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Social Cooperation Among the Guys
I believe that humans are social animals. We cooperate for our mutual benefit. It’s in the jeans.
But obviously that is not the whole story. Men are also coded for fighting and defending the border of the territory of the band, the clan, the tribe, the nation.
In the current era the fighting part seems to have overwhelmed the cooperating part, so that the conventional wisdom is that we need a strong government to protect us from all kinds of perils, from Nazis to Commies to racists to economic royalists to climate change.
I don’t like that, so for some time I have tuned my social media receptors to news of ordinary non-governmental cooperation: how do actual humans cooperate in the wild?
Yesterday, on my X-feed, I found out, in a post by NOBUNAGA on the deeply philosophical question of the all-American truck culture. You should go and read the post for yourself, but I will help with some quotes from the post.
I needed to move a sofa.
I mentioned this to an American. He said, “You know anybody with a truck?”
I did not know anybody with a truck.
He looked at me with real concern. Not pity. Concern. The way you look at a man who has told you he does not have a name.
“You gotta know somebody with a truck.”
Well, eventually NOBUNAGA found Kevin, and Kevin showed up with his truck and a helper, name of Tony, and they moved the bed in 11 minutes. Then NONABAGA offered to pay.
I offered them money. Both of them laughed at the same time, which felt rehearsed and was not.
I asked what I owed them.
Kevin said, “Buy the pizza.”
That is the price. That is the entire economy. The truck costs one pizza and the pizza is not negotiable and the pizza is also not expensive and everyone knows what size.
Well, they sat down next to the sofa and ate the pizza.
Three weeks later, Kevin texted me.
“You free Sunday? Helping Tony move a fridge.”
He did not ask if I wanted to. He informed me of a fridge.
So off he went.
I went. I moved the fridge. I have no truck. I contributed only arms.
Afterward, a man I had never met asked me if I knew anybody with a truck.
I said, “Yeah, I got a guy.”
I have a guy.
I am somebody’s guy now, too. Tony has told two people about me.
He describes me as “the guy who’s strong for his size.”
I have never been prouder of a sentence in my life.
Go and read the whole thing for yourself. Right here.
Up to now I have talked about men as fighters, women as carers. Men have a culture of courage, women a culture of being good. Men know they are expendable, women expect to be protected. Etc.
Here we are talking about the culture of social cooperation among men with no government, no force, no guilt-tripping in sight. And it is good.
All very well. But what do we call the culture of a “guy with a truck?”
I know: we are talking about the culture of barn raising, just like in rural America of the olden time, and the Amish of today.
OK. Been there, done that.
Now I am on the look-out for an X-post that tells us all we need to know about the instinctive culture of social cooperation among women. With no government in sight.
| Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:59:06 GMT |
The Fauci Learing Center
Should Dr. Anthony Fauci be prosecuted for his lies and his responsibility for World War COVID?
I say no.
And my reason is simple. If Dr. Fauci gets convicted or jailed on some lie or some technicality, or because because he awarded a grant to someone for a quid-pro-quo, our liberal friends will make him into a victim — like the poor helpless Commies of Hollywood back in the darkest era in American history: The McCarthy Era.
What we want, I suggest, is that Fauci gets away with it, so that we racist-sexist-homophobe-science-deniers can rail about his villainy from now until the start of the next regime.
But we armed insurrectionists need to make sure we are up on the facts as we rail and rail and rail. And a good place to start is a piece by Matt Ridley at Spiked: “Fauci and the Great COVID Coverup.”
I think that the two takeaways from Matt Ridley’s article are:
[T]he Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Chinese researchers working there – in Wuhan, the very city where Covid first emerged… were engaged in ‘gain of function’ research, editing the genomic sequence of virus samples so as to make them much more infectious.
[Fauci] spent decades championing the idea that gain-of-function research on risky viruses was a good idea, even as others expressed serious doubts.
And, of course, Fauci helped finance the gain-of-function research through cut-out grants to EcoHealth Alliance that were forwarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
I suppose we can imagine that Fauci thought that by balancing his “gain-of-function” research with development of mRNA vaccines to stop the “more infectious” viruses in their tracks he would inaugurate a new and glorious era in the War Against Disease. Hey, maybe get a Nobel Prize!
Now, Ridley has a bunch of stuff in his piece about how Fauci dished out grants to people so they would write articles praising him and not write articles opposing him. Of course he did. That’s what bureaucrats do. It’s all grift and “you scratch my back” and so on down at the administrative state.
It all reminds us that President Eisenhower was a man of wisdom when he warned, in his Farewell Address, about the possible corruption of scientific research:
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields.
…
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
How did he know?
Never mind. He was right, Fauci is the proof.
And now, all the Fauci stuff is water under the bridge — and like that river in Egypt, it will flow forever.
But we wise ones must ponder over this, and consider a great question. Which was the bigger deal?
Was it the Somali child-care fraud uncovered by Nick Shirley at the Quality Learing Center in Minnesota?
Was it the global pandemic seeded by Fauci-funded “gain-of-function” research?
You make the call.
| Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:03:01 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Politician: follow me or you will all be killed. Priest: follow me or you will go to Hell.
Men: “Lead me!” Women: “Protect me!”
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Confronting the Left's Pejorative Politics
