Earlier this week the philosopher Kathleen Stock waded into the national press to talk about Tories and our troubled relationship with transgender issues, using Penny Mordaunts tilt for the top job as commentary fuel.

For Stock, the Tories flapping around on gender issues demonstrates a special kind of indifference to half the population, which she ascribes to a hidden ideological commitment to individualism. She also suggests that the many Tory MPs who do oppose self-ID are motivated by opportunism and cultural warmongering, rather than concern about women.

As with everything Stock writes, the article is good, and I urge you to read it, as I urged people to read her book Material Girls when I reviewed it. However, in crucial respects, Stock doesnt understand her opponents. Thats not a knock on her. Id probably make a terrible mess of writing about Labours internal workings. After all, Im a member of the Tory Party.

The most important thing to remember is that the Conservative Party is (famously) a broad church. Whether were broader than Labours similarly broad church, I do not know.

In any case, it is unquestionably true there has long been a spergy transhumanist element in big-C conservatism. People who are keen on open borders, eating bugs, free trade, GMOs, nuclear power, lab-grown meat, pro-fertiliser, effective altruism and so on. Call it the Tom Harwood faction of Toryism, if you like.

Im old enough to remember when The Economist used to run articles calling for the legalisation of drugs in sport. The Adam Smith Institute (ASI) is full of this sort of thing.

Not everything these people say is nonsense. If it were, I would not have consented to one of my novels being launched at the ASI. Theyre often acute on economic matters, sounding early alarms on how quantitative easing would eventually lead to runaway inflation, for example. Theyre also almost certainly right about addressing climate change by dint of nuclear energy, while their pro-fertiliser criticisms of organic agriculture have been emphatically vindicated by recent events in Sri Lanka.

Some of Penny Mordaunts views are of a piece with this tradition. She also shows how one can combine elements of it including things considered woke with patriotism. (Mordaunts patriotism is genuine, by the way. Its not possible to feign that sort of thing and sign up for the Navy reserves.)

My problem with Mordaunts candidacy was her reverse-ferreting on gender issues (which Stock documents superbly), coupled with wider support for pseudoscience: shes a fan of homeopathy on the NHS, for instance. Had she come out and admitted shed changed her views, Id have been much more sympathetic. After all, in 2012, I wrote the following (for my then professional association, the Law Society of Scotland) on aspects of transgenderism. Note: I dont expect an apology from Mordaunt, just as I dont apologise for present Helen disagreeing with past Helen.

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?

The broader issue is why most of the parliamentary party, the membership, and rusted on Tory voters are opposed to self-ID while simultaneously disclaiming feminism.

In part, its because the ASI types are a minority of both MPs and the membership, and close to non-existent among ordinary voters. Genuine wokies in the electorate will almost always opt for Labour: why go for Woke Lite when you can have the real thing?

Contrary to Stocks argument, it is emphatically not because Tories are indifferent to women or planned to use trans as an issue with which we can wedge Labour (although well take the latter as a present). It is because most Tories think both gender self-identification and feminism are nonsense.

Whod be a feminist?

This isnt just a Tory preoccupation. When the Fawcett Society got a famously honest and scrupulous polling outfit (Survation) to make inquiries of a decent and representative sample, only 7% of Britons self-identified as feminist. Huge, thumping majorities believed in male and female equality, of course, which is often taken to be the definition of feminism. Clearly, however, the public does not see it that way. Perhaps significantly, of those people who called themselves feminist, 68% were more likely to think gender can be a range of identities.

Survation did not disaggregate based on political affiliation, which in itself is revealing. If even 7% of Tories self-identify as feminist, I will eat my Akubra.

One of the great ironies of our time is that feminism has adopted the Victorian Cult of Womanhood: men are uncivilised brutes who women must morally tame. It is an unspoken assumption that the movement of women into, well, everything, is an unalloyed good.

Women are female homo sapiens. The notion that women have no statistically significant, systemic character flaws is nonsense.

Two of the biggest problems when it comes to forming decent, functional, social orders are male violence and male sexual incontinence. The victims, and even more the perpetrators of violence, are overwhelmingly male. A Swedish study found that 1% of adults generated 63% of all violent offences. But that 1% was itself almost 90% male. Males also overwhelmingly dominate sexual offenders, with a similar skewed pattern. Violent crime is a sex-based power-law on steroids.

Thanks to the movement of women into the professions, into creation of culture (women have always been important in its transmission), into management, politics, and media, we are now confronted with a new problem for sustaining functional social orders. Female emotional incontinence, what one old Tory friend calls the blubbering woman problem.

Women are systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than are men. As institutions, including universities, have become more feminised, they have become more hostile to freedom of expression and thought.

Many older Tory men are also angry that they were forced to give up male-only venues historically (they dont use the word spaces) to admit women, and think feminists are hypocrites on this point. Some of these men are not simple-minded golf club bores, either. They see trans as an opportunity to break feminism into what they consider richly deserved pieces.

One reason gender-critical feminists have struggled to win what should be an easy argument is because they havent been able to mount a freedom of association case. And the reason they havent been able to mount a freedom of association claim (which would resonate with older Tories) is because feminism did more to wreck freedom of association in Britain than any other ideology.

Homo sapiens are much more cognitively dimorphic than many people realise. 70% of men have a pattern of personality traits that no woman has; 70% of women have a pattern of personality traits that no man has.

For obvious evolutionary reasons (the elevated risks of pregnancy and childcare and the need to invest in emotionally intense relationships to sustain child-rearing) women are systematically more neurotic, more agreeable and more concerned with propriety (moralised status) than men are. Women are inclined to form cliques (emotionally-intense connections), to engage in relational aggression (attack reputations), and to hide from themselves and others that they are engaging in aggression by claiming it is moral concern.

No, this is not as serious or nasty as sexual assault or violent assault more widely. That reality is something men must simply own. It is why the male prison estate is nine times the size of the female prison estate.

That clear difference in personality traits is also why sex non-conforming behaviour in children is so easy to spot. My father knew I was homosexual when I was five, long before I knew. I never played with the dolls mum and dad bought for me (I have never seen such indifference) and constantly nicked my brothers toys. By the time teenager me was building a scale model of the Colosseum with Meccano, the jury was well and truly in.

Of course, these days, a kid like me would be at risk of transing the gay away.

Feminism has spent decades pretending men and women are interchangeable widgets, and that evolution only had an influence on human development from the neck down. When it has veered away from this claim, its indulged in biological essentialism (viz, women are always kinder) almost as pseudoscientific as Mordaunts apparent enthusiasm for homeopathy. Weirdly, this essentialism doesnt draw on actual evidence of sex-based cognitive dimorphism. Then there are homosexuals. There may not be many of us, but on this sort of thing, we stand out like sore thumbs.

This not individualism or the search for a wedge issue is why the Tory Partys relationship with both trans and feminism is like a Facebook status: its complicated.

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Helen Dale read Law at Oxford and won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, 'The Hand that Signed the Paper'. Her latest novel is 'Kingdom of the Wicked'; it was shortlisted for the Prometheus Prize for science fiction.

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What Kathleen Stock gets wrong about the Tories, trans and feminism - CapX

The Psychology of Totalitarianismby mattias desmettranslated into english by els vanbrabantchelsea green publishing, 256 pages, $53.25

In 2018, a Polish academic study calledTotalitarianism in the Postmodern Age anticipated a shift in attitudes toward freedom among young Europeans. The research canvassed young people from seven E.U. countries: Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. Almost half of those surveyed did not preclude the right of governments to suspend key democratic political freedoms, while one-third were sanguine about governments engaging in political manipulation, or even lying. A similar proportion could identify values for which they would readily forgo both freedom and democracy. Slightly more than half indicated their support for democracy, while one-third said they had no clearly formulated views. Just half of those surveyed indicated that they might resist incursions upon their freedom, while one in five appeared to regard freedom as inessential.

Two years later, Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium, began to ponder developments in a similar light as he observed the COVID lockdowns rolling out all across the world. His reading of the writings of Gustave Le Bon on the psychology of crowds, and those of Hannah Arendt on twentieth-century totalitarianism, as well as his expertise in statistics, led him to take a deeper interest in what was emerging, and rapidly he came to the conclusion that the overwhelming majority of the world had fallen under a kind of spell.In late 2019, visited by some premonition of impending menace, he went to his bank and paid back his mortgagebecause he felt that society was moving towards a tipping point.

In his new book,The Psychology of Totalitarianism, he elaborates on these instincts in light of what he witnessed during COVID, including the strange phenomenon of peoples apparent indifference to their own deprivations, hurts, and incurred damage from the lockdowns: loss of freedoms, work, income, education, human contact, leisure,etc. The discourse surrounding the coronavirus crisis shows characteristics that are typical of the type of discourse that led to the emergence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, he writes. The excessive use of numbers and statistics that show a radical contempt for the facts, the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, and a fanatical ideological belief that justifies deception and manipulation and ultimately transgresses all ethical boundaries.

His book offers a description of modern society in the drifts of a mechanistic culture. Totalitarianism is the ineluctable destination. Gummed up in a congealing ideology, man is reduced to a biological organism and subjected to the positivist logic whereby every aspect of thought must be eminently demonstrable. The human person becomes an atomized subject whose entire existence is as though reduced to elementary particles that interact according to the laws of mechanics. This provides the building block of the modern totalitarian statea world, as Osip Mandelstam once observed, rendered fromman, notfor.

In such a culture, the goal is for society to be led by expert technocrats who make decisions based on objective, numerical data. With the coronavirus crisis, Desmet write, this utopian goal seemed very close at hand. For this reason, the coronavirus crisis is a case study par excellence in subjecting the trust in measurements and numbers to critical analysis. Before, societies were governed on the basis of stories; now, we have tyranny by numbers.

He cites Hannah Arendts assertion that totalitarianism is ultimately the belief in an artificially created paradise: Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man. The destination of this process is transhumanist manthe merging of the human being with the machine, and the supplanting of the human soul with micro-chips in which all communication will be positivistically constructed.

The key instrument in the creation of a totalitarian state is mass formationin effect, mass hypnosisimposed by propaganda and intimidation. On the one hand, the population is systematically exposed to the relentless voice of the totalitarian leaders; on the other, every alternative voice is systematically eliminated. Fear is the grease of this process. When fearful, the population wants a more controlled society.

The essence of mass formation involves proposing a tangible basis for otherwise unexplainablefree-floatinganxieties, frustrations, and aggression.The appropriate conditions, he says, existed in Western societies long before the COVID crisis.There was an epidemic of burnoutsomething between 40 and 70 percent of people in modern societies experience their jobs as senseless. He points also to the escalating use of psycho-pharmaceutical medicines to treat anxiety and depression.By offering a strategy to deal with the specific anxieties imposed by the coronavirus crisis, the would-be controllers were able to create a bogus solidarity in a society that has destroyed true solidarity. Under these conditions A society saturated with individualism and rationalism suddenly tilts towards the radically opposite condition, towards radically irrational collectivism.

When, writes Desmet, a suggestive story is spread through the mass media that indicates an object of anxietyfor example, the aristocracy under Stalinism, the Jews under Nazism, the virus, and, later the anti-vaxxers, during the coronavirus crisisand at the same time offers a strategy to deal with that object of anxiety, there is a real chance that all the free-flowing anxiety will attach itself to that object and there will be broad social support for the implementation of the strategy to control that object of anxiety.

The hypnotized members of a mass formation close out everything but that which the hypnotist tells them is important. They become not just indifferent to the losses of others, but insensitive to losses of their ownwilling, in fact, to sacrifice everything.

Desmet is at pains to underline that, in a mass formation, the leaders and the led operate in symbiotic manner:The process is as much a pandering to the mob as a manipulation of it, and the hypnotist/leader can himself fall under the spell of his own trance.

In situations of mass formation, saysDesmet, three distinct groups manifest themselves. Only 30 percent, he says, are hypnotized beyond reach. Another 40 percent will from the outset go along with that 30 percent of total believers. Another cohort of about 30 percent, who are not hypnotized, will try to speak out and resist. This group, he says, is extremely heterogeneous and disunited. If they could unite, he says, they could bring the whole thing quickly to an end, but this seldom proves possible.

The slightly better news is that mass formation totalitarianism inevitably self-destructs in time, though by then the cost may be enormous. This is because the leaders need continuously to invent new sources of anxiety and introduce new measures to attack these. At the moment of total control, the leaders mania enters its most fanatical stage, pursuing enemies perceived and imaginedas with Stalins purges of the 1930s. This can only lead to absolute destruction, and yet in the short run is essential to the maintenance of the fear that sustains the mass formation.

Professor Desmet writes that a mass formation can only be combatted by an insistence by those who are immune to it upon telling the truth at all costs. The continued presence of alternative voices serves to curb the viciousness of the rulers and constrains the mob in its excesses. In spite of the growing menace of the times, we have to continue to share rational counter-arguments, in the hope of breaking the link of free-floating anxiety.

He stresses also the importance of the maintenance of ethical principles as an antidote to totalitarianism. The books proffered solution is preventative as opposed to curative. Desmet pursues a fascinating refection on a waterwheel designed by MIT professor Willem Malkus in 1972 to illustrate the work of Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist and one of the founders of chaos theory.The device consists of a rotating wheel to which small buckets with a bottom hole are attached. At the top, there is a tap releasing water into the top bucket. At a very low influx, the wheel does not move, because the water flows out of the hole in the bottom of the bucket faster than it flows in. At a slightly higher influx, the bucket fills up and the wheel starts to move, sometimes in one direction, sometimes the other. Once the wheel has chosen a certain direction, its behavior becomes regular and predictable: The greater the influx, the faster it turns.

We cannot predict the specific behaviors of the waterwheel (at least not in its chaotic phase), Desmet outlines, but we can learn the principles by which it behaves. . . . Hence, there is no rational predictability, but there is a certain degree of intuitive predictability. Therefore, Desmet writes, the antidote to totalitarianism lies in an attitude to life that is not blinded by a rational understanding of superficial manifestations of life and that seeks to be connected with the principles and figures that are hidden beneath those manifestations.

And as Desmet rightly points out, this also applies at the societal level: A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. These quantities are not expendable adornments, nor cosseting luxuries, nor optional extras. If it loses its intuition of the absolute necessity for these principled fundamentals, a society will lose the sense and memory of how its own equilibrium has been arrived at, and thereafter descend into chaos.

John Watersis an Irish writer and commentator, the author of ten books, and a playwright.

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Tyranny by Numbers | John Waters - First Things

This is an opinion editorial by Roy Sheinfeld, cofounder and CEO of Breez.

Although Breez often ranks highly on lists of the best Lightning wallets, attentive readers will have noticed that we never refer to Breez as a wallet. Were not trying to confuse anyone. On the contrary, its the language of wallets in the context of Bitcoin and Lightning thats confusing.

Wouldnt it be odd to hear someone refer to a fiat payment app, like CashApp, PayPal, or Venmo as a wallet? Nobody, not even the companies themselves, describes them as wallets. And though many Bitcoin and Lightning companies and apps are both more versatile and further removed from what we normally think of as wallets, thats still what we call them.

This is a very common misconstrual, as Gigi has also noted and (independently) debunked. So lets think about what a wallet really is, what a Bitcoin wallet really is, what a Lightning wallet really is, and what we should call these things instead of wallets. We will spare no effort in pursuit of truth and liberating ourselves from scare quotes.

A wallet is a flat case or pouch often used to carry small personal items such as paper currency, credit cards; identification documents such as driver's license, identification card, club card; photographs, transit pass, business cards and other paper or laminated cards. As Giacomo Zucco put it in a recent chat we had, wallets contain little documents and pieces of information we use to interact with others.

What we call wallets first showed up around the 17th century, concurrent with the rise of paper money. And since there are only so many ways to make a small folding case to carry money, wallets havent changed much over the centuries. Compare these two specimens:

On the left is a leather wallet that archaeologists found in the wreckage of a 160-year-old submarine, and on the right is a typical wallet anyone might have in their pocket today.

The big difference isnt in the wallets, but in their contents. The modern wallet contains credit cards, which arose in the middle of the last century. Its no coincidence that credit cards entered the market around the same time as machine-readable standards enabled a transformation from physical to electronic money.

The more we rely on electronic money of whatever kind, the less we rely on wallets. The quantity of electronic money out there now outstrips physical money by a ratio of about 20:1 and each card in the modern wallet can contain balances dozens of times greater than the antique wallet could hold.

Now consider: if you took the modern wallet back 160 years to the time of the antique wallet, people back then could almost certainly tell you what it is and what its used for. Explaining credit and debit cards would be challenging, but they are still physical objects to represent electronic money. The next step would be to explain fiat payment apps, like PayPal. Your great-great-great-grandparents would positively no longer see a wallet there. By the time you try to explain your favorite Bitcoin/Lightning wallet, theyd not even be sure youre speaking the same language.

We in the 21st century might want to expand the definition. Language evolves. Like Giacomo said, wallets contain documents and little pieces of information that let us interact with others. Phones can now contain digital driving licenses (for as long as driving licenses are still a thing), credit card information, photos of loved ones, passwords, contact info and membership info phones can contain the digital versions of everything we carry in leather wallets.

As a matter of fact, the term wallet might cover more of the functions these devices perform than phone. (While were on the topic of proper labeling, phone is such an outdated term! Here in Israel, nobody younger than Methuselah refers to their mobile device as a phone. Get with it anglophones.) So the 21st century correlate of the leather wallet is the phone, right?

But then does it still make sense to call a specific, single-purpose app a wallet? Many apps store information that is readily available to us. If we dont refer to a contacts app on the device as a wallet, even though it replaces traditional business cards, why use that term for a Bitcoin app like BlueWallet or Wallet of Satoshi? Its the phone itself that is the wallet, not the apps. Apps are more like the compartments in the wallet. If were going to adapt the term wallet to our transhumanist age, lets do it right.

Wallets havent changed, but money has, how we store information has, and the term wallet no longer fits.

Bitcoin wallets and physical wallets are both storage media. Physical wallets store bills and cards that are marked with patterns of information. The right tokens with the right patterns denote value, and wallets move those tokens around in meatspace.

Bitcoin wallets also store patterns of information, but they dont directly store value. Bitcoins value is stored only as records on the public blockchain. Bitcoin wallets store private keys that allow users to authorize changes to the blockchain on their behalf. Anything that can store a long string of numbers (i.e., private keys) a piece of paper, neurons, or a fancy, password-protected flash drive would count as a bitcoin wallet. In Bitcoin, the right private keys with the right patterns indirectly denote value, because these keys allow you to move value around in cyberspace.

When friends split a tab with cash, and bills move from one wallet to another, the value is transported. When friends split a tab with bitcoin, the sender encrypts a transaction with the recipients public key and then their numbers shift around on the blockchain, where the value was and remains.

Lets compare again these two kinds of transactions visually:

Again, its easy to see where a wallet fits into the transaction on the left: cash exits wallet A, changes hands, enters wallet B. But when it comes to Bitcoin, what we call wallets are those colored boxes at the bottom containing the private keys. Does does anyone else find that metaphor silly? Like, if a piece of paper, neurons and a flash drive can all be called wallets, even though none of them contain any physical tokens of value or even any bitcoin (whatever that would mean), then isnt that metaphor misleading and unhelpful?

As Kiara Bickers puts it in her great book, Bitcoin Clarity,

With a physical wallet, you are directly holding cash that has value, but with a digital wallet you never hold the value directly, you only ever hold access to it on the blockchain. If you cross a national border from one country into another, did your bitcoin move with you? Well, no. The private keys stored in your bitcoin wallet represent only the ability to move funds, not the funds themselves. (p. 18)

If you want a better term that is less misleading and more accurately descriptive, how about signers? Same denotation plus vastly improved connotations equals Pareto-efficient semantics.

(Hat Tip to NVK and Conor Okus for helping me to think through this question and terminology.)

The term wallet is applied to all manner of Lightning apps. While that term misses the mark in every case, it errs in different directions depending on the type of app in question. Interestingly, reflecting on how Lightning apps are not like wallets does help to identify what they are like, so lets do that.

Custodial wallets dont transport tokens of value, but they do have an analog in the fiat world: bank accounts. Remember how custodial accounts actually work:

In effect, whoevers operating the custodial wallet is an establishment for the custody [and] exchange of money and for facilitating the transmission of funds. In other words, theyre a bank, and thats not my judgment, its the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Thats just what the word means. And the wallet they provide is an arrangement in which a bank keeps your money but makes it available to you when you want it i.e., a bank account (Cambridge American Dictionary).

Custodial wallets are merely user interfaces for these accounts. They just provide a way for users to pass instructions to and receive messages from the custodial intermediary. Not really wallets, are they?

What a custodial wallet would look like in real life. Doesnt look anything like a wallet, does it? (Image: Adam Norman)

So an actual wallet contains tokens of value to carry them around physical space. A bitcoin wallet (or a signer, remember?), holds your keys, signs transactions and broadcasts them to the network. Custodial Lightning wallets are really like bank accounts, where the value is entrusted to a third-party who transacts on the users behalf.

So what about noncustodial Lightning wallets? (Ugh. It feels awkward just typing that.)

The Lightning Network consists of nodes connected by payment channels. Signing plays a role here too, because every Lightning transaction is a Bitcoin transaction. However, Lightning transactions require routing bitcoin from one Lightning node to another and another and another, along their payment channels, until the payment reaches its destination.

The point is that Lightning payment apps arent just flashy user interfaces to manage wallets or account balances they have to route payments through a fluctuating network graph. And ensuring a decent routing-success rate entails a number of subsidiary tasks. These include, for example, channel management opening and closing channels with other nodes in the network and liquidity management ensuring enough outbound and inbound liquidity.

Some users prefer managing their liquidity and available routes manually on self-hosted nodes. Most users, though, delegate these technical tasks to Lightning service providers, like Breez and Phoenix.

Reading this, did anyone think Well, thats simple! Theyre just describing a wallet!? Thats the point. There is no such thing as a Lightning wallet.

Give this network graph to a toddler with a box of crayons and try to find your way from minute to minute. Thats routing on the Lightning network. (Image: Annie Mole)

Metaphors are great when they help people to communicate a complex reality vividly and succinctly. When E.M. Forster writes that Life is a public performance on the violin in which you must learn the instrument as you go along, it hits. It doesnt require explanation; its already an explanation of something much bigger. Lightning wallet is not like that. As a metaphor, it confuses, misleads and obfuscates.

A better approach would probably be to use terms that describe functions (think: bolt cutter). If an app sends and receives payments, let's call it a payment app. If it's used to play podcasts and stream sats to podcasters, call it a podcast app. If it's used to manage finances, call it a finance app. This applies equally to bitcoin and fiat (remember PayPal, Venmo, CashApp etc.). The apps name should derive from its function, not how it implements that function. And if we must use metaphors, those metaphors should at least reflect the current state of our technological reality.

Were sure that many people will continue to refer to Lightning payment apps and custodial accounts as wallets, and that legislating language never works (or we would be writing these posts in Esperanto, rajto?). Im all for free speech, but simply using a term does not make it accurate or valid. Its still important to think about the relation between how we talk about Lightning and how we think about Lightning, and how the former might influence the latter for better or worse.

Our world is made of concepts (ask Immanuel Kant), and concepts are made of language (ask Ludwig Wittgenstein). Therefore, getting the language right should help us understand and shape the world. How do you expect to launch the Lightning revolution with a mere wallet?

This is a guest post by Roy Sheinfeld. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

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There Is No Such Thing As A Lightning Wallet - Bitcoin Magazine