On my Substack #3
A continuing series.
Below are links to further posts on my Substack. My posts on Helen Dale’s Substack are linked to at the end of this post.
July 2023
I did a post on the deep evolutionary roots of the role of human fathers as providers, how fatherhood is a cultural creation, and the modern shift away from households being units of production to being primarily units of consumption.
August 2023
I had a Zoom chat with Arnold Kling’s paid subscribers. It was fun to do.
Using the very flat business cycle of Australia as a natural experiment, I argued that money is a control variable and that Schumpeterian creative-destruction does not explain business cycles.
I argued strongly for a “No” vote in Australia’s constitutional referendum on the indigenous Voice to Parliament. (A proposal that the Australian electorate later comprehensively rejected.)
September 2023
I analysed the historical operation of rulership as a dance of predation and protection.
I did two posts critiquing ESG (Environmental and Social Governance). Part One on using moralising advocacy economy as a cartel enforcement mechanism. Part Two on the networked organisational weapon.
I critiqued managerialism, which I regard as one of the great curses of our time.
October 2023
I did two posts on how we cannot consciously “see” into the fundamental constituents of thought. Part One on the functions of consciousness and self-consciousness. Part Two on the limits to conscious intelligibility, which also discussed a key difference between Western and Eastern Philosophy.
I did a post on how social crowding drives the origins of farming, the state, and degrades empires.
Events in Israel then prompted an intermittent series of posts. The first looked at the historical roots within Islam and pastoralism of Hamas’s way of war.
I examined how some of the campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote in Australian indigenous Voice to Parliament constituted a form of emotional abuse.
I examined the paradox of polities: how we rely on the state as a social protector but it is itself the most dangerous of social predators, introducing the notion of the institutional commons.
The second Hamas-Gaza-Israel post considered the question of what Hamas is and the problem with fighting networks.
The third Hamas-Gaza-Israel post was a contemplation on the nature of empire.
November 2023
The fourth Hamas-Gaza-Israel argued that the activists of the Jewish lobby were bad for Jews.
I examined the nature of totalitarianism and the utility of the concept.
I analysed the role of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth in turning Western universities into increasingly being toxic nonsense factors.
December 2023
The sixth Hamas-Gaza-Israel post was both an appreciation of, and a critique of, Marxist writer Freddie DeBoer and how Marxism was a dreadful framing of events, particularly of Israel-Palestine history and the social dynamics thereof.
January 2024
I looked at how the stress of mass migration after the invention of steamships and railways had fractured the American Republic along its fault-line of slavery and whether a new US Civil War was at all likely.
I used the example of the failure of the referendum on the indigenous Voice to Parliament to explain why the ALP has such a dismal record of failed proposed constitutional amendments, including differences between how conservatives and progressives ground their identities.
I explained Prof. Timothy Snyder’s analysis of the Holocaust and how it demolishes the justifications that the activists of the Jewish lobby use to degrade freedom of speech.
My seventh Hamas-Gaza-Israel post was a proposal about what to do about the governance of Gaza after the war is over, including dealing with the nonsense concept of hereditary refugees.
I critiqued any strong notion of race, arguing it was a concept too thin to be much use.
February 2024
I did a series of posts critiquing feminism. Part One critiqued contemporary feminism as pseudo-sophisticated collective narcissism. Part Two was on feminism generating an intolerant and imperial sense of propriety. Part Three was on the cultural denigration of the masculine, using Disney Star Wars as a prime example.
March 2024
Part Four was on the creation of a moral caste system based on grading identities. Part Five looked at the decay of institutions, the sneering at those whose connections were locality-based and the problems of evolutionary novelty.
April 2024
I did a post on how to explain bureaucratic dysfunction to a biologist.
I continued to do posts in the Worshipping the Future series.
I also did three posts discussing philosopher Nathan Cofnas’s critique of equalitarianism — that all capacities were equally distributed across human groups — and his support for hereditarianism. The first supported hereditarianism but was less impressed with “race realism”. The second argued for a different take on the history and social dynamics of the rise of “woke” equalitarianism. The third argued that equalitarianism is morally and socially deranging.
