Cobb

You Missed The Sausage Party

Apropos the following:

1. https://letter.wiki/conversation/127
2. https://areomagazine.com/2019/09/24/a-wrong-against-boys-an-impossible-conversation-about-circumcision/

I wonder, given the depth and breath of this essay if some broadly implemented surgical reform is capable of establishing the issue in the forefront of thoughtful parents and all other interested parties. To be blunt, if our common cultural morals consider it taboo to subject anyone to involuntary touching of genitals are we likely to be more rational about our undoing of the custom, behind our backs as it were in a decision by the medical community?

I think we'd be much better off surfacing the information in the context of our social norms and expectations, and that admittedly is a great deal more difficult to do, than to get consensus among practitioners, researchers and ethicists. Who then will have the ultimate responsibility? Well, it must be the individual. That means from my point of view that the most important boat to be lifted is that of a specific male rite of passage. Consequently the same seriousness has to be taken in consideration of why we don't have one.

But where I'm afraid my logic really goes, given that I don't consider my own circumcision to be such an imposition, is to all manner of birth customs. In my family, all us children were assisted out with the use of forceps whose marks on our faces had to be explained. But even more horrid to my sensibilities is the rise in cesarean section for no apparent reason. I don't mean to throw dead cats on the table, but how are we ever to get a men's movement to reconcile this ethical gap given our social environment?

If we are missing, as men, a specific, even if physically minimal transition from the boy's penis to the man's penis because we have been deprived a piece of it, then the social implications go much further than an ethical loathing of heretofore primitive ideas about sexual acts themselves. The greater tragedy is the social lacuna of a male rite of passage similar to a woman's first menses, even as clumsily as that might be handled.

Men's Constructive Hazing

So I'm recently thinking about men and violence, and yes I just finished Jim Mattis' book on leadership. I shake my head in guessing the number of people who still think 'military intelligence' is an oxymoron. I don't recall where I read an excellent passage on how men in dangerous professions tend to haze newbs, but I immediately recognized the sense of it. It reminded me of my own fraternity initiation which included a significant amount of a black cultural angle. Which in as few words as possible can be summarized "If you can survive our terror, then you can survive what the white man has in store for you." We leave that for another day. Today I am answering the question:

Q: What are things men have to go through that women either do not understand or have empathy for?

A: I think women don’t generally understand violent hazing and competition in a non-abstract way. They are generally quick to assert that all violence is stupid and accept that they will not have to make use of it for any reason. They don’t have to live and compete in masculine hierarchies that establish rational violence that controls irrational violence, and generally expect to be protected from such environments.

It is my experience that there are particular ways that men fight and there are particular ways that women fight. I don’t want to get overly deep into that, but I think the following illustration is apt.

Boys playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved immediately face off and blows are exchanged. After some period, other boys will break up the fight. Every one of them will know who won the fight. They are both ejected from the game. In the next game, the boys play fair and the incident is forgotten.

Girls playing soccer encounter a flagrant foul. The two involved face off but no blows are exchanged. Only the original offender is ejected from the game according to those rules. But the sting of the encounter remains. In the next game, the offended girl or one of her friends will foul the original offender for what happened in the prior game.

So what I’m saying is that in all conflict there is a direct application of social game rules and a higher meta application of unwritten rules. The higher meta application of unwritten rules includes unregulated violence and that is considered fair and the ultimate adjudication. It is male.

It’s not fair to say that women don’t understand or have empathy for this because they are very aware of its operation. They simply don’t participate in it in anywhere near the proportion that men do. But they expect men to and they will seek to reward heroes over bullies in the same way men do. I am saying they don’t necessarily understand how those lines of combat are drawn and evaluated the way that men do, from experience.

I think this comes to play in contemporary society often over questions of respect and conflict resolution or ‘anger management’. The simplest way for me to describe it is in terms of the lack of patience men will tend to have over endless negotiation and bickering back and forth in futile attempts to have nobody hurt or making everyone safe from conflict even when it is clear that there are irreconcilable differences in play.

In my personal experience I have observed how my daughters will debate questions endlessly and sometimes bring up old questions that should have been settled years ago. That ‘mean girls’ vibe of pulling back old scabs. I tell them, “Why don’t you just slap box?” They never do of course. It’s just the way they argue. Fathers and sons will resolve this at some point with a credible threat or actual use of violence. Women will argue and non-violently fight with their mothers for their entire lives.

I don’t have a theory as to why this is other than to say that it is evolutionary and that such behaviors are observable and recognizable in other mammals as well. Females nest and arrange for the conflict free home, and will pick over the details endlessly. Males hunt and having won a conflict to the death will plop down the meal anywhere, end of story.

In that context of nature vs nurture, I say it’s both, but evolution has a much deeper influence - millions of years vs a few years of graduate studies and social conditioning.

We could debate this endlessly, or you and I can take it outside.

What is the Role of Reason in Society?

Reason is a discipline of mind that allows people to generate knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff through which one may navigate cleverly to gain an advantage in life. The beasts don't have much knowledge. In our IDW discussion this past weekend, that got a little out of hand, our band of prickly interlocutors tried to get going on this subject. I don't think much was resolved, as a great deal of the talk got tangential to Jordan Peterson and to matters of faith. But what emerged to my surprise was a bit of bonding in the afterparty which came after the Fall.

Just after 7pm as a subgroup of the main decided on where to eat dinner the five of us headed down to the parking structure. Now at this point, to be fair, I suppose I need to start using pseuds, because basically none of these are public figures. I found them, they're my associates. Find your own. The first guy I'm going to mention is Brother. It's probably not fair that I call him Brother, but I do find myself in agreement with his empiricals and his description of the hard knock life. What many of you know about me is that I am the oldest of 4 boys and grew up in a roughneck neighborhood. I was somewhere along a third axis between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and as a young boy very much likely to get into the same kind of mischief and shenanigans, some of which involved cursing, smoking, fighting and wandering far from home. Brother understands a hierarchy of force escalation that I appreciate, as well as a respect for the eternal reasons to cool your own jets, without which one may become very quickly an agent of chaos. Brother and I agreed to carpool to the restaurant.

On our way down the single functioning escalator to the parking structure, our way was blocked by two way traffic and an 89 year old woman who faceplanted on the cold hard steel stairs. We observed momentarily a sea of frozen faces. If they hadn't been in close proximity to the poor old lady in age, I'm sure a dozen smartphones would have been in evidence. As two or three of us snapped to attention and pulled her to her feet and then to a 2/3s chair carry, the stairs were cleared. We sat her down on the large landing one level down. Her face was a bloody mess, but her hips and legs were intact and she was conscious. I immediately ran down the next flight to get my first aid kit from the truck. I had several triangle bandages, and no sterile wipes. I guess I never thought about injuries to the face so it made my ample saline wash useless. There were three lacerations on her forehead that were clearly from the familiar steel pattern of escalator stairs and blood saturated her auburn bangs. There was also blood in her ears, but I quickly assessed that it must have dripped down there. After we got her wiped up a bit and bandaged she was holding the left front of her mouth. She may have lost or chipped a tooth as well. The paramedics arrived about 20 minutes into our impromptu rescue, and we finally scurried off. We got beaming faces and kind words. My heart rate was up to 137, but my hands were steady.

Brother explained as we were washing our hands clear of blood, him much more than me, that we understand something about seeing people hurt. I have since gone through a short inventory of my own bloody scrapes, but from the point of view of whether or not I was fighting for myself or fighting for somebody else. It occurred to me that I have never lost a fight. I certainly lost what, if it were scored like a boxing match, was an ugly fight. But it wasn't a TKO. I guess that means I can take a beating and not quit. Sounds like stupid me. Funny as I write this I think of three other fights I got into, one of which I declined. That was John from Fedco whom I let ride my motorcycle which he promptly laid down within 20 minutes of begging me to let him ride. He said he'd understand if I wanted to punch him in the face (just once) but.. It was an effective enough apology. But I can't remember his last name. Brother reminded me of chivalry. I know he'd have my back in a fight.

At dinner, neither of us said much more about the Fall, but we both said that there is something we owe to bullies. I reiterated the gist of this 'On the Necessity of Knuckleheads'. (Wow, 2004 was a different era of my writing). And that trip down memory lane was abstracted a bit. While I was mostly interested in listening to my new associates, in the back of my head was something I recently said about the logic of violence, something I could not articulate well at all before my martial education but knew implicitly. I think the first time I talked about it was in the mid 80s during the gang wars of Southern California. I remember the movie 'Colors', and I remember saying "There is no such thing as senseless violence." People always have good reasons to squabble, because only psychopaths squabble spontaneously.

As many subjects as we covered through the course of the afternoon and evening, it is the matter of the rationality of conflict that touches closer to my current self. I think it is directly related to the reason each of us who did were comfortable dealing with the bloodied matron. We understand the logic and the rationality of violence. Brother paraphrased a meme which we probably both saw over the past week. "Those who are not capable of violence are not peaceful. Only those who are capable of violence can be peaceful, the others are harmless." And that's my paraphrasing. One must fight for a better peace. That too is rational. It is that rationality that tends to make me believe that Steven Pinker is rather smarmy in his predictions. Like many men who have not learned the hard way, long hair is an easily exploitable weakness. In male company (sometimes) I refer to man buns as a 'bitch handle'.

I struggle to come up with the appropriate handle for our fearless leader, but I am confident that he understands something about the rationality of the warrior spirit. Yet I wonder aloud whether or not such a spirit should be outsourced from society as it is today in our volunteer armies and our combat sports. When I'm in Texas I don't have such concerns, then again I haven't been outside of Las Colinas or Plano for some time now. We Americans are hung up and confused about gender, and many of us men are as well. It's a shame. We don't have very good arts to communicate the virtues of reason, courage, honor and toughness. We pretend to know what we need from our pop culture. Yet when we are faced with sudden violence, even the violence of gravity, most of us freeze. Some of us run towards the trouble. Learning how to survive trouble the hard way is not necessarily a blessing in disguise. Many a hard man has been laid low in our society by perfidious answers to "Or else what?". Beware the vengeance of politics and the force of lawsuits. It's getting easier to punk people via keyboard these days. But what kind of real man doxxes?

There is reason in violence because there are reasons for violence, most of which we don't bother to study or understand. And such ignorance is incapable of navigating cleverly through that knowledge. So it's no surprise that a great deal of mouthing off posing as intelligence is nothing more than propaganda which can often only be unlearned the hard way. Too many Americans are incapable of being peaceful. The have got a lot to learn. Especially those who claim to be innocent of aggression, but call for Leviathan forces in their attempts to turn the tides of history, remake the meaning of culture and manipulate the climate of the entire planet.

At length I am drawn to consider our common sense understanding of violence vis a vis liberty. It goes a little something like this: "Your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose." Yet one of the reasons I have a category in this blog called 'A punch in the nose' is because I would much rather suffer a bloody nose than get hounded out of a job by cancel culture fanatics. What offends me a great deal is how a large contingent of wrong-thinkers, by Jonathan Haidt's definitions, are willing to stand 'in solidarity' with certain victims and support their violent acts.

Hardly any students say that they themselves would use violence to shut down a speech, but two surveys conducted in late 2017 found that substantial minorities of students (20% in one survey and 30% in the other) said it was sometimes “acceptable” for other students to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking on campus.

Is that the effective courage of one's convictions, or is that more like being a football fan? I think it's cheerleading for bullies, but only because most college campus speakers woudn't dare to ask a protester to take it outside. There's a time and a place for roughhousing. If you ask me, there is a very good reason 2019 is nothing like 1967 when there were over 150 violent race riots in America. Racial oppression is nowhere near so violently oppressive. I don't think there was anything so intellectually profound about those riots or of any at all. People who lose their livelihoods fight back. People who are roughed up on the streets of their own neighborhoods toughen up. Human beings are naturally territorial and always will be. There are foolish and wise ways to deal with this territoriality. But a hastag mob defies all territoriality and deals vindictive virtual vigilantism. Who wouldn't face such accusers if they could? The principle of Habeas Corpus demands the face to face conflict. There is reason in this.

I say that reason is no different in the court than outside, and our liberty is fundamentally tied to and inextricable from that reason. A government of the people is granted a proxy of violence not a monopoly. The judicial system holds that proxy and the judge pronounces the coercive violence of law enforcement with a bang. The system is not a substitute for our natural rights, it is an extension made regular. Due process insures the right about of violence is administered on a consistent basis. But our systematic liberty and rights are inalienable from ourselves. So when we are faced with sudden violence we should respond justly according to our reason. The judge is not ever present. The paramedic is not ever present. If we are to be a nation of individuals, then it is our responsibility to know. It is our responsibility to use reason, generate knowledge and navigate cleverly through that knowledge - not be mere unthinking harmless beasts in the ship of state, but free men possessed of reason, toughness, courage and honor.

Will China Adapt?

Q: What is the strategy of Americans to contain Chinese influence in the world markets?

A: I think the world markets are going to teach China lessons in capitalism. I have some suspicions that China, as a command culture, will have a great deal of adjusting to do in order to succeed in various markets. After all, they are going to have to compete with the rest of us, steeped as we are in market cultures and individual choice.

That said, I’m sure that China will engage in some neo-colonial practices in emerging markets. I probably should study up on the Belt and Road program, but my bias is to believe that a country with the nerve to tell its own poor people how many children to have will take a dim view of other poor countries’ liberties. The will pay to use China’s roads or face the belt.

It has been a long time since I thought of ‘spheres of influence’ but I do believe the US and LATAM will be a great deal more impervious to China’s ambitions than countries like Thailand and Vietnam as well integrated as they are into the current world economic order.

As the US finds itself paying more attention to its own resources and supply chains, I think it is more likely that we will ultimately look at China in the way we look at Saudi Arabia. Some few powerful American concerns will make several significant deals with China for strategic purposes, but the relationship will not go much further beyond that. Americans do not perceive China as an open and free society, and we have history, Taiwan and Hong Kong to remind us of that. I thoroughly believe that America’s openness will prove to be more adaptable.

It might be corny, but the exceptional life of Bruce Lee is instructive. He found the best of Chinese traditions in martial arts to be formalistic and non-adaptive, a top down idea of mastery that constrained creativity. He had to leave to expand these ideas and so developed a superior adaptive system. This became the foundation of American MMA. Similarly, as Brazilians opened up and adapted Japanese Judo to become BJJ, a superior system evolved. Today, after fewer than 50 years, Americans and the world have learned a combat format that beats 1000 years of traditional Chinese instruction. Perhaps China may learn an economic format that beats 300 years of free market capitalism in open societies, but I very much doubt it.

 

The Bomb Drops

I put together a survey partly because it's fun and I haven't done it in a long time, and partly because I'm really not interested in people taking tangents outside of my own concerns. When it closes I will paste a link here or in the comments. The survey is all about the recent attacks on Saudi Arabian oil refineries, the extent to which is ballparked at 5% of the world's petroleum supply. That's a chunk significant enough for the President to release the taps on the US Strategic Oil Reserve. I noticed the coincidence that 4 days ago the President was shaking his fists at something related to ANWR, but I wouldn't go so far as to mumble that in front of the students. Nevertheless a small percentage of the respondents thought the US was involved in a false flag attack.

It does change my view of the Middle East. I think the Saudis have turned the corner on their vulnerability certainly with the American willingness to tell them to take a long walk off a short pier. It will be interesting to see how destabilizing this matter will be, and FWIW I might pay attention to the Yemeni war. I sense that the Iranians are getting more and more ballsy these days. I'm not sure if I care, but I'm noticing.

Just Fix The Planet

The ages have taught humanity, and we have learned well, how to deal with the consequences of our nature. And they are manifest in the stories and legends, in the fables and sacred texts, in the shared wisdom of our heritage. We know the virtues of heroism and we reward them. We know the vices of villainy and we punish them. When we pay respect to the wisdom of the ages we can expect justice and social amity, but this is not what we pay attention to in our contemporary American society.

 

What we pay attention to is the monetization of every possible aggregation of interest with nihilistic abandon. We say that infinite freedom exists and that we can be free of judgment. We say that anything goes because everything can be socialized into normalcy and we say that nothing outside of our experience need concern us because there is no standard against which we must conform.

 

So our self-discipline is narrowed to those few things we have decided to be in our individual interests. We pursue our passions. We champion our favorite pet charity or marginalized group. We sell propaganda for our favorite political provocateur or interest group. We consume our favorite flavors.

 

We ignore the commons. We ignore wisdom. We feel something is wrong. We blame others. We expect disaster. We watch zombie movies. We anticipate a great famine, a global holocaust, a Biblical reckoning. We panic and strive to get our last licks in, to cash in while there's still cash to cache. We are thoughtless, juvenile herds, like a swam of seagulls picking through a garbage heap with no higher self-regard than is absolutely necessary in our endless scrapping for scraps. The best thing we can hope to be is a sentimental favorite victim. Oh look at how I suffer. Squawk! Squawk! Where is my piece of this pile of garbage? Squawk!

 

Is it any wonder we kill ourselves? We have engineered our psyches into engines of self-destruction. We rightly hate what we have become, and yet we refuse to give up the game we have been convinced is the only game in town. Because everybody we know is playing, and so what about history? History is a story of oppression, and suffering we say. And so we have been convinced that our material affluence and comfort demand that we follow an arrow of behaviors that inevitably tell us to abandon the very idea of having many children. This is the way of prosperity, we tell ourselves. This is the way of maximizing individual freedom. This is the way of avoiding pain and suffering. And yet we still want to be rock stars, validated by the millions and under no obligations to something so pedestrian as a family, a religion, a nation. With no need to conform to any convention of chastity, of sobriety, or reserve our mantra instead is the direct opposite. Sex! Drugs! Rock & Roll!. We smash our guitars. We get smashed. We leap into the air and expect the adulation of the millions will bear us up. We sing our desperate songs of self to a million other selves who stare up at images of us in our lonely, adolescent cells. We feel stupid, and contagious, here we are now, entertain us. The game of life is hard to play, we're going to lose it anyway. Suicide is painless.

 

But it's not us. It's the guns. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's the opioids. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's the immigrants. Just change that part of the planet and we can go on doing what we want. It's not us. It's ChickFilA, it's the people who eat meat. It's the people who don't sex like we do. It's not us. JUST FIX THE PLANET.

 

Who is going to give us the power to fix the planet? Because it's not us.

Obligatory Seriousness on the Return of Dave Chappelle

Somebody told me that Chappelle is like Pryor. I disagree that Chappelle is like Pryor. I think he's more like Carlin. He's focused on observing the contradictory stuff that people do. DC is very precise with his words, but he does it with subtlety. In a way, he's like Lewis Black. Kind of like, you know where I'm coming from audience. But Chappelle messes with his audience too, because you can't escape his observations. He's like an inner conscience that we have but don't listen to, but most importantly, DC is unleashed.

He's rich. He ended his career. He didn't need the work. He's like the resurrected Christ. Dude, I already died. I'm still funny. I'm still telling the truth. Sorry not sorry. He's not pretending. He goes there. He has got nothing to prove. He can just be Dave. I think he will survive it. And I think like nobody else alive except for Seinfeld, he will have his full, undamaged confident self years from now. I don't think he can be hurt because he's living in truth. All he has to do is walk his straight line and the world will provide the funny. He's just the dude to say it out loud.

Now that Eddie Murphy is coming back, I'm really curious to see what Eddie will do. I can see that he is much more serious. Also Dave Attell and Jeff Ross are the bomb.

I don't know. I think right now Dave Chappelle is the Doctor Manhattan of comedy. He's just out there completely naked and still you look him in the eyes, and you are in awe of his power and you desperately hope he cares about humanity.

Watching Sticks & Stones was brilliant but now more than ever it makes sense to watch his other new releases, which I just did, especially the one recorded in LA where he's super intimate smoking a cigarette on stage. Which, when you think about it, is against the stupid law. So I have to tell my Dave Cheppelle story.

About 25 years ago I was hanging out in midtown Manhattan at the Houlihan's at 42nd and Lex. It was happy hour aka time for Dancing in Suits. It was that night that I hung out in the foyer with a man I am convinced was Dave Chappelle. It was one of the funniest times in my life, and I regret never going to hang out with him and see his show. This was the same time when Ray Romano was just getting started. So I did, within the short time frame, go to that comedy club in the Village. Romano's best joke was a bit about his prediction about people getting implants from their cell phones in which the punchline involved somebody getting a fax out of their ass. But I missed Chappelle's show. Nevertheless, we sat there in the foyer of Houlihan's for about an hour just ragging on people who came through the front door. We were cracking each other up. It was that memorable. 

I often think about that evening. Now I think about how it was that I almost became the class clown, how my insult humor was devastating back in middle school and how I was almost ready to fight to become class clown. I touch of that came out when I watched Dave do a bit of ragging on the dude from Brooklyn in the tracksuit. How hard you can be and not really mean anything by it. And I see how comfortable he is doing just that. Sitting down smoking a cigarette and busting on people. "I say a lot of mean things." He said. Because everything's funny until it happens to you. 

At the same time DC does something that I've only seen in Eddie and in Michael Jackson which is to be so bloody talented that they appear to be approachable. But I'm watching and thinking, damn it would be fun to hang out with Dave again, knowing I'm never going to get that chance. I'd done so with Reynaldo Rey. We hung out and had a hilarious time. I've done so with Paul Mooney, who is a friend of one of my NY cousins. I even met Dave's brother once. And it's weird because I also want to hang out with Neal Brennan. There's almost no other entertainer of any sort that I think it would be cool to hang with - although I haven't thought about it in a very long time. You see, I'm loving what comedians are saying today. They are the necessary jesters in a mad mad world. 

If I had to do it. And desperation might get me there. I would do a little clown makeup and perform a sit down comedy act. It would be like a combination of Spaulding Grey, Joe Frank .. but let me shutup. 

Free Speech, Coercion & the Business of the People

I had something of a difficult conversation the other day with one of my friends from the Breakfast Club. I introduced him, rather clumsily, to the Intellectual Dark Web, which he immediately conflated with the Dark Web, meaning probably 4chan or 8chan. I asked if he had ever heard of Jordan Peterson. He said no. I asked him if he had ever heard of Jonathan Haidt and he hadn't. Nor was he familiar with Quillette or the events at Evergreen State College. I was at something of a loss, halfway through my oatmeal, to describe the state of affairs. 

We talked about free speech and theatre fires, white supremacy and punching Nazis none of which was effective. I feared that he sensed something in me that was wrong, that fell afoul of his best hopes. I'm not sure that I could resolve that in the few minutes we had. The key about the IDW was the story I told about the No Whites Allowed Day at Evergreen State and how Bret Weinstein was run off campus. (I forgot that his wife was too). He was sure that this was an isolated incident signifying nothing. I asked if every client was able to use a similar tactic to get their attorneys disbarred what would become of our legal system. But he was clearly too clever to take the import of my meaning. It's a problem I have arguing with lawyers. They never take my intellectual gist, instead the deal squarely with the words I awkwardly utter, which they should. So perhaps this essay is my second chance. I must admit that without any context of the pitchforks aimed at Peterson and the alt-right, I couldn't expect him to get my gist, so I let it go.

In the end it's not the IDW that I care about so very much as it would be the effect of what they might do, and in that we agreed, finally. Reduce the money in politics. I would go a step further and say reduce the aegis of electoral politics. In my improved America, the Judiciary has a bit more authority, the Congress has a lot less to do, and the Executive Branch presides over a much smaller federal bureaucracy. Quite frankly, I like the idea of the separation between the CIA and the FBI, MI5 and MI6. Let one agency deal with the outside world, and one with the inside world. Let the Presidency deal more with the CIA and less with the FBI. I express it thus: 'Decentralize until it hurts, then centralize until it works'. He immediately understands that I want Utah to be Utah. Good. 

But what I really want is marginal legislation, and a marginal area in which populist politics can operate. I don't think there's a lot of new law we need. Not that I am gung ho for deregulation. I simply believe our ability to generate rules and bureaucracy exceeds our ability to deal constructively with actual change. In other words, the end effect of proper legislation and law enforcement in Congress makes our government more accountable to less reality. It's reductive. From the perspective of those who stand on their hind legs and squawk "There oughta be a law", the successful passing of a legalistic framework over an additional patch of human or organizational behavior is a win for the team. But this is generals fighting the last war. The playing field has shifted. What's really going on is that they have put signs, ropes and a dirt path into a new area of the jungle of human behavior, but the new legal map is not the territory. It just gives the illusion of control. People skip through those ropes all the time and quickly move into the unseen forest. And yet the legal fiction expands the definition of 'forest' to include half the planet of which only a fraction is navigable and policed. Practically speaking, Elizabeth Warren wants to decapitate Facebook and Google, but she understands nothing about the open source software she wants to disable. The law is not fast enough but the spirit of the law is too broad to ever be responsible. The law just captures the jungle path. 

I want society to manage society. I want a society permeated by reason in which the coercion of law is applied minimally and consistently at the margins. I don't want the ideas of culture warriors codified, because laws are hard to ratchet back. If the spirit of the law dominates the spirits of society, we become brittle. When the coercion of law replaces the persuasion of culture, we destroy our democratic experiment. No less than that is at stake. Law enforcement always entails violence. We will become more violent with each other if we try to empower politics over the rules of society. So the failures of the hierarchies of social reward and punishment are what get my attention. When the illogic of aggrieved freshmen can destroy the logic and careers of tenured professors, universities cease to be what they should be, and instead become political battlegrounds. I see more and more of America becoming political battlegrounds in the context where politicians say "Vote for me and I will change the climate." This is the Leviathan of our liberty's destruction.

The business of the people is simple. It is nothing more than the maintenance of a walled garden. We understand the difference between flowers and weeds, but we have let it run to ruin distracted as we are in our attempts to perfect 'equality' and 'save the planet'. The hubris of our political rhetoric has justified in many minds the purposes of flamethrowers and salt for our own front yard. That is the temperature of our screaming. The people don't seem to realize that society cannot be politically weaponized without grave consequences. I must again emphasize the Abstention Principle.

A simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.

Yet here I stand with modest, even minimal, political ambition. I write essays. I do not need a bully pulpit, and yet this is what people want to elect, a spiritual, cultural leader for America placed into the Oval Office, tweeting out the right words. I fear the man with the charismatic smile and silver tongue who captures this sick infatuation. So my interest in politics is about the business of the people. The Commons. Right now the Commons is 'the comments section' and that is a dumpster fire of illogic and emotion. I am not afraid of those who speak loudly, nor if they mumble. My concern is with what policed, flattened shortcuts through the jungle of life are promised by those who run the engines of our democracy. 

The Logos Project

For about 20 years I have been saying that I have 2 or 3 original ideas. Today I'm going to share them in one giant tarball. I'm going to call it the Logos Project. The reason I'm calling it the Logos Project is because of Jordan Peterson's big book Maps of Meaning. It was a very rambly book but it was one that lay behind all of my most profound interests. In one way you could say it represented a reconciliation between faith and reason, which is ultimately the combination of religion and science. What could be more fundamental to the prospects of Western civilization? The one Bible piece I've been able to quote was the beginning of the Book of John. In the beginning was the word. And it seems that many of us have abandoned the word, and that needs to be addressed. Social media falls short. We need to build logical media. We need to transform our computer mediated communications into something that serves the purpose of social maintenance of the commons. This is a management problem which is poorly served by the faint number of actions that social media spaces allow us to perform. We are trapped in Twitter because of what Twitter is, and because we have given it over to the builders of Twitter to be the masters of Twitter, Twitter doesn't belong to the people. Anyway, there are a lot of problems like this and the aim of the Logos Project is to solve each and every one of them.

 

This is something I'm ready to contribute to for the rest of my career. And at this moment I am particularly excited about the Intellectual Dark Web, in that they are finally doing what I've been hoping would be done. Of course I've been creating all kinds of content but I couldn't quit my day job. Now is about that time to see if I can integrate all I've been building and thinking into something both concrete and sticky. I'm sure I'll need others to help me pour the concrete, and this teaser is the sticky part. So please do check it out and put in your comments and criticism.