Immigration Morality

Posted on December 4, 2024 by thezman

One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”

There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.

That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.

Imagine the government starts doing something about the snake problem, thus reducing the snake problem, but at the same time telling you that you need to stop complaining about the snakes. Since you see fewer snakes, you can go along with the program as it tracks with what you are seeing. Then the government starts dumping snakes in your yard while still calling you an ophiophobe. The scales fall from your eyes and the eyes of others, and you get a ophiophobic preference cascade.

It is far too soon to tell if Trump is serious about immigration, but it was the one thing he did well in his first term. Fighting the Republican Party, the courts and the administrative state, they still managed to reduce illegal crossings to a trickle. They also slowed up the legalization process and the visa process. Now that immigration has a bad odor about it, especially among the economic elites, he should be able to make some lasting changes to the system in his second term.

This tracks with the last crackdown on immigration a century ago. After immigrants started killing rich people, culminating in the Wall Street bombing, rich people suddenly had their own preference cascade experience. It turned out that romantic notions about immigration were no defense against bombs, so they started demanding reform to the immigration system and finally the end of immigration entirely. For most of the 20th century, America suffered little from immigration.

Another aspect is the morality of immigration. For a long time, the nation wreckers kept the debate within economics. Immigration in the general sense was good for the economy, thus it was assumed to be morally good. The sequence was to first sacralize the economy, defined in the interest of the ruling class, then declare things like open borders good for the economy. That meant only a bad person who hates the economy could oppose immigration.

This worked in the abstract until real issues that cannot be addressed economically brought the issue back into the domain of morality. Coeds being murdered by Mexican migrants, Hattians eating your pets and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings cannot be dismissed with economics. The Haitian cat-eaters were a great example of how some people benefit from immigration, while the rest suffer. It showed that immigration privatizes profit and socializes costs.

What we see happening is that immigration is becoming a moral issue. In addition to the cat eating stuff, the name calling has lost its punch. Suddenly, people not only started to realize that everyone else is tired of immigration, but they were also tired of being called Hitler by degenerates and deviants. Those old people waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at Trump rallies were the result of people suddenly free from the old moral constraints on the immigration issue.

The rich people are noticing. Elon Musk was doing the old civic nationalist stuff about legal versus illegal immigration in the summer, only to see his posts buried in negative comments about the morality of immigration. Trump has toned that stuff down as well, which means he no longer feels the need to bend the knee to the plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty. It will not be long before libertarians are writing about the damage done by Emma Lazarus.

In a larger context, this is just the start of a process that will have to reach back to the root causes of the immigration issue. For example, there are millions of able-bodied men in the social welfare system. There are millions of people in pointless cubicle jobs who could be in productive work. The social welfare state was not a solution poverty but a solution to upper-middle-class people feeling sad about poverty. The result is a vast warping of the economy, especially labor markets.

Instead of addressing this colossal mistake, the workaround was to both import millions of low-cost workers into America and export industries to low-cost countries through the fiction of “free trade” policies. De-industrialization and immigration share the same root cause, which is the bourgeoise progressive fantasies about the just society that took over the ruling classes in the last century. It is another reminder that ideology is just another word for morality.

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The Antidote

Posted on December 3, 2024 by thezman

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

While everyone lies, most people are honest. They think the truth matters, even if the truth is unwelcome. You want the doctor to tell you the truth about your health, not because it will have an impact on your health, but because it is your health, and you have a right to know the truth about it. This sense of entitlement with regards to the truth stems from the fact that all humans possess the tools to conceive of what with think is reality and therefore we are entitled to reality.

It is why most people struggle to accept that there are people who are not honest, so they do not struggle with the lie. In fact, they take pleasure in tricking people, even when the truth would serve their interest. Unlike the honest person, the Democratic Man sees truth telling as a weakness. He speaks the truth only when forced into it and seems to see it as a weakness. For him, the truth is bait to lure in the honest to trick them into something they would otherwise resist.

An example of this is in The Atlantic, a publication that has become the symbol of democratic mendacity. In less democratic times, it was a journal for the intellectual class of the WASP ruling elite. Now it is a vulgar tabloid used to insert falsehoods into the media ecosystem. This post from David Frum is a perfect example. Everything about it is a lie from the very first sentence. From there is a clever monument to the art of lying to trick the intended audience.

“For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics” is what someone once described as a lie so colossal that people assume there must be some truth to it because they cannot believe that anyone would lie so infamously. Bill Clinton fired the FBI Director, Bill Sessions, as soon as he came to power. He replaced the capable Sessions with the thoroughly incompetent Janet Reno.

The fact is every position in Washington is political. You cannot be in politics without being political, which means taking a side. David Frum surely knows this, but he likes lying and he has an agenda. One of the funny things about this type is they often start with a kernel of truth around which they wrap their lies. In this case, the kernel of truth is that the FBI helped the media drive off Nixon. The schemers are hoping a similar thing happens (again) once Trump takes office.

This is just one recent example. You can scan the regime media sites and find hundreds of examples on a daily basis. We live in a time when the only reasons to consume mass media are entertainment and to learn what is not true. People like David Frum make being funny on social media much easier. If you see an assertion of fact in the Wall Street Journal, then you know what is not true about that particular subject and can eliminate it from the set of possible truths.

The question, from a sociological and analytical perspective, is whether the system produces the mendacious or whether it simply elevates them. Since Grog sold Trog a bad wheel, lying has been a part of human society. Along with it we have evolved various ways to guard against it, both individually and collectively. Among European people, social rules evolved to sort people between the trusted and the untrustworthy, creating moral societies rather than tribal ones.

Therefore, if liars have always been an issue for human society, it means the proliferation of liars is a product of the current rules. We are becoming a low trust society either because we are conditioning each generation to prize mendacity over the truth or the system rewards the mendacious over the honest, thus flooding the public square with shameless liars. The lack of shame is a critical piece, as moral societies rely on shame to govern behavior.

The counter to this is someone like Tutus Oates. He was an English priest who fabricated a conspiracy to kill Charles II. This was the “Popish Plot” that made him quite famous and wealthy for a time. This was just one of his many lies and schemes that often had no obvious benefit to him. Like Hillary Clinton, he loved lying. Eventually, people caught onto his tricks, but again like Hillary Clinton, he used more tricks to escape the hangman’s noose and continue with his mendacity.

This perfect example of the modern pundit lived in the 17th century when democracy was limited to arguments among nobles after too many drinks. This was the restoration, a time when popular government had a very bad odor. Of course, one could argue that the flickers of democracy under Cromwell fertilized the ground where the seeds of mendacity had lied dormant. Still, in a decidedly undemocratic society a trickster like Oates was able to thrive for a little while.

None of this may seem to matter, but Western people evolved over thousands of generations to exist in high trust societies. Unlike the tribal people of sub-Saharan Africa who organize around the tribe or the people in the Middle East who organize around the clan, Europeans organize around a set of moral codes. The proliferation of liars who have undermined social trust are making Western societies unlivable. The next step is they become ungovernable.

What that means for the reform minded is that for reform to work, Western societies must become hostile to people like David Frum. Either they sink in status to the point where they are nothing more than a warning to others or they find life in a high trust society too terrifying, so they self-deport. In other words, the goal of reform must be elevating candor to the highest quality, as the necessary antidote to the mendacity that has come to dominate the modern West.

The Fever Break

Posted on December 2, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about college football and the war on tradition, a post about the bunker mentality in Washington. Due to holiday sloth there was not Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Joe Biden pardoned his crooked son Hunter, which surprised only the enemies of Donald Trump. Everyone else knew that the old man would not leave office without cleaning up the mess of his son. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he loves his kids, perhaps too much. At some level, you must respect his family loyalty. There is an old world gangsterism about his willingness to help his family loot the political system.

An interesting part of the pardon is that it is not just a pardon for specific crimes that have been alleged by the Department of Justice. It is a blanket pardon for all things he may have done since 2014. This does not cover state crimes like murder, but outside of something extreme like that, it means he has been given the sort of get out of jail free card reserved for important gangsters. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was given this type of deal so he would become a rat.

If the 2014 start date seems important, that is because it is when the Biden family started feeding at the Ukraine trough. This was when the State Department engineered the Maidan coup that toppled the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who refused to sign a deal with the EU. Once he was gone, the State Department helped put Petro Poroshenko in charge, who was followed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It is funny how so much has revolved around Ukraine for a decade.

That is what keeps many people in Washington up at night. Trump returning with a vengeance could mean him directing his people to investigate this long running scam called Project Ukraine. After all, it was his decision to question Ukraine that got him impeached, so Ukraine should be at the top of his vengeance list. That and the Ukrainians are desperate to cut a deal with Trump. There may be more Ukraine related pardons coming before January 20th.

That is what makes the timing of this interesting. Normally, the president leaving office signs the pardons on the way out the door or maybe over the Christmas holiday, in order to minimize attention. Bill Clinton pardoned the Jewish gangster Marc Rich on his last day in office. At the time, Rich was on the lamb hiding in Switzerland, but his wife was loading the Clinton family down with cash and prizes. Rich got rich as part of the looting of post-Soviet Russia, in case you are wondering.

As an aside, once word got out that Clinton had pardoned Marc Rich there was a hue and cry in Washington demanding that the incoming Republican administration investigate the matter. It was not just Republicans pretending to be outraged. All the beautiful people were playing along as well. Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to look into it, but she took the job seriously, so she was replaced with James Comey, who could find nothing wrong with it.

That aside, it would have made much more sense for Biden to have done this on the way out the door, so it suggests this is part of a process. Everyone involved in the very dirty dealings in Ukraine must remain silent or face the prospect of Hunter Biden talking without fear of prosecution. Given how the Biden family has operated over the years, it probably means the next six weeks will be a pardon auction for those who ever did business with the Biden family.

The hilarious part of this is how the people we call the left are having a collective meltdown over this news. Twitter/X is now full of angry denunciations from Trump haters about how this makes them look stupid. The people who serious thought Kamala Harris was a good choice are also very vexed. They see this as proof that their girl boss was undermined by a conspiracy of pale penis people. They are now determined to make sure this never happens again. That should be fun.

Official Washington sees the problem with this pardon. They have been running with the narrative that Trump is a say anything to win dictator who will then grow a small mustache as soon as he returns to Washington. That sort of self-righteous indignation does not work when your side is issuing blanket pardons to family members and potentially anyone with a fat wallet. It is hard to claim Trump is corrupt when Joe Biden is putting pardons up on eBay.

In a way, it is a fitting end point for this long moral panic that kicked off during the Obama administration and came crashing down in this election. The subtext to all of it was that the good guys, the people launching the pogroms and panics, were surrounded by an invisible army loyal to Old Scratch. This required any means necessary to reveal and then defeat this threat to our democracy. It turns out that the threat was in the mirror all along.

Not only has the “crying Trump” run its course, but the moral panic that has been the basis of it has also run its course. The public no longer believes any of it now and the people doing the point and shriek are running out of energy. It also means there is no more money to be had from monetizing these panics. The relatively muted response to the election is the result of exhaustion. The Hunter Biden pardon is the start of a great sweep up from a party that went on far too long.

Unification

Posted on November 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: I am taking the long weekend to get started on some projects, so no show today and no posting either. Instead, here is something from behind the green door that people suggested I post here at some point. That point is now. Please consider signing up for a green door account. Five bucks a month is a bargain.

Flipping around YouTube I saw some videos on what I assumed to be the latest abomination in the Star Trek franchise. Having grown up watching the re-runs of the original, I try not to think about what they did to it. Lots of men like me ended up in the STEM world because of science fiction. Not all of it was art. In fact, most of it was crap, but it made being smart cool and adventurous.

That was the real hook for the kids of my day. The original Star Trek was a pirate ship in space where the crew got to do cool stuff with technology. The crew were not just swashbucklers, but problem solvers who often had to use their wits to get out of a jam of their own making. More than a few trips were made to the emergency room because boys decided to replicate what Kirk did to defeat the Gorn.

Then I saw that the Drinker had a review or preview about whatever they were doing with Star Trek, so I gave it a listen. Turns out it is not a new film or series, but a short that is something of a farewell for William Shatner. In less than ten minutes it covers the life of the character he created for the series. There is no dialogue, just computer enhanced images and a soundtrack.

It is a poignant and beautiful farewell to the man who played the role, but also the characters and the series that made the franchise possible. It a short goodbye to a long career and the relationship with the fans. It is exceedingly rare for Hollywood to do anything with dignity and class these days, but this is as close as you get to an honorable death in the entertainment business.

It is ironic, in a way, that Shatner would go out with such class, given that he is an old school carny in many ways. He was known for a willingness to take any role that paid, no matter how ridiculous. His run as TJ Hooker in a television cop show was a long running joke because it was so silly. Shatner was an anything for a buck sort of guy, which often meant taking less than dignified jobs.

On the other hand, it is these sorts of carnies who tend to be the most grateful for and humble about their success. They treat their job as a profession. Michael Cain and Clint Eastwood are other examples. Their job, as they saw it, was to make entertainment product for paying customers. These are the types who avoid politics and just shut up and sing, so to speak.

Maybe that is why Shatner could be part of this poignant goodbye. He is 93 and his health is not good. This is the final role of his career, so he could put what he has left in the tank into it. How much he was able to do is unknown, but the mere fact that he was willing to do it speaks well of him. He respects the role he played, because he respects the audience that made his life possible.

As far as the film itself, it brought back many memories of sitting on the living room floor after school watching the crew of the Enterprise explore the world. It also reminded me of the wonderful scene in The Wrath of Khan where Spock dies and utters the famous line to his old friend Kirk, ““I have been – and always shall be – your friend.” In the theater when I saw it, you could hear a pin drop.

That was the beauty of the original series, something I came to appreciate as I got older, and that is it was a show about a group of men, adventuring through life, not as solo acts but as part of a brotherhood. If you are lucky as a man, you go on your journey with a group of mates, losing and adding some along the way. The ones you lose will be waiting for you on the other side. The ones you add will carry you there.

That is another lesson of the original series. In my life the people who have given me the business for liking the series have always turned out to be people wearing a red shirt, the people who could never get the previous paragraph. Life is for living, which means taking risks. What makes it sweet is doing so with your crew. A man lives and dies inside his *kóryos or he never lives at all.

Another thing that came to mind watching this short was that no one under the age of fifty will get any of it. If you are a millennial, the original series had been supplanted by the sterile nothingness of The Next Generation, which replaced the pirate-ship-in-space concept with the corporate division in space idea. Then came the HR department in space and then the remote field office in space.

More important, the concepts of brotherhood and the noble male life had pretty much disappeared from the culture. Even in my youth these ideas were being mocked by buddy comedies and the action hero. Mel Gibson was a lot of fun in Lethal Weapon, but by normal cultural standards, his character was a loser. The same was true for all the action heroes, who were solitary figures unable to be part of the Männerbund.

Therein lies some flickers of good news. At the AmRen conference I saw groups of young guys, which is not so common. Going to a conference to hear old men moan about the state of the world is not much of an adventure, but it is a start. There are groups like the Old Glory Club forming up for young guys to join. They may not have had these concepts fed to them as children, but the seeds are still there.

That may be why a relatively unsuccessful television series has cast such a long shadow, despite Hollywood trying to kill it. It is based on eternal truths about the human condition and the male role in life. No amount of cultural vandalism can plow under these truths to the point where they cannot grow again. Those who recall the old truths may be in their winter, but spring will come again.

Death By Technology

Posted on November 27, 2024 by thezman

Feeling a bit lazy, I decided to see what the world of sports entertainment was offering on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In a better age, the answer would have been nothing unless you lived in a city with an NBA or NHL team. They would play their games before the weekend and then take off for the holiday. In this age, the people who run the sports leagues think Christmas is the perfect time to make their mostly black employees perform for them and the rest of us.

A few minutes looking at the sports sites and it was clear it was going to be college basketball or nothing at all, always a good option. It has been so long since I have consumed college basketball, it was a bit confusing. The game that jumped out at me was Midway University versus Bellarmine. Midway is not located on a Pacific island, as the name would suggest. It is in Kentucky and originally called the Kentucky Female Orphan School. Now they play men’s basketball.

One of the things you quickly notice when scanning the college basketball schedule is that we have far too many colleges. Not to pick on the good folks at the Kentucky Female Orphan School, but what is the point? When it was actually a female orphan school, it made some sense. Taking care of female orphans is a good thing, but now it is a university handing out worthless credentials. We could easily shutter half of our colleges, and no one would notice.

That aside, the other thing that caught my eye is the array or weird platforms on which these games are now broadcast. The shift away from traditional television to the internet has led to a proliferation of sites. There was a tournament broadcast on something called FloSports, which sounds like a name created by the con men who run the sports nutrition rackets. It turns out that they specialize in low interest niche sports and the small-timers in major sports.

They charge $30 per month for their service, which seems like a big number for the content they are offering. Perhaps if you love F1 racing and you live in the United States, that is a bargain. They are sponsoring college basketball tournaments on the assumption that the fans of the teams involved will spend the money to watch a few games of their favorite team. It is a clever racket, but it also a form of kidnapping in that they are holding the content hostage.

This is something happening with all sports. The NFL is now posting games on Amazon Prime, thus forcing fans to subscribe to it for games, in addition to whatever they use for other television content. There is a network called Peacock that now has select college football games. If you are a fan of Notre Dame, you now must subscribe to the Peacock thing to see their games. It will not be long before much of the sports content is behind an array of paywalls.

This is a sign of decline. As these pay-per-view schemes proliferate, the ways around them proliferate just as fast. Getting the content from FloSports, for example, is simple if you know where to look. There are lots of overseas operators who are indifferent to the financial dreams of our entertainment schemers. With a VPN you can watch just about any sporting event on earth without paying a dime. In fact, you can get any content you like this way, even new release movies.

What you see forming up is what happened to the music rackets. By the 1980’s, the music industry was dependent on two bottlenecks. One was album sales where you paid for ten songs, even though you wanted just one song. The other was commercial radio where you could listen to that one song, but also hours of ads and live reads from drug-addled disc jockeys. The music rackets charged the crap out of the radio stations for use of their content.

Then the mp3 arrived and that was the end of the music rackets. Suddenly you could get that one song without buying an album. Not only that, but the song was also free, and you could easily make copies for your friends. The music industry fought this, but eventually they lost the fight. Now recorded music is just a marketing expense to promote live shows and sell other product. Bands now make more money selling t-shirts and caps than they make from recorded music.

This is what is happening to sports. People are willing to watch a game made twice as long by the insertion of advertising. They will pay a small fee to watch games with the same ads, but if they have choices. They will pay a higher fee for ad free content and lots of choices. They will not pay high fees for what amounts to a three-hour ad campaign with some sports content sprinkled into it. They will find other ways to see the games or simply stop watching.

The lesson of the mp3 is that you cannot beat technology. The music companies sued people for sharing music, but it had no impact on the process. The sports leagues can try the same thing with the pirate sites, but it will fail too. It is simply too easy to access these sites. What is even funnier about this is most of the pirate sites block the ads during the games. The leagues cannot even say to their advertisers that their ads are getting viewed by the pirate users.

There is a cost to this. Pop music has reached a nadir because the only way to make money is to generate Potemkin stars like Taylor Swift. The reason you never hear anyone talk about the content of a Taylor Swift song is because even her fans do not care about the content. It is simply a thing to be swept up in until she gets too fat to make it work and a new star is generated. The same is true for the butt wigglers who target the black music audience.

This may be why movies and television are terrible now. On the one hand, they need to make going to the theater appealing, which means massive computer-generated worlds that dazzle on the big screen. On the other hand, it means dealing with the reality that content best watched at home is easily pirated. That leaves little motivation to pay for quality writing and directing. Instead, the money goes to attention grabbing nonsense like race-swapping and girl bosses.

That paints a bleak picture for sports entertainment. A model built on the assumption that television revenues will continue to grow at double digit rates is not going to do well when the revenue stops growing entirely. Throw in the fact that owning a team is mostly about tax dodging and rent seeking and you see the problem. Like music in the 1980’s, the sports entertainment world is a massive bubble. Similarly, technology is the pin that will pop that bubble.

A Ship Without A Crew

Posted on November 26, 2024 by thezman

It appears the plan is to fill the time between now and when Donald Trump regains the White House with stories about starting a nuclear war with Russia. First, we got the NATO missiles strikes on Russia, then it was the Russian use of a mystery weapon that should terrify everyone. Instead, the response from NATO is a series of stories about doing even dumber things than the missile strikes. It is as if Western leaders are in a contest to see who can think of the dumbest idea possible.

So far this week we have stories leaking out from Europe that the Brits and French are talking about sending an “expeditionary force” to Ukraine. That was followed by comments from the head of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, suggesting NATO launch preemptive strikes on Russia. All of this is taking place in the looming shadow of a second Trump administration. The Europeans are carrying on as if Godzilla is approaching the continent.

Of course, all these ideas are being floated by people who would urinate themselves if faced with a physical confrontation. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron are ridiculous people who have landed in these positions due to the collapse of their respective political classes. The rest of the European political class is equally silly, but most lack the vanity of these two. Most are like German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seems to cherish being a middling mediocrity.

The question that is never asked is how did it come to this? Surely Britain has better men than Keir Starmer. The UK has a lot of problems, but it still has some of the best human capital on the planet. The same is true of France. This is a country that defined diplomacy in the West. There must be a deep well of talent in the country, despite generations of bad policy making. How in the world did these two feckless nitwits end up ruling these two once great nations?

Obviously, these two men did not arrive on the scene by chance. They were selected and groomed by the political system that rules their countries. They made the right friends, followed the right advice and most importantly, never asked the wrong questions about the current narrative. In many respects, these two men were selected purely on narrative grounds. They filled a role in the story better than the alternatives, so they got the job and here we are on the verge of war.

It is the machine that generates the narratives that makes it possible for so many mediocrities to bubble up to the surface of the system. For example, the crackpot idea of an expeditionary force was not dreamed up by Starmer or Macron. This has been floated by the best thinks tanks in the West. Here is a post from the Center for Strategic and International Studies talking up the expeditionary force. It was written by what the system calls an expert on the topic.

This idea is part of a larger narrative that assumes, like all managerial class narratives, that the world can be set right if the managerial elite simply has the will. That is the themes of this post in The Guardian by one of the UK’s top experts on the war in Ukraine and Russia in general. It is a completely insane post that has no bearing on objective reality, but that is not important. What is important is it tells guys like Starmer that the good guys have the will to make the narrative real.

That post is not written by the typical kook that fills the pages of The Guardian, but by a fellow calling himself James Nixey. He leads the Russia-Eurasia program at Chatham House, which is a prestigious think tank in the UK. In other words, he is a guy people like Starmer will call for advice on Russia. Note that Mr. Nixey is barely qualified to offer tour advice on Russia. His entire life has been about sitting in a room somewhere imagining what life is like outside that room.

This is a recurring theme in Western politics. From top to bottom it is people who are very good at playing along inside imagination land and even better at avoiding anything that resembles real life experience. Generations ago, the Prime Minister would have served in the military and maybe even seen war. Even the more effete politicians could rely on a class of men who understood how the world actually worked. Today such men are treated as skunks at a picnic.

In the fullness of time, the defining characteristic of managerialism will be its boiling off of the capable, independent men in favor or complaint mediocrities. Lacking genuine men of action, the compliant mediocrities search for consensus, which becomes their authority figure and their moral authority. It is why everything that comes from the think tanks and media reinforces the agreed upon positions. The most terrifying thing for a mediocre man is to stand alone against the consensus.

The narratives we keep seeing serve to make manifest the consensus and cast those within the consensus as the white hat in the drama. Much of what seems to drive these mediocre men of late-stage managerialism is moral affirmation. It is why they have all herded themselves off the Ukraine cliff. They care only for being seen at the sincerest believer in the prevailing narrative. For the political class, it means public policy is always a public act of piety.

If the crew of a ship all die at once, the ship does not immediately capsize. It will float around until it runs aground or succumbs to a big wave. On rare occasions it makes its way to land in one piece. That is the West right now. It is a ship bobbing around, crewed by mediocre men who are terrified at the thought of being in charge. Instead, they huddle together inside a consensus and ruthlessly enforce it. To continue the metaphor, they are below decks debating the need for a captain.

Two Minutes To Midnight

Posted on November 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about my various handyman-DIY projects, a post about magnificent short film about Star Trek called Unification and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, NATO began firing long range missiles into Russia and in response the Russians fired something entirely new at Ukraine. There is not much data on what it was and what it did, but the Russians claim it was their Oreshnik system, which is a type of intermediate-range missile. The Ukrainians, of course, claim it never happened and Western media is saying it was a ballistic missile. Whatever it was is serious enough to warrant an emergency NATO meeting this week.

From independent sources, the most likely answer is that the Russians demonstrated the first combat use of a hypersonic glide vehicle in this attack. The word “hypersonic” gets tossed around quite about by online “geopolitical analysts” because it is a cool sounding word that is often used in video games. There is nothing all that new about hypersonic missiles, as many long-range ballistic missiles reach or exceed Mach 5 as they descend toward their target.

In fact, there is nothing new about hypersonic glide vehicles. The Russians started working on this technology in the 1960’s. America also had a program testing this technology for weapons. Both sides of the Cold War figured out that traditional ballistic missiles were good enough for the job of terrifying the other side with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, so the technology never went into use. The cost of hypersonic vehicles was simply too high for the task.

There was another problem with hypersonic glide vehicles. Traveling through the atmosphere at those speeds made them impossible to hide. Satellites would be able to track them as soon as they were launched and ground radar would then also be able to track them, even if they have some maneuverability. A pretty good rule of air defense is that if it can be tracked it can be killed. At the minimum, the other side sees it coming and has time to get its own missiles in the air.

That is a bit of the arms race that has been forgotten. It was not just the race to have the most devastating warheads, but also a race to have the best detection systems and the best cloaking system. If the other side could not anticipate your launch or see it coming right away, you had an obvious advantage. This is why both sides eventually banned intermediate range missiles in Europe in 1987. The United States unilaterally withdrew from the treaty in 2019.

The intermediate range missile presents a big problem if your goal is to avoid wiping out mankind in a nuclear war. Because it can hit its target in less than thirty minutes, there is no way to respond, short of mag-dumping your ICBM’s. By the time the launch is detected, the missiles are closing in on the target. Missile defense in the nuclear scenario depends on hitting them in their boost phase or as they leave the atmosphere to prevent them from exploding over your territory.

It is unclear when the Russians resumed their intermediate missile program, but it was probably not long after the U.S. withdrew from the treaty. It is not all that clear when the Russians resumed working on hypersonic glide vehicles either. There is growing evidence that they have been collaborating with the Chinese on this project, because last year the Chinese demonstrated a hypersonic weapon. It combined a hypersonic glide vehicle and a fractional orbital bombardment system.

That last bit is another clue that the Chinese have been working with the Russians on this project, as the fractional orbital bombardment system is technology that dates to the Soviet Union. The Russians first developed this technology in the 1960s for its nuclear program. Unlike a ballistic missile, the FOBS only reaches low-earth orbit and can then deorbit over the target. This makes it very hard to track, because the warhead does not follow a predictable path.

When the Chinese demonstrated the combined use of FOBS and hypersonic glide vehicles, American military planners had a panic attack. General Milley famously compared it to Sputnik, by which he meant a moment when the West suddenly realized it had fallen behind the Soviets in space technology. Everyone dismissed his comments, because he is a notorious liar, but he may have been right. The possible use of this type of weapon by the Russians likely proves it.

The Russians have not said much about this system, other than stating that the West has no defense against it. The usual suspects are claiming that it is just an old intermediate missile system, and the Ukrainians say it was an ICBM. What we know is that minutes after it was launched, multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles slammed into targets in Ukraine at speeds above Mach 5. Some claim Mach 10, but that is probably an exaggeration, but Mach 5 is still very fast.

What this means is that the Russians, if sufficiently provoked, could remove any European city from the game board in a matter of minutes. There is no defense and not much of a warning to the target country. If France, for example, starts firing SCALP missiles into Russia, Paris could cease to exist within a few minutes of someone telling Macron that he better say his prayers. It is easy to see why the deployment of such a weapon is so terrifying to fans of human civilization.

Of course, it is why the treaty banning the development of such weapons was viewed as an important step in deescalating the Cold War. This technology puts the world on a hair trigger with no time to pause for communication with the other side. It is also why the neocons desperately wanted the U.S. to withdraw from the deal. John Bolton was instrumental is convincing American officials to pull out of the treaty. In 2018, politicians still thought listening to psychopaths was a good idea.

The path to this point is a familiar one. The neocons first invent a threat, in this case the threat was that China and Iran were developing intermediate range weapons. There was little evidence of this, but that never matters. This is then turned into a justification for the United States to do something stupid. Famously, the invasion of Iraq was based on the entirely false assertion that Iraq was building doomsday weapons. It turned out that they only had WW1 vintage chemical weapons.

For the next two months, the psychopaths are still in charge of Ukraine policy, so they will no doubt keep poking the bear. It is pretty clear they want the Russians to use nukes in Ukraine. They have been yapping about it since 2022. That means the NATO meeting this week will be about getting the Germans to start launching their Taurus missiles at Russia. The excuse will be that they need to call the Russian bluff, but the real reason is they want a reason to fire the nukes themselves.

It remains to be seen if Trump is up for the difficult task of deescalating the arms race with China and Russia. He fell for every trick Washington could muster the first time, even some tricks they invented just for him. He seems to be set on keeping the neocons out of his administration this time. Even so, he will inherent a world that is now infinitely more dangerous thanks to the reckless behavior of the Biden admin. Simply surviving the next term might be the best he can do.

Whopperville

Posted on November 21, 2024 by thezman

In his podcast on the Persian empire, Dan Carlin told a story from Herodotus about a Spartan Greek who found his way in the court of Cyrus the Great. In the story, the emperor made the point to the Greek visitor that the Persians would have little trouble subduing the Greeks because the Greeks were all liars. They lied to one another in their political debates, and they lie to one another in their economic dealings. A collection of liars could never band together and fight the Persians.

The story is certainly apocryphal, as Herodotus was fond of explaining history through fictional accounts. Carlin further dramatizes it in his telling, in order to emphasize the point Herodotus was making with the story. This fanciful tale gets across the point that lying was highly immoral in Persian society. So much so that lying could get you executed if you lied to the wrong person. In other words, a made-up story by a famous storyteller helps explain the honesty of the Persians.

In fairness to the Greeks, not all of them were liars. The Spartans, for example, were not as fanatical about truth telling as the Persians, but they also looked down about the perfidy of the Athenians. Most of the Greek city-states shared their disdain for lying to one degree or another, depending upon their embrace of democracy. The more they embraced the Athenian democratic culture, the more likely they were to have a casual relationship with the truth.

It is something familiar to us today. As the democratic mindset has settled upon us, the truth has been pushed to the edges of the public domain. Back in the bad old days when certain parts of the population were discouraged from voting, politicians were discouraged from lying. As we have become obsessed with making sure every voice is heard, politicians are now rewarded for perfidy. America is on the verge of becoming a nation of liars, just as Cyrus described the Greeks.

This is by design. The argument for democracy and the “free market” is that the magic of the marketplace will solve the perfidy problem. The expert who is always wrong, due to incompetence or discerption, will be revealed and ignored. The seller who rips off his customers will be found out and before long word will get around that he is a bad guy, and no one should buy from him. We no longer need a moral code in a democratized society, because the market will do the policing.

It turns out that this was a lie. For example, the drug makers lie about all sorts of things and never face any consequences. The miracle weight loss drug Ozempic may cause your heart to explode, but at least you will look good in the casket. Time after time we see the drug companies roll out miracle cures that are worse than the thing they seek to cure, but they suffer no loss of reputation. The people who needed to redefine the word “vaccine” are no redefining the word “healthy.”

It is not just that these companies are not held accountable, but that they continue to hold a prominent place in society. It is not that all their products are deadly or simply a fraud like the Covid vaccines. There are drugs that genuinely improve the health of people, but many of their products are a disaster. In some cases, like the Sackler family’s scheme to addict the world to opioids, the sole motivation behind the product is to harm the intended audience.

Consequence-free lying is most obvious in the public square. Here is a thread about a fellow calling himself Phillips P. OBrien. He is a professor of strategic studies at a Scottish university. He likes to go on about the war in Ukraine. He has been wrong about every aspect of the war, even some that no one thought were important to discuss, suggesting he is a man on a mission. That mission is to deceive, which may explain why he spells his own name wrong.

Of course, the news media is full of lies and there are never any consequences to the media organs for lying. We just went through an election in which the media consciously organized itself around the promotion of Kamala Harris. A major part of that campaign was to bullshit the public into thinking she was a wildly popular person to whom the nation was flocking. They lied and they knew they were lying, yet they will keep on lying about the next thing.

The election is a useful way to imagine the opposite. Imagine a world where lying was the worst offense to the general morality. So much so that people convicted of lying had to be held in special prisons, like we do with child molesters. It is the world of the ancient Persians where men swear oaths like, “If I am lying, I’m dying” in which the result of a lie would be death. The news coverage of the election alone would have been unimaginably different.

The question is why is it that everyone seems to be fine with America evolving into a massive lie machine? Most Americans do not realize it, for sure, but lots of people have noticed the collapse of honesty and integrity. Trump labeling the media “fake news” did not set off alarms. It became a joke and then was internalized. Sensible people know that if it is in the media, it is most likely false. The truth may remain hidden, but at least we know what option that is not the truth.

Perhaps it is self-correcting. In the last election, the Harris campaign spent a billion dollars telling one lie after another. The media added untold billions to the effort with their own gaslighting in her favor. The government and corporations chipped in billions of their own to the cause. It was the most expensive lie machine ever built and yet it failed to fool enough people to make a difference. Perhaps there is a limit to lying and we are reaching that limit.

That raises another question. If the people running the media, to use just one example, reach the point where they see a negative return on lying, how can they change course and stop lying? How do people get used to trusting the media after having been conditioned to not trust them? It may be that once a society heads down the road of democracy is ends up as a low-trust society and then dies. The Greeks never could shake their habit of lying to themselves.

This may be why people were always so terrified of democracy. They understood that as soon as you open everything up for debate, you open the door to the worst aspects of the human condition. That sets off a process from which there is no turning back until it is a war of all against all. Maybe that is the end for the great experiment in self-government we call America. In the end, we are all standing around telling whoppers to each other as the roof falls in on us.

Local Neglect

Posted on November 20, 2024 by thezman

This week, Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company Blackwater, posted a condemnation of the Venezuelan ruler on Twitter. Prince has connections to the inner circle of Donald Trump, so his opinions about such things could reflect Trump’s opinion or may influence Trump’s opinion. He also linked to this New York Times puff piece on Venezuelan “opposition leader” María Corina Machado, which paints her as the Margaret Thatcher of South America.

The quotes around the term “opposition leader” are because there is nothing authentic about María Corina Machado. Like Juan Guaidó, who preceded her as the official opposition leader, Machado is largely a product of the American foreign policy machinery, which produces these figures on demand. The United States intelligence community runs a complex program to select, filter and groom opposition candidates for just about every country on the globe.

That is not to say Machado is not a real Venezuelan, but that like most of these American made opposition leaders, she is more comfortable in an American faculty lounge than on the streets of Caracas. This was the problem with Juan Guaidó, who is now driving an Uber in Miami. The people who select and groom these people select and groom people who are compelling to them, rather than the target audience, which is why they tend not to do so well in their home country.

It speaks to the insularity of the American managerial elite, as well as to the poverty of human intelligence. They never think about why Nicolás Maduro remains popular, despite the conditions in the country. He may not have majority support, it is impossible to know, but he has a strong base of support. The same was true of Hugo Chavez, who preceded Maduro. The American elites just see a thug and assume everyone sees the same thing, so he must be illegitimate.

That is not to say Maduro is a good ruler. By objective measures, he is a terrible ruler, outside of his ability to survive American regime change efforts. Otherwise, his policies have been terrible, and they have helped plunge his country into economic collapse, resulting in a flood of people out of the country. It is a disgrace that the American government has not been able to do anything to address this problem. After all, this is the backyard of the American Empire.

Since President Monroe first articulated it in his State of the Union address, it has been the official policy of the United States to protect and safeguard the countries of the Western hemisphere. At first it was intended to defend them against the colonial powers of the Old World. In the 20th century, it evolved to include protecting the people of the New World from their own rulers. Controlling guys like Maduro used to be a primary mission of American foreign policy.

It is not as if America has not tried to regime change Venezuela. It just so happens that Maduro is better at being gangster than the gangsters in Washington. This gets to another problem with American foreign policy. In the old days, when the people making policy traced their family line to the Mayflower, dollar diplomacy and clever statecraft were used to manage these problems. These days, the people making policy can only think of using force to get their way.

That is where you see other problems turning up in South America. China just opened a massive new port in Peru, which will allow it to service the South American market and buy lots of new friends in the region. Chinese companies have acquired concessions for two of the five ports adjacent to the Panama Canal. China is investing billions into infrastructure projects in and around the canal. Of course, China and Brazil are partners in BRICS and the Belt and Road Initiative.

While The Lobby demands the Levant get all the attention of the American empire, the neocons demand Russia get all the attention and the China hawks demand Taiwan get all the attention, the backyard of the American Empire is ignored. This is in spite of the fact that the two major problems facing the United States have their source south of the Rio Grande. The flow of drugs and migrants into the country is entirely due to neglecting American duties in the hemisphere.

Donald Trump’s focus on immigration suggests he will make the Western Hemisphere a priority again, but it remains to be seen if the foreign policy establishment will go along with it or rethink its tactics. Thirty years of thuggery not working should cause some rethinking, but these are people who struggle to learn from failure. The tone of that tweet from Erik Prince is not encouraging. Perhaps it will take another failed regime change effort to change some minds.

What is happening in South America is a microcosm for what has been happening with the American Empire since the Cold War. Everything close to home is ignored in favor of distant ventures on the periphery of the empire. Policy makers in Washington think more about infrastructure in Ukraine than in the United States. The lack of a response to the hurricane in North Carolina is a great example. If that happened in Armenia, the empire would have swung into action immediately.

In the area of foreign policy, the empire has been doing what it has done with regards to domestic policy. The focus is always on what is furthest away and has the least impact on the citizens. Buckets of tears are shed over “refugees” entering illegally while the millions of Americans poisoned by drugs are ignored. Millions are spent on “securing the safety” of imaginary online communities rather than on the actual safety of the food supply or the physical health of the American people.

The same hollowing out of American culture and the physical homeland has been happening with foreign policy. Trillions are spent trying to change ancient cultures around the globe, while the problems in our backyard are neglected. The Panama Canal matters far more to Americans than Gaza, yet the former is neglected, while the latter is an obsession. As with domestic neglect, there will be a cost to ignoring our backyard in favor of the other side of the world.

The Last Zionist

Posted on November 19, 2024 by thezman

Lost in the excitement of Trump’s proposed cabinet appointment is the lack of neocons in the list of foreign policy names. There are plenty of pro-Israel people, no doubt suggested by the Israel Lobby. It is rather clear that Trump made a deal with The Lobby in exchange for their support in the general election. All his proposed foreign policy people are Iran hawks, except for Gabbard. Otherwise, it is looking like an Israel first foreign policy shop under Trump.

It is important to note that the neocons are not part of The Lobby. They may have a lot of things in common, but they are different gangs with different agendas. The neocons are not Zionists. In fact, they come out of the anti-Zionist intellectual sphere with roots in international communism. The neocons are happy to work with the Zionists and the Israel Lobby when it suits their interests and vice-versa. As we saw under Biden, they are also happy to work against the Zionists as well.

To some degree, Trump’s victory is due to the Biden administration making the strategic blunder of prioritizing Ukraine over Israel after October 7, 2023. Israel looked at that Hamas attack as the opportunity to settle issues dating back to the Six-Day War, when Israel controlled much of the land that the Zionist consider part of Greater Israel but was given up in order to make peace. Netanyahu also imagined a regional war, drawing in the United States to topple the Iranian regime.

Instead, the Biden admin worked to prevent a full-blown regional war, often choking off support to Israel, at least in the view of The Lobby. It turned out that the “arsenal of democracy” did not have enough arms for both Israel and Ukraine, so the neocons running the Biden administration chose to favor Ukraine. Further, The Lobby thought the Biden administration failed to handle the anti-Israel protests that broke out at elite college campuses after Israel launched war on Gaza.

The result was The Lobby backed Trump over Harris and Trump committed to prioritizing Israel over all else in his foreign policy. This is one reason the neocons are escalating in Ukraine and will continue to do so. They think it could tie down the Trump administration in Ukraine and prevent them from delivering on Iran. Again, there is no love lost between the neocons and The Lobby. Contrary to what some believe, these are not two faces of the same collective hive-mind.

This does not change the fact that the neocons are headed for the political wilderness come January. While legacy conservatism would welcome them back, the future of what we call the right is anti-neocon and increasingly anti-interventionalist. The neocons have slithered back to their home on the side we call the left, but they will run into the same problem they now find with the so-called right. The groups in that coalition have little interest in the neocon agenda.

Despite Trump’s commitment to the project, it is not all good news for Israel, or the vast support network called The Israel Lobby. The main problem is the political instability within Israel that could blow up before Trump takes office. Protests against Netanyahu are a regular feature in Israel. Netanyahu is slowly losing the judicial fight surrounding his many corruption probes. Then you have the hardliners in his coalition, who are gaining power as he struggles to maintain his position.

Making matters worse is the fact that it may no longer be possible to bully Iran with the threat of military strikes. The tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran revealed serious flaws in Iranian security, but it also revealed newfound military prowess by Iran. On the one hand, Iran’s missile and drone program is far more advanced than what had been assumed until this exchange. On the other hand, her air defense capabilities are also much better, largely due to Russian assistance.

Then you have the withering of support for Israel in America. The Lobby has roots going back to the middle of the last century, where it capitalized on certain events in the Second World War to build a vast network of support for Israel. Much of this rested on the sense that the Jews deserved special consideration due to what happened to them in the war. Demographic change and the actuarial tables are slowly eroding this base of support, both politically and morally.

Taken together, the ground is shifting underneath the feet of The Lobby, as the state of Israel succumbs to its own demographic revolution and the conditions in the Middle East change to reflect the reality of the multipolar world. The Lobby might not fear the sight of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf, but the Trump people certainly do, and they will have to adjust to this possibility. As with many other things, Trump may be a transitional figure regarding American Zionism.

Put another way, the Zionists may be about to follow the neocons into the political wilderness, despite having their guys in the White House. American Zionism, like neoconservatism, is a creature of the last century. It evolved for conditions that are slowly fading into the history books. Like so much of American politics, it has failed to adapt to the new reality. Just as the Biden administration was the last gasp of neoconservatism, Trump may be the last gasp for American Zionism.

That does not mean the end of Israel or The Lobby. Unlike neoconservatism, Zionism and Israel have a future. There is no interest in the “destruction of Israel’ within the Arab world or among its new friends in the multipolar order. Israel can maintain itself, even without the unlimited support of America. Zionism and The Lobby simply must adapt to the reality of the multipolar world and the changing role of the American empire as it slowly returns to being a normal country.

While Trump could turn out to be the last Zionist in the old school sense of it, he could also become the first Zionist in the new sense of it. On the other hand, if he fumbles the problem of Iran, he could simply be the last American Zionist. The images of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf would signal then end of public support for Israel and The Lobby. Either way, Donald Trump is most likely the last of the old school Zionist presidents and the last gasp of this version of The Lobby.

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