The Assange Case

Posted on December 13, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast as well as some thoughts on the Army – Navy football game.

Thirty years ago, the typical right-wing person would have held a dim view of whistleblowers and their media accomplices. Those whistleblowers were always left-wing people with the strong odors that come with it. They were motivated by left-wing morality rather than republican virtue. Their complaints about the government were motivated by their opposition to America. These stories usually made those who stood for republican order look like the villains.

Probably the most famous example is Daniel Ellsberg. He is the man who released the top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in the Vietnam War to The New York Times and Washington Post. This was in 1971 and Ellsberg was a fanatical left-wing antiwar protestor. He violated a number of laws in releasing those documents, but he was on the Left, so it was okay. Left-wing lawbreaking was always okay as long as it served left-wing interests.

That was another country ago. Today, the typical right-wing person has a new respect for the government whistleblower. You see this with Julian Assange, who is being transferred to the United States for a show trial. The only people speaking out about his treatment are conservatives. Here is a story in Breitbart that manages to tie Assange to an old paleocon concept. It is one of those times when you know they do not know the source of the phrase, as otherwise they would never use it.

The Assange story is a good example of how partisanship within the mainstream makes rational discourse impossible. When Assange was leaking information damaging to the Bush crusades, they were not fans of Assange. Of course, the Left loved Assange and treated him like a modern day Che Guevara. When WikiLeaks embarrassed the Democrats then the Left suddenly hated Assange. It took a while, but eventually the conservatives figured out how to back the whistleblower.

Interestingly, those same conservatives have nothing but contempt for Chelsea Manning, the sexually confused former Army soldier who provided documents to Julian Assange back in the Bush years. For a lot of reasons, Chelsea Manning makes for a troublesome hero for them. Of course, Democrats moved heaven and earth to get their favorite crossdresser out of prison. Then “she” turned on them, as it were. Saying bad things about the police state is no longer left-wing.

These cases, and you can probably put Edward Snowden in there as well, present some interesting dilemmas. The biggest conundrum is the role of the media in these sorts of affairs. They are the platform for disseminating the information being leaked by the whistleblowers. They also shape the narrative around the leaks to paint the person doing the leaking as a hero. The TV tabloid 60 Minutes recently did a puff piece on the leaker, Reality Winner, painting her as a hero.

In a rules-based society, people who break the rules should suffer consequences commensurate with the damage done by the rule breaking. A general principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that the punishment fits the crime. If the crime, however, prevents a much larger crime from occurring, the rule breaking ceases to be a crime and becomes a public service. While this theory makes sense to a sensible person, its abuse by the deranged and dangerous suggests a serious flaw.

Then there is the issue of the media. In the old analog days, it was easy to make an exception for the press. In these cases, they were treated like neutrals. Even though they knew the material they were reporting was illegally obtained, they were allowed to report on it because a free press trumps government secrecy. In the digital age where we no longer have a free press or actual reporters, this no longer makes sense. The media is just the marketing arm of the unofficial ruling party.

Can we have a civil society in the digital age when billionaire public relations firms are able to work with the state to embarrass opponents? This is what we saw with Trump when the New York Times got his tax returns. Clearly, someone in the IRS or Trump’s accounting firm stole the documents. Then they handed them to the press. This is trafficking in stolen goods. If the item in question was a piece of art from Trumps’ office, everyone involved would be in prison.

This is what makes the Assange case interesting. Whether the rulers know it or not, they are putting this idea front and center. If WikiLeaks is not allowed to publish leaked material, then how can the New York Times do it? There are only three solutions to that puzzle and one of them is the farce of a free press is now over. In other words, if only regime supportive media is protected, then we no longer have an independent media with constitutional protections.

On the other hand, if the courts decide Assange gets the same protections as the New York Times or Washington Post, then the age of secrets is over. In the digital age it is simply too easy to spill the beans on official shenanigans. This then spills into personal areas, as rich people make for good headlines. The NDA’s famous people make their staff sign suddenly mean very little. The only solution for the ruling class is to pump out even more disinformation through official organs.

The third option is the courts begin to nibble away at this media exceptions, which is something the Supreme Court has hinted at recently. If possession of stolen goods is the same for the media as it is for everyone else, then these sorts of cases become very complicated for the media. Suddenly, the SPLC publishing e-mails from one of the people they are harassing becomes a criminal case. At the minimum, it becomes the basis for a civil case against the outlet.

Taken together, all of this points to a central question that lurks beneath all of the recent troubles in America. Can a large culturally authoritarian society like American maintain itself in the digital age? The Assange case is only possible in the digital age and the contradictions it reveals are also only visible in the digital age. In fact, much of what ails modern America is made possible by the Internet. It may be that a secular theocracy like America is impossible when information flows even semi-freely.

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Parallels And Precedents

Posted on December 6, 2021 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. This week I take some gratuitous shots at the sperg-right over the racist AI story from last week. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast where I gas on about the news of the week.

Michael Anton, the person responsible for the famous Flight 93 essay endorsing the great gamble on Donald Trump, has a long essay up at The New Criterion arguing that we live in unprecedented times. Those who make predictions about what comes next for the West are foolishly assuming that present patterns are the same as past patterns and therefore they will play out the same as they did in the past. He lays out why the current patterns are unique and therefore unpredictable.

Interestingly, his essay rests on this assertion: “let’s first consider the one historical parallel that all sides of this debate draw on for precedent: the rise, peak, decline, and fall of Rome.” This essay is part of a series, so it is possible the task given to the writers was to draw comparisons between the West in general or American in particular with the Roman Empire or even the Roman Republic. The entirety of Anton’s essay is comparing Rome to America.

Comparisons to Rome have been popular in America for a very long time, mostly because the American republic failed in the middle of the 19th century. This is one of those things that intelligent people have known is true but agreed not to discuss outside where the peasants can hear. A major part of the ruling class ethos has been the maintenance of the republican myth. Some on the Right will still insist that America is a republic and not a liberal democracy.

That is why comparisons to Rome have been popular. Either as a self-deception or as a way to avoid discussing reality, the worry that America could follow the Roman Republic into empire has been a staple for a long time. What makes this present age unique is that many people simply accept America as an empire. Much of the ruling class now prefers the word “democracy” over republic. When was the last time a politician said, “we must defend our republic”?

Anton takes a different approach in knocking down the comparison to Rome, mostly to focus on the great threats to the current order. The fact is though, Rome is not a great guide to understanding the present age. If you are looking for an example from the classical period, then Greece is your best option. Like America, Athens became a democratic empire that never understood itself to be an empire. In dominating its neighbors, it was sure it was liberating them from tyranny.

The other comparison between Ancient Athens and America that works well is in the totalitarian nature of its politics. The Romans put on shows to entertain the masses, but the Greeks staged shows to indoctrinate and control the people. Dionysian theater was about maintaining the prevailing moral orthodoxy. Today, mass media is about controlling the moral framework. Like the Greeks, Americans are hooked on the narcotic of endless morality tales reinforcing their beliefs about themselves.

If one wants to take this comparison back to the origin of America, you can go back to the English Civil War. That is a version of the Peloponnesian War and the American Civil War was a replay of it to birth America a second time. In both cases, it is the democratic side that prevailed over the Spartan side. That makes for a much more interesting comparison as the Athenians were lucky to have lost to the Spartans, so we may be seeing a form of alternative history with America.

If the Classical period is not your thing, then we have an empire closer to home that makes for an interesting and useful comparison. The American empire is looking similar to the Soviet empire at the end. The ossified and geriatric ruling elite is the obvious starting point in the comparison. Like the American empire, the Soviet leaders did not prepare for their departure from the scene. Instead, they purged anyone with ambition and the result was a poverty of talent and vitality at the top.

Another good parallel with the Soviets is the people in charge just assumed they represented the will of the people. The American ruling elite does not have dusty old books about political theory to justify their belief in themselves as the authentic voice of the people, but they believe it, nonetheless. Central to the identity to the managerial elite is their belief in themselves as the expression of the ideals of the system. Like the nomenklatura, the managerial class thinks things going great.

The other selling point in the comparison between the Soviet empire and the American empire is they are the product of the same dialectic. Communism proposed, fascism opposed and the synthesis was liberal democracy. Alternatively, communism and liberal democracy both assumed they were the answer to the great question of history, the solution to the struggle forward. In the end, neither was the answer to anything because history is not a solvable puzzle.

What is most interesting in Anton’s essay is what is not mentioned. For example, the Roman Empire in the last two centuries was a system run by people who had no hand in creating it. Waves of barbarian invaders had changed the complexion of the people over whom the empire ruled. The leaders also stopped being Roman in the sense that they had connections to the Roman elite. We see a similar pattern emerging in the West as immigrants flood Western lands.

There is also the fact that the Roman Republic failed when the economic arrangements supporting it failed. The influx of slave labor after the defeat of Carthage and Corinth changed the economics of the republic. We have a parallel to this age with the reliance on helot labor by Western capitalism. The economic model of fifty years ago no longer exists in the West, so it naturally follows that politics must change. Again we see the people problem as a precedent to our own age.

Of course, one can look for parallels in the rhythms of time. In the case of America, it could very well be the end of a historical epoch. The ideas of the Enlightenment have been fulling explored through Jacobinism, various forms of socialisms and communism and finally liberal democracy. Like all of those prior failures, this one is doomed to crash into the rocks of biological reality. The end point of man’s journey is not a paradise of peace and freedom, but rather the extinction of the species.

Anton’s essay is useful in that it focuses attention on the present trends that threaten civilization, but this is not an age without precedent. In fact, his premise is a bit of a strawman that allows him to avoid the central questions that lie at the heart of the current crisis in the West. It is not a crisis of historical patterns or ideology, but rather a crisis of people. Either the people of the West want to live or not. The real crisis is that there is no agreement on that answer.

Aborted Future

Posted on December 2, 2021 by thezman

Conservative Inc. has been abuzz with excitement over the abortion case recently argued before the Supreme Court. They think this is the big win they have been promising for more than half a century. The five “conservative” justices appear ready to overturn Roe and even Roberts seems to be leaning that way. Oral arguments seemed to center on whether they should reverse Roe entirely or try to find a piecemeal approach to begin the process of reversing it.

One of the ironies of this is that this was made possible by the man Conservative Inc. declared an enemy of their cult back in 2015. If the court does overturn Roe, you can be sure no one in the dying cult of conservatism will have the principles to both admit they were wrong and give Trump credit for the result. They will just pretend none of that happened and use the event to scam their donors one more time. Conservatives never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.

Putting that aside, some may be tempted to think this is a sign of some pushback against the forces of darkness. Roe was always bad law as it involved the court in an area of politics for which it is poorly equipped. Courts are crude instruments best suited for broad issues. Abortion is a purely moral issue. In a big multicultural society like America, there is never going to be agreement on such an issue. It is best left to local communities and the states to work out a compromise.

What Roe was all along was a symbol. The Yankee ruling elite could impose their values on the rest of the people. Roe and other rulings from the court were about maintaining that political arrangement dating to Gettysburg. If the court does reverse Roe, it should be read as the first sign of the Yankee retreat. In the fullness of time, the homosexual marriage ruling in the Obama years ruling will be viewed as the last great legal victory of the Yankee imperium.

Of course, the decline of the old Yankee ruling elite coincides with the demographic decline of heritage America. Abortion was always an issue for middle and upper- middle-class white women. The first generation of white women to enjoy abortion was the Baby Boomers. They wanted it so they could be “free” of the patriarchy. Then they wanted it for their daughters. Today, both cohorts are past childbearing years and the young generation is mostly nonwhite.

We saw something similar with family issues. When the Boomers were having kids, we were inundated with movies about having babies. Education was the top concern among middle-class voters. Then it was college tuition. Notice that politicians now only talk about education with regards to the whiteness of it. Good schools and cheap college are no longer a top priority because those are white people issues and white people with kids are a dwindling minority.

If the court does overturn Roe this summer, you will see some grannies and Nth-wave feminist lesbians out making noise. The Left will do a nostalgia tour, pretending it is 1970 all over again. They will pull the old signs out of storage and reminisce about the old days when they were hip and cool. Like so much of our politics, the response to overturning Roe will be another magical mystery tour of the past. Then it will be forgotten along with the events around it.

One contrary take on Roe that deserves consideration is that abortion was originally about personal privacy. The court was agnostic on the morality of abortion, but it was sure the state had no role in a private medical decision. There was a zone of privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. Even though privacy is never mentioned in the document, most agree the idea is important. There is a line between the public and private and there should be prohibitions against violating it.

In oral arguments, the court did not seem interested in that angle and the pro-abortion arguments did not emphasize it. This is a sign that the notion of the private space, the zone off-limits to prying eyes, is no longer important. This could be a read as an acknowledgment by the court that the concept of privacy is now dead. All of us should expect to live naked in full view of everyone. The public, and by extension the state, have a role in your private life and decisions.

The cycles of history are both large and small. The period following the Second World War kicked of a demographic and cultural cycle in America. That cycle existed within a larger cycle kicked off by the Civil War. You can say that America itself is a cycle within the larger cycle of English speaking people. Often when one cycle ends it creates the necessary elements to begin a new historical pattern. Sometimes the end is not the beginning of anything. It is just the end.

The abortion issue probably signals the end of the post-war cultural and demographic cycle that has been driven by the Baby Boomer generation. Ironically, it is things like abortion that will have killed this cultural period. A politics and culture dependent on middle-class white people is not long for the world if middle-class white people are throwing their babies in the dumpster of abortion mills. Abortion was a self-inflicted gunshot to the womb of heritage America.

Logocide

Posted on December 1, 2021 by thezman

One of the distinguishing features of authoritarian societies is the language becomes lifeless and dull. At the same time, the public space is filled with the language of the authoritarian ruling system. The people at the top give long arid speeches and their propaganda organs fill the spaces in between with official noise. Fidel Castro would give speeches that lasted half a day. Stalin would deliver long harangues to the Party Congress for no other reason than to fill the room with words.

In America, this started to creep in after the Cold War. Bill Clinton would give long speeches that were cognitively meaningless. The word “emote” came into common usage at this time as his speeches were like the “feelies” in the Huxley novel Brave New World. They were not intended to stimulate your mind, but rather to anesthetize it so you could experience the raw emotion being conveyed. His most memorable words are those from his rare confessions of guilt.

Obama took it further by delivering nonsense speeches that were not just devoid of meaning, but an assault on the concept of meaning. His language was an assault on the mind, an effort to destroy reason. Instead, the listener was supposed to abandon his senses and float along on the warm thermals of passive happiness. His fans swore he was a great speaker, but they never quoted him. To quote the great man would invite questioning the great man and that was not permitted.

Authoritarian systems use language to suffocate and stifle the mind, because people thinking independently is always a danger. The point of regime language is to strip language of its meaning. Demagogic language makes the people incapable of the objectivity and perspective that leads to questioning. Questioning naturally leads to the formation of individual ideas. Regime language seeks to destroy the independent mind by stripping the language of meaning.

One result of this is some people become parrots, repeating slogans and catchwords without understanding what they mean. These people are so fearful of any deviation from the prescribed opinions, they only use the terms provided by the regime. It is a ritualized self-degradation. To express and judge all opinions in the accepted clichés and phrasing of the regime is to accept that words and the concepts behind them have no independent meaning.

It is logocide, the deliberate killing of words in order to kill the concepts that lie behind those words. The most obvious example is “fascist”, which no longer has a cognitive meaning in modern society. It exists only to trigger an emotional response tuned to meet the needs of the regime. The structure of modern Western government is about as close to fascism as we have come since the middle of the last century, but the word itself now means anyone who opposes the regime.

A current example of logocide is the war on information. Regime media now obsesses over misinformation and disinformation. Both words are used interchangeably, despite having very different meanings. The former means false information that is often intended to deceive. The latter is official lies promoted by the institutions of authority in order to deceive the people. By conflating these meanings, this important distinction falls away and both words just mean unofficial opinion.

Regime media has declared war on misinformation and disinformation, despite being the primary source of it. The social media publishers regularly announce their progress on the war on misinformation. Of course, the government is the biggest source of disinformation, yet no one questions them. This absurd bit of theater is intended to strip the very concept of truth from the minds of the people. It is a form of menticide intended to make people dependent on the regime.

The point of logocide is to cripple the ability of the people to think independently and to prevent them from sharing information with others. If no one can trust what words mean, you cannot trust the ideas behind those words. One of those ideas is the concept of personal trust. If your best friend is just as susceptible to repeating false information as the stranger on the street, that friends can no longer be trusted. The natural bonds between people fall away and everyone is a node of the state.

This even happens to the people tasked with assaulting the language. Look at the subhead from this story in a regime tabloid. “Journalists and academics are developing a new language for truth. The results are not always clearer.” Imagine the intellectual bankruptcy required to manufacture the phrase “new language for truth.” The person who wrote that is dead inside. They are a shuffling zombie incapable of action not directed by the people who now control his mind.

Notice also the creepy flavorless language of the age. No one speaks in the first person unless they are displaying fidelity to the system. In the corporate space, everything is written in soft passive language stripped of declarative statements. Corporate communication sounds like it comes from an encounter session. The people behind it are incapable of independent thought. They fear deviation and degrade themselves with therapeutic language to magnify their obsequiousness.

This is why authoritarian systems are minimalist. They lack beauty, creativity and vitality because those are burned up in the engine of authoritarian rule. A people living in fear of their own curiosity are not inventing new ways to solve problems. That requires independent thought, which means an independent language. When the point of the system is to kill the meaning of words, there can be no independent thought so there can be no new ideas, just the approved ideas.

This is what we see in the West. The suffocating conformity of thought is boiling off the will to solve problems and challenge old solutions. The centers of cultural production are now manned by automatons. They are decorated in the trappings of past creativity, but they are like mannequins in a museum display, interesting only to those who maintain their ability to see what is happening. Otherwise, the culture is a repetition of the banal official clichés and slogans.

This is what makes language the great threat to the authoritarian. To call a man in a dress a crossdresser, rather than use an approved neologism, offends the puppets of the regime, because it threatens the foundation of the regime. Clear language conveys clear meaning which implies clear truths. Standing on truth allows for the questioning of the official language and by extension, the authority of the system. The antidote to authoritarianism is truth and the honest language it requires.

American Alawites

Posted on November 30, 2021 by thezman

Minority rule is one of those things that on the surface should be rare but is actually quite common in human history. The most common form of minority rule is when one people conquer another and then install their people as rulers. This small ruling class is backed by the conquering power. In the Bronze Age it was not unusual for one city-state to rule over the surrounding city-states. The great leader would rule not only his own people but the people he subjugated.

In medieval times, the family trees of ruling elites were often quite complicated so the duke of some territory might not speak the language of the people over whom he was the ruler. Conquest also played a role. The Normans who were “invited” to conquer Britain did not speak the local language. People were tied to the land, so when a successful ruler conquered new lands, he inherited the people. His descendants would then inherit a kingdom of strangers.

Ruling classes, in general, are a form of minority rule. In South America, most of the countries are controlled by a relatively small number of families that make up the ruling elite of the country. These families trace their origins to Europe, marry amongst each other and keep a tight grip on power. It is why the complexion of the political elite rarely has the same hue as the general public. This demographic realty of ruling elites is true to some degree everywhere in the world.

The thing about rule by minority is it works if that minority has connections to the people over whom they rule. Those kings and queens in medieval Europe may not have had much in common with the people, but they shared a position within in a system that everyone accepted. Richard the Lionheart did not speak English, but his position made sense within the logic of society. Of course, empires tend to have ruling classes that are alien to the people but make sense within the context of empire.

This is what makes empires inherently unstable. Since an empire is an amalgamation of people that don’t have much in common, the one thing they have in common is they are ruled by strangers. The Habsburg Empire made sense to the people running it but to everyone else it was an unnatural combination. The Soviet Union struggled with the same problem at the end. Empires tend to become minority run enterprises that only serve the interests of the minority at the top of the system.

The American empire seems to be entering that minority rule phase where it becomes clear to everyone that the people in charge are aliens. From Gettysburg into the 20th century, America was a proto-empire. The Yankee ruling elite had conquered the rest of the country. Then the push west made Yankeedom into a continental empire and then a regional empire entering the 20th century. The two great industrial wars established Yankeedom as the American empire.

The Yankee ruling elite was joined in the 20th century by a Jewish elite that arrived just as the American empire was forming up. The subsequent Judeo-Puritan ruling class ruled the empire into the current day. While the Jewish side did not have roots in the origins of the empire, the Puritan side more than made up for it. The story of America started at Plymouth Rock with the Puritans. At least that is how every schoolboy learned it through the 20th century.

With the Cold War over and the borders wide open, the great flood of people into the empire proper is about to change the complexion of the ruling class. You see this with the South Asian takeover of Silicon Valley. The latest example is Twitter, the social media publisher, getting a new boss. Parag Agarwal will succeed Jack Dorsey as the CEO of the company. Vijaya Gadde is the policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer and general counsel of Twitter.

If we take a quick inventory of the big tech firms, we see that Google is now ruled by Sundar Pichai. Microsoft is now ruled by a person named Satya Nadella. IBM, once synonymous with American technological innovation, is now ruled by a person called Arvind Krishna. Adobe Systems is ruled by Shantanu Narayen. VMWare, the biggest virtualization firm is ruled by Raghu Raghuram. Silicon Valley is looking like the chamber of commerce of Bangalore.

This may seem like a coincidence, but Kamala Harris is the Vice president because Indian money bought her the spot on the ticket. All of her campaign money came from this cabal of South Asians in California. She remains in her post, even though the Biden people want her out, because the party is afraid of alienating the Brahmans. They know the GOP is on its knees outside those offices begging for cash. They are planning to run Nimrata Nikki Randhawa in the 2024 primary.

What is happening, of course, is the old Judeo-Puritan ruling elite is getting pushed aside by the highly clannish and ambitious Brahman ruling elite. Those high caste Indian migrants come from a long tradition of looking out for their own, but also working the imperial system. The British Raj selected for the sort of high cast local who knew how to ingratiate himself with English speakers. Those skills are now proving to be handy in the American empire.

This is why South Asians are fantastically antiwhite. They have picked up on what is going on with the dying Judeo-Puritan ruling class. Critical theory makes no sense to the new arrivals from the subcontinent, but the slogans are easy to memorize and the targets are familiar. The new ruler of Twitter is not only antiwhite, but he is also openly hostile to the basics of Western society. He thinks the first amendment is a pointless suggestion and he has no intention of respecting its spirit.

From a certain distance, one has to admire the irony of it. India exists because of British colonialism and it is now conquering the inheritor of the British Empire. Perhaps the new Indian ruling class will start wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets. The old quip from Pat Buchanan about immigration comes to mind. He famously said, “American Indians had open borders. Look what happened to them.” One group of Indians getting revenge on behalf of another group of Indians.

Putting that aside, this is another sign that the American empire is far closer to collapse than is evident from the numbers. Actual Americans will notice that they cannot pronounce the names of their new rulers. The alien nature of the ruling class is now being pushed into the face of everyone. It is hard to imagine someone named Satya or Parag commanding much loyalty from people named Bill or even Jonquarius. Rule by alien invader will become evident to everyone.

That does not mean this new ruling class forming up is doomed. Syria has been ruled by an Alawite minority for a long time now. They control all of the institutions of power and that has allowed them to weather the attacks from America and Israel. An alien ruling class can manage to defy the math for a long time, if they are clever enough and ruthless enough. The American Alawites will have to be as ruthless but highly clannish people are never short of ruthlessness.

If one wants to be optimistic, the Illyrian emperors were Roman emperors who rose up from what is now the Balkans during the Crisis of the Third Century. This group of alien emperors culminated with Diocletian and the stabilization of the empire. Maybe one of these new Brahman rulers will go on to stabilize the American empire. After all, this class took over India after the collapse of British rule. Look at the amazing job they have done with the Indian subcontinent.

Fear And Loathing

Posted on November 29, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week I take a deep dive into the legal theory underlying the recent political trials. Behind the green door I have several new items since last week.

Since the Great Panic began almost two years ago, the question on the minds of the curious has been how long will it last? Panics are not new in human society and they are not new to recent times either. The satanic panic that started in the 1980’s never really ended completely. The “face on a milk carton” meme is still with us, despite the fact few people remember is started in a panic. That was close to half a century ago, suggesting panics never really end.

The missing kid panic changed American society. Prior to that time, it was not unusual for children to walk to school with just the older kids supervising. Kids spent their after-school time playing outside, usually unsupervised. In big cities, kids would ride public transit to school. No one thought it was strange. After the panic, supervised activities became the norm. Video games found a target-rich environment of kids stuck inside by themselves or within earshot of their parents.

That suggests the Covid panic has a long way to go and may never end. That should be obvious at this point. First it was two weeks to bend the curve so hospitals could avoid being overrun by flu patients. That gave way to a regime of total fright with people required to wear amulets reminding everyone of the great fear. The vaccine should have broken the fear, but here we are facing new lockdowns due to the omicron strain, which reportedly attacks the vaccinated for some reason.

The omicron variant is probably the most amusing twist in the great Covid panic so far, because it suggests someone in the system has a sense of humor. As many have pointed out, the word “omicron” is an anagram for “moronic”. There is also the reference to a classic Star Trek episode. The spores on Omicron ceti iii made people euphoric and gave them everlasting health in exchange for a desire to never leave. The plants and the humans became two sides of a blissful relationship.

Part of what is driving this is belief. Humans are believing machines and with the collapse of traditional religion, people are falling into cultural and political cults that scratch the same itch as the old gods. Nature cults have been a staple of human existence since the beginning. At a certain level, the people swept up in the cult of Covid feel they are being punished for a sin against nature. Covid is nature’s vengeance against mankind.

That is why good news is always bad news with Covid. The new mysterious variant that does not make people sick is “symptomless Covid” rather than the natural weakening the virus with each new mutation. The omicron variant is similarly a weaker mutation, but it is setting off panic around the world. Covid is a proxy for a new mystery god, one that reveals itself only through it actions. Like all gods, it is eternal, so its manifestations will be eternal as well. Covid is here forever.

The main driver of the panic from the beginning has been the ruling class, which is looking like Howard Hughes at the end. Instead of shutting themselves up in their mansions and wearing tissue boxes on their feet, they are obsessed with conquering death itself. The actors they hire to perform the rituals off democracy are not quite as bad, but they are a gerontocracy now. As such, they startle at the slightest touch, assuming it must be the Grim Reaper.

There is also the weird isolation of the managerial class. It is not a physical isolation as they do leave their compounds to explore the land of the Dirt People. It is a psychological and cultural isolation. They can imagine hospitals overflowing and people dying in the streets, even though they see no evidence of these things, because they are conditioned by their existence to trust their coevals over their own eyes. If they see it in their media, it is true, no matter what reality has to say.

This combination of old and isolated has created a ruling class that is deeply paranoid about what happens outside the safety of their safe zones. Note how often the word “safe” comes up in their rhetoric. They see themselves as the protectors of society, so they are constantly going on about safety. The reason for that is they assume everyone shares their fear and paranoia about the world. Covid is powerful juju for a ruling class hiding from nature, reality and their own mortality.

Of course, a big part of the panic is the opportunity for the deranged to inflict themselves on the rest of us. Covid has been manna from heaven for the sort of person who sees herself as everyone’s den mother. These people will never get enough of the state of emergency, which provides the panic stricken elite with an amen chorus giving them the allusion of consent. One side pleads to be made safe while the other side pleads to be the savior of mankind.

This brings us back to the original question. When does this panic end? Most likely, it will require a generational turnover. The gerontocracy will die off and be replaced by something worse, but something younger. That means these health panics are probably a feature of the empire now. Like superhero movies, Covid will be rebooted and reimagined every few years. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an ornamental mask on a human face— forever.

Why They Hate Us

Posted on November 23, 2021 by thezman

Tech Note: The site was down for a period due to a server issue. During the upgrade a canigulator valve got stuck, causing pressure to build up in one boiler. The subsequent rupture injured several of the mushroom people who work in the bowels of the server room, but they still managed to get us back on line. They are heroes.

Back in the Bush years, the slogan they liked to use regarding their race policies was “the bigotry of low expectations.” An army of people no doubt spent months conjuring the slogan and field-testing it with audiences to make sure it hit the mark. They made sure it was completely anodyne while conveying the required adherence to left-wing morality regarding race. The slogan said George Bush cared while also saying the Democrats were the real racists.

In fairness to the civic nationalists, they have a point about the Left when it comes to the issue of race. Despite all the talk about racial justice, they talk about nonwhites as if they are children. For example, they literally argue that black people are incapable of acquiring a picture ID. Even if you want to limit that claim to the population that is dependent on the state, this claim is never made about the whites. You can forgive civic nationalists for being a bit rustled by this.

Putting that aside, there is another element to that old slogan. The underlying claim is not just that the Left treats nonwhites like children but that the Left assumes the nonwhites lack agency and therefore cannot be held accountable. This is not a small thing to say. It goes behind the hoary clichés about racism and speaks to how the Left sees themselves and the world. They see themselves as the puppet masters and the rest of us are just the puppets.

You see another glimpse of this in the Wisconsin massacre following on the heels of the Rittenhouse verdict. The Left was clearly trying to get a riot going. The over-the-top language was intended to inflame the sorts of people who set fire to Kenosha way back when all of this started. When the hip-hop guy ran down women and children at the Christmas parade, the Left was giddy. They thought their rhetoric had triggered the response they thought was appropriate.

Now, it does not really matter if this guy was triggered by the extreme left-wing rhetoric that has flooded our lives for the last few years. It is fair to say he is not watching CNN every night, but his social media activity shows that he is aware of what is going on in the world. It is one of those realities of this age that even the dumbest person cannot escape the media. Unless you live off-grid in the woods, you live suspended in a solution of messages from the mass media.

The causal relationship here is not really important. It is pretty reasonable to conclude that people who do these things are crazy. Whether they are shooting up a school or attacking a Christmas parade, they are not acting rationally. What matters here is what the Left thinks is the causal relationship in these and other events. They clearly think there is one. It is why the less fanatical elements in the media are trying to downplay the Wisconsin massacre. It is bad optics.

This view of the world is behind the censorship regime. The unsophisticated make the error in thinking that the motive behind it is fear of their facts and reason. “They are afraid of our message” is a popular slogan in certain quarters. This is true only in that the Left thinks people lack agency and can easily be manipulated into rebellion or violence. That is what lies behind the claim that language is violence. They assume everyone does what they are told.

In the Charlottesville circus trial this was part of the plaintiff’s case. They brought in the equivalent of tarot card readers to explain the secret messages between members of the alt-right organizers. These so-called experts explained the secret meanings of the jokes and memes and then explained how they are calls to violence. At the heart of this is the assumption that humans lack agency and are so suggestible that they will become savage at the sound of certain words.

Magic word theory can probably be placed alongside magic dirt theory and magic shape theory in the domain of left-wing magic. Magic dirt theory is the claim that the soil upon which one stands controls your actions in some mystical way. People born on bad dirt turn out bad, while people born on magic dirt get all the breaks. Magic shape theory claims that metal and plastic shaped into something scary like certain types of guns makes people violent or suicidal.

This explains the Left’s quest to control all areas of cultural production. When you assume that people are infinitely suggestable, whoever controls the message controls the people, which means whoever controls the message centers, the centers of cultural production, controls the people. From the point of view of the Left, it is not censorship but leadership. They have seized the centers of information production in order to lead the people into the promised land.

At a retail level, this is not important. If the guy smashing you over the head with a skateboard is motivated by a bizarre understanding of humanity or he just hates you because you are white is not doing you much good in the moment. Step back and it is an important insight. That guy smashing people with his skateboard is not operating from mere partisanship. He is not just mad at the victim because they do not agree on tax policy or race policy. He is acting in self-defense.

At the heart of the crisis, at the center of every riot over the last few years, is one side convinced they must use any means necessary to remove the things standing between them and the egalitarian paradise. If that means killing those who do not want to go along, they feel completely justified. After all, their objections are a call for violence to stop progress. The guy swinging the skateboard believes he is acting in self-defense, even when the attack is unprovoked.

The question alongside that central truth is can society go on if some minority of the population is sure they are in a life and death struggle with the majority? The weaponization of the mentally unstable, minorities and fanatics in a war against stability and normalcy is a threat to the very existence of society. If this was coming from a foreign power or organized crime, the answer would be clear. It would me a war of survival against a direct threat.

All human society is an ongoing negotiation around a compromise. Why would anyone seek compromise with those whose opening bid is your death? The middle ground is still horrible. This is why the Left is waging total war on society. The only rational response is to respond accordingly. The compromise is that our commitment to civic nationalism must give way temporarily in order to deal with the threat in the same way chemotherapy is an exception to deal with cancer.

This is not without precedent. In times of war America has suspended the writ of habeas corpus, confined whole populations and commandeered the economy. In times of extreme emergency, free people suspend their distrust of power in order to wield it against the enemy of freedom. At some point, even the most feckless in the ruling class will have to come to this realization. Otherwise, they will be swept away by the same forces being unleashed by their foot soldiers in the media.

Concepts of The Hive

Posted on November 11, 2021 by thezman

The opposite rule of liberalism says that whatever the Left is saying, you should start with the opposite and that is where you will probably find the truth. For example, if they are accusing one of their bogeymen of something, most likely the target is not doing it and is not the bad guy. Odds are, it is the Left engaging in the activity. Whether it is latent guilt or deliberate distraction, the Left tends to accuse others of the things they are doing or plan to do in the future.

It is not always simple like we learned with the Russian collusion hoax. The Left is fond of creating elaborate and plausible concepts that they can use to frame issues so that they are the default moral position. Homosexual marriage is an example where they inverted the morality of the issue. Normal people felt the need to explain why we should maintain normal marriage, as if it was a novel concept. The opposite, of course, was the truth but it was hard for people to see it.

The idea of the social construct is a good example of how it is not easy to tease out the truth from what the Left is saying. It is tempting to use the opposite rule of liberalism and say that there is no such thing as a social construct. Something like sex is obviously not an invented thing and people are not assigned sex at birth. While their concept of gender is nonsense, there are gender roles in society. These are closely tied to biological sex and the natural differences between the sexes.

Where the opposite rule of liberalism applies in regard to something like social constructs is that it is not the normal world that is a construct but rather how the Left engages with the world that is a creation of their mind. Like the simple example of the Russian collusion hoax, the Left is accusing Mother Nature of creating constructs of the mind when it is the Left that is doing it. In fact, everything about the Left relies on an invented moral framework that does not exist in realty.

A good example of this is the “hate researcher”. There are people running around now with that title. Another flavor of this is the extremism expert. Whenever the media wants to label someone a heretic and have them hurled into the void, they call on people with one of these titles. The target is identified, the hate researcher provides the “data” proving that this person meets the definition of a hater or extremist, and therefore they deserve to be hurled into the void.

The fact that there can be no such thing as a hate researcher, or an extremism expert is never questioned. Hate is an entirely subjective term as used by the Left. It does not actually mean an intense or passionate dislike. Instead, they have created a new definition that means something close to unorthodox and taboo. Most of the people accused of being a hater do not, in fact, hate anyone. They simply disagree from the prevailing orthodoxy with regards to the human condition.

Of course, “extreme” is and must be an entirely subjective term. Extremes are relative, so it all depends upon your perspective. People into “extreme sports” are not all that crazy to the people in those sports. Someone holding an extreme opinion is only considered to be an extremist in relation to others. Researching extremism, beyond explaining the subjectivity of the term and how it is used, is like researching UFO encounters or Big Foot sightings.

What the Left has done is create a moral framework. Inside the framework are the acceptable truths and outside are the taboo ideas. Wrong and right are not determined by factual accuracy but by the rules of the moral framework. Accepting the facts of table 43 of the Uniform Crime Report is wrong even though it is factual accurate. When the Left accuses the world of creating social constructs, it is because everything about their understanding of the world is through a social construct.

The hate expert and extremism researcher are similarly inventions that can only exist within the rules of the moral framework. In actuality there is no such thing and can be no such thing without the warped moral code of the Left. What the Left is doing, what they are expert at doing, is creating the required social constructs that allow them to anathematize things that contradict their current beliefs. It is how something can go from taboo to virtuous in the blink of an eye.

Another good example of this is the concept of “racism”. It is another invention that does not exist in the real world. The Left defines this as prejudice plus power and power is only held by white people. The reason for that is society is a social construct made by and for white people. This mean the lowliest white guy has power, while Barak Obama is his powerless victim. Therefore, by definition, the only people who can be racist are white people, because they have power.

It is only in the matrix of the Left’s fantasy world that this idea can seem real. The moral concept of racism would have been baffling to people a century ago. Prejudice was certainly something people have always known. They also considered it perfectly normal as tastes are subjective. Some people hate lima beans while others love them, but that says nothing about the nature of lima beans. The same applies to people’s taste in other people and other tribes.

This is why clarity of language is such a powerful weapon against the Left, even when wielded by crude people. When a leftist uses the term “hate speech” and someone corrects them with “you mean taboo speech” they will get very nervous. At some level, the Left knows the moral world they inhabit is a fiction. Using clear language to turn the lights on and expose the fiction is horrifying to them. Their fantasy world works only when they can commit to it totally.

Maintaining this fictional moral universe may be why the Left is so prone to accusing others of what they are doing. It is a defense mechanism. By shifting the focus to outside their safe zone, they get to avoid see the reality of their world. It is an extension of their natural self-loathing. The fictional world replaces their hated sense of self and the projection onto enemies of their own fears about themselves provides a necessary distraction from the reality of their condition.

Revanchism

Posted on November 10, 2021 by thezman

Revanchism is a political movement based in the desire to reverse territorial losses after a war or cultural upheaval, like a revolution. The term originated in France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Nationalists wanted to avenge the French defeat and reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. It is often mingled with irredentism, the desire for lost territory based on legend. Israel’s territorial claims in the Levant are an example of both concepts.

In the West, revanchism is generally associated with the Right and especially with nationalist politics. The revanchists wish their nation to reclaim lost turf on perhaps fulfill its destiny by reclaiming its ancient territory. It can also mean a reassertion of the old culture and traditions, rolling back the current culture which is seen as foreign or illegitimate in some way. Revanchists want to go back to some point in the past where they think the break occurred in the culture.

An example is this American Conservative post by Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold. It is titled, “In Defense of Cultural Christianity”, an apologia for the traditional Christian order. It is not a defense but rather a call to reassert a pre-Reformation Catholicism and the political and social elements required to do it. Theirs is a “throne-and-altar” conception of conservatism that seeks to restore the Church as the partner of the secular state.

This wing of the Revanchist Right is responding to the modern Gnosticism of the Left, especially its view of the material world. Since the modern Left does not believe in an afterlife or God, their view of the material world as being hostile to the sacred essence of man leads to a war on the material world itself. Rather than transcending this life, like the Gnostics of old, the modern Progressive seeks to conquer nature and transform it into the tool of the fully self-aware man.

These Catholic revanchists are not the first to note the utopianism of modern liberal thought or its connection to Gnosticism. Conservative gadfly William F. Buckley popularized Eric Voegelin’s phrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!”, which became a conservative slogan in the 1960’s. Immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the final, heaven-like stage of history in this world. Hans Jonas, a century ago, noted the link between Gnosticism and modern thought.

This link between Gnosticism, Progressivism and the Catholic response to ancient Gnosticism is clear in the essay. “The thoroughly anti-gnostic Augustine, moreover, viewed Catholic cultural Christianity as an elongation of the Incarnation. It was its incarnational, anti-gnostic realism about our social and political nature that lent the Christian order of Europe its radiant vitality, its longevity and strength.” In other words, the proper response to the modern is the ancient.

The authors go on to point out that the secular state that subordinates all religion inevitably leads to a deracinated, gnostic form of Christianity. You can enjoy your faith in total private, but it can have no place in the culture or society. In the modern context, Christianity becomes just another hobby that can have no impact on this world or the people in it. You are left with a form of Rod Dreher-ism, in which you must retreat from the material world and wait for salvation in the next.

As an aside, it is interesting that this essay is posted on the American Conservative website, where Rod Dreher promotes his bespoke Gnosticism. He does not sell it as such, but that is what he is selling. His form of orthodoxy is just the special of the day at the cafeteria of Christianity. From the point of view of the revanchists, his call to retreat from this world is just another manifestation of the deracination and degradation of man by the liberal moral order.

Putting that aside, the revanchists are correct for the wrong reasons. They correctly see that the throne and altar are inevitably linked. They seem to think this is a Catholic innovation, but that is incorrect. The joining of the supernatural with human hierarchy is as old as human society. Every ruling elite needs authority, and that authority comes from legitimacy. There is no better way to solve this problem than to claim the ruler or ruling elite are the will of the gods or actual gods.

Once belief is understood as a natural part of man’s nature, like intelligence or the desire to reproduce, the question becomes, what should man believe? This has been the engine of human conflict and human progress since the beginning. The Catholic Church was a late comer to this battle for the soul of man. Modern liberalism may have roots in the ancient past, but it too is late to the party. It displaced that old order the revanchists seek to restore.

That is the central problem of revanchist thinking. It is not hard to make a compelling case in favor of the old throne-and-altar but there is a reason why it was abandoned in favor of the liberal order. Simply dismissing that reality as a wrong turn in the arc of history or a sign of moral decline avoids the issue. The Catholic Imperium has a defined beginning, the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 312 CE, and a less well define end, possibly the Treaty of Westphalia.

To make the claim that this is a universal or timeless moral framework has to address why it did not exist for most of human history and why it was pushed aside. This is a problem shared by all cultural revanchism. In its reaction to the present, it blinds itself to the failings of the past. As a result, it becomes a form of escapism, where the past becomes fantasy literature. In this case, the Catholic integralist gets to imagine what it would be like to live in Medieval Europe.

The anti-Gnostics, however, should not be dismissed. Their observations about modern liberalism are useful, if incomplete. What we see with liberal democracy is an effort to solve its own internal conflict. It rejects the supernatural, but like all political orders, it needs an external source of legitimacy. It is trying to evolve one that only hints at the supernatural by leaving out large swaths of reality that can only be filled in with an undefined faith in the present order.

This is why the term “woke” is popular. These people are aware of their eternal identity, which is analogous to being aware of their divine essence. The great war between those “defending our democracy” and the so-called fascists is a rework of the old Gnostic dualism where the material world is evil, and the god is pure good. Critical theory then becomes the logos connecting the two. Modern Gnosticism is the quest for legitimacy and authority in a secular world.

In the end, revanchism can only be a starting point to model a new moral order that incorporates the old while recognizing its flaws. A new moral order will have to appeal to people as they are in this deracinated modern state. That means what comes next must be a continuation, rather than a rollback. That is both difficult and frightening, which is why revanchism will grow in popularity. Even so, the path is always forward. There is no going back to a prior age, no matter how much we desire it.

The Radical Middle

Posted on November 9, 2021 by thezman

Note: For those who Allah has blessed with a soul, there is a review of the near classic Western, Dance with Wolves up behind the green door. Those without a sub, condemned to a life of darkness, may Allah have pity on you.

For generations, one of the ironies of American politics is that the rank and file of the two main factions never get what they want but they stick with their side. The recent election is a good example of this as the “winning team” was immediately finked on by their party. They thought the message they sent to their leaders and the rulers is they are done with the craziness. The Republican leaders promptly supported the Democrats in generating more crazy.

It has been noted before that for the people who call themselves conservative and support the Republican Party, their best president was Bill Clinton. His was the most conservative administration since Eisenhower, according to the modern definition of conservative. The worst president was George W. Bush, the guy the Republican Party claimed was the epitome of conservatism. Conservative voters still hate Bill Clinton and mostly ignore Bush.

The Democrat side is not much better. The typical Democrat thought was Bush was Hitler reimagined, but he gave them almost everything they wanted. They opposed his crusades against Islam, but only because he was leading it. They forgot all about their antiwar rhetoric when their guy was installed to lead the crusade. Their most recent hero, Barak Obama, delivered on none of his promises to them. Instead, he catered to the party’s ideological and financial interests

There have been many attempts to explain this. The ideological march to the Left has been described as the ratchet effect. The political dynamic is the Left proposes, the Right opposes, and the synthesis is 80% of what the Left demanded. The cycle repeats with each election to one degree or another. The result is that America has become increasingly ideological in its politics and increasingly left-wing. The subsequent policy changes reflect the ideological march to the Left.

This may have been true in the Cold War with regards to domestic policy and perhaps the muscle memory remains but there is something else. Since the end of the Cold War, the American Left embraces cultural Marxism. The old liberalism, which was very lightly decorated with Marxist rhetoric, has given way to a politics of critical theory and Gramscian cultural politics. The Left is now purely about agitation and menticide in order to undermine and collapse the dominant culture.

This has led to a change in what conservatism sells to its side of the fight. The subplot of Republican politics is now stability, safety, and normalcy. The constant crisis of corruption that marked the Clinton years was replaced by the patriotic normalcy of the Bush years. The Republicans are now selling this as an antidote to the uncertainty and instability of the Trump – Biden years. The Virginia election was all about a return to normalcy so conservative voters could go back to grilling.

The new dynamic, new as in the last thirty years, is a clash of visions divorced from actual policy disputes. The one side promises to subvert, disrupt, and confront the prevailing order. The other side promises to supply stability, safety, and a sense of normalcy to society. One side wants to shake the snow globe until is it destroyed and the other side wants to place it back on the shelf so it can settle. Both sides agree on the shared premise of their position.

That shared premise is supplied by the Left. The core assumption of the modern Left is the Marxist assumption. Man is naturally communistic. The old Marxists thought it was the economic arrangements of capitalism that locked man into a competitive struggle with himself, rather than settling into his natural communism. The new Marxists think the villain is culture. They have seized control of the means of cultural production so they can liberate man from bourgeois society.

The so-called conservatives, perhaps unwittingly, accept this premise. They seek to prevent the Left from shaking society apart with their endless disruptions. Their defense of the status quo is not so much a defense of the natural order, something they now fear uttering even in private. Instead, their defense of the present order is simply to provide them with a role in the process. The Left proposes and the Right opposes is now the Left disrupts and the Right cleans up the mess.

This was why both sides feared and hated Trump and his supporters. It is not a policy issue or even a presentation issue. It is the clash of visions. The people most enthusiastically on the side of Trump think that man’s natural state is not communistic but orderly and hierarchical. They think if the prevailing orthodoxy collapses, what rises from the ashes is not communism but a new traditionalism. More important, the Left will no longer have barricades behind which they can hide.

This is why the critiques of Trump by people claiming to be outside the political dynamic are narrow and childish. He was not the Pinochet they imagined, so they slammed their rattle on the highchair and threw a tantrum. Just as the Trump phenomena exposed the hollowness of conservatism, it revealed the shallowness of what is often fobbed off as a dissident critique of it. They failed to understand that Trump was just a wrecker who wanted to tear it down and let nature take its course.

In fairness, Trump may not even get this deeper meaning of his politics, as he is not inclined to intellectual introspection. Most of his red-cap wearing loyalists are blissfully unaware of this sort of analysis. That is not the point. The point is they start from the assumption that if they could burn it all down, what would naturally rise up in its place is the sort of orderly hierarchy the genuine Right thinks is man’s nature. It is a rejection of the core belief of the ruling orthodoxy.

The lesson here is that a genuine opposition should look at the calls for stability and normalcy the same way they view the calls for subversion and disruption. They are two sides of the same coin, two dancing partners heading to the same end. The antidote to left-wing disruption is not stability, but right-wing disruption that helps break the white middle-class of its addiction to stability and compromise. A genuine alternative seeks to radicalize rather than anesthetize the middle-class.

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