Category: society

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Males woes: Charles Murray, Francis Fukuyama, and Heather MacDonald

Charles Murray is the author of The Bell Curve, Human Accomplishment and Coming Apart, among other works. Any conservative minded person ought to have read these books, and liberals who want to inquire into why we think them mostly wrong. His insights into why things are getting worse, for men, for family formation, for society, and then for women, provides a necessary corrective to Steven Pinker’s rosy view set forth in Enlightenment Now.

There is a moment in the interview below which prompted a blog posting this morning. The issue was the sorting of society on the basis of cognitive ability, which is the essential claim of The Bell Curve. Murray remarks (at 15:30) that “What we are doing now is creating a world which is congenial to people of high IQs. People of high IQ love complexity. They think complexity is fun. That’s why you have Kohlberg at Harvard coming up with his seven stages of moral reasoning….. But, a world governed by that kind of complexity is difficult to deal with if you are not very smart”.

The interview is well  worth watching. He preaches the idea that the point of law should be to provide a clear moral compass so as to allow people the maximum moral autonomy which is what he calls “libertarianism”.

I bring up this issue of simplicity and complexity because I spent an evening with liberals last night, possibly wrecking their digestion and certainly providing them with a memorable conflict. At the basis of much of the disagreement was the idea that social democracy – assuming we know what that means  – is a morally superior system because it displays the highest levels of compassion. Hence belief in social democracy means necessarily that one is morally superior, because one has more compassion. Thus if I hold that 53% of GDP should be spent by government, and my political opponent says 46%, or 36%, I do not have to think hard about the consequences of a bloated state sector because I have a superior measure of compassion.

Since the criterion of political virtue is compassion, and compassion is best judged by how well society takes care of the poor and the indigent, and thirdly, that this compassion is accomplished through Scandinavian style state intervention, then in substance there is not much further one needs to think about politics.

Forget for a moment the doubtful superiority of Scandinavian welfare statism for showing compassion. My objection is deeper, and less fact-based.

I find such a one-dimensional view of the purposes of political life repugnant. What about virtue, accomplishment, achievement, belonging, and greatness, collective or individual, in a society that understands and appreciates what greatness is?

I have just begun reading Francis Fukuyama’s Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, and already it is evident that he is talking about the real issues of our time.

“But as important as material self interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, motives that better explain the disparate events of the present. This might be called the politics of resentment. In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity has been affronted , disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage”. (at page 7)

And what group has undergone a persistent social decline of status in the past thirty years? All men? Men of the American working class? Take your pick. This leads us to what Scott Adams and I have been talking about in relation to the Kavanaugh witch hunt. It is not merely the American working class male that is taking a beating, it is all males.

Heather MacDonald writes about the feminist industrial complex  in City Journal:

Our booze-fueled hook-up culture has made relations between men and women messier than ever, leaving many girls and women with pangs of regret—but those regrets do not equal rape. If we were actually in the midst of an “epidemic of sexual assault,” as New Jersey senator Cory Booker asserted the evening of the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings, we would presumably have seen women and girls take protective actions, such as avoiding frat parties and flocking to single-sex schools. None of those protective actions has occurred, however. Either women are too clueless to avoid patent danger, or the epidemic of sexual assault is a fiction. All evidence points to the latter conclusion. Judge Brett Kavanaugh may be the latest male to have his life torn apart by that fiction, but he won’t be the last.

Accordingly, I think a male backlash is finally going to manifest itself, not just by dropping out, as young men have been doing, but by male identitarian politics at the ballot box. It cannot start too soon. Compassion and social democracy will take back seat to a necessary social change that is long overdue.

Fukuyama on Identity

 

 

 

Kavanaugh, men and the Democrats

 

“Some people regard rape as so heinous an offense that they would not even regard innocence as a defense.” – attributed to Alan Dershowitz

People! You have seen the wimmyn’s mob try to take down a man whom I and most men believe to be innocent. You have experienced the expression of the racist and sexist notions that a group of white men are, by nature of their race and sex, disqualified from ruling on any matter. You have experienced the unleashing of witch hunts. As Senator Lindsey Graham said to two wimmyn “Why don’t we just dunk him in water and see if he floats?”.

I shall make a few predictions this morning.

  • As a result of what men have witnessed over the past month, they are beginning to realize that innocence is no defence; that their lives can be destroyed at any time by any woman recollecting any indiscretion, advance, or any figment of their (florid) imaginations, which may have occurred, or not occurred, at any point in their lives, including before they were legally adult;
  • that these accusations will cripple and scar their future existence, reputations and earning power, and that they will be held to mob shaming in a pillory of feminist vengeance;
  • That the Democrats have become officially anti-male, not merely pro-female;
  • That men have an interest to defend, that the male sex as a sex has an interest to defend itself from this calumny, harassment, denigration and illegal discrimination;
  • That men as a sex are realizing this fact;
  • That men will shun the Democrats in droves for a decade to come, and that the sex difference in voting Republican or Democrat will get larger, not smaller.
  • Finally, I think that enough people have seen what their future will be under the Democrats that they will provide enough votes for the Republicans to maintain their majorities in House and Senate.

I will say to all men, as males, your future is bleak unless you start resisting, in every dimension of your existence, the insistent, constant, ubiquitous denigration of your sex by the Feminist Thing.

I observe that Scott Adams, in milder but equally emphatic tones, is saying the same thing.

I think people, men especially but not limited to men, have reached their moment of reckoning.

Bret Kavanaugh will be confirmed and appointed. I do not wonder what mood he will be in for the next fifty years.

Refresher course: The constrained and unconstrained vision

 

Thomas Sowell has spent a life time fighting the unconstrained vision which, crudely, comes down to “I know best and there is no institution that should stand in my way of doing good as I conceive it”. The sincerity and passion with which they hold their view is the guarantor of its truth. “Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Only bad institutions make us behave badly. Since man is the creature of social arrangements, if we change the institutions we will change man, for the better. Nothing prevents us from the attainment of this goal except reactionaries, people of ill-will, ignorance, and the forces of evil.

Sowell, on the subject of sincerity in politics:

“People who have the constrained vision will understand that people make mistakes. and so therefore when someone says something the disagree with,…they see no need to question his sincerity, his honesty or whatever. But for those with the unconstrained vision, what they believe seems so obviously true, that of you are standing in the way of it, either you must be incredibly stupid, utterly uninformed, or simply dishonest.” (at minute 24 of the interview)

Hence, in the days when I still watched broadcast television, I saw the three political party reps talking about gay marriage (as I recall). The little faggot from the NDP [there is no more swiftly accurate designator] was insisting “we shouldn’t even be debating this”. His views exactly typified why normal people find leftists so intolerant.

And that is how it is with everything on the Left. We should not even be debating this, when what they think should not be debated is precisely what should be debated.

 

George Gilder thinks that Google is run by delusional brilliant Marxists

George Gilder was right about a lot of really important things, including especially the future of the computer, the one that you now hold in your hand, called the smartphone. You have forgotten how revolutionary that prediction was in 1990 when he published “The Death of Television”. Some of you were not even born then, I suppose.

Now Gilder has published another significant book, predicting the demise of Google, or at least its dominance.

Gilder observes that by supplying things for free, Google avoids many problems that arise from payment, including the obligation to provide security, to a great extent. Worse, Google avoids the learning process that is acquired with capitalist transactions.

He considers that blockchain technologies will fix much of what is ailing in America. [In this I remain skeptical, but hopeful as well.]

“They [the Silicon Valley apostolate] have a business plan and solutions which are inappropriate to the human mind”. He sees the human mind as the essential source of value, and that Google and cloud-dependent technologies are over-centralized. “Blockchain is an answer to the cloud mind”.

The number of IPOs has been falling, the number of companies on the stock market has also been falling. Consistently with Peter Thiel’s thesis, we do not seem to be getting the innovation that we ought. According to Gilder, the invention of Etherium has halted this decline.

Consequently he takes issue with Ray Kurzweil,  the guy thinks we are approaching a singularity of machine intelligence. Says Gilder, “if you don’t understand consciousness, you don’t understand thinking. Thinking doesn’t produce consciousness, consciousness produces thinking. All these computer scientists are trying to explain away consciousness….To say, oh well, we don’t know what consciousness is, but our computers will compute so fast that it wont matter, that consciousness will emerge like one of their clouds, is I think, one their fundamental vanities of the [Silicon] Valley”.

“What I am against, as Bill Buckley used to call it, ‘immanentizing the eschaton‘; imagining some technology that you came up with last week will end the human adventure, that will subsume all our minds in the clouds, governed by eight giant companies in China and the US, with a few nerds in Israel contributing all the new ideas. This is the vision that I don’t think is going to prevail. I think the human adventure will continue after Google.”

Amen to that, brother.

At 79 years of age, George Gilder speaks as if he were suffering from some neurological ailment that I am not qualified or able to diagnose. Yet he remains a formidable thinker, a seer. I like him. He believes that in principle, machines cannot think, and I agree with him. He foresees the end of the dominance of the current masters of the universe, and how it may come about. He has addressed a vital issue of public interest in Life after Google. Curiously, paradoxically, Gilder reminds me of Timothy Leary, the acid apostle, by his great optimism, but unlike Leary George Gilder is grounded in a formidable mind

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Diversity means uniformity; inclusion means exclusion

You are not alone if you have begun to cotton on to the idea that “diversity” does not include you, dear reader. You are probably male, probably over forty, probably white, and you do not fit into the desired categories of “diverse” people that the Left favours. Tucker Carlson  started into the diversity mantra the other night by asking some long overdue questions.

 

 

Diversity is hogwash. I come from a formerly diverse society. It is called Quebec, and whatever you might feel about the French Canadians, they are very sound on the diversity question. They will have none of it, as long as diversity presents an English-speaking face. They have resisted “diversification” for centuries, which they call assimilation, and will continue to do so until they disappear demographically, which is a long way off. Having been raised in a society where I was the rejected outsider, I have come to appreciate how normal it is for a society to reject multiculturalism, and insist on the society’s right to perpetuate itself, even at great cost.

Perhaps by reason of personal history I am skeptical of diversity, or at least conscious of where it begins and ends. A common language is good, though not essential. But a common set of civic values is essential to the maintenance of liberty, order, cohesion, and yes, actual tolerance for diversity.

If you want to experience “diversity”, go to India. Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Jains Sikhs, Parsis: all vie for space, respect, and resources. Forty,  or is it four hundred, languages create a babble of mutual incomprehension.  Racial, caste, and ethnic differences are as great as anything in all of Europe, even considering how it is after the Muslim refugee invasion.

I want everyone to start questioning “diversity”.

A new bumper sticker is needed.

 

Question diversity

 

Maxime says it straight

 

 

“Trudeau’s extreme multiculturalism and cult of diversity will divide us into little tribes that have less and less in common, apart from their dependence on government in general. He went on to decry the possible “cultural balkanization” of Canadian society.”

Maxime Bernier is exactly correct.

I think he is the real Canadian Opposition. And if Andrew Scheer had any sense, apart from the calculus of the  immediate political impact of anything, he would gradually find a way to agree with Bernier. Because Maxime has just told truth in a public place, which is always called a “gaffe” by the MSM.

Liberals may claim their donations have increased, they may claim their vote has strengthened.  I doubt both. In taverns, barbecues and Legions across Canada,  people are waking up from the summer doldrums and nodding assent to Bernier. You can have too much multi-culturalism. If you doubt this, go to India, and experience real, not ersatz, multi-culturalism. The place scarcely coheres, so great are the internal divisions of religion, caste, language, and race. And canada is heading in exactly that direction, courtesy of the Liberals.

For a more intelligent discussion of this issue, as it relates to immigration, see Does Diversity Really Unite Us?: Citizenship and Immigration by Edward Erler.

 

George Friedman talks Trump, talks Bannon, talks Zeihan

In the following video, George Friedman tells why the expert class has been disgraced since the 2008 financial meltdown. In the end there will be nations, he says. The reign of the unelected and international experts is over. The order that existed in the 70 years since the Second World War is coming to an end.

Friedman is at pains to insist that the pain of the 2007 financial crash was distributed unevenly; the expert class made out like bandits, the working classes are unemployed and in an oxycodone death crisis. This is not sustainable. Hence Trump, Orban, the Italian political crisis, nationalist movements everywhere.

“The nation is back”, says Friedman.

I listened to some smooth-talking London-based millionaire bond trader yesterday tell me that Brexit will never happen, that the vote for it will mean nothing in the end. I refrained from saying he was the same sort of intelligent insider who thought a Trump victory would never happen. My impression is that the expert class has not learned a thing, but will have to be taught through some hard blows to their pocket books and to their self-esteem.

 

“Look at how your income is distributed (within a nation). That is you future”.-George Friedman

Education despite universities

Caitlin Flanagan writes in this month’s Atlantic about why Jordan Peterson is so important. What it points to is that a liberal education is now being offered on Youtube, and not in university.

The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.

That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology. All of these young people, without quite realizing it, were joining a huge group of American college students who were pursuing a parallel curriculum, right under the noses of the people who were delivering their official educations.

“They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology.”

Further, Flanagan writes:

But there is no coherent reason for the left’s obliterating and irrational hatred of Jordan Peterson. What, then, accounts for it?

It is because the left, while it currently seems ascendant in our houses of culture and art, has in fact entered its decadent late phase, and it is deeply vulnerable. The left is afraid not of Peterson, but of the ideas he promotes, which are completely inconsistent with identity politics of any kind.

They – reasonable, moderate centrists – are starting to wake up. That is my conclusion from the publication and writing of this article. They have understood the bankruptcy of the cultural Left and they are starting to see their children have realized this too.

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Post Script:

She could have included Ben Shapiro, and Victor Davis Hanson in this list of educational shows or speakers.

It’s still legal to say what you think

I have been watching a considerable amount of the Rubin Report in my leisure, which I recommend highly. The hour-long discussions allow for an exchange of views, as opposed to a ritualized six-minute interchange on cable TV of talking points.

One of the heroes of truth is Douglas Murray, who has written The Strange Death of  Europe. Asked by Rubin what words of encouragement he has for others, he responded: “It’s still legal to say what you think”.

I want to add my two cents’ worth to that observation. It is surprizing the degree to which, in the absence of any secret police, and with human rights commissions still occasionally defeated in  public and embarrassing ways, that people feel so constrained to toe the line of political correctness.

Yet they do, and for good reason. There are innumerable enforcers out there, in almost any occasion in which polite society meets.

Last year I was talking to a lady at a cocktail gathering and had occasion to observe that North American Indians or blacks were overrepresented in our prisons – and no, I did bring up the topic but did not avoid it either. She asked me quite bluntly: “Was I racist?| I thought for a moment and said, “No. I merely observe statistical realities”. What I ought to have said, and wish I had said, “Are you a member of the thought police?”

Because there are many members of the thought police and they do not hesitate to comment on the slightest deviation – it is the slightest and not the greatest deviation they are sensitive to.

More than any other thing which lies behind the success of Trump is his capacity to talk ordinary language about difficult subjects: to talk like a real person and not in a series of carefully crafted talking points. What he has done is enlarge the capacity of ordinary people to react as normal people should to violations of common sense, good manners, and good public policy. The Emperor of PC has no clothes, which we have seen for some time. Yet it is the power to force people to say that His Majesty is splendidly clothed, to humiliate the general public by ceaseless participation in lies or doubtful propositions, that gives the guardians of PC their power.

To wit:

  • mass immigration is good for all people of the receiving society
  • free trade with China is actually free – that is, standards-based, law abiding  – trade
  • there is no link between Islam and jihad
  • that different rates of criminal incarceration among different ethnicities is a sign of racism or other injustice

Alexander Solzhenitsyn once said that Communism would not survive the day if everyone spoke the truth. As I have said recently, we are living in the liberal version of Oceania, and we will not get out of it until we each decide to tell the truth.

So say something.

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For  good measure, here is the interview with Douglas Murray.

 

 

 

Observations on China

 

 

 

 

The following is drawn from a university professor who has spent nine years in China. From my perspective it is always fascinating to hear the testimony of what it is like to live in a society that has not known Christianity and which has no God but the political leadership, where Caesar is God, and no gods, no ethics, and no general sense of how life should be lived apart from scrambling for money. When there is nothing else but Mammon and tyranny, this is what it is like. (Francis Fukuyama writes more generally about the corrosive effects of tyranny on social cohesion).

In a way, I sympathize with Chairman Xi’s emphasis on rule of law because in my experience laws/rules/norms are simply ignored.  They are ignored quietly so as not to embarrass the enforcer, however, frequently, the enforcer knows rules or laws are being ignored but so long as the breaker is not egregious, both parties continue to exist in a state of blissful ignorance.  Honesty without force is not normal but an outlier.  Lying is utterly common, but telling the truth revolutionary.

I rationalize the silent contempt for the existing rules and laws within China as people not respecting the method for creating and establishing the rules and laws.  Rather than confronting the system, a superior, or try good faith attempts to change something, they choose a type of quiet subversion by just ignoring the rule or law.  This quickly spreads to virtually every facet of behavior as everything can be rationalized in a myriad of ways.  Before coming to China, I had this idea that China was rigid which in some ways it is, but in reality it is brutally chaotic because there are no rules it is the pure rule of the jungle with unconstrained might imposing their will and all others ignoring laws to behave as they see fit with no sense of morality or respect for right.

I had a lawyer tell me about the corruption crackdown, and even most convicted of crimes, that people referred to them as “unlucky”.  As he noted, there was almost no concept of justice even if people recognized the person had done what they were accused of having done.  The discipline stemmed not from their behavior but they were cannon fodder for some game chosen by a higher authority.

China wrestles with these issues like clockwork every few years after a tragic incident goes viral.  A common one is when someone is run over by a car and pedestrians just step over the body until a family member finds the body.  The video goes viral, prompts a week of hand wringing, and then censors step in to talk about Confucianism and how the economy is growing.  There is no innate value given to human life as precious.

A friend of mine in China who is a Christian missionary, told me a story about a time he was invited to speak at the local English corner they had in the apartment development where locals would get together hopefully with foreigners and practice English. He was asked to speak on what is the meaning of life, perfect for a part time missionary. He said he knew what people would say having lived in China for sometime but even so was stunned at how deeply and rigidly held the belief that making money was the entire meaning of life. There was no value system.  There was no exogenously held right or wrong, only whether you made money.  With apologies to a bastardized Dostoevsky, with money as God, all is permissible.

I could talk at length about that what I have observed, but I am not a human rights expert and what type of cultural changes or evolution it engenders.  However, while the well known cases draw attention, these attitudes and responses set the tone for a culture where individuals, respect, and truth mean nothing.

This has impacted my broader thinking in that executive space (thinking of the United States but also applicable elsewhere) is that laws need to be enforced consistently not at the whim of the superior.  If the law exists it should be enforced and consistent, otherwise it should be removed.  Currently, the United States is going further and further in a direction where laws are applied inconsistently shifting from varying enforcement regimes under different executives.  Law is not law if the government can choose whether to enforce it. Law has become the whimsy of sovereigns prone to political fancy.

and much later in the article, after a discussion of the openness of the USA to immigration, he continues:

Conversely, China is a rising power but probably more importantly is a deeply illiberal, expansionist, authoritarian, police state opposed to human rights, democracy, free trade, and rule of law.  Just as we need to consider the state, speed, and direction of change in the United States, China has been deeply illiberal authoritarian for many years, is becoming increasingly illiberal, and is accelerating the pace of change towards greater control.  It both puzzles and concerns me having lived in China for nearly a decade as a public employee to hear Polyanna statements from China “experts” in the United States who talk about the opening and reform of China or refuse to consider the values being promoted. I was left mouth agape once when someone I would consider a liberal internationalist who values human rights informed me he was focused on business and would leave those other issues aside.  The values represented by China cannot be divorced from its rise and influence.

The rise of China represents a clear and explicit threat not to the United States but to the entirety of liberal democracy, human rights, and open international markets.  We see the world slowly being divided into China supported authoritarian regimes of various stripes that support its creeping illiberalism across a range of areas.  The tragedy of modern American foreign policy is the history of active ignorance and refusal to actively confront the Chinese norm or legal violations. The Trump administration is utterly incapable of defending the values and assembling the coalition that would respond to American leadership as they face even greater threats from China….

The concern is not over Chinese access to technology to facilitate economic development for a liberal open state. The concern is over the use of technology to facilitate human rights violations and further cement closed markets.  That is a threat for which neither the United States or any other democracy loving country should apologize for.

I should note that I like many other am concerned about the level of government surveillance on citizenry.  However, equating Beijing to Washington in many of these specific issues is simply non-sensical authoritarian apologetics.  Let me just briefly run through some of the enormous differences. First, some have argued tech firms gather data which is true but does not distinguish what happens to the data. Unlike China, the US government does not have free access to all electronic data.  Second, China uses control over electronic communication in vastly draconian cyber dystopia ways compared to the wide range of opinions that are allowed online in the rest of the world.  By simple comparison, Winnie the Pooh is censored in China while in the United States the debate is over whether some information should be restricted that is deemed inaccurate. It is nothing less than authoritarian apologetics to attempt to equate the two in any serious manner.