How to Turn an Image Into a Concept II: Self-Consumption, Research Time, 29/06/2018

Most of the popular political activism around the environment and Earth’s ecologies is about climate change. Which is a very serious topic and problem that we do need to confront honestly. But it isn’t the only environmental crisis facing human civilization, just the one that’s gotten the most press.

Mining, and the pollution that comes from large-scale mining, is another process significantly adding to the conditions that will keep humans from staying alive on Earth.

Yet the problems of mining are much more difficult for an environmental activism movement to address. The causes how* are frankly painful. It all revolves around those rare earths mines that I was talking about earlier this week.

The Tesla auto company is promoted as a leader in developing the
technology for cars to have no negative environmental impact. It's
true that Tesla cars don't give out greenhouse gas as exhaust, and so
can be major contributors to preventing climate change. But
climate change isn't the only form of catastrophic result from
industrial pollution. The more you learn about heavy industry of
all kinds, the easier it is to conclude that we're damn if we do and
damned if we don't. It's definitely quite easy to feel damned.

* If we say “reasons why,” then why wouldn’t we also say “causes how”? I think I’m going to run with this phrase for a while and see what it gets me. Is it a neologism? Is its meaning clear? I think so, but I need feedback from people who aren’t me. Let me know.

Rare earth metals are essential for the core technologies of the renewable energy industries as well as computer devices. Some examples. Cerium and lanthanum are used in hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. Dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium are important for the powerful magnets used in wind turbines. Neodymium is also an essential component of hybrid car engines. Terbium and europium are used to make solar panels, and terbium is also needed to build fuel cells for fully electric cars.

So the environmental movement becomes, inevitably, complicit in environmental destruction. That’s just great, then. There seems to be no way of continuing large-scale industrial civilization that doesn’t cause severe ecosystemic harm somehow.

Jussi Parikka looks at this fact, as well as heavy industry’s dependence on fossil fuel energy, and concludes that any attempt at an ethical geological approach to philosophy will inevitably be an assault on capitalism as a social order. It seems we can’t build genuinely environmentally friendly and constructive technology products, without causing severe ecological harm somewhere in the production processes.

I’ve been talking a lot about the different social orders that we call capitalism. A lot of us have been talking about it. The last decade or more of Western politics has largely revolved around confronting or sublimating the economic anxieties of life under an increasingly destructive oligarchical economic system.

Because sites like this lie behind every Tesla car, every Prius, every
hybrid and all-electric vehicle, it can really drive you into a more
pessimistic point of view about our future. Here's another horribly
depressing fact: Most of the public transit buses we use today are
hybrid, so these filthy, destructive mines are behind every
proudly environmentally-friendly bus. We can't even reduce car
use without driving the heavy industries that to serious harm to
our ecosystems and ourselves.

You can find plenty of critiques of capitalism in today’s journalism, entertainment, and theory. When they occur in so many different contexts, it can seriously confuse the popular definition of capitalism.

If you use the term as a shorthand label, it means entirely different things to different people. So when I write official publications, I mostly describe economic relationships and processes, rather than the single label for this diverse family of systems.

Geological philosophy, as Parikka describes its mechanics, is an ontology and an advocacy all at once, because thinking philosophically about geology displays the most destructive aspects of capitalist economics. Unlike most of the capitalism-critical traditions, geological (and ecological) thinking focusses on the physical destruction of Earth’s processes and ecologies, rather than directly human misery.

Capitalist society is produced through societies’ energy consumption to build and consume things. But not all energy consumption is capitalistic. You properly call it capitalism when you cross a threshold of intensity in energy production that radically transforms how your society operates.

More than this. Crossing the threshold of heavy industry’s intensity of energy production and consumption transforms what is and isn’t possible for a particular society. That change in what can be is far more profound than a mere change in what is. Keeping energy consumption in a particular, very intense range limits some possibilities and opens others.

Here’s the question you’re left with. Are the possibilities of a high-intensity lifestyle of energy consumption better overall then the possibilities of low-intensity energy production? Is the worst of one better than the best of the other?

Which one?

Ambition to Change the World, Composing, 25/04/2018

So I’m going to take a quick break from going through Paul Patton today. The note that I want to follow up yesterday’s “Mapping Thought” post with, it has a lot to do with the ontology of virtual multiplicities. And I don’t really have the energy tonight to translate that out of mad crazy technical language.

So I thought I’d post a few thoughts about another project I’m working on, which will help me wrap my head around the shape of what I need to write.

This month, I officially joined the team at Ghubril Ltd, a startup think tank specializing in program evaluation for the global NGO and United Nations sector. We produce regular publications – policy papers and white papers – and sell subscriptions to receive them direct.

Explore the website, which I’ll link here again for the second time, and you’ll see the kind of subject matters we work on. We push progressive policy – we do research on different pathways to create a healthier, stronger, freer human civilization that lives in greater harmony with the ecologies of Earth.

This month, our papers all revolve around climate change and related ecological issues. In a way, I have it very easy this month, because I already wrote a book about all this.

My own paper for this month revolves around how you actually make a sustainable society permanent. It needs a complete transformation of the culture. And the best route there is activism. It’s also the slowest-moving of all the methods you could use.

President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic embraced by
Richard Nixon, who was Vice-President of the United States at the
time. Trujillo was one of the many brutal dictators the US
government supported as part of anti-communist geopolitical
strategy. He was responsible for brutal repression of dissidents, the
mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Haitians and other black
people from Dominican territory, and on a personal level,
regular sexual assaults against young Dominican women as if
the country's population were his own personal harem.
Trujillo was also a dedicated environmentalist, expanding
protected natural lands in his country and ordering a large-scale
reforestation campaign.

You can use the laws of your country, of course. But that runs into the problem that countries only have jurisdiction over limited amounts of territory. If Canada becomes the greenest* country on Earth, we’re still in a lot of trouble if the United States’ government grows more indifferent to ecological sanity.

* Political and economically.

And law is an inherently coercive tool as well. It encourages resistance, as part of the natural human instinct to rebel – against authority, against some perceived popular consensus. We’re all punks at heart. It’s just the content that varies. It’s why Paul Ryan can love Rage Against the Machine, and listen to the songs as if they’re about him.

The only way to guarantee that a society will change in a particular direction is the transformation of people’s very moralities. What Nietzsche called the transvaluation of values.

Now, I’ve known plenty of Nietzsche scholars in my time. And many philosophers who’ve followed in the tradition that Nietzsche began. But it’s very difficult to find concrete policy prescriptions for the transformation of popular morality. So I feel like I’m standing on my own here.

So where I’m still trying to punch through as a writer of a policy paper here is this. How do you explain the difficulty of activism as a strategy, while also making clear that activism is the only strategy that can be genuinely successful at all?

It means explaining the ontology of society. It’s not that sociological-scale events and bodies are entirely determined by the psychological and individual-scale. That would reduce the social causally to functions of the individual, which won’t work at all.

But the social is constituted through the relationships among individuals, across all the channels that humans use to communicate with each other. There’s a constant feedback loop of influence across the two scales, each individual being a quantum constituting the entire social field in action together.

From another angle, the difference between the social and the individual is epistemic, a matter of knowledge and investigation. The specific scientific techniques that investigate individual-scale events can’t work to investigate social-scale events. Same goes for techniques for social investigation and the individual scale.

So here’s where I stand. The concept that I’m working with is explaining how the individual / psychological functions as the quantum constituent of a social field. Meanwhile, the phase difference from individual to social – from quantum to field – requires different sciences to deal with each.

Which is fine. Now how do I explain this as a matter of policy prescriptions for process models?

I’m writing this at 23.00. I need to sleep on this.

If We Can’t Go Back Then We Have to Overcome, Research Time, 19/12/2017

It’s a wistful book, What Is Philosophy?. There aren’t too many philosophy books that you can call wistful. But Gilles has his moments.

There's a moment about halfway through the book when Deleuze wonders whether the uniquely vibrant spirit of Hellenic culture could emerge in human communities again. The Hellenes lived with convivial hearts, where your ambition was to get rich enough to spend it all, leading your society through a jovial parliament of friendly, back-slapping rivals. Can it return?

There was once a young man who was very strong, with a good
heart, but who could not express himself in words. He could dream
about terrors that were coming to his people. Death and terror.
He wanted to warn them – he had to warn them.

Of course it can’t, because we live in a contingent universe where nothing can return exactly as it once was. But you can ask whether a human society can produce a similar cultural balance of brotherhood, ego, and intelligence.

But that spirit can’t return. Deleuze knows it. The question is why. When you ask why, you’re asking for reasons. Now, reasons are different from causes. A cause is a question of how, not why, but that’s a matter for semantics.

The distinction between why and how can help work out the difference between a reason and a cause.

Causes bring new processes about – they’re production processes. The universe being as complex as it is, nothing really has only one cause. That we ever thought causality worked that way was a matter of cultural stupidity – Western culture understood causality with images of billiard balls and clocks.

Compared to our contemporary understanding of complex systems – the sciences of turbulence, chance, and contingency – the West at the beginning of the imperialist era were worse than blind. They were foolish. Especially since the best ancient philosophical tradition that could help Westerners was about to get hit with a shotgun blast of colonialism.

But I’m digressing a little. Causes refer to the field of dynamic material processes whose activity constitutes the universe. Reasons refer to conditions – What about the world has to change to make a particular event more or less likely? Possible or impossible?

They were his friends, his family. He had to warn them, make plans,
do something to protect themselves from the coming horror. But he
could not speak well. He could only speak from his heart, not from
his mind. All he could say was, "The horror! It is coming!"

It’s what Bertrand Russell called the difference that makes a difference. Punny Brit bastard.

But yes, the question why hunts down possibility conditions, what kind of world there has to be for something to happen. So what’s changed possibility conditions so radically that the boisterous friendships of Hellenic culture can’t emerge in a new context?

Capitalism is one. The Hellenes never had to deal with the universal social solvent. Pick your flavour of capitalism. Industrial capitalism is a system whose products include mass manufacturing, revolutions in medical and communication technology, and pollution so thick and omnipresent that it’ll likely kill us all.

But the more relevant aspect of capitalism is the venture finance capitalism that I talked about yesterday – the one that converts the profit motive into billion-dollar piracy. Yet capitalism itself has that spark of freedom at the heart of all its processes – creativity in destruction. You have to raze to build again, even if the fires are horrifying.

No, Deleuze picks a worse fire than capitalism. However terrible the effects of unrestrained capitalist desire are, there remains a liberatory force in the structure of its system.

Held back from piracy and governed with heart, capitalism can lay the conditions for a free society – it’s the liberal vision of freedom. Maybe the liberal vision has become impossible now, but it could still have been – at least in its ideal, conceptual, philosophical form – a flight to freedom on many vectors.

Even for us, who think we're so smart and articulate, we find it tough
to talk about the real horror. We can make films, paint amazing
images of terror and its looming face. But look into the abyss itself
and it will do more than stare back. The abyss will make you as
empty as it is. Unless there's a friend to hold you back from the
ethical solvent of the desire for horror.

No, Deleuze is thinking of the Holocaust. We’ve become a people – humanity, that is – who kills by the millions. Worse than that, we’ve come to find it ordinary. Even worse than that – as if it could get worse – we’ve come to find it fun. It’s something we want, a desire for genocide. Mass murder has become a path to personal and community fulfillment.

Not that this happens very often. Anytime is too often, but there are rarely more than a few active genocides happening at a time. Most of them are slow matters of cultural displacement. This century, things are getting more terrifyingly frequent.

But a crime like the systematic murder and displacement of millions has become a matter of course. An ordinary thing. People run on this as a campaign platform in elections, win, then do it.

Can we be convivial friends in such a world? Deleuze doesn’t think we can, and I don’t think so either. Consider the magnitude of the destruction we bring on each other every day. Friends can’t smile and joke when faced with that kind of knowledge.

Philosophy in a culture where this horrific violence has become so ordinary can’t be so jocular or congenial. Philosophy for humans in the 21st century emerges from the tears of friends consoling each other over terrible losses, wondering how and why such things could happen.

What Does It Take to Control History Itself? Research Time, 11/10/2017

When I come up with titles like that, you can tell I grew up watching a lot of Doctor Who. But I’m actually going there by the end of this few hundred words, I think.

I noticed a curious passage in The Human Condition, where Hannah Arendt – in her abstract conceptual approach and her historian’s style of evocative writing – starts talking about network effects.

Even something as ordinary as a timely trip to the bathroom can have
amazing consequences that are impossible to predict.

Not in any technical sense, of course. The Human Condition came long before Bruno Latour and his sociological actor-network theory, or the popular knowledge of neural networks in artificial intelligence research, or any of the networked communications infrastructure our civilization depends on today.

Arendt is talking about the capacity for a small act in any human society to have outsized effects. Consequences spiral outwards from any action, always expanding their power well beyond an actor’s intention.

What do we think of before we make any relatively significant action in our lives? I don’t necessarily mean only the obvious decisions about whether I should marry this person or bomb this country. Those are events with clear meaning and many unintended consequences.

She’s talking about events like conversations about important topics with a friend. Politics, love, business, family – anything that you’d share with someone you trust.

She's even talking about utterly trivial events like picking up a package from the post office, bumming a ride home from work with a friend, going to the bathroom.

Any event can have unintended consequences because we can’t perceive – in the moment of our action – all the indirect and systematic affects that can flow from it. We can’t see the entire web of causality – forward and backward, molecular and molar – at once.

That’s the power and gravity of human action, according to Arendt. Any one of our actions could occur at what turns out to be a critical juncture of causes and processes. Even our most trivial action can have knock-on consequences that transform the world.

That would be a fantastic novel to write, actually. Also reminds me of what I’ve read about Laozi.

What would it take to grab hold of chaos? To bend chaos to your will and make sure that only what you planned would happen.

Kill Your Idols XI: Seeing Only the Conspiracy, Research Time, 23/08/2017

What have I figured out from the last two weeks of speculations, drafts, dry-runs, reflections, and meta-reflections?

I’ve been looking at a fateful decision point in the development of revolutionary philosophical thinking – Europe’s anti-communist crackdowns of the 1920s – to see what lessons this very different moment may have for us. It’s a lesson about the sources of power, violence, and stability in human society.

Thinking of freedom all too often involves philosophies that began
in prison cells.

Gramsci’s moment – holed up in a prison cell, wondering with powerful philosophical rigour where it all went so wrong – illuminates a common mistake in a lot of political activism, no matter its ideology. All too often, you misunderstand the nature of political agency.

Gramsci’s fellow revolutionaries of industrial Europe after the First World War made a curious version of that mistake. They absorbed a strange necessitarianism from their twisty intellectual heritage.

They were dedicated communists whose goal was a political revolution to build a more fair and equal society. That was their heritage from Karl Marx himself, both in his most popular works like Capital and in his work as a political organizer.

But they also believed that transformation of the entire industrialized West was inevitable once one revolution succeeded. That was their heritage from the metaphysics of conservative Hegelianism that no one admitted had influenced them.

When Antonio Gramsci was writing his Prison Notebooks, he was figuring out what about the world was different from their expectations. Not just the contingency of real political developments, but why those contingencies led to such a decisive defeat.

Chomsky's propaganda model of communication has functioned until
recently as the Western left's primary way to interpret the world. I'd
venture it was an important cause of how ineffectual the left was
until the millennial wave of feminism and the post-Ferguson civil
rights movement.

The concept he used to understand those key differences between Russia and Western Europe was hegemony. He adapted it from the vocab of studies of international political jockeying, where it described a regional power’s military and diplomatic influence.

Applied to a domestic sphere, hegemony was a matter of popular morality. A hegemonic ideology is the predominant public morality of social and political relations, where that morality is predominantly that of a dominant class in a country. A hegemonic ideology’s rules, principles, and ideals are those of that most powerful class – whether aristocrats, bourgeois, oligarchs, or maybe even workers.

The key thing about hegemony in this sense is that it’s domination without a will to dominate. There’s no central organizing power directing the expressions of hegemonic morality. Instead, there are networks of relationships throughout a society, and the moralities of particular people or groups have a higher prestige and influence on the thinking and behaviour of others.

I think I’ll pick up Henri Bergson’s Two Sources later this year. It would make a good source of ideas for a framework of how more rigorous concepts of non-intentional causality work in social and political investigations.

The problem with thinking in terms of hegemony is that it can really easily drift into conspiratorial thinking. That’s about what I think Noam Chomsky has inspired in the activist left. He analyzed a complex network of relationships between multiple private institutions, governments, multiple classes of business leaders.

He called it the propaganda model of communication. The one term that evokes a shadowy cabal of masterminds controlling the world – Goebbels for neoliberalism.

Hegemony is about systematic, non-intentional causality. Even the elites are dupes of the system, self-deluded donkeys laughing as they fall into their own graves. We have to understand this if we want to understand reality.

What Makes a Liberal Racist? Composing, 10/06/2016

This late post is brought to you by an absurd day I spent yesterday dealing with extensive plumbing work to my apartment building, rearranging meetings, and going to more meetings. It means my argument is more skeletal than it would be, but maybe that makes it more direct. 

• • •

I watched a clip of a CNN debate on California’s primary night that confirmed in video a lot of what I’d come to conclude about the new reactionary movement in America. Probably the most philosophically comprehensive treatment will come from Phil Sandifer as he drops Neoreaction: A Basilisk officially over the next little while.

In short, the CNN panel basically piled on their pro-Trump contributor Jeff Lord when he tried to spin Donald Trump’s attacks on Judge Gonzalo Curiel as actually being anti-racist. Multiple commentators have called on CNN to sack Lord in response. 

But I think CNN is doing a valuable public service by giving a long-ignored – if horrifying – set of political values the light of mainstream news media attention. When I discuss Trump with a lot of my friends, they dismiss his supporters as uneducated racist idiots. That’s true of some. 

Pictured: Not my Daddy.

But there’s a powerful intellectual movement behind the rise of Trump. Trump is to today’s neoreactionary movement what Sanders is to the post-Occupy movement. Someone who came along at the right time, who has thought in parallel for a long time, and who provides a charismatic figurehead for the movement’s voice in a major state election.

Sandifer will go into the movement in much more detail – he’s already written a 50,000 word book on the subject, which will be published once he finishes all the bonus content for his wildly successful Kickstarter.

But here’s the conceptual skeleton of why the alt-right (or neoreactionaries, or 4chan ghouls, or Milo’s children, whatever you want to call them) think Donald Trump is fighting racism when he says that a Hispanic is in a conflict of interest when ruling on his pending civil case.

The alt-right are the most radical individualists you will ever meet. They’re so individualist that they don’t even believe that systemic racism exists. They don’t think it can exist. They don’t even believe in systemic causality.

It’s kind of understandable. Systemic causality – the causality of conditions, contexts, and tendencies – is very different from our common sense causality of bats hitting balls and such. But an alt-right person – much overlap and ideological similarity with libertarians – only believes in individual social causality.

Now, when I talk about systemic causality, I’m talking about how an institution or a broad social-economic context can foster inequities. And those inequities – when we’re talking about the United States and a global civilization in a centuries-long colonialism hangover – usually racialize. 

These systematic structures and institutions constitute and reinforce inequities along racial lines. It’s not necessary for any of the individuals involved to hold any toxic racist beliefs themselves to take part in, perpetuate, maintain, be harmed by, or benefit from any of these racializing systems. 

The intellectual roots of the right-wing belief that there's
no such thing as systemic causality are in Friedrich
Hayek's Road to Serfdom, a massive popular book
throughout the United States in the late 1940s & 50s.
Multiple times in that book, Hayek describes sociology
and any appeal to any form of human causality
beyond individuals' beliefs and actions as conspiracies
to establish totalitarian government. Seriously.

That’s all that terms like “white privilege” actually mean. But if you don’t believe in systemic causality, you think all that I’ve described in the last two paragraphs is total bullshit. These days, you probably think it’s shit that I made up to justify my individual racist hatred of white people. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d be called a self-hating white.

Having such radical individualist beliefs as a libertarian/alt-right intellectual blinds you to understanding the systematic nature of human life. So they conclude that any appeal to positionality, social-economic structure, or anything other than pure colour-blind judgment is itself an expression of your own racism.

If you believe in systemic causality, you understand that ending racism as a society requires repairing material and institutional inequities that racialize people without individual racism being necessary. End laws and contracts that hold police above rebuke for violence and focus their discipline on racialized communities. Rebuild urban geography to integrate different ethnic communities.

But if you don’t believe in systemic causality, you think none of those material conditions actually matter. More than that, you think that pointing to any racial difference as a problem is itself racist. 

You think that, to paraphrase USA Chief Justice John Roberts, we will end discrimination on the basis of race if and only if we no longer make any distinction on the basis of race. Even to address inequities that are already racializing.

So when a progressive points out racializing inequities, the alt-rightist sees the progressive as themselves racist because they’re making distinctions on the basis of race. That’s why Jeff Lord can be entirely sincere when he says that Donald Trump is an anti-racist and Al Sharpton is a racist. 

To him and the modern neoreactionary, Trump is calling out left-wing hatred of white people dressed in the guise of redressing racial inequities. 

Holy fuck, this is where we are now.

What Haunts Us II: Ghosts of an Imagined Freedom, Composing, 11/11/2015

Continued from previous . . . You see, this Utopias manuscript I’m working on, which I spend a lot of blog space writing about the research for, is fundamentally about freedom. That’s the political message of any utopia worth calling such, this declaration, “When we achieve this, we shall at long last be free!”

And the project is basically exploring what that means. Part of what it does – in the early bits that I haven’t been researching or posting much about recently – is challenge the approach that academic philosophy takes to the problem of freedom.

Unfortunately, one of the most successful popular images
of science is the one the encouraged us to think of
everything science described as the gears of a clock
fitting precisely together and moving with perfect
regimentation. It turned out totally wrong, but it caught
on so easily that too many still think of science this way.

Those early chapters will tear down how the mainstream of respectable academic philosophy treats the problem of freedom. That respectable vision of the freedom problem is the either-or of freedom and determinism (or mechanism). 

The notion survives in strange forms in political contexts. Remember what I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when I was reading Leo Strauss denounce social science. Social science, he said, presumed to seek the mechanisms behind political action. 

In other words, he thought that a scientific understanding of society and politics would necessarily imply that the political doesn’t unfold through the free action of men.* The realm of human action to secure our freedom would itself not be free.

* And with a perspective like Strauss’, it is always men.

That metaphysical exploration of what we think freedom is, what it actually is, and what it could be, leads to a confrontation with the modern West’s strongest voice for freedom above all else. Libertarianism.

Our politics has many progressive movements whose goal is freedom: Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and modern feminism. They have the advantage of using social science and sociological philosophy to build the core concepts to understand the systemic oppression they target.

But the modern era has a curious paradox at the heart of these liberation movements. A powerful reactionary force against them is the libertarian movement. These are people whose political philosophy is the most thorough individualism conceivable. 

Hayek's influence similarly lies with his popular
impact, through the Readers' Digest serialized
version of his Road to Serfdom, how it was first
released in the United States shortly after the
end of the Second World War.

That individualism inherited the right-wing hostility to social science. It's a hostility toward any way of understanding the world that accepts the reality of causes bigger than individuals’ choices and actions. 

That perspective sees any organized community action as collectivist, collapsing the unique desires of each individual to a single political program, universal to anyone. Put like that, it sounds reasonable. But what about when I say the key example Friedrich Hayek had in mind of community action becoming totalitarian was a trade union?

It's an individualism whose refusal to see causes beyond each person’s own choice even blinds them to racism. Not the racism of the self-consciously hurled insult. I mean systemic racism, the responsibility we have for our unconscious presumptions about people, or the disproportionate impacts of institutions.

Here’s an example from some libertarian friends of mine. Because George Zimmerman was afraid for his life at the moment he pulled the trigger, his killing of Trayvon Martin couldn’t have been influenced by racist beliefs.

Those beliefs, and the social atmosphere that makes young black men a presumptive object of suspicion, conditioned the shooting. But a libertarian couldn’t see that, only the beliefs that motivated that precise choice.

At least, two libertarians couldn’t see that. The famous C & G. When they broke their friendship with me, my post about it blew up. It still has more pageviews than any other post I’ve written. 

The main reason that post blew up was because I stuck a link on Reddit, in its Libertarian forum.

They were living examples of the right-wing tendencies in libertarian thinking that helped solidify my analysis. They were very ordinary, quite doctrinaire libertarians. And even though they made a show of their liberal-minded openness to different ideas, the break in our friendships came when they realized that I couldn’t be converted. 

A moment from the terrible Atlas Shrugged movie series.
A common joke was that the films' libertarian funders
contradicted their own principles in bankrolling the full
project. The first film was a colossal financial flop, so a
true liberal capitalist would never have financed a
second film. But the producers were more interested
in demagoguery than living by their principles. Says a
lot about Ayn Rand too.

I was no longer worth talking to after that. It demonstrated the hypocrisy of the modern right in miniature. They cared a great deal about protecting freedom of speech, but had no tolerance for the notion that others were right. 

I’m not about to judge much from the example of two libertarians among a political identity that includes millions across North America. But my friendship with C & G was a year-long case study in libertarian thinking and discourse styles. 

More than a research case, they were also friendships that broke after two years, a long time to talk to someone pretty much every week. I never agreed with them, and never did, but when I see libertarian arguments in video or writing, I hear their voices, even though they never spoke with me face to face.

They’ve become characters, as distinct as any that Virginia Woolf or Mordecai Richler might draw. Characters that stick close to me as I research the philosophy of the modern right. Haunting me.