Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Incorporated America

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Media Note: I have a column up at Taki. This will be a regular thing, but how regular is unknown at this point. We’ll see how it goes. I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around nine eastern and runs for a couple of hours.

The old left-wing critique of post-war America was that it was rampant consumerism resulting from the embrace of unfettered capitalism. Everything is commercialized and that which cannot be turned into a reason to buy stuff is discarded. The old right-wing criticism is that America is not free enough. Everywhere the tentacles of the state invade the normal activity of society. Both are correct in that America now operates like a giant corporate entity, rather than a country.

A country in the modern sense is a collection of nations. France is not a unified nation, as its regions are quite distinct with unique histories. Those nations are held together by a shared history and a common interest in being French. The same was always true of the United States, hence the name. The states reflected the nations of the country, held together by a common origin story and common interest. Those regional differences turned up in the language and culture.

The distinguishing characteristic of the America that emerged from the Cold War is that it is losing its regional variety in favor of a bland, corporate sameness. Everywhere you go you see the same corporate brands, which are often owned by the same corporate parent, providing the illusion of choice. Housing developments are all based on the same styles and patterns, because the builders are all the same. A new development in North Carolina looks just like one in Dallas or Cleveland.

America is often described by critics as nothing more than a shopping mall, where the only connection the people have to one another is the choice of product. This is not a right-wing critique, even though the dissident right has embraced it. This is more of an old left-wing critique of America. Capitalism is to blame for transforming America into a giant open-air marketplace. Instead of a culture based on organic institutions and a shared experience, it is based on buying stuff.

There is truth to it, but it misses what is really going on. America is now a corporation, rather than a country. It is why the public space is being transformed into something that looks like a corporate training center. You don’t go there to express an opinion or advance your interests, but to learn the latest policies. The person in charge sees herself as a facilitator, using behavioral techniques she learned in graduate school, in order to help you reach your potential an employee.

Just look at how the big social media platforms censure people. It is not traditional censorship we would see in an ideological state. Instead, the first violation gets you a day off to think about what you have done. The next violation gets you a longer bit of time off, which everyone knows means you’re on the list. The next downsizing means you get let go, regardless of your performance. Finally, like an employee that never fit into the corporate culture, you’re fired from the platform.

Note too that the enforcers at these firms clearly share information with one another about violators. One day the problematic user wakes up and his Twitter has been suspended, his Facebook is deleted and his YouTube channel nuked. This happens for the same reason the HR department ticks the box “Not eligible for rehire” when you’re riffed out of the place. It is not about you. You’re dead to them now. It is a service to their peers, so they can avoid hiring the same mistake.

This is why our radicals now sound like every human resource department and our politicians look like everyone at a corporate retreat. The managerial elite is imposing its corporate sensibilities on the country. The dreary sameness we see all around us is what you see inside every corporation. Everything must serve the point of the enterprise, even the aesthetic. Everything is subject to the quest for efficiency, so everything that makes life interesting is removed.

The regions of the country are no longer unique cultures with unique histories, but subsidiaries that must be normalized into the cooperate culture. Movies and television are repetitive and shallow, because corporate culture eschews creativity as risky and embraces banality because it is predictable and safe. Sports are drenched in identity politics because cross-marketing says the way to promote a new product is to attach it to the most successful product in the catalog.

Corporations travel a well-known arc. They start with a frontier mentality, in which the creative and daring control the enterprise. They are trying to develop a new market or subvert an existing market, so they can’t follow old rules. This attracts people who are goal oriented, not process oriented. This is the culture of every start-up, which is why they can find new ways to attack the market and maneuver the company around larger, better established competitors.

That success eventually outgrows the capacity of the start-up culture. Eventually, the people being hired to do the things the enterprise needs doing need to be managed and that means managers and rules. A new type of employee is brought in, the sort who enjoys the process. They enjoy creating employee manuals. Soon they are joined by another type of employee, who values conformity. Her job is to make sure everyone follows the rules and does so with enthusiasm.

This is the current phase of Corporate America. The thing that matters most to the managers is not ideology. In the corporate state, ideology is about as authentic and meaningful as corporate culture. It is just a veneer to decorate the latest HR effort to boost morale. What matters to them is the quest to assimilate the wide range of assets now under corporate control. If you step back and look at the current crisis, it is not an ideological battle, but a war on variety and exception.

This is, in part, why the elites hate Trump. It’s not his politics, as his politics, stripped of the carny act, are rather conventional. They hate Trump because he is the guy who laughed at the white diversity trainer when she shared her painful experiences of oppression at Princeton. They hate him because he just wants to do his job and have a life and an identity outside the company. For the champions of the corporate state, nothing can exist outside the state.

You see this corporate mentality most strongly in foreign policy. Russia is the arch enemy, not because they are a genuine competitor, but because they refuse to embrace the latest fads from HR. If the issue was the alleged authoritarianism, then America would invade China, but that’s an important vendor relationship, so their tyrannical system is no problem. In the corporate state, values and principles are just pretty lies to justify executive bonus packages.

Modern America is now an incorporated entity, run by a managerial elite, policed by the human resource departments of the corporate nodes within it. As the assimilation of all the corporate assets continues, it is increasingly difficult to see the divisions within the managerial class. The media, corporations, the academy and the state are blending into one amorphous blob that sits over us like a dome. Everything is in the corporate state, nothing is outside it and nothing can be against it.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

A Peaceful End

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Media Note: I will be on the Counter-Currents livestream this Sunday. Greg uses these as fundraisers, so if you like hearing people like me on these shows, consider sending Greg a few bucks. You can do that via Entropy.

The Feds announced to great fanfare that they foiled a plot by far-right extremists to kidnap the daffy governor of Michigan. They coordinated this with the governor so she could try to gain some sympathy. Of course, this being the age of lies, the extremists were mostly anarchists and random goofballs talked into this by the Feds. Putting aside the absurdity of this case, it does raise a good question. That is, why has there been so little organized violence in America?

Now, people will point to the left-wing riots over the summer, but that was always intended to be theater. Those people in the streets are not resisting anything or trying to topple the system. They are creatures of the system. As soon as official sanction is withdrawn, they melt away, as we saw in 2016 and now 2020. What we have not seen is violence from people who genuinely wish to topple the prevailing order or strike a blow against it for political reasons.

This is not just a current year issue. The 9/11 attacks were a spectacular example of how an open society is vulnerable to attack. There are plenty of Muslims in America and some portion of them hate the government. The 9/11 attacks should have inspired some of them to do similar attacks. Instead, a few misfits were caught in lone-wolf style efforts, but otherwise, not much. As with the fictional right-wing militias, the FBI was left to arresting on-line losers pretending to be Al-Qaeda.

It’s easy to miss the lack of organized violence, as the media floods the zone with agit-prop about invisible Nazis and peaceful riots. These are campfire stories they tell the true believers so they will remain vigilant. In reality, there has been precious little push-back of any kind, much less the violent sort. They had to turn Gavin McInnes’s goofy fan club into a terrorist group, because they were so desperate for material. The demand for extremists of any type far exceeds the supply.

Consider this. When was the last time someone fired a shot at a president? Despite how hated Trump is by the Left, there has been no Squeaky Fromme. According to Wikipedia, the threats to Obama were humorously ridiculous. The worst thing to happen to Bush was that some Iraqi tossed a shoe at him. Like Obama, the threats to Clinton were random goofballs. The last President to get shot at was Reagan. Assassination has become a thing of the past in our politics.

Going back to the Muslim stuff, the thing no one ever asked is why were these guys so bad at violence? Timothy McVeigh showed how easy it is to make a big bomb from common materials. Instead of hijacking airplanes, they could have had suicide bombers in rental trucks popping up all over the country. Think about how many soft targets there are in a typical city. Think about how many vulnerable choke points there are, like bridges and tunnels. Yet, nothing ever happens.

Now, the Feds will claim that their vigilance is what keeps us safe from this sort of stuff, but that is obviously not true. Their effort to subvert the 2016 elections has revealed that the brain-drain in the FBI reached a critical stage long ago. Like the Michigan incident, their big collars are goofballs they talk into saying dumb things on-line. A real terrorist plot would have nothing to fear from the FBI. The lack of such incidents is due to factors outside of the law enforcement operations.

One possible answer for this is that people engaged in politics are not the sort that see force as a political tool. It is the foxes versus the lions phenomenon. Modern politics is about abstract concepts, not group interests. Union guys a century ago were willing to blow up the company offices because both sides were lions, engaged in a battle for physical stuff. Today, political combatants are foxes, engaged in a battle of wits over complex theories about how best to run society.

Another possible reason is people are becoming more docile and stupid. The latter is fairly well established. Not only is the demographic mix lowering overall intelligence, but the smart fraction is getting dumber as well. Organized political violence needs smart motivated people. Since the Industrial Revolution, western culture has selected against violence and force, in favor of cooperation. The result is a more docile population that is getting dumber with each generation.

Of course, political violence may be a lagging indicator or even knock-on effect of political turmoil at the upper reaches of society. The West is middle-class and peaceful, but in a steady decline. At some point, like a failing business, the impending collapse becomes obvious to enough people that they abandon orderly politics. This rush to the exits of conventional politics leads to an explosion of political violence. Perhaps that is what lies ahead for the West.

Perhaps Steven Pinker was right and the arc of human evolution leads away from violence and humanity is headed to a peaceful demise. Occidentals have become the panda bears of our species, happy to eat and sleep, but too disinterested in their own survival to reproduce or defend themselves. The rest of the world, which seems more violent and aggressive, is simply a few steps behind, as they have always been, on the evolutionary timeline, but they too will go gently into the night.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Us And Them

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A striking feature of American liberal democracy is the great gap between the reality of the political class and the people. The Cloud People are not just floating above the Dirt People, living different lives, like aristocrats of old. They no longer have a clear vision of the Dirt People below them. Instead, they conceive of the people over whom they rule based on inputs from the managerial class. To the political class, the general public is an abstraction, not a physical reality.

One example of this is in how the political class understands hierarchy. Every Washington politician and appointee lives in a world where hierarchy is well understood and respected. The appointed class have an array of titles that indicate their position in the hierarchy. Elected officials, of course, have their office and their committee assignments, along with their seniority. This is a world every one of them inherited when they entered politics. It is how it has always been.

In this world, a senator tells his staff to do something and he just assumes they will do it, assuming it can be done. If it cannot be done, then he is going to have them find out why it cannot be done and report back to him. An appointee works the same way within the bureaucracy. They have a staff, usually of appointees, and that staff carries out the orders of the director or secretary. Even though nothing of public good is done in Washington, the petty tasks are carried out with precision.

In this regard, the political class is a petty aristocracy. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, commands absolute loyalty from his staff. Not only does his staff do what they are told, they faithfully keep his secrets. He has been in the Imperial Capital for a quarter century, without a hint of scandal, despite the obvious. Congress operates a private slush fund to settle sexual harassment claims. Over 260 claims have been paid, without a word about the details. That’s loyalty.

Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington. The exception is President Trump, which is why he is hated by the entire political class. He is not one of them.

If any of these people had spent time in the world of the Dirt People, they would know that the reality of the petty aristocracy is nothing like reality. In the dreaded private sector, a manager at any level must be conscious of his subordinates. If that manager is going to make his bosses happy, he has to keep his people happy. Otherwise, they will not do what he asks and they will undermine his authority. This is the reason every middle manager sounds like a psychotherapist.

In the military, every officer is trained to know this. There is a strict hierarchy and ethos that says you respect the rank, not the man. Humans are human, so that theory gives way to the reality that men follow men. A good officer is one who commands the respect of his men. Bad officers think they can just issue orders and they will be carried out, no matter how stupid or ridiculous. The officer who acts like a petty aristocrat can find himself with a live grenade in his bunk.

Everywhere in the dreaded private sector, hierarchy relies about a dynamic that is not all that different from a pirate ship. Everyone understands that someone has to be in charge and that there has to be order. The question as to who is in charge and who gives the orders, however, is not written in stone. You earn your position and you keep earning it in the execution of your duties. Unlike in Washington, failure has consequences and people get fired and demoted.

This great gap between the Cloud People and the Dirt People in the nature of human organization and hierarchy is the great source of friction. We see that with the response to the Covid virus. The petty tyrants in the lowest level of the petty aristocracy just assumed the rest of us would happily follow their orders. The striking feature of this pandemic is how the political class is resentful that the public has not celebrated them in song and story for their heroism during these times.

The ruling class sees no danger in their social engineering schemes, because everyone they know thinks they are great ideas. Spend time in the Imperial Capital and it is like visiting a foreign planet. They live in a world that is divorced from the reality of the human condition. It has evolved into something closer to a college campus, where good times or bad, it is always the best of times. It is why critic race theory sounds like a grand idea to them. All of their ideas are grand ideas.

For those old enough to remember, there is a Ceausescu’s last speech quality to what we hear from our political elites and their organs. The gap between us and them has reached such a point it is impossible for us to think of them as us. This reality is slowly creeping into the minds of the dirty people like the fog. The Cloud People, however, remain locked in their old mode of thought. Nancy Pelosi truly thinks she is a beloved and respected figure to the Dirt People.

In such situations, there is always a moment when the people suddenly realize that they are not alone in their thoughts about us and them. That is what happened during Ceausescu’s last speech. The people suddenly realized that everyone else had the same thoughts about their ruler. On that day, that reality was made clear to Ceausescu’s as he gave his speech. The next day he fled the capital and a few days later he was tried and executed.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Ash Heap Of History

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In the fullness of time, the most important development in the Trump era will be the collapse of conservatism as a political movement. The official Right had been in crisis for a long time, but the old political dynamic had locked it in place. If you opposed the Left, the only alternative was conservatism. Trump did not usher in a new era, so much as discredit the old. The Left quickly redesigned to self as a defender of the status quo and institutional power, while the Right has collapsed.

Even at this early date, it has become a bit trite to note that American conservatism has collapsed over the last five years. Not only has it collapsed, in terms of its intellectual influence, but it has become a ridiculous joke. Even the jokes about it have started to sound a bit hackneyed, as the absurdity moves beyond satire. When a site calling itself The American Conservative is making “the conservative case” for explicitly anti-white pogroms, the jokes stop being funny.

Even so, it is worth looking at why the American Right has collapsed. The majority of white people in America have at one time or another considered themselves conservative or at least were open to it. There’s never been a majority in favor of Progressive reforms, yet those reformers have always carried the day, despite the opposition of the professional Right. It takes a special skill to lose so much despite having a numerical advantage in a democracy.

One obvious reason for the collapse of conservatism is that it lost all of its intellectual vigor decades ago. We live in an age of pygmies, but nowhere is that more obvious than with the professional Right. Half a century ago, the Right was teaming with serious thinkers. A couple of decades ago, National Review had a half a dozen or more quality thinkers and polemicists. Today, no one can think of a single writer or thinker on the Right that is worth a minute’s time.

That really is the striking thing about what has happened to America in general, but the Right in particular. It is as if anyone with the least bit of curiosity about the world has been driven off and replaced by former postal workers. The distinguishing feature of the American intellectual class is its doctrinaire dreariness. Everyone with anything on the ball and a curiosity about the world operates out on the fringes. The American intellectual class is a as vibrant as the surface of the moon.

Another facet of this, a byproduct of the suffocating dullness, is an inability of conservatives to examine how they came to this dead end. This piece in the American Mind, which is supposed to be the free-thinking outlet for conservatives looking to break free of the old modes of thought, is a good example. On the surface, it is supposed to be an analysis of the administrative state, which should mean the managerial state, but instead it means “big government” in the old hackneyed way.

Note that the writer takes as a given the basic assumptions of the Left. His opposition to what he describes as the administrative state, is that it is anti-democratic, prejudiced and discriminatory. This is the sort of complaint that was popular on the Left a generation ago, when they would attack corporate America. In the hands of conservatives, it becomes a complaint about having to deal with a thicket of bureaucrats down at the local motor vehicle department.

Even more ridiculous, their critique of the administrative state tries to use guilt by association to win over their enemies on the Left. You see, the roots of the administrative state are in the Confederacy! You see that my woke brothers? The thing you now control is every bit as racist and cis-gendered as those statues you are toppling all over the country. It is not just a rhetorical devise. Conservatives truly believe that current crisis is rooted in human preference.

The weird logic of modern conservative thinking is worth noting. Professor Hamburger seems to think the great obstacle to the Progressive dream of an egalitarian paradise are the tools the Left has been using to create that paradise. Not only will they agree to throw down their weapons, they will suddenly stop their aggression. It is a bizarre form of utopian thinking. It is even more bizarre, given that the greatest threat to individual liberty is woke capital, not the government.

What is even more striking about this is just how obtuse this line of thought is, given that within conservative intellectual traditions there are far better critiques. Within living memory, Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried wrote extensively about the managerial state, building off the analysis of James Burnham. Perhaps it is understandable that Francis has been forgotten in conservative circles, but Gottfried is still around and active at publications like the American Conservative.

This gets back to the barren intellectual landscape in general, but the aridity of conservatism in particular. Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

What has been lost in this age is anyone that can look down about this dynamic between strategy and tactics and understand the ideas and historical forces that are carrying these combatants along. This should be the role of conservatism. It should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte

The Rhythms Of Revolution

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People who work with large complex systems understand that you don’t always know what will result from even the smallest change in the system. Usually this lesson is learned the hard way, by making some small change that seems simple, only to find out it caused serious downstream problems. Large complex systems are often highly dependent on initial conditions. Those small changes to the initial state, after they branch through the system, can have a huge impact.

This was a point wiser heads made about the Covid panic. The American economy is a wildly complex nonlinear system. The people in charge of it, the Federal Reserve, have mastered just one small set of inputs. This is why they are so cautious about tinkering with the money supply. They understand that beyond small changes in interest rates, they really don’t know what will happen. Through necessity they have figured out how to buy up distressed assets to keep the asset bubble inflated.

Otherwise, no one understands what is happening in the American economy, outside of their very narrow focus. It’s why the lock downs were an insane idea. What local governments have done is not dissimilar to what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian economy after they gained power. This massive reorganization will not fully play-out for years, maybe decades. Even at this point, no one seems to know how many people are out of work or how many businesses survived.

Something similar may be happening with the culture. Up until this year, the sports entertainment complex was the great distraction. Every type of sporting event enjoyed wide following on television and on-line. It’s always hard to know, given how our ruling class lies about everything, but television ratings for the professional sports leagues were strong enough to keep raising ad rates. The revenues of the sports leagues kept growing, despite decades of growth.

That brings us to now, when the ratings for sports entertainment have suddenly collapsed, even for the marquee events. The NBA, which is the blackest of black sports, cannot draw flies. Keep in mind that the television industry routinely inflates their ratings in their press releases used by the media. The endless celebration of all things black for the last five months seems to not have had the effect they expected. All of the other sports have also seen their ratings collapse.

It is tempting to blame this on the anti-white pogrom that has been foolishly embraced by all the sports leagues. There is certainly part of it. That said, the NFL has tried very hard to minimize this in their presentation. Even the players have realized that it is bad for business. The NHL made the required gestures, but otherwise just operated their business as usual and their ratings were immeasurably small. In other words, it’s not just the anti-white pogrom killing the circus.

The problems facing sports entertainment all of a sudden are an example of the large complex system problem. It turns out that the audience for sport is not just about interest in the product and the quality of the performance. Sports operates within the larger culture, which is a highly complex system. There are rhythms to the culture, which carry things like entertainment through the culture. The lock downs and resulting insanity have broken those rhythms.

It is not just sports entertainment that have seen their model upended by the sudden change in the social rhythms. The first debate show also saw a ratings dip. It was not as big as with sports, but given the amount of pre-game hype, the gap between reality and expectations is every bit as large. For six months the people in charge have been blasting us with anti-Trump agit-prop. Of course, everyone knows Biden is suffering from the early stages of dementia. Yet, not a lot of interest.

The American culture had evolved since the Cold War ended to provide the public with lots of things to keep them busy. For example, the entertainment rackets grew like a weed starting in the 1990’s. People forget that sellouts for sporting events were rare into the 1980’s, then all of a sudden, they were common. There was a time, within living memory, when people had three television channels. Of course, the internet of mass entertainment evolved in this time.

Easily forgotten is that politics as entertainment also grew in this period. In the 1980’s, for example, political junkies had to get by with magazines, the opinion section of the newspaper and the Sunday talk shows. People struggled with the idea of an actor running for political office. Imagine that. The political entertainment complex that evolved since the Cold War has probably been a bigger distraction for the American public than sports or Hollywood.

What seems to have happened is the Covid panic and now the color revolution has broken that system. People are not paying as much attention to these things as they did just a year ago. That means they are not being pulled along by the rhythms of that old system. Think about how many apolitical people that have suddenly been made aware of the reality of race and ethnicity. Put another way, the revolution of 2020 has changed the initial state of the American system.

How this ripples through the system is unknown. The current chaos may not be random at all, but determined by the evolving initial state of white America. In other words, this pogrom we are experiencing may, in fact, be a reaction to the changing attitudes sensed by the ruling class. The woke revolution is about restoring the old initial state, but has instead accelerated the evolution of it. The lock downs provided a better medium in which this evolution can occur.

At this point, the one safe conclusion we can draw is we have passed through a strange chaotic barrier on our way to a new normal. The old order, those old rhythms, are gone for good. That means the social controls that nudged people along toward the results desired by the ruling class are no longer working. All the make-believe excitement the media can generate is not getting people to watch the NBA finals, because it was never about the hype. It was the social structures, those rhythms.

In a complex system like a large human society, when the initial conditions change sufficiently, a new dynamic ensues. The unexpected downstream effects loop back and inform the evolution of those initial conditions. The feedback loop between downstream effects and those evolving initial conditions becomes fuel for the changing state of those initial conditions. This is the revolutionary dynamic. Change fuels more change, until the system collapses in on itself.

When the rulers broke the old rhythms with their lock downs, they started a revolution in the minds of the people over whom they rule. As those minds now evolve, seeing the reality of the world created by their betters, the ruling class is desperately trying to contain the process. Like all radicals, they remain supremely confident they will be the vanguard of this revolution. Like all revolutionaries, they will end up swinging from trees as that is the rhythm of every revolution.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte

Blackwashing

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Note: Technical issues scuttled the podcast this week. Apparently, the Yeti USB microphone does not last forever. Too many hours of fiddling with it and I finally threw in the towel and ordered a new one. I’ll be back in business next week.

In the English speaking world, it has become common to “blackwash” movies and television shows. This is the process of removing white characters and replacing them with non-white characters. The stated claim is that popular entertainment needs to reflect the changing nature of the audience. Of course, the reason the audience is changing is that the same people blackwashing films and television shows are ethnically cleansing white societies with mass immigration.

For a long time now, Hollywood has been taking great care to make the good characters black and the bad ones white. For a short while, the bad guys could be Arab terrorists, but now bad guys are white again. If they need to be foreign baddies, then they are neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or Russian gangsters. Of course, the smartest characters are black or female. If we’re lucky, the brainiac is a black lesbian. Every computer hacker is now non-white or female.

On occasion the blackwashing gets ridiculous. Some figure from white history is played by a black actor. A black guy in a show about medieval Europe could be amusing, but that’s not how it is done. Instead, we get black cowboys saving a white town or a black playing King Lear. It will not be long before we have historical dramas in which well-known figures from white history are played by black actors as black people. Imagine Ben Franklin played by Morgan Freeman.

The most recent absurdity in this process is the TV series Fargo. The series kicked off six years ago as an extension of the movie with the same name. As the name suggests, the show is primarily set in North Dakota, but it has scenes and plots that range out into the rest of the region. The first season was primarily set in Bemidji Minnesota. In fact, only the second season is located in North Dakota. The idea is to root the story lines in the sorts of people who settled that part of America.

Of course, that part of America, up until fairly recent, was all white people, with a population of Native Americans. Until the people fond of blackwashing started dumping Africans into Minneapolis, for example, Minnesota was known for being one of the whitest places in the country. It was the Scandinavia of North America. In fact, North Dakota was almost all Scandinavian people. It was settled by Norwegians and Icelanders, who migrated out of Canada, along with some Germans.

That’s what made the first season enjoyable. It was a good plot with good characters set in a place that is a bit quirky. Of course, it had no black characters, because there are no black Norwegians. This being the high point of the colored revolution, the fourth season of the show is now entirely black. Since setting a black crime story in North Dakota is ridiculous, even for the people behind the blackwashing, they located the story in 1950 Kansas City, Missouri.

The point of blackwashing is to erase white history and culture. The world condemns China, for example, when they do this to Tibet or now the Uighurs, but when it is done to white people the great and good celebrate. As Joe Sobran pointed out many years ago, the motivation here is envy. The very existence of white people is a daily reminder of the failure of all others to accomplish much of anything, despite being blessed with the best the earth has to offer.

We will soon reach the point where no characters in movies or television are white, unless they are criminals. The ad makers are far down that path. The ads that are about a product or service, which is rare these days, always have a racial makeup that represents the fantasy of the ad maker, rather than reality. The ads about how much the company cares about us, most ads now, are multicultural orgies of diversity that exist nowhere on earth.

Popular entertainment is a leading edge. It tells us what is in store for us as soon as the great and good think the time is right. The bellowing about white supremacy after the debate show is another clue. It was not enough for Trump to dismiss bigotry or racism during and after the show, They demanded he denounce white people. That’s because the mere existence of white people is a reminder of the great achievements of white people relative to the other races. Therefore, whitey has to go.

The blackwashing has been normalized in entertainment and sports. It will next move into other aspects of life. Whether or not that can be normalized is an open question, as someone has to keep the plates spinning. More important, will white people keep letting themselves be pushed off the stage of life? The pessimist says yes, whites would rather be dead than rude. The optimists say that eventually, whites wake up and take back their lands from the blackwashers.

Either way, the reality of this age is we have moved beyond the quest for diversity into the beginnings of the vengeance phase. The daily attacks on whites going about their business and the evolution of Jim Snow laws are parts of it. The blackwashing is another part of it. Ethnic cleansing is not just about removing the people, but also about removing their culture. It takes a special hatred to erase a people from the book of life and that is the point of the blackwashing.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Church Of Covid

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Depending upon when you mark the beginning, the world is anywhere between six and eight months into the Covid panic. While some parts of the world have slowly climbed back down from the ledge, other parts of the world seem committed to another round of lock downs and public hysteria. In fact, the great and the good are telling us that the public rituals may be a permanent condition. The question, though, is why has the world gone crazy over this particular pandemic?

Strangely forgotten in all of this is the fact that every generation or so has a nasty virus get loose that results in a very bad flu season. The last one was Swine flu, which was about a decade ago. There was a worldwide outbreak of H1N1 called the Soviet flu in the 1970’s and before that the Hong Kong flu. There are localized outbreaks of even scarier things like MERS and SARS. In other words, Covid is neither unusual or particular harmful compared to the regularly occurring pandemics.

In fairness, the initial concern over the virus was justified. It could have been another Spanish flu or it could have been an engineered super-bug. Given the origin and the behavior of China, it was a safe bet that this virus came from a lab. That means it could have been much worse for many obvious reasons. While it most certainly originated in a Chinese lab, we know it is not a super-bug that will plunge the world into darkness or become an extinction event.

One reason for the panic is the ongoing crisis in the West. Most of the world has not only come off the ledge, but is back to normal. China, where this thing started, is completely back to their version of normal. It is Europe and the Anglosphere that continue to struggle with the panic. Europe seems to be determined to go back into some form of lock down, despite the evidence. The great and good in America are praying to their gods for a second wave of infections.

The Covid pandemic has been the best thing to happen to minor politicians and celebrities at all levels since the invention of Twitter. In America, few people have any reason to know the names of their local politicians, but now everyone knows the name of the people behind the lock downs. The same is true of the silly drama queens who fill in the blanks of public entertainment. Every day one of them pops off about the virus in a way that gets them unwarranted public attention.

In the West, public trust and trust in authority have declined to the point where all politics, all social behavior, is built around the gesture. The new social capital is public displays of caring. Everyone feels the need to tell the world how much they care, so anything that can enable that spreads like a virus. The real pandemic this year has been the plague of people and companies telling us how much they care and that we’re all in this together. After all, it is about being safe.

This plague of caring is not all that different from the last plague of caring that is still with us to some degree. The global warming panic operated along the same lines as this Covid panic. Instead of the great and good decorating themselves with masks and face shields, they toted piles of grimy canvas sacks to the supermarket. They imposed silly regulations on everyday items like gas cans and drinking straws. Caring about Gaia is the Eleusinian Mysteries of the managerial class.

There is also a punitive aspect to this. That sense of communal salvation is still very strong among the great and good. One manifestation of this is that all of us must suffer for the sins of the few. Only through suffering can we find salvation. In order to please Gaia, we have to put up with drinking straws made of paper and obnoxious lectures from demented plutocrats. The people behind the climate change stuff admit that there is nothing to be done, but they apply the lash anyway.

In this regard, Covid has been manna from heaven. Just as everyone with an IQ above room temperature has realized climate change is a scam, here comes a scourge of the gods sent to punish the wicked for voting for Donald Trump and Brexit. The vengeful, malicious technocrats that run the West suddenly have a reason to torment the people over whom the rule. Note that they casually exempt themselves from the ridiculous rules they impose on the rest of society.

Then there is the fact that Covid actually exists. Unlike climate change, the great and the good can point to real people who are genuinely sick. They have pumped up the death counts and are now scouring the land for people who can test positive for the virus, but Covid is a real thing. Climate change does not exist in any way that impacts the lives of people. Covid is a bogeyman that does not require mountains of graphs and charts based on cooked data. Everyone can understand it.

This is why the Covid restrictions may be with us for a long time. With these new tools of torment, the Torquemadas of the managerial class get to take out their anger on the rest of us whenever they like. The busybodies and overly officious flunkies of the system get to nose around in your business and push you around. The Church of Covid has made the worst elements of human society into high priests. These loathsome freeloaders will never voluntarily let go of their new power.

Media Note: My YouTube conversation with Cotto and Gottfriedd is now up for the enjoyment of everyone. Make sure to subscribe to their channel, as it helps them get noticed by the Borg that controls YouTube. It was a fun show. I don’t do a ton of these live stream things, so the quality of my performance is inconsistent. I was quite intoxicated for this one, so I had a good showing.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Peaceful Separation

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“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an old expression that like many others, remains true even though it is widely ignored. Proof of this is all round us, as Americans know more about one another than at any time in history. The more we know, the less we like about one another. The reason for this is we have never been one people or anything close to a nation. For most of our history, we have barely been a country. Now we get to see this reality every day on our media platforms.

From the very beginning, from the first settlement, America was a land with people, rather than a people with a land. The people who settled New England were very different from those that settled the South. In fact, those were groups of Englishmen with a long history of not liking one another. The Puritan settlers were on one side of the English Civil War, while the people of the South were on the other. To this day, that animosity shows up in a million little ways.

Even within states there is not a lot of unity. Pennsylvania is a big state with at least three distinct cultures. The people that populated the western part of the state are different from those in the east. That was true from the beginning. It turns up today in cultural habits and especially in voting habits. You could break the state into three smaller states and the people would not care. The fact is, they have never been a unified people loyal to one another.

The colonies and then the new country were a dumping ground from the very beginning for people not all that interested in nation and country. People did not leave the old world for the new because they felt a need to be part of a unified people. Either they were indifferent to it or hostile to it. The original settlers left the Old World to live in the woods with savages because they were done with the Old World. This has remained true, for the most part, to this very day.

The Founders understood this, which is why they tried to avoid creating a strong central government fit for a unified nation. Their first go at it was a loose confederation of states that were free to operate as they thought best. The next go at it was the constitutional framework we pretend to have today. The chief feature of this new structure was that the national government was sharply limited in its powers, outside of a few areas that served the needs of all of the sovereign states.

Much of what vexes modern America is rooted in the fact that the ruling class is oblivious to this reality. They endlessly blather on about the need to unify the country around this or that issue. Their propaganda is drenched in saccharine messages about the need to be unified. The defining characteristic of the modern plutocrat is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is thinking for himself. They are hellbent on uniting a people with no interested in being united.

The quickest way to social peace is to unplug the internet and shutter the public affairs shows on television. If all of a sudden people had to go across town to tell someone that they did not like their politics, they would not do it. In a flash, a disunited and disagreeable people would be minding their own business. The liquored-up harpies on social media would have to join the church or a local civic association if they wanted to gossip about people they barely know.

Obviously, that would not be the end of it, but there is no denying that the increasing social friction is rooted in our increasing familiarity. America has always been a land of many people, a house with many mansions. The reason most of the people are here is they did not want to be around the people over there. Even in America, that mentality has held since the beginning. The migration west was as much about getting away from the people back east as starting new on the frontier.

The great patriotic struggle in the first part of the last century convinced the American ruling class they could and must unite the country. After all, if they could unite the nation to beat the Depression and Fascism, why not poverty and inequality? Why not unite around defeating racism and being mean to people? Not only are they hell bent on uniting a disunited people, they now strive to unite the world. Their new unitarian creed has them as the one true god of us all.

What they are is a lid on a boiling pot of water. The more the water boils, the more the lid is pressed down. America is a pressure cooker right now because the ruling class keeps the lid firmly on, while cranking up the heat. They are under the delusion that if they can just keep it all locked inside, that lid firmly on the top, the whole will suddenly become one. They have been convinced that “E pluribus unum” is their calling, rather than a cheap slogan on our money.

Conservatives get grief for always saying that the solution for our troubles is to get back to our constitutional principles. They should get grief as what we need is to get back to the reason America exists at all. It is a land of people, lots of different people, not a people with a land. There can be local community and regional unity, but this is not a nation and it can never be a unified country. What will bring peace, is what always kept the peace. That is peaceful separation.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Great Stagger

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One of the curious things about the Roman Empire is how it managed to stagger on for so long after the second century. The third century is actually called The Crisis of the Third Century, because the empire was in chaos. Yet, the empire managed to get through that period and carry on for roughly two more centuries. In time, Historians will probably puzzle over the same question regarding America. How is that it staggers on despite the obvious problems?

A popular theme in science fiction is one where the human explorers stumble upon alien technology and they are baffled as to what it does. It’s not that they know the purpose but cannot figure out how to make it work. It’s that they don’t understand the purpose of the technology. The implication is that the aliens were so advanced that they were creating tools to solve problems humans have yet to contemplate. The gap between the aliens and humans is so great that it cannot be bridged.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind when thinking about the modern world. The evidence is pretty good that Western man is dumber than his ancestors. We have more overall knowledge than our ancestors, but our ability to add to it is in sharp decline along with our ability to use it. The people in charge now struggle to do the basics of government, like maintain order and the infrastructure. In America, streets are crumbling and there are regular power failures in parts of the country.

A good small-scale example is the city of Baltimore. All of the machinery that was put in place back when it was an important city is still in place. The people running that machinery today are not doing so well. They clearly lack the intellectual firepower to operate that machinery. Baltimore is one of the most dangerous cities in the world and it is suffering from a steady population decline. The political class is so incompetent they can’t even run the graft system properly.

This was all true before the Covid panic. One thing that kept Baltimore afloat was the tourist and sports industry. In the summer, tourists would come to the well-guarded inner harbor. People from the surrounding areas would come in for sports games and the surrounding restaurants. All of that was shuttered by the panic, which means the tens of millions in tax dollars never arrived. Then there is the cost of the Covid panic itself, which has further crippled the city administration.

When you look at many American cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Newark and so on, the question is not “How did they get to this point?” The question is, “How have they not collapsed by now?” Part of it, of course, is the surrounding infrastructure that keeps them propped up. In the case of Baltimore, the rest of the state is taxed to keep Baltimore City government going. Federal dollars pour in to keep the cops on the streets and the schools open for business.

That’s fine for cities, but that cannot work for the country as a whole. Like those cities, the national government is increasing incompetent. Both official political parties are in such steep decline that the next election will offer a choice between a carny barker and a dementia patient. The sober minded will always feels as if the current age sits on the shoulder’s of giants, but the gap between the best we have today and just a few generations ago is breathtaking.

The only thing the political elite is good at doing is keeping the public at one another’s throat over trivia. This is why Trump in President. His main skill as a politician is to stir the pot and cause outrage. He’s a terribly inflamed hemorrhoid on the political ass of the establishment. The upcoming circus over the Supreme Court nominee promises six weeks of television mayhem. The shouting and shrieking, of course, will be from the political class itself, not an outraged public.

One can dismiss that as “bread and circuses” but that does not explain how the country staggers on despite it all. For six months the government at all levels has been sabotaging the economy and civic life with the Covid panic. Tens of millions have been thrown out of work. No one knows how many businesses have closed for good due to the Covid lock downs. Food lines are popping up in the suburbs. How is it that none of this has resulted in civil unrest or at least a few protests?

Of course, no one can really know what is happening. The media told us over 50 million people were thrown out of work due to the panic. The empty streets seem to confirm it, but they also tell us unemployment is below 10%. The stock market has returned to the levels it was at before the panic. The media also tells us that the riots we saw over the summer were a figment of our imagination. How can anything work when no one can be sure of anything being told to them by the rulers?

Like Rome for close to three centuries, America staggers on, despite the problems and the decline of the ruling class. In the case of Rome, there was no organized force capable of toppling her. In the case of America, the global order assumes America will be the pivot point, the fulcrum on which order balances. As long as people are being fed and have shelter, they will not rise up to challenge the rulers. Like Rome, the great stagger will continue until the corpse of the empire collapses.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that when Rome was finally sacked by the Visogoths, the rest of the known world was stunned. St. Jerome wrote in grief, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe?” In other words, for a very long time people knew the empire was a shell of its former glory and Rome itself was no longer what it was. People just got used to the permanent state of decline. It was their normal. Most likely, American decline will become the new normal too.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Gathering Darkness

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Steve Sailer famously quipped that political correctness is a war on noticing. By which he meant noticing human diversity. Initially, this started out as a war on noticing bad things about groups of people. Then it slowly evolved into prohibitions on noticing general differences between groups of people. After all, it was said, all people evolved from the same source. This process has continued to the point where it is now forbidden to notice anything about people.

A good example is in this tweet from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is the premier peer-reviewed medical journal in the United States. Since the start of the Covid panic, it has been reported that blacks are more likely to contract the virus and more likely to need medical attention. This observation has been politicized, of course, but it is also a clue as to how the virus works. Naturally, there is money to find out why and scientific interest in the subject.

Given the racial unrest that has been manufactured by the nation’s elites, one would think that extra resources flowing into the care of black people would be celebrated by the great and good. If we are remaking movies, television shows and commercials to feature all black people, why not remake medical research too? As you can see from the replies, dogma trumps everything. While racism is a real thing, according to the one true faith, race is imaginary and racist.

The very first reply is emblematic of the modern age. It is from someone calling herself Rose Marie Leslie, MD. She claims to be a medical resident. On her twitter profile she lists the following: Top 20 docs on Social Media, Tiktok, Health Ed, Social Justice, Black Lives Matter and Repro Health. As if that was not enough self-parody, her comment was “Why are you spending the time and money on these studies instead of spending the time and money on fighting racism?”

Just below that comment we have a comment from someone calling herself Ramla N. Kasozi MD, MPH. They do not list their pronouns, so we must assume it is female, based on the profile picture. Mx. Ramla wrote, “An example of Biological Racism as discussed by Dr.@haw95 in her book ‘Medical Apartheid’ and Dr.@DrIbram book ‘How To Be Antiracist’.” According to Mx. Kasozi, noticing that Covid infects blacks more than whites is a form of racist experimentation.

In such a cornucopia of lunacy, it is hard to select the most bizarre, but the replies from someone calling herself Karen Gibbins, MD are a good nominee. Her first comment in the thread was, “Attributing genetic variants to race (which is socially constructed) is racist. Stop.” She then quickly replied to herself with, “And systemic racism is why there is why BIPOC are disproportionately harmed by COVID-19.” Racism, the cause of and cure for everything that is wrong in the world.

While these sorts of public displays of insanity are amusing, the salient issue here is the insane people highlighted are doctors. They work with real human patients in real medical settings. That means people are trusting doctors who think biology is imaginary and human diversity is a conspiracy. Given the histrionics, it is not implausible to think that a few of these people think sex is a social construct. Imagine being treated by someone who thinks your penis is a figment of your imagination.

The other salient issue is the panic that radiates from the replies. The mere mention of disconfirming data causes these people to panic. Their complaint is not about factual accuracy or medical efficacy. These are people deeply committed to a primitive animistic religion. This religion tells them that the world is controlled by various spirit forces, good and evil, engaged in a great struggle. Most important, their role in this great struggle is to fight the evil spirits.

Their commitment to this new faith is so complete that in the name of fighting racism, they would happily let blacks die from disease. If the price of helping the people they claim to care so much about is the acknowledgment that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among people or groups of people, then they are perfectly willing to see those people suffer and die. In fact, the suffering is a confirmation that these evil spirits are real and therefor the struggle is real.

The striking thing about this new faith is it is so primitive. These people are a very long way from the Christian looking up from Scripture and contemplating how God set the world in motion. These are people cowering in the darkness, deathly afraid to know what lies behind the movements of the world. Theirs is a world haunted by dread and foreboding, not a world of miracles to be explored. This is the great darkness that is settling on this age, the new dark age of the West.

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For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!