My friend Zellyn tells me that one GPT can train on another and mysteriously absorb its characteristics.

I hope I’m getting this right. Apparently, coders can tweak the ethical coding of a GPT to make it less scrupulous and more biased. A second GPT that trains on the output of this first vicious GPT will absorb these same vices — even if the content it trains on is not related to the vices in question.

This did not surprise me at all. Faiths are multistable things, and the structures that grasp our perceptions and conceptions of the world also structure our moral reasoning.

If you consume content from vicious ideologues, you’ll start thinking like a vicious ideologue without noticing because you’ll share their worldview. This is how the best propaganda works. It encourages the same naive realism, including naive realisms that have beliefs about naive realism and a belief that this belief immunizes them from naive realism. If that confuses you, just think about how Christians sometimes believe that their beliefs about Christianity immunize them from anti-Christian attitudes. It’s not only like that, it is the same belief structure.

This is how I explain the creepy synchronization of belief and even the words people use to express their beliefs. They are conditioned to produce the same “spontaneous” observations and thoughts as those who share their conditioning. To them it looks like independent verification, but it’s just shared faith doing what shared faith does.

If you don’t want to get synchronized, you have to expose yourself to thoughts, practices and experiences others around you are not thinking, doing and experiencing. If you are not actively trying to be an individual, you’re probably the unwitting agent of some collective. And if that collective imagines itself to be made up of radical thinkers, bold individualists and independent moral reasoners — dissenters, in fact! — you’ll think you’re one of those — despite your lockstep ideological conformity.

Natural leaders are talented at giving and receiving respect.

No self-respecting person accepts a leader who does not respect them.

If you disrespect until respect is “earned”, you have not yet earned the right to lead.

Exchange of respect is everything. It should not be rare.

If you are Progressivist and identify as some other identity or combination of identities, please understand something: you are no longer the identity you once were.

You now have one identity, and only one identity and that identity is Progressivist.

You are like a naturalized citizen of another country who still proudly carries around your expired passport, and uses it as a prop for your new persona. This might impress your new neighbors, but those of us who still live here at home see you as the foreigner you’ve chosen to be.

You chose another nation, and you no longer speak for ours. You are not an ambassador.

Progressivists are essentially political ventriloquists.

Progressivists renounce their own people, and then loudly speak on their behalf, putting Progressive words into their mouths.

Do not even say, “speaking as a Jew” and then talk as a Progressivist. You only speak as a Progressivist, for Progressivism. You do not represent Judaism or the Jewish people. Technically, you are a Jew and nobody can take that away. But please don’t pretend to speak for Jews. You do not.

And if you are a Progressivist with a Progressivist friend who “speaks as a Jew” against Israel, do not even dream of using them as evidence that some perfectly reasonable Jews are antizionists. Your friend agrees with you because you both belong to the same people: the Progressivist people.

Your self-loathing, antizionist, antisemitic Jewish friend speaks for you — and that is why you like what your Progressivist friend says and want to throw their words in my face.

Tell your Progressivist friend “Am Proggo Chai.”

This goes for any other identity.

A Progressivist black person does not speak as a black person on behalf of black people. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

A Progressivist woman does not speak as a woman on behalf of women. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

A Progressivist gay person does not speak as a gay person on behalf of gay people. That person speaks as a Progressivist on behalf of Progressivism.

And a Progressivist POCs and BIPOCs? Latinx? Invented genders? Self-diagnosed mental malfunctions deployed as identities? These aren’t even existent enough to have a point of view to represent. Utter nonsense — all figments of the collective Progressivist imagination.

I just read Matthew Yglesias’s piece “I’m sort of ‘against polling’ too” and was struck by some “saying the quiet part out loud” moments in the article.

If you look at Schumer’s book from 2007, “Positively American,” it’s a deeply political book that’s all about sketching out a set of positions for Democrats that can win a big national supermajority. But it barely cites any issue polling; it’s a very intuitive book.

The core frame of the book is Schumer’s imaginary couple, the Baileys, who are meant to be emblematic of boring middle-aged suburbanites who have mixed feelings about partisan politics. Every few years some internet leftist or other will rediscover some of Schumer’s old statements about the Baileys and their reaction is almost always sharply negative, because “make Democrats more appealing to boring middle-aged suburbanites” is not something that left-wing intellectuals are interested in. But that was the point of Schumer’s exercise, he knows that the kinds of people who work in Democratic Party politics care what left-wing intellectuals say and do and he wants to get them to think more about the kinds of people who don’t care about left-wing intellectuals.

At any rate, that was the old pre-empirical politics — it leaned heavily on the idea that self-identified conservatives outnumber self-identified liberals and that a large majority of the electorate is white so you are basically always bending over backwards to appease the sensibilities of culturally conservative white people. The data revolution in Democratic Party politics was the discovery that issue polling could reveal specific topics on which the public’s view really is quite left-wing. There was actually an opportunity to go beyond the Baileys and use empirical science to identify winning progressive issues and stake out a more left-wing profile for the Democratic Party. This unfortunately became a kind of Goodhart’s Law situation where once you started moving left when issue polling told you to move left, you created an incentive for advocates to pollute the epistemic environment by flooding the zone with skewed issue polling. Outside of time-series (how has the answer to this question changed over time) or cross-sectional (how do men and women answer this question differently) analysis, it’s very hard to know what to make of issue polling, which is often heavily influenced by question-wording or has the public expressing contradictory ideas at different levels of generality. But in practice what happened is people commissioned issue polling to “prove” that Democrats should shift leftward on climate, guns, immigration, etc. after Obama’s reelection.

So here we have it.

The Progressivist Democrats do have a clear idea of what they really want — and what they want is far left of what the electorate wants. It is not only left of what the electorate wants, it is left of what most citizens will accept.

Progressivists know that the electorate does not want what they are selling.

But, even more, Progressivists know they are right. They literally cannot doubt that they are right. They do not even know how to doubt it, because every alternative they hear makes no sense. And why would they work at making sense of it, when they already know it is immoral, irrational, oppressive and violent?

(Indeed, it is easier for a Progressivist to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an alternative to anticapitalism!)

Therefore, false advertising of their intent is not only OK, it is an ethical imperative. Consequently, they see democracy and liberalism as necessary evils to work around and manipulate in pursuit of its higher goal of social justice.

“But!” say the Progressivists, “that is how everyone is! Everyone has a secret agenda! Liberal-Democracy is always a ruse, and whoever isn’t a secret Marxist is a secret Fascist!”

And therefore, of course, it makes total sense to assume the worst of so-called centrist Conservatives and to confront them as the Fascists they really are. In fact, they are even worse than Fascists, because they sneak around, pretending to be moderates, when they are, in actuality, radicals. They must be undermined, fought and annihilated “by any means necessary.”

And old-school left-liberals who actually believe all that old liberal nonsense — and worse, actually believe the liberal rhetoric of Conservatives — are dangerously naïve fools, who, for all practical purposes, are useful idiots to the right.

So, in this way, the left “projects” its own bad faith onto its enemies and then becomes the very thing it claims to oppose.

And then, by some perverse sense of entitlement, the left quotes their arch enemy Nietzsche to their enemies:

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

But what is this abyss? Who even asks this, anymore?

It is the abyss of an amoral reality, beyond good and evil, beyond true and false. It is a reality of pure will, where everything is constructed by power, where might makes right. It is the abyss of taking what transcends our understanding as lacking reality. It takes what our understanding cannot grasp and therefore grasps as nothing for absolute nothing. Is is a confusion of Infinite Absolute for a human-all-too-human zero. It is nihilism.

If you come to see reality as meaningless, and absurd and only arbitrarily meaningful, you become part of that reality. You become a nihilist realist in a nihilistic reality.

And then reality must be that way, for if it is not, you are monstrous.

You — you, personally — are a monster in a meaningful, moral universe.

It matters not one bit how many people around you have chosen monstrousness. You stand alone, naked, guilty. And you stand as a coward, because you preferred standing guilty in a herd to standing righteously alone.

So now it is existentially crucial that liberals and conservatives are all just like you. Duplicitous, nihilistic, self-serving, vicious.

But they are not.

And they — not you — know something important that you refuse to know.

Years ago, a good friend of mine started swirling in the toilet of European New Right illiberalism. He said he was doing recon on a new movement that “had mojo”. He read it obsessively. I warned him that overconsumption of this content would consume him. He dismissed my concerns. He knew himself better than I possibly could, and he was immune to this kind of thing. He needed to understand it to oppose it. But as he researched it, he began to see its validity. He recognized how naive and misinformed he had been. In fact, he now knew how disinformed he was, and how dangerous and powerful these disinformers truly were. They needed to be stopped at all costs, liberal democratic niceties be damned.

I told him that if he is wrong, he becomes the very one who must be fought with fire.

He is now, of course, a citizen of the sewer underworld, QAnon.

I tell Progressivists this story and the nod along, shaking their heads with disbelief.

“See? We must fight them with fire.”

Illiberalism is four-sided duplicity — an evil heart that pumps bad blood.

What do liberals know that illiberals do not?

Liberals know that each of us, at best, knows a small part of an incomprehensibly vast truth. We do not already know better. Far from it!

Liberals know that a truth we arrive at together in good-faith will be inconceivable until the miraculous moment of conception — and only then we will see things differently. Those who believe the scales have already fallen from their eyes, that they were blind but now they see, and that they were asleep but now they are awake have fallen into a dream of awakenness within a dream. And now they have to wake up twice to join the waking, ever-waking world.

Liberals know that every one of us finds it difficult to believe he is not right about all his moral convictions, and that when we succumb to this conviction, we trade morality for moral feelings righteousness for self-righteousness.

Liberals know that we are morally obligated to operate this way, and that anyone who believes that the quest for justice exempts them from this morality holds an immoral misunderstanding of morality and an unjust misconception of justice.

Liberalism is not naive compromise. It is the cornerstone rejected by every illiberal builder of world-systems. It insists that no one already knows the truth, that justice emerges only in good faith collaboration among fellow citizens, and that certainty of righteousness is itself the path to corruption. That humility is the radical heart of liberalism.

I think what separates me from radical leftists is that I believe that there are forms of evil beyond mere greed and bigotry — and that these forms of evil are far worse than injustice.

But many leftists see a world where the ultimate evil is injustice — usually motivated by bigotry or greed or both. That is where the moral spectrum terminates. For them, it’s justice, injustice… and justifiably violent reactions to injustice. After long, egregious oppression, the oppressed feel intense righteous anger, and it is understandable that they sometimes express it violently.

I see this as a deeply stunted conception of morality, and that people who are stuck inside that conception are susceptible to unwitting participation in the worst forms of evil.

Far worse than injustice is a desire to make a person or group suffer for no other reason than hate. This kind of hate is not mere anger. It is an enduring desire to inflict suffering and annihilation not as a means to some other goal, but for the intrinsic sadistic gratification of inflicting it.

My diagnosis of Progressivist support of Hamas is they think Hamas was driven to sadistic violence by injustice, because, according to such Progressivists, it was an act of opposition to injustice, and the expression of their feelings of oppression, the violence — even the exuberant cruelty of that violence — was understandable and justified.

And I think there is a profound darkness in this understanding and justification of radical evil.

I suspect that the darker Progressivists feel this same evil in themselves toward others who have treated them unjustly, people toward whom they feel enduring resentment, people they would like to punish and humiliate. At some submerged semi-suppressed level, they relate to Hamas — sympathize (feel-with) — and revel in witnessing them act on their hatred and actualize real bloody, sadistic revenge.

For Dark Progressivists, feelings of profound hatred and desire to inflict suffering and annihilation on those they call unjust are the primary animus of their “social justice” mission. They are evil and they don’t even know it. Or as one famous Jew put it, “they know not what they do.”

This is what I intuited in the souls of Progressivists even before they gave over en masse to Dark Progressivism in the summer of 2020 — and before their latent antisemitism came to light in 2023.

They are not coming from a wholesome place — despite their idealistic and impossibly aspirational rhetoric. To anyone with eyes to see it, ears to hear it, and most of all, noses to smell it, it is manifestly obvious that what animates their hearts, souls and efforts is not good, but in fact, infernal.

They call for a perfectly just world, first, to make unfavorable comparisons between an impossible worldly paradise and this existing flawed world. And second, to justify violent dismantlement of this flawed world — allegedly as ground-clearing for paradise, but in actuality, for the sake of the sadistic annihilation itself.

His anger is not justified. His anger is morally perverse and more than slightly stupid. It is an actor trying to play the part of the angrily prophetic “good jew”, to win approving applause from Israel’s enemies.

Here is the plain truth: If Hamas were to surrender and return the hostages, the war would end immediately. But Hamas has not surrendered, and they still hold hostages.

Hamas only wants Israel to stop fighting only to enable it to recover, rebuild and make more attempts to annihilate Israel, or at least punish its citizens for the crime of existing. It doesn’t even pretend otherwise, and it doesn’t have to, thanks to the moral bankruptsy of Progressivism.

Now I’m going to challenge you to think critically for yourself instead of passively accepting the “critical thinking” narrative you’re being fed by your trusted sources. What made enemies of the Jewish people so evil and despicable was NOT that they fought the Jews until they were defeated and unable to fight back. That is simply fighting a war to victory. If you recall, this also describes how the Allies fought in WWII. They didn’t make peace with the Germans and Japanese once they were temporarily unable to continue their plans to dominate the world. No! — the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. That is what Israel is doing, and it is what they SHOULD be doing.

Here is really what made the enemies of the Jewish people so evil and so despicable: The Nazis and the like attacked peaceful Jews who were not fighting them. They wanted the Jews to no longer exist.

And this, of course, describes Hamas, not Israel.
I suggest that playing the part of the good Jew should be the opposite of what this silly “angry prophet” wannabe is doing.

Being a good Jew is to insist that people stop attacking Israelis and to insist that they live in real peace — with no long term plans whatsoever to annihilate Israel.

Is that really so unreasonable?

Sadly, the sacrifice demanded at the altar of Progressivism’s golden calf is reason itself. One must conform to the attitudes and feelings and beliefs dictated by the editorial staff of whatever overclass propaganda vehicle one subscribes to — the less reasonable the better. The tastiest sacrifice of all, though, is Jewish self-respect.

Ethnicity is our participation in an ethos and our belonging to it.

Identity is how we conceptualize that belonging.

But we can misconceive identity and become hopelessly confused about it. This is what has happened to Progressivists.

The way Progressivists conceptualize identity has nothing to do with actually participating in or belonging to any ethos — including those with which they identify.

What Progressivists know least of all is that the only ethos a Progressivist can belong to is Progressivism — and Progressivism alone.

There are no intersections with Progressivism, only within it.

The moment someone begins to participate in the Progressivist ethos — when they start to belong to it — they lose their ability to participate in their former ethos. They no longer belong to it. They no longer represent it. Their old ethnicity has been traded in for a Progressivist-issued identity, which authorizes and obligates them to “speak as” a member of their former ethnicity — but, in truth, the only speaking they can do post-conversion is ventriloquizing Progressivist formulas.

The Progressivist ethnicity is oblivious to all participatory being — including ethnicity — so they have no idea what they belong to. If they weren’t oblivious to ethnicity, they’d recognize that Progressivism is their only genuine identity, and the identities they list as theirs, which they mistake for the elements of their self-constitution are only Progressivist furniture. Their being is possessed in full by Progressivism.

Again, whoever views their own ethnicity in the glaring identitarian light of Progressivism, immediately ceases to belong to that ethnicity.

In my last post, I mocked the term “Latinx” — a truly dumb word used only by folks who’ve defected to Progressivism and therefore have no legitimate claim to speak for real Latinos.

In that post, I claimed the “x” stands in for their new unconscious ethnicity.

But I missed a vicious dad joke opportunity, which I must now remedy.

The real problem with the “x” suffix is…

…it should be a prefix.

Even simpler: The minute you view your ethnicity from the identitarian schema of progressivism you’ve lost that ethnicity and are no longer in any position to represent it. You’ve defected to a new denatured global ethnicity: Progressivism. The customs of your new ethnicity demand obsessive categorization of all persons into identities, and then viewing persons, including yourself, as Platonic manifestations of these categories. Everyone who still participates in your former ethnicity will see that you have become alienated from the identity you imagine yourself the spokesperson for, but you won’t care, because in your nightmare you are awake and they are the ones who are still asleep.

Progressivists talk endlessly about identity, but rarely mention ethnicity. Why?

I’ll tell exactly why: because Progressivism is itself an ethnicity – but one that denies it. Progressivism has its own ethos, its own moral code, its own culture. But it conceals all this behind a universalist veil.

Progressivists sincerely believe they have transcended ethnocentricity through their awareness of ethnocentricity, that they have effectively addressed bias through awareness and careful technical neutralization of bias, that their dissection of their own privilege with their razor-sharp – but single-edged – critical tools has enabled them to identify and renounce all privilege. Their belief that they’ve overcome naive realism allows them to exercise it in its purest form. The result is an unacknowledged, thoroughly denatured ethnocentricity masquerading as moral objectivity.

To become Progressivist, one must trade in one’s former lived ethnicity for a Progressivist-certified identity.

That identity has little or nothing to do with the lived ethnicity it purports to represent. The identity functions more like an identification card to present to fellow Progressivists, to inform them of your rank and function within the ethos.

When a Progressivist “speaks as” an identity, this is to show one’s ID card, which authorizes the card-carrier to enjoy the privileged access to objective truth and morality to which all Progressivists are entitled – that is, other Progressivists will assign validity to what is said – plus whatever special perquisites one’s identity within Progressivism affords.

But that is the outside view. Viewed from within, one has awakened to their true condition. It is a conversion. It is political salvation. “I was blind to my privilege – but now I see!”

But what they don’t see is the blindness they’ve adopted in exchange for all their new apparent insights. It is blindness to the fact that Progressivism is an ethnicity that displaces all other ethnic participation. And it is blindness to the possibility that one might still be blind where one suspects it least, where it matters most – in one’s own most deeply held moral convictions.

To clarify the difference between Progressivist-assigned identities and authentic ethnic participation and belonging, we need new language.

The term “Latinx” offers a model.

Studies show that very few Latinos or Latinas outside academia use it. Most actively reject it. “Latinx” marks someone who has traded their ethnic belonging for a Progressivist-issued identity.

Progressivists believe the “x” signifies indeterminate gender. But I propose that it signifies severance – a cut, a disconnection from the culture it claims to represent.

The “x” marks what must remain unknown. Because if the convert were to name their new ethos, they’d be bound – by their own principles – to renounce the power it gives them. But that power is the entire point of the new identity. The “x” conceals the new ethnicity behind a mask of moral transcendence. The “x” is an ignorance that is strength.

So let all those who identify as Latinx be called Latinx, as opposed to whatever ethnicity they once participated in.

And let’s also let Progressivists who identify as Black be called Blax.

And so on: Jewx, Gayx, Womynx, Asianx, Muslimx, etc.

And if Progressivists complain – as they certainly will – we can chalk it up to cultural difference.

Since Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial, Adolf Eichmann has been the paradigmatic example of “banality of evil”: the autistically unemotional functionary who is “just following orders” with no individual evil intent, but with no sense of moral responsibility for the role he plays as a cog in an evil machine.

But this is only one species of banal evil. Another banal evil is at large today, but one that is almost the exact reverse. This one trades unemotional autism for hyper-sentimental borderline disorder. Instead of just following orders, she “just follows her heart” with no sense of obligation to understand what evils this sentimentality tolerates, supports, encourages or generates. She feels no obligation to think at all — only to emotionally react to whatever is thrust before her gaze — with no sense of moral responsibility for supplying emotional fuel to an evil machine.

Over the last decade, I’ve heard more and more milquetoast leftish revolutionaries semi-reluctantly accept censorship and even terrorism as maybe legitimate tactics, at least for people who share their ideological tendencies and goals.

Last year, the target of maybe acceptable terrorism was an insurance CEO. This year’s maybe acceptable terrorism target is a zionist couple. When I read the news, I told a friend:

We have a growing domestic terrorism problem, though not the one most professional-managerial types want to pay attention to. I’m really not looking forward to hearing the same kinds of vapid mealtime pseudo-soul searching I heard after Brian Thompson was shot dead on the street. “Well, you know there’s a lot of anger about this genocide. Maybe it would be a good thing if more Zionists felt some fear about who they’re supporting. I don’t know — is fear of violent retribution always a bad thing?…” blah blah blah.

One thing I’ve learned since October 7th: Decency is far scarcer than I ever imagined.

Sure enough, my daughter posted on the DC murders and received this message on Instagram:

I keep having the same thought.

I do not want to prohibit any speech. But if I were going to prohibit any speech it would be speech advocating prohibition of free speech.

I am against all terrorism. But if I were going to terrorize anyone with the fear of being gunned down on the street it would be people who express their support for terrorists who gun people down on the street for holding an opinion they disagree with.

Almost a quarter century ago, I learned a famous quip from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, commonly misquoted as “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” Here is the verbatim:

The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.

A little practical wisdom.

The Greeks had a word for that. Phronesis.

Resentment, envy, vengeance and sadism are vicious impulses that any decent politics should deprioritize, if not delegitimize altogether, and that each person should try to overcome, not feed and cultivate.

Notice, all these vices are oriented not by positive goals, but by negative ones against particular people, against an enemy.

Any ideology that sees resentment and envy as demanding redress, vengeance as an entitlement of the aggrieved, and sadism as justified when it is an expression of anger at past mistreatment will produce cycles of intensifying anger and violence.

Any politics founded on these vices will corrupt any person who participates in it. And such contentious enemy-focused negative ideologies need their enemies as participants, and consequently seek to force their participation in conflict. Participating as an enemy carries the same risk of corruption as participating as a partisan.

Defeat and annihilation of the enemy is one kind of victory for a negative ideology. Corruption and degradation is another.