Category Archives: Culture

Cats And Dogs

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Anyone who has had a cat knows that the cat takes a certain pleasure in the acquisition of its food. Put food down for the dog and the dog eats the food. Put food down for the cat and it will saunter up to the dish and maybe sample a little, then take a break to watch the dish for a while, before returning for some more food. A bug gets loose in the house and the dog will just eat it, but the cat will torment the thing to death. One animal is all about the process, while the other is about the result.

This difference is something to keep in mind as America descends into the woke totalitarianism of our diversity loving masters. It is assumed that totalitarianism leads to labor camps and people disappearing in the night. Those are the examples we have from our history. The communists liked sending the uncooperative to work camps, while the fascist like shooting the inconvenient. In both cases, the point was to remove the problem and discourage others from being a problem.

Those old school totalitarians were dog people. Just as the dog is happy to eat when hungry, without thinking much about how the food was made available to him, the old totalitarians took an end justifies the means approach to exercising power. Problem people were like any other sort of problem. The point was to solve the problem, which in the case of people meant making them go away. No man, no problem. How the problem felt about what was happening was of no consideration.

Our new totalitarians turn all of this on its head. Like the cat and his food, or his prey in the case of an unfortunate insect, the end is not really the point. It is not about removing the obstacles to their project, in order to achieve some end. The dealing with the problem is the end. In the case of the poor unfortunate who has run afoul of the rulers, the point of the process is submitting the troublemaker to endless torment that has no purpose beyond the pleasure of the tormentor.

Take the doxing business as an example. The people who do this are not trying to make the victim go away, any more than the cat wants the wayward cricket to go away. To the contrary, they hope the victim will cry out in agony and make his misery into a long-drawn-out public performance. They revel in seeing the victim moan about how his PayPal was deleted or how he lost his job. For the army of the woke, the suffering of the victim and the fame for inflicting that suffering is what matters.

When the victim simply kills off his internet character, the doxers have a problem as they do not have that living trophy to show off on-line. They are forced to go onto their social media platforms and imagine how the victim is suffering. We are not far away from a time when Twitter or Facebook start creating scapegoat accounts for the anointed to attack as a part of their rituals.  Instead of relying on a real person to be the victim, they will conjure a fake one that plays the victim properly.

Of course, in every totalitarian society, the people eventually figure out the rules in order to avoid the boot. That was the point of the old totalitarian model. In the new totalitarian model, the rules will constantly change so it is nearly impossible to avoid the wrath of the official tormentors. After all, like the cat tormenting its prey, the new totalitarians care only for the process. Like an engine needs fuel, the new totalitarians need a constant supply of victims to torment.

An excellent example of this is the Covid madness. When it all started, the point was to slow the spread so the hospitals would not be too crowded. We had two weeks to flatten the curve, but after two weeks the rules changed. The rules keep changing as the rulers find new ways to torment us, causing people to go into the streets to protest the new torments, to the delight of the tormentors. Covid has revealed that the new totalitarians are little more than sadists.

What this means, of course, is that there will be not settling into a set of fixed rules as happened in communist societies. We do not know if this would have happened in certain fascist societies, but the experience of Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal and Pinochet’s Chile suggest the fascists would have settled into a conservative system of fixed rules. The new system, in contrast, will be perpetually disrupting this tendency in order to perpetuate the necessary disorderliness.

The question is whether any society can go on very long when the rules are constantly changing in order to give the Torquemada’s more victims. A bedrock requirement for any society is a set of rules to govern conduct. In order to have an organization of humans greater than the Dunbar number means having a code and a way to enforce that code in order to make the code a habit of mind. This is what we think of when we think of culture. The rules we live by because we just do.

We are already seeing problems with the Covid madness. The ever-changing rules are making life impossible for small business. In some areas, whole swaths of the economy have collapsed. Of course, the religious aspects to compliance are pitting people against one another. The new totalitarians are creating a Hobbesian world where it is a war of all against all, not for limited resources, but due to the deliberate cacophony of every changing rules that have no logic.

The good news, if there is any, is that totalitarianism has diminishing returns, as the cost of maintaining it eventually dwarfs the benefits. Initially it seems to work pretty well, but over time the costs become unsustainable. This new totalitarianism is especially front loaded, almost accelerationist. It is destroying every reason for people to remain loyal to the system. Instead of carrying on for several generations, the new totalitarianism will be lucky to make it past this decade.

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The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Cult Of Safety

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For most of human history, the focus of society was on the material side. Progress was about increasing the material wellbeing of people. In fact, political philosophy was solely focused on material well-being. The great battle in the West was over what sort of political economy would provide the most stuff for the most people. Eventually, liberal democracy won over communism. Then the debate subtly changed from material well-being to the overall safety of people. Safety is the new goal.

For example, an increasingly common thing if you work in an office is the notice that the vents will be cleaned one night. You are told to expect some disruption of your day or maybe some things will be moved around in the office. A crew comes in to clean the vents for so everyone is safe. Residential rental properties are now required in most states to have the dryer vents cleaned once a year. In some states, home owners are required to do this too. Vent cleaning is a thing now.

It is more than just a thing. It is a booming little niche business. According to one of the rapidly growing vent cleaning companies, the demand for vent cleaning is growing at close to four percent per year. They say that the increased awareness to the dangers posed by home clothes dryers is what is driving the growth. The claim is the number of accidents caused by these appliances is making people suspicious of what’s happening in those vents, so they want all the vets cleaned regularly.

Of course, This is true to a great degree. In the office space, people have come to believe that whatever is being cleaned out of those heat and air conditioning ducts is bad for the people inside the offices. Sick building syndrome is one of those things people have come to accept without question. The same is true of the dangers posed by the common household dryer. Mention this to someone and they will claim that clothes dryers cause a lot of fires every year.

Interestingly, none of this is true. According to the government, there are about 2900 dryer fires per year. There is no data on fires caused by debris or dust in the ventilation ducts of buildings. The damage resulting from those dryer fires total $35 million per year. Only about a third is caused by too much fuzz in the dryer vent, so that means it is a $12 million problem. Put another way, we have a $350 million dollar industry to solve a problem a bit less serious than bathtub drownings.

The other odd thing about the vent cleaning craze is that people don’t bother questioning it. They just assume it is a real thing. If you ask someone about the dryer vent business, they will fight you about the facts, claiming that clothes dryers have always been a menace. If you point out the facts, they get mad at you, as if you are questioning a tenant of their religion. Seemingly out of nowhere, vent cleaning has become an important part of keeping us safe.

That is the key to it. Safety has become something of a religion. After all, you can never be too safe. We know this because we are constantly being told by the mass media and our government that we can never be too safe. We spent trillions waging a crusade against Muslims because we had to be safe from terror. We are now spending trillions on Covid, so we can be safe from illness. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, because our safety is what matters.

This explains, in part, the bizarre over reaction we saw from our rulers over the protests in Washington. These are the high priests of the cult of safety. They live the safest of lives and depend on faith in safety for their existence. This reminder that no one can ever be truly safe, especially the rulers of a society, was like telling them that their gods are completely fake. They proved that was a lie by turning their palaces into fortified bunkers guarded by heavily armed soldiers.

An easy to miss subtext to the continued lockdowns is the claim that working at home is safer than going to the office. Children at school skin knees and bump their heads, which does not happen when schools are closed. Fewer people commuting means fewer car accidents. The annual flu has been eradicated, they claim, because everyone stays home, instead of mingling with the public. Even if our heroes defeat Covid, staying home is just safer and safer is always better.

There is an obvious problem with this. It is really hard to run a human society when everyone is locked in their pods. Some people can work at home, for sure, but most people need supervision. We are social animals and our sense of self is tied to our participation in our group. This extends to society as a whole. People in isolation from one another or isolated into little tribes lose their group identity. They begin to take on the mentality of prisoners, rather than citizens.

There are also the diminishing returns. The dryer vent business is a great example of how not to solve a problem. An iron rule of life is the solution can never be more expensive than the problem. The dryer vent issue is a great example of how the price of being safer far outweighs the value of being safer. We have long since passed the point of diminishing returns regarding safety. Since there is no limiting principle to the religion of safety, we keep trying anyway, despite the cost.

An easy to overlook angle here is the fact that these efforts to insulate ourselves from risk must fail. The dominant justification for the current arrangements is that it is making us safer. At some point, something bad happens and people will suddenly be less safe. A recession, for example. The gods of safety will be proven to be false or feckless gods. Faith depends on confirmation and nothing harms a religion like a bit of disconfirmation, which in this case is inevitable.

Then again, perhaps we have reached the point in our development that the Eloi reached in the novel Time Machine. The protagonist, having observed the Eloi, the humans of the future, noted that “strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.” That is modern people. We are now too weak and feeble to question our arrangements. Instead, all that matters is the sense of safety and security, whether is real or imagined. Safety is now our god.

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The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Game of Life

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Note: There is a post up behind the green door on the movie Pulp Fiction, which clocks in at #95 on the top-100 list. There is a post up at Taki on the change we are seeing in the political climate.

What has gotten the most attention on this side this past week is the hypocrisy by the ruling class and their histrionic flunkies in the media over the peaceful protest in the Capitol last week. The first response of normal people is to note how the same people raging about these protests were celebrating violent riots in the summer. In what remains of the internet, people have been posting examples of people in politics or the media saying the exact opposite of what they said a few months ago.

Normal people have been programmed to think hypocrisy is important, even though it is clearly not important to the people in the ruling class. Normal people are taught that a civil society operates by a clear set of rules that apply to everyone. When the people in the ruling class have one set of rules for normal people and a different set of rules for themselves, normal people get mad. The ruling class, however, does not care, as there is one set of rules for them and another for the rest of us.

This focus on hypocrisy has left something unnoticed. That is the increasingly overwrought behavior of our rulers. They have become a collection of hysterical drama queens, who carry on like the world is about to end. This is the one thread connecting all of the insanity we have experienced from our rulers recently. Their reaction is wildly out of proportion from what is expected. The actual news, when you think about it, is always about their emotionally charged reaction to mostly normal events.

If we go way back to the 2016 election, the political class reacted as if the most important man in history had come out of his cryogenic chamber in Paraguay and seized control of the government. Instead of analyzing why it was there preferred option was rejected and making the normal adjustments, they concocted wild fantasies about invisible Russians and carried on like teenage girls for four years. It has already been forgotten, but they really believed that Russia stuff.

The Covid stuff is another great example. The local tyrants have used this minor public health issue to feature themselves in a drama of their own creation. In this story, they are heroically fighting the great virus enemy. They are rallying the people in a great cause to prevent the extinction of mankind. The media slavishly reports on their great deeds as if they are out slaying dragons or facing the Black Knight. The buffoonish governor of New York even had a book written about his heroism.

What should be a minor public health issue has been turned into a great drama acted out by emotionally unstable people. According to the CDC, over 250 million people have been tested with 22 million confirmed cases. Total deaths in 2020 were in line with what you would expect, given the country’s demographics. A little higher due to Covid and a little higher due to the reaction. Sober-minded people would have treated this as a very bad flu season. Our hysterical rulers treated it as the end times.

The most recent example of the overwrought behavior by our rulers is the reaction to the protest last Wednesday. The “storming of the Capitol” was really just a bunch of people walking past the cops and going inside the building. Sure, juvenile pranksters livestreamed themselves doing shenanigans, but other than the Pence aide murdering Ashli Babbitt, it was nothing more than a frat house prank. It was nothing like the Kavanaugh protests just a short time ago.

The reaction by the rulers is as if a rebel army laid siege to the Capitol and set fire to most of the city. The FBI has been tasked with hunting down, in the most dramatic way, all of the protestors. Their media lackeys are now calling the Capitol protestors “insurrectionists” and demanding they be destroyed. Instead of calling it a protest, they are calling it a siege. Again, the image is of a foreign army attacking the center of the empire, like the Gauls sacking Rome in 387 BC.

For the inauguration they have now deployed army and national guard units. The media lackeys are bragging that they will be prepared and enthusiastic about using lethal force if any protestors turn up that day. Pelosi has been trying to get the Army to remove Trump from office. She apparently thinks he could launch a nuclear attack. We have come a long way from the America where citizens were expected to petition their government for the redress of grievances.

What we are seeing is the reaction of people who are no longer engaged in normal life, but instead are playing the game of life. They are immersed in a live action role playing game operated by juvenile narcissists. The ruling class gets to imagine themselves as world historical figures and every event puts the world on a knife edge. Their actions will determine the outcome. The entire ruling class is swept up in these false dramas that they get to play, while the rest of the country suffers.

Another clue is how they echo one another in the use of dramatic language to describe mundane events. One uses some over-the-top language then the rest of them are repeating it, maybe adding on some more dramatic language. The “protest” went from “riot” to “insurrection” to “horrendous insurrection” in a few cycles. They are competing with one another to show their loyalty to the group. What matters to them in this game is the opinion of the people in the game, not the rest of us.

America has reached a point where the ruling class and its various support structures is no longer connected to the people over whom it rules. They are inside Versailles or the Winter Palace, imagining what is happening outside. Meanwhile, outside, the world is nothing like the rulers imagine. The people outside look at the palaces and try to understand what is happening inside, based on the noises and behavior they see from the organs of the state.

That really is the root of their anger. The outside broke though the wall and gently reminded them that life is not a game and they are not great men. In the game they are always the winners, but in real life they are judged by their actions. It may take a while, but they will be held accountable. This is what angers them. They hate this reality, which is why they cling to the alternative reality of their fantasy, but reality does not go away when you stop believing it.

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Reno To Damascus

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As the Trump story arc reaches a conclusion over the next few weeks, there will be a lot of writing and talking about the meaning of the last four years. The racketeers of the conservative movement have already concluded that the last four years were just an anomaly and they can go back to the same old rackets. Like career criminals, they learn nothing from the past. Others appear to have been chastened by the experience and are coming out of the other end questioning their old ways.

One of those post-Trump men appears to be the editor of First Things, the conservative religious journal founded by Richard John Neuhaus. The editor, R. R. Reno, published this in the old left-wing magazine Newsweek, in which he sounds more like Pat Buchanan than the typical conservative. In fact, his essay probably would have been accepted by the old paleoconservative journal, Chronicles, as an olive branch to mend the three-decade rift between First Things and the paleos.

What makes Reno’s post interesting is that he was a fervent anti-Trump advocate the last four years. He participated in the now infamous National Review symposium, in which they demanded the rules of the Republican Party be changed to prevent Trump from winning the nomination. His contribution was to offer up the left-wing slur that Trump was a fascist in a business suit and that the people supporting him were stupid and disgusting. They were “trumpster diving.”

There seems to be a great deal of spiritual distance between the 2016 R. R. Reno and the 2020 R. R. Reno, at least in tone, if not substance. In fairness to Reno, he has not been a running dog lackey of Conservative Inc. He has been more of a barking dog around the conservative caravan, as it follows the Left from fad to fad. Often a critic, but never an opponent and always there by the caravan at each stop. He is a critic of conservatism, but one welcome at their events.

This is not a new posture by Reno. During the 2016 Republican primary he made some very sensible observations about Trump and the dynamic in the primary. While most of the conservative racketeers were in the streets rending their garments to show their liberal masters, they were horrified by what was happening, Reno noticed the obvious and was willing to say it. That said, he made sure to underscore that he thought Trump was a “dangerous figure in our public life.”

This is not the first time the First Things crew has struggled to maintain their position as friendly critic of conservatism. Back in 1992, they found themselves in a similar spot when Bill Buckley was purging the paleocons. Most of what First Things claims to support fall on the paleo side, but the money and good living were on the neocon side, so they threw in with Buckley. As George Washington once said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder.

Now, to be even more fair, Reno and the First Things crew could simply be working the same racket they have for years. On the one hand they advocate traditional conservative positions on culture, economics, politics and so on, while publicly opposing anyone that attempts to build a political movement on those issues. They supported the Buchanan message, but not the messenger, for example. They sympathized with the Trump voters, but opposed their candidate.

We will know soon enough if the social conservatives from Conservative Inc. had an epiphany during the Trump years. The rally scheduled for January 6th in the Imperial Capital is both unprecedented and a harbinger. Unlike the Buchanan or Perot movements, the Trump movement will outlive its founder. The people who voted for Trump did so knowing that the time for reform is running out. Many now think it has run out and it is time for something to replace the corrupt system.

Where the establishment social conservatives like R. R. Reno come down with regards to things like the America First movement, led by Nick Fuentes, will reveal if they are just running the old grift or have had an awakening. CPAC is next month in Orlando Florida and AFPAC will be holding their event there at the same time. Last year AFPAC drew hundreds and this year will be even bigger. The people getting tens of thousands in the streets of DC are building a genuine movement now.

For social conservatives like Mr. Reno and the First Things crowd, Fuentes and his groypers should be their ideal vehicle. They can be a little coarse, for sure, but that’s true of all young people. Otherwise, they make a clean presentation and are not afraid to express their Christian faith as part of the politics. While the First Things people are at CPAC next month, they should consider swinging by AFPAC. Mr. Reno could sit down and have a chat with Fuentes. It can be arranged.

The question for social conservatives with regards to politics is what compromises should be made in order to participate in the system. This was the dilemma faced by Buckley and his conservative movement. In their case, there was no compromise they were unwilling to make in order to have a place at the table. For social conservatives to avoid the same fate, they will from time to time need to back someone who is willing to go inside and flip over those tables.

That should be the takeaway for someone like R. R. Reno. Trump was always an imperfect leader, but he was available and willing to go inside the Temple and toss over those tables. He was never a savior, just a disruption in the system. The people who voted for Trump understood this, for the most part. They knew if he busted things up, then it would open the door for the social changes long advocated by social conservatives and the writers of journals like First Things.

The great mistake of the American Right was to accept the proposition that the Left gets to pick their leaders. The Left told them to jettison Buchanan and the paleocons, so they did and got nothing for their trouble. One lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that this does not have to be the rule. Social conservatives can pick their own leaders and make their own tables. That should be the lesson to the leaders of social conservatism as they come to terms with Trump.

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. 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. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Generational War

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Note: The first Taki post of the year is up. I start the year off with some soothing words about race. I also have a post up behind the green door on the move The Searchers, which is ranked #96 on the top-100.

Generational politics has been a part of American culture since the middle of the last century when the Baby Boomers started making noises. Youth culture started in the 20’s during the Jazz Age, but really came into its own in the 50’s and 60’s. Today it is just assumed that each generation has its own unique identity. Zoomers, Boomers and Millennials are separate tribes with nothing in common. On this side of the great divide, “boomer” is commonly thrown around as an epithet.

One of the great ironies of our political culture is that whites are never allowed to play identity politics, unless it is generational identity politics. That because generational war is pretty much a white thing. Zoomers can rant and rave about the Boomers, because it is assumed that both groups are white. You never hear the gatekeepers lecture us about the danger of generational identity politics like they do with other aspects of identity like race, sex or even region of the country.

Putting all of that aside, there is a generational aspect to our politics that will be front and center in the near future. The Baby Boomers get grief for the cultural revolution, but in reality, they were just consumers of that revolution. Despite all the radical rhetoric, the Boomers emerged into adulthood with a high degree of institutional trust. The Left has a deep faith in government and the process of government. The Right has a deep faith in capitalism and the process of the marketplace.

This institutional trust is apparent across the political spectrum. The mainstream Left demands absolute fidelity to the institutions they control. For example, skepticism of the mass media is treated as a dangerous conspiracy theory. The mainstream Right was in a constant state of panic over Trump challenging the system. Even dissident Boomers maintain faith in the system. They are sure that getting the right people in the right offices will result in polices rooted in demographic reality.

This is to be expected. The Baby Boom generation came into a world that not only worked, but worked amazingly well. They were raised up in a high trust society with a booming economy. In their youth they got to enjoy a flourishing popular culture and in their adulthood, they were gifted a robust economy. Through their middle years, they got good schools for their kids and great health care for their parents. The system has been great for that generation, so their loyalty is sensible.

This deep trust in the system will only become more intense as the Baby Boom generation gets older. The first wave of Boomers is either on the cusp of retirement or already retired. Right behind them is the second wave that perks up every time an ad for retirement services comes on the television. What old people do not want is for things to change. Despite the obvious problems in politics, the culture and economy, the Baby Boom generation trusts the system. They have no choice.

Despite their vast influence, the Baby Boom generation will soon begin to give way to the next generation, which is the Millennials. Generation X is too small, and they have been shut out by the massive generation ahead of them. The Millennials are now ready to start taking up their place in American society. The first wave of that generation is approaching forty now. Over the next decade, as the Boomers head into retirement, their children will take over for them as the dominant generation.

Unlike their parents or possibly grandparents in some cases, the Millennials have a different lived experience, as the beautiful people would put it. They came into easy times like their parents, but they never had to fear war, recession, or the ideological threat of Soviet communism. They never had to think much about the system or trust in it in anyway, because the system was never under any threat. For them, the current order was just a part of nature, something taken for granted.

One result of this is an unrealistic sense of entitlement. You see this most acutely on the Left, where the new generation of radicals sound like spoiled children. Their demands are those of a toddler faced with a toy that is not working. They look around and demand to know why diversity is not blooming wherever they look or why there are things within eyeshot that hurt their feelings. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is a petulant child, but also the face of the new American Left.

Another feature of this generation is an absolute faith in themselves. The doting of their parents and the hours of esteem building lessons paid off. Millennials are a wildly confident generation. This makes perfect sense. Things just worked out well for this group, especially those who entered the managerial class. As long as they ticked the right boxes, the treat came out at the bottom. A generation raised on participation medals reached adulthood highly confident in their ability.

They also have a deep faith in their sense of right and wrong. They start from the assumption that their desires are the moral high ground. Whatever they want is not the right thing in the empirical sense, but the right thing morally. This means they receive criticism and failure as a personal affront. Add in their sense of entitlement and this is not a generation built for struggle. They expect and demand things work the way they want them to work and that’s the end of it.

For Millennials, politics will be intensely personal. They define themselves by their lifestyle choices and the opinions they promote. Personal accomplishment plays a minor role, because everything that matters has always been here for them. Gesture politics is all about moral signaling for a generation that conflated everything into some aspect of their personal identity. This is why mainstream political discourse increasingly sounds like a fight between a divorced couple.

For an aging empire showing signs of decay, this sets up an interesting dynamic over the next decades. As the system begins to break in serious ways, the older generation will want to protect it at all costs. On the other hand, the people tasked with fixing the system will be their overconfident, sanctimonious kids. Compounding it will be the fact that the Millennials have come this far assuming the system is just a part of the natural world, like the weather. It does not require maintenance.

The generational war that is shaping up is not between the Zoomers and the Boomers, but between the Boomers and their kids. One side maintains a deep trust in the system, while the other has a deep trust in themselves. One side will demand the system be repaired and defended, while the other will take this as a personal affront. Meanwhile, the people capable of maintaining the system will be too old to do it, while the people tasked with it will be too self-absorbed to be bothered. Good times.

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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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Hindu Lebensraum

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The word “colonialism” is like many useful words in the English language, in that it has been tortured by the Left to the point where it is unrecognizable. A generation ago the Left redefined colonialism to mean European success. The backwardness of the third world was the legacy of colonialism. Today colonialism is a synonym for the imaginary white privilege they see everywhere. Their project now is to decolonize everything, by which they mean drive off the white people.

Still, colonialism is a useful concept. Since the dawn of human civilization, those civilizations have been occupying land with settlers and taking control of settled lands in order to exploit them economically. The Egyptians, Phoenicians and Greeks spread throughout the ancient world by setting up colonies. Their people established settlements outside their home turf and used those settlements to establish trade routes and spread their cultural influence in the region.

In the modern day we see a different form of colonialism that reflects the fact that land is no longer the primary source of wealth. Instead of setting up camp in the non-white world to exploit their natural resources, the West now imports the useful portion of these populations for diversity purposes. Instead of importing ivory and exotic woods from Africa, Europe now imports the talented tenth from Africa, who contribute an exotic flair to the professional and university ranks of Europe.

The fastest growing population of the United States is South Asians, primarily people from the Indian subcontinent. The population tripled to six million over the last twenty years and the flow is increasing. Congress takes every opportunity to make it easier for the professional ranks of India to come to America. Much of it is under the guise of temporary worker programs, but like so many words in the English language, “temporary” means something different now.

Initially, the appetite for South Asian labor was driven by Silicon Valley. They wanted cheap labor to undermine domestic labor costs. When they were not colluding with one another to artificially suppress wages, they were colluding to import cheap labor from India, with the support of the Republican Party. Silicon Valley liked Indian labor because they spoke English and India was very accommodating. Chinese programmers are better, but the Chinese government is not easily exploited.

One result of this brain drain to the West is India has fallen behind China both politically and economically. The per capita GDP of China is five times higher than India, despite the fact India is far more open to Western investment. India has been happy to see their best and brightest head to the West, while the Chinese keep their smart people at home and force the West to come to China. Roughly half of India’s top talent now lives in Western countries. That is an enormous loss.

Another consequence of this is playing out in American politics. Indians have come to dominate the management layer in Silicon Valley. The people at the top may be from a different tribe, but the next layer down is getting very brown. One result is South Asians have the highest household income in America. Another is they have increasing influence in the political system. So much so that they essentially bought Kamala Harris a spot on the Democratic ticket. She is grateful.

These Indian colonies in the West have created a magnet for Indians back on the subcontinent, who want to escape their conditions. This opens the door for the Indians in the West to increase their status and power, by getting more and more of their people into their new colonies in the West. It is why both American political parties support unlimited visas for Indians. The flow of Indian money is now significant, so both parties are willing to sellout to this rising interest group.

The current population of India is 1.4 billion. If we assume the talented tenth is able to live and work in the West, that is 140 million people. If half of those think following their countrymen to Europe and America is the right thing to do, that is 70 million people ready to hop a steamer for the West. Of course, we are not just getting the talented tenth from India, so that is a very conservative number. Then you need to add in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

South Asia has a lot of people living in small spaces. Overall, the countries of South Asia have a population density of 303 people per square kilometer. The United States has a population density of 36 per square kilometer. If you are a people jammed into tight quarters, looking for some elbow room, North America looks like heaven. If that wide open space is begging you to come and your best people are already there establishing thriving colonies, the result is obvious.

One irony of this is that for a generation now immigration patriots have been warning us that the American ruling class is importing a new people. They did not like ruling over the middle-class white people that made the country, so they were bringing in new brown people to break the back of the middle and working class. It also appears that they are importing a new ruling class too. The affluent Indian colonists are ready to take their place at the top of the empire now. Kamala Harris says hello.

This is the ideal moment for this new tribe to flex its muscle as no group on earth is better at playing identity politics than South Asians. South Asia has been nothing but identity politics since the Indo-Aryan invasion of the subcontinent. India has been one of the most diverse places on earth, meaning that Indian ruling class has literally been bred to play identity politics. They now find themselves in an empire convulsed by identity politics and headed to majority-minority status.

If one wants to look ahead to how the American empire finally starts to crack, it may very well be at the top, rather than between the top and the rest. One camp will be the ascendant South Asians, while another camp will be the remnant of the Judeo-Puritan ruling elite from the last century. The former will be rooted in their local economic strength, while the latter will be supported by the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe some oil money from the Middle East thrown in for flavor.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Doctor Stupid

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There is an old line about how some things are so stupid that only educated people are willing to believe them. Sometimes it is phrased as the smartest are the ones who believe the dumbest things. It is one of those aphorisms that is often used to dismiss arguments or ideas that are unpleasant. Most clichés and sayings are conversation enders, not conversation starters. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth here and you see it in this gem from a Dr. Rachel Pope.

As we know from the great Doctor Jill Biden, there are a lot of very stupid people walking around with the label “doctor” in their profile. Another good rule is that when confronted by someone insisting you call her doctor or she puts that title in her social media profile, you are most likely dealing with a stupid person. It is not always the case, as there are smart jerks in the world too, but people who wave around their titles like this tend to be narrowminded and remarkably insecure.

In this case, it appears to be warranted. The claim that there is no genetic basis for skin color is laughably ridiculous. There is a genetic basis for all observable human characteristics like skin color and eye color. That is why we have no cases of two Irish parents giving birth to a Chinese baby. Children look like the people who made them, because they inherit the genes of the people who made them. Things like skin color, eye color, facial features and so on are all genetic.

This is not complicated stuff. Five minutes on a search engine gets you hundreds of studies explaining what is basic high school biology. If Dr. Rachel Pope is so haunted by multicultural taboos that she cannot bear to think of race differences, she could find studies like this one that examine the genetic basis of African skin color. You see, all of the gene combinations for skin color were present in humans from the start, so she could claim that skin color is a genetic response to environment.

If that first tweet was not embarrassing enough, she follows on with a truly deranged claim that there are no indigenous people in Britain. By her definition, there are no indigenous people anywhere. Humans did not spring from the soil by magic and they did not stay in one range. The story of humans starts with populating every nook and cranny of the planet. When people with an IQ about room temperature say “indigenous people” they mean those who settle a place first.

Of course, where Dr. Rachel Pope and her coreligionists in the denialist cult reveal the depth of their stupidity is when they insist race is skin color. The only people who insist this are the people in the science deniers cult. People familiar enough with the human sciences to accept the great diversity of man know that race is a general shorthand for a large basket of measurable human traits. These baskets of traits largely conform to the big geological divides on our home planet.

That last bit may sound awkward, but it is a good way of understanding how it is we have so much diversity in the human animal. If one hundred thousand years ago a group of aliens scooped up a few thousand humans and transported them to another planet, those humans would have adapted to their new world. They would no doubt have evolved unique characteristics because their world required it. No one would pretend that they are not different from earthlings.

It turns out that humans are the product of mating decisions made by their ancestors going back a very long time. Evolution worked on humans just as it does on everything else on the planet. When people migrated to a new environment, they quickly began to adapt to that new environment. The reason Africans have a genetic defense to malaria, but Scandinavians do not, is malaria is not present in the north. Thousands of generations of adaptation are why we have so much human diversity.

What makes this strain of stupidity carried by Dr. Rachel jaw-dropping is the people afflicted with it never shut up about diversity. From the comfort of their whites-only enclaves, they harangue the rest of us about diversity. The term “white privilege” has become a passphrase for these people. Yet, if race is not real, then white is not a logical construct, as it assumes race is real. Similarly, diversity cannot exist if there is no genetic basis for the human differences, we call race and ethnicity.

This brings us back to the beginning. The denialist is always someone who is educated, but also strangely stupid about the obvious. They tend to have inflated credentials in fields that are not particularly taxing. Archeology is a little better than education or psychology, but it is not a STEM field. There is a sense that their credentialism is a defense mechanism rather than a trophy case. That is also why they fall for every nutty fad popular with the modern intelligentsia.

Biological denialism, the refusal to accept the observable and measurable differences in humans, may be the ultimate expression of the aphorism at the start of this post. It is an idea so stupid that only pseudo-intellectual poseurs believe it. It signals to the rest that the person believing it is willing to accept on faith whatever nonsense is running through that particular subculture at the moment. It is an act of submission, showing that the person will never question the tenets of the subculture.

That is an important aspect of the modern intelligentsia. Membership is not just about holding the right beliefs. Those are important, but they change quickly, so what is most important is the willingness to accept the most absurd beliefs. The man who starts wearing a dress, claiming he believes he is a woman must be met by his fellows with absolute acceptance. That is the point of the pronoun stuff. When you address the guy in the sundress as “them” you are a true believer.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Purpose Driven Life

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An underappreciated aspect of human society is that humans in large communities need a set of common beliefs. Large society in this context means anything larger than the Dunbar number. Once you get to that number, law codes and a way to enforce them are a necessity. One tool to do this is a common set of beliefs held by most of the members. This provides a mechanism for those rules to become a habit of mind, a shared reality we would think of as culture.

A simple example of this is a taboo against an activity. Let’s say a poisonous berry grows in a part of the forest. The people may develop a taboo about eating anything or even entering that part of the forest. Perhaps they evolve a legend about one of their gods cursing the place or prohibiting people from entering it. Once enough people believe this, it becomes part of the law code of society and it is enforced by collective action against those who break the taboo about entering that area.

It is a crude example, but we have many such examples in the modern day that are not much different from that crude example. For example, Americans remain convinced that eating fat will anger the health gods. There is no science behind the Standard American Diet, but most Americans accept it as true. They don’t think about it. It is just part of the shared beliefs they grew up with and live within, so they accept it as true. We accept all sorts of behavior and environmental nonsense on faith.

Now, it should be noted that the shared beliefs do not have to be accepted by everyone in a society for them to work. Going back to our sacred bit of the forest example, it is not necessary that everyone accept the myth. It just has to be a critical mass that accept it and is willing to act on it. Unless there is an equally compelling reason to resist the myth and the reason is held by a sufficient number of people, a minority belief will become the majority belief in practice, if not spirit.

It is not too hard to find examples of this form of minoritarianism. American history is riddled with causes that were championed by a minority. The proliferating set of taboos related to the Covid beliefs held by the ruling class are a great example. A tiny number of people, relative to the population, deeply believes in these Covid taboos, so they have launched a crusade against Covid. America looks like a weird Muslim country now, because lots of people joined this new belief.

That is another aspect of shared belief. It appears that another prerequisite for large human society is a sense of shared purpose. The answer to why we are here and what is the purpose of our lives is answered within that shared set of beliefs. “My life has meaning because I am part of this great cause of my people” is a highly efficient way of enforcing group behavior. The best rules are those eagerly enforced by a set of true believers whose purpose in life is to enforce compliance.

Move backward through popular politics in America and you see one holy crusade after another driving the political debate. Today it is driven by Covidians. Before that it was driven by white liberals thinking Obama was Jesus. Before that it was driven by the war on terrorism. When the Baby Boomers had kids in school the crusade was to fix the schools so everyone could be educated. Go back further and we had a war on drugs and, of course, the great crusade against the evils of communism.

American history has been one crusade after another. The great battle between good whites and bad whites exists because it fills that need for a purpose. In the albescence of some external foe, the good whites keep their crusading skills sharp by going to war with the bad whites over some moral cause. This not only gives purpose to their lives, but it also reinforces those shared beliefs about who they are and why they exist. The reaction from the bad whites serves much the same purpose.

If you observe the Covidians for a bit, you see this need for purpose. The HBD community, for example, rushed to be the early adopters of the new faith, sensing it was a way back into the community of the respectable. It was not a conscious decision on their part. They did not vote on their secret e-mail list to become Covidians. It was the result of a shared desire to be rehabilitated and restored to polite society, along with the general sense that their purpose in life is to inform the rulers on the human sciences.

The same can be said for the women volunteering to be the mask police in every community in America. The natural role of women has been so reduced in status that this artificial role of Covidian den mother has become highly appealing. Mothers have been far less emotional about things like mask wearing and social distancing than the army of unattached, childless females. The reason is they have kids to scratch that maternal itch, so being a Covidian den mother has little appeal.

The fact is, human societies need shared beliefs. One aspect of that shared belief is a shared purpose. Most people, certainly not all, need that space labeled “purpose” to be filled by society. This is especially true of childless females. It is also true for males with no male role to play. Stripped of natural sex roles, this need for purpose is filled with causes that give purpose to life. The people wearing masks in their cars are not sheep following orders. They are believers looking for a god.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Next Phase Of The War

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Note: I have a movie review up behind the green door. This time it is #97 on the AFI top-100 list, Bringing Up Baby. I must admit, I’me finding it a lot of fun to sample these very old movies. Like reading old books, there is a lot of secondary cultural stuff to be learned from watching old movies.

Very bad people back in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s noticed that radicals were very good at the first phase of their project, but not the second. The radicals wanted to knock down the institutions of society and replace them with something better, but they never managed to pull off that last part. In fact, the thing they cooked up as the new and improved version of what they destroyed tended to create new problems, which required new solutions that created new problems and so on and so on.

An obvious example of this is family life. The nuclear family, with clear and natural roles for the sexes, worked pretty well. The radicals, on the other hand, could not understand why divorce laws and custody laws were as they were. They could not understand why those sex roles existed. They smashed them up and replaced them with family courts, liberal divorce and weird feminist ideas about sex roles. The result has been three generations of family and social dysfunction.

At some point, even the radicals realized that their project was not the best for their cause, so they simply took over the existing institutions. The long march through the institutions was largely over by the 1990’s. The Baby Boomers had taken over and pushed out their parent’s generation. Along the way they made sure that their generation had the right opinions. Those who did not were cast into the outer darkness of dissident exile. The radicals were in charge.

This is what makes the current revolution a shabby and ridiculous version of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. Today’s radicals are the sons and daughters of those radicals, who now are in charge of everything. The street fighters are not attacking “the man” as the man pays their allowance. They are attacking an avatar of the man their parents vanquished generations ago. It is one-part public theater and one-part cargo cult, put on as if it is an initiation ritual for young adults.

There is a more sinister aspect to it. Read what the young radicals in the academy, politics and even in business, are demanding and you see that their assault on the institutions is really an assault on knowledge itself. The radicals of yesteryear were content to embrace the logic of the institutions, just put to use for their purposes. The new radicals want to wreck the logic itself. They want to replace institutional logic with something different, something that does not exist and cannot exist.

This is the heart of the anti-whiteness stuff. When they claim that institutions suffer from whiteness or are Eurocentric, what they mean is the internal logic that operates the institution is coherent and rational. The STEM fields, for example, still abide by the rules of mathematics. Medicine is still rooted in the logic of Western medicine. Because these rules are barriers to all but the talented tenth of non-whites, these rules must be racist and therefore these rules have to be eliminated.

If one is over a certain age and a fan of dark humor, there is an amusing bit of irony to all of this. The people in charge are now getting the same treatment from their pets that they gave to the Occidentals, who they assaulted as youth. After all, the reason whiteness persists is the white Progressives, and white presenting Progressives, have maintained that whiteness for their benefit. It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the sight of woke females of color screaming at the aging radicals.

Putting that aside, a medical system “disrupted and decolonized” in order to allow for the dominance of non-whites will result in something dangerous and primitive. A world with Africanized math is a world spinning off its axis. Allowing the wrong answer to stand alongside the right answer in the name of equity and equality will result in disorder and chaos within the institutions. In other words, it is not just a threat to the people in charge of the institutions, but the institutions themselves.

In order to maintain the simplest of things, you need to be able to make some simple predictions about the future. Predictions rely upon order, which in turn is the product of rules about the world and how people will act. Imagine a road with no rules. If you cannot know what other drivers will do or how the road surface will be around the next corner, the road becomes useless. You are better off walking through the woods than taking your life into your hands on the road.

This is what the woke revolution is promising and beginning to deliver. Consider the news media, for example. A generation ago it was predictably biased, but it contained some truth in the bias. If you knew the rules, you could watch a chat show or read a newspaper and get a sense of things. Today, in order to strip all that ugly whiteness from it, the news is a random nonsense with no truth value at all. The only point to it is to stimulate the true believers of the revolution.

What the woke revolution and its promise to decolonize Western societies is really promising is a return to a form of occasionalism. The formal definition of this is that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Humans are “created substances” which means they live in a world of miracles. There are no rules, only the whims of the creator. In a world without fixed rules, there is no point in knowing the rules and therefore no point in predicting what comes next.

This is a world of primitive oogily-boogily. It is why the people in charge are suddenly getting nervous about the golem they released on white people. The Democrat leaders in Washington are claiming their radicals have gone too far, while the Republicans are cheering them on, as they silently watch Trump be removed from office. Whether or not they can put the golem back into what holds a golem is unknown. The woke warriors are now everywhere in the institutions and they are not ready to quit.

What this means is the next phase of the revolution shifts from attacking normal white people going about their business, to a fight between the rulers and their pets. The political class can probably handle the people in their ranks, but what will they do about woke capital? How do they plan to contend with the suddenly woke intelligence agencies and the foreign-dominated foreign policy establishment? How will they reign in the woke mayors, governors and police departments?

None of this is to imply that the coast is clear for whites. Attacking whites is now an integral part of what makes the new radical. It’s just that the purpose of it will change from pleasing their masters to attacking their masters. The Pretender Biden does not know it, but Team Kamala has stocked up on My Pillows. The war did not end with the removal of the evil Trump. It was just the opening phase. The next phase is between the ideology of the woke and the cupidity of their masters.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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 sa***@*********************ns.com.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Fanatic’s Ball

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Note: I have a post up on Taki about the end of liberal democracy. As according to the new normal, I have posts up behind the green door on popular culture.

The great British evolutionary biologist, J. B. S. Haldane, famously said that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. The obsessive, uncritical belief in an idea or cause is the opposite of the sober-minded and rational. The fanatic is intolerant of anything that contradicts his views, while the rational man is willing to update or even abandon his views when presented contradictory information. The fanatic sees only that which confirms his fanaticism and refuses to yield in his opinions.

The fanatic, of course, has been in the middle of every man-made social disaster since the French Revolution. It was fanatics who brought on the Reign of Terror and it was fanatics who brought on The Great Terror. Fanatics let loose by Mao in the Cultural Revolution terrorized the Chinese population. Man’s greatest invention turns out to be man’s most terrible invention. Once it is let loose, it is not easily put back on the leash, at least not until it runs out of things to smash.

This year has seen the fanatic set free to run wild in our streets. They were deliberately agitated and let loose by the petty men of the ruling class, frustrated that the people’s champion had not been vanquished. It’s hard for modern people to understand how the French radicals, for example, could have killed so many in the name of the revolution, but current events make this much easier to comprehend, even if we have not reached the bloodbath stage yet.

The thing is, fanaticism is not a well-defined group of people held in reserve and then deployed when needed. It’s more like a spiritual force that sweeps through a population, afflicting the weak minded and those desperate for a purpose. We see this with the election shenanigans. The desire to be part of the great fight against the bad man and his minions caused hundreds, maybe thousands to follow their fanatical rage and engage in thousands of acts of election fraud.

That is what is coming into focus as various parties look into what happened and whistle blowers step forward. The image that is emerging is of an orgy of corruption where the participants are free of any moral restraint. They were not working from a plan, but a belief that they were on the side of angels and therefore free to use any means necessary to help the cause. They were the righteous engaged in the great war against the wicked, unleashed by the ruling class.

The defenders of Trump will work hard to make it sound like a wide-ranging conspiracy, but that’s just how mass media culture works. Facts and observations cannot be presented as is. They have to be part of a narrative with a well-defined protagonist and an easy to hate villain. In reality, there is no grand conspiracy at work. The people involved in the election rigging are true believers. They believe what they are doing is for a just cause and they cannot see the corruption in it.

Fanatics in numbers are a lot like a flock of birds of a school of fish. They instinctively coordinate their efforts without needing to be told. Like fireflies at dusk, they are constantly signaling one another, which intensifies their fanaticism, making them more sensitive to the movements of the group. The people at the top cheered the fanatics in the streets, excused their behavior and reminded them that the evil Trump must be stopped by any means necessary. They were on a holy mission.

The thing is though, what motivates those unleashing the fanatics on the population also motivates the fanatic. That is a search for purpose. These are people who wish to be part of something bigger than themselves, but they lack the skill and ability to create anything but mayhem. This manifests as the smashing of whatever they see in their way, which can be anything. It is why they eventually turn on one another, because at some point they run out of things to smash.

That’s what makes this such a dangerous time. The petty and stupid people surrounding the corpse of Joe Biden are not going to be satisfied with expelling Trump from Washington. They will want vengeance. Part of that will be swinging wildly in what they perceive to be the opposite direction out of spite. It’s not hard to imagine them unleashing a Camp of the Saints event, for example, by reversing Trump’s immigration rules and inviting the world to their celebration.

It’s not that the people around the Pretender Biden want millions rushing the border in the hope of getting a promised amnesty. They are too stupid and short-sighted to think that far ahead. It’s that they will want the quick rush of smashing those rules and gloating over their work. Like the fanatics cheering the executioner holding up the head of his victim, they will simply be looking for the thrill of seeing their enemies, real and imagined, facing their holy wrath.

What the past tells us about times of terror is the fanatics are never satisfied with the blood of a few enemies of the revolution. The sight of the enemies blood just makes them hungry for more. There may be some in the ruling class sensing that they must first put their fanatics back on the leash, but most of too dull and self-loathing to grasp what they have unleashed. There is a good chance that the summer riots were just a taste of what lies ahead in the woke revolution.

It is tempting to assume that this revolution will eat itself, but that is not the pattern people think they see in the history book. People point to Robespierre as the example, but he seems more like an exception. Stalin’s terror campaign ended when Stalin died of natural causes. The Cultural Revolution ended when Mao died. Pol Pot lived to old age and according to his own words, died with a clear conscience. Perhaps this time will be an exception, but that is never the way to bet.

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