For Your Own Good Dept.

     “Death is the price we pay for our life, and for all life.” – Ursula Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

     “No one here gets out alive.” – Jim Morrison

     Welcome to All Hallows’ Eve, Gentle Reader. Yes, it’s better known as Hallowe’en – don’t omit the apostrophe – and the legions of candy-grubbing spratlings in weird costumes that troop from door to door in the evening. But in point of fact, this is the opening day of a solemn Christian commemoration. This day is marked for the contemplation of mortality: yours and mine.

     We shall all die. All that lived before us knew it. All that will come after us will know it, too. Fantasies of physical immortality are just that.

     Thousands are dying as we speak. For many, the event is considered premature, because their lives were ended by accident or violence. But we don’t get to say when the clock of mortality, “that two-handed engine that stands behind the door,” will smite us for the last time.

     It behooves us to be ready.

* * *

     Whew! Glad that’s out of the way. Now where was I? Oh yes, this story:

     The manosphere and online misogyny should be treated by the government as a public health issue, in the same way as obesity or smoking, experts have said.
     Writing in the Lancet, the authors of a new report argue that a coordinated response is needed, involving governments, schools, health services and community organisations, similar to the public-health response to tobacco use and ultra-processed food.
     “Men’s problems are framed [in the manosphere] as the result of feminism rather than structural conditions, and masculine identity is commodified through products and paid content that normalise and reinforce health-harming and performance-oriented masculinities,” the authors write.
     The report defines the manosphere as “a diffuse commercial ecosystem and loose collection of online communities united by shared beliefs about masculinity, misogyny and male victimisation”.

     Heavens to Murgatroyd! Men online are saying critical things about women! I could stop right there, secure in the knowledge that my Gentle Readers are all bright enough to predict the rest. However, a bit from the cited article in The Lancet deserves special attention:

     Similar to the tobacco and ultra-processed food industries,44 content creators and hosting platforms deploy strategies that individualise responsibility.45 Men's problems are framed as the result of feminism rather than structural conditions, and masculine identity is commodified through products and paid content that normalise and reinforce health-harming and performance-oriented masculinities.46 Efforts to regulate or moderate content are frequently framed as threats to men's autonomy, restricting political space for intervention.

     So treatment of the “public health issue” of men griping about women and pursuing traditionally masculine goals is being impeded by that inconvenient matter of freedom of expression! Well, the folks in the United Kingdom have already been told that that’s over with. No doubt their political masters will defer to “experts” Sarah Hawkes and Kent Buse. After all, it’s for your own good!

     Yes, we Americans take a somewhat different view of the matter. But… but… public health! Surely we can see the importance of that! What’s an itty-bitty infringement of our free-speech rights compare to the all-important goal of protecting the health of the public? Can’t we give just a little for something so momentous? It’s for your own good!

     I could go on this way, but it’s ceased to be entertaining.

* * *

     Time was, the “public health” shibboleth was reserved for dangerous infectious diseases. Maladies that can spread rapidly among the populace without anyone knowing. There was some justification for government efforts at tracking and general education, at least. But not long ago, the Left discovered the intimidating power of the phrase. It developed that even Americans are willing to allow their rights to be abridged in the name of “public health.”

     Even Robert A. Heinlein, one of the most freedom-loving of well-known writers, was willing to permit such abridgement:

     ‘Lies! I'm not going to say another word without my lawyer.’
     At which point I made yet another mistake. ‘But, Priscilla, I am a lawyer; you know that. What they're asking is quite reasonable, a matter of public health.’

     The power of that phrase is quite astounding. I hope the ghost of Ayn Rand – it’s a good day for ghosts, isn’t it? – will forgive me for slightly altering something she wrote:

     “Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle—the principle of the public health.”
     “Who is the public? What does it hold as its health?”

     Apparently, “public health” demands that we not own firearms, or drink wine, or eat what we like if “experts” disapprove of it. Mind you, there’s always a degree of dissent among the ranks of the “experts,” but some have the patronage of the Omnipotent State. Their recommendations get official respect. One guess as to why.

* * *

You don't really need to find out
What's going on
You don't really want to know
Just how far it's gone

(Don Henley)

     Everyone knows how far it’s gone. Lockdowns and forced vaccinations made it quite plain. Christian Scientists, Amish, and Mennonites who resist are painted as something akin to public enemies. It’s even been alleged that surgeons who operate on children for typical childhood needs are facilitating the vaccination of those children before the operation, without informing their parents or securing their consent. All in the name of “public health.”

     But we must raise the question governments most hate to face: “What if you’re wrong? Will you restore our rights, refund our money, and apologize for your intrusion on our lives?”

     There’s no chance we’ll get an honest answer. But upsetting the State is always worth doing.

On Not Forgetting

     “For it is the doom of men that they forget.” – Nicol Williamson as Merlin, in Excalibur

     Indeed it is. Worse, we have a tendency to flush that which we should most remember, especially if the event being flushed was unpleasant in occurrence and memory.

     This damp and dreary morning, I’m seized by foreboding. Something impends… something to which we should have relevant memories. But those memories are likely to have been suppressed, or shuffled off the back of our memory warehouses, for they were of ugly sentiments expressed at an ugly time.

     Do you remember this article?

     When the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative efficacies of the Johnson & Johnson shot versus the mRNA options from Pfizer and Moderna. The mRNA vaccines have won out. But at the time, many people in public health were either neutral or expressed a J&J preference. This misstep wasn’t nefarious. It was the result of uncertainty.
     Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims. Remember when the public-health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach? That was bad. Misinformation was, and remains, a huge problem. But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
     Given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic. And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right, and someone else was proved wrong. In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons. In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information
.      The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck. And, similarly, getting something wrong wasn’t a moral failing. Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
     We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge. Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer 2020. Ex post facto, this makes no more sense than my family’s masked hiking trips. But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
     Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.

     I do. I wrote about it, when it was first run:

     You say that we whom the “experts” demonized, whom their allegiants did their level best to silence, scorn, condemn, and impoverish, must forgive our tormentors? You caution us against being caught in “a repetitive doom loop” -- ? You say it’s time to “move on” -- ?

No, It Isn’t.

     This protracted, unbelievably un-American episode has been the best possible lesson in why we must deny political authority to “experts.” As a (retired) expert myself, I maintain that giving a man the power to boss you around because he’s “right” is the worst decision a nation could possibly make. And we must not forgive those who did so.

     But let’s not omit this, for without it the formula would be fatally unbalanced: We mustn’t forgive ourselves either. We gave in when we should have resisted with all our might. We accepted dictatorial impositions and abridgements of our God-given rights when we should have mustered our rage and employed the corpses of our would-be tyrants to decorate lampposts from coast to coast. We acted like pusillanimous cretins rather than the heirs of Patrick Henry, who’s undoubtedly spinning in his grave fast enough to power all of Virginia over this embarrassment.

     The survivors of the Holocaust made a mantra out of the saying “Never again.” The great majority of us wouldn’t even speak our minds for fear of ostracism, demonization, and unemployment. And over what? A disease that’s proved less dangerous than ordinary influenza! A disease that has hardly any effect on the populations most oppressed and disadvantaged by the lockdowns – our minor children!

     No. Do not forgive. To forgive would be to accept that our oppressors’ hypothetical “good intentions” should exonerate them for their totalitarian conduct. To forgive would be to “understand” cowardice instead of reproving it as it deserves.

     To forgive would be to forget. The two are never separated by much.

     [From the “V2.0” site]

     Mistakes made from ignorance of important facts can and should be forgiven. Even the most strident of denunciations can, with effort, be forgiven him who was ignorant of his grounds… at least, if he wasn’t deliberately, willfully ignorant. We give credit for good intentions, and much of the time it’s what we ought to do. But when the good intentions are fictitious – defensive shields wielded to play on our sympathies – it’s vitally important that we neither forgive nor forget.

     I’ve said and written this so many times that it pains me to have to repeat it yet again. Yet I must, for it is the critical cleavage between Left and Right for some years now. The Right must not credit the Left with good intentions. Their intent has been made plain:

They hate us.
They seek our destruction
And the destruction of what we love.

     If anything of enduring value came out of the COVID-19 debacle, it was that the Left’s hatred of us was made so open and indisputable that it can no longer be denied.

* * *

     No, we must not hate them back. I’ve lost all hope that the contemporary Left can be made to see the error of their ways. I accept that they must be shatteringly defeated, such that their madness cannot rise again for generations. But we must not hate them.

     It is one of the weaknesses of our species that we all seek to triumph, to excel: to see ourselves, however briefly, as superior to others. It hardly matters that all human excellence is transient; we want it anyway. We want that moment in the sun, to stand on a pedestal for others to gaze up at and admire. Unfortunately, as those others look up at him, he looks down at them. It tends to make him forget his own fallibility.

     We are as fallible as they. We must not make their error in reciprocity for their mistreatment of us. It’s not in hope of “educating them,” or “bringing them to their better natures.” We can’t assume they have “better natures.” It’s for the sake of our own souls and those of our progeny.

     We can’t “save” them. We can only save ourselves. But to that end, we are forbidden to hate.

* * *

     Now, about that foreboding. Midterm elections are coming up. Control of both Houses of Congress is in jeopardy. We can resent the nonperformance of the Republican caucuses as much as we please. I certainly do.

     But there is this as well: The alternative is worse. Yes, we hoped for too much from that gaggle of time-servers on Capitol Hill. Yes, they could have used their majorities much better than they did. And yes, a number of them were willful nonperformers, whether out of dedication to the status quo or out of resentment of President Trump. But the alternative remains worse.

     The Democrats have made their intentions plain, this time around. We can’t sincerely tell ourselves that “they don’t really mean it.” They do. Given the slightest trace of federal power, they will act on those plainly stated intentions. America will begin a slide into socialism that might well prove termina.

     That makes it critically important not to forget:

• FDR came to power on a small government / hard money platform.
• Lyndon Johnson promised to continue the policies of the Kennedy Administration.
• Bill Clinton was hailed as a “centrist,” then put domestic policy into his wife’s hands.
• Barack Hussein Obama was touted as a healer and unifier.
• And of course, Joe Biden was supposedly a moderate.

     Finally, have a few words from the dean of science fiction, the late Robert A. Heinlein:

     If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong.
     If this is too blind for your taste, consult some well-meaning fool (there is always one around) and ask his advice. Then vote the other way. This enables you to be a good citizen (if such is your wish) without spending the enormous amount of time on it that truly intelligent exercise of franchise requires.

     [From Time Enough For Love]

     And don’t forget.

Conditioned To Deference

     Allow me to open this piece with a snippet from Frederic Bastiat’s great pro-freedom treatise The Law:

     [A celebrated traveler] arrived one day in the midst of a tribe of savages, where a child had just been born. A crowd of soothsayers, magicians, and quacks — armed with rings, hooks, and cords — surrounded it. One said: "This child will never smell the perfume of a peace-pipe unless I stretch his nostrils." Another said: "He will never be able to hear unless I draw his ear-lobes down to his shoulders." A third said: "He will never see the sunshine unless I slant his eyes." Another said: "He will never stand upright unless I bend his legs." A fifth said: "He will never learn to think unless I flatten his skull."
     "Stop," cried the traveler. "What God does is well done. Do not claim to know more than He. God has given organs to this frail creature; let them develop and grow strong by exercise, use, experience, and liberty."

     Give that a moment to sink in while I start a second pot of coffee.

***

     The patterns that run through human history are of many kinds. Some are distinct and easy to trace; others are less so, even if they’re equally critical to the understanding of Mankind and his societies. I’ve harped on the political ones frequently enough to be sick of them... as you might be too, Gentle Reader. But there are others that require more patience and more perspicacity to tease out. One of them is exemplified in the Bastiat snippet above.

     Virtually all societies recognize a class of experts,distinct from other members. The expert is conceded certain privileges, even if they’re never publicly specified. One of those privileges manifests as a social predisposition in favor of letting him have his way, at least on subjects where his expertise is acknowledged.

     What’s insufficiently discussed in this regard is the expert’s predisposition toward intervention: his active insertion into the affairs of others, often contrary to those others’ preferences. In modern societies, the law has been shaped to put many experts’ prerogatives over those of the others. He gets to intervene in their affairs whether they like it or not.

     In some cases, private, non-expert citizens manage to resist the intrusions of even the most assertive experts. But they must fight a strong, socially reinforced current – the presumption that the expert knows best – to pull it off.

     Courtesy of N.C. Renegade, we have this instructive tale:

     The midwife's words hang in the delivery room air like a casual afterthought: "We'll just give baby the vitamin K shot now." Just a vitamin. Nothing more than what you'd find in your morning orange juice. The language itself is the first deception - calling a synthetic blood-clotting agent manufactured by Pfizer's subsidiary Hospira a "vitamin" transforms an industrial pharmaceutical intervention into something as wholesome as sunshine.
     In those first raw hours after birth, when parents are overwhelmed by the miracle of new life, the medical system strikes with practiced precision. The entire infrastructure - from the delivery nurse to the pediatrician, from the hospital protocols to the documentation systems - has been calibrated for this moment. Every medical professional in that room has been trained, not in the science of whether a newborn needs synthetic phytonadione, but in the art of securing compliance. They've learned to frame it as routine, to present it as universal, to make refusal seem like dangerous eccentricity.
     Murphy's father, one of the few who came prepared, discovered what awaits those who dare say no. After his daughter was delivered using vacuum extraction five times - creating a visible blood-filled sac on her head - the red-shirted pediatrician entered within three minutes. Not to examine the baby. Not to celebrate the birth. But to begin the assault. When Murphy's father cited the Australian Paediatric Surveillance Unit study showing only six deaths from vitamin K deficiency bleeding in five million babies over 25 years, with none occurring in hospital births where vitamin K was refused, the doctor didn't engage with the data. Instead, he turned to the mother: "Do you feel differently?"
     The pattern revealed itself through escalation. First the doctor. Then the nurse lecturing about irresponsibility. Then the NICU admission - not for medical necessity, but for "monitoring" a baby whose parents had refused the injection. Then the failed attempts to insert cannulas, the repeated heel pricks for blood tests. Strange behavior for medical professionals who claim the baby cannot clot blood properly. If she truly couldn't clot, why were they so eager to make her bleed?

     Please read it all.

     My purpose in citing this upsetting piece is to underscore the exercise of “medical authority,” to which we have been conditioned to defer. The physician is an expert: specifically, in neonatal care. He only wants “what’s best” for the baby, right? No physician would deliberately harm a newborn, would he? Surely we should let him do as he pleases!

     Maybe not. Quite a lot of “routine” medical interventions are anything but good for the patient. When the patient is a helpless infant, the odds of an uncorrectable error are much higher than otherwise.

     But as the cited article indicates, physicians and the like dislike to be balked. They become officious. They strive to convince you that if you don’t defer to their judgment, you’re committing a sin against your child. Sometimes they invoke the weight of the law. At other times, they perform what amounts to a kidnapping to get their way without your interference. They seldom suffer any penalty for any such action, while the parents of the newborn are often subjected to humiliating interrogations by “child welfare” bureaucrats.

     Fighting the pressure to defer can take everything a parent has. Should the law become involved, it could destroy the family. Their newborn might be taken from them, to disappear into “supervised foster care.” It happens more often than most people are aware.

***

     That’s just the medical aspect of things. Arrogant, brutally assertive experts are everywhere today. They all expect deference from the rest of us. Many are capable of enforcing their will with police assistance. And we, trained from birth to defer to “authority,” more often than not tend to go along as the easiest course.

     Give this a long think, Gentle Reader. How many kinds of “expert” have tried to contravene your will? Did you resist successfully? What were the consequences? I’d like to hear about it.

Quickies: Concerning Experts, Authorities, And Journalists

     There’s a reason why journalists should always keep their distance from priesthoods in any field. It’s particularly in the nature of insular communities of subject matter experts to coalesce around orthodoxies that blind the very people in the loop who should be the most knowledgeable.

     “Experts” get things wrong for reasons that are innocent (they’ve all been taught the same incorrect thing in school) and less so (they have a financial or professional interest in denying the truth)….

     “Authorities” by their nature are untrustworthy. Sometimes they have an interest in denying truths, and sometimes they actually try to define truth as being whatever they say it is. “Elevating authoritative content” over independent or less well-known sources is an algorithmic take on the journalistic obsession with credentialing that has been slowly destroying our business for decades.

     [Matt Taibbi]

     Have I bruised your ears sufficiently about “Anything Authorities?” Good. Because “One Thing Authorities” can be just as bad – and often are. Remember the immortal words of Robert A. Heinlein:

     Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.

     Verbum sat sapienti.

For Our Descendants

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

[Isaac Watts, “O God, Our Help In Ages Past”]

     It’s a commonplace that even the smartest and most erudite of us know very little, in comparison to “all there is to know”…or even to “what we currently know.” I feel secure in predicting that this will not change. The human mind is limited; human mortality guarantees that it will remain so. Though you learn all you can, there will still be a wealth of fields you will never master.

     The “thing” we know the least about is the future: what will come to pass tomorrow. It’s what makes science fiction an inexhaustible field. It’s also the meat and drink of prognosticators past, present, and – dare I say it? – future. There’s good money to be made if you can persuade the rubes that you can see what’s coming…though it’s best to be well out of town before the future actually gets here.

     All the same, we speculate. Some of us lay large bets on the shape of the future. And some of us indulge in dark forebodings of the “The End Is Nigh” variety. Yes, eventually that will be correct, at least for some values of “nigh.” But I wouldn’t go on a spree out of confidence in the proposition.

     The late, great Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist and teacher extraordinaire, once posed this question as the basis for a college-level physics curriculum:

     “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

     Jonah Goldberg has rounded up some answers he’s seen, including Feynman’s own. I must say that none of them impress me – no, not even Feynman’s. So I decided to try it myself. Here’s my best effort:

     The universe has unbreakable laws you can learn and exploit, if you watch the world around you with proper attention and without preconceptions.

     …and it’s really no more impressive than any of the ones Goldberg has aggregated. But perhaps that’s “just the way it is:” — that it’s in the nature of things that no single sentence we could pass on to an unimaginable future would be of much use. Gregory Benford would agree.

---

     We have learned a great deal, including many things we’d probably wish were not so. That, too, is in the nature of things. Thomas Sowell’s discourse on the tragic vision is highly relevant here. I’ve remarked on the thesis in various contexts.

     Ironically, a man whose activism I detest expressed the essence of the tragic vision in three short sentences, all of which any Gentle Reader will find familiar:

Barry Commoner’s Precepts:
1. No action is without side effects.
2. Nothing ever goes away.
3. There is no free lunch.

     The education of the young should emphasize those things. It should also inculcate in the student a healthful distrust of those who are styled “experts.” For what is an “expert?” Who awards that status, and with what justification? How much more, even in a narrowly delimited field, does the typical “expert” really know than anyone else – and how many “experts” infest our airwaves and our corridors of power who really don’t know shit?

     Those who repose their faith in “experts” probably haven’t seen and grasped what Conan’s father told him when he was young:

     It applies quite as strictly to “experts” as to any other human being.

---

     Yes, Gentle Reader, I’m in one of those moods. They’ve been fairly frequent of late, owing to prolonged confinement with my beloved wife, who’s gone about as far toward absolutely BLEEP!ing nuts as an American woman can get without being packed away for a stay in some institution where the guest rooms have soft walls. All I can do is strive to keep to myself, and that has its own costs.

     But this morning, Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman has called my attention to an article that strikes me as unusually optimistic about the future. While the topic is impending backlash against many aspects of our current order, it is nevertheless a pleasant vision of what may come. It’s essentially un-excerptable, so please hie thee thither and read it in its entirety when you’re done here.

     Such a wave of backlashes would do the nation a power of good. In particular, it would immunize us, at least for a time, against uncritical acceptance of the blandishments of “experts.” It would remind us that no one should be trusted with power over others. And it would remind us of something that far too many members of our political class have urged us to forget: that all things have their price – that there is “no free lunch.”

     Conan’s father would approve that message.

---

     Immured in our current condition, un-illumined even by “glimpses of Nirvana as seen through other people’s windows” (Procol Harum), it’s pleasant to imagine that we’ll emerge – assuming we ever do emerge – “sadder, but wiser.” We’ve allowed infamies to be perpetrated upon us – and the worst of them have issued from our own politicians, who have relied upon the dubious authority of various “experts.” That recognition, and the grasp of the motivations that drive those politicians and “experts,” would complete the awakening that began with the election of President Donald Trump.

     For we badly need to awaken. Too much has been taken from us, always under the pretext that “our leaders” and their chosen “experts” know better than do we the hoi polloi. There won’t be a wealth of opportunities to take our rights, our economy, and our nation back into our own hands if we don’t do so P.D.Q. But we won’t do so, now or ever, if we don’t accept the counsel of Conan’s father.

     And in light of that, perhaps the one sentence that would best fit Feynman’s specifications would be this:

Trust no one: not men, not women, not beasts, and certainly not the “experts.”

     It might not strike you as “science,” but it would convey one hell of a lot of painfully won wisdom to our descendants.