The Custodial State

Posted on July 8, 2021 by thezman

One of the weirder aspects of the Covid panic was how every corporation decided they needed to do their duty with regards to panic. In many respects, they were the primary fear mongers, as people interface with corporations multiple times a day, while it is possible to tune out the government. For most people, the yammering meat sticks in the media are just the background noise of life. The corporation, on the other hand, is the safety rails of their life, guiding them as hey go about their business.

Shortly after the politicians declared mass panic, every retail chain was busy putting up signs, setting up social distancing protocols and training an army of harpies to lecture people about the need to be safe. The banal overhead music was replaced with endless chants about how much they cared and wanted you to be safe. Those declarations were followed by the robot voice telling you to obey the latest edicts from the CDC about social distancing and dousing yourself in alcohol gel.

The weird part about it was not that it was right out of dystopian science fiction movies where people live in high tech penal colonies. What was weird is no one noticed that we were suddenly thrust into high tech day care centers. The fact that corporations would take the lead was just expected. Something similar happened with the antiwhite pogroms launched after George Floyd. It was corporate America leading the war on white people through ads, TV shows, sporting events and movies.

Again, the remarkable thing about this is not that corporate America is hyper-political now, but that everyone just accepts it without notice. Here is a story by Matt Taibbi about YouTube censoring someone named Bret Weinstein. He walks through the travails of Mr. Weinstein and other Covid skeptics who have been harried by faceless censors on social media platforms. It is a weird blend of passive-aggressiveness and technological superficiality. It is Kafka meets Hal 9000.

The thing that Taibbi does not mention is why these companies suddenly think it is their duty to police what people say. All of the heads of these tech firms regular say they have a duty to police what people say on their platforms. The retail chains that decorated their stores with Covid stuff took the same stance. They were doing their duty by pushing you around in their stores. It was not profit or the satisfaction of their shareholders at the top of their list. It was your safety.

We have gone from a world where private companies should have the right to regulate what happens in their firms because property rights are essential, to a world where they must regulate what happens because the public good demands it. In the blink of an eye, all of corporate America is of one mind on all issues and they volunteer to be on the front lines of the fight over those issues. America is now a massive daycare center run by corporations acting like matronly old hens.

It turns out that C. S. Lewis got it exactly right when he said, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

The custodial state turns out to be worse than the authoritarian state imagined by Orwell, because there is no face to the enemy. In 1984, it was Big Brother who ruled with an iron fist for his own sake. In the custodial state it is an invisible network of mother hens with unlimited resources. With one hand they dispense the pleasures of life and with the other hand they grab you by the scruff and make sure you eat your broccoli before leaving the table. All we see is the hand, never the face.

Because they are faceless, there is also no way to appeal to their humanity, their sense of fair play or the rules they claim to follow. When YouTube bans you from their platform, they issue a form of “Because I’m your mother and I say so” when you try to appeal their decision. When the bank shuts down your bank account, they make sure to inform you that this hurts them more than it hurts you. Declaring themselves a selfless nanny of the custodial state makes it all right.

The custodial state is the sensibilities of women armed with the weapons and power created by men. This is what lies behind the popular lunacies of Critical Race Theory, wokeness and white fragility. Every one of these is pushed by a thousand perfumed hands as a way to show how much they care for all of their children. Stripped of the Marxist jargon, it is nothing more than a mother standing over her children telling them to play nice and share their toys with one another.

In the Assemblywomen, the 4th century BC playwright Aristophanes described a world in which the women of Athens gained control of the government. Before long the city fell into a chaos that is familiar to us today. Men were wearing their wives’ clothing, ugly women were demanding that men see them as attractive and, of course, everyone was supposed to share their good with the community. In short order the normal rhythms of Athenian life give way to the chaos of female tyranny.

Aristophanes never explained how it ended, because it was just assumed that no such thing could last very long. That was what made the play a comedy. America will soon find out how a gynocratic custodial state ends. Maybe modern people are happy to sink quietly into the darkness of infantilization. Rather than take up their posts in the adult world, they prefer to live like children, a modern Eloi. The collapsing fertility rates and increasing dependency suggest the end of us is a form of crib death.

“‘It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of life—the true civilizing process that makes life more and more secure— had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward. And the harvest was what I saw!”

–The Time Machine

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The Kakistocracy Is Real

Posted on July 1, 2021 by thezman

An easily ignored aspect of the Tucker Carlson spying story is just how ham-fisted this caper was executed, regardless of the reason. Carlson is a relentless critic of the regime, but his audience is relative tiny. His average total audience is roughly 3 million people per night. Even if every night is a new crowd, that is an audience of 15 million in a country of 330 million people. He may be the biggest name in cable news, but the reality is, cable news is a low impact medium.

This was always the lesson of the Trump phenomenon. The entirety of the mass media, including the so-called conservatives, aligned against Trump but he was able to win the nomination and the general election. These are people who were sure they were the king makers in national politics. This TV carny comes along and walks right through their lines as if they were not there. Then he turned them into objects of ridicule and mockery by calling them childish names.

If the intelligence agencies were what they imagine themselves to be, they would see that Tucker is never going to be much of a problem. They could just ignore him, like most everyone does, or they could use him. Carlson is one of the few serious people on television, but he is still on TV. He wants ratings, so a shrewd intel operative could feed him some juicy tidbits that serve the interests of the regime. Instead, they are in a petty spat and making him the sympathetic victim.

These sorts of thumbless capers raise an important issue. Our managerial elite is rapidly getting dumber. This is plainly obvious in the military side. Sure, rural peasants armed with Russian surplus were able to defeat the US army in the 1960’s, but that theater negated the primary American advantage at the time. Armor and advanced transport are useless in a jungle. Air dominance is not terribly effective against guerilla tactics in urban and jungle conditions.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military could exploit every technological advantage against a poorly equipped and trained opponent. In Afghanistan, the US faced off against a Bronze Age opponent. After two decades the white flag has gone up and the Taliban will take over this autumn. In Iraq, a ragtag force of insurgents led by a cleric came close to defeating the US army. The final peace looked more like a concession by the US, as Iraq is now an Iranian client.

The gross incompetency of the military is not unique. The entire managerial class is suffering from a rapid decline in intelligence. The truth is the system evolved for an adult population of the last century. It reflected the demographics of the population as a whole, but also the demographics of the ruling class. Over the last couple of generations, the people taking up positions in the system are significantly dumber, reflecting the changing demographics of the country.

This IQ decline will only become more acute in the next decade. The great Baby Boomer retirement will hit the civil service harder than the dreaded private sector, because the civil service is much older. The average age of the private workforce is roughly 35, depending upon who is doing the measuring. Similarly, the average age of the government workforce is 50. The leadership class is even older. In other words, the people running the system are geezers, not long for the world.

This is most stark in politics. Joe Biden is so old he has been in office longer than most people have been alive. The leadership of both parties is close behind. Pelosi, Schumer, McCarthy, Hoyer and McConnel reflect the sensibilities and the mating decisions of the disappearing past. Their replacements, Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Tim Scott, and so on, reflect the rapidly approaching future. Repeat this throughout the civil service and you can see the problem. The kakistocracy is real.

This decline in IQ is evident in the current upheaval. The great Progressive awakening of the 1950’s and 1960’s was driven by idealism. They really thought they were going to create a better world. It was also driven by the big change in the ruling class. Jews had taken up positions in the post-war ruling elite. They were making their mark by leading many of the cultural revolutions, like civil rights. Self-interest played a role, but social justice has always been a part of the Jewish cultural outlook.

Today, the revolts we see look like a cargo cult. They are reenactors playing parts they heard about in school. They think if they can replay the events of the past, the past will come alive and the great do-over begins. They are led by a carnival of simpletons and lunatics who mostly like smashing things and making noise. Antifa and BLM are the short bus passengers in the story of street activism. None of what we are seeing makes any sense or has any point. It is just mayhem for the sake of it.

The institutions of a society are the tools of the people running the society, designed for their use over the course of time. The institutions of America were made for people a full standard deviation smarter than today’s rulers. Those tools were also created with certain cultural assumptions missing from the current class. The next generation of rulers are the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey compared to the men who created the tools used to run the empire.

It will not end well.

Words Are Keys

Posted on June 29, 2021 by thezman

It is a popular joke among the worst people that the best people need to find a minority to endorse their preferences before they can express them. In this context, the “best people” are the poohbahs of Conservative Inc. No matter how obvious or justified their position, so-called conservatives need to prove they are the best people by searching high and low for a “person of color” who agrees with them. Candace Owens has gotten rich by blessing the positions of conservatives.

It is the slave mentality, of course. The master is always projecting pride and power, as those are the things he values. He is the master, the man in charge, so he places the most value on the things that are useful to him as the master. The slave, on the other hand, is obsequious and submissive. The slave tries to express his will through quiet subversion, always conscious of the master. In American politics, conservatives are the slave, always displaying their submissiveness.

You see this with the growing controversy over Critical Race Theory. Conservative Inc. was silent on the issue until a black women stood up against it at a local school board meeting in Virginia. You could hear the sighs of relief echoing around Washington as conservatives finally had their champion. This antiwhite pogrom aimed at white children was no longer antiwhite, it was racist! Ever since, the conservative panjandrums have been piling in the company Lincoln with the DR3 tags.

Even Chris Rufo, the Andy Ngo of CRT, has struggled to accept the reality of his own reporting on the issue. He has been trying hard to make this about racism, rather than the long war on white people. He has personal reasons for it, but it is clear that he really believes what they say about white people. That is, if two or more white people get together outside the presence of nonwhites, they will immediately start planning for the new camp system in the Fourth Reich.

That last bit may seem like an exaggeration, but it is the root of what drives things like Critical Race Theory. Another person desperate to tone police, while riding the wave of controversy, is Karlyn Borysenko. She was sent in by the usual suspects to tell white people that the term “antiwhite” is very bad. Here she is with Patrick Casey explaining that the term antiwhite promotes white solidarity and white positivity. In this clip, she says that this always leads to genocide.

In fairness to Rufo, he seems to have figured out that he was speaking to no one by making CRT about racism against nonwhites. The parents flipping out about this stuff are all white. The people in the crowd cheering them on are white. He seems to have settled for a middle ground of implying that it is antiwhite racism. Scott Greer seems to be happy with that phrasing as well. The Wall Street Journal is fine with this new, oblique way of framing the issue.

As was brilliantly pointed out yesterday, the R-word can only apply to whites, so this new formulation is nonsensical. When someone on the Left hears the phrase “racism against whites” she hears Charlie Brown’s teacher. Racism can mean only one thing and that is prejudice plus power. In the fantasy world of the Left, the only people with power are white people, so they are the only people who can be racist. As is always the case with the Left, compromise is suicide.

The reason for this is that the Left is a hive, dividing the world into those inside the hive walls and those outside the hive walls. This is reflected in their language. There are words and concepts that can be used as weapons against their enemies and then there is language used by the enemy, that justifies attacking them. When the say language is violence, they really mean it. It is either a justification for their use of violence against outsiders or a call to violence against outsiders.

This is why the word “antiwhite” is so powerful. The Left has no way to redefine it as a slur against their enemy. Worse yet, when they attack their enemy for using it, they confirm the definition of the word. The biggest problem for them is the word strips them of moral authority. When the Left finger-wags about something like racism, they do so as the moral authorities on the issue. Cast as antiwhite, they immediately become just another snout at the trough of the culture war.

The Left has always relied upon informational asymmetry. They operate as pure partisans, while the other side is objectivists. That is, the Left wants to win every fight and the Right wants to find the correct answer. If the Right ever embraces partisanship, then it becomes a genuine fight. Since numbers matter, keeping white people chained to simpleminded individualism has been key. The word antiwhite is a key to unlock the chains and that is terrifying to the Left.

This does not mean the war is won just because the Left is on the defensive over Critical Race Theory. As Joe Sobran pointed out a quarter century ago, “The white
man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And superiority excites envy.” It is only when white people come to terms with this reality will they abandon the slave mentality and begin to assert their power again. This minor slave revolt over CRT is merely a hint of what lies ahead.

Alternative Ruminations

Posted on June 22, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a new movie review behind the green door. This week the movie is Fargo, the great 1990’s crime comedy. For those on SubscribeStar it is here and for those on Buy Me A Beer it is in your e-mail and here as well.

Alternative history is one of those things that should be more popular in Hollywood, as it opens the door for creativity. “What if the South won the Civil War” would let the filmmaker run wild with all sorts of claims about the past, for example. For the same reason, it should be more popular with people in general. It makes for a good start to a campfire story. “Imagine if our enemies from the past had won and we were forced to live in a world of their creation…” is a good scary story.

For whatever reason, alternative history is not very popular. Revisionist history, on the other hand is popular. In fact, revisionism, outside of one subject, is the norm in the history departments of the West. The only thing historians do is question the official narrative of various historical events. The new narrative usually tries to explain the past according to the new morality. Fitting the past into the great story justifying the moral claims of the people in charge is the point of history.

This is why any attempt to question the official narrative of the Second World War is strictly prohibited. The entire ruling class structure is built upon the myths and legends fabricated in the aftermath of the war. The moral center of the American empire is the assertion that the morality of the empire is universal. More important, it is the logical endpoint of the great historical dialectic. It is the fulfillment of the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence, words made flesh.

This has created a massive blind spot in our ruling class. By condemning old enemies, especially the fascists, to the pit of the demons, they don’t have to think much about those systems and how they could have evolved. How would fascism have evolved if the British cut a deal with the Germans over Poland? If not for Churchill’s blood lust for war, a deal could have been made to avert war in the West. How would that have changed the course of fascism in both Germany and Italy?

One possible outcome is it would have quickly evolved into something very similar to what we see in America. The rapid rebuild of the German economy by the fascists bound the state and corporate interests in a way that is familiar to us today. Organized labor was suppressed, in favor of the state speaking for labor. This is not much different from the present model in America. Using Jews and Slavs as cheap labor is not all that different from what American business does with guest workers.

It is generally assumed that the economic model of fascism could never last, as it was really just a form of war socialism. First it was the war on the devastating consequences of the Great War. Then it was the build up to reassert power in Europe. Once war broke out, the economies of fascist states were organized around war. This type of economics is assumed to burn bright but not last. If left alone, the inequities would lead to social unrest and demands for reform.

This was the experience of the Bolsheviks, in a different context. The revolution and then the civil war forced the party to requisition everything they could touch and put it toward the war effort. Once the civil war was over, it became clear that the system could not last. People would not continue to sacrifice their labor for the party when the party was no longer under direct threat. How long would the German people have tolerated the iron rule of the party without the threat of war?

The present gives us some clue. For some time now America has lived under the iron grip of the uniparty. The last agent of change produced by the political system was Reagan and that was half a century ago. The reforms of Reagan were popular, but never challenged the ruling class. Since then, the system has produced one clone after another, with the exception of Trump. He was quickly neutralized and then ejected from the system like a dangerous foreign object from the body.

The party has also kept the country on a war footing. The Cold War shaped the American empire and the ruling class. They need war to exist, so when the Cold War ended, the search for new enemies commenced. First, we got the crusades against the Muslims, which got started with Bush I. Now it is a tossup between China and Russia as to who will be the new devil. The uniparty needs war socialism and war socialism needs an enemy to justify its excesses.

This is why some believe the fascists would have had no choice but to start a war in Europe, even if the British had not been so willing. This type of political system needs to be on war footing. The permanent revolution of communist systems is an effort to institutionalize the creation of enemies around which the system can rally. The current war on white people is very similar. It is an effort to create a permanent enemy of the party that can never be defeated, but must always be opposed.

Of course, the American empire has been at war for close to a century, but unlike the fascists or communists, it persists. The reason is it has not picked the wrong enemies around which to organize the war. It could have been dumb luck. The Soviets came to believe they had to tread lightly around the Americans. The Kennedy administration’s desire to blow up the world over Cuba was a key lesson. The American ruling class was composed of fanatics, not sober minded realists.

Taken together, it suggests that there really was no alternative timeline in which war was averted and the fascists tried to figure out how to make it work. The Americans were on the prowl for an enemy. The fascists systems needed an enemy to justify their control of society. Stalin’s revolution from above required an enemy around which to organize and he was running out of internal enemies to kill. The great contest between various forms of war socialism was inevitable.

Electric Elite

Posted on June 3, 2021 by thezman

Most everyone has looked down at the fuel gauge and suddenly realized the tank is very close to empty. Maybe it is the idiot light going on as you pass the sign that reads “last stop for food or fuel for X miles.” The worst one is when this happens in a rural area or at night. The prospect of being stranded on the side of the road for a very long time quickly crowds out other thoughts. It is a terrible feeling. Almost all of us are conditioned to make sure this never happens.

Running out of gas used to be a common thing in America. In the early days of the automobile, care did not have a gas gauge and gas stations did not always have gas, so it was a common scene. The first “gas gauge” was a marked stick the driver would stick into the tank. Until very recent, gas stations used this method to test how much water was in their tanks. Eventually, more sophisticated solutions were invented and then manufacturers install them at the factory.

Running out of gas is not very common these days. For starters, we have gas stations everywhere people live. They are about 120-thousand gas stations in America. If you live in an urban or suburban area, finding a gas station is not a challenge. The cars are also vastly more efficient today than the old days. Even sports cars get over 20 miles per gallon, so when the light comes on, you have about 40 miles to find gas. It is why it is very rare to see someone walking down the road with a gas can.

This old concern will become a feature of life shortly. Every car maker is determined to abandon the internal combustion engine for electric in the next decade. All of them have a five year plan to ditch the IC engine. Even the sports car makers are planning to drop the old engine and use electric motors. The roar of the engine will soon be replaced by the high pitched hum of the motor. Whether we wanted or not, the electric car will be forced onto American roads over the next decade.

The problem is that electric cars need to be charged. Right now, there are about five thousand fast chargers in America. The term “fast charger” is a little bit of inside humor the EV people enjoy. It takes about forty minutes to charge a car on a fast charger, so the word fast here is sarcasm. There are more slow chargers available, but slow should be interpreted as glacial. Those slow chargers take hours to charge. They are only useful as at-home options or at office parks.

Replacing the gas stations with fast chargers is no easy task. There is the cost, obviously, even if one assumes they could be profitable. That is not an assumption you can make at this point. The economics of EV charging stations are wildly different than those of a normal gas station. You do not need a lot of space for cars pulling into the pumps, fueling up in five minutes and then pulling away. You need vast spaces for cars pulling in and parking for an hour as they charge up the batteries.

Then there is the power grid. The current estimates say the cost to upgrade the power grid for electric cars is between four and ten trillion dollars. That is not money to be spent all at once, but it is real money. In modern America, most streets look like the surface of the moon and our bridges are literally collapsing. Like all aging empires, America is struggling to keep the plates spinning. How realistic is it to think we can upgrade the power grid over the next decade for electric cars?

Like the automobile makers, the nation’s utility companies have five and ten year plans for upgrading their part of the power grid. One cannot help but appreciate the Gosplan nature of this project. Like the car maker’s five year plans, the utility company plans always has a line in there for free money from the Federal Reserve. Unlike the car makers, the electric companies have not secured their free money. Slipping tax breaks into the code is a lot easier than printing trillions of dollars.

As with the Soviets, the central planners in America just assume whatever they dream can become a reality. The Soviets were sure they could find the right math to replace the role of prices in the market. Once they conquered that problem, the system would literally run itself. American central planners are sure they can find the right moral language to make their dreams pop into existence. If electric cars become who we are then all of the problems will solve themselves.

The electric car fetish is a good example of how markets are an illusion, at least in the broad sense the Austrian school economists argued. There never was a market for electric cars and there is not one now, at least in the organic sense. Instead, the market has been manufactured by government policy. Massive subsidies to the production side and subsidies to the demand side have created the market. Take those away and Elon Musk is back selling monorails to midsized cities.

It is also a good example of how elites have the dominant role in society. As with other things like immigration and the Covid panic, your opinion is never solicited, and it is never wanted. These are decisions made by a small cluster of policy makers at secret retreats and over cocktails at parties you will never attend. The American elite has decided the electric car is the future, so that is that. The fact that it could turn out to be another disaster like Covid is not a worry.

The argument against central planning has always been a simple one. It is impossible for the planners to account for all of the variables. Even the most basic of human systems is maddeningly complex. The truth of this is never a deterrent to the elites, especially those who are sure they are on the right side of history. The comically insane outcomes from the Soviet system never deterred the planners. The metric system did not teach American elites a lesson either.

Finally, the electric car fetish is a good example of what happens when an elite class enters into decline. They become rapacious and impractical. On the one hand, they seek to enrich themselves as quickly as possible, because no one in the elite feels a loyalty to the elite class or the society over which they rule. Everything becomes a smash and grab. On the other hand, they have become so insulated from the society over which they rule, they can no longer see their own folly.

America probably needs to spend five trillion over the next ten years to get the infrastructure back to first world standards. We need a Marshall plan for the roads, bridges, and utility systems. An aspiring elite would focus on that, rather than frivolous nonsense like electric cars. It would also be more scrupulous about who gets the money for the projects. That is not the future. Instead, it will be abandoned EV’s next to massive potholes and collapsing bridges.

Partisan Minds

Posted on June 1, 2021 by thezman

A fetish of the modern Right in America has been complaining about and denouncing partisanship in Washington. In fairness, the Left will indulge in this on the rare occasions when the Republicans do something for their voters. Mostly it is a conservative fetish, as it is the Left that drives the debate. The Right needs to maintain the fantasy that republican virtue still matters, so they regularly complain about the Left acting in their narrow interests, rather than in the interests of the country.

In theory, the conservatives are correct. Partisanship is the great bane of a republic, as it subverts the very basis of a republic. What is necessary to maintain a republic is what Montesquieu called republican virtue, the willingness to put the interests of the system ahead of personal or factional interests. For example, you must respect the office, even if you have no respect for the man holding the office. This shows up in our military culture where you do not salute the person, you salute the rank.

The trouble with the conservative approach is we have not lived in a republic for a very long time, so they are playing make believe. We live in a liberal democracy that is decreasing liberal with each turn of the wheel. In democratic systems, the ends justify the means, so partisanship dominates. It replaces republican virtue in favor of subjective moral certainty. This is one of the reasons that conservatism is worthless in a democracy of any sort. It prohibits victory as defined by the rules.

A good example of how partisanship works is in this conversation on the Daily Wire program, which is part of a series they run call Backstage. It is one of those round table deals where the stars chat about issues of the day. The highlighted clip is the discussion of Israel and their attacks on the Arabs last week. The people behind the Daily Wire are hyper-Zionists, so the conversation follows predictable contours. Israel is heroically fighting attacks from those evil Arabs.

Matt Walsh tries to point out a true fact, which is that Americans do not have a patriotic duty to support Israel or any other country. Immediately, the rules of the show are suspended as Boreing, Shapiro and Klavan leap to attack Walsh. It is an amusing bit of mask dropping, given the title of the show. The rules of decorum stop mattering to the partisan, as soon as his interests are in play. They cut off Walsh a few times and make sure he cannot get his point across to the audience.

An example of how rules are meaningless to partisans is when Shapiro claims that patriotism means love of ideas, while nationalism means love of country. This is laughable nonsense, and he surely knows it, so it is also a lie. The word patriotism comes from the Greek for “of one’s fathers” or fatherland. Of course, nationalism means a devotion to one’s own people. Both concepts have been attacked for obvious reasons, but their etymology is never in dispute.

In other words, Shapiro does not feel bound by truth when it comes to these topics, because what matters is his partisan interests. He wants conservatives to think they are duty-bound to back Israel, so he feels justified in making crazy claims like Americans have a patriotic duty to blindly defend Israel. This is an instinct that exists in the lizard brain, so he does not think of what he is doing as dishonest or immoral. It is just what he does, like pulling his hand away from a hot item.

Another aspect of partisanship is on display with Andrew Klavan. In that clip he makes the case for exterminating the Arabs. He does not put it like that, but that is the implication of his argument. In his view, the Arabs will never behave, and the Israelis are justified in using lethal force. The logical leap from those two statements is that the final solution to the problem is the liquidation of the Arabs. His excitement at the thought of exterminating the Arabs is an insight into the partisan mind.

Partisanship, like ethnocentrism, places group loyalty at the top. The first thing the partisan does when encountering people or issues is place them on one side of the partisan lines. “Is this person on our side?” is always the first question. In the case of issues or events, the question is, “how can this be turned to our advantage?” Since the partisans swaps his own individual identity for that of the group, these questions always feel deeply personal. They are life and death.

In a sense they are life and death. Since who Ben Shapiro is, from the perspective of Ben Shapiro, is his membership in the Zionist subculture, any questioning of it is a questioning of his very existence. It is why Klavan starts to salivate at the thought of killing Arabs. He cannot see them as human, as they are opposed to his group, so they are his mortal enemies. One is always justified in using any means necessary when defending your life from a threat.

You hear this in the left-wing justifications for violence over the last year. When they say “silence is violence” they are not being cheeky. To the partisan mind, you are either on their side or against their side. Words and violence are the same to the partisan mind, as anything that opposes the group is seen as a lethal threat. That is why silence is viewed as violence, as not declaring your support means opposition and the partisan is free to use any means necessary to end a threat.

There is not only no reasoning with a partisan, but there is no appealing to their better nature or their sense of virtue. Their chief virtue, the thing that matters the most to them, is their loyalty to the cause. Everything is warped to fit that moral framework, even the very definition of words, as you see with Ben Shapiro. Everything is viewed as a tool that can either be used against opponents or can be used by opponents. Facts and reason have no more resonance than clubs and guns.

This is why moral appeals against partisanship fail. It is like making the claim that pork is healthy to a devout Muslim. He does not share your morality, so your morals appeal sounds weird and offensive. Your good intensions are proof of your bad intensions, which defeats the point of making the moral appeal. The only counter to partisanship is more extreme partisanship. Once that genie has been let out of the bottle, the only way to put it back in the bottle is through any means necessary.

Lost Hoppe

Posted on May 28, 2021 by thezman

Libertarianism comes in for a reasonable amount of criticism on this side of the great divide, mostly for its tendency to side with the Left on cultural issues. Libertarianism, at its best, is low-tax liberalism. The common and well-supported form of libertarianism is the version that functions as lipstick on the pig of corporate excess. The people who claim to champion individual rights always seem to be defending those rights being trampled by massive global companies answerable to no one.

There are some exceptions within the libertarian fever swamp. Ron Paul is still remembered fondly by many on this side of the great divide. He was their guide into the world of political realism. He was always careful to avoid taboo subjects, but there were plenty of paleocons in the baggage train to help guide those swept up in the Ron Paul moment toward sensible politics. The Ron Paul moment turned out to be a waystation for what is now the dissident right.

Another exception is the libertarian theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Greg Hood and Chris Roberts from American Renaissance have posted a new podcast on Hoppe and his most popular work, Democracy: The God that Failed. It is a good discussion of Hoppe, his brand of libertarianism and the arguments in his book. This podcast is part of a series on various writers relevant to dissident politics. The show on Wilmot Robertson is especially good, as few remember him.

One thing that was missed in the review of Hoppe’s book is that he was one of the first people to notice a peculiar feature of democracy. That is, as soon as the idea of democracy is planted in a society, the franchise expands rapidly. Societies can reject the core idea of democracy, but still have limited participation through elections, which was the case in early America. Once the society accepts the idea of democracy, all limits on the franchise quickly give way to democratic zeal.

Hoppe observed this in his book, but he offered no explanation for it. He just accepts it as a force of nature, noting how the franchise expanded in every Western country as soon as democracy was introduced. We saw this in America. In the 20th centur,y as the country transformed from a republic into a social democracy, the franchise quickly started to expand to include all men, then women, then blacks. Now we are extending the vote to criminals, foreigners, and the imaginary.

One reason for this is the very nature of democracy. In a world of fifty percent plus one there will always be a large minority unhappy with the result. In order to avoid conflict, the natural elites form parties, which allows them to form a consensus around a set of compromises on the important issues. This is something that was the norm in the 20th century, whether it was in multi-party parliamentary systems or the two-party bicameral system in America. Liberal democracy was about consensus.

While that greatly reduces the number of people who feel left out of the result, it creates a new problem. Reformers now need to break the consensus in order to get the changes they think are required. That is difficult, so they instead look to increase the number of those outside the consensus. Put another way, the reformer looks for new voters, rather than trying to challenge old voters. Get enough new voters and the outsiders can challenge the prevailing consensus.

In America, expansion of the franchise parallels reform efforts. The social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century were also the driving force behind expanding the franchise to women. Extending the franchise to blacks came with social reforms like the elimination of free association. Today, the people chanting about democracy are also demanding the vote be given to foreigners. Open borders are a way to create a permanent revolution against the prevailing consensus.

Again, this is not something Hoppe addressed, but it does suggest that the primary reason libertarians favor open borders is they share the same reformist impulse that exists on the Left. They instinctively seek to break the consensus, which in their case is their idea of statism. The fact that libertarians never try to think through the ramifications of open borders suggests they are not acting on practical considerations, but rather on an instinctive sense that it is good for them.

Of course, there is a natural limit to democracy’s expansive tendency. Once every human on earth can vote for the next American president, there are no more worlds to conquer for the democrats. Long before that, however, democracy becomes too unstable to maintain a consensus of any sort for any duration. That seems to be happening now, when half the country in unhappy with every election result and the consensus that is implied in the result. America is shaking itself to pieces.

Hoppe is a good reminder that even the most ridiculous ideas can be useful in the right hands, if only as a warning. In the case of libertarianism, its utility was always in its use as a critique of liberal excess. Libertarian economics was an excellent antidote to central planning. Natural rights are useful in challenging authoritarianism. In the case of Hoppe, his economic defense of monarchism is useful in understanding the inherent dangers and defects of liberal democracy.

Big Con

Posted on May 18, 2021 by thezman

Every once in a while, a post or series of posts comes along that captures why conservatism never amounted to much. This post in the ironically named American Conservative is a good example of the genre. The topic is how to deal with the privatization of authoritarian power, primarily in Silicon Valley. The argument put forward is that using the state to tame these rogue companies is morally wrong, so we have to find some new way to contend with these out-of-control tech firms.

The first thing you should notice is the style is exactly what we get whenever the topic of immigration in on the table. The obvious answer is dismissed. In the case of immigration, that means shutting down the border and cracking down on employers who use helot labor. The open borders crowd always says that is impossible or harmful in some way. Instead, they offer a collection of overly complex solutions that have no chance of succeeding but will keep the punditry busy.

In the case of Big Tech, we have laws on the books to put an end to this reign of terror, but enforcing those is socialism, according to the usual suspects. We cannot have that, even if it would work. Instead, let us have a twenty-year series of international commissions to study technical standards and pass a bunch of laws that no one reads, but have cool names like “Data Portability Act”. In other words, the people who cannot build a wall along the border are going to fix the internet.

Interestingly, the rodents from Conservative Inc. always use the same trick the Left is so fond of using, which is the false dichotomy. “We can shut ourselves off from the world or embrace globalism” is how they frame trade. “We can become a hermit nation or remain a nation of immigrants” is how they frame immigration. Now it is “We can choose central planning or preserve an open internet” with Big Tech. It is the same partisan game the Left plays, just tailored for a middle-class white audience.

The fact is, enforcing Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act as intended puts a halt to the most egregious violations of our rights. Twitter can choose to be a publisher or an open platform. If it is the former, they can censure their platform however they like, but they are accountable for the content. If they choose to be an open platform like Gab, then they get the protection of Section 230. There is no need to reinvent the internet to solve the biggest problem with Big Tech.

Similarly, the obvious collusion that goes on with these big firms could be crushed with the use of existing law. There are plenty of examples of the tech companies colluding with one another to ban people from their platforms. If we can give a cop 20-years on civil rights violations for shooting a fleeing suspect, we can give the harpies of Silicon Valley a few years for violating the civil rights of Alex Jones. One lawsuit is all that would be required to end that practice and restore some sanity.

Of course, the author of the AC piece is clearly trying to strike the libertarian position, which is a blend of hiding under the bed and shilling for global capital. This is what is wrong with the libertarian-conservative commentariat. They are not interested in advocating conservative interests. Instead, they are focused on making sure their corporate donors are free of government interference. If that means the rights of conservatives are trampled, well “whoopsie!”

The writer of the AC piece is someone calling himself Zach Graves. He is head of policy at the Lincoln Network. You always have to be suspicious of any group using the name Lincoln and this is no exception. As we saw with the Lincoln Project, these groups tend to attract the very worst people. In this case, this is a not-for-profit located in San Francisco, conveniently near Silicon Valley. A Loren Graves, presumably the same guy as the writer, is a paid staffer for the group.

Before signing on with the Lincoln Network, Mr. Graves was with something called R Street Institute, which is neoconservative front group. The founder of the Lincoln Network is a man calling himself Garrett Johnson. He popped out of college into a job on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then into a position as the founder of something called SendHub and now the founder of Lincoln Network. Nothing strange about this at all. There is no reason to suspect anything hanky.

This is the problem with conservatism in a nutshell. It has always been infested with pens for hire. This bit of corporate marketing posted at American Conservative is just a paid advertisement masquerading as commentary. To their credit, the site does acknowledged that they were paid to run it by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which is a pro-business non-profit in Missouri. There is a good bet that they bankroll the R Street Institute to some degree, given their location.

This is the problem with subjecting everything to the marketplace. When the highest bidder gets to determine public morality, no one can ever question the morality of the highest bidder. Public opinion becomes another commodity to be traded, rather than a genuine exchange of ideas. The founder of The Lincoln Network would be happy to promote communism if that pays better than shilling for Big Tech. He is just face purchased on the market to make the brochure look good.

Similarly, the writers and “policy wonks” at these shops are just pens for hire, with a set of specialties. “Need generic libertarian babble about technology? No problem, we have Zach Graves. That is his specialty.” R Street puts him on the UPS truck and ships him off to a Silicon Valley non-profit. Like the economy as a whole, the marketplace of ideas has become a pirate’s cove. Everything is for sale and everything can be purchased, if the price is right. The consequences are for the suckers to bear.

This is what conservatism should oppose. One basic tenet of conservatism is that there is a transcendent moral truth. That means it is indifferent to the marketplace. it also means that truth itself is not up for bid. Once you concede this point, you are no longer on the Right, but just another kiosk in the bazaar if increasingly bizarre ideas. The way to end the pirate’s cove is to shut it down and hang the pirates. That’s the starting point for conservatism, if it is to be anything more than another grift.

The Weapon Of Language

Posted on May 17, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a new post up at Taki. This week the topic is a written version of the podcast from last week, slimmed down for space reasons. There is a review of the 1960’s classic Easy Rider up behind the green door. It is also available to those who buy me a beer. Finally, Sunday Thoughts, a half hour podcast recapping the news of the week, is also up behind the green door. There is also a post up on American renaissance by from the weekend, for those who missed it.

In a world where the end always justifies the means, even when the end is not achieved, truth must always be a secondary consideration. In fact, the truth is often the enemy, as it serves the interests of your opponents. By attacking the truth of something, or even the concept of truth itself, you take away the legitimacy of the opposition to you and your schemes. When morality is determined by who wins, rather than by some objective standard, partisanship is the new morality.

This is the modern age. You see it in the language. The public space is full of people juggling neologisms that have a nice ring to them as a replacement for old words or labels. They sound better and the best people always love hearing new ways of saying old things. It makes them feel smart and sophisticated. The intellectual in a liberal democracy is primarily concerned with appearing to be unconventional and heterodox, so the new words and phrases quickly become popular.

George Orwell said political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, which is almost always the point of the new words and phrases that come to dominate the discourse. The people introducing them are not trying to clarify some point, but rather to obfuscate. The game is to undermine the truth of some concept in order to put something long settled up for debate. The new word changes the old meaning in a way that makes it less settled.

The popular phrase “social construct” is a good example. There is no such thing as a social construct as currently understood. Into the 20th century people would have laughed at the idea of it. There are customs and institutions, for sure, but those are things that evolved within a people over a period of trial and error. The reason a custom has been passed down may have been lost to time or turned into an amusing bit of mythology, but the custom came into being to address a problem.

The social construct, on the other hand, takes the custom or institution and recasts it as an invention, a thing that is true only because of a set of rules. Further, it smuggles in the idea that it was deliberately invented. Men, and it is always men, sat around dreaming up the new social conventions to serve their interests. This strips the custom of legitimacy by casting it as just a partisan interest. The people wishing to change it are just as legitimate as the people who invented it.

The new term for custom disconnects it from truth by shifting the thing from the domain of things that are true on their face to the domain of things that are true only because of a set of logical rules. Humans come in two sexes, male and female, is a thing that is true on its face. The term social construct shifts this from the world of fact to the world of logical rules by insisting gender, another new word, is determined by society. They now claim gender is assign at birth based on antiquated concepts of gender.

What the phrase social construct permits the partisan to do is to smuggle in the idea that something like sex was an invention of men, and it is always men, to serve the interest of the inventors. On the one hand, the roles assigned to those with a uterus served the interests of the patriarchy. Now we are told that those same men made gender binary in order to oppress the non-binary. The concept of the social construct turns objective reality into an intergenerational conspiracy theory.

One of the ways the political neologism smuggles in lies is that it creates a false dichotomy in the minds of the audience. In the case of sex and sex roles, things are either purely nature or purely nurture, with nurture always assigned the default position in the comparison. Sex roles, for example, are either a social construct or a universal fact of nature. Since few things are the latter, the former becomes the default position, as if by magic. Suddenly, the natural world is up for debate.

This happened with homosexual marriage. It was first detached from its natural meaning to be a social construct, rather than an ancient custom. Instead of being defined by the biological necessity of reproduction, it was just an invention to suppress women and manage property rights to the favor of males. Once that transformation occurred, opponents of homosexual marriage were forced make the affirmative argument for something that had been the default for eons.

The truth is, few things in human society are purely the result of nature. Even things like hair color or eye color in Europeans have a cultural angle. Over time, females with striking hair and eyes found better mating prospects. This naturally led to customs in which women tried to show off these features. The environmental conditions made diverse hair and eye color possible, but custom made it desirable, thus striking hair and eye color were selected for over time. Nature and nurture.

This is the deceit of new words and phrases cooked up by partisans. The point is to assault the truth, strip it of its legitimacy. The partisan is at home on the battle ground of “who? whom?” so they naturally seek to shape the ground to fit their need. It traps the bourgeois objectivist into the either/or trap. Once they accept the false dichotomy, they accept the weaker hand, and the results are inevitable. The Left wins every battle by first destroying the weapons the opponent can use against them.

This is why there is no reasoning with a partisan. That lefty aunt thinks what she thinks because she sees the world in binary terms. She greedily adopts the new language because it reaffirms her world view. The partisan sees the truth in the same way the vampire sees a mirror. It’s not the reflection that terrifies the vampire. It is the lack of one, a reminder of a truth of their existence. Facts and clear language have the same effect on the partisan, which is why they hiss at them.

Meat Man Versus Weed Man

Posted on May 13, 2021 by thezman

Often, the natural confluence of events results in something so elegant or complex that people see the hand of design behind the result. Even though the odds of there being a secret conspiracy or master chess player behind the result are very low, that just seems better than the odds of chance getting the result. Most conspiracy theories rely on this sort of logic. The official explanations seem so unlikely that they must be part of some conspiracy to shield the truth from the public.

A good example of this is the last election. No sitting president has seen a double digit increase in his vote, but still lose. In fact, no one has been able to find an example like this in other elected offices. That’s how rare it is. This once in forever thing could be accepted in isolation, but it is just one of such things. There are so many unexplained anomalies that people are naturally skeptical. The invisible hand of design, even without hard proof, seems like the more likely explanation.

We may be seeing something similar happen with food. All of a sudden, we are being bombarded with agit-prop in favor of eating bugs and plant-based proteins, rather than eating beef and chicken. Beef seems to be the primary target, but that could simply be the result of the Left’s long war against cows. The Left believes cows are part of a secret conspiracy against Gaia to poison the atmosphere. The “cow fart” conspiracy is as real to them as the ongoing Russian conspiracy.

A few years ago, the fast food chain Burger King introduced something called an “impossible burger” which is made from grass clippings. The claim was that it tasted just like their regular burgers but was made from plants. Why they did this was never asked or explained. Up to that point, the number of people saying, “Man, I could really go for a burger made from grass clippings right now” was zero. In fact, the number remains stubbornly pegged at zero. No one wants this.

Now, billion dollar companies make dumb decisions. History is full of ideas cooked up in corporate offices that turn out to be laughably stupid. Maybe this grass burger idea is just another example, like new Coke. The thing is though, they did not invent the grass burger or the idea of it. There are two companies pushing this idea. Impossible Products and Beyond Meat are producing fake meat products. It was the former who approached Burger King with the plant burger idea.

Now, it is important to note here that these new fake meat products do not taste like meat as is claimed. They taste like what people who have never tasted meat think meat tastes like to humans. The fake beef has the mouth-feel of oatmeal. It is a weird sort of grainy slime when you eat it. It is not horrible and if you were starving you would probably eat it, but cannibalism would start to look appealing. Like the previous attempts to create fake meat, this new stuff is not very good.

The point is the companies pushing this do not have a better mousetrap. They are not even making that claim. In fact, they make it clear that their products are not better than what they seek to replace. In their public demonstrations they concede that it is, at best, a close facsimile. Instead, they claim their products are morally superior. You see, the burger made from grass clippings and dried leaves pleases Gaia. She will therefore reward the grass eaters and punish the meat eaters.

That is insane, but these products have the backing of the oligarchs. Both of these companies are supported financially by rich people. The troubled Bill Gates is behind the Impossible Burger scheme. He is the guy trying to blot out the sun because he thinks it is part of the cow conspiracy. Other oligarchs are rushing to get in on the fake meat racket as well. All of a sudden, the rich are sure real meat will go the way of the buggy whip and be replaced by bugs and grass clippings.

The question is, why? The fact is there is no market for fake meat. Dozens of efforts to create one, including the current fake burger idea, have flopped. The fact is the public is not going to voluntarily start eating bugs and grass clippings just because the climate loons say Gaia commands it. If the choice is between a real burger and the artificial alternative, people choose the real burger. In other words, there is no business opportunity here that the oligarchs are trying to exploit.

That is, unless the government plans to ban meat. Despite the organized media campaign by the regime to claim otherwise, the regime is plotting to ban meat. They will not do it outright, but instead regulate it out of existence. In the name of climate change, they will make the sale and production of meat products increasingly expensive. This is why the billionaires all see fake meat as an opportunity. It is also why recipe sites are now removing meat recipes from their websites.

In one respect, the highly coordinated media campaign to deny the Biden war on burgers is correct. There is no design behind this. What is driving it is the weird new religion taking hold of the American ruling elite. They really believe that Gaia is angry with us and will unleash her wrath unless we repent. Of course, they mean repent in that you will commit the act of contrition and they will get salvation. They also get to keep eating meat while you dine on spiders and dandelions.

The war on meat is not a conspiracy. It is an example of the Hoffer line about mass movements in America. They become a business, a racket, or a corporation. In this case, the Gaia worship sweeping the ruling class is becoming a business. These grass and twig burger companies are the first wave of companies hoping to capitalize on the artificially created market for fake food. They see the madness in the eyes of their peers and immediately think about how to profit from it.

Of course, all big business in America depends on government. These fake meat companies and the billionaire sponsor will lobby the state to create legislation favorable to them and harmful to their opponents. The political rackets will get a chance to skim some off this new business, as long as the play ball with fake meat. All of a sudden, real meat has to increase the bribes to counter fake meat. The war on meat is just another manifestation of the natural corruption in liberal democracy.

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