Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Bring On Your Censorship

There’s been some concern over the last months about the potential for greater censorship policies, like those that exist in the UK, Germany, Canada, and other European countries to come to the US. Typically this has been more challenging to enact in the US because of the stronger constitutional protections for free speech, although those protections have been traditionally suspended during times of major war.

Because there is no real war going on, there are not all that many strong precedents for suppressing political speech directly, rather than through the usual indirect methods.

A lot of people in the alt-right have expressed their fear about this. I don’t think it’s something to be too nervous about, even if it goes into effect.

First of all, censorship is an admission that the official ideas are weak, and unable to survive scrutiny and opposition.

Second, it radicalizes moderates.

Third, it makes the official opinion organs less trustworthy, and less able to get accurate information about public opinion (because the information gathering methods are then impeded).

Fourth, it adds more risk and more reward to routing around the censorship.

Fifth, it creates an appearance of hypocrisy among liberals who have argued for untrammeled free speech for centuries.

Sixth, it creates a black market in samizdata, even for ordinary information.

A big part of the legitimacy of the modern arrangement is the claim that it provides both economic and political liberty to its citizens. Neither of those things are really true for any sensible understanding of the word ‘liberty,’ but whenever the state makes a decision that undermines that claim, it loses the loyalty of a large portion of its followers. We’ve seen this dynamic with the news about the NSA in the last couple years. It makes it very difficult for these states to make claims to moral authority. It has had politically significant impacts, especially, in Germany, as PEGIDA gains a lot of its moral force from the failings of the German state and its subordination to the US.

Further, the rising tide of anti-US opinion in Germany is one of the reasons why NATO has been incapable of supporting Ukraine effectively in its war with Russia. So these sorts of shifts in public opinion have major downstream political impacts.

So, my general response to calls for censorship, whether performed by the goverinnment or by private companies, is to encourage them to pull the trigger.

How lucky do they feel?

This is entirely different in countries with no tradition of freedom of thought and inquiry, in which the people have no expectation of enjoying those things. In the West, increasingly, you have freedom of thought if you are a leftist, but not if you are not. A path towards greater formalization of the existing lines is to be applauded rather than decried.

So, when an enemy is about to make a mistake, get out of the way, or otherwise cheer them on as they stumble into a pit.

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Book Review: Whitey On the Moon

The question of what happened to NASA after the moon landing comes up often, especially in the relatively recent context of the closure of the shuttle program and the privatization of space. This book, Whitey On the Moon, attempts to answer that by going through the historical record.

Kersey’s style is that of a newspaper reporter’s, and most of the book is made up of excerpts of old reports from newspapers and magazines.

The answer is that the agency was a persistent target of civil rights activism from the very beginning. Apparently, even President Kennedy attempted to smooth the way for a black pilot named Ed Dwight to join the moon landing mission despite a lack of qualifications, with the motive being to sway the black community and solidify their loyalty to the Democratic party.

The only reason why the pilot didn’t make it was the president’s personal pet project, and when he died, Chuck Yeager, who was running the astronaut program, was allowed to wash him out. You may be familiar with the rest of Yeager’s story from Tom Wolfe’s book on the topic.

When the moon launch actually happened, civil rights protesters picketed it, appearing in mule-drawn carts, as a way to showcase their displeasure with the ways that the public funds were being allocated.

By the early 1970s, public opinion had re-oriented against the space agency, arguing that it in particular needed to have greater racial and gender diversity, but also that the money spent on ‘moon shots’ would be better off spent on domestic welfare. By 1976, NASA had instituted an entirely new method for selecting astronauts to ensure greater representation, on threat from a lawsuit ginned up by the black lady from Star Trek.

Not so oddly enough, this was a similar time period during which power was beginning to transition to Silicon Valley, and its unprincipled exceptions of filtering employees by proxy IQ tests. Microsoft was founded in 1975, at the same time as the capable were being told they were no longer wanted in the government. The Yeager type of person would not be winding up in government after those new policies.

The reason why this story doesn’t get told too often should be clear: after the calls for increased diversity, NASA built useless shuttles full of unqualified astronauts which kept exploding on television instead of colonizing Mars.

To Kennedy, who pressured Yeager to relax the requirements, the selectivity of the program seemed largely arbitrary. We see from the destruction of the space shuttles, and some other disasters, why the program had to be so demanding and selective. It’s not an easy thing to go into space, and it can’t really be phoned in by people who are not at peak, with sufficient knowledge of science and engineering to handle all the inevitable contingencies.

In fact, wherever there are institutions charged with accomplishing difficult goals, with stringent entrance requirements, disparate impact always appears, because the gifts of nature are unevenly distributed.

As Silicon Valley falls to diversity concerns, we should expect a similar fate for those companies as we have seen with NASA. Politically speaking, the Valley-ites are too weak and submissive to survive. If the men with the ‘right stuff’ could barely hold off the onslaught in the early 1960s, the technology dwarves of today have no hope of doing so today, especially considering that doctrinaire leftism that has won over the industry.

Calls to diversity appeal especially to the mediocre man, who knows that by displacing the best with non-merit hires, they will have a lighter load, and less will be expected of them overall. Couple that with the warm feeling of moral do-gooding that washes over all the people who lower standards of excellence to employ all the colors of the rainbow within a single institution, and you get a recipe for mediocrity, and eventual failure.

Indeed, SpaceX, the private space exploration company, has recently been sued for racial discrimination.

The idiotic quote from the company spokesman just demonstrates how ignorant that these corporate leaders are about what civil rights law actually means:

“At SpaceX, we don’t care about your gender, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, age or anything else of that nature — to succeed here, the only requirement is to work hard and produce outstanding results,” Taylor said. “Given the ambitious goals of the company, the standards for work performance at SpaceX are very high [and] it is critical that all employees meet this standard.”

That’s a statement of an illegal employment policy. It routinely results in disparate impact, which is why it’s illegal.

Considering that it’s not likely to be possible to dissuade Americans away from civil rights on a reasonable time frame, the best way for countries like Russia, China, the Gulf monarchies, and other small states to take over from America’s scientific leadership is to poach talent and entire industries away from the US, with the promise of noninterference in hiring practices.

For various cultural reasons, it’s difficult to do this, but considering the recent pushes to diversification, and the closing off of the domestic exits, it should be a lot easier for foreign nations to set up special poaching programs similar to the ones that the US used to pursue Soviet talent. The only thing that is surprising is how few of such programs have succeeded, arguably because the countries that would be capable of doing it are so incapable of absorbing foreigners, which is probably a good thing for them in some respects.

Kersey makes the connection to the fall of Detroit, but perhaps it doesn’t go far enough. Japanese and Korean companies supplanted American car companies from their market-leading positions in part because neither country has diversity programs. In fact, the operating philosophy of companies like Honda and Toyota are inextricably linked with Japanese culture. The success of these companies comes from purity, rather than ‘diversity.’

If diversity really brought about strength, GM would be the world’s leading auto manufacturer, and Detroit would look like Tomorrowland.

The fact is that the US will not be dissuaded from its path to decline until it is forcibly dissuaded, probably by some combination of foreign powers and internal dissent. The failure of the Space Shuttle, which presaged the more recent F-35 debacle, will presage future embarrassments.

Americans universally believe in their own eternal military superiority, which is how you know that the US will be crushed militarily by a technologically and morally superior rival some time in the near to mid term. It will also be repetitively defeated by technologically and economically inferior foes, as we have seen since the end of the Korean War.

America’s proxy in Ukraine is being crushed by the materially inferior Russia, and NATO is fraying under the pressure.

Considering that Americans learned nothing from the domestic collapses of the steel, auto, computer hardware (in large part), aerospace, and manufacturing industries, it’s unlikely that the Americans will learn anything from the collapses of the remaining areas in which they enjoy leadership.

This is why competition matters — people, as a rule, do not change, unless they are forced to change by circumstances.

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Woman, the Degraded Aristocrat

Why does feminism appear to be so important to so many people? For one thing, it’s the most lucrative possible ideology for a woman to promote. No other notion or culture can provide a woman with so much access to funds for so little effort.

There are a number of ways that women can access these funds, which may or may not be directly from the state and federal treasuries. One is by birthing bastards, and then applying for benefits. The next is by divorcing a husband who earns well. Given that both of these two strategies has suffered from depleting effectiveness in recent years, new innovations have to be drummed up to provide the duchesses and princesses their rightful due.

Every man knows that women hold the whip hand in the modern legal system. Those that think that they are exceptions due to whatever personal qualities that they might have often discover later on that their vanity was no match against the court system.

Challenging the new-found authority and status that women have in the public square will earn you righteous indignation. The older the woman, the more ferocious her opposition will be, because her entire legal standing, along with the way that she has structured her relationships, her sense of self, and her bearing are all impacted by her special privileges under the law.

This reveals something essential about humans: someone is always in charge. There is no such thing as a fully equal relationship, just as there is no equality between people as individuals. The rhetoric of feminism centers around achieving equality, but much like Communism requires enormous coercion in the hopes of bringing about a millennium, it is just the same with the new female-headed household.

In family court, there is no presumption of innocence. In general, the presumption is that the man is guilty. The penalties for failure to comply with the dictates of the court are often both civil and criminal. Women are, in general, quite happy with the idea of this arrangement, although the details of the implementation often leave a lot to be desired. It’s much easier to get a right to an income from your deposed spouse than it is to actually squeeze juice from that lemon.

In this, the educated girl at university mouthing feminist slogans is only practicing for her future profession as either a laborer, a legal plaintiff, or both. The enraged sense of entitlement only reaches full bloom in the courtroom, when it comes time for the ideas to be put into practice, for narrative to triumph over facts, logic, and truth, and to gain a fortune besides.

‘Beta’ men get a lot of flak for being doormats. They are simply creatures malformed by fear of superior power. The expectation is still there for them to behave as bourgeois men did in past times, without the legal or social standing that those bourgeois men enjoyed. In general, those men who still behave like the older style man do so upon the virtuous restraint on the part of their wives to not exercise their impressive legal powers. Most do not, because that sort of restraint is in short supply.

Serfs had a certain dignity to them, although they were considered good insomuch as they were loyal, pious, and hard-working. If they had pride, it was in their acceptance of their station, and good behavior as far as serfs go. People didn’t expect serfs to carry themselves as free men or nobles. They had lower legal status, lower status in reality, and their bearing reflected their status.

Similarly, the more civilized the man of today within a system that humbles even the greatest merchant-princes, the more deferential he is to women. The men who are not deferential are hounded out, finding themselves in the lower-status professions, or into banditry, which is to say, outside the magic circle of civilized life, bound together by law.

Sexual harassment laws and scurrilous circulation of e-mails and text messages encourage even leading men to be careful. This is because their rights are conditional upon whether or not a woman gets upset enough at them to raise a case. They can be revoked if she invents a story persuasive enough in a courtroom setting to at least result in a successful civil case. The rights of men are less absolute and more conditional upon the whims of a fully average woman of no special talent or virtue.

When the men cross that line separating the inside from the outside, the cooperative magic of the law loses its power, and there is nothing left but squabbling and fighting among rival powers. Ultimately, men are the fighters of the species. A weighty kick from a man can rupture an organ, but there’s only so much that a bite or scratch can do to the human body. It’s not a good idea to hound the strongest men in your civilization into a profound opposition.

If you say that you only want feeble men within your magic circle, don’t be too surprised if they prove incapable of maintaining it.

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