Author Archives: thezman

Vox Means Stupid

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. Another name for this is the Joe Biden Effect, where a relatively stupid person is certain he is the smartest person in the room, when he is most likely the dumbest person in the room.

People in cults are prone to this because inside the cult, it appears to be a perfectly logical structure for viewing the world. Intelligence is seen as a measure of the degree of acceptance, as well as the ability to repeat dogma in various situations. The result is knowing the catechism better than everyone else makes you the smartest guy in the room.

Progressives suffer from this more than anyone, because they have replaced the supernatural with a warped conception of science. Their cause is not righteous it’s logical, even when it makes no sense to anyone. Here’s a good example of someone smugly thinking they are making a brilliant point, when they are speaking gibberish.

The point of Black Lives Matter isn’t to suggest that black lives should be or are more important than all other lives, but instead that black people’s lives are relatively undervalued in the US (and more likely to be ended by police), and the country needs to recognize that inequity to bring an end to it.

For starters, the premise is a lie. This is easily discovered. A white guy in confrontation with the police is more likely than a black guy to be killed. The fact is blacks are 13% of the population and commit more than half the crime. Therefore, they will have vastly more confrontations with cops, but even so, cops appear to be much more careful with them than with white offenders.

Reddit user GeekAesthete made this point in a thread explaining why the phrase “all lives matter” is offensive

Offensive to whom? It’s the question they never bother to answer as they just assume they are speaking for Science! and you better bow down and worship Science! The possibility that hooting “Black Lives Matter” is offensive to everyone else never crosses their mind. That would require introspection and self-awareness, traits not found in cults.

The childishness on display here is another example of how cults work. When sensible people point out the absurdity of “Black Lives Matter!” the response is a sneering dismissal. The assumption is you are too dumb to understand so they make a silly cartoon to explain it, which not really about explaining as much as the sneering. Cult members are highly invested in who? whom? It’s what defines them.

Young German Lopez, the writer of that nonsense, most certainly thinks he is a clever fellow. After all, he writes for Vox and that’s what clever fellows do. Progressives are so susceptible to the Joe Biden Effect because they have so much confirmation around them. Their cult controls the high ground so there’s an unlimited number of pats on the head for them.

Mitt Romney in a Skirt

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The other day CNN changed their rules for the upcoming debate such that Carly Fiorina can be at the adult table this time. To no one’s surprise the media was giddy over the prospect. Rich Lowry was out in his cheerleader outfit, waving the Fiorina pom-poms. David French had a piece up telling us that Fiorina is the next Margaret Thatcher. My hunch is Conservative Inc. is convinced she can derail Trump and maybe fool his voters into supporting her.

It’s not a terrible idea as GOP voters are like everyone else these days. They are marinated in the proselytizing of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. White men are bad. Women and minorities are good. That means the dream candidate for many voters is a one-legged lesbian Elvis impersonator of color. All Florina has to do is wave around a little American flag and make the right noises about abortion and she’s in double digits.

Fiorina is in many ways emblematic of what’s gone wrong with the GOP. The party is now seen as a craven insider party willing to make whatever cynical deals it needs to make in order to please the donor base. The reason Trump and to a lesser degree Carson are polling so well is they don’t have the stink of McConnell and Boehner on them. The party’s media arm is therefore pumping air into Fiorina ‘s tires thinking that will satisfy the hoi polloi.

That may not be totally fair to Fiorina, but the fact is she is where she is strictly because she lacks a penis and gave a lot of money to Republicans in the past. If she had a penis, she is Brian Russell. Having a moderately successful corporate career is simply not enough to run for president and get more than a few votes. Her resume says Congress, not president.

Of course, that resume is not exactly sterling either. She finished her corporate career as CEO of HP and was the anti-Steve Jobs, because she took a strong brand and ran it into the ground. Under her watch, HP lost half its share price and shed thousands of jobs trying to stem the bleeding. Her tenure is considered one of the biggest fiascoes in Silicon Valley history. HP share holders held parties after she was fired and the stock jumped 10% that day.

She was also a disaster at her previous stop. Lucent does not get much attention when people talk about Fiorina’s resume, but it is probably the most telling part of her story. She swung big deals that looked great on paper, but ended up saddling the company with massive debts that eventually killed the firm. Like everything else in the go-go Clinton years, Lucent was a big bust-out that skimmed billions from suckers through inflated stock prices.

In other places, I’ve called Fiorina the original Ellen Pao and the more I think about it the more I like it. In the 80’s, as the Boomers took over businesses, this weird creature appeared on the scene – the female executive. Every company wanted the power girl on their brochure and in their executive suites. Most were probably qualified, but a lot rode the warm upward currents of affirmative action to positions for which they were unqualified.

Putting that aside, assuming I’m just a bad thinker, she has run for office in the past. In 2010 she took on the rapidly decaying Barbara Boxer, who is as popular as rectal cancer in California. That was a great year for Republicans and a moderate like Fiorina running against an old bag should have been a race. Instead Fiorina ran a comically bad campaign and lost by double digits.

The thing about that race is it looked just like the 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts where Mitt Romney took on Ted Kennedy. Fat boy was on the ropes as the locals were ready for a change. His drunken antics were even embarrassing to Mass voters and Romney was a modern, moderate Republican in the old Yankee tradition. Plus, 1994 was shaping up to be a monster year for the GOP.

I was in a restaurant in Saugus Mass the night of the big debate. It seemed like everyone got up and went into the bar to see Fat Boy finally get taken down. Teddy was sober and played the dead relative card. Mitt folded and he looked scared. Everyone left the bar and went back to their tables. It was over and everyone knew it. Romney saw his polls collapsed and he was crushed in the election.

That should have been the end of it for Mitt, but he was rich and determined. He retooled and won the governorship. Then he retooled again to run for president. All that retooling left a guy who was willing to say anything to win. Even by the standards of politics, Mitt Romney was a gold plated phony. You see the same pattern with Fiorina, except she is skipping the run for governor. But, she’s still Mitt Romney is a skirt.

The Invasion

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The invasion of America from the south has been largely peaceful. Hispanics have a crime rate slightly higher than the whites, but nothing like blacks. Most whites are happy when a neighborhood transitions from black to Hispanic. Even though most will be on welfare, they are not robbing and murdering like the blacks. Plus, a fair number who do work, work very hard and that flatters the typical white person in SWPL-ville.

Europe has a different problem. Their immigration is coming from two places, the MENA and sub-Saharan Africa. These populations have high degrees of clannishness, fanaticism and violence. The Czechs and Slovaks parted ways with a handshake and good wishes. Syria is breaking up in a bloodbath. Similarly, sub-Saharan Africans slaughter one another for sport.

There’s also a different cultural history on the Continent than in the US. Despite all the happy talk and multicultural nonsense belched forth by the ruling elites, the natives have maintained their suspicions of the “other.” Further, they don’t have the same hangups about race as we do in the US. Europeans don’t look at Africans as sacred objects of worship.

That’s why the Euro elites are playing with fire when it comes to the invasion from the south. The natives of Europe are not going to be shamed into suicide, but they will be irate over homicide committed by “refugees” from the south.

Italy’s simmering anti-immigrant sentiment has been stoked by the murder of an elderly couple in their home in Sicily, allegedly by an African asylum seeker.

Mamadou Kamara, an 18-year-old from the Ivory Coast, allegedly slit the throat of Vincenzo Solano, 68, and then attacked his Spanish-born wife, Mercedes Ibanez, 70.

Ms Ibanez fell to her death from a second-floor balcony, during a robbery that turned violent.

Mr Kamara is one of thousands of migrants and refugees living at a vast reception centre at nearby Mineo, in south-eastern Sicily.

They are accommodated there after arriving by boat from Libya, and wait sometimes for months to have their asylum applications assessed.

The migrants are allowed to come and go freely from the facility, a former US military base where prostitution, links with organised crime and the trade in illicit goods is said to be rife.

Mr Kamara, who was rescued in the Mediterranean on June 8 and brought with other migrants to the port of Catania in Sicily, allegedly broke into the pensioners’ flat in the village of Palagonia, six miles away, and slit the throat of Mr Solano.

The elderly man’s wife was found dead in the courtyard of their three-storey apartment block. Investigators believe she may have fallen over the balcony in panic after trying to flee the attacker.

Mr Kamara was arrested after police searched his bag on Sunday as he returned to the migrant centre.

Inside they found a mobile telephone, a laptop computer, a video camera and a pair of trousers, allegedly belonging to Mr Solano, that were covered in blood.

The young African man claimed to have “found” the items, but police arrested him and are expected to charge him with two counts of murder.

Here’s a tip to my European readers. Get used to hearing the words, “The young African man claimed to have “found” the items.” The other line you will hear a lot from the mother of the criminal is “He’s a good boy. He was turning his life around.” For reasons we have yet to discover here in the States, sacred people have a habit of committing major crimes just when they are about to turn their life around.

Sebastian Maccarrone, the director of the Mineo migrant centre, said: “If it was him, it is a tragedy within a tragedy – for the people killed, and for integration. We are all shocked. I have spoken with many migrants and they all want to disassociate themselves from what happened.

“For each small step we have taken forward in terms of integration, this has put us 10 steps backwards.”

The trousers were identified as belonging to Mr Solano by one of his daughters, who was contacted by police.

The pensioner had retired back to his native Sicily a decade ago after working for years in a Mercedes car factory in Germany. Detectives believe that other migrants may have been involved in the burglary.

More than 100,000 refugees have arrived by boat in Italy this year, making the crossing from Libya in overcrowded rubber dinghies and leaky fishing boats. Last year, a record 170,000 arrived on Italian shores.

Here’s another thing you need to get used to hearing. Every time an invader kills a local, the tragedy will be that it hurts the cause of diversity and integration. You’ll note the word “assimilation” has been replaced with “integration” now, meaning you wreckers better not insist on keeping your old habits. You will meet the invaders “half way” and adopt their culture – or else.

Patience is wearing thin among many Italians, with some of the country’s 20 regions refusing to accommodate any more migrants and centre-Right parties accusing the centre-Left government of Matteo Renzi, the prime minister, of having lost control of the country’s borders.

“Italians fear for their lives inside their own homes,” said Gianluca Buonanno, an MEP with the Northern League, a staunchly anti-immigrant party of the Right.

“This is Renzi’s national security strategy. What kind of country are we living in?”

Giorgia Meloni, another centre-Right politician and a close ally of Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister, said: “The instigator of the murder of these two innocents is the Italian state, which is responsible for having kept open a facility … which we said should be closed down.”

“The murdered couple had returned from living in Germany to enjoy their retirement in Sicily,” a relative told La Stampa newspaper. “They shouldn’t have died like this, slaughtered like goats.”

Well, to the people in charge, the goats are a bigger concern than the natives. The typical Western government cares more about animal welfare than the safety of its native people. Being slaughtered like goats is going to look like a good result in a few more years.

Transitive Rape

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I was raped in another life by an ancestor of Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Steve Ballmer and George Soros. Since these men are all Jewish, the numbers say they share a common ancestor, if we go back far enough. That guy raped by ancestor and according to the new rules of epigentics, I am now suffering emotionally from it. I plan to sure them for billions.

That’s absurd, of course, but we are nearing a point where this sort of stuff  is moving from the absurd to the commonplace. This is an example of it.

Nebraska football coach Mike Riley and his former school, Oregon State, face a federal Title IX lawsuit filed by a woman who said she was raped as a result of the coach’s failure to correct a sexually violent culture in the program, according to a report by The Oregonian.

The woman said she was raped by a player’s cousin in October 1999 as a freshman at Oregon State.

Riley coached the San Diego Chargers in 1999 but led the program at Oregon State in 1997 and 1998 and from 2003 to 2014. He was hired at Nebraska in November and is set to coach his first game at the school Saturday.

Riley said in a statement released by Nebraska that he was he was made aware of the complaint Tuesday and previously did not know of the incident. He declined, in the statement, to comment specifically on the matter.

“However, I am committed to a harassment-free culture in our football program,” Riley said, “and I am continually seeking ways to expand our student education program. Sexual assault is a horrendous crime and has no place in our society.”The woman, seeking $7.5 million in damages, said she was raped after drinking at an off-campus party. She said she was taken to another apartment, unable to fight off her attackers as she faded out of consciousness, according to lawsuit.

To summarize, a woman is suing because 15 years ago she has a fuzzy recollection of maybe participating in a drunken gang-bang, which may or may not have included a football player. As a result, she now expects to get $7.5 million, since it was so long ago and she really does not remember, but a rape occurred near there once.

Life is unfair. Women get raped and their attackers walk free. It is a tough crime to prove under the best of circumstances. It’s made more difficult by false claims, regularly made by women simply looking for a payday. It is the cost of not sticking with the old rules about bearing false witness. Throw a few broads in jail for 20 years when they are revealed to have falsely accused a man of rape and this problem fixes itself.

Similarly, make it clear that getting blind drunk with a bunch of strange men eliminates your right to cry rape.This is not to say raping drunken coeds is OK. I’m making the obvious point that it is a very bad idea for a young girls to get drunk with a bunch of men. We used to know this and work hard to keep it from happening. We used to know that if Helen of Sparta was just a bit more modest Troy would still be standing.

The counter to this is that this case will be tossed as soon as it gets to a judge. That’s fine but the cost of defending this lunacy is not just paid for by the accused. Women everywhere suffer by lowering the bar this way. The more fake rape claims we get, the less likely we are to take the real claims seriously. We used to know that too, long ago in another country.

The Madness of Our Age

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One of the great mysteries of the modern age is why the people in charge of Western countries are so determined to fill up their lands with foreigners. The greed explanation implies a level of coordination that seems implausible. The Machiavellian angle is similarly flawed. Left wing parties gain some benefit from mass immigration, but it comes at a price. That and right wing parties are just as enthusiastic.

There’s also the fact the current voters are wildly opposed to immigration. Polling for years now has made it clear that opposition to immigration is a winner. As long as you avoid sounding like Taki commenters, you can win a lot of votes by opposing mass immigration. This recent poll shows that Trump, with all his faults, is being carried to the top strictly on opposition to immigration.

Immigration: When Donald Trump proposed mandatory deportation of illegal aliens, pundits and politicians on both sides of the political aisle were appalled. But on this issue it looks like Trump has the public on his side.

The fire from the right was almost as fierce as that from the left. “It’s not conservative and it’s not realistic and it does not embrace American values,” said Jeb Bush.

Sen. Lindsey Graham called it “absolute gibberish.”

Conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer called the idea “crackpot” and “morally obscene.”

But the prize for overheated rhetoric goes to Hillary Clinton, who said Trump wants to “literally pull people out of their homes and their workplaces, round them up, put them, I don’t know, in buses, boxcars, in order to take them across our border.”

So what do these folks say about the fact that the majority of Americans back Trump on this?

The latest IBD/TIPP Poll asked 913 adults coast to coast if they “support or oppose mandatory deportation of illegal immigrants in the U.S.” Not surprisingly, 87% of Trump supporters back the proposal.

What’s surprising is that 59% of the overall public does as well. Mandatory deportation gets majority support in all age groups except 18-24, every income group, among both women and men, at every level of educational achievement, and in rural, urban and suburban regions.

More interesting still is the fact that 64% of independents and 55% of moderates support deportation.

Even among Hispanics, the poll found 40% backed mandatory deportation — although the sample size is too small to make much of that number.

Trump’s other proposals don’t do as well. Just under half the public favors building a wall along the southern border (48%) or an end to automatic citizenship for children born of illegals (46%). But a majority of independents (55%) back building the wall.

What’s going on here?

The tone and the wording suggest the answer to the puzzle at the top of this post and the question in the article are the same. The people in charge have turned open borders and mass immigration into a sacrament. Instead of looking at it like any other public policy, they view it as the modern equivalent of opposing fascism or slavery. There’s simply no room in the mental space to consider any other option. You are for open borders or you are evil.

This article ostensibly about how immigration is the defining issue of the age illustrates the bizarre lunacy of the managerial class with regards to immigration.

This, incidentally, is why I am convinced that there was no way that the GOP could have precluded the Donald Trump moment in American politics by passing comprehensive immigration reform two years ago. The movement of people from country to the city, from poor nations to richer nations, from the Global South to the Global North, may be the great political problem of the next age in global development. Just as the building of trade routes and the maintenance of empires defined the mercantile age, then the construction of a political economy (capitalist or socialist) became the major problem of the industrial age, the mass movement of people may be the defining issue of whatever we’re calling the information age.

Let that sink in for a minute. The solution to the great revolt over immigration was to pass legislation effectively eliminating the nation’s borders. Put another way, if the people are upset over immigration the solution is more immigration. If it rains too much, the solution is more immigration. If it rains too little, more immigration!

What seems to be happening here is the beautiful people have made open borders the star on their belly. They don’t think about. They don’t even believe in it. It’s all about displaying their piety. The West is experiencing a version of the Lace Curtain Irish versus the Shanty Irish. One group of people, in this case the managerial class, defines itself purely in opposition to the other people, in this case the middle class.

Compounding this is the deeply held belief by the beautiful that they are pulling the wagon and the middle class is freeloading on them. Immigration is a form of spite, revenge upon people our betters see as their burden. It’s how allegedly conservative chattering skulls find it so easy to mock the supporters of Donald Trump. They have never cared for the hoi polloi anyway, so this is a convenient excuse to make that point.

The future is always battled out in the streets. Scenes like this one are becoming more common in Europe and much worse is on tap as the tide of migrants promises to flood European cities. The people in charge face a choice. They can roll the tanks over their citizens in favor of their new charges from abroad. Or, they can yield to the demands of the people. The only question left is just how much blood will be spilled over this suicidal lunacy that has gripped the ruling elites.

The Bowtied Boob

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I think it was Bill Buckley who said you can know a man’s politics based on his opinion of Israel and abortion. It may not have been Buckley, but that’s my recollection. His point was not that you had to agree with him on either of these topics. It was that your reasoning would reveal things about you that were definitive. I’ve always liked that type of litmus test and I have expanded that list for my own tastes.

One on my list is the topic of euthanasia, which George Will writes about in his latest column. I’ll say up front that I oppose government efforts to punish people who commit suicide. I’m also against charging people who try and fail as that’s pretty much the definition of kicking a man while he is down. In almost all cases, suicide attempts are a symptom of serious psychological problems. These people need help, not punishment.

Society has a responsibility to take control of those who lack agency or whose behavior is a danger to themselves or others. Someone trying to kill themselves is someone who is a danger to themselves or others, so we take control of them by force if necessary. If the reasons for their suicidal actions can be addressed, then you let them loose or turn them over to the care of their loved ones. If not, you take reasonable measures to guard them from themselves.

Proponents of assisted suicide dance around all of these issues as we see in the Will column. They also avoid the problems that arise from giving doctors a right to kill people who request it. Nowhere else in the law do we make exceptions in the law in favor of a two party agreement. That’s what a verbal agreement is between a doctor and a patient. It is a verbal contract.

Common law has always held that a contract is unenforceable when the result of fulfilling the contract violates the law. The classic example in contract law is the contract for murder. No court will compel a hit-man fulfill a murder contract. It also means the contract does not provide a shield to those who break the law in order to fulfill a contract.

To carve out an exception so a doctor can put a pillow over granny’s face without being charged with murder is just about impossible. The one exception we allow for homicide is self-preservation. Taking a life to defend life is permitted because self-preservation trumps everything in the hierarchy of limiting principles. That means you can kill a burglar or kill in war time. It even extends to capital punishment, which is in defense of society.

Convenience and practicality are not principles that trump life. Sympathy is certainly not the basis for an exception either. If we let the doctor kill granny out of a sense of mercy, then you have to let her family kill her too. After all, who could possibly have a greater sense of mercy for poor old granny than her family?

The way around it is to limit the power to kill granny to state agents. That brings us back to the death panels and technocrats plugging your vitals into spreadsheets to determine your fate. But the state can only have powers given to it by the people and the people do not have the right to kill granny because she’s sick and ready to check out. The state can kill in self-defense, but that’s it.

This is why I think this is a good litmus test issue. George Will can meander around to supporting what he used to say made the Soviets evil, but only by avoiding anything resembling critical thinking. That either makes him dishonest or stupid, maybe both. Either way, it’s the sort of thing that lets me know he is not a serious person.

In the event you think I’m being pedantic; I have no problem with doctors giving people morphine or even crack if it will relieve their pain in their final days. Letting a doctor prescribe powerful pain medications that gives the dying person comfort is easy. In fact, we don’t even need laws to permit it, just laws to prevent scumbags from suing over it. This has been something doctors and patients have handled on their own since forever.

And yes, there will be times when the doc gives granny a script for enough pain killers to kill a horse, which she will use to take herself out at home. This is the vast gray area where the law must end, and the hidden rules take over. In other words, the doctor is trained where the lines are so he can write the script and let granny decide for herself but do so without endorsing murder or violating his oath.

A conservative understands this. George Will does not.

Class Traitor

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One of the things I’ve often noted is that the above the waterline social commenters scan the fringe for ideas, without ever mentioning the fringe people they were farming for ideas. The most obvious example is how good thinkers on the Right borrow from Steve Sailer whenever they need to write something smart about education or crime. I don’t recall seeing anything that smacks of plagiarism, but I’ve seen lots of stuff that was “inspired by” Sailer.

Anyway, I saw this in my twitter feed and immediately thought of myself and Sailer. I’ve been making the class traitor argument for a while with regards to Trump and Ted Cruz. I don’t think that’s particularly clever of me as it seem obvious. This sense of betrayal was at play with Bush and his overt Christianity. I know Sailer has made the same argument with regards to Trump and it looks like he saw the same story as he has posted about it.

Ross Douthat plays an odd role in the conservative ecosystem. His job, as far as I can tell, is to let the other chattering skulls know what fringe ideas are OK to appropriate without risking the wrath of the Cult. I don’t think it is intentional, more like serendipity. He writes for the NYTimes and he is aware of the alternative writers so he has become a gatekeeper for mainstream conservatives. He also seems to get that and he takes it seriously, but maybe I’m reading too much into it.

This bit got my attention:

This does not mean the two parties are interchangeable, a Republicrat conspiracy against the public. A clash between powerful elites can still be a very real clash, as recent Supreme Court decisions attest.

Nor does it mean that elites always get their way, even where there is bipartisan agreement. If they did, the Simpson-Bowles entitlement plan and comprehensive immigration reform would have passed many years ago.

But it does mean certain ideologies and worldviews get marginalized in national political debate. The libertarian who wants to cut defense spending, the anti-abortion voter who favors a bigger welfare state, the immigration skeptic who wants to keep Social Security exactly as it is … all these voters and many others choose the lesser of two evils every November, because neither party’s leadership has any interest in representing their entire worldview.

Guys like Douthat venture to the fringes of the media reservation, but they never wander far from the perimeter. They can’t as that inevitably means they get proscribed and sent to Sailer’s basement. They fear that more than anything because there’s no rehabilitation for managerial class heretics. Once you turn on your own, they lead you to the edge of the compound and slam the gates behind you. You’re effectively dead.

In this case, it means repeating the company line about there being real differences between the parties. The reality is our parties are just two versions of the consensus of the ruling elite The rich give to both parties equally. More important, they fund the media wings of both parties. Ironically, Trump has talked about this when asked about his political contributions. He buys pols from both parties just to be prudent.

At the end, Douthat repeats something I’ve been writing about here for a while making me think he is a reader.

and he’s coming at all these issues, crucially, from a vantage point of privilege — which his critics keep highlighting as though it discredits him, when in reality it lends his populism a deeper credibility. He’s the Acela Corridor billionaire (albeit tackier than most) who promises to reveal what the elites are really up to, the crony capitalist who can tell you just how corrupt D.C. really is, the financier who’ll tell you that high finance can afford higher taxes. It’s precisely because he isn’t a blue collar outsider that he may seem like a credible change agent: Because he knows Wall Street, and because he doesn’t need its money to campaign, it seems like he could actually fight his fellow elites and win.

He won’t, of course, but it matters a great deal how he loses. In a healthy two-party system, the G.O.P. would treat Trump’s strange success as evidence that the party’s basic orientation may need to change substantially, so that it looks less like a tool of moneyed interests and more like a vehicle for middle American discontent.

In an unhealthy system, the kind I suspect we inhabit, the Republicans will find a way to crush Trump without adapting to his message. In which case the pressure the Donald has tapped will continue to build — and when it bursts, the G.O.P. as we know it may go with it.

Since the founding, America’s party system has been two parties representing broad cultural and economic coalitions. The two parties jostle over building the majority coalition, with spells of Yankeedom trying to impose its communitarian culture on the rest of he country. Otherwise, the parties are coalitions representing the broad political consensus, one left of center and one right of center, but both very close to the center.

What’s happened in the last 25 years is something new in that one party has become an ideological party and both parties now represent the interests of the global elite. This works well for the Democrats because they have always been about the top and bottom versus the middle. Now they are just an explicitly ideological version of that old leftist strategy, financed by the super rich, buying grace on the cheap.

The Republicans are trying to figure out how to exist in this new arrangement. Their success in 2010 and 2014 is entirely due to the middle class having no alternative. That’s why the big fight is happening on that side. The American middle class is sensibly rejecting the dreary technocrats offered up by the party, giving Trump the opportunity to be the leader of a revolt that I doubt he understands.

There’s a lot wrong with his piece, but the fact is he has green lighted a discussion of the contextual issues regarding the Trump phenomenon. So far “conservative” writers have been limited to calling Trump a Nazi over and over because they were afraid to mention the dreary awfulness of the GOP. My guess is we will see discussion of this reality in the media.

Arx-holes

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Way back during L’affaire Cecil, I was struck by something I saw from friends and foes and that is they set their opinion based on the opinion of others, rather than their own reading of things. John Derbyshire did a few segments on the issue in his broadcasts. The “reaction” from the right was anticipatory as Progressives were slow out of the gate. Once the SJW’s joined the party, there was an echo reaction on the Right. Derb’s revisiting the topic two weeks after his initial reaction is a good example.

My reaction to the reaction was this post where I sort of laid out my views on the lion murderer. I still got a few responses pointing out that I was on the side of the fat angry lesbians who stalk bad thinkers on-line. Some people simply can’t find themselves on the same side of an issue with the black hats, not matter what the facts may dictate.

I’ve been thinking about that for a while now. There’s something about it that bugs me. It’s the same vibe I get when reading the neo-reactionary guys. Just the term “neo-reactionary” bugs me. The term “reactionary” has been an epithet used by the Left since the 18th century. It implies an irrational response, not a logical one and certainly not a dispassionate one.

My opinion on the lion murderer was neither passionate nor irrational. It certainly was not reactionary as I held those same opinions before I ever heard of the lion murderer or his victim. If someone had asked me ten years ago about what I thought about big game hunting, I’d have said most of the same things. I would have said the same thing about a theoretical someone who boasted of killing animals in order to scandalize people. In other words, I came to those opinions without regard to who was on which side.

I have no interest in re-litigating the Cecil issue, as the cool kids would say. It’s just a handy reference point. I’m an anti-reactionary. By that I mean my opinions about the world are independent of alternative views. I think what I think about the Cult of Modern Liberalism based on what I know about it and what I know about human nature. If the Cult of Modern Liberalism did not exist, I’d still hold the same opinions about humanity.

The fundamental flaw of the modern Right, and certainly of the neo-reactionaries, is to give the Cult of Modern Liberalism what amounts to a heckler’s veto over their mental landscape. If the Left is deciding where the Overton Window is, for example, they control the debate. Any reaction must take place within that window and that’s a loser on every level.

You see this with the recent spree shootings. The deranged white kid shoots up a black church and the entire debate is about whether or not it is emblematic of white racism. A black lunatic shoots a couple of white coworkers, and the debate is about whether racism drove him to do it. Ideologies built on a reaction to the Left are forever locked into debating issues chosen by the left on the terms of the Left.

It’s why the Left has marched steadily through the culture for the last fifty years. They have been handed the agenda, knowing their opposition will only react to whatever they are doing. The most obvious example of that is the Muslim Wars in the Bush Years. The Left rallied its anti-war elements, locking the Conservatives into a pro-war position that was irrational and self-defeating.

The anti-reactionary alternative is on display with Trump in the GOP primary. For all his faults, Trump is his own man, and he has his own opinions about how to do things. In contrast, the 17 other candidates have built their entire political resumes in opposition to the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Their positions, career choices and priorities are all about what they think the Left will think of them. They are not men; they are shadows.

It’s not an alpha male versus beta male thing, although that’s a related topic. What plagues the modern Right is that they have no reason to exist other than as the Left’s nagging old lady. Some new fad sweeps the fever swamps of the Left and conservatives are right there to lecture everyone about the foolishness of it. That’s fine, but Osama bin Laden was right people. Given the choice between the strong horse and the weak horse, people pick the strong horse. Given the choice between the cad and his nagging old lady, people take the cad.

We live at an unusual crossroads culturally. The Left’s internal contradictions may very well be tearing it to pieces. Its solution to being at odds with human nature is a cultivated paranoia that encourages escalating internal warfare. This time black women take the mic away from Bernie Sanders. The next time they take away Bernie. A mass movement based on revenge has to end in disaster.

The logical alternative, however, is not an alternative. The Modern Right defines itself in opposition to the Left. As the Left collapses, it will take all its reactionary dance partners with it. What will fill the void will be the strongest anti-reactionary movement left standing. Whether that is the Gucci populism of Donald Trump or something else, I don’t know, but something will fill the void.

Hunting Unicorns Part Eleventy Billion

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My favorite new way of mocking libertarians is to call their fads “unicorn hunting.” It’s stupid and childish, but what the hell. I saw this being passed around by libertarian cranks on twitter and it got my attention because I’m on my way to Gloucester right now. I’m on the road as this thing gets posted – literally.

Gloucester, Massachusetts is quintessentially New England. A seacoast town that survives on its working class ethic and seasonal tourism, it has come face-to-face with an epidemic that many cities just like it increasingly contend with: death by heroin overdose. Unfortunately, Gloucester isn’t alone in dealing with a tragic increase in fatalities caused by dangerous opioids.

Data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates that there were 16,235 deaths as a result of prescription opioids, and an additional 8,257 due to heroin during 2013, the last time period for which this information is available. In the same year, there were a total of 43,982 drug overdose related deaths. In Massachusetts alone, at least 1,000 people died of as a result of opioid abuse in 2014.

What sets Gloucester apart from other cities working to combat the same trend however, is its police department’s unprecedented approach to the intersection of law enforcement and drug addiction. Fed up with learning of yet another heroin overdose in his hometown this past winter, Gloucester’s police chief Leonard Campanello decided to take a new approach.

The latest bout of bad news inspired him to log in to the official Gloucester Police Department’s Facebook page and lay out a policy that has since created a ripple effect across the country. In early March, he posted the following:

“Since January of this year, we have responded to dozens of opiate related overdoses and, unfortunately, the City has seen 4 deaths in this time that are heroin related. While we have been successful in our use of nasal Narcan and have saved lives, 4 deaths is 4 too many. The dangers of heroin and opiate use are notorious. We do a lot to collaborate in awareness, prevention, and treatment and will continue to look for new ways to rid our streets of this poison.

As a police department, let me again make our policy clear:

If you are not involved in opiates or heroin, help us. Inform yourself, call us when you see activity, volunteer. You can make a difference.

If you are a user of opiates or heroin, let us help you. We know you do not want this addiction. We have resources here in the City that can and will make a difference in your life. Do not become a statistic.

If you are a dealer of heroin, opiates or any other poison…We are coming for you. We will find you. We will prosecute you to the fullest extent possible. You will pay the price for making money off the misery of others. It’s not a matter of “if” we find you, it’s a matter of “when.” You’ve gotten your warning. Get out of our City.

Chief Campanello.”

Libertarians are very fond of finding examples they like from demographically exceptional areas and then pretending they can be applied to a highly diverse country of 300 million people. Gloucester Mass is a town of 30,000 that is 92% white according to the census. All the kids on the high school basketball team are white so that 92% is an estimate. The only black guy I’ve ever seen there was with me visiting friends.

Gloucester is also boxed in by the very wealthy Manchester-by-the Sea and the modestly well off Rockport. The kinds of problems these towns have with drugs can certainly be addressed with creative solutions that cost a lot of money. You have strong families, high employment and the sort of population prepared to work together to solve community problems.

West Baltimore, in contrast, is full of fatherless children, universal unemployment and the sort of population that thinks it proper to shoot a guy because he’s wearing the wrong sneakers. Telling the dealers to go to another town works in SWPL-ville. In the ghetto, the dealers order the cops around. Gloucester’s problem is a community problem. West Baltimore’s problem is a containment problem.

I think the libertarians are probably mostly right about drug prohibition. Throwing people in jail for weed is stupid, but we don’t do anywhere near as much of it as claimed. Guys in the can for weed pleaded down from bigger charges. Still, it is a waste of resources to throw potheads in jail. When you move onto things like meth and heroine, the libertarian argument starts to sound naïve.

Then there is the demographic problem. Compton California was a mess before crack cocaine. Take away the crack and those boys in the hood are not becoming stock brokers. They will find some other criminal activity. Down deep, libertarians, just like liberals, believe man is infinitely malleable. Just like liberals, no amount of contrary experience will change their minds.

The Crushing Reality of Mathematics

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A fun book to read, if you have a thick skin, is called The Big Questions by a libertarian crackpot named Steve Landsburg. Somewhere in the book he makes the excellent point that mathematics is universal and immutable. At the dawn of time, two plus two equaled four for all values of two. It’s never changed and will never change, even if the universe collapses into an infinitely dense mass.

If you are looking for a nice shorthand definition of reality, mathematics is a good choice. Consequently, a good definition of “crisis” is when beliefs violently realign with mathematics. The Greek crisis is about the number of Euros they owe to creditors is bigger than the number of Euros they have in their accounts.

To paraphrase Philip K. Dick, math is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. Like reality, people can only take so much math, so we spend a lot of time pretending it is negotiable. The most obvious example is the American pension system. Every week we see stories like this one about how cities and towns are being crushed by pension debts.

There are three bits of math to consider here. One is the fact that you can only tax people so much before they revolt. They may revolt by tax avoidance, or they may hang their politicians, but there’s a point where they will not pay any more in taxes. That means every government has a cap on what it can collect from its subjects.

The second bit of math is that people expect certain minimum things from their rulers. Towns have to keep the streets clean, catch criminals, runs schools, etc. National governments have to defend the borders, run the courts, police the economy, attack the muzzies and so on. These things cost money and that amount is always more than the people think they should pay, but it is just below the maximum they will pay.

The final bit of math is the hardest and that has to do with debt. Pension systems are a type of debt. If I hire you and as a part of your compensation, I promise to pay you a monthly stipend after you turn 65, that’s a debt. That debt must be backed by collateral. In a pension system that collateral is the cash contributed by members and the employer, plus whatever interest that cash earns.

Pols have been jacking up the benefits for decades as a way to buy support from unions. This is just another way of saying they have been borrowing massive amounts to buy votes. To hide this reality, these pension systems claim their investments will return 7.5% or more, which they promise will cover their liabilities.

The trouble is the math says otherwise. If your pension system has $100 million in liabilities and those liabilities are growing by 7.5% per year, your returns have to be 7.5% to keep pace, as long as your assets are $100 million.  In many cases, these pensions have assets between 60-70 percent of liabilities. That means 10-12% returns are required and most of these funds are seeing returns of 2-3%.

The only way to make up for this gap, which is getting worse every year, is to divert money for operating expense like street cleaning, to pay pension debts. That and raise taxes, but in most of America we are at the maximum people will pay. The result is the people pay more and more for less and less government. At some point, mathematical reality crushes these municipalities and the states.

Most estimates put the math problem at about $4 trillion, but we have to assume that is the best case scenario. Greece is an excellent example of how math avoidance leads to compounding mistakes, thus making the math worse. Ten years ago, Greece could have unwound their debt with an orderly exit from the Euro. Now they just wait for the revolution.

There’s no reason to think the same thing will not happen in the state pension systems. Some states can cut benefits and others have quietly transferred the liabilities to cities and towns, which can use bankruptcy to cut their debts. California, on the other hand, is looking at a Greek-style economic meltdown in the next decade.

None of these things happen in a vacuum. California owes its former workers money it will not pay. Those employees owe money they cannot play. Of course, California bonds sit on the balance sheet of banks who pledge them as collateral. The math of the pension crisis says it is going to wipe out more than the savings of a few retired bus drivers. The math says we’re all doomed.