Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

The Lying Game

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Note: If you are familiar with Moldbug, who now calls himself Curtis Yarvin, I did a review of and comment upon his work behind the green door. Here is the SubscribeStar link and here is the Substack link.

At first blush, logic says that deception should have been bred out of humans long before humans settled down. Deceiving the tribe would be bad for the deceiver, resulting in exile or even death. That would significantly lower the reproductive success of the deceiver. On the other hand, tribes with deceivers would be less cooperative which would lower their overall success. Given enough time, it seems like deception should have disappeared from humanity.

Clearly that is not the case. We have lots of liars. That means deception has some useful role in human society. At the minimum, deception is not so negative that it would significantly lower the reproductive success of the deceiver. In fact, deception has probably always been an asset on the mating market. Even in the narrow world of the tribe, sweettalking Pebbles into a roll in the cave has obvious benefits. Perhaps lying for sex is enough to make deception a feature of man.

On the other hand, every society has prohibitions against deception. In European cultures, reputation is tied to honesty and trustworthiness. Someone who gains a reputation for deception loses status. In more clannish societies, deceiving outsiders is not so bad, especially if it helps the in-group, but lying to people in the clan can have severe consequences. Someone who deceives his own people can be exiled from the group or possibly worse.

This apparent contradiction has been known for a long time. It is not just humans who display the willingness to deceive others in the group. In many animal societies, like bees and ants, cooperation is rewarded and deception is punished. As with humans, deception should have been selected out a long time ago, but that is clearly not the case which suggest deception has some value. The deceiver gets enough benefit over time to make deception useful in some way.

A new study suggests that cooperation is what makes deception possible, as cooperation involved complex rules. An individual can exploit those rules to gain benefit without having to contribute. The more cooperative a society, the more opportunities there are for free riders to game those rules through deception in order to prosper from the cooperation of others in the group. The less cooperative a society, the fewer opportunities to exploit the rules through deception.

Given that we live in an age of universal deceit, at least by those in positions of authority, the evolution of lying suddenly matters a great deal. Part of it is that we are better able to see the lying of the people in charge. Before the mass media age, it was hard for people to get information on official lies. Of course, it was also much harder to promote official lies. Mass media results in a sense of mass cooperation, which means the communications revolution has revolutionized mass lying.

Even adjusting for our natural recency bias, institutional lying has exploded over the last thirty years in America. Every day someone from the government stands in front of cameras and blatantly lies about things. They know they are lying. The people in the press room know they are lying. Everyone in the room knows that the people watching it know everyone involved is lying. There is the sense that the people in these positions look at lying as a game where the biggest liar wins the day.

This is not a new thing. For twenty years the drug companies have said that serotonin levels are responsible for depression. It turns out to be wrong and the studies they relied upon were obviously wrong. In other words, they should have known their claims were false, but they had a billion reasons to lie, so they lied. This sort of deception has become the norm. Here is a story about a prominent cancer research facility caught faking their research.

Of course, we are still living through one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on human society, which is the Covid pandemic. The virus is real, but the claims around it have been nonsense since the start. Mask wearing and social distancing never had any basis in science or reason. Important people not only insisted it was science but forced people to play along. Now we are learning that the vaccines are not what was claimed and may have made things worse.

Many people have noticed the scale and degree of lying from official quarters, but the assumption is always that the cause is degeneracy. That is the people slithering into positions of authority are responsible for the rise in deception. The solution is to round them up, put them on boats and send them out to sea. Put honest people back into positions of authority and we return to the normal levels of deception. That may be just as wrong as the things coming from our leaders.

It may be that we have reached a point where the people in the ruling class of society, this includes the managerial and administrative classes, no longer feel any connection to the rest of us. They lie and willingly repeat lies, because it causes no harm to them and solves immediate concerns. Like people in clannish societies, deceiving outsiders brings no penalty as outsiders simply do not count. The ruling class is now an alien clan that is indifferent to the rest of us.

Alternatively, this evolving class awareness may bring with it a sense that the people over whom they rule are a constant threat. Like the Alawites in Syria, the new class at the top of the social hierarchy now sees their position dependent on keeping the masses confused and disorganized. Israel has always done this with her Arab neighbors, preventing them from uniting against her. Perhaps the explosion of lying is due to fear and hostility by the ruling class.

Another possibility, suggested by that British study linked above, is that deception tracks with cooperation. The more cooperative a society, or at least the more it appears to cooperate, the more deception in the society. This seems counter intuitive as cooperation is about trust and deception undermines trust. On the other hand, the more people experience deception, the more they are willing to cooperate with those who display trustworthiness. Trust and deception rise and fall together.

An underappreciated aspect of the communications revolution is how unity has become the standard of politics. Fifty years ago, people understood that politics was the art of the possible, which meant compromise. You give a little to get a little, but often there was no deal to be had and you just accepted it. Today, politics is all about uniting everyone behind a narrow cause. Every day our rulers demand we put aside our interest for something. Mass cooperation is the norm.

These demands for mass cooperation track with the growth of mass media and they track with the rise in anathematizing of dissent. As communications have increased, the demand for cooperation have increased. As cooperation increases, the deception increases with it. Some of the lying is in an effort to trick people into putting their interest aside for the good of the cause. Much of the lying is just opportunism. The greater cooperation has led to an explosion in deception.

The prisoner’s dilemma game is a classic example of how even simple human interactions can become quite complex. Rational self-interest can lead someone into a trap depending upon the rules in which they are forced to operate. This may be what we are seeing with the explosion of lying. The communications revolution has altered the ancient rules of human cooperation within large scale society. The ability to enhance mass cooperation has resulted in mass deception.

Like that prisoner’s dilemma game, the people doing the lying think they are acting in their self-interest but they are actually undermining their collective interests. The more they lie in defense of “our democracy” the less valuable the system that makes it possible for them to be a ruling class. Their efforts to enhance the value of their position in society is undermining their position. Taken to its logical conclusion, the collapse in trust will bring about a collapse in the ruling class.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Management Cycle

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Anyone who has spent time in a large corporation has lived through at least one period of downsizing, the modern way of saying layoffs. Revenues fall short, so management scrambles to bring costs in line with the new reality. It starts with getting rid of symbolic things like pizza Friday and the company picnic. That never works so the next step is a series of layoffs to “right size” the staff. The British have a great term for this. They say people have been made redundant.

One of the things people often notice about these periods of mass redundancy is that the redundant are also superfluous. That woman who was in every meeting and handed out reports once a month is now gone. No one is asking for her reports or struggling to produce her reports in addition to their own. The reports simply stopped being produced and her chair in the meeting is now empty. It does not take long before no one remembers her name or her job description.

Those who have some years under their belt know that corporate bloat is just one of those things that infects every large company. Even after a company goes through one of these periods, it does not take long before it begins to re-bloat. Profits return, the economy looks better and people start thinking outside the box again. The empty cubicles begin to fill up with nice people who maintain spreadsheets that everyone thinks are vital until the next time there is a downsizing.

In the dreaded private sector, bloat is constrained by the need to make a profit, but in the public sector there is no such constraint. Universities are so bloated with administrators it is hard to find the faculty. Ideally, a university has one administrator for every three faculty members. This is a well-known metric. At least it was well-known until the explosion of administrators happened. Now most public universities have close to three administrators for every faculty member.

In government, the number of people who do essential work is too small to measure, so the ratio of managers to workers is impossible to state. Even in government, dividing by zero is not allowed. This has crept into the private sector through the door of government contractors. The reporting required to work on government programs requires an army of those nice people who sit in cubicles producing snappy spreadsheet reports that no one reads.

Even in something like military procurement bloat is an issue. One of the things that is becoming clear with the war in the Ukraine is that the United States has a massively bloated military industrial complex. They just assumed this was true for the Russians, which is why they assumed Russia would run out of munitions by now. It turns out that Russia “right-sized” their military industrial complex a long time ago so now they can produce much more for much less than the West.

When you step back and look at the American economy as a whole, it is clear that bloat is the way to describe it. It is packed with jobs that have no real reason to exist, other than the rules created by managers. Most people do work that has no utility other than it ticks some box somewhere in the system. It may be a big reason for why people are dropping out of the workforce. Sitting in a cubicle all day doing busy work is not worth the paycheck for many people.

This may be a clue as to where managerialism ends. The Soviets followed a similar path that eventually led to collapse. After the revolution and civil war, a new class began to emerge that took control of the system. First it was party members gaining control of important parts of the country. Then the party itself became the primary mechanism for running the system. After the war and the death of Stalin, this new class exploded to take control of the Soviet Union.

It has been forgotten, but there was a tremendous amount of optimism in the USSR after the war into the 1960’s. Experts were building and rebuilding the Soviet economy along scientific lines. Many people, even in the West, thought that maybe the communist would catch or even surpass the West economically. That collapsed with the overthrow of Khrushchev. The experimentation and optimism were replaced with dull technocratic conservatism. The managers were back in charge.

That is the way to think about the last twenty-five years of the USSR. It was a lot like the American car makers in the 1970’s. The lack of competition meant that all the bad habits of the managers went unchecked. Before long, the workers stopped caring because why would anyone care when the bosses do not care? By the end of the Soviet era, the Russian economy was festooned with people who produced reports no one read and attended meetings where nothing was decided.

There are lots of theories for why the Soviet Union collapse, but one reason is simply that it became bogged down in corporate bloat. The system got so gummed up with layers of managers looking for something to do or looking for a reason to not do anything that the system itself began to seize up. By the end, a country with vast fertile farmland was struggling to feed itself. Events like Chernobyl were embarrassing emblems of a system that are reached its logical end.

The Global American Empire may be near that same point. The liberal democratic system of the empire is purpose build for war. It was created in war and has been at war with the world for generations. It should be incredibly good at war. Instead, it is on the verge of another ignominious defeat, this time in the Ukraine. A system so bogged down with empty suits and cubicle jockeys that it cannot do the thing for which it was designed is not a system with a long future ahead of it.

The one thing unique about America that the Soviets lacked is the ability to create massive amounts of money from thin air. This covers a lot of sins, but that may be coming to an end as well. Once it is no longer feasible to print up enough cash to pay the growing managerial class, downsizing is inevitable. Unlike a company, the managers of this system are not going to exit the premises quietly. Downsizing in countries tends to be chaotic and violent.

One final point of comparison between this age and the dynamics in a corporation is the lack of institutional memory. Many have noted that this age bears a striking resemblance to the 1970’s. One reason for that is the people in charge today have no memory of that time, even though most were alive back then. Just like a company never remembers the last downsizing and starts to re-bloat the ranks, the managerial system never seems to learn from past errors.

Again, the war in the Ukraine is a good example. Backing a puppet government in a civil war never turns out well. The defining event of the current political class was the war in Vietnam, yet they appear to have learned nothing from it. Management induced amnesia seems to be a feature of managerialism. Like puppies, everyone lives in the moment, excited about the next thing. No one can see disaster coming, because no one seems to remember what happened yesterday.

The old line about bankruptcy attributed Hemingway probably applies to the dynamics within the managerial system. Everyone was surprised by the collapse of the Soviet Union, even the people inside it. In retrospect it made sense. The system was going bankrupt a little at a time. Even though that should have been obvious, few people predicted it. In all probability, the same fate awaits the West. First it will be the satellite countries and then the empire proper.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The End Times

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not entirely related to this post. The Covid stuff does tie into the new religion. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. There is the SubscribeStar version and the Substack version.

Many commenters have noted that American political discourse is much coarser and nastier today than it was a generation ago. The change can be dated to the arrival of the Clintons on the national stage in the 1990’s. They brought with them a crudeness that has become the norm in national politics. The great interregnum that lasted from the 1980’s into the 1990’s was replaced with an ugly and vulgar brand of politics that eventually led to the nasty and censorious present.

The question that never gets asked is why has public discourse become so nasty and unforgiving over the last three decades? The time for intolerance was the Cold War when mistakes could mean nuclear war with Russia. Instead, it was a time of relative tolerance compared to the present. Technological and material advances have made the margin for error extremely broad, yet the people seeking to shape public discourse carry on like one misused pronoun will end the world.

There can be no denying that the nastiness and intolerance is coming from the people we call the Left. The so-called conservatives continue to carry on like they are at high tea with the queen. The censorship, cancel culture and the harassment of dissenters all comes from the tribes of the Left. They are the ones trying to ruin people for explicitly stating obvious truths that suddenly run contrary to official dogma. The mobs threatening social order are all left-wing.

The funny thing is, the Left should be riding high, given that they control all of the high ground of American society. If the new fad on the Left is for “birthing people” to wear flowerpots on their heads, every news anchor will either have the flowerpot on her head or state in advance that they are not a person of uterus so they are respecting the culture of the birthing people. The Left has never had more power in American society, yet they have never been angrier.

One reason for the nastiness is left-wing politics has always attracted people who are full of self-loathing and have a resentment toward normal society. This was true in the French Revolution and it is true today. The conformity and identity provided by the hive mentality of radical politics is the appeal. Radical politics is by definition anti-social, so it attracts anti-social people. The phrase “happy go-lucky communist” is not a staple of our language for a reason.

Of course, the cult-like atmosphere of radical politics limits the ways in which a member can get attention. To get noticed by senior members of the hive means being more extreme than the rest of the hive. Without a limiting principle, virtue signaling quickly becomes a race to the most extreme position. This is how we quickly went from finding a legal accommodation to cohabitating homosexuals to a world where the Left demands that child molesters in drag have unlimited access to grammar schools.

Then there is the fact that people into left-wing politics tend to live in isolation from normal people. They may interact with normals at work or in daily life, but their political activity is exclusively around fellow believers. These ideas arise in a world insulated from the daily realty of normal society. The people operating like spiritual masters inside these movements are never challenged or questioned. They are never exposed to scrutiny or forced to defend their positions.

Someone like Robin DiAngelo is never going to sit down for a tough interview by a knowledgeable critic of her ideas. All of the thought leaders and influencers on the Left are like stage psychics in that they only ever allow themselves to be tested under conditions that allow for success. This serves to promote their brand, to use a marketing term, but it also legitimizes their ideas to their followers. DiAngelo always sounds authoritative, which serves to give authority to her ideas.

The counter here is that people on the Right do the same thing but the big difference is the institutions are run by the Left. A normal person cannot go about their life without running into left-wing assertions. Watch a TV show and it is full of propaganda about the latest causes. Ads are mostly for cultural ideas, rather than products. The workplace is littered with warning signs about offending the believers. There is no escaping the cult of progressive beliefs.

People on the Left can avoid almost all counter-programming. Normal people are naturally polite and non-confrontational. As soon as they learn that Sarah from accounting is a woke believer, word goes forth to avoid talking current events with Sarah or her friends. On the other hand, if a normal person dead names Barbara, formerly known as Robert, Sarah and her coevals will be all over the poor guy, demanding he be hurled into the void for intolerance.

This tendency toward politeness has the perverse effect of providing social proof to the people in these subcultures. The guy getting thrown into the void must deserve his fate as no one defends him, thus his crime is validated. On the other hand, the lack of pushback from the people around them, plus the intense loyalty of the people inside the subculture, is daily confirmation. There is no social cost to holding extreme ideas so the incentives to holding them are unchecked.

Compounding this is a poverty of information inside these movements. Since the leaders are never exposed to scrutiny, their ideas are never tested. In an environment of conformity, showing any doubt about the ideas risks a loss of status inside the group, so no one dares question anything. In the rare occasion when the members confront someone who directly challenges their belief, it is as if the person is questioning the very nature of reality. There must be something wrong with them.

This leads to the sort of performative confrontation we saw in the Senate between Josh Hawley and Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges. To normal people, the professor came of as obnoxious and unbalanced. To the people in the subculture, she heroically defended the one true faith against the violent attacks of a bigot. In other words, their brief confrontations with reality are quickly turned into confirmation. The normal feedback loop is warped by their general isolation.

All of this explains the increasing weirdness of the Left and the intensity of belief, but it does not explain the nastiness. Fifty years ago, progressives were just as committed to their agenda as they are today, but back then they were prepared to debate anyone in public on their issues. Today, the Left is trying hard to purge anyone from the public square who is not enthusiastic for their cause. Fifty years ago, the Left said you had to be open minded. Today, an open mind is violence.

The most likely reason for this is the focus of belief has shifted from the material world to the spiritual realm. In the 1980’s, lefty was all about economics. Progressivism was a material cause, not a cultural one. Today, the Left does not care about economics or the material wellbeing of people. In fact, they seem to think the material wellbeing of people is a danger to their cause. The evolving assault on food production in the name of Gaia is looking like the actions of a suicide cult.

There is the key to the nastiness. Radical politics has always had a religious vibe because ideology is a secular replacement for religion. Instead of God providing authority to the beliefs, it is the will of the people or the tides of history. Until this age, ideology was rooted in the material world. The door through which mankind would enter paradise was economic relations. Today, the door is cultural relations. Once all cultural barriers are removed, everyone is free to fulfill their potential.

The old ideology of the Left had a tangible vision. They thought that in the future, a man would be able to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night. He would be free to live as he chose because his material wellbeing would be secure. The new religion offers an image of the present like a haunted house, in which the monsters are normal people. How can you be a happy warrior when you imagine yourself surrounded by spiritual enemies?

What we may be seeing is the end of ideology. Ideology is a new thing in human history, which means it has a beginning and therefore an end. This great replacement for religion as the set of shared societal beliefs may be in an end phase. The reason it is so nasty and violent is the same reason a trapped animal is nasty and violent. Suicide cults choose death over disbelief. This last ideology is looking to destroy this fallen world rather than give up their beliefs.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The New Right And Old Enemies

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From a dissident perspective, the squabbles between the professional conservatives and their critics in what they are calling the New Right is like see something of a proof of dissident critiques of conservatism. Many of the charges levelled at the professional conservatives are borrowed, without attribution, from dissidents. The main charge, that conservatives have conserved nothing, was a mainstay of dissident discussion before Trump arrived to discredit the conservative establishment.

The term “New Right” itself is borrowed from the old alt-right. Back in 2016 when the alt-right was morphing into old school white nationalism, those not interested in going in that direction were labeled the alt-light. Guys like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobic started calling their thing the New Right as a way to add legitimacy to their activity on social media. Sohrab Ahmari appropriated the term and uses it to describe those criticizing institutional conservatism.

Putting that aside, the back and forth between various groups is useful in understanding what happened with American conservatism. If there is going to be some new force that rises up to challenge the status quo, it will need to avoid the errors made by conservatives in the last century. The debate also provides an avenue for understanding the much larger trends that have led to this point. Ideas matter and it is the ebb and flow of ideas that animates history.

This post in the Claremont publication American Mind by Michael Anton is a good example of how ideas shape actions. Anton is responding to this post by someone calling himself Michael Watson. Those old enough to recall the purging of the paleocons by the National Review crowd will recognize the pattern. Instead of addressing the criticism coming from their right, the conservatives accuse the critics of being anti-Semitic and thus disqualified from the debate.

For his part, Anton responds in the predictable way. He endorses the central claim that any criticism of certain people is off limits, thus his job is to prove that his ideas do not fall into that bucket. The paleos went down this road back in the 1980’s when they insisted that criticizing Israel and Israeli influence in American foreign policy was not an attack on Jews. The neocons were undeterred and paid off enough conservatives, primarily Bill Buckley, to make the charge stick.

For those interested, Bill Buckley produced a special edition of National Review to condemn the paleos. He then turned it into a book. No doubt that American Enterprise, Heritage and other conservative money machines bought skids of the book as a reward for his efforts. Here is a transcript of Buchanan being interviewed on PBS about the charges levelled against him. Thirty years on and we see the same tricks being used by institutional conservatism to guard their right.

Interestingly, Anton makes no mention of the fact that Watson is a member of the neoconservatism cult. He is the associate director of the Center for the Future of Liberal Society at the Hudson Institute. For those interested in the deep state theory of everything, their wiki page is a cornucopia of material. For those interested in anti-Semitism, it reads like something from Kevin MacDonald. It is a good example of how relentless pursuit of group interest can easily look like conspiracy.

Anton has his reasons for avoiding the elephant in the room, but the elephant is at the heart of the debate. Neoconservatism has never made any sense as a subset of Anglo-Conservatism, as its primary focus is international. Conservatism is the elevation of the near over the far, the local over the distant. The singular focus of neoconservatism is the ancient enemies of the Jewish people, both near and far. Given the lack of anti-Semites locally, it is obsessed with distant enemies from the past.

The temptation is to hang all of this on the Jews, but the fact is neoconservatism has become a weird subculture that revolves around the concept of Israel. Many of the biggest neocons are not Jewish. Watson is obviously not Jewish. Bill Buckley was obviously not Jewish. Large swaths of the Evangelical subculture are obsessed with supporting Israel at the expense of everything. Since the Cold War, this subculture has driven conservative politics, right into oblivion.

For this reason, it is easy to see why many on the so-called New Right are loath to take on the neocons. They have a lot of money and they lack a soul. They will say the nastiest things about anyone who crosses them. Taking on a well-heeled collection of sociopaths with institutional power is dangerous. The trouble is, there is no air for a “new right” until the Right is purged of this pestilence. Neoconservatism has to be read out of politics in general, not just right-wing politics.

There are plenty of easy targets in the neocon space. Thirty years ago, neoconservatism was run by smart and clever men. Today it is populated with cranks and crazies who are easy to mock. More important, their schemes have resulted in an evolving economic and political disaster. Pinning the economic war against Russia on the neocons is easy money. The New Right would be wise to borrow a trick from Saul Alinsky and make the neocons own the Ukraine disaster.

Of course, this comes to the other elephant in the room. Conservatism is a business and the neocons have a near lock on the flow of money. They control the billion-dollar think tank racket. They control access to big donors. The reason that First Things continues to publish a nut job like George Weigel is money. His war mongering lunacy and bigotry is out of step with the site, but institutional conservatism likes him so he is tolerated in order to avoid offending the money men.

The golden rule says that the man with the gold makes the rules and that is the problem that any alternative to institutional conservatism faces. Either it accepts poverty as the price for political commitment or it builds a parallel funding mechanism. Whether or not the New Right understands this is unclear. The only way to achieve the latter is to take Alinsky’s advice and focus on the problem, personalize it and then polarize it, forcing people to pick sides, thus neutralizing it.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Managerial Morality

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Note: There is a new post up on both Substack and SubscribeStar. It appears there are lots of people on Substack who would never sign up for SubscibeStar and plenty of people on SubscribeStar who have no interest in moving to Substack. Green door content will be posted on both so pick your poison.

In the classic comedy, The Jerk, there is a scene in which the main character, played by Steve Martin, is in court. He is being sued because the invention that made him rich is supposedly causing everyone to go cross-eyed. He invented a thing to go on the bridge of glasses that prevents them from falling forward when you look down. In the scene, Martin looks around and sees that everyone in the court, including the judge and the jury, are cross-eyed like the people suing him.

This is what Elon Musk is going to face in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor when his case against Twitter goes to trial. That assumes it ever gets to a trial, as there is a good chance his lawyers see the writing on the wall long before that point and there is some sort of settlement. The Twitter legal team features a former chief judge from the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. No doubt there are others with connections to the small club that is the Delaware bench.

Like the Steve Martin character in that movie, Musk is about to learn that the laws and procedures do not matter. What matters is who decides. Every judge on the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor was put there by a politician. Those politicians were selected for their loyalty to a system that many deny exists. That system is the managerial system that governs America. You do not get into office with a chance to wield real power unless you are trusted by the system.

System is probably not the best word for what we are seeing. It is more like a mindset, a set of shared beliefs. The judge in the Twitter case, Kathaleen McCormick, will look out at the players and see that Musk is not her sort. He is not the type of person she thinks should be a winner in this world. She thinks this because everyone she knows thinks this about Musk. She may not be able to say why she thinks Musk is a threat to our democracy, but she is sure of it.

It was not always this way for Musk. He was once the darling of the managerial class, celebrated in popular culture as a modern day Thomas Edison. He was serving Gaia with his electric cars and hyper loops. His battery plants would magically allow us to stop raping Mother Earth for fossil fuels. His reward would be to one day travel the stars in his rocket ships. Musk was the way to the glorious future. When he spoke out against Twitter, he suddenly transformed into the terrible past.

This is what stumps people about managerialism. There was no official pronouncement from the leader of the managers. The supreme leader of managerialism did not read out a fatwa against Elon Musk. There is not even an anonymous memo circulating that says Musk is now on the proscribed list. It is a thing that just happened. One day, people with power were showering Musk with your money. Then all of a sudden, they all agreed that Musk was a threat to our democracy.

Another example of the managerial mindset is in this story about the law firm that won the recent gun case in the Supreme Court. The two lawyers who won the case were met with a termination letter after their victory. The law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, represents the most important people in the most important matters. There is a revolving door between Kirkland & Ellis and the Department of Justice. Former AG Bill Bar was a Kirkland man, as were many on his team.

Why is Kirkland & Ellis dropping second amendment cases? No one has made an official announcement on the issue. The attorneys who won the gun case stated that they were told the firm was dropping their gun clients. No one came to the partners of Kirkland & Ellis and made them an offer they could not refuse. They simply decided that their conscience could no longer allow them to handle these cases. Then they were celebrated for it by their friends down at the club.

This is the first domino. All of the other big forms will drop second amendment litigation because they will all be struck by the same crisis of conscience. Much the same has happened in the insurance industry. Insurers refused to do business with the National Rifle Association. Many banks have also joined the boycott. Again, there was no memo sent out from the secret lair in the hollowed out volcano. No one is forcing these big players to do this. They just think it is right.

It is one of things the paleos got wrong about managerialism. Perhaps wrong is too strong a word for it. More like they did not anticipate it. Burnham, a former communist, focused on the material aspects. He never addressed the culture of managerialism that was evolving along with the managerial system. Later paleos started to approach this topic, but they never fully embraced the idea that this class that rules over American society has reached class consciousness.

That class consciousness is not simply an awareness of their position with regards to economic and cultural relations. It is a moral community now. To be in the managerial class requires accepting a set of beliefs about what is right and wrong. Good people accept climate change. Bad people are deniers. Good people think guns are bad, while the bad people talk about their second amendment rights. The good people saw Trump as a threat to our democracy. The bad people voted for him.

This is what Musk faces in the Delaware Court of Chancery Chancellor. He may have the facts on his side with regards to the fake accounts. He may have the law on his side with regards to the terms of the deal. He has all the money in the world, which should count for a lot. None of that may matter as the people making the decision have all decided that he is a bad guy. Like every issue for the managerial class, Musk is now a moral signifier. Where you stand on him is where you stand on everything.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Questioning Reality

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There is a growing sense that there is a crisis in science, with science being broadly defined to include the soft sciences. The reproducibility crisis, as pointed out by the statistician W. M. Briggs, is close to universal. Across the academy, there is a plague of faulty and fraudulent studies being produced. Worse yet, the systems for controlling fraud seem to be encouraging it. Peer review now means nothing more than politically acceptable in the soft science fields.

Briggs offers one reason for what is happening. He notes that engineering is not having this problem. The reason is the bridge has to actually work as predicted or the engineers suffer a heavy price. Engineering is not science, but it relies upon the sciences to produce practical things. Those practical things must hold up to reality, which controls what comes out of engineering as accepted theory. In other words, everything in engineering gets tested against reality.

The academy, on the other hand, never has to face reality this way. Even in the hard sciences, reality avoidance is common. Theoretical physics has entered a world that is beyond the ability to test. Math is still math, but much of what is done is purely speculative or requires unproven assumptions. In the soft sciences, the rules have collapsed entirely and most of what comes out is narrative framing. The “science” is limited to providing cover for current fads.

Another reason for the crisis in the sciences is modeling. Anyone who has worked with models knows that the model maker can quickly become a god. He creates a model of the world based on what he would like it to be rather than as a reflection of the bit of reality he is trying to understand. Of course, model makers often have a boss who needs to be pleased. That boss could be in a corner office or the boss could be an angry mob of blue-haired harpies patrolling campus.

The point is you can make models do anything. The model maker is like a script writer in that he can make the rules do what he needs to reach his desired end. Bad script writers use clunky plot devices to solve problems for their characters. Bad model makers create a set of rules and data selection methods to close the gap between theory and reality. Since the model will never be tested against reality in the soft sciences, bad model makers can quickly become stars.

Here is where the question of causality comes into play. Is the corruption of the academic domain a symptom of larger societal trends? Has the steady decline of standards in society dragged down the academy or has the corruption of institutions subverted society, including the people in the sciences? Is it simply the natural product of multiculturalism, which needs narratives to hold it together, due to the lack of natural social bonds found in homogenous societies?

You can model this many ways, depending upon how you as the model maker feel about these topics. The last bit is a clue to the problem. The rise of narratives in social discourse tracks with the rise in diversity. Read anything from a century ago and it is free of the narrative structures we find common today. A story about an athlete was mostly the facts about his life. He was not cast as a character in a drama about social justice or the fight against exploitation.

The ubiquity of narratives gets lost in the flood of them. There is a real war going in Europe and the political class speaks of nothing but narratives. They have meetings followed by press conferences to inform the public on the status of their latest narratives and the battle of narratives surrounding the war. Meanwhile, the Russian army slowly grinds down the Ukrainian army. The same can be said of the energy crisis, which is ignored in favor of narratives about climate change.

You get the sense that the people talking about their narratives and messaging, a subset of narrative framing, think that if they get enough people to believe their story, reality will bend to that story. Put another way, if they can model reality with a set of rules and assumption in such a way that only their preferred conclusions are possible, then reality will have no choice but to comply. Like the model makers, the narrative creators have become gods in their creations.

This does not answer the question of causality, but it is clear that the problem of modeling in the sciences has a related problem in the public realm. In elite society, the focus is no longer on the things that are true, like the axioms of mathematics, but rather on the things that are true within the context of accepted rules, like the equity in the distribution of advanced degrees in the sciences. One is true whether you believe it or not, while the other is only true if you accept the assumptions.

A century ago, smart people understood this difference. Models of realty had to account for those things that are axioms of the universe. Over that time a steady shift has gone on where objective reality is excluded from the discussion of the narrative and at the same time, the narrative challenges objective reality. Put another way and getting back to the Briggs post, models are no longer tested against reality, but reality is being tested against the models.

This helps explain why supposedly serious academics sit in front of congressional committees and claim to not know the definition of a woman. They are not simply clinging to fashionable politics. At the heart of it is the claim that reality simply does not comport with the new model of society, so we have to dismiss that bit of reality, in this case biological sex. Just as the model makers can feel like a god, the narrative makers believe they can bring reality to heel.

There is a lot here that deserves further examination, but it is clear that the crisis in science correlates with the crisis in the West. The causality is not clear, but what is clear is that what passes for the smart fraction is no longer willing or able to accept that there are things that are true regardless of opinion. They are questioning the very basics of reality by claiming there is no difference between relations of ideas, their models and narratives, and matters of fact and observable reality.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Culture of Deceit

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A recent Gallup survey reports that confidence in institutions has fallen to an all time low among Americans. The only institutions trusted by a majority of people are small business, the military and the police. The last two are dropping quickly, which makes sense given the behavior of these institutions. A military full of drag queens and a police force siding with barbarians does not inspire confidence. Faith in small business simply reflects the fact that people continue to trust good people.

The normal reaction from the usual suspects is to blame their favorite bogeymen for the collapse in social trust. They will not use the term “social trust” as that risks entering a forbidden zone, but that is the topic. Trust in institutions is a proxy for social trust, how much people trust the people they do not know in their community. A big driver of the collapse in social trust is a generation of open borders. When your neighborhood is full of strange aliens, it is hard to trust anything or anyone.

As is often the case, the flood of aliens into your neighborhood is a symptom of a much bigger problem that lies at the heart of it. The people in charge simply cannot stop lying, which reflects on the institutions they control. The obvious example is the news media, which is approaching single digits in the Gallup poll. The fact that anyone trusts the media is an argument against universal suffrage. Many people, at least ten percent based on the survey, are too stupid to vote.

Putting that aside, the media has become a torrent of lies. Since the very beginning, the media has been partisan. In colonial times, newspapers were known to be advocates for one faction or another. This is what you should get in a society with a free press, free speech and a culture of debate. The partisans in the media make their case for their cause, often cherry picking the facts that work best for them. This is no different from what happens in a courtroom or a business meeting.

That is a vastly different thing than what we see today. Only a complete idiot trusts anything he reads or hears in the media. The starting assumption is not only that the facts are wrong, but the people behind them know they are wrong. It is not partisan zeal or human error, but a deliberate effort to deceive. The people endlessly going on about disinformation are the primary source of disinformation. They either promote the lies of government or they create their own lies.

This story about the war in the New York Times is a good example. Some version of this story has been floating around since the start of the war. It was cooked up by the usual suspects who have been championing war with Russia. The central claim is they have inside access to Putin’s inner circle is obviously false. His one source is not an independent Russian analysist, but a paid anti-Russian activist. The source makes this clear in his own bio.

The author of the New York Times piece is a notorious liar who runs interference for the neocon cult. Despite being a proven liar, he maintains a spot at the main news site in the empire. Certainly, his bosses know he is an activist and a liar. They keep him on because he tells the lies they like to promote. The point is, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying. No wonder trust has dropped to zero.

The media is an easy example. They are simply mockingbirds mimicking the sounds from the institutions they allegedly cover. Notice trust in medicine has dropped over the last year, which should surprise no one. They willingly went along with the Covid farce and the vaccine mandates. When people raised reasonable questions about the side effects of the vaccine, Big Medicine was right there to tell the media that those doubters were hooligans and troublemakers.

The fact that those concerns were legitimate and proven correct is a big reason people are now more skeptical of medicine. More important, telling the truth would have served the interest of medicine. Medicine is nothing but trade-offs between the risk of disease and the risks that come with the cure. Chemotherapy is terrible, but it is better than dying from cancer. Instead of being honest about this, they chose to lie which suggests these are people who simply enjoy lying.

No one expects the institutions to be honest all the time. Men are not angels and as long as the institutions are controlled by men, they will have all of the vices that are part of the human condition. What is new in this age is the culture of lying that has taken hold of the managerial class. They seem to take pleasure in lying to the general public, as if it is a status marker. If you cook up some outlandish whopper you get points in the social credit system of the ruling class.

In this regard, it makes sense why they selected Biden for president. In addition to his stupidity, Biden is a notorious liar. A big part of his affable simpleton routine while in the senate was his penchant for telling outlandish whoppers. Of course, he was always the hero of his tall tales. He is a man who has done nothing useful so he made up for it with glorious tales about himself. In a system increasing defined by a culture of deceit, it makes sense to have a notorious liar as the figurehead.

There is a cost to lying. The drop in trust is one consequence. The main cost is that a society low in social trust is harder to maintain than one with high trust. The cost of keeping America together is reaching a tipping point. Then there is the transaction cost of everyday life. In a world where no one trusts anyone, the cost of doing even simple things goes up. A big part of the drop in the standard of living is due to the collapse in social trust due to the constant lying.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Deep State Interface

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One of the weird things about this phase of liberal democracy has been the normalization of conspiracy theories. Thirty years ago, everyone, regardless of their political inclinations or what they thought of the other side, dismissed the claims of the conspiracy community. At best the deep state conspiracy was a plot device for a fantastical Hollywood script. At worst, it was a sign that the person may be struggling with mental illness.

Today most people think there is a deep state. In fact, the phrase deep state has become a normal part of discourse. In conventional politics it can mean anything from the leaders of both parties to nefarious forces controlling the institutions. George Soros is part of the deep state, even though the deep state is supposed to be a shadowy group of people unknown to the general public. Even secret societies need to be personalized, so the deep state has many public faces.

You do not have to line your clothes with aluminum foil to wonder if there is not something going on off camera that explains what is happening. For example, the berserk effort by Western government to “decarbonize” the West looks like a suicide pact by a collection of cult leaders. How can these people really think it is good idea to shut down Dutch farming to save Gaia? How does returning Germany to using wood for heat make any sense? There must be something else.

Of course, we all know that there is no such thing as a deep state but it is not hard to see why people are open to it. It is sort of like the concept of space-time. That is, it is an invention of mankind to help explain the universe. The fact that it does not exist is not really important because it allows physics to explore the universe. At some point it will be abandoned for a deeper understanding. The same may be true of the deep state in that it works for now, even though it is not real.

For example, when you see an ad for something like plant based milk you are supposed to think, “why yes, I would prefer this over actual milk.” Then your brain reminds you that we have no need for plant-based milk. We have plenty of actual milk. The reason we have lots of real milk is we invented refrigeration so that we no longer have to rely upon things like almond milk. That is when that concept of the deep state fills in the blank and you begin to wonder what they are up to with this.

This is when someone chimes in about lactose intolerance, but you do not build a church for Easter Sunday and you do not build an industry for people who cannot digest milk enzymes. Similarly, you do not invest billions on meat made from twigs and bugs that “tastes almost like real meat!” Similarly, you do not bother inventing eggs made from grass that are almost like real eggs. These are solutions in search of a problem, perhaps a problem contemplated by the deep state.

Now, solutions in search of a problem are not new. The e-book was supposed to replace the real book, but there was never a need to replace the book. It was the result of two thousand years of evolution starting with the early Christians. By the 20th century it was the ideal solution to distributing the written word. That did not stop smart people from pushing the idea of the e-book. Innovation is as much about bad ideas and it is the few good ideas that are genuine improvements on the old ideas.

In the present age, the managerial class plays an outsized role in picking winners and losers, so there is money to be made exploiting their hopes and fears. This has always been the genius of Elon Musk. His projects all tap into the boutique beliefs of the managerial class. He is a futurist selling futuristic solutions to the problems of the future to people haunted by the prospect they will not see the glorious future. They are willing to spend your money to achieve their dreams.

Klaus Schwab is working the same grift. The World Economic Forum is a crackpot idea that appeals to the vanity of the managerial class. It did not get much traction until he was able to hook a few billionaires to attend his event. That was the validation needed to turn the thing into Burning Man for the managerial elite. They go to be seen with their analogs in the other parts of the managerial class. The deep state vibe is part of the appeal to people who spend their days in committees.

What has happened over the last thirty years since the end of the Cold War is the Western managerial class has evolved both a class consciousness and a messianic religion that binds them together. It is why they have become so paranoid about the people over whom they rule. A big part of being a Cloud Person is thinking about how much you disdain the Dirt People. Displaying your cloudiness is often just expressing your contempt for dirtiness.

This is why the concept of the deep state has caught on. From the perspective of the Dirt People, it looks like there is a secret set of hands guiding the movement of the clouds and the people inhabiting them. When all of a sudden, every chattering skull on television is chanting “keev” you cannot help but think it is scripted. The ads for food made from bugs make a lot more sense when you imagine a secret cabal plotting to kill off farming to please Gaia.

Like space-time, the concept of the deep state works because it allows for the further exploration of the environment in which we find ourselves. The fact that it is not a real thing, at least not in the way it is used, does not matter right now. Blaming Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates for the current crisis is fine. Waging war on the people profiting from the system is almost as good as attacking the system itself. For most people, raging against the deep state is comforting.

Just as the reality of the universe lies beyond the interface of space-time, the reality of the managerial state lies beyond the deep state. It is not a collection of super villains controlling the world. It is a system that produces the super villains it needs to control the population over which it rules. If Klaus Schwab did not exist, the system would simply invent him just as physics invented space-time. These bad guys are a necessary interface to the managerial system.

There is another aspect to the deep state interface. It is comforting. The people invited to the soiree’s like WEF and Davos get to think they are influencers, shaping the mind of the deep state actors. The Cloud People can be sure there is a powerful force guiding their hand. The Dirt People get the comfort of knowing there is a rational actor behind the movement of the clouds. Perhaps he is amenable to reason or perhaps he can one day be defeated by the Dirt People.

Maybe like space-time, the deep state interface will be useful in breaking the system open to expose its internal workings. On the other hand, it may come to be a great impediment to understanding the world. There are some who think space-time has inhibited our ability to understand the universe. Regardless, the deep state does not exist, but it is useful. Like electric cars and milk made from bugs, it has a purpose, even if we cannot be sure whose ends it serves.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Death Of Twitter

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Note: My Taki post is on different topic from today’s post. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. It is also on Substack for paying members there. Going forward, I will post the pay-per-view material on both sites. Some people prefer Substack and other people prefer Subscribestar. There was also a rare Saturday post, which was going to be a Taki post but I changed my mind.

The Elon Musk versus Twitter drama is now heading to the litigation phase, as Musk has decided to pull out of the purchase agreement. The usual idiots have taken to social media to offer their hot takes on the issue. Critics of Musk think he made the great blunder they have been predicting. The far-left thinks this is a victory, when in fact it is the death knell for the platform. It is this fact that led Musk to pull out of the deal and take the issue into the litigation phase.

The basics of the dispute are simple. Twitter claims Musk is the breaching party and they intend to force him to abide by the agreement. They argue that they have given him everything he has asked. That means they will go into a Delaware court and ask a judge to compel compliance. Musk will tell the same court that Twitter is in breach of contract for falling to disclose information about their user base, which they are required to do as part of the sale.

No one really knows if the court can actually force Musk to go through with the purchase agreement and buy Twitter. In contract disputes, courts rarely compel one party to perform against their will. Instead, a monetary judgment is levied against the breaching party. In most cases, a settlement is reached before the court has a chance to decide the issue. In contract cases, litigation is a part of the process of negotiating the final settlement of the dispute.

In most contracts, especially complex ones like this, there is a liquidating damages clause that spells out the cost of breaking the agreement. In this particular case, we know there is a liquidating damages clause. Both parties agreed to a billion dollar fee if they break the agreement. There are conditions and the interpretation of those conditions will be part of the litigation. Musk has not offered to pay the billion and Twitter is not asking to be paid the billion so far.

All of this will make for good drama, but it obscures the fact that Twitter is a dead man walking, regardless of the outcome. That reality was made clear when Twitter agreed to the Musk offer. They were under no obligation to accept his offer. The board could have refused the deal. Management initially tried to add a poison pill in order to make it difficult for Musk to buy shares but relented after consulting with the board and the largest shareholders. They wanted this deal.

Musk said he made his best and final offer. He was a large share holder and had access to their public filings but also access to their management. In other words, he knew the peak value of the company and made a premium offer. Twitter had been saying their target price was $70 per share, but they quickly accepted the offer from Musk at $54 per share. In other words, everyone concerned knew that the $54 price was the best Twitter would ever get from anyone.

For its part, the market never bought the $70 claim or the $54 offer. The stock ticked up on news of the offer, but then traded down to below its prior level as news of the agreement got into the public domain. The day before Musk cancelled the deal, you could buy shared of Twitter at 60% of what Musk agreed to pay. The fact that no one was doing this says that insiders smelled problems. They knew Musk would never follow through on the $54 offer.

One reason for the skepticism is that Twitter does not make money and is unlikely to ever make money. The platform is useless for advertising so its only source of income is selling user data. There are plenty of players in that market. The big fish are Google and Apple, who control the mobile market. Since most Twitter users operate on their mobile device, Twitter data is mostly phone data. In reality, Twitter is just a derivative data stream that is rooted in the mobile data streams.

The bigger issue for Twitter and all social media is the barrier to entry has collapsed and disaggregation is upon us. Gab has proven this. They not only have a stable platform that is better than Twitter, but it was done on a shoestring by one committed guy, in the face of massive resistance by the usual suspects. The future is bespoke platforms of like-minded users. People are looking to be free from the blue-check harpies who have ruined the large social media platforms.

Those who have been on-line since the early days saw this coming. It is part of a natural cycle on-line. The first bulletin boards were big central places. They gave way to small places of like-minded people. Usenet splintered into a million sub-channels once it was possible to do so. The first message board communities were much like the big social media sites, but then over-zealous mods ruined them and the sites splintered into a million small communities.

This is why Twitter remains eager to sell to Musk. They have an inside view of what is happening and they know his offer is the best offer. In fact, they know half his offer is the best offer, which is why they will seek to cut a deal. Twitter is basically worthless as they own little in the way of unique infrastructure and their core product is now a commodity anyone can create. Their main offer is access to emotionally unstable people who want to lecture the rest of us.

Elon Musk may be a monorail salesman, but he is an extremely talented one who has worked the most sophisticated marks in the world. He is also the richest man on earth which means he owns the best legal talent on earth. He did not choose to enter the litigation phase because it is a sure loser. He understands that Twitter will have to disclose things in court that they would prefer to keep private. The fact that he is boasting about this on Twitter is a clue to his thinking.

Many assume this is just a way for Musk to lower the price, but he may be using this phase to bleed the company into bankruptcy. His people looked at the user data and probably saw that Twitter is past its peak. Like centralized internet platforms before it, Twitter is about to die from a thousand cuts. If anyone can put up a similar site for people of the same mind, then what is the point of Twitter? Musk can wait out the answer to that question in a Delaware court.

The fact is, Twitter should never have existed in the first place. It was just a novel implementation of the same old idea that has been with us since the dawn of the internet age. The dream of the virtual agora where the demos can debate the issues of the day and find a consensus has been tried many times. In every case, the demos discovered they did not like it and moved back into their own private warrens and subcultures to be free of the masses.

Familiarity breeds contempt and what the big socials have done is make everyone familiar with everyone else. The solution is what was there all along. The various communities build fences between themselves and the others. That way they do not have to be reminded of their unpleasantness. They can also pretend that those people on the other side are good people who mean well. Good fences not only make good neighbors they make human society possible.

This is why Twitter and the other big socials are doomed. Twitter is the most ridiculous and silly, so it will be the first to go. Facebook sees the writing on the wall, which is why they are betting on their virtual realty scheme. Sites like Instagram are just public bulletin boards that offer little interaction, so maybe they stagger on, but the days of big social media platforms are ending. The looming death of Twitter is just the first big step into the inevitable demise of the concept.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Test Of Strategy

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In sports, the final test is the game or the match in which the two sides compete with one side coming out victorious. All the practice and preparation are finally tested on the field against a real opponent. Similarly, war is the final test between nations competing with one another on the world stage. All the theory and strategy that each side was sure would work is put to the test.

This is what we are seeing in the Ukraine. Since 2014, NATO counties have been arming and equipping the Ukrainian army for a war with Russia. For about the same time, the Russians have been thinking about war with the West. Preparation for fighting Ukraine started only a few years ago, but it has been clear to Russian leaders that conflict with the West was coming at some point.

Getting back to the sports analogy, NATO, which is America for all practical purposes, has been the reigning champion. Since the Cold War it has been assumed that no military could challenge the US military. The combination of technology, experience and economic resources made it possible for American to take the fight to any place on the planet and fight in the enemy’s backyard.

That last bit is an important part of the formula. If you have to fight a war on your home territory, winning comes with a fair bit of losing. Even before industrial war, defending your own lands meant disruption to your economy and culture. Fighting on the other guy’s turf is always preferred. Winning is all upside and you can mitigate the cost of losing by withdrawing before total defeat.

This was the formula for destroying Russia. The West, which again is the Global American Empire, would wage a proxy war on the borders of Russia. This would force the Russians to exhaust themselves defending the border. Eventually, the war would move onto Russian territory. Of course, economic war in this age is presumed to be one way to bring the war home to the civilian population.

From the very start, the collective West has operated under the assumption that the Russians could not sustain combat activity in the Ukraine for long. According to all the analysis, the Russians lacked the manpower, the money and the supplies to fight for more than a few months. Many analysts claimed that the war would last but a few weeks before the Russians ran out of material to fight.

Here we are five months into the war and that last bit of analysis has proved to be completely wrong. A study by the Royal United Services Institute, a venerable British institution, finds that the Russians have more than enough industrial capacity to maintain this war for as long as it takes. In fact, the evidence suggests that they have much more capacity than is currently being used.

Last weekend, the Russian army along with militia forces took control of the cities of Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk in the Luhansk region of the Donbas. This ensures the quick end to the Ukrainian occupation of that region. There will be some cleaning up before the final push to destroy the rest of the Ukrainian army currently hunkered down in the towns of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Getting back to the sports analogy, the much smaller force taking the fight to the larger force in this war is like the smaller man going on the offensive against the bigger champion in a boxing match. The Russian expeditionary force is less that two hundred thousand men, while the Ukrainian army is half a million. Then there is the fact that the Ukrainians were armed and trained by the collective West.

There is a lot to be said about the technical aspects of the war and how the Russians have been able to defeat the Ukrainians. There is no question that the Russians, after some early missteps, have been better tactically than the West. The Ukrainians have been doing what American commanders have instructed, but the Russians seem to have done their homework and anticipated these moves.

All of the particulars are interesting on their own and will get analyzed in due time, but the larger issue is what matters now. The West went into this fight, in fact they precipitated the fight, sure that their strategy was superior. The war in Ukraine was going to be the proof of concept. The forces of democracy, trained by the heroes of democracy, would triumph over the opponents of democracy.

Right now, the going is slow for the Russians due to the fact they are meticulously removing an army from industrial areas in large population zones. In the next month, the battle will move to the open country where Russians air power and mobile units will come into their own. Instead of artillery battles, it will be one army demolishing the remnant of another army in the open field.

In other words, to get back to the sports analogy, we are about to enter the part of the fight where it is clear the champion is in serious trouble. This is when the announcers say something about how the champion was not prepared for the fight or that the opponent came in with a better strategy. Barring some miracle, the underrated challenger is going to score a huge upset over the champion.

This is not a boxing match. What the summer and autumn will bring is a flood of refugees from Ukraine into the West. The Germans are already facing a Turnip Winter thanks to energy shortages. The Poles are running out of money and patience with regards to the refugee situation. The collective West is facing a severe economic crisis as a result of the war against Russia.

Getting back to where we started, this war is the great test of the New World Order that Western elites have been boasting about at swanky conferences. It is not about Ukraine, but about the new way of running society. This was supposed to be the great leap forward into international managerialism, rule by the global best. Instead, it is looking like a global disaster caused by the West.

In sports, coaches, trainers and strategists whose teams and athletes fail in competition get fired from their jobs. It remains to be seen whether the people behind this debacle will get fired. History says they will learn nothing from this debacle. Like the restored Bourbons, Western elites forget nothing and learn nothing. On the other hand, if things get bad enough, they may not have a choice in the matter.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.