Category Archives: Culture

Noah Future

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Lefty rage gets all of the attention because they control the media  Their endless tantrums about losing the 2016 election, as well as their increasingly shrill anti-white rhetoric, is flooding the zone. Lost in all of this is the collapse of neoconservatives into a squalor of vulgarity, dishonesty, and paranoia. Whatever it was, the political movement of Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol is now just bigoted rage-heads. This Noah Rothman column is a good example.

The word “ethics” appears prominently in the biographies of the authors who co-wrote a recent Washington Post op-ed lamenting the “taboo” associated with “talking about overpopulation.” Frances Kissling is the president of the Center for Health, Ethics, and Social Policy. Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Only Jotham Musinguzi, the “director general of Uganda’s National Population Council,” doesn’t mention “ethics” in the bio. That’s good because the Malthusian views promulgated in the piece are anything but ethical.

[snip]

Because population control is not a problem in the developed world, where birthrates are declining below even replacement rates, population controllers tend to fixate on sexual habits in the developing world. The authors of this op-ed are no exception. They draw an almost always fallacious straight-line projection to conclude that—in the unlikely event that nothing changes between today and 2100—a population crisis should afflict a variety of Sub-Saharan African nations. To avert this crisis, they advocate promoting and supporting proper sexual hygiene, to which almost no one would object. But their authors’ core agenda isn’t the distribution of prophylactics. They seek to de-stigmatize abortion in the equatorial world, which is controversial for reasons that have nothing to do with faith. After all, it was The Population Bomb and its progenitors that lent renewed legitimacy to old arguments that inevitably result in targeting black and brown populations with sterilization and eugenics.

This is the default approach for Rothman and most of the neocon tribe. Instead of simply disagreeing with someone, they first paint the person as immoral, beyond the pale and therefore fair game for whatever accusation they can conjure. Before offering any evidence, Rothman strongly implies the authors of the Washington Post article are unethical people. He never backs this up with evidence. The fact that he does not like or understand their argument is enough for him to slime the authors.

If you read the WaPo article, you’ll see that it is a good faith effort to talk about the population explosion in Africa. They blame Paul Ehrlich for discrediting the topic of population growth, because they are forbidden to discuss the real issue. To talk about the world’s most important graph, is to risk being called a racist by slime merchants like Noah Rothman, so they dance around it. The piece is actually fair and reasonable, given that it appears the Washington Post.

Now, Rothman is a stupid person, so it is no surprise that he is wildly ignorant of Malthus and population issues. Stupid may be the wrong word. Ignorant is a better word, as he makes to no effort to know about these things. He’s too busy claiming everyone who disagrees with him is immoral. His game is to attack and then cry out in pain when the other side mounts a defense. His likes to paint himself as the moral actor, forced to do horrible things to his enemies.

He is also a serial liar. He smears people all the time and then lies to their face about what he wrote. This classic Tucker Carlson segment is a great example. Rothman lies in his column about something Carlson said. When confronted with it, he then lies about what he wrote. When his own words are read back to him, he changes the subject, only to start lying about what the Secretary of Defense said. When confronted on that, he starts lying about other stuff. Noah Rothman is incapable to telling the truth.

Again, whatever it was, neoconservatism is now just a death cult. It is a strange blend of Zionism and anti-majoritarianism, that lacks an intellectual core. The list of neocon thinkers is not exactly a glittering array of heavy weight intellectuals. Rothman is a smarmy twerp. John Podhoretz is a vulgarian. Max Boot appears to be struggling with mental illness. Bill Kristol is a bitter old fool. Jonah Goldberg is a frumpy dufus. It’s like a Jewish version of the Kennedy family, minus the homicides.

That gets to the heart of it. The Jewish century was powered by a generation of Jewish men who were smart, educated and embraced by a majority ruling class that had built the foundation of the American empire. Not only could neoconservatism only happen in America, it could only happen in Cold War America. Today’s America is a different place and today’s neocons are a collection of feckless heirs, playing make believe as they squander their inheritance. The term of art is reversion to the mean.

Just like the reckless kid with a trust fund, the neocons have caused a lot of damage and continue to be a menace. Their efforts to undermine Trump’s Korea initiative and their efforts to entangle us in the Syrian civil war are two obvious examples. The fact that the New York Times and Washington Post are festooned with these loons, means they will pollute public discourse for a while longer. The good news is that guys like Noah Rothman are the future of the movement, which means it has no future.

The Poz

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I do not have a cable subscription, so the habit of channel surfing is unavailable to me, which means I miss much of what passes for pop culture. If I watch a movie, it is off the pirate system or from Amazon. TV shows I can binge watch off the Kodi, without having to sit through the commercials. Frankly, it is the only way I can watch television now. The commercials are so full of multicultural proselytizing, that I cannot make it through a normal show. That said, there are some shows that are not full of Multikulti agit-prop.

Someone told me the TV series 12 Monkeys was fairly good, so I binged on the first couple seasons recently. The series is based on the movie, which was a time travel flick starring Bruce Willis. The basic premise is people in the future send people back in time in an effort to find the people who caused a great plague. The idea is to alter the timeline by preventing the plague or figuring out the nature of the plague in order to create a treatment or vaccination against it. In the movie, Bruce Willis was a time traveler.

The trouble with all time travel movies is that they can never figure out how to manage the obvious problem of paradoxes. The writers usually fixate on it, as it makes for interesting possibilities, but they lack the smarts to make it work. Sometimes you have old self going back in time to give young self answers, like what happened with Biff in the Back to the Future series. Other times, the old self accidentally alters something in the past, only to return to a wildly altered future, his present. Then he has to go back and fix what he broke.

In this series, the writers actually do a good job avoiding the hackneyed time travel plot gimmicks and produce a good plot that respects the “reality” of time travel. I do not want to give too much away, but it you read the book The Man Who Folded Himself you will appreciate what the writers did with time travel. The show is relatively free of poz. No heroic homosexuals, no superhero women, no magical negros. It is mostly unknown white actors doing a serviceable job acting out a reasonably well-done television script.

Now, no series about time travel can make it to the air without having some scenes about the characters going back in time to Nazi Germany. That is an unknown part of the secret law that was passed in the 60’s. We get that nonsense in this series, but it is brief, even though they obliquely try to blame the cause of the time travel conspiracy on the Nazi scientists experimenting on Jews. It is the one bit of subversion that was tucked into the script after it was written, on instructions from the people producing the series.

The relative lack of poz in the series got me thinking about propaganda in movies and when it became so heavy handed. I had the movie Death Wish on my list, the new version, not the 1970’s version, so I watched it along with the original last weekend. I had not watched the original with Charles Bronson in decades. Frankly, I had forgotten just how bad he was at acting. Then again, the 1970’s featured a lot of really bad acting in popular movies. Maybe the audience just liked the stilted dialogue and clunky style.

For those unfamiliar, the original Death Wish was made during the last Progressive inspired black crime wave, which they started in the late sixties. By the 70’s, most cities were unlivable because feral blacks were running wild in the streets. Death Wish is about a normal middle-class white guy who loses his family to home invaders and decides to become a vigilante. The original makes the killers three Jewish guys, one of whom is Jeff Goldbloom, so even in the 70’s, movies were poz’d up on the race issue.

That said, the woman issue is where you see the difference. In the opening to the original, Bronson is at the beach with his wife, who is portrayed as a normal traditional wife. She likes looking like a woman and being complimented on her looks. Bronson’s character enjoys her being a woman and acts like a normal man. Throughout the movie, women play normal female roles. Whenever I watch an old movie and see how women were cast in their roles, I realize what a great mistake it was giving into the feminist harpies.

The new version does the same thing with the race issue, of course. We have reached the point now where it is forbidden to portray blacks as anything other than noble victims or admirable heroes. That means we have to pretend the nation’s crime problems are the fault of white street gangs using outdated slang from the olden thymes or conspiracies operated by evil white men. Otherwise, the remake is a decent version that is free of the usual multicultural junk that makes most movie watching miserable.

I have developed an interest in 1970’s pop culture, mostly because it seems so alien to me, even though I was alive to remember some of it. I was too young to notice most of it, so seeing it through old man eyes in the current age, it feels like another world. It also reveals that the multicultural assault on our society did not start last week. This is a long term, multi-generational war on us that started before most of us were born. This scene from the 1971 Dirty Harry movie is a warning from the long gone past.

Venezuela’s Future — and Ours

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There are a lot of ways to describe the new political divide. We have nationalists versus internationalists, globalists versus populists and identitarians versus multiculturalists. All of those are true, but another way of thinking about it is that the debate is now moving upstream. For a long time, public debate was focused on economics or maybe politics. Those are downstream from institutions, culture, and biology. Now, the debate has moved upstream, to the stuff that really matters.

Not everyone has figured out that the debate has changed. The Bernie Bros, for example, are like the Japanese soldiers, who were cut off in the war and lived in the jungle for years, still fighting the war. The Bernie Bros still think the Democrats are the party of the working man, as if anyone in Washington cares about the working man. The legacy conservatives are similarly trapped in a bygone era. You see that in this post, by our old friend Sloppy Williamson, on the ravages of socialism on Venezuela.

The United States has resigned in protest from the UN Human Rights Council, which has a long and ignominious record of protecting the world’s worst abusers of human rights. The proximate cause of the U.S. resignation was the council’s unwillingness to act on the matter of Venezuela, where the socialist government of Nicolas Maduro is engaged in political massacres and the use of Soviet-style hunger-terror against its political enemies. Venezuela remains, incredibly enough, not only protected by the Human Rights Council but an active member of it, an honor shared Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its political assassins, the People’s Republic of China and its organ harvesters, and the Castro dictatorship in Cuba with its torturers and al paredón justice.

Venezuela and North Korea could not be more dissimilar in terms of their respective cultures, peoples, and histories. And yet they have arrived in approximately the same place: at the terminus of F. A. Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom.”

For generations, it has been an article of faith among conservatives that everything depends upon economics. Get the economics right, then the miracle of the marketplace will usher in the the age of bliss. Choose the wrong eco9nomic model and terrible things must follow. Bad tax policy not only makes people poor, it makes them corrupt, violent and cheat on their wives. Like Marxists, they think the system makes the man, so there is a moral imperative to adopt the correct economics.

Well, what about Venezuela? What’s really going on? Here’s the per capita GDP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s in constant dollars and it shows a remarkable thing. After the turmoil that brought Hugo Chavez to power, the Venezuelan economy started a nice run. Per capita GDP is a benchmark number that economists love to use to measure the health of a country. Here’s what wages look like in the country:


source: tradingeconomics.com

Now, wages and economic growth don’t tell the whole story. Venezuela suffers from the curse of natural resources, which in her case is oil. What dumb people call socialism is just the way things operate in countries with limited human capital. The elites monopolize the natural resources and the profits that come from selling them on the international market. They spread enough money around to prevent a revolt, but keep the majority for themselves.

In other words, what ails Venezuela is not ideology. It is biology. It is the way it is because of its people. What determines the nature and character of a country is not the tax code or the regulatory regime. Venezuela lacks the human capital to operate a modern economy. It has and always will suffer from the smart fraction problem. That is, it lacks a large enough smart population to carry the rest of the population into a modern economy. It is stuck in a model suited for its people.

Put another way, it is people, not pots. Replace the Venezuelan population with Finns and they will figure out how to make a mild form of Nordic socialism work. Fill the place up with Japanese and the country will look like an Asian tiger. Fill up the United States with Latin Americans and it is going to start to look like Latin America. That’s why your newly imported replacements are running on platforms familiar to anyone getting ready to vote in the upcoming Mexican elections.

Of course, the reason that raging cucks like Sloppy Williamson avoid the obvious is that it is much safer to focus on trivialities. Lefty mobs are not going to swarm his Rascal Scooter as long as he avoids taboo subjects. That and these guys have been playing the role of useful idiot for so long, it is second nature. They operate like a cargo cult, convinced they can pretend it remains the 1980’s and it will magically be so. National Review is like a weird living museum to the Reagan era.

The world has changed and the debate has shifted upstream. People are noticing that when you elect a new people, you don’t actually end up with a new people. You end up with a culture that reflects the biology of the people you imported. Whites in America are now coming to terms with the choices in front of them. Keep their head down and play make believe while they are replaced, or risk moral condemnation for defending their heritage and their culture. That’s the debate.

The White Not

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When one people conquer another people, there are a number of ways they can cement their dominance. One is for the ruler of the winning side to make himself the ruler of the losers, maybe marrying a high-ranking female of the losers. If the ethnic differences between the winners and losers are small enough, this can work out well. In this case, it is not really one people defeating another, so much as one set of rulers besting their relations, who happen to be rulers of another wing of the family. It is a family squabble.

Of course, the other end of the spectrum is when a different people defeat another people. The most likely outcome is some form of genocide. The winners kill off the males or maybe sell them into bondage, while distributing the women as wives to their men. The alternative to this is to simply kill off the losers. Genocide is a lot easier when the vanquished are alien to the victors. Most likely, the point of the conflict was to take the land the losers had been occupying, so killing them off makes perfect sense.

A third way of cementing your dominance over a conquered people is to erase their language and culture. Instead of killing off the men or committing full scale genocide, you take away their religion, ban their customs and force them to use your language for any official business. The first generation is going to resist, but the second generation is going to see the opportunity and adopt the new ways. The benefit of this approach is it turns some portion of the vanquished into an asset that works to support the victors.

The British tried a form of this with the Welsh in the 19th century. For centuries, the Welsh had been a thorn in the side of the English. Despite their numerical advantage, the English were never able to drive them off. King Offa of Mercia built a giant earth works to wall off the Welsh from the English in the 8th century. That was not because the Welsh were a trouble-free population. In the 15th century, Owain Glyndŵr led his people in revolt against the English. For Shakespeare fans, he is Owen Glendower in the play Henry IV.

The English solution in the 19th century was something called the Welsh Not. The British used it in Welsh schools to discourage the use of the Welsh language. A kid caught speaking his native tongue was given the “Not” which was usually a piece of wood on a string he hung around his neck. If he heard another boy speaking Welsh, he could rat him out and the “Not” would pass to him. At the end of the day, the boy with the “Not” got a beating. Alternatively, children were caned whenever they were caught speaking Welsh.

Something similar is happening in English speaking countries today, except the people in charge are attempting to rub out the native culture by un-personing anyone who says or does normal things. People are routinely punished for noticing the obvious or speaking truths about reality. The point of the punishment is to discourage normal behavior, just as the British wanted to discourage speaking Welsh. Every day, we get examples like this one, where the bizarre and deranged are elevated over the normal culture.

The systematic effort to turn bathhouse doggerel into art, at the expense of respectable Western literature, is not so much about elevating the depraved, as it is an assault on the culture. The people doing this are not motivated by a desire to help the degenerates. The point of the exercise is to discredit literature that comports with the norms of Western society. It is the same motivation behind larding up movies and television with vulgarity, even though the audience finds it revolting. Contempt for the audience is the motivation.

It is tempting to assign rational motivations to the PC idiocy, but that is always a mistake when talking about the clash of cultures. The motivations are purely emotional. When the Left flips out over someone noticing a logical flaw in their education policy, it is not the flaw the angers them. It is who is pointing it out. It is why pointing out the endless contradictions and hypocrisies of the Left is a waste of time. In a world of “who? whom?”, the only logic at play is determining who is attacking whom. The point of the attack is manifest.

Like the banning of bagpipes and tartan in Scotland, the Welsh Not probably did more to build Welsh nationalism than break it. It provided motivation for the Welsh to preserve their language. The rallying point was the Welsh-language bible, which was used in Welsh churches. Instead of the language and customs being erased as intended, the British ended up inculcating a deeper sense of identity in the Welsh people. The long-term result has been a modern revival of Welsh and a drive toward greater autonomy for Wales.

It remains to be seen if the current assault on normalcy has the same effect on the normal white people in English speaking countries. Tommy Robinson may be a flawed player in the great battle over immigration in Britain, but he has become a rallying point. The alt-right in America may be a dumpster fire, but the outlandish treatment of them by global corporations has opened a lot of eyes to what’s happening in America. Perhaps the war on whiteness has reached a tipping point and white people are becoming race aware.

Squid Ink

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If you scan the so-called conservative sites these days, the remarkable thing is the dullness of them. The writing is mediocre, at best, and the arguments are mostly washed-out ideas from the 80’s with a heavy dash of libertarianism. The major issues of this age, immigration, identity, populism, and nationalism are largely ignored. When they bother to pick them up, it is to take swings at the growing army of people to their right. The main role of so-called conservatism is to confuse and discourage the rank-and-file conservatives.

This old column from Jonah Goldberg is a good example. It is in the style that he has become mocked for of late. It is where he lards up his text with Borscht Belt gags, along with a bunch pointless dissembling. The post is supposed to take a stab at defining conservatism, but he just does a bunch of name dropping, while making a hash of the subject. His jocular style is intended to put the reader at ease, while his hemming and hawing is supposed to make it seem like conservatism is up for debate.

Now, Goldberg is just an affable guy, who does not want to cause any trouble, while pretending to be an intellectual. I am surely giving him too much credit for suggesting his incoherence is intentional. His latest book is so bad that I suffered from vicarious embarrassment while reviewing it. Even so, he is not alone. If you look around the so-called conservative intellectual space, it is a parade of mediocrities spouting banal nonsense that mostly defends the status quo against criticisms from the Right.

One argument against mediocrity is Ben Shapiro, who is pitched to us as a pint-sized wunderkind. He has a billionaire backer for his web site, a perch at National Review and the full support of Conservative Inc. If that stuff does not impress you, Shapiro did manage to get into Harvard at 16 and graduate at 20. Even the Left has started promoting him as the conservative voice of his generation. Here he is explaining the core principles of conservatism at a Young Americans Foundation event a couple of years ago.

In that speech, he starts out by claiming conservatism is about fairness of opportunity, rather than fairness of outcome. Then he says conservatism is about individual rights and individualism. He makes the point a few times that group identity is invalid, which is rather amusing coming from a guy who sports a yarmulke all the time. He actually says we should target people who discriminate and use the law against them. Not so long ago, conservatives warned that this was the ultimate goal of the Left. Now, here we are.

Individualism sounds fine, especially if you are a member of a small group hoping to topple the large group. If you can convince the large group that it is immoral for them to stick together, then you can pick them off one at a time. That is why there has never been a military organized around individualism. It is also why conservatism never embraced individualism. Deracinated and atomized people are easily conquered, which is why his people have made group loyalty their defining characteristic for a thousand years or more.

Shapiro is a smart guy, so he surely sees the contradictions. That means he says things about conservatism that he knows are false, or at least at odds with what has been the core of conservatism for centuries. Maybe it is just what sells, and he is just an ambitious person willing to do anything to get ahead. None of that really matters because the net effect is the same. The well-meaning young people who look to guys like Shapiro to put structure around their temperament are swimming in squid ink.

One reason conservationism is now a dog’s breakfast of libertarian nostrums and reworked liberal platitudes is that conservatism is short of conservatives. The people carrying the banner for Official Conservatism do not know the first thing about what it means to be conservative. It is as if they have spent their lives trying to avoid the great conservative thinkers. There is no trace of intellectual giants in the ideas of the modern conservative. Take for example the great quote from the philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.

Now, it takes immense talent to write something so powerful and insightful with such an economy of language. No one can be blamed for not having that skill. On the other hand, how is it possible to read that, as a conservative, and not immediately understand that being on the Right is not about individualism or anti-racism or any of the other ridiculous fads popular on the Left? The answer is they are either too dumb to see it or they hope their readers don’t see it. In other words, the squid ink is intentional.

Prison Reform

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One of the under discussed topics floating around Washington is prison reform, which has the support of President Trump. His son-in-law has been quietly whipping support for a bill backed by the White House. Trump’s photo-op with Kim Kardashian was part of the effort to get Democrat support for the bill. The point of the reform plan is to put more money into training and counseling for inmates, in an effort to reduce recidivism and decrease the prison population. America has 2.2 million prisoners.

Prison reform in America is a loser of an issue, mostly because all previous prison reform efforts have been nothing more than opening up the jails. Even if you are not old enough to remember the crime wave of the 1970’s, the “soft on crime, bleeding heart liberal” is a stock figure in pop culture. As a result, whites are solidly against anything with the name “prison reform” in it. That is why you never see blacks on TV making demands for prison reform. Their handlers have no interest in it.

Republicans in the House and Senate are in no hurry to pass anything. Even the open borders fanatics, who want to fill your neighborhood with criminal aliens and MS-13 gang-bangers, are not in a hurry to pass anything. Instead, they are doing the “comprehensive reform” dance, which is how politicians manage to do nothing, while endlessly talking about the need to do something. That means the odds of something getting done in the near term is not good.

That does not mean the status quo is workable. We have roughly 2.2 million people in jail at any moment. There are roughly 4.7 million people on parole, house arrest and court supervision. In a country of three hundred million, that is not a huge number, but seven million people is more than the population of Paraguay. It is close to twice the population of Ireland. One reason we have so many people in jail is it is a lot easier to manage criminals in jail than when they are on parole.

Of course, the prison population is about 40% black. That means about 2.5% of black people are in jail at any one time. Another 5% are under court supervision. As has been pointed out for decades, eliminate black crime and America is suddenly as docile as any other Western nation. That brings us back to the politics of prison reform, as everyone knows the stats on black crime. Since addressing the realities of the black population in America is forbidden, we maintain a massive human warehousing system.

The looming problem is demographics. In the 1990’s, getting tough on crime mostly meant longer sentences for smaller crimes. The “broken windows” approach to policing is mostly mythology, but getting crime under control does have a real impact. It works the same way the death penalty worked to pacify Europe. By handing out long jail sentences, cities like New York culled the herd. Eventually, the people sent away for 20 years get out of jail. What happens to them at that point?

A useful example, although not representative, is Joseph Konopka, who went by the name Dr. Chaos in his criminal career. He recruited a group of young people he called The Realm of Chaos, who committed acts of terrorism and vandalism in Wisconsin and Illinois. Konopka was arrested plotting a mass cyanide attack on the Chicago transit system. He is serving a 20-year sentence at ADX Florence and will be released in August of next year. How is that going to work out?

For those unfamiliar, ADX Florence is a prison for the worst of the worst. It is called a “supermax” prison, but the inmates call it the Alcatraz of the Rockies. It holds people like Larry Hoover of the Gangster Disciples, Barry Mills and Tyler Bingham of the Aryan Brotherhood. They also have Zacarias Moussaoui, Faisal Shahzad, Ramzi Yousef, Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph. In other words, when Konopka comes out, he will have spent 20 years living with some of the most dangerous men on earth.

This is an extreme example, but illustrative. The solution to crime was to lock people up, which made sense at the time, but no one thought much about what those prisons would produce in 20-30 years. Granted, many men coming out of the system are going to be old, but they will still be useless, as the prison did nothing to ready them for life after jail. There is zero chance the social justice warriors running Facebook or Starbucks will be hiring Joseph Konopka upon his release.

The right answer, of course, is to start accepting reality about the last 70 years of social reform that started after WW2. Crime spiraled upward when the constraints on non-whites were removed, and diversity was imposed on whites. Steve Sailer famously used Katrina to illustrate this biological reality. Black crime would be half of what it is today, most of which is against other blacks, if whites were willing to reimpose the sorts of cultural restraints common before Civil Rights.

That said, the diversity horse has left the barn. By turning America into a majority-minority nation, the ruling class of the last half century has condemned future generations to endemic crime problems like you see in Brazil. One solution to this is the return of penal colonies and criminal reservations. The people serving life terms should be housed on remote islands where they can live out their lives, without causing harm to other prisoners and prison guards.

Penal colonies would also mean a shift in sentencing. A guy like Joseph Konopka would not get 20 years. Instead, he would get life in the colony. In fact, a fair chunk of the 2.2 million currently in jail would get sent to the penal colonies. There is simply no point in pretending that a man can come out after 30 years in a gladiator academy and be a normal person in society. There is no point in pretending the rest of us wish to invest in the effort, even assuming it is possible.

The Reality Gap

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In the old days, a popular gag was to comment about the Soviet media’s disconnect from observable reality. Every schoolboy learned that the name of the main party newspaper, Pravda, meant “truth” in Russian. Unlike America, with its free-wheeling adversarial press, the Soviets had one newspaper that published the official truth. It is right out of Orwell! It was all mostly nonsense, of course, but it was a useful bit of propaganda that served the interests of the liberal American media.

Our library had copies of the English version of communist publications. I no longer recall if Pravda was one of them, but there were others from Soviet Bloc countries, along with publications from Western communist organizations, like the Daily Worker and Mother Jones. I enjoyed reading them, especially the news articles, because it was like experiencing an alternate reality. Even allowing for the gross bias of the New York Times, the commie rags were hilariously delusional.

As a result, I have often thought that there should be an index that measures the distance between a society’s official dogma, and observable reality. Every human society has its pretty lies. This is the grease that keeps the gears moving. There are also the things everyone knows are true, but everyone agrees to not discuss. Then there is official dogma, the prevailing orthodoxy, that exists because the people in charge demand that it exists. This is where we see the reality gap.

In the case of the Soviets, they often made claims about their material prosperity, relative to the West, which were everyone knew was nonsense. These were less obviously false in the 1950’s, as Europe dug out from the war and Stalin forced modernization on his country. The gap grew larger after Stalin, as the West slowly passed the Soviets in material prosperity. By the 1980’s, the gap between East and West was too large to hide.

You can see this gap on a smaller scale in cities like Newark and Baltimore. While in Newark, I looked up the local politicians, expecting the usual suspects. The funny part was the talk about the city, as if everything is coming together and the boom years are just around the corner. The pols in Baltimore talk the same way. They claim that young people are flocking to the city, when in reality people are fleeing. In fact, the worse things get, the more they talk about how the city is turning the corner.

The question that naturally arises is whether necessity drives this growing gap between reality and orthodoxy or does delusion drive the decline? In business, management will address falling sales with more marketing, not accepting that it is their poor management and products. The marketing efforts will exacerbate the decline, as the gap between the promise and reality grows. On the other hand, maybe lying is the last resort, when there is simply no way to address the true causes.

The other question is at what point does the gap between reality and official orthodoxy get so wide that the strain collapses the orthodoxy. In the case of the Soviet Union, it was not a bloody revolution or violent civil war that ended the system. It was mostly the fact that the system had grown so absurd, not even the people in charge could accept it any longer. That gap between official orthodoxy and obvious reality was too large to maintain, so the system collapsed.

The challenge, of course, is quantifying this gap between official orthodoxy and observable reality. For example, is the reality gap in America today bigger than the gap was in 1980’s Russia? We are required to pretend there are fifty-seven genders, which seems a click nuttier than pretending the Lada was a nice car. There has never been a time or place where humans came in more than two sexes. The Lada was crap, but it beat walking.

Does it matter if lots of people are willing to believe the nonsense? Today, lots of liberal women buy into the unlimited gender stuff. In fact, it is quite remarkable just how fast so many people in modern America are willing to accept this crazy stuff. For there to be a reality gap, the public has to know it exists. No one in the Soviet Union thought the Lada was a good car. You were even allowed to complain about the poor state of consumer goods, just as long as you kept it to a minimum.

All that said, it seems that a society can tolerate only so large a gap between reality and its official truth. Whether or not we are reaching some sort of breaking point is probably impossible to know. No one saw Trump on the horizon. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, no one saw it coming. Maybe people just get used to the disconnect until one day, the number of people who notice it reaches critical mass. Then like a precipitate falling out of solution, the whole thing collapses.

The Wages Of Parasites

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According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, Sears is on the verge of finally going out of business. For people under the age of forty, this is a meaningless event, as Sears has not been a part of the public consciousness for decades. For those old enough to remember, the early 1990’s was the last time Sears was an anchor store at malls and shopping centers. I think the last time I had a reason to shop at Sears was at the old Natick Mall in the 1990’s. I bought a kitchen item, but I no longer recall exactly.

The conventional telling of these stories says that the big retail stores were killed by some combination of Amazon and the internet. That is mostly just mythmaking as companies like Sears were struggling when Amazon was still just a river in Brazil. The big box store, as they came to be called, was always a bad idea that started to show signs of weakness in the 80’s. The logic of this type of retail is a race to the bottom, where margins are maintained by stripping out the value that is implicit in the local retail store concept.

Think of it this way. The local retailer does more than sell stuff. In practice, he stocks the things popular with his community and offers customer service to help his neighbors get the best product for their needs. He is also going to sponsor the local little league teams and participate in the community. Big retail takes the social capital and customer service and turns that into a quick profit for the chain store, by cutting prices on the retail side and purchasing power on the supply side. It is a form of economic piracy.

This model works fine until all of the local competition is gone. At that point it is a battle of soulless wholesalers operating out of warehouse style facilities. The only competition between Sears and K-Mart, another defunct chain, was price and location. One thing that is certain about a race to the bottom is that everyone eventually reaches the finish line and for big retail that has meant bankruptcy. You see this with Amazon. Their retailing arm is the marketing expense for their media and technology services now.

This is why conservatives used to be skeptical of capitalism. They correctly saw the reality of large-scale retail. It was not that the big retailer was better at selling products or provided a better service. In fact, it has always been obvious. If you go to your local Home Depot, for example, you are unlikely to get any help from the staff, unless you tackle one of them in the aisle. Even then, the quality of service is so poor, you are better off not asking for help. Big retail turns customer service into a net negative.

Big retail operates as a parasite through false economy. It is a form of cost shifting, where the loss of social capital and customer service is pushed into the distance, while the cheap prices are in the present. The Old Right understood the corrosive nature of this form of retail and opposed it. Today, everyone laments the loss of local retail and the town shopping district. We are told it is the result of Amazon being a better choice, but in reality, the cause is the willingness of our leaders to auction off our social capital.

Another example of this is the local industrial supply store. Electrical wholesale, welding supplies, HVAC wholesalers and other businesses that served the trades used to be locally owned family businesses. They were never wildly profitable, but they provided a nice living as a family business. Fred’s Welding Supply would sponsor a little league team, while Fred participated in the community and sent his kids to the local schools. Sometimes one guy would own a couple of stores if his town or city were big enough to support it.

Today, these businesses have been bought up by investment firms powered by credit money from investors. An investment firm gets set up and they bankroll one bigger player as he buys up all of the competitors. The “economies of scale” are that the owners are removed, the accounting and sales staff is centralized, and the social capital is carted off to the investors as profit. The customers may get a small break in price, but usually the only thing they notice is the staff now treat them like strangers, rather than neighbors.

Libertarians and “conservatives” will read this and reflexively start chirping about free markets and invisible hands, but there is a reason they are now a punchline. That is because these are ideologies, if you want to be generous and elevate them to ideologies, that make all the same assumptions about humanity as the Marxists. That is, they see man as the ultimate consumer, a beast that devours his environment, in the same way a plague of locusts wipes out a field. Whittaker Chambers explained this 60 years ago.

Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man’s fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand’s words, “the moral purpose of his life.” Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist Socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence, in part, I presume, her insistence on “man as a heroic being” “with productive achievement as his noblest activity.” For, if Man’s “heroism” (some will prefer to say: “human dignity”) no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche’s anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them.

A life with no other purpose than to work and consume is actually lower than beastly, because the beast in the field only eats to live. It does not live to eat. Like all living things, it lives to make more copies of itself. For man, possessed of a self-awareness and the capacity to remake his environment, the purpose of life expands to the celebration of life by not only reproducing but leaving a cultural legacy for the next generation. The point of life is for old men to plant trees in whose shade they will never stand.

The auctioning off of our social capital has corresponded with the startling spike in suicide rates. Cosmopolitan globalism and the transactional consumerism that drives it strips people of their humanity. Like drug addicts, they no longer have the capacity to experience the normal pleasures. The heroin addict is always faced with the choice. Give up the junk and become whole again or take the easy way out. That is what faces the people of the modern West. The choice is revolt against modernity or amuse ourselves to death.

 

Never Newark Nights

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I cut out of my meeting a bit early, so I could catch the train into Manhattan. I had never been inside Newark Penn Station. I was not entirely sure how to get to it, so I left some extra time to feel my way through. For some reason, I never do well in big metropolitan transit systems. It is not a thing that comes naturally to me. Since I was expected to meet John Derbyshire on 34th Street at 6:30, I gave myself an extra forty minutes. Unless I ended up in Trenton, that would be enough time to correct any mistakes.

I worried for nothing. Penn Station was a ten-minute walk and despite the near total lack of signage inside the place, I figured out the correct track for the train into the city. For some reason no one asked me for a ticket, so I could have ridden the rails like a hobo into Manhattan, but I was happy to pay the $5.40 fare. The trains run every few minutes and it only takes 20 minutes to get into New York Penn Station. I had more trouble getting street side in New York than I did navigating the New Jersey transit system.

If one wants to understand why city dwellers have a peculiarly statist politics, spend time in a big city subway system. For the people in the city, government services are essential for living. They depend on the subway, the trash collection, and the police department. The city depends upon this organic relationship between the state and the citizens. That does not exist in the suburbs or the country. There is a comfort that comes from the daily interaction with the state. Anyone who questions that relationship is suspect.

It has been a few years since I was in Manhattan, so I needed a minute to get used to the rush of the city. In that part of the town, the sidewalks are a crush of worker bees heading home or headed to dinner, along with the summertime tourists. That makes for a carnival vibe, except no one is having a good time. I had some time to kill, so I went to Starbucks to use the bathroom, but it was locked. I went to a bar and had a beer, while listening to three large Dominican women loudly complain about the lack of men in their lives.

I met John Derbyshire just outside the entrance to the Long Island Railroad station and he recommended we head over to a place called the Tick Tock Diner a block away. I must admit, I have met John several times now and socialized with him at events, but I am still a bit intimidated by it all. I am getting used to the reality of what I am doing here, but there will always be a sense that I am playing way above my league. I am grateful that he invited me out and took the long trip in from his estates on Long Island to have dinner with me.

Of course, I am the worst possible dinner guest. I started talking about thirty seconds after we sat down, and I did not shut up until we parted. I can and will dominate a conversation if you let me. Worse yet, I have no filter, so I will ramble on about the many eccentric ideas and interests in my head. When I explained to John my idea of creating a new moral philosophy based on a rational understanding of human nature, a refutation of the Enlightenment, he had the look of a man suddenly finding himself with a lunatic.

Luckily, John is a very gracious dinner companion, so he was not only willing to let me ramble on for hours, but he also picked up the check. When I let him get a word in edgewise, he mentioned that he was recording his novel into an audiobook, He is about halfway through the process. If you can’t wait for the spoken word version, you can buy it here. For those new to all of this, his book We are Doomed is a good place to start understanding the roots of the Dissident Right. John is the man who coined the term Dissident Right.

After talking his ear off, we parted company and I headed down to Penn Station, wondering if I would get on the right train. The thing that struck me about the area around the station was just how nice it was compared to Newark and Baltimore. New York is now a middle-class city, in that the people, for the most part, are urbanites with bourgeoisie sensibilities. It is not a city of gritty neighborhoods run by ethnic coalitions. It is a place for the ruling class, the young strivers of the managerial class and their non-white servants.

The train ride back was uneventful, but it did offer one glimpse of the past. Two guys with Knicks jerseys were sitting up front, drinking tall boys out of paper bags, while talking loudly about something. A black guy was walking up and down the car reciting street poetry about his love for the baby Jesus. He was panhandling, but willing to work for it. I did not give him any money, but I appreciated the effort. These were the kind of people you expected to see on trains and subways, but they are being gentrified away too.

Back in Newark, the area around Penn Station is slated for major development, but now it is mostly abandoned. I saw signs for a condo complex and it looks like they are building several of them. The hockey arena is there, along with the Prudential building, but I saw zero people in the walk back to the hotel. The plan is to gentrify the area, but it reminded me of efforts to do the same in Hartford years ago. It is really hard to inject a cultural life into a dead city, but maybe Newark will be different.

A Honkey In Newark

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The first thing you notice about the ghetto is the sound. It is loud. The black ghettos of America are urban, so you have the traffic noises, but that’s overlayered with the ever-present sound of the music. The steady thumping of hip-hop, urban, and soul music coming from every car, apartment window and the retail store. Then, of course, you have the people. Black people are loud, preferring to yell across a street at a friend than walk across and have a normal conversation. They even talk loudly into their cell phones.

Walking down Broad Street in Newark, I was reminded of my first trip to Mexico. Walking the streets of Nogales, I was struck by the energy. People were scurrying in all directions and music blared from the store fronts in an effort to lure in the tourists. Newark does not have tourists, but it has that same sort of frenetic, pointless energy to it. The downtown is also festooned with garish retail signs advertising the sorts of things you normally associate with a ghetto. There is a lot of money to be made off of the poor in America.

On my walk around downtown, I saw almost all blacks, but there were a few Asians and Hispanics. According to government statistics, 50% of the city is black and 36% is Hispanic, but they must be quartered elsewhere. I was the only member of the master race on the street, but no one seemed to notice. I have strolled through plenty of towns being the only white guy, so I probably have figured out how to make it look natural. I got some food at Haggar’s Halal Kitchen, and no one seemed to think it odd that I was white.

The funny thing about retail commerce in the ghetto is that it is free of the inhibitions you see in the outer world, with regards to the habits of minorities. Walking around Newark, every other shop seemed to be a nail salon. Black women love having exotic nails, so it makes sense to have a lot of nail shops, with lots of over-the-top signage. They are usually next to a shop that braids hair. Black women love their weaves, as much as they love their nails. In the ghetto, no one pretends this is something other than true.

Underneath a giant sign of Ras J. Baraka, the Mayor of Newark, is a store calling itself the Source of Knowledge. It must have started as an Afrocentric bookshop, but figured out why there are no bookstores in the ghetto. They added on African hair braiding and picture framing. Still, the shop is full of books, all of which are the blackety-black stuff you would associate with black nationalism. The shop fits in well with the 1970’s vibe you get walking around Newark. I was disappointed to learn that Big Mustafa was no longer around.

Speaking of Ras Baraka, I knew nothing about him until I saw the sign and decided to look him up. City Hall is on Broad Street, so I went down to have a look. They had a big banner up for Ramadan and some smaller banners for an African music festival. The building itself is quite imposing. It is not far from the Old First Presbyterian Church, where some of the state founders are buried. When I look at these old buildings, created in a different age by different people, I feel a twinge of sadness. Newark is a foreign country now.

As far as Baraka, he was not in, but going by his CV, I suspect he was at a poetry slam or maybe as a local hip-hop studio. He is an example of just how terrible this age has been for the black population. His father, a talented tenth, did real things and tried to make his race proud. Ras is a ridiculous person who would rather spend his time organizing hip-hop concerts than doing something for his people. Today, the talented tenth bolt for the white suburbs or they find ways make money reinforcing their peoples’ worst habits.

Walking around the city, I could not help but notice some nice early 20th century architecture. Even with the grime of ghettoization, you can still feel the grandeur of these old buildings. In the first half of the last century, Newark was a booming industrial town with a flourishing downtown. This is something you see in Baltimore, as well. If you tour Detroit’s bombed out districts, you see the same thing. It is like there are ghosts rising from the rubble to remind those who look, that it was not always the way it is today.

The truth is it does not have to be this way. It would not take a whole lot of will to fix a place like Newark. It has a great location. Install a strong man with authority to clean up the bad elements and crime could be cut in half within a year or two. The morgues would be busy, but it would solve the problem. Then you could bring in urban pioneers to gentrify the downtown and make it attractive to business. But that would mean facing up to realities about the human condition that our rulers simply cannot face.