Escalatory Delusions

Posted on May 30, 2024 by thezman

Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.

If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.

This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.

Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with something worse than backing down.

Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.

We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.

A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.

This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.

It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.

The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.

The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.

Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.

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Peaceful Separation

Posted on May 29, 2024 by thezman

How best to govern a diverse population is a part of the subtext of public political debates in America, mostly because no one is permitted to debate the orthodoxy on immigration, so America gets more diverse every day. This is treated as a novelty that only the best minds in the managerial elite can tackle. In reality, humans have been dealing with diversity since the first human settlements. It turns out that there are only five solutions to the problem posed by diversity.

The most common way of dealing with the problem of diversity is also the oldest way of dealing with diversity. That is for the dominant tribe to subjugate or even eradicate the alien tribes from their land. The people of one place finally get the upper hand over the people adjacent to them and wipe them out. Alternatively, the main identity group in the newly formed society compels the minorities to adopt their identity. Wiping out diversity is the oldest cure for diversity.

The trouble is it rarely works, especially when you are dealing with large numbers of people in tight communities. The Israelis are trying to drive off the Arabs in Gaza, even going so far as to deliberately massacre civilians, but they are no closer to pushing out the Arabs than when they started their genocidal campaign against them. Even with modern tools, it is extremely hard to remove a large population. It is possible, but in this age, even the Israelis cannot get away with it.

That leaves the four more civilized options. One is to simply keep the various identity groups apart to reduce friction. This was common in the northern cities of the United States into the 20th century. The old neighborhood system that is romanticized today used to be rigorously policed by the authorities to make sure blacks were not going into Italian areas and vice-versa. Keeping the peace meant keeping the groups as separate as possible from one another.

In the South there was a soft version of segregation. Diversity primarily meant blacks, who were systematically segregated from whites in largely symbolic ways. Blacks and whites could share public spaces, but had to maintain separation, even if it were mostly symbolic like riding in the back of the bus. This performative segregation was to reinforce the notion that the two races could never mix. Segregation became a habit of mind, rather than physical separation.

Both of those effective and popular systems were overthrown by the managerial elite in favor of the chaos of the present. This system does not have a catchy name, like segregation or Jim Crow, but proportionalism will do. The system of rights that had been the basis of America society was abandoned in favor of egalitarian ideals to which the elites make exceptions in order to achieve what they arbitrarily see as a proportional outcome among the various tribes of America.

The growing tyranny that must come from such a system is what is driving the academic debates about the civil rights revolution and the rear guard action to hold the line against DIE programs in the institutions. Of course, the people responsible for this disaster are not interested in altering course. They are especially uninterested in the fourth option which is to not manage the diversity at all. This was the way America managed diversity through most of the 19th century.

A good example of this is in this interesting post about an old house by one of the professors in that linked video. He bought an old farmhouse and got curious about its history, so he did the research. It turns out that his house has a diverse history that reflects the way diversity was managed in early America. Basically, people were left to sort themselves out as best they could, which generally meant peaceful separation when peaceful cohabitation was not possible.

As pointed out in that post, who people are, in terms of their primary identity, is how they live, and no amount of downward force can change it. This is why the path of proportionalism as practiced by our tyrants must lead to that first and oldest option for dealing with diversity. They are trying to wipe out whiteness, by which they mean white people, through a campaign of cultural genocide, along with the importation of nonwhites in numbers no society can sustain.

The trouble is that wiping out even a small minority is difficult. Purging America of “whiteness” when most of the population is white and determined to live as they prefer, in the teeth of the cultural pogroms, is impossible. This brings us to the irreconcilable contradiction that lies at the heart of the current crisis. For the ruling elite to remain the currently constructed ruling elite they must continue with proportionalism, even though it must fail and lead to their eventual overthrow.

What all of this points to is both a solution to the current tyrannical regime and the challenge of diversity. Because whites will remain the largest population and will increase their self-segregation in response to their shrinking majority and the cultural assault on them from the elites, the racial tyranny must collapse. Put another way, the old solution of self-sorting, the habit of frontier America, will be the rocks upon which the racial tyrants will be destroyed.

This may seem overly optimistic, but the reality is the current regime is fighting human nature, which is undefeated in fights of this sort. Ideology, and the racialized politics of this age are ideological, is hostile to human nature. Communism did not fail due to technical errors. It failed because it was inhuman. The same is true of the racial ideology of the managerial class. Peaceful separation is the natural state of Americans, and it will be it natural order again.

Trump The Elephant

Posted on May 28, 2024 by thezman

Mary was a five-ton Asian elephant that performed at a circus, until she went berserk and killed one of her handlers. For some reason, the otherwise gentle beast attacked the handler on his second day of work. She picked him up with her trunk, hurled him against a wall and then stepped on his head. The circus owner decided that the right thing to do was to hold a public execution of the elephant for the crime of having murdered the elephant handler. The elephant was then hanged.

This strange story happened in 1916 in rural Tennessee, and it is a good way to think about what is about to happen in a New York City courtroom. This week the jury will get the Trump case with instructions by the judge to convict. This trial and the behavior of the people running it is like the execution of a circus elephant. It is about vengeance, rather than justice. The circus owner hanged Mary the elephant to satisfy the lust for vengeance and the conviction of Trump is for the same purpose.

The trial of Trump has nothing to do with the law. He paid a lawyer to make a problem go away, which happens all the time in America. The claim here is that it was booked incorrectly by his accounting department. The trial was never about the alleged accounting error. It was an excuse to humiliate a man that the judge, the prosecutors, the media and most likely the jury think deserves to be punished just as the locals thought Mary the elephant needed to be punished.

There have always been two sides to punishment. The one we like to think is our motivation is side that seeks to discourage future bad behavior. We want the criminal punished so he and others will not commit future crimes. That is a pleasant thought, but in reality, most of the time punishment is about vengeance. The person who harmed us and is causing harm is what the masses detest the most. Low morality revolves around those things that harm people, society, and our beliefs.

Ironically, this is why the “best” people have relished the seedy details of this trial and now prepare to celebrate the guilty verdict. Joe Biden is set to give an Oval Office speech once the verdict is read. The reason for this is the managerial class has the morality of a servant, despite their control of the institutions of power. They look at Trump as someone who harmed them, their system of rule and their beliefs, so as far as they are concerned, he is evil and must be punished.

The Trump phenomenon has provided an interesting insight into the psychology of the managerial elite. Despite their pretensions and their control of the institutions, they are still motivated by a low form of morality. That starts with what the weak always fear, which is harm done to them by those with power. Theirs is the slave morality which is rooted in paranoia, distrust, and fear. Being a good person, therefore, means not causing those reactions among the servant class.

It makes sense as the managerial elite are not powerful in the convention way in which we think of power in a society. They are the product of a system that empowers the servant of the owner, rather than their own accomplishments. You rise in this system by pleasing those above you and managing your horizontal relations. No can ever reach a place of independence within the system as the system is built upon interlocking relationships within the institutions.

This is the difference between an owner and a manager. The CEO of a company is not truly powerful because he must answer to the owners. The power he wields is on behalf of the people who granted him that power. Those people have power due to their own deeds, so their source of power is internal rather than external. Further, that CEO must always fear being replaced by someone below him. The manager must always be paranoid and fearful of everyone around him.

Trump, of course, is not a product of the managerial system. He is in many respects the abnegation of that system. Rather than getting rich and famous through a system of interlocking dependencies, he got rich building big, complicated buildings and famous by being good on television. Trump, for all his faults, is his own man and this is the not just the opposite of managerial man, it is the nullification of him. It is the existence of Trump that terrifies the managerial class, not his ideas.

This is the other cause for managerial rage over Trump. He has choices because his power is internal. He did not have to run in 2016 and he does not have to run in 2024, but he chose to for his own reasons. Everyone involved in the case against Trump depends to a great degree on the decisions of others. They have bosses or they have a career that comes with normative demands. The judge has to act in a certain way in order to remain in good standing.

That is a key difference between the owner and the manager. The owner can separate himself from the manager, but the manager can never separate from the owner without losing all of his status. The owner makes choices based on what he thinks is best, while the manager makes choices based on that fear of losing his position. The reason the slave resents the master is the same reason the manager resents the owner. It is why the managerial class despises Trump.

There is a related motivation here. The managerial class does not just see themselves as functionaries managing the system. They see themselves as something like a priestly class that dictates the happiness of the people. This is especially true in the media which has the greatest loathing for Trump and his fans. These are people whose power rests solely on dictating what is morally right and wrong. They sit in the judgment of everyone, even the truly powerful.

The reason for this is the power of priestly class rests on their framing of good and evil, which always places them on the side of the good. They prove this by pretending to live the purest of lives according to the morality they impose. Note how our managerial elite is always preaching about things like the climate, race, our democracy, and other parts of the progressive catechism. Our managerial class is the clergy, and the elites see themselves as the high priests.

There is no one who enjoys vengeance more than the priest. The suffering of the wicked is the greatest joy to the truly righteous. For the managerial class, punishing those who transgress and seeing them suffer is their reward. It is why the media love ruining people. It makes them feel like Aquinas relishing the image of the damned writhing in the pits of hell. This is why this case matters so much. The managerial priests will get to see a wicked man suffer.

This returns us to Mary the elephant. The people who wanted to see the elephant hanged were not demanding it for practical reasons. They were weak people who lived in fear and the elephant came to represent that fear. Killing the animal by public hanging was an act of piety. It represented the triumph of their sense of justice, which is always expressed as vengeance by those who see themselves as weak. They killed the elephant as an act of revenge.

That is the point of this trial. The managerial class wants revenge on Trump for violating their taboos and holding a mirror up to their system. Vengeance is the product of revenge and revenge is the result of resentment. The managerial class resents men like Trump as a part of their organizing ethos. By running for president, he became the slave owner who came down to party with the slaves in the slave quarters. His actions remind them of their status as slaves.

In the end, that is the point of the Trump phenomenon. Despite his populist rhetoric, Trump is an aristocrat of the old sort. He is a self-made man. The question he poses is will we and can we be ruled by the servants of aristocrats or will they fail and be replaced by the natural aristocracy. Can you have a society ruled by people controlled by resentment for the natural elite? That is the question Trump poses. Whether they hang him or not, the question must be answered.

The Total State

Posted on May 27, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a series of posts on the original Planet of the Apes films, which I watched and reviewed. There was no Sunday podcast due to the holiday, but it will return next week. Subscribe here or here.

If you are of a certain age and inclination, reading The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies, a new book by Auron MacIntyre, feels like a trip down memory lane to a time when you were discovering the major figures of what would eventually be called paleoconservatism. The text is filled with references to Carl Schmidt, Machiavelli, Vilfredo Pareto, James Burnham, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, and other figures who feature prominently in the paleo subculture.

That is the first way to approach this book as the writer was by his own account a garden variety conservative until a few years ago. That means he accepted the neoconservative foreign policy claims, the libertarian economics, and the civic nationalism of the Buckley crowd. The Trump years, the 2020 election and Covid forced him to reevaluate that way of framing politics. Working in the media, he also witnessed firsthand the corruption and mendacity of the fifth estate.

Judging from the number of references to Covid and how often it is used as an example in making points about what he calls the Total State, it is fair to assume that the mass panic and group think within the managerial class during Covid is what sent the writer on his journey out of civic nationalism. The state’s willingness and ability to trample the idea of a rights-based society in the name of public health, along with the media cheerleading, broke the spell of civic nationalism.

What followed was a crash course in the ideas of the “alternative right” as Paul Gottfried used to call it before that term was anathematized. The result is this book which can be read as an intellectual journey. Ideas common in dissident circles were new and amazing in their ability to explain what was happening during Covid. The enthusiasm MacIntyre has for the material will surely bring back memories for older readers who recall experiencing this material in their youth.

Another way of reading this book is as a summary, a Cliff Notes version, of managerialism and the managerial state. MacIntyre borrows the title of the book from Carl Schmidt, who called this form of government der Totalstaat, which translates into English as the Total State. He could also have used the term Sam Francis used, Leviathan, or simply the managerial state. All roughly mean the same thing, which is the all-encompassing corporate state.

Read this way, this book is an excellent primer for the person who is embarking on a journey out of civic nationalism. MacIntyre covers all the important bits using accessible language and recent examples, like the Covid panic. He makes good use of references to the pantheon of stars that make up the paleo constellation but does so in a way that does not require the reader to know about these people. It is an introduction to other modes of conservative thought and the topic of managerialism.

Still another way to approach this book is as the down payment on the long overdue project of building an alternative intellectual framework. What passes for the right in America was not much more complicated than saying, “not so fast” to the schemes dreamed up by the people we call the left. The closest anyone came to building an alternative moral framework was Sam Francis who died before he could finish is magnum opus, Leviathan and Its Enemies.

In his review of The Total State, Greg Hood suggests this might be the start or a restart of that project as MacIntyre is not just a nobody on the internet. He is a member of the so-called conservative media with access to influencers allowed to operate unmolested on the public stage. He regularly turns up on television during elections and has mainstream guests on his show. MacIntyre dusting off these ideas from a perch within mainstream media could be the start of the project.

There could be something to this as there is a gold rush right now to find something to replace Buckley-style conservatism. There are formal efforts like Yoram Hazony’s National Conservatism project and the Claremont Institute. There are informal efforts among online content creators, the sort of people I called Cosmos and those Dave Green calls the LinkedIn Right. There are lots of people searching for a New Right and perhaps they discover a new ideological framework.

The book is not without its flaws, of course. MacIntyre mentions Curtis Yarvin too many times and one is counted as one too many. Yarvin simply has no place in a serious discussion about politics or political theory. Maybe his name was dropped because he is reportedly Peter Theil’s court jester or maybe MacIntyre thinks this is a useful reference point for his intended audience. Regardless, seeing Yarvin’s name turn up in anything is like discovering a hair in your soup.

That aside, another quibble is one it inherits from paleoconservatism and that is it cannot explain why managerialism exists. Burnham noticed that it first appeared in fascist systems. Later writers observed that communism was also good soil for the growth of managerialism. Now we see American-style liberal democracy has also been overtaken by bourgeois managers. This is hardly an accident, but paleos have never produced an explanation for it.

That leads to another quibble that also comes from the paleo space. MacIntyre cannot provide an answer for what to do about it. He finished his book with three possible ends for The Total State. One is it staggers on due to a monopoly of power. Another is it is replaced by a strong man of some sort. The final option, the one MacIntyre prefers, is that it slowly dies from its own internal contradictions. Note that none of these lead to any action against the managerial system.

That was always the flaw of paleoconservatism. It was a call to inaction in the face of perpetual revolution from the top. You cannot build a political movement on a foundation that calls for hiding out in the basement until the storm passes. Even if the storm passes, what comes next will not be the work of those who choose inaction in the face of danger, but by those who have a platform that calls for action in pursuit of something different and better than hoping for nicer weather.

In the end, the judgment of any book is whether it did what it set out to do, not what could have or should have done according to the critics. When approached by any of the angles above, The Total State accomplishes the goal of the author. It is a book for those who would like a fuller understanding of the terms commonly used in dissident circles and for the people looking for a path out of the banality of what passes for conventional conservatism.

The Summer Of Hate

Posted on May 24, 2024 by thezman

Note: Because it is the Friday of the first long weekend of the summer, I am putting aside the Crayola and recycling some material from behind the green door so I can get outside and take care of a project before the rains come. There will be fresh content throughout the weekend behind the green door. Otherwise, have a wonderful weekend and I will be back on Monday.

The attempted assassination this week of the Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, did not get much attention in American media. Slovakia is a tiny country tucked away in the eastern most part of what people consider Europe. Most Americans have no reason to care, but a century ago few Americans had a reason to care about Sarajevo either. A lot of history can happen in a small country sometimes.

The reason this could be the case is Slovakia is one of the countries that exists in the gray zone between East and West. It is part of the Visegrád Group, a political and cultural alliance of former Soviet client states. Like Orbán of Hungary, Fico is a nationalist who won office in the teeth of American efforts. There has been whispers that he could get regime changed due to his stance on Project Ukraine.

Like Orbán, Fico is an old school anti-communist, which means he is an anti-ideologue and that means he sees American liberalism with suspicion. In the Visegrád countries, it has been noted that most of the leading pro-American liberals used to be communists, with many having been part of the communist regime. They quickly changed out of their worker costumes and put on expensive suits.

The guy who tried to kill Fico is described as a leftist, but in the context of this part of the world that means he is pro-Western. Since winning election, Fico has been subjected to relentless media campaigns from American NGO’s criticizing him for his stance on Project Ukraine. There has been a lot of talk about getting rid of Fico by any means necessary, a dog whistle for the liberal fanatics.

The reason this may be a foreshadowing of what lies ahead is the reaction in Western media to the news of the assassination attempt. Instead of condemning the use of political violence, which would make sense from the perspective of people wielding power, the popinjays of the chattering skull circuit smugly suggested that Fico deserved to get shot and that maybe it was not a terrible thing.

Keep in mind that the people who turn up on regime platforms are repeating the opinions they hear on the cocktail circuit. This is even more so with Europe as these are all client states, so much of what makes up their politics is the solon culture where pretentious people compete to see who can stake out the cleverest pro-American position while making it sound European.

The reason this matters is the rhetoric aimed at guys like Orbán and Fico is the same we hear directed at Trump or any other skeptic of the liberal project. The first bullet out of the gun, so to speak, is to label them pro-Putin. Both Orbán and Fico have been given the “Russian collusion” treatment by the chattering classes. Both are called threats to “our democracy” for having won elections.

Now think about the situation with Trump. The regime has thrown everything at the guy over the last two years, but he keeps chugging along. Not only that, but his popularity is also probably higher now, and more intense, than when he ran in 2016 or 2020. At the same time, the liberal hatred for the man is now soul defining. If any means necessary was justified in 2020, it is even more true in 2024.

This is the dynamic of political violence. We tend to think of political violence as organized bands of politically motivated actors. Maybe they are sponsored by the ruling class or opposed to the ruling class, but they are organized. In reality, most political violence is the result of disorganized partisans who are set off by inflammatory rhetoric, as we saw with Black Lives Matter.

The other ingredient to political violence is that the people in charge become comfortable with it, justifying it when it serves their interests and overreacting to it when they need an excuse to use power outside the moral limits. The reaction to the Fico shooting is an example of the former and the ongoing suppression of J6 protestors is an example of the latter.

Probably the most important piece of the puzzle is disconfirmation. Political violence comes from the side that thinks the forces of good are at risk of losing, so something must be done to turn the tide. Trump was never supposed to win, so they created the conspiracy theory about Russian collusion to explain it and when that did not solve the problem, they resorted to violence.

In the fullness of time, we will look back at the shooting of Republican politicians at a pickup baseball game in 2017 as the start of the political violence cycle. James Hodgkinson was an anti-Trump kook, but the anti-Trump kooks were not shamed by his actions into toning down their rhetoric. Instead, they shrugged it off and ratcheted up their attacks on Trump and Trump supporters.

This is why the Fico shooting could be important. We are about to enter the summer of hate when the regime pulls out all the stops to defeat Trump. There are hundreds of potential James Hodgkinson types thinking they could be a hero to their cause by taking their shot. The FBI is always working up plans to create a green flag event in case the regime needs to use violence. This could be the kick-off to a wild summer.

Media And The Cult

Posted on May 23, 2024 by thezman

A mostly unexamined aspect of the ongoing crisis is the role the media plays in keeping the managerial class misinformed. It is always assumed that the firehose of lies that come from regime media is designed to trick the public, but the truth is no one in charge cares about public opinion outside the extremes. Politicians come and go, and the parties take turns pretending to be in charge but the administrative state and the managerial class that runs it are permanent.

One only has to look at the presidential elections over the last thirty years to see that elections have no impact on policy. Bill Clinton was supposed to be a break with the polices of Reagan and Bush, but things changed very little. Bush was supposed to bring decency back to the White House. Instead, he empowered the neocons, who set about making war on the world. Obama was supposed to put an end to all that war making, but instead doubled down in Afghanistan.

If you could map changes in public policy from election to election since the Cold War you would end up with a line that slowly moves upward. The only change we see is slightly more of the same with each change in administration. The same can be said of the changes in the House and Senate. As we have recently seen with the Republicans in the House, they are just a shadow of the Democrats, who shadow the Republicans as they take turns in the majority.

The reason for this is ninety percent of our elected representatives never have to fear the voters. They only have to fear the wrath of their party leaders, who are the representatives of the economic elites that underwrite the system. For the typical congressman or senator, there is no profit in appealing to the voters, if it means going against party leadership. That can only result in a primary challenge, so the rational course is to do what the party tells them.

If the political system is now immune to public opinion, then why are we awash in mass media filling the public square with propaganda? One reason is inertia. There was a time when winning the voters mattered and the media was an essential part of how the parties presented their claims to the public. Listen to media figures talk about their profession and they often sound like museum pieces. The Washington Post hilariously has the line, “Democracy Dies In Darkness” on its masthead.

Another reason for the explosion of agit-prop might be that as the number of safe seats has grown, the consensus between the two parties has narrowed. That means the range of acceptable dissent has narrowed as well. Look around Washington and there is only one acceptable position on most issues. For example, you can wail about the southern border, but you cannot oppose immigration. You can “care about working families” but you cannot oppose finance capitalism.

When a broad range of positions are tolerated, the focus is on winning the public to your side, but when the range of tolerable positions is narrow, the focus must be on keeping everyone inside that tolerable range. That is where the media comes in with its firehose of official nonsense. The point is not to sway or trick a skeptical public, but to enforce conformity of opinion inside Washington. Ironically, this was the primary purpose of the media in the Soviet Union.

Take for example this post at the National Interest. This is one of the many neocon publications used to control official debate on foreign policy. It was founded by Irving Kristol, one of the founding members of the neocon cult. The post reads like it was written by a crazy person, but that is because it is a collection of assertions circulating in the mass media for years. The point of the post is to keep these assertions circulating and therefore the default position on Russia.

Imagine you are a congressman sitting on a committee that serves the interests of the Military Industrial Complex. Image further that you made the mistake of reading unapproved analysis of the war and the war claims. You might be tempted to question the people making the claims, until you run into this wall of official opinion that sprouts from every regime outlet and every regime member. Even if you are skeptical, you will find nothing but hostility to your questions.

In many respects, Washington now operates like a cult. People at all levels are recruited into politics because they conform to the attitudes of the cult. Those who show a lack of enthusiasm are either bullied into submission or expelled. Meanwhile, those inside are subjected to a constant wave of mass media that reinforces the currently acceptable opinions of the cult leaders. The media is an endless chorus praising the cult and the positions held by the cult.

Another aspect of cults is that the people inside them lack the perspective and self-awareness to see themselves as being in a cult. No one ever says “I decided to join a cult” because no one in a cult thinks they are in a cult. Instead, they think the logic of the cult explains everything that needs explaining. To those outside, the logic of the cult seems weird and possibly dangerous. The people inside appear to be painfully divorced from reality, maybe even insane.

This is exactly how normal people see Washington. They see lunatics ranting and raving about imaginary demons, while obvious problems are ignored. One congressman after another swears allegiance to a foreign power, while hooting about China and Russia influencing our elections. This is all amplified by a mass media system that is designed to reward such behavior and punish any hint of skepticism about the narrow set of acceptable opinions.

The Real Idiocracy

Posted on May 22, 2024 by thezman

There has been a lot written and said about the decline of intelligence in the Western world, mostly focused on the Idiocracy side of it. Everyday life is getting dumber, compounded by the demographic collapse. Basic processes can easily turn into an ordeal due to stupid people tasked with operating systems that were designed for operators a standard deviation smarter than the current crop. What no one thinks too much about is how this collapse in IQ is impacting the elites.

The dream of the managerial class is to establish themselves as an unassailable aristocracy that rules over a docile population of workers. It is why they favor open borders and mass migration as it provides an unlimited supply of what they imagine to be their ideal helot class. Even if there are pockets of smart challengers out there among the teaming masses, they will be too busy dealing with diversity to organize an opposition to the managerial elite.

This is a good place to start with the decline of elite intelligence. It is not as if we lack data on this sort of arrangement. The end of colonialism in Africa, for example, is a great example of how quantity has a quality of its own. Millions of 80-IQ Africans were able to overthrow thousands of high-IQ Europeans. Today we see something similar as the Mizrahi slowly push aside the Ashkenazim in Israel. They are not as smart as their European tribesman, but they have numbers.

Israel is another good example of what happens to a society when the intelligence of the ruling elite begins to fade. For a couple of generations Israel has skillfully manipulated regional politics and controlled Washington so as to dictate results throughout the Middle East. With the Gaza operation they have shown themselves to be suddenly thumbless. The Israeli government has turned a tragic event into a crisis that threatens its existence.

Of course, we see the other side of this in America. The people running foreign policy used to know how to keep Israel on a leash. The Israeli lobby was constrained by the Jewish economic elite that largely controls the imperial economy and the neocons who control imperial foreign policy. The former cared primarily about controlling the global economy from their perch in New York and the latter cared primarily about their ancient blood feud with Russia from their perch in Washington.

The Biden administration has managed to make Israeli incompetence and obstreperousness worse by failing to deal firmly with Netanyahu. The result is the pathetic scene of the American military building a dock to supply Gaza with food and water while the IDF blows up schools and hospitals. Add in the bungling of diplomacy in the region, primarily with the Saudis, and the American empire is on the cusp of losing all of its influence in the region.

The clueless bungling with regards to Israel is not confined to the realm of geopolitics, but also turns up domestically. The Jewish lobby used to operate in the shadows, nudging key figures behind the scenes to influence policy. Now it sends out simpletons like Ben Shapiro to demand the genocide of Palestinians. The actors hired to play the role of office holders are marched out to read ham-fisted scripts about Israel and propose laws that manage to offend decent Americans.

It is not just with regards to Israel where things are going sideways. There used to be a time when the Anglo side of the imperial ruling class understood the reality of the neocons and kept them under control. The last gasp of this, ironically, was during the Obama years. Maybe it was that Anglo blood running through the veins of the mulatto mafia that ran the Obama White House, but they did manage to broker a deal with Iran and avoid getting sucked into any new wars.

That barrier to neocon excess has collapsed, along with whatever intelligence that remained within the neocon cult. The result is foreign policy is now run by a pair of slovenly imbeciles who sit atop the Kagan cult. One reason for the Israel debacle is the commitment to Project Ukraine, which itself is becoming a catastrophe that promises to overwhelm the European part of the American empire. It is impossible to overstate the stupidity required to think Project Ukraine was a good idea.

The people who think open borders and mass migration are going to lock in their position also think Project Ukraine is a winner and marching the political actors out on stage to swear allegiance to Israel is a good idea. They also thought it was a good idea to fling open the prisons so black criminals can run wild in the streets. They thought the proper response to general unrest among the white population was to unleash demographic hell on the white middle-class.

It is debatable as to just how much of the general decline in intelligence is attributable to the decline in the European population and how much of it is a consequence of the demographic collapse. This is a big, complicated subject, but what matters most is the general intelligence of the ruling class. If the ruling class is dominated by and controlled by the smart fraction and that smart fraction is rooted in the overall population then society can survive a drop in IQ.

If on the other hand, as we are seeing, the ruling class prides itself on being alien and hostile to the population and begins to exclude the smart fraction, even its own smart fraction, then the consequences for society will be catastrophic. It turns out that the real idiocracy is not with the general population but among the people who control the institutions of society. When the people in charge hire people like this to play the role of elected representative, the end is near.

Blood Sucker Economy

Posted on May 21, 2024 by thezman

Last week brought news that the iconic restaurant chain Red Lobster has filed for bankruptcy protection and has started closing locations. The chain is mostly known for being a cheap night out for people in the suburbs and businessmen stuck near a suburban business park. The people hired to write about business for regime media, people who know nothing about business, have rolled with the usual lines about how casual dining was devastated by the pandemic.

The joke online is that Red Lobster’s all you can eat shrimp deal cost them millions because diversity would sit there for hours eating shrimp. The restaurant admits it was a disaster for them, but the real reason the chain has failed is that it was taken over by gangsters who made it into a bust-out. The gangsters in this case are private equity investors who bought up the chain. This bankruptcy is part of fleecing the dumb money that still remains trapped in the enterprise.

The way these scams work is the private investors swoop in and buy a property that is asset rich but cash poor. That is, they have things of value, but those things are not generating enough revenue to meet expenses. Sometimes the enterprise is profitable but needs cash to expand or maybe reorganize itself to shed poorly performing assets and expand into more profitable areas. Private equity comes in with attractive terms and an army of experts to reshape the enterprise.

In reality, they usually sell the assets in deals that have the buyer lease back the asset to the company in order to raise quick cash. Other times the asset is pledged as collateral in a similar sort of debt arrangement. The result is the enterprise quickly raises cash to pay the investors with a healthy profit but is left stripped of its assets and often holding a lot of debt. This is what happened here. The new investors sold the real estate in lease-back deals that are now expiring.

It is a good example of how so much of our economic output is just moving money around in circles. It is the old joke about a stranger coming into a little town to rent a room for the night. Nothing of value has been created by investors buying up this restaurant chain. It simply became a vehicle for them to lure in new money to pay them a profit for their investment, while all along knowing that the end result would be these new investors getting a haircut in bankruptcy proceedings.

The argument in favor of this sort of dealing is that all of the parties involved are sophisticated enough to know the risks. The real estate investors that bought the properties and then leased them back knew the risks or at least they should have known the risks, as it is their business to know the risks. This is all true, but it obscures the fact that this is not genuine economic activity. This is not how an economy should function, but it is the core of the American economy now.

This is not without consequences. Travelers now have to check out the type of plane they could be boarding, because Boeing planes are falling apart. As with Red Lobster, the blame is placed on diversity, which is not entirely without merit, but the real culprit is the vulture capitalism that has come to define elite economics. Boeing is no longer in the business of building better airplanes. It is in the business of creating financial transactions for the benefit of the investor class.

What we see with Boeing has been happening with the military industrial complex for the last three decades. They are no longer in the business of building practical weapons that can be used by the American military. Instead, they are in the business of creating complex transactions for the benefit of insiders and investors. One result is an F-35 fleet that looks great parked at an air field, but it is too dangerous to fly. Meanwhile, Russia and China make weapons for war, not investor profit.

A root of this growing problem in the American economy is the notion that anything that can be shown to turn a profit is normatively good. The usual suspects are going to ruin the town of Harpers Ferry with a development project that will make them money, but come at the expense of the residents. They can do this because they went to the state and showed it will turn a profit, so everyone fell in line. No doubt promises of insider access to those profits were included in the pitch.

The reason profit is a good thing in an economy is it is supposed to spur innovation that results in new products and greater efficiency. Profit is a means to an end, not an end in itself from a macroeconomic perspective. When profit or the quest for profit results in planes falling from the sky or communities being harvested for their social capital, then profit or the quest for profit is bad for society. It is why we used to hunt down and punish corruption and fraud. Note we no longer do that.

An economy is about making things, fixing things, and inventing things, which is no longer the way to get rich in America. Instead, as Peter Theil explained in his book, the path to wealth is finding a way to game the system. You find a flim-flam like the Red Lobster scam or you game government to let you make electric cars that no one needs or wants. The blood sucker economy is not about making things, fixing things, and inventing things. It is about robbing the people who do those things.

Digital Man

Posted on May 20, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the farcical nature of the young online right, a post about the looming summer of hate that is upon us and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Since the dawn of the digital age there has been commentary about the impact the digital age will have on society. Mostly it comes from how we will do things as technology seeps into every nook and cranny of life. Little attention has been paid to who will be controlling things. It has always been assumed that the social structures and selection pressures within them will remain the same, so the new technology will simply be a new tool for the old ruling class.

In the most general sense this is clearly not true. The oligarchs that rose up out of Silicon Valley are a different breed of oligarch from those who rose up in the last decades of the industrial revolution. The latter were the product of an American empire on the rise while the former were the product of an empire at its peak. The industrial age oligarchs were a part of creating the American empire while the tech oligarchs were taking advantage of an existing empire.

Putting aside the nature of the new oligarchs, the nature of the managerial class that actually runs the empire has changed as well. The type of person who slithers his way up into senior positions is different from the old managerial elite. The top officials in government a generation ago, for example, were the product of different selection pressures than those of today. A generation ago, deeds still counted for something in the competition for status within the meritocracy.

Look around at the people running foreign policy now and you cannot help but notice that they are not exceptional at anything. It is one of the things that makes a guy like John Mearsheimer jump off the screen in the geopolitical debate. In addition to having been right about most things over the last twenty years, he is an immensely talented, intelligent, and confident man. By comparison, Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland come off as dull and confused.

As technology has changed society, the selection pressure for the managerial elite has also changed. The legacy pressures that produced a guy like Mearsheimer have been replaced with new mechanisms that produce men like Blinken. These pressures start much further down the development cycle than the institutions. It reflects the changes in the culture brought about by technology. All along the way, technology plays a role in how men acquire status within the social system.

A simple way to think about how this works may be to think about the broad categories of young males that existed in the analog age versus the digital age. The three buckets for young males were the gymnasium, the library, and the playground. The first was for the jocks who were attracted to structure and competition. The second was for the bookish who were attracted to learning and knowledge. The final category was for the typical young male who generally like socializing.

In the analog age, the managerial elite drew from the gymnasium and the library, the doers, and the thinkers. The American empire was the product of men who produced new ideas and those who found a way to make those ideas into reality. The oligarchs who rose up in the industrial age used their wealth to underwrite the scholarly and cultural side of the house. Libraries, universities, and cultural centers naturally attracted investment from the new oligarchs.

The digital age changed how young males live and as a result it changed how the social systems selected for talented young males. That playground group suddenly had new toys to use in their socialization. Instead of kicking a ball around, they participated in highly structured and highly complex digital gameplay. Instead of sorting social standing on the playground, it was done in the virtual world of gaming, online chat rooms and social media. Most important, these became valuable skills.

Look around at the public square and the biggest influencers are not old smart guys or highly accomplished guys, but young guys raised online. None of them were jocks or even played sports. Many have no accomplishments at all in the meat space. They are not experts in a cognitive field. On the other hand, they are not the basement dwelling weirdos their critics claim. They enjoy competition, just the online version. They know things that are important to success online.

The new generation of social influencers are an extreme example of a process that has been going on since the dawn of the microprocessor revolution. Technology changed the value relationship between these three male roles. The skills useful on the playground, now the virtual playground, have become more important than the skills acquired in the gymnasium or the library. The critics in the 1970’s were correct when they said it was the nerds who would eventually rule.

Now, some will say it is the longhouse, the feminization of society that is the root of this transformation, but it looks more like it was technology that made the longhouse possible by changing the selection pressure away from knowledge and deeds to the social skills of the digital space. Because so much of what makes up digital society is useful only because we pretend it is so, it means it is not subjected to the crucible of practical necessity, so convincing everyone it matters is what counts.

Social media is a great example of something that people think is important only because everyone they know thinks it is important. Imagine you refuse to go on these platforms and just live your life in meat space. Then someone starts a viral campaign against you on Twitter. What happens to you? Nothing happens because you will remain blissfully unaware of it. In other words, Twitter matters to the people on Twitter because they pretend it matters.

From childhood on up, the skills that are the most useful in the digital world are not those acquired in the library or the gymnasium. It is the weird, androgynous social skills learned in the digital playground. These define teenage social status and then professional status. Now we are seeing them define managerial class status structures, including the managerial elite. What powers the longhouse is the microprocessor that changed the people in the longhouse.

Not only are the skills from the gymnasium and the library falling in status, but the playground skills have changed as well. The digital playground is not like the analog playground where you can get punched in the nose for violating the rules or challenging the wrong guy. On the digital playground your character dies and you respawn at a lower level or maybe you have to create a new character. There is never any real consequence to failure on the digital playground.

This is where feminization comes into the discussion. It has been assumed that the feminization of society is the product of the feminist movement, the explosion of women in the workplace or the number of single mother households. In other words, generations of men raised by women made men soft. In reality, it is at least one and maybe two generations of men socialized like girls on the digital playground that has made the longhouse a natural home for the new man.

In fairness, not all males have been raised on the digital playground. Young men still play organized sports and they still read books. The real playground still exists where young boys learn how to be young men. Elite culture, however, no longer selects for the traits learned in these areas. Instead, it is the traits acquired on the digital playground that offer the pathway to the higher reaches. By the standards of the digital age, Nick Fuentes is the quintessential digital man.

Majority Minority

Posted on May 17, 2024 by thezman

There is plenty of talk about the demographic changes happening in America, but not much thought about where it is headed. Some people mention the fact that the country will be majority-minority in a generation, but no one likes to think about that so that is as far as it ever gets. The people in charge seem to think America will be Brazil but without the favellas and kidnapping industry.

The fact is the social and political structures that have defined America cannot survive the demographic changes that are coming fast. The main reason for that is the majority population, once it becomes just another minority population, cannot continue to think like a majority population. The majority will no longer be able to swap the good of the whole for the good of their group.

Everything about America is the result of the majority population swapping their interest for the interest of the country. This altruism works only when the interests of the country are seen to align with the interest of the dominant majority, which is a thing that comes naturally when the majority is near ninety percent. Once that majority shrinks down to nearly fifty percent this perception collapses.

This is what we see happening all around us. The majority looks around and see nothing but angry minorities, both unhappy with their position in society and totally unwilling to sacrifice anything for the good of the whole. The campus protests, for example, are just another sign that we have reached the tragedy of the commons phase of the demographic collapse of the white majority.

That is the show this week. It is a rumination on how majorities naturally see themselves and how minorities naturally see themselves. Democracy can only work in a majoritarian society. Once a democratic society devolves into a majority-minority society, minoritarianism takes over and democracy is no longer possible. What comes next is from a set of choices most do not relish.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Majority & Minority
Majority Attitudes
Minority Attitudes
Majority Minority

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