Substack Notes 13.1 - The Tipping Point
Jan. 13th - Feb. 27th, 2025
Memetics is a Kind of Darwinism
The culture has shifted. A ‘New Deal’-style counter-revolution is pervading our federal government.
In online spaces a complete reversal seems to have happened: platforms and institutions and forums that 5 years ago were flooded with a barrage of indignant and progressive commenters, saturated with certainty, now contain a similar proportion of people, taking the opposite side in every debate. Certainty is always an illusion in these things but-unlike in 2019-I can say that the ideas which are dominant seem to accurately reflect the mainstream.
The culture still has issues: loneliness, addiction, psychological symptoms, pathological self-indulgence. These problems are deeper than any party or legislation and they can only reform with massive cultural shifts. No manager or technocrat could fix those things, and most of them don’t even want to try.
However, we’ve reached a tipping point. The bureaucratic and cultural inertia is now irresistible, whether or not the left yet knows it. Their worldviews and their terminology and their tactics will change over the next few years… or they will vanish.
Memetics is a kind of Darwinism. Good (compelling, appealing, useful, addictive, adaptive) ideas tend to survive. Bad ideas do not.
Jan. 13th, 2025
If you want to beat back ‘disinformation’ or ‘conspiracy theories’ then I’m interested. You’d better have an encyclopedic knowledge and plentiful primary sources though. 9/10 times the ‘experts’ seem to be in possession of little more than assumptions, misunderstood statistics, and popular misconceptions.
The best way to counter disinformation is with vigorous public debates. The experts never seem to favor this route. I wonder why? 🤔
Jan. 14th, 2025
I’m not making a claim here… but could the obvious and visible degradation of important institutions (FBI, Secret Service, FEMA) have anything to do with new selection/promotion priorities? I’m not saying it’s WOMEN per se, but perhaps these organizations are promoting political operators and discounting the capabilities and leadership potential of male members. Could we be seeing the costs of that right now? Boeing, Hollywood, the Games industry, our criminal justice system… everyone (every organization) seems to suck at their jobs right now.
[She] never went to war, led people in a urgent and coordinated project, or (to my knowledge) sacrificed anything for her beliefs. Largely because of her race and sex (and some shallow academic and administrative experience) she became the president of an outstanding Northeast private Liberal Arts college. She is a 21st-century academic leader.
If you want your society to produce transcendent excellence in a given field, the only way to do so is to attach a competitive male status hierarchy to it. With status on the line, men will throw themselves into the arena, immersing themselves completely, devoting their every waking moment to mastering a skill or subject, making it their life’s purpose to push a discipline beyond its limits. Competitive pressures between the best of the best then raises performance to its apogee.
Feb. 8th, 2025
: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. 19th, 2025
:…being feminists, they can’t help themselves but to explain boys and men’s problems as a result of “patriarchy” and “gender norms”. They seem to believe that boys are misshaped and misguided girls, and if boys and men only just leaned into their feminine sides, cultural pressure be damned, they would come out happier and better off in every way.
Haven’t we all ready tried that? I know I will get some push-back here, but in my opinion we have tried our best to “broaden” the “The box” labeled “socially acceptable ways to be a man”, since the 70ies. We have dismantled the nuclear family, abandoned male role models, emphasized emotional vulnerability and “gender non-conforming” trends - for fifty years. (And that’s one issue I have with feminism, its theories are not falsifiable, as in more feminism, less patriarchy, the happier we’ll be. But it has not made us happier or better adjusted.) We’ve tried for 50 years to feminize boys, when should we expect to see results?
Quote a lot of our population have grown up without fathers and hence been under uncontested female influence at home. Few of those boys have been pressured by their mothers to grow up to be the strong, silent type, emotionally unavailable, aggressive and distant, but rather raised as “allies” to girls and women. This seems to have worked poorly for the boys, but also, alas, for the girls and women.
Feb. 20th, 2025
:Education and science literacy correlate with stronger views on controversial topics (source). Intelligence alone is far from being a defense against ideological dogma. Students, in particular, have traditionally been a reservoir of extremism. The Nazis won the German students before they won the German State.
In 1960, William Shirer, the American journalist and author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, described his experiences as a war correspondent in Nazi Germany:
“Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, beer hall, or café, I would meet with outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious they were parroting nonsense they heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but one was met with such incredulity, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty.”
It is trivial to claim that the press are biased. Everybody says it.
In particular, one hears that the press are biased towards the left, but this is incomplete. In fact the press advance a very specific political line that is less undifferentiated leftism than it is establishment progressive liberalism. In Germany there are Marxist publications, like Junge Welt, which lie substantially to the left of the media liberal programme, and there are of course various traditional or conservative publications that outflank it on the right. Institutional media is not just “as left as possible,” but rather a carefully calibrated centre-left internationalism.
For years, the US State Department has secretly funded and coordinated the OCCRP, a massive journalism consortium directing the energies of press across the world towards America’s geopolitical rivals and enemies. The dominant figure in the OCCRP is a mysterious man named Drew Sullivan, whose extensive influence on Western media is sufficient to get a leading German public broadcaster to drop a story that he doesn’t like. The man can literally email hundreds of leading journalists around the world with specific instructions about how they should answer questions. And this is only one NGO, amid a vast sea of them – one node in a massive, hopelessly complex system working to coordinate media across the West.
:
The US has a welfare state. This means that those individuals who are below 60th percentile or so of the income distribution are net receivers of funds from the government during their lifetime (i.e., the net present value of what they contribute less than what they receive later in life, like Social Security and Medicare), those between the 60th and 90th percentile are approximately net zero contributors, and only at the top 10th percentiles are net contributors. In other words, all immigrants that come to the US are below the 90th percentile and won’t help solve the fiscal woes created by low fertility. European countries that have the detailed databases required to compute these numbers carefully have found that not even the second-generation (i.e., the sons of immigrants born in the country) is a net contributor to the welfare state.
(click the graph above to read the article…)
Feb. 20th, 2025
:How personality changes with age.
-Blue: Neuroticism
-Green: Extraversion
-Red: Openness to experience
-Orange: Agreeableness
-Purple: Conscientiousness
Feb. 21st, 2025
THIS is where laws against hate speech get you. All laws are created by and for the powerful. Laws which suppress and control speech end up doing it on behalf and at the direction of the powerful, regardless of their original intent:
I find it hard to exaggerate how oppressive and petty the speech police have become. I’ve covered the case of Stefan Niehoff, a 64 year-old retiree who had his house raided for the crime of tweeting a meme that called Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck a “professional moron.” I wrote about Doris van Geul, a 74 year-old woman who was convicted (among other things) for suggesting that some migrants might be “loafers and freeloaders.” Her pension so meagre and her fines so high that she’ll probably be paying them off for the rest of her life. Tweeting the poop emoji at cabinet ministers, quoting politicians inexactly, calling Green politicians fat and stupid – all of this can lead to ruinous fines in the Federal Republic. Repeat offenders can even face prison time, all for saying impolite things to powerful people.
:
Since 2021, Germany has a lèse-majesté prohibition on the books, which enhances the penalties for defaming, insulting or maliciously gossiping about “persons in political life.” A whole malign industry has sprouted up around this vile statute. Firms with zoomer names like “So Done” file speech crime charges on behalf of defamed, insulted and maliciously gossiped-about politicians, and the “victims” agree to share half of any awarded damages with these self-appointed censors. It is like a free-market Stasi, it really sucks, and thanks to 60 Minutes, Americans get to hear about all of this lunacy over popcorn in their living rooms.
Feb. 21st, 2025
Freddie DeBoer:
Yes, there are of course unique difficulties when it comes to women both flourishing in their careers and starting a family, and these are no doubt influenced not just by biology but by structural sexism. Still, everyone’s ambitions are constrained in prosaic ways in life, including men, and (like the directive to be cartoonishly self-confident) the goal of it having it all becomes just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet.
I know that trans activists are full of shit because they refuse to acknowledge things that EVERYONE knows to be true (even them):
The modern conventions of ‘transwoman’ or reverting to their ‘identified’ pronouns can be confusing as hell
trans people usually don’t ‘pass’
trans (aside from being a psychological condition itself) is often accompanied by a laundry list of delusions and personality pathologies and sexual abnormalities
It’s not transphobic to say things that everyone knows to be true. If it is, that says more about the concept of ‘transphobia’ than it does about anything else.
The fundamental difference between the liberal and the illiberal outlook (Bertrand Russell)
Feb. 22nd, 2025
:
I think that many people in the nonprofit sector, in corporate HR, in K-12 education, and especially in campus administration, have too high an opinion of their intellectual and moral superiority.
During my brief and unhappy experience as an adjunct economics professor at George Mason, I assigned students short essays, and a portion of the grade was on the quality of their writing. One student complained about the poor grade I had assigned to her on writing, so I proceeded to go over her essay with a red pen and highlight its flaws. It was soon covered in red. Meanwhile, she whined, “But I’ve always been told I’m a good writer.”
Exactly. These midwits have always been told that they are great, but they are not. And that is a somewhat different notion of “surplus elite” than what Turchin seems to be offering.
What we have in surplus are social justice activists.
eugyppius’s informative description of the strange menagerie which is the modern German political landscape almost makes me feel lucky to live in the boring old two-party United States:
the Greens… were founded in West Germany in 1980, combining various new left movements that had no real home in the SPD. They were environmentalists, hard-line opponents of nuclear energy and peace activists, and in their earliest phase they were also infiltrated by DDR agents…
They shed their anti-Atlanticist protest elements in favour of a new rabid Atlanticism, and the uncharitable would say that they left one notional foreign partner (the communist East) for another (the United States)…
The Greens are the party of the media, of intellectuals and of status-conscious urbanites everywhere. Their mostly well-off and oblivious voters have yet to feel serious economic pain, which is one reason the party demonstrates such resilience.
Feb. 23rd, 2025
It’s an uncomfortable fact that the ‘experts’ are often little more than arbiters of mingled: uncertain science, arbitrary bureaucratic rules, and status games.
I was a Democrat for a long time. My parents were lifelong Democrats. I’ve always been left of center, even radical in some ways when I was younger…but I never got into identity politics. I always found that gross.
I no longer call myself a Democrat. I’m politically homeless. I loathe both sides. Clinton ran a terrible campaign and screwed us all in 2016. She didn’t even visit the 'deplorables’ in many swing states, the states Trump won. She was arrogant, patrician and far too presumptuous.
Harris did it again in 2024. I blame Biden and the Party here more than Harris.
Democrats have lost their way over the past decade. Classical liberalism is out the window, replaced by fringe-left ideology which almost no one likes. But it’s so much more than that, of course. The lying, the gaslighting, the shitty candidates, the woke racism, the cognitive capture, the denial of science and biology, the ‘peaceful protests’ of 2020, the conspiracy theories (1619 Project, Ibram X Kendi’s brand of hardcore 'anti-racism’), etc.
The major flaw of the left is their brutal lack of self-awareness: They can’t see how most Americans see them. They live in a bubble. They’ve chosen ideology over The People. They are going to keep losing--and badly--unless they have a come-to-Jesus moment and learn to have some humility and self-reflect.
This, of course, almost certainly won’t happen. So get ready for JD Vance in 2028.
Feb. 23rd, 2025
“In my despair I have fathered madmen who dress like factory workers but never do manual labor, who read nonsense and spout pompous bullshit about Algerians and, and who love nothing, not Algerians or French or flesh and blood or anything living… So I have sympathy for a man who can say ‘I have a papa.’ Who does what he must for his family.”
-Munich (film)
Feb. 24th, 2025
(Guest writer Clifton Roscoe):
Congress issued a “National Single Parent Day” declaration last year. Here's a graphic from the US Census Bureau that highlights the magnitude of the issue:
The graphic doesn't do justice to the trend. Here are the percentages of households with children under the age of 18 that were headed by single parents by decade:
1950: 7%
1960: 9%
1970: 11%
1980: 20%
1990: 24%
2000: 27%
2010: 30%
2020: 29%
2024: 30%
…
To make a long story short, these folks are disproportionately in the half of Americans who won't achieve the American Dream. The fading of that dream for half of millennials is an issue that crosses ideological boundaries. Lowering the single-parenthood rate would certainly be a step in the right direction. Anyone who can do that via policy initiatives would likely reap major political benefits.
The protests involved locals protesting against the proposal to use a large vacant building as a hostel for asylum seekers. There have been protests throughout Ireland especially involving small towns and villages saying they are having very large numbers of asylum seekers imposed on them.
On the 13th of June, 2024, a district court Judge in Dublin granted a court order to An Garda Siochána [ the Irish police force] which gave An Garda Siochána the right to seek detailed information regarding the operation of Gript Media’s account on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
…
This media platform always has declined, and always will decline, to voluntarily provide material garnered in the course of our work to An Garda Siochána. The reasons for this are obvious: To do so would be to effectively turn our journalists and employees into intelligence-gathering agents for the state, with material garnered in the course of their work being considered a resource for the state’s police force. Readers and sources would have no reason to trust us to report fairly, or respect the confidentiality of information provided to us.
Feb. 24th, 2025:
If you believe that your favored side isn’t motivated by money and power, that the other side is full of bigots, or that YOU have an excellent grasp on political realities you should reconsider.
Quick: think of all the definite facts you KNOW about these issues. How many statistics have you chased down to evaluate in their original studies? How many arguments from the opposition have you heard made fully and fairly?
You’re being manipulated. We all are… but only some people recognize the fact.
Feb. 25th, 2025
The dark subtext behind the European immigration debate is that people who support open borders don’t WANT a strong and free and fair Europe. Those are not their ultimate objectives. They literally prioritize policies to make their society more inclusive, more diverse, and more polyglot because those are their HIGHEST priorities.
They won’t even deny it when pressed. ‘Would have rather have a safer Britain that’s 90% white… or a more confusing, dangerous, socially fractured country that’s 45% white?’ They implicitly (and even explicitly) choose the latter. These aren’t mere policy preferences, strictly speaking.
Mass migration has become something like a bizarre religious sacrament for the left, something they can never abandon, even as the disorder and dysfunction it entails drives ever more voters to the right.
Mass migration has become a whole system – a kind of publicly-funded industry – in which a great many people, from leftist activists to establishment politicians, act in bizarre and openly corrupt ways under the cover of humanitarianism. It’s hard to pin down their motives, because so little of the migrationist system is understood.
This issue has become a strange, psycho-social reflection of class privilege, psychological insecurity, and the modern need of high-status people to virtue signal.
It’s unbelievable that these kinds of dynamics are literally destroying entire countries, slowly and then all at once.
As culture becomes more openly transgressive, more lonely, more neurotic, more pathological, and more dysfunctional, these kinds of stories will become more and more common.
These employees discussed hair removal, estrogen injections, and the experience of sexual pleasure post-castration. “[G]etting my butthole zapped by a laser was . . . shocking,” said one transgender-identifying intel employee who spent thousands on hair removal. “Look, I just enjoy helping other people experience boobs,” said another about estrogen treatments. “[O]ne of the weirdest things that gives me euphoria is when i pee, i don’t have to push anything down to make sure it aims right,” a Defense Intelligence Agency employee added.
…
According to our sources, the sex chats were legitimized as part of the NSA’s commitment to “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Activists within the agency used LGBTQ+ “employee resource groups” to turn their kinks and pathologies into official work duties. According to the current NSA employee, these groups “spent all day" recruiting activists and holding meetings with titles such as “Privilege,” “Ally Awareness,” “Pride,” and “Transgender Community Inclusion.” And they did so with the full support of NSA leadership, which declared that DEI was “not only mission critical, but mission imperative.”
Much of the explanation for the Trump surge can be understood as a grassroots, naturalist, pro-common sense reaction to institutional capture and cultural forces which have been pushing for legitimization of weird sexual preferences, gender identities, political convictions, and psychological disorders, in the name of tolerance and inclusivity.
We ain’t havin it.
Feb. 25th, 2025
:Kennedy’s alleged crime—one of his many alleged crimes, none of which hold up under scrutiny, but boy is the list of his alleged crimes a long one—is that he does not simply accept the pronouncements of public health authorities regarding vaccine safety. Kennedy’s crime is that he would like to see the drugs that we inject into our children tested for their safety.
During Covid, we learned that all one has to do to render something a vaccine is to call it a vaccine. Abracadabra!—you’re a vaccine! And anything that has been labeled a vaccine must be accepted, nay—loved—by all, lest they be labeled an anti-vaxxer.
This is the third rail that a huge number of us would not have considered touching until the Covid vaccine roll-out. Vaccines—I still hold, and have written into my co-authored book A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21stCentury—are one of the triumphs of Western medicine. That does not mean that they are a cure-all:
Combine a tendency to engage only proximate questions, with a bias toward reductionism, and you end up with medicine that has blinders on. The view is narrow. Even the great victories of Western medicine— surgery, antibiotics, and vaccines— have been over-extrapolated, applied in many cases where they shouldn’t be. When all you have is a knife, a pill, and a shot, the whole world looks as though it would benefit from being cut and medicated.
I wrote something awhile back about people changing their minds-slowly reframing their beliefs and pretending to have believed things they didn’t, and ignoring the contradictions.
Some reversals are too stark and damaging though. Parents that have trans’ed their kids will NEVER repudiate gender ideology. They can’t. Scientists and media companies will never admit that RFK was right (I’m not sure if he is but I they aren’t either!). They can’t.
There seems to be a STRIKING disconnect between popular discourse (on the street) and legacy media managed dialogue.
They keep veering further and further apart. I think this is a reflection of a broken and dwindling institutional media. And the Democrats are NOTHING without the institutional media.
A lot of progressives are in for some serious discombobulation. This is a good time to make contact and try to change minds.
Feb. 26th, 2025
“We were taught that race should be the dominant lens through which clients were to be understood and therapy conducted,” says Elliott, a mother of four who’d majored in psychology.
Elliott’s professors taught her, for example, that if clients were white, she was supposed to help them see how they unwittingly perpetuate white supremacy. “We were encouraged to regard white clients as ‘reservoirs of racism and oppression.’” White women, one professor told a class, were “basic bitches,” “Beckys” and “nothing special”…
Instead of treating each client as a unique individual and working collaboratively, the social-justice therapist reduces them to avatars of gender, race and ethnicity…
I’ve heard many reports of social-justice therapists scolding or rejecting patients. And reams of long-term data show that attaining a good rapport with a therapist is the most important factor in determining the outcome of therapy…
Feb. 26th, 2025
Feb. 26th, 2025
''Oikophobia'', coined by the British philosopher Roger Scruton, is used as a non-clinical description of an 'anti-culture' prevalent among Western artists and intellectuals. It is a combination of:
''oikos'' - from the Greek meaning a “house,” “family,” “people,” or “nation” and ''-phobia'' - extreme or irrational fear or dislike of a specified thing or group.
An extreme and immoderate aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West appears to be the underlying motif of oikophobia; and not the substitution of Hellenic Christianity by another coherent system of belief. The paradox of the oikophobe seems to be that any opposition directed at the theological and cultural tradition of the West is to be encouraged even if it is "significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric"
Feb. 27th, 2025
:Social media is turning us into informants. The rise of public shaming, the digital panopticon, and why people fear speaking openly. Communist regimes needed secret police; we just needed phones and the promise of “likes.”
Christopher Lasch saw this coming in 1979 – Revisiting The Culture of Narcissism and how it explains today’s world better than ever.
Why people work harder to avoid criticism than to improve their lives – A counterintuitive but useful way to understand human behavior.
The hidden shift in how people talk about themselves online – How “I had someone tell me…” reflects the rise of main character syndrome.
Do young people actually want attention? – Why social media culture has made them both more risk-averse and more eager to be influencers.
Everything online is curated—even when it looks real – The difference between reality and the highly manicured world of digital life.
The truth about online trolls. Research shows that the worst people on social media aren’t just nasty online—they’re like that in real life, too.
Why social media feels worse than it actually is. A small percentage of users create most of the content, and negativity spreads the fastest—so we think society is crueler than it really is.
The new acceptable targets for public ridicule. You can’t mock some groups anymore, so people are finding new ones they can still go after.
Feb. 27th, 2025
:COVID proved that UBI would not make people more creative or satisfied. We do need to keep the population occupied to prevent social unrest…
The decline in fertility rates have exacerbated unhappiness because workers without families are atomized and lonely. Many PMCs are stuck in the hamster wheel rat race trying to striver claw their way to higher paying, more prestigious bullshit jobs instead of having more kids. The most miserable period of my life was when I worked a bullshit job without God or family anchoring me at home (more on that in a future post). Only a generation ago, a single income on a real job could support a family but now dual income BS jobs are required to live in a decent area.
University administrators have saddled a generation with debt from useless degrees. Hell is a collection of Africana studies majors becoming DEI commissars and English majors becoming Starbucks baristas. They resent anyone who is happy and doing real work, which they know deep down that they are not.
Most humanities professors have negative social value. The Ivy League is full of sellouts like his friend. Investment banks, consulting firms, and big tech companies lure our best and brightest strivers into meaningless bullshit careers. This phenomenon has also resulted in a brain drain from the country into a handful of coastal cities. How many talented people would be more fully actualized if they stuck to their passions instead of getting sucked into the PMC matrix?
:
At 22, I had met my fair share of people on the planet, yet none had so deeply wounded me as my English professors and my peers in my English cohort. There was something wrong with human beings who studied literature, I concluded…
Literature was for the weak-minded. Literature was for nasty, disillusioned people who were incapable of providing meaningful contributions to society. Literature was people who could not actually write, people who cloaked their anti-intellectualism in obscurantist jargon and meaningless sentences. Literature was for people who did not understand the world.
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