Dan Williams on Misinformation Studies; Jeffery Tyler Syck on humanistic conservatism; The WSJ on the Fed's latest gift to banks; Musa Al-Gharbi on antisemitism
I'd be more sympathetic to a claim that those who favor a "condemnation-only" approach to the Hamas massacre are "not really antisemitic" and just relatively more sympathetic to the just grievances of Gazans than to arguments that Israel should be allowed to exist, if they would only adopt the same standards for "not really racist", which, duh, they would never, ever do in a million years.
Sure, Jewish non-profits trying to raise money will tend to try to water down the definition of antisemitism to scoop up more marginal cases or by easing the standard of proof to include those instances where people are suspected of intentionally using strategically-evasive code language to conceal support for more hateful intentions. But Olympic Gold for defining hatred down in this and a thousand other and far more egregious ways has got to be what we've got after several generations of sustained effort on the part of progressives to do this to "racist" which is rapidly approaching "all of reality".
I'm not saying two wrongs make a right. I'm saying the same standard must apply to both questions if these people want to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as Jew-hating Hamas apologists.
"What do you think should happen to Hamas besides hurt feelings from condemnations?" - "Um, uh, well, the thing about Jewish colonialism is ... " - "Right, ok then, and what do you think should happen to a white person who kills a black person in unclear circumstances?" - "Oh, capital punishment or at least life in prison without possibility of parole, naturally."
There are numbered lists out there of descriptions ordered in escalating rank of hateful intention towards the members of another group. Everything from "Universalist Saint" to "Active participant in an ongoing, mass scale, explicitly genocidal project" with things like endogamous marriage rules, racial preferences or quotas, segregation, apartheid, X-supremacy, X-nationalism, etc. somewhere in the middle.
What I'm saying is that pro-Hamas folks should tell us where, if one moves up from the bottom of the list in terms of a white person's feelings about black people, it stops being "racism", and then pick that same point for where a pro-Hamas person's feelings about Israeli Jews stops being "antisemitism".
There is no point whatsoever to these discussions is they are just a ritual by which people exchange phony cover stories for a dispute-resolution algorithm consisting of nothing more than deciding in favor of members of groups higher on their personal ranking list.
Yes, if we define anti-Semitic broadly enough, everything is anti-semitic. This is much like social justice fundamentalists saying all whites are racist.
Being against the policies of the Israeli govt is not inherently anti-Semitic. Case in point, there is a substantial minority of Jews against much of Netanyahu's policies toward Palestine, including but not limited to the current bombing.
Many of the US subgroups with an especially high propensity towards holding antisemitic views or engaging in bias incidents also tend to be politically aligned with the Democratic Party. However, this is not because these subsets of society tend to skew ideologically left. In fact, within the Democratic coalition, non-whites, less educated voters, et al. are especially unlikely to self-identify as “liberal” or “progressive.” They vote Democrat for practical reasons (such as support for social safety nets or government programs) while largely rejecting left cultural ideology — self-identifying as “moderate” or “conservative” instead.
Insofar as people fail to distinguish between constituents’ political and ideological alignments, it can be easy to mistakenly assume that antisemitism in the Democratic coalition must driven by folks internalizing leftist views. In reality, the Democrat-leaning Americans who are most likely to be antisemites are especially likely to be alienated by cultural leftism.
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Short version: "The biggest anti-semites are black and brown people, but they aren't REAL DEMOCRATS, they are just ghetto vote banks we buy off."
There is a kernel of truth here, but it raises the question of what "cultural leftism" is. Someone that thinks Black Lives Matter more than Jewish lives is certainly imbibing some element of cultural leftism. And hating on "privilege" rich people (Jews) is certainly cultural leftism.
Poor brown people are generally less ideologically consistent and they certainly don't buy into the LBGTQ2+ nonsense that the left invented five minutes ago. Practically, they deal with the dysfunctions of crime and illegal immigration too much to have luxury beliefs on those issues. But they have certainly imbibed the RESENTMENT that is at the heart of cultural leftism, so I'd say they have the core of it.
The piece has the same feel as someone at the National Review looking at Trump and going "that's not REAL CONSERVATISM". Whatever the merits of such a statement, it leaves out much.
Just yesterday I read a New Yorker article partly about Frantz Fanon, who famously argued that mass murder of civilians in an anticolonial cause was not merely justified but righteous:
I think that if you were to make a top 10 list of intellectuals most responsible for the Palestinian mess, Fanon would be high on that list.
Algeria was in a way a simpler case than Israel/Palestine. The French really were settler colonials, and they subjected Algerians to straightforwardly racist oppression, including plenty of civilian-murdering of their own. But the eventual triumph of the Fanon-influenced FLN was a disaster for Algeria, and to its credit the New Yorker article does not sugarcoat that, but makes clear what a practical and moral failure Fanonism has been.
It seems at least plausible that Fanonism was a significant contributor to the toxic stew that is Hamas's ideology, as well as to other Middle Eastern terrorist groups. But it's probably had an even bigger proportional impact on the ideology of Western leftist fellow-travelers. If you want to talk about the moral rot of the universities, I think you have to include not just present-day fecklessness in the face of harassment of Jewish students, but the decades-long effort in the humanities to paint monsters like Fanon as respectable, even admirable thinkers. Certainly _The Wretched of the Earth_ was already a high-status book to be reading when I was in college in the 1990s. It ought by rights to have approximately the status of _Mein Kampf_.
Little more than 2 years ago the New Yorker ran a fawning piece on Fanon, "Frantz Fanon's Enduring Legacy" - by Pankaj Mishra, which emphasized his tragic utopianism.
To wit:
'At the same time, Fanon urged the colonized to “stop accusing” their white masters, and to do what the latter had so conspicuously failed to do: start a “new history of man” that advanced “universalizing values.” In his view, anti-colonial nationalism was only the first step toward a new radical humanism “for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity.” He had already distanced himself from claims to a racially defined identity and culture. The “great white error” of racial arrogance, he had written, ought not to be replaced by the “great black mirage.” “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored,” he wrote in his first book, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952). “I will not make myself the man of any past.” He also saw no point in trying to shame people through exposure to the grisly facts of slavery and imperialism. “Am I going to ask today’s white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century?” he asked. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” he warned the dispossessed against adopting a “psychology dominated by an exaggerated sensibility, sensitivity, and susceptibility.”'
A CTRL-F of that older piece reveals that violence is "counterviolence", counterviolence is "therapy", colonialism is a machine of “naked violence,” which “only gives in when confronted with greater violence” ...
Winding up with the caveat: "The defects and omissions in Fanon’s book are also revealing. His relentlessly male perspective reduced liberation from colonialism to the frustrations and desires of men like him. Proposing that the native’s virility and will to power could counter the violence of the colonialist, he reinforced a hypermasculinist discourse of domination. Not surprisingly, politics remained a vicious affair in Algeria for decades after the French departed."
Fanon was just too much man for us!
That seems to be the theme picked up by this Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming (!) comparative piece lol. They both objectify women!
It reminds me of a friend of mine who had the high-school assignment of writing an English essay comparing two books. I wish I could remember both: one was "That Hideous Strength". The other was completely random - Silas Marner? Uncle Tom's Cabin? Anna Karenina? To Kill a Mockingbird? I remember asking her how she had arrived at those 2 books - she said they were the two books she had recently read.
My kids play on a nearby playground that has the portraits and names of people like Angela Davis and other terrorists listed as effectively saints. On the one hadn't they have no clue who these people are, they just like slides. On the other hand it's indicative of the overall ideological environment they are going to grow up in and at least subconsciously imbibe.
My kid in preschool had a holiday concert where they sung all the various songs of all the different faiths. Including of course the made up holiday of Kwanzaa. That song will likely be stuck in the child's head the rest of their life, and the idea of multiculturalism embedded in them from youth. Of course, what is Kwanzaa:
On August 11, 1965, Los Angeles police pulled over a 21-year-old drunk driver and his brother. The driver, who was black, failed a field sobriety test. He resisted arrest, resulting in a fight between the two brothers, the police, and later, their mother. Amid the chaos, a crowd gathered, growing angry at what they perceived to be police brutality. Later, a woman who spat on police was dragged out of the crowd after resisting arrest. The crowd, mistakenly believing she was pregnant, became even angrier. That night, angry mobs of black Angelinos attacked motorists with rocks and bricks, pulling white drivers out of their cars and beating them. Over the next several days, the city became engulfed in a full-blown race riot. The ensuing violence, euphemistically called the “Watts Rebellion” by some writers today, caused 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, and $40 million in property damage. In its aftermath, a black graduate student named Ron Karenga (born Ronald Everett) established the black nationalist group he called the US Organization1. A year later, he invented Kwanzaa.
...
Two years later, in 1971, Karenga himself was arrested and convicted of kidnapping and assaulting two women he believed were conspiring against him. Court testimony revealed the two women were stripped naked and tortured with soldering irons, forced to drink detergent-filled water, and beaten with electrical cords and batons, among other things. Karenga has always maintained his innocence, despite the plethora of evidence presented at trial, and has described himself as a “political prisoner.” He was released from prison in 1975, and just eight years later became the chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University at Long Beach, a job he still has today despite the current hypersensitive, microaggressions-focused cultural moment.
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Whenever people talk about Nazies or whatever else on the right that is supposed to be outside of the Overton Window, I remember that people and ideas like this are the heart of leftism and what they want to teach children.
Usually lean towards believing ideasmiths matter. But had Fanon never written word, Fanonism would still be sprouting up around the world like poison mushrooms.
The share of the global population that enjoys even de minimis substantive freedom of speech is small and shrinking. And this is largely the result of institutions at work. I trust that you would agree that the question of the proper role of institutions in epistemology is not straightforward as well.
Although he published his masterpiece The Captive Mind back in 1951 regarding Eastern Europe under Stalinism, Czeslaw Milosz's observations appear as pertinent as ever:
"The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into 'loyalists' and 'criminals' a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the 'criminals' one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves. From the social point of view these persons would constitute the best guarantee that the future development of the social organism would be toward good."
However the establishment, most especially in the Commonwealth countries, in Brussell's vassal states, and in places like Bangladesh and China, but not exclusively, is hellbent on crushing nonconformism by any means necessary. Institutions so far do not seem to be the answer.
Further, I would say that David Brin does not seem to oppose resistance to institutional controls:
"the astonishing thing about all this raging individualism is how well it works at generating mutual and reciprocal criticism that is unavoidable even by elites. It is by far the best system ever created for discovering — and even preventing — errors that might cause real harm."
That is, for as long as legal loopholes permit the expression of non-establishment sanctioned views.
And note too, that he considers disputation arenas as a fifth, and equal, arena for discourse:
"Consider four marvels of our age — science, democracy, the justice system and fair markets. In each case the participants (scientists, litigants, politicians and capitalists) are driven by selfish goals. That won't change; not till we redefine human nature. But for years, rules have been fine-tuned in each of these fields of endeavor, to reduce cheating and let quality or truth win much of the time. By harnessing human competitiveness, instead of suppressing it, these "accountability arenas" nourished much of our unprecedented wealth and freedom.
The four arenas aren't always fair or efficient! A good theory, law or commercial product may flounder, or else face many trials before prevailing. But remember that organic systems needn't be efficient, only robust. Likewise, our core institutions have to keep functioning despite individual incompetence, or the most everlasting human temptation — to cheat. In achieving this, the four old accountability arenas have done pretty well by us, so far.
Here's my key point: I think the Net has potential for creating a fifth great arena, equal to the others."
Thus, I am not quite ready to defenestrate individualism and substantive freedom of speech just yet.
My proposal has been that everyone should be able to have a deposit account at the Fed, and everyone should get the same rates. In 2024 there is no plausible argument for why this isn't technically feasible at any scale at negligible cost. If the Fed doesn't want to handle customer service (who does?) then they can allow narrow banks to handle the pesky humans and to be simple pass-through intermediaries for their deposits.
They won't allow them. The New York Fed has been pretending to only 'delay' review of TNB USA's application for a master account for over six years (the form says a decision “may take 5–7 days”), and SDNY didn't even allow TNB standing to sue to complain about this sham.
It is totally not a Catch-22 to tell someone they can't complain until they've been rejected, but that they aren't technically being rejected from doing something just by being prevented from ever being allowed to do it, by a delay that never need end, but which could, theoretically, end, if someone changed their mind and wanted it to end. (Cut scene to group of top bankers laughing so hard in unison they are literally crying and doubled-over, holding their ribs.)
This isn't 'law', and putting any considerations of basic fairness or corrupt bailouts to the side, it seems that as a mere practical measure, the only way to make the Fed either obey laws or follow their own published rules is to make them serve literally everybody.
Public Accountability requires Accounts for the Public.
"It seems that we have to rely on institutions to sort things out."
I don't think I can agree with this, not because we don't need institutions, but because I don't think we ever fully "sort things out." I think a lot of our recent epistemology issues stem from the notion that we can sort things out, identify what is true, then all agree on it and move on. I think it is far more true that we want the certainty more than we want the truth, and in fact dealing with reality is dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Individual choice is one way we deal with this problem, as people can make the best decisions they can based on what they know and believe, and thus we not only avoid all making the same mistakes but also serve as useful examples to others who can learn from the outcomes. The expectation that all knowledge and the means to make every decision perfectly exists out there to find if only we read enough books and journal articles, or easier still just find the right expert, has become wide spread and led to many problems. Not least of which is oppressive conflict over who gets to be the experts.
We now need to rely on a meta-institution to sort the broken epistemic institutions out.
There really isn't anything else but sudden mass convergence to enforcing intellectual norms like "show your work", "use unambiguous language", "prove your skin in the game", and "explain under what conditions you would flip your opinion."
Re: Rational bad guys ("If you keep blaming Israel for Palestinian civilian deaths, in the long run you will make more civilians suffer, because the bad guys know that they can always hide behind civilians.")
Your last sentence is one of the best I've read on Israel-Palestine.
I recently read some old Heather Heying substack posts and she had a similarly good line on universities and grievance studies, " Now that asking for evidence of racism is itself evidence of racism, we have a fully gameable, authoritarian, and anti-intellectual climate."
Businesses’ fetters are forged by competitors who can offer better goods and services at lower prices, customers who can buy elsewhere, and employees who can work elsewhere.
Sure, but once you've accounted for all those fetters, within that vastly smaller room for maneuver, businesses are unfettered, lol.
Seriously though - and perhaps more charitably than he deserves - I think the point Syck was trying - however inartfully - to make was precisely that even in that smaller room for maneuver under current laws, private businesses are still allowed to act in ways that harm the public interest or overall social welfare and that are not genuinely net-positive-sum interactions. I think Syck would call this a nitpick because good-faith readers would obviously all take those basic fetters for granted as basic economic assumptions.
He would say that these new subtle ways that businesses manipulate and harm people and hurt the public interest have been under-recognized (or corruptly tolerated by self-serving elites) and thus new prohibitions correcting the situation have not yet been integrated into laws regulating business activity.
One of the main ways in which businesses hurt consumers is through regulatory capture - influencing regulatory agencies to benefit themselves or hurt their competitors.
“I think that the larger problem is stupidity and too much sympathy for ‘victim classes.’” True. I blame public schools and the private schools that largely mimic them. Public schools breed the “oppressed perspective” which is the seed of DEI. Rare is the grateful, entrepreneurial and personally accountable. Rare is the person who understands Israeli and Zionist history.
The fusionists: "These politicians pushed for low taxes, slashing government regulations, and the broad acceptance of Christian social norms on the local level as a way to preserve the American constitutional order." This is an excellent description of Trump's actual 2017-2020 policies.
Plus unkept promises on reducing illegal immigration & building a Wall. But linking to hysterical pieces doesn't convince me at all that Trump is terrible -- instead that the one linking is untrustworthy & biased. Remember Rob's hard lesson -- look at what people do, not what they say. (Trump supporters who expect huge crackdowns are likely to be see some strong attempt which courts rule as illegal, so much less severe than the linked note claims.)
As is too often the case with Mounk's Persuasion, Syck's Trump hate is obvious to any objective observer: "remember the horrors of January 6th to see that the victory of Trumpian National Conservatism in the right’s civil war would spell disaster for America." There are an increasing number of videos that show more of what actually happened -- the main horrible incident was a Capitol Police officer taking out his gun and shooting and killing Ashli Babbitt. (The Family now suing, will be interesting). Shot for trespassing as she was protesting an election she thought was stolen.
Nobody was even charged with insurrection, much less convicted.
The FBI refuses to identify the many human assets they had in and among the crowd -- not long after the FBI arranged a "foiled" kidnap attempt of a governor.
Censoring the truth in an election is one way to steal an election -- others disagree with this definition.
Syck does do a service in delineating Fusion, Nationalist & Human Conservatism, with the latter "preserving the diverse daily practices of human existence." Most non-political junkies who vote Republican think that's a good description of what they like about Trump, who could be grouped with those who "see an opportunity to defend human life as worthwhile in itself, and to preserve our daily customs and joys from the interference of boorish intellectual systems." Tho Trump's not a Humanist formally.
(I might be one: 1-free market with some welfare & jobs support; 2-preserve communities & groups; 3-pragmatic internationalism; 4-pluralist society, with peaceful disagreement; 5-"moderate politics", like some 10-14 week heartbeat cutoff on abortion? Syck says "abortion" but doesn't quite say what moderate is -- I'm 90% sure Trump would have no problem with any policy BUT he also has little problem with more popular policies. "To be committed to moderate politics means excluding the political extremes" But Syck's linked examples of extreme Trump seem quite contrived when compared to what
Trump
Actually
Did.
As my abortion example of a 12 week heartbeat kinda abortion time shows, it doesn't take many words, but because it's clear, many might want something else to be called moderate.
It's good Syck mentions that fine, but losing politician W. Willkie. Most Trump voters strongly don't want to lose. Which is also part of why Trump can't admit that he lost, even tho Biden was crowned President by the deep state.
I only know for sure what is "misinformation" is when the results and conclusions disagree with observable reality or other measurements or solid theories like thermodynamics which has zero exceptions.
For example: I know the statement that Israels JDF is "carpet bombing", targeting "civilians", committing genocide, and even "indiscriminate" bombing (Biden statement) are pure misinformation when data is available on the number killed per ton of munitions use in city warfare like in WW11. A ton of explosives are the same now as then with the accuracy changing. The number killed in Gaza is claimed to 24,000 claimed dead (note children can be fighters for Hamas), but Israel is claimed to have use 40,000 tons of munitions. At the kill rate of truly near indiscriminate bombing of a city being between 5 and 50 killed/ ton with Israel being down around 0.6 /ton the statements are false by observation. Killing 100,000 in Toyko on one 1,650 ton bombing raid on one night gives a perspective of what even half a century old explosives can do to a city which had bomb shelters for civilians which Gaza doesn't.
In my own technical fields spotting misinformation is more complex as I note environmental activist playing p-hacking games to get the results they want into regulations and bend public perceptions. Little things like leaving out what should be principle variables then claiming an r-sq of 0.4 is good enough to blame farmers and write regulations with billion dollar impacts. For example, a mathematical model for "wild" salmon that added a variable of "delayed transportation mortality" and excluded seal and bird predation (can't have endangered birds eating endangered fish) is such game. All the world wide "salmon farmers" transport smolts (baby salmon ready for seawater) using similar technology and smolts delivered to ocean farms is a billion dollar class business, which has never had papers or sections on that problem at the international aquaculture meetings, which I attend. Something like 30% losses would be a subject of discussion. To catch this class of misinformation you need to understand something about the subject along with being able to "read" math models along with basic concepts like you can't fully describe an N variable problem in a N-X variable space (unless all X are known constants).
I'd be more sympathetic to a claim that those who favor a "condemnation-only" approach to the Hamas massacre are "not really antisemitic" and just relatively more sympathetic to the just grievances of Gazans than to arguments that Israel should be allowed to exist, if they would only adopt the same standards for "not really racist", which, duh, they would never, ever do in a million years.
Sure, Jewish non-profits trying to raise money will tend to try to water down the definition of antisemitism to scoop up more marginal cases or by easing the standard of proof to include those instances where people are suspected of intentionally using strategically-evasive code language to conceal support for more hateful intentions. But Olympic Gold for defining hatred down in this and a thousand other and far more egregious ways has got to be what we've got after several generations of sustained effort on the part of progressives to do this to "racist" which is rapidly approaching "all of reality".
I'm not saying two wrongs make a right. I'm saying the same standard must apply to both questions if these people want to be taken seriously instead of dismissed as Jew-hating Hamas apologists.
"What do you think should happen to Hamas besides hurt feelings from condemnations?" - "Um, uh, well, the thing about Jewish colonialism is ... " - "Right, ok then, and what do you think should happen to a white person who kills a black person in unclear circumstances?" - "Oh, capital punishment or at least life in prison without possibility of parole, naturally."
There are numbered lists out there of descriptions ordered in escalating rank of hateful intention towards the members of another group. Everything from "Universalist Saint" to "Active participant in an ongoing, mass scale, explicitly genocidal project" with things like endogamous marriage rules, racial preferences or quotas, segregation, apartheid, X-supremacy, X-nationalism, etc. somewhere in the middle.
What I'm saying is that pro-Hamas folks should tell us where, if one moves up from the bottom of the list in terms of a white person's feelings about black people, it stops being "racism", and then pick that same point for where a pro-Hamas person's feelings about Israeli Jews stops being "antisemitism".
There is no point whatsoever to these discussions is they are just a ritual by which people exchange phony cover stories for a dispute-resolution algorithm consisting of nothing more than deciding in favor of members of groups higher on their personal ranking list.
Yes, if we define anti-Semitic broadly enough, everything is anti-semitic. This is much like social justice fundamentalists saying all whites are racist.
Being against the policies of the Israeli govt is not inherently anti-Semitic. Case in point, there is a substantial minority of Jews against much of Netanyahu's policies toward Palestine, including but not limited to the current bombing.
In the Slow Boring piece, the author notes that:
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Many of the US subgroups with an especially high propensity towards holding antisemitic views or engaging in bias incidents also tend to be politically aligned with the Democratic Party. However, this is not because these subsets of society tend to skew ideologically left. In fact, within the Democratic coalition, non-whites, less educated voters, et al. are especially unlikely to self-identify as “liberal” or “progressive.” They vote Democrat for practical reasons (such as support for social safety nets or government programs) while largely rejecting left cultural ideology — self-identifying as “moderate” or “conservative” instead.
Insofar as people fail to distinguish between constituents’ political and ideological alignments, it can be easy to mistakenly assume that antisemitism in the Democratic coalition must driven by folks internalizing leftist views. In reality, the Democrat-leaning Americans who are most likely to be antisemites are especially likely to be alienated by cultural leftism.
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Short version: "The biggest anti-semites are black and brown people, but they aren't REAL DEMOCRATS, they are just ghetto vote banks we buy off."
There is a kernel of truth here, but it raises the question of what "cultural leftism" is. Someone that thinks Black Lives Matter more than Jewish lives is certainly imbibing some element of cultural leftism. And hating on "privilege" rich people (Jews) is certainly cultural leftism.
Poor brown people are generally less ideologically consistent and they certainly don't buy into the LBGTQ2+ nonsense that the left invented five minutes ago. Practically, they deal with the dysfunctions of crime and illegal immigration too much to have luxury beliefs on those issues. But they have certainly imbibed the RESENTMENT that is at the heart of cultural leftism, so I'd say they have the core of it.
The piece has the same feel as someone at the National Review looking at Trump and going "that's not REAL CONSERVATISM". Whatever the merits of such a statement, it leaves out much.
Just yesterday I read a New Yorker article partly about Frantz Fanon, who famously argued that mass murder of civilians in an anticolonial cause was not merely justified but righteous:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/15/the-rebels-clinic-the-revolutionary-lives-of-frantz-fanon-adam-shatz-book-review-the-complete-man-ian-fleming
I think that if you were to make a top 10 list of intellectuals most responsible for the Palestinian mess, Fanon would be high on that list.
Algeria was in a way a simpler case than Israel/Palestine. The French really were settler colonials, and they subjected Algerians to straightforwardly racist oppression, including plenty of civilian-murdering of their own. But the eventual triumph of the Fanon-influenced FLN was a disaster for Algeria, and to its credit the New Yorker article does not sugarcoat that, but makes clear what a practical and moral failure Fanonism has been.
It seems at least plausible that Fanonism was a significant contributor to the toxic stew that is Hamas's ideology, as well as to other Middle Eastern terrorist groups. But it's probably had an even bigger proportional impact on the ideology of Western leftist fellow-travelers. If you want to talk about the moral rot of the universities, I think you have to include not just present-day fecklessness in the face of harassment of Jewish students, but the decades-long effort in the humanities to paint monsters like Fanon as respectable, even admirable thinkers. Certainly _The Wretched of the Earth_ was already a high-status book to be reading when I was in college in the 1990s. It ought by rights to have approximately the status of _Mein Kampf_.
Little more than 2 years ago the New Yorker ran a fawning piece on Fanon, "Frantz Fanon's Enduring Legacy" - by Pankaj Mishra, which emphasized his tragic utopianism.
To wit:
'At the same time, Fanon urged the colonized to “stop accusing” their white masters, and to do what the latter had so conspicuously failed to do: start a “new history of man” that advanced “universalizing values.” In his view, anti-colonial nationalism was only the first step toward a new radical humanism “for Europe, for ourselves and for humanity.” He had already distanced himself from claims to a racially defined identity and culture. The “great white error” of racial arrogance, he had written, ought not to be replaced by the “great black mirage.” “In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored,” he wrote in his first book, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952). “I will not make myself the man of any past.” He also saw no point in trying to shame people through exposure to the grisly facts of slavery and imperialism. “Am I going to ask today’s white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century?” he asked. In “The Wretched of the Earth,” he warned the dispossessed against adopting a “psychology dominated by an exaggerated sensibility, sensitivity, and susceptibility.”'
A CTRL-F of that older piece reveals that violence is "counterviolence", counterviolence is "therapy", colonialism is a machine of “naked violence,” which “only gives in when confronted with greater violence” ...
Winding up with the caveat: "The defects and omissions in Fanon’s book are also revealing. His relentlessly male perspective reduced liberation from colonialism to the frustrations and desires of men like him. Proposing that the native’s virility and will to power could counter the violence of the colonialist, he reinforced a hypermasculinist discourse of domination. Not surprisingly, politics remained a vicious affair in Algeria for decades after the French departed."
Fanon was just too much man for us!
That seems to be the theme picked up by this Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming (!) comparative piece lol. They both objectify women!
It reminds me of a friend of mine who had the high-school assignment of writing an English essay comparing two books. I wish I could remember both: one was "That Hideous Strength". The other was completely random - Silas Marner? Uncle Tom's Cabin? Anna Karenina? To Kill a Mockingbird? I remember asking her how she had arrived at those 2 books - she said they were the two books she had recently read.
My kids play on a nearby playground that has the portraits and names of people like Angela Davis and other terrorists listed as effectively saints. On the one hadn't they have no clue who these people are, they just like slides. On the other hand it's indicative of the overall ideological environment they are going to grow up in and at least subconsciously imbibe.
My kid in preschool had a holiday concert where they sung all the various songs of all the different faiths. Including of course the made up holiday of Kwanzaa. That song will likely be stuck in the child's head the rest of their life, and the idea of multiculturalism embedded in them from youth. Of course, what is Kwanzaa:
https://www.piratewires.com/p/abolish-kwanzaa
On August 11, 1965, Los Angeles police pulled over a 21-year-old drunk driver and his brother. The driver, who was black, failed a field sobriety test. He resisted arrest, resulting in a fight between the two brothers, the police, and later, their mother. Amid the chaos, a crowd gathered, growing angry at what they perceived to be police brutality. Later, a woman who spat on police was dragged out of the crowd after resisting arrest. The crowd, mistakenly believing she was pregnant, became even angrier. That night, angry mobs of black Angelinos attacked motorists with rocks and bricks, pulling white drivers out of their cars and beating them. Over the next several days, the city became engulfed in a full-blown race riot. The ensuing violence, euphemistically called the “Watts Rebellion” by some writers today, caused 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, and $40 million in property damage. In its aftermath, a black graduate student named Ron Karenga (born Ronald Everett) established the black nationalist group he called the US Organization1. A year later, he invented Kwanzaa.
...
Two years later, in 1971, Karenga himself was arrested and convicted of kidnapping and assaulting two women he believed were conspiring against him. Court testimony revealed the two women were stripped naked and tortured with soldering irons, forced to drink detergent-filled water, and beaten with electrical cords and batons, among other things. Karenga has always maintained his innocence, despite the plethora of evidence presented at trial, and has described himself as a “political prisoner.” He was released from prison in 1975, and just eight years later became the chair of the Africana Studies Department at California State University at Long Beach, a job he still has today despite the current hypersensitive, microaggressions-focused cultural moment.
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Whenever people talk about Nazies or whatever else on the right that is supposed to be outside of the Overton Window, I remember that people and ideas like this are the heart of leftism and what they want to teach children.
Usually lean towards believing ideasmiths matter. But had Fanon never written word, Fanonism would still be sprouting up around the world like poison mushrooms.
"It seems that we have to rely on institutions to sort things out. "
Hmmm....you mean like the European Commission's campaign against Elon Musk? (https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2023/12/18/brussels-launches-legal-action-against-musks-x-over-illegal-content-disinformation )
Or Germany criminally prosecuting its online critics? (https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/we-powers-be-are-done-playing-grab-ass-stfu-follow-orders-or-else )
The share of the global population that enjoys even de minimis substantive freedom of speech is small and shrinking. And this is largely the result of institutions at work. I trust that you would agree that the question of the proper role of institutions in epistemology is not straightforward as well.
Although he published his masterpiece The Captive Mind back in 1951 regarding Eastern Europe under Stalinism, Czeslaw Milosz's observations appear as pertinent as ever:
"The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts. When people are divided into 'loyalists' and 'criminals' a premium is placed on every type of conformist, coward, and hireling; whereas among the 'criminals' one finds a singularly high percentage of people who are direct, sincere, and true to themselves. From the social point of view these persons would constitute the best guarantee that the future development of the social organism would be toward good."
However the establishment, most especially in the Commonwealth countries, in Brussell's vassal states, and in places like Bangladesh and China, but not exclusively, is hellbent on crushing nonconformism by any means necessary. Institutions so far do not seem to be the answer.
Further, I would say that David Brin does not seem to oppose resistance to institutional controls:
"the astonishing thing about all this raging individualism is how well it works at generating mutual and reciprocal criticism that is unavoidable even by elites. It is by far the best system ever created for discovering — and even preventing — errors that might cause real harm."
That is, for as long as legal loopholes permit the expression of non-establishment sanctioned views.
And note too, that he considers disputation arenas as a fifth, and equal, arena for discourse:
"Consider four marvels of our age — science, democracy, the justice system and fair markets. In each case the participants (scientists, litigants, politicians and capitalists) are driven by selfish goals. That won't change; not till we redefine human nature. But for years, rules have been fine-tuned in each of these fields of endeavor, to reduce cheating and let quality or truth win much of the time. By harnessing human competitiveness, instead of suppressing it, these "accountability arenas" nourished much of our unprecedented wealth and freedom.
The four arenas aren't always fair or efficient! A good theory, law or commercial product may flounder, or else face many trials before prevailing. But remember that organic systems needn't be efficient, only robust. Likewise, our core institutions have to keep functioning despite individual incompetence, or the most everlasting human temptation — to cheat. In achieving this, the four old accountability arenas have done pretty well by us, so far.
Here's my key point: I think the Net has potential for creating a fifth great arena, equal to the others."
Thus, I am not quite ready to defenestrate individualism and substantive freedom of speech just yet.
Typo at the end of this sentence:
> The problem of epistemology—deciding what to believe—is not straightforward. As we discussed in our Zoom recently, each of individually is biased.
Sounds like it should read "each of us individually is biased."
My proposal has been that everyone should be able to have a deposit account at the Fed, and everyone should get the same rates. In 2024 there is no plausible argument for why this isn't technically feasible at any scale at negligible cost. If the Fed doesn't want to handle customer service (who does?) then they can allow narrow banks to handle the pesky humans and to be simple pass-through intermediaries for their deposits.
They won't allow them. The New York Fed has been pretending to only 'delay' review of TNB USA's application for a master account for over six years (the form says a decision “may take 5–7 days”), and SDNY didn't even allow TNB standing to sue to complain about this sham.
It is totally not a Catch-22 to tell someone they can't complain until they've been rejected, but that they aren't technically being rejected from doing something just by being prevented from ever being allowed to do it, by a delay that never need end, but which could, theoretically, end, if someone changed their mind and wanted it to end. (Cut scene to group of top bankers laughing so hard in unison they are literally crying and doubled-over, holding their ribs.)
This isn't 'law', and putting any considerations of basic fairness or corrupt bailouts to the side, it seems that as a mere practical measure, the only way to make the Fed either obey laws or follow their own published rules is to make them serve literally everybody.
Public Accountability requires Accounts for the Public.
Shades of the Bank of Dave...
"It seems that we have to rely on institutions to sort things out."
I don't think I can agree with this, not because we don't need institutions, but because I don't think we ever fully "sort things out." I think a lot of our recent epistemology issues stem from the notion that we can sort things out, identify what is true, then all agree on it and move on. I think it is far more true that we want the certainty more than we want the truth, and in fact dealing with reality is dealing with a lot of uncertainty. Individual choice is one way we deal with this problem, as people can make the best decisions they can based on what they know and believe, and thus we not only avoid all making the same mistakes but also serve as useful examples to others who can learn from the outcomes. The expectation that all knowledge and the means to make every decision perfectly exists out there to find if only we read enough books and journal articles, or easier still just find the right expert, has become wide spread and led to many problems. Not least of which is oppressive conflict over who gets to be the experts.
We now need to rely on a meta-institution to sort the broken epistemic institutions out.
There really isn't anything else but sudden mass convergence to enforcing intellectual norms like "show your work", "use unambiguous language", "prove your skin in the game", and "explain under what conditions you would flip your opinion."
Re: Rational bad guys ("If you keep blaming Israel for Palestinian civilian deaths, in the long run you will make more civilians suffer, because the bad guys know that they can always hide behind civilians.")
The first two rules of strategic interaction:
Never under-estimate your opponent's rationality,
*and*
Never over-estimate your opponent's rationality.
The enemy will always hide among the civilians. Needles like haystacks.
Rare is the human who doesn't hide from the truth behind something.
Your last sentence is one of the best I've read on Israel-Palestine.
I recently read some old Heather Heying substack posts and she had a similarly good line on universities and grievance studies, " Now that asking for evidence of racism is itself evidence of racism, we have a fully gameable, authoritarian, and anti-intellectual climate."
Businesses’ fetters are forged by competitors who can offer better goods and services at lower prices, customers who can buy elsewhere, and employees who can work elsewhere.
Sure, but once you've accounted for all those fetters, within that vastly smaller room for maneuver, businesses are unfettered, lol.
Seriously though - and perhaps more charitably than he deserves - I think the point Syck was trying - however inartfully - to make was precisely that even in that smaller room for maneuver under current laws, private businesses are still allowed to act in ways that harm the public interest or overall social welfare and that are not genuinely net-positive-sum interactions. I think Syck would call this a nitpick because good-faith readers would obviously all take those basic fetters for granted as basic economic assumptions.
He would say that these new subtle ways that businesses manipulate and harm people and hurt the public interest have been under-recognized (or corruptly tolerated by self-serving elites) and thus new prohibitions correcting the situation have not yet been integrated into laws regulating business activity.
One of the main ways in which businesses hurt consumers is through regulatory capture - influencing regulatory agencies to benefit themselves or hurt their competitors.
“I think that the larger problem is stupidity and too much sympathy for ‘victim classes.’” True. I blame public schools and the private schools that largely mimic them. Public schools breed the “oppressed perspective” which is the seed of DEI. Rare is the grateful, entrepreneurial and personally accountable. Rare is the person who understands Israeli and Zionist history.
The fusionists: "These politicians pushed for low taxes, slashing government regulations, and the broad acceptance of Christian social norms on the local level as a way to preserve the American constitutional order." This is an excellent description of Trump's actual 2017-2020 policies.
Plus unkept promises on reducing illegal immigration & building a Wall. But linking to hysterical pieces doesn't convince me at all that Trump is terrible -- instead that the one linking is untrustworthy & biased. Remember Rob's hard lesson -- look at what people do, not what they say. (Trump supporters who expect huge crackdowns are likely to be see some strong attempt which courts rule as illegal, so much less severe than the linked note claims.)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/a-re-elected-trump-will-unleash-unspeakable)
As is too often the case with Mounk's Persuasion, Syck's Trump hate is obvious to any objective observer: "remember the horrors of January 6th to see that the victory of Trumpian National Conservatism in the right’s civil war would spell disaster for America." There are an increasing number of videos that show more of what actually happened -- the main horrible incident was a Capitol Police officer taking out his gun and shooting and killing Ashli Babbitt. (The Family now suing, will be interesting). Shot for trespassing as she was protesting an election she thought was stolen.
Nobody was even charged with insurrection, much less convicted.
The FBI refuses to identify the many human assets they had in and among the crowd -- not long after the FBI arranged a "foiled" kidnap attempt of a governor.
Censoring the truth in an election is one way to steal an election -- others disagree with this definition.
Syck does do a service in delineating Fusion, Nationalist & Human Conservatism, with the latter "preserving the diverse daily practices of human existence." Most non-political junkies who vote Republican think that's a good description of what they like about Trump, who could be grouped with those who "see an opportunity to defend human life as worthwhile in itself, and to preserve our daily customs and joys from the interference of boorish intellectual systems." Tho Trump's not a Humanist formally.
(I might be one: 1-free market with some welfare & jobs support; 2-preserve communities & groups; 3-pragmatic internationalism; 4-pluralist society, with peaceful disagreement; 5-"moderate politics", like some 10-14 week heartbeat cutoff on abortion? Syck says "abortion" but doesn't quite say what moderate is -- I'm 90% sure Trump would have no problem with any policy BUT he also has little problem with more popular policies. "To be committed to moderate politics means excluding the political extremes" But Syck's linked examples of extreme Trump seem quite contrived when compared to what
Trump
Actually
Did.
As my abortion example of a 12 week heartbeat kinda abortion time shows, it doesn't take many words, but because it's clear, many might want something else to be called moderate.
It's good Syck mentions that fine, but losing politician W. Willkie. Most Trump voters strongly don't want to lose. Which is also part of why Trump can't admit that he lost, even tho Biden was crowned President by the deep state.
And the next election might well be stolen again.
AI deepfakes comin' ?
I only know for sure what is "misinformation" is when the results and conclusions disagree with observable reality or other measurements or solid theories like thermodynamics which has zero exceptions.
For example: I know the statement that Israels JDF is "carpet bombing", targeting "civilians", committing genocide, and even "indiscriminate" bombing (Biden statement) are pure misinformation when data is available on the number killed per ton of munitions use in city warfare like in WW11. A ton of explosives are the same now as then with the accuracy changing. The number killed in Gaza is claimed to 24,000 claimed dead (note children can be fighters for Hamas), but Israel is claimed to have use 40,000 tons of munitions. At the kill rate of truly near indiscriminate bombing of a city being between 5 and 50 killed/ ton with Israel being down around 0.6 /ton the statements are false by observation. Killing 100,000 in Toyko on one 1,650 ton bombing raid on one night gives a perspective of what even half a century old explosives can do to a city which had bomb shelters for civilians which Gaza doesn't.
In my own technical fields spotting misinformation is more complex as I note environmental activist playing p-hacking games to get the results they want into regulations and bend public perceptions. Little things like leaving out what should be principle variables then claiming an r-sq of 0.4 is good enough to blame farmers and write regulations with billion dollar impacts. For example, a mathematical model for "wild" salmon that added a variable of "delayed transportation mortality" and excluded seal and bird predation (can't have endangered birds eating endangered fish) is such game. All the world wide "salmon farmers" transport smolts (baby salmon ready for seawater) using similar technology and smolts delivered to ocean farms is a billion dollar class business, which has never had papers or sections on that problem at the international aquaculture meetings, which I attend. Something like 30% losses would be a subject of discussion. To catch this class of misinformation you need to understand something about the subject along with being able to "read" math models along with basic concepts like you can't fully describe an N variable problem in a N-X variable space (unless all X are known constants).