Substack Notes 13.2 - Grappling With Ideology
Mar. 2nd - Mar. 12th, 2025
I’d bet a lot of money that there are many opinionated people out there in the culture that are completely captivated by partisanship and ideology. I see people finding objections (any objection) in order to criticize or rage against their enemies (or defend their allies).
To those people, I would say: Trump and his collaborators are going to make mistakes. They’re going to make a lot of them. Eventually they might make grave or invalidating errors. You should get ready for those opportunities, and stop crowing about the price of eggs (falling), or not enough deportations (not enough? It’s better than -10 to -20 million, which is the net amount for the previous administration). These are both popular posts I’ve seen in the past few days on BlueSky. I strongly doubt that the denizens of BlueSky are truly upset that there are too few deportations. They’re using instrumental outrage and indignation to try to score political points-but that strategy is obvious by now, and hence fairly ineffective. Maybe, instead of trying to score points, they should try having productive exchanges.
Trying to remain unbiased isn’t just useful for careful thinking. It’s also useful when you’re trying to persuade other people.
Too often we (and by ‘we,’ I mean ‘the media’) use flagrantly unequal standards to judge those who agree with us versus those who disagree. Here’s a good rule of thumb: if what you’re criticizing would be totally unobjectionable if it was done by someone on ‘your’ side, then it’s probably an illegitimate target for criticism. The same rule works the other way too. If people were doing something crazy, like firebombing electrical infrastructure, or shooting at businesses (just a hypothetical I came up with right now) then you should react to those acts as if they were being done by your enemies. If your ethical calculations are purely conditional and change completely based on whether someone supports your agenda or not, then they’re not ethical calculations. They’re just political expediency. People can tell the difference.
Mar. 2nd, 2025
Yes, it’s easy to mock USAID for schemes such as the $70,000 spent on a “DEI musical” in Ireland. Yet when placed next to the full size of the national budget, Musk is conducting the administrative equivalent of scrambling about for change behind the sofa.
…DOGE, in short, is a gimmick. … The legislature can nowadays barely pass the stop-gap, temporary funding measures it uses in lieu of actual budgets to prevent government shutdowns. The last time Congress passed all its required bills on time was in 1996, and over the last 40 years it has only managed to complete the appropriations process a grand total of four times…
future historians won’t remember the squabbles around USAID: that just isn’t the story of our age. What matters instead is a financial system in ruins, a political class out of ideas, and the inevitability of a 1789 moment sooner or later.
Mar. 3rd, 2025
Excerpted from one of the best pieces I’ve ever read:
If this was totalitarian politics, what would we see? We would see commissars, political officers. We might call them DEI officers, bias response teams, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers. We would see Lysenkoism, the corruption of science by ideology, where people are punished and excluded for their dissent. We might call this insisting that sex is non-binary, when no species reliant on gametes for reproduction produces more than two types (one large and sessile, the other small and motile).
We would see Zhdanovism, where entertainment—from film to games—is required to conform to set messages and narratives, with dissenters being punished and excluded. We would see purges, where folk are hunted down by ideology-enforcing mobs and sacked: we could call this cancel culture. We would see censorship: the notion that error has no rights and they can determine error. We can call this stopping mis/dis/mal-information.
We would see these things, if we were dealing with totalitarian politics. The politics of a class insisting that they own morality—so politics that resists their claims is immoral, so illegitimate—and their superior deciding capacity should operate in all spheres of life. That is what we would see. And anything that helped divide the demos—and de-legitimise their voices—would help such politics along.
Mar. 5th, 2025
To those who remain under the spell of mainstream media, Trump appearing competent causes them to doubt what they’ve been fed and makes Trump grow stronger.
Normies want to be cool by consooming goodthink from their false idols. Yet no stunning and brave artists dare speak out against this mafia because it would mean the end of their careers. Courtney Love claims she was banned by CAA for warning young actresses about Harvey Weinstein. Many CAA agents knew about his predatory behavior, but kept working with him and sending aspiring starlets to him. It’s only fitting that Anora, this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture, is about prostitutes and sex work.
Mar. 5th, 2025
Another year, another upcoming International Women’s Day.
I resigned from my job a few weeks ago. I didn’t intend to resign but conditions and resignation of my incredible colleagues and mentor made it untenable to remain there.
I’m reminded yet again that toxic female leadership is destabilising and disruptive in the wrong ways. It’s not innovation when it has a destructive effect.
I will not be celebrating women in leadership until enough women get a handle on their emotions and harness them to benefit their teams and organisations instead of destroying them.
Even when there’s evidence of toxic female leadership, other women will cover up their mess and protect the leader over their targets.
Time for some capacity building ladies!
Mar. 6th, 2025
“We are at the very beginning of ‘I never believed any of it.’”
Mar. 7th, 2025
There’s a familiar bit of sneakiness in which certain believers ask “why do you care so much?” about issues that they are deeply opinionated about, but that trick isn’t working so well these days.
Nations just do stuff, but the Eurotards cannot even take a shit without bizarre hamfisted branding campaigns.
As I said, these are deeply serious people, and they also speak very seriously, in declarative sentences that don’t mean anything. In a publicity statement, von der Leyen said that these are “extraordinary times” which are a “watershed moment” for Europe and also a “watershed moment” for the Ukraine.” Such extraordinary watersheds require “special measures,” such as “peace through strength” and “defence” through “investment.” Top EU diplomat and leading Estonian crazy person Kaja Kallas for her part noted that “We have initiative on the table” and that she’s “looking forward to seeing Europe show unity and resolve.” Perhaps there will also be money in the ReArm Europe programme to outfit Brussels with an arsenal of thesauruses so we do not have to hear the same words all the time.
Mar. 7th, 2025
In January, as I’ve written before, the National Park Service adopted a revised Record of Decision regarding its park management plan that reflects the changes on the landscape implied by the settlement of the lawsuit. I thought the new planning document didn’t make much sense, so I’ve spent weeks trying to get the NPS to discuss it. I started by sending email messages to the superintendent of the Point Reyes National Seashore, Anne Altman, but her entirely predictable response was to direct me to discuss my questions with a public affairs officer.
I did that for a while, by email, hoping for a chance to have a face-to-face discussion with a living human. I noted, for example, that the new record of decision says that cattle grazing is harmful to the landscape and has to be ended, but cattle grazing will be needed for the management of brush and the reduction of wildfire risk, so the park service will rent cattle to graze the land after it removes cattle from the land. So here’s an example of a question I asked the NPS: How do you explain the replacement of cows by cows? What’s the logic?
The local political activism strikes me as being deeply channeled into existing forms of fashion and sentiment…
The Wall Street Journal is reporting consulting firms are scheduling meetings with Trump Admin officials to justify their contracts.
Firms include: Ernst & Young, Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Guidehouse among others.
The purpose: justify contracts they’ve been awards. The Journal writes:
The GSA has identified that the 10 highest-paid consulting firms are set to receive more than $65 billion in total fees across 2025 and future years. That is money that has yet to be spent, and comes from contracts tagged as “consulting services” within the Federal Procurement Data System from the top governmentwide vendors, according to a person familiar with the matter.
As a former DoD contractor who worked for one of these companies and provided “consulting services” I can tell you I was nothing more than a butt in a chair.
I provided zero consulting and zero advising. I was there to do the admin work government employees didn’t want to do — like rearrange images on a PowerPoint.
I helped create the illusion we were doing work so my government program manager could justify asking for a higher budget the next year.
I’m not going to say all consulting contracts are a waste of money, but I’d wager most are.
You don’t need hire McKinsey to tell you why homelessness continues to proliferate.
DOGE isn’t just exposing F/W/A in the government; it’s exposing the bloated administrative economy that supports it.
There are a ton of companies and institutions that service the needs of the government.
This include defense contractors, consulting firms, and educational institutions.
Last week a bunch of major universities including Stanford and Cornell announced hiring freezes because of uncertainties around their budgets, signaling higher ed relies more heavily on the government than we realize.
If government $$$ stops flowing, other jobs within the private sector are going to be lost.
Keep paying attention to hiring freezes that are happening where they shouldn’t be.
Companies, media organizations, NGOs, universities, and nonprofits that can’t exist without government funding are not economically viable.
This will continue to have second and third order consequences within the economy.
Mar. 9th, 2025
Barnard is the women’s college attached to Columbia. Last week, rabid Palestine protestors put campus under siege with full throated support from the faculty. They refused to evacuate even after a bomb threat because they are the spiritual suicide bombers of the west. For those keeping score at home, progressive women who can’t define what a woman is are wearing head and face coverings to support Islamists who consider them property with no rights. If they behaved this way in Gaza, they would be whipped and stoned. Since it’s an “elite” university in New York City, they can do whatever they want.
Where are the adults? Who is in charge? Have no fear, Barnard President Laura Rosenbury is here! Students showed their respect for her by hanging an effigy of her. Last year, Columbia President Minouche Shafik stepped down after losing control of the mob. Commissar Laura is even cringier and probably won’t last the semester. Both were appointed in 2023 and will likely set records for shortest tenures at their disgraced institutions. Now they have been stripped of $400 million in federal funding. Let’s translate her Kim Jong Un style coronation announcement.
“[She] does not lead; she bullies and berates. I’ve never encountered a more self-centered, egotistical, untruthful, and revenge-seeking person in my life. The Dean will not even LISTEN to any ideas that she perceives differs from hers. She shuts down conversation, shouts and rants, curses, pounds the table, bullies, and belittles. She will lie to your face. If she were engaging this behavior as a practicing lawyer, she’d be subject to disbarment. It IS THAT bad.”
Mar. 9th, 2025
The Cult of DEI is the cthonic complement to the neoliberal cursus negotium. It represents the unresolvable paradox of the individual attempting to distinguish himself in a system that valorizes the erosion of distinctions. Such differences that are deemed acceptable work as pretexts for the extension of power; the only identities allowed a positive existence are those that can both work against the remnants of older, organic cultures and provide a rationale for intervention on the part of the system. Yet the victim counter-hierarchy managerialism willed into being as a justification for its domination and intrusion into every area of life is also a parasitic force draining it of legitimacy.
All of this together has resulted in cutthroat competition under conditions of terrifying ambiguity. One rises to some degree based on technical expertise and credentials, but one must also demonstrate a fanatical commitment to an ever-more demanding yet nebulous system of luxury beliefs. Though rooted in a leftist understanding of the world, the ideas that animate progressivism have been infused with a hypercapitalist ethos of endlessly mutating novelty and ever more refined customization according to consumer taste. The purity spirals that characterize every revolution have reached the stage of becoming strangling vines, choking off new growth.
Mar. 10th, 2025
In my opinion, the key characteristic of the new AI is not encyclopedic knowledge. It is its personality. For the first time in the history of computing, we can relate to a computer using human language. We don’t have to learn how to write code or navigate a menu. I think that the economic effect of AI will depend on how far this can be taken.
Mar. 10th, 2025
Freddie DeBoer:
Unionized factory in Pennsylvania in the 1970s that built durable goods, paid workers a living wage, and provided the kind of job security that enables community? Tear it down, send the work to dangerous factories in the Philippines that pay workers pennies, and then condescendingly tell anyone who objects that they’re economically illiterate.
…most everyone cares more about the security, community, sense of purpose, and structure of the jobs that were lost than they do about cheap tables. The whole neoliberal world has refused to believe that people want jobs that bring security and community more than they want to buy unnaturally cheap patio furniture at Target. But that is in fact true, and that’s why the postwar order is in slow-motion collapse.
Feminists have killed the "girl boss."
Turns out, women actually don’t want male work ethics- who would have thunk?
Enter the "soft girl," living a "soft life"—a perversion of femininity.
Feminists have clocked onto the research showing conservative women are more attractive and healthier so the "soft life" is about shifting effort the girl boss spent on career to looking pretty—without having to sacrifice or fulfill any obligations usually associated with traditional values.
It’s feminism doing what it’s always been excellent at: marketing and feeding women’s worst impulses.
Conservatives cheer, thinking they’re winning women over, but don’t be fooled. This isn’t a return to tradition; it’s feminism repackaged!
Feminists have co-opted terms women click on—self-care, beauty, spirituality—while stripping away any real commitment to traditional roles.
The "soft girl" has turned the core of femininity- nurturing of a husband and kids (plural)- into nurturing only *yourself*.
The reason this is feminism repackaged is because it’s only through resentment of men that they can reject any obligation and sacrifice, applying minimum effort, with a clear conscience.
Mar. 10th, 2025
(From Arnold Kling)
Tove K writes:
Capitalism requires warriors to patiently allow talented workers to do their thing, using enormous resources in the process. This development stood in direct opposition to the warrior class, which lost both resources and prestige in the process. But the warriors had no choice. If they didn't allow merchants and industrialists a certain amount of freedom, they got less taxes than their neighboring warriors and got annihilated. So step by step, the warrior class in the Western world gave away the power over most of society's resources to the capitalist class.
…rich people are only rich because we have a system that allows them to be. If enough people don't consider it to be in their interest to uphold that system, it will unravel.
She has a theory that is the basis for her speculation about the future:
In the middle ages, war was for specialists and work was for the masses. We are now increasingly getting the reverse situation: Everyone is a potential threat to production, but fewer and fewer are actually contributing to production in any meaningful way.
Mar. 11th, 2025
PENNSYLVANIA
Pennsylvania is becoming Ohio before our very eyes, and the Democrat free fall that began more than a decade ago continues on with no end in sight. Since just November, Democrats have lost another 105,949 net registrations to the GOP, which is within 100,000 if considering only active registrations…
Even if these numbers were the final ones prior to the 2028 election (they will get much redder), they all but guarantee a Vance win in the state, likely by a comfortable margin against anyone but Josh Shapiro, who certainly wanted Harris to lose his state.
With the Democrats having lost the white working-class, and now quick about the work of losing the minority working-class, the damage at the county level is horrific.
“The graph shows the correlations for identical twins (red) and non-identical twins (blue) for every trait included in the meta-analysis. Using these data, the researchers calculated that the average heritability of all traits is 49%.”
Mar. 11th, 2025
The Democratic Party appears directionless and unmotivated in the aftermath of their political defeat to Trump. Many within the party are attempting to rekindle the energy felt in the summer of the 2020, but their efforts feel forced. The crowds are smaller, the enthusiasm diminished. Beneath the surface, a deeper realization may be setting in: the DEI, anti-racism, and equity initiatives they got swept up in were built on morally bankrupt principles. At the time, social pressure made dissent nearly impossible.
Some left-wing commentators have cautiously started signaling the need for reform, only to be met with fierce backlash. Consider California Governor Gavin Newsom, who recently launched a podcast and, in a rare move, invited conservative commentator Charlie Kirk for a discussion. In their conversation, Newsom conceded significant ground, particularly on whether men who identify as women should compete in women’s sports. The reaction from the left was immediate and brutal, revealing the Democratic Party’s current crisis—any attempt to course-correct is met with immediate hostility from the loudest ideological enforcers of the progressive movement.
Noah Smith, a left-leaning political commentator, also gently pondered about reforms, writing on X: “I don’t believe it’ll be hard for Democrats to abandon DEI programs, because that doesn’t mean abandoning the fight against racism.”
This statement, however, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) truly represents, and why the Democratic Party’s moral hangover may last a very long time.
The central reason is this: DEI is not merely an imperfect attempt at combating racism; it is a systemic form of racism itself. To suggest that one can abandon DEI without abandoning the fight against racism presupposes that DEI was ever a legitimate tool for fighting racism in the first place. It never was.
Mar. 12th, 2025
Freddie DeBoer:
In the 1970s, the Canadian psychiatrist Darold Treffert first referred to his concept of “dying with one’s rights on.” The phrase elegantly captures a common tendency in disability rights discourse, which is to privilege abstract concepts like autonomy over the actual physical reality of personal health and safety. In a piece for City Journal, I discussed this attitude through the lens of Rebecca Smith, a schizophrenic homeless woman in Manhattan who froze to death on the street in the 1980s because the barriers to involuntary commitment had prevented city social workers from saving her. Rebecca Smith died with her rights on; liberal do-gooding had created a scenario where the pleasant fantasy of her personal freedom was placed before her literal, material life. Of course, there is no such thing as freedom when one’s mind is hijacked by a psychotic disorder. But years of hippie attitudes about mental illness as a kind of beautiful rebellion had poisoned the well and bent policy in a direction that held physical safety in little regard. As Treffert wrote, in the post-1960s world, America had shifted from “an attitude of stifling paternalism toward the mentally ill to the outright abandonment of their needs.”
A general anti-guardianship movement has started building thanks to the (again, entirely sui generis) Britney Spears situation. You can find this stuff on Reddit and on Twitter and on TikTok and all of the other places where bad ideas flourish online. And there’s of course a preexisting anti-guardianship community waiting to be embraced; it’s an almost perfect Venn-diagram overlap with the autism-disability rights crowd, the ones who say that autism is a disorder but not a disability (incoherent), that attempting to treat autism is genocide (absurd), that autism is an identity (wrong). They’re the same people who push the comprehensively-discredited technique of “facilitated communication.” What this new anti-guardianship crowd shares with the disability activists, in particular, is their absolute inability to contemplate that some people are actually really sick in a way that is genuinely destructive and legitimately unfixable.
Mar. 12th, 2025
Dominic Green, for The Free Press:
The British government is using the old air base at Wethersfield as a camp for asylum seekers. It’s unclear when they came to the UK, as the government does not release information on how long their processing takes. But we do know this: All are adult men. Many crossed the English Channel from France, arriving on small boats and claiming asylum when they hit the beach. They are from countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are allowed to come and go freely from the camp, to the village and beyond.
Currently, 580 of them live on the base. Their number is about to rise to 800. The government won’t say exactly when, but it had initially stated that a total of 1,700 migrants would eventually move here.
Before the migrants arrived, the village of Wethersfield reportedly had a population of 707.
Many great writers and articles. Thank you for including mine!