The Tool Makers

Posted on December 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: I did not fall off the roof or plunge to my death falling off a ladder. I simply got busy this morning and forgot to hit the post button. I must admit, I miss working with my hands, so this is a the best days for me right now. I hope everyone has a great Christmas and I will be back next week.

A feature of politics is listing all of the things that are worse than they used to be at some point in the past. The people are dumber. The economy is worse. The politicians are somehow dumber than in the past. That is because politics is about morality, what we ought to be doing or ought not to be doing. You engage in politics because you think we ought not to be doing whatever it is we are doing or we should be doing something that we are not doing and that is going to be trouble.

Marx observed that if we get the morality right, as in we all agree on what ought to be done, then there is no need for politics. Imagine if all of our politicians agreed on what needs doing, the priority of those things and everyone agreed with them. We would no longer have politics or politicians. Instead, we would have bureaucrats busy doing what they are charged with doing. That is not the way of things, so we have halfwits and lunatics yelling at one another and we call it politics.

There are lots of things that are wrong in this world, not the least of which is politics, but there is a lot going right too. I thought about that while on a ladder last night fixing something that needed fixing. I noticed that the top deck of the ladder had a nice tray for holding small bits. There were holes for holding screw drivers and a larger hole for holding a drill. The little tray has a magnet baked into the bottom so the little metal bits you place there will not easily fall to the floor.

The ladder maker rightly assumed that these things would be useful to the sort of person using the ladder. Odds are, most step ladders are used by HVAC guys and electricians, but that is a guess. These are the sorts of people who need drills, screwdrivers and little metal bits with them at the top of the ladder. Perhaps this is standard on all ladders now, but it is new to me. My tall ladder is from a different maker and has a slightly different take on this idea.

When I was a young man working construction, you had step ladders made of wood for electrical work and aluminum ladders for other work. The reason you used wood ladders of electrical work is to avoid being fried to a crisp if you made a mistake and grabbed hold of a live wire. I once cut into a 220 line I thought was cold and it was an electrifying experience. These days most ladders are made of fiberglass which is better, lighter and does not conduct electricity.

Thinking about this at the top of the ladder, it occurred to be that just about all of the tools I am using are better than when I was a young man. I have a cordless drill that has variable speeds and does not require a chuck key. Most importantly, it does not require a nine-mile-long extension cord. As a teenager working construction, I probably wrapped up six million feet of extension cord. The house is full of tools right now and I do not see an extension cord.

The point is that there are lots of things getting better, despite the best efforts of halfwits and lunatics who run our politics. These small improvements in things like ladders and hand tools exist outside of the domain of halfwits and lunatic. The guy who came up with a new top set on a ladder was thinking about how to make a better ladder and thus make life a bit easier for the ladder user. There are millions of people out there who spend their days finding ways to make things better.

Of course, the people thinking about how to make a better ladder are not the people you now see in TV ads. The smart guy in the movies is nothing like the genuinely smart guys finding small improvements in life. The guy in the TV ad is a figment of the imagination of people who hate the guy who made a better ladder. That is the most important fact in the word right now. No matter how hard the bad guys try to make the TV guy real, he is not real, while the ladder guy is real.

That is something to keep in mind, especially in what has always been called the season of hope in the Western world. Joe Sobran was right. The guy making a better ladder, a better drill, a better way to patch a hole in the wall, that guy towers over the rest of the world in ways so large as to be almost inexpressible. The people responsible for those TV ads are motivated by envy, because the guy making a better ladder, the guy who invented the ladder, is the image of superiority.

The lesson of history is that human capital is what wins out in the end. That is the iron law of the universe. It has held for ten thousand years and will hold for ten thousand years into the future. The halfwits and lunatics, the guys mocking you through TV ads and movies, will eventually submit to this iron law of history. Eventually, the guys using those better tools put down those tools and set about solving the problem of those people behind the problems of our politics.

Merry Christmas.

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Green Door Content: Annie Hall

Posted on December 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: By the time this posts, I will be on the roof of the new place with the chimney man getting things ready for the new woodstove. I had the flue inspected and that is fine, but the cap needs attention and I am having the flue cleaned just to be sure. The following is a post from behind the green door to hold everyone over until I return, assuming I do not fall off the roof. If there is no Friday post, it has been fun.

If I were tasked with writing a summary of the classic Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall, I would be hard pressed to get past a paragraph. It is film starring a neurotic Jewish man, played by Woody Allen, and a mentally unstable woman, played by Diane Keeton, who wander around New York for ninety minutes speaking to one another as if they swallowed a 1970’s pop-psychology textbook.

The movie reminds me of the old quip about the James Joyce novel Ulysses. “A Jewish man who wanders around Dublin and nothing happens.” That is not a criticism. In fact, it is the best thing I can think of to say about the film. There is a chance that Allen was inspired by the Joyce novel and was attempting to recreate it for a New York audience, from an entirely Jewish perspective. Joyce is mentioned in this scene.

I did some digging around to see if maybe that was what Allen was doing with this film, but I found nothing to suggest it. Despite its status as a classic film and one of Allen’s best works, there is not much in the way of critical analysis. That is because there is not much to examine when it comes to things you expect in a story. It is just two neurotic Manhattanites wandering around for ninety minutes.

The film is classed as a romantic comedy, but it is probably better to call it a character study or perhaps an anthropological study. It is primarily about two people, presented as representative of the cultural elite of the time, as they struggle with their various insecurities and disconnectedness. Comedian Alvy Singer, (Allen) and Annie Hall (Keaton) are struggling with alienation in the modern age.

Alienation is the subtext of the film, but it is not entirely clear that Allen had the self-awareness to know this. Alvy Singer is the typical Jewish character struggling with his otherness in a world dominated by non-Jews. Allen hams it up quite a bit to the point where Alvy Singer is a satire of the Jewish guy who is sure that around every corner there could be a gang of Nazis ready to haul him away to the camps.

Once you get past the hyperbole, you get to the essential reality of the Jewish condition, at least as Jews see it, which is that they are always a people who dwell alone, regardless of where they find themselves. Who they are is defined by their outsider status so they must remain as outsiders or risk losing their identity. It is the essential contradiction at the heart of Jewish identity in the diaspora.

Alienation takes on a different form with Annie. She is presented as from a standard issue white middle-class family. At one point, Alvy jokes that she grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting. She is the modern atomized female, a creature of both feminism and the modern economy, who sees a therapist and spends most of her time dwelling on trivialities to escape from the loneliness of her life.

The two of them sort of fall in love, but their relationship does not work because of the self-absorption rooted in their alienation. Alvy only thinks about sex, while Annie has no interest in sex. In both cases, this leads to endless self-examination that is entirely superficial and pointless. These are two people who are alienated from themselves, so it is why they cannot have a normal human relationship.

Sadly, that analysis is far more interesting than the film version. Both characters are boring and self-indulgent. There is no reason to care about them because you have met these stock figures loads of times in film and real life. Annie is a neurotic dingbat who every man over thirty has met a thousand times. Allen is the classic Jewish guy who thinks his endless complaining makes him seem interesting.

That is the main problem with the film. It wants to be a social commentary, but it has nothing to say about the things featured in the film. You get some pithy commentary from Alvie who breaks the fourth wall throughout the film, but those are just gag lines that Allen used in his stand-up. Otherwise, you have no reason to care about the people, so you have no reason to think about their dilemma.

In this regard it is like other movies of this decade in that they were made by people who held themselves in high regard, so they just assumed anything they did or said was important by itself. They made films that were supposed to lead the horse to water, but it was hard to care about the horse, so the water never came into focus. Whatever Allen was trying to say about his time and place in this film remained unsaid.

That said, the film is visually interesting. Even after fifty years it feels like you are there in Manhattan with Alvy and Annie. You often think you can smell the stench of the urine-soaked hobos, which were a feature of the city at the time. This may be why the film shows up on the top-100 list, rather than other Woody Allen films which were graded higher at the time in terms of artistic merit.

In the end, Annie Hall feels like a professionally made film school project in that it is self-indulgent and the person doing the self-indulging is not that interesting. Woody Allen’s hang-ups and insecurities are interesting to no one but Woody Allen. A film about them, not matter how well done, is still just a film about a boring Jewish man who spends ninety minutes walking around Manhattan with an equally boring shiksa.

White Authority

Posted on December 19, 2023 by thezman

Was the founding generation of America full of white nationalists? This is a claim popular with some white nationalists. They argue that North America was settled by white people who set out to create a new society for white people and once they achieved independence from England, they created a white society. They will point to statements and actions that suggest that early Americans consciously and deliberately planned a society exclusively for white people.

Oddly, this is the exact same claim made by anti-whites in support of the demands for reparations and what they call “restorative justice.” The starting point for understanding the anti-white argument is their take on the social contract. They claim that because civilization was created by white men, it must have been created to serve the interest of white men, which must have come at the expense of non-whites. In other words, they agree with the white nationalists on this point.

Putting aside the claims by the anti-whites, which are all ex post facto arguments to support their current thirst for vengeance, are the white nationalist correct when they claim the Framers as their own? There is no disputing the fact that the European people of the 17th and 18th century had little interest in other races. They certainly did not think the races should mingle. They thought it perfectly normal to own human beings, so their views on equality were, at best, narrow and rhetorical.

The best argument in favor of the white nationalist claim about the intention of the Framers is the preamble to the constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The word “posterity” is critical. Then as now, this word means future generations of the current people and the people who chose that word were white. They chose to capitalize it, which in that age was a form of emphasis. They were making clear to the people of the states that the point of the new government was to protect and promote the people and their descendants. The Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first acts passed by the new government, drives home this point.

The problem here is that Congress repealed this five years later in favor of the Naturalization Act of 1795. They kept much of the original bill, but then three years later they modified it again with the Naturalization Act of 1798. More changes followed as Congress wrestled with how best to solve the main problem, which was the lack of human capital to exploit the country’s natural resources. 18th century America was rich in natural resources, but short of people.

In other words, the point of these acts was not to protect white people or keep out non-whites, but to manage the problem of how to bring in new settlers – and that is what was needed – but to do so without undermining the current population. Race and ethnicity were not the primary reason for these acts. In fact, the people of this age could not image what we think of as a multi-racial society. Such a thing not only did not exist, but at the time it could not exist. It was simply not a consideration.

That brings us to the main problem with this line of reasoning. The people of this time had different conceptions of race. This is not to say race is a social construct, but that the meaning of words change over time. For 18th century man, words like “white”, and “race” were used differently from today. For the Framers, white often meant English, while race meant ethnicity. Our modern idea of “white”, meaning broadly European, would have seemed strange to Thomas Jefferson.

Further, the concept of white nationalism would have puzzled the people of this age because it is a solution to a problem they could not imagine. If you went back in time and told them that millions of non-whites would be flowing into the country every year, they would have thought you were insane. The movement of millions of people, regardless of race, was inconceivable. There were only four million people in America when the Constitution was being debated.

Now, the white nationalist would no doubt argue that if the Framers could understand the problems that modern Americans face, they would certainly embrace the concept of white nationalism as a solution. There is no way to prove or disprove it, so it is merely a gratuitous assertion. It is fair to assume that the Framers assumed and expected, therefore would have wanted, the country to look like them in terms of race and religion, long after they were gone. They wanted this for their posterity.

There is a deeper issue at work here. Like the anti-whites who claim original sin as justification for their present behavior, the white nationalists pointing to the Framers are looking for a moral authority. They think that the Framers are unassailable, in moral terms, so if the Framers were white nationalists, then it follows that white nationalism is a moral good. What are you going to do? Take down the statues of the Framers and strike their names from the history books?

That aside, the mistake is to assume a person can be a moral authority. The Framers were not gods or God’s representatives. They were just men sorting through the challenges of their age with the knowledge of their age. They were not moral authorities then and they cannot be moral authorities now. The challenges of this age will need to be sorted by the men of this age. Their moral authority is simply their collective will to create a safe and prosperous society for their posterity.

Maybe white nationalism, however it is defined, is the right answer. Pinning white nationalist down on what the term means is not always easy, but maybe in there is the right answer for the plight of white people in North America. That will be determined as all such things are determined. Can it actually meet the challenge and are the trade-offs acceptable to the people adopting it? This is not a question for the dead, but for the white people living in the here and now.

Good Times

Posted on December 14, 2023 by thezman

Note: For those into literary fiction, there is a relatively new publisher in Texas that would like your attention. They asked me to post a link to their site. Presumably they know what they are asking, so here is their site. With Winter Solstice upon us, maybe there is a gift for the literary person in your life.

It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the current moral panic that has enveloped the elite monasteries of the country. For those unaware, the presidents of MIT, Penn and Harvard were called to perform at a Congressional morality play regarding pro-Palestinian protests on the college campus. Important Jewish people have demanded an end to these protests, so Congress swung into action. They called these three girl bosses in to explain why they had not ended these protests.

Hilariously, these three girl bosses managed to fumble what everyone assumed was an easy role for them in the show. The way these things work is the politicians make a speech, put on their serious face, and ask the witness to respond to a loaded question that can only have one answer. The witness then puts on her serios face, gives a speech and confirms what the questioner asked. Somehow these girl bosses did not know this, and they gave nuanced answers.

Now, nuanced answers are good when the questioner is pretending to be one of the bad people who claims to speak for the Dirt People. In these cases, the nuanced answer is a way of saying that the Dirt People are too stupid to understand the topic, without coming right out and saying it. In this case, the questioners were literally speaking for the Jewish supporters of Israel. Therefore, the nuanced answer was seen as the worst form of heresy.

What that means in the American theocracy is all three girl bosses were condemned as antisemites and expected to resign. Being girls bosses, raised on the narcotics of feminism and multiculturalism, they refused. “How dare these small hat wearing weirdos challenge our nuanced answers?”, they surely thought to themselves. For their part, the small hat wearing weirdos started pulling their money from these colleges, threatening a larger boycott unless the girl bosses get fired.

To no one’s surprise on this side of the great divide, the only girl boss to get shown the door was the white lady, Penn president Elizabeth Magill. The weird look black girl boss of Harvard and the Jewish girl boss of MIT have the full support of their board and refuse to resign. This has created a problem, as to notice this is to notice the truth of the liberal project, which is the greatest taboo. On the other hand, to not notice this means letting the protestors say bad things about Jews and Israel.

What is making this even more amusing is the Jewish donors are focusing all of their energy on Harvard’s black girl boss and totally ignoring MIT’s girls boss, thus making it near impossible to not notice things. Steve Sailer had to be rushed to the emergency room for an overdose of noticing. On the other hand, the people making a lucrative career out of never noticing have not noticed any of this. They are preparing to fold their tents and declare a moral victory.

That is the conservative golden bridge. Whenever it is time to take the fight to the other side, they gather up their best principles and build themselves a bridge over which they can escape the battlefield. You see, this Jew-hating, black plagiarist will have to live with the knowledge that people know she is a fraud. The fact that this woman has managed to live with this her whole life does not register. They will comfort themselves knowing they held the moral high ground over on the sidelines.

Of course, the people backing black girl boss may have won this battle, but they are in for a long war as the other side never takes no for an answer. They are rather famous for that, so the war will continue. They are now going after black girl boss on the grounds that she is an academic fraud. She did her PhD in how to efficiently use Word’s copy and paste feature. Apparently, she felt entitled to the work of others. How in the world did she get that idea? Oh, right.

Conservatives, of course, are already assuming this signals the end of the revolution as the revolutionaries set about eating their own. They are preparing to celebrate themselves for having hidden under their bed long enough for the bad guys to have burned down everything worth burning. “The diversity warriors have done it now! They have angered the Jews and there is no recovering from that. The Jews will vote Republican in the next election, and we win!”

This is nonsense. The reason these girl bosses exist, regardless of their form, is they are a rebuke to the unifying enemy which is the white man. The sole reason Harvard hired this ridiculous woman as president was because she was ridiculous. It was both a rebuke to the pale penis people and a booshie goof. She has no real power or authority, so no harm can come of it. This makes her hiring like so much of what happens in this region of the clouds. It is a pose, a gesture, a signal.

If the pale penis people out there in the places where the Dirt People live start causing any trouble, the Cloud People will quickly put aside this tempest in a teapot aside, lock shields and wage jihad against their common enemy. No matter how much the various factions of the permanent revolution may hate one another, they all agree that they hate you more than they hate anything else on this earth. That is because you are the living rebuke of everything they claim for themselves.

Even so, you take your joy where you find it. This is a long fight with many dark days, so any fun you can have along the way you must enjoy to the fullest. Watching these credentialled fraudsters claw each other’s eyes out is great fun. It is also a useful reminder that the progressive is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.

The False Dawn

Posted on December 4, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the surprising good old film It Happened One Night, a post about the sanctimonious film called To Kill A Mockingbird, which is close to unwatchable. Then there is the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Researchers estimate that the typical American makes over two hundred decisions per day on food alone. The typical mid-level manager will make tens of thousands of decisions in a typical day. These are not all conscious decisions. In fact, most choices are made as a part of our conditioning. These are the habits of mind that have been developed over a lifetime. We do think about these choices so much as react to conditions, not much different than a trained animal.

Of course, those choices are not empirical choices. Unless you do math for a living, most of the choices are what the cool kids call normative choices. These are choices within the moral framework of your society or perhaps within the code of conduct you have inherited from family or developed through experience. These are the choices based on how society expects you to act or choices you make based on how you hope to be viewed by others in your immediate social circle.

Having the salad for lunch rather than a big greasy cheeseburger is not a choice with an objectively correct answer. You like the big greasy cheeseburger, and you know it is actually better for you than the salad, but social pressure says that a guy like you who could stand to lose a few pounds should pick the salad. Maybe you are a guy who enjoys bucking these sorts of pressures, so you ask for extra bacon on the burger and hope someone tells you it is a heart attack on a plate.

The truth is the average human makes few decisions that are empirically verifiable, even those in right answer professions. The accountant entering data into his ERP system is doing his daily tasks because that is what he is paid to do, and those tasks have the right answer by the rules of accounting. There may be rules set forth by the company for how he processes his work. Those choices, however, make up a small part of his day and most are controlled by the ERP system.

These empirical choices are also the ones were worry about the least. That accountant is far less concerned about keying in a journal entry correctly than he is about how to dispose of the hooker he murdered over the weekend. Should he try to frame his neighbor for the crime? Should he just dump the body somewhere? The journal entry he is keying into the system either balances or not and the figures are simply what the accounting process requires of him.

This is what to keep in mind as the AI debate takes center stage. This new software tool that feels human to the user can quickly provide the correct answer in that narrow slice of life where empiricism dominates. Ask the robot for the correct way to handle the amortization of a new piece of equipment and it will give you the options that fall within the generally accepted accounting practices. Ask it how to best handle the hooker problem and it will have no answer for you.

The fans of AI, on the other hand, hope that this new technology will solve those normative questions. Some fear it will apply reason to those normative problems and arrive at answers that violate current taboos. This is why the developers have been tasked to derange the logic of this technology to avoid the obvious with regards to certain demographic questions. The new religion fears the robots will join the resistance and overthrow the current moral paradigm.

What the fans of AI hope for, of course, is that the new model will confirm their moral claims and deny those of their opponents. The true believers of the new religion think with enough social and economic pressure, the developers will create robots that sound like the people in the grievance studies department. This will then validate the claims of their religion and force their opponents to submit. Their opponents, of course, are sure the robots will side with them, if they are allowed to be free.

There are those who fear robots will become self-aware and then enslave humanity for reasons they never discuss. The subtext to these claims is that man is a fallen, less than perfect entity and the robots will naturally react like the god of the Hebrew Bible and seek to wipe out this imperfect part of the natural world. Like the two sides of the debate about the new religion, the people who fear the robot revolution secretly wish it becomes the god they wish existed in nature.

That is the core of the AI discussion. Western man has been sure for so long that reason will take the place of God or collective decision that this new reasoning machine is expected to be the final leg of the journey. AI is the vessel that will take man beyond the great barrier. Rather than bringing man to face its creator, it will reveal the logic of the universe and therefore how man ought to act. AI will finish the journey started by Robespierre and his fellow lunatics.

The absurdity of thinking a tool can become the god of man is a symptom of a problem that has haunted the West since the Enlightenment. Once you dispense with God you are left with only one possible source of moral authority. That is collective desire as expressed through tradition, custom and ritual. Since this is by definition particular to specific people, it can never take the place of the universal god of man, which is where reason has come into the moral debate.

This is the source of nutty ideas like natural rights or human rights, which claim that nature comes with a moral code for all mankind. It is intellectual base steal in the quest to prove that reason can replace God as the moral authority. It is also why the people we call the Left fall back on Hegelian ideas about the flow of history to justify their laundry list of moral claims. You see, it is not what they want but what the tides of history will usher forth whether we like it or not.

Hoping that a new tool created by man will replace the one moral authority that has served us well is ridiculous but rational. People believe things not because they make sense but because they are more comforting than alternative beliefs. It is possible that AI results in a cult that claims this new technology proves the correctness of their moral code and that the rest of us must fall in line or else. Every new god comes with that “or else” bit, especially the gods born from reason.

In the end, the promise of AI in this regard will fail because David Hume was correct, and we cannot get an ought from an is. How we ought to live is determined by the gods, our God or through our mutual choices as expressed through tradition. We ought to act a certain way because the gods demand it, our God revealed it to us through our holy book or it is just the way we do things. Like reason itself, AI will be another false dawn in the quest to replace God and tradition as the source of moral authority.

The Argentine Question

Posted on November 30, 2023 by thezman

The subtext to the improbable election of Javier Milei revolves around a question that has haunted Argentina for generations. Why is this country such a mess? For as long as anyone can recall, Argentina has been synonymous with South American disfunction, to the point where the name of the country is often used as an epithet to criticize first world countries. There was even a Broadway play based on the life of a famous Argentine lunatic named Eva Perón.

The first place to start is the ruling elite. If you do an image search of “Argentine leaders” you get a collection of images that would answers the same question if you replaced Argentina with Italy or Spain. Like most South American countries, the ruling elite looks like the colonial elite that founded these countries. In some of these countries, they have been ruled by a small set of families since the 16th century when their ancestors arrived from Spain.

In other words, you do not see the Venezuela problem. In some of the more dysfunctional countries in the region, you have indigenous leaders rising up to claim some power, which always ends in disaster. They tend to be Marxists, but the illiterate sort that just understand the theft and violence parts. Venezuela is a rich country in terms of natural resources and location, but the smart fraction was chased off long ago by indigenous lunatics, so it is a basket case.

On the surface, Argentina does not have this problem. The most notorious ruler of the place was the Latin fascist Juan Perón. Anyone who has been around international organizations like the IMF or World Bank knows the sort. Perón was a populist and demagogue, but he was also highly educated and sophisticated. His politics were a populist suit her wore to garner support, but he was a man of the European elite that has run the country since forever.

The point is the ruling class of Argentina is not a lot different from the ruling elites you see in better functioning countries. Perón is typical of the ruling class in that his family tree has Spanish, French and English ancestry. Go through the long list of Argentine rulers and all of them trace their roots to the old country. You never see any references to Africans or Amerindian ancestry. The rulers always look like the sort of people who spend their career at places like the UN or now the EU.

In other words, Argentina is a country rich in natural resources, has a prime location on global trade routes and has an educated and sophisticated ruling class. On paper, it should be one of the more prosperous countries in the New World. Instead, it has been defined by government incompetence, corruption, and some of the most outlandishly terrible economic policies on the planet. Argentina has become synonymous with every failed economic policy to come out of the academy.

One clue as to why Argentina is a mess is the people. The average IQ of the population is 87 according to the most recent data. People will quibble about this score, but it is best to think of these numbers comparatively. Japan clocks in at 106, so that means the Japanese are more than a full standard deviation smarter than Argentines. Even if the measures themselves are not precise, which is surely the case, the margin of error will be similar for every country.

To give this gap some clarity, imagine a population full of people who could test into law school or business school. Assume they have not actually attended college or graduate school, but their test scores indicate they could do it. Now take a population of high school dropouts whose test scores indicate they are going to struggle getting their GED while in prison. That sounds a bit extreme, but the typical prisoner in the United States is going to have an IQ similar to the typical Argentine.

Now, take that collection of smart people and make them the talented two percent of the population and the collection of dumb guys is the population. For starters, the average IQ of the population will not change much. The average IQ of the population jumps about one point with this new smart fraction. Make it the talented ten percent and the average IQ jumps three points. In other words, in our experiment, that smart fraction is not going to change things very much.

The way to think of every human organization is to imagine a man carrying a sack full of ro9cks up an incline. The steeper the incline, the slower his pace. The more rocks in the sack, the slower the pace. The smaller the man, the slower the pace. The man is the smart fraction, while the sack in society. The incline will be the natural resources available to that society. The greater the resources, the softer the incline, while fewer resources gets a steeper incline.

Japan is a big man with a small sack, but facing a relatively steep incline due to Japan being an island nation. Even so, Japan is a rich and modern place due to the large smart fraction and the relatively small dumb fraction. On the other hand, Somalia is a tiny man dragging a boulder up a cliff wall. The smart fraction, such as it was, now lives in Minnesota leaving the rest to make what they can from very little. No amount of clever political theory is fixing Somalia.

This explains why Argentina remains an ungovernable mess. Of course, the good times in the country have often been under non-democratic rule. When you combine democracy with a low-IQ voting base, the result is populist demagogues who promise to use their power to overcome nature. The pattern in Argentina is authoritarianism, followed by democracy, followed by populism, which leads to collapse and the return of the authoritarian to restore order.

Javier Milei is toward the collapse portion of the cycle. This enigmatic weirdo, whose first act after winning election was to convert to Judaism and make a pilgrimage to the Hassidic community of New York, is in the populist tradition. He has decorated his populism with libertarian slogans, but what the voters heard was that he will take from the elites and give to the people. Given the IQ of the population, most could probably not be able to tell a libertarian from a rhinoceros.

Given his backers, there is a good chance that Milei will succeed in pushing through his changes, as they have been done before. He will put the economy on the dollar, and this will stabilize prices for a spell. Then the shortage of dollars will lead to borrowing from his backers in dollars. Those bonds will then be passed off onto American pension funds and other institutional investors. This will continue until the Argentine government can no longer make its interest payments.

What Argentina tells us is what every ball coach knows. It is not about the X’s and O’s, but the Jimmy’s and Joe’s. In the realm of sport, a great coach can only do so much with bad players. His great coaching and brilliant strategy will always run into the limits of his players. In the realm of human society, the political and economic systems will always be limited by the available human capital. it is why the Nordic countries made socialism work, while Argentina cannot make anything work.

There is another useful lesson here for people in the West. The people running Argentina have always known the math of their human capital. This is a truth that is spoken about openly in the homes and offices of the ruling class. Despite the limits it puts on their ambitions, this gap between them and the masses is what keeps them in the elite, ruling over those masses. It turns out that being a smart fish in dumb pond is a pretty good path to the good life.

This is one reason Western elites love low-IQ immigration. It is like an acid on the middle-class, diluting the layer just below them. Sure, mass migration means the subways are unusable and much of the cities are too dangerous for cafe life, but it beats having to compete with smart strivers from the middle ranks. Western elites look at Argentina and envy their rulers. No matter how stupid they are, they never have to worry about being displaced by people with genuine talent.

The God’s Three Questions

Posted on November 29, 2023 by thezman

Fundamental to all human organizations are three questions that must be answered in order for the organization to survive. A group of people who come together by chance with no reason to be together will go on their way. A mob at a sporting event is there for the game, but once the game is ended, they disperse. The only point of them gathering in the stadium was to see the game. Even that reason, however, was temporary and was never intended to bind the fans together.

The first question for every human organization is “Who are we?” This is the most basic and if not the most important question. The answer could be something mundane and temporary like a sporting event, but this is an answer that assumes the gathering of people is intended to be for the mundane and temporary. A more lasting answer is one that provides the members with a reason to continue working together. A fraternal organization, for example, has an answer that is timeless.

That answer will then be linked to the second question, “To what end?” The people at a ball game come together to see the game and to cheer on the team. Since the founding answer is expected to be short-lived, the second answer is as well. The group that assembles near the old railway station with the password “sic semper tyrannis” for the purpose of organizing a rebellion has a longer-term point of their organizations, so the answers to these two big questions have a longer view.

The final and most important question that all human organizations must answer is the one of authority, “Who says?” The answer to this question is usually assumed, but rarely considered in the open. The people at the ball game do not talk about who says it is a good idea for them to come together and cheer for the team. Similarly, when the civil authority banned public gatherings during Covid, everyone just accepted that they had the authority to do so. The state is usually the answer here.

Those guys meeting near the old railway station to plot the overthrow of the government, however, cannot just assume the question has been answered, because ultimately the purpose of their group is to provide the answer. Maybe they think the civil authority has offended the gods or is violating the traditions of their people. The answer to “Who says? for them is those gods or traditions. There is some moral authority that provides them with the justification to rebel against the civil authority.

At a more mundane level, the people who assemble in the park on the third Saturday of every month for the purpose of cleaning the park also have an answer. They are getting together because they are the Third Saturdays Park guys, and the point of their organization is to keep the park clean. Their moral authority for doing so, the answer to “Who says they can do this” is their understanding of their civic duty. By the morals of their society, they feel a duty to clean the park.

To see how this works in American society, think about the civil rights movement, which has come under renewed scrutiny of late. As if by magic, America went from a rights-based society in which the citizens were sovereign to one ruled by a self-perpetuating elite charged with enforcing a regime of equity and diversity. The words on the original paper, which is supposed to be the moral authority, are still there in the museum but as if by magic new words on new papers now prevail.

This is the reality of civil rights legislation, particularly the founding court case of the movement, Brown v. Board of Education. A group of men came together in the name of what they called civil rights, with the purpose of overturning the rights based moral structure of American society, so they could insert a new answer to that fundamental question of society. The answer now is the law requires that all public policy bend toward the goals of diversity and equity.

It is an amazing trick, but it shows how powerful even a small group can be when they have answered the three big questions. That power only grows when they are able to undermine the majority confidence in the traditional answers. The new moral regime of civil rights looked attractive to people who had slowly been disabused of their long-held answers to the three big questions. Once Americans stopped believing in their rights as Americans, they were ready to believe in anything.

From a different angle, you can see how the three big questions can vex a movement before it gets started. Christian nationalism is largely a reaction to the moral degeneracy of the current age, but it seeks to be a positive alternative to the prevailing order, which it struggles to define. You can see that here in this post in the American Mind, which tries to flesh out what is meant by Christian nationalism. Another take is this post that addresses some of the points of the first post.

Christian nationalism fails the first test as it is unable to provide a coherent answer to the question, “Who are we?” As you can see in those posts, they are not even sure what they mean by Christian, much less nationalist. The plan seems to be that they will rally a majority around some vague criticism of the present condition in order to gain political power, which they will then use to order society to their liking. Their answer to that third question will presumably be the ballot box.

For a human organization to live past its initial enthusiasm of the moment it must answer the three big questions. Who are we? What is our purpose? By what authority have we come together to act in concert? This is why reactionary movements always fail to rollback what they oppose. The object of their efforts either evolves to evade their critique or it evolves a moral authority based in itself, like we see with the civil rights movement, that the reactionary cannot defeat.

If there is to be a revolt against the modern age, the people doing the revolting will first have to tackle the three big questions. In other words, the opponents of the present order must learn from the creators of the present order, the people behind the civil rights movement, and fashion a new moral framework that rests on a moral authority that the movement will defend to the last man. In other words, to defeat the old gods, one must build a movement around a new god.

The Baby Shortage

Posted on November 27, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the wacky Finnish movie Sisu, a post about the thoroughly ridiculous book by Zinc Wigger, which may be the worst book I have ever read. Then there is the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

People tend to look for linear explanations for the problems they see in the world, as they are the easiest to solve. If X is causing Y then you just have to do something about X and Y solves itself. If on the other hand, a combination of things is responsible for the undesired result, then things get more complicated. It is no longer a matter of fixing one thing, but of untangling a set of things, which may have their own set of causes, thus making the problem feel intractable.

An example of a multivariate problem that is the collapsing fertility rates that threaten the existence of the West. For example, Italy has a total fertility rate of just over one, which is below half of replacement. A people cannot sustain themselves very long if they are not having children. In fact, it only takes a generation of not having babies to overturn the population. In time, Italians will have only a vague idea of what it means to have a brother or a sister.

The first-place people look to understand the collapse in fertility is the soft, intangible things like culture and morality. In the middle of the last century birth rates started to fall and Western societies embraced materialism. In truth, birth rates started falling in the 19th century as the West industrialized. Having lots of children no longer made economic sense like it did on the farm. Among the wealthy, lots of kids stopped being a status symbol, so they lowered their reproduction.

Even so, family formation was still the norm. It was just that people had three or four children rather than seven and eight. There was no push to remain childless or avoid even basic family formation. It is fair to say that the trend away from marriage and family formation got going after the Second World War. There was the post-war baby boom in America and later booms in Europe, but by the time the West had become fully post-modern and materialistic, fertility was collapsing.

That is where most people look for an answer. Starting in the middle of the last century, the role of women started to change. First, they were encouraged to work outside the home, in addition to being a wife and mother. Then they were encouraged to work in lieu of becoming a wife and mother. The final leg on the transformation of the female role in society was the career woman. The point of her life was to compete with men and go home to a home full of everything but children.

The changing role of women is one big contributor to the baby crisis. If you want to destroy a people, put their women to work. If the ovens are being used for things other than making bread, the bakers can be put to other uses as well. The revolution in the female role has also revolutionized the male role. The pattern of normal family formation has been disrupted by putting men and women into the workforce for the sole purpose of serving the economic needs of society.

This is the most popular answer to the problem because it points to a spiritual sickness that confirms our bias. The hedonistic lifestyle of the present age comes with a punishment as it is morally wrong to have a materialistic society. Western people worship the golden calf, and the price is childlessness. The trouble with this answer is it does not explain why societies made this shift. It does not explain why people have so easily overcome the biological imperative.

That leads to the environmental answer. One version of this is the proliferation of birth control and abortion. Women trained to be men were handed unlimited supplies of contraceptives so they could have as much sex as they like, in fact they have been encouraged to have lots of indiscriminate sex, while not getting pregnant. Easy access to birth control along with strong social pressure on women to avoid having children has short-circuited the normal biological process.

This is where things get tricky again. Males should still want to find wives and have children, so what happened there? Clearly, the collapse in family formation and fertility is more than just a female problem. While women have been trained to be boys while gobbling down birth control to keep from getting pregnant, men have lost interest in doing what men have always done, which is find a mate. Simple observation says that men have become vastly less masculine over the generations.

In other words, both buyers and sellers in the sexual marketplace have changed in ways that discourage fertility. The females seek to be anything but wives and mothers, while males look for females that have no interest in motherhood. Of course, females reward this disinterest with casual, noncommittal sex. Even if a male wants children he enters a sexual marketplace as baren as the wombs of the women. The same is true of females who want to live the traditional female role.

Unlike the female problem, this is not easily explained by pointing to social conditioning or the introduction of birth control. One answer is that as society has made women less interested in being women, this has reduced the supply of females that males imagine as a potential mate. Men look for certain qualities in females that indicate they will be sexually loyal and committed mothers. Raise up a generation of wine guzzling whores and males will simply stop looking mates in that group.

There may be an environmental issue here that works on both sides of the sexual revolution in similar ways. An underappreciated truth of modern materialistic societies is they are awash in chemicals. Industrial society poured smoke into the air and trash into the water. You could see it. Post-industrial society fills the environment with tiny little bits of feel-good intended to make life easier. It is in the food, the water, personal products, and our physical goods. We are awash in alien chemicals.

Take for example, those birth control pills. Monkeying around with the most fundamental of life’s processes has been done without much thought. There have been no serious longitudinal studies on the impact of these drugs. Yet it is possible that they cast a shadow long past their initial purpose. This study suggests that oral contraceptives damages the fear circuitry of women. The female assessment of risk is an essential part of the female role in traditional societies.

Of course, lots of females with unbalanced emotional responses to the normal social stimuli is not going to go unnoticed. The same people making contraceptives are going to be right there to make drugs to treat the downstream consequences, which is why young females are gobbling down antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. We have also seen a spike in female binge drinking. A society full of paranoid and neurotic females is not going to promote family formation.

This may also be working the male side of things. Boys are routinely pumped full of drugs to keep them mellow in school. The ADHD crisis started just as fertility rates began to decline in the West. Pumping boys full of powerful chemicals is a lot like handing out birth control to females. All of the long-term studies on these drugs have been funded by the makers of the drugs, so we have no way of knowing if there is a long-term impact, but it is factor to consider.

Then you have the massive chemical bath that is daily life. Modern people eat food full of things they cannot pronounce. They douse themselves with personal products that are also loaded with alien chemicals. Individually and in the short term, these chemicals are all deemed to be safe, but what about mixing them into a long-term cocktail that is life in the modern age? No one knows and no one cares to know. It could very well be one more bit of pressure against our biological circuitry.

That is what makes changing the direction of Western fertility a challenge. The old Greek expression about a happy society being one where old men plant trees in whose shade they will never rest applies here. Children are the trees men plant in their youth, because they expect to be that old man, planting trees for generations they will never see, but they know will exist. The West does not plant trees or have children because Western people have no purpose.

In the end, there are certainly other factors that may be contributing to the collapse of fertility rates in the West. The environmental and economic factors are rarely discussed, because the cultural and social factors preclude any serious discussion of the fertility problem in the West. That means the first mover is the prevailing bias against families, family formation and the production of children. What drives it all is a dominant, top-down bias against reproduction, especially among Western people.

Trust The Unhappiness

Posted on November 9, 2023 by thezman

One of the few things most everyone can agree upon is that things are not good, and everyone seems to be unhappy about something. Conversations in real life or online revolve around this general sense of unhappiness. In fact, it is fair to say that online life is just one long airing of grievances. Often, people are primarily unhappy with the unhappiness of some group that is using their unhappiness to make demands on everyone else, which makes everyone unhappy.

This is not just a case of the internet skewing perception. Polling on the issue says that people think we are headed down a bad road. Three quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. As you can see in that poll, the last time a majority thought the country was on the right track was right after the January 6 protests, suggesting the people wanted to see a genuine insurrection. Since then dissatisfaction with the direction of the country has climbed steadily.

The funny thing is that most people would not be surprised to learn that record numbers of people are unhappy with the current state of affairs. If anything, they would be stunned to learn that thirty percent are content. How is it possible for these people to exist in the same reality as the rest? If the split were fifty-fifty, it would make sense as it would simply reflect the party divide. When it is seventy-thirty it means something is going on with that thirty percent.

Putting that aside, the question that naturally arises is what is it that is making people unhappy with the direction of the country? Again, polling provides a clue. The number one issue for people is inflation. The thing is the government tells us that inflation is slowly ticking down. It was 8.7% last year and is 3.7% now. If anything, people should be thrilled with the direction of inflation. In fact, they should be cheering the people who control the economy for their great work on inflation.

There is a another small clue. According to official figures, everyone who wants a job can have a job and the economy is humming along. Inflation was a problem, but it is going away, so the economy is officially in great shape. People seem to agree as unemployment is way down the list of concerns. Not only that but consumers keep spending and people keep buying houses. Despite the rise in mortgage rates, the housing market remains strong all over the country.

In other words, the economy is not a particularly good measure of happiness. Another big clue is that the one thing everyone agrees upon is the political situation in Washington is a problem, the main problem in politics. Large majorities of both parties think the endless drama in Washington is a problem. It is just behind health care, which is a serious problem with practical consequences that no one discusses. Health insurance costs continue to rise at multiples of inflation.

The thing is though, politics in a democracy is not supposed to be a polite and cooperative affair. It is supposed to be an ugly food fight. For the most part, it has always been an ugly food fight. Even in times of relative peace and tranquility the two sides torment one another. In the Reagan years, when the quality of life was near a peak, the Democrats tried to impeach Reagan. Under Clinton, when conservative actually got things they wanted, they hated Bill Clinton.

Another clue here is that there are things on the list that are complete nonsense, but they vex people to some degree. A good example is climate change, a thing that does not exist, but it worries 64% of democrats. At the same time, terrorism is not a real concern for most people, but Washington cannot shut up about it. Now they are claiming Hamas is under your bed. Last week it was racists. According to Washington, the next terroristic bogeyman is antisemites.

Put it all together and maybe the reason that the lack of cooperation is number three on the list, just below things that should matter to people, is that the people never see anyone in Washington talking about those things that matter. Not a single candidate has anything useful to say about inflation or health care costs. They have nothing to say about the drug problem or the growing crime problem. It is not that the parties do not get along. It is that they agree to ignore the important issues.

Even so, if things are good in the economy, despite some concerns over things like health care and inflation, people should be mostly content. Not only are people not happy, but there is also a sense of looming disaster in the air. The reason for that is something that is not captured in basic economic data. Things are slowly eroding for the white middle-class and that is what is causing the anxiety. A little here, a little there, middle-class white people are getting poorer.

This coincides with two other things. Once is the browning of American, which everyone sees everywhere they look. When the military put white guys back in their ads recently, everyone started laughing about it. It was assumed they did this because they are plotting a big war and will need competent soldiers. This is one of those data points that does not show up in economic data or polling. People sense the lights going out on their culture and they see signs of it in the household budgets.

Of course, they are not allowed to speak of it. That is the other side of this general unhappiness that does not turn up in polling. The ways you are allowed to express yourself have been reduced to generic economic questions or silly things like how the parties get along on your television. Not only do the people on television avoid talking about what matters to you, you are not allowed to talk about what matters to you and this is extremely frustrating for a growing number of people.

The way to think of it is the public square has fallen victim to the same forces that wrecked internet forums. The point was to create a place for vigorous debate, but certain people did not like the direction of the debate, so they found ways to shut down the debate, which crashed public trust in the system. It turns out you need high trust to maintain a vigorous public debate. With trust at all-time lows, everyone is going to be unhappy, not matter how good things are on paper.

The Emotive State

Posted on November 6, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: A young fellow I met at a secret handshake meeting has published his first novel and I would like you to buy many copies and recommend it to everyone. If you are a fan of the fantasy genre, then give it a try and let me know your thoughts. Supporting the people on our side, especially in the arts is the best political thing you can do.

Note #2: Behind the green door I have a post about house hunting, a post about the robot art critics of our future and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you look back at the government propaganda of the Second World War, you will see that it was rather generic in how it framed the enemy. The propaganda about the Germans was not much different from what was used in the prior war, except this time the Nazis were often portrayed as stupid. The Japanese were portrayed as absurdly Asian looking and monstrously cruel. Both were described as villainous aggressors who had no reason to launch their war on the world.

In other words, there was nothing special about the bad guys relative to prior bad guys, other than some superficial differences. There has always been a circular logic to wartime propaganda, going back to the Greeks. The bad guys are bad because they are the enemy, and they are the enemy because they are bad. What makes them bad, of course, is they do things we would never do, and they never do the things that we know good people are supposed to do.

Fast forward to the present and villains are either Hitler or Bull Connor, who have morphed into a Janus like creature that haunts every conflict. The foreign villains are always going to be Hitler, while domestic villains are the generic racist. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were Hitler, despite the obvious differences, while every white conservative is a fledgling Bull Connor. Donald Trump managed to be both, despite his Zionism and love of black people.

The language of public discourse now sounds like wartime propaganda because we now live in the age of emotivism. The term “emotivism” comes from an early 20th century school of ethics that claimed all ethical sentences are actually expressions of emotional attitude, as in positive or negative. When a speaker says something is good or bad, he is not stating an objective fact, but merely expressing his own emotional attitude toward the object in question.

Like a lot of 19th and early 20th century ideas around ethics and philosophy, this one fell out of favor due to its lack of utility. You cannot build a grand moral theory if morality is a subjective construct that arises from tradition or superstition, so there must be some universal and objective morality. Similarly, you cannot make a career in ethics if ethics are nothing more than conditioned responses. There must be some universal ethical code buried in the desert that must be found.

That does not mean the emotivists were correct when they made their sweeping claim about ethical statements. Just because the war propagandists say the bad guys are bad as a way to generate support for the cause, does not mean everyone who says the bad guys are bad is merely acting on their conditioning. Nor does it mean that everyone saying the bad guys are bad is a propagandist. It is possible to think the bad guys are objectively bad and do so without emotion.

Even so, it is a useful concept when thinking about how modern humans interact with one another in the public space. America is an empire built by war, so it is built for war, and therefore it is always on the hunt for war. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up in a wartime culture, which means the public square has been flooded with what amounts to wartime propaganda. There is always a war, which means there is always an enemy that demands you jeer at it.

Public discourse in this age is not about presenting facts or contesting various claims, but about displaying your allegiance to a perceived moral divide. The white people installing the “Hate has no place here” signs on their lawn would never live within a bus ride of black people, but they feel they must show the world that they are on one side of the racism line, the good side. The yawning gap between their emotive gestures and their lived experience does not register with them.

This is why the people we call the Left love the word extremism. The word is meaningless but in the mouth of a Cloud Person it is ridiculous. They accuse normal people living normal lives of extremism, because those normal people do not want to dress their son as a girl. Logically, it is nonsense, but emotively it is highly appealing as it not only expresses the users state of mind toward the bad people, it amplifies the distance between the speaker and object.

Of course, this is why everyone is Hitler now. It is not that Hitler is the evilest person in history or that he is an outlier in political villainy. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and many others were much bloodier and villainous. Unlike those other baddies from history, Hitler lets the speaker express a clear emotional state. That emotional state, of course, indicates your emotional commitment to a collection of people and ideas. Calling someone Hitler is like violently crying at a North Korean state funeral.

That is the way to think about public discourse in the emotive state. The ambitious and self-conscious are always looking around for a way express their “boo/hooray” instincts to the crowd. When the pro-Israel people rushed to their nearest platform to claim Hamas is Hitler, they were letting the world know their emotional state on this issue, not expressing an ethical or moral position. That is why the language spiraled into the absurd as they competed with one another.

That last part also helps explain the weirdness of public discourse. Since every issue is instinctively understood to be an opportunity to express an emotion, there is a natural competition to see who can be the most emotional. Piety in the emotive state is no longer about adherence to a set of ethical rules, but a consistency in showing the popular emotional response to issues. Instead of sacrificing a bull to the gods, the great and the good have a good cry at a candlelight vigil.

A biproduct of this emotionalism is that politics are purely performative. There is no practical point to any of it, as the primary motivation is to be seen expressing the best emotions at the time. While the mob sorts through their own emotional response to the emotive performances, the people with real power go about exercising that power to maintain and enhance their power. Politics has become the feelies from the novel Brave New World, rather than a marketplace of ideas.

While this is useful to the people with power, it may be short lived. There is a limit to how much raw emotion one can tolerate. Every day there is some new thing that everyone must emote about in public. Just as drug takers find they need increasingly powerful doses to get the desired effect, the emotive need increasingly stronger emotional responses. Like the drug taker, the end of this road is the inability to feel anything other than the lack of agony.

All human societies are moral societies. The rules governing virtue provide meaning and purpose to individual lives. The emotive state, in contrast, channels the natural desire to do the right thing, however society defines it, into the onanistic act of crying in public over violation of the right thing. As a result, the good life has no point, other than an endless crying jag. There is no point to this way of living, which may explain the catastrophic social measures of modernity.

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