The End Of Free Will

Posted on June 26, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night we had a great show, one of the greatest shows ever, on Iran and Islam, with a special mystery guest who has a lot of first hand experience with both topics. You can listen to the replay here and here.

The late polemicist Christopher Hitchens famous quipped, “Yes, I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.” He was addressing the paradoxical nature of free will in that even if it were an illusion, and we could somehow figure that out, we would be forced to carry on as if it were real. Everything about how we understand ourselves as human beings, and how we get on with one another, depends on the assumption that we have choices and we make those choices freely.

The reason for that is our societies and even our own minds are organized around prescriptive requirements, not descriptive ones. Sure, we know not to step off a roof as the facts tell us we will accelerate toward the sidewalk below, until we reach the sidewalk and suddenly decelerate. It is that rapid deceleration that kills us and that is a fact not subject to opinion. The reason we believe it is immoral to jump off a roof or kill yourself in any other way has nothing to do with physics.

Suicide is a choice. In Western societies at this point in time, making that choice, regardless of the circumstances, is immoral. In other times and other places, suicide was an honorable option. The Japanese used to treat ritual suicide as an honorable end for a man who faced a disgraceful end. The West used to have the idea of leaving a doomed man alone with a bottle of whiskey and revolver. The former was to gain the required courage to use the latter for the honorable act.

As an aside, this is why the liberal project was doomed from the start. It assumed that there was a universally correct way for humans to organize their societies. We could use reason and observations of nature to arrive at the correct way we ought and ought not act and how we should and should not organize our societies. We can reason our way to a set of universal moral principles. Then we can reason our way to building a society around those moral principles.

The liberal project, all of the ideologies that have spring from it, assumes that human beings are programmed to work best in a specific sort of society. We naturally function at our best within a specific set of rules. If we can figure out those rules and then figure out how to impose them, man will be liberated from the oppression of having to live against his nature within a hostile set of rules. This is the goal of libertarianism, anarchism, communism, progressivism and so on.

This brings us back to the issue of free will. Ideologies fail, because they assume that once the rules are imposed, people no longer have to make choices between the things they desire. Free will is no longer be necessary. Even if free will is an illusion, however, it is one necessary for us to be human beings, rather than moist robots. There is something about the nature of man that requires the belief in free will. Without this illusion, if that is what it is, we cease to be human and cease to exist.

It is probably why we lack the language to discuss the descriptive world in purely descriptive terms. You see that in this post by W. M. Briggs. He is taking on a post by former physicist and current YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, who tries to argue that free will is a myth and you should stop believing in it. As Briggs notes, her language, even when discussing the laws of physics, is prescriptive. Even when we think descriptively, we end up using prescriptive language.

This crackpot notion that we would be better off if we chose to not believe in free will is not new to Sabine Hossenfelder. Like all such arguments, the first person to think about it was the first man with enough free time to waste some of it on contemplating pointless questions like do we have free will? Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the best proof of that is philosophy. Everywhere there have been idle hands we find the philosopher and Hell follows with him.

Of course, free will is a slippery concept. There is libertarian free will, which argues that for any choice we make, we could have chosen otherwise, even if all of the conditions that could impact our decision were identical. For example, you chose to arrive at work on time, but you could have arrived earlier or later, even assuming some negative or positive consequences to the choices. Like so much of libertarianism, this makes sense if you forget that humans live in societies with other humans.

The other form of free will involves morality. Often, oaths have a line where the person taking the oath testifies that he is taking the oath of his own free will. In criminal proceedings we differentiate between knowingly committing a crime and inadvertently or accidentally committing a crime. The driver who purposely runs down a pedestrian is treated differently from the person who does so while trying to avoid a group of school children because of our notion of free will.

Both conceptualizations of free will are most likely illusions, like much of what we think we understand about the natural world. What we think of as physical reality is probably a simplified illusion of reality. Our brains evolved to conceptualize the parts of reality we need to understand in order for our genes to advance to the next round. The concept of free will is just another item in the toolkit. Even our ability to question our conceptualization of reality is probably an illusion.

That is the problem with Sabine Hossenfelder’s argument. Whether or not free will, however defined, is a real thing does not matter, other than it being a useful topic around which to build a post. Whether you believe it or not does not matter, but once you decide to act as if it is not real, then you enter the world in which it is perfectly acceptable to remove the people who cannot fit your model of society. In the end, every ideologue must reject free will in order to pull the trigger.

That is the end of the free will debate. The age of ideology has taught us that in order to have societies that accommodate human nature, we must choose to organize ourselves as comes naturally to use. That means leaving others to organize themselves as comes naturally to them. Once you start down the path of rejecting free will, you end up on the road that leads to industrial slaughter and the menticide that now promises to extinguish the Western world.

We have free will and if we did not have it, we would have no choice but to invent as it is the only way we can live as human beings. That means we have a choice as to how we organize ourselves. We must collectively choose our metaphysics and our morality and choose how we deal with those who undermine our choices. Those who choose otherwise, in effect, choose not to be us. Therefore, we have the choice to exclude them from us, even choosing to use force if necessary.

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Hebrewism

Posted on June 25, 2025 by thezman

One of the many strange things to come out of the short war between Israel and Iran is the fact that many of our politicians seem to worship Jewish people. It could also be that they worship Israel or perhaps some combination of both. They talk about Israel and the Jewish people as if they are gods sent to earth as a test. Those who commit themselves to protecting these magical beings are the people of the light, while everyone else is in the forever darkness.

This is not a new thing. It has always been assumed that Washington loves Israel because Israel pays cash for its politicians and there is nothing a politician loves more than cash, except maybe the person handing him the cash. The Israel lobby has been one of the most fearsome advocacy groups in America for a long time. Men like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan questioned their influence and were then run out of town for the crime of mentioning the Israel lobby.

The most recent example of this is Ted Cruz, who went on the Tucker Carlson show and bragged that his sole purpose for being in the Senate is to serve Israel. “I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the largest defender of Israel in the United States.” The cavalier way in which he says these things tells us that it is the default position for Washington pols. His subsequent attempts to justify this on religious grounds say there is more to it.

This is where most people shift the focus from old fashion graft to the political marketplace, which in this case means Christian Zionism. This is the heresy that claims the establishment of Israel and the return of the Jewish diaspora to the Holy Land signals the Second Coming. Not content to let events take their course, believers assume they have a duty to help this process along. Their fanatical support for pro-Israel politicians is part of the scheme.

It is a weird cult, for sure, but how many people follow it is unknown. The numbers cannot be large enough to explain the behavior of Washington. Another culprit is Dispensationalism, which is a madhouse collection of crackpot ideas loosely based in the uneducated reading of Scripture. Despite its fringe status, it has had a strong influence on Evangelicals, who do make up a sizable voting bloc. These voters have had a big influence on Republican political theatrics.

Still another cause is dominion theology, which is a low church Protestant version of Catholic integralism that has existed in Europe for centuries. This is the political argument that says America should be governed by Christians and organized around their understanding of Scripture. Since there is a lot of overlap between these people and the Christian Zionist, the result is an assertion that it is the Christian duty of Americans to support Israel.

The trouble with these explanations is that politicians ignore the voters all the time because most are not subject to a genuine political marketplace. Only ten percent of elected officials face competitive races. The rest are in seats held by one party of the other in perpetuity, so they have no reason to fear the voters. Ted Cruz, for example, just has to make the transplants in Dallas and Houston happy and these are not people spending their nights reading Scripture.

While it is risky to oppose the Israel lobby, no politician risks anything by ignoring the Christian Zionist voters or any voting bloc. Republicans worry more about the black vote, which goes 90% Democrat, than their white Christian voters. The reason for that is they worry about being called racist by their pals in Washington. They could, if they chose, take the same approach to the Israel lobby, if official Washington decided they have had enough of the Israel business.

Not even Democrats, who have always made antiwar noises, bothered to speak up in the last round of warmongering. Many joined their Republican colleagues in pledging undying support for Israel. They went well beyond what is typically expected from the Israel lobby to the point where it looked as if most of our elected officials had joined a cult that worships Jewish people. Many of them sounded deranged as they screamed for blood in another pointless war of choice.

That may be the missing piece to this. Washington is deep into the racket stage of imperial decline, which means everyone inside Washington looks at the political system in the same way the locals look at the Walmart in a ghetto riot. There is no higher purpose to the life of the politician, as he is just a vehicle for pillaging what remains of the white middle-class and the old America they represent. Israel worship may fill the void that exist where republican virtue once existed.

It is not a simple, linear explanation for the behavior, which is what most people prefer, but it does tie these other causes together. The calls and emails these politicians get from nutty Christian Zionist are validation for their sincere professions of faith in the great people of Israel. The max donation handshakes they get from men in little hats after each speech on behalf of Israel is proof that they are on the side of angels, rather than paid spokesman for a parasitic economic elite.

No man, not even the most debased and corrupt, views himself as the villain in the great story of his life. For Washington politicians, whose lives are defined by the corruption that is Washington, Hebrewism offers a way to see themselves, even for a little while, as selfless heroes. Ted Cruz got to feel like the white hat for a day after that Tucker Carlson sit-down, even though his voters savaged him. He can live without the love of his voters, as long as he has his little gods in little hats.

Mullahs, Rabbis & Priests

Posted on June 24, 2025 by thezman

One of the things ignored about the outbreak of war between Iran, Israel and the United States is that it brought the great religions into conflict. The prior wars in the region have been mostly Israel against one of the Muslim countries or the United States against one of the Muslim countries. This is the first time that all three religions were in open conflict with one another. The conflict reveals some things about the state of each of the Abrahamic religions and the cultures they represent.

The cause of the war, of course, was the sneak attack by Israel, and supported by the United States, aimed at decapitating the Iranian government. Putting everything about the region aside, it was an insane act. Israel is a tiny country, while Iran is a big country, so any war between the two will be lopsided. The only way this made any sense is if Israel assumed they would get help from the United States, but even then, it was a reckless act that wreaks of desperation.

That is the part ignored in the coverage. Israel is a country with very serious structural problems right now. The demographics are the main driver. While Israel fertility is above replacement, it is largely due to the ultra-orthodox (Haredi). Their fertility rate is a whopping 6.48 children per woman. Meanwhile, the Westernized, cosmopolitan population has a below replacement TFR. This demographic revolution is stressing Israeli politics at every level.

There is also the issue of Israeli identity, which was born out of the conflict with the British and then flowered in the endless conflicts with the Arabs. To be an Israeli means to be the David in a perpetual fight against a Goliath. The trouble is the supply of Goliaths is down to one, Iran. In many respects, the Israeli war against Iran is as much about the Israeli need for an enemy as anything else. Israel needs the fear of Persia to keep its population from turning on each other.

We see something similar with the United States. Generations of reckless disregard by the parasitic ruling elite have left America drained of its asabiyyah. The political class senses this, even if they lack the intellect to understand it, so they are always looking for an enemy to unite against. Notice the lack of dissenting voices in Washington as Trump stumbled through the crisis. They were just happy to once again have a common enemy to justify their existence.

As an aside, this may explain some of the Israel worship. The actors hired to fill out the roles in our political theater no longer wave the flag or speak in traditionally patriotic terms, because none of them believe in the ideals of America. Many of them hate those ideals as being white. That leaves a great void. For many, filling that with a bizarre worship of Israel and Jewish people is the answer. Hollow men will fill their souls with anything to avoid hearing the sound of their hollowness.

Putting that aside, this crisis and the proxy war with Russia all have the feel of a bad remake of a classic film because the United States is no longer a nation of people who optimistically look to the future. It is a land of old people and foreigners who fear what may lie ahead. As with Israel, the old gods now haunt the people. Christianity in America is in a shambles and the American ideology that grew out of American Protestantism has curdled into a collection of resentments.

The United States is now a land of priests, with no natural authority to proselytize to the rest of the world. The instinct to lecture remains, but the purpose and authority are gone, so we get men with no moral authority telling the rest of the world how they should and should not act. Notice how much they love saying, “Iran should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” It makes them feel like it is a Sunday long ago and they are in the pulpit of a packed church.

Then we have Iran, which for half a century has been the symbol of radical Islam for most of the West. The Iran of today was born at the very beginning of the Islamic spiritual awakening that has defined the region ever since. Even though Iran is a Shia society, Shia Islam is a minority sect within Islam, it has been viewed as the center of political Islam, largely due to its size. Iran also has a unique identity within the Arab world, considering itself Persian rather than Arab.

Iran has always been the most sophisticated society within the Arab world, due to its history and its religion. Shia Islam is like high church Protestantism while Sunni Islam is like low church Protestantism. Within Shia Islam, you do not get to call yourself an Imam just because you read the Koran. It takes years of study and mentorship before you join the clerical class. Like low church Protestantism, any Sunni can set up shop as a holy man and start developing a following.

Like Israel and the United States, the old gods are starting to fade within Iran, as the population settled into modernity. The revolutionary fervor is long gone, as most of that generation are now dead. The religious fervor has now settled into a cultural and political framework that defines an increasingly modern population. Like all modern people, Iran has seen a collapse in fertility. At the start of the revolution, it had a TFR of 6.38 and now the TFR stands at 1.68.

Like Israel and the United States, Iran is now suffering from an identity crisis as it faces the challenges brought on by modernity. The religious structures remain in place, which are supposed to give meaning and purpose to life, but the population is struggling to remember the authority upon which those structures are built. In the cities, people care more about convenience than Islam. The same cancer eating away at the West is eating away at Iranian society.

This is why the great war between the three major religions looked like a ridiculous pantomime of past conflicts. The audience was expected to sing along with the familiar tunes but was too old or too disinterested to get into it. The actors themselves are too exhausted to put on more than a token effort. The three great civilizations as represented by the three great religions are exhausted. Both sense the future excludes them, but that is too terrifying to consider.

Then What?

Posted on June 23, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film The Grapes of Wrath, a post about the neocon forever wars, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly gardening videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the critical questions in any strategy is “Then what?” This question must be asked with every proposed move and counter move. The question is both a reminder and an assumption that the other players will react to your move. Good strategy focuses on the range of possibilities to each move and is prepared for them. Bad strategy just assumes the move will work and good things will flow from it. This is often referred to as the lack of second-order thinking.

For the last five years this has been at the center of American politics. The regime has clearly lost the ability to ask, much less answer the question, “Then what?” The war in Ukraine is in its fourth year because no one in the West could bother to ask the question, much less answer it. President Trump now has himself in a terrible jam because no one on his team thought to ask this question when they were plotting the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack on Iran.

It does not appear that any of them asked the question when planning the operation against the Iranian bunker facilities. By the looks of it, they settled on this attack because they assumed it would satisfy the Israelis, satisfy the crazies in Washington screaming for blood and provide an off-ramp in the conflict. Signaling to Iran that it was a one-time thing was supposed to induce them back to the bargaining table or at least encourage them to seek a cease fire in the war.

The assumed answer to the magic question was all the good things the administration needs to happen in order to wriggle free from this trap. Perhaps sensing that it was not the magic bullet, they immediately started to beg China to pressure Iran into not closing the Strait of Hormuz. Presumably they asked the Russians to do the same thing, as the Iranian foreign minister is in Moscow this week. Closing the strait would bring the whole thing crashing down on Trump’s head.

While the Iranians are prepared to close the strait, they have not done so, but they continue to send missiles at Israel and Israel is firing back. It is clear that the Iranians are not going to come back to the bargaining table, and they have no intention of ending the war with Israel. Of course, Israel is now demanding more strikes because it was never about Iranian nukes for them. It was always about inducing the United States into a ground war to topple the Iranian government.

President Trump is justifiably getting savaged by his voters, but in fairness to him he now lives in a town that operates like Jonestown. Everyone worships Israel or at least pretends they worship Israel. It is beyond creepy to see everyone in Washington act like Israel is the god of the world. Some sort of mass psychosis has swept the ruling class where they are convinced that their purpose in life is to serve the needs of this flyspeck of a country halfway around the world.

That just makes the crisis worse for the Trump administration. Even if they can have a moment of clarity and see the danger, they are limited in their options. If they do no more than provide support for Israel, they remain entangled in a war of attrition, while the crazies scream for blood, holding the domestic agenda hostage. They cannot make a deal with Iran, as the Israel lobby will never permit it. The only way out is to end the Israel lobby and that means tanks in the streets.

That is the thing about the question at the start. It not only forces the person answering it to think about the possible reactions from the other players, but it forces them to think clearly about the other players. If the Trump people had a realistic understanding of Israel and the Israel lobby, they would know they are dealing with hostile aliens who look at the United States as a Walmart during a ghetto riot. They would know how to treat them as adversaries, rather than allies or clients.

The same can be said for the approach to Ukraine. That has been pushed off to the side, but the neocons have not gone away. As things reach a critical point in the war this autumn, they will be back to extort the Trump admin. Given the duplicity of the Republican Party, the big, beautiful bill will probably still be held hostage in the Senate come the autumn, so it will be another round of extortion in order to give the neocons what they want in the war against Russia.

In a way, the crisis engulfing the Trump administration in the realm of foreign policy is a microcosm of what faces America. The MAGA movement finally got their man into the White House with the clear support of the public. There is a team in place that can execute the domestic agenda. Then what? The answer so far has been a revolt in the judiciary against the Trump agenda, the Republican Party holding his legislative agenda hostage, and the usual suspects subverting his foreign policy.

Cancer does not leave the body just because the body voted to live. The cancer must be removed and that is the answer to the question, “Then what?” That appears to be impossible within the current rules, which brings us back to the question that seems to haunt this age. The current crisis is a gordian knot that cannot be untied within the rules of the system, so then what? For now, the Trump people do not have the answer, but the answer is there, just waiting its turn.

The Foreign Policy Mule

Posted on June 20, 2025 by thezman

Trump has only been in office for five months, but he has quickly managed to smash up a bunch of things. One of those things is the relationship with Europe, which has been in place since the end of the Cold War. By walking away from Project Ukraine, he is putting the world on notice that things will never be the same between the United States and the rest of the NATO countries.

Something similar seems to be developing in the Middle East. He went for the homerun shot against Iran, but that failed, leaving the region on the edge of war and Israel scrambling to avoid Iranian missiles. Trump is left with two terrible choices, either of which probably breaks the old order in the region. He can launch and attack that probably fails or cut a deal, either option looks like a loss.

There is the third option to commit to a long air war against Iran, but you do not win wars with just air power. That was the lesson of Iraq. It took a million-man army to topple the regime. Iran is bigger, tougher, and more stable than Iraq under Saddam, so toppling the government will be much more difficult. The long air war would most likely be a very expensive failure.

The way things currently sit, the end result of this Iran – Israel war will be a new security arrangement in the Middle East. Israel will not be able to threaten her neighbors, expecting the United States to cash the checks she writes. That will be a revolutionary change in a region that needs it. Whatever it looks like in the end, it will be the result of Trump smashing and breaking things.

That is the show this week. As with so many other things, Trump is not the man with a plan, but a man with a hammer. He breaks the old stuff, often by his mere existence, but this opens the way for new stuff. He has broken the political order in Washington and now that he has real power, he is breaking the order abroad. He is the Mule, the destroyer of worlds, bringing the end of empire.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Trumps Foreign Policy
Project Ukraine
Israel
China
Fast Versus Slow
Trump’s Legacy

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Trump’s China Syndrome

Posted on June 19, 2025 by thezman

One of the reliable bits of news that has emerged from the Iran crisis is that at some point, the Trump team radically changed the terms of the deal. Initially, they were willing to do the deal Iran signed with Obama, with some minor changes. The main change was to remove the time limit on its enforcement. Otherwise, Iran was close to agreeing to a deal with the Trump administration. Then out of the blue the Trump team made new demands and soon after we get the Israel sneak attack.

If you listen to what Trump says, he is all over the map, but the one thing he has been repeating recently is the demand that Iran give up all nuclear technology, even for medical uses, and abandon its missile program. This has been joined by a new demand for unconditional surrender. What he means by that last bit is a bit hazy as countries tend not to surrender when they are holding their own. They never surrender to a country that they are not currently fighting.

That is another consistent theme with the Trump people. They keep slipping up when they talk about the war. Instead of “they”, as in Israel or Israel and Iran, Trump people will say “we”, as in Israel and the United States. Then they will correct themselves or use some weasel words. Ted Cruz made this blunder when talking with Tucker Carlson and has been squirming ever since. This hints at the fact the Israel sneak attack was part of a larger strategy by the White House.

The question no one asks is why the administration would want a war with Iran when it brings so many risks. The closest we get is the chanting of the line, “Iran must never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” Even if you accept that moral assertion, Iran was ready to sign over its nukes. The deal they were willing to sign was by all accounts a comprehensive agreement. Even if the negotiations were a ruse, to setup the sneak attack, why would Trump want this?

The most popular answer floating around is they did not want a war. They thought this Peal Harbor style sneak attack would work and by work it would cause the regime to collapse or immediately sue for peace. The Japanese thought the same thing, supposedly, so it makes some sense. Now that Iran is firing missiles at Israel, with no signs of letting up, the White House has a problem. They either go up the escalatory ladder or risk looking weak by taking a deal.

That is possible, but there is another possibility. When it comes to foreign policy, Trump has had one obsession and that is China. When he came down the escalator ten years ago, he was talking about China ripping us off. People forget that this was going to be his main issue until he stumbled upon immigration. When his comments about immigration caught fire, he became a hawk on immigration, but China was always right there at the top of his agenda.

Some say he has an Israel obsession, which is true. He seems to worship Jewish people, a common folk religion in Washington. In his first term, however, he delivered nothing of value to Israel. He was adamant about staying out of new wars in the Middle East and even wanted to close the bases in Syria and Iraq. Starting a war now, less than six months into his do-over term, makes no sense. The country is against war and his base will revolt if he goes to war.

Of course, if he signs off on an attack and Iran crumbles, then he looks like a genius to the average American who is incapable of thinking about what comes next. They will flip back to watching sports while muttering about how Trump wins again. Like it or not, that is how things work in American politics. On the other hand, if he signs off on a strike and it results in more escalation, he risks becoming George Bush. He would be worse than Bush, as people actually trusted Trump.

This raises another angle to this. China is deeply involved with Iran. They have signed a half trillion-dollar investment deal with Iran. They own 80% of the South Pars gas field, part of the biggest gas deposit on earth. They have just completed a railway that links China to Iran. Trains from Xi’an, the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi, started arriving at the Aprin Dry Port near Tehran in late May. All industrial and military goods will now go from China to Iran, bypassing the US navy.

The immediate effect of this is it allows Iran to reach the global economy without having to navigate around the American blockade. This allows Iran to get around the sanctions regime that is central to American policy. It would also make Iran a key cross dock for trade between the region and Asia. Of course, the big effect is it makes BRICS a big player in the region, challenging American hegemony. China, Russia, and India can now easily do business with the region.

That may be the reason for the change in approach by the White House. That railroad begins operation and all of a sudden, they change the terms of the deal to something they know Iran can never accept. This is, ironically enough, the same scheme the Biden people used to induce a war in Ukraine. Notice that the West is still demanding Russia surrender as part of their “negotiations.” The best way to get and keep a war is to demand unconditional surrender.

Another thing that supports this theory is that Trump is a transactional guy who thinks about everything in terms of money. He would understand right away the economic aspects of this China – Iran relationship. It is a threat to American control of the energy markets, something that Trump understands well. He looks at BRICS as part of China’s plan to supplant the United States as the global economic hegemon. A war with Iran, therefore, would appeal to him.

There is also the fact that Trump seems to think he can peel countries away from China in order to isolate her. He has flat out said this regarding Russia. He has convinced himself that he will talk Putin into abandoning China in exchange for some empty words from Trump and maybe a White House visit. He probably thinks he can pry Iran lose from China as well, either by force or by threats. It worked with Panama, so he could think the same trick will work with Iran.

In the end, this looming war with Iran looks more like the start of a war with China, rather than just a war for Israel. The Israelis are getting clobbered with missile strikes, so if Trump were acting out of love for Israel, he would not be escalating with Iran, threatening a new war in the region. No doubt Israel is happy to participate for cynical reasons, but the real driver is probably the China issue. It has been his obsession since he came down the escalator and remains so now.

Time Dilation

Posted on June 18, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night, America’s two leading moderate voices held a special episode to discuss the looming war with Iran. You can listen here.

One of the things skipped past in the flurry of happenings over the last ten days is that the Trump administration has abandoned Ukraine. Pete Hegseth said as much in Congressional testimony where he said there were no plans to send Ukraine additional weapons or ask Congress for more money. At the G7 in Canada, Trump blew off a meeting with Zelensky without saying a word. The reason given was the crisis in the Middle East, which is now the priority.

For the Iran hawks, this is being greeted as good news as they assume this means Trump is onboard with their war schemes, but it may simply be the result of the clash between short term and long-term thinking. Like the this war scheme, Project Ukraine was a short-term operation. All involved assumed it would be a quick and glorious victory, but it turned into a long grind. The American empire does not do long grinds, so it is onto the next military project.

Project Ukraine did not become a long grind by accident. It was made so through deliberate actions by the Russians. Once they realized in 2022, after the war started, that the West was never going to negotiate, they quickly reorganized themselves and their war plans to turn it into a long grind. They correctly surmised that if they wanted a long-term solution to NATO, they needed to win a war of attrition with NATO, so they made Ukraine into a war of attrition.

It is why Trump’s deal making with Russia failed. He assumed that the people who got everything about Russian wrong to this point were right that Russia would jump at a short-term solution, so they used that as leverage. What he learned was that those people advising him were all wrong and Russia was unwilling to take a short-term deal like a ceasefire or a quick peace. Trump has dropped normalization talks with Russia because he sees that he has no cards to play.

Project Ukraine is an important lesson that no one in Washington is ready to grasp as the empire stumbles its way into another Middle East quagmire. The same people who were entirely wrong about Project Iraq two decades ago turned out to be wrong about Project Ukraine, but the results are much worse. The empire was eventually able to subdue Iraq and install a neutral government, but it came with long-term costs that continue to drain the imperial coffers.

The lesson of Iraq should have been that there are no short-term solutions to long-term problems and long-term problems come with long-term costs. People forget that the war with Iraq was touted as the solution to the Middle East problem. Even if it did not result in regime change in Iran, it would sufficiently terrify them that they would cease to be a problem as far as Washington was concerned. Twenty-five years on and Trump is on the edge of becoming George Bush.

We are getting the flickers of this gap between the long-term and the short-term in the war between Israel and Iran. When Washington and Tel Aviv cooked up the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack, it had two base assumptions. They assumed it would work and by work it would collapse the Iranian regime. There was no thought to what would happen after the sneak attack. There was no thought to what could happen if it did not work exactly as the planners promised.

Note that the Iranians have turned this into a long-term issue. They have more missiles and drones than Iran has attack missiles and air defense. Iran is ten times the size of Israel, so they can take a lot of damage and survive. Just as Ukraine found itself in a numbers game that favored the Russians, Israel is facing a similar math problem with the Iranians now. It is why they are demanding Trump join the war. They cannot overcome the math of their war with Iran.

If you can bear listening to the cries for blood from the usual suspects in Washington, what you hear is a demand for quick action. They insist that the Iranian regime is fragile, and it just needs to be pushed over in order to get regime change. These are the same people who said the same things about Iraq in the Bush years and said the same things about Russia just a few years ago. There is no talk of what comes next, because like Ted Cruz, they are incapable of such thinking.

What we are seeing with Iran is the same time dilation that has haunted the American empire since the end of the Cold War. Perhaps it is the result of foreign policy being run by short-term visitors or perhaps it is the nature of democratic societies. No matter the cause, America operates in a world where the clocks always speed forward to the desired result. In the rest of the world, clocks move at their own pace and often that pace is very slow and deliberate, as we see with Ukraine.

An attack on Iran assumes the clocks speed up, but that is unlikely. For all its problems, Iran is a stable society. It has survived fifty years of American sanctions. It survived a monstrous war against Iraq. They think in the long term and seem to have been thinking for a long time about what will happen if America makes war on them. Victory over Iran means a long, bloody fight, one where the clocks move slowly. What would come after that is decades of blood and treasure.

Ironically, the clock is now ticking on the Trump admin. They can take the bait and fall into another grinding war of attrition. That is the quick answer and the way the trap has been constructed by the trap makers. They want to speed up time for Trump so he cannot wait for better choices. On the other hand, they can just wait to see if better choices emerge over time. In Trump’s office, there are two clocks. One moves normally and the other races forward. Which one does he choose?

Remembering What Comes Next

Posted on June 17, 2025 by thezman

Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be who is really in charge of the country.

Thirty years ago, when Bill Clinton was caught chasing interns around the Oval Office, many assumed it was the end of him. Instead, he not only wriggled free of the scandal, and many other scandals, but he seemed to be stronger for it. The reason is Clinton was an extraordinarily clever man. He was not a smart man, in the sense that he could anticipate and avoid problems. Smart men do not have sex with interns. He was clever like a fox in that he could always find a way to slip out of a trap.

The Clintons, of course, set the tone for post-Cold War politics. They brought to Washington the style of politics that is now normal. They formalized both narrative politics, which relies on abductive reasoning to win debates. They also introduced things like media spin and media jamming where they sought to control the narratives at any given moment by overwhelming the system with their messaging. The Clintons made politics into a guerilla media war.

This sort of politics selects for clever over smart. When everything is done in the moment, there is no patience for deliberative politics. In the current Middle East crisis, for example, the information space is controlled by actors chanting rehearsed lines to the other actors in the media. The mainstream media is a Greek chorus and whoever can get the chorus chanting their chants wins. In such an environment there is no room for well thought our arguments and serious debate.

This is a world that favors the clever over the smart. In fact, it strongly selects for the clever and selects against the smart. The guy who tries to make a well-constructed argument from facts and reason does not get invited onto cable chat shows, podcasts or gain a following in social media. On the other hand, the person who is glib and quick on his feet will be in great demand. If he is also entertaining, then he can become a media star and help set the tone of political discourse.

What the Clintons did was merge entertainment and politics so that public policy is often sold to the public as political entertainment. Genuine debates, if they happen at all, are done behind the scenes. Usually, policy is crafted by the powerful interests that have come to dominate a specific domain. Foreign policy, for example, is run by the Israel lobby and the neocons. The political show of the last week around Iran, is about selling it to Trump voters, not genuinely debating the issue.

Another factor here is the explosion of media. Fifty years ago, this sort of politics was impossible as Americans were not living in a 24×7 theater. They consumed news slowly and deliberately through newspapers. Television news was limited to a half hour in the evening and maybe an hour on Sunday. The media menticide of this age was not possible as everyone lived outside the great public theater. Today, most everyone is plugged into the mass media hivemind.

This produces a childishness in the people, because the focus is always on the moment rather than what comes after the moment. Like children, they want their desires satisfied right now, not at some future date. This in turn favors the performers who can deliver that satisfaction right now. As a result, our public discourse is like a comedian rattling off jokes in rapid succession. He may pause and enjoy with the audience the jokes that land, but he quickly moves on from the ones that fail.

You see this with the crisis in the Middle East. The people who caused the crisis quickly moved to the next bit when their first scheme failed. There has been no discussion of what they did or even why they did it, beyond the emotive gibberish, which is intended to set up the next bit. The people who were wrong about the decapitation strike and wrong about the response, are now dancing around on stage promising more good vibes with their next performance.

This is the cause of the collective Gell-Mann amnesia. This is the cognitive bias where people notice the errors in the media about topics they know but trust the same media on the topics about which they know little. Collectively this results in a public fully aware that the media is fake news but still believing what is in the media. Similarly, people who are perpetually wrong, perhaps degenerately so, can continue to control the media narratives on their particular subject.

This sort of public environment rewards those who can quickly slip out of a self-created mess and focus the crowd on the next performance. The clever man, taken to the extreme, is devoid of both a conscience and second order thinking. He lives only in the moment, responding only to the crowd. Like any other actor, he exists only while he is on the stage, performing his role. It is why our politicians look and act like the kids from the high school theater club.

Even the producers of our political theater are not immune to it. They also lack second order thinking. They never ask themselves, “then what?”, after they have settled on some scheme. They just get busy training up the performers. We see this with the Middle East crisis. No one thought about what happens if the scheme fails or what happens if it succeeds. No one thought about what might happen after this caper because they are biologically incapable of second order thinking.

In the fullness of time, the Clinton era will be seen as an inflection point, but it would be unfair to treat them as a cause. Bill Clinton was more of a proof of concept for the emerging mass media politics of the internet age. People forget that Reagan was a trained actor who relied on Hollywood for his public performances. Bill Clinton was the logical extension of what started with Reagan. Bill Clinton was the new performative politics for the mass media age.

The result is we are now dominated by clever men. The genuinely intelligent who possess second order thinking are forced to work within a system that rewards the clever at the expense of the smart. The smart people must find a way to arrange the clever so that they manage to arrive at the right answer while they are searching for a clever way to win the internet or win the news cycle. The smart seek to control the fire that causes the shadows on the cave wall.

This must inevitably fail because the cultural environment favors the clever man who maximizes the moment over the man who thinks long term. The clever guy who can quickly craft a compelling, plausible argument that appeals to the immediate desires of the crowd will always win out over those who seek the right answer. The result is a politics that is more like a variety show than politics. We live from moment to moment, never remembering and never thinking about what comes next.

The American Alcibiades

Posted on June 16, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the film Accountant 2, a post about our rulers love of narrative, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the features of the Trump era has been the sense of chaos that seems to surround everything about the man. Whether as a candidate, as president or as the hero in the fight against the villains of Washington, there is always a whirlwind of action around him that makes understanding it difficult. We now see this in his foreign policy which looks more like a game of flipping over tables and smashing things than a coherent strategy to advance national interests.

The most recent example is the caper to regime change Iran in the middle of negotiations to end the half century cold war with them. Despite the mountain of lies, it is clear that the plan was to decapitate the Iranian government, attack the nuclear facilities and then usher in a regime change. Israel went after military leaders, political leaders, and the top nuclear scientists. They also attacked what they thought were their key nodes in their air defense system.

Despite Trump’s denials, it is clear that the Trump admin knew about this scheme from the start and helped make it possible. When it looked like it was successful, Trump posted about how negotiations were just a ruse to get the Iranians into a false sense of security, but he changed gears once it was clear the scheme failed. He also claimed to have vetoed the killing of Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader of Iran, but that is just damage control after the fact.

As an aside, if you want to get a sense of who really runs American foreign policy, look at the parallels between this sneak attack on Iran and the sneak attack on the Russian strategic bombers. Both used pre-programmed drones launched from trucks. Both used negotiations as a ruse. Both served the interests of those who wanted to halt negotiations with the targeted party. In both of these cases, we see the same fingerprints, but who belongs to those fingerprints is not clear.

That aside, the plan failed. After the initial shock, Iran was able to quickly respond to the attacks with what has been a very effective missile campaign. They also got their air defense system back online and now Israel jets have to operate well outside of their range, which limits what Israel can attack inside Iran. Israel, of course, is lobbying Trump to attack Iran, but so far, he has resisted. The rumor at the moment is that Israel is quietly asking for a truce.

To make things more complicated, Chinese aircraft are landing in Iran, presumably with missiles for Iran. These could also be North Korean missiles. China is Iran’s biggest customer for energy products. China is an 80% owner in the South Pars gas field, which is part of the North Dome field, the biggest on earth. Of course, Russia has a security agreement with Iran and is no doubt providing intelligence for Iranian missile strikes on key targets inside Israel.

On the surface, this looks like a disaster. There is no reason for Iran to do a deal with Washington after this betrayal of basic diplomatic norms. There is no reason for Iran to take the deal on officer, if they decided to come back to the table. They have leverage now, so they will demand much more from Trump. The Israel lobby is now in crisis as the options here are terrible. If Trump green lights an attack on Iran’s nuclear bunkers, we probably get a regional war that America cannot afford.

The Israel lobby does not care about the damage done to America or the American people, but they do care about Israel. What the weekend revealed is that the vaunted Israel air defense system is a paper tiger. Iran was able to overload it and is now hitting targets inside Israel at will. A regional war could very well mean the end of Israel or at least turning Tel Aviv into Gaza. Expect to hear the usual big mouths like Lindsay Graham demanding a truce in the air war this week.

Attacking Iran brings other risks. It is clear that Iran can reach out and touch American assets in the region. That includes naval assets. Trump called off the operation against the Houthis due to both the cost and the risk to American assets. Iran is orders of magnitude more powerful than Yemen. Then you have the American bases in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. There are secret bases that do not appear on any map in Saudi Arabia where the U.S. military operates.

Then there is the elephant in the room. If Trump escalates, the Iranians will probably close the Strait of Hormuz. The Houthis will shut off access to the Red Sea. That means a third of the world’s oil supply stops flowing. What Trump has to ponder, therefore, is whether this is worth gas lines and perhaps rationing. Disrupt the flow of energy and the rest of the world gets involved in this war. The rest of the word does not care about the psychological wellbeing of the Israelis.

Rational people look at this and conclude that Trump will do the rational thing and avoid taking the bait, while working to get a truce. Rational people forget that a rational actor would never have signed off on the sneak attack. Two data points does not make a pattern, but Trump has signed off on two Pearl Harbor style schemes in just the few months he has been in office. This morning brings news that an “armada” of refueling planes left for the Middle East.

Note also that Stealth Bombers have been positioned at Diego Garcia for months, which is from where an attack on Iran’s nuclear bunkers would be launched. These are the planes that can drop the bunker busters that could possibly get to the underground facilities housing Iran’s nuclear program. Trump has been talking about Iran and Israel maybe getting a truce deal done. Given Trumps habit of attacking the people with whom he is negotiating, an attack in Iran is probably imminent.

Regardless of whether Trump throws gasoline on this fire or not, the region is now in chaos and that seems to please Trump. Not only that, but his base of support in the United States is sharply divided. The old people who let Fox News do their thinking are waving the flag and screaming for blood. The younger side takes the phrase “America First” literally, so they oppose another pointless war of choice. Trump is now blasting people like Tucker Carlson over this situation.

That seems to be the goal of the Trump chaos. Another feature of the Trump era is that he never gains anything from the chaos. In this situation, he has the Israel Lobby on their heels, so he could get an Iran deal done that ends this issue for good. There is no reason to think he will take advantage of the opportunity. It is why the way to bet is on an attack this week. It is the one option guaranteed to create more chaos, which seems to be the narcotic of Trump’s choosing.

Perhaps this is just a symptom. Trump as the Mule from the Asimov novel could be what happens at the end of democratic empire. Athens also suffered from a mercurial figure at the end of their empire. Alcibiades, known for his personal ambition, ego and unpredictable behavior, was a key figure in the downfall of Athens. Perhaps that is what we are seeing with Trump. He is the American Alcibiades presiding over the final phase of the American empire.

We Are Doomed

Posted on June 13, 2025 by thezman

The show was recorded while the usual suspects were starting yet another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran. At this point it is hard to know where it leads, but we know Trump is powerless to do anything about it. It is sadly clear over the last three administrations that no White House runs foreign policy. The important decisions are made by people outside the political system.

That is why war is on the list of things that could bring doom to America. The people making these decisions are not thinking about what is best for the United States or the American people. Therefore, the United States and the American people could easily be sacrificed, deliberately or accidentally, in service to the alien cause. Civilization ending wars tend to be tragic accidents.

Even so, America is in no danger of being conquered militarily, so it is hard to see war as the direct cause of our demise. War could trigger other things, like a massive spike in oil prices that then set off a financial collapse. If Iran decides it needs a regional war and blows up Saudi oil facilities, then we could see an energy crisis. Unlike the 1970’s, an energy crisis today could trigger collapse.

That is the show for this Friday the 13th. I go through the possible end times scenarios and rank them on a scale of one to ten. A bit of a spoiler, but war is pretty far down the list of possible doomsday scenarios. It could be a triggering event that eventually leads to one of the other items on the list, but war itself is not a likely end for us. The most likely cause of our doom is, well, you will just have to listen.