Techno-Democracy

Posted on January 13, 2021 by thezman

A popular way to understand the problems of the present is to compare current times to the past. It is popular to say there is nothing new under the sun. That is certainly true regarding the human condition. The mix of people changes over time, but the types of people are fairly fixed. What changes is material progress. There are new things, and those new things are often very important. Those new things create new challenges for those old ways of thinking and acting.

For example, advances in weaponry changed how people related to the people in charge of their society. The crossbow suddenly made it very easy for one man to kill another man from a distance. Even a farmer could quickly learn to use the weapon and be deadly accurate with it. The traditional bow required training and was not as accurate as the new weapon. Suddenly, an angry peasant could take out the king, which changed how the king looked at the peasants.

An example in our age is how technology has made it nearly impossible to know who is making the laws. We have a labyrinth of laws regarding immigration, but no one knows who offered up these laws or when many were created. Exactly no one has ever heard their congressman or senator promise them to increase immigration from Somalia, but it happened. Someone in the law-making system tucked that provision into a bill that no one read, and we suddenly have infinite Somalis.

The truth is, the reason we have the open borders system we have is that a million rats in the system have been gnawing away at the borders for generations. A defense bill will have tucked within in it an obscure passage that removes some provision of a previous bill on immigration. In the farm bill some other gremlin will slip in a provision that replaces that one removed in the defense bill. The old bill that became law years ago is still there but amended over time to be the opposite.

The irony of this is that the argument in favor of liberal democracy is that it opens the law-making process to the public. Laws are proposed in a public forum by legislators, who are elected by the people. Those laws are then debated and voted on by those representatives of the people. If the people do not like how their representative voted they can vote him out of office. Unlike palace intrigue and laws passed by the whims of a king or dictator, it is all out in the open.

This would certainly be true a century ago. The reason is the bills were written by hand and read out loud. Legislators had private correspondence, but it was also written by hand and carried by horse. The only way to conduct business in a parliamentary body was in person and out loud. It also meant the bills were short, as no one was going to write a 6,000-page bill by hand. An American could sit in the gallery and literally watch the laws be written and debated in the Congress.

Today, we have no idea who is writing the bills. There is a vague sense that it is the army of squires in Washington, taking dictation from monied interests. The names of these people are unknown to us. In fact, they are unknown to the legislators who vote on the bills presented to them. None of the bills passed by Congress are read by the men and women voting on them. They simply get an executive summary and calls from their donors as to how they are supposed to vote.

It is not just law making where we see the democratic process overwhelmed by the technological progress of this age. Here is an example from the courts. A century ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment protections only apply to your immediate dwelling. They do not extend to your land. At the time, this meant that the government could walk onto your land and look around for crime. They could not go into your house, but they could walk all around it.

At the time, this seemed perfectly reasonable. You can’t reasonably ask someone to not look at something in plain sight. Modern technology, however, has now taken this bit of common sense and turned it into another tool of the police state. The government can install cameras on your property and record your comings and goings. A century ago, this outcome was impossible to imagine, so no one imagined it. Technology does not just make dreams come true. It makes the unimaginable into reality.

Here is the thing. We have no idea who decided that the court permitted this new intrusion on our privacy. Clearly, the court did not say it is okay for the government to install cameras on your property. Someone in the system looked for a way to do this and found that court ruling. No one knows who that person is because it is probably a collection of people. Like the rats eating away at the border, these rats gnaw away at other aspects of civil society.

A reason America is in crisis is that no one knows who is responsible. The left-wing rioters we saw in the summer were not acting irrationally. Sure, they were mostly rental mobs, but let us suppose they were motivated by legitimate grievances. Where can they go with them? To whom would they make their appeal? The Right is now facing the same dilemma. Where do they go for a redress of their grievances? Who can they blame for the censorship regime we have now?

Since aggrieved citizens cannot put a name to the problem, they are left with attacking the system itself. Technology plus liberal democracy has ended up with a war between the system and the people. Technology has made the democratic process a black box that even the legislators do not understand. It is a system in which no one is responsible for anything, so the system itself becomes responsible. The only option for the disgruntled is to smash the system.

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The Big Lie

Posted on January 12, 2021 by thezman

The expression “the big lie” gets tossed around a lot in modern times, usually defined as the means with which the Nazis fooled the people. In reality, the expression was coined by the most significant man in history to explain how the people who tried to prevent the catastrophe of the Great War ended up being blamed for it. The big lie is a falsehood so big that no one would think it possible to state such a lie. In other words, it is believed because it is so outlandish it must be true.

One of the many ironies of this age is that the people the most significant man in history accused of employing the “the big lie” have spent generations since that time redefining it to mean Nazi propaganda. In popular culture, the Left will apply the expression to some inconvenient facts pointed out by their many enemies. They claim a famous propaganda minister associated with the most significant man in history is the guy who coined the expression to describe his own efforts.

That is the real trick of “the big lie” that gets missed. The audaciousness of it distracts the attention of people. Instead of focusing on the facts of something happening in society, their eye moves to some other related thing. It’s no different than how a magician uses distraction to get the audience looking one way while he some other sleight of hand. Even though you know he does not possess magical powers, you are amazed nonetheless.

We see this in how the term “fascist” is used in this age. The Left in the West has always accused their enemies of being fascists, even when there were no actual fascists vying for political power. For a period, fascists and communist were locked in a bitter struggle for the soul of socialism, so it makes sense. In America is never made much sense, as we never had fascists or a communist party of note, but for the Left everywhere, it is always monkey see, monkey do.

Even so, through the Cold War, a popular way to make sport of the Left in America was to mock their absurd use of the word “fascist.” It was only the hardcore cranks who used the term, so even the conventional Left would mock them for it. The left-wing crazy was the guy making his own clothes and growling his own food, so he was not a prisoner of the fascists running society. The joke relied on the fact that America was a bourgeois society, so we did not have fascists or communists.

Of course, the term is everywhere now, as the rulers and their loyalists wage jihad against our ancient liberties. The excuse for their excess is they are fighting fascists, so it is okay. They have internalized their mythology about themselves and the world around them to such a degree they really think Donald Trump was some sort of fascist dictator plotting to seize power. They are sure that the peaceful protest at the Capitol was their version of the Reichstag fire.

This is the modern version of “the big lie.” Look around at what is happening and it is as close as any western society has come to fascism in 80 years. The people stripping the rights of Americans are not government employees, but corporate powers. The vitriol from the politicians may be the signal to act, but the people trying to destroy Trump and his supporters are corporate actors, not the state. Corporatism is a foundation stone of fascism and that is what is usurping the authority of our system now.

In other words, the big lie here is that the people allegedly under assault are the people wielding power. That is a lie so big that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The people with a monopoly of power are crying out in agony as they crush their enemies. Their claims to be on defense are a lie to distract from the fact they have assumed total power. Amazon can offer murder for hire to prime members and no one can stop them.

This is the “the big lie” in neon. The people who are engaging in a modern version of fascism are claiming to be the great enemies of fascism. This leaves the genuine opponents of genuine fascism without a language they can use. Calling what is happening Marxism is so stupid only the dullards accept it. The communist would not have allowed the tech giants off the leash. They would not have been slavishly in support of the financialization of the economy.

Another part of this big lie is that over time the fans of the most significant man in history have accepted the premise of the big lie as their big truth. That is, fascism exclusively means opposition to nonwhites. The result is we have the self-proclaimed fascists reinforcing the premise put forward by the actual fascists that they cannot possible be fascists, because they are not white. In this version of the big lie, the fascists have created an enemy and put him to service in their cause.

The thing with a lie, big or small, is it is like trying to conceal a body. Like a body after a murder, no matter how well you hide the truth, no matter how many layers of lies you throw on it, its absence is noticed. This is the problem facing our new fascist overlords as they scramble to consolidate their power. Whatever this new system is, people know it is not democracy or constitutional government. No amount of lying can change that realty and eventually, there will be a word for it.

The Game of Life

Posted on January 11, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a post up behind the green door on the movie Pulp Fiction, which clocks in at #95 on the top-100 list. There is a post up at Taki on the change we are seeing in the political climate.

What has gotten the most attention on this side this past week is the hypocrisy by the ruling class and their histrionic flunkies in the media over the peaceful protest in the Capitol last week. The first response of normal people is to note how the same people raging about these protests were celebrating violent riots in the summer. In what remains of the internet, people have been posting examples of people in politics or the media saying the exact opposite of what they said a few months ago.

Normal people have been programmed to think hypocrisy is important, even though it is clearly not important to the people in the ruling class. Normal people are taught that a civil society operates by a clear set of rules that apply to everyone. When the people in the ruling class have one set of rules for normal people and a different set of rules for themselves, normal people get mad. The ruling class, however, does not care, as there is one set of rules for them and another for the rest of us.

This focus on hypocrisy has left something unnoticed. That is the increasingly overwrought behavior of our rulers. They have become a collection of hysterical drama queens, who carry on like the world is about to end. This is the one thread connecting all of the insanity we have experienced from our rulers recently. Their reaction is wildly out of proportion from what is expected. The actual news, when you think about it, is always about their emotionally charged reaction to mostly normal events.

If we go way back to the 2016 election, the political class reacted as if the most important man in history had come out of his cryogenic chamber in Paraguay and seized control of the government. Instead of analyzing why it was there preferred option was rejected and making the normal adjustments, they concocted wild fantasies about invisible Russians and carried on like teenage girls for four years. It has already been forgotten, but they really believed that Russia stuff.

The Covid stuff is another great example. The local tyrants have used this minor public health issue to feature themselves in a drama of their own creation. In this story, they are heroically fighting the great virus enemy. They are rallying the people in a great cause to prevent the extinction of mankind. The media slavishly reports on their great deeds as if they are out slaying dragons or facing the Black Knight. The buffoonish governor of New York even had a book written about his heroism.

What should be a minor public health issue has been turned into a great drama acted out by emotionally unstable people. According to the CDC, over 250 million people have been tested with 22 million confirmed cases. Total deaths in 2020 were in line with what you would expect, given the country’s demographics. A little higher due to Covid and a little higher due to the reaction. Sober-minded people would have treated this as a very bad flu season. Our hysterical rulers treated it as the end times.

The most recent example of the overwrought behavior by our rulers is the reaction to the protest last Wednesday. The “storming of the Capitol” was really just a bunch of people walking past the cops and going inside the building. Sure, juvenile pranksters livestreamed themselves doing shenanigans, but other than the Pence aide murdering Ashli Babbitt, it was nothing more than a frat house prank. It was nothing like the Kavanaugh protests just a short time ago.

The reaction by the rulers is as if a rebel army laid siege to the Capitol and set fire to most of the city. The FBI has been tasked with hunting down, in the most dramatic way, all of the protestors. Their media lackeys are now calling the Capitol protestors “insurrectionists” and demanding they be destroyed. Instead of calling it a protest, they are calling it a siege. Again, the image is of a foreign army attacking the center of the empire, like the Gauls sacking Rome in 387 BC.

For the inauguration they have now deployed army and national guard units. The media lackeys are bragging that they will be prepared and enthusiastic about using lethal force if any protestors turn up that day. Pelosi has been trying to get the Army to remove Trump from office. She apparently thinks he could launch a nuclear attack. We have come a long way from the America where citizens were expected to petition their government for the redress of grievances.

What we are seeing is the reaction of people who are no longer engaged in normal life, but instead are playing the game of life. They are immersed in a live action role playing game operated by juvenile narcissists. The ruling class gets to imagine themselves as world historical figures and every event puts the world on a knife edge. Their actions will determine the outcome. The entire ruling class is swept up in these false dramas that they get to play, while the rest of the country suffers.

Another clue is how they echo one another in the use of dramatic language to describe mundane events. One uses some over-the-top language then the rest of them are repeating it, maybe adding on some more dramatic language. The “protest” went from “riot” to “insurrection” to “horrendous insurrection” in a few cycles. They are competing with one another to show their loyalty to the group. What matters to them in this game is the opinion of the people in the game, not the rest of us.

America has reached a point where the ruling class and its various support structures is no longer connected to the people over whom it rules. They are inside Versailles or the Winter Palace, imagining what is happening outside. Meanwhile, outside, the world is nothing like the rulers imagine. The people outside look at the palaces and try to understand what is happening inside, based on the noises and behavior they see from the organs of the state.

That really is the root of their anger. The outside broke though the wall and gently reminded them that life is not a game and they are not great men. In the game they are always the winners, but in real life they are judged by their actions. It may take a while, but they will be held accountable. This is what angers them. They hate this reality, which is why they cling to the alternative reality of their fantasy, but reality does not go away when you stop believing it.

The Blood Of Patriots

Posted on January 7, 2021 by thezman

Yesterday, Ashli Babbitt was shot in the neck and died while protesting inside the Capitol with other protestors. A group of angry Trump supporters had got into the building and were making a racket. This is not an unusual occurrence. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Democrats organized mobs of screeching women to harass Republicans in the halls of the Capitol. Party media was there to celebrate it as the purest expression of democracy. It was power to the people time.

That was not the case yesterday, according to the media. Instead, it was a direct threat to “our” democracy. This is a bit ironic in that the protests are over the obvious corruption in the election system. The direct threat to democracy is the people demanding their elections be fair and honest. That’s why Ashli Babbitt was inside the Capitol making a racket. Her whole life she had been told this was how citizens angry at their government demand redress when the system fails.

That is how popular government is supposed to work. The people expect their government to be responsive to the will of the people. When they don’t like that they see, they vote for different people to hold office. If those politicians ignore the people, then the people go bang on their door and demand redress of their grievances. The politicians then come out and address their issues. That’s not it works now. Instead, they open fire on the people like they did yesterday.

Ashli Babbitt was not some drug-addled degenerate, like we saw last summer, when the ruling class unleashed their mobs on us. She was a veteran, serving 14 years in the US Air Force, and she was a high-level security official throughout her time in service. She was like most of the people at the protest, in that she had bought into what she was told about America. So much so she signed onto serve in the military and go overseas in various deployments.

Like most of the protestors, she was there because she had spent her life playing by the rules and defending those rules. She was there because the people in charge of maintaining the rules have been violating those rules. They ignored the official corruption in the 2016 election and they laughed about the grotesque fraud that was plainly obvious in the 2020 election. Like the rest of those protestors, she was angry that the politicians were not following the rules.

For her trouble, she died in a pool of her own blood inside what is supposed to be the people’s house in America. It is a bit ironic that a citizen exercising her rights would be murdered by an agent of a corrupt system that is now infringing on her rights. Murder is the right word here. The man who shot her was under no threat and was on the other side of a locked and barricaded door. The murderer was part of Vice President Pence’s security detail. The video, for those interested, is here.

There will be no charges against the murderer. Unlike the cops involved in the George Floyd case or any number of others, this coward will not be fired from his job or face criminal charges. He will probably get a medal. He will not have his face and address plastered all over the media, so that he can be attacked by mobs. There will be no media orchestrated campaign to defund the police over this. Most likely, the whole thing will be put on mute so that the public forgets it.

Of course, unlike George Floyd, Ashli Babbitt will not get three nationally televised funerals and be treated as a fallen hero. That honor goes to drug-addled criminals who overdose in police custody. In this America, patriots who served their country and exercise their rights get gunned down by agents of the state. This woman, this patriot, bleeding out in the halls of the Capitol, murdered by an agent of the state, is the perfect image of what has gone terribly wrong in America.

No doubt, millions of decent people who sympathized with her cause are saddened by this terrible tragedy. It did not have to come to this. This was not an accident. This was not a terrible misfortune. The people on the other side of that door, the people who celebrate the murderer of Ashli Babbitt now, they did this. They created this crisis that threatens to plunge to country into a death spiral. They had choices and they had plenty of warning, but they refused to listen and now Ashli Babbitt is dead.

Be angry, but also remember Ashli Babbitt. The Republican Party will not remember her or even mention her name. The media will work hard to make sure you forget her name and how she died yesterday. Dissidents need to remember her so we never forget why we are angry and why we are dissidents. We are angry with a system that thinks it is okay to murder citizens who play by the rules and exercise their rights as citizens to petition their government for redress.

The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independent for 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Reno To Damascus

Posted on January 5, 2021 by thezman

As the Trump story arc reaches a conclusion over the next few weeks, there will be a lot of writing and talking about the meaning of the last four years. The racketeers of the conservative movement have already concluded that the last four years were just an anomaly and they can go back to the same old rackets. Like career criminals, they learn nothing from the past. Others appear to have been chastened by the experience and are coming out of the other end questioning their old ways.

One of those post-Trump men appears to be the editor of First Things, the conservative religious journal founded by Richard John Neuhaus. The editor, R. R. Reno, published this in the old left-wing magazine Newsweek, in which he sounds more like Pat Buchanan than the typical conservative. In fact, his essay probably would have been accepted by the old paleoconservative journal, Chronicles, as an olive branch to mend the three-decade rift between First Things and the paleos.

What makes Reno’s post interesting is that he was a fervent anti-Trump advocate the last four years. He participated in the now infamous National Review symposium, in which they demanded the rules of the Republican Party be changed to prevent Trump from winning the nomination. His contribution was to offer up the left-wing slur that Trump was a fascist in a business suit and that the people supporting him were stupid and disgusting. They were “trumpster diving.”

There seems to be a great deal of spiritual distance between the 2016 R. R. Reno and the 2020 R. R. Reno, at least in tone, if not substance. In fairness to Reno, he has not been a running dog lackey of Conservative Inc. He has been more of a barking dog around the conservative caravan, as it follows the Left from fad to fad. Often a critic, but never an opponent and always there by the caravan at each stop. He is a critic of conservatism, but one welcome at their events.

This is not a new posture by Reno. During the 2016 Republican primary he made some very sensible observations about Trump and the dynamic in the primary. While most of the conservative racketeers were in the streets rending their garments to show their liberal masters, they were horrified by what was happening, Reno noticed the obvious and was willing to say it. That said, he made sure to underscore that he thought Trump was a “dangerous figure in our public life.”

This is not the first time the First Things crew has struggled to maintain their position as friendly critic of conservatism. Back in 1992, they found themselves in a similar spot when Bill Buckley was purging the paleocons. Most of what First Things claims to support fall on the paleo side, but the money and good living were on the neocon side, so they threw in with Buckley. As George Washington once said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder.

Now, to be even more fair, Reno and the First Things crew could simply be working the same racket they have for years. On the one hand they advocate traditional conservative positions on culture, economics, politics and so on, while publicly opposing anyone that attempts to build a political movement on those issues. They supported the Buchanan message, but not the messenger, for example. They sympathized with the Trump voters, but opposed their candidate.

We will know soon enough if the social conservatives from Conservative Inc. had an epiphany during the Trump years. The rally scheduled for January 6th in the Imperial Capital is both unprecedented and a harbinger. Unlike the Buchanan or Perot movements, the Trump movement will outlive its founder. The people who voted for Trump did so knowing that the time for reform is running out. Many now think it has run out and it is time for something to replace the corrupt system.

Where the establishment social conservatives like R. R. Reno come down with regards to things like the America First movement, led by Nick Fuentes, will reveal if they are just running the old grift or have had an awakening. CPAC is next month in Orlando Florida and AFPAC will be holding their event there at the same time. Last year AFPAC drew hundreds and this year will be even bigger. The people getting tens of thousands in the streets of DC are building a genuine movement now.

For social conservatives like Mr. Reno and the First Things crowd, Fuentes and his groypers should be their ideal vehicle. They can be a little coarse, for sure, but that’s true of all young people. Otherwise, they make a clean presentation and are not afraid to express their Christian faith as part of the politics. While the First Things people are at CPAC next month, they should consider swinging by AFPAC. Mr. Reno could sit down and have a chat with Fuentes. It can be arranged.

The question for social conservatives with regards to politics is what compromises should be made in order to participate in the system. This was the dilemma faced by Buckley and his conservative movement. In their case, there was no compromise they were unwilling to make in order to have a place at the table. For social conservatives to avoid the same fate, they will from time to time need to back someone who is willing to go inside and flip over those tables.

That should be the takeaway for someone like R. R. Reno. Trump was always an imperfect leader, but he was available and willing to go inside the Temple and toss over those tables. He was never a savior, just a disruption in the system. The people who voted for Trump understood this, for the most part. They knew if he busted things up, then it would open the door for the social changes long advocated by social conservatives and the writers of journals like First Things.

The great mistake of the American Right was to accept the proposition that the Left gets to pick their leaders. The Left told them to jettison Buchanan and the paleocons, so they did and got nothing for their trouble. One lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that this does not have to be the rule. Social conservatives can pick their own leaders and make their own tables. That should be the lesson to the leaders of social conservatism as they come to terms with Trump.

Generational War

Posted on January 4, 2021 by thezman

Note: The first Taki post of the year is up. I start the year off with some soothing words about race. I also have a post up behind the green door on the move The Searchers, which is ranked #96 on the top-100.

Generational politics has been a part of American culture since the middle of the last century when the Baby Boomers started making noises. Youth culture started in the 20’s during the Jazz Age, but really came into its own in the 50’s and 60’s. Today it is just assumed that each generation has its own unique identity. Zoomers, Boomers and Millennials are separate tribes with nothing in common. On this side of the great divide, “boomer” is commonly thrown around as an epithet.

One of the great ironies of our political culture is that whites are never allowed to play identity politics, unless it is generational identity politics. That because generational war is pretty much a white thing. Zoomers can rant and rave about the Boomers, because it is assumed that both groups are white. You never hear the gatekeepers lecture us about the danger of generational identity politics like they do with other aspects of identity like race, sex or even region of the country.

Putting all of that aside, there is a generational aspect to our politics that will be front and center in the near future. The Baby Boomers get grief for the cultural revolution, but in reality, they were just consumers of that revolution. Despite all the radical rhetoric, the Boomers emerged into adulthood with a high degree of institutional trust. The Left has a deep faith in government and the process of government. The Right has a deep faith in capitalism and the process of the marketplace.

This institutional trust is apparent across the political spectrum. The mainstream Left demands absolute fidelity to the institutions they control. For example, skepticism of the mass media is treated as a dangerous conspiracy theory. The mainstream Right was in a constant state of panic over Trump challenging the system. Even dissident Boomers maintain faith in the system. They are sure that getting the right people in the right offices will result in polices rooted in demographic reality.

This is to be expected. The Baby Boom generation came into a world that not only worked, but worked amazingly well. They were raised up in a high trust society with a booming economy. In their youth they got to enjoy a flourishing popular culture and in their adulthood, they were gifted a robust economy. Through their middle years, they got good schools for their kids and great health care for their parents. The system has been great for that generation, so their loyalty is sensible.

This deep trust in the system will only become more intense as the Baby Boom generation gets older. The first wave of Boomers is either on the cusp of retirement or already retired. Right behind them is the second wave that perks up every time an ad for retirement services comes on the television. What old people do not want is for things to change. Despite the obvious problems in politics, the culture and economy, the Baby Boom generation trusts the system. They have no choice.

Despite their vast influence, the Baby Boom generation will soon begin to give way to the next generation, which is the Millennials. Generation X is too small, and they have been shut out by the massive generation ahead of them. The Millennials are now ready to start taking up their place in American society. The first wave of that generation is approaching forty now. Over the next decade, as the Boomers head into retirement, their children will take over for them as the dominant generation.

Unlike their parents or possibly grandparents in some cases, the Millennials have a different lived experience, as the beautiful people would put it. They came into easy times like their parents, but they never had to fear war, recession, or the ideological threat of Soviet communism. They never had to think much about the system or trust in it in anyway, because the system was never under any threat. For them, the current order was just a part of nature, something taken for granted.

One result of this is an unrealistic sense of entitlement. You see this most acutely on the Left, where the new generation of radicals sound like spoiled children. Their demands are those of a toddler faced with a toy that is not working. They look around and demand to know why diversity is not blooming wherever they look or why there are things within eyeshot that hurt their feelings. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is a petulant child, but also the face of the new American Left.

Another feature of this generation is an absolute faith in themselves. The doting of their parents and the hours of esteem building lessons paid off. Millennials are a wildly confident generation. This makes perfect sense. Things just worked out well for this group, especially those who entered the managerial class. As long as they ticked the right boxes, the treat came out at the bottom. A generation raised on participation medals reached adulthood highly confident in their ability.

They also have a deep faith in their sense of right and wrong. They start from the assumption that their desires are the moral high ground. Whatever they want is not the right thing in the empirical sense, but the right thing morally. This means they receive criticism and failure as a personal affront. Add in their sense of entitlement and this is not a generation built for struggle. They expect and demand things work the way they want them to work and that’s the end of it.

For Millennials, politics will be intensely personal. They define themselves by their lifestyle choices and the opinions they promote. Personal accomplishment plays a minor role, because everything that matters has always been here for them. Gesture politics is all about moral signaling for a generation that conflated everything into some aspect of their personal identity. This is why mainstream political discourse increasingly sounds like a fight between a divorced couple.

For an aging empire showing signs of decay, this sets up an interesting dynamic over the next decades. As the system begins to break in serious ways, the older generation will want to protect it at all costs. On the other hand, the people tasked with fixing the system will be their overconfident, sanctimonious kids. Compounding it will be the fact that the Millennials have come this far assuming the system is just a part of the natural world, like the weather. It does not require maintenance.

The generational war that is shaping up is not between the Zoomers and the Boomers, but between the Boomers and their kids. One side maintains a deep trust in the system, while the other has a deep trust in themselves. One side will demand the system be repaired and defended, while the other will take this as a personal affront. Meanwhile, the people capable of maintaining the system will be too old to do it, while the people tasked with it will be too self-absorbed to be bothered. Good times.

The Hindu Lebensraum

Posted on December 30, 2020 by thezman

The word “colonialism” is like many useful words in the English language, in that it has been tortured by the Left to the point where it is unrecognizable. A generation ago the Left redefined colonialism to mean European success. The backwardness of the third world was the legacy of colonialism. Today colonialism is a synonym for the imaginary white privilege they see everywhere. Their project now is to decolonize everything, by which they mean drive off the white people.

Still, colonialism is a useful concept. Since the dawn of human civilization, those civilizations have been occupying land with settlers and taking control of settled lands in order to exploit them economically. The Egyptians, Phoenicians and Greeks spread throughout the ancient world by setting up colonies. Their people established settlements outside their home turf and used those settlements to establish trade routes and spread their cultural influence in the region.

In the modern day we see a different form of colonialism that reflects the fact that land is no longer the primary source of wealth. Instead of setting up camp in the non-white world to exploit their natural resources, the West now imports the useful portion of these populations for diversity purposes. Instead of importing ivory and exotic woods from Africa, Europe now imports the talented tenth from Africa, who contribute an exotic flair to the professional and university ranks of Europe.

The fastest growing population of the United States is South Asians, primarily people from the Indian subcontinent. The population tripled to six million over the last twenty years and the flow is increasing. Congress takes every opportunity to make it easier for the professional ranks of India to come to America. Much of it is under the guise of temporary worker programs, but like so many words in the English language, “temporary” means something different now.

Initially, the appetite for South Asian labor was driven by Silicon Valley. They wanted cheap labor to undermine domestic labor costs. When they were not colluding with one another to artificially suppress wages, they were colluding to import cheap labor from India, with the support of the Republican Party. Silicon Valley liked Indian labor because they spoke English and India was very accommodating. Chinese programmers are better, but the Chinese government is not easily exploited.

One result of this brain drain to the West is India has fallen behind China both politically and economically. The per capita GDP of China is five times higher than India, despite the fact India is far more open to Western investment. India has been happy to see their best and brightest head to the West, while the Chinese keep their smart people at home and force the West to come to China. Roughly half of India’s top talent now lives in Western countries. That is an enormous loss.

Another consequence of this is playing out in American politics. Indians have come to dominate the management layer in Silicon Valley. The people at the top may be from a different tribe, but the next layer down is getting very brown. One result is South Asians have the highest household income in America. Another is they have increasing influence in the political system. So much so that they essentially bought Kamala Harris a spot on the Democratic ticket. She is grateful.

These Indian colonies in the West have created a magnet for Indians back on the subcontinent, who want to escape their conditions. This opens the door for the Indians in the West to increase their status and power, by getting more and more of their people into their new colonies in the West. It is why both American political parties support unlimited visas for Indians. The flow of Indian money is now significant, so both parties are willing to sellout to this rising interest group.

The current population of India is 1.4 billion. If we assume the talented tenth is able to live and work in the West, that is 140 million people. If half of those think following their countrymen to Europe and America is the right thing to do, that is 70 million people ready to hop a steamer for the West. Of course, we are not just getting the talented tenth from India, so that is a very conservative number. Then you need to add in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

South Asia has a lot of people living in small spaces. Overall, the countries of South Asia have a population density of 303 people per square kilometer. The United States has a population density of 36 per square kilometer. If you are a people jammed into tight quarters, looking for some elbow room, North America looks like heaven. If that wide open space is begging you to come and your best people are already there establishing thriving colonies, the result is obvious.

One irony of this is that for a generation now immigration patriots have been warning us that the American ruling class is importing a new people. They did not like ruling over the middle-class white people that made the country, so they were bringing in new brown people to break the back of the middle and working class. It also appears that they are importing a new ruling class too. The affluent Indian colonists are ready to take their place at the top of the empire now. Kamala Harris says hello.

This is the ideal moment for this new tribe to flex its muscle as no group on earth is better at playing identity politics than South Asians. South Asia has been nothing but identity politics since the Indo-Aryan invasion of the subcontinent. India has been one of the most diverse places on earth, meaning that Indian ruling class has literally been bred to play identity politics. They now find themselves in an empire convulsed by identity politics and headed to majority-minority status.

If one wants to look ahead to how the American empire finally starts to crack, it may very well be at the top, rather than between the top and the rest. One camp will be the ascendant South Asians, while another camp will be the remnant of the Judeo-Puritan ruling elite from the last century. The former will be rooted in their local economic strength, while the latter will be supported by the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe some oil money from the Middle East thrown in for flavor.

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Observations On The Drug War

Posted on December 29, 2020 by thezman

Note: I have a post behind the green door on the rile of females in movies. Since this is the end of the year and a good time to be grateful, thank you to the 300 who have signed on as patrons to my efforts.

For generations now, libertarianism has been synonymous with the legalization of recreational drugs. It is probably a bit unfair, as libertarianism has a lot more to it than just legalizing weed, but there is no getting around the fact that they have been obsessed with the topic for a long time. Libertarians take the broadest possible view on what could be considered recreations drugs. Their belief is that people can figure out for themselves what drugs they should or should not take.

The libertarian case rests on a number of assumptions about the human condition and human organization. One is that people are rational and act in their best interests or what they believe to be their best interests. The other is that you are responsible only for you and you have no duty to your neighbors or community. Those unable to sort their best interests may kill themselves with drugs, but that’s their problem. You and the rest of society have no duty or right to stop them.

Again, there is more to libertarianism than the legalization of drugs, but it makes for a useful entry point to examine their claims about a wide range of things. Their arguments about drugs can be applied to many other areas of life. That is the stock response from libertarians when they are chided about their drug obsession. Although they are extremely careful to avoid being explicit, the same arguments about drugs could be applied to speech, assembly, personal defense and so on.

Unlike most of the claims from libertarians, we now have some real-world experiments in the drug realm to test their claims. Not only have we had drug prohibition, we now have a lot of experience with legalization. We even have the unofficial decriminalization of drugs in several cities now. If the cops are told to ignore open drug use in a city, that is de fact decriminalization. Generations of claims about the drug war can now be measured against the reality of drug legalization.

The easy stuff to look at are the claims about crime. In places that have legalized marijuana, overall crime rates have not changed much. Property crime rates have not changed significantly and violent crime has actually ticked up, but that has happened in areas that did not legalize weed. In the cities that have effectively decriminalized drug use, like Seattle and Portland, crime has gone up significantly, but there are other factors at work in these cities driving the rise in crime.

There are fewer people in the court system for possession charges now, but no reasonable person doubted that claim. If we stopped arresting people for murder, the courts would see a drop in murder cases. The argument for or against legalizing drugs was never about courts of prisons. It is about the overall quality of life. If a big robust criminal justice system is what we need in order to have a high quality of life, only crazy people will complain about that trade-off. Life is nothing but trade-offs.

When you look at what has been happening in the country in total since states began to experiment with drug legalization, a pattern emerges. We have seen a sharp rise in taxes at the state level, some owing to taxes on drug sales, but also a sharp decline in the rule of law. The Western states, where marijuana legalization first started, has seen a collapse in civil order. You have massive homeless camps in Los Angeles, anarchy in Seattle and Portland. Anarcho-tyranny is the rule out west now.

Another point worth mentioning is that the states rushing to legalize drugs have also been some of the worst offenders of Covid lockdowns. California is operating under a bizarre form of martial law. Criminals and bums can run wild in the streets, but normal businesses are being shuttered over Covid. Maine has wrecked their tourist industry over Covid, despite few cases. Massachusetts is operating under a curfew. Maybe these states did not legalize weed for libertarian reasons.

It is important to underscore that the collapse of civil order in drug legalizing states is not caused by drug fiends running the streets. The bums, drug fiends, petty criminals and bourgeois revolutionaries are symptoms of a larger decline in civil order. The image that is beginning to emerge is that drug legalization efforts correspond with a collapse in the willingness of state government to maintain order. The Covid hysteria is probably just another indicator of this collapse in civil order.

There is another angle to the drug legalization claims. For generations, the image of drug legalization promoted by libertarians was that potheads would be growing weed in their backyards and drugstores would be dispensing harder drugs just as they sell products for foot fungus and allergies. If you liked smoking pot, you could grow some plants in the backyard with your artisanal lettuce. If you had a heroin addiction, your doctor would provide a prescription for safe heroin.

On the latter point we have plenty of evidence that the libertarians were completely wrong about legalizing hard drugs. The opioid crisis in America was created by those benign drug companies. The claim for generations was that business would never try to kill its customer base. It turns out that was false. The Sackler family was perfectly willing to genocide the population for a quick buck. Just imagine if they did not have to work through the legal system in order to deliver drugs to people.

We won’t have to wait to learn what would have happened. The marijuana business is well on its way to becoming the marijuana industrial complex. Companies operating what amount to government monopolies in the growing of pot are now worth billions and growing rapidly. When the business plan for billion-dollar corporations with special access to government is built on getting your kids hooked on drugs, it is not hard to predict what will happen. Let a thousand Sacklers bloom.

As with the breakdown in order where drug legalization is popular, the abuses of global capital in the drug trade are a symptom. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner is a marijuana lobbyist now. Former Speaker Paul Ryan is an off-the-books lobbyist in Washington, as he gobbles up corporate donations in preparation for a 2024 presidential run. Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is Managing Director at Moelis & Company, where he lobbies for business deals.

Taken in total, what we will see from the supply side of drug legalization is the same thing we see everywhere with global capital. Instead of government regulating business, it is business regulating government. The state is always the junior partner. It is a form of post-national colonialism, where global corporations extract resources from communities with the support of local politicians. The opioid crisis was just the first wave of what is about to come in the normalization of drug taking.

There are two takeaways from the first wave of drug legalization. One is the results are nothing like what libertarians predicted. The states that are legalizing drugs are not experiencing empty prisons and courtrooms. Crime has not plummeted as the trade has moved from the streets to the strip malls. There may be fewer people in jail for marijuana possession, but that was always a false metric. Those people are now in jail for other crimes now that they cannot plead down to possession.

The other takeaway is that drug legalization is not the point of the libertarian spear, but the leading edge of anarcho-tyranny. The states rushing to legalize drugs are experiencing the most civil unrest. These state governments are not legalizing drugs because they love liberty. They are doing it because they no longer have the will or the desire to maintain order. In fact, drug legalization appears to be a traveling partner of a growing wave of illiberal authoritarianism.

Fantasy Camp

Posted on December 28, 2020 by thezman

Note: The Monday post is up at Taki. For those who missed it, the playback of my Cotto-Gottfried interview is up on YouTube.

A popular aphorism on this side of the great divide is a line from the poet T. S. Eliot who wrote “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Most of the time it is part of a general critique of the age, with regards to the human condition. Our betters, rather than face the reality of the human condition, concoct comfortable sounding fantasies to explain the inequality of man. The reason Johnny can’t read, for example, is because of some flaw in the schools, not the mating decisions of his ancestors.

Reality avoidance is a modern problem. In recent times it seems to have become something of a plague on society. Movies and television have shifted from fantastical tales of human achievement, like space travel, to comic book tales of god-like creatures saving the child-like humans from reality. Mainstream politics is one fantasy camp screaming at the other fantasy camp over their imaginary differences. The mass media makes fantasy literature look like a technical manual.

The election of Donald Trump has probably been the greatest catalyst for political fantasy in American history. Since he came down the escalator in 2015, few have bothered to look directly at the reality of this phenomenon. Instead, all sides have spent the last five years building elaborate, plausible explanations for what was happening around Trump, rather than accepting it at face value. Our politics the last five years has been a war between competing realities.

Those fantasy versions of Trump are not fixed. Take for example the alt-right crowd that jumped on the Trump train earlier than anyone. They convinced themselves he was the Pinochet they imagined, who would come to power and rescue them from the fringes of political reality. When the reality of Trump turned out to not be something other than the rise of the god-emperor, they turned the other way and created a fantasy world in which they have always been deeply skeptical of Trump.

In this version of reality, we see the use of a scapegoat character that is common to all of the political fantasy camps. The “boomer” is the uncritical believer in conservative politics that is the archenemy of the red-pilled realist. Whatever contradicts the fantasy is boomer politics. They heap onto this character all of the things they think are wrong with modern politics. Even their impotence is the fault of the boomer. For them, Trump is the king of the boomers, who refused to accept the red-pill.

Of course, fantasy has a kernel of reality. The people still convinced that Trump will make some last-minute move to deny Biden the election are delusional. They can accept that the election was rigged, but they cannot accept that this is the result of a deeply corrupt system that is beyond reform. They hold onto the fantasy that somehow, within the rules, there is a solution to the problem. They are now like a UFO cult waiting for January 6th to see the prophesy revealed.

Probably the most deluded people in this age are those fully invested in establishment politics, both Left and Right. The cranks and nutjobs embracing woke politics think they are fighting the man. The fact that the most powerful institutions on earth are backing them is lost in the fantasy. The racketeers of Conservative Inc., in contrast, are sure that once Trump is gone it is back to business. They will be out there selling Reagan and Buckley memorabilia to a new generation of conservatives.

Lost in all of this is the fact that Trump will waddle off the stage next month and no longer serve as the catalyst to these fantasies. The red-pilled crowd will need to come up with a new way to convince themselves they are special snowflakes. They won’t have the MAGA-hat wearing boomer as a foil. The true believers in MAGA world will not have Q or their god emperor to star in their fantasy. Both sides of this relationship will be looking for a new type of escapism.

The mainstream crowd will have it a bit easier, simply because they can plug into mass media and forgot about the world. Still, they will have to come to grips with the fact that they helped install a dementia patient in the White House. The people around the Pretender Biden are not interested in the colored revolution. They just want to steal as much as they can before it is too late. Those longer for a return to the old ways will have to find a new excuse for why things are not working.

Next month will kick off something of a triple witching hour in the fantasy camps of American politics. The three main camps have relied on Trump as a tent pole to hold up their preferred version of reality. With Trump headed off to retirement, those fantasy versions of realty are no longer tenable. The red-pilled will need a new way to pretend they are special snowflakes. The MAGA crowd will need a new banner around which to rally and the blue-pilled will need a new devil.

People may prefer fantasy to reality, but reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. In the coming months, lots of people are going to arrive at the end of a fantasy road. Maybe they come up with a new fantasy. Maybe the ruling class brings back the escapism of sports and consumerism. It’s also possible that people have run out of ways to avoid facing the reality of this age. Like all forms of escapism, the world of fantasy politics may be coming to an end.

Nashville

Posted on December 26, 2020 by thezman

It appears that 2020 will go out with one last bit of madness in the form of what appears to be a random bombing in Nashville. On Christmas morning, according to the police and media, a camper van exploded on an empty downtown street. Supposedly, the police were warned there was a bomb in the area, so they cleared the streets and nearby buildings before the bomb went off. As unlikely as that sounds, it is the story they are currently pushing through the official media organs.

Obviously, the point of the bombing is the story. In a case like this, you have several possible motivations. One is political. The bomber is trying to make a political point that will eventually be revealed. Given the location, it seems unlikely. There is no government facility at the bombing sight. Nashville has not been a hotbed of radical unrest like Portland or Seattle. There has been little in the way of BLM activity or any made-up claims of right-wing activity.

That does not rule out politics, but it probably means the bomber or bombers are well outside the mainstream. In other words, they are crazies who found a reason to be crazy in this way. A lot of what gets classified as terrorism is in fact crazy people acting on something they picked up from the media. Dylann Roof is the media’s favorite terrorist, but in reality, he is a kid with severe psychological problems. Ted Kaczynski is probably the most famous case of crazy man politics.

You also have the more mundane explanations. The bomber could have been in a dispute with the owner of the building. He may have been romantically involved with someone that works in the building. The man responsible for the worst school shooting in American history was a guy who snapped after a local election. Andrew Kehoe went bonkers, killed his wife, burned down his farm and then went to the local school and killed 38 people before blowing himself up in a truck bomb.

Of course, the usual suspects will be flooding the internet with claims that the bomber is part of some wide-ranging secret conspiracy. He was sent by the deep state or maybe he was sent by Q to attack the deep state. This type of event is catnip for the sorts of people into conspiracy theories. Since it fits in well with the Q-grift and the plan-trusting grift, it will draw in the usual crowd. In fairness, the constant lying by people in authority is driving the rise in conspiracy mongering.

That is not to say there is no conspiracy behind this event. We still have no idea what really happened with the Las Vegas shooting. The assassination of Seth Rich on the streets of DC has never been explained. The truth of the FBI conspiracy to overturn the 2016 election has never been explained. You can make a long list of events over the last decade that have been covered up by the government or explained in a way that strains credulity. People are right to be skeptical.

This is the fruit of ruling class corruption. They refuse to abide by the rules and adequately enforce the rules. This lowers public trust. Then the ruling class tolerates an army of incompetents in the bureaucracy, which only makes the public more skeptical of their institutions. To remedy that problem, the media manufactures lies to explain it all, but those lies are rather easy to disprove. Our authoritarian overclass is a toxic blend of mendacity and mediocrity. They can no longer be trusted on anything.

The thing is it could very well be a sign of things to come. Make enough of the people miserable and some of them will respond. Unlike the old Soviet Union or modern China, the American ruling class is fully exposed. They do not live in guarded compounds surrounded by armed guards. They also rely on a managerial class to implement their rules and policies. Those credentialed managers live in easily accessed neighborhoods and travel around in public, totally unprotected.

Then you have the fact that America has tens of millions of people capable of making a decent truck bomb with common materials. How many people walking around in America have been trained by the military on the basics of this stuff? Think about how many guys saw how IED’s and car bombs were used in the Middle East. You do not even have to have had direct experience with these tactics. The use of car bombs and IED’s has been a staple of the mass media for a generation now.

It may seem farfetched but think about what has been normalized this year that was considered crazy talk in 2019. We have widescale lock downs of the population and official talk of internal passports and social credit systems. As America lurches into a high-tech prison state, expect the inmates to respond accordingly. The IRA made war on the support system of the British occupation this way. They used bombs to tell those people that the British could not protect them. It could happen here.

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