Quote of the Day
When an Artificial Intelligence model is fed its own input as training data, the model will tend to degrade over time, losing detail with each iteration like a series of photocopies until the model collapses into a fuzz of noisy static.
Something similar, I think, is happening with liberals. They’ve become trapped in their own illusions, eating a media diet that consists entirely of their own propaganda, and then generating new propaganda that simply refers back to the old propaganda in an endless entropic Ouroboros. Meanwhile, the quality of the propaganda they generate is degrading rapidly: the deceptions in the news media or the academic literature get more transparent and less convincing with every iteration; the entertainment media gets less compelling, more poorly written, with worse special effects and less impressive acting; their literature devolves into hamfisted sermons mashed together with smut; their computer games feature worse stories, uglier characters, clumsy game mechanics, bugs, and degrading animation quality.
John Carter
March 26, 2025
The Involution of the Liberal Mind – by John Carter
Via email from Rolf.
In general, this is true of everyone in every group. It is human, and probably all social animal, nature.
A group of people, or animals, will learn from the behavior of others in their social group. Only a few cattle in the herd need to touch their nose to the electric fence before the herd knows better than do the same. After a few days, you can turn off the electric fence, and the cattle will still keep respecting it as a boundary*.
Human groups have taboos that seem weird to others outside their group. Some of these taboos may have had valid reasons at one time but no longer have the same level of validity as they once did. For example, Jewish and Muslim rules against eating pork. Or in Hinduism, the belief that the cow is representative of divine and natural beneficence and should therefore be protected and venerated. All the variations of Christianity have differences in belief which distinguish them and cannot all simultaneously be true because of the contradictions between the different sects. These people socialize with others of their kind and generally live happy and content lives even though they have some set of beliefs which are demonstrably in error.
It is not limited to religious beliefs. Scientists have had extremely heated debates about the nature of the world as well. And, of course, political beliefs are not immune from such errors as well.
I think the situation where the errors to generate a feedback loop and result in a “model collapse” as with the AI example is when there is insufficient contact with reality. In the threat intelligence field, we are told to never take conjecture more than one or maybe two levels. For example, if you see an IP address scanning your outward facing network, and you know that last week this same IP address was associated with a particular threat actor you can claim you have evidence supporting that threat actor is now preparing an attack against you. But you are on shaky ground to claim that if you defend against what techniques and tactics that threat actor used last week you should be safe.
I view the Democrats as having lost touch with reality. At one point in time, they claimed that homosexuals were deserving of respect, equal treatment before the law, and generally should be left alone if it only involved consenting adults. I think what has happened is that this belief has developed a feedback loop disconnected with reality. The group belief has degraded into believing straight people should be treated as a lower class, and transsexual woman are no different than biologically women and should be allowed to compete in sporting events against women.
Or abortion is about a women’s choice about what happens to her body morphing into partial birth abortions are acceptable.
Or recognizing that firearms are the most commonly used murder weapon morphing into a believe that firearms have no benefits to society and the world would be safer if they were banned.
Their systems of belief gradually lost touch with reality and they are now suffering a catastrophic break with voters.
Republicans, currently, are probably more in touch with reality. But they still have issues where they are straining reality near the breaking point. If there are people who believe high tariffs, in of themselves, are an economic benefit then I am nearly certain they are wrong. As means of negotiating away a tariff against us, sure, that probably will work. Or the war on drugs was a benefit to society. Yes, recreational drug use is harmful. But the deaths and family destruction from alcohol and tobacco use are a huge cost to society as well. And shouldn’t we have learned something from alcohol prohibition that can be applied to prohibitions against other recreation drugs?
People need to get out of their “echo chambers.” Sure, it is easy and comfortable to extrapolate from the echos. But those echos are a distortion of the real thing. And with each echo the distortion increases.
* This is not universal. There are some cattle with a personality that will knowingly take the hit of the electric fence to escape the enclosure.
The best story I have heard was of some pigs. They would form a group, get back several feet, run at the fence, and before reaching the fence, start squealing. They would hit the fence and shoot underneath receiving a quick, and relatively minor shock. The shock intensity is reduced because the total current the fence delivered at any one time is limited. With simultaneous animals distributing the current among them, each individual animal had a lower shock intensity.
I think that there is a significant difference between alcohol and tobacco and most recreational drugs.
Alcohol and tobacco have been part of human life for a long, long time and humans and their societies have adapted (evolved?) to deal with them. Recreational drug use is relatively recent and the long-term effects of them are essentially unknown. There seems to be evidence that they are much more impactful and significant than either alcohol or tobacco.
When was tobacco introduced to Western Europeans? When did people start chewing Coca leaves?
Hundreds of years ago? And tobacco’s societal impacts are very mild, it doesn’t change the user’s behavior a great deal. I think widespread use of recreational drugs is very recent, probably within the lifetime of people currently living.
I’m not an advocate of recreation drug use. Except for that one beer I had when I was 17 years old, I have never used an illegal recreation drug. I have never used tobacco products. I have never used any form of marijuana, legal or illegal. I think they are all more harmful than beneficial.
I know people that have serious messed up and even lost their lives abusing alcohol. And others I know have severely shortened their lives with tobacco. I admit that I suspect many illegal recreational drugs are more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco. But how much is that due to them being illegal and not produced and subject to normal constraints on quality control, proper labeling, and testing? I don’t know and mostly don’t care because I don’t and will not use them. I do know that war on drugs was, and is, one of the biggest excuses for violations of our civil rights.
I would rather stupid people who make a mess of their lives or accidently kill themselves suffer their self-inflected consequences than everyone suffers from their loss of civil liberties and the extreme cost of public enforcement of those laws.
According to Copilot, “Since 1971, America has spent over a trillion dollars on drug enforcement. Despite this, drug use continues to rise.” That trillion dollars could have been spend on something far more productive than failing to stop stupid people from using recreational drugs. I don’t know that Democrats really have that issue right. But I’m certain Republicans spending tens of billions each year on a war they are losing and will never win is wrong.
It seems to me the real problem is the way we use punishment.
We’re learning the hard way that time-out is no replacement for the belt.
And that we’ve been brainwashed into tolerance for things that should never have been acceptable to even a semi-rational society.
Having a drink is one thing, public drunkenness is another.
I can’t help but think a belt across your ass as a youth at home. Or a cane across your ass while you’re still hung-over might help those on the path to abusive addiction.
And just have done with the matter. If your caught with a pound of drugs, you get hung.
Quit playing games with the risks and rewards of society.
Evil needs a quick response.
We all know the lines between good and evil.
But evil will do anything to keep you from enforcing good. Mother’s love and charity has been far to abused in this matter.
P.S. Not that smoking is good by any means. But look up the “12 benefits of Nicotine.”
I was amazed.
Plant stuff (tobacco, coca leaves, opium poppies, cannabis, etc.) is mostly pretty ancient, if confined to certain geographies (interesting, now that I think of it…you’d think there would be trade routes for this stuff…maybe there were & we don’t hear about it much? I haven’t studied this in depth…
The purified substances & chemically modified derivatives & synthetic stuff are pretty much all within the last 100-150 years.
As a rule if you get it directly from the plant (wild type or maybe cultivated but not going crazy with hybrid/GMO techniques which are more modern) it’s way less potent.
Also my understanding is that the war on (some) drugs has been a major driving factor in making substances more potent than they were, say, several decades ago.
This feedback loop is combined with institution al behavior. Advocacy groups that achieve their goals tend to keep pushing rather than disband. Thus gay rights and trans rights blew past the point of acceptance and reasonable accommodation to gay supremacy and trans supremacy. Similarly race relations that had become mostly amicable by the late 90s were fanned into conflagration by academics and activists who were losing their relevance
Amicability and acceptance were never the intended end points, but merely mile markers along the way. Anyone like me who briefly thought otherwise was naive.
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Instalanche!
Great article – spot on. And as for ‘drugs’ –
recreational drugs’ or whatever one wants to call them – two points. Why do some people believe that the use of recreational drugs is a recent phenomenon. I don’t think that is historically true at all. And never forget the “Iron Law of Drug Prohibition.” “Drug prohibition and drug wars lead to stronger and more dangerous drugs.” Full stop – if one can make the same amount of money and faces the same risk for selling say ‘one gram’ of a substance instead of ‘one kilogram’ – they will go for the more concentrated drug every time. In my opinion, and watched it over a long period, I am an old guy – the ‘War on Drugs,’ on balance, caused more damage than the ‘good’ it did. Bottom line – don’t do drugs.
Personal opinion, recreational mind-altering drugs should be banned, because too many people are are weak and once led astray it’s a very hard road to not go down. It’s a road that took my nephew a year and a half ago. But the punishments should focus on fines and hard labor for dealers, and on rehab and restitution for users.
I believe the war on drugs and ease at which humans become addicted to them, (and have always used them, as you point out.)
Has been a plan by evil all along.
The war on drugs has destroyed our rights, true. And at the same time is killing a 100,000 people a year with OD in America.
While fostering a worldwide pandemic of evil that is crushing humanity.
And society is just accepting it all?
We better figure out how to fight it soon. Cause the rabbit hole is a lot deeper than we think it is.
I’d agree that the War on (some) Drugs has been a major problem, and loss of rights / expansion of the police state, but that’s because the way it’s been run is that it’s basically cover for asset-stripping and rights-infringement, rather than actually trying to solve the problem with objectively-measurable improvements in outcomes for the average citizen.
Your spot on.
As with most covert government operations. Say one thing to do another.
We don’t have a war on drugs. We have a war on human rights. And a money laundering power grable.
With the surveillance state we have now? We could shut down drug flows into and around this country in a matter of hours.
It’s allowed to go on for a reason.
There is only one solution to this, a source of absolute truth and consistent adherence to that truth. That way you aren’t making copies of copies, but continually re-establishing your efforts on the solid foundation of truth. The Christian Bible is that source of truth. While you point out differences between Christian denominations as well as sects and even cults claiming a Christian mantle, we still have the Bible to come back to and understand for ourselves, using a consistent hermeneutic and application. As we do that, then we can recognize our faults and failures and sins, repent and believe the truth, and make real progress against the evil and failures of the world around us.
Drugs – AFAIC the development of narcan had a negative effect on the drug problem. Now the druggies – when they OD – get a shot or two of narcan(~ $20-40 per hit) from the EMTs, get transported, wake up in the emergency room, and go looking for their next hit. In point of fact I knew a guy who bragged about getting “narcanned” seven times in one year. Calculate the cost of that on the medical system over a year. And don’t get me started on my views on the fentanyl “crisis”. Personally I think the .gov is fighting the drug war backwards.
I have sometimes thought that government involvement should be limited to ceremonies delivering Darwin Awards to the families of the people who died from recreational drug use.
But that would probably be too harsh on innocent victims.
I think with the addiction level of drugs today we might want to quit calling it recreational drug use.
At this point it’s more a lifestyle?
Barsoom is a great read because Carter is willing to think (and say) the unthinkable. Sort of a social policy version of Herman Kahn. Plus he is Canadian so that imparts a bit of a different flavor, eh.
All this may be true – but the fact is that many of the “progressive” opinions have been purposefully built and deployed by Marxists to attack the democratic, capitalistic West and the Judeo-Christian values it is based on. Especially religion and the family.
They discuss this openly in their literature. Look at Alinsky and the postmodernists.
Hillary Clinton wrote her doctoral thesis on Alinsky.
And she is not unusual – these ideas have taken over academia, journalism, and media.
Anyone attending university over the last 3 generations has been indoctrinated, led to identify with this agenda because it marks them as “elite”. These graduates took these ideas into left-of-center political parties and dragged them further left.
Popular culture bombards us all with these ideas – that’s all the “herd leaning” you need to explain what has happened.
The real “feedback loop” goes like this: people who have been encouraged to reject religion and family continue on this path even as it leads to their own misery and isolation… Without community or family – and without the maturity or social skills to build community or intimacy – they continue reciting the slogans they learned in university or from the television even as these slogans fail them completely. They are like addicts who keep coming back to a “solution” that has never worked… Maybe it is easier than real self-evaluation, maybe they are already so diminished after several generations of this that they cannot conceive of another way, or act on it….
This also explains their furious, uncomprehending anger at conservatives, and their willingness to believe the most awful things about normal people.
As for the whole movement of communism. It is and never was meant to do anything other than use human nature against humanity for evil.
If one take satan’s long view of the matter. It matters little the end result.
(God and Jesus already determined that.)
What matters is the destruction along the way. Human wreckage is the object. As that is what’s happening.
As for the war on drugs? Are we truly fighting one?
The government has RICO/anti-terror laws, and the ability to track down people at the J6 rally. (And if you and your wife have a conversation about your hemorrhoids, a creams ad pops up on all your media.)
But the Crips and Bloods, Mexican cartels? They roam free as feral orcs in the Shire.
Why? Evil wants human wreckage.
And communism is no more than the latest manifestation satan’s political religion of domination.
It’s always been with us and always will be. It’s up to us to fight, adapt, and overcome.
Or die like whiny bitches.
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