Madness

La Cara de la Guerra (1940) Salvador Dalí

Institutional breakdown in a time of Ebola

So, how is everybody feeling about Ebola today?

If exponential projections are to be believed (and the mealy-mouthed afterthoughts of our lizard authorities are not), then it looks like things could be shaping up to get pretty real. Or did you already know that?

Personally, I vacillate between mindblind social scientific absorption and horrified disbelief. As a good libertarian, I try to balance my sometimes-myopic trust in market coordination and social resiliency against a healthy awareness of black swan events and radical uncertainty—all underpinned, of course, by an awesome appreciation for those devilish cognitive biases that can make a lone summer shark attack look like a spree of sharknados. But I gotta admit that this Ebola thing is starting to bug me in a way that other spectacles don’t.

I first got the feeling that something might be amiss when I noticed the Vox set trying so hard to convince me otherwise. Then things got a little too close to the demonpit for comfort, so I summarily paid tribute to the Amazon gods for provisions. Having recently received my 2-day deliveries of the basic rations on the cheap—DuPont elastic waist hooded coverall suits (plus booties!) (2); Uvex stealth safety goggles; disposable latex gloves (100); plenty o’ Purell®; a 3M P100 respirator mask and particulate filter packs (3)—assuredly all very highly recommended by the buzzing prepper forums that I briefly browsed in a wild moment of womanly panic, I’m now feeling like I’m sitting a tiny bit more pretty in this gaping biotarget that is our nation’s capital. All that I really need now is the appropriate safety equipment for my sweet pugdog (hit a sister up if you’ve got the goods) and my superstitious Spanish soul will be that much more at ease.

You can think me a scaredy cat, but I could say I’m “building robustness.” Best case scenario, I get a last-minute tasteless Halloween costume at the reasonable cost of one brunch foregone and a couple of yucks at my morbid imagination. Worst case scenario, I get a few more worry-free days of life in an airborne Ebola situation.

Ok, so maybe I have more legitimate reasons to fear a fluke transmission from ordinary hospital errors than from airborne mutation or a 4GW surprise. Whatever, it made perfect sense at the time.

Clearly, my ritualistic and meager stockpiling does not indicate a real fear that a blood-letting global pandemic lurks in our near future. What truly worries me is the revealed massive failure of governance and series of pathetically botched responses that have allowed the epidemic to grow beyond control.

Those tin foil hatters over at the New York Times saw fit to print this grim diagnosis: “What is not getting said publicly, despite briefings and discussions in the inner circles of the world’s public health agencies, is that we are in totally uncharted waters and that Mother Nature is the only force in charge of the crisis at this time.” And Mother Nature is a bitch.

I can’t tell whether I should take comfort or despair in this shared realization. Looking around, I’m getting the hint that I can’t expect the relevant leaders and institutions to do an adequate job to protect me from the nasties they were created to monitor. A quick jog down memory lane might show you what I mean.

(more…)

How benign is the pink police state?

The University Bookman has published two responses to James Poulos’ pink police state series over at the Federalist, one from Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry and one from myself, in which I make a few points already covered here, and talk about lighting a friend on fire, but not in the pentecostal sense:

One thing that came to mind reading James Poulos’ series on the pink police state is an incident, in eighth grade I believe, in which a friend, with his permission, was dressed up in several layers of old sweatshirts, a smiley face painted in kerosene on his back, and lit on fire. We took pictures, of course, but this being the days before YouTube, we weren’t aiming for a viral video. Call it youthful nihilism, or the establishment of what Poulos calls a “zone of transgression,” at any rate he is fine now and has gone on to a promising career in multimedia. But he damn well could have died.

Poulos has gotten very close to a diagnosis most of us can agree on, and that’s a fine thing. The Tocquevillian notion that things are getting better and worse is something that much of the right could probably do with hearing more often. But it’s hard to read Poulos’s essays and not conclude that the worseness is accelerating. Moreover, despite the distributed nature of the new regime, it is possible to observe a certain logic to it. …

Intellectual bullying and the postmodern discourse of GamerGate

The discrediting of voices in intellectual discourse is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, when a person holds a position that is indefensible and plain wrong, they should either accept that they are wrong or have their soapbox revoked. Most of the time it isn’t this clear. Different opinions are held by disagreeing parties, and silencing dissenting voices requires tactics that are a little more underhanded. The tactic of dishonestly re-framing a viewpoint into something outrageous in an attempt to discredit those who hold the viewpoint is known as intellectual bullying.

Black_box bulling

This is a powerful tool. With enough voices dishonestly insisting that someone holds all those beliefs that everybody hates, the person in question will either be shamed into silence or suffer from character assassination. The black box takes an honest input and produces a dishonest output. But what goes on inside the black box? I am going to try to explain that, both in general and specifically for the GamerGate controversy.

A lot of of the tactics of the anti-GamerGate intellectual bullying campaign were famously codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  The ideological guerrilla warfare tactics encouraged in that book and others like it include character assassination, isolation, and ridicule. Ad hominem attacks are implicitly encouraged, because people are easier to hate than abstract ideas. Strawman arguments are particularly effective – rather than addressing actual arguments, so one should ignore the points of those who disagree with you and respond to something else.

I initially scoffed at the prospect of Cultural Marxism being real, because in common parlance among conservative pundits, it’s used as a stronger pejorative in place of “political correctness.” Despite what the noise around the provocative term might sound like, Cultural Marxism is not Alex Jones-style paranoia. From the beginning, Marxism rejected positivism – positivism meaning the belief that mathematical logic and scientific experimentation are the sole authoritative sources of knowledge. This should be interesting for the reader who has heard of Marxism being scientific socialism. To Marx and Engels, scientific was merely a nice sounding word that meant that their socialism had a philosophical methodology behind it. This is true: Marxism does have a methodology, it’s just a non-rationalistic methodology.

(more…)

Konoe_in_Limo

Ruminations and persuasion

Around this time 73 years ago, the Prime Minister of Japan, Fumimaro Konoe, had been in constant talks with the Emperor, at the time the head of state and military.  While Konoe was no squish in terms of nationalism, he also saw the then-developing idea from the Imperial Japanese Army of a preemptive strike against the United States as a bad idea: They did not have the resources to conduct a three-front war over China/Korea, southeast Asia, and the Pacific, especially with the third front being opposed by an enemy not bound to any war and having far more manpower and materials to use against them.  It is in fact the reason they avoided war with Soviet Union at the time, even when the latter was invaded by the Third Reich the same year.

The American government was predictably angry at the time of the “southern strategy” being used by the IJA and Imperial Japanese Navy, and wanted attacks against Dutch and British colonies to cease, or they would move to war.  Konoe did not want that, but, as the fall turned colder, it seemed nobody in the Japanese government was particularly interested in what he had to say, despite being the head of the government.  The Showa Emperor was initially on his side, even arguing against his chiefs of staff over the fact that despite predictions of finishing up in three months, it had been four years since the invasion of China began with little headway against the united Nationalist-Communist army.  But then he too began ignoring Konoe.  In October, the last shot at negotiations failed, possibly sabotaged by certain military figures, and Konoe resigned.  Six weeks later, the Empire of Japan began its slow demise with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Asked to explain what happened, Konoe said this to his secretary:

“Of course His Imperial Majesty is a pacifist and he wished to avoid war. When I told him that to initiate war was a mistake, he agreed. But the next day, he would tell me: ‘You were worried about it yesterday, but you do not have to worry anymore.’ Thus, gradually he began to lead to war. And the next time I met him, he leaned even more to war. I felt the Emperor was telling me: ‘My prime minister does not understand military matters. I know much more.’ In short, the Emperor had absorbed the view of the army and the navy high commands.”

I think of this in the speech I heard last night.

At a time when the anticapitalist left and the traditionalist/libertarian right are in agreement on not having any further involvement in the Levant, knowing fully well the consequences of what will happen, it seems like nobody inside the Beltway seems particularly interested in listening to them, or the American people.  And just as well: Neither side, due to pure ideological spite, seems to have been persuaded not to join forces for risk of being “tainted” by the other side.  Thus, the Beltway gets further insulated from any outside opposition to this madness.

So then…who exactly are these people listening to?

The white radical’s burden

It’s rather fascinating to see the social radicals fight amongst themselves. Hilarious, even. Especially when it turns into a high school gossip match.

That is one takeaway from the “backlash” that spouted from Michelle Goldberg’s recent New Yorker piece, “What Is A Woman?”  While I haven’t read the piece in full, there are definitely some moments of introspection here and there mixed with some intellectual sloppiness (but then, social radical thinking was always filled with that).  It’s not a great piece, but it’s definitely readable, all things considered.  It’s one of those rare moments where the “radical” feminists actually take a look at themselves and say, “The fuck are we doing?”  It comes at a time when the radfems (such a dumb name) are really at odds with what social media has done to them: Creating nihilistic pursuits of ideological purity through groupthink combined with incentivized “sharing.”  But more on that in a moment.

More interesting in all this is not Goldberg’s piece, but responses from various “radical” transgender sources. Autostraddle, a “intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressively feminist online community” that is neither smart, funny, nor challenging or stimulating (but then I don’t watch television and film), dropped a turd of an article whose title basically states its own weakness:

“The New Yorker’s Skewed History of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism Ignores Actual Trans Women”

Putting aside the fact that headline is incredibly long and ostentatious, it shows that the writer (some nerd who probably failed journalism class named Mari Brighe) is too busy focusing on their own personalized agenda to notice that they sound incredibly stupid when they say these things.  I mean, if it’s about these so-called TERFs – which, by the way, even my friends in the Down’s community called a retarded acronym – why would they discuss trans people in any great length?

Brighe tries to make a case about how awful Goldberg is:

Let’s start with the numbers. In the piece, Goldberg mentions the names of 14 radical feminist activists (frequently providing physical descriptions), and provides quotes from nine of them — including two from books penned by radfems. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.

Forgive me if I stopped after the first sentence. You’re forgiven if you’ve done the same: Slights disguised as statistics do not an analysis make. Utter nonsense. Maybe nausea, but that could just be because I haven’t eaten yet today.

(more…)

Why wasn’t anyone talking about police militarization?

Paul Waldman recently wrote a piece at the Washington Post asking a a reasonable question: where is the libertarian outcry against the overbearing use of police force? At face value, his commentary seems very illuminating: the tragedy in Ferguson shocked all reasonable people into consciousness, and we can’t hear the libertarians doing the same, so they must be unreasonable.

If you talked about police militarization before this tragedy, you would be considered somewhere on the spectrum of paranoid conspiracy nuts molded from the same clay as Alex Jones, especially if you identified as a libertarian. The reason that libertarians didn’t seem to adjust their focus to accommodate for Ferguson is because their focus was already there. Everyone else has since moved into this territory, previously occupied only by those conspiracy mongering weirdos.

Simply by googling “police militarization libertarian” and constraining the search for results from before August 9th to a few years back, we get a treasure trove of now embarrassing snark aimed at ostensibly paranoid and reactionaries. Here’s a great one that spends a majority of the article building the case that a Radley Balko is hopeless reactionary puppet, a racist and not a real journalist. Eventually, there is a payoff to this buildup, when Balko takes the side of a man who defended himself against armed, militarized police engaging in a drug bust. The Alternet writers practically roll their eyes at the assertion that this man may have saved his own life by defending himself, and imply that the libertarian noise surrounding police militarization is just paranoia that is attendant upon Balko’s reactionary beliefs. If this same dismissal of police militarization and the right of a black man to defend himself against such militarization were called into question today, you would be called a racist.

You’d probably be someone who watches Fox News, too. In an odd coincidence, libertarian John Stossel warned against the militarization of police in a piece posted on Fox only two weeks before the Michael Brown’s death-by-cop. He isn’t caught up in his own libertarian headspace, either. Stossel makes the point as diplomatically as possible in the title, earnestly trying to appeal across the political spectrum:

It’s healthy for conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike to worry about the militarization of police. Conservatives worry about a repeat of incidents like the raids on religious radicals at Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas. Liberals condemn police brutality like the recent asphyxiation death of a suspect at the hands of police in New York….

This is a rare issue where I agree with left-wing TV host Bill Maher. On his TV show last week, Maher ranted about no-knock raids “breaking up poker games, arresting low-level pot dealers.”

Going a little further back to April 22, a Libertarian Party official in Michigan rallies civilians to sign a petition against the local police being supplied with military equipment. As you might have guessed, the petition ended up doing nothing. Libertarians tried to make as much noise as they could, but nobody really heard them. This is something that libertarians are used to, but everyone else seems to have a selective understanding of just how small of a soapbox the libertarians actually have. The signal to noise ratio between those who cared about police militarization pre-Ferguson and the paranoid isn’t very high. Remember when the DHS had practice targets of children? Take a look at the bizarre comments on that article. Whether it’s conspiracy mongers or johnny-come-lately activists, you can count on the libertarian voice being drowned out.