Four Moments in One
Some fast and fun updates and quick thoughts on vaccines, politics, culture, and more.
My writing has taken a bit of a hit this summer, but that certainly isn’t for a lack of ideas! So I wanted to provide a few updates and hit on some recent and upcoming themes that I’ll be hitting on.
Vaccines
I just posted an in-depth dive into vaccine safety beyond the scope of the Covid vaccine. It’s well worth a read, especially if you are a new/expecting parent:
The Vaccine Question
Thus far, we’ve said a lot about the dangers of the Covid vaccines here. Despite relative quiet in the past six months, nothing has changed. This means that excess deaths, particularly heart-related, cancers, and other mysterious “sudden deaths” are
And the Covid vaccines - I honestly wish I could leave them behind! The science is settled with these things as far as I am concerned: The Covid vaccine has been the most deadly mistake in human history.
And alas, if we had intellectually honest elites we’d be able to admit that and move on. And yet… here we are: a new booster is out, and the CDC and FDA have bowed to political pressure and recommend the “vaccine” for all Americans 6 months and older.
Assuming a similar safety profile to the original vaccines, such a vaccine could kill up to 200,000 people, and even with meager uptake numbers similar to the last booster (17%), we are still likely to see 34,000 deaths as a result of this next booster.
It’s easy to grow numb to numbers. Consider that about 60,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. We’ve already had 10 Vietnams due to the vaccine, and we’re still about to add another half of one.
So damn it, I’ll speak up as long as there are thousands of lives at stake, and even reaching one person has a meaningful chance of saving a life.
As far as the rest of the vaccine slate, as covered in the linked article above, I’d honestly be curious to hear any and all thoughts, questions, and more. As I said there, prior to 2021 I made fun of anti-vaxxers. Now? Let’s just say the picture is a lot less clear, and I’d love to dig in more if folks are interested in that topic.
Politics, Left & Right
One article I have slated to write is tentatively titled “True Believers” and meant to dive into the psychology of the leftists whose will has taken over the Democratic Party.
The thesis, well defended and one I am certainly not the first to note, is that leftism is a religious cult: the artifact of a culture forsaking traditional religion yet still needing something to provide purpose and meaning. The result is a hysteric belief set that defies reality far more than any religion on the planet today (including Scientology).
And yet, as I built this case have seen similar religious devotion to Trump coming from certain corners of the right.
Such Trumpists posit that the 2020 election stolen, and that most to all of Trump’s actions subsequently have been 4-dimensional chess moves of brilliance and that, if re-elected, Trump and Trump alone can dismantle the deep state.
But these beliefs run counter to evidence on the ground: that in four years Trump did nothing to drain the swamp. Rather, he became part of it much of the time. And the times when he didn’t? The swamp, the bureaucracy, the deep state (whatever you want to call it) ate his lunch. Draconian Covid response was run by the swamp on Trump’s watch. BLM burned cities down with impunity on Trump’s watch. And if the election was stolen (I don’t believe it was) then that was done on Trump’s watch. And now the Swamp also has Trump being tried for dozens of indictments.
Point being this: the Swamp cleaned Trump’s clock because he is a blowhard and an unserious fighter. He’s clearly been outmatched.
But similar to leftists, Trumpist beliefs are unfalsifiable and are (similar to leftism) much more akin to religious or cultist dogma or an elaborate larping of reality.
All that to say: reality is in short supply on both extremes of the political spectrum.
But guess what. When you fight reality, reality tends to win.
So it’s a big problem when both sides pick (different) fights with reality. And it speaks to the importance that those of us in the middle 90% pay attention, speak up, and call out the extremes for their nonsense. And when it comes to Trump: it’s self-evident that there are at least 2 Republican candidates far better suited for 2024.
I am on the right end of that 90%, and I stand by my stance in Unapologetically Right that pledges to support any Republican (including the Orange Man) over Biden in 2024 because I firmly believe 4 more years of the Orange Man would be less harmful than 4 more years of Senile Joe.
But trust me when I say that I am still “pro-reality” and open to fact-based assessments otherwise. My plea is this: many of you are invariably either in the “disaffected middle” or even the “disaffected right” turned off by Trumpism or the “disaffected left” turned off by Leftism. Stand up to the nonsense! Call it out for the religious anti-reality nonsense that it is. Moderation and pro-reality politics can’t be taken for granted and take work from all of us, no matter how fed up we all are.
Culture
Last but not least, culture.
As I’ve noted in The Book of Principles, culture is upstream of politics, such that if we want to change the political dysfunction, we must address the cultural dysfunction:
For my part, I’ve tried to focus on a three letter acronym, PSA:
Principles - establish principles to live by and focus on thinking from first principle standards.
Systems - consider the world as an interaction of various complex systems and understand how incentives shape these systems.
Achievement - subject to constraints from your principles, a focus on achievement is the highest good that most people can provide. It matters less what you do than that you accomplish something real.
There is much more I need to say to substantiate this, but focusing on systems and achievement, I do want to note that I have launched Forward which is an all-in-one habit tracker, task tracker, goal setting app!
I mean, I am biased, but I’ve tried dozens of apps to help manage everything I want to do, and nothing handles these three things (habits, tasks, and goals) well together… until now!
You can read more about it here:
Or checkout my walkthrough video of the platform here:
If it seems like something you’d like, then please go use it here:
It is free for the first 30 days and then $3/mo thereafter, but we are offering a huge (yuuge) 60% lifetime discount to the first 250 subscribers using promo code LAUNCHFORWRARD.
And if anyone here wants to use it and doesn’t want to pay - just shoot me an e-mail and I am happy to accommodate. I’ve built this to increase the amount of achievement in the world, the money is secondary.
For Fun
Yet one more thing I have going on is an enduring interest in the NFL and how to better predict games. I’ve built out a Machine Learning model to predict the winners of games, and have a separate Substack that will cover the picks each week while also talking about how the model is made and some ML concepts throughout.
We nailed a 52% ROI on week one, so we’ll see how quickly that is frittered away.
Check it out if that sounds interesting!
One Last Thought
One other idea that came up in a discussion with another friend was that of viewing the world as a Stable Dystopia. This too should be its own piece when I have time, but I’ll lay out the premise briefly here:
For many of us in our 30’s, the world feels uniquely dystopic today. Collapse of modern society can feel likely if not inevitable.
But the reality may be that the world has always been a dystopia. As a kid, this is obscured from you, but part of becoming an adult is this realization that we live in a dystopia.
And that dystopia, despite our feeling that it can’t last, may actually be incredibly stable. Dystopias don’t have to collapse, they can just… persist. They will mutate over time, and our job could simply be to leave the world slightly less dystopic than we found it.
But it could be a grave mistake to expect a massive sea change as even modern society may be much more stable than we give it credit for.
That’s a Wrap
I apologize for the piecemeal nature of today’s update, but hopefully you found this interesting! I do plan to have pieces on each of these topics over the rest of the year, but you never know!
As always, if you have thoughts on any of these points, I’d love to hear it publicly in the comments or privately via e-mail!