Christian, Conservative, Pro-Western Civilization,Pro-Original Intent Constitution, Pro-Life, Pro Family, Pro 2nd Ammendment, Pro Smaller Government, Pro Control of Borders, Pro Control of Deep / Administrative State, Pro At Least 2 viable political parties ...
In short, a very bad person in BOistan today, fondly remembering America!
I continue my new policy of leaving the "detailed review" to the professional reviewer from the link, and ONLY do my "personal flavor" here. The NR review does an excellent job, just read it to get a fuller concept of the book.
If you are a watcher vs a reader, you can get a flavor here.
I'm reminded of how fun a read Guilder is -- ultra intelligent, witty, sometimes snarky, and very connected to the personalities of those shaping life after Google -- toward the end of the book, he gets a little too enamoured with the personalities for my taste.
I was most struck with the prominence of Peter Thiel ("Zero to One") in the coming age. His 1517 Fund is named after the year Luther put up his thesis because Theil sees the modern university system as the secular replacement for the pre-reformation Catholic Church. His Theil Foundation is looking to help young out of the modern orthodoxy of "Wokeism".
One of the topics covered in the book is Blockchain.
So what’s the answer? Gilder is clear and unequivocal: Blockchain is the future, not just because it will protect user data but because it will allow every user safe and immediate access to that data. It will usher in a world beyond Google.
To understand how, it’s useful to have a basic grasp of how blockchain technology works. Essentially, information in a blockchain exists as a shared — and continually reconciled — database. The blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location; no centralized version of the information exists (as it does in Google’s Dalles data center) for a hacker to penetrate. Instead, it’s hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, like a spreadsheet duplicated across an entire network whose data are constantly updated and accessible to anyone on the network.
The other ((totally unexpected) item that floored me was the very cogent discussion of consciousness vs randomness -- an example from page 300: "By referring back to their own brains which they don't really understand, the AI scientists plunge directly into the self-referential Godel perplex. By using their own minds and consciousness to deny the significance of consciousness in minds, they refute themselves. As Turing concluded, they need an "oracle"-- s source of intelligence outside the system itself..."
On page 103, he is even more explicit: "Creation is an entropic process of a higher consciousness echoed by human consciousness. This higher consciousness, which throughout human history we have found convenient to call God, endows human creators with the space to originate surprising things. This is the mirrored room of cosmic thought, reflective intelligence. Consciousness precedes creation, the word precedes the flesh."
The book is exciting, invigorating and inspirational, while being entertaining. It just doesn't get much better than that!
David Brooks is what counts as a "conservative" at the NY Times ... he voted for Obama twice, so he is a rich white leftist in terms of his article, a "Progressive Activist".
The report, “Hidden Tribes,” breaks Americans into seven groups, from left to right, with names like Traditional Liberals, Moderates, Politically Disengaged and so on. It won’t surprise you to learn that the most active groups are on the extremes — Progressive Activists on the left (8 percent of Americans) and Devoted Conservatives on the right (6 percent).
These two groups are the richest of all the groups. They are the whitest of the groups. Their members have among the highest education levels, and they report high levels of personal security.
His biggest takeaway from this particluar survey is:
You could say that tribalism is the fruit of privilege. People with more stresses in their lives necessarily pay less attention to politics. People with college degrees are more likely to describe their ideology as central to their identity. They are much more likely to derive moral meaning from their label, more likely to affiliate with a herd based on their label and more likely to vote on the party line.
Brooks the intellectual seems to miss that tribalism is NATURAL, it is wired into ALL of us. He could read Amy Chua, "Political Tribes and the Fall of Nations" to get a better handle on that.
On page 40-41 she does a good job of quickly covering the basic science that we already know -- "our brains are hardwired to identify, value, and individualize in-group members, while outgroup members are processed as interchangeable members of a general social category".
"Humans aren't just a little tribal. We're VERY tribal and it distorts the way we think and feel".
"The key to ethnic identity is that it is built around the idea of shared blood; ... For most human beings, the family is primal".
The BASIS that we select our tribe may vary, but there are really only two hopes for rising above tribalism, religion or education. Brooks is saying that "education fails" ... although he likely doesn't know what he has said. His second big takeaway is ...
My second big takeaway from the report is that ideas really do drive history. Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives organize around coherent philosophical narratives. These narratives aren’t visions of a just society. They are narratives of menace — about who needs to be exorcised from society.
Historically, FAITH drove Western history, specifically, Christian faith. I'd argue that it is still faith driving history -- it is just that the tribal faith of both the rich white segments he talks about is no longer a transcendent religious faith grounded in classic historical and SHARED cultural heritage. As he says in his own roundabout way, the "Progressive Activists" want to destroy what is left of "America", and the "Devoted Conservatives" want to preserve it -- so they don't get along.
What he fails to notice is that without Christianity, all the other groups are tribal as well -- their tribe choice may not be as "well thought out" as Brooks seems to think, but that just shows he doesn't understand tribalism. Tribalism **IS** for humans, it is WIRED IN, like sweet/sour, hot/cold, pretty/ugly ... it is "pre-thought", it is emotional / spiritual.
What the "better" educated are able to do is more clearly ARTICULATE their tribalism in an attempt to call it "correct thinking about the world".
For the non-academic, "liberalism" here is classical liberalism -- individual rights (especially property), government at the consent of the people, and freedom of economic activity (often capitalism).
Now, I am not sure the higher purpose that religion offers its adherents can ever be replaced by any other human enterprise. Nor do I discount religion’s positive contributions to the building of community, or to the development of our culture. I am just not convinced that there was ever a way for religiosity to have fully survived Charles Darwin. Even if secularization is in some ways undesirable, it is at least partly inevitable. Most of Europe, for one, has renounced Christianity. Deneen mourns the death of God, and understandably so, but as a political theorist in modern society he cannot just assume that the strength of organized religion can be easily regenerated. He must grapple with, rather than just complain about, the rise of secularism. And his inability to cope with it, ironically enough, serves to demonstrate the wisdom of liberalism — for part of liberalism’s genius is that its pluralistic capacity to foster freedom of association can incorporate atheists and people of faith into the same body politic.
When your argument is that the only remaining "ism" after Communism, Socialism, and Fascism have failed many times is ALSO a failure, it is not all that surprising that pretty much everyone in the modern intellectual elite would have a lot of negative things to say about your thesis.
NR shows it's true colors by siding with godless atheism as a "value" of the liberal project, and Brooks vacuously points out that something so old can't possibly be wrong ...
Deneen’s book is valuable because it focuses on today’s central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order. Nonetheless, he is wrong. Liberal democracy has had a pretty good run for 300 years. If the problem were really in the roots, wouldn’t it have shown up before now?
I think if Brooks read just a little closer, even in his own review, he would see his problem ...
The problem, Deneen argues, started at the beginning. Greek and medieval philosophies valued liberty, but they understood that before a person could help govern society, he had to be able to govern himself. People had to be habituated in virtue by institutions they didn’t choose — family, religion, community, social norms.
While liberalism was far from perfect in basic construction, the fact that up until maybe "1930 or 1940", "culture" at least in the US still involved the CULTIVATION (root of "culture") of the basic virtues of governing yourself as Buckley expertly pointed out in "God And Man at Yale". Unfortunately NR, founded by Buckley has obviously strayed from this key quote from that work ...
"The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world, and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level".
Without the transcendent foundation of Christianity, a country like what America was is impossible -- Buckley saw that in 1950, Reagan saw that in the '80s, and by 2008, such knowledge was all but gone -- which is why Rod Dreher outlines "The Benedict Option".
NR may find that Nietzsche was right and god is dead ... however, God doesn't agree, and that is far more important. Nietzsche is well dead, NR is showing definite signs. Evolution is MECHANISM -- it is a HOW, not a cause. To the extent it operates, it operates in a universe that it did not create, and it operates because of underlying principles in that universe that were not created by evolution.
If I write a program you like and you say, WAIT! You used C++! (a programming language, "mechanism"), therefore you do not exist! You would be using the same argument as "Darwin disproves God).
Whatever science "proves" (and it can only EVER prove by induction), the fact remains that for the vast majority of "common people", "the rank and file", Faith and Hope found in religion and family is the only way to a decent life in THIS world. For those of us that believe, the life in this world is only the preseason for the next, but for the purposes of this book, we are dealing with the here vs hereafter.
Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state. Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities.
("deracinate" -- remove from native environment and/or culture) Once both social and economic "liberalism" have "freed" you from all your "obligations" save to the State, you find that the State is never going to be able to love you or even "care" about you, since it MUST, (by definition) consider you a 100% interchangeable "citizen", "consumer", "taxpayer", etc. that is to be treated "equally".
Our “community” was now to consist of countless fellow humans who shared an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation, and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all it asked in return was complete devotion to the state and the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity.
Say that when you discover that you are completely alone with only a cold uncaring state as a constant companion, you decide to make some friends of your fellow "citizens". Remember the root of "culture" so gleefully fled and then destroyed was "cultivation" -- both you and they needed to have an actual culture to CULTIVATE what it means to be the sort of human that can have meaningful relationships with other humans.
These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.
So now you realize that you truly NEED to relate to other HUMANS in order to live, but you find that both you and your peers are not humans of the sort that relate, but rather deracinated "individuals". The problem has cartoon simplicity!
Finally, we find we are really "all on the same side" to the extent we lost our transcendent faith. We are one big "liberal tribe" mistakenly thinking we are "left and right"! Each a generic greedy, self-centered consuming pure creature, shorn of anything "higher" than the self save the all encompassing state!
People who are “uncultivated” in the consumption of both food and sex, Aristotle observed, are the most vicious of creatures, literally consuming other humans to slake their base and untutored appetites. Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature.
Since we are now mostly atomic individuals who are proud of **OURSELVES**, we choose our vaunted "identity" -- through what we consume, where we live, where we go to school, our sexuality, our degrees, our tats, .... always our "own creation", or more accurately, the creation of a godless state and godless corporate marketing tricking us to the false belief of our "independence".
The book ends with the following ...
After a five hundred–year philosophical experiment that has now run its course, the way is clear to building anew and better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our ability to imagine, and build, liberty after liberalism.
I STRONGLY recommend reading this fairly short work. Almost certainly it will make you uncomfortable no matter what your political, religious, or philisophical stripe. Which for me is one of the most important things a book can do -- because only through pain can there be growth!
The fact "both sides" hate it is an awfully good recommendation!
Kinda got to watch this first to get the mood right!
Some of the reason for the current animosity between left and right is simple propaganda -- false, but incendiary, as the aged calumny of "Nixon's Southern Strategy" as racist, and a continuation of this theme through Reagan.
In his new book, MSNBC political correspondent Steve Kornacki attempts to put the current state of America’s uncivil politics in historical context. He does so, naturally, by blaming Republicans. To get a sense of how objective he is in his outlook -- and rigorous in his research -- the reader only need know that Kornacki repeats the same untruth about Reagan that Hillary Clinton put in in her tedious 512-page alibi published last year. Clinton and Kornacki both wrote that Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss.
Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was the realization that since Republicans had finally beaten back Jim Crow in the South (R Senate 27 yes, 6 no Vs D 46 yes, 21 no, with similar in the House), the South would likely vote with the party that most aligned with their values outside of Jim Crow -- in 100 years, they had somewhat fogiven Republicans for winning the Civil War, or as they refer to it still sometimes, "The War of Northern Agression". The article covers well how easily disproved the Reagan racist start to his campaign charge is, as well as covering how uneccessary it is to read a tribal book on tribalism that in keeping with it's own motif says "the other tribe did it!".
Great article, just go read it. In our hearts, we all know we are filthy rotten sinners -- the issue is usually just "about what explicitly". For the average joe, we have our vices, our bad language, we didn't do our homework or well in school, we might be lazy, etc; For the elites, we know we are snobs, we revel in our pride, yet secretly know how naked we are no matter our degrees, wealth, supposed sophistication. As Earnst Becker put it in "Denial of Death"...
“On the highest throne in the world, man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement - the joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man’s dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real.”
Here is a teaser from the article ... just go read it!
The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of. They skip Davos every year and watch Fox News. Not even the very best has the dazzling brilliance of a Chuck Schumer, not to mention a Michelle Obama. In truth they are dumb as sheep.
In short, the elites seek to convince many "typical Americans", largely those who dearly want to be "moral" in the sense of "popular elite approval", that being "holier than Trump" is a great way to signal their "virtue". They may or may not be practicing Christians, and they may or may not have any understanding of what it means to be "moral" in the sense of what the liveral elite tell them is "moral", but they feel that by claiming to hate Trump, they have some sort of "superiority".
The coastal elites and elite mainstream however have nothing but contempt for them anyway -- but naturally, they know if they can defeat "Trump", they are defeating the only remaining strain of what was "typical America" -- people that understood that the Constitution meant LIMITED government, not an all encomassing adminstrative or deep state.
To many who retain some allegiance to the America that was, it also meant family, community, and the worship of God who was MUCH higher than government -- and of course much much higher than Trump and all temporary holders of the imperfect position of President -- as BO, W, and Slick Willie were before him.
Rick Moran writes at PJ Media: “A gay man who describes himself as a liberal Democrat is accusing New Jersey Senator Cory Booker of sexually assaulting him in 2014…The man, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, penned a lengthy open letter that was posted on Twitter. In the letter he describes the assault that occurred in a bathroom following a meeting at his workplace, where the two met.” Moran links to the letter posted here on Twitter. As Moran puts it, the letter “goes into excruciating detail.”
"Justice" works in mysterious ways, especially if your version of "justice" relies on a belief that the accuser is always to be trusted and the accused is "guilty" unless they can somehow "prove" a negative!
I await the unlikely event of Booker being held to the same standard as Kavenaugh, Judge Moore, or others on the right.
