The Ukraine End Game

Posted on April 9, 2024 by thezman

One of the enduring truths about war is that the side that wins is usually the side that starts with a clear objective. That understanding of the goal allows for a strategy to accomplish the goal, which then becomes the framework for the tactics required to implement the strategy and win the war. Starting with the end in mind also allows for changes in strategy and tactics to account for the unknown unknowns that are always a part of a military conflict. No plan survives contact with the enemy.

We may be about to see this in the Ukraine war. From the start the Russians have had a very clear understanding of their interests in Ukraine. This predates the war by about a thousand years. Russia is a land power without natural barriers between itself and its neighbors, so the goal of Russian foreign policy since forever has been to maintain space between Russia and its neighbors. The Ukraine has always been part of that space controlled by the Russians.

This is why the Russians had clear demands at the start of the war. They wanted the Russian speaking areas liberated from Ukrainian control, they wanted Ukraine demilitarized and they wanted NATO out of Ukraine. When the war started, these goals did not have to change as they were the reason for the war. The Russians would simply have to do what was necessary to impose these ends. In other words, once the war started, the question was how not why.

This was not true on the other side. Ukraine did not want to go to war and was ready to take the deal on offer, until Washington sent Boris Johnson in to convince Zelensky to go to war in exchange for unlimited money and supplies. Ukraine started the war without any clear idea as to why they were fighting it because they had no clear objective, other than graft. Despite the rhetoric, “not losing” is not a goal that can lead to a successful and coherent war strategy.

The West has had a similar problem. Note that no one in the West is ever asked by the media why they are doing this. The reason for that is the answer would be incoherent jibber-jabber about abstract assertions. Defending a notorious kleptocracy in defense of democracy is obvious nonsense. The neocons, of course, have a real goal, but telling the world they want to bring about the end times is not good politics, so everyone just dances around the fact that there is no stated goal.

This is why the West is headed to a crisis over the war. Without a clear goal, there is no way to measure success. Without a way to measure success, there is no way to anticipate failure and adjust to it. The Russians avoided this my seeing early on that they had grossly miscalculated. They could see this because they had a clear understanding of what they wanted to achieve in the war. They set off on a yearlong process to revamp their strategy and tactics.

It is becoming clear even to the zombies in the Western media that Ukraine is going to lose the war on the battlefield. The Russians have been grinding away across the front and are now making increasingly swift advances. The reason for this is Ukraine is running out of men and material. Meanwhile, the Russian war machine continues to grow in size and lethality. There is growing speculation that the Russians are preparing a hammer blow this summer to break the Ukrainian army.

This is why we are seeing a growing panic in the West. They never imagined this as a possible outcome because they never thought about the end. They just assumed they could wish a loss on the Russians. It seems many in the West still think they can wish hard enough to change reality on the battlefield. The French actually initiated a call with the Russians, demanding the Russians quit and go home. Now the French want to send troops into Ukraine, which would be an act of madness.

Assuming the lunatics do not prevail and there is no nuclear war with Russia, the question now is what comes next? The one thing we know is the West will not have a lot of say in the outcome. This is not just because they are losing but primarily because they never imagined such a possibility. The reason for that is they have never been honest with themselves about why they are poking the bear. Like all the other pointless wars of choice, this one will end in adverse terms.

That is the question that will come to dominate this year. The Russians do have a plan and they have the means to implement it. While the Russians have not talked about what comes next, it is clear they will turn Ukraine into a demilitarized buffer zone with a government friendly to Moscow. This was the end they had in mind at the start of the war because it has been the Russian national interest for a millennium. How much of Ukraine remains in Ukraine at the end is unknown.

This is why the West is in a crisis. This war will make clear to everyone, especially Western citizens, that the West is in decline. France, Germany, and Britain are now on the same level as Denmark and Ecuador, as far as geopolitics. The real global powers will want to have friendly relations, but they will not consider them peers. In the new multipolar world, Europe is not one of the poles. Proof of that will be Russia dictating terms to the Europeans as to their future relations.

The psychological struggle that is about to unfold in the West is what is the great unknown in what is about to come. How will the typical Frenchman react when he realizes he is a citizen of a pipsqueak country? How will the typical flag-waving American feel when he realizes he no longer lives in a superpower, but in a regional power that is in steep decline? American exceptionalism takes on a whole new meaning when you are on the losing side of history.

The point is the end game in the Ukraine war will turn out to be much more than the final disposition of the country currently called Ukraine. The end game will be a reordering of the world and a necessary reordering of the Western view of itself and its role in the world. In other words, we are about to see a revolution in worldview, one no one anticipated in the West. Maybe this is why so many Western leaders seem to want a nuclear war. They cannot face what comes next.

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Liar Land

Posted on April 8, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about Bonnie and Clyde, a post about narrative in the managerial class and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: Here is a roundup of the shows I was on last week, for those who love the sound my voice. Here is my appearance on the Killstream I was on with a show with a young YouTuber and another young YouTuber named J Burden.

If you were to go back in time, just a couple of generations, and snatch up some politically active people and bring them forward to this age, they would not only be disappointed that things did not turn out as they predicted, but they would be horrified by what has happened with the public square. They would wonder why there even is a public square when it is now so polluted with deception. How can you have a public debate when so many start with a lie?

This is one of those things that is hard to appreciate about this age as it has crept up on us like the fog and become the new normal. No one tunes into public affairs shows expecting a good faith effort to present the issues and the arguments in a fair and honest way or an effort to inform the viewer. It is not even an attempt to persuade in most cases, but something like a revival for a certain audience. The performers say the expected things and the viewers cheer.

It is not just in the narrow area of performative politics. Deception is now the coin of the realm, even where the truth would serve the parties better. For example, the ongoing feud between Candace Owens and The Daily Wire. None of this would have happened if the Daily Wire had been honest and said they dumped Owens because she is critical of Israel and the platform is pro-Israel. No one would have been surprised and it would have been a one-day affair, but instead they chose to lie.

This is not a peculiarity of the Daily Wire. Lying is now the new normal and truth telling is a good way to get hurled into the void. Whole subjects have been consigned to the shadows because you cannot speak candidly about them, and the lies are so absurd that even the performers cannot say them with a straight face. Crime is the most obvious example of a topic that no longer gets discussed by “serious analysts” because you are not allowed to speak honestly about it.

Crime is a great example of endemic lying. We can no longer trust the FBI crime data because everyone involved in reporting it now lies about it. It used to be that the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting was the gold standard for data, but now it is like everything else in that it is the product of perfidy. The police departments lie about their stats to please the politicians, who lie about the stats to hide the truth from the people they claim to represent. It is liars all the way down.

Every day, the White House sends out that goofy looking black women to address the media on the issues of the day. Everyone in the room knows she is a moron, and everyone knows she is just repeating obvious lies written down in her book that is provided to her by the White House. Everyone in the room then pretends that this is a sincere presentation of events. They refuse to ask obvious questions or address the obvious lies, but instead continue like it is normal.

That is the thing. It is normal. Karine Jean-Pierre is the most absurd and ridiculous example so far, but well within the trend. No reasonable person can accept anything from official sources at face value. The only way to read the news is to first start with the assumption that the truth is from the set of things not mentioned in the news. If you see your picture in the news with your name in the caption, you best check your birth certificate as it is a good chance you are not who you think.

What you see when you lay up a trivial internet drama alongside official pronouncements from the state is that lying is the new normal. Whether it is a small issue or a vitally important issue, the first instinct of everyone involved is to lie and often lie fantastically. It is as if there is a secret competition for who can generate the most outlandish lie each day. Here is a great example of a lie so outlandish that it is hard to imagine anyone doing it without being struck by lightning.

The question is whether this is the result of a corrupt and rotten ruling class or is it the inevitable result of democratic society. In favor of the latter is the observation by the Persians that the ancient Greeks habitualized lying to one another. The agora, the place where Greeks bought and sold things, debated issues of the day, and conducted public affairs was a riot of deception. Winning the argument and winning the sale were the product or clever deception and storytelling.

In the former case, it is clear that the ruling class started to change for the worse after the end of the Cold War. The Clinton’s brought a style of lying to Washington that sent our politics into the abyss of perpetual deception. The financialization of the economy shifted the focus away from building a better mousetrap to creating new and increasingly complex financing of the mouse trap business. These schemes were clever but devoid of any truth value.

As is often the case, it is a combination of these things and some others, but the result is what matters. We now live in a carnival of lies. It is tempting to think that this cannot last, but much of the world lives this way. The reason conspiracy theories are so popular around most of the world is they make more sense than official truth. They also let people think that at the heart of the whirlwind of official lies is a truth that is both rational and reasonable. It lets them sleep at night.

Can Western societies function this way? It is hard to know. A low-IQ, low-trust population can be manipulated by clever midwits, but a high-IQ, naturally trusting society may grow violently irritated by a perfidious midwit ruling class. The general unhappiness we see may be the result of living in a world where stupid people, who think they are clever, tell us obvious lies. One can tolerate someone like Karine Jean-Pierre for so long before something must be done.

Transcendental Ruminations

Posted on April 5, 2024 by thezman

An aspect of our increasingly ideological age is the things that used to be a part of the culture that have been removed by force or by neglect. The parts pried loose and discarded are easy to see, as they come with an angry mob of deranged lunatics there to do the damage. The bits that are just forgotten and fall out of the shared reality that is our culture are the things missed only by those who remember them.

The opening of the show today is one of those bits that has fallen out of shared reality mostly due to neglect. When I was a young person, you had to read Thoreau and Emerson, so you could learn about transcendentalism. Speaking with younger people recently it seems that stopped happening at some point. The old hippie teachers gave way to activists who have no interest in those old white men.

Transcendentalism is a peculiarity of America that not only influenced what became progressivism but also its traveling partner conservatism. You could probably draw a line from Thoreau and Emerson to the weird secular Gnosticism that emerged in the aftermath of the Cold War. Modern progressive rejects individualism, but they embrace the idea of society corrupting the natural goodness of man.

Another line you could draw is from the second wave transcendentalists, who were mostly bourgeois aesthetes, to the middle-class managerial elite of today. Rather than rejecting empiricism, like the first wave transcendentalist, the second wave embraced it but in the context of individual expression. In other words, they loved science as long as it supported their emotional claims.

As nutty as they were, the transcendentalists represented an aspect of American culture that remains with us today. There are hints of it in the parallel society movement and the trad-life stuff that is popular with some young right-wing people. The desire to break free of the corrupting aspects of modern society in order to have an authentic life is something that the transcendentalist would have understood.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Bennett’s Phylactery (Link)
Reality Of Rural Life
Bourgeois Life
It Takes a Village
Liberty Valance Issue
The Matrix
The Reality of Pioneers
Quiet Desperation

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Full Show On Rumble

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Cuban Versus Rufo

Posted on April 4, 2024 by thezman

An interesting exchange took place this week on Twitter between Mark Cuban, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and Christopher Rufo. The topic of their exchange was diversity, with Cuban claiming that diversity was our greatest strength and Rufo claiming that the diversity movement is un-American. Neither man put it exactly that way, but that is the simple summary. Cuban thinks diversity makes things better, while Rufo thinks the push to impose diversity makes everything worse.

The exchange was amusing for the simple reason that Cuban clearly does not understand the issue, beyond knowing the slogans which he spasmodically repeats when the topic is raised. At one point he seems to be saying that the three branches of government are the President, Congress, and the bureaucracy. Everyone had a good laugh at his expense, as it became clear in the thread that Mark Cuban is not the brightest bulb in the bunch, despite being a billionaire.

To some degree that is the point of these mini dramas. The hoi polloi gets to feel good seeing one of their champions best who they think is the enemy. Mark Cuban puts a lot of effort into insulting normal people, so normal people love it when he has his pants pulled down on Twitter or anywhere else. Rufo clearly understands the mechanics of the Diversity Industrial Complex, so he easily swats down the trite claims made by Cuban throughout the thread.

More important, these exchanges frame the debate in such a way that alternative points of view are systematically excluded. Strip away the drama and what we have here are two similar views on race. One side says that racial inequality is the result of racial exclusion by whites and therefore must be remedied by forcing whites to include nonwhites in their activities. The other side says it is immoral to notice race at all, so forcing people to be race-conscious in this way is immoral.

Despite appearing to be opposites, both sides are making the same moral claims with regards to race. Rufo thinks using race to make decisions is immoral, while Cuban thinks whites use race to make decisions, which is bad. In other words, both men agree that making general observations about race is immoral. The difference is that Cuban thinks whites do it all the time, while denying it, and Rufo thinks the diversity crowd is guilty of that which they accuse white people.

Both men are not disagreeing about ends, but about means. This is the model of politics that has prevailed in America since Gettysburg. Both sides agree on the ends but disagree on how best and how quickly to get there. As we see with the race issue, it is not always clear that they both agree on the ends, but once you strip away the rhetoric it is clear that at the minimum, they agree with one another as to the morality of each other’s goals with regards to race.

This is an important bit of conditioning that arises from the selection pressure within the American political dynamic. People approved to be on the stage are conditioned to first evaluate the goals of people seeking to get on stage. If their goals fall within the moral framework of the stage owners, they can debate them. Mark Cuban read portions of Rufo’s book, probably because people he knows read it. He knows Rufo is not advocating for things that are proscribed.

Of course, we know Rufo has put an enormous amount of effort into making it clear that he is not like those bad people who think race is a real thing. This is where you see the selection pressure. This is why he focuses on the goal of organizational success, rather than the details of race. He argues that diversity programs make colleges and corporations worse, by preventing them from hiring the best. You see, in a color-blind society we get a true meritocracy!

Interestingly, if both sides of this debate want to see organizations like Harvard maximize their potential, then they would have to support what is a subtle truth about how the sports world evaluates talent. If you are a white guy who plays cornerback in football, the evaluation of you will be much stricter than if you are black. Tall white guys find it much tougher to standout in basketball. Asian guys are assumed to be poor athletes, so they tend to be ignored.

What happens in sports is what the legendary quantitative blogger La Griffe du Lion described as the theory of differential cutoff. The extremely short version of that post is that those from groups that objectively underperform should be held to a higher standard than those from groups that objectively overperform. In other words, hiring a Jewish guy as your lawyer, even though he went to a state school, is a better bet than hiring the black guy from an elite law school.

Note that this reality lurks beneath the diversity arguments. Mark Cuban assumes people make these judgements about race, thus making it more difficult for qualified nonwhites to gain access to positions for which they are qualified. Put another way, an ancient truth is what haunts the diversity industry. They may not have the smarts to understand it, but they feel it. Note also that it haunts the arguments of people like Rufo, who also seek to banish this ancient truth.

The most important takeaway in all this is that both sides agree that you do not have the right of free association. Cuban thinks you should be required to hire a black guy to meet the demands of diversity, while Rufo thinks you should be required to hire the black guy as long as he meets the objective criteria for the job. Your subjective qualifications and individual preferences are not important. Both men wish to dictate your choice based on their version of reason.

Ultimately, that is the point of framing the debate this way. Nowhere in their exchange is a consideration of preference or free association. They are arguing about which version of reason should be imposed on you, when in reality they are debating whose clerics will decide your punishment for having unacceptable preferences. It is a good reminder that politics is never about facts and the reasonable conclusions from those facts, but about who will impose their morality on whom.

The Internet Of Reality

Posted on April 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: As everyone probably knows, VDare has been under assault by the regime for years and may finally be forced to close down. They have been de-banked so the only way to send them money at the moment is GiveSendGo. If you can spare a few bucks, they could sure use it.

In the early days of the internet, the public places were mostly populated by people who assumed wide open was the natural order. As opposed to the real world with its silos and private spaces, the internet would be wide open. Everyone could go into this new public square and say and hear what they liked. That is why the first public forums were wide open and comprehensive. The idea was that you had one big forum, and everyone could pile in and have their say.

It did not take long for that to fail. The early forums quickly splintered as factions that would develop and soon the forums were a riot of antagonistic posting. This was long before the smart people made it easy for the progressive kooks to get online, but even in a world of smart, tech savvy people, factionalism was an issue. Bulletin boards then UseNet and then message boards followed this pattern. They started centralized and open and soon balkanized into private platforms.

Once the internet was made accessible to the midwit progressive, this pattern became more toxic and nastier. Instead of college football forums unable to maintain civility amongst rival fans, it was the tone police and moral scolds creating dissention and demanding their rivals be censored. They worked to gain control of the platforms and then set about driving off their bogeymen. This led to alternative forums for the people who had been purged from the main platforms.

Another aspect of this new version of the old pattern is that the progressive kooks are unable to start their own forums, so they must infiltrate and co-opt existing platforms, which is why we have a censorious atmosphere online. It was not enough for the kooks to gain control of Twitter, for example, they also had to attack any alternative sites that sprang up in response. In other words, the kooks were threatening the normal balkanization dynamic that had existed since the start.

The point of all this is the last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. Of course, this is compounded by the fact that it is now impossible to avoid the scold. In the analog world you can easily spot the scold and avoid her. They have a look about them that is easy to recognize. If you knew nothing about Kate Starbird you would take one look at her and know she is someone who should be avoided. Online, there is no way to spot these spiteful mutants until they begin to immiserate you.

Here is where we see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

It is clear that kooks in other states are looking to follow the lead of New York, much like we saw with the internet. One site would be subverted by kooks and before long the other sites followed their actions. The peak of this mania was when every internet platform banned Alex Jones on the same day. Even obscure sites like Roku banned him in the rush to anathematize the man. The dream was to bring back internal banishment through de-platforming.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

The Real World War

Posted on April 2, 2024 by thezman

Over the last two years most people who bother paying attention to the world have figured out that the American Empire is waging a proxy war on Russia. The primary proxy is Ukraine, but lesser proxies are also involved. Armenia used to have good relations with Russia but has now been turned into a Western catspaw for the purpose of stirring up trouble in the region. America overthrew the government of Pakistan two years ago so they would not cooperate with Russia.

We could be seeing another front in the war. Israel made the outlandish decision to bomb the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Reportedly the target was a high-ranking Iranian general who was at the facility holding meetings. It could be the other people were the real targets or it could just have been a target of opportunity as Israel tries to draw Iran into a war. Regardless, targeting an embassy in a third country violates centuries of precedent and custom.

Embassies are technically the territory of the country operating them, so this attack on the Iranian embassy is the same as an attack on Iran. That is how the world will view it and certainly how Iran sees it. The Middle East is a dirty place and all of the players, especially Israel, are dirty players, but this is well beyond the norm. There is also the fact that Israel is bombing the capital of Syria, even though there is no state of war between the two countries.

The way to think of this is to imagine if the Russians hit the American embassy in Poland with a missile. Russia is not legally at war with Poland or America, even if both countries are aiding and abetting Ukraine. If the Russians attacked Poland, then it is war, and everyone understands this. Somehow, Israel and her supporters in America seem to think this rule does not apply to Israel. Both China and Russia have come out with strong statements condemning the attack.

One of the worst kept secrets on earth right now is that Israel wants a war with Iran, and they assume this will draw in the United States. The Israelis wanted this war back in the Bush years during the Iraq war. They assume Iran would lose such a war and the regime would be toppled as a result. Israel foreign policy is based on the idea that if the Arab world is in chaos, there will be no organized resistance to Israel. Of course, Iran is also working on getting nuclear weapons.

The question now is what happens next. The Biden administration does not want a war with Iran as the military is stretched thin. Presumably, they will try to make some sort of backroom deal with Iran to defuse things. Russia is the chief sponsor of Syria and has air defense systems in the country. To this point they have not shot down Israeli jets, but that could change now. Russia is also a partner with Iran so the Russians will need to do something to show support for both countries.

China has been making inroads into the region, primarily by helping to facilitate a reproachment between the Saudis and Iran. The peace that now exists between the Houthis and the Saudis is largely a result of this effort. Iran sponsors the Houthis, and they agreed to make peace with the Saudis as part of this warming relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Note the Saudis have not allowed America to use its airspace to attack the Houthis.

In other words, this is not twenty years ago when Iran was alone and largely isolated from the world due to American sanctions. Iran now has two enormously powerful allies, and it is slowly rejoining the Arab alliance led by Saudi Arabia. Iran now has options that it did not have two decades ago. Instead of retaliation we will probably see an effort to win a diplomatic war against Israel, with the help of China and Russia, as Israel is, for all practical purposes, a tentacle of the American Empire.

This is where the real war is being waged at the moment. The American Empire is based on the assertion that the post-Cold War world is a rules-based one led by the United States, who enforces the rules. The repeated violations of the rules by Washington are what drives both Russia and China. Their argument in favor of a multipolar world is that Washington cannot be trusted to follow the rules, so Washington letting Israel violate important rules is a proof of sorts.

There is also the obvious fact that Washington can no longer control Israel. You get to be the lone superpower when everyone has to obey. Israel thumbing its nose at Washington over Gaza is a problem. Israel bombing embassies in third countries is a humiliation of Washington. The Washington led order rests on everyone, including Israel, accepting that order. If Israel does not respect that order, then it will not be long before the rest of the world follows suit.

Of course, what we are seeing in this new world war is chaos all along the borders of the American Empire. Washington’s plan for Russia for the last three decades has been to create chaos around the borders of Russia, believing this would slowly sap her economic and political strength. This is what is now happening to the American Empire, which is forced to race around the world dealing with crises, many of which are the result of its own actions, like we see in Ukraine.

This is what may prevent a regional war in the Middle East. Russia and China know that time is on their side. As a result, Iran also can play the waiting game. At some point, the American Empire will have no choice but to give up on the region. It has largely been driven out at this point. There are American troops in Syria and Iraq, but the cost of supporting them will soon be prohibitive. Instead of Iran retaliating against Israel, she can wait and deal with Israel at a later date.

What we are seeing is the world organizing not for a great final war with the American Empire but the world organizing to manage the decline of the empire. Washington stirs up trouble hoping to preserve itself by unsettling rivals and Israel hopes to start a regional war before her patron is too weak. Meanwhile, the rising powers of the world are trying to avoid a real war with the declining American Empire. The real world war is a war to survive the end of the last empire.

After Left And Right

Posted on April 1, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about Gen-Z being raised on the internet and a post about failing up in managerialism. The Sunday podcast was cancelled due to Easter and nothing happening. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: For those he need to hear my voice as much as possible, there is my appearance on the Killstream last week. I also recorded a show with a young YouTuber who asked some interesting questions.

Note #3: Some may have noticed that I did some experimenting with the comment system over the weekend. It was not without its bugs, so we are back to the basic setup for now. From time to time you may see things like this as I experiment with ideas for the new site that is in the works.

Over the last decade, “conservatism” in America has declined reputationally largely due to the failures and embarrassments of professional conservatism. Depending upon your disposition, the Bush years either sent the conservative movement over a cliff or exposed it for being nothing more than a financial hustle. There are other views of the failure of professional conservatism and all of them are right in their own way, but there is no denying that the Buckley project has failed.

As a result, the last decade has seen various efforts to create a “new right” to replace the Buckley project. Remnants of the alt-right went so far as to call themselves the “new right” for a while, but they had nothing to offer but new slogans. The Claremont collective has fumbled about trying to create a new conservatism, piggybacking on the populism of Donald Trump. Yoram Hazony has tried to preach a new form of nationalism to take the place of conservatism.

So far none of these efforts has made much progress, outside of creating some interesting debates at times. Most recently Claremont published a long essay on its main site attacking the contradictions within Hazony’s nationalism. On their American Mind site they posted a response from David Goldman, formerly known as Spengler in the Asia Times, coming to the partial defense of nationalism. Less rigorous minds have also waded into the topic with echolalic babbling.

One problem that all attempts to fashion a new right face is something Kesler touched on in his essay about Hazony’s nationalism. America is and always has been a multicultural country. Even putting aside the race issue, the thirteen colonies that came together to form the United States were composed of people with unique cultures and histories, which were often at odds with the other states. These differences pre-dated the colonies themselves, coming over from the Old World.

This presents an obvious problem for nationalism as by definition it assumes a common people with common ancestors. Nationalism is exclusive to a particular people, which cannot work when the people are a mixed bag of various people from different parts of the world with different histories. The story of the Tidewater is different from the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Framers understood this which is why they settled on a federal system of government.

As Samuel Goldman explained in his excellent little book, After Nationalism, what has held America together since the beginning is a combination of the covenant, the crucible and the creed. The covenant being a mission to build the city on the hill, the crucible being the shared struggle that binds our various people together and the creed is the statement of shared principles. To one degree or another, these concepts still turn up in our political rhetoric.

Early in his book, Goldman quotes the historian Wilfred McClay, who wrote, “Ties of blood, religion, and soil are not sufficient to hold us together as Americans, and they never have been. We are forever in the business of making a workable unity out of our unruly plurality.” This is the problem with nationalism as a defining force in America, but it also presents a problem for anything calling itself conservatism. Which is why the covenant, the crucible and the creed have shaped conservatism.

Like nationalism, conservatism is strongly tied to the past. You cannot have nationalism without a shared history or at least an overlapping history. Different parts of Germany may have unique pasts, but they share enough of a common past to feel a part of the greater concept of German. Similarly, conservatism seeks to preserve social order by maintaining historical continuity. Conservatives do not oppose change, but instead seek to contain new ideas within the framework of the past.

Central to conservatism is the notion that some things are too important to be put up to the scrutiny of reason. Questioning a tradition, for example, should be resisted even if the logic of tradition is no longer obvious. Conservatives assume that the shared habits of a people exist for a reason. Altering or abandoning the old ways risks unknown and unwelcome consequences, so change must be gradual and cautious. Traditions are the result of trial and error over many generations.

The specter that haunts conservatism, however, is who decides that certain things are not to be questioned? Traditions and customs do not fall out of the sky onto people, but are the product of people, a specific people. The reason they are traditions is they have been handed down to you by your ancestors. They are part of your cultural inheritance that comes from those with whom you share blood. Again, this is something the Framers understood as they debated the new Constitution.

What this means is American conservatism must limit itself to defending the political order as defined by the Constitution. Since that order allows for unlimited changes to the document itself, not to mention unlimited interpretation of the plain text, conservatism is committed to defending a moving target. It is why American conservatism has always been, as Robert Lewis Dabney observed a century ago, “the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”

There is another problem for conservatism in America. The thing they wish to defend, even if they dismiss the centuries of innovation since its creation, is itself the product of the radical idea of the intentional society. The Framers started from the assumption that they could create the society they wanted because society is, as John Locke understood, the result of human labor and intention. Maker’s knowledge lets man create a society as he would make anything else.

If it is perfectly moral and possible to create a nation out of the wilderness, then it is perfectly moral and possible to recreate that nation, even create a new nation from the old, to meet the demands of the present. In other words, American conservatism must defend that which it claims to oppose, because what it defends is the radical idea that we can make our society into anything we choose. America is, after all, a radical experiment in self-government.

There is a way out of this that some conservatives proposed. Pat Buchanan, for example, argued that the Constitution was the result of British people living in the New World for two centuries. The final organizing document by the Framers was simply the only option possible for the American people. Defending the Constitution is a defense of the people and history behind it, not whatever abstract political theories some people claim as the inspiration for the Constitution.

That may be true, but it runs into that same old problem. The people who created that world and the political order that sprang from it are long gone, along with their sense of history and identity. That America was not just European. It was almost exclusively British and Protestant. America will soon be majority-minority and the founding stock is down to ten percent of the population. Defending something that no longer exists is no more possible than defending a moving target.

All of this brings us to why there will not be a “new right” that emerges from the wreckage of professional conservatism. There never was a right in America, at least not since the North conquered the South. Once the last bits of hierarchy were washed from the continent in the blood of the Confederacy, conservatism ceased to be a thing that could take root in the New World. America is and continues to be a radical experiment, a perpetual revolution seeking to reach the end of history.

This is not all bad news. Conservatism in America has always been a reaction to the peculiar ideology of progressivism which emerged in the 19th century. Conservatism sought to create an alternative ideology as an antidote to progressivism. The failure of conservatism may lead to a greater understanding that the antidote to ideology is not ideology but the anathematization of ideology. In its place there may grow a chemotherapy to the cancer of ideology.

This could be helped by the fact that we seem to be reaching the end of the ideological age, as what we call liberal democracy, but is the mature version of American progressivism, reaches its end. The last ideological states are all in a crisis, which has put the ideology in crisis. Just as failure anathematized the other great ideologies, the failure of Western liberalism may do the same for progressivism, perhaps opening the way to an organic organizing ethos.

A Z Potpourri

Posted on March 29, 2024 by thezman

It is appropriate that on this Good Friday I have carried your questions up the hill to my studio and answered them in the podcast. Lots of good ones this time. No questions about Easter, which was not a surprise, as I do not do a lot on religion. Putting the show together, it occurred to me that we will soon see a push to remove Good Friday from the federal calendar of holidays.

Easter has already been greatly minimized. When I was a kid, spring break was always before or after Easter. The schools did an Easter show where the little kids were dressed up in silly outfits to entertain the parents. We also made Easter baskets and colored eggs in school, which is banned now. I think the Easter basket tradition has pretty much gone away entirely at this point.

The current war on the phrase “Christ is King” is a no doubt the first shots in the coming war on the remains of public Christianity. If they manage to make public professions of Christian faith “antisemitic” then it will not be long before Republican governors are banning all displays of Christianity in the public square. It may sound crazy, but most of what is normal today was lunacy just a few years ago.

For now, at least, I hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and Easter weekend with your friends and family. For the Orthodox readers, you will have to wait another month this year, but that is how it goes some years. Catholics, of course, will be saying a special thanks for the Episcopal Church. It is a reminder that no matter how terrible things have gotten for Catholics, it can always get worse.

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Micro-Nationalism
Not Even Wrong
Ben Shapiro
Candace Owens
Blacks
Immigration
Women
Modern Crap
Suburban Peasants
We are Doomed

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The Floor Is Yours

Posted on March 28, 2024 by thezman

Note: Tuesday I was on the Killstream with Ethan Ralph. It was a fun conversation about a bunch of different things. Here is the link. I arrive at about the three hour mark, so fast forward to 3:37:45.

One of the projects that has been on the drawing board for far too long is to upgrade this site and add some additional features. One reason for this is simply to freshen things up a bit, as the site design is over a decade old. There is something to say for tradition, but people expect websites to freshen up their style every so often. A site that sticks with an old look and feel is often assumed to be abandoned or poorly maintained, so giving this site a refresh is something that is long overdue.

Another motivation behind a refresh is to add some features. The problem with using WordPress is most of the plugins do not work. I am not on the WordPress server so do not mention that for the sixth million time. I host my own site, but I use the open-source WordPress software that anyone can download. Even the plugins you can buy are a roll of the dice in terms of functionality. The people behind them often have names that look like an eye chart and the support is what you would expect.

Moving off of WordPress opens the door for other options that are more professional and have real people supporting the product. One option is Locals, which is connected to Rumble in some way. This is becoming popular with the livestreaming crowd as it offers a paywall service, credit card processing and additional features to go along with the normal livestream chat services. The trouble is that it is intended for video creators, so it lacks the features a writer expects.

Substack is slowly building out its services. They can host audio and video, which people with a green door subs already know. They started out as a writing platform, so they have a lot of useful features for writers. More than a few “magazines” now run on Substack using their custom design features. The risk here is being on a platform that could easily be taken over by lunatics. There is already a war against the site by lunatics, so it is not hard to see where that is headed.

The final service that people use is Gumroad. Paul Ramsey and Keith Woods have been on this platform for a long time. This is a small platform, so they are not throwing people off for heresy. This is a familiar pattern now. The video site D-Live did this until the hammer came down and they lost most of their user base, because they were forced to ban the blasphemers. Given the site is owned by a very strange little man from over the rainbow, one should not be optimistic about its future.

The alternative to using a service is to roll my own site, which avoids many of the problems of using a service and opens the door to customization. I could also keep the Substack and SubscribeStar platforms and allow those users to access pay-per-view content on the main site. Both have API’s for this, which means this site would talk to those sites to see if a user here is a user there. If so, then the user here would be treated as a paid customer here.

This would mean that users can get behind the green door two additional ways, as I can set up crypto and cash payments here. For those too paranoid to use a credit card online, you could send cash, checks, gold doubloons or whatever you have through the mail and get a green door account. The crypto users could also send their favorite form of digital money. I could also integrate GabPay, which I am told works pretty well now, even though they could not service VDare.

If you start with a clean sheet of paper, then it is the time to rethink how something works or does not work. It may be time to rethink some features or add new features, like a better comment section or even a group messaging system. Comment sections have been killed off mostly due to the fact that site owners get the sads when they see the comments, but this site has a lively comment section, so making it better by adding additional features sounds like a good idea.

Right away, I think a better editing system is in order. I have tried a million different plugins for this and all of them are terrible. I tried one that I paid for but I suspect the publisher sabotaged it, as it stopped working for some mysterious reason and they stopped responding to my inquiries. Creating a comment system that works as intended from the start would solve this. That means the ability to format comments and edit them as long as you are a registered user.

Along the same lines, I think green door users should blow past the spam filters, so they never have to wait for moderation. I have to check the moderation queue a dozen times a day, and it is always regular users in there. Not only is that annoying to the user, but it is very annoying to me. It would also be useful for green door users to have the ability to limit the visibility of their posts to other green door users. This is a common feature on sports sites that looks like a good idea.

The final novelty I have in mind is to let green door users create their own page and post their own material. The kook sites like Daily Kos pioneered this years ago and it would add a nice wrinkle to the site. There are commenters who put a lot of time and effort into their commentary, so if they had a way to do long form commentary within the context of the comment stream, it might make for a more dynamic site. Who knows, maybe it would attract other writers.

The point of this post is to solicit ideas and demands. Next month I want to flesh out the basic design and then get to work building it before summer. With the economy slowing down I will have some free time from the day job, so I may as well put the time to good use and upgrade the site. Feel free to send e-mails or comment here about what you would like to see or not like to see. The point of the upgrade is to make the site better for the readers and users, so the floor is yours.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Illiberal Multiracialism

Posted on March 27, 2024 by thezman

This post on Twitter from Vivek Ramaswamy got a lot of attention and not the good kind of attention he has been expert at attracting. Instead, the replies were full of baffled people wondering how he could say such stupid things. To many people, it looked like the sort of race-swapping that is common with Hollywood. Instead of black Vikings he was saying there were black roman emperors. He then went on to claim that these truths were somehow erased from history.

As many pointed out, there were no black emperors and Philip the Arab looked like a typical Roman at the time, as in European, because North Africa was settled by people from the other side of the Mediterranean. The “browning” of North Africa happened long after the Romans were gone. The best part of that thread is he was buried by comments correcting him for his nonsense statements. Maybe white people have reached a point where they will not tolerate this stuff.

The post, however, highlights the impossibility of a multiracial society that operates along liberal democratic lines. Liberal democracy assumes a natural equality among people in that we are born with natural entitlements. Therefore, we get equal rights and privileges in a liberal society. That is fine for an ad hoc arrangement. Pirate ships were egalitarian in their operations, for example, but the pirate ship was never intended to be a permanent arrangement among the diverse men.

Human societies assume permanence and that means they require a story for how the society came together. The Romans, for example, had the legend of Romulus and Remus who founded the city of Rome. The Rape of the Sabine Women is another important part of the story of the Roman people. The origin myths of a people are specific to a people; thus, their history is specific to them. In other words, a people’s identity is exclusive to them.

This is why a multiracial egalitarian society is impossible. You have different people with different identities rooted in different origin stories. Any effort to write the origin of one people into the story of the other people will be viewed as theft. Vivek Ramaswamy in that tweet was trying to steal a part of European history on order to insert his people into your story. No doubt he saw the resistance to this as a slight against him and people like him. This is now part of his people’s story.

You see this with the old race divide in America. Black people have an origin story that depends on white people being the villain. White people have an origin story that does not include black people. Inserting blacks into the white story requires whites to accept guilt for things they did not do and shame for ancestors who made it possible for any of us to have this discussion. It simply cannot work, so any effort to make it work aggravates the natural racial friction in America.

This does not mean a multiracial society is unworkable. The Russian Federation is a multiracial society that generally works. For a thousand years the dominant Russians have ruled lands with significant minority groups, almost all on the fringes of their territory, while avoiding many of the problems we see in the West. The most difficult period was in the early years of communism when the egalitarian impulse tried to eradicate the natural differences between people.

What you see in modern Russia is peaceful separation. The fringe areas populated by various non-Russian ethnicities are left to have their own culture and traditions, as long as they respect their place in Russian society. These ethnic groups have an identity that is tangled up in their relationship with Russians, but also separate and distinct from that of the typical Russian. The modern Russian state encourages intolerance of ethnic agitation among the Russians and the Russian minorities.

Much of the rhetoric you will hear from Russian officials about their ethnic minorities will sound like the nonsense we get from Western rulers, but it has a different purpose, and it is received by different ears. Russian multiculturalism assumes a dominant Russian culture that includes a tolerance of minority cultures, as long as they never create trouble for the majority. In other words, the Russians take some pride in not having wiped out these minorities from their lands.

Applying this civilizational model to the West would mean a European identity that assumes a natural dominance over European lands and the people in those lands, regardless of their minority identity. This sort of cultural chauvinism would allow blacks in America, for example, to hang onto their story of victimhood only so far as it gives them pride in who they are now. Antiwhite animosity would be suppressed officially and unofficially through general intolerance.

Of course, this means applying different standards to different people and that is where things run afoul of the liberal project. In order to maintain peaceful separation, it requires different standards of conduct and mutual exclusivity in large parts of the origin story of the different racial identities. The story of black people would include whites, but not in a negative way, but also exclude whites. The same would hold for the story of the white population with regards to blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and others.

There are obvious problems with the concept, not the least of which is the narcotic of egalitarianism that flows through the veins of every European. Before the West can appropriate a civilizational model to managing their now multiracial societies, they must first break their addiction to egalitarianism and natural rights. That will most likely only come through a struggle to avoid extinction. Even so, civilizationalism may be the only path forward for the West if it chooses to survive.

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