People join the political fringe due to a couple common motivations: resentment combined with ambition. The motivations are the same regardless of what the ideology that animates that particular fringe group is. This is why you will often see people who are members of one fringe group often rapidly defecting to another group. The resentment of the established order is the primary motivation: the ‘movement’ is only an instrument for satisfying the ambition of the individual. In most situations, most individuals on the fringes will protest passionately about their true motivations for participating in what is almost always a fruitless, […]

There’s an old joke about Tonto and the Lone Ranger that might have cracked your grandparents up, even though it hits a little too close to home today. I don’t recall all the particulars, but the gist of it is that the two of them are narrowly surviving one Wild West crisis after another. Shootouts with bandits, runaway stagecoaches, collapsing mineshafts, that sort of thing. Each and every time they pull through by the skin of their teeth, nothing but their wits between them and certain death. But then, one fateful day, the pair find themselves chased into a canyon by […]

One morning I woke up and wrote down what an ideologically-bizarro world would look like: the communists would writhe about centralizing the means of production, the libertarians would welcome big government, and the anarchists would violently tear down peer-to-peer ridesharing services that remove the exploitative middleman from the picture. Turns out, unlike the desperate last move of tired, spent Hollywood scriptwriters, this wasn’t just a dream. Seattle Anarchists don’t like Uber. Counterforce, one of the groups responsible for violent reaction, calls Uber “one of the most disgusting tech companies in existence.” Read the post. It’s seething with hysterical rhetoric and […]

I am not a white nationalist, but like Moldbug, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff. Unlike Moldbug, I am seeing white nationalism and Nazi imagery picking up steam in edgy trendsetting intellectual circles, and am worried that it might actually have a political future. Here I’ll explain what I think is happening and what the implications are. When the USSR was going down, there was an obvious schelling point for what to do: surrender to the West and become a liberal democracy. It turned out to be badly executed and didn’t really do them much good, but everyone […]

The noted security columnist Bruce Schneir recently wrote*: In addition to turning the Internet into a worldwide surveillance platform, the NSA has surreptitiously weakened the products, protocols, and standards we all use to protect ourselves. By doing so, it has destroyed the trust that underlies the Internet. … Trust is inherently social. It is personal, relative, situational, and fluid. It is not uniquely human, but it is the underpinning of everything we have accomplished as a species. We trust other people, but we also trust organizations and processes. The psychology is complex, but when we trust a technology, we basically […]

I hate to see stray dogs. Unfortunately, I live in a city that has more than its fair share of them. They’re a sad sight—skittish, fearful, usually in some state of malnourishment or starvation, ribs visible. Dogs are domesticated animals, and they don’t do well when they’re all on their own in the concrete jungle. Abandoned and pitiable creatures. My typical reaction, though, to seeing some un-collared mutt limping along is honestly nothing much. I think dark thoughts for a moment about irresponsible dog owners. Reflect briefly on how much I hate metropolitan life. Move on with my day. My wife, however, […]

Mises was wrong. About a lot of things. In economics, and especially in philosophy—which just means especially in economics. First, to be reasonable, you try and get away with saying that Mises was a good economist, but a terrible philosopher. Folks who style themselves as intellectuals almost automatically concede this—as a form of gut reaction. If it’s not his speciality, the tendency is to want to avoid going out on a limb and defending the undefendable. After all, everyone knows that non-specialists never have anything interesting to say. Or even if it is interesting, it’s wrong. That’s where the priors […]

The late liberty of man is lost Spent as so many thousand t-bills As generously lent as oil spills To a world– that needs not the cost Nor the benefit? and what will make them clean What happens when the loss is unforeseen Has misfortune been among the great uncaused Will the birds and bankers will to forget? So strike iron! that unmistakable sound And bury them deep in the ground, ground, ground Let some age else then bear that debt In a world yet more unstarcrossed For the late liberty of man is lost.

Ideologies are vulnerable to outside subversion—inside subversion, too, but the focus here is on threats from the outside. Let’s take the practical case of entryism. It’s not hard to come up with a half decent definition: whether consciously or unconsciously executed, the paradigmatic example of entryism is where one group is watered down and subverted by the ‘entry’ of others who pass through the gates in Trojan Horse. Ideological Trojan Horses aren’t physical, animal-like structures. Beware Greeks bearing gifts, or beware entryists signaling ingroup affiliation using linguistic tools invented or used by the ingroup. I’m definitely patting myself on the […]

I’m guessing, just now, when you saw the title “Leftists and Mental Illness,” you thought this was going to be some rambling fringe-right screed where I accuse our esteemed progressive colleagues of all manner of neurosis, disease, and psychiatric disorder. I’m guessing you prepared to eyeroll. Well, shame on you if you did. This is a classy e-publication, and I refuse to submit such rank partisan hackery to it. Moreover, I don’t even think that’s true. I don’t think most leftists are mentally ill (genderfluid militant ecofeminists notwithstanding). No. Actually, I want to discuss the accusations of mental illness that get […]