Can I call them Nazis?

A conversation is effectively finished once a Nazi or Hitler comparison is made.
- Godwin's law

I always found Godwin's law pretentious bullshit on some visceral level, without ever consciously articulating exactly why. It's definitely not Godwin's fault, as the quote above is not from him. It is a twisted version of his original observation and thus mistakenly attributed to him. The real one, as I learned recently, states that

"if any online discussion continues long enough, then eventually someone in it will compare something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis"

which is hard to disagree with, on strictly statistical grounds. Nevertheless, the people invoking Godwin more often than not refer to the first version.

The point Godwin was making is obvious. He highlighted the fact that Nazi comparisons are made too frivolously in online discourse, to the detriment of it. This is a factually valid observation. My dislike stems from the smugness of people misusing it, indicating that bringing up Nazis in a conversation about current political events at any time is just a sign of unsophisticatedness.

This post is obviously prompted by the previous one, which in the eyes of many clearly violated Godwin's law, so before I try to figure out why exactly I detest the bastardized version, let's dispel some possible misunderstanding right at the start.

Last time, I made a very categoric statement that Trump voters would have elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor, had they lived in the 30s Germany. This perhaps deserves some afterthought. After great disappointments, one tends to be carried away with emotions, in written form as much as in person, and sometimes expresses opinions in a needlessly offensive, problematic manner, which he later regrets once emotions cool down and common sense prevails. I want to reassure the readers of the New Vac Times that this is absolutely not the case with the previous op-ed. I really do despise half of the electorate. Not as humans in everyday life, not their morality necessarily, but as citizens. I stand by this opinion, and everything that came out after the elections of Trump-supporting intellectuals, media personalities, and tech billionaires supports my belief. So do some friends and family, too, sadly. 

I agree with everything The Dispatch's Nick Cattogio wrote before and after the election. If the paywall stops you, you can listen to Tim Miller reading up a piece of it from 35:05. If you listen to it a bit longer, you will hear the succinct version of the argument, from Tom Nichols: 

"- You can't judge these people!"
"- The hell I can't!"

By the way, I didn't describe Trump voters as Nazis. I merely claimed that they would have voted for the Nazis, and everyone can draw their own conclusions from this. 

Here are mine.

90% of these people are ignorant not only about cold hard facts that are well within their effortless reach but are also unable to comprehend the importance of the rule of law, liberalism, institutions, and many other fundamental building blocks of modern society, more than an average kid does at the age of 12. This is arrested development on a global scale.

Arguably, most people are simply not interested enough in these topics as much as others are not interested in chemistry. There are only 24 hours in a day. But, if you listen to Donald Trump (and you could not listen to him for hours aggregated in the last 8 years) and think, this is the guy I'd rather see leading the world, you lack something more than just information.

If I despise these people, that feeling is nothing compared to what I feel towards right-wing intellectuals and self-described centrists. The staff at National Review, Wall Street Journal, Unherd, and likes of popular historian Niall Fergusson or "journalist" Piers Morgan, or the dozens of podcast hosts with millions of followers. Pretentious assholes playing high-brow intellectuals for the highest bidders. They would have fit in nicely with Albert Speers, Carl Schmitts, and Martin Heideggers, or just the run-of-the-mill functionaries of that era. Fergusson made some indignant noises when Tucker Carlsson interviewed Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper ("the most important historian of the United States today") who claimed that the real bad guy of the Second World War was Winston Churchill, a puppet of his Jewish financiers. In five years, when another slimy little "historian" will voice similar claims, it won't make such ripples, and Ferguson will just shut the fuck up and find something quickly on the Democrats' side to complain about.

As for the tech bros, like Peter Thiel, David Sacks, or Elon Musk? In case you'd think that there is a charitable interpretation of their sycophantic behavior, Thiel just spared you the trouble on Piers Morgan recently, when he gloated about how the time has come to demolish the "ancienne regime", by which he meant, liberalism. It's not clear which part of liberalism he detests. Rule of law? Judicial independence? Free press? Or just voting rights for the hoi polloi? The less said about another self-proclaimed big thinker, Elon Musk, the better. Actually, I can't resist quoteingDestiny: "... Elon Musk is a 97 IQ man who masquerades as a 137 IQ man and all of his followers are 85 IQ so they all believe that he's as smart as he says he is". Zuckerberg, Bezos, and the rest? These are just miserable cowards. They required no prison or threat of physical violence to cave, just the prospect of losing some profit. 

In short, everyone named above would have gone along with every right-wing regime in the 20th century. In the unlikely event that Trump really starts rounding up people by the millions to deport, they will explain why it's still better than a Democrat president. Rotten bunch. They deserve a post on their own.

Yes, this argument is not constructive, but again, a medical diagnosis can be valid even if there's nothing good coming out of it.

That was more long-winded than I expected. The intended main topic of the post will probably end up shorter. So here we go: is it ever justified or useful to call someone (or liken to) a Nazi? I can think of some obvious cons, and some pros as well.

The cons come easy to mind if you open a left-leaning newspaper. The "Israel is the Nazis of today" Soviet propaganda which originated in the seventies when Israel aligned itself with the US is still going strong and will do so as long as the public remembers the Second World War. After that, we might just revert to the old, time-proven habit of calling Jews God-killers. The fascist label is basically on everyone who criticizes BLM, or its next incarnation. Go to the Left enough (no need to travel far, just a step beyond the Guardian) and you will live in a world where everyone but you and your friends (and Facebook soulmates) are fascists.

These people are grinding away one of the best social taboos humanity has come up with, the taboo against racism, one chip at a time. Another metaphor might be even better. Words as vehicles of magic. The word "Nazi" puts a powerful stigma on its target, like the mark of Cain, banning him or her from society. But the magical potential is finite and the power ebbs away at every use, even faster by every misuse.

Having said that, all the above doesn't categorically imply that the comparison is never justified or helpful. To make a convincing argument in a good-faith debate, or to have any real debate at all, the participants need to establish a common ground, from which point they can reach some conclusion following the rules of logic. There is not much common ground left. When even basic facts are controversial, the agreement that Nazis are bad is one of the few remaining ones.

Therefore dogmatic reverence of avoiding Nazi comparisons is silly. If someone chants "Jews will not replace us" or uses the word "vermins" to immigrants who "poison the blood of the country", then obvious analogies come to mind. The burden of proof to justify their position is not on those who point out the glaring similarities but on the ones who have a knee-jerk reflex to dismiss drawing any Nazi parallels. As is the burden on the person who chants and blabbers racist crap to clarify "I only borrow phrases from the Mein Kampf, but I wouldn't follow them up with actions". 

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Is Antisemitism on the rise?

This is one of those posts that have been floating half-written for a long time to be kicked out of that limbo by a real-world event. The reaction of the world to Hamas's Oct 7th massacre of Israeli civilians has made the question obsolete. The pro-Palestinian, even pro-Hamas protests in the West, the refusal to condemn the attack from mainstream left-wing political parties and institutions answered it with an emphatic "Yes".

The question is now how has Antisemitism become practically mainstream again in all but name?

From my childhood in the 80s and 90s of Eastern Europe, I don't remember discussing Jews or Antisemitism at all, either at home or in school (apart from the topic of WWII), or among friends. There was simply no ambiguity about racism or the Holocaust. The worst thing you could call anyone was "nazi", barring "pedophile". But I knew the word "Nazi", as a synonym for evil, long before I came across "pedophile". I recall only a couple occasions when someone in the schoolyard used the word "Jew" as a slur, but they were without exception not the sharpest knives in the drawer. 

I was in my late teens when I experienced actual Antisemitism for the first time. A family member of mine, one who then was best described as a Christian nationalist, once expressed the view that the Jews really take advantage of the Holocaust - that is, they abuse the collective guilt of society to get unfair advantages. And one of my best friends at that time, who generally was a very nice person, turned out to be a rather loud anti-semite when he got in the mood. But as I said, he was a decent and generous fellow, and so was the aforementioned relative, so I saw these as personal quirks of otherwise normal individuals and not part of some general trend in any sense. Once I also noticed a Nazi swastika tattoo on a guy in my sports club, but he was a former convict and also not one of the brightest, so I didn't consider him representative either. 

During my university years, I have never heard anyone among my fellow students mentioning Jews a single time, at least according to my recollection. I was in my early twenties and working already when a close colleague of mine during a common lunch in the office's kitchen started talking about how it was actually the British who "invented" concentration camps in South Africa, and Hitler was a bad man perhaps, but not the worst. I was flabbergasted and found myself out of words. But I still remember thinking how bizarre it is that young, university-educated professionals think it perfectly normal to find excuses for Hitler in front of their peers. In his defense, the said colleague was quite supportive of Israel, or at least definitely preferred them to the Arabs.

In the years to come, there was another couple of occasions when acquaintances or distant family members (everyone has a crazy aunt?) brought up the Jews in public. Not many, but enough. My dad told me once half laughing, half exasperated, that people in the local pub, whose knowledge of the outside world ended at some Greek beach, explained to him with great confidence the machinations of New York Jews. My erstwhile friend by that time had completely gone down the rabbit hole, and on one occasion in a small company of friends, he told us in a hushed, conspirational voice that secret multi-party negotiations were being held to import 2 million Jews to Hungary.

These incidents were isolated and anecdotal. Then George Soros started a late-life career as the bogeyman of Eastern Europe and the lid seemed to open. I have heard good faith arguments against my belief that Soros's prominence is due to his Jewishness. None was convincing. Still, by and large, I believed that anti-semitism is mostly spread among the not very-highly educated.

However, very recently a friend of mine, a very elite, a very leftish American, who never misses an opportunity to lambast the US for its racism against the blacks, in the middle of a conversation casually dropped that the Jews have too much influence in Washington. And he followed it up with a reference to the strange sartorial habits of the Orthodox Jews, whom, he said with a wink in his eye, he just calls "penguins".

Another acquaintance from Hungary told me that in his city, among the well-off people, open homophobia and gypsy jokes are now passé, but people don't feel inhibited when the conversation turns to Jews. Which it does not infrequently.

And then came Oct 7, 2023. Thousands of Hamas terrorists broke into Israel and killed more than a thousand Israelis specifically targeting civilians. They gang-raped women, killed children and elderly people, and kidnapped more than a hundred of them. They posted videos of kids lying as bloody lumps in their cribs and dead women barely recognizable as human bodies anymore. And in London, Sydney, and many capitals in the world, and at Ivory League universities like Princeton, Standford, and Berkeley, people stormed to the streets celebrating Hamas and condemning Israel. It merits repetition. There are students and professors at the world's best universities, who celebrated not the vague idea of Free Palestine, but the massacre itself.

In the past two weeks, hundreds of anti-semitic attacks have been reported in Western countries. This absolutely blows my mind.

People have been recently and currently massacred, violently oppressed, and abused all over the world. Minorities in Arab countries. Uyghurs in China, countless ethnicities in Africa, and in the post-Soviet states. Nothing could happen to them that would provoke a similar wave of street protests in the Western world, and what is mind-boggling, is that these protests now are triggered not by what Jews did to Palestinians, but the exact opposite. By a massacre of Israeli civilians carried out by one of the two Palestinian quasi-governments elected by Palestinians. 

After the original shock and inevitable sympathy for Israel, it only took a week for the New York Times to come out with a front page on the bombing of a hospital in Gaza by Israeli forces. They published the report based on information solely from Hamas and didn't think any verification was needed. It turned out that the missile was fired by not the IDF but by an Islamist organization. No apologies came from the Times. Whatever was behind the Times' actions, the story fits very well in the Leftish trend of desperate attempts for bothsideism.

What the fuck is going on?

I have a very simple thesis that partially explains growing anti-Semitism, and goes like the following. Antisemitism, and racism in general, is the natural state of the world. A chronic disease of society, if you will. A leftover from pre-historic times. It causes only mild discomfort when things go well, but sometimes it bursts into a violent fever. In this metaphor, the Second World War and the Holocaust in particular worked as a vaccination against unsavoury ideologies. It was such a strong dose that it has inoculated almost the whole world against racism, permanently and completely pushing it out of the accepted range of public discourse for many decades. Its effect is fading now in tandem with the memories of the war, but for generations, it was so strong that it made people oblivious of how remarkable and novel this new shared mindset was historically.

We tend to think that the ban on open racism and the collective moral judgment of Nazism came into effect right after 1945. People were so shaken by the horrors of the war, that by the time it was over, they were united in rejecting racist ideologies for good. But actually, surveys showed that as late as the 60s, a third of Germans had a positive view of pre-war Hitler. That is, they thought that barring that catastrophic decision to launch a World War, Hitler wasn't a bad chancellor. It took decades until a consensus had crystallized, which lasted for many decades.

The general opinion about eugenics and racial purity right before the war is similarly shocking when someone reads about it for the first time. Quotas on Jewish university admittance were commonplace not only in Germany and Eastern Europe but in the United States as well. John Maynard Keynes, one of the most famous liberal economists of the 20th century was an active supporter of eugenics. And in that regard, he wasn't an eccentric.

And if you think Jews had it bad in the first half of the twentieth century, just go further back in history. Pogroms, lynchings, and witch hunts used to be for the masses what football matches are today.

What is unique about the current anti-semitism, that perhaps for the first time in history, it is driven by Left-wing morons instead of the usual suspects (in the West at least. East from the Elbe, it's the same old story). Bone fide antisemite right-wing nutjobs like Marine Le Pen in France and Marjorie Taylor Green in the US came out immediately in support of Israel (probably because they figured they hate the Arabs more) while Jeremy Corbyn and Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the other hand couldn't even bring themselves to condemn Hamas. Neither could some prominent leftists in the US Congress. From American universities, which never missed any chance to hector society about social justice and the ever-present racism, the silence has been deafening. And Harvard students found that the best time to go to the street for Free Palestine is when Palestinian terrorists massacred Jewish civilians, babies included, and gang-raped women - and posted videos to social media to boast about it. 

Communists and Socialists have always been low-key anti-semites. The hated capitalist financial system was of course run by the Jews, after all. Just eight years after the holocaust, another pogrom (to "thwart" the Jewish Doctors' Plot) was unfolding in the Soviet Union and was canceled only by the death of Stalin. But it was never so outspoken, maybe because of the lofty universal ideas of Communism, maybe because they always posed as anti-fascist, and fascism got intertwined with anti-semitism.

At first glance, it can seem surprising that anti-semitism can surge right now in the current Zeitgeist, which is so loudly anti-racist, when woke idiots find a fascist in every bush. But it's actually not that hard to explain (this is not a sophisticated worldview). A crude but not inappropriate definition of being woke is to be constantly and obsessively on the look for oppression everywhere and sympathize with the underdog unconditionally. Israel, for the first time in thousands of years, is a dominant regional power, and it doesn't matter that it's a tiny island in a sea of Arabs (look at the map. Just take a break and look at the map), the Palestinians are the downtrodden, so the Jews have to be the evil ones.

Still, this explanation is incomplete. The Chechens have been brutalized by the Russians, the Uyghur by the Chinese, Saddam Hussein wiped out Kurdish villages with chemical weapons, and African warlords and dictators did and are doing unspeakable things all the time. Yet, there are rarely any public protests against these in the West. 

The difference is that progressives designate Jews as white and Palestinians as people of color and this tells you all you need to know about who the bad guys are in this simple place called the Middle East. 

Based on all the above, a simplified but useful way of thinking about the question is that there are two strands of anti-Jewish sentiment. Those characterizing themselves as anti-Zionists are nominally agnostic about Jews themselves but critical of the actions of Israel as a state. This itself is a heterogeneous group consisting of general anti-West activists (like Noam Chomsky), people sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, and people who sympathize with anyone who seems to be on the short end of the stick.

The other strand is represented by run-of-the-mill antisemites who vent out their frustration in the local pubs and blame the Jews for their national or personal misfortunes, and talk about Rothschilds and Jewish plots for world domination. Based on my personal experiences, I would estimate at least 30 percent of the population being susceptible to these ideas to varying degrees. This is a spectrum running from rabid anti-semites to otherwise normal men of the street with half-baked ideas about the world which is too complex for them.

The two strands reinforce each other. The first makes criticism of the Jews a morally defensible stance and with that, it provides an umbrella for real Jew-haters for whom Israel is just a pretext. Those are happy to finally find themselves in a respectable company, while progressives don't much care what company they are in as long as everyone joins the choir.

To summarize it from a bird's-eye view, the different forces in play are the following. Our modern moral values rooted in the Enlightenment are locked in a constant battle with the much older grass-root Antisemitism courtesy of religion which is fed heavily by our instinct of xenophobia courtesy of human nature. Against those atavistic tendencies stand the taboo set by the Holocaust, which time erodes a bit more every year. And finally, there is the modern anti-Israel sentiment which is reinvigorated by the woke craze, pushing the taboo more and more to the side, so Antisemitism can flow freer again under some more palatable guise.

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The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

If I had to choose which lesson I ever received that had to most long-lasting effect on me, I would pick my high-school physics teacher's. It went roughly like this: when you want to test if you really understood something, take a blank paper and write it down from scratch. Getting stuck or confused means that you deluded yourself and only thought you understood the subject. Go back to the textbook again, study, then take out another blank paper. Repeat the process until satisfaction or exhaustion.

I find this advice a no-brainer. It's simple and generally applicable, and I have always looked with bemusement at people who never use it (that is, most people). As a bonus, it also justifies why one would bother to write an article about a topic she is not an expert of, nor could she hope to summarize it any better than his sources.

And in the following, I give an example.

One of the most reverberating news of last week was the run on the bank of many Silicon Valley types, appropriately named Silicon Valley Bank. SVB wasn't a fancy bank investing in even fancier Silicon Valley startup high-tech products. On the contrary, it was the Silicon Valley companies that parked their money in SVB, which in turn, invested their money mostly in boring, long-term bonds. That is, like any ordinary bank does, it used the short-term loans (aka deposits) from its clients - for which it paid a small interest -  to buy long-term financial assets with higher-interest rates.

To simplify the process to the basics (using numbers conjured from thin air, as I haven't bothered to check what those numbers really were), for every dollar deposited, SVB promised to pay it back with a 3% annualized profit. From the money, it bought government bonds with a longer expiry date and 5% profit. At the end of the year, it reaped a solid 2% profit.

This worked well while the interest rates were low - which was the case in the past twenty years - but the model was completely upended when the era of high-interest rates suddenly dawned on the world. The bonds SVB bought earlier that promised 5% of profit in a year dropped their real value in the world of 10% general inflation.

Imagine that you bought government bonds for $1000 for which the said government promised you to pay another $50 at expiration, in a year's time (5% profit). It looked fine when the inflation was expected to be 3%, leaving you with a 2% real profit. It doesn't look fine at all when inflation is hovering around 10%. Your real profit will be -5%, so this bond you won't be able to sell for $1000 anymore, because your potential buyer can easily find something that safely promises 12% interest in a year (e.g. a newly issued government bond). You bought something for $1000 and it's suddenly worth only $900. 

What banks usually do is that they hedge against such turn of events. SVB did not. It actually has in the past successfully lobbied against regulations that might have forced it to be more prudent.

The second big mistake SVB made is that it has built out its clientele among the incestuous Silicon Valley start-up community where financial (and many other) decisions were often dictated by fashion and everyone is closely watching what the rest does. If someone suddenly takes all his money out of SVB, the others will learn about it in hours, and for purely rational reasons, assuming the guy knew something they did not, they will follow. A single actor could and did trigger a bank run much faster than in the case of a normal bank with a diverse clientele.

So, maybe out of sync with the Zeitgeist, SVB was not running some pyramid scheme or some bogus crypto-based fraud. Its management was simply incompetent. As one commentator put it, it was not a "bank run" by idiots. It was a bank "run by idiots".

What triggered the run and whether SVB was really insolvent or could have weathered the storm if the trust in it remains, are, as far as I know, open questions. The result is the same nonetheless, without intervention the bank would have collapsed as the panicked clients sucked it all dry. 

But the US government stepped in, took over SVB, and provided deposit insurance for all depositors, which was surprising for many. The US government guarantees deposits up to $250,000, but those deposits made up less than 2% of what the bank owed to its clients. Most accounts - which as I said belonged to Silicon Valley companies - were in the tens of millions. For some reason, the government decided that the danger of starting a contagion is a bigger problem that the moral hazard they introduced by saving the skin of super-wealthy techies who didn't bother to check how well the bank is run where they store their money.

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After the Midterms

Apparently, even Trump has a half-life. We are looking ahead to a slow, ugly decay.

The rollercoaster ride after Trump's improbable victory in 2016 mostly distracted the attention from an important sequence of events. Elections. He has made every single one of them about himself and he has lost every single one as well. The 2018 midterms elections, the 2020 presidential elections (making Trump the first president in the last 30 years to be kicked out after one term, plus the first president after 1932 to lose the presidency, the House, and the Senate), 2021 Georgia Senate run-off (again costing the Republicans the Senate), and finally (so far) the 2022 midterms. In the latter, almost all of his crackpot endorsees were wiped off, making the midterms a practical Democratic victory.

I - and most other people - were wrong on Trump's prospects at least twice already. I didn't think it possible he would win in 2016, and I thought we saw the last of him after January 6, 2021. Yet he always managed to come back on top, even without his Twitter pulpit. Will he do it again?

I think not. In 2016, he eked out a narrow victory on the back of the American's craving for entertainment and rode that wave until only recently. Even after leaving the White House he could keep up the show with the incompetent coup attempt and beating the drums on the stolen election. The Republicans were in gridlock. Trump doesn't seem to be a winner anymore, but he is still the darling of enough of their voter base. 

But the midterms came, and his candidates lost the race and the Republicans lost the belief that Trump has a more special and closer relation to their voters than themselves.

There is blood in the water. Mike Pence, the most sycophant of Trump trustees (although to his credit, he refused to break the law for the dear leader), openly said that he hopes in 2024 there will be better candidates, and he didn't close out the option to be one of them. Mike Pompeo, Trump's Secretary of State, considers running himself and made disparaging remarks about former leaders whining about the past. And when even Ted Cruz seems to be hedging his bets, Trump must see that things are not going his way.

So when Trump announced his candidacy again, he did it in a very different world than the one of 2016. He is no longer the shiny new thing, he is not even much of an entertainer. He can keep repeating the stolen election mantra, but he can soon find it to be a lonely tune and a boring one. When his fellow election-denier nutjobs lost their elections, apart from Kari Lake, they just shut up and left. J.D. Vance, who won, forgot to name Trump among the 37 people he thanked after the event. Very suddenly, it just doesn't seem chic anymore.

Yet, the Republicans are still in the same gridlock. If Trump gets the nomination, they are probably sailing for another defeat in 2024. If they deny it from him, he could wreck the party in vengeance. In an era, where the voter base is so calcified that elections are decided by a percentage point or even a fraction of it, Trump can destroy the GOP's chances for at least another term by creating a new party, or just by continuing to promote the crazies.

On the top, and perhaps not independently, of that are Trump's mounting legal problems. US Attorney General Merrick Garland just named a special counsel to weigh charges against Trump over the classified documents found in Mar-a-Lago. Garland is not a partisan hack. This step against a former president and present candidate is unprecedented. Also is the hope from Trump's own party for Garland to succeed and rid them of this problem.

Just to counterbalance the above observations, let it be said that Trump has survived legal problems and political challenges, and mind-bogglingly even a failed coup. We might get surprised again. The Republicans are both stupid and coward enough to stick to him and Biden could be foolish enough to try to run again, at 82.

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On Cryptocurrencies

I'm late to the party. I've been continuously postponing writing about my take on Bitcoin for years, and now, with the whole crypto-market crashing through the floor, it will look like I'm just projecting hindsight wisdom back in the past.

But on second thought, religions never really die out. And Bitcoin has had crashes before and always bounced back stronger. It might not be the end yet.

So, why do I think that when the end comes, it won't be pretty?

I owe my antipathy towards Bitcoin at least as much to gutfeel as to rational argument. The former can be summarized quickly. Every second crypto-advocate I stumbled into on Youtube or in real life came across either as a second-hand car dealer, or a fresh convert to a cult - where the leader is an ex-second-hand car dealer. With all the unbearably irritating mixture of smugness and ignorance.

That was the gutfeel part. On the rational side, I never understood what exactly cryptocurrencies are good for. What problems do they solve? They are inferior substitutions to fiat money in almost every respect. According to Economics 101, money has three functions. Medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account.

A bitcoin is a unit of account, that's alright, but as a medium of exchange, cryptos have very limited use. With Bitcoin, I could buy almost nothing I need on a daily basis. Food, books, petrol, clothes, paying the bills - I need local currency for all of these. As a store of value cryptos would need to be stable. They are anything but. If I had converted my savings to Bitcoin half a year ago, I would have lost half of them. If to Terra, they would have been just wiped out.

I've heard two main arguments from crypto fans. One, cryptos are anti-cyclical, two, their built-in scarcity prevents inflation. 

Anti-cyclical means that in times of financial turmoil, cryptos would be safe havens - like traditionally gold has always been. That theory has been just crushed, along with the markets. Everything is in free fall now, but nothing falls faster than cryptos. I have no idea why, but even if I knew it wouldn't make me feel better, had I invested my wealth in them.

The scarcity argument is not convincing either. Whenever I heard someone extolling Bitcoin's virtues, they were always depicted against an apocalyptic view of today's financial world. "Governments will start printing money any day now and we are accelerating toward a new Weimar!" Yeah, sure. 

One, governments don't print money, central banks do. 

Two, independent central banks and fiat money are actually two of the great inventions of humankind. The amount of money in circulation has to be aligned with the size of the economy. The ability of central bankers to control the money supply can be misused, but that possibility doesn't automatically turn a country into Zimbabwe. Rather, it provides tools to mitigate economic turmoils, which central bankers have used quite effectively during both the Great Recession and the pandemic. And didn't use during the Great Depression - hence there was a Great Depression.

So, contrary to libertarian fanatics, who see crypto as a way to freedom from government tyranny, central bankers are not bloodsucking monsters whose only purpose in life is to rid you of all your savings, but professionals whose job is to keep the economy running. They make mistakes, but the last 70 years were, by and large, the most stable and prosperous period in human history. 

Three, the general wisdom is that deflation is even worse than inflation. I'm really out of my wheelhouse here, but if the money supply was constrained and in the growing economy constant amount of money chased a growing number of things, that would lead to deflation. I guess.

But leaving all theory aside, babbling about the inflation-resistance of an asset that loses 10% of its value in a day of its value whenever Elon Mask wakes up on the wrong side of the bed? If a South-American country's currency had this kind of volatility, it would be a laughing stock even in the region. Who are these guys kidding?

Even if cryptos didn't have these shortcomings, I'd have a long list of doubts. What if I invest my savings in Bitcoin, then it falls out of vogue, and another crypto takes its place (which might allow for more than 3-7 transactions per second - just for comparison, for Visa, the number is 1,700)? What if I forget my master password? Normal banks will never seize my money even if I lose all my papers. Speaking of safety, is my money insured by the state? Who I go to complain if I'm the victim of fraud? If I accidentally sent money to the wrong place? What about the unknown unknowns that would manifest only once we moved to a crypto-based financial world? 

Long story short, I think cryptos are Ponzi schemes. You make a profit if more people buy into it after you than the ones before you. The rest is techno blah-blah, hype, FOMO, and libertarian fever dreams.

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Ukraine - state of affairs

A quick summary of the last one and a half months on the Eastern Front.

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Debate circle

 "We couldn't do these meetings in person in the last two years because of the pandemic", explained G. to another newcomer as I entered the room, the last word preceded by a measured pause and accompanied by scare quotes drawn into the air with his fingers. "Well, this is up for a good start", I thought.

I attended this meetup the second time, the first after the second wave of the "so-called" pandemic. That time I was invited by a former colleague and the conversation was about climate change and the role of fossil fuels in it. The speaker then, who customarily gave a presentation that was followed by a free-style debate, was a representative of the coal industry. So I was prepared to hear some controversial opinions about the Ukrainian war as well, which was tonight's topic.

G., who is the chief organizer of these events, is a fellow countryman of mine. He has lived in Switzerland long enough to lose his Australian accent which he had acquired before. Despite the decades of absence, he hasn't lost his touch with our motherland, as I learned five minutes later when the conversation with the nice Canadian lady strayed onto Hungarian politics. "Orban is a center, very center-right guy, who just refuses to go along with this woke craziness" - he explained. "Maybe I should add some nuance to that?", I wondered silently for some seconds, then decided to pass.

Slowly, people started pouring in, and at seven, the official start time, the oblong table was densely surrounded by circa twenty people. The age distribution of the participants ranged from the early twenties to late fifties, the gender ratio was 6-1 for men, and a depressing 80% of us were software developers. And this is a talk about geopolitics. I'm not sure whether there is something wrong with software engineers or maybe with everyone else.

In absence of a designated speaker, G. kicked off the meeting with a quick overview of the situation. This is a terrible tragedy. It's incomprehensible why no one in the world stood up and demanded that the warring parties stop this immediately and sit down to the negotiating table. The Swiss are equally incomprehensible, giving up their hard-earned neutrality? If they freeze the bank accounts left and right, who will keep their money in their banks in the future? The media is biased and unreliable, and this heroic picture they paint of that corrupt Zelensky is just ludicrous. Still, it's a terrible, terrible situation. And so confusing. What does Putin want? What do Ukrainian Nazis want? Just sad. 

I stopped any effort to be subtle about my facial expression halfway through the speech when it dawned on me that I made a terrible mistake. God, there is still two hours left. But luckily, the situation slowly began to improve and a real conversation started with a diversity of opinions. There were a couple of guys who were, not experts by any means, but well-informed. Some were not very well-informed but were arguing in good faith. Then the mandatory useful idiot, chewing on the Monroe-doctrine (what would the US do if Canada wanted to join a Russian military alliance? it wouldn't behave any differently, would it?) and the stealthy, creepy encroachment of NATO upon Russia (that is, the rudeness of the Baltics towards their neighbor for looking for protection). Anyway, what's been wrong with Finlandisation? A like-minded young historian kid chimed in musing on what right the West has to condemn Russia after Iraq? At that point, I was exercised enough to challenge that but someone else raised his hand quicker.

And then there was the highlight of the evening, the guy who bravely made the next step over G.'s hand-wringing lamentations. Ukrainian Nazis are indeed active in the Donbas. How much do they influence the government? Well, who knows, can you prove they don't? Euromaidan protests, orange revolution? The CIA staged them. Russian incompetence? He is not so sure about that, he read some articles. Mariupol? The Ukrainians themselves are shelling it. Bucha? You shouldn't believe the media uncritically. Nothing confrontational, just asking questions. Politely taking notes, nodding. Then the next observation (the Ukrainians were developing nuclear weapons, you know). For a while, I was genuinely puzzled by him. Is he on Russian payroll or simply enjoys being a cretin, just for the thrill of it? In the end, I decided it's the latter (judgment confirmed later in the bar when he said he knows about international banking and finance - that's why he knows it for a fact that the US is about to collapse - because...prepare...he is a software developer in a bank).

But there is was a real and pleasant surprise in the evening. A young Polish guy, A., who, unlike the rest of us, knew the topic in depth. Not my own "30-days podcast crash course on Ukraine" type of education. He was respectful, but argued forcefully, almost passionately. So passionately, that at one point his voice cracked. He had friends in Eastern Ukraine. His dismantling of the nonsense was merciless, and I leaned back and enjoyed the show. 

At 9:30, I almost felt sorry that the conversation ended, but my bladder was on the verge of explosion. I went to shake the hands of A. and joined others in the bar for an after-event beer.

The topic of the next event will be "Books vs Tik-Tok". I'll think about going.

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History calls - and says playtime is over

As a teenager, I had the unconventional view that we live in a very pleasant age. I didn't know that it was unconventional and I didn't know too much about the past apart from what I was taught in school, but that seemed like a no-brainer. According to those high-school history books, before the second part of the twentieth century, people stumbled from one war to another. In peacetime, they simply lived in poverty, religious intolerance, and under the oppression of the nobility and the Church. Those who were too loud about not liking it faced horrendous torture and ended up serving as common entertainment when they were executed in public. Even if you were well-off and left in peace, there was no medicine, hygiene, education, policing, impartial justice system, and all the rest we take for granted today.

My own, more recent, family history didn't paint a much brighter picture either. All of my grandparents were dirt-poor as children. Apart from one grandfather, all of them lost siblings while growing up. They had six years in school tops, spent part of their teenage years in cellars during WW 2 hiding from bombs and Russian soldiers, then started their families in the darkest period of the communist dictatorship. My parents' lives, growing up in the sixties and seventies, were incomparably better. And I and my generation had it the best so far.

So it was baffling to find out that others didn't share my opinion. A cousin of mine was a devout Catholic and very much into medieval history, so for her, the Middle Ages rocked. It was understandable, in a way. But I also recall a conversation that happened around 11th or 12th grade. I don't remember how we came to the topic, but an otherwise very smart, though probably a bit naive, boy argued that peasants in the olden times must have had a much better life than we. They didn't need to hurry anywhere, had a great community, and were able to enjoy small things in life. Well, I thought, since they buried a third of their children, had not much to eat, and were brutally exploited, they'd better enjoy the small things they had. There was a couple of similar conversations in the following years. Not too many, but all reliably similar to make me feel rather lonely with my worldview.

Things are going well...

Much later, around 3-4 years ago, I came across Steven Pinker's books, in which he demonstrates the decline in violence through the ages, and the progress humanity has achieved in almost every part of life that counts. Life expectancy, security, material well-being, education, freedom, tolerance, etc. It is a very long list. Pinker's work has been either a massive boost to my confirmation bias, or just a welcome vindication of my default worldview.

Around the age of 23, when I started reading newspapers, my view changed a bit. I still thought that from a historical perspective, life today was great - although not everywhere -, but I also had the impression that a day will come when it will be viewed as a golden era - that is, the good times won't last forever. Not because the trends showed a downward trajectory, more like the opposite, but there are ups and downs in everything.

...too well

The point I want to make with this long-winded rambling is that things are really much better today than they used to be. Having done so, now I can present the central thesis of the post: this state of affairs has some unforeseen and negative consequences. Our life has become so safe and comfortable that we can afford to be unserious. Not only in the political sphere, but in the general social realm.

It's been demonstrated in plain view by the ubiquitous attitude towards public safety and the well-being of others during the recent pandemic. Many people who could work from home, watch Netflix 24/7, and in general were not very affected by the pandemic, when facing some mild inconveniences (like the requirement of vaccination for entering restaurants and theatres), cried immediately tyrannies. The obligatory mask-wearing on public transport was "unbearable oppression". Vaccine certificates are the proof of a "dictatorship". Everything was about "my rights" and no mention of "my responsibilities" towards others. Perhaps the restrictions were overdone. But those who think that they now live under tyranny have no idea whatsoever what real tyrannies look like. 

Back to politics, when Boris Johnson became the mayor of London back in 2008, I joked that the English are doing so well that they can afford to choose a clown as the mayor of their capital. At that time, I meant "clown" as more of a compliment. I didn't know anything about BoJo but he seemed like a cool guy. 

On more recent events, I never bought into the story that the voters for Brexit and Donald Trump were the losers of globalization who felt that the "elite" is despising them. I thought both disasters were brought about by people who were simply bored and wanted entertainment. Practically no one starves today in the UK or in the States. No child is without a roof over her head. No one is facing religious persecution, everyone has access to education. No one seems to remember why the European integration started (spoiler alert, the Second World War). We live a pampered life, where the fiercest battles we can find are fought in Brussels, the House of Commons, and in the US Senate, and it's boring.

Politics used to be about material things because just two generations ago material things were of life and death importance. Today, politics is mostly about identity and feelings. People can make incredibly stupid decisions at the polling booth and nothing really bad will happen. And when the lower level desires of the Maslow pyramid are satisfied, our attention turns elsewhere. We want entertainment and to feel important, righteous, and smart.

I heard recently a historian explaining how well Hitler understood the underlying principle. Promising fight and glory, even hardships for the noble cause, captures people's hearts and imaginations more than "gradual change", "material prosperity", "steady improvement", "insightful debates", etc. The latter ones are what democracies should be about.

The infantilization on the Left

Being unserious manifested itself in different ways on the two ends of the political spectrum. Many on the left, feeling disappointed that the great battles for liberal ideas happened before they were born, decided to pretend that we live in the most homophobic, misogynistic, racist world, so they can feel good about themselves by fighting against it. In reality, no human in history ever lived in a place where it was better to be a woman, homosexual, or brown-skinned than the present, in the West. It's not that the wokes remind us that there is still much to do to lift up minorities. Many of them say with full seriousness that so far, there has been no progress at all.

 ... and the Right

On the right end, people started to fantasize about non-existent enemies (hordes of Muslim migrants in Hungary, power-hungry, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, godless liberals destroying the nation in the US), and to wax lyrical about older, better, more God-fearing times of national greatness and their strong, wise leaders. Paranoia about international philanthropists, like George Soros, was always present, but now, when there was no Cold War to fill people's hearts with real dread, it has grown a hundredfold.

It is fascinating that it doesn't matter how much a leader steals openly, trashes democratic norms, or even orders the murder of journalists and political opponents, he only needs to say: "I stand for Christian/traditional values", to get an out-of-jail card from religious right-wingers of otherwise democratic affiliations and high education. The majority of American public intellectuals on the Right, after getting past the mandatory throat clearing ("yes, Orban is overstepping the legal boundaries, his media-handling is heavy-handed, blah-blah..."), will continue on expressing their admiration for the kind of country that obnoxious tin-pot dictator has been building. Recently, up until a month ago, even Putin was a strong, masculine, Christian role model for not a negligible portion of Republicans. And for the full Hungarian right-wing elite.

Brexit has been a great example of making a decision that had clear, numerous, and thoroughly explained drawbacks, mostly imaginary benefits, and was made in a fight against non-existing enemies. Trump is the best example of how people can descend into complete, bottomless madness.

Reality calls

Putin's attack on Ukraine was a jolt of common sense into the common consciousness. Life can be serious, and decisions have consequences. Reality doesn't care about your pet fantasies. Our brief, ahistorical era of complacency is over.

It won't wake up people who are already invested in their beliefs. Almost nothing does. But it will sway people who are sitting on the fence. Many liberals will realize that the West might be not the worst place to live, and who goes to what toilet might be not the most important problem of the world today. And some strongman-sympathizer Christian nationalists will sympathize less. On both sides, the taken-for-granted advantages of liberal democracies, like not being sent to Siberian prison camps for opposing the government, or beaten up by the police just for protesting against a war, will be a bit more appreciated.

Regardless of how individual thinking on these issues will change, the public tolerance for people whining about hurt feelings and the oppressive nature of Western democracies will sink. Same for public admiration of "strong Christian leaders" (aka Putin&Orban).

The hardcore won't change, but as we finally have real problems to talk about, they will get less oxygen in public discourse. That's a good start.

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Is Putin a rational actor? - Part 2

The previous post left the topic off with the statement that Putin is a Russian imperialist with 19th-century values and priorities and a US-sized chip on the shoulder. He cares only about Russia's coercive power over other countries - which he equates with greatness -  and he thinks that everyone else does the same. He also believes that the West is out to destroy or at least subdue Russia. These are not mere speculations, Putin himself expressed them openly many times.

But more than that, his obsession with West's bad intentions is personal. Putin is convinced that the color revolutions in post-Soviet republics (2003, Georgia; 2004, Ukraine; 2005, Azerbaijan; 2006, Belarus) were all staged by the CIA, and he allegedly blames Hillary Clinton personally responsible for the Ukrainian one. He believes America wants a regime change in Russia itself (he just made that a self-fulfilling prophecy two weeks ago) and for him personally, Moammar Gadhafi's fate.

Gadhafi's grisly end is something that reportedly rattled Putin because he interpreted it as a cautionary tale. The Lybian dictator accepted the West's terms and gave up financing terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction in exchange for being left alone. And then, they killed him. The moral of the story is that the more concessions one makes to the US the closer he gets to being murdered. If he believes this, that would explain why he has chosen to depend on China instead of integrating with the West, even if he is aware of the strategic dangers of China's friendship.

Based on how things look now, with the Ukrainian invasion, Putin took a gamble and lost big time. He didn't expect the reactions from either the West or the Ukrainians. He destroyed Russia's economic prospects for decades. He ensured that the EU will now do everything to rid itself of its dependency on Russian gas. He managed to revive NATO - which will likely expand even closer to Russia now - and strengthen the EU - the exact opposites he wanted to achieve.

His imperialistic drive might have made him attack Ukraine but his paranoia will dictate his actions from here. 

What makes Putin extremely dangerous is that he is very different from past Soviet leaders. He is not just the first servant of a universal ideology. Khrushchev or Brezhnev were simple figureheads of the Communist Party. Chernenko's and Andropov's names barely ring a bell to anyone anymore. Even Stalin presented himself as the face of the Party and, ensuing some political murders, was duly replaced after his death. But Putin is the regime. 

The war was his decision and his alone, and he will bear the sole responsibility for the economic collapse that at the moment looks like the most probable future for Russia. An additional military defeat would mean losing face and shattering the image that he has built up for domestic use in two decades, as the infallible hypermasculine leader. And losing the war could very well mean losing his life, too. Even before the attack on Ukraine, Putin had been long past the point when peaceful retirement was an option for him. If the opposition ever overthrows the government, he will spend the rest of his years in prison. If one of his enemies gets to the helms, he will be probably killed.

Besides this all, this is the guy who has flooded the internet with his half-naked muscleman photos. There are videos of him taking a scuba-dive and, lo and behold, emerging with two ancient Greek urns. Or of him shooting a snow leopard. Or scoring eight goals against professional hockey players. When he started showing age, he underwent cosmetic surgery (which he denies), which made his face almost unrecognizable. He sits at the end of a ridiculously long table when he meets foreign leaders, reportedly lived in isolation in the last two years, and publicly humiliated his own chief of intelligence on national television just before launching the war. What does this all tell about his mental state? 

In short, Putin is a man who ordered the killings of journalists, political opponents, schoolchildren (Beslan school siege), and tens of thousands of civilians (during the Chechen wars), perhaps even Russian civilians to create a pretext for the Chechen war. He is incredibly vain and he has cornered himself into a position, from where for him personally, victory is likely a question of life and death. Being rational from there is not reassuring for the rest of the world.

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Ukraine at war

Disclaimer: unedited post.

For weeks, I was on the fence, but if I had been forced to put money on it, I would've bet Putin backs off. There is nothing to gain by occupying countries. Not anymore. As Yuval Harari put it, there are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. But either he cornered himself in a place where backing off would have meant losing face badly, or it was his plan from the start, and now the post-Cold War era is over.

Why would Putin do this? Solution 1: he really thinks the West is out to get him. Solution 2: he is playing for the domestic audience, and a war abroad is an opportunity to boost popularity and crack down on the opposition. Solution 3: a democratic, free, less corrupt, EU-integrated country of the Slavic cousins would give the Russians bad ideas, so it has to be prevented before it's too late. 

Let's start with Solution 2. The Putin regime is ever more oppressive, living standards are stagnating, the contrast between the boss's chummies and the common citizens is outrageous. Rising petrol and gas prices have boosted the economy, but there is only so much to squeeze out of that. And Navalny and other anti-corruption activists are a huge pain in the ass. A war can dial-up patriotic feelings even in those who don't sympathize with the regime, and the disappearance of troublemakers will be the least of the people's problems. Or western journalists'.

Solution 1 is the fear of the West. According to this narrative, which, before the war started, had been echoed back even by Western voices, NATO has been encroaching upon Russia for decades. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Americans allegedly promised to not extend NATO and they did. In 2008, they even floated the idea of offering membership to Ukraine someday. Therefore Russia is absolutely in its right to feel threatened and take countersteps, just like America would do if one of its direct neighbors would step into a military alliance with Russia on China. Most recently, I listened to a conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Anne Applebaum, where Sullivan parrotted back all the Russian talking points one by one (even asking it whether Ukraine had ever been a sovereign state - as if the Austrians had all the right to reconquer Slovenia or Slovakia if they wanted, just because 35 years ago neither of them existed). Sullivan is an Oxford-educated British-American journalist and author, and has been a staunch conservative in his entire life. And really, and very well-respected and brilliant guy. Either the decades of smoking pot or Roman Catholicism, but something must have softened his brain. It was great to hear Applebaum counter his nonsense.
Back to the point, there are many issues with this course of logic. One is that comparing the expansion of Russosphere and that of NATO as if they were, in some abstract way, of the same nature, is abstracting away exactly from the important factors. Russia has historically expanded its sphere of influence the following way. It invaded other countries by force, set up puppet regimes, and when some time later the population raised up against their Russia-loving rulers, it sent in tanks and killed some more people. Whereas the NATO enlargements happen as follows. Countries, that are bullied by Russia for years, are practically begging for membership, because they want protection.
The other, more pragmatic issue is that Russia claims it feels threatened and encircled. Looking at the map, Russia's borders are 57 thousand km in total. From which, it is neighbored by NATO countries (Estonia and Latvia) on a couple of hundred kilometers. Poland, which is separated from Russia by Belarus, didn't even station American soldiers until Obama put them there after the annexation of Crimea. On the other hand, Russia has modernized its forces immensely in the last two decades, so the balance of military power has tipped heavily in its favor. This argument really is just bullshit. Russia is not scared by Western agression. It is annoyed by not being able to bully its neighbors. If Putin's aim had been to make Russia safe and prosperous, he would have integrated it into the West, as much as possible. Instead, he choose an allegiance of China. But China doesn't have allies, just vassals. (Great sentence, I stole it from a NYT op-ed)

Which leads to Solution 3, which Applebaum promotes. Putin is not afraid of NATO, which, as it knows well, would never attack Russia. He is afraid of the EU. Russians might be duped into thinking that the decadent West is digging its own grave. The French, German, English, and American are different and far away. But Ukrainians are fellow Slavs. If democracy works for them, and they start to be both freer and more prosperous, that sends the message that without Putin, you Russians could have this all, too. Crimea might have been a military success, but it was a political debacle. It alienated the Ukrainians forever. Keeping them under Russia's influence is now only possible by force.

So these are Putins' possible motivations, as far as I see them. Next question. What will happen now? First, let's see what is on Russia's side, then what goes against it.

Russia has accumulated huge reserves of foreign currencies, according to the latest tally, around $630 billion. Instead of using the profits of years of soaring petrol prices to raise the living standards or make structural changes, it channeled them into a war chest. It has also made steps to make it's technological and financial sector self-sufficient. Putin apparently decided that he doesn't want to go to the West in his life anymore, and built a fortress economy. Possible sanctions might hurt, but Russia can withstand isolation for long years. Or at least Putin can. And if the Russians are unhappy about that, that's their problem. There are plenty of policemen to beat some sense into people if they start to get unruly.

Russia also has the energy weapon and very good timing on its side. Thanks to the famous German Russenverstehen and idiocy (well done, Angela Merkel and the rest of German establishment), Europe gets 37% of its energy from Russia (and yes, the Germans also had the brilliant idea of not only depending on the Russian, but also closing their nuclear plants - if Greenpeace-activists really cared about the climate, they would chain themselves not to trees but to nuclear plants when politicians come to shut them down, but I digress), and lower than average reserves. If Europeans banned Russian gas imports, it would send the prices through the roof and that might even help Russia, or at least blunt the weapon and even hurt the Europeans.

Who are divided, anyway. The first set of sanctions was watered down heavily by the Germans (their clear-sightedness has been commented on above), Italians (let's exclude luxury goods exports - seriously?), and Victor Orban. The first two countries have stupidity and avarice as excuses. The Hungarians simply yearn to be the despised servant of bloodthirsty lunatics. Looking back to the past hundred years, this must be our defining national characteristic.

Finally, Russia has an army much better equipped and much larger than Ukraine. NATO won't send there soldiers because everyone is shit-scared that the situation could escalate. Apart from the Americans, the West has really lost its appetite for wars, and at the end of the day, Putin can always count on that.

Ok, so what goes against the Russians?

About the war chest. Yes, they have a huge amount money in foreign currency. However, however. Having $630 billion dollars doesn't mean the Russian Central Bank has thousands of suitcases bursting with banknotes. It has those dollars on the virtual accounts it holds in other countries' central banks. And as they say, if you owe the bank $1 million, it's your problem. If you owe the bank $10 billion, it's their problem. If the FED and the ECB start sanctioning the Russian Central Bank, they could literally destroy Russia's economy. No idea how these things work, but this is the financial equivalent of a nuclear weapon. 

About the divided EU. When really scary things start happening, the EU has proved to be way less dysfunctional as many love to portray it. Europe might have become soft and weak as far as military virtues go, but it's an economical giant. Whereas Russia's GDP is less than Italy's. And although there's been some dithering at the very beginning, after 4 days, even the Putin-lover Viktor Orban fell in line. If the EU makes up its mind on sanctions, Russia will be very badly hurt. Regarding the energy import, closing off the Russian gas would be painful. But I can't believe that in the 21st century, Europe couldn't handle this, especially with the US as the world's biggest energy-exporter at its back. And if not, perhaps wearing an extra sweater is not a price too high to pay when in the direct neighborhood people literally face bombs and bullets.

What about Russian domestic politics? I think selling the war as a patriotic cause will be much harder at home then the Kremlin imagined. The Ukrainians are not some dark-skinned Muslims living in some exotic place far away. They are literally relatives living right next to Russia. Killing slav brothers and sisters won't go do well with the public, whatever Putin says. The Ukrainian president Zelensky, unlike the Afghan leaders, didn't take the first plane out when the war started. Murdering him would make Putin an international pariah for ever. Or how will Russian citizens take to the following headline? "Boxing legend, Ukrainian national hero and Kyiv's mayor Vitaliy Klitschko killed by Russian soldiers." This would be very, very bad PR. Buy the way, the other day Putin came out and gave a speech in which he called for the Ukrainians to throw off the yokel of their drug-addicted neo-nazi leaders. This language barely falls short of the usual North-Korean way of calling dissidents pedophiles. Does Putin really think there are enough morons in Ukraine or at home who are suckers for that level of language?

And finally, what about the war itself? It's very early to say, but the Ukrainians seem to be willing to put up hell of a fight. What I most wonder about is: where are the cyberattacks? That should be the Russian speciality, and the least-bloody way of crippling Ukraine. 

That's it for now. I do have a Ukrainian colleague with two small children, working from his home country, and we can't reach him for days (probably phones are shut off for security reasons). I can't write glibly about this now.

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Democracy, liberalism, rule of law

Can a country be democratic without being liberal? When I first heard Viktor Orban daydreaming about an "illiberal" democracy, back in 2014, I thought it was just an oxymoron. But in recent years, hearing people constantly complaining about undemocratic processes and governments in very different situations (Brexit: pro-and-contra, the Biden-presidency, Turkey, Eastern-Europe, etc), and experiencing how the adjective "liberal" has gradually become a form of accusation, got me thinking. What do these words, "liberal" and "democracy" actually mean? 

So I started thinking about the political systems we live in the West and trying to figure out what makes them work. Meanwhile, I consciously avoided opening any book or even a Wiki page on political philosophy. That would have spoiled the blue-collar intellectual pedigree of the blog, wouldn't it? Consequently, skepticism is stongly advised for what comes next.

I think the three main components that uphold Western-style societies are the rule of law, liberalism, and democracy. These are related, but not interchangeable concepts which get conflated in the popular discourse quite a bit. A joke comes to mind: one day, an older fish swims by two younger ones and greets them: "Hey boys, how is the water today?" As he passes, one of the two turns to the other and asks: "What is water?" The joke illuminates the fact that it's hard to see what characterizes something that surrounds you and taken for granted if you have never encountered the alternatives. So, for figuring out what the relationship between the three concepts above is, I tried to think about how political systems would look like that only implemented a subset of them.

First, I give some rudimentary description of each of these three concepts, as I see them, then take a look at that in what combinations they can co-exist.

The rule of law

...deserves to come first, since, as explained later, this seems to me not only the most important of the three, but also that what undergirds the other two. The expression means that there are written rules that place boundaries on personal liberty and regulate conduct between parties in all fields of life. Laws are enforced by an effective and apolitical police force, and disputes are resolved before impartial courts also independent of the political influence. If a society possesses nothing of the blessings of modernity beyond this, it's already a vastly better place to live in than people had to put up with before our era. According to most social scientists who study the development of nations (I mean the 3-4 I read), the legal guarantee of private property is the most important prerequisite of prosperity.

Liberalism

...., in a nutshell, is built upon two core ideas. Everyone is born with the same value, rights, and dignity, and secondly, everyone is entitled to live her life whichever way she chooses, as long as it doesn't violate the freedom of others to do the same. These two principles are not interchangeable, and it's easy to imagine a society where the first is upheld, but the second isn't. An ideal Christian society would be like that. Everyone is born as equal (in sin, that is), but lifestyle choices are rather vehemently constrained. The reversed situation in which people are unequal by birth but have the same opportunities and freedom seems implausible. 

Democracy

...., as understood today, is representative democracy with universal suffrage. In democractic countries, political leaders are elected by the citizenry for limited terms of service. At the next election, the leaders can be peacefully voted out of office, which decision they accept and leave.

These three components, on the assumption that they are independent, can be combined in eight different ways. Which of these are viable?

System 0: weak rule of law, illiberal, undemocratic

Assigning the number zero to this combination is approprioate, because this has been the default for almost all states in human history. Historical examples are therefore are abundant and there are many countries even today that fit the bill: Russia, China, Third World countries, etc. They are fully or partially undemocratic, practically or proudly illiberal, and the courts and police are under the thumb of the holders of power.

System 1: illiberal, undemocratic, with the rule of law

Examples for societies that respect the rule of law, but are neither democracies nor liberal include most late-nineteenth-century countries in the West. The United Kingdom, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bismarckian Prussia, ...etc. The rulers weren't elected by universal suffrage (or elected at all), poor and rich people were not treated as equals, societal pressures were stifling, but an aristocrat at least couldn't just go and kick you out of your house without a legal pretext. Which you could challenge in court. Theoretically, at least. In practice, the rule of law was lousy by today's standards, but it was definitely a huge step forward from the earlier eras.

System 2-3: weak rule of law, democratic (liberal or illiberal)

Democracy without a strong legal foundation never existed - at least not in a larger society, and probably never will. It is built on the practice of peaceful transfer of power which only works if it's enforced by law. People don't give up power without the threat of punishment, and if one does, the next one won't.

System 4-5: undemocratic liberalism (with or without the rule of law)

Like democracy, liberalism on its own never existed, either. Non-democratic countries by definition violate the principle that everyone has the same rights, and in practice, personal freedom as well. Liberalism presupposes democracy, which presupposes the rule of law. Or to look only at the relationship between law and liberalism: small communities can live without a legal system, but in larger ones, nonconformism needs the protection of the law. High level of cultural tolerance is not natural for humans.

System 6: Democratic, lawful, illiberal

Back to the idea that initiated this post. Can a country be democratic without being liberal? When I first heard Orban's latest "revelation", I dismissed it immediately (mostly for the reason that what he had in mind was simply a kleptocracy, but even he felt the need to dress it up to sound somewhat better). But I wasn't entirely right. The 1920s United Kingdom wasn't very liberal in today's sense, even though universal suffrage was granted in 1923. The 50s America weren't much better either, with institutional racism, pervasive homophobia, laws against sodomy, oral sex, interracial marriage, etc. In theory, a truly Christian democracy would be an illiberal one, too. Access to political power for everyone, but strict social norms (very illiberal ones for gays, women, atheists, etc) for all.

So illiberal democracy is a viable form of government, for a time being, anyway. In a healthy democracy, different opinions tend to percolate up to the decision-makers, constantly pushing against the consensus, which would broaden the range of accepted norms. An illiberal democracy either turns ever more liberal (which happened in most Western countries after the Second World War) or ever less democratic (e.g. pre-war Germany and Italy, or contemporary Hungary, Poland, Turkey).

System 7: Liberal democracy founded on the rule of law

Back to the water.

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Video games are not the menace you think

Have you heard the latest news about the violent kids inspired by that immoral video game? If not, just google it. He who seeks finds. Worrying about the younger generation is as old as mankind, and video games are but one of the new scares. Middle-age people, whose youth preceded the advent of commercial computers, are especially likely to express disapproval of or dire warnings over this new wave of teenager pastime. Even though the worries about the dangers of excessive consumption of video games are not unfounded, they are greatly exaggerated due to oversimplification and neophobia. 

To start with, anyone who thinks that getting lost alone in a fantasy world populated with violent people and questionable morals is something new should think again. The phenomenon has been around for centuries and it’s called books. Many traditional children's books, like the Grimm stories, are full of gore, wanton cruelty, and immoral characters. It’s hard to imagine a game, allowed to appear in public, that is more disturbing to a sensitive teenager – target group of both video games and worrying parents and politicians – than the reading of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Lately, movies have made storytelling even more popular by adding visual aid, and there is no shortage of films depicting the darker sides of life. Many of them are highly acclaimed and represent the peak of the cultural achievement of the 20th century. There are new things under the sun, but video games – not technologically, but in the story-telling respect – are not one of them. 

Claims of the aggression-inducing nature of video games - often the main accusation leveled against them – should also be taken with a grain of salt. One can argue that the comparison with books is invalidated by the active nature of the games. One can read a book or watch a movie, but cannot actively live out her own worst impulses with them in a way that video games allow us to do. That is true. But first of all, the vast majority of the games out there – simulators, Super Mario clones, strategic games - have nothing to do with explicit violence. Second, the implicit assumption, that acting out in a fantasy world makes the person’s real-world behavior more violent, is not backed up by scientific consensus either. On the opposite, many psychologists support the claim that people, who blow the steam off this way, are less compelled to do so in real life. Much more research by experts needs to be conducted to convincingly support either side of the debate. Until the consensus is reached, the jury on video games’ unique violence-inducing effects is out. 

The second most frequent complaint, regarding the time one wastes while sitting in front of the computer, should be taken seriously, but with some caveats. Games indeed can be massively addictive, especially young males tend to become slaves of their computers. But an unhealthy level of attraction to something can develop in countless other areas – movies, card games, football teams, artistic endeavors come to mind –, and time-wasting is highly subjective. One can equally argue that reading detective novels doesn’t contribute to the well-being of the person or the society either. Additionally, some games do actually improve important skills of the player. Reflexes, strategic thinking, even gains in lexical knowledge can be the result of intensive gaming sessions. Whether it’s time wasted or well-spent, depends on the game and the person – much like with most activities in life. 

As with most broad topics, sweeping statements over the wide variety of video games are largely meaningless, and the critic should narrow her aim. Games range from hyper-violent hitman adventures to tools of modern time education. First-person shooters, strategic games, car races, Tetris, city-builder simulations are but a very few examples of the plethora of the genres out there. They attract, influence, develop in very different ways. Criticism – or support – should target specifics if it wants to be of any meaning. 

In conclusion, as a form of human activity, the video games phenomenon is neither entirely new nor very meaningful as a single concept. Some genres will be indispensable parts of 21st-century education, some are just trash no one should take a look at – just like books, movies or theatre plays. Anyone wishing to express a strong opinion about them should, first of all, get her facts straight, and second, be specific.

Disclaimer: this is a reprinted essay of the author from 2019

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Trump again?

This is not a post I really wanted to write. I'm really sick of American politics. But my last statement on the topic, that is, Trump had finally committed a successful political suicide attempt, has been proven wrong dramatically quickly. So honesty demands a follow-up which at least gives the opportunity to look at the bigger picture. Let's do it and get over it.

The election immediately refuted some of my theories. I thought Trump is already in his "fat Elvis-stage", where he has become more of an embarrassment for the Republican voters. He lost his novelty, he didn't reach out for new supporters, he had proven to be a complete failure in every respect. Every ethnic minority will come out against him. He will lose big time. He didn't. Actually, it was a very close election (thanks to the electoral system). 10 million more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016. But, at least, at the end of the day, he lost.

After the election, to no one's surprise, Trump kept shouting lies and conspiracy theories about his "stolen victory". "Great, keep doing it", I thought. The louder he is, the smaller he grows, and the bigger the embarrassment he causes to the GOP. All is well-deserved. What I didn't - and neither many others - expect was that the GOP would enthusiastically go along with his lies. That was bad because the longer they stick with Trump, the longer it will take to finally get over him.

And then came January 6. It was a cathartic moment. I think if the Senate had voted on the impeachment trial that day, Trump would have been finished. Even the Trump-fans of the party shat themselves enough to immediately blame Trump and distance themselves from him. 

And then, the impossible happened. The GOP "civil war" between Trumpists and normals lasted about two weeks and ended with a whimper. The Republicans not only refused to convict Trump, but ran back to him as fast as they could. The ten Republicans who voted with the Democrats face censure, death threats, and ouster from office. State-level Republican Parties literally censure them for being "insufficiently loyal" to the former president. They make the Soviet Politburo of the 80s look like a group of free thinkers.

There is a reason why I said it was something impossible. In America, the world's oldest democracy, one of the main parties supports someone who openly tried to overthrow a democratic election, and having failed in that, he incited a mob to attack the nation's Capitol, which left 5 people dead. Ah, yes, and they also wanted to hang his vice-president. They not only support him, they practically worship him. The GOP is a party of traitors, and it's not hyperbole. It's a fact.

This is something about which if you weren't wrong, you just didn't pay attention. This might seem like a lame attempt to explain away how badly I read the situation, but I stand by it. 

So, will Trump be the Republican candidate in 2024? Let's sketch up the usual quick pro and con lists.

The GOP is in a very hard place now. I still think most of them would love to put Trump behind them. But there are two main reasons why they keep toadying to him. One is that none of them wants to face what Cheney, Kitzinger, Sasse, Cassidy, or the other dissenters are going through now. The other is that Trump holds them as hostages. If he created his own party, half of the voters might flock to him. (Yes, impeachment conviction would have solved your problems, coward idiots). Even if only 10% does, the GOP will never win an election again. Yet, January 6 left the stain of unacceptibility (for some, at least) on Trump. Even before that, he managed to be the first president in 30 years kicked out after one term, and the first in 100 years under whom the governing party lost the trifecta of the presidency, the Senate, and the House. He really doesn't look like anyone's idea of a winner. Yet, supporting him gives at least a chance for the GOP to win back the Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024.

And this is where the pro list ends. The con list has two items, one is Trump's looming legal battles, and the other is the other contenders.

Trump's legal challenges are numerous but fall into two broad categories. First of all, if McConnells dreams come true, the criminal system catches him for inciting the insurrection, or for trying to put pressure on officials to change the election result, or something like that. McConnell would love it, because then the system would do the dirty work of getting rid of Trump for him. Second, New York prosecutors finally got their hands on Trump's tax records. That could lead to some juicy stories, but unless he appears on the front pages lead away in handcuffs, none of them will shake his base.

About the other Republican presidential hopefuls, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley stand out. They would love to inherit Trump's voters, but until Trump is legally banned from running for the presidency, they have no chance. They are cowards, they are spineless, they are young, they might just wait for their turn in 2028.

So, the con list is not very strong either.

Well, that's it for now, I guess.

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Bye, Trump 2024

Will Donald Trump be the Republican presidential candidate in 2024? I wanted to write this post right after the Georgia runoffs (January 5) but procrastinated long enough, that is, 24 hours, for letting Trump render the question moot. Nevertheless, I think he already lost that chance on January 5, and what he did the next day will push the Republican Party further away from him - which is an undeserved present for them and a good thing for everyone.

The reasons are his complete failure in delivering victories, the stain of January 6, being the only president ever impeached twice, and being kicked out of Twitter.

Not that the GOP gave a damn about any of the last three items. It is beyond caring about principles, or just the illusion of the minimal standards of decency, or the president being an incompetent, corrupt, race-baiting moron. They don't even care that much about policies anymore. The single purpose of the Republican Party is to win elections. And the Great Negotiator has turned out to be pretty shitty at that. 

In 2016, with the stars aligned, Trump finally won the presidency he has been attempting to run for since the beginning of the 2000s. And then it went all downhill. In 2018 he declared that the midterm elections are a referendum over him. The Republicans then duly lost the House. In 2020, the voters kicked out Trump himself, making him the first one-term president in 30 years. The fact that the GOP actually gained seats in the House made it clear that the GOP can still win elections, but Trump is a liability. Then he just couldn't bring himself to shut up and on January 5 he cost the Republicans the Senate as well. And that's when I think the romance ended for good.

Hawley and Cruz didn't lead the movement to challenge the election result because they love Trump so much, but because both of them wanted to be the 2024 nominee. Like the other Republicans who planned to vote with them and refused to vote for impeachment, they don't want Trump, they want his base.

And then, as the cherry on top, came the unique historical feats of being the only president ever impeached twice and having incited the mob to attack the Capitol of his own country. Social media platforms have taken away his megaphone, Amazon pulled the plug on Parlor. In the near future, without the impunity of his office, ugly things will just keep coming up around him. 

I think even without these, 4 years of him not being the president would break the spell. Without his bully pulpit, he will stop being scary for Republicans, and instead, for all the reasons above, he will become more and more an embarassment. Even if Republicans refuse to convict him, and thereby banning him from holding public office again, Trump is done.

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Farewell letter to the National Review

After four years, I decided to cancel my National Review subscription. I thought it's a good idea to share them why, and I sent the paper the letter below. I tried to be short, charitable, and to avoid being snarky or pompous. I don't think I succeeded in any of those apart from the charitable part, but I did my best. Here it is:

Dear National Review,

After four years of reading and a couple of months of thinking, I decided to cancel my subscription. In the following, I'd like to explain my decision in the hope that it might do some good. 

In 2016, when Donald Trump became the presidential candidate of the Republican party, I, like half of the world, was dumbfounded. I didn't understand how any moderately well-informed person, political affiliation notwithstanding, could vote for a conman, who is a despicable character and a national security threat. It prompted me, a centrist, to dive into conservative journalism. After some trial and error, I ended up with the flagship magazine of the American conservative movement, National Review. 

I was happy with my choice. NR provided a diversity of opinion, great writing, new ideas (new for me at least), and thoughtful challenges to my more liberal worldview. I didn't agree with all the articles of course, but at least half of them in every issue gave me something to think about.

However, in the following years, as it became obvious that Donald Trump is exactly the man he had shown himself to be during the primaries, my satisfaction slowly started to erode, step by step.

Donald Trump has trampled on every principle this magazine is purported to care for: character, fiscal responsibility, free trade, Christian values, standing up against dictators, standing up for allies. He has ballooned the deficit. He sucked up to foreign dictators and took the side of Vladimir Putin against his own intelligence services. He abandoned war allies. He dragged the level of political discourse to the gutters. He blackmailed a foreign ally to force it to come up with dirt on his political opponent. He paid off a porn star he had sex with while his wife was in labor. He pardoned his corrupt business partners. He embraced the support of white-supremacists and genuine lunatics who think that the Democrats are literally a pedophile, Satan-worshipping cult led by George Soros. And, in the time when every day almost as many Americans (and on some days more) die in COVID as in 9/11, he held rallies just to be celebrated by thousands of maskless people - who cares who might die because of this. "I take no responsibility at all".

And the Republican Party went along with it. Not reluctantly, not with protests, but with a Lindsey Grahamesque eagerness to please. And, unenthusiastically and grudgingly, National Review went along, too. Yes, it still offered diverse voices. Yes, it called out the most egregious offenses. It never hid its opinion of the president's character. But the objections to Donald Trump never went beyond what is expected from Her Majesty's Opposition. It was always about finding the easiest path not to go against the grain while finding convenient reasons to support it - masquerading as responsible, principled journalism. Toothless and restrained admonitions to Trump, war cries against the most moderate, institutionalist, establishment-type Democratic challenger one could imagine, Joe Biden. The diversity of opinion now includes Conrad Black and Victor David Hanson on one end but stops with Kevin D. Williamson on the other. And even Williamson's GOP-critical pieces are mandatorily embedded between two Democrats-bashing articles from him.

In short, the National Review chose to tolerate the president and support the GOP based on the conviction that the Democrats are even worse than Trump. That opinion could have been held with fairness and integrity. But every time Trump and his enablers did or said something indefensible, Biden grew a bit more menacing. He spoke up against defunding the police and similar radical left idiocies. He refused to jump on packing the court. He believes in compromises and has reached out to the other side. None of these matters a bit - he is still worse than a narcissistic, callous, petty, corrupt ignoramus whose indifference and stupidity has probably killed tens of thousands of Americans, and who is actively spreading Russian propaganda (an American president spreading Russian propaganda!). No critical inquiry into our side except for the most glaring errors. No trace of subtlety in the analysis of the other side. No difference between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Conveniently, no hard decisions for a right-wing magazine.

The partisanship is as dismaying as obvious. The GOP and even Trump have always been given the benefit of doubt, a generosity that has never been extended to the other side, which is of course a single, monolithic block hellbent on destroying America. Whatever his sons' faults, everyone knows that Biden has never used his office to enrich himself and his family, just as everyone knows that Trump and his family are doing exactly that. Still, the National Review chose to find problems only with Hunter Biden and never with Jared Kushner. When Donald Trump was publicly demanding that his attorney general indict his opponents, National Review worried that Biden wouldn't be a reliable custodian of the constitution. When the NYT revealed Trump's decades-long tax evasion, David Harsanyi of the NR declared this behavior "patriotic". When Donald Trump with half of the GOP is literally trying to steal the election (please forget the anodyne descriptions, like "undermining democracy" - this is plain treason), and his former National Security advisor calls for suspending the constitution and declaring martial law to re-run election,  National Review poses the on-line question: "What do you think is the greatest threat to America? Cancel Culture or Socialism?"

I was relieved to see that at least in this madness, National Review refused to follow the rest of the right-wing media (even though it still deems the doctoral title of Jill Biden as scandalous as the call of Trump-loyalists for the execution of a public official). But when the line to make a stand is simply between being a democracy or a Banana-republic, that's a very low bar. No decent citizen needs journalists and political thinkers to tell him or her how to make a judgment on that. Republican congressmen and prominent right-wing media personalities are working with the gleeful support from Russia and China on destroying the most fundamental democratic norm - the bipartisan transfer of power. You have to be an intellectual to see nuance into it.

Arguably the most valuable and generally unappreciated gift from Trump presidency is that it provided a once in a lifetime opportunity to test your character. Standing up for decency and principles has never been less risky. In darker ages and places, one could pay for it with her life. In today's America, the penalty was angry tweets from the Crybaby-in-Chief. For the overwhelming majority of the GOP-members, that was too much. But there were conservatives and even Republicans who stood by what they believed in the face of ostracism and sometimes financial difficulties. They are the Never Trumpers, the erstwhile allies National Review never ceased to disparage while itself stayed in the warm and secure nest.

If I want to read good writing and excellent opinion pieces informed by conservative ideas, I could still find both in the National Review. But the amount of confirmation bias, self-delusion, and hypocrisy I would need to wade through is just too much. NR is still the flagship of intellectual conservatism. But that aspect is of secondary importance. First and foremost, the magazine exists to serve the GOP, which, having thrown away every principle it ever claimed to believe in, only exists to oppose Democrats.

Goodbye for now, with the hope that one day we can meet again.

Sincerely,
The Editors of New Vac Times

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Pranks, bubbles, disappointments

 

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics and physics, submitted an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to an academic journal of postmodernist cultural studies. It passed through peer reviews with flying colors and garnered praise across the targeted segment of academia. Shortly after, Sokal announced that it was a prank. Prompted by his annoyance with pseudo-intellectuals, he had packaged lengthy nonsense in obscure language and tested how well it would sell. It did sell well, not to the amusement of the duped parties, at least not after he exposed the trick. Astonishingly, some of them even doubled down. Instead of owning their embarrassment, they claimed that Sokal might have been insincere, but his article accidentally happens to be full of gems.

Twenty years later the philosopher Peter Boghosian, the mathematician James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, an English literature scholar, pulled off the same trick. To expose poor scholarship of certain academic fields, they submitted a series of bogus papers to various journals. Their target this time was yet another subfield of postmodernism, the gender- and race-studies - "grievance-studies" as the trio puts it. They rewrote some parts of Mein Kampf, wrote an essay about how dog-parks facilitate rape-culture in society, another one about the benefits of anal sex toys for men in the fight against transphobia, and a series of others in a similar vein. Boghosian's "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct" probably crowns their efforts, but it's a tough race. Like Sokal, Boghosian and his partners in crime wanted to cast a spotlight on what they perceived as pseudo-intellectual bullshit masquerading as science.

The hoax was eventually exposed and it predictably ruffled the feathers of a great many people. It generated both furor and discussion about many topics around ethics, groupthink, cultural influence over academia, orthodoxies, etc.  Lindsay and Pluckrose recently wrote a book about the broader topic of their interest with the lengthy title of "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody".

I listened to many interviews with the guys, and I like them a lot. This all happened in the past. Then a couple of days ago Lindsay' tweeted: "Frankly going to unhappily vote Republican, including Trump, until the left walks this shit all the way back." 

Well, that was a bombshell. I don't think Lindsay is a racist or misogynist or even the kind of guy who suffers Trump. But it is a colossal error in judgment, for two reasons. 

For one, Donald Trump dragged the presidency and public discourse in the gutters like no one ever has before, and by paralyzing America, it made the world a more volatile, dangerous, and cynical place. Yes, America never fully lived up to its ideals, but: 1. no country ever had 2. the world's hegemon at least had noble ideals. Good luck with the world that is governed by Chinese, Islamist, or Russian ones instead. The damage being caused by irritating poseurs, virtue-signaling craze, and victimhood culture on the Left is very bad and it does real harm to real people, but it still doesn't even come close. Your sense of proportion has to be so imbalanced to see that exactly the opposite way, that it's a miracle if you can even utter a straight sentence. Clumsy metaphor, never mind.

Nevertheless, Lindsay's opinion on the dangers of the two extremes is at least defendable. Maybe he is right and my sense of proportion is useless. But what is not defendable, in fact, almost inexplicable for a man of Lindsay's intellect, is that he thinks reelecting Trump would somehow help his cause. A ruling white-grievance party is not a bulwark against left-wing idiotism. It's the fuel of it. Lindsay seriously thinks that another four years of Trump wouldn't make Wokes even crazier?! It would make me crazier.

Luckily, his college, Helen Pluckrose, has not fallen in the same pit. She, without judging her acquaintances' decisions, encourages everyone to vote for Democrats. I wonder whether it has to do something with gender (that would be ironic for the trio). Women certainly seem to be less enamored by this faux-strongman-shtick.

Anyway, read what Jerry Coyne has to say about the matter.

The affair made me sad but also prompted me to contemplate bubbles. Lindsay lives in a bubble where he faces the absurdity of and harm caused by Wokeness every day. He probably also suffers attacks from them every day. And this apparently distorts his picture of the world to a dangerous extent. It is sad and disconcerting.

It's sad to realize that someone, whose opinion you have valued high so far, proved to be very fallible. It is also frightening, because if a smart guy like him can't see the forest from the trees, how do I know that it's not I who lives in a bubble? How do I know that Lindsay is not right, and a Trump presidency is, all things considered, still better than a Biden one? Or how do I know that Lindsay was right about Wokeness, to start with? It's both true and meaningless to say that everyone lives in a bubble. Obviously, everyone has preferred sources of information and a specific group of fellow humans he or she regularly interacts with.

I suppose the only remedy for close-mindedness is to follow the well-known and rarely practiced advice of staying out of your comfort zone. I suppose one can try to stay informed simultaneously inside multiple bubbles with little overlap or push the walls of her preferred bubble as far as she can. 

When Trump won in 2016, I started actively seeking out right-wing information sources. The farthest I had to stomach to go was National Review, and even that one I'm planning to ditch now (although, had they not gone all-in for the GOP by 2020, if not for Trump, I would stay). I never had it in me to watch Fox, let alone to read Breitbart. Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson, Niall Fergusson, Andrew Neil, Douglas Murray, Charles Murray, and few other people whose names I can't recall now, are whom I strongly disagree with at times, but I enjoy listening to. I can't listen to anyone who I can't enjoy. Probably that's the reason why I never sought left-wing sources of information. They are humorless. Hm...I just realized I have to correct myself here. I accidentally stumbled upon Slavoj Zizek, and he is quite funny, but I have no idea where he is on the political spectrum - even though he calls himself a communist. Anyway, this post has descended into a rumbling, it's time to stop.

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