The Naked Eye

Posted on June 4, 2020 by thezman

Imagine you are kidnapped off the streets and after a period blindfolded isolation transported to a small coastal village. instead of being chased by a balloon-like automaton, you find yourself constantly watched by cameras. You begin to notice that everywhere you go, there is a camera. You even discoverer them in the bathroom and in your sleeping quarters. Further, these cameras are beaming your activities to a large screen in the middle of the village in real-time.

Once you discovered the reality in which you were now living, you would begin to mull over the consequences. For example, escape would no longer be a possibility, as the cameras would be broadcasting your efforts in real-time. You could not try to plot with others in the village, as that would be broadcast to the whole village as well. Of course, things you may do in private, but never in public, would suddenly become public, once you forgot about the camera and did them as usual.

This is a good plot for a sci-fin story, but it is pretty close to reality now for cops in the United States. They don’t have to deal with cameras in the toilet yet, but they are recorded constantly as they go about their jobs. Often, they are recorded without their knowledge, so they now must assume they are always performing in front of an audience that is hostile to them. They get called to handle a misbehaving black and there will be an army of militant millennials holding up cellphones.

It is not just cameras on the street. The use of selective editing, which has become a feature of these hoaxes, means the cops wear body cams. Remember back to the O.J. Simpson trial and the cops had to deal with secret audio recordings of themselves long before Simpson murdered his wife. Mark Furman’s life was ruined by recordings of himself using colorful metaphors in an interview years prior. Cops are fired now for private communications that become public.

One thing these latest batch of riots seem to be revealing is that conventional policing is impossible in the Synopticon. The Panopticon is a situation where the few watch the man, like in a prison or an authoritarian state. The Synopticon is where the many watch the few, like a theater. The crowd watches the actors on the stage. In modern America, we have a combination of both. The state and its technology patterns watch us, while the masses and their cameras watch the police.

Most of the debate about the emerging surveillance state focuses on the state and its private collaborators spying on citizens. So far, we have not had a riot over Apple harvesting your metadata. We have been convulsed by video of cops beating blacks turning up on social media. Just wait until deep fakes make it possible for people to post realistic fake videos of cops abusing blacks. What happens when activists can use technology to identify the cops and that gets posted on-line?

If you are a cop, unless you are a rage-head moron, you have to realize that your range of motion is increasingly restricted. In these riots, the cops have been mostly useless, because there is no way for them to be effective. Even if they are following direct orders to end the violence, they know their bosses will not back them if a video of them getting rough with a hooligan shows up on-line. If a rioter captures one of them using colorful language in a melee with rioters, the cop is fired.

We think of privacy as just the area of our life that is off-limits to the public, but in reality, privacy is a spectrum. There are things that exist only in our head or perhaps with a few people in our lives. Then there are things known to family and close friends. Out further and there are things that are known to the community or maybe the workplace. The most distant belt is where we are supposed to find the things available to anyone interested enough to discover them, like an address or phone number.

Technology is collapsing the normal structure of privacy. There are things that get done in public that should not be broadcast to the world, just as there are things done in private that should not be made public. Those cops who took down the Gentle Giant did not spring from nothing. They were operating in the context of a career dealing with these sorts of people. The bit of the event we see is not the entirety of the event, It is devoid of context that would change how we view it.

This is happening all over. An academic, for example, discussing speech laws at a conference, could be secretly recorded. The recording is then edited to only include his recitation of prohibited words and phrases. All of a sudden, he is being forced into a struggle session by the mob. Alternatively, we have the situation of a jilted lover releasing private information about a public man. Things said in the heat of the moment, assumed to be private, suddenly become public.

There are some inevitable results of this. One is what we see with the cops. They can no longer do their job without personal risk, so they will evolve to avoid any situation where they could be shown in a bad light. We will no doubt see laws passed that ban the filming of rich people and politicians. They will not want to be subjected to what is happening with the cops. We’re already seeing signs in public buildings banning the use of cellphone cameras, Soon, phones will be banned entirely.

The more important change will be the contraction of the public space. On the one hand, those with nothing to lose will feel liberated in the public space. On the other hand, the auxiliary volunteer army of ideological enforcers will be emboldened to go crazy recording and reporting everyone. Those with anything thoughtful or controversial to say will flee the scene entirely. Even private conversation will collapse, as you cannot trust anyone to respect the ancient rules governing privacy.

Another consequence will be the collapse of what remains of trust. If you are a dissident, for example, you will no longer speak with anyone in possession of a mobile phone, even if you know them. In fact, the new tracking laws will mean all dissident will meet without phones. Not only will they fear recording; they must fear tracking, as the tech companies share this data with Antifa now. To voice a controversial idea now means living in a world closer to organized crime than politics.

Even apolitical people will have to assume that even their closest friends will be tempted to fink on them. Think of the “leaked” video of stars or ballplayers at private events or in private phone calls. These are all leaked by people close to the subject, so everyone now must distrust even their closest friends. The Synopticon will accelerate us into the no-trust society. The only place trust will exist is in secret societies that enforce their codes of silence the old-fashioned way.

In a world of a million leering eyeballs following your every move, lots of necessary things will simply stop happening. They will have to retreat to the world of intimate thought, but even there, coded to make it impossible to publicize. Outside, in the outer rings of the public-private spectrum, life will become simultaneously more intolerant and more vulgar. It will be a riot of uninhibited vulgarians and reckless scolds, where no useful work necessary for society can be done.

It remains to be seen if such a world can function. The riots suggest there is a point where the machine just stops. On the other hand, within living memory, people thought the current state was beyond the pale. Maybe people in the Synopticon will quickly evolve to become the uninhibited vulgarian or the reckless scold. Or maybe as we see in these cities, we stagger from one crisis to the next until finally the people are exhausted. We collapse while livestreaming it to 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 Chaos Election

Posted on June 3, 2020 by thezman

344

If any other president in recent history was facing both wide scale riots and an economic depression before his reelection, the smart money would be on the side of the challenger, regardless of his quality. For the longest time, conventional wisdom has said re-election campaigns are a referendum on the times as much as the performance of the sitting president and his party. Despite the gloom and doom, Trump’s re-election chances remain a coin toss at this point in time.

Part of it is the fact that Joe Biden is a relic from a bygone age, a relic suffering from severe cognitive decline. If not for the shenanigans of the party, Bernie Sanders would be the nominee of the party right now. At best, the party would be looking at a deadlocked convention, from which they could select an alternative to a fossilized communist and a dementia sufferer. Trump versus a tattered museum piece is about the best match-up Trump can get in November.

Even so, this election is probably the first in this new cycle that was ushered in by the 2016 election. Maybe the 2016 election could be called the first post-post-Cold War election, but no one knew it at the time. This time, everyone seems to know that the rules are different and the forces shaping the election are different. Trump the Mule, the guy who breaks things and disrupts the natural order has changed the normal re-election pattern as well. This will be a different election.

That’s why the skeptical on-looker should be cautious about judging Trump’s behavior by the conventional metrics. For example, he has been tweeting during the black riots about how great he has been to the black people. This tweet was relentlessly mocked, but Trump will no doubt stick with it. Critics scoff that he is just a delusional civic nationalist groveling to blacks. From now until the election, he will talk about how he has been the best thing for black people since emancipation.

The thing that people on this side of the great divide often miss is that sentiment carries a lot of weight among white voters. This side is often too spergy to appreciate the value of gesture, but in the age of gesture politics, the sentiment counts for a lot. Trump’s apparent concern for blacks counts for a lot with his base. Those older white voters really do care about race relations. These riots, at one level anger them, but at another level they sadden them. They hate seeing it.

Take a look at those scenes of whites kneeling and bowing. The crowd always skews older, with lots of gray ponytails in the scene. Granted, these are aging libs looking for some final redemption before they die. That said, it is just an exaggerated sentiment common with older white people. They spent their whole lives trying to make race relations better. Even the right-wingers think it is really important for blacks to feel included in American life. It’s a big part of who they are.

That’s why Trump plays to that sentiment. His ham-fisted appeal to blacks is not really aimed at blacks, but at older whites who decide our elections. He’s never going to win over the gray ponytail crowd, but he will appeal to the weekday golf crowd. They see his earnest appeal to blacks and think well of Trump, despite the black youth rioting in the streets in every city. Talk to the sort of older white who has been vexed by Trump’s tweeting in the past and they are eating this up.

It’s also the nature of his appeal. He is not blathering about dignity and respect or any of the crap you hear from activists. He’s talking economics, things like jobs and crime, the sorts of tangible things that resonate with older white people. The Zoomers can mock the materialism of the Baby Boomers, but politics is about reality. Trump is appealing to the most important part of the electorate where they are, not where the Zoomers would like them to be. It will most likely work.

Not too put too fine a point on it, but look at what just happened in Iowa, a state in the heart of the Cuck Belt. Steve King was defeated in the GOP primary by some loser who will happily flood the state with Africans. If King was the nominee, he would win the general election for sure, but GOP voters could not tolerate someone labeled a racist by the inner party. The sin of racism is so powerful to the old whites that make up the GOP primary electorate, no one can survive a hint of it.

There’s also the black vote. Trump is relentlessly mocked for courting the black vote, but he may not be as dumb as he seems on this issue. The closest comparison in history to Trump at the moment is Richard Nixon. After the riots in 1968, Nixon won 14% of the black vote. This was the guy who ran the Southern Strategy, which was allegedly a crypto-racist appeal to former Klansmen. Clearly, blacks were motivated by something other than the superficial appeal to race.

The truth is, black voters, a distinct subset of black people, are a very conservative voting bloc. The thing is, they are conservative in the traditional sense of the word, not the neoconservative sense. That is, they don’t give a crap about economics as much as they care about their people. They look around at the riots and see this as a threat to their people and their communities. Blacks as a whole may have outlandishly high crime rates, but black voters incline toward law and order.

Trump will never win a big share of the black vote. Critics who think he thinks he can win the black vote are more delusional than they accuse Trump of being. What Trump is up to is appealing to that core black vote. If the choice is between an old white guy siding with the rioters and old white guy promising jobs, they will be much less motivated to come out in big numbers. That’s why Trump is working so hard to frame the choice for blacks in exactly this fashion.

The thing about the 2020 election is it will be a purely in the moment election, in that it will turn on how people feel at the moment. Trump the chaos agent won in 2016 because he had the knack of keeping people on edge. Some who never voted, responded by voting for the first time. Some who always voted one party stayed home or switched to a third party in a moment of anger. Trump is a guy who likes chaos and seeks to create it in all of his endeavors.

In the moment, people act on instinct. That’s what Trump is betting on for his re-election this fall. If things are in total flux, his opponents are unable to get footing. More important, the voters are unable to settle into comfortable patterns. Riots, plague and economic devastation is maximum chaos. Voters may instinctively go with what appears to be the safe choice, but is just the familiar choice. More important, they will not be thinking about it, but rather acting on instinct.

President LARP

Posted on June 2, 2020 by thezman

446

After close to a week of dithering, Jared Kushner allowed Trump to stage a publicity stunt, where he waddled out of the White House down to the church the looters had burned the other night. In front of the cameras, Trump held up a Bible and said some things. They said it symbolized national resilience to the mob violence that is engulfing the nation’s cities. In reality, it was the perfect image for a presidency that is nothing more than live action role playing.

Trump holding up a Bible is as ridiculous as Democrats talking about the Constitution and the rule of law. Trump is famously not religious. His life has been one of hedonism and self-regard. He does not attend services and breaks into hives whenever he has to speak about religion. There’s a good chance he was worried that he may be struck by lightning out there. It was the sort of highly choreographed political stunt that symbolizes everything that people hate about democracy.

That said, it will work with the plan-trusters. Scott Greer took to Twitter to announce that Trump saved his re-election campaign. Lots of his fellow plan-trusters seem to agree, at least for now. Way back in the election of 2016, Trump said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” He took some grief for that at the time, but he was right. For his supporters, Trump is a vehicle through which they experience an alternative reality.

Under Trump, a new form of fantasy game has emerged. This new game is where Trump voters, and those adjacent, rush to social media in a crisis and start posting about “what Trump should do…” It’s followed by what is often a sensible suggestion, but one that will never happen. Then a long back and forth of various strategies about what he should do ensues. Sometimes Trump will goose this along with some tweets that are designed to encourage this form of role playing.

Of course, Trump never does anything. He’ll tweet out some outrage porn to the Left and make some vague threats, but otherwise he is all talk and no action. Right now, for example, he and President Kushner are trying to figure out how to win back the six black votes they were counting on this November. Now that “lowest black unemployment in history” has proven to be something less than the inspirational message they assumed, it is back to the drawing board.

In lieu of action, these internet fantasies fill the void left in these voter’s minds. They get to pretend that Trump will actually do something other than laugh at them. They look at Trump awkwardly holding a Bible in front of St. John’s Church and imagine it is a great moment where the country rallies around their hero. They get the same rush from the make believe as they would from the real. Trump pretending to do whatever it is he is promising is the same as Trump actually doing something.

In fact, they often believe it is real. Talk to a true-blue MAGA type and they will tell you Trump has clamped down on immigration and is now “draining the swamp.” If you point out the facts, they will call you a “libtard” and refuse to discuss it further. For example, many of these people not only think he is building the wall, but that it is already built, which why he no longer discuss it. The fantasy version of the Trump presidency is so fulfilling it has supplanted the real Trump presidency.

This is a form of false consciousness. Instead of workers unable to understand class reality and their own exploitation, it is white conservatives unable to process their diminished status in America. In the real world, they are at the bottom of the social hierarchy, slowly being eliminated from society. In the fantasy realm, they are still the top dogs. In the fantasy version of Trump, he is one of them, acting on behalf of their interests, when in reality, he is a tool of the ruling class.

An interesting off-shoot of this is that when you can get a Trump supporter to acknowledge that he has done nothing for them, they switch tracks. He stops being the God-Emperor and becomes Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. He is the sincere reformer being thwarted by the corrupt machine. In an instant, the main character in the fantasy goes from omnipotent leader to impotent victim. Trump fighting Washington is just another version of the fantasy.

Both sides of this fantasy have one thing in common. There is an unspoken, instinctive contempt for democracy. In the God-Emperor mode, Trump is issuing edicts and imposing his will on the nation. In the tragic hero version, the will of the people is thwarted by a corrupt system. In both versions, voting and debating, the core of democracy, have no role. One version is the hero slaying democracy and the other version is the hero being slain by democracy.

This form of false consciousness is not exclusive to Trump fans. His enemies now engage in their own fantasies. They imagine him as Orange Hitler and they carry on as if he really is a dictator. Further, they will convince themselves that Joe Biden is reversing all of Orange Hitler’s polices, once he is in the White House. Within days of Biden taking office, they will pretend Biden has swept aside all of the things they spent four years pretending Trump was doing.

The difference is that with the Left, they expect the fantasy to be made real and they get angry when it fails to happen. We saw this in the Obama years. They really did think he was the prophesied messiah, who would usher in a new era. As the reality of his administration became too hard to ignore, the Left got mad. When Trump won in 2016, they got super-agitated and have remained so ever since. The current round of riots are just a carryover from the disappointment of the Obama years.

For the normie right, anger and rioting are off the table, so they will continue to indulge in the fantasy game that is the Trump presidency. He will continue to monitor the situation and consider doing things. Maybe a symbolic executive order will be tossed in for effect. Meanwhile, his base will invent scenarios in which he drains the swamp and owns the libs. The less he does, the deeper the fantasy. Trump is the first virtual President, playing a role for the amusement of his voters.

Anger Management

Posted on June 1, 2020 by thezman

344

Watching the events of the last few days, it is impossible for a sensible white person to not get angry. Blacks and now Antifa are running wild in the streets, looting and now killing people. Meanwhile, the cops stand around doing nothing, while the politicians stumble all over themselves trying to excuse what’s happening. Worse yet, they are now blaming white supremacists. It is, as the great man once said, enough to cause a normal man to hoist the black flag and start slitting throats.

The people responsible for this, of course, want you angry. Angry people lose focus and pin their anger on convenient targets. Angry people say and do things that make them easy to dismiss. No matter how much they think they are “owning the libs” right now, those angry BoomerCons on Facebook posting boogaloo rants are just playing a role laid out for them by the usual suspects. Their anger is confirmation to those leftists who define themselves in opposition to normal white people.

Instead, now is a good time to think about excluding from your life those anti-whites who you would like to punch in the face right now. Just as blacks need to be around whites, those anti-whites trying to explain why this nonsense is justified need to be around you and people like you. They need to see you unhappy in order to feel the closest thing to happy their dead souls can experience. If you really want to “own the libs” in your life right now, calmly and clearly disassociate yourself from them.

That’s hard for a lot of people to do. Generations of conditioning have designed the right-wing American to think their purpose in life is to squander their time trying to convince lefty of the errors in his ways. Just as every Mormon dreams of bringing a Jew or Muslim into the church as a convert, every conservative dreams of the day when that lefty in their life says, “You know what? You are right.” Even if that epiphany does not lead to conversion, to be right just once is the dream.

If that instinct is still with you, now is the time to put down the needle and begin the journey to political sobriety. The white people who instinctively side with the blacks against the whites, are not your people. They can never be your people, because they hate your people. Granted, what drives them is hatred of self, but it is not your job to heal them. These people are driven by the thought of your people living as hated minorities in their own lands. They cannot be saved.

That’s the thing the modern dissident must keep in the front of his mind. Every event, every crisis, every great disappointment, is a chance to bring one person on the journey this way. Wasting a second of your life trying to “own the libs” is time you could be using to help a fellow traveler on his journey over to this side of the great divide. They are just as angry as you, maybe more so, because they have not yet come to understand the reality of the great struggle that lies before us.

That may be the greatest challenge for the dissident in times like these. Those normal conservative types in your life are now feverishly trying to explain why this is not about race, despite the images and rhetoric in the media. Maybe they are focused on the how the cop should not have been so rough with the Gentle Giant. Maybe they are focusing on the white people the media so carefully shows in their coverage. Worse yet, they are now doing the “Democrats are the real racists” chant.

It’s frustrating, because they are like people who clearly see the problem, but somehow the cause of it is invisible to them, while it is brightly illuminated for you. The frustration is the same as when they tell you how Israel is our greatest ally, while at the same time condemning the neocons and the forever wars. The natural frustration you feel with these people is probably more enraging than what you feel with lefty. You know lefty is an idiot, but these people should know better.

Succumbing to that anger and calling them a stupid Boomer is just as self-defeating as yelling at that idiot liberal in your life. There’s no point in it. Instead, now is the time to shift the focus, break form and knock them off-balance. If you have read this far, those BoomerCons in your life already know where you are coming from on this and they are expecting a certain response. They may even be looking for some fellowship by letting a few racist comments slip in their discussion with you.

The thing you can’t forget is these people have spent their entire lives being trained to be the respectable conservative. It is instinct with them. If you let loose with an unvarnished explanation for what’s happening, that programming will be triggered and they will close down. Their sense of righteousness will lie between those terrible liberals they hate so much and you, the right-wing extremist they have been trained their whole life to avoid. Don’t make the mistake of playing that role.

Instead, now is a good time to use the most powerful weapon in the dissident arsenal when dealing with normie whites. That is the fact that whites will soon be a minority in this country and that their children and grandchildren will be minorities. This fact unnerves the normal white person in the same way that seeing signs for Martin Luther King Boulevard frightens the white driver. It touches them at the deepest part of who they are, the part the Left can never take away from them.

For example, now is a good time to send them an old VDare column like this one that talks about Pat Buchanan. “If we had only listened to Buchanan” and a link to something like this is the sort of thing that nudges that person onto the path that eventually leads to here. Alternatively, “Pat Buchanan was right, but everyone was worried he was a racist” is another subtle way to undermine the conditioning, by creating a contradiction in the mind of the target.

The goal of the dissident in these times is not to find fellowship in anger or offer fellowship in anger. The goal is to use scenes of blacks pulling down statues and setting fire to historic America, in order to undermine the prevailing morality. Find a way to make that normie friend in your life struggle with his anti-racism and the images he is seeing on his television. Make him think about his children and grandchildren living at the mercy of those mobs. Do him that favor.

It is a long struggle and not everyone can be saved. That angry normie in your life who has maybe let fly with a few colorful metaphors may not be ready to hear the Good News about white people just yet. Until you are sure, keep calm and keep nudging him along the path. Being angry at avatars on the television and internet does nothing to change what’s happening. As the old saying goes, think racially, act sensibly. That means being the calm voice converting one soul at a time.

The Price Of Cotton

Posted on May 31, 2020 by thezman

340

If you are over the age of forty, the current black riots seem like another bad remake of a bad movie from your youth. You can appreciate how the young and stupid may be fascinated by it, but you know it is just pointless destruction by people who are over indulged and terminally ungrateful. The whites involved, and there are plenty, are just ridiculous people playing make believe. They are reenactors dressing up to play a role they read about in their grievance studies classes.

Further, you know what comes of it. There will be lectures from the servants of the ruling class about white privilege and the legitimacy of black rage. The so-called conservatives will grovel and plead. There will be some candlelight vigils tossed in so the politicians can perform their public acts of piety. It is the same old story remade by decreasingly plausible actors. Meanwhile, normal white people just see their tax for being white go up yet again. It is so tiresome.

All of it, even the sense of exasperation by normal white people, is just a way to avoid the painful truth about America. If the plantation owners had simply paid European workers, even Chinese workers, to pick the damned cotton, none of this ridiculous drama would keep happening. These riots, like all previous riots and pretty much the last seventy years of American history, is just the price of cotton. The tax paid by white people that never goes away and goes up every year.

While that may be a pithy way of putting it, the truth is the endless racial strife is the result of the Yankee conquerors not dealing with what they had done. Then as now, the Yankee moralist was long on proselytizing, but short on conviction. They wanted to end slavery and enjoyed killing white people to do it, but when it came time to address the question of what to do with the freed slaves, they abandoned their pulpits and left the issue to future generations. It remains unresolved.

For going on a century now, the story of America is the endless proselytizing by the usual suspects about the problems they have created. The greatest social construct in human history is the African-America. This a concept for a people who are neither African or America. These are a people who are totally dependent on white people for their survival, but bred to hate the people on whom they are dependent. It is a cancer the country gave itself and refuses to cure.

If after the Civil War, the North had setup a reservation for the freed slaves in Florida, none of this would be happening. Sure, Florida would be Haiti right now, but no one cares about Haiti, not even the descendants of those proselytizing abolitionists who stalk our culture today. Florida or whatever made up African name the locals gave it, would be at most, a sad curiosity. Americans would leave their doors unlocked, stroll around their inner cities and have normal car keys again.

We have reached the point where the good and decent white people of the country will be forced to do two things they will not enjoy. One is do away with the proselytizers and their damned pulpits. That means overthrowing their morality in order to overthrow their moral claims on our collective consciousness. Good people are going to have to be rude and angry. They will have to tell the scolds they don’t care about racism and they don’t care about the feelings of black people.

Those same good white people are going to have to tell black people, most of whom are kind and decent, that it is time for a divorce. Generations of trying to make race relation work has been a failure. There are no more options left to try other than peaceful separation. Whatever the cost of implementing the divorce must be paid as it is less than the constant tax on white people for events that happened over a century ago now. It is time we go our separate ways.

This is ultimately the price of cotton. Like the cost of cheap labor today, the cost of slavery is paid by those who never wanted it and never benefited from it. That’s always the cost of cheap labor. The employer gets the benefit of the cheap labor and society it gets the bill. In the case of black slavery, generations of white people, many with ancestors who came over after the Civil War, have been paying for the decision to use Africans to pick the cotton.

Divorce is never pleasant. The married couple that goes down that road is sustained by the thought of what comes next and the relief of not being burdened by the other. That is what we must do now. Focus the mind on a world without no-go zones, a time when it is unnecessary to ask the realtor about the schools and read their face for the truth, a day when the purple faced loon is not screaming at you about your privilege. The divorce will be hard, but it has to be better than this.

The Race Drama

Posted on May 30, 2020 by thezman

255

One of the features of modern liberal democracy is that everyone is trapped in a constant present, unaware of both the past and future. The current black riots, for example, are being described as unprecedented, when in fact they are a regular feature of American life. Birds fly, fish swim and blacks riot. Amusingly, the man allegedly responsible for these riots, President Trump, you know, because of the low black unemployment, is in office because of the last round of black riots.

In fact, black rioting is one of the regular features of the ongoing morality play that is modern liberal democracy. The usual suspects, looking for a reason to get white people to the theater, start scanning about for some case where a black was harmed by an unsympathetic white. They create a narrative around the incident, have the stories placed in the media and then encourage the black “activist groups” to start making an issue of it. From there, the story writes itself.

The regularization of this is clear when you look up from this incident and recall that just a few weeks ago we had Jogger. This was an off-Broadway effort to angry-up the blacks, but it failed to catch on. Blacks were sort of ready to play their role, but only the dumbest white people fell for it. Those would be the type who declare their pronouns on social media. Normal white people saw through the plot like a bad movie and failed to show up at the theater. Jogger never made it to Broadway.

As an aside, you’ll note something about the Jogger that goes unremarked. American blacks are not all that sympathetic to imported blacks. When some guy with a weird African name gets jammed up, regular blacks just shrug. The reason is their identity starts with them being near whites against their will. Despite their relentless demands for access to white people, black identity starts with the belief that they are around whites by force. African man violates that narrative.

The general framework of this particular morality tale follows the approved script of all morality tales in modern America. First, the usual suspects, or their puppets, announce there is a great danger to the community. Alternatively, there is some group being harmed and the community must rally to their defense. Sometimes the two are combined in a Godzilla attacks Tokyo scenario. The people are then supposed to flood the theater to be properly scared or angered.

You see this with these Cop-Black tales. The black is always cast as an innocent victim in the trailer for the show. They find pictures from his high school yearbook to hand out in the press kits when promoting the story. We saw that with Trayvon Martin. The media used pics of him as a child, rather than as a hulking teenager. Jogger was shown in his cap and gown seven years prior. The cop, in contrast, is never really filled out as a character, because he is a catspaw for the real villain.

The paradox of these cops versus blacks riot-dramas is that we live in a country that worships cops. There are dozens of TV shows and movies on all the time celebrating the cop as the guy guarding the wall between civilization and barbarity. Usually, the hero cop is required to break the rules to exact justice. On the one hand, white people are supposed to see cops as rule breaking moral agents, while blacks are required to see cops as immoral agents of a system of oppression.

The second act of the morality tale always brings the so-called conservatives onto the stage to play their part. Normally, they are required to dismiss the danger or the victim, in order to appear unfeeling or callous. In this case, the role is changed up. They are first required to worship a special character created just for these shows. This is the Magic Negro, who is black, but a conservative! He is brought on to confirm the wishy-washy civic nationalism stuff popular with old people.

After the required doses the negrophilia, the conservatives in the crowd are ready for the usual performance. The conservative character can either be shocked at the hypocrisy of the Left or outraged by the civil unrest. In both cases, the underlying assumptions are the same. Racism is the worst sin, but a sin, ironically, that can only be committed by white people. As such, the whole point of the citizen’s life must be to eradicate this sin from their heart and from their community.

Like the Dionysia in ancient Athens, these morality plays are intended to reinforce the larger moral framework of society. If you step back from the particulars and look at these race dramas, they are not all that different from a fire breathing minister telling his flock that they are all sinners and must redouble their efforts. Instead of pleasing God, it is the god of democracy. These dramas are a lecture to whites that they will only be saved when all people are welcomed into their community.

Of course, that is one of the many paradoxes of modernity. In order for the morality plays to work there has to be real victims and real villains. This is why everyone is a racist Nazi now. The supply of genuine racists and Nazis has evaporated. The only actual racists in America are not white, which will not do, so the play makers expand the definition for racist to fit their needs. It also means they deliberately create villains by manufacturing them when the supply is low.

In theory, the way out of this endless drama is to simply ignore it. Get enough white people to stop showing up or even acknowledging these dramas and the theater runs out of audience members. In reality, this can never happen, at least not to the extent it changes public morality. The people running the theater will just force people inside, as we see with the schools, corporate diversity training and the like. In a libel democracy, society itself becomes the theater and life is the morality play.

Letters

Posted on May 29, 2020 by thezman

247

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.

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

Posted on May 28, 2020 by thezman

215

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.

The Good White Bible

Posted on May 27, 2020 by thezman

271

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.

The Paradox Of Democracy

Posted on May 26, 2020 by thezman

213

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.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Author Archives: thezman