Emerging Lunacy

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Emergent behavior is one of those things that people struggle to grasp, because it seems to violate the expected cause and effect relationship. Most people operate on the assumption that whatever we are seeing is caused by something that can also be seen or at least described. Of course, most people like to think there is some human actor behind everything, operating from the normal human motivations. It is always tempting to reduce things to the personal as it is relatable.

There are lots of examples in nature of emergent behavior. Cross-breeding of plants can result in a characteristic that does not exist in the two plants that have been crossbred by a curious gardener. Domestic animal breeders, from time to time, will bump into this. The Ocicat is a great example crossbreeding two animals and getting a result that has qualities not present in the parents. Insects colonies are a great example of emergent behavior.

Something similar can happen with human behavior. Put the right group of people in the right situation and you get behavior that seems to spring from nowhere. Some historians have argued this is what happened in Germany in the period after the Great War when the Nazi rose to power. The panic over witches and witchcraft in early New England is another cited example. All of a sudden, people began to act in ways that were not typical of their past behavior.

This is, in part, what we are experiencing today. The people in charge have unleashed forces they do not understand for short term gain. The massive wave of irregularities in the election are one result. The bizarre, superstitious behavior of the Covidians is another manifestation. These people have been swept up in a frenzy and have become untethered from the normal restraints. “Through any means necessary” has become a rallying cry for direct action against the imagined enemy.

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

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Me Talking A Lot
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

 

Dissident Thanksgiving

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Thanksgiving is considered the most American of holidays, as it is nothing like the typical holiday celebrated in the West. It has rather specific origins located in the founding of the country. Those origins are complete nonsense, of course, but that’s often the case with cultural traditions. Even so, since Lincoln imposed the holiday on the conquered nations of America, Thanksgiving has been the quintessential American holiday and probably most people’s favorite time of year.

The origins of the holiday may be nonsense and the reason we have it may be less than noble, but a time to count your blessings is a good thing. It is made more important in an age in which the ruling class is trying hard to destroy the social capital that is an essential part of human society. When everything is transactional and artificial, having a few days in which you are supposed to think the exact opposite looks a lot like leaving the back door of the Death Star open.

That may be especially true this year. According to current polling, more than half of American adults think the recent election was rigged. No one has asked, but there is a good bet that most of those people think the mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were in on the caper. In other words, most adults right now have lost trust in the controlling institutions of our society. A holiday in which we are encouraged to think about what really matters could not come at a better time.

Of course, this year has seen our rulers go mad with power and inflict all sorts of indignities upon us. There are the absurd lock downs and costume requirements related to the Covid panic. In the states where the tyrants have arbitrarily banned the sale of alcohol and installed snitch lines for people to rat out their neighbors for enjoying themselves, this will be a special time of year. A few days to think about all of this is just what the doctor ordered.

For those in areas where the Left’s street thugs have been running wild for most of the year, something similar is at work. The point of civilized society is to provide leisure time, when you can enjoy the simple pleasures with those you love. That is a sharp contrast to what the wreckers who bankroll the street mobs think. Over turkey tomorrow, a lot of people are going to think about what those oligarchs are really trying to take from us with their street thugs and gangsters.

Most important, of course, those engaged in the fight against the gathering darkness will be fortified by a few days of good food, good friends and time with family. While the forces of darkness are driven by avatars of the promised land and envy at what they can never attain, the dissident it driven by the thoughts of home, community and the daily struggle to make those things possible. For the dissident right, this is the best holiday of the year, even more so in the current crisis.

The challenge, of course, will be the spiteful mutants who will try to wreck the good times with their politics. The wine aunt who wants to gloat about the election, the unstable uncle who thinks Hitler is hiding under his bed and the young person whose mind has been poisoned by the system will all think this is their time to be the wrecker they imagine themselves to be. Dissidents everywhere will have to find a way to deal with these people, but this is the nature of the struggle.

Probably the most important thing to take away from this year, the thing to contemplate over the next few days, is the fact that we are on the cusp of a new age. Those promises from the ruling class puppets, like the Pretender Biden, to “build back better” should not worry anyone, as these people are parasites. They are wreckers, unwittingly clearing a path for what comes next. Someone will build back better, but it comes after the reckoning that awaits every radical wrecker.

It may feel like a small consolation, but Thanksgiving has always been about looking forward, as much as looking back. You take the time to count your blessings and enjoy what you have, family, friends, your health and so on, but it is also about giving thanks for being in the great struggle of life. Whether it is carving a new society out of the wilderness or preserving the seeds of civilization in the great storms of the present, Thanksgiving is mostly about the promise of better days.

That is the thing that should keep the dissident going. The rage the other side has for what is good in life is rooted, to a great degree, in their fear of tomorrow. They know they are “always exposed to sudden unexpected destruction. As he that walks in slippery places is every moment liable to fall, he cannot foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next.” This is the source of their rage. They know they stand upon the slippery stones of radicalism, while we stand on the firm ground of truth.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Cynical Phase

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332

Note: I have a new post up behind the green door on the move Mr. Jones, which I recommend to those mulling over the current age. Learning about the realities of Soviet communism is a good palliative to those prone to optimism.

The Soviet Union, like all radical experiments, went through several phases in its roughly three generations of existence. The first phase, of course, was the revolution, in which the old order was toppled and a battle ensued to fill the void. This initial phase of revolution is always the one that attracts the most attention. This is when the great heroes of the revolution and the great villains of it are made. It is in this phase we get both Lenin and Stalin, hero and villain.

There is a phase that gets little attention and that is when the people come to terms with the irrationality of the world that has been created for them. One reason Stalin was able to send so many to their deaths or to labor camps is so many people kept thinking there was some rationality to the world being created. Some remained idealistic believers in the cause, while others became critics of the cause. They assumed the revolution would bring clarity and rationality when it brought only the opposite

In time, the people came to terms with this. The humor of the Soviet Union reflected the fact that one got along by accepting the irrational in the same way you accept that the grass is green or the sky is blue. You don’t think about it. The jokes were often about these daily contradictions and how the unfortunate were those who did not get the joke that was at the heart of those contradictions. In other words, the joke was always on the fool who was not cynical enough to anticipate the lie.

This is relevant in our current age as we may be past the revolutionary stage and into that time when the people adjust to the irrational. The legacy conservative media keeps pounding the drum about how “we’re lurching into socialism” when we have been a socialist society for generations now. There is no aspect of our economic life outside the grip of the now semi-permanent ruling class. Telling people otherwise is just part of the way the ruling class controls the population.

Of course, this reality is dawning on even the dullest people, so we are being told that the bad guys are planning a “radical revolution.” The truth is, that revolution is well past the planning stage. It has already happened. From top to bottom, despite party labels or rhetoric, the system is stacked with people committed to the great reordering of society into the egalitarian paradise. The expulsion of Trump from office like a foreign body is the proof that the organism of state is wholly alien now.

In other words, a revolution has occurred out of view from the rest of us and now we are seeing the revolutionaries step out of the shadows. This is not a lot different than how Stalin took control of the party and government. He quietly consolidated his hold on the party, while his rivals were thinking the revolution was still ongoing. By the time they realized what had happened, it was too late. This realization was probably penultimate thing that went through Trotsky’s head.

Now we are in the phase where we get used to the often-bizarre contradictions in the rules being imposed by the new rulers. Some are easy, like the fact that states have put mentally disturbed Jewish men in sundresses in charge of public health. These are ornamental positions, so putting a crazy person in the role allows the governor to display his piety at little cost. Until the Covid hysteria, no one had any reason to know their state had public health officials.

Other bits of the new normal have no explanation. For example, states are now telling people they cannot make noise in their home, as part of the alleged fight against the spread of Covid. In Europe, they are banning the sale of alcohol at certain times, claiming this is to fight Covid. Maybe they believe Covid hates loud noises and people get loud when they drink. It is insane, but it makes more sense than the official explanation, which is no explanation at all.

The lunacy of official policy will not always be humorous. The freedom loving Boris Johnson is now promoting a plan whereby Brits will be issued “freedom passes” if they comply with official edicts on Covid. For a long time, people threw around the word “Orwellian” to mean something they did not like. The English-speaking world is about to learn the real meaning of the term. Getting a freedom pass for doing exactly what the government has instructed is the very definition of Orwellian.

Another part of this phase where we come to terms with the madness of the situation is the acceptance of official silence. In a country with anything resembling an independent media, these officials would be asked to explain their polices. Boris Johnson would be asked about his Orwellian freedom pass scheme. Instead, the media is full of lectures about how we’re all in this together. You see, this is an opportunity to build back better, so you need to embrace this glorious opportunity.

Westerners have been trained for generations to think the media has an adversarial relationship with the government. This will change during this time. We will come to understand what the Soviet citizen understood. The official media is just that, official media promulgating the new lies. It’s value to the people is only in letting us know how to stay out of the camps and in providing a laugh at the absurdity of living in a society based on obvious lies. Everyone becomes a cynic.

That is something else we will learn. Pessimism is not the opposite of optimism. The man who is sure the end is near is really just another type of optimist. He believes that soon, his struggle will come to an end. The opposite of optimism is cynicism. Both the optimist and the pessimist are willing to accept the moral framework as stated. Their actions and understanding of the world are tightly bound by the orthodoxy. Both the optimist and the pessimist give up their agency to faith in the rules that govern them.

The cynic, in the context of an authoritarian society, accepts that there is no inherent logic in the system, other than to insulate those who prosper from their position. The cynic accepts that there is no truth in the system and the outcomes are random, based on the changing desires of the people you interact with in the system. The cynic knows there is no truth in a world of lies, other than his own acceptance of it. It is in this phase we are in now where we learn that you can never be cynical enough.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Election Math

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Note: I have a Thanksgiving themed post up at Taki this week. I have a long essay in my long promised on the subject of the Puritan Question. This a small taste.

An iron rule of the universe is that anything that has value will inevitably be forged or stolen, usually both. This is especially true of elections, because the election promises to bestow the most valuable thing of all to the ruling class. Elections give the ruling class legitimacy. As a result, every American election has had irregularities. Whether it is the Democrats calling out the dead vote or Democrats busing in illegal’s to vote in the suburbs, Democrats have been gaming elections since forever.

This most recent election may set a record for irregularities. It is hard to know if the claims being made by Trump are real. Trump’s track record on truth telling is not great, but even putting his claims aside, this election has more strange angles than any election in American history. Too many states have had ballots magically appear in the middle of the night or last minute rule changes that favor one side. When this happens in the third world, the West demands new election.

Here’s a bit of data that should jump off the page. In the modern era, no incumbent that has increased his vote total from the previous election has lost. Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and Bush all won reelection by increasing their vote total from their first election victory. Obama saw a slight down turn in his vote total, but his 2008 victory was landslide. Trump increased his vote by 17% over his 2016 total, 73,763,979 versus 62,984,828, yet his vote share declined and he lost.

To call this unprecedented is a wild understatement. A contested election between two new candidates generates a lot of interest. Elections with an incumbent are referenda on the person holding the seat. If people are happy with him, his vote total goes up. The voters now have more certainty about the man. If the voters are not happy, then his vote total goes down, as people who voted for him sit out or vote against him.

What the vote totals are telling us this time is that millions of people who did not vote for Trump in 2016 either came out to vote for the first time in their life in 2020 or switched from opposing him to supporting him. Yet, despite millions being happy with his term in office, millions more were so outraged that they came out of nowhere to vote against Trump. The improbability of this is hard to overstate.

This brings up probably the most absurd anomaly in election history. According to the official narrative, Joe Biden brought in close to 15 million new voters. The last four elections saw the following vote totals: 121,056,394, 129,390,000, 126,035,116,   128,824,246. The vote total for 2020 was 153,548,144. If we net out the 11 million extra who voted for Trump, we are being told that the vibrant and exciting Joe Biden, a man who could not win a primary, added 15 million new voters.

Everywhere else in life, an extreme outlier is a red flag that warrants investigation, because it suggests something unexpected has happened. If a sprinter shows up at an international event and runs a sub-nine second 100-meters, his life will be torn apart on the assumption he is cheating. If it snows in July, people are going to wonder if the gods are angry at us for some reason. When things don’t follow the normal patterns, people naturally wonder why. Can you spot the oddity here?

 Election Year US Population Total Vote % of Population
1948      146,600,000      48,399,989 33%
1952      157,600,000      61,093,955 39%
1956      168,900,000      61,319,768 36%
1960      180,700,000      68,334,742 38%
1964      191,900,000      69,972,432 36%
1968      200,700,000      72,514,998 36%
1972      209,900,000      75,645,594 36%
1976      218,000,000      79,973,609 37%
1980      226,500,000      84,843,024 37%
1984      235,800,000      92,032,260 39%
1988      244,500,000      90,695,171 37%
1992      256,900,000    103,756,701 40%
1996      269,700,000      94,686,514 35%
2000      282,200,000    104,338,854 37%
2004      292,800,000    121,056,394 41%
2008      304,100,000    129,390,000 43%
2012      313,900,000    126,035,116 40%
2016      323,100,000    128,824,246 40%
2020      331,000,000    153,548,144 46%

Now, the claim will be that the public was so outraged over the terrible Donald Trump that people who had never voted came out to vote for Biden. The plausibility of that claim is undermined by the fact that we have no example of this. The pattern is that the unpopular incumbent sees his voters either stay home of vote against him. Carter lost 13% of his vote in 1976. Bush lost 20% of his vote in 1992. We’re supposed to believe that Trump increased his vote by 17% because people were angry?

Compounding all of this is the fact that exactly no one found evidence of this in their polling in the run-up to the election. It is one of the things that pollster try to gauge when doing a poll. How enthusiastic are the voters for each guy? Trump had a big lead in enthusiasm, which was obvious in the final weeks. He was speaking to massive rallies, while Biden was speaking to empty parking lots. Apparently, those enthusiastic Biden voters really went out of their way to conceal themselves.

Of course, the basic vote totals make the post-election analysis about why Trump lost sound rather ridiculous. You cannot seriously claim he failed to appeal to his voters in some way when he increased his vote total by 17%. That means we have to believe that an 80-year old dementia patient inspired millions to vote for the first time, because Trump did not appeal to his base enough. That’s the sort of logic you get from people who want attention, not answers.

Now, we will hear a lot about the “Tucker Carlson standard” where any questioning of the system must include incontrovertible proof. That is just an effort to create a false dichotomy in order to avoid explaining the weird anomalies about this election. Where the facts lead us is to shift the burden of proof. The principle of parsimony says that something very unusual went on during the voting and counting process. It is on the defenders of the process to explain what happened.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Struggle Continues

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In the business world, a regular topic of conversation is the cost-benefit analysis to solving business problems. It is easy to see that you don’t solve a fifty dollar problem with a million dollar solution, but most problems are not so simple. Figuring out the real cost of the problem is not so easy and then imagining the solution adds a whole new layer of complexity. One of the ironies of problem solving is figuring out the cause of the problem can cost more than the problem itself.

Watching the election shenanigans roll on, it seems that the ruling class may have created an expensive problem while trying to solve the Trump problem. The wholesale election fraud has created a very expensive problem for them. They cannot sit back and let Trump’s lawyers find examples of fraud or use those examples to overturn one of the disputed states, as that creates a big problem for them. Joe Biden becomes the Pretender Biden for most of the country.

On the other hand, the only way to prevent any of this is to double down on the shenanigans in all of these states. That means threatening judges, lawyers and election officials. It means more midnight capers to alter the rules and results. In other words, the way to prevent Trump from establishing his claims is to prove another set of claims. They will convince a large number of people that the whole system is rigged and controlled by thugs and crooks.

This is a managerial class feature. A group of experts identify a problem, real or imagined, then set about solving it. In the process, they create a whole new set of problems that require a new set of experts to solve. That new set of experts are conveniently the proteges of the first set of experts. This cycle has rolled through the culture since the middle of the last century. It now appears to be consuming the system that makes the managerial class possible.

It is remarkable, when you think back over the last five years. They could have easily co-opted Trump, by cutting some deals with him. He would have put the MAGA stamp of approval on things like DACA, higher immigration levels and big new administrative initiatives, in exchange for some trinkets like the wall project. Instead, they cut off their nose to spite their face. It is insane and suggests that maybe they are the victims of the same process that has consumed the Trump movement.

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

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Giving Thanks To Our Enemy (Link) (Link)
  • 17:00: Goodbye To Bad Cess (Link)
  • 27:00: Stupid People (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: Welcome To The Madhouse (Link)
  • 47:00: The Ungrateful (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Our Abductive Mind

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333

Note: I have a heretical post full of crime-think behind the green door. This is a post about the sitcom The Big bang Theory.

One of the odd experiences you have on this side of the great divide is you notice just how many ridiculous things people accept as true. It’s not just gullible and stupid people who walk around with heads full of nonsense. Lots of smart and thoughtful people cling to ideas that are superstitious and primitive. Often people who make the journey to this side of the great divide struggle with the fact that for most of their life they have believed things that are ridiculous or devoid of any truth content.

A good example of something most people think is true, but is complete nonsense is the claim that your diet determines your health. More specifically, the claim that the Standard American Diet, as recommended by the rulers, is the key to long life and healthy lifestyle. That means lots of carbohydrates, rather than proteins and fats, especially from meat. Not only is there no truth to these claims, the Standard American Diet is probably the exact opposite of the truth.

The fact is, outside of the extremes, like starvation or morbid obesity, diet has little to no impact on your health. All of the “evidence” trotted out in favor the SAD is based on nonsense studies that are easily refuted. Humans are omnivores, which means we can survive on a wide range of foods. The main problem for modern humans is too much food, so many become obese. Otherwise, the combination of foods you eat has no measurable impact on your health or your lifespan.

The thing is, you can carefully explain this to someone and they will nod along maybe, seeming to get what you’re saying, but as soon as they get the chance, they will repeat the approved lines about diet. A man who has seen every man in his family get colon cancer, despite their diet and lifestyle, will cling to the idea that he can prevent colon cancer by eating oatmeal for breakfast. It’s no different than thinking he can appease the gods by sacrificing a goat on the prescribed day.

Another great example is mass media. One of the funny things about this age is the more partisan you are, the more trusting you are of the media, despite the fact partisans on all sides are sure the media is covering up the truth. Trump haters have fallen for every race hoax perpetrated by the media over the last five years. The old alt-right, the guys sure the media is controlled by little men in volcanoes, accepted without question the media claims about the Covid pandemic.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is one of those remarkable observations that gets to the heart of why mass propaganda works. It’s not that good propaganda tricks people into believing lies. It’s that in every population, there is a percentage that will believe the lies being spread. It is not always the same percentage, which is what makes this so useful to the propagandist. That percentage does the hard work of repeating the lie in private conversations to friends and family.

Joseph de Maistre said, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” That right there is why so many people, even very smart people, believe some amount of nonsense. They get the nonsense from people they know and trust, so they are inclined to believe it. At the minimum, they play along with the nonsense, for the sake of social peace,

This is the great insight of the propagandist. The purveyors of the big lie don’t start with the big lie, but the small ones. Maybe the small lies undermine some authority figure in society or maybe they nibble away at some accepted truth. Other small lies offer alternatives to the official truth or suggest motivations for why the authority is not being honest with the people. Over time, the little lies accumulate to the point where some people are unwilling to believe their own eyes.

Again, the diet stuff is a great example of this. Everyone who goes to a new doctor has to answer tons of questions about health history and the health history of family members, maybe going back a generation or two. They do this because disease runs in the family and disease runs in families because it is genetic. Yet, the same doctor will tell you to eat more grains and vegetables and lose a few pounds. A lifetime of little lies about diet have conditioned him to doubt his own training.

The most likely reason for this strange willingness to accept pretty lies is that humans are natural story listeners. For a very long time, most of human history, in fact, humans passed around knowledge with stories and songs. Most likely, we are wired to be more receptive to a good tale, than the hard truth. A story about how eating the right food pleases the gods and brings good health is something our ancestors heard around the campfire when they first climbed out of the branches.

Our deductive mind is that which allows us to know important truths about the world, while our inductive mind allows us to think about how the world should be. That conflict between is and ought is resolved by the abductive mind, which resolves these conflicts with amusing tales and easily remembered sayings that let us ignore these conflicts and focus on the act of living. Trog angered the gods is more easily accepted than Trog was eaten by a bear, because that’s what bears do.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Trade-Offs

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Back in the Cold War, one of the unanswered questions that came up from time to time was why did the people in the Soviet Union put up with it? American propaganda said that the living conditions were terrible. They had to stand in line for essentials like toilet paper and meat. The secret police regularly hauled people away, sending them into exile in Siberia or worse. Despite it all, the people, including those in the captive nations never revolted against the state or the communist party.

It is a useful question to ponder now as America and the West slip into the abyss of soft totalitarianism. We don’t have cops busting down doors and hauling away dissidents, at least not yet. We do have ideologues armed with the power of the state pushing people around because they can. The Covid hassles are the result of petty pipsqueaks in government offices dreaming up new ways to torment us. Curfews and bans on alcohol are punitive measures, not palliative ones.

It brings up that old question. Why are people tolerating this? There were some flickers of resistance during the early stages of the lock downs, but governments sent out the cops to harass dissenters and the media revved up the fear campaign. Here we are in a second wave of pointless lock downs, more petty and stupid than the first, but no one is raising hell about it. Back in the Cold War, stories like this elicited oaths about how the tree of liberty needed to be fertilized with the blood of tyrants.

A popular answer, for why people willingly allow themselves to be stripped of their liberty and dignity, is our material prosperity. The Boomers care more about their stock portfolios and their kids care more about the game consoles. The reason everyone goes along with this stuff, according to popular thinking, is everyone feels like they have too much to lose. That material prosperity has made everyone lazy and cautious, so they are easily pushed around by the petty tyrants.

While there is some truth to it, that can’t be the answer for why the people living under communism never revolted. The stories about people waiting in line for bread were no doubt exaggerated by Western media, but there is no doubting that the people in the Soviet Union lived well below Western standards. The Soviets may have had great military gear, but their consumer goods were terrible. Only party members had access to the small luxuries taken for granted in the West at the time.

In retrospect, we now know that life for most people in the Soviet Empire was not the dystopian nightmare portrayed in the West. Once Stalin died, there was a brief period of reform and then communism fell into a long period of conservatism. That is, it was more about maintaining a set of rules and enforcing them. Ideological experimentation came to an end and the focus was on the basics of life. For most people this meant a predictable life, where they had the necessities.

There’s no doubt that material standards of living for people in communism were far below that of the West, but this was not something they saw everyday. They just knew that life was better under communism than in the past. They were also free of crime, disorder and the great uncertainty of the first half of the 20th century. In other words, lacking a plausible alternative that was clearly better, most people were willing to knuckle under to the ideologues in order to get on with life.

We see that in America now. An under appreciated subplot to the Trump phenomenon is that Trump represented disorder and uncertainty, while his establishment opponents became stability and order. They selected the Pretender Biden because no one could possibly see him as a revolutionary. To use the old movie concept, the election was about the blue bill of Biden or the red pill of Trump. Note that the old alt-right greedily gobbled down the blue pill of Biden.

Another historical parallel is important. The captive people of the Soviet Empire were not all willing to go along to get along. The Hungarians revolted in October of 1956 against the party and the Soviet occupation. In November the Soviets sent in the Red Army to crush the revolt. The Politburo was initially open to dealing with the leaders of the rebellion, but changed their mind and crushed the revolt. The reason was they did not want to encourage more rebellions.

In January 1968, the reformer, Alexander Dubček, was elected First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. This set off what is known as the Prague Spring, which was an effort to liberalize Czech politics and economics. This reform effort did not go over well with the Soviets who sent in half a million Warsaw Pact troops to suppress the reform movement and restore the old order. The scenes from Freedom Plaza last Saturday had a Prague Spring vibe to them.

What the Hungarian Revolt and the Prague Spring showed is that raw power has an appeal that can never be underestimated. There is no question that the people of the captive nations were in support of their independence, but the raw power of the Soviet Empire was more than enough to counter popular support. When the rebels had no answer for the Soviet tanks, the people did what Osama bin Laden observed many years ago. They chose the strong horse.

This is a lesson the Poles learned and put to good use in the 1980’s. The Solidarity Movement was as much about making the Polish communist party look weak as it was about organizing the people. Instead of hoping the party would yield to popular will, they played a game of chess with the party, putting them in positions where they looked weak and indecisive. This allowed the people to trust that the cure for communism was not worse than the disease of communism.

This brings us back to the current time. One obvious failing of the populist movement that put Trump in the White House is it was never able to create a plausible alternative in the mind of the people. Was the goal a return to the past or was the goal the present with specific modifications? Was it some undefined future? Trump was not skilled enough to grasp this and lacked the imagination to articulate a plausible alternative, even if he recognized the historical moment.

This is something that the reformers and rebels in the late Soviet Empire did not fail to grasp when their time came. When the party tried to oust Yeltsin, for example, the public rallied to his side because he represented a clear alternative. The Solidarity movement in Poland had a clear set of goals, rather than a list of complaints. When the party tried to muscle them, they were opposing more than just a rebellious rabble, but a set of specific reforms popular with the people.

Getting back to the central question as to why people throughout the ages have been wiling to submit to the most terrible crimes against their liberty and dignity, the answer is that life is about trade-offs. Instinctively, people make their choices based on the options put before them. They do not rebel against the present arrangements because they fall short of some ideal. They rebel, either because the alternative is misery and death or they see some better option on the table.

This has been the magic of the two-party democracy, which is explicit in America and implicit in Europe. The options before the people are always the two faces of the establishment, Republican and Democrat, Liberal and Conservative. Unless and until that dynamic is broken, either with a third option or the discrediting of the two option system, the status quo remains the strong horse. Nothing will change until the trade-offs presented to the people change.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Next Phase Of The War

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Note: I have a movie review up behind the green door. This time it is #97 on the AFI top-100 list, Bringing Up Baby. I must admit, I’me finding it a lot of fun to sample these very old movies. Like reading old books, there is a lot of secondary cultural stuff to be learned from watching old movies.

Very bad people back in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s noticed that radicals were very good at the first phase of their project, but not the second. The radicals wanted to knock down the institutions of society and replace them with something better, but they never managed to pull off that last part. In fact, the thing they cooked up as the new and improved version of what they destroyed tended to create new problems, which required new solutions that created new problems and so on and so on.

An obvious example of this is family life. The nuclear family, with clear and natural roles for the sexes, worked pretty well. The radicals, on the other hand, could not understand why divorce laws and custody laws were as they were. They could not understand why those sex roles existed. They smashed them up and replaced them with family courts, liberal divorce and weird feminist ideas about sex roles. The result has been three generations of family and social dysfunction.

At some point, even the radicals realized that their project was not the best for their cause, so they simply took over the existing institutions. The long march through the institutions was largely over by the 1990’s. The Baby Boomers had taken over and pushed out their parent’s generation. Along the way they made sure that their generation had the right opinions. Those who did not were cast into the outer darkness of dissident exile. The radicals were in charge.

This is what makes the current revolution a shabby and ridiculous version of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. Today’s radicals are the sons and daughters of those radicals, who now are in charge of everything. The street fighters are not attacking “the man” as the man pays their allowance. They are attacking an avatar of the man their parents vanquished generations ago. It is one-part public theater and one-part cargo cult, put on as if it is an initiation ritual for young adults.

There is a more sinister aspect to it. Read what the young radicals in the academy, politics and even in business, are demanding and you see that their assault on the institutions is really an assault on knowledge itself. The radicals of yesteryear were content to embrace the logic of the institutions, just put to use for their purposes. The new radicals want to wreck the logic itself. They want to replace institutional logic with something different, something that does not exist and cannot exist.

This is the heart of the anti-whiteness stuff. When they claim that institutions suffer from whiteness or are Eurocentric, what they mean is the internal logic that operates the institution is coherent and rational. The STEM fields, for example, still abide by the rules of mathematics. Medicine is still rooted in the logic of Western medicine. Because these rules are barriers to all but the talented tenth of non-whites, these rules must be racist and therefore these rules have to be eliminated.

If one is over a certain age and a fan of dark humor, there is an amusing bit of irony to all of this. The people in charge are now getting the same treatment from their pets that they gave to the Occidentals, who they assaulted as youth. After all, the reason whiteness persists is the white Progressives, and white presenting Progressives, have maintained that whiteness for their benefit. It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the sight of woke females of color screaming at the aging radicals.

Putting that aside, a medical system “disrupted and decolonized” in order to allow for the dominance of non-whites will result in something dangerous and primitive. A world with Africanized math is a world spinning off its axis. Allowing the wrong answer to stand alongside the right answer in the name of equity and equality will result in disorder and chaos within the institutions. In other words, it is not just a threat to the people in charge of the institutions, but the institutions themselves.

In order to maintain the simplest of things, you need to be able to make some simple predictions about the future. Predictions rely upon order, which in turn is the product of rules about the world and how people will act. Imagine a road with no rules. If you cannot know what other drivers will do or how the road surface will be around the next corner, the road becomes useless. You are better off walking through the woods than taking your life into your hands on the road.

This is what the woke revolution is promising and beginning to deliver. Consider the news media, for example. A generation ago it was predictably biased, but it contained some truth in the bias. If you knew the rules, you could watch a chat show or read a newspaper and get a sense of things. Today, in order to strip all that ugly whiteness from it, the news is a random nonsense with no truth value at all. The only point to it is to stimulate the true believers of the revolution.

What the woke revolution and its promise to decolonize Western societies is really promising is a return to a form of occasionalism. The formal definition of this is that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Humans are “created substances” which means they live in a world of miracles. There are no rules, only the whims of the creator. In a world without fixed rules, there is no point in knowing the rules and therefore no point in predicting what comes next.

This is a world of primitive oogily-boogily. It is why the people in charge are suddenly getting nervous about the golem they released on white people. The Democrat leaders in Washington are claiming their radicals have gone too far, while the Republicans are cheering them on, as they silently watch Trump be removed from office. Whether or not they can put the golem back into what holds a golem is unknown. The woke warriors are now everywhere in the institutions and they are not ready to quit.

What this means is the next phase of the revolution shifts from attacking normal white people going about their business, to a fight between the rulers and their pets. The political class can probably handle the people in their ranks, but what will they do about woke capital? How do they plan to contend with the suddenly woke intelligence agencies and the foreign-dominated foreign policy establishment? How will they reign in the woke mayors, governors and police departments?

None of this is to imply that the coast is clear for whites. Attacking whites is now an integral part of what makes the new radical. It’s just that the purpose of it will change from pleasing their masters to attacking their masters. The Pretender Biden does not know it, but Team Kamala has stocked up on My Pillows. The war did not end with the removal of the evil Trump. It was just the opening phase. The next phase is between the ideology of the woke and the cupidity of their masters.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Fanatic’s Ball

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Note: I have a post up on Taki about the end of liberal democracy. As according to the new normal, I have posts up behind the green door on popular culture.

The great British evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, famously said that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. The obsessive, uncritical belief in an idea or cause is the opposite of the sober-minded and rational. The fanatic is intolerant of anything that contradicts his views, while the rational man is willing to update or even abandon his views when presented contradictory information. The fanatic sees only that which confirms his fanaticism and refuses to yield in his opinions.

The fanatic, of course, has been in the middle of every man-made social disaster since the French Revolution. It was fanatics who brought on the Reign of Terror and it was fanatics who brought on The Great Terror. Fanatics let loose by Mao in the Cultural Revolution terrorized the Chinese population. Man’s greatest invention turns out to be man’s most terrible invention. Once it is let loose, it is not easily put back on the leash, at least not until it runs out of things to smash.

This year has seen the fanatic set free to run wild in our streets. They were deliberately agitated and let loose by the petty men of the ruling class, frustrated that the people’s champion had not been vanquished. It’s hard for modern people to understand how the French radicals, for example, could have killed so many in the name of the revolution, but current events make this much easier to comprehend, even if we have not reached the bloodbath stage yet.

The thing is, fanaticism is not a well-defined group of people held in reserve and then deployed when needed. It’s more like a spiritual force that sweeps through a population, afflicting the weak minded and those desperate for a purpose. We see this with the election shenanigans. The desire to be part of the great fight against the bad man and his minions caused hundreds, maybe thousands to follow their fanatical rage and engage in thousands of acts of election fraud.

That is what is coming into focus as various parties look into what happened and whistle blowers step forward. The image that is emerging is of an orgy of corruption where the participants are free of any moral restraint. They were not working from a plan, but a belief that they were on the side of angels and therefore free to use any means necessary to help the cause. They were the righteous engaged in the great war against the wicked, unleashed by the ruling class.

The defenders of Trump will work hard to make it sound like a wide-ranging conspiracy, but that’s just how mass media culture works. Facts and observations cannot be presented as is. They have to be part of a narrative with a well-defined protagonist and an easy to hate villain. In reality, there is no grand conspiracy at work. The people involved in the election rigging are true believers. They believe what they are doing is for a just cause and they cannot see the corruption in it.

Fanatics in numbers are a lot like a flock of birds of a school of fish. They instinctively coordinate their efforts without needing to be told. Like fireflies at dusk, they are constantly signaling one another, which intensifies their fanaticism, making them more sensitive to the movements of the group. The people at the top cheered the fanatics in the streets, excused their behavior and reminded them that the evil Trump must be stopped by any means necessary. They were on a holy mission.

The thing is though, what motivates those unleashing the fanatics on the population also motivates the fanatic. That is a search for purpose. These are people who wish to be part of something bigger than themselves, but they lack the skill and ability to create anything but mayhem. This manifests as the smashing of whatever they see in their way, which can be anything. It is why they eventually turn on one another, because at some point they run out of things to smash.

That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. The petty and stupid people surrounding the corpse of Joe Biden are not going to be satisfied with expelling Trump from Washington. They will want vengeance. Part of that will be swinging wildly in what they perceive to be the opposite direction out of spite. It’s not hard to imagine them unleashing a Camp of the Saints event, for example, by reversing Trump’s immigration rules and inviting the world to their celebration.

It’s not that the people around the Pretender Biden want millions rushing the border in the hope of getting a promised amnesty. They are too stupid and short-sighted to think that far ahead. It’s that they will want the quick rush of smashing those rules and gloating over their work. Like the fanatics cheering the executioner holding up the head of his victim, they will simply be looking for the thrill of seeing their enemies, real and imagined, facing their holy wrath.

What the past tells us about times of terror is the fanatics are never satisfied with the blood of a few enemies of the revolution. The sight of the enemies blood just makes them hungry for more. There may be some in the ruling class sensing that they must first put their fanatics back on the leash, but most of too dull and self-loathing to grasp what they have unleashed. There is a good chance that the summer riots were just a taste of what lies ahead in the woke revolution.

It is tempting to assume that this revolution will eat itself, but that is not the pattern people think they see in the history book. People point to Robespierre as the example, but he seems more like an exception. Stalin’s terror campaign ended when Stalin died of natural causes. The Cultural Revolution ended when Mao died. Pol Pot lived to old age and according to his own words, died with a clear conscience. Perhaps this time will be an exception, but that is never the way to bet.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

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. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. 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. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.