Radio Derb January 17 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Radio Derb Podcast, 1/17/2025
  • Table of Contents
  • 01m53s World Logic Day
  • 09m09s The Competence Collapse
  • 16m00s Economist fixes Africa
  • 19m35s French theater fiasco
  • 22m28s A new Botany Bay?
  • 26m10s How is Tété-Michel Kpomassie doing?
  • 30m39s The immigration racket
  • 39m28s Where is Vivek?
  • 40m13s Usha, Tennyson, and me
  • 41m41s Can the universe think?
  • 43m04s Signoff for California

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2 and this is your logically genial host John Derbyshire with news and commentary.

First, however, a little housekeeping. The website VDARE.com remains in suspense thanks to the evil machinations of New York State’s well-upholstered Attorney General. However, the parent VDARE Foundation is very much alive, and planning for the future.

The latest development there is that Peter Brimelow, who got the whole thing started 25 years ago, now has his own Substack account. You can subscribe, and I urge you to do so.

You can support the VDARE Foundation itself by mailing a check to us at P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. You can support me personally by earmarking the check with my name, or by any of the alternative options spelled out on my personal website. Thank you!

End of housekeeping. Let’s see what’s in the news. Continue reading →

Civilizationalism

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Last year I did a show on the concept of civilizationalism, but I thought it was a good idea to revisit the topic now that Trump is back in town. Many of the things Trump has been saying since the election suggest he is headed in this direction, even if he does not think much about the concept. The tides of history are dragging him along toward this new organizational model.

The short definition of civilizationalism is that instead of humanity organized into countries or empires, it will be organized by civilization. Language, culture, history, tradition, and religion are not immutable, but they are not malleable. They evolve over long periods of time, so they feel permanent to us. These are things that resist the best efforts of the ideologues.

The last time I addressed this topic it was in the historical perspective. The show this time is about the nuts and bolts of it. We are seeing the rough contours in the world and even in the behavior of Trump. His desire to annex Greenland and Canada is not much different from Russia reabsorbing Ukraine into the Russian world. Canada and Greenland are part of the American civilization.

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
  • Trump’s Curveballs
  • Sphere of Influence
  • Clash of Civilizations
  • Multipolar World
  • America & The New World

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Troubled Youth

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Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

The economic question for young people is difficult, because it is more about expectations than objective measures. For example, about 16% of native-born teenagers have jobs today, compared to 32% in 1990. On the one hand, this is a bad thing because it means fewer young people getting necessary training to be an adult once they finish their education. On the other hand, it means they have an easier time of it than prior generations who had to work.

Those over the age of fifty love telling stories about the terrible jobs they had as young people, while no one under the age of thirty complains about not having had crappy jobs to make ends meet. In fact, the main complaint from college graduates in their twenties is that they have crappy jobs. This is where the great divide opens between those two main camps debating the issue. Old people roll their eyes, because having a crappy job is a rite of passage. Young people see it as a broken promise.

If you are in that third camp, you can see how both sides are right. On the one hand, young people should stop moaning about crappy jobs and being poor, because that is what every generation faced. In fact, prior generations had it far worse. On the other hand, this was not the deal promised to young people who went into debt to get a college diploma. They were told that this investment would let them bypass the struggle portion of their life and get right into the middle-class.

Here you see the root cause of the complaint from young people. The breakdown of order has eroded the social contract. In fact, the social contract is now a terms of service agreement. They were told to click “accept” in high school, but once they exited college, they were told the terms of service have changed. Just in case they objected, they were also told that the privacy policy had changed as well. “Please click accept” quickly became “accept or else.”

There is more to this broken social contract than economics. The conditioning of young people comes with the assumption that if they follow the rules and tick the correct boxes, they will find meaning and purpose in life. Instead, what they find is life in a cubicle, paying off school debts while living at home. Half of college graduates live at home, which is not as high as you might think, but they continue to live at home long after they have left college. That is a novelty.

In effect, young people were sold a program that said if they went to college, took on the debt and followed the rules, they would come out the other end with the sort of fulfilling life they saw in the media. Instead, they are faced with what feels like a pointless existence as an economic unit. That philosophy major at the coffee shop is not just a punch line. She is a bitter victim. Telling her that she now must find her own meaning in this struggle sounds like another lie to her.

That said, the youth of the past did not like working in high school and would have preferred to hang out with friends playing video games. College grads of the past would have preferred to get a job in their field at the same wage as an experienced man, rather than working retail until they could get their foot in the door. The struggle for today’s youth is relatively easy, even if it is the result of a broken promise. In fact, young people probably have it too easy in many respects.

This generational conflict is, in the end, a proxy for the larger conflict which revolves around the failure of the ruling class over the last thirty years. Instead of upholding the rules, especially the rules of the social contract, they turned the country into a smash and grab where everyone is on their own. As a result, the powerful, for example colleges, exploit the weak, their students. It should be no surprise that the victims of such a system are not its biggest fans.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Inequality Of Man

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In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?

At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.

This conflict is right there in the founding myths. The colonists rebelled against the symbol of hierarchy and innate inequality, the King of England. They did so on the grounds that all men have the same rights. It is right there in the powerful opening of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest celebration of egalitarianism ever written, but written by a man who was the gold standard of both the natural inequality of man and the necessity of hierarchy.

This contradiction is right there in the life of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of aristocratic stock, born into a wealthy family. He was living proof that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. He supported the redistribution of land to the poor, despite the fact he was a wealthy planter and slave owner. Despite the reality of his life, he was also capable of expressing the egalitarian spirit in such powerful and direct language that it continues to haunt the nation he helped create.

Modern America, the Global American Empire, is the product of the innate American egalitarianism, but also the willingness to use violence in the unequal relationship between America and the rest of the world. The regular speeches we hear from politicians about America’s role in the world would be familiar to Thucydides. On the one hand those speeches are a form of the funeral oration of Pericles and on the other hand the frank dialogue with the people of Melos.

The present crisis of America is the product of this great contradiction. In his majority opinion in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice John Roberts struggles with this very question. Much of the opinion, in fact, is a recitation of how the country has struggled with this question. Often, Roberts laments that the court has failed to live up to those ideals of equality, but then he acknowledges that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

In his discussion of Plessy, the case that established the doctrine of separate but equal, Roberts argues that despite the intent and the remedies to address defects in the doctrine, the result was institutional inequality in education. Roberts writes, “the
inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent.” The remedy was to scrap it entirely in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Note that in a 237-page decision lamenting the history of discrimination and challenges in addressing it, the central problem lies in just one sentence. You cannot derive equality from inequality. If Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, a truth not only visible to the casual eye, but supported by mountains of data, then the equality of man is impossible and any effort to achieve it is folly. Despite this immutable truth, the court continues its quest to reach the egalitarian paradise.

Right there is the beating heart of the current crisis. For going on three generations now, the moral arbiter of America society, the Supreme Court, has demanded that we press ahead with a project it knows is impossible. The moral regime that makes the open society as the highest good and discrimination as the worst evil, which grew from the Brown decision, is all about finding, at long last, some way over or around that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

The moralizing is clear in the text of the decision. Roberts often blurs the lines between legal discrimination and general discrimination, because to make such a distinction suggests the latter is acceptable under the right conditions. Instead, the starting place is the assertion that discrimination is always immoral, but for now certain exceptions must be made until we work out a few things. Affirmative action, for example, is a temporary fix until equality is achieved.

Think about how many social problems could easily be solved by simply acknowledging that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. If the court said that Harvard is a private college and so it can admit who it likes for any reason it likes, this case never sees a courtroom. Public universities, on the other hand, must admit everyone that meets the objective criteria for admissions. Debates over college admissions would vanish instantly.

Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible. The belief in the equality of man is too powerful with the managerial class. John Roberts and his staff wrote 237-pages of text to cover over “it is folly trying to derive equality from inequality.” Since the middle of the last century, all efforts have been mustered to defeat that simple truth, but it remains that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

A Do Nothing President

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Note: Over the weekend the SSL certificate for the site was supposed to renew, but something went wrong and it did not renew. This is why your browser got angry when you tried to access the site. H1B strikes again!

On Monday, Trump will be installed as president, so naturally everyone is speculating about what he will do once he gets the keys to the White House. Interestingly, much of the speculation is around the foreign policy issues he inherits. The neocons in the media are working hard to keep Ukraine in the news, so they are making claims about what Trump will and will not do with Putin. The Israel lobby wants Israel to be number one, so they are focusing on Iran.

What does not get noticed is Trump was elected on domestic issues. In the last election, Israel and Ukraine were far down the list for all voters. The number one issue was the economy. Immigration was the next big issue. The typical Trump voter looks at Ukraine as a boondoggle and Israel as an unsolvable problem. Logically, these two issues should be far down the list for Trump, but the media is focusing on them, which speaks to the power of their respective lobbies.

The first hint of what Trump has in mind for Ukraine came last month when Trump’s personal envoy to Ukraine and Russia said that it will take one hundred days to get a deal with Russia over Ukraine. This was a big shift from prior claims about Trump ending the war in a few days. Kellogg has also shifted with regards to what is happening in the war. The business about there being a stalemate has been dropped in favor of an acknowledgment that Ukraine is in trouble.

What the “one hundred days” tells us is Trump is not going to litter his first one hundred days with the Ukraine matter. It is a custom to assume that the first one hundred days of a new administration set the tone, so it is not an accident that Kellogg was suddenly using that phrasing. It is a signal that the Ukraine matter is not in the list of items that will take up the president’s time starting in January. To whom it was a signal is not all that clear and whether they understood it is unknown.

Time is the way to think about what Trump is planning for his second term. He has just one term and that means he has about eighteen months to get his domestic agenda pushed through Congress and the administrative state. Once we get to the summer of 2026 his party will be busy throwing the midterms. This means they will not pass anything the people want but instead focus on angering the base. After the election, Trump will get nothing from Congress.

This is a lesson Trump learned the hard way the first time. Once he won the election, he was swept up in a series of events that forced him to use his time in ways that had no benefit to him. He became the salesman wasting his days tending to customer service issues, rather than finding and closing new business. The number one skill for a salesman is time management. If you fail to manage your time, you fail. This is true for presidents, especially reformers like Trump.

It is why the signs point to Trump being something of a do-nothing president with regards to foreign policy issues. With Ukraine, he can do nothing, and it will resolve itself, as far as Trump is concerned. He inherited an unsalvageable mess from Biden, so no deal is better than any deal. Spending any time on it is a waste, so the one hundred days will probably turn into forever. The post-war deal with Russia will be left to the governments of Europe and the EU.

As for Israel, the signs are there for a delaying action. Kellogg was asked about it and reiterated the usual lines about pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program, which they largely did long ago. Michael Waltz, the new national security adviser, seems to get his opinions on Iran from Fox News. One suspects that he was picked because he will do what the boss says. Despite talk of new sanctions, Trump remains opposed to a war with Iran, or an Israeli war with Iran.

Another signal that the Middle East may be down there with Ukraine on the priority list is the fact Trump has signaled his disdain for Netanyahu. He was not invited to the inaugural and Trump has tweeted some untoward things about him. He also posted a link to Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch”, which is not the sort of thing you say about your friends. Trump has also been clear about wanting out of Syria, especially now that it is in chaos.

What may be shaping up for the first half of the Trump term is a policy of doing nothing with regards to the foreign policy hotspots. Trump and his advisors can answer questions and make the usual noises, but when it comes to investing time, the scarcest commodity Trump possesses, the administration will be stingy. These issues will get the absolute minimum amount of time and only so that they do not become a time waster for the domestic agenda.

It is looking like Trump learned that the most important card any president can play in politics is his attention. There is not much anyone can do if Trump simply de-prioritizes Ukraine, for example. “We are looking into it” works just as well against the schemers behind things like Ukraine as it does his own voters. Perhaps this time, instead of saying this regarding domestic issues, Trump will be saying it regarding foreign policy, to focus on the issues that matter to him.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Dogs And Bones

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the coming troubles for Europe with regards to Ukraine, a post the eternal war between mice and cats, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.

This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.

Similarly, the traitor that comes over from the other side is usually treated with suspicion. In the Cold War, defectors were rarely treated well by either side. Russians who betrayed their countrymen just so they could get an American passport were treated well enough to encourage others, but they were assumed to be disreputable people. The Russians took the same view. Famous spies like Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union, were never welcomed by Russia.

Again, the underlying reason for the way traitors have been treated by their own people as well as the enemies of their people is that someone who breaks trust for any reason cannot be trusted. Someone who deliberately breaks a sacred trust is especially suspicious. It is why American corporations used to discriminate against divorced men. If your wife cannot trust, why should your boss? Adultery used to be a serious social crime when we were a proper society.

It is a good thing to keep in mind as we head into what is looking like another interregnum. Suddenly, the people who were sure Donald Trump was Hitler are now strangely quiet. Much of it is simply the fact that their emotional tank is drained. A decade of hysteria has run it course. At the same time, many have just decided to change tactics, seeing that their Hitler lies failed to stop Trump. They will come up with new lies because it is what liars do. They lie.

The same should apply to those who look like converts. Someone who was an implacable opponent of even the slightest pushback but is now “coming around” on things like immigration should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. They could simply be opportunists. That is, after all, the spring that motivates every traitor. They see an opportunity for themselves in violating the trust of others. Often, they lure their victims into trusting them so they can betray the trust.

A great example is Ben Shapiro. Everyone with two brain cells knows his deal. He is an ultra-Zionist whose only interest is his people. He is willing to lie promiscuously for that cause. It speaks to the nature of Zionism that its most fervent practitioners are the least endowed with European morality. Even the most fervent Nazi understood that there is such a thing as truth. It was the Nazis, after all, who gave us the expression “The Big Lie.”

That aside, even when a Ben Shapiro is doing damage to the enemy, it is important to always qualify the praise so no one forgets that a dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If an arsonist burns down the house of that guy selling drugs near the high school, it is normal and healthy to be happy for his suffering or death, but it should never be an endorsement of arson. If the arsonist, however, is one of your guys, then that is another matter. “Who” is what matters, not how.

Those are easy cases, but a more challenging example is someone like James Lindsay, who started out in life as an anti-Christian bigot. He then moved on from that hustle to tricking academic journals with fake grievance studies papers. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian made up fake studies using the bizarre jargon of the grievance studies rackets. These papers were made deliberately ridiculous to expose the vacuity of the so-called social sciences.

This was hilarious and it confirmed that the people involved in these fields are mostly hucksters making a living off lunatics. The trouble though is Lindsay and Boghossian were deceiving people not on behalf of their cause or for their people. They were betraying people for personal advantage. In other words, they were bringing a bone to one group but would eventually carry a bone from that group. This is what we now see with their attacks on populists and Christians.

Whatever benefit came from these two subverting the grievance studies people came at the cost of having them attack the people who cheered for them, but from a position of greater authority. When James Linday was just a chubby massage therapist hating on Christians, no one cared. Now that he is a famous internet influencer; he can do real damage. It is a good reminder that giving power to immoral people is never a good idea.

None of this means that political actors must be purer than Caeser’s wife. As Mr. Dooley said, “Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ‘Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.” Or as Carl Schmitt would put it, politics is about friends and enemies. The thing to remember is that it is a commitment to the morality of the cause that distinguishes the friend from the enemy, so even though an enemy can be useful, they remain enemies.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Radio Derb January 10 2025

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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 04m24s Not a disaster, a tragedy
  • 10m21s Illegal aliens > U.S. citizens
  • 14m52s The Muslim thing
  • 23m48s Trump’s imperial dreams
  • 26m18s An African in Greenland
  • 33m26s Meet the norovirus
  • 34m57s Unwelcome fame?
  • 36m33s 2025 IYQST
  • 38m51s Happy birthday to the King

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Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 1 and this is your frostily genial host John Derbyshire with a brief scan of the news.

The news is of course dominated by the terrible fires over on the other coast. The news pictures showing the devastation of Los Angeles are really stunning. My sympathies to those afflicted, and all praise to the brave Angelenos fighting back against the flames.

L.A. can now join the sad list of cities that have been burned out in peacetime. Back when wood construction was the norm, such events were not uncommon. The Great Fire of Chicago is the one everyone knows about. That was in 1871. Legend has it that the fire was started when Mrs O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, but I don’t know if that’s ever been confirmed.

San Francisco suffered devastating fires in 1906, following the great earthquake of that year. It’s a little-known fact that far more buildings were destroyed by the fires than by the earthquake itself.

Better known to British schoolkids was the Great Fire of London in 1666 that destroyed the old St Paul’s cathedral, giving Christopher Wren the opportunity to build the new one. Also on the upside, it likely put an end to the great plague of earlier that year, by killing all the rats.

Yes: back through history peacetime cities have gone up in smoke. My own little provincial hometown, Northampton in the English Midlands, burned down in 1675. Our schoolmasters used to tell us that the medieval town records, kept in the town castle, were moved to All Saints’ Church for fear the castle would be burned down. As it happened the castle went unscathed; but All Saints’ was burned to the ground and the records were lost. Municipal incompetence is not a new thing.

So Angelenos are in plenty of historical company here, although I don’t suppose it’s much consolation for them to know that.

And it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good. Hop over to Amazon.com and put the words “The Great Los Angeles Fire” into the search box. You’ll see that there was a novel of that name by Edward Stewart, published in 1980.

Stewart wrote a shelf-full of novels, none of which I’ve read. Amazon has “The Great Los Angeles Fire” at sales rank 9,687,510 in Books, with just one posted review, dated 2015. This week’s events might give it a boost. That would be too late for Stewart, who died in 1996, but might help his estate beneficiaries. Continue reading →

The Four D’s Of Destiny

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One of the many strange things about this age is that the most urgent issue facing the developed world gets the least amount of attention. That urgent thing is the collapse of fertility in every country with indoor toilets. Even India, a country famous for outdoor toilets, is having a baby bust. Indian fertility is now below replacement and, according to recent reports, is following the rest of Asia off the cliff.

In the EU, there are currently 1.46 live births per woman. France has the highest TFR at 1.84 live births per woman, but that is mostly the foreign population. The rest of Europe has birthrates well below replacement. Spain and Italy are at 1.3, which is what demographers call a population collapse. The only place in Europe with a healthy TFR is the Faroe Islands, which lies east of Iceland.

The Occident is doing well compared to the developed parts of Asia. Hong Kong no longer has children, as there is less than one live birth per woman. South Korea is right there with a TFR of 0.6. China is at 1.2, which should be what gets the ruling class to take notice, given China’s rocket high fertility in the recent past. It seems that wherever there are good times, people have stopped making babies.

This flies in the face of what we think we knew about biology. It has been assumed, because history seems to confirm it, that in good times people tend to have more children, while in bad times they limit their children. It is why Western nations cooked up schemes to limit reproduction during the Industrial Revolution. It was assumed that improving living standards would result in overpopulation.

The great global baby bust is telling us something. One is that what we thought we understood about demographics and population is wrong. When what was predicted did not happen, instead you got the opposite, it is time to rethink everything. The other is that there is a combination of forces that have been unleashed leading to what is looking like a great pruning of the human population.

That is the show this week. Everyone has their favorite reason for the population collapse, but those answers are probably wrong for the simple reason they assume a one-to-one relationship. In reality, complex things like human reproduction have highly complex causal relationships. That means the population collapse is most certainly do to a combination of things working in concert.

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
  • The Fertility Crisis
  • Diet
  • Development
  • Deracination
  • Divinity

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The Drug Resistant Troll

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Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” This is generally true, but occasionally something new comes along. The printing press is the best example. In fact, it was a revolutionary novelty. Much of what ails the modern world in some way traces its roots to the printing press.

The internet is another great novelty. Sure, the internet is, as Twain said, a lot of old ideas in a new combination. Sending letters to people over the internet is just a modern version of sending letters through the mail. Social media is a crowded public place where people strain to understand one another. Quantity has a quality of its own, however, and in the case of the internet, hooking billions together has created something that is different from its antecedents.

One example of this is the digital grifter. These are people who have many of the qualities we associate with conmen, but they also have qualities unique to the digital age and therefore could not exist before it. The analog grifters did not seek unrestricted attention, because they feared getting exposed. The digital grifter lives on attention and has no fear of being caught. In some cases, being labeled a grifter is viewed as an asset to the overall grift.

The difference between the digital grifter and the old fashioned grifter who may ply his trade online is that the money aspect of the grift is secondary. The old fashioned grift is all about separating the mark from his money. The digital grifter is not directly trying to scam people out of money. Instead, he wants a crowd that will operate as social proof for others who may buy something from him or sign up for a service like his YouTube channel, which is heavily monetized.

A good example of this is James Lindsay, the buffoonish “anti-woke” crusader who spends his days offending as many people as possible. He started out as a garden variety anti-Christian bigot, but that market was overserved, so he moved on to opposing “woke” nonsense in the academy. This got him a bunch of attention, so he expanded his anti-woke campaign to cover everyone. The Framers are now woke and Karl Marx was a woke crypto-Christian.

By making himself a public nuisance, he gets lots of attention, which brings him money through subscriptions, monetization and invites to events where other public nuisances do their act to the suckers. What he has done is make himself into a version of Mike Cernovich, a pioneer in using Twitter to troll himself into a career. Instead of pretending to be a lifestyle expert, Lindsay pretends to be a student of left-wing ideology and the champion of the fools who believe him.

The professional troll is a genuinely new thing made possible by the novelty of the internet, which makes it possible for a man and his phone to irritate millions of people with the push of a few buttons. While the public nuisance is not new, his elevation to a public figure is a novelty. In the analog age, Nick Fuentes was selling used cars and James Lindsay was that guy in accounting who talked about model trains. In this age they are getting rich as annoying weirdos.

This is leading to another novelty. The digital platforms that made these people possible are now transforming to encourage them. The Twitter monetization scheme is based on the number of people who engage with your post. The monetized users get paid for getting your attention and the best way to get attention is to be controversial, so it is not hard to see where this is heading. It is why Musk reinstated Fuentes. He may not get monetized, but his opponents do get paid to make noise.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he is cancelling his army of Indian content moderators and going to a group-sourced system like Twitter. The reason for this is moderation is bad for the professional troll. Community notes, however, is great for the professional troll, as it brings them even more attention. In effect, the group-sourced moderation encourages the sorts of behavior that moderation was intended to suppress, thus generating more of it.

It is why the “For You” tab on Twitter is worthless. It is filled with accounts that are designed to maximize attention. Many of them are bots that post and repost the same material to game the engagement system. There is a tragedy of the commons going on with Twitter. This is when many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, like your attention. They will tend to overuse it. For Twitter, it means people retreating to a narrow group they follow.

It remains to be seen if the social aspects of the internet can exist as a massive version of daytime television. There is a novelty to it and each version of the troll brings some new way of being a troll. There is a limit to everything, however, and we are already seeing a recycling of the trolls. James Lindsay ripped off Vox Day, who was on the anti-woke stuff when Lindsay was busy insulting Christians. The “groypers” are just a dumber version of the “stormies” created by Andrew Anglin.

Maybe this phase runs its course, like Hollywood reboots. After a few more turns of the wheel, people develop the mental armor to ignore the genre entirely. Starved of what it needs most, attention, the troll then withers and dies. On the other hand, maybe they kill off the big social media platforms as people retreat to private spaces. We are already seeing signs of this with the kooks stomping off to Bluesky. The great disaggregation of the internet will make the professional troll impossible.

Of course, the digital grifter and its crude variant, the professional troll, are novelties of this age, so it means their demise, if there is one, will be a novelty as well. New problems often require new solutions. Given that these people are unemployable in the normal sense, they will no doubt be like a drug-resistant virus, mutating with each eradication effort. Like those afflicted by herpes, the internet may never rid itself of the infection known as the professional troll.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Wolf At The EU Door

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Note: An unexpected event this morning left me with no time to write,  so this is the green door post from yesterday to fill the void. Assuming nothing else goes wrong today, I should be back tomorrow.

As January 20th grows closer, the Europeans are growing more hysterical about what Trump may do with Project Ukraine. There were rumors before the holidays that Keir Starmer was set to visit Mar-a-Lago to talk with Trump about Ukraine. Starmer had a call with Trump which must not have gone well, as the British media came out with stories about Trump rambling during the call.

It is hard to know what Trump is thinking with regards to Ukraine, which is why the Europeans are in a panic. If they knew what he is planning, they would be busy undermining it, which is why Trump is not talking about his plans. His personal emissary on Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, has cancelled his plants to visit Kiev and European capitals, which only adds to the intrigue.

The big fear in Europe is that Trump will do a deal with Putin and cut the Europeans out of the process. One would think that any deal that leads to peace would be welcome, but the Euros have more skin in the game than most realize. They either need the war to continue, or they need it to end in a way that does not expose the financial corruption around the entire project.

One good example for why the Euros are in this predicament is a town called Shevchenko, which is in eastern Ukraine. The Russians have just captured it as part of the steady push west. This little village would not matter, if not for the fact that it has one of the largest lithium mines in the world. It is part of what may be the world’s biggest lithium deposit.

While lithium is enormously important, that is not why this matters. You see, this mine is not actually owned by Ukraine. The rights to exploit it were traded away to an English company that was planning to use an Australian company to mine it. How this came to be is not all that clear but given the way the world works it surely required underwriting, which means British bankers were involved.

Now west of this town are other towns with massive lithium deposits, which have been pledged as collateral for various things, including the war. It is the thing that never makes it into the media. A significant portion of the financing for this war is tied to Ukrainian assets, which serve as collateral. They also buy the support of economic elites for this project. Project Ukraine is important business.

The reason the Russians captured this town is they are slowly encircling a city called Pokrovsk, which has been a major supply hub for the Ukraine army. The Russians are trying to split the front so they can break up the Ukraine army. This lets them destroy it piece by piece, limiting Ukraine’s ability to shift reserves where needed. This town with the big lithium mine is near the city of Pokrovsk.

This is a huge problem for Ukraine, but it is an even bigger problem for the EU, because Pokrovsk is vital to the coal and steel industry of Ukraine. You see, project Ukraine was supposed to bring the Ukraine steel industry into the EU economic zone, but now it looks like it will become part of Russia. The many investors in Ukrainian industry are not going to happy if Trump signs this land away to Russia.

This is the reason they put a gun to Speaker Johnson’s head last year to get the $60 billion Ukraine bill passed. Much of that money was to make whole those who had invested in project Ukraine. The arms dealers had “lent” the Biden admin weapons to send to Ukraine and they needed to be paid. The same is true for players like Blackrock that invested in Ukrainian agriculture.

Based on the hysteria in Europe, it does not appear as if the political class there has a similar way to solve their problem. If Trump makes a deal with Russia, all those companies and banks that invested in the project will be left with nothing but worthless Ukrainian bonds. It is why the European political class is desperate to be included in the negotiations. They think they can claw back some of the money.

Then there are the Russian frozen assets. Most of these are held in European banks and the Euroclear Bank. Any deal the Russians make with Trump to end the Ukraine war will include those assets. Otherwise, the Russians will confiscate American assets currently in Russia and Trump will not agree to it. In fact, walking bank sanctions and unfreezing assets may be the prerequisites for negotiations.

What if those assets are not available? The Europeans have been issuing bonds against the profits from those assets, but what if they have been using the assets themselves for other things? Even if the principle is intact, the investors expect to get paid, so if the assets are gone, then the profits are gone as well. Billions rest on those assets not being unfrozen anytime soon.

In a way, project Ukraine is coming full circle. In Trump’s first term, official Washington freaked out when Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine. What followed was the first Trump impeachment as a massive smokescreen to hide what was happening. Five years later and the Europeans are in the same bind, but they cannot stage a phony scandal and impeachment to buy time and conceal the crime.

This is probably why the Europeans are going crazy over Musk. They think they can escalate their feud with Trump to the point where he either backs off and agrees to consult with them on Ukraine or maybe they can pin the blame on Trump for whatever happens to Ukraine in the coming year. It is not a great plan, but when you owe money and have no way to pay, you will try anything.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!