Thoughts On Kenosha

Posted on August 27, 2020 by thezman

Kenosha Wisconsin has now become the pivot point for the revolution from above being waged on middle America. Riots have convulsed the city for three nights since a violent black rapist was shot by police after resisting arrest. Large swaths of the city have been burned as the mayor cheered on the rioters. This led to the shooting of three rioters by a 17-year old kid, who volunteered to help defend the property owners. The video of the incident has become a world-wide sensation.

Of course, this being Jim Snow America, the white kid is now charged with capital murder and faces life in prison. White people who kill in self-defense get charged with capital murder, while blacks who kill for sport are allowed to go free. You see, the former is exercising white privilege and is guilty of being white. The latter, on the other hand, is the victim of white privilege and is justifiably angry. In post-reality America, privilege means being stripped of your rights and dignity.

If Kyle Rittenhouse was a black or an immigrant from the third world or even a transexual, he would not be in jail right now. He would be held up as a hero by the mainstream media. President Trump would send Air Force One to bring him to Washington for a special ceremony. Speakers at the RNC convention would be told to mention his name in their speeches. He is white, so no one at the convention will mention his name. They have not mentioned Cannon Hinnant either.

Unlike other cases where the media can suppress the truth while spreading lies, this time the truth was all over the internet before the media could act. As soon as it happened, social media had video of the attack on Rittenhouse. He fell to the ground as violent criminals attacked him and he opened fire on them. There can be no narrative in which he is the villain. He may have been naive, but he was simply following the civic nationalist code and doing what he thought was his duty.

This is Jim Snow America. A white kid following the rules is guilty, no matter what the facts say, so he sits in prison. His family started a defense fund on Go Fund Me, but it was immediately taken down. Again, in Jim Snow America, whites are not allowed to avail themselves of the resources for self-defense. The system will now wage war on this kid’s family in order to prevent them from defending their son. In Jim Snow America, white people just have to take it.

It is an infuriating reality, for sure. In a better world, the mayor of Kenosha would already be swinging from a tree. The good people of that city would have remembered the words of Jefferson and fertilized their tree of liberty. Of course, in a sane society, it would never have come to this. There would be no riots sponsored by the ruling class, so Kyle Rittenhouse would not have felt the need to go out in the streets. The reason all of this happened is the rulers made it happen.

As infuriating as it may be, it is this reality that must shine through. Those old rules you were taught about the law and your rights as an America no longer exist. They certainly don’t exist if you are white. If you are white, the system sees you as an enemy and will spare no expense in attacking you. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse sits in jail is no one told him this. Instead, internet warriors playing tough guy on-line encouraged him to be a man of action.

This is why people who like saying “well, at least he is doing something” need to be shouted down at every opportunity. These are people who think every cause needs martyrs, just as long as they are not the martyr, so they encourage everyone else to be foolishly brave. Like James Fields, we have another naive and impressionable young white man facing life in a cage, because he was convinced that doing something is always better than doing nothing.

This is just one aspect of a larger point that white people need to grasp. None of this would be happening if not for the political class. The Kenosha police department has tanks and armored vehicles. They have highly trained tactical units that are trained by Israel special forces officers. The Kenosha police force could invade a small country, but they are nowhere to be found during these riots. The reason they are absent is the politicians have ordered them to let the riots rage.

This is what makes Kenosha a pivot point in the ruling class revolt. This kid is not a scary monster who can be anathematized by the system. Even vulgarians like David Frum think he looks innocent. Note that Frum is okay giving weapons to these kids when they are killing Muslims on behalf of Israel, but otherwise he never wants to see white people holding firearms. For the typical white person, if he had a son, he would look like Kyle Rittenhouse.

Ultimately, that is now the significance of the Kenosha riots. White people are faced with the reality of their sons being sent to prison for the crime of being white. They face having their businesses destroyed because non-whites are ungrateful. They are being harassed at restaurants and in their home by mobs sponsored by the ruling class who have embraced anti-whiteness as a revolutionary cause. It’s no longer an abstract political argument. It’s daily reality.

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Taboo Breaking

Posted on August 22, 2020 by thezman

The Scandinavian nationalist, Fróði Midjord, is fond of saying that the way to break a taboo is to break the taboo. The logic is that taboos only work as a crowd control device when the crowd agrees with the taboo. If people stop abiding by a taboo, then it loses its power to enforce behavior. We see this with the social norms that have fallen away since the 1960’s. Things like adultery and divorce were normalized, in part, by people ignoring the taboos against them.

Of course, a good way to have your life destroyed is to go around breaking taboos, especially the ones that matter to the people in charge. Start talking race realism at your office and you not only get fired, you become unemployable. Break the taboo against fighting back against left-wing street thugs and you could end up in prison. Breaking taboos works only when a critical mass of people decides to break the taboo and a larger set of people are ready to join them.

That’s the other problem with taboo breaking. Without popular or institutional support, the taboo breaker ends up enforcing the taboo. He gets hauled out in front of the crowd and is properly punished. The crowd sees it and the point is made. If you don’t want to end up like the guy being made into an example, don’t break the taboo. Rosa Parks would not be known to us without the support of the ruling class. Her taboo breaking was welcomed by the people in charge.

Obviously, taboos are an essential part of every human society. They are the unwritten rules that habituate people to the historic norms of society. Usually, they have some basis in reality. A prohibition against going to the dark part of the forest is probably because it poses a real danger. A taboo against infidelity is rooted in the understanding that stable families make for a stable society. Shaming the adulterer is a way to discourage the behavior that disrupts stable family life.

Taboos also require a moral authority. We’re pretty sure belief, as in spiritual belief, co-evolved with language. There’s a pretty good chance that religion co-evolved with human settlement. As human groups began to settle down and invest in their territory, rather than just guard it, religion evolved to provide both the rules to govern human relations and to provide an authority for those rules. If the gods think you should not steal from your neighbor, you should listen to them.

When a taboo is rooted in religion or even tradition, it becomes self-enforcing. Humans are social animals, which means we want to be thought well of by others, so we look to show our conformity to group norms. One way to do that is public piety. The person known for fidelity to the faith or the traditions of the group is always going to be thought well of by his peers. Enforcing taboos is a good way to demonstrate your piety, thus you are someone that can be trusted by others.

This is the fundamental flaw in the current taboos. There’s no religious basis for anti-racism, for example. Even if there was, the people screaming about racism are flamboyantly opposed to religion. There’s nothing in our history or traditions that can be the moral authority for something like anti-racism. Republican virtue demands equality before the law and support for the basics of citizenship, but it does not require you to live next door to a black guy. In fact, it opposes such a requirement.

Most of the current taboos are deliberately conceived to contradict religion and tradition, which are dismissed as white privilege. The normal impulse to be around those with whom you have something in common has been anathematized in order to damage the normal functioning of society. Sending men dressed as women into the schools, while demanding everyone celebrate it, is nothing more than an outlandish rebuke of religion and tradition. Its only purpose is spite.

The same can be said for the whole catalog of modern taboos. There is no moral authority for them. There’s no logical basis for them either. A society that thinks sexualizing children is acceptable cannot rationally claim it is immoral to oppose the normalizing of men in dresses. The only authority for the current taboos is the force wielded by the taboo makers. They have control of the institutions and use that power to enforce these taboos on society.

Force is always the costliest form of rule. When the law is the habit of mind and obedience is the natural instinct, the ruling class does not have to spend very much to maintain order and their place at the top of that order. On the other hand, when their rule is at odds with habit and the people must be forced to obey, the cost of maintaining order eventually exceeds their capacity to impose it. Our ruling class is exhausting itself maintaining this collection of absurd moral codes.

It is why deliberate taboo breaking is probably the wrong course. Giving the people in charge easy targets and useful examples lowers the cost of enforcement. Mockery and avoidance do the opposite. It’s hard to drop the hammer on someone who is mocking your silly taboos. It’s expensive to root out the bad thinker minding his own business in the cubicle farm. The guerrilla in a modern moral war must live in the shadows, turning up to mock the enemy, but always avoiding direct confrontation.

The Failed Experiment Problem

Posted on August 20, 2020 by thezman

At the end of the Cold War, Progressives pointed out that conservatism no longer had a purpose, so it was probably going to follow communism into the past. Of course, the Left had its own problems in this regard, but conservatism in America had largely been about opposing the Soviets. They had conceded all the important points in the cultural war and the Left was ready to embrace corporate control of the economy, so there was no longer any purpose to conservatism.

This was a fair analysis, but one conservatives could not accept, as it would mean getting real jobs and doing honest work. Instead they tried to define conservatism as green eye-shade bean counting in the 1990’s. That was no fun as they like spending borrowed money as much as the Left. Then they tried to define conservatism to mean dropping high explosives onto Muslims. That worked for a while, but then the public soured on the pointless flag waving and hollow patriotism.

In the Obama years, conservatism entered the darkness and it has not been able to find a way out of it ever since. They tried to rally people around hating Trump, but that just underscored the bankruptcy of modern conservatism. Since then, various writers have been trying to figure out what conservatism is supposed to mean in the age of post-national globalism. The one enduring feature of the Right has been its roots in nationalism, so without that, it has no anchor.

This summer, the American Conservative has been running pieces on the topic from various writers. Here’s one from July doing the old constitution bit. Here’s one relying on historicism to define conservatism. A couple of Israelis contributed a piece claiming conservatism is a big shopping mall. This one makes the Straussian argument that conservatism is rooted in natural rights. Along the same lines, Yoram Hazony posted a long piece at Quillette about the dangers of Marxism.

The main take-sway from all of this is that no one in conservatism has the slightest idea how to breathe life into the corpse of their project. If they are unwilling to reject universalism and egalitarianism, they cannot embrace nationalism, other than as a shallow rhetorical device. Yoram Hazony has turned himself into a pretzel trying to promote a nationalism detached from biological reality. Everyone else is too afraid to go near anything that contradicts Progressive dogma on biology.

The truth is, the closest America ever came to having a genuine conservative alternative to Northern Progressivism ended in the Civil War. Since then the dynamic in America has been the Left innovating and the Right implementing. The Left, needing to exercise its reform impulse, finds something to break with novel ideas. The Right then comes in to clean up after them, finding some way to normalize it. The Robert Lewis Dabney observation is has never ceased to be true.

This is why whatever replaces conservatism as the alternative to the Progressive orthodoxy has to free of conservatism. It must be a clean break with that failed tradition of accommodation and obedience. A genuine alternative, a real competitor to the Left, has to be a stand-alone moral framework, rather than just a collection of criticisms and critiques of the liberal moral order. A critique is just a conditional agreement. That’s always been conservatism, agreement with conditions.

This may prove to be easiest in Europe, as Europeans have a genuine conservatism in their past they can pull out of storage. It may have failed under the pincer assault of Marxism and liberal democracy, but it offers a foundation to build on. Like an old house with good bones, it can be rebuilt with modern ideas and understandings. The failings of liberal democracy now make it a weaker foe than in the past. Liberal democracy is no longer about promise, but about practice.

For Americans, the task is difficult, as it means jettisoning most of the American story, maybe even the very concept of American. The frontier culture that has always been at the root of American mythology no longer makes a lot of sense in the demographic age with high-density urban areas. Rugged independence is suicidal when facing a demographic assault. There’s also the fact that the past has been rewritten to support the egalitarianism and universalism of the Left.

Then there is that American creed that starts with the assertion that all men are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights. The rejection of universal equality is a rejection of the core component of Americanism. This is the trap that devoured Buckley style conservatism in the last century. It is simply impossible to forge an alternative to Progressivism without first rejecting universal equality. To American ears, that sounds like a rejection of their very identity.

It is not impossible though. Events are what forge ideologies and the demographic changes sweeping North America will forge new political constructs. Organizing civil life in a world where the government is no longer willing or able to control the frontier or police the violent elements will require new ideologies. Most likely that means a return to the oldest form of social organization, which is relatedness. The large society problem will be solved with racial and ethnic identity.

Ultimately, that is the project facing the West. Liberalism, communism and to a lesser degree fascism, were all solutions to the large society problem. Liberal democracy is the current experiment in solving the problem. The real alternative to the prevailing order starts with accepting that these experiences have all failed. They failed because there is no solution to the problem, other than a passive ethno-nationalism organized around group identity and rights.

Lessons In Identity

Posted on August 17, 2020 by thezman

The so-called conservatives are muttering about how the choice of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate is an ominous example of identity politics. She was picked for her skin tone, they say, which is the worst thing possible. In their fantasy country, the only thing that matters is the content of your character. They have it all wrong, of course, but the selection of Harris does provide some good insights into how identity politics will work in the new non-white America of the near future.

For starters, Kamala Harris did not end up on the ticket solely because of her burnt orange complexion. That was how she was sold to Biden, who was still hurting from being called a racist by Harris in the debates. She was on the list, however, because she is the favorite of a powerful constituency in the ruling class. The Silicon Valley oligarchs backed her candidacy. They are an important part of the empire’s ruling elite, so they have a great deal of influence in both parties.

The reason Harris is so popular with Silicon Valley is the number of high caste South Asians in the executive suites of these companies. The old gag about the tech call centers and programming shops being located in India is still true, but the management suites are now increasingly filled with South Asians. This is why they lobby so hard for worker visas. This allows them to bring their co-ethnics over and begin the process of normalizing them into America.

Unlike the so-called conservatives, stuck in the past with regards to the contours of identity politics, the new tribes jostling for power in America play identity politics the old-fashioned way, the tribal way. It’s why Harris took to Twitter to celebrate Indian independence day with her people. Harris was not the only “American” politician to celebrate her people’s national holiday. Not to be outdone, Nikki Haley included a nice little graphic in her celebratory tweet.

It turns out that there is one group that plays identity politics as well as Jews and that is South Asians. They stick together wherever they find themselves. So much so they were able to elbow the Jews out of the Amsterdam diamond market. That is a remarkable feat, given the history and nature of the diamond market. In the United States, they are taking over the wholesale jewelry business. They are doing it on the power of informal agreements among co-ethnics.

That’s the real nature of identity politics, but the yesterday men are not entirely wrong in how Democrats play it. Even there, they miss the point. Barak Obama did not win with huge black support simply because he was black. He resonated with the black community in America because he strongly appealed to black identity. A mixed-race child of extreme privilege with a foreign sounding name was able to click with black voters like no black politician in American history.

Obama appealed to the strongest element within black America, which is black women, who dictate the size and intensity of the black vote. Obama looked and sounded like what every black woman fantasizes for herself and her son. He also married a very typical black woman, thus flattering black women. He had two children with her and gave them goofy fake African names. Obama may have been a mixed-race son of privilege, but he strongly identified with black identity by choice.

That’s how identity politics works. It is not the superficial nonsense about skin color or even ethnic heritage. This is what the yesterday men of both the Left and the Right fail to grasp. Identity goes much deeper. It is the essence of who we are, because it represents the long arc of history that led to our existence. It’s the confluence of history and biology. It’s why Africans are not African-American. It’s also why Kamala Harris is not a person of color to black Americans.

That’s why Harris was probably the worst choice for Biden. She helps bring in South Asian money from Silicon Valley. The tech monopolies will now swing into action in a million little ways to help their co-ethnics. She will titillate the upper middle-class whites who reliably vote Democrat. She will turn off blacks, however, who see in her what they see at the cash-only convenience store in their neighborhood. A foreigner leap-frogging them in the hierarchy of American identity.

There is another lesson in the Harris story. In the primary, even the media found her unpleasant, despite being paid by Google to promote her. Andrew Yang, in contrast, was a likable character, who had no institutional support, but was able to get grassroots and media support. According to the yesterday men, he should have got tons of elite support, based on his race. There are many more East Asians than South Asians, so by their logic he should have been a great candidate.

The difference between Yang and Harris is South Asians are very tribal, while East Asians are not very tribal. We see this in genetics and marriage patterns. India is a beef stew of various tribes, castes and ethnic groups. China, in contrast, is dominated by Han Chinese. East Asia tends toward mono-ethnic societies. Put another way, the biology of South Asia reinforces and encourages extreme identity politics, while East Asian biology tends to encourage uniformity and conformity.

In America, the East Asians that come here are the least ethnocentric of their kind, so they look to quickly assimilate. They name their kids Bob and Sally, take up golf and join the local Christian church. High caste Indians move here and name their kids Sinjar and Amala. They have a tandoor clay oven installed in their house and they find a local Hindu temple to join. In Asia, South Asians are as tribal as Jews are in the West, while East Asians are about as tribal as white people.

This is why South Asians get one of their own installed on the Democratic ticket, while East Asians are discriminated against by the Ivy League. South Asians and Jews are wildly over-represented in elite institutions, while East Asians and whites are ridiculously under-represented. So much so that the Democrats are comfortable putting a bitter bindi on the ticket and giving the affable Andrew Yang the stiff arm. He will have no role in the coming Democratic convention.

This is the shape of things to come. The Judeo-Puritan ruling class is now making room for high caste South Asians. Soon, saying anything unapproved about Indians will be as forbidden as holocaust denial. Native Americans will no longer be allowed to refer to themselves as Indians. Whites and East Asians will be the lumpen proletariat of the new Tribal States of America. Despite having numbers, they lack the ethnocentrism to make those numbers translate into political power.

Gaming The Election

Posted on August 13, 2020 by thezman

For most people who plan to vote in the upcoming election, the choice is clear and they don’t have to think about it very much. They know their guy is the right choice and the other guy represents the end of the world as we know it. There is nothing anyone could say to them to change their mind. In fact, the number of persuadable people probably rounds to zero. The issue in this election, like most elections, is which side is able to get their partisans to vote, either in person or by mail.

For dissidents it is not that easy. Once you make it to this side of the great divide you know elections are not a solution, but, at best, another opportunity to get more people heading in this direction. Supporting Trump in 2016 was about breaking the pattern so people were not as locked into the old political framing. After four years of Trump, we are faced with a new situation. Is a Trump win better for our side or is a Biden- Harris win better for our side? The answer is not obvious.

Often, our elections are the opposite of what we assume. The pull of partisan politics in a liberal democracy tends to warp the thinking of even the most cynical. In 2000 it seemed obvious that Bush was better than Gore, but in reality, Gore would have been the better choice for white Americans. Bush was the worst thing to happen to white America since the Emancipation Proclamation. Counter-intuitively, Bill Clinton was one of best presidents for white people in the 20th century.

Additionally, even dissidents can fall into the old Cold War mentality of judging candidates by their economic or foreign policy pretensions. The Democrats are the commie doves, while the Republicans are the capitalist hawks. Even at this late date, many dissidents still cling to their libertarian or conservative priors. Instead of thinking about the outcome that serves their people, they think about the outcome that serves their narrow interests as individuals. Group think is hard.

Then there is the bitter loser problem. Many people circulating on this side of the great divide were sure Trump was Hitler. When he turned out to be just another guy, they took it personally, as they personalize everything. Trump did not just get beat by the system, he deliberately finked on them. The only way to assuage their hurt feelings is to show that mean old orange man they are super mad at him. Richard Spencer, for example, is now “Bobbin for Biden” in this election.

If you can stand outside it all and just look at the two outcomes in terms of how they would serve the interests of dissidents, the choice is not so clear. The vinegar club that is now sour on Trump are right that four more years of Trump are unlikely to result in positive changes for our side. Trump is not an ideologue and he tends to personalize everything, so four more years means four more years of squabbling with illiterates on the cable chat shows, but not much else.

On the other hand, when the Left wins, they tend to make good use of their opportunity, so Biden winning means they will move the state in their direction. The most likely outcome of a Biden term in office is an orgy of globalism. Trump has caused the drive to global corporatism to stall, so the usual suspects will be eager to make up for lost time once the addle-minded Biden is in office. On the other hand, the culture war probably goes on hiatus, as it will no longer be useful to them.

Neither of those outcomes are objectively good or bad for dissidents. If you are a fatalist, then the Biden acceleration will be appealing. If you are in the camp that thinks buying time is important, then the Trump interregnum is appealing. Both of those positions miss the point. This is a culture war, so public policy only matters in regards to how it opens the culture to our arguments. In either case, the nature of the culture war changes very little, so both outcomes are a net neutral.

Now, a Trump loss would open one important avenue for us. It would reveal to those rank and file white people that the demographics have now changed and those changes are permanent. That silent majority they were sure exists is a myth. Instead, whites are effectively a minority population. Imagine Trump getting 70% of the white vote but losing the election. All that groveling to non-whites would suddenly become a bitter rebuke of the old civic nationalist politics.

On the other hand, Trump losing would be cast by Republicans as a rejection of racist and evil politics of the past. Both faces of the political class are ready for a campaign to convince those disappointed whites that the reason Trump lost is they foolishly supported a racist. Their path to redemption is to wash the feet harder. The ease with which these people convinced so many to wear their underwear on their head to ward off the virus should be a warning to the acceleration crowd.

The “win by losing” theory is like libertarianism, in that it sounds good in the classroom, but it is nonsense in the field. The fact is, Trump winning would give us more riots and mayhem, so the white awakening would probably accelerate. The fact is, more white people have become racially aware in the last three months than in the last three years, despite Trump’s groveling. There are much larger forces at work than one election, so the outcome is just one small data point.

That said, winning breeds confidence. Most of the people ready to vote Trump are more ready for the trip over the great divide than at any point in their lives. That transformation will continue, regardless of the outcome, but a little confidence never hurts. In a way, mobilizing to put Trump over the top is good practice for the sorts of politics that lie in the near future for these white people. They may not be ready to know it yet, but their pro-Trump activity is their first step into the future.

Greg Johnson pointed out, that small minds focus on people, while average minds focus on events. Great minds focus on ideas, but it is the combination of these that provides the full picture. Most of the partisan squabbling on-line about the election will be among one of those first two camps. What will matter is how this election serves the promotion of racial awareness among whites. More specifically, how will the outcome give whites confidence to look at the world racially?

The critical issue in this election is in how dissidents use it to promote their interests in their daily lives. Passing around this story to whites still trapped in the fog of old politics is more helpful than mocking those calling Harris a radical or a commie. Instead of mocking those “boomers’ trapped in the past, offer them a way forward by using this election to normalize racial politics for them. That’s the gift Biden gave us by picking Kamala Harris as his running mate.

Ultimately, the result of this election will matter very little. The demographic die is cast and there is no voting our way out of it. America will soon function like Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire. What will matter in this election and for the remaining elections is how dissidents use these opportunities to awaken white people to the reality of this age and provide a positive way forward into white identity politics. It is not about the man or the event, but about us and our ideas.

The End Of The Beginning

Posted on August 10, 2020 by thezman

For months now, the more cynical have suggested the lock downs will continue into the fall, as the hysteria has become something of a religion. The facts on the ground are useful to the panic party in so far as they can be used to support the idea that this plague is a curse sent from nature because of Trump. They hope the self-inflicted suffering will purge the lands of orange come November. Word now comes that they plan to cancel college football this week.

There’s no public health reason for cancelling college sports this fall or for keeping the kids of campus, which many colleges are doing. Many colleges will be on-line only this fall, meaning it will be a full year of virtual learning for their students. It was not that long ago when these very same colleges said on-line learning was terrible. Students needed personal interaction with their teachers and fellow students. Like so much that comes from the Left, that was true only while it was useful.

As far as college football, the plan was to minimize attendance at the games and make sure the players were tested on a daily basis. The only thing missing from the regime was daily dips into vats of hand sanitizer. Despite it all, the people who run big time college sports have been bullied into shutting down. This should put to rest that the people behind this stuff are motivated by money or power. They are tossing away billions and their grip on millions of people’s attention.

Sport has always been a window into what lies behind the general culture. In this case, the plight of sport reflects what is happening in society as a whole. The efforts to restart professional baseball, basketball and hockey have been a disaster, because the stripped-down versions lack essential ingredients. Like everything else about a big complicated society, sport evolved over time to work a certain way. Rebooting it without essential elements like a live audience does not work.

The people running the NBA and NHL are a reflection of the people running the country as a whole. They have the problem all outsiders have, in that they see the parts of society and can navigate through them, but they can’t see the invisible bonds that hold those parts in relation to one another. Their scheme to restart their respective sports made sense to them on paper, but to the rest of us it is like trying to impose the metric system or soccer. It’s alien and weird.

There’s also the social aspect to the popularity of sports. Football became the dominant sport because it is the best television sport. It was the one thing people could talk about at the office with no problems. It’s why so many companies encouraged their people to sport the colors of the hometown team on casual Friday. The popularity of sports like football had as much to do with their place in the social fabric as their popularity as an entertainment product. Big time sports fill a social niche.

The people in charge predicted people were suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome and that the return of any sports would be a success. Instead, baseball, basketball and hockey are not drawing much interest. People moved on in the short time those sports were off the air. Football will most likely face the same fate if it goes dark this autumn. Sports passion is like a fire. It requires constant tending and fuel in order to keep burning. Once it goes out, it stays out.

What’s happening with sports also puts to bed the notion that the people in charge are playing 4-D chess in order to maintain their power. Keeping white people locked into sports watching was always about crowd control. Nowhere is egalitarianism and anti-racism sold harder to more white people than at a sporting event. It is the one place where multiculturalism appears to work. Take that away and normal white people are left to watch white radicals and black activists riot in the cities.

What lies ahead for sports entertainment, maybe all big-time entertainment, is what small business is facing right now. Every business has a cost structure that reflects its revenue stream. Seasonal business has seasonable const structures. Small business has low cost structures. Global sport has a cost structure that requires millions to spend billions every year. Suddenly, owning a big fancy sports arena is not such a great idea in a world where large gatherings are prohibited.

There is a general assumption that the Covid stuff comes to an end with either the defeat of Trump in November or one final tantrum in January if he wins. At that point, the practical reality of life will force this charade to come to an end. That’s true, most likely, for this phase of the process. Economic necessity will force the people in charge to relent or civil unrest will force it. Unless this is really a simulation and the base code has been altered, this cannot continue much longer.

That’s just the end of this phase. The breaking of the sports entertainment model will have far reaching consequences. Tens of millions of people will fill in the gaps left by tailgates, trips to the alma mater, weekend parties glued to the television and billions spent on sports entertainment. All of a sudden, the sort of liberal guy you used to talk to about the football team is not a guy you talk to at all. Instead of talking to the conservative guy about sports, you talk about other stuff.

Even the most basic human societies are a highly complex web of interpersonal relationships that operate within a hard to define thing we call culture. A big diverse country like America has a degree of complexity that we cannot comprehend, other than to have the wisdom to accept that reality. The people in charge have thrown sand in all the gears of the machinery, machinery that has allowed them to rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Sports will soon be the least of their problems.

Mask Madness

Posted on August 8, 2020 by thezman

The petty tyranny of the Covid panic has gone from a genuine response to a public health concern to just another aspect of post-sanity America. People now wear all sorts of silly face coverings when going about their day for the same reason they wear pants or shoes. It’s just another thing that is required. Soon, it will be custom, like not wearing white before Memorial Day. The ever changing rules issued from local tyrants are now taken in stride like, the weather or earthquakes in California.

The mask issue is another great example of how American politics is just a morality play with the same roles every time. The Official Left strutted onto the stage warning about the great monster and how the democracy was at risk. Their solution was mandatory mask wearing like their sponsors in China use. The Official Right tried to minimize the issue and resisted for a while, but the Official Left whipped up their partisans in the crowd and the Official Right eventually relented.

Meanwhile, out in the crowd, the partisans of the Left now feel emboldened to harass people on the streets about masks, distancing and so forth. Normal people, of course, are still stuck in the world of facts and reason, but they are adjusting to life in a past-sanity world. A similar pattern happened with homosexual marriage. Normal people still think it is ridiculous, just as they think men in sundresses is absurd, but they navigate around it and the crazies that support it.

Unlike homosexual marriage and drag queens, the petty tyranny has a moral signifier to it that makes it tougher to navigate. The mask is the most obvious one. Spend time in a public setting and you can see the believers versus the compliant. The believers make sure their face muffler is firmly attached and is clean and new. They make sure it is on before they leave the car and they wear it all the way to the car. Normal people stick theirs on just before they enter a store.

The same is true of other aspects of this performance. At places that offer hand sanitizer, the faithful queue up, making sure to keep their distance, then make a big show of rubbing themselves down with sanitizer. Normals feel pressured to do it, but they look a bit out of place. It’s like the C&E Catholics taking communion. They just assume everyone knows they are going through the motions. Others, of course, just ignore it and go about their business.

What makes all of this more compelling, from an anthropological and sociological perspective, is no one knows if these measures have any impact. The people who say they are effective almost always have no math or science. They would not know the first step in thinking about how to test the effectiveness of these measures. The other side of the debate does not exist, at least not publicly. Those strongly opposed to these measures base their arguments in the law, not science.

The truth is, there is no reason to think any of these measures have a positive impact on the progress of the pandemic. That’s the first important thing to know if you want to think about a pandemic. It is a process. Assuming the new bug is not 100% lethal to those exposed and humans can develop an immunity to it over time, a pandemic follows a predictable pattern. There is the initial outbreak, where the most vulnerable succumb, then it spreads through the population and eventually burns out.

A pandemic burns out because eventually there is a critical mass of people who are immune to the virus. Maybe they have a natural immunity or they have developed one, but over time, the ability of the virus to find a new host diminishes and it can no longer spread to new victims. Of course, in the extreme, the virus just kills all those vulnerable to it and the rest survive. Some researchers think this could have happened in Philadelphia during the Spanish Flu outbreak.

The theory behind these counter measures was to slow the spread, so hospitals would have time to gear up for patients. The fact that the spread was not impeded in the slightest is a pretty good real-world test of the measures. Maybe in theory they could work, but we don’t live in theory. In reality, months of social distancing and mask wearing have had no impact on the course of the disease. In fact, in places like New York, their policies probably made it worse.

It is possible that all of these measures are bad idea. Take the mandatory mask wearing business as an example. Wearing a surgical mask in a medial setting as part of a protocol to maintain a germ-free environment is well established. Hospitals have very lengthy procedures for the staff, as well as regular training by people who are tasked with maintaining a clean environment. The mask is just one small part of a larger process to maintain a safe environment in the hospital.

In the regular world, where no such procedures are in place and no one is trained in the proper use of masks, or even using proper masks, the mask may be a bad idea. If you watch people in the wild, they are endlessly fiddling with their masks. We know a primary vector for a virus is people touching their face and eyes. A policy that increasing face touching is not a good idea in a pandemic. In other words, mask wearing may increase the spread of the virus in the real world.

The efficacy of mask wearing does not matter, as it is now just another amulet people can wear in public to express their adherence to a particular cult. In the case of the scolds yelling at people about their masks, they believe their mask loyalty is a license to harass the world. Social misfits at the bottom of the social hierarchy now use the mask issue to attack the normal people for not liking the mask policy. The mask is now just another part of the general madness of this age.

What Comes Next

Posted on August 3, 2020 by thezman

In July 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be interrogated for being part of Trotsky-led conspiracy. The pair had been part of the ruling triumvirate, along with Stalin, after Lenin was incapacitated with a stroke, but they had sided with Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. As a result. their status had declined in the party. In 1932, they were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.

The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.

In the West, of course, the Left defended the trials as proper and necessary. In America, Progressive big shots signed onto a statement celebrating the trials. “The measures taken by the Soviet Union to preserve and extend its gains and its strength therefore find their echoes here, where we are staking the future of the American people on the preservation of progressive democracy and the unification of our efforts to prevent the fascists from strangling the rights of the people.”

You’ll note the familiarity of those words. Despite being written 82 years ago, the sentiments are the same as those of the modern Left. Other than the reference to the Soviet Union, those words would sound familiar on the college campus on in the halls of the New York Times. Modern Progressives see themselves as the defenders of the people against the enemies of democracy, by which they don’t mean elections, but rather the cooperative society of equals they imagine.

It is therefore no surprise that as the woke revolutions rolls on, the Left is now dreaming of show trials of their own. Instead of forcing their opponents to confess to imaginary crimes against the revolution, they want to drag their victims in front of the television cameras and force them to confront their racism. Undoubtedly, they will want to force these people to denounce their ancestors too. For good measure, maybe denounce some friends and family members as racists.

It may all seem ridiculous, but that is the way it goes with ideological movements running unchecked through a society. The original Bolsheviks who were eventually murdered by Stalin never saw it coming until it was too late. The Ukrainian farmers who supported the revolution never imagined the Holodomor. The Girondins, who had been the radicals of the French Legislative Assembly in 1791, became the conservatives of the Convention in 1792. They were purged and executed in 1793.

In this revolutionary moment, we went from protesting the police to toppling statues within weeks. Words like “plantation” have been erased from the language and companies are demanding employees submit what amount to loyalty oaths to the new woke religion. If corporate monopolies feel free to fire those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic, how long before they are demanding employees rat out fellow employees for speaking against anti-racism?

Revolutions are not just the violent replacement of the old with the new. They quickly become purification rituals. As Joseph de Maistre noted, “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.” This is what leads the radical to go from revolutionary to executioner.

Make no mistake. The New York Times to did not commission that demand for show trials because they needed to fill space. They have gone through their own form of the Ryutin affair, along with the rest of elite media. The Bari Weiss resignation letter and Andrew Sullivan’s final column are repeats of the Boris Nicolaevsky’s Letter of an Old Bolshevik, in which a loser in the great struggle for the revolution describes the divisions that formed in the revolution.

Take the time to read that New York Times piece. The writer is barely literate. The text reads like something from a hip-hop performer or maybe a slam poet. The words are not intended to convey literal meaning. Instead, the column should be read out loud to the sound of jungle rhythms. It is a call to war by the savages of the revolution, who can only be satisfied by the sight of blood. It’s the woke revolution’s declaration of war against western civilization.

This being a feminized age, even the vulgar revolutionaries lack the stomach to follow through on their desires. The woke women of the revolution can bully the soft men off the stage, but they will not be hanging anyone. Instead, this revolution will be satisfied to humiliate and harass. Women are much more vicious than men, so they will not have the decency to execute their enemies. Instead, ritual humiliation will be the end point of the coming show trials.

Parable Of The Lizard People

Posted on July 30, 2020 by thezman

Imagine a strange world that is inhabited by a variety of intelligent life forms, rather than just one like on earth. These life forms are not just different tribes or races like here on earth, but different species. That means no interbreeding between the groups, so they remain separate and distinct. Here on earth, humans are the smartest beasts on the planet, so we sit at the top of the hierarchy. On this alien world, the top of the hierarchy is a crowded place populated with these different intelligent species.

One group evolved from a serpent-like ancestor, so they retain many of the features we would associate with reptiles. Unlike a lizard here in earth, they are like the aliens from the movie They Live, in that they can appear to be familiar to those around them. This is one of their main advantages as a species. They sort of fit in with the other species when they want to do it, so they are able to influence the other intelligent species. This allows them to avoid direct confrontation with the other intelligent life forms.

Another intelligent species evolved from something bird-like. Like birds and reptiles here on earth, this groups shares a distant relative with the lizard people, but it is too far back for them to share many similarities. One branch went the bird way and then a bird-like humanoid way in the distinct past. The lizard people went reptilian and the evolved into the smart lizard people of the present. The bird are much more efficient breeders, so they have the ability to increase and decrease their numbers quickly.

Another group went down the primate path like humans. They split into two branches at some point in the past. One group turned out to be a dumber, brutish ape-like creature that lives in caves and is prone to violence. The other branch ended up something closer to what we think of as humans, but still apish. They are like the apes from the Planet of the Apes movies. All of these species are smart enough and aware enough to grasp their relationship with one another.

The lizard people are smaller in number, but nature has endowed them with great cleverness as a force multiplier. The bird people are smart as well, but not quite as smart as the lizard people. They have greater numbers when necessary. The cave-apes, of course, are quite dumb, while the yard apes are pretty smart. They can be as smart as the bird people, but they are a notoriously individualist species. They tend to cluster in small groups while the bird people organized into large flocks.

Now, these are all species of varying intelligence, so instead of relying on the natural evolutionary processes to sort out their differences, they reason them through. The lizard people, despite being small in number, tend to control things. The bird people feel a natural kinship with the lizard people, for the most part, but they also compete with the lizard people for control. The lizard people will use the cave-apes as an ally in these fights, while the bird people will try to recruit the yard apes.

Into this system of interlocking loyalties and rivalries comes a new group of intelligent creatures from some other planet. These are much closer to humans, with a wide range of skills and intelligence. They are refugees from a nearby planet and settle onto this new world. Initially, they hope to reason with the host species to carve out a place for themselves in this complex set of relations. After all, these are all intelligent species that can solve problems and avoid conflicts.

What they find is none of the groups in these coalitions want to open up to them. The lizard people, in fact, dedicate their efforts to keeping the new group outside the coalition, even trying to oppress them. They encourage the yard apes to attack the new comers and organized the cave apes to harass them. The bird people see no reason to side with the newcomers, as they don’t want to go to war with the lizard people and their cave ape army. The planetary coalition remains closed.

The new people now face a dilemma. They can leave, but there is no guarantee they can find a new world that will welcome them or be able to sustain them. They can stay and allow themselves to be preyed upon by the apes. Maybe if they defend themselves well enough, they can win a long war of attrition and bring the lizard people to the negotiating table. Alternatively, they can go to war with the current system and find ways to shatter the current relationships.

Naturally, the first choice will be to find another world, as this is not a war-like species, but the facts eventually make this unreasonable. That leaves the long war of defense or the possible shorter war of offense. Either choice means violence. The only way to survive is to either smash the current arrangements or drive up the costs to the people at the top of it until they yield. That either means war on the lizard people or a long war against their ape-like proxies.

Fundamentally, this is the logic of political violence. The group committing the violence on behalf of their cause is assuming there is no other option. Muslim terrorism in the West is the long war of attrition. They don’t think they can negotiate with the West, which they see as the aggressor, so it is the long war model. The Civil Rights movement was the other option. The people behind it were using black violence to overthrow the natural order, controlled by a white elite.

This is a useful way to consider the current organized street violence. The people doing it have access to power. Many are the sons and daughters, sometimes both at the same time, of the people at the top. They have that initial option of petitioning for redress and negotiating for new rules. This is what makes them the cave apes in our fantasy world described in the above scenario. They may think they are revolutionaries, but they are actually tools of the prevailing order.

The people being assaulted and attacked, the white shop owners and residents in these areas are the newcomers in our scenario. It’s why there are no corporate sponsors for their side, as we see with the attackers. These riots are one step from having commercials from Amazon and Goldman Sacks. “This assault on an old white man walking his dog is brought to you by Amazon World Services.” It’s also why no one in charge thinks anything is wrong or this needs to be stopped.

The one difference between our reality and the conjured reality of the above scenario is the people under attack in our world lack self-awareness. They think they are in charge and that the corporations and politicians will respond to market pressure. You can be sure most of them think they will have their revenge in November. They think “get woke, go broke” is a reflection of reality. A big part of the war being waged on them is a psyop to reinforce this false consciousness.

Another important difference is the math of the situation. On the alien world, the existing species have the numbers on their side. In this world, the ruling coalition does not have numerical superiority. Once the people being attacked realize there is no negotiating with the lizard people and there is no escaping the situation, the math of the situation becomes the most salient aspect of the fight. The only question is how long will it take for the people under siege to grasp the reality of their situation.

Our House Of Cards

Posted on July 28, 2020 by thezman

Adolf Hitler once said, “There is nothing new under the sun. There are just new ways of expressing the same ideas.” There is some truth to this, which is why we have so many ways of saying that history repeats itself. At least we like to think it repeats itself, as that’s a comforting thought. It means the answers to today’s problems, no matter how vexing, exist in the past. All we have to do is rummage around in the past for a similar time and take a look at the solutions from that period.

There are exceptions. The French Revolution is one of those novel happenings that had no precedent in the known past. The Bolshevik Revolution looked a bit like the French Revolution, but turned out to be something different, mostly because the Bolsheviks were students of the French Revolution. Sometimes things are different enough to be treated as totally new. We may be experiencing one of those times where the conditions are unique enough to feel as if there is no precedent.

Older pundits are fond of comparing the current cultural revolution to the cultural revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s. They make the comparison because they were around for the first one and they go in for nostalgia. They also see that the people cheering it on in the halls of power are often people who participated in the cultural revolution of the past. You can be sure that many oldsters on the Left think what is happening today confirms their forever youth.

There are some big differences though. For one, the rebels of the past were actually rebelling against something. They did not have unlimited corporate and institutional support. The cops were told to beat the crap out of the rioters in the 1960’s by the political class, both Democrat and Republican. Today, the political class, both Democrat and Republican, is on the side of the rioters. We saw that in New York, Washington and now Portland and Seattle.

There’s also the fact that the rebels of the past had an agenda. It may have been childish and silly, in a college sophomore sort of way, but it was an agenda they could talk about in public. They wanted more personal freedom. They wanted the war in Vietnam to end. They wanted public aid for poor people and blacks. The current rebels talk about nonsense like social justice and privilege. All they can muster is pointless slogans they heard on-line.

A couple generations ago, the Silent Majority could look at the situation and imagine an end game. For example, they could connect ending the Vietnam War with ending the anti-war protests. That meant voting for Nixon in 1968. They could see a connection between loosening social mores and clearing the streets of hippies. On the other hand, they could imagine law and order politicians instructing the cops to clear the streets of the hippies and protesting students too.

Today, there is no silent majority. The great demographic changes that have been wrought by those ascendant rebels of the 1960’s has reduced the white population to about 60% now. About 20% of that population is on the side of the rioters, just as long as they stay away from their mansions. Some portion has walked away from politics entirely, due to the aforementioned changes wrought by the rebels. The Silent Majority is just a bitter minority now.

That’s an aspect to this that gets little attention and makes this very different from the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. The geezers cheering their grandchildren burning Starbucks keep expecting the jackboots of the Silent Majority to show up like they did the last time, but those jackboots are now on golf courses in Boca. No matter how much they provoke their imaginary enemy, there is no response. This reboot of the 1960’s is missing the thing that made it possible, that Silent Majority.

Another novel item is that the now silent minority has nowhere to turn for the solution to this cultural revolution. What is it that they can give to the people burning and looting the cities to make them go home? How does one answer the call for social justice or the end of systemic racism? What would those things look like? These chants and incantations have no practical meaning. They are moral signifiers borrowed from the grievance studies programs on the college campus.

More important, there is no electoral option either. The Democrat party is actively cheering on this lunacy. Joe Biden is running an extortion campaign, where a vote for him means an end to the violence and Covid lock downs. How realistic is that when his party is cheering for the mayhem, promising to take it to a new level after they win the final election. It is not hyperbole to say that a Democrat sweep in November means the end of elections. What would be the point?

Of course, the Republicans are revealing themselves to be entirely bankrupt. Their response to the unrest is nothing. They are too busy crafting yet another giveaway to their corporate paymasters. Trump is nowhere to be found. He occasionally tweets something stupid, but otherwise he looks like a beaten man. In fairness, he is a beaten man, beaten by a political class that is corrupt beyond reform. For that silent minority, there is no political option to end the current madness.

This is a novel problem for Americans. If you are a white person in a place like Seattle, what are your options? If you abide by the law, you have your property destroyed and possibly your life threatened. People are being shot in their cars now as they try to go about their business. Gun sales are booming, but the people buying the guns imagine themselves defending their life and property within a system of laws. What happens when they realize there is no system of laws?

If you read about the deliberations of the decision-makers in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the thing that stands out is their sober mindedness. They were very worried that America was on the cusp of social collapse. The decision makers of today, that means political and corporate leaders, seem to think American society is an indestructible object they can abuse without consequence. They are carrying on like reckless children, incapable of imagining any consequences to their behavior.

Social collapse comes when the majority stops accepting the legitimacy of the system and the authority of those in charge of it. The one result of the street rioters and their corporate and political sponsors is they may get what they want. The majority may stop accepting the legitimacy of the system. That silent minority may lose all faith in the system and the people running it. That would be us one step from the edge, when all respect for authority collapses and takes society with it.

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