Is, Ought, And The Elephant

A brief illustration:

A well-written, entertaining, and impressively comprehensive mini-book article from the web-journal “The New Atlantis” has been making the rounds lately, and I highly recommend it to you, “Do Elephants Have Souls?”

Whatever you think about the topic, there is a treasure trove of fascinating trivia as well as an excellent collection of elephant-related literary commentary.

For example, did you know that Elephants commit suicide?  That they might be able to exchange infrasonics with Blue whales?  That they occasionally rape rhinoceroses, perhaps in part due to culling having , ‘…disrupted the transmission of elephant culture from one generation to the next.’?  (Don’t ask about human analogies).

Which justifies an obvious pun: this joke will only work if presented audibly, in a cockney accent:

A: Hey Costello, did you know that Elephants sometimes rape Rhinos?

C: No Abbott!  That’s shocking!  What happens when an Elephant rapes a Rhino?

A: Hell If I Know!

Of course, since the answer given by the article is essentially, ‘close enough’, a more honest title would have been, “Treat Elephants Better, You Evil Bastards!”

It’s a classic of moral persuasion in the field of humane-treatment of animals, somewhat reminiscent of David Foster Wallace’s ‘Consider The Lobster‘, but with a much more arguably deserving (and less tasty) subject.

First we are going to examine reality, and show you that that most people are making an error – perhaps an innocent oversight – into something empirically observable, and should thus adjust their beliefs about the natural world.

And next, we are going to plug that amended paradigm into your moral calculator and show you that you (well, everyone) ought to be modifying their behavioral choices.  We would like you to adjust your moral calculus in our direction, of course, but even if you don’t, we think you should find this argument compelling even on the basis of your existing moral principles.

Because I am an incurable quant-type at heart, I tend to conceive of such arguments in a pseudo-mathematical fashion.

So, I imagine some empirical metric for moral ‘worthiness’, as in: “The well-being of which is worthy of our moral concern and is thus something we should take into account to some degree when we make moral decisions.”

Although it would be extremely crude to do so (not to mention highly controversial if one draws certain human analogies), I think the tone of the article and the instinct of animal-lovers everywhere is that this ‘worthiness’ is somewhat proportional to higher brain functioning, with perhaps total mass, number, and efficiency of convoluted grey-matter neurons in the cerebral cortex being a passable intraspecific proxy.  Consider these images:

One can see that Primates, Marine Mammals, and the larger Terrestrial Mammal Quadrupeds dominate.  From La Wik’s neuron count list, we can see Humans, Elephants, Whales, Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Dolphins, Monkeys, Dogs, and Cats (perhaps also Horses) earning places at the top of the biological charts.  This seems to accord with a lot of people’s observations about relative animal intelligence and their emotional instincts to admire – even love – some of these creatures and believe they should be treated with something other than mere material indifference.

So, the primary line of attack of the article seems to be a demonstration arguing for this adjustment:

Well, perhaps.  But you know, there’s a problem.  The problem is that the author knows that the empirical argument is being made in a particular moral climate: a function that maps ‘objective’ moral worthiness to arbitrary ethical imperatives in terms of treatment.  That tends to map onto this graph as so:

So, the question is one of these is the Dog and which is the Tail?  Well, if you’re trying to change people’s behaviors, you could try to shift their treatment-mapping curve to the left, some element of their empirical worthiness curves (such as the elephant’s) to the right, or some combination of both.

It all depends on which is easier to do, and I submit the ‘objective’ curve-shift is usually easier than convincing someone to change their moral mapping.  After all, you ‘know’ your own moral calculator pretty well, but you probably don’t know much of anything about elephants, and ignorance is the mother of indifference.  One you learn about how human-like the creatures are, well, now you’re got to do some serious recalculation.  Then again, we’re ignorant and indifferent to a lot of things, so whoever is in charge of providing us with educations and information about the world has a tremendous opportunity to decide what we learn about, and thus what we come to care about.

This of course gives rise to an awfully tempting incentive to be less than fully honest about your empiricism (and less than perfectly forthcoming as to its political ulterior motive).  I wonder if we just occasionally observe this in the Social Sciences (Oh, don’t try to hide. I’m looking at you too, Economics!)

For problems like this, the ‘moral landscape’ of belief reduces to shifts in the mean and also variance (but only on the low side, human moral systems seem to have an asymmetric bias, but look, it’s just a diagram to ease communication).  Here’s how you might label them:

JAIN: As in Jainism, or followers of the ‘do not harm’ principle Ahisma, who famously avoid hurting even insects.

PETA: Include more animals into your care-focus.

SPCA: Treat some charismatic macrofauna humanely, but then sharp drop off.

NIET: Nietzsche-Bomb Ichiban!  Only Übermenschen need apply!

ARIS: Either Aristotle or Aristocratic, take your pick, but it’s the view that there’s a lot of variety in the worthiness of human beings and how you are ethically compelled to treat them.

TRAD: Willing to judge some vilest-slice of humanity as deserving to be treated no better than animals, but being strictly humane above that level.

So, quick gist of the argument behind the Elephant Article is: Perform Empirical Adjustment from v. 1.0 to 2.0 because it is more correct, and also perform Moral Adjustment from Avg. to SPCA/PETA because you should; it is more ethical.

I find this a pretty extensible and handy tool when I contemplate the political-moral landscape (for instance, on display recently at Marginal MORAL REVOLUTION – allcaps theirs, not mine), and all you have to do is replace ‘animals’ with ‘groups of people’, depending how you label them.

On the Empirical side of things, you can compare those who believe in Human Biodiversity with those who insist of Human Neurological Uniformity.  Before everyone calls me mean names, you can replace ‘worthiness’ with any objective metric, it doesn’t matter.

And you can also model moral-mapping functions as well.

Conservatives, even nominal Universalists, tend to emphasize a series of concentric circles from the individual of proximate-relations, radiating outward with further distance in ranking in terms of moral concern.  So there is one’s family, community, religious-group, country/nation, culturally, geographically, and ethnically close foreigners … eventually landing in all humanity.  As the Arab Bedouins say, “I against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, then my cousins and I against strangers”

But Western Liberals tend to display a xenophilia that Sailer calls ‘Leapfrogging Loyalties‘.  After all, if you need to distinguish your class as superior to your bumpkin compatriots (always a popular source of humorous, camaraderie-building conversation among asses everywhere), then it helps to ally with the alien against him.

One can use this moral-visualization tool to picture the difference between Universalists vs. Particularists, between Immigration Selectionists vs. Open-Borders proponents, between patriots vs. leapfroggers, and between citizenists and bubblers.

The point is to analyze what people write by working backwards.  Everyone is trying to influence you to change your behavior, and if they can’t coerce you, then the are going to try and change your beliefs, both type 1 and type 2.

So, whenever I see the kind of moralistic nonsense exploding in certain parts of the blogosphere – like we’ve been observing lately with the open borders / amnesty issue – I try to break the assertions apart into claims about reality and claims about morality.

But it’s usually easy and straightforward to contest falsifiable claims about reality.  And it also easy to say, ‘well, that’s your opinion’ when someone is being honest and telling you they are merely expressing their arbitrary political preferences.

But it’s a pointless, futile, and frustrating exercise to ever try to prove to someone they are ‘wrong’ about their moral-mapping, especially if you yourself remain beholden to a shared premise that it is even possible for them to be right about it, and that there there actually exists a thing to be ‘right’ about that doesn’t rely on a shared belief in a common moral authority.  You know, like God or something.

But now that God’s dead, there’s a great incentive to fill the vacuum of a desire for universal moral certitude, confuse the issue, and deceive yourself and everyone else by conflating the two and asserting that the political is the moral is the rational is the empirical.  Which means you’re going to see it all the time, and the only real question is where will it take us?

Samuel Johnson once said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”, but today, unsubstantiated moral proclamation is his first and only resort.  After all, with suckers born every minute, what else does he need?  It doesn’t matter if an advocate is wrong about the elephants in reality if he can always compensate and adjust the moral goal posts to whatever extent necessary to maintain his ability to say it is right to protect them.

This feedback between political ends and moral means may work to the great benefit of the animal elephant.  But I’m increasingly convinced it will inevitably result – and sooner rather than later – in the effective extinction of the Grand Old Pachyderm.

Can You Handle It?

I’m still somewhat amazed – and certainly amused – that our little NR/DE ideegemeinschaft has generated even the small amount of attention and coverage that it has.  Of course, much of it is simply awful, inaccurate, and banal libel (e.g. Kuznicki, Bartlett, Shea) but that’s to be expected.

What is more surprising is that some genuine talents have spent some considerable amounts of their scarce time exploring the subject with fairness and at least a certain amount of open-mindedness (e.g. Alexander, Gurri, and Bloom).  I can’t quite come to believe that today’s shrinking attention spans and news-cycles don’t force all this to blow over soon, but I was wrong before, and so one can only hope that future writing looks more like the work of the latter group than the former.

But the work of these authors is not done, and I want them to take another go at it, and to do it from a different angle.

Master Spandrell says:

In a way this reminds me of a similar issue in the altright movement. We are the enemies of leftism, and at the present stage most of us writers and thinkers are mainly engaged in the analysis of the leftist hegemony. The Cathedral’s rule is so pervasive that rather than think “how do we get out?”, many of us are still mostly concerned with the “how did we get here?”

And there’s been enough introductory-level ‘neoreaction 101’ reporting.  Anyone can write a ‘What is X-ism’ article.  But to take it seriously means to ask ‘Why is X-ism now a thing?  Why do people go there?’ and to engage earnestly with those root motivations and experiences.

Why is this important?  Because NR – like any young political scene – presently has no ‘catechism’ and is conflicted, schismatic, and evolving in an ongoing process of deveopment.  Writing to report that there is something new out there and about what ‘it’ is well and good, but as Gurri stated, one can’t do justice to that mission when there isn’t yet a solid core ‘it’ to cover.  But that doesn’t mean there still isn’t some common thread.

It should come as no surprise that the better journalists are Libertarian-ish, and I hope they are reading this post, because it is to them that I am addressing it.

Here is my view of things in order of increasing NR/DE consensus / commonality:

1. Prescription and Strategy – What to do, how to change things, ‘how do we get out?’
2. Goals – What do we want?  What is the vision of the better society, and how can it be made to function to produce the intended results?
3. Analysis and Diagnosis – What is the nature of the problem, ‘how did we get here?’
4. Presentation of Symptoms and Social Critique – The list of things that people think are going seriously wrong and an awareness that the doctrinaire remedies and ideas upon which we were taught to rely are ineffective to arrest the disease.
5. Libertarian and/or Traditionalist Right Ideological Back-Story.

That back-story (or ‘sick journey‘, and see also) isn’t universal of course, but it’s common enough especially among the most prominent writers that I think it deserves special attention.  Foseti is very fond of asking new members to the fold, “Where did you come from and what brought you here?”  The answers tend to have a lot in common, and I think that says more about what’s really happening here than our struggle to intellectually address the higher order problems.

As Peter A. Taylor wrote:

The “neo” prefix flags me as a busted libertarian, or at least, a busted something else. I am not a native-born reactionary. I am an ideological refugee or squatter, someone who undertook a Moldbug-like “sick journey”, if not from Mises to Carlyle, then at least from David Friedman to Henry Sumner Maine.

The back-story occasionally goes further (in a way that I think is more common for the older cohort of bloggers) to a progressive and/or mainstream religious rearing before a sociopolitical / ideological awakening to step 5, and I’d include myself amongst that number.

So, in the spirit of Harris’ Moral Landscap Challenge (to which there were 424 submissions), and borrowing Bryan Caplan’s concept of an ideological Turing Test, here is my challenge to the Libertarian-sympathetic NR-covering journalists out there:

Explain how you imagine Handle went from stage 5 to 4.

I don’t claim to be representative at all, but I use myself instead of the group of ‘neoreactionaries’ as a whole because it provides both a clearer target (I’ve left a bit of a comments trail that’s not hard to trace) and makes it easier for me to evaluate your efforts.  I promise I’ll be fair and honest.  If you don’t trust me, you can try to simulate Handlesprechweise and my fellows can grade how close to the mark they think you’ve hit.

And … hold on just a second.  We all know where this is going, right?

Well, obviously Handle is some evil, stupid, ignorant, creepy, racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, hateful, extremist, neo-Nazi, anti-Semite oppressor who is probably an unemployed, broke, fat, ugly, socially awkward and involuntarily celibate failure in life.

He is a geek shut-in who plays games all day because he cannot function in the real world, except when he attends nerdy costume conventions, and who blogs from his mother’s basement.

He is bitter, angry, and frustrated at the world’s failure to recognize his (nonexistent) ‘genius’ and so tilts Quixotically at windmills, grossly exaggerates social problems or concocts delusional apocalyptic scenarios that are entirely imaginary, and dreams about fantasy-fascism with his other loser-cult buddies.  Ha Ha!  If he’s not an X, then it’s only because he couldn’t hack it, or they kicked him out!

You get the point.  Believe me, I’ve heard it all before.

Well, I plead not guilty down the line of the charge-sheet, which you can choose to believe or not of course.  After all, if you’ve never met me, I’m just some random pseudonymous person on the internet, hardly a bastion of trustworthiness.

But besides being wrong, I’d encourage you to avoid this false name-calling for three reasons:

1. It’s the easy way out, and neither of us will learn anything or do any actual thinking.
2. This is precisely what more mainstream folks say about you – just more of the relatively stronger tribe  ‘punching down’ to the the even more outnumbered – and it’s just as erroneous.
3. It is rude.  It indulges your prejudices, and to overcome those disrespectful biases you should, like Arnold Kling, try to take ‘the most charitable view of those who disagree’.

So, imagine Handle is a person just like you, who once thought almost exactly as you presently think, but then … something … – actually many things – and he decided he no longer wished to remain within the fold and identify with it as he once did, and that is was pointless to try and nudge it from within.  He took a step away, found it to be superior, and began a journey that led him to where he is today.  All exit, no voice.

If you’re an educated conservative-ish or libertarian-ish individual, that probably means he knows your beliefs, how you came to them, and the arguments you use to justify them, much better than you know him.

But, maybe not!  We shall see!  Take a shot a what you think those ‘somethings’ were, and if you believe in those somethings too, then why they haven’t led to your own exit.

Adam Gurri Is A Mensch

(UPDATE: Adam responds at The Ümlaut, I really wasn’t trying to be bruising.)

Adam Gurri has written what I regard as the best and fairest post about neoreaction that has yet come out.  But more important than the content of his composition is the honorable and gentlemanly process by which he drafted his piece.  Adam demonstrated a truly remarkable amount of balanced intellectual discipline; if only that were more common!  He researched his subject thoroughly, reached out to the primary-source author-subjects of his investigation, invited commentary and draft-review by other members of the DEC (including yours-truly) and comported himself in an unceasingly friendly, respectful, open-minded, and civil manner.  For all this, he has earned my admiration and justifiably deserves our esteem.

During the course of our dialogue I made several amicable criticisms of a few of his points, and Gurri has told me he has written a follow-up to those points that will appear next Monday.  I have not seen a draft of that piece, but I can try to anticipate some of its content.  I asked Adam if he would permit me to post my criticisms in a response post on this blog, and he not only approved by invited me to do so as soon as possible (in time for that next article).

The first category criticism is something I’ll concede is a bit trivial, but worth mentioning because I think it characterizes the kind of coverage NR/DEC is likely to get.

Despite what it may seem, most coverage of NR is not actually designed to denigrate this particular idea-community per se, but mostly to repeat the same theme and tribal-signaling the ‘journalist’ usually pursues.  If they are a lefty progressive and worship democratic universalist absolutist-egalitarianism (or occasionally even a Libertarian sympathetic to some of those ideals), then the theme is to denigrate any anti-egalitarian (genetic-realist) and anti-democratic (political-realist) ideology as creepy, evil, racist, etc. and then to make sure your readers know how opposed to racism you still are – you know the drill.  But they always say everyone non-progressive is like this, whether overt or covert, whether as an inchoate or fully-manifested hazard, and so they haven’t bothered to make or acknowledge any distinction between NR and the rest of their usual targets.

This is to say that they have no interest in acquiring or presenting an accurate picture or taking it seriously as a matter to be assessed on its own merits which could be weighed in an agenda-free and disinterested manner.  Gurri, it seems to me, is about as close as an outsider will ever get to that ideal, though, as a hyper-federalist, he may be closer than he thinks.

The other ‘journalists’ are like the professional antigen-presenting cells that digest this dangerous foreign matter and present it to the immune system in a way that triggers the psychological allergic-reaction.  The way these journalists make their money is to start these allergic reactions (audience-tailored ‘sensationalism’ compatible with, and merely serving to reinforce, the readership’s biases).

And so it’s naïve to expect they would ever care about reading or learning anything new, just jump at the first rat-trap, hair-trigger sign of ‘offensiveness’ – the bare minimum to be able to paint the same picture on the tent canvases of whatever enemy camp is being assailed this week.  In this way, NR is just a Rorschach test – your typical hack sees just enough of what he wants to see to make the same point he’s always making – just another pile-drive from the same jackhammer.  That’s why reading so much political journalism these days is like being submitted to industrial-strength Chinese water torture, except with acid.

And Adam Gurri is definitely no hack, but the opus of his writing does display a common thread which has a particular purpose, and he uses his excellent article on neoreaction as much as an opportunity to pursue his theme as one to merely provide ‘coverage’.  And that’s perfectly fine – I can’t emphasize enough how much a realistic individual should appreciate his work as close to the ideal as can possibly be expected.  It’s especially commendable that Adam is completely forthright about this in that he announces this theme – his understanding of the science of social order and institutions – and restricts his commentary to it.

There is a minor problem with this approach, and again, I admit I’m nitpicking here. But that focus severely constricts the scope of his coverage of NR.  It overly focuses on the positive proposals from ‘the three kings’ of Moldbug, Land, and Anissimov (Neocameralism, Technocracy, Monarchy), and less on the negative critique of Egalitarian Democracy that, in my view, is the bulk of the core consensus and community-organizing principle of NR-affiliated individuals.

Ok, with that trivial amuse-bouche out of the way, let’s get to the meat-and-potatoes criticisms.

I. Order must be Discovered, Not Designed / There is no such thing as Political Engineering.

This is a Burkean-Hayekian (with also some Oakeshott and even Chesterton) line of thought, often deployed in defense of market ‘order’ against Socialist central economic planning.  This is where the logic of the infamous ‘calculation problem’ applies just as well to the structures of governance established by over-optimistic rationalist constructivists.

And I’m generally sympathetic to that notion.  However, the main problem with rational constructivists is almost always in the use of false premises about the nature of their subjects – human beings – (deriving from delusional ideology and not reality, ‘Rousseau-disease’) and leaping over the limits of what knowledge they do possess.

As an analogy, there is nothing wrong with a civil engineer using rational principles and scientific evidence to build a suspension bridge.  But if they extend the principles outside their operating envelope – if they assume the rules for smaller bridges in calm environments will always work for larger ones in windy settings and forget to account for resonances – then they’ll occasionally build a galloping gertie.  And they can learn from that experience and build a better Tacoma Narrow Bridge.

If you were to look at that history and say ‘Bridges cannot be designed, only discovered’ or ‘There is no such thing as civil engineering’, well, there may be some kernels of truth in those statements – there’s a lot of trial and error and learning by small steps – but mostly it would seem ridiculous.

Let’s take the analogy into the political arena to consider the American founding.  Following the revolutionary war and independence from Great Britain, the American colonies established themselves under the infamous Articles of Confederation.  The arrangement – despite the fact that it unsettled the absolute minimum of the underlying order and organic institutions of the states – was recognized almost immediately as an unstable failure in terms of building a viable nation, and so only 6 years later they were making plans for the constitutional convention.

What emerged with the US Constitution was inarguably both more radical and more stable.  If you can read the Federalist Papers and say that that the founders themselves didn’t think they were involved in a project of rational political-order engineering, then I’m sorry but we just have different systems of interpretation.  Consider, for example, these words from Charles Murray’s “American Exceptionalism”

…you are watching the beginning of an experiment in governance unlike any in the history of the world. Four million people, spread out over thirteen colonies stretching from New England to Georgia, have separated themselves from the world’s greatest power and then invented a new nation from
scratch.

That all by itself makes the United States unique and also makes it impossible to predict what might happen next.

It isn’t just the newness of the nation that makes its future so imponderable. … instead the founders of the United States have created a form of government that will attempt all sorts of things that are widely thought to be impossible.

Republican government itself is widely thought to be impracticable and unstable. No country in continental Europe has a constitutional monarchy, let alone a republic in which all power ultimately resides in the citizens. Even Britain, Europe’s most politically liberal nation, still expects the sovereign to play a major role in the governance of the nation and shudders at the memory of its own brief experiment as a republic.

It is widely thought to be impossible for a nation to function with a head of state elected for a limited term. How can the Americans realistically expect a successful, popular president who is chief executive, head of state, and commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces to retire voluntarily? Every lesson of history teaches that transmission of power through an electoral system doesn’t work for long.

Surely it is impossible that a piece of paper, the Constitution, can command the allegiance— indeed, the reverence—that the American system will require. The consensus at the Constitutional Convention and in the debates over ratification of
the Constitution is that the new Supreme Court has the power to strike down laws already passed by the legislature and implemented by the executive power— an unprecedented level of judicial independence. …

Now, in the alternative, if one says that the Constitution just wasn’t ‘radical enough of a change’ from the pre-existing institutions of social-order, then one is making one’s assertion unfalsifiable.  Unless one can define a precise metric for ‘radical’ (which I’d say one cannot), then if a new system persists, it wasn’t ‘radical enough’, and if it fails, it was ‘too radical’ by definition.  I can’t possibly disprove the order-discovery thesis under those definitions.

One could say, “Well, there is a difference between ‘designing’ and ‘offering a flexible, adaptable plan’ that you expect to both evolve organically and over which you hope to exert some influence.”  But where does the ‘plan’ come from if not design?  Is ‘design’ now defined as the hubris that one’s political plan will be implemented exactly as written and self-sustained with perfect fidelity and rigidity?  That’s a strawman argument in which no one actually believes anymore.  People may be overconfident at times, but that degree of enthusiastic naivete in the perfection of one’s own utopian scheme is thankfully rare.

One can also say that successful designers ‘flatter’ themselves, because their principled systems only worked because they were coincidentally in accord with discoverable order.  But all human systems are ‘unnatural’ (imposing constraints on human impulses) and thus friction-forming to some extent by necessity.  But often those frictions are absorbable and survivable – ‘there is a lot of ruin in a nation’.  If you define every failure as ‘too much distance between design and discovery’, then what you have a tautology, not an insight of political science.

And the constitution was hardly the only successful effort at creating a political order.  There are plenty of constitutions out there, as well as genuinely radical new laws, regulations, or Supreme Court opinions ordering an upheaval of the existing social order.  It would be a stunning statement to assert that the Court has never moved against the tide but dragged the society to a new, deliberately designed and intended, destination if by nothing else than the force of law and passage of time.

And, in truth, institutions are designed everyday.  Think about new corporate organization, or the invention of bureaucracies with genuinely novel structures.  There is lots of innovation in governance out there is you expand your focus.  Think about how wikileaks or anonymous works, or those ‘radically flat’ programming collectives or cooperative internet opinion-journalist outlets.  You can define ‘discovery’ as ‘what works vs what doesn’t’, but Gurri’s actual claim reduces to one in which there can be no systematic difference detectable between the design-phases of the ‘order of delegated authorities’ in systems that work vs. systems that failed.  I find that to be highly implausible.

Also, consider the problem of multiple-equilibria.  That is to say, there is no single order to ‘discover’ at all.  Indeed, how can one see the variety of stable systems in History, or around the world – or in the multiplicity of successful organization arrangements – without some inkling of the fact that there are probably many different kinds of functional orders, with some clearly better than others depending on one’s goals and preferences.

If each of these ‘equilibria’ is a path dependent evolving order, then it seems to me it could be possible to ‘design’ a discontinuous leap from the current system to a superior model – even if that model is as-yet untried, hypothetical and speculative (as was the proposed Constitutional order, and, as Moldbug says, the highly influential Napoleonic Civil Code).  Gurri is right about the ‘how do we get from here to there’ problem, but I think he errs whenever he disparages any ‘there’ that seems remote from ‘here’ as a priori infeasible.

II. ‘Dictatorship’ vs. ‘Monarchy’

Gurri says:

For better or for worse, modern radical regime change means either democratization or dictatorship …  any revolution with an articulated desire to set up a monarchy of the sort that existed during the Enlightenment is much more likely to end up with just another 20th century style dictatorship.

I wish Gurri has gone into slightly more detail to explain what he means, and how we he proposes we distinguish between the two.  If he means Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, etc… well … that seemed a bit far-fetched.  He focuses somewhat on military junta / coup-leaders like Pinochet, Franco, or Papadopoulos, so maybe that’s what he’s talking about.  But what about Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – King (constitutional monarch) of Dubai, or more illustratively,  Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore?  Are these 20th century style ‘dictatorships’?  If so, they’re not so bad.  If not, then Gurri needs to explain how they bucked his thesis.

Also, what exactly is ‘modern’?  I would argue that the New Deal was a ‘modern radical regime change’ (its abruptness certainly argues against the notion that it was a ‘discovered order’) that didn’t mean either democratization or dictatorship.

III. Democracy As a Political ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

I’ll admit I can’t remember reading any of the three authors ever using this analogy in their critiques of democracy, but I could be wrong, so please feel free to enlighten me with sources in the comments sections.  Nick Land apparently thinks this is a clever setup, but I think it requires some more specificity.

Let’s define the issue and see it if fits.

A tragedy of the commons is an economic phenomenon that emerges whenever there is some valuable and durable (or self-regenerative) resource in which the property right to exclude others either does not exist or is not enforced.  If the resource were made subject to a lawful title of exclusive property, it would tend to be managed in a market-efficient manner, maximizing the net present value of expected production, which usually implies sustainable levels of utilization into the long-term.

But without these property-rights, each user of the resource can gain more expected utility from each marginal increase in utilization, regardless of the decreases in utility to the collective whole, and even when the collective detriment is greater than the individual benefit.  This leads to an intense race which in turn causes premature and inefficient over-utilization, exhaustion, and depletion (even extinction) of the resource.  The classic examples are common pastures for livestock, or the stock of fish populations in the open seas.  And the classic remedies are proprietization (e.g. for land) or regulation (e.g. for fish)

Ok, can we now, mutatis mutandis, fit this analogy with the authors’ critiques of democracy?  It doesn’t seem to make sense for the resource to be ‘sovereignty’ itself.  No individual or politician can vote as many times as they want without someone stopping them.

However, it seems to me there are two possible ways to make this analogy fit.

III.A. Redistrubution

Two quotes:

George Bernard Shaw: “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

Alexis de Tocqueville: “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”

So, if the ‘resource’ is ‘tax revenue’, then the citizens of democracy can vote themselves benefits out of a public burden, and will tend to do so whenever they believe (usually incoherently) that the advantage they will receive will be larger than their expected increase in taxes.   And one can be more abstract to accommodate cases of rent-seeking (e.g. quotas and unjustifiable barriers to entry for licensed professions) or regulatory party-to-counterparty transfers that lie outside of taxation (e.g. minimum wage laws).

So perhaps the real ‘resource’ is the overall underlying economy, and the ‘overuse’ of that resource is the use of necessity for politicians to direct sovereign power towards the enabling self-destructive levels of mutual predation in their pursuit of votes and legal bribery campaign financing.

And while all fits the tragedy of the commons analogy, it’s certainly not a new claim – it constitutes one of the most classic criticisms of democracy – and it hardly makes sense to call ‘sovereignty’ itself the commons.

And more to the point, Gurri actually makes what I regard as a claim that is both incredible and which contradicts this line of criticism, “The ballooning of the relative size of governments is unlikely to be caused by democracy … ”  If this is the way democracy creates a tragedy of the commons, it can only work to the effect of ballooning the size of government.

Consider, and while it is an imperfect measure because of outsourcing and contracting, there are hardly more executive branch civilians (and over a million fewer military personnel) than there were half a century ago, and in a much larger country.  What has expanded tremendously, however, are redistributive transfers which now constitute the vast majority of the federal budget.  If that ballooning is not a democratic tragedy of the commons at work, then what is it?  Perhaps Gurri is talking about pre-60’s ballooning, but that’s not continuing expansion which people have been complaining about for the last 50 years.

III.B. Zero Sum Game of Influence In A Winner-Take-All Demotist Content.

Another classic criticism of non-proportional-representation democracy is that since power depends on public opinion, and in any particular contest the result is either 100% or 0% power, then political opponents (and their culturally-influential allies) will expend more than the ‘efficient’ (however defined) amount of resources (and really do almost any sleezy thing) to influence public opinion in their direction.  That includes everything from campaign ads to biased ‘journalism’ to … in the most extreme cases such as totalitarian states which perceive themselves vulnerable to popular upheaval, establishing an apparatus of suppression and thought-control.

All this is definitely tragic, however, it is even harder to map to the ‘tragedy of the commons’ analogy.  I invite people to weigh in on the topic in the comments.

Gurri very much wants to use this topic to launch a brief mention of the work of Elinor Ostrom, but it seems out of place.  Is it really all that insightful to say that individuals in particular trades with deep experience in the hazards and tensions of conflicting interests over limited resources don’t always need laws or full-proprietization of resources to self-regulate and develop community customs to keep the peace?

One of the problems with Ostrom’s work, however, is that it turns out many of these pragmatic and spontaneous arrangements have all the economic efficiently of a cartel involved in a conspiracy against trade.  ‘Avoiding overuse’ is not distinguishable from ‘anything less than maximum use’ and is distinct from the market ideal sustainable use.  And some of the institutions that accomplish this are far from genteel.  Established Lobstermen, for example, have been known to settle their differences by surreptitiously sinking the newest entrant’s boats or cutting away his traps’ buoys.  As Adam Smith said:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

So, for example, the members of OPEC have certainly developed their own customs, practices, and institutions to manage the market price for their resources.  That’s a real ‘tragedy of the commons’ all right, a single user could make a little extra marginal profit at the cost of expanding supply, which would lower prices according to the elasticity of demand and thus hurt the total revenues of all the suppliers by lowering profits below monopoly-levels and down to the prevailing market margin.  And usually we call such a situation the markets working as they should – as we consumers want them to!

And many professionals are guild-like and can effectively restrict supply – even outside a state-licensing framework – at the cost of consumers and potential new entrants.  Indeed, that is precisely how many professions ‘self-regulated’ even prior to state-licensing.

We often don’t want markets to develop Ostrom-like institutions outside law and markets, and weather states or markets are ‘uniformly successful’ or not, they are often preferable to the alternatives, whether spontaneous or not.  If democracy is a tragedy of the commons in any way, it doesn’t help matter if two dominant parties cooperate, despite their competition, to ensure they can always divide whatever spoils there are between them.

IV.  Neocameralism

Gurri chides Moldbug for rhetorical hypocrisy when Moldbug criticizes Hoppe for entertaining the possibility of a functional anarchy (though one has never existed), when at the same time Moldbug proposes a joint-stock corporation model of governance which is – according to Gurri – likewise ahistorical.

I think the difference between the ahistoricity (really utter implausibility) of ‘no government’ vs. a merely innovative form of government is a vast chasm that kills the attempt at equivocation.  After all, the JSC-like structures of authority are found in many governmental organizations such as the military and certain departments of the bureaucracy, which is part of the reason why transitioning from the government to the corporate world is often so easy and seamless.  Also, many of the world’s non-democracies utilize corporate-style organizational schemes.  Historically, certain colonial-governments (sometimes also ‘companies’) were run on the basis of corporate charters (and sometimes also explicitly for profit).

But furthermore, even the formal political level of the U.S. Government was designed to function in a corporate-like way, with the House representing by proxy the ‘shareholders’ of the citizens (each with one vote), The Senate acting as a kind of Board of Directors, and the President functioning as the CEO.  Here is Judge Posner in a recent and related post which definitely indicates he shares the opinion that corporate authorities would yield more effective governance.

The point is that ‘anarchy’ and ‘a form of organizational governance discovered by market and trial-and-error processes to be the most effective at managing large enterprises’ are simply worlds apart as political innovations, and Gurri’s accusation erroneously ignores that distance.

V. On Military Coups and Political Formulas

Gurri present an interesting hypothesis that attempts to explain the absence of America military coups.  To explore this thesis, I’ll use a term from Gaetano Mosca (one of Moldbug’s favorites) the ‘political formula’ which he defined as:

Those abstract principles through which the political élite justifies its own power, building around it a moral and legal structure.

Near-Religious Worship of Democracy is America’s political formula, and Gurri says that our society’s inculcation (one could just as easily say ‘indoctrination’ or ‘brainwashing’) of respect for the established form of democratic governance (regardless of its actual merits) is what keeps military leaders from attempting takeovers.

There are a few obvious problems with this thesis.

The first problem is that the U.S. military itself does not actually do much of this ‘inculcation’ in favor of Democracy – certainly not with any effectiveness or genuine motivation – and when it does, it mostly centers around the abstract idea of personal freedom and liberty.

On the contrary, military experience itself is demonstrative of the strengths of hierarchy, the necessity of a unity of command, the folly of dispersed authority and responsibility (if you’ve ever participated in an interagency consensus-requiring committee, you never want to do so again) and it emphasizes the martial virtues of duty, obedience, conformity, and self-sacrifice.  In short – it is about as undemocratic / reactionary an institution as exists within the government (not in terms of the political sentiments of its members, but in its structure).  It is somewhat ironic then that when Gurri chastises Anissimov for ignoring that, “… there exists today, in America, an institution that looks a lot like Anissimov’s ideal picture of an oak. It’s the US military,” he is specifically identifying the least democratic institution.

I also think Gurri’s implicit theory of the cause of military coups – a lack of special ideological affection for the existing system – is flawed in two ways.

First, it ignores the history of coups (a woefully understudied topic, but I’d recommend Luttwak’s Coup d’Etat)  Coups often originate in social chaos and/or pending collapse in the midst of an impotent, flailing, and unpopular regime, or in very weak, small, and primitive governments where a single well-planned assault can capture the palace.  Fortunately, these conditions have not characterized American history.

Second, all nations and systems have political formulas which justify the existing power structure, whatever it is, and Soldiers have fought and died obediently without thought of coup-plotting for all kinds of regimes, democratic or otherwise, and some quite nasty.  There’s nothing special, I submit, about democratic legitimacy vs. any other kind of legitimacy.

Finally, even assuming Gurri is right about the benefits of inculcation, that indoctrination actually occurs at the general-population levels and begins practically at infancy.  Is Gurri in favor of legitimacy-creating, manipulative constructed social narratives in general – that is, effective political formulas – so long as they prevent coups?  And is he so sure that’s he is immune to those democracy-worship messages that he’s been receiving since childhood?

VI.  Survivorship Bias

Gurri leans heavily on the very conservative notion that we should give the presumption of respect to institutions that have lasted with longevity.  In general I agree, but I think American Democracy makes a bad example for two reasons.

First, I think there is a good argument that American Democracy did not in fact, in the actual day-to-day operation of government, survive intact at all.  The transformation of American government after the New Deal into one dominated by an administrative-bureaucracy largely insulated from democratic considerations is the best example.  Moldbug would argue that actual distribution of power and responsibility for writing and enforcing laws and regulations bears increasingly little resemblance to the ‘formal’ democratic dictates of the Constitution, and that to think we have preserved institutions is to buy into the facade instead of looking behind the veil.

And Second, respect for any system cannot derive from longevity.   Some very nasty systems (e.g. North Korea) have lasted a very long time all things considered.  And if a system is decaying, you will go on respecting it until it’s dying day.

Gurri is saying, “You must give respect to this system because it is old.”  But the three authors would say, “No, this thing is a rotting oak, or better yet, a cancer.  It started out as one mutant cell, and all its age means is that its mechanisms of growth are slow by steady, and it has taken this long to grow as large and threatening as it has – more dangerous every single day.  You don’t look at a big tumor and say, ‘It must be benign because it is old’.  You say, ‘Good grief!  We need to cut this thing out right away or we’ll lose all the things we really care about.  If we would have known ages ago that we would be led inexorably to this sad state of affairs, then we would have cut it out from the start!”

That is their argument, that democracy is reaching its terminal, stage-IV phase, that we are declining as a culture, (in a way masked by technological advance) and that decline was baked into the cake from the very beginning.  And how long it took to get to this stage is fairly irrelevant when it comes to prescribing a remedial course of action.

VII.  Conclusion

The truth is, I regard all the above criticisms as minor corrections, or even just volleys in a friendly conversation.  None seem at all fatal to Gurri’s presentation or seriously detract from its excellent quality.  Again, I can’t emphasize enough how impressed I am with Gurri’s fairness and nobility, and I greatly look forward to his next piece.  In a way, it’s a bit sad, because I can guess that Gurri’s article will be the zenith and high-water mark of coverage of neoreaction which means it will only get worse from here on in.  But everyone expects bad-faith, and so it was a refreshing experience to be pleasantly surprised with the opposite.

The Atheist Evangelist

Punxsutawney Handle 2014 – the groundhog emerges from his hovel of hibernation only briefly to keep his promised appointment and make an appearance for the cameras, and then, upon being filled with a terrifying foreboding by witnessing the spectacle of his own shadow – sign of signs – he slouches back into his dusky den to wait out the last six weeks of winter.

Sam Harris is one of a handful of prominent atheists who have carved out for themselves the latest bit in the old public-intellectual-niche of anti-religion.  He’s got a challenge for you, and if you’re interested in the prize of $2K (guaranteed to go to someone) /$20K (much less likely), then you’ve got a few hours left to submit your own entry.

(AMENDATION: Harris Responds to Haidt (unfortunately selecting a rare example of his changing his views an instance where his beliefs shift in the wrong direction in response to a work of propaganda politicized advocacy, which I think is revealing), and This View of Life gives these four essay submissions, all surprising weak and certainly missing Harris’ point.  Oh well.)

I think answering his challenge ought to be an easy exercise of presenting the many well-known, ancient, and logically air-tight results of countless objective-morality-critical philosophers.

The demonstration is simple.  Any claim, assertion, or statement, moral or otherwise, can be subjected to the inquiry, “Why?”  The question can only be answered in three ways:

1. As a deduction from other, logically prior claims
2. I don’t know why, some things just are by necessity.  But it is what we always observe in a way a fair contrarian skeptic could confirm self-persuasively.
3. Because X Says So.

David Hume’s infamous ‘guillotine‘ is merely the statement that all moral ‘oughts’ can only ever originate in 3 (even if X is yourself) and proceed through 1, but never overlap with 2 (which you could say is whatever forms our current best guess at the fundamental natural and physical laws of the universe.)

But the interesting thing is that while Harris is perfectly familiar with these results, and has had to engage with critics who have repeated them to him ad nauseum, he flatly rejects the validity of those arguments.  The mutually frustrating dialogue proceeds as follows:

H: Human well-being is an empirical phenomenon – a fact deriving from natural 2’s.  We should avoid 3’s because they are unreliable, and anyway, we don’t need them.

C:  Ok, but why should we care about well-being?

H:  What else can rational, objective morality consist of besides concern for the well-being of conscious creatures?  Any other concern can only come from unjustifiable bias or some fictional basis for a 3-like statement.

C:  No, your assertion is just another 3-like statement, with X being Sam Harris.  If a robber asks, “Why should I care about the other guy’s well-being when robbing him improves my own?” your only answer can be, “well, it might hurt his more”, and he’ll ask again, “Why should I care about that”, and in the end the final answer can only be, “Because Sam Harris said so.”

H:  No.  I have no say over the natural fact of well-bring.

C:  Argh! We’re going in circles!  You have to be able to answer why it is moral in a 2-like statement.  It doesn’t matter even if your proposal is the only possible answer to ‘objective morality’.  We can only observe actions and consequences, but we can’t observe your logical leap that we ‘ought’ to be pursuing a certain kind of consequence.

H:  What else can objective morality possibly be about?  If we’re going to have morality, and it’s going to be based on 2-like statements, then my proposed consequence is the only one that makes sense.

C:  And why should we have morality?

H:  Duh!  Because it’s morality, which is good by definition, and I say we should do good.  What are you, some kind of evil person?

C:  I must be.  I want to kill you now, and I don’t think it would be wrong.

So Harris’ challenge now becomes more challenging if you cannot persuasively undermine the very basis of his premises (which tells you a little bit about the difference between proving and convincing).  If there’s still time left then you should give it a shot, and who knows, maybe one of you will win.  I hope so – it would be a bit of an entertaining coup on behalf of our little despised community.  (UPDATE: more submissions than I expected, it turns out)

424 entries received by the deadline for the Moral Landscape Challenge. @SamHarrisOrg

— Russell Blackford (@Metamagician) February 11, 2014

Anyway, back to Harris.  What is clear is that he genuinely would very much like his own views to become more prevalent and for religious people to abandon their theological beliefs and then convert to his; he’s not just some closet believer cynically playing the part of an atheist in order to win fame and make money.  If he’s a crypto-anything, it is a thing that is hidden also to himself, which is both the most common and also the most powerful kind of human crypto.

“Ironically” (actually not, but that’s another story) Harris shows a lot of evangelical and missionary zeal in his proselytizing.  One can always speculate as to his real, root psychological motivations, where they originate and whether he is aware of them or not, but he embraces the classic anti-religious cover story which is that religion is not merely factually false but that it is on net a force that undermines human happiness and welfare.  There are three general claims the “New Atheists” would make along this line of thinking:

1. Because humanity does not share one, true, permanent religion (which is inevitable with something as reliably schismatic), the differences in theologies tend to perpetuate and exacerbate our outmoded and suppression-worthy tribal tendencies (indeed, to serve the needs of tribalism in the primitive environment was part of the role religions played), and, yadda yadda [insert logic and evidence here], lots more pointless war and slaughter caused by belief in imaginary myths than would otherwise be the case.  Religion makes us kill each other over nothing, in a way that cannot be resolved by civil debate, and so it is a force for evil.  On the other hand, Science provides us with verifiable, universal truths upon which all humanity could coordinate and live in rationality, peace, and harmony – if only the stubborn clingers would just let go of their pleasant but fraudulent fantasies.
2. Religions are not even very good at accomplishing the incidental personal and social benefits that they often claim for themselves.  On the individual levels, there are psychological comforts, motivational enhancers, and coping skills.  And at the collective level they provide a societal organizing principle, as well as a stability-enhancing political formula, and there is also the taming of the inborn vacuum of a need for spirituality by filling it with something common (and which leads to reflexive pro-social behavioral tendencies) instead of letting it hallucinate and go berserk in countless varieties.  That is, even if evaluated in a light sympathetic to noble lies, it remains the case that in practice religion tends not to achieve more noble effects for its adherents than would be the case under general belief in Scientific Atheism.  All that religions are really good at, in the end, is making themselves hard to remove from those who are attached to them, and encouraging those adherents to propagate the faith.
3. Religious people tend to a lot of crazy, wasteful, and harmful things in the name of utterly bizarre notions of ‘the good’.  Their ethical systems cause a lot of needless suffering which is at odds with any common sense view of human flourishing.

Harris’ claim, then, is that the world would be a much better place – not just for him, but that most people would greatly prefer it – if everyone came to believe in the truth he knows.  And that, he claims – and probably also believes –  is why he’s so motivated to play his part to eradicate the nonsense once and for all.  But for some nefarious reason the obstinate idiots just won’t go along!

To Harris – it’s not as if we lack evidence and arguments for Scientific Truth in a way that makes an embarrassing mockery of contradictory religious claims originating in superstition and fabricated fictional mythology.  To him, the verdict has been in – well beyond any reasonable doubt and publicly available – for a very long time: centuries at least.

It’s not as if people lack awareness or that they don’t have cheap, easy access to these facts and arguments in this information age.  It’s not as if these messages aren’t found in the content that permeates their daily lives (at least in all parts of the world sufficiently economically developed to have access to television – which is almost everywhere these days).  Outside the muslim world, it’s not like the State is standing in the way of Harris’ message – quite the contrary.  And the issue is not merely one of inertia and waiting for generational turnover.

So, what’s the problem?  Three things:

1. Competition: Religious public intellectuals, while admittedly on the defensive against the cultural tide these days, retain a certain degree of influence, even on marginally religious (or “affiliated”) people.  There is always an asymmetric advantage given to the advocate who is arguing in favor of his audience’s existing beliefs and loyalties, especially if it constitutes part of their traditional heritage and self-identity.  Religious intellectuals may be sincere believers, but they are using their cognitive capacity to engage in motivated reasoning and confirmation bias in order to act as committed lawyers to construct the best persuasive case for one particular side of an argument (and one weighing heavily on irrational psychological propensities) instead of as disinterested judges that fairly and rationally weigh all the evidence.  They then transmit this ‘strongest’ case to the members of their audience/jury who are predisposed to embrace and retransmit it, and, anyway, not very good at being either creative lawyers or rational judges.  To honorably combat this asymmetric advantage, New Atheists must go on an offensive (and occasionally militant and obnoxious) crusade to compensate for their disadvantage.
2. Most people seem to have a religious/spiritual module built-in to their brains by human evolution (though there is clearly some biodiversity in this regard) – they want/need to believe in some magical fairy tale that soothes existential angst and explains everything – and parental encouragement, social conformism, and acculturation provide the desired content ready-made.  ‘Raw’ Science is simply not attractive enough to most people to be emotionally appealing and compelling.  People naturally find the prospect of a meaningless, purposeless, and purely-material existence to be bleak, depressing, or even terrifying.  It’s therefore profoundly hard to make a persuasive case that they should liberate themselves from the pretty lies they’ve allowed themselves to be suckered into believing and overcome their biases in order to embrace the truths they find so ugly and repulsive (this should be a fairly familiar feeling to folks around these parts).  This is especially hard when some people who have embraced the truth confess it makes them feel awful.
3. Related to 2 is the common belief (or perhaps instinct) that without something like religion and a faithful belief in materially transcendent morality that is both unprovable and denies its own need for proof – or equivalently in a God-like unevaluated ethical evaluator – people will see the logic of moral nihilism and, realizing there is nothing real beyond their own personal preferences, become Machiavellian real-politikers, scheming to maximize their own self-interests in what is bound to be an anti-social manner.  If a poor man finds a rich man’s wallet on the ground and his desire is to keep it – knows that if he keeps it that it will give more pleasure to him than pain to the rich man and also knows he won’t get caught – then why would he ever return it unless he’s been psychologically conditioned to not use his reasoning logically and instead simply believe that he should sacrifice his own interests without justification because ‘it’s just the right thing to do’?  Religion does this, and what’s going to replace it when it’s been eradicated?  Some kind of thought-control apparatus of mass influence?  And who exactly gets to run that?  And why should anyone trust them not to turn into exploitative Machiavellians themselves?

Whatever you think about the merits of 2 and 3, suffice is to say that people like Harris perceive them to be dwindling – yet still successful and so particularly aggravating – sources of remaining psychological resistance to their persuasive goals in the kangaroo court of public opinion.

Countless alternative ethical schemes – rationally reconstructed from plausibly appealing first principles – have been proposed by true geniuses and over many centuries of effort.  But while some have indeed become popular most of their authors were both philosophically sophisticated and honest enough to concede that while these systems may ‘tend to do what we want them to do’, they remained inescapably arbitrary and logically incapable of self-validation.

And while there were brief periods when it was intellectually fashionable to embrace the truth of such arbitrariness (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche call your office), it never seems to last more than a generation or so before being replaced in one way or another by some new movement propelled by a zealous belief in the objective moral truth of their own new righteous cause.

My view is that, compared with the typical style of the previous generation of writers, current political discourse seems to have regressed into just such a remoralized phase, with such compelling arguments as ‘It’s just wrong!’ becoming increasingly common and brazen with an almost stunning lack of self-awareness or realization of any need for clarification or justification.  Not just, “It is immoral not to follow my policy recommendations because God says so, or according to my preferred system of moral philosophy, with which you may of course differ in a way I cannot possibly prove to be ‘incorrect'” but simply, “It IS immoral.”  Full stop.

UPDATE: Read this latter-day mini-sermon (or this one) for a typical example.

UPDATE2: Now this: “In the blogosphere, is moralizing really that which needs to be raised in relative status?”

As if to prove my point only a week after I made it, the Blog Title has now changed from “Marginal Revolution – Small Steps Towards A Much Better World” to “REVOLUTION -Big Steps Towards A Much, Much More Moral World”.

And not just as a shortcut rhetorical device either – as if everyone understands the implied qualifications – or even as an appeal to the modal sentiments of an ethically homogenous audience, but instead out of a genuine belief that there is such a thing as a God-less objective and rational morality (which there isn’t) and that enlightened geniuses like Rawls have discovered it.   So they feel they can now skip the disclaimer mumbo jumbo and just make unsubstantiated moral assertions – and without even bothering with pondering the moral calculus of hard cases – as if the answer should be obviously real and true for everybody and there is no possible good-faith disagreement on that score.  And we can feel free to do this without shame even if we have a degree in Philosophy from Harvard where the professors taught us that we are certainly in the wrong about all that.  Their immediate predecessors certainly wrote from the amoral frame as if that were the case, but obviously we’ve made moral progress since then.

Explaining the mystery of the remoralization of our political discourse in this increasing non-theistic age, and exploring the consequences, is a project I’ve been working on.

But the contemporary atheist moralists aren’t the only ones to reject moral nihilism in principle (and not merely pragmatically) of course.  One of the cleverest Christian criticisms of moral nihilism is an argument reminiscent of Marxist Historicism and which claims that, regardless of its truth, due to its intellectual-energy-sapping incompatibility with human nature, nihilism is not self-stabilizing as a general popular – or even elite – belief system, that it is only one phase of a repetitive historical cycle and thus merely sets the stage for events which will inevitably lead to destructive horrors.

A metaphor is that nihilism deals with a problematic garden by converting the weed-picker into a plowman who then plows the garden under in a process which exhausts him to the point where he stops caring about either plowing or weed picking.  Then the noxious and invasive weeds move in and take over, but they eventually choke each other’s roots into mutual annihilation, and then out of the composted rubble of the great weed-war, someone rebuilds a new imperfect garden, and so on.

The way we ‘step outside history’ is to manage social discourse in a way such as to make sure nihilist arguments can never make any meaningful progress, especially amongst the intellectual class.  This isn’t too hard because, as mentioned above, nihilism is already very unappealing.  It’s only real appeal is that it is logically coherent, fully consistent with the evidence scientific observation, and the most parsimonious explanation of a world full of injustice and apparently devoid of miracles.

But that’s pretty weak tea for an intellectual who is motivated in part by the adulation his peers tend to grant to bold and brilliant rebellions from the established fairy tales believed by all the idiot chump rubes, from whom they desperately want to distinguish themselves.  You can’t ever breed that tendency away, but perhaps you can tame it if you can distract your intellectuals with a different mechanism by which they can jockey for status – one that always steers clear of anything with a morally nihilistic aspect.

The problem is that if moral nihilism is true, then your intellectuals will be pursuing something false and thus schismatic, and with religious-like moral fervor.  Which … is exactly the problem Harris et al claim to have with religions.  If this actually happened without the participants even realizing it then that would indeed be ironic.  But more worrying is that it will necessarily generate a conflict between empirical reality and moral imperative.

And – as the New Atheists will be the first to tell you – historically, the loser is usually reality.  The result is intellectual and philosophical stagnation in the face of either a futile impotence or an insane counterproductivity at dealing with social problems that can never be solved without breaking down one’s righteous avoidance and turning off the ideology-protecting / ego-defending cognitive filters and being able to stare a piece of ugly and morally-offensive truth straight in the face.  And so they are indeed never solved, and we also never learn.  And this is mostly because this setup make public constructive criticism impossible.  If you try to tell someone they’re incorrect, they’ll just call you immoral and evil and then ignore or persecute you hysterically for offending their fragile sensibilities and breaching the peace.  Seen any of that around lately?

Let us now return to the question of how Harris dealt with the dilemma posed by atheism resistance-generators 2 and 3 above.

The dilemma is this.  He can’t make any progress in terms of public popularity by taking what I’ll call the Heartiste position and saying:

There is no such thing as morality or spirituality or meaning or purpose or soul or afterlife or God or the supernatural or good and evil or right and wrong.  There is no natural law or human rights or anything like that.  These are all just seductive illusions and mental reflexes, the desire and easy-suggestibility for which was implanted in your genes by evolution for reasons that are no longer operative.

You are all just a bunch of emergent phenomena of an enormous complex arrangement of strange quantum things pointlessly interacting in that weird way they do.  That’s it.  Everything else is make-believe which your mind refuses to accept is make-believe with every last bit of its unlimited power for denial.

Sorry if that upsets you, but that’s the truth.  You should stop craving fantasy land and grow up and be an adult and just accept it and cope.  If you need to talk, I’ll be poolside.  We should just be getting whatever pleasure juice we can squeeze out of this big orange called life and by whatever means optimal.  You should hurry up and join me and get started because there’s not as much time left as you may think to extract some safe fun during these last days of the evaporating civilization that made it possible.

Yes, I admit if this belief spread widely – as opposed to being followed by a tolerable number of free-riding sociopath parasites – that it will accelerate our civilization’s demise.  It wont be a happy day when every babysitter is a Woody Allen.  So what?  There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.

I think you can appreciate that this message doesn’t tend to win many hearts and minds, which is what Harris is trying to do.

Another option could be the brutal honesty of moral subjectivity, “This is merely what I, Sam Harris want.  I prefer to live in a world where people feel compelled (and are occasionally coerced) to obey this principle.  It’s not a universal truth, it’s just the truth of my preference.  It’s not any more significant than my preference for chocolate over vanilla ice cream, but it’s still real.”

Again, not very persuasive unless you happen to want what Harris wants.  When’s the last time you verbally convinced someone to change their favorite flavor of ice cream?

The only other option for a moralist Atheist is to contradict the Hume, Leff, and Heartiste positions by means of scientific 2-like statements which any skeptic could verify, and this he cannot do because it is impossible.

Well, the easiest way to end a war is to surrender.  The second easiest way is to stop fighting, declare victory even if you didn’t actually take a single inch of territory, and just pretend you won.  You can hold your triumphal parade to the folks back home who never witnessed the battle.

And this is what Harris has done.  The way to address the questions of morality and spirituality is simply to assert as confidently and unapologetically as possible that there is indeed such a thing as an objective, rational, universal atheist morality (which is something like a natural law of the universe) and that atheists can be ‘spiritual’ too.  Over three years ago, Harris published his “The Moral Landscape” to make the first assertion at length, and in a few months he will release “Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion“.

I don’t know how persuasive these books will turn out to be, but they probably offer some false but genuine comfort to the marginally-loyal atheist who is logically-able and philosophically-sophisticated and who would otherwise be quite bothered by the problems discussed above.  And who do we accuse of dishing out false but genuine comforts – of dispensing opium to the masses?  And now we get self-righteous atheists both as pretty-lies-junkies and as pushers too.  Terrific.

But my assessment is that, so far, Harris is having less success pushing his dope than he had originally hoped for, hence the existence of this publicity stunt essay contest.  It would be hilarious and genius if Harris bought all his press for only one thousand dollars, picks the stupidest submission while claiming it was the ‘best’ (thus enabling the perception which makes all his critics appear even more asinine) and then easily tears it apart.  But I doubt he’s that deviously clever, and I think he’s being completely sincere.

But I don’t detect any ‘trend discontinuity’ of noticeable acceleration in the decline of religious attitudes in the public as a result of Harris’ work – or even all the New Atheists combined.  Of course, it would be silly to expect mere books to accomplish that goal, but that is what the books themselves claim is their purpose.  So why is Harris having any trouble?  The answer, in two words, is ‘Direct Game‘.

And direct game applied to people predisposed to reject your message is usually unsuccessful, often even for the masters.  So maybe what the New Atheists need is a bit more salesman’s subterfuge and indirect game, though that requires a great deal more sophistication and intelligence.

And it is by this path that we come to the so-called Straussians and Neoconservatives.

Paul E. Gottfried has recently published, “Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America“.  (UPDATE: See also Daniel McCarthy’s Review, Gottfried’s Response, and McCarthy’s rejoinder – all excellent), Quick, be like Handle and go buy and read everything Gottfried has published (ok, fine, just the stuff written in English).  Done?  Good.  Well, as you might imagine, the book has come under a great deal of specious criticism from fans of Strauss’ project, and Gottfried recently responded in a post at the impressive “Nomocracy in Politics Site“.

Let me do a great deal of torturous injustice to Gottfried’s work by breaking down the history of the Straussian successful ‘subversion’ of the intellectual commanding heights of the American establishment right; a takeover that was benevolent and enlightened, outright welcomed and invited, or sinister and insidious, depending on your point of view.

1. Strauss inclined towards the Schopenhauer-Nietzsche tradition early in his philosophic career (see the beginning of ‘the Heartiste position’ above)
2. Then the Nazis and Soviets, the horrors of WWII, genocide and persecution (for example, of Strauss himself), and the ghastly Communist domination of much of the world’s population.
3. Which was really, really bad, and promised to get much, much worse with the explosion of technology-enabled state capability.
4. And, Strauss reasoned, some of that badness can be fairly laid at the feet of the vacuum created by the demise of traditional Christianity and its replacement with alternative sociopolitical-rooted philosophies which, it seemed, were even more likely to go completely berserk in the modern age.  It didn’t matter that they were slightly more in accord with reality than old-time religion, because it is now pretty clear that public truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and there are far worse things than spreading noble lies.  Integrity is a value, but so is peace, harmony, and especially, survival.
5. So what to do?  It’s not like you can (or even want) to bring back old-time religion.  You need something religion-like to take its place which is a more human-friendly societal operating system.  You would need that thing to be positioned against nihilism in general as part of its cultural legacy, and especially its worst excesses of Fascism and Communism, and to possess the actual geopolitical power able to withstand those rivals and crush any potential upstarts.  Because you can’t build it from scratch, you would like to build upon an already existing tradition and just nudge it a little in the direction you’d prefer it to go.
6. Cut to the chase: It’s America silly – time to grab the reigns of that least worst behemoth.  And that means it’s also time to swallow your pride, suppress your compulsion to tell the truth, and stop making the obvious arguments against the absurdities of democracy, rights, equality, and so on, and instead flatter existing patriotic Americans who love this stuff by doubling down on your extolations.
7. With two exceptions.  First, that whole ‘isolationism’ thing, the prudent anti-foreign-entanglements view of which was the genuine American tradition that went back to nation’s founding.  Well, you can hardly crush Nazi and Communist nihilists and keep that around, so it’s got to go, replaced with a messianic Palmerstonian interventionism of righteous crusades.  Second, a truly universal civil faith will have to actively divorce itself from it’s particular Christian and Northern-European heritage.  Paleoconservatives who don’t get this will simply have to make way for Neoconservatives.  Or they can be made to make way.  Whatever.
8. So we get into ‘the uses of history’ clever propaganda territory.  A modernized version of the American classical liberal tradition is now The American Religion (which it has always really been, in truth).
9. And if anyone tries to criticize you and you can’t silence them, then you can always accuse them of being immoral or unpatriotic.
10. And, yeah, all this kind of depends on having actual dangerous nihilist enemies to fight.  It would probably all break down and go berserk in its own way if that condition were to disappear.  But it’s not we’re writing a permanent script for all time (though, of course, we have to pretend to be doing exactly that).  It’s just for a generation or so, until the current storm passes.  When it does, hopefully, maybe, people in the future will be able to safely liberate themselves from this concocted, but extremely useful, nonsense – this old and newly-improved secular religion.  But from the point of view of where we stand in the immediate aftermath of the war – the heaps of smoking rubble, mounds of human ash, cold war, and the prospect of nuclear annihilation or Communist domination – (the mugging by reality which has opened the eyes of even those who were once devout Trotskyites) I’ve got to say, I’m willing to take that chance.

And the rest, as they say, is history.  The paleoconservatives got a bad shake from all this, but even they admit that it was worked like a charm – at least in terms of its success in conquering the intellectual right and creating lots of brilliant disciples (some witting, some not) to further the project along. I think even Strauss would be surprised with the way much of this work has shifted from Historians, Philosophers, and Political Theorists to Economists, Journalists, and Foreign-Policy players.

If Sam Harris wants us to follow his own prescriptions for morality and spirituality, then he could definitely learn a thing or two from old Master Leo about how to gradually and stealthily replace an old religion with a new one.

Unfortunately, the Straussian-American religion is now well past its sell date, and the Atheist Evangelist Religion will never be ready for prime-time because it can never overcome its own self-contradictions.  Traditional religion is everywhere on the ropes, and the pool-sides are getting increasingly crowded.  To some of us who have particular preferences, this – and a whole host of many other social issues – looks like a big problem in need of some radically new solutions.  But no one can get anywhere if those solutions can’t get past the firewall that someone implanted in your brain and had the nerve to name ‘morality’ when, in the end, it was nothing more than ‘politics’, which is to say, ‘power’.

Human being are naturally power-seekers, of course, and our brains are made to help us rationalize our selfish motives away in the name of something we can justify as the greater good.  The second most dangerous psychological vulnerability is the tendency for unconscious-hypocrisy to hijack the moral sense and put self-interest firmly in the driver’s seat.  The most dangerous one is the tendency to accept someone’s else’s elucidation of their own power-driven-morality as accurate, driven by the reflexive instinct for morality as an adaptive social coordination mechanism.

The original critical-mass of publically prominent atheists emerging from the enlightenment made exactly this claim in their criticism of old-time religion.  That is was merely a system created (or which perhaps emerged spontaneously) to organize and justify social and political power through thought-control.  And that we wouldn’t be able to make certain kinds of progress unless we liberated our minds from that thought-prison.

Our problem today is just the same because the human mind is made to be institutionalized, and like the old prisoner, can’t handle life on the outside for long.  As we enter a pathetic parody of an increasingly remoralizing phase of our contemporary ‘intellectual’ life, we witness a long line of new wardens.  They all live in their own cozy jails, naturally, and are all in full agreement as to the benefits of mass incarceration – eagerly jousting with each other and salivating over the prospects of the lucrative commissions should the line of new prisoners be persuaded to select their particular cell-block.

The real moral landscape challenge, then, is to recognize the efforts of Sam Harris for what they really are, even if he won’t.  And, of course, and even if propelled by necessity rather than nobility, to summon the courage to face life on the outside.

Anti-Sabbatical

Anti-Sabbatical: When one has to attend to his professional and family affairs, and priority personal projects, for an extended period of non-disruption, at the cost of one’s participation in the community.

I regret that I will not be able to post anything here, or read or comment on your blogs, for approximately one month. Time to disconnect, get off the grid, and go dark for a while.

If you’d like to get a hold of me, or bring something particularly interesting to my attention, or update one of my lists, do not hesitate to email or leave comments to some post on this site. See you all again in due time.

-Best Regards
-Handle

A Fifth Column In Every Pot

One of the problems with the whole Snowden** story is that it tends to make the NSA into too much of a cynosure of paranoia when it comes to individuals, entities, and institutions ‘spying on us’ or ‘invading our privacy’ or whatnot.

The reality is that everybody is trying to spy on everybody else.  Countries and Corporations, Lovers and Lawyers and Law Enforcement, oh my, and so on.  If you’re worried about the NSA in particular you definitely aren’t worried enough.

And speaking of worries; Charlie Stross recently posted a slight conceptual extension on the relatively recent Chinese tactic of covertly placing wireless internet accessing devices inside ordinary electronic appliances.  These stories have been coming out for a while now, and the problem is only getting worse.

The ‘first generation’ version of this idea is simple.  Inside your electric chicken pot, tea kettle, desk lamp – whatever – is a little microprocessor always drawing a negligible amount of current and scanning for some unsecured wifi router.  If it finds one, it establishes a connection and surreptitiously ‘beacons’ to headquarters.  The little chip is now useful for various purposes.

Maybe it’s now a hop-point for proxying which impedes attempts at attribution.  Maybe it monitors your traffic.  Maybe it uses your electricity to mine Bitcoins.  Maybe it reprograms your router and puts a new password on it, or installs malware on it, or fries the circuit-board from overloading, or disables the thing by corrupting the firmware.  Maybe it’s just really good at pinging a particular website and acting as a bot in a DDoS attack.  Lots and lots of scary possibilities.

Of course, for this to be a major threat and cause of personal – as well as national – concern, it would have to involve the obviously impossible coincidence of a peer-competitor adversary nation with a vast and highly sophisticated cyber-espionage division, that also was ruthless and brazen and had little compunction about spying or concern about getting caught.  And this nation would also simultaneously have to be the same country with a huge trade surplus that exported billions of cheap, retail electronic devices to every country in the world, dozens of which are probably in your house.

Which as we know is such an unlikely concurrence so as to be totally imposs…  oh.  Scheiße!

Frightened of things besides just the evil NSA yet?  Good; you should be.  We don’t have a good name for this kind of (very reasonable) panic yet, so I’m going to dub it, ‘The Blue Scare‘.  That’s after the color of the lights on my own wifi router, which … just got a new password.  Can’t be too careful, you know?

Stross takes it a step further and imagines these implants being clandestinely embeddable not just in conventional plug-in appliances, but in all sorts of devices; really anything with a power source, even from batteries, and maybe even the batteries themselves.  This would be particularly useful, if done cleverly, in logging your keystrokes or tablet-pokes and intercepting your passwords and credentials to gain privileged access to all your accounts and information.

You have no idea how many people can blackmail you now.  You might as well just believe everything you do is being watched so you should fear the consequences and try to be on your best behavior at all times.  God’s not dead; we just replaced him with technology.  ‘Reincarnated’ even; if that’s not too blasphemous. ‘Don’t Be Evil’, indeed.

But fortunately there are some obvious countermeasures, and I’m sure the genuine tech people in the crowd know plenty more.  For one, secure your darn router with a password.  Second, it can’t be that hard to set up routers with little ‘unsecure honeypot sandbox hotspots’ (to mildly abuse all those terms), just waiting for some Chinese Chip to take the bait and reveal itself.  And then probably reporting everything it does to your favorite anti-virus company.  I knew some guys at University who shared an apartment and an internet connection and had something just like that on their router just for laughs that sent expectant free-riders to some very nasty websites.

Maybe you get a sniffer tool too and figure out where it is so you can return it to Walmart.  Is it really a breach of warranty if your lamp works perfectly, but just happens to have a little extra invisible spying parasite attached to it like a tick?  Be sure to add a microphone to the sniffer too to prevent acoustic attacks.

So, probably, we’ll quickly defeat most of the implants which have to ‘out’ themselves to perform their mischief, and the tactic will rapidly disappear.

But then what?  No more Blue Scare?  Quite the contrary, alas.

Putting on my inner-evil-monster, hope-the-enemy-doesn’t-read-this hat, I try to imagine what damage could be done with undetectable sleeper implants that can’t connect to the internet or any wireless network because they’d reveal themselves.

And what they could do is listen.  For two things.  First, they could scan for all the frequencies that are typically emitted in their area.  Second, for the encrypted signal order that instructs them to 1. Suck up all the power available and jam on all those detected frequencies, 2. Constantly repeat the encrypted jam order to all other jamming devices in range, and 3. Irreversibly enter into this mode so that, even if you disconnect the power, as soon as you plug it back it, it starts jamming and order-signal-repeating again.

This is a cascade of dominoes that sets off a pretty awful avalanche, especially in high density urban areas.  How awful?  Well, first, how much do we rely on wireless telecommunication devices these days – the ones that will all be immediately neutralized everywhere an RF-avalanche was triggered?  I think everybody is utterly dependent on them.  And second, how exactly do you turn this nightmare off without scrapping everything everyone has that uses electricity or some self-directed super Nuclear-EMP?  You probably can’t.

And no one has to fire a single shot to unleash this catastrophe. No one even has to put a single human being behind enemy lines, because all the fifth-column agents are electronic.

All they have to do is put the little devices in the cheap retail electronic items, flood your country with them (it’s not like it wouldn’t be hard to hide this capability from customs inspectors), and wait.  Oh, you want to intervene against that Taiwan invasion reincorporation-liberation?  Are you sure?  Are you sure you’re sure?  You might want to reconsider.

Are you Blue Scared enough yet?  Still like free trade?  Don’t even remember the NSA now, do you?  Except maybe you’re thinking, “Somebody’s got to do something about this!”  Well, who do you think that somebody is?

**What ever happened to Snowden’s girlfriend?  Does she still love him?  Has she visited him in Russia.  Does he have a new one?  Does the FSB provide for his needs?  Do they need to?  The guy is a top-tier global celebrity right at the end of – but still within! – his 15 minutes of fame.  He probably gets his pick of the litter of the Bolshoi Ballerinas.  That is, when groupies and/or ‘journalists’ aren’t flying in from all over the world to ‘intimately interface’ with the guy.  Sigh … no one covers this stuff.

140 Years Ago

The substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbours, and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes, and should be provided with a rateable share of the sovereign power in the shape of a vote, and that the result of this will be the direction of power by wisdom, seems to me to be the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds.

Fitzjames Stephens, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 1874.

UPDATE, 140 Minutes Ago:

I have many times made it clear that I view myself as an obituarist for my country, not a campaigner or a political activist. After the utter failure of my attempt to influence politics at the last election  (when millions of conservative patriots voted for the Conservative Party that hates and despises them, so saving that ghastly organisation from what would otherwise have been certain doom), I have abandoned any serious hope of making any difference. It goes deeper than that. Over many years of presenting conservative and patriotic arguments in public places, I have found that it is becoming harder and harder to do so, not easier. The overwhelming bias of our culture, media and schools towards the ideas and beliefs of the left has produced three generations to whom my beliefs are now actually shocking.

So I have decided that telling the truth must be its own reward.  As I have often stated here, what we do here matters somewhere else, often in ways we cannot see at the time. This applies to evil deeds and to good ones.

Peter Hitchens, 30-DEC-2013.

Happy New Year!

Drugs Discussion Forum

The great Peter A. Taylor asks an interesting question over at Land’s place.

Do you have a position statement somewhere on drug prohibition? I’m wondering which way the wind is blowing in these parts, and why.

I left some of my initial impressions over there.  But I’m curious to see how else you all would address Peter’s inquiry.

On a small subset of that large subject, Peter Hitchens has been writing a lot on the subject as of late and recently got into an argument with Matthew Perry (‘Chandler’ from Friends) on the subject of addiction and related to his recent book, “The War We Never Fought: The British Establishment’s Surrender to Drugs”

Hitchens likes to ‘heighten the contradiction’, as they say, in the progressive stance on drugs and addiction.  The progressives say addiction is a real, serious, and severe compulsion beyond the means of normal amounts of discipline, self-control, and willpower.

But, moreover, the use put to the ‘addiction’ ideograph is in its exculpation from personal responsibility, punishment, and stigmatization that it is supposed to provide to its ‘victims’.  If it is a ‘disease’, then the enlightened are supposed to ‘treat’ it as a form of temporary mental illness amenable to some form rehabilitation.  Paid for out of the public fisc, no doubt, because it would be unfair and socially unjust otherwise.

Well, fine, Hitchens says, but if drugs were actually so dangerous such that a single taste could dissolve one’s will and make one a total slave of the substance, then surely it is right and just and proper to make such chemicals dangerous contraband and expend all the great coercive resources of the state into prohibition.  And because it is the demand which creates the dangerous black market supply, we should punish users as much as dealers to achieve the desired deterrent effect.

But the progressives take the very opposite tact, and constantly advocate for less state enforcement, less severe sanctions, and definitely for more benign neglect of users contra the smugglers and dealers.

Hitchens says ‘addiction’ is baloney, and likes to cite Dalrymple’s experience as a prison psychiatrist to illustrate that withdrawal even from heroin is relatively quick process akin to a severe bout of the flu (a case explored in his Romancing Opiates).  He would be caught in his own contradiction if he didn’t cite the other deleterious effects of drugs besides ‘addiction’ on the minds and lives of its users, though in this respect I think he has a tendency to exaggerate the dangers.

Anyway, that’s enough context.  Have at it fellow neoreactionaries.  Is there an undiscovered country of a common position on the subject?  Or will it fray into fissiparous camps?

P.S. I’d like to recommend the tublr blog Odd Blots.  I wish OddBlot would move the blog to WordPress or adjust the setting to enable replies from people, like myself, without tumblr accounts.  But then again maybe there’s some tumblr-ninja magic code to get it done.  Anybody know?

Bullied and Badgered, Pressured and Purged

This is a placeholder website for the chronicling of … ‘The PC Inquisition’ isn’t too far off. Bleg from all of you to help me expand it via crowd-sourcing. The dates are not consistent, sometimes it is from the ‘offending event’, other times it is from the purging or just the publication dates of the news stories. As of 11-JAN-2015, this post has now been read by over 30,000 people.

1. 10-OCT-1959: Revilo Oliver purged from National Review.  A complex personality – the sixth generation in his family to bear the burden of a purposefully palindromic name.  Archive at Unz.org
2. 20-APR-1968: Enoch Powell purged from British Conservative Party.
3. 1969-1973: The ‘original’ race and intelligence ‘controversy’ hysteria over Jensen, Herrnstein, Draper, Wilson, and Shockley, et al. (see also Sociobiology)
4. 19-OCT-1974: Sir Keith Joseph deemed ineligible for Chancellor of the Exchequer for this notorious speech.
5. JAN-1984: Ray Honeyford forced into early retirement as headmaster of Drummond Middle School.
6. 17-MAR-1984: Geoffrey Blainey silenced by University of Melbourne.
7. 12-MAR-1985: Murray Dolfman suspended from lecturing at the University of Pennsylvania for talking to black students about the 13th Amendment.
8. 06-APR-1987: Al Campanis ‘ignites controversy’ over remarks about black baseball team managers.
9. 19-JAN-1988: Jimmy ‘The Greek’ Snyder purged from CBS.
10. 1989-1991 (and continuing): Related to the above, Linda Gottfredson’s torturous path.
11. NOV-1990: John Strugnell purged from the Dead Sea Scrolls project.
12. 22-APR-1991: William F. Buckley devotes an entire issue of National Review to “In Search of Anti-Semitism: What Christians Provoke What Jews? Why? By Doing What? — And Vice Versa.” focused greatly on Pat Buchanan (and timed to coincide with his big for Presidential candidacy).  Later, collected with responses, into a book.
13. 1993 – Jospeh Sobran purged from National Review.
14. 13-JAN-1993: Eden Jacobowitz charged by University of Pennsylvania with violating racial harassment policy by shouting ‘Water Buffalo’ at some large, rowdy black women.  (He should have just said ‘Behemoth‘ like he was thinking in Hebrew).  There was even a Doonesbury comic on it.
15. 27-JUN-1995: Sam Francis purged from the Washington Times.
16. 23-APR-1995: Frank Urban “Fuzzy” Zoeller loses his sponsors after Tiger Woods joke.
17. 1997: Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan (and many others) purged from National Review.
18. 09-AUG-1997: Chris Brand purged from Edinburgh University purportedly for discussing sexuality amongst minors, but mostly for his IQ heresy.
19. 15-JAN-1999: David Howard purged for his vocabulary.
20. 01-FEB-1999: Glenn Hoddle purged as England’s soccer coach
21. 20-APR-1999: Marge Schott finally gives up being “Baseball’s Big Red Headache“
22. 27-DEC-1999: John Rocker forced into Psychiatric testing after expressing some opinions, but judging by his later behavior, he somehow didn’t get the message.
23. 17-SEP-2001: Bill Maher purged from ABC (well, ok, just reassigned to HBO, he’s doing great)
24. 02-OCT-2001: Ann Coulter purged from National Review (NR’s version here).
25. 2001: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together goes unpublished in the U.S.
26. 18-NOV-2001: Stuart Nagel commits suicide after a lost battle with a long, drawn-out process of academic inquisition into anonymous and unfounded racism accusations.  It wasn’t ‘win-win’ for him.
27. 21-FEB-2002: Bjorn Lomborg investigated and found ‘guilty’ by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty for complaints related to the publication of his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.
28. 09-MAR-2002: Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot convicted of intolerance by Canada’s Victorian and Civil Administrative Tribunal.
29. 27-APR-2002: Scott Phelps suspended from teaching at Muir High.  (note: none of the links to the news stories seem to work anymore).
30. MAY-2002: Geoffrey Sampson purged by the UK Conservatives.
31. 06-MAY-2002: Pim Fortuyn assassinated by multicultural leftist Volkert van der Graaf for opposing mass immigration into Holland.  His murdered has been released from prison less than 12 years after the fact.
32. 29-MAY-2002: Michel Houellebecq charged with inciting racial hatred for stating, in an interview, that Islam was “the most stupid of all religions”.
33. 17-JUN-2002: Rev. Stephen Boissoin persecuted by Canadian Human Rights Commission.
34. NOV-2002: Oriana Fallaci becomes the subject of arrest warrants in Switzerland related to her excellently passionate book The Rage and The Pride.  (See also her trial in Italy on 12-JUN-2006 for The Force of Reason.)
35. 05-DEC-2002: Senator Trent Lott resigns his Senate leadership by having to gall to flatter Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday.
36. 2003: J. Michael Bailey two-minutes-hated and investigated for ethics after publishing ‘The Man Who Would Be Queen‘.
37. 10-MAR-2003: The Dixie Chicks intensely criticized and forced into apology for opposing Iraq War while overseas.
38. 01-OCT-2003: Rush Limbaugh pressured to resign from ESPN after comments related to Donovan McNabb.
39. 17-OCT-2003: Greg Easterbrook purged from ESPN (and his content memory-holed)
40. 1. 15-MAR-2004: Ted Rall purged from New York Times. (it’s a thing with him, see below)
41. 30-JUN-2004: Rachel Ehrenfeld found liable by default judgment by British Court after successful libel-tourism suit brought by the Bin Mahfouz family (it’s kind of a patten with them).  The case is important for illustrating not just the legal controversy, but the willingness of certain nations to extent to private parties the ability to commandeer the judicial apparatus on mere pretext for speech-suppressive ends.
42. 12-AUG-2004: Tatu Vanhanen investigated by Finnish NBI at the behest of the Ombudsman for Minorities.
43. SEP-2004: Thomas Klocek suspended from teaching at DePaul.
44. JAN-2005: Kevin Lamb purged from Human Events.
45. 19-JAN-2005: Lawrence Summers purged from Harvard
46. 25-JULY-2005: Michael Graham purged from WMAL.
47. 31-JULY-2005: Drew Fraser suspended from Macquarie University over a letter he wrote to a suburban newspaper.
48. 26-OCT-2005: Fisher DeBerry probably purged from U.S. Air Force Academy (left a year after controversy over his comments)
49. 15-NOV-2005: Alain Finkielkraut two minutes hated for making comments about the 2005 French Riots and is forced to apologize.  Interestingly, Le Nouvel Observateur writes about him in an article called, “The Neo-Reactionaries“.
50. JAN-2006: Fr. Alphonse de Valk persecuted by Canadian Human Rights Commission.
51. 11-FEB-2006: Ezra Levant investigated after publishing Mohammad photos in Western Standard.
52. 25-FEB-2006: Michael Regan pressured into resignation from Allegany County, Maryland DA’s office.
53. 23-MAR-2006: Frank Ellis forced into early retirement from Leeds University for views on race and intelligence.  He has earlier decried British ‘racial hysteria’ and notably gave a talk on Liberal Totalitarianism.
54. 16-JUN-2006: Dr. Bruce Lahn pressured out of IQ / brain-size / recent human evolution genetic research. (10Q from GNXP) – Take note of answer #3.
55. 14-JUL-2006: Jeneane Garofalo purged from The Majority Report for comments on the relative status of statements about Scientology and Judaism. I think.
56. 09-AUG-2006: Dr. Rod Lea two minutes hated for statements related to Maoris and the monoamine oxidase-A gene.
57. 20-OCT-2006: Mark Steyn investigated after writing about islam in MacLean’s..
58. 20-NOV-2006: Michael Richards (“Kramer”) purged from the biz.
59. 04-APR-2007: Don Imus purged from CBS and NBC.
60. 04-MAY-2007: Larry Auster purged from FrontPage Magazine.
61. 22-MAY-2007: Comedian Guy Earle fined for mocking a lesbian heckler.
62. 07-JUN-2007: Isaiah Washington purged from Grey’s Anatomy and ABC.
63. 11-JUN-2007: Norman Finkelstein denied tenure at DePaul.
64. 11-SEP-2007: Doug Christie fined by the Law Society of British Columbia for advocating a little too vigorously for the wrong kind of people.
65. 16-OCT-2007: James Watson investigated and purged.
66. NOV-2007: Keith John Sampson found guilty of racial harassment by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Affirmative Action Officers for reading Todd Tucker’s book, Notre Dame Vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan in, er, impolite company.  The chancellor eventually apologized.
67. 22-MAR-2008: Randi Rhodes purged from Air America.
68. 15-APR-2008: Brigitte Bardot goes on trial for Muslim comments (and hardly for the first time)
69. 31-OCT-2008: Everybody goes berserk on the Mormons because of proposition-8 support. (google for more).
70. 20-APR-2009: Carrie Prejean two minutes hated for expressing views on gay marriage at Miss USA contest.
71. 24-APR-2009: Ted Rall purged from United Media.  (see below, again)
72. 06-MAY-2009: Michael Savage banned from Britain.
73. 15-JUL-2009: Dr. Kathy Albain  two minutes hated for accusations of ethnicity-based medical profiling.
74. 13-OCT-2009: Thilo Sarrazin purged from Bundesbank
75. 16-NOV-2009: Lou Dobbs purged by CNN over immigration reporting.
76. 27-JAN-2010: ESPN writer Paul Shirley purged for some ungenerous remarks about Haiti following their tragic earthquake.
77. 28-APR-2010: Gillian Duffy publicly declared ‘that bigoted woman’ by Gordon Brown.
78. 30-APR-2010: Stephanie Grace and the case of her infamous Harvard email.
79. 01-MAY-2010: Peter Duesberg investigated by UC Berkeley.  (later dropped, though I think his clinging to his AIDS stuff over all the years of contrary evidence is pure derp, but still if shouldn’t have had the effect on Charlton below.)
80. 11-MAY-2010: Bruce Charlton purged from Medical Hypothesis.
81. 19-MAY-2010: Physics Professor Jonathan Katz purged from BP-Oil-Spill Brain Trust.
82. 04-JUN-2010: Steve Blair purged by KYCA radio.
83. 10-AUG-2010: Dr. Laura Schlessinger eased off the air for discussing whether the use of the word ‘nigger’ could ever be appropriate.  Here’s some Chris Rock, “The correct answer is, ‘Not really’.”
84. 01-OCT-2010: Rick Sanchez purged from CNN.
85. 08-OCT-2010: Juan Williams purged from NPR.
86. 02-FEB-2011: John Casteel purged from Arkansas Republican Party.
87. 07-MAR-2011: Cathy and Fred ‘Gopher’ Grandy purged from WMAL.
88. 11-MAR-2011: Alexandra Wallace purged from UCLA for her ‘ching-chong ling-long’ ‘Asians in the Library‘ viral youtube clip.
89. 30-MAR-2011: Andrew Bolt sued (and later found guilty) for some crimethink blog posts he made in April 2009, including ‘It’s so hip to be black.”
90. 27-APR-2011: Simon Ledger arrested for singing ‘Kung-Fu Fighting’.
91. 16-MAY-2011: Satoshi Kanazawa purged from Psychology Today.
92. 03-JUN-2011: Tracy Morgan forced to apologize by NBC after gay comments.
93. JUL-2011: Jared Taylor removed from State Department translation referral website at the behest of the $PLC.
94. 01-AUG-2011:  Principal Frank Borzellieri purged from Archdiocese of NY Schools.
95. 03-NOV-2011: Brett Ratner purged from Oscars.
96. 18-NOV-2011: Sepp Blater pressured within FIFA.
97. 29-NOV-2011: Emma West arrested for snakes on a plane racism on a train.
98. 09-JAN-2012: Principal Ted Horrell two minutes hated for talking honesty about test scores.
99. 17-FEB-2012: Patrick Buchanan purged from MSNBC.
100. 19-FEB-2012: Anthony Federico purged from ESPN for ‘Linsane’ ‘Chink in the Armor’ headline.
101. 01-MAR-2012: Rush Limbaugh advertisers pressured to bail after Fluke slut comment.
102. 05-APR-2012: John Derbyshire purged from National Review.
103. 10-APR-2012: Robert Weissberg purged from National Review.
104. 30-APR-2012: Naomi Riley purged from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
105. 16-MAY-2012: Manny Pacquiao ‘on defensive’ on same-sex marriage
106. 22-MAY-2012: Andy Gipson threatened for quoting Bible on gays.
107. 22-MAY-2012: Mark Traina purged from New Orleans Public Schools.
108. 21-JUN-2012: Sanford, Florida Police Chief Bill Lee fired for not arresting an innocent man, a clear mishandling of criminal ‘justice’.
109. 02-JUL-2012: Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A pressured.
110. 15-JUL-2012: Mark Steyn published column that got him sued by Michael Mann. (ongoing!)
111. 25-JUL-2012: Paraskevi “Voula” Papachristou purged from 2012 Olympics for making light of matters involving sacred objects.
112. 06-AUG-2012: Robert Oscar Lopez targeted for authoring a personal reminiscence of growing up with gay parents.
113. 08-AUG-2012: Bret Easton Ellis two minutes hated for thoughts on proper casting.
114. 27-SEP-2012: Nakoula Basseley Nakoula arrested for violating parole by producing that ‘Innocence of Muslims’ movie, or something.  A strange case all around, I’ll admit.
115. 02-OCT-2012: Lewiston, Maine Mayor Robert MacDonald scolded for comments related to Somali immigrants.
116. 17-MAR-2013: ‘Dongle-Gate’, dongle-joker-geeks purged.
117. 20-MAR-2013: Steven Landsburg gets two-minutes-hated for a thought experiment.
118. 17-APR-2013: Rick Ross dumped by Reebok for some dope lyrics (HT: Taki), which are totally shocking, because, as we all well know, rappers never talk about drugs.
119. 03-APR-2013: Terri Proud purged from Arizona Veterans Administration
120. 10-MAY-2013: Jason Richwine purged from Heritage
121. 17-MAY-2013: Paula Deen purged.
122. 22-MAY-2013, Julia (a 13-year-old, name withheld) forced to apologize for taunting the shattered, fragile ego of allegedly full grown man athlete, Adam Goodes.
123. 30-MAY-2013: Gordon Gee purged from Ohio State University (he’s going to West Virginia now)
124. 04-JUN-2013: Geoffrey Miller two-minutes-hated for ‘fat shaming’.
125. 05-JUN-2013: Nissim Yeshaya purged from Israel Court.
126. 07-JUN-2013: April Sims purged from Dallas Police Dept.
127. 20-JUN-2013: Mike Krahulik gets two-minutes-hated for ‘transphobia’.
128. 25-JUN-2013: Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer banned from Britain.
129. 03-JUL-2013: Aaryn Gries purged from Zephyr Talent.
130. 12-JULY-2013: Orson Scott Card threatened with Ender’s Game boycott.  (See also his mothballed Superman project)
131. 20-JULY-2013: Ron Unz purged from The American Conservative for this
132. AUG-2013: Paul Gottfried purged from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute for having friends who had opinions about ethnic disparities like Charles Murray’s.
133. 08-AUG-2013: Richard Dawkins gets a taste of the Zeitgeist.
134. 14-AUG-2013: Vox Day purged from Science Fiction Writers of America.
135. 27-AUG-2013: Tuffy Gessling purged from Rodeo Clowning.
136. 04-SEP-2013: Yelena Isinbayeva almost purged as Russian Olympic Ambassador.
137. 08-SEP-2013: Craig James purged from Fox Sports, because, “We just asked ourselves how Craig’s statements would play in our human resources department.”
138. 10-SEP-2013: Pax Dickinson purged from Business Insider.
139. 25-SEP-2013: Barilla CEO, Guido Barilla pressured on gay marriage.
140. 25-SEP-2013: David Gilmour two-minutes-hated for literature judgment.
141. 26-OCT-2013: Don Yelton purged from local GOP because of Daily Show.
142. 14-NOV-2013: Helmuth Nyborg investigated for ‘scientific dishonesty’ (he was also purged in 2006)
143. 26-NOV-2013: Alec Baldwin purged from MSNBC not for vulgarity, ha!, but for swearing in that impermissiable way.
144. 28-NOV-2013: Ted Rall purged from Daily Kos.
145. 03-DEC-2013: Bob Dylan threatened by French prosecutor.
146. 09-DEC-2013: Tila Tequila gets erased by Facebook for trying her hand at being a classless provocateuse.  No word yet on Miley Cyrus’ account.
147. 10-DEC-2013: Chip Wilson purged from Lululemon.
148. 10-DEC-2013: Researchgruppen (an antifa organization), in collaboration with the newspaper Expressen cracks blog-commenting service Discus in order to expose their politically incorrect enemies to the Brown Scare, and enable Marxist bombers.  (See also, The Journal News publishes map of gun owners)
149. 12-DEC-2013: Bob Newhart intimidated.
150. 19-DEC-2013: Phil Robertson purged from A&E.
151. 20-DEC-2013: Justine Sacco purged from IAC.
152. 20-DEC-2013: Dawn Barnett found guilty and sent to diversity training over a Golliwogg comment (HT: Derb)
153. 29-DEC-2013: Ani DiFranco concert cancelled in protest over venue choice.
154. 02-JAN-2014: Heartiste threatened with blog memory-holing via WordPress malicious prosecution (Kevin Conboy)?  It wouldn’t be the first time a blog was suddenly disappeared.
155. Senator Cory Bernardi two minutes hated by Australians in general for the content of his new book, The Conservative Revolution (note the ‘reviews’), with preference for traditional nuclear families seeming to be the key irritation.
156. 07-JAN-2014: Prof. Mary Willingham threatened and her research disowned by UNC for exposing the ‘special talent’ program.
157. 17-JAN-2014: Juan Pablo Galavis, Conquistador-American Hispanic, two minutes hated for preferring heterosexuals for roles on a dating show.  Groveling here.
158. 18-JAN-2014: Maria Conchita Alonso purged from a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues” for appearing in a political ad for – gasp – a Republican!
159. 20-JAN-2014: Bill Simmons forced to apologize for ‘Dr. V‘ story.
160. 22-JAN-2014: (Note: Merely Cautionary, So Far), IRS goes after Friends of Abe Hollywood Conservatives, with particular interest in outing the membership list.
161. 18-MAR-2014: Hempstead (IVO Houston, Texas) Middle School Principal Amy Lacey purged (other coverage links) for strongly encouraging students and teachers to speak English in the classroom.
162. 24-MAR-2014: Brendan Eich experiences purging campaign to get him fired at CEO of Mozilla due to $1,000 donation in 2008 in support of California Proposition 8, which succeeded at the polls, if not in the courts.  OkCupid goes all in on full, guilt-by-association excommunication .  The flipside of campaign funding transparency is the the risk of being on the receiving end of the politics of personal destruction.  Talk about a chilling effect.  But, naturally, the same people would publicly lose their minds with maximum mouth foaming if they heard of a company firing someone because they contributed to the campaign to oppose proposition 8.  UPDATE: Sigh, purged.  Depressing and predictable.  Only missing the ‘to spend more time with his family’ line.
163. 28-MAR-2014: Stephen Colbert feels the rage of #CancelColbert inquisitors who relish being purposefully obtuse and can’t take an obvious joke.
164. 02-APR-2014: Michael Mann takes aim and demands that David Koch be purged from the board of Boston PBS station WGBH.
165. 08-APR-2014: Ayaan Hirsi Ali spiked from Bradeis U. graduation ceremony / honorary degree.  Fox takes a look behind the scenes.
166. 10-APR-2014: Prolific French writer Renaud Camus fined 4,000 Euros, and forced to give 500 Euros to an anti-racist group, for criticizing non-assimilating Muslims and espousing his ‘replacement’ theory.
167. 17-APR-2014: They’ll be asking for your expulsion too, soon enough, Julius Kairey of Cornell.  That’s the real ‘rape culture’.
168. 21-APR-2014: Tom Preston-Werner purged from GitHub.  Some facts were conveniently withheld, not like they will do Tom any good, even though, “… the investigation found no evidence of illegal practices.” (HT: Sailer)
169. 22-APR-2014: Charles Murray spiked from Azusa Pacific University. (HT: Sailer)
170. 26-ARP-2014: Donald J. Sterling playing defense after ‘racist’ comments. (HT: Sailer) (UPDATE: fined, purged.)  Look, by all accounts, this guy was an awful sleezeball and deserved what he got.  Fine. Nevertheless, this was also obviously a baited setup (100 hours of secretly and illegally recorded conversations with the floozy?), and no one but Sailer’s been covering the real story behind the ouster instead of leveraging the media hysteria-catnip of the race-opera to cover it up.  No One.  That should trouble you.  And no one’s been making the obvious, prospective point, which is that today, Big Brother Is Everyone.  Hell is other people.  With smartphones, everybody’s carrying their own personal wire all the time.  If the adventuress isn’t convicted, then the signal to everyone else is that there is zero cost to extracting something juicy from the right person, and the deterrence effect is destroyed.  Imagine a future where everyone is their own Stasi, keeping an option-for-extortion retirement fund archive, and incentivized to get people to trust them and reveal their un-PC opinions in private.  People, it’s all going downhill.
171. 26-APR-2014: Paul Weston arrested for Quoting Churchill. (HT: Steyn) and do check out the photos at Liberty GB.
172. 01-MAY-2014: Eric Walsh purged from Pasadena Health Dept.
173. 01-MAY-2014: Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson almost purged from the BBC over a very rude original version of a children’s rhyme.
174. 01-MAY-2014: Josh Olin purged from Turtle Rock for tweeting the following about #161 to his 142K followers, “Here’s an unpopular opinion: Donald Sterling has the right as an American to be an old bigot in the security of his own home. He’s a victim.”  He’s not the only one now, Josh!  (HT: Ace) Pro-tip #1: If you start a tweet under your own name with, “Here’s an unpopular opinion,” and you rely even indirectly on popularity, then you’re doing it wrong in the #hashtag advocacy world.  Pro-tip #2: Never side with, or stand up for, losers, because that just makes you a loser too, and guilty by association, even if you signal condemnation, and even if you’re just arguing about ‘rights’.  You have to understand this most of all : error has no rights, and any defense of error is just more error.  So, watch your mouth.  Or else.
175. 03-MAY-2014: Condoleeza Rice spiked from Rutgers Commencement following pressure from leftist student groups.  To his credit, Rutgers President Robert Barchi attempted to resist the pressure on principle, but for naught.  Rice can go back to filming more ‘Ban Bossy‘ PR-stunts for Facebook now, and maybe be President Sandberg’s Secretary of State or National Security Adviser one day.
176. 07-MAY-2014: David and Jason Benham’s show spiked from HGTV.  UPDATE: SunTrust Bank closes their bank account, then relents after uproar.  I’m beginning to think that these ‘capitulate, excommunicate, then rehabilitate’ actions are the way that corporations try to please everyone, and have their cake and eat it too.   That might be understandable, but it’s not a good result, so the only appropriate policy if you care about this issue is to close your SunTrust account right now and never look back.
177. 07-MAY-2014: Dr. Caleb Rossiter purged from the Institute for Policy Studies for writing an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that poor Africa needs an exemption to climate change emissions control policies (HT: Powerline)
178. 11-MAY-2014: Don Jones noted for being controversial.  Stay tuned for developments.  UPDATE: Fined and suspended.
179. 12-MAY-2014: David Lowe fired from BBC Radio after playing a song from 1932.
180. 13-MAY-2014: YEAR OF THE SPIKED SPEAKER.  Now comes Robert J. Birgeneau and Christine Lagarde.  “between 1987 and 2008, there were … 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking. Since 2009 there … 39 cancellations…”  Rate of increase? 550%
181. 14-MAY-2014: Lennart Bengtsson hounded out of his membership in the GWPF.
182. 22-MAY-2014: Mark Cuban under fire for the following ‘comments about race’, “If I see a black kid in a hoodie and it’s late at night, I’m walking to the other side of the street. And if on that side of the street, there’s a guy that has tattoos all over his face – white guy, bald head, tattoos everywhere – I’m walking back to the other side of the street.”
183. 27-MAY-2014: Ru Paul gets in hot water for defending use of the word ‘Tranny’.
184. 28-MAY-2014: Evan Spiegel, Snapchat CEO, has to apologize for some offensive youthful indiscretion, er, completely standard fraternity communication.  Then again, you can never tell what atrocities frat-culture will be held accountable for next week.
185. 04-JUN-2014: And Dan Savage gets in the same hot water for using the ‘transphobic slur’.
186. 09-JUL-2014: Anthony Cumia fired by Sirius XM for some tweets.
187. 11-JUL-2014:  Ashutosh Jogalekar fired from Scientific American for failing to be sufficiently critical of Richard Feynman, and perhaps in addition to his heresies within his review of Nicholas Wade’s book. (HT: Sailer)  He responds here.
188. 12-JUL-2014: Now that she’s going to be on The View, Rosie O’Donnell is still taking heat for a legal shark fishing expedition she went on two years ago.  Don Surber ‘defends’ the act here.
189. 24-JUL-2014: Minnesota Vikings special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer suspended for ‘homophobic’ remarks.
190. 06-AUG-214: Steven G. Salaita had his academic job offer rescinded by the University of Illinois for tweeting some very uncivil things about Israel during the latest outbreak of hostilities.  NB:  I have received a few emails, thankfully civil in tone, but which have accused me of bias and favoritism in the composition of this list.  I plead innocent, and assert that [the] reality [of ideological pressure] has a liberal bias, and that instead of a one-sided list, I have tried to be fair, and that the severe asymmetry and disproportion in representation (and in the very selective cases of a broad class of similar injustices for which liberals collectively demand redress) is a social phenomenon and not an artifact of my construction.  As corroboration for my claim, I move for the admission into evidence of this particular item, of an individual’s purging for which I would be sympathetic were it not for my much stronger commitment to the higher principle of freedom of expression and robust, disciplined tolerance for diverse viewpoints.  That being said, I have to say, given the pattern of these incidents, I predict Mr. Salaita will land firmly on his feet.  Stay tuned.
191. 18-AUG-2014: Gavin McInnes purged from Rooster (a company he co-founded along with VICE) (HT: The Advocate, and thanks guys for all the traffic to this list – actually, that should be thanks for Justine Tunney), for a “Transphobic Essay“, that you can’t even read yourself because ThoughtCatalog says it’s “been reported [by folks like the ones at Salon] as hateful or abusive content.”
192. 07-SEP-2014: Bruce Levenson purged from owning the Atlanta Hawks (or is that ‘Sterlinged‘ (see Brendan’s comment), or ‘Derbyshired‘) for a single email expressing some hatefacts about sport event spectator demographic attendance dynamics.
193. 24-SEP-2014: Bill Frezza purged from Forbes for writing forbidden thoughts about drunk girls.
194. 26-SEP-2014: Political activist Tressy Capps fired for videotaping her interactions with a family with a Mexican-flag in their yard in Ontario, California.
195. 29-SEP-2014: Police Officer Jason Lentz fired for posting that Darren Wilson ‘did society a favor’ by killing Michael Brown.
196. 09-OCT-2014: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella (sounds like ‘Sat In Nutella’) blasted on Social Media for advising women against asking for raises, and, of course, he almost immediately reverses himself when informed of his transgression.
197. 17-OCT-2014: Professor of Poetry Barry Spurr suspended and banned from campus for some offensive language and views.
198. 22-OCT-2014: Detective Frank Lyga fired from LAPD by Police Chief Charlie Beck for various minor offenses, such as calling someone an ‘ewok’.  But he was the wrong kind of someone.
199. 27-OCT-2014: Bill Maher targeted for commencement speech cancellation by delicate-snowflake Berkeley students.
200. 29-OCT-2014: Michael Che denounced for insufficient deference to street-catcall moral panic. (HT: Sailer)
201. 19-NOV-2014: Julien Blanc banned from Britain for … well, being a typical PUA I guess. (HT: Derb)
202. 19-NOV-2014: ‘Abortion culture’ debate shut down by Oxford students.  Tim Stanley, pro, and Brendan O’Neill, anti, were both upset, but tough luck for everyone except the hecklers who are allowed to keep their veto.
203. 01-DEC-2014: Elizabeth Lauten, Republican congressional aide, purged after criticizing first daughters.  Time to learn who is off limits, Elizabeth.
204. 03-DEC-2014: That’s Just Great Tumblr-sphere: ‘Racists’ Getting Fired (And Getting ‘Racists’ Fired).  If you want a vision of the future, imagine a lynch mob of 300 million Pavlik Morozovs, pointing fingers at and outing each other, to each other, forever.  Except even little Pavlik made an accurate report, unlike these guys.
205. 04-DEC-2014: Sgt. Bret Barnum, the Portland ‘Ferguson Hug Cop’ gets in some hot water for liking a Facebook post.  The boston.com article headline is, “Internet Turns on Once Beloved ‘Ferguson Hug’ Cop,” but the URL says, “once-beloved-ferguson-hug-cop-now-hated-racist”.  Whoa.  (HT: Sailer)
206. 07-DEC-2014: Robert Jennings purged from his position as president of Philadelphia’s Lincoln University, for giving feminism-unapproved advice to female students.  (HT: Candide)
207. 09-DEC-2014: Prof. Walter Lewin, celebrated physics teacher, stripped of his emeritus status and barred from campus, and all of his physics lectures removed from OpenCourseWare, because an internal investigation found that he had been sexually harassing students online.  He probably did some messed up stuff, who knows.  But to completely remove his unrelated and excellent content online?  That’s crazy and hurts lots of innocent people.  And it is that purifying impulse which is … disturbing.  Related thoughts from Scott Aaronson.
208. 13-DEC-2014: Plebcomics purged from her job for pissing off the Social Media Warriors over at Tubmlr about feminism or rape culture or something … it’s hard to tell.
209. 17-DEC-2014: Marquette professor John McAdams suspended for asserting that open and frank discussion of diverse points of view on controversial topics should occur in the academy.  Crazy.  This will teach him quite the lesson. (UPDATE: 05-FEB-2015, Enough to Move to Revoke Tenure for the upcoming purging, apparently).
210. 18-DEC-2014: Charlotte, NC fire investigator Crystal Eschert fired for Facebook post.
211. 18-DEC-2014: Troll Hunters looking for … you? (HT: Sailer)
212. 18-DEC-2014, Sony, Paramount, and all major US film distributers cave to NK on The Interview and Team America.  Just part of a trend of cowardice which includes PC, as Douthat points out.
213. 19-DEC-2014: Geert Wilders on trial again for ‘inciting racial hatred’, i.e., talking about immigration.
214. 20-DEC-2014: Eric Zemmour, author of recently-released Le Suicide français, (which like Deutschland schafft sich ab, is one of the best selling books in a foreign country in a decade, and so must never be translated into English, some background from Christopher Caldwell here), purged from his television program on i-Télé for expressing his honest sentiments.
215. 20-DEC-2014: Daniel Mael finds that a ‘student representative’ at Brandeis has no sympathy for murdered cops and publishes her words.  Drama to ‘hold him accountable’ ensues.  Thoughts from Alan Dershowitz (who seems to be starting to wonder which side he’s really on) and John McAdams (see above)
216. 22-DEC-2014: Vaclav Klaus – ‘a champion of liberty’ – purged from the Cato Institute for going off-sides on matters of foreign policy.  Cowen says he’s bad and should feel bad.  Related thoughts from Luboš Motl.
217. 30-DEC-2014: The Social Media Warriors Feminists pile on Scott Aaronson for only being 97% down with the program.  (It’s all or nothing Scott, who notices nothing but the absolute minimum amount of rottenness in Denmark, even as Denmark pounces on him and does its very best to reveal to him what it really is and shove the rest of the stench up his nostrils!) Now, it’s hard to be sympathetic with a guy who does everything he can to fail to update his priors, remain clueless, and instead try to throw other people under the bus and normalize expression of delegitimating sentiment when he says, “Though I don’t consider it legally practicable, as a moral matter I’d be fine if every such [crimethinking] man were thrown in prison for life,” but the incident is still worthy of contemplation.  Here’s the intellectually-revolting Amanda Marcotte and Laurie Penny.  Here are some better thoughts from Scott Alexander and Lubos Motl.
218. 31-DEC-2014: 19 year old arrested in UK for burning Koran.
219. 01-JAN-2015: Katie Hopkins investigated for Ebola tweet. “… around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online, with around 20 people a day being looked into by the forces of the law …”  Yikes.
220. 05-JAN-2015: Scotland, No Country For Free Speech, “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media & any offensive comments will be investigated.”  Translation, “Watch your mouth, comrade.”
221. 13-JAN-2015: Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran purged for writing Christian-themed book critical of homosexual practices.  (HT: Dreher)
222. 15-JAN-2015: Whoa, only 18 years after her once ‘transgressive’ play opened in New York, Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues gets the boot from Mt Holyoke for being offensively and insufficiently inclusive of “people-of-femaleness-self-identification-and-aspiration” but who happen to not presently have, actual, you know, vaginas.  The ratchet moves swiftly my friends; the mills grind fine, but fast now too.
223. 17-JAN-2015: 34-year CNN Anchor Jim Clancy purged (and memory-holed), not for trying to spin the ‘real meaning’ of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in an implausibly nutty way, but for accusing the folks that pushed back of working for Israeli public relations.  Wrong target Jim.  (HT: Sailer)
224. 17-JAN-2015: British Magistrate Ricard Page ‘sent to equality training’ for stating that children are best off with a mother and father.
225. 19-JAN-2015: Billy Crystal SMJW-shamed for the bigotry of saying that he hopes gay sex scenes aren’t ‘shoved in his face’.
226. 20-JAN-2015: Annie Lennox covers ‘Strange Fruit‘, the internet covers her in shaming, because, while she’s got the right kind of voice, well, she’s not the right kind of person.
227. 22-JAN-2015: French court sentences three to fines for nasty ‘homophobic’ tweets.  Not that it’s nice to say that gays should die or be burned; duh, it’s not.  But take a look around twitter, even à la française, and you’ll see plenty of that kind of thing.  But some people get rounded up and tried, while others need not worry.  Who, Whom?
228. 26-JAN-2015: Benedict Cumberbatch humiliated for using the word ‘coloured’, instead of ‘people of color’, because …
229. 27-JAN-2015: Jonathan Chait pens his “Not A Very PC Thing To Say,” which, apparently, itself was not very PC, judging by progressive responses.  Some moron named Amanda Taub at Vox does the typical, predictable – and by now quite boring and tiresome – Vox thing by claiming that PC doesn’t exist.  ha.  Douthat comments (HT: Sailer).  And don’t miss Dreher, “Still, I will have a talk with my teenage son today to tell him not to defend anything that might be remotely controversial online, unless he does it under a false name, and leaves no identifying details. Six to eight years from now, when he will be applying for a job or to graduate school, someone, somewhere, will Google him. If he has ever said anything that violates the progressive code, he may be sunk.”
230. 30-JAN-2015: Jill Soloway browbeaten for putting up imitation image containing the word, ‘Transdashian’, imitating the imagery from her own transgender show, Transparent.  Trans is so hot right now, but you can never be too holy not to be criticized as a heretic.
231. 06-FEB-2015: Jonathan Turley publishes his own list on his blog.
232. 09-FEB-2015: Wiltshire Police demand the names of the buyers of  the post-massacre commemorative edition of the Charlie Hebdo magazine.
233. 10-FEB-2015: Ethan Chazor, Jeb Bush’s 2016 Election Chief Technology Officer, ousted for prohibited insensitive remarks, for instance, expressing a negative judgment regarding the fact that, “… the majority of newborn black babies belong to single-parent households.”
234. 17-FEB-2015: Tim Cook’s Apple terminates its relationship with lobbyist and former Republican state congressman for Montgomery, Alabama Jay Love for retroactive political incorrectness.
235. 20-FEB-2015: Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has has image purged from a window by a student campaign at King’s College London for retroactive political incorrectness.
236. 25-FEB-2015: Vivek Wadhwa swears off speaking for gender diversity in tech (after an attempt to be a self-appointed spokesman and advocate for the cause) when the female advocates decide that they don’t want his kind of competition.
237. 26-FEB-2015: Salt Lake City, police officer Eric Moutsos lost his job because he declined to march in a gay pride parade.
238. 05-MAR-2015: New York Baseball Player Daniel Murphy silenced by Mets organization with regard to expressing his honest sentiments relating to his religious views … ok, not really.  He can talk about Jesus all he wants, so long as he doesn’t mention homosexuality.
239. … Too many to count … the more commonplace and boringly predictable is is, the more serious it becomes.
240. 03-JUN-2015: Curtis Yarvin’s Urbit presentation booted from StrangeLoop tech conference.  The man has my gratitude and respect, but his fate to live out of any spotlight is sealed.  The Heckler’s Veto is the order of the day, and there are so, so many volunteer hecklers these days.  “In this case it is clear to me that your opinions in areas outside your talk are concerning enough for a significantly large number of attendees that those reactions are overshadowing the talk and acting as a distraction for launching the conference as a whole.  Because of this, I am sorry that I must rescind your invitation and I will not be able to accept or include your talk at the conference.”  No Enemies To The Left; No Platform For The Right.  Banned with BS Boilerplate.  That’s how it ends for the purged, these days.  No sticks for you, but no carrots either.  And you can’t do much of anything if you’re not holding an official carrot, these days, so it probably feels like a lot like a stick.   We will all now have to be much more careful and less free than he was.
241. ETA 10-AUG-2017: James Damore purged from Google for the Diversity Memo.

And with that – fittingly – FIN for this list.  We have been witnesses to the end of the beginning, but alas, it was only the beginning.  Now is the time for the wearing of masks.

Brothers and Sisters, your warrant is this:

Protect, Preserve, Transmit; All that must be passed down:

Wear the masks, keep heads-down, pay lip-service:

But remember the Truth, lest it wither and drown.

Sound and Fury; But No Reaction

Merry Christmas Everyone!  My prayers go out to all my comrades in dangerous places and far away from their families.  I’ll see you all on the high ground.

UPDATE: SEE BELOW*

For the Holiday, it seems as though the Media-Political Complex has delivered another provocative and stimulating human-sacrifice conversation topic as a gift to every gathering family and just in time for Christmas.  Everybody loves to have a new viral reason to feel superior (upworthier?) to their extended family members, which enables a common cultural context by which to explain to one’s friends exactly why one’s family members are so embarrassing.  Discourse In A Time Of Generation-Buzzfeed, “You won’t believe these 4 craziest, bigoted/ignorant things my Uncle said over ham and eggnog that will make you cry with rage.”

I’m very tempted by the convenient timing and the duration of the intense internet-churn to believe that the whole affair was concocted months ago by chummy agreement, and that everyone involved in this ‘dispute’ knows there’s no such thing as bad press as they laugh all the way to the bank.  In the future, the ‘news’ will be nothing but a stream of elaborately coordinated pseudo-scandals precisely designed to get as many people as possible excited (bot not too excited) over next-to-nothing (but never too trivial).

Maybe we’re already in the future and we mutilate the old word and call it ‘politics’.  You probably don’t even have to conspire in advance to get everyone to play their parts perfectly and predictably, but in this case we’ll never really know.  So I’ll assume it’s ‘real’ and liberally deploy the scare quotes accordingly.  Anyway, for every potentially fake public purging, there are dozens of real ones, and countless heads kept down, so we can profitably treat it as real to extract any lessons.

I’m speaking, of course, of the decision by the cable television channel A&E (owned jointly by companies bearing the names of Hearst and Disney) on 19-DEC-2013 to ‘suspend’ a Mr. Phil Robertson from his role on the extremely popular and lucrative ‘reality’ show, ‘Duck Dynasty‘.  This was purportedly for some ‘anti-gay’ remarks he gave during an interview with Drew Magary of GQ magazine, which is owned by Condé Nast, which is owned by Advance Publications, which is owned by the Newhouse family, which owns the Discovery Communications company (just down the road in Silver Spring) and which in turn coincidentally owns a lot of rival cable television channels.  You might say there’s a good amount of concentration in the industry.

Now, I know this has been covered over, and over, and over again, all across the internet, but I think it’s important – just to highlight how utterly absurd this has all become – to repeatedly emphasize the utterly harmless banality of the text so intolerable such that we are instructed to believe it constitutes a casus-belli which all right-thinking people should know never to say in public ever again, or else. Let’s excerpt the smoking gun from the GQ article:

… There are seat belts in this ATV, but it doesn’t look like they’ve ever been used. Phil is not wearing one. I am not wearing one, because I don’t want Phil to think I’m a pussy. (Too late!)

… But there are more things Phil would like to say — “controversial” things, as he puts it to me — that don’t make the cut. …

Out here in these woods, without any cameras around, Phil is free to say what he wants. Maybe a little too free. [emphasis added because wow] He’s got lots of thoughts on modern immorality [nothing ‘modern’ about it, but whatever], and there’s no stopping them from rushing out. Like this one:

“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

Perhaps we’ll be needing that seat belt after all.

Oh my!  Quick, where’s my heart medication?  Hold on to your hats, pajama-boys!  It’s about to get bumpy.  And Drew, if he thinks you’re a pussy, then at least he thinks you have ‘more to offer’ than an a**hole, so there’s always that.

… “Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Sin becomes fine.”

What, in your mind, is sinful?

“Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,” he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

And what does Paul actually write in his first epistle to the Corinthians 6:9 (which, fittingly, also contains the famous line, ‘for now we see through a glass, darkly’)

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.  And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

One of the very few instances where good old King James lets us down with euphemism, (Warning: these are NSFW because Wikipedia likes graphical graphics) because the Greek word that Paul used, ‘translated as ‘effeminate’ actually means ‘bottoms‘ and the next one he is said to have coined, ‘arsenokoitai‘ that was translated into ‘abusers of themselves with mankind’ just means ‘tops‘. You ever hear the phrase, “1,000 malakoi looking for an arsenokoi“?  Picasso certainly did, and he knew how to give the art critics exactly what they wanted.

So Paul says pretty clearly to the Greeks of Corinth, in terminology they certainly understood, that the Bottoms and Tops don’t inherit the Kingdom of God, and don’t let anyone (like Puerto Rican GLAAD spokesperson Wilson Cruz –  advocate-especial for gay youth of color) try to deceive you that Christianity means something different.  Nevertheless, the attempts at deception come steady and brazen, because why not?:

Phil and his family claim to be Christian, but Phil’s lies about an entire community fly in the face of what true Christians believe

Chutzpah!  ‘Sin became fine’, indeed.  ‘True Christians’ these days, apparently, just aren’t that keen on the New Testament.  At least not those embarrassing, archaic bits.  If you write the miraculous out of the Bible like Jefferson did, and then you also write out those inconvenient ‘Morals of Jesus of Nazareth’, then what’s left?

A thin and utterly inconsequential biography of some guy who said something vague about Love (which apparently justifies everything) and got himself executed for it because the agitated local bigots had the nerve to disagree.  If that’s going to be the official modern interpretation, then it makes one want to side with Nietzsche in Der Antichrist where he identifies poor Pontius Pilate as the real tragic hero of the story.  After all, if we can try to twist Jesus into whatever knots we want, then we might still be forced to pause to contemplate Pilate’s philosophical question which rings down to every age and scolds us, “What is, ‘Truth’?”

So, let’s be clear.  In contemporary America, Phil Robertson was ‘a little too free’ by expressing his honest and accurate sentiments regarding his understanding of his religion to some columnist – a position completely typical among Americans – and was fired for being a Christian.  You know how the anthem goes, “… o’er the land of the not. too. freeeeee …” As old Abbadabba might say, “Nothing personal, it’s just business.”

Well, what else is new?  How can this be ‘news’?  Shouldn’t this be boring and ordinary by now?  I guess the witch-hunts spectacles are always exciting festivals to the witch-hunters, but it’s a bit strange when then witches themselves keep expressing shock or surprise every time someone who watches MMNBC (Malleus Maleficarum, that is) decides not to suffer one of their kind.

Or maybe they always thought that it would only ever happen to those ‘far-dark’ witches by not this coven of the respectable-dark, which has mostly managed to avoid the wrath of witch-hunters so far by always being so compliant and careful in immediately condemning and delivering up those other witches when commanded to do so by the local wielders of the witch-hammers.  ‘First they came for the warlocks, but I was not a warlock, so I said nothing, but I was personally a little uneasy …’

I mean, come on people, this kind of thing has been going on regularly for decades, and it seems to be to be accelerating as of late with some kind of famously public excommunication ritual over some trivial ‘offense’ popping up every month or so.  You could write a whole book about it; I nominate Ann Coulter who already makes a good living doing that kind of thing.  I tried to start making a chronicle of all of them for this post and got exhausted before escaping 2013, so I’ll defer it to the comments section.(UPDATE: Go here for a list.)

It is for this reason that so many of us around these parts and in vulnerable economic circumstances (i.e. not independently wealthy and without guaranteed jobs for life), myself definitely included, are intimidated and deterred and have to use pseudonyms because we know full well what will happen to us if we publish our own thoughts under our legal names.

We will be crushed.  No, not Gulags and Gas Chambers crushed, but our employers will be bullied into firing us (or ‘suspending’ us, or mothballing us as ‘radioactive’, etc.) and we’ll ‘never work in this town again’, to use a familiar and perfectly apt phrase. There is an effective chilling effect, and in fact, that effect is the whole point, because no one really cares about these specific cases on an individual level.

Sure, go ahead and call me a coward if it makes you feel better.  The line between bravery and stupidity is drawn at the point of utter futility.  I don’t see anyone rushing forward to volunteer to establish a foundation to grant lifetime tenure to anyone who gets themselves fired for expressing unpopular or taboo ideas.  Anyway, the very existence of such a thing would create some very perverse incentives, so it’s obviously impossible.

But anyway, for some reason, this particular purification episode has gotten more than its fair share of internet traction.  If only they all did!  But in the infinite amplifying echo-chamber that is the blogosphere, much has been written, some of it excellent (e.g. Mark Steyn), but most of it awful.  Again, too much to chronicle here, so I’ll put a bunch of links in the comments if you’re interested.

But all of these complaints are, in the final analysis, meaningless.  Now here’s the Macbeth:

It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying Nothing.

Why ‘meaningless’?  Because in the midst of all this outraged complaining, I find almost no expectation that this situation will improve on its own – which is completely accurate – but furthermore I cannot find one single good idea for a plan on how to reverse this foul course and improve this intolerable situation.  So far it is not a firing offense to merely lament this state of affairs, so there is plenty of lamentation going on, but how shall we best react?

A neoreactionary understands that actual ‘power’ in a society is something very much other than what is formally written down in legal charters and codes of regulations.  It includes all the levers of mass influence, intimidation, deterrence, chilling and Ken White’s infamous ‘social consequences’. (As an aside, Linda Gottfredson has a series of papers on ‘social consequences’ of a different sort)

Social power is like water or electricity; whatever blocks you place in front of it are mere diversions for it eventually finds whatever available paths of least resistance remain to be exploited.  The people who have managed to find a successful way of controlling those ‘social consequences’ outside the formal state have accumulated significant amounts of informal power over the years, enough to easily oppose majoritarian preferences, and it’s no use complaining about it, because there’s no one to complain to.  Only power trumps power; so if you’re ideologically sympathetic with the targets of these hunts and want change, you had better get some.

You don’t need an actual, official thought police if the volunteer auxiliary thought police in their boycott-bully-brigades can get the job done well enough – which they do.   It’s nothing more than a modern form of the power of a lynch mob.  If the state won’t stop the mob, or looks the other way, or says ‘I don’t have the authority, my hands are tied’ then the trees will bear strange fruit.  The lynch mob hears that message just as loudly and clearly as their targets.  Since uncontested, their might makes them right; and every triumphant victory just whets the appetite for the next feast.  Call it, ‘Mob Privilege’.

White followed that post up recently with another relevant hit, “Ten Points About Speech, Ducks, And Flights To Africa.”  I agree with him 100%.  The first amendment has nothing to do with any of this and people who appeal to it are fools.  A ‘right to free speech’ protects you (sometimes, barely) from official, formal government retaliation, but nothing else.  Yes, it’s nice that, in the US, so far, state power is somewhat tamed.  Though, try being a government employee and falsely accused by some mendacious and resentful ogre of saying something that made them feel ‘uncomfortable’.  I was fortunate enough to witness such a thing when very young, and I learned the lesson well!  Though at another poor chap’s expense.

To illustrate the point, here’s a quick quiz.  If you had to choose between a week in prison, but returning unencumbered to one’s normal life, protected from the mob – or – getting publicly smeared and bullied out of your current job and all future jobs by the thought police commissars; which would you choose?  I’d pick the week without hesitation.

Sure, Roman ‘state’ power crucified Jesus.  But the mob made them do it, and would have likely done it themselves in a riot that would have been even worse had the Romans refused them.  Pilate, like some ancient ‘Commander of Coalition Forces – Afghanistan’, condemned to administer some fanatical backwater of the empire with a mandate to do what was necessary to keep the peace, might as well have asked, “What is ‘Power’?  Who really has it?”  Eventually, Rome decided that the answer should be clearly ‘Rome’ and not ‘the local mob’.  The consequences were not pretty, but they were quite significant historically.

And the question today is, “If you don’t like the current regime of social consequences, then what are you going to do about it besides cry in your Bierstein and bemoan your unjust woes?”

You need power to fight power – it’s as simple as that and you can’t escape that reality and no one in History ever has.  And, if you don’t create a balance of power and implement a system of social consequence countermeasures and reprisals at least as potent and terrifying as the one under which we currently suffer, then the incentives remain exactly as they are, and the progressives will continue to revel in their endless excommunication crusades.  Which, to the extent you may disagree with them, will absolutely get you and the things you care about too one day; it’s only a matter of time.

If you want something to never happen again, then strategic logic is exactly the same as with military deterrence in the nuclear age with mutual assured destruction.  Credibly threaten to retaliate with everything you have against any single step over your red-lines.  If the other side sees the evidence that you have built the capacity and have the will to fight fire with overwhelming fire, then, “the strategy is a form of Nash equilibrium in which neither side, once armed, has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.”

So let’s brainstorm a bit on how to get ‘armed’ in the non-violent ways of our opponents, shall we?

There are two general ways for any social subgroup to defeat an adversary terrorist mob.  They both necessarily involve out-terrorizing them, which is something that does not include annoying them to death with mere whining:

1. Get the government to punish the mobsters for you.  Call this ‘Plan CBB’ for ‘Call Big Brother’.
2. Organize an even stronger counter-mob.

Plan CBB is straightforward and we already have a perfectly satisfactory racial-discrimination model for it – The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent ‘enabling legislation’ and constitutional case law such as Heart of Atlanta Motel and Katzenbach. 

The essence of this half century of American law is that by means of the infamous ‘commerce clause’  the federal government can pretty much do anything it wants to any entity which participates in the economy – which is pretty much everything and everybody – in the name of anti-discrimination and bolstering constitutional rights.  Or even just in an effort to place floors on agricultural prices.  The states are no less constrained in their anti-discrimination authorities, as recently illustrated by the Colorado compulsory gay-cake case.

Now, I’m actually not a huge fan of these laws today, which in my opinion have definitely outlived their justifying circumstances and have all kinds of perverse consequences, (see also Foseti) but it seems the ship of hope of easing the regulations sailed long ago and there’s not much sense in letting the other side pick up the sword while leaving your own lying on the group out of some naive ‘principle’ that will only get you fired.

There’s no reason one couldn’t at least try to be creative with some free-speech versions of these anti-employment-discrimination laws.  The owners of some Alabama country BBQ in 1964, whatever their other personal motives, probably had perfectly rational economic and business reasons, given their customer base, not to serve or hire blacks, but the law never cared about that rationale.  That economic reason, the prejudices of ones customers, is irrelevant.  ‘It’s only business’ needs another rationale.

So, just as a quick example, you could craft a law that imposed the same government non-discriminatory obligations on private employers and presumes that any firing due to the offensive content of an individual’s speech was wrongfully discriminatory and actionable and that an employer would have to successfully rebut that presumption by clear and convincing evidence that they weren’t engaging in mere view-point discrimination, etc., etc.   Ask a lawyer and he’ll give you the run down on how all this works.  Like Steyn says, in the modern Kafka-esque judicial system, the process is the punishment, and the A&E’s of the world will have to think twice (or pay a handsome settlement) before they fire anyone for quoting the apostles approvingly.

And not just the A&E’s, but perhaps even the National Reviews of the world too.  Because a company that doesn’t really want to fire somebody like Derbyshire, but is under a lot of social pressure to do so, would just love to have the cover of being able to say, ‘Sorry, but we can’t lawfully retaliate against him for that offensive thing he wrote in another publication, our hands are tied!’

Sure, they may suffer the loss of some subscribers, but remember, some customers may never come back to the integrated BBQ either and the courts have no problem whatsoever telling the business owners they have to shut up and deal with it.  Of course, they may gain some business too.  Some customers won’t go to a racist BBQ joint, and some readers won’t subscribe to the publication that purged Derbyshire.

Of course, this is all idle fantasizing, because one would fully expect all these laws to be struck down by the courts posthaste.  Any clerk could write the judge’s opinion blindfolded, “Speech is not an immutable characteristic like race or gender or the official state position on sexual orientation.”

But then again, lots of human characteristics in this world of human biodiversity are the products of heritable gene expression and are both very much immutable and economically relevant to an employer.  These features form the valid basis of the mass of employment discrimination we call ‘hiring in a competitive labor market’.  So the clerk would go further and talk about those special ‘suspect’ immutables that have been subjected historically to irrationally prejudiced, counter-economic discrimination designed to try and keep a particular group suppressed.

And, try as you might, you are never going to get that clerk to agree that, sometimes, some groups with some ideas, face the same kind of suppression and need the same kind of special protections to survive.   But then again, there is this strange twilight zone of employment protection called, ‘religion‘ which is extremely mutable, around which (unlike race and gender) it is difficult to draw bright lines of distinction, but which under Title VII still gets a very hefty degree of anti-discrimination special solicitude.

So maybe, just maybe, the Republicans, if they were interested, could mount an effort to try and get expressions of non-progressivism a similar degree of employment protection as religion.  If you are an American and not a progressive, you may have realized that there is no organized effort whatsoever on the part of the Republican Party or Conservative Establishment to support anything like this whatsoever – not even, as Hanson might say, a cynical display just to show they care.  Because they don’t.

Similarly, it’s almost certainly hopeless to try and have the state criminalize boycotting like with Israel’s law on the subject which, anyway, only applies to the state itself as the target.  Not only hopeless, but definitely undesirable and dangerous, because it’s only a matter of time before the one-party state uses such a law to further neuter the opposition to the benefit of the one-party.

The point is, if you want to actually do anything about this issue and actually empower individuals to speak their minds without fear from their governments or their local activists, then you can’t rely on democracy or the political system because the game is rigged, the deck is stacked against you, and the modern structure has been utterly irredeemable for a long time.  Never place your faith in politics or the State.

So while you may win ‘the battle of ideas’ or even merely ‘the battle to express your ideas’ in the long run, in the short-term, that leaves you only with the counter-mob.  Sorry, I know how ugly that sounds and how, as an appreciator of social order you may recoil at the notion.  But as unpalatable as it may seem, there is no evidence of any feasible alternative besides ‘surrender, complain, and bring me my crying-stein’.

Any victory in this matter can not be won on the fields of battle, in the halls of congress, or in the courts of law. Sure, what you actually want to do is regulate behavior in your society which is equivalent to a change in the ‘law’, and ‘mob-law’ is how you get it done.  After all, non-criminal mob-law is just another name for ‘social consequences’, isn’t it?  So, to borrow Luttwak’s language, the right, having been disarmed by the enemy of the ability to resort to conventional political weaponry, must now play the game ‘socio-economically’, in the markets of commerce.  A Cold Cash Civil War.

And since the state is mostly against you as a practical mater, the counter-mob needs to be civil, non-violent, and immaculately lawful.  Which is tricky!  Because any form of pressure strong enough to work is likely to be already contrary to law or easily criminalized as some exotic and felonious form of tortious interference.  So that doesn’t leave one much room for maneuver besides what is already being used by the opposing side.

Now, I concede, it’s usually a mistake to try and fight with the enemy’s weapons, but though they dominate in the media, they don’t own the markets or the internet, and they have not yet found a way to dictate the flows of consumer purchases suggested by social media websites.  One must rely on one’s remaining repositories of strategic strength, whatever they happen to be.

And anyway, don’t forget the purpose of our counter-mob.  In the short term, we actually want actual freedom of expression (that is, a form of freedom from fear of being fired for it) in our society.  We aren’t trying to get people fired; we’re just trying to stop other people from trying to get people fired – the one form of speech which does deserve to be targeted and suppressed.  We never initiate, but we always react.

At the very least, if you don’t have a problem with ‘social consequences’ then you shouldn’t have a problem with counter-social-consequences aimed at building stable norms against organized public calls for termination.

And finally, it’s actually a fool’s errand to try and go against the offense-industry lobby groups directly.  Crying wolf is what they exist to do, and it is also how they pay the rent.  One just wants them to change their behavior and the easiest way to do that is to shape the facts on the ground that makes them conclude this particular tactic is now pointless.

What you really want to do is neutralize their efforts and make their kind of pressure ineffective by means of credibly threatening to apply countervailing pressure not on them, but on their targets.  I don’t want to go after GLAAD or the SPLC or the NAACP, but I definitely want to see any individual or company that submits to these bullies – National Review, Heritage, TAC, whatever – be irreversibly pulverized into liquidation bankruptcy by its own side, because that’s exactly what they’re doing to the people they are being pressured to purge and stab in the back.  In a word; justice.  

Do you see any other way to reliably stiffen the backs of these milquetoasts?  Please, by all means, share your ideas.  But I don’t.

As an example, consider what happened recently with the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.

Cracker Barrel, having been targeted and pressured by pro-gay lobbies and various litigious government organizations for years, finally eking out a fragile state of ‘rehabilitation’ by means of modern forms of indulgences, overreacted to news of the Robertson fiasco and even more lobby pressure and immediately announced they would stop carrying Duck Dynasty merchandize in their tacky restaurant ‘country stores’.

Their customers (who you would think the Cracker Barrel people would know and, more importantly, care more about than some distant lobby) tend to be ‘pro-Duck’, and predictably went berserk, forcing Cracker Barrel to quickly recant, ‘apologize’ snarkily on its Facebook page, and train their workers to dissemble ‘apologize’ in person.

Should anyone accept this apology?  No and never.  Learn from your enemy’s successes with their ‘pour encourager les autres‘ tactics!  If a company was encouraged by them, then it’s up to you to discourage the rest.

If you would prefer to live in a society where a bible-belt company will not rip a man’s wares off its shelves for quoting the bible, then you have to be adamantly firm the first time it ever happens, so that it will be the last time.  Say to yourself, “It’s too late for Cracker Barrel, it doesn’t matter what they do now, I won’t ever go there again, and they need to pay the price and disappear.” It’s not hypocrisy – it’s called ‘reality’, it’s the only chance we’ve got to stop the madness before it’s too late.

So, Gentlemen, what I propose is a counter-intimidation mission, OPERATION BACKSLAP.

It’s a website to help people commit and coordinate to bring an end to this nonsense.  There are plenty of clever e-commerce ways to get it done, combining elements of Mint and Stickk perhaps, but at a minimum BACKSLAP has to satisfy the following conditions.

1. Intimidate institutions and individuals from capitulating to progressive anti-expression intimidation.
2. Let them know that, instead of silent-majority individualized quiet boycotts, that there is instead a large number of organized customers that have already pre-committed to drop their service if they step over a red line.  “Of our ten million members, 200 thousand subscribe to your publication, 80% of whom have authorized our system to automatically send a cancellation order if you give in to latest prominent intimidation incident X, with the remaining 9.8 million unlikely to ever subscribe in the future.”  This also has the advantage of giving a company a kind of ‘market signal’ of real costs and benefits and what their readers customers want.
3. Have a means to stay abreast, track and monitor, or just chat and blog about pressure-purgings and witch-hunts.
4. Let people look up institutions and individuals to see which have successfully resisted intimidation in the past or actively taken part in expression-purgings themselves- to reward the brave and punish the cowardly.  Have a way to steer people to alternatives, technological and otherwise, if they don’t know of other options.
5. The BACKSLAP-BACKCHANNEL:  Let’s say you’re Bob Newhart and you’re, “… the beloved, decidedly non-political 84-year-old comedian who happens to be a practicing Catholic and a graduate of Catholic University…” and you want to do a show for a Catholic businessmen group that the gays don’t like, and they’re trying to get you to back out (which, alas, he did.)  It would be great if, when so pressured, you could communicate with BACKSLAP and plead, “They’re trying to get me to back out.” which would be followed by a home-page economic threat, “Don’t back down Newhart, or else!”  And Newhart can tell the gays, instead of Legatus, ‘I had no choice, the pressure was too great.”   Who knows, maybe Steyn will be next.

Some of you are internet development people.  If you care about these sorts of things, then I beg you.  Make!  Build!  Advise.  Pitch In.  Do this thing.

I’ll help if I can; just tell me how.  I would certainly pay an annual fee just to belong to it.  It’s that important.  Maybe it all crashes against the rocks one day, but wouldn’t it be worth it if the the plaque on the one trophy in your case was inscribed, ‘Broke Cracker Barrel’?

If you would have proposed any of this to me a decade ago, I would have thought it was crazy and exaggerated.  I would have believed naively in the inherited community norms of a once free and rugged people among whom I was raised.  I would have seen these instances as merely anecdotal and aberrational; I would have trusted in the political process and in the ‘wisdom of the people’ to remedy these transgressions without any need for this kind of moderate ugliness.

But those days are gone, gone.  Too many tipping points passed already.  This is a new era.  The ship will not right itself, and the ill winds blow its listing further and further into the darkening sea.

If you want to oppose their action, you can trust nothing but reaction.

*UPDATE:  Fake after all?  ‘Real’ but never with any intention of permanence, letting it just fester long enough to take it’s modern story-cycle course?  Anyway, the bully lobby claims to be disappointed and thwarted, which is mildly pleasing.

A&E “Backs Down“.  It doesn’t matter.  The point is that Phil makes A+E money, and the commercial incentives are stronger than the PC-inquisition-milieu.  And this is both how and why BACKSLAP works.  A+E thinks they’ve satisfied the witch-hunters and encourager les autres enough, and that it can back to business because the public attention span is low, inertia in the cartel of cable-TV subscriptions is high, and they expect all this to blow over.  But in the future, the PC-based suspension is a red-line, and they’ll know in advance that they won’t get a similar chance to recover after crossing it.

Finally, the station issued a typically revolting ‘public explanation’ with all the right ‘re-communication into tolerated society’ corporate buzzwords.  Forget about the rectification of names; even Orwell could hardly imagine the mutilation of the English language that has become our daily exposure to verbal manipulations.

… he and his family have publicly stated they regret the “coarse language” he used and the misinterpretation of his core beliefs based only on the article. He also made it clear he would “never incite or encourage hate.” We at A+E Networks expressed our disappointment with his statements in the article and reiterate that they are not views we hold.

Except, Phil’s language wasn’t coarse.  What’s the ‘coarse’ part full of vulgarities and obscenities?  That leaves us with the ideas being ‘coarse’.  The idea,, if I may paraphrase a bit to be less ‘coarse’ is, once again, ‘Homosexuality is sinful according to the Christian religion, of which I am a genuine adherent.’  Coarse!  And he doesn’t regret this non-existent coarseness or the ideas.  Maybe he regrets his suspension – though I doubt it.

His words and intentions were extremely clear to anyone above a 4th grade reading level – and he wasn’t ‘misinterpreted’ except by people who were specifically trying to twist his words to make him a persona non-grata.

Trying to ‘incite’ or ‘encourage’ ‘hate’ (versus ‘hatred’, or ‘violence’) has nothing to do with this.   ‘Incitement‘ is trying to provoke or urge someone to break the law.  Encouragement is a form of purposeful persuasive influence.  Phil was giving an interview with a columnist and expressing his honest sentiments concerning ideas which are still very much mainstream and, so far, not against the law.  It is against mob-law to continue to express beliefs as though they are normal when the mob wants them ‘denormalized’.  Getting in the way of ‘enlightened renormalization’ is pretty much the progressives’ definition of ‘sin’ though, and slowing down the socio-moral reformation might as well be ‘incitement’ to keep the lingering evil hate of the status-quo.

And then there’s the patronizing and condescending word of ‘disappointment’ that one uses in the direction of ones inferiors.  La Wik:

… the feeling of dissatisfaction that follows the failure of expectations or hopes to manifest.

If you’re crazy, you can hope for any crazy thing, I guess.  I can be disappointed that I didn’t win the lottery, and that would be very juvenile.  But what mature adult would have reasonably expected anything different from Phil?  He said exactly what anyone with a brain would expect him to say.

Finally, there’s the ‘we’. ‘We at A+E’.  Who is this ‘we’?  There is no ‘we’.  It’s a corporate decision, made by a single CEO, to disseminate a cynical public relations message, masquerading as if it represents the shared values of an entire community.  Corporations don’t have values or opinions besides profit, though management like to try and fool people into believing that they do.  And, again, according to Title VII or the CRA, the corporation isn’t theoretically allowed to act on that ‘value’ when it comes to hiring decisions (though I’m sure it does).  Who knows how many people who actually work for A+E believe that homosexuality is a Christian sin, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no ‘we’.