Worthy Reads: How an RBMK Reactor Explodes
A Double-Length Worthy Reads for August 2024
Welcome to Worthy Reads, where I share some things that I think are worth your time. It has the rare De Civitate paywall. Everyone gets the first half of Worthy Reads, but only paying subscribers get the second half. Retweets are not endorsements. Extra-long because I missed July.
“It Is Time For Radical Candor,” by Kevin D. Williamson:
It is not lost on me that, if what Florida’s 1st Congressional District wants is a “Trump Republican,” then Matt Gaetz is exactly what the witch-doctor ordered. And so I asked Dimmock: “From a certain point of view—and it is my point of view—what you’re doing is trying to beat one dishonest, disreputable, dishonorable man so that you can go and do the bidding of a different dishonest, disreputable, dishonorable man.” Yeah: Gaetz is Gaetz—but Trump is Trump, too, and Dimmock insists he is a “Trump Republican.” And how in the hell does a self-styled “Trump Republican” have it in him to complain about anybody’s character: Matt Gaetz, Joe Biden, Pol Pot, etc.
Oh, but Mr. Radical Candor has an answer for that!
“I think Donald Trump is being targeted by a politically motivated prosecutor. And that’s the only comment I have on that.”
I’m not a Kevin Williamson stan, but I only say this when I really mean it: read the whole thing. I cannot translate the effect of this article in a pull quote. I can’t even comment very well on the piece because there’s no good way to convey the force of its thesis through the pull quote. You’re going to have to read it. Of all political writers active right now, I think only Kevin D. Williamson is capable of giving full expression to the cynicism needed for our moment.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how hard it is to run for public office without becoming a monster. My ten-year-old said she wanted to be President. I spent my grade-school years dreaming and scheming after the presidency, so I knew the socially correct answer here: “You’d be a great president and, with a little luck, you have the right stuff.” Instead, rather to my surprise, I heard myself tell her that she certainly didn’t want to be President, because the cost was too high, because becoming President would destroy what is lovable in her.
Winning requires lying. If you are very smart, very vigilant about your words, and jesuitical in the most pejorative sense of the word, you might obtain high office while only lying by omission—that is, by withholding information from the public that you have and which you have a moral duty to communicate to the public. Lies of omission are, of course, sins in themselves. Deceptive equivocation (sometimes called “mental reservations”) can be justified when someone demands information from you to which they have no right. For example, when a child asks, too early, how babies get made; or a constituent asks about classified information; or when the Nazis ask if you’re hiding any Jews in the house… these are appropriate times to evade and equivocate (without directly lying). However, mental reservations are not generally justified in speaking about public affairs with one’s constituents. They deserve the entire truth about your views and plans. Yet, if you fulfill this duty, you will certainly lose any election of significance. So, if you want to win, you will deceive those you have no right to deceive.
That is not even the entire danger. Once someone establishes a habitual division in his mind between “this is what I believe to be true,” and “this is what I need the public to think I believe,” the habit of deception (it seems to me) leads fairly directly from carefully calculated lies of omission to accidental lies of commission. Someone asks a question and you try to think up a technically “honest” way to deceive that person and you blurt out a lie without realizing it. Do this a few times, and it gets easier, and then you start in on the lies of commission, and lose yourself altogether. I’d like to think that this is how Joe Biden became so fundamentally dishonest, but, if it is, he must have crossed over before I was born.1
The Republican Party of the moment is a particularly good example of this, simply because the Republican Party’s leader lies so freely, and he and his followers demand such absolute fealty to his lies at all times. Yet this is true everywhere. Every political party has certain lies—and everyone with any sophistication knows they are lies—that they are required to mouth as the price of membership. You spend enough time in politics, and you become fluent in reading between the lines.
For example, a few months ago, Minnesota state Sen. Nicole Mitchell (D-Woodbury) got caught in the act of criminal breaking-and-entering. The Minnesota Democratic Party stood by her. Everyone with a heartbeat (except, perhaps, the most far-gone double-thinkers) knew this was only because they needed her vote. You see, the Democrats’ trifecta in Minnesota hinged on a one-seat senate majority, 34-33. Mitchell was arrested weeks from the end of the session—a session in which the DFL was pushing a number of radical bills to remake Minnesota in their image. If Mitchell had resigned in disgrace, those bills all would have died. So they rallied around Mitchell. Her party leadership repeated Mitchell’s obvious lies about how and why she committed her crimes. Some gullible voters sympathetic to the DFL even believed them, or seemed to.
I didn’t. I know how the game is played. A week after the session ended, the DFL turned on her and called for Mitchell’s resignation. Obviously. Having to so often read through the lies of my elected officials (in both parties) has given me what I might call the habit of dishonest thought. I don’t try to deceive the public, but I spend so much time trying to think like people who do that, alas, I fear I succeed.
There’s a warm acquaintance of mine from a number of years ago—not quite a friend, but I think he would have liked to be friends if I’d made more time for him, but I was always so busy. Anyway, my acquaintance recently ran a serious and expensive campaign for public office. This is a very mild-mannered guy, who I am quite sure shares many of my sensibilities about Trump, and prioritizes the issues I prioritize.2 It was surreal, then, when I innocently signed up for his campaign emails during the primary and started getting deluged red meat about empowering poll watchers and stopping the “woke mob!” There were, I’m confident, no actual lies here. In fact, I agree with a lot of it. (The woke mob is real and bad; I just don’t think it’s usually productive to use such charged language.) My acquaintance even (somehow) managed to avoid telling the most necessary lie in Republican politics: that “we don’t know precisely what happened” in the 2020 election. Yet the overall effect of his mailings was to paint a picture of a bulldog candidate I didn’t recognize.
He lost.
Since Kevin Williamson wrote this piece, there has been a single poll in the race between Matt Gaetz and Aaron Dimmock. Gaetz leads by 47 points. The primary is Tuesday.
ADDENDUM: I try to be honest because, among other reasons, dishonest people make crapsack bloggers. Yet, just a few hours after I wrote this item,3 I attended a party where I deliberately deceived a group of people for no other reason than to avoid a minor embarrassment. Technically, I did not lie; I misleadingly equivocated. Every word said was true without qualification.
It never even occurred to me that this contradicted anything I’d written that afternoon about “the mental habits of dishonesty” until, on the drive home, my wife and children realized what I’d done and roundly abused me for it. I had to go to Confession!
Obviously, my dishonesty is my own responsibility, and blaming it on “reading too much about lying politicians” would be insufferable. Yet it served as a good reminder to me: the person a liar works hardest to fool is himself. Be vigilant. Err on the side of admitting the ugly truths out loud. Live not by lies!
“Live Not By Lies” by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
The circle – is it closed? And is there really no way out? And is there only one thing left for us to do, to wait without taking action? Maybe something will happen by itself? It will never happen as long as we daily do not sever ourselves from the most perceptible of its aspects: Lies.
When Violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self confidence, as if it were carrying a banner and shouting: “I am violence. Run away, make way for me – I will crush you.” But Violence quickly grows old. And it has lost confidence within itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehoods as its ally - since violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder. It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies – all loyalty lies in that.
And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal nonparticipation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything – not with any help from me. This opens a breach in the imaginary encirclement caused by our inaction. It is the easiest thing to do for us but the most devastating for the lies. Because when people renounce lies it simply cuts short their existence. Like an infection, they can exist only in a living organism.
So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether to remain a conscious servant of falsehood (of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one’s family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies). Or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one’s children and contemporaries. And from that day onward he… will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
The essay then expands into a kind of “tennis court oath” for truth-tellers. The pledge is rigorous, unbending, it goes beyond the strict demands of essentially any moral system, and I would very much like to live up to it—despite my fear of the price.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn told the truth when it was exceedingly dangerous for him to do so. As a resident of the Soviet Union, he had already spent time in a gulag. He risked execution. The day he published this essay, he was arrested and deported.4
In America, we face no such dangers. Although there are costs to preaching heresies in our country, nobody is executed, deported, or arrested for it. (If you live in the United Kingdom, well, personally, my opinion is that you should emigrate to a free country.) The worst we face from airing unpopular ideas is cancellation, mob threats, and loss of employment. That’s pretty bad, but the KGB it ain’t—and, usually, the worst consequence we face is (blush) minor embarrassment at a party. We should be braver! We do not live in a dictatorship of lies, thank God!
We do, however, live in a republic of lies.
Three to Read on the Biden Revelations:
“The Smell Was Elephant S*** All Along,” by HollyMathNerd:
This moment presents a priceless opportunity for we the people to recognize that nearly all of our influencers and commentators are either liars or not up to the job of obvious pattern recognition—often, both.
So many people were surprised by what happened. Why? Many were so relieved that the Bad Orange Man was gone that they never really bothered to assess what had replaced him. Others simply accepted the media’s curated, brief snippets of Biden here and there without ever thinking about the possibility that Biden may not be up to the job.
But 90 minutes of flying solo made it abundantly clear that the sitting President needs a memory care unit, not a high-stress job. The people who were first realizing that this wasn’t “cheap fakes” or “Russian disinformation” as they watched then got the additional, stunning surprise of watching the media landscape change in real time. My Sunday post will go into great depth about this, but for just one example: the New York Times ran interference for Biden as recently as last week.
But also:
“Fuzzy Human Subjective Factors I Am Not Really Qualified To Talk About,” (subhead) by Scott Alexander:
So with the constant attempts to prove that both candidates were senile, the constant demonstration by both candidates that they weren’t, and the constant retreat into conspiracy theories of “I guess he used the magic drug again but we’ll get him next time!”, I just tuned out this entire category of thing. And I guess I kept it tuned out longer than I should have, whoops.
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Even if liars are saying something for their usual liar reasons, it can still be true. For twenty years, people spread false rumors that Castro was on his deathbed, but this didn’t make Castro immortal. In the same way, I should have figured out that even if I couldn’t trust any particular claim that Biden was senile, the prior for an 81 year old becoming senile was still high.
But I guess I assumed that if he was becoming senile, some Democratic elites would have secret knowledge about it, and they couldn’t possibly be so stupid as to deny it while also scheduling him for a debate where it would inevitably come out. So I figured the Democratic elites who were closest to him thought he was doing well, and I trusted them more than the people who had been wrong every time for the past five years.
And finally:
“Come On, Man,” by eigenrobot:
Ben Smith, writing at Semafor in a roundup of journalists’ self-recriminations:
It’s the biggest question for American journalism right now:
How could we have allowed our audience to be surprised about the basic condition of the number one reporting target in the country, the president?…
How indeed.
A charitable response might be that a demonstration of infirmity by the head of state of the world’s hegemon is a shocking event. A less-charitable response is that perhaps the journalists Ben Smith is writing for, about, and among are incredibly bad at their purported jobs.
This is not a new observation. Ben Rhodes, an Obama deputy national security advisor responsible for “strategic communications,” had this to say in 2016 about his successful attempt to pull one over on Americans by lying to the press:
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
The exposure of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline at the debate is yet another treason-of-the-epidemiologists moment. Politically, the June 25 debate was memorable. Epistemically, however, it was shattering. How can we ever trust the Regime about anything, ever again? (Answer: we shouldn’t, and in fact we should reconsider past occasions on which we trusted them. I’ll have more to say about this in a forthcoming full-length post.)
In picking up the pieces, we find ourselves with a few different explanations for how the mainstream media deceived itself and the American People for so long about President Biden’s cognitive decline:
Ms. MathNerd gives the parsimonious explanation: they were lying!
Mr. eigenrobot is more generous: they were unwilling to see what was right in front of their eyes. They were, in other words, unfathomably incompetent.
Mr. Alexander thinks people like him (including the media, if I understand him correctly) were successfully deceived by a few elites at the White House. This was firstly because those elites were acting irrationally, and so their behavior slipped past people expecting rational behavior. It was secondly because the broader Democratic elite exercises less control than Alexander thought they did. It was thirdly because people like him had developed mental antibodies against the notion of Biden’s decline because scurrilous right-wingers had falsely peddled the charge so many times before.5 Alexander is too polite to say this, but it’s implicit in his argument: the fact that the Democrat White House fooled him so badly is really the Republicans’ fault for being so partisan about it!
Before I pick on Alexander, let me point out that the only reason I am able to pick on him is because he is one of the precious few blue-pillers who was honest enough with himself and others to admit that he was bamboozled where very few others were and to analyze where he went wrong. Almost nobody on his side has done this. The press went to war with Joe Biden the day after the debate, pretending to be shocked! shocked! that what they’d been peddling about Biden was actually a pack of lies, and never pausing for a moment to assess their role.
They haven’t acknowledged their lies, nor even tried to argue (contra Mr. eigenrobot) that they were innocently blind to the truth because they were so busy giving the Democratic Party head. A fifteen-year-old student journalist from Joplin could do a better job holding her school principal accountable. (Not hyperbole!) The press failed, and it has not even attempted to account for it as Mr. Alexander has.
So I really do respect Alexander for bothering to try, especially since he isn’t a media figure (and thus owes us no accountability) and, even moreso, since he was never actually on the record defending Biden—and thus had nothing to be accountable for anyway!
(Full disclosure: Scott Alexander once featured De Civ in his monthly links post. The linked post instantly became, and remains, my most-read post ever and nearly doubled my free subscriptions. He is a De Civ recommendation, because he’s written many of the most important essays of our era—including this one on media bias, which means he is more aware of the problem than most!)
At the same time, Scott’s understanding of the Biden coverup is wrong, and the updates he made to his mental model don’t get to the heart of the problem.
It is true that partisans are always trying to build narratives and they surface (or invent) facts to support their narratives. However, most don’t go anywhere, because they are bull pucky. In the end, only the hardest-core partisans bought, for example, the nonsense that vaccines were causing mass deaths, because they weren’t, and this was obvious on examination. The “Biden is senile” narrative, by contrast, picked up steam in a huge way. A majority of the American electorate had already concluded three years ago that President Biden was senile to an extent that interfered with his ability to do his job. Why?
The Republicans had receipts! My mother, a faithful reader of the newspapers, learned before I did that they lie and therefore started supplementing her news diet with viral video clips on Twitter. You might think, “oh no! misinformation!” but my mom was better informed than I was. She would show me clips of Biden every few weeks. It being Twitter, they’re all impossible to find now, but this Rumble (“oh no! misinformation!”) gives the general vibe, as does this one.6 I would run my usual “surely there’s an innocent explanation” heuristic, since this was, after all, partisan narrative-building. Sometimes I would come up with one, others I’d come up blank. The White House did not provide convincing counter-evidence. In fact, the White House hid Biden from view. He ran a “basement campaign” in 2020, with the convenient excuse of the pandemic, and then ran a “basement presidency,” with few press conferences and fewer unscripted appearances. The American people looked at the evidence the right-wing fever swamps had pulled together, dismissed some of it, accepted other parts of it, and drew a conclusion.
Their conclusion was correct. The Wall Street Journal convincingly showed in its (horrendously overdue) blockbuster reporting of June 4 that Biden was likely seriously impaired by, at the very latest, May 2023. Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy soon gave us good reason to think the decline was both underway, and well known to the White House, before the November 2022 elections. Subsequent reporting gives strong indications that Biden’s brain was in serious trouble by October 2021—just when the majority of Americans started telling pollsters that they thought he might be senile!
Of course, not every piece of evidence against Biden had aired by the time of the debate… but, in February 2024, Robert Hur’s damning report declined to charge President Biden with crimes relating to the mishandling of classified documents on the grounds that President Biden was too senile to be convicted by a jury. This dominated (right-wing) news for days, and should have been a tip-off to even the most stubborn blue-pilled kool-aid drinker. Establishment media also reported on it, but largely to pooh-pooh it. Vox ran a whole explainer on why Hur was wrong about Biden! Meanwhile, Biden started missing increasingly obvious free press events, which was no secret.
In short, the mainstream media position that Biden was fit to hold office required reports to uncritically accept White House talking points that flagrantly contradicted both private and public evidence that had become so overwhelming that, by mid-2024 the vast majority of the American people (who had access to only the public evidence) were convinced of the opposite despite the media’s best efforts. The media either engaged in an active disinformation campaign, or journalists are so grossly incompetent that their behavior was indistinguishable from an active disinformation campaign.
Perhaps, if this were just one horrific journalist error, we might be able to write it off with only modest adjustments to our mental models of how reliable the mainstream media is. We might adopt the old saying, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
However, this is, very conservatively, the fourteenth time the mainstream media has catastrophically failed to cover a story correctly in the Trump years—always in the same direction. It is also the fourth time in the past 110 years that the mainstream media has specifically “whoopsied” stories about specifically Democratic presidents with grave health issues.7
Please everyone stop adding epicycles to your theories about why you and the media got this wrong. The media got it wrong because it is either actively suppressing factual information to help Democrats, or its incompetence (a very specific incompetence that always points in the same political direction!) is so deep as to have the same effect. To use an admittedly imprecise colloquialism: they lie! Proudly and through their teeth!
If you got this wrong, then, it seems to me that it can only be because you invest too much faith in mainstream media outlets (not Democratic Party elites). Your estimates of their brazenness are too low. Your bounded distrust is too bounded.
Alexander writes that “reversed stupidity is not intelligence.” He is correct, but he has aimed it in the wrong direction. He was wrong in 2021, wrong in 2023, and wrong in early 2024 (in the Hur report aftermath). There was ample evidence that he was wrong. Sufficient evidence was available to the public that the public concluded, by an overwhelming margin, that he was wrong. He continued to get it wrong because he accepted mainstream media reassurances that President Biden was compos mentis. In particular, he accepted (and continues to regurgitate) their frame of weighing rehearsed events (like the State of the Union) against hyperbolic memes and Donald Trump’s (admittedly) insane rants. There was no need for this frame. This was Scott’s stupidity. He finally got it right only in July 2024, exactly when the media admitted the truth. This was Scott’s reversed stupidity. It was not intelligence.
And that’s Scott frigging Alexander. He’s a paragon of mental hygiene. He will probably admit that what he did wasn’t intelligent! The rest of you lot, still parroting whatever pap Politico feeds you from anonymous sources, after all this? (After the Hunter Biden laptop?) You people terrify me, in exactly the same way my friends who have fallen into QAnon do.
Normie epistemology is dead. What must replace it is the topic of a future post. Until then, the only winner here is my mom.
So much for the public lies steering our republic, and the liars who sustain them. Perhaps even more important, though, are the private truths many of us know, but which we also know we aren’t supposed to say. Let’s change gears:
“If Different Perverts Got There First,” by Holly MathNerd:
Teacher pushed the button and the screen switched from the principal’s office to the animation of Sammy Switch, which was the official name of the Discipline Dinosaur. […]
Teacher used her laser pointer to point at Sammy, up on the screen.
“Last week after CCC we talked about how there’s a spectrum of feelings about correction. Some people really like to be corrected. It makes them feel good, and safe. They like it when they sit down and feel a little sore. It reminds them that if they don’t control themselves and break the rules, someone else will help them remember not to break the rules anymore. That makes them feel safe, and important. And we talked about how other people really like to be the one who corrects others. That makes them feel strong and powerful and like they can be in control, and that makes them feel safe and important. And some people, like our friend Sammy–” she points the laser at the Discipline Dinosaur on the screen – “They like both! They’re in the middle of the spectrum. What makes them feel safe and important changes from time to time.”
Teacher clicks the pointer, and a long line of numbers appears on the screen, 1 on the far left and 10 on the far right. At 1, a picture of some people-pups, recognizable from having come to last month’s Honor Assembly, grinned up at their Master, a tall man who wore leather. At 10, their Master stood next to a lady. Both of them wore leather and held riding crops, smiling at the camera. Sammy was in the middle, standing with one foot on 5 and one foot on 6.
The first half of this post is the Worthy Read. The second half (once it starts talking about Ray Blanchard and autogynephilia) is not, in my opinion, interesting, and you can safely abandon it. Still, that first half…
I had to work hard to find a pull quote that I could include here on De Civ without violating my own editorial standards. The full story is… very disturbing. It depicts what I can only call child sexual abuse.
I hesitate to use that label, because the story attempts to draw an analogy to real-world classrooms. If what the story depicts is child sexual abuse, and the analogy holds… well, I’ll let you decide for yourself.
The story stuck with me for several days. The questions I asked myself during that time were:
Why am I not as disturbed by the reality as I am by this story?
Does the analogy fail in some way? Or am I simply desensitized by exposure?
If the analogy holds, is “mere” social conservatism an adequate response? That is, is it enough to vote for moderate, popular measures like Florida’s revisions to statewide curricula and Arkansas’s attempt to prevent trans-identified kids from making any permanent changes before they are adults?
If not, then what could?
In my original notes on this item (jotted down in July), I wrote, “I have no answers to those questions, but I thought the piece that raised them was worth sharing.” However, since the theme of this Worthy Reads has become Live Not By Lies,8 I must admit that was a cowardly deceptive equivocation. I don’t have firm answers to those questions. I do have preliminary answers. I am open to persuasion, but I have answers.
I do not think the analogy fails in its key respects. I think I am desensitized. I (truly) don’t know what response that requires, but I am thinking about it. I both acknowledge and regret the pain that may cause some of the people reading this, who can’t help but view this story as a brutal attack on a movement they consider essential to their lives. I am still bound by the duty to be kind, generous, and understanding, but I don’t think anyone is served by me Kolmogoroving around what I think of all this.
Oh, hang on, you don’t know Kolmogorov, do you? Let’s fix that.
Below the paywall: Kolmogorov, the role of government secrecy in our epistemic crisis, a flashback to a 2016 piece about our then-nascent epistemic crisis, the answer to the question you’ve been asking from the start—how does an RBMK nuclear reactor explode?—and, finally, the bonus videos of the month (there’s three! and two of them are funny! bonus videos may be getting out of hand!). Whether you’re free list or pay list, thanks for reading this far!
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