Substack Notes 12.4
Jan. 15th, 2025 - Feb. 8th, 2025
Do not sleep under a roof. Carry no money or food. Go alone to places frightening to the common brand of men.
-Miyamoto Musashi
Jan. 15th, 2025
:Only the privileged and entitled believe they can speak on behalf of oppressed others, elevate them to sacred victim status, and get social status credit for their communal narcissism.
Empathy, like every other human quality, has a dark side when misused. Before we can talk about how to apply it, it’s a good idea to have a shared understanding of what it is, what it isn’t and the slippery slope to radicalisation when empathy is ideologically informed.
Jan. 16th, 2025
:Janet Yellen gets low marks from most financial experts for her term as Treasury Secretary… During the pandemic, interest rates were very low—below 1 percent in most instances—and instead of locking in those low rates for 10 or 30 years, she chose to mostly issue debt in short maturities, usually two years and under.
When interest rates inevitably rose in 2022, the U.S. government was forced to refinance at significantly higher rates, which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. It was an error of judgment that most of us cannot even comprehend—if interest rates are close to zero, you lock them in for as long as possible.
…perhaps she couldn't do the hard thing politically—if she had termed out the debt to 10-year notes and 30-year bonds, it would have caused long-term interest rates—and by extension, interest rates on mortgages—to rise slightly, and she couldn't bear the political risk. Now, incoming Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (who is almost certain to be confirmed) will be faced with the prospect of terming out the debt to longer maturities in the event that rates rise even higher than they are currently.
Heterodoxy by definition is not a coherent ideology. It is a challenge to the status quo. And the status quo as exemplified by the American left is so stifling and, I would argue, so potentially dangerous that challenges to it come from all over the cultural and political map. Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shermer would not be in the same political category at any other moment in history - except now. Historically, though, there are some parallels to the situation a hundred years ago when the progressives in the West defended Soviet communism, which was opposed by a motley collection of groups, from fascists to liberals to libertarians and even Social Democrats. The lesson of that time is that attention should be paid to who opposes who and why. The excessive focus on Trump obscures the real ideological realignment we are witnessing. We know what the "woke" or identarian left is (though more analysis of this ideology is needed). But what is its viable alternative? If not MAGA, then what?
Jan. 17th, 2025
:One of the most fascinating papers I've read for a long time: People dislike their political opponents for views most don't actually hold:
What an image. Palestinian death cultists surround one young woman, who they’ve held in tunnels alongside other hostages (many of whom they killed) for over a year. They murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped many, many others like her, ranging from kids to holocaust survivors. These are crimes that should never be forgotten.
Immediately upon the news breaking that Hamas and other Gazans had carried out a medieval pogrom, vast crowds took to the street to chant Muslim supremacist war cries, or to shriek about Israel. Not just in the Muslim world, but in European and American cities.
People in London, where I live, donned the very green headbands you see here and paraded through the streets in them. Elsewhere, synagogues were set on fire. Swastikas were daubed on subway carriages, Israeli flags were burned…I could go on.
All of this was before Israel had even responded.
Unlike quite a few of my followers, I harbour real concerns about the specific nature of Israeli military conduct in the war that followed (then again, maybe there was no choice but to respond with overwhelming military force - I’m also very open to that argument. Are Jews just meant to sit back and take it if a Nazi-level Islamic death cult slaughters their friends and family members during a ceasefire, and vows to do it again and again?).
But as the dust settles, it becomes more apparent than ever to me that the Muslim fanatics and progressive cultists who sided with the gun-toting tunnel-dwellers in this image have plumbed new depths of intellectual depravity. No amount of victim-politics or faux-intellectual gaslighting can obscure that basic fact.
One upside, though: my sense is they’ve repulsed the silent majority. Millions of people are deciding ‘enough’s enough’. About time.
for Donald Trump’s
Second Presidential Inauguration
January 20, 2025
Rain washes the dust from train windows
as we barrel through the poem of America.
From New York to Chicago, I watch it scroll by—
frame by frame and line by line.
Rivers and lakes reflect the pale winter sky
and haunt my vision.
America, what you were,
and will be again—I see you
in silos rising like fists from farmland.
America, the land itself says, “Fight!”
America, I see you in chipped brick walls
stained with faded logos.
I see you there, waiting
to rise from gone-under towns
and cities spangled in endless dusk.
We can see you now
emerging from boarded-up corner bars,
baseball fields barbed with weeds,
hollowed-out churches
and factories folded in on themselves
like crushed cans reclaimed by the wild.
And we see you, and we know you
in ragtag families packed into vehicles
to head to church on a Sunday,
or to visit a grandfather who remembers war
and what it means to survive
for love of the country that survives because of him
and his brothers—gone.
America, for love, we go on.
America, you defy the narratives
imposed to poison your majesty.
All the poison imposed
to warp us away from our axis:
the true, the beautiful, what binds us
to a shared reality
sealed under the hand of God.
Americans, may we all wake
to the dawn, this day,
with courage,
for we are the whirlwind
promised by patriots
who fought to the depth
of a last breath
to birth America.
And we are here—
there is no other time—
to watch her rise again.Jan. 20th, 2025
“Listening to working-class people of color means unshackling ourselves from self-anointed socialist saviors who speak falsely in their name”
-Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY)
Jan. 20th, 2025
:People randomly assigned to farm rice are more collectivistic than those randomly assigned to farm wheat.
“Rice farmers were less individualistic, showed a greater tendency to favor friends over strangers, and exhibited a more relational thinking style."
Jan. 23rd, 2025
:…he pulled out a knife and attacked a nearby daycare group. He killed a two year-old Moroccan boy, and when a 41 year-old man who was in the park with his child tried to intervene, he killed that man too. He also stabbed a 72 year-old bystander in the upper body and a two year-old Syrian girl in the neck. One of the female daycare staff who were minding the children fell and broke her arm in the violence.
Omarzai was in Germany illegally. He came to the Federal Republic in November 2022 via Bulgaria, Austria and France. He therefore had no rights to asylum here, and his application was never accepted. In December he finally announced that he wished to leave Germany for his native Afghanistan. Immigration authorities suspended his asylum process and ordered his deportation to Bulgaria, but he failed to appear at ensuing appointments and so nothing happened.
Omarzai was known to police for at least three prior criminal offences. In each case he was sent away for psychiatric treatment and later released back to his residence. On one occasion he attacked and wounded a Ukrainian woman in his Alzenau refugee centre with a knife. He also attempted to rape another Ukrainian refugee, and locals in Alzenau report that the police were called to the centre multiple times because of Omarzai’s behaviour, which included public urination and breaking into his fellow residents’ rooms.
This is the progressive criminal justice theory in action. Aggravated assaults, rapes, and harassment (not to mention illegal migration!) are ignored. They’re simply not government priorities.
Jan. 24th, 2025
Most zoos currently prioritize individual animal longevity. However, a hyperfocus on longevity increases pressure on the holding capacity of zoos. It also comes at a broader cost to animal welfare and sustainable population management. For example, the increased use of contraceptives to stop reproduction may be invasive (e.g., surgical implants) and carries the risk of pathological side effects and irreversibility, while separation by sex affects social behaviors and may also jeopardize subsequent breeding. Stopping reproduction also deprives zoo animals of one of their most basic evolutionary drives: to pass on their genes to the next generation. Without births, females miss the opportunity to be mothers; groups miss the opportunity to interact with young. Furthermore, as animals age beyond their natural longevity, their need for health interventions increases dramatically. Indeed, a whole new subdiscipline of veterinary care has recently developed for the many geriatric animals now living in zoos (7), while zoo staff are becoming less experienced in reproduction-related husbandry.
Zoos must embrace animal death for education and conservation
I believe the country is once again on the brink of another second act—or rather a fifth or sixth one, depending on which historian you consult. In many ways, we’ve already begun this next phase of renewal, as many of the elements that will undergird this national renaissance are already in place.
In the past decade, for instance, the United States has become an energy superpower through its development of hydraulic fracking, allowing us to use our supply of relatively cheap oil and gas to strengthen everything from our industrial base to our alliances with energy-dependent states in Europe and Asia.
Meanwhile, America leads in the development of most of the newest cutting-edge technologies, from AI to space travel to synthetic biology. For all the talk of the threat from China, the most impactful work in new industries is still largely being done here.
There are other positive signs too. American GDP growth and worker productivity have in recent years exceeded expectations. These numbers are likely to get even better, with productivity growth benefiting greatly from the AI revolution that is just beginning.
But there are also less quantifiable trends that point to national renewal. For instance, the mood in the country seems to be shifting away from socially harmful ideas like equity and back to sounder ones like merit. In fact, this particular shift is already well underway, with everything from universities to big corporations abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Jan. 24th, 2025
:
On 31 May 2024, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Sulaiman Ataee killed the policeman Rouven Laur and severely wounded five others in a knife attack in Mannheim.
On 23 August 2024, at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, a Syrian migrant to Germany named Issa al Hasan killed three people and wounded eight in an apparently Islamist attack for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
On 20 December 2024, a Saudi migrant to Germany named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW through the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, killing 6 people and wounding 299.
On 22 January 2025, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Enamullah Omarzai killed two people and wounded three in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg.
Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg: That is the catalogue of migrant terror pounding like remorseless waves on the brittle outdated politics of the Federal Republic.
Pushed with great enthusiasm by activists who didn’t really understand the nuts and bolts of energy markets, the rush towards weather-dependent renewables carried risks that are only now being recognized. Intermittency—renewables’ propensity to flake out when the weather isn’t cooperating—turned out to create complications the climate movement hadn’t properly thought through. For all the hype, hydrogen and grid-scale batteries are far from being ready to take up the slack. Renewable-heavy grids, it turned out, only work if backed up by hugely expensive back-up power sources, usually reliant on fossil fuels. Wherever regulators pushed up the share of renewables in the grid, prices rose, price volatility rose, and grids became more fragile.
This was foreseeable, and ought to have been foreseen. But ideology is a hell of a drug, so the unthinking push towards unstable, unaffordable energy picked up steam around the world. The places that have gone farthest in this direction have ended up with some of the world’s highest and most volatile energy prices. Energy intensive manufacturing has begun to flee these places, which figures: who wants to run a factory where the cost of energy depends on the weather forecast?
Freddie DeBoer:
Today, we stand in a moment that can fairly be described as the repudiation of the social justice moment that empowered these small bands of screaming censors. People try to deny that social justice overreach played a role in our current period of conservative froth, but I just don’t find those denials credible. Whatever the origins of this moment, it won’t last forever; the worm will turn again, as it inevitably does, no matter how many sneering X accounts insist otherwise. But for now, we have an ascendant quasi-conservatism that’s built on hatred of liberals rather than any affirmative agenda, while we still have a system of social justice surveillance, censure, and control that has been partially dismantled - but only partially. People still try to cancel. Adolescents still look into their front-facing cameras and make declarations not so much about what is wrong in the world but about who is wrong in the world, and they expect those declarations to be consequence-bearing. The steering committee of elite liberal culture, blue-check Twitter, has been disbanded, but its membership has fanned out across various networks and media and many among them still unthinkingly assume that their judgments have an implacable effect upon the world.
“This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence.”
Jan. 25th, 2025
:Concepts aren’t tainted by their misuse.
A major thought error I see among my compatriots: you can’t just throw out every concept that was ever used to justify immoral actions or hierarchy. The claim that we need a more just society that honors inalienable rights is a universalist moral claim. The people who claim this also dismiss the following concepts: logic, the scientific method, universally applicable ethics, sexual dimorphism, meritocracy, masculinity, and uncomfortable facts about human nature. One cannot make universal moral claims about rights and then throw out every concept that would help support the claim. This is how we lost masculinity and merit to the right. Back in the days of the moral majority I can understand the questioning of universal truth claims. But it is fundamentally a logical fallacy to demand rights in one breath and deny the foundation of the argument in the next. The concepts thrown out are the legacy of the Enlightenment in the west, the very basis of our society. And this is perhaps why the center left has lost the plot. It is unwilling to defend these basic concepts because it has been held hostage by illogic from further left. And perhaps herein lies the problem: people form their beliefs based on emotions, not logic. And without a strong center, extremes come to rule.
Jan. 29th, 2025
:The obvious reality is that Biden and a relatively close circle of aids mislead many of their own appointees and fellow Democratic Party elected officials. They lied to the public, not convincingly enough to persuade most Americans, but convincingly enough to persuade most Democrats, and in the process, made their friends and supporters look ridiculous. They selected a VP nominee they didn’t have confidence in as a party leader and whom they did not set up to succeed. And they put the whole Democratic Party in a series of impossible situations because of their hubris, or vainglory, or I don’t know what.
What the champions of soak-the-rich policies miss, however, is that the negative side effects of their favorite taxes and regulations can still be horrible. Why? Because the mere fact that a person can afford a burden does not imply that they will, given a choice, ignore the burden. And in the real world, taxes and regulations almost always come with choices.
Don’t want to pay the tax? Earn less.
Don’t want to face the regulation? Do less.
A pedantic point? Hardly. We actually have a word for people who remain highly responsive to prices despite their wealth: cheap.
The upshot: The idea that government can tax and regulate with impunity as long as they focus on rich individuals and big businesses is mostly wishful thinking.
Jan. 30th, 2025
Axios chart showing total executive orders issued per day in office. Trump still lags behind Biden (many of whose EO’s were essentially undoing Trump policies) but I would argue that his EO’s have been more targeted and effective. They’re certainly gotten a LOT more media coverage… but the media still doesn’t seem to grasp: this is what the voters VOTED for.
Tough math teachers get lower ratings from students, because students like them less. However, students get better grades with the tough teachers than with laxer teachers. Reason #167 why student evaluations of teaching aren’t particularly useful.
Jan. 31st, 2025
Jan. 31st, 2025
Freddie DeBoer:
…a job where your primary responsibility is to talk to customers is a job that requires you to speak the native language of the country you’re in with at least a certain minimum of fluency. Whether that’s good or bad, progressive or reactionary isn’t the point; it just is necessary.
I would also like to pose a simple thought experiment: if I moved to France and lived there for however many years, and I came back home on a visit complaining that the French refuse to speak English, what would those same liberals say? They would, of course, accuse me of being a typical uncouth American, egocentric and clueless, rudely assuming that the rest of the world has a responsibility to conform to my language preferences. Only an American would think to assume that people from another culture are obligated to conform to him, rather than for him to conform to that culture. It’s no different than going to Japan and refusing to take off your shoes when you walk into someone’s house; you are the recent arrival, and so you don’t get to dictate terms. I will never forget being in the UK, as part of a European study abroad program in college, and watching several of my peers react in shock when the McDonald’s at Heathrow didn’t take American dollars. Well, McDonald’s in New York doesn’t take GBP, either. These dynamics are symmetrical. And to suggest that an immigrant to America has less obligation to honor the customs and mores of this country than an American immigrant has to do the same in another country can only reflect a powerful condescension towards those immigrants.
:
Who Believes Conspiracy Theories? More people believe the 2016 U.S. election was fraudulent than that the 2020 election was. (!)
Jan. 31st, 2025
:Subcultures are supposed to be edgy variations on everyday life, not the main event.
What I’m saying is this: it’s possible to sideline minority ways of life without abusing or persecuting the people who choose them. It’s possible to put stable, traditional families at the center of your culture—the way they have been in every functioning civilization since the dawn of always—without demanding that everybody form one.
The key point here is that even the slightly unusual and off-center among us will benefit from living in a country with a solid core of law, order, and normalcy. Grumpy priest lady doesn’t have to like it, but the rest of us are moving on.
Feb. 3rd, 2024
:Trigger warnings don’t help people emotionally prepare for distressing material, or lead them to avoid it – the two things they’re intended to do. Their main effect seems to be to make people more anxious about encountering the material.
Feb. 4th, 2025
:A trans-identified male has been accused of sexually assaulting a number of women while staying at a female-only shelter.
This is what happens when abstraction drives policy, and real costs/risks/victims are forgotten or ignored. Trans activists will say “this never happens!” Well, what about when it does?
Feb. 5th, 2025
Some Americans wanted to absolve themselves of guilt about race and sexuality and liberate themselves from the shackles of history and biology. Prudent observers could have warned them about the impossibility of this enterprise, but the gurus had, for a time, seemingly unstoppable momentum.
The most significant was Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi.
As the country emerged from BLM-induced mania, journalists began to cast a more critical eye on Kendi and his work. The conservative press circulated embarrassing clips, including one in which Kendi could not define the word “racism” without deploying circular logic. By 2024, the New York Times, no longer interested in his nighttime reading routine, exposed the professor’s shallow ideology and raised questions about his leadership at the research center.
The reality was uncomfortable for Kendi’s cheerleaders. The smarter critics, pushed aside during the BLM era, always knew that he was a lightweight. The Center for Antiracist Research produced almost no research, despite millions in funding and dozens of full-time staff. When Kendi was confronted with the evidence, he lashed out in signature fashion, blaming “[r]acist ideas” for the negative coverage.
New York attorney general Letitia James threatened local hospitals that complying with President Trump’s executive order curtailing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for gender-confused minors constitutes “discrimination” under state law. Two sets of parents whose children are 12 years old told The New York Times that their appointments to have a puberty-blocking implant placed in their arms were canceled immediately after Trump’s announcement. When are Democrats going to learn that sterilizing teenagers is not a political winner!
Democrats will claim that surgeries aren’t happening to minors. I’ve heard that many times in conversations. If surgeries aren’t happening to minors then why is a law against surgeries on minors problematic?
Feb. 6th, 2025
:
Consider Claudine Gay, Harvard’s disgraced former president. Despite plagiarizing her doctoral thesis about getting more black candidates elected and spending her tenure as Art and Sciences dean focused on DEI and anti-racism, the first thing she did after former Obama official Penny Pritzker selected her as the university’s first black president was to target black scholars for being insufficiently woke, including the renowned economist Roland Fryer over his research showing that police do not shoot more blacks than whites.
Freddie DeBoer:
Then there’s abandoning core progressive virtues out of a short-term desire to justify undocumented immigration, which happens all the time. Hayes again:
Who do people think are gonna rebuild Los Angeles? Who do you think’s gonna rebuild Los Angeles? Who do you think is gonna clear brush and clear debris hour after hour, day after day, week after week? Who do you think is going to do that? We all know the answer. Yeah. Is it is going to be largely undocumented immigrant later. 100%. That will be the answer to that question, which is one of the most vital things that can happen for the rebuilding of that city right now. And it's going to fall upon folks that have no legal status, that are being demonized and called rapists and murderers by the president of The United States.
If you express this just slightly differently, you can see that it’s exceptionally racist. “You know what would be great? If we let a bunch of people of color into our country and have them do hard, dangerous, demeaning jobs. And get this! We’re going to sneak them in secretly, so they won’t be protected by minimum wage laws, OSHA, regulations on work hours and overtime, and all manner of other labor protections. And most of them are going to be paying into Medicare and Social Security but won’t ever be able to practically draw from those programs that they’ve contributed to. They’ll also be constantly subject to personal, economic, and sexual exploitation because they won’t be able to call the police due to their undocumented status. Why, you might as well call them slaves! This is all very enlightened and liberal btw.”
:
The dirty little secret of liberal America is that it has believed in the Great Replacement Myth just as strongly as the right does, seeing the arrival of nonwhite majority as a political deus ex machina that eliminates all opposition and contestation of its worldview.
Immigration politics have always been viewed through that lens, on both sides. It's a fight over how many blue votes can be added to the mix from across the border.
The 2024 Election has to be the end of that viewpoint for anyone looking at it rationally. Actually existing nonwhite voters are rapidly fleeing the politics of cosmopolitan identarian solidarity, there is no Permanent Democratic Majority at the end of the rainbow no matter how open the borders are.
In theory that ought to lead us to a much MUCH more healthy place on immigration politics. We shall see.
(from
’s Substack…)The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk—
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.
The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell...
- Kipling, The Stranger
…they come from a culture in which the mental habits inculcated by thousands of years inside a brutal caste system (what was that about racism?) force everyone into the role of either abused or abuser. One is either in an inferior position, in which case one is expected to be obsequious, servile, slavish, bootlicking, and sycophantic; or one is in a superior position, in which case one must be tyrannical, sadistic, and rapacious. There is no in between. If in an inferior position, one can only survive the impositions of the superior by being crafty, by lying, by being lazy – doing as little as one can get away with, exaggerating what one has done, obeying instructions to their strict letter while ignoring their spirit, and never, ever taking initiative. If in a superior position, one knows implicitly that all of one’s inferiors are backstabbing, shiftless, deceitful little wretches, and treats them accordingly. That may have sounded harsh to you. If so, read this from Jayant Bhandari, an Indian who’s lived in the West for some time: substack.com/redirect/7… All of the above is lifted straight from his description and diagnosis. If anything, I toned it down.
Feb. 6th, 2025
:How IQ, the Big Five, and various other non-cognitive traits correlate with occupational status and income.
ISEI and SIOPS = measures of occupational status. Red bars show the raw correlations; blue bars show the correlations after controlling for IQ.
:
Admitting you were totally wrong about an issue is a little like admitting you lied: the earlier you do it the better for everyone.
Feb. 7th, 2025
:
I wonder if Hollywood is capable of making a movie that promotes the sunnum bonum of Aquinas or Aristotelian virtue ethics? Not necessarily something that is nakedly Christian, but something that promotes the “Good” of society.
A few years ago, an amateur botanist was hiking above the Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles when he noticed several shrubs had been flattened by construction work. What he had stumbled across was an effort by the LA Department of Water and Power to replace the wooden poles of power lines with steel ones. The old ones, you see, were a fire hazard.
But the hiker was more worried about those flattened shrubs, which turned out to be a rare plant called a milk vetch.
There millions of people who do not accept the shape of reality. They do not accept concepts like constraints, trade-offs, suffering, merit, biology, scarcity, incentives, or punishment.
These are ultimately the most dangerous kind of people… for they’re all rich (and therefore powerful).
“The murderer is reported to have found happiness in prison ‘presenting as female’ and suggests the three people he brutally killed might still be alive if he’d just felt able to ‘transition’ earlier in his life. He claims he's a different person now that he’s ‘Linda’ Mai Lee, and the article’s sympathetic author seems to agree.”
Mental illness can prompt people to cut out their own tongues, to light themselves on fire, to kill their children because they believe that CIA bugs are implanted in their brains, but it can’t prompt ordinary socially disreputable behavior or bigotry, apparently. It’s hard to believe, but very convenient for people who are desperately trying to keep various elements of their personality and politics stitched together without confronting the contradictions.
Feb. 8th, 2025
“When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.”
-Frank Herbert
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