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Readers of this newsletter have probably seen the news that I did not win the Democratic primary for Congress in the Fifth District.
Voters went with the known, comfortable, established guy. I coaxed a couple of thousand people, in a fairly low-turnout primary, to vote for a more constitutionally focused agenda, but I was afraid from the beginning that local Democrats really, really just wanted to go with their guy. You can see this in a lot of other Virginia races (such as in the First District, just to my east) where voters went with the established choice.
I suppose that’s natural. One of the things that struck me about running for office is that if you want to run for Congress, the best time to start is fifteen years ago: enough time to build up name-recognition, contacts in your political party, influential local leaders who owe you favors, and a fundraising network. (The guy who won in my district is from a prominent local family, so he had all of that from the get-go.)
In normal circumstances, this lends a certain stability and even conservatism to our political system, but it also means that the system is very slow to react to new events. So if someone gets into high office and starts tearing apart the whole American political system, people are reluctant to change their ideas about what their top political priorities are and what sort of person they need to represent them.
People liked my message, mind you. They agreed with it. As I was speaking to Democratic Party groups, I saw a lot of people nodding along. But they did not find it compelling enough to choose me over the familiar guy. Or perhaps they assumed he would do all of the same things, which—well, I hope so.
So what next? Fortunately, running for office is not the only way I have of influencing the future of our country.
I ran for Congress and stayed in the race because I was not fully confident that the guy who eventually won the nomination would stand up for the constitutional reforms we need. But I am 100% confident he will do so if it is clearly popular and polls well. That’s the case across the country. It would be nice if we had political leaders with clear principles, foresight, courage, and the ability to think in constitutional terms. To the extent we can’t rely on that, we have to do our best to marshal the pressure of public opinion.
In short, it’s back to pamphleteering for me. I’ve been writing recently about the influence of ideological pamphlets on the American Revolution, and that’s the model I’ll be following.
In immediate practical terms, that means rebuilding my business as a writer. You will see my free-lance articles appearing again soon at some of the old places and a few new ones. Most of all, I’ll be reinvigorating this newsletter.
The hardest thing about running for office is having to do it while still working for a living. (This is why most congressional candidates have either already made a fortune or inherited one.) It’s harder still when the work you used to do for a living included a lot of writing about politics, and now you can’t do that without running afoul of campaign finance laws. I took a hit for doing that, losing a small but significant portion of my subscribers who fell off the list presumably because I was no longer providing a steady stream of political commentary, at least not here.
If you’re one of the people who lapsed as a paying subscriber, now is the time to come back on.
Here’s what I have coming up:
I’ve been thinking that whether I win or lose, I have a hell of an article to write on what I’ve learned about politics by actually engaging in it rather than observing it from the outside. It will be eye-opening—and offered at first exclusively for paying subscribers.
I’ll be going over some stories I’ve missed during my campaign, or ones where I’ve linked to interesting news reports but haven’t had the opportunity to draw out their full meaning.
This will include the rise of “democratic socialism” in the Democratic Party. It’s not that I was avoiding the issue. “Democratic socialism” just isn’t much of an issue, one way or another, in the Fifth District. But I’ll try to put the national phenomenon into some kind of perspective.
In the next day or so, I’ll put up my review of the recent film version of The Odyssey. For those who know their Ancient Greek history, I can say that Christopher Nolan set out to film The Odyssey and ended up filming the Melian Dialogue. If you have no idea what that means, stay tuned, I’ll explain it all.
I’ll offer a defense of data centers against the latest reborn NIMBY crusade—something I got a look at up close on the campaign trail. But I’ll also go into more detail about my warnings that artificial intelligence, which is the main impetus behind the giant investment bubble in data centers, is overhyped.
And as promised above, I’ll have a lot more to say on the issue that animated my campaign: the reforms we need to restore the American system for the next 250 years—as well as new commentary on the history, philosophy, and political theory of democracy.
Stay tuned.
Running for Congress very much took me outside of my comfort zone, which is sitting in front of a laptop writing, and the one positive thing about losing the primary is that I will have a lot more time to spend in a quiet room alone with my words. They have missed me, and I have missed them. And readers of this newsletter will be the beneficiaries.
If you want a clue to the basic reason behind Trump’s capitulating “Memorandum of Understanding” with Iran just read his attempted justification for allowing the Iranians to keep their ballistic missiles:
“I mean, they have to have some, because other people have some. . . . I’m saying that if other countries have them, it’s a little bit unfair for them not to have some.”
True, the reference to “other countries” was to other despotisms in that region. But the whole point of this nominal war was to eliminate a significant threat to America. And Iran is the nation posing that danger. It is Iran that is dominated by an ideology that regards America as the “Great Satan” which needs to be annihilated. It is Iran that is spearheading jihadism across the globe. It is Iran, therefore, that needs to be defeated and disarmed. Yet Trump is concerned about being “unfair” to Iran by removing its arsenal of ballistic missiles.
An effective foreign policy must make moral discriminations. It must identify the nature of a country that is an enemy, and the nature of a country that is a friend. Merely looking at a country’s weaponry cannot guide us. Nuclear bombs in the hands of Iran or North Korea are very different from nuclear bombs in the hands of England or France. Just as the guns possessed by criminals call for a very different evaluation than do guns possessed by the police.
But Trump is incapable of making such moral evaluations. Whatever the conflict—Ukraine vs. Russia, Israel vs. the Palestinians—he cannot understand which side deserves our support and which our condemnation. And even when it comes to Iran, he does not comprehend the fundamental moral distinction between that nation and ours.
Instead, he sees only two haggling parties that need to come to some agreement. What he sees is an opportunity to impress the world with his deal-making skills.
This amoral approach to Iran has, predictably, led to disaster. Trump engaged in a war that will not result in the categorical defeat of an enemy and the irreversible removal of its ability to threaten us. He does not grasp the reason Iran is a threat. Instead he declares that he has achieved a change of regime in Iran, because “we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.” The fact that they hold the same ideas—the same theocratic, America-hating ideas—means nothing to him. Because ideas, particularly ideas of morality, mean nothing to him.
The only way to remove that threat is by removing the people whose ideas create that threat. Which means real regime change.
The post Trump, Iran and Moral Discriminations appeared first on PeterSchwartz.com.
John AB Da Silva “Is taxation theft?, Observador (July 27, 2026): “Call it public service, sovereignty, or territorial continuity. The name is irrelevant. The bill never was.”
Related
TAP religiously held strikes in August and at Christmas, precisely when the most people depended on it, earning it the international nickname “TAP: Take Another Plane”. Then came the partial privatization of 2015, the relief of no longer having to pay for an expensive and poor service, the renationalization in 2020, and the return to square one. Since one cannot be half-pregnant, here is TAP again, with the deadline for binding proposals from Air France-KLM and Lufthansa closing on July 29th, the third attempt to sell it since 2015. Behind this are the Airbus funds scandal, the compensation authorized via WhatsApp to a public manager, the compensation claimed by the former CEO, dismissed after the supervisory body announced her dismissal without even hearing her side of the story, and an endless number of other absurdities.
It was in this context that an unusual sign emerged. On June 27th, Porto hosted Rothbard 100, the largest libertarian gathering ever held in Portugal, to mark the centenary of Murray Rothbard. Among Hans Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella, and the other speakers, the phrase that most bothers those who live off the state budget was heard again: “taxation is theft,” said, with some irony, in a city with a historical tradition of the left. A month later, I no longer found it only on billboards. I saw it printed on t-shirts, from Lisbon to the beaches of Sagres. Something has changed in taxpayers’ tolerance for the waste of public money. It is not necessary to accept that all taxes are theft to recognize that a tax levied on everyone to finance the losses of a few is hardly distinguishable from a forced transfer of wealth. That is what TAP and, let’s be frank, also CP have been doing for decades: transferring the cost of companies that never asked taxpayers if they wanted to be shareholders to everyone.
Stuart K. Hayashi
I keep hearing from Sam Harris fans that neuroscience proves that humans don’t have free will. They want me to mull over their case and concede their correctness. Yet my opting — in contrast to the alternatives available — to take the initiative to contemplate their case and weigh the evidence for it is something that depends on my having the capacity to will myself freely
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine.
My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free.
Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research.
Here are some of my favorite psychology findings:
The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine.
Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence.
Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity.
Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require.
Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness.
GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep.
Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way.
The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects.
Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering.
The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines).
None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet.
In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science:
If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.
Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention.
Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun.
Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...]
A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.
Psychology isn’t centrally the new n=5paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop.
The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area.
(I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make)
Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions.
I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general:
The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad.
The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole.
To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here.
To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee.
From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter:
This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines!
1
To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
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