Category Archives: Culture

The Dead Enders

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When it comes to not getting it, there are few that can challenge the modern conservative for his obtuseness and proud indifference to the facts. For going on 30 years now, conservatives have refused to notice that America is rapidly changing in the exact opposite direction they predicted. That’s a remarkable run of wrongness that even the libertarians struggle to match. Whatever it once was, conservatism is now a fantasy camp of escapism, disconnected from reality.

A good example is this recent post on a once popular conservative website called National Review. The writer, like all so-called conservatives, is happily dreaming of the day when the terrible Donald Trump is sent packing. That’s when they can come out of hiding and everything will be put back to the way it was. The Janus Party, one face Democrat and one face Republican, will be back to the way it was before that mean old orange man stirred things up with his meanness.

The writer, like most so-called conservatives, has never thought too much about why Trump won in 2016 or why we have a crisis on our hands in 2020. Somewhere back in the 1990’s, after the end of the Cold War, they imagined what the world would be like in the future and reoriented themselves to it. They have not bothered to revisit that worldview since then. They have not thought much about why they instinctively embraced cosmopolitanism in the first place.

Like a long serving house slave, the conservative pundit never troubles his mind about his arrangements. The role of conservatism has always been the same as Dabny described a century ago. “Conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.” This is a role the conservative was born into and he resents those who question those arrangements.

That is the atmosphere around conservatism these days. They hope this is finally the end of Trump and what he represents. Like that house slave after a revolt has been put down, they look forward to serving the master of the house again. In this case, it means they have that old 2012 postmortem out, thinking about how they can embrace the new diverse America. That has always been the hallmark of conservatism. They accept what the Left says about them at face value.

Of course, with any post from so-called conservatives, the first thing to do is hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard and start typing the word “immigration.” There are two hits, one for an ad and the other a mention about executive orders. The fact that immigration was what put Trump in the White House, or at least one of the things, has never registered with conservatives. Trump was the first candidate to speak frankly about the subject and it is what legitimized his campaign.

Immigration is also why the Republican Party is headed to permanent minority status in the very near future. Virginia is solidly Democrat because close to 15% of the population is foreign born. That’s the official number. North Carolina is following Virginia for the same reason. It now has an 8% foreign born population. Georgia is at 10% and will soon be a solidly Democrat state. Helping the Left import a new people was a bad idea, but conservatives never think about it.

A search on the words “race” and “white” yields a similar result. White people in America have been subjected to an unprecedented assault over the last year and this does not rate a single mention. Instead, it is blather about being the “party of Lincoln”, a phrase intended to tell the Left that conservatives will not be any trouble. Note too that Lincoln killed many of the ancestors of the GOP coalition. Peddling Lincolnism in the South is like selling Hitler memorabilia to Jews.

Now, the linked post does provide some insight as to why conservatism is a museum piece, sitting next to whiggism and the free silver movement. The writer makes the same call as other conservatives about the future of their thing. They need to be “a coalition of work and probity.” Later, he quotes Lincoln’s Independence Hall address to add authority to the claim. “In due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

Right there is why conservatism has never conserved anything. Probity requires honestly, which requires a sober minded acceptance of reality. To assert that there can ever be a world in which everyone has an equal chance is to deny the fundamental reality of the human condition. Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, so in the context of the social order, equality is a dangerous fantasy. Probity requires a frank acceptance of this reality of the human condition.

Obviously, in the mouth of the modern conservative, probity simply means adherence to the highest of ideals. In the context of modern American politics, that always means the ideals of the Left. Those are never questioned. As Dabny pointed out a century ago, conservative principles are always yesterday’s Progressive fad. When they say they seek to be the “party of Lincoln” that simply means they intend to be the party of whoever was the last Progressive icon.

Sadly though, conservatism does reflect the sentiments of white people, especially the older generations. Facing the promise of marginalization and possibly extermination, they seek to embrace those promising their demise. That slave’s mindset is so strong, no amount of beatings will break their loyalty to the master. In the case of whites and conservatives, the master is that 19th century radical dream of universal equality and fraternity between all men.

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.

Mediocre Man

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Notes: I have a new post up behind the green door. This time it is deep thoughts upon viewing the movie Timecop. Well, not exactly deep thoughts. Just some thoughts.

When trying to understand what has gone so terribly wrong with the Occident, observers often point to intelligence as the main driver. The populations of the West are getting dumber, so they are less capable than in the past. This is not to say there are no geniuses today or that there are fewer of them. It’s that their proportion of society is smaller than in the past. It is the smart fraction that is getting smaller. As a result, the progress of the West has slowed and may be in reverse.

The typical way this is explained is this way. Imagine a man dragging a sack of rocks down a road. If he is a large man and the sack has only a few rocks, he can drag the sack as fast as he could walk without it. If on the other hand, he is a small man and the sack has many rocks, he will move much smaller than his capacity. This will show up most prominently when his path is not clear. He may even come to a halt when he comes to a hill or a long incline.

Now, one reason for this decline in intelligence, is the mass invasion from outside the Occident over the last fifty years. Minneapolis is now a dysfunctional city because of the importation of sub-Saharan Africans. The sorts of people who think Ilhan Omar is a great leader will struggle with modernity. The reason these people are trapped in the Neolithic age is they lack the cognitive ability to go much further. California looks like Mexico because it is now full of Mexicans.

Another reason, and most likely the reason for the mass invasion from over the horizon, is white people are getting dumber. A quick look at what average students did in school a century ago makes that clear. Most college freshman would flunk this eighth grade exam or be so offended by it they would need counseling. Ed Dutton has written a book on this issue and continues to do videos explaining the topic. The short version is that white people have been in decline for a long time.

There is another aspect to this that does not get mentioned. That is, the smart fraction in the West may not have changed that much, but the middle fraction has grown rapidly over the last century. Better nutrition and education have swelled the ranks of the mediocre, changing the nature of our societies. Men who used to be supervisors on job sites now run offices. Women who volunteered in the community and kept a good house now run the nation’s human resource departments.

In other words, that man dragging the sack has not changed much. He is not as big and fit as before, but he is pretty close. His sack is larger and heavier, but he also has modern tools to mitigate much of it. He’s not moving anywhere near as fast as he could, but it is not the burden in the sack. It is the regulatory burden he must navigate to even pick up the sack. Around the superior man is an army of mediocrities with a myriad of rules and regulations governing the dragging of sacks.

Everywhere you go in the West, you are confronted with rules and regulations that make little sense at face value. Every business has to have people who spend their days keeping up with the rules, which change constantly. The “compliance officer” has taken the role of the ideological enforcer. Instead of making sure everyone is properly enthusiastic for the latest truth from the party, the compliance officer makes sure everyone is enthusiastic about following the rules.

These rules, of course, are the domain of the mediocre. Now, don’t confuse mediocre with average. Average people know they are average and accept their limitations, while the mediocrity imagines himself as an elite. Every “policy expert” in Washington is sure he knows more about his subject than the people who actually do the work. Every lawyer thinks he is Blackstone. Every politician thinks he is a great historical figure. The mediocrity does not know what he does not know.

This is the reason mediocrities love complex rules. The Mediocre Man loves rules for the same reason small children love large bulky toys. Just as the child lacks the fine dexterity and spatial awareness to manipulate small objects, Mediocre Man lacks the cognitive ability to act independently. He is a man who grasps the rail when going down a few steps, because that’s what you do. His mastery of the rules is proof that he is the smartest man in the room.

This is why the West is so burdened with elaborate and complicated rules that have no obvious point. It’s why Massachusetts now has a curfew to fight Covid. It’s not just that they think Covid is a night stalker, but that an army of mediocre men came up with a plausible sounding, but ultimately absurd, reason for the curfew. The mediocre men in politics, being mediocrities themselves, embraced it for the same reason a toddler picks up the big toy. It’s what makes sense to them.

Mediocre Man and his love of rulemaking is why we have a war on reason and observation in the West. Mediocre Man sees the rules against reading Table 43 of the Unified Crime Report and assumes anyone mentioning its contents broke the rules, which the worst possible crime. There are rules about what you can say about Covid, peace be upon him, so anyone not in full compliance, even if he is right, must be hounded out of polite society. The rules demand it.

None of this is to say that the mass invasion of stupid people and the decline of native intelligence are not factors. In fact, the domination of Mediocre Man may be another result of the Occidental decline. For the same reason we have allowed millions of barbarians to enter our lands, we have allowed Mediocre Man to take the controls of society and drive us into a jungle of rules. It is why Mediocre Man has locked himself in place by a form of regulatory capture.

Just as regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries or interests they are allegedly regulating, Western societies have been captured by those rule loving mediocrities they should be controlling. The smart fraction, like those in the classic science fiction story, find themselves the slaves of stupid people who think they are the masters of the universe. The problem in the West is that it has been taken over by Raskolnikov, who thinks he is Petrovich.

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 End Of A Story

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Note: I have a new post up behind the green door. This is a review of the next film on the top-100 greatest movies, Unforgiven. I’m a fan of Eastwood, so I’ll probably be doing more posts on his work.

One of the things that was debated on the fringes of politics the last few years is whether this period was a replay of the late-60’s and early 70’s or a replay of the early and mid-60’s. Were we heading to some new and much worse phase of radicalism or was this a rear guard action as this spasm of radicalism burned itself out? Put another way, was this the dawning of the age of Jonquarius or the sunset of the radical awakening that was kicked off in the 2000 election?

The outright theft of the 2020 election tells us that we are probably witnessing the end point of a radical phase, rather than a beginning. The reason, to stick with the historical comparison, is that Trump is clearly Nixon in this drama. The Left, which controls both the aesthetic and the cultural norms of official Washington, reacted to Trump just as their analogs reacted to Nixon a half century ago. They were willing to break every rule to get rid of him and finally did it.

The way they have rid themselves of Trump is interesting for a few reasons. One is that they did it in reverse order this time. For a backward age, in which everything is a deliberate attempt to reboot old franchises, running the old Nixon playbook in reverse suggests the cosmic forces have a sense of style. Instead of rigging an election to keep Nixon out and then impeaching him after he got into Washington, they impeached Trump first and then rigged the election to throw him out.

Those old enough to remember Nixon will recall that long after Nixon was gone, the Left still groused about the man. They made movies trying to portray him as worse than they painted him while in office. They used him as a pejorative when assaulting Republican political opponents. Everything that made lefty sad in the 1980’s was called Nixonian, as if Nixon was the face of evil in the world. Nixon was a great enemy that served them so well, they could not bear to let him go.

You can be sure this will be true of Trump. In order to keep their conservative toadies in line they will be calling them “Trumpian” whenever they dare speak out of turn or show any signs of life. Republicans, of course, will fully embrace the term to police their ranks for anyone that questions the oligarchs. For the political industrial complex, the Trump era will be like a brush with death. It will color their perspective on everything and modify their politics long after Trump has left their midst.

To further bolster the analogy is the fact that Biden is a vegetable. Carter came in after Nixon, but exactly no one in Washington respected carter. They laughed at him to his face and treated him like a servant. They were slightly embarrassed by him, but he was a necessary place holder, so he was tolerated. That’s Biden. He was installed as the nominee and now president because the political class does not know where they go from here, so they put in a place holder.

With Carter, the promise was that all the professional hacks would get their jobs back and begin to rebuild an activist foreign policy and continue remaking the post-industrial economy, while the establishment found some better front men. This is why the neocons were all on the Mumbly Joe bandwagon. They expect to slither back into the foreign policy side and begin preparing for war with Iran next decade. The bankers will get their men back in to restart the globalism process.

The thing to keep in mind with historical analogies is they are never perfect and only a fool gets hung up on that fact. They’re comparisons, not replications. The reason they are useful is people don’t change all that much from generation to generation. The people who pushed out Nixon in the 1970’s are not all that different from the people involved in the coup against Trump. Many were around back then. That means they will react to the aftermath in a similar way.

That said, the differences are important. There is no conservative movement brewing this time to be a useful gatekeeper for the establishment. Conservatism has been so discredited; few Trump supporters will be fooled by their efforts to legitimize the shenanigans that have gone on during Trump. They will try, of course, but the result will be a further discrediting of themselves. Too many people are wise to that game now for it to work on anyone but the extremely stupid.

Further, there is no new thing on the horizon this time. The reason Buckley-style conservatism got off the ground is the people in charge immediately saw it would be a useful foil for them in the charade of democracy. Buckley’s over-the-top Brahman act legitimized conservatism. A vulgar little dwarf like Ben Shapiro is never going to be able to pull that off. The fact is, the bench of Conservative Inc. is full of misfits and mediocrities, best suited for parody, not legitimacy.

The point here is this era is probably not the beginning of the end as many disappointed dissidents would have you believe. There will be no internment camps for racists or truth and reconciliation commissions. Instead of the beginning of the end it is just the end of a cycle of radicalism. Just as the New Left spent their last bit of fervor ejecting Nixon from Washington, our woke crazies of this age have spent themselves now. Their reason to exist is about to leave town.

Further, this may signal the end of another story. That story is the tale of the American Empire that began in the middle of the last century. After conquering Western Europe and much of Asia, the American Empire engaged in a long face-off with the Soviet Empire. Just as the Peloponnesian was a multi-generational affair, the Cold War spanned close to three generations. It changed the culture of America and cast a long shadow after it was over.

The first truly imperial generation rose up in the middle of the last century too. They remade the culture and economy in their image. The story of the last 70 years has been the story of that generation, but just as the empire is in decline, so is that generation. The weird backward-looking nature of modern politics, the endless cycle of reboots and remakes in Hollywood, the stalling of technological advance, all suggest we have reached an end point.

The multi-generational cycle that was kicked off with the start of the Cold War and the struggle between two global empires may be reaching its end. All the old purposes that drove that cycle are gone now. There are no communists. There are no Nazis to hunt as a reminder to remain vigilant. Every battle in the culture war has been won. There is nothing left to do, so the imperial generation has been replaying old fights in a politics of nostalgia, but now their time has come to an end.

That is probably what we are witnessing. The generation that made a fetish of free speech, good government and democracy, is now closing the show with censorship, corruption and now the undermining of democratic legitimacy. They are not doing this because of Trump or what he represents, but as one last replay of a drama that has outlived its reason to exist. It’s fitting that the capstone of this generation’s nostalgia politics will be a man who cannot remember yesterday.

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.

Partisans and Objectivists

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One way to describe the great divide within mainstream politics is that one side is the partisans and the other side objectivists. The partisans are focused on their objectives and what they think is good for their side. They just want to win and don’t worry too much about how they win. The objectivists are focused on facts and think that truth will prevail eventually. The partisans are what we call the Left and the objectivists are what we call the Right in America.

The partisans are an ends justifies the means mode of thought. They are unconstrained by rules or convention. In fact, they are not limited by what they said last week, as last week was a different time with different goals. In a world where winning is the only thing that matters, everything else bends to serve that end. If being seen as on the science is useful in the moment, they love science. If treating science like magic is useful next week, then next week they will mock science.

Objectivists, of course, find this mind boggling. They look at these contradictions as the Achilles’s heel of their opponents. They spend a lot of time pointing out how the partisans are contradicting what they said last week. Often this is effective, as the public tends to side with the objectivists in most things. The climate change stuff is a good example of how the partisans harm their own cause. Their flexibility with the truth is a liability when asking the public to take their word on science.

For the most part, though, this willingness to transcend facts, and even reality in some cases, is a great advantage in a democracy. Politics in a democracy is immediate, rather than deliberative, so that first impression counts for a lot. If in the fullness of time those initial arguments are found to be full of lies or simply wrong, it does not matter as everyone is onto the next thing. It is rare in a democracy for the debate to circle back and address an old argument or have a do-over.

A good example of how this works is the term “gun show loophole.” This remains a popular catchphrase on the Left. They know gun control is wildly unpopular, so they talk about ending gun show loopholes. The fact that there is no such thing as a gun show loophole does not matter. It sounds good. People don’t like loopholes of any sort as they seem dishonest, so they support ending gun show loopholes. The Left can appear reasonable, despite perpetrating a fraud on the public.

Of course, this summer we got to experience another example of how the truth is no constraint to the partisan. The people burning, looting and attacking people in the streets have been labeled peaceful protesters. Just this week, as video comes out of massive looting and pillaging in Philadelphia, the governor of the state called it a mostly peaceful protest. That strikes the objectivists as insane, but from the point of view of the partisan, it helps their cause and that’s all that matters.

As violence spread around the country this summer, the chant from the rioters was often something like “silence is violence.” In other words, if you did not vocally support them, they could rightfully assume you were plotting violence or supported violence against them, so they were justified in using violence. In other words, to the partisan, their violence is speech, while your speech is violence. The objectivists are stymied by this sleight of hand, so they have remained dumbstruck by it.

This willingness to transcend the rules of language was on display this week as democrats threw a choreographed tantrum over Judge Barrett. They claimed that Trump was packing the court, a term that goes back a century to when FDR tried to increase the number of judges, so he could get his guys on the bench. The fact that Trump was not actually doing anything like that was not a constraint on the Democrats bleating about court packing all week.

Just as their violence is speech, while your speech is violence, the logic of the situation is being turned on its head. They now claim that their plans to pack the court are a justified response to Trump packing the court. You see, when their enemy scrupulously follows the rules it is a gross violation of procedure, but when they overturn procedure it is restoring order and balance. This is not mere hypocrisy. This is the natural detachment from objectivity that is a predicate for the partisan.

This is why the partisans tend to prevail in a democracy. They have a wider range of options because they are not limited by facts and reason. Additionally, the objectivists are self-limiting, often ceding the field because they think the rules require it. One side gets to play dirty, while the other side tries to talk them out of it. The truth is, there is no reasoning with a partisan. There is no way to reason with someone who will not stipulate to the basic facts of life. They exist beyond reason.

This is the story of the last 30 years. As the partisans have become increasingly partisan, which means less constrained by reality, the objectivists have become more certain that reality will step and do the job they refuse to do. They imagine a time when the partisan suddenly realizes the truth of his situation, throws down his weapons and embraces the objectivist as a brother in logic. For the objectivist, reason has become escapism in order to avoid what must be done.

A byproduct of this dynamic is that most people have no voice in the media, government or any other area of public life. The partisans advance their positions on behalf of their cause, while the objectivists fret about factual accuracy. In a democracy, objectivity is not a constituency, so the objectivists end up representing the interests of abstract concepts, rather than genuine people, which means the bulk of the people have no representative.

Another old saying relevant here is that in war, truth is the first casualty. The reason for this is war is a conflict between two sides, neither of which has a reason to see things from the point of view of the other side. It is the ultimate partisan conflict. If there is ever going to be a force to topple the current Left, their first task will be to eliminate those more concerned about truth and reason than the welfare of genuine people.

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.

Our Gang

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In the Depression era Our Gang comedies, a recurring gag was for the kids to get adult sized costumes and put on a show. The joke was the sight-gag of the kids wearing the oversize clothes, but trying hard to play the roles in their show. It was made in a time when there was a clear line between childhood and adulthood, so the audience understood that it was not just using kids for cheap gags. It was also a way to make sport of current issues without being too obvious.

The man behind the Our Gang series was credited with using children in a natural way, so they came across as real kids, not adult actors playing children. The authenticity of the roles, a group of poor children in the depression, often pretending to be adults or what they imagined it was like to be adults, allowed the adult audience to laugh at themselves and the foolishness of adult pretensions. The best comedy is that which allows the audience to approvingly laugh at themselves.

It makes for an interesting contrast to the modern day. The most popular movies in this age feature adults dressing up as children’s comic book heroes. They engage in the sorts of fantasy stories featured in comic books. These movies are not made for children, but for adults. The median age of the American comic book consumer is 34. The point of the movies is for the adults to escape anything resembling adulthood and engage in the sorts of flights of fancy normally associated with children.

Movies have always been escapism. In the Depression, people went to the theater to get some relief from the daily grind of hard times. During the war they went to be reassured that they were on the winning side. In the Cold War, movies often reminded people that they were on the side of angels in the great struggle with communism. Alternatively, they were a cautionary tale about the foolishness of war in a nuclear world. Movies reflect and shape the shared public consciousness.

That’s what makes those old Our Gang skits about kids in adult clothes relevant in the age of comic book movies. We live in an age in which fools and knaves dress up as serious people and perform serious roles. The typical politician is a dangerously stupid simpleton, but he can play his role well, so he gets the part. He is no different from the kids dressed up in adult clothes. The difference is you could laugh at the kids, but the modern version is nothing but horror.

Just look at the absurdity of the Covid panic. All over we see adult children cast in the role of political leader, playing a real-life action fantasy game where they are heroically fighting the Covid monster. Mario’s Cuomo’s oldest, currently staring as Governor, commissioned a book about himself fighting the Covid. It’s a wonder he did not have it titled My Struggle. Like so many other reckless idiots holding high office in this country, he lives in a fantasy land where he is always the hero.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but much of the outrage over Trump is that he is an authentic human being, not some airhead hired for the role. The long arc of our presidential candidates has reached the point where the Inner Party candidate is a man who could very well be dead right now. He stays locked in a basement. We are a click away from the next candidate being a concept or maybe a holographic image created by the special effects people in Hollywood.

That’s probably why the super hero genre has become so popular. In an age of mediocre men dressed up to play important roles, it is natural for the common fantasy to revolve around some great leader emerging to transcend the dreary blandness of the age and carry us forward into a heroic age. The foil for these heroes is always a group of people who are too small minded to appreciate whatever it is the hero is bringing to society with his super-natural or super-human skills.

It’s also not surprising that these emergent heroes are psychologically flawed in some way that will prevent them from fully realizing their power. The audience is supposed to see the foolishness of anyone trying to transcend this age. In the end, there is no escaping the dreary blandness of the egalitarian age. The subtext to these films is that only mentally flawed people think anyone should seek something more than material prosperity and temporary happiness. It is nihilism for a nihilistic age.

Another juxtaposition worth considering is that in the dawn of Hollywood, movies were a break from the labors of life. The audience was serious people engaged in the serious struggle of life. Today’s audience is composed of grown up children escaping the boring drudgery of life to pretend for a little while to be serious adults. They don’t desire a great leader to carry them to something better. They just think it would be cool to fly around in magic underwear for a while. Small men. Small dreams.

Joseph de Maistre said, “Every country has the government it deserves.” It is a popular quote with modern critics of liberal democracy, but they miss the larger point. The government is the reflection of the society’s elite, which in turn is a reflection of the people and culture that produced that elite. It is no wonder that modern leaders are grown up toddlers dressed up in adult clothes. They are the elite we deserve, because we are no longer able to demand more from ourselves.

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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

Incorporated America

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Media Note: I have a column up at Taki. This will be a regular thing, but how regular is unknown at this point. We’ll see how it goes. I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around nine eastern and runs for a couple of hours.

The old left-wing critique of post-war America was that it was rampant consumerism resulting from the embrace of unfettered capitalism. Everything is commercialized and that which cannot be turned into a reason to buy stuff is discarded. The old right-wing criticism is that America is not free enough. Everywhere the tentacles of the state invade the normal activity of society. Both are correct in that America now operates like a giant corporate entity, rather than a country.

A country in the modern sense is a collection of nations. France is not a unified nation, as its regions are quite distinct with unique histories. Those nations are held together by a shared history and a common interest in being French. The same was always true of the United States, hence the name. The states reflected the nations of the country, held together by a common origin story and common interest. Those regional differences turned up in the language and culture.

The distinguishing characteristic of the America that emerged from the Cold War is that it is losing its regional variety in favor of a bland, corporate sameness. Everywhere you go you see the same corporate brands, which are often owned by the same corporate parent, providing the illusion of choice. Housing developments are all based on the same styles and patterns, because the builders are all the same. A new development in North Carolina looks just like one in Dallas or Cleveland.

America is often described by critics as nothing more than a shopping mall, where the only connection the people have to one another is the choice of product. This is not a right-wing critique, even though the dissident right has embraced it. This is more of an old left-wing critique of America. Capitalism is to blame for transforming America into a giant open-air marketplace. Instead of a culture based on organic institutions and a shared experience, it is based on buying stuff.

There is truth to it, but it misses what is really going on. America is now a corporation, rather than a country. It is why the public space is being transformed into something that looks like a corporate training center. You don’t go there to express an opinion or advance your interests, but to learn the latest policies. The person in charge sees herself as a facilitator, using behavioral techniques she learned in graduate school, in order to help you reach your potential an employee.

Just look at how the big social media platforms censure people. It is not traditional censorship we would see in an ideological state. Instead, the first violation gets you a day off to think about what you have done. The next violation gets you a longer bit of time off, which everyone knows means you’re on the list. The next downsizing means you get let go, regardless of your performance. Finally, like an employee that never fit into the corporate culture, you’re fired from the platform.

Note too that the enforcers at these firms clearly share information with one another about violators. One day the problematic user wakes up and his Twitter has been suspended, his Facebook is deleted and his YouTube channel nuked. This happens for the same reason the HR department ticks the box “Not eligible for rehire” when you’re riffed out of the place. It is not about you. You’re dead to them now. It is a service to their peers, so they can avoid hiring the same mistake.

This is why our radicals now sound like every human resource department and our politicians look like everyone at a corporate retreat. The managerial elite is imposing its corporate sensibilities on the country. The dreary sameness we see all around us is what you see inside every corporation. Everything must serve the point of the enterprise, even the aesthetic. Everything is subject to the quest for efficiency, so everything that makes life interesting is removed.

The regions of the country are no longer unique cultures with unique histories, but subsidiaries that must be normalized into the cooperate culture. Movies and television are repetitive and shallow, because corporate culture eschews creativity as risky and embraces banality because it is predictable and safe. Sports are drenched in identity politics because cross-marketing says the way to promote a new product is to attach it to the most successful product in the catalog.

Corporations travel a well-known arc. They start with a frontier mentality, in which the creative and daring control the enterprise. They are trying to develop a new market or subvert an existing market, so they can’t follow old rules. This attracts people who are goal oriented, not process oriented. This is the culture of every start-up, which is why they can find new ways to attack the market and maneuver the company around larger, better established competitors.

That success eventually outgrows the capacity of the start-up culture. Eventually, the people being hired to do the things the enterprise needs doing need to be managed and that means managers and rules. A new type of employee is brought in, the sort who enjoys the process. They enjoy creating employee manuals. Soon they are joined by another type of employee, who values conformity. Her job is to make sure everyone follows the rules and does so with enthusiasm.

This is the current phase of Corporate America. The thing that matters most to the managers is not ideology. In the corporate state, ideology is about as authentic and meaningful as corporate culture. It is just a veneer to decorate the latest HR effort to boost morale. What matters to them is the quest to assimilate the wide range of assets now under corporate control. If you step back and look at the current crisis, it is not an ideological battle, but a war on variety and exception.

This is, in part, why the elites hate Trump. It’s not his politics, as his politics, stripped of the carny act, are rather conventional. They hate Trump because he is the guy who laughed at the white diversity trainer when she shared her painful experiences of oppression at Princeton. They hate him because he just wants to do his job and have a life and an identity outside the company. For the champions of the corporate state, nothing can exist outside the state.

You see this corporate mentality most strongly in foreign policy. Russia is the arch enemy, not because they are a genuine competitor, but because they refuse to embrace the latest fads from HR. If the issue was the alleged authoritarianism, then America would invade China, but that’s an important vendor relationship, so their tyrannical system is no problem. In the corporate state, values and principles are just pretty lies to justify executive bonus packages.

Modern America is now an incorporated entity, run by a managerial elite, policed by the human resource departments of the corporate nodes within it. As the assimilation of all the corporate assets continues, it is increasingly difficult to see the divisions within the managerial class. The media, corporations, the academy and the state are blending into one amorphous blob that sits over us like a dome. Everything is in the corporate state, nothing is outside it and nothing can be against it.

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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

Might As Well Nudge

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Everyone is familiar with psychological warfare, in which information is used to breakdown the moral of an enemy in wartime. It can also be used on individuals within a community in order to get them to act in a specific way. There’s also propaganda, which is an information campaign used by government to change public opinion or reinforce codes of conduct. This is no different from a marketing campaign, except the people doing it can also use force to get the attention of the audience.

Less known is the use of behavior techniques to subtly encourage or discourage behavior within a population. The idea is to change the environment so that the desired behavior feels like a natural choice. Humans are not fully rational and will make choices that are not entirely in their interests, because of things like peer pressure or assumptions about what everyone else is doing. The Chinese social credit system works on these principles to encourage compliance.

One way this is being done in English speaking countries is through the anathematizing of ideas and concepts the managerial elite wants to discourage. The coordinated and often theatrical banning of people from social media, for example. The people targeted often seem random and nonsensical, but it is not about the people, but about reinforcing an environmental variable. That is, you can be cut off from your in-line community for saying the wrong thing, so you best be careful.

The managerial class has used this tool to great effect. The number of people actually banned from these platforms is quite small, relative to the overall numbers, but the effect has been enormous. Corporate censorship and self-censorship are becoming normalized in America. Note how the term “free speech” is no longer used by anyone but those treated as subversives and trouble makers. They have changed the environment regarding speech and the people are complying.

This is what lies behind the rather weird war on white supremacy the government has been waging since the Charlottesville debacle. We have black mobs, supported by far-left radicals, rioting in cities and the government is telling us white supremacy is our greatest enemy. They are running around arresting alleged white supremacists on spurious charges. The distinguishing feature of these arrests is the pettiness of the campaign against them.

The people being targeted by law enforcement are not posing a threat to the public in the conventional sense. They are not sowing discord in the public or building a huge following of believers. Instead, they are being used by the managerial class to reinforce the concept that there is a hard limit on what one can say and do in politics by normalizing the criminalization of politics. Once this idea gets normalized, the only questions are what is allowed and who decides.

Obviously, the managerial class is working hard to get the evil Donald Trump voted out of office next month. Note that there is very little in the way of a propaganda campaign in favor of Biden and Harris. The former is mostly in hiding and the latter has been completely forgotten, despite the fact she is the actual candidate. The goal of the information campaign is to play a form of three-card Monte, in which the public never actually sees the option placed in front of them.

Instead of a conventional campaign on behalf of the candidate, we have a social proof heuristic through the use of polling and media coverage. Everywhere you turn there are polls telling us how everyone hates Trump. Polling, we’re told, says he is facing a historic defeat next month. The media is full of stories about how this group or that group is angry or disappointed in Trump. They have created an environment in which people are ashamed to say they are voting for Trump.

Another technique being used is to make voting against Trump the default option if you wish to escape the insanity of 2020. Many states, for example, have promised to end the Covid restrictions after the election. The media is injecting the term “return to normalcy” when discussing a Biden victory. In other words, having created a highly unpleasant environment for the public, they are now talking about the one door through which people can escape the madness of the current year.

The people behind this are not particularly adept at using force to maintain their position and compel compliance. This has been clear in the response to the riot campaign waged by the Soros organization this summer. The politicians all the way up to the President were too timid to take on the rioters. Instead, their instinct was to out-clever them until they tired of the violence. These are people uncomfortable with confrontation, so they went with the indirect approach.

This is the nature of the managerial class. These are not the sorts of people who relish the big confrontation. They are not lions. They are foxes. This means that their nature is to use deceit, cunning and now manipulation through the use of sophisticated behavior techniques arising from business and economics. Rather than be faster than the fastest lion, they have removed the lions altogether. They get to rule by being cleverer and more manipulative than any potential rival.

This is why Trump is so hated in Washington. He is a lion, at least in how he presents himself in any competition. He is loud and brash, just like a lion, because it scares off most competitors. The lion is the baddest animal on the savanna because it does not have to fight to prove it. The foxes in Washington fear the very idea of such a person, so they instinctively work to get him removed from their environment. It is not about ideology or policy. The clever naturally hate the bold.

Psychological warfare and propaganda have had mixed results, owing to the nature of the environment and the quality of the people on either end. What works in theory does not always work in practice. The same is true for the new behavioral techniques used by the managerial class. There is also the fact that the evidence supporting their effectiveness is spotty. Manipulating the environment of a grocery store is possible, but applying that to a country is questionable.

There’s also the fact that these techniques are largely the product of the analog age, updated for the digital age. The internet is a force multiplier that the managerial class can exploit, but it is also an obstacle. The massive flow of information appears to be making people less trusting and more skeptical of what comes from the official organs of the managerial class. Every official lie and half-truth is met with a correction or a different lie, creating a low trust information environment.

Put another way, the managerial class maybe extremely clever and adept at accumulating and manipulating information, but in so doing they are annihilating the information by degrading the trust environment in which it is most useful. The more they nudge, the more people resist in unpredictable ways. They generate polling that says Trump will lose in a landslide, but the polling also says most people think Trump will win re-election despite it all.

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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

Fighting Reality

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From time to time it is useful to pick up the spyglasses and take a look at some of the smaller gatherings on the other side of the great divide. The establishment Left is easy to see, as it takes up so much space and makes so much noise. The same is true to a lesser extent with the professional Right. The smaller subcultures are not as easy to see, but they can be more useful in understanding the nature of the divide and why there is a great divide in the first place.

This conversation between someone calling himself Brendan O’Neil and someone calling himself Bret Weinstein is a good example. It appears this is a regular show hosted by Weinstein, where he invites on guests of “diverse opinion” to discuss issues he thinks are important. The topic of this show, according to the copy, was what he calls the woke war on the Enlightenment. Not much was revealed in that regard, but it is useful in understanding why there is a dissident right.

Now, Brendan O’Neil bills himself as a man of the Left. He is the editor of something called Spiked, which is the successor of something called Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party. According to his Wikipedia page, he is a former Trotskyist and communist, but now he self identifies as a Libertarian Marxist. That last bit only makes sense when you know that Spiked is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the guys who bankroll Reason Magazine.

Bret Weinstein is a bit more familiar to Americans. He is a member of the gratuitously self-described “intellectual dark web.” This a group of mostly Jewish writers who churn out conventional opinions for various mainstream sites. Weinstein got famous because he was attacked by a mob on lunatics on his college campus because he lacked enthusiasm for their latest fashions. He became a symbol of mob action on campus. He describes himself as a progressive and left-libertarian.

The first interesting thing to note in this is that both describe themselves as left-libertarian in their own way. No one describes themselves as right-libertarian, as that is something which no longer exists. The so-called conservatives would claim they are now the home of right-libertarians, but that is just another self-serving lie. They pose no opposition to the Left on anything. Conservatism is nothing more than a polite fiction now, a holding place for something yet to come.

Putting that aside, this conversation provides a good example of what happens when you eliminate the right answer. You are left trying to mold the wrong answer into something useful. Here, they refuse to consider biology plays any role in culture and politics. In particular, they refuse to accept that the people toppling statues and running Jewish professors off campus are motivated by race. It can’t be race, so they conjure strained explanations for what is happening.

At about the six-minute mark they get into identity politics. The claim by the British guy is the lock downs broke the British collective identity and that’s what caused mobs of people to go out and tear down statues. He terms it a retreat into group identity, rather than collective identity. The fact that the people doing the rioting were non-white and their targets were white people and culture, seems to be lost on him. It is a good example of what happens when you eliminate the obvious.

The response from Weinstein is amusing. He makes the obvious point that technology has made the world smaller. No matter how narrow your interests, you can find people who share your interests on-line. In the case of politics, it means on-line community around shared identity. He suggests this is a problem, as people falling into these “echo chambers” on-line eventually succumb to identity politics. It looked like he wanted to use the term “false consciousness” at that point.

Later on, they refer to the “murder of George Floyd” which gives the game away, but the show is still worth a listen. These tribes of the old Left are struggling for the same reason that the so-called conservatives and libertarians struggle. They cling to the notion that countries are built around ideas. They think that ideology can replace biology as the building block of human organization. The new man will completely submit to the prevailing orthodoxy of the new society.

The creedal nation was always a left-wing idea and it was always wrong. Like the Soviet Union, creedal America had a good run through the Cold War. For a half a century, most Americans were happy to put aside their natural identity in favor of patriotism, for the good of the country. It was a useful way for the ruling class to organize the public in the great game against communism. The Cold War is over and the reason to put aside those natural identities is gone with it.

It should be no surprise that blacks in America and the new arrivals in the West are the first to embrace this new reality. American blacks never embraced the creedal nation stuff. They have always been the least patriotic group. The new arrivals were never encouraged to drop their natural identity. In fact, they were encouraged to embrace it as they were told diversity is our strength. It is the occidentals that are the last to catch on, but that is changing.

That is what you see in that video. Both men are clinging to the old modes of thought, hoping to find a way to keep white people from embracing identity politics. Nowhere in their discussion do they condemn blacks or immigrants, even though they are the people rioting in the streets. The long post-war period was, in fact, a break from human reality, but now reality is roaring back. Yesterday men like those two in the video cling to their creedal notions, while reality returns with a vengeance.

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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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 Rhythms Of Revolution

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People who work with large complex systems understand that you don’t always know what will result from even the smallest change in the system. Usually this lesson is learned the hard way, by making some small change that seems simple, only to find out it caused serious downstream problems. Large complex systems are often highly dependent on initial conditions. Those small changes to the initial state, after they branch through the system, can have a huge impact.

This was a point wiser heads made about the Covid panic. The American economy is a wildly complex nonlinear system. The people in charge of it, the Federal Reserve, have mastered just one small set of inputs. This is why they are so cautious about tinkering with the money supply. They understand that beyond small changes in interest rates, they really don’t know what will happen. Through necessity they have figured out how to buy up distressed assets to keep the asset bubble inflated.

Otherwise, no one understands what is happening in the American economy, outside of their very narrow focus. It’s why the lock downs were an insane idea. What local governments have done is not dissimilar to what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian economy after they gained power. This massive reorganization will not fully play-out for years, maybe decades. Even at this point, no one seems to know how many people are out of work or how many businesses survived.

Something similar may be happening with the culture. Up until this year, the sports entertainment complex was the great distraction. Every type of sporting event enjoyed wide following on television and on-line. It’s always hard to know, given how our ruling class lies about everything, but television ratings for the professional sports leagues were strong enough to keep raising ad rates. The revenues of the sports leagues kept growing, despite decades of growth.

That brings us to now, when the ratings for sports entertainment have suddenly collapsed, even for the marquee events. The NBA, which is the blackest of black sports, cannot draw flies. Keep in mind that the television industry routinely inflates their ratings in their press releases used by the media. The endless celebration of all things black for the last five months seems to not have had the effect they expected. All of the other sports have also seen their ratings collapse.

It is tempting to blame this on the anti-white pogrom that has been foolishly embraced by all the sports leagues. There is certainly part of it. That said, the NFL has tried very hard to minimize this in their presentation. Even the players have realized that it is bad for business. The NHL made the required gestures, but otherwise just operated their business as usual and their ratings were immeasurably small. In other words, it’s not just the anti-white pogrom killing the circus.

The problems facing sports entertainment all of a sudden are an example of the large complex system problem. It turns out that the audience for sport is not just about interest in the product and the quality of the performance. Sports operates within the larger culture, which is a highly complex system. There are rhythms to the culture, which carry things like entertainment through the culture. The lock downs and resulting insanity have broken those rhythms.

It is not just sports entertainment that have seen their model upended by the sudden change in the social rhythms. The first debate show also saw a ratings dip. It was not as big as with sports, but given the amount of pre-game hype, the gap between reality and expectations is every bit as large. For six months the people in charge have been blasting us with anti-Trump agit-prop. Of course, everyone knows Biden is suffering from the early stages of dementia. Yet, not a lot of interest.

The American culture had evolved since the Cold War ended to provide the public with lots of things to keep them busy. For example, the entertainment rackets grew like a weed starting in the 1990’s. People forget that sellouts for sporting events were rare into the 1980’s, then all of a sudden, they were common. There was a time, within living memory, when people had three television channels. Of course, the internet of mass entertainment evolved in this time.

Easily forgotten is that politics as entertainment also grew in this period. In the 1980’s, for example, political junkies had to get by with magazines, the opinion section of the newspaper and the Sunday talk shows. People struggled with the idea of an actor running for political office. Imagine that. The political entertainment complex that evolved since the Cold War has probably been a bigger distraction for the American public than sports or Hollywood.

What seems to have happened is the Covid panic and now the color revolution has broken that system. People are not paying as much attention to these things as they did just a year ago. That means they are not being pulled along by the rhythms of that old system. Think about how many apolitical people that have suddenly been made aware of the reality of race and ethnicity. Put another way, the revolution of 2020 has changed the initial state of the American system.

How this ripples through the system is unknown. The current chaos may not be random at all, but determined by the evolving initial state of white America. In other words, this pogrom we are experiencing may, in fact, be a reaction to the changing attitudes sensed by the ruling class. The woke revolution is about restoring the old initial state, but has instead accelerated the evolution of it. The lock downs provided a better medium in which this evolution can occur.

At this point, the one safe conclusion we can draw is we have passed through a strange chaotic barrier on our way to a new normal. The old order, those old rhythms, are gone for good. That means the social controls that nudged people along toward the results desired by the ruling class are no longer working. All the make-believe excitement the media can generate is not getting people to watch the NBA finals, because it was never about the hype. It was the social structures, those rhythms.

In a complex system like a large human society, when the initial conditions change sufficiently, a new dynamic ensues. The unexpected downstream effects loop back and inform the evolution of those initial conditions. The feedback loop between downstream effects and those evolving initial conditions becomes fuel for the changing state of those initial conditions. This is the revolutionary dynamic. Change fuels more change, until the system collapses in on itself.

When the rulers broke the old rhythms with their lock downs, they started a revolution in the minds of the people over whom they rule. As those minds now evolve, seeing the reality of the world created by their betters, the ruling class is desperately trying to contain the process. Like all radicals, they remain supremely confident they will be the vanguard of this revolution. Like all revolutionaries, they will end up swinging from trees as that is the rhythm of every revolution.

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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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

Conspiratorial Rule

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It is hard to know, but most likely the conspiracy theory is one of the oldest parts of human society. In fact, the popularity of conspiracy theories is probably a good measure of social trust. Low-trust societies, like you find in the Middle East, tend to be shot through with conspiracy theories. High trust societies in Northwest Europe tend to have less of it, but even they are prone to bouts of conspiracy mongering. The Great Fear that swept through rural France is a good example.

In modern times, the conspiracy theory has been formalized. The assassination of John Kennedy is probably when this formalization process began. For example, a conspiracy theory needs a series of hard to accept coincidences. In the case of Kennedy, we have the amazing marksmanship of the shooter and then his unlikely assassination at the hands of a Jewish gangster, while he was in police custody. The Jack Ruby part is what made the whole thing perfect for the conspiracy theorists.

The first step in a conspiracy theory is that the obvious answer or the official answer must be eliminated as a lie or implausible. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the start of the conspiracy dynamic was the dismissal of Oswald as the lone actor. It is a variation on the old Sherlock Holmes line. Once you eliminate the parsimonious explanation, then the more complex and convoluted explanations become more plausible. That opens the door to endless speculation.

We see this with the QAnon cult on-line. All of it starts with the assumption that the obvious answer is wrong. For example, it is plainly obvious that Bill Barr is covering up the FBI spying scandal. He’s had years to do what should have taken a few months. Instead of accepting that rather obvious and plausible explanation, the QAnon people reject it and instead weave wildly complex theories about how half of Washington is about to be charged with crimes.

Another aspect of the formal conspiracy theory is the liberal use of the associative property to connect unrelated events. Person A knows Person B and Person B once had lunch at the same place as Person C. If any of these three people can be tied to the event in question, then it is assumed the other two are connected. The weakest associations are enough to assume a conspiracy. The associative property is an essential element of the modern conspiracy theory.

In the case of Kennedy, for example, organized crime is a popular player, because Jack Ruby was a minor criminal. His tenuous association with organized crime opens the door for linking any number of underworld characters with the assassination. It also opens the door for all sorts of theories about the Kennedy administration’s connections to organized crime. The associative property then ties communism, organized crime and the Cuba situation to the assassination.

Probably the most overlooked aspect of the formal conspiracy theory is the personalizing of complex events. The conspiracy theorist assumes there is a small group of people behind the events in question. These super-intelligent, shadowy figures pull the strings from the shadows. Even when a government agency is at the core of the conspiracy, it is really a core of individuals within that core that is secretly manipulating the organization.

This turns up with the spying scandal. The reality is, the Washington-based intel community is horribly corrupt. The spying and subsequent cover-up is a product of a culture of corruption in these institutions. For the conspiracy theorist, that does not work, so they focus on a few “shot callers.” Of course, it was not just mere partisan zeal that led them to spy on Trump people. They are part of some shadowy organization that is secretly doing all sorts of bad things.

Probably the most important part of the modern conspiracy theory is that it must flatter the person obsessed with it. For the conspiracy buff, the thrill is in feeling that they have figured it all out. Those super-intelligent people working in the shadows were not smart enough to outwit the conspiracy hunter. Everyone else falls for the official story, but the conspiracy theorist knows the real truth. Paradoxically, the conspiracy theory makes the world a much simpler and safer place for them.

The best example right now is the Left’s obsession with white supremacy. They cannot accept that their vision of Utopia is not very popular. That’s the first step in a conspiracy theory, the rejection of the most plausible reason. That allows them to spin wild tales of secret Nazis and spectral supremacists. Rather than confront reality, which is frightening and disconcerting, they have created a series of conspiracy theories to explain why the world is not as they imagine it.

This is why conspiracy theories are a useful metric to gauge social trust. When order begins to break down, people naturally look for reasons. That opens the door to speculation and then conspiracy theories. This, in turn, erodes social trust, which is the foundation upon which every ruling class rests. As that foundation falters, the ruling class looks for reasons. Since blaming themselves is always off the table, they naturally begin to speculate, which opens the door to conspiracy theories.

America is now ruled by conspiracy theorists. That is clear in the debate surrounding the first Trump-Biden debate show. The Left is obsessing over white supremacists and the old Gavin McInnes fan club, the Proud Boys. They have any number of conspiracies involving those things, but now they are cooking up conspiracies as to why Trump did not properly denounce them. It must mean something! For the people in charge, it is conspiracy theories all the way down.

None of this is to say there are no conspiracies. The FBI spying scandal, for example, is a good example of a conspiracy. It was corrupt and self-important mediocrities playing at spymaster. In a functioning society, they would be in jail now and that would be the end of it. In a conspiratorial state, they remain free as one side conspires to defeat the white supremacy conspiracy, while the other conspires to cover it all up. The QAnon people strap on their aluminum foil hats to sort it all out.

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