Letters

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I finally had the time to clear out the inbox and go through everything from the post office box, so for a day, at least, I’m caught up. One of the reasons I thought about doing a live stream or something similar was that it could be a way to answer mail each week along with the live questions. I’ve tabled that idea for now, as I have too many other things on my plate at the moment. The day job has been keeping me crazy busy of late, so I don’t need another project right now.

Another upside to doing a mailbag show this week is I was not tempted to talk about the ghetto riots spreading around the country. They have not started here in Lagos yet, but the locals are beginning to feel left out, so it is matter of time. Given that the lock down is still technically in place, they are just looking for an excuse to act up. With the new wave of censorship crack downs rolling out, it is probably a good idea to avoid talking about this stuff on YouTube right now.

The fact is, I don’t care all that much. I don’t care about these people as I don’t think they should be in the same country as me. We’re onto three generations now of trying to make this work and we still have blacks rioting in the streets. Many of the rioters in Minneapolis are foreigners. These are non-whites imported to punish the whites living in places that had few non-whites. Instead of sitting around Africa they were plopped into the Twin Cities by people who hate us.

The people responsible for Ilhan Omar are the problem, not the savages running wild in the streets. Sure, the rioters are the immediate problem if you live in one of these places, but they are a symptom. The cause is a ruling class that defines itself by its hatred of white people. You can be sure that the usual suspects are laughing themselves silly over what’s happening in Minnesota right now. As far as they are concerned, the people of that city are getting what they deserve.

That said, never let a crisis go to waste. Normal white people looking at this, even the ones beaten into self-hatred, sense the truth. This would not be happening if we just accepted the reality of race. Whites and blacks cannot live with one another. It can never work. No amount of speech laws and limits on white freedom will cause blacks to behave themselves. What we are seeing is the natural order, their natural order. It’s who they are and we need to accept it.

The fact is, these people rioting are not me. They are not my people. I feel no connection to them in the best of times. I don’t hate them. I live in a 70% black city and see black people every day of my life. I harbor no malice toward them, but I feel no connection to them either. On paper, we are fellow citizens. In reality we are people thrown together by fate and the vengeance of the ruling class. Pretending that these people are our people is just lunacy. We are not the same.

This is underscored by the fact that many of the rioters are recent imports from the former third world. They are guests rioting in the home of the host. That’s not a fair analogy, because a host invited his guests. These people are more like home invaders than guests. No one asked for them to be here. No one was walking around Minneapolis saying, “We need for Africans.” The people of that city were never asked if they wanted more Africans. They never got a say.

That’s the lesson here. These things we are seeing are not the fault of the people for voting for the wrong guys. The polices that have created these riots were never put up for a vote or even discussed openly. Whether it is race policy or immigration policy, the decisions were all made in the shadows. The public was never given a chance to have their say in the matter. If Trump wants to send the National Guard somewhere, send it to the halls of Congress. That’s where the trouble lies.

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!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00 Opening
  • 02:00 Supply Chains
  • 08:00 Propertarianism
  • 13:00 What About Trump
  • 19:00 Covid-19 Talk
  • 24:15 Effective Politics
  • 35:00 Despair
  • 39:00 Hate Mail
  • 50:30 Bastards
  • 57:00 Thank You

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Morality Politics

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The simplest definition of politics, regardless of the political system, is that it is formalized collective action. An individual or group of individuals gets a group of people to act as a group on some issue. It may be to lobby the king for some policy, undermine the dictator in some way or vote for a particular issue. Further, the kernel of all political action is dissatisfaction. The people doing the organizing are unhappy with something so they find the like-minded and appeal to their unhappiness.

As a practical matter, politics is about persuasion. The reformer, for example, first persuades people that something is broke. Like a good salesman who creates need in the mind of the prospective customer, the reformer creates a sense of unhappiness with the status quo in his target audience. The reformer is, in effect, a chronic complainer, always talking about his unhappiness with the status quo. His goal is always to first persuade people that something is broken and needs fixing.

No all persuasion is the same. if you listen to this interview with Ryan Faulk, he frames politics as narrative driven and data driven. The guys in whatever the now defunct alt-right are calling themselves these days are narrative driven. They create stories to explain the important facts of some issue. The other side stacks up the facts and lets them do the talking. If the other side is wrong about the facts, it is assumed they must be wrong about the general arguments built on those facts.

The politics of multiculturalism, if you examine the claims, is narrative driven, always around a story of group conflict. Blacks, for example, are in their present condition because of the long oppression by whites. Feminism is the story of female liberation from the patriarchy. It’s why the Left falls for rape hoaxes and noose hoaxes so easily, despite the history of these hoaxes. The hoax fits the narrative that for them, explains everything about the world and their role in it.

On the other hand, the politics of conventional conservatism is about facts and ideas, specifically the rejection of the narrative idea. The Right in America, the conventional Right, that is, remains under the spell of Richard M. Weaver. As Joe Sobran put it, they have always been convinced that “their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d’état, after which truth would reign.” Being right is all that matters.

You see some of this in the anti-Semite community. The Holocaust revisionists are sure that if they just reveal the facts about what happened to Jews under the Nazis, the narrative of the Holocaust will collapse. Once that narrative collapses, that which it supports will collapse with it. Their great enemy, the men with little hats, will then be routed and driven from the halls of power. This is why they obsess over it. They believe the facts will conquer their enemy’s narrative.

Ironically, this fact versus narrative dichotomy is most popular and most well-known because of Jewish conservatives like Ben Shapiro. He is famous for saying “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” He invests a lot of time discouraging whites from embracing their own narratives to counter those on the Left. Instead, they are supposed to embrace facts, as facts are the magic that will destroy the narrative. Well, not all narratives, of course, but that’s another issue.

The thing is though, this fact versus narrative construct is a left-wing creation, at least it serves left-wing ends. Narrative is the predicate for morality. The reason the Bible is full of stories is moral claims naturally rise from stories. A good narrative not only encompasses the known facts, it orders them. These are the important facts of the story, while these are not essential, there for color and context. It is this ordering that reinforces and existing morality or creates a new one.

Raw facts are not the basis of morality. As David Hume famously explained, you cannot get an ought from an is. Indiscriminate killing of human beings is not wrong because it violates the laws of the natural world. It is wrong because we say it is wrong or we claim our gods say it is wrong. Those stories about how the gods punished those who kill without reason are the basis of a moral code that changes homicide into murder and prescribes punishments for those who commit murder.

Of course, this is why the fact side of the dichotomy favors the Left. When Shapiro demands you focus on facts, it is so you do not focus on the moral framework. Similarly, the Holocaust revisionist obsesses over granular details of the story, because it is easier than mounting a moral argument against the prevailing orthodoxy. While it is most certainly intentional in the former case, in the latter case it is simply an outgrowth of how right-wing politics were created in the middle of the last century.

This is also why white identity politics frightens the people in charge. The right side of the game sees it as a mortal threat to their existence as a loyal opposition. The left side sees it as an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. White identity politics offers an alternative set of narratives and as a result, an alternative morality. The Left hammers away at “facts” about race in an effort to steer identitarians away from moral considerations and back into the old dichotomy.

These narratives do not rise from nothing. There must be some basis in reality, but mostly they need people willing to fit reality into the general narrative. In the case of white identity politics, it means fitting events into the general themes of peaceful separation, natural group affinity and so forth. It also means drawing moral conclusions from events. The current riots, for example, are an example of the immorality of forcing dissimilar people to live together. Morality transcends fact and narrative.

An excellent example of this, oddly enough, comes from the Left. The gun grabbers have been repeating the same demands for generations now. No matter how many times the facts are presented, they remain steadfast. The reason is they truly believe gun grabber is a moral imperative. Now amount of facts and reason will persuade them to abandon their moral code. Not even an alternative narrative to explain events is tolerated, as it slams into their morality.

This is why the fact versus narrative dichotomy is false. Both are codependent in support of the prevailing moral orthodoxy. The narrative side is constricted by the prevailing moral code to support certain narratives. It is why, for example, they can so easily abandon one narrative and adopt its opposite. Free speech, for example. It is also why the fact side is limited to a list of acceptable facts. Raise the wrong facts and you are banned to the outer darkness.

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!

The Good White Bible

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A strange thing that used to be more common a decade ago, but still persists to this day is the use of the book Guns, Germs and Steel as an escape hatch. That is, when a conversation with good whites turns to biology, they will at some point attempt to change the subject by bringing up this book. Always, it is in the form of “A great book on this is Guns, Germs and Steal. Have you read it?” After all these years, it remains the one acceptably dangerous book they have read on the subject.

In this context, dangerous means that the book sort of accepts the fact that human populations are not exactly the same everywhere. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have defined the story of man, while arguing against biological reality. For good whites, merely acknowledging that sub-Saharan Africans have little to show for their time on earth is scary. Even though Diamond is a biological denialist, the book is still a dangerous read.

Of course, it is acceptable because of that denialism. The thesis of the book is that serendipity and ecology explain why some human populations have advanced beyond simple farming, while others have not. Diamond makes many claims about different food stuffs, weather and pathogens to explain why Europeans, in particular, have risen to the top of the human hierarchy. The basic claim, in a nutshell, is they got lucky and really don’t deserve their spot at the top of the hierarchy.

This is a familiar theme for those who have read the writings of Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony, both of whom make similar claims. In the case of Shapiro, he argues that Europe was the creation of Hellenize Jews, who arrived with the Romans. He is not that honest or explicit, but that is his claim. Hazony takes a similar approach, but credits the Romans for imposing culture on the people of Europe. He also credits dumb luck in explaining why Europe is not the Levant or Mesopotamia.

This makes sense from the perspective of Zionist Jews. They view life as a great struggle between people, particularly their people, the Chosen People, and the rest of the people of the world. They don’t have to think too hard about why they are superior to Arabs, but Europeans are another matter. The Jewish people don’t have a big trophy case like the people of the Occident. They credit this to dumb luck in order to maintain the fiction that they are still God’s favorite people.

Now, it is important to note that the Diamond book is riddled with errors of fact and logic that undermine the central premise. In fact, there are so many of these errors it has to be assumed the author knew he was making false claims. For those with some time to kill, Ryan Faulk made a two hour video going into the details of Diamond’s claims about agriculture and animal husbandry. The best you can say about Guns, Germs and Steel is it is a masterful display of modern sophistry.

Now, ecology did play a defining role in shaping the people of Europe, just as it did the people everywhere on earth. Fundamental to the human sciences and dissident politics is that people are different. The people of Europe are different because they had to be in order to survive and thrive in their environment, which is radically different from the environment of Africa. They also mixed with archaic people, just as East Asians mixed with a different archaic people. Human biodiversity is real.

The appeal of the Diamond book, the intent of it actually, is to turn this reality on its head in order to supplant biological reality with the egalitarian fantasy. The impression Diamond tries to leave on the reader is that he is accepting the premises of the realists, while coming to a more parsimonious explanation. This is a similar approach taken by Nathan Cofnas in his critique of Kevin McDonald’s book. It is a form of abductive reasoning meant to persuade, not explain.

Similarly, a book popular with the same crowd twenty years ago was Why Nations Fail, which attempted to solve the same problem. It makes the claim that the reason the West has raced ahead to lead the world is that they have inclusive institutions and that economic prosperity depends above all on the inclusiveness of economic and political institutions. This magical inclusiveness just fell from the sky and landed in the West, explaining why the Occident has dominated.

The popularity of these books, and in the case of the Diamond book its enduring popularity, speaks to the power of the egalitarian faith. People in modern democracies, particularly bourgeois people, need to believe that all people are born with the same innate talents and abilities. The belief is so powerful it can overcome the absurd circular reasoning in a book like Why Nations Fail and raise Guns, Germs and Steel into the gospel of modern liberal democracy.

There is another element to this. The premise is that the “superficial” differences in people are due to environment, but the people themselves are all the same, once those environmental issues are removed. This sort of thinking allows the believer to feel shame for his privilege, while lamenting the fact the poor browns were not blessed with better stuff or the divine magic of liberal democracy. The good white can indulge his natural self-loathing and proselytize for his way of life.

This is a very Christian dynamic. The good white, like the good Christian, embraces the fallen state of mankind. For Christians, it is man’s obvious sinful nature. For the good white, it is white privilege, the undeserved blessings of serendipity. Like the believing Christian, the good white sees the path to salvation in spreading the faith. Instead of observable reality leading to an acceptance of the human condition, it drives a desire to rectify it and overcome the forces that have shaped it.

This is probably why a book like Guns, Germs and Steel remains a popular text with the good whites. It is literally written to flatter the reader and offer an alternative narrative to explain observable reality. White people are not evil because of their nature, but because of their failure to acknowledge their privilege and put it to good use in saving the rest of mankind from his plight. To be a good white means embracing one’s undeserved place in the world as fuel to reform the world.

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!

The Paradox Of Democracy

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The great paradox of democracy is that the system is supposed to break the chains that bind the citizen to the state, but instead it immerses the citizen in the state. If you go back 200 years in any country in the West, you would find that the people had very few dealings with the national government. They had dealings with local government, but even that was minimal. Politics, even in Britain and America where popular government was established, played a minor role in the lives of citizens.

Today, in supposedly free countries, no one can be free of politics. Everywhere you go, politics plays a part in your life. Political correctness governs the workplace and the academy. If you fall behind in the latest trends in pronouns, you could end up in a struggle session with the human resource people. Entertainment is saturated with multiculturalism and the lectures that come with it. It is nearly impossible to live in a modern western democracy without politics.

One reason for this is the natural logic of democracy. The proper way to run society, according to democracy, is for the people to express their will through a plebiscite or an elected body like a parliament. The good citizen takes an interest in his society and makes his opinion known though his vote or through participation in public and private debates about the issues. The system is intended to encourage the people to get involved and participate in the political process.

Therefore, someone who does not wish to participate in the democratic process is, in effect, opposed to democracy. If being a good citizen means keeping up with politics and participating in the process, not doing those things means you are something less than a good citizen, maybe even a bad citizen. This logic not only works on the laggards, but it encourages everyone to be a scold. The person trying to avoid politics will be a target by the champions of democracy.

Of course, one goal of democracy is to get people to cooperate with one another in order to set public policy and shape society. Rather than one guy dictating the rules or a group of powerful people making law, the people come together and find some compromise that suits the most amount of people. A point of democracy is to allow the losers to accept defeat, as they get something in the compromise and they have a chance to win the next time. Democracy is about compromise.

Compromise has an important meaning in democracy. It is not a grudging compromise or simply a truce to the fight. The point of the compromise is to reach a consensus on the issue at hand. This general agreement comes about by the parties working together to find a solution to which they can all agree. Compromise in a democracy is not a hostile agreement, like that between warring parties, but a friendly agreement struck between partners. Compromise is cooperation in a democracy.

This naturally leads to the conclusion that those who are not participating in politics are possibly excluded in some way. Simply eliminating the explicit rules against participation like limits on the franchise are just a start. Until everyone participates fully, it is assumed something is excluding them. This is the source of things like “voter suppression efforts” and “exclusionary practices” in the workplace. If anyone is not fully engaged and represented, then something is preventing them.

This is the root of speech and behavior laws. Speech that mocks or minimizes some group makes them feel unwelcome. This could lead they to avoid participation or encourage others to block their way. Similarly, rules or customs that exclude people must only exist to exclude and are therefore anti-democratic. It’s why any humor based on observing human behavior is forbidden. It is why noticing difference in people is now the worse crime. To differentiate is to exclude.

Inevitably, it means the system does not just pick the low hanging fruit of exclusion like laws that discriminate or banning exclusionary speech. Unless and until everyone is participating and getting along with everyone else, the cause of discord and exclusion must be sought out by the system itself. What we see today is democracy has become an endless struggle session for society. We collectively hunt for anything that offends or discourages cooperation among citizens.

This leads to another strange paradox. Once the hunt for the cause of less than perfect social cohesion starts, it must invade every aspect of life. The speech laws lead to theories about the thoughts behind the forbidden speech. Private association must expose itself to endless examination in order to make sure it is not excluding anyone or creating tensions between groups. In short order, as we see in America since the Cold War, the citizen exists only as a thoroughly political animal.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the spirit of democracy is why social media companies hunt down dissenters. These people posting mean things on-line cannot be ignored, because there very existence, according to the logic of democracy, is to crate conflict and undermine cooperation. In a way, the platform becomes a metaphor for society as a whole. The army of volunteer speech monitors are fully actualizing their freedom in the democratic system by driving out the anti-democratic elements.

This immersion of citizens in a political environment eliminates the private institutions and associations that were supposed to be the bedrock of democracy. If private association is exclusionary, then private institutions are as well. Since anything that obstructs perfect cooperation is anti-democratic, democracy means the elimination of the very institutions that are supposed to make it possible. Democracy now looks a lot like Soviet communism, where the party was everything.

Another paradox is that democracy is supposed to rely on the independent citizen being able to assess his own interests. By eliminating private associations and institutions, the citizen naturally becomes dependent on the state. If you cannot belong to a club or an organic group, your only option for social support is family, but that too is under endless assault by democracy. Feminism, after all, is the elimination of womanhood as an independent role. As feminism grows, family formation falls.

With communism, the goal upfront is a society without social conflict. The communist seeks to flatten the natural hierarchy of society. By destroying class and the distinctions among citizens, all citizens are equal. Equality of existence means an equality of purpose, so everyone naturally cooperates. The ideology itself is shot through with the understanding that the communist is a purely political animal, as he is defined by the fact that he is a communist man in a communist society.

In democracy, the declaration is the opposite. Democracy is supposed to make men free to enjoy their lives as they see fit, exercise their liberty and pursue the ends that bring them happiness. In theory, citizens are free to participate in the system or they can choose to opt out of the system. In reality, it is impossible to exist in a democratic system without also being a citizen. To be a citizen, you have to fully participate in the process and that means fully cooperate will all fellow citizens.

That’s the great paradox of democracy. A system advertised to offer maximum liberty turns out to be a system that offers no freedom. The logic of democracy requires all members to cooperate with one another. That inevitably requires constraints on speech, behavior and association. Every word and deed must foster cooperation or it is anti-democratic and therefore forbidden. The full range of action by citizens is constrained to the point where the democratic man is a prisoner.

Note: I’m still working on the comment system issue. It should be resolved shortly.

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!

Comments

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07:00: The commenting software was updated last night. Of course, they willy-nilly changed things in a way I don’t like. I know about the color schemes, which are stupid, but I have to dig around to find where to fix them. if anyone has other issues, post them here.

10:30: Setup reCaptcha. That should be working now. The appearance will take some time, as I think I need to edit the CSS itself. I think it should be high contrast, so a white background with heavy black text.

11:00: Okay, I removed the reCaptcha for now. The stock version is terrible. The spam filter should be enough for now.

Born To Lose

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On this side of the great divide, it is popular to bang on about how Buckley-style conservatism is dead. Alternatively, people like to go on about how conservatives have systematically betrayed their supporters. It is also common to explain both trends in purely personal terms. For example, conservatism died because it became a business, perhaps even a racket, rather than a political movement. The sellouts are doing what they do because it gets them media and think tank jobs.

Reducing politics to personal squabbles and motivations is a way to justify supporting or opposing something, without thinking too much about it. This is the preference of the simple minded, who struggle to understand events in the larger context of general trends or the ideas driving those trends. In reality, it is ideas, events and people that come together to shape our present reality. More often than not, the things we see today largely came about by accident or chance played a big role.

You see this with Buckley-style conservatism. It was never an ideology or even an independent agenda. It existed, as Buckley himself often said, to “stand athwart history yelling STOP!” The whole point of the Buckley project was to slow the roll of the Left in mid-century America. That became such an intense point of focus it made impossible any consideration of what to do if they succeeded. The whole point of the exercise was to slow down the Left without ever expecting to win.

Put another way, it was like a dog that chases cars. It was never expected to catch the car and if it did catch the car, it had no plan for what to do when that great achievement was attained. As a result, conservatives have never been able to plan for victory or take advantage of their successes. In fact, the very framework for thinking about winning has been eliminated from the thought process of the Right. Whenever they manage to trip up the Left, the hunt is on for some new car to chase.

This article in the American Conservative is a great example. The short version is that the author thinks Trump missed a golden opportunity to advance his agenda and fundamentally change politics during this virus crisis. He could have used the event itself and the fallout to become this century’s FDR. One notable aspect of the post is that it is posted months after the crisis began. Maybe if conservatives had thought about catching that car a little bit, this would not be an issue.

One of things that drives conspiracy theories about 9/11 is the neocons and the war machine were the primary beneficiaries of the event. The Left, which is always ready for a crisis, got very little from it initially. They have since taken over the surveillance state, but they initially opposed its creation. The simple minded assume that 9/11 must have been a neocon conspiracy, as how else could they have been ready to make such good use of it? The answer is, they planned to catch that car one day.

Another reason for the failure of Buckley-style conservatism is the mistaken belief that virtue is a useful weapon against the ideologue. In reality, ideologues think the adherence to principle is akin to falling for superstition. Ideologues on the Left are at their core anti-tradition. Therefore, they see the defenders of tradition as madmen, obstacles to be cleared from the path. Those lunatics from the Buckley cult standing on the train track need to be mowed down, not respected.

This post in National Review is a good example of the problem. The Buckley crowd is arfing like seals at Bill Barr’s assertion that there will be no criminal investigation of Obama and Biden over the FBI scandal. It is hard to know if Barr is unilaterally ruling it out as a possibility or he is simply stating that at the moment there is no reason to think such a thing will happen. Either way, Buckley-style conservatives are soiling themselves in ecstasy over this development. Here’s the money quote.

Having watched the hardball that investigators played against Trump associates, Trump partisans want comeuppance. It is natural, especially for the non-lawyers among them, to maintain that there is no satisfactory form of accountability other than criminal prosecution. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind, no matter how difficult doing so may be, that we react so negatively to the use of investigative processes as a political weapon because it is wrong.

On the one hand, it is tempting to explain this as the lunacy of someone unable to come to terms with the fact that they are defending rules that no longer exist. The writer still thinks he lives in a world bound by mutually agreed upon rules. He’s like a boxer thinking the crooked referee is on the level. The other fighter has a bat and a length of chain as weapons, but the clean fighter is convinced this cheating will be stopped by the referee at some point, so he sticks to the rules.

On the other hand, a core feature of Buckley-style conservatism is it was never designed to go on offense. It has no mechanism to advance forward, because it was designed as a fixed installation. it would be like the castle walls moving outward when the besieging army falls into disarray. Such an idea cannot exist even in fantasy, as it is beyond all possibility. Instead, to continue the analogy, the Buckley-style conservative dreams of repointing the mortar after the battle.

This reticence to go on offence has become such an integral part of conservatism that the use of it has become a weapon of the Left. This post is pretty typical of what happens whenever the Left wrecks themselves with scandal or overreach. They are quick to warn the Right that they better not think about taking advantage of this situation or there will be hell to pay. Put another way, the Left has evolved to use the fundamentals of Buckley-style conservatism to their advantage.

There’s no doubt that many of the people living well in Conservative Inc. understand their role is to be the eternal loser. Maybe they started out as a real culture warrior, but sold out for a good life in the Imperial Capital. Make no mistake, it is a great life that surpasses everywhere else on earth. Rich Lowry makes close to half a million a year running National Review. He knows he could not make that doing anything else, so he is not rustling any jimmies in his role.

The thing is though, such men dominate conservatism because conservatism was by design intended to be a foil for radicalism. It was never intended to defeat it or even stop it, but as Buckley said, merely slow it down a bit. Inevitably such a worldview must boil off fighters and replace them with the accommodating. Buckley-style conservatism did not lose every fight because conservatives are losers. It lost because it was born to lose and therefore it attracted losers.

 

All About Me

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After a while of doing this, you get to see the patterns. Certain times of the year have high traffic to the site, more comments and so on. Other times of the year it goes the other way, sometimes in the extreme. Most years, the week leading up to Memorial Day in the United States is one of the slowest weeks. Independence Day is another dead period for the site. It makes sense and is encouraging. People are thinking about outside stuff, so they don’t have time for politics.

This year has not been much different, despite the fact everyone has been stuck at home for going on two months. Around here, people would normally be headed to the beach or off to the woods for camping and hiking. The locals would be looking forward to a long weekend of shooting at one another. The lock down has been lifted by the state, but local government continues to keep the policies in place, so the beach and camping are closed. Gun play is still possible.

Still, traffic has ticked down, so I thought it would be a good week to catch up on the mail bag, but the mail has gotten away from me again. I sat down last night to clean out the inbox and the task was too much. I did notice a lot of familiar questions from unfamiliar correspondents. That spawned the brilliant idea of doing a show on the most common questions I get from readers and listeners. All of them are about me in some way, hence the title of the show this week.

I have to say that I did not like how it came out. I’m not a fan of talking about myself, as I’m not that interesting. It’s not false modesty. It is reality. No one is really that interesting when you think about it. You can do interesting things or have interesting experiences, but those things are not dependent upon you to be interesting. Throw Fred from accounting into the middle of a street riot and Fred will have some fun stories for the next office party. Fred, however, is still a boring guy.

That said, I have been studying live streaming for the last couple of months, as I have been contemplating that avenue. One of the things I’ve noticed is all of the popular streamers are highly personal in their presentation. They talk about themselves endlessly on their shows. That may be the appeal. For the people watching these shows, it’s like having the streamer in the home. Even TV chat show hosts are not as personal in their presentation as the live streamer.

What that means is if you wish to be a modern media star these days, you will have to endlessly talk about yourself. That’s probably why the space is so heavy with women and gay men. That’s the other thing I’ve noticed about the live stream world. It has a lot of girls and gay guys. At least I think they are girls and gays. You never can tell for sure, as some of them may be a man dressed as a woman claiming to be deer. Some claim to be hundreds of people trapped in a girl’s body.

This is a familiar topic, but there has to be consequences to having the public space dominated by lunatics. Even assuming they are harmless lunatics, like the guy in drag claiming to be Bambi. It is impossible to have a serious conversation with someone in that condition. Why would you? It is impossible to be mature and thoughtful in the presence of someone claiming to be a deer. It means all serious conversation about serious issues will be crowded out by the lunatics.

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!

This Week’s Show

To All My Friends

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The Jelly Bean Man

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Imagine one day you are snatched off the streets by a group of men, who throw you into a van and take you to some hideaway. They blindfold you and refuse to tell you why they have snatched you off the streets. At some point you’re drugged and you wake up in a mysterious coastal village. Everything about the village seems normal, except for the fact you are there, a place you have never been. Everyone seems to know you, as if you belong there. Naturally, you are completely disoriented.

Of course, you try to find a way out of the village. After several escape attempts which are thwarted by a giant balloon-like automaton. You realize that the village is not really a village, but a form of prison. It is bounded by the mountains and sea, in addition to various surveillance devices. In between your escape attempts, you are interrogated by the person that seems to be in charge of the place. He keeps asking your questions about your old life, but you cannot figure out what it is he wants.

After a while, the interrogations become conversations and then friendly conversations as you become habituated to your new life. In fact, you have grown to like the talks you have with the man in charge. The villagers are nice, but rather simple and incurious and they are oblivious to their situation. Number One, on the other hand, is fully aware of your situation and quite open about it. It becomes clear that you were not really kidnapped, but recruited in an unusual way to an unusual life.

In time, the man in charge offers you a position in the power structure of the village, as you are feeling quite at home. The village does not use normal money, but instead uses jelly beans. The different colored jelly beans have different values in relation to one another and are used like currency. The villagers carry them around in a sack like gold coin in the old days. The basic unit is the black bean, while the highest denomination is the white bean, which is five-thirds the black bean.

The arrangement works well enough, as the villagers with jobs are paid in jelly beans and those on the dole are paid with jelly beans. Everyone has some source of income, so everyone can use beans for transactions. In fact, it works so well that no one thinks it odd in the least. Even you have grown used to carrying around a sack of jelly beans to make your purchases. Now that you are working for Number One, you too get a fresh sack of beans every payday.

There are some problems. One is people occasionally eat their jelly beans, thus removing them from the economy. Because they are small, they can also be lost if someone drops them. Then there is the fact that they are a bit fragile and can be destroyed if not handled carefully. The result is there is a declining number of beans in the system. It also means certain villagers, who are more prudent, increase their stock of beans relative to everyone else in the village.

Your job with Number One is to figure out how to maintain the stock of beans in the village and keep anyone from hoarding the beans. Then there is the fact that new people show up in the village from time to time, just as you did, and they have to be stocked up with beans. Of course, people do try to run off from time to time and the giant balloon-like automaton will take them out. Your job as Head Keeper of Beans is to figure out how to manage the bean supply in the village.

You got the job because you have a head for numbers, so you first try to count the beans in the village on a regular basis. This proves to be impossible, as the villagers appreciate why you are doing it, but they can’t be bothered. The count is unreliable and you can’t trust it to make decisions about adding or subtracting beans. You then come up with a way to take a sample count and estimate the total from it, but you find that your estimates are lagging indicators. You’re always behind the curve.

After careful consideration, you land upon an idea. You realize that as any bean becomes scarcer, it will become more precious, so villagers will be less inclined to part with their stock of them. It means these beans will move around the village at a slower rate. If you can measure the bean flow on a regular basis, this will be a good measure the total number of beans and the balance of beans. More important, you’ll know in real time if there is a bean imbalance.

You also notice that the people who hoard beans are never the people who eat their beans as a snack. They value their beans more than anyone else in the village, so they are always looking to increase their stash as a good in itself. You figure out that like other types of loss, this is a constant. The solution is to add the hoarding rate to your other measures in order to increase the bean supply. In effect, the number of beans must always increase over the base line bean total.

It has taken a while, but you now have a set of measures you can use to manage the bean supply. Once you see bean flow drop in some area, you put more beans there to stimulate the movement of beans. If you see beans accumulating in one area, you change the mix of beans or add beans in a different part of the village to balance the bean total in the village. You even figure out how to maintain the mix of beans in the system, as the various colors have symbolic value beyond their face value.

Number One is so happy with your work as the head of the bean supply, he slowly increases your portfolio to manage other things related to beans. In fact, you started life in the village as Number Six, but have slowly ascended to the position of Number Two, but both you and Number One realize you’re partners now. He may control the giant balloon-like automaton and other weapons, but your control of the now highly complex bean system makes you an indispensable man.

What really keeps you up at night is not the fact that Number One still controls the giant balloon-like automaton or that you could be transported back to your old life. Sure, there is some possibility he will use his monopoly of force to undermine or even eliminate your position. What haunts you is the thought of the villagers suddenly realizing that their economy is based in candy. What if one day they all wake up and realize their economy is based on a made-up system of fake money?

This is the life of the central banker.

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!

The Flynn Puzzle

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Imagine you are out and about and you come upon something that is so incongruous, you can’t help but take note of it. Maybe it is a car parked on the roof of an old barn or a cat chasing a horse around a field. The thing itself is not all that interesting, but its improbability or its incongruousness is what gets your attention. How is it possible that a horse is afraid of a cat? Why would someone put a car on a barn? The strangeness of the possible reasons is what draws your attention.

That’s what is happening with the General Flynn case. Originally, it looked like the same old political shenanigans we always see in Washington. The establishment wants a scalp to parade around so they find a patsy to frame for a minor crime. In the case of Flynn, the inner party needed some red meat for their crazies. Over time, it became clear that the FBI had framed him and the careerists in the system were working to prevent that reality from becoming explicit to the public.

At some point, it was too obvious to everyone to maintain the charade, so the information that was being hidden for three years was made public and the DOJ moved to dismiss the case. The people who conspired to frame Flynn were not being charged and the people who systematically concealed information from the courts for three years were not fired. Instead the whole thing would be made to go away. At some point, Flynn would be paid for his trouble and his silence.

Then, the judge went crazy and started doing things to keep the case open for no obvious reason. He invited outside parties to file briefs with the court and then assigned a retired judge to act as prosecutor, going so far as to give him leeway to bring new charges. At the same time, someone rounded up a bunch of former justice officials to lobby the court against dismissing the case. The defense has now filed an appeal asking the court to force the judge to follow the law.

The whole thing is so bizarre, some are wondering if the judge presiding over the case has possibly had some sort of mental break. He’s had a reputation for being a stickler for procedure and for being tough on prosecutors. He was the judge who handled the Ted Stevens case, where the FBI and DOJ conspired to frame then Senator Ted Stevens on corruption charges. Many expected him to react in a similar way once it was clear that General Flynn had been framed by the FBI and DOJ.

Instead, Sullivan has gone bonkers in what appears to be an effort to drag this out for months or maybe even years. Since the Supreme Court has been unanimously clear on this issue, the odds of this going on much longer are slim. Sullivan has to know that a few weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 9-0 decision, authored by Justice Ginsburg, that took judges to task for similar actions. In fact, that case is eerily similar to what Sullivan in doing in the Flynn case.

We are in Sherlock Holmes territory now. That is, once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. In this case, what we are seeing cannot be explained by an ongoing conspiracy to frame Flynn. That horse left the barn a long time ago. Similarly, we can eliminate a cover-up. The DOJ has released the documents exposing what happened. Other disclosures make clear that Flynn was a target of the Obama administration for years.

One possible reason for the actions of the judge is that he has been blackmailed or extorted by people involved in this caper. If that were the case, they would have forced him to shut this thing down a long time ago. Flynn was forced to sign a confession years ago, so the judge could have sentenced him and called it a day. Appealing a confession, even a coerced one, takes years. Flynn would have done his time and been free by the time the case made it through the courts.

Another possibility is the judge knows something that he cannot reveal, but that maybe this new outside prosecutor could reveal. That would make for a great plot to a movie or TV drama, but the legal system does not work that way. If he had some secret intelligence, he could easily have it passed to Flynn’s defense team. He could order the people with the information to appear in his court and answer questions. There is no reason for the judge to play cloak and dagger this way.

Now, there may be some political benefit to dragging out the Flynn case. It is possible the Democrats think they need to maintain this charade in order to maintain the larger charade of impeachment. In an effort to gain access to secret grand jury testimony, they have told the court they are preparing another round of impeachment. The trouble with this scenario is they would be better served with the Flynn case being dismissed, so they could then wave it around as part of some conspiracy.

There is the possibility that the Flynn case is tied to something that has yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe as long as Flynn remains in legal jeopardy, he is prohibited from talking about certain issues. After all, the FBI did threaten his family at one point. There’s no escaping the fact that Obama himself had a personal interest in the Flynn case.  There were high level meetings in the Oval Office about what should be a trivial issue. Why does Team Obama hate Flynn so much?

That seems to be the turtle on the fence post here. Flynn is not some big shot political operator with a lot of enemies. He’s one of the thousands of careerists who will work with both parties. It was President Obama who made Flynn director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, thus beginning his civilian career. He probably would have joined the next administration, if asked, regardless of the party. General Flynn was on his way to becoming part of the semi-permanent ruling class.

Something happened in 2014 that turned the Obama people against him. His term as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was ended. A systematic leaking campaign to the media about Flynn started around the same time. When he joined the Trump campaign, it appears the Obama administration began a surveillance operation against him, using not only the FBI, but the NSA, CIA and even Treasury. People at the very top of the Obama administration had some reason to hate General Flynn.

The puzzle is what could it be? It is entirely possible that this whole sordid affair is like the Watergate scandal. That is, people far down the food chain from the White House abused their power in some petty political shenanigans. Then they cooked up tales of Flynn working with the Russians as a cover story. By the time this was obvious, lots of administration people were implicated in a cover-up. Like Watergate, a minor scandal grew into a monster that consumed the administration.

Alternatively, maybe the full reading the Flynn case, once all the shouting and disclosures are done, will reveal a wide-scale, systematic use of government institution for political operations. People forget about Lois Lerner using the IRS to harass conservative groups in the 2012 election cycle. There’s now a whistle blower claiming Treasury was spying on Team Trump and others. Perhaps if any of these cases is fully revealed, it threatens to reveal a much bigger picture.

All of this is fun speculation and none of it could be true. The problem is none of the explanations offered up so far to explain the Flynn case make any sense. Throw in the bizarre behavior of the judge and it suggests there is something behind all of this that is much bigger than General Flynn. The extraordinary efforts being made to run out the clock on all of this suggest it is vitally important to permanent Washington. Solving this puzzle may be the only reason to vote for Trump this fall.

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!

Strategy, Tactics & Discipline

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One of the longest running debates on this side of the great divide is about how best to work through the thicket of taboos created and maintained by the ruling class. Because so much of observable reality is now off limits, it is nearly impossible to contradict the prevailing orthodoxy and maintain a position in the public square. For example, there can be nothing interesting said about crime, because no one is allowed to discuss the demographic reality of crime. The facts themselves are taboo.

One side of the debate argues that the only way to break a taboo is to break a taboo, so the only way forward to is to talk frankly about these things. In the case of crime, for example, the dissident must always interject the demographic facts about crime into the debate, even if it makes the beautiful people shriek. Since most people know the facts, the shrieking by the beautiful people actually advances the cause. This line of reasoning is extended to all taboo subjects universally.

The other side of the debate points out that the taboo breakers always end up in exile or condemned to some ghetto. In fact, their deliberate breaking of taboos ends up reinforcing the taboo, as no one wants to end up like the heretics. Instead, this camp argues the dissident must come up with clever language that subtly mocks the taboos, but narrowly adheres to the rules. The recent use of the word “jogger’ is an example of complying with the taboo, while undermining it.

The taboo breakers counter that this just results in an endless search for approved language to hint at unapproved things. It is just a form of self-deception, where the clever think they are in revolt when in reality they are just asking permission. The optics guys counter this by pointing out the obvious. The taboo breakers are removed from the process, so in reality their tactic is just quitting the game. Rather than take on the system in a meaningful way, they mutter epithets in their ghetto.

The heart of this debate is the paradox of the marketplace. Contrary to popular mythology, markets eventually end up with a limited number of choices, unless some external agent, like the government, intervenes to maintain a balance of options on both the supply side and the demand side. In the case of the marketplace of ideas, it means the range of acceptable opinion eventually collapses into a narrow range. Inevitably, what the market decides is who will control the market.

Anyone alive in the early years of the personal computer will recall that a walk through the computer section of a department store meant a dizzying array of options. There were dozens of computer makers. It was not just different labels for the same hardware and hardware standards either. The technology was different from one maker to the other, with different operating systems and peripherals. Many companies were searching for the right solution for the home computer.

Eventually, the marketplace “decided” that Microsoft and Intel would control the market place for personal computers. They colluded with one another to drive most everyone out the business. The government did not step in to prevent their collusion, preferring to let the market work its magic. Today, all personal computers are the same. Sure, you can be a weirdo running Linux or Apple, but that is a tiny fraction of the marketplace that is tolerated because they are no threat to the dominant players.

Political opinion in western liberal democracies works the same way. Over time, a few parties have come to dominate, becoming the mainstream. They are not identical with one another and they do have real fights for power. They have simply agreed to a set of rules that will regulate their fights for power. Put another way, they have come to define the marketplace of politics in such a way that ensures they will be the dominant players in that marketplace. Democracy put them in charge – forever.

Now, this is usually when a certain type of critic jumps in and claims this group or that group secretly controls things behind the scenes. Personalizing a process is like anthropomorphizing your pets. It is satisfying because it takes something complex and makes it simple. In the case of pets, the owner gets the satisfaction of thinking his dog loves him for how he treats the dog. In the case of politics, personalizing the process avoids thinking about the systemic issues, which can be complex.

A good example of how the marketplace of ideas operates in a liberal democracy is in this story from Germany. The AfD has been forced to purge one of the leaders of the radical wing, because of his associations with a taboo group. Technically, he is being forced out over not being honest in his statements about those past associations, but in reality, it is about acceptability. The moderate wing wants to engage in respectable politics and that means following the rules.

This is exactly the problem conservatives in America faced in the 20th century when they sought to participate in politics. In order to participate in the marketplace of ideas, they had to follow the rules and remain respectable. In the case of the Buckley crowd, respectable meant agreeing to the prevailing moral orthodoxy. They had to embrace the open society, egalitarianism and the blank slate. Any of their members who refused had to be tossed out in order to maintain respectability.

The taboo breakers look at the optics guys and say, “See, when you agree to the rules you eventually come to defend them against the rest of us.” That AfD story is a pretty good example. In time, the system will eliminate one member after another from AfD until the party is indistinguishable from the main parties. At some point, the party will become respectable. The paradox of democracy will result in the “alternative” for Germany being indistinguishable from the status quo.

The optics side will note that the reason the radicals get purged is they almost always lack the necessary discipline to participate in much of anything. They say and do things impulsively and fight stupid pointless battles. In the case of the AfD guy, if he was as smart as he imagines himself to be, he would understand how this works and be prepared for it, but instead he refused to comport with reality. This is the story of taboo breakers everywhere. They always lose site of the goal.

In reality, there is no voting your way out of the inherent defects of liberal democracy, so the taboo breakers are right to reject conventional politics. On the other hand, politics is always about persuasion. You can only persuade people by addressing them where they are, not where you hope them to be. That means maintaining enough respectability to be able to address them in the public square, even if it is in the shadows. In fact, the edge of the public square can be an attraction, as people like intrigue.

The key to any alternative politics in liberal democracy is that it must be both a critique of the system and operate on the moral high ground. This requires the discipline to sublimate tactics to strategy. It also means policing the ranks to weed out those who simply refuse to place the strategy before their own personal desires. Strategically breaking taboos, in anticipation of the response, can be good outsider politics. Similarly, maintaining enough respectability to remain viable is essential.

In the end, alternative politics in a liberal democracy comes down to attracting high quality people, disaffected by the short comings of the system. If there is a genuine alternative, then there is a genuine choice. This has always been the defect of outsider politics in western liberal democracies. The alternatives are unreasonable and therefore attract the marginal and the unstable. A real alternative will maintain discipline and sublimate tactics to the strategy of being an authentic alternative.

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!