Abortion Inc.

Posted on August 27, 2024 by thezman

A new trend in the world of internet politics is a reboot of an old trend in actual politics and that is the abortion issue. Abortion was good politics for both parties since Roe because it let them posture without having to do anything. The Democrats promised to defend abortion and Republicans promised to end it. Meanwhile the issue languished in the courts until the Trump court overturned Roe. Since then, both sides of the abortion battle have been trying to revive their money maker.

To some degree, they have been successful. The people we call the left have convinced themselves that the election will turn on abortion. They generate fake polls and fake news stories to goose the online influencer community. Of course, the most gullible of that bunch, the right-wing influencers, take the bait. There is no group less politically astute than the right-wing influencers. The media then uses online chatter to talk about the abortion issue as if everyone cares.

The truth is, no one cares. Just two percent of people list abortion as a major concern going onto the election. As always, economics is what matters. The people who care about abortion are the most predictable voting bloc in America. The pro-abortion people vote Democrat and the anti-abortion people vote Republican. It is why both parties took these voters for granted for fifty years. They knew that these voters would never alter their behavior.

The new wrinkle this time is also a reboot, of sorts. The usual suspects are now running a media campaign online trying to convince people that Evangelicals and pro-life people are abandoning Trump because he opposes a federal abortion ban. The abortion ban idea is a last gasp effort to keep the abortion rackets going. If they cannot pretend to fight over Roe, maybe they can pretend to fight over whatever they will call the bill, if they ever get around to drafting one.

Republicans Against Trump (R.A.T.) have been spinning up fake pro-life and Evangelical accounts on Twitter, now stupidly called X, who do the classic bit of pretending to be a disillusioned former supporter. “I have been a lifelong X, but I will not support Y because he is not 100% in favor of X” is one version. The other version is “I have always voted for Y, but because of X I cannot support Y this time.” The R.A.T. people have invested heavily in this gambit.

The result of this is we have one side pretending abortion is the pivotal issue of the campaign and the other side using abortion to undermine Trump. For his part, Trump has staked out what was the conservative position on the abortion issue since the courts sacralized it in the Roe decision. The American system is designed to send normative issues to the smallest political unit of the country. Therefore, it was un-American for the court to impose Roe on the country.

The stated goal of the pro-life movement for decades was to overturn Roe and then fight it out on the state level. Trump delivered his end and Pro-Life Inc. will never forgive him for it, but the general public is thankful. A dirty little secret of the abortion issue is that people would rather not talk about it. Normal people find crotch warriors to be icky and strange. Moving abortion out of national politics means never having to think about abortion again and for that the public is thankful.

This is, however, another bit of mask dropping for the so-called right. Professional Evangelicals, professional social conservatives and the usual suspects have abandoned their old federalist principles in favor of a national abortion ban, because they think it is good for business. Once again, we see that those “conservative principles” they never shut-up about are relative, relative to their ability to make money off of them. Everything about conservatism is a racket.

The fact is, however, the conservatives of fifty years ago were right to argue that Roe was a terrible decision because it violated the American social contract. For a big, diverse, and complicated country like America, there are few normative issues about which you can get broad support across all regions. Therefore, most issues, like abortion, are best managed locally. Just because they now think it is more profitable to argue against this does not make it less accurate.

It is what makes a federal abortion ban every bit as immoral and un-American as the Roe v. Wade decision. On the one hand, it violates the basic American notion that moral issues should be decided locally. Family issues are decided by the family. Community issues are decided by the community. On the other hand, it is an effort to impose the morality of the minority on the majority. This runs counter to the long held American opposition to minoritarianism.

In the end, the abortion issue is symbolic, in that it represents the old civic nationalist America of the late 20th century. People could argue over abortion, because the much larger issues that come with cultural decline were still far down the road. As those larger issues now appear much closer, abortion, along with the civic nationalist culture, is fading into the history books. As civic nationalist America gives way to tribal identity America, the debate will be tribal, not civil.

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The New Christianity

Posted on August 26, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the send gamers to labor camps, a post about finance socialism and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Was Jesus a loser? By the standards of the age, the human standards, he was most certainly viewed as a loser, with the exception of his followers. That was the point of crucifying someone in that period. The Roman authorities used the practice as a form of humiliation as well as capital punishment. The point of displaying the condemned as they suffered and died was to let the rest of the population know that the guy on the cross was at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Modern Christians would take exception to calling Jesus a loser, but early Christians would not have been offended. The humiliation of Jesus was integral to both understanding the life of Christ and the message of Christ. If the Romans or the Jews had executed Christ in the fashion reserved for prominent people, then the life and message of Christ would mean something quite different. The stripping of all human dignity at the end was essential to the life of Christ.

Therein lies the problem for modern Christians. By the standards of this age, Christ is a loser, just as he was two thousand years ago. The message of Christ not only runs counter to the way in which modern people live and are expected to live, but the bad end runs afoul of how modern people expect the life of a hero to end. The modern person expects the hero’s life to end in a great triumph and universal acclaim or at least the acclaim of the major characters in the story.

Of course, the message of Christ does not work too well either. Eschewing material prosperity is just not a thing people do in this age or for a long time. In fact, the point of life for a long time has been to increase your material wealth. All of the heroes of the modern age are those who either got rich for their own sake or got rich for having upheld the modern morality. The way around this for the modern Christian is some form of the prosperity gospel, but that often looks like a grift.

More important, the message of Christ was aimed at the losers. From the start, Christianity was a religion for losers. Its appeal assumed that the audience was composed of people who were losers and would remain losers until they died, which would probably be soon. For them, investing in this life made little sense, so they should invest in the next life. Their time on this plane of existence was best used to prepare for everlasting life in Christ.

It is a powerful message if you are a loser and most people in the late Roman Empire and post-empire Europe were losers. Nasty, brutish, and short is a famous line from Hobbes to describe pre-society man, but it was also a good description of life for most people in the early Christian era. It was true for many people when Hobbes was writing in the 17th century. The typical person was subjected to violence, disease, and the constant fear of running out of food.

A religion that tells the losers that their suffering is part of a transition from this life to everlasting life and bliss is going to find a lot of interest. The folk religions of the age were not so rosy about what comes next. Worse yet, if you were going to get any sort of reward in the next life, it meant living this life heroically. That did not offer much for the peasant farmer or the man tied to the land. It is not hard to see why a religion for losers would spread rapidly through Europe at the time.

This insouciant description of Christianity as a religion for losers is not intended as an insult to Christians or Christianity, but to make a point. The rise of Christianity in the West was due to two things. One is the majority of the population, even the upper classes, lived harsh lives. Therefore, a promise of relief from suffering and everlasting life had a strong appeal. The second factor was the embrace of this life as a means to an end, rather an end in itself.

Fast forward to this age and you see that poor people live lives of luxury relative to just a century ago. The typical poor person in America is obese because he has unlimited cheap food. His home is full of conveniences and entertainments. Even in the most terrifying modern ghettos, violence is a fraction of what people experienced even a few hundred years ago. A religion aimed at people living a life of misery is not going to sell to a population living in luxury.

Compounding the problem is a new religion of sorts has evolved in the West that celebrates material success. The point of life, according to the new religion, is to increase your material wellbeing. The point of the state is to foster those conditions and measure success by society-wide material increase. In every election, the economy is the top issue because in this age, we worship stuff, so the promise of more stuff is a sign of virtue. The point of life is more stuff.

A much bigger problem for Christianity is the fact that the ruling elites of this age have no use for Christianity. In the Middle Ages, not only did the ruling elites have lives of struggle, but they also saw utility in a religion that shifted the focus of their people from their current squalor onto what comes after this life. Marx was not entirely wrong when he wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Probably the biggest challenge for Christianity is the modern Christian, who like the modern grammarian, refuses to evolve. The grammarian clings to the rules of grammar as if they are timeless truths. Any thought of ignoring them for the sake of clarity is treated as a crime against humanity. The fact that most of what he clings to is a relative new invention is lost on him, because what matters most to him is wielding the blue pencil like nuns used to wield the ruler.

This is the problem with the modern Christian. He is ossified in a mode of thought that is relatively new. Transport a modern Christin back to medieval England and he would be burned at the stake as a heretic. Plop him down among the early followers of Christ and they would be baffled by his Scriptural dogmatism. The early proselytizers charged with converting the pagans would find the modern Christian to be a rigid and irrational burden on their work.

Christianity, as we understand it, is the result of a long evolutionary process that adapted the life and message of Christ to the audience and times. The inability and unwillingness of modern Christians to evolve and adapt is probably the biggest challenge facing Christianity. Put another way, the problem with modern Christianity is not its opponents, but its most dogmatic defenders. They have made failure their security blanket and refuse to let go of it.

If Christianity is going to survive, it will have to adapt to this age and repurpose itself as a replacement for liberalism, rather than an enabler of it. Christianity gave birth to liberalism, but it does not have to sink under the waterline with it. Instead, it will have to either replace it with a new Christianity or give rise to a secular alternative that cannot just coexist with Christianity but allow it to once again flourish. Otherwise, Christianity will go into the dustbin of history along with Western civilization.

College Football

Posted on August 22, 2024 by thezman

The college football season kicks off this weekend with a game between Florida State and Georgia Tech in Ireland. This is what is now called “week zero” of the college football calendar where a handful of teams start the season early. Labor Day weekend remains the “official” start of the college football season. For the longest time, football season was Labor Day to Thanksgiving, but like everything else that tradition has given way to rapacious greed by all involved.

College sports is a genuinely American thing. On the one hand, it is amateur sports played by college students. On the other hand, it is a billion-dollar sports entertainment industry operating on college campuses. Even elite colleges like Stanford, Northwestern and Boston College find a way to be in the circus, while pretending to put academics ahead of the sports entertainment business. It is a uniquely American form of mass self-deception that the rest of the world does not understand.

The roots of college football are as normal as any other tradition. The game evolved from both rugby and soccer, which were popular sports in the 19th century. The old English line that “Soccer is a gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and rugby is a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen” carried over to America. Young college men would play one or both, depending upon their inclination. Before long they combined into what eventually became American football.

Naturally, the young men playing sports on their college campus would want to test themselves against the young men on the nearby college campus. Until fairly recent, this was the normal habit of young males. Legend has it that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American football game, but it was more like soccer. Harvard and McGill played the new game which quickly became popular and eventually supplanted both soccer and rugby on the college campus.

To some degree, the popularity of college football was due to one of those threads that made up the American character. In every region of the new country, self-organization was an essential element of life. This is something Tocqueville noted when he traveled around America in the 19th century. Self-organization was the antidote to the alienation and isolation that arises from democracy. Instead of withdrawing from mass public life, the individual forms islands of free association.

You see that in the early days of college football. The sport got its big boost in the Great Depression when local leaders were looking for ways to rally the people and keep them from organizing revolts against the government. Cheering on the local team as they did battle with the team from across town or across the state line was a good way to bring people together and to give them a healthy outlet. Many sports rivalries were born during the Great depression, even high school rivalries.

Of course, free association is at the heart of the college experience. For most families, primary school is a function of where they live. Your kids go to the local public schools whether you like it or not. It is why in the current age it has become common to ask the realtor showing you houses about the local basketball team. Parents understand that they are not just buying a house, but they are committing their children to the schools that come with the community in which the house is located.

College has never been that way. Young people are free to pick whatever college they like as long as they get accepted and can afford it. That plays a part in how the alumni of every school view their rival. Every school’s rival is populated with impoverished simpletons for some reason. While most students attend college within a three-hour drive of home, they are still spoiled for choice. This makes the rivalries between the schools possible and often makes them quite intense.

That is why college football rivalries remain, despite the fact that the localized logic and self-organization have given way to financialization and greed. The family who has always gone to Oklahoma continues to suspect that the people with the Longhorn sticker on their car are Harris voters, because it is the way it has always been and every autumn, they are reminded of that at the big game. America has always been a diverse country and that has always been the root of college rivalries.

The acid of modernity is slowly eroding this bit of social capital. The television oligopolies have decided it is good for them to have Oregon and Rutgers in the same football league. The league Oregon played in since forever was destroyed so they could join the Big Ten, which is still technically a Midwest conference. Washington, USC, and UCLA have also joined a conference whose center is two times zones away, because that makes sense to the bankers.

What is happening to college football is a microcosm of what has been happening everywhere in America since the dawn of financialization. The money men find a way to monetize social capital in order to haul it away to their vaults, leaving behind a shuffling husk of that which they sucked dry. College football is well on its way to becoming as artificial and synthetic as the suburban town center. The reason it exists is nothing organic is allowed to replace it.

Whether or not this is sustainable is never asked, as the point of the American economic model is for connected people to create bottlenecks they can then use to skim money from every transaction that passes through that bottleneck. This was the point Peter Theil made in his book. Once that bottleneck or monopoly is played out, then the parasites get back in their wagon and go looking for a new opportunity to exploit and never look back at what they left behind.

College football attendance has been in steady decline for a decade, even though the television dollars have exploded. They claim ratings are great, but no one cares about TV ratings, as most of the revenue comes from subscriptions. Television in America is one of those bottlenecks the oligarchs exploit. It is why CNN remains in business, despite having few viewers. At some point, the empty seats at football games will become a problem, but no one worries about it now.

For now, like so much of American life, what sustains college football is the echo of old America on which college football was built. Men watch games on Saturday because they watched games with their father, who watched games with his father. Maybe you make a trip to your alma mater once a year to see a game. The tradition has been hollowed out and is now worn as a skin suit by oleaginous television executives and grasping college administrators, but it is all you got.

That is the thing about traditions. People will hang onto them, no matter how tattered and lifeless, until something comes along to replace them. College football is a good example and representative of America as a whole. The fumes of old glory and old traditions fuel the present, but something will come along to replace those things and the people profiting off the nostalgia for them. After all, on any given Saturday, something could happen that changes everything.

Will And Reason

Posted on August 19, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the microprocessor revolution and its discontents, a post about the drama within the chronically online community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Many of the leading figures of what came to be known as the Human BioDiversity (HBD) movement are reaching the age where they are no longer producing new work, but instead are part of retrospectives of the movement they created. This post in Aporia by Bo Winegard is a good example. It works as both a summary of Murray’s work and a summary of the hereditarian perspective on the human animal. “Hereditarian” is another word used for the biological realist wing of the human sciences.

It is not entirely accurate to call these people a movement as they have had no impact on how Western societies view human organization. If anything, the West has raced in the opposite direction of what should follow from the realities that have come from the human sciences. Since The Bell Curve was published thirty years ago, the blank slate, fanatical egalitarianism and universalism have become so entrenched in elite thinking that dissent is now criminal in many countries.

That is what you are seeing in the UK. The people being sent off to prison for voicing complaints about immigration are not being punished for opposing public policy, but for violating official orthodoxy with regards to the human condition. Across the West, any noticing of difference between groups of humans is blasphemy. Not only would The Bell Curve not get a publisher today, but it is also something of a miracle that it has not been put on the index of banned books, next to The Camp of the Saints.

Therein lies the most important lesson to come from the HBD scene. Facts and reason can never overcome belief. There is no questioning the science with regards to the human condition. It has confirmed thousands of years of observation that nature does not distribute her gifts equally. That is true with regards to individuals and with regards to groups of individuals. The reason you never take the MLK exist is not because you are immoral, but because you are rational.

Rationality is no match for belief, at least when it comes to politics. The promise of a guilt free future has won every battle regarding biology. Of course, it is the echo of Calvin that embedded racial guilt into the Western mind. Facts and reason had no impact on belief before, during or after the Civil War, because the fanatics behind the abolitionist cause were immune to facts and reason. Like all fanatics, they saw only that which confirmed their fanaticism.

The point here is that the defeat of human biodiversity, hereditarianism, biological realism, or whatever term you have for the facts of the human condition, was simply another battle in the long war between belief and reason. One side, the winning side, believes the human condition can be solved because they believe the cause of human conflict lies in the human mind and can therefore be eradicated. The other side has never had an answer to that claim.

Another lesson from the twilight of the human sciences is that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a dead end. What matters in the affairs of man, therefore what matters with regards the human condition, is knowledge that leads men to act either on behalf of that knowledge or in opposition to it. Anything else is at best useless and at worst a reason for opponents to act on the claim that this new knowledge is a threat to the wellbeing of society.

In one of life’s great ironies, the HBD people never understood how their work could be seen as dangerously heretical. For all their knowledge about the mechanics of mankind, they have never understood the will that lies behind human action, preferring to believe what lies behind the motivations of their accusers is just as mechanical and sterile as their own understanding of man. Materialism is a terrible way to understand the why of the human condition.

More important, the HBD people could never shake their civic nationalist priors or even question them in light of their own work. The Bell Curve is the argument against liberal democracy, an argument understood long before the HBD people arrived. Despite the obvious conflict between what the science was telling us and what political science was demanding of us, the HBD people never lost faith in liberalism. They remain convinced it is the only political option.

It is not all bad for the HBD scene. It has, at least for a while, provided a moral authority of sorts for resisting the gathering darkness. There remains an “E pur si muove” mental space for dissidents to gather their thoughts about what is happening. Inside the mental space lies the flicker of hope that reality cannot be swamped by the fantastical reality of the prevailing orthodoxy. The foundation of the dissident cause are the people who accept the reality of the human condition.

In the end, however, it will not be men armed with charts and graphs who shall beat back the forces of darkness but the men who know that society is determined by those who understand it is always who shall overcome whom. If the West is to survive, it will be due to those who will it so and use any means necessary to prevail over those determined to turn out the lights on civilization. The only justification needed will simply be the desire to make it so.

Baseball

Posted on August 15, 2024 by thezman

Watch an American baseball game and the thing you quickly notice, especially if it has been a while since you bothered, is that the game is riddled with interruptions to the point where it feels like more stoppage than gameplay. Baseball was always a leisurely game that evolved for a people who had long attention spans, so it is a poor fit for the modern American with their low IQ’s and high time preference, but it is also made unwatchable by the constant stoppages.

The league has tried to address the problem by speeding up the gameplay with a pitch clock that gives pitchers 30 seconds between at-bats, 15 seconds between pitches with no one on base, and 20 seconds between pitches with runners on base. According to major league baseball, this has resulted in a 24-minute decrease in the total length of the game compared to the 2022 season. The average length of a game is now two hours and 40 minutes.

That is fine, but it does not change the fact that the number of breaks in play has not changed much and is probably a little worse. The reason for the breaks is the specialization in the game. The days of nine guys playing nine guys are long gone, as now teams employ specialists who enter the game at various points, which slows the game play down. Specialization is the result of quantitative revolution that has happened in all sports, but especially baseball.

Baseball used to be a game run by men who wanted to put on a show for fans and build hometown pride. The owners of baseball teams were local rich guys who not only wanted to make money off the game but took some pride in their local community and wanted their team to win. They hired people to run their teams who had played the game and presumably knew what it took to win. Those guys found and developed players who had the skills to play the game.

That started to change with the growth of advanced statistics. Baseball was always a game of numbers, like batting average, earned run average and other measures of a player’s success in his role. Advanced statistics took that a step further and used quantitative measures to predict the impact of players on winning games, based on measures like on-base-percentage and wins above replacement. These new measures not only determine rosters, but they also determine gameplay.

That is why we get so many breaks in the game. After every at bat, both teams basically re-crunch the numbers to determine what they should do next. That may mean pulling the pitcher who has been on a roll to this point or pinch hitting for a guy who has had a monster game thus far. We now have scenarios in which a pitcher is pulled from a game while throwing a no-hitter. The numbers say he has reached his pitch limit, and the reliever has a better chance against the rest of the lineup.

You can see how this works by looking at the roster of the current best team in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, and the roster of the 1970 Oriole team that went on to win the World Series that year. The first thing you will note is that the 1970 squad used a total of thirty-two players for the entire season. The current year Orioles have already used fifty-four players and will use many more once rosters expand in September. Baseball is now a game of roster rotisserie.

Another thing you will note is that the best starting pitchers on the current team will not reach 200-innings this year. Most likely, they will rest their best pitcher down the stretch so he will finish the regular season with around 175-innings. On the 1970s team, three pitchers pitched 300-innings. More shocking is the fact that the 1970 pitching staff had sixty complete games, while the current staff has none. Last year there were a total of 34 complete games in all of baseball.

The stat guys will tell you that the use of advanced statistics makes for a more competitive game by removing chance from the equation. People with a soul will tell you that the stat guys should be sent to a labor camp. No one watches any sporting event to see the stat guys show off their latest number crunching. Sport is human drama with all of the flaws that come with it. Removing the flaws inevitably removes the humanity from it and you are left with robots playing robots

The reason everyone who was aware in 1988 remembers Kirk Gibson hitting the homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the World Series is because it is the thing every kid who played baseball dreamed of doing. It is a scene every father taking his son to a game hopes they will see. The aging slugger called in to face off against the game’s best closer in the deciding moment. The old man mustering what little he has left to stroke one last home run to win the game.

If the modern stat head had been in charge, that moment never would have happened because Gibson would not be on the team, much less sent up to bat. Tommy Lasorda would not have been in the dugout to make the call. Instead, the robot manager would have sent up a specialist whose only role was to face Eckersley. Maybe the Dodgers win anyway, but no one would remember it because there would be no reason to remember what in the end was a statistical anomaly.

The reason that any of this matters is that baseball is a microcosm of American life in that society, like baseball, is now run by people who have no appreciation for the things that make life worth living. Instead, they view people as mere economic units or perhaps items to manipulate in the transactional world of managerialism. Society has been drained of its authenticity and in its place is the drab materialism in the meat space and the superficial drama of the virtual space.

The answer to fixing baseball and other sports is to open the windows of the skyboxes where the stat guys run the game and throw them out of those windows. Let the players play the fans enjoy the human drama. Similarly, the answer to what ails the modern world is to throw the managers off the roof of their offices and let people go back to figuring out how to live. The results may not make for an impressive pivot table, but no one should live inside a pivot table anyway.

An Old Story

Posted on August 14, 2024 by thezman

For a little over a year, it has been clear to people who have followed the war in Ukraine that there is no winning scenario for Ukraine. The sanctions on Russia failed to change the Russian approach to the war. The hundreds of billions in NATO weapons, planning and support were not enough to beat back the Russian army. The great Ukraine offensive of 2023 was a stunning failure that eliminated any possibility of the Ukraine army holding the line in the Donbass.

The question has been how does the war end. For Ukraine, the best outcome is a negotiated settlement that includes a change in Ukrainian attitudes. Maybe NATO abandons the project and the Russians install new leaders. Maybe Zelensky figures out that he is about to be cut loose and cuts a deal with the Russians. Maybe Washington, hoping to save face, backs Zelensky in making a deal with the Russians. No matter how, the best option for Ukraine was a negotiated settlement.

That appears to be off the table now that the Ukrainians have launched this crazy incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. It appears that the plan was to reach the nuclear power plant in Kursk and then use it as blackmail. The Ukrainians would not just demand negotiations but require a Russian withdrawal as a condition for negotiations or they would blow up the nuclear power plant. As ridiculous as that sounds, the other explanations for this gambit are even nuttier.

Of course, this plan sounds like it is from a poorly made Hollywood action thriller, rather than a sober-minded military operation. The reason for that is the people running Ukraine are actors. For going on three years now they have spent far more time crafting creative narratives about the war than thinking soberly about how they can avoid being wiped off the map. For people who imagine reality is just a clever written story, this operation sounded brilliant.

The supreme role of narrative for Western political elites is evident in how they have reacted to this new production. It seems they had no part in its construction, or at least they were not told about it in advance, so they were unprepared to play their role in selling this as the next great event in the drama. Western media was not provided with a script, so they had no idea what to say. Eventually they settled on this being bad for Putin’s narrative, a thing that does not exist.

It is another example of the total lack of realism in our political class. The Ukraine war is an unnecessary venture for everyone involved except the Russians. A thousand years of history says they will not allow Ukraine to fall into the Western orbit. Otherwise, everyone else involved has practical reasons for not having this war, but the good feelings that come from good narratives have been too much to resist. The result is an unfolding catastrophe for the West.

This total lack of realism in the West seems to have finally reached an end point with the Russians after this latest caper. In a recent press conference, Putin said that it is now impossible to deal with Ukrainian leadership. While not closing the door to negotiations completely, he has now ruled out dealing with Zelensky. Other Russian officials are floating the idea of regime change in Kiev as a necessary precondition for any negotiated settlement to the war.

What that means is that the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian army, which is now accelerating due to the nutty decisions made by Kiev, will be followed by a political collapse, by force if necessary. In other words, if the West deciders it is time to make a deal with the Russians, that deal starts by cutting Zelensky loose, which in the context of Ukrainian politics means the whole crew must go. They will not go voluntarily, so it means the end game includes a civil war in Western Ukraine.

The Ukraine war is a microcosm of what is happening in the West. Every decision is based only in the moment without any thought of what comes next. Things are done voluntarily that should have been avoided, not because they are part of a larger strategy but because they fit the current narrative. It is as if once the story is created, the writers are sucked into it, losing all control of the plot. All they can do is respond as if they are now unwitting characters in the story.

This is harmless in the low-stakes world of parlor games in which members of the political class evolve, but in the practical world, it is a disaster. It leads to a scenario in which no one knows if the current president is alive or dead. No one seems to care because his character has been written out of the story. Who is actually making decisions is a mystery. It is the dynamic that created the condition for war in Ukraine and is now pushing it towards catastrophe.

On the one hand, it certainly seems like the West is now governed by emotion and symbolism, rather than practical considerations. The Kamala Harris campaign can be boiled down to a promise of feel goods. The entire production is a collection of symbolic shapes and sounds to transmit the simple idea that it feels good or that the alternative will make you feel bad. To his credit, Trump is offering tangible things that have some connection to practical reality.

The lesson of the Ukraine war, however, is that reality still matters. All the feel-good stories and symbols has not changed the fact that the Russian army is chewing up the Ukrainian army. The clever narratives cannot conceal the massive cemeteries full of dead Ukrainian soldiers. The question that arises from this war is whether Western elites will learn that the clever stories by the managerial class will not keep them from the gallows if things start to crumble.

The great lesson of history is that there is always a price to be paid for failed leadership and that price is paid by the people, then their rulers. Joseph de Maistre famously said that the people get the government they deserve. He was wrong. The lesson of the French Revolution is that the ruling elite gets the people they deserve. A ruling class that is concerned more with clever narratives than practical reality will face a people, who out of practical necessity, decide they must get a new ruling elite.

Escape From Reality

Posted on August 13, 2024 by thezman

The great fear as the internet spread across American society was that things in this virtual world would somehow cross over into the real world. Usually this meant that the machines would get super intelligent and take over society. This is the underlying theme of movies like The Terminator. Alternatively, a being from inside the internet would make the jump into the meat space. This is the plot for the film Virtuosity. A virtual serial killer gets loose in the real world and does his worst.

Nothing like that has come to pass, but something worse may be happening and that is reality is being sucked into the virtual world. More accurately, people are spending so much time online that the virtual world is supplanting reality for them. We are seeing this with the Harris campaign, which is probably the most intensely online political program we have every experienced. Everything about it is based on winning the internet that day, which means it operates by the rules of the internet.

The most obvious example is how the Kamala Harris character has been reimagined by her developers into something disconnected from reality. From the presentation, one would never know she has been Vice President for the last four years or that she has spent those years arguing for the administration’s positions. Like a discarded scene from a video game, all of that is gone now. In its place is the new character whose only connection to the prior character is the name.

The disconnectedness extends to her campaign and its supporters. Trump has been stumping on the idea of exempting tips from income taxes. Whatever the merits of the idea, it is a clever way to appeal to young people. The other day, the Harris character announced its plan to not tax tips, as if it were something totally new that had never been mentioned by anyone. Miraculously, the people playing the Harris character online responded as if it was a total novel idea.

Of course, this being the age of mendacity, the new Harris gameplay comes with manufactured crowds online that cheer for it. There are fake polls that claim this character is now the most popular character in the game. It is destroying all of the orange baddies in this expansion pack. We know this because every day the lie machine we call mass media fills the game space with stories about how Trump is raging in his bunker about the greatness of the Harris character.

This upgraded version of Kamala Harris is now equipment with a lacky to do the things lackies do for the hero. Like the new Kamala Harris, the character called Tim Walz bears little resemblance to the old version. Instead of being a bloviating windbag who bores people with his imaginary tales of heroism in the military, this version is a folksy good old boy who just happens to hold all of the same opinions as the developers who created his character for the game.

What we are experiencing right now is a political campaign that exists only in the virtual world of the highly online. If you are not playing in this part of the game or you live in reality, you may not know about any of this. Maybe one of your favorite “influencers” has gone into panic mode for some reason and that got your attention. Otherwise, if you are not in this part of the game, none of this is real to you. The main reason for that is that nothing about this campaign is real thus far.

This is why the people most affected by this new release are the self-styled influencers who live entirely online. These people spend all day, every day, looking for something they can front-run in order to maintain the illusion that they are not just playing the game, but they are controlling it. The reason they are called influencers is not that they influence anyone, but that they are the most easily influenced. The right-wing influencer crowd cannot stop playing the new Harris character.

The highly online, of course, will argue that this is reality, and it is now changing the meat space, but how would they know? One of the weird aspects of virtual reality is that it is self-affirming to the people who have been sucked into it. For many of them, Twitter is reality and people outside of it do not exist. This is why influencers banned from Twitter were so desperate to get back on the platform. Having your account suspended is what passes for Hell in the virtual world.

That still leaves the question as to whether this is working. More people get their news from online sources than from legacy sources, so if you win the internet then it suggests you can influence people. On the other hand, the internet is a big place and people gravitate to that which confirms the opinions. One reason the undecided voter is a thing of the past is everyone now has an online tribe. Alternatively, they have a cable chat show they watch every night for their opinions.

The highly online like saying that arguing with a boomer is arguing with the television because all of their opinions come from television. Ironically, arguing with the highly online is arguing with the internet. The people playing the Nick Fuentes character right now have no ideas of their own. They have the ideas of the other players in the Nick Fuentes game space. It turns out that right-wing zoomers are just like the right-wing boomers they criticize. They just have a different god.

That is what will be the interesting thing about the Harris game. Eventually, the Harris character will have to step outside the curated world of gameplay and talk to flesh and blood humans, as well as debate Trump. As much as the developers would like to believe the reality they have created has supplanted the old reality, the test of this will be their character leaving the game space for the meat space. The same holds for the lackey with his Elmer Fudd costume and reimagined backstory.

What it will ultimately come down to is whether the voters will prefer the game space reality to the meat space reality. Will they believe the upgraded Harris character is preferable to the meat space Harris and continue to play the game character as a form of escapism or will they experience the meat space version and get turned off by the game itself? That is the central question of this election. This is the first election where people are asked to choose reality versus escapism.

The Haunted Present

Posted on August 12, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about land management in Sweden, a post about the drama within the macramé community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

At the dawn of the information age, it was assumed that everyone having the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips would unleash human potential in ways that had never been imagined. Instead of vast swaths of information being cloistered in the books of specialists, it would be available to everyone. The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people who would otherwise be denied access to the information.

A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. New movies and television shows are, at best, technically superior, but creatively inferior, remakes of past works. The traditional arts, like painting and sculpture, have been made ridiculous in an attempt to find novelty rather than genuine cultural expression. The creative side of Western culture has reached a nadir as technology has reached its zenith.

The public space, of course, has become so narrow that comparisons to the Soviet era are becoming trite. In the UK, men are being sent to dungeons for the crime of mentioning that foreigners are murdering British school children. In the United States, the secret police is everywhere looking for dissidents to harass. The great democratization of information and the public square has led to a dark age of authoritarian violence and suppression.

Alexander Duggan once said that the end of the Cold War was a catastrophe for the world, by which everyone assumed he meant the Russian world. That was certainly true, as the Russian world had evolved to depend on the Cold War as both a justification for the Soviet system but also the framework in which people lived. Once the Cold War ended, the moral framework collapsed along with the political system, and the result was a generation of chaos.

Something similar may be happening with the flood of data that has washed over the Western world via the internet. We now live in a world where it is plain to see that every creative thing one can imagine has been done and most likely done better than anything that could be done today. Why paint portraits when the greatest portrait painters who ever lived, have already lived? Why sculpt when a machine with unlimited information can produce better results?

No one thinks too much about how the technological revolution must change the way we organize ourselves, because we are awash in the history of the twentieth century where all of the political ideologies were resolved, and liberal democracy was declared the winner. The end of history has left us with nothing but history. The information age has not just made the past accessible, but it has also tuned the past into a great flood that washes over every aspect of the modern age.

The curse of information is most evident in the public square where it is easy to see, or at least it seems that way, that every idea worth discussing has been raised, debated, and judged in the past? More important, every idea that is viewed as dangerous can be compared to something from that past that has been condemned. The reason that everyone with questions is called Hitler and even the slightest push back is fascism is that the information age makes such comparison simple.

Why would a young political activist spend time thinking critically about the world as it is when he can more easily look up ideas from the past and then repackage them for the present age? The reason our politics feels like a technically superior reboot of prior politics is that all of the participants are rooting around in the past for inspiration, rather than thinking of something new. Instead of standing on the shoulders of the past, everyone now trembles in its shadow.

The promise of the internet was that it would unlock the doors to the future, but instead it has walled them off by opening every door to the past. It is simply too easy to find what you need from the stock of existing knowledge than to take a step back and think about what you are seeing. The information age has turned the intellectual space into an endless museum in which we are all trapped, forced into playing roles from the past, regardless of their applicability to the present.

This may explain the woke business. The reason people are creating these bizarre and logically impossible roles for themselves, things like transgenderism, for example, is as a way to escape the conformity of the present. On the one hand we live in a world where you are told to be an authentic individual, but the information age shows that every human character has already existed. The solution is to break free from reason itself in order to create new roles to play.

Another piece of this is the American civic religion of progressivism, which treats the past like an angry mob chasing after the righteous. The information age has turned the past into a deadly fog that has descended onto society. The only solution to this is to destroy reality itself since the past is what shapes present reality. The war on biology, reason, truth, and empiricism is a war on the fabric of reality that defines the present and that which makes the past possible, our minds.

In the final analysis, the information age, especially the internet, may turn out to be a terrible curse, rather than a liberating force. For most of human history, the past was of little use, other than the lessons of the past. These were contained in stories and songs, rather than in detailed accounts of the events and participants. The point of the past, in this context, was to inspire, rather than constrain. Our detailed knowledge of the past, in contrast, is a psychological prison.

Ironically, this is not new either. James Joyce wrote about how the Irish were prisoners of their own struggle. The fictional South created by William Faulkner was also haunted by the past. The solution in both cases was the abnegation of that present reality in order to close the door to what created it. The Ireland of Joyce no longer exists, and the South of Faulkner exists only as a bogeyman for the progressive. The solution to the past haunting the present was to abandon it entirely.

Christianity Versus Democracy

Posted on July 29, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about a good new Western called Old Henry, a post about the Olympics and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

A question that does not get asked very much, especially in public, is if Christianity is compatible with democracy. Organized Christians in this age make a point of supporting “democracy” because the people in charge cannot stop talking about it, but that speaks to the sorts of people running organized Christianity. They want to be in good standing with the rulers, an irony that never gets mentioned. The thing they claim to profess evolved in opposition to secular rule.

Putting that aside, the issue of whether democracy, as in the consent of the governed through direct participation in governance by the governed, is compatible with Christianity is an important one. It is clear that as the West has become more democratic, it has become less Christian. Open hostility to Christianity is a feature of the class of people who talk about democracy the most. It certainly seems like the fans of democracy are not fans of Christianity.

Most people today who call themselves Christian or one of the sects of what we think of as Christianity are well aware of the hostility, but they blame secularism or various names for radicalism, rather than democracy. Christians embrace democracy as much as the opponents of Christianity, even if their particular brand of Christianity has no democratic elements. Catholicism, for example, is anti-democratic in structure, but American Catholics love democracy.

There are, however, Christian sects that do embrace democracy. Baptists churches, for example, hire their pastors. If the pastor finds a bigger church willing to hire him and pay him more money, he is free to leave the old church and join the new one. On the other hand, if the church congregation or the deacons decide the pastor is not to the liking they can fire him. Here is a video from a Baptist minister giving the background on why he was recently fired by his church.

The short version of the video is the pastor gave a sermon on marriage and the role of women that was based in a traditional interpretation of Scripture. The wife of the youth pastor, a more modern woman, was offended by the sermon. She and her husband organized a campaign within the church against the pastor in the video and eventually got him fired from his post. In the end, they got a majority of the congregation to agree that either he goes, or they go.

This is a very democratic result. After all, the starting point for democracy is the assertion that the majority must prevail. While there is nothing in Scripture that says this is how things must be, most Christians accept this assertion. In fact, one could argue that the most important victim of majority rule was Christ. If instead of demanding Barabbas they demanded Jesus, the world would be quite different. The point is this congregation and others like it are not organized according to Scripture.

More important, the way they are organized contradicts a basic assumption of all religions, not just Christianity. That basic assumption is that there are some things too important to be left to man. These are things that are true because the gods or God have declared them to be true. Scripture does not say adultery, for example, has to be sorted through a show of hands. For Christians, adultery is a sin, and it is not up for debate

Without knowing the content of the sermon that the pastor in the video says was the source of the conflict, it cannot be judged dogmatically. What matters is the pastor preached in a way that offended the congregation, or at least a majority of them, so the rest went along with firing him. If his sermon was theologically and scripturally correct, then it means the congregation decided they did not like that part of the Bible, so they avoid it and those who preach it.

The point here is that for Christianity to work, or any religion for that matter, the main body of its beliefs must be beyond the collective judgement of man. The collection of oughts and ought nots that make up every religion are rooted in an authority beyond the ability of man to question. Otherwise, the oughts and ought nots are rooted in the collective will of the people. The word we have for this is democracy. In other words, democracy replaces God or the gods as the moral authority.

This is why the radicals of the French Revolution firts set their eyers on the Catholic Church when they gained power. Popular consent could not coexist with an alternative moral authority or its representative on earth, so it had to go. The same logic was at work when they eradicated the aristocracy. Hierarchy is an alternative moral authority to popular sovereignty, so it cannot coexist with it. The thrown and the altar have always been the enemy of popular consent.

You see that in the story of the video pastor. The people who engineered his termination feel justified not because they find support in Scripture, but because they think they have the support of the majority. The God they truly worship is not on the Bible but in the show of hands and their sense of being in the majority. It is not hard to see how this can lead to what you see with the Episcopal Church. It is rainbows and sodomites because the god they worship is the god of democracy.

What the evidence leads to is that the enemy of Christianity is not liberalism or even secularism, but the concept of democracy. Once people of any faith embrace the idea that truth is the result of consent, there is no room for God. Any religion that tries to exist in a society that embraces democracy, will come under pressure to replace its God with the god of the people. As a matter of survival, Christians should see democracy as their primary enemy, externally and internally.

This raises an important question. Can Christianity survive in a democracy. Even if the Church rejects democracy and all its works, can it survive in a society which is governed by the principles of democracy? Is there some limit on the democratic impulse that must be in place and be viewed as unassailable in order for Christian to live in democratic society. If not, then are Christians obligated to fight democracy or simply acquiesce to their own destruction?

You Can Never Hate Them Enough

Posted on June 27, 2024 by thezman

To great fanfare Julian Assange struck a deal with the American government whereby he would be allowed to leave a British jail and return home to Australia. Reportedly, the deal he accepted was to plead guilty to some charges in exchange for a sentence of time served in the British jail. The full details of the deal have not been released, but most likely he gave the government information they wanted or sufficiently demonstrated that he was not in possession of it.

This was always the primary issue. Secret documents and information leak out of the government all the time, but the government knows who leaked it. Most of the time the leaks are official leaks. Someone with authorized access to something hands it over to someone in regime media to publish. Once in a while the people at the top of the regime get mad about this habit and demand to know the source, and the regime reporter puts on a show of resisting but gives in at the end.

Generally speaking, what the regime cares most about in the case of these leaks is the source of the leak and the method they used. If regime information is getting into the public through unknown channels or by unknown figures, it can not only lead to things in the public the regime does not want made public, but it threatens the legitimacy of the regime for the people inside the regime. Blackmail, for example, only works when the victim is sure the blackmailer has control of the information.

A big part of what makes the managerial system of the Global American Empire work is the trust the people in the system have in the system. The yawning gap we see between the confidence of regime figures and their ability is due in large part to their trust in the system. For them, the system works, so they naturally assume their elevation inside the system is due to merit. A loss of control of the system could lead to a loss of trust and the whole thing spins apart.

Putting that aside, the only good thing about Assange getting released is that the worst people can no longer wave around that bloody shirt. For close to two decades, fringy irritants have been using the Assange case to demonstrate their moral purity and to defend the crackpot idea that journalism is a priesthood. Their defense of Assange always rested on the dubious claim that journalists have special rights and therefore must not be subject to the laws governing the rest of us.

You see, once you call yourself a journalist, you get to ignore the rules of decency, the laws governing private property and declare yourself a moral authority. You get to betray confidences and deceive people about your intentions. You also get to steal the property of others and use it for personal gain. All the while, you get to wrinkle up your nose as if you caught wind of a bad odor and lecture the rest of us about your moral goodness and our moral failings.

The game here was to hold Assange up as a paragon of virtue because he was upholding the highest standards of journalism. He was doing the same thing major media does all the time, namely revealing secrets about the regime. In reality, Assange was just trying to avoid an American prison. Like every other person calling himself a journalist, Assange was a dirtbag and a thief. He trafficked in stolen goods for personal benefit and when he got caught, he tried to avoid punishment.

If you are clear headed about this, the correct response to the Assange case is the opposite than that of the moralizers. Information is property and people who traffic in stolen information should be treated like any other thief. In fact, they should be treated more harshly. Stolen property can be replaced, but stolen information is often irreplaceable and the damage that ensues from its theft can last a lifetime. Information thieves should be killed on the spot.

In other words, the right response to the Assange case was not to treat him as a hero but to demand that all journalists get the same treatment. Imagine a world where doxers have to flee the country and hide out in embassies to avoid being sent to prison and you will immediately see the logic. Imagine if the people who stole Trump’s tax returns and gave them to the New York Times were sent to the gallows along with the people who agreed to publish them. Nice thought, isn’t it?

The defense of journalism has always been a moral perversion. The worst people a society can produce end up in journalism. The fact that they from time to time do harm to terrible people is not just used as a reason to elevate these garbage people, but a reason to sacralize their gutter morality. Journalists are good people, so the reasoning goes, because they are more degenerate than politicians. Assange was celebrated because he represented the ideal of this gutter morality.

Those calling themselves journalists, but lack a place in regime media, have noted that regime journalists have been silent on Assange. The main reason is regime journalists are moral nullities. They envy the attention Assange is getting, so they use the only power they have to smite him. The main power of regime media is the power to ignore, so they were happy to ignore Assange. There is no honor among thieves, so the thieving weasels of the media can never honor one of their own.

Despite his position at the bottom of the moral hierarchy, Assange was useful as a regime irritant, thus proving no life is entirely meaningless. Hopefully, his final contribution is to sink quietly into obscurity. The moralizers who have used his name to elevate the worst profession and the worst people will have to find a new bloody shirt to wave around in defense of the despicable trade. The rest of us can return to hating the worst people, because you can never hate them enough.

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