Jettison Your Tribal Politics!

I’ve repeatedly expressed my concern with the idea of a “political spectrum.  In their book, The Myth of Left and Right: How the Political Spectrum Misleads and Harms America Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis argue that the notion of a “political spectrum” is the root of much of our political dysfunction. I agree and I would recommend reading their article at Heterodox Academy. Here are a few excerpts from their article:

For most of our history, Americans didn’t think in terms of a spectrum. They just saw (accurately) that America had a two-party system and that each of these parties stood for a bundle of unrelated positions. This all started to change after World War I when Americans imported the left-right model that had arisen in Europe during the French Revolution. Since then, the use of the spectrum has grown exponentially and actual policy has been obscured as Americans have become accustomed to placing every person, institution, or group somewhere on a left-right scale (with radicals on the far left, progressives and liberals on the center left, reactionaries on the far right, and conservatives on the center right). The political spectrum is, without question, the most common political paradigm in 21st-century America.

The central problem with this model is that it’s inaccurate for the simple reason that there’s more than one issue in politics and a spectrum can, by definition, measure only one issue. There are a multitude of distinct, unrelated political policies under consideration today (e.g., abortion, income taxes, affirmative action, drug control, gun control, health care spending, the minimum wage, military intervention, etc.), and yet our predominant political model presumes that there is just one.

So if there is more than one issue in politics, why do Americans use a unidimensional political spectrum to describe politics? Generally, it’s because they are convinced that there is one essential issue that underlies and binds all others, such as “change,” and therefore the political spectrum accurately models where someone stands in relation to this essence

We contend that this is exactly backward. There is no essential issue underlying all others—abortion and tax rates really are distinct and unrelated policies—and socialization, not essence, explains the correlation between them. People first anchor into a tribe (because of peers, family, or a single issue they feel strongly about), adopt the positions of the tribe as a matter of socialization, and only then reverse engineer a story about how all the positions of their tribe are united by some essential principle (e.g., progressivism or conservatism) . . . Left-right ideology is the fiction we use to justify and mask our tribal attachments.

. . .  Would it be useful for medical doctors to model all illnesses, treatments, and patients on a spectrum? Obviously not because medicine is multidimensional and trying to model all medical issues using a single dimension would do great harm. The same is true of politics. Doctors get along just fine by talking about specific illnesses and treatments (lung cancer, fractured tibia, bronchial infection, chemotherapy, bone setting, antibiotics), and political discourse would be much more productive if we simply talked about specific political problems and policies (crime, poverty, inflation, gun control, welfare spending, interest-rate tightening).

Yes, all models are simplifications of reality, but those models must also be accurate such that they improve rather than hinder our understanding of the matter in question. A bad model is actually worse than no model at all (as the four humors theory of disease makes clear), and the political spectrum is a bad model. It is a tool of misinformation, false association, and hostility.

. . .  Talking in terms of a spectrum serves no informational function, but it does serve to elevate the temperature of debate and make the public really angry about the “commies” or “fascists” on the other side.

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The Insane U.S. Foreign Policy Regarding Ukraine that Has Needlessly Brought the World to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation

I have encountered many people who have strong opinions about the Ukraine War. Their opinions go something like this:

Putin is Bad. He is Evil Like Hitler. Putin invaded Ukraine. He must be pushed back out. Or else he will invade other countries, just like Hitler did.
No, these are not 8-year olds. They are middle aged adults. They proudly admit to me that they know next to nothing about pre-2022 Ukraine.

Now consider this succinct history of the conflict offered by comedian Dave Smith during an discussion with Joe Rogan:

[T]he list of people with in the government within the national security apparatus, who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long. There's a lot of really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s. When it first started, at least three Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama's Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton, Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time. They all opposed [NATO expansion] in the strongest possible language, and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia.

They were like George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior. There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from the New York Times, you can find it online. And it's in the 90s when they're doing the first round of NATO expansion. And he is furious. His anger comes through the page when you're reading it, because he's like, What are you guys doing? We won the Cold War. We won. And now you're picking a fight with Russia?. And this isn't Vladimir Putin's Russia. This was Boris Yeltsin and these aren't the Soviets. These aren't the communists. These are the heroes who overthrew them. Why are we picking a fight with them? [Kennan] was a cold warrior. He was like, You're throwing away my life's work. And he said, and this was a really a crazy prediction, really ominous. He said, the people who are advocating expanding NATO are going to continue advocating expanding it and expanding and expanding it, and then there will be a Russian reaction. And then when there's the Russian reaction, they're going to say, see, that's proof that we have to keep expanding it. And damn, if he wasn't right. If he wasn't right about that.

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Google/Youtube Steps Up to Protect Hypocrisy and Profit

Videographer Matt Orfalea (who formerly worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign) creates mashup using ONLY video clips and statements published by corporate news outlets. Orf's video illustrates that the COVID narrative kept changing dishonestly, by silently moving the goalposts, rather than by acknowledging that the previous narrative was untrue. Google/Youtube Response: This video is not "suitable." It must be demonetized.

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Anthrax and COVID

Glenn Greenwald and Saagar Enjeti independently took deep dives to investigate the bizarre and, in fact, highly suspicious, behavior of the U.S. regarding the 2001 anthrax attacks. They discussed their conclusions together on Rumble:

Here's an excerpt of the transcript from their interview:

G. Greenwald: We've been planning the anthrax program we did last night to kind of walk through and remind people of exactly what that attack was, why it was so significant, but also the multiple mysteries embedded within it. And out of the blue, not without knowing I was working on it. You came to me and said, I've currently fallen into this anthrax rabbit hole. And as a result, I've run into a lot of the stuff that you're writing about because I wrote about it almost nonstop for two years in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Tell me what it was that kind of attracted your interest to it? Like what has made you so fascinated by this topic?

Saagar Enjeti: Glenn, for me, it was a lab leak. I mean, at the very beginning, you know, of course, we've done our best to try and dig as deep into lab leak as possible. So, at the very beginning, we started with the Wuhan lab. So obviously we have the Wuhan lab, I think at this point is basically, I mean, I don't really know anybody who doesn't believe that it came out of there. If we can rehash that evidence at a later time, I'll […]

G. Greenwald: I'll tell you some people if you want to find out. But anybody rational does not believe that any longer.

Saagar Enjeti: Yes, there is. There is a tremendous amount, an overwhelming amount of evidence to say that Covid leaked from the Wuhan lab. Then you peel back one layer that's almost boring now at this point. And we look at the U.S. funding. We have Dr. Fauci, Dr. Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance. All of that is now well-established. I wanted to keep going back even more layers. So, then we go to the overall arc of gain-of-function research. Then, I decided to go even higher than gain-of-function research to say, where the hell did this vast amount of money being pumped through the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, even come from? That leads me to the 2007 Review of the Government Accountability Office about specifically the bioterrorism initiatives that were sparked by the anthrax attacks of 2001. And what I realized, Glenn, is that the 2001 anthrax attacks opened the door and changed completely the way that we handled dangers not just here in the United States, but all across the world. And our dirty fingers are all over gain of function, research opportunities all over funding people who are going into caves, which no human being ever would be in in the first place, getting covered in bat poop and then getting bitten, going back into a lab and being like, “Hey, we found this one thing and tried to develop a vaccine for it just in case that somebody ever does go into that.” And instead, we now have actually vast and ample amounts of evidence. Not only did COVID leak from the Wuhan lab but actually it looks like Ebola. There is a very good case to say that the Ebola outbreak in the mid-2010s also came from the lab. Then you go back even further. And so really what I became interested in is your reporting specifically around the anthrax attacks, because the more I realized that it all started with anthrax and the fact was that everyone was ignoring me on it, I was like, oh, well, they solved that one, right? No, actually, not at all. The FBI accused the wrong man, the person that they pinned it on. They just blamed it on him with no due process at this point. I think you have to be an idiot to think that Bruce Ivins was the person responsible for the anthrax. I mean, many of the people who were even involved in the investigation would tell you that. And so actually, I was saying I can't believe Glenn has been so right for so long.

When he mentioned his own anthrax episode, Glenn was referring to the previous night's show, where he connected bizarre and incriminating behavior by the U.S. in the 2001 anthrax attacks to what appears to be dangerous biological weapon experimentation by the U.S. ever since, leading up to what appears to be the U.S. misconduct related to the release of COVID in Wuhan. It is a long, detailed, gripping and convincing episode.

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