OLXIV: rules for reactionaries

But the reality is: this thing is done. It is over. It is not fixable by any form of conventional politics. Either you want to keep it, or you want to throw it out. Any other political opinions you may have are irrelevant next to this choice.

Rule #1 is the one we just stated. Reaction is a boolean decision. Either you want to discard our present political system, including democracy, the Constitution, the entire legal code and body of precedent, the UN, etc, etc, or you think it's safer to muddle along with what we have now. Either is a perfectly legitimate opinion which a perfectly reasonable person may hold.

Of course, it is impossible to replace something with nothing. I've presented some designs for a restoration of secure, responsible and effective government. What I like about these designs is that they're simple, clear and easy to understand, and they rely on straightforward engineering principles without any mystical element. In particular, they do not require anyone to be a saint.

But here is another simple design: military government. Hand plenary power to the Joint Chiefs. Let them go from there. This won't do permanently, but for a few years it'd be fine. That should be plenty of time to figure out what comes next.

Here is yet another: restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practised in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason. As John Jay put it: those who own the country ought to govern it. Mere freehold suffrage is a poor substitute for military government, and it too is not stable in the long run. But it would be opposed by all the same people, and it would constitute a very hard shakeup in exactly the right direction.

Here is a third: dissolve Washington and return sovereignty to the states. Here is a fourth: vest plenary executive authority in the Chief Justice, John Roberts. Here is a fifth: vest plenary executive authority in the publisher of the New York Times, "Pinch" Sulzberger. Here is a sixth: vest plenary executive authority in the Good One, Barack Obama. I am not altogether fond of the jobs that the latter two are doing with the limited authority they have now, but they are at least prepared for power, and real authority tends to create real responsibility in a hurry.

At present, any of these things is such a long way from happening that the choice does not matter at all. What matters, dear open-minded reactionary, is that you have had enough of our present government, you are done, finished, gatvol, and you want to replace it with something else that is secure, responsible, and effective.

In other words, rule #1: the reactionary's opposition to the present regime is purely negative. Positive proposals for what to replace it with are out of scope, now and for the foreseeable future. Once again, think in terms of the fall of Communism: the only thing that all those who lived under Communism could agree on was that they were done with Communism.

The advantage of rule #1 is that, applied correctly, it ensures a complete absence of internal conflict. There is nothing to argue over. Either you oppose the government, or you support it.

One exception to rule #1 is that the same coherent pure negativity, and resulting absence of bickering, can be achieved by opposing components of the government.

For example, I believe that both America and the rest of the planet would achieve enormous benefits by a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration, and a return to the 19th-century policy of neutrality - an approach easily summarized by the phrase no foreign policy. I believe that government should take no notice whatsoever of race - no racial policy. I believe it should separate itself completely from the question of what its citizens should or should not think - separation of education and state.

These are all purely negative proposals. They all imply lopping off an arm of the octopus, and replacing it with nothing at all. If any of them, or anything similar, is practical and a full reset is not, then all the better. However, any practical outcome in this direction is at present so distant that it is hard to assess plausibility.

Rule #2 is that a restoration cannot succeed by either of the following methods: the Democrats defeating the Republicans, or the Republicans defeating the Democrats. More precisely, it cannot involve imposing progressivism on traditionalists/"fundamentalists," or traditionalism on progressives.

Traditionalism and progressivism are the two major divisions of Christianity in our time. Not all traditionalists are Catholics, and many progressives are, but "fundamentalism" today occupies the basic political niche of Catholicism in the European tradition, and progressivism is clearly the Protestant mainstream (historically Unitarian, Congregationalist, Methodist, etc; doctrinally, almost pure Quaker).

If secure, responsible, effective government has to wait until this religious war is over, it will wait forever. Or there will be a new Bartholomew's Day. Neither of these options is acceptable to me. Are they acceptable to you? Then you may not be a restorationist.

Of course, each of these Christian sects is intimately connected, exactly as Noah Webster describes, with a political party and a set of politically constructed opinions about what government is and how it should be run. Since progressivism is politically dominant, one would expect it to have the most political content and the least religious content, and indeed this is so. And as we've seen, in a democracy there is no reason to expect anyone's political opinions to have any relationship to the actual art of responsible, effective government.

Nonetheless, it is entirely possible to be an apolitical progressive. Progressivism is a culture, not a party. Charity, for example, is a vast part of this culture, and no reasonable person can have anything against charity, as long as it remains a purely personal endeavor and does not develop aspects of political violence, as it did in the late 20th century. Environmentalism is a part of this culture, and who doesn't live in the environment? Etc, etc, etc.

The fangs can be pulled without much harm to the snake. In fact, the snake has never really needed fangs, and will find itself much more comfortable without them.

Rule #3: in case this is not a corollary of rule #1, a reset implies a total breach with the Anglo-American political tradition.

The fact that an institution is old, and has carried the respect of large populations for decades or centuries, is always a reason to honor and respect it. That you oppose Washington, the real organization that exists in the real world, does not mean that you oppose America, the abstract symbol. (Nor does it mean you oppose America, the continent in the Northern Hemisphere, whose destruction would be quite the engineering feat.) It does not mean that you want to burn or abolish the flag, etc, etc, etc. Similarly, the fact that I'm not a Catholic doesn't mean that if I met the Pope, I'd say, "Fuck you, Pope!" As a matter of fact I would probably want to kiss his ring, or whatever is the appropriate gesture.

On the other hand, we have no reason to think that the political designs we have inherited from this tradition are useful in any way, shape or form. All we know is that they were more militarily successful than their competitors, which may well have been flawed in arbitrary other ways. If the Axis had defeated the Allies, a feat which was quite plausible in hindsight, we would face a completely different set of reengineering challenges, and it would be the Prussian tradition rather than the Whig that had to be discarded.

Historical validation is a good thing. But history provides an extraordinary range of examples. And there is no strong reason to think the governments recent and domestic are any better than the governments ancient and foreign. The American Republic is over two hundred years old. Great. The Serene Republic of Venice lasted eleven hundred. If you're designing from the ground up, why start from the first rather than the second?

A total breach does not imply that everything American (or everything Portuguese, if you are trying to reboot Portugal; but not much in the government of modern Portugal is in any sense Portuguese) must be discarded. It means everything American needs to be justified, just as it would be if it was Venetian. If you believe in democracy: why? If you favor a bicameral legislature, a supreme court, a department of agriculture: why?

I hope it's unnecessary to say, but it's worth saying anyway, that the only force which can terminate USG by military means is the military itself. There is no reason to talk about this possibility. If it happens, it will happen. It certainly won't happen any time soon.

This means that democracy can only be terminated by political means, ie, democracy itself. Which means convincing a large number of people. Of course, people can be convinced with lies as well as with the truth, but the former is naturally the specialty of the present authorities. Better not to confuse anyone.

What is the truth, anyway? The truth is reality. The truth is what exists. The truth is what rings like a bell when you whack it with the back of a knife. It is very difficult to recognize the truth, but it is much easier to recognize it when it's right next to an equal and opposite lie. A certain device called the Internet is very good at providing this service.

Here is an example. The wonderful kids at Google, who are all diehard progressives and whom I'm sure would be horrified by the uses I'm making of their services, have done something that I can only compare to Lenin's old saying about the capitalists: that they would sell the rope that was used to hang them. Likewise, progressives seem determined to publish the books that will discredit them. As in the case of the capitalists, this is because they are good, not because they are evil. But unlike Lenin, we are good as well, and we welcome these accidental forced errors.

I refer, of course, not to any new books. It is very difficult to get reactionary writing published anywhere, even (in fact, especially, because they are so sensitive on the subject) by the conservative presses. However, as UR readers know, the majority of work published before 1922 is on-line at Google. It is often hard to read, missing for bizarre reasons that make no sense (why scan a book from 1881 and then not put the scans online?), badly scanned, etc, etc. But it is there, and as we've seen it is quite usable.

And there are two things about the pre-1922 corpus. One, it is far, far to the right of the consensus reality that we now know and love. Just the fact that people in 1922 believed X, while today we believe Y, has to shake your faith in democracy. Was the world of 1922 massively deluded? Or is it ours? It could be both, but it can't be neither. Indeed, even the progressives of the Belle Epoque often turn out to be far to the right of our conservatives. WTF?

Two, you can use this corpus to conduct a very interesting exercise: you can triangulate. This is an essential skill in defensive historiography. If you like UR, you like defensive historiography.

Historiographic triangulation is the art of taking two or more opposing positions from the past, and using hindsight to decide who was right and who was wrong. The simplest way to play the game is to imagine that the opponents in the debate were reanimated in 2008, informed of present conditions, and reunited for a friendly panel discussion. I'm afraid often the only conceivable result is that one side simply surrenders to the other.

For example, one fun exercise, which you can perform safely for no cost in the privacy of your own home, is to read the following early 20th-century books on the "Negro Question": The Negro: The Southerner's Problem, by Thomas Nelson Page (racist, 1904); Following the Color Line, by Ray Stannard Baker (progressive, 1908); and Race Adjustment: Essays on the Negro in America, by Kelly Miller (Negro, 1909). Each of these books is (a) by a forgotten author, (b) far more interesting and well-written than the pseudoscientific schlock that comes off the presses these days, and (c) a picture of a vanished world. Imagine assembling Page, Baker and Miller in a hotel room in 2008, with a videocamera and little glasses of water in front of them. What would they agree on? Disagree on? Dear open-minded progressive, if you fail to profit from this exercise, you simply have no interest in the past.

However, an even more fun one is the now thoroughly forgotten Gladstone-Tennyson debate. I forget how I stumbled on this contretemps, which really does deserve to be among the most famous intellectual confrontations in history. Sadly, dear open-minded progressive, it appears to have been forgotten for a reason. And the reason is not a good one.

You may know that Tennyson, in his romantic youth (1835), wrote a poem called Locksley Hall. Due to its nature as 19th-century dramatic verse, Locksley Hall is unreadable today. But its basic content can be described as romantic juvenile liberalism. Here is some of the pith, if pith there is:

Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new: That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

I'm not sure whether this is supposed to remind us more of the UN, the British Empire, or Star Trek. Perhaps all three. But you get the idea. The "Parliament of man" couplet, in particular, is rather often quoted.

Well. So, Tennyson was a romantic young liberal when he wrote this. In 1835. In 1885, when he wrote (adding ten years for some dramatic reason) Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After, he was neither romantic, nor young, nor - um - liberal. While the sequel is also unreadable today, for more or less the same reasons, here are some couplets from it:

I myself have often babbled doubtless of a foolish past; Babble, babble; our old England may go down in babble at last.

Truth for truth, and good for good! The Good, the True, the Pure, the Just; Take the charm 'For ever' from them, and they crumble into dust.

Gone the cry of 'Forward, Forward,' lost within a growing gloom; Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space, Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage into commonest commonplace!

'Forward' rang the voices then, and of the many mine was one. Let us hush this cry of 'Forward' till ten thousand years have gone.

France had shown a light to all men, preached a Gospel, all men's good; Celtic Demos rose a Demon, shrieked and slaked the light with blood.

Aye, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise: When was age so crammed with menace? Madness? Written, spoken lies?

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, 'Ye are equals, equal-born.'

Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat. Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.

Till the Cat through that mirage of overheated language loom Larger than the Lion, - Demos end in working its own doom.

Those three hundred millions under one Imperial sceptre now, Shall we hold them? Shall we loose them? Take the suffrage of the plow.

Nay, but these would feel and follow Truth if only you and you, Rivals of realm-ruining party, when you speak were wholly true.

Trustful, trustful, looking upward to the practised hustings-liar; So the Higher wields the Lower, while the Lower is the Higher.

Step by step we gained a freedom known to Europe, known to all; Step by step we rose to greatness, - through tonguesters we may fall.

You that woo the Voices - tell them 'old experience is a fool,' Teach your flattered kings that only those who cannot read can rule.

Tumble Nature heel o'er head, and, yelling with the yelling street, Set the feet above the brain and swear the brain is in the feet.

Bring the old dark ages back without the faith, without the hope, Break the State, the Church, the Throne, and roll their ruins down the slope.

Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of men; Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast again?

Etc. Obviously, either someone has been reading Pobedonostsev, or great minds just happen to think alike. I don't think you have to be a Victorian liberal to see that this is highly seditious material. Inflammatory, even. Not bad for an old fart.

Well, Gladstone, who was both a Victorian liberal and an old fart himself, reads this, and of course he shits a brick. The poem might as well have been a personal attack on Gladstone himself - especially that bit about "Celtic Demos," which is not a terribly well-concealed reference to Home Rule.

And what does he do? He's not just a statesman, but a real aristocrat. Does he challenge Tennyson to a duel? A bit late in the day for that. No, he takes time out, from his busy duties as Prime Minister, to write a response. Not in verse, since taking on Tennyson in trochaic couplets is like challenging Chuck Norris in Fight Club. But Gladstone was a master of prose - listen to this wicked little intro:

The nation will observe with warm satisfaction that, although the new Locksley Hall is, as told by the Calendar, a work of Lord Tennyson's old age, yet is his poetic "eye not dim, nor his natural force abated."

Take note, kids. This is how you start out if you're really going to crucify someone. Gladstone continues by flattering the person for a few paragraphs. Then he flatters the poem for a page or so. Then he changes his angle slightly:

Perhaps the tone may even, at times, be thought to have grown a little hoarse with his years. Not that we are to regard it as the voice of the author.

Oh, no. Not at all. Then (page 319) Gladstone spends another page agreeing with Tennyson. Yes, the French Revolution was terrible. And the riots of Captain Swing. Etc, etc. But it all worked out in the end, didn't it? What bliss was it to be young, after the First Reform Bill? Etc, etc.

During the intervening half century, or near it, the temper of hope and thankfulness, which both Mr. Tennyson and the young Prophet of Locksley Hall so largely contributed to form, has been tested by experience. Authorities and people have been hard at work in dealing with the laws, the policy, and the manners of the country. Their performances may be said to form the Play, intervening between the old Prologue, and the new Epilogue which has just issued from the press. This Epilogue, powerful as it is, will not quite harmonize with the evergreens of Christmas. The young Prophet, now grown old, is not, indeed (though perhaps, on his own showing, he ought to be), in despair. For he still stoutly teaches manly duty and personal effort, and longs for progress more, he trows, than its professing and blatant votaries. But in his present survey of the age as his field, he seems to find that a sadder color has invested all the scene. The evil has eclipsed the good, and the scale, which before rested solidly on the ground, now kicks the beam. For the framing of our estimate, however, prose, and very prosaic prose, may be called in not less than poetry. The question demands an answer, whether it is needful to open so dark a prospect for the Future; whether it is just to pronounce what seems to be a very decided censure on the immediate Past.

What follows is a rather amazing document - a compact and thorough defence of Victorian liberalism and democracy, and its prospects for the future:

In the words of the Prince Consort, "Our institutions are on their trial," as institutions of self-government; and if condemnation is to be pronounced, on the nation it must mainly fall, and must sweep away with it a large part of such hopes as have been either fanatically or reflectively entertained that, by this provision of self-government, the Future might effect some moderate improvement upon the Past, and mitigate in some perceptible degree the social sorrows and burdens of mankind. I will now, with a view to a fair trial of this question, try to render, rudely and slightly though it be, some account of the deeds and the movement of this last half century.

I should not attempt to abuse Gladstone by excerpting him. But one morsel - especially considering the above - stands out as particularly choice:

One reference to figures may however be permitted. It is that which exhibits the recent movement of crime in this country. For the sake of brevity I use round numbers in stating it. Happily the facts are too broad to be seriously mistaken. In 1870, the United Kingdom with a population of about 31,700,000 had about 13,000 criminals, or one in 1,760. In 1884, with a population of 36,000,000, it had 14,000 criminals, or one in 2,500. And as there are some among us who conceive Ireland to be a sort of pandemonium, it may be well to mention (and I have the hope that Wales might, on the whole, show as clean a record) that with a population of (say) 5,100,000 Ireland (in 1884) had 1,573 criminals, or less than one in 3,200.

But try the experiment: read the rest of Gladstone's essay, and ask yourself what he and Tennyson would make of the last century of British history, and her condition today. Suffice it to say that I think someone owes someone else an apology. Of course, they're both dead, so none will be forthcoming.

In general what I find when I perform this exercise, is that - as far to the right of us as 1922 was - the winner of the triangulation tends to be its rightmost vertex. Not on every issue, certainly, but most. (I'm sure that if I was to try the same trick with, say, Torquemada and Spinoza, the results would be different, but I am out of my historical depth much past the late 18C.)

What's wonderful is that if you doubt these results, you can play the game yourself. Bored in your high-school class? Read about the Civil War and Reconstruction and slavery. Unless you're a professional historian, you certainly won't be assigned the primary sources I just linked to. But no one can stop you, either. (At least not until Google adds a "Flag This Book" button.)

I am certainly not claiming that everything you find in Google Books, or even everything I just linked to, is true. It is not. It is a product of its time. What's true, however, is that each book is the book it says it is. Google has not edited it. And if it says it was published in 1881, nothing that happened after 1881 can have affected it.

Here is another exercise in defensive historiography: skim this facile 2008 treatment of Francis Lieber, then read the actual document that Lieber wrote. The primary source is not only better-written, but shorter and more informative as well. (One page is mis-scanned, but one can make out the wonderful words "the utmost rigor of the military law"...)

You'll see immediately that the main service Professor Bosco, the modern historian, provides, is to deflect you from the brutal reality that Lieber feeds you straight. Lieber says: do Y, because if you do X, Z will happen. The Union Army did Y, and Z did not happen. The US in Iraq, and modern counterinsurgency forces more generally, did X, and Z happened.

The modern law of warfare, which Lieber more or less founded, has been twisted into an instrument which negates everything he believed. The results have been the results he predicted. I know it's a cliche - but history is too important to be left to the historians.

Any political conspiracy, reactionary or revolutionary, is in the end a social network. And we observe an interesting property of social networks: their quality tends to decline over time. It does not increase. Facebook, for example, succeeded where Friendster and Orkut failed, by restricting its initial subscriber base to college students, which for all their faults really are the right side of the bell curve.

In order to make an impact on the political process, you need quantity. You need moronic, chanting hordes. There is no way around this. Communism was not overthrown by Andrei Sakharov, Joseph Brodsky and Vaclav Havel. It was overthrown by moronic, chanting hordes. I suppose I shouldn't be rude about it, but it's a fact that there is no such thing as a crowd of philosophers.

Yet Communism was overthrown by Sakharov, Brodsky and Havel. The philosophers did matter. What was needed was the combination of philosopher and crowd - a rare and volatile mixture, highly potent and highly unnatural.

My view is that up until the very last stage of the reset, quality is everything and quantity is, if anything, undesirable. On the Internet, ideas spread like crazy. And they are much more likely to spread from the smart to the dumb than the other way around.

One person and one blog is nowhere near sufficient, of course. What we need is a sort of counter-Cathedral: an institution which is actually more trustworthy than the university system. The universities are the brain of USG, and the best way to kill anything is to shoot it in the head.

To be right when the Cathedral is wrong is to demonstrate that we live under a system of government which is bound together by the same glue that held up Communism: lies. You do not need a triple-digit IQ to know that a regime held up by lies is doomed. You also do not need a triple-digit IQ to help bring down a doomed regime. Everyone will volunteer for that job. It's as much fun as anything in the world.

Solely for the purpose of discussion, let's call this counter-Cathedral Resartus - from Carlyle's great novel, Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Reclothed).

The thesis of Resartus is that the marketplace of ideas, free and blossoming as it may seem, is or at least may be infected with lies. These lies all have one thing in common: they are related to the policies of modern democratic governments. Misinformation justifies misgovernment; misgovernment subsidizes misinformation. This is our feedback loop.

On the other hand, it's clear that modern democratic governments are doing many things right. Perhaps in all circumstances they are doing the best they can. Perhaps there is no misinformation at all. The hypothesis that such feedback loops can form is not a demonstration that they exist.

Therefore, the mission of Resartus is to establish, using that crowdsourced wiki-power we are all familiar with, the truth on every dubious subject. Perhaps the truth will turn out to be the official story, in which case we can be happy.

The two sites today which are most like Resartus are Climate Audit and Gene Expression. Both of these are, in my humble opinion, scientific milestones. CA's subject is climatology; GNXP's subject is human biodiversity. There are also some general-purpose truth verifiers, such as Snopes, but Snopes is hopelessly lightweight next to a CA or a GNXP.

CA and GNXP are unique because their mission is to be authorities in and of themselves. They do not consider any source reliable on the grounds of mere institutional identity. Nor do they assume any institutional credibility themselves. They simply try to be right, and as far as I can tell (lacking expertise in either of their fields, especially the statistical background to really work through their work) they are.

CA - created and edited by one man, Steve McIntyre, who as far as I'm concerned is one of the most important scientists of our generation - is especially significant, because unlike GNXP (which is publicizing mainstream research that many would rather see unpublicized), McIntyre, starting with no credentials or academic career at all is actually attacking and attempting to destroy a major flying buttress of the Cathedral. And one with major political importance, not to mention economic. Imagine a cross between Piltdown Man, the Dreyfus Affair, and Enron, and you might get the picture.

If the fields behind AGW, paleoclimatology and climate modeling, are indeed pseudosciences and go down in history as such, I find it almost impossible to imagine what will happen to their promoters. Their promoters being, basically, everyone who matters. McIntyre is best known for his exposure of the hockey stick, but what's amazing is that CA seems to find a similar abuse of mathematics, data, or both - typically less prominent - about every other week or two.

The scientific achievement of GNXP is less stunning, but its implications are, if anything, larger. I've discussed human neurological uniformity and its absence on this series already. But let's just say that a substantial component of our political, economic, and academic system has completely committed its credibility to a proposition that might be called the International White Conspiracy. Statistical population variations in human neurology do not strike me as terribly exciting per se - a responsible, effective government should be able to deal with anything down to your high-end Homo erectus. Lies, however, are always big news. If there is a much, much simpler explanation of reality which does not require an International White Conspiracy, that is a problem for quite a few people - the vast majority of whom are, in fact, white.

At the same time, CA and GNXP and relatives (LvMI, though it's not just a website, has many of the same fine qualities) were not designed as general-purpose information-warfare devices. There is some crossover, but I suspect most CA posters are unaware of or uninterested in GNXP, and often the reverse. Many people are natural specialists, of course, and this is natural.

The idea of Resartus - which, as usual, anyone can build in their own backyard (contact me if you are interested in resartus.org) is to build a general-purpose site for answering a variety of large, controversial questions. A smart person should be able to visit Resartus and decide, with a minimum of effort, who is right about AGW or human biodiversity or peak oil or the Kennedy assassination or evolution or string theory or 9/11 or the Civil War or....

To build a credible truth machine, it's important to generate true negatives as well as true positives. For example, I favor the conventional wisdom on evolution and 9/11. On peak oil and the Kennedys, I simply don't know enough to decide. (Actually, I live in terror of the idea that someone will convince me that Oswald didn't act alone. So I try to avoid the matter.) Therefore, I would hope that any attempt to audit Darwin, as McIntyre audited Mann, would result in a true negative.

The easiest way to describe the problem of Resartus is to describe it as a crowdsourced trial. Indeed, any process that can determine the truth or falsity of AGW, etc, should be a process powerful enough to determine criminal guilt or innocence. Certainly many of these issues are well into that category of importance - in fact, I would not be surprised if one day we see legal proceedings in the global-warming department. There have already been some suspicious signs of "lawyering up."

A trial is not a blog, nor is it a discussion board. One of the main flaws of Climate Audit is that it does not provide a way for AGW skeptics and believers to place each others' arguments and evidence side by side, making it as easy as possible for neutral third parties to evaluate who is right. I am confident that CA is on the money, but much of this confidence is gut feeling.

In the evolution world, the talk.origins index to creationist claims has probably come the closest to setting out a structured argument for evolution, in which every possible creationist argument is listed and refuted. However, a real trial is adversarial. The prosecutor does not get to make the defense lawyer's arguments.

On Resartus, the way this would work is that the creationist community itself would be asked to list its claims, and edit them collectively, producing the best possible statement of the creationist case. Not showing up should not provide an advantage, so evolutionists should be able to add and refute their own creationist claims. Creationists should in turn be able to respond to their responses, and so ad infinitum, until both sides feel they have said their piece.

As an evolutionist, I feel that this process, which could continue indefinitely as the argument tree is refined, evidence exhibits were added, etc, etc, would demonstrate very clearly that evolutionists are right and creationists are blowing smoke. As a matter of fact, as someone who's served on a jury, I feel that such an argument tree would be far more useful than verbal lectures from the competing attorneys.

And if these structures were available on one site for a wide variety of controversial issues, it would be very, very easy for any smart young person with a few hours to spare to see what the pattern of truth and error, and its inevitable political associations, started to look like. It certainly will not be easy to construct a nexus of more reliable judgments than the university system itself, but at some point someone will do it. And I think the results will be devastating.

When I look at the thinking of people who disagree with me, and especially when I look at the thinking of the educated public at large (New York Times comments, on the few articles which they are enabled for, are an invaluable vox populi for the Obamabot crowd) I am often struck by the fact that their perspective differs from mine as a result of small, seemingly irrelevant details in the interpretation of reality.

If you believe that John Kerry was telling the truth about his voyages into Cambodia, for example, you will hear the word "Swiftboating" in a very different way. On a larger subject, if James Watson is right, our historical interpretation of the 1860s will simply have to change. Details matter. Facts matter.

Our democratic institutions today, though far more distributed and open than the systems of Goebbels or Vyshinsky, are basically designed to run on an information system that funnels truth down from the top of the mountain. This is a brittle design. If it breaks - if it starts distributing sewage along with the rosewater - it loses its credibility. If it loses its credibility, the government loses its legitimacy. When a government loses its legitimacy, you don't want to be standing under it.

The Cathedral is called the Cathedral for another reason: it's not the Bazaar. Coding, frankly, is pretty easy. Reinterpreting reality is hard. Nonetheless, I think this thing will come down one of these days. And I would rather be outside it than under it.

Again, UR will return on August 14. At this point it will be exclusively devoted to answering the accumulated questions, objections and catcalls, for at least a week and maybe more like four. (Hopefully at this point I will also have cleared out my inbox - although I have made this promise before.) Please feel free to post any reactions to the whole series on the thread below.

The end of the series. Theoretical and a summary of points. I excerpted just the second half that has the summary. You may wish to ping some of the cw2 folks.

The first part has a very telling illustration of the descent from moral outrage to selective moral outrage (and silence).

3 posted on 07/17/2008 4:58:29 PM PDT by jokar (The Church age is the only time we will be able to Glorify God, http://www.gbible.org)

An original article on “the topic” by freeper Harrius Magnus for your consideration. CW II PING !

“Either you want to discard our present political system......or you think it’s safer to muddle along with what we have now.”

....I’m afraid we’re not going to have much choice in the matter...the anglo-european/judeo-christian culture is still the majority culture; still the dominant culture...at present, it doesn’t have the birth/immigration rate to sustain this for more than a generation or so...eventually the minority cultures will begin to seize power as they have in our inner cities now.

6 posted on 07/18/2008 1:17:30 PM PDT by Squantos (Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet)

I’ll read it as soon as I get home. :-) Thanks for the ping on this! Later! :-)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.