Death Of The Grammar Nazi

Posted on October 10, 2024 by thezman

109

A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.

The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.

Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.

There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.

You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.

On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”

That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.

It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.

Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.

Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.

There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.

Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.

That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.

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The Smash And Grab Ends

Posted on October 9, 2024 by thezman

146

This weekend, the heads of the NATO families were supposed to meet to discuss the “victory plan” for Ukraine created by Volodymyr Zelensky, but the meeting has been cancelled, allegedly due to the weather. Joe Biden was supposed to attend but dropped out on Tuesday due to hurricane Milton. The peace summit Zelensky was planning was also cancelled. When Zelensky was in Washington last month he was given millions to hold a second peace conference.

One thing that was supposed to be discussed at this meeting was a plan that has been in the works for eighteen months according to the Financial Times. This story covers the basics of the new plan for victory. Russia would be handed a deal whereby they get to hold the lands they have, Ukraine joins NATO, but promises to not start a war to reclaim those lands and at some point in the future, Russia will give back those lands to Ukraine for reasons no one can explain.

The scheme is ridiculous, which is probably why the intel service planted the story in the Financial Times this week. This has become a habit of the Anglo intelligence services over the last year. When they want something injected into the political discussion regarding Ukraine or they want to elicit a Russian reaction to something discussed behind closed doors, they plant a story in the Financial Times. Presumably, this story was placed there ahead of the meeting for some reason.

Officially, the main focus of the meeting was supposed to be the Zelensky plan for peace, which has two main parts. One is Ukraine joins NATO right now and Russia agrees to return all lands claimed by Ukraine. That is pretty much it. The path to victory is the United States threatens Moscow with nuclear war unless the Russians withdraw all of their forces from Ukraine, including Crimea. The reason to cancel the meeting is there is nothing really to discuss. The plan is nonsense.

That may be the reason why Zelensky created the plan and spent the last month shopping it around the West. The one thing Zelensky cannot survive right now is a peace process involving the Russians. The reason for that is the ultranationalists in Kiev and on the front are strong enough to oppose it. They can use the process as an excuse to take out Zelensky. On the other hand, Zelensky cannot simply flee with his billion dollars, as the West will not protect him.

He is in a political vice. One jaw is the nationalist forces that have been committed to war with Russian since the Maiden coup in 2014. Despite the losses on the battlefield, they remain committed to the war. They have no choice from their perspective, as a Russian condition for peace talks is dissolution of the nationalists. Given the Russian habits and recent history, the leaders of these nationalists forces are right to assume dissolution means they end up dead.

The other jaw is the West, which has committed itself to the war against Russia, but is unwilling to go all in fearing the consequences. The truth is escalatory dominance only works if the other side believes you can continue to escalate. The Russians know the West is not willing to go all in for Ukraine. The West is now in a trap they created for themselves in 2022 and 2023 with all the hot rhetoric. They need a way out, but they cannot simply quit, so they need Zelensky to make a deal.

For his part, Zelensky has been a rapacious schemer who has survived far longer than anyone expected. He does not get credit for managing to stay alive while existing in this impossible position. He must wage a war enthusiastically that he knows cannot be won, but also keep the various factions from pointing the finger at him for the failure to find a miracle solution to the battlefield reality. So far, he has outmaneuvered all of his opponents in Kiev, which is miraculous.

It looks like the Zelensky victory plan is actually a survival plan. The game is to buy time so that the nationalist units on the front get worn down or destroyed, thus weakening their political support in Kiev. As the saying goes, political power comes from the barrel of a gun. If there is going to be a move against Zelensky, it will include nationalist military units. If those units are buried under rubble in the Donbas, then they will not be around to depose Zelensky.

For their part, the nationalist units seem to get this, as they have repeatedly refused orders to engage with the Russians in difficult battles. Despite having the best equipment and the best men, they have been held in reserve for most of the war, most likely for political reasons. That cannot go on much longer, given the condition of the front, so time is probably on Zelensky’s side. At some point, the nationalists either die on the front or quit on the war.

Of course, all of this assumes the Russians will be willing to deal with Zelensky when the time comes. It also assumes the West will not kill him as an excuse to wash their hands of the project. Then you have the nationalists who may simply kill Zelensky because they can, and they have never liked him. The Zelensky survival plan assumes many things that may turn out to be unrealistic, but for now it is the only plan he has, so he is working it as hard as he can.

That may be the other reason for the cancellation of the Ramstein meeting. It may be dawning on the Western political class that there is no plan for victory because victory is impossible and Zelensky has known it for a long time. His little green man act was just part of the long con he has been running to both remain in power and get hundreds of billions in financing, some of which has underwritten his retirement. The West now needs a plan for how to not look like dupes.

In this regard, the Ukraine war is a metaphor for the West. Everything about this project has been in the short term. Everyone involved is thinking like a smash and grab gang working the shopping mall. At the macro level, it is as if the West is controlled by an alien class that is here to harvest what they can before moving on to the next opportunity to run the next grift. As with Ukraine, no one thinks about investing in the people or the long-term consequences of their actions.

The Answer To Death

Posted on October 8, 2024 by thezman

229

One of the first awakenings people have on the road out of the liberal mental order is the realization that libertarianism is nonsense. It is why you find so many former libertarians in the dissident space. Many of them started to see conservatism as a pointless trap, so they went searching for another answer and landed on libertarianism, only to discover that it was just a ridiculous version of conservatism. This sent them off on the journey that led them over the great divide.

While libertarianism has collapsed, conservatives continue to struggle with why their cause has slowly been marginalized, despite billions in funding. On the one hand, they have no answer for the post-liberalism that has swept the ruling elites. They struggle to even understand that there is a ruling elite divorced from the ballot box. On the other hand, they cannot bring themselves to join the populist reaction to the post-liberalism that is executing a revolution from the top.

Other than chanting about their principles, these people have had no answer for why they oppose the populists. Part of the conservative delusion is to assume that you are part of a temporarily out of work alternative elite. Once radicalism has run its course and everyone has returned to their senses, you will once against be a part of the cultural if not the political elite. Therefore, joining with those icky prols in the populist movement means abandoning the dream of restoration.

From Burke to the present day, this has been the personalized conceit of what passes for conservatism in the Anglosphere. On the one hand, the conservative is compelled to oppose radicalism in the name of culture and tradition. On the other hand, he must defend the system, even as it absorbs the values and principles of radicalism, because he imagines himself one day in the leadership of the system. The ratchet effect exists because conservatism exists.

At the most basic level, politics in the West has been driven by the internal political dynamic of the United States. That dynamic is a dance between those who operate on the assumption that the ends justify the means and opposed by those who argue that the means justifies the ends. The reason this has been a lopsided struggle in favor of the former is they have a wider range of action. To win, they just have to learn what the opponent will not do and then do that.

A good illustration of this is the Biden administration’s war on the court system in the person of Jack Smith. The courts knock down his spurious legal arguments, but he keeps coming back with new versions of the same arguments, always with the purpose of jailing enemies of the regime. Thousands continue to sit in jail after the Supreme Court shot down the legal claim against them, because as far as Jack Smith and his lieutenants are concerned, any means necessary is justified.

It is the one thing reactionaries understood. The antidote to people like Jack Smith is not obsessive rule following but a radicalism far more violent and deliberate than that practiced by Smith. You do not dig up the corpse of Cromwell and put his skull on display as a deterrent. You do so in order to get comfortable with what must be done to the next lunatic that slips thorough he defenses. In order to defend the law, one must go outside the law to destroy those who live outside the law.

Another way of thinking about it is the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee Marvin. In the film, set on the frontier, Stewart represents law and the order. Marvin is the frontier, the forces arrayed against the law. This is the central conflict of the story, which is settled when Stewart finally agrees to confront Marvin. Wayne, the man with a foot in both camps kills Marvin, but lets people think it was Stewart.

This is why conservatism is about to be run out of town. Like Stewart in the film, it has always refused to accept that the law is not the answer to the radicalism that seeks to destroy the very idea of law. Anyone or anything that rose up to face the radicals was met by the conservatives as a greater threat than the radicals. Imagine Jimmy Stewart having John Wayne arrested before the big fight. Conservatives imagine themselves as the defense of order, when in reality they are its chief opponent.

All is not yet lost for conservatives. Billions in financial support have allowed them to survive their audience leaving them. While the older generation is happy to sit around playing make believe until the sweet relief of death, the younger generation is looking around wondering if conservatism is worth saving. You see it in this interesting essay by someone calling himself Henry George. It is of the same tone you saw with libertarians a decade ago before they had their awakening.

All of those cultural sentiments captured in words by conservative writers over the years will only live on if the people moved by them are willing to fight. They can either be pleasing thoughts as you slip into the darkness of death, or they can be an inspiration to be far more ruthless and radical than the radicals who promise to condemn your culture and people to the dustbin of history. Some young conservatives seem to be creeping up to this realization.

In the end, the sentimentality that is conservatism is a luxury item. It can be indulged in times when there are no great threats to law and order. That law and order, however, must be ruthlessly enforced by those who cannot and will not allow their virtues to be turned into vices by the enemies of law and order. If conservatism is to survive it must transition from a comforting death into an inspiration for a violent revolt against radicalism and the societal death that leads from it.

The Rise Of Metadata Man

Posted on October 7, 2024 by thezman

162

Note #1: Behind the green door I have a post about the escalatory path of Iran and Israel, a post about the most efficient way to install, operate and maintain the guillotines after the revolution and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: Some of our folks could use your help in the aftermath of the hurricane that hit parts of Appalachia. Here is a GoFundMe for a family that Pete Quinones knows who lost everything in the flood. Give what you can and post up others so people can pitch in to help our folks.

For the longest time, before we had loads of tests and studies on the topic of intelligence, being smart was something like pornography. It was not easy to define, but you knew it when you saw it. The smart person was well-read. You knew this because he could quote famous writers from memory. In fact, memorizing lots of things was essential to being a smart person. Of course, the only way to memorize lots of things was to read lots of things.

This view of intelligence remains with us, despite the fact there is little reason to remember much of anything. The guy who can quote a famous work of literature at the dinner party is assumed to be smart. The guy who speaks more than one language must be smart, because he had to memorize a second vocabulary. The fact that he does nothing useful with his life is overlooked. That old assumption about having a head full of information indicating smartness is still with us.

We may be on the cusp of that old notion fading away. In everyone’s pocket is a device that gives you access to the sum total of human knowledge. Not only is there no reason to memorize how many feet are in a mile, but there is also no reason to remember street names or how to get from one place to the other. That magic device will tell you where to go and how long it will take. It will also tell you in whatever language you like, in whatever country you find yourself.

Technology is not only making information available to us, but it is also about to make it much easier to access by way of Large Language Models. The hype around artificial intelligence obscures the fact that most decisions are normative, so those can never be made by robots unless we program the robot to do it. What AI will do for us is make the vast stock of information online easier to access. You will no longer have to be clever to search the internet for answers to your questions.

It will also make learning a language somewhat pointless. Your mobile device can already be used as something of a universal translator. It can translate what you say in your language to a close enough version of another language. You can scan foreign words, and an app will translate them. We are not far from the point where anyone from anywhere can communicate to everyone through a real-time translation service they can access through their mobile device.

Einstein famously quipped that he had no reason to remember how many feet were in a mile because he could look it up in a book. The same thing is about to happen to the study of languages for most people. Unless you are linguist or study a foreign culture, there is no practical reason to learn another language. The same is true for lots of things like dates of specific events and the names of important people. What will matter in the future is using the tools to access this data.

That sounds like heresy to most people, but we see this happening all around us as the internet becomes ubiquitous. We are losing patience for the long argument or the slow-paced story, because we are used to tapping a few keys and getting the pay off without all the extra stuff. For young people who have been socialized on the internet, waiting for anything is intolerable now. They just want the answer, and they have little interest in the context around the answer.

Schools are struggling with this reality. It is not just students using their phones to get the answer on a test. They can use the internet to write their papers and do so in a way that makes it hard to detect the fraud. The same tools a teacher can use to find plagiarism or answer sharing are available to the students, who can then make their work look original enough to pass the test. Getting a good grade is not about learning the material, but about mastering technology.

There is a practical genius to it. Education in this age is about passing through a series of gates to get a credential. Few students use much of what they learn in school in their work life, so cheating makes a lot of sense to them. In a way, they are mastering what they will actually use as an adult to game an antiquated and often pointless education system in order to attain a credential. This is especially true for college where most of what is taught has no practical value to the student.

We are moving from a world where being smart was about memorizing lots of information to a world where being smart means knowing how to find the information quickly and efficiently. Put another way, being smart is not about the store of data, but the store of metadata. Knowing the words, phrases and context of data is what makes finding the data possible. The same skull packed with metadata has access to vastly more data than the skull could ever hold.

This presents a bit of a problem in that we lack ways to display our stock of metadata, so how can we know who is smart? In the old days, we could safely assume the guy quoting Longfellow was above average in smarts. There is no way to quote metadata in a way that tells us much of anything. On the other hand, is someone highly skilled at finding the answer actually smart? It is, after all, a form of problem solving which is the skill we expect to be honed through conventional education.

This also raises the issue of formal assessment. Our systems assume that the person who scores high on the math and verbal portion of the SAT, for example, is smarter than the person who scores poorly on one or both portions. That will probably remain true in the metadata age, but what about the person who scores high on his verbal, but average on the math compared to the reverse? We value math over verbal, for practical reasons, but in the metadata age verbal skills may be more valuable.

Of course, all of this points to something else. We are becoming an increasingly fragile species due to our dependence on technology. A prolonged GPS outage, for example, would mean deliveries grind to a halt. No one owns a map, much less has the ability to use one to navigate. If the power goes out, our advanced skills at finding information on the internet quickly becomes a liability. Suddenly we are in a world of simpletons who do not know how anything works.

Radio Derb October 03 2024

Posted on October 5, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m52s Hurricane Helene
11m32s Vice-Presidential debate
19m07s The Israel-Iran War
30m19s Longshoremen strike
33m56s President Carter at 100
35m49s The Great (squirrel) Replacement
40m04s Signoff with Buck Owens
00m00s Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your undeniably genial host John Derbyshire, with a glance at the news as September crumbles down into October.

Before proceeding, just a word of thanks for the encouragement and support I get from listeners and readers. Back in July, when VDARE finally succumbed to the relentless assaults of Letitia Lard-butt and her legions of lawyers, I admit I was in low spirits for a while, but you guys soon got me back to my normal, cheerful, sparkling self. Heck, I may even write another book, possible title We Are More Doomed Than Ever.

Please allow me my weekly reminder that you can make a tax-deductible donation to my work by mailing an earmarked check to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

OK, this week’s news. Top of the headlines: that disastrous storm in the Southeast.

Continue reading →

Modern Sophistry

Posted on October 4, 2024 by thezman

184

Every once in a while, I stumble upon a topic idea that vexes me because I am not sure where to go with it. A month or so ago I stumbled upon a Jordan Peterson video in which he explained why Jews are so successful in America. It was a bizarre thing that presented many jumping off points. Then the video disappeared from YouTube, as he no doubt has minions policing the site, so I went looking for it elsewhere.

I did not find it, but I found something similar that he wrote on his site back when he was being stalked by alt-right types asking him about Jews at his events. What came to mind was a post from five years ago where I used Stefan Molyneux and Scott Adams to explain the sophist of ancient Athens. For some reason that brought to mind this interview on the site IM1776.

It seemed like there should be a show about sophistry there or maybe a long post on the topic of profilicity which is related. The trouble is the topic is probably too big for a thousand-word post and maybe not big enough for a show. Anyway, I decided to wing on a show and let the chips fall where they may. That means the show will either be cheered as one of my best or jeered as one of my worst.

Something that did not occur to me while doing the show is that certain topics have become sophists tests. In fact, in retrospect I should have called the show that and made the show about the topics that flush out the sophist from the crowded field of people who present themselves as analysist and critics. If you cannot manage topics related to race or ethnicity, for example, you are a faker.

We got a taste of this in the vice president debate when Walz started ranting about how Finland has low crime but lots of guns. The online audience erupted in “what else does Finland not have?” while others remained puzzled by the question. If you know the answer, you know the truth, but if you do not know the answer or cannot understand the question, then you a faker or simply ignorant.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
What We Mean By Sophistry
What The Ancients Thought
Leo Strauss
Modern Sophistry (interview) (Link)
Sophistry & Democracy

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Generations

Posted on October 3, 2024 by thezman

Lost in the commentary about the vice-presidential debate is the looming generational issue haunting the political system. On the stage that night was a member of Generation X and a Millennial. J.D. Vance is not the first Millennial to enter politics, but he is the first one to enter the main stage. At forty years old, he would be the third youngest vice president ever, if Trump wins in November. Walz would become the first member of Gen-X to accomplish anything in politics.

Walz and Vance are good examples of their generation. Gen-X was known as the slacker generation, mostly because they were not politicized like the two waves of Baby Boomers that preceded them. They just wanted to do what they needed to do in order to get a decent job and enjoy their life. With the massive boomer generation ahead of them, ambition was pointless, beyond the personal. That is pretty much how it has played out for this relatively small cohort.

Tim Walz fits this profile. He kicked around in his youth, unsure what he wanted to do with himself as an adult. After a while he went back to college. He joined the National Guard because his father told him to join. He then got a job teaching because that was available and required the least effort. Serendipity got him into politics where good timing seemed to be his best asset. Like his generation, Tim Walz is a guy to whom life has happened, rather than a guy who attacked life.

In contrast, the life of J.D. Vance is like a well-executed battle plan. Millennials are strivers and box tickers. Encouraged from the womb by their mostly Baby Boomer parents and teachers to attack life with a detailed plan, this is a generation that started building a resume in kindergarten. Everything about their primary schooling was aimed at getting into a good college. College was about landing in the right career and their careers have been the accumulation of credentials.

That describes the life of J.D. Vance. One path out of poverty was the military, so he went into the military. That opened the path to college, so he went to the best college he could and got the best credentials he could get. Those credentials opened the door to a career in the swankiest of careers in venture capital. Unlike Walz, nothing about the life of J.D. Vance is due to chance other than his current position. One does not have much control over the choices made by Donald Trump.

The result of this generation gap was evident on stage. Walz probably would have arrived in his Elmer Fudd costume if they let him, for no other reason that it is more comfortable than a suit. He probably watched sports instead of prepping for the biggest moment of his life. Vance, on the other hand, was a machine. He crammed for the test because it is what he has done his whole life. He went to the debate to ace the exam and that is exactly what we saw.

You can expand this out to the top of the ticket. It is both symbolic and ironic that the race is between an old white guy who speaks for the America that is slowly slipping away and diverse girl boss who exists only in the imagination of the bitter, angry managerial class. Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country, so a good economy means everything is fine.

Harris is a ~~Baby Boomer~~ X’er, but her alien existence places her outside of what most people would understand by the term. She was born and raised outside of the country by parents who were not Americans. If a writing team from Hollywood took a break from ruining classic movies and were tasked with creating a story involving politics, they would make the star a diverse girl boss like Harris. She would be smart and sober-minded, however, miraculously always coming out on top.

The Harris as diverse girl boss from the movies can be taken further by the fact that she has never earned anything in her life. This is the way it works in film. Diverse girl boss never has to struggle and doubt like the traditional white lead. She is just given everything she needs by the writers. That is Kamala Harris. The biggest challenge of her life has simply been showing up without her dress on backwards. Now she expects to be handed the presidency.

The one thing missing from the picture is the hysterical female Millennial. Another feature of that generation is that strivers like J.D. Vance have had to navigate the hysterical female Millennial with a head full of feminist nonsense. Female Millennial hysteria as escapism is probably worth a book treatment. Much of the lunacy of the last twenty years has been driven by childish girls who became girl bosses rather than wives and mothers with a stake in their community.

The absence of this character from the current drama is probably the biggest white pill of this election cycle. Even in the unserious world of modern politics, the hysterical female Millennial is shunted over to the side when the adults are talking. In this regard, the rise of J.D. Vance could be signaling a return to normalcy once the Baby Boomers shuffle off to the shuffleboard courts. Perhaps the answer to the harpy all along was to simply ignore her while getting the job done.

One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself. One reason the media has been told to hate him is that he is seen as a traitor. This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class. This suggests that the new left and right in our politics are managerialism versus culturalism.

The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties. That means our politics and culture will reflect the sensibilities of this generation. The least ethically centered generation in American history will be defining the nation. Millennials are an end-justifies-the-means generation and maybe that is what will be required going forward.

Normal Versus Crazy

Posted on October 2, 2024 by thezman

Political debates in America are rarely worth the effort to watch mostly because they are not genuine debates. Instead, they are something like a joint press conference where the candidates also get to shout at one another. In a general election, the candidate of the stupid party always agrees to allow the candidate of the evil party to invite his friends to be the moderators. The resulting show, and it is mostly just a show, is about the stupid party candidate fending off the others.

There are exceptions to this farcical aspect of our elections. Once in a while something will happen in the show to address a lingering concern of the public or maybe bring out something about one of the candidates that people have suspected. The most obvious example is the Trump – Biden debate in the summer. People suspected that Joe Biden was a vegetable, and this was confirmed in the debate. The subsequent response from regime media led to his ouster.

There was some of this in the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz last night. Unless you live in Minnesota or Ohio, you had no reason to know these guys until now. Vance was a rising star in the GOP, so he is a bit better known than Walz, but hardly a household name. Before winning the VP lottery, Walz was an unknown governor from flyover country. The debate was a chance for both men to introduce themselves to a national audience.

In the case of Vance, the regime media has been attacking him daily. They started with the “weird” campaign in the summer and then moved onto a narrative that says he is dragging down the Trump campaign. They even floated stories about Trump dropping him, which were all nonsense. His performance in the debate show put to rest any concerns the media campaign may have planted in the minds of voters. He was sharp, prepared and dominated the evening.

What normie got to see in Vance is a guy who is extremely smart and confident, but also extremely normal. He wove in his backstory when required, which is highly relatable, but he did not wave his bio around like a bloody shirt, which is something modern politicians do constantly. They have to be the hero of their story. Vance came across as down to earth, despite owning the room quite easily. Even the regime media had to admit that he dominated the show.

Walz on the other hand came across as a strange combination of Uncle Fester from the Addams Family and a highly caffeinated Mr. Magoo. Most of the night he was maniacally scribbling things on a pad he brought with him. One got the sense that he was taking notes so he could tattle on Vance to the teacher. Obviously, someone told him that smart people take notes in these things, so he practiced doing what he thought smart people do when taking notes.

Of course, the main takeaway from the night for Tim Walz was his comically weird facial expressions when staring into the camera. You half expected him to put a lightbulb in his mouth. It was the sort of behavior that crystallizes a suspicion of him in the minds of the typical voters. This is a very strange man. His overly-caffeinated Elmer Fudd routine might be fine for the folks back home, but for the rest of the country it suggests there is something disturbing about his private life.

Normally this would not matter, as people do not think too much about the vice-presidential candidates. At most they suggest something about the presidential candidate’s strengths or weaknesses. In this case, it matters a lot because there are questions about both party candidates. This election is not just about Trump versus the Blob, but about the future of Republican Party, on the one hand, and the trust in the regime candidate on the other.

What Harris needed in her running mate was someone who could reassure the white population that they could trust a boozy bimbo. Harris may be a simpleton, but the people around her are competent. The narrative they were going for was what they thought worked in 2008 with Obama. The young diverse hero supported by the old white establishment man. This story would be diverse girl boss supported by middle America white dudes in the person of Tim Walz.

Instead of salt of the earth middle-aged white guy, the Harris campaign got wacky old guy who gives people the creeps. The debate simply underscored the fact that the regime candidate is a ham-and-egger thrown in at the last minute. On the other hand, Vance looked like the guy who would take over the populist movement after Trump retires and actually have the skill to implement the agenda. Last night highlighted the fact that this election is a choice between normal and crazy.

Of course, the specter haunting this election is the rigging. Will we see waves of phony ballots mysteriously turning up in the dead of night again? It is hard to rig two elections in a row and always a bad idea to try it. That is the main reason to think they will try to rig this election. The regime is in the phase where they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. If rigging this election is the worst thing they can do, you can be sure they are thinking about it.

That aside, if Trump does win the election, one reason will be that he picked the right sidekick this time. It shows he learned from the last time and that he is thinking beyond the mere vanity of his politics. He will also have been blessed with an opponent that reminds people of their last trip to get their license renewed. Her choice of Uncle Fester as a running mate confirmed that she has no business make lunch decisions, much less making important decisions in the Oval Office.

The Port Strike

Posted on October 1, 2024 by thezman

The International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike as of midnight in the first major port strike in the United States in decades. Twenty years ago, dock workers on the West Coast struck for eleven days. The ILA has not gone on a strike since 1977, so this is a historic event for that reason alone. If the strike lasts more than a few weeks, then it will be much more than a historical event. About half of the cargo that goes in and out of the country flows through the affected ports.

The bankers estimate that the strike will cost the economy five billion per day, but that is a number plucked from the air. What we learned from the Covid fiasco is that American supply chains are extremely fragile, so any interruption will have unpredictable long-term consequences to the economy. This is also when consumer goods for the Christmas season begin flowing into the country, so delays will result in shortages which will disrupt the biggest retail period of the year.

One of the first things that will happen is conservatives will be told by conservative media to blame the dock workers. The reason for this is conservatives are idiots who do what they are told by the people they claim to oppose. The regime would like to turn this into a problem for Trump if possible, so they are busy filling the teleprompters of Fox News with squirrely rants about the greedy union guys. The vegetables that consume that slop will then regurgitate it on social media.

The fact of the matter is there are no good guys or bad guys when it comes to the strike itself, but the port system is an indictment of the economy. There is no reason for one company to control ports up and down the coast. Ports should be controlled by the states and encouraged to compete with one another for cargo. This makes for better port operations and eliminates the prospect of a crippling port strike. It also encourages modernization and efficiency at the ports.

The reason this is not the case is our ports are primarily skimming operations, rather than a part of a manufacturing and export base. What America primarily exports does not require seagoing vessels. Transgenderism, homosexual pride parades and cultural subversion are shipped around the world on the back of the dollar. What comes back are container ships full of consumer goods. A collection of people then skim a little from each container that reaches an American port.

This gets to why the dock workers are striking. They want protection from automation that will eliminate jobs. This will strike most people as nuts as they have been conditioned to think automation is a good thing, because that is what the television has told them, but in reality, most automation is about socializing the costs of business and privatizing the profits. Automating the ports will not result in lower consumer prices, but it will make the port operators richer.

If the point of the American economy were to make things and then sell them around the world, the ports could never be allowed to function as they do today because it would interfere with selling things around the world. That is not the point of the American economy, so the main function of ports is to skim from imports. This is why one main operator controls the East Coast ports. Consolidation makes it easier to institutionalize the skim.

None of this is to suggest that the dock workers are victims. Senior members of the ILA make four and five times what the typical American earns. Most of the guys on strike make six figures plus very generous benefit programs. The reason it is impossible to get a job at the ports is they control the labor force, which means they only allow friends and family to get jobs when they come open. The docks are pretty much a government created medieval guild system.

That is the other thing about the ports. The labor situation is a creation of the federal government over the last half century. In the middle of the last century, the mafia got control of the union pensions and immediately looted them. This brought in the feds who eventually restructured the union, so it was free of gangsters in track suits, but was filled with gangsters from the government. Both sides of the current contract dispute are the result of decades of government management.

Of course, there is a political angle to this. The Biden admin has done nothing to prevent the strike, which is interesting as they moved heaven and earth to head off the rail strike last year. That was when Biden thought he was going to be allowed to run for a second term. Now that he is drifting off into retirement, no one in the admin can be bothered to work on anything other than Ukraine and Israel. Kamala will be left to deal with the politics of a port strike.

This is where things get interesting. Pennsylvania and Michigan are union states, so the white remnant will be watching this strike. These are people who have always voted Democrat for economic reasons but detest the other stuff from the party. They like Trump, but wisely distrust Republicans. There is an opening for Trump the deal maker to take the union side without pandering. Harris, on the other hand, does not have any good options on this one.

In a way, the ports are a good model for our ruling class. Everyone involved in the ports is doing well, better than they should expect, but everyone involved in the ports is sure the system is screwing him. That is because the ports exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. It is a world unto itself that only interfaces with the rest of society, rather than operate within the economy. It is how high-earning people on both sides of this strike can think they are the little guy.

Another reason for this is the bottleneck mentality. Ports are a bottleneck and everything that passes through is taxed. In this way, the ports are just like our banking system or the information system. That means the real competition is over how much you get to tax what passes through the bottleneck. To the people inside a bottleneck system, it always feels like it is a zero-sum game, and their slice of the overall pie is never the biggest slice of that pie.

In the end, the union will get what they want as there is no real reason to not give them what they want. Their cost just gets tacked onto the cost of goods that flow through the port to your local Walmart of Amazon distribution center. Just like those Walmart’s and Amazons, the cost of the ports are socialized. With no fear of competition, there is no concern for the profit margin. You get to pay more for stuff, so the dock worker and his manager get to go boat shopping this spring.

The Lincoln Exception

Posted on September 30, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door I have a post about why you should never trust anything in the visual media, a post about the strangely large amounts of money spent on bad movies and television and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.

We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.

When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.

Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.

The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.

Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.

This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.

We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.

The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.

What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.

In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.

This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.

Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.

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