Replacement Theory

Posted on January 23, 2024 by thezman

195

Imagine a medieval city is under siege and the prince of the city is in his palace supposedly working with his advisors on how to break the siege. The people of the city are rationing food as no one knows how long the siege will last. The prince and his people, however, are living the good life. Now, imagine that the prince is quietly plotting a way to fling open the gates of the city at night so that the besiegers can rush in and have their way with the people of the city.

It sounds like an impossible scenario, but that is the world in which we find ourselves with regards to the immigration issue. The Constitution gives the federal government control over immigration policy. Supreme court rulings have recognized Congress as having plenary power over all aspects of immigration. It is one of those powers exclusive to the federal government. Congress passes laws on immigration and it is the duty of the executive to enforce them.

Of course, that is not happening. Congress has been refusing to pass sensible immigration laws for decades now. Whenever the Republicans have power, they start talking about amnesty. When Democrats have power, they start talking about granting citizenship to every human on earth. Meanwhile, the executive branch does nothing to enforce the existing laws. Instead, they scheme with both sides to increase the flow of illegals, while waxing romantic about the glories of immigration.

Like the prince at the beginning, the sovereign is deliberately failing in its basic duty while scheming to harm the people. The recent court ruling that will allow the border patrol to dismantle the razor wire barriers installed by the state of Texas on one part of the border illustrates the problem. The Biden administration went to court so they can throw open the gates in order to encourage more illegal immigration. SCOTUS sided with them until the issue is fully resolved.

Now, it is important to note that the court ruling was limited and temporary, as the issue is part of a larger case in the Fifth Circuit. It is also important to note that this should have been a 9-0 ruling, but four justices are alarmed enough about the problem to break with a century of precedent. Again, immigration, including border control, is a power reserved exclusively to the federal government. Under normal conditions, this case never reaches the Supreme Court.

The immigration issue is not an isolated issue. People engaged with this issue often miss the fact that the federal government is derelict in its duties across the board and often colludes with those seeking to destroy the people. This Breitbart story on systematic corporate theft is a good example. These companies steal your activity, which is your property, in order to use it against you. The government literally exists to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

This Twitter thread about a firm called Pendulum, that exists to help powerful people use that stolen data to create disinformation campaigns, is another example of how the government not only ignores its duties, but colludes with the enemies of the people in order to harm the people. That company is literally a corporate bullshit generator, but instead of being a source of entertainment, it seeks to be one of the many hands of the state throwing open the gates to the barbarians.

The point of the ruler, the reason for this role to exist, whether it is a prince, a warrior-king, a republic or the present managerial elite, is to protect the people. That is the primary reason for there to be a ruler or ruling class. Government is a protection racket whether it operates by consent or by imposition. A prince who flings open the gates to the barbarians or a managerial elite that defines itself in hostile opposition to the people is a contradiction that cannot endure very long.

This is why the court will struggle with this immigration case. It has never had to deal with a federal government that deliberately undermines the rationale for its own existence in this way. Instead, the court is equipped to deal with disputes between the states and the federal government or individuals and the government. It always assumes that the issue at hand is the government trying to do too much. The prince flinging open the gates is truly novel.

This brings up another question. Is the failure of the political class with regards to immigration a cause or a symptom? In other words, is what we are seeing deliberate or simply due to the collapse of the political system? Politics is the puppet show the ruling class puts on for us, so maybe the political dysfunction we are seeing is a reflection of a ruling class that is in crisis. Maybe the reason the state cannot perform its basic functions is it no longer able to predictably accomplish them.

All of this is beside the point for the people. Like those people hiding in the city thinking their prince will come up with a plan to break the siege, Americans continue to assume the system will eventually right itself. In the days of princes, when the people lost faith in their prince, they abandoned him to his enemies. Just as it is axiomatic that the primary duty of the state is protection, it is axiomatic that whenever the state fails in this duty the people must find a way to replace it.

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Another Shoe Drops

Posted on January 22, 2024 by thezman

226

Note: The Sunday podcast is back as a morning performance this week, but could shift back to evenings as needed until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about the classic film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and a post about time. Subscribe here or here.

The weekend brought news that the employment level in the imperial capital took a hit when Ron DeSantis ended his campaign for the Republican nomination. The army of Washington insiders DeSantis hired to run his campaign will now have to get working on the next bit of shenanigans to thwart Donald Trump. Similarly, his online surrogates will have to find a new way to pretend they are important influencers, but without the large financial cushion of the Republican donor class.

DeSantis suffered the same problem as Scott Walker in 2016 in that he is a competent administrator with a solid record as a governor, who could be relied upon as president to not go into the street and scare the horses. By objective measures, he ticks all the boxes you want for the job, regardless of his party. Like Walker, he is a man perfectly suited for the Cold War consensus. The trouble is the Cold War consensus is long gone, so men like this are an anachronism.

DeSantis also suffered from the fact that we live in a whirlwind of media bombardment with an increasingly stupid voting base. Part of the latter problem is demographics, but a big part is the internet. People lack the ability to pay attention for more than a few minutes so they make judgements on memes and hot takes. A boring guy who looks like he is passing a stone when tries to tell a joke is never going to go over well with a voting base that thinks Sean Hannity is brilliant.

There is an interesting contrast here between DeSantis and Ramaswamy, who also dropped out of the race. The former tried hard to be a pebble in Trump’s shoe, while the latter carefully avoided upsetting the guy who he clearly admired. Given his resources and experience, one has to wonder if DeSantis would not have been wise to follow the Ramaswamy plan, instead of the Bill Kristol plan. It suggests something about DeSantis that this was not obvious to him.

Putting that aside, the important bit in all this is that DeSantis immediately endorsed Trump, which is a bit of surprise. He also bashed Haley a bit, which is probably a bigger surprise, given their backers. If you listen to his speech, it is clear he is more cross with her than with Trump, who spent the last year mocking him. The reason is that Haley hoovered up his donors in the last few months of 2023, which meant she got the media attention and that sucked all the air out of his campaign.

That brings us to his endorsement of Trump. Clearly DeSantis knows the regime hates Trump and will not stop until he is dead or in prison. After all, the reason DeSantis decided to run was that he was told by regime members that Trump would be forced out of the race, so the field was open. Several of the other candidates blurted this out at various times and DeSantis people hinted at it as well. It seems odd that DeSantis would then endorse Trump on the way out of the race.

One way to read this is that the plan to remove Trump is still active, but that DeSantis will not be the guy they pick as a replacement. Like a ball coach who removes his name from consideration, when it becomes clear he is not going to get the job, DeSantis is salvaging what he can from the situation by endorsing Trump. In a few years maybe he can use this to tap into an even angrier voting bloc. If by some miracle Trump wins, then he can get a job in the administration.

Another way of reading this is that this is just one more bit of evidence that behind the scenes the regime is about to abandon their plan to remove Trump. The narrative said that by now a viable alternative would have risen up in the primary as Trump’s support fell after all of the indictments. Jack Smith planned to be preparing for a March trial at this point, so that would be the news. Instead, Trump is rolling through the early primaries and the only opponent is Haley.

There are other signs that the regime is losing faith in their narrative, so on the surface the DeSantis endorsement fits in here. The trouble is the court cases are still active and there is no clear way to pull the plug on them. The thing about this regime is they never give up on their narratives once they adopt them. Bill Kristol thinks we should still be occupying Iraq preparing for an invasion of Iran. It is unlikely that the regime will reverse course on the lawfare against Trump.

All of this seems to be pointing to a clash of visions in the summer. On the one hand Trump is rolling through the primaries on the assumption he will be the nominee, while on the other hand the narrative still says he will be removed. Imagine a scenario in which Trump is convicted in the summer, after he locked up the nomination, but before the convention makes it official. Imagine if it happens after the convention. Will the party be forced to remove him at that late date?

Back when Trump came down the escalator, brilliant observers noted that he was like the Mule from the Asimov novels. The logic of managerialism says that political forces like that which Trump represents are impossible. The days of the populist hero are gone, replaced with the expertise of the managerial class. Trump’s existence causes chaos because it contradicts the fundamental logic of the system. It is not what Trump says but that he exists is the issue for the regime.

This conflict ends one or both sides are destroyed in the conflict. The regime can never accommodate itself to Trump and what he represents. What he represents is the result of a system that is at war with the people over whom it rules. It is an irreconcilable difference in design and purpose. It is why old fashion politicians like DeSantis have no place in this age. In a time when compromise is impossible, there can be no room for those who seek compromise. This is the age of conflict.

Thoughts On Digital Tyranny

Posted on January 19, 2024 by thezman

194

Fifty years ago, people just accepted the fact that there were people walking around with nutty ideas in their head. You could easily avoid them, and you could trust that the “marketplace of ideas” would police the problem. Most people would recognize that this guy is a nut and ignore him. The small number of people who fell for things like conspiracy theories or libertarianism was small.

That is no longer true. It seems that the “marketplace of ideas” has been flooded with crackpots, many of them sporting credentials. Everywhere you go you feel the need to be on guard against the loonies ululating about the latest thing. In social settings everyone has to look over their shoulder before speaking, for fear that stating obvious truths will set of a firestorm of mental illness.

Of course, much of this is due to the digital age. It is much easier for the crazies to find you and inflict their craziness on you. The Gaia worshippers, who have always existed in one form or another, are everywhere now. Even mundane things give them a reason to start hooting about Gaia. There is no escaping the misinformed and the deranged because they have flooded the digital zone.

It is an interesting dilemma. The managerial elite is not wrong to worry about the tsunami of nonsense that has swept society. You cannot have any sort of self-governance when most people are misinformed. It is not even clear you can have an authoritarian society when most people are misinformed. How can you organize society when most people believe in nonsense?

A lament among people on this side of the great divide is that Western societies have become atomized and deracinated. That would be preferable to a world of misinformed people networked to the rest of us via technology. Imagine if the Gaia worshippers all suddenly lost their internet connection for a year. The world would suddenly become quieter and vastly more sober minded.

It is not just people who are sincerely misinformed. Spend time on social media and it quickly becomes obvious that there are people who take some pleasure in minting false information and passing it onto others. In an age when information is king, these people should probably be killed. They are the coin clippers of the digital age and should be treated as such. Death to the misinformers!

Of course, that would require a ruling class that is not chock full of misinformed and deranged people, which is obviously not the case. In fact, they may be the most deranged of all. Their efforts to combat “misinformation and disinformation” are only lowering trust in all information. What is needed is an informed will to power that will replace the ruling class with an informed one.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Increasing Tyranny
Analog Versus Digital
Three Types Of People
These Groups In The Analog World
These Groups In The Digital World
Elites & Misinformation/Disinformation
The Great Firehose
Amnesia
Incompetence
Governing The Misinformed

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A Flower In The Parking Lot

Posted on January 18, 2024 by thezman

107

Note: Events are taking me on the road before the cock crows, so today the post is something from behind the green door. This post is from a a week ago when I had to rent a car. Something similar is happening this weekend but for entirely different reasons, so the post is appropriate.

We are expecting the white death this weekend and my car is useless in the snow, so I booked a rental for the weekend. God’s country is expecting five to eight inches of snow on Saturday and the tiny roads will not see a plow until late Sunday, so I needed something that could give me a chance to get off the mountain. I booked what the web site said was a front wheel drive Volkswagen or similar.

The key words are always “or similar” with rental cars and “similar” turned out to be a Jeep Gladiator, which is like a Jeep with a pickup bed on it. It did not cost more and they were happy to see me take it, so it worked out for the best. I can now haul some junk from Lagos to the new place. That and the thing is pretty much a tank, so I should have no trouble in the snow.

Standing in the lot waiting for the rental car guy to do his thing, I looked around at the cars and struggled to tell the models. I am not a car guy, but I used to know a Toyota from a Ford without much trouble. Car companies all had their distinctive styles, which was one way they differentiated themselves. Cars are a utility good, but aesthetics are what gets people to sign on the dotted line.

I was reminded of something a crazy guy told me when I was a teenager. He said that by the time I was his age, all cars would look the same. His reasoning was that the drive for efficiency would lead to a singular shape that was the most efficient both in terms of aerodynamics, but also in design cost. All the car maker’s efforts were converging on a singularity of sorts and all cars would look the same.

Crazy guy was mostly right. In the economy and mid-market range, it is hard to tell one model from another. It is not just the exterior. Inside they are all the same too. Options vary, but the options list from Toyota is no different from the options list at the other makers and the pricing is the same. Like the rental car page, we are reaching a point where cars are just small, medium, large and similar.

There are exceptions to this process. The Jeeps are outliers. Ford is selling a Bronco that is supposed to compete with the Jeep, but the best I can tell the Bronco is more like the other SUV’s on the market. The Jeep is a genuine off-road vehicle, even in this age of safety compliance and standardization. Driving this thing around is not quite like a pickup truck and nothing like an SUV.

Of course, there are sports cars. I stopped to grab the mail and there was a Corvette in the parking lot. Like the Jeep, it fills a category unique to itself. It is not in the same league as a Porsche or the high-end BMW’s and Audis. It is not a supercar, but it is not a muscle car either. I see a lot of the new models around so they must be popular with people who are not conformists.

I used to joke that if a man fell asleep in 1965 and awoke in the modern age, he would walk around a parking lot thinking the commies won the Cold War. The aesthetics of this age are dreadful and they are getting worse. That Corvette I saw in the parking lot was like a singular flower blooming against a black and white scene. The dreary cars around it threatening to snuff out the last bit of beauty.

The raises the question of why the car makers are not doing as they did in the past and making weird looking cars. The main reason is the economics of car making have stamped out all signs of adventurism. Every automotive executive knows the story of Saab and its last years making cars. The engineers and managers wanted to make cool cars, but that brought risk and that meant added cost.

General Motors owned Saab at the time and they were not interested in taking risks so they finally shuttered the Saab brand. When you learn about the story of how Saab died you cannot help but think that it was more than just economics. The ugly people at GM could not tolerate the free thinking that was the spirit of the Saab brand. They were the gray background swallowing up the colorful flower.

Of course, there needs to be a market for risk taking. America is no longer a place for young risk takers. It is a place for old fuddy-duddies who live in constant fear of risk because risk could mean the icy hand of death. America has always been a business and now it is a mature business with little tolerance for risk, so even if you wanted to make a funky car for the masses, the market would be small.

At the new place, I noticed that everyone seems to drive a Subaru or a pickup truck with most drives have one of each. The Subaru is great for bad weather driving on hilly country roads and the pickup is good for hauling stuff. I am not ready to be a Subaru man, so maybe I will like this Jeep enough to buy one. Maybe buy a red one so I can be that flower blooming in the grayness for a little while longer.

False Choices

Posted on January 17, 2024 by thezman

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

Under normal circumstance, when someone makes a credible threat on your life, the response is not to offer a compromise or pretend the threat is not real, but that is exactly what conservatives are doing in the face of these pogroms. Christopher Rufo says the only option to these antiwhite pogroms is for white people to embrace a colorblind morality. In other words, white people should put all their energy into a fantasy program rather than defend themselves.

The vision of a colorblind society may be appealing, but the fact that it does not exist and has never existed is called a clue. Whites have displayed some capacity to live under such a regime, but nonwhites clearly cannot exist this way. Outside of European lands, the skins game is the rule. We will never see non-European societies fling open their doors and invite the world into their lands. As we see every day, when these people enter European lands, they bring the skins game with them.

What Rufu is offering up is a false choice. You can put all your energy into this fantasy of a colorblind, multi-racial, multi-ethnic society or you can succumb to the antiwhite pogroms that are raging right now. The point of framing it this way is to eliminate other options, like whites joining the skins game. Not only does this framing sideline other more reasonable options, but it also subtly endorses the moral claim by the left that there is something immoral about whiteness.

Another example is this Elon Musk post in which he says, “Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong.” The natural response should be, “who says?” but that is not what you see in the replies. Instead, everyone accepts the false choice that you can either allow nonwhites to play the skins game unopposed or you dream of a day when no one plays the skins game. Again, whites joining in on the skins game and maybe winning at it is off the table.

As an aside, his comment should make everyone’s skin crawl. He is saying that having personal preferences is immoral. Since all humans have tastes and preferences, a feature that makes up a large part of our nature, he is hoping to anathematize most of what makes us human. For Musk, the ideal human is a moist robot. This is the thinking that lies behind the culture war. With the right amount of force, people can be re-coded into what society needs or simply eliminated from the population.

Regardless, the point of his post is to foreclose the parsimonious option which is to let people discriminate for any reason they like. Free association was the foundation of America into the last century. The settlers to the New World literally acted on their belief that people should live where they want and with whom they want, which is why they got on boats and came to the wilderness. The immigrants of the 19th and 20th century acted on the same premise.

Of course, the ultimate false choice, the very heart of American conservatism, is the assertion that they cannot use the same tactics as their opponent or exact revenge when they have power, because that would make them as bad as the left. In other words, the choice presented as conservatism is to adhere to a set of rules that guarantee failure or succumb to some abstract conception of moral turpitude that is somehow worse than losing.

In the end, the culture war is not a clash of visions, but rather a struggle among white people about how best to avoid the fight. The winning side in this fight has always relied on some form of the false choice in order to prevent engaging the people called the left in the culture war. This means the path to victory in this civilizational struggle starts with overthrowing conservatism and its spiderweb of false choices. In its place is a new form of identity politics to counter the current identity politics.

About Last Night

Posted on January 16, 2024 by thezman

174

In the old days, people used to preserve food by “putting it up” in various ways, which meant storing it in a way that prevented spoiling. It also meant storing it in such a way that rats and mice could not get to it. In modern times homeowners make sure their house is safe from mice and squirrels. In both cases, there is a lot of time to think about the strategy of rodents. This is the same sort of thinking we must use when looking at the results of the Iowa caucuses last night.

None of the players in the drama were operating entirely on the level. Trump was the big winner; however, his game is not about the conventional winning of delegates, but of outflanking the lawfare system. The bigger the wins, the more difficult it will be for the system to remove him. At least that is the thinking. He assumes, perhaps foolishly, that a runaway win in the primaries will force the party to abandon its scheme to remove him from the ballot and appoint someone as the nominee.

Similarly, the minor candidates were using the six-month run up to this event for reasons that had nothing to do with winning. Christie ran to earn some good will from the party by saying mean things about Trump in the debates. Hutchinson ran so they will mention it in his obituary. Ramaswamy is playing the long game, hoping to become the heir to Trump. He is hoping to be the burnt orange version of Charlie Kirk so he can run in the future or have a media career.

These sorts of rodents scurry around every presidential primary, but we have some unusual vermin this time. Nikki Haley is running as a standard issue regime Democrat in the Republican primary. The base assumptions of her campaign are that Trump will be removed from the ticket and the party is ready to throw in the towel and merge with the Democrats like you see in most Democrat states. In those states, the Republicans run lighter versions of the Democrats in statewide elections.

What she hoped for in Iowa was a clear second place finish. This would have knocked DeSantis out of the race. She would then be the sole anti-Trump option for the next few months, establishing herself as the logical alternative for when the party removes Trump from the ballot. Instead, she came in third place, with her support coming mostly from Democrats crossing over to vote for the most virulent anti-Trump option. She was close enough to DeSantis, however, to stay in the race.

Her strategy is to look for a big night in New Hampshire next week. The way to look at this New Hampshire primary is as a general election. It is an open primary so anyone can vote on the Republican side. The Democrats and Republicans have been running massive get out the vote drives in order to have as many far left crackpots from Massachusetts take a GOP ballot. That is another thing about the state. People from Massachusetts regularly drive over and vote in the primary.

DeSantis has all but abandoned New Hampshire, as in a general election style format there is no room for a candidate trying to stake out the middle ground. Instead, he is now focused on South Carolina and Nevada. He has no chance to win either contest, but his people think he can beat Haley in both. If he bests her in her own state, then he can argue that he is the better choice for when Trump is removed. Currently he is behind Haley by a factor of four in South Carolina.

The more likely path for DeSantis is to do well enough in South Carolina to argue that Haley is unelectable and then conserve money to run a minimum campaign into Super Tuesday when things get interesting on the lawfare side. It is the longest of longshots, but it is what he has at the moment. The party and its financiers prefer Haley as their Trump alternative and Trump voters have come to despise DeSantis. That leaves him with few voters to collect in these primaries.

Of course, one of the biggest rats gnawing away at things is the media. Clearly, the word has gone forth that they are to invest in Nikki Haley. The reason they called the race so soon was so the campaigns could have a coping strategy and therefore a narrative to use in the media. This will help Haley as she can plausibly claim that she barely lost to DeSantis due to the early call. She did win one county, which is something DeSantis did not accomplish.

Through the media, we can see that the regime has determined that Haley is a good replacement for Biden, even if she is in the wrong party. In a way, they are trying to engineer the primary into a version of Hillary versus Trump in 2016. This may be why Haley is running around praising Hillary Clinton. This is the narrative framing that the regime is conjuring, so Haley is leaning into it. After all, from her perspective, the real nominating process is in Washington.

The biggest rat in the room is the regime. It is an open secret that they want Trump removed from the ballot, but even a regime as evil and sterile as this one has some fear of the peasant revolt. If Trump is plowing through these primaries and people are wise to Haley being a Democrat catspaw, executing their scheme could turn out to be their Samson option, so there may be some hesitance in some circles. Last night’s result was another setback in their scheme.

Much will depend on what happens in the courts. The first shoe to drop will be the 14th amendment case. The court has agreed to take this on an expedited basis, which means a decision may come in February. If the court comes down hard in favor of Trump, which is a possibility, then it could signal to the rest of the legal system that lawfare will face an uphill battle. If the court is open to the claim, then it will be read by the lower court judges that they can do their worst.

All of the study of rat behavior obscures the fact that the only reason any of this is happening is Trump dared to speak for normal white people in 2016. Whites are about seventy percent of the voters right now. Twenty percent of them are insane, leaving about half the voters with no representation in the system. The Democrats explicitly hate these voters, and the Republicans implicitly hate them. Elections are about who gets to spit in these people’s faces first.

That is the subtext of this election. The regime is debating with itself whether now is the time to close the door entirely on the white voter. They believe the time is near when national elections will be like we see in Democrat controlled states. There is a permanent majority called Democrats, a ceremonial opposition called Republican and the goal is to prevent the majority of citizens from getting any say. The results last night suggest they still have some work to do.

Managerial End

Posted on January 15, 2024 by thezman

261

Note: The Sunday podcast is back!. It will be an evening performance until I get settled in the new place. There is a post about the cost of groceries and a post about driving the Jeep Gladiator for a week. Subscribe here or here.

Last week someone posted a video of herself getting fired by Cloudflare via a zoom call and the video went viral. It has nine million views at this point. The reason the video caused such a stir is it touches on many of the things that people find unpleasant about the current age, but either lack the language to discuss or feel they should not be discussing out in the open. That last part turns up in the resulting thread as people naturally turn it into a black hat versus white hat issue.

That last part is the most obvious, but the least interesting. Whenever these sorts of topics arise on social media, conservatives begin rhythmically chanting phrases like “toughen up snowflake” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” What they are instinctively doing is rallying to the defense of the giant corporation as they have been trained to do by conservatism. When challenged, the retort is some form of “The world does not owe you anything”, which is complete nonsense.

The basis of all human societies is reciprocal obligations. Social contract theory rests on this assumption. Monarchy rests on a collection of reciprocal vertical relationships that bind the king to the lowest peasant. The social club assumes the members will be loyal to the club and its members. In return, the members get benefits from the club and fellow members exclusive to them. A club that has no duties to the members is not a club, but a random collection of strangers.

This is the central defect of conservatism. When the people we call the left claim society has some new moral duty, conservatives never challenge the moral duty, but instead fall into a form of bourgeois anarchism. Terrified of challenging the left on moral grounds, they instead argue that society has no duties at all. In the case of the mega-corp screwing its employees, they say the company has no duties to them. Conservatism is always an answer to a question no one asked.

Putting that aside, you see the horrors of managerialism in that video. Clearly, senior management screwed up and hired too many new people. Instead of admitting this and reducing their staff, they send out flunkies from middle-management to chant nonsensical gibberish at people via Zoom call. Odds are neither of these two zombies could name a single metric they reference or what it means. For them these are abracadabra words that make the employee go away.

The woman getting let go has a reasonable expectation. She was hired under a set of conditions, and she met her end of the bargain. At one point she concedes that the company has a right to change the bargain. They over-hired and now need to trim the staff and her name was picked from the hat. If they were honest with her the video probably never gets posted. It is clear that the woman is not offended by the firing so much as by the lying about it.

This is one corrosive effect of managerialism. It turns everyone into a sociopath by forcing them to lie even when the truth makes more sense. The two zombies chanting corporate catchphrases are doing it so as to avoid being on the other end of one of these zoom calls. Like the Nazi camp guards given a choice of being a guard or being one of the guarded, millions of Americans are forced to be terrible people in middle-management positions, doing the bidding of management.

This is why we get the weird language. It is a way for the people at the top to manipulate their flunkies into doing this stuff. Instead of cutting jobs they are enthusiastically reducing newly discovered redundancies. They are not eliminating a department and the people in it, they are efficiently implementing a new compelling initiative in furtherance of corporate goals. No one can be upset at these words because they are stripped of anything meaningful to humans.

Managerialism, whether on the small scale like at a corporation, or at the large scale as in a society, is a system that seeks to socialize the cost of decision making while subtly privatizing the benefits. Senior managers enjoy the bulk of the benefits but spread the cost of failure across the organization. It does this by distributing the decision making across senior management. No one person at the top gets the blame when things fail, because it is always a group decision.

We see this in politics. The banks fail and the Fed has to print up trillions to bail them out and no one gets fired, much less jailed. Instead, all the top people agree that the system failed in some way. Top men are tasked with addressing this system failure, which of course pays them handsomely. After the banks get bailed out and things return to normal, the bankers congratulate themselves with bonuses. Managerialism is an aristocracy with none of the social benefits.

This is not without consequences, and we see it in politics. When no one in the managerial elite is ever held accountable, the selection pressure for membership in the elite shifts from aptitude to obsequiousness. You see this in every established corporation and in the government. The people at the top are increasingly incompetent while increasingly obsequious. Politics is packed to the gills with oleaginous grifters because the system selects for such people.

While it is true that the Pareto principle works in the elite as it does everywhere, eventually that smart fraction within the elite is overwhelmed by the growing number of sociopathic grifters slithering into the elite. Again, we see this writ large in politics where incompetence and failure seem to be the goal. The logical end of managerialism is a committee room stuffed with narcistic simpletons waving their credentials at one another as the riots rage outside the committee room.

This may be one bit of subtext to the statue toppling. “No one builds statues honoring committees” is an old truth that haunts managerialism. Statues to great men offend the managerial elite not just because those men were white. It offends because it is a reminder that it is great men that make the world, not the boring mediocrities who come to dominate managerialism. The latest thing is just a convenient excuse to remove the shadow of the great men that haunt the mind of the manager.

Sermon On The Who

Posted on January 12, 2024 by thezman

190

Watching the tunneling Hebrews scurrying out of their warrens the other day, my first thought was why did the government let these people into the country. The original cult members came over during the war, so maybe no one noticed, but since then they keep coming and there is no excuse for not noticing the weirdness. No offense to these people, but we have our own weirdos. We are full up.

Of course, no one is allowed to notice such things or notice anything about people unless it furthers the goal of eliminating “who” from our reality. We can notice blacks in the context of them being the victims of whiteness and we can notice whites as oppressors, but this in furtherance of dismantling the “how” of things so that these identities are no longer a part of contextual reality.

Otherwise, talking about who is doing anything is increasingly off limits, to the point where police sketches will soon be stick figures. Most normies looked away from the images of those Jewish guys crawling out of the sewer grates because the only way to understand it was to think about who these people are what makes them so different from what we consider normal in America.

This aversion to who and the preference for how is not new. This is part of the Western intellectual tradition and is now reaching a peak. Transgenderism is the logical endpoint of universalism, which strips the who from the moral debate. If anyone can be inside the Western moral framework, then people no longer have fixed identities. If a man can be anything he wants, then logically he can even be a girl.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Tunneling Hebrews
Why Are They Here
Who Versus How
Our Priors
Who not How

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Abyss Road

Posted on January 11, 2024 by thezman

175

The entirely authentic and on the level Republican Party primary is about to kick off for real next week with the Iowa Caucus. The totally legitimate and sincere debates came to an end with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley declared the finalists. They booted Chris Christie and Vivek Ramaswamy from the debates because no one cared about Christie and Ramaswamy was too normal. Despite both having no chance to win next week, the party had DeSantis and Haley debate last night.

Of course, none of this is on the level. The reason there are debates at all is everyone knows the party will remove Trump from the ballot if the court does not go along with the crackpot scheme to use the 14th amendment. Regime media is holding these debates thinking they will get to pick the replacement. They are probably right about that, given the ridiculousness of the Republican Party. Even the candidates admit they are running to be the party’s regime approved booby prize.

Politics has always been theater, but now it is the theater of the absurd where everyone pretends that this is all on the level, while knowing that it is not on the level and that everyone in the country knows it is not on the level. The Solzhenitsyn line captures this farce of a primary campaign perfectly. We know that they are lying and they know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. We also know that they know we know they are lying, but they keep lying.

The only drama at this point is who the Democrats tell the Republicans to pick for their nominee once Trump is booted from the campaign. Haley is the darling of the regime because she is a soulless automaton who will do what she is told. DeSantis has some friends in the regime, but he has two brain cells so there is always the risk he decides to think for himself. The party could always look for someone else, like Glenn Younkin, if they think they need to grease the rubes some more.

What goes unnoticed in all of this is the collapse of the GOP. They handed these fake debates to cranks of lunatics. The big final showdown that is supposed to sell one or the other zombies to the voters was held by a collection of far left nutters on CNN, a network that remains an epithet among Republican voters. The only way it could be more obvious that they are controlled by the other party is if the debate were held in the White House and moderated by Kamala Harris.

The reason the media is pushing Haley so hard is she holds all of the same positions as Joe Biden, except she can string a sentence together and is not drooling oat meal all over herself in public. Haley is running around telling voters that Hillary Clinton is her idol and was her inspiration to run for office. DeSantis is running as George Bush and many members of the media still remember hating George Bush. That and he is a click away from climbing out of a tunnel in Crown Heights.

What we are seeing here is the consolidation of the center that has been the pattern all across Europe for over a decade. Unwilling or unable to address the issues most concerning to voters, the main parties consolidate as a unified front against any opposition to the status quo. Parties that are supposed to be ideologically incompatible suddenly find a way to cooperate. The Republicans and Democrats are now effectively in a coalition government to defend the regime.

The one saving grace is that the regime has proven itself to be increasingly incompetent, so this scheme to rig the 2024 election could end in disaster. Current polling says Trump wins handily in Iowa. The game is to make it look like Haley is viable as an alternative, so if she bombs then that is a problem. On the other hand, DeSantis is as popular as colon cancer in New Hampshire, so in a few weeks the party could be left with two corpses running as the not-Trump option.

That will make picking one of them difficult. Even if they find an alternative, they still face the prospect of a riot at the convention. The people who show up at these things are the committed supporters and they wear red hats these days. Unless the party closes the convention entirely, they could be facing a modern version of the 1968 Democratic convention, which ended up in street battles. A lot of things can wrong when morons are plotting the shenanigans.

Then you have the fact that the universe has a sense of humor. Smart schemers always ask “what happens if the plan fails?” Our ruling schemers never ask this and the universe always throws a wrench in their plans. The brewing disaster that is Project Ukraine is a good example. The schemers all assumed the plan would work and when things went wrong, they were left with nothing. The same thing could happen with their scheme to rig the 2024 presidential election.

In the end, the normal person is left wondering to wonder if it is time to take the old advice from the hippies and turn off, tune out, drop out of the system. If voting is not a complete farce and the regime is committed to rigging the results even if the votes are counted honestly, then what is the point? The right answer may be to deny them the thing they desire most, which is your consent. If you drop out of the system, then they cannot manufacture your consent.

This being the modern age, tuning out is near impossible, so the more likely result is the disconnect between the official truth about our system and the reality of our system grows wider and the people grow angrier. This is the road to ruin where the regime reacts to discontent with shenanigans, which leads to further discontent and then more shenanigans from the regime. Those two zombies on stage last night were just mile markers on the road the national abyss.

Tunneling Into The Clouds

Posted on January 10, 2024 by thezman

217

By now everyone has seen the videos of weird looking Jewish men popping up from sewer grates in New York City. The men were popping out of underground tunnels built by the Chabad cult in Crown Heights. The city discovered them in December and was attempting to fill them with cement, when the Chabad members rioted in an effort to thwart the city’s efforts. The cops were forced to arrest many of the members and physically clear the facility of Chabadists.

Needless to say it was the best day ever for the antisemites, who naturally looked at the scenes as confirmation of their claims. It was also a great day on social media as the jokesters had some of the best material ever. The images of soiled mattresses being pulled from the tunnels reminded many that this subculture has long been accused of hiding terrible things. Of course, the scolds were out wagging their bony fingers at the world for noticing what was happening.

Lost in all of this are the questions about who these people are and why are they allowed to operate in this country. Most news sites just called the facility a synagogue but it is the world headquarters of the Chabad cult, which is an international movement that aims to influence government through the conversion of secular Jews back into what the cult thinks is the authentic Judaism. This group has centers in every Western capital and many major cities.

Imagine if white nationalists bought a building in New York City and declared it their international headquarters. Imagine they imported men from around the world to live in and around it. The videos online of the riot tell us that many of these men at this location are foreigners. Instead of white nationalists, imagine it was supporters of Palestine doing this. It is a good reminder that providing special status to groups of people comes with downstream consequences.

The more important question, however, is why has the ruling class allowed this bizarre international cult to setup shop in the United States? This cult formed in the 18th century in what is now Poland. They remained there until the Second World War when the head of the cult relocated to New York City. The circumstances at the time probably prevented careful scrutiny, but since then the ruling class has had plenty of time to figure out whether these people should be allowed to remain.

Immigration is always a tool of the ruling elite. This was true in the Roman Empire and it is true in the American empire. Outside of some very narrow exceptions, immigration is a tool of the ruling class to weaken domestic opposition. In the 19th century it was used to suppress wages and prevent unionization. In the current age it is used to maintain the power of the managerial class by diluting the demographics of the country and disrupting the formation of natural community.

How does Chabad fit into this scheme? They do not work in the normal sense which means they are useless in suppressing wages. This cult operates within the Hasidic community, so they are like an economy within an economy. They self-segregate, outside of their recruitment of secular Jews, so they are not showing up in your suburban subdivision to create problems with the neighbors. What they mostly due is recruit secular Jews with access to power in order to influence the elite.

Again, this cult has centers in every Western capital. They operate near the centers of power in the West, so that means they have facilities in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a member of the Chabad cult. Given the scrutiny on Trump, one has to wonder why the media never did a deep dive on why and how this cult was able to place a member at the center of global power.

None of this should suggest that Chabad is evil or at the center of an international conspiracy to destroy the world. The point is that this extremely bizarre and alien religious movement is allowed to operate unfettered in a time when Western ruling elites are increasing paranoid about internal threats. One would think a cult digging secret tunnels under New York City streets would produce more concern than some grannies wandering around the capital waving Trump flags.

What all this points to is two things. One is the dynamic of American society, especially within the managerial class, is a non-linear system. It is not a top-down system where a small group engineers everything from the shadows. Instead, there are a lot of players jostling with one another seeking advantage. The paranoia we see from the ruling elite is not due to fear of a peasant revolt, but genuine fear of a palace coup that uses a peasant revolt as a pretext.

The other thing this Chabad business tells us is the ruling class is not thinking far beyond one move on the board. A strong ruling class would have packed the Chabad guys off hours after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not that Chabad is evil, but that no smart ruling class tolerates a cult it cannot control. Instead, the managerial elite seems to be blind to this weird movement. It helps explain why foreign governments find it so easy to manipulate the political class.

All of this is a good reminder that America has never been a country in the conventional sense, but rather something like a large distributed network. The nodes on this network are the power centers that wield influence in certain areas. These nodes are often networks themselves, like the news media. The New York Times is the major node within the news media, which itself is a node on the ruling network. These nodes influence one another and jockey for power with one another.

As a result, no one is ever really in charge, like we see in Russia or China, where the state is the dominant power and controls all the power centers. We saw this with Trump when he was thwarted by the various nodes within government. When he overcame those problems, he was stymied by the judicial and corporate nodes operating within the general network of the managerial class. The ruling elite of America is a mesh network that operates atop society.

The Chabad people understand this, which is why they recruit members who can infiltrate these nodes. Most Chabad members do not look like those guys scurrying out of underground tunnels. They look like anyone else in society. Foreign governments see this is well, which is why Israel can have so much influence. China, despite enormous wealth and willingness to buy politicians has less influence than Saudi Arabia because the Saudis understand how America really works.