Strange Days

Posted on September 26, 2024 by thezman

A feature of this age is that we are regularly presented with unusual events and then presented with an official explanation that is stranger than the event itself or given no explanation at all for what happened. In fact, you could describe the Trump era as a series of unexplained phenomena that either come with no official explanation or one so ridiculous no one accepts it. Trump is like a modern-day wizard in that his mere existence creates unexplainable happenings.

In this age of mass communications, we are more likely to experience rare events, because those rare events get blasted around the internet by people looking to profit from them, so that is part of it. On the other hand, the same technology regularizes rarity, so rare events should be less frequent. Just as soon as people start to notice some bit of weirdness, the authorities can flood the information space with a plausible explanation, so it is not just a feature of mass media.

For example, this summer a young man managed to get on the roof of the only building near a Trump rally and take shots at Trump. He did this despite Trump allegedly having the best personal security available to an American. For some reason, none of these crack security guys thought it was a good idea to guard the roof. Not only that, but they were also in the building and somehow managed to not hear a man walking around on the metal roof above their heads.

Just that bit of the story is explainable as incompetence. We live in the age of increasing incompetence, especially with the managerial class. Then we learn that the shooter, who was killed on the scene, is the only young person on planet earth without an extensive internet profile. He also happens to be a kid from a tiny town in flyover country that was in a Black Rock ad. Now we learn that an off-duty ATF agent in a suit was there taking pics of the corpse.

Any one of those points are farfetched at face value, but the lack of any explanation from the government makes the whole thing a one in a billion event. At least it should be, but now we have another one to pair with it. Last week we got Ryan Routh crawling around Trump’s golf course with a rifle. How he got there and how he knew Trump would decide to get in a round of golf that day is a mystery. Like the first assassination attempt, this one makes no sense on the surface.

To date, no one has bothered to explain how this penniless kook managed to travel around the world supporting Ukraine. No one has explained how he got to Florida and how he acquired the rifle. He is a resident of Hawaii, so he would not be able to buy a gun in the lower forty-eight. Why did he drop off a box of ammo containing a written confession to an associate months prior? Who was funding this guy and how did he end up in the bushes outside Trump’s golf course?

No one knows and the government is not talking. The same people who cannot shut up about disinformation and misinformation are perfectly happy to let speculation run wild on these two bizarre events. It is possible they do not know. Maybe they are as stumped as everyone else. They could just say they are as baffled as everyone else, but instead they now claim that Iranian hit squads are roaming the country looking for their chance to take out Donald Trump.

To make the Iranian stuff fit in with the bizarreness of the two assassination attempts, the secret police posted this story in their media outlet claiming Trump is nuts to think the Iranians are out to get him. Then in another media outlet, the secret police say they warned Trump about the Iranian assassination attempts. The one thing we know is that everything in the media about the government is written by the government, so why do we have these two conflicting reports from the government?

The general weirdness of these stories and the even stranger handling of them by the regime is not the main topic of conversation because they are not unique. They are part of a general pattern that has become the new normal. We still have no plausible explanation for the pipe bomb story the FBI put out during the election integrity protests of January 6, 2021. All we know for sure is someone planted them while the local police looked on from their marked police vehicles.

In fairness, that is not the only thing we know about the events that day. We have also learned that the Justice Department has been stonewalling investigations into what actually happened on that day. We know this because Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified to it this week. In fact, he volunteered it and promised to keep stonewalling until after the election. The strangest thing about this admission is that no one seemed surprised.

You could probably write a book detailing the bizarre occurrences we have seen over the last ten years since Trump arrived. You would not have to offer an explanation or a conspiracy theory to any of them. Just provide the known facts and maybe a few blank pages for official explanations. That really is the remarkable bit about what has been happening since Trump came down the escalator. It is not the explosion of anomalies, but the silence from official sources.

What this suggests is that maybe there is no general conspiracy at work, but rather a breakdown of control at the top. The reason no one can explain how in the hell that kid got on the roof of that building in Pennsylvania is no one in the regime really knows for sure who is working which caper. In other words, it is not a desperate effort to maintain control by the people at the top, but a breakdown of their own internal control mechanisms leading to seemingly random rogue behavior.

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The Only Solution

Posted on September 25, 2024 by thezman

Yesterday the state of Missouri executed convicted murderer Marcellus Williams after a quarter century of legal wrangling. The case gained some attention because the defense managed to muddy the waters on the DNA evidence and therefore drag out the process long enough to get some of the principles to change their opinions on whether Williams did the crime. Of course, the real reason it gained attention was that the killer was black, and his victim was white.

The subtext to crime in current year America is that on the one hand, blacks commit crime due to living in a white supremacist society. On the other hand, when blacks commit crimes against whites, the whites must deserve it for perpetuating the white supremacist society that causes black crime. This is what makes up the social vengeance subculture at the heart of the social justice movement. In the end, it is all about getting revenge on white people.

The result of this or maybe the cause, it is not easy to know at this point, is that whites often appear to worship black people or at least want the world to think they hold blacks up as gods among men. The three dumbest members of the Supreme Court made sure the media knew they were opposed to the execution. As part of what we call the left in America, they need to let the rest of the hive know where they stand on every issue that involves race, especially when a black is involved.

Putting aside the racial stuff for a second, the case is a good example of the disfunction in modern America. The point of the death penalty is to exact revenge, on behalf of society, on the person who committed the crime. If it takes a quarter century to get that revenge and, in the process, the worst people are able to gnaw away at the justification for that revenge, then the point of the execution collapses. This is a basic function of human society, and we can no longer perform it.

The main argument against execution has always been that it is theoretically possible to convict an innocent man, so it is possible to execute an innocent man. This is why it takes decades in many cases to get to the vengeance part. Every conceivable question is addressed, even frivolous questions designed to stall the process. The point of the death penalty now is to make sure that there can be no possible chance that the person convicted of the crime is not guilty.

Even so, there are examples where there is some questions about the guilt of the person who was executed. Ironically, the best example is Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed for the killing of his three daughters in a house fire he was convicted of starting. Otherwise, the examples used for this argument are those who were eventually exonerated. Instead of proving the point about innocent men getting executed, it shows that it is close to impossible.

Obviously, this argument against the death penalty only comes into play when the person facing Old Sparky is black. The Cameron Todd Willingham case did not get the frumpy Supreme Court justices out in the streets to tell the world they would have granted a stay of execution. The media was not interested in his case. It is always cases like the one in Missouri that get the attention of the people who apparently think black people are gods who walk amongst us.

This Afro-philia that has become a feature of the culture might seem like bourgeois degeneracy, but it has had an impact on the death penalty. According to the anti-death penalty people, there are 2244 people on death row in America. This is a shockingly low number, given that we have over 20,000 homicides per year. Of those on death row, just 41% are black. Even more shocking, 42% are white. Amazingly, only 14% of death row inmates are classified as Hispanic.

What this tells us is we need to be executing many more black offenders, to not only get the current numbers in proportion to the well-known crime figures on murder, but to address the many years of discrimination against white murderers. Blacks commit far more murder in America than any other group and this has been true for generations, so they are grossly under-represented on death row. That under-representation is due to the general worship of Africans in the culture.

Afro-philia and Leukophobia not only warp the application of the death penalty in favor of blacks, but it also provides them with many more appeal options because the black offender draws more support. Black offenders spend more time, on average, waiting for their execution than white killers. The official explanation for this is black offenders have more complex cases, which is another way of saying they get far more legal help from people exceptionally good at undermining the system.

The Marcellus Williams case is a great example. He murdered Felicia Picus in her home during a robbery. He stabbed her over forty times with a kitchen clever, which means he hacked her to death. There was a mountain of physical evidence and witness testimony that pointed to Williams as the killer. The usual suspects swept in once he was convicted to trick people into questioning their own minds, in an effort to free another black killer from the justice he deserves.

Of course, the response is always the same. Blacks spent yesterday on Twitter bemoaning the racial inequity of the death penalty. Progressive whites joined in with their usual public acts of piety. Pointing this out results in the usual abracadabra words from the usual suspects. It is all so tiring and underscores the fact that there is no remedy to this other than peaceful separation. There is no solving the race issue because Afro-philia and Leukophobia are too powerful.

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The People They Desire

Posted on September 19, 2024 by thezman

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

In every organization of scale, and society as a whole, the focus of attention has shifted from things that are easily measured and understood in terms of practical impact, to things that are not quantifiable. At the same time, it is increasingly assumed and asserted that these intangibles are more important than the tangibles. The practical impact of inflation on the household budget is not important, but whether a political candidate can show they share your values is monumentally important.

You can see this change in how Harris and Trump present themselves. Trump has rattled off a list of things he says he will do if elected, like eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, which he says will boost the middle-class. These are claims that rest on the agreed upon math of economics. Harris, on the other hand, talks about her plan in soft, intangible terms. What matters to her, and what she thinks matters to you, is that she shares your values as a middle-class person.

Notice that no one ever tries to explain exactly what they mean by “share your values” or describe the actual values. Is it even possible to share the values of another person, since values are subjective? This sort of therapeutic language is deliberately vague, as it is entirely emotive. When someone says she shares your values, she is saying you are on the side of good and she is on the side of good. There is nothing more being communicated with those words.

This shift from the objective to the subjective goes beyond how the political candidates present themselves to the public. Increasingly, people and events are viewed not in practical terms but in the context of an evolving set of normative standards that have no clear truth value. What is “wellness” and why do we care? Ask ten people and you get ten answers to those questions. Wellness is a thing we believe exists and it is either good or not good and good is what we should want.

Another example is the reaction to the Israeli terror attack on Lebanon. Blowing up random people is supposed to demoralize Hezbollah. This is a claim that has been repeated, even by Israel haters. Why would anyone think this and so what if it gives some Hezbollah guys the blues for a few days? What is supposed to happen as a result of this case of the sads? Not only does no one know, no one asks. The practical issue is no longer of interest. It is all about the psychological.

The Ukrainians launched an attack on the Kursk region of Russia last month and according to everyone involved, the main purpose was to “psychologically impact Russian civilians” and embarrass Putin. Again, why would anyone think such a result was likely or would matter? Did they think Putin would delete his Twitter account and call off the war, because he got owned on the internet? The answer must be yes, as this has been a theme in the West since the war started.

What we are seeing is an orientalization of the culture. Saving face and losing face are things that we associate with East Asian societies. An important person is found to have failed in his duties, so in order to avoid losing face and shaming his family and associates, he kills himself in a ritualized fashion. His honorable choice in the end absolves him and his associates of his dishonorable behavior. This means behavior is controlled within this cultural construct.

In the West, this shame/lack of shame concept has been embedded into the binary politics of progressivism. Someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, is terrible at all of the practical things related to politics, but she upholds the honor culture of progressive politics, so she is an honored elder of our politics. Trump brings shame to the democracy and refuses to let himself be killed, so he deserves assassination. The fact that he is good at politics and is right about most things is irrelevant.

One reason for this is the feminization of the ruling class. Relations between men are controlled by honor and duty. Relations between women are based in shame, so as women have taken over areas of the ruling class, the values have shifted from a foundation in honor and duty to one of shame. In a world run by people biologically tuned to care about looking good, how things look is paramount, so it is no surprise that a feminized ruling class now cares about saving face.

Probably the biggest fact, however, is the ruling class of the American empire has not had to worry about the duties of a ruling class for a long time. By the end of the Cold War, the domestic stuff was on autopilot. As long as the Fed controlled the money supply, recession and social unrest were not a concern. The only remaining concern was relations with Russia and once the Cold War ended, foreign affairs stopped being a game controlled by adults.

That last bit is the important part. Along with the feminization of the ruling class has come the infantilization of politics. It used to be said that “politics ain’t beanbag” but now it is closer to dodgeball. Instead of serious men making decisions with practical consequences, politics is now a playground for adult children. The reason our politics reflect the language and attitudes of the academy, is like the academy, the political class is an adult daycare center.

This is why the information space is full of assertions about soft concepts like the morale of guerilla fighters in Lebanon or the political class of Moscow. It is also why facts and charts have no impact on public attitudes. Increasingly, the sensibility of the general public reflects the sensibilities of the adult babies who parade across the screen, pointing and jeering at one another. People may not get the government they deserve, but the rulers get the people they desire.

The Drone Revolution

Posted on September 17, 2024 by thezman

The war in the Ukraine grinds on, despite claims that the Ukraine army is collapsing at various areas of the front. The fact is large industrial age armies do not break and run like armies of the past. This was true in both world wars when the German army was able to fight effectively in certain areas right up to the end. We are seeing the same with the Ukraine army, which maintains some offensive capacity, despite losing ground in many areas due to a lack of men and material.

There is a new element in the mix that changes how a large industrial army, like the Ukraine military, succumbs to a superior opponent. The drone has become a ubiquitous element of the battlefield, and it has not only changed how armies fight, but also how they retreat and get destroyed. We are seeing this in the Donetsk region, where the Ukrainians are struggling to find units to man fortified positions, but the Russians are struggling to overrun these positions.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

In the past, an attacking army would soften up the fortified position with artillery and air power and then use overwhelming numbers to overrun the enemy position. Defenders would likely fall back before the assault, understanding the math. Today, the defenders can attack the enemy as he is forming up for the attack and at every step he makes toward the defender. This radically increases the cost to the attacker, in men and material, without increasing the cost to the defender.

This is why the NATO counterattack on the Russians in 2023 failed. NATO doctrine is pre-drone, so it assumes the attacker can organize superior numbers to attack a narrow part of the defensive line, thus creating a gap. Reserves are then poured into the gap to break the line and force the defender into a chaotic retreat. This was the plan General Milley devised for Ukraine in 2023. Ukraine would pierce the Russian defenses with a big arrow offensive and the Russians would flee.

What happened is the Ukrainian attackers never got to the line, as drones attacked the advancing columns. The vehicles at the front of the column were hit with drones, which stalled the column. Then precision artillery strikes using geolocations from the drones attacked the rest of the column. The Ukrainians were forced off the roads into the mine fields where they were finally destroyed. The drone allowed the Russians to create a kill box before the Ukrainians could see the front.

The Russians learned from this, which is why their 2024 offensive has been moving at a snail’s place along many points on the front. They use their drones to find weak points on the front, send in small units to develop their attack close to the Ukraine positions, thus avoiding large accumulations of men and machines. This forces Ukraine to move in reserves, which the Russians attack as they are on the move. Then the Russians repeat this in some new area of the front.

This is why the Russian advance has been a creeping affair, rather than the big arrow offensives Western analysts still think is the norm. Even when the Russians open a sizable gap, they avoid pouring in large numbers of troops until they can clear the area and create their own fortifications to protect their men and machines from Ukrainian drone operators. The drone has not only changed the battlefield, but it has also changed the rear areas that support the frontline troops.

The main advantage of the drone is it is cheap, even cheaper than the legendary sniper team that could stall a battalion. Snipers are expensive. It takes a lot of skill and practice to become an effective sniper team. Drone operators, on the other hand, can be created from raw recruits in a short period of time. Most young people have grown up with the technology, so they quickly pick up the skills to effectively operate drones on the modern battlefield.

Of course, the drones themselves are cheap, relative to the other sorts of weapons we see on the modern battlefield. A modern anti-tank system like the Javelin costs about a quarter million dollars. This is the launcher and missiles. New missiles are about one hundred thousand per copy. Compared to a tank, which costs tens of millions, this is a cost-effective weapon, but compared to a drone, that costs ten thousand dollars, it is a wildly expensive white elephant.

The low cost of drones is what has kept the Ukrainians in the war. They can manufacture tens of thousands of these a month using readily available supplies they buy using some of the money they get from the West. They have been able to prevent a large-scale rapid collapse anywhere on the front by slowing down the formation of Russian troops and slowing down Russian advances after they create a gap in the lines or take over some key positions.

The next shoe to drop in the drone revolution is the use of drones in guerilla war and urban combat scenarios. We are getting a glimpse of this in Ukraine. The Russians are using fly-by-wire drones to attack Ukrainians inside buildings. They do this to avoid electronic warfare systems. Surveillance drones looking down on an urban accommodation will detect movement in a building and then drone units will get close enough to fly a drone through the window.

The next step in the evolution of urban combat drones is to cut the wire and program the drone to navigate its way to the target without the use of GPS. The Russians are starting to adapt cruise missile technology, which relies on terrain matching to navigate the missile to the target, to their drones. It will not be long before drones are able to operate without radio communications. Thus, the jamming technology currently used to defeat drones will become ineffective.

Military tech has a habit of finding its way to the streets, which is why police departments all over the West have tanks, armored personnel carriers, and elite tactical units to arrest hate-speakers. This means Western cities will be thick with drones monitoring the behavior of the citizens. It also means gangsters and rival political factions will be using FPV drones on one another. The next shot at Trump could very well be a drone attack and then the drone revolution comes home.

Jesus Hates Immigration

Posted on September 16, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the demographic collapse playing out in the workforce, a post about how the Tenet Media case looks like a political op and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Would Jesus hate the cat memes that have spread across the internet in response to the Haitian problem in Springfield Ohio? Some people think so. Progressive cranks have responded to this by claiming it is your Christian duty to welcome these people into your homes. Granted, these people are not sincere but people who claim to be Christians of some sort often agree with them. They claim Scripture requires the faithful to treat everyone equally, as God’s children.

This is the official position of the Catholic Church. The Pope is a big fan of open borders and mass immigration. It is not just for theological reasons. One argument is that the migrants from the global south are Catholics or could become Catholic. Protestant churches make similar claims. Immigration is seen by main stream churches as a solution to their empty pews. Some claim that the Haitian migrants have revitalized the churches in the Springfield Ohio area.

Of course, the people making these claims can find in Scripture what they need to support their position as the morally correct one. Ephesians says, “you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.” Leviticus says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”. Hebrews says you must show hospitality to strangers and modern Hebrews say you should never notice this.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The place to start is where Christianity starts. The “open borders Christians” are correct when they say these Haitians are God’s children, no different from the fifth-generation Irish guy or the guy who traces his line to the Mayflower. Fundamental to the Christian faith is that we are God’s creation and humans are made in God’s image. Our ability to understand God at all rests on the assumption that he possesses all the qualities we possess as human beings.

From this we can draw one obvious conclusion. We have reason and free will, thus God intended for us to use our reason and free will. God does not make mistakes, at least this is true for the New Testament God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not as confident, so maybe he was still prone to error. Regardless, God gave us, and only us, free will and reason, so it must have been on purpose and for a reason. The only possible reason is to use them.

The other thing that we know, if we are all God’s creation, is that all men are God’s property for the same reason man can have property. God owns himself, so God owns that which he has created. He gave man dominion over the earth and all of the living creatures on it, but he did not grant ownership. God may be an absentee landlord, as many have asserted, but he is still the landlord, which means he still owns what he created, including mankind.

This is the basis of Christian ethics. What we ought and ought not do is based on the idea that we are all God’s property. Theft is wrong because when you steal the labor of another man, you are harming God’s property. On the other hand, punishing someone for theft, is acting on God’s behalf to right the wrong done to God. It is why we think hunting for food is perfectly acceptable. Man needs to eat, and God gave us domain over the animals. Hunting for sport, however, is complicated.

The logic of Christianity tells us that Jesus would be appalled by what is happening in towns like Springfield Ohio. Rounding up Haitians and dumping them into unsuspecting towns around North America does nothing to reduce the damage done to God’s most precious property, mankind. In fact, it increases the damage. Worse yet, this damage is done for the benefit of the money changers responsible for it. What we see happening with immigration is a deliberate offense to the Christian God.

This is even more obvious when we remember that we have reason and free for the sole purpose of using it. If we wanted to help Haiti, there are ways we could improve the conditions on the island without harming cat owners in Ohio. We could take over the island, set up a local dictator tasked with distributing food and medicine. We could round up the Haitians and send them to Africa, where they have the minimum infrastructure needed to maintain an African population.

The point of all this is that Christian ethics is about reducing the damage to God’s property, which is primarily mankind, but also that which mankind has been granted dominion, the earth, and its inhabitants. Mankind has reason and free will in order to figure out the best way to act in order to minimize the damage to God’s property, so we are free to debate the issue. We must be free to debate the issue. Cherry picking lines from Scripture to shut down debate is therefore immoral.

More important, cherry-picking lines from Scripture so that you can claim a sense of compliance with the will of God, at the expense of God’s property, as in the damage done by immigration, violates the foundational logic of Christianity. If Jesus were here today, he would not only flip over the tables in the offices of the people responsible for unchecked immigration, but he would also whip the people waving around their Bibles in support of it. Jesus would hate them.

Narrative Doubt

Posted on September 12, 2024 by thezman

An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

The Last Debates

Posted on September 10, 2024 by thezman

The first and possibly last presidential debate of this cycle is scheduled for tonight in Philadelphia between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Given the result of the last Trump – Biden debate, this one should get a good audience. Despite the massive marketing campaign on her behalf, people know little about Harris. She has been a colored ornament on the Biden administration and the butt of jokes on the internet, but most people have no genuine sense of her.

That is the reason it could be the last debate of this cycle. Harris has a poor reputation as a public speaker. Her only real debate experience was in the 2020 Democratic primary and she was horrible. Despite having millions in tech money and a favorable media, she used the debate to alienate every constituency in the party and dropped out soon after it. Her recent CNN interview, which was heavily edited, suggests she has not gotten better over the last four years.

It is possible this may be the last presidential debate we see at all. It is assumed that debates are part of the show, but for most of the country’s history debates were not a part of our political process. The first general election debate in our history was the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Prior to that, there were a few debates between members of the Democratic party on specific issues like foreign policy, but those were a rarity.

After the Kennedy – Nixon debates, which were a great success in the sense that they captured the attention of the public, there were no more debates until 1976 when Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter three times. The logic behind this series of debates was that neither of the candidates were well known. Carter was the surprise winner of the Democratic nomination and Ford fell into the Oval Office after Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate coup against him.

Since then, we have had debates every cycle, but they stopped being debates in the normal sense, devolving into choregraphed media contests. The candidates come equipped with canned one-liners they practice before the event. They hope to use one of them to win headlines. The moderators do the same thing, usually in collaboration with the Democratic candidate. No one remembers the content of these things because there is no content to our debates. They are emotive gibberish.

This will become clear in the opening statements tonight. Harris will repeat the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to trigger good feelings for the target audience of her campaign. She will quickly chant the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to get these same people angry at Trump. In his unscripted way, Trump will attempt to do the same thing. Both candidates could be replaced with lights that flash green for good and red for bad.

If Harris is terrible again in this debate, then they most likely pull the plug on the rest of them, including the Vance – Walz debate. Trump would have no need for a rematch and Harris would have no reason to take another beating. It also may be why the whole general election debate concept ends this year. From the perspective of the regime, there is nothing to debate, so why have debates? It was clear over the last month that the regime was not excited about having these things.

The debate concept we have now was a response to the chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which was created by the ruling class, and then the Watergate coup to remove Richard Nixon. The presidential debates were designed to turn the page on the prior decades of cultural chaos and convince people that the political class had regained its mental stability. The ruling class had settled its difference in the wake of the civil rights revolution and was ready to discuss the new consensus.

Prior to the Carter – Ford debate, there was nothing to debate, at least nothing that required public attention. The legal and cultural battles that often played out on the streets in the 60’s and 70’s reflected the debate within the ruling class. Those first presidential debates reflected the new consensus. Once the issues had been settled, then the public could be allowed to see the results. The result was the presidential debate format within the new moral order.

Something similar to the revolutions from above in the middle of the last century has played out in the post-Cold War period. The triumphalism of the Clinton and Bush years gave way to the collapse in confidence of the Obama years. The chaos of the last decade reflects the collapsing confidence of the ruling class. The abolition of rights, the pogroms and censorship all point to a time when the regime simply decides there is nothing to debate and puts an end to all public debate.

Another way of putting it is that after the radicals within the ruling class won the fight, the debate concept emerged as part of a strategy to normalize their victory. Note that in the first debates, none of the major issues of the prior decade were discussed. Both sides were ready to move on to practical issues like the economy and how best to deal with the Soviet Union. No one mentioned the riots and the violence, much less questioned the new civil rights regime.

At the other end of that story arc which began with the Brown decision, the regime is in full control, but paranoid and insecure. The response to Trump and populism was not to confidently confront it and “set it straight” but to use any means necessary to avoid exposing the logic of the regime to the crucible of reason. If Trump wins in November, you can be sure the response will be a renewed pogrom against white people and the rights they assume to be their inheritance.

Win or lose, the lesson the regime will take away from this election is that there is no reason for debates anymore. There is nothing to debate. More important, maintaining the idea that it is acceptable to question the prevailing orthodoxy just leads to misinformation and disinformation. The only thing left to do is to create a narrative that explains why ending debate is vital to our democracy. If they can say free speech is a threat to democracy, ending debates is no great challenge.

Numerology

Posted on September 5, 2024 by thezman

If you pay attention to sports, one of the things you may have noticed over the last few decades is the rise of numerology. The people making money from sports entertainment and their fans do not call it numerology, but they often treat the numbers of the respective games in the same way mystics treat numbers in life. They think numbers have qualities beyond the thing they are supposed to represent. Therefore, the numbers of the game are transformed into magical tokens.

For example, there is a site called Pro Football Focus that sells itself as something like a quantitative lab for the game of football. They started on the claim that they grade every player in every game in the NFL season, by grading every snap of every game in the NFL season. They conjured a grading system that they claim lets their clients compare the value of each player to the value of other players. Their numbers allow everyone to be a quantitative expert on football.

That last bit is part of the hook. While sports are not complicated, most fans never play organized team sports, so they know nothing about the game, beyond their own emotions while looking at the results. The typical football fan could not tell you the difference between zone blocking and zone blitzing. Baseball fans have no idea why an off-speed pitch is effective. Soccer fans could not tell you anything about the game, as the strategy is a total mystery to them.

What the numerology of sports does for the fan is give them ready made truths they can easily digest and memorize, so they can feel confident when assessing what they are seeing on their televisions. The baseball fan can confidently say Play X is not a good player, because his WAR is below three. The football fan can say that his team lost because the left tackle got a sixty-grade from Pro Football Focus. These numbers bestow a sense of knowledge on the person using them.

Of course, the people using these numbers have no idea what lies behind them, which is the magic of numerology. This allows the sports fan to think these numbers are predictive of future behavior, when, at best, they merely quantify past behavior in a way that allows for further investigation. Many of the numbers that arise from the numerology of sports are meaningless nonsense. The numbers from Pro Football Focus are a good example.

If you look at their site, they state that they are endeavoring to do something that is practically impossible. They employ a team of 600 people, but only 60 are qualified to grade games. These sixty people are then tasked with assigning a pass/fail/neutral grade to every player on every play and have the results hours after the game has been completed. Not only are they doing this for all sixteen NFL games but the fifty or so college football games each weekend.

Even if they solved the man-hour problem in such a task, the numbers they produce are based on purely subjective criteria. Anyone who has played sports understands that a player can do his job as dictated by the coach, but still fail. In other words, the only way anyone can know if a player executed his assignment in a game is to know what the coaches assigned him. You can surmise in many cases, but that requires a deep understanding of the game.

The ridiculousness of the numbers do not matter, even when it is pointed out to the people who love using them. There is a magic quality to assigning numbers, especially numbers that have been sacralized, to the sport. Scan a sports fan forum right now and you will find lots of posts about the grades from PFF. The fans want to believe these numbers tell them something about the prospects for their favorite team, so they accept the validity of the numbers, despite the absurdity.

At this point, some readers will be tempted to post the dumbest comment on the internet which is, “I do not own a television” followed by the second dumbest comment, which is, “I do not watch sportsball.” No one cares that you do not own a TV or that you spend your leisure time in self-flagellation. That is not the point of this post. The point is that in something as banal as sports entertainment, numerology has crept in and taken up a place in the mind of the viewer.

The reason for this is our society is saturated in numerology. In every large company there are hundreds of worker bees churning out tables and graphs that have meaning to the intended audience, well beyond the factual. Show the mid-level manager a report with sales figures and he gets excited. Show those numbers in the form of a dashboard and he passes out in ecstasy. There is a whole industry built on the magical power of showing numbers in the form of a dashboard.

The “data analyst” and the “data scientist” have become the court astrologers of the business world because of an obsession with numbers. The things they produce for their employer are not just about understanding the descriptive reality of the company but also understanding the prescriptive reality of the company. When the needle on the meter is in the green, everyone is in a state of grace. If the meter moves into the yellow, then it means someone inside is cavorting with Old Scratch.

This helps explain the obsession with AI. Numerology is just a way of creating an authority outside the people involved in the process. The sports fan does not want to know who is posting those grades after the football game. They just want to believe that there is some objective, omniscient force that knows the truth. Similarly, the people we call the left demand AI not talk about a certain Austrian painter, because they want AI to validate their beliefs and thus be their moral authority.

This is why the game of baseball has been taken over by robots. Quants crank out decision trees they supply to the managers, which the manager consults at every decision point in the game. Everyone embraces this, even when the results are bad, for the same reason the Muslim says, “inshallah” before embarking on a project. The results are in the hands of an authority everyone must obey and trust. If the team loses, then the mystery force behind the numbers must have willed it.

One of the unexpected results of the proliferation of numbers has been the collapse in the ability to rationalize the numbers. The numbers of life used to be simple measures of what needed to be measured. Now they are treated like omens that not only indicate the future but weigh on our moral understanding of ourselves. The bad stats from a game reinforce the notion among the fans of the losing team that they deserve to feel bad because their team deserved to lose.

This helps explain why the sports fan went from being a guy enjoying men compete to a guy whose identity is tangled up in the identity of a team. Numerology of sports did not create the bug man organizing his life around televised sports, but it coevolved with the general phenomenon of numerology, which itself is the result of the search for new moral authorities to replace faith and tradition. The numbers of life have now become signs from the gods, whoever they may be.

Winners & Losers

Posted on September 4, 2024 by thezman

In sports, when a team prepares for a game, they think about all of the ways they can defeat the other team within the rules of the game. The good teams will be as expansive as possible when it comes to the rules of the game. If something is not explicitly forbidden, then they will assume it is permitted, even if convention and the unwritten rules of the game discourage it. The reason for this is the goal is to win, not uphold the traditions and customs of the game.

This is often the difference between winners and losers. The winners are always “pushing the envelope” when it comes to the rules. These are the guys for whom new rules are created because they discovered a loophole in the rules that gives them an advantage but might undermine the game. The people charged with protecting the game then make a new rule to close that loophole. The losers, in contrast, rarely think about finding loopholes and new interpretations of the rules.

Further, when the winner loses, he immediately begins to think about how to get around the limitations he sees to his success. Maybe it means changing how he or his team prepares for games. Maybe it is a fresh look at the rules that prevented him from doing what he needed to win. The loser, on the other hand, simply accepts that he lost and will often justify it within the rules of the game. The winner was simply better and that proves the rules, traditions or customs of the game are sound.

Put another way, the winners in all forms of competition look at the rules, traditions, and customs as a means to an end. The end is always victory. If the rules serve his ends, then he is a lover of the rules, but as soon as the rules prove inconvenient to his success, then he is an enemy of the rules. The loser is always a lover of rules, as they provide him comfort when he inevitably loses. The rules allow him to think that his role as loser is integral to the functioning of those rules.

This is why slavering works. The modern loser likes to think that slavery died out in America because it was bad economics, but this is nonsense. Slavery was fantastically successful as an economic practice. Slavery ended in America because the winners saw slavery as an obstacle to their success. The slave states wielded power derived from the practice of slavery that the northern states wished to overcome, so they decided to change the rules to rid the country of slavery.

The American Civil War is a complicated topic, but the index card version is familiar to anyone familiar with sports. The North kept losing to the South within the rules of the game of politics as set forth in the Constitution. Therefore, they did what winners always seek to do and that is change the rules. They won the Civil War by not allowing the rules, traditions, or customs of the young country to get in their way. Ever since, they have used control of the rules to secure victory.

Slavery itself is a great example of how winners and losers look at the rules, traditions, or customs as justification for their status. There is no greater lover of slavery than the slave, as the rules of slavery protect him from the whims of his master. The slave knows that as long as he upholds the rules, his master will show him mercy and kindness, so he is the great enforcer of the rules on his fellow slaves. One reason slaves seldom revolt is they prefer subjugation over uncertainty.

For his part, the master understands that the rules of human conduct among the slave owning class are a great tool to maintain the slave mentality of his slaves. His mercy and kindness is doled out like treats to a dog. He is not compelled by the rules to show his slaves mercy or kindness, so he does it as it suits him. This leaves the slave always seeking those things from his master, just as the dog is always ready for the pat on the head or the pleasant sounds from his owner.

In this age, we see this master and slave relationship between the people we call the left and the people we call the right. The former looks at the rules as a means to an end and that end is always getting what they want. Even the rules of physical reality are subject to interpretation if they prove difficult. In the hands of the people we call the left, the rules that supposedly regulate every aspect of life are merely the whip in the hands of the masters, who apply it to ensure obedience.

The people we call the right see the rules as every slave sees the rules, which is as a source of shelter from the uncertainty of their masters wrath. They invest their time in polishing their principles in the same way the house slave makes sure to always be seen busy tidying up the master’s house. This is a sign of subservience. David French is at the New York Times for the same reason the field slave rises to become the master’s manservant. He is the most resolute loser.

This is one reason the regime despises Trump. Unlike conservatives, the slaves of the system, he does not look at the rules as a security blanket. He wants to win so he is willing to reinterpret the rules to suit his needs. The people in charge see this as a challenge because they understand what it takes to win. A charismatic loser is easy to control, but a winner, even a boorish and thumbless one, is dangerous, because winners never stop trying to win.

It is also why the “right-wing influencers” have their panties in a twist over the Trump general election campaign. Despite their pretense to the contrary, the “right-wing influencer” is just another manifestation of the conservative loser. They suffer from the same slave mentality as all conservatives. Doing anything to win offends them because winning terrifies them. People born to be, at best, beautiful losers fear nothing more than winning as it reveals the ugliness of their reality.

Trump is far from a revolutionary character, but within the Trump phenomenon lies the seeds of a future revolt against the regime. That seed is the understanding that what matters is winning. That which serves the cause of winning is used and that which hinders success is discarded. Whatever rises up to topple this regime will not be constrained by the love for rules or the desire to follow the rules. They will be motivated only by winning, by any means necessary.

The New Athens

Posted on September 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about our robot overlords and a post explaining how you could have won millions on sports betting over the long holiday weekend, but the was no Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Instead, I was on the Coffee and a Mike podcast and the J. Burden Show.

One of the features of this age is the proliferation of lying to the point where it is reasonable to assume everything is a lie. The West is a liar’s culture now, where only the naivest trust anyone or anything. This liar’s culture is led by the people at the top, who seem to take great pleasure in lying for its own sake. They often lie when the truth would serve them best. As a result of the endless downpour of lies from the top of society, the culture itself is drenched in lying.

At the top, the culture of lying is obvious. We just went through a month where the media and the so-called experts told us that a day-drinking simpleton went from the butt of jokes to heroic strong diverse female character. Of course, the fact that the concept of the strong diverse female character exists is a testament to the promiscuous lying that now defines the entertainment industry. Every ad on television now contains a naked lie, placed there like some sort of cultural totem.

This is filtering down to the rest of the culture. Online, social media is now full of fakers called “influencers” who create an image for themselves that is based on the lie that they are influencing how people view the world. The internet influencer has taken the line from the prior age, “fake it until you make”, and created a lifestyle around it in order to convince the world that they are something they are not. With many of them, it is clear that the lying is the primary appeal.

Of course, deceptive marketing has always been a part of retail economics, but now it is the default assumption. The key to marketing is to create a clever lie that does not necessarily fool people but stands out amongst the other lies. The ability to craft a clever narrative around a product or find a unique way to trick people into thinking they need the thing is a point of pride now. It has reached the point where it is expected, so that an honest appeal feels inauthentic.

You see the normalization of skullduggery in this post about how Facebook pitches itself to advertisers on its platform. The pitchmen laugh and boast about spying on users via the mic on their mobile device to target ads to them. There is no hint of shame at this sort of behavior, as it is both expected and the standard. We now live in a time when not cheating raises suspicions. If Facebook were not spying on its users, violating their privacy, everyone would think it is odd.

The sacralization of lying is not without precedent. The Athenians were famous for their lying and cheating. The Persian king Cyrus the Great famously observed that the Greeks made a habit of cheating one another through deception. Not only were they famous for their lying at the time, but much of what we know about the Greek world comes to us from notorious fabulists. Greek philosophy is the result of this culture that prized lying above all other virtues.

The reason the Greeks were such promiscuous liars is their culture relied upon persuasion to establish hierarchy and public policy. If an Athenian male were particularly clever at winning arguments and persuading the crowd, he would rise in status, which is why young males from prominent families were drilled in rhetoric. In Athens, you could rise to high status simply by being an unusually good liar. The Greek hero Odysseus was a hero because he was a fantastic liar.

This is the fruit of the democratic spirit. In a world where the standard is public opinion, winning public opinion is what matters most. In fact, it must count for more than the truth, as the public often accepts as true things that turn out to be false. If the goal is to win the crowd, then playing to their deeply held misconceptions is just as good, if not better, than disabusing them of those misconceptions. You are more likely to win the crowd through flattery than through confrontation.

This is most obvious in the marketplace. The seller has one goal and that is to get the maximum price for his product. The buyer has one goal and that is to pay the lowest price for the things he needs. Since these are the two things that define the relationship between buyer and seller, both sides have an incentive lie. If the only thing that matters is getting over on the other side, then the truth is not a restraint. As Cyrus noted, it means that Greeks freely lied to their brothers in the agora.

For the dimwitted, democracy in this sense is not the mechanics of casting ballots but the spirit that animates the people. The resulting morality that arises from a culture where persuasion is the standard against which everything is measured is going to be a morality that is intended to persuade the masses. The “good” is not rooted in factual reality, but in the needs of powerful interests whose power relies on winning the mob to their side to the point where it is a habit of mind.

It is how America has become the New Athens. Like the Athenians, we have embraced the democratic spirit to the point where factual reality is just one tool in the toolkit of persuasion that may or may not be used by the successful. The modern sophist is untethered from the truth, both spiritually and emotionally, because the only thing that matters is tricking some portion of the public. The road to riches is to be a clever liar, who even lies about his sincerity.

The lesson of the Greeks, one the framers understood, was that a society stripped free of truth seeking, even when blessed with great philosophers, will eventually persuade itself into a calamity. For the Athenians, it was the Peloponnesian War. For the New Athenians, it will be something similar, but until then sophists will be busy monetizing their predictions, because in the New Athens, the only thing that matters is lying, even if it is lying about the dangers that lie ahead.

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