American Trotskyites

Posted on October 21, 2024 by thezman

171

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the collapse of the entertainment industry, a post about the end of The Grand Tour and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the most remarkable, but woefully unremarked, developments of the last decade is the shift of the neocons back to the left. Starting with Trump coming down the escalator in 2015, the neocons first tried to purge him and his supporters like they did to Pat Buchanan and the paleos in the 1990’s. When that failed, they began their slow march out of the conservative movement then out of the Republican Party, returning to their old home on what we call the left.

Perhaps it is the timescale, but this is not something that has gotten a lot of attention, despite the centrality of the neocons to conservatism. There are prominent neocons at all the major media nodes, where they have spent the last decade railing about Donald Trump on a daily basis. For those familiar with the history of neoconservatism and their wars with the people we call paleos, this transition is like getting confirmation of a long-dismissed conspiracy theory.

Imagine if twenty years from now a collection of retired government officials steps forward and to say that 9/11 was an inside job. The planes were real, but the whole thing was orchestrated by the CIA or maybe the Mossad. It is not just that it would reveal a conspiracy to conceal the truth, but that it would validate the people tarred as conspiracy theories for doubting the official truth. It would be the sort of revelation that leads to questioning other official truths.

That is how this post about Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen should be viewed. Way back when a group of Jewish intellectuals broke with the left in the middle of the last century and started their march into Buckley conservatism, there was a debate about what they were really doing. Was it a way to subvert the Buckley movement? Were these people genuinely changing their ideological orientation or were they simply opportunists seeing conservatism as a more useful vehicle for their project?

Long forgotten is the fact that the label “neoconservative” was a smear coined by a socialist named Michael Harrington. These newly minted conservatives were often called Trotskyites because they never abandoned their old ideology, but simply opposed the people who came to dominate the American left. Of course, others accused them of being a stalking horse for Zionism and the Israel lobby. Still others suspected that their obsession with Russia was the real motivation.

In other words, from the very start no one trusted their sincerity with regards to their conversion to the conservative cause. They brought lots of money and organizational might, so the Buckley crowd overlooked these concerns and welcomed them into the movement over many objections. Before long, the neocons organized the purge of their doubters and enemies in the movement. Half a century or so since this started, the skeptics of these people have been vindicated.

Buried in that post about Kristol and Cohen is an easily overlooked assertion that has always been at the heart of the issue. They claim that conservative Jews have specific interests that they think are better served by the Democrats now. Leaving aside their definition of “conservative Jews”, what they are arguing is that this subgroup of Americans has interests peculiar to themselves that can conflict with the majority interests of the country, but those minority interests come first.

This gets to something further down the memory hole than the old neocon – paleocon battles of the last century. Jewish liberals and leftists have often accused neocons and Zionists of being bad for the Jews, because they confirm the claims often made by Jewish opponents regarding the loyalty of Jews. Bill Kristol makes explicit that his primary interests lie outside of and often in opposition to the interest of the American people, so you can see the problem.

A lot of people accused of being conspiracy theorists with regards to the behavior of the neocons have been vindicated over the last decade. This gets little to no attention in the mainstream media because the neocons still wield enormous power. They have always deftly folded their interests into those of the Israel lobby and no one in politics dares take on those guys. For elected officials, opposing Israel means losing the next election and for the chattering classes, it means exile.

Another aspect of this is the ease with which the neocons have made the transition from conservative and Republican to progressive and Democrat. Disgraced in the Bush years, they nevertheless hung on in the Obama years, orchestrating various schemes like the 2014 coup in Ukraine. They have had total control of the Biden administration to the point where its sole purpose was war with Russia. At no point in this transition was there a hint of dissent or self-examination.

The other side of this is the fact that the Democratic Party has put up no resistance to the return of their old Trotskyites comrades. The same people who were marching around in the streets, banging their pots and pans over the Bush wars in the Middle East now wear Ukraine lapel pins. Without a trace of irony, they accuse Trump fans of disloyalty for not supporting the Ukraine war or the Israel wars. There is a last scenes in Animal Farm quality to all of it.

Of course, this raises the oldest critique of America’s two-party political system, that it is just a show put on for the masses. The real decisions are made outside of public view by the powerful interests who control the system. One of those powerful groups are the neocons, who work with the Israel lobby to control foreign policy. Given what we have witnessed over the last decade, that old critique is vindicated. The people in charge are immune the ballot box and operate as an alien overclass.

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

.

Dreams Of Purges Past

Posted on October 17, 2024 by thezman

155

Yesterday, internet activist Christopher Rufo posted on Twitter a long post denouncing, disavowing and anathematizing someone named Chris Brunet. Apparently, Brunet used to work for Rufo or maybe they were friends, but Rufo now finds that old association inconvenient to his current relationships and career choices, so he decided to do the predictable thing and denounce Brunet. It is a weird form of public piety that the conservatives inherited from communism.

For those of a certain age, this is familiar stuff. While the format is different from the old days of conservatism, the act is the same. That post reads like a Twitter version of Bill Buckley’s denunciation of Pat Buchanan thirty years ago. Interestingly, that famous essay is nowhere to be found online, but the book version is still available. Imagine someone writing a forty-thousand-word essay denouncing someone then being so proud of it that he turned it into a book.

That is the first notable thing about this bit of drama. Those familiar with the history of conservatism recognize this performance. The person putting on the show is doing it for an audience that is never named, but always assumed. The stated audience is either credulous, incredulous or confused by the performance. Everything about this age is a reboot, especially the stuff that emanates from the political class, so the “new right” is just a low-budget reboot of the old right.

There is a Little Rascals quality to all of it. They put on the costumes of the past and reenact events as they think they happened, but in a high school musical sort of way, which makes it feel small and petty. Thirty years ago, Buchanan and Buckley were towering figures fighting for the right to define a sociopolitical movement they helped create, while Rufo and Burnet are two guys on the internet. To his credit, Burnett seems to appreciate the absurdity of it.

The resulting drama brings up another notable aspect. Then as now, the people doing the denouncing always couch their denunciations in moral terms, when it is obvious that they are motivated by money. Buckley knew there were loads of cash waiting for him if he denounced the paleocons. The neocons, Zionists and the Israel lobby were as flush with cash thirty years ago as they are now. They hated the critics of these things as much as they hate them today.

There is nothing wrong with currying favor with rich people. The “American experiment” is pretty much an institutionalized version of this habit. The market economy, after all, is nothing more than people with something to sell chasing after and flattering people who have money to spend. Democratic politics is the art of flattering wealthy interests so they will back your candidacy. There is a reason that one of the highest paid people at every Washington think tank is the fundraiser.

In theory, the one group most comfortable with this reality should be the conservatives, as they boast of being the most free-market of the bunch. Yet, they are the ones most ashamed of being men for hire. They cast all their actions in moral terms, often making it seem like they are engaged in the greatest of moral struggles. David French has made a career of nailing himself to the cross. So much so, in fact, that he has attained what all conservatives seek, a place at the New York Times!

It is a strange quirk of conservatism. Read the comments of that Rufo post and you see the phrase “moral clarity” turn up often. It is as if these people have a strange form of Tourette’s that only comes out when they are finking on one another. It brings to mind the famous quote from Emerson, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Whenever a conservative begins speaking of moral clarity, get ready for a load of arrows in your back.

The reason for this is the central contradiction of conservatism. They start by agreeing with the central premise of progressivism, which is that all people are equal and infinitely malleable. Hierarchy is therefore a construct. You cannot oppose an egalitarian ideology like progressivism by first agreeing with its central claim, so conservatives can never admit that they are simply doing the bidding of their patrons. That means they must invent other reasons which they call principles.

That aside, the sense that this is just recycled drama from a bygone age is due to progressivism becoming a backward-looking phenomenon. It evolved to its logical endpoint only to find nothing there. The modern progressive must content himself with refighting old fights with old enemies reimagined for this time. The new Nazi is the guy opposed to Israel carpet bombing civilians. The new Bull Connor is the guy wondering why the FBI is faking crime stats.

The new right is now following suit. They search around for someone to play the Pat Buchanan role or the Joe Sobran role. It will not be long before these guys pick a fight with the Birchers, which is still around, amazingly enough. Conservatism has always been the slow version of progressivism, so as progressives become a strange sort of antiquarian society, conservatives will slowly join them in the project. The left-right debate is about who hates the past the most.

Of course, what they truly hate is the future. Both progressivism and conservatism are artifacts of a bygone age. They reached their peak in the twentieth century at the zenith of the Global American Empire. That was an empire built for a world that not only does not exist, but the memory of which is fading into the past. Imagine conservatism and progressivism as two old ships engaged in battle as they slowly slip over the horizon, and you have a good sense of it.

In the meantime, they will continue to engage in their mock battles with each other and with themselves, pretending to believe that things have not changed and will never change, while terrified by the sense that they are changing. Like science, politics advances one funeral at a time. As the codgers of the old politics march off to the cemetery, they will be replaced first by their imitators and then by their replacements, who will create a new politics for their age and challenges.

The Decline Of Pop Music

Posted on October 16, 2024 by thezman

380

One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry. The sale of physical content has just about disappeared, outside of the vinyl subculture. Even if you count downloads, the gross sales of music decline more than ten percent per year. On a per capita basis, popular music revenues are a little more than half of their peak fifty years ago. The biggest drop in sales started with the introduction of the mp3.

Unlike the newspaper industry, which thought they could make money giving their content away on the internet, the music industry always saw technology as a threat to their business model. They famously fought the introduction of cassettes because it would make it easier to record and transport music. If you could copy that album and give the copy to a friend, the music industry reasoned, there would be no reason for the friend to buy the album.

The music industry went to extraordinary lengths to protect their cartel, but they simply could not hold off the flood of technology. They treated downloaders like the Israelis treat Palestinian civilians, but it failed to deter people from downloading free copies of the song they wanted. Eventually, the industry gave into reality and started selling single copies of songs, but by that point, the horse had left the barn. There are too many ways to get a copy of a song free of charge.

The hope was streaming services would stem the bleeding. Instead of loading up on free music maybe people would pay five bucks a month to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. That did seem to work for a while, but then it just further cratered the music sales side of the business. There is also the fact that the public does not listen to as much pop music as in the past. Part of it is demographics, but part of it is the collapse in the quality of content.

This is starting to damage the last area where money could be made in the music business, which is the live show. For the first time in a decade, excluding the Covid years, live shows are in decline. The popular excuse is to blame the ticket sellers and the secondary market for pricing people out of the events. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because it is too crowded.

One reason for the decline of live shows is Covid. A weird thing happened during Covid and that is people discovered that they could live without things they suddenly could not have due to the panic. Restaurants never fully recovered from Covid because people got used to not going out to dinner. Something replaced it. Live events are another thing people did not miss as much as expected. Pro sports have had to work hard to regain their crowds and college sports never fully regained them.

Another reason live music is struggling is the quality of the product. As the industry relies more on technology to create listenable content, the less able they are to stage compelling live shows. This is not a new problem. In the golden age of pop music, they often used studio musicians to record the songs. The “band” often could not play their own music at all. This limited the “band” to doing studio shows where they could lip-sync to the recorded music.

This changed in the 1960’s when bands could play their own music and insisted on recording their own music. They also did live shows where they could actually play their stuff and not sound like a bag of cats. Technology has reversed this so that the performers are no longer able to produce the songs live in any way that sounds like the recorded material. Technology has made it easier to make music, but that has resulted in fewer acts that can do live shows.

Here is where you see the damage done by hip-hop. This is content easy to create in the studio, but it is hot garbage when performed live. In a small venue, the tight spaces and use of drugs can result in a good time for the audience, but in an arena it is often hilariously terrible. It looks like that homeless guy who yells at passing cars got on the stage and is yelling at the audience. Whatever the merits, there are none, hip-hop does not make for a compelling live show.

Another issue for live music is young people are not being socialized in the meat space, so live shows fall outside of their comfort zone. A generation used to interacting with their peers through internet platforms is not going to see the live show as an opportunity for socializing and dating like the old days. They would rather hear the music while cartoon characters perform the concert online. For a generation that prefers the indoors, the outdoor music show may as well not exist.

Of course, the music business was always a racket. The golden years of pop was when the music companies ruled with an iron fist. They could make you buy the album when you wanted just one or two songs. They forced radio stations to play the songs they wanted played. Most important, they we free to rob the music acts. Technology nibbled away at the music cartel eventually freeing the consumers and the music creators from the clutches of the music companies.

One result is there is probably more music available now than in the golden age of popular music. Creators can make good stuff from their bedroom and make it available to the world via the internet. The other side of this is the days of the rock star are coming to a close. Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness. Her songs are popular because she is popular, not the other way around. Her music is secondary to her act.

Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera. They will not understand it, because the people and culture that produced it are as alien to them as the people and culture of China. The concept of the rock star will disappear with memories of phone booths and quadrophonic sound.

Washington Was Right

Posted on October 14, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the death of grammar, a post about life as a modern serf and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

George Washington famously observed, “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.” This was in his farewell address where he cautioned that one of the risks to the new nation was from involvement in foreign affairs. When a country aligns with another country, it not only takes on the friends and enemies of that country, it opens the door for that country to influence its leaders and shape its policy.

We see this writ large with Israel. Since the Bush II administration, Israel has been seeking a way to get the United States to go to war with Iran. They claim Iran is the cause of all the problems in the region. Coincidentally, Iran also backs the two primary opponents of the Greater Israel project, Syria and Hezbollah. Therefore, if the United States takes out Iran, then peace will descend on the region and, coincidentally, Israel will face no opposition to its expansion plans.

Bush II probably would have pulled the trigger on a war with Iran if the Iraq war had not been such a debacle. The neocons were boasting in the first term that once Iraq was made into a democracy, it would help “liberate” Iran from its rulers. These plans we shelved once Obama came to power, in part because of Valerie Jarrett, who was in favor of normalizing relations with Iran. The neocons were also busy getting Project Ukraine off the ground.

Depending upon whose narrative you prefer, the United States is either abandoning Project Ukraine in order to deal with the Middle East or the United States is getting sucked into a war with Iran and must abandon Project Ukraine. Either way, it is becoming clear that war with Iran is in the cards. The Israelis keep provoking the Iranians, who have no choice but to respond. The Israelis then claim the response is an unjustified attack so they must respond.

The last turn at this game was a genuine escalation as the Iranians launched waves of ballistic missiles that were able to penetrate Israeli air defenses. This by itself is a huge step in the process. No one thought the Iranians had this ability. Add in the accuracy with which they were able to target Israeli military facilities and the Israel – Iran conflict moved much closer to all-out war. Israel promised massive attacks against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities.

Now we get word that the United States is setting up the THAAD anti-ballistic missile system in Israel. This is the most advanced air defense system in the American arsenal and it is supposed to be capable of defeating the best missiles. Of course, the Iron Dome was supposed to be the best air defense system until it was defeated. The Patriot system was also supposed to be a great system until it was destroyed by the Russians in Ukraine as soon as it was deployed.

Reportedly, the Biden administration opposes attacks on Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, but that could be a cover story. They reportedly promised Iran that Israel would not retaliate to the Iranian drone attack. Then Israel set off a string of targeted assassinations and the famous pager attack. It is a good reminder that everyone involved in Middle East politics is incapable of honesty. Everyone lies about everything to everyone, even about the lies they are telling.

Regardless of intentions, this move now provides Israel with cover for whatever attacks they have planned. This will inevitably mean Iran launches another wave of missiles at Israel, maybe even targeting that THAAD system. This is what happened with the Patriot system in Ukraine. The Russians filled the sky with drones, so when the Patriot system lit up, it became an easy target for Russian missiles. The use of air defense systems makes them vulnerable to attack.

Even if the Iranians avoid striking this system, they have a lot of missiles and the THAAD system is limited. Each battery is about forty interceptors. Iran reportedly has thousands of missiles. Of course, like everything to do with the Military Industrial Complex, the THAAD system is riddled with corruption. It is a big, complicated and expensive system no one expected to use in war, so it is mostly a jobs and patronage program, rather than a weapon of war.

All that aside, it is easy to see that George Washington was correct. Indulging habitual fondness for Israel has made the world’s lone superpower a slave to whatever schemes the Israelis are plotting. The United States is on the brink of war with Iran, solely because Israel desires it. No one in Washington dares question any of this, as the Israeli lobby is too powerful. Even the neocons, who prefer Project Ukraine over Project Iran, are powerless against the Israel lobby.

War with Iran will be a disaster of the United States. The American military can deliver devastating strikes against Iran, but Iran can also close the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices through the roof. They could also attack oil facilities in the region, crippling global supplies and sending the world into a depression. Only a madman would want such a scenario, but this is the price that must be paid when you chain yourself to the lunatic regime that is Israel.

Compounding things is the fact that no one knows who is actually running foreign policy in the Biden administration. We know it is not Biden, due to his declining health, but who is calling the shots is a mystery. It is no doubt a mystery to Iran, as well. The Russians have made this point regarding the Ukraine war. The result is the United States is the Lennie Small to the Israeli George Milton as far the Iranians are concerned, which means the United States no longer has agency.

This is exactly what Washington warned of in his farewell address. The only way out of this degenerate relationship with Israel is a revolution in how Washington deals with the entire region and that is impossible due to the massive Israel lobby. When every Congressman has a minder from Israel and every media outlet has to run their coy past AIPAC and the ADL, there is no room to think about this clearly, much less have a debate about this terrible situation.

This is why the way to bet is war with Iran after the November election. The Biden people have no reason to care at that point and Israel will see it as an opportunity to get what they have wanted for decades. The next administration will have to pay the price for this reckless foreign entanglement. Perhaps it is the price that must be paid for the end of empire. Gas lines and ten-dollar gasoline will surely cause some to question this habitual fondness for Israel, at least.

Radio Derb October 11 2024

Posted on October 12, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m50s Controversy in science, new and old
14m24s Disaster equity
27m09s Hillary, Zamyatin, and Us
38m59s Voice cloning
40m50s Using a shovel
43m36s An old friend is angry
46m46s Signoff with Cilla

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. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2, as originally scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, serpent, and percussion, the serpent being an 18th-century wind instrument now defunct, ancestor I think of the modern trombone. And this is of course your formidably genial host John Derbyshire with some notes on the passing charivari.

We are now less than one month away from the general election. I shall of course have things to say about that. The Southeast of our country has been stricken by yet another natural disaster; I shall cover that, too. Before either of those topics, though, I’m going to take a detour through science.

I am, as I’m sure I have mentioned before, a science geek from far back. Although I don’t have any expertise in any of the rigorous sciences, the old affection lingers and I try to keep up with developments.

There has been news from the world of science this past week, so let me start off with that. Continue reading →

Death Of The Grammar Nazi

Posted on October 10, 2024 by thezman

A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.

The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.

Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.

There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.

You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.

On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”

That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.

It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.

Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.

Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.

There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.

Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.

That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.

The Answer To Death

Posted on October 8, 2024 by thezman

One of the first awakenings people have on the road out of the liberal mental order is the realization that libertarianism is nonsense. It is why you find so many former libertarians in the dissident space. Many of them started to see conservatism as a pointless trap, so they went searching for another answer and landed on libertarianism, only to discover that it was just a ridiculous version of conservatism. This sent them off on the journey that led them over the great divide.

While libertarianism has collapsed, conservatives continue to struggle with why their cause has slowly been marginalized, despite billions in funding. On the one hand, they have no answer for the post-liberalism that has swept the ruling elites. They struggle to even understand that there is a ruling elite divorced from the ballot box. On the other hand, they cannot bring themselves to join the populist reaction to the post-liberalism that is executing a revolution from the top.

Other than chanting about their principles, these people have had no answer for why they oppose the populists. Part of the conservative delusion is to assume that you are part of a temporarily out of work alternative elite. Once radicalism has run its course and everyone has returned to their senses, you will once against be a part of the cultural if not the political elite. Therefore, joining with those icky prols in the populist movement means abandoning the dream of restoration.

From Burke to the present day, this has been the personalized conceit of what passes for conservatism in the Anglosphere. On the one hand, the conservative is compelled to oppose radicalism in the name of culture and tradition. On the other hand, he must defend the system, even as it absorbs the values and principles of radicalism, because he imagines himself one day in the leadership of the system. The ratchet effect exists because conservatism exists.

At the most basic level, politics in the West has been driven by the internal political dynamic of the United States. That dynamic is a dance between those who operate on the assumption that the ends justify the means and opposed by those who argue that the means justifies the ends. The reason this has been a lopsided struggle in favor of the former is they have a wider range of action. To win, they just have to learn what the opponent will not do and then do that.

A good illustration of this is the Biden administration’s war on the court system in the person of Jack Smith. The courts knock down his spurious legal arguments, but he keeps coming back with new versions of the same arguments, always with the purpose of jailing enemies of the regime. Thousands continue to sit in jail after the Supreme Court shot down the legal claim against them, because as far as Jack Smith and his lieutenants are concerned, any means necessary is justified.

It is the one thing reactionaries understood. The antidote to people like Jack Smith is not obsessive rule following but a radicalism far more violent and deliberate than that practiced by Smith. You do not dig up the corpse of Cromwell and put his skull on display as a deterrent. You do so in order to get comfortable with what must be done to the next lunatic that slips thorough he defenses. In order to defend the law, one must go outside the law to destroy those who live outside the law.

Another way of thinking about it is the classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Lee Marvin. In the film, set on the frontier, Stewart represents law and the order. Marvin is the frontier, the forces arrayed against the law. This is the central conflict of the story, which is settled when Stewart finally agrees to confront Marvin. Wayne, the man with a foot in both camps kills Marvin, but lets people think it was Stewart.

This is why conservatism is about to be run out of town. Like Stewart in the film, it has always refused to accept that the law is not the answer to the radicalism that seeks to destroy the very idea of law. Anyone or anything that rose up to face the radicals was met by the conservatives as a greater threat than the radicals. Imagine Jimmy Stewart having John Wayne arrested before the big fight. Conservatives imagine themselves as the defense of order, when in reality they are its chief opponent.

All is not yet lost for conservatives. Billions in financial support have allowed them to survive their audience leaving them. While the older generation is happy to sit around playing make believe until the sweet relief of death, the younger generation is looking around wondering if conservatism is worth saving. You see it in this interesting essay by someone calling himself Henry George. It is of the same tone you saw with libertarians a decade ago before they had their awakening.

All of those cultural sentiments captured in words by conservative writers over the years will only live on if the people moved by them are willing to fight. They can either be pleasing thoughts as you slip into the darkness of death, or they can be an inspiration to be far more ruthless and radical than the radicals who promise to condemn your culture and people to the dustbin of history. Some young conservatives seem to be creeping up to this realization.

In the end, the sentimentality that is conservatism is a luxury item. It can be indulged in times when there are no great threats to law and order. That law and order, however, must be ruthlessly enforced by those who cannot and will not allow their virtues to be turned into vices by the enemies of law and order. If conservatism is to survive it must transition from a comforting death into an inspiration for a violent revolt against radicalism and the societal death that leads from it.

The Rise Of Metadata Man

Posted on October 7, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door I have a post about the escalatory path of Iran and Israel, a post about the most efficient way to install, operate and maintain the guillotines after the revolution 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.

For the longest time, before we had loads of tests and studies on the topic of intelligence, being smart was something like pornography. It was not easy to define, but you knew it when you saw it. The smart person was well-read. You knew this because he could quote famous writers from memory. In fact, memorizing lots of things was essential to being a smart person. Of course, the only way to memorize lots of things was to read lots of things.

This view of intelligence remains with us, despite the fact there is little reason to remember much of anything. The guy who can quote a famous work of literature at the dinner party is assumed to be smart. The guy who speaks more than one language must be smart, because he had to memorize a second vocabulary. The fact that he does nothing useful with his life is overlooked. That old assumption about having a head full of information indicating smartness is still with us.

We may be on the cusp of that old notion fading away. In everyone’s pocket is a device that gives you access to the sum total of human knowledge. Not only is there no reason to memorize how many feet are in a mile, but there is also no reason to remember street names or how to get from one place to the other. That magic device will tell you where to go and how long it will take. It will also tell you in whatever language you like, in whatever country you find yourself.

Technology is not only making information available to us, but it is also about to make it much easier to access by way of Large Language Models. The hype around artificial intelligence obscures the fact that most decisions are normative, so those can never be made by robots unless we program the robot to do it. What AI will do for us is make the vast stock of information online easier to access. You will no longer have to be clever to search the internet for answers to your questions.

It will also make learning a language somewhat pointless. Your mobile device can already be used as something of a universal translator. It can translate what you say in your language to a close enough version of another language. You can scan foreign words, and an app will translate them. We are not far from the point where anyone from anywhere can communicate to everyone through a real-time translation service they can access through their mobile device.

Einstein famously quipped that he had no reason to remember how many feet were in a mile because he could look it up in a book. The same thing is about to happen to the study of languages for most people. Unless you are linguist or study a foreign culture, there is no practical reason to learn another language. The same is true for lots of things like dates of specific events and the names of important people. What will matter in the future is using the tools to access this data.

That sounds like heresy to most people, but we see this happening all around us as the internet becomes ubiquitous. We are losing patience for the long argument or the slow-paced story, because we are used to tapping a few keys and getting the pay off without all the extra stuff. For young people who have been socialized on the internet, waiting for anything is intolerable now. They just want the answer, and they have little interest in the context around the answer.

Schools are struggling with this reality. It is not just students using their phones to get the answer on a test. They can use the internet to write their papers and do so in a way that makes it hard to detect the fraud. The same tools a teacher can use to find plagiarism or answer sharing are available to the students, who can then make their work look original enough to pass the test. Getting a good grade is not about learning the material, but about mastering technology.

There is a practical genius to it. Education in this age is about passing through a series of gates to get a credential. Few students use much of what they learn in school in their work life, so cheating makes a lot of sense to them. In a way, they are mastering what they will actually use as an adult to game an antiquated and often pointless education system in order to attain a credential. This is especially true for college where most of what is taught has no practical value to the student.

We are moving from a world where being smart was about memorizing lots of information to a world where being smart means knowing how to find the information quickly and efficiently. Put another way, being smart is not about the store of data, but the store of metadata. Knowing the words, phrases and context of data is what makes finding the data possible. The same skull packed with metadata has access to vastly more data than the skull could ever hold.

This presents a bit of a problem in that we lack ways to display our stock of metadata, so how can we know who is smart? In the old days, we could safely assume the guy quoting Longfellow was above average in smarts. There is no way to quote metadata in a way that tells us much of anything. On the other hand, is someone highly skilled at finding the answer actually smart? It is, after all, a form of problem solving which is the skill we expect to be honed through conventional education.

This also raises the issue of formal assessment. Our systems assume that the person who scores high on the math and verbal portion of the SAT, for example, is smarter than the person who scores poorly on one or both portions. That will probably remain true in the metadata age, but what about the person who scores high on his verbal, but average on the math compared to the reverse? We value math over verbal, for practical reasons, but in the metadata age verbal skills may be more valuable.

Of course, all of this points to something else. We are becoming an increasingly fragile species due to our dependence on technology. A prolonged GPS outage, for example, would mean deliveries grind to a halt. No one owns a map, much less has the ability to use one to navigate. If the power goes out, our advanced skills at finding information on the internet quickly becomes a liability. Suddenly we are in a world of simpletons who do not know how anything works.

Generations

Posted on October 3, 2024 by thezman

Lost in the commentary about the vice-presidential debate is the looming generational issue haunting the political system. On the stage that night was a member of Generation X and a Millennial. J.D. Vance is not the first Millennial to enter politics, but he is the first one to enter the main stage. At forty years old, he would be the third youngest vice president ever, if Trump wins in November. Walz would become the first member of Gen-X to accomplish anything in politics.

Walz and Vance are good examples of their generation. Gen-X was known as the slacker generation, mostly because they were not politicized like the two waves of Baby Boomers that preceded them. They just wanted to do what they needed to do in order to get a decent job and enjoy their life. With the massive boomer generation ahead of them, ambition was pointless, beyond the personal. That is pretty much how it has played out for this relatively small cohort.

Tim Walz fits this profile. He kicked around in his youth, unsure what he wanted to do with himself as an adult. After a while he went back to college. He joined the National Guard because his father told him to join. He then got a job teaching because that was available and required the least effort. Serendipity got him into politics where good timing seemed to be his best asset. Like his generation, Tim Walz is a guy to whom life has happened, rather than a guy who attacked life.

In contrast, the life of J.D. Vance is like a well-executed battle plan. Millennials are strivers and box tickers. Encouraged from the womb by their mostly Baby Boomer parents and teachers to attack life with a detailed plan, this is a generation that started building a resume in kindergarten. Everything about their primary schooling was aimed at getting into a good college. College was about landing in the right career and their careers have been the accumulation of credentials.

That describes the life of J.D. Vance. One path out of poverty was the military, so he went into the military. That opened the path to college, so he went to the best college he could and got the best credentials he could get. Those credentials opened the door to a career in the swankiest of careers in venture capital. Unlike Walz, nothing about the life of J.D. Vance is due to chance other than his current position. One does not have much control over the choices made by Donald Trump.

The result of this generation gap was evident on stage. Walz probably would have arrived in his Elmer Fudd costume if they let him, for no other reason that it is more comfortable than a suit. He probably watched sports instead of prepping for the biggest moment of his life. Vance, on the other hand, was a machine. He crammed for the test because it is what he has done his whole life. He went to the debate to ace the exam and that is exactly what we saw.

You can expand this out to the top of the ticket. It is both symbolic and ironic that the race is between an old white guy who speaks for the America that is slowly slipping away and diverse girl boss who exists only in the imagination of the bitter, angry managerial class. Trump is not technically a Baby Boomer, but he is a man with the Baby Boomer sensibilities. He is a guy who thinks the economy is the country, so a good economy means everything is fine.

Harris is a ~~Baby Boomer~~ X’er, but her alien existence places her outside of what most people would understand by the term. She was born and raised outside of the country by parents who were not Americans. If a writing team from Hollywood took a break from ruining classic movies and were tasked with creating a story involving politics, they would make the star a diverse girl boss like Harris. She would be smart and sober-minded, however, miraculously always coming out on top.

The Harris as diverse girl boss from the movies can be taken further by the fact that she has never earned anything in her life. This is the way it works in film. Diverse girl boss never has to struggle and doubt like the traditional white lead. She is just given everything she needs by the writers. That is Kamala Harris. The biggest challenge of her life has simply been showing up without her dress on backwards. Now she expects to be handed the presidency.

The one thing missing from the picture is the hysterical female Millennial. Another feature of that generation is that strivers like J.D. Vance have had to navigate the hysterical female Millennial with a head full of feminist nonsense. Female Millennial hysteria as escapism is probably worth a book treatment. Much of the lunacy of the last twenty years has been driven by childish girls who became girl bosses rather than wives and mothers with a stake in their community.

The absence of this character from the current drama is probably the biggest white pill of this election cycle. Even in the unserious world of modern politics, the hysterical female Millennial is shunted over to the side when the adults are talking. In this regard, the rise of J.D. Vance could be signaling a return to normalcy once the Baby Boomers shuffle off to the shuffleboard courts. Perhaps the answer to the harpy all along was to simply ignore her while getting the job done.

One final angle here. J.D. Vance is the full expression of managerial man. The fact that he walked away from that system into the populist revolt against it suggest that managerialism lacks the cultural fulfillment to sustain itself. One reason the media has been told to hate him is that he is seen as a traitor. This is the main reason the system hates Trump; he betrayed his class. This suggests that the new left and right in our politics are managerialism versus culturalism.

The main take away from this election cycle for Baby Boomers and Generation-X should be that your time is done. The people who will be running things starting now are the people in their thirties and forties. That means our politics and culture will reflect the sensibilities of this generation. The least ethically centered generation in American history will be defining the nation. Millennials are an end-justifies-the-means generation and maybe that is what will be required going forward.

The Lincoln Exception

Posted on September 30, 2024 by thezman

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.

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.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Badder Thoughts