We Are Not Saved

The number of teenage girls identifying as transgender has skyrocketed, by as much as 4,400% in the last decade by some accounts. What explains this staggeringly rapid and precipitous increase? Abigail Shrier thinks that these girls are falling pray to a peer contagion. A combination of the typical confusion and discomfort associated with puberty combined with a culture that celebrates transgender individuals. That in essence going through puberty is tough and being trans allows these girls to put that out of their mind while also gaining the approval of the peers and in many cases mimicking their peers who have already transitioned. In this podcast we examine the arguments and the evidence. Might she have a point?

Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years by: Vaclav Smil The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley By: Malcolm X (Author), Alex Haley (Author), Laurence Fishburne (Narrator) Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets By: Sudhir Venkatesh Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters By: Abigail Shrier (Moved to the next episode) The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage By: Anthony Brandt Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations by: John Bartlett The Golden Age By: John C. Wright How to Start Your Homeschool: What I Learned My First 5 Years by: Taylia Clegg Bunker Destroying Their God: How I Fought My Evil Half-Brother to Save My Children By: Wallace Jeffs  (Author), Shauna Packer  (Author), Sherry Taylor  (Author) The Neal A. Maxwell Quote Book by: Neal A. Maxwell

In politics there's always a choice between extremism and moderation. In this episode I discuss all the reasons for making moderation the default, and under what circumstances it might be appropriate abandon it and pursue extremism instead. My general conclusion is that there aren't many, but that it's a very difficult problem where clear lines are hard to draw.

Most people understand that voting is a way of making decisions via consensus, what people have forgotten is that voting is also a proxy for power. A much better proxy than those which have existed historically, and positively fantastic when compared to directly matching power via bloodshed and violence.  If people have decided (as Trump supporters) evidently have, that the proxy of voting is no longer working then they can either decide that they have been outmatched in these different arenas, or they can seek other proxies of power to even things out. Up to and including a direct exercise of power, through resorting to bloodshed and violence. 

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by: Geoffrey West From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia by: Pankaj Mishra Just like You by: Nick Hornby Seven Types of Atheism by: John N. Gray Why Not Parliamentarism? by: Tiago Ribeiro dos Santos An Instinct for Dragons by: David E. Jones Aristophanes: The Complete Plays by: Aristophanes Translated by: Paul Roche Battle Ground by: Jim Butcher

I think many people expect too much out of the election. Trump supporters expect that if he manages to get reelected that he will do all the things he's been promising since 2016, while Biden supporters expect that their long nightmare of political dysfunction will finally be over. But political dysfunction has been around for a lot longer than Trump and so much of what seems wrong with the world has nothing to do with him. He does have the talent of making everything seem like it's about him, but if Biden is elected (and I think he will be) it will quickly become apparent that most of our problems had nothing to do with Trump... 

Any rational assessment of the effect of your vote on the presidential election is bound to conclude that there is no effect if you're not in a swing state and that even if you are in a swing state the effect is still infinitesimal. But what other option do you have? Well that's what this episode is designed to reveal. I would argue that there's a great option which is almost entirely overlooked, voting for a third party candidate or writing someone in! I'm writing in General Mattis, and if you want to know why you'll have to listen.

In this episode we discuss China, and the various opinions about what they're up to, and what we should do in response to whatever that is. There are numerous opinions and while I don't try to cover them all, I cover a lot of them, and it's safe to say opinions are all over the place. But beyond all of the opinions of others I provide my own unique theory, which is not the theory I find most likely, but it may be the most frightening theory. What is it? You'll have to listen and find out.

Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress by: Christopher Ryan The End of History and the Last Man by: Francis Fukuyama Sidhartha by: Herman Hesse The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Sławomir Rawicz Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space by: Kevin Peter Hand Kansas City Noir by: Various Innsmouth: (The Weird of Hali #1) by: John Michael Greer The Kill Chain: How Emerging Technologies Threaten America’s Military Dominance by: Christian Brose Trump vs. China: Facing America’s Greatest Threat by: Newt Gingrich A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by: G. J. Meyer

In the book The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama spends quite a bit of time talking about the idea of legitimacy, in particular how the End of History represents a time when only liberal democracy has any reserves of legitimacy. But two questions occur, first where does a nation go if liberal democracy starts failing? And second does that failure happen, does it end up just like all previous systems, if it no longer provides reserves of legitimacy? Recent events seem to indicate that the answer to those two questions maybe no where, and yes. In other words liberal democracy is suffering a crisis of legitimacy and unfortunately, at this point, there's no where left to go.

Coming up with solutions is difficult. I've read many books that present an excellent diagnosis of the problem, but then finish things off by presenting utterly ridiculous solutions. I take one of these books Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan and go into detail on why the solutions he proposed are so inadequate and then go into some detail as to what I think good solutions should include. 

With the stock market prices seemingly bearing little relationship to the actual economy, investment strategies are on the mind of many. Here I briefly describe my own investment strategy which unfortunately has very little to say about the current craziness, but hopefully contains some wisdom about longer term investing. In particular the idea that you should view investing as purchasing pieces in potential futures. This may not sound particularly radical, but I argue that this change in focus from what constitutes wealth now to what constitutes wealth in the future can be profoundly illuminating.

Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk by: Justin Tosi, Brandon Warmke The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by: Iain McGilchrist The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust by: John Coates Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16) by: Jim Butcher Euripides V: Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, The Cyclops, Rhesus by: Euripides Cutting for Stone by: Abraham Verghese How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by: Francis A. Shaeffer 

We're told that in order to combat fake news, conspiracy theories, and misinformation of all kinds that we need to do a better job of examining the evidence, of looking at the data, but what if this is entirely backwards? What if we're too focused on the data, on the little bits of evidence that make up our world view, and that the problem is we're bad at organizing these bits of data into a coherent and common-sensical world view? What if we're so focused on justice, punishing people for the separate misdeeds that occur every day, that we neglect mercy, the art of seeing how interconnected everything and everyone really is. 

After having a conversation with a friend I decide to dig into the numbers on police officer killings since 1965 as compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. In the process I discover that there's a lot of fairly obvious subjectivity to who those numbers can be interpreted, and the general impression that right-wing extremism is more dangerous is muddier than people think.  It's a long one, but it's got lots of numbers so that makes up for it. Right?

Super Cooperators: Evolution, Altruism and Human Behavior (Or, Why We Need Each Other to Succeed) by Martin Nowak Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by: Satya Nadella The Book of Three by: Lloyd Alexander The Black Cauldron by: Lloyd Alexander The Castle of Llyr by: Lloyd Alexander Taran Wanderer by: Lloyd Alexander The High King by: Lloyd Alexander Euripides IV: Helen, The Phoenician Women, Orestes by: Euripides A Secular Age by: Charles Taylor A Secular Age by: Charles Taylor (Religious Review)

How is it, that the French and American Revolutions, so close in time and goals, had such different outcomes? One answer is that the American Revolution built on the foundation of English legislative traditions whereas the French had no such traditions (at the time of the revolution it had been 175 years since the last time the Estates General had been called). Which is to say the American Revolution modified the existing system, while the French Revolution was an attempt to completely replace the old system. This gave the American Revolution an obvious end point, which the French Revolution lacked.

Increasingly liberalism and the values associated with it have been judged inadequate to the task of rectifying racial inequalities. But the question is, what are the alternatives? One that has been mentioned is Critical Race Theory (CRT). In an article from The Economist these two approaches are pitted against one another. And despite the article's attempt to be balanced it seems clear that most people who advocate for CRT as some kind of alternative have never really grappled with the practical considerations of abandoning liberalism, an ideology that despite its failings has provided the underpinning for centuries of progress.

In which I present the parable of the traffic light, and a deep discussion of the various epistemologies at play in the world today including conflict vs. mistake theory, on which I spend quite a bit of time. Each of these frameworks has different consequences and benefits, but I contend that right now, no framework is dominant, and it's possible that having numerous frameworks is even worse than having a bad one.

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder By: Peter Zeihan The Good Soldier Švejk By: Jaroslav Hasek The Diaries of Adam and Eve By: Mark Twain White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism By: Robin DiAngelo Guns of August By: Barbara W. Tuchman Euripides III: Heracles, The Trojan Women, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Ion (The Complete Greek Tragedies) By: Euripides Acid Test: LSD vs. LDS By: Christopher Kimball Bigelow The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories By: Don Bradley