Trump’s Foreign Policy Problem

Posted on October 30, 2024 by thezman

One of the problems the world faces is that the dominant power on the planet has entered a period of incoherence. Joe Biden has come to symbolize the country he allegedly leads in that he is old, frail and not always understandable. This is how much of the world now sees the United States. What they see from Washington are people either trapped in a bygone era or divorced from present reality. It is as if the last several decades never happened.

You see this in this Financial Times post about what foreign policy could be like under a second Trump presidency. Keep in mind that the Financial Times is often used by the intelligence community to plant stories it wants to launder. The audience is not just the English-speaking world, but also Europe. The people quoted are all said to be associates of the Trump team. Their views may or may not reflect the thinking of Trump’s inner circle.

That aside, the first thing to note is that there is no acknowledgement of present reality in the story. For example, Congressman Michael Waltz is quoted often about how to resolve the Ukraine war. He says, “Trump could threaten to crash Russia’s economy by lowering the price of oil and gas.” According to Waltz, this will force the Russians to beg for peace negotiations. This policy makes sense if it is 1985 and Russia is still the Soviet Union with a brittle command economy.

For starters, the president cannot willy-nilly change oil prices. No amount of American production can drive down prices to a level where it would have an impact on the Russian economy. The “break even” point of Russian crude is well below that of the cheapest American production. Then you have the fact that it will take a decade to bring American crude production to the levels needed to crash prices. There is also the fact that Biden emptied the strategic oil reserve.

In other words, the big idea from the foreign policy experts is something they read about from the Reagan years that has no chance of working now. It is as if they are unaware of the sanctions war they launched two years ago that not only failed to crater the Russian economy but boomeranged back on them. The German economy is in in free fall because they no longer have access to cheap Russian gas. Meanwhile, the Russian economy is booming.

Of course, there is the fact that these people can only think in terms of threats when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world. Congressman Michael Waltz is a neocon sock puppet who was an early cheerleader for Project Ukraine. He was also wrong about every aspect of it. In any other profession, being as wrong as Mike Waltz would be disqualifying, but here he is being quoted as an authority on Russia. This is what happens when there are no consequences to failure.

Elsewhere in the article, they quote Fred Fleitz, a former John Bolton staffer and current foreign policy adviser at the America First Policy Institute, which promotes itself as helping shape Trump policy. With regards to Iran, Fleitz argues “The objective should be to bankrupt Iran again and to reinstitute maximum pressure.” Again? Has he not noticed that Iran survived sanctions for three decades? Is he not aware that Iran now has the support of China and Russia?

With regards to settling the war in the Ukraine, Fleitz says, “We freeze the conflict, Ukraine does not cede any territory, they don’t give up their territorial claims, and we have negotiations with the understanding there probably won’t be a final agreement until Putin leaves the stage.” Unlike Waltz, Fleitz has no clue as to why the Russians would entertain such a silly offer. Note that this idea was first floated by the neocons when the Ukrainian counter-offensive failed.

The jaw droppingly ignorant part of that post is the use of the term “Minsk-3” to describe the Trump strategy. The Russians correctly view the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy time to arm Ukraine. The reason they think this is Angela Merkel said this in an interview last year. Naming the Trump strategy after two prior efforts to trick the Russians is just a way to make sure there can be no negotiations between the Trump people and the Russians.

This is probably why this story was planted in the Financial Times. The hope is to poison the well, so to speak, for the next administration with regards to negotiating with the Russians. They may not be able to control what Trump does, but they can give the Russians many reasons to not trust any overtures. After all, Trump will be gone in four years, so if they can freeze the Russia situation, they have a chance to get back in power and resume their efforts to start a war with Russia.

What becomes clear in that Financial Times story is that the American foreign policy establishment does not have a clue as to how to address the many problems the next president will face. The main reason for their incoherence is they seem to be unaware that these problems were caused by them. Compounding it is the toxic ideology of neoconservatism that has poisoned the foreign policy community. It is a cancer in the bowels of America’s most important institution.

It is what makes prospects for a sober minded and realistic approach to foreign policy under Trump unlikely. Trump’s instincts are good, as are those with many of the people around him, including JD Vance, but he will inherit a foreign policy establishment that is both stuck in the past and corrupted by a worldview that is inconsistent with the world as it is today and with the needs of the country. Fixing this problem without the use of extrajudicial means may not be possible.

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A New American Identity

Posted on October 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interested in an hour of precise predictions about the upcoming election, then you are in luck. I was on the Coffee and a Mike show and you can listen to the recording of it here.

The American civil war created an intellectual problem for both sides that was far more important than the issue of slavery. The 19th century was the age of nationalism and national liberation in Europe. These ideas made their way to America and fit in neatly with the American sense of self. After all, the United States was the result of a revolt against an empire in the name of national liberation. The war between the North and South, therefore, was also a war over nationalism.

By default, the South had the better claim. It was the South, after all, seeking to secede from the Union to create a new nation that would better serve the interests of the people of the South. The North was trying to prevent this from happening and willing to conquer the people of the South to do it. From a nationalist perspective, the South was the sympathetic side, even though they were also fighting for the right to maintain the institution of slavery.

A solution to this problem that evolved in the North was the argument that true nationalism was comprehensive. That is the nationalist loved all of his country and all of his people, so a nationalist government must serve and protect everyone. Since the South was not a different people and the Union was not abandoning them in the way the crown had abandoned the colonies in the runup to the Revolution, it was the South that was in violation of the nationalist ideal

Further, the evolving sense of Northern nationalism claimed that the national purpose of America from the start was to spread liberty around the world. America was the city on the hill, so to speak, that stood as an example of freedom craving nationalists around the world, so what the South was doing was a threat to that project and therefore a threat to the national purpose. American nationalism, unlike that of Europe, was a revolutionary nationalism to free all of mankind.

In fairness, these debates about the nature of American nationalism were not at the center of the dispute, but they played a role in shaping how the new intellectual class would define American identity after the war. Those arguing in favor of the war being a new founding are not entirely wrong. The country that emerged after the war was completely different from what existed prior to the war. It was not just free of slaves, but full of a sense of national purpose.

In his book After Nationalism, Samuel Goldman describes the three forms of national identity that have prevailed in America. Goldman comes up with three national identities he calls the Covenant, the Crucible, and the Creed. The Covenant is the sense of national purpose. The Crucible is the old melting pot story popular in the 20th century after the war. The Creed is the idea of America being a set of ideas, rather than a physical place or people.

It is a good book that offers a useful way of framing the main ways in which Americans have tried to create a unitary identity. Goldman does observe that it is the covenantal aspect of American identity that has been the most powerful, but he does not get into how this Puritan sensibility evolved in the 19th century during the Civil War to become a civic religion for the ruling elite. He does not mention how the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam blended into this as Jews took up posts in the elite.

This understanding of American identity, or the best effort at forging one, is essential to understanding the current crisis. For over a century, since Woodrow Wilson, America has been on a mission to heal the world. The ruling class has asked, often demanded, that the people put aside their regional and local concerns for the good of one great cause after another. It has become so ingrained in ruling class thinking that they seem incapable to thinking about the state of the country.

Strip away the panic, the hysteria and the outlandish claims and the coming election is about whether we care more about the fate of Mongolian transgender lesbians or the fentanyl epidemic in Appalachia. Do we care more about the abstract concept of climate change or addressing the slow collapse of our infrastructure? What counts for more as an American? The health of your neighbors or the plight of migrants? Will we sacrifice everything in a vain attempt to save the world?

All these questions stem from a growing doubt in this sense of American identity that has been with us since Gettysburg. Americans are increasingly wondering not only if the cost of saving the world is worth the effort, but if it makes any sense at all for us to stand astride the world, balances in our hand. Maybe the people who demand we do this do not have the right to judge the world. Maybe these people lack the moral standing to stand in judgement over us as well.

Fundamentally, the current crisis is about the covenant. If our national purpose is to be the city on the hill, then we must ensure that the city is not full of vagrants and racked with crime and corruption. If our national purpose is to heal the world, then we must first heal ourselves. On the other hand, maybe our national purpose was to avoid falling for these claims and instead focusing on creating a society in the wilderness, away from the entanglements of the old world.

No matter how one seeks to frame it, the struggle today is over our national purpose, a struggle between those who stubbornly cling to the last century and those looking ahead to the next century. The question is whether America will collapse in a heap, exhausted from trying to save the world or will we pull up, realize our folly and return to a sense of purpose rooted in simply being an example to the world? Will we attempt to heal ourselves with the same zeal with tried to heal the world?

It could also be that all these efforts at national identity have failed and what comes next is the great disaggregation. Perhaps it was always impossible to forge an American identity that could permanently hold the people together. Maybe in the end, we learn that the true American identity is no identity at all. We are simply a diverse collection of people who agree to cooperate, when necessary, but otherwise we prefer to leave the world alone and be left alone.

The Kazan Catastrophe

Posted on October 24, 2024 by thezman

Back in the ancient times, if you wished to buy product from someone you arrived at their location with money, or they arrived at your location with product. The product was inspected, and the money was inspected. Once both sides were satisfied, the exchange was made, and the deal was done. It did not take long for a class of middlemen to turn up who brokered such deals. They inspected the goods, arranged transportation and safeguarded the product and the money.

World trade has not changed much since the ancient times. Middlemen still facilitate most of the trade. They are called banks, insurance companies, freight brokers, shipping companies and so forth, but they are all part of this vast and essential middleman economy that makes it possible for the local Walmart to have shelves stuffed with goods from Asia. It is what makes it possible for the Chinese company selling dog food to get paid by Walmart.

One thing to note about this setup is the two greatest seafaring nations in the history of the planet, the United States and Britain, do very little shipping. Instead, they control the flow of goods around the world through control of the insurance markets and the financial system used in global trade. If you are involved in global trade, you are certainly using the American financial system and either directly or indirectly the British maritime insurance system.

The dollar being the world’s reserve currency has been to this point the main driver of the explosion in global trade. The buyer in South America can do business with a seller in China, because his bank is connected to the American financial system through his country’s central bank. He does not have to get RMB from his bank to pay the Chinese vendors, because the exchange is done automatically through the dollar dominated global financial system.

This is about to change with the launch of an alternative payment system that was announced at the BRICS summit in Kazan Russia. The Russians and the Chinese have been working on creating an alternative to SWIFT, which stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. It is the platform that networks the world’s banks to facilitate the flow of money around the world. The new system seeks to replace SWIFT for trade among the BRICS countries.

For most people this is an eye-glazing topic, but in the fullness of time it could be an event that generations of historians study as an inflection point. What the BRICS countries are seeking to do is wrest control of the global financial system from the West, specifically the English-speaking countries, at least for the members of BRICS and those countries willing to trade with BRICS. By extension, it is an effort to reduce the power of the dollar and thus the power of the American empire.

What this new system proposes to do is make it easier for participating countries to conduct business in the currency of other participating countries. Instead of China needing dollars to buy oil from the Saudis and therefore preferring dollars from other countries for Chinese goods, the Chinese will be able to buy oil in RMB and the Saudis will be able to buy Chinese goods in whatever currency they possess. The new system would handle the conversion and exchange rates instantly.

As an aside, that last part is interesting. In the United States, a business does not get paid by the credit card company for a few days. Often, the delay is longer. Of course, there are fees for taking credit card payments. In Russia and China, the movement of money is instant. The system is treated as a public utility, so fees are relatively small compared to what we see in the West. This is owing to much better and newer technology and a different attitude toward banking.

That aside, the significance of this proposal is enormous. The BRICS countries represent half the world’s population. The Arab oil countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, are onboard for this new system. The Saudis let expire the fifty-year-old deal with Washington that established the petrodollar. China, India and Russia are the driving force behind this new arrangement and represent three of the most important economic powerhouses in the world at the moment.

What this means for the West is far less influence over the rest of the world through the control of the financial system. The main reason China, Russia and India have pushed for this new system is they have grown weary of Washington abusing its position to bully the rest of the world. The sanctions war unleashed by Washington against Russia in 2022 was the final straw. If Washington would use the dollar to try regime change in Russia, it would do it to anyone, especially China.

What the BRICS summit in Kazan represents is decades of belligerently incompetent foreign policy in Washington. Ten years ago, it was inconceivable that these important countries would come together to create a parallel financial system, as all of them were committed to the dollar and the Western system. They were committed to the “rules-based order” because they assumed it served their interests, but decades of abuse by Washington has convinced them otherwise.

What this means for the West is clear. What we see forming up is a trading and cooperation block that includes all the countries outside the West, representing the bulk of the world’s population and the majority of economic activity. Add in the fact that the West has let its manufacturing base shrivel and seems to be at war with its agricultural base and you can see the problem. Economies based in providing services tied to the financial system are facing a cliff now.

For the United States, this could not come at a worse time. Debt is already at staggering levels and is accelerating. The productive and innovative portion of the population is aging, while the unproductive portion is exploding. Add in decades of infrastructure neglect, the demographic and cultural catastrophes, and now is not a good time for a decline in the dollar. America is an empire that debased its currency via the perfidious subversion of its own rules.

Contrary to some claims, the dollar is not about to collapse, but what Kazan signals is the steady decline in the dollar. As the rest of the world begins to trade outside the dollar, it means dollars and instruments denominated in dollars, like debt, will lose value on the global market. This means the American banking system must slow the creation of dollars to prevent inflation. This means the cost of borrowing dollars must go up and stay up in anticipation of declining dollar demand

The steady decline of the dollar means a steady decline in the American standard of living, baring a revolution in Washington. Being the world’s mint and banker only works if the world accepts what you are minting. A rentier economy reliant on skimming from every transaction is only possible if you control the currency. The parasitism that has become a feature of our economy is going to become more obvious. That will bring political consequences as well.

The Lives Of Others

Posted on October 22, 2024 by thezman

Since most anyone reading this has been alive, there has been a debate in what is called the right in America, about what to do about the right. Going back to the middle of the last century, the debate is about replacing the opposition to the ruling progressives with something new or reforming the current opposition. Once side thinks the current opposition is too corrupt to be reformed while the other camp thinks a startup has little chance to succeed, so reform is the best course.

If you go back to the early days of the Buckley movement, you find the same sort of debates going on among those members of the “new right.” The Buckley people did not have much of an “old right” to worry about, as it had collapsed in the FDR years, but they had the issue of the existing institutions. Should conservatives seek to create their own institutions or seek to take over existing ones? In the end, it was a mix of both choices that resulted in what is called Conservative Inc.

It is also why there is another debate about what to do with the old right among people trying to form up a new right. The complete failure of conservatism was made clear in the Bush and Obama years to everyone not getting a paycheck from one of the many conservative think tanks and institutions. Paul Gottfried coined the term “alternative right” in this period while commenting on the failure of movement conservatism to conserve anything more than their positions.

Everyone knows what happened to the alternative right, but the sense that something must rise up to replace Conservative Inc is still with us. People like Christopher Rufo, Matt Walsh and Michael Anton, all see themselves in the process of creating a new right for the current age. Amusingly, all of them are linked to nodes of the old right, places like Claremont, Hillsdale and others. Like Dionysus, they hope the new right will be born from the thigh of the old right.

This gets to the impossibility of either approach to creating a new right. On the one hand, you need money to hire writers, thinkers and activists. Raising that money one small donor at a time is hard and unpleasant, at least from the perspective of people who imagine themselves leading the new right. That means going to the people who have lots of cash to spare. Those are the people who fund the old right, which means making an accommodation with the old right.

Of course, if the old right saw a need to reform itself, it would do it, so the reformers coming in to fix things run into a wall of resistance. The donors like the institutions as they are, but they would like a little youthful energy to spruce things up, which is why they invite in the reformers. Like men who spend a long time in prison, the reformers are eventually institutionalized by the entities they seek to reform. Before long they are leading the charge to purge a heretic.

This has been the cycle since the full flowering of the Global American Empire after the Second World War. The opposition to the prevailing progressive orthodoxy, on the one hand, maintains a wall between the establishment and the public, while on the other hand, selectively recruiting some reformers to provide energy and the facade of opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy. Notice how all the members of the current new right sound like exhibits in the Reagan Museum.

It has always been assumed that what makes this system possible and so durable is the money supply. The golden rule says that the men with the gold make the rules, so if the donor class exists as it is, both the progressive orthodoxy and what is allowed to officially oppose it will not change. There is some truth to it, but there is more to it than just money. Even the money men find themselves constrained by a system that they supposedly control.

What has kept this system going is the social aspect of the commentariat. It operates as a subculture, separate from the larger culture. People have noted that Washington operates like a small town, and this is obvious in the commentariat. The people inside depend entirely on the system for their money, reputation, and friendships. It is a lot like how one percent biker clubs operate. You are either completely inside or completely outside the ecosystem. There is no middle ground.

This is why when it comes time to exile a heretic, all of his friends rush forth to condemn the man, often claiming to have never trusted him. On the one hand, they fear being associated with the heretic, but on the other it provides an opportunity to display their fidelity to the subculture. Like Brutus stoically standing by as his sons are executed for their participation in the Tarquinian conspiracy, members of the commentariat heap recriminations on former friends sent into exile.

As a result, everyone is always looking around for cues about what is currently acceptable within the system. When your livelihood depends on toeing the line at the office, you can think about getting a new job. When your social standing, friendships and family relations depend upon toeing the line within the political ecosystem of the commentariat, you can think of nothing but toeing the line. Everyone inside the system, even the donors, are terrified of being exiled.

This helps explain why our commentariat sounds so weird and alien. Our chattering classes are like the courtiers who live their lives walled up inside the king’s palace, talking amongst themselves. Everyone they know thinks the same things, says the same things and cares about the same things. Most important, they fear the same thing, which is the outer dark of exile. The result is a political commentariat that is isolated from the reality of the general public.

This model of the chattering class applies to the regime media, which is itself a subculture cut off from the general public. This model also applies to the managerial class, which now functions as a separate society, with its own economics, culture and morality, sitting atop the larger society. The thread that runs through all these subcultures among the Cloud People is fear of being expelled and having to live with John the Savage and the rest of the Dirt People.

American Trotskyites

Posted on October 21, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the collapse of the entertainment industry, a post about the end of The Grand Tour and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

One of the most remarkable, but woefully unremarked, developments of the last decade is the shift of the neocons back to the left. Starting with Trump coming down the escalator in 2015, the neocons first tried to purge him and his supporters like they did to Pat Buchanan and the paleos in the 1990’s. When that failed, they began their slow march out of the conservative movement then out of the Republican Party, returning to their old home on what we call the left.

Perhaps it is the timescale, but this is not something that has gotten a lot of attention, despite the centrality of the neocons to conservatism. There are prominent neocons at all the major media nodes, where they have spent the last decade railing about Donald Trump on a daily basis. For those familiar with the history of neoconservatism and their wars with the people we call paleos, this transition is like getting confirmation of a long-dismissed conspiracy theory.

Imagine if twenty years from now a collection of retired government officials steps forward and to say that 9/11 was an inside job. The planes were real, but the whole thing was orchestrated by the CIA or maybe the Mossad. It is not just that it would reveal a conspiracy to conceal the truth, but that it would validate the people tarred as conspiracy theories for doubting the official truth. It would be the sort of revelation that leads to questioning other official truths.

That is how this post about Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen should be viewed. Way back when a group of Jewish intellectuals broke with the left in the middle of the last century and started their march into Buckley conservatism, there was a debate about what they were really doing. Was it a way to subvert the Buckley movement? Were these people genuinely changing their ideological orientation or were they simply opportunists seeing conservatism as a more useful vehicle for their project?

Long forgotten is the fact that the label “neoconservative” was a smear coined by a socialist named Michael Harrington. These newly minted conservatives were often called Trotskyites because they never abandoned their old ideology, but simply opposed the people who came to dominate the American left. Of course, others accused them of being a stalking horse for Zionism and the Israel lobby. Still others suspected that their obsession with Russia was the real motivation.

In other words, from the very start no one trusted their sincerity with regards to their conversion to the conservative cause. They brought lots of money and organizational might, so the Buckley crowd overlooked these concerns and welcomed them into the movement over many objections. Before long, the neocons organized the purge of their doubters and enemies in the movement. Half a century or so since this started, the skeptics of these people have been vindicated.

Buried in that post about Kristol and Cohen is an easily overlooked assertion that has always been at the heart of the issue. They claim that conservative Jews have specific interests that they think are better served by the Democrats now. Leaving aside their definition of “conservative Jews”, what they are arguing is that this subgroup of Americans has interests peculiar to themselves that can conflict with the majority interests of the country, but those minority interests come first.

This gets to something further down the memory hole than the old neocon – paleocon battles of the last century. Jewish liberals and leftists have often accused neocons and Zionists of being bad for the Jews, because they confirm the claims often made by Jewish opponents regarding the loyalty of Jews. Bill Kristol makes explicit that his primary interests lie outside of and often in opposition to the interest of the American people, so you can see the problem.

A lot of people accused of being conspiracy theorists with regards to the behavior of the neocons have been vindicated over the last decade. This gets little to no attention in the mainstream media because the neocons still wield enormous power. They have always deftly folded their interests into those of the Israel lobby and no one in politics dares take on those guys. For elected officials, opposing Israel means losing the next election and for the chattering classes, it means exile.

Another aspect of this is the ease with which the neocons have made the transition from conservative and Republican to progressive and Democrat. Disgraced in the Bush years, they nevertheless hung on in the Obama years, orchestrating various schemes like the 2014 coup in Ukraine. They have had total control of the Biden administration to the point where its sole purpose was war with Russia. At no point in this transition was there a hint of dissent or self-examination.

The other side of this is the fact that the Democratic Party has put up no resistance to the return of their old Trotskyites comrades. The same people who were marching around in the streets, banging their pots and pans over the Bush wars in the Middle East now wear Ukraine lapel pins. Without a trace of irony, they accuse Trump fans of disloyalty for not supporting the Ukraine war or the Israel wars. There is a last scenes in Animal Farm quality to all of it.

Of course, this raises the oldest critique of America’s two-party political system, that it is just a show put on for the masses. The real decisions are made outside of public view by the powerful interests who control the system. One of those powerful groups are the neocons, who work with the Israel lobby to control foreign policy. Given what we have witnessed over the last decade, that old critique is vindicated. The people in charge are immune the ballot box and operate as an alien overclass.

Dreams Of Purges Past

Posted on October 17, 2024 by thezman

Yesterday, internet activist Christopher Rufo posted on Twitter a long post denouncing, disavowing and anathematizing someone named Chris Brunet. Apparently, Brunet used to work for Rufo or maybe they were friends, but Rufo now finds that old association inconvenient to his current relationships and career choices, so he decided to do the predictable thing and denounce Brunet. It is a weird form of public piety that the conservatives inherited from communism.

For those of a certain age, this is familiar stuff. While the format is different from the old days of conservatism, the act is the same. That post reads like a Twitter version of Bill Buckley’s denunciation of Pat Buchanan thirty years ago. Interestingly, that famous essay is nowhere to be found online, but the book version is still available. Imagine someone writing a forty-thousand-word essay denouncing someone then being so proud of it that he turned it into a book.

That is the first notable thing about this bit of drama. Those familiar with the history of conservatism recognize this performance. The person putting on the show is doing it for an audience that is never named, but always assumed. The stated audience is either credulous, incredulous or confused by the performance. Everything about this age is a reboot, especially the stuff that emanates from the political class, so the “new right” is just a low-budget reboot of the old right.

There is a Little Rascals quality to all of it. They put on the costumes of the past and reenact events as they think they happened, but in a high school musical sort of way, which makes it feel small and petty. Thirty years ago, Buchanan and Buckley were towering figures fighting for the right to define a sociopolitical movement they helped create, while Rufo and Burnet are two guys on the internet. To his credit, Burnett seems to appreciate the absurdity of it.

The resulting drama brings up another notable aspect. Then as now, the people doing the denouncing always couch their denunciations in moral terms, when it is obvious that they are motivated by money. Buckley knew there were loads of cash waiting for him if he denounced the paleocons. The neocons, Zionists and the Israel lobby were as flush with cash thirty years ago as they are now. They hated the critics of these things as much as they hate them today.

There is nothing wrong with currying favor with rich people. The “American experiment” is pretty much an institutionalized version of this habit. The market economy, after all, is nothing more than people with something to sell chasing after and flattering people who have money to spend. Democratic politics is the art of flattering wealthy interests so they will back your candidacy. There is a reason that one of the highest paid people at every Washington think tank is the fundraiser.

In theory, the one group most comfortable with this reality should be the conservatives, as they boast of being the most free-market of the bunch. Yet, they are the ones most ashamed of being men for hire. They cast all their actions in moral terms, often making it seem like they are engaged in the greatest of moral struggles. David French has made a career of nailing himself to the cross. So much so, in fact, that he has attained what all conservatives seek, a place at the New York Times!

It is a strange quirk of conservatism. Read the comments of that Rufo post and you see the phrase “moral clarity” turn up often. It is as if these people have a strange form of Tourette’s that only comes out when they are finking on one another. It brings to mind the famous quote from Emerson, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Whenever a conservative begins speaking of moral clarity, get ready for a load of arrows in your back.

The reason for this is the central contradiction of conservatism. They start by agreeing with the central premise of progressivism, which is that all people are equal and infinitely malleable. Hierarchy is therefore a construct. You cannot oppose an egalitarian ideology like progressivism by first agreeing with its central claim, so conservatives can never admit that they are simply doing the bidding of their patrons. That means they must invent other reasons which they call principles.

That aside, the sense that this is just recycled drama from a bygone age is due to progressivism becoming a backward-looking phenomenon. It evolved to its logical endpoint only to find nothing there. The modern progressive must content himself with refighting old fights with old enemies reimagined for this time. The new Nazi is the guy opposed to Israel carpet bombing civilians. The new Bull Connor is the guy wondering why the FBI is faking crime stats.

The new right is now following suit. They search around for someone to play the Pat Buchanan role or the Joe Sobran role. It will not be long before these guys pick a fight with the Birchers, which is still around, amazingly enough. Conservatism has always been the slow version of progressivism, so as progressives become a strange sort of antiquarian society, conservatives will slowly join them in the project. The left-right debate is about who hates the past the most.

Of course, what they truly hate is the future. Both progressivism and conservatism are artifacts of a bygone age. They reached their peak in the twentieth century at the zenith of the Global American Empire. That was an empire built for a world that not only does not exist, but the memory of which is fading into the past. Imagine conservatism and progressivism as two old ships engaged in battle as they slowly slip over the horizon, and you have a good sense of it.

In the meantime, they will continue to engage in their mock battles with each other and with themselves, pretending to believe that things have not changed and will never change, while terrified by the sense that they are changing. Like science, politics advances one funeral at a time. As the codgers of the old politics march off to the cemetery, they will be replaced first by their imitators and then by their replacements, who will create a new politics for their age and challenges.

The Decline Of Pop Music

Posted on October 16, 2024 by thezman

One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry. The sale of physical content has just about disappeared, outside of the vinyl subculture. Even if you count downloads, the gross sales of music decline more than ten percent per year. On a per capita basis, popular music revenues are a little more than half of their peak fifty years ago. The biggest drop in sales started with the introduction of the mp3.

Unlike the newspaper industry, which thought they could make money giving their content away on the internet, the music industry always saw technology as a threat to their business model. They famously fought the introduction of cassettes because it would make it easier to record and transport music. If you could copy that album and give the copy to a friend, the music industry reasoned, there would be no reason for the friend to buy the album.

The music industry went to extraordinary lengths to protect their cartel, but they simply could not hold off the flood of technology. They treated downloaders like the Israelis treat Palestinian civilians, but it failed to deter people from downloading free copies of the song they wanted. Eventually, the industry gave into reality and started selling single copies of songs, but by that point, the horse had left the barn. There are too many ways to get a copy of a song free of charge.

The hope was streaming services would stem the bleeding. Instead of loading up on free music maybe people would pay five bucks a month to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. That did seem to work for a while, but then it just further cratered the music sales side of the business. There is also the fact that the public does not listen to as much pop music as in the past. Part of it is demographics, but part of it is the collapse in the quality of content.

This is starting to damage the last area where money could be made in the music business, which is the live show. For the first time in a decade, excluding the Covid years, live shows are in decline. The popular excuse is to blame the ticket sellers and the secondary market for pricing people out of the events. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because it is too crowded.

One reason for the decline of live shows is Covid. A weird thing happened during Covid and that is people discovered that they could live without things they suddenly could not have due to the panic. Restaurants never fully recovered from Covid because people got used to not going out to dinner. Something replaced it. Live events are another thing people did not miss as much as expected. Pro sports have had to work hard to regain their crowds and college sports never fully regained them.

Another reason live music is struggling is the quality of the product. As the industry relies more on technology to create listenable content, the less able they are to stage compelling live shows. This is not a new problem. In the golden age of pop music, they often used studio musicians to record the songs. The “band” often could not play their own music at all. This limited the “band” to doing studio shows where they could lip-sync to the recorded music.

This changed in the 1960’s when bands could play their own music and insisted on recording their own music. They also did live shows where they could actually play their stuff and not sound like a bag of cats. Technology has reversed this so that the performers are no longer able to produce the songs live in any way that sounds like the recorded material. Technology has made it easier to make music, but that has resulted in fewer acts that can do live shows.

Here is where you see the damage done by hip-hop. This is content easy to create in the studio, but it is hot garbage when performed live. In a small venue, the tight spaces and use of drugs can result in a good time for the audience, but in an arena it is often hilariously terrible. It looks like that homeless guy who yells at passing cars got on the stage and is yelling at the audience. Whatever the merits, there are none, hip-hop does not make for a compelling live show.

Another issue for live music is young people are not being socialized in the meat space, so live shows fall outside of their comfort zone. A generation used to interacting with their peers through internet platforms is not going to see the live show as an opportunity for socializing and dating like the old days. They would rather hear the music while cartoon characters perform the concert online. For a generation that prefers the indoors, the outdoor music show may as well not exist.

Of course, the music business was always a racket. The golden years of pop was when the music companies ruled with an iron fist. They could make you buy the album when you wanted just one or two songs. They forced radio stations to play the songs they wanted played. Most important, they we free to rob the music acts. Technology nibbled away at the music cartel eventually freeing the consumers and the music creators from the clutches of the music companies.

One result is there is probably more music available now than in the golden age of popular music. Creators can make good stuff from their bedroom and make it available to the world via the internet. The other side of this is the days of the rock star are coming to a close. Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness. Her songs are popular because she is popular, not the other way around. Her music is secondary to her act.

Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera. They will not understand it, because the people and culture that produced it are as alien to them as the people and culture of China. The concept of the rock star will disappear with memories of phone booths and quadrophonic sound.

Washington Was Right

Posted on October 14, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the death of grammar, a post about life as a modern serf and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

George Washington famously observed, “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.” This was in his farewell address where he cautioned that one of the risks to the new nation was from involvement in foreign affairs. When a country aligns with another country, it not only takes on the friends and enemies of that country, it opens the door for that country to influence its leaders and shape its policy.

We see this writ large with Israel. Since the Bush II administration, Israel has been seeking a way to get the United States to go to war with Iran. They claim Iran is the cause of all the problems in the region. Coincidentally, Iran also backs the two primary opponents of the Greater Israel project, Syria and Hezbollah. Therefore, if the United States takes out Iran, then peace will descend on the region and, coincidentally, Israel will face no opposition to its expansion plans.

Bush II probably would have pulled the trigger on a war with Iran if the Iraq war had not been such a debacle. The neocons were boasting in the first term that once Iraq was made into a democracy, it would help “liberate” Iran from its rulers. These plans we shelved once Obama came to power, in part because of Valerie Jarrett, who was in favor of normalizing relations with Iran. The neocons were also busy getting Project Ukraine off the ground.

Depending upon whose narrative you prefer, the United States is either abandoning Project Ukraine in order to deal with the Middle East or the United States is getting sucked into a war with Iran and must abandon Project Ukraine. Either way, it is becoming clear that war with Iran is in the cards. The Israelis keep provoking the Iranians, who have no choice but to respond. The Israelis then claim the response is an unjustified attack so they must respond.

The last turn at this game was a genuine escalation as the Iranians launched waves of ballistic missiles that were able to penetrate Israeli air defenses. This by itself is a huge step in the process. No one thought the Iranians had this ability. Add in the accuracy with which they were able to target Israeli military facilities and the Israel – Iran conflict moved much closer to all-out war. Israel promised massive attacks against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities.

Now we get word that the United States is setting up the THAAD anti-ballistic missile system in Israel. This is the most advanced air defense system in the American arsenal and it is supposed to be capable of defeating the best missiles. Of course, the Iron Dome was supposed to be the best air defense system until it was defeated. The Patriot system was also supposed to be a great system until it was destroyed by the Russians in Ukraine as soon as it was deployed.

Reportedly, the Biden administration opposes attacks on Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, but that could be a cover story. They reportedly promised Iran that Israel would not retaliate to the Iranian drone attack. Then Israel set off a string of targeted assassinations and the famous pager attack. It is a good reminder that everyone involved in Middle East politics is incapable of honesty. Everyone lies about everything to everyone, even about the lies they are telling.

Regardless of intentions, this move now provides Israel with cover for whatever attacks they have planned. This will inevitably mean Iran launches another wave of missiles at Israel, maybe even targeting that THAAD system. This is what happened with the Patriot system in Ukraine. The Russians filled the sky with drones, so when the Patriot system lit up, it became an easy target for Russian missiles. The use of air defense systems makes them vulnerable to attack.

Even if the Iranians avoid striking this system, they have a lot of missiles and the THAAD system is limited. Each battery is about forty interceptors. Iran reportedly has thousands of missiles. Of course, like everything to do with the Military Industrial Complex, the THAAD system is riddled with corruption. It is a big, complicated and expensive system no one expected to use in war, so it is mostly a jobs and patronage program, rather than a weapon of war.

All that aside, it is easy to see that George Washington was correct. Indulging habitual fondness for Israel has made the world’s lone superpower a slave to whatever schemes the Israelis are plotting. The United States is on the brink of war with Iran, solely because Israel desires it. No one in Washington dares question any of this, as the Israeli lobby is too powerful. Even the neocons, who prefer Project Ukraine over Project Iran, are powerless against the Israel lobby.

War with Iran will be a disaster of the United States. The American military can deliver devastating strikes against Iran, but Iran can also close the Strait of Hormuz, sending global oil prices through the roof. They could also attack oil facilities in the region, crippling global supplies and sending the world into a depression. Only a madman would want such a scenario, but this is the price that must be paid when you chain yourself to the lunatic regime that is Israel.

Compounding things is the fact that no one knows who is actually running foreign policy in the Biden administration. We know it is not Biden, due to his declining health, but who is calling the shots is a mystery. It is no doubt a mystery to Iran, as well. The Russians have made this point regarding the Ukraine war. The result is the United States is the Lennie Small to the Israeli George Milton as far the Iranians are concerned, which means the United States no longer has agency.

This is exactly what Washington warned of in his farewell address. The only way out of this degenerate relationship with Israel is a revolution in how Washington deals with the entire region and that is impossible due to the massive Israel lobby. When every Congressman has a minder from Israel and every media outlet has to run their coy past AIPAC and the ADL, there is no room to think about this clearly, much less have a debate about this terrible situation.

This is why the way to bet is war with Iran after the November election. The Biden people have no reason to care at that point and Israel will see it as an opportunity to get what they have wanted for decades. The next administration will have to pay the price for this reckless foreign entanglement. Perhaps it is the price that must be paid for the end of empire. Gas lines and ten-dollar gasoline will surely cause some to question this habitual fondness for Israel, at least.

Radio Derb October 11 2024

Posted on October 12, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m50s Controversy in science, new and old
14m24s Disaster equity
27m09s Hillary, Zamyatin, and Us
38m59s Voice cloning
40m50s Using a shovel
43m36s An old friend is angry
46m46s Signoff with Cilla

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2, as originally scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, serpent, and percussion, the serpent being an 18th-century wind instrument now defunct, ancestor I think of the modern trombone. And this is of course your formidably genial host John Derbyshire with some notes on the passing charivari.

We are now less than one month away from the general election. I shall of course have things to say about that. The Southeast of our country has been stricken by yet another natural disaster; I shall cover that, too. Before either of those topics, though, I’m going to take a detour through science.

I am, as I’m sure I have mentioned before, a science geek from far back. Although I don’t have any expertise in any of the rigorous sciences, the old affection lingers and I try to keep up with developments.

There has been news from the world of science this past week, so let me start off with that. Continue reading →

Death Of The Grammar Nazi

Posted on October 10, 2024 by thezman

A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.

The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.

Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.

There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.

You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.

On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”

That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.

It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.

Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.

Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.

There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.

Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.

That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.

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