Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Lessons From Collapse

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When the Soviet Union collapsed, it did not descend into chaos or have a long period where no one was in charge. It was a process that began with the power struggle between Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. This power struggle undermined the power of the party and eventually the government. Into the void flowed a new source of power and authority, the oligarchs. These were men with control of key assets who backed Yeltsin’s privatization plans for the economy.

Those oligarchs did not spring from nothing. Some were key party figures who had controlled aspects of the Soviet economy, but most were privateers who operated in the shadow economy of the Soviet system. They held posts in the Soviet system but had extensive contacts in the criminal underground. As the power of the state declined, the power of the underwound economy grew. When the system collapsed, they became the power centers providing control of the country.

This was not unique to the Soviet system. Whenever power begins to wane, alternative centers of power begin to flourish. There is a period in which the real power exists in these distributed power centers, but the façade of the old system remains. Collapse is merely the formal recognition of reality. Germany in the interwar years is another example of what happens when there is a power vacuum. The fascists did not spring from nothing. They had roots in German history and culture.

The Western Roman Empire is probably the best example of the process of collapse and what follows. For a long time, the empire was mostly a fiction. The daily life of the people was controlled by the local powers, the large landowners. These local authorities had power through ownership of land and authority through the administration of the law and regulation of local economics. They even supplied local security in addition to providing men to fight in the legions.

The latifundia was what we would think of today as a plantation. It was the closest thing to agribusiness in the ancient world. It was a large parcel of land worked by slaves for the purpose of export. By the late stages of the empire, these enterprises were common throughout the empire. After the empire, they became the basis of what we understand to be feudalism. The slaves became peasants, and the landowners became the feudal lords controlling the administration of Western Europe.

There was a lot more going on at the end of the Western Roman Empire, but a critical and necessary element was the rise of distributed power centers. Like the ethnic gangsters in the Soviet Union, these agricultural enterprises initially filled in the gaps of the system to keep it functioning. In time they began to rival the power of the empire and when the empire collapsed, they filled the void left behind. The resulting system was built around those local centers of power.

Just as there is a point at which a number of grains of sand becomes a pile of sand, there is a point where the decentralized power centers go from subservient to the central authority to rivaling the central authority. There is a paradox at work in that we can know this point exists but can never identify it with certainty. How many grains of sand constitutes a pile? At what point do people look first to the oligarch for leadership rather than the central authority?

It is a useful question to consider, because there was a point of no return in the Soviet Union just as there was in the Western Roman Empire. Many of those oligarchs in Russia were just the guys who noticed it first. Mikhail Fridman was active in the underground economy in the later years of the Soviet Union and quickly moved to the newly privatized economy as soon as it was possible. Like most of the oligarchs, he was an early adopter who saw the writing on the wall.

In other words, the men who would eventually become the oligarchs after the fall of communism were the first to see that the old system was doomed and something else was coming to replace it. They did not know or care what was coming. They just wanted to profit from the chaos. In fact, when the opportunity arose, they promoted the chaos, backing Yeltsin over Gorbachev because it was good for business. They profited from the collapse before anyone saw the collapse coming.

In current year America, this is relevant because it suggests that the American empire has been in collapse for a long time know. The rise of the financial oligarchs in the late-1980’s and 1990’s was one sign. The rise of Silicon Valley oligarchs as a rival power center to Washington is another. The assault on small business and the middle class by the combined power of the oligarchs and the political class is analogous to the late years of the Soviet system.

In other words, the American empire may already be in collapse. The geezers in Washington are allowed to pretend they are in charge as it benefits the oligarchs, but they have no real power. Legislation is written by the army of scribes known as lobbyists and think tanks, underwritten by the oligarchs. Elections are determined by the money and media supplied by those same oligarchs. The real power lies in boardrooms and villas, while the political system is just a show.

The Soviet and Roman examples suggest such arrangements never last as reality eventually forces its way to the front. In Russia, the oligarchs were brought to heel by the one universal source of power. Vladimir Putin, with the support of the intelligence community and the military was able to reassert civil control of Russia. The oligarchs still exist, but enough have been killed, exiled, or jailed to make sure the rest know who wields the real power in the country.

This is the other shoe to drop in the American empire. The intelligence services have real power, as we saw with the FBI efforts to overturn the 2016 election. The military has real power but lacks real leadership. Their willingness and ability to thwart Trump’s efforts to get out of Syria and Afghanistan should be of concern. Somewhere in the officer ranks there is a man with the skill and desire to change the relationship between the military and the decaying civil control.

Historical analogies are never perfect and are useful only in comparing the broad outlines of times and places. A smooth landing for the empire is not guaranteed any more than Caesarism is a certainty. The military could blunder the empire into a war it cannot win and destroy its credibility in the process. A financial collapse could lead to a popular revolt against the oligarchs. Of course, there is the looming demographic crisis that will bring unimaginable social upheaval.

Even so, what history is telling us is that the American empire is well past the point where reform is possible. It is past the point where the decaying system of imperial control can expect to outlive its current operators. The system is on life support and powerful interests are evolving in response to this reality. The collapse is now certain, but the timing is what is unknown. Another lesson of history here is that no one saw the Soviet collapse coming. The end is always a surprise.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

State Of Fear

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There are many theories as to why the managerial class of America enthusiastically embraces the nutty social fads. California now has a law requiring “gender neutral” toy aisles in stores, for example. One crazy putting this into a bill is understandable, but why did everyone else go along with it? Why does anyone go along with the loopy idea of gender at all? It is not a real thing. Humans are male and female. Everyone has known this for thousands of years.

This is just one example, but the pattern is always the same. Certainly, some do it out of fear of losing face. The oriental nature of the managerial class is easily missed, but the whole face saving thing is where you see it. That is not a normal quality of Northern European people. It is what you see in a small, tightly knit people, but it is a real thing in our managerial class. They fear being seen as outside the current cultural norms of their class, so everyone plays along.

You can really tell this when you run into someone who is in the habit of announcing her pronouns in her workplace. The low level people are most prone to peer pressure, so they jump on these fads with as much enthusiasm as they can muster. The trouble is she still interacts with normal people. When she breaks out the pronouns around a normal, she has the look you see with people struggling with mental illness. She is not sure if what she is saying is what she is thinking.

This is how a minority within the managerial class is able to exert so much power over the rest of the class. That California requirement on toy aisles is no doubt the product of a lone crazy, but fear of exclusion prevented everyone else from speaking out against an obviously insane idea. No one wants to be the one who is seen rejecting the morality of the whole. In a world where the most insane ideas get embraced, who wants to risk opposing this nutty idea?

Even so, the managerial system selects for conformity, but it also allows for the crazies who cook up these ideas. In other words, it selects for a conformity that makes exception for anti-social behavior and it selects for people who are always looking to undermine the dominant culture. Put another way, the personality type most prized is the sadistic subversive with a passion for enforcement. The most perverted people are the most highly regarded in our ruling class.

Another angle to this, perhaps, is that the general belief system of the managerial class is highly conformist. The reason is the people at the top have no natural authority to legitimize their positions. The result is a rigid culture that allows for very little creativity and originality. The exception is when it comes to offending the normal people of society, which is what separates the managerial class from everyone else. You can be weird as long as it offends the normals.

The resulting culture is one that is extremely intolerant of deviation, yet desperate for innovated ways to undermine tradition. The reason these cultural fads are increasingly ridiculous is they are running out of things to smash. When you have already put gay men in jock straps on parade floats and made everyone remain silent about it, finding something more offensively ridiculous is not easy. They jumped on drag queen story hour out of desperation for something new.

The austere conformity is not seen by those who operate outside the domains of the Cloud People, so the quiet desperation is not obvious. Venture inside and what will be most striking is the humorlessness. People smile and laugh a little, but there is an uncanny valley quality to it. They laugh like people who read about how humans laugh from time to time. Say something intended as a joke and they will look at one another for permission to laugh at what the alien said.

The state of fear within the managerial class cannot be underestimated. The ritualized sacrifice of that football coach over his heresy is not intended for the Dirt People the NFL preys upon. That was for the Cloud People. In a world where ritualized human sacrifice is accepted as normal, fear of violating the rules, even by accident, is a very real concern for these people. The threat of exile works the same as Stalin’s gulag worked in the Soviet Union.

This is why no one in the media ever asks the obvious questions when the various talking robots are put out for question and answer periods. A group of normal people in the White House press room would cause the face plate of Jen Psaki to fall off by coordinating their questions and tangling her up in her lies. This never happens because normals are never allowed inside. The people allowed inside know they can easily be replaced by actors if they get out of line.

That was the point of the Kamala Harris video. Not only did they use child actors, but Harris also clearly performed like a well-trained actress. To normal people it is just more evidence that these people are sociopaths and liars. Inside the world of politics, it is a message. There are plenty of unemployed actors willing to play politician, reporter and so on, so make sure you know your lines before filming. Democracy is just the theater portion of the managerial system that rules America.

A ruling class rooted in fear of deviation but permitted to undermine that which makes their existence possible is not one that can last. We are seeing this with the growing economic crises. No one dares suggest anything other than what is being done, so they are frozen in place, hoping for a miracle. The Afghanistan debacle is another example of how extreme conformity results in disaster. No one dared question the plan or adjust it on the fly, so the plan just slammed into the rocks of reality.

The is the crisis of today. The ossified geezer class at the top of the system have insulated themselves against all possible reform. They rule their system through fear and manufactured consent. The only relief for the people in it is the orchestrated subversions like gender neutral toy aisles. Like starving men fighting for crumbs, they jump at these opportunities at something resembling life. Subversion is the bit of sunlight that comes through their prison windows.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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 Microcosm Of Sport

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Like most things in the current age, professional sport has become a degenerate mockery of itself. The presentation is a high-tech vaudeville act that is now mostly advertisements and propaganda. The people in charge of the various sports are the worst this age can muster. The participants are vulgar carnies. Despite the best efforts of this age, however, sport continues to provide an insight into our times. It is a microcosm of the larger society in which it operates.

For example, football was always the second sport in America, up until the explosion of mass media in the 1980’s. In fact, football was probably behind sports like boxing and horse racing, not just baseball. The explosion of television rocketed football to the top of sport entertainment because it was a natural for the medium. It provides a stage that fits the screen, has breaks for ad space and is a weekly happening. The NFL quickly became a lightly scripted television sports drama.

The mass media culture made the NFL in particular, and football in general, the king of the sports entertainment industry. Like the culture as a whole, the apparent success of the league masks the problems. Ownership has given way to a class of mercurial operators with no loyalty to the local communities. Their greed has resulted in a steady decline in the product. While ratings have seen a boost so far this year, general interest has been in decline for the last decade.

A big reason for that is the product. Kids are not playing football at the youth level, like they used to, so the number of young males moving through the system is in decline, meaning that the quality of player has declined. You see that with the quarterback position, which is the most challenging. The sudden decline in the number of white kids playing youth ball means a decline in the positions requiring smarts. One result is the position has become more “athletic”.

Of course, modernity destroys social capital, and youth sports are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to social cohesion. When America was based on strong white communities, it had lots of white fathers volunteering to coach sports, run youth leagues and so on. As the white population declines, white volunteers decline. As society becomes more diverse, which brings deracination and alienation, the organic structures that make youth sports possible decline.

The men running the sport are not concerned about that as they are not the sort to invest in society. They just assume they can pack up their stuff and move onto the next society once all the life from this one has been drained. These are post-Americans who operate as pirates. Like the global economy that spawned them, they ride the waves of globalism. America is just the place where they can operate at the moment, a pirate’s cove that means nothing to them.

The NFL is also riddled with scandal. Its team in Washington is owned by a degenerate who is one scandal after another. To distract from the latest scandal, DEA agents raiding their facilities, the league instructed their media to focus on manufactured crises involving coaches. For a while, the media was obsessing over the coach of the Jacksonville franchise. They keep making up stories about him, relying on imaginary sources and manufactured internet chatter.

The coach of the league’s Las Vegas franchise was just forced to resign when it was learned he held normal opinions about gays and blacks. His e-mails magically appeared in the media just when the DEA came calling. It was an orchestrated hit, probably with the help of that team’s owner, in order to get out of paying the contract. It could also be part of the effort to distract from the looming narcotics scandal. The DEA does not raid famous people because of a paperwork discrepancy.

This stuff is a microcosm of the ruling class. They got these e-mails from a previous investigation of their Washington team. Then they used those e-mails from that prior scandal to distract attention from the current scandal. Those e-mails were handed to a reporter, who did not bother to mention the source of them. Once the coach addressed the issue another batch of e-mails was delivered to the New York Times. They did not mention their source either. Imagine that.

Like the political media, the sports media is owned by the system. They are the ministry of truth blasting out what the league tells them to say. If one of them gets froggy and does genuine reporting, he is dismissed from his post. YouTube and Twitter are full of people who would be happy to play the role of jock sniffer. Everyone in the ministry of truth knows this, so they play along. To borrow a phrase from Theodore Dalrymple, the media is a collection of emasculated liars.

Right there is the last five years of Washington politics. The system manufacturing fake scandals in order to hide real scandals. The media, which still claims to be impartial observers, plays along because they have not choice. They are servants. The result is the real crimes get pushed to the shadows, while nonsense stories fill the air, often used to discredit people asking too many questions. This is rule by sociopath. It is a reflection of the ruling class as a whole.

The Gruden affair is a perfect moment to see the reality of this age. He is a person who holds normal opinions about things like race and gays. In private he talks like what normal people would expect from a sports coach. He is being hurled into the void on a morality charge by people who lie on spec. The relatively normal guy is condemned by the carny trash as morally unfit. That’s America in a nutshell. Our moral arbiters are vulgar degenerates and sociopaths.

The problems we see with professional sports in America reflect the problems of the West in general. Sport is a Western thing. Other people compete in small ways, but organized sporting activity is part of European man. There is a reason there is no equivalent of the NFL in Africa. Big time sports need big time societies and those societies will always be European societies. The other people of the world simply lack the capacity to produce these cultural artifacts.

As the West declines, sport has now declined with it. The people running pro sports, active in the destruction of the West, are operating under the delusion that they can survive the decline of Western people. In fact, many are driven by a desire to create a post-European world. This is what you see everywhere in the ruling class. You also see that it is unsustainable. Without the necessary human capital, these manifestations of Western culture cannot last and they will not last.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Fruit Of The Poisoned Tree

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Note: The Monday Taki column is up. The topic this week is the increasingly familiar and obvious Jim Snow laws of America. Behind the green door we have the weekly Sunday podcast where I rant and rave about the world.

In every form of human organization there are layers of responsibility. The simplest way of expressing it is that at the top there is always the boss who is the guy making the important decisions for the organization. Everyone else, in one fashion or another, takes orders from the boss and carries out the orders.  Always at the bottom are people who just do what they are told. The vertical arrangements are one of the truths of work life that everyone just accepts without much thought.

More formally, at the top layer of an organization, like a business, are the big decision makers for the organization. Below them are the policy makers. They take the big initiative and turn it into rules and plans. Below them are the people who make those rules and plans into reality. This is the layer most people inside and outside the organization see. They instruct the bottom layer of the organization, train them and making sure they follow through on their orders.

The important part of this arrangement is that everyone in the organization understands their role within the organization. The private in a rifle platoon has to understand that his role is to follow the orders given him by is squad leader or platoon leader. His job is not to determine strategy or decide on objectives. Similarly, the guy on the shop floor has to know his duty is to perform the role he is assigned at a workstation. Otherwise, the organization breaks down and fails to operate as intended.

At the bottom this is rarely a problem, as the people at the bottom are well aware of their status in the hierarchy. The people at the top, of course, know they are at the top of the hierarchy and what that means. The trouble comes in the middle layers where the people tend to be the most ambitious and most prone to overstepping their bounds, hoping to impress the boss. They can also be overly cautious, fearful of getting blamed for doing something wrong and losing status in the organization.

This is where the culture of the organization plays a decisive role. A company with a good corporate culture will have a management layer full of people who not only know their roles but embrace them in the context of the larger organization. A good military culture is one where the officers respect the chain of command, but also understand mission priorities and the need to improvise when necessary. Good organizational culture is what makes or breaks an organization.

This is also where we see the inherent problem of democracy. The basic premise of democratic systems is one man one vote. That means every vote is equal, which is another way of saying that every opinion is equally valid. In the political sense, it means the opinion of the bum counts the same as the opinion of the businessman who volunteers at the church on weekends. The bum’s vote counts for the same as the vote of the man committed to his community.

Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere. Worse yet, it gnaws away at the basic understanding of human relations. Those middle-managers in a well-run company are happy to be in their roles. They may have ambition, but they also accept reality and know that their ambitions are linked to that reality. The morality of democracy undermines the very basis of their relationship to the whole.

This is why modern democracies are full of people confused about their place in society as well as the role others play. There is a whole genre of videos on-line where people confront store managers about things no reasonable person should expect them to know or control. We have the opposite, as well, where people at the lowest ranks of management carry on like they are shot callers, pushing people around and going well beyond the limits of their role.

Imagine a factory where everyone thinks they should have a say in what the factory makes and how much they make of it. The guy who cleans the workstations gets the same vote as the sales manager and the plant manager. Imagine a platoon where the men vote on their missions and collectively decide on their targets. It sounds like madness because it is madness. That factory would go out of business in a hurry and that military unit would quickly become a criminal gang.

This is, however, how the West has decided to run their societies. Now, it is true that the real shot callers hide in the shadows, using the institutions to manipulate public opinion and coerce people into their positions. They do so, however, while promoting the idea that everyone’s opinion is the same and every opinion counts. On the one hand they promote chaos, while on the other they try to maintain order. It is no wonder that the liberal democracies are shaking themselves to pieces.

The temptation is to blame the internet for allowing the stupid to have easy access to the public square, but in reality, the internet is just a facilitator. According to the tenets of democracy, Twitter is the goal, not a terrible accident. Imagine the town square full of howling lunatics and you get the prefect image of democracy. Social media made real is a public riot but is also exactly what you get when everyone stops accepting their role in the hierarchy and thinks they are a king.

Fundamentally, all forms of democracy are as hostile and contrary to the nature of man as all forms of communism. Both communism and democracy assume something about people that can never be true. That is, all men are equal. This is obviously false in the simplest organization and even more so in the most complex. Just as communism has always ended in disaster, democracy has always ended in murder. Both delusions are the fruit of the same poison tree named equality.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Emotional Appropriation

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One of the weird aspects of this age is how important people appropriate the emotions and feeling of others and make them their own. They will make statements about their feelings on a subject, but those feelings are not really their feelings because they cannot actually be experiencing the feelings in questions. Our Cloud People have normalized emotional appropriation as a way of projecting to the Dirt People that they have genuine human emotions.

The easy example here is the public person who has a rare moment of honesty and posts what they really think on Twitter. This sets off the familiar drama on-line in which people rush to their favorite platform to express their outrage. The fact that they have no reason to care, much less be outraged, goes unnoticed. Eventually, the director of this drama tells the star to waddle out on stage and issue an apology. In that apology, the star claims to feel things that cannot be felt.

For example, they always say something about feeling remorse for the pain they have caused, despite the fact this is impossible. You can feel remorse for causing harm to an actual human, but not for anonymous zombies on-line. Further, the people claiming to have been harmed were not harmed. In fact, the opportunity to play along in the drama was the highlight of their day, maybe their life. Like the famous people, they got to appropriate the feelings of others.

None of the emotions expressed in these offense-apology dramas can be real, because it does not involve real victims or real offenses. The star of these shows often says, “I apologize to those I have offended” but the statement itself says they are not sure who they could have offended. You can only apologize to real humans to whom you have committed real harm. An apology to imaginary people is an imaginary apology for an imaginary harm. It is all just emotional appropriation.

A recent example of this is the football coach caught dancing with a woman not his wife after a football game. For some reason, football fans were “outraged” as if we have suddenly been thrust into Victorian times. The owner of the team that employs the coach was scandalized, calling it “inexcusable”. The coach then apologized to imaginary people for something no one, other than maybe his wife, should have an interest, much less an emotional investment.

Another common example of emotional appropriation is the Cloud Person taking pride in something that does not exist. Politicians will talk about different communities, for example, as if they are rural villages with a well-defined character. The “trans community” is a current favorite. The politicians will claim to be proud of their support for the trans community. You cannot take pride in something you had no part in creating and you cannot be proud of something that does not exist.

Pride, ironically enough, is one of the most important emotions for our modern emotional appropriators. College presidents are always talking about how proud they are of their community. They are just hired fundraisers who drift from job to job, never creating anything but trouble. Yet, they will take pride in the work of others as if they had a hand in it. The fixation on the sin of pride by the Cloud People is one of those things that reveals much about our age.

The sin of pride, for those deprived of proper religious training, is considered a rebellion against God. The person committing this sin attributes to himself the honor and glory that is due to another, usually God. Since our Cloud People worship the arc of history, it sort of makes sense that they inappropriately take pride in that which is the product of generations of history. Pride has been called the cancer of the soul. It is considered the first and most serious of the deadly sins.

One reason for these weird public displays of emotion is that we have shifted from a male dominated culture to a female dominated one. Maintaining a stiff upper lip, especially in public, is a male attribute. Women, on the other hand, have always been encouraged to show emotion. This is why all public people feel a need to show emotion in public. It is how they project their piety. In order to gain status, you must show how much you care, which often means blubbering in public.

Another issue here, though, is the people who now dominate public life are not capable of real human emotion. They don’t do things, for example, for which they could take genuine pride. They don’t have a concern for the welfare of others. This is the age of the public sociopath. Caring about real people is a sucker’s play in this age, so the ambitious try to avoid it. The result is we get these weird dramas where the Cloud People appropriate the emotions of others.

In the novel Brave New World, humans in the imagined future went to something called the Feelies, which was a theater-like experience. They would be simulated to feel strong emotions via the use of various inputs. The people went to these things to feel things like grief and anger, because they had no way of experiencing these emotions in their regular lives. The combination of their genetic engineering and taking the happiness-producing drug called Soma blocked normal emotions.

Something similar happens today. The Cloud People are mostly sociopaths at this point, incapable of having normal human emotions. The general population, however, has been plucked from normal human community and thrust into a synthetic solution of consumerism that does not allow for the normal human experience. In order to keep the system running, the Cloud People are constantly creating synthetic emotions they can display and use to stimulate emotion in the Dirt People.

This is the appeal of mass media in general and social media in particular. Just look at the name “social media”. It is a replacement for the normal human socialization that would occur in natural human communities. The most emotionally unstable people are intensely on-line. They lack the normal structure of human community to keep them balanced so they seek an alternative on their phone. The result is a population on a roller-coaster of emotional appropriation.

Emotion is not much different from what comes from taking stimulants. The first hit is the best hit. The most intense emotions we feel in our lives are at the extremes, so the emotionalism of this age grows more intense. Public emotion in a liberal democracy is the opiate of the people. Therefore the emotional appropriation becomes more prolific and the drama more intense. We are shaking ourselves to pieces in an effort to feel that which has been normal for the life of man.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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 Escapists

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One of the things about liberal democracy that is hard to see from the inside is how the system must be all consuming. The people trapped in such a system are forced to engage with it constantly. You are not allowed to live outside of politics. Everywhere you go there are people preaching the latest gospel, demanding you engage with it, usually demanding you not only have an opinion, but you have the right opinion. There is no escape from politics, because politics is everywhere.

The reason for this is democracy can only derive its authority from the general will, which must be expressed through public opinion. That is the basis of all democratic systems of government. Truth itself is fifty percent plus one. If people refuse to participate by not voting or not having an opinion, they must be assumed to be in the opposition to whatever is being proposed. Democracy off all kinds is a binary system where you can only be for or against the current issue.

You may not want to engage in the current issues because you simply don’t care, but your lack of caring can only be read as opposition. After all, if you supported the latest fad, you would make that clear. Your indifference gives support to those who oppose it, so your reasons are unimportant. What matters is your indifference is standing in the way of the cause. Both sides, therefore, feel it is their duty to force you to pick a side, as otherwise you are on the other side.

This binary view of the world that is forced on everyone inside a liberal democracy is a form of totalitarianism. The conventional definition of a totalitarian system is one that exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. The merely authoritarian system seeks only to control the state. Totalitarian systems seek to change the world and human nature with total control of public and private life. Man in a totalitarian system is a prisoner of enforced consent.

In contrast to the masculine nature of communist systems, liberal democracy is a softer and more subtle expression of control. The old communists would send men around to beat nonconformists. Millions were sent off to die in camps because they needed to be examples to the others. In liberal democracy, there is the same need for examples, but instead of torture and murder, the system uses psychological weapons against the intended victims. They get nagged into submission.

We see this with the Covid cult. In the Soviet Union, citizens would have been dragged off to get their shots and that would have been the end of it. There would be no need for vaccine passports, as internal passports were compulsory. In liberal democracy, the system seeks to nag and torment people into compliance. It is a passive-aggressive assault on the mind of the citizen. You are told you have choices, but if you choose incorrectly you are tormented by the system.

Note also that the point of compliance in liberal democracy is the same as in the communists forms of totalitarianism. Compliance is a moral issue. No one in charge cares about the health of the people. In fact, they secretly hope the white population dies from Covid. What matters to them is that you agree. They need your affirmation because they get their sense of authority from the general will. No matter your reasons, you not getting the vaccine is viewed as rejection of their morality.

This fear of and intolerance for opposition is the hallmark of totalitarian regimes and it is the operating ethos of modern liberal democracy. It is why the system has become entangled with digital life. It allows them to search for what the Soviets called refuseniks, people who refused to agree with the system. In liberal democracy, the refusenik is a “denier” of some sort or possibly a conspiracy theorist. The search for such people using digital tools is the highest priority.

The term “conspiracy theorist” is instructive. History is full of conspiracies, and these are taught in the schools. One of the most famous is the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar by Roman senators. It is used as the archetypal example of the political conspiracy. Despite the fact that conspiracies are the norm in human history, a person who traffics in them is anathematized as a dangerous weirdo. More important, anyone questioning official dogma is called a conspiracy theorist.

This is all part of the central demand of liberal democracy. Like all totalitarian systems, it cannot tolerate deviation or doubt. The authority of the people in charge is dependent on the general will. That is not only what puts them in charge, but it provides the systems of power they control. The indifferent in some small way question this moral authority by withholding their consent. This is why in a liberal democracy; you can never escape politics. You are only permitted to agree.

It is also why the liberal democrat has a special loathing of those who are indifferent to their moral claims. The person who mocks or dismisses their morality is assumed to worship different gods and have a different moral code. His source of strength is outside the liberal democratic order. That person is the true danger because he carries with him an alternative truth. That alternative truth is a direct threat to the system and the people who control it, so it must be destroyed.

This is why Christianity collapsed in the West as liberal democracy was imposed on it by the America empire. Christianity places the ultimate authority, the basis of right and wrong, outside of politics. To allow such an alternative source of morality is impossible in the liberal democratic order. As a result, all forms of Christianity have been swept from the public square. This is why Muslims reject liberal democracy. They know it is a direct threat to their faith.

Perhaps the most important innovation in the realm of totalitarianism is the lure of popular participation. In the communist systems, the party was supreme. In the liberal democratic order, the system attempts to draw everyone in with the promise that they can change things by participating. This flushes the opponents out into the open, who foolishly take the bait. This is the main role of mass media. They promise to amplify your opposition, but only serve to identify you as a heretic.

The Soviet Union made the great turn into decline when it began to run out of enemies it could use to focus party efforts. Once the people figured out that they could only live in the shadows and must always avoid engaging in politics publicly, the system was starved for energy. It settled into a long period of decline and eventually collapsed when faced with the crisis of the 1980’s. Convenient opposition, the handy heretic, is the fuel that powers the totalitarian system.

In a liberal democracy, a genuine opposition will refuse to engage the system and seek to live in the shadows. It will stay off the official social media platforms and avoid all contact with regime media. It will evolve its own language and its own moral structures outside of and independent from the system. The modern dissident will not stand athwart history yelling “stop”. He will stand outside of it, going about his business, building an alternative that is free from the bloody grasp of liberal democracy.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Cloud People Loathing

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Note: The weekly Taki column is up. This one did not come out very well, but even the best have their off-days. I could not quite figure out where I wanted to go with the analogy, so it went nowhere. Maybe I’ll revisit it here this week. The Sunday show is up behind the green door for those with a soul.

A feature of the ongoing crisis in America is people realizing that things they assumed to be true are not what they had always assumed. The so-called red-pilling or awakening is usually related to the egalitarian issues, but it can also be about general politics, as we saw in 2016. Many rank-and-file conservatives discovered that professional conservatives were not what they claimed. Their attacks on Trump and populism were an awakening for many normal people.

Another part of the great awakening is the realization that things make much more sense if you start from the assumption that the people in charge are motivated by a hatred for normal people. The pointless and punitive measures with regards to Covid has opened a lot of eyes. The people in charge seem to be sitting around dreaming up ways to hassle people, using Covid as an excuse. The pandemic has been a two year party for the sadists among the ruling class.

You really see this with the so-called conservatives, who have evolved into nothing but a cult of loathing. That loathing is directed at the sorts of people they used to trick into supporting them. This is most likely connected, in part, to the fact that so many of the former suckers have wised up over the last five years. The Trump phenomenon broke the spell and there is no way the former suckers are going to go back to being conned by the grifters of Conservative Inc.

The glaring example here is the revolt of the neocons, who broke with Conservative Inc, and have now migrated back to their old home on the Left. Jonah Goldberg, who started out in life fetching coffee for the far-left crank Ben Wattenberg, is pretty much a middle of the road lefty now. Bill Kristol is openly supporting far-left candidates like Terry McAuliffe in Virginia. When you see Bush flunkies in bed with Clinton flunkies, it is not hard to see that conservatism was always a grift.

That is the thing about a grifter. They despise the person they are trying to scam, which is why they can be so ruthless. The grifter does not rip-off everyone. They target a mark and then use all of their powers to harm him, often just for the fun of it. People who have studied the confidence man have noted that the conman always feels like he is in the right and the mark somehow deserves it. You see that with the neocons, who cry out as they strike at the people they conned for so long.

Another example of this conservative loathing for normal people is this post from the corpulent Kevin Williamson. For a long time, his grift was to be the common man at National Review, where he wrote about the little people. Unlike the rest of that crowd, he was not the product of elite universities and connected families. He was from West Texas and flunked out of a state college. His job in Conservative Inc. was to be the populist affirmation of the latest conservative fads.

Conservatives are supposed to “stand athwart” this sort of corruption of the law by the Left, but here you have Williamson celebrating it. The reason is Alex Jones is associated with Donald Trump and populism. In other words, his hatred for the people who used to read him counts for everything. If it means goofball judges promoting nonsense lawsuits that undermine public order, Williamson is for it as long as it harms the people he loves to hate.

Kevin Williamson is a good example of how the loathing of normal people is linked to a deep self-loathing. He is famously obese. He often looks like one of those people who paramedics have to use a flatbed truck to transport to the hospital. The morbidly obese are driven by self-loathing. They eat to get the momentary hit that comes from high calorie foods, but this also fuels the self-loathing. The more they eat the more they hate themselves for it. The morbidly obese have a death wish.

Another reason that guys like Williamsons and David French, another good example, are so blatant in their hatred for normal people is they have always had to play the role of the Dirt Person for their masters in the rackets. They used to make Williamson, for example, dress like a rag-picker when he went on television. You see, he was playing the lucky dirtball, allowed to live in the master’s house, as long as he was a good boy and did what he was told. It is a degrading existence.

This is why he is obsessed with hating Trump and those associated with him. The 2016 election put the lie to his existence. He was just a houseboy for mediocrities like Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru. Imagine having to call them sir when out in public and you can see why Williamson is filled with rage. You also see why he drowns it in processed foods and invective aimed at normal people. He hates you because you remind him of why he hates himself and why he should hate himself.

No life is without some purpose and the purpose of these people has been to open the eyes of normal people about the reality of conservatism. Millions of people have realized over the last five years that these people are liars and crooks. Conservatism was always just a con. Like all conmen, the various characters of Conservative Inc. were motivated by a deep hatred for their marks. Like the rest of the Cloud People, they are defined by their loathing for the Dirt People.

It is this awakening that has put those rackets into crisis. Rich Lowry was finally demoted from his position. Daily management of National Review has now been outsourced to Bangalore. Massive pay cuts and layoffs hang over the entire enterprise now that the suckers have smartened up. A big part of this great awakening is that people are figuring out that it all makes sense when you realize that the people in charge hate you. Your only choice is to hate them back.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Everything Is Broken

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Way back when the government kicked off the Covid panic, smart people pointing out that shutting down the world to bend the curve was not a cost free way of addressing the problem. In fact, it was a very expensive and risky solution to a problem that was best addressed through traditional means. The world has a pandemic every 15 years and a severe one at least once a generation. Humans have figured out to tough out these naturally occurring events.

Shutting down the world and making people stay home from work is a novel invention, so there was no way to know what would happen. Human societies are tough, so it took a while for the problems to manifest. Initially, those who could work from home worked from home and those unemployed were supported with subsidies. This could never be a permanent condition, so we have been trying to transition back to normalcy for the last six months, but things are nowhere near normal.

The Brits have gasoline shortages, and they are facing a winter with spiraling natural gas prices, because the energy supply chain is a mess. Keeping people at home meant keeping people out of their cars, which collapsed fuel consumption. The trucks and truck drivers were put to other uses and now that demand is returning, they suddenly have a shortage of trucks and truck drivers. This will soon hit other parts of the supply chain as demand suddenly increases for goods and services.

In the US, ports are a mess as they face similar supply chain problems. The ports in America are weird systems. The labor is unionized, but the unions are pretty much run by the government under an array of consent decrees. Demand for labor is driven by the ships in port needing to be loaded and unloaded. The stevedoring firms hire when they need to unload a ship, but they keep few fulltime people. They simply draw from the pool of longshoremen that operate at the port.

During the shutdowns, fewer ships came into port, so fewer people were needed to unload ships and fewer trucks were needed to cart the goods out of the port. That is why ships are stacked up at the ports now. The system for unloading those ships had atrophied during the pandemic, so it is now over-capacity. This leads to shortages and price disruptions throughout the economy. For example, America has been suffering an aluminum shortage for close to a year.

A good example of how throwing wrenches into the system has unpredictable long term effects is the automobile industry. When the government shut down the country, the travel industry was flattened. The car rental firms did the prudent thing. They liquidated their car fleets. After all, if you make your money renting cars and no one is renting cars, those cars are direct hits to the bottom line. In order to weather the storm, they sold off their fleets and furloughed their staff.

The trouble is a big source of used cars is the car rental industry. They get cars on programs from the manufacturers. They can be three, six or nine month programs where the company takes the new cars for a monthly fee and then returns them to the manufacturers after the term of the program. Those cars end up in the new car dealer lots as discounted used cars. Look around the car lots in America and what you see is lots of empty spaces where cars used to sit.

Once things opened up, the car rental companies went looking for cars, so they went to the used car auctions. Other shortages have made it impossible for the manufacturers to get cars to their own dealers, much less supply program cars to the rental fleets, so that left the used car market. Used car prices are now spiking to record levels because the supply chain is a mess. It will take years for this to normalize, and the cost will be in the tens of billions.

Of course, everyone who buys food has noticed that food is suddenly much more expensive and there are weird shortages. Like everything else, the broken supply chain is the main culprit. Those trucking companies suddenly put out of business by government fiat did not sit around waiting to open up again. They fired their staff, sold off their trucks and found other ways to survive. Rebuilding the many small links of the supply chain will take years and show up in higher food prices.

In a modern liberal democracy, every event requires a response, and every response requires a response and so on. The smallest pebble tossed into the water can potentially result in a flood. In this context it means government jumping in to mitigate the consequences of their fix for something else they broke. Inflation will get calls for more spending, which will get more inflation. The central banks will then try to redirect that inflation from goods to assets.

In other words, the shutdowns have created a dynamic of chaos that will take years to settle out, assuming no further shocks. The Biden administration is promising another meteor strike with their Build Back Better nonsense. You see, they broke everything and now see it as a chance to remake the world in their image. When crazy stupid people want to try to make the world, the only thing that can follow is chaos. We may be at the cusp of an age of unimaginable economic madness.

This is a good example of something said by Will Durant. “Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.”

In the fullness of time, after the West is a ruin of its own making, this age will be remembered as a gross and sustained violation of that sentiment. If over the last thirty years the people in charge had done nothing but entertain themselves with their toys, none of this would be happening. Instead, they kept trying to prove nature wrong and overturn the wisdom of ages. Reality does not take kindly to this amount of abuse, so there will be consequences.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.

Reruns

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Long before the cock crows I am out and on the road to a secret meeting, so I am unable to post as usual. Instead, here is the paywall podcast that I do on Sunday and post up on SubscribeStar. Those supporting the cause will have no doubt listened and memorized it, but for the vast majority who are not kicking in the value of a cup of coffee, here is a portion of what you are missing.

What I’m trying to do with the paywall content is settle into a routine where twice a week there is a written post and on Sunday a podcast. That way, people kicking in five bucks or more per month can feel like they are getting their money’s worth. For now, the paywall stuff is lighter stuff. At least once a week is a movie review or commentary about popular culture. The Sunday show is all news stuff.

Item #1 The Ungrateful
  • The Undefeated: Jaylen Brown on why it’s important for the Celtics and NBA to hire African American head coaches – Link
Item #2 Indians
  • WSJ: Ancient Footprints Yield Surprising New Clues about the First Americans – Link
Item #3 The New Religion
  • Reuters: Washington cathedral to install stained glass with racial justice theme – Link
Item #4 Mushrooms
  • Reason: Oregon Legalizes a Breakthrough Treatment: Magic Mushrooms – Link

The Nature of Tyrants

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In the West, the morality of the state has been determined by how much or how little it respects the basic rights of its citizens. During the Cold War this was a critical measure used to justify foreign policy. The American government claimed it was within its rights to overthrow South American governments that got too chummy with the Soviets because they would endanger the rights of their people. On the other hand, they would back anti-communist dictators because they were better than communists.

There was a lot of lying and dissembling on this issue, but the principle was important to Western governments, so they made a big show of it. In America, for example, this meant protecting property rights from the excesses of the state. As a practical matter, it meant the state had to prove they had good reason for violating your rights before the court would permit them from doing it. They had to get a warrant, for example, before tapping your phone or riffling through your papers.

Government is always a blunt instrument and men are not angels so to avoid office holders and bureaucrats from abusing the rights of the people they first had to demonstrate there was a compelling government interest in declaring your backyard a wetland or banning a certain activity. Put another away, it was the duty of the government to make the affirmative argument. Citizens did not have to justify their rights to exercise them. They were assumed.

Property is a useful metric in this regard because it is simple and the economic basis of Western society. Even in feudalism property rights were respected, because ownership was what made the system possible. The right to speak out or organize are up for debate to some degree, but the right to own the fruits of your labor is the starting point for social organization in the West. It is what makes communism alien and why it has always been the domain of outsiders and subversives.

In the United States, property rights barely exist now. This story about the Feds smashing into a private business and taking their stuff sounds like something from North Korea or maybe Australia. For reasons they feel no need to explain, they broke into a private bank vault and stole the property of the customers using the service and refuse to return the property. By any reasonable moral standard, this is theft and worse, it is legal plunder. The state is plundering the citizens.

Like all criminals, conmen and sociopaths, the state is throwing up a dust storm of legal points to distract from the moral point at the center. In a just society, is it appropriate to take the goods of the people without first demonstrating that the state has a reason for seizing that property? The answer is obvious. By Western standards, this is immoral and the sort of thing that justifies revolution. In fact, it is this sort of behavior that justifies the very existence of the United States.

This is not an atypical story. The Federal government now routinely seizes the property of citizens without justification. Nick Fuentes, the young firebrand nationalist, had his bank accounts seized by the government. They have not explained why they took his money, and they refuse to even acknowledge it. One day he had money in his account and the next day it was cleaned out. The bank finally told him it was the government, but it took them weeks to get around to telling him.

The general violation of property rights is now the norm. The tech oligarchs, for example, strongly oppose private property. If they don’t like what you are saying on your website, they will steal your domain name. They will collude to limit your ability to hold a job or have a bank account. What used to be a sacred right of all people is now up for debate with an unelected oligarchical class as the judge and jury. What is yours is theirs and what is theirs is theirs and they own everything.

It is tempting to call this feudalism as people have a cartoonish understanding of the term and the times from which we get the term. The fact is the typical feudal lord had a greater respect for property rights than anyone in authority today. The authority of the lord was rooted in property rights. He respected the rights of small landowners, because he expected his lord to respect his rights the same way. The upper cast of modern society has no respect for the people in the least.

This is the critical thing to understand about the modern authoritarian. They no longer respect what used to be the common morality of the West. The ultimate constraint on feudal excess was that universally accepted morality with regards to property, the law and governance. Most people were illiterate, even the rulers, so the letter of the law was not paramount. It was the spirit of the law that mattered. In fact, it was this respect for the spirit of the law on which authority rested.

Today, the people in charge have no respect for the law or the concept of law, so their agents just do as they please. In fact, they take pride in trampling the rights of the people, because it pleases their masters. The goons prosecuting the January 6th protestors, for example, take a sadistic pleasure in the torment they are inflicting on the people caught in their trap. Their intentional cruelty has become a positional good, something that elevates them in the eyes of the oligarchs.

The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable document that is mostly remembered for the opening lines. Even though those lines have been abused by the very tyrants that now rule over us, the document is a remarkable expression of Western thought and Anglo-Saxon morality. After the long bill of indictment against the king, a list familiar today, there is this line. “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

The beauty of that line is that it qualifies the moral depravity of the tyrant by juxtaposing it against the nature of a free people. A people who sit idly by as their rulers trample their ancient rights are getting the government they deserve. A free people, in contrast,  must hold their prince to the highest moral standard. It is immoral for them to do otherwise, as it violates that which defines them as free people. Every tyrant issues his own death warrant to the free people he seeks to oppress.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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.