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July 25, 2020 - Dark Horse - Weinstein & Heying
01:06:01
Bret and Heather 33rd DarkHorse Podcast Livestream: Ponzi Memes & Tyranny of the Minority
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*music* Okay, bye.
Hey folks!
Welcome to the 33rd Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
I am here with Dr. Heather Hying.
Lots of things are occurring.
I think we should get right to it.
All right.
Go ahead.
So we had talked about me setting up some of what we've been discussing and then launching into a conversation about S.A.M.E.
Should we do that?
Should we start there?
Yeah.
How about I set up your setup?
Okay.
This is like the English to English translation.
Oh man, it's just right on target for English to English translation.
So what's happening here is that I had what seemed to me like an epiphany last night and I explained it to Heather and she said, that's everything we've been talking about.
What's there?
And we wrestled about this for a while and it turned out she was absolutely right.
And there was stuff that needed to be brought to the surface in order to find what was new.
And so anyway.
Well, I think, but then therefore I wasn't absolutely right, because there is something new here.
I wasn't seeing it at first, and I don't know how much of that is because you weren't saying it at first, and how much of it is because it felt like it was the same stuff in slightly different clothing.
Well, let's put it this way.
The nature of consciousness and discovery and emergence being what it is, I think I was not saying it in such a way that what was new, I did have the inkling of something new, but I hadn't figured out what it was.
And so anyway, I think a very normal process of wrestling something into some kind of useful form occurred.
And anyway.
And Zach got to witness the whole thing.
Toby, our other son, left at some point, cleaned up after dinner and slunk away.
Well, he can watch the live stream either now or later.
That's right.
All right, so should we launch into it?
Let's do it.
Okay, so to the position that we currently find ourselves in in society, We wanted to start by saying two things, not axiomatic exactly, but two things that are true in a number of situations.
What the background of our current environment is and then the current situation with regard to the protests and riots in the streets.
So I'm going to set all that up and then we'll talk more and we'll have a little cat bell throughout.
A little bit of cat bell.
Yeah, a little cat bell.
The first two things that we know to be true across a number of domains, not at all limited to right now, are that Ponzi schemes exist, also known as pyramid schemes, and they carry a pattern of behavior from one individual to an exponentially expanding number of individuals until they collapse.
The usual incentive, of course, is currency accumulation, like actual literal dollars.
And that functions within the system as long as the layers below you exist.
Those who are effectively feeding you their currency have to exist or else you don't join.
So that's one thing, right?
We have pyramid schemes.
So pyramid schemes collapse on the late adopters.
Exactly.
So they are not a fiction from the point of view of early adopters.
The fiction comes from the idea that it can continue to function.
Yep.
The second thing that is true across many domains, but highly relevant to the situation we find, is an idea formalized by Nassim Taleb in a piece, well in his inserto, in a piece that he calls The Most Intolerant Wins, The Dictatorship of the Small Minority.
So, just to quote him, The best example I know, this is Taleb writing, the best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation.
It suffices for an intransigent minority, a certain type of intransigent minorities, to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority.
A naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority.
If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren't calibrated for that.
Forget about scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments, they don't work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmother's wisdom.
So, we have pyramid schemes, the existence of pyramid schemes, and the existence of this truth that many people do not intuit, especially those who think they like to play in numbers but actually are kind of innumerate.
The idea that actually a tiny, tiny percentage, he puts it at 3-4%, can actually be sufficient to convert an entire system.
Add to this the background situation of just social media, which is a kind of online ecosystem which can house its own Ponzi schemes, and features include trafficking in a kind of social currency as opposed to monetary currency, which is quantified in ways that we can all see, you know, followers and likes and subscribers and views, which, you know, we're playing in that landscape here.
And, of course, in social media the product evolves culturally by very standard cultural evolution mechanisms.
Just to add a few more things to the setup before we go further with it together, the current situation with regard to the protests and now riots on the streets with regard to the movement that is formally called Black Lives Matter, although many of the people who are advocating for change on the streets don't know what that movement actually stands for,
Note that, to Taleb's point with regard to the dictatorship of the small minority, only a tiny group of people could actually believe, and this was your opening salvo to me last night, only a tiny percentage of people could actually believe that it would be a good idea to abolish the police, or that logic is a function of whiteness, which are two of the things that are being said.
Um, that's, and yet, and yet it's gaining ground.
Okay, so add two more things and then we'll, we'll engage, we'll engage with each other and the cat here.
Um, we have a public relations issue that is different from most Ponzi schemes, uh, in that while many people have never heard Abolish the Police or Logic is a Function of Whiteness, they believe that they're fighting the next civil rights fight.
They think they're being righteous.
They think that they are actually fighting for change that is not what the intransigent minority is advocating for.
And then finally, there's a payload here.
This is not just about being able to make a little cash off the backs of the people who follow in the pyramid scheme.
The payload in this particular one has the chance to actually take over and frankly destroy civilization, right?
It may be able to restructure the real world and not just the online world.
So, let's unpack this a bit.
The idea, what started the discussion last night, was that nobody could possibly believe this.
That the number of people who actually believe, as you said, that eliminating the police would be a good idea, that it would increase the safety of the public, is tiny.
If you then figure, okay, well what's the percentage of people who might think that opening the borders would be a good idea?
Also tiny, right?
You mean like abolishing the borders?
Opening the borders?
Open borders, yeah.
What is the fraction of people who think it's a good idea to abolish prisons, right?
Now you take the intersection of these things.
What are the chances that you believe all of these things, right?
This movement at various times espouses all of these things.
Now take What percentage of the population thinks that the nuclear family is somehow a mechanism of white oppression of other people, right?
The intersection is a fraction of a percent at most, right?
People don't actually believe this stuff.
It's too dumb.
But it is now threatening to alter policy.
And so the question is, how did that happen?
How does the tiniest of minorities end up dictating terms to society?
Terms that will ultimately cause the collapse of civilization if they are broadened.
Right?
Why is it that in Seattle we are apparently discussing the abolition of prisons and police simultaneously?
I mean, even if you were dumb enough to think that those were a good idea, you would want to figure out whether they were a good idea together.
In other words, you're going to open the, you're going to abolish the prisons.
Do you believe that psychopaths exist?
Are there any in prison?
I think they're actually pretty likely to end up there.
Right?
Release some psychopaths.
Is it possible you might want more police in that case?
You don't know.
But the point is, however dumb it is to abolish the prisons, it would be even dumber to do it as you defunded or eliminated or abolished or whatever your terminology is, the police.
And yet, we are discussing these things.
We have the mayor of L.A. broadcasting on Twitter his solidarity with the protesters in Portland.
Now, frankly, I went to school with the mayor of L.A.
I didn't know him well, but I did go to school with him.
Before he was the mayor, presumably.
Oh, quite a bit before.
I think he was a few grades below me.
But in any case, to have the mayor of Los Angeles broadcasting a message of support for people that I believe are putting the rule of law in jeopardy in my hometown is a remarkable turn of events.
How could somebody have ended up in such a position of power and be persuaded by such low-quality arguments?
And so, in any case, where we arrive is that actually this isn't about persuasion.
This is about a Ponzi scheme in which you don't... Well, let's put it this way.
The mayor of LA has apparently signed up for this Ponzi scheme and he's signed up early enough that maybe it doesn't collapse on him and he seems to be okay with the idea that it might collapse on Portland and that it might result in violence against people that he doesn't know or doesn't care about or whatever it is.
So, the point is A Ponzi scheme, actually Ponzi was a guy.
The Ponzi scheme started with one person, right?
Now maybe critical theory isn't one person.
It may be a small discipline of people who believe amazingly foolish things.
But they are managing to spread those things, not by virtue of the arguments being the least bit compelling, but by two mechanisms.
One of them is that you are better off signing on and letting it collapse on other people.
So standard Ponzi scheme stuff.
But also by virtue of the fact that we have this evolutionary phenomenon taking place online, right, you have the characteristics necessary for adaptive evolution on Twitter, Facebook, everywhere else, which is you have reproduction, you have variation, you have heritability, and differential success.
Yeah, say it again.
Those four.
That's what's needed.
Reproduction, you've got variation, variation is heritable, and you've got differential success, which means that the messages are evolving.
Now I want you to ask yourself a question.
Do you know why it is that we mustn't open the borders?
Can you explain it?
You probably can't.
You know we shouldn't.
You know it would be a terrible idea.
But the problem is, unless you have the language of game theory, unless you have at the tip of your tongue the phenomenon of a tragedy of the commons, it's very hard to explain why that would be a bad idea and who will be harmed by it.
It happens that if you open the borders, you can predict the following thing.
People who flood over the borders, because there is opportunity here more so than elsewhere, they are not going to take corporate jobs.
Whose jobs are they going to take?
They're going to take the lower wage jobs, the lower skilled jobs, right?
So who is going to get hurt by what floods over the border, right?
It's going to be people who are most disadvantaged, not the people who are at the top of this ladder.
So, it's a very regressive move to expose the lowest rung of the ladder to intense competition from people flooding over the borders.
However, it is very hard to explain why you mustn't open the borders without then opening yourself to the accusation that you are anti-immigrant.
Right.
And I mean, I think when you were talking about the idea of abolishing prisons and that, you know, if that was successful, that would likely result in the actual need for more police because you would have actual psychopathic criminals, which is hardly the entire population of prisons, but it almost certainly represents a higher population of prisons than out in the rest of the world.
Abolishing prisons would require more police in order to keep people safe, but these two moves are happening at the same time.
Abolish prisons, these two movements, abolish prisons and abolish police.
And it reminded me actually of the, I want to imagine, unintended consequence, but at the time it seemed insane in the 80s when Reagan basically went after a lot of mental health hospitals Closed them down, shunted a bunch of people with actual mental health problems onto the streets, and boom, we get a rise in homelessness.
And there were no things put in place to accommodate these people who had no ability to help themselves, because they had just been thrown out onto the street.
Yeah, it's a very good analog.
We've got the population that can't fend for themselves because of mental disorders, and then here we've got a population of people who won't play by the rules because they're not built for it.
Now, as you point out, we immediately step into this trap, right?
Oh, you want to keep the prison industrial complex.
Well, no I don't.
Police reform, prison reform, mental health reform.
We are not claiming that any of this is being done right.
Food reform, like almost none of our modern systems are being done right.
This has been our bread and butter, our wheelhouse for decades now, and it's in fact what our book is about.
What is it that we should be eating that we're not doing?
How should we be sleeping that we're not doing?
How is the hyper-novel environment of the 21st and late 20th century Destroying human life, everything from relationship and childhood to school, back to food and sleep and health and medicine, on to society and how to be an adult.
The hyper-novelty is destroying all of it and part of what we have now is an empowered minority.
Tiny minority who know that change is necessary and are being handed solutions that aren't solutions and all they can do is shout those things.
Abolish the police.
Abolish prisons.
No.
That's not going to work.
It's not going to work.
And people who say that's not going to work are not inherently conservatives.
You and I are, you know, lifelong liberals.
We are progressives and, you know, I don't...
I don't know where you would put yourself, but I would say I'm a radical because I believe we need radical change.
That is not the same thing as all change is good, maximal change is good, right?
Tear it down.
This is another one of the linguistic traps that is set, right?
We have a, we, the movement, the protesters, whatever, are going to claim a goal.
And if you do not sign on with that goal, then clearly you are anti-whatever.
You know, you are against us.
But snuck into that is we have methods, and you have to not only sign on with the goal, but in order to sign on with the goal, you have to sign on with our methods.
And we have seen for years now, over and over and over again, that the methods are often actually maybe designed, maybe inadvertently, often some combination of the two, but the methods will actually achieve the opposite of the stated goal.
Therefore, when you stand against the methods of many of these movements, you are actually saying, no, I do believe Black Lives Matter, I am anti-racist, and you are acting in a way that is the opposite of that.
But by standing against a movement that has cleverly branded itself, that's basically won the PR game, We appear to be the people who are regressive when it's actually quite the opposite.
Yeah.
Now I'm going to push back a little bit on this question of methods because I find that the methods thing is a retreat that people who Can't find the courage to object to obviously stupid and dangerous things Go to and they force us to it by saying so you agree with the objective But you don't agree with the methods then right and my feeling is the problem is with a leaderless movement
What you don't have is any ability to say what they are actually pursuing.
And some of the people pursuing this are actually not well-intentioned.
And so the point is, no, I disagree with the idea that we should be even listening to these people, let alone correcting them about methods.
The majority of people who are sympathetic in some way have some vague idea, right?
But the basic point is, Evolution has created a set of arguments that, dumb as they are, are very difficult to challenge.
How did that happen?
Our online environment has created a new mode for the evolution of discourse.
And it explains a great deal about what we are seeing.
It explains what is, I hate the term, but being called cancel culture.
Right?
Cancel culture is about the evolution of mechanisms to tear down something that stands in your way.
Right?
How is that evolving?
Well, lots of people are experimenting with arguments.
And when something goes viral, when some argument catches on, boom!
That thing becomes the new argument.
And that process, that evolutionary process, builds this bulwark of nonsense.
That is nonetheless difficult to challenge and so those of us who know better are busy saying well I don't I don't understand even why we have to establish that for example Men and women are different, right?
I don't understand how we fell to a level where that actually needs some kind of a defense and as you pointed out last night there was a standard that applied when we taught college students how to make proper scientific arguments.
You want to say what it was?
Yeah.
When I was teaching people how to write scientific papers, and the question would always come up, which is a totally legitimate question and one that most people haven't considered formally, what do I cite?
When do I reference something that I've written down?
And, you know, the answer is it is a judgment call.
And if it's entirely your own idea, you don't cite it.
And that is part of why you must cite every idea that is not yours and that is new, so that the reader can know that when you aren't citing something, that's your idea newly.
But what you don't cite, you cite anything that is new enough to be attributable to a person or a research program.
But once things have become so accepted within the dominant scientific culture, and that's not to say that some things couldn't be overturned, but once things become so accepted within the dominant scientific culture, you do not cite them.
We no longer have to cite Galileo or Darwin, right?
When we speak to the very important observations and truths that they revealed to all of us.
In part, the reason that we know who those people are is testament to why we no longer have to cite them because those were such universal and enduring truths.
Occasionally in this men aren't women and women aren't men argument, I will receive, well you know, show us your receipts, show us the citation.
And you know, no one is writing this because there's no, it's just, it's just been understood.
accurately for, gosh, since the Greeks before that, and that men aren't women and that women aren't men.
And I can point to papers that suggest that 1.2 billion years ago sex evolved and that about 500 million years ago our lineage started going down a path of sexual reproduction that's uninterrupted.
But that's not a citation that says men and women are different, right?
That doesn't exist in the scientific literature because it's too basic.
Wouldn't know who to cite.
Yeah.
It doesn't exist.
I mean, honestly, wouldn't know who to cite, wouldn't know, you know, it's too obvious.
And so the point is, yes, this is just another trap.
Can you explain why you don't have a citation that explains that men and women are different?
Well, no, I can't exactly explain that, but it's hardly an indictment.
Right.
One thing with regard to this particular pyramid scheme that makes use of this intransigent minority, in Taleb's words, to make a tiny minority position appear to be the majority, is that many pyramid schemes are basically opt-in.
You get approached, and there's this external motivator, and external motivators tend to be either carrot or stick, and this is part of why external motivation is not nearly as effective or honorable as internal motivation.
But external motivators tend to be carrot or stick, And a typical pyramid scheme is using the carrot of your own greed, right?
Your own greed for wealth.
And therefore, you know, when it's carrot, it can be opt-in.
You can be like, come to the carrot.
But these, this one here, it seems to be opt-out and it's using the stick.
It's using fear.
It's using the fear of being hurt if you don't succumb, if you don't get in line as the way that it motivates people to join.
And it's not even there's an opt out component, but are we opted out?
I mean, it seems to me we've got live stream after live stream talking about the fact that we are not on board with this thing, but we cannot affect the fact that the mayor slash police commissioner of our city has.
Decided not to enforce the law locally and the New York Times has decided to portray Federal action to enforce the law around federal buildings as a fascist incursion So we are being set up right so as much as we would like to opt out we can opt out of the narrow thing of Participating in spreading the Ponzi scheme, but we cannot opt out of its consequences.
They have opted everybody in and so What I think needs to be understood is nobody has any idea what fraction of the population of Seattle actually organically believes that abolishing the police and abolishing prisons would be a good idea.
It's not a large percentage.
It's not a large percentage of black people.
It's not a large percentage of anything.
What it is, is contagious.
And so the question is not how many people will say, black lives matter, therefore these downstream consequences, because those people are rationalizing their own participation in a Ponzi scheme, right?
And you can actually see this in the history of Ponzi schemes.
The initial Ponzi scheme involved stamps.
Then there was a bunch of pyramid schemes.
You and I remember as kids that there was this pyramid scheme moment where the FBI started busting pyramid schemes.
Like the late 70s, early 80s.
Yeah, I think it was 70s.
And there was all of this footage of like these You know, rooms full of card tables.
People had rented these spaces for their pyramid schemes, and people were marched out in handcuffs and all of this stuff.
And then there was this next phase, which was the multi-level marketing version, where instead of just having a pure pyramid scheme, you pretended it was about a product.
Right?
And so, anyway, this is now... So the House of Cards has something inside of it.
Right, you're selling some object rather than selling an opportunity to participate in a pyramid scheme, right?
So that you can rationalize that this is really about knives or water filters or whatever the hell was being sold.
Beauty products, yeah.
Right, beauty products.
So now we're in a new phase, and that's kind of the point here, is the new phase is there's no product.
There is a message that is being carried forward, and that message is structured so everybody can sign on.
Right?
If you can't sign on to Black Lives Matter, there's something wrong with you.
And I actually agree with that.
At the slogan level, yeah, black lives are undervalued.
Anybody should be able to sign on to that.
But having signed on to it, what have you dragged in with you?
You've dragged in all of these nonsense proposals, these civilization-ending proposals, right?
Which you can disavow.
You can say, oh, no, but, you know, I got attacked on Twitter.
You know, nobody is saying, abolish the police.
Really?
I can read it in the New York Times, right?
It's right there.
But you can tell yourself what abolish the police means is defund, which means reduce the militarization, yada, yada, yada.
All of the rationalizations.
But you see on the official Black Lives website, which is the one thing that they have given to those of us who would like to make them accountable for what they're doing, right?
You see, as we've talked about in past live streams, them going after the nuclear family, them conflating trans black lives with all black lives and rising in the ranks, trans lives, you know, over all sorts of other lives.
You see official Black Lives Matter accounts going after Israel.
So, you know, in what way is anti-Semitism about Black Lives Matter?
In what way are trans lives about Black Lives Matter?
In what way is the nuclear family an attack on Black Lives Matter?
I mean, really, I mean, And that's the most obvious one to say, what are you guys doing?
Right.
Yeah, it's preposterous.
But okay, let's go to the next phase.
So you've got absolute nonsense arguments.
You've got policy, which is moving at an incredible rate.
Seattle is now playing with the most Dangerous moves based on the idea that there is public outcry demanding these things, when that public outcry is itself based in part on fear and in part on a pyramid scheme.
And there's no way, I mean, we are literally not supposed to be making policy on the basis of people being violent in the street.
Right?
Right.
And yet, that's what we're about to do.
It looks very much like Taleb's point about the tiniest minority being able to drive policy, which is absolutely undemocratic.
Do you want to show this letter that emerged yesterday?
Yeah, so this – before you show it, Zach, I think we need to set it up a little bit.
I think in mid-June, the Seattle City Council voted unanimously in a – let's see – City Council Ordinance 119805 to – actually, you can show it now, Zach.
To ban Seattle police officers from using less lethal tools, including pepper spray.
And that goes into effect tomorrow, so that was voted on unanimously.
So that does suggest that either the tiny minority is all in power, or it's now becoming, or this fear, this mechanism of fear, the stick motivator, has caused people to fall in line.
Voted on in mid-June, goes into effect tomorrow, and so the police chief in Seattle sent a letter to business owners and residents of Seattle yesterday.
Effectively saying, we are going to be deploying police differently and less when we get calls, basically because we cannot keep ourselves safe in the way that we would Would want to have before.
And this is, you know, the letter specifically says we are not going to put ourselves in harm's way to defend property.
It does not say we are not going to put ourselves in harm's way to defend you if you are under duress.
But that point looks like a slippery slope as well.
Oh, it's clearly a slippery slope.
And there are two blocks in Portland where the police will not defend you if things happen to you.
This has now been demonstrated on video.
Now, there are times of day when it's perfectly safe to go there, but there are times of day when it is reliably not.
The police know exactly where this is, and they, I think, can't intervene based on the constraints that they've been handed by city government.
So, yes, we are not yet at the position of the police failing to defend people in a general sense across the city.
There are places in cities where that's true, but it is not yet general.
But the rate at which we are moving in this direction is absolutely staggering, and as a result of the phony impression that this is what the public is demanding, Right?
So, maybe, let's talk a little bit about the Portland situation.
So, can we do that slideshow, Zach?
I took some pictures and I don't know what order they're in, but it almost doesn't matter.
Actually, can you start with the, can you start with the image from Reddit of the notice that was posted on the fence?
Okay, so what you have now for those of you who are listening is a removal notice for the fence that has been placed in front of the courthouse.
This is the city government placing a notice on the fence that is Let me be clear, the fence was erected by federal officers and the city of Portland, the Portland Bureau of Transportation is declaring that the fence that was erected by federal officers Is a hazard and must be removed.
But the fence was erected by federal officers, that's the piece I didn't hear you say.
So the federal officers have been left to defend these buildings because the city is not enforcing the law.
So the federal officers are defending the buildings, and instead of defending them against incursions that come right up into, break into the building, start fires, all of this stuff, they put up a fence to reduce the access of these nightly rioters.
The city is now saying, oh, you're blocking traffic, which is actually nonsense.
It is true that they do come into a lane of traffic, but it's not like the traffic doesn't move.
It moves perfectly well.
But the city is now effectively signing up with the rioters to get the fence removed.
The rioters try to remove the fence every night and they frequently succeed.
So, the city has now taken a position on these riots.
Okay, now do you want to go through the slideshow?
These are slides that you took.
These are pictures that you took this morning?
Yeah, these are pictures I took this morning.
So here... Things are calm.
Absolutely calm, which is a reliable fact.
They are calm every day during daylight hours.
This is in the park directly across from the courthouse.
This is a concession stand in which you can get free ribs.
They've named it Riot Ribs, which is funny.
But nonetheless, this is an autonomous zone.
It's undeclared, but it clearly is an autonomous zone.
These concession stands are there every day.
Okay, can you advance one?
Here are city workers cleaning up the nightly mayhem.
Zach, we can't tell which... You're showing us two different pictures.
We don't know what people can see at the moment.
Okay, can you go one more?
OK, here you see a huge number of barbecues.
OK, this is absolutely an autonomous zone.
These barbecues are there.
They are being used to cook food.
Keep going.
OK.
That one is not in the correct orientation, but you can still read that it says, get out of my city, feds go home.
Now, remember, the rioters nightly attack federal buildings and the police, the local police, are not enforcing the law.
Therefore, I would argue that actually the feds have no choice but to defend those buildings.
I mean, legally speaking, they have no choice.
And so, in effect, we are being set up to imagine that there is a federal incursion.
Now, there are things about the way that this influx of federal officers is going about their business that make me uncomfortable, but it's also not as portrayed.
They are taking people into unmarked cars, but they themselves are clearly labeled as federal officers.
Are there more pictures?
Yep, keep going.
This one says, there's no police force like no police force.
So when people tell you that nobody is arguing for no police force, in fact, it's right here on this tree.
Keep going?
Okay, our mayor is being taunted by these people, right?
Ted Squealer, and he's depicted as a pig, and of course pig means cop to these people.
Above it is a sticker that says gas me, Teddy.
Now I want to talk a little bit about this term gas, right?
The term gas is being used to make everybody squeamish about tear gas.
Now, I don't like the idea that tear gas is being used in Portland, but the thing is, tear gas is an irritant, right?
The term gas evokes mustard gas, it evokes Nazi gas chambers and Zyklon B, So, the point is, the idea that Ted Wheeler is gassing people is being used to make him squeamish about doing what he absolutely must do as the mayor and police commissioner, which is enforce the law, which he is not doing.
Let's see, the final sticker here says, Talk to Plants, Not Cops.
Now this is all very...
Humorous, except that this don't talk to cops thing is being used to make an incident, a violent incident, between the police and the protesters slash rioters more likely.
It's divisive.
It is dehumanizing.
We saw the bits of this during Occupy.
Of course, it was considered treason to talk to the cops, even though it is necessary to talk to them.
Frankly, they are citizens too, and it is necessary that they understand that they are not up against some monolith, but that they are up against people.
I believe that you had a conversation with a policeman during Occupy in Olympia, in which you talked to him, and I think maybe even a couple of other policemen came around and were engaging.
About the need to not follow orders when orders are themselves immoral.
Immoral orders.
This is the conversation that you were having with police and you were being decried by fellow protesters for engaging with police.
Yeah, and that was a peaceful protest.
That was a peaceful protest.
But, you know, that was actually... And, you know, when we were being told to get off the lawn so we didn't hurt the lawn, right?
Like this, that, that was, that was what this is pretending to be.
Yep.
It is pretending.
And that is, from the point of view of the New York Times and all of your standard democratic outlets, the portrayal makes one move, right?
The idea is, this is all a reaction to a federal incursion.
Therefore, this is effectively Trump deploying troops to the streets of Portland because we always were told that he was going to do this.
It was going to be a power grab.
But the fact is, no, no.
There were federal officers defending these buildings because that's legally required.
They are federal buildings.
And then this surge of new federal cops is the result of the fact that these city cops aren't doing their job.
Yeah.
I should point out.
The notice saying that the fence was impeding traffic and therefore had to go is actually part of a deeper plan, I am told.
You are told by whom?
Well, there were two people who had a sign out saying that they were offering free legal advice to people who had been released from jail after having been arrested in this circumstance.
People in downtown Portland early on a Saturday when there is no activity really but, you know, Patently sympathetic to the protesters and no evidence that they themselves are, you know, adding to the chaos of the anarchy.
Nope, I would say these people look like they were probably folks who knew what they were talking about legally, probably had been to law school, don't know.
Okay, so what did they say to you?
They said to me that the fence was impeding traffic where it was, but to move it back towards the building would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.
So effectively, they've got the feds right where they want them.
Oh, God.
The Americans with Disabilities are needing to go inside the federal, like, what is the access that is... That's apparently the access, but I mean...
Yeah.
I mean, I... I just don't even know how to respond.
It's hard to counter the argument because, I mean, presumably you and I would both want Americans with disabilities to be able to access this building.
On the other hand, I don't want... Well, and they blocked a bike lane earlier, and we bike, and we don't want bike lanes blocked, but... For God's sake!
So here's the thing.
If you're going to argue that this federal incursion is illegitimate, then it is your obligation to explain what is supposed to be happening.
Because it looks to me like they have gone up against every tier.
And the last tier, the only tier that won't give, are the feds.
Right?
I don't like that.
That's not what's supposed to be going on in downtown Portland.
But if the city is going to abdicate responsibility and they're going to attack a federal building, which obviously they are doing to precipitate a federal response.
No, I mean, you get rid of these smaller, more local, more empathetic to your particular phenomenon, hometown police, and what you will get is a police state.
This is what will happen.
And that's not what I think is, that doesn't appear to be the goal by anyone here, but this will be the effect of going after the smaller jurisdiction policing, which is happening not just in Seattle and Portland, but in lots of places.
So let's talk a little bit about the... Are there more slides there, Zach?
You want to go through the remainder of them and then I'd like to talk about the next level here.
And the police occupation of Portland.
I don't see that the police are occupying Portland.
I see that rioters are occupying Portland.
I mean we've got effectively two months of nightly riots against federal buildings.
So this is a false narrative that this is the police occupying Portland and it implies of course if the police leave everything will be hunky-dory when effectively we can see that the people who are demanding this are attempting to light these buildings on fire.
Should we allow that?
Right, okay.
Keep going Trump Nazis go to hell.
Okay.
Now this I think is the crux of it is that we have a situation in which the fact of Trump in the White House and the fact therefore that everything federal looks to people on the left like Trump is Means that there is a total loss of coherence, right?
More slides.
So here you can see this is clearly an undeclared autonomous zone, right?
These are concession stands set up in a public park across the street from this courthouse where nightly there are riots.
It's clearly an autonomous zone.
Anymore?
Here is where rioters have attempted to cut through the barricade.
There are many of these breaches and it is not difficult online to find video of the protesters shaking the fence down, ripping it apart on a regular basis.
Anything else?
Ah, this is actually part and parcel of what we were talking about before.
This model in which the messages are being evolved online.
Okay, here's a hashtag.
Spray painted.
Tear gas Ted.
Yeah.
Okay.
Tear gas Ted.
Keep going.
Okay, all cops are bastards, no justice, no peace, and that bit of graffiti on the far end says, fuck you, which in some sense I think may be the best description of what this means.
Here we see, on the Justice Center, abolish USA.
Now, you know, be one thing- How many of these people have ever been outside of this country?
I mean, this has been my point for months now.
I mean, years actually, because we saw, yes, we saw this at Evergreen.
That the most susceptible to this batshit ideology were the people with the most naivete about what the world actually looks like, what different people sound like, and think like, and eat like, and what their music is, and what it is to be on the ground in someone else's culture.
Abolish the USA?
Try going somewhere else and living with other people for a while in the conditions in which they live and come back to your home and let's talk then.
Let's talk then.
Even that, I mean I agree with you that, you know, it's not people who have seen the world who are arguing to abolish the USA, but even that Those other countries are stable.
If you abolish the USA, so I've heard recently, what does the world look like where you've abolished the police, right?
It looks like a beautiful white suburb.
No, it doesn't, right?
It does not look like... This is the same people who believe in noble savages, frankly.
It's the same level of analysis.
It is woo-woo utopian nonsense.
It's nonsense.
And the thing is, it looks like, you know, Mogadishu, right?
So, it does not look like Bel Air.
It looks like Mogadishu.
It looks like Mogadishu, right.
Or it looks like, you know, war-torn Afghanistan, right?
The point is, a power vacuum does not serve the downtrodden.
It serves those who are amoral and willing to wield violence in their own interest.
And that's what we saw in the one official autonomous zone that was established in Seattle, the Chazz Chop, before it was actually disbanded by the Seattle police when they still did have some power to do so, which may, you know, which may stop tomorrow.
That no, it didn't, it wasn't all roses and unicorns, people.
No, it's nonsense.
And the fact is, we should not have to test this on civilization in order to discover what kind of nonsense it is, because frankly, you don't need to be that smart to extrapolate to what actually happens when you tear the structure down that is keeping the peace.
It's pretty clear.
Once again, I've used this phrase before, but I think it's the comic bookification.
Of people's moral sense.
That they think that there are true heroes who do nothing but good in the world, and there are true villains who do nothing but evil in the world.
And I think people have also slotted every single other human being into, well, they may not rise to having a cape, but they're actually all heroes.
So we've got a whole bunch of people who simply do good in the world, and then a few people who simply do evil, and if we just get rid of the evil, then we'll be fine.
It's like these people have never spent a moment alone with themselves.
Every single one of us has thoughts and proclivities that aren't as honorable as they might be.
Every single one of us.
And the idea that you can imagine that a vast majority of humans are purely good begins with the idea that you can imagine that a single human being can be purely good.
And frankly, this is part of the same ridiculous foundational belief that gets us to actually use another telebism, what he calls retrospective bigoteering.
Okay, so this is the idea that all we have to do is find something in important historical figures past that rendered them a bigot or somehow not pure by today's standards, and we can cancel them.
Let me see if I can pull up his actual language because it's good.
Here we go, Zach.
Accusing ancient individuals or groups of violating today's ethical norms.
Saying Aristotle was sexist or Nietzsche was racist should only be used in what probabilistics call filtration at time t. Okay, I'm not going to read the whole telebism here.
He does say, let me see, I think I can get to the whole tweet here.
He points out the New York Times suggests canceling Aristotle.
This is retrospective bigoteering.
It implies that moral values do not evolve, which we know they do.
People need to be judged with respect to the morals of their own time, but this is the important thing, parenthetical in Taleb's tweet, but we can be harsh with Napoleon because he reinstated slavery.
This is what we need to be doing.
Looking at when people actually were regressive for their own time, made decisions that were bad in their own time, or, on the contrary, were perhaps forward-thinking and progressive and moving towards greater unity and less division for a number of people in their own time, even if they simultaneously did things that were of the norm of their time that would not be regarded as honorable by today's standards.
And frankly, even in the case when they were regressive for their own time, right?
Unfortunately, I don't have the evidence for it ready to display, but I saw an important move at the highest levels to remove the names of important scientific figures because of their own moral failings.
Mm-hmm.
That's this retrospective bigoteering.
This is exactly what Taleb is talking about.
But here's my feeling.
Look, we are evolutionary biologists.
R.A.
Fisher was Deeply anti-Semitic, okay?
I don't want R.A.
Fisher removed from biological history because it will set us back 70 years, right?
Well, I mean, it's just, it's not even possible.
Right.
Right?
I mean, not only are his thinkings completely embedded in evolutionary theory, he's also by many measures the father of modern statistics!
That's exactly it!
Not only is he the guy who figured out sex ratios, which are the basis for understanding all sorts of important phenomena, including why men and women are different and meaningfully so, but the father of modern statistics.
Yes.
Was he morally compromised?
Yes.
Likewise.
Did he have some reprehensible ideas?
Yes.
Too bad.
Likewise, Conrad Lorenz.
You know, and if we want to, you know, go after Darwin.
Louis Agassiz.
And pretty much anyone from more than a hundred years ago is going to have held some beliefs that we, in retrospect, can say, no, I wish you didn't.
I wish you hadn't.
But the thing is, history is what it is.
And so the thing is, I'm not looking to obscure what was wrong with these people's belief systems.
I don't want, you know, the idea that Fisher was anti-Semitic eliminated from his Wikipedia page.
I want that front and center so people understand that somebody who was morally compromised was nonetheless clear-headed in a way that's so important we still invoke him regularly today.
Right?
Certainly, we can retrospectively forgive him his sins if he did not act on them in ways that did damage to people, and we can appreciate what he did bring to our understanding of the world.
I think the thing is, history, it's got to be warts and all.
But you can't obscure it.
Tearing down George Washington does nobody any good.
That's right.
So I want to sort of bring this full circle.
Part of what is going on On the left side of the spectrum is that the shadow cast by Trump is so big that it has blinded the entire left to its own failings.
And this is going to actually wreck the U.S.
and because of the role that the U.S.
plays internationally, the danger is quite a bit beyond that, right?
As long as Trump is in the White House, people on the left cannot understand that they actually have to balance concerns.
And you will actually hear people say this, right?
Why are you focused on X when we still have this primary problem?
Well, I have yet to hear anybody apologize for telling me he was Hitler.
Right?
I have yet to hear anybody say, actually, we were wrong about that, but still, right?
It's like that never happened, right?
That was regularly claimed.
I haven't heard it claimed.
Well, it's still implied in one of those pictures you showed, the Trump Nazis, right?
Yep, it's still implied on that particular tree, but nonetheless, in polite circles, it's rarely invoked anymore.
So the idea is you'll still hear fascist, right?
But Hitler, hmm, I haven't heard that one except from that tree recently, right?
So you are talking to the plants.
You took the advice of that other sign.
No, I will talk to the cops and I will also talk to the plants.
Let the plants talk to you.
I'm listening.
And the right plants.
I'm all ears, or eyes, as it is.
But in any case, look people, the problem isn't Trump, okay?
The problem is the confluence of Trump and the reaction.
That thing is putting civilization in jeopardy, right?
And it is not It is not reasonable, it is not smart, it is not logically defensible to behave in this way, to tear down the structures that we are now jeopardizing, simply because you find the guy in the White House abhorrent.
And likewise, as many people have pointed out, the fact that you find him abhorrent doesn't mean that he's wrong on every issue.
And, you know, it's your responsibility to explain what is supposed to happen, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, when you have rioters clearly attempting to precipitate a federal response.
You have the New York Times portraying Trump as the instigator, when in fact, in this case, he is, at the very least, he is responding to two months of riots, you know?
Anyway, can we please get over this sense that just because Trump is in the White House you're allowed to do anything, say anything, attack anything?
Because that can't possibly be right.
That's right.
Two last things.
Yep.
To pick up Taleb again for the third time today, in the piece where he originally writes about bigoteering and then alludes to this what he calls retrospective bigoteering, he also introduces a term that he calls pedophrasty.
So you can put this up if you will, Zach.
And pedophrasty, he says, His definition is an argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole.
As people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children, nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting, often done with the aid of pictures.
We've all seen this, but in the current moment I would add to this, Matt Refrasti.
The Wall of Moms in Portland is, if it is legitimate at all, it is this.
It is it is matrifrasti, which, you know, is not a word anymore than pedofrasti was before Taleb coined it, but I'm now coining matrifrasti, which to use exactly his definition for children, An argument involving mothers to prop up rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of the suffering mothers.
Nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting, often done with the aid of pictures.
Totally agree with this.
Now, as you know, I've done a little attending of the protests, and I will say I have attended the protests because the protests precede the riots, and I've been Warned and I've now seen reason to think it's true that attending within each day.
You're talking about temporarily Yes, the protests happen and then the Sun sets and there's a protest rally that happens and then violence breaks out tear gas is used those these things But I saw the wall of moms I would say Maybe 20% of them appear old enough to be moms.
I'm not saying they're not biologically old enough, but they did not read as a wall of moms.
They read as a wall of yellow shirts.
Now, interestingly, As I left to go home the day that I intersected with the wall of moms, I did see some people who were almost certainly mothers walking towards, in yellow shirts.
So I'm not arguing that there are no mothers among them, but I'm arguing that this is actually Taking a small number of mothers and turning them into an outcry of mothers in order for the New York Times to to rant and rail against Trump's fascist incursion into Portland and It doesn't read that way on the ground.
It really doesn't and so Had it I'd be telling you but it doesn't and I'm not saying actually this is maybe the the most difficult part for me and The rally that preceded the riots, the night that I encountered the Wall of Moms, was electric.
By which you mean what?
By which I meant you could feel the camaraderie in the air, right?
And, you know, I think what they're demanding is nonsense.
I think that, you know, a rally preceding a predictable riot in which People are attacking federal buildings, attacking elk statues, occupying city blocks, that this is completely unacceptable.
But as somebody with experience in the world, I'm telling you, the moms didn't look organic to me, but the sense of camaraderie was there.
It was in the air enough that somebody who is as skeptical as I am of this still felt it walking into that.
And that should tell you something.
Yeah.
Well, among other things, apparently we're supposed to talk to the plants, but not to the elk.
Right, well, exactly, because what do elk eat?
They eat plants, right?
We're on the side of the plants and the angels.
Okay, to finish this off, I'd like to read a few paragraphs from an op-ed, I guess, published in the Boston Globe, actually a week and a half ago, by Robbie George and Cornel West.
Robbie George is a friend of ours, and Robbie George, who is conservative, and Cornel West, who is illiberal, are fast friends as well, and they are sort of, I don't know if poster children is the right term, but for working across and friending across significant differences and actually seeing the value and honor in other people's positions.
So they've written a piece called To Unite the Country, We Need Honesty and Courage.
You can show it briefly, although then I'm going to go back to my screen because I want to read just bits and pieces of it.
So it begins, oh, It begins, fellow citizens, honesty and courage alone can save our wounded, disunited country now.
We need the honesty and courage to speak the truth, including painful truths that unsettle not only our foes, but also our friends and most especially ourselves.
And it's a long and wonderful piece.
In the middle of it, there are these six short paragraphs.
We need the honesty and courage not to compromise our beliefs or go silent on them out of a desire to be accepted, or out of fear of being ostracized, excluded, or cancelled.
We need the honesty and courage to consider with an open mind and heart points of view that challenge our beliefs, even our deepest, most cherished identity-forming beliefs.
We need the intellectual humility to recognize our own fallibility, and that, too, requires honesty and courage.
We need the honesty and courage to recognize and acknowledge that there are reasonable people of goodwill who do not share even some of our deepest, most cherished beliefs.
This is true for Christians, like ourselves, or members of other traditions of faith, as well as for religious skeptics and atheists.
It is true for conservatives, as well as progressives, for libertarians, as well as socialists.
We need the honesty and courage to treat decent and honest people with whom we disagree, even on the most consequential questions, as partners in truth-seeking and fellow citizens of our republican order, not as enemies to be destroyed.
And we must always respect and protect their human rights and civil liberties.
We need honesty and courage to be willing to change our beliefs and stances if evidence, reason, and compelling argument persuade us that they are in need of revision, even at the cost of alienating us from communities in which we are comfortable and rely on for personal affirmation, solidarity, and support.
And finally, We need the honesty and courage to love in the highest and best sense, to will the good of the other for the sake of the other, to treat even our adversaries as precious members of the human family.
We need the honesty and courage to resist the hatred, the spirit of hatred, that the zeal even for good causes can induce in we frail, fallen, fallible human beings, and that corrupts the human soul and leads inexorably to spiritual emptiness and to tyranny, even among those who began as sincere advocates of freedom and justice.
So this is marvelous and fits perfectly with the guy we have come to know.
Robbie George is a truly amazing human being who has come to our defense many times despite being on the other side of the political spectrum from us.
I think there are two things that we need to add to cap this off, though.
I will try to keep them brief.
First one, Zach, could you show that tweet that I sent you?
Here's what happens if we...
Wait, the video file has that.
Right.
Well, what Zach is looking for is a tweet that...
Did I find it?
Oh, wait.
One with four images?
Yep.
Can you put it on the big screen so we can read it?
Yeah.
Thank you.
Okay, the tweet and I say I must tell you I wish I could just simply assume that the I know that the event is real.
I cannot vouch for the source.
I know nothing about them.
They may they are more than likely just fine, but I don't know enough about the source to to say but the tweet says good morning from Louisville, Kentucky today and all black militia group called the not fucking around coalition hashtag.
NFAC is holding an armed rally for Breonna Taylor, expected at noon.
Conservative militias are already gathering to counter it.
I'll be covering all day.
So this is happening.
I don't know if the images are necessary or not.
The fact of this rally is significant.
I have seen video of the rally itself.
I have seen video of the militias that are coming to counter-protest it.
I know that at least one shot was fired, probably accidentally.
Nonetheless, the danger to the Republic that comes from not listening to Cornel West and Robbie George is spectacular and immediate.
And that is what we are playing with, is that this will unfold badly.
One bad confrontation between one group and another that gets read as somehow an attack Or is an attack.
A single entity that decides to make an attack could set things in a direction from which we will not recover.
And we must not allow that to happen.
Yeah.
Okay.
Final thing.
With the death of Michael Brooks, I have held my fire with respect to the interaction with the producer of the Majority Report, Matt Leitch.
But there's something that needs to be said here.
So many will remember that Matt Leitch unleashed a falsehood about me, and therefore about us, that I was somehow consulting for the Department of Homeland Security.
And what he was referring to was discussion with an officer for the DHS, which I made no secret of.
I talked about it right here on the livestream.
So he took that and he portrayed it.
As my consulting for the Department of Homeland Security.
And then I said that he needed to apologize, he needed to retract, and he needed to be fired.
And I was challenged in a way that I actually probably should have seen coming, but I did not expect.
Which is, oh, I get it.
You are in favor of cancel culture when it's about you.
Now this strikes me as insane.
Why does Matt Leitch need to be fired?
He does not need to be cancelled.
I never wanted him cancelled.
He needs to be fired for cause.
That's what used to happen in the adult world.
When somebody, if your pilot, shows up drunk, they need to be fired for cause.
If your surgeon refuses to scrub up before surgery, they need to be fired for cause.
That's not cancellation.
This person does not belong in journalism.
And if he just made an error, if this is once in a lifetime, then he needs to own up to that error exactly.
And nothing he has delivered so far is anything other than grudging.
So I think he needs to be fired for cause.
And I think Sam Seder needs to understand that his ability to continue in whatever he's doing, if it's journalism, requires that he own up to the fact that what Matt Ledge did
Is justification for firing and that that is actually the required action unless something utterly extraordinary happens So I don't want to hear any more of this garbage about I'm for cancel culture This has nothing to do with cancel culture This has to do with the fact that the world functions when people do jobs properly and some jobs Do not accept failures like this a drunk pilot needs to be fired for cause a journalist who lies about
The nature of an interaction of citizens with federal officers needs to be fired for cause.
Why?
Because it put us in danger.
There are nightly attacks on federal officers in Portland.
Violent attacks.
By describing us as collaborating with the Department of Homeland Security, that was clearly painting a target on us that was foreseeably going to end in violence against us on totally false pretenses.
So, anyway.
I now feel That issue is clear enough, and if you describe it as cancel culture, that's your failure.
All right.
Okay, well I think we are about ready to wrap up.
Yep.
Tomorrow we will have our private Q&A for Dark Horse members, for people at my Patreon at the $5 or up level at 11am.
And if you're interested in the private Discord server, you can access that by joining either of our Patreons at the $5 or up level.
What else?
There's Clips Channel.
Clips Channel.
There's Unity 2020.
There's Unity 2020.
Big things are headed your way.
Keep your eye out for that.
You just released the Zuby conversation yesterday.
The Zuby conversation.
I was just going to say, the Zuby conversation is great.
Zuby is a gem and totally worth your time, so you should check that out.
If you haven't seen the Matt Taibbi discussion, that one also was excellent.
Mike Mew, the Black English program table, it's all good.
This guy knows what he's doing.
Alright, so we are going to return.
Yeah, so we'll take a 15-minute break.
We'll be answering as many of your Super Chat questions as we can, taking the top monetary value ones from this first hour first, and then taking what comes in next hour in roughly the order in which they come in.
All right.
We look forward to doing so.
Yep.
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