It seems to me that we in the United States — and, from what I can tell, the Western world more broadly — never did come to terms with the reality of Jihadist ideology and its clear intentions for us. Media malpractice and a general decline in cultural courage and self-confidence seem substantially to blame for that — themselves downstream of a “long march through the institutions” of toxic ideology that’s quite deliberately designed to weaken us. I don’t know how not to feel disgust for those responsible for it. In any case, this far down the road from the 9/11/2001 Al Qaeda attacks on the USA, I expect we’re pretty firmly settled into our respective conclusions and not much seems likely to change that. With Al Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL largely rendered inoperative, there hasn’t been as much reason to worry about Jihadist violence in recent years, and we’ve moved on as a culture to fearing, doubting, distrusting, and punishing ourselves over other issues. My focus has shifted to understanding the deeper roots underlying the general weakness that afflicts us, and seeking ways to re-energize a culture and civilization that I see as well worth saving. I’ve grown weary of trying to warn people about things they don’t want to be warned about, so writing to try to spread awareness among the less aware has seemed less useful than trying to offer tools and insight to see our ailing state and want to do something to fix it. Time will tell where that goes. I hope I’ll be able to find ways to make a positive difference.
(Posted as a Twitter thread, and on GETTR, Parler, and Gab, and probably worth adding to my archive here. If Twitter changes for the better, maybe I’ll let go of the need to maintain and cross-post to so many accounts…!)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the tremendous value of salutary feedback systems: how vitally important they are to human flourishing and to getting us out of bad situations where we’d otherwise become stuck.
A feedback mechanism is anything that course-corrects when inputs indicate something’s not right. Much of the sad state we’re in seems to be the result of inadequate or severed feedback loops. Unaccountable systems end in persistent failure.
Our neurobiology is built on feedback loops. Motor control circuits work like servo controllers – targeting a desired outcome, checking results, and adjusting motor control impulses, iteratively, in real time. The immune systems that keep us healthy are similarly feedback-based.
The scientific method, when its feedback systems are allowed to operate as they should, is able to converge on truth more reliably than most other claims to knowledge precisely because it is accountable to open scrutiny and the necessity of solid methods and reproducible results.
When the scientific practice’s essential feedback mechanisms are suppressed, science becomes becomes crippled and devolves to a garden-variety appeal to authority.
Businesses have to be accountable to their customers. The only sustainable way for them to succeed is to make those customers happy. Businesses that take insufficient interest in satisfying customers’ wants and needs, or that cheat or deceive, must either course-correct or fold.
Laws and enforcement thereof deter harmful criminal activity in people whose internal moral compasses didn’t head off or avoid such impulses at an earlier stage. Feedback systems can operate in layers, or in concert, to apply beneficial course corrections.
Democracy is a feedback mechanism that seeks to apply public accountability to the state and to those who hold office within it. To avoid pure democracy’s failure mode of mob rule, we declare certain foundational rights inalienable and codify immutable constraints on state power in a constitution.
For career politicians and immortal government programs, the name of the game is avoiding accountability at all costs. For too often, and by design, new programs and departments are created without sufficient accountability to the results they promise. Slow-to-boil public outrage rarely provides a sufficient restoring force to stop the insanity.
Major social media sites, like the legacy journalistic and media outlets that preceded them, have sought to stem political accountability and suppress the course-corrections that could result, by seeking to shape what we are allowed to know and discuss. The deception we long suspected is now being laid bare. Will this produce sufficient public outcry to force a return to less filtered and manipulated public square?
The existence of alternatives – from places we can spend our time in cyberspace to physical places we can go to live and be governed more reasonably – provides some course-correcting pressure on legacy institutions.
The “Network Effect” makes the hold of large social media incumbents hard to break, so we’re lucky to have a rogue outsider like @elonmusk come clean house at Twitter. There was otherwise no sufficiently strong feedback loop in place that would disrupt the manipulation going on behind the scenes.
The opening of new frontiers that I’ve been focused on for years offers hope of alternatives to legacy governance, both for those who go and for those whose governments may feel pressured into more competitive practices. Whether the mechanics are spacefaring, seasteading, taming untapped wilderness, building “network states”, or other, we will find and develop new places that open up new possibilities, and – I hope – build better, more robust salutary feedback systems along the way.
Just a loose collection of thoughts so far, on ideas I expect I’ll ponder further. I’m under no illusion that our very substantial political divide is fixable by anything other than people w/different values going separate ways, but this does seem to get at something deeper that may help us understand things better and navigate to where we each need to be w/greater clarity.
Building robust salutary feedback systems into everything seems like a worthy endeavor.
Pretty horribly, it seems, if what their handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed is any indication. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying get to the heart of it in this on-point Dark Horse clip:
And lest you retain an intact shred of hope that once-functioning and crucially important institutions haven’t been compromised, Bret and Heather assure us in episode 144 that “It’s even worse than that” (YouTube, Apple Podcasts). We’ve got some real work to do, if we’re to restore our knowledge-building capabilities to a semblance of sanity and trustworthiness.
I’ve been greatly enjoying Zuby’s show, guest appearances, and Twitter feed (@ZubyMusic) ever since encountering his online presence in the past year or so. He’s a great, genuine interviewer — intellectually curious, eager to dig deeper in search of underlying truths, and not afraid to reach courageously unpopular positions. He listens, considers, and engages in enjoyable and illuminating ways that far too few interviewers do.
One of Zuby’s latest drops is a worthwhile interview with Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe (YouTube, Instagram, banned from Twitter), on the subject of media malpractice and digging for truths that so much of the press in the USA often seems selectively disinterested in uncovering. Good stuff.
It’s about time I posted some thoughts on the monumental and (to me, at least) unexpected election outcome of last week. I don’t flatter myself to think anyone has been waiting breathlessly on my analysis, but it’s an event that bears marking, and there are things that ought to be said about it in this record I’ve been keeping. (I’ve written almost nothing about this election cycle here on the blog, due partly to favoring my Twitter feed.)
Trump wasn’t my pick, and I have plenty of concerns about him — from the basic observation that he’s no small-government, free-market conservative (and has furthermore reversed his positions and schmoozed with and donated to so many office-holders of both parties in the past that his set of beliefs is clearly fungible), to his often coarse demeanor, to creepily fascist-ic remarks he’s made at campaign stops, to his overly cozy rapport with Vladimir Putin and clueless retweeting of support from the alt-right. He’s no exemplar of how to treat and talk about women, nor do I find the cronyism that’s characterized his business dealings admirable. I felt betrayed and crestfallen to learn that the GOP had crowned him its nominee.
All of that said, our choice this time around was (pardon my bluntly apt metaphor) between a shit sandwich and a crap sandwich. It’s taken a truly terrible alternative to make Trump’s candidacy even possible, and we found that in Hillary Clinton. Her role in our becoming a country that leaves its people to die in hostile territory, her knowingly lying to the American people and families of the dead about the cause of the Jihadist attack on the U.S compound in Benghazi (promising to punish, and jailing, a scapegoat filmmaker in the process), her gross negligence, at best, with matters of national security (it appears to me that she is clearly guilty of felonies, and owes her escape from prosecution to a cowardly, politically compromised FBI) — these should all have been (and evidently proved to be) deal-breakers for her candidacy, or for any other candidate’s, from whichever party. All this sits atop the fact that she clearly intended to continue pushing us down the road of incrementalist collectivization via nationalized healthcare, inflexible state-run education, and increased taxation, for she is a Progressive cut from the same loom of cloth as Barack Obama.
Trump’s rise is ultimately an unpleasant and worrisome but predictable result of people laboring for decades to chisel away at this Civilization of ours, with the ultimate goal of undermining our cultural and governmental institutions and “fundamentally transforming” us into something we were never meant to be: a collective society, built on the ruins of a former outpost of individual liberty that was tricked into giving up on itself and committing suicide. Barack Obama’s presidency was the latest chapter in that “long march”, and Trump’s ascent was propelled by eight years of an administration that belittled, berated, and condescended to half the country, that demagogued and divided to the best of its ability. It was fueled the cramming down our throats of Obamacare, and by scandals at the IRS, NSA, DOJ, and EPA. By the shameless cheerleading of a lapdog press for its anointed Lightbringer, while demonizing and vilifying the liberty-minded Tea Party movement and anyone else who dared oppose his agenda. There is plenty to dislike and distrust about Trump, but the fact is in the end it wouldn’t have mattered who the GOP’s nominee was. Said nominee — whether Cruz or Carson, Romney or other — would have been painted by the press as a villain in the extreme. So while there are plenty of valid concerns about Trump, we can be forgiven for finding it difficult to discern objections to him that sincerely target said concerns from others that we’d be hearing regardless — had, say, Ted Cruz won the nomination and the presidency. My years of experience observing the vilification of Republicans from Reagan to the present has made me quite confident of that.
I had strong reasons for wanting to vote against Hillary Clinton. Trump’s flaws were worrisome enough that I could not bring myself to vote for him, despite knowing that any other course of action would be effectively futile. It was not lightly that I cast a write-in vote for Ted Cruz, the only decision that I could feel right about in this craptacular election season. I maintain respect for others who concluded that despite Trump’s flaws he was the necessary lesser of two evils. Among them are Bill Whittle and Victor Davis Hanson, both of whom articulated ample cause for concern about Trump in the past. I fully acknowledge that whatever good a President Trump ends up doing, I cannot claim any credit for as a voter. But I am not sanguine about where we seem to be headed. This is in the best case a temporary reprieve — a chance to “stop the bleeding” as Bill Whittle put it — and, sadly, I expect it to turn out to be a wasted opportunity, at best. A popular revolt was warranted, but it seems to have been squandered on a very poor choice. As with Barack Obama’s presidency, I hope to be proven wrong, and I’ll give President Trump the same chance, but I fear I’ll be proven right.
The way ahead from here is treacherous, and seems bound to be full of missteps and disappointments, at the very least. Both the Republican and Democrat parties bear their share of responsibility for putting forth such awful nominees. But the ultimate blame for this mess rests with the perpetrators of a Culture War who have been relentless in their aim of dismantling our essential cultural foundations. Without their vain and bitterly determined attempts to steer us away from the course of individual liberty and the tightly constrained form of government needed to enable it to thrive, we would not be in such dire straits.
The week since the election has seen insanity that rivals the already insane campaign season to date: ongoing “protests”-turned-riots; claims of Trump-inspired discrimination, some proven to be fabrications (see also this); people identified as Trump voters or supporters being beaten, including this motorist, and this one, and this student, and this one; breathless comparisons of the election outcome to the 9/11 Jihadist attacks; numerous tweeted assassination threats, including threats from at least one journalist and CEO; other CEOs including Pepsi’s and GrubHub’s disparaging or threatening employees who supported Trump; celebrities who threatened pre-election to leave the country if Trump was elected apparently having second thoughts (echoes of 2004, to be sure). Meanwhile, the press has made some public displays of repentance and introspection regarding its insular bias — including the New York Times, which has vowed to rededicate itself to honest reporting after a stunningly candid confirmation that it has tailored its reporting to fit a preconceived narrative — but I expect all of that will be short-lived. (Oh, by the way: the electoral college is suddenly a sinister threat to democracy again!)
One of the more disheartening things I’m seeing is parents scaring the daylights out of their children — including children who are too young to have the historical context and skepticism to properly assess what they’re being told. The amount and extent of awfulness and unhinged ridiculousness I’ve seen in response to Trump’s election has, astonishingly, been enough to make me start feeling sympathetic to a guy I never liked to begin with. I predict it will backfire in a big way if it continues.
So, one way or another, here we are. If there’s a bright side, maybe it’s that long last the press can be expected to do its job again (sort of), dissent has surely become the highest form of patriotism again (an assertion I remember being made frequently during the Bush years), people are finding renewed skepticism and concern about the wisdom of having a powerful federal government (sadly, I expect that will last only until the next electoral reversal of the tables) … in short, the world is once more inverted, and I expect there’s going to be a lot more along those lines to keep up with in the coming years.
Some wry and apt observations from the Twitterverse:
Love trumping hate involves a lot more assault and arson than I anticipated.
Calling for rape of woman because you hate her husband. Tell me again how our election set feminism back 50 years but that doesn't? #Melaniapic.twitter.com/jwf7YfupCz
MSM Lost Its Moral Compass, Integrity, Culpable, Participated, Condoned Corruption, Dishonest, Could Not Be Trusted. FAILED GLORIOUSLY. pic.twitter.com/2kLwc4QYp6
Of them all, this very aptly captures the seeming lack of self-reflection that’s going on:
Indeed, epithets of that sort have come to be used so frequently, routinely, and loosely, they’ve lost much of their gravity, and furthermore produced an understandable backlash from the wrongly accused.
This gem from a parody account echoes the same sentiment:
If we are to win the House and Senate in 2018, we MUST strive to call every white voter an uneducated racist homophobe for the next 2 years.
Fourteen years later, I have nothing fundamentally new to add.
The horror of that day has long since been eclipsed in my mind by the consequent exposure of our own weakness, and our determined unwillingness to squarely confront the enemy that brought such horror to us, in the years since. Our appetite for self-deception and willfully naïve thinking far exceeds anything I’d have imagined. Our foundational institutions, from academia to journalism to entertainment and the arts to government and even our military, have been extensively compromised beyond likely repair by determined ideological termites whose goal of an ever-weaker America is now at hand. The realities of the day did not shake their belief systems, as I had once supposed an attack on our nation would. Nor has the steady litany of attacks in the years since — from London, to Madrid, to Beslan, to Bali, to Mumbai, to Kenya, to Paris, to Moscow, to the Fort Hood shooter, to the Beltway Snipers … the list goes on and on. Nor has the rise of ISIS, with all its attendant barbarity plainly on display for the whole world to see. ISIS operates with free reign because we — The United States in particular, and the West in general — lack the resolve and moral conviction to do anything substantial to stop them. We are now led by people deluded enough to believe that weakness is somehow strength, and that our implacable and barbaric enemies can be persuaded by olive branches and “Coexist” bumper-sticker platitudes. These are people who led us to abandon all gains in Iraq, with our intentions and timetable so clearly advertised that we might as well have hung out a “This territory up for grabs” sign. ISIS is expanding its reach virtually unchecked, and is successfully recruiting from Western populations, for God’s sake — because unlike us, they actually believe in themselves and what they are doing.
Soon, Iran — whose political and spiritual leaders have been unambiguous about their intentions toward Israel, the United States, and the West — will have nukes. They’ll have them because, gullible fools that we’ve become, we’ve effectively surrendered on that front too.
I’ve pleaded. I’ve striven to educate. As have many others, with much greater dedication and skill. At this point, those who can be awakened have been. Those who do not wish to see, won’t.
I’m weary of seeing things I don’t want to see, that few others are willing to see and acknowledge. I have no patience to stand by and watch a slow cultural suicide, nor do I especially want to spend years studying the mechanics of self-inflicted civilizational decline when there are far higher aspirations for this civilization of ours to reach. I have zero respect or patience for PC scolds and their demonstrably flawed multicultural platitudes, whose net effect ends up somewhere between naïve ignorance and willful sabotage. We, who have managed to welcome and happily “Coexist” with people of just about every other belief system in the world, have encountered an enemy that has been pretty clear about its lack of interest in “Coexist”-ing with us, and with our cultural foundations now compromised due to the willful actions of some among us, we are under-equipped to confront that reality and deal with it. We’re in grave danger of losing everything that matters, not because a handful of Jihadist scumbags attacked us on 9/11/2001, but because far too many among us are willing and eager to choose cultural surrender as an alternative to fighting and decisively defeating those rotten bastards.
It seems maybe, remotely possible that in the final, twilight years of this once great Civilization of ours, the lunatics who labored to institute such weakness might, as they finally start to notice things crumbling around them, look back and wonder whether they’d perhaps made a mistake or two — long, long after it’s far too late to do anything to turn the tide. I’m not holding my breath.
We’re a culture in serious need of a reboot, and I’ve turned my efforts to finding a way for that to happen — for some remnant of our indomitable spirit to have a chance to thrive again unhindered. Because in the end, mere physical survival and avoiding playing a part in the fulfillment of a Jihadi death wish for another day isn’t what it’s about. It’s the long-term survival of the essence of who we are that matters. And how that goes … is entirely up to us.
Freedom is a tremendous and precious inheritance. To develop our potential, thrive in it, and pass it along to each successive generation is our highest calling. I write here to give my thanks, and to seek ways we can cultivate the resilience, independence, courage, and indomitable spirit necessary to sustain a culture that cherishes liberty.
