The Politics Of Failure

Posted on May 1, 2024 by thezman

One of the eternal truths of human society is that the people with real power are those with control of the economics of society. Whether the society is ruled by a king or a committee of girl bosses, the people who have the final say on all matters are those who control the wealth of society. The golden rule of human organization is “the man with the gold makes the rules.” Without much fanfare, we may have seen this rule work its magic in the big neocon funding bill.

The first thing to note about the money for Project Ukraine is most of the money will never turn up in Ukraine, at least not in the form of weapons. If you read the text of the bill most of the money is for slush funds the White House can use to replenish weapons taken off the shelf and sent to Ukraine over the last year. It appears the White House has been shipping weapons to Ukraine that were not paid for by Congress, so this created a debt to the Pentagon budget that is now repaid.

The number of actual weapons going to Ukraine as a result of this bill is a fraction of the sixty billion allocated. Ukraine needs advanced air defense systems, artillery tubes and artillery shells, but none of this is coming from Washington. The main reason for this is none of these things exist, at least not in surplus quantities. You cannot send what does not exist, even with billions to spend. Instead, Ukraine is getting what is available which is wheeled vehicles and surplus arms.

It is not all that clear that supplying Ukraine with what they need would make much of a difference, as Ukraine has another problem. The Ukraine army is running out of men and there is no money solution to this problem. It takes time to draft and train men to fight this sort of war. According to Ukraine sources, they need two hundred thousand men right now to be made whole. That deficit grows bigger by about a thousand men a day and there is no way to solve this problem.

The reality on the battlefield raises an important question. If there is no money solution to the problems facing Ukraine on the battlefield, then why spend sixty billion on this project when it must inevitably fail? That money could be used to other foreign policy adventures like the planned war with China over Taiwan. Of course, they could spend the money on Israel. There is always an appetite for that in Washington. Instead, they chose to shovel sixty billion into the Ukraine furnace.

The first clue is all the money allocated to the Pentagon for various undefined things supposedly related to Ukraine. It is clear the administration sent far more to Project Ukraine than Congress authorized. What most likely happened is something like the old arms-for-hostages game played in the Reagan years. Military contractors sent men and material to Ukraine on the promise they would be made whole with interest at some point in the future. The future arrived in that bill.

The other clue is the money being sent to Ukraine for economic support. It is so tangled up in the language of government that it would take years for an outsider to figure out what any of it means. This is how Washington launders trillions of dollars through and for friends of Washington. Billions will go into obscure programs administered by the administrative state and then those funds will end up in grants to NGO’s or contracts to vendors with obscure business models.

Of course, some will go to the Ukraine government, but with very specific instructions on how it is to be spent. There are many friends of Washington that have unpaid bills for services rendered to Ukraine. The vendors must be paid in dollars, not the worthless currency of Ukraine. Some of this money will be directed through Kiev to those friends of Washington. It would be a total coincidence if those vendors just happened to employ friends and family of important people in Congress.

Most likely this was the main reason for the sense of urgency. Over the last two years big players have been making deals with Ukraine for economic development, on the assurance that Ukraine would win the war. BlackRock, for example, made a number of deals with Kiev. BlackRock and JP Morgan have created a bank for rebuilding Ukraine, by which they mean looting Ukraine. Large global operators have been cutting deals with Ukraine since the start of the war.

What this means is heavy weight players have been given exclusive access to Ukraine in exchange for economic assistance now. Much like how the Pentagon “borrowed” from military contractors, the regime has been promising the usual suspects first rights to loot Ukraine after the war, in exchange for “investments” now. This is all done informally, but no one is hiding it. War has always been good for business, especially the banking business.

In other words, another purpose of this bill was to repay economic elites who had been talked into going along with the project. Keep in mind that players like BlackRock and JP Morgan have money in Russia as well. Now that it is clear that Ukraine will lose the war, they need to think about how the world looks after Project Ukraine. As you always see with a failing enterprise, the insiders are getting their money out before it becomes obvious to everyone that the enterprise is doomed.

This is all speculation based on the available data, but the facts on the ground are making it clear to everyone that Ukraine is finished. The text of this spending bill and the announced weapons transfers that are part of it all point to a rush for the exits rather than a new commitment to the project. The smart money just jumped out the window, carrying your tax dollars with them. That means the next phase is finding someone in Washington to blame for the failure of the enterprise.

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The Right-Wing Coffeehouse

Posted on April 30, 2024 by thezman

Last week Keith Woods posted on his Twitter a video montage of a guy going about his daily routine somewhere in America. Woods captioned the video with “One of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever watched.” What followed was a chain of thousands of comments back and forth, either trying to explain what Woods meant by that tweet or why he missed the point of the video. The video is worth watching and the comments are worth reading to get a sense of the debate.

The video itself was posted by the guy you see in it, and it turns out that he is a reasonably successful man. He has an advanced degree and a nice job. He is obviously doing well in the material sense. He is also married to a professional woman, and they are expecting their first child. Reportedly he posted the video without thinking much about how people would react. As is often the case with “viral” content, this one is about the people reacting to it, not the content.

The first thing it reveals is there is a segment of the on-line right that looks at normal life as something to be avoided. For Woods and many of his fans, a life like the man in the video enjoys is a nightmare. The reason for it is they see his life as having been reduced to material goods. He is not “living” in any meaningful way. He labors in a tedious job inside a sterile office in order to pay for things that are as sterile as the life he lives in order to obtain those things.

For this side of the on-line right, the point of life is not material prosperity, but something else that they are never very good at explaining. Keith Woods is not a hardy guy who is going to go off on dangerous adventures. He is not signing up to be a soldier of fortune or sail the seas as a merchant marine. In all probability his life is as routine and boring as the man in the video. Yet, he thinks that life should be about more than material comforts and should have a higher purpose.

Romanticism like this is associated with the people we call the left, but there has always been a strain of it on the right. This is especially true in Europe, where the terms left and right used to mean more than tomorrow and yesterday. In America, the people we call the right have always embraced the sterility of material existence. The point of life is to get a good job, work yourself to death to buy stuff and then die before you become a financial burden on the next generation.

Note that Woods was not universally denounced for his post. There was another divide in the responses and that was the age divide. His younger fans were right there with him in condemning the traditional definition of success, while the old guys like Matt Walsh were baffled by the response. From his point of view, the old American right’s point of view, the video guy is living the best life. It is impossible for Walsh to grasp why people like Woods reacted negatively to the video.

No doubt hoping to benefit from the debate on Twitter, Nick Fuentes posted this video of himself mocking people with jobs. Unlike the Keith Woods reaction, Fuentes is crude and self-indulgent, but the point of view is the same. He is rejecting what most people would consider a normal and happy life. It is important to him that the world knows he rejects the conventional life. His critique of women, heterosexuality and marriage all come from the same rejection of the conventional.

This new romanticism is not entirely new with the Zoomers. Richard Spencer should probably get credit for introducing this to the alt-right. Much of his appeal was to the sorts of young men who suspected that the middle-class suburban life they have always known was missing something important. Spencer was never able to explain what was missing, but he was able to tap into this longing in order to make himself a cultural phenomenon for a brief time.

The superficiality of this new form of romanticism is what gives it the coffee house radicalism vibe. By any reasonable standard, Richard Spencer lived a boring life, even when he was at his peak fame. Other than a few publicity stunts, he spent his days drinking and playing on the internet. The next generation of online romantics does even less living in the romantic sense. Woods and Fuentes, for example, are teetotalers who primarily exist as avatars online.

Even so, there does seem to be a change among the young right-wing with regards to their view of what constitutes a good life. Read the comments to that Fuentes video and they are more slobbering than normal. The new counterculture forming up is on the right and it is exclusively male. Having been raised online, they want nothing to do with the mundane life that makes the physical world possible. They may not know what they want, but they do not want what is on offer.

Athenian Lessons

Posted on April 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about what is now considered a classic children’s film, a post about joining the Gaia cult via battery powered tools and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

There has always been a fascination in the West with ancient philosophy, especially the Greeks, as it is assumed Greeks gave us philosophy. Studying the Ancients used to be a central part of liberal education. You could not be a well-rounded, educated person without at least some exposure to Greek philosophy. That has died out in elite circles, but it continues in less elite circles. The internet is full of philosophers without portfolio talking about and teaching the Ancients.

The funny thing about this recent fascination with the Ancients is that it tends to ignore the part most relevant to our age, which is the Peloponnesian War. The internet is full of people interested in the pre-Socratics and, of course, legions who want to talk about Plato and Aristotle, but few hipsters are into what is arguably the most important war in human history, or at least Western history. Similarly, Thucydides is the one Ancient who seems to be on everyone’s ignore list.

One reason for that is despite the greatness of Athens, she was on the losing side in this great battle in the ancient world. Not only did Athens lose to Sparta, but she also lost her democracy for a period when the Spartans imposed an oligarchy. This was eventually overthrown, but the aftermath was the Golden age of Greek philosophy, which suggests maybe it was not Athenian democracy that gave us Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle but the failure of democracy that produced these men.

That is open to dispute, obviously, but given the times, it seems that the place to start, if one is hoping to find answers to the current crisis in the ancient world, is not the time after Athens lost the war, but the period before it. The heroic ideas that come from the Ancients are in the period prior to the Peloponnesian War, when the Greek world struggled to unite in order to defeat the Persians. This was the time of Thermopylae, Marathon, and the great sea battle at Salamis.

It was after the stunning defeat of the mighty Persians that Athens was at its peak politically and militarily. This is where to start when thinking about what went wrong leading to the defeat at the hands of Sparta. Athens was economically, culturally, and militarily stronger than Sparta, so what happened that eventually led to Athens losing the war to Sparta and her allies? More important, what does this have to do with the American empire in the current crisis?

The first thing to consider is Athenian democracy during the wars with Persia evolved into a wartime operating system. The focus of all internal debate was toward the goal of beating back the Persians. More important, the great success over Persia validated this way of organizing Athenian society and how it approached the world. Her identity was created during the victory over Persia. Put another way, the telos of the Athenian way of life was making war, not making peace.

It is why Athens wanted to continue the war with Persian after the Battle of Plataea, which was the final victory over the Persians. In the process of beating back the Persians, Athens had become a war machine. Sparta, on the other hand, wanted no part in what would be a foreign adventure. For the Spartans, the defeat of Persia changed nothing about how they engaged with the world or organized their society, so it was just another successful defense of their homeland.

Put another way, the lesson the Spartan rulers gained from the victory of Persia is that you should always be vigilant in defense of the homeland, by making sure to never get tangled up in a foreign adventure. Athens, in contrast, came away sure that their culture and political order were morally superior. The proof of this was the victory over the competing moral order of the time, what the Athenians saw as tyranny. The Athenian way of life was morally superior to the alternatives.

Now, this is a topic that could fill a library, but the very general point is that the reason Athens became so warlike after the defeat of Persia is that Athens was morally defined during the Persian war. While it did not think of itself as an empire or a war machine, it did come to assume it was the morally superior moral order. It beat back the Persians because it operated on a higher moral plane. This sense of moral superiority inevitably led to the aggressive behavior toward the Greek world.

There is a parallel for our age. The American empire has become a belligerent and reckless giant in geopolitics. Like Athens, the American empire projects power over the seas and through control of the financial system. Also, like Athens, the American empire is hell-bent on picking fights with the great land powers. Instead of Sparta it is Russia and now China. The American empire today looks a lot like what the ancient world faced with the Athenians before the Peloponnesian War.

To continue the comparison, we could look at the American victory in the Cold War as something like the Athenian defeat of Persia. From the perspective of both sides of the Cold War, the struggle was not an old-fashioned fight over resources and status, but a fight between two competing ideologies. Ideologies are about how men ought to organize their societies, so an ideological war is a war over competing moral systems and the winner can claim the moral high ground

The United States, after the Second World War was the defender of freedom, not simply the winner of the war. The eventual defeat of Soviet Communism was proof the American way of doing things was the only proper way of doing things. It is why the end of the Cold War did not result in a long-earned peace dividend, but rather one crusade after another to impose liberalism on the world. The so-called end of history was the start of the great liberal crusade to set the world right.

The other angle here is that the American empire, like Athens during the wars with Persia, evolved into a war machine during the Cold War. The great engine of war making that was created to beat the fascists quickly converted to a way of life seen necessary in defending against communism. For close to half a century, the American empire was a war society. Everything was organized for that purpose, so after the Cold War, that purpose needed a target.

Of course, you can probably start this parallel back further and compare the defeat of the fascists with the defeat of Persia. In this version, the Cold War is one part of what will be seen as the American Peloponnesian War. The first half was the Cold War and the second half, which will lead to a final end of this democratic empire, will come at the hands of the Russians or Chinese or both. It is not a perfect parallel, as historical parallels are never perfect.

If you prefer, you could drop the parallel to the Peloponnesian War and just focus on the fact that Athens evolved morally during its war with Persia. Similarly, the American empire has evolved in wars against what it has viewed as anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian organizing systems. The birth of the American imperial mindset was Gettysburg and for over a century since the Civil War, this imperial mindset has found one monster to slay after another.

In the end, the reason America is now seen as a global bully and troublemaker is it is what it evolved to do which is find wrongs to right. The America that evolved to become the global superpower, the final superpower, did not evolve to keep the peace, but to defeat enemies of its moral order. Like Athens after the defeat of the Persians, the American democracy needs an enemy to exist. As with Athens, the rest of the world now must figure out how to disarm a global belligerent.

The FUD-Packer’s Ball

Posted on April 24, 2024 by thezman

Throughout the Cold War years, it was a standard claim from the people called the left in America that the intelligence services manipulated domestic politics. This did not come from the mainstream left, but the fringier left-wing activists. For its part, the right in all its forms simply ignored the claims. Eventually, the mainstream right became the primary defenders of the intelligence agencies. They were viewed as the first line of defense in the Cold War and thus were lionized.

Of course, the claims about the intel agencies were not without some merit. In the late 1960’s a communist student publication called Ramparts reported that the National Student Association, which was a federation of student governments, was funded and controlled by the CIA. Later it was revealed by the Church Committee that many newspapers were cooperating with the CIA. Operation Mockingbird was one of the CIA programs used to manipulate the media.

The Church Committee is an interesting bit of history as it might be the last time Congress did anything useful in terms of oversight. The final report was massive and you can still access it on the Senate website. One reform that resulted from this event was the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has been thoroughly captured by the CIA. Members of this committee participated in the Russian collusion hoax, for example.

Putting that aside, the headline item at the time was that the intelligence agencies were spying on Americans, experimenting on Americans, and manipulating the media by placing assets at media companies. In the fullness of time, the important revelation was that this practice was thoroughly normalized in the agencies. The intel agencies saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. That means we can assume they continued doing it despite the revelations.

Again, the Russian collusion hoax is a good starting point. If the intel agencies were comfortable in trying to overturn the 2016 presidential election, then it is safe to assume this behavior is normalized inside these agencies. That returns us to the Church Committee and the scale of operations fifty years ago. In the analog days, the intel agencies were comfortable with subverting newspapers, so what sorts of things will they be comfortable doing in the digital age?

For example, would the intel agencies pay social media influencers? If they were paying student groups in the 1960’s how opposed would they be to paying social media characters to push certain themes? It is not as if anyone bothers to look into the background of bigfoot influencers. These characters seem to appear from nowhere, gain a big audience and join the ranks of influencers. Inserting intel agents into this space is a low-cost, high reward activity.

Look at someone like Michael Tracey, who is a bigfoot influencer on Twitter with over a quarter million followers. According to Twitter, about 15% of their users have more than one thousand followers. Only one percent of American users have more than three thousand followers. That means someone with a quarter million followers is in a ridiculously small club of users. This assumes the follower counts are accurate and the followers are not purchased from a bot farm.

Michael Tracey has no job and no obvious source of income. He lives in New York City, one of the most expensive places in America. He regularly travels the world to pester government officials at press gatherings. His Substack mostly gathers dust, in terms of readership, and he never posts monetized content on Twitter. Maybe he has a rabbi that underwrites his activity, which is not unusual, but maybe that rabbi is tied to one of the intel agencies, which would not be unusual either.

Note that Tracey spends most of time doing FUD-packing. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Right now, he is flaming the Trump world right now with claims that Trump is responsible for the war funding bills. It is a weird claim, but coming from a major account it does seep into the public consciousness. This is new for him, as he usually spends his time attacking progressives. In fact, he built his following on the right by FUD-packing the people on the left.

Now, Michael Tracey is probably on the level, but there is no way of knowing it, which is the point of this example. In a world where people are more likely to get their information from anonymous and unexamined characters on social media, how hard would it be for the intel agencies to manipulate this system? Build up a network of influential FUD-packers and you can control the unhappy portion of both political parties by saturating them with misery.

Here is something else to consider. These days, the intel agencies do not have to actually buy the FUD-packer. They can simply manipulate him though the various donations options most people have these days. When they like the FUD-packing from an influencer, they can send a bunch of small donations. They can also use their bot farms to boost that guy’s FUD-packing. In other words, a FUD-packer could be compromised without even knowing it.

The point of thinking about FUD-packing is that we live in an age where it is much easier for the intel agencies to do what they habitually were doing fifty years ago, so it is wise to assume it is as common now as it was back then. The digital information space is now a wilderness of mirrors manipulated by people who are drawn to the work because they love FUD-packing. As a result, our information space is a FUD-packers ball where nothing should be taken at face value.

Everyone Believes It

Posted on April 23, 2024 by thezman

The mostly online wars over what has come to be called “woke culture” obscures a reality that lies behind the fads and programs. That reality is an ideology that evolved in the last century and now defines the ruling class of America in a way that the people in the ruling class do not understand. It is just an assumed part of the culture they were selected into and conditioned to accept. They believe what they believe because everyone they know believes it.

That ideology begins with egalitarianism that has its roots in Protestantism and eventually gave birth to the progressive movement. The claim that all men are equal in the eyes of God became simply all men are equal once God was dropped from the thinking of the ruling elites. Since all men are obviously not equal, the blank slate evolved as a solution to this dilemma. The inequality we see is the result of society, so the great and the good have a duty to fix it.

What many now call the civil rights revolution is the most recent and damaging manifestation of this urge to level society. In his pamphlet on the landmark Supreme Court decision, Brown versus Board of Education, professor Jesse Merriam explained how this case revolutionized the law by transforming the Constitution from a rights based political system to a civil rights political system. What is now called antiracism is actually the point of our political order.

This interview with Merriam is interesting for a number of reasons. One is the exchange he had with the interviewer over the case of an Alabama eatery that had separate seating for whites and blacks. The interviewer tries hard to get Merriam to say the restaurant should be allowed to set its own policies, even if these policies violate what is, in reality, the ruling dogma of this age. It is a long game of verbal chess as Merriam deftly avoids the trap set for him by the interviewer.

That exchange is a good example of the prevailing orthodoxy at work. The interviewer, most likely without thinking about it, tries to get the interviewee to say he would tolerate discrimination, which is the chief sin of this age. The interviewee, knowing this, carefully avoids stating this by refocusing the discussion on the legal dynamics behind the court case that arose from this situation. Imagine this going on in elite offices every day and you get a sense for how ideology rules our elites.

The case in question, Katzenbach v. McClung, is another good example. The restaurant did business only in Alabama so it should never have been subjected to the interstate commerce clause and therefore immune from the new civil rights provisions recently enshrined in federal law. The court acknowledged this, but then imagined a scenario in which the restaurant bought goods that at some point originated out of state, so therefore it was now subject to federal regulation.

What the court did was reason that since the primary evil against which the Constitution stands is discrimination, it is logically impossible for any part of the Constitution to stand against overcoming discrimination. Whatever “the words on the paper” say, as Barak Obama once put it, they can never be read to oppose what is now assumed to be the spirit and point of the document. Belief and righteous commitment to that belief are now the litmus test of the ruling class across all domains.

We are about to see the flipside of the civil right revolution in the federal case launched against the Sheetz store chain. The feds are quite open about the fact that they do not think the store is using race to discriminate. In fact, they are not even claiming the policy is leading to fewer black employees than what would happen without the policy against hiring convicts. They simply say it could happen, because of upstream discrimination in the criminal justice system and the economy.

This strikes normal people as madness, and it is madness, the madness that naturally arises from ideology. The ethical model of the world that arises from the belief that all men are equal must inevitably target reality as the ultimate obstacle to achieving the promised goal of the ideology. It is why ideologues always end up in a life and death struggle with the reality of the human condition. It is also why they usually kill a lot of people before reality finally defeats them.

It will not be long before the zombies that dominate the late-night comedy circuit begin to make jokes about Sheetz not hiring blacks. Jon Stewart is now practicing his funny faces in the mirror to go along with his new Sheetz material. This provides the social proof needed so that everyone in the managerial class will adopt this assertion as a part of their shared reality. No one will think of the lunacy at the heart of it because there is no benefit to questioning the belief.

This ties back to that exchange between Klingenstein and Merriam over the choice involving the Alabama restaurant. There was nothing but danger for Merriam in defending the ancient right of free association. For Klingenstein, there was nothing but accolades awaiting him for defending antiracism. The cult of antiracism that arose from egalitarianism selects for those who are loyal to the cause and weeds out those who question the logic of the cause or its underlying assumptions.

This is why we have a ruling class that seems to be at war with not just the culture and traditions of America but at war with reality itself. The American ruling elite has evolved to serve the needs of the civil rights revolution and what Professor Merriam calls the antiracist constitution. Happening as it has over generations, the people in it are unable to see that they are operating within an ideological framework. They believe what they believe because everyone they know believes it.

A View To The End

Posted on April 22, 2024 by thezman

Correction: Last week in this post I linked to something at Claremont and said they are financially backing the IM1776 project. I am told by the people at IM1776 that this is not the case and their operation is funded only by subscriptions. Claremont is merely helping them navigate the process of IRS approval as a non-profit. I apologize for the error and will have the researchers flogged.

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the state of basketball in America and how it relates to other things, a post about Wile E. Coyote sniffing around the house and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Since the failure of the Ukrainian offensive last summer, the question that remains unanswered is how does the war in Ukraine end? All wars end eventually, with most ending in a negotiated settlement. If the Ukrainians armed with everything NATO can supply are unable to push back the Russians, then their most logical next step is to find a solution at the negotiating table. The West should also be looking for a way out of what has become a quagmire for them.

To date, Ukraine has showed no signs of understanding their position in the war, instead demanding more weapons and the unconditional surrender of Russia. The West has also ruled out a negotiated settlement. Europe is still talking about finding new weapons to send to Ukraine and Washington just secured a new aid package. Ukraine has also passed a new mobilization bill with the aim of press-ganging what amounts to a new army while not demobilizing existing forces.

That is the first clue as to where things are heading. Various Ukrainian sources have made statements about the current state of the army. Military sources say the army is forty percent short of men. They need 100,000 new soldiers to fill the front lines and another 150,000 for reserves. Do a little math and that means they need an army of 625,000 to match the Russians and currently have 375,000. In other words, they are currently outnumbered by at least two-to-one.

The first thing to note here is that the Ukrainian government, Zelensky himself, has claimed to have mobilized one million men. This is explains this Washington Post story last month focusing on the 700,000 missing men. This works out to be about thirty thousand men per month, which lines up with Russian figures on the Ukrainian losses, both killed and severely wounded. It also explains why Western intelligence sources have said Ukraine could collapse this summer.

This would also explain the fanaticism with which the regime pushed to get the Ukraine spending package through Congress. The administration is now haunted by a much larger version of the Afghanistan debacle unfolding in Europe. Imagine millions of Ukrainian refugees flooding into Europe right around when Trump is doing a presidential debate from prison. The hope is that an influx of aid will hold off the inevitable for long enough to drag Biden’s carcass across the finish line.

The spending package itself is the typical boondoggle. Most of the money is going to friends of government to help them further rob the middle-class. Another ten billion will go to Ukraine to pay salaries and pensions. Much of it will be stolen. Another fifteen billion could pay for weapons, but the warehouses are empty, and the West lacks the things Ukraine needs. There are no air defense systems or artillery tubes sitting around waiting to be sent to Ukraine.

There is a bigger problem with sending aid to Ukraine. it appears the political situation inside the Ukraine military is becoming unstable. The Azov battalion, for example, has become increasingly insubordinate. An ultranationalist brigade made up of Right Sector volunteers had to be disbanded due to insubordination. Some elite units have chosen to surrender rather than fight. These are all signs of an army that is exhausted from two years of fighting a war of attrition.

Another clue as to where things are heading emerged recently when the Russian U.N. representative, Vasily Nebenzya, warned the West that not only would further military aid to Ukraine make no difference, but it would mean “the only peace discussion it would have was of Ukraine’s unconditional surrender.” Additionally, members of the Putin government have now made it clear that there will be no negotiations with Zelensky or Ukraine as long as Zelensky is president.

Up to this point, the Russians have been careful to keep the door open to sitting down with the Ukrainians to hammer out a deal. Their position in 2023 was that they would like to return to the deal worked out in Istanbul in 2022. That changed this winter to that deal being the starting point of a new potential deal. Now it is clear that there is no interest in dealing with Zelensky at all and that soon the Russians will abandon the idea of a negotiated settlement entirely.

These three data points now frame what can happen next. Washington is not interested in any deal with the Russians. The Russians have concluded they cannot deal directly with the Ukrainians and there may be no deal with the West. The rapidly deteriorating condition of the Ukrainian military means it will break in the next year but could also collapse at any time. In other words, the war is now a game of chicken in which the West just assumes the Russians will blink.

What this suggests is that inside Washington has evolved an absolutist point of view in which the only tolerable outcome is the absolute position. In the case of the Ukraine war, the only acceptable outcome is the total submission of Russia. All other scenarios are ruled out as intolerable. We saw this with the Ukraine spending bill. There was no room for negotiations. Attempts to negotiate resulted in greater demands until the Republicans folded and submitted to everything.

In other words, even as conditions in Ukraine deteriorate, it is unlikely the West will seek out a deal with the Russians. Instead, they will seek ways to drag out the inevitable, operating on the assumption that the Russians will eventually blink. This is an irrational position, as the Russians have no reason to change course. If anything, they have new motivations to find additional pressure points on the West. Based on recent statements, the Russians seem to understand this.

This may be a foreshadowing for what lies ahead for the West. The adoption of an absolutist position is a sign of fear. Instead of adapting to changing conditions, the leadership is becoming paranoid and delusional. There is a Hitler in the bunker vibe to what we are seeing in Washington. That means the end game in Ukraine may be a clue as to how things unfold for the American empire across a range of things. The end game of the empire is coming into focus.

Escape From Talos IV

Posted on April 18, 2024 by thezman

One of the underappreciated aspects of political discourse is that the person arguing for a particular theory or ideology starts with a set of assumptions. Often, the assumptions are part of the arguer’s conditioning to the point where he no longer thinks about them, so he never mentions them. Progressives, for example, now assume equality is a morally good thing and an obvious goal of policy. They never bother to mention this, as from their perspective, it is manifestly obvious.

The exceptions to glossing over the assumptions are always on what passes for the political right in America. You see it in the back and forth between Christopher Rufo and Curtis Yarvin in that IM1776 post. Early on in his reply to Yarvin, Rufo states, “My conviction is that there is a logical structure to human nature and, consequently, a structure of political order.” This is a familiar claim to those familiar with the natural rights argument popular in some circles.

The basic argument is that there is human nature, by which they mean things that are true and observable about all human beings. Therefore, there must be things that are universal and true about how human beings interact with one another. Therefore, if we tease these truths out about the human condition, we can fashion a political order that results in the least amount of friction between the citizens. The assumption is that the closer we are to our nature, the happier we will be.

Like most assumptions that form the basis of a political theory, this assumption about human nature is never examined. Are there objective, quantifiable behaviors that are universal to all humans? Obviously, this is true. All humans, for example, work together for food and safety. We do not have written records for the hunter-gatherer phase of human development, but what we have tells us that humans cooperated within kin groups to collect food and defend the group.

It seems obvious that there are not only physical properties of humans that are universal, but that there are behaviors that are universal. Of course, this is also true of canines or arachnids, but no one would make these observations the basis of a political theory or a moral framework. In other words, even at this level, there is an unexamined assumption that we can create a list of things you ought to do from the things we can observe about the general nature of humans.

Putting that aside for a second, think about the things that are true about canines that define domestic dogs as a species. While there is a collection of properties that define the domestic dog, no one would confuse a Doberman with a Poodle. Everyone can quickly understand the difference between a border collie and a similar looking mutt from the local shelter. Even though the herding dog has the physical properties of a domestic dog, it is different from the other dog breeds.

If the domestic dog world ever produces the dog equivalent of Thomas Aquinas, he will have to contend with the fact that the herding dogs will be scandalized by sheep wandering around unattended, while the hunting dogs will think this condition to be the best way to order dog society. Even though both groups share a common dog nature, they will have naturally different views on the sheep question. This is a silly idea, but you can probably see where it is going.

This gets to another assumption that you see in the Rufo response. He asks, “What is the telos of your political system?” The assumption he is making is that any political system and therefore any political theory must include as a foundation item an explanation for the purpose of human society. This is an unexamined assumption inherited from Christianity. Humans have a purpose so human society must have a purpose and this is a measure of any political system.

What science tells us about human nature does suggest that there is a purpose to all human societies. That purpose is to increase the odds of the individuals in that society making it to sexual maturity and reproducing. Cooperation is all about safety so that the young can one day reproduce and pass on their genes, the genes shared by the group, onto the next generation. The cause and purpose of human society is the preservation and propagation of our genetic material.

How that is done is not universal. Again, this is observationally true. Humans around the world have evolved different ways of organizing themselves to increase their safety and security, just as their physical form evolved to their environment. Africans do not have black skin for no reason. Just as the environment selected for certain physical features over others, it selected for different organizational behaviors. The telos was the same, but the implementation cannot be the same.

There is something else science can tell us about human nature. Once humans started to settle down and distinct groups started to cooperate with one another, the selection pressures changed. As Greg Cochran explained in The 10,000 Year Explosion, settled life rewards and punishes different human behaviors than pastoral life and especially hunter-gatherer life. That means the organizational behavior is not entirely learned, but a part of our genetic code that defines every human.

This is the logical defect of the natural rights argument. The fans of this make assumptions about nature that are counter to what we actually know about nature and what we know about nature argues against their universals. Therefore, the assumption upon which they rest their arguments are false. This leaves them with denying biology, replacing nature with the Christian idea of God, or arguing in favor the strict segregation of people based on race.

Note that the egalitarians face the same dilemma. Whether it is Marx or the new head of NPR, their assumptions about the natural equality of man run counter to what science tells us about human nature. The communist got around this by blaming economics for oppressing some and elevating others. Today’s woke crowd takes a much simpler route by defying biological reality. The transgender stuff is a way of denying biological reality by denying fundamental properties of humans beings.

Also note that natural rights arguments should be placed alongside things like Marxism, libertarianism, and anarchism. What all of these share, in addition to the denial of biological reality, is the egalitarian assumption. Lurking underneath all of these political systems is the assumption that all men are naturally equal. They also assume that something unnatural is the cause of the inequality. The point of their systems is to restore equality by restoring the “natural” order.

The final point to be made here is that all of the political theories of the last three hundred or so years suffer from the same defect. The theory always rests on assumptions that either go unexamined because they cannot be evaluated, or they go unexamined because the result would negate the theory. The last three centuries of Western thought has been a game of finding a suitable replacement for God as the telos of human society and the results have been as predicted.

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A Lesson In Managerial Imbecility

Posted on April 17, 2024 by thezman

It appears the end times have been avoided as Israel has been forced to take no for an answer and not escalate her war with Iran. The Iranians put on a show of force, apparently as part of a deal with Washington, as their answer to the Israeli attack on their consulate in Damascus. Israel has been making noises about “retaliation” but for now it appears they are not getting any support for it. At least for now, it seems the prospects for a regional war have ended.

On the surface this looks like a rare occurrence of realpolitik from Washington, as they used diplomatic channels to head off a major conflict. That or the hotheads who always want war were finally told no by the few remaining sober minded people left in the foreign policy establishment. Alternatively, it could simply be that Iran had other motivations in addition to avoiding war. In other words, dumb luck saved Washington from a catastrophe in the Middle East.

Evidence for the latter was on display during and after the attack. The first thing that was reported was an impressive number of drones put into the air from a variety of locations in Iran, northern Iraq, and Yemen. Israel had no trouble taking out these drones, but that is not the point. The point is Iran can fill the sky with cheap targets for the extremely expensive Israeli air defense system. Modern war is fought on the balance sheet and Iran can now fight on that front.

It was not just a drone attack. The Iranians launched a variety of cruise missiles mingled in with their drone swarms. This is a tactic the Russians used to deplete the Ukrainian air defense systems last year. They filled the sky with drones. This often overwhelmed the air defense systems, but also exposed the location of radars and launchers, which were targeted by missiles. The Iranians demonstrated the ability to coordinate this sort of attack, which is an ability they lacked to this point.

The third interesting bit from that attack was the use of liquid fueled ballistic missiles, which were able to penetrate Israel air defenses. These were the strikes that hit the airfield in the Israeli desert. To this point it was assumed the Iranians did not have the technology for this sort of missile. As far as anyone knew, they had solid fuel rockets, but now they seem to have taken the next step in rocketry. It also means their chemical industry has also made big strides.

The final item of interest is the accuracy of the attack. To this point it was assumed the Iranians did not have the ability to precisely target their missiles or guide them in flight, but it appears they now have the technology. Presumably, they now have access to GLONASS, which is the Russian GPS. It also means they have the ability to use this information in real time to adjust flight paths. The Russians most likely supplied this at some point over the last two years.

This is why the “dumb luck” option makes the most sense. The reason the Russians are willing to help the Iranians with this is the gross mismanagement of American foreign policy over the last decade or more. In the past, Russia and China avoided these sorts of technology transfers, in order to avoid sanctions. Now that the West has imposed every conceivable sanction on Russia, the Russia are free to act in ways that they never would have considered five years ago.

Of course, the fact that sanctions failed to dent the Russian economy has made the threat of sanctions into a barking chihuahua. The Chinese have been transferring technology to Russia, despite the threat of sanctions. The reason is they see how the Russians got around those sanctions. This also means the Chinese could be helping the Iranians with their missile program as well. Iran, after all, revolutionized the drone game with the Shahed 136, so have things to share too.

All of this is the result of mismanagement by Washington. The sanctions war on Russia was poorly conceived and executed, but the biggest mistake was not considering the downstream consequences. Iran now has the ability to make anti-ship missiles that the American navy cannot defeat. No one knows if they have taken this step, but now we know they can take that step. This would most likely not have been possible if not for the sanctions war on the world.

This incident between Iran and Israel is a good example of how the decline in aptitude accelerates in a managerial system. The selection pressure inside the foreign policy establishment has been in favor of conformity to orthodoxy over strategic thinking, which has resulted in an ecosystem in which people like Victoria Nuland rise to the highest reaches of the system. Like everyone else, she rose up the ranks due to her fidelity to established orthodoxy in spite of her incompetence.

You can be sure the collection of dullards and mediocrities that run the Biden administration are celebrating themselves for defusing this situation. Instead of recognizing what really happened, they come away thinking they are master chess players on the international stage. That is another thing about managerialism. Every failure is somehow turned into confirmation of their expertise. The result is a system packed to the gills with overly confident imbeciles.

The question that arises from this is when will these imbeciles run out of luck and do something from which they cannot be saved? The Soviets had the Afghan war debacle and then the Chernobyl meltdown. Taken together, these failures by their managerial class drained all trust from the system. Most likely it will take something similar to collapse American managerialism. People might want to look up the nearest nuclear power plant and make sure you are not downwind.

The End Is Nigh

Posted on April 16, 2024 by thezman

Since it became clear during the 2016 election cycle that Conservative Inc no longer had any influence on the Dirt People, there has been an effort to reconstitute a New Right that will fill the void left by the now Old Right. This being the mass media age, one part of that effort is to promote certain online personalities as spokesmen for a particular point of view. You see an example in this debate organized by a site called IM1776, which is “a magazine of cultural and sociopolitical analysis.”

It should be noted that IM1776 is the product of a not-for-profit called The Art & Literature Foundation, which appears to be the brainchild of an Italian guy named Mark Granza, who had his political awakening in 2016. You can read a lengthy interview of him in this English language Hungarian site. For the sake of clarity, IM1776 is financially supported by Claremont. It is always wise to know how someone pays his bills before assessing his political opinions.

That aside, what you see in this back and forth is the same specter that has haunted Western political thought since 1789. That is the specter of ideology. Both men are in their own way ideologues. They have an image of how society ought to be organized based on how they think men ought to act toward one another. While their ideal society is something of an end point, it is, in fact, the starting point for them. In other words, they begin with the end in mind.

For Curtis Yarvin, the end is a form of monarchy not because he thinks it is the best in the abstract sense of the best society, but that only through an absolute ruler can the things he likes about Western society be defended from the dark forces that seek to unsettle our cultural norms. Rufo, on the other hand, is a natural rights republican, who thinks the ideal society is based in individual rights. It is only through reaffirming our natural rights that we can restore the republic.

While there is a lot of overlap between what both see as the ideal society, they clearly have different visions for how to achieve it. Yarvin thinks we have to wait for the great man to emerge and topple the present order. Alternatively, the present orders collapses, and a great man emerges. Rufo thinks the way forward is to nibble away at the civil rights order by attacking it fruits. His current project is to hold the diversity hires in the academy to the alleged standards of the academy.

For most people this sounds logical. You start every project with the end in mind and you see that is the Yarvin – Rufo debate. In fact, that is the primary appeal of both Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin. They hold up this image of a possible future and if you like what you see, you support their program. This has been how political debate has been framed in the West since the French Revolution. You are presented with two images of the future and asked to pick one of them.

The problem with this, the reason that ideology must always fail, is that it never considers if the end is possible or even plausible. This is not because the ideologue is incapable of doubting the ideology. It is because ideology must always rest on the assumption that all societies are intentional societies. What we see is the product of human labor, therefore the goodness or badness of society reflects the goodness or badness of the people who made it.

Good people not only follow a certain code, but they must constitute the telos of the society of which they are a part. No ideology ever concludes that the ideologue must disengage with society, other than if it helps him engage with fellow ideologues in plotting to overthrow the present order. Ideology assumes you must be engage in the project of moving society toward the desired end. Otherwise, you are assumed to be working against those who are doing so.

To think that society is anything other than the fruit of human labor would be a nullification of ideology. If society is the product or random chance, for example, then what we ought to do to improve society is meaningless. It makes no difference what we think we ought to do, as the result is just a random walk. If what we see is the best we can muster from the material at hand, then the ideal, what we ought to seek, is actually a hindrance to creating a harmonious society.

As an aside, this explains the rejection of biological reality. The popularity of the trans business is one way of denying biological reality and the limits it must place on what is possible for human society. The New Right rejects biology as it undermines their claims about the nature of man. As soon as you accept biological reality, most arguments about how we ought to live become superstition. You are left with the question of what can we do with the material at hand.

Another thing you see with all of the participants in the New Right project is that none of them are looking forward in the sense that some novel vision of the future is leading them to question their own assumptions of the past. Their prize is something like what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida called hauntology. The New Right is sentimental for a promised future that never materialized. It is why they focus so much on the “wrong turns” of the past.

What all this leads to is the fact that we are seeing the end of ideology. It is easy to forget, but ideology is a relatively novel thing in the history of man. The Franks did not have a governing ideology. The Greeks were not ideologues. Rameses did not govern with a vision of the future in mind. For all of human history, how we ought to organize society was a practical question, not a moral one. Ideology is an invention of Western man, the weeds that grew out of the rubble of the Thirty Years War.

Taxes & Conservatism

Posted on April 15, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the classic comedy, Dr, Strangelove, in which I reveal that I am a humorless dullard, a post about how O. J. Simpson was framed by the Clintons and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.

Half a century ago, the run-up to Tax Day was a big party for the people we call conservatives, as it gave them an excuse to go out into the streets, banging their pots and pans about the unfairness of the tax code. Taxes were not only too high, but they were also far too complicated. Rarely said, but often implied, was the claim that a complex tax code allowed special interests to game the system and avoid taxes or bribe their favorite politicians to get special tax breaks.

You never hear this sort of talk now. Taxes were the bread-and-butter issue of so-called conservatives since Barry Goldwater, but no more. One reason for that is tax simplification was passed under Trump. For most Americans taxes are a few clicks on the computer and that is it. Business owners, rich people and the self-employed still have to go through the game of guessing what the IRS says they owe, but the typical suburban peasant is now free of this burden.

Interestingly, a central theme of so-called conservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s regarding taxes was that if people knew how much they really paid in taxes they would revolt against the welfare state. There were schemes back then to make taxes a quarterly affair, so everyone was always be aware of their tax burden. Instead, they went the other way and made taxes simpler, so that their voters no longer cared about the main issue for the so-called conservatives.

Of course, the main reason so-called conservatives have forgotten about the tax issue is they have done with it what they have done with so many other issues and that is embraced the position of the people they oppose. The fiscal conservative is like a guy wearing a denim leisure suit in Washington. It is so rare to hear anyone talk about the nation’s finances that when it happens it brings back memories of those halcyon days when the Gipper was shaking his fist at the Soviets.

This raises another truth about so-called conservatism. They were sure that if you starved the system of taxes, it would have to cut spending. Despite history saying otherwise, they were certain of it. Instead, they habituated their minds to ever growing deficits and an incomprehensible national debt. Per capita debt is about five times higher than under Reagan and about four times higher as a percentage of the GDP, so it is safe to say they were all wrong about this one.

There is a demographic aspect to this as well. When the baby boomers were in their prime working years, it was good politics to promise them lower taxes and greater returns from their investments. Now that they are retiring in droves, the tax ploy no longer works, so no one discusses it. Instead, it is good politics to create more money from thin air to pay for the entitlement programs. Like everything else about conservatism, taxes were nothing but a good marketing ploy.

This raises another tax-related issue. Tax collections are at record highs, but the deficit is also at all-time highs. The federal deficit in 2023 was $1.7 trillion. The rosiest of rosy scenarios says that federal budget deficits be $20 trillion over the next decade and federal debt held by the public will reach 116 percent of GDP. Given that these projections always turn out wrong, it is not hard to see why no one in Washington is talking about taxes or the state of the budget.

This is why so-called conservatism is headed to the dustbin of history. It was never really a conservative political movement, but more of a money laundering scheme masquerading as a political movement. The response to progressives promising to rob your neighbor and let you have a piece was so-called conservatives promising to rob the progressive and let you have a piece. Taken together we got a half century of systemic looting of their American economy.

For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.

Another legacy of the so-called conservatives with regards to tax policy is the sacralization of rich people. Part of their sales pitch for tax changes was the claim that our noble rich people were paying more than their fair share in taxes. This was always nonsense, but it convinced most white people that it is immoral to question the motives and behavior of the rich. One result is a perfidious and destructive ruling class that seems hellbent on pulling the roof down on all of us.

In the end, the disappearance of the tax issue from public debate is a good reminder that we are at the end of a long cycle. That means we are about to start on a new political cycle, so the past framing of things is of no use to us. The old ideas and arguments from the last century, things like tax fairness, need to be sent to the dustbin of history along with the people who championed them. In some future Tax Day, no one will have a reason to think of so-called conservatism.

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