My thanks to Librarian of Celaeno on Substack for provoking one of my comments which turned into a mini-essay. His original post related to an essay written about a conservative journalist who faced an online backlash for daring to suggest that a kid who scored close to 1600 in his SATs might be better served by gaining a degree than by becoming a plumber. It’s a mad, mad world we are living in. It’s been a while. I hope the season finds you all in good cheer and good health. Merry Christmas!
Good article- yet another paywall for comments! There’s a great point to be made about Peter Turchin’s Elite Overproduction- just because society tries to jam those without the cognitive chops into higher education, it doesn’t mean that the truly gifted should skip university and pursue a life in the trades.
Of course, with the political skew in the universities there is a lot to be said for the path of the autodidact, but just how likely is it that the feedback idiosyncrasy of the internet is going to produce the intellectual texture and richness derived from studying a subject in depth? God, I miss the BBC Four which only existed for the briefest of spans- between the time that BBC iPlayer was introduced and when the BBC went woke and decided to decolonise their content. There were a number of programmes which opened my mind to whole new theatres of intellectual curiosity. What’s more, such endeavours require both an audience and an expert class to produce them- the first of which may well be guaranteed, but the second could be in precariously short supply within a generation.
And, of course, that’s what the new wave of cultural censors are after in their hunt for Substack Nazis. They never cared that much about Fox News, because its content was too easy to scoff at, its viewers too easy to stereotype. Sure, they lambasted its very existence and lamented its large audience but it was never really a threat to their cultural dominance. Similarly, they never saw the occasional well-informed status quo conservative as a threat, because they knew full well a little political skew and mild skewering they could portray them as cultural anachronisms going the way of the dodo.
No, the source of all the outraged ire with regard to Substack is that they’ve become used to owning the cultural means of production, and simply cannot stand that a growing cadre of conservative and heterodox writers seek not only preserve a Western cannon, the appreciation of which was on the verge of extinction, but also to do so with a flair and imagination that ties in with our current cultural and political paradigm.
Some of the Nazis are very real by the way, with a far larger contingent only guilty of some past objectionable comment in the past couple of decades. But regardless of whether the Substack Nazis are real or imagined, they are only the first in what it likely to be a long list of intellectual offenders and the objectionable, all sure to be added to a McCarthyite list of ever-expanding intellectual deplorables. They didn’t like vaccine or lockdown sceptics, and hate that they happened to be right on any number of specifics. They don’t like the intellectual nuance of those who admit that climate change exists, but also maintain that it’s not worth deindustrialising the world over with cataclysmic degrowth agendas over, or indeed throwing the developing world back into semi-permanent malnutrition for a somewhat serious problem which is neither an existential threat or a civilisation ender (though some of the proposed solutions may well be the latter). They may not like the fact that there were a legion of largely voiceless heretics able to demonstrate their intellectual folly through juxtaposition, but what they hate is that anybody has the capacity at all to override their often disingenuously corrupt mass media gatekeeping and reach an audience.
What we are witnessing is yet another scouting mission to pre-emptively destroy opposition to the all pervading and poisonously disingenuous Narratives of our time. They might not like the fact that a large percentage of Brits still consider the British Empire a good thing, but they loathe the fact that there are still intellectual remnants capable of proving beyond any reasonable doubt, that despite its cultural imperialism and endemically casual brutality, it nonetheless was a long-term force for good in the world- if for no better reason than it evangelised the concept that all children should be educated, rather than a select and privileged few. Soon they’ll be censoring those who happen to make the point that despite all the follies and misdeeds of the British Empire, it did possess the merits of promoting a system of ideas which ended the legality of slavery and raised 90% of the world’s population out of the most abject and brutal poverty imaginable.
For them the goal is nothing less than the monopolisation and mass marketeering of instrumental rationality. Epistemic rationality may prove the abject folly and stupidity of instrumental rationality time and again, but it lacks the emotive appeal of narratives which seem true, but aren’t, and as such doesn’t spread through the culture with anything like to virality of what Shelby Steele has called ‘Poetic Truths’- assertions which seem intuitively correct, but upon further examination prove completely false. Dry empiricism has become the domain of increasingly frustrated cultural critics with no real voice. Worse, there is growing trend on the Right to indulge in the same type of tactics- resorting to hyperbole and misrepresentation, unmindful of the fact that they face a fundamental asymmetry of fact checking and media strawman arguments. Simply put, whilst they might make a persuasive argument preaching to the choir, they lack the infrastructure or reach to sell the Big Lie to the frustrated and apathetic middle.
What the Left really doesn’t want is a class of heterodox and conservative writers, equally able to entertain, inform politically or espouse effusively on the soaring ambitions towards truth and beauty of yesteryear without resorting to illusions of a glorious bygone era. Life was shit. Life was hard. But the poets, architects, artists of sculptors of past eras make our cultural artefacts of today look like trash and a collection of clever intellectual conceits.
Noting the intellectual and artistic bankruptcy of our current era, the Left’s creatives apply the same broad brush to every aspect of our societies. There is nothing that they don't want to nihilistically destroy or discredit- for if they feel miserable, so should everyone else. Where they fail to inform is that in almost every area where there is room for criticism in the realm of economics the root causes can be traced directly back to government, or by extension a failure to enforce free and fair market competition- with competition the single most important criteria for human flourishing in a market system. The last thing they want people to hear is that government is the one pulling the strings of corporate oligarchs and not the reverse- government is the disease of which it pretends to be the cure. In a single conceit they’ve created both their own protagonist and a raison d'etre for the continued expansion of unelected bureaucracies with the structural ability to sidestep the democratic veto.
The last thing the censors want is anyone intellectually capable of pointing this out, or indeed pointing out that rather than being edgy anti-establishment rebels, they are drones for Left neofascism- the definition of which (according to Benito Mussolini) is the merger of state and corporate power. As anyone who happens to have watched the Congressional Hearings on the Twitter files will know this corporate/state merger has the Democratic Party as its chief proponent. They not only want to own the narrative but also license it, and they certainly don’t want anyone capable of contradicting them given access to an audience.
Good point on Fox News. They weren't that far off the reservation and could be counted on to fall in line on anything important. Fox provides the illusion of opposition. Substack is uncontrolled and therefore subversive. It must be killed, or rather neutered to continue the illusion.
We peasants must be made to think we still have agency.
It's even worse in the UK. Our civil service guarantees that if any political party tries to do something like slow down mass immigration, the highly educated bureaucrats are there to stop it. We get to vote, but we don't actually have a democratic veto anymore- one cannot oust unelected bureaucracies.
> Epistemic rationality may prove the abject folly and stupidity of instrumental rationality time and again,
Please elaborate.
> ... but it lacks the emotive appeal of narratives which seem true, but aren’t,
Yes. I'd like to read something even book length on the current dominance of the just-so story. Of course we've always had our narratives but, remembering Ray's Law of the Conservation of Irrationality, we used to 'park' our need for organizing stories -- narratives -- in religion. Remember Andras back on QC? I suppose his TFM narrative isn't quite a religion but it's close. But it surely is a just-so story and it sounds true. Surely all freely-made commercial transactions must, by definition, be in the interests of both parties? But then again so does the commie just-so story: Surely it is in the interests of the working class to throw off the capitalists who eat their lunch? Or the facist: Surely when the entire resources of the nation are focused thru one unified entity (the state) and focused on one national project, there is nothing that might not be achieved? Woke: Surely, since we are all created equal, if any Identity is doing poorly it must be because someone is Oppressing them? But whereas old-time religions were 12 course meals of narrative, currently popular narratives are twinkies -- quick hits of 'meaning' or 'structure' as shallow as a desert mirage.
> Life was shit. Life was hard. But the poets, architects, artists of sculptors of past eras make our cultural artefacts of today look like trash
Yup. We have more stuff now but our internal lives are junk *and* even our stuff is trash tho powerful. Let's have smartphones and Shakespeare.
Did you know that here in BC kids are no longer required to learn their times tables?
Hey Ray. Epistemic rationality is evidence, instrumental rationality is most often the selective curation of subjective and/or highly selective evidence to 'prove' a particular assertion with a particular goal in mind. Basically, a particular narrative goes out and the evidence proves otherwise, but so many people have already chosen to invest in the emotional appeal of narrative that it might as well be true for the purposes of the damage in does to society. The best example would be Shelby Steele's documentary What Killed Michael Brown?
Andras was largely right with one all important caveat- where government exists, if it is to promote human flourishing, its most imperative function must be to preserve a healthy number of competitors in every sector of the economy. Some on the Left might baulk at this description, but it's important to not that competition also requires some duplication, meaning tighter labour markets, as well as tighter profit margins- fat cats don't get fat for long when they are forced to compete.
I was a bit unkind to the arts. There is still at least some good art out there. The Dig was good. Spotlight was good, as was the series Wolf Hall. The brass structure from the 2012 Olympic Games was both beautiful and ingenious.
Wow. Getting rid of times tables is a form of intelligence-induced blindness. Because of what we know about Cognitive Load Theory, only the smarter kids will ever be able to do mental maths or maths reasoning.
> instrumental rationality is most often the selective curation of subjective and/or highly selective evidence to 'prove'
Ok, that's a high-falutin' term for twisting the evidence then.
> Shelby Steele's documentary
Yes, it's nice to be a documentarian one can spin, trim and enhance to the point where Himmler was a nice guy.
> Andras was largely right
It seems to me the thing about just-so stories is not that they are wrong in the binary sense, but that they are incomplete and simplistic. I hold that every just-so story should be listened to -- it might just hold the key to solving some problem. Thus a paean to TFM is worth listening to because Market Forces very often are the best way to let commerce sort itself out.
> ... to preserve a healthy number of competitors
Sure. I'd add a few more functions of government but that's clearly one of them. TR was so delightfully forthright about that: Nothing in the Constitution forbidding monopoly, but he broke them up anyway.
> Getting rid of times tables is a form of intelligence-induced blindness.
You've mentioned positive things in UK education but over here it's down hill all the way. We have woke textbooks of course but algebra hasn't been formally banned yet.
It's been a while since I've seen anything from you. A very nice article and from my experience pretty accurate on the humourless left wing. There is always the antidote of Tom Wolfe though.
“ No, the source of all the outraged ire with regard to Substack is that they’ve become used to owning the cultural means of production, and simply cannot stand that a growing cadre of conservative and heterodox writers seek not only preserve a Western cannon, the appreciation of which was on the verge of extinction, but also to do so with a flair and imagination that ties in with our current cultural and political paradigm.”
Man that is so true! Every single time the free speech Nazis (as opposed to the “Substack Nazis”) come at Substack with one of these attacks this is 100% the reason. It’s always cloaked in high-minded principle, but Katz went looking for the things he wanted to find. He’s had a bad attitude about Substack since he joined.
I think the Hanania thing made him really blow a gasket. He thought nobody was taking his allegations seriously. In reality, most of us looked at his past quotes, found them deeply distasteful, but were willing to give him a free pass for being young and dumb. I don't really read Hanania anymore- but it's a free country (or least it used to be)- and the default position for people who write or do dumb shit when they are young should be the Daryl Davis approach, not permanent exile to the writer's Phantom Zone.
Yeah Hanania is a known quantity. He’s a troll. He doesn’t believe half the things he says. Two years ago, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi were the guys the mainstream media were freaking out about. Today it’s Hanania.
Yano, I believe in due process, but sometimes you just hafta take charge and that's where a king can come in handy. If King of America for a day I know there's one thing I'd get done: Quickly assemble all the parents of those kids massacred at Sandy Hook then tie Tucker too a lamp post and cordially invite each parent in turn to lay five lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails on Mr. C -- or to decline to do so if Mr. C would apologize for his bullshit to their personal satisfaction. Then hand the cat to the next parent and so on. Yes, freedom of speech is sacred, but I like the idea that if you really abuse it past all possible bounds, then ... ok, not a king but a jury of your peers should be able to sentence you to a public flogging.
You could also use the same argument for any politician who times his impassioned speech on gun control to coincide with tragedies. They've already tried it in America for 10 years under Clinton- it had no effect on gun homicides and a negligible effect on school shootings.
The better answer is civil liability for parents who allow their children unsupervised access to firearms, who are then involved in an unjustified shooting. There would be exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of school shootings are committed by under sixteens, with a scary level of medication involved in many cases.
The gun thing is a good example of a topic where the partisans on both sides are incapable of being reasonable. It seems that something like 80% of Americans are perfectly capable of seeing sense when it comes to prudent controls to keep guns out of the hands of demented teenagers but somehow the fanatics prevent it. Americans have a built-in psychosis when it comes to guns.
One thing I thought about was a transferrable voucher system for gun purchases. Every gun purchase automatically generates a 5% voucher towards the purchase of a 'free' security gun locker. The gun manufacturers could chip in for good PR and the government could refund a little bit of tax.
Nobody wants to concede an inch on this issue.
What outsiders fail to understand on this issue is that the American military is specifically incapable of acting against its own citizens. The ethos is so deeply ingrained in the American military no amount of political commissarship would ever reverse it. In the event of a popular uprising against a tyrannical unconstitutional government it would be police against citizen militia and the militia would win (at a high cost). Plus many police would resign. Sworn officers of the court are similarly embargoed against unconstitutional action.
This may seem like a faraway and unlikely scenario, but it affects the here and now. In Canada, Turdeau has been been able to set an agenda for radical ideological societal transformation against the will of many Canadian citizens in a blindingly fast fashion. A decade ago, would you have believed that what is happening now would have been possible? Because of 1A, 2A and State's Rights the Dems have been forced to enact their agenda at a much slower pace- and with Dem supermajority strongholds fast becoming disaster zone homeless encampments (including in the wealthiest state other than DC in the country) it gives moderate Americans the chance to rethink their voting choices.
So those American constitutional checks and balances will begin to look pretty good to many Canadians in a few years...
> ... but Katz went looking for the things he wanted to find
Is that not one of our problems? You can find *anything* on the internet and then point to it and shriek that that's what THEY are really about. Good example: the famous Trucker's Shutdown of Ottawa few years back. "The Nazis! The Nazis! They're Trumpists! They're racists!" And we see a pic of someone who looks like an American bubba who is *surely* a member of the Klan. Yup, scan the entire convoy and you'll find a few Nazis. But if you liked, you could have also found several protesters in turbans. We need a new approach to 'evidence' -- we have too much evidence of too little quality.
Good point on Fox News. They weren't that far off the reservation and could be counted on to fall in line on anything important. Fox provides the illusion of opposition. Substack is uncontrolled and therefore subversive. It must be killed, or rather neutered to continue the illusion.
We peasants must be made to think we still have agency.
It's even worse in the UK. Our civil service guarantees that if any political party tries to do something like slow down mass immigration, the highly educated bureaucrats are there to stop it. We get to vote, but we don't actually have a democratic veto anymore- one cannot oust unelected bureaucracies.
They mean to rule, be it ever so badly.
Good to see you back on the keyboard Geary.
> Epistemic rationality may prove the abject folly and stupidity of instrumental rationality time and again,
Please elaborate.
> ... but it lacks the emotive appeal of narratives which seem true, but aren’t,
Yes. I'd like to read something even book length on the current dominance of the just-so story. Of course we've always had our narratives but, remembering Ray's Law of the Conservation of Irrationality, we used to 'park' our need for organizing stories -- narratives -- in religion. Remember Andras back on QC? I suppose his TFM narrative isn't quite a religion but it's close. But it surely is a just-so story and it sounds true. Surely all freely-made commercial transactions must, by definition, be in the interests of both parties? But then again so does the commie just-so story: Surely it is in the interests of the working class to throw off the capitalists who eat their lunch? Or the facist: Surely when the entire resources of the nation are focused thru one unified entity (the state) and focused on one national project, there is nothing that might not be achieved? Woke: Surely, since we are all created equal, if any Identity is doing poorly it must be because someone is Oppressing them? But whereas old-time religions were 12 course meals of narrative, currently popular narratives are twinkies -- quick hits of 'meaning' or 'structure' as shallow as a desert mirage.
> Life was shit. Life was hard. But the poets, architects, artists of sculptors of past eras make our cultural artefacts of today look like trash
Yup. We have more stuff now but our internal lives are junk *and* even our stuff is trash tho powerful. Let's have smartphones and Shakespeare.
Did you know that here in BC kids are no longer required to learn their times tables?
Hey Ray. Epistemic rationality is evidence, instrumental rationality is most often the selective curation of subjective and/or highly selective evidence to 'prove' a particular assertion with a particular goal in mind. Basically, a particular narrative goes out and the evidence proves otherwise, but so many people have already chosen to invest in the emotional appeal of narrative that it might as well be true for the purposes of the damage in does to society. The best example would be Shelby Steele's documentary What Killed Michael Brown?
Andras was largely right with one all important caveat- where government exists, if it is to promote human flourishing, its most imperative function must be to preserve a healthy number of competitors in every sector of the economy. Some on the Left might baulk at this description, but it's important to not that competition also requires some duplication, meaning tighter labour markets, as well as tighter profit margins- fat cats don't get fat for long when they are forced to compete.
I was a bit unkind to the arts. There is still at least some good art out there. The Dig was good. Spotlight was good, as was the series Wolf Hall. The brass structure from the 2012 Olympic Games was both beautiful and ingenious.
Wow. Getting rid of times tables is a form of intelligence-induced blindness. Because of what we know about Cognitive Load Theory, only the smarter kids will ever be able to do mental maths or maths reasoning.
> instrumental rationality is most often the selective curation of subjective and/or highly selective evidence to 'prove'
Ok, that's a high-falutin' term for twisting the evidence then.
> Shelby Steele's documentary
Yes, it's nice to be a documentarian one can spin, trim and enhance to the point where Himmler was a nice guy.
> Andras was largely right
It seems to me the thing about just-so stories is not that they are wrong in the binary sense, but that they are incomplete and simplistic. I hold that every just-so story should be listened to -- it might just hold the key to solving some problem. Thus a paean to TFM is worth listening to because Market Forces very often are the best way to let commerce sort itself out.
> ... to preserve a healthy number of competitors
Sure. I'd add a few more functions of government but that's clearly one of them. TR was so delightfully forthright about that: Nothing in the Constitution forbidding monopoly, but he broke them up anyway.
> Getting rid of times tables is a form of intelligence-induced blindness.
You've mentioned positive things in UK education but over here it's down hill all the way. We have woke textbooks of course but algebra hasn't been formally banned yet.
Keep writing -:-)
It's been a while since I've seen anything from you. A very nice article and from my experience pretty accurate on the humourless left wing. There is always the antidote of Tom Wolfe though.
Good essay. I agree they want to control all speech. They have to.
The confident don't need to control narratives. Only the insecure.
“ No, the source of all the outraged ire with regard to Substack is that they’ve become used to owning the cultural means of production, and simply cannot stand that a growing cadre of conservative and heterodox writers seek not only preserve a Western cannon, the appreciation of which was on the verge of extinction, but also to do so with a flair and imagination that ties in with our current cultural and political paradigm.”
Man that is so true! Every single time the free speech Nazis (as opposed to the “Substack Nazis”) come at Substack with one of these attacks this is 100% the reason. It’s always cloaked in high-minded principle, but Katz went looking for the things he wanted to find. He’s had a bad attitude about Substack since he joined.
I think the Hanania thing made him really blow a gasket. He thought nobody was taking his allegations seriously. In reality, most of us looked at his past quotes, found them deeply distasteful, but were willing to give him a free pass for being young and dumb. I don't really read Hanania anymore- but it's a free country (or least it used to be)- and the default position for people who write or do dumb shit when they are young should be the Daryl Davis approach, not permanent exile to the writer's Phantom Zone.
Yeah Hanania is a known quantity. He’s a troll. He doesn’t believe half the things he says. Two years ago, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi were the guys the mainstream media were freaking out about. Today it’s Hanania.
Yano, I believe in due process, but sometimes you just hafta take charge and that's where a king can come in handy. If King of America for a day I know there's one thing I'd get done: Quickly assemble all the parents of those kids massacred at Sandy Hook then tie Tucker too a lamp post and cordially invite each parent in turn to lay five lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails on Mr. C -- or to decline to do so if Mr. C would apologize for his bullshit to their personal satisfaction. Then hand the cat to the next parent and so on. Yes, freedom of speech is sacred, but I like the idea that if you really abuse it past all possible bounds, then ... ok, not a king but a jury of your peers should be able to sentence you to a public flogging.
You could also use the same argument for any politician who times his impassioned speech on gun control to coincide with tragedies. They've already tried it in America for 10 years under Clinton- it had no effect on gun homicides and a negligible effect on school shootings.
The better answer is civil liability for parents who allow their children unsupervised access to firearms, who are then involved in an unjustified shooting. There would be exceptions, but the overwhelming majority of school shootings are committed by under sixteens, with a scary level of medication involved in many cases.
The gun thing is a good example of a topic where the partisans on both sides are incapable of being reasonable. It seems that something like 80% of Americans are perfectly capable of seeing sense when it comes to prudent controls to keep guns out of the hands of demented teenagers but somehow the fanatics prevent it. Americans have a built-in psychosis when it comes to guns.
One thing I thought about was a transferrable voucher system for gun purchases. Every gun purchase automatically generates a 5% voucher towards the purchase of a 'free' security gun locker. The gun manufacturers could chip in for good PR and the government could refund a little bit of tax.
Nobody wants to concede an inch on this issue.
What outsiders fail to understand on this issue is that the American military is specifically incapable of acting against its own citizens. The ethos is so deeply ingrained in the American military no amount of political commissarship would ever reverse it. In the event of a popular uprising against a tyrannical unconstitutional government it would be police against citizen militia and the militia would win (at a high cost). Plus many police would resign. Sworn officers of the court are similarly embargoed against unconstitutional action.
This may seem like a faraway and unlikely scenario, but it affects the here and now. In Canada, Turdeau has been been able to set an agenda for radical ideological societal transformation against the will of many Canadian citizens in a blindingly fast fashion. A decade ago, would you have believed that what is happening now would have been possible? Because of 1A, 2A and State's Rights the Dems have been forced to enact their agenda at a much slower pace- and with Dem supermajority strongholds fast becoming disaster zone homeless encampments (including in the wealthiest state other than DC in the country) it gives moderate Americans the chance to rethink their voting choices.
So those American constitutional checks and balances will begin to look pretty good to many Canadians in a few years...
Sigh and this is why people can't find any serious discussion anymore. Too many jokers and idiots.
My editorial sarcasm doesn't work for you sir?
that's probably the best possible use for Banania!
To be honest, I'm not fond of either writer. Both a prone to that particular type of attention-seeking hyperbole.
the plague of our online age!
> ... but Katz went looking for the things he wanted to find
Is that not one of our problems? You can find *anything* on the internet and then point to it and shriek that that's what THEY are really about. Good example: the famous Trucker's Shutdown of Ottawa few years back. "The Nazis! The Nazis! They're Trumpists! They're racists!" And we see a pic of someone who looks like an American bubba who is *surely* a member of the Klan. Yup, scan the entire convoy and you'll find a few Nazis. But if you liked, you could have also found several protesters in turbans. We need a new approach to 'evidence' -- we have too much evidence of too little quality.
You know how many Nazi's there are on the planet: 100%.
Lol.