Author Archives: thezman

The Port Strike

Posted on by

The International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike as of midnight in the first major port strike in the United States in decades. Twenty years ago, dock workers on the West Coast struck for eleven days. The ILA has not gone on a strike since 1977, so this is a historic event for that reason alone. If the strike lasts more than a few weeks, then it will be much more than a historical event. About half of the cargo that goes in and out of the country flows through the affected ports.

The bankers estimate that the strike will cost the economy five billion per day, but that is a number plucked from the air. What we learned from the Covid fiasco is that American supply chains are extremely fragile, so any interruption will have unpredictable long-term consequences to the economy. This is also when consumer goods for the Christmas season begin flowing into the country, so delays will result in shortages which will disrupt the biggest retail period of the year.

One of the first things that will happen is conservatives will be told by conservative media to blame the dock workers. The reason for this is conservatives are idiots who do what they are told by the people they claim to oppose. The regime would like to turn this into a problem for Trump if possible, so they are busy filling the teleprompters of Fox News with squirrely rants about the greedy union guys. The vegetables that consume that slop will then regurgitate it on social media.

The fact of the matter is there are no good guys or bad guys when it comes to the strike itself, but the port system is an indictment of the economy. There is no reason for one company to control ports up and down the coast. Ports should be controlled by the states and encouraged to compete with one another for cargo. This makes for better port operations and eliminates the prospect of a crippling port strike. It also encourages modernization and efficiency at the ports.

The reason this is not the case is our ports are primarily skimming operations, rather than a part of a manufacturing and export base. What America primarily exports does not require seagoing vessels. Transgenderism, homosexual pride parades and cultural subversion are shipped around the world on the back of the dollar. What comes back are container ships full of consumer goods. A collection of people then skim a little from each container that reaches an American port.

This gets to why the dock workers are striking. They want protection from automation that will eliminate jobs. This will strike most people as nuts as they have been conditioned to think automation is a good thing, because that is what the television has told them, but in reality, most automation is about socializing the costs of business and privatizing the profits. Automating the ports will not result in lower consumer prices, but it will make the port operators richer.

If the point of the American economy were to make things and then sell them around the world, the ports could never be allowed to function as they do today because it would interfere with selling things around the world. That is not the point of the American economy, so the main function of ports is to skim from imports. This is why one main operator controls the East Coast ports. Consolidation makes it easier to institutionalize the skim.

None of this is to suggest that the dock workers are victims. Senior members of the ILA make four and five times what the typical American earns. Most of the guys on strike make six figures plus very generous benefit programs. The reason it is impossible to get a job at the ports is they control the labor force, which means they only allow friends and family to get jobs when they come open. The docks are pretty much a government created medieval guild system.

That is the other thing about the ports. The labor situation is a creation of the federal government over the last half century. In the middle of the last century, the mafia got control of the union pensions and immediately looted them. This brought in the feds who eventually restructured the union, so it was free of gangsters in track suits, but was filled with gangsters from the government. Both sides of the current contract dispute are the result of decades of government management.

Of course, there is a political angle to this. The Biden admin has done nothing to prevent the strike, which is interesting as they moved heaven and earth to head off the rail strike last year. That was when Biden thought he was going to be allowed to run for a second term. Now that he is drifting off into retirement, no one in the admin can be bothered to work on anything other than Ukraine and Israel. Kamala will be left to deal with the politics of a port strike.

This is where things get interesting. Pennsylvania and Michigan are union states, so the white remnant will be watching this strike. These are people who have always voted Democrat for economic reasons but detest the other stuff from the party. They like Trump, but wisely distrust Republicans. There is an opening for Trump the deal maker to take the union side without pandering. Harris, on the other hand, does not have any good options on this one.

In a way, the ports are a good model for our ruling class. Everyone involved in the ports is doing well, better than they should expect, but everyone involved in the ports is sure the system is screwing him. That is because the ports exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. It is a world unto itself that only interfaces with the rest of society, rather than operate within the economy. It is how high-earning people on both sides of this strike can think they are the little guy.

Another reason for this is the bottleneck mentality. Ports are a bottleneck and everything that passes through is taxed. In this way, the ports are just like our banking system or the information system. That means the real competition is over how much you get to tax what passes through the bottleneck. To the people inside a bottleneck system, it always feels like it is a zero-sum game, and their slice of the overall pie is never the biggest slice of that pie.

In the end, the union will get what they want as there is no real reason to not give them what they want. Their cost just gets tacked onto the cost of goods that flow through the port to your local Walmart of Amazon distribution center. Just like those Walmart’s and Amazons, the cost of the ports are socialized. With no fear of competition, there is no concern for the profit margin. You get to pay more for stuff, so the dock worker and his manager get to go boat shopping this spring.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Lincoln Exception

Posted on by

Note #1: Behind the green door I have a post about why you should never trust anything in the visual media, a post about the strangely large amounts of money spent on bad movies and television and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: Some of our folks could use your help in the aftermath of the hurricane that hit parts of Appalachia. Here is a GoFundMe for a family that Pete Quinones knows who lost everything in the flood. Give what you can and post up others so people can pitch in to help our folks.

The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.

We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.

When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.

Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.

The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.

Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.

This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.

We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.

The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.

What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.

In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.

This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.

Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Radio Derb September 27 2024

Posted on by

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m30s Canceller gets canceled
  • 12m48s Crushing dissent in the Party
  • 24m06s The Amy Wax saga latest
  • 32m08s Good news about Higher Ed.
  • 34m55s A new ministate
  • 37m49s Sir Keir is the wurst
  • 39m52s Signoff for Springfield
  • 00m00s Signoff

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners, from your holistically genial host John Derbyshire, looking back on another week of fun and frolic in the public sphere.

Before I begin, my thanks as always for your emails and your support. This is the last podcast of September so it comes with a reminder that my monthly Diary will be up next week, readable at johnderbyshire.com/Opinions and cross-posted to The Unz Review.

And please let me just also remind you that you can make a tax-deductible donation to my work by mailing an earmarked check to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

Continue reading →

The Crisis & Old Scratch

Posted on by

The defining feature of this age is the never-ending crisis, always surrounding the latest name for the Devil. Everything about politics surrounds the current panic over Trump, Putin, white supremacy, and so on. These are just names for Old Scratch and the people going on about it are in a panic. It is not just that the Devil is out there, but that we must act now to prevent some terrible thing he is doing.

The theater of American democracy is always the same. The people we call the left are always in a panic about the Devil or a potential victim of the Devil. The point of their panic is to generate a sense of urgency to do something about the Devil or about the alleged victim of the Devil. Sometimes, it is a combination where the agent of the Devil must be stopped in order to save his victim.

Trump has been useful for the regime because he is the Devil, but not an abstract version like climate change or a foreigner like Putin. It is much more difficult to get people excited by a distant threat or one that is hard to explain. Trump is right here, walking among us. For the people we call the left, the last decade has been defined by the great struggle against the orange demon and his minions.

When Trump is gone, they will have a huge hole in their lives, but they will find a replacement as the center of American identity is this concept. What it means to be an American is the crisis of Old Scratch. To be an American means moving from cause to cause, always the same cause though. It is the crisis of what to do right now about Old Scratch and his evil designs on our democracy.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Introduction: The Crisis & Old Scratch
  • Old Scratch
  • The Crisis
  • Permanent Crisis

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Strange Days

Posted on by

A feature of this age is that we are regularly presented with unusual events and then presented with an official explanation that is stranger than the event itself or given no explanation at all for what happened. In fact, you could describe the Trump era as a series of unexplained phenomena that either come with no official explanation or one so ridiculous no one accepts it. Trump is like a modern-day wizard in that his mere existence creates unexplainable happenings.

In this age of mass communications, we are more likely to experience rare events, because those rare events get blasted around the internet by people looking to profit from them, so that is part of it. On the other hand, the same technology regularizes rarity, so rare events should be less frequent. Just as soon as people start to notice some bit of weirdness, the authorities can flood the information space with a plausible explanation, so it is not just a feature of mass media.

For example, this summer a young man managed to get on the roof of the only building near a Trump rally and take shots at Trump. He did this despite Trump allegedly having the best personal security available to an American. For some reason, none of these crack security guys thought it was a good idea to guard the roof. Not only that, but they were also in the building and somehow managed to not hear a man walking around on the metal roof above their heads.

Just that bit of the story is explainable as incompetence. We live in the age of increasing incompetence, especially with the managerial class. Then we learn that the shooter, who was killed on the scene, is the only young person on planet earth without an extensive internet profile. He also happens to be a kid from a tiny town in flyover country that was in a Black Rock ad. Now we learn that an off-duty ATF agent in a suit was there taking pics of the corpse.

Any one of those points are farfetched at face value, but the lack of any explanation from the government makes the whole thing a one in a billion event. At least it should be, but now we have another one to pair with it. Last week we got Ryan Routh crawling around Trump’s golf course with a rifle. How he got there and how he knew Trump would decide to get in a round of golf that day is a mystery. Like the first assassination attempt, this one makes no sense on the surface.

To date, no one has bothered to explain how this penniless kook managed to travel around the world supporting Ukraine. No one has explained how he got to Florida and how he acquired the rifle. He is a resident of Hawaii, so he would not be able to buy a gun in the lower forty-eight. Why did he drop off a box of ammo containing a written confession to an associate months prior? Who was funding this guy and how did he end up in the bushes outside Trump’s golf course?

No one knows and the government is not talking. The same people who cannot shut up about disinformation and misinformation are perfectly happy to let speculation run wild on these two bizarre events. It is possible they do not know. Maybe they are as stumped as everyone else. They could just say they are as baffled as everyone else, but instead they now claim that Iranian hit squads are roaming the country looking for their chance to take out Donald Trump.

To make the Iranian stuff fit in with the bizarreness of the two assassination attempts, the secret police posted this story in their media outlet claiming Trump is nuts to think the Iranians are out to get him. Then in another media outlet, the secret police say they warned Trump about the Iranian assassination attempts. The one thing we know is that everything in the media about the government is written by the government, so why do we have these two conflicting reports from the government?

The general weirdness of these stories and the even stranger handling of them by the regime is not the main topic of conversation because they are not unique. They are part of a general pattern that has become the new normal. We still have no plausible explanation for the pipe bomb story the FBI put out during the election integrity protests of January 6, 2021. All we know for sure is someone planted them while the local police looked on from their marked police vehicles.

In fairness, that is not the only thing we know about the events that day. We have also learned that the Justice Department has been stonewalling investigations into what actually happened on that day. We know this because Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified to it this week. In fact, he volunteered it and promised to keep stonewalling until after the election. The strangest thing about this admission is that no one seemed surprised.

You could probably write a book detailing the bizarre occurrences we have seen over the last ten years since Trump arrived. You would not have to offer an explanation or a conspiracy theory to any of them. Just provide the known facts and maybe a few blank pages for official explanations. That really is the remarkable bit about what has been happening since Trump came down the escalator. It is not the explosion of anomalies, but the silence from official sources.

What this suggests is that maybe there is no general conspiracy at work, but rather a breakdown of control at the top. The reason no one can explain how in the hell that kid got on the roof of that building in Pennsylvania is no one in the regime really knows for sure who is working which caper. In other words, it is not a desperate effort to maintain control by the people at the top, but a breakdown of their own internal control mechanisms leading to seemingly random rogue behavior.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

The Only Solution

Posted on by

Yesterday the state of Missouri executed convicted murderer Marcellus Williams after a quarter century of legal wrangling. The case gained some attention because the defense managed to muddy the waters on the DNA evidence and therefore drag out the process long enough to get some of the principles to change their opinions on whether Williams did the crime. Of course, the real reason it gained attention was that the killer was black, and his victim was white.

The subtext to crime in current year America is that on the one hand, blacks commit crime due to living in a white supremacist society. On the other hand, when blacks commit crimes against whites, the whites must deserve it for perpetuating the white supremacist society that causes black crime. This is what makes up the social vengeance subculture at the heart of the social justice movement. In the end, it is all about getting revenge on white people.

The result of this or maybe the cause, it is not easy to know at this point, is that whites often appear to worship black people or at least want the world to think they hold blacks up as gods among men. The three dumbest members of the Supreme Court made sure the media knew they were opposed to the execution. As part of what we call the left in America, they need to let the rest of the hive know where they stand on every issue that involves race, especially when a black is involved.

Putting aside the racial stuff for a second, the case is a good example of the disfunction in modern America. The point of the death penalty is to exact revenge, on behalf of society, on the person who committed the crime. If it takes a quarter century to get that revenge and, in the process, the worst people are able to gnaw away at the justification for that revenge, then the point of the execution collapses. This is a basic function of human society, and we can no longer perform it.

The main argument against execution has always been that it is theoretically possible to convict an innocent man, so it is possible to execute an innocent man. This is why it takes decades in many cases to get to the vengeance part. Every conceivable question is addressed, even frivolous questions designed to stall the process. The point of the death penalty now is to make sure that there can be no possible chance that the person convicted of the crime is not guilty.

Even so, there are examples where there is some questions about the guilt of the person who was executed. Ironically, the best example is Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed for the killing of his three daughters in a house fire he was convicted of starting. Otherwise, the examples used for this argument are those who were eventually exonerated. Instead of proving the point about innocent men getting executed, it shows that it is close to impossible.

Obviously, this argument against the death penalty only comes into play when the person facing Old Sparky is black. The Cameron Todd Willingham case did not get the frumpy Supreme Court justices out in the streets to tell the world they would have granted a stay of execution. The media was not interested in his case. It is always cases like the one in Missouri that get the attention of the people who apparently think black people are gods who walk amongst us.

This Afro-philia that has become a feature of the culture might seem like bourgeois degeneracy, but it has had an impact on the death penalty. According to the anti-death penalty people, there are 2244 people on death row in America. This is a shockingly low number, given that we have over 20,000 homicides per year. Of those on death row, just 41% are black. Even more shocking, 42% are white. Amazingly, only 14% of death row inmates are classified as Hispanic.

What this tells us is we need to be executing many more black offenders, to not only get the current numbers in proportion to the well-known crime figures on murder, but to address the many years of discrimination against white murderers. Blacks commit far more murder in America than any other group and this has been true for generations, so they are grossly under-represented on death row. That under-representation is due to the general worship of Africans in the culture.

Afro-philia and Leukophobia not only warp the application of the death penalty in favor of blacks, but it also provides them with many more appeal options because the black offender draws more support. Black offenders spend more time, on average, waiting for their execution than white killers. The official explanation for this is black offenders have more complex cases, which is another way of saying they get far more legal help from people exceptionally good at undermining the system.

The Marcellus Williams case is a great example. He murdered Felicia Picus in her home during a robbery. He stabbed her over forty times with a kitchen clever, which means he hacked her to death. There was a mountain of physical evidence and witness testimony that pointed to Williams as the killer. The usual suspects swept in once he was convicted to trick people into questioning their own minds, in an effort to free another black killer from the justice he deserves.

Of course, the response is always the same. Blacks spent yesterday on Twitter bemoaning the racial inequity of the death penalty. Progressive whites joined in with their usual public acts of piety. Pointing this out results in the usual abracadabra words from the usual suspects. It is all so tiring and underscores the fact that there is no remedy to this other than peaceful separation. There is no solving the race issue because Afro-philia and Leukophobia are too powerful.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Trouble On The Edge Of Empire

Posted on by

In the end phase of an empire, there are two political dynamics. One is the intense, internal politics among the ruling class of the empire. These are the people fighting to hold onto the power of the empire, but also fighting with one another to maintain their slice of the shrinking pie of benefits. The other politics are on the fringe where the beginnings of alternative power centers grapple with reality and the decreasing ability of the empire to provide necessary protection.

For the American empire, one of those fringes where politics is happening as a result of the decline of the empire is Europe. The Germans, for example, have had a set of local elections that were all bad news for the provincial rulers, which in this context is the coalition government led by Olaf Scholz. The parties that make up the ruling coalition of Germany did poorly, and in the case of the Greens catastrophically bad, in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg.

Worse yet, the winner, in the public relations sense, was the hated AfD, or Alternative for Deutschland, which came in second in Saxony and Brandenburg and won for the first time in Thuringia. The AfD gaining support is a disaster all by itself, but doing so in Brandenburg is a fascinating development. This is the base for the SPD, and they needed shenanigans to prevent the AfD from winning the election. The CDU threw its support to the SPD to block the AfD.

Another bit of subtext to this is that a new party of former leftists, in the German sense of the word, has created an anti-immigration party around Sahra Wagenknecht, called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance or BSW. They came in third place. That means two anti-immigration parties are surging. On top of that, the Green Party appears to be losing all of its support everywhere. In Brandenburg they failed to meet the minimum threshold to gain any seats in parliament.

Of course, the German political elite is not taking this well. As we see all over Europe, the parties that pretended to be ideological opponents for years have come together to thwart these outsider parties. Germany, for example, has been ruled by the “traffic light coalition”, which would be like the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Greens forming a new coalition to fend off the Constitution Party in Congress. It gives the game away to maintain control of politics.

This is the same thing we saw in France over the summer. The anti-immigration party led by Marie Le Pen surged to the lead in the first round of elections for the National Assembly, so all of the other parties teamed up to prevent the Le Pen’s party from winning an outright majority in the second round. Of course, the parties in this grand coalition to stop mean words has immediately started to attack one another because the only thing they have in common is corruption.

As in Germany, the bit above the waterline is the immigration issue, but beneath the surface there is a bigger issue. The political elites of Europe no longer look like European political elites. Instead, they are these weird, cosmopolitan citizens of the world types whose success is pegged to their slavish loyalty to an international economic elite centered in London and New York. There is an alienation rooted in their transnational transactionalism to which the locals are reacting.

Of course, immigration is the tangible manifestation of this. Immigration only makes sense if the immigrants are a net benefit to the locals. This only works in boom times when everyone is feeling generous. It is not boom times in Europe, but the immigrants continue to pour in, which suggests there is another reason behind immigration enthusiasm among the political elites. This is where the sterile, technocratic alienness of the political class comes into play.

It is not just in the heart of the EU where this “us-versus-them” cultural dynamic is turning up in practical politics. Italy has quietly started to limit immigrants while not offending Brussels. The Italian economy relies on transfers from the rich, intelligently managed economies of the north, so the Meloni government has to tread carefully in order to avoid regime change. She has managed to remain popular, while quietly addressing the immigration issue.

At the other end of the EU, the Nordic countries are experiencing something of a revolution in thought on immigration. Denmark has been quietly hostile to immigration, but now Sweden is becoming publicly hostile to it. The Swedish government is now paying immigrants, even those with citizenship, to leave Sweden. This is an enormous change in attitude, as Sweden was the most fanatically pro-immigration country in the EU just a few years ago.

Something that may be working in the favor of nationalist parties and activists in Europe is the lunacy in the Anglosphere regarding immigration. Vulgar simpletons like Keir Starmer are a warning to the continent. Despite having support from just one of every six British voters, the Starmer government is aggressively waging war on the natives on behalf of the immigrants. What is going on in the UK and America is proof that those “far-right” parties are right about what lies behind immigration.

All of this has been helped along by the proxy-war against Russia. After the effects of the initial gaslighting wore off, Europeans started to notice that their political elites were far more enthusiastic for Ukraine than their own countries. They also noticed that their political elites were happy to sacrifice the welfare of their people for Project Ukraine in order to curry favor with Washington. The American empire was happy to inflict misery on Europe if it furthered their petty fights with Russia.

Where this has left Europe is as a collection of provinces that no longer enjoy the protection of the empire but are governed by a provincial ruling class that enjoys the financial benefits of empire. The growing awareness of this reality is causing the clodhoppers of Europe to revolt. The continent is far from breaking free from their Anglosphere masters, but the politics of Europe are opening the gates to parties and politicians who will seek liberation from empire.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Death By Openness

Posted on by

Note: Behind the green door I have a post why you should fill up your diet with seed oils, a post about losers and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

In the early days of the internet, people started to notice that there was another side to the mass accumulation of information online. The information piling up in databases and data centers was not just public information, but also what had always been assumed to be private information. Pictures of your home and maybe even you outside cutting your grass could now turn up in the public square, without you knowing it. Lots of things about your life were now public information.

Suddenly, a degenerate with free time could figure out things about you that he could not know in the past. Of course, this became a temptation for people to nose around in the lives of coworkers and neighbors. The more information that piled up online, the less privacy everyone could expect. Quickly we were moving into glass houses and subjected to the unwanted gaze. The only place where you can be free of the gaze is in your own mind, and even there the synopticon is hunting for data.

Of course, in typical American fashion, the same people gathering up your private information and making it public now sell services to keep your private information as private as possible in this age. On the other hand, people told by the state to gather your private information for things like banking are reckless with their security, so it is regularly stolen and published by gangsters. Again, in typical American fashion, the reckless people never pay a price for it.

We are quickly reaching the point where nothing is private and anything of private value will be stolen. One result of this is no one cares about the private. The rise of profilicity is a response to the collapse of individual privacy. Since no one has a private life, what distinguishes us is the public profile we create. This profile is just about disconnected from the person playing the profile. In other words, the collapse in privacy has eliminated the value in having private things.

It is tempting to blame this on technology, which is the mistake made by privacy advocates in the last century. In typical American fashion, they assumed there was a mechanical solution to a moral or spiritual problem. In the case of privacy, they assumed new rules to guard your privacy would prevent the people who laugh at the concept of a rules-based society from harvesting your privacy. Unsurprisingly, privacy has collapsed despite the rules.

The reason for the collapse in privacy in America goes back to the civil right revolution in the middle of the last century. When the ruling elites transitioned from a rights-based moral framework to the civil rights moral framework, they had no choice but to abandon the concept of personal privacy, despite claims to the contrary. This is why Europe has been much better at enforcing privacy laws. They never had a civil rights revolution, so they have not fully internalized its moral structures.

The way to understand this is to think about the moral spectrum in the political order of 19th century America. The “good” pole was where the state played no role in the decisions made by the citizens. People were on their own to sort things. The bad pole was where the citizens needed permission to do things. The concept of individual rights was not to carve out a free space for the citizen. It was to carve out space for the state to do the narrow purposes of collective security.

The civil rights revolution in the middle of the 20th century abandoned this old spectrum, which had been discredited, at least in the collective reasoning of the emerging managerial class, in the great struggle against the economic crisis of the 1930’s and the war on fascism in the 1940’s. What the civil rights revolution did was replace this old and largely civic moral paradigm with a new paradigm. The goal of which was not maximum liberty but maximum access.

The open society concept, popularized in America by Karl Popper and now George Soros, is the end point of this new moral paradigm. The new poles are openness, access, and diversity at the “good” end. The bad end is discrimination, which can only come through the mechanism of barriers to entry, so the ultimate bad thing in this new society is the locked door. The goal of the open society is to find every locked door and bust it down in order to maximize openness.

One of the immediate results of this moral revolution at the top was the end of public discrimination through the violent overthrow of the old segregation systems, in both the North and the South. What followed was pogrom after pogrom to breakdown every locked door that could be found in private America. Men’s clubs, for example, were forced to accept women or face endless litigation for discrimination. The Boy Scouts were handed over to pedophiles for the same reason.

Long before degenerates were googling your name looking for private information, the state was hunting around for locked doors on the assumption that there were private people collectively closing themselves off from others. If one wants to look for the logic behind the claim that nonwhites have a right to access white people, it lies in the fundamental logic of the open society. In a world where discrimination is the ultimate evil, everyone has a right to everyone, even their intimate life.

There is, ironically, a private benefit to this. Certain members of the ruling class benefit through the anathematization of preference. In a world where it is immoral for you to prefer not to associate with certain people, it is unacceptable for the masses to prefer that certain people not have access to power. At the same time, the ruling class as a whole benefits from the fact that it is close to impossible to organize opposition when everything must be done in plain sight.

The collapse of privacy is the logical outcome of the civil rights revolution and the synopticon that has involved to enforce it is a practical necessity. Humans are naturally self-organizing and naturally self-segregating. Unconscious bias is not just a weapon to compel submission to the new racial hierarchy but a way to condition the populace to question their own minds. A people who naturally feel in conflict with what they are told is the shared collective morality will remain docile.

Of course, much of the behavior from the ruling elite in the open society is designed to prevent asking basic questions, like who says discrimination is bad? Who or what is the moral authority for this claim? Why is diversity good? Why are my preferences less valid than the person on the television preaching about diversity? The collapse in individual and collective privacy makes it much easier to hunt down those asking these questions before they get too much of an audience.

The ultimate question is can such a system last? There is a reason why there are so few prison riots and history has not been kind to slave revolts. It is not just force that keeps the prisoner under control or the slaves from revolting. In every prison, inmates outnumber guards. Slaves always outnumber the overseers. What keeps them under control are the moral chains that tell them they deserve their position. A nation in such chains is as unlikely to revolt.

On the other hand, if the prisoners know the guards cannot rely on the state to protect them, the prisoners will begin to question the morality of their position. Similarly, if the social structures that make slavery possible collapse, then the slaves quickly overthrow their masters, even if it means their own death. One of the consequences of the open society is a deeply paranoid and conspiratorial ruling elite. They know more than anyone how near run things are for them.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Radio Derb September 20 2024

Posted on by

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 02m06s Trump twice lucky
  • 09m49s The Grim Beeper
  • 15m08s This is not 1954
  • 30m12s Trump’s inner gentleman
  • 32m19s Scientific American betrays science (again)
  • 37m17s Sir Keir speaks American
  • 39m08s Et in Arcadia ego
  • 42m03s Signoff with Johnny

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners and readers, from your manifestly genial host John Derbyshire, bringing you commentary on the week’s news from a National Conservative point of view.

As I go to tape here midday on Friday, the week’s big stories have been Sunday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and the very interesting advance in military technology we saw in Beirut, Lebanon on Wednesday and Thursday. I shall give full coverage to those.

Humming away in the background are topics less dramatic but at least equally consequential, topics concerning the upcoming election, immigration, and the culture wars. I shall have things to say there, too. In the matter of immigration, I shall in fact engage in argument with the Boss himself, Peter Brimelow, not without some trepidation.

As usual, though, before we start Let me just remind you that you can still make a tax-deductible donation to the Derbyshire retirement account by mailing an earmarked check to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759.

OK, the news. First that assassination attempt.

Continue reading →

Back By Popular Demand

Posted on by

It has been at least a year since I took a deep dive into the published works coming from the grievance studies departments. Back when I did regular Xirl Science segments, I spent a few hours a month perusing the various journals and aggregators, looking for the most amusing items. If that is your intent when reading something like Hypatia, the journal of feminist philosophy, you are spoiled for choice.

Perhaps it has been the long break from reading this material or perhaps they have continued to evolve, but the material seems different now. On the one hand, it is less flamboyantly nutty than I remember. There are far fewer articles that read like satire on the grievance studies rackets. They still exist, but it is clear that the trends have changed, and outrageousness is no longer the in-thing.

Instead, the work is more seriously crazy, as in claims that time itself is a result of oppression and whiteness. They appear to have moved on from claiming that Western culture is a conspiracy by the pale penis people to oppress embodied coloredness and people of uterus, to questioning reality itself. Even though it is loaded with insider jargon, the point of many papers is to question space-time.

This makes sense when you think about the basis of the project. What started out as a belief that culture creates people, so therefore those who “control” the culture create the people to their benefit, must eventually arrive at the conclusion that reality itself is merely a product of cultural control. Therefore, the victim of this can only escape by escaping the reality manufactured by the creators.

There is, of course, a strong whiff of the old gods in this. The culture is the creation of the white patriarchy in the same way the natural world is the creation of the Old Testament God. Alternatively, it is a corruption by white men in the same way Odin and his brothers killed the true creator in order to rule the world. The point of this “scholarship” is to return to the original intent of creation.

In other words, all of this stuff, like the liberal project that proceeded it, operate within the old mental frameworks inherited from both the Christian framing of existence and the pre-Christian framing. They discarded the essential bits and have set about producing things to fill the void of the supernatural. The woke are those most in need of the old gods searching for a modern version of them.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • Introduction
  • Chrononormativity (Link)
  • Queerness (link)
  • Anality (Link)
  • Science Inc. (Link)
  • A Nation Of Therapists (Link)
  • Oppressive Rocks (Link)
  • Board Broads (Link)
  • Xirl Eggsploitation (Link)
  • The Bogeyman (Link)
  • Bad Date (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee