NelsonRushton
Doctorate in mathematics from the University of Georgia, specializing in probability theory. Masters in AI from the University of Georgia. 15 years as a computer science professor at Texas Tech. Now I work as a logician for an AI startup. Married with one son. He's an awesome little dude.
I identify as an Evangelical Christian, but many Evangelicals would say that I am a deist mystic, and that I am going to Hell. Spiritually, the difference between me and Jordan Peterson is that I believe in miracles. The difference between me and Thomas Paine (an actual deist mystic) is that I believe the Bible is a message to us from the Holy Spirit -- and the difference between me and Billy Graham is that I think there is noise in the signal.
User ID: 2940
Note: The original version of this post theorized that there was a causal connection from the botched Secret Service protection of Trump to Microsoft's layoff of its DEI team. However, @The_Nybbler then pointed out that the firing happened before the assassination attempt (see below). The post is now about why I think that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) push within the Secret Service was responsible for their poor performance on July 13.
When I was a university faculty member, I noticed pretty quickly that no matter what issue was being debated in a faculty meeting, it was always the same people in two camps opposing each other. I am reminded of Thomas Sowell's well-put description:
One of the curious things about political opinions is how often the same people line up on opposite sides of different issues. The issues themselves may have no intrinsic connection with each other. They may range from military spending to drug laws to monetary policy to education, Yet the same familiar faces can be found glaring at each other from opposite sides of the political fence, again and again. [Sowell (1987): A Conflict of Visions, p. 13]
In the case of disputes among college faculty, it took me a while to figure out the underlying variable that basically split the department into two camps -- but once I noticed it, it was consistent and the data grew over time: the basic ideological split in the department was between people who want a culture of meritocracy, and people who don't. So I learned that not everyone wants meritocracy; some people in fact are strongly opposed to it, and that this variable is a major ideological axis in the culture of a university department, and probably of any organization. The degree of meritocracy in an organization correlates with a large number of other variables and determines which direction it goes on a variety of high stakes decisions.
DEI is an assault on meritocracy in a deceptively direct and damaging way, and so it fundamentally changes the organizations it infects. The result of DEI is not just that you hire and promote the best candidates you can under the constraint of identity-group quotas -- because under a DEI push you can't even have an honest discussion about it in case there are better white male candidates. Fundamentally, DEI isn't about quotas; it is about denying facts about group differences, and corresponding individual differences, that underlie the need for quotas. In this way, DEI requires systematically lying about merits of people's credentials and performance, which entails the erosion of the fundamental variable of meritocracy in the organization. This sends the organization into a sick corner of ideological space that results in a pathological inability to perform its mission -- unless its mission is licking the boots of DEI-loving bureaucrats and politicians, which is, without exaggeration, the primary, or at least a primary, mission of a growing number of organizations.
And that, I think, is how an amateur would-be assassin was able to stalk unopposed onto on a rooftop, with a rifle, 130 yards (short rifle range) from a podium where the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee was speaking, with a clear line of site to the podium (every time I re-read that sentence, I think I am in the Twilight Zone). The more information comes out about this event, the more it seems to be a result of institutional incompetence on the part of the Secret Service, and the more egregious the stonewalling is from that agency, and the more baffling the whole situation is -- unless you understand DEI and its consequences.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
In light of that, what argument would you make against prohibiting (1), (2), and (3) in media depictions, that does not contradict your original argument on CSAM?
- A large supermajority believes that sexual urges towards 5 year olds is fundamentally morally abhorrent
- No such contingent is even remotely there on (1), (2) or (3). In fact, none of those can even claim a bare majority against them
As I reported before, a supermajority of married women disapproved of premarital sex in the 1960's. Moreover a supermajority of adults in the US (75% of those who expressed an opinion) believed premarital sex was wrong as late as 1969 [source]. By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago; premarital sex was wrong until 60 years ago, and gay marriage was wrong until 10 years ago. I assume you believe, however, that the abolition of slavery (e.g.), which changed the supermajority consensus, was a good thing. If so, then there must be some consideration aside from the majority opinion that informs morality. My question is, in your view, what is it, and how does it apply to CSAM in a way that it does not apply to, say, the normalization of premarital sex in media?
I don't understand how this is different from skepticism in general. Like if I believe that apple pies can't spontaneously appear or disappear, by your reasoning do I have any non miraculous reason to believe that?
It is different from more aggressive forms of skepticism in that I take for granted that the universe is governed by unchanging laws and that inductive reasoning is valid in theory. The principle of abductive inference says, in effect, if I cannot produce a counterexample, there probably are no counterexamples. This requires a certain level of facially hubristic confidence in the power of your mind, relative to the complexity of the system under study -- even if that form of reasoning would work on that same system for a sufficiently intelligent agent.
I must admit, though, that the law of conservation of apple pies strikes me as pretty non-miraculous. I will think that over and get back to you.
You say: z can never be 1 for any finite number of observations, no matter how small the desired confidence c is, unless c = 0 Well where is your proof for this?
That is my thesis (recall the context was statistical reasoning). My argument is that I do not know of an inference rule that would permit this without begging the question and I have looked diligently (abductive inference). You could disconfirm my thesis by pointing out such a rule. If you try to disconfirm it and fail (like I have), that would count as additional evidence for the thesis in my view -- because you are such a smart fellow.
Do you honestly believe that we can't say, by study of the motion of say, the planets of our solar system, be justified in believing a theory about the motion of the planets (and only the planets)?
My view is not that we cannot be justified, but that we cannot be objectively justified -- justified for an objective, articulable reason that does not rest on an article of faith as I described. The theory you are probably referring to is Kepler's law of orbital mechanics. What I believe about that is that we are objectively justified (statistically) in believing Kepler's equations are usually, approximately true. That is, they are at least a useful fiction. However, I do not see any objective reason (short of a miracle) to have nonzero confidence that Kepler's' equations are always exactly true, or even always approximately (to within specified tolerances).
Imagine, for example, that I am skeptical of whether Kepler's equations hold universally (as anyone, even Kepler, should be a priori); you claim to have a justified nonzero degree of belief that they do, and I ask you for evidence. What form of argument would you use to establish this?
Suppose you try to use Bayesian statistics. It will be mathematically impossible for you to produce a nonzero posterior probability if you do not have a nonzero prior, and a nonzero prior would beg the question, so that's out.
Suppose you try to use the standard go-to method of confidence intervals (as @self_made_human mentioned, p-values), to give a statistically significant confidence interval on the probability that Kepler's laws hold for a given occurrence. Now "the rule of 3" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(statistics)) says that as your number of observations approaches infinity, the lower bound on estimate of the success rate of Kepler's laws will approach 100%, but it will never be 1 with for finite number of observations. For example you can get a statistical result that Kepler's laws hold 99.9% of the time, but not 100% of the time -- that is, never any statistically significant evidence that they constitute a universal natural law of the physical world. So that's out. Moreover, it will not work to lower your confidence level to 90%, or 85%, or any other percentage other than zero. So that's out.
All other ideas I can come up with for an objective, quantifiable solution also fail. How about you? Note that I am not asking you to go out and gather the actual observations, or even to understand Kepler's equations; I am just asking for the statistical method that you would use to draw the onclusion from those observations.
Finally to address this:
Our observations inspire us to a mathematical proof that every three-sided polygon has an internal angle of 180 degrees. Would we be justified in believing that every three-sided polygon in the box, has an internal angle of 180 degrees
What we could prove, mathematically, is that in a space that satisfies the axioms of Euclidean geometry, the sum of the internal angles of every triangle is 180 degrees. However, that is not a theorem about the physical world, and it is not known whether or not the space we live in satisfies the axioms of Euclidean geometry. So we would have justified confidence in the theorem, insofar as some propositions logically entail others, but it is not a universal generalization about the physical world.
NelsonRushton
4mo ago
I read Ch 10 of How to be an Antiracist and did not find what I expected, from this post, to find there. I don't see him walk back the contents of his 2003 Famua article; he says you shouldn't hate white people for being white, but he was already expressing that position in 2003. Can you quote him on retracting and/or apologizing for the 2003 article I quoted?
I think we've reached a terminal point in this thread of the discussion, where we are at what Sowell calls a "conflict of visions". I have read Isaiah in its entirety, and I presume you have as well. There is no more data to collect, but we see the data through the lens of different concepts and different values. The truth is, you aren't going to convince me of your reading of Isaiah through dialectic, and I'm not going to convince you of mine, even if we are both being honest and logical. The denial of that truth is a chief delusion of the so-called "Enlightenment". A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell by the way side...". That's life.
With respect to "humble laments", sure there are plenty of Roman myths where the god, and by extension the people the god represents, are humbled in some sort of way.
I wish you would have given an example of a source. I'm skeptical of this (that any Roman myth has the tone and general purpose of Isaiah) to begin with, but if it comes without a source on the first stab, I'm doubly skeptical.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
@NelsonRushton: By your argument, that I quoted above, slavery was moral until 300 years ago
@anon_: This is a fairly common, silly argument.
The argument you are calling silly is your previously stated argument on the topic of CSAM (supermajority, etc. etc.).
What I asked for is your argument that the abolition of slavery was a moral improvement. I'm now asking for the second time. Whatever argument that is, it will have to prove that majorities don't decide morality, which will contradict your argument for the prohibition CSAM.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
The definitive portrayal of Dr. Frankenstein, of course, is Mary Shelly's novel. Before I respond to this, I am curious whether you (@IGI-111) have read the book, and, in case you have, whether, upon reflection, you think it is accurate to describe Dr. Frankenstein's driving motive as "lust for knowledge".
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, especially focusing on the woke ideology, and how to combat them. The first two chapters were:
- Introduction: Past peak Woke? Don't count on it.
- Say then, my friend... Plato on Democracy and Tyranny
The third chapter is titled Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness.
Preface to Chapter 3
The radical progressive movement in the West today, aka wokeness, bears a striking resemblance to the populist tyrannical regime described by Plato in The Republic. Given that, one would expect wokeness to have more recent historical counterparts as well, and I will argue that it does. This chapter will examine parallels between today's woke movement and the early emergence of three major tyrannical regimes of the 20th century: Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism.
It is not surprising that wokeness looks and feels a good deal like communism -- since it is a common view that wokeness inhabits the far left, and communism is often thought of as the really far left. However, even in light of that, I will attempt to show that the historical parallels between wokeness on the one hand, and the early rise of Chinese and Soviet Communism on the other, run deeper than one might expect. It is perhaps even more surprising, as I will also argue, that many of these parallels also extend to the rise of Nazism -- which is commonly viewed as the opposite of communism, and as an ideology of the "far right". This following chapters will examine historical parallels in the emergence of all four of these ideologies (Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Nazism, and wokeness) along three lines: victim identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
- victim identity politics is a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation.
- authoritarianism is a sense of being entitled to control other people. This sense of entitlement engenders censorship, militance, lawlessness, and arbitrary, intrusive governance -- in particular, the use of government power to harass and silence political opponents.
- extremism is the embrace of policies and values that flagrantly defy reason and common sense.
Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness
(c) Feb 6, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the Lord.
[Proverbs 20:10, KJV]
Diver's weights? Actually here, divers is an archaic spelling of diverse, meaning various and sundry. Of course different things have different weights and measures, but I think what is supposed to count as an abomination is different weights or measures for the same thing.
This phenomenon of diverse weights and diverse measures was brought home to me when -- somewhat to my chagrin, but also as the source of a few valuable life lessons -- I wound up rooming with a pot dealer for a few months when I was in graduate school. To be fair to him, my classified ad didn't specify "no drug dealers please" -- but, to be fair to me, he might have presumed on general principles that could be on my list of concerns, and given me a heads-up to see if it was a deal breaker. In any case, he didn't disclose his profession, and I didn't disclose a preference about that profession, and he moved in.
So one day my drug-dealing roomie has a client over and I am watching the deal happen in the living room. The dealer weighs out however many grams or ounces of pot was asked for, and then the customer pulls out his own scale, weighs the same lot again, and completes the transaction. Why the second weighing? The dealer isn't likely to have a broken scale; he buys and sells for a living. Aha!, I thought: Divers(e) weights and divers(e) measures! Evidently, it is a thing for particularly unscrupulous drug dealers to keep two scales in their pocket: one for buying and another one for selling -- and to pull out whichever one benefits him the most on each given occasion. That is the literal reading of the abomination in question -- though I suspect my pot-slinging roommate could plead ignorance on that score, not having not been much of a Bible reader at that stage of his life. Incidentally as it turns out, he is now, but that's another story.
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I define victim identity politics as a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation. The justification for woke victim politics was famously encapsulated by Ibram X. Kendi:
The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
-- Ibram X. Kendi: How to Be an Antiracist
Here, Kendi is saying that (1) black people have been wrongfully oppressed by white people, in particular in America, throughout much of history, and that (2) the just and effective remedy for this offense is institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks over whites, presumably until the books are balanced. One of those things is true. Kendi's argument seems to be based on a general principle that when one class of people has been systematically wronged by another class, each member of the offending group then owes each member of the offended group preferential treatment and reparations. But in the light of day, this view breaks down for two reasons: first, the woke don't really believe it, and, second, the principle itself is ridiculous.
The more you study it, the more you see that woke identity politics is not about keeping a ledger of historical injustices between groups and trying to balance the books; it is about keeping a ledger of historical injustices committed by groups that oppose the woke agenda, against groups that support the woke agenda, while conveniently ignoring all other patterns of predation and exploitation in the country and around the world. For example, the woke say that America owes blacks reparations for slavery. Maybe She does; around 450,000 blacks were brought to the United States and its original colonies in the Transatlantic slave trade, and their descendants held in bondage until the end of the Civil War in 1866 -- the total evil and suffering of which practice over time defy imagination or calculation. But on the other hand, over 1,000,000 whites were brought to the Mediterranean region in slavery by the Barbary pirates, and their descendants held in bondage until decades after the practice had been abolished in the United States, under circumstances no less brutal and probably worse. We hear indignant outcries by the woke for America to pay reparations to blacks -- but where are the cries for Morocco, Libya, or Turkey to pay reparations to whites and their families for their past enslavement and its deleterious and lasting effects? Of course there aren't any, because (1) the peoples of the Barbary Coast are not political opponents of the woke agenda, (2) group justice for ancient wrongs is a ridiculous idea in the first place, and (3) even if whites asked for reparations for their centuries of brutal oppression under North African slavery, as Thomas Sowell wrote, nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
The woke would argue that, unlike the centuries-long slavery of whites in the Mediterranean, institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the United states is our problem, that it extends into living memory through the end of the Jim Crow era, and that its lasting effects are still felt by blacks today. And every word of that is true -- but if that is an outrage when it happens to some groups, shouldn't it be just as much of an outrage when it happens to others?
The raids of the Barbary pirates happened far away and long ago. But when it comes to alleged injustices by whites against non-whites, the woke certainly don't restrict attention to problems in our own back yard, or to problems that are currently going on. They fill the streets to protest the Israeli occupation of Palestine, wail angrily about the historical colonization of Africa by European powers like Belgium and Holland, and point their fingers over the long-ago British rule of India and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America -- all as if to say, look at all the terrible things white people have done. And they are right: white people have a lot of terrible things -- but so have other people, here in America and all around the world. Do the woke stigmatize the Japanese for their inhuman mistreatment of the people of Nanking and Korea during their subjugation under Hirohito? Do they lambast ethnic Hawaiians for the imperialism, slave driving, and brutality of King Kamehameha -- more recently than the American founding, and right in our own backyard? Are they calling for reparations to the Ute Indians for their epochs of enslavement and exploitation at the hands of the Navajo? And is anyone -- woke, Ute, or otherwise -- wagging their finger at modern day Navajos for those brutal crimes? Not at all. Not a peep. Why not?
Woke activists insist the United States should return the Black Hills region, in which Mount Rushmore is located, to the Sioux Indians -- from whom the United States seized it during the Black Hills War. And maybe we should: the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that the United States owed the Sioux $106 million in return for the wrongful seizure of the Black Hills. But on the other hand, nobody -- neither the woke, nor the Supreme Court, nor anyone else -- is suggesting that the Sioux should pay reparations of any kind to the Cheyanne, who occupied the Black Hills for years before being driven out at the points of Sioux spears. Even the Cheyanne don't push that agenda; if they did, it would loose from Pandora's box the principle that people other than whites can be held individually and collectively responsible for the ancient wrongdoings of others of their race -- and nobody wants that.
To apply the principle of collective guilt to any group other than those targeted by the woke -- whites, and men, and especially white men -- sounds crazy. And it is crazy, but it is not less crazy for one group than it is for another. The fact that it has been normalized in our public conversation to do this selectively to certain groups shows how far down the woke rabbit hole our whole culture has fallen, and how far we have to go to drag ourselves out of it.
The "social justice" crowd claims that (1) blacks are negatively affected by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow even today, and that (2) "systemic" racism continues to subtly permeate the fabric of our institutions, resulting in currents of racial prejudice that blacks must swim against -- and, therefore (3) policies and principles that discriminate against whites are necessary to "level the playing field". Claim #1 is certainly true, and I believe there is a good deal of truth to #2 -- but, again, does the social justice crowd go from #1 and #2 to #3 by the same logic for every group -- or are they pulling out diverse weights and diverse measures as it suits their political purposes?
If historical class maltreatment justifies present class favoritism, as Kendi claims to believe, then no group in modern history has earned it more than the Jews of Europe. If the Jews of Europe are not lagging economically, and are not overrepresented in Europe's prisons and poorhouses, should we conclude it is because, they have entirely escaped the effects of the brutal victimization that was historically aimed at them for thousands of years, to the point of attempted genocide almost within living memory? Or that all remnants of antisemitism have been completely extinguished from our institutional DNA and collective consciousness? Both claims are preposterous. If the Jews of Europe are doing better than the blacks of America, despite millennia of atrocious oppression and widespread lingering animus, it is only because the Jews of Europe do not act like fools as often as the Blacks of America. If blacks deserve officially sanctioned favoritism to level the playing field, on the argument that past discrimination requires it, then the Jews deserve such favoritism as much or mor. Of course that would only put the Jews farther ahead than they already are -- but, after all, a level playing field is a level playing field. Wouldn't the Jews be doing even better on a level playing field -- where they had never been persecuted and marginalized? So if the woke want to level the playing field, and if the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination, where are the strident demands for reparations and affirmative action for Jews?
It seems that a level playing field is not what the woke really want after all. They are often accused instead of chasing the dream of equity, or equal outcomes, defined as equal average levels of success and failure, in all major measures of quality-of-life (educationally, economically, in criminal justice, etc.), for every demographic group. That would explain why they don't support affirmative action for Jews -- and why the remedy for past discrimination against them isn't current discrimination at all. Some of the more extreme SJWs, such as Kamala Harris, even admit to wanting equal outcomes for all groups. But do they really want that? Do they apply the principle of equal outcomes evenhandedly to different demographic groups, for each basic measure of success and quality of life? Or is this another case of diverse weights and measures?
One key demographic group that is woefully lagging in quality of life in America, and falling behind farther with every year, is the largest minority group in the country comprising 49.5% of the population: men. For example, a man in America is around four times more likely than a woman to be sent to prison for a violent felony. (Should we automatically conclude there could be no other reason for this than sexism in the criminal justice system?) Roughly four fifths of all suicides in America are by men, and the rate of suicide among men increased 28% between the years of 2000 and 2021. American men die of drug overdoses at two to three times the rate of women, and almost 70% of homeless people in America are men. Even among those American men who escape catastrophic events like a felony conviction or a fatal overdose, educational and economic attainment among men is in worrisome decline. Only 44% of the students now enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States are men -- 12% less than the figure for women -- and men are falling rapidly further behind in this key measure of achievement and future success. Among adult men in the US, the percentage who are not working and not looking for work increased 3-fold (from 4% to 12%) between 1960 and 2010 and continues to grow. A tiny handful of the growing cohort of non-working men are independently wealthy -- but the vast majority are either sponging off of their wife or girlfriend, living on handouts from of the state, panhandling and hustling to get by as homeless addicts, or making their living through some form of organized crime. Twelve percent of all adult men in America now fit that description -- roughly the same proportion of men that earn graduate degrees, while two thirds of graduate degrees now go to women. To put that a different way, a man in America today is only half as likely as a woman to get a graduate degree, and is as likely to be an indigent or dependent as he is to get that graduate degree. In summary, men have disproportionately bad outcomes in several major areas of life, and they are falling farther behind in these areas by the year.
If you have been paying attention to the political discourse of the times, you may have heard statistics like these about the plight of men in America. But even if you have heard of these gloomy trends and disparities, you will have rarely if ever heard calls for pro-male affirmative action to remedy them, or seen women blamed for them wholesale as a class -- especially by woke SJW's. If the woke want what they say they want and think what they say they think, reverse discrimination and narratives of class exploitation should be right up their ally. But in the case of men, what happened to equal outcomes? and what happened to class exploitation as the explanation for group differences in outcomes? And if not equal outcomes and class oppression, what the Hell happened to leveling the playing field?
So let's summarize. The woke agenda is to balance the books of historical class oppression -- but only to examine the entries in the entries in those books where white men did something wrong. And they want to level the playing field -- except that they are fine to leave it tilted against groups that are succeeding on their own merit. And they want the same outcomes for every group -- and to impose quotas, regulations, and subsidies to bring about equal outcomes for all groups -- except for a striking lack of interest in any program or policy that would help men catch up to women in major areas of quality-of-life such as education, housing, and mental health. Make sense?
Cui bono?
The woke ideology's ideology does make sense if you watch what they do instead of listening to what they say. What is going on is that the aim of leveling the playing field, and the narrative of class exploitation as the automatic explanation for why some groups outperform others, and even the quest for equal outcomes by group, were all lies in the first place. The pattern of which groups are demonized by the radical left and targeted for group guilt, and which group disparities and trends the woke crusade to fix with affirmative action and reparations, are as clear as the pattern of which crooked scale a drug dealer chooses to weigh out his pot, depending on whether he is buying or selling: it is a matter of cui bono.
The table below shows the political leanings of several major demographic groups in the United States, according to Pew Research polls conducted in 2024 [source1, source2]. The number in the right-hand column is the percentage who described themselves as leaning Democrat, minus the percentage who described themselves as leaning Republican -- so the higher the number, the greater the number of self-described Democrats in the group. The groups appear in the table from top to bottom, ranked by their affinity toward the Democratic party.
- black women: +74
- gay women: +71
- black men: +66
- gay men: +66
- Hispanic women: +28
- Hispanic men: +22
- white women: +10
- white men: -21
Whaddayaknow? If you only looked at the left hand column, you might think this was a chart of the woke victim status hierarchy from top to bottom. There are two salient explanations of what could be going on here. The woke explanation would be that America is institutionally rigged to favor the groups at the bottom, and the Democrats are the ones who are trying to level the playing field -- so of course the groups at the bottom, who don't want the playing field leveled, tend more to vote Republican. If it were remotely true that Democrats wanted to level the playing field, that might be plausible -- but I believe there is a simpler explanation that fits more of the facts. Like Plato's drones buzzing around the bema, the radical left wants to silence and marginalize its political opponents, whose identities fit the pattern in the table above, and part of the plan is to demonize them as historical class oppressors.
As an experiment to test this, you could ask what would happen if Latino men began voting Republican in larger numbers. My theory suggests that, since selectively enforced class-guilt narratives are a propaganda tool of the woke, we would see a sudden wellspring of woke narratives about Latinos as class oppressors. But that experiment has already been run. Over the course of the last several years, Latinos began moving to the right politically source, to the point that almost half voted for Trump in 2024. Now Google "racism against Latinos" on the one hand, and "Latino white supremacist" on the other, and check the dates and sources on the top twenty articles for both searches. It seems that Latinos were once portrayed copiously in woke outlets as historical class victims -- until around 2023 when stories began to emerge of a nefarious white supremacy movement in the Latino community. So, either Latinos began flocking to the Republican party because they shifted toward white supremacy, around the same time left-leaning pundits came to their senses and realized Latinos had never been class victims in the first place, or the woke propaganda machine began to pump out articles about Latino white supremacy to marginalize that group as soon as they began voting more like white men. You make the call.
It is often said that the woke ideology is unforgiving. That is said with good reason: people have been cancelled by the woke left, for example, for years-old drunken social media posts, that were objectively inoffensive in the light of reason, and that were inside the window of acceptability at the time they were made. People have even been cancelled for liking such posts -- and in England some have been arrested. And that is pretty unforgiving. But, on the other hand, senator Roberd Byrd was literally an officer of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth (an Exalted Cyclops, no less!), and he was never cancelled for that. At the time of Byrd's death, he was a powerbroker in the national politics of the Democratic party and a dependable supporter of the Democratic agenda (the latter of which was no change; the Klan has always been dominated by Democrats). At his funeral, Byrd was lovingly eulogized by Democrats including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor Joe Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Representative Nick Rahall, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and former president Bill Clinton. So they aren't that unforgiving after all -- as long as you are squarely on their team. Diverse weights and diverse measures.
There is a second, less subtle reason whites would naturally appear at the bottom of the woke caste hierarchy. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to form a political movement -- not for the purpose of achieving any real aim of social justice, but just to plunder the wealth of an opportunistically selected class of people through the apparatus of the state. Who would be the most natural targets of such a scheme? the same as the natural targets for any other sort of robbery: the ones with the most money. This pattern dates back to the time of Plato, as he noted:
Then there is another class which is always being severed from the mass. They are the orderly class, which in a nation of traders sure to be the richest. They are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones.
-- Plato: The Republic, Book VIII
The pattern has repeated itself with the targeting of industrialists, aristocrats, and land-owning farmers (the "bourgeoisie") in the communist revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia, to name a few -- and with the targeting of Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Igbos in Nigeria, and Christians in Lebanon to name a few more. In every case named here, and many others not named, a disproportionately successful demographic group was demonized as a historical exploiter class and targeted for persecution and plunder, ending in tyranny, and in several cases genocide. Some of these groups, without a doubt, had histories of predatory exploitation of their countrymen -- and some of them, without a doubt, did not. But in no case did the persecution and plunder solve the problems of the alleged victim classes that perpetrated them. In each case, on the contrary, it affected a catastrophe for everyone involved. It turns out that the alleged historical exploiter class, even when it actually is exploitative, is almost never the problem at the root of lagging outcomes for less fortunate groups.
The final reason why whites would find their place at the bottom of the woke caste system is the simplest of all. Whether the targets are whites, or Jews, or aristocrats, or industrialists, or Tutsis, or Tamils, or Igbos, or somebody else, when people are hurting and hungry, it is easy to get them to hate others who have more than them, to churn this hatred into an ideology, and then to mill that ideology into a political regime. That is the nature of the game of modern-day tyranny -- from Mugabe to Khomeini, from Lenin to Hitler, and in scores of other cases. Many of the class-exploitation narratives leveraged by tyrannical regimes of the 20th century had truth to them; some had smaller threads of truth, and some were utter fabrications. But no good came of the victim identity politics in any case; it is a murderous plague, plain and simple. There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, remembering who did what to whom with an eye toward preventing it from happening again, and, on the other hand, saying, "...so let's do it back to them." Doing it back to them is the message Xendi expressed with such force and poetry, and his expression of that message -- the toxic, two-faced message of modern tyranny -- is the reason he has been elevated as a spokesman for the woke movement.
Conclusion
It is a natural question why, if wokeness functions largely a pretext for class warfare to demonize white people and redistribute their wealth, so many college-educated whites have nonetheless become infected with the woke mind virus. I will return to this question in detail in a later chapter, but the basic answer is that, in a tragedy of commons orchestrated by the woke censorship-indoctrination complex, it behooves them as individuals to be part of the problem in the large -- something like it behooved Uncle Tom. Doesn't it behoove you, at the very least to play along and keep your mouth shut? Playing along and keeping your mouth shut under tyranny is what Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, in his book The Captive Mind, called ketman. Ketman is a dangerous game: you can only pretend to be something for so long, before you start to become what you pretend to be. Even if you continue to secretly and silently resist being changed by one-sided propaganda pouring out of our major institutions, the young people around you, who only hear one side of the argument voiced by authority figures in public, will presume that side is just and right, and that it is an offense to their community to question or deviate from it. Our cowering in silence, even in silent resistance, explains why our children are getting away from us.
The following chapters will discuss victim identity politics under Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong.
This is a good question.
If inductive reasoning is valid why can't we go from "all observed masses follow Newton's law" to "therefore all masses follow Newton's law."?
I think this puts the burden of proof in a strange place. The question is always why should we be able to make the inference, and according to what articulable rule of inference. But I will pick up the burden of proof and try to explain why we can't make that inference from all observed P are Q* to all P are Q, using the Raven Paradox.
Imagine that I see a few crows and note that they are all black, and I form the hypothesis that all crows are black. I begin to seriously pursue the matter by looking for crows, counting them, and noting their color. How many crows would I need to see, all of which are black, before I can conclude that all crows are black, or, more conservatively, that probably (more than 50% likely) all crows are black? Pick a number you think is reasonable. I'll say a hundred thousand; that sounds conservative.
Now the following is a theorem of first order logic: (for all x, P(x) => Q(x)) <=> (for all x, -Q(x) => -P(x)). Or to instantiate the symbols, all crows are black is equivalent to everything that is not black is not a crow. One way to see that that is a theorem is to see that whichever form you consider, a counterexample would consist of a crow that is not black.
But now the alternative formulation gives me an idea. It's not that easy to find crows, but it's really easy to find things that aren't black. Now there are about 150 million blades of grass in an acre of land, so I can go into my 1/8 acre back yard and find about 19 million non-black things (namely, blades of grass) that are not crows. That's waaaaay over what seemed like a reasonable threshold to establish that probably, everything that is not black is not a crow, which is logically equivalent to all crows are black. Hypothesis confirmed!
But seriously, can I prove that probably most crows are black -- let alone that definitely all crows are black -- by looking at blades of grass in my back yard? of course not. So that shows that this reasoning is not valid, even if some forms of inductive reasoning are:
If inductive reasoning is valid why can't we go from "all observed masses follow Newton's law" to "therefore all masses follow Newton's law."?
I won't spoil the fun by resolving the paradox for you. Unless want me to.
Kendi clearly retracts “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,”, but this is in the context discussing the crazy idea that white people are literally aliens from another planet. In the book, he recounts his friend Clarence pushing back against that:
“Answer me this: If Whites are aliens, why is it that Whites and Blacks can reproduce? Humans can’t reproduce with animals on this planet, but Black people can reproduce with alien from another planet? Come on, man, let’s get real.
and then, in the next paragraph, says he was wrong to think whites are a "different breed of humans". Ok, Kendi believes white people are homo sapiens; that's a relief. The rest of the paragraph could be read as backtracking substantial parts of the 2003 article, but it doesn't do that explicitly. Maybe he retracts it more strongly somewhere else, but if this is all there is, my guess is that he doesn't really want to distance himself from it, but has realized he was talking like a Nazi and wants to manufacture plausible deniability. If I had once said what he said, and wanted to retract it, I'd be pretty clear about it. Is this quote the best there is, to your knowledge?
NelsonRushton
5mo ago
I'm rather sure that Trump's victory last year is by far not the first setback of wokeness in the US, and arguably not the biggest either.
I'm curious what your top three candidates would be.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
What's silly is the idea that my judgment today of has to be based on what people thought in a different century... They [majorities] do [decide morality]. And the majority now has decided that slavery was pretty awful.
Let me see if I understand correctly. Do you affirm the following?
- Proposition A: Slavery was immoral in 1700, because a majority of people in 2023 believe it was, regardless of what a majority of people in 1700 thought.
If so, why is that true but not this:
- Proposition B: Slavery is morally permissible in 2023, because a majority of people in 1700 believed it is, regardless of what a majority of people in 2023 think.
For example, is it because 2023 comes after 1700? Or because we are having the conversation in 2023? Or for some other reason?
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
Ideally they would be welcome in a muslim country. They could go to Egypt. No wait Egypt has a fortified barrier with Gaza -- more heavily fortified than their border with Israel -- to keep them out of Egypt. They could immigrate to Lebanon. No wait they were kicked out of Lebanon for inciting terrorism. They could go to Jordan. No wait they were kicked out of Jordan for inciting terrorism. Maybe they could to Kuwait. No wait they were kicked out of Kuwait for inciting terrorism. I'd say they can go to hell but they would probably be kicked out of there too.
While it is true that Dr. Frankenstein wanted to know something, I think to state that as his motive, and leave it at that, leaves out what is most essential. I submit that Victor Frankenstein has more in common with Faust, or Elric of Melniboné than he does with, say, Paul Erdos, or Thomas Edison (doesn't it feel so?). Like Faust and Elric, but unlike Erdos or Edison, Dr. Frankenstein commits copious moral transgressions in the service of his compulsive quest (e.g., desecrating dead bodies, theft, vivisection). In his effort to cross certain boundaries as a far term objective, he crosses boundaries that he knows, or ought now, should not be crossed in the here and now. He could have violated those boundaries in a quest for knowledge, or, like Elric or Gilgamesh, in a quest for something else. So, I think Frankenstein's quest for knowledge is relatively incidental while his quest by forbidden means, for what he ought to know is within the exclusive dominion of the gods is essential. Like Prometheus.
If this analogy [I presume you mean the analogy between the trans-mania and Frankenstein] has any legs, it has to be about the desire to see if man can be turned into woman and vice versa, about transhumanism and the escape from the binding of natural laws without regard for prevailing morality... Not the petty bureaucratic impulse of classification and normalization that moves Canada as a nation and its managerial ilk today, which itself is justified by conforming to a morality, not disregard for it.
From this I suspect one difference between you and me is that I believe Dr. Frankenstein -- along with Faust, and Elric, and the trans-mutilators -- are recklessly crosswise of morality plain and simple, not merely "prevailing" morality. They all lie to themselves to justify the intoxicating ecstasy of crossing boundaries, and seeming, for the time being, to get away with it. Like Prometheus.
So, to be clear, this is the strongest retraction of the 2003 article he makes, to your knowledge?
You wrote:
setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.
My standards came from the expectations I had based your description:
Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views.
NelsonRushton
9mo ago
If you shoot someone in the head at close r
Amen. No damn way a 7.62x51 rifle round (what the Israeli's use, comparable to a .308 Winchester) fails to exit a human skull.
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
Do you believe in the symmetry of C/D? Or do you believe 300 years ago fire really was phlogiston?
I believe that combustion consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston. I assume you do too. The next question is why this is true. Do you believe that this is true because (1) a majority of people in 2023 believe it is true, or because (2) regardless of what a majority of people believe, combustion actually consumes oxygen as opposed to liberating phlogiston?
They do care about the lives of black people. But they also care about not being seen to be racist and paternalistic to black communities. So they will defer solutions and conversations in that space to black people. White people telling black people that black on black crime is a problem absolutely stinks of neo-colonialism to progressives.
I can't tell whether you are saying that (A) this is what's going through their woke minds, or (B) this response has objective merit, so I will respond to both.
Regarding (A):
Telling blacks what what their problems are and how to solve them is the modus operandi of white radical progressives. "When a basic definition of each policy was provided [to 1300 blacks polled], 79% of Black parents supported vouchers, 74% supported charter schools, and 78% supported open enrollment." [source], but Democrats oppose school choice, and oppose it more the more woke they are, saying that they hurt black students [for example here]. Thomas Sowell's book Charter Schools and their Enemies establishes this pattern on charter schools beyond reasonable doubt IMO. I submit this is representative of the bigger picture of white progressives shoving problems and solutions down the throats of the black population. Progs claim that climate change disproportionately impacts disaffected minorities and push for "climate justice"; disaffected minorities want cheaper power bills and don't give an ass rats about climate change. This phenomenon also extends to the issue at hand. "Among those polled, 47% [of black Democrats] say federal budget spending should be “increased a lot” to deal with crime, compared to just 17% of white Democrats" source. It's disproportionately white woke liberals who call to defund the police on behalf of blacks, not blacks who want it.
Regarding (B):
The truth? There is no "black community". There is a shared community in which murder rates are skyrocketing, and skyrocketing disproportionately for our black neighbors -- and sitting on your hands about it because it is "their problem" and not "our problem" is depraved.
Aside from a few outspoken radicals, most blacks want more funding for the police, and almost half of them want "a lot more" (see above). So how, again, are white college girls holding up signs to "defund the police" because "black lives matter" not telling blacks how to solve their problems?
NelsonRushton
1yr ago
The big media outlets don't seem to be interested in this story. Maybe that is because they are controlled by a Jewish syndicate, or maybe it is because it isn't a big deal. I go with "isn't a big deal". If they were conspiring to break the law that would be a big deal; if they were conspiring to change the law it would be at least interesting -- but what is happening here is that they are "conspiring" to enforce the law -- which they would already be enforcing, with prejudice, if a group on the other side were doing the same thing. So, so what?
I would like to understand the pro-Israel position better
Coleman Hughes puts the case for the Israel beautifully in this 2 minute video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZloHekt7WLo
I don't think the Israel-Palestine conflict can be understood without considering the facts that (1) Hamas, and the Palestinian people in aggregate, are strategically committed to genocide against the Jewish people, and (2) Hamas, with the enthusiastic support of the Palestinian people, deliberately embeds themselves into the civilian population in such a way that their operatives cannot be brought to justice for acts of terror without high civilian casualties. If you don't believe those two things, then the occupation looks unjust, and the Palestinian civilian casualties like a moral outrage that can be blamed on Israel. If you do believe those things, then Israel is taking just and necessary steps to defend themselves, and the Palestinian civilian casualties look like a moral outrage that can be blamed on Hamas. By analogy, suppose someone broke into my house and started killing members of my family, and he was holding his 1-year-old daughter in front of his chest as a human shield; I take a shot and accidentally hit the girl. The death of that child is his fault, not mine. In a similar case where his daughter is 10 years old and is deliberately acting as a human shield for him as he continues to stab members of my family, her death on him and her, but not me.
My opinion is that Israel has the right to defend itself by waging war against Hamas -- and also that, since Israel has overwhelming military superiority, they have an obligation to do this with the lightest touch they safely afford to. But Oct. 7 showed that Israel has heretofore been applying a lighter touch than they can safely afford to -- and so a heavier touch, so to speak, is called for. This "heavier touch" means that thousands of Palestinians will be killed, some of whom are completely innocent -- and the blame for that catastrophe lies entirely with Hamas and their civilian collaborators.
The objective of genocide against the Jews is stated in Hamas's 1988 charter. In the early 2000's, the ruling party of Palestine was Fatah, a terrorist organization. Before the 2006 elections, Fatah renounced terrorism as a tactic, but Hamas did not. Subsequently, Hamas became more popular and they won 74 seats in Palestinian parliament, a majority, compared with Fatah's 45. Since then, Hamas has controlled the schools and media in Gaza and the Palestinian population has become even more fanatical in their genocidal hatred of Israel. The analogous situation in the US would be if the KKK and the Aryan Brotherhood were the two major political parties, the KKK renounced terrorism, and as a result the AB pulled ahead in the polls and won majorities in both houses. But it is still not analogous because the AB doesn't strategically target black noncombatants. Hamas is morally worse than the KKK and the AB; they are more comparable to the Nazis, but they have much broader public support in their home country. They even use the same pretext as the Nazis: those people perpetrated a grievous historical wrong against us, and so we want them all dead, whether they individually had a hand in the alleged wrong or not.
If you are continuously denied justice in an existential matter, though, I don't think it's at all an alien viewpoint that you are morally entitled to do whatever you find appropriate to seize justice for yourself,
In the abstract, this is the case for Palestine. If you look at it in the abstract and in a vacuum, it makes sense, but I don't think we should look at it in the abstract and a vacuum. Instead, we should compare the response of the Palestinians to the way they have been treated to the responses of other groups who have been treated badly. We didn't see this kind of terrorism from the counties occupied by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Are the Palestinians being treated worse than the Ukrainians were in the Holodomor? (Hell no) Ukraine's ancestral homeland was occupied, and, unlike the Palestinians, they were really targeted for genocide. We didn't see this behavior from 1st Century Christians in the Roman Empire (who, in the latter case, were really targeted for genocide). We don't see it by Armenians against Azerbaijan, we didn't see it when France and Poland were occupied by Germany; We don't see it from the Comanches or the Sioux today; etc., etc., etc.
When somebody says, "how would you feel if...", the very fact that they have to make up this hypothetical means that they cannot think of a historical example of a morally justified campaign of terror against a civilian population by an allegedly oppressed civilization. And the reason there are no examples is that in the real world, civilized people do not respond to oppression with campaigns of murder of civilians on the other side. In a hypothetical, you might imagine that they do, or that you would -- but they don't and you wouldn't.
If you want to argue in the direction that my historical examples above aren't comparable to the Palestinian case, then that itself demonstrates that you cannot make a moral case for Hamas. If you wanted to (validly) argue that the Palestinian response is moral, you would have to either (1) assert that the Palestinians have gotten shafted worse than any other group in history ever has, or (2) point to historical examples of morally justified campaigns of homicide against civilians, morally comparable to that of Hamas in terms of their justification and methods (e.g., in their use of human shields, the degree to which they preferentially target civilians, and their stated objective of genocide). You might argue, for example, that (A) IRA terrorism is or was morally justified, and that (B) the tactics of the IRA are morally comparable to those of Hamas. Or you might argue that the French Underground in WWII was comparable to Hamas in their justification and in their tactics. Would you make one of those arguments, or any other such argument based on a historical example rather than a hypothetical or an abstraction? You have all of recorded history to choose from.
Corrected this to "What it did accomplish was to murder 25 million Russian people, plus or minus 15 million,". 25 million seems to be the midpoint of the mainstream scholarly estimates, with a low of around 10 and a high of around 40, according to Wikipedia.
Personally, I find R.J. Rummel credible, and he put the Soviet number at 60 million in his book Death by Government [source], which in my opinion justifies my original claim of 40 million plus or minus 20 -- but you reminded me that I should use more conservative numbers, lest someone be tempted to pick nits as an excuse to ignore the spirit of the argument. They will probably find another excuse anyway, but I want to do due diligence.
Currently, I do think it's a nitpick to insist that "Russian" means "ethnically Russian", but I will check with my Russian friends and see what they think.
Update: One of my Russian friends responds as follows:
I don’t see why it’s inaccurate to use the term “Russian” since colloquially it meant “anyone who lived under the Soviet regime”.
Thanks for the correction.
Grandmother, What big teeth you have!
Part 2: Censorship in the Soviet Union
(Note: This continues an earlier post on how Russian intellectuals failed to foresee the brutality of the Soviet communist regime, and discussing certain hallmarks that tyrannical ideologies tend to display, even in their early stages.)
Plato wrote 2500 years ago that when a society ceases to honor virtue, that society is ripe for descent into tyranny. The emerging tyrannical ideology, he wrote, will be advanced by a coalition of drones -- those who do no useful work -- consisting of three separate factions: bureaucrats, criminals, and those who live on handouts [The Republic, VIII]. As they gather power on the road to tyrannical rule, one of the first things the drones begin to do, according to Plato, is to try and silence the speech of their political opponents:
While the keener sort [of drones] speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema [public speech platform] and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side [The Republic, VIII].
Plato’s observation has proven to be prescient: tyrannical regimes have often attempted to silence their political opponents through intimidation and harassment, even before they gained the political power enact legal censorship. The Nazis, for example, while they may have been on the other side of the political spectrum from Plato's archetypal tyrant, began employing such tactics long before they officially came to power in 1933. Indeed, before Nazis were even a viable political force at all, Nazi paramilitary thugs -- "Brownshirts" or "Stormtroopers" -- began harassing attendees and speakers at political gatherings opposed to Naziism.
To be fair, Marxist agitators tried to harass Nazis at their political events as well, and one of the functions of the Brownshirts was to prevent that; and if that was all the Brownshirts had done, they would not have foreshadowed the monstrous tyranny that German Naziism was to become. If you had lived in Germany in 1925 and had been wondering what the Nazis might do if they came to power, one clue would have been their attempts to suppress opposing political speech. Another would be their militant identity politics: advocating discrimination and collective punishment against an alleged historical exploiter class (viz., the Jews). Soviet communism, like Naziism, bore these hallmarks of tyranny early in its emergence, long before the Bolsheviks formed their dictatorial regime. In a previous post I discussed the role of identity politics in the early rise of Soviet communism. This article will discuss the phenomenon of Soviet censorship, which emerged early on in subtle forms, and then unfolded with ever-growing virulence as the ideology rose to power — and which bears a striking resemblance to the cancel culture and censoriousness of today’s woke ideology.
Censorship in the Early Bolshevik Movement
Before October of 1917, the Bolshevik party in Russia was not in a position to censor anything. Indeed, before 1905 the Bolshevik party was not in a position of sufficient power to realistically dream of censoring anything. Yet, even at that time, while giving some lip service to freedom of the press (which he would later revoke), Lenin was advocating strict, top-down orthodoxy and cancel culture within his sphere of control, which at that time consisted of the party itself:
Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. The party is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views. [Lenin (1905): "Party Organisation and Party Literature"]
On one hand this passage may seem innocuous: any organization is entitled to reject, or eject, would-be members who are working against the goals of the organization -- and the goal of the Bolshevik party was an ideological one. On the other hand, for example, even if you think of Donald Trump, or, respectively, Joe Biden, as a despot of some kind, I submit that it would be a bit jarring to hear either one of them speak publicly in the language of cleansing their ranks of anti-party views. It is one thing to say that someone is working toward goals that are inconsistent with those of an organization and is therefore unwelcome in it; it is another thing to label this as a cleansing -- as if anyone who departs from the party line is filth.
Moreover, recall that Lenin did not countenance deviation from (his version of) socialist ideology in the slightest degree [Lenin (1902): "What is to be done?"]. Correspondingly, he writes that there should be no independent press within the socialist movement, but that the only socialist literature should be official party literature:
All Social-Democratic literature must become Party literature. Every newspaper, journal, publishing house, etc., must immediately set about reorganizing its work, leading up to a situation in which it will, in one form or another, be integrated into one Party organization or another. [Lenin (1905): "Party Organization and Party Literature"]
We see that the idea of ideological purity -- intolerant of any deviation and enforced from the top down -- was already present in Lenin's public writing in 1905. In this early stage, Lenin was not yet advocating official government censorship [Kenez (1981): "Lenin and the Freedom of the Press"]. However, by 1917, on the eve of the Bolshevik coup d'etat, Lenin reversed the lip service he had previously given to freedom of the press -- on the grounds that government non-interference merely sets the stage for the spread of misinformation:
The capitalists (and many SRs and Mensheviks following them either through misunderstanding or inertia) call freedom of the press that situation in which censorship is abolished and all parties freely publish any paper they please. In reality this is not freedom of the press, but freedom for the rich, for the bourgeoisie to mislead the oppressed and exploited masses. [Lenin (1917): How to Guarantee the Success of the Constituent Assembly]
As soon as the Bolsheviks seized power October 1917, one of their first actions was to systematically confiscate the presses of major opposing newspapers. Within a year, only one point of view was to be seen in the Russian press -- and within a few years practically every newspaper, theater, and publishing house in the former Russian Empire was under strict supervision, if not direct control, of the Soviet government. All to protect the victims of historical class oppression from misinformation by historical class exploiters and their hangers-on. Of course.
The Blooming of Lenin's Tyranny
Before coming to power in 1917, Lenin had lived through Tsarist censorship and wartime censorship in Russia -- both of which had been applied to his own writing -- in addition to a period of relative freedom of the press, which occurred in the roughly ten-year span between the fall of the Tsar and the entry of Russian into World War I. Having tasted from both wells, Lenin's response could have been to dedicate himself to fighting against censorship and authoritarianism of all kinds. It wasn't.
Decades earlier, Karl Marx had written that the working class, when they had grown sick enough of being oppressed by their employers, would spontaneously revolt and seize power, forming a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with no official government. These ideals of spontaneous working-class revolution and stateless society were fundamental to Marxism, and Lenin opposed them so staunchly that he could not rightly be called a Marxist. Hence, we have the term Marxist-Leninist for the political philosophy of Lenin and his followers in the early Soviet Union. In contrast to Marx, Lenin wrote that the working class would never spontaneously revolt against the foundations of capitalism, but instead would merely try to strike a better deal with their employers though collective bargaining and moderate government regulation. He believed, therefore, that the working class would have to be guided from without, so to speak, by forceful intellectual and political leaders:
We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals...
To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, ... Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. [Lenin (1902): What is to be done?]
Reading Lenin's words in 1902, one might have wondered how, exactly, the working class was to be "brought under the wing of the socialist party", and induced not to "turn aside from it [Marxist-Leninist ideology] in the slightest degree". Could Lenin have meant that the people just need a good talking to, in order to achieve and maintain ideological purity? In hindsight we know that is not what he meant by any means, but we also know that many people -- even within the party and sympathetic to it -- were blindsided by murderous brutality of the regime that would emerge from the Bolshevik Revolution. I submit that the signs they missed included Lenin's contemptuous intellectual elitism, his sense of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed (under the wing), and his militant intolerance of opposing ideas even before he had the power to legally censor them. Sound familiar?
Ideologically speaking, Lenin pivoted away from Marx's notion of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", and towards a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat, but directed by the communist government, led by himself. In case one wondered what Lenin meant by dictatorship, he would soon make that quite clear: "dictatorship means unlimited power based on force" [Lenin (1906): The Victory of the Cadets]. In theory, practically unlimited power might be used exclusively for kind and helpful purposes: to fight injustice, and rescue the oppressed from their oppressors, like Superman and the Fantastic Four. That is the way Lenin talked about using his power before he got it, but people who strive for power sometimes do not to use it the way they say they are going to. Those who champion a narrative of militant identity politics -- that is, collective punishment of historical class oppressors -- are particularly likely to bloom into tyrants as they gather power. If, in addition, they have a strong impulse to control what other people are allowed to say and write, then it is practically a theorem that they will abuse whatever political power they eventually get their hands on.
So while Newton's L.O.G. is just a guess from an epistemological standpoint, I am also tentatively accepting it as true. I claim it really is true, and I act upon that belief, although my belief in that is just a guess. Does that satisfy what you felt was missing from my position?
The difference I was trying to elucidate with the missile defense system example was a difference in the degree of confidence you would have between two theories A and B, both of which have been tested, neither of which has been disconfirmed, but one of which has been tested more thoroughly (or, for whatever reason, you have more confidence in). The crucial issue is a difference in degrees of confidence (or what Popper called degree of corroboration) between two hypotheses, neither of which has been falsified.
The hypothesis that has passed its tests I can tentatively accept as true, and I prefer the course of action based on that hypothesis. If both hypotheses have passed all their tests, I would try to conceive of a test that distinguishes between them
This is not the situation I was describing. In the hypothetical, the two laws are in different domains (gravity vs. quantum computing), possibly for different purposes (say, missile defence vs. airplane autopilot) and one is better established (or better corroborated) than the other.
Nice thesis statement.
What I would be interested to see is evidence in the sacred texts of other religions, or in the histories of other tribes, of humble laments of the sort found in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah -- in contrast with the "them's the breaks" tone of the pagan texts, or the "we got stabbed in the back by vermin within and without" tone of Mein Kampf. Of course I haven't read every mythological treatise of every world religion, so maybe you can teach me something.
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