The Internet Of Reality

Posted on April 3, 2024 by thezman

Note: As everyone probably knows, VDare has been under assault by the regime for years and may finally be forced to close down. They have been de-banked so the only way to send them money at the moment is GiveSendGo. If you can spare a few bucks, they could sure use it.

In the early days of the internet, the public places were mostly populated by people who assumed wide open was the natural order. As opposed to the real world with its silos and private spaces, the internet would be wide open. Everyone could go into this new public square and say and hear what they liked. That is why the first public forums were wide open and comprehensive. The idea was that you had one big forum, and everyone could pile in and have their say.

It did not take long for that to fail. The early forums quickly splintered as factions that would develop and soon the forums were a riot of antagonistic posting. This was long before the smart people made it easy for the progressive kooks to get online, but even in a world of smart, tech savvy people, factionalism was an issue. Bulletin boards then UseNet and then message boards followed this pattern. They started centralized and open and soon balkanized into private platforms.

Once the internet was made accessible to the midwit progressive, this pattern became more toxic and nastier. Instead of college football forums unable to maintain civility amongst rival fans, it was the tone police and moral scolds creating dissention and demanding their rivals be censored. They worked to gain control of the platforms and then set about driving off their bogeymen. This led to alternative forums for the people who had been purged from the main platforms.

Another aspect of this new version of the old pattern is that the progressive kooks are unable to start their own forums, so they must infiltrate and co-opt existing platforms, which is why we have a censorious atmosphere online. It was not enough for the kooks to gain control of Twitter, for example, they also had to attack any alternative sites that sprang up in response. In other words, the kooks were threatening the normal balkanization dynamic that had existed since the start.

The point of all this is the last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. Of course, this is compounded by the fact that it is now impossible to avoid the scold. In the analog world you can easily spot the scold and avoid her. They have a look about them that is easy to recognize. If you knew nothing about Kate Starbird you would take one look at her and know she is someone who should be avoided. Online, there is no way to spot these spiteful mutants until they begin to immiserate you.

Here is where we see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

It is clear that kooks in other states are looking to follow the lead of New York, much like we saw with the internet. One site would be subverted by kooks and before long the other sites followed their actions. The peak of this mania was when every internet platform banned Alex Jones on the same day. Even obscure sites like Roku banned him in the rush to anathematize the man. The dream was to bring back internal banishment through de-platforming.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

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After Left And Right

Posted on April 1, 2024 by thezman

Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about Gen-Z being raised on the internet and a post about failing up in managerialism. The Sunday podcast was cancelled due to Easter and nothing happening. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: For those he need to hear my voice as much as possible, there is my appearance on the Killstream last week. I also recorded a show with a young YouTuber who asked some interesting questions.

Note #3: Some may have noticed that I did some experimenting with the comment system over the weekend. It was not without its bugs, so we are back to the basic setup for now. From time to time you may see things like this as I experiment with ideas for the new site that is in the works.

Over the last decade, “conservatism” in America has declined reputationally largely due to the failures and embarrassments of professional conservatism. Depending upon your disposition, the Bush years either sent the conservative movement over a cliff or exposed it for being nothing more than a financial hustle. There are other views of the failure of professional conservatism and all of them are right in their own way, but there is no denying that the Buckley project has failed.

As a result, the last decade has seen various efforts to create a “new right” to replace the Buckley project. Remnants of the alt-right went so far as to call themselves the “new right” for a while, but they had nothing to offer but new slogans. The Claremont collective has fumbled about trying to create a new conservatism, piggybacking on the populism of Donald Trump. Yoram Hazony has tried to preach a new form of nationalism to take the place of conservatism.

So far none of these efforts has made much progress, outside of creating some interesting debates at times. Most recently Claremont published a long essay on its main site attacking the contradictions within Hazony’s nationalism. On their American Mind site they posted a response from David Goldman, formerly known as Spengler in the Asia Times, coming to the partial defense of nationalism. Less rigorous minds have also waded into the topic with echolalic babbling.

One problem that all attempts to fashion a new right face is something Kesler touched on in his essay about Hazony’s nationalism. America is and always has been a multicultural country. Even putting aside the race issue, the thirteen colonies that came together to form the United States were composed of people with unique cultures and histories, which were often at odds with the other states. These differences pre-dated the colonies themselves, coming over from the Old World.

This presents an obvious problem for nationalism as by definition it assumes a common people with common ancestors. Nationalism is exclusive to a particular people, which cannot work when the people are a mixed bag of various people from different parts of the world with different histories. The story of the Tidewater is different from the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Framers understood this which is why they settled on a federal system of government.

As Samuel Goldman explained in his excellent little book, After Nationalism, what has held America together since the beginning is a combination of the covenant, the crucible and the creed. The covenant being a mission to build the city on the hill, the crucible being the shared struggle that binds our various people together and the creed is the statement of shared principles. To one degree or another, these concepts still turn up in our political rhetoric.

Early in his book, Goldman quotes the historian Wilfred McClay, who wrote, “Ties of blood, religion, and soil are not sufficient to hold us together as Americans, and they never have been. We are forever in the business of making a workable unity out of our unruly plurality.” This is the problem with nationalism as a defining force in America, but it also presents a problem for anything calling itself conservatism. Which is why the covenant, the crucible and the creed have shaped conservatism.

Like nationalism, conservatism is strongly tied to the past. You cannot have nationalism without a shared history or at least an overlapping history. Different parts of Germany may have unique pasts, but they share enough of a common past to feel a part of the greater concept of German. Similarly, conservatism seeks to preserve social order by maintaining historical continuity. Conservatives do not oppose change, but instead seek to contain new ideas within the framework of the past.

Central to conservatism is the notion that some things are too important to be put up to the scrutiny of reason. Questioning a tradition, for example, should be resisted even if the logic of tradition is no longer obvious. Conservatives assume that the shared habits of a people exist for a reason. Altering or abandoning the old ways risks unknown and unwelcome consequences, so change must be gradual and cautious. Traditions are the result of trial and error over many generations.

The specter that haunts conservatism, however, is who decides that certain things are not to be questioned? Traditions and customs do not fall out of the sky onto people, but are the product of people, a specific people. The reason they are traditions is they have been handed down to you by your ancestors. They are part of your cultural inheritance that comes from those with whom you share blood. Again, this is something the Framers understood as they debated the new Constitution.

What this means is American conservatism must limit itself to defending the political order as defined by the Constitution. Since that order allows for unlimited changes to the document itself, not to mention unlimited interpretation of the plain text, conservatism is committed to defending a moving target. It is why American conservatism has always been, as Robert Lewis Dabney observed a century ago, “the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”

There is another problem for conservatism in America. The thing they wish to defend, even if they dismiss the centuries of innovation since its creation, is itself the product of the radical idea of the intentional society. The Framers started from the assumption that they could create the society they wanted because society is, as John Locke understood, the result of human labor and intention. Maker’s knowledge lets man create a society as he would make anything else.

If it is perfectly moral and possible to create a nation out of the wilderness, then it is perfectly moral and possible to recreate that nation, even create a new nation from the old, to meet the demands of the present. In other words, American conservatism must defend that which it claims to oppose, because what it defends is the radical idea that we can make our society into anything we choose. America is, after all, a radical experiment in self-government.

There is a way out of this that some conservatives proposed. Pat Buchanan, for example, argued that the Constitution was the result of British people living in the New World for two centuries. The final organizing document by the Framers was simply the only option possible for the American people. Defending the Constitution is a defense of the people and history behind it, not whatever abstract political theories some people claim as the inspiration for the Constitution.

That may be true, but it runs into that same old problem. The people who created that world and the political order that sprang from it are long gone, along with their sense of history and identity. That America was not just European. It was almost exclusively British and Protestant. America will soon be majority-minority and the founding stock is down to ten percent of the population. Defending something that no longer exists is no more possible than defending a moving target.

All of this brings us to why there will not be a “new right” that emerges from the wreckage of professional conservatism. There never was a right in America, at least not since the North conquered the South. Once the last bits of hierarchy were washed from the continent in the blood of the Confederacy, conservatism ceased to be a thing that could take root in the New World. America is and continues to be a radical experiment, a perpetual revolution seeking to reach the end of history.

This is not all bad news. Conservatism in America has always been a reaction to the peculiar ideology of progressivism which emerged in the 19th century. Conservatism sought to create an alternative ideology as an antidote to progressivism. The failure of conservatism may lead to a greater understanding that the antidote to ideology is not ideology but the anathematization of ideology. In its place there may grow a chemotherapy to the cancer of ideology.

This could be helped by the fact that we seem to be reaching the end of the ideological age, as what we call liberal democracy, but is the mature version of American progressivism, reaches its end. The last ideological states are all in a crisis, which has put the ideology in crisis. Just as failure anathematized the other great ideologies, the failure of Western liberalism may do the same for progressivism, perhaps opening the way to an organic organizing ethos.

Illiberal Multiracialism

Posted on March 27, 2024 by thezman

This post on Twitter from Vivek Ramaswamy got a lot of attention and not the good kind of attention he has been expert at attracting. Instead, the replies were full of baffled people wondering how he could say such stupid things. To many people, it looked like the sort of race-swapping that is common with Hollywood. Instead of black Vikings he was saying there were black roman emperors. He then went on to claim that these truths were somehow erased from history.

As many pointed out, there were no black emperors and Philip the Arab looked like a typical Roman at the time, as in European, because North Africa was settled by people from the other side of the Mediterranean. The “browning” of North Africa happened long after the Romans were gone. The best part of that thread is he was buried by comments correcting him for his nonsense statements. Maybe white people have reached a point where they will not tolerate this stuff.

The post, however, highlights the impossibility of a multiracial society that operates along liberal democratic lines. Liberal democracy assumes a natural equality among people in that we are born with natural entitlements. Therefore, we get equal rights and privileges in a liberal society. That is fine for an ad hoc arrangement. Pirate ships were egalitarian in their operations, for example, but the pirate ship was never intended to be a permanent arrangement among the diverse men.

Human societies assume permanence and that means they require a story for how the society came together. The Romans, for example, had the legend of Romulus and Remus who founded the city of Rome. The Rape of the Sabine Women is another important part of the story of the Roman people. The origin myths of a people are specific to a people; thus, their history is specific to them. In other words, a people’s identity is exclusive to them.

This is why a multiracial egalitarian society is impossible. You have different people with different identities rooted in different origin stories. Any effort to write the origin of one people into the story of the other people will be viewed as theft. Vivek Ramaswamy in that tweet was trying to steal a part of European history on order to insert his people into your story. No doubt he saw the resistance to this as a slight against him and people like him. This is now part of his people’s story.

You see this with the old race divide in America. Black people have an origin story that depends on white people being the villain. White people have an origin story that does not include black people. Inserting blacks into the white story requires whites to accept guilt for things they did not do and shame for ancestors who made it possible for any of us to have this discussion. It simply cannot work, so any effort to make it work aggravates the natural racial friction in America.

This does not mean a multiracial society is unworkable. The Russian Federation is a multiracial society that generally works. For a thousand years the dominant Russians have ruled lands with significant minority groups, almost all on the fringes of their territory, while avoiding many of the problems we see in the West. The most difficult period was in the early years of communism when the egalitarian impulse tried to eradicate the natural differences between people.

What you see in modern Russia is peaceful separation. The fringe areas populated by various non-Russian ethnicities are left to have their own culture and traditions, as long as they respect their place in Russian society. These ethnic groups have an identity that is tangled up in their relationship with Russians, but also separate and distinct from that of the typical Russian. The modern Russian state encourages intolerance of ethnic agitation among the Russians and the Russian minorities.

Much of the rhetoric you will hear from Russian officials about their ethnic minorities will sound like the nonsense we get from Western rulers, but it has a different purpose, and it is received by different ears. Russian multiculturalism assumes a dominant Russian culture that includes a tolerance of minority cultures, as long as they never create trouble for the majority. In other words, the Russians take some pride in not having wiped out these minorities from their lands.

Applying this civilizational model to the West would mean a European identity that assumes a natural dominance over European lands and the people in those lands, regardless of their minority identity. This sort of cultural chauvinism would allow blacks in America, for example, to hang onto their story of victimhood only so far as it gives them pride in who they are now. Antiwhite animosity would be suppressed officially and unofficially through general intolerance.

Of course, this means applying different standards to different people and that is where things run afoul of the liberal project. In order to maintain peaceful separation, it requires different standards of conduct and mutual exclusivity in large parts of the origin story of the different racial identities. The story of black people would include whites, but not in a negative way, but also exclude whites. The same would hold for the story of the white population with regards to blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and others.

There are obvious problems with the concept, not the least of which is the narcotic of egalitarianism that flows through the veins of every European. Before the West can appropriate a civilizational model to managing their now multiracial societies, they must first break their addiction to egalitarianism and natural rights. That will most likely only come through a struggle to avoid extinction. Even so, civilizationalism may be the only path forward for the West if it chooses to survive.

Bridge Thoughts

Posted on March 26, 2024 by thezman

In the 18th century, planners did not have to worry too much about ships smashing into bridges because ships were small and made of wood, while bridges and seaports were massive and made of stone. If a captain made an error and hit a bridge support, his ship would be damaged, but the bridge would be fine. The worst case is it would take a few days to clear the debris of the ship from the waterway. In other words, the seaways were somewhat error resistant.

The news of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse is an obvious example of how this is no longer the case in the modern world. That ship is massive, relative to anything that existed a century ago, much less the 18th century. The bridge, in contrast, was a slim wisp of thing compared to bridges in the past. When it was completed half a century ago it was the third longest truss bridge in the world. Now, of course, it is a pile of scrap iron after having been knocked off its moorings.

People will naturally rush forward with their favorite pet theory about how this could have happened. None of these claims are about the accident or why it happened, but rather a way to use the event to promote their favorite theory. Steve Sailer has decided to avoid the usual answers and instead go with an insane theory about bombs being squirrelled away on the ship. No doubt the usual suspects are working on a plot where Putin is responsible for the accident.

For those who know how ports operate, especially an inland port like the Port of Baltimore, the most likely answer is more mundane. These ships are piloted by a harbor pilot in and out of the upper bay. These are men who know every inch of the waterway and rely on a large support staff to pilot the vessel. That means the cause is a failure of that system, most likely the ships navigation systems. It lost power and the crew was unable to restore power before hitting the bridge.

Putting that aside, the port is the ninth largest seaport in the country and has certain specialties like the import of cars, which cannot be easily replaced. Until the bridge debris is cleared from the waterway and the waterway is inspected, the port will remain closed, which will create supply chain problems throughout the year. Of course, the bridge is a vital part of the local ground transportation system. Baltimore is surrounded by a beltway system and this bridge was a key part of it.

Replacing the bridge has been debated over the last ten years, but the will to do it has never been enough to overcome the sclerosis that plagues state politics. A project that will not be done until most of the people voting on it are dead or retired is never going to get a lot of support in the modern age. The things that get pols trending on social media is what gets the support, even if the reason to be trending on social media is the ghetto has just lost track of one of its simpletons.

Now they will have no choice but to replace the bridge, but that will take years to debate and then years to get approval and then more years to build. The people who make the economy work will figure out ways around this new obstacle in the meantime, so there will be no sense of urgency to address the bridge problem. In fact, it is entirely possible that the bridge is never replaced. A generation from now people will look at the remaining pillars the way people look at old Roman aqueducts.

If you want to contextualize this accident into something bigger, the best approach is from the angle of complexity. Like everything else in the American economy, our ports have become extremely complex systems with many points of failure. There are millions of people with the word “logistics” in their job title who make sure that some point of failure does not fail in the complex system of moving goods in and out of the country and around the country to your store.

One reason for that is the berserk quest for efficiency. Every manager in the system dreams the dream of that box of Cheerios arriving on the shelf just at the moment you decide to reach for it. Everything in the economy is now geared to reduce the shelf time, warehouse time and transport time of every item. Every bit of extra is cut from the system to maximize profit, but the result is often fragile systems that work well when there are no problems but fail miserably in a crisis.

The complexity problem is turning up in the Ukraine war. Russia, with its massive industrial base and redundant systems, now outproduces the West in terms of military supplies at a fraction of the cost. Western countries with massive GDP’s are faced with impossibly complex economies that cannot be quickly modified to address the need to make even simple things like artillery shells. Like the now collapsed bridge, solving this problem will probably never happen.

That is the other angle to this accident. That bridge was built in 1976 and was out of capacity twenty-five years ago. A second span should have been started at the turn of the century with a third span or another bridge up stream in the works, but these sorts of projects are not popular with modern politicians. Half a century ago, the political class was not obsessed with media attention, so they could think longer term about projects that would benefit those who followed them.

It is popular to blame “democracy” for our present ills, but our political system has not changed in fifty years. If anything, we are less democratic today. What has changed is the explosion of media. We now live suspended in a media solution. As a result, even the lowest person measures himself by likes, follows and media exposure. This has warped the political class the most, turning them into ridiculous carny acts that do nothing but find ways to get attention in the mass media.

In the end, none of this matters. The bridge story will dominate the news for a few days this week, but then the media will be onto the next thing. By the end of the summer the port will be reopened, and the bridge will be forgotten. The bridge is a symptom of a much larger problem for which no one has any answers, at least not answers that get you trending on Twitter. Maybe the remains of the bridge will one day be a warning that a people that does invest in its future has no future.

The Gangster State

Posted on March 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the horrors of living in a town free of diversity and a post about the internationalization of Hollywood. The Sunday podcast was posted early for a change. Subscribe here or here.

Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the main question immediately after it is who conducted the attack. This is not just for the mundane reason of apprehending the people responsible, but also for understanding why they did it. Terrorism, by definition, exists within the context of a larger political cause. A crazy person opening fire at a mall is a different thing than an Antifa member opening fire at a church school. The former is simply crazy while the latter has a political motivation.

After the attack on the Moscow music venue over the weekend, the first thing people naturally asked is who did it. The Russians quickly apprehended the four gunmen and then the question shifted to who sponsored it, as it was clear that these four people could never have done this alone. The Russians have arrested a dozen other suspects they think may have been involved, but the four Tajiks have been identified as the shooters and they have confessed.

The bullets were still flying when the many bot accounts operated by American intelligence started to flood social media platforms with claims that it was Islamic terrorism, which was a red flag. Then Washington rolled out the ISIS-K claim, which is another red flag. No one had ever heard of ISIS-K until now, so that is one problem, but the bigger problem is ISIS is an American creation. Coupled with the recent State Department warnings, it looks suspicious.

It gets even more suspicious when internet sleuths figured out that the head of ISIS-K is a person calling himself Sanaullah Ghafari, who used to work at Bagram airfield as a special guard to the vice president of the American backed Afghan government, until that government was ousted by the Taliban. Mr. Ghafari also has ties to NATO as a sanctioned arms dealer. Maybe this is the wrong Sanaullah Ghafari, it is a common name, but it is another red flag.

What we know is that four Tajiks were given weapons that are exceedingly rare on the black market and paid a quarter of a million dollars each to go on a shooting rampage in Moscow and then they fled toward Ukraine. Washington claims they were backed by an organization that was created by Washington and appears to be led by a man with deep ties to American intelligence. It should be noted that Washington is now backing off the ISIS story, which can be interpreted in several ways.

There is another way of looking at this. It is possible that the White House simply has no idea what is going on with Project Ukraine. This would not be the first time they were caught off-guard by a terrorist act. After the Nord Stream attack, the Biden admin jumped from story to story, trying to find a narrative that people would accept, until the CIA planted the story of Ukrainian frogmen using a dingy to float out into the sea and plant the bombs on the gas pipeline.

The Biden admin was also lost when Daria Dugina was blown up by a car bomb in an attempt to assassinate her father, Alexander Dugin. The first story said that there was no way the Ukrainians were behind it. Eventually, they had to admit that it was most likely Ukrainian intelligence behind the assassination. This event was the start of a pattern where Ukraine or friends of Ukraine in the murky world in which the Kagan cult operates do things outside official channels.

Of course, stupidity always plays a role in these things now. Back when all the best people were sure the looming Ukrainian offensive would smash the Russian lines, Mark Milley, told a gathering of top NATO commanders and Ukrainian special forces being trained by the American military, “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night. You gotta get back there, and create a campaign behind the lines.”

Every day for over two years voices of authority in Washington have said that Ukraine must win by any means necessary. European leaders come out daily and say there are no red lines when it comes to beating Russia. France is now threatening to send their troops into Ukraine and encouraging other NATO countries to join them. If you are running a CIA operation in Syria, like Sanaullah Ghafari, you are not going to hesitate to help your friends put together a terror attack in Moscow.

Getting back to the central question of terrorism, the answer here may be that this is the result of the Biden administration losing control of their foreign policy. They are no longer calling the shots. Instead, it is the shadowy world of the usual suspects doing what they like without regard to the political or geopolitical consequences. It is not as if the political class ever had tight control of foreign policy. Maybe now they no longer have any control over what happens in their name.

If you want further evidence that the White House no longer controls foreign policy, you can look at what Israel is doing. Netanyahu is openly defying the White House in his campaign to drive the Arabs out of Gaza. Anthony Blinken has been sent there to beg Netanyahu to stop a dozen times to no avail. If America’s greatest ally no longer cares what the White House has to say, maybe Israel is simply working with people it sees as more important than the White House.

Since the most likely suspect in the Israel case is also behind Project Ukraine, it is not a big leap to think they are working with the Ukrainians to conduct terrorism. It is also not a big leap to think that these same people would turn their weapons on politicians that do not support their projects. Given the direction of the Ukraine war, this may explain why European politicians make daily devotionals to the project. They do not want any Tajiks showing up at their house.

All of this is speculation and supposition, but it fits in with the general breakdown of order we see in the Global America Empire. For the last ten years this has been the defining feature of America. The rules are falling to pieces because powerful people refuse to abide by them or enforce them. This Ukraine fiasco suggests that America is falling into gangsterism. Powerful players no longer care what elected officials say or think as they conduct their private agendas.

Death Of The Middle Man

Posted on March 12, 2024 by thezman

Imagine you are a rich guy, maybe a banker working at an investment house, and your neighborhood starts to have a crime problem. Maybe you get mugged on the way to your car or perhaps you start hearing about break-ins in the area. All of a sudden, your safe world is no longer safe. You think that maybe it is time to hire some private security to enforce the rules, but you find that they do not exist. All of a sudden, your cash is not all that important to maintaining your lifestyle.

That is the position of Western political elites as they come to terms with the reality playing out on the Ukraine battlefront. The West has lots of cash. They can literally create what they need from thin air. Sure, it has created inflation for the Dirt People, but only a sucker cares about them. Ukraine is what matters. Even though Congress is slow walking the next pile of cash, there is still plenty to send Ukraine. The EU and now the U.S. are plotting to “loan” Ukraine the money.

The trouble is dollars and euros are not much use on the battlefield. What Ukraine needs is machines, ammunition for the machines and men to run the machines, but that is something the West is struggling to produce. CNN has a story up that reports the Russians now produce three times the number of artillery shells as America and Europe combined, which is probably an understatement. The production numbers cited are more theoretical than actual for the West.

The industrial aspect of this war has been a topic of discussion around here since the war started, but like the rich guys living in their fantasy world of wealth and access, the political class of the West has not thought about it. Making stuff, inventing stuff and fixing stuff is for the Dirt People. Cloud People need their time and energy to think about new ways to describe the glorious future or turn bits of invented money into more bits of invented money so they can underwrite their lifestyle.

What the war in Ukraine is doing is reminding the world that the strength of a country is not magical numbers in reports that no one reads, but the hard cold reality of making stuff, fixing stuff, and inventing new ways to make and fix stuff. You can probably throw in food production, which is a form of making stuff, but a unique form, along with digging stuff out of the ground, like energy products and minerals. Countries good at these things will be strong countries.

The West no longer does these things. America and Europe still grow lots of food but the war on food production, as part of the Gaia cult, is threatening to kill off whole swaths of farm production. The war on digging up the ground is mostly about aesthetics, as the Cloud People hate seeing people do dirty work like farming or digging minerals out of the ground. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. has dropped by half over the last half century, despite the population growing by a third.

This is why the West is losing this proxy war with Russia. Despite having a far smaller population and smaller GDP, Russia still makes things and has the facilities and work force to make more things. If you can grow your own food in vast excess, supply your own energy needs, plus much more for export and you make things that people around the world want to buy, you are going to be immune from the machinations of the money changers in New York and London.

It goes beyond this though. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and the world’s biggest consumer market. India is the second largest consumer market, and it is emerging as a manufacturing powerhouse. Russia is now the fifth largest economy in the world, despite the sanctions. What is happening here is the places where things are made and dug out of the ground are getting rich, which means they can also buy things, like the stuff they make for Western markets.

What we are seeing here is the death of the middle-man economy. For the last half century, America has positioned itself to be the money lender, the regulator, and the facilitator of economic activity, rather than the producer. To finance this, much of the manufacturing base was auctioned off and the economy became reliant on the production of credit to the global economy. To a lesser degree, the EU has done the same thing, as the junior partner of the United States.

What the war on Russia is revealing is that in a street fight, the banker has no chance against the guy who works on a factory floor. Sure, the banker has a Brazilian Jujitsu trainer and access to the finest steroids, but the working man knows how to fight and win, so it can never be much of a match. Further, in the contest of countries, it is the rules of the street that matter, not the rules of the boardroom. The competition of nations is always a street fight.

Long ago, the paleos made the point that you cannot have an economy based on everyone doing each other’s laundry. The great transition from an industrial economy to a service economy was cheered by the Cloud People but people like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot warned that it was unsustainable. A generation on and the world is learning that those old guys were right. A country that does not make things, fix things, and invent things is no longer a serious country.

Twenty years ago, Yuri Slezkine observed in his book, The Jewish Century, that the American economy had been transformed into one that primarily served the interests of the facilitators and middle-men. Jews, he argued, were unusually skilled at these tasks and that is why they have been so successful. According to the Atlantic, the golden age of American Jews is ending, and probably taking America with it. It turns out that the middle-man economy is not sustainable.

Burn The Boats

Posted on March 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Super Tuesday results and a post about my thoughts about moving from Lagos. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

The Ukraine war is the latest example. When the Russians threatened war, it was over the Minsk agreements not having been followed. They had a specific set of claims against Ukraine, and they wanted help from the West to enforce those claims, but instead they got bellicose threats from Washington. In retrospect, we now know that the West wanted war with Russia. Deliberately picking a fight with the world’s biggest nuclear power is about as reckless as it gets.

For two years the West has steadfastly refused to have any dealings with the Russians, instead demanding total surrender. Every few months the West seeks some new “red line” to cross, hoping to provoke the Russians. Now the French are recruiting the micronations of NATO to send troops into Ukraine. The whole point of this is to bait the Russians into responding in a way that will then let NATO pretend they are being attacked by Russia so they can invoke Article 5.

Project Ukraine is a pointless and risky adventure, but even as the Russians gain the upper hand, the Western managerial elite remains addicted to it. Like drug addicts, they crave only the next hit of foolish risk in this thing. So much so that they look for new ways to make it so they cannot change course. There is a burn the boats mentality to this project, where they seek out policies that further commit the West to the project in such a way that no one can apply the brakes.

This burn the boats mentality is everywhere. The immigration crisis is not simply about border management, something that could be fixed. It is aimed at making it a permanent crisis, a permanent project for the managerial class. Tens of millions of illegals now roam the countryside, raping and killing Americans. Even if a new president wants to fix the problem, he will still be left with the tens of millions of criminal aliens unleashed on the cities and towns of America.

One of the defenses of aristocratic rule is that it is naturally cautious. The king has an investment in his country and people in that he directly benefits from them. Who he is as a king depends upon the health and welfare of the people and the land on which they live, so he is not going to be quick to risk either of those for novelty. In fact, he is going to be cautious of change, especially in domestic affairs, because he has everything to lose and little to gain.

This is not true in democratic systems where the rulers have no investment at all, as they can be replaced at the next election. Hans Hermann-Hoppe noted that in democratic systems, the people holding office often despise the office they hold, as they gained it only as a steppingstone toward some other goal. The people have nothing but their vote, so they are willing to take great risks. The result is a system that is willing to take enormous risk for theoretical and ephemeral gains.

America is not a democracy, but a sense of democracy is there in the institutions controlled by the managerial class. What we have is a managerial polyarchy, where the elites use the institutions to chase the mirage of the democratic society. Because the goal is not real, it is maximally alluring. This is why the elites are willing to trample the democratic process to defend “our democracy.” What they are defending is not a real thing but the imagined end point of history.

It is that democratic spirit that makes them so risk happy. This burn the boats approach to public policy comes from the sense that this condition of society is temporary and therefore the positions held by the elite are temporary. In a real sense, those positions are temporary, as all managers keep their resume up to date for a reason. Throw in the fact that failure never comes with consequences and the result is a ruling elite that operates like a desperate gambler looking for a score.

The great lesson in democratic risk taking is Athens in the Peloponnesian War where the Athenians were determined to spark war with Sparta. It was the Athenian decision to roll the dice on an invasion of Syracuse that led not only to the end of the war but the destruction of Athens. Given the similarity between America and Athens, it is fair to assume the same fate awaits the American empire. Democratic empire will turn out to be a suicide pact crafted by people addicted to risk taking.

Oriental Managerialism

Posted on March 6, 2024 by thezman

Saving face is a phrase we tend to associate with oriental cultures, but it is an expression used in the West. The idea is that one wants to avoid being publicly disrespected in order to maintain your dignity. This means either doing something in response to a slight or committing a ritual act when you fail. Famously, committing suicide is an act of saving face in order to avoid the shame of public humiliation for having failed in your duties.

Even though the concept is oriental it is not entirely alien to the West. In fact, face saving has become a cultural aspect of the managerial elite. We just saw this with Victoria Nuland resigning her post. She had failed to destroy the ancient enemy of her people, so she was allowed to resign and save face. If she had been fired, it would be a public acknowledgment that she had failed. Her standing and that of her cult would be lowered as a result, so she was allowed to save face and quit.

This idea of face saving is not entirely alien to the West, but it is not a natural thing the way we see it practiced by our elites. Western societies are moral societies, held together as much by a set of agreed upon codes, passed down from one generation to the next. Publicly shaming someone for his failure to live up to the prevailing moral code is part of reinforcing that code. Letting someone save face undermines this so it is not natural in Western societies. We punish the sinner.

This oriental idea of face saving is behind the phenomenon of failing up which has come to define the modern managerial class. Someone like Victoria Nuland, for example, has been a failure at every stop in her career, but at every stop she has been allowed to save face and move to some new position. You can be sure she will assume a spot at a think tank or university. If Trump wins in November, she will get a media gig to criticize his handling of Russia.

The norm for Western society, with regards to someone like Nuland, is she would have been flushed out of the system as a warning to others. Go back far enough and she may have been killed or exiled. Maybe after she had demonstrated enough contrition she would be rehabilitated to a limited degree. That would include publicly admitting to and accepting that she was a failure. This is now alien to the managerial elite, even though it remains the norm with the Dirt People.

This idea of face saving is behind the cancel culture stuff that soon became a pogrom against normal people who held normal opinions. For our elites, simply being exposed as having broken the new rules was enough to compel a self-imposed exile of some sort, in order to save face. The accused was allowed to depart and save face, without suffering more than a minor loss of social standing. This offered the hope of rehabilitation once everyone forgot about it.

Since this is alien to normal people, it did not work this way so tougher measures were rolled out to punish the hooligans and running dog obstructionists. Banning people from Twitter, for example, was viewed by the people we call the left as an extreme punishment, because the victim lost face. The fact that the victim just respawned as a new character was seen as proof of their evil, because good people wish to avoid losing face and would have accepted their punishment.

People have noted that the response of the West to the Ukraine war is a globalized version of the cancel culture and censorship pogroms. Most of what Western leaders did over the last two years was about “isolating” Putin. It was as if they thought excluding him from the cool kid table would humiliate him to the point where he would either resign or be deposed. It never occurred to them that he and his government did not understand what any of this meant.

The question is why has face saving crowded out the old, natural way of policing the ranks of the elites? Part of it, obviously, is the way in which the managerial elite now see themselves individually and as a group. Many still see themselves as a minority and they brought the minority viewpoint into the elite. Minorities are always aware of their standing with regard to the majority, so saving face is important. Many originate from face saving societies, so this comes naturally.

There is also the bourgeoise nature of the elites. Our ruling class is not filled with an aristocratic sense of position. Instead, they view themselves as having scored the better on the test, relative to others. In other words, they are a system dependent elite, while an aristocracy is an independent elite. The former are full of angst about their position in the system, so they obsess over it. The latter sees the system as an expression of their natural position atop their society.

Like all middle-class people, our bourgeoise managerial elite is riddled with self-doubt about their standing. As you see in any middle-class suburb, the primary obsession is with noticing what everyone else is doing in order to make sure you are seen as part of what everyone else is doing. Conformity is a defining feature of bourgeoise culture and is thus the defining feature of the managerial elite. The so-called “Karen culture” is a natural product of an elite harvested from the middle-class.

The formation of a middle-class is most likely a lagging indicator. The independent farmer is something that arises late in an agrarian society. The urban middle-class was a late development in the industrial age. Our bourgeoise managerial elite with its oriental outlook probably signals a late stage of managerialism. The committee mentality and face saving are all part of a general decline in competence, which also suggests we are in the late stages of managerialism.

The God Of The Clouds

Posted on February 29, 2024 by thezman

One of the things about the current age that gets little attention is the contradiction we see every day in the political system. On the one hand, most people think the political system is captured by minority interests like corporations, the military industrial complex, ideological fanatics and so on. At the same time, the political class puts an enormous amount of time and energy into convincing the public. If public opinion plays little role in policy, why do the politicians care what we think?

First off, there is the question of whether public opinion matters. Paradoxically, many of the people who claim government is controlled by minority interests put a lot of time into convincing people of this theory. They also make claims about the nature of the minority interests that are absurd. For example, white men are claimed to have special access to power, when this is clearly not true. For this class of critic, “minority interests” are whatever bogeyman haunts their fevered dreams of utopia.

Ten years ago there was a big study to determine if public opinion matters when it comes to the making of public policy. By the standards of social science, the data set was massive and comprehensive. The result was that economic elites control public policy, not majority will. If rich people want something from government, they tend to get it barring overwhelming public opposition. If the people want something but rich people oppose it, then the politicians are happy to ignore the people.

To the realists, this makes perfect sense. In every area of life, rich people have far more influence than regular people. This has been true since the first guy drew a line around some land and declared sole ownership of it. Wealth is power because it can be used to buy influence, but also because people tend to respect money. It is a sign that the person is successful and therefore has qualities we should respect. Even the most radical leftists respects rich people. Just as George Soros.

This answers the question as to who really controls the political system in the general sense, but it does not cover everything. Do the economic elites of the West want a long war in Ukraine? Maybe in the United States the war profiteers see it as a good thing, but European industry has been getting killed by the war. Similarly, environmentalism benefits some profiteers, like Elon Musk, but it harms many others. Clearly, rich people can be cajoled into supporting things that harm their interests.

That starts to get at the question as to why the ruling class puts so much time and effort into tricking the public. If you look at lists of the richest people, the one thing lacking in the vast display of wealth is diversity of opinion. You do not find immigration opponents, for example, in the Fortune 1000. There are no zealous Christian Nationalist or even serious opponents of Zionism. There are degrees of enthusiasm for the latest thing among the elites, but everyone supports the latest thing.

No one, not even the sociopaths who populate the economic elite, wants to think of themselves as the bad guy. They may embrace a mock version of being the devilish figure in the drama of life, but no one thinks of himself as the devil. No matter your station in life, you are the hero of your story. What supports this is others taking your side in some moral cause. It is why people like sympathy and forgiveness when they do something stupid or get harmed. It means they are the good guy.

The reason our elites chant about democracy so much now is they not only believe what they are saying, but they have to believe what they are saying. In order for them to maintain their sense of being the hero, they need some moral authority to bestow upon them the blessings that are reserved for the righteous. The support of their fellow elites is not enough. In this age, the righteous have the support of the masses, so that is why our elites invest so much in winning public approval.

The god of democracy is not the god of the people. It is a process that turns the people into a fickle god that must be cajoled and bullied in order to give its blessing. In order for our rulers to see themselves as heroically leading mankind to the next phase of human existence, they need the people to be cheering them. Like the deranged rulers of Rome who staged games to win public acclaim, our rulers stage mass media events, public festivals like elections and public relations campaigns.

In a way, our rulers are acting the same way as the people who go door to door handing out information about their cult. On the one hand, these people think they are giving away something beneficial. They are offering people a way into their cult. On the other hand, they are looking for confirmation. If even a few people show some interest, it confirms to them that their beliefs have some merit. The conversion process in all religions is for the benefit of the converted.

Unlike a religious cult, our rulers resent this relationship. It is a weird aspect of the morality of democracy that it corrupts the soul of the believer. They begin to hate the god they are forced to worship. Our elites hate the marketplace, whether it is the economic market or the political one. It is why they seek monopoly. If they can so dominate the market that they always get majority support, they have tamed their god into always being a loving and approving god.

Of course, nature abhors a monopoly, so that means our elites are always in a contest with the Old Scratch of democracy, which is dissent. As long as there is one person out there who disagrees it remains possible that the opinion of the elites is invalid or even immoral, despite the level of support. Much of the venom directed at the public by our elites is the result of this reality. Final confirmation can only come when the final dissident is wiped from the scene.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe famously picked “Democracy: The God That Failed” for the title of his book promoting private government. It contains many of the themes in this post, but it misses one essential point. Democracy is not a god that fails the people or even society, but a god that can never satisfy the ruling elite. Every ruling needs a god, as they must stand on a moral framework. All societies start from a moral basis and it must feel permanent. Democracy is simply too fickle for the task.

In the end, that is why our rulers and their servants in politics and the media so frantically chase after public opinion. It is why vast amounts of capital are invested into tricking the people. Like the rabbis looking for loopholes in the Talmud, our rulers are always looking for some way to get justification from the public for their actions and their position, but they always find dissidents. For them, democracy is a god that always brings the devil with him to undermine their efforts.

The Losers Morality

Posted on February 27, 2024 by thezman

Note To SubscribeStar Users: I was told that their payment processor made some changes, so that screwed up some of the renewals. The usual suspects continue to harass credit card processors who do business with normal people. It is a hassle, for sure, but a reality of life these days.

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.

On Sunday, a US Air Force member named Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire outside the Israel embassy to protest the war in Gaza. This being the modern age, he live steamed the act on Twitch. According to the BBC, he had e-mailed a message to the Antifa media operators with whom he was associated. “Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people,” the email read, warning it would be “highly disturbing”.

The video is disturbing for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which it shows a man burning to death, which is one of the most horrific ways to die. It also shows uniformed police doing nothing but pointing their guns at the man as he burned to death, because that is the only thing they know how to do now. Finally, someone rushed up with a fire extinguisher to put out the flames, but the cops still stood there ready to shoot the poor man if they could find a reason to do it.

The point of this act was to get attention to the cause, which is the Israeli war on the Palestinian settlements in Gaza. Antifa, with whom Mr. Bushnell was associated, is anti-Israel, so they have taken up the cause of Gaza. Despite claiming to be antifascist, the anarchist subculture is surprisingly antisemitic, something that gets left out of the reporting by the media. It is a good example of how the Washington regime will align with anyone, no matter how bizarre, if it suits their needs.

The logic behind this protest is that it so shocks the sensibilities that no one can ignore it, thus attention is brought to the cause. There is no disputing this. Before Aaron Bushnell self-immolated, no one other than his family and friends had any reason to know his name, but now he is global news. To a lesser degree, his reasons for doing what he did are also global news. For the anti-Israel movement around the world, Aaron Bushnell is now a martyr and hero for the cause.

That is where things get complicated. For those already in the pro-Gaza camp, Mr. Bushnell’s actions are noble because they elicit pity. Michael Tracy tried unsuccessfully to make this point on Twitter. You are supposed to see the act, feel pity for the man suffering and then think about his reasoning. Presumably, once you understand his reasoning, you will not only embrace his reasoning, but embrace the moral claims that he is making with regards to Israel.

Of course, you could just as easily look at his act, feel pity for the man and then conclude he must be insane. After all, reason tells us that all living creators seek to preserve their lives by any means necessary. This we can observe in nature and within ourselves as living things. Therefore, a human seeking to die is probably suffering from mental defect and needs protection from himself. Perhaps his cause is just as crazy as the man killing himself in the name of the cause.

There is something else. Why should the moral claims of a loser, a failure, a maniac, have greater appeal than the moral claims of the people supporting the stronger party in the Gaza conflict? In other words, why do the losers have a claim on our sympathy rather than the winners? Why should our sympathy have any role in determining the morality of the two parties in the conflict? Why are both sides appealing to our pity and sympathy rather than some other emotion?

In no other area of life is this logic applied. In a war the winners are celebrated and the losers are punished, usually by their own people. When the Ukraine army falls apart, the political leaders of Ukraine will flee for their lives. The leaders of NATO countries will be mocked and scorned by their own people. We see the same in sports competition, where the winners are feted and the losers and excoriated. Why in this case should the morality be turned on its head?

The truth is, it is not turned on its head. The reason this sort of protest, and most protests, fail to sway the public is they appeal to a loser’s morality. The protestors are saying, in effect, that they cannot win the debate with the public and they cannot win the argument with the rulers. They are powerless, so no one addresses their concerns, which leaves them with nothing by an appeal to your sympathy. This always fails as people naturally support the winner and reject the loser.

This is why most of the commentary online about the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell was mocking and joking. Even in that Michael Tracey thread the replies are sarcastic, despite his obvious appeal to pity. It turns out that appeals to pity only work on those who see themselves as pitiful. To everyone else, they just reinforce the notion that the losers deserve to lose, which is why they act like losers. For most people, Bushnell’s act proves his cause is not worth considering.

It is an important point about politics. Democratic politics are theater and self-pity makes for bad box office. Successful political movements project strength and confidence, not weakness and self-pity. That means all public displays, including protests, should project strength and confidence. Aaron Bushnell would have served his cause better if he went about punching Israelis in the nose. At least then he would have been seen as a threat and people will respect a man who is a threat.

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