Politics – Graham Stull

The Age of Post-outrage

Upon hearing the news that the French journalist Natacha Rey was cleared by a French court of defamation in her case against Brigitte Macron, I was prompted to consider the consequences. To be clear, Rey’s claims about France’s first lady are spectacular and scandalous: that ‘she’ is in fact a man, most likely ‘her’ own brother Jean-Michel Trogneux, and therefore that Emmanuel Macron has been duping the French public and the world for nigh on a lifetime.

To be even more clear, I am agnostic on the substance of these charges. If true, I’m not even sure I attach all that much significance to it – I have always held that public figures should be judged for their public actions, not their private ones.

But none of that is the point, because my views are not what matters. What matters is that, under normal circumstances, this should be the Scandal of the Century. After all, it appears that the French voters were lied to. It also raises important questions about issues of state – who has what kompromat behind this salacious truth? Every newspaper, every television, every corner of the Assemblée Nationale should be abuzz with the controversy. Rightly or wrongly, pressure should be mounting on Brigitte Macron to take whatever simple and obvious steps could be taken to dispel this ‘fake news’. (Of course, if that were possible, one must assume her legal team would already have presented that evidence to the Court, and the defamation case would have been won against Rey).

So the real question is not whether Brigitte Macron is the same person as Jean-Michel Trogneux. It is why, in the face of relatively strong evidence that this might well be the case, widespread public awareness is not triggering any political immune response. We appear to have moved beyond the point where the system is capable of focusing enough outrage over issues that in the past, would have constituted major scandals.

Brigitte-gate is not even the most egregious example of this. Take the issue of lab leak. Whatever one still thinks about the Covid ‘vaxxines’, there is now virtually no serious disagreement – neither in scientific circles nor in the public at large – over how this virus came to be: Taxpayer-funded research networks, most likely linked to bioweapons programmes, gave money to a lab in Wuhan China to carry out gain-of-function research on a bat coronavirus. Some variant escaped and became SARS-2, spread across the planet and killed millions of people.

At this stage everyone knows this is what happened. But once again, the outrage is missing. Not only have the authors of this human catastrophe not been held to account, they are in fact still receiving taxpayer funding to carry out more of the same kind of deadly research. When I wrote a fictional book about a 2020 virus, back in 2015, this is the thing I got most wrong. In The Hydra, the outrage is a key theme – it topples governments, it motivates vast public interest, it moves the plot along, in fact. But I wrote that book at a time and in a world where tectonic events caused political earthquakes.

Nor is Covid even the most egregious example. We now live in a world where, not only do we passively watch a genocide unfold using weapons we have paid for, but when the author of that genocide nominates his principle weapons supplier and financial backer for a Nobel Peace Prize, barely anyone blinks. We sit dumbly and shrug as that same weapons supplier flatly tells us that although Ghislaine Maxwell was guilty of five counts of sex trafficking, she trafficked those children to no one at all. Kash Patel’s team didn’t even bother to edit the time stamps for the missing minute in the surveillance video tape of when Jeffrey Epstein was murdered (something I could have done with Adobe After Effects and a few days of careful work).

This kind of political numbness is not new. We saw a similar relationship between demos and veritas among the citizenry of the Soviet Union. A sort of cynical acceptance of the complete disconnect between official narratives and the quietly understood reality of everyday people, best encapsulated in the quip: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

It would be foolish to believe this is harmless. If nothing else, it speaks of a dangerous apathy among the masses that threatens the pluralist roots of our society, and breeds a culture of impunity among those in power. At its worst, it leaves us defenseless against corrosive influences. After all, biological creatures have immune responses for a reason – to warn us of when destructive pathogens have penetrated our systems, and then to mount a defense.

If we’re not careful, we might end up in a situation where one of the world’s nuclear powers is ruled by a man who, at age 39, sexually preyed on a 15 year old boy, while pretending to be a woman.

On tariffs, migrants, machines and the meaning of work

The pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over Trump’s tariff chaos is a thing to behold. The shock, particularly among Europeans, is almost as funny as it is silly: after all, Trump told us he was going to bring in tariffs during his election campaign. He led in the polls, duly won the election and is now following through on his campaign promises. It says much about how the transatlantic elites view political promises themselves, that they appear genuinely surprised to see Trump doing exactly what he promised his voters he would do.

What is even more hilarious are the post hoc condemnations of this transparent effort to redefine the architecture of 20th Century global trade. Suddenly, long-time critics of globalisation are rushing to its defence, using arguments so textbook that they could have been cut and pasted from a 1980s economics textbook: Prices will go up, growth will stall, the uncertainty will kill business, third worlders will suffer, retaliatory tariffs will hit America hard…

Economics 101: trade is good for everyone, dummy

To get behind this debate, it’s useful to go back to the basics of economics. Every student will remember the name David Ricardo, and the conclusions of his basic trade model that show that when two nations trade together, they both get better off. The intuition behind the Ricardian model is simple: the United States specialises in, say, computer engineering and trades the IT to Vietnam, which specialises in tailoring shirts. Because the US has a comparative advantage in computers and the Vietnamese a comparative advantage in making shirts, everyone is strictly better off from the trade.

David Ricardo was a parliamentarian during the heyday of the British industrial revolution.

“Let them eat cake from the Googleplex free buffet”

The problem is what happens to the American shirt makers who are put out of work. In Ricardo’s defence, this was less of a problem in the year 1800, because at the time, Britain’s industries were booming and the factories of Manchester, Sheffield and Stoke had a near insatiable demand for unskilled labour. Even so, free trade worked to depress their wages too, but this effect was invisible in the general rising tide of industrialisation. It would take decades before the horrific inequality and exploitation of unfettered capitalism gave rise to a countermovement, in the person of a handsomely bearded German-Jew named Karl.

In 21st Century America, the story is not quite the same. Voters from flyover states see with their own eyes the factories close down and the poverty set in. Barack Obama’s solution for the out-of-work shirt makers was that they must learn to code. I encourage you to watch the video clip, because the political moment proved to be weighty. In 2013 it took Obama and his out-of-touch DC advisors completely by surprise that this message would backfire so badly. They never imagined that it would help elect Donald Trump a few years later.

Looking at it through the lens of 2025, ‘Learn to Code’ seems absurd. A 50 year old forklift driver from small town North Carolina will not be able to start programming apps in California, when the crates of shirts he loads into trucks are outsourced to Vietnam. For despite what Obama claimed, ‘nearly anyone’ can not learn to code.

This is the essential point from the tariffs debate: because inequality is as high as it is, it is not only possible that market contraction and negative GDP growth be consistent with an improvement in the quality of life of the median American, it is almost axiomatic that this will be true. Because the real issue at stake is that as America shifts production into ever higher-valued added output, the labour share of income has been continuously shrinking. Don’t take my word for it, just look at the chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics below.

The steady erosion in how much of the country’s income went to labour, as opposed to capital, began to markedly accelerate in the 2000s as the bipartisan trade liberalisation agenda was rolled out and China emerged as a supplier-superpower to replace US manufacturing. Yes, cheap imports kept prices low. Yes, rock-bottom interest rates meant impoverished workers could borrow cheaply. But with widening income inequality, they were always getting worse off, even as the country got richer in exactly the way Ricardo would have predicted.

Trump’s tariffs are his promise to the ‘Left-Behinds’ to turn this process on its head. And let’s be clear: there is every reason in economics to believe that tariffs – however haphazardly imposed – will succeed in increasing the labour share of income by reshoring labour intensive manufacturing. Some cost will be born by the consumer, but because prices are elastic on many consumer goods with global supply chains, most of the cost will be born out of the rents that accrue to capital. Money will flow inland from Connecticut to Ohio; and from California to Wyoming.

The three-headed hydra choking the American working class

Of course, trade is not the only factor driving a deterioration in labour’s share of income. It’s a hydra with two other heads: mass-migration and technology. Mass-migration is, in fact, perfectly analogous to production outsourcing through trade liberalisation, except that instead of having your blue collar job go to a third worlder overseas, the third worlder crosses the sea to take your blue collar job. He might take your house too.

The old Firestone Textile plant in Gastonia, North Carolina closed in the 1990s. Gastonia voted 61.4% for Trump.

I know, I know. Lot’s of reputable economists will vehemently argue against this, claiming that migrant labour is wage-augmenting etc. But it’s notable that none of those economists actually works in a factory. They have never been told that if they don’t want to work late shifts on a Saturday for no extra pay, there are twenty Mexicans who will be happy to take their place. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, have been told this, which is why they gave their Orange Man a clear mandate to do something about it.

Then there’s technology. Here the economists are a little more attentive to the risks of labour displacement, perhaps because AI software does a better job at forecasting GDP than robots do at stitching together Ralph Lauren shirts. The principle is the same as with trade: every labour-saving innovation shifts more income to capital and away from labour.

And while Secretaries Besset and Noem have shown how they can take care of trade and migration pretty well, it’s not clear to me what, if anything, Trump is prepared to do about the dangers tech poses to the American working class. The President of Mars appears to have a veto over the President of the United States of America, and His Autistic-ness is all for loosening – not tightening – the noose on the Big Tech monopolies that are currently stealing our jobs and our souls.

Cuz man these god damn food stamps don’t buy … self respect

What of the opposition?

Back when Democrats still pretended to care about this problem, their solution was generally some form of fiscal transfer: essentially to tax some of the output gains from capital and give it to labour as welfare benefits. This would compensate them for their share loss in the open borders, trade liberalised, technology-pumped economy. Politically, it’s not hard to see the appeal – you create a system where voters are dependent on hand-outs from government to compensate them for their loss of income created by government policies.

But there are many problems. First, capitalists are insanely good at sneaking past that fourth space on the Monopoly board. This means that in practice, the welfare transfers will have a hard time keeping up with the loss in income share. More importantly, people do not just work in order to have food on the table. They work in order to be part of society, to have a feeling of accomplishment and achievement, something fiscal transfers can never provide. People don’t want hand-outs, they want economic sovereignty.

And to get it, they are prepared to elect an orange-faced egomaniac; they are prepared to see their country’s place in the world economic order decline; they are prepared to endure higher prices; all in order to restore the pride of knowing they are a meaningful part of the economy. They might buy fewer things, but the things they buy will be made by someone whose values they share.

Before you judge them as being short-sighted, do a few shifts in an American factory. If you can find one that is still open, that is.

A simple plan to stop the killing in Europe

Donald Trump has won the election, in part on the promise to bring an end to US involvement in foreign conflicts. This includes swiftly bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. But how?

Here I propose a simple and, I think, obvious solution to the conflict that could be acceptable to all sides.

Main elements of the deal

An immediate ceasefire along all lines of contact, and for all missile and drone attacks.
The Russian Federation withdraws its forces from all DMZ territory currently occupied (e.g. the city of Mariupol…), and relinquishes all territorial claims to Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Kharkiv oblasts.
Ukraine withdraws its forces from Kursk and any other territory of the UN-recognised Russian Federation. Ukraine withdraws its forces from those parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts currently occupied by AFU forces. Ukraine relinquishes any legal claim to Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.
Ukraine is divided into three regions, as below, (for which all parties agree to seek immediate recognition by the UN):
1. The first region (in dark blue on the map) is the EU security zone. This comprises all oblasts and parts of oblasts west of the Dnieper River. The only territory east of the Dnieper is the remaining piece of Kiev Oblast. It is understood that this region will fall under the protection of NATO, as it transitions into a permanent security arrangement under a new EU Defense Treaty, which would have a smaller and decreasing role of the United States, but would cover countries like Moldova, (Western) Ukraine, the UK, the EU itself and other areas vital to Europe’s security interests.
2. The second region (in light blue on the map) is the DMZ. This region comprises the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy and Chernihiv oblasts, as well as those portions of the Cherkasy and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts that are east of the Dnieper River. It remains under the administration and jurisdiction of Ukraine, but is not covered by the EU Defense Treaty. Ukrainian police can operate, but no weapons systems, artillery, combat units, military aircraft or missiles are allowed. Russian military advisors have permanent, unfettered access to all parts of this zone. All civilian and economic infrastructure remains fully Ukrainian, with no obligations to supply or facilitate the supply of power, water or other utilities to the Russian Federation.
3. The third region (in red) is Crimea including Sevastopol, as well as Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. This territory becomes part of the Russian Federation.
The Russian Federation grants freedom to navigate in the Sea of Azov for all civilian and commercial purposes and allows unfettered access through the Kerch Straits.
Ukraine commits to passing, in law, denazification rules, in particular in relation to the Azov Brigade and a full repudiation of historical associations with the Nazi German SS.

On leaky woodsheds and subjective validation

I sometimes listen to Brett Weinstein on the Darkhorse Podcast, whence I hear an uncanny number of my own, older ideas echoing back at me – which is a little creepy, somewhat flattering but mostly not that edifying an experience. In general, I find Brett in that category of thinkers who – though quite smart and original – is slightly less smart and original than he thinks he is. If his brain were a little bigger, or his ego a little smaller, he would stand a better chance of making a meaningful contribution to the world of ideas. All in all, I think I listen more for the comforting and good-natured repartee he has with his sidekick wife Heather, than because I expect to learn something.

Occasionally, though, Brett hits upon something that really provokes thought. In a recent episode, he makes the point that there is a fundamental difference between academic and vocational education: for the former, test results are given by the teacher. It’s possible for the teacher to exercise discretion, induce grade inflation or act on biases. For the latter, the outcome of the education is too closely tied with a material, objective result. If you write a bullshit essay about the sociology of queer bubble tea drinkers, it’s possible a sufficiently biased teacher would give such an essay a high grade that does not reflect its true merit. If, on the other hand, you build a book case so badly that it falls apart upon contact with any reading material, there is nowhere to hide the fact that you have not been a good student. The physical world has a way of highlighting failures which, in the artificial world of academics, can be disguised behind a veil of ‘subjective validation’.

This idea of ‘subjective validation’ is actually an important point for making sense of the Western World in 2024. I have argued before that wokeness as a form of postmodernism is a real and meaningful concept for understanding current affairs – so many of society’s ills involve the replacement of the objective with the subjective. I have also argued that there is a pandemic of overeducation which leads to the ‘dumb but educated’ having less – not more – capacity to reason.

Weinstein’s point about education fits right in to this architecture. From kindergarten through to her second master’s degree, the entire life path of a middle class, professional American is defined by validation – not from the hard edges of bumping into physical failure – but from the soft, socially malleable constraints created by authority figures, peers or other social forces. Even in the physical sciences, the majority of ‘research’ involves models and theories that are two steps away from any practical application. This dulls us to the rigors of objective reality, in favour of subjectivism which may in itself be a defining factor in the success of postmodernist ideas like critical race theory or transgenderism.

All the A+’s in the world won’t make this woodshed less leaky

None of us is immune from this, of course. I recently attempted to erect a woodshed in my garden. To accomplish the task, I took with me a few tools, but a much larger stock of hubris from my relative success as an ‘attender of meetings’ and ‘sender of emails’. After all, I have many degrees and accolades, etc, etc. None of this mattered much to the final result of the woodshed, which currently stands as a risible and leaky testament to the fact that the physical world doesn’t give a damn how smart other people tell me I am.

In fact, you can generalise Weinstein’s point to encompass many phenomena in today’s society; a society in which an increasingly large number of people have learned what they know through subjective, rather than objective, validation. Take the entire culture of safety-ism. If your conception of the dangers of falling and hurting yourself comes from warnings issued by your overprotective mother, rather than the crunch of your seven-year-old bones as you plunge from the climbing frame, then your understanding of risk is one degree separated from the consequence itself. How well equipped will you be when, later in life, the government mandates you to Stay Safe from a virus that poses virtually no risk to your 24 year old body?

And what impact does subjective validation have on the media? If the very idea of what is ‘true and correct’ comes, not from a careful observation of nature, but from some authority figure telling you ‘you are right’, what hope can we hold out for the journalists whose job it is to sort through this very social noise in search of the important objective facts? Today on Substack, the excellent Eugyppius writes about how shockingly the media has reported on the thorny issue of President Joe Biden’s mental health. When the quality of reporting is validated not by any objective truth, but rather by the subjective validation of the collective authority (in this case of the elites themselves), this kind of mistake will be par for the course.

Of course, the world of subjective validation is itself ultimately subject to constraints of the objective kind. When entire generations have been told they are smart and clever by indulgent university systems, the fruits of this false validation will eventually result in economic stagnation, in military unpreparedness, and in a lack of meaningful innovation.

In other words, the woodsheds we’re building are getting very leaky.

A General Theory of Society

I’ve had in my head for some time a general theory of society, that I’ve been meaning to put down in writing. Here goes:

Society – any society – consists of three essential elements: a State, a Market and a Community. Let’s take each in turn.

The State is, in its essence, the monopoly on physical force. The weaker the State is in a given society, the more physical force is dispersed between different actors. The stronger the State, the more physical force is concentrated in the State itself. A hallmark of a strong State is, therefore, laws which prohibit any form of violence, up to and even including self-defense.

It follows from this definition of the State that everything it does in some way relates to its monopoly on violence. For example, the State spends money on infrastructure. But in order to do so, that money must come from taxes. These in turn are collected from taxpayers who, if they refuse to pay, will have the money taken from them. If they resist, the State will not hesitate to use physical force to compel them out of their possessions and into prison.

Next comes the Market. The Market is the free exchange of value between actors. It reposes on the assumption that exchange is mutually beneficial. In its purest form, the Market knows neither altruism nor compulsion. Each actor enters the Market to further his own self-interest, and finds that agreement with other actors is the best way of doing this.

The final pillar of society is Community. Community is all voluntary interactions of social actors that are neither transactional nor subject to compulsion under threat of physical force, So anything that is non-State or non-Market is by definition Community. Examples of Community are families, friendships, bowling clubs, religions and board game meetups.

A key feature of Community is that it has the power of banishment or exclusion, but no other power. Another key feature is that interactions within a Community tend to be highly altruistic. Community members ‘care’ about one another, and in fact are often willing to suspend their own self-interest in pursuit of Community-defined goals and in adherence to Community-defined values.

Now comes my core hypothesis about the ideal organisation of a society:

A society can be said to be well-organised when the Community, the Market and the State all have equal weight. This is because each of these three mechanisms represents an important check on the other two. The State provides order and peace, the Community provides values and morals, and the Market provides economic rationality and innovation.

A society that has a strong State, but a weak Market and a weak Community, will tend towards Communism. The lack of (Community) moral compass will allow the State’s leadership to abuse its monopoly on power, while the lack of (Market) pressure will lead to bad economic-decision making and undermining of democracy, because consumers and businesses exert a democratising influence.

A society with a strong Market, but a weak State and a weak Community, will tend towards Corporatism, a consolidation of economic power in the hands of wealthy oligarchy, who will lack morals (e.g. fly to space with Captain Kirk in a giant dick, while their workers have to pee in bottles). Likewise, enforcement of contracts will be impossible, because that requires either the compulsion of the State or the moral impetus of the Community. Ultimately, even basic transactions will be burdened with additional costs of self-enforcement, and entire markets will collapse under that cost.

It’s rather hard to find examples of a society characterised by strong Community, but weak State and a weak Market. However, tribal societies exactly fitted this description. And while they may be marked by a degree of stability, I would argue that this comes at a high price: investment is next to impossible, nothing is there to drive human progress and innovation.

In modern political discourse it is conventional to consider society along a ‘left-right’ axis, in which two of the three essential societal elements are considered as opposing poles of a spectrum. My hypothesis suggests that in fact there is no place along this spectrum that can deliver a healthy, well-functioning society, because the third element – Community – is not represented.

That is why it is best to illustrate politics not with a left-right spectrum, but with a Social Triangle

And in fact, much of the imbalance in modern society is related to a steady erosion of the influence of Community on our daily lives. Church attendance has plummeted, people have fewer meaningful friendships and participate in fewer activities. Families are smaller and more fragmented than ever before. Indeed, we have drifted down the Social Triangle, and are approacing the bottom axis that runs between State and Market.

That is why when the Left and the Right complain about the other side, they are both right and both wrong. A good example is around Hate Speech. New laws are being rushed upon us by well-meaning, but wrong-headed Leftists to outlaw saying ‘mean things’. These laws are incredibly stupid – at best they won’t work, and at worst they will. But the question is, why is this happening? Simply put, the power of the Community to check the behaviour of society’s members is increasingly absent. We now find ourselves trying to criminalise the sort of behaviour that used to cost you friendships, club memberships and a place at your cousin’s dinner table.

Markets are also malfunctioning in ways that Right-wingers find hard to explain away. It turns out that excessive greed and amorality are themselves a form of market failure, because any asymmetry between market participants creates an opportunity for sharp practice – information is imperfect, bargaining power is lopsided. Absent Community, the only way to check those immoral excesses is ever-more costly regulation. That in turn creates opportunities for regulatory capture and barriers to entry for new market participants. We find ourselves in a social market economy that is neither very social nor very market.

What is the solution? Clearly, it is to restore some sense of Community – common values, a common purpose, a clear set of religious dogma and a shared moral code. Adam Smith understood the importance of this intuitively, (even if Karl Marx was less perspicacious in this regard).

Now, this is all well and good, but do I have any more practical suggestions or is this just another ‘everything is awful’ blogpost? Here’s my three step plan:

Awareness. Stop pretending like our Community doesn’t matter. Restart a conversation about what our values are, what we can agree on, and how we can come together to pray and play – knowing that is every bit as important as who our State leaders are or how our economy is working.
Subsidiarity. An interesting result that comes out of the social triangle is the question of scale. It turns out the Market works ever better at scale, and the State too seems pretty able to work at scale. But Communities don’t seem to work very well at scale at all. Insofar as altruism is a key ingredient, it’s really not possible to have empathy with a million other people, much less 8 billion. In other words, today’s society is too big for real Community to exist. Not only is globalism a terrible idea, in fact, we need to break nations down into pieces that are well proportioned for Community to prosper. This suggests devolving more of the Market and the State to smaller scales – local government and buy local goods.
Stop uncontrolled immigration. Yes, there I said it. Immigration is very bad for Community, for the obvious reason that immigrants are least likely to share the common values that bind people together in voluntary ways. Immigration erodes Community and splinters society.
God. That’s right. The big guy. Flowing white beard. Turns out, not only is He almighty, but He’s also quite good for creating the conditions under which Communities can flourish. He sort of works as a rallying point and an anchor for common values and beliefs.
Get the hell offline. I don’t believe the internet is the cause of failing Community. After all, the excellent book Bowling Alone came out when the internet was still in diapers. But I also don’t think the internet can be part of the solution. If you want real Community, you should get off this damn computer, go outside and meet people. Join a choir. Or a rugby team. Or take a pottery class.

On the fall of Avdiivka (and Western political rationalism)

Can’t leave the news for even a weekend?

I spent a rather pleasant weekend with my family in Transylvania, among other things visiting the spectacular Salina Turda salt mine. I was less than 200 kilometers from the border with Ukraine, but well over a thousand from the beleaguered city of Avdiivka – and my mind was further still from the horrors its name evokes.

So it wasn’t until this Monday morning that I learned the city’s defenses had collapsed in a disorderly retreat; one which left the thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to run along the only remaining road out; or to be killed; or to be captured by the storming Russians. The collapse of Avdiivka also punctured a gaping hole in Ukraine’s longstanding defensive line inside the Donetsk Oblast, through which Russian forces are storming as I type these words.

Asymmetric warfare: shovels against balcony flags

The Russian troops have at their backs an overwhelming superiority in shovels (i.e. airplanes, artillery, drones, missiles), in troop numbers (essential for troop rotation), in morale and in momentum. Their political leader enjoys unprecedented popularity, a mostly buoyant economy and newly forged alliances with the most powerful economy in the world, China, whose leader has just refused to even speak to the Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zellensky.

What does Ukraine have at its back? Despite the promises of support for ‘as long as it takes’, the US Congress has decisively denied a funding package of 60 billion dollars to rearm its proxy ally. America’s most popular journalist (by viewer numbers) just conducted a soft-ball interview of President Putin that was watched by over 100 million Americans; and the clear frontrunner for the presidency in November has vowed a policy of negotiation and disengagement.

Meanwhile the EU is out of military cadeaux (shells, F-16s, Leopard IIs) to send east, and is facing a run of elections likely to further erode the political appetite for any form of solidarity more painful than photo-ops and impassioned speeches. Its latest economic forecast, meanwhile, shows anemic growth and deteriorating public finances, while Polish farmers are blocking their Eastern border to stem the flow of cheap wheat, Ukraine’s only real remaining export.

A badly scripted TV president with a predictable ending

The worst part is, this was all so depressingly predictable. I’m no great military tactician, but it didn’t take me long to understand that this war was entirely unwinnable for Ukraine, at the very latest once the Russians had declared the territories in dispute to be an integral part of the Russian Federation itself. Absent direct military intervention from NATO leading to a catastrophic escalation, Ukraine’s battlefield valor could do no more than prolong the inevitable, and claim the lives of ever more young men. You only need to have played a few games of Risk to understand that when the troops stack sufficiently high on one side of a battle, the outcome is not seriously in question.

Likewise, one didn’t have to be a great statesman to see the dangers of driving Russia into China’s arms. Nor was a Nobel Prize in economics needed to understand that the rise of BRICS meant there was limited scope for Western sanctions to dissuade Putin from his course of action, or that the politicisation of the Bretton Woods financial system would backfire, undermining its credibility and hastening de-dollarisation.

Why, then, did the West persist? And persist it surely did – with months of declarations of unwavering support, with ever more risible packages of sanctions, with arsenals of last-generation military gear. Why did not a greater statesperson emerge, look three moves ahead and realise where this was all heading? Why did he not take Putin quietly by the elbow, smoke a cigar with him and hand over just enough territory to restore the peace and allow everyone to declare some sort of victory?

Did Big Gun bring out the big guns…?

The internet is full of conspiracies these days. When Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and George Soros are not busy planning mass depopulation of the planet, it’s Taylor Swift and her devil cult rigging the Super Bowl so her (presumably Satanic) boyfriend’s team can win (they play in red! Coincidence? I think NOT).

According to the sages of this school, the powers that be knew full well Ukraine was a lost cause from day one. They nevertheless wanted to draw Putin into a messy conflict, stir up a heightened sense of threat and play on that in order to be able to fill the arsenals of Washington and Brussels with next-gen NATO weapons, all on the dime of the West’s generous taxpayers. They foresaw the fall of Avdiivka long before I or even Putin, but they frankly didn’t care, and will watch indifferently as every rick and croft east of the Dnieper gets burned. The shadowy cabal pulling the strings here is the military-industrial complex, and it’s all about the money.

…or is the truth even more depressing?

I don’t buy it. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying Honeywell, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin et al do not actively lobby to promote hawkish policies – this they have always done. Nikki Haley is just Dick Cheney in heels, and Dick Cheney was just Henry Kissinger with better glasses. But their influence is limited, their reach finite. They can tilt outcomes at the margins perhaps. They cannot, however, cause a Ukrainian flag to hang from every balcony from San Francisco to Helsinki. They cannot cause the West to lose its collective mind and throw all its political capital, hundreds of billions of dollars and its very economic hegemony into what is obviously a lost cause.

My theory is what we have witnessed with the fall of Avdiivka is the collapse of something much more central to Western civilisation. It is the loss of political rationalism in Western decision-making. The West no longer has the ability to apply reason to its political calculations. The carefully groomed tradition of considering consequences and working backwards from there to determine the best future course of action is out of fashion. Instead, decisions are made on impulse – mad gambles steered by the public mood, by passions and by the moment.

Baby needs a new pair of shoes!

Of course, when the gamble goes bad, there is an emotional reaction. A sort of heart leaping into the mouth, as the gambler sees that he somehow did not make the flush on the river card, even though he ‘had had that feeling’. That is what we see in the news today: multiple reports of ‘shock‘ at the news from Ukraine, a sense of ‘gloom‘.

This is precisely the moment when you should cash in your remaining chips, take stock of the experience and review the path that led you to such bad decision-making. Sadly, for most gamblers, this is not what actually happens. They make excuses, double down, and continue with the bad decisions. The reason Avdiivka fell is because Congress did not hastily enough approve the additional funding. We must send more to Ukraine, we must press Putin harder. Perhaps another round of sanctions (this time targeting the lucrative Russian canine toothpaste market)?

In my heart, I want to believe we can regain our ability to apply political rationalism. But if I were a betting man, I’d cash in my chips and go buy a 500 litre rainwater filter.

In defence of free speech (again)

Mal- mis- dis-, a neo-Marxist twist?

This is not the first time I’ve written about the importance of free speech on this blog. Since my last post on the subject, however, Western society’s commitment to the ideals that underpin free speech has waned further. We have endured not only sinister revisionist attacks on ‘problematic’ heritage statues; not only the mainstreaming of the censorious concept of ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’; but also an entire, carefully orchestrated, campaign to eradicate free speech on the internet, including the mainstreaming of some outright ludicrous euphemisms like ‘malinformation’. At least, it would be ludicrous if the stakes weren’t so very high – the wholesale collusion of government in managing the flow of public information is beyond dangerous, as evidenced both by Laura Dodsworth’s excellent book and the Twitter Files.

Questioning the effectiveness of face masks and SARS-2 vaxxines has been the subject of official censorship

The diarrhea icing on this shit cake is the rise of the most revolting class of idiots in the Censorship-Industrial complex, the odious legions of ‘fact checkers’. Really, these are just self-appointed, highly-opinionated urbanites of the burgeoning Laptop Class – rebranded journalists with hutzpah – but it’s remarkable how easily everyone fell for their sham-show, and how effective they have been in fostering acceptance for the abolition of free speech online.

I find myself wondering whether the very act of advocating for free speech might soon be targeted by the censors – is it not, after all, the crime of ‘incitement to mal-, mis-, disinformation’?

I don’t agree with your cliched Voltaire quote, but I’ll defend to the death your right to use it as a section header.

It’s always good to hash over the core arguments for allowing even the most outrageous opinions to be voiced as ‘free speech’. First of all, if the goal of inhibiting free speech is to safeguard against falsehood, then censorship does an appalling job. This is because it presupposes not only that censors have pure motives, but also that they know what the truth is to begin with. As the Covid debacle showed clearly, this is not the case. In fact, it is precisely through the freest and most open exchange upon the marketplace of ideas that we begin to approach truth – an asymptote at which we never arrive.

Second, on a purely practical level, even when it’s well targeted at actual falsehood, censorship is mostly self-defeating. The ‘Streisand Effect’ takes hold, and people’s natural instincts draw them to the very pink elephant you are trying to get them to not think about.

Third, censorship is like pregnancy. You can’t really have a little bit of it. Because even when a case can be made, theoretically, for blocking speech at the extremes – for example shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre – it tends to slip, over time, towards more and more authoritarian restrictions on speech. Interestingly, even this censorship straw man doesn’t hold up very well. Try actually shouting fire in a theatre and see how many people stampede. Probably none. It may be that once upon a time, with lower fire standards, such a thing might have happened. But then the solution wasn’t censorship, it was better fire-resistant building materials and sprinklers.

The case for ‘free hearing’

And yet, the recent debate has caused me to realise that none of these classic arguments against censorship is the most compelling defence of free speech. What matters more than all of the above is the effect censorship has on the audience.

To understand why, consider what effect free and open debate has on those who listen to it and participate in it. Much of what is said will be false, or only partially true. When anyone is free to claim anything, it becomes more important to use one’s own sense of discernment in analysing those claims. At its worst, of course, censorship stifles inconvenient truth. But even when it is at its best, it diminishes the audience’s capacity to exercise the mental muscles of discretion. Like people who use Google Maps to get around, the minds of the audience under (even benevolent) censorship regimes become lazy and less able to navigate their way towards the shimmering city of Veritopolis.

This is an important point to consider. Because the right to ‘free speech’ is often defended as an individual right. Yet the right to ‘free hearing’ is a social right. It is the right we all enjoy to be tricked and fooled, the right to believe something stupid, to learn from that experience and to become more discerning. Especially for the malleable minds of young people, this is a right that must be exercised widely; all the way ‘from the river to the sea’.

The Oracle and the Glock

The worst lies are a mosaic made of a thousand truths

We live in a world of noise. Information, almost infinite, is streamed at us relentlessly, bombarding our minds and overwhelming our capacity to distill truth. In such a world, it is very easy for narrative weavers to create truth. After all, there are facts everywhere, enough that they can carefully select the ones that suit their message and create a story that is not only convincing, but is actually full of true facts. The lie is in the selection of facts, and the choice to omit ones that do not serve the narrative.

And yet… I believe with even a modest degree of focus, most of us would be capable of separating out the informational wheat from the chaff. I think we could know more truth with a bit more effort, if we really had to. The question is, how can that be done?

The Oracle and the Glock

This takes me to the ‘Oracle and the Glock’. One imagines an omniscient personage – for the sake of visualisation a faceless, spectral figure dressed in black body armour with empty, luminescent blue eyes, in the fires of which glows the flame of perfect knowledge. This is the Oracle. She is armed with a Glock 9mm pistol, black to match her general appearance.

Her M.O. is that she approaches you and places the barrel of the pistol against your temple. She then asks you a question; a question to which she, in her omniscience, already knows the correct answer. The game is quite simple. If you give her this correct answer, you live. If you fail to answer or you answer incorrectly, she will blow your brains out. But because the Oracle has some sense of justice, she will allow you enough time to scroll through the internet in search of whatever information you need to support your answer.

The question is this: In such a world, would more people come closer to the truth than is currently the case? In other words, how much is the plague of disinformation a result of willful ignorance, laziness and dishonest self-interest, and how much is a genuine artefact of the digital age, or the pernicious activities of Russian bots?

Who has Dominion over election results?

Perhaps it helps to consider a concrete example. Let’s take, for instance, the results of the 2020 US Presidential Election, in which Joe Biden is said to have defeated Donald Trump. Imagine the Oracle asked you this question, “If the 2020 election had been run entirely absent electoral fraud, mail-in ballot stuffing or manipulation of electronic voting machines, would Joe Biden still have been declared the winner?”

If you are a left-leaning, college educated Coastal American or a middle class European, you would casually answer this question with a ‘yes of course’ while sipping a £10 craft IPA with your friends on the sunny terrace of a trendy London bar. But imagine the question came while you were in the Oracle’s dark crucible, on your knees, transfixed by the piercing blue light of her spectral eyes?

I hope you would at least take the time to go through the evidence carefully – after all, the Oracle is patient. I hope the pressure of the Glock’s cold steel against your temple would make you just a little distrustful of the first few hits you got from Google. I hope you would dig a little deeper. You might think, ‘obviously the election wasn’t rigged. But, well, what if I’m wrong?’. Maybe you would dig out the footage of the vote count in Cook County or Philadelphia and look, really look, at what happened around 11 O’Clock that evening. Maybe you would listen, for the first time, to what Trump said that night and the next day and search for the lie in his eyes. What answer would he give to the Oracle? And if he really believed it was rigged, is he just a crazy, egotistical old man? Or did he know something I don’t? Maybe you would read the documents submitted by the Republicans in all the court cases that were dismissed for lack of standing.

You might even listen, for the first time in your life, to what intelligent people on the other side think is the right answer to this question. Not because you necessarily agree with them, but because there’s a chance you might be wrong. I certainly hope you would search for the truth, as if your life depended on it.

Because I know I would.

The pretense of knowledge, or ‘how to draw a very accurate map’

When I was a child, I liked to draw maps. Even at an early age, I understood there was something powerful about the ability to render graphic representations of spatial relationships on paper. From memory, I drew maps of the United States of America. It didn’t take me long to realise that if you memorised the big ticket contours (the point of Maine, the rough bulge of the mid-Atlantic, the curve and hook of Texas…) you could supplement this rough shape with random but detailed ‘squiggles’ that would approximate the twists and turns of the actual coastline.

To the casual eye, the map would look much more accurate that way. I recall some of my teachers’ reactions to these visually appealing, detailed maps of the US which decorated the blank pages of my phonics workbooks – they took me for some kind of prodigy. Of course, if you were to compare the detailed squiggles with the actual contours of the coast, there would be no more overlap than what chance might throw up – after all, I improvised the squiggles randomly. But it didn’t matter, the pretense of detailed knowledge was enough to convince most people that the map was far more accurate than it really was.

Would that this little deception remained in the workbooks of a 1980s schoolboy. Alas, this technique of pretending detailed knowledge has since gone mainstream. It defines ‘the Science’ behind a great many, drastic policy choices that are being implemented at this very moment.

Consider the Imperial College Model developed by Neil Ferguson, and which was adopted and copied to provide justification for draconian lockdown policies across the globe. The ‘model’ is very detailed and provides point estimates to a high degree of specification on how different policy choices would impact mortality as the pandemic progressed. The problem, of course, is that these estimates fell well outside the confidence intervals that should have been attached to them. If the fake squiggles had not been included in the model, the real answer would have been ‘we simply don’t know how many lives could be saved from locking down’.

Now, three years later, we can compare the fake Imperial College map with the actual evidence and we see how wrong they got it. Estimates for how many deaths would arise in the absence of lockdown were at least an order of magnitude wrong.

The same trick is being used to justify unprecedented changes in energy policy. Point estimates are being provided for the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and increases in surface air temperature, with a degree of precision that completely belies the actual level of confidence ‘the Science’ could have in these numbers. In fact, as I argued previously, it is not possible to know whether the changes in climate the Earth is currently experiencing are at all the result of an increased concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere, because the two bigger causes of atmospheric heat – solar irradiation and albedo – cannot be measured with the requisite degree of accuracy, much less do scientists have any idea of the dynamic interaction between the three effects.

Of course, the really big problem with the pretense of detailed knowledge is that it acts as an obstacle to the pursuit of real knowledge. Once I became adept at faking coastal squiggles, I stopped looking carefully at the outline of the actual Atlantic / Pacific coasts, because to do so would jeopardise the professed accuracy of the maps I already drew. The same is true for climate science. No one is spending time and money to figure out whether the intensity or composition of solar energy is changing in a way that would impact the climate, because the question has already been answered, and the Science is not a very humble religious institution.

The question now facing us is whether we, as a civilisation, are prepared to do better than a bored 8-year old sitting at the back of the class.

The shift in geopolitics – why RRR matters

Empires do not fade in a day. If you asked a British citizen when exactly their empire collapsed, they might point to the 1947 announcement of withdrawal from India, the British Empire’s crown jewel, as the landmark moment. But in reality, this merely formalised a shift that had been underway since the 1919 Government of India Act, the granting of home rule to the Irish Free State a few years later, and a whole host of other concessions the island rulers were forced into making as their economic and military power declined. By the end of World War II, the Empire had ceased to exist in all but its name, and in the collective consciousness of those old colonels living in a run-down seaside hotels, telling tourists about the time they hunted the Bengali tiger.

A hundred years later, the same might be said of that Empire known by euphemisms like – ‘the Western World’, the ‘liberal world order’, or my personal favourite: ‘the International Community’ – but is, in reality, better called the American Empire.

Not without some irony, Lingchi, the Chinese death by a thousand cuts, best describes what has been happening to this Empire. Cultural narratives like critical race theory and transactivism are tearing apart the Empire’s collective sense of self. As counterculture movements they are divisive by design. On the economic front, the steady offshoring of manufacturing capacity and the overeducation of a whole generation of unproductive soy-infused urbanites has left the Empire economically reliant on its favourable global terms of trade in order to maintain high standards of living among its ruling classes in the Coastal USA and in Europe. The legacy financial architecture, in the form of the petrodollar and the Bretton Woods institutions, grows shakier with every passing bank bailout. The ill-advised choice to politicise the SWIFT global payment system further erodes those financial foundations. At the same time, the self-hating ideology of climate activisim not only undermines the Empire’s own energy supply, but also heralds a steady attack on its productive capacity. Europe is about to ban combustion engine cars, a technology in which it maintains a historic advantage, in favour of battery-powered ones where it is forced to compete with China on more level terms, and where it is completely dependent on imported raw materials.

What, then, remains of the Empire and its ability to enforce its system of goverance on its global dependents? There is still some measure of political and cultural good will. While not entirely guiltless, this Empire has been more benevolent that many that have come before it, and American cultural exports like McDonald’s and Hollywood have made the Empire’s mass culture seem both accessible and aspirational. But I would argue that this good will has largely dissipated. Since Covid at the latest, the Empire is no longer a good ambassador of its own liberal values, if indeed it ever was. Hollywood has eaten itself, and Wokeism is a singularly unattractive cultural export for those in the far reaches of the Empire who feel neither guilt for American slavery, nor a desire to blur the gender divide between men and women.

What the American Empire still has, of course, is the world’s mightiest military – effective control of international shipping lanes, satellite communication and a network of bases that neatly spans the globe. But the world is big, and as the map shows, there’s an important gap in the Empire’s coverage, right where it matters most. With the exception of volatile Pakistan, the withdrawal from Afghanistan has left the Empire with virtually no foothold on the biggest and most valuable continent: Asia.

In fact, on closer inspection the Empire’s military grip is tenuous. Sloth in the military industrial complex and avarice among the Empire’s European vassal states have hollowed out its real fighting capacity. For the most part, the Empire rests on its historical reputation and on the fact that its adversaries lack coordination. The fear of American power – rather than the reality of its execution – has, up until now, been enough to deter any meaningful resistance.

In this context, the breakthrough success of the Indian film RRR gains new significance. A smash commercial hit for Netflix, the three hour Tollywood blockbuster tale of friendship and revolution in 1920s occupied India enchanted audiences well outside of Hindustan. That the navel-gazing, ultra-woke Hollywood Insiders chose to shower Oscar recognition on it is less important than the fact that it was watched – and loved – by the Empire’s ordinary subjects, just as much as by the barbarians outside its borders.

Because RRR is not an Indian imitation of a Hollywood film. It is unwaveringly, unflinchingly and unashamedly not Western. With its cinematography, its over-the-top choreography and its Hindi-language in-jokes, this film makes no attempt to appeal to Western audiences. Its global success is the proof that today, that is not even a requirement.

Most shocking is the depiction of the Westerners. The British colonial occupiers in RRR are not just ‘bad guys’. They are depraved, morally bankrupt and palpably evil. The only redeeming Western character is Jenny (Olivia Morris), the white woman who falls in love with the dominant Indian protagonist, and who finishes as a happy bride, dancing in a sari and singing in Hindi, unphased by the brutal annihilation of her wicked family and loss of her Western way of life. The message is clear: we’ll take their women too.

Yet that is not the worst. Nor is it even exceptional – after all, unflattering depictions of the West have been common in Western media for decades. The truly shocking thing about the British villians in RRR is that they are weak. Physically, morally and intellectually weak. They recoil as cowards against the righteous outrage of the Hindi protagonists. They cannot shoot for beans and they lack the physical strength of Indian men.

Whether this is an historically accurate and fair depiction of the British Army during the Raj is entirely beside the point. What matters is that in a global blockbuster that out-eyeballed all but a handful of Western films last year, the Indian director feels empowered enough to depict the West as hopelessly weak. And barely anyone bats an eyelid. India’s foreign minister even used the representation as a barb, in conversation with the American Empire’s foremost disgraced lapdog, Tony Blair.

A few months later, the world witnessed the spectacle of Presidents Xi and Putin embracing each other during a state visit to Moscow with a display of friendship and complicity that left little doubt about their intentions with respect to the American Empire. Neutral spectators from Latin America to Africa, to the Indopacific are watching. And now, they are no longer sure the West can contain this new Asian Axis. With emergent Hindi nationalism as a tailwind, and given the subcontinent’s historic links to the USSR, there is no guarantee that India will heed the American Empire’s warnings not to slide too far into a Putin-Xi rebel alliance.

After all, as RRR has shown, the world may have less to fear from weak, evil Westerners than the US State Department would like them to believe.