On The Death Of Twitter

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter for the vastly-inflated price of $44 billion is probably the singularly largest and most rapid destruction of corporate value in the history of American business thus far. While there have been plenty of terrible deals in American history – AOL/TimeWarner stands out as an example, it took years for those business deals to turn sour. Musk has managed to destroy Twitter in a matter of weeks.

While Musk had been known as the visionary genius behind Tesla’s electric cars and SpaceX’s incredible rockets and spacecraft, he has managed to torch not only a social networking site, but his own mystique. Instead of a tech visionary, Musk looks like a terminally uncool and out-of-touch shitposter with a boundless ego and an equally boundless sense of self-importance. Because Musk heavily leveraged his Tesla shares, it is quite possible that he could lose control of that company. Given that NASA and the Department of Defense are some of SpaceX’s largest and most important customers, the backlash to Musk’s radicalism could (and probably should) cause him to be ousted from that company as well. And the next time SpaceX needs a capital raise how many investors will see the garbage fire that is Twitter and think that giving Musk more money is a sound investment? Musk’s infantile antics have real-world implications for both him and his companies.

I said that if Musk reinstated The Former Guy, I would leave the site. He did, and I did. What is even more pathetic is that Musk is practically begging TFG to return to Twitter. While TFG would certainly get a bigger audience at Twitter than at his private internet pigsty Truth Social, TFG seems uninterested in returning. Knowing how TFG loves making others squirm, Musk’s pathetic entreaties must tickle the Mango Mussolini of Mar-A-Lago. But given the choice of playing on Musk’s playground or the one he owns completely, TFG appears content to stay put.

Not only has Musk invited TFG back to the site, but he is actively restoring the accounts of every shitposter, racist, and fool he can find. Project Veritas, the painfully unfunny Babylon Bee, the idiot’s intellectual Jordan Peterson, etc. Musk is rapidly turning Twitter into a virtual Mos Eisley Cantina – a digital den of scum and villainy.

Musk’s idiotic business deal means that Twitter needs to bring in roughly twice the revenue it has ever had just to service the site’s massive debt obligations. The math behind Twitter’s debt obligations simply does not work. In order for Musk to keep the lights on at Twitter he needs to find a source of revenue.

Unfortunately for Musk, he has pissed off advertisers to the point that major firms have already begun pausing or even cancelling campaigns. Major brands do not want their ads next to a racist rant from “JewHatr1488.” Instead, Musk has been pushing for the $8 “Twitter Blue” subscription model, that includes some additional features and a “verified” checkmark. However, Musk failed to understand that the purpose of verification was not to make a user seem cool, but to ensure that everyone else knew that user was legitimate. This misunderstanding led to a clusterfuck of epic proportions as people used Twitter to impersonate major brands. If Musk had already been on thin ice with advertisers before, the botched Twitter Blue rollout made things infinitely worse.

Even if Musk is content to let Twitter go without its main source of revenue, the idea that people are going to pay $8 a month for a septic tank of a website seems hopelessly naive. The only value of a social media site is its people. And as normal people leave Twitter in droves, whether decamping to Mastodon, Instagram, or any of the up-and-coming sites like Hive or Post, the value of Twitter drops even more. Most people are not going to wade through a sea of filth just to hear what their friends are doing. And even fewer still are going to pay $8/month for the privilege of doing so. The chances that Musk is going to make enough money to even come close to servicing Twitter’s debt obligations with Twitter Blue subscriptions is naive at best, and catastrophically idiotic at worse.

This does not even touch on the way in which Musk’s has mismanaged Twitter’s employees. Musk’s management strategy is basically “the lashings will continue until morale improves.” The employees that Musk has not fired either as a headcount reduction strategy or in fits of pique have largely left. At this point the skeleton crew that is left tends to be people who have few other options, like H1-B visa holders that cannot leave without the risk of deportation.

The fact is that Elon Musk is someone so desperate for any kind of attention that he will burn billions of dollars in cash to do so. The purchase of Twitter was not a savvy business move—it was a toddler’s tantrum. Musk’s crowing about Twitter’s spiking usage shows how he fundamentally misunderstands his position. Gawking at a dumpster fire brings eyeballs, but it does not bring revenue. Insulting users is not going to make people want to stay on the site, and once a critical mass leaves, the rest will follow. It is quite possible that critical mass has already left. From my experience, most of the people I follow have already decamped to Mastodon. Despite Mastodon’s issues, it is far less toxic.

In the end, Twitter is likely to collapse. There are plenty of ways in which Twitter could die in very short order. The mass firings of engineers could cause the site to slowly break down to the point that people just do not bother. Elon’s blatant violation of Twitter’s FTC consent orders could cause ruinous fines or even personal liability. Google and Apple could see a Twitter that’s become a haven for porn, piracy, racism, and trolling and decide to boot the Twitter app from their respective app stores. Twitter could simply run out of money and have to file for bankruptcy. There are a million ways that Twitter could die at this point and very few scenarios in which the site survives.

Business and law textbooks will no doubt have lengthy chapters on Musk’s Twitter acquisition and its fallout. None of them will be flattering to Musk.

Sad Puppies Victorious

Science fiction is full of stories of a rag-tag group of rebels taking on the Big Bad Empire. These rebels, using a combination of wits, pluck, and determination, inevitably manage to take the Empire down and bring a new era of peace to the galaxy.

Rarely, however, does such a thing happen in real life.

The Hugos are the Oscars of science fiction and fantasy, an award with a long and pedigreed history of honoring the greatest visionary minds in the genre. However, in the last few years the Hugos have become the exclusive playground of a clique—the “Mean Girls” of genre fiction—who have tried to use the Hugos as a political statement rather than a celebration of the incredible diversity of science fiction and fantasy. Instead of being awarded on merit, the Hugos were passed out to members of the clique, led by a powerful and influential publisher, and restricted to only those who towed the political line.

Cue the rebels.

A group of science fiction authors had enough. They founded “Sad Puppies 3,” a slate of deserving works and authors long passed-over by the Hugo clique. These works were not picked on politics, but on their merit.

The fans—the fans that have been neglected, insulted, or ignored by the ruling clique—won. The plucky rebels defeated the Empire.

Just like the great sci-fi epics, the rebels won—the Sad Puppies slate dominated the Hugo nomination process, along with another fan-driven slate. The old system of exclusion was broken by a flood of new entrants.

Of course, the Empire tried to strike back. As SF author Brad Torgersen put it:

It’s been most of a full day since the final Hugo award ballot was announced, for the 73rd World Science Fiction Convention. If you’re tuned in to this thing — and if you’re reading this, you probably are — you’ve no doubt seen the small mountain of verbal outrage which has flooded forth. Because the SP3 slate didn’t just do well with nominating voters, it did overwhelmingly well. A raft of notions has been forwarded by different critics, to explain the “discrepancy” in the 2015 ballot. Most of the critical commentary takes the form of very earnest protestations focusing on violation of etiquette — though, again, SP3 broke no rules — and seem intent to make SP3 out as nothing more than a “fringe effort” by a minority.

. . .

You, gentle SP3 supporter, are not good enough. The refined arbiters of the field all say so. Your politics are wrong, your taste is wrong, your reading habits are wrong, your affiliations within fandom are wrong, you like the wrong things, you go to the wrong fan meetings, you are part of the wrong circles, you like the wrong publishers, and you vote wrong when you cast your ballots. You’ve been told this for years, in variously subtle and sometimes unintentional ways. But now your intellectual and moral betters in the field are getting more explicit about it.

But the self-appointer arbiters lost out this week. The fans—the fans that have been neglected, insulted, or ignored by the ruling clique—won. The plucky rebels defeated the Empire.

The Empire would rather blow up the Death Star than let it get captured—there’s an organized campaign to vote for “No Award” rather than let us heathens sully the Hugos with our doubleplus ungood badthink. However, even though nominations are closed, for $40 you can be entitled to vote on which work you believe deserves a Hugo. Anyone with a love of science fiction and fantasy is welcome—and the more people who vote for the Hugos, the more representative it will be of the entirety of fandom, not the ruling few.

There is a lesson to be learned here. Too often those of us on the right-leaning side of the political spectrum just throw our hands up and say that we can’t change the culture. We spent inordinate amount of time trying to change the political system while forgetting the culture moves politics, not the other way around. So many of the issue for which we advocate are cultural issues, not political ones.

Despite this, we barely show up to the fight in the culture wars. We give up the battle before it even begins, and the Empire takes over.

What the Sad Puppies campaign teaches us is that we can make a difference—we can change the culture. All we have to do is show up. We think that culture is built from the top down, when more often than not it comes from the bottom up.

How big a difference could be made if small book clubs featured more conservative or libertarian works? How big a difference could some political diversity make on local library boards? There are countless little opportunities for change that those on the right neglect because they become so focused on the narrow canvas of politics. Meanwhile, the other side began its “long march through the institutions” fifty years ago and have burrowed their way into nearly every facet of American life. What strategy is more effective?

Sad Puppies is an excellent reminder of the difference that individuals can make if they band together, work towards a goal, and execute. Cultures do not change overnight, but they can change.

As a die-hard science fiction fan, growing up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and reading Asimov, Bradberry, and Clarke, I loved stories about the brave rebels defeating the Empire. Those stories were designed to inspire, empower, and teach important lessons about courage, initiative, and determination. The best science fiction and fantasy holds a mirror up to our society and gives us the opportunity to look at our world from an entirely new perspective. The Sad Puppies movement is in the spirit of the best of the genre, and serves as a valuable reminder that we are only powerless if we choose to be so.

UPDATE: Entertainment Weekly published a shameless hit-piece on the Sad Puppies campaign. Glenn Reynolds has a compendium of links to the original EW piece and reactions from the Sad Puppies organizers. Of course, EW got it entirely wrong, slimed the Sad Puppies organization, and never bothered to ask for the other side. In other words, the typical practice of the mainstream ideological media. This is why groups like Sad Puppies not only need to exist, but must be willing to speak out against the agenda-driven journalism that would try to marginalize them.

Tom Friedman: Losing The Future

Tom Friedman phones it in again, in yet another New York Times column filled with the same old cliches we’ve heard a thousand times. This time, instead of kissing the asses of the Butchers of Beijing, Tom Friedman decides to give the GOP some unsolicited and unwelcome advice. Apparently, what the Republican Party needs to do is just agree with the Democratic Party on everything, and all will be well.

The problem with Friedman’s ideology is that we’re already watching it fail. The blue-state model is failing here, and the European welfare-state model that the Democrats want to emulate is teetering on the edge of chaos. (Just observe the inevitable end-state of the European welfare state as exemplified in Greece.)

Friedman argues that we need spend more on infrastructure and education—the same old cliched thinking we’ve heard before. The problem with such spending is that it doesn’t produce anything: it’s the equivalent of digging ditches to keep people busy. Take “high speed rail,” the fetish of statophiles everywhere. Nearly every rail project in this country goes massively over-budget and few people ride in them. Yet we spend billions of dollars developing “solutions” no one wants to problems no one has. But that’s how America is supposed to compete in the 21st Century.

What we don’t need is more bureaucratic pipe-dreams. We don’t need more top-down initiatives made by Washington D.C. that have no basis in the needs of real people. Have we learned nothing from the 20th Century: central planning does not work. No government agency, no matter how well-functioning, has the level of knowledge necessary to make better economic decisions than the people who are actually effected by those decisions. Trying to direct the economy from afar does not work, never has worked, and won’t work in the future.

And of course, Friedman wants to “raise revenue” to fulfill all of his dreams of high speed trains and elaborate (and pointless) fights against global warming. The problem with “raising revenue” is every dollar taken out of the productive economy and put into wild-eyed government initiatives is a dollar that can’t be invested in something actually worthwhile—the fact is that the “Keynesian multiplier” is a myth and $1 in government spending does not magically produce more than $1 in growth.

And that’s why we shouldn’t listen to people like Tom Friedman. It’s not that the Republican Party lacks ideas, it’s that the Democratic Party is threatened by change. The poles of American politics have reversed. From the union battles in Wisconsin to the 2012 Presidential race, it’s been the conservative upstarts trying to overturn the sclerotic and malfunctioning status quo while the left tries to defend their fiefdoms from substantive change.

Friedman doesn’t want to embrace the 20th Century, he wants to repeat its mistakes. The 21st Century is all about the decentralized over the centralized, autonomous and intelligent networks over large institutions, the agile over the cumbersome. And there is nothing that is less agile, less intelligent, and less willing to delegate power and authority than the United States federal government. Yet Friedman and his ilk would imbue that same broken system with more and more power over every facet of our lives. It’s like arguing that we should take down the Internet and put everyone on Minitel.

If the United States is to be successful in the 21st Century, it can’t emulate the failed policies of the last century. If there’s one side in this equation that is horribly out of step with the times, it’s the one embracing the failed strategies of the past. Perhaps it’s President Obama and his cast of Clinton-era retreads that should simply give up.

The Ninth Circuit Hands Same-Sex Marriage A Pyrrhic Victory?

In a 2-1 decision that comes as little surprise, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that California’s Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. Prop 8 came about after California judges ruled that California’s constitution mandated the recognition of same-sex marriages. A majority of voters in the State of California passed an amendment that gave same-sex couples all of the legal rights of marriages without the use of the title. This lead opponents of gay marriage to sue in federal court to overturn Prop 8. As expected, the district court and the Ninth Circuit went along.

I’m a supporter of gay marriage, although a tepid one. I don’t buy the argument that allowing gay marriage does a damn thing to harm the institution of marriage in this country beyond the massive damage done to it by heterosexual couples over the decades. If we really wanted to restore marriage in this country, we’d make divorces much harder to get. But that has no chance of happening any time soon.

At the same time, the term “marriage” isn’t a term that can be changed on a whim. It has a specific meaning. And the state has an interest in healthy families, which means families where there are two parents who pass along the values necessary for a functioning democracy. If you undermine the family, you undermine society, and you undermine democracy. The decline of the American family is at the foundation of the decline of America, and it’s a serious issue that needs to be fixed.

Even with that as a given, how does denying the right for gay couples to get married fix marriage? If anything, it creates the societal expectation that gay couples should be in stable monogamous relationships and should raise healthy and well-adjusted children. That, in my book, is a good thing for society. Rather than marginalizing homosexuality, we’d be better off mainstreaming it.

Why The Ninth Circuit Was Wrong

That being said, I think the Ninth Circuit was dead wrong in overturning Proposition 8. Two unelected federal judges have absolutely no business writing the social policy of a state against the express will of the voters. The same would be true if California voters had recognized gay marriage and a federal appeals court told them that they could not. The federal government, no less the federal judiciary, has no business deciding what is a matter dedicated to the states.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Proposition 8 could have been undone the same way it was enacted: by the voters. That’s the way it should be overturned. The Ninth Circuit got it wrong in saying that the effect of the law was too rash and not a “cautious” approach. By taking the question away from the legislature and the judiciary, Proposition 8 forced the question to become one of popular will: and there’s no reason to suggest that popular will isn’t already changing. It’s not even a matter of rights: gay couples in California had all of the same legal rights as married one, as the Ninth Circuit opinion took pains to point out. But instead of finding that to be in the favor of Proposition 8, the Ninth Circuit found that to be a mark against it.

That is deeply problematic for acceptance in gay marriage in this country. It basically means that once a state recognizes civil unions, it really is a “slippery slope” towards full-on recognition of same-sex marriage. It makes it a binary proposition for most states—either deny all marriage rights to gay couples or redefine marriage entirely. If the issue is forced like that, many states will just deny all marriage rights.

Moreover, this gives a new push for the Federal Marriage Amendment. If states are going to be forced to accept gay marriage against the will of the voters, it’s possible that the voters will take the matter into their own hands.

Why The Supreme Court Will Affirm Anyway

Obviously, this is a question that the Supreme Court will be taking up in this Term. And Judge Reinhardt, who wrote the opinion, did something very smart for someone in his opinion: he wrote the opinion with one particular Justice in mind: Justice Kennedy.

Ultimately, even though I strongly disagree with the Ninth Circuit’s decision, I would bet that it will be affirmed by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsberg will vote to affirm. Justices Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia are sure votes against (although it’s possible that either Alito or Roberts could vote to affirm). Justice Kennedy will write the opinion. Even though a petition for certiorari hasn’t even been filed yet, the writing is already on the wall.

The reason is because Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Romer v. Evans, the case that overturned an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that was ostensibly written to prevent special rights being granted on the basis of sexual orientation. Justice Kennedy’s opinion struck down the amendment, holding that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Judge Reinhardt’s decision striking down Prop 8 also was based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

It would be difficult for the Supreme Court to overturn the Ninth Circuit without scrapping Romer in the process. I don’t see Justice Kennedy undercutting his own decision any time soon. With the four “liberal” justices and Kennedy, Prop 8 is almost certainly to be DOA when it gets to the Supreme Court.

Getting Civil Rights Wrong

In the end, the problem I have with the Ninth Circuit’s decision isn’t really the outcome: I will shed few tears over Prop 8. The problem is the process. Not every odious law is a violation of the U.S. Constitution. We have a federal government based on limited, enumerated powers. None of those include telling other states how they should or should not define marriage.

The Ninth Circuit has basically said that we no longer have a government “by the People, for the People.” We have a government that’s “by the People unless the judiciary disagrees, in which case the judiciary wins.” That’s a dangerous precedent to set.

This isn’t at all like the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The advocates of same-sex marriage have plenty of recourse at the ballot box and in the court of popular opinion. They’ve won plenty of battles there. The fact that they’ve lost some of those battles doesn’t justify saying that the federal government must step in and take away the right of the voters to choose their own paths. Proposition 8 may be an odious and vile law, but there are plenty of laws that I consider odious and vile. The remedy for those laws is to get the people to overturn them, not to make the whole country less democratic. This isn’t a case where same-sex couples are denied public accommodations. Proposition 8 granted same-sex couples every right of marriage but the name—but that wasn’t enough for the Ninth Circuit. Which indicates that this really isn’t about legal rights, but moral ones.

This decision was ostensibly based on the law, but at the end of the day it was one in which two judges decided that they think that the choices made by California voters were morally wrong and they wanted a different choice. Those two judges may be right, maybe it is morally wrong to deny the moniker of “marriage” on committed same-sex marriages. But it’s not their call to make. That’s what being a nation of laws rather than men implies—and if you don’t like it, then work to get the law changed.

The fact is that full legal recognition of same-sex marriage was probably inevitable anyway. But if the Supreme Court does what it is likely to do, the result could well be a Federal Marriage Amendment that puts the question back into the hands of the people. That would be a major setback for the cause of same-sex marriage, but when you take power away from the people and invest it in unelected judges, you will create popular blowback. The real solution would have been to use the power of our democracy, to speak out, and to get the voters of California to overturn Prop 8 on their own accord. In the end, the Ninth Circuit’s decision may have been a victory for same-sex marriage, but it may also turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory in the end.

Rebooting America

Niall Ferguson has an excellent article in Newsweek on how American civilization can avoid a precipitous collapse. His advice boils down to a proposition that’s simple in theory, but difficult in practice: the United States must return to the system of values that made it what it is today.

Specifically, Ferguson identifies six “killer applications” that made the West stand out from the rest of the world from the 1500s through the end of the 20th Century. He identifies competition, the scientific revolution, the rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic as the factors that led success of the West for five hundred years.

The challenge that America faces, and Western nations face generally, is that at the same time we are turning our backs on those values, other civilizations have figured out that they can copy our success. India, which gained some benefits from its days as a British colony, is rapidly industrializing and developing its own transnational elite. The industrialization of China has transformed it from a Maoist hellhole to a unique hybrid of state oligarchy, crony capitalism, and small-scale free markets. Despite its lost decade, in 50 years Japan transformed from a bombed-out shell to a global powerhouse. Other Asian countries, from Singapore to Taiwan to even Communist Vietnam are combining their cultural work ethic with open markets to power a major economic boom. The 21st Century could see the world’s centers of economic power shift from London, New York, and Berlin to Mumbai, Beijing, and Taipei—and in many ways, this is already happening.

But the biggest enemy that the West faces isn’t other upstart civilizations—it is its own complacency. As Ferguson implies, the rise of the modern welfare state undercuts many of the factors that led the West to success in the first place. For example, a society with a cradle-to-the-grave welfare state will always be a society that has a lesser work ethic. The hard truth of the matter is that if you remove many of the risks of failure, there’s less incentive to work hard. If the state takes care of you no matter what, then why bother with hard work? This harm is not a theoretical one—we can already see it playing out across multiple sectors of American society today. The same is true of competition. Why should GM be truly innovative? They have already gotten bailed out by the government, and their main market is no longer the American consumer, but their government keepers. The Chevy Volt is not a vehicle designed for American drivers, it’s a vehicle designed to meet the artificial mandates of the United States Government. When the state picks winners and losers, the market will start being more responsive to the state’s preferences rather than the consumers.

America cannot simply keep going on like this. Ferguson is right—we’re heading for an “Oh, shit!” moment. The continuing collapse of the Eurozone is a preview of our own future. Greece is just further ahead on our same path.

Hard Choices

In theory, all we have to do is get everyone to embrace the values that made America strong and things will sort themselves out. After all, they did in the past. We survived the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War all in a row, didn’t we?

The problem is that the theory and the practice of “rebooting America” as Ferguson calls it are two entirely different things. The self-absorbed Baby Boomer generation systematically turned its back on the values that made America what it was (and Jesse Jackson got Stanford students to attack Western civilization itself). We replaced competition with a radical and false sense of egalitarianism. We replaced the rule of law and representative government with an administrative state that has sweeping and largely unconstrained powers. We replaced modern medicine with the inane idea that health care is a “right” and that medicine should be free. We replaced the value of the consumer society with a parody of itself fueled by cheap credit. And finally we replaced our work ethic with a culture of entitlement. In short, we made a mockery of our own success. We chipped away at our own cultural foundation, slowly but surely undermining it.

But that was the past. The question is how do we go back? And that will be more challenging than anything this country has ever faced. How do we tell an entire society that all the things they’ve thought that they were entitled to they will have to earn from now on? We can’t make minor changes to our entitlement programs without huge controversy? How do we expect to start facing the difficult reality that those programs are fundamentally broken and can’t survive into the future?

To be pessimistic, I don’t see this country making those hard choice until that “Oh, shit!” moment actually comes. We will have to suffer a collapse before the body politic will embrace substantial reform. We will have to face something worse than a Greek-style debacle before things can get better. We are simply too attached to the status quo. In most circumstances, that’s a benefit—we don’t want a society prone to wild swings in the social status quo. Those seeking to change society rightfully bear the burden of persuasion to get people to change. But in this case, our status quo is unsustainable, and the body politic wants to cling to their comfortable illusions for as long as possible. They will not let go until all other avenues are exhausted.

But there is an optimistic side to all of this—if there is to be a collapse of the current status quo, the values that underpin our society haven’t been erased. America is still a land of innovative people. America is still a land with an incredible work ethic. America is still a nation, and will be so even if the state were to evaporate overnight. If tomorrow Washington DC were hit by a rogue asteroid and the entire federal government were to stop, America would not stop running. We would form voluntary organizations to take care of each other—it’s what we’ve always done. In fact, many of those voluntary organizations would be better off than they would be if the state could coopt them as it so frequently does.

Starting from the Ground Up

Can America reboot itself? It is possible, but it is going to require this country to make substantial sacrifices and be willing to make substantial changes. Our political system is not designed for that. Ultimately, if we want to look to Washington D.C. for change, we will never find it. The changes necessary to reboot America are not going to come from the halls of government, they will come from the people.

The fact is that culture influences politics much more strongly than politics influences culture. Washington can create some of Ferguson’s “killer applications,” such as enforcing the rule of law, but ultimately there can never be a law that creates a strong work ethic. The focus must be on instilling small-r republican values in the population—which requires strong families and a culture that rewards hard work, thrift, and the entrepreneurial spirit. We can create such a culture, but that takes time, and a willingness to shed cultural baggage from the failed counterculture of the 1960s. And it must come from the bottom up, not the top down.

And that’s the problem. We want easy solutions, and pushing our problems off on Congress is as easy as it gets. Finding out that we are personally responsible for America’s future success is a hell of a lot more daunting. But at the same time, it’s also an acknowledgment of something positive: that we are part of America’s success when it fails. And those values still exist, waiting to be unleashed.

It’s time to reboot America by first rebooting the American spirit, which is the fuel for the engine of American prosperity. We have the “source code” for America’s “killer applications.” It’s time we used it again by first getting government out of the way as much as possible and secondly by working on an individual level to restore our commitment to the culture that makes this country the world’s preeminent superpower.

Can America Do Big Things Again?

Neal Stephenson, long one of my favorite authors, has a crucial and timely article asking whether America can still do the “big stuff” anymore. In the latter half of the 20th Century, Americans landed men on the Moon, cured several diseases, increased the ability for the world to feed itself, and invented the modern technological age. Even in the former half of the 20th Century we invented the airplane, created the Atomic Age, won two World Wars, and survived a depression worse than the one we are living in now.

But what have we done lately? Stephenson notes our cultural and technological malaise:

My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.

Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.

Stephenson points out that we are no longer a society that embraces risk in the way that we have in previous years. If we want to advance as a society and continue to provide a better life for our children, we have to embrace the idea that no great advancement comes without substantial risk. Yet our culture, our politics, our whole society has turned its back on the spirit that produces the next batch of great entrepreneurs.

The Lost Spirit Of American Entrepreneurship

From childhood, we are systematically smothering the initiative of our children. We fret about vaccinations (one of the greatest life-saving technologies of the last 200 years), we worry about them falling on the playground. We have overblown fears that any moment a child predator will snatch them up, and we imprint that fear of the world onto them.

We don’t let our children explore the way they used to. The chemistry set has been practically banned out of existence. It used to be that children could learn about engineering and science by actually building things themselves—instead, we encourage children to color inside the lines, sit down, do what they are told, and accept the guiding hand of authority.

That is not how you raise a culture of entrepreneurial risk-takers. That’s how you raise a culture of middle-managers.

And that same aversion to risk continues on in our politics. Our politics is not about the future, but about the past. Look at the Democratic Party: what is their bold political position for the future? It’s going back to the New Deal. For that matter, the Republicans aren’t much better: they envision a return to a more restrained system of government—but they can’t seem to elucidate why that benefits the future of the country except in the most nebulous way.

That’s because our politicians are more concerned about preserving the past spoils system than launching the future. Our political class suffers from a severe lack of vision: instead of bolding charting new courses, our political system has become largely about managing our decline. That isn’t all bad—we don’t really want a system of government that leaps from bad idea to bad idea. But our Founders didn’t want a static system of government either: they wanted the states to retain sovereignty so that they could become laboratories of democracy and experiment with new and better systems of governance. But the creeping centralization of Washington has eliminated the ability of the states to do much other than comply with the demands of the D.C. nomenklatura.

Reclaiming America’s Future

What can we do to restore America’s future? We have to stop placing roadblocks in our own path. What we need can’t be legislated from the top-down, it has to come from the grassroots up. We need a culture that encourages and fosters responsible risk-taking. That requires parents to stop living in fear and let their children learn. That requires a culture that doesn’t coddle future generations, but gives them room to explore. That requires us to stop sliding comfortably into decline and start taking personal responsibility for the future.

We are still a culture that can do great things. We still have innovators like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos who can provide instructive examples. We could, if we desired, return to the Moon and create a lasting human community outside the bounds of Earth’s atmosphere. We could, if we desired, became a nation where great technological leaps once again happened in the garages of individual innovators. There are subcultures in America that are not only dedicated to making things again, but could revolutionize manufacturing for the entire world.

America in 2031 can be a country where small innovators use computers and 3D printers to design amazing new technologies and take them from the drawing board to reality in hours rather than days. Or, America in 2031 can be a country where what few resources we have left are being fought over in an intergenerational battle between young and old.

We can’t hope for government to solve our current economic and cultural crisis—only rekindling the American spirit of innovation can get the economy growing again and allow us to have another period of growth and optimism.

America can to great things again. The question is whether we’re willing to do what’s necessary to get there.

Reading Conservatively

Five Books, a great and very interesting bookblog has a list of the five best conservative books as rated by some luminaries of the conservative movement. The list is what you’d expect—F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom came out as number one, followed closely by Whittaker Chambers’ Witness and De Toqueville’s Democracy in America.

But this got me thinking—a dangerous thing indeed! What would be my top five list of the best conservative books of all time?

So here are my rankings for the top five books on conservatism. Of course, some of them are part of the classic canon of conservative thought, but others a little more modern and accessible. After all, as important as Edmund Burke’s political and social thought is to the principles of conservatism, it’s not exactly the sort of thing you’d load onto your Kindle for a long weekend.

The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk

This is not easy weekend reading, but Russell Kirk’s book is one of the most important works for those wanting to understand modern American conservatism. It brings together some of the biggest luminaries like Edmund Burke and John Adams as well as some brilliant but obscure thinkers and weaves them into the foundation of a lasting ideology.

If you are a conservative, you need to read this book to understand what the basic principles of conservatism really are. If you are not a conservative, this book is essential to understanding what conservatism is actually about. It is a seminal work. This, along with William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, are the foundational works of modern American conservatism. It is a master’s class in conservative political thought in one volume, and well worth reading and digesting.
Parliament of Whores by P.J. O’Rourke

This is one of my favorite books, one of the books I’d take with me to a hypothetical desert island, a book that I could read again and again. It is a trenchant and uproariously funny satire of American politics, and even though it dates from the early days of the Clinton Administration, it’s still relevant to today’s politics. If you were going to give one book to a friend to try to convert them to conservatism, this would be the book. It’s accessible, funny, and does a great job of explaining why conservatives believe what they do.
Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton and Rose Friedman

Another classic, and also very accessible. Milton Friedman, of course, is a giant among conservative economists, and this is a very rare work&madsh;a book about economics that’s easy to read and easy to understand. Milton Friedman ties the concepts of individual liberty and economic liberty together and makes a persuasive case for why they are truly the same thing.
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak

But what about the poor? What is the moral case for free markets? This book is the Theory of Moral Sentiments to Friedman’s Wealth of Nations. So many critics of conservatism accuse conservatives of not caring about the poor, of not caring about others, etc. But this book explains why these arguments miss the mark. Michael Novak is a theologian, and he approaches the topic of capitalism from a Christian perspective, but his moral insights are universal. Conservatives believe in economic freedom because a state that respects human rights will inevitably be capitalist—because democratic capitalism is the only system of government and economics that truly respect human rights. If that argument seems bizarre to you, then you need to read this book.
Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

I had to include at least one novel, and this is a largely-forgotten classic. So many political potboilers owe their existence to this book. It’s a tautly-written thriller that explores the inner workings of the U.S. Senate in the days before JFK. So many novels owe their existence to Drury—he is the forerunner of thriller writers like Tom Clancy and Dan Brown. Advise and Consent is the story of a President who nominates a Communist agent as Secretary of State, a conflicted gay Senator, and plenty of backroom wheeling and dealing in the Senate. It’s a book that’s over 50 years old, but still holds up quite well—perhaps even better now than in 1959.

The iPad Experience

I’ve had about a month to play around with the iPad, Apple’s long-awaited tablet computer. The iPad seems to engender more controversy than any other gadget I’ve seen. People seem to either love the iPad or absolutely hate it. After playing around with it, I’m firmly in the “love it” camp. The reason why the iPad provokes such strong reactions seems to be because it’s such a revolutionary device—here’s why.

Grokking the iPad

One of the reasons why the technical elites seem to look down their nose at the iPad is because it’s not intuitive what the iPad really is. The iPad is not a laptop replacement. Yes, it replaces many, if not most, of the functions of a laptop, but it’s not designed to replace a primary computer. The iPad has to be connected to iTunes before it can be used the first time. The iPad isn’t the right device if you want to use Photoshop or write a thesis—although it can edit images and has a decent word processor. It is what Steve Jobs said it was back in January 2010—it is a device that sits between a laptop and a smartphone/iPod.

The critics argue that it’s just an oversized iPod touch. In many ways they’re right—but that misses the point. The iPod touch is a fantastic gadget, and it sells like hotcakes. It has a huge base of users. So when Apple says in regard to the iPad that “you already know how to use it” they are absolutely right. Coming from an iPod touch or iPhone to an iPad is basically seamless. The only learning curve comes from getting used to the larger virtual keyboard. And it is that vastly expanded screen space that makes the iPad different. Calling it a bigger version of the touch ignores what being a bigger iPod touch entails—it opens up new uses for the device.

For example, watching video on an iPhone is possible, but painful. The screen is just two small at 3.5 inches. But on an iPad, watching video is a dream. The iPad’s screen is naturally suited to it in a way that the iPhone’s is not. The same is true for web browsing. The iPhone browser is great, but when you expand the screen real estate to the size of the iPad, web browsing becomes much more natural.

That’s what makes the iPad so ineffable. It’s hard to describe the feeling of sitting on a couch with an iPad and just surfing the web. It feels incredibly natural. It’s completely effortless. That’s the advantage of the iPad: it takes the familiar touch-based interface that millions already know and loves and gives it much more room. Handling it in the store doesn’t give the full experience—the iPad is a device that isn’t instantly intuitive, but once you understand it and get a feel for it, you just get it.

Giving the Deskop the Finger

Here’s where the revolutionary part comes in. The iPad is the future of computing. That’s not hyperbole, it’s based on the nature of the device.

Since the late 1970s, computers have all followed the same basic metaphor. You have arbitrary files in a hierarchical file system. Graphical user interfaces all tend to use “windows” representing applications that are controlled with a pointing device. There’s a “desktop” underneath where files and application shortcuts can be saved. When Xerox PARC came up with this metaphor in the 1970s it was revolutionary. Everyone, from Apple to Microsoft to Linux, copied that metaphor.

From a computer science standpoint, it makes sense. From a user’s standpoint, it doesn’t. The desktop metaphor is just not that intuitive. For example, take the task of trying to find a picture from vacation. Is it on the desktop? Is it is ‘My Documents\My Pictures’? Or did it end up in ‘C:\Program Files\Some Application\Some Arbitrary Directory\Timestamp\Vacation Photos’? Various operating systems have tried to make it easier to find files, but it can still be a pain.

The iPad jettisons that whole metaphor. There’s no “desktop” on the iPad, just a space for applications, and only applications. If you save a picture to the iPad, it’s in a common repository and nowhere else. All the videos are in the video application, all the music is in the iPod application. The user never thinks of interacting with “files” stuffed into a hierarchical file system. That file system is there, underneath everything, but it’s been shrouded from view.

And, most critically, there’s no pointing device. The benefits of multitouch interfaces are obvious. And the iPhone OS that runs the iPad was built especially for multitouch devices. Microsoft’s efforts shoehorn multitouch into Windows 7 have failed, because there’s a fundamental difference between an OS designed for touch and one designed for a pointing device. Apple understands this, and has designed the iPhone OS to be built for multitouch and nothing else.

The old desktop metaphor made sense back when it was invented and used. But it no longer makes sense for a device like the iPad. What makes the iPad so revolutionary is that it proves the desktop metaphor is no longer required. The touch metaphor has replaced it, and the touch metaphor has much more potential for innovation than the desktop metaphor did.

What about Freedom?

The critics say that the iPad isn’t a liberating device—you’re stuck playing in Apple’s sandbox when you use it. That’s only half true. Yes, the App Store requires you to play by Apple’s rules and Apple’s rules alone. But there’s a good reason for this, and even then the App Store is not the only thing that makes the iPad shine.

First there’s the issue of iPad apps. Apple has gotten a lot of heat for their policies on how apps are approved and how they may be created. Some of it is admittedly deserved. But the purpose behind these rules is valid: Apple wants the iPad to just work. Right now a user can install any iPad app without fear of crashing their system. There’s no need for installers—every app is in its own self-contained sandbox. There’s no need for uninstallers—when you get rid of an app it goes away completely. There’s no fear in adding apps to the iPad in the way that many users fear adding apps to their computers. Apps can be disposed of quickly and easily. To the user, this is liberating. The iPad is a computer than no one fear to break.

Yes, that means that developers must follow Apple’s rules. And yes, Apple has admittedly been less than consistent in how they enforce those rules. But the rules are not arbitrary. They are to control the platform, but not just to the benefit of Apple. This walled-garden approach benefits users as well.

The iPad is not a closed ecosystem though. Remember when Google announced their Chrome OS project? The tech world swooned at a tablet that did nothing but run web apps. Think of the iPad being a version of that tablet with an additional proprietary app store bolted on. The iPad can run any given web app, and it runs them well. The same technology that powers the iPad’s browser also powers the browser for Android devices. And Google’s Chrome. And the new Blackberry 6 browser. That means that the iPad is part of a huge meta-platform that can run web apps that run across just about every device out there. Web apps won’t necessarily replace native apps—at least not yet, but they do give developers virtually unlimited freedom.

Screw Flash

But the iPad doesn’t run Flash! So what?

I’ll be blunt. Flash is a pile of crap. I don’t miss having Flash on my iPad, because I don’t even use Flash on my desktop. The Mac OS X version of Flash is slow, buggy, and annoying. I have Flash content blocked by default on every one of my computers, and virtually never unblock it.

Flash is old technology. It belongs in the scrap heap with Java Applets and Microsoft’s Active X. The future lies in HTML5, a completely open standard not controlled by any one company. Flash is a dead man walking, but Adobe has yet to figure that out.

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe Adobe will get Flash working so well on Android that Apple’s devices will be at a competitive disadvantage because they won’t run all the great apps written in Flash.

And maybe a naked Angelina Jolie will parachute into my backyard with a suitcase full of $100 bills.

Flash is a dying platform that’s being quickly overtaken by better and more advanced technologies. Steve Jobs is right to chuck it out. The App Store does not need a bunch of slow, buggy, third-rate apps that depend on Adobe’s notoriously slow development cycle when Apple updates iPhone OS. Apple’s been down that road before, and they’re not doing it again.

The lack of Flash isn’t a glaring omission from the iPad, it’s a feature. The web will embrace HTML5 long before Apple feels the need to embrace Flash. If Adobe were smart, they’d be embracing HTML5 too. There are enough good and innovative developers at Adobe that they could do it if they’d stop staring into the rearview mirror.

Welcome to the iPad World

The iPad is a revolutionary device. It is just as polished as Apple’s other offerings, and being based on mature technologies, it’s more polished than a first-generation product normally is. It’s a device that once used quickly becomes indispensable. The critics tend not to understand it, and keep trying to compare it to devices that are not comparable. Just like the original iPhone, the critics will end up owning one or more of them in a few years.

The iPad is the future of computing. The desktop metaphor is no longer the only game in town. Apple is betting their future on the idea that computing will become less about desktops and laptops and more about small devices connected to the “cloud” of internet-based applications. And just like the iPhone, Apple has taken a product that hadn’t yet had a breakout devices and created something that will have everyone else scrambling to catch up. Even if Apple somehow fails (and the one million iPads sold in a month say that’s not going to happen), they have left their mark on the industry. Look at the iPad. That’s what computers of the future will look like.

Obama ‘Acted Stupidly’

President Obama made a major mistake this week by attacking the police officer that arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It was a mistake that could cost him significantly.

The President got elected largely on his ability to transcend the racial politics of the past. He presented himself as a post-partisan healer who rejected the transparent race-baiting of a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton. It was one of the reasons why the Obama campaign went to such lengths to bury Obama’s association with the viciously racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright—because it undercut the narrative they wanted to portray.

Now, Obama has waded right back into the politics of racial polarization with his attack on a veteran Cambridge police officer.

All this will do is polarize the country. The police officer can hardly be accused of being a racist—he taught classes on stopping racial profiling, tried to save the life of NBA star Reggie Jackson, and has a sterling record on the police force. Yet the President, without knowing all the facts, accused him of “acting stupidly” and insinuated that race played a factor in the arrest.

Based on the police report of the incident, race did play a part. Prof. Gates’ racist diatribe, not his attempting to get into his own house, is what got him arrested. The mere sight of a white police officer legitimately trying to do his job was met by a tirade by Gates. If anything, it was Gates who “acted stupidly.” Perhaps not stupidly enough to get arrested, but stupidly enough that he was hardly a victim in all this.

By taking sides in this matter, the President was walked right back into the fields of racial polarization. He has diminished his office by attacking a law enforcement officer without knowing the facts—and even if Sgt. Crowley was at fault, the President should not have injected himself into the matter in the first place.

This may not sink the Obama Presidency, but it does hurt him. He came into the Oval Office with the noble goal of being a President for both Black America and White America, a President that would try to heal racial divisions. Now, he has helped to open another racial wound in this country. He “acted stupidly” in doing so, and it may well end up costing him politically at a time when he’s already starting to take political heat.

A Case Study In Why Higher Taxes Hurt People

Minesota has the second-highest business property tax rate in the United States. In a time when the retail sector is already taking a pounding, this additional burden is forcing retailers to abandon the state. World Market, one of my favorite stores, is one of the retailers pulling out of the state entirely.

I’m sure all the wonderful “government services” purchased with those tax dollars will help. Myself, I’d rather that business stay open and those people who work there have their jobs.

The central reason I’m not a liberal is because the idiocy of taxing businesses to death to expand the government dole is so transparent. We need jobs, not handouts, and right now our government is strangling us to death in red tape and drowning us in a sea of debt.