YET MAN IS fALLEN:

A personal tale of intellectual humility – and the rewards of being open-minded (Gemma Ware, 2/29/24, The Conversation)

To Daryl Van Tongeren, the pressure to be right all the time is an “unassailably tall order”. He believes that we’re living in a moment where even when people make mistakes, apologize and say they’ve changed their minds, it isn’t good enough.

We demand perfection. Not only perfection now but also perfection in one’s past and perfection in one’s future.

Van Tongeren is a psychology researcher at Hope College in Michigan in the U.S. who conducts research into the concept of intellectual humility. He explains it as something that happens both within us – “our ability to admit and own our cognitive limitations” – and in our relationships with others. “It means being able to present my ideas or interact with someone in a way that’s nondefensive,” he says.

Overall, if somebody is intellectually humble, they are willing to be open-minded enough to revise their beliefs if presented with sufficiently strong evidence.

Because ideologies are utopian they deny humanness.

A CLASH OF IDENTITARIANS:

Stuck in the Middle with Hayek (James E. Hartley, 2/29/24, Law & Liberty)

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek wrote in “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his The Road to Serfdom:

It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off—than on any positive task. The contrast between “we” and “they,” the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive program. […]

The stories Alberta tells are interesting, but the most important part of the book is a conversation Alberta relates with a set of prominent evangelicals who vocally oppose the Trumpian wing of evangelicalism:

We all agreed that these ideological diehards whom [David] French was describing were not a majority of the evangelical movement. There is a difference between the people who prefer the 6 p.m. hour of programming at Fox News to those of its cable rivals, and the people who marinate in right-wing misinformation all day long. That latter group, everyone estimated, was still no more than 15 or 20 percent of most church congregations they knew of. The problem is, as [Russell] Moore pointed out, “That vocal minority will always push around a timid majority. The people who care the most usually get what they want.”

It was at that moment I had an epiphany.

I am an evangelical Christian who works at a secular liberal arts college. I am thus personally acquainted with not only this new wing of evangelicals, but also with the woke academy. While the woke movement is incredibly and aggressively vocal on college campuses, it is a minority of the community. There is a very noticeable difference between the generally liberal members of the faculty and student body and the woke activists who capture all the headlines. A good estimate of the size of the latter group is 20 percent.

Looking at the American landscape, we are watching a pair of dueling religious movements consisting of a vocal minority of people using fear of their opponents as a recruitment tool. As John McWhorter documents in Woke Racism, what is happening on college campuses, the rise of what he calls “the Elect,” is not “like” a religion; it actually is a religion. “An anthropologist would see no difference between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.” There is a clergy, an original sin, attempts at evangelism, an apocalyptic narrative, and ostracism of heretics. The stories in Alberta’s book have obvious parallels with this new religion on the Left. Thinking about the evangelical church, David French noted, “If [pastors in evangelical churches] had a just-as-committed twenty percent to push back on [the politicized 15 to 20 percent] the churches would be just fine. But they don’t.” The same thing is true in the academy.

The Right is the Left.

HISSY FITS LOSE STEAM:

When the populist tide ebbs: What’s left behind? (H. W. BRANDS, FEB 24, 2024, A User’s Guide to History)

Populists in the 1890s attacked globalization, particularly international finance. Populists today are equally anti-globalist. As president, Trump launched tariff wars against America’s foreign competitors, and as a candidate again, he has promised more of the same. The 1890s attack hardly slowed the growth of international trade. Today’s attack has been equally unsuccessful. After a covid dip, world trade resumed its steady growth of around five percent per year. It’s more than twice as large as it was when the 1999 Battle of Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization kicked off the current anti-globalist campaign.

Populism is as much a mood as it is an agenda. Sometimes parts of the agenda stick. The mood always passes.

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

Cheap, clean energy could unleash the power of thermal storage (Eric Wesoff, 29 February 2024, Canary Media)

Rocks and hotness have existed for billions of years, but it’s only now that the two can be used to help the world decarbonize — and it’s all because the insanely low cost of solar and wind power has made thermal storage economically possible.

US immigration: economics vs. politics (Riley Callanan, 2/28/24, GZero)

According to a CBO study, the surge in irregular migrants seen under Joe Biden will lead to 1.7 million more workers in 2024, and will grow the economy by about $7 trillion over the next decade.

One of the reasons the Right is so anti-capitalist is that economic growth attracts immigrants. And immigrants produce more growth.

MET ONE IDENTITARIAN…:

He Hunted al-Qaeda. Now He Hunts Neo-Nazis (Feb. 27th, 2024, Free Press)

On a frigid night last February, Iraq combat veteran Kristofer Goldsmith woke to the sound of his dogs barking. He removed a gun from the safe next to his bed and crept downstairs to the kitchen of his home in suburban New York when he noticed movement just outside the glass kitchen door.

He turned to find a man in all-black tactical gear crouched behind a bush, pointing an AR-15 with a suppressor directly at him.

“I didn’t know at that moment if it was a terrorist or a cop,” Goldsmith remembers.

Goldsmith, 38, has made enough enemies that they frequently retaliate. He is the founder of Task Force Butler—an elite team of veterans who use their military expertise to take down neo-Nazi terrorists on American soil. Over the last few years, the Aryan Freedom Network (AFN) has repeatedly posted his home address online as well as photos of his family. Just this month, the FBI contacted him to say an AFN member had made a credible threat to “exterminate” his family.

That night back in February 2023, someone had called the police claiming Goldsmith had murdered his wife, and a cop had staked out his home.

Though Goldsmith managed to defuse the situation, he could have easily ended up wounded or killed. But he says it’s all in a day’s work for a neo-Nazi hunter and former Army sergeant who’s tasted his fair share of danger.

“I have a high threshold for threats,” he says with a slight grin and a shrug.

Folklore is philosophy (Abigail Tulenkois, 2/26/24, Aeon)

The Hungarian folktale Pretty Maid Ibronka terrified and tantalised me as a child. In the story, the young Ibronka must tie herself to the devil with string in order to discover important truths. These days, as a PhD student in philosophy, I sometimes worry I’ve done the same. I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons.

The demons of academic philosophy come in familiar guises: exclusivity, hegemony and investment in the myth of individual genius. As the ethicist Jill Hernandez notes, philosophy has been slower to change than many of its sister disciplines in the humanities: ‘It may be a surprise to many … given that theology and, certainly, religious studies tend to be inclusive, but philosophy is mostly resistant toward including diverse voices.’ Simultaneously, philosophy has grown increasingly specialised due to the pressures of professionalisation. Academics zero in on narrower and narrower topics in order to establish unique niches and, in the process, what was once a discipline that sought answers to humanity’s most fundamental questions becomes a jargon-riddled puzzle for a narrow group of insiders.

This was inevitable once Physics became obscurantist. It was intolerable for specialists that people could understand their fields but they couldn’t understand others. So they just added phoney-baloney theories too.

…AND CHEAPER…:

We Are Still Measuring Inflation All Wrong (Alan Reynolds, 2/26/24, Cato)

Owners’ equivalent rent purports to measure monthly variations in a price nobody pays, and to average those estimates for every house in the entire country. Nearly every other country wisely excludes such impossibly arbitrary OER estimates from their measure of inflation. Yet that singular made‐​up number dominates the US CPI, and to a lesser extent the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation index too.

Shelter accounts for 36.1 percent of the CPI and 42 percent of Core CPI. Shelter also accounts for 60 percent of measured inflation in non‐​energy services. This turns out to matter quite a lot, because estimated inflation for shelter has long been extremely high, while inflation for everything else has been extremely low.

The Graph shows that from July 2022 to January 2024, the average CPI inflation rate for shelter was 7 percent, yet the average inflation rate for everything else was only 1.2 percent. This January alone, the reported annual inflation rate for shelter was 6.9 percent, but inflation for everything else was 1.6 percent.

RACISM IS THE TRUMP BRAND:

Trump says he’s long worked ‘hand in hand’ with Black people. Let’s review. (Glenn Kessler, February 27, 2024, Washington Post)

You could begin the story in the 1950s, when Trump’s father, Fred, became the subject of a protest song, “Old Man Trump,” written by one of his tenants, folk singer Woody Guthrie, who objected to the all-White environs of his apartment complex. “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his Beach Haven family project … Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower / Where no black folks come to roam,” the lyrics go.

Trump’s first appearance in the New York Times was under the headline “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.” The front-page article detailed how the Justice Department had brought suit in federal court against Trump and his father, charging them with violating the 1968 Fair Housing Act (another LBJ bill that helped Black people) in the operation of 39 buildings through their Trump Management Corporation. The city Human Rights Commission had tested what would happen if Black and White people tried to rent the same Trump apartments — and discovered White people could easily get a rental but Black people were told nothing was available. A DOJ subpoena revealed that Black applications were marked with a “C,” for “colored.”

Donald Trump, then 27, took the lead in defending the case and told the Times that the charges “are absolutely ridiculous.” He added: “We never have discriminated and we never would.” The Trump Management Corporation turned around and sued the U.S. government right back.

Elyse Goldweber, a Justice Department lawyer who brought the suit, recalled in 2019 that Trump remarked to her during a coffee break: “You know, you don’t want to live with them either.”

RELEASE BARGHOUTTI, HONOR THE ELECTIONS, RECOGNIZE THE NATION:

Netanyahu’s ‘day after’ plan for Gaza is unviable (Ishaan Tharoor, 2/26/24, Washington Post)

Much of this flies in the face of the stated expectations of the United States, European and Arab governments. The Biden administration has repeatedly stressed that Israel should not maintain an indefinite occupation of Gaza and wants to see the Palestinian Authority assume responsibilities there. Egypt has rejected any Israeli role on its border with Gaza. UNRWA is a vital institution for the delivery of services to millions of Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and, for all the controversy surrounding some of its employees, would be difficult to replace.

In the West Bank, Palestinian Authority officials rejected Netanyahu’s approach. “The plans proposed by Netanyahu are aimed at continuing Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state,” said Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Israel will not succeed in its attempts to change the geographical and demographic reality in the Gaza Strip.”

On Monday, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister presented the resignation of the beleaguered entity’s entire government, as the United States and other governments look to it to reform and pick up the slack after the fighting eventually stops. The PA is deeply unpopular among Palestinians for its role as handmaiden to Israel’s occupation, as well as the alleged corruption of its entrenched political elites.

Recognizing Likud’s mission of the river to the sea is Israel’s existential threat.