Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Morality Politics

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The simplest definition of politics, regardless of the political system, is that it is formalized collective action. An individual or group of individuals gets a group of people to act as a group on some issue. It may be to lobby the king for some policy, undermine the dictator in some way or vote for a particular issue. Further, the kernel of all political action is dissatisfaction. The people doing the organizing are unhappy with something so they find the like-minded and appeal to their unhappiness.

As a practical matter, politics is about persuasion. The reformer, for example, first persuades people that something is broke. Like a good salesman who creates need in the mind of the prospective customer, the reformer creates a sense of unhappiness with the status quo in his target audience. The reformer is, in effect, a chronic complainer, always talking about his unhappiness with the status quo. His goal is always to first persuade people that something is broken and needs fixing.

No all persuasion is the same. if you listen to this interview with Ryan Faulk, he frames politics as narrative driven and data driven. The guys in whatever the now defunct alt-right are calling themselves these days are narrative driven. They create stories to explain the important facts of some issue. The other side stacks up the facts and lets them do the talking. If the other side is wrong about the facts, it is assumed they must be wrong about the general arguments built on those facts.

The politics of multiculturalism, if you examine the claims, is narrative driven, always around a story of group conflict. Blacks, for example, are in their present condition because of the long oppression by whites. Feminism is the story of female liberation from the patriarchy. It’s why the Left falls for rape hoaxes and noose hoaxes so easily, despite the history of these hoaxes. The hoax fits the narrative that for them, explains everything about the world and their role in it.

On the other hand, the politics of conventional conservatism is about facts and ideas, specifically the rejection of the narrative idea. The Right in America, the conventional Right, that is, remains under the spell of Richard M. Weaver. As Joe Sobran put it, they have always been convinced that “their own beliefs would creep up on the ideas of the Left, slit their throats in the dark, and stage an intellectual and cultural coup d’état, after which truth would reign.” Being right is all that matters.

You see some of this in the anti-Semite community. The Holocaust revisionists are sure that if they just reveal the facts about what happened to Jews under the Nazis, the narrative of the Holocaust will collapse. Once that narrative collapses, that which it supports will collapse with it. Their great enemy, the men with little hats, will then be routed and driven from the halls of power. This is why they obsess over it. They believe the facts will conquer their enemy’s narrative.

Ironically, this fact versus narrative dichotomy is most popular and most well-known because of Jewish conservatives like Ben Shapiro. He is famous for saying “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” He invests a lot of time discouraging whites from embracing their own narratives to counter those on the Left. Instead, they are supposed to embrace facts, as facts are the magic that will destroy the narrative. Well, not all narratives, of course, but that’s another issue.

The thing is though, this fact versus narrative construct is a left-wing creation, at least it serves left-wing ends. Narrative is the predicate for morality. The reason the Bible is full of stories is moral claims naturally rise from stories. A good narrative not only encompasses the known facts, it orders them. These are the important facts of the story, while these are not essential, there for color and context. It is this ordering that reinforces and existing morality or creates a new one.

Raw facts are not the basis of morality. As David Hume famously explained, you cannot get an ought from an is. Indiscriminate killing of human beings is not wrong because it violates the laws of the natural world. It is wrong because we say it is wrong or we claim our gods say it is wrong. Those stories about how the gods punished those who kill without reason are the basis of a moral code that changes homicide into murder and prescribes punishments for those who commit murder.

Of course, this is why the fact side of the dichotomy favors the Left. When Shapiro demands you focus on facts, it is so you do not focus on the moral framework. Similarly, the Holocaust revisionist obsesses over granular details of the story, because it is easier than mounting a moral argument against the prevailing orthodoxy. While it is most certainly intentional in the former case, in the latter case it is simply an outgrowth of how right-wing politics were created in the middle of the last century.

This is also why white identity politics frightens the people in charge. The right side of the game sees it as a mortal threat to their existence as a loyal opposition. The left side sees it as an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. White identity politics offers an alternative set of narratives and as a result, an alternative morality. The Left hammers away at “facts” about race in an effort to steer identitarians away from moral considerations and back into the old dichotomy.

These narratives do not rise from nothing. There must be some basis in reality, but mostly they need people willing to fit reality into the general narrative. In the case of white identity politics, it means fitting events into the general themes of peaceful separation, natural group affinity and so forth. It also means drawing moral conclusions from events. The current riots, for example, are an example of the immorality of forcing dissimilar people to live together. Morality transcends fact and narrative.

An excellent example of this, oddly enough, comes from the Left. The gun grabbers have been repeating the same demands for generations now. No matter how many times the facts are presented, they remain steadfast. The reason is they truly believe gun grabber is a moral imperative. Now amount of facts and reason will persuade them to abandon their moral code. Not even an alternative narrative to explain events is tolerated, as it slams into their morality.

This is why the fact versus narrative dichotomy is false. Both are codependent in support of the prevailing moral orthodoxy. The narrative side is constricted by the prevailing moral code to support certain narratives. It is why, for example, they can so easily abandon one narrative and adopt its opposite. Free speech, for example. It is also why the fact side is limited to a list of acceptable facts. Raise the wrong facts and you are banned to the outer darkness.

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 Good White Bible

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A strange thing that used to be more common a decade ago, but still persists to this day is the use of the book Guns, Germs and Steel as an escape hatch. That is, when a conversation with good whites turns to biology, they will at some point attempt to change the subject by bringing up this book. Always, it is in the form of “A great book on this is Guns, Germs and Steal. Have you read it?” After all these years, it remains the one acceptably dangerous book they have read on the subject.

In this context, dangerous means that the book sort of accepts the fact that human populations are not exactly the same everywhere. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have defined the story of man, while arguing against biological reality. For good whites, merely acknowledging that sub-Saharan Africans have little to show for their time on earth is scary. Even though Diamond is a biological denialist, the book is still a dangerous read.

Of course, it is acceptable because of that denialism. The thesis of the book is that serendipity and ecology explain why some human populations have advanced beyond simple farming, while others have not. Diamond makes many claims about different food stuffs, weather and pathogens to explain why Europeans, in particular, have risen to the top of the human hierarchy. The basic claim, in a nutshell, is they got lucky and really don’t deserve their spot at the top of the hierarchy.

This is a familiar theme for those who have read the writings of Ben Shapiro and Yoram Hazony, both of whom make similar claims. In the case of Shapiro, he argues that Europe was the creation of Hellenize Jews, who arrived with the Romans. He is not that honest or explicit, but that is his claim. Hazony takes a similar approach, but credits the Romans for imposing culture on the people of Europe. He also credits dumb luck in explaining why Europe is not the Levant or Mesopotamia.

This makes sense from the perspective of Zionist Jews. They view life as a great struggle between people, particularly their people, the Chosen People, and the rest of the people of the world. They don’t have to think too hard about why they are superior to Arabs, but Europeans are another matter. The Jewish people don’t have a big trophy case like the people of the Occident. They credit this to dumb luck in order to maintain the fiction that they are still God’s favorite people.

Now, it is important to note that the Diamond book is riddled with errors of fact and logic that undermine the central premise. In fact, there are so many of these errors it has to be assumed the author knew he was making false claims. For those with some time to kill, Ryan Faulk made a two hour video going into the details of Diamond’s claims about agriculture and animal husbandry. The best you can say about Guns, Germs and Steel is it is a masterful display of modern sophistry.

Now, ecology did play a defining role in shaping the people of Europe, just as it did the people everywhere on earth. Fundamental to the human sciences and dissident politics is that people are different. The people of Europe are different because they had to be in order to survive and thrive in their environment, which is radically different from the environment of Africa. They also mixed with archaic people, just as East Asians mixed with a different archaic people. Human biodiversity is real.

The appeal of the Diamond book, the intent of it actually, is to turn this reality on its head in order to supplant biological reality with the egalitarian fantasy. The impression Diamond tries to leave on the reader is that he is accepting the premises of the realists, while coming to a more parsimonious explanation. This is a similar approach taken by Nathan Cofnas in his critique of Kevin McDonald’s book. It is a form of abductive reasoning meant to persuade, not explain.

Similarly, a book popular with the same crowd twenty years ago was Why Nations Fail, which attempted to solve the same problem. It makes the claim that the reason the West has raced ahead to lead the world is that they have inclusive institutions and that economic prosperity depends above all on the inclusiveness of economic and political institutions. This magical inclusiveness just fell from the sky and landed in the West, explaining why the Occident has dominated.

The popularity of these books, and in the case of the Diamond book its enduring popularity, speaks to the power of the egalitarian faith. People in modern democracies, particularly bourgeois people, need to believe that all people are born with the same innate talents and abilities. The belief is so powerful it can overcome the absurd circular reasoning in a book like Why Nations Fail and raise Guns, Germs and Steel into the gospel of modern liberal democracy.

There is another element to this. The premise is that the “superficial” differences in people are due to environment, but the people themselves are all the same, once those environmental issues are removed. This sort of thinking allows the believer to feel shame for his privilege, while lamenting the fact the poor browns were not blessed with better stuff or the divine magic of liberal democracy. The good white can indulge his natural self-loathing and proselytize for his way of life.

This is a very Christian dynamic. The good white, like the good Christian, embraces the fallen state of mankind. For Christians, it is man’s obvious sinful nature. For the good white, it is white privilege, the undeserved blessings of serendipity. Like the believing Christian, the good white sees the path to salvation in spreading the faith. Instead of observable reality leading to an acceptance of the human condition, it drives a desire to rectify it and overcome the forces that have shaped it.

This is probably why a book like Guns, Germs and Steel remains a popular text with the good whites. It is literally written to flatter the reader and offer an alternative narrative to explain observable reality. White people are not evil because of their nature, but because of their failure to acknowledge their privilege and put it to good use in saving the rest of mankind from his plight. To be a good white means embracing one’s undeserved place in the world as fuel to reform the world.

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 Paradox Of Democracy

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The great paradox of democracy is that the system is supposed to break the chains that bind the citizen to the state, but instead it immerses the citizen in the state. If you go back 200 years in any country in the West, you would find that the people had very few dealings with the national government. They had dealings with local government, but even that was minimal. Politics, even in Britain and America where popular government was established, played a minor role in the lives of citizens.

Today, in supposedly free countries, no one can be free of politics. Everywhere you go, politics plays a part in your life. Political correctness governs the workplace and the academy. If you fall behind in the latest trends in pronouns, you could end up in a struggle session with the human resource people. Entertainment is saturated with multiculturalism and the lectures that come with it. It is nearly impossible to live in a modern western democracy without politics.

One reason for this is the natural logic of democracy. The proper way to run society, according to democracy, is for the people to express their will through a plebiscite or an elected body like a parliament. The good citizen takes an interest in his society and makes his opinion known though his vote or through participation in public and private debates about the issues. The system is intended to encourage the people to get involved and participate in the political process.

Therefore, someone who does not wish to participate in the democratic process is, in effect, opposed to democracy. If being a good citizen means keeping up with politics and participating in the process, not doing those things means you are something less than a good citizen, maybe even a bad citizen. This logic not only works on the laggards, but it encourages everyone to be a scold. The person trying to avoid politics will be a target by the champions of democracy.

Of course, one goal of democracy is to get people to cooperate with one another in order to set public policy and shape society. Rather than one guy dictating the rules or a group of powerful people making law, the people come together and find some compromise that suits the most amount of people. A point of democracy is to allow the losers to accept defeat, as they get something in the compromise and they have a chance to win the next time. Democracy is about compromise.

Compromise has an important meaning in democracy. It is not a grudging compromise or simply a truce to the fight. The point of the compromise is to reach a consensus on the issue at hand. This general agreement comes about by the parties working together to find a solution to which they can all agree. Compromise in a democracy is not a hostile agreement, like that between warring parties, but a friendly agreement struck between partners. Compromise is cooperation in a democracy.

This naturally leads to the conclusion that those who are not participating in politics are possibly excluded in some way. Simply eliminating the explicit rules against participation like limits on the franchise are just a start. Until everyone participates fully, it is assumed something is excluding them. This is the source of things like “voter suppression efforts” and “exclusionary practices” in the workplace. If anyone is not fully engaged and represented, then something is preventing them.

This is the root of speech and behavior laws. Speech that mocks or minimizes some group makes them feel unwelcome. This could lead they to avoid participation or encourage others to block their way. Similarly, rules or customs that exclude people must only exist to exclude and are therefore anti-democratic. It’s why any humor based on observing human behavior is forbidden. It is why noticing difference in people is now the worse crime. To differentiate is to exclude.

Inevitably, it means the system does not just pick the low hanging fruit of exclusion like laws that discriminate or banning exclusionary speech. Unless and until everyone is participating and getting along with everyone else, the cause of discord and exclusion must be sought out by the system itself. What we see today is democracy has become an endless struggle session for society. We collectively hunt for anything that offends or discourages cooperation among citizens.

This leads to another strange paradox. Once the hunt for the cause of less than perfect social cohesion starts, it must invade every aspect of life. The speech laws lead to theories about the thoughts behind the forbidden speech. Private association must expose itself to endless examination in order to make sure it is not excluding anyone or creating tensions between groups. In short order, as we see in America since the Cold War, the citizen exists only as a thoroughly political animal.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the spirit of democracy is why social media companies hunt down dissenters. These people posting mean things on-line cannot be ignored, because there very existence, according to the logic of democracy, is to crate conflict and undermine cooperation. In a way, the platform becomes a metaphor for society as a whole. The army of volunteer speech monitors are fully actualizing their freedom in the democratic system by driving out the anti-democratic elements.

This immersion of citizens in a political environment eliminates the private institutions and associations that were supposed to be the bedrock of democracy. If private association is exclusionary, then private institutions are as well. Since anything that obstructs perfect cooperation is anti-democratic, democracy means the elimination of the very institutions that are supposed to make it possible. Democracy now looks a lot like Soviet communism, where the party was everything.

Another paradox is that democracy is supposed to rely on the independent citizen being able to assess his own interests. By eliminating private associations and institutions, the citizen naturally becomes dependent on the state. If you cannot belong to a club or an organic group, your only option for social support is family, but that too is under endless assault by democracy. Feminism, after all, is the elimination of womanhood as an independent role. As feminism grows, family formation falls.

With communism, the goal upfront is a society without social conflict. The communist seeks to flatten the natural hierarchy of society. By destroying class and the distinctions among citizens, all citizens are equal. Equality of existence means an equality of purpose, so everyone naturally cooperates. The ideology itself is shot through with the understanding that the communist is a purely political animal, as he is defined by the fact that he is a communist man in a communist society.

In democracy, the declaration is the opposite. Democracy is supposed to make men free to enjoy their lives as they see fit, exercise their liberty and pursue the ends that bring them happiness. In theory, citizens are free to participate in the system or they can choose to opt out of the system. In reality, it is impossible to exist in a democratic system without also being a citizen. To be a citizen, you have to fully participate in the process and that means fully cooperate will all fellow citizens.

That’s the great paradox of democracy. A system advertised to offer maximum liberty turns out to be a system that offers no freedom. The logic of democracy requires all members to cooperate with one another. That inevitably requires constraints on speech, behavior and association. Every word and deed must foster cooperation or it is anti-democratic and therefore forbidden. The full range of action by citizens is constrained to the point where the democratic man is a prisoner.

Note: I’m still working on the comment system issue. It should be resolved shortly.

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!

Comments

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07:00: The commenting software was updated last night. Of course, they willy-nilly changed things in a way I don’t like. I know about the color schemes, which are stupid, but I have to dig around to find where to fix them. if anyone has other issues, post them here.

10:30: Setup reCaptcha. That should be working now. The appearance will take some time, as I think I need to edit the CSS itself. I think it should be high contrast, so a white background with heavy black text.

11:00: Okay, I removed the reCaptcha for now. The stock version is terrible. The spam filter should be enough for now.

The Jelly Bean Man

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Imagine one day you are snatched off the streets by a group of men, who throw you into a van and take you to some hideaway. They blindfold you and refuse to tell you why they have snatched you off the streets. At some point you’re drugged and you wake up in a mysterious coastal village. Everything about the village seems normal, except for the fact you are there, a place you have never been. Everyone seems to know you, as if you belong there. Naturally, you are completely disoriented.

Of course, you try to find a way out of the village. After several escape attempts which are thwarted by a giant balloon-like automaton. You realize that the village is not really a village, but a form of prison. It is bounded by the mountains and sea, in addition to various surveillance devices. In between your escape attempts, you are interrogated by the person that seems to be in charge of the place. He keeps asking your questions about your old life, but you cannot figure out what it is he wants.

After a while, the interrogations become conversations and then friendly conversations as you become habituated to your new life. In fact, you have grown to like the talks you have with the man in charge. The villagers are nice, but rather simple and incurious and they are oblivious to their situation. Number One, on the other hand, is fully aware of your situation and quite open about it. It becomes clear that you were not really kidnapped, but recruited in an unusual way to an unusual life.

In time, the man in charge offers you a position in the power structure of the village, as you are feeling quite at home. The village does not use normal money, but instead uses jelly beans. The different colored jelly beans have different values in relation to one another and are used like currency. The villagers carry them around in a sack like gold coin in the old days. The basic unit is the black bean, while the highest denomination is the white bean, which is five-thirds the black bean.

The arrangement works well enough, as the villagers with jobs are paid in jelly beans and those on the dole are paid with jelly beans. Everyone has some source of income, so everyone can use beans for transactions. In fact, it works so well that no one thinks it odd in the least. Even you have grown used to carrying around a sack of jelly beans to make your purchases. Now that you are working for Number One, you too get a fresh sack of beans every payday.

There are some problems. One is people occasionally eat their jelly beans, thus removing them from the economy. Because they are small, they can also be lost if someone drops them. Then there is the fact that they are a bit fragile and can be destroyed if not handled carefully. The result is there is a declining number of beans in the system. It also means certain villagers, who are more prudent, increase their stock of beans relative to everyone else in the village.

Your job with Number One is to figure out how to maintain the stock of beans in the village and keep anyone from hoarding the beans. Then there is the fact that new people show up in the village from time to time, just as you did, and they have to be stocked up with beans. Of course, people do try to run off from time to time and the giant balloon-like automaton will take them out. Your job as Head Keeper of Beans is to figure out how to manage the bean supply in the village.

You got the job because you have a head for numbers, so you first try to count the beans in the village on a regular basis. This proves to be impossible, as the villagers appreciate why you are doing it, but they can’t be bothered. The count is unreliable and you can’t trust it to make decisions about adding or subtracting beans. You then come up with a way to take a sample count and estimate the total from it, but you find that your estimates are lagging indicators. You’re always behind the curve.

After careful consideration, you land upon an idea. You realize that as any bean becomes scarcer, it will become more precious, so villagers will be less inclined to part with their stock of them. It means these beans will move around the village at a slower rate. If you can measure the bean flow on a regular basis, this will be a good measure the total number of beans and the balance of beans. More important, you’ll know in real time if there is a bean imbalance.

You also notice that the people who hoard beans are never the people who eat their beans as a snack. They value their beans more than anyone else in the village, so they are always looking to increase their stash as a good in itself. You figure out that like other types of loss, this is a constant. The solution is to add the hoarding rate to your other measures in order to increase the bean supply. In effect, the number of beans must always increase over the base line bean total.

It has taken a while, but you now have a set of measures you can use to manage the bean supply. Once you see bean flow drop in some area, you put more beans there to stimulate the movement of beans. If you see beans accumulating in one area, you change the mix of beans or add beans in a different part of the village to balance the bean total in the village. You even figure out how to maintain the mix of beans in the system, as the various colors have symbolic value beyond their face value.

Number One is so happy with your work as the head of the bean supply, he slowly increases your portfolio to manage other things related to beans. In fact, you started life in the village as Number Six, but have slowly ascended to the position of Number Two, but both you and Number One realize you’re partners now. He may control the giant balloon-like automaton and other weapons, but your control of the now highly complex bean system makes you an indispensable man.

What really keeps you up at night is not the fact that Number One still controls the giant balloon-like automaton or that you could be transported back to your old life. Sure, there is some possibility he will use his monopoly of force to undermine or even eliminate your position. What haunts you is the thought of the villagers suddenly realizing that their economy is based in candy. What if one day they all wake up and realize their economy is based on a made-up system of fake money?

This is the life of the central banker.

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 Minority State

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Thirty years ago, as the Cold War was ending, the big question for the West was what was going to come next? The great struggle between liberal democracy and communism was over and the clear winner was liberal democracy. The only real question, in terms of politics, was just how quickly the rest of the world embraced what was clearly the only rational politics. The question political theorists will be pondering in the future, is what went horribly wrong with liberal democracy?

There really is no other way to frame things at this point. In 1990, there was a long list of things that no one thought would ever happen in the West. Most of things on that list were things assumed to be common in the Soviet Empire. The police arresting someone for holding the wrong opinion was the symbol of everything that was wrong in the communist system and everything right about liberal democracy. Yet, thirty years on and this is exactly what we see happening all over the West.

This story from Kentucky, of all places, is a good example. Two children and two adults have been arrested for racism. That’s not the specific charge. Instead the state has invented a novel new crime called “harassing communication” which means it is against the law to upset the wrong people with your public utterances. Since there’s not official list of people one must avoid upsetting, the state is free to arrest anyone for their speech on the claim that someone may be upset by it.

At this point, it is tempting to make a comparison to the Stasi or maybe Stalin’s KGB, but that would be a slander against the communists. They were always quite clear about who you could never criticize and what you must never dispute. When Stalin’s boys dragged you from your home, you knew exactly why you were being hauled away by the police. Every man in the gulag knew why he was there. The novelty of liberal democracy is in keeping everyone in the dark about these things.

Another novelty is that in communism, everyone also knew to avoid taking the side of the accused and they knew why to avoid it. That was another thing Westerners would brag about during the Cold War. In America, when someone was bullied by the state, lawyers would volunteer to defend the accused. A common phrase used by Progressive civil and political rights activists back then was “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it.”

It turns out to have been a complete lie. Not only will no one fight to the death to defend speech, the great and the good line up to condemn anyone for speaking out. Where is the ACLU in these cases? Certainly not rushing to defend children against the crime of saying mean things. No, the ACLU is too busy ratting out heretics and blasphemers, who dare question the liberal democratic ideology. In one of life’s great ironies, all of the civil rights groups now work to limit your civil rights.

Notice also how the concept of rights has changed. Thirty years ago, even left-wing political actors accepted the old definition of rights, as limits on the state. Your right to speak out against the government was really a hard limit on the state to police the speech of the citizens. Today, rights are just demands from an increasingly minoritized population for things to which no one can have a right. In this Kentucky case, they demand the community celebrate their mating decisions.

That should be the story here. This family moves to the community and begins making demands on the community. The white mother and her mulatto daughter start harassing the school about the racial complexion of the curriculum. The father demands the teachers change their classrooms to satisfy the demands of his children. This mixed-race family instantly became a cancer on the community, by making an increasingly narrow set of demands in the name of their rights.

This is one of the new realities of liberal democracy. Instead of people fearing the secret police and their many spies, the people fear the civil rights activists and their auxiliary army of novel weirdos. A mixed-race couple of trannies moves into the neighborhood and everyone is gripped with fear. It not only means everyone has to play make-believe with the lunatics, but must live in fear of upsetting them in some way. The agent of terror is the bespoke weirdo and its crazy demands for acceptance.

As an aside, this may explain the popularity of movies and television shows based on Stephen King books. One of his formulas is the nice, quiet small town that is suddenly beset by a demon that exploits the innocence of the locals, often the children. Everything is just right until the monster arrives. Further, the real terror in this formula is that there is no reason behind the demon. It’s just evil for the sake of being evil. That’s what the people in the Kentucky story are experiencing right now.

It is tempting to think that the people will tire of this terrorism by weirdo phenomenon, but the lesson of communism is that people will tolerate pretty much anything in an ideological state. The old rule about people revolting unless they are well fed and entertained turned out to be untrue in the Soviet Empire. The people often lacked the basics and the pleasures of life were highly rationed. Communism was not overthrown by an unhappy people. It just ran out of social capital to burn.

That is the secret sauce of popular government, whether it is some form of communism or some form liberalism. Both rest on the concept of the general will. The ideology of the state and the actions of the state are in the name of the general will. Everything that is done is done in the name of the people, as if fifty percent plus one is a god that must always be pleased. People will revolt against a king or despot. They will revolt against an aristocracy. People will not revolt against themselves.

That really is the paradox of liberal democracy. In the name of the people, the will of the people must be thwarted in the name of minority interests. We saw this with homosexual marriage. The champions swore they were fighting for the people, even when the people kept rejecting these proposals. It is why increasingly narrow minority groups are so popular with the ruling elite. If they can find just one weirdo to champion, they have a license to do as they please.

This fetishization of obscure minorities is leading inevitably to the West being dominated by minorities to the point where there is no majority. America will be non-white in two decades and Europe will be swamped with Africans by mid-century. Not only is there no effort to prevent this, all efforts are made to accelerate it. Paradoxically, the end point of majority rule is minority rule. Mature liberal democracy is a collection of minority groups demanding stuff from the state, like children at a candy store.

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 Creedal Insult

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One of the side effects of the bizarre creedal nation theology is that what claims to create unanimity ends up creating friction and hostility. The most obvious and predictable way it does this is the debate over the creed itself. What it means to be an American, for example, will change over time under normal circumstances. Attitudes change, circumstances change, the culture evolves, so inevitably what defines the people will change with it. Everything evolves over time.

Not everything evolves at the same rate, so that definition of the unifying creed quickly becomes many versions of the creed. In a liberal democracy, where radicals are encouraged to dream up novel new social fads, this quickly gets out of hand. We now live in a land where the “unifying creed” of the people in Pennsylvania includes making a mentally unstable Jewish man the head of their public health. In a creedal nation, everyone is encouraged to have their own reality.

There may be a bigger problem with the liberal democratic notion that a nation just needs a unifying set of principles. That is, the implementation of that system cheapens it and eventually mocks it. The simplest way to think of it is this. If everyone can easily become an American, then being an America is not all that special. After all, what makes Harvard the most prestigious college on earth, aside from the human sacrifices and satanic rituals, is that it is difficult to gain admittance.

Liberal democracy flips this on its head and claims that something that is easy to attain is somehow special and unique. If Pablo can just float on over in his inner tube and become an American, then what’s the point of being an American? There is none and we see that in current year America. In fact, citizenship is now a burden. The McMichael case in Georgia is an obvious example. Following the law and being a good citizen is for suckers. It’s why people are abandoning their citizenship.

Putting aside the material aspects of the creedal nation theology, there is another aspect that makes it a lethal poison for a human society. People are tribal, having a natural affinity for their kind. Despite the massive agitation efforts to deny this reality, it remains a reality nonetheless. For example, real estate brokers will now be mentioning the local jogger scene, or lack thereof, when showing houses. The reason is we all know the correlation between joggers and quality of life.

No one wants to think their tribe is a bunch of losers. Another aspect of our tribal nature is to think our tribe has some unique quality that is unique to us. Those stereotypes did not spring from nothing. Blacks think they invented basketball, because they dominate the sport at every level. Italians assume they have a superior sense of style. The French think they are the intellectual masters of the West. Every tribe has cultural items they believe to be unique to them.

This is where the creedal nation theology creates conflict. This piece in Counter-Currents on great Jewish violinists makes the point that Jews dominate the list of great violin players. If Jews had invented the violin or invented the music best performed with the instrument, it would be a great cultural achievement of their people. Instead, it is outsiders mastering the cultural achievements of others. It’s no different than a group of genetically engineered Asians dominating basketball.

That is the unintended insult. The musician that masters the instruments and music of another people to the point where he is superior to their best is committing a great insult to those people. It is a demonstration that their cultural achievements are so little that an outsider can master them better than the natives. This does not necessarily have to be intentional. The virtuoso could sincerely love the instrument or music he is mastering, but the result is still the same.

This is most obvious in popular culture. Movie makers inserting Africans, for example, into movies about the middle ages has become a running joke on-line, because it has become so common. The zeal to prove that people don’t matter has the rulers of popular culture feverishly rewriting popular history to include everyone. The result is the past, our past, is no longer our past. Even if the intent is to be “inclusive” of the new Americans, the result is an insult to white people.

Guarding the culture from outsiders is the natural response to efforts at cultural appropriation, something we see on the college campus. If the kids want to have a party on Cinco de Mayo, they better not wear culturally appropriate costumes. Even if the kids make every effort to avoid mockery or snark, it is still forbidden. The guardians of political correctness will have none of that, as to appropriate the symbols and images of another culture is assumed to be an insult.

Jews, of course, are the most ethnocentric people on earth. They have survived as a guest people for thousands of years. One reason for that is they guard their culture, forbidding outsiders to access it. For example, teaching the Torah to non-Jews is forbidden, unless it is part of a conversion, which is not encouraged. In Israel, religious Jews send their kids to separate schools to avoid being mixed in with Arabs, but also to provide their children with training in their culture.

Even in modern America, where Jews operate at the top of society and dominate the popular culture, few non-Jews know much about Jews or Judaism. Part of it is genuine fear of being called a blasphemer, but a big part of it is that Jews are not all that forthcoming about what goes on inside their culture. By guarding large swaths of their culture and not permitting outsiders to imitate it in anyway, Jews have been able to preserve themselves as distinct people.

The creedal nation theology is the exact opposite of what has worked for Jews and other people. Instead of preserving and protecting the culture of the people, it cheapens it and commodifies it. To be an American, for example, now means occupying some space in North America and having a Netflix account and the newest iPhone. The solution in which a people are naturally suspended dissipated and we are left with a collection of strangers agreeing only on our insults.

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Springtime For Joggers

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Thanks to the relentless anti-white animus, America and the world now has a new colorful euphemism for a certain element of society. The word “jogger” is now the preferred word of choice to describe the young black male creeping around in the neighborhood, looking for trouble. Over the weekend, the funnymen and meme makers had fun with the story of Ahmaud Arbery, the black male shot and killed by two white men in Georgia during a confrontation.

The “jogger” phenomenon is interesting, because it suggests white people in America have turned a critical corner. When this well-orchestrated media campaign was unleashed last week, the first reaction by most whites was to assume it was yet another hoax to libel white people. Instead of the public acts of piety, whites took to social media to laugh at the absurdity of the case. The first instinct was to call it Trayvon Martin 2.0 and mock the ham-fisted propaganda campaign.

Now, not all white people reacted this way. Some older white people in the northeast, conditioned to hate white people from the South, fell for the hype, but they were quickly brought around by others. A lifetime of being told you are a good white, even after you realize you are not, is hard to ignore. Of course, there were plenty of “fellow whites” on social media working their usual scams. Then there were the professional grovelers, who are whites paid to amplify anti-white propaganda.

The most amusing of the bunch was a soy-faced sad-sack calling himself Matt Walsh, who unironically works for Ben Shapiro. In response to new video showing Ahmaud Arbery prowling through unattended building sites in the neighborhood just prior to the confrontation, he made the laughable claim that it is perfectly normal to wander through unattended building sites. In fact, it is one of his favorite pastimes! He went so far as to say that men do this all the time. It’s a “guy thing.”

Within minutes every soft-handed, anti-white bigot was echoing the claim on social media, claiming they spend their free time prowling around work sites. Like the jogger claim, this was met with a deluge of mockery. Maybe if Mr. Walsh was not a prissy little pansy, he could have got away with it, but the image of that guy walking around a building site was too much for most people. The army of sissies that came forth to echo his claims made the whole thing easy to lampoon.

Unremarked thus far is just how quickly this crew came up with this ridiculous rationalization in support of the narrative. Certain people will claim they received instructions from the usual suspects, but in reality, it was as natural a response as pulling away from a hot stove. These organ grinder’s monkeys for the anti-white rage heads in charge of America are so thoroughly conditioned, rationalizing the blood libel is as natural to them as breathing or blinking.

In this time of government-imposed misery, it was a nice bit of fun. The fact that the propagandists have had to retreat from the story is the real story. Unlike prior hoaxes, this one appears to have crashed into a new wall of white skepticism. The police have arrested the two men involved, but the lynch mob that was expected to pressure the authorities into railroading these two men has suddenly gone quiet. All of a sudden, white people are pushing back against the Jim Snow laws.

Of course, the story was greatly enhanced by the fact that as the blood libel machine was cranking up, a black was literally hunting white people in a Delaware veterans cemetery, killing an elderly couple. A jogger named Sheldon C. Francis executed an 80-year old couple as they honored their ancestors. It was a stark reminder that while the Ahmaud Arbery story is entirely fake, the jogger threat is real. White people in America have spent generations trying to avoid joggers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but generations of white people have had to pay the tax, the jogger tax, for sins they never committed and in fact, we never committed. Baltimore would go from Lagos on the Chesapeake to Hong Kong on the Chesapeake if the local joggers all decamped to another land. If not for the jogger phenomenon, alarm companies would go out of business and cars would have normal keys again. Everyone knows this. The jogger tax is the cost of being white.

Another nuance to this is that there has not been much outrage from whites about yet another libel against white people. Instead, it seems as if whites, at least with regards to joggers, have moved past outrage onto mockery. The usual suspects can manipulate the righteous anger of the victims to their ends, but they are powerless to do much in the face of mockery. Odious carbuncles like Matt Walsh will continue to put on their self-righteous face, but it just makes the mockery more powerful.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the race problem. Blacks still think OJ Simpson was innocent, they think Trayvon was executed and they think Michael Brown was the victim of police abuse. They think the father and son at the center of this jogger hoax hunted and killed Ahmaud Arbery. They are absolute sure gangs of whites roam the countryside hunting innocent black bodies. They are sure everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist for supporting the racist-in-chief.

Similarly, the usual suspects share most of these beliefs. Two standard deviations to the right of blacks are a class of people whose identity is rooted in the blood libel against white America. Matt Walsh did not rush forth to condemn white people because he is being paid by Ben Shapiro. David French and his goofy old lady did not kidnap an African child as a trophy for career advancement. These self-loathing whites are not just paid flaks for the orthodoxy. This is who they are now.

This means there is no reconciliation possible between the self-loathing whites, American blacks and the rest of white America. No amount of mockery will dampen the enthusiasm for these hoaxes and libels. No matter how many are revealed to be fake and no matter how many joggers roam white neighborhood looking for victims, the people behind this latest hoax will keep at it. Who they are depends on it. Like the oxpecker, they exist to live off the rest of us.

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 Ruling System

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There are a variety of ways to hold power. Some are better than others and over the history of man everyone one has been tried with varying degrees of success. By far the most effective way of maintaining power is to get those over whom you hold power to think their interests lie in you remaining in power. If you can get your subjects to think that their very survival depends upon you remaining their ruler, not only will they obey your orders, but they will volunteer to defend your position.

Of course, convincing even a majority of this can be expensive and difficult, so a better way to work this is to convince the people at the top. Every society is hierarchical, so if you get the ruling class to think their interests are your interests, then your interests become their interests. Not only will they defend your position, but they will seek to strengthen it when they can, as it benefits them. With everyone’s interest commingled, opposing the king means threatening the system itself.

The best example of this is probably the court at Versailles under Louis XIV. He not only brought the nobility of France under one roof; he created a social milieu for them that transcended their existence. To be a noble meant having a place at court. Your position in the ruling class was defined by your position and status in court. The aristocracy of France, in effect, became a society in itself, isolated from and distinct from the people over whom it ruled. It was a society atop a society.

If you examine the run-up to the French Revolution, it is clear that the system that evolved to that point had overtaken the people in charge of it. It was clear to most everyone that reform was needed. The finances of the king were a disaster and the nobility were being overtaken by changes in technology and economics. Yet, all reform efforts failed as reform was a threat to the nature of the system. Like a sentient being, the system conspired to thwart all reform efforts.

A similar problem vexed the Soviet Empire. The long terrifying reign of Stalin triggered an evolution in the system. Instead of one man ruling with an iron fist, a collection of men at the top of the party would hold power. The man at the top would depend on the party for power and legitimacy, while members would depend on the party for their power within the system. It’s what allowed Khrushchev to outmaneuver Malenkov, but also what led to the fall of Khrushchev and the reversal of his reforms.

One very interesting thing about the Soviet system that evolved after the revolution is how the party became a social organ, rather than a technocratic one. To rise in the party meant to rise in the narrow communist society that ruled over the larger empire, much in the same way the French aristocracy ruled over France. To be outside the party was to be no one. That threat alone was enough for most party members to wake up every morning thinking about how best to serve the party.

The social aspect cannot be overstated. Like Versailles, party members lived among one another and socialized with one another. Their children went to the same schools and eventually married one another. In the case of the Moscow elite, they lived in the same building. The ruling elite was not just a separate class of people, but a separate and distinct society. If it had carried on for long enough, the communist party would have been a separate race of people.

We see the same thing has evolved in the American Empire. If you take time to read up on the Flynn case or the much larger plot around it, you see a large cast of people with one thing in common. They all live together as a social class. Some were having sex with one another. Others had been friends since college. Others developed their relationships when they came to Washington. All of these social relationships transcend the formal positions and titles of the people.

For example, one thing the plotters liked to do is plant stories in the community paper, the Washington Post, which they would then use as evidence of something needing official investigation. This was possible because the people in the FBI had old friends at the Post, who they could grab a bite with and pass on the information. The “reporter” was happy to oblige, because he had the same interests as the FBI man. They were friends indebted to the same system that made their lives possible.

Throughout the scandal, you see people happily going along with what they know is against the rules, possibly even illegal, because they just assume it is the right thing to do for the system. The righteous indignation from these people when questioned is not an act for the cameras. These are products of a social world that defines who they are as people. They see their actions as a defense of a system that makes it possible for them to exist. They think they are heroes.

In a way, they are heroes. The very core of western civilization is the Greek notion of the citizen, as a man defined by his relationship in his polis. In his final hours, Socrates explains to his old friend Crito that he must accept his fate, as to do otherwise would make him an enemy of that which defines him. To flee Athens and escape death would make him an enemy of the law. That would make him an enemy of Athens, and thus no longer part of it and no longer Socrates.

Now, none of the people in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election are Socrates or even capable of pronouncing his name. That’s not the point. It’s that they see themselves as members of a community. That membership not only provides for their material existence, it defines who they are as people. To defend it from a threat, even a duly elected threat, is to defend who they are as people. Even the slightest change in the system, no matter how necessary, threatens their existence.

This is why Trump has run into a stone wall as president. The entirety of the system, like a living organism fighting for its life, has organized itself against him. His failure to grasp this reality has made him entirely ineffective. It’s also why the investigation into the scandals will go nowhere. The system cannot testify against itself. It’s also why the Clintons were protected for so long. Once they were assimilated, they were another node in the system to be defended at all cost.

The lesson from the French Revolution is that once a ruling class becomes a ruling community, reform is no longer possible. The only way to change the system is to decapitate it. The lesson of the Soviet system is that technology can perpetuate the community until it exhausts itself. That is what happened with the Russians. The party eventually was overrun with people willing to ride in the wagon, but desperately short on men capable of pulling the wagon.

How the American system will end is anyone’s guess, but it will not carry on forever, as no organism lives forever. The low quality of the people involved in the FBI shenanigans suggests they are reaching the same point as the Soviets in the 1980’s. No matter how cleverly designed, a system needs capable operators. If John Brennan and James Comey are the elite, the community has a serious inbreeding problem. Still, the fact that it staggers on despite this speaks to the power of societal inertia.

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 Negative Mind

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For a very long time, the radical conception of politics was the struggle between the radicals advancing society forward and reactionaries trying to block the way. In this formulation, the radicals push for reform and the reactionaries concoct an argument against it and the resulting struggle advances society forward. The result is imperfect, so the ideal solution from the radical perspective is to eliminate the reactionaries, who stand in the way of the project and the path of human destiny.

Strangely, the modern Right has also embraced this view. This was not always so, but the conservatism that evolved in the 20th century fully embraced its role as the dancing partner of radicalism. Bill Buckley made this clear when he said, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Note also the need do the yelling when others are not inclined to do any yelling.

Superficially, this was an effort to own the insult, a pose to signal indifference to the self-righteousness of the radicals. There’s a bit of self-dealing there, as it assumes a bravery on the part of conservatives that has never been observed in the field. At the core, however, is the acknowledgment that conservatism as Buckley and others imagined it in the 20th century could not exist without radicalism. Conservatism was just one prop on a set that was built to feature the radical agenda.

Of course, this is an entirely negative identity. There is no internal mechanism to define Buckley-style conservatism. In isolation, it is like a pathogen looking for a host. It can only be kept alive through artificial means. This reality means that Buckley-style conservatism could never defeat the radicals, as to do so would be to sign their own death certificate. In time, this evolved into a sort of battered wife syndrome, where they needed the radicals to win every fight in order to feel alive.

The thing is, the radicals were not entirely self-determined. If we assume the birth of radicalism was the French Revolution, what defined it at its conception was an opposition to the established order. Radicals opposed tradition and order, seeing those as superstitions and cowardice. The way forward was to abandon those things in pursuit of human destiny, so naturally the radical must always be opposed to convention and orthodoxy. The radical was born to be in opposition.

In the 20th century, as liberal democracy became the norm in the Anglosphere and the nations under its dominion, radicalism blossomed into its own negative identity. To be on the Left meant opposing normalcy. Whatever normal people were doing, the radicals had to oppose and try to wreck it. This is explicit today in the grievance studies rackets, where they endlessly go on about disrupting and overturning what they imagine to be their oppressors. It’s all about opposition to normal human relations.

Modern politics is a dynamic between two co-dependent worldviews that must oppose one other to exist. This dynamic between two entirely negative identities has come to define modern liberal democracy. The radicals search around for things they must oppose and the conservative are constantly examining the radicals for what it is they plan to oppose. Once some novelty is discovered, both sides feverishly engage in well-established dance that always ends in the same place.

Take, for example, the issue with Joe Biden. He has a long reputation for being a guy who gropes women, often in public. He seems to get off on it. He’s not a rapist or a sexual predator. He’s just a weirdo who likes to grope women. According to the current sensibilities of the Left, he should be torn to pieces and fed to the dogs. After all, women have come forward with specific complaints and his behavior. In the Kavanaugh hearings, they said we must believe all women.

Of course, the Left is not all that interested in this. The conservatives are up in arms at the alleged hypocrisy. How can they support the absurd claims about Kavanaugh, while ignoring the quite believable claims about Biden? Predictably, the conservatives are putting on their outrage faces and doing the self-righteous indignation act. Soon, they will be outraged that the Left is not shamed by their own hypocrisy. That’s always the next phase of these political dramas.

The thing is, the Left is not indifferent or ignorant to the obvious hypocrisy. They are energized by it. Seeing the conservative apoplexy is what makes them feel alive, because it means they have disrupted and subverted the status quo. Who they are, what makes them what they are, is entirely dependent on the outrage and anger of the people they oppose. When the conservatives put on their angry face and appear to be confused, the radicals have become self-actualized.

What may have happened over the generations is liberal hypocrisy has evolved into a form of caudal luring. The radicals naturally embrace hypocrisy as it lures in the conservative, causing them to act in a way that validates the radicals. Unlike a snake or shark that uses its tail to lure prey, the radicals are not hoping to destroy their opponent, but rather they are sustaining themselves. As an entirely negative identity, they need the outraged conservatives in order exist.

This dynamic between two co-dependent negative identities that has come to dominate liberal democracy may be at the root of the crisis in the West. With no positive vision of the future and the endless struggle between two political forces with no natural reason to exist, nihilism becomes the default. At some level, both sides feel the despair that must come from knowing the pointlessness of their existence. The result is a manic quest to plumb the depth of cultural despair.

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!