Modern intimidation

From a commenter:

It’s clear enough how it works when a marauding horde of horse-archers or even a gang of street toughs wins by intimidation; but even this is only possible under certain certain conditions.

But when that strategy works for crybabies complaining to teacher, then you have to ask what peculiar conditions did teacher create?

John McWhorter would say that the threat of being called a racist puts as much fear into people as the threat of being attacked by a marauding horde of horse-archers. But it seems that we could overcome the former fear by a simple act of will.

Selecting for jerks

Michael Bang Petersen and Alexander Bor write,

our study, however, suggest that it’s not the Internet that transforms otherwise nice people into angry trolls. People who are jerks online are jerks offline, too. We do find that the kind of people who are obsessed with politics are often frustrated, angry and offensive. But they tend to rant about politics in offline interactions as well.

Who are these people? We find that the biggest factor associated with political hostility — online and offline — is status-seeking. Some people crave higher social status and try to intimidate others into recognizing them.

Are these people angry because of what society has done to them, or because they are just intrinsically angry? The authors seem to lean toward the former explanation, but I lean toward the latter.

Cyberspace vs. the physical world

N.S. Lyons writes,

Today, I would argue, there is an immense and growing popular thirst for a return to and reconnection with reality. And our leaders and would-be leaders should recognize this and understand that it is (I am convinced) an immense latent political force, of which we have only seen the first stirrings.

He links to Mary Harrington, who writes,

And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves.

They describe gnosticism as a movement to escape the physical world and live in an alternate reality. Metaverse, anyone? With Bitcoin as currency?

Kling reviews Weinstein-Heying

My review of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century is here. Again, I conclude on a quibbling note.

In short, almost every reference to “market” is pejorative. But one could easily argue that the market is an expensive, long-lasting trait and thus should be presumed to be adaptive. Unfortunately, WH seem to see no reason to investigate what positive functions it serves and what trade-offs might exist in attempting to do away with it or regulate it.

In general, although I found the sermons in WH interesting and worthwhile, I felt that the book suffered from a framework in which the individual engages in a lonely battle with the natural and social environment.

Winning through intimidation

Peter H. Schuck writes,

Dissident students know that university leaders at the most prestigious schools (with rare but notable exceptions like Robert Zimmer and Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago) are prepared to pay a dear price to secure campus peace. And since they and their faculty are overwhelmingly liberal politically—almost 90 percent identify with and often contribute to the Democratic Party—they tend to sympathize with the protesters’ agendas, even when more radical than their own.

There are many other passages in the essay that I was tempted to excerpt.

Winning Through Intimidation is the title of a business book from the 1970s, at the height of the “me generation.” I don’t know what is inside the book, but I suspect it is mediocre pablum. The title, on the other hand, seems to me to describe how the Woke movement succeeds.

A latent third party

Jonah Goldberg fantasizes about a third party.

The point is to cause the GOP some pain for its descent into asininity. Giving conservatives turned off by both the Democrats and the Trumpified GOP a way to vote their conscience in the general election would put political pressure on Republican candidates to curtail their Trump sycophancy. It would also serve to remind the GOP that if you abandon conservative principles, conservatives might abandon you.

Thanks to a commenter for the pointer.

But as Stalin reputedly said of the Pope, how many divisions does he have?

I believe that there is a latent third party in the United States, one that is #neverWoke as well as #neverTrump. This latent third party is stifled within the primary system. If it could cross some viability threshold, the latent third party might represent a silent majority, or at least a plurality.

But libertarians and conservatives should not get our hopes up. Even within the latent third party, we are no more than roundoff error.

And contemplate this, from George Hawley:

conservative elitism has a problem: it assumes the existence of conservative elites. As the mainstream media, the bureaucracies, the universities, and even big business move leftward on a host of issues, this assumption is increasingly problematic. Conservative deference to contemporary elites can only lead to more conservative defeats. Conservative success often requires circumventing ordinary representative democracy, winning political victories via initiative and referendum processes at the state level.

More FITs links, discussing ignorance of history

With my own commentary.

Lately, I have been asking myself: how can we have so much intelligence around us and yet find ourselves deluged by stupidity? I mean, we have smart phones, smart TV’s, smart thermostats, computers everywhere, information at our fingertips. . .But if stupidity were a river, I would say that it’s at flood stage.

When writing was invented, humans lost the ability to memorize epic poems. But it didn’t make us stupid.

Perhaps because of machine intelligence, people are immersed in the present and have lost historical perspective. My guess is that 90 percent of Harvard graduates today know less about the Second World War than what you can find in this book that I read as a child.

Keeping up with the FITs, No. 21

They’re at it again. One example:

Matt Yglesias writes,

what you don’t want to do, as a political movement, is run around looking for reasons to exile people from your political coalition. A non-trivial number of rank-and-file Democrats have a range of views on LGBT issues that put them at odds with the bulk of progressives. It is very important that those people keep voting for Democrats, or else Donald Trump is president again and progress on things like military service becomes impossible.

My thought:

He wants progressives to engage in rational political behavior. Tactically, you want to try to tolerate people with whom you do not always agree. But I would argue that Woke progressivism is not a political movement in that sense. Political movements are inclusionary, but it is in the nature of Wokeism to be exclusionary. Exercising the power of shaming, shunning, and excommunicating is at the essential core of Wokeism. The Woke would rather lose elections while retaining their power to intimidate than have it be the other way around.

New FITs links on wokeism

The 20th edition of Keeping up with the FITs.

Wilfred Reilly writes,

According to the best publicly available data, members of most minority groups dislike PC culture more than whites do. Eighty-eight percent of Native American Indians, 87 percent of all Hispanics, 82 percent of Asian Americans, and 75 percent of blacks (vs. 79 percent of whites) call political correctness “a problem” for the United States. Per several studies, the only group that strongly supports the movement of speech in a more woke direction is made up of young liberal white women.

This is not so surprising. The moral dyad theory, as described in my review of The Mind Club, says that we simplify complex moral situations by assigning one party the role of unfeeling agent and the other party the role of helpless person who feels pain. In the case of political correctness, white males become the unfeeling agents and others become helpless feelers. In the extreme example, the party with agency is a robot and the party with only feelings is a baby. But a full human adult has both agency and feelings. So PC not only insults white males by treating them as unfeeling; it also insults others by treating them as infantile.

National Conservatism Confers Again

In just three weeks, and I just found about it a couple of days ago. It will cost 315 bucks, plus transportation and lodging. I doubt that I will attend.

It looks to me as though almost every public intellectual who has ever had a kind word to say about Donald Trump will be there. One of the more interesting people on the list of speakers is Batya Ungar-Sargon, who has said

I, too, have been shocked at the refusal to acknowledge Trump’s wins, many of which were actually really progressive. Thanks to his economy, the base pay of the lower 25% of wage earners rose by 4.5%, which is unprecedented in recent history (certainly, nothing like this happened under Clinton or Obama). He brought truly unprecedented unemployment to marginalized communities and gave millions and millions of dollars to HBCUs. He freed over 4,000 Black men from prison; men sent to prison because of Joe Biden’s crime bill, the irony of ironies. Had the Democrats not been so totally committed to their loathing of Trump, they could have gotten much more out of him.

I recommend the whole interview. The title of her scheduled talk at the conference is “America’s Hidden Class Divide and Our Terrible Media.”

The political party I want would be:

(a) anti-Woke culturally
(b) respectful of working- and middle-class voters without pandering
(c) determined to cut Federal government spending, including on entitlements
(d) determined to shake up bureaucracies (like the FDA and CDC) so that they solve problems instead of operating as self-licking ice cream cones

The National Conservatives are anti-Woke, but they want to pose as working- and middle-class champions. Pandering includes ignoring the out-of-control growth in entitlements. And I don’t see anyone stepping up to the plate on shaking up Washington. In the case of Mr. Trump, the swamp drained him rather than the other way around.