January 7, 2024 Elites & Democracy Luke Ford No sacred cows.

Elites & Democracy

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes a chapter called “Carl Friedrich and the Cancellation of Pareto” in the 2023 book, Vilfredo Pareto’s Contributions to Modern Social Theory: A Centennial Appraisal:

* What makes Friedrich of special interest is not only the texts but also the role he and his thought played in forming the self-conception of Harvard faculty and leadership as it emerged during the late Roosevelt administration and World War II as the academic arm of the federal government, where it played the role of an elite and as the academic wing of the national elite. Friedrich was a member, by any standard, of the elite, both German and American. Moreover, he was a major participant in the successful political Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grab for World Power) of Harvard during the period from the mid-1930s, when Harvard celebrated its tercentenary by inviting scholars from all over the world, to the 1960s, when the Kennedy Presidency was dominated by the “thought brigade” (Stuart 1963), overwhelmingly from Harvard. His comments on elites were therefore descriptions and implicit justifications of his own status-or denials of it. This lends his texts and thoughts a special historical interest, notably in relation to Pareto’s own account of elites, and points to reasons to be cautious in interpreting them.
The temporal background of the rise of this new elite is important. Bronislaw Malinowski confided in an unpublished text written shortly after the First World War that “the basic principle of democracy as we find it now is wrong [ and] hence real advance lies in government by detached experts” (quoted in Coleman 2021, p. 99). This was a common perception at the time, promoted in the American public sphere by Walter Lippman. It came to be combined, in the 1930s, with the enthusiasm from intellectuals for the expansion of state power and liberation from a strict interpretation of the constitution under Roosevelt, his “brains trust,” and the expansion of federal regulatory agencies with expert leaders. These were developments the Harvard community generally applauded, and in some key cases, such as the appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, participated in. But they often did so by treating these developments not as anti-democratic but as the fulfillment of genuine democracy. Friedrich’s writings of the period and indeed throughout his career reflected this climate of opinion, as well as his active membership in this group.
Nor was Friedrich’s role merely intellectual. Not only was Friedrich a prominent figure in the movement to involve the US in the European war, which characterized itself as defending democracy, he played a prominent role in Harvard’s participation in the war effort, especially in the training of officers for the expected occupation, along with Talcott Parsons who used this role as a way of expanding his own power…
“Hitler’s rule was legal, but it was not legitimate; it had a basis in law, but not in right and justice.”
* Pareto was an elitist and therefore anti-democratic, whereas Friedrich defended democratic institutions; Friedrich embraced Kantianism and genuine authority, whereas Pareto ridiculed doctrines, especially Kantianism and Natural Law, that embraced the idea of genuine authority rooted in reason; Friedrich had a rich and humane Kantian view of reason, which included values, whereas Pareto had an odd and narrow view of logical action and scientific method that excluded the rationality of values and exposed their emotional basis and was therefore a form of irrationalism. Friedrich was open and honest, as shown by his various public confessions, while Pareto was disingenuous, elusive, and cynical, as shown by the contradictory and opaque character of his political statements; Friedrich embraced the idea of representation, whereas Pareto dismissed it as “poppycock”; Pareto believed in the inevitability of the rule of the few based on his account of history, whereas Friedrich affirmed the possibility of a future politics of a different more egalitarian kind; Pareto regarded the law as an instrument in the hands of the powerful, whereas Friedrich granted it an intrinsic purposiveness and rationality apart from the aims of its creators; Friedrich believed in universality, emancipation, and the power of reason to bring them about, whereas Pareto celebrated the dark, irrational, and particularistic side of humanity; for Pareto, bureaucracy was a stage of elite decadence, whereas for Friedrich, bureaucracy represented reason itself. The summary is this: Pareto was a Machiavellian who saw ancient and modem regimes as all governed by the rule of the few and their underlying power motivations and regarded this not only as unavoidable but good; Friedrich celebrated the modem state and the superior rationality of its bureaucratic and representative institutions governed by the rule of law and looked forward to more political equality.
* when one encounters an ideology, look for the underlying sentiments and at the group which shares them.
* Pareto is closer to Freud or Jung: he categorizes a long list of residues, or sentiments, drawn from the historical and anthropological literature with an eye toward finding the common features among superficially different ones, with the aim of identifying and grouping them into a systematic classification scheme. He treated the ideologies that derived from these sentiments as more variable responses to transient situations and treated political structures as even more variable results of sentiments and ideologies. This conflicted with the holistic, relativistic view of culture that became fashionable in the interwar period: for Pareto, residues were fundamental and persisted, ideologies and explicit cultural beliefs-that is to say “reasons” other than those of science-were transient and derivative.
* “through the dexterous use of such ambiguous terms as ‘functional’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘realistic’, ‘progressive’, [Carl Friedrich] invests the American ideal of democracy, equality and freedom, with a content which reduces the role of the common man to his status in medieval times.”
* Kantian reason was prone to slipping into overt authoritarianism in the name of reason.
* These governing classes tended to be overthrown; in time, they came to be populated by people he likened to foxes, people who mastered the art of getting their way without force. They lacked, however, the talent and capacity to defend themselves or their rule with force. The people who overthrew and replaced them had those talents. He likened them to lions. History was a graveyard of elites. Through the process of succession, one elite replaced another.1 An elite could prolong its rule by co optation, bringing forceful types into the ruling class. But there was a tendency for this not to happen and for the lions to replace the old governing class. Both were examples of “circulation.” The governing classes did indeed have special talents and capacities. But the capacities of foxes were different from those of lions (Pareto [1935] 1963, vol. IV, §2178, pp. 1515-1516). The theory implied that the governing class would become corrupt and be replaced if they were not open to outside talent of a different kind, which would have to, by definition, come from outside the governing class. Normally, the governing class became closed, fox-like, and vulnerable to challenge from below.
* Lincoln was an outsider to the foxes who dominated late antebellum American politics and had failed to solve the slavery question. He came with a following that transformed the federal system after his death-a transformation carried out not by the foxes but by the pride of lions who had risen to prominence through their military service in the Civil War and the radical Republicans, who took over and expanded the Federal government-only to be themselves followed by foxes.
* A sovereign or parliament “occupies the stage. But behind the scenes there are always people who play a very important role in actual government.”
* Bureaucrats operated in this way. They were the ones who carried out the law by taking “measures,” a concept Friedrich emphasized, in contrast to legislation, as the place where governance happens. They did so with discretionary power, which he also emphasized, but always with a sense of the limits imposed by the potential reactions of others. The picture we get is this: politicians propose, bureaucrats dispose, and in the way they want, unless they provoke a reaction…

Rony Guldmann wrote in his work-in-progress Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

Fascism is defined, not by rabid nationalism as such, but by a set of emotional or instinctual impulses that fuel an uncompromising quest for community, the “urge to ‘get beyond’ politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth.”21 Fascism calls upon man “to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image.”22 To this end, it sanctions an all-powerful state led by “an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”

Was Carl Friedrich pushing a kind of liberal fascism? Does not liberalism want to get beyond politics by rendering neutral as much of the political as possible (initially that meant neutralizing the ability of religion to set men at each other’s throats, and then liberal neutralization came for the politics of race, sex, immigration and other hot button issues), and hence under the rule of experts rather than voters? Does not liberalism believe in the authority of experts? Does not liberalism reject “the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like”? Liberalism does not abide the “uncompromising quest for community” because that tramples on human rights. It does not worship the aesthetics of youth. Different types of liberalism react differently to the idea of “an all-powerful state led by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”

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NYT: ‘Los Angeles Pedestrians Look Forward to Relaxed Jaywalking Law’

Posted on January 3, 2024 by Luke Ford

The New York Times published Nov. 3, 2022:

“I’m smart enough to know if cars are coming,” said one walker who is glad the old law will come off the books on Jan. 1.
Starting Jan. 1, thanks to the “Freedom to Walk” act, people in California will no longer have to worry so much about making a legal misstep when they are safely crossing a street. Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the act was designed to give pedestrians in the state more leeway. No longer will they be charged with an infraction or fined for crossing outside designated intersections — with the caveat that police officers may still give tickets to pedestrians who are creating a safety hazard, in their view.

Dec. 11, 2023, the New York Times reports:

Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Sometime around 2009, American roads started to become deadlier for pedestrians, particularly at night. Fatalities have risen ever since, reversing the effects of decades of safety improvements. And it’s not clear why.
What’s even more perplexing: Nothing resembling this pattern has occurred in other comparably wealthy countries. In places like Canada and Australia, a much lower share of pedestrian fatalities occurs at night, and those fatalities — rarer in number — have generally been declining, not rising.

This explosion in pedestrian deaths occurs in just one racial group in America – blacks.

Steve Sailer writes:

The most striking aspect is that the black pedestrian death rate has almost doubled since its low during the Great Recession. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, economic hard times tend to reduce deaths by traffic accident and homicide. This makes sense if you think of them as Deaths of Exuberance, more common when people have ample cash in their wallets.
By 2014, the black pedestrian death rate was back up to the level seen during the housing bubble of 2007, but growth was slowing. Then came the Ferguson Effect, as The Establishment warned cops not to police so proactively, and the black death rate shot upward as motorists sped more and packed more pistols. Indeed, the Ferguson Effect started in Ferguson, Missouri, when officer Darren Wilson shouted at jaywalker Michael Brown to get out of the street and back on the sidewalk.
Growth slowed somewhat in the late 2010s, but then came the Floyd Effect of the 2020s.
Among Hispanics, pedestrian deaths fell sharply with the bursting of the Housing Bubble. (It’s likely that many of the most marginal Latinos returned to Mexico when construction jobs evaporated.) As with homicides, Hispanics didn’t get the message as rapidly as blacks did about the racial reckoning, so their death rate peaked in 2022 rather than in 2021.
Whites have been slowly degenerating for a decade and a half, but didn’t rapidly respond to the racial reckoning.
Asians have kept their pedestrian death rate more or less flat for a decade and a half.
…What would save lives in the short term is going back to the more active policing of bad drivers and bad walkers that we had before we gave Black Lives Matter veto power over law enforcement.

Posted in BLM, Crime | Comments Off

Understanding Israel’s War In Gaza

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Luke Ford

John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato write in their 2023 book, How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy:

…when states believe their survival is at stake, they do not hesitate to kill large numbers of civilians if such murderous behavior will help them avoid defeat or massive casualties on the battlefield. Britain and the United States blockaded Germany during World War I in an attempt to starve its civilian population and force the Kaiserreich to surrender. The United States also relentlessly firebombed Japanese cities beginning in March 1945 before dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, to bring World War II to an end and minimize American casualties.

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How Covid Explains My Worldview (1-1-24)

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Luke Ford

01:00 Different strategies have differing effectiveness in different situations
10:30 Stop saying “we need to build alternative institutions”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyyq126kZMI
23:00 Life is a Dinner Table, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSawhpPzOFs
42:20 People with Bigger Brains are More Intelligent
45:00 Immigrants with less than a bachelor’s degree are a net cost to society
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/amy-wax-versus-the-midwit-gynocrats
49:00 The A-cup woman vs the E-cup woman
54:45 The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153841
58:00 Tucker SOUNDS OFF On Ben Shapiro, Israel, Free Speech And UFOs, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lIO3B3k7Mo
1:05:30 From the Second Intifada to October 7th (with Daniel Gordis), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqYMG8BYScE
1:07:00 Daniel Gordis background, https://www.lukeford.net/profiles/profiles/danny_gordis.htm
1:27:00 Elliott Blatt joins the show to talk about New Year’s Resolution
1:29:00 Elliott wants to dial back Twitter
1:50:00 Fentanyl whores
2:00:00 Elliott’s drinking
2:29:30 Paul Hedderman – Non Duality – Skillman, NJ, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00se60gh-tc
2:38:00 What makes for a guru? https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=148127

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The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

Adam Nagourney writes in this 2023 book:

* September 20, 1972… [New York Times Executive Editor A.M.] Rosenthal sent a note to David R. Jones, the new national editor. “We seem to be taking a beating on the Watergate case from the Washington Post. Let’s talk it over.”
* That Monday morning, a story in The Washington Post by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that one of those arrested, James W. McCord, Jr., was on the payroll of Nixon’s reelection committee. That was the beginning of a run of stories by Woodward and Bernstein — two reporters on the metropolitan staff — that would humble the Times, on what would prove to be the biggest scandal in Washington in fifty years.
* Watergate would eclipse that. The Times would come close to catching up with the Post, throwing some of its best investigative reporters, among them Seymour Hersh, into the hunt. But Watergate would change American journalism. It would always be known as the Post ’s story, and Rosenthal saw Watergate as the biggest failure of his years running the newsroom. At the time, Rosenthal wanted an early accounting of the front page of the Post every night; clerks from the Washington bureau would wait outside the Post headquarters to retrieve first – edition copies and rush them back to the Times bureau. He ordered the Times to match, in its final editions, any big Watergate revelation the Post had that the Times had missed. It then fell to Rosenthal to write a letter to Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Post, with copies to Woodward, Bernstein, and Katharine Graham, the publisher, congratulating his biggest rival for being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its Watergate coverage. “ No jokes this time…Huge applause from Forty – third Street,” he told Bradlee, a reference to their jousting, competitive relationship.
It could not have been easy. As Rosenthal once put it, “He is out to cut my throat and I am out to cut his.” And he held one person responsible for the Times ’s failure on Watergate: Max Frankel, the head of the Washington bureau. I should have fired you, Rosenthal told him.
Watergate happened on Frankel’s watch, though he always resisted much of the blame (and, as would become clear in the coming years, the episode would not harm his career).
* But the Watergate failures spoke to a broader issue: the rules of Washington journalism were changing. The Times was trying to retain its magisterial distance and establishment authority as competing newspapers — led by the Post — turned sharply more adversarial toward the government. Watergate, coming after the disclosures in the Pentagon Papers, had undermined the assumptions that had governed the everyday working relations between journalists and the people they wrote about. Public officials lied. They covered up. They broke the law. At first, Frankel could not imagine Nixon engaging in anything like this. “ Not even my most cynical view of Nixon had allowed for his stupid behavior,” Frankel wrote years later. “There he sat at the peak of his power, why would he personally get involved in tapping the phone not even of his opponent but of only a Democratic party functionary?”
The Times could no longer assume that an event was not news until it had written about it on its front page. There was a demand for aggressive investigative reporting that stepped ahead of the FBI or the police — the kind of reporting that was being done by Woodward and Bernstein. And the standards for what kind of information was needed to back up an explosive story were changing. Rosenthal would call, riled up by the latest dispatch from Woodward and Bernstein. Frankel would assure him he shared his frustration, but he did not know what to do. So many of its rival’s stories gave no hint of sources.
We got beaten on stories that I couldn’t have gotten into The New York Times, he would say to a colleague years later.
The Times had long kept a dignified distance from investigative reporting. Sulzberger wanted Rosenthal to eliminate the phrase “investigative reporter” because it created two classes of reporters. “The government has investigators and The Times reporters,” the publisher said. It was a cautious stance that would cloud the paper’s efforts to recruit investigative reporters and constrain its reporting for another twenty years. Gene Roberts, who was the paper’s national editor, would complain that the Times lacked an investigative mentality. He eventually left to run The Philadelphia Inquirer, which under Roberts would win seventeen Pulitzers over eighteen years.

Where does Adam Nagourney get the idea that Woodward and Bernstein were ahead of the FBI or the police? In the July 1974 issue of Commentary magazine, Edward Jay Epstein wrote:

A sustaining myth of journalism holds that every great government scandal is revealed through the work of enterprising reporters who by one means or another pierce the official veil of secrecy. The role that government institutions themselves play in exposing official misconduct and corruption therefore tends to be seriously neglected, if not wholly ignored, in the press. This view of journalistic revelation is propagated by the press even in cases where journalists have had palpably little to do with the discovery of corruption. Pulitzer Prizes were thus awarded this year to the Wall Street Journal for “revealing” the scandal which forced Vice President Agnew to resign and to the Washington Star/News for “revealing” the campaign contribution that led to the indictments of former cabinet officers Maurice Stans and John N. Mitchell (who were subsequently acquitted), although reporters at neither newspaper in actual fact had anything to do with uncovering the scandals. In the former case, the U.S. Attorney in Maryland had through dogged plea-bargaining and grants of immunity induced witnesses to implicate the Vice President; and in the latter case, the Securities and Exchange Commission and a grand jury had conducted the investigation that unearthed the illegal contribution which led to the indictment of the cabinet officers. In both instances, even without “leaks” to the newspapers, the scandals uncovered by government institutions would have come to the public’s attention when the cases came to trial. Yet to perpetuate the myth that the members of the press were the prime movers in such great events as the conviction of a Vice President and the indictment of two former cabinet officers, the Pulitzer Prize committee simply chose the news stories nearest to these events and awarded them its honors.
The natural tendency of journalists to magnify the role of the press in great scandals is perhaps best illustrated by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s autobiographical account of how they “revealed” the Watergate scandals.1 The dust jacket and national advertisements, very much in the bravado spirit of the book itself, declare: “All America knows about Watergate. Here, for the first time, is the story of how we know. . . . In what must be the most devastating political detective story of the century, the two young Washington Post reporters whose brilliant investigative journalism smashed the Watergate scandal wide open tell the whole behind-the-scenes drama the way it happened.” In keeping with the mythic view of journalism, however, the book never describes the “behind-the-scenes” investigations which actually “smashed the Watergate scandal wide open”—namely the investigations conducted by the FBI, the federal prosecutors, the grand jury, and the Congressional committees. The work of almost all those institutions, which unearthed and developed all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate, is systematically ignored or minimized by Bernstein and Woodward. Instead, they simply focus on those parts of the prosecutors’ case, the grand-jury investigation, and the FBI reports that were leaked to them.
The result is that no one interested in “how we know” about Watergate will find out from their book, or any of the other widely circulated mythopoeics about Watergate. Yet the non-journalistic version of how Watergate was uncovered is not exactly a secret—the government prosecutors (Earl Silbert, Seymour Glanzer, and Donald E. Campbell) are more than willing to give a documented account of the investigation to anyone who desires it. According to one of the prosecutors, however, “No one really wants to know.” Thus the government’s investigation of itself has become a missing link in the story of the Watergate scandal, and the actual role that journalists played remains ill understood.

Adam Nagourney writes:

After the late – afternoon Page One conferences, where Punch Sulzberger would sit quietly to the side as the editors debated the news of the day, offering questions but not opinions, they would retire to Rosenthal’s private office to share a bottle of wine and trade gossip about correspondents and salty jokes about pretty women, the kind of banter that was accepted from powerful men of that era.

Only powerful men in that particular era engaged in salty jokes about pretty women? Is Adam Nagourney gay? According to Wikipedia: “Nagourney is gay, as was his predecessor as chief political correspondent at the Times, Rick Berke.”

I’ve never been a powerful man, but I’ve enjoyed that kind of banter for about fifty years now.

Adam Nagourney was called a “major league asshole” by President George W. Bush and many of Adam’s peers agree.

* Nagourney writes:

[Howell] Raines was less driven by ideology than competitiveness. He wanted stories that commanded public attention, that were exciting to write and to read. Every ambitious reporter at the Times knew this was how he measured success, and that included Judith Miller. And the single biggest unanswered question in the summer of 2002, the most obvious target for a story, was the one that had been assigned to Miller and [Michael] Gordon about weapons of mass destruction.

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Looking For Signs Of Victory In Gaza (12-31-23)

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 The Guardian: As Gaza death toll mounts, Israelis look in vain for any sign of victory, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153831
05:30 Do we need to talk about group differences, https://www.richardhanania.com/p/amy-wax-versus-the-midwit-gynocrats
07:30 Nathan Cofnas influences Amy Wax
https://twitter.com/MillennialWoes/status/1740100903565431277
08:00 Amy Wax: The Woke and the Asleep: Hanania’s book is bold and well-researched, but he underestimates how attached even right-wing audiences are to the egalitarian fallacy, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-woke-and-the-asleep/
11:30 Does Israel plan an ethnic-cleansing of Gaza?
21:00 Steven Pinker vs John Mearsheimer debate the enlightenment, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNVm-oXFK9k
30:00 How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153528
43:00 Richard Spencer on Milleniyule, https://twitter.com/MillennialWoes/status/1740100903565431277
1:01:00 Richard Spencer’s GF in late 2016 was Julia Ioffe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Ioffe
1:04:45 Richard’s infamous Charlottesville rant
1:08:00 Colin Liddell: THE WEIRDEST THING I KNOW ABOUT MY OLD FRIEND RICHARD SPENCER, https://colinliddell.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-weirdest-thing-i-know-about-my-old.html
1:11:00 What lessons can nationalists learn from the collapse of the National Justice Party?
1:24:40 The 13th Step podcast, https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1179417899/the-13th-step
1:28:00 Kristen Ruby, Frame Game Radio, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/michael-benz-rising-voice-conservative-criticism-online-censorship-rcna119213
1:38:00 Talkline With Zev Brenner with Satmar Ger Yechiel Bloyd who left Judaism on why he joined and left, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXY4Rp8kYqs
1:49:00 Why the Haredim didn’t participate in the recent Washington D.C. pro-Israel rally, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKk8mNlSLk
1:52:00 Samson Raphael Hirsch, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Raphael_Hirsch
1:55:00 Marc Shapiro on Zionism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwDfCEQcXo4
2:03:30 Judaism and Islam: Some Historical and Halakhic Perspectives || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMfgqwmqVto
2:14:00 Rabbi Seligmann Baer Bamberger, the Wuerzburger Rav (Part 3) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKk8mNlSLk
2:16:00 Decoding Dennis Prager, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=148127

Posted in America, Gaza, Israel | Comments Off

The Guardian: As Gaza death toll mounts, Israelis look in vain for any sign of victory

Posted on December 31, 2023 by Luke Ford

I don’t expect Israel to achieve victory in Gaza or in Lebanon or anywhere (if victory is understood as vanquishing the foe). Given Israel’s location (surrounded by hostile nations), there’s no ultimate lasting peaceful solution to the conflicts between Jews and their neighbors (unless one side destroys the other). The best that Israel can do is to survive.

Life is usually like this. There’s rarely an ultimate victory over our foes. We live in conflicts of interest that cannot be reconciled. The best we can do is to survive.

When I converted to Judaism (1993), a part of me thought I had won. I had not. I had just begun a different phase of my life. After a while, my idealistic conceptions of Judaism melted away (by 2001), and after putting it off as long as I could, I recognized that I was the problem, that there was nothing outside of me that was going to rescue me from me, and then the real work began (about 2011).

Along the way, I experienced significant victories (I love practicing Judaism and I feel at home among Jews, I began Alexander Technique lessons in 2008 and a lifetime of bad posture and muscle ache started to fade away and I stopped in March 2009 my daily intake of lithium, clonidine and clonazepam, I began 12-step programs in 2011 and developed some emotional sobriety, I began taking modafinil regularly in 2013 with significant cognitive benefit, I took positional release lessons in December of 2016 and developed increased physical ease and freedom as I integrated its practice into my daily routine, I bought an activator and guide book in 2017 and let go of expensive physical therapy, I began taking beef organ capsules in June of 2021 and a lifetime of health problems disappeared within two weeks, and I got diagnosed with ADHD in October 2023 and a lifetime of ADHD problems melted away with medication).

The Guardian reports:

As Gaza death toll mounts, Israelis look in vain for any sign of victory
IDF bombs urban refugee camps, UN agency warns of famine risk and skirmishes on Lebanon border intensify
Israeli planes bombed refugee camps in Gaza on Saturday as its troops expanded ground operations and tens of thousands of Palestinians fled their homes, setting the stage for a new year as bloody and destructive as the last three months of 2023.
The threat of wider escalation also looms large over the region, as skirmishes on the northern boundary with Lebanon intensify, and Israeli officials have hinted that the “diplomatic hourglass” is running out to reach a negotiated solution.
For now there seems little hope of even a temporary break in attacks, even after Egypt hosted leaders for talks last week and pushed plans for a staged break in the war.

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Democracy Dies In Darkness (12-27-23)

Posted on December 27, 2023 by Luke Ford

01:00 Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153758
04:00 Marty Baron on leading The Washington Post and covering President Trump , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGie7DGC5p0
22:00 Stephen J James joins, https://twitter.com/MuskMaximalist
36:20 The falling out between Charles Johnson and Richard Spencer
42:00 Black-pilled freaks
1:24:45 Rabbi Seligmann Baer Bamberger, the Wuerzburger Rav (Part 5) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkiddfUXEU0
Populism, Neoconservatism & Lessons in the Application of Power, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153654
WP : Trump disqualified from Colorado’s 2024 primary ballot by state Supreme Court, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/19/trump-off-colorado-ballot/
Israel’s border failure, https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/12/19/failure-at-the-fence-documentary/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/18/us/abbott-texas-border-law-arrests.html
Uvalde response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBofi_etkUo
Populism is popular but ineffective, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153654
New Yorker: How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker: The upstart motivator Jesse Itzler wants to reform his profession—while also rising to the top, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153558
NYT: Talk of a Trump Dictatorship Charges the American Political Debate, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153538
Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=121464
The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153489
My Fourth Day On Adderall, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153449
Vouch nationalism, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143499
Do American Conservatives Want Regime Change? And What Would That Look Like?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153355
Conservaphobia: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144168
Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Part Two, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=144294

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Expertise in Complex Organizations

Posted on December 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes in the 2023 book, The Oxford Handbook of Expertise and Democratic Politics:

Science is sometimes thought to be a self – correcting system: replication and the fact that other scientists must rely on the previous and related research results to perform their own experiments is thought to provide error detection. Sometimes, this works. But as the statistician John Iaonnidis (2005) has shown with respect to medical research, the idea that the system is self – correcting may be an illusion: “Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing prevailing bias” (40). Researchers searching for a particular drug effect, for example, may find it and report it, but they will not report failures to find it, or they will abandon research strategies that fail to find it. And this bias is a result of facts about the social organization of research — namely, the institutional reasons that cause people to look for confirming results, or, as Iaonnidis explains, where there is “financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance” (2005, 40).
We can see, sometimes in advance, that particular institutional arrangements, such as highly competitive grant systems, which rely on peer review, are likely to produce a great deal of conformism and far less high – risk innovative thinking. This was a fear of the physicists who produced the A – bomb. They used the risk – reducing device of setting up rival teams, with rival approaches, notably on the 600,000 – person Manhattan Project and throughout the postwar period. Lockheed pioneered the use of “skunk works,” innovation – oriented units created outside the normal organizational structure, to generate alternative technologies, which, at IBM, produced the personal computer (PC). And there are ongoing efforts in science to create institutional structures to correct for issues that become problematized. In recent years, for example, there have been organizations that publicize misconduct, such as Retraction Watch, and a large structure of research misconduct mechanisms was created over the last generation. Most recently, there have been such innovations as the online postpublication commentary forum on PubMed ( Marcus 2013 ) and funding for replication studies ( Iorn 2013 ).
* Professions typically operate in markets, which they seek to control.
* An expert who speaks against the consensus risks losing the status of expert. And this is grounded in a basic feature of expertise itself: the legitimacy of expertise is closely associated with the legitimation provided by other experts who validate the expertise, the credentials if not the specific views, of the expert in question. So “intellectual capture” in the sense of the mutual dependence of experts on one another for legitimacy is a feature, not a bug, of expertise, and an organization that promotes opinions that fall outside of the range of what other experts treat as genuine expertise risks reputational loss or the loss of expert legitimacy.
* Consensus, even the limited kind of agreement necessary to produce a policy decision through the aggregation of expert knowledge, requires procedures.

From the chapter, “The Third Wave and Populism: Scientific Expertise as a Check and Balance,” by Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Darrin Durant, and Martin Weinel:

* Although it is important to challenge expertise to ensure accountability and legitimacy, in the last decades expertise has been steadily undermined in Western democracies to the point that, under some interpretations, everyone is counted as an expert.
* The actions of former US president Donald Trump are an iconic example of the confluence. His actions while in office were, in effect, “breaching experiments,” forcing us to think much harder about what democracy means and revealing things that we did not realize we already knew. 7 For example, we can now see that, before Trump, there was an unwritten constitution underlying the written Constitution of the United States. The unwritten constitution included the expectation that presidents will disclose their tax returns, divest themselves of their private business interests, and not appoint unqualified members of their families as senior advisers. It also assumed that they will refrain from attacking scientific expertise by denying its efficacy and shamelessly proclaiming the existence of an alternative set of truths, authorized by the government and its supporters, which better align with their preferred policies. 8 The Trump presidency and its aftermath have shown us, anew, how democracy works, or used to work, and where scientific expertise fits within.
* Under populism, in contrast to pluralist democracy, “the people” that the government claims to represent are no longer all citizens but only the subset that expressed a particular view — usually the majority view (though this is often substantially less than 50% of the electorate). Crucially, once expressed, this view is treated as a fixed, uniform, and collective view that encapsulates the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the entire society and can be understood and represented by a single leader or party, possibly in perpetuity. Minorities, or others who oppose this vision, are treated as deviants, and their refusal to accept the legitimacy of the populist claim is denounced as a betrayal of what is now defined as the organic view of the people. Under populism, the pluralist democratic principles of freedom and equality that uphold respect for minorities are set aside, and the diversity that pluralist democratic societies permit and even celebrate is seen as a sign of failure or danger.
* …we stress the importance of the right kind of representative institutions, including expert institutions, as opposed to giving ever wider responsibility to citizens. Broadly, we favor Walter Lippman’s views over John Dewey’s and elected representatives over continual referendums.

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How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy

Posted on December 25, 2023 by Luke Ford

John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato write in this 2023 book:

* Contrary to what many people think, we cannot equate rationality with success and
nonrationality with failure. Rationality is not about outcomes. Rational actors often fail to achieve their goals, not because of foolish thinking but because of factors they can neither anticipate nor control. There is also a powerful tendency to equate rationality with morality since both qualities are thought to be features of enlightened thinking. But that too is a mistake. Rational policies can violate widely accepted standards of conduct and may even be murderously unjust.

* Rationality is all about making sense of the world for the purpose of navigating it in the pursuit of desired goals… Rational decision makers are theory-driven—they employ credible theories both to understand the situation at hand and to decide the best policies for achieving their objectives. A state is rational if the views of its key decision makers are aggregated through a deliberative process and the final policy is based on a credible theory. Conversely, a state is nonrational if it does not base its strategy on a credible theory, does not deliberate, or both. A careful review of the historical record shows that judged by these criteria, states are regularly rational in their foreign policy.

* Rational policymakers are theory-driven; they are homo theoreticus. They have
credible theories—logical explanations based on realistic assumptions and supported by substantial evidence—about the workings of the international system, and they employ these to understand their situation and determine how best to navigate it. Rational states aggregate the views of key policymakers through a deliberative process, one marked by robust and uninhibited debate. In sum, rational decisions in international politics rest on credible theories about how the world works and emerge from a deliberative decision-making process.

All of this means that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was rational.

* Individuals have in their heads different theories—probabilistic statements made up of assumptions, causal logics, and supporting evidence—about various aspects of international politics. Many of these The Rational Actor Assumption theories are credible, which is to say their assumptions are realistic, their causal stories are logically consistent, and their claims find substantial support in the historical record. Some theories, however, are noncredible on suppositional, logical, or empirical grounds (or all three), in which case the policy prescriptions that flow from them are nonrational. So, too, are strategies based on any form of nontheoretical
thinking.

When confronted with the need to make a decision on a particular issue, rational policymakers once again rely on credible theories. Because they explain the way the world works, these theories help policymakers decide the best strategy for dealing with the situation at hand. To be sure, no credible theory applies to all problems,
and even if it applies in one instance, it may not do so later if circumstances change. In other words, rational policymakers are strongly wedded to their theories, but they also assess whether those theories apply in the relevant case, and they are willing to change their minds in the face of powerful new evidence.

* Theories are simplified descriptions of reality that explain how some facet of the world works. They are made up of empirical claims, assumptions, and causal logics. Empirical claims in the international relations literature stipulate a robust, though not absolute, relationship between an independent and a dependent variable.

* Policymakers’ reliance on theories is unsurprising, as it is the only viable way they can do business.

* Binyamin Appelbaum writes in The Economists’ Hour, an account of the relationship between economic theories and American economic policy between 1969 and 2008, that Richard Nixon “was not well versed in economics but, like most Americans of his generation, his basic frame of reference was Keynesianism. He believed the government faced a choice between inflation and unemployment, and he knew what he wanted to order from the menu.” Ronald Reagan, by contrast, was heavily influenced by Milton Friedman’s monetarist theories, going so far as to write a leading journalist that he could not embrace a policy proposal that “one of my favorite people Milton F. opposed.” More generally, Appelbaum makes it clear that the evolution of American
economic policy over the decades he covers was influenced at every turn by competing theories.14

Much like its economic policy, America’s foreign policy since the Cold War has relied on the same theories that populate academia. The United States adopted a policy of liberal hegemony after the superpower competition ended and the world became unipolar.
That policy was based on the “big three” liberal theories of international relations: liberal institutionalism, economic interdependence theory, and democratic peace theory.

* Policymakers’ reliance on theories is unsurprising, as it is the only viable way they can do business. The essence of policymaking is determining the consequences of different strategies.

* Realist theories share the premise that the architecture of the international system is the main driver of state behavior. “Realism,” Kevin Narizny notes, “is a top-down paradigm. Every realist theory must start with a specification of systemic imperatives; only then can it address other factors.”

Liberalism, Narizny writes, “‘rests on a ‘bottom-up’ view of politics in which the demands of individuals and societal groups are treated as analytically prior to politics.’ Every liberal theory must start with a specification of societal actors and their preferences; only then can it address other factors.”

* A rich tradition, with both philosophical and religious roots, mandates that states should aim to avoid killing civilians while waging war. This line of thinking is especially powerful in liberal democracies, where it is widely believed that human rights are inalienable and directly targeting noncombatants is therefore an atrocity.
Yet the historical record shows that when states believe their survival is at stake, they do not hesitate to kill large numbers of civilians if such murderous behavior will help them avoid defeat or massive casualties on the battlefield. Britain and the United States blockaded Germany during World War I in an attempt to starve its civilian population and force the Kaiserreich to surrender. The United States also relentlessly firebombed Japanese cities beginning in March 1945 before dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, to bring World War II to an end and minimize American casualties.

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