Female Trouble

Posted on August 3, 2018 by thezman

This week is a show about women. No, it is not just me mocking feminists, but there is some of that. I think our side does not always talk about the proper role of women, mostly because the people involved in dissident politics are men. That and the feminist loons dominate the issue, so the natural tendency is to react to their latest lunacy. It is a topic our side should talk about in a more constructive way, so I thought I’d try a little bit of that this week. At the same time, I wanted to keep it light, so I have some feminist bashing too.

After wrapping this episode up, it occurred to me that there are no alt-right women outside of the eye candy who do YouTube videos. Let’s face it, their popularity is superficial. No one will be asking me about Tara McCarthy’s thoughts on the current crisis. That’s no knock on these women. I’m just pointing out that the women involved in dissident politics are not engaging at an intellectual level. On the other hand, the more thoughtful women may be confined to the trad-mom world, which I don’t follow, so who know.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Music)
02:00: The Reality Of Women
12:00: Women In Politics
22:00: Feminism
32:00: Girl Power
42:00: Misery
52:00: Xirl Science
57:00: Closing (Music)

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

House of Cards

Posted on August 2, 2018 by thezman

The world is probably overdue for a catastrophe. The last major war in Europe was 73 years ago. There have been some minor skirmishes but nothing to alter the political arrangements. It’s been an extraordinary run of peace. Despite the howling by the neocons, there’s little chance of a war breaking out. The rest of the world is unlikely to see a major war anytime soon. Asia is too busy selling stuff to wage war, and the Middle East seems to have exhausted itself, at least for a little while.

The best chance for something significant is a plague. The last good disease outbreak was the Spanish Flu, which gets overlooked because of the Great War. That killed three to five percent of the world population. Some would say HIV counts as a pandemic, but that’s a different thing than a plague. Everyone knows how to not get HIV. There’s no defense against something like an airborne virus. The normal activities of life spread the disease, no matter what you do.

Researchers at John Hopkins University simulated the spread of a new deadly disease, a variant of the flu, using real politicians to “war game” the thing. A doomsday cult releases a genetically engineered virus, and the politicians were asked to make decisions based on the rules of the simulation. The result was 150 million dead in less than two years and close a billion dead by the end of the simulation. They modeled the new disease on SARS, just made it more deadly.

One of the researchers said, “I think we learned that even very knowledgeable, experienced, devoted senior public officials who have lived through many crises still have trouble dealing with something like this.” That’s a very nice way of saying that the people in charge are not very good at this sort of thing. When you dig into the story, the impression is that the result of this simulation was the worst-case scenario. Maybe they had their thumb on the scale, hoping to use the result to get research money.

The simulation does not address the knock-on effects of a plague. For example, the infrastructure of modern life requires a lot of maintenance. Crews around the country are out every day repairing power lines and communication equipment. If a plague starts, what percentage of that work force must get sick, scared or die before maintenance falls behind? Just imagine what happens if your power goes out for an extended period. Then imagine it happening during a plague.

Then you have the interconnection of world populations. A serious plague is going to hit a place like India much harder than a country like Canada. The West has come to depend on India for all sorts of services. Imagine a world without Hindu telemarketers and the world’s call centers shut down. In all seriousness, the disruptions to the supply chain would be massive, because so much is outsourced to poor non-white countries with low standards for public health.

Given that the disease rates would inevitably be higher in non-white areas, white intolerance of non-whites would spike. We see signs of this already, as Amerindians bring forgotten diseases like TB and scarlet fever into the US. This would make it impossible for the politicians to continue the white replacement project, at least not without declaring martial law. That assumes the military could or would go along with martial law. A plague would probably hit the military hardest.

Trust in institutions is at an all-time low in the United States. We have a strong economy, and the nation is at peace. If suddenly food gets scarce and civil unrest is a problem, trust in the state could very well collapse. Decades of stoking hatred among the populace could easily boil over into chaos. Imagine a dozen Katrina scale breakdowns around the country. The people in charge could not respond sensibly to one city-wide catastrophe. Imagine a dozen of them.

There’s something else. The common argument you hear is that there is a shortage of qualified people in critical areas of the economy. This is the argument for importing slaves from Asia. If an airborne virus starts killing people, those who work in offices will be hit hardest. What if we run out of people able to do important jobs. What if 20% of the medical staff drops dead in the first wave of the infection? The point is, it’s not hard to imagine that a serious plague could cripple the system.

In a lot of ways, the modern society is a house of cards. Everything is dependent on everything else. In the normal course of life, this works as defense in depth, with layers of dependency and redundancy. It’s easy to see how this could be turned into a weakness, due to severe shortages of manpower or one part of the system getting hit particularly hard. The modern economy assumes everything breaks, but only breaks a little and not all at one time.

That’s why the Black Death was so significant. It fractured the feudal system in ways that could not be repaired. Some have argued that the plague made the Renaissance possible, by crippling the old feudal order. That certainly seems plausible. The feudal order was a pyramid scheme of sorts. It required a large peasant population. Once the peasants started dying off, the system became unstable. Of course, the plague killed a lot of high-born people too. That changed the ruling classes.

The Late Bronze Age collapse is another example of a systemic failure brought on by exogenous forces. The reasons range from diseases, climate change to invasion, but probably a combination of them. The palace system for distributing goods and maintaining order was not able to hold up to these pressures. Since the relationships between the kingdoms were built around the palace system, one kingdom failing set off a domino effect. The result was a dark age that lasted about 300 years.

That does not mean a modern plague would result in a dark age, but major resets change the trajectory of human development. Suddenly, the prevailing orthodoxy is not so strong that no one challenges it. The neo-liberal order of today is fragile and requires enormous resources to maintain. In fact, the cost of maintaining it probably exceeds the benefits. A plague would cause a major reset to the world order and probably force a retreat of the prevailing order, at the minimum.

Democracy Without Borders

Posted on July 31, 2018 by thezman

Steve Sailer is fond of characterizing the Democrats as the “party of fringes” as they make their primary appeal to minority groups. When they run short of minorities, they create them by finding a way to slice off some portion of the majority, declaring it an oppressed minority. The result is we have one party that is the default for the white majority and another party that is for none-whites. It is the circus acts attacking the audience members.

This misses a larger consequence of democracy. That is, democracies must always seek to expand the electorate. This is an easily observed pattern. In the 19th century, as the West began to experiment with limited democracy, the franchise was sharply limited to males of wealth. The vote was limited to men, usually over the age of 25, and limited to property holders. In the early years of political liberalism, less than 10% of the adult population could vote.

The franchise slowly expanded, even in monarchies. The German Empire had universal male suffrage by 1871. Italy expanded the franchise to all men over 30 by 1912 and then lowered the age to 21 in 1918. The British followed a similar pattern. Universal male suffrage became the norm, then it was female suffrage. Unsurprisingly, women voting got going first in Germany, the birthplace of every bad idea in human history, and then spread around the West.

In the United States, the presence of a large black population, as well as a sizable indigenous population, added another wrinkle to the process. The urban immigrant population of the early 20th was another group exuded from voting. Eventually, these groups were handed a ballot. Immigrants became a powerful political force, pushing aside the heritage population in major cities. Blacks have become a key part of the Democratic constituency, once granted full voting rights in the 60’s.

The history of liberal democracy since the late 18th century has been a steady expansion of the voting base. At each turn, various arguments have been put forth in support of expanding the franchise, but the one thing that has always been true is there is never a move to narrow it. After every reform effort, every crisis and every war, the arguments are always in favor of expanding the franchise. Today, the debate is over handing a ballot to children, the retarded and foreigners.

As much as some people wish to believe that open borders are motivated by greed, the real reason is something more systemic. An official open borders policy for labor is actually bad for employers looking to game the rules. That is the whole point of hiring non-citizens over citizens. The illegal, is less likely to fight back at exploitative employers. Open the borders and they become a part of the normalized labor force available to everyone.

The real motivation behind open borders is systemic. In a democracy, all fights within the ruling class take place within the bounds of democracy. One side, let us call them the reformers, wants to change things. The other side, presumably benefiting from the rules, resists these changes. Selling the status quo to existing beneficiaries is easy, because over time, democracy creates a prevailing consensus. This leaves the reformers at a numerical disadvantage.

The solution is to expand the voter base. Political reformers of the 19th century, looking to reform the legal and economic arrangements, could appeal to disenfranchised men, offering them access in exchange for a vote, if they could get the vote. Social reformers of the 19th and 20th century could appeal to the female vote, if they could get women the franchise. The last fifty years in America has been about creating a new voters, by expanding the franchise with race consciousness .

The fight over open borders today are actually a battle to expand the franchise by those seeking to push through a post-national agenda. Since the Cold War, the White House has been held by two progressives and a neocon, which is just a hyper-violent variant of progressivism. Despite a near total dominance of politics, the political center has not moved that much since the end of the Cold War. The consensus has the advantage of numbers, so the solution is to import millions of new voters.

The expansion of the electorate is a consequence of democracy. In the age of kings, the ruling class was narrow, closed and well defined. The interests of the king are the interests of the property classes. Disputes are narrow, as the ruling class is hierarchical, with the king having the final word. The ruling class of a monarchy has a motivation to keep the ruling class numbers small. Expansion of their class must necessarily dilute their power within the ruling class. No one wants that.

In a democracy, no one owns the state, so factionalism is the inevitable result of disputes over the proceeds of government. By the logic of democracy, the fights between the factions are adjudicated by the public through elections. Eventually, a consensus forms and the major factions find an equilibrium. The minor factions and the losers of previous fights have no recourse other than to undermine the consensus and alter the make up the voting public.

It is axiomatic that democracy must be short-term oriented. This is not due to greedy voters, as much as the nature of democracy. The people holding office are temporary office holders with no investment in their position. Therefore, their goal is to squeeze every drop from their position as quickly as possible, Hillary Clinton is the ideal politicians in a democracy, because she wants to auction off every asset of the office she holds, as quickly as possible.

When seen in the light of democracy’s inevitable expansion of the franchise, open borders make perfect sense as the next logical step in Western democracy. It is why the open borders advocates are endlessly chanting about “our democracy” requiring the free flow of people. Democracy starts as a system for the people, controlled by the people in order to chart their own path. It soon becomes a system that eliminates the very concept of a people.

The Corporatist Enterprise

Posted on July 30, 2018 by thezman

Fascism is word that no longer has meaning, mostly because the left has made it the catchall term for anything they currently oppose. Even adjusting for that, no two academics can agree on a usable definition of fascism. Paul Gottfried, who has studied the subject more than anyone alive today, makes the point that fascism was a lot of different things, even to its advocates. It was an anti-movement, a reaction to and rejection of things like modernity, radicalism, and liberalism.

That is not a fair rendering of Gottfried’s thoughts on the subject, but it is a useful starting point when thinking about historical fascism. The book Fascism: The Career of a Concept is an excellent entry point into a topic for those interested in a sober minded history of fascism. An aspect of fascism that rarely gets discussed in the current age is its corporatism. Fascists, particularly Italian fascists, were corporatist. Mussolini saw the state as something like an organism that transcended all institutions.

The most famous expression of this is the line from Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism, “everything in the state, nothing against the State, nothing outside the state.” The state not only provides the services expected of the government, but it also provides the spiritual purpose for those in the state. The individual exists only in so far as his interests as an individual correspond with the interests of the state. The state is an organism that defines the citizen.

This is often used as the description of totalitarianism, but that is not an exactly accurate comparison. Bolshevism, for example, was indifferent to the spiritual life of the citizen, only focusing on the political and material life. That is the striking thing about Italian fascism versus Marxist movements. It attempted to give purpose to the life of the citizen, beyond his material utility. Instead of viewing the citizen as an economic unit, fascism saw the citizen as a heroic part of the great struggle.

This spiritual appeal can be seen in the modern managerial state. Politics is becoming all consuming. You cannot watch a movie or sporting event without being barraged with messages about “who we are.” Trump sounds like an anachronism, because he talks about bread-and-butter issues, while the rest of the managerial elite focuses on esoteric topics like “who we are” and “our democracy.” By democracy, they mean the managerial system and culture.

It also shows up in the modern conception of the business enterprise. It is not enough to have a job. It must give purpose to your life. It must be part of the great struggle that helps you reach your potential in service to the great cause. You see that in this story about a firm that forces its employees to embrace vegetarianism. Read about the company and it sounds like a religious mission. It used to be that businessmen only wanted to make money. Now they are priests.

It’s why rank and file employees of new style companies like Constant Contact feel the need to moralize from their cubicle. The young woman doing this is not merely a bonehead functionary. She sees herself as committed to the cause of the company, which is a holy cause. It is not a place where she performs tasks for money. It is what defines her life as a person. Led by tech, the managerial enterprise is not just an employer to its hired help. It is the defining feature of their lives.

The historian Ernst Nolte described one aspect of fascism as “theoretical transcendence” which he called a metapolitical force. Fascism sought to go beyond what exists in this world, toward a new future that was free of the restraints on the human mind. It imagined a world that was free of class, poverty, ignorance, and material restraint. That is what the modern managerial enterprise preaches. They are not just selling a service. They are changing the world.

The bizarre nature of the modern enterprise, where it describes itself as a mission to change the world, is one result of democracy. It obliterates local institutions, leaving the citizen as a stranger to himself and his fellow citizens. The corporation fills this void by providing a structured environment where the employees share an identity and see one another as on the same team. The managerial enterprise becomes both the local community and the church for its people.

The trouble is that a business is primarily about making a profit. Social activism keeps running up against the profit motive. Short of state sanctioned monopoly power, the corporate enterprise must compromise its values in order to make a profit. This is why democracy must favor monopoly. You see this with media companies, where the government encourages collusion and combination. Amazon enjoys massive subsidies, as it obliterates all other forms of retail.

This dynamic between the growing cultural power of the corporation, and its greater dependence on the state for protection, results in a merging of the two. Walk around a government campus and you see the modern corporations. College presidents now call themselves CEO’s, not because the college has become a business, but because both are now part of the great mission. The line between the state and the private sphere no longer exists because it cannot exist for both sides to thrive.

This is why gun grabbers, for example, have turned to corporations to advance their gun grabbing agenda. The state failed to ban guns, so now banks, media companies and retail monopolists are stepping in to “solve” the problem. In the not-so-distant future, you will have the unfettered political right to carry a gun, but no one will sell guns because it is practically impossible. No “private” enterprise will do business with a gun maker or a gun retailer. Individual rights are worthless without individuals.

The Irrational Mind

Posted on July 29, 2018 by thezman

Smart people tend to think smart people are immune from irrational beliefs. The smart scale has belief at one end and rationality at the other. The conceit of smart people is that they populate the rational end, while dumb people are at the other end. This leads to hubris. Smart people often fail to examine their own beliefs, assuming their every utterance is the model of rationality. It also leads to blindly going along with the crackpot ideas popularized by pseudo-intellectual posers.

The fact is, that smart scale is fiction. Smart people are just as prone to nutty ideas as anyone else. Belief as a stand-alone cognitive trait is largely independent of our ability to work the puzzles of life. History is full of examples. Francis Bacon dabbled in the occult and alchemy. Ben Franklin was a Rosicrucian. J.B.S. Haldane was the father of population genetics and a resolute communist, then a socialist and at one point a fan of eastern mysticism.

Another consequence of thinking belief and rationality are mutually exclusive is the mistake of assuming a rational motive to crazy actions. For example, Steve Sailer thinks people like Paige Harden are running a complex ruse when they go out in public and howl from the progressive catechism. After all, Harden is a smart person who spends all day working on tough problems related to human genetic diversity. Sailer jumps to the conclusion that she must be doing this to safeguard her research.

That is comforting to a smart guy like Sailer as it appeals to his preference for a wheels-within-wheels explanation of the world. The truth is though, smart people are just as prone to group think and crazy talk as everyone else. Read Mx. Harden’s social media feed and you come away with the sense that she is every bit as nutty as the hormonal feminists from the womyn’s studies department. She believes these things because these are the things her social class now believes.

That is the age-old error regarding the left. The default assumption is that they are acting as rational players. If they are rational, yet arriving at insane ideas like communism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism, they must have the wrong facts or a mistake in their reasoning. After all, they are smart people and smart people always seek the factually correct answer. Therefore, the only explanation for their mistake is they lack the facts or have a flaw in their logic.

The bourgeois Marxists of a century ago are now bourgeois anti-whites today. Read old books from a century ago and it is remarkable to see how many smart people bought into fascism, socialism, and communism. The New Deal intellectuals were all fans of European fascism, and many were communists. The British ruling class was saturated with various forms of socialism. Today, you cannot be a Cloud Person without embracing anti-white hatred. It is what good people do.

Of course, most of the bourgeois socialists of a century ago were serious about their radicalism right up until it required sacrifice. It is the old gag about the pig and the chicken discussing breakfast. The pig is committed, while the chicken is merely involved. You see that with the modern anti-whites. You can be sure that Mx. Harden makes sure to avoid the spicier parts of Austin like Montopolis, which is just seven percent white. She appreciates her diversity from a great distance.

Just as pointing out the outlandish contradictions between how bourgeois socialists lived and what they advocated had no effect on them, pointing out Mx. Harden’s hypocrisy is a pointless exercise as well. In fact, she will hate you all the more for having tried to force her to focus on herself. The whole point of being an anti-white is to hide from her own whiteness. Her belonging to the anti-white anointed is all about self-abnegation. She hates white people because she hates herself.

Modernity is based on the false assumption that man is rational. That people wish to be satisfied with their material wants and at peace with their neighbors. The truth is people are motivated by a quest for grace. Humans want to believe the universe cares for them, and it has a purpose for their lives. Therefore, they seek out some avenue to reach that state of grace, to give purpose to their lives. Ask Paige Harden about her research, and you will get some statement about social justice.

That is the key to understanding the current crisis. Our ruling elites believe they are on the side of history, so the results of their actions must be the will of the heavens. They do not measure the results empirically or think through the consequences. When they see white people complaining about anti-white rhetoric, the anti-whites see this as proof of their righteousness. Marxist said the recalcitrant working classes were suffering from false consciousness. Today’s anti-whites accuse recalcitrant whites of white privilege.

The Power Of Comfortable Beliefs

Posted on July 28, 2018 by thezman

A frustration on our side are the people, who should be on our side, but continue to believe things that are obviously untrue. For example, we see new evidence against the alleged benefits of immigration, but most Americans still worship immigrants like they are magic talismans. Show some principled conservatives a video from a naturalization ceremony, featuring bearded Muslims and those principles conservatives will burst into celebratory tears of joy.

What makes this more frustrating is that you could sit down with these people, explain the facts of immigration to them, and they will nod along in agreement. Then, an hour later they will say something stupid like “we need these workers to do the jobs Americans won’t do!” Generations of propaganda about open borders play a role, but a bigger part is that it is just easier to stick with the familiar opinions. Once you arrive at an opinion on some subject, changing it is not easy.

This is not just something that happens with the hoi polloi. The intelligentsia suffer from it more than normal people. Steve Sailer often notes how supposedly smart people in the human sciences fall for old fallacies about genetic group differences. Here is an example from a while back. Eric Turkheimer is a smart enough guy to know he is wrong, but it is easy to be wrong. There is also a social benefit to remaining wrong, so he stays in the easy chair of egalitarian ignorance.

Greg Cochran puzzles over this stuff in the field of medical research, about which he knows a great deal. His idea that pathogens may be the root cause of things like Alzheimer’s is a revolutionary idea that is universal rejected by science, despite some promising evidence in the case of Alzheimer’s disease. Cochran remains puzzled by this, but the answer is the same as with group genetic difference. It is simply easier and safer to believe the old ideas.

There seems to be something baked into the human consciousness that rejects empiricism, even for people in empirical fields. Mystery is more interesting than certainty, superstition is more inspiring than materialism. A famous example of this is how medicine initially responded to the Spanish Flu. Despite germ theory being established science, many doctors still thought the cause was miasmas that came from burning human waste.

One obvious cause is that when everyone believes something, or people assume everyone believes something, it is assumed to be correct. This is human nature, which is why propaganda is such a big part of our lives. Our rulers flood the zone with one set of opinions, in an effort to drive out all others, so that people will assume everyone accepts the official dogma. It’s why every TV ad features race mixers. There can be but one opinion, the approved opinion.

There are practical considerations, as well. If you are in politics, there is no upside to pointing out to your liberal colleagues that open borders are suicide. Bernie Sanders is not a bright man, but even he understands the laws of supply and demand apply to labor markets. He will enthusiastically support the Puerto Rican bimbo running on a mix of open borders and universal free stuff. There’s no obvious benefit to pointing out that this woman is as dumb as a gold fish, so they nod along with her.

When even people in difficult STEM fields virtue signal on nonsense like racism, there is more than practical necessity at play. Paige Harden is a smart women working in a field compiling mountains of evidence contradicting the progressive narrative, but she will stick with the narrative, because everyone she knows believes it. If she gets her way, brown people will be squatting in the burned-out husk of her lab, as society will have reverted to their natural state.

It is an important thing for outsider movements to keep in mind when thinking about how to approach the other side. The normie in the tricorn hat hooting about the constitution is not amenable to facts and reason. He is in a comfortable place that lets him feel morally superior to lefty, while embracing progressive morality. You turn him to the dark side by making that place uncomfortable for him. It is why mockery and humor are powerful weapons of outsider movements.

It is also why various forms of socialism persist, despite the monstrous failures at implementing them and the mountain of evidence contrary to the theory. The appeal of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that going along with her is easy and fun. The media and all of the beautiful people are celebrating her. She is like a viral video that everyone feels they need to see. Socialism has always that desire to feel that something better must lie ahead..

Barak Obama was the definition of an empty suit. He managed to make John Kerry seem complex. Yet, millions of white people showed up to vote, crying as they pulled the lever, believing they were about to experience the rapture. Obama was obviously a feckless ninny, but it was easier to believe he was the messiah, so most people went along with supporting him. It turns out that the most effective movements are the ones that make it easiest for people to accept things that are obviously untrue.

Libertarianism

Posted on July 27, 2018 by thezman

From time to time I get serious queries about my views on libertarianism. I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for modern libertarians, so I think a lot of people just assume I have never bothered to fully understand the topic. This is a popular defense from libertarians and soccer enthusiasts. As with soccer, the primary appeal of libertarianism is its simplicity, so this line of defense is a bit silly. Still, I thought a fuller explanation of my views on the topic would make for an interesting show this week, so here we are.

Now, as we see with defenders of Islam, libertarians have a habit of strapping on roller skates whenever you begin to analyze their thing. “That’s not the real Islam” follows every terrorist attack. “That’s not the real libertarianism” will inevitably show up in the comments of this podcast. I chose to rely on Hans-Hermann Hoppe for this show, as he is the pope of the faith right now. I did draw on Rothbard a bit and Rand, of course. I largely ignored the childish scribbling from Reason [clown horn] and Cato.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Wrong From The Start
12:00: Getting There and Keeping It
22:00: The Reality Of The Market
32:00: The Story of Iceland
42:00: Drug Legalization
47:00: Libertarian Trade
52:00: Individualism
57:00: Closing

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Odysee

The High Cost Of Cheap Labor

Posted on July 26, 2018 by thezman

From time to time, the claim is made that we need to import indentured servants from Asia, because the STEM fields are short of labor. This is a variation of the old line about crops rotting in the fields for the lack of stoop labor. The fact that no human living in America has ever experienced a food shortage due to crops rotting in the fields underscores the fact that these claims are nonsense. Indentured servants from Asia are cheap and more important, the threat of them depresses wages for American workers in the STEM jobs.

That is the cost of cheap labor that is easy to see. There are other costs that are not so obvious. In the case of the tech fields, indentured servants from Asia have had the perverse effect of discouraging young Americans from going into these fields. When tech firms started filling entry level jobs with foreign labor, they made the field unattractive to young people, who correctly saw that jobs were scarce and the ones available paid low wages. Young Americans were advised to not go into technology, as a result.

Put another way, cheap foreign labor drove out domestic labor from these entry level jobs, thus institutionalizing the use of indentured servants in the low-level tech jobs. Slavery had the same effect where it was practiced. In the case of tech, there is a social element involved. You go to college in order to get a good job. That is a social definition that goes beyond earnings. If your field requires you to work with smelly South Asians for five years until you can be the supervisor of smelly South Asians, that is viewed as a low-status field.

There has been another consequence of the use of indentured servants. People think of tech as coding shops in Silicon Valley, but the vast majority of American business relies on small local firms that bring a combination of technical and business skills to their role as technology consultants. The usual pattern is someone works as a programmer for a developer and then goes out on his own as a consultant, supporting clients that use the software that he worked on as a developer. He becomes their part-time CTO.

The result of flooding the entry level jobs with Asians on H1-B visas has been a shortage of people in these higher end consulting and development jobs. In many parts of the country, the shortage of people with a mix of business and technology skills that can be used to solve real world problems is acute. You can find plenty of pajeets, who can write code but are useless at solving problems. Locating someone with business and programming skills that can solve real problems is becoming close to impossible.

At the other end of the labor market, the hidden cost of cheap labor has created another problem. The landscaper hiring Mam-speaking tribesman from Guatemala is no longer hiring teenagers on summer break. Retail operators in vacation areas game the system and import Eastern Europeans for service jobs. The availability of cheap foreign labor has made the summer job a thing of the past. It used to be a part of growing up in America, but now it is a rarity. Instead, foreigners do seasonal work.

In general, the part-time job and summer job was when a young person started to learn how to be an adult. They had to show up on time and learn how to get along with strangers. They had to learn how to put up with a crappy boss and perform tasks that seemed stupid and pointless, in order to get paid. They also learned the value of money and its connection to labor. That first check, less taxes, was the great eye opener for every young American. Today, they do not experience that until adulthood.

There is another aspect to this. The summer job for boys was often manual labor, like operating a rake or lawnmower for a landscaper. Maybe it was as a laborer on a job site for a roofer or painter. It was there that a young man got his first taste of being a man, because he was around adult males in their natural habitat. A young man learned that men are not as forgiving as mom and that you had to be earn respect. Young males today do not experience this. Instead, they live like girls.

This is probably why millennials have such a terrible reputation. The girls are spoiled brats, making crazy demands, while the boys are hysterical sissies. One of the things employers will tell you on the side is that they are careful about hiring millennials. They would prefer to overpay for a semi-retired boomer than hire a petulant man-child from the millennial generation. When a millennial takes over a family business from a retiring parent, it is a good bet the company will go through a rough transition.

Public policy is about trade-offs. The cost of cheap labor is not limited to the direct cost to labor markets. There are hidden, long-term social costs. The generations of young people warped by the consequences of not working will show up in the culture long after Sanjay is back in Bombay. What foreign labor does is monetize future social capital and pull it forward. It is a form of debt creation, not a lot different than eating the seed corn. Future social harmony is consumed today, with no way to replace it.

The Ideological State

Posted on July 25, 2018 by thezman

Civic nationalism is an effort to define a nation ideologically, rather than biologically and geographically. Up until the French Revolution, a nation was primarily a related group of people with a common language, culture, and history. The French were not defined by geography or ideology, but by blood. The lands they occupied were French lands because French people occupied them. The people were loyal to themselves and, by extension, a king, whose duty was to defend the interests of his people.

The French Revolution changed that as a nation came to be defined by geography and ideology. The challenge of replacing private government, where a king defends his lands and the land of his people, is in finding something to replace the basis of loyalty. That is where the civic religion comes into the mix. Instead of people giving their soul to God and their sword to the king, both are pledged to the new civic religion, where the state is the object of worship and veneration. Citizenship becomes a sacred duty.

The Enlightenment ideas about public government were, of course, a reaction to the defects of the aristocratic regime. A good king makes for the best form of government, but a terrible king, who is greedy or stupid, makes for the worst form of government. The former advances the peace and prosperity of his people, while the latter damages it. Placing the fate of the people on luck, hoping the next king turns out to have the right mix of qualities for the age, seems like a rather silly way to run a society, when you think about it.

Public government addresses that by giving the people an organized way to get rid of bad rulers and change public policy. The trouble with public government is the same trouble we see with public property. When no one owns something, no one has an incentive to sacrifice for it or invest in it. The tragedy of the commons applies to all public goods, including government. The solution is the civic religion, where the identity of the citizen is tied to the success of the state. The state becomes the altar of the people.

This is why, in our current age, the ruling class drones on endlessly about democracy and the alleged threats to democracy. They do not use the word democracy to mean people voting on public policy. They mean it as a synonym for the neo-liberal order and the cosmopolitan ideology that animates it. It is why the wrong person winning an election is a threat to democracy, while the right person winning is a celebration of democracy. It is also why the coup plotters in the FBI still feel smugly justified in their actions.

Ideological nations have two problems. One is they must endlessly whip the citizens into a fervor in order to keep them loyal to the state. Religions have the same challenge, which is why the preacher is always warning about some imminent threat to your soul or reminding everyone about God’s wrath. Piety is a full-time commitment and that applies to civic piety, as well. It is why communist countries are drenched in patriotic symbols, songs, and public performances, designed to keep everyone in a heightened state of ideological frenzy.

The other problem, a consequence of the demands of piety, is they become ruthlessly intolerant of dissent. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” becomes the mantra of every nation built on ideology. If people are allowed to question the ideology that organizes the state, they are doubting the project itself and this must be viewed as a threat to the state. Therefore, civic religions must always become increasingly intolerant and narrow, in order to defend the state against challenges.

This is why the two great industrial wars of the 20th century were blood baths. When one tribe fights another for access to the river, they just want access to the river. They see each other as competitors for a resource. Compromise and mercy are possible because their conflict is not personal. They may work up a good hatred for the other people in order to screw up their courage, but that is a fanaticism of temporary necessity. Once the material dispute is resolved, the people have no reason to hate one another.

When two people make war over religion, because they see one another as an abomination or a direct threat to what defines them as a people, the conflict must be a fight to the death. There can be no mercy toward that which threatens your existence. This also means no limits. The total wars of the 20th made perfect sense to the combatants because they saw the other side as devoted to evil. Incinerating a city is perfectly reasonable if you think the people in it are evil, because they support an evil ideology.

Again, this is something we see in our own time. Social media is full of post by Progressive fanatics, celebrating violence against people they call Nazis. It is not that these victims are actual Nazis, of course. It is just that the word now means “evil people” who the pious see as a threat to their existence. By definition, the pious must never show mercy to evil, as to do so means accepting that there is some virtue in the evil people that is worth preserving. Piety demands no mercy be given to the impious.

Now, the American ruling elite, for the last 75 years or so, has claimed that rather than being a nation defined by blood and soil, America is a nation defined by allegiance to a set of ideals, the American creed. That way, anyone who wanders in can be a citizen, as long as he pledges allegiance to those ideals. This was a post hoc justification for mass immigration in the early 20th century and a way to include the sons of recent immigrants into the national mythology. It sacralized the immigrant as the ultimate American.

In fact, Americans are now more loyal to foreigners than to one another. It seems that a third defect of the ideological state is that the ideology evolves a hatred of itself. Something similar has happened in Europe. The EU is, after all, an effort to apply the lessons of America to the European continent. Instead of defining the people biologically and geographically, a European will be an idea. In Europe and America, the idea of citizenship has curdled into self-loathing. What defines the people is their hatred of themselves.

This is not correctable. People join a cause or a movement in order to swap their individual identity for that of the group. In other words, people are driven to ideology out of self-loathing. A society based on ideology must therefore reward those most riddled with doubt and celebrate self-loathing as the highest virtue. The ideological state, regardless of design, must always become a suicide cult. It simultaneously boils off the skeptical and rewards the most fanatical. A society run by fanatics always ends up in a blood bath.

Thoughts On The Current Crisis

Posted on July 24, 2018 by thezman

Imagine you and a group of your friends produce what you think is a revolutionary way to improve the world. You are so sure it is a great idea, you and your buddies decide to overthrow the government so you can implement your idea. Now, even assuming your revolutionary idea is legitimate, that is a terrible way to go about changing the world. You and your band of nobodies lack the numbers and the moral authority to take over the government. The most likely result is you get arrested and locked away in a padded cell.

Now, a more rational way of putting your brilliant idea into action is for you and your group to go out and start telling people about it. In a prior age, this meant handing out fliers and knocking on doors to spread the good word. In the current age, you can start a social media campaign and create a YouTube channel, where you post informative videos on your brilliant ideas. Maybe someone with a big on-line following notices your efforts and joins the cause. Perhaps someone of importance gets interested in your ideas.

The point of raising awareness and getting people involved in your movement is to increase your numbers. One reason your plot to overthrow the state failed in the first paragraph is you lacked the numbers. If you get a million people to sign onto your cause, then you have a chance. Not only that, when it comes to changing minds, quantity has a quality of its own. People are much more open-minded to an idea that has a big following than one held by a tiny fringe group. Human beings are social animals.

On the other hand, numbers alone are not enough. Your revolution also failed because you still lack moral authority. In a country of 300 million, a million strong movement is still pretty small. The state will feel justified in using extreme force against you and your movement if they see you as a threat. Numbers are not the only reason you failed. The people in charge could operate in the knowledge that most people see them as the legitimate power in the country. Therefore, they can squash all threats.

Revolutions succeed because the prevailing order lost its moral authority. Even though the numbers that oppose them are small, the lack of moral authority means no one is willing to risk much to defend the status quo. The lack of legitimacy is why governments fall, religions collapse and cultures collapse. The Bolsheviks did not succeed because they had a better set of tactics or a plausible alternative. They toppled the Czar because the one thing everyone agreed upon is the old order had to go. Anything had to be better.

That means you and your band of revolutionaries does not really need a manifestly brilliant idea to change the world. If the prevailing orthodoxy has lost its legitimacy, even a mediocre alternative is enough. If you examine successful revolutions, the alternative on offer is usually quite vague and, in the end, totally impractical. It was more of a sunny vision, a promise of a better day, than a fully considered alternative moral order. It was just something that felt better than the discredited status quo.

The point of all this is that in the current crisis, the job of the dissident is to build numbers and delegitimize the prevailing order. When the alt-right got full of themselves and decided to it was time to start the revolution, they were squashed like a bug. The reason was they lacked the numbers, and they had done nothing to undermine the moral authority of the people in charge. To most white people, the riot in Charlottesville looked like a bunch of fringe weirdos making a nuisance of themselves. They deserved what they got.

Ultimately, revolutions that matter start with the small group and slowly grow into a larger group. That was true of the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, and the Iranian revolutionaries. It was true of the American revolutionaries. The small group grew into a larger group and then it became a sub-culture. Finally, it blossomed into a counter-culture that provided a home for the whole man, not just the revolutionary. Dissidents in America are in the sub-culture phase or possibly in the early phases of becoming a counter-culture.

Another aspect of successful revolutions is they are short on concrete ideas. Detailed plans can be analyzed and critiqued. Vague promises cannot. That is one reason Trump won in 2016. His promises sounded good, mostly because they lacked specificity. They were aspirations, not policies. That means the people spending their days working out the new legal code for the ethno-state are wasting their time. The timeless principles of today are just the rules instituted by the winners, after they won.

There are two recent examples American dissidents should study. The first is the Evangelical movement that started in the 1970’s as a response to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. They had unassailable principles and specific policy goals that arose from those principles. They had great organic organizations, their churches. They had money and manpower. They also focused on one party, hoping to make the GOP the counter to the Left. By the 80’s, the Evangelicals were a powerful political force.

They also failed to accomplish any of their goals. Their top issue was abortion, specifically rolling back Roe. They lobbied hard to get their guys into office and on the bench so they could get that ruling overturned. They had zero success. In fact, it is hard to find any aspect of the culture war they were able to win. If you had told Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson in the 70’s that their efforts would still mean gay marriage and trannies stalking little boys in public toilets, they probably would have lost their faith entirely.

The reason they lost is they engaged the ruling class on their terms. The Evangelicals agreed to play by the rules set by the ruling class. This ultimately meant supporting the ruling class institutions, like the political rules and the party system. Those things are designed to preserve the current order. In effect, the Evangelicals agreed from the start to defend and support the prevailing order. It was inevitable that their efforts would only lead to more of the same because they agreed to all of the assumptions of the prevailing order.

Another useful example is the NRA. Starting around the same time as the Evangelicals entered politics, the NRA decided to change direction. They became apolitical, supporting only candidates that were pro-gun. They stopped arguing about the efficacy of gun control as a crime fighting tool and started arguing about gun culture as a vital part of American culture. The NRA shifted from political debates to moral debates and captured the high ground by linking gun rights to patriotism and basic America concepts of liberty.

This is why the fight over guns has been the one exception in the culture war. The Left tried hard to capture the high ground, usually by standing on the bodies of dead kids, but they failed because the NRA always fights to hold the moral high ground. They never conceded the premise or the moral framework of the debate. When the Left says they want guns off the streets because of the children, the NRA says they want guns in the hands of parents, so they can protect their children and themselves.

The lesson for our thing is to first understand where we are in the process. Our job right now is to grow our numbers by promoting our ideas. Part of doing that is taking every opportunity to undermine the other side’s moral authority. Just as important, it means developing a genuine alternative to the moral order. A counter-culture has its own ethos, which means its own media, its own language, and its own comedy. That last part is important because what we mock speaks directly to what we believe.

Revolutions feel like they happen overnight, but they are the culmination of a long process that starts before the vanguard is out of diapers. The 60’s radicals would never have existed without the Beatniks and the drug culture. The Jacobins would not have existed without the salon culture that had developed in Paris. Radical politics are born of a counter-culture that provides the basis of an alternative moral order. For there to be right-wing radicals tomorrow, we must build the right-wing counter-culture today.

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