Travel Clarifies

SYDNEY. Most of what I was thinking about in LA (getting ahead and making moves), I am no longer thinking about down under. Almost everything that concerned me in LA is of little concern to me in Sydney. Disappointments in California have largely left my mind in Australia. Frustrations that bugged me in Beverly Hills are milder on Bondi Beach.

I am talking about degrees of concern here, not states of absolute concern vs no concern.

Wherever you go, there you are? That is only partly right, because who we are is largely constructed by where we are and with whom we are. I am no longer the person I was in Los Angeles. That person only exists in Los Angeles. When I lived in the Napa Valley and in Auburn and in Orlando, I was different from LA Luke.

There is no true self. We are usually different in different situations. The most prominent exceptions to this are addictions and personality disorders. If you over-eat or over-debt or under-earn or go manic or drown in depression everywhere you go then these compulsions to participate in your own destruction appears to be essential to who you are without recovery. People talk in AA about doing a geographic ala moving with the hope that your problems with addiction will disappear. Almost by definition, if you have an addiction, this won’t work. If you can move to a new place and stop acting out, then the classic 12-step approach would suggest you don’t have an addition. I don’t have a strong ideological commitment to this addiction as disease model, I just see it pragmatically helping people including myself (under the moral model where my failings reflected bad character, I just increased in self-loathing and didn’t get better) but there may be more profound explanatory models.

I’m sitting here in Sydney on a Sunday afternoon thinking about the Dallas Cowboys playing the Green Bay Packers tomorrow morning Sydney time and I am trying to figure out where I will see the game. Without social support, the NFL is not nearly as compelling to me. This must be why the rabbis counseled Jews to not separate yourself from the community and to never step foot in a church service. Where you are and what you do is often more likely to shape you that any inherent qualities or commitments you might believe you have. We are not the buffered, strategic autonomous rational beings that the moderns conceive. We are porous, self-centered, self-deceiving beings who tend to take the easy way out, just as the ancients believed.

I spent a year in Australia after high school, and when I returned to Sacramento in June of 1985, my interest in sports was less than half as intense. That fall of 1985, when the Kansas City Royals met up with the Saint Louis Cardinals in the World Series, for the first time in years, I had no interest in watching.

So what I care about is in large part socially constructed. Those parts of me that I think are essentially me are not essentially me, they are contingent and socially constructed. Change the contingency, change the society, and many of those essential parts of me are either gone or diminished.

I have a wildly successful friend with a rich husband who lived for years in a beautiful home in a safe part of Los Angeles but she had trouble sleeping. When she moved to Europe during Covid, her sleeping problems disappeared.

Living in many of America’s big cities, one is constantly aware of crime, homeless and social decay. That angst disappears in Australia.

America’s culture wars have about one-tenth the intensity in Australia.

In Los Angeles, there is widespread dissatisfaction with crime, homelessness and the inability of the political process to meet the challenges of the city. In Sydney, I am not detecting similar amounts of rage and frustration. I’ve been here nine days and nobody has wanted to talk to me about Australian politics or Australian culture wars. They just don’t matter much. I’ve heard only one angry outburst. I’ve heard no police sirens. I’m not detecting rage and despair in Sydney’s eastern suburbs (the most affluent parts of Sydney).

Friends seem easier to make and maintain in Sydney than in America. Loneliness is a major news story in the United States and England, but not so much in Australia. Why? Australians have mates.

If I am right that friendship is more prevalent in Australia than America, why is that? One explanation is that the culture war is less important here. Another explanation is that Australians are more homogeneous. The more diverse the population, the less people have in common. In America, everyone is uncomfortable because of diversity. You go through the airport and you are treated like a potential enemy. You go through the airport in Australia, and you are more likely to encounter people like yourself.

Steve Sailer noted that Australia is the best place in the world to be an average bloke. Australia’s more restrictive immigration policies ensue easier living standards for its citizens (wages are high, and family formation is more affordable).

Another explanation is that Australia is more communal while America is more individualist. The great American value is freedom while the great Australia value is fairness. These differences in emphasis might largely account for the greater strength of friendship in Australia as compared to America.

The BBC published Nov. 11, 2022:

How loneliness is killing men

Back in 2008, a small but very cute study asked people to stand at the bottom of a hill, look up and guess how steep it was. Some people were there alone, others accompanied by friends. The hill, on the campus of the University of Virginia, had an incline of 26°. But to the people who were there with friends, it looked a lot less. Compared with those who turned up on their own, they significantly underestimated the gradient. The feel-good lesson? Everything looks easier when there’s a friend by your side.

Yes, mate, the benefits of friendship are profound. Having a strong social circle is associated with a longer life and fewer illnesses. Your pals lower your blood pressure and trigger positive chemicals in your brain. People with a strong social network are less stressed, more resilient and more optimistic. They’re more likely to be a healthy weight and less likely to suffer cognitive decline. They also enjoy some protection from cancer, heart disease and depression.

But there’s one group – a big one – that is missing out on these benefits. Men are lonely. Growing numbers of men are standing at the bottom of that hill, alone and overwhelmed, as surveys point to a recession of social connection among those of us with a Y chromosome.

I suffered from poor health for most of my life and the prospect of a walk was not always an enticing one. But when I walked with a friend, the miles flew by. Almost all of my challenges seem easier when I have friends. I can talk about what is bothering me and not only diminish my pain, but gain new insights to overcome my problems. That sense I am not alone makes me feel stronger, and when I feel stronger, I make better decisions as I see things more clearly, I behave in a more pro-social manner, and as a result of these qualities I have fewer problems, I feel happier, and my focus shifts from my own pain to helping other people.

On the other hand, when I had no ride to the hospital, when I saw no way out of my misery, when I felt like the world was shutting its doors to me, those were dark self-centered days indeed.

A YouGov poll in 2019 concluded that one in five men have no close friends, twice as many as women. In 2021, the Survey Center on American Life found that since 1995, the number of American men reporting that they had no close friends jumped from 3 to 15 per cent. In the same research, the number of men saying they had at least six close friends halved from 55 per cent to 27 per cent.

This rings true to me. One part of American life I have found to have all the virtues of mateship is traditional religion. Loneliness is not a common problem among normal Seventh-Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews.

Loneliness is a health hazard, as dangerous as smoking or alcoholism, according to some research.

A major study by scientists at Brigham Young University in the US found that long-term social isolation can increase a person’s risk of premature death by as much as 32 per cent. For this reason, some have called it the ‘shadow pandemic’. It was brought into focus during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when all of us were isolated and friendship became a hot research topic again, but it had spread around the world long before the novel coronavirus had.

What is the cause and what is the effect? Are dysfunctional maladjusted anti-social people more likely to be lonely? Of course. On the other hand, I have known mateship and I have known loneliness, and mateship is better, and I feel like I have made decisions that moved me toward more of one than the other. There is room for agency.

“It’s a story I’ve been telling for 30 years,” says Prof Niobe Way, of New York University. As a developmental psychologist, Way has spent much of her career interviewing boys and men about their relationships, and how they change over time (documented in her book, Deep Secrets). She believes that hyper-masculine ideals are stripping young men of close friendships and the intimacy that goes with them.

“When you speak to boys aged 11, 12 or 13, they have this natural capacity and desire for closeness. And it’s not a bromance thing, it’s not just wanting to have dudes to hang out with. It’s wanting someone they can share their secrets with,” she says. “Then you speak to them again around 15 or 16 and you get this stereotype creeping into the responses. They start saying things like, ‘Oh sure, I have friends, everyone’s my best friend, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.’”

Way admits that young men being macho about their friendships is nothing new, but she thinks it’s telling that a change occurs in adolescence that – seemingly – frames the way a lot of men form and maintain their relationships all the way through adulthood.

Masculinity seems less charged and contentious in Australia, the one first-world country where men and women naturally segregate. If you are a bloke at a barbie in Oz, it would be weird if you spent most of your time talking to sheilas. It is accepted wisdom here that men and women prefer their own company and have separate concerns.

If you’ve ever watched a sitcom, you know how it goes: men have superficial or transactional relationships with each other and bond by banter as they watch sport or drink beer. Women, in contrast, have deep and emotionally vulnerable conversations marked by shared secrets and interpersonal closeness. The funny thing is, these sitcom stereotypes are borne out by research.

“One of the main things we’ve shown is that the two sexes are very different in their social style,” says Prof Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Oxford whose work centres on social bonding. “The girls’ social world has been built around personalised relationships. It matters who you are, not what you are.

“For men, what makes the difference is investing time in doing something together. It might be meeting up for a pint or arranging to climb Ben Nevis. The activity is irrelevant as long as it’s a group activity – and that often doesn’t involve a lot of conversation. There’s a bit of banter but really, the content is close to zero.”

That rings true. On the other hand, male friendships don’t seem to be volatile as female friendships. And male banter, in my experience, is a trope that eases the way for more substantive interaction. When I get together with my mates, we start out abusing each other for a few minutes, and then we get to the guts of our lives. With other male friends, we largely skip the banter and just go for the guts. And much of this varies with the circumstance. If one of us is in distress, we don’t usually banter about it.

The difference between male and female friendship is often characterised as side-by-side versus face-to-face relationships. When men meet their friends, they stand shoulder-to-shoulder: at the bar, at the football ground, fishing at a river. When women meet up, they often sit across a table from each other and talk.

That rings true.

I wonder if reduced levels of friendship among first-world men is in part a reflection of the growing acceptance of homosexuality. Going with a mate to see a play or to see flowers blooming used to be normal. Now it is thought of as gay activity, and most straight blokes don’t want to look gay. Now that many weddings are super gay, I expect that many straight men are more reluctant to marry.

The emotional investment and frequent contact that women prize is not as important for men, Dunbar says. Men can go months without seeing a mate but still consider that person a close friend. Could this superficial approach to friendship explain why men are losing friends and more likely to feel lonely?

It’s almost certainly a factor, but it’s not the only one. Sociological and generational changes also play a part. It was only a few generations ago that, for the majority of people, friends were constants in our lives, like family. People moved less, travelled less, changed jobs less. Today, our mobility – literal and figurative – means that friendships can more easily come and go.

Male friendship depends upon common activity. With the decline in organized religion comes a decline in common activity. Also, fewer exclusive roles in religion, charity and wider society are now reserved for men. As men don’t like competing with women, they’d rather drop out.

Loneliness and isolation can also happen as a consequence of other things, says Dr Mike Jestico, a psychologist at the University of Leeds who also works with local men’s groups in the city. “Homelessness, addiction, breakdown of family home… Men are more likely to experience these than women, leading to isolation,” he says.

“Isolation is more likely to happen to men with lower incomes, as social experiences tend to cost money. One of the men in my research sang in a social singing group. But when the group moved venues, he couldn’t afford the bus fare to travel, thus increasing his isolation.”

We’ve had structural legal changes in the West over the past 60 years, including civil rights legislation that makes it increasingly difficult for men to enjoy male-only spaces. It used to be that men gathered at service clubs such as Kiwanis. Now that these clubs are co-ed, men have dropped out. The presence of a single woman in a male group completely changes the dynamic.

The TV host Toure writes in the New York Times:

Black people know that just by walking down the street, you can fall through any number of trapdoors that lead to a bizarro world where up is down and your life is in danger. You can be bird-watching in Central Park like Christian Cooper, and then the next thing you know, a white woman is calling 911 and saying you’re threatening her. You can be jogging in Georgia like Ahmaud Arbery when three men start chasing you in trucks and suddenly you’re running for your life. Even if things don’t spiral that far out of control, Black people are often assumed to be someone we are not. Even if you’ve got on a suit, you may be a street criminal, so you’re vulnerable to cops and Karens alike. When you get to your job, some people will assume you got it because of affirmative action or diversity initiatives. At any moment, you may be assumed to be intellectually below average and, at the same time, hyper-proficient in sports, dancing and sex.

Black life can often seem like a house of mirrors: A situation feels racist, but when you look again, you’re not really sure. You don’t have a way to X-ray white hearts, so now you’re calculating — are the store clerks ignoring you because they don’t expect a Black person to have enough money to buy anything, or are they genuinely busy? Did you get this table in the corner because the restaurant doesn’t want Black people to be prominent, or is this the only table that’s open? Did you not get the promotion because of racism, or is that younger, less-experienced white person actually better? Is that cop following you because …? All that analyzing can drive you mad.

The constant surrealism of Blackness — the way I fear the cops more than the criminals, the way I feel racism stalking me throughout my day like a horror-flick monster even if I’m not certain it’s there — all of it leads me to crave oases away from the chaos and uncertainty. We need safe spaces where we can recover.

Years ago, I was taught the value of Black safe spaces when I was writing a story for Rolling Stone about the Black Lives Matter movement. In my time with B.L.M. members, I learned that they very consciously prioritized self-care as a bulwark against the impact of racism on their spirit. They knew that if they didn’t regularly take time out to heal, they wouldn’t last in the long battle against white supremacy. To them, self-care could be any activity that soothes. For the group of B.L.M.ers I hung out with in Washington, D.C., it meant going to a nearby park, choosing a small space off to the side, putting up signs saying “Black-only space” and sitting there in peace among Black friends and family.

That sort of self-segregation can be so valuable. When we remove the aggravations of dealing with whiteness — the microaggressions, the silly questions, the lack of perspective, the otherization — only then we can truly relax. For me, “Atlanta” was a safe space like that. It was a Blackcentric world that embraced the complexity of our culture and generally ignored whiteness. There are no recurring white characters, and the main characters rarely interact with white people at all. Watching “Atlanta” made me feel at home. By embracing the surrealism of Black life, the show confirmed that we’re not crazy to think the world is crazy. Like no other show, “Atlanta” made me feel seen.

Wouldn’t most of these feelings and observations about black life also fit for male life in general? If blacks get black-only spaces, why can’t men reclaim men-only spaces?

The BBC: “Throw in working from home, the closure of pubs, declining engagement in religious activities or social clubs, not to mention smartphone addiction and so-called social media, and perhaps the statistics on men’s shrinking friendship circles aren’t that surprising after all.”

Yes.

I remember in 2011, I had to move, and it was a trauma because I had to face the limitations of my choices and the poverty of my resources. I needed to find friends with whom I could stay for two weeks during the transition of moving out of one place and into another. My economic and social poverty was diminishing my life prior to my needing to move, but it was the move that made these problems unavoidable. So too with the Covid pandemic. Lurking loneliness pushed out of one’s conscious mind became impossible to ignore during the lockdowns.

BBC:

Another important factor is, of course, that men are a bit useless. When it comes to making plans or staying in contact with friends, men are socially lazy. This appears to be especially true in middle age when something strange happens with men’s friendships. At this age, men don’t appear to be lonely, on the surface.

“Data including men and women has often found a U-shaped relationship, where teenagers and the oldest people in society are the loneliest,” says John Ratcliffe, a researcher at the Centre of Loneliness Studies at Sheffield Hallam University. “That said, the highest suicide rates are in single men in their 40s and 50s.”

Men show a stronger link between marital status and loneliness than women, Ratcliffe says. Which is to say, unmarried women are less lonely than unmarried men. “I would link this statistical trend to a greater ‘reliance’ on partners for intimacy in men, and a greater ideation of the family role. For men who don’t have a partner, loneliness can be particularly severe.”

America and the West in general have made many structural changes diminishing the status of men. They have created societies less hospitable to men. As a result, men have suffered. The BBC is blaming the victim. Can you imagine the BBC publishing an article calling black people “a bit useless”?

According to Wikipedia:

Mateship is an Australian cultural idiom that embodies equality, loyalty and friendship. Russel Ward, in The Australian Legend (1958), once saw the concept as central to the Australian people. Mateship derives from mate, meaning friend, commonly used in Australia as an amicable form of address.

Most simply, the term mateship describes “the bonds of loyalty and equality, and feelings of solidarity and fraternity that Australians, usually men, are typically alleged to exhibit.”[1]

The historical origins of the term are explained in Nick Dyrenfurth’s Mateship : a very Australian history (2015). He cites the work of historian Russell Ward, who argued that “a convict-derived ethos of matey anti-authoritarianism embedded itself in the Australian psyche from the beginning.” The original obligations of mateship could be compared to ‘codes amongst thieves.’ It likely emerged out of a shared fear of authority. Men who betrayed their companions, or accepted authority over them, would be called ‘dogs’ for their betrayal.

According to Dyrenfurth, “Much of the rest of the world thinks of this practice as friendship, pure and simple. Yet in Australia, mateship evokes more than mere friendship…. Most Australian citizens … associate mateship with wartime service – in particular, the Anzac tradition forged on the shores of faraway Gallipoli during April 1915.”

Mateship is a concept that can be traced back to early colonial times. The harsh environment in which convicts and new settlers found themselves meant that men and women closely relied on each other for all sorts of help. In Australia, a ‘mate’ is more than just a friend and is a term that implies a sense of shared experience, mutual respect and unconditional assistance.

Sydney has a reputation as a tough place to make friends.

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How to Live in a Catastrophe

Women and liberals love catastrophes or the appearance thereof. It fills them with drama and purpose.

Elizabeth Weil, climate reporter, writes Nov.8 for New York magazine:

How to Live in a Catastrophe

Hello, excuse me, are you lost? Not in physical space or in your personal life — just kind of cosmically unmoored? It seems like we’re in a catastrophe. I mean, obviously we’re in a catastrophe.

Our clown-car democracy. Our warm embrace of surveillance capitalism. Dobbs. Just days ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter and the fascists openly rejoiced. Six months ago, a teenager killed 19 kids and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, while hundreds of law-enforcement officers stood around. Plus the big granddaddy catastrophe of them all, the planetary crisis. The planetary crisis … what a term. Your life is still stable enough that you’re reading magazine articles. You’ve got that huge lucky fact going for you. But even so, how could a person possibly stay sane and oriented? How could a person think straight and well in a moment such as this?

You try. You really do. You’re an A-minus person, maybe B-plus. You sweat out the record-high temperatures this summer in Shanghai or London or Anaheim or Salt Lake City or Sacramento.

In 2014, Joel Kotkin described this mentality:

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.
The rise of today’s Clerisy stems from the growing power and influence of its three main constituent parts: the creative elite of media and entertainment, the academic community, and the high-level government bureaucracy.
The Clerisy operates on very different principles than its rival power brokers, the oligarchs of finance, technology or energy. The power of the knowledge elite does not stem primarily from money, but in persuading, instructing and regulating the rest of society. Like the British Clerisy or the old church-centered French First Estate, the contemporary Clerisy increasingly promotes a single increasingly parochial ideology and, when necessary, has the power to marginalize, or excommunicate, miscreants from the public sphere.

In his book-in-progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:
The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia
, Rony Gulmann writes:

* Unlike the old French First Estate, the progressive Clerisy is not an official institution with a formal membership list. But conservative claimants of cultural oppression believe that it is all the more insidious for this very reason. Enjoying the plausible deniability provided by a façade of democratic idealism, the liberal elites have quietly colonized a host of powerful social institutions—the judiciary, academia, public public schools, large foundations, the media, entertainment, and others—through which they now pursue unofficially what earlier clerisies had to pursue officially. They do not marginalize or excommunicate in the name of some codified orthodoxy like Catholic teaching or Talmudic law. But conservatives believe that the cumulative social prestige arrogated by this “rising class” is the functional equivalent of such an orthodoxy, imbuing the liberal elites’ pronouncements with a special power to cut off debate and silence dissent. Seeking above all to maintain this power, this new secular priesthood will badger, scold, and bully all who defy it. And this means conservatives.

* Despite their official egalitarianism, liberals believe in their heart of hearts that they enjoy a more self-regulating and self-transparent form of human agency than has been attained by conservatives, the “bitter clingers” lost in a hallucinatory world of imaginary cultural villains.

* Naturally, liberals will deny that they are elites given to intolerance and bullying. But they can do so only because drives that were once acknowledged openly by earlier generations of modern elites have since receded into the invisible, taken-for-granted background of things, covered over by a veneer of pragmatism, therapy, and moral common sense—e.g., fears about mass shootings. But underneath this veneer, gun violence and other “policy problems” are being employed as occasions to promote a thicker social morality than liberals will acknowledge, to promote the disciplinary ethos that conservatives confront on an intuitive, visceral level that defies easy articulation. The resulting inarticulacy is what allows liberals to remain perennially insensible to the deeper truth of conservatives’ cultural grievances, which conservatives must always struggle to convey. Conservative polemics against political correctness may rest on exaggeration and distortion. But the exaggeration and distortion form part of an attempt to symbolically encapsulate the exceedingly subtle forms of illiberalism at play within this subterranean layer of human experience, for which we lack an adequate vocabulary. Hence what many conservatives acknowledge as their perennial rhetorical disadvantages vis-à-vis liberalism.

* Like the elites of old, today’s liberals insist that the lower orders be “not left as they are, but badgered bullied, pushed, preached at, drilled, and organized to abandon their lax and disordered folkways and conform to one or another feature of civil behavior.” Seen in the context of the mutation counter-narrative, the E.P.A. and other liberal institutions are merely carrying forth this longstanding tradition. Conservatives understand their conservatism as their resistance to the badgering and bullying, and this is why they cannot be see liberals as tyrants and usurpers, cryptofascists who are always scheming to undermine the natural liberty of the conservative. Liberalism has become ascendant, not by providing compelling solutions to discrete problems, but by suppressing and discrediting the free human nature that the conservative strives to retain.

* Conservative claims of cultural oppression are what Foucault calls “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.” This is knowledge “located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity,” knowledge in which “lay the memory of hostile encounters,” knowledge which “owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it.” Those hostile encounters are the badgering, bullying, and scolding with which modern elites have always sought to impose their disciplinary impulses, which have now become nearly invisible, taken for granted as “natural.” This problem may be articulated through various empirical claims many of which can be proven false. But the empirical claims are most profoundly understood as symbolic efforts to expose the contingency of the buffered identity, the buffered identity as the outcome of a parochial culture that hides itself behind a universalistic facade.

* What the progressive tries to pass off as an innocent request for clarification is in its unacknowledged undertones a direct assault on the conservatives’ character and intellect, the insinuation that no thinking person could possibly believe what the conservative claims to believe. Pretending to extend the conservative the benefit of the doubt, the liberal assaults him with his very magnanimity. Though feigning that he is engaged in a thoughtful exchange between inquiring minds, the liberal quietly invokes a presumed social consensus before which the conservative is expected to cower in fear.
Liberals can thus engage in conservaphobic bullying behind the cloak of plausible deniability. This plausible deniability moreover allows them to chalk up the ensuing conservative resentment to unhinged irascibility or paranoia. Employing a façade of rationalism to disguise the performative dimension of their dialectic, liberals reinforce a subtle social hierarchy that is just as pervasive as it is deniable. Liberals can thus drown conservatives in an ever-expanding accretion of insinuations and intimations, a Kafkaesque world each layer of which is recognizable only by reference to the rest, leaving conservatives unable to expose the bigotry of liberals even as they are submerged by it. The cumulative result of all the subterfuge, double-talk, and mystification is that ultra-liberalism is now regarded, not merely as the superior public philosophy, but also as a special vantage point that is somehow post-ideological and “pragmatic.”

* Hofstadter writes that “it is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale.”132 But for conservatives, this putative magnanimity bespeaks the fact that intellectuals’ hierarchical impulses are invested in influence rather than acquisition. The “consistent concern” referenced by Hofstadter isn’t unvarnished altruism, but rather the characteristic ambition of modern elites, to “make over the whole society, to change the lives of the mass of people, and make them conform better to certain models which carried strong conviction among these elites,” as Taylor says. Like the elites of yesteryear, today’s liberals believe the lower orders are not to be “left as they are, but badgered, bullied, pushed, preached at, drilled, and organized to abandon their lax and disordered folkways.” That the bullying and badgering is now effectuated through the well-meaning solicitude of the family doctor rather than the stern admonitions of the village priest or constable does not alter the fundamentals of the project. For this solicitude is but the latest iteration of the civilizing process, merely a sublimated, intellectualized, and etherealized variant of the reforming impulses that were once expressed more brutally and openly by an earlier generation of modern elites. The bullying and badgering may now be subtle and indirect, and undertaken within the constraints of democratic norms. But conservatives sense that their cumulative impact is profound, because they have transformed our very understanding of who we are.

* Liberalism’s inveterate impulse to moralize all social activity never presents itself as raw, unabashed moralism, but always as a specific response to specific social problems which few deny are real. It is only to be expected that the elites’ reforming impulses will express themselves in a more scientifically sophisticated fashion in the context of a more scientifically sophisticated society, where the badgering, bullying, and drilling can be expected to assume a more circuitous and genteel form, advanced as focused correctives rather than in the name of discipline as such. But behind the focused corrective lies liberalism’s “silent” or “hidden” curriculum, which seeks to “mold people in a manner that helps ensure that liberal freedom is what they want”…

* Conservatives are driven on by the inexorable conviction that liberalism is not to be taken at face value, because what it holds out as its transcendence of conservatives’ moralistic authoritarianism is just another form of moralistic authoritarianism in disguise. Thus, Goldberg charges that environmentalism grants license to a level of moral bullying that would be denounced as totalitarian if motivated by traditional values.

* If feminism originated in the imperiousness of elite cadres bent on stigmatizing the housewife, this is as one more stage of the civilizing process, whose norms always spread outward from elite circles through the badgering, bullying, and scolding of the unwashed masses, whose capitulation will then be celebrated as liberation and enlightenment. Graglia charges that the feminist movement sought to eviscerate the metaphysical significance of sexuality, reducing it to the “physical assuaging of a genital itch.” And this is just another instance of the buffered identity’s war against “embodied feelings of the higher,” which it must reduce to biological impulses purged of all anthropocentric predicates. The disenchantment of sexuality by feminism was, just like the disenchantment of the world generally, advanced in order to cultivate a disciplined and productive citizenry. This is what the career woman exalted by feminism represents, the milquetoast technocratic egalitarianism of the liberal culture, in whose service every last vestige of traditionalist sentiment must be uprooted. Whereas liberals locate the meaning of feminism in the supersession of certain historical inequalities and the prejudices that permitted them, conservatives locate it in the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, for which “equality” is merely a vehicle.

*

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Day 6 Down Under – The Road To Watsons Bay

The high quality videos in this post are recorded on my DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo.

The low quality videos are streamed from my Oppo A15 because with this cheap phone I bought for about $140 USD on my visit a year ago, I can get an Australian data plan for 80 GBs for $40 a month, while T-Mobile carrier from the US that goes with my iPhone (and I usually add my shure mic) charges $50 for 15GBs.

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Where’s The Anger Down Under?

SYDNEY. I haven’t encountered any anger or despair. I’m sure there is some, but there’s nothing like the disgust that’s chronic in LA. I’ve yet to hear an angry word down under. Life is healthier and more relaxed and more communal.

Nobody has tried to talk to me about Australian politics. Nobody has mentioned any Aussie politicians. They don’t matter to the lives of ordinary Aussies. The culture wars rage in Australia at about 10% of the intensity of America. Still, ambitious young Aussies tend to move to the USA to pursue their dreams.

The news in Australia is comparatively boring, because there aren’t many disasters around here.

The water pressure is about ten times as intense in Sydney compared to LA. So taking a cold shower is ten times as painful.

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From Terman to Today: A Century of Findings on Intellectual Precocity

Abstract from this 2016 paper: “One hundred years of research (1916–2016) on intellectually precocious youth is reviewed, painting a portrait of an extraordinary source of human capital and the kinds of learning opportunities needed to facilitate exceptional accomplishments, life satisfaction, and positive growth. The focus is on those studies conducted on individuals within the top 1% in general or specific (mathematical, spatial, or verbal reasoning) abilities. Early insights into the giftedness phenomenon actually foretold what would be scientifically demonstrated 100 years later. Thus, evidence-based conceptualizations quickly moved from viewing intellectually precocious individuals as weak and emotionally liable to highly effective and resilient individuals. Like all groups, intellectually precocious students and adults have strengths and relative
weaknesses; they also reveal vast differences in their passion for different
pursuits and their drive to achieve. Because they do not possess multipotentiality, we must take a multidimensional view of their individuality. When done, it predicts well long-term educational, occupational, and creative outcomes.”

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