The People They Desire

Posted on September 19, 2024 by thezman

133

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

In every organization of scale, and society as a whole, the focus of attention has shifted from things that are easily measured and understood in terms of practical impact, to things that are not quantifiable. At the same time, it is increasingly assumed and asserted that these intangibles are more important than the tangibles. The practical impact of inflation on the household budget is not important, but whether a political candidate can show they share your values is monumentally important.

You can see this change in how Harris and Trump present themselves. Trump has rattled off a list of things he says he will do if elected, like eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, which he says will boost the middle-class. These are claims that rest on the agreed upon math of economics. Harris, on the other hand, talks about her plan in soft, intangible terms. What matters to her, and what she thinks matters to you, is that she shares your values as a middle-class person.

Notice that no one ever tries to explain exactly what they mean by “share your values” or describe the actual values. Is it even possible to share the values of another person, since values are subjective? This sort of therapeutic language is deliberately vague, as it is entirely emotive. When someone says she shares your values, she is saying you are on the side of good and she is on the side of good. There is nothing more being communicated with those words.

This shift from the objective to the subjective goes beyond how the political candidates present themselves to the public. Increasingly, people and events are viewed not in practical terms but in the context of an evolving set of normative standards that have no clear truth value. What is “wellness” and why do we care? Ask ten people and you get ten answers to those questions. Wellness is a thing we believe exists and it is either good or not good and good is what we should want.

Another example is the reaction to the Israeli terror attack on Lebanon. Blowing up random people is supposed to demoralize Hezbollah. This is a claim that has been repeated, even by Israel haters. Why would anyone think this and so what if it gives some Hezbollah guys the blues for a few days? What is supposed to happen as a result of this case of the sads? Not only does no one know, no one asks. The practical issue is no longer of interest. It is all about the psychological.

The Ukrainians launched an attack on the Kursk region of Russia last month and according to everyone involved, the main purpose was to “psychologically impact Russian civilians” and embarrass Putin. Again, why would anyone think such a result was likely or would matter? Did they think Putin would delete his Twitter account and call off the war, because he got owned on the internet? The answer must be yes, as this has been a theme in the West since the war started.

What we are seeing is an orientalization of the culture. Saving face and losing face are things that we associate with East Asian societies. An important person is found to have failed in his duties, so in order to avoid losing face and shaming his family and associates, he kills himself in a ritualized fashion. His honorable choice in the end absolves him and his associates of his dishonorable behavior. This means behavior is controlled within this cultural construct.

In the West, this shame/lack of shame concept has been embedded into the binary politics of progressivism. Someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, is terrible at all of the practical things related to politics, but she upholds the honor culture of progressive politics, so she is an honored elder of our politics. Trump brings shame to the democracy and refuses to let himself be killed, so he deserves assassination. The fact that he is good at politics and is right about most things is irrelevant.

One reason for this is the feminization of the ruling class. Relations between men are controlled by honor and duty. Relations between women are based in shame, so as women have taken over areas of the ruling class, the values have shifted from a foundation in honor and duty to one of shame. In a world run by people biologically tuned to care about looking good, how things look is paramount, so it is no surprise that a feminized ruling class now cares about saving face.

Probably the biggest fact, however, is the ruling class of the American empire has not had to worry about the duties of a ruling class for a long time. By the end of the Cold War, the domestic stuff was on autopilot. As long as the Fed controlled the money supply, recession and social unrest were not a concern. The only remaining concern was relations with Russia and once the Cold War ended, foreign affairs stopped being a game controlled by adults.

That last bit is the important part. Along with the feminization of the ruling class has come the infantilization of politics. It used to be said that “politics ain’t beanbag” but now it is closer to dodgeball. Instead of serious men making decisions with practical consequences, politics is now a playground for adult children. The reason our politics reflect the language and attitudes of the academy, is like the academy, the political class is an adult daycare center.

This is why the information space is full of assertions about soft concepts like the morale of guerilla fighters in Lebanon or the political class of Moscow. It is also why facts and charts have no impact on public attitudes. Increasingly, the sensibility of the general public reflects the sensibilities of the adult babies who parade across the screen, pointing and jeering at one another. People may not get the government they deserve, but the rulers get the people they desire.

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The Theater Of Politics

Posted on September 18, 2024 by thezman

263

The great exploding pager psy-op Israel pulled on Hezbollah yesterday is a great example of how the focus of all politics has shifted from the practical world of doing things to the virtual world of saying things. Owning the information space in an effort to win the information war has taken precedent over accomplishing real things in the world of real things, even when it comes to war. Every operation, even those with practical goals, has a public relations element at the center of it.

As is always the case, time will tell if the initial reports are close to reality, but there is no doubt that pagers were exploding, and Israel was responsible. The questions not asked by Western media, much less answered, are why Israel would do this and what did they think they would achieve by it? That is the first clue. The media and their audience just assume it is a good thing and will result in more good things. What those things are and why they are good is not a topic of interest.

It is a clever caper, for sure. The Israelis accessed the supply chain that delivers these devices to Hezbollah. They most likely bribed an official at the Taiwanese plant that makes these things. This gave them access to the shipment, which they then sabotaged with some form of explosive. Then they waited until the devices were deployed and sent the signal to them. The sheer cleverness of it is admirable, so it is easy to see why that is the focus.

That is the thing about this caper. It is mostly a public relations caper, with little practical impact on the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. Sure, Israel won the news cycle for a day or two and the Hezbollah side feels stupid, but by Friday any practical impact is gone, and everything is back to where it was pre-caper. Hezbollah now has a new step in the process, where they inspect their communications devices, something they should have been doing all along.

This is where certain people insist that it was a great scheme because it affected important people. The reality of communications devices is that the closer you are to one, the lower you are down the status ladder. Low level people display their device on their person because that is all they have. Important people have someone who manages the communications gear. You do not call Warren Buffett. Your people reach out to his people to set up a call.

That aside, the shift in focus from practical reality to the abstract reality of public relations is something we see everywhere now. Washington’s war on Russia has mostly been about winning the information war, on the assumption that losing the information war would have a practical impact on Russia. Instead, Russia has lost every round of the media war, often failing to attend the fight, but Russia has seen its economy boom and its standing in the world rise.

In fairness, the schemers in Washington were reasonable to think “wrecking Putin on social media” would be a big win. In their world, getting wrecked on Twitter can have practical consequences. We have gone through a decade of “cancel culture” where people lose their jobs and their lives for imaginary crimes like using anathematized words or holding impure thoughts. In a world where being cancelled is a serious concern, cancelling Putin makes a lot of sense.

That was certainly the thinking inside the Israeli brain trust when they were cooking up this exploding pager scheme. They surely understood that sabotaging pagers would have little impact on Hezbollah. On the other hand, blowing them up like this would make for great memes on social media. The sheer cleverness of it would impress their American audience, who they sense might be bored with them. This caper got the crowd back into their seats for more of the Israel show.

The Roman poet Juvenal famously criticized the Roman people for caring more about the “bread and circuses” than their freedom. This is often twisted around to mean that the rulers relied on bread and circuses to trick the people out of their freedom, but Juvenal was focusing his critique on the people. Radicals of the ideological age have made a similar complaint. Marx famously called the peasants a sack of potatoes because they could not be politicized.

This narcotic of entertainment that troubled Juvenal is now corrupting the political class of the West. They care more about the show of which they are a part, or the show being put on for them by others, than the practical reality of their position. The manufactured reality of politics obscures political reality, not because the political participants cannot see it, but because they do not want to see it. They prefer their manufactured, abstract reality, over the practical reality of their position.

This is why Israel invested in the pager scheme. They understand that practical arguments about the reality on the ground in the Levant will have no impact on Washington or the American public. Similarly, Zelensky understands that he has to keep producing new acts to keep Western politicians amused enough with Project Ukraine to keep the money flowing. Like a Hollywood producer, he tells his generals he needs bigger explosions and bigger drama.

Objective reality has always been the substrate on which human relations operate, so there has always been a gap between the human drama and reality. Human relations, especially politics, are more often than not about what we think ought to happen, rather than what we think will happen. However, necessity has always kept the gap narrow, but that seems to be changing. In fact, it seems that politics is often about broadening that gap between itself and reality.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it, so this turn from reality will eventually end. Israel cannot stay at war forever with its neighbors, no matter how good the show. The West cannot remain at war with the world, no matter how many times they cancel people they do not like. At some point the theater of politics, the theater of Western public life, must give way to reality and people who prefer reality over self-generated fantasy.

The Drone Revolution

Posted on September 17, 2024 by thezman

166

The war in the Ukraine grinds on, despite claims that the Ukraine army is collapsing at various areas of the front. The fact is large industrial age armies do not break and run like armies of the past. This was true in both world wars when the German army was able to fight effectively in certain areas right up to the end. We are seeing the same with the Ukraine army, which maintains some offensive capacity, despite losing ground in many areas due to a lack of men and material.

There is a new element in the mix that changes how a large industrial army, like the Ukraine military, succumbs to a superior opponent. The drone has become a ubiquitous element of the battlefield, and it has not only changed how armies fight, but also how they retreat and get destroyed. We are seeing this in the Donetsk region, where the Ukrainians are struggling to find units to man fortified positions, but the Russians are struggling to overrun these positions.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

In the past, an attacking army would soften up the fortified position with artillery and air power and then use overwhelming numbers to overrun the enemy position. Defenders would likely fall back before the assault, understanding the math. Today, the defenders can attack the enemy as he is forming up for the attack and at every step he makes toward the defender. This radically increases the cost to the attacker, in men and material, without increasing the cost to the defender.

This is why the NATO counterattack on the Russians in 2023 failed. NATO doctrine is pre-drone, so it assumes the attacker can organize superior numbers to attack a narrow part of the defensive line, thus creating a gap. Reserves are then poured into the gap to break the line and force the defender into a chaotic retreat. This was the plan General Milley devised for Ukraine in 2023. Ukraine would pierce the Russian defenses with a big arrow offensive and the Russians would flee.

What happened is the Ukrainian attackers never got to the line, as drones attacked the advancing columns. The vehicles at the front of the column were hit with drones, which stalled the column. Then precision artillery strikes using geolocations from the drones attacked the rest of the column. The Ukrainians were forced off the roads into the mine fields where they were finally destroyed. The drone allowed the Russians to create a kill box before the Ukrainians could see the front.

The Russians learned from this, which is why their 2024 offensive has been moving at a snail’s place along many points on the front. They use their drones to find weak points on the front, send in small units to develop their attack close to the Ukraine positions, thus avoiding large accumulations of men and machines. This forces Ukraine to move in reserves, which the Russians attack as they are on the move. Then the Russians repeat this in some new area of the front.

This is why the Russian advance has been a creeping affair, rather than the big arrow offensives Western analysts still think is the norm. Even when the Russians open a sizable gap, they avoid pouring in large numbers of troops until they can clear the area and create their own fortifications to protect their men and machines from Ukrainian drone operators. The drone has not only changed the battlefield, but it has also changed the rear areas that support the frontline troops.

The main advantage of the drone is it is cheap, even cheaper than the legendary sniper team that could stall a battalion. Snipers are expensive. It takes a lot of skill and practice to become an effective sniper team. Drone operators, on the other hand, can be created from raw recruits in a short period of time. Most young people have grown up with the technology, so they quickly pick up the skills to effectively operate drones on the modern battlefield.

Of course, the drones themselves are cheap, relative to the other sorts of weapons we see on the modern battlefield. A modern anti-tank system like the Javelin costs about a quarter million dollars. This is the launcher and missiles. New missiles are about one hundred thousand per copy. Compared to a tank, which costs tens of millions, this is a cost-effective weapon, but compared to a drone, that costs ten thousand dollars, it is a wildly expensive white elephant.

The low cost of drones is what has kept the Ukrainians in the war. They can manufacture tens of thousands of these a month using readily available supplies they buy using some of the money they get from the West. They have been able to prevent a large-scale rapid collapse anywhere on the front by slowing down the formation of Russian troops and slowing down Russian advances after they create a gap in the lines or take over some key positions.

The next shoe to drop in the drone revolution is the use of drones in guerilla war and urban combat scenarios. We are getting a glimpse of this in Ukraine. The Russians are using fly-by-wire drones to attack Ukrainians inside buildings. They do this to avoid electronic warfare systems. Surveillance drones looking down on an urban accommodation will detect movement in a building and then drone units will get close enough to fly a drone through the window.

The next step in the evolution of urban combat drones is to cut the wire and program the drone to navigate its way to the target without the use of GPS. The Russians are starting to adapt cruise missile technology, which relies on terrain matching to navigate the missile to the target, to their drones. It will not be long before drones are able to operate without radio communications. Thus, the jamming technology currently used to defeat drones will become ineffective.

Military tech has a habit of finding its way to the streets, which is why police departments all over the West have tanks, armored personnel carriers, and elite tactical units to arrest hate-speakers. This means Western cities will be thick with drones monitoring the behavior of the citizens. It also means gangsters and rival political factions will be using FPV drones on one another. The next shot at Trump could very well be a drone attack and then the drone revolution comes home.

Jesus Hates Immigration

Posted on September 16, 2024 by thezman

193

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the demographic collapse playing out in the workforce, a post about how the Tenet Media case looks like a political op and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Would Jesus hate the cat memes that have spread across the internet in response to the Haitian problem in Springfield Ohio? Some people think so. Progressive cranks have responded to this by claiming it is your Christian duty to welcome these people into your homes. Granted, these people are not sincere but people who claim to be Christians of some sort often agree with them. They claim Scripture requires the faithful to treat everyone equally, as God’s children.

This is the official position of the Catholic Church. The Pope is a big fan of open borders and mass immigration. It is not just for theological reasons. One argument is that the migrants from the global south are Catholics or could become Catholic. Protestant churches make similar claims. Immigration is seen by main stream churches as a solution to their empty pews. Some claim that the Haitian migrants have revitalized the churches in the Springfield Ohio area.

Of course, the people making these claims can find in Scripture what they need to support their position as the morally correct one. Ephesians says, “you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.” Leviticus says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”. Hebrews says you must show hospitality to strangers and modern Hebrews say you should never notice this.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The place to start is where Christianity starts. The “open borders Christians” are correct when they say these Haitians are God’s children, no different from the fifth-generation Irish guy or the guy who traces his line to the Mayflower. Fundamental to the Christian faith is that we are God’s creation and humans are made in God’s image. Our ability to understand God at all rests on the assumption that he possesses all the qualities we possess as human beings.

From this we can draw one obvious conclusion. We have reason and free will, thus God intended for us to use our reason and free will. God does not make mistakes, at least this is true for the New Testament God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not as confident, so maybe he was still prone to error. Regardless, God gave us, and only us, free will and reason, so it must have been on purpose and for a reason. The only possible reason is to use them.

The other thing that we know, if we are all God’s creation, is that all men are God’s property for the same reason man can have property. God owns himself, so God owns that which he has created. He gave man dominion over the earth and all of the living creatures on it, but he did not grant ownership. God may be an absentee landlord, as many have asserted, but he is still the landlord, which means he still owns what he created, including mankind.

This is the basis of Christian ethics. What we ought and ought not do is based on the idea that we are all God’s property. Theft is wrong because when you steal the labor of another man, you are harming God’s property. On the other hand, punishing someone for theft, is acting on God’s behalf to right the wrong done to God. It is why we think hunting for food is perfectly acceptable. Man needs to eat, and God gave us domain over the animals. Hunting for sport, however, is complicated.

The logic of Christianity tells us that Jesus would be appalled by what is happening in towns like Springfield Ohio. Rounding up Haitians and dumping them into unsuspecting towns around North America does nothing to reduce the damage done to God’s most precious property, mankind. In fact, it increases the damage. Worse yet, this damage is done for the benefit of the money changers responsible for it. What we see happening with immigration is a deliberate offense to the Christian God.

This is even more obvious when we remember that we have reason and free for the sole purpose of using it. If we wanted to help Haiti, there are ways we could improve the conditions on the island without harming cat owners in Ohio. We could take over the island, set up a local dictator tasked with distributing food and medicine. We could round up the Haitians and send them to Africa, where they have the minimum infrastructure needed to maintain an African population.

The point of all this is that Christian ethics is about reducing the damage to God’s property, which is primarily mankind, but also that which mankind has been granted dominion, the earth, and its inhabitants. Mankind has reason and free will in order to figure out the best way to act in order to minimize the damage to God’s property, so we are free to debate the issue. We must be free to debate the issue. Cherry picking lines from Scripture to shut down debate is therefore immoral.

More important, cherry-picking lines from Scripture so that you can claim a sense of compliance with the will of God, at the expense of God’s property, as in the damage done by immigration, violates the foundational logic of Christianity. If Jesus were here today, he would not only flip over the tables in the offices of the people responsible for unchecked immigration, but he would also whip the people waving around their Bibles in support of it. Jesus would hate them.

Radio Derb September 13 2024

Posted on September 14, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m44s Haiti comes to Ohio
10m22s Population doubles, employers leave
18m04s Towards the immigration singularity
24m39s The Trump-Harris debate
35m47s Signoff

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Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners, from your superabundantly genial host John Derbyshire, currently convalescent after watching the Trump-Harris debate Tuesday evening.

I shall of course have things to say about the debate later in the podcast. Recording these words at midday on Friday, however, Tuesday’s debate is already old news. I shall offer my opinion, but I don’t have anything original to add to what has already been said. That’s the disadvantage of a weekly podcast.

Before I get moving in earnest, permit me my weekly reminder that the VDARE Foundation is still accepting tax-deductible donations by check earmarked to yours truly and sent by snail mail to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

That’s the intro. And now … [Clip: Ethel Merman, “Let’s go on with the show.”]

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Transcendental Wokism

Posted on September 13, 2024 by thezman

177

The term “woke” started turning up in mainstream discourse about a decade ago as part of the cultural revolution from the top. When this current phase started is debatable, but the term “woke” started circulating around social media in the Obama years, which means we are into the second decade of the woke phenomenon. In fact, it has been around long enough to become a bit dated.

Interestingly, the word and the concept did not originate inside the academy. A century ago, a black blues singer calling himself Lead Belly urged his listeners to “stay woke” in a song about blacks being falsely accused of rape by whites. The term and concept caught on among blacks as a warning about accepting the reality of white America as advertised and instead accepting the lived reality of black Americans.

In the middle of the last century, upper-middle-class white feminists culturally appropriated the term to criticize what they called the white patriarchy and then woke was off and running in the academy and then society. As with so many things, the managerial class, devoid of any creative or critical thinking, pilfered an idea from black culture in order to pretend to have a culture of their own.

It is why the concept of cultural appropriation was so easily adopted by the people flying the woke flag outside their mansions. They could easily imagine the damage done by frat boys wearing sombreros at their Cinco de Mayo party because they themselves have been pillaging the cultures over which they rule. The culture of the ruling class is a self-critique projected onto the masses.

Putting that aside, the appeal of “woke” to the managerial class, as well as the adjunct professor living in her car, may be caused by something other than cultural barrenness and ideological fervor. When you get past the lunacy, there are traces of the same impulse found in the transcendental movement. There are some strong parallels between the main concepts in both.

That is what the show is about this week. In the first half we cover the two main concepts of what most mean when they use the word “woke”. The second half of the show is a very brief discussion of Emerson and his classic lecture to the Harvard Divinity School, along with a reading from Thoreau. The idea is to see if “woke” is just the current manifestation of the American moral imperative.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Introduction
What is Woke?
Lived Experience
What Is Going On Here?
Emerson
Woke As Deformed Americanism

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Narrative Doubt

Posted on September 12, 2024 by thezman

An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

The War Of Politics

Posted on September 11, 2024 by thezman

“War is a continuation of politics by other means” is a famous quote attributed to Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th century Prussian military theorist. This line is often used to end discussion about the causes of a war, rather than to understand the motivations of both sides, but that is the way to use it. Wars are not just about geopolitics, the disputes between the combatants, but the internal politics of the parties. In most cases, the parties to a war are in the war due to internal political reasons.

We see this with the Ukraine war. For Russia, decades of meddling around the border of the Russian Federation had reached a critical point internally. The pro-Western wing of the Russian political class had maintained that they could deal with elements in the West to address the concerns of Russia. The realist wing argued that there was no dealing with Washington, as they were implacably anti-Russian. The oligarchs sided with the former for financial reasons.

The provocations by the Biden administration along with the superheated rhetoric aimed at Putin changed the internal dynamics of Russian politics. On the one hand, this vindicated the position of the realists. They said all along that there was no way to make a deal with Washington, because Washington was not honest. It is impossible to deal with people who come to the table in bad faith. Any deal you make with them will fall apart because they will never abide by it.

Proof of this was when Angela Merkel said in an interview that the Minsk agreements over the disputed areas in eastern Ukraine were just a stalling tactic so the West could arm Ukraine for a war with Russia. This statement was done to humiliate Putin within the Russian political elite. This was when the West was sure that sanctions would topple the Russian state, so it was a bit of anticipatory celebration expecting that Putin would be out of power at any minute.

Instead, it had the opposite effect. The reason for this is both wings of the Russian political class wanted a peaceful solution to the Ukraine issue. They just disagreed about the best course. Western behavior leading up to the war and throughout the war has convinced both wings that peace can only come through the defeat of the NATO backed army in Ukraine. In other words, Russian politics brought war to their border, but now Russian politics control the prosecution of the war.

That should have been clear to the West in 2022 when the Russians reorganized their army and military industrial complex in response to the collapse of the Istanbul negotiators that were skuttled by Washington. The competition with the West had changed, so the war with the West was changing. The Russians settled in for a long war of attrition against the Ukraine army, society, and the West. The Ukraine war was now part of a larger global conflict with the West.

This is where the war reveals things about politics in the West. It was clear by the end of 2022 that there was no scenario in which the Ukrainians defeated the Russians militarily, so the set of possible outcomes was limited to a total defeat of Ukraine or some sort of negotiated settlement. This is what realists like John Mearsheimer argued even before the war started. The trouble is, there are no realists in Washington or the European capitals, at least none with influence.

Instead, foreign policy is controlled by a coalition of ideological zealots and infantilized managers who are easily led by the zealots. They do this by creating pleasing narratives that always end with the managerial elite coming out as Churchill in this new version of the last world war. Every new scheme to win the war always ends with some Western political figure giving the great speech announcing the triumph of the forces of good over the forces of evil.

As an aside, it is why the usual suspects broke out in hives when Tucker Carlson had on his show a historian who questions the role of Churchill. They immediately started calling Cooper and Carlson Nazis, not because either of them defended Hitler or the Nazis, but because they questioned the archetypical hero of the modern political narrative, the figure every managerial striver sees in the mirror. Cooper did not just question the narrative, but the point of the narrative.

That aside, we see this political dynamic in the conduct of the war. The Western political class is the audience, demanding a good war narrative. The ideologues are the producers, who collaborate with the writers and show runners in Ukraine. Together they create narratives like the Great Ukraine Counter Offensive of 2023 or now The Great Kursk Offensive for the fans in the political class. The military logic of these schemes does not matter, because it is all about the politics of the West.

Now that The Great Kursk Offensive has turned into a military disaster for Ukraine, the series will be cancelled, so the usual suspects are busy working on a new show to put on for the Western political class. This time it will probably include firing long range missiles into Russia to “humiliate the Putin!” You see, despite it all, the main plot line says that in the end, someone in the West will be the idealized Churchill, triumphing over Putin, who they have bizarrely cast as their Hitler.

This war has also altered geopolitics. The Chinese, who had a similar dynamic in their political elite as the Russians, experienced a similar evolution in thought about how they deal with the West, especially Washington. The Chinese have been quite blunt in their assessment of Washington. They have repeatedly told high ranking Biden officials that the constant lying is an impediment to good relations. If the Chinese think your candor is a problem, you have a serious problem with honesty.

Returning to Clausewitz, this war has allowed Russia and China to reorient global politics away from the unipolar, post-Cold war arrangements toward a multipolar world based in regional interests. This has been made possible by the war exposing the superciliousness of Western political leaders, but also the childish ignorance of the people allegedly making policy in the West. The world is starting to see the West as a setting sun and men close their doors to the setting sun.

The Last Debates

Posted on September 10, 2024 by thezman

The first and possibly last presidential debate of this cycle is scheduled for tonight in Philadelphia between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Given the result of the last Trump – Biden debate, this one should get a good audience. Despite the massive marketing campaign on her behalf, people know little about Harris. She has been a colored ornament on the Biden administration and the butt of jokes on the internet, but most people have no genuine sense of her.

That is the reason it could be the last debate of this cycle. Harris has a poor reputation as a public speaker. Her only real debate experience was in the 2020 Democratic primary and she was horrible. Despite having millions in tech money and a favorable media, she used the debate to alienate every constituency in the party and dropped out soon after it. Her recent CNN interview, which was heavily edited, suggests she has not gotten better over the last four years.

It is possible this may be the last presidential debate we see at all. It is assumed that debates are part of the show, but for most of the country’s history debates were not a part of our political process. The first general election debate in our history was the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Prior to that, there were a few debates between members of the Democratic party on specific issues like foreign policy, but those were a rarity.

After the Kennedy – Nixon debates, which were a great success in the sense that they captured the attention of the public, there were no more debates until 1976 when Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter three times. The logic behind this series of debates was that neither of the candidates were well known. Carter was the surprise winner of the Democratic nomination and Ford fell into the Oval Office after Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate coup against him.

Since then, we have had debates every cycle, but they stopped being debates in the normal sense, devolving into choregraphed media contests. The candidates come equipped with canned one-liners they practice before the event. They hope to use one of them to win headlines. The moderators do the same thing, usually in collaboration with the Democratic candidate. No one remembers the content of these things because there is no content to our debates. They are emotive gibberish.

This will become clear in the opening statements tonight. Harris will repeat the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to trigger good feelings for the target audience of her campaign. She will quickly chant the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to get these same people angry at Trump. In his unscripted way, Trump will attempt to do the same thing. Both candidates could be replaced with lights that flash green for good and red for bad.

If Harris is terrible again in this debate, then they most likely pull the plug on the rest of them, including the Vance – Walz debate. Trump would have no need for a rematch and Harris would have no reason to take another beating. It also may be why the whole general election debate concept ends this year. From the perspective of the regime, there is nothing to debate, so why have debates? It was clear over the last month that the regime was not excited about having these things.

The debate concept we have now was a response to the chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which was created by the ruling class, and then the Watergate coup to remove Richard Nixon. The presidential debates were designed to turn the page on the prior decades of cultural chaos and convince people that the political class had regained its mental stability. The ruling class had settled its difference in the wake of the civil rights revolution and was ready to discuss the new consensus.

Prior to the Carter – Ford debate, there was nothing to debate, at least nothing that required public attention. The legal and cultural battles that often played out on the streets in the 60’s and 70’s reflected the debate within the ruling class. Those first presidential debates reflected the new consensus. Once the issues had been settled, then the public could be allowed to see the results. The result was the presidential debate format within the new moral order.

Something similar to the revolutions from above in the middle of the last century has played out in the post-Cold War period. The triumphalism of the Clinton and Bush years gave way to the collapse in confidence of the Obama years. The chaos of the last decade reflects the collapsing confidence of the ruling class. The abolition of rights, the pogroms and censorship all point to a time when the regime simply decides there is nothing to debate and puts an end to all public debate.

Another way of putting it is that after the radicals within the ruling class won the fight, the debate concept emerged as part of a strategy to normalize their victory. Note that in the first debates, none of the major issues of the prior decade were discussed. Both sides were ready to move on to practical issues like the economy and how best to deal with the Soviet Union. No one mentioned the riots and the violence, much less questioned the new civil rights regime.

At the other end of that story arc which began with the Brown decision, the regime is in full control, but paranoid and insecure. The response to Trump and populism was not to confidently confront it and “set it straight” but to use any means necessary to avoid exposing the logic of the regime to the crucible of reason. If Trump wins in November, you can be sure the response will be a renewed pogrom against white people and the rights they assume to be their inheritance.

Win or lose, the lesson the regime will take away from this election is that there is no reason for debates anymore. There is nothing to debate. More important, maintaining the idea that it is acceptable to question the prevailing orthodoxy just leads to misinformation and disinformation. The only thing left to do is to create a narrative that explains why ending debate is vital to our democracy. If they can say free speech is a threat to democracy, ending debates is no great challenge.

Faith & Reason

Posted on September 9, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about bringing back penal colonies and exile to deal with crime, a post about how the fight with Old Scratch continues among the people we call the left and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus rational? If you are a modern Christian, this is a question that probably sounds intentionally offensive or unintentionally ignorant. It suggests the person asking the question thinks Jesus was insane. Calling Jesus a crazy person therefore could sound deliberately provocative. On the other hand, someone asking the question could simply be ignorant. Only someone unfamiliar with Scripture or Christian theology could suggest that God’s only son was a lunatic.

This is not a question that would have offended early Christians, however, because they had a different relationship with faith and reason. The gods of the ancient world were not the defenders of logic and reason. Often, the gods were the greatest offenders of logic and reason, using tricks and magic to bring down the hero, even though the hero was acting rationally. After all, the tragic hero is often the man who does the rational things but is brought low despite his reason.

The ancients did not look at reason like modern man. They had to solve problems like all humans, but they did not worship reason like a god. In fact, reason was often viewed as a hinderance to understanding the gods. Understanding the gods and their relationship to man started with the understanding that the gods operated outside of the rationality of mankind. They had their rules, man had his rules, and the story of man was the interplay between these two worlds.

Of course, there was that sense that the fate of men and the individual man was controlled by things beyond human comprehension. It was not just the capricious gods who tripped up men, but that sense that there was something else going on to determine the outcome of life, something that was well outside the domain of man, a thing called fate. Just as the tragic hero was undone by fate, the hero was the man who recognized and submitted to his fate.

For most of human history, the key to making any sense of life was in accepting the mystery of the natural world and man’s place in it. That acceptance never meant understanding it, much less conquering it. The natural world was not a thing to be conquered or even challenged. It was a thing to be accepted. Therefore, for the early Christians, the irrationality of Jesus and his life would have made far more sense to them than the far more rational version of this age.

The phrase, “Athens and Jerusalem”, which turns up in certain parts of American conservatism has its roots in this question about the rationality of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Tertullian famously asked, “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” in response to those trying to make sense of faith. The absurdities within the story of Jesus are what gives power to faith, because the truly faithful believe the message despite the absurdities.

As an aside, “Athens and Jerusalem” was reintroduced to us by Strauss, who used it for a series of lectures and essays. No one knows what he meant by it as the main project of his students is to make themselves and their mentor as incomprehensible as possible on the assumption that “Straussian” is code for incoherent. Others have picked up the phrase as a way of weaving their ancestors into your family tree, thus making Western civilization the fruit of the Greeks and the Jews.

It is debatable as to whether Strauss clipped this phase from Tertullian in order to open the gates to ideas outside of Christianity. In the hands of lesser minds, it has led to idiotic concepts like “Judeo-Christian.” Tertullian would have happily lit the fire underneath the heretics promoting such an idea. Like the other Christian writers of his age, he was hostile to the Jews and wrote polemics against them. For their part, the Jews have never forgiven him for it.

That aside, there is little doubt that Christianity, as it spread throughout Europe, became a vehicle to introduce Greek thought to Europe. Not only did the Church preserve and reproduce ancient works, including the Greeks, it began to absorb the rationality that Tertullian would have found difficult in the organization of the Church and its relationship with the secular authorities that evolved in the Middle Ages. The irrationality of faith planted the seeds of the rational rejection of faith.

Therein lies the problem for the modern Christian. He has grown up in a world that worships reason to the exclusion of mystery. The point of human thought is to locate every mystery and strip from it all of its irrationality, so that it is reduced to a mechanism explained by mathematics. Reason is the hunter who poses with his kill for a picture he can use on his internet profile, because the beauty he sees in the image is him posing next to the kill, not the bit of nature he harvested.

The Christian who bristles at the “absurdity” the question posed at the beginning is a Christian forced to explain faith by the rules of reason. It is a hopeless project, which is why the churches have emptied out across the West. If the churches are to fill up again or new churches are to be founded, the modern Christian must confront the fact that the god of this age is rationality. That god must be overcome in order to be restored to his proper place alongside the mystery of life.

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