Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a publicity juggernaut these days. …
The reason he gets so much attention here at the Briefing is because he doesn’t make any unforced errors. Some claim that his recent remarks on Ukraine could be construed as such. I don’t:
DeSantis is speaking to voters, not to the out-of-touch DC bubble people. https://t.co/2cUygGHETC
Of course, all the right people got really mad about it — when Bill Kristol, Adam Kinzinger, David French, Max Boot and Mitt Romney are all for something, you need to be against it. Hardest hit was the GOP establishment — it was very sad because the governor refuses to be dragged along into cheerleading yet another massive foreign policy failure.
Anti-woke action:
When DeSantis makes bold moves in Florida, they’re the right ones. His battle with Disney’s toxic wokeism is the stuff of conservative legend. Now he’s taken a swing at the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, or at least part of it. Robert has the story:
But now, for the first time, Ron DeSantis is making sure that these Leftist corporate behemoths will pay a price for pandering to today’s cultural saboteurs. The Hyatt Regency Miami is losing its liquor license.
Fox News reported Tuesday that “the DeSantis administration is moving to strip a major Miami hotel of its liquor license after hosting a Christmas-themed drag queen show in December with children present despite warnings.” With this and DeSantis’ earlier actions against the woke propagandists of Disney, we have done nothing less than enter into a new world. For the first time, corporations are seeing that they might suffer the adverse effects of tilting far to the Left and outraging the sensibilities of their customers who still retain a modicum of decency and sanity.
As Robert explains, there were a lot of tawdry displays of sexuality in front of the young kids at this show. … The leftist penchant for exposing young children to sexual situations is appalling. It’s as if they’ve all decided to become sexual predators to prove how “open-minded” they are.
Again, this isn’t some mom-and-pop corner bar that’s getting its liquor license taken away, it’s a Hyatt Regency in a very trendy neighborhood. DeSantis and his administration aren’t afraid to pick fights with the heavyweights. It takes that kind of fearlessness to battle the woke mob, which wins its fights by publicly intimidating opponents until they yield to the radical lunacy.
Corporate involvement in that lunacy has been a boon to the mob. They can now get the message out via heavily funded national advertising campaigns. There are as many ads about ideology as there are about products now. “You will be made to care” has been put on steroids, thanks to corporate money.
Action, not just Trumpian promises.
While collective action to dissuade territorial aggression is a vital principle motivating the west on Ukraine, it is also bleeding obvious that the war in Ukraine is a “territorial dispute” that isn’t a vital US interest.
The 92-page report warns against ‘colonial’ phrases such as ‘headquarters’, suggests ‘local’ may be offensive and says ‘people’ could be patriarchal. …
The introduction apologises for being written in and about the English language, saying: ‘We recognise that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation. We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality.
‘This guide aims to support people who have to work and communicate in the English language as part of this colonial legacy. However, we recognise that the dominance of English is one of the key issues that must be addressed in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power.’ …
Released on Monday, the Oxfam publication tells staff not to say they ‘stand with’ people they support because it ‘potentially alienates people unable to stand’. Even ‘people’ is a suspect word, as it ‘is often misunderstood as only referring to men’. …
Workers were told ‘parent’ is often preferable to ‘mother’ or ‘father’, terms such as ‘feminine hygiene’ should be dropped, and ‘people who become pregnant’ should be used instead of ‘expectant mothers’.
The guide even suggests that ‘youth’, ‘the elderly’ and ‘seniors’ should be avoided – to afford respect and dignity.
Oxfam graphics show a suspicious lack of diversity — no white people, or is that a light brown “white”? They grow ever bolder, when hinting at the future.
So Kevin McCarthy released some 40K hours of surveillance tape of J6 to Tucker Carlson, for him to release to the public — much to the consternation and dismay of Official Washington. …
Tucker released his first batch from that trove a week ago last Monday [03/06/23], thereby proving that certain established narratives about J6 were, to use a quaint and old-fashioned term, a lie.
The day after Tucker released his first volley, Sen. Chuck Schumer called upon Rupert Murdoch to squelch this threatened outbreak of journalism at his network. Sen. McConnell also registered his opposition to any release of this footage, quoting T.S. Eliot who once said that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Okay, he actually didn’t quote Eliot, but he might as well have.
Since that call went out to Murdoch, the expected conga-line of explosive footage drops that we were all anticipating from Tucker has somehow failed to materialize.
The conclusion should be obvious, which is that Fox News is censoring Tucker — Fox News has teamed up with Official Washington.
From the Late Middle Ages onward, cognitive evolution was driven by the middle class having more babies than everyone else. They had the skills to identify and exploit opportunities in the expanding market economy, particularly skills like reading, writing, calculating, budgeting, and negotiating. In some countries, most of the population would end up being middle-class or having recent middle-class ancestors.
That baby boom began to run out of steam in the late nineteenth century. Household workshops, where family members did the work, gave way to factories, where it was done by employees. Instead of marrying earlier and having more children, a successful industrialist would hire more laborers. Factory capitalism thus severed the link between economic success and reproductive success.
Meanwhile, the middle-class lifestyle was imposing more and more socially defined needs: a big home, a summer cottage, a luxury car, a college education for the kids, and so on. Couples maintained that lifestyle by reducing the number of children they had.
That fertility decline led to a decline in mean cognitive ability, as shown by several lines of evidence: alleles associated with educational attainment; cranial volume; visual reaction time; vocabulary size; and Piagetian tests.
Decline in alleles associated with educational attainment:
Three studies have shown a decline in the population frequency of alleles associated with high educational attainment, specifically among European Americans, British people, and Icelanders. …
Kong et al. (2017) examined genomic data from Icelanders born between 1910 and 1990 (n=129,808). … The authors found that the mean polygenic score “has been declining at a rate of ~0.010 standard units per decade,” where one unit equals one standard deviation. Moreover, because the polygenic score “only captures a fraction of the overall underlying genetic component the latter could be declining at a rate that is two to three times faster.” …
Kong et al. (2017) concluded that the cognitive decline was due only in part to more intelligent Icelanders staying in school longer and postponing reproduction. Higher cognitive ability was reducing fertility independently of higher education, perhaps because of its association with the ability to plan ahead and foresee the costs of raising a family.
Lengthening of visual reaction time:
Silverman (2010) obtained visual reaction times from 14 studies published since 1941 and compared them with visual reaction times from a study conducted by Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century. …
Using the correlation between visual reaction time and g, Woodley et al. (2013) calculated a decline of 1.23 IQ points per decade, for a total of 14 points since Victorian times. That decline might be due, however, to a more representative sampling of the general population by later studies …
On the other hand, the same lengthening of reaction time has been shown by Swedish, Scottish, and American participants, particularly those born since circa 1980. The IQ decline was likewise calculated to be 1.3 to 1.7 points per decade …
Reduction of vocabulary:
Twenge et al. (2019) examined the size of the average adult American’s vocabulary, using the General Social Survey of U.S. adults (n=29,912) and controlling for educational attainment. …
Ethnic change does not seem responsible, since non-Hispanic European Americans had almost the same decline: 7.2%
The reduction was mostly in passive vocabulary, i.e., the words we understand but do not use spontaneously in speech. …
Falling scores on Piagetian tests:
A Piagetian test differs from a conventional IQ test in that it is much more demanding. You cannot pass it by simply having a strong procedural memory, low exam anxiety, and good familiarity with likely questions and their correct answers. …
“The Piagetian results are particularly ominous. Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning.”
And yet IQ scores were rising!
Mean IQ rose throughout the twentieth century. Flynn (1984) calculated a rise of 13.8 points between 1932 and 1978 among European Americans. When that increase, now called the Flynn effect, was charted from 1920 to 2013, it amounted to no less than 35 points …
The Flynn effect began in the core of the Western world and is now ending there. In fact, it has ended altogether in Norway and Sweden and has begun to reverse itself in Denmark and Finland …
The sharp rise in IQ over the past century is far from obvious to someone like myself who lived in that century and who knew people born as early as 1900. I also knew the old textbooks that they used and which our elementary school kept in a storeroom. If they had been less intelligent than my generation, how could they have understood those textbooks? How could they have handled the dense subject matter, the vocabulary, the detailed charts and figures, and the long and complex sentences? …
The Flynn effect also implies that post-millennials are 10 points smarter than my generation. Again, that’s not my impression. Books and movies now have simpler plots and use a smaller vocabulary — a key component of verbal intelligence. …
I suspect we are indeed doing better on IQ tests simply because we’re spending more of our lives sitting in a classroom … and taking tests. In addition, IQ scores may have been inflated by the increase in test preparation during the late twentieth century, notably for the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). …
Once the adult population had become fully proficient in test-taking, the Flynn effect ran into a wall and could no longer mask the real decline in cognitive ability. …
Are there steps we can take to reverse that trend? Yes. The first step, and the hardest one, is simply to acknowledge what is happening.
The left cannot even tell the difference between men and women. It barely recognizes the existence of IQ and cognitive differences between people, and certainly not between groups. There is way too much political gain to be had from distorting and ignoring IQ effects, so expect unhindered dumbing down to continue for the foreseeable future.
Washington DC is abuzz with speculation over which Biden family member got a cut of a $3 million wire transfer to Hunter Biden associate John “Rob” Walker, just weeks after Joe Biden was no longer Vice President in 2017.
According to House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) — who last week said that evidence of CCP money flowing to the Biden family was “as bad as we thought” — revealed that bank records obtained via a subpoena have implicated a “new Biden family member” in the ongoing investigation into the first family’s finances.
Comer told Fox News that Walker received a $3 million wire from two individuals tied to the Chinese Communist Party, which he then divvied up between Biden family members.
“The very next day after that wire was received, the Walker account started transferring money into three different Biden family members’ accounts, including a new Biden family member that’s never before been identified as someone being involved in the influence-peddling scheme,” Comer told host Sean Hannity (as part of several recent interviews on the network). …
Comer added that the $3 million wire transfer was “just the first wire that we’ve actually been able to obtain bank records on. There are many, many more.” …
So, everything they accused the Trump family of doing?
You’ll never hear about this, or Hunter’s laptop, on the Australian nightly news. Yet you heard a lot about Trump’s non-existent ties with Russia, and what Trump’s tax records were going to reveal (except they didn’t). Our media are such liars now, and our ruling class are corrupt and sometimes treasonous, sadly.
Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.
Nothing like corrupt, stumbling, lying Joe Biden
As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news — except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS.
The reality:
Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.
It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week — not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.
We’d typically tape on Thursday or Friday mornings to turn around by Friday nights. Being of Bill Moyers’ approximate height, I was tasked with showing up early to fill his chair as gruff union guys set up cameras and lighting. Then, as Bill’s blogger and research assistant, I’d watch live interviews from the control room to highlight quotable moments.
Uncut conversations were eye-opening; it was astonishing how often our esteemed guests hemmed and hawed and got basic facts embarrassingly wrong. And how many came off batshit crazy: one, later an anchor on MSNBC, speculated that Captain Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson—visible from our west side offices — had been God blessing the Obamas.
Drafting the Moyers Blog and promotional listings, I’d sit in with producers and video editors to consult on coalescing broadcasts. They were like wizards, casting away awkwardness and errors to sculpt artful vignettes of the most compelling bits of conversations that often stretched well over an hour or more.
So many of the most rousing clips came from when guests were at their most factually inaccurate, and editors deftly dipped in and out to pull and seamlessly reassemble the very best parts. It was wondrous alchemy, and a privilege to work with super-talented creatives, but the reality of our academic pundits remained the same.
Some (many?) on the left are sustained by those fantasies, which prevent them from conceding to reality:
Viewers, or at least those motivated enough to weigh in, frequently testified that their social-democratic faith had been wavering until they’d seen whichever inspiring interview affirming what they’d always believed. I always found that frustrating, wondering if they might have reacted more thoughtfully to the real deal than the perfected package that aired.
By no means were Bill Moyers and team operating with any less than the highest of ethics or best of intentions — from their perspective, we were clarifying what our distinguished guests were truly saying. The problem was that the intellectual scene our show channeled was dwindling, but my colleagues so badly wanted things to be better that it was all too easy to paper over the accelerating collapse of discourse. …
A lot of the time we were turning dreck to quasi-profundity by sheer force of will.
In a west that’s losing a point of average IQ every decade.
I am seriously contemplating giving up living in the Big Bagel after nearly 70 years. It’s elementary, dear readers, that the place simply ain’t what it used to be; in fact, it’s the lack of glamour and chic, the utter coarseness of everyday life, and the total lack of manners of its denizens that have driven me to contemplate leaving what used to be the most glamorous and exciting place on earth.
My first view of Manhattan was in 1948, being driven in from La Guardia Airport by my father’s chauffeur and seeing the Chrysler and Empire State buildings lording it over the other skyscrapers. The scene was like a promise of great times to come. After so many years of war in Europe, those great towers of the city, clustered on a narrow island, still glittered in the afternoon sun. The city, colossal and imposing, looked untouched by the war. Compared to a world of loss and ruin back in Europe, the skyline was majestic.
We moved into a large suite at the Plaza Hotel on 5th Avenue and 59th Street, and from my window, I saw a large RCA sign on the most imposing of all buildings, the Rockefeller Center. I didn’t sleep a wink that first night. After four years of war and six months of a civil conflict between communist guerrillas and royalists, beautiful Athens had been torn to shreds, pockmarked by bullets and blown apart. Gotham was like paradise.
The next day, I saw people as glamorously dressed as those I had seen in the movies. Men wore hats and suits, women wore gloves, hats, and high heels. Most people were fair-haired and Nordic looking, as were the tall Irish cops — because of height rules, now abolished — who were everywhere. My honeymoon with the city didn’t last long. I was sent off to boarding school after three days, but New York remained always on my mind, a dreamlike obsession for its glamour and unsaid promise that anything was possible. …
The party lasted until the late 1960s, when hippies and anti-war freaks, lionized by the media, took over the night scene. … The WASP establishment moved out — literally — as it already had been replaced in Wall Street and in the banking sector. Elegance was out, as was restraint and good manners; in their place was public showing-off, swearing and ugliness, à la Andy Warhol and his freaks, who were in the front pages. …
Let’s face it: the city and the country today are not the same ones I encountered as a bright-eyed 12-year-old. Denunciation, once a communist custom, is now more American than apple pie, and mob-rule almost an article of the Constitution.
The America of today gives the impression she is resigned to her decline and weary of her values — not least of which is too much freedom for criminals to enjoy equal rights with the rest of us. While hundreds of thousands from Central America besiege the borders to enter the United States, Americans themselves deny their own virtues and believe they don’t deserve their nation’s success. In fact, success is now perceived as privilege that deliberately disadvantages other groups.
There is something very wrong with a country where a man can lose his job if he even hints that he finds a woman attractive, while three-year-olds are being taught by teachers that they can change their gender. Time to move to the Alps!
Western civilization depends on the existence of objective truths. And not just any objective truths. All societies believe in something, but our civilization is unique in forming intellectual systems for discovering truths, objectively determining their validity, and building institutions around them. That is the genius of western civilization.
America took this genius to its apex with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, taking government out of the realm of mysticism, away from specialists, and turning it over to the people, guided not by class and title, but by pursuing their own interests with character and virtue.
But government grew, and truth was put back in its political cage:
The Left began its civilizational assault by spreading mistrust in the independence of the individual and the worth of institutions through conspiracy theories about class, gender and then race. It undermined confidence in meritocracy and individual initiative to build support for a takeover of institutions through violent revolution and political agitation so that those institutions would pursue its political goals. …
Science has since been reinvented as a social criticism conspiracy theory to focus on the environmental apocalypses supposedly caused by capitalism and industry. …
The measure of objectivity is that facts and truths can be verified regardless of worldview. The Left denies the validity of an apolitical objectivity while insisting that its beliefs are objectively true.
The media traded objective journalism for political narratives, and yet insists that any objective person would recognize that its narratives are true. …
Without enough truth, we all suffer:
Societies require objective truths, objective standards, and objective institutions to function. When these are politicized, no one believes in the truth, standards of conduct collapse, and the institutions that keep a society going are no longer trusted. …
Politicized universities cease educating, and begin indoctrinating, leading to massive mistrust and hostility that cuts off academia from the country at large. Cultural industries exchange the assertion of common values for their own political values. And much of the public tunes out the entertainment industry leading to the collapse of a common culture. Radicals elected to higher office pursue their agendas without regard to the law until the structure of the administrative state becomes the enemy.
That zombie apocalypse arrived in the sixties. America has been increasingly overrun by it since.
Our politicized institutions don’t work.
The schools and colleges don’t actually educate anyone. As the rot moves outward from the cultural studies to the scientific ones, our medical and technological prowess will collapse along with the rest. The modern tech pioneers are already often college dropouts. Our last burst of technological progress was built by defectors from academia even as it was being incubated in its universities.
Does anyone seriously believe that the diversity assault on STEM and objective scientific methodology will lead to any future technological revolutions emerging from the universities?
The only parts of government that work to any degree are those where heroic individualism is still possible, the military, emergency services, and some elected offices, because of individuals risking everything to do the right thing. The system, the leadership, and the daily protocols in all these areas are hopelessly broken and in the case of a serious disaster pose an existential threat to our survival. …
The left placed a losing bet on our behalf:
The Left bet our entire civilization on its vision of how things should be. …
The more the system controls everyday life through its institutions, the fewer people trust the system and its institutions. Individuals become untrustworthy, communities collapse into neighborhoods of suspicious strangers, and the very notions of truth, honesty, and integrity become laughably naïve delusions.
This is, in one form or another, how life is lived in much of the world. America was better. It can be again. The virtuous society has fallen leaving pockets of virtuous communities and individuals.
Back to the future. The modern, enlightened world is dying.
Up until about last Thursday (speaking metaphorically), … feminists upheld and socially enforced an outgrowth of “gender neutrality” theory: that the sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences and, therefore, raising them identically ensures they’ll end up identical in inclination and, even, the devout believers insisted, in abilities.
This sameness-of-the-sexes dogma (SSD) was the wokeness of its day, enforced with a pink fist inside an iron glove. An example: Self-professed feminist academic and lesbian Camille Paglia once mentioned that fellow feminists would corner her on college campuses in the ’70s and, glaring, insist that hormones didn’t exist and that, even if they did, they couldn’t possibly influence behavior.
SSD was applied to sports, too. … Two exercise physiologists predicted decades ago, after analyzing the sexes’ world records’ progression, that women would overtake men in track and field by the late ’90s. (In reality, the intersex performance gap actually widened again that decade owing to better performance-enhancing-drug testing.) …
SSD was convenient: Since belief in inherent sex differences could be used to justify different sex roles and male-only domains (e.g., police), it had to be deep-sixed.
Very “logical” — how one lie led to another:
Yet, tangled web woven, doing so paved the way for today’s MUSS agenda. How?
First, feminists spent decades enforcing the proposition that “the sexes are the same except for the superficial physical differences.” Then the MUSS [made-up-sexual-status] crew came along with a corollary:
Changing the superficial physical differences can make you the opposite sex. …
This is now:
Thus is it tragically comical seeing feminists such as Kara Dansky appear on Tucker Carlson’s show and call the MUSS phenomenon “men’s rights movement” handiwork and “The New Misogyny.” At age 49 (soon), Dansky is old enough to remember feminist SSD advocacy but, hey, none of this is about principle — and feminists will never admit their error.
Yet her feelings are fathomable. By entering and sometimes dominating females’ sports, MUSS males have accomplished something that eluded normal men: Given the feminists a painful object lesson in reality. …
But it’s always men’s fault, you see. The 2008 article also laments how in our male-dominated civilization, “the shadow of female frailty still shapes the environment of sports.” Female frailty, perish the thought!
Except that now, 15 years later, ex-runner and coach Lauren Fleshman complains at Time that having girls train athletically as boys do is causing them injuries and health problems the lads don’t suffer. And whose fault is this?
Fleshman writes that sports, as we know them, were “designed by men for men and boys” and “have never been designed around” the female body’s “developmental norms.” She’s on to us, alright. Do you fancy that sports evolved organically because people wanted to have fun and learn who was stronger, faster and “better”? Ha! No, they were “designed,” beginning millennia ago in ancient Greece, by a patriarchy so clever and nefarious that it purposely made athletics incompatible with the female body. …
Cannot admit they were wrong:
It’s ironic, though: Disputing SSD decades ago — by, let’s say, mentioning male athletic advantages and that women can’t compete with men — made you a sexist or misogynist who must be silenced via social pressure and career-destruction threats.
Now feminists will write articles, produce videos, appear on shows and even before government bodies talking about a plethora of “immutable” male athletic advantages such as the benefits of testosterone, increased muscle mass, greater VO2 max, and bone structure differences (e.g., narrower pelvises). Imagine that; feminists went from not knowing in the ’70s if hormones existed to being able to write a physiology textbook. Those MUSS men sure can deliver an education.
And today, saying there’s no reason women can’t compete with men athletically renders you, again, a sexist or misogynist who should be canceled. After all, females deserve “their own sports and private spaces.”
So, does this mean men get theirs back? Will institutions such as the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute and once-male-only clubs again become XY exclusive? Will boys’ sports teams now be able to reject a girl without possibly being dragged through the mud and into court? Of course not.
In 2006, then Democratic Senator Barack Obama bemoaned the country’s “empathy deficit,” telling college graduates, “I hope you choose to broaden, and not contract, your ambit of concern.” In 2012, Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney said, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”
The distinction between Obama and Romney captures the distinct worldviews of American political liberals and conservatives, respectively. Romney prioritized the family unit, whereas Obama highlighted the planet broadly.
This difference in parochialism versus universalism became exacerbated during the 2016 presidential election, with one article noting, “Trump vs. Hillary Is Nationalism vs. Globalism, 2016,” contrasting the more parochial Republican candidate with the more universalist Democratic candidate. Others have characterized the Trump administration’s policy decisions as battles between nationalists (typified by parochialism) and globalists (typified by universalism).
These differential tendencies toward parochialism and universalism on the political right and left, respectively, extend beyond the United States as well. For example, leading French right-wing politician, Marie Le Pen declared in 2016, “The gap is not between the Left and the Right, but between globalists and patriots. The globalists are acting for the dilution of France and its people in a huge worldwide magma. The patriots hope that the nation constitutes the most protective space for the French.”
Across Western Europe, ideological battles between the left and right have centered on this tension between universalism and parochialism.
Normal people preference those around them. The woke hate the people around them and prefer wider and more abstract membership. Study results:
Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology …
Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows:
all of your immediate family
all of your extended family
all of your closest friends
all of your friends (including distant ones)
all of your acquaintances
all people you have ever met
all people in your country
all people on your continent
all people on all continents
all mammals
all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds
all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae
all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms
all living things in the universe including plants and trees
all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks
all things in existence
Funny how the woke accuse everyone else of hate speech. All projection, of course.
There are many ways to illustrate this, but the most efficient is probably this classic Nature paper on Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle. (See this post.)
What, again? Perhaps it’s important.
Among other things, the authors asked study participants identifying as “conservatives” and “liberals” (in the American sense) to indicate their spheres of primary moral concern. “Conservatives” tended to emphasise those spheres nearest to themselves — their immediate family, their more extended relatives, their friends — as bearing the greatest moral weight. “Liberals,” meanwhile, expressed the greatest moral interest in those spheres furthest from themselves — “all people on all continents,” for example, or “all mammals.” …
It’s really “normal” versus “perverse”:
Because the future survival of humanity is at stake here, we should drop the dumb “conservative” and “liberal” labels.
The heatmap on the left is not “conservative.” It reflects the ordinary, unremarkable moral orientation of almost all human beings who have ever lived, and almost all currently living humans across the entire world. Without a moral orientation that somehow prioritises your progeny and your relatives (however widely understood), your genes will get nowhere.
The heatmap on the right, meanwhile, represents the anomalous exogenous moral orientation (EMO) of politicial and cultural elites in the developed West, which “liberal” cannot even begin to describe, and which applies primary moral emphasis to circles 13 and 14. These are “all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms” and “all living things in the universe including plants and trees.” Substantial moral value is also attached to things in the twelfth circle, “all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae,” and in the fifteenth circle, “all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.” These are people who, strictly speaking, claim to feel morally bound to family, friends and relatives primarily to the extent that these fall within the “living things” or “things in existence” categories.
While we aren’t exactly governed by shape-shifting lizards, we are governed by completely insane ideologues who would do the bidding of shape-shifting lizards -– if necessary at our dire expense -– were these ever to be discovered.
Some of it is just virtue signalling, but still:
Now, it’s not quite as bad as it seems. Remember above all that these are moral aspirations and ideals; they are how study respondents claim to feel. Revealed preferences show that most of these people, in their personal lives, still attach substantial moral weight to their immediate friends, family and community. They probably feel qualms about this, however, and when the context is not so immediate — when, for example, they’re making policy decisions for millions of citizens — they’ll compensate by caving to their idealised EMO wherever possible. Put another way: Bill Gates likes the convenience of his private jet, even as he hopes to discourage people from flying.
Remember also that it is the dose which makes the poison. Some degree of EMO isn’t bad. It’s one reason that we look down on littering, for example. An important expression of growing Western EMO would be the European interest in other peoples and cultures, including much-maligned colonialism and the less-maligned British campaign to abolish the slave trade after the later eighteenth century.
Particularly since 1900, however, the EMO of Western governing elites has grown ever more extreme, to the point that it has begun to constitute an existential threat for human civilisation.
How this radical and historically unprecedented EMO came to be so ingrained is a complex question. Putting it down to the media or to propaganda is not fully satisfying, because we’d have to ask where the media and the propagandists got these ideas in the first place.
A prerequisite is technology and our growing alienation from nature. Anyone who has spent a rough week or two on the face of a mountain will come away from the experience personally enriched, but perhaps also doubtful that unmanaged unmitigated nature is every bit as friendly, good and deserving of moral concern as his immediate family. Tropes which locate wisdom in distant indigenous peoples and on foreign continents likewise betray a naivete about the realities of hunter-gatherer existence and a lack of experience with life beyond the prosperous West.
A more important, immediate causal factor, is the upset in established social orders since the Industrial Revolution, which has coincided with the rise of liberal democracy, and the replacement of the traditional aristocracy with new managerial elites. The latter have frequently pursued tactical alliances with outsiders or the lower classes to displace prior establishments – including, as the quiet revolution continues, prior managerial establishments. This is the primary function of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity initiatives in America today, and it obviously encourages and depends upon both orchestraters and beneficiaries to engage in radical EMO rituals.
As the problem seems to be growing worse over time, self-reinforcing selection effects probably also play an important part. The more pronounced EMO is favoured by the governing elite, the more all politicians and persons of prominence in the West are specifically selected for this trait, or at least for their willingness to pantomime it. While people with these moral tendencies have always existed, they’ve never been so heavily concentrated in positions of influence before, and the more concentrated they become, the more aggressively they filter for like-minded radicals like themselves, even in the absence (and in excess) of any specific objective.
Once you have seen this simple dynamic at work, you cannot unsee it.
It explains the increasing prominence of animal (and even alien) protagonists in entertainment media, the overt preference for fringe sexual minorities, the predilection for supranational global political bodies and non-governmental organisations which transcend borders and national institutions.
It explains, in particular, why governing elites are so open to insane unprecedented policies like mass immigration. …
As it turns out, utter bollocks.
Bill Gates personifies a certain type:
In the nineteenth century, somebody like Bill Gates would be far more likely to run domestic charities, but in our present hyper-EMO world, he spends every waking moment thinking about Africa, and how he can help Africans, and in the process also save nature by hastening the African transition towards lower birthrates and bringing the netzero ideal closer to reality. All the policy documents and aspirational statements produced by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations and other bodies are animated by a similar spirit.
A globalist cabal plotting the depopulation of the world would be a grave problem, but one with a clear enough solution. We’re facing, instead, an entire moral and ideological system, with very deep roots in prosperous Western culture. …
It’s a world where millions of people share the ideological anxieties of eccentric children like Greta Thunberg, manifest escalating indifference to adverse policy outcomes in their own countries, and dream of a future earth devoid of humans like themselves. Because the driving forces operate at the level of moral instinct and emotion, no amount of evidence or appeals to reason that can stop this.
Immune to logic and data
Probably the best hope lies in its naivete and idealism. Worsening conditions will ultimately deprive these ideologies of their cultural appeal; how bad things have to get before this happens, is the terrifying question.
At Stanford Law School last week … Judge Kyle Duncan of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit went to speak there at the invitation of its Federalist Society chapter. He was to talk about the Fifth Circuit, the Supreme Court and constitutional law.
Duncan is a conservative, and Stanford Law’s “progressive” students didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
They could have avoided that by simply skipping the talk, but they didn’t want anyone to hear what he had to say.
When Duncan showed up, they literally shouted him down.
About 100 protesters made sufficient noise, shouting insults: “We hate you!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc students, f—k them, they don’t belong here either!” and so on.
They also carried childishly insulting signs with slogans like “JUDGE DUNCAN CAN’T FIND THE CLIT” and “FEDSUCK!”
Duncan finally became angry, calling the protesters “juvenile idiots” — which they were — and asked an administrator to restore order.
Stanford Law’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach came to the podium — and sided with the protesters, speaking from remarks she’d prepared in advance.
The scene seemed shocking, but this sort of thing is inevitable when students are told that being exposed to views they disagree with is “harmful” and an intolerable personal insult as well.
And that’s what they’re taught in America’s “elite” institutions and in many non-elite ones too: Words you don’t like are “violence” and do “harm.”
(A friend comments that anyone who thinks “Words are violence” has never been punched in the mouth.)
These students will be running the western world in about 2050.
