Throne and Altar

Combine the increasingly frank contempt of our elites for the working class, their hysterical but purely symbolic moralism, and improvements to CGI…

In the future, America will be ruled by a (largely Jewish-Asian) cognitive elite nakedly exploiting their subjects.  Subject races will be kept far from the privileges and power of the elite, but whenever one of the ruling classes appears on television, he will always appear behind the avatar of a black lesbian.  The only whites shown on television will be foreign enemies, who will all be shown as looking like Vladimir Putin (regardless of their actual race and appearance).    None of this will help actual blacks, living in savage, lawless ghettos without police protection (because their benevolent rulers need to protect the blacks from racist cops, of course), but rulers will bask in the satisfaction of at last having stuck it to the white Christian patriarchy.

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The day after declaring that fascination with hackers was just a nineties thing, I’ve come across a new article about them linked at Arts and Letters Daily.  We’ve mentioned the group Anonymous before in connection with their declared intent to out all of us thought-criminals.  (By the way, I haven’t heard about this actually happening to anyone.  They must not be as great hackers as they make themselves out to be.)  The cognitive dissonance of it is truly breathtaking:  “We’re bold rebels against the status quo, so we’re going to give the names of our ideological opponents to journalists and employers so they can lose their jobs and be socially shunned.”

I think it will surprise no one to learn that these Leftist crusaders are really just a bunch of sadistic cyberbullies:

Lulz is a major aspect of Anonymous’s subversive political potential, as Coleman tells it. Lulz, a corruption of “LOL,” is essentially an evil laugh at someone’s expense. It is a holdover from Anonymous’s birth on 4chan, when trolls claimed that they harassed and attacked victims not because they were horrible people, but “for the lulz.” It was a sort of game: the bigger the reaction provoked, the bigger the lulz. Typical lulzy behavior includes spamming a teenage car-crash victim’s memorial page with gruesome photos of the accident scene. I first encountered the lulz when I wrote a story for Gawker about how Anonymous had harassed an 11-year-old girl into police protection “for the lulz” after she had recorded a YouTube video that annoyed them. Even as Anonymous has evolved into its current do-gooder phase, the mischief and deviance of lulz remains an important cultural lodestar.

The article is written by a Leftist at The Nation, who concludes that Anonymous is not really subversive at all, but is rather “Silicon Valley’s unwitting shock troops”.  I quite agree!  I wonder if writers and readers at The Nation realize that this is also true of all contemporary Leftism.  Feminism, anti-racism, and secularism are, after all, working to destroy all rival forms of organization to corporate capitalism.  Consider what’s happened to the word “social justice” over the past decade.  During the 20th century, calling somebody a “social justice warrior” would be understood to mean, basically, calling that person a communist.  Nowadays, socialism isn’t even on the radar.  In 1930, a moderate Leftist wanted to tax corporations heavily, and a radical Leftist wanted to ship the capitalists off to gulags.  In 2014, a moderate Leftist wants more female CEOs, and a radical Leftist wants more transgender CEOs.

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Is it really true that nerds are more popular than they used to be?

Continue reading →

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I’ve had a request from a student for PDF versions of Throne and Altar‘s essays.  If you go to the top of most of the essay pages, you will now find links to files.

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Liberal academics writing about the more conservative beliefs of the populace seldom amounts to more than a venting of hostility–the emotional gratification of imputing every kind of vice and stupidity onto one’s enemies.  The best work comes from those working on the science of manipulating the populace.  Although done to assist the liberal elite, because it is interested in results, it must attempt to be accurate.  Hence the more perceptive works of Jonathan Haidt and now Dan Kahan.  I was interested in the latter’s work on getting people to obey climate scientists without triggering the partisan modules in their brains because of the use he made of Mary Douglas’ worldview/society taxonomy.  I reviewed her impressive but mostly-forgotten Natural Symbols here, and I’m glad to see these ideas getting more attention.

Braman also sent Kahan the work of Mary Douglas, an anthropologist who, several decades earlier, had developed a cultural theory of risk assessment. Social norms, above all else, informed how people judged risks, she said. The public divided along two spectra: one measuring their support of social structure, running from egalitarian to hierarchical; the other, their devotion to individualism or communitarianism. The scales combined for four essential “worldviews.”

Kahan looked past controversy over Douglas’s work—in particular, a 1982 book she co-wrote that attacked environmentalists (whom she saw as extremely egalitarian and communitarian, and motivated by contempt for industrial society)—and saw a powerful tool. He had already dipped into psychological research showing how we engage in “motivated reasoning,” shaping facts around our beliefs, especially in situations that threaten our identities. Perhaps the worldviews described by Douglas were shaping those biases and causing conflict? A believer in free markets might balk at climate change, given the predominant warming narrative aimed at curbing economic growth; an egalitarian-communitarian, meanwhile, would find the centralized authority demanded by nuclear power unbearable.

The big conclusion is that it’s easier to convince people to do something if you can frame it in a way that you’re not attacking their general worldview.  Put that way, it doesn’t sound like such a discovery.  But worldview attack is the reason liberals latch onto issues.  They only care about climate change because it’s somehow become a stick to beat their enemies with.  I tend to think that, being a fundamentally empirical matter, global warming positions didn’t have to become attached to ideologies, but there were many people, including I think many climate scientists, who wanted them to be.

In general, I’m not sure whether Kahan’s science of manipulation will be a good or a bad thing.  If ideology is irrelevant to an issue (as I think response to global warming is), it’s a benefit to us all if he helps politicians to bypass it.  Some “science” issues–embryonic stem cell extraction being one alluded to in the article–are really ethics issues, and work to keep them “technical” and “practical” will really mean inventing obfuscatory language to conceal the fundamental ethical problem.  From what I’ve read, I don’t trust Kahan and his collaborators to have the philosophical acumen to tell the one type of “science debate” from the other.

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