A useful way to experience the lunacy of Progressives is to discuss guns with your local lefty. Most people understand that gun control is worthless as a tool to control crime or even reduce gun accidents. The people using guns in crime are by definition not the sort to obey gun laws. Similarly, the people inclined to shoot themselves or friends while playing William Tell will find some way to off themselves, no matter what you do. The only result of gun control is to harass honest citizens exercising their rights as citizens.

The mountain of data in support of liberalized gun laws is beyond dispute. Even if you are not inclined to dig into the details, the fundamental logic is manifest. People who abide by the laws are, by definition, not the sort to break the laws. That means people who break the law are not interested in any new laws you are passing. Therefore, passing gun laws will only inconvenience those who follow the law and do nothing to stop the criminals. At best, gun laws are just a tool of the state to go after the more clever street gangs.

Despite all this, Progressives obsess over gun laws. This story from a few months ago is a good example. The people who support this sort of stuff know nothing about guns, gun culture or gun shows. Yet, they remain convinced that gun shows resemble an arms bizarre in the Middle East, where bearded men buy and sell military gear. Further, they remain convinced that gun shows are exempt from the thousands of gun laws on the books. They are convinced that “gun show loophole” is a real thing.

That’s what makes guns a useful topic for understanding the Prog mind. All of us have had the experience where the Prog friend or relative starts going on about guns. Someone then steps forward to correct all of their errors about guns and gun laws. Then someone gently explains to them the anti-logic at the core of gun control. The Prog will take correction, nod along and seem to understand the material, but then soon after they will be repeating the same gun control slogans they were saying the last time.

It’s tempting to think it is a mental illness and to some degree it is. It’s just the nature of the fanatic. They see only that which confirms the nature of their fanaticism. That simple and seemingly effective conversation you had with the blue haired girl at the office about guns may as well have been in Swahili. As soon as she confronted disconfirmation, her receptors shut down and she went onto autopilot, appearing to comprehend what you were saying, but not really hearing any of it. You were Charlie Brown’s teacher.

It’s why it is an error to think they are stupid or dishonest. Those things may be true, but the reality is, they don’t know they are doing it. It’s as natural to them as blinking is to the living. Gun control has become an obsession with Progs, because they are convinced it harms white people, particularly white men. Again, this is not malice of forethought. It is instinctual as the Prog faith is an explicit rejection of the culture created by western white males. Gun control reminds them of this and it makes them feel good, so they embrace it.

This is why gun control has been a political topic for more than fifty years. G. Gordon Liddy, when he was in the Nixon administration, worked on gun control. That was the early 1970’s. His task was to help craft regulations to get the so-called “Saturday Night Special” off the streets, particularity the streets of DC. That term came into the lexicon via the Gun Control Act of 1968. In other words, like the “gun show loophole”, 1960’s Prog fanatics invented a phrase to market gun control, despite the fact there was no such thing.

That’s what makes the gun issue useful in understanding the Prog mind. Gun control as a social policy has been thoroughly discredited, but that does not dissuade the Left from pushing gun control. It’s why it is pointless to think you can change their mind or get them to reconsider their position. The Prog is beyond the reach of facts and reason. They are the truest of true believers committed to a cause they put above all else. You can no more talk them out of their beliefs than talk a Muslim out of his faith.

This applies to all issues, not just guns. Take a look at this video of Tucker Carlson talking with the neocon nutter, Ralph Peters. The neocons have been wrong about everything with regards to foreign policy. Despite the disastrous results, they continue to advocate for the same polices that have been discredited by reality. At one point, Peters admits to having been wrong about Iraq, but then seamlessly presses the case for repeating the mistake in Syria. It’s as if he tuned out his own admission of failure.

The lesson here is that there’s no point in trying to reason with a fanatic. Whether or not the neocons are the Trotsky wing of the Progs or the Buckleyites is debatable, but there is no debate about their fanaticism with regards to Muslims and the Russians. The endless fake news about Russia and the election is rooted in neocon fanaticism. They are sure Putin is Tsar Alexander III threatening to impose the May Laws on Manhattan. The abject lunacy of it, like the lunacy of gun control, has no effect on the mind of these fanatics.

There’s another lesson here. The NRA has been the one effective organization in the culture wars of the last half century. They do not win every fight, but they have managed to claw back territory after having lost some fights in the 60’s and 70’s. The reason is they avoided party politics and the temptations of political access, They stuck to building majorities in favor of their issues. They win because they transcend Washington politics and build large coalitions in favor of gun rights. Our team can learn a lot from the NRA.

This week I try to build on lessons learned from week one. I have decided to create both a full episode and a collection of sub-episodes. The full podcast will be on my Spreaker page and on my YouTube channel. The sub-episodes will be on the YouTube channel only as that is just easier for me. Converting these things to the YouTube format and uploading them is a pain. There has to be a better way, but for now I’ll just suffer for my art.

Here is the direct download link

I have a passing interest in the Church of England and its American variation, the Episcopal Church. An old friend is in the church so I get some first hand descriptions of what it is like to be in a dying institution. That’s the only way to describe the Episcopal Church. Attendance declines every year as old members die off and new members never materialize. Go into an Episcopal service and you can’t help but notice that most everyone is a senior. The actuarial tables are the church’s greatest enemy.

Of course, church attendance has always skewed a little older. Young people tend not to be attracted to the faith, even if their parents regularly attend services. As people get older, have families and begin to sink roots, they get more involved in their faith and attend services regularly. That’s the trouble with the mainline Protestant religions. The young are not coming back once they start having families. That means their children are not raised in the faith. As a result, these churches are now in a death spiral.

The story is familiar to anyone who has been paying attention. These churches made the decision to chase the latest social fads in the 70’s and 80’s, hoping to make themselves more appealing to the young. The only thing they did was make themselves less attractive to people interested in being part of a traditional Christian sect. It was not just in the pews, but in the clergy as well. Those feeling the call found that the church in which they were raised was not interested in defending and maintaining the faith.

The result is the clergy slowly radicalized. First came the women and then the feminist women. Soon they invited in the homosexuals and the clergy started looking like the faculty of a liberal arts college. That’s when the pews started to empty out. Why bother going to church, when you can get the same liberal lecture from television? That’s what started the decline in church attendance. Instead of offering a shelter from the storm, they decided to chase an over-served market – radical Progressives.

Talking to my friend, he tells me that there are elements within the Episcopal Church that know what must be done to save the church. The trouble is they are outgunned and out maneuvered by the radicals. That’s the thing. The conservatives make it a priority to serve the church and serve God, while the radicals are always scheming to advance the radical agenda. The conservatives are constantly outmaneuvered because they are not playing the political games. They end up getting marginalized, despite having numbers.

Of course, young people seeking to join the clergy are confronted by a politicized bureaucracy full of homosexuals and social justice warriors, who are mainly interested in advancing their own agenda within the church. Like the old commie radicals of yesteryear, the current radicals use struggle sessions and purity tests to boil off those who would challenge their agenda. Imagine you’re a young priest and you are told you now have to celebrate a special mass for the transgendered.

The General Synod of the Church of England has voted to ‘welcome transgender people’ by considering preparing a church service as a way to “mark a person’s gender transition”.
The official church of the United Kingdom voted four to one in favour amongst the Clergy and more than two to one amongst the Laity (members who are not Clergy) at the four-day Synod, the motion reading:

“That this Synod, recognising the need for transgender people to be welcomed and affirmed in their parish church, call on the House of Bishops to consider whether some nationally commended liturgical materials might be prepared to mark a person’s gender transition.”

Vicar of Lancaster Priory Church, Chris Newlands, posed the motion to the Synod, saying he would speak on behalf of transgender people as the church’s Synod has none.

He said: “We need to be aware of the impact that our actions – be them welcome or rejection – have on the members of the trans community.

“I hope that we can make a powerful statement that we believe trans people are cherished and loved by God, who created them.”

The BBC reports that, “Such a service would not be a second baptism, however, as the Church’s teaching is that humans are made in the image of God – transcending gender – and baptism takes place only once.”

Archbishop of York Dr. John Sentamu said there was a need for vicars “to welcome and affirm, in their parish, transgender people”, adding that the “theology has to be done” by the House of Bishops and “can be done very quickly”.

Notice the feminine language. They want to “welcome and affirm” trannies into their churches. I’d like these guys to point to the passage in the Bible that covers men who like to play dress up or people so mentally unbalanced they believe their sex organs are imaginary. Ministering to the mentally ill has a place in a church, but that’s not what they are saying. They want to make mutilating people a sacrament. Imagine being forced to embrace this sort of madness. It is no wonder the sane clergy are leaving.

Of course, it’s also why the pews are empty. It’s another reminder that Progressives must be treated like rage zombies or highly contagious disease carriers. Once you let one into your organization, it will set about bringing in more of its kind. In this case, it was women in the clergy, then feminists, then homosexuals. They have reached the point where few inside the church care at all about the faith. It’s all about the latest Progressive fads and how they can outrage the remaining members of their congregations.

The weaponization of the law, particularly the civil courts has become so common, that we no longer notice it. The most obvious example is when  someone gets acquitted of a crime, but then the alleged victim goes to civil court for damages. Alternatively, some hate thinker gets off in state court, but the the feds come in and charge the guy with civil rights violations. It’s an obvious abuse of the law in order to get around the jury system, but it is now just another feature of a system more concerned with vengeance than justice.

The college rape hoax phenomenon is another variation on this. A mentally unstable coed makes claims that can never be proved, but the school, fearing Title IX litigation, punishes the accused anyway. The SPLC is doing something similar with their litigation against the website, The Daily Stormer. The point of the suit is to shut down the site, because the people at the SPLC don’t like the content. Even if the case is eventually tossed, the point is to intimidate the owner and anyone who holds similar opinions.

This bizarre story is a new twist on how the lawfare game is being played.

Tumblr has released account information for close to 300 anonymous users to a revenge porn victim in what online privacy advocates say is a major violation of the First Amendment.

The 27-year-old New York victim, who first learned that an unauthorized video of her having sex with a boyfriend when she was just 17 had been posted on Tumblr ​​last winter, plans to sue the users for disseminating child pornography.

“The ultimate goal is to expose these people,” said attorney Daniel Szalkiewicz, who represents the Bronx victim.

“There is no First Amendment protection for child porn,” Szalkiewicz said.

On Monday​,​ Tumblr complied with a June 7 order issued by a Manhattan state court judge to release the email addresses and account names of 281 Tumblr users.

You’ll notice the legal base stealing. Is this woman a victim? We can’t know that until it is established that the video was shot without her consent. If she agreed to the filming, which is most likely, then she is the victim of her own stupidity. Then you have the legal fiction that this is child pornography. No one in their right mind would call this child porn. Clearly, her lawyer is hoping that fear of being tarred with “child porn” is enough to coerce a settlement. The Mafia would be envious of this maneuver.

What we have now is litigation in the shadow legal system. The lawyer has coerced the company into aiding him in what amounts to a shakedown. The lawyer is also using the media to threaten his targets with exposure and all that comes with it, unless they agree to pay him off. It is a clever legal trap. In order for these people to defend themselves, they first have to admit to viewing the material. A First Amendment defense would argue that they had a right to look at what was posted on the site, even if it was illegally posted.

Once you admit to viewing the material, you run the risk of losing the initial claim and then having to argue about whether it constitutes a violation of child porn laws. You don’t have to be a graduate of Harvard Law to see that the easiest way out of this trap is to settle as a group and get some sort of non-disclosure in place. In other words, this case is not brought in the interest of justice or to mitigate harm done to the alleged victim. It is a shake down and what most people would consider extortion, even if the court does not.

This goes back to the Servile State post. No one in this sordid relationship is free in any meaningful way. The big bad company is being forced to supervise its users, to make sure they do not violate the ever shifting morality of the people in charge of the state. If they fail in that duty, they are forced to help punish the users they did not properly supervise, by ratting them out to the state. The result here is that everyone is responsible for everyone else. It turns everyone into both a slave and slave master.

That’s the other aspect of lawfare. It is uncivilized. Into the Middle Ages, tribes in Europe still practiced the wergeld. This was the price put upon a man’s life based on his rank. If a rich man killed a poor man, by accident or on purpose, he could pay the victims family in gold for the value of his life. You can see how this can quickly get out of hand. Not only would rich people feel free to kill inconvenient poor people, they would be tempted to kill their families too. No family to pay, means to no wergeld to pay.

That’s what we have with lawfare. Instead of the law determining if a crime has been committed and then determining the guilt or innocence of the accused, the process is about determining the price of this woman’s honor, as it were. In the future, the courts may be forced to post prices for posting revenge porn so that angry ex-boyfriends know in advance the risk of hitting send. At the same time, young women will now know what they can get for agreeing to be filmed having sex with that guy they picked up at the bar.

That’s sarcasm, obviously, but lawfare is not a good thing for a society. What cases like this do is undermine the respect for law. It is why the bar associations used to forbid advertising on TV. They knew that greasy sleezeballs in their ranks would go trolling for slip and fall cases and phony disability claims. That’s been the result and as a consequence the public’s respect for lawyers has declined. If you want to have a low-trust society, erode public faith in the law. That’s exactly what lawfare is doing in America.

I read Tyler Cowen’s blog a couple of times a week, despite the fact he banned me from his site. I mostly skim the comments looking for familiar names. There are a handful of commenters there that post interesting responses. Cowen is not all that interesting. He’s Thomas Friedman without the mega-rich wife. Here’s Friedman’s wife’s home, in which she permits him to live. Banal rump-swabbery pays well, but not as well as marrying the daughter of a billionaire, so Cowen remains a junior rump-swab.

Looking for material, I stumbled upon this in Cowen’s links. It’s not a very interesting article, so don’t bother reading it. What is interesting is the author is a guy named Reihan Salam and he wants to reorganize American politics to be more like some place not called America, perhaps his home country of Bangladesh. Proportional representation has always been antithetical to the American creed, because it breeds the sort of tribalism and sectarianism a continental sized country can never afford.

One of the reasons many of us gave up on conventional politics is that in the mainstream, guys with weird, unpronounceable names, from foreign lands keep demanding we change our country to suit their needs. That would be tolerable if the response was “shut up and learn how to be Americans.” Instead, the political class goes out of its way to celebrate these people. Our rulers make it clear that the opinions of newly arrived boat people count for more than the opinions of the natives, who made the country possible.

Putting aside my justifiable xenophobia, take a look at Salam’s biography.

Salam was born in Brooklyn. His parents are Bangladeshi-born immigrants who arrived in New York in 1976; his father is an accountant and his mother is a dietician. Salam attended Stuyvesant High School and Cornell University before transferring to Harvard University, where he was a member of the Signet Society and lived in Pforzheimer House. He graduated from Harvard in 2001 with a degree in Social Studies.

Everything sounds like an American success story until that last line. What we have is a classic example of how the affirmative action game is played at the highest levels. Most likely he went into Cornell through the agricultural college, which has much lower admissions standards. He then transferred into Harvard because he ticked the right boxes and was placed into a nonsense track like social studies. Barak Obama was at least able to pass the bar. Salam has yet to prove he can stock shelves at a grocery store.

That’s not the worst of it. According to his bio, “Salam has been described as Literary Brooklyn’s Favorite Conservative. He has written that he intends to pump ideas into the bloodstream of American conservatism”. If there is any question about the dullness of Reihan Salam, it is answered right there. Conservatism, by definition, is the rejection of exactly what he claims as his goal. Conservatism, allegedly, is not about chasing the latest fads or ideas. It is the preservation of the proven and the traditional.

That’s not the worst of it. Again, according to his bio, “He believes it is “racist” for people to date only those of their own race.” Everyone knows that a cornerstone of conservatism is race mixing. Of course, that’s a requirement to get invited to the “right-wing” platforms on which he regularly performs. Salam is a regular on Slate, Vice, NPR, The Bill Maher Show, Chris Mathews Show and The Colbert Report. He also writes for National Review when he is not too busy with all of his other media ventures.

You can certainly see why Salam is Brooklyn’s favorite conservative. He’s a regular on all of their favorite shows and writes for their favorite publications. He even holds most of their favorite opinions. If you were one of those ridiculous racists who thinks words have meaning, you would erroneously think that Salam is just playing a well crafted role as the house broken conservative. That would be ridiculous. Salam is a conservative in the tradition of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan. What sort of bigot are you?

Obviously, Reihan Salam is just another guy working the Conservative Inc hustle. His utility lies entirely in the fact he has brown skin and a weird name. Instead of being an ornament on the ankle bracelet of Elizabeth Warren, he is a token on the charm bracelet of Rich Lowry. Even so, he is always ready to better deal himself and become a full-throated Progressive if there is a well paid opening. For now, he’s perfectly willing to convince people that today’s Progressive lunacy is tomorrow’s conservative dogma.

It’s why Conservatism is dead. It’s not just that they outsourced their movement to Asian migrants. It’s that they stopped being serious. They turned their thing into a parlor game, where they play a role the Left designed for them. Instead of being in opposition to the Left, they have embraced the morality of the Left, in order to party with the Left. If the public leaders of conservatism prefer to hang around degenerates like Bill Maher, rather than fight for the causes they claim to champion, why would anyone follow them?

Many on the alt-right make references to Weimar Germany and the rise of the NSDAP under Hitler. The Richard Spencer wing is particularly fond of Nazi aesthetics, the haircuts being the most obvious example. Part of it, of course, is owning the insult. If they are going to be called Nazis, they may as well own it. This is a time honored way of signalling a rejection of the prevailing morality. If you are going to be called a dirty hippy, you may as well grow your beard and stop bathing. The alt-right is doing the same thing.

It goes much further than simply adopting the Nazi aesthetics, though. Richard Spencer is fond of drawing comparisons between his thing and the rise of the Nazis in Weimar Germany. He’s not alone. Ryan Landry works from the “Weimerica” motif, in his blogging and his Daily Caller posts. The popular blogger, Brett Stevens, does a lot of this too. The alt-right is not in favor of invading the Sudetenland or partitioning Poland, but they think Weimar Germany is a good analog to the modern US.

I don’t think it works, though. Germany after the Great War was exhausted in every measurable way. It was not just cultural exhaustion. That was certainly part of it, but the heart of Europe was leveled by war. By the end, civilians on both sides were lacking in the necessities of life. The economic base was destroyed. The political classes and social classes were in ruins. Not since The Thirty Years War had Europe been so completely devastated. That does not compare with modern America or even modern Europe.

The utility of such a comparison is mostly on the economic front. Modern America is not suffering from wholesale price inflation due to money printing. We are, however, suffering from asset inflation. The value of homes and businesses, particularly publicly traded companies, has skyrocketed across the West. This is showing up in home owner rates, as young people are finding it hard to buy a home. As Steve Sailer pointed out, affordable family formation is at the heart of what ails modern America.

There’s also the unfathomable public debt. It is not just public debt. Private debt is at record levels and showing no signs of cresting. In fact, it is reasonable to say the world is entirely fueled by debt now. It was the German decision to fund their war effort with debt that led to the economic catastrophe following the war. It was debt that allowed them to make one disastrous decision after another, taking on more risk in a hope of winning a final victory over the Allies, and reaping the benefits of that victory.

The critical missing ingredient, though, is the massive cost of war. America can, if she is inclined, scale back the military-industrial complex, withdraw from policing the barbarian lands and stop playing big brother to Europe. America has good options for averting disaster and no one is dictating policy to us. German after the war had nothing but bad options and the Allies were doing everything possible to maximize the suffering. The soil in which the Nazis blossomed was vastly worse than what is birthing the alt-right today.

A better analogy may be Ireland under British rule or the British Raj. The resistance movements that evolved in those countries were not the result of desperation or a political void. The British, while no one’s idea of generous colonizers, were not ruthless conquerors either. Compared to other European countries, the Brits were sensible and humane administrators. They tried to work with local elites to maintain order. More than a few Indians, for example, were sent to England to be educated and trained.

Even so, they were still foreigners and the natives, like all people, chaffed at being ruled by foreigners. It is a truth of life that most people would rather be ruled by a tyrant from their own tribe than a benevolent king from a foreign tribe.The Irish and the Indians were no different. They wanted the British gone, despite the fact that the Brits were the best thing to happen to them. These nationalists were not motivated by the chaos of cultural collapse. They were motivated by a positive love of their people and their culture.

That’s what makes these nationalist movements a better analogs for what is going on in the West. The people signing onto populist and nationalist movements are not doing so because the state has failed. Ours is not an age of economic dislocation and political chaos. No one is going hungry or being thrown into the streets. What’s motivating these populist revolts is that the people who rule over us are no longer like us. They feel like foreigners, who have no regard for local customs and traditions.

Another reason these are better analogies is the Hindus and Irish were successful, long term movements that brought with them a widespread cultural component. The Nazis, in contrast, were losers whose legacy still haunts the West to this day. Emulating the tactics and philosophy of the Nazis is a good way to follow them into the dustbin of history. It may be a fun taunt, given the nature of the people who rule over us, but in the end, cheap taunts are not going to overthrow colonial rule. Only a legitimate counter culture can do it.

Steve Bannon famously said, “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken.” This is a long war. The alt-right would be wise to think about how to win a long, low grade culture war. That means building up the intellectual and cultural side, while also systematically throwing sand in the gears of the colonial machine. The path to victory is to make neo-liberalism too expensive to maintain and too unappealing to support. Think Michael Collins, not Joseph Goebbels.

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A century ago, Hilaire Belloc wrote in the The Servile State¹ that attempts to reform capitalism will lead to an economy in which the state dictates that certain people will work for others, who likewise must take care of them. Belloc called this the servile state. This is different from early arrangements in which slaves and serfs were the backbone of the economy. In those arrangements, the owner has a choice to not own slaves. It is also different from capitalism, in which everyone is politically free by law.

Belloc was a man of his age so he viewed economics through the goggles of socialism and the newly emergent industrial capitalism. In The Servile State, he was searching for an alternative to the destruction of liberty necessary with socialism and the instability inherent to capitalism. The former results in an inequality of political power, while the latter results in an inequality of material wealth. Eventually, a small number of people rule over the masses, who begin to resent their rulers, seeing them as tyrants.

What Belloc argued is that socialism is inevitably the state dictating to property holders how they can dispose of their property. The state does this either through direct ownership, or through legal requirements for the ownership and use of property. Political freedom is determined by the degree of freedom one has with regards his labor and the results of his labor.. Therefore, socialism must restrict the political liberty of citizens to the same degree that it controls property and labor of the citizens.

Capitalism puts ownership and control of property in the hands of the people. In pure capitalism or what we now call libertarianism, individuals not only control their labor and the results of their labor, they are politically free. In theory, men either labor for their own use or agree to labor for others. The state’s only purpose is to enforce contracts as all of the dealings between citizens is consensual and formalized in a contract. The appeal of capitalism, pure capitalism, is the allure of pure political freedom.

By the time Belloc was writing, it was clear that pure capitalism would inevitably result in the concentration of wealth. A small class of property owners would come to posses the bulk of the nation’s wealth. That means a class of people who were free and a class of people who were not free, because they could not own and control their own labor. This led to social instability and eventually violence. Belloc argued that attempts to reform capitalism through state action would result in something he called the Servile State.

Reforms to capitalism are always through the law. The state places limits on how the owners of property may use their property. This then leads to a negotiation between the state, which has the monopoly of force, and the property class, which has a monopoly of capital. The result is a system in which the state seeks to protect those without property by placing requirement in the capital owners. In return, the state require the masses to labor for the property class, under conditions set by the state.

The result is that the business is forced to hire people it may not wish to hire, but the state also dictates to labor how and when they can sell their labor. Put another way, the poor are forced to serve the rich, but the rich are forced to be generous to the poor, looking out for their welfare. It is a social contract enforced at the barrel of a gun. It has the inequality of capitalism and the lack of political liberty inherent in socialism. The Servile State is the worst elements of both economic systems.

Belloc could not see what was coming in the post-war era and he certainly had no idea what was coming with the technological revolution and the explosion of neo-liberal globalism. He was prescient, however, with regards to how English economic systems would evolve over time. Look around at the modern world and you see the world he described as the inevitable result of “reformed capitalism.” Today, employers hire whole teams of people who makes sure the rich and powerful follow the rules.

What’s been missing in the technological age is the other half of the equation. As the West de-industrialized, the enforcement of labor laws have fallen away. Masses of helot labor brought over from Asia into Silicon Valley, for example, worked under agreements they struck with the business owners. Tech companies love open borders as it gives them a loophole to avoid some of the constraints of the Servile State. The same is true at the unskilled end, where companies rely upon masses of labor from Latin America.

This is an untenable situation in its own right, but the coming automation of the American economy will result in an evolution of the Servile State. The Universal Basic Income is nothing more than a modern implementation of the sort of infringements on political liberty Belloc described a century ago. Property holders will be forced to care for the dispossessed and, inevitably, the state will put behavior rules on the dispossessed. The UBI will come with rules requiring the recipients to act a certain way.

You get a glimpse of this in the efforts to control political speech on-line. Social media companies get exceptions to anti-trust laws, permitting them to run monopolies. In exchange, they are tasked with policing dissent on behalf of the state. The users get “free access” to platforms like Faceberg and Twitter, just as long as they agree to the terms of service and accept discipline when they post subversive things. Imagine this system applied to the universal basic income or to access to your self-driving car.

Belloc’s alternative was something he and Chesterton called distributism. Some have argued that their economic ideas were proto-fascism, but that’s debatable. What Belloc argued for was the inverse of the Servile State. Instead of a strong central state, political authority would be distributed and diffused throughout society, while wealth concentration would be constrained locally though ad hoc arrangements and cultural institutions. The goal is to maximize liberty, while minimizing inequality.

Whether or not this is possible in the modern age is debatable. Belloc and Chesterton argued that this was the natural arrangement of Europe. They also argued that it required a strong and energetic Christian tradition. That ship has sailed in the West, but maybe it does not matter. There’s no getting around the fact that neo-liberalism may be economically stable, but it is wildly unstable culturally. The experience of Europe thus far suggests it is suicidal. How to address it may lie with globalism’s last critics.

Here is the debut episode of what I will call the Z-Cast, until I come up with a better name or I am chased off the internet. It is a first effort so it has all the flaws of every first effort, but you have to start somewhere. Every actor has his first role. Every surgeon has his first operation. Every hit-man has his first kill. I have a long way to go between here and good, but I’m hoping it is fun learning how to make the trip. Of course, comments and commentary are encourage.

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Recently, the government has seen fit to dump a collection of hobos into my part of the ghetto. For a long time we were bum free, then one day we had four or five camping in shrubbery, behind buildings and so forth. One was completely insane, running into the street screaming at people. The others just look like men down on their luck, as we used to say. They stay out of the way and they don’t panhandle, at least as far as I can tell.

The one guy I see, on my way to and from the office, never seems to move from the clump of bushes he now calls home. It was raining today and he had an umbrella, so he could guard his camp, I suppose. The bum’s life is a mystery to me, but my hunch is the sheer boredom of it alters them psychologically, assuming they are something close to sane before they hit the streets. This one looks like a drunk to me, but that’s a guess.

Still, imagine what it must be like to wake up every day knowing you have no reason to exist. The crazy ones are probably lucky in that regard. The drunks and drug addicts sober up long enough to realize they are just extra people that have no purpose and the world has no use for them. Presumably, their addictions are what landed them on the streets, but that realization is probably what keeps them there. What’s the point?

Once in my life, I was out of work for an extended period. The career I was in had run its course so I was in need of a course correction. I had some money put away that I could use to take some time off to figure out my next move. The first month was great. I enjoyed all the things I never had time to do when working. Then it got boring and my sleep started getting weird. I realized that I was not built for retirement or extended unemployment.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of the “work sets you free” types. I like goofing off as much as anyone. It’s just that I need a reason to get up in the morning. I need a purpose and it does not need to be a grand purpose. Even a job stocking shelves would be enough, just as long as I know I’m part of the world. I don’t think I’m an outlier. My general impression is most people have the itch that is best scratched by having a job.

Fear of the robot revolution mostly focuses on the economics of a world without work, but there is that other side and it may be more important. Let’s pretend the robots figure out how to keep us in material goods beyond any reasonable expectation. Without some purpose, lots of people will get bored and then go a little crazy. Crazy bums are a manageable problem. Crazy bored smart people may not be manageable.

That’s the other thing about the robot revolution. It’s assumed that the laboring classes will be hit first. That may not be the case. I was talking with a friend over the holiday and he is fairly sure he will be out of a career soon. He is in the money business and much of what he does is being taken over by software. The algorithms are so good there is no need for the smart guy who trades on math, rather than emotion or experience.

It’s not just that the machines are replacing people. What automation often does is reduce the skills required of certain jobs. In the industrial age, automation replaced the skilled craftsman with a local yokel, who would work cheap. Similarly, smart experienced people in the investment game are being replaced with younger, cheaper people who will push the green button when it flashes and the red button when it flashes, like bond traders do now.

The robot revolution is not going to happen overnight, but a lot of smart people in their middle years, see the writing on the wall. Baby Boomers have not prepared adequately for their retirement, but at least they had a job until retirement. The next generation is facing a great dislocation in the second half of their prime working years. If “greedy geezers” are warping our politics, just imagine what a wave of pissed off middle-aged people will do.

We may be getting a glimpse of it with the alt-right. It’s hard not to notice that the movement is mostly young males. There are plenty Gen-X people, but they are the geezers of the movement. The irreverence and subversiveness are only partially driven by youth. There’s a healthy disdain for the culture too. The alt-right is a rejection of the modern American culture, by people who think the culture has rejected them.

As the middle-aged people begin to wonder what’s the point, many will do like the hobos at the start of this post. They will find ways to lose themselves in drugs, booze and despondency. Some will get into the sort of dissident politics we see with the alt-right, while others may even find more radical ways to find purpose in their lives. Men need a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning. If work is not it, then something else will fill the void. The robot masters may learn that idle hands do the devil’s work.

Here’s an anecdote to consider. In my most recent travels, I was told by friends about a woman we know. She is about to leave her husband, who we also know. The two of them are in their mid-to-late-40’s and their children are teenagers. The man is just a normie, who was happy to live his live as a conventional man. His wife, in contrast, had sampled the narcotic of feminism in college. In marriage, she went from being a college feminist to being a petite bourgeoisie feminist, living in a comfortable suburb.

The women who never move past college feminism tend toward a strange hypocrisy in married life. They adopt the lifestyle of June Cleaver, but rant and rave about women’s issue to anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot. During elections, for example, they are sure that some candidate is plotting to stuff their uterus with Bibles and sew their legs shut. They also over-indulge in the artsy lifestyle. The women in question was into local theater and visual arts, aping the modern carny aesthetic.

In the case of this particular woman, it also meant embracing the latest Progressive lunacies. Her daughter declared herself a lesbian in high school and is now demanding everyone pretend she is a male. One son was put on female hormones, even though he displayed no signs of insanity. It’s child abuse, of course, but it is the latest thing for middle-aged feminist loonies. Of course, she has gone overboard into social activism, almost all of which revolves around the crotch. Feminism is mostly a crotch fetish now.

We tend to think of feminism as a young woman’s game, but the real damage done to society is by the middle-aged feminists. They are like the post-graduate drug dealers that hang around high school kids, offering them booze and drugs. Not content with having thrown their own lives away, they give meaning to their lives by helping the next generation destroy itself. That’s the modern feminist. Her singular purpose is to pass the virus onto the next generation, while simultaneously ruining the lives of her peers.

When you step back from the rhetoric, feminism has always been a tantrum against biological reality. Nature has assigned narrow roles to the sexes. Men are wired to mate as often as possible with as many females as possible. Women, in contrast, are built to select a high status male and keep him around for protection of themselves and their off-spring. The pair-bonding we see outside of sub-Saharan Africa is a delicate balance that requires a complex social structure to maintain. Feminism is a tirade against this reality.

The reason feminism may have such a strong effect on middle-aged women is a combination of biological reality and modern youth culture. Women usually start having their babies in their mid-20’s. Some wait longer, but by mid-30’s most women are done with babies. This means that middle-aged women, like the one discussed at the start, coming to the end of their biological road in their 40’s. They created life and brought it to the point where it can take care of itself, so hey no longer have an obvious role.

That’s one half. The other half and maybe the real cause of this late onset lunacy we call feminism, is youth culture. Everyone feels the cold shoulder of our youth obsessed modern societies. For the longest time, men were accused of having mid-life crises, where they would get in better physical shape, buy a sports car and maybe trade the old lady in for a younger model. This is not all wrong, Most men reading this who are over 40 know exactly what this means. You’re no longer young and it kinda sucks, but you deal with it.

Women have a much more difficult problem in our modern youth culture. Men can still get women well into their old age. All they need is money and just enough to impress a younger women. There’s a reason old rich guys have young hot wives or girlfriends. Just ask our president about that. Old guys can still make babies too. I know a few men who started having kids in their late 40’s. Their wives were in their early 30’s. Put less delicately, a man still has a reason to exist well into his old age, socially and biologically.

The middle-aged woman therefore runs out of road in her 40’s and looks around wondering why she is suddenly invisible. Young men are not interested, even if she has money. Men her age are lusting after young flesh. That’s the biology. Then there is the fact that there’s no longer an important social role for women in their middle years. In a prior age, a woman would enter these years helping her children prepare themselves for marriage and settled life. Today, those tasks are turned over to schools and pop culture.

Feminism, at least for middle-aged women, may simply be a manifestation of the mid-life crisis. These females are like wasps in fall. The queen wasp has stopped laying eggs and the males are no longer needed to gather food for the hive. So, they go a bit bonkers and that’s why every public trash barrel has a million wasps around it. They have a brief orgy of self-indulgence before they die. Middle-aged women, finding themselves with no obvious purpose, take up the mania of feminism. It is their mid-wife crisis.