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.

I’ve been reading Ezra Klein’s and Derek Thompson’s new book Abundance. This book has sparked a lot of conversation and debate, and, I think, at least with me, a lot of much-needed hope.

For me, the book and its ideology, called the Abundance Agenda, has more methodological and rhetorical significance than any or all of the specific policies it advances. Don’t get me wrong, I do like what they propose, but much more than that, I love how they do their proposing.

This movement does a lot of the best things designers do. Maybe that’s why I like it so much. Abundance Agenda is designerly politics.

First and maybe best, they demonstrate a commitment to positive persuasion. This has been missing in leftist politics for a long time. When I say “positive persuasion” I am not talking about appealing to “emotional positivity” (though they do lead with optimism). I mean that they offer possibilities we can want, instead of possibilities we want to avoid or defeat.

The book starts by telling what we designers call “Stories From the Future”, meant to appeal to the maximum number of people. The goal is to get a critical mass of citizens to align behind their vision of life, and all the policies and initiatives that will bring that vision to life and support its establishment and growth.

In design, we work backwards from these desirable stories. We ask ourselves “can we do this today?” Wherever the answer is “no” we ask “What is required to do it?” The answer to that question is a capability or set of capabilities. A capability might be a new policy, or a new process, or a new technology of some kind, or an organizational change or even a new organization. Once we develop these capabilities, and turn our answer from “no” to “yes, we can do this today” we can start actualizing the story.

In other words, in design we operationalize backwards from a story.

This is what the Abundance Agenda is doing — starting with clean energy and housing.

Part of what is exciting about it is that many of the technological capabilities required for the stories it proposes are in place. Can we do this today? Yes, we can.

The missing capabilities are social ones — alignment problems. And — glory hallelujah! — they embrace these alignment problems as the very substance of politics.

I read a piece criticizing Abundance Agenda as a sort of technocratic revival. I found that angle of attack interesting, because it is right, but not nearly right enough. Technocracy is not bad because it puts experts in positions of power. It is bad because the experts become so enamored with their expertise that they stop responding to non-experts. They feel qualified to engineer society instead of codesigning it with those who will live with the consequences of their actions.

I see Abundance Agenda as rejecting technocratic social engineering and instead embracing technocratic social design. That makes all the difference.

One other thing good designers know very well is that all design involves trade-offs. Designers who work for clients who refuse to make trade-offs in a misguided drive for perfection end up with much worse solutions than clients who seek the wisest trade-offs. Much of what Abundance Agenda criticizes about contemporary leftism is along these lines. In general, the left refuses to make intentional trade-offs aimed at optimal outcomes. It avoids even acknowledging the need for them. Its “idealism” seems to hope for a world without trade-offs — which is unrealistic — and condemns all trade-offs, or at least ones that affect the groups they care about, as unacceptable flaws, which makes them uncompromising, in a bad way.

What the Abundance Agenda needs now is a center-left Ronald Reagan to announce that it is, once again Morning in America. Because the cement gray malaise of now is reminiscent of the drab brown late-70s. It is high time for a sunburst. Sometimes optimism, not anger, is the most powerful force.

(This post needs serious editing. I’m posting it, anyway.)

Last year I started reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Radical Evil. A passage rang true to me, and it keeps coming back to mind:

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

Since the publication of this book in 2002, nearly every “educated” person has adopted the general worldview of Bernstein’s philosophers and political theorists. Most people think exclusively with words. Whatever they cannot say, they cannot think. If the language of evil has been dropped, for wordworlders, evil is just an imaginary artifact of propaganda past.

Because they have been equipped with pre-fabricated ideas and language — notional slogans — to recognize, process and respond to injustice, human rights, ethics and cognitive biases, this is where the average mind channels its passionate intensity.

But for the same reason, because they have no cognitive tools for evil, evil can operate undetected — and flourish.

Anyone who wants to commit evil in plain sight can do so by using magician’s tricks, misdirecting attention to matters of justice, human rights or ethics. The only reason people would behave in an evil way is if the injustice of more powerful people drove them to such acts. See what you made them do?

Or they can use quantification to de-thicken human action, and morally flatten it into statistics. They count bodies, and whether these deaths are intentional murders or accidental deaths no longer matters. 1,139 eyes for 1,139 eyes. 1,139 teeth for 1,139 teeth.

Which brings me to another point. It gives me chills to notice how automatically most people assume war is an act of pure vengeance. That Israel is entitled to some number of Palestinian deaths, at which point enough is enough? The punishment must be proportionate to the crime?

Are you fucking kidding me? That is actually an evil logic.

The purpose Israel’s war in Gaza is not to balance some magical atrocity spreadsheet.*

The purpose of the war is to ensure October 7th can never happen again. Which is the diametric opposite goal of Hamas, which explicitly stated that the October 7 attack against Israel was just the first of many. Hamas would launch “a second, a third, a fourth” attack until Israel is annihilated. And observe the social justice magician’s trick, as the same Hamas official continues on to say: “We are victims – everything we do is justified.”

But according to the atrocity accountant’s calculations, after Israel has extracted its due pound of flesh, it must consent to a ceasefire with an enemy whose entire raison d’etre is its annihilation, and hope it doesn’t ever succeed.

This is how “good” people think, now. This is how “good” people not only tolerate, but support and encourage evil.

We are dying of stupidity.

Note: Incidentally, this atrocity accounting is the logic behind “antiracism”. The best way to balance the justice spreadsheet is to subject oppressors to equal humiliation, or rather allow the oppressed to savor the joys of sadism until they have finally gotten their fair share of this sublime delicacy. It is a disgusting way to understand the world, but it appears it is the only way many “leftists” know how to process moral questions.

This is, of course the opposite of what Martin Luther King advised. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Today’s smug hate-mongers claim time has proved MLK naive. He is now, according to them, obsolete. But these same people were around during MLK’s time, and interfered constantly with his mission. The last half of his last book argues against the misguided “black power” approach. They are nothing new. The resentment-mingers are always there, always tempting good-willed people to succumb to their violent impulses, always calling good “naive”.

And this atrocity accounting is also the opposite of the Dhammapada: “The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified. Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.”

How ironic is it, that the same set who condemns “cultural appropriation” appropriates Buddhist meditation techniques, while embracing resentment politics and identitarianism, which is profoundly anti-Buddhist. And they support the most virulent and bloody cultural appropriation of all time, the wholesale appropriation of the Jewish religion by Islamic supercessionists, who incidentally spread their religion through imperial expansion and colonized the region as settler-colonists. No group could possibly be more anathema to the principles Progressivists pretend to care about than the Islamists theocrats who seek Israel’s annihilation. But of course Progressivists have no principles — only ideas they “leverage” to justify seizing more and more dominance. Only an overwhelmingly powerful group could be this unaware and unbothered by their own profound hypocrisy. Their accusations against those categories of person they hate are projections of their own worst characteristics. If you can’t see it yet, someday you will, and you’ll convince yourself you always saw it, and were never a part of it. But I remember, and I will never forget any of this. I’ll listen and listen, but I will hear right through you, hypocrites.

Neocons, proggos, now MAGA. Y’all are all exactly the same. You are different only to yourselves — and that is what makes you alike. Keep pointing at each other, though. Keep on pointing.

A little more than a decade ago I saw a horrifying documentary on ISIS. Unexpectedly, I was struck by a comforting thought: While Americans disagree on many important matters, we can all at least agree on what we oppose. Theocratic Islamist extremism is something we stand united against, even if we sometimes find it hard to stand united for anything.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today, we are invited to remember the six million Jews who senselessly lost their lives and to ask ourselves how it happened. Many people who believed themselves good supported the persecution and killing, while myriad others stood by and allowed it to happen. As we reflect on this past crime, we must confront a painful question: How do we avoid being complicit in such a crime in the future?

To this end, we should take a moment to reflect on our own personal vulnerability to collective delusion, at the core of which is the conceit: “Had we been there, we would never have gone along.”

The belief in our personal immunity from mass madness — the notion that our own innate decency makes it unnecessary to take active measures to maintain independent judgment against the conventional wisdom of our time — makes us especially vulnerable to mass madness.

Intellectual and moral independence is not an innate personality trait; it is a hard-won accomplishment, which must be perpetually re-won. The default is intellectual osmosis and consequent conformism. If most of what we know is fed to us from contemporary sources, we are almost certainly conformists — even if everyone around us agrees unanimously that we, they, and all who think in lockstep with us are fiercely independent, critical thinkers.

No, had we been alive in a time when we were immersed in anti-Jewish propaganda—on the news, in entertainment, in casual conversation, in the “everyone knows”—and it had been drummed into our heads that Jews had committed all manner of atrocities and that they deserved to be driven out, in all likelihood, we’d have gone right along with it.

Our minds would have boggled at the very notion that our most trusted sources of information about the world were corrupt. Hearing stories of cruel slaughtering of Jews, even designs to annihilate them altogether, we would likely have shrugged our shoulders and assumed it was all Jewish disinformation. We would have assumed the sneaky Jews were trying to manipulate us with lies, and that the thugs, claiming to be the cruelly persecuted ones, were telling us the true truth.

We wouldn’t have bothered reading the manifestos and charters of these anti-Jewish militants, and we wouldn’t have connected their explicitly stated aims with what they were actually doing.

We would have gone with the flow of all our similarly malinformed friends, with smug conformist confidence, perhaps issuing the occasional condescending scold to those who refused to march in step with the right-thinking, right-feeling progress parade.

And somewhere in the back of our minds, we’d have known that there is safety in numbers. If we were dreadfully, evilly wrong, we’d share blame with innumerable others. Our own share in the shame would feel minuscule.