Adaptive Curmudgeon

I’d pretty much assumed The Onion had faded out on the PC altar of unfunny wokeness (along with sorely missed Cracked). But they just surprised me with a fun one; Historians Still Unable To Determine How Americans Were Able To Build Hoover Dam.

“There’s no evidence for how the people in this country worked and achieved such a challenging task without fucking it all up. Frankly, I’m beginning to think the answers may be lost to history.”

I’m not saying The Onion or Cracked are gone. They both still have a “web presence”. I’m saying the jokes started getting weaker and preachier until I stopped going there for a laugh. They’re dead but don’t know it yet. Like the last Radio Shack in an empty mall… they exist mostly on inertia. That said, when one door closes another one opens; all hail the Babylon Bee.

OK… it’s not terribly interesting unless you’re a nerd like me. In which case it’s fascinating!

I ponder long haul, “through the eye of history”, systems of wise governance. The chaos of the day sucks. I wish people would turn off Twitter and read a fucking book. We’re supposedly adults. We’re theoretically equipped to maintain civilization during our time. Yet we founder and waffle. We unwisely let fools meddle with forces beyond their ken. We let them manipulate money they didn’t earn, make rules they won’t follow, and force other people do their bidding.

It doesn’t have to be like this. We have the wisdom of the ages. The internet (and libraries) offer two thousands years (and more!) of carefully considered ideas. It’s as relevant now as when the Greeks wrestled with the same issues. Starting with Socrates, continuing clear through the Enlightenment, and marching right up until today; smart thinkers have sought the right path. They cared. They thought about their statements. As imperfect as they are, they’re better than a mob. If you block a road, hit someone with a stick, or seek an ill considered impeachment, your heart may be in the right place; but your mind isn’t.

Real thinkers should merit our attention, not journalists. Journalists are losers. You met them in college. They were too dumb for other topics. “I’m majoring in public speaking. I want to change the world!” Really? The rest of us worked through chemistry and calculus. We learned to do. They learned to talk.

Give a microphone to a human mannequin and he/she will report whatever they’re told. They supplant slogans for reason: the rich are oppressors, the poor are helpless, people are malleable, people are without agency, people are widgets, freedom is a burden, being managed is good, people are expenses to be paid, they’re mouths to be fed, the electoral college is outdated, perfectly creased pants matter, judge politicians by their words but not their actions, judge a law by it’s intent but not its result, pigeonhole individuals by group identity, history started last week, slavery is uniquely American, borders are passé, rules mean only what judges say, what judges say only matters if it’s the right judge, fly-over voters are inferior, bi-coastal elites are superior, citizenship is irrelevant, nations are irrelevant, science is irrelevant… These things come from intellectual lightweights. They don’t know what they’re saying because they have no thoughts behind the words.

The quotes I list below don’t fit on a bumper sticker, they won’t be a zinger on “The View”, late night comedians can’t weave jokes around them, and no journalist will report it. I aim (imperfectly) above the weeds of tactical scorched earth daily politics.

These snippets are from a speech by Attorney General Barr. Despite being trapped in our current partisan stupidity, he posits interesting points. It’s not so much things we didn’t know as things that needed to be said, once again.

Regardless of your party affiliation and even if you loathe our current president, it’s good to think about long term wise governance. It’s time for considerations beyond emotions. It’s actually well past the moment of inflection.

The “quelle surpise” election of 2016 led to a cognitive dissonance shitstorm and I get that. Surprises are hard. But it has never abated and it became creepy. As the 2019 year of madness slowly leads to the 2020 year of pants shitting hysteria it’s time to chill out, dust off the civics lessons we all forgot decades ago, and think about why we have an executive.

Happy reading:

As I have said, the Framers fully expected intense pulling and hauling between the Congress and the President. Unfortunately, just in the past few years, we have seen these conflicts take on an entirely new character.

Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called “The Resistance,” and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his Administration. Now, “resistance” is the language used to describe insurgency against rule imposed by an occupying military power. It obviously connotes that the government is not legitimate. This is a very dangerous – indeed incendiary – notion to import into the politics of a democratic republic. What it means is that, instead of viewing themselves as the “loyal opposition,” as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.

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Congress has in recent years also largely abdicated its core function of legislating on the most pressing issues facing the national government. They either decline to legislate on major questions or, if they do, punt the most difficult and critical issues by making broad delegations to a modern administrative state that they increasingly seek to insulate from Presidential control. This phenomenon first arose in the wake of the Great Depression, as Congress created a number of so-called “independent agencies” and housed them, at least nominally, in the Executive Branch.

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In any age, the so-called progressives treat politics as their religion. Their holy mission is to use the coercive power of the State to remake man and society in their own image, according to an abstract ideal of perfection. Whatever means they use are therefore justified because, by definition, they are a virtuous people pursing a deific end. They are willing to use any means necessary to gain momentary advantage in achieving their end, regardless of collateral consequences and the systemic implications. They never ask whether the actions they take could be justified as a general rule of conduct, equally applicable to all sides.

Conservatives, on the other hand, do not seek an earthly paradise. We are interested in preserving over the long run the proper balance of freedom and order necessary for healthy development of natural civil society and individual human flourishing. This means that we naturally test the propriety and wisdom of action under a “rule of law” standard. The essence of this standard is to ask what the overall impact on society over the long run if the action we are taking, or principle we are applying, in a given circumstance was universalized – that is, would it be good for society over the long haul if this was done in all like circumstances?

For these reasons, conservatives tend to have more scruple over their political tactics and rarely feel that the ends justify the means. And this is as it should be, but there is no getting around the fact that this puts conservatives at a disadvantage when facing progressive holy war, especially when doing so under the weight of a hyper-partisan media.

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The Framers did not envision that the Courts would play the role of arbiter of turf disputes between the political branches.

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[t]he Constitution gives Congress and the President many “clubs with which to beat” each other. Conspicuously absent from the list is running to the courts to resolve their disputes.

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[i]f the political branches believe the courts will resolve their constitutional disputes, they have no incentive to debate their differences through the democratic process — with input from and accountability to the people. And they will not even try to make the hard choices needed to forge compromise.

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Attempts by courts to act like amateur psychiatrists attempting to discern an Executive official’s “real motive” — often after ordering invasive discovery into the Executive Branch’s privileged decision-making process — have no more foundation in the law than a subpoena to a court to try to determine a judge’s real motive for issuing its decision. And courts’ indulgence of such claims, even if they are ultimately rejected, represents a serious intrusion on the President’s constitutional prerogatives.

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The Constitution does not confer “rights” on foreign enemies. Rather the Constitution is designed to maximize the government’s efficiency to achieve victory – even at the cost of “collateral damage” that would be unacceptable in the domestic realm. The idea that the judiciary acts as a neutral check on the political branches to protect foreign enemies from our government is insane.

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In this partisan age, we should take special care not to allow the passions of the moment to cause us to permanently disfigure the genius of our Constitutional structure.

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I know. I’m totally out of sync with the internet age. Forgive me. I just posted a lot of wordy, boring, speechifying. But it’s good stuff. I’m indulging in a theory that my audience (small and irrelevant as it is) are happy to see meat on a post’s bones.

If it’s TL:DR for the kind of society that invents the nomenclature “TL:DR”, that’s OK with me. I also know that folks in the thrall of an “Orange Man Bad” hissy fit, won’t hear what’s being said. I can live with that too. It’s not even a “one team” thing. Folks who like Trump but don’t know why (other than he’s not Hillary Clinton) won’t get it either. I accept that.

Both sides have plenty of dumb. That’s a given. But I liked this speech. I felt encouraged that at least one guy was talking about the balance between Legislative, Judiciary, and Executive branches. Partisan or not, he was at least not talking down to us. I enjoy depth beyond than the usual “politician on my team yay, politician on other team boo” that passes for discourse.

Gird your loins y’all. Regardless of your political bent we can all agree 2020 is going to be stupid shallow people shitting on a fan… for a full year. Take solace when possible. Retreat to depth of thought when the option appears. Good luck.

A.C.

BTW: This speech was delivered the 19th Annual Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society’s 2019 National Lawyers Convention. (Links to the text are here and here.)

I last seriously managed my blog two weeks ago (don’t be shocked but sometimes I post by autopilot and/or approve comments in haste). Two weeks is unconscionably long by modern standards but not rare for me. I won’t go into details. I had shit to do and chose not to burn time keeping up with the world at large.

Now, having accomplished some of the things that needed doing, I’m of two minds. On one hand, I want to get back on the internet. I’d like to check my blog and I’ve the normal human desire to find out what society has been doing in my absence. On the other hand, I already know what society has been up to; the same shit it’s been doing for ages. A few rational actors have watched in horror as lunatics en masse caterwaul like little bitches. Emotionally stunted, otherwise unemployable, loons cavort about; demanding respect they haven’t earned. Having done nothing (possibly because they’ve done nothing), nutcases demand the keys to the world. Ironically, the ability to control lies unnoticed at their feet. Build the world, expand and improve it, and you’ll find your hands on the tiller by default. But true accomplishment is very hard. So much easier to seize authority and drive what already exists into a ditch.

Am I wrong? Was there an outbreak of kindness and rationality? Everyone just chilled out and decided to stick to their own knitting? I’m betting “No”. I’d love to be wrong.

So I sit here, relaxing on a day off, avoiding my laptop. There it is, inert, stuffed in my travel luggage, totally hamstrung. Powered on, it’ll be linked to the largest, most powerful human emotion generation machine ever devised. The internet (and social media) lies in wait, ready to do its thing. It’s poised to mock my beliefs, shovel propaganda, spew information leavened with bullshit, and dole out little dopamine hits of irrelevance. The internet whispers its siren song “post about how completely you comply with the required narrative and I’ll give you ‘likes'”. It’s all about compliance. I could get on Facebook and tell everyone I bought a new Apple product. They’d treat me like a hero. Or I could use the same soapbox to tell everyone I went hunting. I’d be treated like I’d committed a war crime. The media is there too; ready to keep me agitated. It cajoles with inflammatory crap about which I’d never otherwise be aware; “A tattooed, pierced, gender amorphous wingnut you’ve never met checked onto a commercial airline with an ’emotional support animal’. It was a pelican. The pelican was died blue, infected with Ebola, has gender issues, shit all over, and disrupted the flight. The plane was diverted to Detroit where it landed amid a gang war. The pelican owner is suing everyone in the time zone for being racist.” I’m supposed to read that shit and get angry. That’s its purpose.

Nothing is so stupid and weird that it’s not useful for manipulation. We all know (in general) that stupid shit’s going down, but the media seeks out the obscene and pipes it to our living-room. Right now, some politician is singling out “people like X” as “not who we are”. The politician doesn’t want my vote and will never get it. Yet I fear I look like X. I’ve seen this movie before. It’s the forever and ratcheting run up to “up against the wall” or “burn the witch”. It’s slow coming and ideally it never arrives. Is it wise to let media roll out the red carpet for every step? In my house? Why give headspace to such crap?

The same shit’s been going on since the first caveman learned incitement is easier than getting his hands dirty doing work. He got his tribe to dogpile “others” and put him in charge. They all died the next winter.

Ah, the irony of it all. I have at my command the greatest database in human existence; the sum total of human knowledge. Yet, I’m reluctant to turn it on. I’ll have to sift shit to find the gems and I’m not in the shit business today. For every delightful nugget of knowledge there’s an angry cat lady bitching about how the world would be better if she were in charge of… well in charge of ME. That’s all they want, to boss other people around. I’m part of “other people”. You are too. Remember this:

Nobody wants a position of power to better manage their own affairs.

Meanwhile I’ve got a real problem. I hauled firewood to the house but didn’t bring kindling. Whoops. (Notice I didn’t blame anyone for my oversight? It never occurs to me that my failures are someone else’s problem. This is why I’m not a politician.)

My current, front and center problem is how to coax a warm fire from big hunks of wood without the requisite little hunks of wood. I have a choice; go through the snow to the woodshed and drag back an armload of kindling or get creative with some junk mail and a match. It’s very cold out.

My problem is minor, immediate, and solvable. The electronic shitstorm we mainline into our cerebrum focuses on the massive, distant, unsolvable, and almost exclusively contrived. I’ll eventually get my woodstove going. I won’t “solve” Syrian foreign policy. You won’t either. Likely Syria is unsolvable and the people there might resent being “solved” by outside forces anyway.

Incidentally, this is how you know I’m out of the loop. Syria was in the news when I checked out. Two weeks is longer than the lifespan of a modern topic. For all I know it’s forgotten by now. Likely the new issue is unrelated. What’s the new topic? Another reason why the election of 2016 didn’t happen? Surprise at California burning itself to the ground again? Tide pod eaters have taken to pissing on spark plugs?

I won’t know until I fire up the laptop. Right now, I’m using a brick-solid, dumb as rocks, Neo2 word processor. I’m almost done typing. Soon I’ll tentatively nudge into the least stupid online neighborhood possible. I hear Emporium Outdoors has an new ATV. That’s a good start. Emporium Outdoors won’t set the world on fire with deep oration, but watching a man and his dog rest by a campfire is good for the soul. It never fails to amuse and everyone loves the dog.

Yeah, that’s the ticket. I’m going to wade in the shallows and, if I don’t get mental Ebola from a bunch of hyperactive lemmings, I’ll gradually get around to checking the news. If not, this text will live on my Neo2 while I withdraw again.

In the meantime, I’ve got important issues to address. I have kindling to split.

A.C.

I mourn lost humor venues but the universe provides. Lately the Babylon Bee has been on a roll:

Millennial Wishes There Were Some Historical Examples Of Socialism We Could Study To Have Some Idea How It Might Turn Out

PORTLAND, OR—Local socialist millennial man Matthew Hatter lamented Monday that there are no concrete examples of socialism he can point to in order to have some kind of idea how it would turn out.

“If only there were other countries that have tried socialism before,” Hatter said to a friend at an ethical coffee shop, Commiebrews, Monday afternoon, after he finished his paper route. “Then, we could see if there are any pitfalls.”

Hatter said it’d be nice if there were books that covered things like world history and economics that we could read…

Damn, that’s good stuff!

I wrote about how I built a boat as a retreat from the bullshit that surrounds us. My logic is simple. You build a boat with real physical materials and put it in real actual water. If it sinks you did it wrong. If it floats and performs, you did it right.

Human thought benefits from interaction with reality.

Lets turn now to one of my least favorite people; Paul Krugman. I don’t dislike Krugman because he’s wrong. Mistakes are how we learn, unless of course you’re Paul Krugman. He follows the classic cop out of simply never admitting you were wrong. This frees him from the feedback that would allow him to learn. It’s not that he doesn’t learn, it’s that he actively built a world where he cannot learn.

Willful ignorance annoys me; God did not give us turbo powered super monkey brains to sit in the dirt. He wants us to be awesome. Krugman is not awesome and he’s not on the path to get there. He starts wrong, stays wrong, and continues being wrong.

Because Krugman’s wrong in a way that tells people what they want to hear, they keep listening to him. They continue to think he’s clever no matter how wrong he gets. They are immune to learning and they listen to rapt attention to a man who is equally immune to learning.

This is what happens when you separate people from real world tests of their theories. You get dipshits like Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman in New York Times November 9, 2016:

“It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging. When might we expect them to recover?

Frankly, I find it hard to care much, even though this is my specialty. The disaster for America and the world has so many aspects that the economic ramifications are way down my list of things to fear.

Still, I guess people want an answer: If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.“

Forbes Magazine October 29, 2019:

“The S&P 500, now gaining almost 22% this year, broke its record high of 3,027.98 on Monday, rising to 3,044.08 during day trading.”

This is just the most recent in a three year avalanche of good news. I can come up with a thousand such milestones since late 2016. Krugman wasn’t just wrong, he was wrong on a level and depth that expands the very definition of wrongness.

Paul Krugman, was very very very very very very very very very wrong. He has a Nobel in economics. He was still wrong. He was wrong even if he wears a cape and gets interviewed by “journalists” on TV. No matter how many awards he get, no matter how well he’s treated, no matter how spiffy he looks in a suit and tie… he’s wrong.

I do not have a Nobel prize. But my boat floats. It tracks straight, steers well, and sails as it should. I have a blog instead of a paying writing gig. But I wasn’t wrong.

That’s why I recommend boats.

Recently I posted a quote about academics being mental conformists (which also means mental weaklings… but we all knew that). Specifically referring to academia, their lockstep thought and lemming-like propensity to stampede is all pervasive. It stunts their growth. They learn only so much, and then it’s variations on a theme until they die.

Academics can be fine people individually (it’s the collective that sucks) but even if you’re talking to an individual, you have to be careful. In many, the hive mind resides behind the mask. You have to watch out; if they detect you’re of “the other” (however they define it that particular week) they’ll become cruel and vindictive. They’re not even nice to each other. They’re constantly fighting about internal politics that don’t matter anywhere else. You don’t want to get caught up in their dumb little dramas! They’ll piss and moan for decades about some committee meeting that would bore sane people to death in an hour. They’re fish that can’t see the water in which they swim and therefore deny there’s any such thing as water. Since they’ve never been out of it… they’re right for their own world and wrong for the universe as a whole. This also means if you’ve got a problem that isn’t solved by one of their cookie cutter solutions they’ll be stumped. They’ll continue trying the same approach (whether it works or not) until the money is gone and they’re wheeled out of their office having attained complete geezerhood.

I shudder to remember my time in academia. I went behind enemy lines to get what learning I could. I fled in terror as soon as I’d plundered what was available and no more learning was at hand. I risked becoming incurably dull.

It’s sad what academia does to it’s younger more gullible members. Look at an impoverished adjunct professor slaving in the galleys of the Lotus eaters. Highly credentialed and modestly bright; yet earning slightly more than minimum wage (possibly less) and working huge hours. Trapped by the sunk cost fallacy and too brainwashed to seek a real paycheck elsewhere. A man digging a ditch, makes a ditch and gets paid a fair wage. It’s hard labor but he drinks beer on the weekend and the world needed the ditch. He has an OK life. An adjunct professor makes nothing and gets paid just enough to go broke slowly while his shoulders sag under imaginary stress.

Sometimes that sort of shit happens in the world where the rest of us live. It gets me down. Luckily, I found a cure. I’m sharing it with you; free of charge:

Build a boat.

It doesn’t have to be a big boat. It doesn’t even have to be a boat. But you have to build it and you have to use it. No cheating. Get out your tools and make the damn thing. Then use it.

The thing about a boat (or whatever you choose as an alternative) is you can assess failure the old fashioned way; put it in the water. If it sinks, it sucks. No amount of committee meetings, group hugs, collective brainstorming sessions, votes, whiteboard diagrams, or discussion will make a sunk boat right or make the boat that you built and is bobbing in the waves into an “un-boat”. If it floats and works, it’s right. Nobody else’s opinion matters.

Interface with reality and the group project people flee. They don’t want to hear about your dumb little hobby. It scares them. They can’t make suggestions about rocker curves, epoxy mixes, rigging setups, or weight distribution… because the water will test their theories and that terrifies them. 

I found that people who mess with boats are a different breed. They way they assess success or failure is whether the damn thing sinks or not; so they are profoundly confident and deeply humble. If they fuck up they’ll find out in the worst possible way. Nor do they seem overly impressed with degrees in “boat-ology”.

If your craft does well, they’re supportive… even if you’re just a novice and their boat is better. It’s not a zero sum game. There’s plenty of water to float as many boats as there are people. If your boat sucks they don’t have to tell you because you already know. (I was hanging out with small boat builders. It may be very different for big boats. Then again the Titanic was built by the best professionals in the field.)

If you’re feeling awash in a sea of dipshits; build a boat. It will tell you what you need to know. It will encourage you to improve. It will not require meetings. It will tell you what’s important and what’s not. (Hint: the water doesn’t give a shit what color paint you choose but it cares about how you anchored the rudder’s pintle and gudgeon. Don’t argue with the water; it doesn’t speak bullshit.)

It worked for me, if you don’t like boats, choose your own substitute. Leave the academics to their playpens and enjoy using your mind. It’ll be worth it.

Jack Kerwick in Academia and the Spirit of Fear not only hits the nail on the head, he pounds it to the center of the earth:

“Academia, perhaps second only to Hollywood, remains the largest bastion of mental conformity in the Western world.”

Of course, we all knew that. What’s interesting is his assessment of the cause:

“What accounts for the tragic but undeniable fact that the average academic is a herd animal, I contend, is that he suffers from want of courage, the daring to think.  Academics are possessed by what my martial arts instructor, retired USMC Lieutenant-Colonel and founder of Warrior Flow, Al Ridenhour, refers to as a ‘Spirit of Fear.’

This painfully conspicuous lack of fortitude, this Spirit of Fear, I further submit, deprives the academic of knowing the joys of thinking and learning and, thus, the motive to cultivate the courage to think in the first place.”

Hat tip: Maggie’s Farm.