The Haunted Present

Posted on August 12, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about land management in Sweden, a post about the drama within the macramé community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

At the dawn of the information age, it was assumed that everyone having the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips would unleash human potential in ways that had never been imagined. Instead of vast swaths of information being cloistered in the books of specialists, it would be available to everyone. The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people who would otherwise be denied access to the information.

A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. New movies and television shows are, at best, technically superior, but creatively inferior, remakes of past works. The traditional arts, like painting and sculpture, have been made ridiculous in an attempt to find novelty rather than genuine cultural expression. The creative side of Western culture has reached a nadir as technology has reached its zenith.

The public space, of course, has become so narrow that comparisons to the Soviet era are becoming trite. In the UK, men are being sent to dungeons for the crime of mentioning that foreigners are murdering British school children. In the United States, the secret police is everywhere looking for dissidents to harass. The great democratization of information and the public square has led to a dark age of authoritarian violence and suppression.

Alexander Duggan once said that the end of the Cold War was a catastrophe for the world, by which everyone assumed he meant the Russian world. That was certainly true, as the Russian world had evolved to depend on the Cold War as both a justification for the Soviet system but also the framework in which people lived. Once the Cold War ended, the moral framework collapsed along with the political system, and the result was a generation of chaos.

Something similar may be happening with the flood of data that has washed over the Western world via the internet. We now live in a world where it is plain to see that every creative thing one can imagine has been done and most likely done better than anything that could be done today. Why paint portraits when the greatest portrait painters who ever lived, have already lived? Why sculpt when a machine with unlimited information can produce better results?

No one thinks too much about how the technological revolution must change the way we organize ourselves, because we are awash in the history of the twentieth century where all of the political ideologies were resolved, and liberal democracy was declared the winner. The end of history has left us with nothing but history. The information age has not just made the past accessible, but it has also tuned the past into a great flood that washes over every aspect of the modern age.

The curse of information is most evident in the public square where it is easy to see, or at least it seems that way, that every idea worth discussing has been raised, debated, and judged in the past? More important, every idea that is viewed as dangerous can be compared to something from that past that has been condemned. The reason that everyone with questions is called Hitler and even the slightest push back is fascism is that the information age makes such comparison simple.

Why would a young political activist spend time thinking critically about the world as it is when he can more easily look up ideas from the past and then repackage them for the present age? The reason our politics feels like a technically superior reboot of prior politics is that all of the participants are rooting around in the past for inspiration, rather than thinking of something new. Instead of standing on the shoulders of the past, everyone now trembles in its shadow.

The promise of the internet was that it would unlock the doors to the future, but instead it has walled them off by opening every door to the past. It is simply too easy to find what you need from the stock of existing knowledge than to take a step back and think about what you are seeing. The information age has turned the intellectual space into an endless museum in which we are all trapped, forced into playing roles from the past, regardless of their applicability to the present.

This may explain the woke business. The reason people are creating these bizarre and logically impossible roles for themselves, things like transgenderism, for example, is as a way to escape the conformity of the present. On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed. The solution is to break free from reason itself in order to create new roles to play.

Another piece of this is the American civic religion of progressivism, which treats the past like an angry mob chasing after the righteous. The information age has turned the past into a deadly fog that has descended onto society. The only solution to this is to destroy reality itself since the past is what shapes present reality. The war on biology, reason, truth, and empiricism is a war on the fabric of reality that defines the present and that which makes the past possible, our minds.

In the final analysis, the information age, especially the internet, may turn out to be a terrible curse, rather than a liberating force. For most of human history, the past was of little use, other than the lessons of the past. These were contained in stories and songs, rather than in detailed accounts of the events and participants. The point of the past, in this context, was to inspire, rather than constrain. Our detailed knowledge of the past, in contrast, is a psychological prison.

Ironically, this is not new either. James Joyce wrote about how the Irish were prisoners of their own struggle. The fictional South created by William Faulkner was also haunted by the past. The solution in both cases was the abnegation of that present reality in order to close the door to what created it. The Ireland of Joyce no longer exists, and the South of Faulkner exists only as a bogeyman for the progressive. The solution to the past haunting the present was to abandon it entirely.

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Whither Managerial Polyarchy?

Posted on August 8, 2024 by thezman

One of the strange truths about democratic governments is that they can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. This seems counterintuitive as the whole point of democratic government is to have public policy reflect the general will of the people. In theory any divergence should be rectified in subsequent elections so that over time, the majority support the policy. As we see in the modern West, this is not how things work in “our democracy.”

There is a great example of this in the UK. Immigrant crime has reached a point where even the most teary-eyed immigration romantic has had enough. All of the polling shows that the majority wants an end to immigration. The new Labour government won power largely by hinting they would be tough on immigration. They were lying, of course, and that is clear now. The government only had about thirty percent support at the election, and you can be sure it is lower now.

In other words, the current rulers of the UK have less popular support than the current ruler of Venezuela. The UK is allegedly a democracy, while the democracies all claim Venezuela is a dictatorship. While technically correct, if we redefine democracy to mean having some sort of voting process, the undeniable fact is the ruling class of Venezuela has far more popular support than the ruling class of the UK. Yet, for now at least, the UK government does not fear being overthrown.

Immigration is a great example of how democracy can remain unpopular for much longer than other forms of government. There has never been a time when there was popular support for open borders and unfettered immigration. The issue may not have ranked high on the list of voter concerns, but there was never a clamoring for violent foreigners to be imported into the country. Now there is massive hostility to it, but the policies not only persist, but they get worse.

Immigration is just the latest example of this. The de-industrialization we saw in the 1970’s and 1980’s never had popular support. People in the emerging service industries or technology may have been indifferent, but there were no rallies in the streets demanding the government ship the car parts plant to Mexico. The people in the manufacturing sector certainly cared, but their interests were ignored because the oligarchs saw a quick buck in selling off the manufacturing base.

The point is the so-called democracies of the West have been unpopular for an exceedingly long time, but it persists due to two factors. One is the people assume they can eventually get what they want through the democratic process. The ballots at every election have two options, heads they win and tails you lose, but people insist on picking from those options. It takes a long while, as we are now seeing, for people to lose faith in the democratic system.

The other reason, and perhaps the main reason, why democratic governments can remain unpopular for so long is the people who run the democratic system grow increasingly convinced they can trick and cajole enough people to manufacture a majority in their favor. In fact, as we keep seeing, this becomes the primary focus of the people running the system. It is as if they seek to prove Lincoln wrong and find a way to fool all of the people all of the time.

The guy running Venezuela knows that a large swath of his population thinks the system is rigged. He certainly knows it is rigged. He also knows that unless he keeps that disgruntled portion of the population pacified, he will be swinging from a tree branch, so that is his primary focus. He needs to always be looking to expand popular support for his policies, while at the same time defusing the anger in the portion that is unhappy with him and his policies.

The glue that has held Western democracies together for so long, despite not being particularly popular, is managerialism. The vast administrative state controlled by a permanent ruling class of managers is an unprecedented defense against any threats to the democratic system. Internal opposition is assimilated into the system so quickly that it never has time to flower into a palace coup. External opposition is subverted through the complex network of government affiliated organizations.

If you look closely, for example, at the pro-government protests in response to the anti-immigration protests in the UK, you will see people wearing the colors of groups like Amnesty International, Hope Not Hate and various immigrant charities right next to the cops waiting to crack the skulls of native Brits. Much of the police action, in fact, is coordinated by these “private groups” who “defend our democracy.” All of them are client organizations of the managerial state.

For this reason, managerial polyarchy¹ is highly resistant to popular discontent, even when that discontent is near universal. The problem though is that it is top-heavy, which makes containing internal dissent increasingly difficult. With so many people inside the managerial system or dependent upon it, factionalism is inevitable. It is why the managerial class has its politicians chant about unifying the country. What they really mean is unifying the managerial elite and the oligarchs.

We see a glimpse of this with Elon Musk. When he bought Twitter and reopened it, the system quickly moved to suppress him. Ben Shapiro and the ADL made him pray at the pile of shoes. The trouble is, Musk is the world’s richest man and someone who does not like being pushed around, so Twitter remains largely open. Musk has now weighed in on the two-tiered justice system of the UK. Elon Musk is a serious problem for a system that thinks it needs complete unity.

Why is Elon Musk a serious problem? A society in which the majority is disgruntled but lacks a leader and a method to compel change is like dry leaves and wood in the underbrush of a forest. It is a forest fire waiting to happen. The disgruntled inside the managerial system may look at the disgruntled masses as an army in waiting and decide it is a good time to stage a palace coup. This is why the British government is one step away from declaring war on running dog deviationists.

In the end, government, regardless of form, must not only satisfy the majority, but pacify those unsatisfied so they will not revolt. The present systems in the West have proven quite resistant to this reality, but reality must always prevail. The crisis in the West is over the central question of managerial polyarchy. Can it adapt and reform itself to comport with the demands of the people over whom it rules? If not, then what happens when these long bottled-up forces finally explode?

¹Managerial Polyarchy refers to the fact that large complex society does not have central control. Instead it has nodes that control specific domains, like banking, the media, the academy, and so on. These are networked together by a common understand of their role in society. This polyarchy of institutions shares the ideology of managerialism, thus we get the term Managerial Polyarchy.

Regime Games

Posted on August 6, 2024 by thezman

Today is supposed to be the big day when the world learns who the regime has selected to be the running mate of kamala Harris. Last week, the Mayor of Philadelphia tweeted out that it was to be Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, but regime media ignored it. In fact, they continue to ignore the story. As of now they are “reporting” that the choice is down to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.

Harris is scheduled to be cackling in Philadelphia today, so would make sense if it were Shapiro, but regime media says the plan is to do the reveal game show style like they did when Biden “picked” Harris. They will stage a video of Harris calling the condemned man over Zoom, because you know strong diverse female loves to use the latest technology like a big girl. She will cackle, he will make the soy face and accept his role as the loyal aid to girl boss.

One clue is this item posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, showing a fleet of black SUV’s at the home of the Minnesota governor. A similar thing happened at the home of J.D. Vance once he was notified. Once the pick is made, the Secret Service is dispatched to explain how things will work as far as security. It is possible that this is some sort of ruse, but that would be dumb even by Harris standards. On the other hand, she is a remarkably stupid woman.

Regardless, you can get a sense of how the regime really thinks about the race by the final three contestants. The fact that two are white men and one is a Jewish man is what everyone will notice. More important is that all three look old and therefore can be passed off as a steadying force. They did this with Obama when they picked Biden to be his running mate. The claim was that Biden was a longtime Washington insider and he would help steady the Obama ship.

Of course, Biden was both an olive branch and an insurance policy. Team Obama ruffled a lot of feathers in official Washington during the primary and they made enemies of the Clinton crime family. Adding Biden was a signal to permanent Washington that Obama was a team player. For similar reasons he made Clinton Secretary of State and turned a blind eye to her selling access. Biden was also an insurance policy, as no one could imagine him being president.

Harris is completely controlled by the regime, as they selected her for Biden and now have selected her to replace Biden. Her only base of support is the regime, so there is no need to pick a running mate for her that is regime friendly. Instead, they need someone that can make her more plausible as a candidate. That is why they obviously cast around for an old white guy. It is an admission that Harris comes off as a bumbling simpleton that could frighten many white voters.

The fact that they have settled on three unknowns is also telling. Shapiro is the only name with any recognition and that is only regional. Walz and Kelly are complete unknowns outside their respective states. Presumably all three can help win their respective states, which is interesting given that Walz is the governor of Minnesota, a state everyone thinks is safe. Trump lost there by 200,000 votes in 2020, but only by 50,000 in 2016, so maybe it is not that safe.

Another thing about these three options is that none of them have been mentioned as serious 2028 candidates. The big names like Gavin Newsom and Karen Whitmer were not interested, as they probably think they can win the nomination in 2028, even if the regime finagles Harris to a general election win. Despite the regime media campaign the last two weeks, the general consensus is that Harris is so terrible that once the action starts her balloon deflates quickly.

Of the three, Shapiro is the best option, as he brings the massive vote rigging machine to deliver the state to Harris. There are basically five states that decide the presidency at the moment. Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. There is some possibility that Minnesota adds itself to the list. If we take Pennsylvania off the board that leaves the four states and a 251-to-245 electoral college score in favor of Trump, so Harris is within striking distance.

The problem with Shapiro is his biography makes clear that his primary loyalty is to his people and his people are not Americans. He volunteered to serve in the IDF, rather than the American military. Imagine him explaining this while on stage with Vance, who served his people in the Marines. A Harris – Shapiro ticket is so alien and weird that even the dullest normie will notice it. A ticket that looks like every television ad, rather than America is not a good look right now.

Kelly is probably the second-best option, mostly because he has a good biography, but otherwise he adds nothing to the ticket. He is not the most likable guy, which is not a great thing for a ticket already short on charisma. Walz is the safest choice as he has carefully cultivated the “aw shucks” hick-lib act and he is a true believer. Walz is Bernie Sanders without the grating New York personality. He is Trotsky reimagined as a character from the television series Fargo.

What all of this tells us is the regime continues to struggle keeping all of the plates spinning, so they keep dashing about creating new narratives. Week one was the “weird” nonsense and now they are going with the claim that Trump is in a panic over Harris having such a good honeymoon. Like everything else we are seeing with the regime, there is no thinking past the first move. As a result, they rush from one fire to the next, claiming victory after avoiding disaster.

The Eighth Decade Curse

Posted on August 1, 2024 by thezman

Israel’s efforts to start a regional war in the Middle East took a big step forward when they murdered a Hamas official in Tehran and another in Beirut. The murder of Fuad Shukr in Lebanon is something the Israelis have been doing for a long time, but the missile attack killing Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran is both a clear violation of international law and a provocative escalation. Taken together it suggests that the Israelis want a war with Iran and are doing everything they can to provoke it.

The puzzle is why are they are doing this, especially now when it is clear that Washington is in turmoil and the American empire is stretched thin. Joe Biden is at best a caretaker at the moment. Netanyahu met with him last week, so he must know that Biden is a vegetable. He also has to know that it is not clear who will be in the White House six months from now. The only thing certain is it will be a new team running foreign policy, regardless of the results.

It may be that Netanyahu calculates that if the next administration inherits a regional war in the Middle East, they will have little choice but to continue whatever policy they inherit, so it is best to get everything in place now. It is not as if the Israelis do not have control of both parties. The neocons may think Trump wins the election, so leaving him with a regional war will cripple his term before it gets started. As a result, they are telling the Israelis to start the war.

Another theory floating around is that the Israelis have determined that Iran does not want a war right now, so their response to these moves will be limited. The Israelis can literally get away with murder, as long as the people they are targeting are not Iranian officials or important Iranian citizens. The two people they just murdered have been on their kill list for a long time. Targeted assassinations have always been a part of the Israeli toolkit, despite the civilized world’s protests.

Along the same lines, the Israelis may be looking at the way things are shaping up in the neighborhood and think they have to flip over the board with a war. Russia and Iran have close ties. China is now building relations with Iran. This has led the Saudis to end the petro-dollar agreement and begin to normalize relations with Iran now that they are both in BRICS. A new regional order is forming up where Russia and China supplant the American empire as the patron.

From the Israeli perspective, this is a catastrophe. Both Russia and China are wise to how the Israelis operates, and they have no Israel lobby in their countries. While both countries have always tried to maintain good relations with Israel, they both see Israel as part of the Global American Empire. It is not all that clear if they understand how the neocons use Zionism as a cover, but they certainly understand that Israel is a launching pad for American shenanigans in the region.

Instability has always been part of the Israel playbook too. Whether it is exploiting rivalries between its neighbors or rivalries inside its neighbors, the game has always been to maximize regional instability. This not only keeps the Arab countries on shaky ground, but it keeps the American empire involved. A war with Iran that draws in other Arab countries, thus forcing the American empire to get directly involved maximizes uncertainty and instability in the region.

One final possibility here is that the neocons may have decided that the Ukraine project is hopeless, so it is time to open a new front. Russia has strong relations with Iran, so war between the American empire and Iran would inevitably force the Russians to provide support to Iran. This would fit with the overall strategy laid out by the Rand Corporation five years ago and the philosophical outlook of the neocons going back to the end of the Cold War.

The question no one asks is if the American empire could wage a war against Iran and whether it could survive it. For decades it has just been assumed that the empire will win any war with any nation if it so chooses. A big part of the mythos of the American war machine is the assertion that the only wars the empire has “lost” are those it chose not to fight to win. This started with Vietnam and has been a fog that rests over any analysis of American war capacity.

The Ukraine war revealed this to be a myth. American wonder weapons either failed to live up to their promise or were quickly neutralized by the Russians. More importantly, NATO has been exposed as a paper tiger with regards to its ability to manufacture the sorts of weapons necessary for a long war. You can also throw in the failure to suppress the Houthis with expensive bombing campaigns. Clearly, the rest of the world learned something from thirty years of American war making.

Iran does not have the military industrial capacity of Russia, but it does have the support of Russia and China. Iran can also count on Syria and Iraq to help deliver weapons and men to the border of Israel. She can also count on OPEC not coming to the rescue when oil prices double overnight. In other words, whatever the motivations, a regional war that drags in the American empire to fight Iran could very well be a catastrophe for the American empire.

What all of this points to is exhaustion. The Israeli political culture is a chaotic mess that shows all the signs of being a spent force. It is a bunch of old guys living in the past, trying to cling onto life and power. This is not much different from the state of play in Washington, where it is a political class trapped in the last century. The flailing about that now defines imperial foreign policy is the result of yesterday men unable to come to terms with the reality of current age.

If this comes to pass, the American empire would not be the first to face its mortality in the Middle East. The Romans eventually learned that the Middle East was more trouble than it was worth. Perhaps it also spells the end of the Zionist project. It has been eighty years since the birth of the Zionist state, so maybe they are about to succumb to the curse of the eight decade. Of course, the Global American Empire is in its eighth decade as well, so maybe there is something to it.

Our Code Death

Posted on July 31, 2024 by thezman

Simulation theory is the hypothesis that says what people perceive as reality is actually an advanced, hyper-realistic computer simulation. It sounds like the basis for a cheesy science fiction story, but serious people think seriously about it. This post in Scientific American covers the basics. The very short version is something similar to what was presented in The Matrix series of films, just without the killer computer programs hunting humans who have managed to escape the simulation.

This idea is not new. In fact, it may be one of our oldest weird ideas, if you think of Plato’s allegory of the cave as a stab at simulation theory. It seems that humans have always known that at the minimum we are of two minds. There is the mind that attempts to comprehend objective reality and the other mind that contextualizes reality into things like social order, culture, history, and tradition. Culture is an artificial reality of sorts, but it is often more real to us than objective reality.

The obvious question is how could we tell if we are in a simulation? If the beings running the simulation have fooled us for this long, then surely, they have the ability to hide evidence of their handiwork. On the other hand, maybe there is evidence all around us, but we were initially coded to not be good at noticing it. As we have evolved, we have gotten better at noticing, so perhaps our evolutionary arc is that we finally reach the point where we notice the simulation.

Some people suggest that the drive toward creating artificial intelligence and virtual reality is evidence that we live in a simulation. If humans can create a reality with conscious beings inside of it, then it stands to reason that other intelligence species have reached the same point and we are their creation. That would mean they are a creation of some other species and so on and so on. In other words, “reality” is simulations all the way down.

That still leaves us with the problem of knowing we live in a simulation. One bit of evidence would be limits or shortcuts in the universe. There is some process, for example, that works, despite violating the laws of physics that prevent other similar processes from working. Maybe we find some part of the universe that seems to be off-limits to our observations. We build a super powerful telescope and finally see that door with the sign on it that reads, “No Entry.”

The thing is though, this approach assumes we have correctly noticed everything to this point and have not yet found the evidence we seek. Another way of looking at it is that maybe we have not reached the level of noticing to see the evidence that is all around us in our daily lives. The Mandela Effect is the observed phenomena where large numbers of people believe something false to be true. There are dozens of examples where lots of people collectively share a false memory.

Maybe our brains have been coded to contextualize reality in such a way that anomalies are filtered out along with other useless junk. For example, millions of Trump haters are slowly coming around to the idea that the Trump assassination attempt is a false memory. Facebook is removing the iconic images of Trump raising his fist on stage with blood running down his face. It will not be long before these people are sure it never happened and call it a conspiracy theory.

Along the same lines, we have the Russia Collusion Hoax, which these same people swore was real, but now they swear it never happened at all. The same people who made up that hoax have convinced most of the world that Hunter Biden never owned a laptop and if he did, it was planted in that computer shop by the same people who rigged the 2016 election for Trump. Remember Covid? Of course not, as it never happened, and only crazy people think otherwise.

The Covid event is rather good evidence of one of those systemic shortcuts that point to this being a simulation. For months much of the world literally stopped going to work and yet the economy did not collapse. Everything we thought we knew about the workings of a modern economy said such a thing would plunge the world into a dark age, yet nothing changed all that much. Food got more expensive, but it somehow managed to get on the shelves.

Probably the biggest anomaly that has been at the center of politics for twenty years is the election of Barak Obama. To this day no one can say with confidence that he was born in the United States. In addition to his murky backstory, his total lack of qualifications to do anything, much less be president, should have relegated him to obscurity, but in violation of two hundred years of past practice, it was an asset in his campaign for the White House.

We are seeing another one of these political paradoxes. In 2020 Kamala Harris was as popular as rectal cancer. Despite having more money than any other candidate, she was never able to get any interest. Now, all of a sudden, she is anointed as the favorite to win the November election. As with Obama, we are seeing a violation of rules that have been predictive for many generations. Perhaps what we are really seeing is one of those shortcuts used by the programmers.

The larger point here is that what we are seeing makes no sense in the context of the rules we think govern human society. The reason no one talks about the economy anymore is it no longer makes any sense. The lunacy of the political media that has become the norm is not an effort to warp our sense of reality, but a reflection of the spaghetti code that is generating political media. The simulation is shaking itself to bits because of an accumulation of bugs and bug fixes.

Of course, we know what happens when a software system becomes so buggy that it can no longer be trusted. At least we think we know. You wipe the system and begin with a new code base. When a business reaches a point where it can no longer be reorganized, it is wiped out in what we call bankruptcy. A human society that reaches the point where the bugs are too numerous to fix, like the bad software, it is wiped out in what we call a revolution. We may be at that point.

The Last Atheist

Posted on July 30, 2024 by thezman

There was a time when the so-called New Atheists were getting a lot of attention online and in the media. The main reason for the interest was famous people with claims to empiricism, people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, leading the charge for the New Atheists. Famous people can focus public attention on just about anything and when those famous people have credentials people are conditioned to respect, then those famous people can lead public debate.

The movement ran out of steam for a few reasons. One is Richard Dawkins found out that he could bash Christians as much as he liked, but when he moved onto other religions the priests of the New Religion took exception. In Britain, you cannot mock Islam and nowhere are you allowed to mock Judaism. Although it is unlikely that he ever figured it out, the truth is Christianity in the English-speaking world has come to mean “white” and the New Religion is antiwhite.

Sam Harris, the another famous New Atheist, was largely undone by his own weirdness, which you can see in this old debate. He looks like someone you would see in a documentary about serial killers. Persuasion is as much about how the arguments are presented, as about the facts and reason, and Harris presents as a psychopath who you would not buy a car from much less an argument about God. It turned out that Harris was the best argument against atheism.

The main problem for atheists, of course, is that they do not have an affirmative argument to make in support of their claims. You cannot prove a negative, which means there is no way to prove God does not exist. The best they can do is attack the arguments in favor of the existence of God. This not only makes them sound like jerks, but it can never work for the simple reason that people do not abandon their beliefs when they stop making sense, only when they find a better belief.

The other problem for atheists is that they engage in a form of argument that is inherently dishonest in its form. They start with the assertion that their claim is one of however many valid claims. Therefore, if they disprove the other claims, that means their claim is the right one by default. It is why atheists spend all of their time attacking what they claim are the arguments in favor of God, rather than putting together an argument in favor of their godless universe.

This is the Intelligent Design argument in a nutshell. Since there is no way to prove that God got drunk one night and created the platypus, they spend all of their time “disproving” evolution or asserting that “Darwinism” is a religion. It is entirely possible everyone is wrong, and we live in a simulation and the ID’ers are mistaking what they see for the hand of providence, for what is really just the work of bored child of a race of superbeings in another dimension.

That aside, the biggest problem for atheists, however, is that our moral framework as a civilization rests on the assumption that right and wrong, ought and ought not, are backstopped by something that lies outside the reach of man. This has always meant God, the gods or the shaman who communicates with the spirit world. Often, this supernatural element is bound up in tradition, which is just a handy word for agreed upon ways of acting over a long period of time.

If you rip out God from the equation, then all things are permitted unless you can find a reasonable argument against it. You can see the problem here in this video of Harris being interrogated by a young YouTuber. It quickly becomes clear that the new moral framework Harris proposes makes no sense, not even to Harris. He is reduced to endless equivocation and restatement. Depending upon your perspective it is either sad or amusing to watch him struggle.

Of course, the main problem for Harris in his quest to create a new reason-based morality is that such a thing is not possible. Every human society has a morale code, a list of things you ought and ought not do. These collective beliefs in what is and is not ethical are either based on tradition or in the supernatural. One of the cornerstone beliefs must be that there are bits of this code that are off-limits to questioning, as they are too important to put to a vote.

This is the problem for late-empire America and the West in general. Once the medieval Christian conception of God was removed, the entire moral superstructure of the West began to faulter. Liberalism itself rests on a priori beliefs that are rooted in the Western Christian tradition. The reason liberal democracy looks like despotic anarchy is that the thing it requires to remain rational has been removed. The result is a Hobbesian moral universe that often appears suicidal.

This brings us back to the atheists. The main reason their project has always failed is that you cannot replace a set of beliefs with nothing. People will believe in something similar until a better option is found. Belief in the supernatural solves a problem, which is why humans share this one quality. For Western man, the zenith of belief was late-medieval Christianity. The long arc of the West that has reached the current state is the struggle to replace that belief with nothing.

In a way, the rise and fall of New Atheism gives us an insight into what lies ahead for the Godless world we have created for ourselves in the West. It is the image of the last atheist stammering his way through basic questions which he cannot answer because how we ought and ought not live lies in the thing he seeks to destroy. Ironically, it means the reality of belief will once against reassert itself because reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

Christianity Versus Democracy

Posted on July 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about a good new Western called Old Henry, a post about the Olympics and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

A question that does not get asked very much, especially in public, is if Christianity is compatible with democracy. Organized Christians in this age make a point of supporting “democracy” because the people in charge cannot stop talking about it, but that speaks to the sorts of people running organized Christianity. They want to be in good standing with the rulers, an irony that never gets mentioned. The thing they claim to profess evolved in opposition to secular rule.

Putting that aside, the issue of whether democracy, as in the consent of the governed through direct participation in governance by the governed, is compatible with Christianity is an important one. It is clear that as the West has become more democratic, it has become less Christian. Open hostility to Christianity is a feature of the class of people who talk about democracy the most. It certainly seems like the fans of democracy are not fans of Christianity.

Most people today who call themselves Christian or one of the sects of what we think of as Christianity are well aware of the hostility, but they blame secularism or various names for radicalism, rather than democracy. Christians embrace democracy as much as the opponents of Christianity, even if their particular brand of Christianity has no democratic elements. Catholicism, for example, is anti-democratic in structure, but American Catholics love democracy.

There are, however, Christian sects that do embrace democracy. Baptists churches, for example, hire their pastors. If the pastor finds a bigger church willing to hire him and pay him more money, he is free to leave the old church and join the new one. On the other hand, if the church congregation or the deacons decide the pastor is not to the liking they can fire him. Here is a video from a Baptist minister giving the background on why he was recently fired by his church.

The short version of the video is the pastor gave a sermon on marriage and the role of women that was based in a traditional interpretation of Scripture. The wife of the youth pastor, a more modern woman, was offended by the sermon. She and her husband organized a campaign within the church against the pastor in the video and eventually got him fired from his post. In the end, they got a majority of the congregation to agree that either he goes, or they go.

This is a very democratic result. After all, the starting point for democracy is the assertion that the majority must prevail. While there is nothing in Scripture that says this is how things must be, most Christians accept this assertion. In fact, one could argue that the most important victim of majority rule was Christ. If instead of demanding Barabbas they demanded Jesus, the world would be quite different. The point is this congregation and others like it are not organized according to Scripture.

More important, the way they are organized contradicts a basic assumption of all religions, not just Christianity. That basic assumption is that there are some things too important to be left to man. These are things that are true because the gods or God have declared them to be true. Scripture does not say adultery, for example, has to be sorted through a show of hands. For Christians, adultery is a sin, and it is not up for debate

Without knowing the content of the sermon that the pastor in the video says was the source of the conflict, it cannot be judged dogmatically. What matters is the pastor preached in a way that offended the congregation, or at least a majority of them, so the rest went along with firing him. If his sermon was theologically and scripturally correct, then it means the congregation decided they did not like that part of the Bible, so they avoid it and those who preach it.

The point here is that for Christianity to work, or any religion for that matter, the main body of its beliefs must be beyond the collective judgement of man. The collection of oughts and ought nots that make up every religion are rooted in an authority beyond the ability of man to question. Otherwise, the oughts and ought nots are rooted in the collective will of the people. The word we have for this is democracy. In other words, democracy replaces God or the gods as the moral authority.

This is why the radicals of the French Revolution firts set their eyers on the Catholic Church when they gained power. Popular consent could not coexist with an alternative moral authority or its representative on earth, so it had to go. The same logic was at work when they eradicated the aristocracy. Hierarchy is an alternative moral authority to popular sovereignty, so it cannot coexist with it. The thrown and the altar have always been the enemy of popular consent.

You see that in the story of the video pastor. The people who engineered his termination feel justified not because they find support in Scripture, but because they think they have the support of the majority. The God they truly worship is not on the Bible but in the show of hands and their sense of being in the majority. It is not hard to see how this can lead to what you see with the Episcopal Church. It is rainbows and sodomites because the god they worship is the god of democracy.

What the evidence leads to is that the enemy of Christianity is not liberalism or even secularism, but the concept of democracy. Once people of any faith embrace the idea that truth is the result of consent, there is no room for God. Any religion that tries to exist in a society that embraces democracy, will come under pressure to replace its God with the god of the people. As a matter of survival, Christians should see democracy as their primary enemy, externally and internally.

This raises an important question. Can Christianity survive in a democracy. Even if the Church rejects democracy and all its works, can it survive in a society which is governed by the principles of democracy? Is there some limit on the democratic impulse that must be in place and be viewed as unassailable in order for Christian to live in democratic society. If not, then are Christians obligated to fight democracy or simply acquiesce to their own destruction?

DEI Another Day

Posted on July 25, 2024 by thezman

The ongoing saga over who is actually running the White House and who will be the opponent of Donald Trump in the fall is a good example of how the political class lacks second order thinking. When they bumped off Biden, they did not think about what comes next, so they are now stuck with Harris. It also reveals that these people have no institutional memory, so they repeat past errors. In the case of Harris, they seem to have learned nothing from the Obama experience.

Back during the great interregnum, when issues like race, affirmative action, and demographics could be discussed, it was obvious that the main failure of affirmative action programs was not that they did not result in more blacks in the targeted area, but that the blacks themselves often resented it. Everyone just assumed that these people got where they were through affirmative action, rather than merit, so those who thought they earned it hated the stigma that came with affirmative action.

It is an important and overlooked part of race politics. The white saviors who create and implement these race programs are not counting heads looking for the correct number of brown people. They are looking for salvation. That comes, they assume, when the black recipients of their programs are grateful to the people behind them. The “failure” of affirmative action was that it created black resentment, the exact opposite of what the white saviors were expecting.

That aside, there were second and third order effects that no one thought to consider, and they also contained an internal contradiction that could not be covered up with moral language. You cannot have a meritocratic, egalitarian society and at the same time have special rights for certain people based on dubious claims about the suffering of their ancestors. Good intentions and righteous indignation could not obscure this reality nor stop people from acting on it.

Not only do our betters not think past their first move, but they also never learn from their past errors, so affirmative action was rebranded. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, no matter how they frame it, is just another set of lectures about how whites must overlook merit in order to fill the ranks with nonwhites. The libraries full of books soaked in emotive language on this topic delight and confuse the promoters of DIE projects, but the fundamental facts remain. It is affirmative action.

This is why people like Christopher Rufo have found it so easy to anathematize the term DEI and use it as a club to beat the managerial class. The fact that this new branding easily converts to DIE made it even easier. When a company CEO proudly states that his company will replace whites with nonwhites in order to meet the goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in the minds of white people, the “great replacement” move from abstraction to a direct threat.

In other words, the whole DEI program that evolved in response to the moral failure of affirmative action pleased the people behind it, but they never thought about how it would play outside the hothouse of the academy. They never pondered the contradiction between mandatory association and the internal logic of a society that strives to be an egalitarian meritocracy. All they could see was the wonderfulness of their first trick and the assumed ends that must come after it.

This is all coming together with the Kamala Harris campaign. Apparently, not one remembers her 2020 primary run. No one remembers why they carefully groomed and insulated Barak Obama. Instead, they just bumped off Biden and assumed all their dreams would fall into place. Instead, they have the face of DEI as the default option for the Democratic nomination. Kamala Harris is the embodiment of everything the critics of DEI have been saying for a decade.

This is why her polling is terrible, worse than Biden’s, and why she may have to be replaced before the convention. White people see in Kamala Harris the face behind those dreadful diversity seminars at the office. Black people see the patronizing white women behind those same programs. For both races, Harris is what middle-aged cat ladies imagine is the ideal black woman. It is not that she is inauthentic, which is certainly true, but that she is genuinely offensive.

Of course, the people who created this mess are now tasked with finding a remedy to it, which means more obtuse shortsightedness. Reportedly the Obama faction is unhappy with Harris, a member of the Clinton faction, so they are floating the idea of Senator Mark Kelly as her running mate. The problem there is it underscores the fact that Harris is a DEI candidate. Fitting her with a competent white man not only highlights her ineptitude, but confirms what critics say about DEI.

This is why there is a good chance that this scheme falls apart entirely and the Democrats are left with a chaotic scramble at their convention. The thing they hoped to avoid would be made possible by their thumbless attempts to engineer a result that prevents an open convention. They keep stepping on these rakes, because they never think past the first move, and they learn nothing from past errors. The Democrats are now a collection of high time preference amnesiacs.

All of this brings up a larger issue, one that will not go away when this present fiasco has gone down the memory hole. Popular government can only work in an orderly society, and you get an orderly society when the people who make up that society agree that following the rules is of paramount importance. This is not possible in a diverse society, which must devolve into tribal factionalism. This is why the Framers warned about the threat of factionalism to the republic.

The ongoing demographic collapse of America, and the West in general, means the underlying requirement of Western style government is collapsing. The chaotic, big man government we see evolving with the Democrats is simply a product of the people who make up that party’s coalition. In time, this will be the reality of American society, if the demographic trends continue. The real choice behind these election dramas is between order and diversity. You cannot have both.

Weekend At Biden’s

Posted on July 23, 2024 by thezman

Going back to when the regime selected Joe Biden to “win” the Democratic primary and then “win” the general election, there have been jokes about his health, making references to the movie Weekend At Bernie’s. Just about every way to call someone a corpse has been used to describe Joe Biden. In what could be final proof that we do live in a simulation, Joe Biden is now hiding out, incommunicado, at his beach house in Delaware, supposedly suffering from Covid.

Now, he is not entirely cut off from the world. He supposedly wrote that letter, a scan of which was posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, in which he bowed out of the presidential race. Someone who sort of sounded like Biden supposedly “called” the Harris campaign to pledge support. Amusingly or alarmingly, depending upon your point of view, Harris flubbed her lines and started to say it was a recording, but then caught herself and played along until the end.

Now, the letter Biden allegedly wrote is a huge problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we have no idea who wrote it. The official version is his longtime friend “helped” him write it, but then why was it not on White House letterhead or even the letterhead of the campaign? Why does the signature look like it was written by another person or possibly generated using Microsoft Paint? Resigning by scanned letter posted on social media is also bizarre.

What the letter suggests is that Biden is either dead or in a coma or maybe in and out of it mentally, so people around him wrote the letter to distract people. If they had not posted this letter on Sunday, there would be media camped out in Delaware doing what they have been told to do, which is hound Biden out of the race. The letter was to shift the focus from Biden onto Harris. The trouble is, everyone in Washington seems to understand this so they started calling for proof of life.

That explains the bizarre show they put on yesterday. The whole thing looked like a poorly done high school play. Of course, faking a voice is now quite simple thanks to the explosion of cheap software tools. Someone with free time was able to make this video that looks fairly good but sounds even better. A professional with the right equipment would be able to create a fake Joe Biden recording that would fool even his family, so it is well within the realm of the possible.

In fact, all of this fakery is well within the realm of the parsimonious. A good rule of life is that people who have lied to you everyday up to this point are probably lying to you now and will continue to lie to you in the future. Everything about the Biden campaign, presidency and re-election campaign has been a lie, so it is wise to assume that what is happening with him right now is a lie too. What we can assume at this point is the official version of events is false.

Of course, the counter to this is why would they do this? The whole point of the lies to this point was to keep him in the race so the vote-rigging machine could get him re-elected and his team could carry on for another term. If he is unable to fill that duty, then why not finish him off and rally around Harris? It is not as if she is a genius who will outwit these people and install her own regime. Even in his vegetative state, Joe Biden is smarter than Kamala Harris.

Therein lies the mystery. One clue to all of this is that Harris was never part of the Obama crime family. When she ran in 2020, her staff was composed of former Clinton people, not Obama people. Amusingly, it is just assumed that because she is not white that she is in the Obama crime family. This is not the case at all, and it is why the Biden people dunked on her to the media. Putting Harris in the White House would be bad for the Biden-Obama people who are running things.

That raises another question. Why are the people around the dead or comatose Biden saying he endorses Harris? One reason is it would look even weirder than any of this stuff looks if he did not endorse her. That and an open primary could result in violent street battles in Chicago. Both parties remain haunted by the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, but especially the Democrats. Even a mild version of that would sink the party up and down the ticket.

The other reason is that there seems to be a consensus that Harris is simply too stupid and obnoxious to win. From the perspective of the Obama crime family, Harris running a shabby campaign and losing to Orange Hitler would put an end to the Clinton crime family as a viable force in Washington. In another of life’s amusing ironies, the Clinton wing is now seen as the old white leadership, while the Obama wing is the new, diverse and ascendent leadership of the party.

The main problem with all of this is that at some point, Biden will have to either make an appearance or be replaced by Harris for the remainder of his term. At least that is what the normal rules would dictate. We live in a bizarre age, so it is possible that the regime media simply refuses to discuss the fact that the president has not been seen for however long it takes to pull off this caper. They are not all that curious at the moment when the topic is at the center of the public stage.

It is an example of the lack of second order thinking. The people around Biden are like conmen who lie to get out of a jam, but each lie creates a new jam, for which they have to come up with another lie. The result is they get carried along by their river of lies without any concept of where it leads. That has been the history of the Biden presidency thus far. In this case, they cannot figure out what lie to tell now, so they remain under the cone of silence.

What we know now is Biden is either too dead or too sick to meet with the Lizard King’s chief emissary on earth. If he cannot make that meeting, then it is safe to assume he is too sick or dead to do much of anything. This raises the obvious question of who is making decisions in his name. You can get away with this for a week, but any longer than that is too absurd even in our clown times. Sometime soon, Biden must make an appearance or step down from office.

The Conspiracy Times

Posted on July 22, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the dullness of political conventions, a post about the normal people who still live in heritage America and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note: I jumped onto a Twitter space hosted by Pete Quinones Friday night. I had just returned from a nice dinner and a long drive in the country, so I was a bit tired, which means I was a bit incoherent, but not too bad. Listen here.

The term “conspiracy theory” has been a popular and effective slur against anyone skeptical of official narratives for a long time. The main reason it has been effective is it was always used against people with implausible theories. While the official narrative may not hold up, the alternatives ranged from unlikely to absurd. We have now reached a point where the poles have reversed. The “conspiracy theories” are often far more plausible and sober minded than official narratives.

Yesterday, Biden announced he was not going to run. He released a letter on Twitter, now stupidly called X and a supporting tweet. Others chimed in to say that he had a long think about things while recovering from Covid and decided that it was time to retire and pass the torch to his most trusted understudy, Kamala Harris. Regime media then set off memorializing the great man and his bold decision, thus setting the stage for the Kamala Harris campaign.

The problem is none of this actually happened. The letter Biden supposedly wrote was not written by him, but by some guy named Steve. Reportedly he worked with Biden in the middle of the night to craft the letter. Then he told the family that Joe had decided to call it quits. Then a chubby girl in the White House was given the task of posting a scan of the letter on Twitter. The letter is not on the official White House letterhead nor is it on the campaign letterhead. Just plain paper.

Joe Biden has not made a public appearance in many days and is not scheduled to show up anywhere at the moment. A sitting president choosing not to run for re-election is highly unusual. For the president who makes this decision, or any politician for that matter, it is the biggest event of his career. The first sentence in Biden’s obituary will now include his decision not to run for re-election. That requires more than a tweet from a chubby intern and a letter written by your lawyer.

Adding to the official version is the fact that his campaign chair was on television Sunday morning demanding the party fall in line behind Biden. His top people were running around Washington whipping support among donors and important party officials on the basis that Biden was the nominee. Once news hit the internet, many of these people told the press that they had no idea this was in the works and only heard the news from their interns who are on social media.

In other words, nothing about the official narrative rings true. In fact, it is so implausible that in a different time it would have been one of the conspiracies floating around in response to a much more plausible official narrative. This is the sort of thing Alex Jones says on his show. The mystery guy named Steve Ricchetti, by the way, is a long-time fixer and bag man for the Democratic Party. He is a boring version of The Smoking Man from the old conspiracy series The X Files.

The trope from gangster movies is that when the mafia decides to whack a guy, they find someone the victim trusts to do the deed. Steve Ricchetti has been around Washington for almost as long as Biden and he has been friends with Biden for decades. He has been in the White House with a minor title, but he is one of the family’s closest advisers and he is also keeps an eye on them for the regime. No doubt he was tasked with delivering the bad news to the family.

It is unlikely that there was a scene at the family home where Steve Ricchetti presented the already written letter to Biden and said, “I either get your signature or your brains on this letter” but this decision was obviously not a voluntary. The fact that Biden is unable to speak publicly about it suggest he is in worse shape than we are being told, which is probably why regime flunkies from the Republican Party are now demanding he resign from office, or they invoke the 25th amendment.

Given that Biden has not been in charge of things in any meaningful sense since he was installed, having him serve out his time in a coma or worse is not troubling to the people running things. It may be a problem for them if Harris is installed, as it is known that the Biden staff despises Harris and her people. In other words, the soft coup may be a modified limited hangout to buy some time. The people running the White House agreed to this, but not to Harris becoming president.

Alternatively, the people who engineered this soft coup did not think too much about how it looks as they just wanted Biden out of the race. They had Biden endorse Harris, but they can deal with that later. They now have a month to figure out how to find someone who is plausible enough as a candidate so that when the rigging machine kicks in on election night, the results are plausible enough to accept. Maybe they simply have not thought this far at all.

That is the other thing about our conspiratorial age. Not only are the official narratives more ridiculous than the conspiracy theories, but the people engineering the official narratives are thumbless screw-ups. Even the guys lining their clothes with aluminum foil would have cooked up a better story than the official narrative of how Biden decided to quit the race. The official narratives are not just implausible, but they are also stupid which makes the conspiracy itself stupid.

Of course, what all this points to is more ham-fisted shenanigans as the regime plotters try to sell Harris as a plausible alternative to Trump or find a suitable replacement if she flops this week. In other words, we will get a firehose of nonsense and lies from the regime, which will turn the conspiracy theory machine up to eleven. We have reached the point where only a fool accepts the official truth, which opens the door for everyone with a clever imagination to conjure alternatives.

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