Killer Drones

Posted on February 13, 2024 by thezman

Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

If you were alive a thousand years ago and decided you wanted to kill the local prince, it meant getting within reach of the prince. You would have to get close enough to stab him with a knife or poison his food. That meant getting past the guards and his retainers who were always with him. For anyone but those with regular access to the prince this was near impossible, which is why political assassinations were almost always a part of palace intrigue or a palace coup.

Ranged weapons changed this math a bit, but the bow was around a thousand years ago and was not a weapon for this type of activity. The reason is bows were primarily for hunting at close range or part of a system for war. The hunter would need to get close to his quarry as bows were not terribly accurate. In war, masses of archers operated a lot like a missile battery. They would fill the sky with arrows using volume to overcome the limited accuracy of the weapon.

The first real innovation in weapons that could be used for assassinations was the crossbow which arrived in the Middle Ages. We know the ancients had crossbows and used them in war, but they were not terribly accurate. The cost made them a weapon of war rather than a tool for private use. The crossbow disappeared from Europe for almost a thousand years, but then reappeared in the tenth century. Technology soon made them cheap and deadly accurate in the right hands.

This is why medieval leaders grew concerned with this weapon and tried to ban their private ownership in some cases. A weapon that a peasant could own and master that would allow him to strike the prince from a distance created a new problem for the ruling class of the time. A couple of angry peasants on the roof tops or even in the crowd could kill the prince. All of a sudden, having guards and a retinue was not enough, so the prince had to be more careful around the peasants.

Of course, we see the same thing happen with firearms. In the 18th century it was not a great weapon for assassinations. If you could get close enough you could kill the prince with a muzzle loader, but you would also be easy to spot. The first widely available firearms were not great for up close work. Pistols started to change this, and technology soon made it possible to conceal a deadly weapon on your person, thus making the assassin a real threat to authority.

Even though the problem was obvious, it took a while for rulers to figure out how to deal with firearms as political weapons. The same is true for things like roadside bombs and bombs delivered through the mail. A hundred years ago anarchists sent bombs to rich people through the mail. Of course, political actors were able to assassinate important people with the use of commonly available firearms. This is no longer an issue, as the ruling class has adapted to this threat.

This may be about to change. The use of FPV drones in the Ukraine war is doing to range weapons what war did for prior weapons. The FPV drone is a First Person Video drone that an operator uses to put an explosive on a target. The drone has a camera so the operator can look through that camera to guide the drone to the target where it explodes upon impact. Two years ago, these did not exist as a practical matter, but now the battlefield is littered with them.

The reason the skies are full of drones in Ukraine is they are cheap to produce and cheap to master. A team of two can become a highly effective weapon on the battlefield with a week of training on the drone. Training men to use million dollars tanks and artillery takes years. The drone is not a replacement for these weapon systems, but they are proving to be a cheap way to increase the combat effectiveness of troops that have the minimum amount of training.

A big part of the drone war is that the soldiers are learning to operate them and also repair them when needed. After the war, millions of men will go back to civilian life knowing how to make a cheap flying bomb they can guide to a target. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian men will come home angry at their politicians or the politicians of Europe about their conduct of the war. In other words, you do not have to be a genius to see the potential downstream consequences of the drone revolution.

For the last fifty years, the West has had to deal with terror attacks, which meant bombs, mass shootings and hijackings. Western elites had largely insulated themselves from assassination, so the only political violence was attacks on civilians. Now that is about to change as the terrorist can fly a bomb through the window of a rich person’s home or into the limousine of an important person. The math of political violence is about to change due to the drone.

History tells us that no one will notice this until a lunatic flies his homemade FPV drone into a government building. Then the security industrial complex will get the money to unriddle the problem. The battlefield will provide a lesson here as well because those soldiers using drones are working on defending against them. Reports suggest the Russians are way ahead on this, but it will not take long before the private sector in the West is working the problem of killer drones.

In the middle of the last century, it was still common to see politicians mixing it up with the people, but that no longer happens. Over time the threat of political violence, despite the rarity, has put the political class behind a wall. Drones will probably put them in a bunker, but it will also put the managerial elite in bunkers too. They will cease to be real people and instead be nothing more than images on our screens. The FPV drone cannot hunt what it cannot see in the wild.

It will also mean new rules to monitor the sale of components used to make drones, like we see with explosives and street drugs. You cannot go into a store and buy certain cold medicines without a note from the state. It will not be long before you must pass a background check to buy a drone. We may even see politicians try to ban assault drones on the grounds that they are weapons of war. It sounds ridiculous, but our rulers think this is a good ad, so nothing is too farfetched.

This thought experiment is a good reminder that war has downstream consequences that no one can foresee. Cheap crossbows were great for waging war, but lots of good crossbowmen in the crowd were not good for the king. The same proved true for other weapons of war. We are about to see the same thing with this war. In the fullness of time, it will be seen as an inflection point and maybe one that makes the economics of the Western ruling system unworkable.

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The Big Show

Posted on February 12, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door are a couple movie reviews and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

One of the novel things about this age is the role played by carnival acts in reinforcing public morality and shaping public opinion. With the exception of ancient Athens, human societies assigned entertainers a low status. After all, we still have the expression, “run away to the circus”, even though we no longer have the circus. The idea behind that expression is you reach such a degraded state that you literally leave decent society and join the low status world of the circus.

In modern America and the West in general, the circus not only plays a central role in society, but the circus performers also have enormous influence. So much so, in fact, the most powerful people want to be friends with the popular carnies. Every president has a stream of carnies coming through the White House, often attending state dinners with important foreign leaders. Carnies have even turned up in Ukraine, getting a special welcome by the Ukrainian dictator.

Of course, we have just had the biggest circus event on the American calendar, which is the Super Bowl, the title game of the NFL. According to the people in charge, almost all Americans stop what they are doing to watch the spectacle. The Super Bowl party has become something of an industry. Americans spend over $15 billion on parties that host three quarters of all adults. Naturally, all the important carnies seek a way to be part of what is the biggest carnie act of the year.

It is popular to compare the Super Bowl to the Roman games, maybe even dusting off Juvenal’s line about bread and circuses. There is some truth to that, but the Roman games were nothing compared to American entertainment. The games were a distraction for the masses and important people, but the performers were never treated like the modern celebrity or athlete. The performers in the arena were low status and important people made sure they remained so.

This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.

Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.

When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.

You see the warping power of the circus with the public romance of Chiefs player Kelce Travis and middle-aged warbler Taylor Swift. She is a super famous pop star, but she can always be more famous, so dating a famous sports star, especially one who gets to perform in the big circus, is good business. The NFL loves it and makes sure to feature this totally authentic romance in their shows. Any bets on whether these two love birds manage to build a life together?

All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.

It is why our politicians are mostly actors playing a role. The producers of the political shows are no different from the people who make movies, television shows or produce extravaganzas like the Super Bowl. They select people who can play the role, which often means picking people who will not question the script. Oklahoma senator James Lankford was picked because he is not smart enough to question things. He looks the part, and he reads his lines. That is why he is in the Senate.

It is easy to be critical of mass democracy, but the Super Bowl shows how powerful it is at controlling the masses. More people care about why Travis Kelce wore a suit made from garbage bags than the fact Joe Biden is non compos mentis. More important, it encourages the masses to empty their wallets in order to see the next show that the ruling elite will stage for them. Mass democracy is where the ruling elite charge the masses to be the masses.

For most of human history, carnies were relegated to the fringes of society because the running of society was too important to do otherwise. Today the running of society is over on the fringes, in the shadows where no one looks, because the carnies are now at the center of society. Maybe this is how the great experiment with participatory government is supposed to end. The masses think their voice matters, but in reality, no one cares, just as long as they pay full price for their ticket.

The Madame’s Shadow

Posted on February 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: For those looking for a good book to read, check out this new novel Faction: With the Crusaders, which is the follow on of the writer’s first novel called Faction.

One of the underappreciated aspects of the French Revolution is how the ruling class system became detached from the overall social system. The people in the ruling class were ignorant of what was happening in the country and not just the social unrest, but the economic changes that were coming. The people were just as ignorant about why their rulers were doing the things they were doing. Pre-revolutionary France was two black boxes left to guess about the contents of the other.

The United States is entering a similar period. Much of what makes up internet political content is either a reaction to some new emission from the managerial elite or an effort to contextualize those emissions. No one can be sure why the ruling class is doing the things they are doing, as it is not tied to anything normal people experience, so the Dirt People are left to produce their own explanations. Dirt People political culture is a debate about what in the hell is going on in the clouds.

The people in charge could very well be holographic projections from an alien world as far as anyone knows. Their actions and statements rarely correspond to their stated interests or the social interests. You see it in this big drama they are staging for themselves over the failed Senate bill on immigration. Somehow, official Washington convinced themselves that bundling Israel money, Ukraine money and open borders money was a winning formular with the Dirt People.

The reason they bundle these things together is one faction decides to make a trade with another faction in what is called log rolling. Congressman X wants money for a project and Congressman Y wants money for a different project, so they agree to support each other’s projects, even if they should be opposed to them. In this case, neocons go along with some sort of border reform, so they get more money for their efforts to start a nuclear war with Russia.

That is the theory, but in reality, the bill both parties in the senate thought was a winning compromise was something entirely different. It was the open borders crazies getting support from the blow up the world crazies so they could both get billions to fling open the borders and blow up the world. There was nothing in the bill that the voting factions of either party would want or even care about. No one wants open borders, and no one cares about Ukraine or Israel for that matter.

As soon as the senate bill failed, the demon known as Chuck Schumer told the world that he will be working with Mitch McConnell to come up with a way to give money to the blow up the world faction. This gives us a clue about what was really going on with that senate bill. We already have open borders, so that faction was not getting much from any deal, so the real issue was smuggling in the Ukraine money. Israel has check writing privileges at the Fed, so they get their money automatically.

That explains what was really going on here, but it raises a question. Why are these people so obsessed with Ukraine? We know the Kagan cult has enormous sway in Washington, probably due to their work with Epstein. We know that Ukraine is a money laundering operation and much of the money ends up in the pockets of connected people in Washington. That all makes sense, but we also know that this project is doomed, so why are they still obsessed with it?

The writing has been on the wall with regards to the Ukraine war for a long time, especially after the NATO planned offensive failed last summer. The reason General Miley is fishing now is he promised a smashing success. Instead, he delivered scenes of NATO armor on fire in the fields outside the Russian lines. Self-interest should have told Washington that it was time to find a way out of this mess. Instead, they remain singularly obsessed with this project.

People will be tempted to say it is money and power, as those are simple answers that let you stop thinking, but these people have the money and power. If Mitch McConnell wanted more power, he would never have gone along with this ridiculous bill and instead railed against the Ukraine project. That is good politics, especially in an election year when he could see his party return to the majority. Money and power say the republicans should be doing the opposite of what they do.

That brings us back to those black boxes of the French Revolution. A healthy society has a feedback loop between the people and their rulers. The practical interests of the people feed the rulers through various mechanisms like the media, voting, public protests, and economic behavior. The moral claims of the rulers, the things you ought and ought not do, flow down those same channels to the people so that the behavior beneficial to the elite becomes a habit of mind.

In pre-revolutionary France, this loop was broken. The economic interests of the elite were still based on a feudal understanding of the world, so they could not read the economic activity of the masses, which were shifting from that model. Similarly, elites were blind to what was happening in the newly emerging bourgeois class that was arguing about liberal ideas in salons and public houses. The feedback loop had broken and that left those two black boxes.

We have a similar problem in modern America. The media used to provide signals to the Cloud People about what was happening with the Dirt People. Now the media is poorly tuned repeaters of things said by the Cloud People. For example, they are all chanting the word “chaos” now, as if they received a memo instructing them to weave the word into their public performances. This makes the Cloud People feel good, but it also blinds them to what is happening with the Dirt People.

Similarly, Dirt People continue to get bizarre instructions through the economic and media channels about the constantly changing moral code. For no reason at all the Clouds begin to rumble and some weird new idea rains down on people. One day it is men in dresses falling from the sky. The next day it is Jewish dwarf in a green jump suit demanding money to fight the Russians. When the Dirt People look into the clouds, they now see a funhouse mirror.

There are two ways this can end. One is some people in the Clouds realize what is happening and organize a revolt against the other side. This is mostly what happened in the late-1960’s and 1970’s. One group of Cloud People revolted and ushered in a period of reform. The other way it ends is the Cloud People rally in defense of their position against what they perceive to be a peasant revolt. This inevitably leads to a peasant revolt and the collapse of the system.

What that senate bill suggests is that there is no one in the managerial class aware of the problem, much less interested in solving it. James Lankford, the Oklahoma senator who negotiated the deal with Schumer, should not even be in the senate much less brokering such a deal with an arch demon like Schumer. Lankford should be back organizing swim lessons at Bible camp. If there were any reformers in the system, they would have stopped this before this point.

The question that remains is whether or not the American system is past the point where reform is possible. There are libraries of books describing such inflection points in the French Revolution. The past is always uncertain, so there are lots of debates about when things became inevitable in revolutionary France. In the moment, however, no one seemed to know because no one could know. In other words, we will know it is too late when Madame Guillotine is set up across from the Capitol.

The Witch Hunters

Posted on February 6, 2024 by thezman

In 1692, nineteen people were hanged for the crime of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, the first of whom was Bridget Bishop, a woman who had been married three or four times and previously accused of bewitching one of her husbands, leading to his death. She was hanged after the court determined that she was a witch because she was a promiscuous liar. There was also the claim that she had a third nipple that mysteriously disappeared upon examination.

Witch trials were not unique to the colonies or to the Puritans. Witch hunting became a thing in Europe during the 15th century and lasted into the 18th century. It corresponded with the great upheavals that occurred with the breakup of the Catholic Church and the wars that followed it. It was a terrifying time in Europe and people naturally looked for reasons as to why it was happening. Naturally, they assumed it was the result of supernatural forces unleashed by the religious convulsions.

We like to think we have moved past this sort of superstitious madness, but superstitious panic is part of the human condition. In the 20th century America experienced the satanic panic. This was when over ten thousand people were accused of participating in satanic rituals in which children were abused. The panic was set off by a Canadian psychiatrist not named Jordan Peterson and his patient who claimed to have recovered memories of satanic abuse.

Eventually this led to wild claims about the sexual abuse of children at daycare centers around America. There was the McMartin preschool case where the operators were charged with all sorts of heinous crimes. There was no physical evidence, and the charges were eventually dropped after thirteen years of court cases. There was the Fells Acres case in Massachusetts, not far from Salem, oddly enough, where the owners were jailed for the satanic abuse of children.

The point here is that superstition is still with us. You can see it in posts like this one from what amounts to a modern witch hunting operation. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism could just as easily be called the Global Project Against Witchcraft and Sorcery and make more sense. The words “witchcraft” and “sorcery” have an agreed upon meaning while “hate” and “extremism” are reduced to nonsense words by the modern-day witch hunters.

Instead of Old Scratch tempting the morally weak into doing his bidding, the modern witch hunter tells us it is white kids using magical incantations to introduce evil spirits into the gaming community. You see, exposure to certain ideas can cause you to build a death camp, so Old Scratch has his minions use special magic words and phrases in the chat rooms of video games. Exposure to these words and phrases can cause the morally vulnerable to succumb to the charms of Old Scratch.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but it is right at the top of that post. They have a warning to readers that reads, “Warning: This analysis contains highly offensive and potentially triggering language and imagery.” They literally assert that words and images can have a physical effect on some people. The assumption is the effect must always be bad, which explains the warning. The only thing missing here is a reminder that the reader should make sure to wear her special amulet.

The entirety of the hate hunter industry rests on the assertion that certain opinions must lead to certain actions, not only by the person holding the taboo opinion, but by those who are exposed to the opinion. At no point will you see these people argue that the opinions are inaccurate, beyond some chanting of abracadabra phrases like “race science” which is supposed to protect the chanter from the opinion. They never explain how opinion must lead to action.

The closest you get is what amounts to the modern version of spectral evidence which they call “stochastic terrorism.” This is a novel concept that claims, “the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.” In other words, get enough bad words into circulation and people will do bad things in response to the bad words, but there is no way to know who will do the bad things.

Since there is no way to know who will do the bad things in response to the bad words, the only remedy is to eliminate the bad words. Oddly, the witch hunters cannot know who will be triggered by the bad words, but they know exactly which words will do the triggering and who possesses those bad words. We are right back to examining women for third nipples by self-declared experts in a field that has no rational basis, only moral certainty about their own righteousness.

The graybeards will talk about something they call the great interregnum, a time when interested intellectuals and commentators could speak openly about subjects like race, intelligence, sex, demographics, and immigration. This was in the 1980’s and 1990’s when America was feeling confident. The ruling elite was talking about the end of history, by which they meant their final triumph of all mankind. The Cold War was over, and they would lead humanity to the promised land.

The great interregnum ended as Western elites began to sense they were not leading humanity into the golden age. The rest of the world was stubbornly refusing to go along with this end of history stuff and Western critics began to question the sanity of the end of history business. In other words, just as witch hunting in the late Middle Ages was a response to the collapse of the old moral order, the modern witch hunting is a response to the collapse of elite moral order.

The Reformation was the result of an institution that had evolved down a dead end because it evolved for a world that was beginning to recede. The social and economic relations that made the Church possible were giving way to new social and economic relations, so a new moral order rose up to challenge the old moral order. American liberalism is facing the same crisis. It evolved for a world that no longer exists and has unleashed the witch hunters to find the cause.

That is why efforts with grandiose names like the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism attract money from the elites. They promise to find those responsible for challenging the moral order and suppressing them. The gaggle of petty Torquemada’s that have been unleashed are a rearguard action by an elite that sees itself in crisis and is terrified by the prospect of an alternative moral order. The modern witch hunters are part of the death throes of a dying system.

Political Onanism

Posted on February 5, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film I did not like, a post about code-switching and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Of course, this goes both ways. Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire often makes fun of Zoomers for being whiny and soft. Recently, a young girl posted a video of herself crying about having to work forty hours a week and still not having money to live like she did in college so Matt Walsh made sport of her. The young people who always complain about the boomers then piled in to tell him he was a horrible person for not empathizing with the young girls in the video.

At a personal level, generational politics is good as it makes money for the people doing it, but at another level it is bad for their overall political mission. The only people engaged in generational politics are white people who are either in white identity politics or aligned with it. Nick Fuentes casts himself as a white identitarian, but he spends a lot of time mocking white people. Matt Walsh opposes antiwhite politics, but like Nick Fuentes, he spends most of his time attacking white people.

You will note that the people who control the culture are fine with this sort of politics, despite it coming from people they hate. In popular culture you will never see a young black guy calling his grandfather a boomer. You will not see an old Jewish guy laughing at his grandson’s student loan debt. For the people who control the centers of cultural production, generational politics is only for white people. It is one part of their antiwhite pogroms that have come to define popular culture.

Generational politics is not politics at all but a form of political onanism. It is not only a fruitless activity, but it also discourages the sort of politics that could bear fruit. It is no different from the war of the sexes business, where feminists and anti-feminists seek to pit white males against white females. Whatever the truth of the mutual critiques, it is not an activity that can lead to anything other than temporary ecstasy. It is a form of politics that can never lead to good activism or any activism.

For example, look at the recent trend of attacking Reagan. Critics correctly note that he signed off on immigration reform. He also ushered in economic reforms that now feel like bad ideas, especially for young people. This critique of Regan usually ends with angry shouting at boomers for having enjoyed the good times that followed the reforms of that period. The boomers are bad people for having enjoyed a good stock market and low interest rates over the last forty years.

Let us assume that Reagan and his supporters were evil people who knew what they were doing would harm their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Let us also pretend that the boomers all agreed it would wreck the country for their children and grandchildren who they would live to see. Even if you could prove this, what would be the point of doing it? The most you get from it is the momentary satisfaction of shaking your first at an imaginary version of the past.

The reason to care about the past is to understand how you reached the present and to have some sense of what comes next. Understanding the politics around the Reagan era immigration policies is about understanding the nature of the people behind the just proposed immigration reform bill in the senate. Chuck Schumer put that together because he hates you and he has always hated you. There is no talking him and his allies out of hating you. He is the forever enemy.

There you see the problem with generational politics. The young people trembling with anger over the thought of Ronald Reagan are focusing on their grandparents rather than the people who finked on their grandparents, the same people who are now trying to close the door on America, by opening up the borders. It is a politics that turns old friends into imaginary enemies and enemies into fans cheering the people attacking one another in the arena of generational politics.

The Death Of Pop

Posted on January 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: A British man named Sam Melia has been convicted of speaking freely and faces prison time for it. He is a married man with a young family. If you feel inclined to kick in a few bucks to help him out, do so here. You can also buy something from his family’s online shop. Their tea is exceptional.

Heard a good new song lately? Given the demographics of this site the answer is most likely negative but there are some young people here. If their answer is yes, it is going to be something from the hip-hop genre. Of course, given the demographics of this site they would probably not admit to it. This was the number one hip-hop song last year, in case you are curious. This one was number two, suggesting that the worst form of music has managed to get worse.

When it comes to what most people reading this would call popular music, the results are not much better. This was the most played “rock” song of 2023. One cannot help but wonder if it was created by AI due to its generic power-pop sound. This is the second most played “rock” song, which is not terrible, but it sounds more like a country tune than a rock song. In fact, it was number three on the country charts. This song was the most played song on the country stations.

You can go through the music charts and listen to the top-10 in each category each year and find songs that are pleasant and songs that are hilariously terrible. Miley Cyrus should cut back on that five pack a day habit and spend the savings on some people who can write music that make some sense. The fun part about scanning these music lists is there are many comically stupid entries that got pushed into the top-40 by the mega corporations that control the music business.

When it comes to what most people reading this consider rock-and-roll, the landscape has been barren for a long time. Who is the best guitar player in a rock band that is under the age of forty? No one knows. He probably does not exist because rock music does not exist as a genre anymore. If you want to hear that sort of music you are going to be buying or streaming stuff from thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Even young people who want that style reach back to the oldies.

The question is why has the popular music landscape become a barren desert of corporate product? There are still plenty of young whites who would listen to knew guitar music. Blacks still like things like soul and rhythm and blues. Even blues music could have an audience if anyone bothered. This post by Brian Niemeier goes into the reasons why popular music, especially rock music, has collapsed. He did an earlier post on the same topic discussing different reasons.

Not discussed is the culture of the managerial class. The people running the music business are no different from the people running the other centers of cultural production in that they have had the antiwhite bug for a long time. The music industry went all in on hip-hop in the 1990’s. Part of it was the belief that it was a fresh market and part of it was cultural. For managerial types, hip-hop was cool because it was not white, while rock-and-roll was pale, male and stale.

One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.

For rock music, this has killed the feeder system for generating new sounds and new acts that made the genre possible. Even if young people were still dreaming of being a rock star, the clubs where they would learn how to perform have dried up. The culture around going to club to find new sounds and new acts has also dried up. When the music industry shifted to hip-hop and corporate pop, they also shut down the development system for creating various genres of rock music.

We are starting to see this in other areas. The military is worried that white guys from the South are no longer signing up as in the past. This decline in white participation is due to the same factors as the decline in white music. If you make your institution openly hostile to white people, they will politely avoid your institution. Before long, you will lose the ability to win them back. A good rule of life for institutions is that once you go black the whites are never coming back.

Race is not the only reason for the decline of rock music. As those Niemeier posts explain, the industry is suffering from systemic failure. There lies another useful example that applies elsewhere. The federal government failed in its duty to maintain a marketplace for music. They allowed corporate players to monopolize radio stations, which coincided with the consolidation of the music business. The result is a narrow system that operates as skimming operation.

We see this in tech. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and office productivity products. Innovation is non-existent in this area. Apple and Google own the mobile telecommunications industry. Despite the hype, there has been nothing interesting in mobile computing for a decade or more. The whole tech space is consolidating to the point where every business will be forced onto one of a few clouds of the cloud computing leviathan.

Of course, all of this can be chalked up to the end of empire. Empires are the result of failed societies, not successful ones. The Roman Empire grew out of the rubble of the failed Roman Republic. For half of its existence the Roman Empire operated like a mafia bust-out operation. The same is happening with the American empire, which grew out of the republic that died at Gettysburg. The main difference with the American empire and prior empires is speed due to the state of technology.

The shame of it is that like the remaining passengers on the Titanic, most Americans would enjoy some good tunes as the empire sinks under the water. That is not looking like it is going to happen, given the state of music. Who knows? Maybe Miley Cyrus will get lucky and made a good song for end-stage America. Or more likely, maybe a cage full of monkeys with some instruments will be the new Oliver Anthony and create an authentic anthem for this age.

The Clash Of Visions

Posted on January 24, 2024 by thezman

The New Hampshire primary turned out about how most sober minded people expected, with Trump cruising to victory. As expected, regime media and those in the anti-Trump cult have quickly moved onto other things. Even though the narrative on this election has been wrong so far, these people were sure the gods would deliver them from the terrible Orange Man in New Hampshire. Now they will update the script for the South Carolina primary in a few weeks.

Even though the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise to normal people, it does have a few things worth noting. One is the turnout. In 2016 when all of this was new and exciting, about two hundred and sixty thousand people voted on the Republican side, with Trump getting one hundred thousand votes. This time, with the results known in advance, three hundred thousand voted on the Republican side and Trump got one hundred and sixty thousand votes or fifty-four percent.

Further, exit polling says that only about a third of the people voting would call themselves “MAGA”, by which they mean part of the Trump movement. We do not have similar polling from 2016, but it is reasonable to say that most of Trump’s vote during those crazy days would declare themselves part of the movement. You also have to consider the fact that even Trump’s most loyal fans would find it weird to ask them if they were part of the MAGA movement, as if it is a club.

Even so, it says that people were voting for different reasons this time. Various anti-Trump groups poured money into the state to boost other candidates. Mikki Haley spent over twenty million on ads. The DNC spent millions last year getting their voters to switch to undeclared so they could vote in the GOP primary. About half of the Republican primary voters were undeclared, so it is reasonable to assume many will vote Democrat in the general.

What the regime tried to do with a fair bit of success is turn the Republican primary into a general election by flooding the voting booth with Democrats. It explains why Haley dropped her “tough conservative gal from the South” routine and morphed into “I want to speak to the manager” feminist hero. Her people had her go out and praise Hillary Clinton because they knew that half the voters probably voted for Hillary over Trump and would like to do it again.

It also tells us something about the dynamics of this election. This is not the 2016 election where people voted for Trump for the same reason the drunk guy in the crowd mooned the king or shouted derogatory things at him. In 2016, Trump was for many voters a harmless protest vote. In 2024 it means something different because things have gotten much worse since then. Note that for the first time primary voters put immigration at the top of their concerns.

There is something else here that may be driving a new dynamic in this election and that is the open shenanigans in this process. Think about the sort of person who schemes up a plan to get Democrats to vote in the other party’s primary a year in advance in order to subvert the will of the voters. This is a level of sociopathy that few people think is possible. Serial killers are not this devious. The people claiming to defend democracy are now out front with these schemes.

Of course, such a scheme only works if there are people willing to do it. Years of interacting with people who put up signs on their lawn promoting the latest thing is slowly changing how normal people see things. Thirty years ago, the typical suburban peasant thought they just needed find the right person to say the truth the right way and these people would see the light. Today, the typical suburban peasant thinks the woman with the BLM sign might be better off in another country.

What the typical suburban peasant is waking up to, even though he cannot articulate it, is that we are living in a clash of visions. The people on the other side of that sign explaining all the things that go on in that house have a view of the world that is completely different from most people. That vision often assumes that the people without such signs are what stands between them and the future. The vision of the self-anointed says the benighted are the problem.

This is because when they talk about “democracy” they are not talking about the mechanics of picking office holders. They imagine a society in which all of the moral questions have been solved. The only thing left is figuring out how to quickly attain diversity, inclusion and equality. Further, they assume that everyone must want this, unless they are evil, so the only reason we have not “made progress” is that these evil people are using shenanigans to confuse the masses.

In contrast, the typical suburban peasant imagines a world where he has a job he enjoys, friends to grill with and watch ball games and a chance give his kids a better life than he got from his parents. For him, democracy is about picking the best office holders who will take turns buggering through the problems. In most cases, the typical suburban peasant prefers the guy who will do very little, as things could always get worse so best not to rock the boat too hard.

It is not just that one vision is radical and utopian and the other conservative and pragmatic, but that the former sees the destruction of the latter as a proper and necessary part of their program. What we are seeing in this election could be a sign that the typical suburban peasant is waking up to this reality. It is not just that the middle-aged white woman with the BLM sign is wrong, but that she represents a danger to the life and welfare of the typical suburban peasant.

Whether or not this awakening among the typical suburban peasant is happening can be debated, but we can be sure he has yet to arrive at the solution. There can be no compromise in this clash of visions. When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same. As more suburban peasants wake up to the reality of sign lady, more will inevitably arrive at the only solution that guarantees their survival.

Replacement Theory

Posted on January 23, 2024 by thezman

Imagine a medieval city is under siege and the prince of the city is in his palace supposedly working with his advisors on how to break the siege. The people of the city are rationing food as no one knows how long the siege will last. The prince and his people, however, are living the good life. Now, imagine that the prince is quietly plotting a way to fling open the gates of the city at night so that the besiegers can rush in and have their way with the people of the city.

It sounds like an impossible scenario, but that is the world in which we find ourselves with regards to the immigration issue. The Constitution gives the federal government control over immigration policy. Supreme court rulings have recognized Congress as having plenary power over all aspects of immigration. It is one of those powers exclusive to the federal government. Congress passes laws on immigration and it is the duty of the executive to enforce them.

Of course, that is not happening. Congress has been refusing to pass sensible immigration laws for decades now. Whenever the Republicans have power, they start talking about amnesty. When Democrats have power, they start talking about granting citizenship to every human on earth. Meanwhile, the executive branch does nothing to enforce the existing laws. Instead, they scheme with both sides to increase the flow of illegals, while waxing romantic about the glories of immigration.

Like the prince at the beginning, the sovereign is deliberately failing in its basic duty while scheming to harm the people. The recent court ruling that will allow the border patrol to dismantle the razor wire barriers installed by the state of Texas on one part of the border illustrates the problem. The Biden administration went to court so they can throw open the gates in order to encourage more illegal immigration. SCOTUS sided with them until the issue is fully resolved.

Now, it is important to note that the court ruling was limited and temporary, as the issue is part of a larger case in the Fifth Circuit. It is also important to note that this should have been a 9-0 ruling, but four justices are alarmed enough about the problem to break with a century of precedent. Again, immigration, including border control, is a power reserved exclusively to the federal government. Under normal conditions, this case never reaches the Supreme Court.

The immigration issue is not an isolated issue. People engaged with this issue often miss the fact that the federal government is derelict in its duties across the board and often colludes with those seeking to destroy the people. This Breitbart story on systematic corporate theft is a good example. These companies steal your activity, which is your property, in order to use it against you. The government literally exists to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

This Twitter thread about a firm called Pendulum, that exists to help powerful people use that stolen data to create disinformation campaigns, is another example of how the government not only ignores its duties, but colludes with the enemies of the people in order to harm the people. That company is literally a corporate bullshit generator, but instead of being a source of entertainment, it seeks to be one of the many hands of the state throwing open the gates to the barbarians.

The point of the ruler, the reason for this role to exist, whether it is a prince, a warrior-king, a republic or the present managerial elite, is to protect the people. That is the primary reason for there to be a ruler or ruling class. Government is a protection racket whether it operates by consent or by imposition. A prince who flings open the gates to the barbarians or a managerial elite that defines itself in hostile opposition to the people is a contradiction that cannot endure very long.

This is why the court will struggle with this immigration case. It has never had to deal with a federal government that deliberately undermines the rationale for its own existence in this way. Instead, the court is equipped to deal with disputes between the states and the federal government or individuals and the government. It always assumes that the issue at hand is the government trying to do too much. The prince flinging open the gates is truly novel.

This brings up another question. Is the failure of the political class with regards to immigration a cause or a symptom? In other words, is what we are seeing deliberate or simply due to the collapse of the political system? Politics is the puppet show the ruling class puts on for us, so maybe the political dysfunction we are seeing is a reflection of a ruling class that is in crisis. Maybe the reason the state cannot perform its basic functions is it no longer able to predictably accomplish them.

All of this is beside the point for the people. Like those people hiding in the city thinking their prince will come up with a plan to break the siege, Americans continue to assume the system will eventually right itself. In the days of princes, when the people lost faith in their prince, they abandoned him to his enemies. Just as it is axiomatic that the primary duty of the state is protection, it is axiomatic that whenever the state fails in this duty the people must find a way to replace it.

False Choices

Posted on January 17, 2024 by thezman

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

Under normal circumstance, when someone makes a credible threat on your life, the response is not to offer a compromise or pretend the threat is not real, but that is exactly what conservatives are doing in the face of these pogroms. Christopher Rufo says the only option to these antiwhite pogroms is for white people to embrace a colorblind morality. In other words, white people should put all their energy into a fantasy program rather than defend themselves.

The vision of a colorblind society may be appealing, but the fact that it does not exist and has never existed is called a clue. Whites have displayed some capacity to live under such a regime, but nonwhites clearly cannot exist this way. Outside of European lands, the skins game is the rule. We will never see non-European societies fling open their doors and invite the world into their lands. As we see every day, when these people enter European lands, they bring the skins game with them.

What Rufu is offering up is a false choice. You can put all your energy into this fantasy of a colorblind, multi-racial, multi-ethnic society or you can succumb to the antiwhite pogroms that are raging right now. The point of framing it this way is to eliminate other options, like whites joining the skins game. Not only does this framing sideline other more reasonable options, but it also subtly endorses the moral claim by the left that there is something immoral about whiteness.

Another example is this Elon Musk post in which he says, “Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong.” The natural response should be, “who says?” but that is not what you see in the replies. Instead, everyone accepts the false choice that you can either allow nonwhites to play the skins game unopposed or you dream of a day when no one plays the skins game. Again, whites joining in on the skins game and maybe winning at it is off the table.

As an aside, his comment should make everyone’s skin crawl. He is saying that having personal preferences is immoral. Since all humans have tastes and preferences, a feature that makes up a large part of our nature, he is hoping to anathematize most of what makes us human. For Musk, the ideal human is a moist robot. This is the thinking that lies behind the culture war. With the right amount of force, people can be re-coded into what society needs or simply eliminated from the population.

Regardless, the point of his post is to foreclose the parsimonious option which is to let people discriminate for any reason they like. Free association was the foundation of America into the last century. The settlers to the New World literally acted on their belief that people should live where they want and with whom they want, which is why they got on boats and came to the wilderness. The immigrants of the 19th and 20th century acted on the same premise.

Of course, the ultimate false choice, the very heart of American conservatism, is the assertion that they cannot use the same tactics as their opponent or exact revenge when they have power, because that would make them as bad as the left. In other words, the choice presented as conservatism is to adhere to a set of rules that guarantee failure or succumb to some abstract conception of moral turpitude that is somehow worse than losing.

In the end, the culture war is not a clash of visions, but rather a struggle among white people about how best to avoid the fight. The winning side in this fight has always relied on some form of the false choice in order to prevent engaging the people called the left in the culture war. This means the path to victory in this civilizational struggle starts with overthrowing conservatism and its spiderweb of false choices. In its place is a new form of identity politics to counter the current identity politics.

DIE Another Day

Posted on January 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: There was no Sunday podcast this week. I got back from the new house and was simply too tired to do it. I may put the Sunday show on ice until I get the house finished, which means doing something else in its place. Behind the green door, there were two written items this week. A post about my trip to the witchdoctor and post about the aesthetics of modern cars. Subscribe here or here.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the massive food fight that erupted among the worst people over how the allegedly best people cheat like crazy. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the egalitarian blank slate religion of the Cloud People. In reality she was as synthetic as their empathy for people of color. Claudine Gay was a modern lawn jockey. Instead of standing on their lawn with a lantern, she held up her diplomas.

Then we have Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund guy who started this when Gay made unpleasant noises about Israel. He first threatened to withdraw funding and when that did not work, he went after her credentials. In a world of credentialism this was a declaration of war on the system. Soon the internet dug into Gay’s background and found examples of alleged plagiarism. Harvard then demoted her to being a million dollar a year political science instructor.

In response, MIT decided to get into the fight, and they leaked dirt to Business Insider about Ackman’s wife, who supposedly had a cut and paste problem too. It is ironic that people who are immune to the charge of hypocrisy thought they could use the charge of hypocrisy against people famously immune from the charge of hypocrisy. It is an example of how the hive mind operates. Once Ackman was declared outside the hive, he was no different from Trump or Hitler to the hive.

For his part, Ackman has declared a jihad against MIT. He is asking for volunteers to scan the academic work of everyone at MIT. He has also offered to fund the use of technology to expedite the process. Interestingly, the MIT president said all the same things as the Harvard and Penn presidents about Israel, but she has been immune from criticism to this point. Perhaps she thought the force field was not enough to protect her, so she launched this preemptive strike.

Again, it is hard not to enjoy this poo-flinging contest, but it obscures a reality at the heart of the whole thing. That is the logic of the egalitarian religion must lead them to these self-destructive ends. The reason for that is there is no way to reach the stated goals of this new religion without dismantling the standards and practices of the Western society that made the modern university possible. In other words, to dismantle whiteness they must dispense with the rules of whiteness.

The only reason Claudine Gay can exist is if the rules of the academy are changed to make it possible for her to exist. All along the way her mostly white advisors cut corners for her so she could move along through the system. They do this because it was the path of least resistance, but also for self-interest. They could subtly mention how they were once the advisor of this shining example of the new religion. This is social capital an academic can use for status seeking.

Systemic rule breaking is not confined to the grievance studies areas. The need to acquire totems of the new religion is everywhere on campus. The chemistry department at Rice University, for example, spends scarce resources on thirty different diversity and inclusion programs. The department now offers a for-credit course in Afrochemistry, which is taught by this woman. She will no doubt be lifted up on the shoulders of academics and socially promoted into a leadership role.

This all sounds fine except that when you populate your new system with people who are both incompetent and entitled, the results of that system will reflect this. The long running discussion about the decline of elite universities is centered around the fact the graduates are often astoundingly incompetent. The truth is, they may be incompetent at traditional things, but they are stars at the rules of the new system. The products of dismantling whiteness are good at dismantling whiteness.

The reason we have a crisis of competence in America is the managerial system is slowly being taken over by people who are only good at gaming the system to produce diverse, equitable and inclusive results. The managerial system is slowly being bent to the goal of denying its own existence. No one would dare hire Brooke Johnson to do chemistry, but she plays a role in who gets hired to do chemistry. Get enough Brooke Johnsons and Claudine Gays and the system begins to fail.

All of this was inevitable as soon as the moralizers of the mid-twentieth century declared a fatwa against nature. Once it was immoral to notice natural inequality and the fixed nature of people, the old system was doomed. The only permissible explanation for the persistent inequality was to blame the system and that meant destroying the system was the only moral path forward. The social promotion system is about maintaining the myth of egalitarianism.

That also means there is no way out for these elite colleges. Bill Ackman can expose all of them as plagiarists, cheats, and fools, but nothing will change because nothing can change as long as the core tenets of the faith remain. Unless Bill Ackman has a new religion for these people to embrace, they will burn the whole system to the ground before abandoning diversity, equity, and inclusion. This means the collapse of the university system is inevitable.

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