Which leads me to this article by Scott Alexander. He elaborates on an idea by one of his ingroup about their being two ways of looking at things, “mistake theory” and “conflict theory”. Mistake theory claims that political opposition comes from a different understanding of issues: if people had the same amount of knowledge and proper theories to explain it, they would necessarily agree. Conflict theory states that people disagree because their interests conflict, the conflict is zero-sum so there’s no reason to agree, the only question is how to resolve the conflict.

I was speechless. I am quite used to Mr. Alexander and his crowd missing the point on purpose, but this was just too much. Mistake theory and Conflict theory are not parallel things. “Mistake theory” is just the natural, tribalist way of thinking. It assumes an ingroup, it assumes the ingroup has a codified way of thinking about things, and it interprets all disagreement as a lack of understanding of the obviously objective and universal truths of the ingroup religion. There is a reason why liberals call “ignorant” all those who disagree with them. Christians used to be rather more charitable on this front and asked for “faith”, which they also assumed was difficult to achieve.

Conflict theory is one of the great achievements of the human intellect; it is an objective, useful and predictively powerful way of analyzing human disagreement. There is a reason why Marxist historiography revolutionized the world and is still with us: Marx made a strong point that human history was based on conflict. Which is true. It is tautologically true. If you understand evolution it stands to reason that all social life is about conflict. The fight for genetical survival is ultimately zero-sum, and even in those short periods of abundance when it is not, the fight for mating supremacy is very much zero-sum, and we are all very much aware of that today. Marx focused on class struggle for political reasons, which is wrong, but his focus on conflict was a gust of fresh air for those who enjoy objective analysis.

Incidentally the early Chinese thinkers understood conflict theory very well, which is why Chinese civilization is still around, the oldest on earth. A proper understanding of conflict does not come without its drawbacks, though. Mistakes happen for a reason. Pat Buchanan actually does understand why USG open the doors to trade with China. Yes, Whig history was part of it, but that’s just the rhetoric used to justify the idea. The actual motivation to trade with China was making money short term. Lots of money. Many in the Western elite have made huge amounts of money with the China trade. Money that conveniently was funneled to whichever political channels it had to do in order to keep the China trade going. Even without Whig history, even without the clueless idea that China would never become a political great power, the short-term profits to be made were big enough to capture the political process in the West and push for it. Countries don’t have interests: people do.

That is true, and should be obvious, but there are dangers to the realization. There’s a reason why people dislike cynics. People don’t want to know the truth. It’s hard to coordinate around the truth, especially when the truth is that humans are selfish assholes constantly in conflict. Mistakes happen because people find it convenient to hide the truth; and “mistake theory” happens because policing the ingroup patterns of thought, limiting the capability of people of knowing too much, is politically useful. The early Chinese kingdoms developed a very sophisticated way of analyzing objective reality. The early kingdoms were also full of constant warfare, rebellions and elite betrayals; all of which went on until the introduction in the 13th century of a state ideology (neoconfucianism) based on complete humbug and a massively unrealistic theory on human nature. Roman literature is refreshingly objective and to the point. Romans were also murderous bastards who assassinated each other all the time. It took the massive pile of nonsense which we call the Christian canon to get Europeans to cooperate in a semi-stable basis.

But guess what? Conflict theory also exists for a reason. And the reason is to extricate oneself from the ingroup, to see things how they actually are, and to undermine the state religion from the outside. Marxists came up with conflict theory because they knew they had little to expect from fighting from within the system. Those low-status workers who still regarded their mainstream society as being the ingroup they very sharply called “alienated”, and by using conflict theory they showed what the ingroup ideology was actually made of. Pat Buchanan and his cuck friends should take the message and stop assuming that the elite is playing for the same team as they are. The global elite, of America and its vassals, is not mistaken. They are playing for themselves: to raise their status above yours, to drop their potential rivals into eternal misery and to rule forever over them. China, Syria, and everything else, is about that.

https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2018/03/09/mistakes-happen-for-a-reason/#comment-18834
Heh heh. It’s a lost art. The Greeks and Romans were realists about it (except Cicero, that idealistic bastard). They knew language, being the birthright of man, was just another way (and a damn powerful one) to gain status, make war, and steal each other’s women. Better be good at wielding it.

- Roger Scruton, etc.

It’s time to rename the ‘Adam Smith Institute’, now captured by drug legalisers. Something tells me the Scotch moralist wouldn’t have thought a stupefied and acquiescent population the best basis for civilisation, wealth or morality.

So I suggest calling this screeching nest of mentally pubescent drug zealots

The Adam Spliff Institute

I am moved to this suggestion by their latest attempt to debate the drug issue. I say ‘attempt’ because they really have very little idea of how to argue.

Sobran on "Alienism" and Liberalism

One of liberalism's most successful strategies has been to establish a standing presumption of guilt against the native: his motives are always in question, his racism and bogotry "just beneath the surface." But the native is forbidden to play this game: if he suggests that certain Alienist forces aren't on the up-and-up, he "thinks there's a Communist under every bed." His bad faith can be inferred from "patterns of discrimination"; he has to make a "good-faith effort" to cleanse himself before Alienist arbiters of good faith.

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/888972865063747587
https://archive.is/nuwnX
feser is good on this: chief task of conservative intellectuals is to defend epistemic credentials of mere prejudice

The Right vindicates common sense distinctions: https://bonald.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/the-right-vindicates-common-sense-distinctions/
In some ways, we’re already there. One of the core intellectual tasks of the Right has been, and will continue to be, the analysis and rehabilitation of categories found useful by pre-modern humanity but rejected by moderns in their fits of ideologically-driven oversimplification.
Consider these three:
1. Friend vs. Enemy. Carl Schmitt famously put this distinction at the core of his political theory in explicit defiance of the liberal humanitarianism of his day that wanted to reduce all questions to abstract morality and economic efficiency. The friend vs. enemy distinction, Schmitt insisted, is independent of these. To identify a threatening nation as the enemy does not necessarily make any statement about its moral, aesthetic, or economic qualities. Schmitt observed that the liberal nations (for him, the victors of WWI) in fact do mobilize against threats and competitors; forbidding themselves the vocabulary of “friend” and “enemy” means they recast their hostilities in terms of moral absolutes. The nation they attack cannot be called their own enemy, so it must be demonized as the enemy of all humanity. This will be a reoccurring conservative argument. Eliminating a needed category doesn’t eliminate hostility between peoples; it only forces them to be incorrectly conceptualized along moral lines, which actually diminishes our ability to empathize with our opponent.
2. Native vs. Foreigner. Much of what Schmitt said about the distinction between friend and enemy applies to the more basic categorization of people as belonging to “us” or as being alien. I argued recently in the Orthosphere, concerning the topic of Muslim immigration, that we can actually be more sympathetic to Muslims among us if we acknowledge that our concern is not that their ways are objectionable in some absolute (moral/philosophical) sense, but that they are alien to the culture we wish to preserve as dominant in our nation. Reflections about the “universal person” are also quite relevant to this.
3. Masculine vs. feminine. Conservatives have found little to recommend the liberals’ distinction between biological “sex” and socially constructed “gender”. However, pre-modern peoples had intriguing intuitions of masculinity and femininity as essences or principles that can be considered beyond the strict context of sexual reproduction. Largely defined by relation to each other (so that, for example, a woman relates in a feminine way to other people more than to wild animals or inanimate objects), even things other than sexually reproducing animals can participate in these principles to some extent. For example, the sun is masculine while Luna is feminine, at least in how they present themselves to us. Masculinity and femininity seem to represent poles in the structure of relationality itself, and so even the more mythical attributions of these essences were not necessarily intended metaphorically.

The liberal critique of these categories, and others not accommodated by their ideology, comes down to the following
1. Imperialism of the moral. The category in question is recognized as nonmoral, and the critic asserts that it is morally superior to use only moral categories. (“Wouldn’t it be better to judge someone based on whether he’s a good person than on where he was born?”) Alternatively, the critic presumes that other categories actually are reducible to moral categories, and other categories are condemned for being inaccurate in their presumed implicit moral evaluations. (“He’s a good person. How can you call him an ‘alien’ as if he were some kind of monster?!”)
2. Appeal to boundary cases. Sometimes the boundaries of the criticized category are fuzzy. Perhaps a particular person is like “us” in some ways but unlike “us” in others. From this, conclude that the category is arbitrary and meaningless.
3. Emotivism. Claim that the criticized category is actually a sub-rational emotional response. It must be because it has no place in liberal ideology, which the liberal presumes to be coextensive with reason itself. And in fact, when certain ways of thinking are made socially unacceptable, they will likely only pop out in emergencies and moments of distress. It would be no different with moral categories–if the concepts “evil” and “unfair” were socially disfavored, people would only resort to them when intolerably provoked and undoubtedly emotional.
4. Imputation of sinister social motives. The critic points out that the categorization promotes some established social structure; therefore, it must be an illusion.

Why the Republican Party Is Falling Apart: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-the-republican-party-falling-apart-22491?page=show
Moore and a great many of his voters subscribe to a simplistic and exaggerated view of the world and the conflicts it contains. Moore has voiced the belief that Christian communities in Illinois or Indiana, or somewhere “up north,” are under Sharia law. That’s absurd. But why does he believe it, and why do voters trust him despite such beliefs? Because on the other side is another falsehood, more sophisticated but patently false: the notion that unlimited Islamic immigration to Europe, for example, is utterly harmless, or the notion that Iran is an implacable fundamentalist threat while good Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia are our true and faithful friends. Each of the apocalyptic beliefs held by a Roy Moore or his supporters contains a fragment of truth—or at least amounts to a rejection of some falsehood that has become an article of faith among America’s elite. The liberal view of the world to which Democrats and elite Republicans alike subscribe is false, but the resources for showing its falsehood in a nuanced way are lacking. Even the more intellectual sort of right-winger who makes it through the cultural indoctrination of his college and peer class tends to be mutilated by the experience. He—most often a he—comes out of it embittered and reactionary or else addicted to opium dreams of neo-medievalism or platonic republics. Since there are few nonliberal institutions of political thought, the right that recognizes the falsehood of liberalism and rejects it tends to be a force of feeling rather than reflection. Moore, of course, has a legal education, and he assuredly reads the Bible. He’s not unintelligent, but he cannot lean upon a well-balanced and subtle right because such a thing hardly exists in our environment. Yet there is a need for a right nonetheless, and so a Roy Moore or a Donald Trump fills the gap. There is only one thing the Republican establishment can do if it doesn’t like that: reform itself from stem to stern.

Who Are ‘The People’ Anyway?: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/who-are-the-people-anyway/
Beware of those who claim to speak for today's populist audience.
- Paul Gottfried

Gottfried's got a real chip on his shoulder about the Straussians

Senior aide Stephen Miller has been working with conservative senators to make good on Trump’s campaign promise.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/03/everything-need-know-raise-act-without-reading/
lol: https://heavy.com/news/2017/08/watch-stephen-miller-white-house-press-briefing-cnn-jim-acosta-ignorant-foolish/
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/450117/bad-argument-against-immigration-reform
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/04/why-trumps-new-immigration-bill-makes-sense-215457
http://www.vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-trumps-immigration-bill-makes-cnns-acosta-squeal-like-a-pig-that-justifies-it-right-there
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/opinion/sunday/trump-immigration-compromise-douthat.html
https://gnxp.nofe.me/2017/08/24/give-us-your-huddled-scientists-yearning-to-innovate-free/

A Senator’s Plan to Reduce the Flow of Legal Migrants: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-senate-plan-to-reduce-the-flow-of-legal-migrants-1490197378
Sen. Tom Cotton says family reunification undermines benefits and public support of legal immigration; is he right?

apocryphal, but still:
Otto von Bismarck is said to have proposed the following solution to the Irish Question: Move all the Irish to Holland and all the Dutch to Ireland. With their industriousness, sobriety, and civic virtue the Dutch would soon have Ireland thriving. The Irish meanwhile would be so busy drinking and fighting, they would neglect the dikes. The sea would rush in and they would all drown.

http://www.politics.ie/forum/history/22143-anti-irish-quotes-throughout-history.html
http://www.samueljohnson.com/scotland.html

Steven Pinker is not wrong to say that some things have got better – or even that some things are getting better. We live longer. We have more food. We have more medicine. We have more free time. We have less chance of dying at another’s hands. My main objection to his arguments is not that some things have got worse as well (family life, for example, or social trust). It is not that he emphasises proportion when scale is more significant (such as with animal suffering). It is the fragility of these peaceful, prosperous conditions.

Antibiotics have made us healthier but antibiotic resistance threatens to plunge us into epidemics. Globalisation has made us richer but is also a powder-keg of cultural unease. Industrialisation has brought material wealth but it is also damaging the environment. Nuclear weapons have averted international conflict but it would only take one error for them to wreak havoc.

At his best, Pinker reminds us of how much we have to treasure, then. At his worst, he is like a co-passenger in a car – pointing out the sunny weather and the beautiful surroundings as it hurtles towards the edge of a cliff.

http://takimag.com/article/dusting_off_the_crystal_ball_john_derbyshire/print
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/11/the-new-york-times-on-violence-and-pinker/

"The Power of the Powerless" (October 1978) was originally written ("quickly," Havel said later) as a discussion piece for a projected joint Polish Czechoslovak volume of essays on the subject of freedom and power. All the participants were to receive Havel's essay, and then respond to it in writing. Twenty participants were chosen on both sides, but only the Czechoslovak side was completed. Meanwhile, in May 1979, some of the Czechoslovak contributors who were also members of VONS (the Committee to Defend the Unjustly Prosecuted), including Havel, were arrested, and it was decided to go ahead and "publish" the Czechoslovak contributions separately.

Havel's essay has had a profound impact on Eastern Europe. Here is what Zbygniew Bujak, a Solidarity activist, told me: "This essay reached us in the Ursus factory in 1979 at a point when we felt we were at the end of the road. Inspired by KOR [the Polish Workers' Defense Committee], we had been speaking on the shop floor, talking to people, participating in public meetings, trying to speak the truth about the factory, the country, and politics. There came a moment when people thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways?

"Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later—in August 1980—it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity, and of Charter 77, I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel's essay."

Translated by Paul Wilson, "The Power of the Powerless" has appeared several times in English, foremost in The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, edited by John Keane, with an Introduction by Steven Lukes (London: Hutchinson, 1985). That volume includes a selection of nine other essays from the original Czech and Slovak collection.

...

THE MANAGER of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.

Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?

...

Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.

Live Not By Lies: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/SolhenitsynLies.php
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
We do not exhort ourselves. We have not sufficiently matured to march into the squares and shout the truth our loud or to express aloud what we think. It's not necessary.

It's dangerous. But let us refuse to say that which we do not think.

This is our path, the easiest and most accessible one, which takes into account out inherent cowardice, already well rooted. And it is much easier—it's dangerous even to say this—than the sort of civil disobedience which Gandhi advocated.

Our path is to talk away fro the gangrenous boundary. If we did not paste together the dead bones and scales of ideology, if we did not sew together the rotting rags, we would be astonished how quickly the lies would be rendered helpless and subside.

That which should be naked would then really appear naked before the whole world.

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one's family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one's children and contemporaries.

The Kolmogorov option: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3376
As far as I can tell, the answer is simply: because Kolmogorov knew better than to pick fights he couldn’t win. He judged that he could best serve the cause of truth by building up an enclosed little bubble of truth, and protecting that bubble from interference by the Soviet system, and even making the bubble useful to the system wherever he could—rather than futilely struggling to reform the system, and simply making martyrs of himself and all his students for his trouble.

I don't really agree w/ this

http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles7/SolzhenitsynWarning.php

http://www.catholicworldreport.com/2015/07/08/revisiting-aleksandr-solzhenitsyns-warnings-to-the-west/
At first regarded as a hero by Americans, he eventually found his popularity waning, thanks in part to his controversial 1978 commencement address at Harvard University.

...

"Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life."

“The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries,” he also insisted, “more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary. One would then like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?”

Our Culture, What’s Left Of It: http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=7445
FP: You mention how 19th century French aristocrat, the Marquis de Custine, made several profound observations on how border guards in Russia wasted his time pushing their weight around in stupid and pointless ways, and that this is connected to the powerlessness that humans live under authoritarianism. Tell us a bit more of how this dynamic works in Russia.

Dalrymple: With regard to Russia, I am not an expert, but I have an interest in the country. I believe that it is necessary to study 19th century Russian history to understand the modern world. I suspect that the characteristic of Russian authoritarianism precedes the Soviet era (if you read Custine, you will be astonished by how much of what he observed prefigured the Soviet era, which of course multiplied the tendencies a thousand times).

...

FP: You make the shrewd observation of how political correctness engenders evil because of “the violence that it does to people’s souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe, but must not question.” Can you talk about this a bit?

Dalrymple: 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 … [more]

longform history of alt-right
The dark history of Donald Trump's rightwing revolt: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/16/secret-history-trumpism-donald-trump
pretty good actually. did not know the "Journal of American Greatness" was a thing and read by beltway types.

also good introduction to James Burnham and Samuel Francis.

All the time I hear some public figure saying that if we ban or allow X, then logically we have to ban or allow Y, even though there are obvious practical reasons for X and obvious practical reasons against Y.

No, we don’t.

http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/005864.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/002053.html

compare: https://pinboard.in/u:nhaliday/b:190b299cf04a

Small Change Good, Big Change Bad?: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/02/small-change-good-big-change-bad.html
And on reflection it occurs to me that this is actually THE standard debate about change: some see small changes and either like them or aren’t bothered enough to advocate what it would take to reverse them, while others imagine such trends continuing long enough to result in very large and disturbing changes, and then suggest stronger responses.

For example, on increased immigration some point to the many concrete benefits immigrants now provide. Others imagine that large cumulative immigration eventually results in big changes in culture and political equilibria. On fertility, some wonder if civilization can survive in the long run with declining population, while others point out that population should rise for many decades, and few endorse the policies needed to greatly increase fertility. On genetic modification of humans, some ask why not let doctors correct obvious defects, while others imagine parents eventually editing kid genes mainly to max kid career potential. On oil some say that we should start preparing for the fact that we will eventually run out, while others say that we keep finding new reserves to replace the ones we use.

...

If we consider any parameter, such as typical degree of mind wandering, we are unlikely to see the current value as exactly optimal. So if we give people the benefit of the doubt to make local changes in their interest, we may accept that this may result in a recent net total change we don’t like. We may figure this is the price we pay to get other things we value more, and we we know that it can be very expensive to limit choices severely.

But even though we don’t see the current value as optimal, we also usually see the optimal value as not terribly far from the current value. So if we can imagine current changes as part of a long term trend that eventually produces very large changes, we can become more alarmed and willing to restrict current changes. The key question is: when is that a reasonable response?

First, big concerns about big long term changes only make sense if one actually cares a lot about the long run. Given the usual high rates of return on investment, it is cheap to buy influence on the long term, compared to influence on the short term. Yet few actually devote much of their income to long term investments. This raises doubts about the sincerity of expressed long term concerns.

Second, in our simplest models of the world good local choices also produce good long term choices. So if we presume good local choices, bad long term outcomes require non-simple elements, such as coordination, commitment, or myopia problems. Of course many such problems do exist. Even so, someone who claims to see a long term problem should be expected to identify specifically which such complexities they see at play. It shouldn’t be sufficient to just point to the possibility of such problems.

...

Fourth, many more processes and factors limit big changes, compared to small changes. For example, in software small changes are often trivial, while larger changes are nearly impossible, at least without starting again from scratch. Similarly, modest changes in mind wandering can be accomplished with minor attitude and habit changes, while extreme changes may require big brain restructuring, which is much harder because brains are complex and opaque. Recent changes in market structure may reduce the number of firms in each industry, but that doesn’t make it remotely plausible that one firm will eventually take over the entire economy. Projections of small changes into large changes need to consider the possibility of many such factors limiting large changes.

Fifth, while it can be reasonably safe to identify short term changes empirically, the longer term a forecast the more one needs to rely on theory, and the more different areas of expertise one must consider when constructing a relevant model of the situation. Beware a mere empirical projection into the long run, or a theory-based projection that relies on theories in only one area.

We should very much be open to the possibility of big bad long term changes, even in areas where we are okay with short term changes, or at least reluctant to sufficiently resist them. But we should also try to hold those who argue for the existence of such problems to relatively high standards. Their analysis should be about future times that we actually care about, and can at least roughly foresee. It should be based on our best theories of relevant subjects, and it should consider the possibility of factors that limit larger changes.

And instead of suggesting big ways to counter short term changes that might lead to long term problems, it is often better to identify markers to warn of larger problems. Then instead of acting in big ways now, we can make sure to track these warning markers, and ready ourselves to act more strongly if they appear.

Growth Is Change. So Is Death.: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/growth-is-change-so-is-death.html
I see the same pattern when people consider long term futures. People can be quite philosophical about the extinction of humanity, as long as this is due to natural causes. Every species dies; why should humans be different? And few get bothered by humans making modest small-scale short-term modifications to their own lives or environment. We are mostly okay with people using umbrellas when it rains, moving to new towns to take new jobs, etc., digging a flood ditch after our yard floods, and so on. And the net social effect of many small changes is technological progress, economic growth, new fashions, and new social attitudes, all of which we tend to endorse in the short run.

Even regarding big human-caused changes, most don’t worry if changes happen far enough in the future. Few actually care much about the future past the lives of people they’ll meet in their own life. But for changes that happen within someone’s time horizon of caring, the bigger that changes get, and the longer they are expected to last, the more that people worry. And when we get to huge changes, such as taking apart the sun, a population of trillions, lifetimes of millennia, massive genetic modification of humans, robots replacing people, a complete loss of privacy, or revolutions in social attitudes, few are blasé, and most are quite wary.

This differing attitude regarding small local changes versus large global changes makes sense for parameters that tend to revert back to a mean. Extreme values then do justify extra caution, while changes within the usual range don’t merit much notice, and can be safely left to local choice. But many parameters of our world do not mostly revert back to a mean. They drift long distances over long times, in hard to predict ways that can be reasonably modeled as a basic trend plus a random walk.

This different attitude can also make sense for parameters that have two or more very different causes of change, one which creates frequent small changes, and another which creates rare huge changes. (Or perhaps a continuum between such extremes.) If larger sudden changes tend to cause more problems, it can make sense to be more wary of them. However, for most parameters most change results from many small changes, and even then many are quite wary of this accumulating into big change.

For people with a sharp time horizon of caring, they should be more wary of long-drifting parameters the larger the changes that would happen within their horizon time. This perspective predicts that the people who are most wary of big future changes are those with the longest time horizons, and who more expect lumpier change processes. This prediction doesn’t seem to fit well with my experience, however.

Those who most worry about big long term changes usually seem okay with small short term changes. Even when they accept that most change is small and that it accumulates into big change. This seems incoherent to me. It seems like many other near versus far incoherences, like expecting things to be simpler when you are far away from them, and more complex when you are closer. You should either become more wary of short term changes, knowing that this is how big longer term change happens, or you should be more okay with big long term change, seeing that as the legitimate result of the small short term changes you accept.

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/03/growth-is-change-so-is-death.html#comment-3794966996
The point here is the gradual shifts of in-group beliefs are both natural and no big deal. Humans are built to readily do this, and forget they do this. But ultimately it is not a worry or concern.

But radical shifts that are big, whether near or far, portend strife and conflict. Either between groups or within them. If the shift is big enough, our intuition tells us our in-group will be in a fight. Alarms go off.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/129902/nutso-state-has-nukes-john-derbyshire
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/154851/pakistan-options-john-derbyshire
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2015-12-04.html
http://takimag.com/article/begging_questions_john_derbyshire/print
http://www.vdare.com/articles/after-san-bernardino-hatefacts-and-stupidfacts-we-let-muslim-immigration-increase-and-let-pakistan-get-the-bomb

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
https://twitter.com/HoustonEuler/status/887479542360702977
My embedded opinion is that Cathy O'Neil frequently writes foolish things
She's a former mathematician/finance quant who dresses up a lot of progressive dogma with phony skepticism

http://www.vdare.com/tag/minority-mortgage-meltdown
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2008/10/subprime_suspects.html
http://voxeu.org/article/minority-mortgage-market-and-crisis

Causes of the Financial Crisis: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2016/01/17/causes-of-the-financial-crisis/
Look, Wall Street was definitely a bad actor from 2000-2008. But the idea that they were solely responsible for the crisis has got to go. There were four main factors, in descending order:

a) A huge global savings glut that meant there were vast amounts of cash people were eager to lend out, combined with…

b) Enormous pressures to make use of all that money to increase lending and reduce standards for lower-income and minority households.

This book has some of the story, mostly focusing on the expansion and growing political power of Freddie and Fannie in the 1990s, but it really wasn’t any secret that reducing credit-worthiness (sorry, barriers to homeownership) was an explicit goal of the Clinton and Bush administrations and affiliated banks. Bush gave a long speech on these goals in mid-2002. Countrywide, led by Angelo Mozilo, pledged $600 billion in loans to low-income and minority homeowners in early 2003. Then, the Bush administration was bragging in late 2004 about the commitments they had elicited from lenders to expand low-income and minority lending by over $1 Trillion. Then, a few months later, in 2005, Countrywide, with a former HUD secretary on its board, released a press release bragging that they were going to increase their book of lending to minority and low-income households to $1 Trillion. Looking back on the crisis, liberal sociologists find, unsurprisingly, that subprime lending and the subsequent foreclosures were concentrated in minority households.
c) The efforts to extend massive amounts of credit to non-creditworthy families were abetted by fraud and irresponsible borrowing by those same households. See, for example, Atif Mian’s papers on widespread fraud in mortgage applications.
d) Bad actions by Wall Street (Inside Job is probably a good version of this.)

The idea that only d matters is just nuts.

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability–within acceptable conditions for evolution–of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/07/18/samuel-huntington-a-prophet-for-the-trump-era/
The book looks back to the Revolutionary War, the Jacksonian age, the Progressive era and the 1960s as moments of high creedal passions, and Huntington’s descriptions capture America today. In such moments, he writes, discontent is widespread, and authority and expertise are questioned; traditional values of liberty, individualism, equality and popular control of government dominate public debates; politics is characterized by high polarization and constant protest; hostility toward power, wealth and inequality grows intense; social movements focused on causes such as women’s rights and criminal justice flourish; and new forms of media emerge devoted to advocacy and adversarial journalism.

Huntington even predicts the timing of America’s next fight: “If the periodicity of the past prevails,” he writes, “a major sustained creedal passion period will occur in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century.”

We’re right on schedule.

...

Over the subsequent two decades, Huntington lost hope. In his final book, “Who Are We?,” which he emphasizes reflect his views not just as a scholar but also as a patriot, Huntington revises his definitions of America and Americans. Whereas once the creed was paramount, here it is merely a byproduct of the Anglo-Protestant culture — with its English language, Christian faith, work ethic and values of individualism and dissent — that he now says forms the true core of American identity.

...

The Huntington of 1981, apparently, was just wrong. When listing academics who had — inaccurately, he now insists — defined Americans by their political beliefs, Huntington quotes an unnamed scholar who once eloquently described Americans as inseparable from the self-evident truths of the Declaration. Unless you recognize the passage from “American Politics” or bother to check the endnotes, you have no idea he is quoting himself. It’s as close to a wink as you’ll find in Huntington’s angriest book.

...

Little wonder that, long before Trump cultivated the alt-right and Hillary Clinton denounced the “deplorables” in our midst, Huntington foresaw a backlash against multiculturalism from white Americans. “One very plausible reaction would be the emergence of exclusivist sociopolitical movements,” he writes, “composed largely but not only of white males, primarily working-class and middle-class, protesting and attempting to stop or reverse these changes and what they believe, accurately or not, to be the diminution of their social and economic status, their loss of jobs to immigrants and foreign countries, the perversion of their culture, the displacement of their language, and the erosion or even evaporation of the historical identity of their country. Such movements would be both racially and culturally inspired and could be anti-Hispanic, anti-black, and anti-immigration.” The more extreme elements in such movements, Huntington notes, fear “the replacement of the white culture that made America great by black or brown cultures that are . . . in their view, intellectually and morally inferior.”

...

This is a conflict he had long anticipated. In his 1996 book proclaiming a clash of civilizations, he writes that the West will continue its slow decline relative Asia and the Islamic world. While economic dynamism drives Asia’s rise, population growth in Muslim nations “provides recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration.” Much as Trump mocks politicians who refuse to decry “radical Islamic terrorism,” Huntington criticizes American leaders such as Bill Clinton who argued that the West had no quarrel with Islam, only with violent extremists. “Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise,” he remarks.

Huntington’s clash has been caricatured as a single-minded call to arms against Muslims, and certainly the argument is neither so narrow nor so simple. He is probably more concerned with China and fears a “major war” if Washington challenges Beijing’s rise as Asia’s hegemon. Yet the threat Huntington sees from the Muslim world goes far beyond terrorism or religious extremism. He worries of a broader Islamic resurgence, with political Islam as only one part of “the much more extensive revival of Islamic ideas, practices, and rhetoric and the rededication to Islam by Muslim populations.” Huntington cites scholars warning of the spread of Islamic legal concepts in the West, decries the “inhospitable nature of Islamic culture” for democracy and suggests that Islam will prevail in the numbers game against Christianity. In the long run, “Mohammed wins out,” he states. “Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction.”

https://twitter.com/tcjfs/status/918662411669917697
https://archive.is/Z2FlF
I am rereading Huntington. The only options he foresees are:
* cultural decay
* political breakup
* white re-assertion
* Christian revival

For what could be more purely and perfectly Communist than to say that you regard other people’s children as if they were your own?

“Wheel And Fight”—Pat Buchanan’s Nixon Book Provides Road Map For Trump: http://www.vdare.com/articles/wheel-and-fight-pat-buchanans-nixon-book-provides-road-map-for-trump
After The Anti-Trump Coup, What Then?: http://www.vdare.com/articles/pat-buchanan-after-the-anti-trump-coup-what-then
https://twitter.com/avermeule/status/895711695192174602
Best real example of (1) an enduring polity composed of (2) large blocs (3) fundamentally at odds over ideological and cultural premises?
United In Tragedy—But For How Long?: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/united-in-tragedy-but-for-how-long/

Unlike Nixon, Trump Will Not Go Quietly: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/unlike-nixon-trump-will-not-go-quietly/

Mueller obtains "tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails: https://www.axios.com/scoop-mueller-obtains-tens-of-thousands-of-trump-transition-emails-1513456551-428f0b7a-b50e-4d9e-8bc4-9869f93c2845.html
https://act.moveon.org/event/mueller-firing-rapid-response-events/search/

https://twitter.com/netouyo_/status/942187038958333952
https://archive.is/4oKKB
I suspect there is gonna be a big finale for Trump-Mueller before the end of the year, shit goin down

https://twitter.com/netouyo_/status/942201841869312005
https://archive.is/GQKmD
who needs laws/due process when daddy Mueller is gonna save us from the evil Russians?

*The Great Convergence*: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/11/the-great-convergence.html

Richard Baldwin on the New Globalization: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/04/the-new-globalization.html
To really understand how this changed the nature of globalization, consider a sports analogy. Suppose we have two football teams, one that needs a quarterback but has too many linebackers, and one that needs a linebacker but has too many quarterbacks. If they sit down and trade players, both teams win. It’s arbitrage in players. Each team gets rid of players they need less of and gets players they need more of. That’s the old globalization: exchange of goods.

Now let’s take a different kind of exchange, where the coach of the better team goes to the field of the worse team and starts training those players in the off-season. This is very good for the coach because he gets to sell his knowledge in two places. You can be sure that the quality of the league will rise, all the games will get more competitive, and the team that’s being trained up will enjoy the whole thing. But it’s not at all certain that the players of the better team will benefit from this exchange because the source of their advantage is now being traded.

In this analogy, the better team is, of course, the G7, and not surprisingly this has led to some resentment of globalization in those countries. The new globalization breaks the monopoly that G7 labor had on G7 know-how…

good reviews here:
The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Convergence-Information-Technology-Globalization/dp/067466048X

Conservatism may have a future in America, but it will arise most likely from families and intentional communities that live as a counterculture to self-immolating American liberalism, and not as something that will be created in a political laboratory by the educated or from the wreckage of a Flight 93 administration in Washington, D.C.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Pat Buchanan profile

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

Why settle for bombing one side when you can bomb both?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/jihadists-receiving-most-arms-sent-to-syrian-rebels.html

it's full of Mormons for one thing
some commentary: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/tuesday-assorted-links-106.html
eg, "The answer to it all is WASP theocrats that heavily push 1950s life scripts. It was better when most of the country was that way, and its still better now."

Scott: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/public-intellectuals-pundits-and-all-that/#comment-79158
Buchanan and WW2 (why it was necessary): https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/public-intellectuals-pundits-and-all-that/#comment-79159
https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-01-17/how-britain-tried-influence-us-election-1940
Richard Posner: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/05/13/public-intellectuals-pundits-and-all-that/#comment-79257

http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/09/and_now_a_word.html
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2007/09/qa_with_gregory_1.html
Yarvin posted some BS on the exchange here: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/03/ur-will-return-on-thursday-april-17.html
also has some paleocon book recommendations

Managerial state is a concept used in critiquing modern social democracy in Western countries. The term takes a pejorative context as a manifestation of Western decline. Theorists Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried say this is an ongoing regime that remains in power, regardless of what political party holds a majority. Variations include therapeutic managerial state,[1] welfare-warfare state[2] or polite totalitarianism.[3]

Francis, following James Burnham, said that under this historical process, “law is replaced by administrative decree, federalism is replaced by executive autocracy, and a limited government replaced by an unlimited state.”[4] It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as equality or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of taxation and wealth redistribution to keep itself in power.

Samuel Francis argued that the problems of managerial state extend to issues of crime and justice. In 1992, he introduced the word “anarcho-tyranny” into the paleocon vocabulary.[10] He once defined it this way: “we refuse to control real criminals (that's the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that's the tyranny).”[11] Francis argued that this situation extends across the U.S. and Europe. While the government functions normally, violent crime remains a constant, creating a climate of fear (anarchy). He says that “laws that are supposed to protect ordinary citizens against ordinary criminals” routinely go unenforced, even though the state is “perfectly capable” of doing so. While this problem rages on, government elites concentrate their interests on law-abiding citizens. In fact, Middle America winds up on the receiving end of both anarchy and tyranny.[10]

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site:www.nationalreview.com+anarcho-tyranny

http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/17/welcome-to-the-pink-police-state-regime-change-in-america/

James Burnham’s Managerial Elite: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/02/james-burnhams-managerial-elite/

James Burnham and The Managerial Revolution / George Orwell: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/james_burnham/

Book Review: James Burnham’s Suicide Of The West: https://www.socialmatter.net/2016/12/19/book-review-suicide-west/
- ARTHUR GORDIAN

In 1964, a book was published which described the Puritan Hypothesis, the concept of No Enemies to the Left, the Left’s tactical use of the Overton Window, virtue signaling, out-group preference, the nature/nurture debate, the Corporate-Managerial character of liberalism, and the notion of conservatism as nothing but a pale shadow of liberalism. This book was James Burnham’s Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.

It is one of the latter works of a man made famous by his hypothesis of a Managerial Revolution in the mid-20th century, where the old, bourgeois elites were being displaced by a class of high-verbal IQ specialists, where wealth as a source of status was being replaced with credentialism and political creedalism, and where the accumulation of wealth was becoming a product of political-corporate collaboration and rent-seeking, rather than innovation and production.

...

According to Burnham, liberalism is “a set of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments[9],” which undergird a post-Christian society and which emerge from the high verbal IQ “opinion-makers” which he defines as, “teachers, publishers, writers, Jewish and Mainline clergy, some Catholic bishops, the Civil Service, and the leaders of the monied Foundations[10].” These sentiments and prejudices are largely unspoken and unacknowledged by the liberals which hold them, but form the foundation of their perception of the world and reality, from their idealistic doctrine of Man’s perfectibility to their moral preference for anyone who is not them.

What this means is that the liberal’s notions are not derived from principles but from instinctive, gut-level reactions to situations which are then rationalized post-facto into the categories of Peace, Justice, Freedom, and Liberty[11]. Trying to understand liberal thought by beginning with these principles is working backward, and theorists who attempt to do this create theories which lack in predictive accuracy; in short, it’s bad science. Predicting that the liberal will pursue egalitarianism flies in the face of the reality that liberals do not care about equality for outgroups like poor whites, divorced men, or Christians suffering religious persecution in Islamic countries. What most accurately predicts liberal behavior is the combination (or possibly merger) of the No Enemies to the Left doctrine and the moral asymmetry doctrine. In any conflict between the “less fortunate” and the “oppressor,” the liberal will either side with the “less fortunate” or explain away any atrocities too great to ignore by denying the moral agency of the group due to “oppression,[12]” always defined in accordance with No Enemies to the Left.

...

The source of this sentiment and prejudice according to Burnham is the replacement of Christianity in the West by a bastardized Calvinism incapable of dealing with the human problem of guilt and the psychological need for forgiveness. Christianity provides a solution to the problem of guilt in the person of Christ, who forgives sins through his death on the cross in a way that liberalism cannot[14].

Because forgiveness is not available in liberalism, the liberal elevates the problem of personal guilt to the level of the abstract and institution; the concept of the white race, in Burnham’s account, is a liberal invention in order to create a scapegoat for the personal guilt of the liberal. Likewise, the notion of institutional racism is the other fork of this same motion, to rid the liberal of his personal guilt for sin by placing sin at the level of abstraction and society. One function of this abstraction is that it provides an easy way for the liberal to absolve himself of sin by turning his guilty self-hatred against his neighbors and country. The liberal declares that he is not racist because everyone else is the real racist. DR3 was not a conservative invention but an expression from liberalism itself, which began as YouR3 and USAR3 then continued into Western CivR3. This is one of the reasons that, as Vox Day states, SJWs Always Project; the core of their belief system is the projection of their personal sinfulness onto others and onto abstract concepts.

...

Burnham gives one sliver of hope to a non-liberal future. First, he demonstrates that the various special-interest groups of “less fortunates” are not liberal in any real understanding of the word. These groups, of which he focuses on blacks, Jews, and Catholics, are fundamentally operating at the level of tribal self-interest, to the point of nearly being non-ideological. The “less fortunate” groups are riding liberalism’s moral asymmetry so long as that gravy train holds out and show no evidence of holding any real allegiance to its doctrines. Secondly, he argues that white labor is only superficially liberal and supports the liberal agenda of the Democratic Party only insofar as it provides tangible benefits in the form of higher pay and less hours[16]. Liberalism is a doctrine for the managerial class of the white majority which justifies their prejudices, so it should be no surprise that Burnham believes that blue-collar whites will slowly drift out of liberalism as it becomes increasingly hostile toward their interests.

Why the West Is Suicidal: https://home.isi.org/why-west-suicidal
How do you gauge the health of a civilization? There are geographic and demographic, strategic and economic, social and spiritual measures. By almost all of them, Western civilization appears to be in trouble. Fertility rates in the U.S. and Europe are below replacement levels. America is mired in the longest war in her history—having spent seventeen years in Afghanistan come December—with no glimmer of victory in sight. Indeed, for the West’s greatest military power, one war shades into another in the Middle East: Iraq, ISIS, Syria, Yemen, perhaps soon Iran, none ever quite won.

The West remains rich, but the Great Recession of a decade ago and the sluggish recovery that followed suggest that our prosperity is faltering. Workers and the middle classes fear losing their jobs to automation, immigration, and financial chicanery. The destruction of old party coalitions and the dethronement of liberal elites on both sides of the Atlantic by new congeries of nationalists, populists, and socialists are an index of economic as well as political dissatisfaction. Meanwhile pews continue to empty throughout what was once Christendom. The religious group growing most quickly in the U.S. and Europe are the churchless “nones.”

...

Burnham wrote in a spirit of hope, not despair: his book was intended as a warning against, and corrective to, the path of Western self-destruction. He was heard in time—or perhaps the West just received an unearned reprieve when Soviet Communism imploded at the end of the 1980s. Today, as a post–Cold War liberal world order underwritten by American power unravels, thoughts of suicide have returned. And like Burnham, another National Review mainstay, Jonah Goldberg, has written a book called Suicide of the West.

Goldberg’s Suicide is subtitled How the Rebirth of Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy. His book is, in some respects, the opposite of Burnham’s earlier Suicide, whose subtitle was An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Goldberg can fairly be called a liberal conservative, and his Suicide argues for the preservation of a civilizational patrimony inherited from the Enlightenment. This includes economic liberalism (in the “classical” sense); religious and political pluralism; and faith in democracy, properly understood. Burnham, by contrast, was… [more]

How do you control your judges? You know what? Think about it. There is no other possible criterion except “what did this text mean, what did the people understand it to mean, when it was adopted.” You either adopt that or you tell your judges — wise, wonderful judges who went to Harvard, Stanford, and maybe even Yale Law School — you must know the answers to all these profound moral questions like homosexuality, abortion, suicide. … You either use originalism or you tell your judges: “You govern us, whatever you think is good is okay. Whatever you think is bad is bad.”

A lot of our nuclear weapons are old, and it’s not clear that they still work. If we still did underground tests, we’d know for sure (and could fix any problems) – but we don’t do that. We have a program called stockpile stewardship, that uses simulation programs and the data from laser-fusion experiments in an attempt to predict weapon efficacy.

I talked to some old friends who know as much about the nuclear stockpile as anyone: neither believes that that stockpile stewardship will do the job. There are systems that you can simulate with essentially perfect accuracy and confidence, Newtonian gravitational mechanics for example: this isn’t one of them.

You had two approaches to a problem that was vital to the security of the United States: option A was absolutely sure to work, option B might possibly work.

The Feds picked B.

interesting: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/stockpile-stewardship/#comment-65553
Can’t they stick a warhead on a space launcher, loop it around the moon followed by some compact instrumentation and detonate it there, out of view? And keep mum about it.

How hard would it be for radioastronomers to notice a nuclear blast on the other side of the Moon? Would reflected light over interplanetary distances be even detectable?

I once brought this up to a bomb-designer friend: people have in fact worried about this.

They signed a treaty against that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty

The Soviets signed a treaty against developing germ warfare too, but they did it anyhow. Do you think that the Galactic Overlords automatically vaporize treaty violators?

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/stockpile-stewardship/#comment-65769
People working in US intelligence may well have opinions, but they don’t know jack about nuclear weapons. I once said that Iraq couldn’t possibly have a live nuclear weapons program, given their lack of resources and the fact that we hadn’t detected any sign of it – in part, a ‘capacity’ argument. I later heard that the whole CIA had at most one guy who knew enough to do that casual, back-of-the-envelope analysis correctly, and he was working on something else.

http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/Diaries/2017-06.html