Category Archives: Culture

DIE Another Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Imperial Outlook

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One of the many complaints in the brief against conservatives is that they care more about Israel than they do about the southern border. A similar complaint comes up with regards to the war in Ukraine. Professional conservatives do not care about the things that normal people think are important. Instead, professional conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, spend their days convincing normal people that the concerns of Israel or the Kagan cult matter more than the opioid problem.

While this is true, professional conservatives are not the ones spearheading this approach to politics. Look at the other side and you see the same. The people we call the Left spend their time telling the world that the mundane things that can and should be addressed by government must take a back seat to the bogeyman. Joe Biden is kicking off his campaign by visiting places where the bogeyman was seen doing the things they claim the bogeyman does.

In other words, it is not just so-called conservatives who spend their time focused on things over the rainbow. It is that our politics, in general, deliberately shifts the focus from the local and practical to the distant and obscure. No one running for anything talks about the fact that America has a $34 trillion dollar debt and that we spend almost $15,000 per person per year on medical services. America is a sick society that is becoming too broke to mend itself.

In fairness, a candidate who ran on a platform of deregulating the health care rackets and restoring order to the legal system would have no audience. Over several generations the people have been conditioned to care more about the bogeyman and Israel than their own neighborhood. A practical candidate could go into a suburb strewn with trash and illegal aliens promising to clean up both and the locals would demand to know his position on the war in Gaza or abortion.

This was not always the case. Within living memory congressional candidates would show up in their district to ask for votes. The whole “kissing babies” thing was a joke because it was a real thing that happened. Not only did politicians mingle with the voters, but office holders also responded to questions and complaints from them. Not so long-ago elected officials held town-style gatherings where normal people in the area could show up and ask questions.

Nothing like that happens now. The closest you get is Trump flying around to rural airports to hold his raucous rallies. Joe Biden will run his 2024 campaign from his beach mansion in Delaware. Occasionally they will produce a television event that makes it seem like he is in front of real people. Most likely these will be done using modern technology as he is incapable of forming a sentence now. His avatar will talk about the bogeyman and maybe Ukraine or Israel.

What we are experiencing is an inverted version of America. The founding of the country was by people who had the exact opposite view of the world. They came to the new world for selfish reasons. They did not want “freedom” or “liberty” and they did not give a damn about American values. They wanted cheap land and an opportunity to provide a better life for themselves and their family. Their patriotism, if it existed at all, was focused on the things close to them.

Well into the 19th century the typical American had little reason to care about the federal government because it was far away and did nothing that was of a great concern to the average person. The town council, on the other hand, was important because it did important things. People cared about those offices and who held them because those people had the power to do things that mattered locally, and the people were primarily focused on local matters.

The point here is that empire does not just invert the sensibilities of the ruling class but also the people in the empire. Throughout the Cold War, Finland was sandwiched between the two great empires. As a normal country with normal citizens, they focused on what was best for Finland and the Finnish people. They did not worry themselves about communism versus capitalism, other than when they needed to placate one or the other side of the Cold War.

Now that Finland has submitted itself to the empire, the primary focus of the Finnish state will be the bogey man and the enemies of the empire. Finnish politicians will feel the need to have a position on Israel. They will shake their fists at the current enemy of the empire. Meanwhile, the borders will be left open, and the social capital will be monetized and hauled away by the usual suspects, but Finns will feel good about hating the current bogeyman of the empire.

It is the nature of empire to flip the normal relationships upside down so that people focus on what is far away rather than what is near. Right now, conservatives are cheering that Harvard replaced their black lesbian president with someone who looks like he is from an antisemitic pamphlet. Meanwhile the public schools are full of pedophiles and drug dealers. No one should care about Harvard’s president, but they should care about who is running the local schools.

It very well may be that the antidote to the problems of empire is to stop thinking like the subject of an empire. When people care more about the school board elections than the presidential election, it is no longer possible for the beneficiaries of empire to frame elections around the issues of empire. Imagine if the next GOP debate was about the color of crime rather than how much everyone loves Israel. Of course, no one currently in the race would qualify under that system.

This is why empires must always run their course. The empire is born and soon the focus of everyone is on the maintenance of the empire. The people in the empire come to define themselves in terms of the empire. The empire then fades, and the people have to relearn how to be normal again. The empire must end before people can replace their imperial identity with something new. It is why the only true patriots are those who oppose the Global American Empire.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Myth Of Dual Loyalty

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Over the holidays, a bit of controversy erupted when in an interview, Tucker Carlson noted that certain people, like Ben Shapiro, are much more concerned about Israel than the people of the United States. The bat signal was immediately lit, and Israel supporters started chanting about how Ben Shapiro is a patriot and Carlson’s criticism smacked of the old dual loyalty “canard” from a mythical time in America’s past when Jews were forced to live under a cloud of suspicion about their loyalty.

Because this is the media age, it was not hard to see the invisible hand of coordination in the responses from the usual suspects. Here we have Andrew Klavan posting the same thing as Ben Domenech, who posted the same thing as Kurt Schlichter who said the same this as Chris Loesch and you get the idea. A memo went out to their Twitter influencers to boost the idea of Ben Shapiro being a patriot. The object of his patriotism, however, is never mentioned.

This is an old trick to avoid the actual question. The pro-Israel lobby is not addressing the issue at the heart of Tucker’s criticism, which is that people like Ben Shapiro and his defenders care more about people in other countries than Americans. Instead, they want Tucker and his fans to address this made-up idea that Jews were subject to bigotry in the past on the grounds they have dual loyalty. Instead of addressing the point, they shift the focus to another topic.

Of course, the concept of dual loyalty itself is the result of a similar tactic used in the past to shield Zionist from criticism. The “dual loyalty” concept is a product of the 20th century, created by the Israel lobby to obscure the fact that we suddenly had this new force in politics that demanded the government care more about the interests of Israel than the interests of Americans. People who raised questions about the Israel lobby got smeared as antisemites.

For most of American history and probably European history, the concept of dual loyalty was unknown, for the simple reason people understood that a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can have only one true loyalty. You may have conditional loyalty to other people and ideas, but those conditional loyalties have to give way to your primary loyalty. You were primarily a Christian, an Englishman, a loyal subject of the empire or a Jew. That is the nature of loyalty.

That was always the criticism of Jews, that their first loyalty was always going to be to their people, no matter their conditions. In America into the 1970’s it was common for people to note, often approvingly, that Jews stick together. The implication was that they cared primarily about their people. Jewish comedians had jokes about this that had a punchline, “but is it good for the Jews” that played on this well-known and generally accepted reality of the Jewish people.

It should be noted that into the 20th century this was same reasoning was applied to Catholics, who were assumed to be primarily loyal to the Church. This was a carry over from the schisms within Christendom. Protestants in Protestant countries could accuse Catholics of being loyal to the Pope rather than the king. Even today, Catholic judges have to answer questions about their faith. Jewish liberals attacked Amy Coney Barrett for being a faithful Catholic, especially on abortion.

The clever trick about this “dual loyalty” stuff is it not only shifted the focus from Jews onto their critics, but it made noticing what everyone, including Jews, had accepted for hundreds of years into a taboo. Noticing that Ben Shapiro was an emotional wreck over the Hamas attack, but he blatantly states that he does not care about the health and welfare of the white people is somehow immoral. It is a form of the motte-and-bailey argument that is so popular with the Left.

Of course, guys like Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak do not have dual loyalty, despite having dual citizenship. It is impossible to have dual loyalty. Their primary loyalty is to their people, which is why they wear the funny little hats. That is the point of the hats, to tell the world they are not of the world, but separate. This is an age-old way people identify with a specific group and show their loyalty to that group by physically separating from everyone else in society.

There is nothing immoral about this and there is nothing immoral about noticing it, but it does raise questions, which is why we have the “dual loyalty” stuff. Tolerating a minority whose primary interests lie outside the majority must be limited. That limit is the interests of the majority, whose primary loyalty is to themselves. It means Ben Shapiro cannot pretend to speak for the interests of the majority. He must appeal to them as an outsider on behalf of outsiders.

This creates an obvious problem, so what people like Ben Shapiro prefer to do is conflate the interest of Americans with the interests of Israel so that questioning the behavior of Israel is equivalent to burning the American flag. To their credit, this rhetorical game has worked on many people. Anyone questioning the proportionality of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack or criticizing the wholesale killing of civilians is unironically accused of being unpatriotic.

The fact that Tucker has not been hurled into the void over this speaks to the changing nature of public consciousness. America and the West are heading into a time for choosing in which people must think about the question of loyalty. Are you more loyal to an abstract concept or to people who look like you, sound like you and share your same concerns about your community? We are entering a time when people begin to think about their hierarchy of loyalties and their identity as people.

It also speaks to the fact that the old pseudo-loyalties are breaking down. When the concept of American has been watered down to the point where it often means caring more for strangers than your own family, it is not hard to see why increasing numbers of Americans are no longer moved by calls to patriotism. Ben Shapiro waving the American flag and Israeli flag in front of the suckers is not working because the suckers are no longer moved by the American flag.

It is natural for minorities to put the interests of their minority group first, as their identity is tied to their minority status. In a society composed of minorities, there can be no patriotism as everyone’s primary loyalty will be to their group, so the good of the whole is always a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all. In other words, America will be populated with people who think about their people, just as Ben Shapiro thinks of his people, but they will just wear different hats.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Ungovernable Costs

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Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.

One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.

This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.

Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.

It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”

This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.

That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.

Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.

Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.

One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.

Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.

When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.

In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.

In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.

What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Liberal Intolerance

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There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The Tool Makers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merry Christmas.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Green Door Content: Annie Hall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

White Authority

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Good Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

The False Dawn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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