a coven of initiates..............

 

I have attended too many seminars in some great universities which degenerated into a closed language game played by a coven of initiates who prized obscure self-referential congratulations over hones engagement with reality.

-Michael Ignatieff

Imaginary boundaries..........

Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.

-and the rest of the story is here

Every once in a while............

 

...........................only Martin Gurri will do:

Social relations as they actually exist, and democratic politics as they are actually practiced, are repudiated. Everyone is against, but few can say what they stand for. The radical Left, which wields substantial influence within major institutions, loathes nearly every aspect of Western civilization—its history, its economic system, its racial and sexual norms—and would happily demolish the entire edifice. The populist Right is eager to smash whatever regions or organizations that the Left controls, with little regard for the consequences. And the institutional elites, who might be expected to defend the status quo, now feel compelled to strike insurgent poses and denounce the very structures that they oversee.

----------------------

Populism is a political by-product of the post-truth condition. Once presidents and TikTokers stand on the same plane of plausibility, with only the unruly public to choose between them, the temple of establishment authority is destined to tumble like the walls of Jericho. Sensing this, elites have succumbed to a reactionary panic—they want their twentieth century back. The first article of faith in “our democracy” is that the public must be pushed out of the commanding heights of the information sphere and that the power to construct a single, universal reality should return to those deemed properly trained for the task: the expert, the scientist, the politician, the journalist, the bureaucrat.

The Spirit of Dialogue...................

 

My long-standing contrarian rule is that the Davos consensus is always wrong.

-Niall Ferguson

When "elites" aren't very elite..........

 

Out of disorder and discontent come leaders who have strong personalities, are anti-elitist, and claim to fight for the common man.  They are called populists.  Populism is a political and social phenomenon that appeals to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are not being addressed by the elites.  It typically develops when there are wealth and opportunity gaps, perceived cultural threats from those with different values both inside and outside the country, and "establishment elites" in positions of power who are not working effectively for most people.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

lost a focus........................

 

More than an ideological shift, it’s important to have a candidate who taps into public disdain for politics-as-usual. Even if they can project a more moderate image, this is the ingredient that continues to elude the current crop of Democrats.

It’s not just that Democrats have gotten too liberal. It’s that by opposing Trump on all fronts, they’ve been tricked into adopting a posture of defending the elite norms and institutions Trump attacks. And they’ve lost a focus on regular people in the process.

-Patrick Ruffini, from this edition

Be careful what you wish for...............

 

Societies are much more fragile than the elite seems to think. One of the things our Founders and the people who built our country understood was that building and maintaining a free society was hard and took real maintenance. Our current elite has inherited a society that was built over generations and is squandering the inheritance at an alarming rate, assuming that it exists as a permanent structure, and not a carefully balanced practical project. 

-David Strom, from here

We just don't talk like this anymore.....

 

     I cannot appease my melancholly commiseration for our Armies in this furious snow storm in any way so well as by studying your Letter of Oct. 28.

     We are now explicitly agreed, in one important point, vizt.  That "there is a natural Aristocracy among men; the grounds of which are Virtue and Talents."

     You very justly indulge a little merriment upon this solemn subject of Aristocracy.  I often laugh at it too, for there is nothing in this laughable world more ridiculous that the management of it by almost all of the nations of the Earth.  But while We smile, Mankind have reason to say to Us, as the froggs said to the Boys, What is Sport to you is Wounds and death to Us.  When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence; and on the other hand,  the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks:  I feel a stronger disposition to weep at their destiny, that to laugh at their folly.

- John Adams, from a letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 15, 1813

A potential speedbump for AI.........?

 

The 19th century disruptions were severe, and many people suffered as their experience and skill set no longer matched the new economy.  But eventually everyone, from the poorest to the rich, were better off for letting the industrial revolution run its course.

But in the 19th century, the disrupted were essentially powerless.  What happens this time around, though, when the disrupted are the ruling elite themselves?  These potentially disrupted professions include lawyers and doctors who already have shown themselves very willing to organize to block innovation, squash competition, and protect their high pay.

-Warren Meyer, from this blog post

rating this mostly true............

 

And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

-as culled from this VDH post

Opening paragraphs.............

 

     A cold day in December.  Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man's grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease.  He was concerned about the weather, that the old man not be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of the freezing newspapermen, that he not have to wait for a cab.  Instead he had guided his guest to his own car and driver.  The older man would remember the young man's good manners almost as clearly as the substance of their talk, though it was an important meeting.

-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest

Here's an idea................

 

....................................anti-Brahminization:

In reality, the party maintains a meticulous commitment to fiscal responsibility, democratic governance, and material populism.

Can I get an Amen........................

 

     via

When elites aren't........................

 There’s a radical dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo across the democratic world. The people in charge are distrusted and despised by the public: They are thought to be in business for themselves and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. From government agencies to the scientific establishment, the institutions that buttress modern society have been tainted by the corruption and poor performance of the ruling elites. The public has come to view these institutions as cash cows for the haves—and an oppressive machinery for bleeding the have-nots.

-Martin Gurri, from here

I like how he thinks...................

 If Donald Trump creates the position, I volunteer to be Secretary of Feeding People to Komodo Dragons. The first round of tossings into the lizard-pit will involve “experts” who still use grossly snobbish terms like “fringe” and “contrarian” to describe beliefs held by most of the population . . .

-Matt Taibbi, from here

Arnold Kling is worried..................

 

The intellectual mediocrity of today’s educated class is made worse by a lack of self-awareness. If they recognized that they are lightweights, they would exhibit less class snobbery. But it is the opposite. They feel that their college credentials entitle them to lord it over everyone else. They see their luxury beliefs as setting them apart and above everyone else in America, either in the present or in the past.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Endarkenment......................

 

..............from the essential pen of Martin Gurri:

The Endarkenment is the pathological disorientation that convulses a society after it has extinguished all sources of meaning and lost sight of all paths to a happier future. It’s the triumph of wish over facts, the infantilization of top echelons of the social pyramid—of hyper-credentialed, globally mobile people, wielders of power and wealth and media, who, on a routine basis, confuse their self-important imaginings with the world itself. It’s the widespread descent of everyone else, now deprived of teachers, preachers, and role models, into a cognitive underclass, prone to the most bizarre theories about how things work.

thanks Kurt

When the word "elite" is applied to......................

 

...........to current world-wide political leadership it feels like an abuse of our language. We should reserve the word for those who truly deserve it - our greatest professional athletes.

Full story here.  Money quote here:

These three skills – attention, memory and creativity – have technical names: inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, respectively.   They are the three core executive functions used by the brain to execute complex tasks.

via

Starting to think that.......................

 

................Bari Weiss is a national treasure:

What's become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately a crisis of trustworthiness.

In other words, it's not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists.  It's that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust.

-as culled from here

making the abstract concrete..............

 When liberal policies were simply abstract inanity, average Americans could roll their eyes, hold their tongues, and let their lives go on.  But the radical Left made the abstract concrete for average Americans.  For their part, average Americans have found the radical Left’s policies as unavoidable as they are unendurable.

-J. T. Young, as culled from here