“ The human instinct for fairness is deep-seated and evolutionarily ancient. Parents notice how naturally it comes to their children to complain that their sibling got more than they did. It doesn’t need to be taught,”
I disagree slightly. As the following article highlights, our aversion to unfairness is more accurately described as an aversion to lack of proportionality.
There are lots of ways to define fair. One way is equal outcomes regardless of contribution. Another is outcomes/rewards proportionate to need. According to the above studies, our default nature is more toward defining it as rewards/outcomes proportionate to contributions.
And this is something socialism has never been good at.
Wokeism is just another flavor of utopian dreaming and is doomed because of (a) human fallibility and (b) the group who thinks that those who disagree with their utopian dream must be censored, punished, etc. A constrained vision, on the other hand, acknowledges human diversity and flaws, and is willing to work with it. A pluralistic world, if you will.
I agree with all of that except the bit where you say wokeism is doomed. Like Dalrymple, Hughes and Arnold, I don't think it is. Utopian dreaming never goes out of fashion.
Thanks, I didn't make myself very clear on that point. I didn't mean to convey that it will go away. By doomed, as with all utopian dreams, I meant it will not succeed in delivering utopia. All the dreamers continue dreaming despite their failures.
I wanted to say the same thing. Wokism can't measure success by any real world statistics since it is so loosely defined. Look at how they cancel each other and eat their young. That is success to them. Each new incoming class sets their own agenda, and graduating classes fade from sight and are forgotten if not canceled. They're like coals in a firebox, each new shovelful turning to ashes to be dumped and forgotten.
Remember Greta? Not a woke star, but woke adjacent, and she had to resort to a sailboat carrying a few pounds of "supplies" to Gaza to get any attention, and faded fast. She's irrelevant and desperate, just like every graduating class replaced by the new frosh.
Since the idea of communism itself, it is the most dangerous, most immoral form of (supposed) utopianism we have seen, as it casually justifies the most evil, immoral things.
Woke oppressor-oppressed ideology asserts that the oppressed have the right by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to defeat their oppressors.
Hence the post-October 7th cheering on by the left of Hamas’ brutal murders, kidnappings, tortures, rapes of Israelis, including children and babies.
“We hold Israel entirely responsible for all unfolding violence in the region.”
At least more and more normies who vote a Democrat are learning the horrors of this ideology. Unfortunately, most of them are willing to remain silent and allow their left wing to dominate the left agenda.
I appreciate this insight — that history's most consistently destructive ideas (and oof, is that a big bag!) need to be steered away from perpetually. I don't know if Hughes would second this point, but in my mind this is a rallying cry for a rich K–12 history curriculum.
Me too, and I believe it applies just as well (unfortunately) to a general fear of “the other” and racism specifically. As much as I love the sentiment of Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” (from South Pacific) it’s unfortunately just not true. If we recognize the 97% of our DNA shared with Great Chimps, whose clans regularly murder (male) territorial interlopers on sight, or if we simply acknowledge the reluctance and sometimes terror of infants or young children when they’re handed over to a *blood relative* with whom they’re unfamiliar for a kiss or a hug.
It’s tolerance (liberality), for most of us, that must be taught.
Wokeism suffers from 2 fatal flaws. Univariate analysis and static analysis. This is true of progressives in general. Univariate analysis is easily ridiculed in almost all cases. Recently one study or ongoing study that was canceled by doge looked at organ donation disparities. Of course racism was assigned as the cause. Now anyone with any understanding of genetics knows that donations across races are going to be extremely rare, your best chance of a match is a close family member. The woke idiots were assigning a cause for the disparities that was impossible. The actual cause was a lack of minority donors. Their study was not going to help anybody because it was stupid. Static analysis is a little bit more difficult to disprove, but can be easily attacked by asking “and then what?”.
While your matching argument has some truth, most American blacks have quite a bit of white ancestry and this is more important than skin color.
I would expect there to be lots of reasons for disparities in who received donor organs besides racism in the process. That said, I can easily see how the process might be unintentionally tilted along racial lines, maybe even intentionally.
No. Mixed ancestry actually makes it harder. Again your best chance is a family member- the closer the better. When you have mix, the mix of genetic markers they try to match gets more complex more unique
Wokeness is a huge epidemic that has captured well-meaning, empathetic young and old alike — in the name of social justice. Its underpinning on postmodernism postulates that there is no objective reality, only cultural frameworks. And the simplest solution is that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, victims and oppressors. Adoption of this binary and suppression of complexity has been all powerful. It started on college campuses in the 1980s. By 2014, the shooting of Trayvon Martin (black) by George Zimmerman, an Hispanic-American (misidentified as ‘white’), exploded into an anti-racist rampage against white privilege. Then came the feminist rampage against (toxic) males; then the trans activists rampage against everyone else. Who could have predicted that a massacre of Israelis in 2023 by joyful Islamist would result in the explosion of world-wide anti-semitism in 2024?
Let’s see what mathematics can tell us about the good guy/bad guy binary. Such a competition can be represented by the predator-prey model, used to describe the population dynamics between two species where one (the predator) consumes the other (the prey). With two players, the populations continue to oscillate; it takes a third or fourth player — call it complexity — to product an asymptotically stable solution. Complexity, too, can lead to sudden changes in outcomes as reflected in both chaos theory (e.g., butterflies in Australia causing storms in the northeast) and catastrophe theory.
Sowell’s description of unconstrained and constrained visions does account for the wokie solutions of today’s elites. But solving the wokeness dilemma will necessitate academics injecting complexity into the learning process.
Geroge Zimmerman is a white Hispanic. The NYT told us this.
And always prior to and since that identifier label, the Times has rigorously distinguished white Hispanics form black Hispanics and “other” Hispanics.
I am responding to Irvin Singer's post. I was questioning his race card as I said "other" and that could be 98 % anything. I am a proud Wo(r)ker, and that is all I got. George was the responsible party in the tragedy.
It is one of the most shameless and shameful things they had done up to that point.
Of course, since Trump came down the escalator 10 years ago, they have since done far more shameful and shameless things, and destroyed their own journalistic credibility in the process.
George should have stayed home. Involuntary, Manslaughter at a minimum. If George was wearing an ICE mask, would that matter? Trayvon never was called to the stand. We can push the laws used in the case to make duals legal in Florida.
A couple days ago I listened to Joe Rogan's interview of Steven Pinker. I've never heard Pinker's political views but I really liked what he said in this interview and what I've heard from him and about him before. I can only guess he is a liberal Democrat. I'd also guess he has a constrained vision and from what I know, he seems completely unwoke. At minimum he has spoken against aspects of wokeness.
Yesterday I listened to Joe Rogan's interview of Bernie Sanders. They spoke of nothing I'd label woke but virtually everything was unconstrained, from both Bernie and Rogan. Hard for me to believe Rogan is the darling of the right.
Anyway, both interviews were enlightening in different ways. For what it's worth, I tried some other Rogan interviews I couldn't finish. It had been years since listening to any and I had a very similar experience then, a couple of interesting interviews and a lot of what I thought was drivel.
But if you go listen to his interviews before the election last year with Trump and Musk you will understand why, though imo your description of Rogan as a “darling of the right” is not actually correct, he is vilified by the left.
As is anyone noteworthy who does anything to harm leftist ideology and agenda.
I agree that most of the left holds irrational, uneducated, nonsense views of him. Then again, maybe it has something to do with interviews before the election last year. IDK but my weak guess is that is at best a minority contributor.
Maybe darling is/was too strong but he is the top podcaster with 14-19m followers on Spotify, YouTube and Instagram. No doubt plenty more, by your own claim mostly not on the left, listen or otherwise like him without following.
My understanding is that his core audience is young men. His other core would be the RFK Jr conspiracy types - which until RFK Jr broke from the left and endorsed Trump last year were roughly evenly split between left and right.
So while I have no doubt Rogan has few listeners on the hard core left, I suspect there are plenty of young men who might not vote and/or aren’t that political and may well even vote Dem some or all of the time who listen to him.
Pre-COVID, he was roughly a leans-left populist who liked Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr. And I believe only a minority of his supporters were on the right, and few actually conservative.
Since COVID lockdowns, he has moved to be a centrist-ish leans-right populist.
So if your point is a majority of his supporters *now* do not vote left, sure I agree. Perhaps even a large majority.
But that is very different from the OG claim that he is a “darling of the right.” Because he simply is not.
The one thing I learned and use to this day from my Sociology 101 class applies here:
NOT BLACK <> WHITE.
Because there are shades of gray.
Rogan being vilified by the left does NOT make him a darling of the right.
I will never subscribe to the 'unconstrained vision' = it's so incredibly obvious that even the most positive innovations and improvements in our lives create new problems over time. There are so many innovations that at first were beneficial, then created new problems as time went on.
One of the reasons my Chartertopia is such a minimalist government is to force everyone who wants more meddlesome government to create and join together contractually. I call them associations, but any name will do. The idea came to me once I realized that individualism allows simulating collectivism contractually, while no collectivist society can ever simulate individualism, let alone tolerate it.
Socialist associations can't be perfect simulations since they can only tax themselves and have no coercion beyond their membership. Slavery is impossible in Chartertopia, regardless of what the membership contract says; members can always self-emancipate, even on the gallows or with their hand on the chopping block. But they would probably lose all vested interest in Ponzi pensions, or any property they had turned over as part of signing up.
If they want territorial exclusivity, they have to buy the land. Members who "buy" association land probably won't get to take it with them if they quit. Associations can print as much money as they want, but they can't force anyone else to accept it, or control exchange rates. They can try to con rich fools into parting with their money, but they'll need to constantly refresh the pool of fools.
Part of the hope for these socialist associations was replacing the USSR and its subsidized socialist failures like Cuba and Venezuela and Eastern Europe. These associations would always be in the news for one failure or another -- bankruptcy, corruption, embezzlement, election fraud. I doubt many would last beyond a generation and most would be bankrupt within a few years at most, as the search for true socialism continued. But there would be hundreds of them popping up every year, most fading away within months, and that would be an excellent rebuke to the "true socialism" crowd, and an excellent way to let them vent their steam and discover reality. The diehard fanatics would never learn, but most who would normally be blindly obedient followers would have hard questions from all the experiments they'd tried.
Who knows, some might even learn to balance the books and not offend all their members into quitting for greener pastures. None of the longer lasting ones would ever satisfy the true believers and fanatics, but they'd have to be at least decent places to live if they survived more than a few years.
Wondering how you deal with the "rogue utility" problem: under a minimalist gov't., you will have some single entities (military, power grid) that could get captured by the Woke. There are measures: regular elections; community boards, but... you know how it goes.
I believe the US does not need a military, because it is practically immune to invasion and our current military is only used offensively.
Why are power grids single entities?
At any rate, woke is only good for tearing things down. It is not productive. Any business or utility taken over by woke ruins that business and leaves a hole for realists. Woke only survives and thrives when the government backs it, and that too is self-destructive. That self-destructive nature can only ruin a country when the government is powerful.
My system puts the legislature entirely under the control of district elections which the government has no say in, not even the voting process (elections are handled by private companies, immune to all but the smallest fraud, and reported publicly such that everyone can add up the results and verify them). These elections define the legislature structure, schedule elections, and recall legislators. They can also override legislation, and if district voters have no legislators, that legislature's bylaws do not apply within that district; "no taxation without representation" taken a little further.
The minimalism leaves associations in charge of their members alone. I believe no association would ever grow large enough to dominate because dissidents would find it too easy to quit and form new associations, and too many control freaks would rather be big frogs in small ponds than settle for the compromises that allow ponds to grow.
The quote by Hughes represents to me a perfectly reasonable desire. He said “more equal” not “perfectly equal“. The fact that perfect inequality is not possible does not lead to the conclusion that high inequality is without downsides. The fact that Stalinist-style socialism was an unspeakable horror does not in any way vindicate free market capitalism. An unrestrained free market can also usher in catastrophe by corrupting politics, overwhelming and corrupting the information ecosystem, squeezing out the majority of people from asset ownership, reducing the economic and political power of the majority, and all of the external costs that are paid by society to enable the extraordinary profits of corporations. It is fine to criticize socialism but in today’s world, vilification of socialism is most often used to silence dissent and distract people from the enormous tragedies of the commons created by capitalism. Capitalism is about the break itself. We should reign it in thoughtfully if we want to avoid the worst alternatives.
Very hard to kill some beliefs which might seemed to be killed only to be dormant until the environment changes to allow them to spring back to life once again.
Take antisemitism which many Jews thought for long time to be dead and have now found such not to be the case.
Woke and Socialism both have appeal to any number and once again are likely to rise from the fall they had seemed to some to have taken, but may get dialed back in at some future date.
When children complain that something is "not fair," is that actually a manifestation of an instinct for fairness (or equality)? Or is it just an effective way to manipulate their parents into redistributing benefits from their rivals to themselves?
I have never observed a child implore its parents to give it less on grounds of fairness.
What if socialist morality has its roots in the evolved instincts of children, instincts that serve children very well in the ultimate face-to-face society, the family?
Socialism is the unrealistic, but highly desired promise of the govt making life fair, or at least more fair. There is no fair way for humans to significantly reduce the actual unfairness of life: IQ, height, birth parents location in geography and social class & money, physical attractiveness, God-given talents or lack. Every govt attempt to reduce unfairness results in some injustice against some innocents.
Injustice occurs thru human action, like slave owners. Unfair is being born a slave, or an owner. Justice is the human action in response to injustice, like freeing slaves, or punishing criminals. There are no Justice actions that make fair the unfair life. But that’s what so many want, including me (a bit), yet I know it’s impossible. Gullible voters believe it’s possible.
(I also want to fly & teleport, but it ain’t gonna happen)
I don't think Coleman Hughes's explanation of young people not living through the Cold War is a satisfactory explanation for socialism becoming more popular, if that is indeed the case. Many leftists during this period, like Chomsky, basically dedicated a significant part of their careers to engaging in socialist apologetics. Anti-communism may have contributed to the baby boomers being a less leftist generation.
However, the predominant factor was that baby boomers grew up in unprecedented affluence with a stable job market, knowing they could comfortably retire. Zoomers and Millennials today face an unstable economy and a chaotic world, created mainly by the incompetence of baby boomers. There are still plenty of examples of socialism failing in the post-Cold War era (Cuba and Venezuela) that could dissuade young people from being attracted to that system. The issue is that socialists today have been successful in portraying themselves as the alternative to a make-believe status quo of laissez-faire capitalism, when in reality, many of the problems affecting young people are caused by the incompetence and miscoordination of the state and private corporations.
Perhaps Dalrymple’s title, “Wokeism’s Deeper Roots,” was slapped on there by an editor without his knowledge, but the book review didn’t really seem to address that topic. So I will take the opportunity thus provided to proffer a few thoughts. “Wokeism” is too broad a term for me to comprehend as a unitary phenomenon, so I will restrict my comments to the “millennial socialism” that has grown from the earlier “boomer socialism.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial_socialism )
It seems, to me at least, that the millennial socialists are for the most part not at all ideological socialists and I see no evidence that they have any interest at all in Hobsbawm, Chomsky, Marx, or the Frankfurt School. The surveys seem to indicate that they are most interested in policy changes that will increase the likelihood that they will own a home someday, that they will have access to affordable health care as they age, and that the national debt is not going to overwhelm the social safety net such as it is. You will not reach these people talking about an “unconstrained vision.” Medicare spending, the defense budget, and rent increases are unconstrained. “Suck it up, buttercup” isn’t a winning platform. Even the center left Economist understood this back when it was AOC who had the establishment in an uproar: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/02/14/millennial-socialism Pragmatic reform might be a winning platform if there was anyone with a spine in Congress that wanted to do anything other than pretend to cut spending and continue the debt-fueled business as usual graft. And that is why the socialists will wind up winning.
Secondly, I would proffer that millennials are not facing a simple choice. I reopened Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat (https://archive.org/details/strangedefeatsta0000marc ) recently and was struck by how much political dialogue this observation would appear to apply:
“The ‘thinking onself into the other fellow’s shoes’ is always a very difficult form of mental gynmnastics, and it is not confined to men who occupy a special position in the military hierarchy. But it would be foolish to deny that staff officers as a whole have been a good deal to blame in this matter of sympathetic understanding. Their failure, when they did fail, was, however, due—I feel pretty sure—not so much to contempt as to lack of imagination and a tendency to take refuge from the urgency of fact in abstractions.”
This is not mere hyperbole for Bloch’s role in the French resistance was to attempt to set up communications between various resistance groups while dealing with a remote upper command. He had fought in WWI as well and was a serious man, really a man’s man, and was ultimately machine gunned down in a ditch. We don’t have serious men like him around anymore.
Another serious man whom I have mentioned in previous comments was Fernand Braudel whose unit surrendered to the Germans and he spent 5 years in prison camp after being denounced as a de Gaulle supporter by the Petain supporters in his unit. Braudel was no socialist but he was not deluded about the critiques possible of capitalism (https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAndCapitalism/Braudel%2C%20Fernand%20-%20Civilization%20and%20Capitalism%2C%20Vol.%201/ ) Widely considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest historian of the 20th century, he is naturally unknown in the United States.
On one hand, he observed “companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties." On the other hand he observed “"Capitalism is something different from the market economy.” The difference being capitalists “were the friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state.” Perhaps the right’s insistence that such capitalism is not true capitalism, but rather “crony capitalism” or “rent-seeking” is a bookend to the left’s proverbial “true socialism has never been tried”?
At any rate, unless someone has something to offer that pragmatically addresses the normal day to day concerns of millenials in getting ahead, one might wonder whether they are helping or hurting their cause.
“ The human instinct for fairness is deep-seated and evolutionarily ancient. Parents notice how naturally it comes to their children to complain that their sibling got more than they did. It doesn’t need to be taught,”
I disagree slightly. As the following article highlights, our aversion to unfairness is more accurately described as an aversion to lack of proportionality.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0082
There are lots of ways to define fair. One way is equal outcomes regardless of contribution. Another is outcomes/rewards proportionate to need. According to the above studies, our default nature is more toward defining it as rewards/outcomes proportionate to contributions.
And this is something socialism has never been good at.
Probably by design.
Wokeism is just another flavor of utopian dreaming and is doomed because of (a) human fallibility and (b) the group who thinks that those who disagree with their utopian dream must be censored, punished, etc. A constrained vision, on the other hand, acknowledges human diversity and flaws, and is willing to work with it. A pluralistic world, if you will.
I agree with all of that except the bit where you say wokeism is doomed. Like Dalrymple, Hughes and Arnold, I don't think it is. Utopian dreaming never goes out of fashion.
Thanks, I didn't make myself very clear on that point. I didn't mean to convey that it will go away. By doomed, as with all utopian dreams, I meant it will not succeed in delivering utopia. All the dreamers continue dreaming despite their failures.
"it will not succeed in delivering utopia." What will? It may give us a more Rawlsian world..
Utopia is kind of a hoax, since it implies things never get better.
I wanted to say the same thing. Wokism can't measure success by any real world statistics since it is so loosely defined. Look at how they cancel each other and eat their young. That is success to them. Each new incoming class sets their own agenda, and graduating classes fade from sight and are forgotten if not canceled. They're like coals in a firebox, each new shovelful turning to ashes to be dumped and forgotten.
Remember Greta? Not a woke star, but woke adjacent, and she had to resort to a sailboat carrying a few pounds of "supplies" to Gaza to get any attention, and faded fast. She's irrelevant and desperate, just like every graduating class replaced by the new frosh.
I agree with the rest.
But it is not just another flavor.
Since the idea of communism itself, it is the most dangerous, most immoral form of (supposed) utopianism we have seen, as it casually justifies the most evil, immoral things.
Woke oppressor-oppressed ideology asserts that the oppressed have the right by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY to defeat their oppressors.
Hence the post-October 7th cheering on by the left of Hamas’ brutal murders, kidnappings, tortures, rapes of Israelis, including children and babies.
“We hold Israel entirely responsible for all unfolding violence in the region.”
At least more and more normies who vote a Democrat are learning the horrors of this ideology. Unfortunately, most of them are willing to remain silent and allow their left wing to dominate the left agenda.
>> "It doesn’t need to be taught."
I appreciate this insight — that history's most consistently destructive ideas (and oof, is that a big bag!) need to be steered away from perpetually. I don't know if Hughes would second this point, but in my mind this is a rallying cry for a rich K–12 history curriculum.
Me too, and I believe it applies just as well (unfortunately) to a general fear of “the other” and racism specifically. As much as I love the sentiment of Rogers’ and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” (from South Pacific) it’s unfortunately just not true. If we recognize the 97% of our DNA shared with Great Chimps, whose clans regularly murder (male) territorial interlopers on sight, or if we simply acknowledge the reluctance and sometimes terror of infants or young children when they’re handed over to a *blood relative* with whom they’re unfamiliar for a kiss or a hug.
It’s tolerance (liberality), for most of us, that must be taught.
Wokeism suffers from 2 fatal flaws. Univariate analysis and static analysis. This is true of progressives in general. Univariate analysis is easily ridiculed in almost all cases. Recently one study or ongoing study that was canceled by doge looked at organ donation disparities. Of course racism was assigned as the cause. Now anyone with any understanding of genetics knows that donations across races are going to be extremely rare, your best chance of a match is a close family member. The woke idiots were assigning a cause for the disparities that was impossible. The actual cause was a lack of minority donors. Their study was not going to help anybody because it was stupid. Static analysis is a little bit more difficult to disprove, but can be easily attacked by asking “and then what?”.
While your matching argument has some truth, most American blacks have quite a bit of white ancestry and this is more important than skin color.
I would expect there to be lots of reasons for disparities in who received donor organs besides racism in the process. That said, I can easily see how the process might be unintentionally tilted along racial lines, maybe even intentionally.
No. Mixed ancestry actually makes it harder. Again your best chance is a family member- the closer the better. When you have mix, the mix of genetic markers they try to match gets more complex more unique
Wokeness is a huge epidemic that has captured well-meaning, empathetic young and old alike — in the name of social justice. Its underpinning on postmodernism postulates that there is no objective reality, only cultural frameworks. And the simplest solution is that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, victims and oppressors. Adoption of this binary and suppression of complexity has been all powerful. It started on college campuses in the 1980s. By 2014, the shooting of Trayvon Martin (black) by George Zimmerman, an Hispanic-American (misidentified as ‘white’), exploded into an anti-racist rampage against white privilege. Then came the feminist rampage against (toxic) males; then the trans activists rampage against everyone else. Who could have predicted that a massacre of Israelis in 2023 by joyful Islamist would result in the explosion of world-wide anti-semitism in 2024?
Let’s see what mathematics can tell us about the good guy/bad guy binary. Such a competition can be represented by the predator-prey model, used to describe the population dynamics between two species where one (the predator) consumes the other (the prey). With two players, the populations continue to oscillate; it takes a third or fourth player — call it complexity — to product an asymptotically stable solution. Complexity, too, can lead to sudden changes in outcomes as reflected in both chaos theory (e.g., butterflies in Australia causing storms in the northeast) and catastrophe theory.
Sowell’s description of unconstrained and constrained visions does account for the wokie solutions of today’s elites. But solving the wokeness dilemma will necessitate academics injecting complexity into the learning process.
George Zimmerman, a vigilante of Spanish/ native american/ +other DNA heritage ... is not white.
What are you talking about?
Geroge Zimmerman is a white Hispanic. The NYT told us this.
And always prior to and since that identifier label, the Times has rigorously distinguished white Hispanics form black Hispanics and “other” Hispanics.
As you can easily look up yourself.
I am responding to Irvin Singer's post. I was questioning his race card as I said "other" and that could be 98 % anything. I am a proud Wo(r)ker, and that is all I got. George was the responsible party in the tragedy.
I was responding *solely* about the labels/identifiers.
The New York Times *is* the paper of record, and THEY declared George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic”.
And then I sarcastically pointed out that that was basically the only time they used that label.
And *clearly* they used that label to serve the “whites are racist against blacks/PoCs” narrative they wanted to tell.
So they had to make Hispanic George Zimmerman “white.”
https://chatgpt.com/share/687e9525-1858-8005-b60d-cd353597b7a9
It is one of the most shameless and shameful things they had done up to that point.
Of course, since Trump came down the escalator 10 years ago, they have since done far more shameful and shameless things, and destroyed their own journalistic credibility in the process.
George should have stayed home. Involuntary, Manslaughter at a minimum. If George was wearing an ICE mask, would that matter? Trayvon never was called to the stand. We can push the laws used in the case to make duals legal in Florida.
A couple days ago I listened to Joe Rogan's interview of Steven Pinker. I've never heard Pinker's political views but I really liked what he said in this interview and what I've heard from him and about him before. I can only guess he is a liberal Democrat. I'd also guess he has a constrained vision and from what I know, he seems completely unwoke. At minimum he has spoken against aspects of wokeness.
Yesterday I listened to Joe Rogan's interview of Bernie Sanders. They spoke of nothing I'd label woke but virtually everything was unconstrained, from both Bernie and Rogan. Hard for me to believe Rogan is the darling of the right.
Anyway, both interviews were enlightening in different ways. For what it's worth, I tried some other Rogan interviews I couldn't finish. It had been years since listening to any and I had a very similar experience then, a couple of interesting interviews and a lot of what I thought was drivel.
I don’t doubt any of what you said.
I’ve never been a Rogan listener.
But if you go listen to his interviews before the election last year with Trump and Musk you will understand why, though imo your description of Rogan as a “darling of the right” is not actually correct, he is vilified by the left.
As is anyone noteworthy who does anything to harm leftist ideology and agenda.
I agree that most of the left holds irrational, uneducated, nonsense views of him. Then again, maybe it has something to do with interviews before the election last year. IDK but my weak guess is that is at best a minority contributor.
Maybe darling is/was too strong but he is the top podcaster with 14-19m followers on Spotify, YouTube and Instagram. No doubt plenty more, by your own claim mostly not on the left, listen or otherwise like him without following.
My understanding is that his core audience is young men. His other core would be the RFK Jr conspiracy types - which until RFK Jr broke from the left and endorsed Trump last year were roughly evenly split between left and right.
So while I have no doubt Rogan has few listeners on the hard core left, I suspect there are plenty of young men who might not vote and/or aren’t that political and may well even vote Dem some or all of the time who listen to him.
Pre-COVID, he was roughly a leans-left populist who liked Bernie Sanders and RFK Jr. And I believe only a minority of his supporters were on the right, and few actually conservative.
Since COVID lockdowns, he has moved to be a centrist-ish leans-right populist.
So if your point is a majority of his supporters *now* do not vote left, sure I agree. Perhaps even a large majority.
But that is very different from the OG claim that he is a “darling of the right.” Because he simply is not.
The one thing I learned and use to this day from my Sociology 101 class applies here:
NOT BLACK <> WHITE.
Because there are shades of gray.
Rogan being vilified by the left does NOT make him a darling of the right.
I will never subscribe to the 'unconstrained vision' = it's so incredibly obvious that even the most positive innovations and improvements in our lives create new problems over time. There are so many innovations that at first were beneficial, then created new problems as time went on.
The smartphone is one of the most obvious.
"does not ensure" should be "does not ensue"
One of the reasons my Chartertopia is such a minimalist government is to force everyone who wants more meddlesome government to create and join together contractually. I call them associations, but any name will do. The idea came to me once I realized that individualism allows simulating collectivism contractually, while no collectivist society can ever simulate individualism, let alone tolerate it.
Socialist associations can't be perfect simulations since they can only tax themselves and have no coercion beyond their membership. Slavery is impossible in Chartertopia, regardless of what the membership contract says; members can always self-emancipate, even on the gallows or with their hand on the chopping block. But they would probably lose all vested interest in Ponzi pensions, or any property they had turned over as part of signing up.
If they want territorial exclusivity, they have to buy the land. Members who "buy" association land probably won't get to take it with them if they quit. Associations can print as much money as they want, but they can't force anyone else to accept it, or control exchange rates. They can try to con rich fools into parting with their money, but they'll need to constantly refresh the pool of fools.
Part of the hope for these socialist associations was replacing the USSR and its subsidized socialist failures like Cuba and Venezuela and Eastern Europe. These associations would always be in the news for one failure or another -- bankruptcy, corruption, embezzlement, election fraud. I doubt many would last beyond a generation and most would be bankrupt within a few years at most, as the search for true socialism continued. But there would be hundreds of them popping up every year, most fading away within months, and that would be an excellent rebuke to the "true socialism" crowd, and an excellent way to let them vent their steam and discover reality. The diehard fanatics would never learn, but most who would normally be blindly obedient followers would have hard questions from all the experiments they'd tried.
Who knows, some might even learn to balance the books and not offend all their members into quitting for greener pastures. None of the longer lasting ones would ever satisfy the true believers and fanatics, but they'd have to be at least decent places to live if they survived more than a few years.
Interesting.
Wondering how you deal with the "rogue utility" problem: under a minimalist gov't., you will have some single entities (military, power grid) that could get captured by the Woke. There are measures: regular elections; community boards, but... you know how it goes.
I believe the US does not need a military, because it is practically immune to invasion and our current military is only used offensively.
Why are power grids single entities?
At any rate, woke is only good for tearing things down. It is not productive. Any business or utility taken over by woke ruins that business and leaves a hole for realists. Woke only survives and thrives when the government backs it, and that too is self-destructive. That self-destructive nature can only ruin a country when the government is powerful.
My system puts the legislature entirely under the control of district elections which the government has no say in, not even the voting process (elections are handled by private companies, immune to all but the smallest fraud, and reported publicly such that everyone can add up the results and verify them). These elections define the legislature structure, schedule elections, and recall legislators. They can also override legislation, and if district voters have no legislators, that legislature's bylaws do not apply within that district; "no taxation without representation" taken a little further.
The minimalism leaves associations in charge of their members alone. I believe no association would ever grow large enough to dominate because dissidents would find it too easy to quit and form new associations, and too many control freaks would rather be big frogs in small ponds than settle for the compromises that allow ponds to grow.
The quote by Hughes represents to me a perfectly reasonable desire. He said “more equal” not “perfectly equal“. The fact that perfect inequality is not possible does not lead to the conclusion that high inequality is without downsides. The fact that Stalinist-style socialism was an unspeakable horror does not in any way vindicate free market capitalism. An unrestrained free market can also usher in catastrophe by corrupting politics, overwhelming and corrupting the information ecosystem, squeezing out the majority of people from asset ownership, reducing the economic and political power of the majority, and all of the external costs that are paid by society to enable the extraordinary profits of corporations. It is fine to criticize socialism but in today’s world, vilification of socialism is most often used to silence dissent and distract people from the enormous tragedies of the commons created by capitalism. Capitalism is about the break itself. We should reign it in thoughtfully if we want to avoid the worst alternatives.
Very hard to kill some beliefs which might seemed to be killed only to be dormant until the environment changes to allow them to spring back to life once again.
Take antisemitism which many Jews thought for long time to be dead and have now found such not to be the case.
Woke and Socialism both have appeal to any number and once again are likely to rise from the fall they had seemed to some to have taken, but may get dialed back in at some future date.
When children complain that something is "not fair," is that actually a manifestation of an instinct for fairness (or equality)? Or is it just an effective way to manipulate their parents into redistributing benefits from their rivals to themselves?
I have never observed a child implore its parents to give it less on grounds of fairness.
What if socialist morality has its roots in the evolved instincts of children, instincts that serve children very well in the ultimate face-to-face society, the family?
Life is unfair.
Socialism is the unrealistic, but highly desired promise of the govt making life fair, or at least more fair. There is no fair way for humans to significantly reduce the actual unfairness of life: IQ, height, birth parents location in geography and social class & money, physical attractiveness, God-given talents or lack. Every govt attempt to reduce unfairness results in some injustice against some innocents.
Injustice occurs thru human action, like slave owners. Unfair is being born a slave, or an owner. Justice is the human action in response to injustice, like freeing slaves, or punishing criminals. There are no Justice actions that make fair the unfair life. But that’s what so many want, including me (a bit), yet I know it’s impossible. Gullible voters believe it’s possible.
(I also want to fly & teleport, but it ain’t gonna happen)
I don't think Coleman Hughes's explanation of young people not living through the Cold War is a satisfactory explanation for socialism becoming more popular, if that is indeed the case. Many leftists during this period, like Chomsky, basically dedicated a significant part of their careers to engaging in socialist apologetics. Anti-communism may have contributed to the baby boomers being a less leftist generation.
However, the predominant factor was that baby boomers grew up in unprecedented affluence with a stable job market, knowing they could comfortably retire. Zoomers and Millennials today face an unstable economy and a chaotic world, created mainly by the incompetence of baby boomers. There are still plenty of examples of socialism failing in the post-Cold War era (Cuba and Venezuela) that could dissuade young people from being attracted to that system. The issue is that socialists today have been successful in portraying themselves as the alternative to a make-believe status quo of laissez-faire capitalism, when in reality, many of the problems affecting young people are caused by the incompetence and miscoordination of the state and private corporations.
I hadn’t read ‘unconstrained vision’ in awhile!
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-lie-of-the-unconstrained-vision
Perhaps Dalrymple’s title, “Wokeism’s Deeper Roots,” was slapped on there by an editor without his knowledge, but the book review didn’t really seem to address that topic. So I will take the opportunity thus provided to proffer a few thoughts. “Wokeism” is too broad a term for me to comprehend as a unitary phenomenon, so I will restrict my comments to the “millennial socialism” that has grown from the earlier “boomer socialism.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennial_socialism )
It seems, to me at least, that the millennial socialists are for the most part not at all ideological socialists and I see no evidence that they have any interest at all in Hobsbawm, Chomsky, Marx, or the Frankfurt School. The surveys seem to indicate that they are most interested in policy changes that will increase the likelihood that they will own a home someday, that they will have access to affordable health care as they age, and that the national debt is not going to overwhelm the social safety net such as it is. You will not reach these people talking about an “unconstrained vision.” Medicare spending, the defense budget, and rent increases are unconstrained. “Suck it up, buttercup” isn’t a winning platform. Even the center left Economist understood this back when it was AOC who had the establishment in an uproar: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/02/14/millennial-socialism Pragmatic reform might be a winning platform if there was anyone with a spine in Congress that wanted to do anything other than pretend to cut spending and continue the debt-fueled business as usual graft. And that is why the socialists will wind up winning.
Secondly, I would proffer that millennials are not facing a simple choice. I reopened Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat (https://archive.org/details/strangedefeatsta0000marc ) recently and was struck by how much political dialogue this observation would appear to apply:
“The ‘thinking onself into the other fellow’s shoes’ is always a very difficult form of mental gynmnastics, and it is not confined to men who occupy a special position in the military hierarchy. But it would be foolish to deny that staff officers as a whole have been a good deal to blame in this matter of sympathetic understanding. Their failure, when they did fail, was, however, due—I feel pretty sure—not so much to contempt as to lack of imagination and a tendency to take refuge from the urgency of fact in abstractions.”
This is not mere hyperbole for Bloch’s role in the French resistance was to attempt to set up communications between various resistance groups while dealing with a remote upper command. He had fought in WWI as well and was a serious man, really a man’s man, and was ultimately machine gunned down in a ditch. We don’t have serious men like him around anymore.
Another serious man whom I have mentioned in previous comments was Fernand Braudel whose unit surrendered to the Germans and he spent 5 years in prison camp after being denounced as a de Gaulle supporter by the Petain supporters in his unit. Braudel was no socialist but he was not deluded about the critiques possible of capitalism (https://archive.org/details/BraudelFernandCivilizationAndCapitalism/Braudel%2C%20Fernand%20-%20Civilization%20and%20Capitalism%2C%20Vol.%201/ ) Widely considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest historian of the 20th century, he is naturally unknown in the United States.
On one hand, he observed “companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties." On the other hand he observed “"Capitalism is something different from the market economy.” The difference being capitalists “were the friends of the prince and helpers or exploiters of the state.” Perhaps the right’s insistence that such capitalism is not true capitalism, but rather “crony capitalism” or “rent-seeking” is a bookend to the left’s proverbial “true socialism has never been tried”?
At any rate, unless someone has something to offer that pragmatically addresses the normal day to day concerns of millenials in getting ahead, one might wonder whether they are helping or hurting their cause.