The Death Of Progressivism

Posted on January 27, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about how the presentness of this age results in collective amnesia, a post how AI will destroy us, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

In certain circles the triumph of Donald Trump is being viewed as either a sign that liberalism is dying out or the sign that it is dying and the forces opposed to it are finally on the ascendant. Still others, stuck in the thinking of the last century, see the victory of Trump as a sign that the forces of darkness are ready to turn out the lights on the liberal order they are committed to defend. In both cases, there is that old problem of language in that no one seems to have the same definition of liberalism.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that for about a century the people at the retail end of politics have used the word “liberal” as a label. In the United States, people we call the left also use the term liberal. In fact, they often use the term left to mean super-liberal or radically liberal with liberal simply meaning pro-government. Liberals for example, want Medicare for all, while the left wants single payer. To confuse things even more, the right wants government regulated healthcare.

Putting aside the retail use of the word liberal, there is confusion as to what is meant by liberalism in modern discourse. The civic nationalists continue to insist it means the moral and political systems based on things like individual rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed. Critics tend to view it as the collection of bourgeois cultural and social fads that have ripped through the West. One imagines liberalism as John Locke and the other as John Rawls.

The truth is the liberalism of the 18th century has been dead for a long time. In Europe, ideology replaced liberalism in the 19th century. The triumph of ideology resulted in two great industrial wars in the 20th century and then the rise of managerialism in response to the dominance of the American empire and the Cold War. In Europe, the dominant political order is managerialism. Rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed exist only as rhetorical flourishes.

In the United States, the Lockean liberalism of the Framers quickly gave way first to a reformist Protestantism, culminating in the Civil War. This slowly gave way to what was called progressivism in the 20th century. progressivism is the reformist Protestantism of the past but stripped of its Christian overtones. The mental and moral structures remain but lacking the fixed points of Scripture and the Christian conception of God, the implementation has wandered all over the place.

Another way to think of it is that the European left travelled down a road that began with the decline in Christian faith. The first step was to use reason to arrive at the same ethical conclusions as Christianity, just without the Christianity. This then led to thinking about new ethical conclusions based on reason alone. Ideology is, after all, a set of moral claims backed by the authority of reason. The two great industrial wars in Europe were about how we ought to organize ourselves.

In the United States, reason has never played much of a role in what has often been called liberalism, because it never dropped the mental structures that it inherited from the Protestant reformers. The original progressives littered their language with references to Scripture. This stopped in the 20th century as Jews joined the elite and entered progressive politics. The moral structures stayed in place, but the authority for them simply disappeared, but has always been assumed.

It is why the people we currently call the left are so fond of claiming that they are on the right side of history. In part, this is a reference to the Hegelian historicism they experienced in college but is much closer to the Calvinist sense that the righteous act as they do because they are righteous. Instead of being on the right side of history, they could just as easily claim to be on the side of angels. They do what they do because they are trying to bring the rest of us along to the glorious future.

It is why modern progressivism is so thuggish. Without a Bible to hold up as his authority, the modern progressive has only her fist to shake at the crowd. Since she is on the right side of history, she is the white hat, so anyone in opposition must be the black hat and against the black hat, you must use any means necessary. What was called Woke was the fanaticism of the Puritan but untethered from Scripture and the reason to interpret and apply Scripture.

This explains the progressive takeover of Protestant churches. Instinctively, they seek moral authority for their claims, so they take over the old moral authority and decorate it with their symbols. Elite divinity schools are full of progressives who reject everything about Christianity, but they seek the framing of Christianity to animate their own progressive moral claims. Protestantism gave birth to progressivism and then was slowly devoured by it.

One of the oldest debates within Christianity is between faith and reason. This is the source of the phrase, Athens and Jerusalem. What we see with progressivism is the end result of that debate. The people called woke are briming with faith, but devoid of reason, so what they believe cannot be expressed in words. Woke was a visceral expression of progressive faith. The often-comical irrationality of it was the logical end of the abandonment of reason.

The growing sense that the fever has broken, which some see as a sign of the end of liberalism, is something much simpler. The fever has broken, and that fever was the secular religious fervor of late stage progressivism. It was the primal scream of faith without reason. What this signals is not the death of liberalism, which happened long ago, but the death of progressivism. Like a demon leaving the body of the possessed, the old Calvinist demon is leaving American politics.

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Artificial Eternity

Posted on January 23, 2025 by thezman

One of the clarifying things about Trump’s second term is that we are seeing the reality of politics on display. He made deals for support and right away he is making good on those deals. One of those deals was with Silicon Valley with regards to Artificial Intelligence, which they think is the next revolution. Trump is pledging billions for something like a Manhattan Project to make AI real. Here is Sam Altman explaining why this is the greatest thing ever.

Lost in most of the AI debate is something Altman said in that clip, “Immortality is not too far ahead.” That is an interesting selling point, as it assumes that everyone wants to live forever, but it is not the first time this has come up with the tech bros. Once Silicon Valley was awash in billions, they started investing some of it in life extension technology with the hope of conquering death. Ray Kurzweil has made a nice living selling life-extension ideas to the tech bros.

It is fair to say that conquering death has been an obsession with Silicon Valley since the great boom of the 1990’s started. Perhaps there is some natural link between extending human ability through technology and extending life with it. On the one hand, solving the complex mathematical puzzles that put the stock of human knowledge at your fingertips leads to hubris. On the other hand, that same hubris can easily lead to a view of life as nothing more than complex math puzzles.

Much of what lies behind the synopticon that Silicon Valley has rolled out over the last decades is the assumption that life is not terribly complicated because humans are relatively simple in their actions. Facebook and Google easily roll up our lives into easy-to-use data sets, so marketers can nudge us into buying their products. The fact that this strategy does not work is ignored. They have come to believe that the vast network of machines is controlling human behavior.

That aside, conquering death is not new to this age. Christianity is all about conquering death and living forever in bliss. That is the main point of Christianity, at least from the marketing point of view. If you live an ethical life, when you die and your life is put in the scales, you will gain access to heaven, which is everlasting life. John 3:16 tells us, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”

The Christians were not the first to think this way. In fact, it was most likely borrowed from Zoroastrianism, which held that heaven was one option for your soul once it left your body and crossed Bridge of Judgment. Of course, the concept of reincarnation has been with us since forever probably. The soul reentering the material world in the body of another human or as another species is a form of conquering death. The soul is eternal, so you never truly die.

In folk religions without a complex system of ethics tied to their deity, conquering death was still an important topic. The ancient heroes fought to be remembered after they had fallen in battle. Valhalla, which was reworked by early Christians into a warrior heaven, was originally just a resting place for warriors, until they poured out to fight alongside Odin against the jötnar during Ragnarök. Conquering death was to live so you could take part in the final scene of existence.

Simply being remembered was a form of conquering death. Greek mythology is a great example of this. To be remembered was the point of life. The great heroes of the long-forgotten past are proof that a man can outlive his people. Troy, for example, was long gone by the time of Homer, but the men of Troy and those who defeated them, lived on long after Troy was forgotten. Our modern cemeteries still reflect this ancient urge to be remembered and thus conquer death.

in the modern age, men who aspire to greatness are not satisfied with having their memory carved on a rock. They will not blink their last blink with the knowledge that they will live forever at the foot of God. Both require a connection to a people who will maintain the rock or pray for your soul. Instead, they hope the machines with which they spend so much of their lives will save them from rotting away in a field or being incinerated in a crematorium.

Despite their brilliance, they not only think little about their obsession with immortality, but they never wonder if it is what they want. To this point, people have understood that living even a very long time comes with punishments. Our fiction is full of examples of men who lived too long. Even in good health, their psyche suffers from having lived beyond the natural limit. We have always had a sense that who we are is tied to the brevity of our time on this world.

Artificial Intelligence may help mitigate diseases like cancer, but at this stage it is mostly used for creating clever memes. The walls that contain AI right now, the limits of human knowledge, will probably prove impenetrable. It will never be able to go beyond what we know but merely be faster at accessing and applying it. That will have its uses but will fall far short of the robot future. Until we unriddle what makes human consciousness possible, AI will remain a fantasy.

Nature, of nature’s God, has a sense of humor, so the most likely result of AI is better ways to kill one another. We already see that with the war in Ukraine where AI powered drones hunt for men and equipment. This is another thing the present quest for eternal life shares with the past quests. The end result will inevitably require death, as without death, life is not possible. Living is not merely the absence of death but the struggle against death. Artificial Intelligence cannot do that for us.

Racism: The Death Of A Concept

Posted on January 22, 2025 by thezman

The concept of racism is a novelty of the twentieth century that in recent times has been treated as a timeless truth. In the last century, the best people decided that their fellow white people had been living in sin because they had not welcomed the descendants of former slaves into their lives, so they set about correcting it. What started as a project to better the material condition of black people and include them into general society, slowly transformed into a cult of leukophobia.

It is a good example of how a negative identity can both spread and slowly destroy the people who embrace it. The first “antiracists” were sober minded compared to the modern version, in that they simply wanted to address the practical problem of incorporating the black population into the American legal system. As a practical matter, the United States had two legal frameworks into the twentieth century, one for the white population and one for the black population.

The fact that this dual legal system existed in America is a great example of how practical necessity must always come before the ideal. America was born, in part, in the notion of equality before the law. It nearly tore itself apart in a civil war over this very same issue, but into the twentieth century the majority of Americans, of both races, were comfortable with a two-tier legal system. It was this gap between the ideal and reality through which antiracism entered.

Those first “antiracists” were opposed to this dual legal system. Soon they were opposed to the people who defended it and then opposed to the human reality that perpetuated it despite reforms in the law. The civil rights revolution in the middle of the last century went beyond eliminating the dual legal system. It was aimed at eradicating the conditions that made it possible. Those conditions, it was assumed, were in the hearts and minds of the white population.

This version of the Great Awakening was motivated by a desire to once and for all eliminate that which makes racial inequality possible. Instead of pulling up at the water’s edge of biological reality, the reformers imagined that they were smashing into the final defenses of racism and the racists who made it possible. That sin of racism discovered in the last century was anthropomorphized into an army of imaginary devils, against which the great and the good could rally.

The last generation of madness has been in pursuit of what Chief Justice John Roberts called the folly of trying to create equality from inequality. Not only are differences in individual people immutable, differences on groups of people are immutable, but that itself became one of the deadly sins of antiracism. The stubbornness of this reality just made the antiracist more determined until they embraced state sponsored violence against this imaginary evil.

Whether they understood what they were doing is unclear, but what antiracism became was a mirror of what they claimed was white racism. This started with shifting the definition of racism from “prejudice based on race” to “prejudice plus power”, which meant only whites could be racist. Since hating white people was not new, they shifted to hating whiteness, the conditions that produce white people. The result was a moral code built on the hatred of white people, leukophobia.

In the final decades of the last century, American children were taught about the cultural lunacy in communist countries like Russia and China. They would struggle to accept that people could submit to reeducation camps and struggle sessions run by crazy people at war with reality. In the fullness of time, children will look at the diversity pogroms of this age the same way. Future children will struggle to believe that psychopathic con artist like Robin DiAngelo were real.

Like the madness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the bloody madness of Stalin’s purges, the madness of antiracism has run its course. Yesterday, Trump signed another executive order, this one rescinding Lyndon Johnson’s EO 11246, which established affirmative action in government contracting. Ten years ago, anyone suggesting this was called a white nationalist and purged from polite company. Suddenly it is in the trophy case of the most banal political activists.

What we are experiencing right now is a preference cascade. Long ago, a wiseman said that antiracism would collapse on the day a so-called conservative professed his antiracism in front of a gathering and that gathering started to chuckle and then burst into uproarious laughter as they all realized the same thing. That thing was that everyone else was sick of this nuttiness too. All sudden, it was okay to laugh at it and so everyone indulged in hysterical laughter.

This is not to suggest that we will be restoring segregation or that television actors will start casually dropping racial epithets. It simply means that the social movement built around antiracism has reached the end of the line. The quest to eliminate race as a defining feature of public discourse ended with race as the defining feature of public discourse, leaving it with nowhere to go but away. The solution to a racialized public square is a de-racialized public square.

Another way of looking at this is the old expression, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. This refers to the idea that wealth gained in one generation will be lost by the third. The founder starts the business, turning it over to his son who competently manages it. His son then runs it into the ground. There are a lot of variations on this same theme, but all point to the same idea. Regression to the mean is undefeated over a long enough time span.

The concepts of racism and antiracism were created by clever people seeking to capitalize on that gap between the American ideal and reality. They got the social movement going and the next generation established it as a fixture of American political discourse. For a couple of decades, antiracism provided good jobs at good wages to college educated people with no real skills. They just had to show up and play their role, but instead they brought the movement to ruin.

One could also look at the death of racism, the political cause, and its moral claims, as part of the overall decline of the American empire. Racism and antiracism were made possible by the emergence of the American superpower after the two great industrial wars of the twentieth century. This last spasm of racism was made possible by the final victory over the other great ideology to emerge from those wars. Now that the empire is on the wane, its social movements are dying with it.

Regardless of your preferred narrative, there is no escaping the fact that the world has suddenly shifted on the issue of race. The moral center is coming to rest where it belonged all along with regards to race and that it is a private matter. One chooses to live with who they like, for any reason they like. It is not a collective matter. We are seeing the line between the private and public reappear. The first casualty is the concept of racism and its traveling partner antiracism.

The Instauration

Posted on January 20, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about robot doctors, a post the coming interregnum, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Today is the big day when Donald Trump completes the greatest comeback in American political history. After his ouster in 2020, few thought he would be allowed to run, much less win the presidency. Every part of the managerial regime was focused on stopping him by any means necessary, but he found a path through it. In that regard, his restoration today is the greatest political victory in American history. No candidate has overcome bigger odds than Donald Trump.

That may be why the crazies are so quiet this time. Every narrative since 2016 has ended with the end of Donald Trump. They simply ruled out any possibility of Trump winning this election, so now that it has happened, they have no mechanism for dealing with the disconfirmation. No one has conjured a new narrative that includes their victory over the orange man as he enters the White House. There is no Russian collusion hoax to explain this victory.

It is a good reminder that the crazies are not self-directed. They need to be fed stories from the system around which they can rally. Remove the Russian collusion hoax and much of what happened in Trump’s term is not possible. The “resistance” rested on the belief that his victory in 2016 was illegitimate due to the modern version of Old Scratch tricking people into supporting his agent, Donald Trump. They were not just mad about an election result. They were resisting evil itself.

This does not mean the Russian collusion hoax was 4-D chess. It was just another lie from the Clinton machine, but the stars aligned for it to become the great rallying point for the mentally ill. It was also a useful excuse for permanent Washington, as they scrambled to contain the damage of 2016. It is why to this day no one who bought into the Russian collusion hoax has explained how Trump’s alleged deal with the Putin resulted in his winning Pennsylvania.

It is a good example of how events take on a life of their own. While there are schemers plotting behind the scenes, their schemes often turn into something far different from what they initially imagined. The Russian collusion stuff was originally a way to distract from those embarrassing emails being released online. It then became the magical reason to explain the failure of the Clinton campaign and then it became the excuse for official Washington to declare war on the president.

The great gaslighting campaign on behalf of Harris did not include such a provision, probably because the people behind it did not think it would work. They knew all along that her odds were not good. Unlike in 2016 when everyone was sure Clinton would win easily, no one thought Harris was a favorite. The efforts to conjure a new conspiracy to explain Trump’s victory went nowhere primarily because powerful people were unwilling to invest in a new Old Scratch story.

There is another bit of evidence to suggest that the reason Trump is in Washington right now is the economic elites shifted in his favor. In 2016 they were all invested in Clinton as she was the machine candidate and the machine ran Washington. Rich people took the safe course and invested in the “resistance.” The great drama the machine put on for the country was as much about gaslighting the economic elites as it was about undermining the Trump presidency.

Four years of mismanagement under Biden caused enough concern among the economic elites that they were not willing to hand Washington a blank check, especially after the events of the summer. Biden’s incoherence, Trump getting shot and then the selection of Harris deeply concerned the economic elites. Like the ownership of a company realizing that their managers are stealing from them, the economic elites decided it was time for a change.

One result is no money to underwrite a new resistance. The crazies have been sent off to the internet version of an internment camp. Facebook and Twitter are now back to normal, for the most part. Regime media is under pressure to behave this time, which has led to a purge of some of their hard thumping crazies. The Washington Post and New York Times will not be leading the resistance to Trump this time. Their owners will not tolerate it, so the coverage has been quite tame.

This is another clue that the people in charge are back in charge. The Trump agenda is far more aggressive this time around, but we are not hearing much from the regime lackeys about it. Trump is expected to sign one hundred executive orders today and regime media has barely noticed. The prevailing mood in Washington now is like what happens when a new management team is installed. Those who buy in really buy in and those who do not buy in head for the exit.

None of this suggests it will be all puppies and rainbows, but the signs all point to a restoration of normalcy as the default. The freakshow that has been the norm for the last decade is being replaced with a sober minded standard. You see this in the nomination hearings where the hysterics have been kept to a minimum. In Trump’s first term, for example, the crazies shut down Washington over Kavanaugh, but this time they were quite muted over Hegseth.

One should not forget the lesson of the Russian collusion hoax. This effort to wrench normalcy from the jaws of lunacy will itself set off a chain of events that will lead to things no one can anticipate. Careers have been built on the lunacy, so the decline of Lunacy Inc. will have fallout. Some of it will be good for those on the dark side of the great divide but might not be viewed as such by the economic elites. The rich guys can easily go from heroes to zeroes.

There is also the fact that the rich guys will want what they want from Trump and that may not be good for the country. We saw this with the recent H1B flap. The good guys won the rhetorical fight, but it is a good reminder that rich people are like any other tool in radical politics. They are useful when they are useful and that is determined by those who are using them. The price of victory in this system is relentless pressure on the economic elites, not hero worship.

In the end, today signals quiet waters for the first time in a long time. The instauration will be followed by another interregnum. The Great Awakening that kicked off with the 2000 election has finally burned itself out and we will get a period where the mess gets cleaned up and normal people can speak freely about it. In the previous interregnum, after the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, everyone assumed it was forever and failed to claw back what had been lost.

That is the great question that looms over all of this. In the short term, will Trump follow through on his promises and address the crimes of the past? Will we see some corrective action taken against the system for the abuses? On the other hand, will the beneficiaries of his victory use their new platforms to continue the long-term fight against the forces of darkness or will they simply get rich off it? Today is the end of the beginning and the start of the long interregnum war.

Troubled Youth

Posted on January 16, 2025 by thezman

Over the last week a dispute has erupted on Twitter about the relative difficulties faced by young people. One camp, current young people, claim they are entering a world that is much more difficult for them than youth of prior generations. They do not think they have the same opportunities as their parents and grandparents. Another camp thinks that young people are entering relatively good times economically but may have unrealistic expectations regarding adulthood.

To be accurate, there is at least one other camp in this debate. That camp thinks the youth face a demographic reality for which they have not been properly prepared and a prevailing culture that works to prevent that preparation. The relative state of the economy for young people does not matter if they are entering a society that is about to come apart along demographic lines. Young white people have been poorly trained up for a world that should not exist.

As is often the case, the two camps squaring off over economics are on the main stage while the camp looking at upstream issues is marginalized. While economics is downstream from demographics and culture, it still matters. We see this with the oldest demographic who remain stubbornly committed to the system. Baby boomers, overall, have it pretty good, so they still believe in the system, even it means they must endure an emergency room that looks like a Tijuana bus stop.

The economic question for young people is difficult, because it is more about expectations than objective measures. For example, about 16% of native-born teenagers have jobs today, compared to 32% in 1990. On the one hand, this is a bad thing because it means fewer young people getting necessary training to be an adult once they finish their education. On the other hand, it means they have an easier time of it than prior generations who had to work.

Those over the age of fifty love telling stories about the terrible jobs they had as young people, while no one under the age of thirty complains about not having had crappy jobs to make ends meet. In fact, the main complaint from college graduates in their twenties is that they have crappy jobs. This is where the great divide opens between those two main camps debating the issue. Old people roll their eyes, because having a crappy job is a rite of passage. Young people see it as a broken promise.

If you are in that third camp, you can see how both sides are right. On the one hand, young people should stop moaning about crappy jobs and being poor, because that is what every generation faced. In fact, prior generations had it far worse. On the other hand, this was not the deal promised to young people who went into debt to get a college diploma. They were told that this investment would let them bypass the struggle portion of their life and get right into the middle-class.

Here you see the root cause of the complaint from young people. The breakdown of order has eroded the social contract. In fact, the social contract is now a terms of service agreement. They were told to click “accept” in high school, but once they exited college, they were told the terms of service have changed. Just in case they objected, they were also told that the privacy policy had changed as well. “Please click accept” quickly became “accept or else.”

There is more to this broken social contract than economics. The conditioning of young people comes with the assumption that if they follow the rules and tick the correct boxes, they will find meaning and purpose in life. Instead, what they find is life in a cubicle, paying off school debts while living at home. Half of college graduates live at home, which is not as high as you might think, but they continue to live at home long after they have left college. That is a novelty.

In effect, young people were sold a program that said if they went to college, took on the debt and followed the rules, they would come out the other end with the sort of fulfilling life they saw in the media. Instead, they are faced with what feels like a pointless existence as an economic unit. That philosophy major at the coffee shop is not just a punch line. She is a bitter victim. Telling her that she now must find her own meaning in this struggle sounds like another lie to her.

That said, the youth of the past did not like working in high school and would have preferred to hang out with friends playing video games. College grads of the past would have preferred to get a job in their field at the same wage as an experienced man, rather than working retail until they could get their foot in the door. The struggle for today’s youth is relatively easy, even if it is the result of a broken promise. In fact, young people probably have it too easy in many respects.

This generational conflict is, in the end, a proxy for the larger conflict which revolves around the failure of the ruling class over the last thirty years. Instead of upholding the rules, especially the rules of the social contract, they turned the country into a smash and grab where everyone is on their own. As a result, the powerful, for example colleges, exploit the weak, their students. It should be no surprise that the victims of such a system are not its biggest fans.

The Inequality Of Man

Posted on January 15, 2025 by thezman

In the fullness of time, whoever is writing the story of the American experiment will marvel over the fact that the United States never understood itself and as a result, was eventually destroyed in a struggle with itself. A land with vast resources and a capable people could never move past a central problem that stepped off the Mayflower to start the American story. That problem is how can you build a society that derives equality from inequality?

At every step in the American story, we see this conflict. One the one hand, what drives the efforts of the American people is the desire to equalize not only American society, but the society of man. On the other hand, there is the grudging acknowledgment that what lies between here and the egalitarian paradise if the impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. Despite the unconquerable truth of the human condition, what drives America is the desire to overcome it.

This conflict is right there in the founding myths. The colonists rebelled against the symbol of hierarchy and innate inequality, the King of England. They did so on the grounds that all men have the same rights. It is right there in the powerful opening of the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the greatest celebration of egalitarianism ever written, but written by a man who was the gold standard of both the natural inequality of man and the necessity of hierarchy.

This contradiction is right there in the life of Thomas Jefferson. He was a man of aristocratic stock, born into a wealthy family. He was living proof that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. He supported the redistribution of land to the poor, despite the fact he was a wealthy planter and slave owner. Despite the reality of his life, he was also capable of expressing the egalitarian spirit in such powerful and direct language that it continues to haunt the nation he helped create.

Modern America, the Global American Empire, is the product of the innate American egalitarianism, but also the willingness to use violence in the unequal relationship between America and the rest of the world. The regular speeches we hear from politicians about America’s role in the world would be familiar to Thucydides. On the one hand those speeches are a form of the funeral oration of Pericles and on the other hand the frank dialogue with the people of Melos.

The present crisis of America is the product of this great contradiction. In his majority opinion in Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College, Chief Justice John Roberts struggles with this very question. Much of the opinion, in fact, is a recitation of how the country has struggled with this question. Often, Roberts laments that the court has failed to live up to those ideals of equality, but then he acknowledges that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

In his discussion of Plessy, the case that established the doctrine of separate but equal, Roberts argues that despite the intent and the remedies to address defects in the doctrine, the result was institutional inequality in education. Roberts writes, “the
inherent folly of that approach—of trying to derive equality from inequality—soon became apparent.” The remedy was to scrap it entirely in the famous Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision.

Note that in a 237-page decision lamenting the history of discrimination and challenges in addressing it, the central problem lies in just one sentence. You cannot derive equality from inequality. If Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, a truth not only visible to the casual eye, but supported by mountains of data, then the equality of man is impossible and any effort to achieve it is folly. Despite this immutable truth, the court continues its quest to reach the egalitarian paradise.

Right there is the beating heart of the current crisis. For going on three generations now, the moral arbiter of America society, the Supreme Court, has demanded that we press ahead with a project it knows is impossible. The moral regime that makes the open society as the highest good and discrimination as the worst evil, which grew from the Brown decision, is all about finding, at long last, some way over or around that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

The moralizing is clear in the text of the decision. Roberts often blurs the lines between legal discrimination and general discrimination, because to make such a distinction suggests the latter is acceptable under the right conditions. Instead, the starting place is the assertion that discrimination is always immoral, but for now certain exceptions must be made until we work out a few things. Affirmative action, for example, is a temporary fix until equality is achieved.

Think about how many social problems could easily be solved by simply acknowledging that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man. If the court said that Harvard is a private college and so it can admit who it likes for any reason it likes, this case never sees a courtroom. Public universities, on the other hand, must admit everyone that meets the objective criteria for admissions. Debates over college admissions would vanish instantly.

Simply acknowledging objective reality about human beings would solve many of the problems in present day America, but it is impossible. The belief in the equality of man is too powerful with the managerial class. John Roberts and his staff wrote 237-pages of text to cover over “it is folly trying to derive equality from inequality.” Since the middle of the last century, all efforts have been mustered to defeat that simple truth, but it remains that impenetrable barrier called the natural inequality of man.

Dogs And Bones

Posted on January 13, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the coming troubles for Europe with regards to Ukraine, a post the eternal war between mice and cats, a video from the bed of my truck and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

“A dog who will bring a bone will carry a bone” is an old-time expression that usually is meant to say that someone who will steal for you will steal from you. More generally it means that an immoral person on your side will eventually let you down or go over on the other side. The underlying assumption is that even in an adversarial environment, there are rules. The person who violates those rules can never be trusted, even when their rule breaking favors you.

This “lack of a code” lies at the heart of the traitor in wartime. The person who makes a deal with the enemy is harshly punished, usually executed, not because of the practical aspects of their crime. It is not that they gave the enemy an advantage or useful information. It is that they violated the code that holds everyone together in the fight. They have excluded themselves from the company of men who can be trusted to uphold the code when no one is looking.

Similarly, the traitor that comes over from the other side is usually treated with suspicion. In the Cold War, defectors were rarely treated well by either side. Russians who betrayed their countrymen just so they could get an American passport were treated well enough to encourage others, but they were assumed to be disreputable people. The Russians took the same view. Famous spies like Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union, were never welcomed by Russia.

Again, the underlying reason for the way traitors have been treated by their own people as well as the enemies of their people is that someone who breaks trust for any reason cannot be trusted. Someone who deliberately breaks a sacred trust is especially suspicious. It is why American corporations used to discriminate against divorced men. If your wife cannot trust, why should your boss? Adultery used to be a serious social crime when we were a proper society.

It is a good thing to keep in mind as we head into what is looking like another interregnum. Suddenly, the people who were sure Donald Trump was Hitler are now strangely quiet. Much of it is simply the fact that their emotional tank is drained. A decade of hysteria has run it course. At the same time, many have just decided to change tactics, seeing that their Hitler lies failed to stop Trump. They will come up with new lies because it is what liars do. They lie.

The same should apply to those who look like converts. Someone who was an implacable opponent of even the slightest pushback but is now “coming around” on things like immigration should be treated with a great deal of suspicion. They could simply be opportunists. That is, after all, the spring that motivates every traitor. They see an opportunity for themselves in violating the trust of others. Often, they lure their victims into trusting them so they can betray the trust.

A great example is Ben Shapiro. Everyone with two brain cells knows his deal. He is an ultra-Zionist whose only interest is his people. He is willing to lie promiscuously for that cause. It speaks to the nature of Zionism that its most fervent practitioners are the least endowed with European morality. Even the most fervent Nazi understood that there is such a thing as truth. It was the Nazis, after all, who gave us the expression “The Big Lie.”

That aside, even when a Ben Shapiro is doing damage to the enemy, it is important to always qualify the praise so no one forgets that a dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If an arsonist burns down the house of that guy selling drugs near the high school, it is normal and healthy to be happy for his suffering or death, but it should never be an endorsement of arson. If the arsonist, however, is one of your guys, then that is another matter. “Who” is what matters, not how.

Those are easy cases, but a more challenging example is someone like James Lindsay, who started out in life as an anti-Christian bigot. He then moved on from that hustle to tricking academic journals with fake grievance studies papers. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian made up fake studies using the bizarre jargon of the grievance studies rackets. These papers were made deliberately ridiculous to expose the vacuity of the so-called social sciences.

This was hilarious and it confirmed that the people involved in these fields are mostly hucksters making a living off lunatics. The trouble though is Lindsay and Boghossian were deceiving people not on behalf of their cause or for their people. They were betraying people for personal advantage. In other words, they were bringing a bone to one group but would eventually carry a bone from that group. This is what we now see with their attacks on populists and Christians.

Whatever benefit came from these two subverting the grievance studies people came at the cost of having them attack the people who cheered for them, but from a position of greater authority. When James Linday was just a chubby massage therapist hating on Christians, no one cared. Now that he is a famous internet influencer; he can do real damage. It is a good reminder that giving power to immoral people is never a good idea.

None of this means that political actors must be purer than Caeser’s wife. As Mr. Dooley said, “Sure, politics ain’t bean-bag. ‘Tis a man’s game, an’ women, childer, cripples an’ prohybitionists’d do well to keep out iv it.” Or as Carl Schmitt would put it, politics is about friends and enemies. The thing to remember is that it is a commitment to the morality of the cause that distinguishes the friend from the enemy, so even though an enemy can be useful, they remain enemies.

Radio Derb January 10 2025

Posted on January 10, 2025 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

04m24s Not a disaster, a tragedy
10m21s Illegal aliens > U.S. citizens
14m52s The Muslim thing
23m48s Trump’s imperial dreams
26m18s An African in Greenland
33m26s Meet the norovirus
34m57s Unwelcome fame?
36m33s 2025 IYQST
38m51s Happy birthday to the King

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 Joseph Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 1 and this is your frostily genial host John Derbyshire with a brief scan of the news.

The news is of course dominated by the terrible fires over on the other coast. The news pictures showing the devastation of Los Angeles are really stunning. My sympathies to those afflicted, and all praise to the brave Angelenos fighting back against the flames.

L.A. can now join the sad list of cities that have been burned out in peacetime. Back when wood construction was the norm, such events were not uncommon. The Great Fire of Chicago is the one everyone knows about. That was in 1871. Legend has it that the fire was started when Mrs O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern, but I don’t know if that’s ever been confirmed.

San Francisco suffered devastating fires in 1906, following the great earthquake of that year. It’s a little-known fact that far more buildings were destroyed by the fires than by the earthquake itself.

Better known to British schoolkids was the Great Fire of London in 1666 that destroyed the old St Paul’s cathedral, giving Christopher Wren the opportunity to build the new one. Also on the upside, it likely put an end to the great plague of earlier that year, by killing all the rats.

Yes: back through history peacetime cities have gone up in smoke. My own little provincial hometown, Northampton in the English Midlands, burned down in 1675. Our schoolmasters used to tell us that the medieval town records, kept in the town castle, were moved to All Saints’ Church for fear the castle would be burned down. As it happened the castle went unscathed; but All Saints’ was burned to the ground and the records were lost. Municipal incompetence is not a new thing.

So Angelenos are in plenty of historical company here, although I don’t suppose it’s much consolation for them to know that.

And it’s an ill wind that blows no-one any good. Hop over to Amazon.com and put the words “The Great Los Angeles Fire” into the search box. You’ll see that there was a novel of that name by Edward Stewart, published in 1980.

Stewart wrote a shelf-full of novels, none of which I’ve read. Amazon has “The Great Los Angeles Fire” at sales rank 9,687,510 in Books, with just one posted review, dated 2015. This week’s events might give it a boost. That would be too late for Stewart, who died in 1996, but might help his estate beneficiaries. Continue reading →

The Drug Resistant Troll

Posted on January 9, 2025 by thezman

Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” This is generally true, but occasionally something new comes along. The printing press is the best example. In fact, it was a revolutionary novelty. Much of what ails the modern world in some way traces its roots to the printing press.

The internet is another great novelty. Sure, the internet is, as Twain said, a lot of old ideas in a new combination. Sending letters to people over the internet is just a modern version of sending letters through the mail. Social media is a crowded public place where people strain to understand one another. Quantity has a quality of its own, however, and in the case of the internet, hooking billions together has created something that is different from its antecedents.

One example of this is the digital grifter. These are people who have many of the qualities we associate with conmen, but they also have qualities unique to the digital age and therefore could not exist before it. The analog grifters did not seek unrestricted attention, because they feared getting exposed. The digital grifter lives on attention and has no fear of being caught. In some cases, being labeled a grifter is viewed as an asset to the overall grift.

The difference between the digital grifter and the old fashioned grifter who may ply his trade online is that the money aspect of the grift is secondary. The old fashioned grift is all about separating the mark from his money. The digital grifter is not directly trying to scam people out of money. Instead, he wants a crowd that will operate as social proof for others who may buy something from him or sign up for a service like his YouTube channel, which is heavily monetized.

A good example of this is James Lindsay, the buffoonish “anti-woke” crusader who spends his days offending as many people as possible. He started out as a garden variety anti-Christian bigot, but that market was overserved, so he moved on to opposing “woke” nonsense in the academy. This got him a bunch of attention, so he expanded his anti-woke campaign to cover everyone. The Framers are now woke and Karl Marx was a woke crypto-Christian.

By making himself a public nuisance, he gets lots of attention, which brings him money through subscriptions, monetization and invites to events where other public nuisances do their act to the suckers. What he has done is make himself into a version of Mike Cernovich, a pioneer in using Twitter to troll himself into a career. Instead of pretending to be a lifestyle expert, Lindsay pretends to be a student of left-wing ideology and the champion of the fools who believe him.

The professional troll is a genuinely new thing made possible by the novelty of the internet, which makes it possible for a man and his phone to irritate millions of people with the push of a few buttons. While the public nuisance is not new, his elevation to a public figure is a novelty. In the analog age, Nick Fuentes was selling used cars and James Lindsay was that guy in accounting who talked about model trains. In this age they are getting rich as annoying weirdos.

This is leading to another novelty. The digital platforms that made these people possible are now transforming to encourage them. The Twitter monetization scheme is based on the number of people who engage with your post. The monetized users get paid for getting your attention and the best way to get attention is to be controversial, so it is not hard to see where this is heading. It is why Musk reinstated Fuentes. He may not get monetized, but his opponents do get paid to make noise.

Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he is cancelling his army of Indian content moderators and going to a group-sourced system like Twitter. The reason for this is moderation is bad for the professional troll. Community notes, however, is great for the professional troll, as it brings them even more attention. In effect, the group-sourced moderation encourages the sorts of behavior that moderation was intended to suppress, thus generating more of it.

It is why the “For You” tab on Twitter is worthless. It is filled with accounts that are designed to maximize attention. Many of them are bots that post and repost the same material to game the engagement system. There is a tragedy of the commons going on with Twitter. This is when many people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource, like your attention. They will tend to overuse it. For Twitter, it means people retreating to a narrow group they follow.

It remains to be seen if the social aspects of the internet can exist as a massive version of daytime television. There is a novelty to it and each version of the troll brings some new way of being a troll. There is a limit to everything, however, and we are already seeing a recycling of the trolls. James Lindsay ripped off Vox Day, who was on the anti-woke stuff when Lindsay was busy insulting Christians. The “groypers” are just a dumber version of the “stormies” created by Andrew Anglin.

Maybe this phase runs its course, like Hollywood reboots. After a few more turns of the wheel, people develop the mental armor to ignore the genre entirely. Starved of what it needs most, attention, the troll then withers and dies. On the other hand, maybe they kill off the big social media platforms as people retreat to private spaces. We are already seeing signs of this with the kooks stomping off to Bluesky. The great disaggregation of the internet will make the professional troll impossible.

Of course, the digital grifter and its crude variant, the professional troll, are novelties of this age, so it means their demise, if there is one, will be a novelty as well. New problems often require new solutions. Given that these people are unemployable in the normal sense, they will no doubt be like a drug-resistant virus, mutating with each eradication effort. Like those afflicted by herpes, the internet may never rid itself of the infection known as the professional troll.

The Wolf At The EU Door

Posted on January 8, 2025 by thezman

Note: An unexpected event this morning left me with no time to write, so this is the green door post from yesterday to fill the void. Assuming nothing else goes wrong today, I should be back tomorrow.

As January 20th grows closer, the Europeans are growing more hysterical about what Trump may do with Project Ukraine. There were rumors before the holidays that Keir Starmer was set to visit Mar-a-Lago to talk with Trump about Ukraine. Starmer had a call with Trump which must not have gone well, as the British media came out with stories about Trump rambling during the call.

It is hard to know what Trump is thinking with regards to Ukraine, which is why the Europeans are in a panic. If they knew what he is planning, they would be busy undermining it, which is why Trump is not talking about his plans. His personal emissary on Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, has cancelled his plants to visit Kiev and European capitals, which only adds to the intrigue.

The big fear in Europe is that Trump will do a deal with Putin and cut the Europeans out of the process. One would think that any deal that leads to peace would be welcome, but the Euros have more skin in the game than most realize. They either need the war to continue, or they need it to end in a way that does not expose the financial corruption around the entire project.

One good example for why the Euros are in this predicament is a town called Shevchenko, which is in eastern Ukraine. The Russians have just captured it as part of the steady push west. This little village would not matter, if not for the fact that it has one of the largest lithium mines in the world. It is part of what may be the world’s biggest lithium deposit.

While lithium is enormously important, that is not why this matters. You see, this mine is not actually owned by Ukraine. The rights to exploit it were traded away to an English company that was planning to use an Australian company to mine it. How this came to be is not all that clear but given the way the world works it surely required underwriting, which means British bankers were involved.

Now west of this town are other towns with massive lithium deposits, which have been pledged as collateral for various things, including the war. It is the thing that never makes it into the media. A significant portion of the financing for this war is tied to Ukrainian assets, which serve as collateral. They also buy the support of economic elites for this project. Project Ukraine is important business.

The reason the Russians captured this town is they are slowly encircling a city called Pokrovsk, which has been a major supply hub for the Ukraine army. The Russians are trying to split the front so they can break up the Ukraine army. This lets them destroy it piece by piece, limiting Ukraine’s ability to shift reserves where needed. This town with the big lithium mine is near the city of Pokrovsk.

This is a huge problem for Ukraine, but it is an even bigger problem for the EU, because Pokrovsk is vital to the coal and steel industry of Ukraine. You see, project Ukraine was supposed to bring the Ukraine steel industry into the EU economic zone, but now it looks like it will become part of Russia. The many investors in Ukrainian industry are not going to happy if Trump signs this land away to Russia.

This is the reason they put a gun to Speaker Johnson’s head last year to get the $60 billion Ukraine bill passed. Much of that money was to make whole those who had invested in project Ukraine. The arms dealers had “lent” the Biden admin weapons to send to Ukraine and they needed to be paid. The same is true for players like Blackrock that invested in Ukrainian agriculture.

Based on the hysteria in Europe, it does not appear as if the political class there has a similar way to solve their problem. If Trump makes a deal with Russia, all those companies and banks that invested in the project will be left with nothing but worthless Ukrainian bonds. It is why the European political class is desperate to be included in the negotiations. They think they can claw back some of the money.

Then there are the Russian frozen assets. Most of these are held in European banks and the Euroclear Bank. Any deal the Russians make with Trump to end the Ukraine war will include those assets. Otherwise, the Russians will confiscate American assets currently in Russia and Trump will not agree to it. In fact, walking bank sanctions and unfreezing assets may be the prerequisites for negotiations.

What if those assets are not available? The Europeans have been issuing bonds against the profits from those assets, but what if they have been using the assets themselves for other things? Even if the principle is intact, the investors expect to get paid, so if the assets are gone, then the profits are gone as well. Billions rest on those assets not being unfrozen anytime soon.

In a way, project Ukraine is coming full circle. In Trump’s first term, official Washington freaked out when Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine. What followed was the first Trump impeachment as a massive smokescreen to hide what was happening. Five years later and the Europeans are in the same bind, but they cannot stage a phony scandal and impeachment to buy time and conceal the crime.

This is probably why the Europeans are going crazy over Musk. They think they can escalate their feud with Trump to the point where he either backs off and agrees to consult with them on Ukraine or maybe they can pin the blame on Trump for whatever happens to Ukraine in the coming year. It is not a great plan, but when you owe money and have no way to pay, you will try anything.

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