'The Fifth Wave' by Martin Gurri - new blog featured here

New blog on the sidebar: 'the fifth wave' by Martin Gurri. As often cited by Arnold Kling's blog.

"The same unmodulated whine about present conditions circled around and around, without even the ambition to achieve wit, depth, or originality:

    The internet is the enemy:  of rationality, of democracy, of truth.  It must be regulated by enlightened minds.

    The public resembles an eight-year-old who is always fooled by tricks and lies.  For its own protection, it must be constrained by a Guardian class.

    Populism is the spawn of lies.  Even if it wins elections, it is never legitimate, and must be swept away by a higher authority.

    Climate change is a scientific mandate for torturous economic and political experiments, implemented by experts. To deny this is worse than error – it’s a crime against humanity.

    Hate speech, offensive words, fake news, deep fakes, privacy violations, information bubbles, bitcoin, Facebook, Silicon Valley, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Brexit:  all must be controlled, criminalized, exploded, broken up, exposed, deposed, or repeated until the right answer is obtained.

None of this was up for discussion. None of it was uttered with the least semblance of self-awareness.  In the same breath, a speaker called for the regulation of the web and the education of children in “tolerance.” If I had pointed out the contradiction, the speaker, I’m certain, would have denied it.  Tolerance, for her, meant the obliteration of opinions she disliked.   ..."

So long, Marianne .. and Michele

Albert Einstein wrote the following, in a letter of condolence to the sister and son of his long-time closest friend, Michele Besso, upon his death, four weeks before Einstein's own (18th April, 1955).

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

Leonard Cohen wrote an emotional final letter to Marianne Ihlen, the woman who inspired his “So Long, Marianne” and “Bird on the Wire,” just days before her July 29th death.

‘Well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.

And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.'

She died two days after receiving it; he died three months later.

There's quite an art to the final goodbye.

Leonard Cohen's work is a Rorschach diagram, a  mirror to your own pre-occupations and persona and signalling needs .. .

The cline of fearlessness

There are many class-gradients across capitalist society: income, wealth, power, intelligence, health, genetic load.

Let me add another one.

Life within contemporary bourgeois elites is perhaps the safest it has ever been anywhere. Disputes are not normatively settled by inter-personal violence. Coordination is via transactions not threats. There is a premium to being generally affable rather than intimidating.

(These are rules - there are individual exceptions which are normally deprecated).

This suggests that capitalism as a complex self-reproducing system selects - in a biological sense - for smart, high-trust, non-violent individuals in its elites. People who are the opposite of the suspicious, family-and-clan-oriented, rough types who were the success stories of pre-capitalist elites.

In a word: capitalism selects for liberals. Who have smaller amygdalas.

Surely this explains a lot?