conservativehome--2019-11-09--The poor bloody infantry: why people join political parties

Footsoldiers: Political Party Membership in the 21st Century by Tim Bale, Paul Webb and Monica Poletti  “The trouble with writing about politics is that things can change so fast.” So say these authors in a rueful tone at the end of their study of political party membership.  When they started work over five years ago, they thought they would be examining a story of decline. They instead find “the SNP and Labour have enjoyed truly unprecedented growth and the Liberal Democrats haven’t done too badly either”.  They add that “the Conservatives seem to be treading water, finding it difficult to recruit younger people, women and ethnic minorities in particular”.  Whether that is correct, it is perhaps too early to say with certainty. But the growth in the other parties illustrates an aspect of our political tradition which is easily overlooked, or at least undervalued, namely its ability to correct itself.  Abuses cry out for redress. Often the problem is so intractable that decades pass before one can say it has been dealt with at all satisfactorily. But at length it is tackled, and replaced by some other difficulty.  The problem of over-mighty trade unions, addressed with humiliating lack of success by the governments of Harold Wilson, Edward Heath and Jim Callaghan, was at last settled under Margaret Thatcher, with Tony Blair prevailing on Labour to accept the settlement.  The hollowing out of the membership of political parties, apparent for a long time, is only now being addressed. On the Left, it sprang in part from the humbling of the trade unions, which provided, at least on paper, a membership of millions, and also a practical route by which members of the working class could gain political experience, enter Parliament and reach high office.  Momentum is in part a nostalgic attempt to recreate that working-class involvement, but without the political education, the hard practical experience of negotiation and bringing your members with you, provided by work as a trade union organiser.  On the Right, there is much less fear of socialism than prevailed from 1917 until the 1980s. Bolshevism was a great recruiting sergeant for the Conservatives, to which should be added a certain gift, apparent since the founding of the Primrose League in 1883 and carried on by the Young Conservatives after the Second World War, for making politics enjoyable.  The volume under review adopts a narrower focus. The authors want to know why, in the present day, people join political parties, what if anything they do for those parties, what they think of those parties, why quite often they leave those parties and how the requirements of the membership are balanced against those of the parliamentary leadership.  These questions are all worth asking. To help answer them, the authors surveyed members of Labour, the Conservatives, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party of England and Wales, and UKIP, in 2015 and again in 2017.  Forty-eight tables of figures are provided in this book, starting with “Occupational class profiles of party members and voters”, and proceeding to “Intensity of election campaign activities and purposive, material and solidary incentives”.  These terms are part of the General Incentives Model, which is explained in the text:  What does all this effort show? In their conclusion, the authors write:  “First and foremost, people join a political party because they are attracted by its principles and very often by its leader and because they are keen to see its policy platform implemented and to stop rival parties bringing in or continuing with policies they dislike and think are damaging. They also join because they believe it’s important that people get involved in democratic politics. True, these expressive, collective policy and altruistic incentives are not the only ones that are important: social norms (friends and family) and selective process incentives (engaging in activities with like-minded people) also matter, but they matter less. Joining for the sake of advancing one’s career (either in or outside of politics) – a selective outcome incentive – is not unknown, of course, but appears to be nowhere near as common as people who aren’t members think it is. This misapprehension, it turns out, is one of several which, along with (equally misplaced) concerns about how much time membership might take up, may prevent people who strongly support parties from actually joining them. That said, it remains the case that some types of people are more likely to join parties than others: their members are not only more convinced than their supporters that they can make a difference, but they are noticeably more male, middle class and better educated, suggesting ‘resources’ are still a factor when it comes to the reasons why people join.”  None of this seems surprising enough to justify the effort needed to read it. Anyone with some slight involvement in politics would already know most of it, and some of the sentiments can be heard expressed in plainer language in the local pub: “They’re all in it for the money” and so forth.  The remarks by practising politicians which are quoted here are more vivid than the surrounding text. A “Liberal Democrat staffer” says:  Here one feels one is getting close to politics as it is actually practised – something from which the great apparatus of scrupulous, jargon-ridden social science cuts us off in the rest of the book, with its well-meaning attempts to quantify sentiments which are unquantifiable.  Barbara Pym wrote with wonderful insight and wit about the Church of England because she was a member of it, yet capable of seeing how absurd it often looked.  The story of why people join political parties probably has to be written from the inside too. The outsider can say that socialism, or indeed any form of political engagement, would take too many evenings, but is unlikely to understand why someone might actually want to join the socialists, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems, the Greens, the Scots Nats or the Brexit Party.  The impulse often comes from a feeling of deep disgust with the way some other party is run: an indignant sense that it does not value or listen to its members, or is going to inflict terrible damage on the nation, or on Europe, or on the planet. Every party is in a sense a protest party against the other parties.  So for the parties to gain members, things have to become more dangerous. Brexit too has become a recruiting sergeant.  This book contains scattered insights into the memberships of political parties, but no very remarkable conclusions spring from its statistical tables and it cannot be described as either readable or penetrating.


dailykos--2019-05-14--Do I Have Something to Sell

Do I Have Something to Sell?

Do I have something to sell?  Can I get off the “slush-pile” of unread manuswcripts at publishing houses in New York?  Can my 40 yearrs of work on this project be useful for people, or have I gone up an un-productive dead end?  I have an interesting biography (available at my site), essentially I was the very good student who never stopped looking for “the truth” about human beings, why do we do the things we do?  It was back in 1978, I was working as a free-lance researcher/writer a few years out of college, that I started seriously wondering, “What if we had a science of History that was concerned about every person, every single one?’  Of course that’s a very deep well, and of course the obvious answer is that we simply don’t have any data on 99.9999 % of all the people who have ever lived, even in times for which we have some semblance of historical records, and only archeological/fossil anthropological data on all the people who existed for tens or hundreds of thousands of years before that.  Yet nevertheless I kept after it, and I think I have been able to pry some useful threads out of this well of missing and confusing data.  The main contribution I’ve come up with is a “learning aid” for understanding the social sciences, and how they work within human personalities and human societies.  It is meant to be a system for helping anyone in the world to apply the data they have on people in their environment, to understand those people better and thus be able to deal with those people more productively.  I really hope that it’s something that can be useful for students, for young people, for anyone who doesn’t feel they are getting the life-guidance they need from the current academic perspectives on the social sciences.  My “learning aid” is just complex enough that I don’t like to summarize it in less than a few hundred words --so I won’t summarize it in this short article that’s meant to get you to spend some time at my site.


dailykos--2019-08-08--The Climate Emergency Does Anything Else Really Matter

The Climate Emergency: Does Anything Else Really Matter?

It’s really happening.  We’re cooking the world to maintain our convenient and comfortable lifestyles.  Every gallon of gasoline we burn is eight more pounds of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.   The first big crop failure from climate change is happening right now with corn and soybeans in the American Midwest.  The permafrost in the Arctic is melting, accelerating the release of heat-trapping gasses.  Accelerating: that means all the bad changes we’re already seeing will happen faster and larger than the changes we haven’t really adjusted to, so far, in this frustrating fantastic journey that our “modern economy” is taking us on.  We all love being in rich, relatively free societies removed from the drudgery and pain of pre-industrial agricultural economies – yet my work as an amateur historian leaves me convinced that every major industry has “developed” by using the ability to dump their wastes cost-free into the global environments that support us, and every living thing.  The dumping of fossil fuel waste into our atmosphere unfortunately has the consequence of heating the planet so we can’t live comfortably on it any more.  Extreme weather events, heat spells covering continents for months, floods we can hardly imagine, beyond-Category-5 hurricanes coverings 800 miles, the collapse of the Pacific fisheries, or simultaneous failures of global wheat, rice and cassava crops.  Can you imagine the spectacle if Miami gets an 8-foot hurricane surge that doesn’t want to leave?  I’m pushing 70, I’m thinking of the crap I’m leaving my children,  If you’re 50 MAYBE the world lasts long enough for you to retire for a few years with a semblance of today.  If you’re 40 or under it is YOUR LIFE that is at stake.  The scale of the potential catastrophe – essentially, our suicide as a “civilization” leaving only a few hunter-gatherers if any of us at all – is so great that we, as individuals, as members of families and communities and citizens of nations have to fully confront the question: Does Anything Else Really Matter?  In the face of the existential/extinction crisis facing us as individuals and as a species, I can safely say that your games and TV shows certainly won’t matter, your social media triumphs and tragedies, the stuff you’ve saved on your phone, none of those things will matter.   Your jobs, your savings and properties, your money will matter a lot in the run-up to the final crises – but they won’t matter if there’s no food or water to be bought.  Your personality preferences and your politics – to the extent that they’re not focused on reversing the emergency – won’t, in the end when it all collapses, matter.   Your loves, your sex drives, your feelings for your children and your grandchildren (or your possible children and grandchildren), none of that will matter – because hardly any of them, any of us will survive the disasters -- if we can’t get it together to stop and reverse the climate emergency.   The systems we have created that enable our wonderful lifestyles are not going to matter in the end, because to the extent they depend on fossil fuels or other pollution outputs, they are actively creating the agents of their own, of our own, destruction.  I’m trapped in it too, I can’t stop driving myself around to fulfill the three jobs that keep my family going economically.  Two of those jobs are with the businesses run by my handicapped wife, I can’t get out of the many chores I have each day to help her keep going.  At age 68 and nowhere-near-retired, I’m trying to convince myself that it’s a good idea to invest a big chunk of my retirement savings in an electric car and a lot of solar panels for the house.  I love my comforts and conveniences as much the next privileged person, yet it’s getting clearer and clearer that many things will have to change greatly if any global societies, either privileged or underprivileged, are to survive at any economic level resembling today’s.  Yet it’s also becoming clearer that significant change is exactly what our government and economic leaders are not willing to allow.  The business and technology tycoons of the richer, freer countries, and the governments they support, and the even more selfish and more ruthless government dictators and privileged elites that control the two-thirds of the world that is less rich and less free, have apparently decided that maintaining their selfish comforts as long as possible is far more important than the survival of large populations enjoying stable food, water and housing supplies.  On the hopeful assumption we haven’t already goosed it, how many years can we keep dumping trillions of tons of heating gases into the atmosphere before we fatally condemn our future?  3?  5, maybe 7?   I admit I’ve just guessing, but 11 years to 2030 sounds way too long to me, and to think that setting goals for 2050 can be significant is a ridiculous fantasyland.  So the challenges are severe, nearly impossible.  We have to remove (or bring very major changes in the behavior of) the most selfish, most powerful people in the world, the plutocrats, the dictators, and all their servants including the Republican Senators in America.  The intelligent and altruistic persons in our world will have to overcome the selfish and short-sighted persons, something which is all too rare in human history.  There are no pat answers, and I don’t want you to fall shivering and helpless in hopeless pessimism.  We all do need our entertainments and diversions, we all certainly need to spend time maintaining and improving our love and family connections.  This is a capitalist world and all us non-plutocrats have to struggle to put food on the heated, well-lit table every night.  But in World War II our parents and grandparents and great-grands had rationed food and gasoline.  Are any of us ready to face that in an emergency?  And gasoline and all fossil fuels need to get out of here posthaste anyway.  Yet my work as an amateur historian has led me to one big idea, a sort of “learning aid” for making sense out of all the crazy and conflicting data about human beings, helping connect our everyday actions to the basic social sciences so every person can try to be “your own best social scientist” in figuring out what people you know and see in your environment are doing and why they’re doing it.  (It’s a 20-page book longform  presentation, in my website (without stupid click-bait ads)  that is a small book with my current articles and historical/autobiographical information, hope you can check it in a relaxed state of mind.)  And the conclusion I’d like to share here is that we are not helpless in the face of this emergency.  We can (and we often do anyway) change our psychologies, our personalities and our personality structures, we can make the sacrifices and do the work that we’re going to have to do to save a world for ourselves and our children.  We can (and we often do) change our “explanations,” our sciences, our religions, our philosophies, and we can make sure our explanations of why things are the way they are, fit the reality we are finding so that we can find realistic solutions for immediate problems.  The realm of politics, our natural tendency to judge and rank others in our communities and to create status and rank, which has “crystalized” in our world into some 190 very specific nation-states, all with specific government structures to carry out their mandate of power over public behavior, yet all these government structures in their ways can be seen as very specific cliques with clear rules of behavior for joining and advancing in government structures, and the vast majority of them are too often ready to disregard their “citizens” at a moment’s notice (and even the best ones can end up disregarding their citizens on various issues).  Yet we can (and we do) change our judgements of who we honor in our daily lives and in our communities, and we can (and we do) change our ways of working with (or avoiding, or working against) with our specific national and local governments, according to how they are aggravating or working to reduce the climate emergency (and how and when one may safely oppose their jealous government).  And in the realm of economics, our systems of value and our creation of goods and services to fulfill those values, we can and do change the most easily of all.   Getting out of gasoline in X years will be very tough, it will require a lot of personal sacrifices by a lot of people.  How do we make them happy about saving their children’s lives by giving up that comfy SUV?  Yet we have been adapting to economic changes every season since our times as hunter-gatherer tribes, our consumer cultures can spin things very quickly, can we use psychology in economics to make it “cool” to use as little energy as possible?  Because in the face of the tremendous opposition we face, two of our best resources are our creativity, and our communities.  We plan against doomsdays by cultivating community resources of persons and goods and services and mutual support, we use our creativity to overcome all the persons and institutions that are stuck in the past.  It’s heck of a load of work we face, and it’s going to have to be done together with a whole lot of other political and economic struggles, but if you plan on living much past 2025 or 2035, it looks like The Climate Emergency is going to be, in far too many times and places, the only thing that Really Matters.


dailymail--2019-08-06--Mental illness is not to blame for mass shootings its access to deadly weapons

Mental illness is not to blame for mass shootings: it's access to deadly weapons

Mental illness and video games are fringe concerns that are not the primary drivers behind deadly shootings in the US, experts say.  President Donald Trump, in his first comments on the weekend shootings in El Paso and Dayton on Monday, described the shooter as 'twisted', blamed video games, and psychiatry, saying: 'Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.'  However, data show access to guns is the bigger problem, as Dr Arthur Evans, CEO of the American Psychological Association, pointed out in his reaction to the president's address.  As for video games, Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Stetson University, told the New York Times: 'The data on bananas causing suicide is about as conclusive. Literally. The numbers work out about the same.'  There is a link between video gaming and violence, but gaming is not unique to the US, and no other country with a strong gaming culture suffers anywhere near as many mass shootings.  South Korea is home to the most video gamers in the world, and Japan is home to one of the fastest-growing video game markets in the world, according to gaming analytics company Newzoo.  But they are also homes to some of the lowest rates of violence in the world, with barely any mass shootings, as these graphs show.  Americans spend a bit more than Brits on gaming, and a bit less than the Chinese. And yet, the rate of violent gun deaths is about 110 times higher than both.  Video games have long been a popular topic of conversation in the wake of shooting in the US. After Columbine, and it emerged the shooters played the game Doom, there was a push to ban video games in California.  It was rejected by the Supreme Court, and Antonin Scalia said in his majority opinion: 'These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively.'  In the years since, research has backed up that verdict. The American Psychological Association found in 2015 that video games may make players more aggressive, but no clear link to violence.  Last year, research by Jay Hull, associate dean of faculty for the social sciences at Dartmouth College, found kids who played video games were eight times more likely to be sent to the principal's office for risky behavior, but were not more likely to be violent.  As for mental illness diagnoses, separate from video games, the link is also tenuous.  It is incredibly common for mental illness to be brought up in the wake of a shooting - particularly if the shooter is white: white shooters are 19 times more likely to be described as 'mentally ill' than black shooters. Latino shooters are 12 times more likely to be described as mentally ill.  Indeed, after the Dayton, Ohio shooting, a former girlfriend of the shooter Connor Betts, 24, told NBC that he struggled with mental illness, showing her a video of a mass shooting and singing sexually violent songs.  The El Paso shooter, Patrick Crusius, 21, the son of a mental health counselor, has been described as a 'loner', and posted a racist 2,356-word manifesto on 8chan. But solitude and racism are not mental health disorders.  Around 5 percent of shootings are committed by people with a diagnosable mental illness, according to research published in 2016 in the most comprehensive, non-partisan, evidence-based review of gun violence and mental illness to date.  'Blaming mental illness for the gun violence in our country is simplistic and inaccurate and goes against the scientific evidence currently available,' Dr Evans said late on Monday.  'The United States is a global outlier when it comes to horrific headlines like the ones that consumed us all weekend.  'Although the United States makes up less than 5 percent of the world's population, we are home to 31 percent of all mass shooters globally. This difference is not explained by the rate of mental illness in the US.  'The one stark difference? Access to guns.'  There are around 650 million civilian-owned guns in the world. More than 300 million of them are owned by US citizens.  Dr Evans said there are some 'red flags' that should be monitored for in background checks, and should warrant removing guns from people at risk of violence - namely a history of violence, which is 'the single best predictor of who will commit future violence', and people with access to deadlier guns.  'Access to this final, fatal tool means more deaths that occur more quickly, whether in a mass shooting or in someone's own home,' Dr Evans said.  'As we psychological scientists have said repeatedly, the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent. And there is no single personality profile that can reliably predict who will resort to gun violence.'  The president said: 'We need to do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs.'  Dr Evans called on the president to provide dedicated federal funding for psychology research in this area 'to ensure we are making decision based on data, not prejudices and fear.'  Above all, he said: 'The president clearly said that it is time to stop the hateful rhetoric that is infecting the public discourse. We ask that he use his powerful position to model that behavior. And we ask that the federal government support the research needed to better understand the causes of bigotry and hate, and their association to violence, so that we may devise evidence-based solutions.'


dailymail--2019-09-01--Religion and political ideals replaced with dogma that has turned beliefs into hate crimes

We are going through a great mass derangement. In public and in private, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and unpleasant. The news is filled with the consequences. Yet while we see the symptoms everywhere, we don’t see the causes.  Various explanations have been given, usually involving Donald Trump, Brexit, or both. But these explanations don’t get to the root cause of what is happening. For beneath all the day-to-day madnesses – over race, sex, sexuality, gender and the rest – are much greater movements and much bigger events. Even the origin of this mass derangement is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives about our existence have collapsed.  Religion went first, falling away from the 19th Century onwards. Then, over the past century, the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies followed. In the latter part of the 20th Century, we entered the post-modern era, defined by its suspicion towards grand narratives.  However, nature abhors a vacuum. People in today’s wealthy Western democracies could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have no explanation for what we are doing here and no story to give life purpose.  The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich and have fun – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years has been to live in a permanent state of outrage. To find meaning by waging constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question to which the answer has only just been altered.  The bewildering speed of this process has been principally caused by the Silicon Valley giants (notably Google, Twitter and Facebook). They have the power not just to direct what most people in the world know, think and say, but have a business model which has accurately been described as relying on finding ‘customers ready to pay to modify someone else’s behaviour’.  But today’s wars of ideas are not random – they are consistently being fought in a new and particular direction. And that direction has a purpose that is vast. The purpose – unwitting in some people, deliberate in others – is nothing less than to embed a new religion into our societies.  though the foundations had been laid over several decades, it is only since the financial crash of 2008 that there has been a march into the mainstream of ideas that were previously known solely on the obscurest fringes of academia.  The interpretation of the world through the lens of ‘social justice’ and ‘identity group politics’ is probably the most audacious and comprehensive effort since the end of the Cold War at creating a new ideology.  To date, ‘social justice’ has run the furthest because it sounds – and in some versions is – attractive. Even the term is set up to be impossible to argue with. ‘You’re opposed to social justice? What do you want, social injustice?’  The attractions are obvious. After all, why should a generation which can’t accumulate capital have any great love of capitalism? And it isn’t hard to work out why a generation who believe they may never own a home could be attracted to an ideological world view which promises to sort out every inequality. The place where social justice finds its warriors is identity politics. This atomises society into different interest groups according to sex (or gender), race, sexual preference and more. It presumes that such characteristics are the main, or only, relevant attributes of their holders and that they bring an added bonus. As the American writer Coleman Hughes has put it, it assumes there is ‘a heightened moral knowledge’ that comes with being black or female or gay. It’s why people start statements with ‘Speaking as a ...’. And this new religion is something that people both living and dead must be on the right side of.  That’s why there are calls to pull down statues of historical figures viewed as being on the wrong side and it is why the past needs to be rewritten to suit any interest group you wish to champion.  Identity politics is where minority groups are encouraged to simultaneously atomise, organise and go on the attack. Tied into this is something social justice warriors call ‘intersectionality’ – the notion that there is a hierarchy of oppressed minorities and society should organise itself around correcting this.  Today, intersectionality has broken out from the social science departments of the universities from which it originated into the mainstream. It’s now taken seriously by millennials and has become embedded via employment law (through a ‘commitment to diversity’) in all major corporations and governments.  The speed at which the ‘social justice’ causes have taken over everyday life is staggering. Once-obscure phrases such as ‘LGBTQ’, ‘white privilege’, ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘transphobia’ are suddenly heard everywhere – even though in the words of mathematician Eric Weinstein, they were ‘all made up about 20 minutes ago’. The policing of these issues is an even more recent phenomenon. Researchers found that phrases like ‘triggered’ and ‘feeling unsafe’ only spiked in usage from 2013 onwards.  It is as though, having worked out what it wanted, the new religion took a further half-decade to work out how to impose its credo on non-believers. But it has done so with frightening success.  The maddening results can be seen on a daily basis. It’s why a British academic study which found muscular, wealthy men are more attractive could be headlined by Newsweek magazine as: ‘Men with muscles and money are more attractive to straight women and gay men – showing gender roles aren’t progressing.’  It’s why a previously completely unknown programmer at Google could be sacked for writing a memo suggesting some tech jobs appeal more to men than women. It is why The New York Times ran a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my children be friends with white people?’ And it’s why a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman was framed through the headline: ‘Roads designed by men are killing women.’  Such rhetoric exacerbates existing divisions and creates new ones. For what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.  For most people, awareness of this new religion has become clear not so much by trial as by public error. Because one thing that everybody has begun to sense in recent years is that a set of tripwires have been laid across the culture. Among the first tripwires was anything to do with homosexuality. In the latter half of the 20th Century, there was a fight for gay equality which rightly succeeded in reversing a terrible historic injustice. Then, the war having been won, it didn’t stop. Indeed it began morphing. GLB (Gay, Lesbian, Bi) became LGB so as not to diminish lesbians. Then a T for ‘trans’ and a Q for ‘queer’ or ‘questioning’ got added. Then the movement behaved – in victory – as its opponents once did, as oppressors.  When the boot was on the other foot, something ugly happened.  A decade ago, almost nobody was supportive of gay marriage. Even gay rights group Stonewall wasn’t in favour. Now it’s a central tenet of modern liberalism. To fail the gay marriage test – only years after almost everybody failed it – is to put yourself beyond the pale.  People may agree with or disagree with gay marriage. But to shift mores so fast needs to be done with sensitivity and deep thought. Yet we engage in neither.  Other issues followed a similar pattern. Women’s rights had also been steadily accumulated throughout the 20th Century. They too appeared to be arriving at some sort of settlement. Then, just as the train appeared to be reaching its desired destination, it filled with steam again and went roaring off into the distance. What had been barely disputed until yesterday became a cause to destroy someone’s life today. Whole careers were scattered and strewn as the train careered along its path.  Careers like that of the 72-year-old Nobel Prize-winning UCL Professor Tim Hunt were destroyed after one lame joke, at a conference in South Korea, about men and women falling in love in the lab. What was the virtue of making relations between the sexes so fraught? Why, when women had broken through more glass ceilings than at any other time, did talk of ‘the patriarchy’ seep out of feminist fringes and into popular culture?  In a similar fashion, the civil rights movement in America, which started to right the most appalling of all historic wrongs, looked like it was moving towards some hoped-for resolution. Again, near the point of victory everything soured.  Just as things appeared better than ever before, the rhetoric started suggesting things had never been worse.  The most recent tripwire addition, and most toxic of all of them, is the trans issue. It affects the fewest number of people, but is nevertheless fought over with an almost unequalled ferocity and rage. Women who have got on the wrong side of the issue, including notable feminists like Julie Bindel and Suzanne Moore, have been hounded by people who used to be men.  Meanwhile, mothers and fathers who voice concerns that ten years ago would have been considered common sense have their fitness to be parents questioned. People who will not concede that men can be women (and vice versa) can amazingly now expect a knock on the door from police.  Last September, a billboard that comprised the dictionary definition ‘woman: noun, adult human female’ was taken down after someone complained it was a ‘symbol that makes transgender people feel unsafe’.  Everyone knows what they will be called if their foot nicks against society’s new tripwires. Bigot, homophobe, sexist, misogynist, racist and transphobe are for starters. To avoid these accusations, citizens must prove their commitment to fashionable causes.  How might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being ‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By stressing how ardent your desire is to bring down the patriarchy.  And this creates a situation where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be made regardless of whether it’s needed. It’s an extension of a problem in liberalism identified by the late political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon, the warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for more glorious fights. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons, he may eventually be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining dragons.  Today our public life is dense with people desperate to slay imagined dragons. On all the big issues, an increasing number of people, with the law on their side, now pretend that all questions have been resolved, all answers agreed upon – and that no good person can have any doubts. The case is very much otherwise.  Each of these issues is infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies admit. Yet while the endless contradictions, fabrications and fantasies within each are visible, identifying them is not just discouraged but policed.  And so we are asked to agree to things which we cannot believe, and told not to object to things to which most people object, such as giving children drugs to stop them going through puberty or allowing men who self-identify as female to use female toilets. The pain that comes from being expected to remain silent on important matters and perform impossible leaps on others is tremendous, not least because the problems are so evident.  As anyone who has lived under totalitarianism can attest, there is something demeaning and eventually soul-destroying about being expected to go along with claims you do not believe to be true.  If the belief is that all people should be regarded as having equal value and be accorded equal dignity, then that may be all well and good. But if you’re asked to believe there are no differences between men and women, racism and anti-racism, homosexuality and heterosexuality, then this will drive you to distraction. That distraction is something we’re in the middle of and something we must try to find our way out from. If we fail, the direction of travel is clear.  We face not just a future of ever-greater atomisation, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances – including the good ones – grows more likely.  A future in which racism is responded to with racism, denigration based on gender is responded to with denigration based on gender. At some stage of humiliation there is simply no reason for majority groups not to retaliate with the exact same weapons that have worked so well on themselves.


dailysignal--2019-04-08--Jordan Peterson Explains What Draws People to Socialism

_Jordan Peterson spoke at a Heritage Foundation event in New York City. We discussed the rise of socialism in America, the importance of personal responsibility, and why his message is resonating with so many people. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and author of the book “_[ _12 Rules for Life_](https://amzn.to/2UmRfFl) _.” A lightly edited transcript is below, or you can listen to the interview on The Daily Signal Podcast._    **Genevieve Wood: People are interested in what you have to say.**  **Jordan Peterson:** It seems that way, somewhat of a shock.  **Wood: Or maybe it’s because you aren’t a politician, you are a psychologist and you understand more about what’s going on in the world than many of our lawmakers actually do.**  **I know we’ve got so many ways that we could go with this interview tonight. We have questions, thank you to all of you in the audience who sent in your questions. I’ve got some of them right here, and we’re going to get into those. But … let’s just start with the socialism piece. Do you think Americans truly understand the history of socialism, and actually what it is?**  **… You speak to, not just college campuses, you’ve been to events around the world. I think 250,000 people you’ve spoken in front of.**  **Peterson:**  People are unbelievably ignorant about history. I would include myself in that. I know what I know about history, say, proceeding the 20th century is very sketchy. It’s embarrassingly sketchy.  What young people know about 20th century history is nonexistent, especially about the history of the radical left. I mean, how would they know? They’re never taught anything about it, so why would they be concerned about it?  And then, for many of the people in the audience, you’re old enough so that the fall of the Berlin Wall was part of your life. That was really the end of the Second World War … and it was very meaningful. But that’s a long time ago. There’s been a lot of people born since then, and it’s ancient history.  We don’t have that many good bad examples left. There’s North Korea, there’s Venezuela, but we’re not locked tooth and nail in … in a proxy war and a cold war with the Soviet Union.  It’s easy to understand why people are emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism, let’s say the left, because it draws its fundamental motivational source from a primary compassion. That is always there in human beings, and so that proclivity for sensitivity to that political message will never go away. It’s important to understand that. You have to give the devil his due, unfortunately.  **Wood: You’ve also said that people aren’t as resentful at the success of others as we might think. And I think as you watched a lot of people being interviewed today and you watched some of the students being interviewed, … you hear people talking a lot about inequality, but you say they really aren’t as resentful as we might think as long as they don’t think the game is fixed.**  **Peterson:**  Yes, that’s certainly the case. First of all, if you look at the psychological literature to the degree that it’s accurate, which is difficult to ascertain often, people report far more prejudice against their group than against themselves. That’s quite an interesting phenomenon, as far as I’m concerned.  There’s a tendency for people to exaggerate the degree to which the group they belong to is currently suffering from generalized oppression. They’ve been relatively free of it themselves.  I also think that fairness is an absolutely essential, and perceived fairness is an absolutely essential component of peace. Because people can tolerate inequality, so to speak, or even revel in it, if they believe that the unequal outcome is deserved.  Look at how people respond to sports heroes. … No one goes to a sports event and boos the star, even though he or she is paid much better and attracts the lion’s share of the attention, hopefully not in a narcissistic manner. People can celebrate success, but they do have to believe that the game is fair. And the game needs to be fair because otherwise the hierarchy becomes tyrannical.  The problem with the radical left is that it assumes that all hierarchies are tyrannical, and it makes no distinction between them. And that’s an absolute catastrophe because there’s plenty of sins on the conscience of the West as a civilization. But we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, and there are far worse places. … People also don’t understand that, and they also don’t understand this is something that’s of particular importance.  They also don’t understand … the knowledge of how rapidly we’re making economic improvements around the world, in the developing world, for example, how fast that’s happening. That is not well distributed knowledge, that between the year 2000 and the year 2012, the rate of absolute poverty in the world fell by 50%.  Now, it’s a U.N. figure. One dollar and 90 cents a day, that was their cutoff for absolute poverty. So, the cynics have said, “Well, that’s a pretty low barrier. It’s not such an achievement to obtain that.” I can tell you it’s an achievement to obtain that if you were living on less than $1.90 day to begin with. But if you look at, if you double the amount to $3.80, or you double it again to $7.60, you find the same pattern.  The poor in the world are getting rich at a rate that is absolutely unparalleled in all of human history. I think a large part of that is happening in Africa. By the way, here’s another lovely piece of news, the child mortality rate in Africa is now the same as it was in Europe in 1952. That’s an absolute miracle. It’s insane that that’s not front-page news, right? That within a lifetime. And the fastest-growing economies in the world are also there.  **Wood: But, as you’re saying, why isn’t it front-page news? And when you’re considering social media, and how fast news, and photos, and all that can travel, and that young people are aficionados of all this technology, why don’t they know these things? Or why aren’t they computing what they see as being progress?**  **Peterson:** I think part of it is that things are changing so fast that none of us can keep up. It’s hard to keep the story updated. I had no idea, for example, that most of the world’s economic news and even a substantial proportion of its ecological news was positive until I started to work on a U.N. committee about five years ago on sustainable economic development.  I read very widely, economically, and also ecologically and realized that things were way better than I had any sense of. That these improvements had come at a tremendous rate. But you see partly, it is just that it’s so new that we don’t know and we don’t have a story about it.  And who would be driving the communication of such things? Especially given two other things. One is that human beings are tilted toward negative emotion in terms of its potency. For example, people … are much less happy to lose $5 than they are happy to gain $5. We’re loss averse. We’re more sensitive to negative emotion than we are to positive emotion, and there’s a reason for that.  The reason is, you can only be so happy but you can be dead and right. And I mean dead, that’s not good. And there can be a lot of misery on the way to that end, so we’re tilted to protect ourselves and that makes us more interested, in some sense, and more easily captivated by the negative than by the positive. That’s a hard bias to fight.  And then when you also take into account … and I think this is something that worth seriously considering because the other thing we don’t understand is the technological revolution that’s occurring in every form of media. No one understands it. But one of the consequences is that the mainstream media, so to speak, is increasingly desperate for attention. They exist in a shrinking market with shrinking margins, all of the leading newspapers and magazines are feeling the pinch. Television is dead because YouTube has everything the television has, and then an incredible array of additional features.  And radio is being replaced by podcasts, so it’s a very unstable time for the mainstream media and what would you expect them to do except to do whatever they can to attract attention in whatever manner they can manage?  … One very good example of this is you may or may not know that the rates of violent crime in the United States and actually in most places have plummeted in the last 50 years. It’s really quite remarkable. The United States is now safer in terms of violent crime than it has been since the early ’60s. And that was probably the safest time there ever was. But the degree to which violent crime has been reported has increased.  It’s funny, the curves are almost completely opposite to one another. This is the decline in violent crime, this is the increase in the reporting of violent crime. And the reason for that is people read stories about violent crime, and then of course, they’re much more likely to believe that it’s on the increase.  The people who are most likely to believe that it’s on the increase are also those who are least likely to be affected by it because to be a victim of a violent crime, it helps to drink too much, but it also helps a lot to be young and male. And those aren’t the people who are particularly afraid of violent crime even though they’re the ones most likely to be implicated in it.  So there’s technological reasons for our concentration on the negative and they’re complex. It’s not easy to figure out how to combat the spiral of outrage and attention-seeking that I think is accompanying the depth of our previous means of communication. No one knows how to handle that, and that’s a big problem.  **Wood: … I know so many in this audience—and not just here in New York, but we hear from our members all over the country—they’re so concerned about what their children and what their grandchildren are both being taught. But also what they’re coming back home from college and talking about and saying, “Where are they learning this?” And they know where they’re learning them, but how does this get seeped into them?**  **You obviously have spoken not just at the University of Toronto, but colleges all over the world. What is it you see today on the campus, or among young people today that’s new? Or is it new? I’ve heard you say that we’re no more polarized today than we were maybe even under Richard Nixon, and the campuses were more on fire then than even they are today. So what are the similarities and differences that you’re seeing?**  **Peterson:** I don’t see any real evidence that your society is more polarized, generally speaking, than it has been many times in the past. And I think the next scenario is a good example. If you think about it, merely statistically, you’ve been split 50/50, Republican/Democrat, for what? Five elections now. And it’s almost perfect 50/50 split, that really hasn’t changed.  Trump, of course, is somewhat of a wild card and so that complicates things. But I don’t think it changes the underlying dynamic. What I do think has arisen again—because it’s made itself manifest many times in the last 100 years—is the rise of this group identity-associated, quasi-marxist viewpoint with this additional toxic mixture and paradoxical mixture of postmodernism.  The postmodernists are famous for being skeptical of meta narratives that might be a defining—that was Lyotard, I believe, who coined that, although I might be wrong. It was one of the French postmodernists.  And that means that they’re skeptical about the idea that large uniting narratives are valid. And it’s a huge problem, that claim, because the first question is, “How big does the narrative have to be before it’s a meta narrative?” Is the narrative that holds your family together falsehood? Is the narrative that holds your community together a falsehood? How big does it have to be before it becomes a falsehood?  So it’s a very vague claim, and it’s a very dangerous claim, in my estimation … and I believe the psychological research is clear on this. What we have, our cognitive abilities are nested inside stories. We’re fundamentally narrative creatures, that’s how our brains are organized. And to deny the validity of large-scale narratives is to deny the validity of the manner in which we organize our psyches, and that’s unbelievably destabilizing for people.  First of all, the simplest story in some sense is that I’m at point A, and I’m going to point B. That’s not as simple a story as it might sound because it implies that you are somewhere and that you know it, you have a representation of it geographically, let’s say, socially, psychologically, you have some sense of who you are. But more importantly, you have some sense of who you are transforming yourself into. So that gives you a direction. The direction gives you meaning.  … I don’t mean that in a cliched sense. What I mean is that the way that our brains are constituted is that almost all the positive emotion that people feel—and it’s also true of animals—it emerges as a consequence of observing that you’re making your way to a valued endpoint.  So you think what makes you happy is the attainment of something, and there is a form of reward that is associated with that that’s called consummatory reward. It’s the satisfaction that you feel say after you have a delightful Thanksgiving meal, but that isn’t the hope and the meaning that people thrive on.  The hope and the meaning that people thrive on is the observation that they’re moving toward something worthwhile and that might be individually, although it really can’t be because we live in collectives. But it should be collective and that isn’t optional.  If you don’t have a goal, a transcendent goal, say something that’s beyond you, then you don’t have any positive emotion and that’s not good because you have plenty of negative emotion.  That’s the problem with fundamental claims of meaninglessness, too, in life. That it’s the philosophical error that’s made by nihilists who say life is meaningless. It’s like, well, if you’re a nihilist genuinely, you’ve lost all hope your life isn’t meaningless, it’s just unbearably miserable and that’s a form of meaning.  Suffering is a form of meaning and you can try to argue yourself out of that with your nihilistic rationalizations, but that is not going to work. You need a transcendent goal in order to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and the destruction of the narratives that guide us individually, physiologically, and that also unite us socially, familiarly and socially. It’s an absolute catastrophe. The question then is, why is it being undertaken?  That’s a complex question and I don’t know if we can even discuss that. That has something to do with this unholy marriage of the postmodern nihilism with this Marxist utopian notion, which makes no sense at all because the postmodernists are skeptical of metanarratives, yet Marxism is a grant metanarrative. …  **Wood:**   **It doesn’t have to make sense.**  **Peterson:** In fact, the idea that things make sense is part of the oppressive patriarchy. … People teach that in a dead serious manner that the requirement for logical consistency is an arbitrary and positional and cognitive structure. It’s not something necessary for rational cognition, even if there is such a thing.  You don’t know how deep this war goes in some sense. I can give you an example. There’s a debate about free speech on campus. But what you don’t understand is it isn’t a debate about who can speak, it’s a debate about whether there is such a thing as free speech and the answer from the radicals is that there isn’t because for there to be free speech, there has to be sovereign individuals, right?  Those sovereign individuals have to be defined by that sovereign individuality. They have to have their own locus of truth. In some sense, that’s a consequence of that sovereignty. And then they have to be able to engage in rational discursive negotiation with people who aren’t like them, which means they have to stretch their hands across racial or ethnic divides.  They have to be able to communicate and they have to be able to formulate, and negotiated, and practical agreement, and none of that is parcel of the postmodern doctrine. All of that’s up for grabs.  There’s no sovereign individuals. Your group identity is paramount. You have no unique voice. You’re a mouthpiece of your identity group. You can’t speak across group lines because you don’t understand the lived experience of the other. So it’s not who gets to speak, it’s whether the entire notion is a very classic Western notion and a very deep one of free and intelligible speech is even valid.  This intellectual war that’s going on in the universities is way deeper than a political war. It’s way more serious than a political war. It manifest itself politically but, no, politics is way up the scale from where this is actually taking place.  **Wood: So when you’re talking with students both one on one or taking their questions … these are not all conservative students that are coming up to you and they’re downloading your videos and listening to your podcast. Though it is a lot of young men, it’s not all men.**  **Peterson:** Right.  **Wood: What do you think drives people to the message and to the things that you talk about?**  **Peterson:** I think I’m believable. That’s why. … I’ve done about 150 public lectures or so in the last year, all over the world and to large audiences, the audiences in Australia were starting to approach. We had audiences of 5,500 people in Australia, which is quite remarkable that 5,500 people would come to listen to a serious discussion about philosophical, theological, and psychological issues and participate in that.  I don’t pull any punches, I’m not speaking down, I would never speak down to an audience. I think that’s a dreadful error of arrogance. But the reason I think people believe what I say is that I’m very pessimistic.  Most times when you listen to someone who’s a motivational speaker, … it fills you with a temporary optimism, but you go home and the wiser part of you knows that mostly it’s the painting over of rotten wood with a fresh coat of paint.  I tell my audiences very clearly that their life is going to be difficult and sometimes difficult beyond both imagining and tolerance. That is definitely in your future, if it isn’t in your present, and for many people it’s in their present.  That can be unbearable enough to turn you against life itself. To corrupt you, to drive you to nihilism, to drive you to suicide, and worse, to drive you to thoughts of vengefulness of infinite scope. To not only be turned against yourself and your fellow men but to be turned against being itself because of its intrinsically brutal, in some sense, nature. That it’s worse than that actually because it’s not only that we suffer and that that will necessarily occur, but that we all make our suffering worse because of our ignorance and our malevolence and everyone knows that to be true.  So the discussions start on an unshakable foundation, but then I can tell people … that despite that we’re remarkable creatures. We’re capable of taking up the burden of that suffering and facing the reality of that malevolence voluntarily.  We can actually do that and all of the psychological evidence suggests—and this is independence of your school of psychology, if you’re a practical psychologist. A clinical psychologist of any sort, the evidence is crystal clear that if people voluntarily confront the problems that face them and the malevolence that surrounds them, they can make headway against it. And not only psychologically.  So it’s not only meaningful to do that psychologically, which it is to confront the problems that torment you voluntarily. That’s meaningful psychologically, but it’s also practically useful in that you can actually solve some of the problems that beset you.  God only knows how good we can get at that. I don’t know what percentage of human effort is spent in counterproductive activity. I’m not an absolute cynic about that. But when I talk to undergraduates, I ask them, “How much time do you waste every day by your own reckoning?” It’s somewhere between five and eight hours. It’s a lot of time.  I usually walk … the students through an economic analysis of that. I said, “Well, why don’t you value your time at $50 an hour and calculate for yourself just exactly what you’re doing to your future by your inability to discipline yourself?” It’s worth thinking through.  In any case, people do waste a lot of time and they also act counter productively a lot of the time. Regardless, we do make progress and we can thrive under the difficult conditions that make up our lives and we can resist the malevolence that entices us. That’s within our power.  We don’t know the limits to that and we also know that it’s better to … live courageously than cowardly. Everyone knows that. That’s what you teach people that you love. We know that it’s better to live truthfully than in deceit and you can tell that, too, because that’s also what you tell people that you love and we know that you should pick up your damn responsibility and move forward.  Everyone knows that. It’s part of our intrinsic moral nature and that nature is there. It’s not difficult to communicate to people about this. Everyone knows that you wake up at three in the morning when you’ve let your life go off the rails and that you berate yourself for your uselessness and your cruelty and your failure to take the opportunities that are in front of you.  If you are the master in your own house, in some sense, the captain of your own destiny, if there was no intrinsic nature, that would never happen. You’d just let yourself off the hook. There’d be no voice of conscious tormenting you. But no one escapes from that and what that indicates to me is that at least psychologically we live in a universe that’s characterized by a moral dimension and we understand that well.  Moral failings have consequences and they’re not trivial, they destroy you. They destroy your family, they destroy your community. You can tell people that and they listen because they know. They don’t know they know. That’s the thing and maybe that’s the thing about being an intellectual. You have the opportunity to articulate ideas that other people know, they embody, but they can’t articulate and that’s what people tell me.  They say, “Well, you help me give words to things that I always knew to be true but couldn’t say.” Or they say, “I would be trying to put some of your precepts into practice, responsibility being a main one, vision another, honesty.” … It’s the remarkable part of doing all this.  I have people tell me constantly wherever I go—it’s so delightful that they were in a pretty dark place and they tell me why, and there are plenty of dark places in the world, and they decided, well, maybe they were going to develop a bit of a vision and take a bit more responsibility and start telling the truth and putting some effort into something and they come up and they say, “Wow you can’t believe how much better things are.”  It’s like I got three promotions. I had one guy tell me—this was a lovely story. Fifteen seconds. He came up after a talk, he said, “Two years ago, I got out of jail, I was homeless.” He said, “I own my own house. I have a six- figure income, I got married, and I have a daughter, thank you.” And that was the whole conversation. It’s like he decided he was going to put his life together.  So you can look at that pessimism that constitutes … I think, the core religious message, really is the tragic nature of the world, the reality of suffering. It’s part of the core religious message. But what emerges out of that properly conceptualized is a remarkable appreciation for what human beings are capable of. We are unbelievably resilient and able creatures. We do not have any conception of our upper limits.  **Wood: … Is that hope that you’re talking about, that you’re giving people hope, young people hope, is that one of the secrets to reaching them?**  **Peterson:** It’s a funny kind of hope and it’s such a perverse sort of hope because I would say for the last 45 years we’ve told—psychologists have been certainly to blame for this, at least in part—”You’re OK the way you are,” that’s what we tell young people. “Oh, you’re OK the way you are.” … There’s nothing worse … you can tell someone who’s young than that, especially if they’re miserable.  Lots of them, if they’re miserable and aimless, it’s like, “Oh, I’m miserable and aimless and sometimes I’m suicidal and I’m nihilistic and I don’t have any direction … in my life.” It’s like, “Well, you’re OK the way you are.” It’s like they don’t want to hear that. They want to hear, … “You’re useless. You know nothing, you haven’t got started. You’ve got 60 years to put yourself together and God only knows what you could become.”  That message is so … funny because it’s such an attack but it’s so positive because there’s faith there in the potential that makes up the person rather than the miserable actuality that happens to be manifesting itself at the moment. Young people respond extraordinarily well to that.  … If you’re a parent and you love your child, your son, your daughter, what you’re trying to foster is the best in them. You want that to manifest itself across the course of their life. You want them to become continually more than they are to see what they could be.  And I think that’s part of the great message of the West is that that’s the ethical requirement of individual being, in the proper sense, is to constantly know that you’re not what you could be, to take responsibility for that, and to commit yourself, body and soul, to the attainment of that ideal.  **Wood: We’re going to get a question here from our members, right here in the front row. Bob Grantham had a couple good questions right here. He asked, “Much of your effort today is trying to help people improve their lives.” You’ve just been talking about that. “Why does the establishment attack you, rather than try to support your efforts?”**  **Peterson:**  We should be nuanced about that. A group of newspapers in Canada called Postmedia—that’s 200 newspapers strong—they supported me. I’ve had a lot of support from journalists, and I would say I’ve had more support from the higher quality journalists, which I’m quite happy about. So, it’s polarized.  I have a dedicated coterie of people who regard me as an enemy. There’s no doubt about that. And I think it’s because I am absolutely no fan whatsoever of the radical left. I think the fact that you can actively present yourself on campus as a communist … the fact that that’s allowable is as mysterious as it would be if it was allowable to present yourself as a Nazi.  I am not a fan of the radical left. And I understand the motivations on the radical left, both on the postmodernist end and on the more Marxist end. Because of that, I’m a relatively effective critic, and that makes me very unpopular. And that’s fine because … because what people are being taught, that’s emerged from that brand of absurd and surreal philosophy, is of no utility as a guiding light to anyone.  It’s a catastrophe to take young people in their formative years, when they’re trying to catalyze their adult identity, and to tear the substructure out from underneath them and leave them bereaved. I do believe that that’s what the universities—on the humanities end, and to some degree on the social science end—fundamentally manage to achieve.  I don’t admire that. I think there’s something deeply sadistic about that. There’s something deeply anti-human about that, and it presents itself in the guise of moral virtue, which makes it even worse. Well, that’s why people don’t like me.  **Wood: All right. … So, this was [Adam from Vassar College’s] question. He said, “Given the liberal political order bends toward automatization of individuals, e.g. automation and urbanization, how can meaningful community be assured?”**  **Peterson:**  You build that for yourself, in part. I mean, Adam, get a girlfriend. People aren’t doing that. That’s falling by the wayside, right? And it’s because it’s trouble … Life is trouble. And it’s trouble to establish a permanent relationship.  We’ve told young people for far too long that they should be happy in their relationships. And it’s like, that’s weak. … God, most of you are married. To be married for 40 years, that’s not a triumph of happiness. It’s a triumph of character. It’s a triumph of negotiation, right? It’s a triumph of will to do that. And that should be celebrated.  But to children today, it should also be pointed out, that no matter who you find, they’re no better than you. And that’s not so good. So, there’s going to be problems.  But that shouldn’t stop you. Find someone. If you’re lucky, you’re going to have the opportunity to sort of sift through about five people in your life. That’s about it. And then you’re going to have to stake yourself on one of those people. It’s a hell of a risk, but with any luck, it’ll make you a better person, that wrestling.  … I did a series of biblical lectures in 2017, which have turned out to be crazily popular of all the insane things to be.  **Wood: And I was supposed to ask you, why do you think that is?**  **Peterson:**  … Well, one of the things I learned in those lectures—and should’ve known before—was that the word Israel, so the chosen people of God, the people of Israel, are those who wrestle with God. And that’s such an interesting idea. It’s a fascinating idea because it indicates at least—even in our deepest religious texts—that there’s something about existential conflict and engaging in that that’s actually part of the moral substructure of life.  That simple belief, let’s say, whatever that might mean in a deity, isn’t sufficient. There’s an active engagement with the infinite. And it’s a battle in some sense. And I think that’s the proper way to conceptualize. And I think it’s the proper way to conceptualize a relationship. It’s a battle. It’s a battle toward a positive end. It’s a battle toward the transformation of both of you into more than you could’ve otherwise been.  So, you need that. And you need your friends. And you need to develop a network of friendship. And you need to put your family together and to act responsibly toward them. And then you need to move out from that into the broader community. And that’s on you.  That’s how you foster it. You make it a part of the ideal that you’re pursuing, and then you realize that that’s up to you to do. And maybe then you realize that you can do it as well, if you’re willing to make the right sacrifices—which usually means burning off a fair bit of dead wood. And that’s not something that people are particularly excited about doing. And no wonder.  **Wood: … Thinking of our theme of standing up against socialism, what have I not asked you about? What have other interviewers not asked you about that would be beneficial for us all to know?**  **Peterson:**  Well, you asked a little bit about these biblical lectures, and what was interesting was I rented a theater in Toronto. I rented it 15 times. It was theater of about 500 and sold out every time. And I lectured about Genesis. It was mostly young men who came. They weren’t all young, but they were mostly men, which was very surprising because that’s just not what happens.  The reason that the lectures worked was because I put together something that I don’t think liberals or conservatives have done a good job of putting together. The liberals are more on the happiness and freedom end of things, and the conservatives are more on the duty end of things. And those both have their place.  But I’ve been attempting to develop an argument that’s centered on meaning. And I believe that our most central religious symbols—like the symbol of the cross itself, for example, the bearing of the cross, is an embodiment or a symbolic representation of this idea that you have to have a meaning in life that sustains you. Life is a serious business. You’re all in.  It’s a fatal business, right? Everyone’s in it up to their neck, and it’s dreadful in some sense, in the classic sense. And you need a meaning that can sustain you through that, and that’s to be found in responsibility. And that’s something that we have not communicated, I don’t think, well to ourselves. But we certainly haven’t communicated it to young people. It’s like, “Well, you’re lost? There’s reasons that you could be lost, and they’re real.”  God only knows what terrible things happened to you in your life. It’s like, “How are you going to get out of that?” Well, not by pursuing impulsive happiness. That is not going to work. Not by thinking in the short term. Not by thinking in a narrowly selfish manner, either. But by taking on the heaviest load of responsibility that you can conceptualize and bear. That will do it. It’ll do it for you.  It’ll give you a reason to wake up in the morning. It’ll give you a balm for your conscience when you wake up at night and ask yourself what you’re doing with your life. It’ll make you a credit to yourself and to your family, and it’ll make you a boon to your community. And more than that. There’s more than that.  It’s said in Genesis that every person is made in the image of God. And there’s an idea in Genesis that God is that which confronts the chaos of potential with truth and courage. That’s the logos. If we’re made in the image of God, that’s us. That’s what we do, we confront the potential of chaos, the future, the unformed future.  We confront that consciously, and we decide with every ethical choice we make what kind of world we’re going to bring into being. We transform that potential into actuality. And we do that as a consequence of our ethical decisions.  So, it’s not only a matter of putting yourself together and putting your family together, putting your community together. It’s a matter of bringing the world in its proper shape into being.  I truly believe that that’s the case. I believe that we all believe that. We hold ourselves responsible. You know, that if you’ve made a mistake with your family because you were selfish or narrow-minded or blind in some manner that you regard yourself as culpable. You could have done otherwise. And now you’ve brought something into the world that should not be there. And it’s on you.  We hold ourselves responsible in that manner. So, what that indicates to me is that in a deep sense, we believe that we are the agents that transform the potential of being into reality. … If anything, [that] links us with divinity. It’s our capability to transform what is not yet into what is.  The other thing that happens … is that as God conducts himself through this enterprise of the transformation of potential into actuality, he stops repeatedly and says, “And it was good.” And that’s a mystery. Why is it good?  The answer is something like, “Well, if you conduct yourself with the courage that enables you to accept your vulnerability—which is no trivial matter—and if you’re truthful, then what you bring out of potential is what’s good.” And that sets the world right. And that’s up to us.  To me, that’s the great story of the West. That’s why we regard ourselves as sovereign individuals of value, is that’s what we are. And we need to know that to take ourselves seriously and to act properly in the world.  That’s what I said in the biblical lectures in many hours. And that’s what’s made them popular because people, at the level of the soul, people know these things to be true.  **Wood: Ladies and gentleman, please help me thank Jordan Peterson.**


dailysignal--2019-07-02--How to Restore America

How to Restore America

Are America’s best days behind it? Or is there a way to return to the values that our Founding Fathers and so many subsequent generations held? Tim Goeglein, co-author of the new book “[American Restoration: How Faith, Family, and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2437ZR/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)” is an optimist about the future—believing Americans can rebuild their culture from the ground up, starting in their own neighborhoods. Read the full interview, posted below, or listen on the podcast:  We also cover these stories:    * Iran announces it has more uranium than was allowed under the Iran agreement.   * President Donald Trump is mad at New York state, which he says is targeting him unfairly.   * Sen. Ted Cruz calls for the Justice Department to investigate after a journalist is attacked by Antifa.  The Daily Signal podcast is available on [Ricochet,](https://ricochet.com/podcast/daily-signal/) [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily-signal- podcast/id1313611947?mt=2), [SoundCloud](https://soundcloud.com/dailysignal), [Google Play](https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ioljswxouzznf6gseznz3sptndu), or [Stitcher](https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/the-daily-signal-podcast). All of our podcasts can be found at [DailySignal.com/podcasts](https://www.dailysignal.com/podcasts). If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [[email protected]](/cdn-cgi/l/email- protection#86eae3f2f2e3f4f5c6e2e7efeafff5efe1e8e7eaa8e5e9eb). Enjoy the show!  **Daniel Davis: We are joined in the studio now by Timothy Goeglein.**  **He is the vice president for external and government relations at Focus on the Family here in Washington, D.C. And he’s also co-author of the new book “[American Restoration: How Faith, Family and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2437ZR/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).” **  **Tim, thanks for your time.**  **Tim Goeglein:** It’s a real pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.  **Davis: So Tim, in this new book, you talk a lot about the need to return to America’s spiritual foundations.**  **There’s so much to unpack there, but I want to ask you, first off, what do you mean when you say returning to American spiritual foundations?**  **Goeglein:** It’s impossible to understand the United States of America without understanding the spiritual foundation, even before our founding.  You know, Americans were a great presence in North America 150 years before we were formally a country. And literally from the beginning we were a nation, which was a eventually a religious republic. A country that faith and public life could not be divorced. They went together.  And from the very beginning, this idea of self-government was rooted in a spiritual dimension that you cannot impose virtue, the other side of freedom, upon the people. That you need to have moral excellence in the people and in the leaders.  Our Founding Fathers and mothers rightfully asked, “Well, in the American experience, where does that come from?” And in the American experience, it comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In “American Restoration,” we do not open up our book pining for the 18th century or the 19th century or the 20th century. What we say is that the way forward is not despair and discouragement, but it is being hopeful about the next chapter of America.  I’m an irredeemable optimist and “American Restoration” is built on the foundation.  What we say in this book is that if we really want to restore our country and we’re very serious about restoration, regeneration, renewal, it’s not going to be rooted in Washington, D.C., and in government. It’s going to be rooted in faith, the family, and personal sacrifice in our communities, in our neighborhoods.  That’s where the solutions, as it were for “American Restoration,” are really based.  **Kate Trinko: You just mentioned that you’re hopeful and I would say that I am a pessimist, so I’m going to push back a little bit here.**  **Why is there a realistic chance for hope when right now, a lot of Americans came, had grandparents from this foundation of faith and virtues, and have chosen to reject it?**  **What about the modern world gives you any realistic hope that people are suddenly going to change their lives and take up sacrifice and virtue?**  **Goeglein:** First, I’m a hopefulist … and may tell you it’s not rooted in a confetti-to-the-wind optimism.  I am an optimist, but that’s not my basis for hope. First and foremost, I’m a Christian, and I love living in a country, in a culture and a civilization where the foundation of that hope is the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is definably, the best foundation that a country can be built on.  I’ll tell you, I never negate and we should never negate as Americans that we’ve been in incredibly tough positions before.  This is a country that lived through a Civil War. We lived through two world wars. We lived through the social and the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.  During all of those periods of time, it was very tempting … for Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives to sort of say, “That’s the end of America.”  There was a time not very long ago in the ’60s and ’70s where quite literally parts of America were burning down. Where there were shootings in the streets. Where there were shootings on campuses. Where we had the resignation of a U.S. president for the first time ever.  We lost nearly 60,000 Americans in Vietnam. We lost 750,000 Americans in the Civil War. And I’ll tell you, during those chapters of American history, people said, “Count me out. The country’s done.”  It isn’t. Because for America there’s always tomorrow and there’s always the hope for restoration.  What we do in this book is that we set out a blueprint for how to restore the country. To restore the Constitution. To restore the family. To restore civic renewal and civic responsibility.  It’s really a wonderful read because it’s a read that says better days are ahead. Not easy days.  Restoring a country like ours is not easy. This is a large, complex continental nation of 329 [million] souls. … So when you’re talking about restoration, it is necessarily not going to be easy, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a way forward.  **Davis: Your book mentions multiple things. Fifteen actually. Fifteen chapters, 15 things, areas where America can be restored.**  **Walk us through just a couple of those that you think are the most important and how specifically how that would happen.**  **Goeglein:** I believe that the most important way to restore America begins in the home. It begins with family.  We in America have a large percentage of families which are broken. Marriages, families, parenting, absolutely broken. And it is totally and completely central to our whole idea of restoration.  Government cannot cause the family to fall in love again. Government cannot tuck a child into bed at night. But government can get out of the way. And government can also find ways to incentivize ways to make it easier for parents and families to thrive.  So we with clarity and with, if I may say, pinpoint accuracy define focusing on the family as something that is absolutely central to the restoration of our country.  We also concurrently say that it’s very important to restore the idea of the centrality of the Constitution.  This is a country of law and not men. And the Constitution has a fixed meaning and a fixed purpose. And we have lived for too long in an ever-growing gargantuan federal government, which believes that it can better than families, communities, churches, synagogues, neighborhoods, localities, believes that it can better and more uniformly address the problems that ail us.  In “American Restoration” we say just the opposite, that it begins at the local level.  It begins with what the great statesman Edmund Burke called the “little platoons.” And what he meant [is] the little platoons are family, church, synagogue, neighborhood, community. All those associations and groups, which Tocqueville celebrated when he looked at America in the 1830s and [said], “That’s what makes America exceptional. It’s what makes us different.”  **Davis: One of the things I want to ask about that, you talk about the importance of little platoons, but it seems to me that so often when we think about cultural erosion and corruption, a lot of it does come from the elites in our culture who are controlling.**  **Think of the tech companies who control with algorithms what we see on social media. Or think about when you open up Netflix, the first thing you see is something overtly sexual that you didn’t want your kids to see.**  **Those are the kinds of structural problems that are driving social change in the wrong direction. And those are set by elites, rather than people in local communities.**  **Do you think that a big part of the problem at least is the culture of the elites and what they’re pushing through Hollywood, through Netflix, through other media that are affecting our communities?**  **Goeglein:** I could not agree more. And not only can I not agree [more], this is part of the central narrative of “American Restoration,” that we believe that irresponsible elites across a series of professions have been a central part of the problem.  I mentioned one of them a moment ago. The problem of a central government that is literally out of control. That believes it can micromanage better than people in the home or in the church or in the neighborhood or in the community. That it can control and make these decisions for us better than we can make them ourselves.  So the answer is absolutely yes.  A very good friend of mine is David Azerrad, and by the way, several people at The Heritage Foundation play an important role in “American Restoration.”  We’ve gone into some of the best research that the matchless Heritage foundation has done. And we have used that in our book.  One of the things that David Azerrad has written about is a front-row America and a back-row America.  A front-row America being elites, who are out of touch. Who are like the boy and the girl in the bubble. You know, they don’t have to mix with other people but, in fact, back-row America is hurting very badly.  And there have been many important studies and books that have—like “Hillbilly Elegy,” “Alienated Americans” by my friend Tim Carney—done an excellent job of distilling what the problem is.  What “American Restoration” does is it’s a bookend to those kind of excellent analysis. It says, “Yes, we’ve got real problems in our nation. Here are the reasons why, and here are some of the ways that we can address head-on these real challenges and problems and can make them better.”  We quote in this book a little-known scholar who deserves to be much better known, Gertrude Himmelfarb, in which she talks about how Victorian England—by the way, Victorian England was in absolute meltdown mode—reapplying the great spiritual truths of Anglo-American civilization was able to help restore a really great country. And there are lots of other examples.  So restoration and renewal and regeneration are possible. It can happen and I’m confident.  **Trinko: Yeah. And of course, if you’re interested in the back-row, front-row America, we interviewed Chris Arnade, the former Wall Street trader-turned- photo journalist, I guess you would say … I think might’ve coined that term.**  **We had him on the podcast a few weeks ago and I’d encourage you to check that out if you’re into this topic.**  **So, one poll that came out recently that really surprised me from The Wall Street Journal and the NBC News found that back in 2000, which is not that long ago, two decades ago, 41% of Americans said they went to religious services weekly. That number is now down to 29%.**  **You and your book discuss a lot about how important regular church attendance is. What do you think drove the decline in the past two decades and how do we reverse this?**  **Goeglein:** I believe that the biggest driver of the decline, as you describe it, has been the fractioning of the American family. And I want to give a very concrete example.  One of the things, by the way, that powers “American Restoration” is not a bunch of opinions and anecdotes. It’s actually empirical data. It’s very important in data sets that we know what we are actually dealing [with], and I want to give just one example. …  In 1965, a mere 56 years ago, 54 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a very important study on the African American family in the United States of America.  Now, this is only 1965. He found that 25% of all African Americans were born out of wedlock. Now we’re in 2019, that number is at 70% or above. Also, that’s 53% of all Hispanic Americans and more than 30% of native-born white people.  In composite, about 40% of all Americans are now born out of wedlock. And for the majority of babies born to women who are 30 years of age and under, the majority of babies are now born out of wedlock.  So if you have this kind of demography and you are facing this kind of challenge, it is not the federal government. Frankly, it’s not any government that is going to be able to address that kind of decline.  And the question emerges in social science: Well, wait a minute, what drove that? And the answer goes back to where we started.  It ultimately starts from a spiritual decline that is measurable in some pockets of America. The great conservative statesman and philosopher Russell Kirk said that political and public policy differences are actually spiritual differences first. And I think that there’s a lot of truth in that.  **Trinko: That is a great segue into my next question, which is, just looking through your book, I share so much of the analysis of the culture that you give. It’s a pretty bleak picture right now.**  **And you know … we’re recording this in June, which is Pride Month. And as a Christian I have certain feelings about that.**  **You paint a picture of a culture that is losing, its sort of adrift in moral relativism, and your book is about recovering that.**  **The solution you’re calling for, though, doesn’t it really just come down to people converting to Christianity and being faithful?**  **Goeglein:** That’s correct. I’m glad you raised that.  And in light of the last question, I believe very strongly that you can be a great American and be a man or woman of faith. I believe very strongly that you can be a great American and not be a person of faith. Or be a great American and a person who’s searching and looking, right? I don’t think that that is the the demarcation. I really don’t.  I also believe, and we say this in “American Restoration,” that for all of the many cultural challenges we have, and there are many, we also have a lot of bright spots.  May I say, just when you think that you’re at a moment of cultural decline, that even in that decline you can see spots of recovery and of renewal.  It’s kind of like when you have one of these terrible California wildfires and you look out and you say that is a very bleak landscape. Until you come back about two weeks later. And from all the charred cinders, coming through the charred cinders are small green shoots. And I do believe that organically cultures are the same.  I believe that you can focus like a laser beam on all of the problems. And we certainly seek to do that in “American Restoration.” But we also seek to hold up real examples of real people, real institutions, real groups, who are really addressing some of our most important social, moral, and religious issues.  So we don’t say or assert in the book that in order to restore America that we must have a mass conversion to Christianity. As Christians, you know, we certainly pray that people would come to know Jesus Christ, but that is not our demarcation for a healthy or flourishing country.  We know that from our founding.  Some of the greatest people in our founding were serious Christians. Benjamin Rush and George Washington.  Others were not serious Christians, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. It doesn’t make them any less great as human beings. But it also does not deter from the fact that foundationally and from the beginning, America was a nation that flourished because of strong Christianity and strong Judaism. And you know, that is a fact.  **Trinko: You talk in the book about the importance of religious liberty and, obviously, if you’re going to practice your faith, you need to be allowed to by the states.**  **However, we’re seeing more and more clashes on this front and you describe some of them in the book.**  **Specifically, I would say pro-abortion advocates and LGBT activists are often pushing for things that Christians feel in good conscience they cannot accommodate.**  **And there’s often a push from the extreme left to say, “No, we’re not going to find a third way. It can’t be that there’s another baker who bakes the cake. It has to be this baker.”**  **How do you recommend people engage with the far left and with maybe family and friends who are sympathetic to the far left?**  **Goeglein:** May I say, I am really thrilled by that question because I believe, a tenet to where we began this interview, that the frontal assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience in the public square is overwhelmingly one of the greatest challenges that we face.  And the question is why? Because it’s unconstitutional.  There is absolutely nothing in the Constitution that in any way usurps the centrality of religious liberty and conscience rights, that were inherent in the Constitution from the beginning.  We have seen endless cases at the Supreme Court. Endless cases in the circuit and in the the the district courts, which have been a net result of this assault on religious liberty and conscience cases.  I feel very strongly, in fact, we say this in “American Restoration” and we have a whole chapter on the restoration of religious liberty in the book for this reason, that incrementally, and it does take time, that we will eventually move our way back toward the constitutional position and defense of religious liberty and conscience rights.  It’s not to say that we are not having and will not continue to have a major debate in this area, but I believe that incrementally we are going in the right direction, even as we have enormous challenges.  We also have a chapter in “American Restoration” on the restoration of the right to life and human life. That is incredibly important to us.  Look, we have had more than 60 million abortions in America since 1973. That is a real black mark on our country. But … as a person who has been involved in the pro-life movement since I was 12 years old, I believe very strongly that this is a very good time for the pro-life movement.  I think we are winning. I think we’re moving in the right direction.  I am overwhelmed, having been [to] every right to life march in January with the exception of two for the last 30 years, that the right to life people who come to Washington get younger and they get larger. And those numbers are overwhelming.  It’s simply bad manners in a lot of quadrants in America now, where it wasn’t even 15 years ago. It’s bad manners not to be pro-life with 3D and 4D images of babies. We know that it is a baby.  **Trinko: I appreciate it, in your book, how you talked about the importance of caring for foster kids and also your co-author mentioned that at his church there is, I believe, a night for parents of Down syndrome kids.**  **I just thought it was nice how you guys paid so much attention to being pro- life after birth, as well.**  **I think that’s very true of the pro-life community, but we’re always slammed as not. And it was nice to see you address that.**  **Goeglein:** I was in a debate just last week in which my interlocutor said, “Yeah, you’re pro-life, which means that you only care about the baby until the day it’s born.” And I said, “That is absolutely false.” And he said, “Prove it.” And I said, “Read ‘American Restoration.'”  We have a whole chapter in this book, to your point, we care about mother and baby before the baby is born. We care about the baby in all three trimesters, right? And we care about mother and baby long after the baby is born and the mother is dealing, as is baby, with a lot of issues.  But also to capitalize on that, we care a lot about orphan care, foster care, and adoption. And we wanted to make sure that “American Restoration” had a a sizable bit of attention to this issue.  One of the tragedies in America is not only abortion, but also the vitiation of young Down syndrome babies. That has got to change and we’ve got to do that better.  I trust and believe that by raising it in books like this, talking about it on a podcast like this, that we will move more and more toward a pro-life America.  I believe that we will see a day when Roe v. Wade is overturned. I do believe that, and I think that it will be on par of the day that Dred Scott finally came to it’s last gasp.  **Davis: Your book also responds to folks like Rod Dreher, who have offered what they call the Benedict Option, in which Christians are engaging in a strategic withdrawal from certain sectors of culture in order to protect the good that we have.**  **What’s your main response to that argument?**  **Goeglein:** Rod Dreher is a great friend and I’ve known him and benefited from his writing, his research, and his friendship for many years.  I have read his book now three times, cover to cover, and I have compared the text of the book with debates that have happened and with analysis since.  I want to be very direct in this point. To the degree that there is a difference or a distinction it is at least in some of those debates and analysis that he has been calling for disengagement.  And there’s a nuance about this, and we make this very clear in the book. This is not in any way a backdoor attack or a critique of Rod. But we disagree in this regard. This is not a time for Christians or conservatives to disengage, to be discouraged, to drop out.  This is a time … we say in “American Restoration,” to engage more than ever.  For us to be present more than ever in the public square. To be involved in schools, public schools, and private schools. To be involved in government. To be in the media. To be in the culture, shaping professions. To be in the law and legal societies. To be in the permanent bureaucracy. To be a presence in the state capitals and in Washington, D.C.  There’s never been a time where we have needed men and women of faith to step up and to be more involved than now.  **Davis: That is a great place for us to leave it. The book is called “[American Restoration. How Faith, Family, and Personal Sacrifice Can Heal Our Nation](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q2437ZR/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1).” Available on Amazon. Tim Goeglein, thanks so much for your time.**  **Goeglein:** Such a pleasure. Thank you so much, and God bless The Daily Signal.


dailystormer--2019-01-11--Illegal Immigrants Commit Fewer Crimes Than Natural Born Americans Is Anti-Black Hatespeech

“Illegal Immigrants Commit Fewer Crimes Than Natural Born Americans” Is Anti-Black Hatespeech

It is time for the media to stop touching black bodies with their hateful statistical facts.  After President Trump’s speech in the Oval Office telling America about the need for a wall, the media returned with an old anti-black canard to defend Mexicans: the theory that natural Americans commit more crimes than illegal immigrants.  It was all over the gosh-darned place.  But Trump’s suggestion that undocumented immigrants are more prone to commit acts of violence is false. A 2018 Cato Institute study that looked at crime in Texas found that “As a percentage of their respective populations, there were 56 percent fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born Americans in Texas in 2015.” “The criminal conviction rate for legal immigrants was about 85 percent below the native-born rate,” it adds. In an overview of the relevant social science research published last year, the Washington Post concluded, “Undocumented immigrants are considerably less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens, with immigrants legally in the United States even less likely to do so.”  Of course, what they are all dog-whistling is “blacks are more violent than precious Mexicans.”  It is an old canard based on long-debunked annual statistics that are released by the FBI every year.  The theory, promoted by the FBI using racist information, is that blacks commit so many crimes that no other race could possibly make a statistical difference of any kind.  True or not, there can only be one reason for bringing up this information: pure hatred for the color of the skin.  One type of racism can’t be used to justify another – saying “oh but niggers are killing everyone anyway” is racist, even if true, and should not be used by the media in a conversation about immigration.  Doing so is hatespeech, and I am shocked that the media is willing to sink this low simply to take a cheap shot at Donald Trump.  The fact that Mexicans commit 50-100% more violent crime than white people is no reason not to flood America with criminal latinos. In fact, it is all the more reason to do so, as it will teach white people a lesson.  But we do not need to insult the blacks in order to accomplish this goal.