Substack Notes 12.5
We’re well into the New Year, and many of our social systems have hit barely perceptible inflection points. The shift (the ‘vibe’ shift, in the parlance of modern digital idiocy) has been so subtle and easily dismissed that many folks are still living in denial: it hasn’t happened! Nothing has changed! Label and deride and exaggerate the flaws of our opponents!
Those tactics are less and less useful. You don’t have to like it but you should try to reconcile yourself to the fact that the old, fossilized institutions are increasingly feeble, and the old orthodoxies increasingly ridiculous. If I were you, I would set to work to shape some new ones.
Jan. 29th, 2025
:Partisan bias in the media isn’t the only or the main pathological dynamic at play, as these titles show:
The New Yorker: Climate Whiplash and Fire Come to L.A.
ABC News: How hydroclimate whiplash contributed to the severity of California wildfires
Newsweek: Why a Rain 'Whiplash' Is to Blame for Los Angeles Fires
The LA Times: Intensifying climate ‘whiplash’ set the stage for devastating California fires
The Guardian: Climate ‘whiplash’ events increasing exponentially around world
Financial Times: Fire and floods: the rise of climate whiplash
Grist: The ‘weather whiplash’ fueling the Los Angeles fires is becoming more common
(Read a full and honest breakdown of the ‘whiplash’ narrative here: breakthroughjournal.org…)
All journalists live and work in a very small social and cultural bubble. Their ideas, values, and experiences are increasingly out of touch with reality, as the wealth of their societies and their jealously guarded class prerogatives are designed to shield them from the risks and costs of bad policymaking.
Above all the NARRATIVE MUST BE PROTECTED. Could any of these writers publish a story about the collapse of Germany’s power industry due to Green Party policies or the unethical sourcing of cobalt or solar panels or the institutional capture of government by environmental nonprofits? Of course they could, but they won't. Even if they looked into these issues (which they never would) they would never write such a story, and if they wrote it their editor wouldn’t publish it. Extrapolate this dynamic across every contentious political issue and partisan debate and you begin to understand the corruption of legacy media.
Jan. 31st, 2025
, writing about Trump’s EO “directing the Department of Defense to update its guidance regarding trans-identifying medical standards for military service and to rescind guidance inconsistent with military readiness”:Physical fitness standards have been complicated by the attempted denial of human sex difference. Unisex restrooms have become unit priorities. Medical transition demonstrably reduces readiness. Transgender activists tout suicide risk to justify the accommodations they demand, and suicidal people do not belong in uniform. [The article subject] complained to [an interviewer] that he and other transgender service members have been “basically invalidated” by Trump. Demands for validation are incompatible with the humility required to serve
…
I served in Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Army. The key problem with DADT was that it required service members to lie about themselves. As explained above, the key issue with transgender ideology is that it requires the people in uniform to lie about each other. Lies are contrary to the good order and discipline needed for an effective fighting unit. “LGBTQ+” is a lie. Transgender is not a ‘new kind of gay’ and same-sex rights are incompatible with denial of human sex difference.
So contrary to popular belief, there is no reason to expect newly-affirmed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will revert to DADT. The closeted gay and lesbian soldiers I knew were not trying to stand out, either. They did not want to run a rainbow flag up the base flagpole, or special attention. They wanted to be treated as normal male and female soldiers, not members of the opposite sex. They met or exceeded the standards for their own sex.
“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
Feb. 8th, 2025
:Describing administrative reform via auditing as a form of warfare might seem hyperbolic but that is, I think, precisely the correct metaphor. Armoured by iron-clad job security, the permanent bureaucracy has squatted for decades behind an impenetrable fortification built out of administrative, regulatory, and financial complexity, which they defended using procedural manipulation, slow-walking of unwelcome reforms, and diffusion of responsibility through opaque committee structures. Figuring out who made what decision or which dollar went where was simply impossible for outsiders. From this impregnable position they could then sally forth like feudal lords to loot the serfs using the IRS.
DOGE’s application of AI algorithms has cut through their castle walls like cannon shot, an ultima ratio regum that has left the deep state speechless. The networks are effortlessly mapped, the flows of capital are traced, the corruption is exposed, the swamp creatures left naked and shivering.
The enemy has collapsed. Decades of preference falsification have come apart, as they always do, in a preference cascade – people admitting that they don’t actually believe the things they pretended to believe because everyone else was pretending to believe them and they didn’t realize everyone was pretending, only now they do know, so they’re saying what they really believed all along, and so is everyone else. It’s an Emperor’s New Clothes moment, a Fall of the Berlin Wall moment. The invulnerability conferred by the appearance of monolithic consensus has been cracked; the illusion having been dispelled, the spell is impossible to cast again. They’re done.
Feb. 9th, 2025
:“As expected, people reacted less positively to sex differences favoring men than to those that favored women.”
Feb. 10th, 2025
:This is exactly on point. I will amplify with my own experience. Until a few years ago I was working as a mid-career research scientist, no I won't tell you what field. Within my collaboration I was known for being extremely productive.
I've seen jaws drop when I show colleagues my publication list. Then it came time to start applying for junior professor positions. Got a few interviews, but doors kept getting slammed in my face.
It's a very opaque process of course, they never tell you why. In one case however I had the dean - a portly Hispanic woman - tell me two minutes into the interview that "women in STEM are very important to me", and ultimately heard informally from one of the profs at that dept that I hadn't been hired because of interference from the dean, despite all of the profs on the committee wanting me, and that instead they'd hired ... no one.
That was in the US.
Meanwhile in Canada, where open discrimination against white men is not only legally allowed but federally mandated, the federal government rolled out a research chair program that was only available to applicants who weren't white men, while telling universities that if their faculties weren't diversifying overall they wouldn't qualify for the research chairs.
After that I heard from two different deans, at two schools, that there was an unofficial moratorium on hiring white males. Sure enough, every subsequent new hire I saw was a nonwhite. At the same time, "diversity statements" became mandatory for application packages, basically everywhere.
These require the applicant to wax poetic about how much they love DEI, how much they will do to advance DEI, how DEI is the absolute center of meaning for their lives. It's a bit much to demand guys write about how they adore a system that discriminates against them.
I have my pride. So if a diversity statement was required, I did not apply. Whoops, there go like 90% of available positions.
Just because a school doesn't have an explicit DEI policy, doesn't require diversity statements, etc., means little. One European university I applied to provided detailed feedback, not just on my application but those of other applicants, due to some kind of transparency policy.
This was very informative. Not only was the (female) referee noticeably biased towards women, she gave a 1/5 rating to every teaching statement that didn't mention diversity ("no mention of diversity" was literally the only comment she made on most of the teaching statements).
Needless to say, as this situation continued, I became rather discouraged. My research activity slowed and then basically stopped.
What the fuck is the point.
I killed myself for like a decade, for what?
This isn't a sob story, I'm not fishing for sympathy here.
In the meantime I started writing, building an audience, and for now I'm supporting myself reasonably well as an essayist, with the added bonus that I can work while traveling and living wherever I want. And honestly, I've always wanted to be a writer. So it's working out reasonably well for me, personally.
But if it wasn't for DEI it's very likely that I'd still be in the field, happily doing scientific research, supervising students, and so on. Instead whatever resources were used to train me got poured down the drain, as far as the system is concerned.
And I know for a fact that my particular story is very far from unique, and is very far from being limited to academic science departments.
Feb. 11th, 2025
:
USAID just doesn’t work politically without the support of conservative hawks.
Meanwhile, though, I certainly believe foreign aid has some national security benefits, I will admit that my personal interest is primarily in the humanitarian mission.
Then why don’t you give your OWN money to causes? If every progressive complaining about aid cuts donated $100 to foreign charities and relief organization there would be billions of dollars immediately? Why should strangers have money taken to fund things they disagree with?
I think I know why. It’s much easier to demonstrate virtue through articles and opinions than it is to actually be a good person or give up your own resources or privilege. Most of these writers are incredibly wealthy in a global sense… and they simply don’t understand their own fortune or privilege. Everyone around them is in a similar situation so they don’t perceive that they are the plutocracy.
That, I think, accounts for the state of our elites these days. They all believe that responsibility and civic virtue lie in posting the right things on X… while in private they are greedy, vicious, and unkind.
500,000… Germans took to the streets this past weekend to combat the out-of-bounds radical views held by 52% of everybody.
Could it be that the Greens and the SPD are using the substantial resources of the German state to call forth massive street protests against all the Germans who are not planning to vote for them?
Yes, in fact that is exactly how it could be:
When 160,000 demonstrators turned out to protest on behalf of the cordon sanitaire on the first weekend in February, and organisers projected the words “All Berlin hates the CDU” onto the Victory Column, the red-green federal government provided financial support. The rally was co-sponsored from the coffers of the federal budget …
All of this is to varying degrees illegal. Non-profit organisations, which receive tax-deductible contributions from supporters, are bound to political neutrality. Nor can the government finance (directly or otherwise) campaign events against the political opposition. Since 2021, however, in the name of defending democracy, the traffic light coalition have called into being an absolute jungle of NGOs to intimidate voters, censor the internet and riot on the streets against parliamentary votes. Their semi-affiliated activist cadres police German politics and redefine as right-wing and forbidden whatever it is our rulers happen to disagree with at the moment.
Andreas Rosenfelder (at Welt) proposes that it is the “division between state and society” that differentiates “liberal democracy” from “authoritarian and totalitarian systems.” This would mean that liberal democracy is at the very least “threatened” in Germany, if indeed it has not been quietly abolished. Perhaps that happened while we were all cowering under our beds worrying about sub-microscopic respiratory pathogens.
This is the vision that the Democrats would love to implement in the U.S. Progressive groups receiving overwhelming federal funding and political support, dissenters crushed by the agencies and stigmatized by the culture, and a captive and two-faced media which uses wildly different terms and standards for discussing the two sides.
To some extent that is what we had, and still have. Yet it is, despite its lofty ideals and fuzzy language, a kind of soft totalitarianism.
Feb. 11th, 2025
Feb. 12th, 2025
:
The large human influence on forests does not mean that the climate has not changed in ways that also influence fires, but it does mean that the management (intentional or not) of ecosystems has played a much larger role in shaping fire behavior than has any plausible effect of greenhouse gas emissions on climatic conditions that favor fire.
The PMC feminist rhetorical fortress
Why do women treat each other badly? > patriarchy
Why can’t women see their own bad behavior toward each other? —> internalized misogyny
Why can’t they see past internalized misogyny? —> patriarchy
But men don’t control women —> systemic patriarchy, no female president
But a female president shouldn’t be required to prove that men don’t control women —> ?????
Why is meritocracy bad? —> because white men invented it
But then how does one know whether a person is qualified? —> that’s racist/sexist
Do women have agency? —> depends on the situation. With men, never. And with ourselves, see above.
If feminism has to be this impervious to logic, what does that tell us about its legitimacy? oh wait, logic is white supremacy
Feb. 12th, 2025
, relating someone’s FTM transition:I was dating women and men, but I noticed that being sexual with women made me start to feel like I was an oppressor. The only way I can describe it is that testosterone made my sexuality more carnal and aggressive.
I suspect that there’s also a form of transgender identity that is more of a social contagion. I believe that it’s very human to at least contemplate what it must be like to be the opposite gender. I think social media, transgender influencers, and the ease at which the medical/psychological establishment will “affirm” people, these conditions make it far likelier that a person with natural curiosity can be influenced toward transition. Especially if they are unhappy for other reasons, or mentally ill and see transition as the answer to their problems.
Magatte Wade writes,
Why is Africa poor?, most Africans (and their allies) will come up with the usual suspects: colonialism, slavery, they’re stealing our natural resources, racism, yada yada yada yada. But non-Africans who are not allies of Africans and have no compassion whatsoever would tend to say low IQ, they fight all the time, they’re lazy, they’re crooks. Both sides would also say bad leaders, bad government. But do you know what I don’t hear from either side? No one will say, Africa is the poorest region in the world today because it is the most over-regulated region in the world. It is the place in the world where it is hardest for any entrepreneur to do business. And that’s the right answer to the question of African poverty.
Peter Zeihan and others would cite Africa’s lack of internal transport, because rivers are not as helpful as they are in Europe or the United States. But she writes,
Africa should be the most connected continent, but it’s not. Tariffs, quotas, and inefficiency make it easier to trade with Europe than our neighbors. We lose billions of dollars every year because of this.
:
Try not to judge a book by its cover when it comes to real life. I am a white man from a wealthy family who grew up in external privilege. I had it all: Big house, pool and jacuzzi, fancy private school, the works.
I also, at age 8, had a loaded 9-millimeter placed in my mouth and was told that, counting down from 10 to 0, at 0 my life would end. I also was molested by my father’s work colleague’s 19-year-old son when I was nine. I also had a mother who was suicidal and had a long history of clinical depression; she once dropped me off at her psychiatrist’s house at 3am in the middle of a nervous breakdown when I was 6.
When I told my mother as a teen that I’d been molested she told me that I had a very strong imagination. Later when I got sober she made it about her, saying that I probably thought she was a “bad mother.”
Needless to say: This led me in my teens to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. Was it “because” of my parents and my childhood? No. I think it’s genetic; it runs in my family. But my environment didn’t help.
I can’t tell you how many times in my life (childhood included), well-meaning people told me I had no real problems, that my life was easy, that I had nothing to complain about. And now in our current moment I’m a White Straight Man, so my life has been perfect, right? I’ve had all the power, all the privilege.
My life—trust me—was not and has not been easy.
Feb. 13th, 2025
Heatmaps indicating highest moral allocation by ideology, Study 3a. Source data are provided as a Source Data file. Note. The highest value on the heatmap scale is 20 units for liberals, and 12 units for conservatives. Moral circle rings, from inner to outer, are described as follows: (1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence.
Research seems to indicate a Leftist inversion of natural concerns and affiliations. They care more for strangers and abstract groups than they do for the people in their lives and communities.
These people are living in a digital make-believe. Their empathy makes them heroic (or at least virtuous) in their own minds… meanwhile they do/risk/sacrifice nothing.
Feb. 14th, 2025
:The problem is that DEI focuses on groups, while employers hire, fire, and promote individuals. An employer cannot hire a group, nor can an employer fire or promote a group. They must focus on the individual. And DEI has nothing to do with individuals. It is entirely focuses on groups.
And how do you know when society has eliminated all vestiges of racial and gender discrimination? The reality is that we have no idea how much discrimination actually exists. At some point, assuming that DEI works, we will hit a time of no discrimination.
Will DEI policies be terminated when that happens? I seriously doubt it.
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the various constituencies of the American establishment developed varied, sometimes overlapping, and nearly always self-serving answers to the urgent questions Trump’s victory posed. Here, to give but a sampling, are three of them: Leftists who had always claimed that America’s biggest problem was economic inequality claimed that Trump’s rise was caused by economic inequality and promised that fixing economic inequality would reduce Trump’s support. Identitarians who had always claimed that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry were America’s biggest problem claimed that racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry had gotten Trump elected and promised that the best way to beat him was to organize the marches and equity programs and diversity trainings that would fight racism and sexism and other forms of bigotry. Social scientists, for the most part, offered an account that implied the need for even less action or self-reflection: Trump, they reassured their grateful readers, had been elected due to the nostalgia and “racial resentment” of old, white men; since the segments of the population staging this “last stand” against the inevitable were thankfully declining as a share of the electorate, the threat they posed was sure to prove temporary.
In the wake of Trump’s reelection, enormous mental acrobatics are required to maintain any of these narratives. That doesn’t mean that their advocates haven’t given it the old college try.
Feb. 15th, 2025
:To many in my country, Jacinda Ardern’s tyranny was a realisation that her message of ‘be kind’ was only operationalised for when she needed it, and importantly, only for those she thought deserved it. To me, as a student studying psychology, Jacinda Ardern epitomised The Myth of Liberal Empathy - the ‘confounding’ finding that shows it is conservatives, rather than liberals, who show more empathy to their political opponents.
The finding is well documented, but a study in 2023 replicated it:
In four studies, U.S. and U.K. participants (total N = 4,737) read hypothetical scenarios and extended less empathy to suffering political opponents than allies or neutral targets. These effects were strongly shown by liberals but were weaker among conservatives, such that conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives.
There are many reasons why this might be the case, here’s a list:
Many conservatives are ‘matured liberals’ and thus know what it was like to be one;
Conservatives are more likely to be Christian and thus view all people, even their direct political enemies, as children of God;
Conservatives are less ideologically homogenous, and contain far more disagreement between sub-groups, and may be ‘more trained’ in offering empathy to dissidents;
Conservatives are happier on average, and thus are more likely to engage altruistic emotions like empathy and compassion.
The researchers of the original paper found that:
This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals’ harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1–4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3 and 4).
“They miss the ultimate intersectionality: The individual.”
“The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from [East Germany].”
“The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this, apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It seemed never to bother them that their ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.”
-Jonathan Franzen
Feb. 17th, 2025
[W]e’re not going to endorse in their elections, we certainly don’t want to meddle in their elections. But do we think that European leaders can sort of say, “Here is a group of opinions that are completely anathema to democratic debate?” No, you can’t do that, because the people who decide whether a particular opinion should be part of the democratic debate is the people.
And if the people keep on saying we’re pissed off about something, we’re frustrated about something, you can’t say we’re going to ban, censor, silence this group of people. You have to listen to them, even if they’re a minority.
I mean … sometimes … in European elections … you have migration skeptic parties who win a plurality of the votes, but then have no presence in the government. It’s crazy that people are crying out, I think, for a particular response to what’s going on in Europe over the past 10 years, and I just think that European leaders have to be more responsive to that.
That is defense of democracy. It’s listening to the people. It’s not hanging your hat on these institutions that are very valuable, in some cases, but are often disconnected from the will of the people.
-J. D. Vance
Feb. 18th, 2025
: and are co-winners of the AKSHUALLY award. We should admire their wonk slop as an art form. Tons of words and data, but not an ounce of insight. Their takes age like the people in this room. Here is a summary of their creative process:Step 1: A horrific crime occurs, like an illegal immigrant burning a woman to death in the subway.
Step 2: Write piece called “AKSHUALLY, CRIME IS DOWN”
Step 3: 10,000+ people pay them millions of dollars of year because they’re “smart”, vote blue no matter who cuz data and orange man bad.
Step 4: Civilizational collapse.
Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and SHARE.
Your compilations help me gather related materials to mine, thank you as always
I didn’t vote for Trump or the idiot (and please why can’t people admit that she is an idiot?), but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.