Category: Censorship

The Atlantic Monthly Ponders: Where Will It End?

Today we are witnessing extreme examples of moral nihilism. By moral nihilism I mean the concoction of novel “moral laws” in rapid succession, combined with the expection and demand that everyone else respect and obey these new “laws.” Moral nihilism is often associated with moral subjectivity. The opposite is the case. The current chaos in our cities is a direct manifestation of objective morality. It requires the assumption that one is acting on behalf of some objective “good,” existing independently of anyone’s mere opinion. It is an illusion spawned by the very power of our moral emotions, and one that we must shed if we are ever to make anything that can be accurately described as “moral progress.” Absent objective morality, the very notion of judging people who lived centuries ago by the moral fashions prevailing today becomes absurd.

The fundamental lie of objective morality is commonly used to justify all kinds of ancillary lies. Indeed, the illusion often promotes a sincere belief that the lies are true. One of the best antidotes is historical source material, taken straight up rather than filtered by some academic historian to fit a preferred narrative. I found a good example bearing on our current situation in the pages of the December, 1857 issue of the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Where Will It End?” (To see the article, click on the link that appears when you click on the first link).

The “it” referred to was slavery, and the question was to be emphatically answered in a few years. Among the lies that this article demolishes, along thousands of other articles like it that appeared in contemporary books, newspapers, and magazines, is the argument, beloved of Marxists, Confederate Heritage zealots, and 19th century British aristocrats alike, that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. By all means, read the whole thing, and you’ll see what I mean. However, its value hardly ends there. Let’s take a look at some of the more striking excerpts. The first explodes the leftist narrative that the country was built on the backs of slaves:

When the eyes of the thoughtful inquirer turn from the general prospect of the national greatness and strength, to the geographical divisions of the country… He beholds the Southern region, embracing within its circuit three hundred thousand more square miles than the domain of the North, dowered with a soil incomparably more fertile, watered by mighty rivers fit to float the argosies of the world, placed nearer the sun and canopied by more propitious skies, with every element of prosperity and wealth showered upon it with Nature’s fullest and most unwithdrawing hand, and sees that, notwithstanding all this, the share of public wealth and strength drawn thence is almost inappreciable, by the side of what is poured into the common stock by the strenuous sterility of the North. With every opportunity and means that Nature can supply for commerce, with navigable rivers searching its remotest corners, with admirable harbors in which the navies of the world might ride, with the chief articles of export for its staple productions, it still depends upon its Northern partner to fetch and carry all that it produces, and the little that it consumes. Possessed of all the raw materials of manufactures and the arts, its inhabitants look to the North for everything they need from the cradle to the coffin. Essentially agricultural in its constitution, with every blessing Nature can bestow upon it, the gross value of all its productions is less by millions than that of the simple grass of the field gathered into northern barns. With all the means and materials of wealth, the South is poor. With every advantage for gathering strength and self-reliance, it is weak and dependent. Why this difference between the two?

The author doesn’t leave us guessing. The answer is slavery. Far from being the economic dynamo on the back of which the evil whites stood to build their empire, it hobbled and impoverished them for the benefit of a few. In his words,

The key of the enigma is to be found in the constitution of human nature. A man in fetters cannot do the task-work that one whose limbs are unshackled looks upon as a pastime… Hence the difference so often noticed between tracts lying side by side, separated only by a river or an imaginary line; on one side of which, thrift and comfort and gathering wealth, growing villages, smiling farms, convenient habitations, school-houses and churches make the landscape beautiful; while on the other, slovenly husbandry, dilapidated mansions, sordid huts, perilous wastes, horrible roads, the rare spire, and rarer village school betray all the nakedness of the land. It is the magic of motive that calls forth all this wealth and beauty to bless the most sterile soil stirred by willing and intelligent labor; while the reversing of that spell scatters squalor and poverty and misery over lands endowed by Nature with the highest fertility, spreading their leprous infection from the laborer to his lord.

In the next passage we find a denunciation of slavery similar to those penned by a myriad other authors in the decades leading up to the Civil War:

That the denial of his natural and civil rights to the laborer who sows and reaps the harvests of the Southern country should be avenged upon his enslaver in the scanty yielding of the earth, and in the unthrift, the vices, and the wretchedness which are the only crops that spring spontaneously from soil blasted by slavery is nothing strange. It is only the statement of the truism in moral and in political economy, that true prosperity can never grow up from wrong and wickedness.

There is a striking similarity among virtually all of these authors; they are all white. Similar denunciations of slavery in the literature of any other race or culture are virtually nonexistent in comparison. We don’t know when or where the first incidence of human slavery occurred, but we do know who put a stop to it, and they happened to have white skin. Absent the battle waged by whites against slavery, first with the pen and then with the sword, the chances that slavery would be considered anything but a benign social institution today are vanishingly small. This fact alone exposes the gross racism of today’s pious social justice warriors.

The article also exposes the racism inherent in the claim that all whites are born tainted with the original sin of slavery. As the author points out,

The entire sum of all who have any direct connection with slavery, as owners or hirers, is less than three hundred and fifty thousand, – not half as many as the inhabitants of the single city of New York.

The white population of the country at the time the article was written was about 25 million. Slave owners and hirers made up little more than one percent of the total, especially when one deducts women and children from the total. As the author points out, the remaining white population of the South was impoverished by slavery, not enriched by it. He notes that the increasing desperation of the slave oligarchy is driven in part by growing signs of resistance among poor whites:

It rages, for its time is short. And its rage is the fiercer because of the symptoms of rebellion against its despotism which it discerns among the white men of the South, who from poverty or from principle have no share in its sway. When we speak of the South as distinguished from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black slaves themselves… That such a tyranny should excite an antagonistic spirit of resistance is inevitable from the constitution of man and the character of God. The sporadic cases of protest and of resistance to the slaveholding aristocracy, which lift themselves occasionally above the dead level of the surrounding despotism, are representative cases… The unity of interest of the non-slaveholders of the South with the people of the Free States is perfect, and it must one day combine them in a unity of action.

Just as many of us have underestimated the recently demonstrated willingness of many of our fellow citizens to grovel and humiliate themselves for such sins as telling the truth and mildly challenging leftist dogmas, the author underestimated the willingness of southern whiles to fight for the oligarchs who impoverished them. The Civil War demonstrated the southern oligarchy’s ability use their nearly unchallenged control of the social media of their day to influence and manipulate the behavior and opinions of the population. The techniques they used will sound eerily familiar to 21st century readers:

There must be intelligence enough among the non-slaveholding whites to see the difference there is between themselves and persons of the same condition in the Free States. Why have they no free schools?… Why are they hindered from taking such newspapers as they please? Why are they subjected to censorship of the press, which dictates to them what they may or may not read, and which punishes booksellers with exile and ruin for keeping for sale what they want to buy? Why must Northern publishers expurgate and emasculate the literature of the world before it is permitted to reach them?… The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of, employ these mighty instruments of power to create the public sentiment and to control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety. A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church, and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the country. Another in South Carolina presumes to express in conversation his disapprobation of the murderous assault of Brooks on Senator Sumner, and his pastoral relations are broken up on the instant, as if he had been guilty of gross crime or flagrant heresy. Professor Hedrick, in North Carolina, ventures to utter a preference for the Northern candidate in the last presidential campaign, and he is summarily ejected from his chair, and virtually banished from his native State. Mr. Underwood of Virginia dares to attend the convention of the party he preferred, and he is forbidden to return to his home on pain of death. The blackness of darkness and the stillness of death are thus forced to brood over that land which God formed so fair, and made to be so happy.

Do you notice any similarity between the tactics of 19th century slave owners and 21st century social justice warriors? You should! Source literature is a wonderful thing. It transports you to a different world where you can watch the narratives that pass for “history” pop like soap bubbles before you eyes. The author concludes,

Thus the ideal of a true republic, of a government of laws made and executed by the people of which bards have sung and prophets dreamed, and for which martyrs have suffered and heroes died, may yet be possible to us, and the great experiment of this Western World be indeed a Model, instead of a Warning to the nations.

It was whites who first raised a moral challenge to slavery, and finally put an end to it. Their reward has been blanket condemnation as a race for the sins of a tiny minority. No, dear author, your hopes were vain. The monuments to the martyrs and heroes you refer to are being defaced and pulled down as I write this. We did not become a Model for others. We certainly became a Warning.

Of Intellectuals, Ideology, and Ingroups

I’ve written much about the ingroup/outgroup aspect of human nature. It would be difficult to exaggerate its importance. If you’re not aware of it, you will never understand the species Homo sapiens.  The myriad forms of bigotry that have plagued mankind over the years, our countless wars, such furious animosities as those between the blues and greens of the circus, or those who believed that Christ had only one nature and those who insisted he had two, and such stunning scientific debacles as the Blank Slate – all were profoundly influenced if not directly caused by this aspect of human behavior. I’ve just read a brilliant description of how it works in practice in a book by Norman Podhoretz entitled Breaking Ranks. Podhoretz began as a leftist radical, and ended up as a conservative. He probably never realized exactly what it was he was describing. For all that, he succeeded in describing it beyond all praise.

Podhoretz edited Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. His milieu was that of New York intellectuals. Their ingroup was defined, not by race, religion, or ethnicity, but by ideology. He describes what was going on among them during the emergence of what became known as the “New Left” in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. To read his book is to understand what George Orwell meant when he wrote, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” What Podhoretz describes is stunningly similar to what we see going on all around us today, imagining it is somehow historically unique. Consider, for example, the following passage, in which he describes what happened to those who committed thoughtcrime against the ideological shibboleths that defined his ingroup.

No one was arrested or imprisoned or executed; no one was even fired from a job (though undoubtedly some who lost out on job opportunities or on assignments or on advances from book publishers they might otherwise have had). The sanctions of this particular reign of “terror” were much milder: One’s reputation was besmirched, with unrestrained viciousness in conversation and, when the occasion arose, by means of innuendo in print. People were written off with the stroke of an epithet – “fink” or “racist” or “fascist” as the case might be – and anyone so written off would have difficulty getting a fair hearing for anything he might have to say. Conversely, anyone who went against the Movement party line soon discovered that the likely penalty was dismissal from the field of discussion.

Seeing others ruthlessly dismissed in this way was enough to prevent most people from voicing serious criticisms of the radical line and – such is the nature of intellectual cowardice – it was enough in some instances to prevent them from allowing themselves to entertain critical thoughts. The “terror” in other words, could at its most effective penetrate into the privacy of a person’s mind. But even at its least effective it served to set a very stringent limit on criticism of the radical line on any given issue or at any given moment. A certain area of permissible discussion and disagreement was always staked out, but it was hard to know exactly where the boundaries were; one was always in danger of letting a remark slip across the border and unleashing the “terror” on one’s head. Better, then, not to take a chance. Of course, one could recant and be forgiven; or alternatively one could simply speak one’s mind and let the “terror” do its worst. Yet whatever one chose to do, the problem remained.

Sound familiar? It should. Here’s another bit that should sound just as familiar, recounting a conversation with Podhoretz’s erstwhile friend, Jason Epstein:

I never hesitated to cut him off when he began making outrageous statements about others, and once I even made a drunken public scene in a restaurant when he compared the United States to Nazi Germany and Lyndon Johnson to Hitler. This comparison was later to become a commonplace of radical talk, but I never heard it made before, and it so infuriated me that I literally roared in response.

Those were halcyon days! Today comparing a (Republican) President to Hitler isn’t even enough to evoke a yawn. Podhoretz’s Making It was decidedly politically incorrect for its day. Here’s what happened when he tried to get his manuscript published:

My agent read the manuscript and decided that she would rather forfeit a substantial commission and a client hitherto considered valuable than represent such a book. My publisher read the manuscript and decided that he would rather lose the substantial advance he had already paid me than put him imprint on such a book. They reacted, as I said at the time, the way their Victorian counterparts might have reacted to a work of sexual pornography. So did another publisher to whom the manuscript was then submitted by my new agent. Nor was the response much better among my friends. Lionel Trilling advised me not to publish it at all, warning that it would take me ten years to live it down. Jason Epstein agreed. No amount of money, he said, was worth what “they” would do to me when this book came out.

That’s how de-platforming worked in those days. I’m sure Milo Yiannopoulos would have a good idea how Podhoretz felt. Eventually, the book was published. Here’s how he describes the response of his ingroup, described as the “Inner Clan”:

In an article about Making It and its reception that was itself none too friendly to the book, Norman Mailer summed up the critical response as “brutal – coarse, intimate, snide, grasping, groping, slavering, slippery of reference, crude and naturally tasteless.” But, he added, “the public reception of Making It was nevertheless still on the side of charity if one compared the collective hooligan verdict to the earlier fulminations of the Inner Clan.” By the “Inner Clan,” Mailer meant the community of New York intellectuals I myself had called the Family. According to Mailer, what they had been saying in private about Making It even before it was published made the “horrors” of the public reception seem charitable and kind. “Just about everyone in the Establishment” – i.e. the Family – ” was “scandalized, shocked, livid, revolted, appalled, disheartened, and enraged.” They were “furious to the point of biting their white icy lips… No fate could prove undeserved for Norman, said the Family in thin quivering late-night hisses.”

The Gleichschaltung of the equivalent of the MSM of the day proved to be a mere bagatelle. They fell into line as soon as they sensed which way the wind blew. As Podhoretz put it,

…most of them had become fellow travelers of the Movement and so obedient to the radical party line on all issues that they could not even recognize it as a line. (They thought it was the simple truth and self-evident to all reasonable minds.)

The situation in the universities in the 60’s was also uncannily similar to what we see among today’s “snowflakes.” It was worse in those days, though, because “the Youth” was practically deified.

For by 1968 radicalism was so prevalent among college students that any professor who resisted it at the very least risked unpopularity and at the worst was in danger of outright abuse. Indeed it was in the universities that the “terror” first appeared and where it operated most effectively. But there was also a more positive pull in the idea that if so many of the “best” students were becoming radicals, then the new radicalism must surely be that “wave of the future” the Communist party had only seemed to be in the days of one’s own youth.

Podhoretz comments on the Vietnam War are a perfect example of how a policy that had once been open to rational discussion became a defining shibboleth of the ingroup, about which no “deviation” was allowed. The war was actually a legacy of JFK and originally almost universally supported by his liberal followers. He notes that, prior to about 1965,

…there would have been nothing especially outlandish in saying that the “intellectuals” or the “academic community” were an important constituent of the liberal consensus on foreign policy that had in some sense led to American military intervention into Vietnam.

However, beginning in the mid-60’s, there was a drastic shift in the direction of the ideological winds. Eventually, opposition to the war became one of the shibboleths that defined Podhoretz’s ingroup. Defying that shibboleth was heresy, and, then as now, heretics were cast into outer darkness:

In turning against the war, many of these liberal intellectuals no doubt thought that they were responding to the force of evidence and argument, and this may indeed have been the case with some. But I have always found it hard to believe that it was the case with most. In those days the argument over Vietnam in the universities was characterized less by the appeal to evidence and reason than by the shouting of slogans, the mounting of mass demonstrations, and threat and the occasional resort to physical force, and the actuality and ubiquitousness of rhetorical violence and verbal abuse.

…a point was soon reached where speakers supporting the war were either refused a platform or shouted down when they attempted to speak.

Podhoretz noted that the language used against the outgroup became increasingly furious. He added,

Language like that was not meant to persuade, nor could it do so; it could, however, incite supporters and frighten opponents, and that is exactly what it did. Those already convinced were encouraged to believe that no other view deserved to be tolerated; those who still disagreed but who lacked either very powerful conviction or very great courage lapsed into prudent silence.

Then as now, there were those who liked to tickle the dragons tail with an occasional provocative remark. However, that required a fine sense of where the red lines were that couldn’t be crossed, and when a ritual kowtow was in order to appease the gatekeepers of the ingroup. Podhoretz provides us with an example of this behavior in the following remarks about Norman Mailer’s “tail tickling”:

But there were limits he instinctively knew how to observe; and he observed them. He might excoriate his fellow radicals on a particular point; he might discomfit them with unexpected sympathies (for right-wing politicians, say, or National Guardsmen on the other side of a demonstration) and equally surprising antipathies (homosexuality and masturbation, for example, he insisted on stigmatizing as vices); he might even on occasion describe himself as (dread word) a conservative. But always in the end came the reassuring gesture, the wink of complicity, the subtle signing of the radical loyalty oath.

For more modern examples, see what I wrote in my last post about Steven Pinker’s unhinged ranting about Trump in his Enlightenment Now, a book that was supposed to be about “science” and “reason,” and an earlier one I wrote about Prof. Travis Pickering’s “violent agreement” with what Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz wrote about the “hunting hypothesis,” furiously attacking them and then repeating what they’d written earlier virtually word for word without attribution. Pickering was well aware that some of the ancient high priests of the Blank Slate were still around, and they still had plenty of clout when it came to casting out heretics, even if they were forced to throw in the towel on human nature. They have by no means forgotten how Ardrey and Lorenz shamed and humiliated them, and the good professor decided a bit of judicious virtue signaling would be prudent before repeating anything so closely associated with their legacy.

There are many other outstanding examples of how, then as now, the ingroup “sausage” was made. They demonstrate how intellectuals who pique themselves on their devotion to “science” and “reason” can be convinced after the fashion of Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984 that two plus two really does equal five.  Orwell was a remarkably prescient man. He also wrote, ““If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Now, as in the 60’s, that right is under attack. It is entirely possible that, in the long run, the attackers will win. Communism and Nazism were defeated in the 20th century. Today we take their defeat for granted, as if it were inevitable. It was not inevitable. Our future may well look a great deal more like Communism or Nazism than anything the heroes of the Enlightenment had in mind. If we would avoid such a future, we would do well to understand ourselves. That’s particularly true in the case of what a man named Ardrey once called the “Amity/Enmity Complex.”

Der Spiegel and the Relotius Affair

In case you’re reading this on another planet, the Relotius Affair is a particularly egregious instance of Fake News. Claas Relotius was a star reporter for Der Spiegel, the number one German news magazine. On December 19 an article appeared at the Medium website entitled Der Spiegel journalist messed with the wrong small town. It documented the fact that a story Relotius had written about a small town in Minnesota by the name of Fergus Falls was actually a pack of lies. An article admitting as much appeared at Der Spiegel’s website the same day.

The lies in question were remarkably crude. For example, according to Relotius, who claimed to have arrived on the bus from Minneapolis,

“After three and a half hours, the bus bends from the highway to a narrow, sloping street, rolling towards a dark forest that looks like dragons live in it. At the entrance, just before the station, there is a sign with the American stars and stripes banner, which reads, ‘Welcome to Fergus Falls, home of damn good folks.'”

In the following quote from an article at Der Spiegel by Chief Editor Ullrich Fichtner, we learn that Relotius embellished this account as follows:

In his story about Fergus Falls, Relotius tailored his report in a harmful and arrogant manner. To get the ball rolling, he told how he saw that a second sign had been set up right next to the welcome sign at the entrance to the town, half as high, but plainly visible. On this sign, made of thick wood driven into the frozen ground, stood in large, painted letters, “Mexicans Keep Out.”

In the first place, it apparently never occurred to the editors at Der Spiegel to ask an actual American how likely it is that an expletive such as “damn” would appear in a welcome sign. I’ve driven hundreds of thousands of miles through all parts of the country, and have never seen anything of the sort. As far as the “Mexicans Keep Out” sign is concerned, the chances that it would be found “driven into the frozen ground” in Minnesota, home of the extreme left-wing Farmer Labor Party, of all places, is vanishingly small. More to the point, did it never occur to their fact checkers to do something as elementary as taking the bus ride into town themselves using Google Street View? According to Der Spiegel,

Any text that appears in the weekly SPIEGEL, whether printed or digital, is read by many colleagues before its publication: by at least one department head and one editor-in-chief, by staff in editing and the legal department. But the heart of quality control is the in-house documentation. The more than 60 colleagues – physicists, historians, biologists or Islamic scholars – ensure that names, dates and facts are correct, they verify every word and every number. Hardly any other news medium makes such an effort to live up to the claim: What we write is true. In the days of Fake News, documentation is something we take very seriously.

I hereby offer my services to Der Spiegel to replace all those “60 colleagues,” and I’ll even work for half of the total that was paid them! Using my extraordinary computer skills, I accessed Street View, something apparently unheard of among the “physicists, historians, biologists, and Islamic scholars” working for them. It took me all of a few minutes to find that on the bus route into town there are no forests and no dragons. As far as I could tell there wasn’t even a welcome sign, not to mention one with a smaller sibling advising Mexicans to keep out. As for the “bus station” it appears to share an address with a local Tesoro gas station.   If one exists at all, it would seem to be remarkably unpretentious. It’s more likely that the bus merely makes a pit stop in Fergus Falls.  

The real Fergus Falls welcome sign shown in the Medium expose is not even on the bus route into town, unless the bus driver is in the habit of taking the “scenic route.” It sits next the to Applebee’s on Kennedy Park Road just off W. Lincoln. As seen in the accompanying image, it’s not exactly on a par with St. Louis’ Gateway Arch. You’d miss it if you happened to blink at the wrong time. If you squint you’ll see it just to the right of center in the image.

 

Consider for a moment the above along with all the other lies documented in the Medium expose. The only fact checking it would have taken to debunk any of them would hardly have amounted to more than a few phone calls. Is it even barely credible that a reporter with an international reputation to protect, like Relotius, would have dared to try to get away with even one of these lies if he so much as suspected that anything even remotely worthy of the name of “fact checking” was going on at Der Spiegel? Would he have risked his career in that way if he thought there was even a slim chance that his employer would call him out on his lies? I think not. Indeed, he did get away with it as far as Der Spiegel is concerned. Relotius knew the Spiegel narrative by heart. He knew what the editors wanted to hear, and he delivered. The one thing he forgot is that the media in the US isn’t quite as firmly in the grip of their clones here as it is in Germany. When they realized they were going to lose control of the message, they threw him under the bus with alacrity.

However, in spite of their ruthless reckoning with Relotius, it would seem the Spiegel editors have never heard the good advice to stop digging if you find yourself in a hole. Instead, they have invented a whole new fairy tale according to which a newly anointed Sherlock Holmes by the name of Juan Moreno, who works for them, was the “real” knight in shining armor who exposed Relotius. Evidently this threadbare lie is intended to prop up the myth that their system is “self-correcting.” Unfortunately, a couple of alert citizens of Fergus Falls who happened to notice the hit job on their town, and probably swallowed their gum in the process as they read through all the lies, have published a timeline on Twitter documenting the fact that they brought the matter to Der Spiegel’s attention as far back as April. They were stonewalled until the editors realized that the story was going to come out whether they liked it or not. That’s when their “Sherlock Holmes” appeared on the scene.

Of course, since they are obviously unconcerned with fact checking, this begs the question of what all those department heads, editor’s in chief, lawyers, physicists, historians, biologists, and Islamic scholars at Der Spiegel actually do. The answer is obvious enough. If you’ve read Der Spiegel for any length of time, you should have no trouble seeing that each one of Relotius’ lies supports at least one of the quasi-racist stereotypes of Americans that are a prominent part of the favored narrative there. The imaginary “Mexicans Keep Out” sign emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes actually kills several of those birds with one stone, portraying us as obnoxiously patriotic, racist, and xenophobic all at once. All the other favorite Spiegel stereotypes appear like so many ducks in a row. Americans as gun nuts? Check! Americans as religious fanatics? Check! Americans as prudes? Check! Americans as thoughtless polluters? Check! Americans obsessed with violence? Check. The fact that these bigoted stereotypes have been enduring themes at Der Spiegel for many years is documented in a collage of Spiegel covers that appeared on the Davids Medienkritik website more than a decade ago. In short, it is far more likely that what all these “fact checkers” really do is make doubly sure that nothing slips by that doesn’t fit the narrative. Presumably this also conforms to the definition of “fact checking” favored by the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review, which recently praised Der Spiegel for having the largest “fact checking” apparatus in the world. The CJR describes itself as “the voice of journalism,” which, given the current state of the art, is entirely plausible.

It is hardly true that all Germans hate the United States. There, as here, however, the mainstream media is under the firm control of the “progressive” Left, and scorn for the United States and its people, with the exception of their fellow leftists and a few favored identity groups, forms a prominent plank in the ideological box they live in. It is one of the markers that defines their ingroup, if you will. Indeed, in spite of the German fantasy that they have “one of the most free presses in the world,” the reality isn’t even close. There is no equivalent in Germany of prominent conservatives on talk radio and TV with huge audiences, influential websites that push back against leftist propaganda such as Instapundit and Breitbart, or major news outlet that don’t always play along with the narrative, such as Fox. The Left has almost complete control of the message. No matter where you turn, whether to Spiegel, Focus, the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, ARD, ZDF, or what have you, the message on such critical international issues as immigration is virtually identical. 

The same, of course, is true of the MSM in the United States, but they enjoy nowhere near the hegemony of their German equivalents. However, the leftist narrative is virtually identical whether here or in Europe, and one often finds stories in MSM outlets in the US such as CNN and The New York Times that are as similar to their European equivalents as so many peas in a pod. Indeed, these organizations are as committed to the narrative and as indifferent to the truth as Der Spiegel, as evidenced by their award of prestigious prizes to Relotius for “excellence in journalism.” What Marx said of the proletariat is certainly true of the globalist media; they have no country. Their “country” is their ideology, and that is where their true loyalty lies.

Regardless, it has certainly been amusing to watch Der Spiegel squirm and struggle in a futile attempt to restore its lost journalistic virginity. “Schadenfreude” is the appropriate German expression. Of course, virginity is hard to restore once it’s lost, and no one capable of taking a step outside the leftist ideological box referred to above is likely to believe the now familiar cant about “layers of editors and fact checkers” at this point. At some level, even the editors at Der Spiegel must suspect that the rest of the world sees them for the bold faced liars they so obviously are. A large part of the German population has been aware of the fact for some time. I’m sure many more will swallow the red pill in the aftermath of this affair. For that, perhaps, we should be grateful to Herr Relotius.

UPDATE: Apparently the Spiegel fans have an even bigger problem with the truth than even I imagined. I was locked out of Twitter overnight after posting this story.

Twitter suspends hbd chick

As her moniker would imply, hbd chick writes about human biodiversity, and many other topics in the arts and sciences that interest her. She used to run a great blog, but it became inactive because of health issues. For the last couple of years she has been holding up her end with frequent entertaining posts on Twitter.  Now the Twitter Thought Police have suspended her. I don’t know what sham reason they’ve given for doing it. I’m sure “hate speech” would be appropriately cynical and arrogant, because she’s the furthest thing from a hater I can imagine. In my personal opinion, we “ought” to smash these monopolies. I will eagerly await the reaction of all the academic peddlers of “moral progress.” I hope she will find the strength to start blogging again.

UPDATE: Apparently hbd chick’s suspension has been lifted, at least for the time being. Twitter has not yet deigned to reveal what lame reason they had for suspending her in the first place.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear. The fact that there is no objective morality most definitely does not mean that you are forbidden to fight back if you or someone you admire is attacked.

Here is a personal opinion: Denial of access to the social means of communication is denial of freedom of speech. These monopolies need to be destroyed.

 

 

 

On the Need to Suppress Freedom of Speech in the Interest of “Moral Progress”

In my last post I noted that, objectively speaking, there can be no such thing as “moral progress,” and that pursuing such a nonexistent thing as a goal is potentially dangerous.  The reasons for this have to do with the way some of our innate behavioral traits manifest themselves in environments unlike the ones in which they evolved.  As I pointed out in the post,

It is certainly possible to identify aspects of the expression of moral emotions that all human populations have in common, but particular aspects of those emotions can vary significantly between individuals, and between populations.  It follows that we will never agree on what our “goals as a society” should be.  Some subset of the individuals in a society may agree on the goals of “moral progress,” but what of those who don’t?  Inevitably, they will be the evil ones, the “deplorables,” the outgroup whose opinions can be ignored because they are “morally bad.”

This dual nature of human morality based on our universal and powerful tendency to perceive others in terms of  ingroups and outgroups is reason enough in itself to reject the notion of “moral progress.”  We have tried to outlaw various manifestations of the behavior by giving them bad names, such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, bigotry, and so on.  The result of such attempts has invariably been the creation of yet more outgroups.  The hatred doesn’t disappear.  Instead, it simply pops up again, even more virulent than before, but directed at some alternative outgroup that hasn’t yet been declared off limits.

A good illustration of how this works in practice just turned up in the Washington Post in an article entitled, “When free speech becomes a political weapon.”  The author, Jennifer Delton, expresses concern about the threat of freedom of speech to “moral progress.”  According to Delton, when freedom of speech is accorded to “evil” people, it is transmuted into “freedom of speech.”  By this she means that it becomes a “political weapon,” which is then used by the “evil” people to impede “moral progress.”

As is often the case, Delton defines her ingroup in terms of ideology.  “Good” people are those whose ingroup is defined by the same ideological shibboleths as hers, and “evil” people are those belonging to outgroups whose members challenge those shibboleths.  More precisely, “Good” people are those whose beliefs are in harmony with “the internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism that marks the thinking of educated elites of both parties.”  She cites Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as an example of the practical application of these ideals.

In common with most humans, Delton perceives her “Good” as an objective thing.  In other words, she considers “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism” to be “good in itself,” regardless of whether it is thought to be good or not.  Obviously, it never occurs to her to explore the evolutionary reasons for this common illusion.  Digging down through layers of cultural and environmental impedimenta to discover the innate predisposition(s) that are the “root cause” of her perception of “the Good” is certainly a project that would never occur to her.  Still less would it occur to her to consider the question, interesting from a biological, if not a moral point of view, of whether her response to the emotions in question enhance or reduce the odds that the responsible genes that she happens to carry will survive and reproduce.  Instead, she merely cites the authority of the “educated elites of both parties,” and leaves it at that.

Since the only “truly good” things are the “Goods” that define her ideology, it follows that any other supposed rights or principles are not good in themselves, and can be dispensed with to the extent that they threaten those things that are.  Freedom of speech belongs in this category.  As Delton puts it, referring to the New Deal,

Liberals would be chumps to let a principled commitment to “freedom of speech” undercut the pragmatic goal of political survival, which was the only way to ensure progress in civil rights and social welfare.

In this case, Delton is referring to the decision by an earlier generation of “Good” liberals to end their support of freedom of speech for Communists.  This was to be done, not because the Communists had murdered millions of people, and enslaved millions more, or because they sought to use freedom of speech to destroy the system that defended that freedom.  Indeed, Delton doesn’t perceive Communists as an outgroup at all.  Instead, Communists were to be deprived of freedom of speech because they were being used as tools by those who were “really evil.”  In Delton’s words,

Their presence in liberal organizations made liberals vulnerable to Republican and conservative attacks.  So those liberals interested in political success (and in preserving the New Deal) drove them out of politics.

If freedom of speech could be legitimately denied to Communists because they were a mere annoyance, it must be doubly legitimate to deny it to conservatives, who are “truly evil.”  However, Delton isn’t brazen enough, or at least not brazen enough yet, to say, “I think freedom of speech should be denied to conservatives,” which is what she actually means.  Instead, she falls back on the distinction between freedom of speech and “freedom of speech.”  Of course, that begs the question, “What’s the difference?”  According to Delton,

Philosopher Sidney Hook hinged his argument about speech on the distinction between the free flow of ideas, which the First Amendment protected, and actions, which it did not.  He said liberals had no problem with Communists’ ideas, which they were free to expound upon and disseminate.  The problem lay in their organized actions, which involved, “all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, and illegal methods, evasions and subterfuges” developed by Lenin to subvert democracy.”

There’s no need to wade through swamps of philosophical mumbo-jumbo in a vain attempt to understand the obscure chain of events by which the “free flow of ideas” is transmogrified into “all sorts of stratagems, maneuvers, and illegal methods, evasions, and subterfuges.”  That Gordian knot is easily cut if you simply assume that the former applies to speech by those who belong to Ms. Delton’s ingroup, and the latter to speech by those who do not.  So it is that any attempt by “evil” people, that is, those who don’t quite see eye to eye with Ms. Delton touching on the universal benefits of “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism,” to assert and defend their freedom of speech becomes a “right to create political spectacle and instigate violence.”  Apparently more or less the same logic is used to defend the assertion that attractive women who don’t wear a burka “create a public spectacle and instigate rape.”

Ms. Delton makes sure that her readers realize that anyone who disagrees with her opinion is evil.  Having compared them to Communists, she doubles down by claiming that they are Nazis on top of that:

It was one thing to defend the American Nazi Party’s right to march in Skokie, Ill. in 1977, when the liberal establishment and mainstream media were still intact and the American Nazi Party was a marginal fringe group.  The group was offensive, but neither its actions nor its ideas posed a threat to the political or social order, which was stable.  The situation is different today, with an erratic President Trump in the White House, elites in disarray and white nationalism on the rise.

I note in passing the degree of panic such hyperbole reveals on the left of the political spectrum in response to the recent election.  After dragging in the Communists and the di rigueur Nazis, Delton throws in some pejoratives to insure that even the most obtuse won’t fail to grasp that “conservatives = evil!”

Quoting Voltaire is not going to preserve anyone’s liberties – least of all those populations most vulnerable to vicious racist, misogynist and anti-Semitic attacks.

Note that racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism are merely different forms of outgroup identification that have been deemed by common agreement to be evil.  However, they are all symptoms of the same phenomenon; blind hatred of outgroups in the context of an environment radically different from the one in which that innately motivated behavior evolved.  Ms. Delton is no less a bigot merely because her hatred is directed at an outgroup based on ideology rather than race, sex, or religion, and one that doesn’t yet happen to be among those that are considered “off limits.”  Of course, there is an alternative explanation.  The people she hates may really be trying their very best to do things that they consciously believe are evil.  They may really be mortified if they pass the day without committing three or four bad deeds.  I wouldn’t put it past Ms. Delton to believe as much.  However, I have my doubts.

The point here isn’t that Mr. Delton is a bad person.  The identification of something she happens to want with “objective good” is a delusion common to almost every other human being on the planet.  I merely point out that the delusion can be inconvenient if you happen to value your right to speak freely, and downright deadly if you happen to be a Jew or a “bourgeois” in the wrong place at the wrong time.  It follows that it would behoove us to at least be aware of the danger.

I note in passing that the most extreme forms of the delusion are currently found among individuals who are on the left of the ideological spectrum.  That has not always been the case, and is, of course, no basis for concluding that leftists are “really evil.”  However, we can consider why this is the case.  I think part of the reason is that leftists like Ms. Delton imagined that they were safely in control of the tools needed to shape popular opinion, including the academy, the media, and the entertainment industry.  The results of the election were a terrible shock to many of them.  Ever since they have been frantically trying to think up ways to nullify those results and reassert their status and power.  Part of that project includes plugging the leaks that allowed thought crime to poison the minds of impressionable “deplorables” to begin with.  That entails denying access to a public forum to anyone who disagrees with “good” ideology, if necessary with the aid of modern day “antifa” storm troopers.

It is very unlikely that my little blog will convince enough people that “moral progress” is an illusion to matter.  It is much too delicious for human beings to believe in their own moral righteousness, and on the Left that sentiment has now become, for all practical purposes, an indispensable fetish, comparable to a form of religious fanaticism.  At best, I can point out the danger of the all but universal faith in “moral progress,” and advise my readers that, if they value freedom of speech, it is likely they will have to fight for it.

The Damore Affair and the Ghost of the Blank Slate

So you thought the Blank Slate was dead, did you? Check out this post about the Damore affair by Jerry Coyne at his Why Evolution is True website:

Salon disses dismisses Google memo as “biological determinism” that can “slip into eugenicist doctrines”

Coyne is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago. He’s also a leftist of great honesty and intellectual integrity. You should read him should you believe that such creatures went the way of unicorns long ago.  Among other things, he’s a strong supporter of the University of Chicago’s steadfast stance in favor of freedom of speech.  Coyne takes issue with an article by one Keith A. Spencer entitled, The ugly, pseudoscientific history behind that sexist Google manifesto, condemning Damore. Here’s the money quote:

The Salon article is “The ugly pseudoscientific history behind that sexist Google manifesto“, and is by Keith A. Spencer, a Salon writer whose scientific training appears to be a B.A. in astrophysics/English at Oberlin (double major) and then subsequent work in the humanities and writing ever since (he also has a master’s degree in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon).  Although I’m not a credentials monger, perhaps Spencer’s lack of biological training is shown in the way he refutes Damore’s “pseudoscience”: his refutation relies on a single book published in 1984: Not in Our Genes, by Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin (henceforth LRK). I am well familiar with that book, as the first author was my Ph.D. supervisor, and I have to note two things. First, The book not a dispassionate review of the literature: the authors wrote it because they were committed to dispelling biological determinism, and were certainly diehard opponents of evolutionary psychology, then called “sociobiology”. You cannot count on that book to be an objective review of the literature, as it’s a polemic. It should not have been used by Spencer as an authoritative refutation of gender differences.

Second, the book is outdated. It is now 33 years old, and a considerable literature has accumulated since then. Not one thing is cited from that literature save in support of the absence of two sexes (see below)—Spencer just emits quote after quote from that book. And he uses it to refute three assertions that, he claims, Damore makes—at least implicitly…

Note that Lewontin was Coyne’s Ph.D. supervisor. I know from other posts that Coyne admires and respects him personally, and reveres him as an educator in the field of evolutionary biology. The fact that he would take issue with Lewontin in this way is, among other things, what I mean by honesty and intellectual integrity.

But just check out the quote. Here we have someone citing “Not in Our Genes” as a respectable scientific tract. It’s stunning! Even such reliable stalwarts of the Left as Scientific American and PBS threw in the towel and accepted the fact that there actually is such a thing as human nature long ago, flinging Not in Our Genes on the garbage heap of history.  How can one account for such an absurd historical anomaly?  Well, if you read Damore’s manifesto, you’ll notice that he actually uses the term “evolutionary psychology,” and in a supportive fashion, no less.  Of course, the fundamental premise of evolutionary psychology is the reality and importance of human nature, and insisting on that fact is tantamount to waving a red flag in the face of hoary Blank Slaters like Spencer.  These people are like the Bourbons; they’ve learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They still quote their ancient texts as if nothing had happened since those golden days of yesteryear, when the Blank Slate orthodoxy controlled the academy, the media, and the behavioral sciences virtually unchallenged for upwards of half a decade. They also still recall those who smashed their hegemony with unabated bitterness. Foremost among them was Robert Ardrey.  Sure enough, he popped up in a PBS special about Homo naledi as an evil proponent of the “Killer Ape Theory” even though no one, to the best of my knowledge, ever suggested that Homo naledi hunted or even ate meat. For more on that similarly incongruous fossil of the Blank Slate, see my post, PBS Answers the Burning Question:  What Does Robert Ardrey have to do with Homo naledi?

It’s not hard to find similar artifacts these days.  Indeed, they pop up on both the Left and the Right, as evolutionary psychology has a way of deflating cherished narratives on both ends of the ideological spectrum.  However, those responsible for the mutilation of the behavioral sciences we recall as the Blank Slate were primarily leftist ideologues.  Given the Left’s current all but unchallenged hegemony in the academy, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a concerted attempt to turn back the clock and restore the Blank Slate orthodoxy at some point along the line.

“Milo News,” Jerry Coyne, and Infant Euthanasia

Prof. Jerry Coyne recently posted an article on his Why Evolution is True website defending euthanasia for severely deformed or doomed infants.  This provoked a predictable enraged response from right wing and Christian websites.  Prof. Coyne responded to these attacks here.  There’s nothing surprising about any of this except for the fact that one of the attacks on Prof. Coyne was posted at Milo News, edited by Milos Yiannopoulos.  In view of Prof. Coyne’s consistent defense of Yiannopoulos’ freedom of speech, I found it particularly incongruous that one of the attacks should appear on his website. I left the following comment.

BEGIN QUOTE

I’m also an atheist, like Prof. Coyne, but more to the right than average.  In fact, I recently defended Milo’s book on my blog:

http://helian.net/blog/2017/07/16/worldview/milos-dangerous/

However, I also agree with Prof. Coyne’s view on euthanasia of infants.  Unlike the furious zealots of the left and the right, however, I don’t assume the right to stuff my views on morality down anyone else’s throat.  It’s odd that many of the commenters on this thread defend their pious hatred of Coyne in the name of Judeo-Christian morality.  There seems to be something of a disconnect between their rage and what is taught in the Bible, such as “judge not, lest ye be judged,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” “Blessed are the meek,” etc.  In view of the fact that Christians have used their religion to justify killing tens of millions in religious wars, a million witches, give or take, in the Middle Ages, hundreds of thousands of Jews in pogroms over the centuries, most notably whenever a body of troops left for the Crusades, and murdered tens of thousands more as “heretics,” it seems absurd for them to imagine they’re standing on the moral high ground as they foam at the mouth about Coyne’s views on euthanasia.

As it happens, it’s particularly incongruous in view of Prof. Coyne’s consistent and effective defense of freedom of speech in general and Milo’s freedom of speech in particular.  See, for example,

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/milo-yiannopoulos-talk-canceled-at-university-of-california-at-davis/

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/berkeley-students-defend-violent-protests-over-milo-yiannopoulos-talk/

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/02/21/milo-falls-on-his-sword/

In Dangerous Milo places the University of Chicago at the top of the list of his college “heroes,” noting that the “Chicago Principles on Free Expression” are the “gold standard in the fight against campus censorship.”  Prof. Coyne has consistently and strongly defended those principles.  These are a few things to consider as you work yourselves up into orgasms of pious indignation.

I would love to see Milo sit down and have a beer with Coyne sometime.  They are both individuals who can actually think.  The results of the exchange might be interesting.

END QUOTE

Prof. Coyne is certainly on the left of the ideological spectrum, but he is decidedly not a Social Justice Warrior, nor is he a regressive leftist of the authoritarian persuasion who is determined to stuff his version of morality down anyone’s throat, nor is he intolerant of opinions that differ from his own.  He will have nothing to do with the ludicrous love affair between the SJW left and radical Islam, in spite of the usual specious accusations of “Islamophobia.”  I find it unfortunate that in this “four legs good, two legs bad” world where so many have chosen to confine themselves in ideological strait jackets, there are so few who seem willing or able to make the distinction between someone like him and, say, a garden variety SJW whose tastes run to fascism.

The comment quoted above still hasn’t made it out of moderation at Milo News, and may have been consigned to the memory hole there.  Be that as it may, I reiterate my support for Prof. Coyne’s position on infant euthanasia.  This is a case in which it’s very important to consider why your moral emotions are pushing you one way or the other on the issue, and what paying heed to them (or not) will actually accomplish.  I personally would prefer that the issue be regulated by law, with euthanasia allowed up to the age of, say, a week, with the decision left strictly to the parents.  After that the usual laws dealing with murder would apply.  I do not think my opinion is capable of rendering itself independent of the neurons that gave rise to it, clothing itself in the odor of sanctity, and then fobbing itself off as a “moral law” to my unsuspecting fellow citizens.  However, I do think it should be given as much weight as any other opinion, preferably in some rational process of deciding what “ought” or “ought not” to be done that has been made as free from blatant attempts to manipulate moral emotions as possible.

As for Milo, I know he rejects the notion of apologizing for anything, and I don’t blame him.  However, according to his own principles as set forth in Dangerous, there is much “good” in Prof. Coyne.  It would be nice to see him recognize the fact instead of simply relegating him to the same circle of hell as, say, octogenarian establishment Republicans, hideous third-wave feminist scolds, and craven, back-stabbing book publishers.

The “Islamophobia” of Richard Dawkins; Have We Reached Peak Insanity Yet?

KPFA radio in Berkeley recently invited Richard Dawkins to discuss his latest book, Science in the Soul:  Collected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.”  Now, however, he has been disinvited.  The reason given by the sponsors, along with an abject apology that is now a familiar feature of such self-humiliation rituals, was as follows:

We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier. We also apologize to all those inconvenienced by this cancellation.

Really?  KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech?  Right!  The kind of free speech a Communist apparatchik in eastern Europe would have joyfully embraced in the 1950’s.  Whether you like Richard Dawkins or not, there is no denying that the author of books such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The God Delusion is one of foremost scientific writers and thinkers of our time.  Denial of a public forum to someone like him is a particularly egregious form of censorship, and the very opposite of “support for serious free speech.”  The idea that KPFA has a problem with hurtful and offensive speech is beyond ludicrous.  As I write this, the lead story on their website includes the following:

Trump is Appallingly Ignorant on Healthcare; Puts Greed Above Human Lives; David Cay Johnston: GOP Budget Redistributes Money to the Rich; Helps Make U.S. a Police State; Rights Advocates: Trump’s Commission on Election Integrity Set Up as a Pretext for Voter Suppression; Trump and the Russian Money Trail: Trump’s Ties to Oligarchs Go Back Decades; Married to the Mob: Investigative Journalist Craig Unger on What Trump Owes the Russian Mafia.

Nothing Dawkins has ever written about Islam even comes close to being as “hurtful” and “offensive” as the above.  Obviously KPFA has no problem whatsoever with hurtful and offensive language per se.  They do have a problem with any criticism, no matter how mild, and how truthful, of any of the identity groups that are deemed “good,” and are therefore protected by the regressive Left ingroup.

If the whole “Islamophobia” charade hasn’t reached peak insanity, it must be approaching it very quickly.  Recently a flash mob of Moslems rioted and sexually assaulted several women at a fair in the German City of Schorndorf.  I could find not a single headline or byline in the German legacy media the day after the event that identified the attackers as other than “youth.”  The US media were similarly coy about identifying the Minnesota policeman who shot and killed an Australian woman who was unarmed, dressed in pajamas, and merely trying to report a sexual assault, as a Somali Moslem.  One could cite countless other examples of the legacy media “protecting” the rest of us from the truth in this way.  Any criticism of Islam, no matter how mild, is deemed “Islamophobia.”

The weird nexus between the regressive Left and Islam is remarkable in its own right.  Many of the former tend to be fascinated by radical mass movements that peddle promises of a paradise to come.  Communism was a natural fit, but its formerly powerful appeal has been drowned in oceans of blood.  Now, at least for the time being, the only game in town for those whose tastes run to rabid fanaticism on behalf of messianic worldviews is radical Islam.  Hence this odd couple’s incongruous love affair.

Is there really even such a thing as completely irrational and unjustified “Islamophobia,” or is there really some reasonable basis for being wary of Moslems and their ongoing penetration of western societies?  After all, freedom of religion is considered a fundamental principle in most western democracies.  One of the best known statements thereof is the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and became state law in 1786.  The text included the following:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

However, according to another clause in the law,

That it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.

Well, principles have broken out into overt acts against peace and good order on numerous occasions, most notably on September 11, 2001.  The usual rationalization of this fact is that Islam is a “religion of peace,” and the persons committing these acts simply don’t understand their own religion.  This is a dubious assertion in view of the fact that the “persons committing these acts” have often been schooled in Islamic madrassas, and have been steeped in the religion their whole lives, whereas the peddlers of the “religion of peace” nostrum have seldom even read the Quran.

The idea that Islam is a “religion of peace” is absurd on the face of it.  The populations of Egypt and the rest of North Africa as well as much of the Middle East, including Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel were formerly predominantly Christian, Jewish, and/or Zoroastrian.  They did not become Moslem by peaceful penetration, but by the most extensive and successful campaign of military aggression and colonialism the world has ever seen.  At one time Spain and much of southeastern Europe as well as Sicily, Crete, Cyprus and many other large and small Mediterranean islands also fell victim to Moslem aggression, but managed to expel their conquerors, sometimes with and sometimes without outside help.

As for the Quran itself, it hardly supports the notion that Islam is a “religion of peace.”  One can certainly cherry pick verses that seem to suggest that Moslems and infidels can live at peace with one another.  However, these periods of peace are, at best, only breathing spells in a campaign of violence that must continue until the whole world is Moslem.  Peace is certainly not an option if Moslems have the upper hand.  For example, from verse 38 of Sura 57,

Be not fainthearted then; and invite not the infidels to peace when ye have the upper hand:  for God is with you, and will not defraud you of the recompense of your works.

and verse 4 of the same Sura,

When ye encounter the infidels, strike off their heads till ye have made a great slaughter among them, and of the rest make fast the fetters.

From Sura 9, verse 124,

Believers!  wage war against such of the infidels as are your neighbors, and let them find you rigorous:  and know that God is with those who fear him.

and finally, from Sura 8, verse 40,

Fight against them till strife be at an end, and the religion be all of it God’s.

Homosexuals are condemned to hellfire in several places.  See, for example, Sura 27, Verses 55-60.  The Quran condones slavery, and particularly the sexual slavery of women.  See for example, Sura 23, Verse 6, which praises those,

who restrain their appetites, save with their wives, or the slaves whom their right hands possess.

and, from Sura 4, Verse 28,

Forbidden to you also are married women, except those who are in your hands as slaves; This is the law of God for you.

Western feminists are strangely silent about the plight of their sisters in Moslem countries in spite of such passages such as the following from Sura 4 (Women), Verse 38,

Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God hath gifted the one above the other.

And, according to Sura 4, Verse 12,

God commandeth you to give the male the portion of two females.

Christians, or at any rate those who associate the word “begotten” with Christ and those who believe in the Trinity are considered so evil that they will burn in hell forever.  For example, from Sura 10, verses 69-71,

They say, “God hath begotten children.”  No! by His glory!  He is the self-sufficient.  All that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth is His!  Have ye warranty for that assertion?  What! speak ye of God that which ye know not?  Say:  “Verily, they who devise this lie concerning God shall fare ill.”  A portion have they in this world!  Then to Us they return!  Then make We them to taste the vehement torment, for they were unbelievers.

As for the Trinity, from Sura 9, Verse 6,

Attack those who join gods with God in all, as they attack you in all:  and know that God is with those who fear Him.

and from Sura 5, Verse 77,

They surely are infidels who say, “God is the third of three:”  for there is no God but one God:  and if they refrain not from what they say, a grievous chastisement shall light on such of them as are infidels.

Moslems are explicitly forbidden from taking Jews or Christians as friends, hardly a promising recommendation for a thriving, multicultural society.  For example, from Sura 5, Verse 56,

O believers!  take not the Jews or Christians as friends.  They are but one another’s friends.  If any one of you taketh them for his friends, he surely is one of them!  God will not guide the evil doers.

and, from Sura 4, Verse 91,

They desire that ye should be infidels as they are infidels, and that ye should be alike.  Take therefore none of them for friends.

There are several other similar passages in the Quran.  Moslems, who are quick to claim freedom of religion for themselves, deny it to others, and particularly to those who may have been born to Moslem parents but reject Moslem teachings.  For example, from Sura 3, Verses 84-85,

As for those who become infidels, after having believed, and then increase their infidelity – their repentance shall never be accepted.  These! they are the erring ones.  As for those who are infidels, and die infidels, from no one of them shall as much gold as the earth could contain be accepted, though he should offer it in ransom.  These! a grievous punishment awaiteth them; and they shall have none to help them.

Early Moslem visitors to western countries were often nonplussed by the existence of parliaments and other secular legislative bodies.  After all, the law had been handed down by Muhammed in the form of Sharia.  Surveys consistently show that large percentages of Moslems still believe that Sharia should be the basis of all law.  In other words, Islam is not just another religion.  Its dogmas apply as much in the realm of politics as they do in theology.  As Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in his book, Dangerous,

Islam is not like other religions.  It’s more inherently prescriptive and it’s much more political.

He also notes the disconnect between the principles the Left is supposed to stand for and its support for Islam:

There is nothing else which better exposes the modern Left’s rank hypocrisy, their disregard for the facts, and their hatred for the West and all it stands for than their attitude to Islam.  Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.

I doubt that any sincere Moslem, at least to the extent that he is honest, could claim that any of the above is “hurtful,” or “offensive,” unless they are “hurt” and “offended” by facts.  It is simply a truthful accounting of relevant historical events and a summary of some of the things the Quran actually teaches.  The Left can dream as much as it wants about a future border-free paradise of perfect equality and human brotherhood.  That dream will be shattered by a much grimmer reality in any country where Moslems get the upper hand.

Leftist are masters at manipulating moral emotions to get what they want.  They claim that the rest of us are “immoral” for resisting the “paradise” they have in store for us.  That’s why, when it comes to morality, its always a good idea to go back to basics.  Always consider why the moral emotions exist to begin with.  They exist because they happened to enhance the odds that the genes responsible for their existence would survive and reproduce.  Those genes are the root cause for the existence of all human moralities, in all their gaudy variations.

Does tolerating the unlimited immigration of culturally and/or genetically alien hordes enhance or diminish the odds that those same genes will survive and reproduce in the existing population?  The answer is the latter – it will diminish the odds.  It will lead to all the social disorder potentially ending in civil war that history has taught us to expect when ingroups are brought in close proximity to their outgroups.  Beyond that, it will greatly increase the environmental damage the Left claims to be so concerned about, exacerbating it by further increasing what are clearly already excessive populations in terms of the health of the planet we all depend on for survival.  In fact, if one takes the facts of human nature into account, enabling such unlimited immigration is nothing short of suicidal.

Of course, there is nothing inherently “evil” about the Left’s version of morality.  In the end, it amounts to manipulating moral emotions to accomplish ends that are the exact opposite of the reasons those emotions exist to begin with.  I personally prefer to pursue goals that are in harmony with those reasons, if only for the sake of consistency.  Objectively speaking, that doesn’t make me morally better or morally worse than the most Islamophilic Leftist you can imagine.  However, it strikes me that any life form that pursues its own destruction is dysfunctional, and I find it unaesthetic to consider myself dysfunctional.  In short, I haven’t adopted the Left’s version of morality for the same reason that I don’t try to walk on my hands instead of my feet, or smell with my ears instead of my nose.

As for Dawkins, he’s said some “hurtful” and “offensive” things about all religions, not just Islam.  However, regardless of who they happen to “hurt,” or “offend,” those things may just happen to be true.  Whether in reading his books or listening to his talks, it would be useful to at least consider that possibility.

“Dangerous” by Milo Yiannopoulos; A Review

Back in February the legacy media was gloating over the demise of Milo Yiannopoulos.  Apparently the Left’s faux outrage machine had successfully smeared him over some unguarded comments he made about his sexual relationships as a young teenager.  These were construed as “support for pedophilia,” which they decidedly were not as anyone can see who listens to what he actually said.  No matter, Simon and Schuster cancelled his book deal, CPAC rescinded their speaking invitation, and even Breitbart caved, accepting his resignation as their technical editor.  It would seem Milo’s enemies gloated too soon.  He self-published his book, which currently sits at number two on the New York Times list of best sellers for combined ebook and print nonfiction.

What to make of Milo, his book, and the public reaction to it?  When it comes to human behavior, the answer is always the same; go back to Darwin.  Forget the futile game of arguing about who is “good” and who is “evil.”  These categories exist only as subjective mental constructs, and are manifestations of emotions, not reason.  In short, they are figments of our imaginations.  Instead, look for the evolved emotional traits and predispositions that are driving the behavior.

For starters, it’s always a good idea to look at ingroups and their associated outgroups.  They are a universal and fundamental aspect of human behavior, and they will always be there, along with all their associated loyalties and hatreds, as well as the dual system of morality human beings apply depending on whether they are speaking of one or the other.  They are also one of the most “dysfunctional” aspects of human behavior.  The innate traits responsible evolved at a time when the ingroup consisted of the relatively small group of hunter-gatherers to which one belonged, and the outgroup almost automatically became a similar group living in the next territory over.  At that time ingroup/outgroup behavior obviously increased the odds that the responsible genes would survive and reproduce.  However, our brains became bigger, and we began associating in ever larger groups.  Our powers of imagination expanded with our brains, and we became capable of identifying our ingroups and outgroups based not merely on physical proximity, but on race, religion, class, ethnicity, ideology and a host of other criteria.  There is no reason to believe that such “modified” versions of the behavior will accomplish the same thing now that they did then.  In fact, there is good reason to believe they will accomplish exactly the opposite.

In this case, Milo makes it easy for us to identify the relevant ingroups.  They are each identified in the title of a chapter of his book, and Milo has the honor of belonging squarely in the outgroup of every one of them.  They include feminists (chapter 4), Black Lives Matter (chapter 5), Muslims (chapter 9), and so on.  Many of them either overlap or have some affinity with the most significant of them all, the Progressive Left (chapter 1).  The Progressive Left is an ingroup that defines itself according to ideology.  In other words, the boundaries of its “territory” consist of a set of ideological shibboleths.  As set forth by a member of this ingroup in a review of Dangerous, these shibboleths are supposed to promote a “fair, multicultural, egalitarian society.”  A fundamental theme of Milo’s book is that, in fact, the Progressive Left is creating a profoundly unfair, divisive society that, far from being egalitarian, is based on a rigid hierarchy of identity groups.  In his words,

We live in an age where one side of the political spectrum would like all debate, all challenge to their viewpoints, all diversity of thought to be snuffed out.  Why?  Because they’re scared.  Scared that their political, social and cultural consensus, carefully constructed and nurtured over the past few years, with its secular religions of feminism, enforced diversity, multiculturalism, and casual hatred for straight, white men, is built on a foundation of sand.

The response of the Left to this assault on its ideology has been typical of ingroup responses that transcend species.  They have made a furious rush to defend their ideologically defined territory, filled with rage towards this presumptuous outgrouper, for all the world like a pack of howler monkeys defending its turf.  In a word, Milo is right.  They do hate him.  Leftist reviews of the book include such well-reasoned responses as,

America now faces greater problems than the mean-spirited shitposts of a preening hack.

Why any troll, racist, sexist, or teenager would pay for the version of Dangerous this draft presents when it exists on 4chan in endless supply is a mystery. At least the hatred there is more interesting.

He’s a clickbait grifter who has made a name for himself spewing hate speech.

Read them and you will find claims that the book is boring (it’s not), that it’s not selling (it sold out almost immediately on Amazon), that it discusses issues that are so yesterday (they aren’t yesterday for people who don’t happen to be obsessed with social media), and, of course, the de rigueur claims that the book is racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and so on.  What you won’t find, or at least I haven’t found so far, are well-reasoned arguments against any of the major themes of the book.  That’s not surprising.  The Left has now controlled the media, the academy, and the arts for so long that its ability to engage in rational argument has begun to atrophy.  Instead, it seeks to bully, vilify, and bludgeon its opponents into submission.  Conscious of its power, it has become increasingly authoritarian.  Hence its fury at the “deplorables” who dared to defy it in the recent election, and its determination to refuse legitimacy to the results of that defiance.

Allow me to provide a brief tutorial on how such a rational argument might actually look.  In his book, Milo cites statistics according to which blacks are responsible for a disproportionate level of violence and crime in our society.  A rational response would be that the statistics are wrong, and that levels of violence and crime among blacks are comparable to those among other ethnic groups.  Concerning the gender pay gap Milo writes,

Study after study show the wage gap shrinks to nonexistence when relevant, non-sexist factors like chosen career paths, chosen work hours and chosen career discontinuity are taken into account.  They key word is chosen… The wage gap is almost entirely explained by women’s choices.  Men prefer technical jobs; women prefer people-oriented professions.

As Christina Hoff Sommers says, “Want to close the wage gap?  Step one:  Change your major from feminist dance therapy to electrical engineering.”

A rational response would be to cite studies that demonstrate a systematic pay gap between men and women in identical jobs, or evidence of verifiable attempts to discourage women from choosing careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.  Regarding Islam, Milo writes,

Islam is not like other religions.  It’s more inherently prescriptive and it’s much more political.  That’s why I, a free speech fundamentalist, still support banning the burka and restricting Islamic immigration… Everywhere Islam exists you find political tyranny.  Islam is as much a political ideology as a religion, which is why limits on it are perfectly compatible with religious freedom and the First Amendment… Every noble principle the Left claims to uphold, from rights for women to gay liberation, even diversity itself, dies on the altar of its sycophantic defense of Islam.

A rational response would be to demonstrate that the Muslim religion doesn’t inject itself into politics, that the states in which it prevails tend to be secular democracies, that Muslim theocracies are tolerant of gays, and they promote equal rights for women.  I have seen no such responses in any of the many attacks on Yiannopoulos and his book.  Instead, they tend to confirm his claim that,

The practitioners of the new political correctness are not equipped for a world in which individuals can disagree with what is deemed appropriate thought.  They rely on silencing the opposition with hysterics, instead of winning with superior ideas… Purposefully or unwittingly, a generation of Americans now exists that is terrified of critical thinking.

In other words, the Progressive Left seldom meets the arguments of Yiannopoulos or anyone else head on.  Instead they rely on the illusion that they occupy the moral high ground, and seek to vilify and anathematize their opponents.  Unfortunately, outside of the subjective consciousness of individuals, there is no such thing as a moral high ground.  Claims to moral superiority can never be objectively legitimate.  They exist in a realm of fantasy where good and evil exist as independent things.

In spite of the Left’s anathemas, Dangerous is well worth reading.  Yiannopoulos is a very intelligent man, and his book reflects the fact.  He is well aware of the role of innate emotions and predispositions as drivers of human behavior.  In particular, he is aware of the fundamental importance of ingroup/outgroup behavior, or what Robert Ardrey called the “Amity/Enmity Complex.”  As he writes in Dangerous,

Since the 1970s, social psychologists have been aware that emphasizing differences between groups leads to mistrust and hostility.  In a series of landmark experiments, the psychologist Henri Tajfel found that even wearing different-colored shirts was enough for groups to begin displaying signs of mistrust.  So guess what happens when you tell everyone that their worth, their ability, their right to speak on certain subjects and – shudder – their “privilege” is, like original sin, based on what they were born with, rather than any choices they’ve made or who they are?

Like the men’s health gap, the black murder gap is very real, and simply isn’t discussed by black activists.  I suspect it’s a matter of tribalism, or ingroup/outgroup psychology, a common occurrence in politics.  Like feminists who blame their everyday grievances on an invisible “patriarchy,” or Wi-Fi enabled Waffen-SS wannabes who think Jews are responsible for everything bad, or Democrats who blame the Russians for Hillary losing the election to Daddy.  It’s very easy to dodge responsibility if you have a boogeyman to lump the blame on.

These quotes reflect a level of awareness that most leftists never reach.  They also allude to the reason that the utopias they are in the habit of concocting for us have never worked.  An ingroup can be as egalitarian as it pleases, but the assumption that the identity groups they invite to inhabit their multicultural world will necessarily be similarly altruistic is delusional.  Ingroups and outgroups will always exist, and they will always hate each other, as demonstrated by the bitter hatreds leftists themselves tend to wear on their sleeves.  Until the innate behavioral traits responsible for ingroup/outgroup behavior and the dual morality inevitably associated with it are understood, accepted, and a way is found to effectively control them, they will continue to be as dangerous as ever.

The book is an interesting read for many other reasons.  Its detractors dismiss discussions of such controversies as Gamergate as water under the bridge, but they should be of interest to readers who aren’t obsessed with the very latest twists and turns in the culture wars.  Such readers may also have heard little or nothing of the many contemporary thinkers mentioned in the book who, like Yiannopoulos, are challenging the dogmas of his opponents.  Their work is seldom found in newspaper columns, and the book is a useful guide on where to look for them in contemporary social media.  Other than that it includes some thought provoking comments on Andrew Breitbart’s dictum that “politics is downstream from culture,” the reasons for the counterintuitive nexus between the Progressive Left and radical Islam, the remarkable cultural similarity between current “conservative” and “liberal” elites outside of superficial political differences revealed to the surprise of many in the recent election, the many contradictions between the avowed ideals of the Progressive Left and the other “haters” called out in the book and the various forms of racism, sexism and bigotry they practice in the real world, and so on.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the book is something it has in common with virtually every other similar work you’re likely to find, whether it comes from the left or the right of the political spectrum.  It tries to counter claims of moral superiority with claims of its own moral superiority.  One can “win” such a contest by being more effective at manipulating moral emotions than ones opponents, but in the end it is an irrational, dangerous, and futile game.  Consider what is actually being manipulated – innate emotions and predispositions that have no intrinsic purpose or function, but exist merely because they happened to improve the odds that certain genes would survive and reproduce.  There is certainly no guarantee that they will even accomplish the same thing in an environment so radically different from the one in which they evolved as the one we live in today.  On top of that, those who seek to manipulate them often do so in pursuit of goals that have little if any connection to the reasons they exist to begin with.

The only way our species will ever manage to get off of this merry-go-round is by finally learning to understand the fundamental drivers of behavior, moral and otherwise.  An individual who is fully conscious of the nature of the emotions that are the motivators for all the goals and aspirations he sets for himself in life will also be an individual who is capable of discarding the illusion of objective moral laws as a rationalization for those goals and aspirations.  I don’t oppose the Progressive Left because it’s immoral.  In the end, I oppose it for the same reasons that are actually motivating Milo.  I don’t like to be bullied by people who assume they have some imaginary “moral authority” to tell me how I should behave and think.  We could “win” by beating the leftists at their own game, and seizing the “moral high ground.”  It would be a hollow victory, though.  As has happened so often in the past, we would end up by becoming clones of the monster we had just slain.  We need to stop playing the game.  There has to be a better way.

Of Solar Energy and Amateurish Agitprop at Fox News

Reading the “news” can be a painful experience in our time.  Most of it consists of a blend of sensationalism, human interest stories, accounts of the lives of various vapid celebrities, and attempts to inspire virtuous indignation based on a half-baked knowledge of some ideologically loaded issue or other.  One finds very little that could be accurately described as useful knowledge about things that are likely to have a major impact on our lives.  I generally find Fox News less painful to read than what is commonly described as the Mainstream Media because I happen to be emotionally conservative.  However, I must admit that Fox can occasionally be more ham-handed than the competition when it comes to dishing out propaganda.

A story that recently turned up on the Fox website is a case in point.  It happened to be about the Ivanpah solar generating system that was recently completed in California’s Mojave Desert.  The word “solar” should enable most readers to predict the ideological slant on the story one is likely to find at Fox.  Sure enough, the title of the story is, “Taxpayer-backed solar plant actually a carbon polluter.”  In the article itself we learn that the plant,

…is producing carbon emissions at nearly twice the amount that compels power plants and companies to participate in the state’s cap-and-trade program.

In fact, the plant does emit CO2 because it burns natural gas to avoid damage to equipment and to serve as a baseline source of power to meet electricity needs at night or during cloudy days.  A bit further on, we learn from a “research fellow at the Heartland Institute” named H. Sterling Burnett that,

…designers also erred in placing Ivanpah between the tallest mountains in the Mojave where there is significant cloud cover and dust which would interfere with the sunlight.

He adds that,

…They say it is green, but that assumes that there is a power source without any environmental impact.

I don’t find anything as egregious as actual lies in the article.  Rather, Fox limits itself to “creative” use of the truth.  For example, it may be quite true that the plant, “…is producing carbon emissions at nearly twice the amount that compels power plants and companies to participate in the state’s cap-and-trade program,” but it’s also true that it produces far less carbon per unit of electricity delivered than a purely fossil fuel fired plant, a fact that is left unsaid in spite of its much greater relevance to the underlying issue of climate change.  A researcher at the Heartland Institute is quoted without mentioning that the institute is funded by the fossil fuel industry, and is considered a source of blatant disinformation by environmentalists.  That charge may be unfair, but one can hardly claim that it is irrelevant and should be ignored.  As for his claim that, “designers also erred in placing Ivanpah between the tallest mountains in the Mojave,” etc., I invite interested readers who may happen to visit Las Vegas to drive out and have a look at the plant.  It’s actually quite a spectacular sight.  It certainly doesn’t appear to be sitting in the shadow of towering mountains, and the cloud cover is generally minimal, as one can confirm by Googling nearby locations.  As for the dust, one surmises that it would have been worse if the plant had been built on the Los Angeles side of the mountains.  As for Burnett’s last remark, as far as I am aware not even the most wild-eyed and fanatical environmentalist has ever claimed that the description of a power source as “green” implies the assumption that it has no environmental impact at all.

The reality is that the plant is reasonably sited given the location of the major consumers of the power it produces.  Given the current limitations in our ability to store and distribute the excess power produced by renewable energy sources like wind and solar, some form of baseline power is always necessary to insure a steady supply of electricity when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.  My own choice for that purpose would be nuclear, but given the regulatory hurdles in the way, that would probably have been impractical for Ivanpah.  Natural gas produces significantly less CO2 than, for example, coal, and was probably the best choice.

In short, the article is an example of what I have referred to above as “attempts to inspire virtuous indignation based on a half-baked knowledge of some ideologically loaded issue or other.”  If the goal at Fox had been to inform rather than propagandize, they would have provided the reader with “fair and balanced” information about the cost of electricity produced at Ivanpah compared to alternative sources, the amount actually produced in comparison with predictions, the amount of CO2 it produces per unit of electricity in comparison to coal or oil fired plants, the relative advantages of solar and nuclear in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, etc.  None of what I write here should be taken to imply a belief that solar should be preferred to any alternative.  In fact, my own choice would be to reduce the regulatory burden to rational levels and build next generation nuclear plants instead.  However, regardless of the technology involved, I would prefer to see it judged on a level playing field.

I know, I know, the MSM is hardly innocent of slanting the news.  Indeed, its hysterical response after the announcement that Sarah Palin would be John McCain’s running mate puts anything I have ever seen at Fox News completely in the shade.  Generally, however, it tends to be at least marginally more subtle.  For example, instead of attempting to slant important news stories that don’t fit its narrative, it will often simply ignore them.  If the story is too big to ignore, it will vilify the messenger instead.  Of course, such techniques reflect a greater maturity and experience in handling agitprop than is available to the team at Fox News.  However, that doesn’t prevent them from learning by example.  Given that we will be subjected to propaganda no matter which “news” source we choose to follow, we should at least be able to demand that it not be crudely done.

Ivanpah