Sexual abuse is structurally enabled in patriarchal societies and rarely reported because the power structure imposes devastating costs on victims while providing perpetrators plausible deniability.

something that wrinkles my brain every time I remember it is the fact that total eclipses are only possible on earth because the moon and sun appear to be the same size in our sky, due to the insanely, astronomically unlikely fluke that the moon is 400x smaller than the sun but 400x closer to us.

I’m sure they were aware this was happening but the reality is that they had no way to prevent it unless they could figure out a way to get thousands of bored men in the dead of winter give up every hope of getting laid

The internet is the first information technology whose native topology is a mesh. Not by accident — it was designed by Baran and the RAND people specifically to survive decapitation, because the problem they were solving was how a command network could function after Moscow had removed Washington.

Somedays it makes me cry to see how hard my kids have to work to survive the social sorting brutality of the American school system.

American media routinely normalizes the personality disorders of the elite. In egalitarian cultures, bullies are routinely held to account by the public and the press alike. The anti-social behavior that plagues American business and politics is virtually unheard of in Nordic leadership.

I call for all Centrist Democrats to condemn CNN and CBS for hosting bigots on a daily basis. Refusing to go on a show with million listeners because it lacks a chyron and a green room isn't a principled stand — it's a status ritual. It cedes the entire conversational space to whoever does show up.

It's my daily experience that folks have very unrealistic expectations of what they can afford. Just a total fantasy world out here. I guess it's a combination of normalization of debt for consumption and mass marketing making consumption rather than creativity/production/maintenance the new normal.

Neoliberalism is maladaptive New Social Conservatism is maladaptive Authoritarianism is maladaptive Could we move on to knowledge now and leave childish ideology behind?

Thank you everyone who has shared in the joy of this book release day with me. I went through some very hard times while I was writing this book and worried about how that imprinted on the work. To get this warm reception is a joy, and I hope the book gives people joy and a sense of possibility.

It's quite discouraging, but not surprising given the educational environment in the US over the past half century, that people still sort themselves into totally obsolete Left/Right/Liberal/Conservative political buckets. As a result, we get equally useless categorizations like Consumer/Worker etc.

In my culture we view appeals to nuance and avoidance of contention in the face of anti-social behaviors, as pure cowardice. It's the false secondary self, the commanding self, desperately choosing self-preservation over truth and sacrifice. I guess lots of time on the North Sea teaches things.

Why is Nordic journalism not a game of carrots and sticks, persuasion and mind manipulation?

Yes, we feel empathy for good but ignorant people that cannot distinguish between good and evil, but that does not mean that we passively let them destroy our nation and drag the whole world down with their bizarre misunderstandings of religious texts.

1/ Sweden taxes flat. America taxes progressive. Guess which one creates equal opportunity and achieves better outcomes on all relevant metrics? The answer tells you something Democrats refuse to say out loud: taxes don't fund a sovereign government. They shape the country it builds.

If was the editor of Vanity Fair, I would assign a journalist to the task of building a psychological portrait of Donald Trump as the Mad King presiding over end stage Conservatism.

Finance is the path to Constitutional reform that establishes a permanent administrative state as an independent 4th branch of government staffed by a representative body of citizen domain experts that maintain knowledge and institutional continuity through cycles of ideological volatility.

The overwhelming evidence from evolutionary biology, sociology and economics is that borders and restrictions on freedom of movement are maladaptive and serve no other purpose than demarking legal regions and preventing military invasion. Everything else is emotions, false assumptions and ideology.

This is also fascist to the core. The mix of the sacred & the most vulgar stuff. The glorification of violence against "insane" and last but not least the self-ascription of normality that is contradicted by the extremist tone of the leader's promise of raw and radical violence against his enemies.

Palmer writes a devastating critique of Mearsheimer while apparently not noticing that every failure he identifies is constitutive of the disciplines, not aberrant within them. This article summarizes what's wrong with PoliSci and Economics. 18th century assumptions = 18th century conclusions.

What is it about car culture that prevent clear thinking? www.ft.com/content/8ac8...

In terms of winning the peace, the United States has not won a single war since 1945. We know why but the "conservative" minority cannot accept the answer without exiting the knowledge bubble that contains both the Left and the Right.

The same structural logic — rights without communal accountability, autonomy without obligation, sovereignty without retreat — operates at every scale from the individual armed citizen to the nuclear-armed state. And at every scale, it produces the same outcome: escalation without resolution.

a whole slew of Neoliberal Economists have been very influential in the Democratic Party but someone like Joseph Stiglitz has not. To me this fact gives away the structural conservatism built into Hamiltonian Federalism. Stiglitz correctly treats finance as a site of power. Democrats have not.

"We can't afford it" translates to one of three things: we chose not to prioritize it, we lack the institutional capacity, or we judge the inflationary/distributional consequences unacceptable. The binding constraint is always institutional, and thus political, not financial.

I see a historical awakening in America. 1/ Americans are waking up. Not to a party. Not to a platform. To the fact that they were lied to about what was possible. That's the most dangerous kind of awakening. And the most fertile.

I’ve been around the army for 53 years. Never been more pessimistic about the health of the institution — it’s likely to get much worse over the next 34 months. Rebuilding the norms and ethics of the profession is going to take a generation+.

Culture is a product of institutional design. Welcome to the clash between 21st century network structures and 18th century hierarchy.

Everyone inside a patriarchal pecking order structure is being used — including the people who think they're running it.

I was a night janitor at American movie theaters for several years in my early twenties; this picture represents relatively good behavior. Culture is a product of institutional design.

Sam Alito and the Trump Administration argue that my children, born in California, are somehow less American than a child born in California to parents from Indiana.

The Administration's argument this morning reveals the cage in real time: Sauer argued that automatically granting citizenship to people born in the United States "demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship" and "operates as a powerful pull factor for illegal immigration." 1/2

The 14th Amendment has stood for 158 years. Wong Kim Ark has stood for 128 years. Attempting to overturn them by executive order is the very definition of the rationalist radicalism that Burkean conservatism exists to oppose. American Conservatism is incoherent and should be easy to defeat.

Justice Roberts inadvertently reveals the real problem facing every American

Hierarchical centralization and individualism go hand in hand, because centralization gradually eliminates the functional need for individuals to understand and comport themselves as social creatures, accountable to one another and nourished by and embedded in their proximate social contexts. 1/2

I made this years ago and can’t update (no bberg) but one big difference from the 1970s is that the 70s saw a massive increase in workforce participation, especially by women, that bolstered household incomes even as real average hourly earnings fell.

What does evolutionary biology tell us about structures that produce human societies locked inside of ideological debates based on deeply flawed assumptions and inaccurate concepts? What paths to group functional outcomes exist? A thread

While patriarchal cultures do not, I think it may be helpful to highlight that many cultures from Afghanistan to Scandinavia **do learn from history**. The question isn't why we don't learn from history. It's why **certain institutional structures** can't. Science tells us why that is.

Someone should introduce American voters to Axel Oxenstierna before it's too late because apparently studying Liddel Hart's work at War College isn't doing the trick.

Axel Oxenstierna and my ancestors understood something in 1634 that is foundational to functional democracy and capitalism: the backbone of democracy is the independent administrative state staffed by a representative body of citizen domain experts.

I knew Kathy in the 80s and she was just the nicest down-to-earth person. It's just awful that predators are not more effectively marginalized and sanctioned by our system.

Serious people understand that corporate profits are built on a foundation of a functional administrative state. As of Monday morning in Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 is down approximately 4.1% to 5.0% in early trading.

There's no left in the US, but we should talk about the phantasmagoria in Conservatives' heads! 😅

David hits the nail on the head and here's a news flash for corporate media: the greatest asset transfer from men to women is well underway. The future belongs to plain old normie middle-aged lib women.

The framers didn't design an adaptive system. They designed a hierarchical republic with competing power centers — a within-group selection dominance structure with internal friction built in. The checks and balances are not egalitarian; they're competing hierarchies. The design is the problem.

What is the psychology of automatically defending a favored authority figure, doctrine, ideology, field of study etc, instead of seeking truth, knowledge, and solutions?

Yes. And evolutionary biology explains why the Anglophone intellectual tradition keeps rediscovering that its two available settings both produce concentration — of capital or of state power — and keeps treating that rediscovery as a novel crisis rather than a structural design feature. A thread 1/

Addicts lie

It's very difficult to be an honest and effective journalist in the US. Christopher is one of the few.

For four centuries the patriarchal hierarchy controlled the rate of informational inflow. The internet removes that control entirely. Suddenly, women trapped in patriarchal relationships see the way out: asset rights! Not just financial independence. Psychological and financial autonomy.