Links to Consider, 8/1

Michael Gibson on Gundo defense startups; Vanity Fair on same; Clinton Ignatov on the online generation; Tanner Greer on how the two parties function;

Michael Gibson writes,

The out-of-whack cost ratio seen on today’s battlefields suggests a real opportunity. War is too expensive for America, and startups think that they can build success cheaper, better, and faster. It costs the U.S. $5,000 to make a single 155-millimeter artillery shell; it costs Russia $600. The Houthis are launching unsophisticated drones to attack commercial vessels in the Red Sea; the missiles that our navy fires to take out those drones cost $2.1 million apiece. Think also of the cheap spy balloon that China floated over the U.S. last year. Cruising at over 60,000 feet, it could not be shot down with guns but required $500,000-a-pop Sidewinder missiles. Even the U.S. is not rich enough to protect itself and its interests at these prices.

He goes on to describe the counterculture of El Segundo, California.

An antidote to this conformist establishmentarian- ism is to build right at the edge of science fiction, in earnestness, in the name of the family, the nation, and even God—and preferably to do it in the Gundo. “There is a natural pendulum swing,” Doricko tells me. “Kids are always going to be rebellious. And my cohort have been told for our whole lives, ‘You will own nothing, and you will be happy. You will have a remote, e-mail job. You will not see any meaningful technological progress in your lifetime. You will eat bugs.’ A lot of the Gundo is about bringing together high-agency, assertive guys who are rebelling against the narrative we’ve been fed for so long.”

For Vanity Fair, Zoe Bernard writes,

For over two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies.

…They have an outsize respect for their country and men in uniform. They love fast cars, tobacco products, and their Lord and savior Jesus Christ. They are aspirationally blue collar, often wearing blue jeans, clean leather work boots, and dark T-shirts with company emblems embroidered on their breast pockets.

Pointer from Aaron Renn.

Clinton Ignatov writes,

At risk of putting the matter too bluntly, coming out as somehow “queer” is the only scalable rite of return society has managed to innovate and scale for leaving the liminal stages of so-many varied and seductive online spaces. Obviously it’s just the expansion of the pre-existing rite of return innovated by gay men and women.

Coming out has been expanded for the all lonely people who have, for long formative periods, found “who they really are” almost entirely online or while engaging with fiction or fantastical art and the highly insular fan-groups of such art. Needless to say, having some kind of a rite of return for such people is absolutely essential. Yet the fact of the matter is that “coming out” is the only one we’ve blindly thrown together, and we’ve done so by tenuous false equivalency of gay people and queer people. “Queer” here means not only trans, but all the many various sorts of people whose common factor is to develop while radically out of touch with their bodies and without a strong sense of identity with their wider society.

He says that we need

to figure out how an adult society can address the blossoming fractal of liminal Never-Never lands which is preventing its precocious citizens from fully growing up and entering its adult world.

It is a challenging essay. I read it as saying that the online young person goes through strange rites of passage, and we need to find better ones. But feel free to give your own interpretation.

Tanner Greer writes,

Where most Democratic activists view their constituency identity as primary and their party identity as secondary, most of the Republican feminists Freeman worked with saw themselves as Republicans first. Many were the wives of sitting Republican officials. They were not outsiders clamoring for clout but insiders maneuvering for influence. Their party worked in a very different way from the Democrats:

The basic components of the Republican Party are geographic units and ideological factions.  

… The purpose of ideological factions—at least those that are organized— is to generate new ideas and test their appeal. Initially these new ideas are for internal consumption. Their concept of success is not winning benefits, symbolic or otherwise, for their group, so much as being able to provide overall direction to the Party.

…The Republican Party does have several organized groups within it such as the National Federation of Republican Women, National Black Republican Council and the Jewish Coalition, but their purpose is not to represent the views of these groups to the party. Their function is to recruit and organize group members into the Republican Party as workers and contributors. They carry the party’s message outward, not the group’s message inward.

He is quoting political theorist Jo Freeman.

This model of the Democratic Party is that demands flow outside-in. The various constituency groups want the party to take certain stands. For Republicans, the stands are taken by the party standard-bearer, and the job of a constituency group leader is to sell the party’s positions to the group.

Another aspect of this model is that one gains entry into the Democratic Party by staging a protest. Today’s marginalized protest movement will eventually become incorporated into the party’s mainstream. Think about what that means for what we can expect regarding the protest movement that is most prominent today.

substacks referenced above: @

Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones

@

On Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Part Two