"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss." - sung at an earlier time of cultural upheaval. I didn't quite understand it at the time. Great commentary. Thank you!
I frequently hear Pink Floyd’s song from The Wall. “Teacher, leave them kids alone” and think it’s very appropriate today though it’s quite the reverse of what they were thinking at the time when they wrote it.
It depresses me that even for your audience, you felt a need for footnote #2.
Sense-making on the ground is challenging. My older sister, a "young boomer," is a good example. A 61 yo pediatrician, she still seems to adhere to the medical institution, and it's easy to understand why: she's been steeped in it since her first year of med school in 1985. Yet she resists it in many ways.
My younger sister and I are both older Gen-X. We've both looked sideways at institutions for quite a long time, but 2021 was the end of it for both of us.
Dad was THE institution, at least for agriculture in Louisiana. Born in 1937, that's all there was. But the institutional façade began to crack for him in the 20-teens. He still gives it his obeisance in some ways, but he is even more distrustful of institutions than my older sister.
For all 4 of us, the institutions were a repository of trust. They just aren't anymore. I don't know if my family can pinpoint the time when they realized the emperor maybe wasn't wearing any clothes, but for me it happened in the Spring of 1993 in Waco, Texas. And I was a Houston cop at the time. The raid of the Branch Davidians caused me to deeply question what it was that I was doing, and I didn't have anything to do with it. I was just a lowly night shift patrolman in a bad neighborhood at the time.
Holly hits it out of the park again with great clarity. I didn’t see the JRE episode but I read Kisins piece and saw Murray on Bill Maher. From my “vibe” of these two items I don’t think they were suggesting censorship or strictly controlled standards. Their response was the free speech push back. Bad ideas need more speech not less. I listened to Darkhorse and felt that Brett was a little too insensed over their response and assumed they had called for censorship which I don’t think they had. I respect Murray’s take on Israel. He has been on the ground and is well researched, so for my money he cannot be dismissed out of hand. Triggernometry equally has my respect. Brett seems to feel that out of the chaos of a babel of voices, opinions and ideas, the good ones will come to the surface. Maybe, but how exactly does that happen and how much time does that take and how much damage do the bad ideas cause in the meantime. Just look at the last four years of “Biden”.
Your Covid story is interesting. It's a good thing you were a remote worker.
Yeah, President Biden making threats irritated me as well. I don't like people threatening me.
In 2019, 2020, 2021, I was working for the state prison system, and when Dr. Disease suggested lockdowns, I immediately refuted it. Lockdown is a prison term for solitary confinement. you don't take care of an epidemic or disease by locking civilization down. You quarantine the sick and let the healthy people work or play.
I also understand how vaccines are made and know that it takes years to develop a vaccine that's safe.
Like you, my doctor kept pushing me to take the so-called vaccine. I flat out told him that I wouldn't, ever.
Now that I've shared my story, I want to walk through some statements.
Institutions don’t need trust — which is why Congress, the IRS, the police, and the Presidency still qualify.
I disagree with you on that. I have never trusted congress, the IRS, some police departments, or the President. They haven't earned my trust, and in some cases, have made it so I can never trust them. I can't trust congress because they locked up innocent protestors on Jan 6th, while letting violent terrorists out on bond that the congressmen paid for.
I can't trust the IRS, because they've been weaponized in the past and threatened churches, schools, and charities.
I don't trust the executive department, because they've already shown that they'd imprison us for not obeying them.
Institutions require reliance, not trust. People depend on them — sometimes unwillingly, often resentfully — because they’re central to some unavoidable aspect of how the world works.
If I can't trust an institution, I'm not going to rely on it. Why would I do that? Why would I rely on an institution that might kill me for telling them off.
You have a legal question. I contact my family lawyer, or county attorney.
You need weight loss advice. I check with my doc, then check his answers. If I like it, I take it. If I don't, I won't.
You’re preparing for a tax audit. I contact my family estate CPA. She's been working for us for 40 years.
The CDC’s mask guidance. was a joke, as was their suggestion as to who shouldn't get the vaccines. Remember when they suggested that white people not get it, but everybody else should get it first? Fine with me..I didn't want the fauxine anyway.
It's kind of interesting that JRE is who people turn to. He's an ex-MMA fighter, who smokes marijuana, and gets drunk. He's not an expert, but he does try to get experts on his show.
Another pattern I can’t stop seeing — and I say this bluntly — is how few Americans take the threat of radical Islam seriously.
I've been trying to wake people up to the islamic threat for twenty years. It won't work, because the education system has told student that the Muslims are civilized people who never start fights.
They completely ignore the facts before their eyes.
As usual, you wrote a great article and one that I just had to answer. I may not always agree with what you say, but you'll always get respect.
You consistently make me feel that I've completely failed as a writer. Because the fact that the IRS and cops and Congress all play a role in your life means that they are institutions in the sense that I describe, and your trust is irrelevant. Sigh.
Yes, they are institutions. I didn't say that. I merely said that I neither rely on them, nor trust them. I've watched them break the law and punish people that they shouldn't have punished.
I'm a three times burned gen xer. I watched the FBI/ATF kill an innocent family at Ruby Ridge. I watched them kill 27 women and children in Waco, and I watched them arrest some protestors while letting others go scot free.
There are people who rely on them and trust them. I'm just not one of them.
They are institutions, and my trust is irrelevant. My problems are mine, because i know that if I were in their positions, I could do better.
Understood your intent to distinguish between institutional trust and relevance . Thanks as usual for the thoughtful and articulate post.
To me one of the most interesting devopments of the Biden presidency ( the Covid mandates, the lies concerning his mental acuity, the personal corruption in which he 3as implicated) and its aftermath is that whatever trust thereonce was among even its most loyal adherents has almost completely disappeared.
You (Holly) will never be a failure as a writer and as a person of profound impact on impacting and shaping my view moving forward in whatever days I have left on this earth? I offer thanks during my devotions that fate had us cross paths.
This highlights the need for sharpening sense-making skills in a world filled with noise and lies passed of as truths worthy of trust.
I have not trusted an institution since I was told by the school principal that I had to apologise to my bully for defending myself in grade 6. Thank goodness for trustworthy and reliable humans who can help navigate the murkiness of institution controlled life.
This was the crux for me: "We no longer mistake credentials for credibility. We look for performance. For humility. For signs that someone can handle disagreement, admit error, and tell the truth even when it costs them."
This is orthogonal to your point, but I suppose it’s a testimony to my “Christian Lite” upbringing that I looked up those passages from Proverbs. I mean, I thought I knew what you were referring to, and I was right -- but I did have to look to make sure. My own parents were nominally Christian-- they went to church and stuff. And you know what -- the folks at church were very nice when my parents suffered ultimately terminal illnesses. But they definitely had a filter for the Bible stuff. I don’t think they literally believed in Seven Days or that God killed the whole world in a flood, and they definitely paid no attention whatsoever to the stuff about beating children. And, for that matter, while I did turn out to be quite conventionally heterosexual, I am pretty sure it would have been utterly unremarkable if I’d turned out to be gay.
In fact, when I was in high school my dad and I read a book called “The Religions of Man,” which contended that all religions are getting at the same truths, just in different ways. Many paths up the same mountain was the metaphor it used.
So my parents were nominally religious, but they ignored the nasty bits and certainly didn’t take those bits seriously. I think it’s hard for people who grew up as I did to get their mental arms around the fact that a lot of Muslims do indeed take the nasty bits very seriously indeed.
And also the desire to be tolerant does tend to cause people to ignore very real differences between holy texts. To the extent we take the historicity of Jesus seriously (and I do think there was probably a guy), he had zero political power at the time and that is reflected in the texts his followers produced. Whereas Muhammad was a political and military leader, and this produced a text that reflects that. Which matters. I mean, I could imagine violent militant Taoists, but the text doesn’t give them a lot to work with. But militant Muslims have a lot of text they can use.
In my limited life view, you (Holly) will not be and are not to be a failure as a writer nor are you a shepherd as your readers are not treated as sheep. You are the rare essayist who transcends your readers' beliefs and experiences when presenting your appreciation of current issues in a way as unique as the JRE. Where you excel with me? You are grounded. Your PTSD touches my own by expressing it in feelings, interpretations, and unique thoughts about how to interpret whatever life throws at us. Some of us may miss points you try to make, but in my case, your impact is so powerful that I revisit what you speak of weeks later to see where I am at 'in the now' and in the moment what whatever crap life has slung at me or my beloved sphere of influence. Thank you so much for The Emperor's New Gatekeepers. I regret I did not know you or your readers when faced with the shimmering coronavirus mirage.
I have no love for Islam or religious fundamentalism in general. It's clear that Oct 7th comes directly downstream of Muslim hatred for Jews, among other things. Islam has a major and debilitating defect (worse than other religions I can think of) because it centers Mohammed as the guide for morality. Whatever else you might say about Mohammed, he ended up marrying and having children with his cousin. In Islam, that means there's no practical way to tell Muslims they shouldn't marry and have children with their cousins. In Gaza/Palestine, this issue is especially prevalent, with up to HALF of all people being the result of consanguineous relations.
The act of trying to tell any Muslim that having children with their cousin is bad could be seen as a form of apostasy for which the punishment might be death. Even the study I linked to seems to tiptoe around the fact that marrying your cousin has anything to do with Islam. It's "Arabs" who seem to have this preference, and also people in central and south Asia...
Reforming this issue is incredibly fraught, especially as every generation of Muslims has the tendency to literally become more retarded than their parents - and the ability to understand nuance and to gerrymander your beliefs to fit your traditional religion becomes less likely.
I have no interest in importing this kind of world view to the US for a variety of reasons. Having a pocket of a few million people under this kind of grand and dangerous delusion as neighbors across a tiny border also is not preferable.
But I also understand Dave Smith's views on Israel-Palestine. And I really think you're off the mark with your take that Joe/Dave or the anti-war crowd in general is critical of Israel and this conflict because they're hooked on the feeling of being leftist-humanitarian types.
I would not call Dave an expert on the middle east or Israel-Palestine, but then, I don't think Douglas Murray is an expert either. Douglas Murray hasn't waded through the blood and bone of a battlefield, nor has Smith, or Joe Rogan or I for that matter. And there are plenty of war veterans who align with Smith's views on American foreign policy.
And American foreign policy, I think, is the real story here, because Israel is basically an American satellite state. I won't say vassal state, but it's more like a stationary US aircraft carrier with its own domestic government. If that sounds odd to you consider that even feckless, senile Joe Biden was dictating (or attempting to) Israeli's allowable military response.
This whole conflict (and many others, including Ukraine) are directly downstream of American foreign policy failures going back decades. Now Israel is in the compromised position to either have to completely ethnically cleanse Gaza (difficult under the best of scenarios) or to be forced into a kind of intermittent war with increasingly retarded enemies who revel in brutality.
But they're an aircraft carrier run by some assholes in Washington DC who don't really care if some of the citizens of the carrier get brutalized every few years. They just need the carrier to stay afloat and to be operational enough.
If this situation seems intractable, then I agree but I also have good news. There is a historical analogue that's not too far off from what we're seeing (minus the inbreeding.)
It involved two ethnically similar groups separated by a scant border. It involved centuries of bitter conflict centered around religion and culture, with plenty of legitimate grievances. It involved brutal terrorism and the deaths of many civilians on both sides. It was a fashionable cause du jour, especially for certain Americans with no skin in the game. And it resolved in the last ~3 decades to the point that there is now zero hostility to be found in the whole region.
I'm talking about a conflict that most people don't even think about anymore, but I believe is instructive: the Irish/British "troubles."
Most instructive is that right now, the US/Israeli governments do not appear to be actively engaged in anything close to a peace process. This scenario only benefits the most aggressively pro-forever war factions in Israel, the US and Palestine. And I think that's the main thrust of Smith's criticism. If you're interested in peace I think you should understand that perspective, because the alternative is either a highly unlikely ethnic cleansing or continued conflict that only gets worse for both Israel and Palestine -and is highly likely to draw the US into more wars in the region. There are people who cheerlead for that latter outcome and of course, they stand to profit from it, and will avoid sending their sons to die in it.
It’s adorable that you think there’s any comparison to the deeply entrenched anti-semitism. Did either side in that require their kindergarteners to enact martyrdom skits? Did either side declare that they love death more than their enemies love life, and that’s why they would win? Did either side have mothers cheering and celebrating the loss of their children to suicide bombing? You’re invoking standard laws of game theory and political calculations when the laws of nature don’t even apply here.
Trying to understand this stuff in any lens outside of, “They actually believe in their religion; they’re not lying, they believe what they have been telling us all along they believe” is arguing about the details of the bark on the interesting tree instead of examining the fucking forest.
There are absolutely people in the region who believe all of the above and more to their core, obviously. We can choose to elevate those people as the dance partner, like we usually do, or we can try something else. The something else could be ethnic cleansing but I don't think that will work because even if Israel has the stomach for it, I don't think the people running the aircraft carrier do.
"When institutions got it wrong, they rarely owned it — or corrected themselves long after the damage was done."
To this day, the "institutions not only admitted their flaws and didn't own it, they doubled down.
Excellent article Holly. Whether it is expertise or institutional authority, equality or equity, credentials or credibility, so much about CoVid exposed the weaknesses in our system. I'm not a researcher nor do I profess to be one. I do look at statistics and will admit to being shocked at some things that I saw within VAERS. I also was flummoxed in the division between the medical community as it pertained to CoVid. And these were the "experts".
Within all of this is the role of journalism. I grew up in a time when the "news" was simply a statement of events without ideology or opinion injected. Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley--maybe the reason that all they did was give us the news was because there were no 24 hour news channels, there were only a few political pundits in media, there was no internet.
On the subject of CoVid, one thing stands out to me. When Dr. Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine (it wasn't publicly available until 3 full years after development and with thorough clinical trials and not via EUA), Dr. Salk declared that the "patent" on his vaccine belonged to the public and he did not collect a penny for his invention! Mid 20th century is a far cry from the early 21st century in those respects. Ah, the word at the root of a lot of this. RESPECT. Dr. Salk was not only respected but, I suspect, revered by his peers. Given our current system of media and medicine, would he have been revered or reviled using today's standards?
I am just picking one or two points from your large piece. Because they spoke to me the most. Like you I would lose against the 2+2=5 crowd in any open non-written debate. I can blame my foreigness and ineloquence. Or that I look more like Bernadette from the Big Bang Theory and people just do not take me serious enough. Many reasons.
I think my fallacy is that I always assume everyone is using the same data and facts for their argument. So I get baffled when they do not. When they refuse to recognize facts as truth and speak from a basis of make believe. The honest answer is I cannot deal with people arguing in bad faith. I get triggered and with that flustered and it spawns my PTSD reactions and I can no longer maintain my posture and logic. I will always lose against anyone arguing in bad faith. I hate liars and lying with a passion.
The same way it is really hard to get away from categorizing the left and right as good and bad. Like you I feel always some sort of relief when I can side with the left.
I cannot make that break cleanly.
The pattern I am seeing is, though, that the right is about to lose me. Or in other words: there are people on the right I think are toxic and basically take anything conservative to an extreme. Like talking about eliminating women’s voting rights, like opposing gay marriage, like being openly antisemitic or speaking racist. And I am not talking about people like Josh Slocum who is just direct and calls out bad behavior. I am talking about those that truly display toxic Cluster B traits. If they get more momentum than we might as well say goodbye to the more positive move to the right I had seen around Trump’s election. The extreme side of the right is not me. So I have to admit that I am just in the middle somewhere. Hopefully with common sense.
Superb. This is a great, useful, informative analytical framework. It was Institutions Good, (dissenting) Experts Treasonous - from the regime side. Then in the pushback it was Institutions Bad, (dissenting) Experts Heroic.
Credentialism is a different issue entirely that relates to the education-employment-debt millwheel and the competency crisis, but is not related to authoritarian power mediated by institutions.
“The startup guy who rails against credentialism still hires the backend dev who built two scalable systems — not the philosophy major who read The Lean Startup twice.”
Building something well is not a credential. A relevant credential would be hiring the ex-Google guy. Sounds impressive, often is, but doesn’t translate well outside of Google.
Startup guys are actually more likely to care about competence over credentials. There’s an intense recency bias though.
One thing that stands out to me as someone raised and educated in a different culture is that at least here in the US of A, we are terribly lazy.
And laziness breeds reliance, from everything from day to day basics like food prep to getting to work. Take away the <thing> and you may quickly see two predictable outcomes:
1. How hopelessly reliant we are on <thing> and
2. How quickly we'll adapt to replace <thing> with <thing version 2>
We are lazy - we do not wish to work for something that we can get quicker by having it provided to us on a silver platter. Now when we rely on the provider of that silver platter, the provider has us where they can use us to their own ends. This is the downside of capitalism. Those who figure out how to be a provider of <thing> and can serve it up on a platter get rewarded with a lot of business.
American culture is this, only in a never ending - rinse - cycle - repeat sequence.
"They live in safety. They evaluate the world from within it.
They speak from a life built in a Western country, protected by Western men who hold Western values.
And they have no idea how protected they really are — or how much of that protection depends on someone else’s spine holding the line."
I deeply appreciate you reminding people of this. As someone who didn't grow up with a foundational sense of safety, I find people's ongoing naivete regarding fundamentalist religion (specifically Islam but I have many, many issues with fundamentalist Christianity as well) to be genuinely frightening. I am at my wit's end as to how to explain to people that actual hate exists and that there are truly bad, brutal people in the world. You can't tweak a few things in their environment or give them the one great book to read in order repair their corrupted characters. They have to be seen and dealt with as the people they have chosen to be- hateful, brutal, and sometimes deadly. I worry our culture has created both men and women too soft for the challenge.
"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss." - sung at an earlier time of cultural upheaval. I didn't quite understand it at the time. Great commentary. Thank you!
I frequently hear Pink Floyd’s song from The Wall. “Teacher, leave them kids alone” and think it’s very appropriate today though it’s quite the reverse of what they were thinking at the time when they wrote it.
It depresses me that even for your audience, you felt a need for footnote #2.
Sense-making on the ground is challenging. My older sister, a "young boomer," is a good example. A 61 yo pediatrician, she still seems to adhere to the medical institution, and it's easy to understand why: she's been steeped in it since her first year of med school in 1985. Yet she resists it in many ways.
My younger sister and I are both older Gen-X. We've both looked sideways at institutions for quite a long time, but 2021 was the end of it for both of us.
Dad was THE institution, at least for agriculture in Louisiana. Born in 1937, that's all there was. But the institutional façade began to crack for him in the 20-teens. He still gives it his obeisance in some ways, but he is even more distrustful of institutions than my older sister.
For all 4 of us, the institutions were a repository of trust. They just aren't anymore. I don't know if my family can pinpoint the time when they realized the emperor maybe wasn't wearing any clothes, but for me it happened in the Spring of 1993 in Waco, Texas. And I was a Houston cop at the time. The raid of the Branch Davidians caused me to deeply question what it was that I was doing, and I didn't have anything to do with it. I was just a lowly night shift patrolman in a bad neighborhood at the time.
Holly hits it out of the park again with great clarity. I didn’t see the JRE episode but I read Kisins piece and saw Murray on Bill Maher. From my “vibe” of these two items I don’t think they were suggesting censorship or strictly controlled standards. Their response was the free speech push back. Bad ideas need more speech not less. I listened to Darkhorse and felt that Brett was a little too insensed over their response and assumed they had called for censorship which I don’t think they had. I respect Murray’s take on Israel. He has been on the ground and is well researched, so for my money he cannot be dismissed out of hand. Triggernometry equally has my respect. Brett seems to feel that out of the chaos of a babel of voices, opinions and ideas, the good ones will come to the surface. Maybe, but how exactly does that happen and how much time does that take and how much damage do the bad ideas cause in the meantime. Just look at the last four years of “Biden”.
Your Covid story is interesting. It's a good thing you were a remote worker.
Yeah, President Biden making threats irritated me as well. I don't like people threatening me.
In 2019, 2020, 2021, I was working for the state prison system, and when Dr. Disease suggested lockdowns, I immediately refuted it. Lockdown is a prison term for solitary confinement. you don't take care of an epidemic or disease by locking civilization down. You quarantine the sick and let the healthy people work or play.
I also understand how vaccines are made and know that it takes years to develop a vaccine that's safe.
Like you, my doctor kept pushing me to take the so-called vaccine. I flat out told him that I wouldn't, ever.
Now that I've shared my story, I want to walk through some statements.
Institutions don’t need trust — which is why Congress, the IRS, the police, and the Presidency still qualify.
I disagree with you on that. I have never trusted congress, the IRS, some police departments, or the President. They haven't earned my trust, and in some cases, have made it so I can never trust them. I can't trust congress because they locked up innocent protestors on Jan 6th, while letting violent terrorists out on bond that the congressmen paid for.
I can't trust the IRS, because they've been weaponized in the past and threatened churches, schools, and charities.
I don't trust the executive department, because they've already shown that they'd imprison us for not obeying them.
Institutions require reliance, not trust. People depend on them — sometimes unwillingly, often resentfully — because they’re central to some unavoidable aspect of how the world works.
If I can't trust an institution, I'm not going to rely on it. Why would I do that? Why would I rely on an institution that might kill me for telling them off.
You have a legal question. I contact my family lawyer, or county attorney.
You need weight loss advice. I check with my doc, then check his answers. If I like it, I take it. If I don't, I won't.
You’re preparing for a tax audit. I contact my family estate CPA. She's been working for us for 40 years.
The CDC’s mask guidance. was a joke, as was their suggestion as to who shouldn't get the vaccines. Remember when they suggested that white people not get it, but everybody else should get it first? Fine with me..I didn't want the fauxine anyway.
It's kind of interesting that JRE is who people turn to. He's an ex-MMA fighter, who smokes marijuana, and gets drunk. He's not an expert, but he does try to get experts on his show.
Another pattern I can’t stop seeing — and I say this bluntly — is how few Americans take the threat of radical Islam seriously.
I've been trying to wake people up to the islamic threat for twenty years. It won't work, because the education system has told student that the Muslims are civilized people who never start fights.
They completely ignore the facts before their eyes.
As usual, you wrote a great article and one that I just had to answer. I may not always agree with what you say, but you'll always get respect.
You consistently make me feel that I've completely failed as a writer. Because the fact that the IRS and cops and Congress all play a role in your life means that they are institutions in the sense that I describe, and your trust is irrelevant. Sigh.
Yes, they are institutions. I didn't say that. I merely said that I neither rely on them, nor trust them. I've watched them break the law and punish people that they shouldn't have punished.
I'm a three times burned gen xer. I watched the FBI/ATF kill an innocent family at Ruby Ridge. I watched them kill 27 women and children in Waco, and I watched them arrest some protestors while letting others go scot free.
There are people who rely on them and trust them. I'm just not one of them.
They are institutions, and my trust is irrelevant. My problems are mine, because i know that if I were in their positions, I could do better.
OK, now that we've covered things that are completely irrelevant to any point that I tried to make, I've no idea what to say. Happy Wednesday.
Understood your intent to distinguish between institutional trust and relevance . Thanks as usual for the thoughtful and articulate post.
To me one of the most interesting devopments of the Biden presidency ( the Covid mandates, the lies concerning his mental acuity, the personal corruption in which he 3as implicated) and its aftermath is that whatever trust thereonce was among even its most loyal adherents has almost completely disappeared.
You (Holly) will never be a failure as a writer and as a person of profound impact on impacting and shaping my view moving forward in whatever days I have left on this earth? I offer thanks during my devotions that fate had us cross paths.
This highlights the need for sharpening sense-making skills in a world filled with noise and lies passed of as truths worthy of trust.
I have not trusted an institution since I was told by the school principal that I had to apologise to my bully for defending myself in grade 6. Thank goodness for trustworthy and reliable humans who can help navigate the murkiness of institution controlled life.
As always Holly, you give us food for thought.
This was the crux for me: "We no longer mistake credentials for credibility. We look for performance. For humility. For signs that someone can handle disagreement, admit error, and tell the truth even when it costs them."
This is orthogonal to your point, but I suppose it’s a testimony to my “Christian Lite” upbringing that I looked up those passages from Proverbs. I mean, I thought I knew what you were referring to, and I was right -- but I did have to look to make sure. My own parents were nominally Christian-- they went to church and stuff. And you know what -- the folks at church were very nice when my parents suffered ultimately terminal illnesses. But they definitely had a filter for the Bible stuff. I don’t think they literally believed in Seven Days or that God killed the whole world in a flood, and they definitely paid no attention whatsoever to the stuff about beating children. And, for that matter, while I did turn out to be quite conventionally heterosexual, I am pretty sure it would have been utterly unremarkable if I’d turned out to be gay.
In fact, when I was in high school my dad and I read a book called “The Religions of Man,” which contended that all religions are getting at the same truths, just in different ways. Many paths up the same mountain was the metaphor it used.
So my parents were nominally religious, but they ignored the nasty bits and certainly didn’t take those bits seriously. I think it’s hard for people who grew up as I did to get their mental arms around the fact that a lot of Muslims do indeed take the nasty bits very seriously indeed.
And also the desire to be tolerant does tend to cause people to ignore very real differences between holy texts. To the extent we take the historicity of Jesus seriously (and I do think there was probably a guy), he had zero political power at the time and that is reflected in the texts his followers produced. Whereas Muhammad was a political and military leader, and this produced a text that reflects that. Which matters. I mean, I could imagine violent militant Taoists, but the text doesn’t give them a lot to work with. But militant Muslims have a lot of text they can use.
Plus they take it seriously, unlike my parents.
In my limited life view, you (Holly) will not be and are not to be a failure as a writer nor are you a shepherd as your readers are not treated as sheep. You are the rare essayist who transcends your readers' beliefs and experiences when presenting your appreciation of current issues in a way as unique as the JRE. Where you excel with me? You are grounded. Your PTSD touches my own by expressing it in feelings, interpretations, and unique thoughts about how to interpret whatever life throws at us. Some of us may miss points you try to make, but in my case, your impact is so powerful that I revisit what you speak of weeks later to see where I am at 'in the now' and in the moment what whatever crap life has slung at me or my beloved sphere of influence. Thank you so much for The Emperor's New Gatekeepers. I regret I did not know you or your readers when faced with the shimmering coronavirus mirage.
This is another masterpiece that reveals the depth of your razor-sharp intellect. Thank you for your outstanding observations and explanations.
Thank you! And thanks for reading!
I have no love for Islam or religious fundamentalism in general. It's clear that Oct 7th comes directly downstream of Muslim hatred for Jews, among other things. Islam has a major and debilitating defect (worse than other religions I can think of) because it centers Mohammed as the guide for morality. Whatever else you might say about Mohammed, he ended up marrying and having children with his cousin. In Islam, that means there's no practical way to tell Muslims they shouldn't marry and have children with their cousins. In Gaza/Palestine, this issue is especially prevalent, with up to HALF of all people being the result of consanguineous relations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1769721214000214
The act of trying to tell any Muslim that having children with their cousin is bad could be seen as a form of apostasy for which the punishment might be death. Even the study I linked to seems to tiptoe around the fact that marrying your cousin has anything to do with Islam. It's "Arabs" who seem to have this preference, and also people in central and south Asia...
Reforming this issue is incredibly fraught, especially as every generation of Muslims has the tendency to literally become more retarded than their parents - and the ability to understand nuance and to gerrymander your beliefs to fit your traditional religion becomes less likely.
I have no interest in importing this kind of world view to the US for a variety of reasons. Having a pocket of a few million people under this kind of grand and dangerous delusion as neighbors across a tiny border also is not preferable.
But I also understand Dave Smith's views on Israel-Palestine. And I really think you're off the mark with your take that Joe/Dave or the anti-war crowd in general is critical of Israel and this conflict because they're hooked on the feeling of being leftist-humanitarian types.
I would not call Dave an expert on the middle east or Israel-Palestine, but then, I don't think Douglas Murray is an expert either. Douglas Murray hasn't waded through the blood and bone of a battlefield, nor has Smith, or Joe Rogan or I for that matter. And there are plenty of war veterans who align with Smith's views on American foreign policy.
And American foreign policy, I think, is the real story here, because Israel is basically an American satellite state. I won't say vassal state, but it's more like a stationary US aircraft carrier with its own domestic government. If that sounds odd to you consider that even feckless, senile Joe Biden was dictating (or attempting to) Israeli's allowable military response.
This whole conflict (and many others, including Ukraine) are directly downstream of American foreign policy failures going back decades. Now Israel is in the compromised position to either have to completely ethnically cleanse Gaza (difficult under the best of scenarios) or to be forced into a kind of intermittent war with increasingly retarded enemies who revel in brutality.
But they're an aircraft carrier run by some assholes in Washington DC who don't really care if some of the citizens of the carrier get brutalized every few years. They just need the carrier to stay afloat and to be operational enough.
If this situation seems intractable, then I agree but I also have good news. There is a historical analogue that's not too far off from what we're seeing (minus the inbreeding.)
It involved two ethnically similar groups separated by a scant border. It involved centuries of bitter conflict centered around religion and culture, with plenty of legitimate grievances. It involved brutal terrorism and the deaths of many civilians on both sides. It was a fashionable cause du jour, especially for certain Americans with no skin in the game. And it resolved in the last ~3 decades to the point that there is now zero hostility to be found in the whole region.
I'm talking about a conflict that most people don't even think about anymore, but I believe is instructive: the Irish/British "troubles."
Most instructive is that right now, the US/Israeli governments do not appear to be actively engaged in anything close to a peace process. This scenario only benefits the most aggressively pro-forever war factions in Israel, the US and Palestine. And I think that's the main thrust of Smith's criticism. If you're interested in peace I think you should understand that perspective, because the alternative is either a highly unlikely ethnic cleansing or continued conflict that only gets worse for both Israel and Palestine -and is highly likely to draw the US into more wars in the region. There are people who cheerlead for that latter outcome and of course, they stand to profit from it, and will avoid sending their sons to die in it.
It’s adorable that you think there’s any comparison to the deeply entrenched anti-semitism. Did either side in that require their kindergarteners to enact martyrdom skits? Did either side declare that they love death more than their enemies love life, and that’s why they would win? Did either side have mothers cheering and celebrating the loss of their children to suicide bombing? You’re invoking standard laws of game theory and political calculations when the laws of nature don’t even apply here.
Trying to understand this stuff in any lens outside of, “They actually believe in their religion; they’re not lying, they believe what they have been telling us all along they believe” is arguing about the details of the bark on the interesting tree instead of examining the fucking forest.
There are absolutely people in the region who believe all of the above and more to their core, obviously. We can choose to elevate those people as the dance partner, like we usually do, or we can try something else. The something else could be ethnic cleansing but I don't think that will work because even if Israel has the stomach for it, I don't think the people running the aircraft carrier do.
"When institutions got it wrong, they rarely owned it — or corrected themselves long after the damage was done."
To this day, the "institutions not only admitted their flaws and didn't own it, they doubled down.
Excellent article Holly. Whether it is expertise or institutional authority, equality or equity, credentials or credibility, so much about CoVid exposed the weaknesses in our system. I'm not a researcher nor do I profess to be one. I do look at statistics and will admit to being shocked at some things that I saw within VAERS. I also was flummoxed in the division between the medical community as it pertained to CoVid. And these were the "experts".
Within all of this is the role of journalism. I grew up in a time when the "news" was simply a statement of events without ideology or opinion injected. Walter Cronkite, Howard K. Smith, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley--maybe the reason that all they did was give us the news was because there were no 24 hour news channels, there were only a few political pundits in media, there was no internet.
On the subject of CoVid, one thing stands out to me. When Dr. Jonas Salk developed his polio vaccine (it wasn't publicly available until 3 full years after development and with thorough clinical trials and not via EUA), Dr. Salk declared that the "patent" on his vaccine belonged to the public and he did not collect a penny for his invention! Mid 20th century is a far cry from the early 21st century in those respects. Ah, the word at the root of a lot of this. RESPECT. Dr. Salk was not only respected but, I suspect, revered by his peers. Given our current system of media and medicine, would he have been revered or reviled using today's standards?
If you want to take a deep dive into the history of vaccines, this is the book: https://dissolvingillusions.com/
Salk and the polio vaccine are discussed extensively.
I am just picking one or two points from your large piece. Because they spoke to me the most. Like you I would lose against the 2+2=5 crowd in any open non-written debate. I can blame my foreigness and ineloquence. Or that I look more like Bernadette from the Big Bang Theory and people just do not take me serious enough. Many reasons.
I think my fallacy is that I always assume everyone is using the same data and facts for their argument. So I get baffled when they do not. When they refuse to recognize facts as truth and speak from a basis of make believe. The honest answer is I cannot deal with people arguing in bad faith. I get triggered and with that flustered and it spawns my PTSD reactions and I can no longer maintain my posture and logic. I will always lose against anyone arguing in bad faith. I hate liars and lying with a passion.
The same way it is really hard to get away from categorizing the left and right as good and bad. Like you I feel always some sort of relief when I can side with the left.
I cannot make that break cleanly.
The pattern I am seeing is, though, that the right is about to lose me. Or in other words: there are people on the right I think are toxic and basically take anything conservative to an extreme. Like talking about eliminating women’s voting rights, like opposing gay marriage, like being openly antisemitic or speaking racist. And I am not talking about people like Josh Slocum who is just direct and calls out bad behavior. I am talking about those that truly display toxic Cluster B traits. If they get more momentum than we might as well say goodbye to the more positive move to the right I had seen around Trump’s election. The extreme side of the right is not me. So I have to admit that I am just in the middle somewhere. Hopefully with common sense.
Superb. This is a great, useful, informative analytical framework. It was Institutions Good, (dissenting) Experts Treasonous - from the regime side. Then in the pushback it was Institutions Bad, (dissenting) Experts Heroic.
Credentialism is a different issue entirely that relates to the education-employment-debt millwheel and the competency crisis, but is not related to authoritarian power mediated by institutions.
Quibble:
“The startup guy who rails against credentialism still hires the backend dev who built two scalable systems — not the philosophy major who read The Lean Startup twice.”
Building something well is not a credential. A relevant credential would be hiring the ex-Google guy. Sounds impressive, often is, but doesn’t translate well outside of Google.
Startup guys are actually more likely to care about competence over credentials. There’s an intense recency bias though.
One thing that stands out to me as someone raised and educated in a different culture is that at least here in the US of A, we are terribly lazy.
And laziness breeds reliance, from everything from day to day basics like food prep to getting to work. Take away the <thing> and you may quickly see two predictable outcomes:
1. How hopelessly reliant we are on <thing> and
2. How quickly we'll adapt to replace <thing> with <thing version 2>
We are lazy - we do not wish to work for something that we can get quicker by having it provided to us on a silver platter. Now when we rely on the provider of that silver platter, the provider has us where they can use us to their own ends. This is the downside of capitalism. Those who figure out how to be a provider of <thing> and can serve it up on a platter get rewarded with a lot of business.
American culture is this, only in a never ending - rinse - cycle - repeat sequence.
My favorite lines:
"They live in safety. They evaluate the world from within it.
They speak from a life built in a Western country, protected by Western men who hold Western values.
And they have no idea how protected they really are — or how much of that protection depends on someone else’s spine holding the line."
I deeply appreciate you reminding people of this. As someone who didn't grow up with a foundational sense of safety, I find people's ongoing naivete regarding fundamentalist religion (specifically Islam but I have many, many issues with fundamentalist Christianity as well) to be genuinely frightening. I am at my wit's end as to how to explain to people that actual hate exists and that there are truly bad, brutal people in the world. You can't tweak a few things in their environment or give them the one great book to read in order repair their corrupted characters. They have to be seen and dealt with as the people they have chosen to be- hateful, brutal, and sometimes deadly. I worry our culture has created both men and women too soft for the challenge.