi & Chuck Schumer
exclaim in an interview on The View
that the ant has
gotten rich off the back of the
grasshopper,
and both call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, the EEOC drafts
the Economic Equity &
Anti-Grasshopper Act
retroactive to the beginning of
the summer.

The ant is fined for failing to hire a proportionate number
of green bugs and,
having; nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by the

Government Green Czar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and given to the grasshopper.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper
and his free-loading friends finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in,

which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house,
crumbles around them because the grasshopper doesn’t maintain it.

The ant has disappeared in the snow, never to be seen again.

The grasshopper is found dead in a drug related incident, and the house, now abandoned, is taken
over by a gang of spiders who terrorize the ramshackle, once prosperous and peaceful, neighborhood.

The entire Nation collapses
bringing the rest
of the free world with it.

MORAL OF THE STORY:

Be careful how you vote in 2020.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (4)

The Mouse That Roared

May 3, 2020 – 1:38 pm

Here are the latest Wuhan Red Death stats from the CDC. The page shows the week-by week numbers since the beginning of the outbreak. As of May 1st, the revised U.S. total is 37,308.

Enjoy your new economy.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (1)

Obstruction Of Injustice

May 3, 2020 – 12:25 pm

It’s becoming clearer every day that Michael Flynn’s persecution was a nothing more than a politically motivated frame-up (many of us have known this for ages, but in the past week documents have come to light that make it irrefutable). But why Flynn?

Andrew McCarthy gives us the reason: he was a liability to the ongoing plot against Donald Trump.

Details here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

Sez Who?

May 2, 2020 – 1:14 pm

Here’s the question that interviewers should be putting to governors:

“If, in normal times, you were to announce as a matter of executive fiat that people must close their businesses, could not assemble in groups over a certain size, and must stay home except for travel you deem essential, it would seem an absurdity. People would say that you were grossly, and obviously, exceeding your authority.

That you are doing this now, therefore, suggests that you believe there must be some explicit grant of power, somewhere in your state’s legal framework, that gives you the authority to do these things in response to this emergency. Can you tell us where we can read this statute, so that we may clearly understand its limits?”

Perhaps, for all I know, there are such grants of power in various state codes and constitutions. But it would be good to force these people to provide some clarity.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (17)

PSA

May 1, 2020 – 1:55 pm

In times of crisis, it’s important to do what we can. One of the ways good citizens have responded to our current health emergency has been by sewing their own protective face-masks.

Given that many of you, I’m sure, would find it easier to shove a camel through the eye of a needle than to wield a needle in the public interest, I’m doing my part today by providing a helpful and instructive video.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (4)

With A Little Help From My Friends

April 27, 2020 – 10:29 pm

Like so many other musicians, during this enforced quarantine I’ve been collaborating online with my pals. In my case it’s the group of talented players and singers I get together with every September for a musical retreat out in the Isles of Shoals. I put up a mix a little while back of one of the songs we’ve been working on, and now we’ve made it into one of those multi-paneled music videos that have been popping up everywhere.

Here it is:

The personnel: Kemp Harris on lead vocal. The guitars are by my boyhood friends Carl Sturken and Joe Abelson. Ray Castoldi (music director at Madison Square Garden, and organist for the New York Mets) is playing the keyboards. On drums is Gary Lue, and on bass & congas we have Al Hospers. Ray’s wife April played tenor, while Joe’s two sons Rico and Max, and Al’s friend Michelle Boggs, rounded out the horn section. The high female part in the background vocals is Christie Moran, and the other female singers are Jackie Muniz and Erin Dow.

My own contributions: percussion, background vocals, editing and mixing.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (7)

Live And Learn

April 25, 2020 – 12:39 pm

I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog lately. Life is beginning to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, with few new impressions to think or write about (other than the books I’ve been reading in the evenings the past couple of weeks, which I’m still digesting). I’ve been spending a lot of time down in the studio, working on our collaborative music project (the first installment of which, for those of you who missed it, you can listen to here).

Lewis Amselem, a.k.a. DiploMad, has been lying low as well, but yesterday he emerged to post a piquant item about the lessons we can take from the Wuhan Red Death and this protracted surrender of our liberties lockdown.

Money quote:

I have written a lot about the “experts,” their models, and policy prescriptions, and how they have produced the dire predicament in which we find ourselves. I will try not to repeat it all, but, of course, will just a bit…

A real expert is somebody who can keep a farm running, or fix a complex piece of machinery, or build a house, or keep a fleet of trucks on the road, or pick off an enemy sniper at 600 meters. Those are true experts. They produce tangible results. Getting a university credential from “experts” does not make you an expert, it makes you an “expert.”

Read the whole thing here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (1)

Musical Interlude

April 19, 2020 – 11:41 pm

Just to take our minds off the Wuhan Red Death for a moment, here’s some music you might enjoy. The piece is called Spirit Moves, and it’s the opening track from Vince Mendoza’s album Instructions Inside, which I recorded and mixed back in March of 1991.

We did the sessions at Edison Recording in midtown Manhattan, with a venerable ensemble of musicians. This track features Peter Erskine on drums, Will Lee on bass, Don Alias and Manolo Badrena on percussion, Bob Mintzer on tenor, and John Scofield on guitar; the players overdubbed together to a few sequenced parts that Vince had prepared ahead of time. There were only one or two takes.

I did a lot of work with Vince back then; this was the second of two albums we made together in New York in a fairly short timespan (the first was Start Here, which we’d recorded about sixteen months earlier at my alma mater, Power Station). I’m still very fond (and proud) of both of these records. Vince Mendoza is a profoundly gifted composer and arranger, and even though we did these albums on tight schedules, we always had a lot of fun working together.

Headphones on then, and have a listen. If you want to hear more, the full albums are linked above.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (1)

Wuhan Red Death: The Boogaloo Scenario

April 17, 2020 – 12:39 pm

Our reader the indefatigable JK has introduced me to a blogger I’d never heard of: B.J. Campbell, whose posts are collected under the title Handwaving Freakoutery.

The post that JK sent me today is about the possible consequences for social order of this ongoing (and, increasingly, arguably unconstitutional) lockdown.

It begins with an amusing roundup of the contradictions and inconsistencies of the guidance we’ve been given by our overseers. That part’s worth a chuckle, perhaps, but then the author moves on to more serious business — starting with a persuasive argument against the official line that the virus outbreak originated in a “wet market”:

This thing came from a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We don’t need evidence gift wrapped by the Chinese to make this case. We just need simple mathematics, and the case is rock solid.

The “official channels” have maintained for four months that this virus originated in a wet market in Wuhan, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the world’s Mecca of studying emergent SARS coronaviruses that originate in bats. A lot of speculation by the media has gone into supporting this case, as well as the solid support of the Chinese government, but the case is obviously garbage. I grant that wet markets for exotic harvested wild meats are a great vector for something like this, but set that aside for a moment.

There are between a hundred and a thousand wet markets in China. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Vietnam. There are well over a thousand wet markets in Thailand. There are hundreds or thousands of wet markets in Laos, hundreds or thousands more in Cambodia, hundreds or thousands more in Burma and Myanmar and Malaysia. Nobody knows for sure, but it’s completely reasonable to estimate the total number of wet markets in East Asia being at least ten thousand.
But only one of these ten thousand or more wet markets is two blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The chance that a brand new never before seen SARS coronavirus variant would emerge at the only wet market two blocks from a laboratory whose primary function is to study never before seen SARS coronavirus variants, specifically from bats, is simply too astronomical to believe. If a brand-new world epidemic virus were to emerge every day from a wet market in east Asia, it would be three years or more on average before one emerged from Wuhan. No honest scientist would believe that coincidence given what we know.

Even that is just the beginning; the rest of the article discusses how our stifling, viscous bureaucracy smothered efforts to develop testing. It reminded me at once of Tocqueville’s description of the democratic form of tyranny:

“…it rarely forces men to act, but constantly opposes itself to men’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it presses down upon men, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and it finally reduces each nation to no longer being anything but a herd of timid and industrious animals, whose shepherd is the government.”

What the FDA and CDC did in the early days of this crisis, until Messrs. Trump and Pence called them off, exemplifies this to perfection.

The rest of the post discusses the road to “boogaloo”: the point in an accelerating social breakdown where the excreta impact the rotating air-circulator.

Read it all here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

When The Cure Is Fatal

April 15, 2020 – 7:37 pm

Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey published a brief item today about the cost, in human life, of this indiscriminate shutdown of the American economy. A key excerpt:

Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase in suicides according to data provided by the National Bureau of Economic Research and the medical journal Lancet. These are facts based on experience, not models. If unemployment hits 32%, some 77,000 Americans are likely to die from suicide and drug overdoses as a result of layoffs. Scientists call these fatalities “deaths of despair”.

Then add the predictable deaths from alcohol abuse caused by unemployment. Health economist Michael French from the University of Miami and a co-author found a “significant association between job loss” and binge drinking and alcoholism.

The impact of layoffs goes beyond suicide, drug overdosing and drinking. Overall, the death rate for an unemployed person is 63% higher than for someone with a job, according to findings in Social Science & Medicine.

Layoff-related deaths are likely to far outnumber the 60,400 coronavirus deaths predicted through August.

Read the rest here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture | Comments (4)

Separation Of Powers

April 15, 2020 – 6:21 pm

The criticism of President Trump’s response to the Wuhan Red Death has been all over the map; in general whatever he does is wrong, regardless of whether Blue politicians have done the same or worse in their own bailiwicks, and whatever he doesn’t do is a crime of omission. He’s been faulted at every step either for assuming dictatorial power, or for not assuming dictatorial power. This is always done in hindsight, of course, and without regard to truth or falsehood, because, as George Orwell explained so well, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — and our media, who still regard themselves as controlling the present, do what they can every day to control the past. The “memory hole” is very real, and they make liberal use of it, on the (mostly correct) assumption that most people don’t remember much at all about the chronology of events even a few weeks old. (This is why, for example, we don’t hear much about Nancy Pelosi telling people to get out and eat in Chinatown more than three weeks after President Trump had declared the Wuhan virus a U.S. public-health emergency and banned travel from China.)

Regarding Presidential authority, there seems to be deep confusion, even among some of my most highly educated friends, about the nature of sovereignty under the American Constitution. The truth, at least in terms of original Constitutional principle, is that both the federal and state governments are supreme sovereigns. This is possible because their sovereignty is limited by the Constitution to different realms: by ratifying the Constitution the States, acting as independent entities, agreed to delegate a carefully enumerated list of powers to the Union, with all powers not so enumerated reserved to the States. (This has, of course, been subject to a lot of judicial erosion over the past century or so, and much of the clarity of the original idea has been obscured and confounded by “emanations” and “penumbras”, but the principle of separated realms of sovereignty is still the default.)

Without exception, however, all of the liberal friends I have spoken to about this seem to think that the whole arrangement is a simple hierarchy. One person I spoke to said that the president was “the boss” of the state governors, while another said they had to “answer to” him. This is quite astonishing to me; I think the power-sharing arrangements of the States with the Union were well understood by even the average adult American until quite recently. (It certainly was in Tocqueville’s time; he was impressed by how much even the rustics he met knew about American civics.) There’s a lot of talk about when Mr. Trump is going to “re-open” the economy, and end the lockdown — but aside from exerting the federal government’s constitutional powers over interstate and international travel, he really doesn’t have the power to do much other than make suggestions. Most of the real power still lies with the States, varying internally by the particulars of their own constitutions.

There are, of course, some open questions about all of this. This is a new situation, and many of these issues have never been clarified in court. If you are curious, and have fifteen minutes or so, you might like to listen to John Batchelor’s discussion last night with law professor John Yoo. It’s in two parts, here and here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

The Devil Finds Work For Idle Hands

April 13, 2020 – 12:49 pm

I’ve previously mentioned the musical retreat I enjoy each September in the far-flung Isles of Shoals. I get together with an eclectic assortment of musicians (both pros and civilians), and we have a fine time as the house band for all the people enjoying Star Island‘s final conference of the year.

With this global panic trapping us all at home, we thought it would help to pass the time if we worked on a collaborative recording project. Thanks to the magic of Al Gore’s “Internet”, we can easily pass audio files around, and so members of our little team have been recording their respective tracks and sending them on to the project’s nerve-center: Knob and Kettle Studio, Wellfleet, MA (which happens to be a room in my basement).

Our first effort was one of the crowd-pleasers we play each year: the Joe Cocker arrangement of the Beatles classic A Little Help From My Friends.

That’s Kemp Harris on lead vocal. The guitars are by my boyhood friends Carl Sturken and Joe Abelson. Ray Castoldi (music director at Madison Square Garden, and organist for the New York Mets) is playing the Hammond B3. On drums is Gary Lue, and on bass & congas we have Al Hospers. Ray’s wife April played tenor, while Joe’s two sons Rico and Max, and Al’s friend Michelle Boggs, rounded out the horn section. The high female part in the background vocals is Christie Moran, and the female vocal ad-libs are Erin Dow.

My own contributions: percussion, most of the background vocals, editing and mixing.

Have a listen.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (2)

When I’m 64

April 13, 2020 – 11:57 am

When I get older, losing my hair
Many years from now…

Or, as it happens, today. My, how time does fly when you’re having fun.

As always: natal salutations to Guy Fawkes, Thomas Jefferson, F.W. Woolworth, James Ensor, Butch Cassidy, Sir Arthur “Bomber’ Harris, Robert Watson-Watt, Samuel Beckett, Harold Stassen, Stanislaw Ulam, Eudora Welty, Howard Keel, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Ken Nordine, Don Adams, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Seamus Heaney, Paul Sorvino, Jack Casady, Tony Dow, Lowell George, Al Green, Ron Perlman, Christopher Hitchens, Max Weinberg, and Garry Kasparov.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (5)

Gonna Get You All

April 9, 2020 – 8:38 pm

Yesterday was this year’s “Pink Moon”.

Here’s a lovely song by that name, from the long-departed Nick Drake.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (0)

Jesters Do Oft Prove Prophets

April 9, 2020 – 8:35 pm

From the Babylon Bee:

Bernie Sanders Drops Out As Campaign Goals Of Locking Everyone Up, Destroying Economy Already Achieved

Full story here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (0)

John Prine, 1946-2020

April 8, 2020 – 1:05 pm

I was very sorry to learn this morning that John Prine has died of the Chinese coronavirus. He was a truly gifted songwriter, and made his gift a gift to us all.

I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I will never forget seeing him perform in Princeton’s Alexander Hall on April 1st, 1972, where he opened, completely incongruously, for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He stood alone on stage with his guitar; nothing more was needed.

Here is his song Angel From Montgomery, which has been covered by many other artists. One of those is Bonnie Raitt, who joins him in this live recording.

By Malcolm | Posted in Music and Recording | Comments (1)

Casting Out The Devil

April 7, 2020 – 11:12 pm

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this Wuhan-virus emergency is how clearly it reveals the breadth and depth of the great fissure dividing the nation. In times of crisis, families set aside their internal squabbles:

Me and my brother
We fight with each other
But woe betide
The guy from outside.

When the towers fell in 2001, George W. Bush was the U.S. president, and Rudy Giuliani was the mayor of New York. Both were polarizing figures, to say the least, and both were roundly despised by the the Blue faction who, then as now, held the commanding heights of culture and media. But in those grim days, with the stench still rising from Ground Zero, and the certain knowledge that an invisible enemy was out to kill us all, a great surge of fellowship bound us together as a nation. It didn’t last all that long, but at least it happened.

Not now. As frightening an enemy as this virus has been for the nation and the world, for Blue there is an enemy still greater: the man in the White House. Whatever comity and commonality still existed in 2001 was enough to remind us of what remained of our familial national ties — and, as several now-deceased parties in the Dar-al-Islam were to learn in the following years, “woe betide the guy from outside” was still in effect. Now our own president is, for half the nation, “the guy from outside”: the external enemy who must be destroyed, no matter what the cost.

The extent to which this is now an axiom, an unshakable article of moral faith, is easily seen by the way that people who associate with the president are treated. I have a very close friend, a man of high intelligence, with whom I was chatting about the crisis the other day. Being generally a Blue-leaning sort, and a consumer of mainstream news (we usually get around this by just not talking about politics), he lit into Mr. Trump for what he understood to be catastrophic mismanagement. I said that while I’m sure in hindsight errors could be found, I thought there was an awful lot of hostile spin going around, and suggested that if Barack Obama were still president, and had handled every aspect of this emergency just as Trump has, he’d be getting much softer treatment from the press. My friend disagreed, with considerable vigor. I pointed out that even Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom (!) had praised Trump for his response, and my friend said they were just saying that because they had to.

Think of that: the strength of this faith is such that, rather than entertaining, even for a moment, the possibility that Donald Trump had done a single thing right, my friend was forced instead to accuse two prominent Democratic governors of lying — and he did so entirely without hesitation or reflection. The same has been true about other public figures, formerly universally respected, such as William Barr, Anthony Fauci, and Deborah Birx; they have all been assumed after decades of distinguished and uncontroversial public service, to have been corrupted by the Devil. That is the power of the repulsive force that divides us. One half of the nation believes that the other half is not merely wrong, but evil. And there can be no compromise, no alliance, with evil. Even if it kills us.

To borrow a metaphor from Chiang Kai-shek, the Wuhan virus is a disease of the skin — but the nation was already sick unto death with a disease of the heart.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (6)

All Or Nothing

April 5, 2020 – 7:24 pm

Curtis Yarvin (whose erstwhile nom de plume “Mencius Moldbug” we will, for the time being, continue to mention), has posted a new essay calling for a temporary dictatorship to combat the Wuhan coronavirus. After a discussion of the many, many shortcomings, weaknesses, and debilities of our national government, and of democracy in general — which no longtime reader of Yarvin should by now have any reason to quibble with — he proposes a Coronavirus Authority with “plenary” power: in other words, an absolute sovereign.

It’s all a little over the top, even for Mr. Yarvin, who seems increasingly unconcerned with connecting his possible worlds, as robustly conceived as they always are, with any possible future of the actually existing one.

Here we go:

The strongest possible response will come from a new agency, built as a startup. This Coronavirus Authority will scale up faster than any existing organization can execute. It will use the old agencies only where it finds them useful. And it will dissolve itself once the virus is beaten.

And all the CVA needs to do its job is plenary (unconditional) authority over all federal, state, local and private actors. In theoretical terms, its sovereignty is absolute — but both temporary (limited in time, to the end of the war) and partial (applied only to its specific mission or scope). A small thing!

Dissolve itself? Hm. Is it common for absolute sovereigns to abdicate? My own understanding has always been that those wielding power generally develop a taste for it; even the limited accretions of power that we have bent the Constitution to grant various bureaucracies during the great crises of the past have proven to be very sticky indeed. (The authoritative work on this topic is Crisis and Leviathan, by Robert Higgs; now would be a good time for everyone, especially Mr. Yarvin, to read it.) I think also that it is terribly optimistic to grant any governing entity unlimited power to manage an existential crisis while imagining that you can constrain its “scope”; the scope of any aspect of State power can be relied upon to expand at every opportunity, and almost never to contract.

But whatever the pros and cons of Mr. Yarvin’s proposed dictatorship, it certainly won’t fly in the United States. In his closing remarks, Yarvin reminds us of the distinctions the Roman made between dictator and tyrant, but both arouse an instinctive revulsion in the American soul (or at least they did until recently). As Patrick Henry said: “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel.” And so we do, or at least enough of us to make any sort of temporary dictatorships a casus belli.

This essay is marred, too, by an uncharacteristic note of petulance; at one point, for example, Mr. Yarvin calls upon Donald Trump to “do the decent thing and resign”. Really? What then? Is he so fond of Mike Pence, who has for some time now been tasked with orchestrating the Federal response that, Mr. Yarvin explains, has failed so predictably, and so spectacularly? Or should they both resign, and hand the White House to Nancy Pelosi? Or should we have a special election right away, while everybody is locked in their houses? Such carelessness is oddly un-Moldbuggian.

I’ve long been an admirer of Curtis Yarvin’s work. His writing has influenced my own thinking over the years, and I thank him for that. But he has always been better at description than prescription, and perhaps more so than ever in this latest essay.

Read it here.

By Malcolm | Posted in Society and Culture, Politics | Comments (12)

Sign Of The Times

April 1, 2020 – 12:49 pm

Just to remind you, readers, as you contemplate the millenarian tableau unfolding before us: yes, there is also a comet. (Of course.)

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (8)

Question

March 30, 2020 – 12:31 pm

I’ll confess that all this self-isolation has hardly been difficult for me. I’m a homebody by nature anyway, and having an excuse not to go anywhere suits me fine. I’ve been reading a lot, walking in the woods, cooking, and spending a lot of time on various musical projects downstairs in the studio.

One thing I have not been doing is paying much attention to the news. In boringly typical fashion, the media have taken up this crisis as the latest cudgel to bash Donald Trump for allegedly botching the U.S. response. Now I know of course that they can’t be trusted; if he were healing the sick by laying on of hands, they’d arraign him for inadequate “social isolation”. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

So, what do you think? Did Mr. Trump fail bigly here? I can’t be bothered to figure it out for myself: I have a nice South Asian curry to prepare in the kitchen, and a song that needs mixing downstairs.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (14)

Rashomon, Redux

March 29, 2020 – 1:47 pm

In response to Friday’s post about the different emotional reactions of Democrats and Republicans to the Wuhan-virus pandemic, our longtime commenter, the indefatigable JK, posted a link to a thoughtful essay on the topic. I though it worth promoting to a post of its own, so here it is.

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (12)

Rashomon

March 27, 2020 – 12:23 pm

Make of this what you will:

By Malcolm | Posted in General | Comments (13)

Pronoia

March 26, 2020 – 6:46 pm

With a hat-tip to our pal Bill Keezer, here’s a rumination by Victor Davis Hanson on the challenge facing Donald Trump in the coming weeks and months.

By Malcolm | Posted in Politics | Comments (3)