Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Our Emmanuel Goldstein

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One of the best observations Orwell had about totalitarian society is had to have an opponent, against which everyone must rally. It was not just a practical opponent, like another country. The forever bad guy had to have a spiritual dimension. In opposing the bad guy, the members of the society established their commitment to the cause and thus their standing in society. Emmanuel Goldstein in the Novel 1984 and Snowball in the novella Animal Farm are his famous examples.

Of course, modern totalitarian states are almost always the result of some mass movement that swept to power. Their ascent was either based on their promise to reform or their ability to demolish the prevailing order. Eric Hoffer noted that “mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” The bogeymen in the Orwell novels were such devils. They were the center of the moral universe for the totalitarian society.

The important part of this bogeyman role is that the bad guy cannot simply be a man with whom you can reason or even conquer. The bad guy has to have supernatural abilities and maybe be unconquerable. In the 1984, Emmanuel Goldstein is powerful enough to cause all of the regimes troubles and smart enough to avoid getting caught by the party. The value of the supernatural enemy is that they can never truly be defeated, so they are a convenient scapegoat.

This is something to keep in mind with the bizarre obsession the ruling class has with Russian meddling. Like The Brotherhood in 1984, the concept of Russian election meddling was a fabrication by the inner party of America. Initially it was just part of the widespread seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. It was the excuse to explain the criminal shenanigans. The media was tasked with spreading the concept and it became a part of the collective reality by the time Trump was in office.

Despite the fact that no one has every provided actual evidence the Russians or anyone other than the Israelis and Saudis have interfered in our elections, the Russian meddling meme persists. The Left is captivated by it. So much so the inner party feels they must persist in the charade. This story is a great example. In order to keep the true believers excited, the FBI squanders money in phony investigations into Russian election meddling. They would be better served hunting UFO’s.

Russia has become the Emmanuel Goldstein of current year America. Whenever things go wrong for the inner party, they blame Russia. If that’s not practical, they shift the focus to Russian in some other way. Maybe it is Russian meddling in the Middle East or South America. When a party member is struggling, as we see with Biden, then it must be the work of those evil Russians. You can be sure that is trump wins in 2020, we will get another round of “Russian hacking” allegations.

As with the Orwell figures, the Russian conspiracy stuff is not just about the practical things vexing the party. There is a moral dimension to it. “You are a Putin defender” has become one of the worst things a true believer can say to someone. Whenever the party member or even just a true believer is confronted with disconfirming facts, they instinctively suspect the person confronting them is allied with Russia. Just put the phrase “Tucker Carlson Russia” into Google.

This behavior would suggest we are in a soft version of the totalitarian states described by Orwell in the last century. There’s plenty of evidence to support that claim, but the lack of organization by the inner party suggests another possible explanation. That is, the inner party of the true believers operate like a school of fish. When one fish responds to something, the other fish respond. The beautiful ballet of the school of fish or flock of birds looks like design, but it is pure instinct.

The thing that holds the ruling class together is a shared morality that not only defines them, but gives purpose to their lives. The Judeo-Puritan morality of the American ruling class runs on shared believe, not central coordination. The Judeo side cannot not stop obsessing over their ancestral homelands in the Pale of Settlement. All of those old grudges remain fresh. The Puritan side is always in a life and death battle with Old Scratch, the forever tempter of the righteous.

Put the two together and the evolving those of the inner party has turned a relatively backward country between Europe and Asia into the great villain. It give purpose to their lives and justifies their actions. Whatever Russian does, they must oppose, but whatever they oppose, they assume Russia supports. This asynchronous relationship between themselves and the devil is the center of their moral universe. Literally, who they are is the opposition to Russian meddling.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

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!

Digital Grifters

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Like most slang terms, no one is entirely sure how the word “grifter” came into common usage, but it has been fairly common since the start of the last century. Researchers claim it was carnival slang that crossed over into common usage in the late 19th century and early 20th century. It was possibly a corruption of the word “graft”, another slang term that loosely meant financial crime. Either way, a look at Google Ngram shows it took off in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

One interesting fact about that graph is the usage of the word seems to track with the rise and fall of social trust. In the run up to World War Two, social trust began to decline for a number of reasons. One big one was the financial collapse and the subsequent economic depression in the 1930’s. The fact that the word is increasingly common today, starting in the 1980’s with the digital revolution, suggests a correlation. People are more exposed to corruption now than 30 years ago.

Putting that aside, the microprocessor revolution has changed many things in our culture, one of which is the nature of the confidence man. Before the internet, running a con was an intimate affair. The con man had to personally interact with the mark in order to earn his trust. That meant the con man had to be able to read people and control his own emotions and body language. He also had to understand his mark, so he could say and do things that played on the mark’s vanity.

The life of the analog con man was a dangerous one. Having to operate in close proximity with the mark meant physical risk. If the mark got wise, it could mean a beating or maybe worse. The analog con man therefore had to be highly skilled, but also possess some courage. Often, he was operating in a world with other criminals, maybe even targeting criminals. One mistake, knocking on the wrong door or targeting the wrong old lady, could mean physical harm.

That’s the first thing that has changed about grifting in the digital age. The con man can operate from a great distance, often in anonymity. He can put up a false website that lures people in, based on certain known characteristics. Alternatively, he can create a false persona on-line that ticks the boxes needed to appeal to a class of people the con man is targeting. The confidence game and marketing are often indistinguishable from one another on-line. It’s easier to be a con man now.

Unlike the analog con man, the digital con man no longer has to possess the personal skills to work a mark or a group of marks. They also have a much lower risk of being caught and they don’t have to worry about physical harm. The result is a lower barrier to entry, which means many more con men. In the depression of the 1930’s, money was scarcer so people were more aware of swindlers. Today, the number of swindlers is much higher, so the word “grifter” is more common.

Another difference between the analog and digital grifter is the former operated on a small scale. He had to work a small number of marks at any one time. The latter can work in volume. In fact, the digital con game works better when scaled up as it can then rely on social proof to draw in suckers. While analog grifting was a retail operation, often a bespoke business, the digital con man works wholesale. He skims a little from many people, who often do not notice the con.

One main way the digital grifter works is through front running. They find a fad that is building up steam on-line and rush to the front of it. This helps them get attention from the sorts of people who get caught up in fads. These are people that like being led and need social proof. Once the con establishes himself as a prominent person in the fad, he either asks for support or has something to sell. Think about all the Tea Party sites that offered merchandise ten years ago.

A great example of this is Mike Cernovich. He has jumped from one fad to the next, almost exclusively operating on Twitter. He jumped from fad to fad on-line until he struck pay dirt with his goofy self-help book. He then re-titled it for the Trump era and became a leader of the MAGA cult on-line. When Trump got into office, he then started claiming to be a White House insider. His front-running of Trump allowed him to move a lot of merchandise and establish his brand.

That’s the other aspect of the digital grift. In addition to front running, the digital grifter is always looking to free ride. They look for a movement or fad forming up on-line and then come in with something to sell. It may be a book targeted at the vanity of the people in the movement. E-books are a popular item, because they are cheap to produce and don’t require a lot of work. Video is another, as it can monetize the front-running aspect with just the cost of a webcam.

The real pros in this segment were on display when it looked like Trump was contemplating war with Iran. The cable chat shows were littered with people ready to sell a book on their alleged inside knowledge of Trump, the war planning or the Iranian regime. The same people who peddled books for or against Trump three years ago were going to selling war books. Cable news was a grifter’s ball for a few nights, until Trump pulled the plug on the ear machine.

One similarity between the analog and digital grifter is that the mark builds what he thinks is a strong personal bond with the con man. In an atomized world of deracinated bugmen, there are tens of millions of people willing to follow a guy on-line. Just as lonely old shut-ins were easy marks for the analog grifter, the intensely on-line, who lack the normal personal connections in the physical world, are easy targets for the digital confidence man.

The low barrier to entry means we are Carny Town. The question that remains unanswered is that of cause and effect. Is the proliferation of con men on-line driving down social trust? Is the decline in social trust opening the flood gates for the con men to pour into our lives? Another possibility is that both are driven by the breakdown of white community. A world of atomized strangers is a fertile hunting ground for sociopaths, serial killers and confidence men.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

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 Compound Eye

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Compound eyes, common with insects and crustaceans, are made up of thousands of individual visual receptors, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is a fully functioning eye in itself. The insect’s “eye” is thousands of ommatidium that together create a broad field of vision. Every ommatidium has its own nerve fiber connecting to the optic nerve, which relays information to the brain. The brain then processes these inputs to create a three-dimensional understanding the surrounding space.

The compound eye is a good way to imagine how the surveillance state will keep tabs on the subjects in the near future. Unlike the dystopian future imagined by science fiction, it will not be one eye focusing on one heretic, following him around as he goes about his business. Instead it will be tens of millions of eyes obtaining various bits of information, sending it back to the data-centers run by Big Tech. That information will be assembled into the broad mosaic that is daily life.

For example, rather than use informants and undercover operatives to flesh out conspiracies against the state, the surveillance state will use community detection to model the network of heretics. Since everyone is hooked into the grid in some fashion and everyone addresses nodes of the grid on a regular basis, keeping track of someone is now something that can be done from a cubicle. There is no need to actually follow someone around as they go about their life.

For example, everyone has a mobile phone. At every point, the phone is tracking its location, which means it is tracking your location. It also knows the time and day when you go into various businesses. Most people use cards to pay miscellaneous items, so just that information would tell the curious a lot about you. Combine that information with the same information from other phones that come into close proximity with your phone and figuring out the community structure is simple.

Of course, the mobile phone is not the only input device. Over Christmas, millions of Americans were encouraged to install surveillance devices in their homes by friends and family. Maybe it was an Alexa listening device from Amazon or a Nest Doorbell surveillance device from Google. All of these gadgets are collecting data on your life inside and around your home. It is then fed to the same data-centers that have all of your movements and associations collected from your phone.

That’s an enormous amount information about the lives of the subjects, but that’s just the start of what they are collecting. Everything about property and property ownership is now kept in those same systems. Tax and earnings information are now shared with the new technological overlords. We know this because Raj Chetty told us so. He gained access to everyone’s tax information from the IRS. Since Big Tech provides the infrastructure to all government operations, they have their data too.

It turns out that the future will not be one big eye searching about for a heretic on which to focus or even thousands of such eyes. Instead, it will be tens of millions of eyes, collecting data, filtering it through a specific lens, and passing it onto massive data-centers controlled by Big Tech. It is there where the focus will narrow, looking for patterns, modeling communities and searching for any anomalies that could indicate unacceptable behavior. Big Brother will be an Indian in a cubicle.

The human eye is attached to muscles that allow it to move, expanding the field of vision and narrow in on specific items of interest. The compound eye is fixed and therefore cannot focus on a single item. It also results in nearsightedness. It is, however, exceptional at detecting motion. The mosaic of infinitesimally small images lets the insect notice the smallest movement around it. This is why flies, for example, are so good at anticipating your effort to swat them.

Big Tech’s compound eye will be similar. It will be adept at tracking movement and capturing data about the environment, but it will not be very good at focusing in on one individual or even a group of individuals. That’s where the brain takes over to interpret the data, looking for the sorts of movement that could present danger. As with insects, the compound eye has evolved for defensive purpose. Hunters need focus, prey need a broad field of vision and pattern matching.

We are seeing the precursors of what will be special teams of agents charged with focusing in on potential trouble. Those “Trust & Safety” squads on social media are the early attempts at this. Algos were created to look for patterns and movement that would then warrant further review. The “focus teams” then look more carefully at individuals inside an identified community. This is how a heretic gets banned from Twitter despite not using the system very much. He was part of an identified community.

In the future, these “Trust & Safety” teams will be dispatched into the real world to infiltrate suspected communities, disrupt social bonding within dissident communities that are forming up and, of course, neutralize genuine threats. That last part is always what the dystopians focus on, but that will be an exceedingly rare occurrence as we move into the custodial state. Technological advance will also bring with it new ways to influence behavior in a myriad of small ways.

Alongside those millions of eyes collecting data will be other nodes that nudge people in the right direction through the power of suggestion, social proof and social bonding. The Chinese social credit system is a crude example of what is to come. A much more subtle version will rely on social influencers, who will be rewarded for encouraging positive behaviors. Social proof and fear of ostracism will confirm the tendency to accept what comes from prominent influencers.

This is already happening in a crude way on social media platforms. They promote those with the right opinions and demote those with the wrong opinions. Since active users seek an audience, inevitably they act in such a way that gets them promoted by the algos running these sites. It is why review sites have abandoned real user reviews in favor of robots. It is a lot easier to push a movie on a movie review site if the “viewer reviews” are actually robots run by the site.

That’s the future that awaits us in the custodial state. It is living under the watchful compound eye that is feeding all of our data into massive data-centers controlled by private companies. Since information is the ultimate currency and controlling the currency makes you sovereign, the official state will simply become another node on the network run by the Big Tech. There will be no recourse. Any effort to revolt will be detected by the compound eye before it gets started.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

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

The Great Dilution

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The inner workings of a society’s ruling elite are always opaque to the people of the society, mostly because the elite fear the people. They think if their true thoughts were ever made public, the people would turn on them. This is mostly true throughout history, but it has become especially true in the age of democracy. One of the features of democracy is that the people elect representatives, who secretly hate them, but are very good at keeping that from becoming obvious.

Still, people in modern democracies can get a sense of what the rulers think about them and what they are planning. The modern mass media, which is just the marketing department for the managerial elite, is the best source. The ads and programs on television reveal a lot about the elites. The fetish for miscegenation, for example, tells us things about the ruling class they would otherwise deny. The same can be said for the proliferation of homosexuals in the media.

One take away from the miscegenation fetish on television is that the elites imagine a future in which there are no races. This turns up in movies about the future, where everyone is a mulatto. It’s often assumed that the elites are lying when they chant about the horrors of racism, but in reality, anti-racism is a religion for them. They really do believe this stuff, even if they have no interest in race mixing themselves. They truly think a world without races will be a world without racism.

Of course, it is not just a dream for them. They are actively promoting it and it is not just about wish fulfillment. In the book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, by Eric Kaufmann, the author not only predicts a great mixing of the races due to migration, but he lays out ideas on how to achieve it without white people catching onto the scheme. There’s that sense that the gray future planned by his kind is more about vengeance than natural reality.

The miscegenation fetish in the mass media is, of course, mostly about advocacy and it does have an impact on public thinking. It’s just not in the way the elite opinion makers think it works. For example, the proliferation of homosexuals has not made people more accepting of homosexuals. It has just made people more aware of them. In fact, people are so aware of the gays, they think their numbers are vastly higher, at least in terms of percentages, than is reality. Everyone sees gay people now.

Something similar is at work with miscegenation in the media. Almost all ads now have mixed race people in them. It’s becoming so common; the ad makers now seem to be in a race to come up with the least likely combination. One ad for an insurance firm matched a Jewish man with an aboriginal from Australia in an American city. You have a better chance of being struck by lightning as you cash in your winning lottery ticket than ever seeing such a combination in North America.

The result of this is Americans think miscegenation is much more common than the numbers or biology support. People have become tuned to seeing mixed race couple, so they remember it more than the millions of normal couples. At about the forty-five minute mark of this video, Ed Dutton and Michael Woodley go into the reality of inter-racial mating. They also address the data Eric Kaufmann incorrectly uses in his argument in favor of breeding away white people.

The short version for those unwilling to watch a video on the subject is that humans are naturally disinclined to miscegenation. One reason for this is we are naturally attracted to people who look like us. The point of mating is reproduction and the point of reproduction is to pass on a copy of your genes to the next generation. The more similar the mate, the more likely you both have shared genetics. That means the greater the odds of your DNA making it to the next round.

Now, there are more mixed-race couples today, for sure, but they are less stable and produce fewer off-spring than normal pairings. Part of it is cultural, for sure. The reason people race mix is they see it celebrated in popular culture, so they seek status by finding a mate outside their race. This is particularly true of women. The trouble is biology gets in the way. These arrangements don’t last long and they don’t produce many off-spring. Rushton studied this two decades ago.

Like so many things regarding the mixing of the races, genetic distance seems to be the root of the dilemma. The greater the genetic distance between people, the lower the sexual attraction between them. It is why elite media prefers black women with white features over the typical looking black women. A black woman who just looks like a very tan white woman will appeal to white males. That’s not reality though, so that genetic distance problem will be a brake on miscegenation.

There’s also the reality of cultural status. The ruling class is the least likely to engage in miscegenation. They are the least likely to enjoy the benefits of diversity. The ruling elite live like white nationalists. Their neighborhoods look like the typical white suburb of the early 1960’s. They send their pure white children to private schools with other pure white children. Sure, they have some diversity on the school sports team, but those highly selected non-whites are for decoration only.

Everyone else notices this. In one of his most amusing and informative videos, Ed Dutton explains how status works in this regard. The top-tier women in every society will seek high status males. If they can find males outside their group, that have higher status than the males in their group, they will be open to them. Similarly, males who can better deal themselves by looking outside for a mate will do the same thing. It’s why white guys like East Asian women these days.

In America, it means the better white women will seek out high status white males or Jewish males, not black guys on the basketball team. Middle of the road white guys will go shopping for Asians, if they cannot find a white woman of equal quality. Race mixing will be mostly bottom tier white women, who are repulsive to even the lowest status white male. This is, in fact, what we see today. Miscegenation is far more common in the underclass than anywhere else.

The great dilution will mostly fail. There will be a Brazilian-style mulatto class, but it will be mostly a novelty. On the other hand, that genetic distance issue will remain a factor. The multicultural future will mean people with a great genetic distance thrown in together. Instead of the great dilution favored by people like Eric Kaufmann, society will become less stable and conflict will increase. Genetic distance not only thwarts miscegenation, it thwarts peaceful coexistence.

Note: Some have asked why comments end up in moderation. This is the doings of the spam filter I’m using. It is often triggered by epithets, certain links and mysterious word combinations. These messages get flagged as possible spam. Now, in half a dozen years it has blocked over 3.5 million spam messages, so it is trade-off I accept. It means I check the moderation queue once an hour or so. I approve the real comments and trash the spam. Otherwise, there is no moderation.

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!

Open And Closed

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Communities, by definition are closed. The reason for that is a community is a group of similar people with reciprocal responsibilities and duties. If you are outside of that community, it means you are not like the people inside and you do not share their duties and responsibilities. In order to gain entry to the community, you therefore must be invited into it by the people inside it. The community has the sole right to add new members, so the very definition of a community means it is closed.

Think of it this way. Imagine a community organized around a hobby like collecting and admiring something, a pop culture item maybe. Each individual, in pursuing his interest in the hobby runs into others with the same interest. They begin to form social bonds like shared experiences and shared relationships with others, who they have met while pursuing their hobby. They eventually begin to socialize in more formal settings like swap meets and collectors’ conventions.

What all of these people have in common is an interest in the subject matter, but what makes them a community is they have developed a shared interest in enjoying the hobby together. It is these social connections around their shared interest that makes them a community. In other words, what makes them a community is the shared social bonds around the hobby. It’s not just the transaction of participating in the hobby, but the invisible human connections that defines the community.

In order to join that community, you must have more than just an interest in the hobby, but also be invited into the social group. You start showing up at their public events and talking with the members. Over time, your interest in the hobby helps you make regular acquaintance with some of the members. In time, they bring you into the community and you begin to build social bonds. At some point, you go from being someone who shares their interests to a member of their community.

In theory, an open community is one that allows anyone to just walk in and claim membership, as long as they tick some boxes on a form. In reality, this is not a community at all, as the members have no control of membership, because they have no control of what defines the community. The new members can come in and agree to change the terms of entry, for example. This is because their duty to the community ends with the last tick on the admission form.

The same logic applies to a society or any human organization. The New York Yankees get to decide who is and who is not a Yankee. They not only have rules for membership, but they alone decide membership. A political or cultural movement follows the same logic. You can be in agreement or supportive, but you are not a member of it until you are included in it by the people inside the movement. This is why the Tea Party movement failed. It had no barriers to entry.

This conflict between open and closed community is at the heart of the current crisis in the Western world. After the Second World War, it was argued that a moral society must be tolerant of dissimilar people. Tolerance for different races, ethnic groups, religions and cultures slowly became the definition of the moral society. The “open society” was the goal of social reformers. This explicitly meant that the people in Western societies no longer had the right to determine membership in their society.

This is why private discrimination and free association are now forbidden. If a group of left-handed gingers, with an interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry, were to form a community around these traits and interests, they must get permission from the state. That would mean allowing in girls, non-gingers and maybe even people not suffering the defect of left-handedness. Otherwise, they’d risk litigation. You see, in an open society, there can never be barriers to entry. Everything is open to everyone.

The people who promoted the open society in the last century, and continue to promote it today, do so as outsiders. They look at the organic communities and societies of the West and simply see collections of people. The alien cannot see or understand the reciprocal obligations and duties that hold the community together. These are only obvious to the people inside, because it is what holds them together. The outsider only sees the benefits of membership, not what defines it.

This is the heart of the problem in America. The people with the greatest influence in the country, the ruling class, are not part of the communities and cultures that have defined the country. They just see people, not the many invisible connections that define local community. For them, the peculiarities that are the outward facing aspects of community are just items on the cultural buffet. They can sample what they like, because they have no meaning beyond the superficial.

The result of this is the slow erosion of the social capital that defines and holds together a community. It is also eroding the invisible bonds that hold communities together around a shared public culture. When the public space is made open to everyone, everyone shows up. The shared reality of public life in America looks like a park after an open-air concert or a leftist demonstration. It is no longer part of our shared reality that we own in common. It is not ours.

Compounding the crisis is the fact that the people at the top, the managerial class, have become self-aware. They now have a sense of community. More important, their sense of community is the closed variety. They now think the only way to maintain their community is to maintain the open society over which they rule. In order for their community to be tolerated by the open society, they must foster an intolerance of those questioning the logic and consequences of the open society

This is how we find ourselves in a world where destructive degenerates are celebrated as the new cultural norm, but the natural bonds of organic community are demonized and anathematized as immoral. The only way for the closed community at the top to maintain the open society over which they rule is to systematically destroy the normal social bonds that make organic community possible. The open society is thus a war on the very conditions that make normal human society possible.

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 Weirdo Problem

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The other day, the YouTube pioneer RamZPaul posted something on Twitter that generated a lot of responses and not all of them positive. The tweet was a link to a story about the arrest of someone calling himself Augustus Sol Invictus. Paul added a bit of commentary, “The former Alt Right was a movement that welcomed freaks and weirdos. The “no punch right” philosophy resulted in this.” As of this posting, the tweet had 133 replies and over one thousand likes.

Not all of the responses were positive, of course. Members of the subculture, in which people calling themselves Augustus Sol Invictus are welcome, were unhappy with Paul’s take on the matter. The general theme of the negative reactions is that Paul is ”punching right” and that this guy claiming to be a 2000 year old Roman Emperor needs to be defended. In other words, drinking goat’s blood and claiming to be a Roman emperor are not unforgivable acts in that subculture.

It probably does not need to be said, but Paul is correct. A person who has legally changed his name to that of a Roman emperor and is regularly issuing royal decrees on Twitter, needs mental help, not a political career. He’s also running for president, when he is not drinking goat’s blood in pagan rituals. The normal response to such things is to assume the person is mentally ill. Even if he is not a danger to himself or others, he should not be included in anything serious.

Paul is also correct to point out that the alt-right collapsed under the weight of these sorts of weirdos. There were so many oddballs and crazies flying the alt-right flag at one point, their enemies were spoiled for choice. The far-left media could just keep plucking these characters out and putting their profile out there on-line. In fairness, most of the people attracted to the alt-right were perfectly normal, but that’s not what the public saw when the alt-right was showcased in the mass media.

This is a problem that all outsider politics faces. The weirdo problem was not unique to the alt-right. Anyone who has attended a Libertarian Party event knows that movement has had a weirdo problem for generations. The environmental movement has had a similar problem. Most people are happy to support conservation efforts, for example, but when they see some nut dressed as an elf, demanding everyone give up their cars, they assume he and the movement are crazy.

There are two reasons outsider politics is plagued with weirdos. One is they are always going to be the most open to newcomers. They are trying to boost their numbers, so they are never going to be too picky about people coming into their thing. Even if the new people have odd ideas, the assumption is they will learn the new politics and eventually fit in. You see this with the White Nationalists, who spend a lot of time indoctrinating one another in the ways of the subculture.

The other reason for the weirdo problem is there are a lot of weirdos in a big society like America, so supply can easily overwhelm a new movement. These weirdos are always looking for a home, so as soon as something gets going, they are attracted to it like moths to a flame. Since new political movements are disorganized and chaotic at first, they have no way to ward off the weirdos. The alt-right was swamped by people whose reality was formed by fantasy literature and video games.

That is the lesson of the alt-right, one that the successor operations like Casey’s American Identity Movement have learned. Rather than try and attract the biggest crowd possible in the shortest time possible, the goal is to focus on high quality people, who can grow local chapters organically. It’s not as fun as trolling people on Twitter, but it limits the number of weirdos entering the movement. It is much harder to be August Sol Invictus in real life than on-line.

Of course, the main issue with outsider politics is that they usually form up around a complaint or a list of complaints. If the Roman emperor and the accountant have the same complaints they can end up in the same camp. At that point the accountant rethinks his position and moves along. In other words, a negative identity opens the doors for anyone who has those grievances. Often, it rewards the extremists at the expense of the sober minded.

That is the key to any successful movement in the age of democracy. The default is always going to be the shared reality of the society. The people who control the public space, can therefore always be the default position. In order to combat that the outsiders have to have a positive identity that can be both defended, but also advocated to normal people. The trick for outsiders is to remain in the realm of the acceptable while challenging the prevailing orthodoxy.

That can only be achieved by having rules and standards. This gets back to what Paul pointed out in his tweet. “A man that drinks blood and thinks he is literally a Roman Emperor is probably not my first choice for leadership material.” When the standard means presenting a respectable face to a skeptical public, lunatics drinking goat’s blood are never embraced as part of that public face. Instead they are kept in the background so they cannot cause trouble.

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 Future Of Futurism

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About ten years ago, you could find any number of sites that focused on the future in one fashion or another. Futurism was a cottage industry. Ray Kurzweil and others, who made futurism a specialty, would get interviewed by big shot publications. Kurzweil was even hired by Google to be their professional futurist. The field was full of predictions about how we were on the cusp of the singularity or that we were about discover the fountain of youth. We would live forever in the robot future.

All of that petered out in the last few years. The futurist bloggers closed down and either moved to Twitter or disappeared entirely. The sites that pushed whiz-bang technology stuff have fallen out of favor. We seem to have run out of road on the technology side of things, as all of the low hanging fruit from the microprocessor revolution has been picked and turned into mobile devices. There has not been a killer app or killer device in a long time now. The future is not so promising.

One reason for this sudden lack of interest in the future could be that we are living in a simulation, specifically a quantum simulation. The beings running this simulation decided we needed to focus on other things. Alternatively, this simulation inevitably results in a lack of interest in the future. Having overcome the Malthusian limit and reached the post-scarcity world, the future is not all that interesting. The recent obsession with the future was just an echo effect.

Alternatively, the corresponding simulation to our simulation is now focused on the future, so we are focused on the past. Maybe in this quantum simulation, another version of us exists in another universe. If you spin around clockwise in this universe, your other self spins counter clockwise in the corresponding one. Perhaps when our alternative universe gets romantic about the past, we will see a new burst on interest in the future here in this version of the quantum simulation.

The main argument against this being a simulation is that a race of beings that sophisticated would not have created a simulation this stupid. They would put us in a much more interesting experiment or throw the whole thing in the trash. On the other hand, this simulation could be a child’s experiment. This world in which we exist is sitting on a child’s dresser like an ant farm. The last few decades were the result of the cat getting into the experiment and breaking some things.

The people who claim to know about public sentiment used to claim that movies and television shows about the future were a reflection of the public’s anxiety or lack of it about the present. If dystopian shows were popular, it meant the public was worried about current events. If the shows were more positive, then it meant people were feeling good about things. Presumable the lack of movies about the future would say something as well, but no one mentions it.

That is something that gets little attention about the multicultural paradise our rulers have planned for us. The business model of Hollywood is built on the assumption of a white middle-class. Devouring that white middle-class in order to create a multicultural paradise leaves Hollywood without an audience. South America has never been a great market for mass media. China and India are capable of producing their own computer-generated crap. The future of Hollywood looks grim.

That may be why the focus on the future has faded of late. Twenty years ago, the Matrix could promise a mulatto future, because it seemed so implausible. The tan future imagined by Hollywood seemed as implausible as space ships. Now, people are increasingly aware of the realities of demographics. Imagining a universe that is full of mystery meat people is just going to press the wrong buttons. Maybe that’s why Hollywood interest in the future has waned over the last few years.

That also raises another issue. Very few people, even in dissident politics, like talking about the multicultural future that awaits us. All of the commentary is either directly or indirectly about how to prevent it. Since there is no stopping the transformation of America into a majority-minority society, the most fertile ground of futurism is about a world where hostile tribes, rubbing shoulders with one another, are monitored by high tech corporations. That’s the future that awaits us.

Maybe that’s the reason futurism is no longer popular. Dystopian futures were intended to be warnings about the present. Whiz-bang futures are about current trends, or imagined ones, advancing to their natural end. Since no warning about multicultural future will make a difference, there’s no point in it. Because that future will be awful, there’s no point in thinking about it now. For people who sense they have no future, there is no market for futurism.

On the other hand, that means there is a market for dissident writers to create fiction that is positive about the fight ahead. The trouble is the people who make movies don’t want white people to be positive, so they instead make movies about gay comic book heroes and mulatto girls running the world. Still, it is an untapped market that some clever dissident could mine. Maybe the next turn of dissident politics is dissident samizdat fiction about the tribal wars to come.

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!

Year In Review

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This is the time of year when lazy writers do retrospectives, usually in the form of lists or worse, tweet collections. Streaming has reached a point where people are doing these on YouTube or DLive. Then you have the predictions for the coming year, which hardly anyone ever mentions as part of their yearend review posts. This makes sense, as most predictions are terrible. No one can see the future, so predictions are always about the present trends and the prognosticator’s hopes for the future.

There is some value in looking back at past predictions. It’s a lot like reading old articles about the glorious future of 2020, which is now upon us. Predictions tend to reflect the binary model of the future that is inflicted upon us by our rulers. The future is either going to be much worse than anyone today wants to believe or much better than anyone ever promised. In reality, the next year will be pretty much the same as the last year, with maybe some new characters in the media.

Looking at your own past predictions is a bit humbling, which is probably why no one does it as a part of their yearend posting. Here is my post from last year with my crystal ball forecast for the upcoming year. When I do these posts, I’m not trying to be too serious, as this is not the time of year to be serious. The point is to have some fun with the format and make some points along the way. Still, if you make a post full of predictions, you must be made to answer for them!

So, how’d I do?

My first prediction about how Congress and the Senate will behave in the new year was pretty much dead right. The Democrat House did spend the year chasing Trump around with subpoenas and the Senate did nothing. I did not see the impeachment fiasco coming, but no one thought the Democrats were that dumb. I was wrong about the Mueller probe. That’s probably the surprise of the year. Trump gets a lot of grief, but you have to give him credit for getting rid of Mueller.

As far as the race for the Democrat nomination, I will take a bow on predicting that Warren would be a bust. She is still in the top-tier of the candidates, but she is fading and probably headed to a bad end. The current polling has her finishing second or third in Iowa and second or third in New Hampshire. That’s pretty much the Howard Dean phenomenon. He never recovered from that and she will not recover from losing the early races. Being a total fraud has consequences.

I think the jury is still out on the censorship. There’s no question that is has slowed over the last year, but that could simply be due to a lack of targets. The alt-right was mostly an open door for the old 1.0 types and other fringe weirdos. Once that door closed, they went back to their respective warrens. As a result, there is not a lot of low hanging fruit for the censors. Still, I think the trend will continue, as the platforms find the cost of censorship rise and the benefits decline.

On the economic front, I got it all wrong on the stock market. The markets continued to be strong, despite the beginning of the great retirement. The fact is, the markets are no longer connected to reality. Instead, they are driven by Fed policy, which was another miss last year. I did get China right. I’ve been saying for years that China is more paper tiger than most realize. China remains a low trust society, outside the local community, so that means lots of mischief in the national economy.

As for Europe, I nailed the Brexit process. I was a little muddled on the way the end game would play out, so I can’t crow too much. My expectation was that the globalists would offer up the Tories as a sacrifice to globalism. I did not think it would work, but I was not all that clear, so I get dinged a few points. I was a bit early on the role of the Eastern bloc of countries. I still think that is in the offing, but Brexit may have to unfold before that can get momentum.

On the sportsball front, I was ahead of my skis on that one. Ratings keep declining for the NBA, but the NFL rebounded a bit. Of course, the ratings are mostly fake, so no one can be sure. My hunch, just based on personal experience, is that more and more white people are abandoning conventional entertainment. The obnoxious propaganda packed into everything is impossible to ignore. Even so, we don’t have hard data to back this, so the cord cutting prediction goes into the loss column.

Finally, I swung and missed on the Facebook prediction. Frankly, I remain puzzled about this one. It is so obviously true that ads on that platform are a waste of money, but they keep suckering in advertisers. Further, the data they steal from users and sell to marketing companies and the FBI is mostly garbage. Facebook is a company that exists in spite of reality. This is why looking back at predictions is good. It reveals gaps in your understanding and it reveals bias.

Over all, it was a mixed bag. In the gambling business, the rule of thumb is you have to win 57% of the time in order to make money. That covers the juice owed to bookmaker I’ve lost track of where I was on this, but I’m glad I did not bet the “Escape Lagos Fund” on these predictions. Even so, it is always fun for me to look back at these posts. They are a good reminder that no one can see around corners, so it is wise to be skeptical of one’s confidence.

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!

Supporting The Cause

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Since we are rapidly running out of road in 2019, it seems like a good time to address some common questions that come up from time to time. Something that has gone unnoticed over the last year is the number of people moving into dissident politics is growing, despite the efforts of the ruling class. When big shot pundits feel comfortable using terms like “cloud people” in public, it suggests the people on the other side of the great divide are at least looking over at what’s happening here.

A question that comes up with some frequency is what people can do to support the cause of dissident politics. It makes sense. Once you have come to terms with the fact we are in the demographic age, you want to support your team. There’s also the fact that people attracted to this type of politics are the type used to solving problems and fixing things that are broken. Sitting around bitching about things being broken is not what comes natural to those drawn to this side of the great divide.

The first rule of organizing is to develop as many on-ramps as possible for people to come into your thing. The reason outsider politics remains fringe is it tends to have just one entry point and that door is guarded by weirdos. The libertarian movement never got out of the valley of weirdos, because it deliberately disconnected itself from the mainstream, despite so much help from Conservative Inc. The key is offering many paths to entry and not being ideological about those paths.

For example, 2020 is an election year. There are few good candidates running, but there are some worth supporting. No, they are not “our guys” and no, winning elections will not result in the changes we seek. The way forward for us is not going to be through the ballot box, but elections can open doors to our side. Despite all the screw-ups and mistakes, Trump has opened a lot of doors for us. Lots of people had their eyes opened about demographics through the issue of immigration.

If politics is your thing, consider supporting these candidates:

Again, there is no voting our way out of the problems of democracy, but engaging in the process can open doors to our side. A guy like King winning is social proof to a lot of people who quietly agree with us, but maybe don’t know it. This was the sole value of Trump winning in 2016 and will be the only value of his winning again in 2020. It validates the opinions of people who are heading this way. When you learn that your taboo thoughts are not uncommon, it liberates the soul.

There is another angle to this. If you are in these areas where populist candidates are running, even if it is a guy running for dog catcher, volunteer for the campaign. What you will find is that there are other bad thinkers doing the same thing. These campaigns have become an underground meetup for people in dissident politics to recruit people into local groups. If you are in a local group, find a candidate close to our side and get your guys to volunteer. It’s a great recruiting tool.

That is, of course, the main thing we should be doing. Getting people of like mind together in real life is the foundation of any movement. The story of every successful mass movement is normal people getting together in real life for fellowship, support and community building. If you don’t know anyone local, sign up for AIM. They have local groups all over now. It’s not just young people either. They have men of all ages in their chapters. It is a good thing to support.

Another way to engage likeminded people in real life is to attend events where our people meet, like American Renaissance. They will be holding their annual convention in May this year. It has not been announced, but the tentative date is the last weekend of May. There will be other events coming up like the Northwest Forum, which is held in Washington State. There are a lot of plans for events in the works this year and they will be posted here and elsewhere as the details emerge.

Finally, if the best you can do is throw money at the cause, there is no shame in that as there is no shortage of donors in this thing. American Renaissance and VDare are two groups that do a lot for the dissident cause. Solo acts like Steve Sailer and Paul Ramsey are examples of individuals, who can always use a few bucks to help keep the lights on and food on the table. Paying NetFlix every month may ease the pain of your demise, but giving that money to dissidents may save your kind.

It’s not just about donating to our guys. You can also buy the books written by our guys, which is is a great way to support our media. Conservative Inc. is a great book by one of our great young writers. It’s a good book to give to your curious normie friend. If you are into fiction, pick up a copy of Faction by Karl Dahl. For something witty and funny, there is Galaxy Mindset. Greg Johnson has a lot of books for the dissident reader and he can always use our support.

Of course, the best thing you can do, the most important thing you can do, to support the cause is be a prince among men in your daily life. Men follow men. By setting a high standard in your personal life and being a respectable face to skeptical people about these issues, you become one of those many on-ramps to our thing. If you are the sort of person people admire, they will admire your politics. The reddest red pill is the realization that you are the message. Never forget it.

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!

No More Weirdos

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A couple of weeks back, National Review was doing one of its ritual denunciations of the Four Bads. Those are the things our betters have declared to be the worst things possible for anyone to allow into their minds. They are racism, sexism, homophobism and, of course antisemitism. These are the mortal sins of the current age. Someone calling himself Zachery Evans posted this column about the alleged rise in antisemitism in Brooklyn. Supposedly it is on the rise over the last year.

Now, it has to be mentioned that the writer is not an American. He is an Israeli whose bio states he is a “veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces and a trained violist.” It’s hard not to suspect that this person is a Hasbara operative. His lack of a social media presence is a bit suspicious. That and these writers go heavy on the networking, hoping to climb the media ladder. This guy is probably on the payroll of a pro-Israel, white box content operation that places material in sites like NRO.

Putting that aside, the column comes with a picture of a young fellow in the typical outfit of the super-orthodox Jews. They dress a lot like the Amish, except for the long curls of hair and the tassels. There are variations on the costumes. Some wear enormous fur cylinders on their heads. Others wear different headgear. Presumably these things all have meaning inside the cult. These outfits are both a tradition and a way to separate themselves from everyone else.

The use of costumes as a form of self-ghettoization is not exclusive to the super-orthodox Jews. Black American cults have used the uniform as a form of separation from the main. The Black Panthers are the most obvious example. The Nation of Islam and their bow ties are another. The Black Hebrew Israelites, who have been in the news of late, dress in white robes and white head dresses. The point of these outfits is both recognition and separation. They are not us.

Now, the article itself is reasonable about the harassment of these super-orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. The media likes to say it is due to white nationalism or the rise of the KKK or something, but that’s insane nonsense. The real issue, one the writer alludes to in his piece, is the local blacks and now the imported Muslims. Blacks have never liked Jews in general and they really don’t like the ones in funny outfits. They see these people as just another gang, one they can easily push around.

Then there are the imported Muslims. Since 9/11, the United States has responded to the threat of Islamic terrorism by scouring the earth for Muslims of every sort to import into the country. The theory is that by importing tens of millions of Muslims from places the American military has bombed for decades, the miasma that is causing Muslims to commit terrorism will dissipate. It’s lunacy, but the result is places like New York City suddenly have a new class of weird foreigner.

Inevitably, these various weirdos, imported and domestic, will not only agitate against the main, but begin to attack one another. The old rule of diversity plus proximity equaling violence is what you see in that NR story. It is one non-white tribe of outsiders attacking a different tribe of outsiders. The only role white people play in this at all is in the madness of importing these people into the country. Otherwise, this problem is not a white people problem. It is a diversity problem.

A fundamental axiom of group dynamics is that you get rid of the people who cause disharmony in the group. The people who stir up trouble, don’t fit in or simply cannot behave themselves, are removed. This leaves the like-minded to get along with one another with the minimum of friction. In the current age, this has been turned on its head so the opposite is the goal. Our rulers import weirdos from all over the globe and put them in close proximity with us and one another.

If one were to sum up the demands of the populists in every country of the West, it would be “no more weirdos.” If every mainstream political party of the West, even just one major party in each country, embraced this simple dictum, most of the populist unrest would subside. The native populations are simply tired of having to make excuses and accommodations for the foreign weirdos. People are simply exhausted from having to tolerate these people and their weirdness.

Think about it. Imagine if these fur cylinder guys were packed up and sent back to Eastern Europe of Israel. On a different plane were the various brands of Islam imported over the last decades. That alone would make the tri-state area more livable for actual Americans. No more disputes with the orthodox Jews trying to take over local neighborhoods. No more Muslims trying to blow themselves up in public. Two big problems would go away for the people of the region.

It’s not that these people are hated. Most Americans have no idea why the orthodox walk around with giant fur cylinders on their heads. They don’t understand anything about Islam. They don’t want to know. They should not have to know. These are foreign to a Western nation in general and very foreign to America in particular. There is no reason to have these foreign people here. They are weird and they will never fit in with the rest of us. It is immoral to demand we accommodate them.

That is what makes the simplicity of the “no more weirdos” idea so beautiful. It does not tax anyone, by requiring anything from them. They are free to be themselves, in all their weirdness, just not here around us. If the fur cylinder guys want to parade around Tel Aviv, best of luck to them. If Mohamed wants to pray in public, let him do that in a Muslim land. If Mr. Abdillahi wants to do whatever it is, he does in Somali, as long as he does it in Somalia and not Maine, no one needs to care.

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!