June 2, 2021 The Nudgelords Luke Ford No sacred cows.

The Nudgelords

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

* At this point I’m pretty familiar with Cass Sunstein. I’ve participated in a multi-day workshop with him, read some of his books and many of his articles, and have used his writings frequently in my teaching. I don’t plan on reading his new book since I think I already know what he will say about almost any topic.

There are two central legs (stool minus one) to his thinking. The first is that he fully embraces a conception in which the ideal rational actor is counterposed to the empirical actor burdened by nonrational heuristics. His understanding of rationality is not simply abstract in the sense of consequentialist decision theory but operationalized via orthodox welfare economics. All choices are understood as consumption decisions over which each individual has or should have a consistent preference map. Our truest guide to well-being are the consumption choices people make when not under the influence of heuristics, which is most of them. Thus monetization as a framework for cost-benefit analysis of the remaining choices is theoretically grounded. There is also a libertarian bias to welfare economics insofar as it uses individual utility-maximizing as its benchmark, understanding individuality as possession of one’s own preference map. The honoring of individuals as a moral and political value—liberalism—is therefore no more or less than respecting their preferences. I will admit that Sunstein has helped me understand the limitations of welfare economics to the point where I would now do without it altogether.

The other leg, which has made him a frequent subject of this blog, is that he shares the delight that Andrew has recognized in many economists (and economist followers) in showing that people are less rational than they think they are. Sunstein and those of a similar bent regard themselves as experts in rationality, equipped to detect lapses among the less knowledgeable. Identifying such lapses and coming up with policy tweaks to remedy them is how they see their job. (Designing nudges is one strategy but hardly the only one, and Sunstein’s advocacy of cost-benefit analysis goes far beyond nudging.) As Andrew has pointed out, identifying the foibles of others gives people like Sunstein enormous pleasure, so much that they seize on every research paper that claims to have found a new irrationality, whether or not the evidence stands up to scrutiny. I won’t stoop to pointing out the irony here….

* Basically – famous/influential people have an impact because they have optimized, at least in part, for becoming and staying famous and influential. This might necessarily (though I don’t actually know that it must) make them worse at getting things right. There was a recent Scott Alexander post on this that I thought was pretty good:

* WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice.
* Dr. Anthony Fauci is the WebMD of people.
At least this is the impression I get from this rather hostile biography. He’s a very smart and competent doctor, who wanted to make a positive difference in the US medical establishment, and who quickly learned how to play the game of flattering and placating the right people in order to keep power. In the end, he got power, sometimes he used it well, and other times he struck compromises between using it well and doing dumb things that he needed to do to keep his position.
* I can’t tell you how many times over the past year all the experts, the CDC, the WHO, the New York Times, et cetera, have said something (or been silent about something in a suggestive way), and then some blogger I trusted said the opposite, and the blogger turned out to be right. I realize this kind of thing is vulnerable to selection bias, but it’s been the same couple of bloggers throughout, people who I already trusted and already suspected might be better than the experts in a lot of ways. Zvi Mowshowitz is the first name to come to mind, though there are many others…
When Zvi asserts an opinion, he has only one thing he’s optimizing for – being right – and he does it well.
When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things – being right, and keeping power. If she doesn’t optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she’s trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.
The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they’re leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.
The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she’s out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford’s epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they’ll review it further.
* Dr. Fauci is able to make decisions that will affect billions of dollars in wealth, Senate seats, Twitter likes, and other extremely valuable resources. Thousands of people who would prefer that they get the dollars and seats and likes will be gunning for him. In order to stay on that throne, Dr. Fauci will need to get and keep lots of powerful allies (plus be the sort of person who thinks in terms of how to get allies rather than being minimaxed for COVID-prediction).
This interferes with his COVID predicting ability, but in the current system there’s no alternative.
* Think of centers of expertise like the CDC or the IGM Economists Panel as giant systems for disentangling corruption and power. Their job is to produce one or two people who can get in front of the population and say something which has some resemblance to reality, even though the entire rest of the economy and body politic is trying to corrupt them. They…actually do sort of okay. Anthony Fauci is neither Attila the Hun nor Trofim Lysenko. He’s a kind of bumbling careerist with a decent understanding of epidemiology and a heart that’s more or less in the right place. The whole scientific-technocratic complex is a machine which takes Moloch as input and manages – after spending billions of dollars and the careers of thousands of hard-working public servants – to produce Anthony Fauci as output. This should be astonishing, and we are insufficiently grateful.

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Figureheads, ghost-writers and pseudonymous quant bloggers: The recent evolution of authorship in science publishing

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Luke Ford

According to Wikipedia: “Bruce Graham Charlton is a retired British medical doctor and was Visiting Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham.[1] Until April 2019, he was Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University.[2] Charlton was editor of the controversial and non-peer reviewed journal Medical Hypotheses from 2003 to 2010.”

Charlton co-authored a 2016 book with Edward Dutton — The Genius Famine: why we need geniuses, why they’re dying out, and why we must rescue them.

In 2008, Dr. Charlton published:

* Traditionally, science has been published only under the proper names and postal addresses of the scientists who did the work. This is no longer the case, and over recent decades science authorship has fundamentally changed its character. At one extreme, prestigious scientists writing from high status institutions are used as mere figureheads to publish research that has been performed, analyzed and ‘ghost-written’ by commercial organizations. At the other extreme ‘quant bloggers’ are publishing real science with their personal identity shielded by pseudonyms and writing from internet addresses that give no indication of their location or professional affiliation. Yet the paradox is that while named high status scientists from famous institutions are operating with suspect integrity (e.g. covertly acting as figureheads) and minimal accountability (i.e. failing to respond to substantive criticism); pseudonymous bloggers – of mostly unknown identity, unknown education or training, and unknown address – are publishing interesting work and interacting with their critics on the internet. And at the same time as ‘official’ and professional science is increasingly timid careerist and dull; the self-organized, amateur realm of science blogs displays curiosity, scientific motivation, accountability, responsibility – and often considerable flair and skill. Quant bloggers and other internet scientists are, however, usually dependent on professional scientists to generate databases. But professional science has become highly constrained by non-scientific influences: increasingly sluggish, rigid, bureaucratic, managerial, and enmeshed with issues of pseudo-ethics, political correctness, public relations, politics and marketing. So it seems that professional science needs the quant bloggers. One possible scenario is that professional scientists may in future continue to be paid to do the plodding business of generating raw data (dull work that no one would do unless they were paid); but these same professional scientists (functioning essentially as either project managers or technicians) may be found to lack the boldness, flair, sheer ‘smarts’ or genuine interest in the subject to make sense of what they have discovered. Some branches of future science may then come to depend on a swarm of gifted ‘amateurs’ somewhat like the current quant bloggers; for analysis and integration of their data, for understanding its implications, and for speculating freely about the potential applications.

* Over the past few decades, these ideas of personal responsibility and accountability seem to have broken down – at least in medical science. Scientists’ names no longer guarantee the provenance of the work published under that name, and a specific
name and address no longer implies accountability. Especially has accountability broken down in relation to the highest status scientists.

From numerous informal observations over the past two decades, it seems clear that high status scientists are no longer required to respond to requests for clarification or to published criticism, but can ignore it with impunity. The traditional default that criticism was regarded as correct unless it was refuted, no longer seems to apply to high status scientists when a criticism comes from a lower-status scientist. This applies even when clarification is clearly necessary, when the criticism is potentially devastating, and even when critical communications are published as articles or correspondence in high impact journals. The fact is that, nowadays, high status scientists are seldom sanctioned in any way for ignoring criticism by the scientific community.

The current default assumption seems to be along the lines that high status scientists are always right unless and until conclusively demonstrated otherwise – in other words, high status scientists are now regarded as innocent until proved guilty. So that science published under the name of high status scientists from prestigious institutions is apparently regarded as intrinsically correct until such time as it is proven false. And high status scientists are now placed under no obligation to co-operate with their critics in discovering the truth – in the first place high status scientists usually do not need to acknowledge or respond at all to criticism; if they respond they are not compelled to provide relevant refutation but are allowed to bluster, change the subject, and make ad hominem attacks on their critics; requests for extra methodological detail or raw data can be ignored. Sometimes, criticism is met with legal threats – for example accusations of libel.

* The deep, underlying cause of the immunity to criticism of high status scientists is probably the greater role of peer review in science, and the domination of peer review by a minority (‘cartel’) of high status scientists. Peer review mechanisms are now used not only to evaluate completed science, but pre-emptively in allocating resources. Modern science uses peer review mechanisms at many levels: defining overall research strategies, awarding research grants, granting ethical permission to do research, journal refereeing processes prior to publication, organizing conferences. . . indeed it is hard to find an area of science which is not dominated by peer review. This means that a low status scientist can have their career damaged (perhaps without knowing it) if s/he makes a powerful enemy of a high status scientist who is influential within the all-important peer review system. The problem is that peer review processes are systematically biased to give more weight to negative than positive evaluations (ie. a bad report has a greater impact on the review process than a good report [2]) – so having a high status enemy involved in the peer review system is likely to have a significantly damaging impact on a scientist’s career.

The result is that high status scientists are feared to the extent that the mass of lower-ranked scientists will not call them to account for their errors and misdemeanours in case they provoke reprisals via the peer review systems. Another very important result of the centrality of peer review is that while traditional science was mostly a marketplace of ideas, modern science is dominated by a ‘cartel’ of scientists who are powerful within peer review and have quasimonopolistic power. (In economics a cartel usually refers to a group of persons or organizations who cooperate to act as if a monopoly; to control production
and prices and to protect themselves against competition, for example by lobbying government to introduce favourable regulations.)

* It is a bizarre paradox of modern science that while named high status scientists with postal addresses at prestigious institutions are operating with suspect integrity and minimal accountability; by contrast, science bloggers – of (mostly) pseudonymous and unknown identity, unknown education or training, and writing from unknown addresses – are nonetheless publishing interesting work and having exciting interactions, on the internet. The recent emergence of (frequently pseudonymous) ‘quant bloggers’ and other internet scientists is a phenomenon at the opposite extreme from the high status scientists who seem to be operating as individuals but in fact function as ‘front-men’ (or women) for anonymous teams with inscrutable agendas.

In what follows I provide only a very selective picture of blog science, based on my personal interests and tastes, and noting only the blogs that I have been reading for months or years. Clearly there are many, many other examples – but the blogosphere is now so vast that no individual can experience and evaluate more than a tiny fraction of the output.

The term ‘quant blogger’ (i.e. quantitative analysis blogger) was invented by Steve Sailer [8] who is the practicing ‘blogfather’ of an interconnected group of mostly pseudonymous bloggers that have been in some way inspired by Sailer’s example and his (often distinctly ‘non-PC’) interests in issues such as IQ; immigration; evolution; education; politics and sports – often analyzed by sex, class and race. Sailer has blogged many interesting quantitative analyses, including an influential hypothesis of the relationship between ‘affordable family formation’ and politics in the USA.

The Sailer-influenced quant bloggers include the pseudonymous Razib who hosts GNXP (Gene Expression) which includes several other quant bloggers such as the pseudonymous Agnostic and (his real name) Jason Malloy [9]. Other pseudonymous quant bloggers in this Sailer-descended group include Inductivist [10], Half-Sigma [11] and the Audacious Epigone [12]. Unrelated, not-Sailer-connected, quant bloggers include Engram who posts almost daily quantitative analyses on mainly socio-political or policy topics [13]; and who discovered an inverse relationship between capital punishment and murder rates in four developed nations. La Griffe du Lion has focused on IQ [14] and developed many hypotheses including the ‘smart fraction’ theory of economic development. The Climate Audit blog has been influential in its field, and is associated with discrediting the ‘hockey stick’ graph that was supposed to illustrate climate change over the past millenium [15].

In most of the above examples, typically the blogger presents analysis, tabulations or graphs of already-published data sets – such as population surveys or questionnaires; or does a re-analysis of a published scientific paper; or synthesizes several
studies; or draws out applied implications of published science which are neglected (or obfuscated) by the primary authors. (Of course, quant bloggers usually also post chatty ‘opinion’ pieces and responses to current news.)

Although often the blogger’s true identify and location may be unknown, there is an accountability mechanism via the comments section of the blog which follows the primary blog posting, and potentially also by other blogs linking and critiquing the original blog. Most of the above named bloggers form a broadly-sympathetic network who comment-on and critique each others work. But the crucial point is that a quant blogger must behave such as to earn the trust of their readers – and this typically involves engaging with their critics critics, and refuting relevant criticisms to the satisfaction of their readership.

Presumably, the reason why most of these bloggers are pseudonymous is their subject matter: they are often dealing with population differences in relation to sex, class and race; focusing on controversial matters such as IQ, personality, educational achievement or crime. At present, in USA and Western Europe – and especially in universities – such issues are virtually taboo except when treated using elaborately euphemistic language and reaching politically correct conclusions [16]. This means that mainstream human sciences may err in ignoring robust, but politically-incorrect, interpretations for their data [e.g. 17].

Pseudonyms are used because scientists (and other media commentators) who work in these non-PC ‘taboo’ fields may be subject to the risk of denunciation by the media and to professional or institutional arbiters of coercive political correctness. The sanctions have ranged from the moderate unpleasantness of unpopularity among professional colleagues, up to deliberate misrepresentation and false ascription of opinions or motivations, mob-vilification, hate campaigns, persecution by employers (failure to get academic jobs, failure to get promotion or tenure, sacking etc.), legal sanctions, aggression and personal violence. Even the most distinguished scientists are vulnerable to onslaught: the hugely-influential psychologist Hans Eysenck was one of the earliest victims from the mid 1960s, the sociobiologist E.O Wilson was similarly attacked in the late 1970s, and more recently Harvard President Larry Summers and the great James D. Watson both lost their jobs after transgressing the bound of political correctness. In such a context of endemic intimidation, a scientist’s natural wish to get maximum personal credit
for their research by using their real name and address is often overwhelmed by sheer survival instinct – and pseudonyms and web addresses are regarded as safer. For such reasons, some of the most exciting and potentially important current scientific discourse is forced to be pseudonymous; even though – in a more honest, tolerant and rational world – it would surely be better to have scientific discussion between people using their real identities.

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I Love The New York Times! (6-1-21)

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 What does it mean when you don’t like the New York Times?
07:00 How Do Animals Safely Cross a Highway? Take a Look., https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/31/climate/wildlife-crossings-animals.html
10:00 Ethan Ralph vs Anthony Fauci
17:00 Lionel Nation makes fun of e-streams
25:00 How the World Ran Out of Everything, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/business/coronavirus-global-shortages.html
27:00 Disputing Racism’s Reach, Republicans Rattle American Schools, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/us/politics/critical-race-theory.html
30:00 Biden’s China Policy | John Lee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCwG5wW-OqQ
33:30 Something Bothering You? Tell It to Woebot. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/health/artificial-intelligence-therapy-woebot.html
36:00 Editor of JAMA to Step Down Following Racist Incident, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/health/jama-bauchner-racism.html
38:00 Four Lessons From Your Anxious Brain, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/well/mind/anxiety-brain.html
41:00 The 36 Questions That Lead to Love, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html
42:00 To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/style/modern-love-to-fall-in-love-with-anyone-do-this.html
45:00 New opportunities for the USA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nGDDIrjSxk
53:00 7 Podcasts to Soothe Your Back-to-Normal Anxiety, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/arts/podcasts-anxiety-covid.html
56:00 Peter Zeihan on Silicon Valley woes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nGDDIrjSxk
1:00:30 Paying More for Uber and Lyft Rides, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/technology/uber-lyft-surge.html
1:02:45 Jordan Peterson drops the Red Pill on woman that has hit the wall, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTtAyfJ1CiI
1:04:00 MAGA (Make America Goalless Again), https://www.takimag.com/article/maga-make-america-goalless-again/
1:12:40 Life at the Bottom | Theodore Dalrymple – Jordan B Peterson Podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ET7banSeN0
1:15:00 France and Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139858
1:21:00 ‘Man who told police he fatally shot ex-Hardeeville fire chief in 2017 found not guilty’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139834
1:25:20 John Ziegler Explains Why He Believes Jerry Sandusky Is Innocent, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24rwXoJfvNM
1:28:00 Sandusky: ‘I’m attracted to young people’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF5SkaUbXuY
1:32:00 Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/303812/
2:08:00 Confrontation Talk: Arguments, Asymmetries, and Power on Talk Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139829
2:10:00 Call-In Talk Radio: Compensation or Enrichment?, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139785
2:19:10 Extemporaneous Blending: Conceptual Integration in Humorous Discourse from Talk Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139777
2:20:00 UCSD Cognitive Science – Seana Coulson, Ph.D
2:26:40 World’s best radio host is Australian Kyle Sandilands
2:28:00 Australian Talk Radio, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139732
2:48:00 JUST BE YOURSELF? TALK RADIO PERFORMANCE AND AUTHENTIC ON-AIR SELVES, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=139758
3:11:00 Eric Kaufman, author of White Shift, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/23/both-left-and-right-pratise-cancel-culture-both-should-stop

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Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

Peter Zeihan writes in this 2020 book:

* The United States’ Report Card
BORDERS: Lakes, mountains, forests, deserts, and vast ocean moats surrounding the best agricultural lands and largest waterway network on the planet. Nowhere else on Earth does a territory have such a beneficial balance of good lands with great standoff distance. Americans spend little on territorial defense, freeing their military to project out .
RESOURCES: Nearly two centuries of industrialization have heavily tapped out a continent of bounty, but new technological breakthroughs continue to surprise. The most recent surprise—the shale revolution—has made the country a net oil and natural gas exporter.
DEMOGRAPHY: The American Baby Boomers—the country’s largest generation ever—are nearing mass retirement, generating a painful financial crunch. But American Boomers had kids. Lots of them. America’s Millennials may be a pain, but their numbers may just save us all. *gulp*
MILITARY MIGHT: The most powerful projection-based military in world history. With the Order ending, it has . . . nothing to do.
ECONOMY: The American economy isn’t simply the world’s largest and most diversified economic system; it is the least dependent upon the outside world for its health. The world needs the American economy to survive, not vice versa.
OUTLOOK: The Americans excel at missing opportunities due to domestic squabbling, but there is nothing in what’s left of the international system that will threaten the American heartland either militarily or economically before 2050.
IN A WORD: Detached.

* China’s Report Card
BORDERS: Vast emptiness to the west, jungles to the south, nuclear powers to the north and southwest, and superior maritime powers to the east. China doesn’t so much secure its borders as manage them the best it can.
RESOURCES: China didn’t get really serious about industrializing until the 1970s, so its local resources were all tapped more or less at once. That served China well . . . until now. China is on the verge of running out—of everything.
DEMOGRAPHY: Oy! Breakneck urbanization combined with Maoist population controls gutted the Chinese birthrate for decades. The one bright spot is that China’s demographics are not the worst in the world. Yet.
MILITARY MIGHT: China is BIG and its military is modernizing quickly, but that doesn’t mean its military is well suited to the challenges of today. Or tomorrow.
ECONOMY: The Chinese system is both highly leveraged and highly dependent upon international trends it cannot shape or preserve. Every system that has followed China’s path has crashed. So too will China.
OUTLOOK: Only Russia has worse relations with its neighbors. When the Order ends, everything that has made China successful will end with it and no one will reach out with a helping hand.
IN A WORD: Overhyped.

* Japan’s Report Card
BORDERS: Japan’s island geography provides covetable standoff distance from the region’s major land power, China. But the archipelagic nature of Japan has made intraregional connectivity costly and difficult.
RESOURCES: The most resource-poor of the world’s major powers, Japan is also located at the very end of several major supply lines. The Japanese import nearly all their energy. No potent navy, no modernized Japan.
DEMOGRAPHY: It’s not just the monarchy of Japan that’s the world’s oldest. Japan’s population is also aging, with 28 percent over age sixty-five.
MILITARY MIGHT: On paper, Japan doesn’t have a military. In reality, they are close training partners with the United States military and possess the most capable indigenous navy in Asia, arguably the second best in the world.
ECONOMY: Japan was once one of the most globally exposed industrial economies, but Japan has been in the rare position of having the capital to face its challenges head-on. The Japanese have invested heavily in automation to offset a shrinking labor pool, and have moved much of their supply chains offshore.
OUTLOOK: The Japanese have the capital, navy, technological know-how, and geographic insulation to step into the space left by a retreating United States better than any other regional power. They also don’t have a choice.
IN A WORD: Jefe.

* Russia’s Report Card
BORDERS: Russia’s borders are long and impossible to defend, prompting the Russians to endlessly expand outward until they hit significant geographic or military resistance.
RESOURCES: Russia is a huge producer of oil and natural gas, and its vast geographies sustain massive mining and even more massive grain production. Much of this activity is seasonal; most Russian territory vacillates between frozen and swampy.
DEMOGRAPHY: The horrific Soviet legacy and the post-Soviet birthrate collapse have fused with skyrocketing mortality fueled by alcoholism, heart disease, violence, tuberculosis, and HIV. Russia is suffering through a complete, multivector, unstoppable demographic collapse.
MILITARY MIGHT: Russia still invests heavily in defense, though much of the hardware is showing its age. Thirty-plus-year-old submarines and an aircraft carrier that habitually catches fire, but impressive tanks and aircraft and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal—Russia’s kit may be old, but it still packs a punch.
ECONOMY: Sanctions and an overreliance on commodity exports have made Russia struggle since the Soviet fall, but Russian geography never supported a successful, industrialized economy.
OUTLOOK: Russia is an aging, insecure, former power determined to make a last stand before it is incapable of doing so. American disengagement from the global scene couldn’t have come at a better time, but the reactivation of Russia’s traditional local foes couldn’t have come at a worse one.
IN A WORD: Panicked.

* Germany’s Report Card
BORDERS: There are few significant buffers between Germany and its western, eastern, and northern neighbors.
RESOURCES: The greatest concentration of wealth-generating navigable internal waterways in the world, the most efficient manufacturing and production systems in the world, and the best trained labor force in the world. But jack for actual physical resources.
DEMOGRAPHY: Old! So very ooooold! One of the grayest and fastest-graying populations in the world, Germany’s population is too old to consume the goods its industrial sector produces, creating a dependency on exports.
MILITARY MIGHT: Germany makes excellent tanks, diesel submarines, and electronic surveillance equipment. Unfortunately for Germany (but not Poland or Belgium or anyone else), decades of reliance on NATO and being hamstrung by the Second World War and the Cold War have left it a paper panzer.
ECONOMY: The entire German economy is predicated on leveraging its manufacturing sector to push high-quality exported goods to a globalized consumer base. In a post-Order world this will not work. At all.
OUTLOOK: Few countries are more dependent on the American-led global Order. Germany’s best backup plan—the European Union—is already falling apart. Germany needs a new way of doing things. Or an old one.
IN A WORD: Outdated.

* From a geopolitical point of view, nationalism’s defining characteristic is its capacity to better harness national power. Medieval feudalism splits capacity among the royals, the nobles, and the peasantry, with loyalty within and among the three largely determined by a system of bribes and threats. It works, but is wildly inefficient. In contrast, nationalism fuses ethnic identity directly to a centralized governing system, both eliminating the middleman and making loyalty part of the governing rationale. Such organizational slimming funnels more resources—financial and labor, in particular—to the one government that rules it all.
Nationalism took root quickly, in no small part because France’s rivers enabled the quick transmission of ideas. A single horrific bloodbath to annihilate the economic and political classes of the medieval order and France was off to the races.
The question quickly became what to do with all those newly concentrated resources. Nationalism suggests the answer. Because the nation-state is rooted in ethnicity, not everyone qualifies as “people.” Sitting not-so-comfortably on the other side of the twentieth century, you probably see where this is going. Nationalism might make for a much more powerful, capable, inclusive, and accountable state than feudalism, but it also makes it excruciatingly easy to march to war.
Empowered by the social technology of nationalism, France was the most consolidated, stable, mobilized, and potent country of the early 1800s. In contrast, the rest of Europe was politically shattered, emotionally demoralized, and in many cases militarily incompetent. Napoléon Bonaparte wielded the merger of ethnic and government interests against his unsuspecting foes like a flamethrower against soccer hooligans. In a few short years, France’s citizen armies had either conquered or forced alliance upon every country on the North European Plain, as well as Italy and Iberia, and stood at the gates of Moscow itself.
Yet the French bid didn’t simply fail, it failed catastrophically . Which brings us to the first lesson of French power: even when France has its ducks rowed up and everyone else has gone fishing, the geography of Europe—the endless Northern European Plain, the variety of highlands and peninsulas and islands—means France can never win.

* While only about 13 percent of the US economy is dependent upon imports and 8 percent on exports, the total trade flow in and out of the United States still amounts to about $4.3 trillion in commercial involvement. Total Latin American non -commodity trade is another $2.3 trillion.

* In a world of Disorder, the power balance in the Canadians’ disfavor is extreme. Working purely on population and economic strength and completely leaving aside issues of military capacity and reach, the United States outweighs Canada by a ratio of roughly ten to one. Other similarly lopsided power balances around the world include India v. Bangladesh, Japan v. Taiwan, China v. Vietnam, Brazil v. Bolivia, and Germany v. Denmark.

* Brazil’s choice is a direct, brutal one. Encourage those American business interests—the sole source of the capital that Brazil so desperately needs—and risk the country spinning apart as local oligarchs seize operational control. Or bar the Americans, and descend into such poverty that the country becomes a riotous mass. Such options feel almost . . . Chinese.

* straightforward. The nature of the Israeli state will determine future American-Israeli relations. Ever since occupying the Palestinian territories after wars in 1967 and 1973, the Israelis have wrestled with an internal, existential debate: Is Israel a democracy, a Jewish state, or should it directly control all occupied lands? So far, Israel has mostly managed all three, but demographics are swinging the argument. Higher birthrates among both the occupied Palestinians and deeply conservative Orthodox Jews means that by 2030 an enlarged Israel will be a Jewish-minority state that will not even want to converse with the Palestinians, much less grant political or territorial concessions.
The only possible outcome is a social and security management system that makes Apartheid look progressive. Apartheid South Africa enabled the country’s black population to hold jobs in white-run zones but refused integration or political rights. In contrast, in Israel the Palestinians are kept permanently in what have become massive open-air prisons.
For Americans with a sense of history or ethics or national security, this is, at best, problematic for bilateral relations. Add that Americans under age fifty have no memory of Israel battling for its life in the wars of the 1950s to 1970s, and it’s easy for the American polity to view Israel as aggressor and occupier rather than plucky upstart.
Even before economics, distance, and time suck some of the venom out of American-Iranian relations, Israel’s coming evolution means there is no way forward for Israel in which US-Israeli relations strengthen. The increasingly racial and religious diversification of the American political scene will only hasten this evolution in perceptions. The rise of American populism, particularly on the political left, has brought the questioning of the ethics of Israeli security policy into the American political mainstream, and there it will stay.
Such shifts in American perceptions do not present Israel with an imminent threat. The Israeli military is among the world’s most competent, and the threats to Israel are manageable. Jordan already is a satellite state. Egypt and Saudi Arabia already are de facto allies. Lebanon and Syria already are teetering on the edge of failed-state status. The Palestinians are already boxed up. Post-Order Turkey already has a cool, businesslike partnership with Israel that soon will likely include joint management of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The only country with the capacity to take military action against a worse-than-Apartheid Israel for moral reasons would be the United States, and the Americans need to work from their current attachment to Israel to neutrality before they might even theoretically flip to hostility. That mental evolution would take at least a decade or two. Israel may become defined by attributes that are normally associated with pariah states, but without American leadership, international institutions like the United Nations are not likely to continue anyway. Being a pariah doesn’t mean what it used to.
For the duration of the Disorder, Israel will be left alone—even if supporters of liberal democracy don’t necessarily like what they see.

* The “America First” of the hard right is reflexively hostile to the world. The “America First” of the hard left is reflexively hostile to American involvement in the world. The “America First” of the middle just finds the world exhausting.
In all three versions, however, Americans believe that the world is not their problem and that America’s military strength will keep the world from hurting them.

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Dominic Cummings

Posted on June 1, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books: “Cummings, while individually odd, is in many ways a familiar political archetype. The annals of politics are replete with advisers who seemed to be impregnable and uniquely insightful until, just like that, they fell out of favor—often pushed by their own hubris. In that sense, if not ideologically, the Bannon comparison is perhaps apt. In TV drama terms, Cummings came to resemble less Sherlock Holmes than Malcolm Tucker, the foul-mouthed spin doctor from the British political satire The Thick of It whose Machiavellian reign of terror eventually petered out into impotence. As Darren Lilleker, a professor of political communication, wrote last year, the depiction of Cummings as a Svengali is part of a discourse that pervades British politics, one that “allows the political leader to be portrayed as the innocent at the mercy of their gurus.” But this itself, Lilleker noted, “is essentially a piece of spin.””

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Desmond Ford: His Life & Times

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

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‘Man who told police he fatally shot ex-Hardeeville fire chief in 2017 found not guilty’

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Not to worry. This kind of miscarriage of justice in state court is easily fixed by bringing federal civil rights charges against the miscreant. After all, it’s an interracial crime. I’m sure Joe Biden’s Justice Department will get right on it.

* The innocent want a judge; the guilty prefer a jury.

* The press reports were very poorly done so it’s hard to understand what went on. It sounded like the murder charge failed due to lack of proof of intent or what is sometimes called “premeditation” . Perhaps the jury was poorly instructed. Premeditation doesn’t require that you plan for a murder in advance – you can achieve the necessary intent an instant before you fire the gun.

The stories don’t explain why there weren’t alternative charges such as manslaughter or felony murder. It’s very unusual for a confessed murderer to just be allowed to walk. They couldn’t even get him for possession of a gun used in a crime because they concluded that there was no crime.

As local newspapers have disappeared, the quality of local reporting has fallen steeply. Wokeness is not a good substitute for quality. We have seen this even in the news pages of “quality” newspapers such as the NY Time and the WSJ. But Wokeness is like Covid – the strong experience it as a cold and for the weak it is deadly. The internet has already put local newspapers in the nursing home and Wokeness has pushed them over the edge. If you’ve already lost 3/4 of your circulation, going Woke and losing half of the quarter that remain means that you have to close up shop unless you can migrate to the “non-profit” sector where the paper will be supported by wealthy Democrat donors.

* The jury system should be eliminated in every country that have them. It was designed in ancient England where a man could be judged by a jury of his peers. In those days, there were only three types of people in society… peasant farmers, nobles and priests. Today, with the complexity and racial divisions in society, to say that the jury system is fair is nothing but a joke. Better to be judged by one educated judge who knows the law than by twelve ignorant clowns. Today being forced to sit on a jury is an enormous inconvenience to any productive person and it’s a crime that in this day and age that we still have this atrocious artifact lingering in our legal system. It should be dispensed with as we did with judge’s wigs.

* If Steve Sailer was a “Citizenist,” his posts wouldn’t overwhelmingly concentrate on pointing out the flaws of non-Whites and discussing White racial interests. When was the last time Steve said something sympathetic about non-Whites (or critical about Whites)?

His views are very strongly Pro-White Nationalist. Due to his calm temperament, he’s definitely more moderate than some of the more extreme posters who hang out here (many of whom are fed posters), but his views fit within the ideology.

However, due to political&social persecution of White Nationalists, he has to rebrand himself in certain ways.

Sort of how illegal aliens became “undocumented workers.” Amnesty became “a path to citizenship.”

Branding is important.

You couldn’t be a “Capitalist” in the Soviet Union, but you could argue for mild, pro-market reforms. You can’t be a White Nationalist in today’s America, but you can be a “Citizenist” and still push views that accomplish 80% of what WNs want.

There’s a reason why he highlights stories like this, but doesn’t do posts on a topic like Muslim refugees who were displaced by the US “War on Terror.”

His main interest (other than HBD) is promoting the ethnic interests of his people. He’s basically a White activist. Though he blogs under his real name, so he has to speak cautiously.

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Confrontation Talk: Arguments, Asymmetries, and Power on Talk Radio

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 1996 book:

* In sum, use of the “You say (X)” device can show how closely hosts are monitoring callers’ talk for potential arguables. The oppositions that are constructed frequently focus on very minor details of the caller’s talk: use of extreme case formulations, generic references, or inappropriate descriptors. Moreover, the contrastive device not only works in the construction of controversy by locating empirical inconsistencies in a caller’s account. Quoting a caller’s assertion back and subsequently allowing it, through the contrast, to be judged as faulty enables hosts to project doubt about the verisimilitude of the caller’s account without taking on the question of its actual truth or falsity.

* We thus find evidence of how callers both recognize and resist the contrastive and the skeptical nature of the “You say (X)” device. First, the use of continuers at the boundaries of “You say (X)”-type components demonstrates callers’ recognition that such units can and indeed should project some further talk from the host. Secondly, callers’ occasional attempts to modify hosts’ attributions suggests that they also may recognize the potentially damaging skepticism achieved through this device, and can be seeking to resist such doubt-casting by hosts. A final significance of this discussion is that it once again shows hosts pursuing controversy, and pursuing it singlemindedly with the use of a particular formal device.

* One way, then, in which talk radio hosts can use interruption as a control device is to cut into an unacceptable response-in-progress in order to press for a response that would be acceptable. Clearly, it is not open only to hosts to engage in this practice. There is no rule or process which disables callers from producing post-response-initiation interruptions in order to press for acceptable responses. Yet the fact is that in all the calls I have recorded and transcribed, I find no examples of callers doing this.

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Tom Wolfe and the Rise of Donald Trump: A Review of Wolfe’s Writings

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

Wight Martindale Jr. writes in 2018:

* I believe that intellectually and, in some personal habits as well, Wolfe and Trump are similar. But they lived in separate worlds. Perhaps someday a doctoral student will show us that all along Wolfe was commenting on Trump.

For sure, they were both dedicated New Yorkers, loving the city’s energy and glamour. And both are great self-promoters. Trump had a TV show and sold himself along with his hotels and clubs as a brand. Wolfe got attention by wearing white suits, often with a white vest—winter or summer. When he was on the cover of Time in 1998 he added a white homburg, while holding a pair of white kid gloves and a white walking stick.

Most importantly, they both recognized themselves as natural drainers of the swamp, born iconoclasts. And they remained outsiders, for life. The political class dislikes Trump, and the West Side publishing world resents Wolfe. Trump has gone after an elite, bureaucratically protected political class, full of perks and power for themselves, using, rather than helping, the little people who elect them. They are both great defenders of the middle class, often feared by the elite (this is where the new rich and powerful will come from) and resented by the poor. Wolfe punctured the over-the-top pretentiousness of New York intellectuals—the secretive William Shawn (editor of the The New Yorker), the rival novelists who despised him, as well as insider celebrities like Leonard Bernstein (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” 1970). He bravely championed a new writer from Harlem, Claude Brown, whose book, Manchild in the Promised Land, was to sell four million copies (New York, July 18, 1965). “Brown,” Wolfe wrote, “makes James Baldwin look like a tourist.” Wolfe was a new kind of iconoclast, refreshingly different from people like Darwin or Freud, Marx or Chomsky. He made you laugh. He loved what he was doing. He was having fun.

I am not the only person who has noticed the Wolfe-Trump connection. No less than Niall Ferguson—Research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and one-time Laurence Tisch Professor of History at Harvard—has made the same observation. Ferguson’s commentary in the May 18, 2018 issue of the South China Morning Post, goes back to 1987, the year Trump published The Art of the Deal and Wolfe wrote Bonfire–both books being about financial wheeler-dealers. “You can easily picture the young tycoon Trump rubbing shoulders with Wolfe’s character, Sherman McCoy, the bond-trading master of the universe,” Ferguson writes. Wolfe’s second novel A Man in Full, is about an Atlanta real estate developer with a gorgeous young wife and an embittered ex-wife. His business, like Trump’s, is loaded with debt and often in trouble.

Ferguson goes on to point out that in March 2016 Wolfe recognized that Trump’s candidacy was capitalizing on the widespread distress and contempt for government and said that Trump’s “real childish side” is part of his appeal.

“Childishness makes him seem honest,” Wolfe observed. He might have made another observation: Donald Trump was having fun upsetting things. He was not just rich, but happy with his toys, his influence, and his family. Wolfe’s established literary rivals, including Noman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving, recognized Wolfe’s conservatism and said bad things about his novels. Wolfe counterattacked with “My Three Stooges,” in 2000. In this rivalry Ferguson sides with Wolfe writing, “Wolfe’s fiction is superior to theirs. For what Wolfe shows is that the obsession with money and the status it confers is only part of a triptych. Next to it, is sex—about which Croker, the central character in A Man In Full thinks a great deal—and race, America’s original sin, about which Wolfe wrote fearlessly. Most intellectuals missed completely the potency of Trump’s candidacy.”

* Why does Wolfe find this so offensive? First, The New Yorker style is exactly what Wolfe and the new journalism is not. Wolfe discovered new subjects and wrote about them in a flamboyant, original style, his style. He believed everything about The New Yorker writing was wrong. The passive-aggressive tone of its overediting had always limited the number of authors willing to submit stories. After John O’Hara, who wrote for The New Yorker for 38 years, the most used writers of fiction in its early days were Sally Benson (99 stories from 1929 to 1941) and Robert Coates. From 1935 to 1982 John Cheever sold the magazine 121stories, but he always viewed his editor, William Maxwell, as a competitor who was trying to squelch him.

Wolfe called this committee-driven style the “whichy thicket,” by which he meant “all those clauses, appositions, amplifications, simplifications, qualifications, asides, and God knows what else hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss.” This was the product of the fact-checking, proof reading, style-controlling system Shawn had created to preserve—Wolfe would say embalm—The New Yorker style. One rebel in the system described it to Wolfe as a literary “auto-lobotomy.”

Further, Wolfe continued, the magazine was always overrated. He lists two dozen good writers who published in Esquire first, and another dozen who published first in the Saturday Evening Post. Twisting the blade, he reminds us that J. D. Salinger was published in Esquire before he came to The New Yorker. He concludes that for 40 years The New Yorker has paid top prices and achieved a strikingly low level of literary achievement. What the magazine does have is advertisements; it has the perfect audience for those who purchase Lincolns and Cadillacs.

* For Wolfe, this was the literary establishment which he would challenge for the rest of his life, his own success being his ultimate victory. But the lines were drawn: Shawn would never allow anything resembling the “new journalism” into his magazine; its new home would be Clay Felker’s New York.

* As Maggie Haberman has written in the New York Times, “Tom Wolfe envisioned a Donald Trump before the real one came into tabloid being.”

* “Plenty of outsiders have tried to capture the spectacle that is Miami, and some, like Joan Didion (Miami, 1987), have succeeded to an extent. But nobody has ever conveyed the intricacies of the city and its roiling cultural cauldron with such breathless, gaudy literary acrobatics as Wolfe does in Back to Blood.”

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David Foster Wallace: Deep into the mercenary world of take-no-prisoners political talk radio

Posted on May 31, 2021 by Luke Ford

From 2004 on John Ziegler:

* His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction.

* It’s near the end of his “churn,” which is the industry term for a host’s opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show’s nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they’re drawn into the program and don’t switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience — if only because so many of the listeners are driving — but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a 5 or 6 percent audience share.

* One reason why callers’ voices sound so much less rich and authoritative than hosts’ voices on talk radio is that it is harder to keep telephone voices from peaking. Another reason is mike processing, which evens and fills out the host’s voice, removing raspy or metallic tones, and occurs automatically in Airmix. There’s no such processing for callers’ voices.

* As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic glee, all of which the Nick Berg thing’s got in spades. Mr. Ziegler, whose program is in only its fourth month at KFI, has been fortunate in that 2004 has already been chock-full of Monsters — Saddam’s capture, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Scott Peterson murder trial, the Greg Haidl gang-rape trial, and preliminary hearings in the rape trial of Kobe Bryant. But tonight is the most angry, indignant, disgusted, and impassioned that Mr. Z.’s gotten on-air so far, and the consensus in Airmix is that it’s resulting in some absolutely first-rate talk radio.

* Be advised that the intro’s stilted, term-paperish language, which looks kind of awful in print, is a great deal more effective when the spiel is delivered out loud — the stiffness gives it a slight air of self-mockery that keeps you from being totally sure just how seriously John Ziegler takes what he’s saying. Meaning he gets to have it both ways. This half-pretend pretension, which is ingenious in all sorts of ways, was pioneered in talk radio by Rush Limbaugh, although with Limbaugh the semi-self-mockery is more tonal than syntactic.

* It is true that no one on either side of the studio’s thick window expresses or even alludes to any of these objections. But this is not because Mr. Z.’s support staff is stupid, or hateful, or even necessarily on board with sweeping jingoistic claims. It is because they understand the particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio. The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “We’re better” — strenuously — or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating. An obvious point, but it’s one that’s often overlooked by people who complain about propaganda, misinformation, and irresponsibility in commercial talk radio.

* One of the more plausible comprehensive theories is that political talk radio is one of several important “galvanizing venues” for the US right. This theory’s upshot is that talk radio functions as a kind of electronic town hall meeting where passions can be inflamed and arguments honed under the loquacious tutelage of the hosts. What’s compelling about this sort of explanation is not just its eschewal of simplistic paranoia about disinformation/agitprop (comparisons of Limbaugh and Hannity to Hitler and Goebbels are dumb, unhelpful, and easy for conservatives to make fun of), but the fact that it helps explain what is a deeper, much more vexing mystery for nonconservatives. This mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in US political life, why the conservative message seems so much more straightforward and stimulating, why they’re all having so much more goddamn fun than the left of the Times and The Nation and NPR and the DNC. It seems reasonable to say that political talk radio is part of either a fortuitous set of circumstances or a wildly successful strategy for bringing a large group of like-minded citizens together, uniting them in a coherent set of simple ideas, energizing them, and inciting them to political action. That the US left enjoyed this sort of energized coalescence in the 1960s and ’70s but has (why not admit the truth?) nothing like it now is what lends many of the left’s complaints about talk radio a bitter, whiny edge …which edge the right has even more fun laughing at, and which the theory can also account for

* Why is conservatism so hot right now? What accounts for its populist draw? It can’t just be 9/11; it predates 9/11. But since just when has the right been so energized? Has there really been some reactionary Silent Majority out there for decades, frustrated but atomized, waiting for an inciting spark? If so, was Ronald Reagan that spark? But there wasn’t this kind of right-wing populist verve to the Reagan eighties. Did it start with Gingrich’s rise to Speaker, or with the intoxicating hatred of all things Clinton? Or has the country as a whole just somehow moved so far right that hard-core conservatism now feeds, stormlike, on the hot vortical energy of the mainstream? Or is it the opposite — that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we’ve reached a kind of apsidal point? It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It’s not that hard. Imagine gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children’s fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what’s supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you’re him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it’s got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family’s computer. Your kids’ school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor’s moving away because he can’t afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver’s licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president’s ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country’s been directly attacked, and people aren’t supporting our commander in chief.

* Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names. To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want — with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential — a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying — which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. ) Plus ideally what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself — your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious “umm”s or “you know”s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English — the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: It can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it’ll sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and strictures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air…

* It is, of course, much less difficult to arouse genuine anger, indignation, and outrage in people than it is to induce joy, satisfaction, fellow feeling, etc. The latter are fragile and complex, and what excites them varies a great deal from person to person, whereas anger et al. are more primal, universal, and easy to stimulate (as implied by expressions like “He really pushed my buttons”).

* “Why is talk radio so overwhelmingly right-wing? [It’s] because those on the left are prone to be inclusive, tolerant and reflective, qualities that make for a boring radio show.”

* But there is also the issue of persona, meaning the on-air personality that a host adopts in order to heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike. It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But it’s not the same as outright acting. A host’s persona, for the most part, is probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.

* National talk radio hosts like Limbaugh, Prager, Hendrie, Gallagher, et al. tend to have rich baritone radio voices that rarely peak, whereas today’s KFI has opted for a local-host sound that’s more like a slightly adenoidal second tenor. The voices of Kobylt, Bill Handel, Ken Chiampou, weekend host Wayne Resnick, and John Ziegler all share not only this tenor pitch but also a certain quality that is hard to describe except as sounding stressed, aggrieved, Type A: the Little Guy Who’s Had It Up To Here. Kobylt’s voice in particular has a snarling, dyspeptic, fed-up quality — a perfect aural analogue to the way drivers’ faces look in jammed traffic — whereas Mr. Ziegler’s tends to rise and fall more, often hitting extreme upper registers of outraged disbelief. Off-air, Mr. Z.’s speaking voice is nearly an octave lower than it sounds on his program, which is mysterious, since ’Mondo denies doing anything special to the on-air voice except maybe setting the default volume on the board’s channel 7 a bit low because “John sort of likes to yell a lot.” And Mr. Ziegler bristles at the suggestion that he, Kobylt, or Handel has anything like a high voice on the air: “It’s just that we’re passionate. Rush doesn’t get all that passionate. You try being passionate and having a low voice.”

* Kobylt and his sidekick Ken Chiampou have a hugely popular show based around finding stories and causes that will make white, middle-class Californians feel angry and disgusted, then hammering away at these stories/causes day after day. Their personas are what the LA Times calls “brash” and Chiampou him self calls “rabid dogs,” which latter KFI has developed into the promo line “The Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio.” What John & Ken really are is professional oiks… The point being that Mr. John Kobylt broadcasts in an almost perpetual state of affronted rage; and, as more than one KFI staffer has ventured to observe off the record, it’s improbable that any middle aged man could really go around this upset all the time and not drop dead. It’s a persona, in other words, not exactly fabricated but certainly exaggerated . . . and of course it’s also demagoguery of the most classic and unabashed sort.

* It should be conceded that there is at least one real and refreshing journalistic advantage that bloggers, fringe-cable newsmen, and most talk radio hosts have over the mainstream media: They are neither the friends nor the peers of the public officials they cover.

* Robin Bertolucci wants the program to be mainly info-driven (according to KFI’s particular definition of info), but she wants the information heavily editorialized and infused with ’tude and in-your-face energy. Mr. Ziegler interprets this as the PD’s endorsing his talking a lot about himself, which Emiliano Limon views as an antiquated, small-market approach that is not going to interest people in Los Angeles, who tend to get more than their share of colorful personality and idiosyncratic opinion just in the course of their normal day. If Emiliano is right, then Mr. Z. may simply be too old-school and self-involved for KFI, or at least not yet aware of how different the appetites of a New York or LA market are from those of a Louisville or Raleigh.

* One of many intriguing things about Mr. Ziegler, though, is the contrast between his cynicism about backstabbing and the naked, seemingly self-destructive candor with which he’ll discuss his life and career. The best guess re Mr. Z.’s brutal on-record frankness is that either (a) the host’s onand off-air personas really are identical, or (b) he regards speaking to a magazine correspondent as just one more part of his job, which is to express himself in a maximally stimulating way (there was a tape recorder out, after all).

* His sense of grievance and loss seems genuine. But one should also keep in mind how vital, for political talk hosts in general, is this sense of embattled persecution — by the leftist mainstream press, by slick Democratic operatives, by liberal lunatics and identity politics and PC and rampant cynical pandering. All of which provides the constant conflict required for good narrative and stimulating radio. Not, in John Ziegler’s case, that any of his anger and self-pity is contrived — but they can be totally real and still function as parts of the skill set he brings to his job… A corollary possibility: The reason why the world as interpreted by many hosts is one of such thoroughgoing selfishness and cynicism and fear is that these are qualities of the talk radio industry they are part of, and they (like professionals everywhere) tend to see their industry as a reflection of the real world.

* Mr. Z. is consistently cruel, both on and off the air, in his remarks about women. He seems unaware of it. There’s no clear way to explain why, but one senses that his mother’s death hurt him very deeply.

* Ideology aside, this may be the most striking thing about talk radio personalities: They are the most media-saturated Americans of all. The prep these hosts do for every show consists largely of sitting there absorbing huge quantities of mass-media news and analysis and opinion… then of using the Internet to access still more media. Some of the results of this are less ironic than surreal. John Ziegler, for instance, is so steeped in news coverage of the Peterson trial that he appears to forget that the news is inevitably partial and skewed, that there might be crucial elements of the case that are not available for public consumption. He forgets that you simply can’t believe everything you see and hear and read in the press. Given the axioms of conservative talk radio and Mr. Z.’s own acuity as a media critic, this seems like a very strange thing to forget.

* Mr. Z. has an observable preference for female callers. Emiliano’s explanation: “Since political talk radio is so white male–driven, it’s good to get female voices in there.” It turns out that this is an industry convention — the roughly 50-50 gender mix of callers one hears on most talk radio is because screeners admit a much higher percentage of female callers to the system.

* The standard of professionalism in talk radio is one hour of prep for each hour on the air. But Mr. Ziegler, whose specialty in media criticism entails extra-massive daily consumption of Internet and cable news, professes to be “pretty much always prepping,” at least during the times he’s not asleep (3:00–10:00 am) or playing golf (which since he’s moved to LA he does just about every day, quite possibly by himself — all he’ll say about it is “I have no life here”).

* Nobody ever ribs Mr. Z. about the manual golf ball thing vis-à-vis, say, Captain Queeg’s famous ball bearings. It is not that he wouldn’t get the allusion; Mr. Z. is just not the sort of person one kids around with this way. After one mid-May appearance on Scarborough Country re some San Diego schoolteachers getting suspended for showing the Nick Berg decapitation video in class, a certain unnamed person tried joshing around with him, in an offhand and lighthearted way, about a supposed very small facial tic that had kept appearing unbeknownst to John Ziegler whenever he’d used the phrase “wussification of America” on-camera; and Mr. Z. was, let’s just say, unamused, and gave the person a look that chilled him to the marrow.

* He keeps saying he cannot believe they’re even giving Simpson airtime. No one points out that his shock seems a bit naive given the business realities of network TV news, realities about which John Ziegler is normally very savvy and cynical.

* “And to top it off,” Mr. Z. is telling [the intern] Kyra as her smile becomes brittle and she starts trying to edge away…

* Plus of course there’s the creepy question of why O.J. Simpson is doing a murder-anniversary TV interview at all. What does he possibly stand to gain from sitting there on-camera and letting tens of millions of people search his big face for guilt or remorse? Why subject himself to America’s ghoulish fascination? And make no mistake — it is fascinating. The interview and face are riveting television entertainment. It’s almost impossible to look away, or not to feel that special kind of guilty excitement in the worst, most greedy and indecent parts of yourself. You can really feel it: This is why drivers slow down to gape at accidents, why reporters put mikes in the faces of bereaved relatives, why the Haidl gang-rape trial is a hit single that merits heavy play, why the cruelest forms of reality TV and tabloid news and talk radio generate such numbers. But that doesn’t mean the fascination is good, or even feels good. Aren’t there parts of ourselves that are just better left unfed? If it’s true that there are, and that we sometimes choose what we wish we wouldn’t, then there is a very serious unanswered question at the heart of KFI’s sweeper: “More Stimulating” of what?

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