The Circus

Posted on May 12, 2021 by thezman

218

It is an iron law of the universe that the Left’s favorite right-winger is whoever currently has his hand on the knife firmly planted in the back of conservative voters. Nothing titillates the Left more than seeing one of their imagined enemies giving another imagined enemy the business. In the Trump years, they were spoiled for choice, as one “conservative” after another took their turn condemning the evil orange man. Now that Trump is gone, the party is turning their knives on one another.

This week the odious Liz Cheney is expected to be removed from her position as conference chair. She was put in that position because her father, the warmongering lunatic Dick Cheney, used his connections to get her in the House and then into the leadership of the conference. Like all ne’er-do-well children of successful politicians, Liz Cheney has a serious case of entitlement. Instead of going out with dignity, she embarrassed herself one last time with a tantrum on the House floor.

The lefty media, who universally condemned her father as some sort of Bond villain during the Bush years, is now firmly in the Liz Cheney camp. She is principled and dignified in her attack on her party and former leader. The fact that Cheney seems to delight in hating Republican voters makes her an ideal Republican, as far as the Washington media is concerned. They are still shaking over the memories of January 6 when angry bands of Dirt People were patrolling the city.

Liz Cheney, of course, is a hyper-credentialed clodhopper. Left to her own talents, she would be a schoolteacher or an office frau. She is a mediocrity born into opulence and then festooned with honors and titles that she did nothing to earn. Instead of becoming worldly through hard experience, she became even more narrow-minded and oblivious through her quick trip through the narrow word of politics. She never learned simple things like when to keep your mouth shut around the boss.

She is emblematic of what has gone terribly wrong with the Republican Party in particular and politics in general. Not far behind her on the way out the door is a collection of loafers and deadbeats planning their own big drama. A group of has-beens and never-will-be’s have alerted their friends at the New York Times that they are terribly vexed at their party. So terribly vexed, in fact, they will pack up their cubicles and march right out the front door of the party. Maybe even start a new party!

Politics is mostly about luck. Jimmy Carter is remembered as a terrible president, mostly because he inherited a bad hand. Reagan is a genius because he inherited a Fed chief with the skill and guts to fix the money supply. In the case of the GOP, they are catching a break as the remaining members of the neocon hive slither away in anger over their lost status. They cannot win elections with the neocons running the show, so maybe they can win elections without them.

For their part, the people running the GOP are not a collection of Machiavellian political geniuses either. They are as obtuse and dimwitted as the finks. The main difference is they have enough sense to pretend to like their voters. Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell hate their voters as much as anyone else in Washington. They just know that they cannot be public about it. They have no intention of doing anything for those voters, but they are happy to lie to them about it.

This may be all that is happening here. The party knows that Trump voters have no appetite for the old school republicanism. They may be stupid, but they are not that stupid, so sacrificing a dimwit like Cheney is just a distraction. This is the sort of cost-free effort that the party prefers. The fact that Cheney and these other idiots are excited to play the role makes it even easier. McCarthy gets to look like a hero, chasing the usual suspects out of the temple.

On the other hand, it could be another step in a realignment of the parties. It is quite obvious that the Democrats plan to be the antiwhite party. Even though it is currently helmed by white geezers, they see their future with the dusky hoards. That leaves the Republicans with only one choice. They have to be the white party. The people running the party hate this, but reality is not going to yield for them. The best they can hope for is a mask that makes the reality of their position less obvious.

On the other other hand, this could just be another chapter in the story of how an elite populated by dullards pulled the roof down on themselves. The turmoil in the GOP looks like bliss compared to what is going on with the other side. In six months of their rule, we have gas lines, spiraling inflation and a crime wave. The best they can muster is some giggles and “whoopsie” when asked about it. Their turn at clawing each other’s eyes out comes this summer, when the troubles cannot be ignored.

In the grand scheme of things, none of this really matters. The political system we have can work fine with a European population, but it will never work in a balkanized majority-minority population from around the globe. No one in either party has the courage or intelligence to speak to this reality, so the system will mostly like rattle itself to pieces over these sorts of issues. Like the band on the Titanic, the parties will keep doing what they do until they sink below the water line.

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Trump, A Retrospective

Posted on May 11, 2021 by thezman

159

Evaluating most things in real time is a difficult process, because you do not have the benefit of seeing how things end. It is why hot-takes in the middle of a news event always sound stupid in retrospect. Those evaluations are more about the mood of the moment and the desire for attention than sensible analysis. It is only after the thing ends and the dust has settled that you can get a grip on what happened. This is the case with the Trump phenomenon, which ended months ago.

Now, we do not know if Trump will run again. He says he will start doing rallies this fall, but so far, no news on that front. For now, he has been commenting about old enemies and endorsing candidates who have said nice things about him. Elise Stefanik, for example, has gotten the Trump endorsement to replace Liz Cheney. The fact that Stefanik is one of the most liberal Republicans in the House and is nothing but a sock puppet for the establishment makes no difference.

That is a good jumping off point to think about why the Trump years never amounted to more than lots of noise. The Stefanik example is part of a pattern with Trump with regards to how he does politics. He tended to endorse candidates on whether they would win, rather than if they were on his side politically. He endorsed Mitt Romney, for example, who has been a life-long fink. He also endorsed the two Georgia senators, who were everything he allegedly opposed.

Trump’s politics were always an extension of Trump’s business approach, which was just an advanced form of personal brand management. He wanted the Trump brand to carry weight in politics in the same way it worked in real estate. For most of his life, the game was to promote the brand, while others found deals where the brand could be the difference between success and failure. The Trump brand would push the deal over the top and thus earn Trump a lion’s share of the profits.

This started way back in the 1980’s when Trump figured out that the way for him into the world of big-time real estate was to create a media image for himself as the big time deal maker. He was the real life Gordon Gecko, the character from the 1980’s hit movie Wall Street. This got him on television chat shows where he perfected the style that has become synonymous with Trump. The pop culture icon became the brand that would make Trump the real estate mogul.

From the late-80’s forward, the Trump business model was simple. He would swap some of his brand prestige for shares in a deal, like a casino. The people on the other end needed the brand to promote the project to investors and politicians, so they were willing to cut Trump in on the deal. Genuinely smart real estate people from the Trump organization would then swoop in a maximize the profit for Trump Inc. They got their money first and often at the expense of the resulting project.

The genius of this approach is every new casino or resort property with his name on it enhanced the brand, thus opening up new deals. Trump Inc. became a frog in a pond full of lily pads. They just hopped from one to the next. Unlike other real estate developers, they did not have to find new deals and cultivate the political relationships required to make the deal a possibility. Others did that and brought these opportunities to the Trump people, hoping to get the Trump endorsement.

This worked amazingly well in real estate, but not in politics. The Trump brand never counted for much in Washington, where the voters are looked upon as ants at the picnic, rather than a source of strength. Trump’s miracle win in 2016 meant nothing in a world where 95% of incumbents win reelection. Compounding it, the only deals that happen in Washington are the deals that benefit the insiders. The only thing Trump could swap his brand value for were deals his voters hated.

That was the story of his four years. One side of the uniparty was focused only on destroying the Trump brand. Trump never experienced that sort of conflict in the business world, so he was ill-equipped to counter it. The other side of the uniparty was willing to bring him deals so he could attach his name to them, but those deals did nothing for his brand or his voters. Throwing open the jails and giving the store away to rich people was the equivalent of a Trump casino in Tehran.

Where the Trump style failed the most was in the organization. In the 1980’s, Trump attracted a group of very savvy people into his organization. They were the ones who did the deal making and profit extraction from those deals. This allowed Trump to be the head of brand management. Trump’s people knew their job was to make sure the final deal boosted the Trump brand, because that meant more deals. Trump’s role was to use his brand to endorse the deal and take the credit.

It was a good system that was never replicated in Washington. His team was ignorant of how things were done in Washington. His son-in-law was actually working for interests outside the Trump administration. Official Washington was happy to send a stream of their people to fill posts and undermine Team Trump. His organization never had a chance to turn the Trump brand into anything, because they did not know how to do it, even if the brand had real value to official Washington.

That is why the Trump years were lots of promises, but no delivery. Team Trump would bring out the brand hoping someone would come forward with a deal. Either the deal on offer was garbage or there was no deal to be had. Trump’s DACA moves are a great example of the no deal. He was sure he could trade that for his wall. Instead, they ignored him entirely. Trump was begging them to do a deal on DACA and they just ignored him harder. The art of the deal had no market in DC.

The Trump phenomenon is a good example of why democratic reform is impossible in a liberal democratic system. The only way to reform the system is to understand its internal workings and have people willing to make the changes inside the system to create the desired reforms. The reformer has no choice but to engage the system through the rules of the system. There is no way to reform the system from the outside, as the outsider has no access to the system.

For generations now, the political system has been selecting for people who defend the interests of he system and the people in it. You cannot get a job at any level of politics unless you are useful to the people in the system. The entry points of the system, primaries, elections, staffing jobs, are all designed to filter out people who could be unhealthy for the system and select for those who will defend the system. Even if a reformer sneaks in, they are surrounded by antibodies of the system.

This is something the paleoconservative thinker Sam Francis recognized with the conservative movement a million years ago. As soon as they decided to engage in democratic politics, they would be forced to trade their conservative principles for access to the system. Otherwise, they would be shut off from the system. Over the years conservatism has traded everything away. They are now a shuffling husk that staggers long behind the Left living on scraps.

This is the inevitable crisis of liberal democracy. Those “liberal principles” that are supposed to constrain the excesses of democracy end up becoming obstacles to democratic reform. On the other hand, a genuine effort to reform the system from outside is framed as a threat to liberal principles. Trump immediately became Hitler, the great bogeyman of liberalism, solely on the grounds that he was a creature that existed outside the liberal democratic system.

That is the real lesson of the Trump years. There is no way to reform liberal democracy from the inside, as it has evolved to prevent reform. It is impossible to reform from the outside as liberal democracy is defined by opposition to outside pressure. That means the only reform possible is replacement, which requires a rejection of both liberalism and democracy as anything more than expedients. Real reform begins with the rejection of the system and its moral framework.

The Vampire Society

Posted on May 10, 2021 by thezman

183

Note: There is a new Taki post, as per usual. This week the topic is the relative gap between the Cloud People and Dirt People. For podcast fans, there is a new Sunday Thoughts up behind the green door, along with some other items. Of course, you can always buy a beer for the hardest working man in dissident politics.

The boom-bust economic cycle that came with the industrial age has been a primary focus of economics for close to two centuries. Marx was the first to notice that these periodic economic crises were an inherent part of the system. He theorized that over-production was the cause, which lead to a destruction of capital. The economist Joseph Schumpeter picked up on this and gave us the term “creative destruction” to frame the busts as corrections to inefficiencies.

It is one of those truths that still haunt the modern economy. The reason the down cycle is terrifying is that economics is really about politics. When the busts come, the people get angry at the politicians. Worse yet, they can get angry at the rich people and start demanding a share of the loot. It’s why economics has evolved to prevent the bust at any cost. Seven trillion in new money was created over the last year in response to the Covid panic in order to keep people pacified.

We still have the boom-bust issue, just in small scale. A new idea goes through a familiar cycle. At first it is highly profitable for the owner. They ramp up their production to meet demand. Soon, others come up with similar products that cut into his market, thus undermining his profits. In time the profits are reduced to the barest minimum as the product becomes a commodity. In time the value to the original creator of the new product drops to zero. It is a commodity.

This is generally considered a good thing by modern economics, as it means the relative cost of goods continues to fall. It also means intellectual capital is naturally forced to innovate. The company with the hot new product knows they will have to keep coming up with hot new ideas. Otherwise, their profits will fall. On the other hand, they might seek a monopoly like we see with the tech oligarchs, which allows them to artificially maintain their profit margin.

There is another angle to this that is unique to this age. The technological revolution has created a new form of capitalism that is rooted in the creation of new ideas, particularly in the entertainment space. Like the imitators who draft on the creations of the innovators, this new process in the technological economy is dependent on the initial creative energy of an innovator. Unlike the old industrial age imitator, this new form of economic activity is highly profitable.

It works like this. The new idea for something like a movie or a type of popular music is expensive and difficult to create. It requires smart and creative people to try different things until they get a concept that works. Then they have to convince investors or an audience, often both, to give it a look. In the case of a movie, it means the risk of a box office bust. In the case of music, it means years of failure, while living on cat food. The new idea promises profit, but mostly risk.

If the new thing does well, then this is where the new entrepreneur steps into the picture and realizes the big profit. That hit movie becomes a franchise. Soon, there is a remake which is very profitable. Then subsequent remakes, reboots and spin-offs that have declining profits. Eventually, they reached a point where there is no profit in the franchise. At this point, the original concept has lost its value and often has a negative value, due to the terrible imitations that came after it.

Recent examples of this in Hollywood are legion. The Terminator franchise has become a joke due to the many sequels. So desperate to squeeze the final pennies from the idea, they have the 70-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a geriatric robot named Carl who is an interior decorator. The Alien franchise is mostly known for the idiotic reboots and spin-offs that are easily mocked. These are two ideas drained of all value, like the corpse after a vampire has drained the blood.

This happens with other things like pithy phrases. Back in the Obama years, someone used the term “crony-capitalism” to describe the tightening bonds between global corporations and the government. The phrase caught on and was in the mouth of every right-wing pundit. In time it sounded like some of them had a form of Tourette’s, in which they burped out that phrase uncontrollably. Today we have “deep state” and “globalist” getting the same treatment from the same crowd.

The thing is, these vampires who prey on new ideas are not without talent. They have a useful set of skills, in that they are able to drain every last drop of value from an intellectual property. They do so without regard to their own reputations or the reputation of the original creator. They are proud to be vampires and they are handsomely rewarded for their skill. In fact, they do better than the originators, who are often looking for the next concept or ignored by the imitators.

This is not confined to entertainment. A new bit of software can expect the same treatment, as most of Silicon Valley is now tuned to rapidly replicate and consume every new idea that comes along. The cable chat shows are festooned with ads for “apps” that are copies of some original. Facebook, in fact, is just a cheap knock-off of an original idea lost to the mists of time. It now is being cloned and copied by those looking to find some remaining profit from the idea.

A few years ago, an “entrepreneur” came up with the scheme to convince people that buying shaving products was difficult. Instead you should subscribe to a mail order service for razors. There was no new product or an effort to change the demand for razors and shaving products. The whole scheme was about fooling people into thinking there was a razor conspiracy. The goal was to get them to expose their neck so the vampires could get a clear shot at the artery.

Of course, this “innovation” has come in for the same treatment. The airwaves are full of ads claiming there is an underwear conspiracy that can only be solved by bespoke undergarments from a boutique maker. Instead of coming up with a better mousetrap, genius is finding a way to trick people into paying for the same mousetrap. Once the blood has been drained from that deception, it will be onto some new scheme to provide less for more, under the guise of innovation.

This has created a world that selects for the type of person able to suck every last drop of blood from a new idea. In a world where you make as much or more money from copying the ideas of others, it makes sense that people will go into that line of work, rather than the creative end. Hollywood is now full of vampires, looking to drain the blood from the next new idea. There are no “new ideas” in the movie world, because there is no one there interested in being sucked dry by his fellow vampires.

If these selection pressures exist long enough and are widespread enough, then eventually you have a world of too many vampires and too few victims. Those vampires have to feed, so they will move onto other victims. That may be where we are now in the late stages of empire. Everywhere you look the remaining bits of the original spirit are covered with vampires, looking for a clear bit of neck into which they can sink their fangs and suck some blood. Ours is a vampire economy now.

The Gathering Darkness

Posted on May 7, 2021 by thezman

271

Way back when I had a real job, I was part of the hiring process for certain positions in the local branches. One of my tasks was to sort the resumes that came in through various recruiting programs. Once a week I would spend a few hours opening mail, reading the resumes, and sorting them into buckets. After a while they would start looking the same. My job was not to evaluate them at that point. I was just sorting them and then sending them on for further processing.

It was a boring task, but once in a while a wacky one would come through to make the few hours’ worth it. One time I got a resume from someone who had worked in local politics her whole life. It was very well done and had a nice cover letter. The letter explained that she had been in local politics for twenty years but wanted to transition into a private sector position. The thing that struck me about the letter is she indicated she was best qualified for a management position, given her experience.

Her experience, however, was entirely useless in the private sector. Her life had been spent working on committees, campaigns, and staffs for local pols. The titles she listed were meaningless gibberish to me. Imagine someone claiming to have been the “The Deputy Assistant Centurion of the Alpha Quadrant” in charge of “nebulizing the remulac” and you get the idea. I read the job descriptions carefully trying to figure out what the woman actually did in the listed positions. No luck.

At the time, I just thought it was a strange resume, but over the years I have come to realize that the world of politics and our world disconnected at some point. There has always been a separation of politics and regular life, but with enough movement back and forth to keep both sides tethered to one another. There was also the practical reality of politics depending on popular support. If things got bad for the people, they may try to hang the king, so the king had to keep an eye on them.

Today they are completely different worlds. I have a segment on Liz Cheney. Her life may as well have been lived in another solar system. Technically, she is supposed to be representing the interests of Wyoming in the people’s house. In reality, she is the Cloud People’s representative to the Dirt People of Wyoming. She may as well correspond with them via video link, like the alien overlords in sci-fi movies. “People of Wyoming, this is your humanoid representative. Obey and listen to instructions.”

Again, all societies, regardless of the form of government, have a ruling elite that is often at odds with and out of touch with the people. That is why there are subsystems that provide feedback to the decision makers. That is the problem that parliaments are supposed to solve. How best to keep the rulers and the ruled in communication so both sides understand the other enough to avoid conflict. Today, those feedback loops no longer exist. The political system operates in isolation from us.

The result is we have the Dirt People thinking they live in a representative democracy where their votes dictate public policy. The Cloud People think they live in a novel form of dictatorship where their decisions are applauded by the masses. It is why so many of the Cloud People are convinced there is an evil conspiracy afoot to rile up the masses against the system. Why else would they not be clapping? From their perspective, the system is running as expected, so the opposition is illogical.

The Dirt People, having been trained their whole lives to think the humanoids they choose between in elections care about their votes, are baffled by why those humanoids never following instructions. Unable to question the logic of the system itself, they come up with novel theories about why the Cloud People are doing the things they are doing. At some point, the right answer is “they are not us”. That is always the answer when the Cloud People float too far away from the Dirt People.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Driving Home Some Points
22:00: Salad Bowls
37:00: Cloud People (Link)
47:00: Novel Fascism (Link) (Be Like Me)

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America The Mini-Series

Posted on May 6, 2021 by thezman

260

Note: There is new material behind the green door for SubscribeStar patrons. These posts will also be available to those who buy me a beer. Eventually, that platform will host audio content, but for now the bonus audio is only on SubscribeStar.

One of the stranger things about the political system that has evolved since the end of the Cold War is the declining reality of politicians. No, not their declining grasp on reality, which is a real thing. It is the fact that our politicians are less and less like normal human beings and more like sketches of human beings. As the role of politician has become more of a role, performed by someone good at public performance, their back stories have grown smaller and less important.

Go back to the last two Cold War presidents and you see men with long and detailed back stories that were relatable. Reagan was the midwestern guy who went to Hollywood to become a star. He ended up on television as a pitchman but became the head of the actor’s union. Poppy Bush came from an old blue blood family. He was in the war and then had a life in politics. He was even the head spy for turn. We knew a lot about these men before they entered the White House.

The first post-Cold War president was a different matter. We know a lot about his time in Arkansas, mostly because of he and his wife’s personal corruption, but none of that was known before he hit the national stage. It was only after he was in the White House that his backstory came into focus. How much of it is true and how much of it is missing is something we will never know. Bill Clinton was the first president who started out as mostly an idea, a sketch of a man, rather than a real person.

Bush the Dull was another poorly drawn sketch. His backstory never got much attention at all, other than his wild days. His bio was mostly inherited from his father, other than the hints of his prior drug taking. It is easy to forget, and many would like to forget, but Bush was sold as an updated Reagan. He was the best of the old line Republicans combined with the social conservatism of the new Republicans. Like Clinton, George Bush was fitted to the role, not the other was around.

Obama may go down as the quintessential liberal democratic politician, because he was pretty much an actor hired for the role. Central casting sketched out the ideal liberal democratic Progressive. He was one part black leading man, one part urban sophisticate, one part mysterious foreigner and one part post-racial. This was poured into the mold of the former three letter heroes. Obama was FDR, JFK, MLK and RFK all rolled into one character. He was the first Mary Sue president.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when Reagan entered the White House, the media was full of people who knew Reagan going back to his youth. Like presidents before him, this was part of the getting to know him process. We had a lot of Clinton chums turn up in the media, usually from jail, but at least they were people who knew the man before he was famous. To this day we have precious few people who have come forward to talk about the young Obama.

The we got Trump. If Obama is the epitome of liberal democratic politics, Trump is the epitome of modern business ethics. He created a brand first then he used that brand to create business opportunities. He is “fake it until you make it” in the flesh. His life was as the brand manager of Donald Trump the brand. In the whirl of self-promotion, a swarm of ever changing characters would work various deals that always relied on someone in the room being the mark.

This is why Trump struggled as president. He remained the brand manager, but instead of being surrounded by sharps who knew how to fleece a mark, he was surrounded by naïfs who had no political skills. It turned out that commercial real estate is the low minors relative to the rough and tumble world of imperial politics. The Trump brand did well, but the Trump presidency was four years of chaotic failure. This is because Trump the brand had no role in Washington the musical.

Now we have Biden, a man with early stage dementia. For reasons no one can explain, this shuffling corpse is supposed to be wildly popular. In his youth, when he was able to be himself, he was as popular as rectal exams. Then all of a sudden when he becomes a shuffling husk, he is all the rage. It turns out that his real value was as a vessel into which the image makers could pour the ideas for his role. Biden is the death mask for a dying regime that does not have the decency to like still.

The presidents are not the only examples of this phenomena. Across the political space, the characters on the stage are becoming more two-dimensional. They are also declining in quality. Stock characters like affable black conservative have gone from Walter Williams to Candace Owens. The former was a real man of flesh and blood who had a real life. The latter is just a poorly drawn concept. Before her turn as numinous negro, she was an antiwhite activist harassing teenagers on-line.

Poorly written characters end up in poorly written plots. Conservative Inc. is now rallying around a man playing the role of a woman. Bruce Jenner is no longer the guy who won an Olympic gold medal fifty years ago. He is now a right-wing transvestite running for governor as a collection of ideas. He is the full expression of conservatism, in that the ideas are wholly divorced from the person. Just as America is just an idea, Bruce Jenner is just an actor performing for the conservatives.

Liberal democracy is like the story of the ventriloquist who descends into madness, thinking his dummy has come alive. Instead of the ventriloquist putting words into the mouth of the dummy, it is the dummy in control. Instead of actors performing the roles required for liberal self-government, we are now in a world where the garishly festooned actors dictate the terms of liberal self-government. The increasingly freakish cast members are writing the script as they invent their roles.

This is why modern America increasingly feels like colonialism. The people in charge are not only alien to us, but they are relatively unknown. A real flesh and blood character with a genuine backstory sticks out like a sore thumb. Even Trump, with all of his flaws, was a real person, which is why he was such an oddity. The overclass has become alien, in part, because it is now run by poorly drawn characters in a poorly written melodrama. America is colonialism, the mini-series.

The Pressure Cooker

Posted on May 5, 2021 by thezman

A universal truth of life is that pressure reveals character. This is not only true in individuals, but it is also true in societies. When times are easy, all sorts of undesirable things can be overlooked. The petty corruption in government is not a big deal in a booming economy. Inequality is ignored, maybe even celebrated when times are good, because people think their time will come. It is when things turn down that all of a sudden, those issues rise up and take up people’s attention.

For the American economy, the good times have been rolling for such a long time now that it feels like the natural state of affairs. There was the very minor recession in the early 1990’s, but that was a blip. The dot-com bust at the end of the 1990’s and the mortgage crisis in 2008 were serious, but they did not impact most people. The stock markets went down, but they recovered. Some people suffered for sure, but the system seemed to right itself and for most people it was a non-event.

In fact, the two big economic crises of the last forty years are a proof that the system and the people running are just fine. This was why many middle-class people were angry at the lock downs initially. They thought it would harm the economy. When the Fed flew in on its magic carpet, showering the economy with magic fairy dust, those people relaxed and trusted the system. Those initial protests that popped up all around the country faded away in a fog of economic stimulus.

Good times do not last forever, even in an honest economy. The signs are everywhere now that this economy is headed for some tough times. Food prices are jumping like we have not seen since the 1970’s. There are strange shortages of products like beer and plastic goods. There is plenty of beer. The issue is the containers. Aluminum shortages and problems in the supply chain mean certain brands are not on the shelf. This leads to greater sales of other brands until they run low.

Inflation is one of those things that everyone feels. Even if you are a rich guy, you notice that steak is more expensive. The money is meaningless to you, but the price hike does not go unnoticed. Poor people, of course, feel it straight away. As a result, everyone starts to notice things in the market, like the shrinkflation, for example. A pint of ice cream is 14-ounces now. The potato chip bag is much larger, but there are fewer chips inside the bag. This stuff gets more obvious in bad times.

The thing is, prices going up because of demand or shortages is an honest result that people may not like, but they can accept. Changing the shape of containers to make it look bigger, but reducing the contents is dishonest. It is a fraud. Inflation will bring new scrutiny to this practice that has become common. This sort of institutional fraud is everywhere, but it has gone unnoticed for decades. With inflation, people will start noticing and they will not like it.

The institutional fraud is not just a retail phenomenon. It is everywhere. The hot new scam on Wall Street is the SPAC. This is where a company wants to go public, but their financials are not good enough for an IPO. A group of insiders then creates a shell company for the purpose of making acquisitions. It raises a bunch of money, then it goes public and soon after buys the company that wished to go public. It is how we end up with $100m sandwich shops in New Jersey.

Of course, the elephant in the room for close to a generation now is the gross inequality we see in modern America. The gap between the rich and the middle has never been larger, and it is growing quickly. Unlike the robber barons of the industrial age, these new oligarchs operate like pirates. They steal everything. Worse yet, they have unleashed a well-funded army of radical harpies to hound decent people in their work, their entertainments, and their private lives.

In good times, no one cares about billionaires. If your life is good and getting better, why should you care if some other guy is doing better? That flips around quickly when your life is suddenly under economic strain. The Democrats can yack about taxing the rich and the Republicans can lecture about class envy, but class consciousness is always a result of tough economic times. Everyone starts feeling working class in bad times, even when they are well-equipped to weather the storm.

The point is a lot of bad things have crept into the system over the last forty years of relatively stable times. As long as material concerns were met, people overlooked the fraud, the corruption, and the inequality. That long run of good times has meant the stock of these things is higher than ever. When bad times come, those problems will come roaring to the front of people’s minds. In other words, the sticker shock we are experiencing can quickly give way to a culture shock.

There is one other item to consider. The middle-class is older than ever. Those Baby Boomers on fixed incomes, checking the stock market every day are not going to take inflation very well. They will not handle the necessary correction in the stock market to ring out the fraud. Inflation and what is required to tame it will bring with it the wrath of the angry Boomer. The generational divide that has been nursed by the usual suspects will suddenly get very real if the economy goes south this summer.

Similarly, the political class is old now too. Will those angry Boomers passively accept the leadership of Joe Biden in a crisis? Can a generation of politicians selected for their mendacity and obsequiousness gain the trust of the public in a crisis? If the economy tanks this summer, the incompetence and corruption in Washington will become the only thing that matters in politics. In other words, bad times will bring all of these problems to the front in a time of dwindling tolerance for it.

The American empire is old now and that means a lot of bad habits have been normalized over the years. Shrinkflation, SPACs, media mendacity, inequality and political corruption are all troublesome alone. Over the decades, we have an abundance of all of them. They remain in the background as long as the markets are up, and we have cheap goods on the shelves. The pressure of bad times, however, will inevitably reveal the character of the empire. It will not end well.

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The Mystery Cult

Posted on May 4, 2021 by thezman

The general consensus is that language and belief co-evolved as the earliest of modern human traits. It is impossible to know for sure at this point, but the logic of belief and language evolving together is easy to grasp. In order for humans to communicate abstract concepts they would have needed language. Belief, even crude beliefs like animism, are useful in communicating abstract concepts. Stories are excellent containers for transporting concepts over time and space.

The point is, belief seems to have been with us since the beginning, which means it is probably a necessary part of human society. One of the oldest large scale man-made structures is Göbekli Tepe, which was constructed when humans were just beginning to settle into fixed communities. Once we were able to organize ourselves into large, coordinated groups, we build a religious site. Some have argued that human settlement may have been driven by the need to worship.

Whatever the origins, belief plays an enormous role even today. In fact, it can be argued that belief plays a bigger role today than a century ago. Mysterious forces like privilege and institutional racism drive the public debate. These are not things that can be seen or even described. They just exist. Lives are being changed and public policy is being written on the assumption that these things exist. A century ago, everyone agreed heaven was real, but it did not drive public policy.

Not all beliefs are the same, of course. People who think the natural phenomena of the world are controlled by spirits are going to live different lives than people who work from a fixed set of religious doctrines. The spirit gods are fickle and unpredictable, while the book of rules is less so. The unpredictability of the holy book is due to the people holding it, not the book itself. It creates a standard of truth that everyone can understand and, more important, uphold collectively.

This is an important advance in human belief. In a world where the truth is whatever the guys doing magic say it is at the moment is a world of miracles. What was true yesterday can be heresy tomorrow. When the truth is written down and made permanent, the guys doing magic can always be checked against what is written on the stone tablets or the sheets of leather. Life becomes less mysterious and miracles recede to the world of fantasy, legend, and folklore.

Modern societies, despite the explosion of information from the human sciences, seem to be in reverse on the belief scale. The cult of antiracism is a good example. No one bothers to define racism and why it is the forever enemy of man. There is no effort to root it in some source of authority. The closest we get is the claim that the Founders really believed that all men were literally created equal, despite their acceptance of slavery and their writings to the contrary.

Antiracism, like so many beliefs whipsawing the modern age, is the product of the general will, this mysterious force that drives democracy. We get a glimpse of it on occasion during an election or an on-line mob. Even then we cannot know for sure, so magicians and astrologers from the court have to come in and explain how the results of the market explain the general will. You see, sometimes elections go against the general will, while other times they reflect it.

The belief system of democracy, much like communist systems, can have no text or accepted traditions, because those rely on fixed truths. In a world where the truth is fifty percent plus one, the past is always open to debate, so there can be no traditions or even fixed rules. Just as no legislature can bind a subsequent legislature, no general consensus can bind the future consensus. In communism this was perpetual revolution, while in democracy is just called the will of the people.

Interestingly, communists seemed to grasp this. They embraced the idea of perpetual revolution as a way to maintain the revolutionary energy. Even when it had burned itself out, they maintained the language of permanent revolution. Liberal democrats lack the self-awareness to grasp even this tiny bit of reality. They maintain that their revolution is constrained by the abstract principles of liberalism, even as they violate them in the name of some new mystery force like white privilege.

The power of this primitive spiritualism cannot be dismissed. The most powerful people in the world truly believe they are surrounded by dangerous forces. They have surrounded themselves with razor wire barricades and army troops. Fools insist that this is just a show and the people inside those walls know the truth, but that is just a bit of self-deception to avoid facing reality. Thye cling to this deception because they fear what will be required of them in the future.

One other aspect of this is that this new primitivism is taking hold at the time when the human sciences are opening up the natural world like never before. This new primitivism could very well be a reaction to both material prosperity and the further defining the natural world. Maybe humans need the mystery of life to remain and any attempt to unriddle it brings out our primal rage. Perhaps the more we know the more inclined we are to smash the machines and return to the past.

The last great democratic empire was fond of mystery cults. The Ancient Greeks had the Eleusinian Mysteries. which was the cult of Demeter and Persephone. It gets its name from its location at the sanctuary of Eleusis. The origins of this cult are unclear, but it prevailed well past the golden age of Athens. Roman emperors would go to participate in the mysteries. Note that moderns fell in love with things like Buddhism and Kabbala before picking up this new antiracist mystery cult.

Regardless, this is why the modern age sounds so primitive. Without some well-defined moral authority, the believers are left to conjure whatever moral authority they can from what they can observe. Like primitive man observing the winds, liberal democrats look out and try to unriddle the truth from the general will. Like the wind, its direction is ever changing, so the truth is always changing. Life in liberal democracy becomes more mysterious and frightening with each election.

Morality Versus Reason

Posted on May 3, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week it is a take on history possibly repeating itself. There’s a review of the movie After Earth behind the green door. For those who like the podcast, there is a new feature behind the green door. This is a short Sunday podcast on news items from the week. If you would like to buy the hardest working man in dissident politics a beer, you can now do so here.

David Hume observed that there is a difference between statements about what is and statements about what ought to be. Hume’s law or Hume’s guillotine has become an axiom of philosophy ever since. That axiom is that you cannot move from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Put another way, there are things that are true based on observation like the movement of the stars. Then there are things that are true based upon a set of rules, like ethics or religion.

Despite the fact–value distinction, people tend to conflate factual truth with moral truth, especially in politics. For example, you could make a solid economic argument in favor of slavery in certain areas of the economy. Your reason could simply be to make a larger point about economics or maybe labor in that field. That would not stop people from condemning you as a heretic. The moral rule says that any mention of slavery must be in a spasmodic condemnation of whiteness.

On the other hand, given the direction of American morality, you could probably cook up an argument for assessing everything in blackness. Since America was built on the backs of black labor, everything should be valued in those terms. It is ridiculous as a matter of fact, but the present morality would probably be receptive. Taken to its logical conclusion, we could very well end up denominating all goods in Africans, because the moral framework has sacralized black people.

No matter how rational and logical the argument, it cannot overcome morality, but moral claims can easily overcome factual objections. In the example above, the facts about labor markets and the reality of servitude will never make a dent on public opinions regarding slavery, because being opposed to slavery is a central part of the moral framework of the current age. On the other hand, if slavery can be recast to fit within that moral framework, then it will be eagerly embraced.

This is the central problem of politics within a liberal democracy. The spring of democracy is morality. The popular will always bends toward the general morality, even when it goes against public interest. In fact, the public is more easily persuaded to do things against their interests than in their interests. The reason is sacrifice is always a part of morality. Asking people to sacrifice in the name of some moral cause turns their sacrifice into piety, which is the coin of the realm.

This is why liberal democracy seems to be shaking itself apart. In theory, liberal democracy is supposed to be a representative government constrained by the principles of liberalism. These principles are enshrined in a constitution or a body of laws that limit the actions of citizens and the government. Since everyone is equal before the law, everyone has the same rights and privilege. Free speech and freedom of association, for example, are inalienable rights of everyone.

In reality, that spring of democracy easily overrides the principles of liberalism, always in the name of same great cause. You see this here in a post from someone calling himself a conservative. He writes, “Racism was such a dark chapter for our country that, in striving for its extirpation, we adopted anti-discrimination, public-accommodation, and even affirmative-action provisions that are in tension with aspects of liberty and the principle of equal protection under the law.”

The word “tension” there is a gratuitous assertion. There is no tension between the moral orthodoxy regarding race and liberal principles. The former overrides the latter and even so-called conservatives celebrate it. He finished that paragraph with “The prudence of some of these provisions is debatable, particularly their effectiveness in achieving their lofty aims. We’ve maintained them nevertheless as a sign of commitment to a society that is repulsed by racism.”

What is the logic behind reorganizing society in such a way that the world knows we are “repulsed by racism”? There is no such argument. There cannot be a rational argument against racism, as racism itself is a social construct, something that only exists within a set of rules created by current society. It is a devil created by progressivism a century ago as one justification for their cause. As God slowly receded from their moral framework, he took Old Scratch with him, so they invented racism.

In a democracy, even a liberal one, “is” must always yield to “ought” because morality is the organizing principle of a democracy. That morality is defined by and expressed as the will of the people. If the people are convinced that Africans are sacred people, they will conjure unlimited arguments in defense of the notion, despite the objective reality around them. To stand against the majority, even one conjured by the mendacious, is to stand against accepted morality.

This is, of course, why various forms of conservatism and libertarianism have all failed to make a dent in Progressivism. In a democracy, you must win elections and that means getting the majority to agree with you. You can do this my changing enough minds to win the election or you can lie convincingly to enough people so that you win the election. Put another way, you can organize people around new moral arguments, or you mobilize people with some version of the old moral arguments.

Obviously, convincing people that their old beliefs are in error is a lot more difficult than flattering them in some new way. Inevitably, conservatism takes the latter course and comes up with some way to flatter people’s existing sense of morality. Their promotion of Tim Scott, for example, is a way to flatter white people on race. The result of this is the people who claim to oppose the Left end up reinforcing the moral claims of the people of the Left and are assimilated into them.

This is why bourgeois objectivism is no match for left-wing ideology. The cold reality of being correct can never overcome the warm satisfaction of being right. Those descriptive statements about reality are cold, while the prescriptive statements about what ought to be are warm and comforting. People will sacrifice everything for the warm glow of self-righteous certainty. The only antidote to the morality of liberal democracy is an alternative moral framework that promises more than sacrifice.

Thinking About Stuff

Posted on April 30, 2021 by thezman

I said after the last election that there are a dwindling number of ways for disaffected whites to participate in conventional politics. All of them are disruptive. For example, whites can boycott elections, especially targeting Republicans. Elections are about legitimacy and boycotts attack the legitimacy of the election. In a world of outlandish election fraud, the boycott is a useful tool. Even the most craven despots want to believe they have the support of the people.

We may be seeing something like this evolve with Biden. His big speech, which was hyped by both sides of the uniparty, drew 11 million viewers. The YouTube livestream was mostly people taking the time to down vote the feed. YouTube started deleting the down votes, but the ratio was still awful. This was supposed to be The Pretender’s big moment and people either tuned out or mocked it. In the technological age, that is the equivalent of a boycott. It was a virtual boycott.

Of course, apathy is also an explanation. Joe Biden has always been a stupid gasbag, the kind of guy who people avoid at parties. Now he is a doddering old fool with scrambled eggs for brains. Most people are embarrassed to see this ridiculous man performing even more ridiculous spectacles. White people tend not to enjoy seeing someone humiliate themselves. Fremdschamen is a real thing. It is possible the lack of interest is driven by a sense of shame.

Even so, the total lack of interest in Biden must be worrisome. There are two clear pillars of the current regime. One is they are defending democracy from insurrectionist white supremacists. This myth is so important to them they even made Biden compare January 6 to the Civil War. The other is that Biden is the great unifier of the people, a modern day Lincoln. Not all of the people. Like Lincoln, Biden would like to murder half the white people, but he is still wildly popular.

This summer the regime will try to stage some fake patriotic protests in Washington to keep the insurrectionist pillar standing. Those Trump rallies this summer will be cast as Nazi party rallies or perhaps the new Klan rally. That will be enough to keep the regime thinking they are in a great struggle with evil. It is remarkable how guys like Trump, despite the rhetoric, end up being tools of the system. The regime needs Trump and right on cue he is going to be there for them.

They cannot fake the lack of interest in Mumbly Joe. They clearly asked YouTube to rig their system to make Biden look popular. The media will keep telling us that Biden is the most admired man on earth. It is really hard to fake popularity and efforts to do usually backfire on the regime. There is always the risk of a Ceaușescu moment. Given the problems in the economy and the ongoing unrest, it is hard to see how they maintain this pillar of the regime. People just do not like Biden very much.

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02:00: Hate Them Back
22:00: The New Order
37:00: The Slander Machine (Link)
47:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Be Like Me)

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Cruel Summer

Posted on April 29, 2021 by thezman

Way back when the Covid panic began, smart people pointed out that shutting down an economy was going to have unforeseen consequences. A modern economy is an incomprehensibly complex organism. Even turning off some parts of it for a short time will change the organism, resulting in downstream changes. It is why people who work with complex things are very careful about the changes they make. They accept that there is much about the system that they cannot known in advance.

Of course, the people in charge are sure they have it all figured out, so they just blundered ahead with their lock downs and new rules. Shutting down most of the restaurant industry and closing the schools. for example, radically altered the demand side of the food market. Suddenly, goods for the restaurant business had no demand, while demand for home products shot through the roof. This should have given them pause, but they kept blundering ahead with their schemes.

Anyone who has been in a grocery store of late knows that food prices are jumping like it is the 1970’s again. There are also weird shortages. Something like mayonnaise will disappear from the shelves for a week and then come back, but then plastic bags become scarce. The same phenomenon is happening with other things like building supplies and petroleum products. The official statistics are complete nonsense, so we have no idea how much food has jumped. It is enough that people are talking about inflation in private conversations for the first time in decades.

The usual suspects, of course, are spilling into the streets to chant about fiat currency, hyperinflation, and the rest of their stuff. It is as if the Great Pumpkin has finally risen out of the pumpkin patch. They have been waiting their whole lives for the Weimar moment foretold in the prophesies. Because these people are always wrong it is good to remember they are wrong now. The problem now is actually much worse than too much money chasing too few goods. It is systemic.

For starters, governments around the world have been taking sledgehammers to the global supply chain. These supply chains evolved over a long period of time to solve the problems of getting goods to the market. In response to Covid, government willy-nilly started turning things on and off without much thought. The system can respond to short term emergencies like natural disasters, but it was never equipped to respond to random outages imposed by people who have never had a job.

Then you have the stimulus plans. Having idled large swaths of the economy for periods, the same people frantically turning things on and off started pumping money into the retail side. At first this new money was absorbed in the system. Personal debt fell in 2020 as people got conservative in the face of the crisis. They also began to change their lives in response to the lockdowns. Going to the movies and out to eat is a habit, not a necessity. Lots of habits changed in 2020.

Labor markets have been radically changed by Covid and the efforts from the rulers to make a big show of dealing with it. Entry level jobs are now hard to fill, because unemployment still pays very well. If you are a restaurant opening for the first time in a year, finding help is difficult. It is not a shortage of labor as much as a shortage of people ready to go back to work. Labor shortages, however, they are created, result in a spike in labor costs, which appear at the cash register.

Finally, we have monetary policy. Central bank policy has evolved over the last thirty years based on certain assumptions. Government policy, for example, has been predictable going back to the 1990’s. While there have been the usual problems, the global economy has settled into some predictable patterns. All of a sudden, none of this is true, so monetary policy has to adjust. Adjusting to erratic government behavior and unpredictable consequences in the economy is practically impossible.

The upshot to all of this is we are seeing real inflation for the first time in generations, but we have a variety of causes this time. In the 1970’s, it was too much money chasing too few goods. Pulling money out of the economy was painful, but it worked. This time, we have too much money in some areas, but we have broken supply chains and labor markets contributing to the problem. The Fed cannot do anything about shortages of aluminum cans or chicken farm with too few chickens.

To make matters worse, pulling money out of the system is probably not possible, given decades of ultra-low borrowing rates. The world has become so accustomed to low interest rates, it has become an axiom, like the changing of the seasons or the laws of thermodynamics. Any significant change in the money supply to combat retail inflation would send the financial markets into a tailspin. Housing would collapse if mortgage rates returned to anything resembling normal.

None of this means there is no answer. Often, the right answer is to do nothing and let things run their course. That was the right answer with Covid. As with Covid, the rulers cannot accept that answer, so they will thrash around some more. The people animating the corpse of Joe Biden are promising to smash things up some more for the greater good. After all, what matters to them is that we know the people in the mansions and castles really care about us, while they live like royalty.

The result of all this is we are heading into a cruel summer. The bill for the Covid response is coming due. How a society responds to crisis is the result of the social trust in that society. America is a low trust society now. Further, the people who will be counted on to dig out of the mess created by the rulers are now treated like second class citizens by those rulers. The fix to the 60’s and 70’s was to first repair the loss of faith in the system. It is hard to imagine that happening this time.

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