Honestly, lose that friend. These are moral inquisitors on a trip. They like to tell others what they should do in their bedroom, and how they should love. I am not straight, and I was born not long after WWII. I remember the time when in my country, and in yours as well, many forms of sex between consensual adults were a crime, punishable with prison. There is no difference between your friend and the gay-bashing folks who ostracised homosexuals and strived to have them lose their jobs. There is no difference between her and the witch hunters of Salem. They all want to impose their individual morality, on private feelings and acts, upon others.
Well done. You touch on it a little but has anyone written anything on those who went heterodox and received so much positive attention from the other side that they seemingly switched views?
I’ve read a few pieces on this, and they always bother me.
“This person used to be sensible, but he spent too much time online / got captured / got too angry, and now he’s spouting terrible views. It’s so sad. All heterodox thinkers need to make sure we don’t become this guy.”
It’s not that I agree with the people often cited as heterodox people who went off the deep end, but maybe they’re just conservative? Maybe they have legitimately changed their views.
If someone comes to the left, we think “Good, he gets it now.” But if someone becomes more conservative it must be a sign that he’s captured or crazy or rabid with rage.
We don’t own “heterodox” thinkers and it’s okay to just say “I disagree with his current views.”
Most of this comes down to making excuses for Team D.
Note how the election of Obama neutered the antiwar movement better than anything Bush/Cheney ever could have done, and the election of Trump (who made some sensible noises before he got elected, along with a lot of asinine noises) turned goodthink liberals into rabid supporters of Muh National Security State.
Trumpism also allowed a lot of big-shot neocons from the Bush II administration to basically launder their Iraq war reputations by joining The Resistance to great applause. Like, it was *so* *brave* for all those lying warmongers to grow a conscience because the President lied about the size of his dick on TV.
There's also been a sort of contrapositive version of OP's contention in effect. Some of the usually skeptical MSM have praised neo-con riff raff like John Bolton and even Darth Cheney just because they were 'principled enough' to criticize Trump. Just no, guys.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t surprised by the previous post and I’ve found you to be quite consistent in where you stand on things. I do read you precisely because your point of view is quite different from
mine in a number of respects, which is useful in more ways than one, including when we do agree as you often bring a different perspective to a similar conclusion. I don’t hate America, but I do think your criticism of its foreign policy has a lot of merit, and in my view the tendency to avoid unpleasant (and let’s just say it, immoral) realities is a far bigger problem than some kind of rampant America-hating (if indeed the latter is a problem to begin with). My ideal in this regard follows Rorty, even if I can’t say I am successful in following it https://adamgurri.com/2019/06/30/the-project-of-a-nation/
Adam, thanks so much for not only this thoughtful comment, but also for the links to your own work. What a useful and engaging extension of the conversation initiated by Freddie.
I would go further and say that even when you have the best, most principled people imaginable at the helm, the very existence of power of this kind results in a lot of immorality and brutality in its exercise
Of course, as anything other than omniscience and omnipotence will require compromises and tough choices. And even then there is the problem of succession.
I came here to mention Rorty if no one else had. Highly recommend 'Achieving Our Country' for those who haven't read/are unfamiliar -- its a very accessible read (originally delivered as lectures [in 1998!], so the prose isn't too tortured) from a dyed in the wool leftist (and card-carrying postmodernist to boot).
"The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.
...
This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country.
Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list--endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets--might revitalize leftist politics."
I would love to see the bona fide Left coalesce around at least a core "charter" of this kind, instead of giving so much oxygen to arguments over "whether CRT is really taught in schools" which is easily co-opted by a mendacious Right and sets fire to social and political capital.
I've thought about this quite a bit too. Will Heterdox ultimately fall into the same traps as every other political tribe?
Blocked and Reported has mostly been pretty good about avoiding this, but I can't tell you guys how many times I've joined a group going "Finally! Nice to have fellow liberals push back on this Woke shit too!".... only to watch helplessly as that group goes further and further off the deep end to the point where they're indistinguishable from Fox News. It sucks.
B&R does tend to be pretty good about this. They've definitely had a few episodes that were heterodox to the heterodox. I also give them a lot of credit for having an episode just before the 2020 election pushing the thesis that "While there are things to complain about about the left, Trump is really bad and you should vote for Biden."
I would have to completely disagree. Trump's rhetoric was off the charts but that's all it was: rhetoric. In terms of actual governance his administration was a staid affair.
And in terms of metrics how has the Biden administration turned out? The economy: Trump somehow managed low unemployment without runaway inflation and the threat of a severe recession. Crime: obviously much lower under Trump. Immigration: ask Eric Adams and Lori Loughlin. Covid: about twice as many Americans have died under Biden than Trump, despite the availability of vaccines.
Their irritation with the very real excesses of trans ideology is leading them to become damn close to single-issue gender-crit weirdos, though. I can't say I blame Freddie for nixing that topic here (hope I'm not violating it here), because it sucks all of the oxygen out of the room and leads otherwise-reasonable people to some pretty unreasonable conclusions.
"The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing, a character you'll eventually tire of."
There's an up side to audience capture, though. I used to follow a blogger who had a large number of people who disagreed with their ideology, and ran a vibrant comments section in which they all debated the topics. For reasons I won't go into, this blogger lost the comments section, and within about 6 months I stopped following the blog because its posts had become so extreme and lost much of its thoughtful character.
Online, as in meatspace, we need to treasure the people who thoughtfully challenge us. They make us better.
The comments section at Rod Dreher's blog wasn't a place of robust debate, even before AmCon required posters to be subscribers, but mostly just self-reinforcing prejudice or, at most, movement to a different part of the right-wing spectrum.
Is the discord server more of the same? I keep hearing complaints that they're stifling conversations about LGBTQ issues (which is odd since that's about half of Rod posts these days).
I don't know - I think B&R is undergoing an ideological capture of it's own, just not by the "Intellectual Dark Web", but rather by the whole gender-critical/radical feminist milieu. They're even quite chummy with Julie Bindel, who's a person with an absolutely horrible history. My jaw kind of dropped when I heard Katie say that she didn't think Bindel was transphobic. Her ideology is the very epitome of "trans-exclusionary radical feminism"! More generally, I've been quite disgusted at how much the "centrist space" has been all-in on Louise Perry's radically sex-negative feminism. Honestly, those things are kind of deal-killers for me and I don't know how much longer I'm going to stay subbed to some of those podcasts.
Love it! It's easy for me, a Canadian, to indict the US for its sickening "foreign policy" actions; where I'm from, it's basically a tradition. It's harder, and more laudable, to do it as an American citizen--particularly one who's carved out a niche in the anti-woke set. Also very useful to construct the indictment as a list of common would-be excuses for the government's atrocities.
We've gotten our hands dirty, as you put it, in the Balkans, in Somalia, in Afghanistan... I didn't at all mean to place Canada out of consideration when it comes to this kind of guilt; its government has its own instances of disgrace. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
I'm definitely not a pacifist, and I didn't include WWII because the general discussion seems to be primarily about Cold War and post-Cold War actions. I think a case for Canadian participation in the Balkan conflict could be defended; Afghanistan was a sick farce, in my opinion; as for Somalia, two words: Airborne Regiment. For the most part, I don't think American military decisions in the postwar years have been "tough," if by that you mean they were arrived at with scrupulous and difficult moral consideration by those in power.
And of course living in a multicultural liberal democracy is inherently uncomfortable. The word "tolerance" itself implies a kind of grudging acceptance. You tolerate the KKK and BLM because in a diverse society it goes without saying that there will be extremist groups that you find to be personally objectionable.
I feel like this issue may be more tricky than you consider here. I value independent thinking, but I also value "good" thinking.
My particular "red line" is COVID conspiracies. If you go down the Bret Weinstein route, if you are going to start spouting things about how COVID is really caused by lack of Vitamin D from lock downs, or that the Vaccine is part of some government conspiracy, it is going to raise serious questions in my mind about your ability to think about things and make me question whether you are really worth listening to on other topics. The alternative is Gell-Mann Amnesia.
This doesn't mean that I will reject everyone any time I find that I disagree with them on a particular topic. I'm very much not a socialist, let alone a Marxist. However, I don't find that your views on Marxism (or American Patriotism) are evidence that you are bad at processing information, just that we have different world views and have come to different conclusions based upon the available evidence.
There are also situations where I might see that someone is wrong on a topic, but I've seen them be right on enough other things, that I can remain reasonably confident that whatever is causing them to be wrong on that topic doesn't seem to span domains. If so, I may continue to be interested in listening to them on other topics, even if my degree of skepticism on those other topics may have increased somewhat.
Everyone has to make judgment calls in these situations. My point is that to embrace independence and free thinking should tend to make people expand the range of opinions that they'll consider. And when I write about foreign policy here I get such knee-jerk invective about it that I don't think people are considering much at all.
Fair enough. I will certainly grant you that there seems to be a particular world view where "independent thinking" is effectively its own dogma, for which deviations can get you excommunicated.
What range of opinion from readers do you consider--especially with regards to foreign policy? Or is the embrace of independence and free thinking a one-way street?
Part of what makes this difficult is that many independent writers just have bottom of the barrel audiences. Then we judge the writer from their followers. For example, I don't agree with Brett on much, but I occasionally check in with him, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe what you claimed. But some of his audience surely does, and worse.
And only because Freddie brought it up in the article, I'm uncomfortable that being specifically against the covid vaccine now means anti-vaxxer. Brett has had considerably more vaccines than almost anyone else and considers them one of humanities great achievements.
Our "good thinking" needs to remain valued when talking about people we disagree with.
I agree; this is why I struggle to read The Free Press since they're constantly signal-boosting people like Weinstein, Vinay Prasad and Jay Bhattacharya. I don't begrudge FDB contributing to them and I don't think that a lot of the folks on that site are wrong about everything, but as long as authors like them keep bringing up "draconian Covid measures" despite the lack of a "lockdown" anywhere in the U.S. for years at this point I'm not going to subscribe there and I definitely look at everything else on that site with a jaundiced perspective.
The issue isn't whether there have been any recent lockdowns, the issue is whether any lockdown at any point in time was every justified. The Swedish example suggests that the answer is probably no.
Bari Weiss definitely has hit my threshold for taking enough positions that I think are dubious that I don't find it useful to listen to her. Note that this doesn't mean that all of her arguments are wrong, just that I don't have enough faith in her to get things right that it is worth reading or relying upon her.
The final straw for me on Weinstein and his podcast/Youtube channel when I noticed his moderation team (whoever they may be) faving/liking/boosting the most obnoxious cult-like comments about how everyone else are sheep, how the whole world is filled with conspiracies, that Weinstein and his fans were the only vanguard against encroaching evil, etc etc. It really undercut the pretension that they were fostering independent thought.
The Free Press seems to be trending a bit too right but it's still mostly fine. Their comment sections though look like they were transplanted from Fox news. The Free Press looks like it's in serious danger of audience capture.
Isn't this a straw man? Does Weinstein actually believe that the vaccines are a government conspiracy rather than just plain old irrationality and group think?
It's not a strawman because I'm not really making an argument regarding Weinstein's positions, I'm just using him as an example of someone who has struck me as wrong enough on a particular issue that I have no faith in his position on on any issue. I will admit that my exposure to his views is relatively limited - basically I listened to an interview with him and his wife by Meghan Daum on her Unspeakable podcast, and have occasionally heard other people discuss his positions - but what I heard from him hit my limit. I don't recall if he was actually claiming a conspiracy, but his position regarding Vitamin D, and my general impression of his other claims (which I no longer specifically recall) that I reached the conclusion that this guy had gone far enough down the IDW rabbit hole that he was no longer a reliable source on anything.
Einstein was wrong, badly wrong, in quantum mechanics. The standard that a human being is trustworthy only if they never make a mistake is a badly flawed one in my opinion.
Consider news organizations. The NY Times, WaPo, WSJ--all of them have had to retract articles. Does that mean everything they publish going forward is automatically didqualified?
It is true that everyone is occasionally wrong about something. However, sometimes it appears that someone is wrong in a way that suggests their general way off thinking or gathering information is flawed. When this is the case, you really can't trust them on anything.
What, you don't know the specifics of how he was wrong on quantum mechanics? But didn't you also just admit that you can't remember the specifics of how Weinstein was wrong in your opinion?
I know roughly why Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics - he didn't believe there could be true randomness. But that's kind of irrelevant to this because A) I don't know enough about this for this to trigger my thinking that Einstein was generally not a reliable source; and B) I rarely listen to Einstein about anything - most of what I'm hearing about Einstein's thoughts are mediated by someone else.
With respect to Weinstein, like I said, I'm not actually making any arguments regarding his position, I'm arguing that, sometimes, there are people who are wrong in a particular way that makes you no longer trust them as a source on anything. I'm using Weinstein as an example of this, in part because FdB referenced him in his article and because he is, in fact, such a person for me. I don't actually have to remember why I came to this conclusion about him, I just have to remember that I have placed him in this category (but like I said, his thoughts on Vitamin D were probably enough for me). If he hasn't hit that threshold for you, I'm not trying to convince you here (although I would suggest you think about it in the case of Weinstein).
It matters why someone was wrong. Einstein was wrong about some aspects of quantum mechanics but nonetheless made important contributions to it (photoelectric effect, Bose–Einstein condensate, even the EPR paradox was a contribution, in hind-sight).
Weinstein and Heying have no such track record of being right on COVID-19 and their stances essentially come from absurd starting points that are essentially conspiratorial (e.g., big pharma and government are working against you).
The pharmaceutical companies have received billions in government funding and stand to make billions more from vaccination. To imagine that there is not a financial motive here given the quantities involved in naive.
In addition there are any number of prominent pediatricians/medical professionals/etc. who are pointing out that vaccination of anybody young enough to be in the public school system is unwarranted. Providing examples is a trivial exercise in consulting Google. What then is the justification for attempting to mandate vaccination for anyone under 18 when the risk from Covid is essentially indistinguishable from seasonal influenza?
`To imagine that there is not a financial motive here given the quantities involved in naive.'
Of course the pharmaceutical industry has too much power over our government. But independent scientists have looked at the data from trials, both lab and natural, and concluded, overwhelmingly, that vaccines are incredibly safe.
`there are any number of'
There are many, many more numbers of prominent `pediatricians/medical professionals/etc.' who point out that vaccination for everyone is the best course of action.
I think the core issue is that ultimately it is up to an individual to open him or herself up to other viewpoints, even those with which they disagree, while still maintaining sufficient mastery of the self to see value in that person's thoughts and views. It's rare for a well-thought out perspective to have absolutely nothing of value to it. I actually enjoyed Freddie's Thanksgiving post even if I disagreed with it. After all, what's more American than having someone play the gadfly or turd in the punch bowl at the holidays?
My only real disagreement with FdB in this piece is that America has been uniquely bad in character, when I think the more accurate way to look at it is that we have been uniquely powerful in some very consequential ways. We aren't as special as being uniquely bad would grant us, but we are maybe more unique in that our system allows us the ability to do things about our misdeeds, and prevent future misdeeds, should we care to. And that's why it's important to keep talking about them.
Really if I had to give him crap about anything it would he unreconstructed Marxism, a philosophy designed to address 19th century problems, as a solution to 21st century challenges. But then all the more reason to read him. No one comes away stupider from any of the posts here, which I think is the best compliment one can give any writer.
"We have been uniquely powerful in some very consequential ways" is actually a crucial component of my main go-to defense of the US's bloody history, one that I waited to see show up among the fallacious defenses listed in the second half of this article (but didn't). I don't have time to figure out how to fully lay out the argument by now, but it's something along the lines of "when one entity has absurdly more power than others, it changes the way we should measure the rightness and wrongness of its actions in order to judge how much we admire or hate it; because of human nature, more powerful entities will always to some extent seek to use their power in dominating ways; this is true in theory of many much existing smaller countries as well." That does not mean that my opinion of the US is an outright positive one unaffected by its horrible trail of crimes.
There is IMO a very lazy critique of the US that implicitly treats the country as being the only one with any agency, acting in a total void of external facts and circumstances (I believe Freddie has criticized that thinking as well). To me the primary failure, among a number, is a perversion of the 'with great power comes great responsibility' maxim. Too many people in the US and in US foreign policy interpret that as a mandate to intervene, and into an ends justify the means kind of philosophy, which is then of course cynically ridden by profiteers and various private and public interests. If our heads were on straight we would be interpreting it the opposite way, that because of our power we need to be more careful than others, and maybe even more selfless in light of how much we have. It's legitimately a lot to ask but doing the right thing is often by definition not easy.
"because of our power we need to be more careful than others"
Of course that's what our mindset *should* be, but I'm pretty sure that's not how humans or human-based entities have ever tended to handle power, especially when it comes in absurdly disproportional amounts.
I've strongly agreed with Freddie's writing on how other countries need to be treated as if they have agency, because they do, but I thought that came with examples showing where the other countries with no small amount of agency often have wielded it in horrible ways.
After the fall of the Soviet Union George Kennan warned against pushing NATO right up to the border of Russia. Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously said that the the United States should behave like "just any other nation" or words to that effect, meaning that the US should keep its foreign policy circumspect and cautious.
Instead the establishment bought into the idea of "the end of history" and set out to change the world. The results are a Russian invasion of Ukraine, a new cold war conflict that sees the West aligned against Russia/China/Iran while the rest of the world remains studiously neutral and massive global uncertainty.
My interpretation was that she envisioned a scenario where the grander ambitions of the United States would have to be curtailed because conflict between peers inevitably provides a check on any country's foreign policy goals. Of course, the US at that time had no peers which I think was precisely Kirkpatrick's point.
I'm a Polish-born US citizen, and my family and I have a *lot* of thoughts about regional geopolitics.
Also, if Russia's goal is to limit NATO expansion, then *maybe* invading a neighbor who is not a NATO member is not a great way to demonstrate to other countries that NATO is no longer needed? Just a thought!
If you are not willing to defend Ukraine with military force using ukraine as a pawn in a game of geopolitics is morally bankrupt and criminally short sighted. The world is filled with the wreckage of "friends" the US initially toyed with and finally abandoned.
Eventually the costs of military aid to Ukraine will rise too high and the US will deliver an ultimatum: get what you can from Russia because we are cutting you off.
1. Abandon Ukraine and let them take their chances with Russia = morally abhorrent, would lead to Ukraine being conquered in short order and ordinary Ukrainians suffering terribly at the hands of their conquerors. Do not recommend.
2. Fight Russia directly = pretty much guarantees nuclear escalation, with results ranging from *merely* a few cities being destroyed to civilization-ending all-out nuclear warfare. Too horrific to contemplate. Do not recommend.
3. Provide Ukraine with weapons/supplies without fighting Russia directly = least bad of all options, gives Ukraine a fighting chance while minimizing risk of nuclear escalation. I say we stick with it.
Also, America is not using Ukraine as a "pawn," because the Ukrainians *want* our help. If Zelenskyy wanted to surrender to the Russians, he could have done that anytime.
Are you also on board with: "We aren't as special as being uniquely bad would grant us, but we are maybe more unique in that our system allows us the ability to do things about our misdeeds, and prevent future misdeeds, should we care to."
As far as most powerful empires go I don't think humans have done or can do much better than the US, even with its flaws. Paradoxically, the reason we are the most powerful and therefore necessarily the most cruel, is also the reason it's better that we're in charge.
earnest question from a new subscriber. I get some of this criticism about the modern US, what countries do you *do* like who you think are leading a different path?
To me being open minded means trying to understand ideas that aren’t your own to the point that you can explain them as if you really do believe them. This has lead me to change my opinions on big issues a few times in my life, and I’m glad it’s happened. I’m an ex-libertarian now leftist, for one. There are good arguments for all kinds of ideas and it’s healthy to get passed initial revulsion and really try to get it.
I used to follow a rationalist blog which did the 'ideological Turing test' several times. I felt at a loss because I couldn't judge the particular ideologies they chose to compare, but it was a cool idea. I'm absurdly puffed up whenever some conservative online tells me I have fairly presented their arguments.
I think it's weird on a basic level to demand that thinkers you read on the internet to believe all the same things.
We are all different with different experiences. I tend to personally believe that Marxism is an enormous, often dangerous boon-doggle that's actually just a secular reinvention of Christian eschatology.
But what's the probability that it and it's adherents have absolutely nothing to offer? Marx profoundly shaped our idea of history and inspired millions of people to turn their societies upside down in the name of justice.
Thoughtful and intelligent people still think it has a tremendous amount to offfer. I'd have to be insane to believe there was nothing there!
Great post. I think we should cultivate the opposite attitude. If I, with my divergent life experience and personality think exactly the same as someone else about everything, something is wrong.
The sweet spot is probably 40 and 18.
Honestly, lose that friend. These are moral inquisitors on a trip. They like to tell others what they should do in their bedroom, and how they should love. I am not straight, and I was born not long after WWII. I remember the time when in my country, and in yours as well, many forms of sex between consensual adults were a crime, punishable with prison. There is no difference between your friend and the gay-bashing folks who ostracised homosexuals and strived to have them lose their jobs. There is no difference between her and the witch hunters of Salem. They all want to impose their individual morality, on private feelings and acts, upon others.
Lose her.
The end with an air pocket.
Well done. You touch on it a little but has anyone written anything on those who went heterodox and received so much positive attention from the other side that they seemingly switched views?
I’ve read a few pieces on this, and they always bother me.
“This person used to be sensible, but he spent too much time online / got captured / got too angry, and now he’s spouting terrible views. It’s so sad. All heterodox thinkers need to make sure we don’t become this guy.”
It’s not that I agree with the people often cited as heterodox people who went off the deep end, but maybe they’re just conservative? Maybe they have legitimately changed their views.
If someone comes to the left, we think “Good, he gets it now.” But if someone becomes more conservative it must be a sign that he’s captured or crazy or rabid with rage.
We don’t own “heterodox” thinkers and it’s okay to just say “I disagree with his current views.”
I agree with the point. But in many cases most of their effort is spent on "look at those bad people with whom i used to agree".
The Red Scare girls lol
Doesn't it have to be a combination - positive attention from the other side *plus* negative attention from their old side?
Most of this comes down to making excuses for Team D.
Note how the election of Obama neutered the antiwar movement better than anything Bush/Cheney ever could have done, and the election of Trump (who made some sensible noises before he got elected, along with a lot of asinine noises) turned goodthink liberals into rabid supporters of Muh National Security State.
Trumpism also allowed a lot of big-shot neocons from the Bush II administration to basically launder their Iraq war reputations by joining The Resistance to great applause. Like, it was *so* *brave* for all those lying warmongers to grow a conscience because the President lied about the size of his dick on TV.
This. Note how Dick Cheney morphed from Team D Folk Devil Number One to Respected Elder Statesman overnight.
There's also been a sort of contrapositive version of OP's contention in effect. Some of the usually skeptical MSM have praised neo-con riff raff like John Bolton and even Darth Cheney just because they were 'principled enough' to criticize Trump. Just no, guys.
For what it’s worth, I wasn’t surprised by the previous post and I’ve found you to be quite consistent in where you stand on things. I do read you precisely because your point of view is quite different from
mine in a number of respects, which is useful in more ways than one, including when we do agree as you often bring a different perspective to a similar conclusion. I don’t hate America, but I do think your criticism of its foreign policy has a lot of merit, and in my view the tendency to avoid unpleasant (and let’s just say it, immoral) realities is a far bigger problem than some kind of rampant America-hating (if indeed the latter is a problem to begin with). My ideal in this regard follows Rorty, even if I can’t say I am successful in following it https://adamgurri.com/2019/06/30/the-project-of-a-nation/
Adam, thanks so much for not only this thoughtful comment, but also for the links to your own work. What a useful and engaging extension of the conversation initiated by Freddie.
Ain't a matter of hating, just noting thst power attracts sociopaths the way catnip attracts cats, the way cocaine attracts addicts.
The United States is no different.
I would go further and say that even when you have the best, most principled people imaginable at the helm, the very existence of power of this kind results in a lot of immorality and brutality in its exercise
Of course, as anything other than omniscience and omnipotence will require compromises and tough choices. And even then there is the problem of succession.
I came here to mention Rorty if no one else had. Highly recommend 'Achieving Our Country' for those who haven't read/are unfamiliar -- its a very accessible read (originally delivered as lectures [in 1998!], so the prose isn't too tortured) from a dyed in the wool leftist (and card-carrying postmodernist to boot).
(semi paywalled but some relevant excerpts are here: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/advice-for-the-left-on-achieving-a-more-perfect-union/531054/)
Relevant to the discussion here:
"The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.
...
This Left will have to stop thinking up ever more abstract and abusive names for “the system” and start trying to construct inspiring images of the country.
Only by doing so can it begin to form alliances with people outside the academy—and, specifically, with the labor unions. Outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place … Nothing would do more to resurrect the American Left than agreement on a concrete political platform, a People’s Charter, a list of specific reforms. The existence of such a list--endlessly reprinted and debated, equally familiar to professors and production workers, imprinted on the memory both of professional people and of those who clean the professionals' toilets--might revitalize leftist politics."
I would love to see the bona fide Left coalesce around at least a core "charter" of this kind, instead of giving so much oxygen to arguments over "whether CRT is really taught in schools" which is easily co-opted by a mendacious Right and sets fire to social and political capital.
Yes, but, PRONOUNS!
I've thought about this quite a bit too. Will Heterdox ultimately fall into the same traps as every other political tribe?
Blocked and Reported has mostly been pretty good about avoiding this, but I can't tell you guys how many times I've joined a group going "Finally! Nice to have fellow liberals push back on this Woke shit too!".... only to watch helplessly as that group goes further and further off the deep end to the point where they're indistinguishable from Fox News. It sucks.
B&R does tend to be pretty good about this. They've definitely had a few episodes that were heterodox to the heterodox. I also give them a lot of credit for having an episode just before the 2020 election pushing the thesis that "While there are things to complain about about the left, Trump is really bad and you should vote for Biden."
I would have to completely disagree. Trump's rhetoric was off the charts but that's all it was: rhetoric. In terms of actual governance his administration was a staid affair.
And in terms of metrics how has the Biden administration turned out? The economy: Trump somehow managed low unemployment without runaway inflation and the threat of a severe recession. Crime: obviously much lower under Trump. Immigration: ask Eric Adams and Lori Loughlin. Covid: about twice as many Americans have died under Biden than Trump, despite the availability of vaccines.
Jesse has been adamant about this for a while. Basically, you can't let your irriation with wokeness turn you into a single-issue weirdo. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-rise-of-the-anti-woke-weirdos/
Their irritation with the very real excesses of trans ideology is leading them to become damn close to single-issue gender-crit weirdos, though. I can't say I blame Freddie for nixing that topic here (hope I'm not violating it here), because it sucks all of the oxygen out of the room and leads otherwise-reasonable people to some pretty unreasonable conclusions.
I read something about this that invoked the concept of 'audience capture.' https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
money quote:
"The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity. But amid such temptations, it's worth remembering that when you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing, a character you'll eventually tire of."
There's an up side to audience capture, though. I used to follow a blogger who had a large number of people who disagreed with their ideology, and ran a vibrant comments section in which they all debated the topics. For reasons I won't go into, this blogger lost the comments section, and within about 6 months I stopped following the blog because its posts had become so extreme and lost much of its thoughtful character.
Online, as in meatspace, we need to treasure the people who thoughtfully challenge us. They make us better.
Sure was for me
The comments section at Rod Dreher's blog wasn't a place of robust debate, even before AmCon required posters to be subscribers, but mostly just self-reinforcing prejudice or, at most, movement to a different part of the right-wing spectrum.
Is the discord server more of the same? I keep hearing complaints that they're stifling conversations about LGBTQ issues (which is odd since that's about half of Rod posts these days).
I probably should have known that, but I bounce off Eric Weinstein's writing *so hard*...
I don't know - I think B&R is undergoing an ideological capture of it's own, just not by the "Intellectual Dark Web", but rather by the whole gender-critical/radical feminist milieu. They're even quite chummy with Julie Bindel, who's a person with an absolutely horrible history. My jaw kind of dropped when I heard Katie say that she didn't think Bindel was transphobic. Her ideology is the very epitome of "trans-exclusionary radical feminism"! More generally, I've been quite disgusted at how much the "centrist space" has been all-in on Louise Perry's radically sex-negative feminism. Honestly, those things are kind of deal-killers for me and I don't know how much longer I'm going to stay subbed to some of those podcasts.
Love it! It's easy for me, a Canadian, to indict the US for its sickening "foreign policy" actions; where I'm from, it's basically a tradition. It's harder, and more laudable, to do it as an American citizen--particularly one who's carved out a niche in the anti-woke set. Also very useful to construct the indictment as a list of common would-be excuses for the government's atrocities.
We've gotten our hands dirty, as you put it, in the Balkans, in Somalia, in Afghanistan... I didn't at all mean to place Canada out of consideration when it comes to this kind of guilt; its government has its own instances of disgrace. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
I'm definitely not a pacifist, and I didn't include WWII because the general discussion seems to be primarily about Cold War and post-Cold War actions. I think a case for Canadian participation in the Balkan conflict could be defended; Afghanistan was a sick farce, in my opinion; as for Somalia, two words: Airborne Regiment. For the most part, I don't think American military decisions in the postwar years have been "tough," if by that you mean they were arrived at with scrupulous and difficult moral consideration by those in power.
We don’t know how to deal with discomfort.
Ain't it the truth
And of course living in a multicultural liberal democracy is inherently uncomfortable. The word "tolerance" itself implies a kind of grudging acceptance. You tolerate the KKK and BLM because in a diverse society it goes without saying that there will be extremist groups that you find to be personally objectionable.
Well said
I feel like this issue may be more tricky than you consider here. I value independent thinking, but I also value "good" thinking.
My particular "red line" is COVID conspiracies. If you go down the Bret Weinstein route, if you are going to start spouting things about how COVID is really caused by lack of Vitamin D from lock downs, or that the Vaccine is part of some government conspiracy, it is going to raise serious questions in my mind about your ability to think about things and make me question whether you are really worth listening to on other topics. The alternative is Gell-Mann Amnesia.
This doesn't mean that I will reject everyone any time I find that I disagree with them on a particular topic. I'm very much not a socialist, let alone a Marxist. However, I don't find that your views on Marxism (or American Patriotism) are evidence that you are bad at processing information, just that we have different world views and have come to different conclusions based upon the available evidence.
There are also situations where I might see that someone is wrong on a topic, but I've seen them be right on enough other things, that I can remain reasonably confident that whatever is causing them to be wrong on that topic doesn't seem to span domains. If so, I may continue to be interested in listening to them on other topics, even if my degree of skepticism on those other topics may have increased somewhat.
Ultimately, it is a balancing test.
Everyone has to make judgment calls in these situations. My point is that to embrace independence and free thinking should tend to make people expand the range of opinions that they'll consider. And when I write about foreign policy here I get such knee-jerk invective about it that I don't think people are considering much at all.
Fair enough. I will certainly grant you that there seems to be a particular world view where "independent thinking" is effectively its own dogma, for which deviations can get you excommunicated.
What range of opinion from readers do you consider--especially with regards to foreign policy? Or is the embrace of independence and free thinking a one-way street?
Part of what makes this difficult is that many independent writers just have bottom of the barrel audiences. Then we judge the writer from their followers. For example, I don't agree with Brett on much, but I occasionally check in with him, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't believe what you claimed. But some of his audience surely does, and worse.
And only because Freddie brought it up in the article, I'm uncomfortable that being specifically against the covid vaccine now means anti-vaxxer. Brett has had considerably more vaccines than almost anyone else and considers them one of humanities great achievements.
Our "good thinking" needs to remain valued when talking about people we disagree with.
Bottom of the barrel audiences, from the basket of deplorables!
I agree; this is why I struggle to read The Free Press since they're constantly signal-boosting people like Weinstein, Vinay Prasad and Jay Bhattacharya. I don't begrudge FDB contributing to them and I don't think that a lot of the folks on that site are wrong about everything, but as long as authors like them keep bringing up "draconian Covid measures" despite the lack of a "lockdown" anywhere in the U.S. for years at this point I'm not going to subscribe there and I definitely look at everything else on that site with a jaundiced perspective.
The issue isn't whether there have been any recent lockdowns, the issue is whether any lockdown at any point in time was every justified. The Swedish example suggests that the answer is probably no.
Bari Weiss definitely has hit my threshold for taking enough positions that I think are dubious that I don't find it useful to listen to her. Note that this doesn't mean that all of her arguments are wrong, just that I don't have enough faith in her to get things right that it is worth reading or relying upon her.
The final straw for me on Weinstein and his podcast/Youtube channel when I noticed his moderation team (whoever they may be) faving/liking/boosting the most obnoxious cult-like comments about how everyone else are sheep, how the whole world is filled with conspiracies, that Weinstein and his fans were the only vanguard against encroaching evil, etc etc. It really undercut the pretension that they were fostering independent thought.
The Free Press seems to be trending a bit too right but it's still mostly fine. Their comment sections though look like they were transplanted from Fox news. The Free Press looks like it's in serious danger of audience capture.
Isn't this a straw man? Does Weinstein actually believe that the vaccines are a government conspiracy rather than just plain old irrationality and group think?
It's not a strawman because I'm not really making an argument regarding Weinstein's positions, I'm just using him as an example of someone who has struck me as wrong enough on a particular issue that I have no faith in his position on on any issue. I will admit that my exposure to his views is relatively limited - basically I listened to an interview with him and his wife by Meghan Daum on her Unspeakable podcast, and have occasionally heard other people discuss his positions - but what I heard from him hit my limit. I don't recall if he was actually claiming a conspiracy, but his position regarding Vitamin D, and my general impression of his other claims (which I no longer specifically recall) that I reached the conclusion that this guy had gone far enough down the IDW rabbit hole that he was no longer a reliable source on anything.
Einstein was wrong, badly wrong, in quantum mechanics. The standard that a human being is trustworthy only if they never make a mistake is a badly flawed one in my opinion.
Consider news organizations. The NY Times, WaPo, WSJ--all of them have had to retract articles. Does that mean everything they publish going forward is automatically didqualified?
It is true that everyone is occasionally wrong about something. However, sometimes it appears that someone is wrong in a way that suggests their general way off thinking or gathering information is flawed. When this is the case, you really can't trust them on anything.
Like Einstein?
What, you don't know the specifics of how he was wrong on quantum mechanics? But didn't you also just admit that you can't remember the specifics of how Weinstein was wrong in your opinion?
I know roughly why Einstein was wrong about quantum mechanics - he didn't believe there could be true randomness. But that's kind of irrelevant to this because A) I don't know enough about this for this to trigger my thinking that Einstein was generally not a reliable source; and B) I rarely listen to Einstein about anything - most of what I'm hearing about Einstein's thoughts are mediated by someone else.
With respect to Weinstein, like I said, I'm not actually making any arguments regarding his position, I'm arguing that, sometimes, there are people who are wrong in a particular way that makes you no longer trust them as a source on anything. I'm using Weinstein as an example of this, in part because FdB referenced him in his article and because he is, in fact, such a person for me. I don't actually have to remember why I came to this conclusion about him, I just have to remember that I have placed him in this category (but like I said, his thoughts on Vitamin D were probably enough for me). If he hasn't hit that threshold for you, I'm not trying to convince you here (although I would suggest you think about it in the case of Weinstein).
It matters why someone was wrong. Einstein was wrong about some aspects of quantum mechanics but nonetheless made important contributions to it (photoelectric effect, Bose–Einstein condensate, even the EPR paradox was a contribution, in hind-sight).
Weinstein and Heying have no such track record of being right on COVID-19 and their stances essentially come from absurd starting points that are essentially conspiratorial (e.g., big pharma and government are working against you).
The pharmaceutical companies have received billions in government funding and stand to make billions more from vaccination. To imagine that there is not a financial motive here given the quantities involved in naive.
In addition there are any number of prominent pediatricians/medical professionals/etc. who are pointing out that vaccination of anybody young enough to be in the public school system is unwarranted. Providing examples is a trivial exercise in consulting Google. What then is the justification for attempting to mandate vaccination for anyone under 18 when the risk from Covid is essentially indistinguishable from seasonal influenza?
`To imagine that there is not a financial motive here given the quantities involved in naive.'
Of course the pharmaceutical industry has too much power over our government. But independent scientists have looked at the data from trials, both lab and natural, and concluded, overwhelmingly, that vaccines are incredibly safe.
`there are any number of'
There are many, many more numbers of prominent `pediatricians/medical professionals/etc.' who point out that vaccination for everyone is the best course of action.
I think the core issue is that ultimately it is up to an individual to open him or herself up to other viewpoints, even those with which they disagree, while still maintaining sufficient mastery of the self to see value in that person's thoughts and views. It's rare for a well-thought out perspective to have absolutely nothing of value to it. I actually enjoyed Freddie's Thanksgiving post even if I disagreed with it. After all, what's more American than having someone play the gadfly or turd in the punch bowl at the holidays?
My only real disagreement with FdB in this piece is that America has been uniquely bad in character, when I think the more accurate way to look at it is that we have been uniquely powerful in some very consequential ways. We aren't as special as being uniquely bad would grant us, but we are maybe more unique in that our system allows us the ability to do things about our misdeeds, and prevent future misdeeds, should we care to. And that's why it's important to keep talking about them.
Really if I had to give him crap about anything it would he unreconstructed Marxism, a philosophy designed to address 19th century problems, as a solution to 21st century challenges. But then all the more reason to read him. No one comes away stupider from any of the posts here, which I think is the best compliment one can give any writer.
"we have been uniquely powerful in some very consequential ways."
Yes, I'm on board with that.
"We have been uniquely powerful in some very consequential ways" is actually a crucial component of my main go-to defense of the US's bloody history, one that I waited to see show up among the fallacious defenses listed in the second half of this article (but didn't). I don't have time to figure out how to fully lay out the argument by now, but it's something along the lines of "when one entity has absurdly more power than others, it changes the way we should measure the rightness and wrongness of its actions in order to judge how much we admire or hate it; because of human nature, more powerful entities will always to some extent seek to use their power in dominating ways; this is true in theory of many much existing smaller countries as well." That does not mean that my opinion of the US is an outright positive one unaffected by its horrible trail of crimes.
There is IMO a very lazy critique of the US that implicitly treats the country as being the only one with any agency, acting in a total void of external facts and circumstances (I believe Freddie has criticized that thinking as well). To me the primary failure, among a number, is a perversion of the 'with great power comes great responsibility' maxim. Too many people in the US and in US foreign policy interpret that as a mandate to intervene, and into an ends justify the means kind of philosophy, which is then of course cynically ridden by profiteers and various private and public interests. If our heads were on straight we would be interpreting it the opposite way, that because of our power we need to be more careful than others, and maybe even more selfless in light of how much we have. It's legitimately a lot to ask but doing the right thing is often by definition not easy.
"because of our power we need to be more careful than others"
Of course that's what our mindset *should* be, but I'm pretty sure that's not how humans or human-based entities have ever tended to handle power, especially when it comes in absurdly disproportional amounts.
I've strongly agreed with Freddie's writing on how other countries need to be treated as if they have agency, because they do, but I thought that came with examples showing where the other countries with no small amount of agency often have wielded it in horrible ways.
After the fall of the Soviet Union George Kennan warned against pushing NATO right up to the border of Russia. Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously said that the the United States should behave like "just any other nation" or words to that effect, meaning that the US should keep its foreign policy circumspect and cautious.
Instead the establishment bought into the idea of "the end of history" and set out to change the world. The results are a Russian invasion of Ukraine, a new cold war conflict that sees the West aligned against Russia/China/Iran while the rest of the world remains studiously neutral and massive global uncertainty.
My interpretation was that she envisioned a scenario where the grander ambitions of the United States would have to be curtailed because conflict between peers inevitably provides a check on any country's foreign policy goals. Of course, the US at that time had no peers which I think was precisely Kirkpatrick's point.
"The results [of NATO expansion] are a Russian invasion of Ukraine"
Right, because Russia would *never* have invaded Ukraine if NATO hadn't expanded. /rolls eyes
So, what's the closest approximate year when you first became acquainted with the regional geopolitics of Ukraine?
a. 1960
b. 1992
c. 2007
d. 2014
e. 2021
https://jackmatlock.com/
I'm a Polish-born US citizen, and my family and I have a *lot* of thoughts about regional geopolitics.
Also, if Russia's goal is to limit NATO expansion, then *maybe* invading a neighbor who is not a NATO member is not a great way to demonstrate to other countries that NATO is no longer needed? Just a thought!
If you are not willing to defend Ukraine with military force using ukraine as a pawn in a game of geopolitics is morally bankrupt and criminally short sighted. The world is filled with the wreckage of "friends" the US initially toyed with and finally abandoned.
Eventually the costs of military aid to Ukraine will rise too high and the US will deliver an ultimatum: get what you can from Russia because we are cutting you off.
AFAICT, America has three choices:
1. Abandon Ukraine and let them take their chances with Russia = morally abhorrent, would lead to Ukraine being conquered in short order and ordinary Ukrainians suffering terribly at the hands of their conquerors. Do not recommend.
2. Fight Russia directly = pretty much guarantees nuclear escalation, with results ranging from *merely* a few cities being destroyed to civilization-ending all-out nuclear warfare. Too horrific to contemplate. Do not recommend.
3. Provide Ukraine with weapons/supplies without fighting Russia directly = least bad of all options, gives Ukraine a fighting chance while minimizing risk of nuclear escalation. I say we stick with it.
Also, America is not using Ukraine as a "pawn," because the Ukrainians *want* our help. If Zelenskyy wanted to surrender to the Russians, he could have done that anytime.
Are you also on board with: "We aren't as special as being uniquely bad would grant us, but we are maybe more unique in that our system allows us the ability to do things about our misdeeds, and prevent future misdeeds, should we care to."
As far as most powerful empires go I don't think humans have done or can do much better than the US, even with its flaws. Paradoxically, the reason we are the most powerful and therefore necessarily the most cruel, is also the reason it's better that we're in charge.
This is the subject I agree with you most on and why you came onto my radar many years ago.
Probably a good time and place for me to ask for recommendations for other writers with similar histories of principled independence.
This ability to go against the grain for years, despite all push-back, also seems to be what every Venture Capitalist says they look for in founders.
earnest question from a new subscriber. I get some of this criticism about the modern US, what countries do you *do* like who you think are leading a different path?
To me being open minded means trying to understand ideas that aren’t your own to the point that you can explain them as if you really do believe them. This has lead me to change my opinions on big issues a few times in my life, and I’m glad it’s happened. I’m an ex-libertarian now leftist, for one. There are good arguments for all kinds of ideas and it’s healthy to get passed initial revulsion and really try to get it.
I used to follow a rationalist blog which did the 'ideological Turing test' several times. I felt at a loss because I couldn't judge the particular ideologies they chose to compare, but it was a cool idea. I'm absurdly puffed up whenever some conservative online tells me I have fairly presented their arguments.
Yeah… with my political background conservatism is the hardest for me.
I think it's weird on a basic level to demand that thinkers you read on the internet to believe all the same things.
We are all different with different experiences. I tend to personally believe that Marxism is an enormous, often dangerous boon-doggle that's actually just a secular reinvention of Christian eschatology.
But what's the probability that it and it's adherents have absolutely nothing to offer? Marx profoundly shaped our idea of history and inspired millions of people to turn their societies upside down in the name of justice.
Thoughtful and intelligent people still think it has a tremendous amount to offfer. I'd have to be insane to believe there was nothing there!
Great post. I think we should cultivate the opposite attitude. If I, with my divergent life experience and personality think exactly the same as someone else about everything, something is wrong.