Epistemic Sabotage

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

People like Dennis Prager, in the words of Decoding The Gurus, "produce ersatz wisdom: a corrupt epistemics that creates the appearance of useful knowledge, but has none of the substance. …the guru is highly motivated to undertake epistemic sabotage; to disparage authoritative and institutional sources of knowledge."

When I argue that someone like Dennis Prager engages in epistemic corruption, I claim that he manipulates knowledge for his personal, professional and monetary gain, and by so doing, he pollutes public and private discourse. 

Dennis Prager's March 7, 2023 column is a classic example of his habit of epistemic sabotage. The innumerate pundit normally disdains academic studies, but because he found one that he thought supported his point of view, he embraced it as a truth bomb against the Left without regard to what it actually said. To push his personal and ideological agenda, he treated truth like a used tampon. 

Why the Left Is Pro-Mask

The world’s most trusted evaluator of medical studies, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, has just released as close to a conclusive report on the effectiveness of masks against respiratory viruses such as COVID-19 as we are likely to have for the foreseeable future. The report assessed data from 78 different studies, including 11 new randomized controlled trials involving 610,872 participants.

In the words of one of the authors, Dr. Tom Jefferson of Oxford University, Cochrane concluded, “There is just no evidence that they (masks) make any difference. Full stop.”

Among the reasons for that assessment was Cochrane’s conclusion that states and countries with mask mandates fared no better than states and countries without.

Moreover, Dr. Jefferson’s conclusions were not limited to cloth and surgical masks. Regarding N95 masks, Jefferson said, “Makes no difference — none of it.”

As for the early COVID-19 studies that policymakers cited to justify mandates for mask-wearing, Jefferson said: “They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”

Compare Prager's column with the essay of sociologist Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times March 10, 2023:

Here’s Why the Science Is Clear That Masks Work

“Many commentators have claimed that a recently updated Cochrane review shows that ‘masks don’t work,’ which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation,” Karla Soares-Weiser, the editor in chief of the Cochrane Library, said in a statement.

“The review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses,” Soares-Weiser said, adding, “Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask wearing itself reduces people’s risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses.”

She said that “this wording was open to misinterpretation, for which we apologize,” and that Cochrane would revise the summary.

Soares-Weiser also said, though, that one of the lead authors of the review even more seriously misinterpreted its finding on masks by saying in an interview that it proved “there is just no evidence that they make any difference.” In fact, Soares-Weiser said, “that statement is not an accurate representation of what the review found.”

While the review assessed 78 studies, only 10 of those focused on what happens when people wear masks versus when they don’t, and a further five looked at how effective different types of masks were at blocking transmission, usually for health care workers. The remainder involved other measures aimed at lowering transmission, like hand washing or disinfection, while a few studies also considered masks in combination with other measures. Of those 10 studies that looked at masking, the two done since the start of the Covid pandemic both found that masks helped.

The calculations the review used to reach a conclusion were dominated by prepandemic studies that were not very informative about how well masks blocked the transmission of respiratory viruses…

Soares-Weiser told me the review should be seen as a call for more data, and said she worried that misinterpretations of it could undermine preparedness for future outbreaks…

Lab studies, many of which were done during the pandemic, show that masks, particularly N95 respirators, can block viral particles. Linsey Marr, an aerosol scientist who has long studied airborne viral transmission, told me even cloth masks that fit well and use appropriate materials can help…

David Lazer, a political scientist at Northeastern University, calculated that before vaccines were available, U.S. states without mask mandates had 30 percent higher Covid death rates than those with mandates…

So the evidence is relatively straightforward: Consistently wearing a mask, preferably a high-quality, well-fitting one, provides protection against the coronavirus…

Others have come to think mandates represent illogical rules. To be sure, we did have many illogical rules: mandating masks outdoors and even at beaches, or wearing them to enter a restaurant but not at the table, or requiring children as young as 2 to mask in day care but not during nap time (presumably, the virus also took a nap). Some mask proponents and public health authorities have also used weak studies to make overblown or imprecise claims about masks’ effectiveness…

It’s no surprise that Jefferson says he has no faith in masks’ ability to stop the spread of Covid.

In that interview, he said there is no basis to say the coronavirus is spread by airborne transmission — despite the fact that major public health agencies have long said otherwise. He has long doubted well-accepted claims about the virus. In an article he co-wrote in April 2020, Jefferson questioned whether the Covid outbreak was a pandemic at all, rather than just a long respiratory illness season. At that point, New York City schools had been closed for a month and Covid had killed thousands of New Yorkers. When New York was preparing “M*A*S*H”-like mobile hospitals in Central Park, he said there was no point in mitigations to slow the spread.

In an editorial accompanying a 2020 version of the review — the review is in its sixth update since 2006 — Soares-Weiser noted a lack of “robust, high-quality evidence for any behavioral measure or policy” and said that “when protecting the public from harm is the objective, public health officials must act in a precautionary manner to take action even when evidence is uncertain (or not of the highest quality).”

Which of the two authors above is more committed to truth? Prager or Tufekci? Due to his agenda, Prager took what he wanted out of the study, and then moved on, like a man dispensing with a whore. 

Prager reminds me of the protagonist of the 1970 Paul Simon song The Boxer. "Still a man hears what he wants to hear/And disregards the rest"

Justin Peters wrote for Slate Nov. 8, 2021:

On Monday, Nov. 1, Dennis Prager began his popular radio show with a very strange boast. “I rarely say, ‘I did the following.’ It’s not my style,” the 73-year-old conservative host and YouTube culture war impresario said. “But I believe I am responsible for the CDC announcing the following: that if you have natural immunity you are less immune than if you have the vaccine.”

Prager was referring to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, released on Friday, Oct. 29, which found, basically, that the immunity conferred by full vaccination with an mRNA COVID vaccine is more effective than the “natural immunity” gained by having had and recovered from COVID-19. Good news, right? Ha! If you welcomed the CDC’s findings, you are almost certainly not in Dennis Prager’s target demographic.

The CDC’s conclusions are broadly in line with the scientific consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. And they directly contradict Prager’s contention, voiced over and again on his long-running, nationally syndicated show, that natural immunity to COVID-19 is superior to vaccinated immunity. To Prager, the CDC’s latest findings did not mean that he, Prager, was wrong—they meant that the liberal, corrupt health agency had ginned up a bogus study in order to cloud the debate and specifically silence his voice.

“All I did was open up to you, my audience,” Prager said, referring to his advocacy for natural immunity. “I had no idea that I would shake up the nest to the extent that I did.” Assuring his audience that he had done “a lot of homework on COVID,” and highlighting an Israeli study from August (even though it has not yet been peer reviewed and had certain limitations that ought to make any prudent person think twice before citing it as definitive), Prager weaved a fantastical counternarrative as a way of underscoring his central point: that the CDC study in question was a dirty, rotten lie. “To some of you, it is stunning to say the CDC is lying,” said Prager. “To me, it is like saying the sun shines brightly when there are no clouds.”

Huh? Why would the CDC rush out a false study—co-authored by more than 50 people—just to neutralize a random right-wing radio host? Why would Prager presume calumny and conspiracy in the agency’s motives? These fair questions naturally beget another fair question: Why are so many right-wing talk show hosts still being such dicks about COVID measures?

…“I took ivermectin for the last year and a half as a prophylactic, believing, and I put my actions where my mouth was, believing that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and zinc, et cetera, over the course of time, that it would prevent COVID from being seriously injurious to me,” Prager said on that Nov. 1 show, railing against those fools in the media who dared to characterize ivermectin as a mere “horse dewormer.” As per the irrationalist imperative to willfully confuse correlation with causation, the host presented his victorious bout with COVID as clear evidence both of the merits of Dr. Prager’s Curative Elixirs and of the superfluity of the various vaccines. By ostensibly proving that his ivermectin use was what prevented him from dying from COVID, Prager hoped to demonstrate that he was once again privy to the “real truth” that the liberal establishment is determined to suppress.

For decades now, the most successful conservative broadcast media sources have sought to isolate their audiences by constantly sowing distrust of any news outlet or official entity that exists outside of the hard right. The unifying theme is the notion that there are no depths to which the deep state, liberal media, and elitist professoriate will not stoop in order to advance their godless, anti-American, and culturally transgressive agendas.

So for committed Pragerheads, it is perfectly rational to believe—even as 750,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19—that the media is still suppressing the real truth about ivermectin and that the CDC is basically SPECTRE, because right-wing media has literally spent decades convincing its audience that politics is as conspiratorial and simplistic as a James Bond movie. “It’s impossible, virtually impossible, to live in a right-wing bubble,” Prager said on his program on Wednesday, in a statement that is so un-self-aware as to be almost entirely self-aware. Prager surely understands how right-wing media works, even as he also surely understands that he can never, ever publicly admit it.

This cynical strategy, enervating enough in normal times, is especially frustrating in the midst of an ongoing public health crisis in which lots and lots of people are still dying in part thanks to the endemic misinformation being spread by dummies on the radio. Actually, dummies might not be the right word here. No matter what you might think of their politics, Prager and his nationally prominent peers are not stupid. You can tell this is true because they are so adept at dancing right up to the lies-and-lunacy line while almost never crossing it. The evening opinion hosts on Fox News, for example, rarely tell outright lies; instead, they draw false equivalencies, or cherry-pick outlying details and use them to inaccurately characterize the whole, or offer misleading narratives that can be explained away as matters of opinion.

Even Prager is not explicitly anti-vaccine. He does not say that the vaccines don’t work, or that they are actively harmful to those who take them. Instead, he disparages them via a boatload of logical fallacies that he presents as plain common sense. “I have never once told any of you or anyone not to take the vaccine; it is not my province to tell you what to do. But it is my province to tell you the truth, and the truth is that natural immunity is stronger,” said Prager on Nov. 1. “Alex Berenson wrote about this. He’s the guy who was with the New York Times until he started telling the truth.”

As always with right-wing anti–virtue signaling, deflection is the point here. Prager and his peers’ goal writ large is to get their audiences so hot and bothered about federal government overreach and the scurrilous rascals in the elitist media that those audiences do not stop to think critically about what these hosts are actually selling. When Prager threw his show to commercial break, his announcer reported that The Dennis Prager Show was broadcasting “live from the Relief Factor Pain-Free Studio.” The ad gave away the game.

As historian Rick Perlstein observed in his seminal Baffler essay “The Long Con,” and as anyone can observe by watching or listening to more than 20 minutes of conservative broadcast content, right-wing media is and has long been underwritten by billions of dollars of advertising for dubious curatives. While lots of reputable news sources also have some questionable advertisers, the practice is particularly pervasive on the right…

“The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place,” wrote Perlstein. “One weird trick”–style remedies, in a very real sense, pay the salaries of hosts such as Prager; these hosts are incentivized to tout them just as their audiences are conditioned to trust them. The vaccines threaten the framework of burnished shit that supports and sustains these sorts of programs…

On Monday, Prager led off his show by blasting the city of Los Angeles for a new ordinance that would require patrons to show proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test in order to dine inside a restaurant, get a haircut, or engage in certain other indoor activities. Prager warned of “the communist hell that all communists create, and will in the United States if allowed,” and bemoaned “the love of power and the hypochondriacal fear, the maniacal fear that pervades the left about [COVID] and global warming.” Then, he threw the show to a commercial for Relief Factor, in which he spoke glowingly about the supplement’s “100 percent drug free ingredients, each helping your body deal with inflammation.”

…the layout of HumanEvents.com on the day it featured an article headlined “Ideas Will Drive Conservatives’ Revival.” Two inches beneath that bold pronouncement, a box headed “Health News” included the headlines “Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days,” “Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easily—without drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet,” and “High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points.” It would be interesting, that is, to ask Coulter about the reflex of lying that’s now sutured into the modern conservative movement’s DNA—and to get her candid assessment of why conservative leaders treat their constituents like suckers.

When Prager came back, he was at it again about natural immunity and the CDC—“who I believe are professional liars,” he clarified. By sowing doubt over the vaccines and crying foul over mandates, Prager and his peers are running through the tribal script of right-wing infotainment, otherizing every idea and institution that could plausibly be considered “liberal.” But in a very real sense, they just don’t want the liberals’ miracle drugs, because they already have plenty of their own.

In 2012, Rick Perlstein wrote:

The Long Con – Mail-order conservatism

In 2007, I signed on to the email lists of several influential magazines on the right, among them Townhall, which operates under the auspices of evangelical Stuart Epperson’s Salem Communications; Newsmax, the organ more responsible than any other for drumming up the hysteria that culminated in the impeachment of Bill Clinton; and Human Events, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite publications. The exercise turned out to be far more revealing than I expected. Via the battery of promotional appeals that overran my email inbox, I mainlined a right-wing id that was invisible to readers who encounter conservative opinion at face value…. I learned of the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta…

These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.

Dishonesty is demanded by the alarmist fundraising appeal because the real world doesn’t work anything like this. The distance from observable reality is rhetorically required; indeed, that you haven’t quite seen anything resembling any of this in your everyday life is a kind of evidence all by itself. It just goes to show how diabolical the enemy has become. He is unseen; but the redeemer, the hero who tells you the tale, can see the innermost details of the most baleful conspiracies. Trust him. Send him your money. Surrender your will—and the monster shall be banished for good.

This method highlights the fundamental workings of all grassroots conservative political appeals, be they spurious claims of Barack Obama’s Islamic devotion, the supposed explosion of taxpayer-supported welfare fraud, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

And, in an intersection that is utterly crucial, this same theology of fear is how a certain sort of commercial appeal—a snake-oil-selling one—works as well. This is where the retail political lying practiced by Romney links up with the universe in which 23-cent miracle cures exist (absent the hero’s intervention) just out of reach, thanks to the conspiracy of some powerful cabal—a cabal that, wouldn’t you know it in these late-model hustles, perfectly resembles the ur-villain of the conservative mind: liberals.

In this respect, it’s not really useful, or possible, to specify a break point where the money game ends and the ideological one begins. They are two facets of the same coin—where the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself. The proof is in the pitches—the come-ons in which the ideological and the transactional share the exact same vocabulary, moral claims, and cast of heroes and villains.

…Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher. Sneering at, or ignoring, your earnest high-minded mandarin gatekeepers—“we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” as one Romney aide put it—is another part of closing the deal.

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The Andrew Breitbart Story

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Ben Smith writes in his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral:

* Huffington’s young protégé was Andrew Breitbart, who had worked in her rotating cast of researchers and assistants back when she was a conservative. He was brilliant and frenetic, and brought both a deep knowledge of the internet and a different set of relationships in Los Angeles. Most intriguing, Andrew had a connection to Drudge himself: he was quietly running The Drudge Report eight hours a day!

* Arianna wanted Andrew Breitbart for the simple reason that he held the key to what The Huffington Post needed: traffic. Andrew was Matt Drudge’s minion—or assistant, or silent partner, depending on whom you asked. For eight hours a day, Andrew wrote and rewrote the simple HTML code that could drive one million views to an article. The Drudge Report ’s true power was that it told the story of American politics to millions, and set the agenda for news organizations whose editors and producers were forever refreshing the site.
Andrew had paid a strange, heavy price for that power—a decade of anonymity and even humiliation at the hands of his boss and idol. To most who knew him in Los Angeles, Breitbart was a frenetic, overweight fleabag of a man, an underachiever who’d grown up in Brentwood, barely made it through Tulane, and washed out in Hollywood. It was, in retrospect, classic Arianna Huffington to believe that, with only her connections and a dash of fairy dust, she could turn Andrew Breitbart into a leader at 2005’s hot new left-wing website. But she did have something to offer him: the chance to be his own man. She’d shifted her own politics, so why couldn’t he? And she and Kenny needed some of that traffic. First, though, she’d have to pry Breitbart loose from Drudge.
Andrew never forgot the moment he met Matt Drudge. It was a sunny day in the summer of 1995 when Drudge pulled his shitty little red Geo Metro onto Carroll Canal Court, a street in Venice, California, that neither man could possibly afford to live on. But Andrew’s girlfriend’s father was a famous comedian, Orson Bean, and so Andrew had invited his hero to their family’s glamorous address. Andrew was working on the fringes of Hollywood then, a rich kid back from partying his way through college, now building websites for the embarrassingly trashy E! network. Andrew had always had trouble paying attention—he was later diagnosed with ADHD—and he spent much of his day on the nascent internet, in particular on a set of bulletin boards called the Usenet. Posters on one of his favorite boards, alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater, would often cut and paste in an email digest called The Drudge Report , a list of links that included the newest political scandals, the big news of the day, and various oddities its mysterious author had uncovered. The newsletter “was like a tour of one man’s short-term memory,” Andrew later wrote. He was obsessed with its author, and finally gathered up the courage to send him an email. “Are you 50 people? A hundred people? Is there a building?” he asked.
Matt Drudge was, in fact an obscure, sallow, twenty-nine-year-old gossipmonger working as a clerk for CBS—which meant, in reality, folding T-shirts in the gift shop, eking out a living. At night, though, he was a new kind of journalist, emailing out a news digest that ranged from political scandal to early Hollywood box office numbers.
The two men connected intensely and immediately, spending four hours talking about politics and media, peering into the future from their vantage point deep inside the early internet. Drudge’s biographer Matthew Lysiak later reported that Drudge had offered Andrew a 25 percent stake in the website version of his email newsletter that he was launching. But Andrew wasn’t willing to give up his industry job, much as he hated it, for such an uncertain venture, and so they parted instead with a handshake deal that The Drudge Report would be Andrew’s side hustle. Between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m., Andrew would be the one posting its links, and Matt would pay him “what he could.” Andrew was awed by the meeting. “That guy is going to change the world,” he told his girlfriend as the Geo Metro drove away.
Working for Drudge was a dream of relevance and power. From that day in 1995 forward, Andrew Breitbart had a front-row seat to the birth of the internet, as Drudge channeled the anger and resentment of their favorite talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, into a riveting and simple page of links. There was right-wing politics and celebrity gossip, and other subtler strains that tickled America’s id: stories of loony liberals, terrifying Muslims, extreme weather, and weird science. Slowly but surely, the minor scandals that dripped out of newsrooms to the reclusive blogger became major ones. Andrew had been the silent force in the Clinton scandals, watching as the media raced to catch up with Matt’s (and his) obscure, ugly website.

* Drudge was the force Kenny Lerer and Arianna Huffington sought to rival; he was a veritable pillar of the early internet. He was powerful and famous. Andrew had some of the power, but none of the fame. He eventually quit the job at E! but still couldn’t quite explain to people what he did for a living. After Andrew married Susannah Bean and moved back to Brentwood, few of his friends and neighbors had any idea of his power. One neighbor watched the 2004 Super Bowl with him, and saw Andrew grab his laptop when Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction” revealed one breast. Andrew termed what she was wearing beneath it a “solar nipple medallion,” and the neighbor realized that “for the next couple of hours you could see that phrase popping up on all the broadcasts. I couldn’t believe how quickly they could influence the Zeitgeist of the world.”
Andrew also felt the excitement of the insurgent new internet, an allegiance that sometimes trumped his politics. Back then, right- and left-wingers online had a common bond: they were allied against the old establishment. So when Gawker took a shot at launching a Hollywood blog (called Defamer ) in 2004, Nick saw Andrew as an ally. “At the time, we were all bloggers of different political complexions—in opposition to a stultifying mainstream media,” Nick wrote.

* As Nick and Jonah’s competition intensified in the beginning of 2012, Andrew Breitbart felt he’d finally found his footing. Anthony Weiner’s dick, his downfall, and the election of a Republican to replace him had combined for Andrew to wash away the stain left by the Shirley Sherrod incident. Breitbart had brought a new wave of money into the company too: A low-profile hedge fund billionaire, Robert Mercer, had been taken with this new source of power, and invested $10 million. They’d put some of the cash into a splashy redesign, just like the one Nick Denton had done a year earlier to make the Gawker Media brands look bolder and less bloggy. (This stylish redesign had cost the site valuable page views. Chris Batty, the longtime ad salesman, departed over it.) Just as Nick had done, Andrew would make his blogs—initially just lists of stories, the latest first—into something glossier and more professional, with the biggest story of the day pinned to the top left corner.
Breitbart.com’s traffic, which plummeted after Drudge dropped Andrew, was coming back, starting to trickle in from Facebook. Somehow, even while Facebook trumpeted its role in the Obama campaign and its executives considered future careers in Democratic politics, Breitbart’s sort of people were on there too. Anger at the media and the Clintons, coverage of Black people committing crimes—for Andrew, it was all very promising.
But Andrew hadn’t gotten much healthier since he’d landed in the hospital during the Sherrod crisis. He was just forty-three, but he was fat and stressed, and his life was a mess. He was still riding his Vespa from Brentwood to an office in a dingy warehouse near Santa Monica. Andrew confessed to a friend that while he’d become a conservative rock star—“I could get laid in a geriatric center in flyover country”—he owed $133,000 to the Internal Revenue Service; he was still struggling to navigate the internal politics and secret flows of dark money that powered the right-wing media, including many far smaller and less successful sites.
Andrew would sometimes have a drink by himself to unwind, so there was nothing unusual about his stop on February 29, 2012, at the Brentwood, a restaurant and bar near his house. He arrived a little after 10:00 p.m., alone, for a drink. Another man at the bar, a marketing executive, recognized him and started talking politics, trying to get under Andrew’s skin by discussing recent stumbles of Republican Senate candidates. Andrew, toggling between his BlackBerry, his drink, and his new companion, engaged cheerfully, and argued that the liberal media, not the Republicans, was at fault. They parted in good spirits, agreeing to disagree.
Andrew Breitbart collapsed on the sidewalk soon afterward. He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead at 12:19 a.m. on Thursday, March 1, 2012. Friends at the funeral couldn’t help noticing that Matt Drudge, wearing sunglasses sunglasses throughout the ceremony, looked rested and almost absurdly fit, his biceps bulging out from beneath the sleeves of a black T-shirt.

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The Baked Alaska Story

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Ben Smith writes in his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral:

* “The internet is ours,” Benny [Johnson] had said, and he had a point. Jonah and Nick and their editors—Peggy and Anna and Jessica and AJ and I—thought we were inventing digital media, along with all the journalists and writers and techies around us. And yet the figures who would create the new American Far Right had been flickering around the edges of that picture from the start. There, at BuzzFeed’s office in Chinatown, sat Chris Poole, better known as moot—the creator of 4chan. There, hanging out late into the Brooklyn nights with Jezebel’s Tracie Egan, was Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes, who went on to start the pro-Trump militia known as the Proud Boys. There was Andrew Breitbart, mentor to Ben Shapiro and a generation of right-wing online figures, co-founding The Huffington Post . There was Steve Bannon paying us a visit. There was Benny in BuzzFeed’s West Twenty-First Street office, making lists. We’d seen them as the marginal characters in our story; by the time my editor and I were talking this book over in 2022, that picture looked exactly wrong: we seemed to be, he mused, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their tragedy.

* Gionet [Baked Alaska] had been subject to the evils that had been denounced at Trump’s social media summit. He’d been deplatformed—thrown off Twitter and Twitch—and had his YouTube videos demonetized. So he was streaming to DLive, a blockchain-based service, when he entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He strode around like he owned the place. “America First is inevitable! Fuck globalists, let’s go!” he yelled. At one point he advised other rioters not to damage anything; at another he yelled at a police officer that he was a “fucking oathbreaker, you piece of shit.”
Gionet’s excitement grew as he watched the number of viewers to his livestream rise. It was easy to relate to—it reminded me of that afternoon in April of 2016 when a couple of my colleagues had transfixed the world by putting rubber bands around a watermelon, watching the view count grow above eight hundred thousand, until the fruit exploded. “We’ve got over ten thousand people live, watching, let’s go!” he said excitedly, standing in the trashed office of a senator from Oregon, Jeff Merkley. “Hit that follow button—I appreciate you guys.” His followers excitedly replied, cheering him on to “hang all the congressmen.”
At one point, someone off camera warned that President Trump “would be very upset” with the antics of the rioters. “No, he’ll be happy,” Mr. Gionet responded. “We’re fighting for Trump.”
Later, when it became clear that Trump would not, or could not, protect the rioters, Gionet went briefly underground, posting frantically from short-lived Twitter accounts that he was in hiding. The FBI caught up to him in Houston nine days later, on January 15. The federal court in Washington, DC, didn’t have much sympathy for the rioters, whose actions, the circuit’s chief judge said, had been “reprehensible as offenses against morality, civic virtue, and the rule of law.” Then they fitted him with an ankle monitor and sent him back to Scottsdale. He was not, it turned out, chastened.
On March 31, the ankle bracelet was off and Gionet, awaiting trial, was streaming again. In one video, he films as police arrive to inform him that there have been complaints that he’s harassing people. In another, he picks a fight with a friend, and when the friend slaps the camera out of his hand, Gionet himself calls the police. He leers at an attractive female cop, and does his best to provoke others. And in a video that appears on an unlisted Twitter account, he complains that the federal agents on his case are “fat faggots and dykes,” a piece of information he says he’s learned from the Nazi publication the Daily Stormer. He says he’s been watching a lot of documentaries about violent standoffs between Far Right figures and federal agents at places like Waco and Ruby Ridge.
On June 4, 2021, the federal officer monitoring him before trial dragged him back in front of a federal judge, via videoconference, to demand that he be barred from streaming videos. It was clear from the videos, his pretrial release officer told the court, that he was trying “specifically to agitate, anger, and offend and provoke a violent response to the video during livestream for people to continue to comment.” Then Gionet piped up to clarify. “Calling the cops—that’s a prank,” he explained, before his lawyer cut him off. The judge said he found the videos “inane,” but that Gionet had stayed just on this side of the line and hadn’t violated the conditions of his release. What’s more, Gionet and his lawyer had made a compelling case that streaming on social media was the defendant’s job, and had been ever since he started at BuzzFeed six years earlier.
The court couldn’t take away a man’s ability to feed himself. As Gionet told the judge, “That’s my income.”
Gionet kept streaming, kept playing cat-and-mouse with social media platforms and courts alike, all through the next year. In January of 2022, a Scottsdale judge sentenced him to thirty days in jail for the attack on the bouncer, after prosecutors called him “lost” and a “danger to society.” On May 11, he appeared in federal court to plead guilty on a single misdemeanor charge connected to the attack on the Capitol. But when Gionet told the judge that he was pleading guilty on his lawyers’ advice despite believing “I’m innocent,” the judge rejected his plea. Finally, Gionet relented and pleaded guilty, and, in January of 2023, a federal judge sentenced him to two months in jail. He had “made a mockery of democracy,” Judge Trevor McFadden told the thirty-five-year-old defendant, who had been convicted on the evidence of his own live stream. The judge marveled at how brazen his crimes had been: “You did everything you could to publicize your misconduct.”

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The Israeli Mind: How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Alon Gratch writes in this 2015 book:

In one version, the victim continues to reexperience the traumatic event in nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, the startle response, and so on, while in the other, he numbs himself to any feelings and withdraws from people in order to avoid being emotionally triggered and overwhelmed. In therapy, the goal is to integrate these two syndromes, helping one patient to contain the anxiety and move away from the trauma, and the other, to confront the trauma and let in some anxiety. Many individuals with PTSD are somewhere in between the two extremes, vacillating from one to the other in an effort to find a resting place.
Ka-Tzetnik had, it appears, struggled mightily to integrate these two positions. We know that after years of suffering silently through his nightmares, his wife finally pleaded with him to seek help. He refused for a long time, explaining that nobody, not even those who had been to Auschwitz, could ever understand him. When his wife heard about a new form of treatment, developed by Dutch physician Jan Bastiaans, at the Center for War Injuries in Leiden, Holland, she again begged Ka-Tzetnik to try it. At last he gave in. He was just about sixty when he arrived in Holland for what he knew was a highly controversial treatment. Bastiaans’s therapy rested on the reasonable-enough assumption that in becoming introverted many survivors created an internal concentration concentration camp, walling themselves off from the healing touch of other people. The more questionable element in his approach was his use of LSD to break down these defenses. Unlike drugs with soothing or numbing effects, LSD tends to sharpen perceptions. It usually precipitates powerful flashbacks from significant events in the past. Bastiaans injected his patients with several rounds of LSD, recorded or videotaped their reactions, and then analyzed them. The idea was to force the patient to reexperience and confront his trauma directly, under supportive medical supervision. Bastiaans received permission to administer his treatment in the 1960s only after several Dutch Holocaust survivors sent a petition to the queen.
During his LSD-induced trances, Ka-Tzetnik experienced the most horrific hallucinations. He saw his mother standing naked with other women on line to the crematorium and then going up in smoke. He saw his sister among the camp prostitutes. He saw a friend from the barracks being beaten to death on his naked buttocks. He saw starving prisoners attacking one of their own after his face was covered with jelly by the guards. Within seconds, a thousand prisoners were licking and biting each other, and when it was all over, Ka-Tzetnik saw the bloody, eaten-away corpse of a friend, surrounded by laughing German guards. And he saw an SS soldier murdering a boy whom he had sexually abused. The soldier then grilled the boy’s body on a skewer and ate it piece by piece.
During a break between trances, Ka-Tzetnik was able for the first time in his life to expose the number on his arm—to a group of German tourists when he was taking a walk on the beach. He later wrote that when one of these tourists, who had strange, elaborate tattoos on his chest and arms, approached Ka-Tzetnik on the beach to examine his simple and therefore more unique tattoo, Ka-Tzetnik suddenly panicked. “A crazed beast was awakening inside me, ready to plunge its fangs into the throat of this creature standing over me. I jumped to my feet, shouting curses, and ran.” 3
In a subsequent trance, Ka-Tzetnik saw himself in an SS uniform, wearing a hat with the skull insignia. He then came to what he considered the major discovery of his treatment: Auschwitz was man-made, and in different circumstances he himself could have been the Nazi murderer, and the Germans, his victims. This insight triggered a horrible sense of guilt and a desperate plea to God: “O Lord, merciful and compassionate Lord, am I the one, the one who created Auschwitz?” 4 This new awareness also apparently cured Ka-Tzetnik of his nightmares—strangely, though logically, by creating a new problem for him. While letting go of his nighttime dreams about the past, he now developed daytime fears about the future. If the Holocaust was indeed man-made, what could man do now when he had the atom bomb at his disposal? He thus began to have tormenting visions about a nuclear holocaust. “Wherever there is humankind, there is Auschwitz,” he later explained. 5 He had gone to Holland demanding an explanation for Auschwitz of the night, he wrote, but where might he go now for an explanation of Auschwitz of the day?
Whatever one makes of this type of treatment, in broad conceptual terms it bears some similarity to contemporary psychoanalytic therapy. Both seek not to eliminate symptoms but rather to replace them with more authentic sufferings, which is what Ka-Tzetnik’s outcome appears to have been. Indeed, as part of the horrific realization that under certain circumstances he, too, could have been a Nazi, Ka-Tzetnik came to see that Auschwitz was not another planet after all. It was very much man’s creation and should therefore not be walled off or delegated to dreams and other works of fiction. It had to be—it was—part of everyday reality. Thus, Ka-Tzetnik and De-Nur were one and the same, not of two different worlds, and with this resolution Ka-Tzetnik terminated his therapy. Dramatically, Ka-Tzetnik’s LSD-induced hallucinations allowed him to leave the “other planet” behind, in Holland, or more accurately, to bring it back into his reality in Israel. He continued to struggle with integrating the two, and it was ten years before he was able to write the story of his treatment, which further reinforced this integrative process.

Posted in Holocaust | Comments Off on The Israeli Mind: How the Israeli National Character Shapes Our World

My Rules For Life

Posted on May 7, 2023 by Luke Ford

Stephen J. James talked in his May 5 video about doing a show on “Luke Ford’s 12 Rules for Life.”

So I started thinking about my rules for my life and my principles for decoding reality.

* Clean your room.

* “We treat other people the way we treat ourselves.” (Allen Berger)

* “We construct reality to make ourselves feel OK.” (Allen Berger)

* I can do things with great intentions, great effort and great care and still come a cropper if I fail to follow the rules of the people in charge, no matter how inconsequential I find those rules. If I don’t follow the rules of people and institutions that have the ability to hurt me, they will hurt me. I can’t rarely defeat city hall and it is not usually worth trying. My natural instinct is that I am a precious snowflake who doesn’t have the follow the rules. This has not served me. The world doesn’t care about what I think is important. When reality and I go to war, reality always wins.

* I am not responsible for other people’s behavior, but if they are in my life, I usually have some influence over them. If they make a choice, it is 100% on them, but if I make different choices, there is a more than zero chance that they will behave differently.

* Knowing right from wrong is not of much use if you don’t have the power to choose the right. Most of us lack the power to do what is good more than we lack the knowledge.

* If you need people to vouch for you, you’ll behave better. If there’s nobody who’ll vouch for you, you have a serious problem.

* “My behavior tells me who I am. The feet never lie.” Your head and your heart are often delusional. How you behave is who you are. How you behave is what you believe. If you want to know the truth about your character, look at how you behave. (HerbK)

* At all times, preach what you believe. Occasionally, use words. (Francis of Assisi, according to legend) We’re always transmitting. Everything we do affects other people.

* If people consistently treat you with disrespect, it is because you are encouraging that (perhaps by being too vulnerable).

* The bigger your need for a hero, the bigger the hole in your soul. The stronger your parasocial relationships, the bigger the holes in your soul.

* Here are some of the ways that I see people becoming unhinged by the news: (1) They overestimate their ability to change the world. (2) They overestimate the importance of news. (3) They overestimate their ability to understand the news. (4) They are blind to the fictional reality of their hero system. (5) They are blind to their own limitations. (6) They rage against reality. When man and reality conflict, reality always wins. (7) They deepen their pathologies, such as feeling superior to or inferior to others, becoming hopeless and desperate, identifying too strongly with winners or losers in the news, getting their sense of importance from the news, and then feeling desperate to make the news (feeling as if they don’t count if they don’t get on TV). (8) They sell out who they are to gain respectability. (9) They damage what should be most precious to them by making impolitic reactions to the news. (10) They fail to wisely navigate between reactions #8 and #9. Feeling anxious, they either sell ourselves out to get along with others or they ignore the repercussions to their relationships by following their heart.

* To enter into a relationship is to start a countdown on feeling betrayed (meaning, you will inevitably be shocked that the other party has different priorities from what you expect, such as that you are not their top concern at all times).

* Don’t separate yourself from the community. When you watch Chimp Empire, you see the chimps who leave the herd have a hard time. At the same time, recognize that the stronger your in-group identity, the stronger will be your sense of your group’s victimhood. Ties bind and blind (Jonathan Haidt). So when you are with your in-group, think at times about how your side’s behavior and words look to disinterested outsiders.

* In some situations, you will be a concentration camp inmate, and in other situations, you will be a concentration camp guard. The situation will consistently shape you as much or more than your inherent characteristics. So if you want to stay faithful or sober, avoid situations that will endanger you.

* If you get your expectations right, you’ll feel happier and you’ll operate more effectively. One of the best ways to do this is to place people and institutions into their correct genre.

* Live as though everyone knows everything as opposed to trying to get away with as much as possible. (James Burnham) Act and speak as though your words and actions were accurately represented on the front page of the New York Times. This simple test is the best one I know for gauging proper behavior. It’s more powerful than asking what does God want from me (a question I also ask) because the New York Times is more real to me than the invisible non-physical God.

* As soon as you go online, you will feel a tug to be impulsive and to develop an inflated sense of your importance. You will feel tempted to ignore social proprieties (such as discussing dark topics that you would normally avoid in face-to-face interaction). These tendencies, if not successfully resisted, will damage your life. (Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality)

* The best protection is connection. The best way to survive a layoff or an earthquake or inflation is connection with others near you. The best way to develop conscientiousness (correlates with academic, personal and career success) is to connect. When you take your spouse, your friends, and your boss into your consideration, you make better choices.

* “Threatening a company’s sense of protection is the number one cause of job loss today.”

* “Even if you have the best skills in the company, you will have no security, none of your needs will be met, and no doors will be opened to you unless you gain the trust of those at the top. Trust is based on the company’s perception of you. Whatever that perception is at this moment is actively determining your job security and value.”

* “The closer you bring yourself into the appearance of alignment through your daily actions and choices, the more favorable the company’s opinions of you will be, and the more secure your job will be.”

* “Highly skilled employees, with seemingly great value to their organizations, are let go every day because they are perceived to be a potential risk and cannot be trusted.”

* “Companies look at your appearance as a sign of the way you think. Dated clothing translates into dated thinking. Don’t wear glasses from the ’70s or clothes from ten years ago. No matter how good you are at your job, a dated appearance will give you an image of someone behind the times, someone who might keep the company from moving forward.”

* “There’s no right to free speech in the workplace [or in your group].”

* “Look at your actions through the eyes of an owner. Do you outwardly act like someone who supports the company policies and interests, no matter what you think on the inside? Do you openly behave and speak like someone with ownership and passion, or someone looking for more money in your paycheck? Look at your actions through the lens of the company values. How close in alignment do your actions seem when viewed from the outside?”

* “Negativity is highly contagious.”

* “So who is this person with such tremendous power over your career? For better or worse, it is your boss. Without his or her support your career goes nowhere.”

* When you think about how your selfishness hurts other people, you sober up and snap back into reality. When you think about people who’ve loved you, you sober up and snap back into reality. When you think about your failures, your transgressions, and your humiliations, you sober up and snap back into reality (though for some people, this will drag them down, so these would be bad things to dwell on).

* It is inevitable that we will constantly compare ourselves to others (and we will find ways to convince ourselves that we are superior to them). We need to do this comparison for information and connection. We need to believe we are more important than we are otherwise we would be crushed by our own insignificance.

* If you quickly and completely confess your wrongdoing, you can overcome most of your mistakes with people.

* “Virtue signalling is virtuous.”

* If you react to an angry person with empathy, they usually calm down.

* We’re driven to improve our social status, but the more extreme our drive, the more likely we are to step on the toes of other people and they will retaliate.

* A good way of judging one’s importance in a particular profession is how much income you legitimately, legally and ethically derive from it.

* If you bid for someone’s attention, and fail, perhaps try once more, but don’t go beyond that.

* If you must give someone unsolicited advice, do it only once. If you can’t help yourself and you do it again, forgive yourself for being a bloody fool.

* When I have a painful confrontation with someone, I look for where I was at fault.

* When someone criticizes me, I look for where I at fault.

* When someone important to me says something, I look for how they could be right.

* I carry around the people important to me in my heart, and they affect how I conduct myself. If I forget my client’s interests, I lose that client. If I forget my friends’ interests, I lose those friends. I want to live to simultaneously develop the relationships dearest to me, and to pursue what I believe to be right (and these are often in conflict and neither side of the spectrum is where I want to live). Freedom and community are in opposition and I will sacrifice some freedom for community and some community for freedom.

* Living by principles is usually a wonderful thing, but your well-being should also be a principle and sometimes it should be more important to you than abstract values. What other employees will tell you about your job is more likely to be accurate than the employee handbook. The law in effect for you is not the law on the books, it is the law that is enforced. If everyone around you is driving 80 mph in a 65 mph zone, drive 80 mph.

* Just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean you need to be angry about it. Just because I don’t like something does not mean it is not good for me.

* When you avoid things that make you feel uncomfortable, you put yourself in a prison of anxiety and depression.

* Happy successful people tend to be more willing than average to appropriately extend trust.

* If you are not living in reality, your visions will turn into straitjackets.

* We all need more internal power, and the best way to get more power, is to connect with others.

* Loser lose themselves in drama. Producers minimize drama.

* If you can’t get love, you’ll seek attention.

* “Humans belong to multiple hierarchies and tend to value the one in which they rank highest. Consider the mailroom clerk who is also the best player on the company’s softball team. The latter may be emphasized & become a source of considerable self-esteem.”

* We weren’t born yesterday. People did not evolve to be gullible about their welfare. Advertising and propaganda doesn’t change us unless we want to change.

* WSJ: “You’re extremely unlikely to change someone else’s bad behavior. And the more you call that person out, the more likely he is going to get defensive and double down on it.”

* When we encounter things we can’t handle, we will tend to react with fight, flight, freeze or fawn reflexes, which quickly translate into the emotions of anger (fight), fear (flight) or hiding (freeze).

* Humility means accepting reality. Insanity means denying the truth. Sanity means accepting the truth.

* Be who you need to be during the day (subordinate, assistant, cashier, janitor, clerk) but don’t forget who you are (your vision).

* Communication builds on itself just as hiding collapses on itself. Polish here and shine there (The Karate Kid).

* If you have a problem in one area of your life, you have this problem all over your life, you just can’t see it. If you habitually over-eat, you over-indulge in other areas of your life. If you habitually lie in dating, you lie in other areas of your life. If you are nasty with your spouse, you are likely nasty to others as well. If you lie about what you believe and what you practice with your religion, you likely do the same in other areas of your life. If you get panic attacks in elevators, you likely have this problem in other areas of life. If you hide in one area of your life, you hide in many areas of your life. If you can’t control your behavior on social media, you likely have unmanageability in many areas of your life. If you smoke too much or watch too much tv, you overdo other things. If you are vague with your exercise commitment, you likely will be vague in many areas of your life. If people tend to find you annoying in one aspect of your life, you are likely obnoxious in other areas of your life. If you have an instinctive suspicion or hatred of people in authority at work or in your religion, you likely have this baggage with authority elsewhere in your life. If you can’t get over loss in your love life, you will have similar problems elsewhere.

* When you’re losing at life (such as the loss of relationships, status, income, opportunities), you’ll likely retreat into depression (usually an adaptive response where you stop acting habitually, try to learn from your mistakes and plot productive ways forward) or you’ll become reckless and likely compound your problems because you can’t stand losing and you don’t feel you have much of a life to protect. When you’re winning at life, you’ll tend to be protect the precious things you have going, and you’ll make better decisions.

* In most circumstances, if you are aligned with God (Reality), you will feel content and serene. If you don’t feel content and serene, you are not aligned with God. If you are not serene and content, you will hurt other people. We are constantly transmitting who we are to others.

* When you text, you don’t just text words, you also text you. (Dennis Prager)

* If you yearn to help somebody, ask yourself your motivation. Is it coming from a good place or a bad place? If you want to tell a joke, ask yourself if it is because you want to transmit joy or just attention seek? If you are not sure about saying something, ask yourself if it is helpful, is it true, is it necessary, is it timely and am I the one to say it?

* How you do any one thing is likely to provide a window into how you do everything. For example, I could teach 100 valuable Alexander Technique lessons to the same pupil where all he dies is get in and out of a chair. That stimulus of folding and unfolding his limbs will reveal his tension patterns throughout his life.

* “If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

* What does it mean to put first things first? For me, it means getting clean at the start of the day physically and spiritually. Then I do the most important items in my day in descending order of importance. Another approach to this question is to get clear on what is of secondary importance such as social media or playing video games and make sure I don’t get sidetracked in the first ten hours of my day with nonsense.

* Rushing and multi-tasking are signs to your nervous system that you are not OK. Happiness means loving what you have. Your nervous system’s omnipresent question is — am I safe? Intimacy and purpose are the first things to go when your nervous system gets corrupted [by cell phones, etc]. (Fred Luskin)

* “The action is the success; the results are out of our hands” (Jerrold Mundis).

* Our default emotional state is anxiety. Our protection against this anxiety is connection with people we love. Happiness is the ability to love and be loved. We are programmed for flight, fight or freeze. It’s only when we feel compassion (for ourselves and others) that we are in reality. If you want to get into reality, think about people you love and who have loved you, and feel your gratitude. (Fred Luskin)

* “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” (Steven Pressfield, The War of Art)

* “Saying ‘have a nice day’ or ‘take care’ to a stranger is linked with greater subjective well-being…minimal social interactions with strangers contribute to subjective well-being in everyday life.”

* Transformation begins when we decide that continuing on as we are is intolerable. The pain of not changing outweighs the pain of changing.

* “I USED TO IMAGINE life divided into separate compartments, consisting, for example, of such dual abstractions as pleasure and pain, love and hate, friendship and enmity… As time goes on, these supposedly different worlds draw closer…so that, at last, diversity between them…seems to be almost imperceptible… [N]early all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out to be tenaciously inter-related; love and hate, friendship and enmity, too…” (A Dance To The Music Of Time, Book Two)

* Fred Luskin: “I see time and again that when hurt people reconnect with their noblest goals they gain an immediate burst of power. Finding your positive intention reconnects you with your goals. The sad truth is, your grievances separated you from your most positive goals through your excessive focus on what went wrong… The biggest drawback to telling grievance stories is they keep us connected in a powerless way with people who have hurt us. When we mull over our past wounds and hurts, we remind ourselves of a part of our life that did not work. Reconnecting with our positive intention reminds us of our goals and enables us to move forward.”

* You can tell if you have processed something if you can talk about it without physiological reactions such as stuttering, voice cracking, flushing, etc. If you can’t talk about something without getting triggered, you haven’t processed it. If you can’t talk about your urges without getting triggered, you haven’t fully recovered. If you still have “triggers”, you haven’t processed and come to terms with you. The intensity of your triggers is inverse to your level of recovery. Triggers are signs you need to work your program. In blunter terms, triggers are bullshit. Step work reduces our unnecessary sensitivities. It make us more resilient.

* A sign of recovery is living an increasingly transparent life.

* “People feel more extroverted, more agreeable, more conscientious, when they are in other places, compared to when they are at home,” she said, while “people feel more disorganized and chaotic when they are at home.” When people spent time in social environments, they also felt more compassionate, open-minded and kind compared to when they were at home. (WSJ)

* You can’t be happy without friends.

* Almost every point of view has its time and place, including “lol nothing matters” which is incredibly fun and liberating when used appropriately.

* “The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.” (David Viscott)

* Anger is often adaptive in the moment in that it gives you the strength to deal with a problem. Anger outside of the moment rarely serves you.

* I like this advice:

Always assume five people will watch when you broadcast:

* Your best friend
* Your worst enemy
* Your boss
* Your mother
* A lawyer

* You’re likely to feel great when you wear great clothes.

* Annie Murphy Paul wrote in her 2021 book, The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain:

[P]eople who are more aware of their bodily sensations are better able to make use of their non-conscious knowledge. Mindfulness meditation is one way of enhancing such awareness. The practice has been found to increase sensitivity to internal signals, and even to alter the size and activity of that key brain structure, the insula.

* Even when I’m alone, most of my thinking is stimulated by the most important relationships in my life. Paul wrote:

A major factor in the grad students’ transformation, he concluded, was their experience of intense social engagement around a body of knowledge—the hours they spent advising, debating with, and recounting anecdotes to one another.

* I’m a life-long vegetarian and as a result, I’ve had terrible health. In July 2021, I started taking six beef organ capsules every morning from Ancestral Supplements and I feel great. We were built to eat meat.

* According to this podcast, the dark side of fame includes:

* Difficulty trusting people.
* Has been syndrome (the flame of celebrity always dims)
* Acquired situational narcissism
* The brain gets addicted to a high level of neurological stimulation and hungers for recognition
* People aren’t looking at you, they’re looking through you
* Temptation

Here are the positive sides of fame that I have experienced:

* Free travel;
* Easy money;
* I got more opportunities to do what I was good at;
* I sensed the world opening up to me, I got access to where I wanted access (such as interview subjects);
* I expanded my social circle (making up for the losses of people who turned their back on me because they despised my blogging);
* Successful people in my space treated me like a peer;
* I filled up with energy and I passed that energy on to others;
* My opportunities to do good expanded;
* I had new experiences which prompted me to have new thoughts and feelings that would not have been available otherwise;
* Preferential treatment.

I don’t feel like listing off the dark sides of fame for me. I prefer to focus on the good things in my life.

* Around 2012, I largely stopped regretting the past because I adopted the 12-step maxim of given who I was at the time, I couldn’t have acted differently. I did the best I could with the tools I had. For example, I never chose to be a love addict, a sex addict, a debtor, a co-dependent, and an under-earner. These compulsions were ways I learned to deal with pain, and now I have better techniques for living.

I first did a blog post titled “My Rules For Life” Feb. 23, 2020:

* I look for ways to approach life that make me happy and prosperous, that enable me to get along with other people, and to have a sense of ease with myself, with others, with the universe and with God.

* I like the teaching found in the Alexander Technique that all beliefs are just unnecessary tension. I find that insight useful, though not necessarily true. There are many beliefs that are useful though not necessarily true. I’m happy to play with them.

* I like the idea that everybody should be appreciated in their own genre. That is my recasting of historicism. I want to understand people within their context.

* Not just everybody but every thing has its genre. I look for learning about biology among biologists, for learning about Talmud to Talmud scholars and to learn about history from historians. In general, the smarter and the more accomplished the person, the more seriously I take them.

* There are certain clues for people I do not take seriously. For example, if they base their teachings on their anger or their feelings, if they feel that they run the world, if they believe that there is a magic key to how history or the world works, I immediately dismiss them. If they consistently locate their troubles outside of themselves, I can’t take them seriously. I consider conspiracy theorists cranks and nutters.

* I believe we attract people into our lives and people create the kind of societies that chiefly reflect their genetic code when matched with a particular environment.

* I believe that I am an intellectual gigolo who falls in love with every attractive idea that comes along but stays loyal to none.

* I try to stay aware that I usually do not see the world as it is, but as I am.

* I try not to give my opinions undue weight, because every time I share a heavy one, I then feel compelled to defend it, and I dig myself a hole.

* I don’t know of any moral teaching more valuable than that one should act as if what you are doing and saying will be reported accurately on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow. I guess that’s my principle moral code.

* I think the more integrated your life, the better. The fewer secrets the better. The more honesty the better. I like to ask myself regularly — what am I hiding that should be shared with others? What am I ashamed about? Who do I resent? What am I lying about? What relationships and situations am I in that weigh me down? Do I have unnecessary possessions and tensions? And then I clean house and help others.

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