Modernity

Light unto the nations: Israel launches the national Iron Beam laser defence system.

An important timely piece: “The Return of the Jewish Question” by David Azerrad in Compact Magazine. All of this should be obvious but perhaps that is why it’s important.

That the average Fox News watcher is utterly oblivious to the JQ only enhances its appeal. The JQ is a kind of gnosis, a secret knowledge that allows the enlightened few to pierce through the illusions of ordinary politics and grasp the ultimate reality.

Call it Jewsonia: the week that Norman Podhoretz passes on, I’m sure he’d be pleased that Commentary Magazine published “The New American Jews: A manifesto for change, survival, and national flourishing” by Tal Fortgang and Ella Fortgang.

More [Jews] should also consider affordable, growing cities with small Jewish populations such as Omaha and Reno. This is an economic issue with a significant political dimension: We will continue to be taken for granted as constituents as long as we remain clustered…

It’s a kick-ass ⁠— not to mention world-saving ⁠— manifesto.

Demonstrating the relative seriousness of Israeli versus British media discourse, The Independent vs The Jerusalem Post on Trump’s UN speech. The former characterized it as “an extraordinary tirade” and “a spectacular outburst” and worried that “the speech risked all of the goodwill from last week’s historic state visit.” The latter:

Trump held up a mirror to the world. He did not seek to please, did not seek to appear enlightened, but exposed what other leaders try to hide. For him, leadership is not the art of compromise but the courage to tell the truth.

“No further Ribbonfarm”:The story of ribbonfarm has been, in a small one-of-a-million threads way, the story of civilization itself, through the 2007-24 period. Venkatesh Rao writes:

The story of ribbonfarm has been, in a small one-of-a-million threads way, the story of civilization itself, through the 2007-24 period.

There’s even wit in the laudatory comments.

UN General Assembly speeches this week:

• Argentinian President Javier Gerardo Milei: A great speech about the UN itself, praising it first before damning it.

Thank you Rusto Reno, editor of Feisty Things, for this articulation towards the end of this podcast episode:

The liberation project is a utopian project that doesn’t have any limits. And moreover, if you can redefine husband and wife, why can’t you redefine men and women? I mean, if we can redefine marriage, the primordial institution of society that is more fundamental than any particular form of government, it’s universal across all cultures, then if you can redefine that, then I don’t see how you can object to people redefining what it means to be a man and a woman, or for that matter, to redefine anything.

In The Telegraph, Allister Heath spells it out:

West-hating pro-Palestinian protests are a harbinger of much worse to come.

Israel must stop faffing.

In what may be Harvey Mansfield’s final book, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World is reviewed in City Journal.

Now it’s been a while since I mildly wrestled full-time with such issues, but through the mists and wisps of memory I recall that although the reviewer treats the title as hyperbolic and provocative, I thought it was pretty much conventional wisdom among any who care.

In reaction to and also growing out of the fevered dream palaces of the Christian Church, the cornerstone of modernity is epistemological humility. Alongside Descarte’s application of it in science with his Discourse on the Method is Machievelli’s application in politics. This pragmatism brought about the world-historic boon that is political tolerance; 150 years after Machiavelli’s The Prince came Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration.

Frank Furedi and Brendan O’Neill discuss Gaza, anti-Semitism and the global culture war and it is a single topic. Ultimately, Furedi argues, Hamas is not even an entirely Middle Eastern phenomenon but at least partially a cultural creation of an influential strand of Western self-loathing that seems to be on track for a self-evisceration.

Do the woke not see that if they are successful in their takeover of the modern state they will immediately become actually oppressed, this time by their erstwhile favored activists who have already demonstrated their methods? All the glories and technologies that have come about as a result of the new liberties of modernity will fall into the hands of ruling barbarians. We need no longer fear the singularity; technology will have peaked and start regressing. I hope the American high school curriculum still assigns A Canticle for Liebowitz alongside Brave New World, Animal Farm and 1984??.

Discomfiting and Olympian, this top story at UnHerd “Israel is no longer Britain’s war” by Aris Roussinos:

Discomfiting because he opens with:

…as the righteous bloodlust of the sensible centrists has been awoken once again…

Ouch. And Olympian because he steps way back to look at the issues, beginning with:

Though there is no obvious linkage between any of these matters, if I knew your opinions on wokeness or gender issues, or on Net Zero or Covid restrictions, then I could ascertain, with 99% accuracy, your opinions on a distant ethnic conflict in the Middle East.

I do disagree however with an important part of the initial premise, as I think there very much are linkages among these issues. To quote the rather indignant Likud MK Amir Weitmann:

If you hate Human beings, chances are you will hate the Jews.

Once again I link to Brendan O’Neill, Chief Political Writer at Spiked, a publication that increasingly seems to me just about the only sane and brave outpost out there. “The climate witch trials”, an excerpt from O’Neill’s new book A Heretic’s Manifesto, ingeniously frames climate orthodoxy within medieval witch hunts. Towards the end, O’Neill laments:

Since the 1960s, the intellectual classes have been pondering the ‘social construction’ of scientific truth. The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckmann, was published way back in 1966. French philosopher Bruno Latour was fawned over on campuses across the West for his theories on ‘the social construction of scientific facts’. Feminist philosopher Judith Butler thinks even biological sex is a social construct. Meanwhile, the cry goes up to ‘decolonise the science curriculum’, to weave ‘Indigenous Witch-Finding knowledge’ ⁠— an equally valid way of knowing, apparently ⁠— into scientific discussion.

Everywhere science is picked apart, dismantled, relativised, often in a way that undermines the entire project of scientific inquiry and its important search for knowledge. But climate-change science is never socially deconstructed. It is sacralised, made utterly unimpeachable, put beyond the grubby questioning of both the layman and the expert.

I might as well start addressing my thoughts as my Michael Linds because they appear to be one and the same:

• Missing but Wanted: Children
• The End of Progressive Intellectual Life

Oh my, Michael Lind writes in Tablet exactly what I’ve been thinking, so forgive the extensive quoting:

… The Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism … Derived from the Greek words meaning “against” and “law” or “norm,” the term antinomianism refers to the view that all laws and norms are oppressive always and everywhere, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy.
…
The three saints of transgression are the illegal immigrant, the transsexual, and the woman who proudly celebrates abortion. All three are idealized by our revolutionary ruling class precisely because they violate traditional norms ⁠— the traditional norm of patriotism, based on the legitimacy of the city-state or nation-state or kingdom and its laws and borders; traditional gender norms; and traditional family norms, which celebrate the capacity of women to give birth and to nurture their infants and of men to provide for them. Most of what is called “progressivism” today is really transgressivism.
…
By now the antinomians in Western nations have won their war against tradition in every realm.
Having vandalized every premodern tradition, the elite antinomians of the modern West now don’t know what to do next. What should rebels against the bourgeoisie rebel against when the bourgeoisie has fallen?
The answer, it is increasingly apparent, is to rebel against the proletariat.
…
Whatever working-class “normies” believe and enjoy, the most influential tastemakers of the trans-Atlantic ruling class denounce and seek to ban, using one of their three or four specious all-purpose justifications. If non-college-educated Americans were to take up square dancing as a fad, the powers that be in the media and academia would solemnly inform us that square dancing is problematically racist or sexist or worsens climate change.

Woke:

• its core demand: are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?
• describes the ongoing cultural revolution which defines reality by its usefulness in achieving left-wing goals

Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes! The Goodfellas address climate change. Niall Ferguson complains about, just as I see it, the opportunity costs ⁠— and also the mental health toll on the young. John Cochrane complains that no cost/benefit analysis is being applied to climate change policy. And Bjorn Lomborg specifies what those opportunity costs are, listing demonstrably better ways to invest in human betterment. How wonderful it would be if everyone seriously considered the contents herein.

And now for something completely different, ie nice and civilized: John Mount’s article “Good Stationery as a Tool of Thought”.

Spend a ridiculous amount of effort to have around at all times notepads of varying sizes and capabilities. I have seen a big increase in productivity since saturating my environment with many notepads of different sizes. If you have a good notebook around you will find ways to use it. I always take the largest one that isn’t entirely silly to have around.

Jonathan Haidt speaks with Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly on democracy in the next cycle of history and the fragility problem of Gen Z. What a line-up!

Some Twitter accounts posting frequent videos of the courageous protests by young women in Iran:

• @1500tasvir
• @IranIntl
• @IranNW
• @HeshmatAlavi
• @Afshin_Ismaeli

This, it seems to me, is inspiring, world-historical stuff.

As Descarte completed his Discourse on the Method I wonder if he had an inkling it would come to this, from “What Trans Health Care for Minors Really Means” by Tyler Santora at mainstream medical reference website WebMD:

For adolescents who are assigned female at birth, top surgery can be performed to create a flat chest. The Endocrine Society states that there is not enough evidence to set a minimum age for this type of gender-affirming surgery, and the draft of the updated SOC recommends a minimum age of 15. “Usually, for a [person] assigned female at birth, the chest tissue continues to mature until around 14 or 15,” Inwards-Breland says. “What I’ve seen surgeons do is after 14, they feel more comfortable.” If, though, a person is started on puberty blockers followed by hormone therapy from a relatively early age ⁠— around 13 ⁠— they will never develop breast tissue and wouldn’t need surgery to remove it.

Steve Jobs said: “Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization.” Implicit in his statement is that it can be unlearned. As an intellectually inquisitive teenager in the 1980s I would have scoffed at the notion that religion serves to keep us rational. But the evidence suggests that it does, and without its drumbeat the fever dream of linguistic chimeras can drive us surprisingly mad surprisingly quickly.

For the first time, Iranian protests are nationwide, multi-ethnic, political and non-clerical, so much so that this could finally be the end for the mad mullahs.

Yippee, Conrad Black is back, juicy and crunchy as ever. From “The Triumph of Davos Man”:

Our [hard Left] enemies leapt from the jaws of bitter and total defeat, hijacked the careening gadfly of esoteric conservationism, and transformed it surreptitiously into a well-camouflaged battering ram that has inflicted immense costs and opprobrium on the corporate world and great sadness and inconvenience on the laboring proletariat on whose behalf the Marxist Left has supposedly been crusading these past 150 years.

Nice on Nietzsche. And nice that reviewer John Gray mentions La Gaya Scienza as one of his best books. Time for a reread.

“Punch a TERF, smash the Zionists!” Fathom magazine, the journal of BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center, begins a series investigating the ramifications of the post-modern sociological revolution, ie, wokeness.

In The Atlantic, a beautifully ⁠— if overly politely ⁠— written piece on family estrangement, the sting is in the head; no doubt to get it past the young <del>censors</del> editors, the author has expunged all mention of religion and therefore duty from his discussion, save in this first line, which encompasses all that follows: “Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy.” Author Joshua Coleman is a practicing therapist and prolific author. Looking around, his fee per webinar on the topic is $25. And he’s also a tv composer!

Anyhoo, the plot thickens, and my suspicions are correct: while he squeezed them out of the text body, he shoehorned in his convictions at the very edges as frames; look at this 1-star Amazon review of his book by one Acer Girl:

He fails to recognise how the nuclear family itself is being redefined and gay/lesbian parents are becoming more accepted, so it is rather inevitable that people will start to place less emphasis and importance on blood ties alone ⁠— so I really don’t understand the alarmism he tries to create around this. Above all, what I found really demoralising is his attack on one of the founding principles of western civilisation ⁠— autonomy and individual liberty. People’s right to live their lives in whatever way they wish and to associate and disassociate with whomever they wish. He claims this right should be policed.

And the final piece in the puzzle: he himself has been cut off by his own daughter! Estrangement is an underly-noted fault-line in the post-religious West; whether to honor or cast off the 5th commandment to honor one’s father and one’s mother ⁠— that has become a question.

So Marc Andreessen’s interview with Tyler Cowen is making some waves because he seemed unable to justify Web3 (see tweets from Ian Bremmer, and, more predictably caustically, Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Personally I think Andreesse ha’s made the case better elsewhere, for instance, saying that if the internet had originally had a money layer then we’d never have had spam. But for me, as the developer of a new RSS reader, I was more interested in Tyler’s question about RSS:

Tyler Cowen: Do you still use an RSS reader?

Mark Andreessen: I do. This is actually an exciting moment on that topic for those of us who love these things. I use Feedly, which I like a great deal. It’s a guy. The guy who does it is a guy who used to work for us, a wonderful guy. I think it’s a great product and the inheritor of the now-lost Google Reader, the ruthlessly executed Google Reader.

This is talking about books, but Substack ⁠— one of our companies ⁠— has a new reader. It’s primarily for reading Substack. It basically is recreating, in my view, the best of what Google Reader had. That’s the other one that is getting a lot of use right now. I use both of those.

TC: Why does RSS at least seem to be so much less important than before?

MA: RSS is one of those things. I would say this gets into a broader, overarching, huge debate-fight happening in the tech industry right now. Internet got built on two models, which are diametrically opposed.

So Marc Andreessen uses Feedly and Substack! I wonder why both. I also want to know which reader TC uses ⁠— I seem to recall him saying that he does use one. The man seems to reply to hoi polloi ⁠— maybe I’ll ask him.

Incidentally I was surprised that this was not one of the better Conversations with Tyler. It didn’t really warm up into a good actual converation. For instance, I’d have thought MA would have asked TC, the world’s most renowned information omnivore, which RSS reader he uses. MA came across as a bit robotic, whereas I hadn’t gotten that impression from him before.

Germany’s industry-leading Lilium demonstrates both vertical take-off and landing with its Phoenix 2 eVTOL technology demonstrator, reports eVTOL.com.

Venkatesh invites us to join him in exploring the hive mind (very meta). What a candy-maker, this one.

At 1:03, this transcendent moment of moviemaking, John William’s theme counterpointing Alec Guinness’s delivery of George Lucas’s creation. “It surrounds us, penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.”

Jonathan Haidt is wise enough to note that it is mainly America, not necessary the rest of the world, that has gone particularly mental the past decade. Haidt blames social media. But the word “marriage” does not occur even once in the article, despite the decade having seen same-sex marriage transformed from oxymoronic absurdity to self-evident cudgel. If a human institution so deep ⁠— deeper than the nationstate, than monotheism, even than history itself ⁠— can be so decidedly upended, then what chance has anything else of standing, the collective subconscious must wonder.

Goldman is moved by Reacher:

Radical Protestantism leads the pilgrim from the “howling wilderness” and the “enchanted ground” of the Old World and leads him to the Canaan of the spirit. The question is addressed to, and answered by, the individual pilgrim. The Jew is born into the people of Israel; the Christian seeks adoption into the Israel of the Spirit. American Christianity retains the radical individualism of its Protestant forebears, who chose as individuals to become Americans. We have become Americans by adoption, and we have adopted the history of Israel as our national common memory. A profound parallelism is involved. The biblical Election of Israel was not a prize that God awarded to an unlikely nation of shepherds, but rather the outcome of Israel’s free choice to accept the Torah and the responsibility of election. It is our free choice to become Americans that is the cornerstone of our culture.

eVTOL Innovation YouTube channel extols the Lilium as the most promising of the upcoming ways we will fly.

One main worry exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic is erosion in faith in science. While some of our denizens have pursued wantonly contrarian beliefs, others got busy blithely eroding core tenets. The Royal Society is warning that all this is dangerous. Its first prescription: “investing in lifelong information literacy programmes”.

The solutions are deep because the problems are; we live in an information glut yet there has been no parallel explosion in education ⁠— indeed rigor has likely lessened alongside national priorities skewered due to intemperate new orthodoxies which are due in turn to I know not what.

Yet some heartening news, as related in “Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy”, which happened under Trump. If we can optimistically harness the former President as a metaphor for Western civilization, perhaps the outlandish demeanor belies sound and enterprising deeds.

At any rate, this is the big shit.

In the very-nicely-titled online review Crooked Marquee, Jason Bailey does justice to Wes Anderson’s fabulous new The French Dispatch:

Charmingly, this film that loves writers is also one of Anderson’s most lavishly directed ⁠— which is, I know, saying something … Anderson’s films have also become a welcome opportunity for serious actors to let their hair down ⁠— Tilda Swinton is clearly having a blast.

Yes indeed, The French Dispatch is a box of supercandy for grownups. Modern works seem to take it as part of their mission to be the supreme work; even if doomed to fail, there’s an understanding that a serious attempt elevates everything. (Or, as Frank Lloyd Wright said, “I don’t design a house without reimagining the social order.”) The French Dispatch is a contender for one thing it is an ode to other mediums: typography, cooking, France, the written word. All that and the title triggers “The French Mistake”…).

And looking around again at reviews, actually again it’s David Brody who treats it most appropriately, so bloody enthusiastic that he retells parts of it, which seems rather a faux pas for his critical stature. Brody reminds us at the end that yes, it is a screenplay that flows with noble emotion, exquisitely portrayed. And in the end he compares Anderson with Hemingway. See, what did I tell you…

Nice to see David Goldman finally with a simple plan to save the world. I mean, I’ve been thinking this for years, and Matt Yglasias got a book out of it, One Billion Americans. So here’s Goldman the Wise in one sentence on the USA in “Import Americans”:

Our capacity to integrate human capital is our only natural advantage and it may prove to be our decisive strength.

I’m not sure about only natural advantage ⁠— the USA has probably the most natural advantages among all the world’s nation-states, but still.

Israel Hayom reports that Israel has paused offshore gas exploration with Energy Minister Karine Elharrar intoning: “2022 will be the year of renewable energy.”

Israel should keep in mind that her modern Achilles’ Heel is not disunity but overconfidence; and, previous Trojan War reference notwithstanding, should not be looking the gift horse of natural gas in the mouth. Because a prudent energy policy demands a short-, mid- and long-term strategy.