Narrative Collapse

Posted on May 17, 2023 by thezman

The overused cliché about the truth being the first casualty of war is an overused cliché because it is so obviously true. Wars are the result of rulers on both sides seeing advantage in the suffering of their people. That means producing a story to explain to the people why they must sacrifice for the ruler. The war in the Ukraine is no exception, but it may be the first war to be turbocharged by the narrative industrial complex through the internet.

For several months, the usual suspects have been promoting a narrative framework with regards to a Ukrainian counter-offensive. Tens of billions of Western arms have been shipped to Ukraine, along with plane loads of cash. This has been done to great political fanfare in every Western capital. Slowly, the story evolved into the great spring offensive in which a newly formed Ukrainian army using Western super-weapons would smash through the Russian lines and send them fleeing.

The explanation for how this would work or why it should be attempted was never provided, but a good story is worth skipping over the details. Russia has about half a million men in Ukraine at the moment. They have air superiority, and they have a growing advantage in firepower. How a seventy-thousand-man attack force could smash through their lines was left to the imagination. That is where people like Edward Luttwak filled the void with serious sounding plans for the attack.

In the age of narrative, facts about firepower and troop strength are no match for a really good story. The story was so good, in fact, that last week the internet was full of rumors that the Ukrainians had launched a counterattack in Bakhmut, sending the Russians fleeing. The prophesies were true! It turned out that it was nothing more than a faint to try and evacuate Azov fighters trapped by Wagner forces, who continue to grind down the remaining forces in the city.

Eventually reality does prevail, and we may be entering a phase of the war in which reality slowly overcomes the current narratives. We are a month from summer and there is no sign of a counter-offensive. Zelensky has been on a tour of European capitals, demanding more weapons and money. He says they lack the weapons to conduct an offensive and his advisors are echoing his claims. Even Washington is starting to back off the spring counter-offensive narrative.

The reason for this is those facts on the ground. For close to a year the Russians have been launching drone and missile attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid. It was assumed that they were trying to turn off the lights, but in reality, they were exhausting the Ukrainian air defense system. They determined that Ukraine had a finite number of surface-to-air-missiles. The West had no replacements, so once that stock was exhausted, the air defense system would collapse.

This is where things are now. The Russians are now using their air force to attack high value targets in Ukraine. The Russian hit a large warehouse facility where Ukraine was stockpiling weapons. The resulting mushroom cloud revealed that it was a massive facility, perhaps holding depleted uranium shells supplied by Britain. The increase in gamma radiation seems to confirm it. Some reports claim half a billion dollars in weapons were destroyed in that one strike.

A few days ago, there was another missile strike on Kiev aimed at a high value target, this time a Patriot missile system. The West has supplied two of these to defend Zelensky from a decapitation strike. A Russian missile struck in or around the system, after it expended all of its missiles to defend itself. Even CNN had to concede that the video of the strike was real. Reliable reports say one launcher was destroyed, one launcher was severely damaged, and one launcher survived.

What we are seeing over the last month is both an increase in the use of the Russian air force over Ukraine and their greater success. The Russian are now hitting high value targets with increasing regularity. One theory for why there has been no Ukrainian offensive is the Russians keep blowing up their equipment. Some of the shiny new Western equipment has been turning up in Bakhmut, suggesting Ukraine has had no choice but to repurpose this material.

There is something else lurking over all of this. The West is out of ammo. All of the old Soviet era stockpiles have been depleted. The stockpiles of Western weapons have been run down as well. The thirty Patriot missiles Ukraine fired off the other night cost five million a copy. The waiting list for new ones is over a year. Just as Russia is getting better at destroying Ukrainian weapons, the supply is running low. It is not hard to see what will happen in the not-so-distant future.

Since the war started, there was a gap between what the narrative industrial complex was emitting and what was happening in reality. That gap was concealed by media perfidy and the glacial pace of the war of attrition. Those slow changes in the battlefield were easily obscured by the tsunami of storytelling in the media. We are now entering a phase where that gap cannot be concealed. We can see what is happening on the ground does not match the current narratives.

The expression “narrative collapse” is most often used with regards to a political scandal or a scandal with famous people. The story offered to explain things is slowly undermined by reality. At some point, even the creators of the narrative have to admit it is not reality. The release of the Durham report is a case in point. The Trump haters like Jonah Goldberg have had to finally admit they were lying. Their Russia collusion narrative had finally collapsed.

We are about to see something similar with the Ukraine war. We are now entering the narrative collapse phase. The sharps are already heading for the exits, while stupid people like David French wait for the signal. It will not happen overnight, but the process has begun and by the end of the year, the brooms will be out in the media, assigned to sweeping the whole thing under the rug. Like prior failed narratives, this one will be deposited in the memory hole.

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The Modern Mirsky

Posted on May 16, 2023 by thezman

In 1904, Prince Pyotr Mirsky was appointed Minister of the Interior by Tsar Nicholas II, after the previous Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, had been assassinated by Jewish revolutionaries. This was a volatile time in Tsarist Russia, as trust in the system was at a low. Liberal reformers wanted what they thought the West had in terms of political freedom. Revolutionaries were conducting terror campaigns in order to undermine the tsarist system.

For his part, Mirsky was both a reformer and loyal to the Tsarist system. In his role as Governor-General of Vilna, which is modern day Lithuania and Belarus, Mirsky implemented liberal reforms like granting political rights, ending the pogroms against the Jews, and allowing a degree of autonomy to ethnic minorities. In his role as Minister of the Interior, he granted freedom of the press, freedom of religion and increased the power and authority of local self-government.

Mirsky was not a reformer because he had dreams of creating a liberal paradise to replace tsarist Russia. He was a reformer because he worried that the lack of reform would result in more radicalism, like the sort that had claimed the life of his predecessor and the life of the Tsar’s grandfather. For Mirsky and his supporters within the system, liberal reform was a way to address some of the issues of the people, while also maintaining the legitimacy of the tsarist system.

Uncertain times always product men like Mirsky. He was not the only reformer around Tsar Nicholas before the revolution. There were others but all of them failed to arrest the process that eventually led to revolution. Reformers were around the King Louis XVI and among the aristocracy prior to the French Revolution. They failed for the same reason Mirsky failed. There were men who feared reform would go too far and there were those who feared reform would not go far enough.

This is what should come to mind while watching Elon Musk try to navigate his way through the current crisis. Musk is a reformer at heart. He bought Twitter because he thought it was drifting away from its essential purpose which is to allow for free and open debate about the issues of the day. His inhospitable takeover of the company was driven by a genuine concern for what is happening in the West. Like all reformers, Musk fears what could happen if current trends continue.

It may seem a bit odd to compare Musk to Mirsky or any of the other reformers who existed in revolutionary times. After all, Musk is the world’s richest man. In the managerial age, however, that only buys a seat at the table. The nine other men in the top-10 richest list are worth five times Musk combined. Apple has a hedge fund that is ten times the wealth of Musk. Blackrock controls trillions in assets and has unlimited access to the highest reaches of government.

While Musk may be the world’s richest man and the most famous of the plutocracy, he is just one voice among many. The managerial elite is thousands, and the managerial class is millions of people. This new class is analogous to the aristocratic classes that existed in 18th century France and 19th century Russia. The best Musk or any liberal reformer can do is influence the people in the system. This is what Musk is attempting with his mild reforms of Twitter.

In this illiberal age, Elon Musk has appointed himself to be the minister of speech on-line and is attempting to roll back the reactionary controls that were put in place by the ruling class over the last decade. While Twitter is not the internet of old, Musk has rolled back much of the censorship. He still bans certain accounts, mostly as a way to tell the reactionaries that his reforms will not go too far. Otherwise, he has had a light hand on the censorship of his platform.

This is where that old revolutionary vice shows its jaws. The side that fears the reforms will go too far has successfully organized an advertising boycott. State sanctioned pressure groups like Media Matters have organized other pressure groups to harass companies that were advertising on Twitter. Those companies dropped their ads, resulting in a fifty percent decline in ad revenue. Musk has been forced to hire a girl boss approved by the reactionaries to be his new CEO.

Meanwhile, the other jaw of the vice sees what is happening and assumes Musk will eventually be brought to heel. Open sites like Gab continue to flourish, building on the alternative platform model. Amusingly and a bit ironically, the hard-core censors are abandoning Twitter for the opposite reason. Mass media companies, no longer assured of artificial reach on Twitter, are also jumping ship. Musk is facing the same dilemma all reformers face when taking the middle position.

On January 22, 1905, soldiers of the Imperial Guard fired on demonstrators in Saint Petersburg as they marched towards the Winter Palace. Hundreds were killed and thousands were arrested in what came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Mirsky denied having any role in it, but he was blamed by his conservative opponents, as well as the radical opponents of his half-measures. Mirsky did the honorable thing and resigned from his office and retired from politics.

In the end, Mirsky was like all prior reformers in that he was both right and wrong about what was happening. He was correct that radicalism was spreading due to the inability of the system to address the issues of the times. He was wrong in thinking that the solutions to the problems of the system could be found in the system. Just as there was no saving King Louis XVI and the old order, there was no saving Tsar Nicholas II and the system that made him possible.

This is where liberal reformers like Musk find themselves. On the one hand, they are correct in fearing a rising tide of radicalism. He rightly sees that it is driven in part by the abuses of the ruling class, of which he is a part. The trouble is the system cannot withstand open debate. It cannot risk questioning the shibboleths that sustain the moral framework at the heart of the managerial system. In the end, reformers will be crushed by that old vice that has destroyed prior reformers.

We Deserve Better

Posted on May 15, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about my travel woes, a post about the ungovernable country and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The ancient Greeks had a rule at one time where anyone proposing a change in the current laws did so with a rope around his neck. He stood in front of the people with the noose around his neck and made his appeal. If the people adopted his idea, then he removed the rope and went on his way. If his idea was rejected, he was hanged using the noose that was around his neck. Needless to say, this reduced the demand for change to that which was obvious to the vast majority.

From time to time, as in a crisis, they would pass a rule with regards to whatever course of action they agreed upon to address the crisis. Anyone who questioned the agreed upon approach or offered up a change to it, was killed or banished. The point of these extraordinary measures in times of crisis was to prevent the minority from undermining the will of the majority and thus the agreed upon policy. Once the majority agreed upon a course of action, the time for debate ended.

While the idea of our current legislators offering amendments while wearing a noose is amusing, we should be able to see why the Greeks did this. In this age, all everyone talks about is change. The way to show your virtue to the rest of those desperate for acclaim and affirmation is to demand change. The managerial elite and their flunkies in the managerial class spend so much time producing new changes, none of the basic things are getting done.

This is because the spring of democracy is morality. In a democratic society, even if it is not actually democratic, the thing that motivates people is the desire to be seen as moral, which means on the side of the people. When moderns say they are on the right side of history, what they mean is they are on that leading edge of change that is carrying the people toward the goal of the general will. They are turning the wheel of progress toward the promised land.

We have no information to suggest the Greeks viewed it this way, but they clearly understood that those always demanding change were a menace. Even in a genuine democracy, someone has to be in charge so that things get done. That person or group of people could not function if they were constantly fielding criticism or adapting to new policies pushed through by the change artists. The noose was the way to limit this impulse and prevent the chaos we are experiencing today.

In this age, this would start with the Federal bench. The executive branch of government is now hobbled by judicial fiat. Trump could get nothing done because crazy judges kept inventing novel reasons to block him. Some of his stuff eventually made it through, but the courts ran out the clock on most of it. The same thing happens with governors. They are constantly blocked by judges who just make up reasons to block their policies.

A simple way to stop this is to institute a three strikes rule. A judge who is overturned three times is removed from the bench. In a short time, this would clear the court of most left-wing judges, who are overturned on a regular basis. What would remain is judges who adhere to the point of their role. Further, judges who are removed from the bench are barred from practicing or teaching law. While banishment would be the best option, removing them from the law is good enough.

A similar problem is in the legislatures. All across the country, deranged state legislators have crafted new gun laws. These laws will be struck down by the courts but create mayhem for years. These legislators cook up these laws knowing they will not pass muster with the courts. This is performative legislation. The point of it is to show the intended audience that the legislator is on the right side of history, mostly by tormenting the normal people who are the victims of these laws.

While hanging is the right course here, a less entertaining option is to impoverish the people who vote for laws that are overturned by the courts. For example, when the courts overturn the latest gun grabbing from the New York legislature, the people who voted for it have all of their assets confiscated. They are immediately barred from politics and practicing law. Instantly, the legislative calendars will be free to work on the practical things that are currently neglected.

These small, common-sense changes are not a panacea, but what they would do is reintroduce the idea of a limiting principle. The current civic religion starts with the assumption that anything is possible. If anything is possible, then your version of Utopia is possible, which means it should happen right now. After all, what could be the argument against having paradise right now? There has to be a way to anathematize that impulse and thus curtail this behavior.

Of course, this would require a ruling class that sees the danger. The Greeks were often blessed with an elite that knew society could tolerate only so much debate and so much criticism, so they found ways to limit it. Instead, the current ruling class celebrates the resulting chaos that comes from a culture of critique. They somehow think that paradise is a world where nothing is beyond the destructive forces that lie at the heart of this endless demand for change that animates our age.

Joseph de Maistre famously said, “Every country has the government it deserves”, but this is always misinterpreted to blame the people for bad government. This is the thinking of the mind poisoned by democracy. Joseph de Maistre was not a democrat, so it is incorrect to think he was blaming the people. Instead, he was laying the blame at the feet of the ruling class. The elite get the government they deserve and they take the people with them, even if the people deserve better.

Imagination Land

Posted on May 11, 2023 by thezman

One of the strange and unnoticed aspects of the modern age is how much time is spent debating imaginary things. In fact, most of our public debates are about things that may happen or could never possibly happen. The things that are actually happening get very little attention. In some cases, like the ongoing criminal operations of the Biden family, the only people discussing them are “conspiracy theorists”, a term that has been transformed to describe imaginary villains.

In fact, much of what passes for public debate is the shift from things that are real and observable in the present moment to things that do not exist. Crackpot libertarian congressman Thomas Massie spends most of his time warning about a highly unlikely problem with E-Verify, so that his voters do not notice the waves of migrant invaders filling up their cities and towns. He is not alone. Every politician is an illusionist now, making reality disappear behind a curtain of deceit.

What has happened to modern American society is a form of the Peter Pan syndrome, in that society prefers to live in a world of make believe, rather than face up to the tough choices that come with adulthood. Libertarian kooks would rather think about a world governed by the non-aggression principle than think about the problems that the current world is presenting to us. Ten thousand migrants a day cross the border, but libertarian guy is concerned about theoretical abuses of state power.

It is not just libertarian kooks who avoid reality. It is a system-wide phenomenon that now defines our public life. Trillions are being spent on climate change, which probably exists as a concept. We know the earth’s climate is always changing. As a real threat to humanity, however, it exists only in the imagination. Given the rampant fraud in the world of science, it is possible that everything about climate change is a lie, yet we are pretending that it is a real as a rose bush.

To fight climate change, governments are putting mandates on carmakers to force them to make electric cars. The people who produced this mandate have no idea if this makes any sense or is even possible. In fact, it is not possible. We do not have enough lithium, for example, to make the required batteries. Our power grid will have collapsed long before that is an issue. In fact, it is already happening. We are spending trillions on climate change while the power grid is failing.

Imagine a politician running on a platform of upgrading the power grid. He promises to improve reliability and toughen it against storms. Many of the lines will be put underground to improve aesthetics. This could never happen because his opponent would instead promise to use the money for “gender affirming care” or maybe combat racist road systems. She would win in a landslide because who cares about the power lines when imaginary problems need our attention?

Imagination land is so powerful, it even warps the mundane things. Here is a story about a sportsball coach who used salty language in public. It was rude and he apologized for it. In the world of real things, this would be enough, but in the world of imaginary things, he must be punished. Imaginary people were traumatized, maybe even physically harmed by his words. According to his boss, the imaginary people now have scars that cannot be seen, because they are not real.

Much has been made of the public apology in these matters. It is a weird ritual that never has the intended effect. The coach just got fined millions of dollars for harming imaginary people, despite his real groveling. What gets missed is these apologies are always directed at people who do not exist. In the material world, you apologize to a person who you can identify as a victim of your actions. In imagination land you apologize to imaginary people for imaginary crimes.

Last month, Douglas Mackey was found guilty in Federal court of violating the civil rights of people who do not exist. The government claimed that his tweets mocking Hillary Clinton voters in 2016 harmed these people. They produced no one claiming to have been harmed by these tweets. They did not establish that such a harm was even possible, but that did not matter. In imagination land, anything is possible. When anything is possible, you go to jail for imaginary crimes.

Another example of how imagination land now crowds out the world of reality is the Bud Light marketing fiasco. The people who cooked up the idea were sure that there are millions of crossdressers desperate for a beer that appeals to them, so they created a campaign around a crossdresser. The fact that in the real world there are more left-handed ginger midgets than men who wear dresses did not matter. In imagination land, the crossdresser is the future.

Everywhere you look in the modern age, the imaginary is crowding out the real, as if everyone is now terrified of reality. The media fills the zone with terrifying stories of disinformation campaigns and hate speech be imaginary actors, while ignoring the tsunami of lies that comes from the government. More time has been spent trying to pretend a brown guy is a white supremacist than looking into the very real problem of the Biden family taking bribes from foreign governments.

The usual suspects rush in at this point and claim it is all a plot by the “deep state” or some other catchphrase to get money and power. As ridiculous as this age has become, one has to leave open the possibility that we live in a simulation controlled by men living in a hollowed-out volcano. Alternatively, maybe Wells was right when he noted “It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.”

Generations of easy living, living outside the world “change, danger, and trouble” has turned us into Eloi. Our triumphs over the material problems of human existence have left us incapable of dealing with the reality of human existence. If we just wish hard enough, they will go away. If not, then we just fill our minds with the pleasing conflicts that exist only in imagination land. We are a society of helpless children determined to remain children regardless of the demands of reality.

Mob Morality

Posted on May 9, 2023 by thezman

A sportsball coach is in the news for having used a taboo word during an interview with some jock sniffers. The other jock sniffers are now demanding the coach be hurled into the void so they can get some piety points on Twitter. The coach, of course, has issued the groveling apology, which will make no difference. The people howling for blood are not interested in his apology. They want blood. These cancel campaigns are a form of human sacrifice to appease the mob.

The thing about these campaigns is they obscure something that no one bothers to ask and that is who decided that you cannot use certain words? The coach in this story was responding to a question about fans throwing rubber marital aids onto the floor during games at Xavier University. He jokingly referred to them as “Catholic fags” because it is a nominally Catholic college and the fans of their basketball team seem to be obsessed with rubber penises.

Now, the word “fag” has always been an expletive. As such it was always considered rude to use it in public, especially around women and children. Men, of course, tend to use rough language around one another, but it used to be the custom to avoid such language in public. Today we live in an age where men in dresses are allowed to chase children around the playground, so prohibitions against using rough language in public seem more than a bit ridiculous.

Obviously, that is not why the mob is after the coach. You see, he expressed something less than a positive opinion about people attracted to the same sex. The question that never gets asked is, who decided this? This taboo is not in the Christian Bible or in the Hebrew Bible, so this taboo is not from there. We did not have a vote on it, nor has anyone run for office promising to institute this taboo. What is the moral authority for demanding that we worship homosexuals?

The same question can be asked for most of the novel taboos. Racism used to mean a prejudice against someone for their race. Until the middle of the 20th century, no one cared about racism or used the word in normal conversation. Making judgments about people based on race, ethnicity, sex, class, education and so on is what humans naturally do when evaluating people. All of those, except for the last two, are now official taboos ruthlessly enforced by the worst people.

None of these modern taboos have a recognizable moral authority. Racism, which now means white people making informed decisions about nonwhites, is especially ridiculous, given that the enforcers are almost always white and living in white nationalist communities. The whiter the community, the more absurd and infantile their views on race, but the more certain they are about the alleged racism of their fellow whites living over the horizon.

What is going on here is a bit of moral base stealing. The people wagging their bony finger at the fag-bashing coach assume a moral authority and then proceed to stand on it while lecturing the rest of us. If you could sit down that jock-sniffing weirdo from CBS Sports to explain why he thinks what the coach said warrants him being hurled into the void, he would not be able to do it. All that he knows is he gets points for being at the front of the mob demanding the blood of the heretic.

This is why you see no one in the media that is willing or able to ask any of these people the rather obvious question about these things. Who decided that it is immoral to hold negative opinions about homosexuals? It has always been rude to say disparaging things about people when they are not around to defend themselves, but it has also been rude to pick your nose in public. Rude and immoral are not the same things, so who decided to make rudeness taboo?

The same question can be asked about all of our taboos. There is no moral authority that anyone would recognize. Jesus was fine with slavery, so it is unlikely that he would be upset about judging people by race or ethnicity. Jews call themselves the chosen people, which means the very definition of what it means to be a Jew rests on an assumed racial superiority over all other humans. If racism is the worst taboo, why are Jewish people allowed to practice their religion?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the guy who cooked up the term “homophobia” was psychologist named George Weinberg. He not only coined the term, but declared that it was immoral to be a homophobe. Who in the hell was this guy to think he could conjure a new moral code for the rest of us? That is what he did and lots of other self-important people joined in on it. Why did all the beautiful people suddenly decide that this weirdo is allowed to make up new rules?

Of course, we know the answer. The people in charge have cooked up these novel taboos because their heads are full of nutty ideas about humanity. They do not make any sense because the underlying ideology makes no sense. They never think about it very much because their time is filled with waging their bony fingers at the rest of us so they can get piety points online. It turns out that the moral authority for this stuff is just as mysterious to them as it is to the rest of us.

The reason moral authority for this stuff is a mystery is that the authority is the mindset of the mob. The fundamental morality underpinning democracy is that fifty percent plus one is what makes right. Win the mob, or convince yourself that you have won the mob, and suddenly you are on the side of angels. If the mob can be convinced you are a heretic, then the mob shows up at your door. The morality of the mob is as mysterious to the mob as it is to the rest of us.

Official Madness

Posted on May 8, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Amazon show Clarkson’s Farm, a post about the Republican brown plan and the Sunday podcast. I was on live with Patrick Casey last week and the replay is here. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to pay attention to the news, you remember the debate about the news media. One side, the conservatives, complained about the media bias against them. The other side, the liberals, dismissed the claim as something like a conspiracy theory. For its part, the media spent time trying to prove they were not biased at all. They would point to the one conservative story in the back pages as proof they were giving both sides equal treatment.

The funny part about that debate is everyone was right. The conservatives were right in that self-described conservatives outnumbered self-described liberals two-to-one, but the media was almost entirely liberal. The liberals were right in that it was not some sort of conspiracy to silence conservatives. The media simply reflected the opinions of the people who were in the media and politics. The media was being generous to conservatives, given that everyone they knew was a liberal.

Fast forward to the present and the media is insane. Right now, they are claiming a Mexican immigrant, who shot up a Texas mall, is a white supremacist. Here is the Washington Post version of this whopper. Here is Rolling Stone. Here is the Daily Bleat hyperventilating over it. Of course, the volunteer army of regime toadies is uncritically posting this on social media. The thing missing from all of these stories is a picture of the shooter, Mauricio Garcia.

Of course, by the time they get around to showing a picture of the shooter, someone will have doctored the photo to make him look like a German. The previous Texas spree killer, also a migrant from Mexico, was whitewashed so he could look the part, but the real photo was soon on the internet. The media did the same trick with the Uvalde, Texas shooter last year, then they edited their own news articles when the fraud was detected, but by that point it was too late.

Texas seems to be having a problem with migrants going on killing sprees and not just the mass shooting variety. Over the weekend a migrant drove into a group of migrants, killing eight and wounding ten. This does not get the same attention as the Texas mall shooter, because we are supposed to think it is perfectly normal for illegal immigrants to drive cars into pedestrians. Sadly, it is becoming normal as the country is being invaded by tens of millions of migrants right now.

The regime media telling us that brown people are now the face of white supremacy is just the next click of the ratchet in terms of media perfidy. Over the last year they told us the Russians bombed their own pipelines and the Azov battalion, festooned with Nazi iconography, are freedom fighters. Before that they told us the unvaccinated people cause vaccinated people to get Covid. Before that, they said Russians used mind control to alter the 2016 election results.

In other words, there is a pattern here. The lies from the regime have become more common, but also more outlandish. The crossdresser who shot up a Christian school was characterized as the victim. Imagine what it must be like to sit in a room with an editor who is explaining how the narrative position on the school shooter will be that the little kids she murdered are to be ignored, while the shooter is the victim. Imagine that being the new normal in the media because it is.

Lost in the mounting vulgarity is the question at the center of that old debate from forty years ago regarding media bias. Back then, people in the media could not see their own bias because from their perspective, there was no bias. Everyone they knew agreed that the media was playing it fair. If anything, the media was being too generous to those horrible conservatives. We are seeing the same thing about the grotesque dishonesty in the regime media today.

The reason the crew of eight people responsible for that Washington Post story are willing to post nonsense about the brown guy being a white supremacist is everyone they know thinks this is obviously true. When the FBI guy told them on the sly that the shooter was their primary bogeyman, they had no reason to question it. Normal people would have laughed themselves silly, but not Post writers. For them, it was confirmation of everything they know to be true.

Forty years ago, media bias was simply the result of media culture. What had been a working-class profession came to be dominated by credentialed professionals from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds. Media bias reflected the class of people who working in the media. The paranoia and penchant for wild conspiracies involving fictional bogeymen we are seeing in the regime media today also reflects the culture of the people in media. They really believe this stuff.

In fact, it reflects the managerial elite as a whole. These crackpot tales about Mexican white supremacists are not intended to sway the public. They do not care about the public, so they do not care about public opinion. They do care about opinion in the increasingly isolated elite circles. You can be sure that all of the flunkies, seat warmers and coat holders in Washington read that Post story and believed it. They believe because their bosses believe and everyone they know believes it.

That is probably the hardest thing for normal people to accept. Forty years ago, conservatives were sure they could talk their liberal friends in the media out of their obvious bias. Forty years on, normal people still think the media must know what they are doing is madness. They have to know it is fake. The truth is, they think these nutty conspiracy theories and outlandish whoppers are real. Our ruling class is as nuts as they appear to be, maybe even worse.

Gradually Then Suddenly

Posted on May 4, 2023 by thezman

There is a famous exchange in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises where over drinks one character asks another how he went bankrupt. The reply is “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Often this is misquoted as “a little at a time then all of a sudden” which sounds better than the original. Hemingway was famous for his economy of language, which did not always serve him well. Even so, it is probably Hemingway’s most famous line, even if most people do not know the source.

The main reason it is a famous line is it is true in the narrow sense of business, but also in the broader sense of life itself. Things do not suddenly fall apart all of a sudden for no reason at all. In fact, the expression “no reason at all” precedes all of the big lies because nothing happens for no reason at all. The big events in human history are the slow buildup of little things then all of a sudden, a lot of history seems to happen in a short period of time, to borrow another famous expression.

This is something to keep in mind while following this story about an FBI whistleblower’s claims regarding the Biden family. According to Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. James Comer, this whistleblower has presented to them documentation showing the FBI has evidence of a pay-for-play scheme run by the family of Joe Biden while he was Vice President. The allegation is that Biden sold his influence to a foreign entity in exchange for cash to the Biden family.

For starters, this is not a new claim, but coming from two politicians not known for rocking the boat changes the nature of the charges. Joe Biden has been dogged by corruption allegations for a long time. He is worth tens of millions despite never having had a job outside government. That and he bragged on the campaign trail about extorting personal favors from the Ukrainian government. He got a prosecutor fired by threatening to withhold an aid package.

Next week there will reportedly be a hearing at which the current head of the FBI will be asked pointed questions about the specific documents Grassley and Comer cite in their letter to the FBI. Most likely Christopher Wray will lie and stonewall at the hearing, refusing to acknowledge even his own existence as a way of telling Congress that he is above the law. This is one of those gradual things. Gradually, the bureaucracy refuses to acknowledge the authority of Congress.

Those paying attention know the FBI is America’s most corrupt organization. They tried to overturn the 2016 election by running an illegal surveillance operation on Trump, then engineered a year’s long coverup of it. Holding black mail material on Biden may actually be worse. That is the real story here. They also have Hunter’s laptop, which they tried to hide and still refuse to acknowledge. Why would they need all of this dirt on a sitting President?

This is one of those gradual events. In isolation, the FBI shenanigans during the Trump era could be written off as partisan zealots abusing their power, but when you add in this stuff you suddenly get a different picture. What emerges is something like a praetorian guard controlling the most important offices in the system through blackmail, extortion, and espionage. The question that should follow is who else are they blackmailing with secret material?

Another gradual moment is the great leaving alone the media is giving to this and the other whistleblowers who have revealed corruption in the FBI. If such revelations happened in the Trump years, the coverage would be wall-to-wall. We would know the name of the whistleblower, as the press would have made her a star. The reputation of the media is very poor, but most people still trust it. This sort of bias is what will eventually lead to the total collapse in trust.

A glimpse of what is coming can be seen in the Tucker Carlson drama. Fox News Channel has lost half their audience since they fired their most popular host, but the collapse is not just about Carlson. It is the final straw, the one break in trust that on top of many others is what finally does it for these former viewers. Gradually, then all of a sudden people realized that Fox News was a scam, run by grifters who privately mocked the people in their audience.

Of course, the Joe Biden story is itself an example of the gradually then suddenly phenomenon in our politics. For half a century he was nothing more than an affable dimwit who represented the interests of the credit card companies. Everyone in Washington knew Joe Biden was a stupid man, but he was likable and generally regarded as an honest man. Sure, he told outlandish lies about his life, but no one thought he was taking bribes.

As with everything else in the 1990’s, Joe Biden appears to have gone from affable dimwit who was mostly honest to a man who walked around Washington with a list of prices for the services he could offer. Those two grifters from the Ozarks set the ball in motion for everyone. If their corruption was allowed, then why not a little influence peddling in the Senate? If that is okay, then why not sell insider information in exchange for stock tips?

This is how we find ourselves with a corrupt buffoon in the Whitehouse, held hostage by a secret police relying on blackmail and extortion. All of those small steps here and there down the path of corruption eventually led to that all of a sudden moment on election night in 2020. Half a century ago when Joe Biden was in his prime, no serious person imagined him in the White House, unless he was on a visitors pass, but all of a sudden, he is president.

In the fullness of time, we will experience the great all of a sudden moment and the usual suspects will swear it was for no reason at all. In reality it will be the result of those many gradual changes that began with the decision by official Washington to invite the Devil into their world. After that, it was one small compromise here, another there, until there were no rules at all, just naked power. Then all of a sudden, no one had any reason to trust anything, and Hell followed after it.

Tucker Thoughts

Posted on May 3, 2023 by thezman

One of the interesting elements to the Tucker Carlson story is that no one knows why he was fired, but lots of people are sure they know why he was fired. The only thing from Fox so far has been a brief statement in which they announced his departure and thanked him for his service to the company. Carlson made a short video from his home studio telling his fans that everything is going to be fine. Otherwise, there is nothing solid on which to base a theory.

The best reason so far was the first reason. The timing suggested it had something to do with the lawsuit Fox was forced to settle with Dominion over their coverage of the election shenanigans. Facing a rigged trial, Fox agreed to pay Dominion an absurd amount of money for hurting their feelings and the feelings of the crazies who demand we believe Joe Biden is more popular than Jesus. Right after they made the deal, Tucker and Dan Bongino get fired.

Given the nastiness of the people who chant “election denier” it is perfectly reasonable to think they would demand a pound of flesh from Fox. Many of the crazies jumped on this idea because it made them feel like winners. On the other hand, the Murdoch clan may have decided that they were dragged into this mess by people like Carlson, so they were going to purge the ranks of these people. Again, the timing of this is what lends support to the claim Carlson was fired over the lawsuit.

This being the current year, it did not take long for new theories to emerge. One was that Rupert Murdoch was spooked by Tucker’s speech at Heritage. Reportedly, Rupert Murdoch freaks out when people mention God around him. Others said Carlson’s candor about the news media in the speech is what did the trick. The speech covered a lot of ground, so the people pushing this theory were spoiled for choice. The speech was the last straw for the Murdoch family.

A new theory has been dropped that suggests The Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky had Tucker fired. He supposedly had a call with the Murdoch clan just before they made the call on Tucker. The antiwar crowd has seized on this story, claiming that the Murdoch clan are either in bed with the dictator or they were pressured by the regime to get rid of their most prominent war critics. This does not explain the Bongino firing, but maybe that was unrelated.

The New York Times has now created a new theory. Someone at Fox News is leaking confidential company material to regime media. These are texts that were produced in discovery during the Dominion lawsuit. In one of the text, Carlson used the phrase “white men” in a positive way. According to the anti-white bigots at the New York Times, this was such an outlandish threat to “our democracy” the Murdoch clan had no choice but to expel this heretic from their company.

Amusingly, the people the Times is fond of libeling are perfectly willing to accept this as a valid theory for the firing of Tucker Carlson. Here is Keith Woods on Twitter signal boosting the theory. It is a great example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. If the Times placed this story next to a story denying human intelligence, the same people would point out all of the errors in the latter but accept without question all of the claims in the former, never noticing the contradiction.

The trouble with all of these theories is that they depend on the assumption that Carlson is something different behind the scenes. This is not a bad assumption since most entertainers are horrible people. They play a role on television that is designed to attract an audience. In real life, they are usually terrible people. In the case of Tucker, the crazies think he wears a white sheet in his free time, while his fans worry that maybe he does not wear a white sheet in his free time.

In reality, Carlson is pretty much what you see on television. If anything, his on-air persona is more biting and tough than he is in real life. Unlike most people in the media, he is a normal person in real life. He is rich as hell, but he likes the things normal men enjoy, like hobbies and time with his family. He is a rarity in conservative show business in that he actually lives a conservative life. It is highly unlikely that he says anything in private that is all that interesting.

What is really going on with these theories is that they provide an escape from facing the underlying reality to this story. That reality is the people at the top of American society not only all agree on the important things, but they all agree that you are the real problem. What defines people at the top of the managerial class is their disdain for normal people. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on members of the elite to conform to current fads.

Since Trump came down the escalator, the Murdoch family has been subjected to the worst sort of social pressure. Despite their great wealth, they still seek approval from their social class. The reason they fired Tucker and will most likely turn Fox News into a gay version of CNN is they simply grew tired of being pariahs. Maybe the lawsuit was the final straw or maybe it was an innocuous thing, but they finally decided they were tired of fighting and submitted to their mob.

This has been the story of the last eight years. Trump and his supporters among the Cloud People have been viewed as traitors. The antibodies of the ruling class have been at work isolating and then expelling them. The Murdoch clan feared expulsion more than submission, so they submitted. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, has been expelled. Soon, Trump and his followers will be expelled, and democracy will have finally been cured of this terrible disease.

The Narrative Industrial Complex

Posted on May 2, 2023 by thezman

One analysis of the Roman Empire says that it reached a point where the cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the benefits of empire. The investments required to maintain the complex social and political structures to maintain the empire continued to rise while the benefits slowly fell to zero. This is the general thesis presented by Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. Complex solutions eventually reach a point of diminishing marginal returns.

We may be seeing a similar issue with the Global America Empire. On the one hand, we have the massive amount of debt accumulation to maintain the global military presence required to maintain the empire. The official United States military budget exceeds the combined total of the other great powers. No one really knows what the actual cost of the military is, as so much of it is off budget. Of course, this allows many of the rulers to get rich in the process.

On the other hand. Enormous amounts of time and energy are invested in maintaining the rationale for the empire. Unlike the Roman empire, which was ruled by a small number of men, democratic empire must continue to provide energy to the spring of democracy, which is moral certainty. Rome conquered because it could, while America conquers because it has a moral duty. “Our democracy” requires an endless war against those who resist being crushed by “our democracy.”

What this means is that in addition to the trillions spent on weapons and armies, trillions are also spent on maintaining the moral framework. This cost is not strictly a government expense, but the system requires it, so corporations are as engaged in narrative maintenance as government entities. Companies embrace degenerate social fads, like crossdressing, because they support the system. They support the system because it is the system that makes them possible.

The most obvious example is the media. Thirty years ago, much of what a newspaper did, even the big broadsheets like the Washington Post and New York Times, was report on the mundane affairs of the world. They promoted left-wing causes on the editorial side, but the news side was the boring stuff of the news. Today, the entirety of the mass media is engaged in the support of narratives. These entities are staffed with content creators and storytellers.

Here is an example in the Washington Post. Three people were assigned the job of creating a story to explain the mass shooter phenomenon. The plot here is that crazy white people are irrationally paranoid about crime, so they are going shooty all of sudden, for no reason at all! You see, crime is just fine. In fact, under the patient rule of Dear Leader, crime is better now. The real problem is these heavily armed white people and their racism.

Of course, the mass shooter phenomenon is a narrative created by the same people now trying to explain it. The fact is, America is a big country. That means there are lots of potential crackpots, compared to a small country like Norway. When you look at the numbers on mass shootings, America is doing better than most. Norway, on the other hand, seems to have a problem. While “per capita” is a racist trope, it is the best way to understand crime data.

Enormous amounts of time and money are directed by the regime into gun grabbing and concealing the color of crime. The Mexican national who went on a killing spree in Texas had his picture whitened by the news media. This is a thing that started with the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman who did the world a favor and killed Trayvon Martin ten years ago. Every media company now has people whose sole job is to whitewash criminals this way.

The color of crime is just one tiny area of the narrative support system. The New York Times had a whole floor full of content creators pushing various aspects of the Russian collusion hoax during the Trump years. Thousands of people in the media are now used to push the Ukraine story. Think about the cost in time and money that is required to fake a Joe Biden press conference. The entire media complex is now employed in the creation and support of narratives.

Again, the media has always been run by regime toadies, but thirty years ago most of what they did was reporting. The bigshot columnists and editors were allowed to put their thumb on the scale in terms of what got promoted. The rest of the people produced mundane news accounts. What we see today is an industrial bullshit machine that exists only to crank out new narratives in support of the regime or new tales to promote existing regime narratives.

This is just one small part of the narrative industrial complex. Tens of thousands of people in government have been repurposed to the task. Corporations have whole floors of people dedicated to the job of pushing the latest thing. Hollywood is just another marketing arm of the regime. Of course, the big tech platforms have dedicated themselves to protecting and promoting regime narratives. More people engage in censoring the internet now than in maintaining it.

The Twitter experience offers some insight into the cost of this. When Musk took over, he fired waves of people. His rule was that if you wrote code, you stayed, but if not then you were gone unless you could explain yourself. He eventually fired eighty percent of the staff. The website was unaffected. The reason is those fired people were employed to police and promote the current narratives. They did nothing to keep the site running or make the business profitable.

What all of this suggests is that the cost of maintaining the rationale for the Global American Empire has reached the point of diminishing returns. Just as the Roman empire’s investment in complex systems to maintain itself reached the point of diminishing returns, the cost of the imperial bullshit system has reached that point and maybe blown way past it. The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.

The Odious Carbuncle Problem

Posted on May 1, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about American feudalism, a post about the NFL draft show and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Imagine someone trying to convince you to do something by arguing that this thing is in your financial interests. They give you a stock tip, for example. You check it out and decide to buy some of the stock. In the following weeks, the stock price collapses, and you lose money. Obviously, you will not be happy, but you are not going to assume the guy who gave you the stock tip wanted to harm you. Unless you bought the stock from him, you will assume he made the same error as you.

Now think about a different scenario in which someone convinces you to do something because it is the right thing to do. In other words, he is not appealing to your desire to make money, but your desire to be viewed as a good person. The deed in this case is donating to some cause. You check it out and donate, but soon learn that it is a fraud and the people involved are swindlers. The person who tricked you into giving money was also in on the scheme.

If we assume the money lost is equal in both cases, you are going to have much stronger feelings toward the second person than the first person. One reason is the assumed intent of the two people. The first guy was trying to help you but was wrong about his stock tip. The second person wanted to rob you. Even if the first guy was reckless in his behavior, he was not trying to harm you, but there is no doubt about the intent of the second guy.

More important, the first person appealed to your greed, while the second person appealed to your morality in order to trick you. We can accept some blame when we let our vices get the better of us, as in the stock tip scenario. You let the idea of free money cloud your judgement. When someone turns your virtue into a vice, by playing on your good intentions in order to harm you, it challenges the idea of right and wrong, which is far worse than simple theft.

This is what comes to mind reading this post in First Things. George Weigel is a well-known neocon and warmonger. The timing of the post is a bit odd, given that we are in the end phase of the war. The time for making the “moral case” for yet another war on the world was a year ago. It suggests the Kagan cult is planning to keep the war on Russia going long after the Ukraine portion is settled. Weigel has been dispatched to turn virtue into vice for the suckers of Conservative Inc.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, Weigel made the same “moral case” for launching a preemptive war on Iraq. It you read both posts together, it is as if he is working from a template. That is because he does work from a template. When you strip away the moral pretentions, Weigel is not much of a thinker. His act is to play on your Christian duty or maybe your patriotic morality. He is not trying to appeal to your reason with a well thought out argument.

Last year, Eric Sammons at Crisis Magazine dissected the Weigel style. “The Weigel Script includes: (1) a comparison to Nazi Germany; (2) turning foreign leaders into cartoon villains; (3) accepting at face value any and all U.S. intelligence that puts the proposed adversary in the worst light; (4) making non-falsifiable assertions about a dire future if the U.S. doesn’t intervene; and (5) ignoring any potential negative consequences of U.S. intervention.”

You see it in the First Things post. He even adds in the now famous meme associated with the neocons. “For no reason at all” Russia invaded Ukraine. In this case, he surely knows that what he is saying is a lie. Twenty years ago, when he was selling the death of Iraqi children as a cost worth paying to stoke his moral vanity, he could claim ignorance about the lies underneath the claims about Iraq. Lots of people assumed George Bush was sincere about the WMD business.

In the case of the Ukraine war, Weigel knows he is lying, and he probably knows that the readers know he is lying, but he lies anyway. You are not supposed to think about the facts, because it is your moral duty to oppose evil! As long as you accept his claims about Putin being yet another Hitler, the lies do not matter. Like the guy from the second example at the start of this post, Weigel is trying to turn your virtue into a vice, and he is doing it with knowledge of forethought.

The thing is, Weigel is not an exception. Conservative Inc. has always produced odious carbuncles who prey on the decency of normal people. Weigel is getting long in the tooth, so his act has been moved from the main stage. Guys like David French have taken up the mantle of moralizer for the cause. He now claims to be the keeper of the true conservative flame, while he writes about himself at the New York Times, the supposed enemy of conservatism.

All of this brings us to a question. Who is the real enemy? Is it the self-described leftist who maintains an alien moral code? Is it the alleged friend and ally who uses your moral code against you? The former thinks he is right and thinks you would be wise to agree with him. The latter knows you are right but uses that to trick you into going along with what is wrong. The former may support evil things like gender identity, but the latter seeks to make you evil.

What all of this gets to is that before conservatism and its neoconservative core are pushed into the dustbin of history, we need to think about how a new moral order resists this form of trickery. The trouble with conservatism is it never thought much about inoculating itself against these sorts of people and instead just accepted them as a feature, rather than a bug. Whatever replaces conservatism must prevent people like George Weigel from gaining a purchase.

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