We Are Starting Down a Dark Road…

I feel it’s time to write another post, largely because I want my thoughts on this written down before everyone else starts to say that they never really believed in any of the discrimination going on, and they never supported it. Today is December 13, 2021. I oppose vaccine mandates. I oppose any and all forms of discrimination against the unvaccinated. I will do everything in my power to protect the rights of unvaccinated individuals.

How We Got Here

Here is how I remember things. I will miss much, because I am writing quickly, but the gist is here.

In March of 2020 we first heard about this virus that was being called COVID-19. We were told it originated in Wuhan, China, and it was easily transmissible and very dangerous. We were not told how transmissible or how dangerous it was, but the implication was that this was unlike anything we have ever seen before. Crucially, we were told that many people were infected with COVID despite being completely asymptomatic. These people did not know they had COVID, so were going about their business, spreading it to other people who often had serious complications from it, including death.

Some time in March of 2020, the NBA made a decision to cancel the rest of their basketball season, including the playoffs, out of concern for COVID-19. This opened the floodgates. All businesses closed. The government closed. The government forced the businesses that didn’t close to shut its doors. The message was ’15 days to flatten the curve’, where the curve of the number of people infected with COVID-19 was increasing exponentially. People were told to stay home and not go within 6 feet of others outside your immediate ‘bubble’. The utility of masks was debated. Fauci initially claimed that masks were not useful, and may even be counterproductive. The surgeon general Jerome Adams tweeted that we should not buy masks because they are not effective and in any case should be reserved for medical professionals.

Thereafter, the messaging rapidly changed. Masks were required everywhere and anywhere. Outdoors, indoors, adults, children (!). Fauci later said he denied the effectiveness of masks in order to keep the supply available for medical professionals. Regardless, everyone was required by law to wear a mask everywhere, and in the early days of the pandemic such a law was redundant because everyone was willingly wearing a mask. People were frightened of COVID, and did not know what it was or what its effects were.

By the end of two weeks, it became clear that the curve was not flattening. Yet, we as a society stayed the course. In hindsight, I am baffled by how we all just complied. Businesses closed, never to reopen. Schools shut down. Offices remained completely empty. Shul closed. After two weeks, everyone was still petrified of going out in public. Friends did not see each other in person. We had not acquired the ability to just video chat with friends, so many friendships collapsed because – although many friendships, especially with old, out of town friends were primarily digital, we did not know how to communicate digitally with friends that we often saw in the supermarket, in shul, around town. When we did see each other, it was only ever with masks on. The pressure to keep your mask on was incredibly intense. If you were thought of as not taking COVID seriously enough, you were not likely to see each other again. Daycare was shut down in early April, I believe. For three months, my wife and I had to work 40 hours a week while watching our son full time. He was just learning to climb up and down the stairs, and had to be watched like a hawk to make sure he did not fall.

Months passed where people did not see each other. Some businesses convinced the government to allow them to reopen, and of course grocery stores always remained open. Trips to the store involved, in the early days, masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and wiping down anything and everything. The government put out almost daily numbers of the case fatality rate (CFR) for COVID, which was an astronomical 1%. No distinction was being made between the CFR and the infection fatality rate (IFR). The IFR included people who had COVID who never knew they had it, who never came in to seek treatment, and for whom it was so mild that they never reported it. The IFR was a much more important number than the CFR but it was never mentioned. Furthermore, negative tests for COVID were required in many places, including getting treatment at the doctor. These tests had really large false positive rates, sometimes exceeding 1%. These things contributed to huge numbers of COVID cases and death percentages.

Government guidance changed almost daily. On the issue of masks alone, it was debated whether they needed to be worn outdoors. Whether masks were protecting the wearer or others from the wearer. What was and wasn’t effective at stopping the spread of COVID-19 was modified nearly every day. Each time, Fauci said something to the effect of ‘Science is telling us something new every day, and we are following the science’. The few times that reporters challenged him on the efficacy of the response to COVID-19, he would say something to the effect of ‘The science is clear and settled’.

The lack of research into COVID-19 was maddening. Nobody investigated how it spread. I remember Arnold Kling writing a blog post bemoaning why nobody had studied how long COVID-19 survived on a door handle touched by somebody with COVID. Yet, a picture was starting to emerge. It was becoming increasingly clear that COVID was incredibly deadly for people over a certain age, about 60 years old. For everyone else, it ranged from flu-like symptoms to the sniffles. Kids, in particular, were almost entirely asymptomatic, and it was not clear that they ever transmitted the virus. As a write, something like 500 kids in the United States have died of COVID between March 2020 and December 2021. Nearly all of them had comorbidities. 500 children. Out of millions! The survival rate for COVID-19 was something like 99.995% if you were under 18. It was something like 99.95% if you were under 60. These numbers are larger than the seasonal flu, meaning that the seasonal flu was actually more dangerous to people under 60 than was COVID. It was also emphatically true that the elderly and the obese should have been really concerned about COVID. This prompted the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing that protection should be focused on those most vulnerable to COVID, and that everyone else should be allowed to go out into the world and contribute to herd immunity. The GBD fell on deaf ears, and its proponents were labeled as belonging to the cult of death.

As daycares and schools slowly started to reopen, children as young as 2 were forced to wear masks over their faces for 8+ hours a day, ostensibly to protect others from COVID. Given the above information about the symptoms of children with COVID and their risk of death from it, is was and still is absolutely baffling to me that the benefits of masking were never weighed by lawmakers against the costs of imposing masks on little children still learning to talk and read facial expressions. To me, this is child abuse. It is unthinkable to me that we as a society imposed the costs of dealing with COVID on those least vulnerable to COVID, and those most vulnerable to those costs. I worked really hard to make sure that my son has never worn a mask, and I hope he never ever does.

And then came the vaccines.

I knew from early on that I did not want the vaccine. Although I have an autoimmune condition, I am only 32, and at extremely low risk of dying from COVID. If I get COVID, I would likely be sick for a half a week or so, and then recover. Something I have experienced many times in my life. My reasoning was that every time I used to get the flu shot, my autoimmune condition would flare up, and I would be unwell for months on end. The couple of times I had the flu, I was miserable, but I made a conscious decision, when it came to the flu, to risk being unvaccinated against it because the costs outweighed the benefits. I tried to apply the same logic to the COVID vaccine.

Unfortunately, I was denied the right to make decisions about my own health. The vaccines became available sometime early in 2021. Following the predictable disastrous government roll out of these vaccines, when it was impossible for those who wanted to get one to make an appointment (websites didn’t work, you had to ‘wait your turn’, shortages caused by the government making them free… the usual stuff), the world once again lost its mind. Briefly, there was a phase when the local rules were that people who had gotten the vaccines did not need to wear masks, while those who were unvaccinated had to wear masks. Never mind that it was concluded that masks protected others, not the wearer. So, effectively such rules required the unvaccinated to protect the vaccinated from a virus which the vaccinated were protected against. Obviously these rules were meant to punish and shame the unvaccinated. When everyone who wanted to get the vaccine had gotten one, and it was clear that COVID cases were still not zero, people started discussing vaccine mandates. This was a place that those of us who had doubts about the seriousness of COVID knew we were going to get to, and we were called conspiracy theorists. In the summer of 2021, Joe Biden mandated that all civil servants, contractors to the government, and businesses with more than 100 employees get vaccinated. How a country that supposedly valued freedom did not erupt at this I will never understand. It’s like we were sheep knowing we were being led to slaughter, and yelling at the sheep in the front to move faster. I started looking for another job as soon as the mandate was announced, but with little motivation, because nobody seemed to object to this sweeping mandate, and where was I going to find a small business that didn’t require me to get the vaccine? I got the vaccine, rather than lose my job, as together my wife and my salaries were barely breaking even with our expenses on a month to month basis.

When my job sent the formal mandate out, they made it clear that they would consider medical and religious exemptions. I wrote to my gastroenterologist explaining my decision. He said that ‘because all major research centers’ that study my condition recommend vaccination, he could not sign off on an exemption. Furthermore, my employer (the government) made it clear that even if I were to get a medical or religious exemption, I would have to wear a mask, social distance, and provide negative test results in perpetuity. In effect, obtaining an exemption put you in an inferior class of people. As Jews, we are taught that if we are going to be discriminated against, it will be because of our Judaism. But that was not the case. My local orthodox shul banned unvaccinated people from entering the building. New York City banned unvaccinated people from stores and restaurants. Philadelphia did the same. Austria forced unvaccinated people to stay home indefinitely. Germany did the same. All of this despite the vaccines not even preventing transmission of COVID.

What is Wrong With People?

As long as I live I will never understand what happened. A generation that grew up learning about racism and Jim Crow laws; about the Soviet Union and government coercion; about antisemitism and the Holocaust; about World War II and Japanese interment; about George Orwell and 1984 submitted peacefully to government propaganda and fear and once again turned on a subset of people for being different. Yes, the ultimate blame lies with government bureaucrats who made these masking and lockdown rules. But it is equally horrifying to think of the millions of regular people who enforced these policies on little children. Who denied entry to those who were unvaccinated. Friends who broke off contact with other friends because they weren’t vaccinated. The forced injection of drugs into people’s bodies against their will.

So far, we are considered fully vaccinated if we have had two shots of the mRNA vaccines or one of the J&J vaccine. I fully expect the number of booster shoots needed to be considered ‘fully vaccinated’ to steadily increase. I fully expect, within a few years, for human beings to line up other human beings and shoot them, and for other human. beings to say something to the effect of ‘Well, that makes sense… they refused to get vaccinated.’ How have we not learned from our mistakes over the centuries? How are human beings still so cruel to one another despite having to learn the hard way over and over and over again.

That’s what the government does. It instills fear in order to obtain power. The masses are more vulnerable to menticide than individuals. And I saw it happen. I saw formerly good people, who took care of each other, who would do anything for each other, begin to treat other people as unworthy of human interaction because they were unvaccinated. Why? If you have gotten the vaccine, what are you so afraid of? You are protected!

God help us survive this with our humanity intact.

George Orwell, 1984

Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind

Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd; A Study of the Popular Mind

Czeslaw Milosz; The Captive Mind

On Masks

We are told that when we wear a mask, we are protecting others rather than ourselves. To the extent that this claim seems to be backed up by the scientific literature – and it’s not clear that it is – I find it difficult to understand. When a construction worker is building something that produces dust they typically wear a mask. Obviously, they are doing this so that the dust doesn’t get into their system. I guess I never asked this question pre-COVID, but I always assumed that masks were worn to protect oneself from particles in the air. But now we are told that masks ought to be worn to protect others, rather than the wearer.

It seems more likely to me that if you cover your mouth and nose with anything, that reduces the likelihood that particles in the air will enter. I don’t understand how this could not be the case. If you are wearing a mask that protects me, but if I were to wear the same mask that doesn’t protect me? As far as I know, the mask does not care which direction the particles are traveling. Even if it does, it wouldn’t be difficult to make a mask that is made of the same material on both sides, so it prevents particles from coming in or going out.

What am I missing? This seems to me to be a conspiracy theory on the part of Fauci and some segment of the epidemiology community. They know that if they say that you should wear a mask to protect yourself, the ‘problematic’ people will refuse because ‘Murica or some such and, in the view of the Fauci-ites, contribute to the spread of the virus. Thus, they claim that the mask protects others, so that it is more likely that you feel guilted into wearing it.

On the topic of Fauci, I do not envy him his role. While I firmly believe that COVID is a big fat nothingburger unless you are over 60 years old, I cannot confidently say that were I in Fauci’s shoes I would act differently. He knows that he will be judged by how seriously he took the pandemic. Anything less than the ‘nuclear’ option on his part could turn out to be catastrophic for him.

The Utility of Chesterton’s Fence

I came across a concept the other day that I always thought was true, but never formulated it, nor knew that it was a well-established idea. This is Chesterton’s Fence. The principle can be formulated as follows.

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

I think this idea is all too often ignored. I see it every four years, when much of the country starts complaining about the Electoral College, and I see it every time a politician tries to pass a bill to raise the minimum wage. I wonder, have they asked themselves what the purpose of prices are? Have they answered that question for themselves?

On a more abstract level, I think of this when it comes to religion. In some sense, it’s so easy to call yourself an intellectual and reject the existence of God, of organized religion, and of traditional beliefs, in general. It’s hard to see the purpose, or you see bad things happening to good people (or vice versa) and you decide to say that God is dead. Chesterton’s Fence would ask you to figure out why – if bad things happen to good people, or the Holocaust occurred, or “science” – do so many people still devote themselves to religion?

On a more specific – and personal – level, this is often my response to the Jewish feminist movement. It makes criticisms which are valid, on their face, and – not being as well studied as I should be – I don’t always know the answer. Why, for example, can women not lein Torah while men can? Why do married women have to cover their hair? Why can women not be Rabbis? The truth is that I do not know the answer to these questions. But it seems facile to ask them, refuse to spend more than an hour looking for an answer in the medieval commentaries, and then declare the religion sexist. The Chesterton’s fence principle is much more intellectually satisfying.

I Voted Trump

As I write this, on the morning of 04 November 2020, the votes are in but it’s still not clear who won the election. It seems like Biden will end up winning, but it’s too early to tell.

In the lead up to the election I wasn’t convinced that I would vote at all. I sat out 2016 because I find it hard to vote to give someone – anyone – power over me. I anticipated doing the same in 2020. However, a couple of things occurred that made me change my mind.

First was the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh at the hands of the Democrats during his Supreme Court confirmation process. The fact that these people assumed guilt on the basis of an accusation alone – ostensibly because the ‘worst case scenario’ was that a raped would go unpunished (in fact, the worst case scenario is that innocent man goes punished) – convinced me that Democrats belong as far away from power as possible.

Second, Trump has gotten the USA involved in exactly 0 wars. That said, I think the administration’s trade ‘war’ with China and other countries is shooting ourselves in the face not even to spite our nose.

Third, Trump has facilitated peace between Israel and multiple Arab countries, and this is after moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, which the ‘experts’ said would result in Arabs losing their minds.

Fourth, Trump has gotten us out of the Iran deal and the Paris climate agreement.

I remain appalled by Trump’s stance on immigration. I remain appalled by conservatives insistence that immigration be strictly through legal channels. In doing so, they place the same people in charge of immigration as are in charge of health care, homeland security, food and drug administration, public education, etc. If conservatives despise how the government has handled all of those departments, why on Earth do they think the government has any right to decide who gets to come into the country? The federal government fails consistently and spectacularly. Them determining what constitutes ‘legal’ vs. ‘illegal’ has only ever ended poorly for everybody. This is not to mention that freedom for everybody is enriched, not curtailed, when people are able to enter the United States in pursuit of their dreams and goals.

What I’m Reading

Israel, A History: A surprisingly easy read about the history of Israel starting from the late 1800’s. Martin Gilbert is a phenomenon. It’s baffling that one person could accumulate so much information over the course of a lifetime. The one place where I wish there was more detail is on the conditions and reasons for the Arab exodus from many of their villages in 1947/1948. There is some discussion of Arab military leaders telling the residents to leave, and the Mufti exhorting the Arabs to leave and come back when Israel was defeated, but few sources are cited here and few examples are given. In light of the controversy over this issue, it would be good to have read more about it.

The Noblest Triumph; Property and Prosperity Through the Ages: This will probably be unspeakably dull for anybody who isn’t obsessed with the fundamental role that private property plays in our conception of liberty and freedom, but I am finding the book to be illuminating.

Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes From an Infinite Paradise: Somewhere in between a popular science introduction to fractals and a technical introduction to fractals. I’m struggling to get very far for this very reason. It gives me too much detail where I don’t want it, and not enough detail where I do.

Poor Arguments Against Libertarianism

Joe Lonsdale criticizes libertarianism. I’ve never heard of Joe Lonsdale. He claims to “no longer” call himself a libertarian. His critique boils down to the observation that there is no turning this ship around, and libertarians better focus on making sure the ship stays afloat, rather than complaining about the course the ship should have taken.

Of course he is right that the government is completely enmeshed in our lives at this point. The IRS is never going away. The FDA is never going away. There will always be public schools. Libertarians can and do complain that the system would have been more efficient had the government not subsidized education or built the roads.

But Lonsdale gives the game away with an example he provides about the government covering dialysis for patients suffering from kidney disease, claiming that prior to the government’s intervention, dialysis was scarce and unaffordable. He writes “The knee-jerk reaction from the libertarian right is that government shouldn’t be involved in healthcare at all. Your libertarian friend might interject: “In a wealthier society charity would pick up all these costs more efficiently.’ ” The claim, as I understand it, is that there are clear examples of government being able to distribute resources better than the free market would, and that libertarians should focus on directing government to find those situations, rather than rejecting government intervention out of hand.

This claim is a straw man. First, I do not think libertarians claim that the government is never able to produce a successful federal program or safety net where none has been produced by the market. Libertarians claim that most government programs are utter failures and produce the exact opposite of the intended consequences of the program. But OK – let’s grant Lonsdale’s point that the dialysis program was successful, and that the results of the program matched the intended consequences. An actual libertarian response is not that charity would pick up these costs more efficiently. It’s not even that the market would – given more time – produce cheaper and better treatments for kidney disease. I would say the response from a libertarian economist would be that yes – the program produced results, but it did so at the cost of some other good or service. The funding that went into the program did not go to a winter jacket that a single working mother needed for her child. It did not go to the initial investment that a struggling worker needed to start their own business. As Thomas Sowell says, “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs”.

Lonsdale’s response might be, “Well, how do you know the money wouldn’t have been used to buy a spoiled brat yet another video game that he doesn’t need? Surely dialysis is more important!” I would respond – “Why do you think that’s where the money would have gone? Maybe it would have gone to a startup that would have cured cancer. The government funding therefore saved X number of people from kidney failure, but the unseen consequence may have been that N*X people died of cancer.

Lonsdale goes on to write “The better question is: why does dialysis cost taxpayers well over $35 billion annually, or a full 7% of the Medicare budget? The answer is that the federal government is willing to sponsor lifesaving care for people experiencing severe kidney failure, but not willing to sponsor preventive treatments that could effectively keep Americans from progressing into kidney failure.”

Obviously the answer to the question Lonsdale poses has very little to do with the government being unwilling to sponsor preventative treatments, and everything to do with the elementary concept that the government is promising a blank check to providers of dialysis services. If Lonsdale is shocked that the cost is so high, he should offer his next child the opportunity to specify their own monthly allowance, with the promise that he won’t reneg on the promise to pay it.

It seems baffling to me that Joe Lonsdale ever called himself a libertarian. If the best he can do is set up such a straw man, he probably never understood libertarianism to begin with.

Yes – it’s true that libertarians are fighting a losing battle. Government programs are here to stay, and we are not undoing them. But the point of libertarianism is also to show that it is always counterproductive to add more programs. Just because government programs are here to stay doesn’t mean we have to add to them.

The best criticism of libertarianism I have seen came from Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex. He made the effort to actually get the libertarian argument right before critiquing it. Maybe someday I’ll respond to his anti-libertarian FAQ with an anti-anti-libertarian FAQ.

Some Blogs I Follow

Over the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly interested in economics. As a result, I’ve found myself following several economics blogs that have really shaped my thinking on the subjects. My favorites are CafeHayek.com and Arnold Kling’s blog. I also enjoy reading Marginal Revolution. All three are written by economists at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

CafeHayek is written with the purpose of fiercely defending free markets and free trade. It gets a bit repetitive at times, but, on the other hand, the same arguments for government intervention and tariffs are consistently repeated in the news, so it is necessary to continually addressing them.

Arnold Kling (who, coincidentally, taught me AP Statistics in High School) has daily really short blog posts about things that are on his mind. He often about his 3 languages of politics, where the political left sees the world through an oppressor-oppressed axis, the political right sees things through a civilization-barbarism axis, and libertarians think in terms of a freedom-coercion axis. He argues that if each side is able to argue on the axes of the other side, it may be possible to make some progress.

Marginal Revolution is consistently in the top five economics blogs as voted by various economics blogs, and a compendium of thoughts from Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabbarok. They often summarize and give their thoughts on interesting studies.

All these blogs are highly recommended.

Some Thoughts on The IDW

I’ve been listening to a bunch of different podcasts on YouTube by various members of what Eric Weinstein termed the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ (IDW). People on both sides of the political isle, who are not afraid to have civil conversations without resorting to calling each other racist or bigoted or… People like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, the Weinstein brothers, Jonathan Haidt, and Steven Pinker, among others. Joe Rogan has done a series of interviews with many of these people and it is really interesting to listen to them talk, mostly uninterrupted, for a couple of hours. It’s still crazy to me that the dudebro who hosted Fear Factor all those years ago is who I have to go to now for intellectual stimulation, because traditional media is full of NPCs.

Out of most of these interviews, I have been most impressed with Sam Harris and Jonathan Haidt. Although both would describe themselves as ‘members of the political left’, the shifting of the Overton window would put them, in my mind, firmly in the center, politically. Haidt talks eloquently about the moral underpinnings of people of different political persuasions, and about the important role religion plays in human flourishing. In contrast, Harris has serious criticisms of religion in general, and Islam in particular. Harris has a fascinating interview with Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, about the role of religion in the development of human morality. The interview was incredibly respectful, on both sides, and a pleasure to listen to.

Of the others, I have also watched a lot of Jordan Peterson interviews and talks. He is also really impressive, but I think he would be a lot more impressive if he could pick a thought and stick to it. He has a tendency to wander in his stream of consciousness lectures, and it seems that every time he gets to an interesting insight he loses track and goes off in a different direction. However, reading between his lines, his critiques of postmodernism, feminism, and social justice are very powerful. He is obviously a very insightful individual, but is difficult to listen to because he has so much on his mind and tries to get it all out. This is actually why I am so impressed with Sam Harris. He is able to get his thoughts out in a coherent and eloquent manner, so that even when I disagree, I do follow his reasoning and thought process.

The thing about the IDW that is so appealing to me is that, in addition to the discussions being so civil and disagreements respectful, the arguments made by both sides do a great job of steel manning the other side’s points. This is very often frustrating me when I consume traditional media. Both sides – though I find this to be more true on the left than on the right – build this weak straw man argument that the opposition supposedly makes, and then eviscerate it. But these guys in the IDW get it. The progressives *get* conservatism. The conservatives *get* the progressives. And they try to elucidate precisely where they agree and where they disagree with each other, leading to a more coherent debate.

Swapping Places

I read a blog post by Matt Taibbi in which he argues that the political left and political right have swapped places as lifestyle and speech police. Whereas a decade or so ago, Taibbi writes, it was the political right that freaked out about e.g., homosexual relationships, political correctness, and the teaching of evolution in private schools, in today’s atmosphere, it is the political left that is losing its marbles, with cancel culture run amok, demands for defunding the police, and an “anti-racism” movement that is more racist than anti. Taibbi can hardly be called a right wing ideologue, having spent much of the last decade criticizing conservatives. Along with Sam Harris, another self-identified ‘member of the left’, Taibbi has been vocal in calling out cancel culture.

While it is nice to see a reckoning on the left about its collective loss of sanity, I find Taibbi’s argument unconvincing. My feeling is that while the political right can be said to have been ‘freaking out’ about homosexual relationships, political correctness and other such issues, the focus of the right has always been about them [meaning people on the political right] not being forced by others [meaning people on the political left] to do things that went against their consciences. So, the concern on the right has been that the government is forcing them to teach evolution, or forcing them to use or not use, certain language which can be said to be politically incorrect. Meanwhile, in the last couple years, the left can be said to be ‘freaking out’ about forcing people to adopt their beliefs. Men can have periods. Police are racist. Systemic racism keeps minorities down, etc. So there is a big difference here. The right was concerned about people foisting their beliefs on others. The left is concerned that their beliefs are not adequately being foisted upon others.

This is not always true. The right certainly has its share of ‘foisting their beliefs on others’. I think the idea that one must stand for the American flag, for example, is honorable, but the political right is toeing the line between making the personal, solemn decision to stand for the flag, and criticizing – and cancelling – others for not standing for it. There are other examples. But I think on the whole, the left and right cannot be said to have swapped places, in terms of hysteria.

What I’m reading

In The Beginning, by Chaim Potok – an incredibly sad story of a Jewish boy growing up in depression era New York. Very powerful and puts into perspective the challenges faced by new immigrants.

The Gun Seller, by Hugh Laurie – I’m still in the beginning of this book, but Hugh Laurie’s voice is easily heard as you read. Too early to say if I recommend it.

Ysabel, by Guy Gavriel Kay – I was a huge fan of Kay’s Tigana and Song for Arbonne, but my attention hasn’t really been caught by this book.

Catch the Jew, by Tuvia Tenenbom – An interesting look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, through the eyes of Tenenbom, who, despite having the stereotypical Jewish appearance, is able to pass as a Palestinian to explore some parts of Judea and Samaria forbidden to Jews. Amusing. Recommended.

Unsuccessful People

I was listening to a podcast between Joe Rogan and Bret Weinstein about the latter’s experience being ‘canceled’ by a mob of students at Evergreen State after objecting, in writing, to white students being prohibited from coming to campus. If you haven’t watched the encounter please google it. It’s hard to watch. This encounter was a precursor to today’s ‘cancel culture’, in which individual who hold, or once held, disagreeable beliefs, are shunned from polite discourse, boycotted, and embarassed. In an attempt to explain the baffling behavior of the mob, somewhere around the 50 minute mark of the interview, Weinstein states his belief that these students are venting their anger at the ‘system racism’ in the court of law and of police officers. He argues that they are taking it out at the universities because they will not fight back, and are already predisposed to a progressive view of the world. Note that Weinstein’s belief that such racism exists was of no help to him in his encounter with the mob. Personally, I don’t believe that there is ‘systemic racism’ in, well, any system, but even if I were to grant Weinstein that premise, I would disagree with his conclusion that cancel culture is so prevalent at universities because they won’t fight back.

It’s not clear what Weinstein means by universities ‘fighting back’. I interpret this to mean that a student member of the mob will not be suspended by a university, in part because there are so many hooligans that they cannot all be identified and suspended, but also because this would reflect terribly on the university in the next day’s headline: “University suspends student for protesting systemic racism”.

Maybe.

But I have another explanation, and it comes from, I believe, Jordan Peterson, though I cannot remember where I heard him say this.

He argued that cancel culture is a manifestation of suppressed jealousy and an inferiority complex, which occurs when completely average people try to come to terms with their lack of accomplishments relative to those of others. So the idea is that if you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything with your life, and/or have no motivation to achieve anything meaningful, be it a career, a family, financial success, etc, you start to feel envious of those who have accomplished those things. Then you have two options. You can either 1) work harder to achieve success for yourself, or 2) bring down the success of others so that you can claim to be superior to them, and your accomplishments, or lack thereof, stand in stark contrast to the failings of others.

I think this is pretty decent explanation of some of the phenomena we are seeing in the world today with cancel culture.

Hello, World!

I’m going to try to start a blog; let’s see how long this goes for.

The purpose of this blog is just to get my thoughts down. I tend to think differently than a lot of people in my network, and oftentimes I have nobody to share my opinions with or don’t feel comfortable sharing my thoughts.

A little about me. I’m Jewish. I’m the son of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. I’m an astrophysicist. Politically, I consider myself a conservative libertarian. I enjoy reading books; mostly fantasy, but also non-fiction history, economics, and psychology books.

I will try to blog about the things I am thinking about, but for the most part will steer clear of things I am an expert in, so the things I write are just my opinion, and certainly do not reflect those of my employer. The reason I will steer clear of things I am an expert in is the same reason that I steer clear of needles in a haystack: they are hard to find, and if found, nobody likes them.

Here goes.