Abracadabra

Posted on December 20, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Instead of the normally optimistic post, this week is a look at the court fights that lie ahead. No Sunday podcast this week, but I do have a post up on the Ray Epps story. This insurrection show trial could turn out to be an amusing and embarrassing debacle for the regime.

One of the striking features of public discourse in a liberal democracy is the narrowness of language used by people with speaking roles. This narrowness of language reflects the narrowness of acceptable thought. The people allowed on stage signal their conformity to the hive mind by using the approved language. This means using the popular words and phrases of the moment. It is why the mass media resembles fireflies at dusk, blinking at one another as if they are coordinated.

A ridiculous example was the aftermath of the 2010 election when Barak Obama came out and said his team had been “shellacked” in the election. This is an old fashioned term that used to be common in sports. The media, unfamiliar with sports and sports metaphors, spastically repeated it. They were sure their cult leader has just invented the term and they seemed to be sure it was designed to cure their pain. For weeks they found a way to insert the term in every story.

It was not just monkey-see-monkey-do with them. There was a strong odor of incense about how they kept repeating it. This mysterious new word was like a sound in the darkness telling one another of their presence, The repeating of it was a way to move past the disconfirmation of the election. Instead of facing the fact that Obama was not Black Jesus, they reassured one another that their beliefs were valid. The use of the leader’s new word was a form of re-confirmation.

We are seeing something similar happening in the aftermath of the failure to pass Biden’s big spending bill. The term Build Back Better has become a bizarre abracadabra phrase for the true believers. They are sure that every problem can be solved with Build Back Better. The far-left activists who chased Senator Kyrsten Sinema into a toilet were chanting “Build Back Better” as if they thought the phrase would magically transform her into a believer.

Senator Joe Manchin refused the Build Back Better sacrament over the weekend, thus scuttling the bill for this year. The result has been a flurry of incantations in the media using the term to mean everything. Here we have CNN explaining how the faithful were let down by the running dog heretic Joe Manchin. The phrase is used half a dozen times but there is no effort to explain what it means. Everyone knows that it means the final push to promised last stage of history.

Here we have a story telling us the long dark winter Joe Biden has been promising for two years is finally upon us. The reason is the Build Back Better plan was defeated by the forces of darkness. Goldman Sachs is now saying the economy, like the earth when Persephone returns to the underworld, will now go into a period of mourning over the loss of Build Back Better. How or why this will happen is not discussed, because to do so would possibly offend the gods further.

The fact that the bill itself is meaningless gibberish that only exists as a concept adds to its mystery. Since no one can point to the text and find fault, because the text is just word salad at this point, makes it unassailable. This allows the believers to cast onto it all of their hopes and dreams. Build Back Better is just a catchphrase to mean the great leap forward into the last stage of history. As a result, the believers are baffled as to why Manchin opposes this unalloyed good.

The fight over this bill is a good reminder that conservative explanations for left-wing behavior are mostly wrong. If they were about money and power, they would have done something different here. The fact that they have all of the money and power yet still engage in this ritualized behavior is another important point. The religious fervor over Build Back Better, the moralization of the slogan, suggests these people are acting from some sort of religious impulse rather than politics.

The root of that impulse is the assumption that once everyone agrees on the morality of something, the solution is self-evident and beyond debate. It is why they cannot accept that Manchin and others could be right that the trillions in new money creation proposed by the believers could create terrible trade-offs. There can be no practical objections to the plan when the morality of it is settled. There must be something else at work, which is why they will turn Manchin into Trotsky.

Another aspect of this morality-politics dynamic is that politics is now a sign of moral ambiguity or worse, dissent from accepted morality. Logically, if politics ends when the morality is settled, the continuation of politics means the moral issues have not been settled or some oppose the settled morality for some reason. What lies behind the structure of the Build Back Better bill is to end politics by delegating what should happen in the legislature to the administrative state.

Put another way, what the Left seeks is an end to politics, but they are not interested in debating the morality. From their point of view, the moral issues are settled so the task now is to stamp out the remaining political resistance. Given the slim differences between the two parties, they are not mistaken. A big Republican win next November will probably mean the Build Back Better plan gets passed as a way to “unite the country after a contentious and divisive election”.

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The New Segregation

Posted on December 15, 2021 by thezman

Walk around in public and it is increasingly obvious that Americans now live in at least two parallel worlds. For the bare-faced, the masked are a strange and alien people who are starting to fade into the scenery. The weirdness of these people strapping amulets to their faces has faded and it is now just something to be ignored, along with the person wearing the amulet. In fact, the weird collection of beliefs that lie behind the bizarre face-gear are also fading into obscurity.

The mask is no longer about following directions, complying with authority, concerns over public health and so on. It is about membership in a parallel universe that occupies the same physical space as this universe. If you want to know what segregation in the South was really like, go to a grocery store. Jim Crow was mostly two groups of people operating under mostly the same rules but living psychologically apart from one another in the same public spaces.

The masked versus unmasked is just the physical manifestation of the new segregation in current year America. Behind the mask lies paranoia and fear about those not wearing the magic amulet. The bare-faced are Trump supporters, possibly even insurrectionists or white supremacists. They most certainly are not vaccinated and therefore carry the latest letter of the Greek alphabet. These are the people against whom the elect are chosen to wage the holy war.

It sounds insane, but it is a generous description of the people living in the parallel universe that is the Left in America. Theirs is a world of magic and miracles where dark forces are resisted by the forces of light. They cannot explain how this works, but they have plenty of examples. The massive tornadoes that hit the bad people in Trump country were the wrath of Gaia. She is angry over climate change so she sent another warning to the sinners.

Exactly no one in the Gaia cult can explain how any of this works, but that is not how religions work anyway. The rituals and incantations are simple ways for the believer to show she is a believer, without knowing the logic of the belief. The overlap between Gaia worshippers and Covidians is not an accident. Both of these are viewed as supernatural occurrences by the Left. It is why your vaccination status matters so much to them. They have been told it matters, so they believe it.

Behind those masks is not just fear of Gaia, but a general fear of mysterious forces operating in the universe. It is why the Russian collusion hoax still circulates among these same people. They were never able to explain how it works, but they just knew it because that is how they imagine the world works. That is where you see the parallel universes at play. In one universe, hoaxes get debunked and people move on while in the other they become part of the canon.

In the world of normal people, the great struggle of life is the great struggle over the small things like money, family and work. Behind the mask, the great struggle is the defense of democracy. There is a war on democracy waged by those who oppose democracy for some reason. The faithful need Joe Biden to take on the real enemies of democracy in order to save it. Of course, those who criticize Joe Biden, in his noble quest, are threatening democracy by weakening his resolve.

One interesting thing about this new religion is it is mostly a grab bag of old ideas put to less interesting ends. For example, the crazies now have their version of the Inquisition where they will torment suspected heretics. Mark Meadows has been named by the Inquisition and will be brought to justice. He is charged with using the Devil’s own language to direct the armies of Satan. The point of this Inquisition is to finally defeat Old Scratch himself, former president Donald Trump.

To normal people, this obsession with the January 6th protests is completely insane, but lots of people believe otherwise. Behind those masks you will find that many, maybe most, buy into the insurrection myth entirely. Just as their magic amulet is about being on the right side of history, the basket of boutique beliefs swirling around the managerial class are about picking sides in the great struggle. The “insurrection” has become a rallying cry for those covering their faces in public.

Stand around in a public place where you can see a lot of believers and think about something that lies at the heart of it all. Can our societies continue to function when a significant minority of people believe these insane things? What Covid has really done is move this question to the forefront by bringing these people out of the shadows and giving them constant reinforcement. Those magic amulets are not just warding off the evil spirits, but reinforcing their faith in the new religion.

For the last two years the normal portion of the population has been buoyed by the hope that this will all peter out eventually. The madness of the Trump obsession would go away once Biden was in office. The Covidians would move onto something else once the cost of their madness was too much for them. Wait long enough and things will return to normal. It is looking like they can remain irrational for as long as it takes to pull the roof down on all of us.

One of the forgotten bits of truth about the segregated South is that without outside intervention, the system would have carried on indefinitely. The talented ten percent of blacks grumbled about not getting access to the elites and white merchants grumbled about the restrictions on commerce, but most people found it workable. Contrary to the cartoon version of the period popular with the crazies, the system kept the peace and most people saw it as an acceptable compromise.

The lesson is that two different people can live together in peace even if the separation is just psychological or cultural. Perhaps this is where things are heading. There will be no return to normal. One group will walk around with their magic amulets on their faces while normal people simply ignore it and much of what they say. The masked will traffic in their conspiracy theories about insurrectionists and white supremacists, while everyone else gets on with the struggle of life.

Regime-ology

Posted on December 14, 2021 by thezman

Back in 2014, Rolling Stone published a story about an alleged rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s “A Rape on Campus” story was a bombshell story that became a national controversy. It seemed to confirm everything the Nth-wave feminists were saying about the scourge of white males raping white women on the college campus. All of the usual suspects rushed to the nearest outlet to display their outrage over the incident.

Of course, this later became known as the “Virginia Rape Hoax” as the story was completely fake. The only things about it that were true is the star of the story was a human who attended the university and the writer used her real name. Otherwise, the story was a total fabrication and a ridiculous one at that. Sensible people noticed huge problems with it from the start. The two big clues that it was fake were that it read like a bodice ripper and the villain was named Haven Monahan.

In retrospect, this story was a turning point for mass media. By the old rules, everyone involved would have been shamed out of the public eye. The writer, Sabrina Erdely, would have been drummed out of the profession. Jackie Coakley, the coed who was the fake victim, would have been destroyed by an angry media. Erdely faced no repercussions and still works in the media. Coakley was mostly ignored and has gone on with her life, not having suffered from it.

The news was always biased and lots of reporters fabricated stories to fill up their stories, but there was always risk to being a fabulist. Stephen Glass, the guy who cooked up legendary whoppers while at the New Republic was drummed out of the business and the reputation of the magazine was destroyed. Jayson Blair. the black New York Times reporter was fired for making up stories. Imagine a black reporter being fired today for anything, much less for slandering white people.

Prior to the Rolling Stone story, a reasonable person knew the media was biased toward left-wing causes and left-wing institutions. They would favor the Democrat over the Republican, for example. They would promote left-wing causes and ignore or dismiss right-wing issues. After the Rolling Stone hoax, the prudent person assumes that everything in the media is fake. The question is, what is possibly true and what is the agenda behind the proposed narrative.

In other words, reading the American media has taken on the same quality as reading the Soviet media in the Cold War. You read it like you read any piece of fiction in that you are looking for clues in the narrative to discovery the deeper meaning. Instead of Kremlinologists, Americans have to be regime-ologists. The regime media offers clues about what is going on behind the veil. Those clues help understand the workings of the inner party and what they are plotting.

Take this story in Yahoo News about a high-tension cloak and dagger affair that supposedly happened in Washington during the Trump years. The story has a female heroine named Ali Watkins, who is a strong independent female journalist working for the New York Times. It has a villain, a shady character named Jeffrey Rambo, who worked at a secretive Customs and Border Protection division. The two of them engage in a high stakes game of cat and mouse in the capital.

The story seems ridiculous and oddly familiar. The reason for that is it is ripped from the ham-fisted television shows about rogue government agencies. Of course, the main character is described like someone from female fantasy literature. Instead of the villain being named Haven Monahan, he is Jeffrey Rambo. The story does not describe him as having a thick New York accent or dropping from helicopters with a bayonet between his teeth, but you just know it happened!

There are some things about the story that are true, like the names of the two main characters, but the story is most assuredly fake. The first clue the story is made up is that this fantastic story is in Yahoo News, rather than the New York Times where the protagonist works. Instead, it is at a C-list outlet written by a nobody whose prior work was reporting on the FBI. Dumping these stories on nobody reporters is standard practice for the regime. It is part of the subterfuge.

Another clue is the main character. She is not the strong independent female journalist speaking truth to power. She is the tramp who was having sex with James Wolfe, the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee. He was busted for giving her information that she used in her stories. She denies it but this is not an issue in dispute, so we can add liar to the morals charges. Watkins at the time was in her mid-20’s and Wolfe was in his late-50’s.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Wolfe was the Security Director of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee for 29 years. This means he was one of a small number of people seeing the nation’s most sensitive intelligence data. In other words, he was a professional spook who knew the game. Most likely, in addition to getting some young flesh ,he was also using Watkins to peddle disinformation. This is not a new game between “young reporters” and old DC hands.

Using our regime-ology skills we quickly see that the drama of the story is mostly fake and intended to get attention. The real story is the FBI is peddling a story to the media that both damages another agency and helps their friendly media. They picked Jana Winter because she has nothing else going on, is desperate for a break and has been a willing stenographer in the past. She will not ask too many questions. Again, this is old hat in the game of media manipulation.

That raises the question as to why this story was planted by the FBI. There is the special prosecutor glacially investigating the Russian collusion hoax and the FBI’s role in promoting it. The Trump people did use the “rogue agency” in question to uncover the Wolfe-Watkins operation. It is possible Durham is using the same assets to investigate the FBI or allies. It could also be another smear job against Trump that will be later used in the campaign against him.

At this point, it is hard to know, but it is good practice in reading the media in order to tease out what is happening behind the veil of secrecy. Given the effort put into writing this whopper, it will come up again at some point. All we can know is there is trouble inside the security operations. One branch is not happy with another and is now taking their war to friendly media. Perhaps soon people will be airbrushed out of official photos, a practice popular in authoritarian regimes.

The Assange Case

Posted on December 13, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast as well as some thoughts on the Army – Navy football game.

Thirty years ago, the typical right-wing person would have held a dim view of whistleblowers and their media accomplices. Those whistleblowers were always left-wing people with the strong odors that come with it. They were motivated by left-wing morality rather than republican virtue. Their complaints about the government were motivated by their opposition to America. These stories usually made those who stood for republican order look like the villains.

Probably the most famous example is Daniel Ellsberg. He is the man who released the top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in the Vietnam War to The New York Times and Washington Post. This was in 1971 and Ellsberg was a fanatical left-wing antiwar protestor. He violated a number of laws in releasing those documents, but he was on the Left, so it was okay. Left-wing lawbreaking was always okay as long as it served left-wing interests.

That was another country ago. Today, the typical right-wing person has a new respect for the government whistleblower. You see this with Julian Assange, who is being transferred to the United States for a show trial. The only people speaking out about his treatment are conservatives. Here is a story in Breitbart that manages to tie Assange to an old paleocon concept. It is one of those times when you know they do not know the source of the phrase, as otherwise they would never use it.

The Assange story is a good example of how partisanship within the mainstream makes rational discourse impossible. When Assange was leaking information damaging to the Bush crusades, they were not fans of Assange. Of course, the Left loved Assange and treated him like a modern day Che Guevara. When WikiLeaks embarrassed the Democrats then the Left suddenly hated Assange. It took a while, but eventually the conservatives figured out how to back the whistleblower.

Interestingly, those same conservatives have nothing but contempt for Chelsea Manning, the sexually confused former Army soldier who provided documents to Julian Assange back in the Bush years. For a lot of reasons, Chelsea Manning makes for a troublesome hero for them. Of course, Democrats moved heaven and earth to get their favorite crossdresser out of prison. Then “she” turned on them, as it were. Saying bad things about the police state is no longer left-wing.

These cases, and you can probably put Edward Snowden in there as well, present some interesting dilemmas. The biggest conundrum is the role of the media in these sorts of affairs. They are the platform for disseminating the information being leaked by the whistleblowers. They also shape the narrative around the leaks to paint the person doing the leaking as a hero. The TV tabloid 60 Minutes recently did a puff piece on the leaker, Reality Winner, painting her as a hero.

In a rules-based society, people who break the rules should suffer consequences commensurate with the damage done by the rule breaking. A general principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that the punishment fits the crime. If the crime, however, prevents a much larger crime from occurring, the rule breaking ceases to be a crime and becomes a public service. While this theory makes sense to a sensible person, its abuse by the deranged and dangerous suggests a serious flaw.

Then there is the issue of the media. In the old analog days, it was easy to make an exception for the press. In these cases, they were treated like neutrals. Even though they knew the material they were reporting was illegally obtained, they were allowed to report on it because a free press trumps government secrecy. In the digital age where we no longer have a free press or actual reporters, this no longer makes sense. The media is just the marketing arm of the unofficial ruling party.

Can we have a civil society in the digital age when billionaire public relations firms are able to work with the state to embarrass opponents? This is what we saw with Trump when the New York Times got his tax returns. Clearly, someone in the IRS or Trump’s accounting firm stole the documents. Then they handed them to the press. This is trafficking in stolen goods. If the item in question was a piece of art from Trumps’ office, everyone involved would be in prison.

This is what makes the Assange case interesting. Whether the rulers know it or not, they are putting this idea front and center. If WikiLeaks is not allowed to publish leaked material, then how can the New York Times do it? There are only three solutions to that puzzle and one of them is the farce of a free press is now over. In other words, if only regime supportive media is protected, then we no longer have an independent media with constitutional protections.

On the other hand, if the courts decide Assange gets the same protections as the New York Times or Washington Post, then the age of secrets is over. In the digital age it is simply too easy to spill the beans on official shenanigans. This then spills into personal areas, as rich people make for good headlines. The NDA’s famous people make their staff sign suddenly mean very little. The only solution for the ruling class is to pump out even more disinformation through official organs.

The third option is the courts begin to nibble away at this media exceptions, which is something the Supreme Court has hinted at recently. If possession of stolen goods is the same for the media as it is for everyone else, then these sorts of cases become very complicated for the media. Suddenly, the SPLC publishing e-mails from one of the people they are harassing becomes a criminal case. At the minimum, it becomes the basis for a civil case against the outlet.

Taken together, all of this points to a central question that lurks beneath all of the recent troubles in America. Can a large culturally authoritarian society like American maintain itself in the digital age? The Assange case is only possible in the digital age and the contradictions it reveals are also only visible in the digital age. In fact, much of what ails modern America is made possible by the Internet. It may be that a secular theocracy like America is impossible when information flows even semi-freely.

The New Religion

Posted on December 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: Somewhat related to the post today is a post behind the green door about the classic movie Ben-Hur. It is an amazing film to watch in the current context, especially when you think about the audience of the time.

Imagine you were a peasant in the early medieval times and one day you looked up from your toils to see some men on the road wearing funny outfits. You see that they must be of means as they are not covered in muck and they have men of arms guarding them, but they are strange and different. They are headed in the direction of the lord’s home. You assume they are nobles of some sort. You are a peasant, so you go back to toiling away and think no more of it.

Days later, the lord’s men come to round up you and your neighbors. Everyone is herded down to the river. The lord is there and to your surprise the men you saw the other day are there as well. The lord announces that everyone is now something called a Christian and worshipping the old gods will no longer be allowed. Along with the other peasants, you are walked out into the river where you get dunked while the strangers say something in an alien language.

This is not exactly how Europe was Christianized, but it is not far off. Men from the Church would cut deals with the local rulers. The nobles would get financial help from the Church, maybe even promises of military support. In exchange the nobleman would become a Christian and his people would also become Christians. Early on, the Church took the “whatever means necessary” to win over converts. Many conversions were sincere of course, but many were out of convenience.

We don’t know if the old religions swept Europe the same way. It is possible they followed agriculture as it swept Europe. Regardless, the same paradox of conversion must have existed. There is a point at which they went from some older form of belief to the more personal and concrete belief of polytheism. Like the paradox of the heap, there is some point at which a society stops being defined by one set of beliefs and is defined by a new set of beliefs. We are in such a phase now.

If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, then you are like the medieval peasant at the beginning. All of a sudden, the people in charge now believe weird new things for no obvious reason. You try to assign the usual reasons for what you see, things like power and money, but they make less sense over time. After all, the people in charge have all of the power and money. What is in it for billionaires like George Soros who underwrite this strange new faith?

One reason for what is happening is something called isomorphism. This post in City Journal explains why social pressure is causing the people at the top to conform to this bizarre new faith informally called Wokism. Humans are social animals with a strong instinct to conform. In a world full of uncertainty, both personally and collectively, Wokism offers structure and a form of shelter. The underlying logic of this new religion is not as important as the structure it promises.

The problem with that post is it does not address the origins of this strange new religion and why it got started in the first place. It also fails to grasp that Wokism is a religion, rather than a social fad. It is assumed that religions require a well-defined anthropomorphic deity or deities, but this is a cultural bias. The evidence suggests that these well-defined gods were a product of settlement. When man was in the hunter-gatherer stage, nature was his god.

When viewed as a religion, things make a bit more sense. Religion first and foremost explains the natural world. For ruling-class people their environment is now the culture that has evolved in urban areas. They have little interaction with nature, other than to see it from their window. The natural environment of most people, especially those embracing this new religion of Wokism, is the highly urbanized and socially constructed world of the Cloud People, like universities.

It is not surprising that this new religion would be born on campus. They have been the monasteries of America since the beginning. The Puritans founded Harvard soon after they arrived for the purpose of training preachers. The beliefs of the ruling class of America have always been incubated and maintained on the college campus, so it is no surprise that this new faith was hatched there. The newly minted faithful then went forth to convert the masses.

It is also no surprise that the corporation have taken the lead in conversion. One of the few things the old radicals in the last century got right was the relationship between corporate America and the culture. Corporatism has always been the organizing principle of the American empire. Corporations sell the culture through advertising, entertainment and consumer goods. Now they are selling the religion and forcing the conversion of the people.

This is why the old liberals are baffled by it all. The New Left is in bed with corporate America in a way that would have shamed the Right not long ago. The old school lefties, trapped in the old ideology, are unable to grasp what is happening, because they are operating from the old framing. Similarly, conservatives are unwitting dupes in the process of conversion because they were conditioned to defend corporations from the “socialists and communists” on the Left.

Getting back to the primary role of religion, this new faith is catching on with the rulers because it explains what they are seeing in their natural world. First, they see the browning of the West. Even though they could put an end to it tomorrow and even reverse the trend, that requires things of them they no longer possess, so the new religion makes it seem like a naturally occurring thing. The arc of history is toward a multicultural universe free of white supremacy.

Wokism also explains why people are not the same, despite the unshakable belief that all men are created equal. The disparate outcomes must be the result of the social structures of society. The new religion not only explains the conflict between reality and their beliefs, but it also gives them a purpose. Overturning the white power structure to liberate the people from white supremacy is the ritual and practice of the faith. Wokism tells them the universe cares about them and has a plan for them.

This is why it is delusional to think this stuff is just a fad and will fade without having to confront it in the culture war. That is the old libertarian impulse to cower on the sidelines while pretending to be above it all. The new religion may be at odds with reality, but reason has never played the defining role in the ways of men. The woke can remain unreasonable longer than the reasonable can remain smug. Our peasant from before learned that when he was eventually forced to abandon his gods.

Logocide

Posted on December 1, 2021 by thezman

One of the distinguishing features of authoritarian societies is the language becomes lifeless and dull. At the same time, the public space is filled with the language of the authoritarian ruling system. The people at the top give long arid speeches and their propaganda organs fill the spaces in between with official noise. Fidel Castro would give speeches that lasted half a day. Stalin would deliver long harangues to the Party Congress for no other reason than to fill the room with words.

In America, this started to creep in after the Cold War. Bill Clinton would give long speeches that were cognitively meaningless. The word “emote” came into common usage at this time as his speeches were like the “feelies” in the Huxley novel Brave New World. They were not intended to stimulate your mind, but rather to anesthetize it so you could experience the raw emotion being conveyed. His most memorable words are those from his rare confessions of guilt.

Obama took it further by delivering nonsense speeches that were not just devoid of meaning, but an assault on the concept of meaning. His language was an assault on the mind, an effort to destroy reason. Instead, the listener was supposed to abandon his senses and float along on the warm thermals of passive happiness. His fans swore he was a great speaker, but they never quoted him. To quote the great man would invite questioning the great man and that was not permitted.

Authoritarian systems use language to suffocate and stifle the mind, because people thinking independently is always a danger. The point of regime language is to strip language of its meaning. Demagogic language makes the people incapable of the objectivity and perspective that leads to questioning. Questioning naturally leads to the formation of individual ideas. Regime language seeks to destroy the independent mind by stripping the language of meaning.

One result of this is some people become parrots, repeating slogans and catchwords without understanding what they mean. These people are so fearful of any deviation from the prescribed opinions, they only use the terms provided by the regime. It is a ritualized self-degradation. To express and judge all opinions in the accepted clichés and phrasing of the regime is to accept that words and the concepts behind them have no independent meaning.

It is logocide, the deliberate killing of words in order to kill the concepts that lie behind those words. The most obvious example is “fascist”, which no longer has a cognitive meaning in modern society. It exists only to trigger an emotional response tuned to meet the needs of the regime. The structure of modern Western government is about as close to fascism as we have come since the middle of the last century, but the word itself now means anyone who opposes the regime.

A current example of logocide is the war on information. Regime media now obsesses over misinformation and disinformation. Both words are used interchangeably, despite having very different meanings. The former means false information that is often intended to deceive. The latter is official lies promoted by the institutions of authority in order to deceive the people. By conflating these meanings, this important distinction falls away and both words just mean unofficial opinion.

Regime media has declared war on misinformation and disinformation, despite being the primary source of it. The social media publishers regularly announce their progress on the war on misinformation. Of course, the government is the biggest source of disinformation, yet no one questions them. This absurd bit of theater is intended to strip the very concept of truth from the minds of the people. It is a form of menticide intended to make people dependent on the regime.

The point of logocide is to cripple the ability of the people to think independently and to prevent them from sharing information with others. If no one can trust what words mean, you cannot trust the ideas behind those words. One of those ideas is the concept of personal trust. If your best friend is just as susceptible to repeating false information as the stranger on the street, that friends can no longer be trusted. The natural bonds between people fall away and everyone is a node of the state.

This even happens to the people tasked with assaulting the language. Look at the subhead from this story in a regime tabloid. “Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer.” Imagine the intellectual bankruptcy required to manufacture the phrase “new language for truth.” The person who wrote that is dead inside. They are a shuffling zombie incapable of action not directed by the people who now control his mind.

Notice also the creepy flavorless language of the age. No one speaks in the first person unless they are displaying fidelity to the system. In the corporate space, everything is written in soft passive language stripped of declarative statements. Corporate communication sounds like it comes from an encounter session. The people behind it are incapable of independent thought. They fear deviation and degrade themselves with therapeutic language to magnify their obsequiousness.

This is why authoritarian systems are minimalist. They lack beauty, creativity and vitality because those are burned up in the engine of authoritarian rule. A people living in fear of their own curiosity are not inventing new ways to solve problems. That requires independent thought, which means an independent language. When the point of the system is to kill the meaning of words, there can be no independent thought so there can be no new ideas, just the approved ideas.

This is what we see in the West. The suffocating conformity of thought is boiling off the will to solve problems and challenge old solutions. The centers of cultural production are now manned by automatons. They are decorated in the trappings of past creativity, but they are like mannequins in a museum display, interesting only to those who maintain their ability to see what is happening. Otherwise, the culture is a repetition of the banal official clichés and slogans.

This is what makes language the great threat to the authoritarian. To call a man in a dress a crossdresser, rather than use an approved neologism, offends the puppets of the regime, because it threatens the foundation of the regime. Clear language conveys clear meaning which implies clear truths. Standing on truth allows for the questioning of the official language and by extension, the authority of the system. The antidote to authoritarianism is truth and the honest language it requires.

American Alawites

Posted on November 30, 2021 by thezman

Minority rule is one of those things that on the surface should be rare but is actually quite common in human history. The most common form of minority rule is when one people conquer another and then install their people as rulers. This small ruling class is backed by the conquering power. In the Bronze Age it was not unusual for one city-state to rule over the surrounding city-states. The great leader would rule not only his own people but the people he subjugated.

In medieval times, the family trees of ruling elites were often quite complicated so the duke of some territory might not speak the language of the people over whom he was the ruler. Conquest also played a role. The Normans who were “invited” to conquer Britain did not speak the local language. People were tied to the land, so when a successful ruler conquered new lands, he inherited the people. His descendants would then inherit a kingdom of strangers.

Ruling classes, in general, are a form of minority rule. In South America, most of the countries are controlled by a relatively small number of families that make up the ruling elite of the country. These families trace their origins to Europe, marry amongst each other and keep a tight grip on power. It is why the complexion of the political elite rarely has the same hue as the general public. This demographic realty of ruling elites is true to some degree everywhere in the world.

The thing about rule by minority is it works if that minority has connections to the people over whom they rule. Those kings and queens in medieval Europe may not have had much in common with the people, but they shared a position within in a system that everyone accepted. Richard the Lionheart did not speak English, but his position made sense within the logic of society. Of course, empires tend to have ruling classes that are alien to the people but make sense within the context of empire.

This is what makes empires inherently unstable. Since an empire is an amalgamation of people that don’t have much in common, the one thing they have in common is they are ruled by strangers. The Habsburg Empire made sense to the people running it but to everyone else it was an unnatural combination. The Soviet Union struggled with the same problem at the end. Empires tend to become minority run enterprises that only serve the interests of the minority at the top of the system.

The American empire seems to be entering that minority rule phase where it becomes clear to everyone that the people in charge are aliens. From Gettysburg into the 20th century, America was a proto-empire. The Yankee ruling elite had conquered the rest of the country. Then the push west made Yankeedom into a continental empire and then a regional empire entering the 20th century. The two great industrial wars established Yankeedom as the American empire.

The Yankee ruling elite was joined in the 20th century by a Jewish elite that arrived just as the American empire was forming up. The subsequent Judeo-Puritan ruling class ruled the empire into the current day. While the Jewish side did not have roots in the origins of the empire, the Puritan side more than made up for it. The story of America started at Plymouth Rock with the Puritans. At least that is how every schoolboy learned it through the 20th century.

With the Cold War over and the borders wide open, the great flood of people into the empire proper is about to change the complexion of the ruling class. You see this with the South Asian takeover of Silicon Valley. The latest example is Twitter, the social media publisher, getting a new boss. Parag Agarwal will succeed Jack Dorsey as the CEO of the company. Vijaya Gadde is the policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer and general counsel of Twitter.

If we take a quick inventory of the big tech firms, we see that Google is now ruled by Sundar Pichai. Microsoft is now ruled by a person named Satya Nadella. IBM, once synonymous with American technological innovation, is now ruled by a person called Arvind Krishna. Adobe Systems is ruled by Shantanu Narayen. VMWare, the biggest virtualization firm is ruled by Raghu Raghuram. Silicon Valley is looking like the chamber of commerce of Bangalore.

This may seem like a coincidence, but Kamala Harris is the Vice president because Indian money bought her the spot on the ticket. All of her campaign money came from this cabal of South Asians in California. She remains in her post, even though the Biden people want her out, because the party is afraid of alienating the Brahmans. They know the GOP is on its knees outside those offices begging for cash. They are planning to run Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in the 2024 primary.

What is happening, of course, is the old Judeo-Puritan ruling elite is getting pushed aside by the highly clannish and ambitious Brahman ruling elite. Those high caste Indian migrants come from a long tradition of looking out for their own, but also working the imperial system. The British Raj selected for the sort of high cast local who knew how to ingratiate himself with English speakers. Those skills are now proving to be handy in the American empire.

This is why South Asians are fantastically antiwhite. They have picked up on what is going on with the dying Judeo-Puritan ruling class. Critical theory makes no sense to the new arrivals from the subcontinent, but the slogans are easy to memorize and the targets are familiar. The new ruler of Twitter is not only antiwhite, but he is also openly hostile to the basics of Western society. He thinks the first amendment is a pointless suggestion and he has no intention of respecting its spirit.

From a certain distance, one has to admire the irony of it. India exists because of British colonialism and it is now conquering the inheritor of the British Empire. Perhaps the new Indian ruling class will start wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets. The old quip from Pat Buchanan about immigration comes to mind. He famously said, “American Indians had open borders. Look what happened to them.” One group of Indians getting revenge on behalf of another group of Indians.

Putting that aside, this is another sign that the American empire is far closer to collapse than is evident from the numbers. Actual Americans will notice that they cannot pronounce the names of their new rulers. The alien nature of the ruling class is now being pushed into the face of everyone. It is hard to imagine someone named Satya or Parag commanding much loyalty from people named Bill or even Jonquarius. Rule by alien invader will become evident to everyone.

That does not mean this new ruling class forming up is doomed. Syria has been ruled by an Alawite minority for a long time now. They control all of the institutions of power and that has allowed them to weather the attacks from America and Israel. An alien ruling class can manage to defy the math for a long time, if they are clever enough and ruthless enough. The American Alawites will have to be as ruthless but highly clannish people are never short of ruthlessness.

If one wants to be optimistic, the Illyrian emperors were Roman emperors who rose up from what is now the Balkans during the Crisis of the Third Century. This group of alien emperors culminated with Diocletian and the stabilization of the empire. Maybe one of these new Brahman rulers will go on to stabilize the American empire. After all, this class took over India after the collapse of British rule. Look at the amazing job they have done with the Indian subcontinent.

Fear And Loathing

Posted on November 29, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week I take a deep dive into the legal theory underlying the recent political trials. Behind the green door I have several new items since last week.

Since the Great Panic began almost two years ago, the question on the minds of the curious has been how long will it last? Panics are not new in human society and they are not new to recent times either. The satanic panic that started in the 1980’s never really ended completely. The “face on a milk carton” meme is still with us, despite the fact few people remember is started in a panic. That was close to half a century ago, suggesting panics never really end.

The missing kid panic changed American society. Prior to that time, it was not unusual for children to walk to school with just the older kids supervising. Kids spent their after-school time playing outside, usually unsupervised. In big cities, kids would ride public transit to school. No one thought it was strange. After the panic, supervised activities became the norm. Video games found a target-rich environment of kids stuck inside by themselves or within earshot of their parents.

That suggests the Covid panic has a long way to go and may never end. That should be obvious at this point. First it was two weeks to bend the curve so hospitals could avoid being overrun by flu patients. That gave way to a regime of total fright with people required to wear amulets reminding everyone of the great fear. The vaccine should have broken the fear, but here we are facing new lockdowns due to the omicron strain, which reportedly attacks the vaccinated for some reason.

The omicron variant is probably the most amusing twist in the great Covid panic so far, because it suggests someone in the system has a sense of humor. As many have pointed out, the word “omicron” is an anagram for “moronic”. There is also the reference to a classic Star Trek episode. The spores on Omicron ceti iii made people euphoric and gave them everlasting health in exchange for a desire to never leave. The plants and the humans became two sides of a blissful relationship.

Part of what is driving this is belief. Humans are believing machines and with the collapse of traditional religion, people are falling into cultural and political cults that scratch the same itch as the old gods. Nature cults have been a staple of human existence since the beginning. At a certain level, the people swept up in the cult of Covid feel they are being punished for a sin against nature. Covid is nature’s vengeance against mankind.

That is why good news is always bad news with Covid. The new mysterious variant that does not make people sick is “symptomless Covid” rather than the natural weakening the virus with each new mutation. The omicron variant is similarly a weaker mutation, but it is setting off panic around the world. Covid is a proxy for a new mystery god, one that reveals itself only through it actions. Like all gods, it is eternal, so its manifestations will be eternal as well. Covid is here forever.

The main driver of the panic from the beginning has been the ruling class, which is looking like Howard Hughes at the end. Instead of shutting themselves up in their mansions and wearing tissue boxes on their feet, they are obsessed with conquering death itself. The actors they hire to perform the rituals off democracy are not quite as bad, but they are a gerontocracy now. As such, they startle at the slightest touch, assuming it must be the Grim Reaper.

There is also the weird isolation of the managerial class. It is not a physical isolation as they do leave their compounds to explore the land of the Dirt People. It is a psychological and cultural isolation. They can imagine hospitals overflowing and people dying in the streets, even though they see no evidence of these things, because they are conditioned by their existence to trust their coevals over their own eyes. If they see it in their media, it is true, no matter what reality has to say.

This combination of old and isolated has created a ruling class that is deeply paranoid about what happens outside the safety of their safe zones. Note how often the word “safe” comes up in their rhetoric. They see themselves as the protectors of society, so they are constantly going on about safety. The reason for that is they assume everyone shares their fear and paranoia about the world. Covid is powerful juju for a ruling class hiding from nature, reality and their own mortality.

Of course, a big part of the panic is the opportunity for the deranged to inflict themselves on the rest of us. Covid has been manna from heaven for the sort of person who sees herself as everyone’s den mother. These people will never get enough of the state of emergency, which provides the panic stricken elite with an amen chorus giving them the allusion of consent. One side pleads to be made safe while the other side pleads to be the savior of mankind.

This brings us back to the original question. When does this panic end? Most likely, it will require a generational turnover. The gerontocracy will die off and be replaced by something worse, but something younger. That means these health panics are probably a feature of the empire now. Like superhero movies, Covid will be rebooted and reimagined every few years. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an ornamental mask on a human face— forever.

Order And Chaos

Posted on November 26, 2021 by thezman

Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.

The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.

This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.

That is the first lesson of this trial. Two lessons, actually. One is the reminder that political activism is all about boosting the spirits of your side and depressing the sprits of the other side. In the language of Osama bin Laden, activism is about making your horse look strong and their horse look weak. When given the choice, people will always pick the strong horse. Everything about the UTR event was bad activism for the participants and good activism for their opponents.

The other lesson here is that the world has now moved on from that chapter of political opposition to the ruling regime. Hardly anyone in regime media noticed the trial when it was happening. The verdict was a one day event celebrated by trivial figures on low-end social media. Basically, the story rated a wire report that was picked up by websites as part of their automated filler. The world has moved on from this sort of drama, which is very good news for dissidents.

Another lesson of this case is one of the oldest. If you lie down with dogs you will wake up with fleas. Guilt by association is a real thing. You may think it is unfair, but it is just how the world operates. If you hang around with screwballs like Chris Cantwell, then you will be judged by that association. The fact is, all organizations, especially in politics, are judged by their worst members. It is why high standards are essential in all political activism. You are judged by the company you keep.

Similarly, this should be the final nail in the optics debate. Both sides of this case revolted the jury. They clearly saw that the plaintiffs were liars and doing this for political reasons, but the defendants were wildly offensive to them. It is not hard to imagine the jury’s motivation here. They wanted out of that courtroom and as far away from all of them as possible. The symbolic award was a way to end the nightmare and inoculate themselves from retaliation by the Twitter blue-checks.

The fact is, the alt-right and its traveling partners never much cared about the issues they claim are at the center of their politics. The big names of that thing were there for attention and internet likes. Spencer represented himself in the case because it afforded him more time to talk about himself. The narcotic of minor celebrity is powerful stuff and it led the big shots of the alt-right to embrace increasing extreme rhetoric as they chased the dragon of internet celebrity.

The final lesson here is that America is no longer a rules-based society. This case like so many of late, had no business in a courtroom. The underlying claims are un-American and fly in the face of civil society. The people behind this case have no business in a Western society. Until this is remedied, no sane person should ever put himself in a position where he may end up in court. Even if you are completely in the right the courtroom is no place for a white person.

Scars are lessons. Stupid people accumulate as trophies to their past stupidity, while smart people carry them as lessons. These trials are scars on the face of Western civilization and they need to be seen as such. It is not about winning and losing, but about the far deeper problem that lies behind them. The people behind these cases are the same people behind the riots. The great lesson in all of this is the battle is not about policy, but between order and chaos and chaos is winning.

Idle Hands

Posted on November 24, 2021 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the HBD delusion and I have a short audio post on the Charlottesville verdict. With Thanksgiving upon us, posting here will be light, but I will be posting some content behind the green door.

By now it is obvious to everyone that Covid has become a bizarre mystery cult embraced by those into left-wing politics. There are some exceptions, like the HBD crowd, which was driven mad by Covid. A few dissidents were gripped by the great fear, but most have recovered. The bulk of the people hooked on Covid, however, are the sorts of people who obsess over climate change or check under their beds at night to make sure Hitler is not hiding there.

The HBD people were driven mad by Covid because it was a reminder of their exile and the price they have paid for holding bad ideas. This issue was in their wheelhouse, but their status excluded them from the conversation. If they had been in good standing, this would have been their time to shine. Instead, they were left to jump up and down on the sidelines desperately trying to get the attention of their old friends. This is the agony that comes with exile.

The Covidian proper is someone who traffics in the usual fads. She totes her groceries home in grimy canvas sacks because Gaia supposedly hates plastic. At one time, she had a weird food allergy, maybe a series of them. The overlap between Covidians and Glutenites is near 100%. Of course, she was sure that Trump was Hitler and she was also sure Kavanaugh was going to stuff her uterus full of Bibles. Covid is just the latest stop on the crazy train for her.

She used to think the problem was too many people. This has been lost to the mists of time, but the Gaia worshippers started out as hardcore misanthropes. Mankind was a plague, a virus on the planet that had to be contained. This was the primary motivation behind unlimited abortions. These people think mankind is the enemy so anything that is bad for humanity is good. That is the appeal of Covid. To the Covidian, it feels like Mother Earth is getting her revenge.

Revenge is a big part of left-wing politics. The Wisconsin massacre was immediately hailed as revenge for the Rittenhouse verdict. Social justice, of course, is just a dog whistle for racial vengeance. Environmental justice, according to the EPA, is where the nonwhite populations exact revenge on white people on behalf of Gaia. The word “justice” is a universal dog whistle for vengeance. As a result, the Department of Justice is now the inquisition of the new religion.

Covid is not just about the vengeance of Gaia. It is about a general all around vengeance toward the enemies of the faith. That is what lies behind the redefinition of words like “vaccinated” and “immunize”. By redefining these words, it allows the Covidians to exact vengeance on the unbelievers. It allows the Covidians to retroactively blame the enemies of the faith for this great plague. It is a witch hunt in which the witches are doing the hunting.

Of course, vengeance has always been a traveling partner of radical politics because radical politics is at odds with nature. The great smashing of the system never ushers in the promised Utopia, so someone has to pay for it. Covid, however, reveals that the thirst for vengeance is what draws people into radical politics. Like the bitter, self-loathing wife beater looking for an excuse to knock around the old lady, the radical seeks out politics that promise the chance for vengeance.

There is more to the Covid phenomenon than vengeance. The ritualized mask wearing and obsession with vaccines suggest there is a mystery element. There is something magical about all of this that appeals to the Covidian. Talk to a Covidian and few have a high school level understanding of biology. They talk about Covid as if it is an evil spirit, some dangerous miasma. The mask has become a talisman and the vaccine is a blessing from the shaman to ward of the evil.

This is why women insist they have Covid despite testing negative. It’s not a lot different than saying you have been touched by Old Scratch or bewitched by the old woman who lives in the woods. First, it elevates her status. The evil one has targeted her for some reason. Second, she is a victim and gets sympathy. Of course, she is a hero for battling this great plague on her own. The negative test ties it all together allowing the accursed to suffer for all of our sins on Twitter.

This is the promise of the new symptomless Covid. The evil one is so evil that it is now able to infect without anyone knowing about it. The true believer can now claim to be infected, but fighting it, even when she has no symptoms and the test comes back negative for Covid. It also means wearing the proper amulets is now more important than ever, since spotting the damned is now impossible. Society will now be reorganized around the beliefs of this new mystery cult.

Taken together, what Covid has revealed is that something has gone horribly wrong with Western people. The self-loathing, the thirst for vengeance and the paralyzing fear of existence all point to a common cause. The West has reached a point where we hate our very existence. We have evolved down a cultural dead end and we have no way to escape it, so we are hoping for a great destruction. A great plague or natural disaster is seen as the hope of mankind, because it promises a do-over.

The flip side of this is that Covid and these other mystery cults are just a way to give purpose and meaning to life. Western society has arrived at the point where there is nothing left to do but consume. A species built to compete with the world has conquered the world and is now left to graze in the fields. Our success is our curse and the price to be paid is eternal self-torment. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop and too many idle hands have created this devil we call Covid.

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