I Heard A Rumor (1-31-21)

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 Are you more interested in destroying or in building up? https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/77d7e5451ea3467eaed19686cf7fce19
07:00 Psychologist Brooks Gibbs: Reaction to Quaden Bayles, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF0hXThqBjI
34:00 The mysterious French blogger who donated $520,000 to the Capitol Hill rioters, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9202857/French-blogger-killed-drugs-overdose-day-520-000-Capitol-rioters-donation.html
35:00 NYT: How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/how-trump-s-focus-on-antifa-distracted-attention-from-the-far-right-threat/ar-BB1deJBk
35:50 DENNIS PRAGER UNMASKED by R. Yaron Reuven, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW6SYcnwuoo
43:20 The Making of My Most Recent Book, A Thirty-Year Story (Part 32) || Dr. Marc Shapiro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foUZM36juwI
48:00 Rise of the Warrior Apes, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9035618/
1:07:00 Isaac Arbarnel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Abarbanel
1:10:00 Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought, https://www.amazon.com/Resisting-History-Historicism-Discontents-German-Jewish/dp/B01A0BW6UA
1:31:00 Matt Christman: Media Coverage of Joe Biden, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38u4edyr5go
1:37:00 Andy Ngo on Antifa, BLM
1:39:20 Gamestop volatility
1:41:50 Vaush: THE VERY REAL BREADTUBE CRISIS NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT
1:44:50 Why doesn’t cancel culture apply to Joe Biden?
1:47:50 Why professional athletes and Olympians struggle with life after sport, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zs10zs3qVI
1:49:00 The late rugby star Daniel Vickerman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Vickerman
1:53:00 Learning emotional resilience, https://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/TMS_Recovery_Program
2:13:00 The 3 Australian Accents: General, Cultivated & Broad | Australian Pronunciation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnioDeQNlxQ
2:28:00 Russell Roberts interviews Martin Gurri on the Revolt of the Public 5/25/20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxf-JGhpTsU
2:48:00 Babs joins
2:50:00 Luke in 1995’s Apricot Sky movie, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpsl34lzjPs

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Dennis Prager Unmasked?

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Yaron Reuven and Yosef Mizrachi are a couple of Sephardic rabbis with limited learning and IQ who make a ton of compelling and entertaining speeches. They have a gift for rabble rousing. They’re not particularly concerned with accuracy. They don’t attract a good crowd.

The fastest way to grab attention and to climb in status is to take down those above you. That’s true for apes, it’s true for members of the dissident right, and it is also true for Orthodox rabbis. Content that appeals to modest IQ rabble will get more than 100x the viewership of intelligent Marc Shapiro-style content.

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Renewing Trust in America’s Institutions

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

If you are not interested in restoring trust, rightfully earned, in our key institutions, you are a nihilist. You just want to destroy. I suspect that in the dissident spheres, there is one hundred times more interest in tearing down than in building up. Destroying is easy, building is tough.

If I make a video or blog post tearing someone down, it is like to get 100x the viewership of a post or video on building something up.

Martin Gurri writes:

The recent sacking of the Capitol building can stand as Exhibit A for what transpires in a democracy under conditions of profound distrust. The public, alienated from government and the electoral process that endows it with legitimacy, now stands eternally against, and can, at any moment, coalesce into a nihilistic mob. The institutions, for their part, are unable even to defend themselves effectively. The elites that inhabit them seem clueless and demoralized.
The search for a remedy won’t entail salvation from a messiah or the slaying of a supervillain. Our predicament is structural, not personal. Even so disruptive a figure as Donald Trump should be considered a symptom of a deeper malady that can engender many more Trumps and much, much worse.
Before we can talk about restoring trust, we must understand why it drained away in the first place. I believe that our institutions of government and politics are fatally maladapted to the digital age. These institutions received their form in the 20th century, heyday of the top-down, I-talk-you-listen model of organizing humanity. They are too ponderous and too distant from ordinary people. Legitimacy had depended on control over information: failure and scandal could be dealt with discreetly. Once the digital tsunami swept away the possibility of control, the system lapsed into crisis. Today, elite failure and scandal set the information agenda.
To restore trust, we must reconcile a networked public to the authority of democratic institutions. Since the crisis is structural, a reconfiguration of government is called for: no reason exists why it can’t be made flatter and faster, less like an immobile pyramid and more like an internet service provider. After all, Amazon is an immense bureaucracy, but what the public experiences is fast, reliable service. Government can match that. We know this because it has already begun to do so in places like Estonia and Taiwan. Political organizations, like the parties, which at present resemble Masonic lodges, should look more like Wikipedia or Reddit, where a churn of enthusiasm from below interacts with governance from above. At every step, the distance between the public and its representatives must be drastically reduced. The web entails proximity. If our elites insist on social distance as the reward for political success, the public will be justified in questioning their commitment to democratic principles.

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Surmounting five riddles of the information sphere

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Martin Gurri writes:

“The hypothesis, which seems to me the most fertile,” wrote Walter Lippmann back in 1922, “is that news and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished.” Lippmann found truth in the analysis of causes and relations—in context. I will have more to say about that.

But what is news?

A century of dishonesty has accumulated around that word. I’m willing to give a pass to political bias—the kind of reporting that makes Trump the villain of every New York Times story and the hero of Fox News. It’s perfectly possible to be an honest partisan. The lack of truthfulness I want to consider runs deeper and is more corrupting.

There is an implicit ideology of the news. It rests on three claims: one, that consumption of news produces the omnicompetent citizen supposedly required by democracy; two, that news is a special form of information, complete in scope and objective in tone; and three, that the mission of news is to act as the voice of the people against the predations of power and wealth. As with most ideologies, these propositions are not internally coherent—but note that they enable news practitioners to feel morally superior both to the public (which must be educated) and the political class (which must be exposed).

All three claims are false. As a record of human affairs, the news is a vast ocean of silence, sprinkled with arbitrary islets of content. Three million people died in the Congo out of range of the news, at a time when CNN was pursuing, relentlessly, the adventures of a runaway bride. The world is full of such forgotten humanitarian crises, ignored by Western journalists. It is taken for granted that presidents and politics rule the news—while science, technology, poetry, the visual arts, philosophy, and religion receive scarcely a whisper.

News is not truth. In the time of the tweet, news isn’t even first in delivering “news or information,” as journalism professor Jeff Jarvis recently noted. News is bait for ads sold by a hard-nosed business: rather than inform citizens or protect the underdog, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, Vox, and Politico are trying desperately to make money. That fact explains many of the strange distortions of news content. The failure to cover the civil war in the Congo was a business decision. So is the obsession with Trump. The primacy of politics, on the other hand, allows journalists and media owners to feel like players in the great game—with an added moralistic buzz. Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post converted an unpopular billionaire into the hero who would save democracy from dying in darkness.

The riddle posed by such contradictions has a simple answer. Let’s demystify the news. We can consume it or not, believe it or not, find it useful and entertaining or not, but we must never again grant it a privileged position, either in our politics or in the hierarchy of information. The public has lost all trust in the news. That can be repaired with a sensible reappraisal of its value. Freed from magical claims, the news will cease to be an agent of dishonesty and post-truth, and assume its proper place among the information sphere’s near-infinity of stuff.

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The Real ‘Social Dilemma’? It’s Our Clueless Elites.

Posted on January 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Martin Gurri writes:

What are we to make of the feature length documentary, The Social Dilemma? I would start with the fact that it’s immune to contradiction. You have to go to Netflix, a digital streaming service, to get lectured for 94 minutes about the horrors of digital life. In fact, the documentary is a “Netflix original,” which means it must have received some portion of the $17 billion the streaming giant spends on proprietary content. So it’s the web exploiting the anti-web. But you can also think of The Social Dilemma as a slick, manipulative film production slamming the big digital platforms for their slick, manipulative algorithms.

The digital environment, it seems, is Plato’s cave—dancing shadows on a wall that confuse and distract you. Or it’s a twist on the Hotel California, where you check in whenever you switch on your smartphone but you can never leave. Or it’s an evolutionary death trap, into which you are seduced by the lure of algorithmic brain candy. So we are told during the film by a succession of neo-Luddites and repentant techies who have themselves risen above any such failings. They know better, and they will grab you by the shoulders and tell you why.

Formally, The Social Dilemma consists of a series of interviews with experts inserted in brief cuts, which alternates with a supposedly comedic docu-drama about an average family’s travails with the smartphone, also presented in snippets. The level of subtlety probably falls below that of Soviet propaganda, but the point is clear enough. Properly understood, the documentary is an extended rant about the 21st century, using the digital world as proxy.

Viewing the web as a political doomsday device is now mandatory among our elites. Barack Obama, who won the presidency in 2008 in part because of a brilliant online campaign, recently told The Atlantic that he considers “the internet” to be the “single biggest threat to our democracy.” Francis Fukuyama, that barometer of elite opinion, holds that “social media” has been “weaponized against democracy.” The Social Dilemma pitches to this unhappy audience, riding every argument over the cliff to the most extreme conclusions.

In it, we are told that the internet is “really bad” or maybe “really, really bad,” like “a drug” but also like a “rabbit hole,” a “totally new species of power” that uses “disinformation for profit as a business model,” controlled by “digital Frankensteins that are terraforming the world in their image.” The effects are said to be manipulation, addiction, polarization, and exile to a kingdom of lies. “This is overpowering human nature,” intones Tristan Harris, a former “design ethicist” at Google who is introduced as “the closest thing to a conscience” in Silicon Valley, “and this is checkmate on humanity.” As we shuffle through this hellish landscape, the Obama theme is sounded—there’s talk of “a global assault on democracy,” for example—but, by comparison, it feels like a minor complaint.

The film treats the concept of “persuasion” as a self-evident moral abomination on a par with child abuse or cannibalism.

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