Every collectivist revolution rides in on a Trojan horse of “emergency”. It was the tactic of Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini… This technique of creating emergency is the greatest achievement that demagoguery attains.
World War I was such a war. That
conflict was so awful, in terms of carnage, that it is tempting to
conclude, as many have, that it was “futile” and “unnecessary.”
According to this popular line of thinking, the fighting was all a
tragic misunderstanding, and so as a solution for the future, the
thinking goes, let’s all have better understanding—let’s communicate
more.Alas, while such thinking might be tempting, it is not correct. The
truth is that Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany understood full well that he
was plunging Europe into war in 1914; he had his eyes wide open, and he
welcomed the conflict, because he thought he could win.
So we can see: Once you’re in a war of national survival, there’s no
point in thinking about whether it’s “futile” or “unnecessary.” Instead,
the point is to win it, with as few casualties as possible—or, more
precisely, with as few casualties on your side as possible. As George Patton—by then Lt. General Patton—said
in 1943, “No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his
country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his
country.”With that sort of mindset, backed up by the best technology, America will always have the military muscle it needs. The hope is that robust American armed forces will persuade potential foes that it is a bad idea to fight the United States. We want everyone else thinking that war with the U.S. is, indeed, “futile.”
But of course, hope is never enough in world affairs. So we must always be prepared for war. As the ancient Roman Vegetius knew, preparation for war is the best preparation for peace. We can pray that all wars we fight are necessary wars, but we must prepare, too, so that we can win them all.
Pinkerton: Learning the Right Lesson of World War I on Its 100th Anniversary
These
are reasonable and sensible steps to reform a process that was being
misused by so-called civil rights activists who had never patrolled the
streets of a dangerous city or tried to make an arrest of a drug-crazed
felon. In effect, activists with the ACLU and Black Lives Matter
believed if it came to a life and death situation between a cop and a
criminal, it would be better if the cop died in order to preserve the
“civil rights” of the perp.Many
of these decrees try to micro-manage police procedures. In Chicago, the
decree will force officers to report when they point their gun at
someone. The results of this micro-management are predictable; cops will
only respond to direct calls for help and won’t get out of their car to
investigate possible crimes. In Baltimore, this has led to a massive
spike in violent crime and Chicago’s crime rate is also expected to rise
dramatically.
The only reason my account was restored was because there was a large objection
from many high-profile journalists and activists who understand the
dangers of internet censorship, and I’m not willing to gamble that I’d
get that lucky should something similar happen again. Being able to
disrupt establishment narratives on a high-traffic website like Twitter
outweighs the benefits of speaking in an unmitigated way.And
that ultimately is precisely the point. If the social engineers can
make an example of a few dissident voices in the public eye, everyone
else will rein in their own speech and behavior to avoid the same fate.
The overall effect of this phenomenon is actually far more effective in
suppressing dissident speech than the overt censorship is by itself,
because self-censorship actually silences exponentially more
anti-establishment opinions. For every one voice you crack down on
overtly, a thousand more silence themselves out of self-preservation,
not saying things they would otherwise say and not doing things they
would otherwise do.
So anyway, there’s my confession that I have been caving to
self-censorship to avoid being de-platformed. Rather than denying it, I
think it’s best that we all admit to it when we do it and call it what
it is, because it’s an unseen part of the people’s media rebellion that
is generally overlooked and under-appreciated. I haven’t really figured
out what to do about it beyond that, but in my experience drawing the
light of attention to these things is always a good idea.
During the past few decades, a disturbing trend has emerged in many scientific fields. The number of researchers required to generate new discoveries has steadily risen …
This doesn’t mean
the research is no longer worth doing. But it does suggest that
specific scientific and technical fields yield diminishing marginal
returns. In the 1800s, a Catholic monk named Gregor Mendel was able to discover some of the most fundamental concepts of genetic inheritance by growing pea plants. In the 1960s, a handful of scientists at university labs discerned the basic structure of DNA. A few decades later, a large team of scientists sequenced the entire human genome for a little less than $3 billion. Now biotech venture capital spends more than that in a single year — one can receive hundreds of millions of dollars to discover narrow applications of the grand ideas that began in Mendel’s modest garden.
Science thus needs less iteration and more reallocation. Researchers
should be prompted to get exposure to a wider array of mentors. They
also should be given more leeway to focus on their own ideas. Some
sciences might even take inspiration from the field of economics, where —
for better or worse — methodological novelty tends to be rewarded above
all else.
focus on creativity and free the geniuses to roam out side
Scientists Do Too Much Research on the Old Instead of the New
CultML 