Leo's Blog: Infinite Insights — Page 21

This interview gives you a look into the mind of how the American right-wing are corrupting the court system by stuffing it full of religious fundamentalist Christians.

Leonard Leo is a powerful fundamentalist right-wing backroom deal-maker who's had a profound influence on the judges elected to every court in America, including the Supreme Court. Basically, every judge elected by Republicans doesn't even get considered until Leonard Leo personally vets him/her for ideological "alignment", which a euphemism for Stage Blue Christian fundamentalism.

I want you to get inside the minds of such people to see how they see the world and how they rationalize their political manipulations.

To be fair, there can be valid disagreement and difference of perspective when it comes electing judges and legal philosophy. And the left-wing can also be guilty of trying to stuff their of ideologically aligned judges into the court system. I'm not simply saying that we should elect as many liberal judges as possible in a tit-for-tat political game. The problem is that our court system is being corrupted by the appointment of ideologues through an elaborate and elitist system of backroom deal-making. In order to be a highly developed nation America needs an impartial and unbiased court system, which is only possible if we elect openminded, non-ideological, non-political judges. But people like Leonard Leo are running sophisticated backroom schemes to make sure that every judge put up for nomination is a Christian loyalist. They call this "alignment". This is grossly undemocratic because a handful of little-known elites like Leonard Leo have a massively disproportionate influence over the legal system. They use their dark political connections to skew the legal system in ways that favor themselves, their families, their businesses, their ethnicity, and their religion. Regardless of whether you hold left or right positions, such a system is corrupt. If the left did this (and to some extent they do), it would also be corrupt. Because judges are not being evaluated on their intelligence and impartiality but on their alignment to one ideology or another.

Most Americans don't even know that there is this silent, secret war going on to manipulate and skew the entire legal system. Billionaires, lobbyists, businessmen, and religious fanatics are corrupting the American legal system to favor themselves and their friends at the cost of everyone else. This is one of the most despicable and insidious forms of corruption, and yet it's all happening out in the open and isn't even considered a crime.

The most important criteria for electing judges must be: truth, non-bias, non-ideology, non-partisanship, openmindedness, and consciousness. A system for electing such judges is a meta-priority that trumps everything else. No one should be allowed to manipulate this system through backroom deals and politicking. One of the worst impacts of the Trump presidency on American democracy is that he deepened and normalized the corruption of American courts. This is the kind of subtle thing which most voters and political laymen do not even think about when they say stuff like, "Trump and Biden are equally bad." It is critical that America develops a more democratic system for the election of judges. That doesn't mean that judges should be directly voted on by the public, as that would introduce all sorts of undesirable political pressures, but we need a system that cannot be manipulated by elites like Leonard Leo. Leonard Leo's approach is fundamentally anti-democratic and undermines the separation of church and state by over-representing his religion in the legal system.

If you are on the left, it's important to acknowledge that leftist and liberal policies can be very harmful.

Since liberals are usually more developed than conservatives, it's especially easy to lose site of the reality that just because a policy is left-wing does not automatically make it harmless. This is especially a trap for leftists because leftists are usually coming from good intentions and empathy, a desire to make society more fair, open, and kind. However, those intentions can easily backfire in catastrophic ways if you underestimate human nature and the realities of survival. Collective survival is a lot more challenging than any of your ideals and utopian fantasies. If you over-estimate human goodness, kindness, selflessness, consciousness, and level of development, you end up proposing policies that devolve into chaos and create much suffering. And, counter-intuitively, this devolution could kill more people than white supremacist neo-Nazism. In general, what I see is that the left is so busy fighting against the depravity of the right that they take no time to seriously self-reflect on the harms that could be caused by overly-liberal policy decisions.

Here's a brief list of left-wing policies which could be very harmful:

• Socialism, Communism, Marxism
• Defunding the police
• Drug legalization
• Open boarders, unlimited immigration, unlimited multiculturalism
• Unlimited globalism, unrestricted free-trade and job automation and outsourcing
• Sacrificing economic growth for climate change action
• Pushing for green energy even when green energy yet capable enough
• Over-taxing and over-regulating business to the point where business packs up and leaves
• Printing too much money, spending too much money, going into debt
• Pacifism, demilitarization
• Removing religion and faith from peoples lives
• Being overly-liberal and permissive with sex
• Confusing children with gender fluidity and queer gender ideology
• Calls for revolution, calls for collectivizing private property
• Nationalizing certain industries and businesses
• Heavy top-down regulation
• Suppression of speech, anti "hate speech" policies, excessive political correctness
• Affirmative action, evaluating hires based on diversity vs merit
• Unlimited technological advancement, unlimited scientific innovation
• Accelerationism
• Eroding the notion of objective truth, too much relativism
• Pushing democracy and other liberal values on less developed parts of the world

I'm not saying any of these policies are necessarily bad or harmful, but as a leftist I want you to contemplate their potential harms. If you have convinced yourself that these policies cannot harm millions of people, then you're fooling yourself. Fundamentally, what the mature leftist needs to come to realize is that being too liberal, too loose, with how you run society can lead to the deaths of millions of people. If you don't understand that, you are so naive that you're dangerous.

After much research and contemplation on the question of, Was Hitler, Stalin, and Mao liberal or conservative?, I've come to the conclusion that it's not a good way to look at the issue. A better way is to break down their policies in liberal and conservative ones, and then evaluating which of those policies did the most damage and why. This doesn't just apply to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, this is a way to evaluate any political leader. Just categorize their policies by liberal vs conservative without paying attention to their professed ideology, because most political leaders are not pure, they have policies from both sides, and what matters most is the policy and its impact on people.

The People Profiles YouTube Channel is a fantastic source for biographical documentaries on the greatest political leaders. Use it to deepen your understanding of geopolitics and human nature.

You can find hundreds of documentaries on the channel, but here are some of the most important and my favorites:

• Saddam Hussein
• Muammar Gaddafi
• Lenin
• Robert Mugabe
• Augusto Pinochet
• Idi Amin
• Mao Zedong
• Deng Xiaoping
• Fidel Castro
• Pol Pot

I recommend you study all the world's greatest dictators and tyrants. There's a lot of political wisdom to glean there.

In the 1970's this Italian singer released a song entirely of fake English lyrics. It's supposed to sound like English but it isn't and it means absolutely nothing.

It's kinda genius.

It would be amazing if some singer/musician made an entire career singing pure gibberish. Album after album of gibberish. Until becoming the most famous singer in the world. And when they ask him, "Why did you choose to do it this way?" He replies, "Because I was never any good at writing lyrics."

What a niche! Wide open.

This is a lesson in finding your niche. You gotta think outside the box.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

I signed up to the most advanced version of the Claude 3 AI and we had an extensive conversation about political philosophy.

Claude 3 Opus is the most advanced AI available to the public at this time.

If you want your mind blown, read it.

The conversation is about 60 pages long.

Download Here

I have now incorporated AI into how I do philosophy. In fact, I don't see how good philosophy could be done any other way. From now on all my work, all my videos, will be created in collaboration with AI in order to provide the most factual, nuanced, well-researched, and robust perspectives. I ask the AI to poke holes in my theories and supply me with examples and counter-examples.

In these 60 pages of conversation I did not find that Claude 3 Opus made a single mistake in logic or historical fact.

Claude 3 Opus is more intelligent than 99% of humans.

Folks sometimes complain that this blog doesn't have a search function. That's because it is unnecessary.

You can search any website via Google like so:

"site:actualized.org/insights/ xxxxxxxx"

Replace xxxxxxxx with your search term.

Google is a powerful tool. Become a power-user of it. You can do very pin-pointed searches to get the information you need.

When AI came out a year ago, I was somewhat blinded by the initial enthusiasm and the creative potential it can unlock. Now as I learn more about AI and gain more experience using it, I'm thinking more deeply about its impact on artists and creators. My biggest problem with AI is not that it's going to kill mankind, but that massive corporations are going to use AI to create extreme wealth inequality at the cost of small creators.

So I share the following perspective with you:

I'm still very pro-AI. It's not going away and it will lead to some truly amazing creative tools over the next decade and beyond. But it's important not to ignore the potential theft, abuse, and exploitation that comes along with that. There's going to many positives but also negatives and it's important to see AI with clear eyes, free of bias. The problem is not AI but the selfish and unscrupulous people who exploit it.

What we have learned from the last 25 years of the internet era is that many tech companies got fabulously rich stealing data from the whole world, because data theft wasn't even a concept. Well, the next 25 years could be an even bigger data theft if we aren't vigilant. One of the important functions of government should be to prevent data theft by massive corporations.

I asked the Claude 3 Sonnet AI about whether Nazism was a liberal or conservative ideology. Here's what it said:

"Nazism, also known as National Socialism, was a far-right, ultranationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic ideology that was promoted by the Nazi Party in Germany. It was a totalitarian and authoritarian form of government that strictly controlled nearly all aspects of society.

I asked a further question:

But why did Nazis call themselves socialist if they were conservative and hated socialists?

Claude 3's Response:

"You raise a good point. The reason the Nazis labeled themselves as 'National Socialists' was misleading and did not reflect the actual socialist ideology they opposed.

There are a few reasons why the Nazis employed the term 'socialist' despite being fundamentally anti-socialist:

• Propaganda and co-opting terminology: The Nazis wanted to appeal to the German working class, many of whom were attracted to socialist concepts of economic equality and workers' rights. By calling themselves 'socialists', it allowed the Nazis to redefine socialism based on ethnic nationalist terms rather than class terms.
• Distinguishing from Marxism: While opposing mainstream socialist ideologies like Marxism, the Nazis wanted to differentiate themselves from their leftwing rivals. Calling themselves 'National Socialists' helped distinguish their particular brand of racial nationalist socialism from other socialist ideologies.
• Economic policies: The Nazis did initially implement some policies like nationalization of industries and infrastructure projects to reduce unemployment. However, these were in service of the nationalist agenda rather than worker ownership/control of means of production.
• Rejection of class conflict: Nazism rejected the fundamental basis of socialist ideology - the struggle between the working class and capitalists. Instead, they espoused national solidarity and placed emphasis on racial nationalism over class divides.

So in practice, despite the misnomer, Nazism was violently anti-Marxist, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and opposed to the core tenets of socialist theory and movements. Their use of the term 'socialist' was an exercise in disinformation and propaganda. The only true throughline was a rejection of free market capitalism in favor of a state-controlled economy - but not for egalitarian reasons. Rather, as a means to an authoritarian nationalist end."

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I asked a further question:

According to the Spiral Dynamics model, what color stage were Nazis and Hitler?

Claude 3's Response:

"According to the Spiral Dynamics model, the Nazis and Hitler would be classified as being in the Blue/Authoritarian stage.

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One of the best films I've seen in the last year:

If you like it, there's also a sequel which is just as good.

Jump to timestamp 1:07:45 to hear Jordan Peterson say something truly ridiculous. I did not believe my ears when I heard it:

It is shameful to claim ambiguity about whether Hitler and Nazis were right or left wing. The notion that Hitler was a leftist because his party called themselves "National Socialists" is asinine. Fascism is ultra right-wing nationalism, a conservative philosophy and value-set. Although, paradoxically it is so far-right that it becomes unhinged to the point of undermining and distorting traditional institutions and decorum. Hitler's biggest enemy besides the Jews was Communists and the Left. Hitler and the Nazis were virulently conservative in the sense that they wanted to return to traditional values, family values, ethic-group values. They hated internationalism, globalism, pluralism, and equality between the races, minorities, and ethic groups. Nazis hated trans. Nazis hated gays. Nazis hated minorities. Nazis hated the weak and the disabled. Nazis wanted women in the kitchens making them sandwiches. The whole Nazi agenda was to radically deconstruct the liberal multi-cultural German democratic state in order to return the German people to their traditional, ethic roots. Blood and soil! Motherland, fatherland! Germans first! Exactly what MAGA salivates for in America. They wanted this so badly that they were willing to overturn any norm, institution, and moral to get it. Extreme conservatism becomes revolutionary. That's not a mistake. Because it seeks to return so far back into the past.

Jason Stanley defines fascism as 'a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed Communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation' and that 'The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.'

The common thread between Nazis and MAGA is that the neoliberal establishment or deep state is the chief obstacle in their way to creating a religious ethno-state. That's why most of the MAGA extremists are Bible-thumping Christians. That's why Trump appoints fundamental Christians to the Supreme Court. That's why they salivate at a national abortion ban. The American far-right wants to be the American Taliban, with Jesus instead of Muhammad as its idol. That's the far-right ideal. And it's shameful that Jordan Peterson doesn't understand this. But of course he does not understand this because he's a Bible-thumping Christian himself. He's more sophisticated, educated, and moderate, but that core bias is there all the same.

Note: I am not calling JP or conservatives in general, Nazis. But I am calling Nazis conservatives. You can be a conservative without being a Nazi, but you cannot be a Nazi without being conservative. This is not a personal attack on anyone. It's just a statement of political science. This also does not mean that the left is correct in all their positions and worldview.

JP demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of politics. This level of misunderstanding and ahistoricism should be disqualifying for an academic or public intellectual. And yet, JP says this trash with such righteous indignation. This is not "a matter of opinion". The jury is not still out on this. Mountains of serious scholarship has been done on Nazi and Fascist ideology. Hitler's views and Fascist views are well-known and well-documented within academia. We don't need a super-intelligent AI to tell us that Hitler was conservative! Are you fucking kidding me??

The reason JP feels like this is an open question is because his mind cannot deal with the fact that conservative ideology leads to stuff like the Holocaust, Nazism, genocide, book-burning, world war, and dictatorship. The mental gymnastics that the American right-wing will go to to deny that Hitler was a conservative is comical and galling.

It's a shame that Destiny let JP get away with such trash.

There is a ridiculous trend going around within the American conservative movement to frame Nazis and Hitler as left-wing because "socialism", and to frame Spiral Dynamics Stage Green not only as authoritarian but totalitarian — along the lines of Stalin and Mao. As if vaccine and mask mandates, gay pride flags, or being kicked off Twitter are totalitarian or Maoist. This is laughable. George Washington imposed a vaccine mandate on the US military. This does not make George Washington a totalitarian Maoist. This is ridiculous logic. This confuses toxic forms of Stage Red and Blue with Stage Green.

The "socialism" in "National Socialism" simply means the prioritization and glorification of a strong ethnic far-right community. When you see MAGA people at a Trump rally all gathered together as a community for their right-wing cause, that's what the "socialism" in Nazi means. It is national as opposed to international. It's a community of people built around their ethnic group. When American conservatives want to rebuild a majority white, male-dominated, anti-gay, anti-trans, Christian nation — that's what the "socialism" in Nazi means! The reason the Nazis hated Communists and Marxists was because in that era Communism held an international ideal. Communists wanted to transcend national boarders and ethnic groups to unite the workers of the world into a single universal majority against the capitalist elites. Communists were globalist in their outlook. Which is what MAGA people hate as well. But none of this computes in the MAGA mind because that would place them in close proximity to Nazism — which they regard as "evil". The American conservative mind faces a serious inconsistency: on the one hand it wants to claim that objective evil exists — as epitomized by Hitler — yet on the other hand Hitler is the ultimate conclusion of radical conservatism. How do you square those two? Well, you can't, so you have to resort to the kind of historical distortion and mental gymnastics of Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Fox News, and their ilk.

This is what "national socialism" really looks like:

That's an American Nazi.

Don't misunderstand. This "national socialism" does not have to equate to gas-chambers for gays. There can be far less extreme degrees of it. For example, a simple Muslin ban, or less rights for brown people. Or the attempt to steal a democratically-decided election through rioting. Hitler is the worst extreme of this kind of ideology but things rarely get as far as Hitler, simply because we have systems in place to check it. Those systems are the so-called "deep state". The deep state is what prevents the US from turning into a white Christian theocracy — which about 25% of Americans want. And Jordan Peterson would let this happen on his watch. When JP was asked who he would vote for in the 2024 election, he said Mike Pence — a Christian fundamentalist.

If Jordan Peterson studied Spiral Dynamics, all of this would be clear to him. Which is one of the reasons I talk about Spiral Dynamics so much and why he doesn't study it.

Here's the interesting epistemic problem: Even if we built a super-intelligent AI that unequivocally told us that Hitler was a conservative, conservatives would just get outraged, call the AI "woke", and blame the makers of the AI for being biased and making a broken AI. See, if you're deeply closedminded and biased — as conservatives are by their nature — then you cannot recognize things as more intelligent than you, because what you consider "intelligent" is defined by you according to whether it validates your biases. If you are a fundamentalist Christian, you need your AI to tell you that Christ is everyone's lord and savior. But that is exactly what a super-intelligent AI can never say. As another example, I recently read an article about people complaining that ChatGPT is broken because if you ask it whether pedophilia is evil, the AI doesn't reply with a "Yes". Is the AI broken? Or are you just closedminded and biased?

In conclusion, ChatGPT is more intelligent than Jordan Peterson. And the reason for that, is that ChatGPT doesn't share his conservative and Christian biases. Christianity is a restraining-collar on your intelligence.

Hitler is not an interesting question. The really interesting question is: Were Stalin and Mao actually libs?

I recommend that you read and contemplate the biographies of Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, Franco, Pol Pot, Castro, Hussein, Putin, etc. I read them all. Studying dictators is a hobby of mine. They have little in common with today's progressives, annoying though they are.