Political Onanism

Posted on February 5, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the classic film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a film I did not like, a post about code-switching and the Sunday podcast which remains a morning edition for now. Subscribe here or here.

Carl Schmitt famously said that “the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy.” The shorthand you hear in dissident circles is that politics is about friends and enemies. You can see this in your own life when it comes to some issue with which you have been on the opposite side of a friend. That person may now be a former friend if the issue was important at the time. It is why families often avoid talking about politics during the holidays.

A practical aspect of this reality is that political activism should always seek to harm the opponent and boost your side. An action that makes the other side look bad is good activism and it is even better activism if it also makes you look good. Of course, bad activism is that which boosts the enemy and harms you. The Charlottesville rally in 2018 turned out to be disastrous activism for the alt-right. It rallied their enemies and gutted their support in the broader community.

Life is not always so cut and dried. Generational politics, for example, often feels like good politics to the people doing it. Whether it is young people moaning about old people having had it easy or old people moaning about young people having it easy, the people doing it always feel good about it. A Nick Fuentes feels like a hero when he makes fun of adults for being adults. He thinks it is good politics because it brings in money and gets his young fans excited.

Of course, this goes both ways. Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire often makes fun of Zoomers for being whiny and soft. Recently, a young girl posted a video of herself crying about having to work forty hours a week and still not having money to live like she did in college so Matt Walsh made sport of her. The young people who always complain about the boomers then piled in to tell him he was a horrible person for not empathizing with the young girls in the video.

At a personal level, generational politics is good as it makes money for the people doing it, but at another level it is bad for their overall political mission. The only people engaged in generational politics are white people who are either in white identity politics or aligned with it. Nick Fuentes casts himself as a white identitarian, but he spends a lot of time mocking white people. Matt Walsh opposes antiwhite politics, but like Nick Fuentes, he spends most of his time attacking white people.

You will note that the people who control the culture are fine with this sort of politics, despite it coming from people they hate. In popular culture you will never see a young black guy calling his grandfather a boomer. You will not see an old Jewish guy laughing at his grandson’s student loan debt. For the people who control the centers of cultural production, generational politics is only for white people. It is one part of their antiwhite pogroms that have come to define popular culture.

Generational politics is not politics at all but a form of political onanism. It is not only a fruitless activity, but it also discourages the sort of politics that could bear fruit. It is no different from the war of the sexes business, where feminists and anti-feminists seek to pit white males against white females. Whatever the truth of the mutual critiques, it is not an activity that can lead to anything other than temporary ecstasy. It is a form of politics that can never lead to good activism or any activism.

For example, look at the recent trend of attacking Reagan. Critics correctly note that he signed off on immigration reform. He also ushered in economic reforms that now feel like bad ideas, especially for young people. This critique of Regan usually ends with angry shouting at boomers for having enjoyed the good times that followed the reforms of that period. The boomers are bad people for having enjoyed a good stock market and low interest rates over the last forty years.

Let us assume that Reagan and his supporters were evil people who knew what they were doing would harm their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Let us also pretend that the boomers all agreed it would wreck the country for their children and grandchildren who they would live to see. Even if you could prove this, what would be the point of doing it? The most you get from it is the momentary satisfaction of shaking your first at an imaginary version of the past.

The reason to care about the past is to understand how you reached the present and to have some sense of what comes next. Understanding the politics around the Reagan era immigration policies is about understanding the nature of the people behind the just proposed immigration reform bill in the senate. Chuck Schumer put that together because he hates you and he has always hated you. There is no talking him and his allies out of hating you. He is the forever enemy.

There you see the problem with generational politics. The young people trembling with anger over the thought of Ronald Reagan are focusing on their grandparents rather than the people who finked on their grandparents, the same people who are now trying to close the door on America, by opening up the borders. It is a politics that turns old friends into imaginary enemies and enemies into fans cheering the people attacking one another in the arena of generational politics.

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The Death Of Pop

Posted on January 25, 2024 by thezman

Note: A British man named Sam Melia has been convicted of speaking freely and faces prison time for it. He is a married man with a young family. If you feel inclined to kick in a few bucks to help him out, do so here. You can also buy something from his family’s online shop. Their tea is exceptional.

Heard a good new song lately? Given the demographics of this site the answer is most likely negative but there are some young people here. If their answer is yes, it is going to be something from the hip-hop genre. Of course, given the demographics of this site they would probably not admit to it. This was the number one hip-hop song last year, in case you are curious. This one was number two, suggesting that the worst form of music has managed to get worse.

When it comes to what most people reading this would call popular music, the results are not much better. This was the most played “rock” song of 2023. One cannot help but wonder if it was created by AI due to its generic power-pop sound. This is the second most played “rock” song, which is not terrible, but it sounds more like a country tune than a rock song. In fact, it was number three on the country charts. This song was the most played song on the country stations.

You can go through the music charts and listen to the top-10 in each category each year and find songs that are pleasant and songs that are hilariously terrible. Miley Cyrus should cut back on that five pack a day habit and spend the savings on some people who can write music that make some sense. The fun part about scanning these music lists is there are many comically stupid entries that got pushed into the top-40 by the mega corporations that control the music business.

When it comes to what most people reading this consider rock-and-roll, the landscape has been barren for a long time. Who is the best guitar player in a rock band that is under the age of forty? No one knows. He probably does not exist because rock music does not exist as a genre anymore. If you want to hear that sort of music you are going to be buying or streaming stuff from thirty, forty or fifty years ago. Even young people who want that style reach back to the oldies.

The question is why has the popular music landscape become a barren desert of corporate product? There are still plenty of young whites who would listen to knew guitar music. Blacks still like things like soul and rhythm and blues. Even blues music could have an audience if anyone bothered. This post by Brian Niemeier goes into the reasons why popular music, especially rock music, has collapsed. He did an earlier post on the same topic discussing different reasons.

Not discussed is the culture of the managerial class. The people running the music business are no different from the people running the other centers of cultural production in that they have had the antiwhite bug for a long time. The music industry went all in on hip-hop in the 1990’s. Part of it was the belief that it was a fresh market and part of it was cultural. For managerial types, hip-hop was cool because it was not white, while rock-and-roll was pale, male and stale.

One result of the money drying up for all forms of music that appeals to white people is white people stopped making that music. They stopped learning to play instruments, stopped forming garage bands and stopped cutting their teeth at clubs. Elementary school bands are full of Asian girls playing violin. There has been a steady decline in the sale of musical instruments over the last few decades, even though technology has made it easier to record at home and make it sound good.

For rock music, this has killed the feeder system for generating new sounds and new acts that made the genre possible. Even if young people were still dreaming of being a rock star, the clubs where they would learn how to perform have dried up. The culture around going to club to find new sounds and new acts has also dried up. When the music industry shifted to hip-hop and corporate pop, they also shut down the development system for creating various genres of rock music.

We are starting to see this in other areas. The military is worried that white guys from the South are no longer signing up as in the past. This decline in white participation is due to the same factors as the decline in white music. If you make your institution openly hostile to white people, they will politely avoid your institution. Before long, you will lose the ability to win them back. A good rule of life for institutions is that once you go black the whites are never coming back.

Race is not the only reason for the decline of rock music. As those Niemeier posts explain, the industry is suffering from systemic failure. There lies another useful example that applies elsewhere. The federal government failed in its duty to maintain a marketplace for music. They allowed corporate players to monopolize radio stations, which coincided with the consolidation of the music business. The result is a narrow system that operates as skimming operation.

We see this in tech. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems and office productivity products. Innovation is non-existent in this area. Apple and Google own the mobile telecommunications industry. Despite the hype, there has been nothing interesting in mobile computing for a decade or more. The whole tech space is consolidating to the point where every business will be forced onto one of a few clouds of the cloud computing leviathan.

Of course, all of this can be chalked up to the end of empire. Empires are the result of failed societies, not successful ones. The Roman Empire grew out of the rubble of the failed Roman Republic. For half of its existence the Roman Empire operated like a mafia bust-out operation. The same is happening with the American empire, which grew out of the republic that died at Gettysburg. The main difference with the American empire and prior empires is speed due to the state of technology.

The shame of it is that like the remaining passengers on the Titanic, most Americans would enjoy some good tunes as the empire sinks under the water. That is not looking like it is going to happen, given the state of music. Who knows? Maybe Miley Cyrus will get lucky and made a good song for end-stage America. Or more likely, maybe a cage full of monkeys with some instruments will be the new Oliver Anthony and create an authentic anthem for this age.

The Clash Of Visions

Posted on January 24, 2024 by thezman

The New Hampshire primary turned out about how most sober minded people expected, with Trump cruising to victory. As expected, regime media and those in the anti-Trump cult have quickly moved onto other things. Even though the narrative on this election has been wrong so far, these people were sure the gods would deliver them from the terrible Orange Man in New Hampshire. Now they will update the script for the South Carolina primary in a few weeks.

Even though the New Hampshire primary was not a surprise to normal people, it does have a few things worth noting. One is the turnout. In 2016 when all of this was new and exciting, about two hundred and sixty thousand people voted on the Republican side, with Trump getting one hundred thousand votes. This time, with the results known in advance, three hundred thousand voted on the Republican side and Trump got one hundred and sixty thousand votes or fifty-four percent.

Further, exit polling says that only about a third of the people voting would call themselves “MAGA”, by which they mean part of the Trump movement. We do not have similar polling from 2016, but it is reasonable to say that most of Trump’s vote during those crazy days would declare themselves part of the movement. You also have to consider the fact that even Trump’s most loyal fans would find it weird to ask them if they were part of the MAGA movement, as if it is a club.

Even so, it says that people were voting for different reasons this time. Various anti-Trump groups poured money into the state to boost other candidates. Mikki Haley spent over twenty million on ads. The DNC spent millions last year getting their voters to switch to undeclared so they could vote in the GOP primary. About half of the Republican primary voters were undeclared, so it is reasonable to assume many will vote Democrat in the general.

What the regime tried to do with a fair bit of success is turn the Republican primary into a general election by flooding the voting booth with Democrats. It explains why Haley dropped her “tough conservative gal from the South” routine and morphed into “I want to speak to the manager” feminist hero. Her people had her go out and praise Hillary Clinton because they knew that half the voters probably voted for Hillary over Trump and would like to do it again.

It also tells us something about the dynamics of this election. This is not the 2016 election where people voted for Trump for the same reason the drunk guy in the crowd mooned the king or shouted derogatory things at him. In 2016, Trump was for many voters a harmless protest vote. In 2024 it means something different because things have gotten much worse since then. Note that for the first time primary voters put immigration at the top of their concerns.

There is something else here that may be driving a new dynamic in this election and that is the open shenanigans in this process. Think about the sort of person who schemes up a plan to get Democrats to vote in the other party’s primary a year in advance in order to subvert the will of the voters. This is a level of sociopathy that few people think is possible. Serial killers are not this devious. The people claiming to defend democracy are now out front with these schemes.

Of course, such a scheme only works if there are people willing to do it. Years of interacting with people who put up signs on their lawn promoting the latest thing is slowly changing how normal people see things. Thirty years ago, the typical suburban peasant thought they just needed find the right person to say the truth the right way and these people would see the light. Today, the typical suburban peasant thinks the woman with the BLM sign might be better off in another country.

What the typical suburban peasant is waking up to, even though he cannot articulate it, is that we are living in a clash of visions. The people on the other side of that sign explaining all the things that go on in that house have a view of the world that is completely different from most people. That vision often assumes that the people without such signs are what stands between them and the future. The vision of the self-anointed says the benighted are the problem.

This is because when they talk about “democracy” they are not talking about the mechanics of picking office holders. They imagine a society in which all of the moral questions have been solved. The only thing left is figuring out how to quickly attain diversity, inclusion and equality. Further, they assume that everyone must want this, unless they are evil, so the only reason we have not “made progress” is that these evil people are using shenanigans to confuse the masses.

In contrast, the typical suburban peasant imagines a world where he has a job he enjoys, friends to grill with and watch ball games and a chance give his kids a better life than he got from his parents. For him, democracy is about picking the best office holders who will take turns buggering through the problems. In most cases, the typical suburban peasant prefers the guy who will do very little, as things could always get worse so best not to rock the boat too hard.

It is not just that one vision is radical and utopian and the other conservative and pragmatic, but that the former sees the destruction of the latter as a proper and necessary part of their program. What we are seeing in this election could be a sign that the typical suburban peasant is waking up to this reality. It is not just that the middle-aged white woman with the BLM sign is wrong, but that she represents a danger to the life and welfare of the typical suburban peasant.

Whether or not this awakening among the typical suburban peasant is happening can be debated, but we can be sure he has yet to arrive at the solution. There can be no compromise in this clash of visions. When the ends of one side are the destruction of the other, the only plausible response for the other side is to seek the same. As more suburban peasants wake up to the reality of sign lady, more will inevitably arrive at the only solution that guarantees their survival.

Replacement Theory

Posted on January 23, 2024 by thezman

Imagine a medieval city is under siege and the prince of the city is in his palace supposedly working with his advisors on how to break the siege. The people of the city are rationing food as no one knows how long the siege will last. The prince and his people, however, are living the good life. Now, imagine that the prince is quietly plotting a way to fling open the gates of the city at night so that the besiegers can rush in and have their way with the people of the city.

It sounds like an impossible scenario, but that is the world in which we find ourselves with regards to the immigration issue. The Constitution gives the federal government control over immigration policy. Supreme court rulings have recognized Congress as having plenary power over all aspects of immigration. It is one of those powers exclusive to the federal government. Congress passes laws on immigration and it is the duty of the executive to enforce them.

Of course, that is not happening. Congress has been refusing to pass sensible immigration laws for decades now. Whenever the Republicans have power, they start talking about amnesty. When Democrats have power, they start talking about granting citizenship to every human on earth. Meanwhile, the executive branch does nothing to enforce the existing laws. Instead, they scheme with both sides to increase the flow of illegals, while waxing romantic about the glories of immigration.

Like the prince at the beginning, the sovereign is deliberately failing in its basic duty while scheming to harm the people. The recent court ruling that will allow the border patrol to dismantle the razor wire barriers installed by the state of Texas on one part of the border illustrates the problem. The Biden administration went to court so they can throw open the gates in order to encourage more illegal immigration. SCOTUS sided with them until the issue is fully resolved.

Now, it is important to note that the court ruling was limited and temporary, as the issue is part of a larger case in the Fifth Circuit. It is also important to note that this should have been a 9-0 ruling, but four justices are alarmed enough about the problem to break with a century of precedent. Again, immigration, including border control, is a power reserved exclusively to the federal government. Under normal conditions, this case never reaches the Supreme Court.

The immigration issue is not an isolated issue. People engaged with this issue often miss the fact that the federal government is derelict in its duties across the board and often colludes with those seeking to destroy the people. This Breitbart story on systematic corporate theft is a good example. These companies steal your activity, which is your property, in order to use it against you. The government literally exists to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

This Twitter thread about a firm called Pendulum, that exists to help powerful people use that stolen data to create disinformation campaigns, is another example of how the government not only ignores its duties, but colludes with the enemies of the people in order to harm the people. That company is literally a corporate bullshit generator, but instead of being a source of entertainment, it seeks to be one of the many hands of the state throwing open the gates to the barbarians.

The point of the ruler, the reason for this role to exist, whether it is a prince, a warrior-king, a republic or the present managerial elite, is to protect the people. That is the primary reason for there to be a ruler or ruling class. Government is a protection racket whether it operates by consent or by imposition. A prince who flings open the gates to the barbarians or a managerial elite that defines itself in hostile opposition to the people is a contradiction that cannot endure very long.

This is why the court will struggle with this immigration case. It has never had to deal with a federal government that deliberately undermines the rationale for its own existence in this way. Instead, the court is equipped to deal with disputes between the states and the federal government or individuals and the government. It always assumes that the issue at hand is the government trying to do too much. The prince flinging open the gates is truly novel.

This brings up another question. Is the failure of the political class with regards to immigration a cause or a symptom? In other words, is what we are seeing deliberate or simply due to the collapse of the political system? Politics is the puppet show the ruling class puts on for us, so maybe the political dysfunction we are seeing is a reflection of a ruling class that is in crisis. Maybe the reason the state cannot perform its basic functions is it no longer able to predictably accomplish them.

All of this is beside the point for the people. Like those people hiding in the city thinking their prince will come up with a plan to break the siege, Americans continue to assume the system will eventually right itself. In the days of princes, when the people lost faith in their prince, they abandoned him to his enemies. Just as it is axiomatic that the primary duty of the state is protection, it is axiomatic that whenever the state fails in this duty the people must find a way to replace it.

False Choices

Posted on January 17, 2024 by thezman

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

Under normal circumstance, when someone makes a credible threat on your life, the response is not to offer a compromise or pretend the threat is not real, but that is exactly what conservatives are doing in the face of these pogroms. Christopher Rufo says the only option to these antiwhite pogroms is for white people to embrace a colorblind morality. In other words, white people should put all their energy into a fantasy program rather than defend themselves.

The vision of a colorblind society may be appealing, but the fact that it does not exist and has never existed is called a clue. Whites have displayed some capacity to live under such a regime, but nonwhites clearly cannot exist this way. Outside of European lands, the skins game is the rule. We will never see non-European societies fling open their doors and invite the world into their lands. As we see every day, when these people enter European lands, they bring the skins game with them.

What Rufu is offering up is a false choice. You can put all your energy into this fantasy of a colorblind, multi-racial, multi-ethnic society or you can succumb to the antiwhite pogroms that are raging right now. The point of framing it this way is to eliminate other options, like whites joining the skins game. Not only does this framing sideline other more reasonable options, but it also subtly endorses the moral claim by the left that there is something immoral about whiteness.

Another example is this Elon Musk post in which he says, “Discrimination on the basis of anything other than merit is wrong.” The natural response should be, “who says?” but that is not what you see in the replies. Instead, everyone accepts the false choice that you can either allow nonwhites to play the skins game unopposed or you dream of a day when no one plays the skins game. Again, whites joining in on the skins game and maybe winning at it is off the table.

As an aside, his comment should make everyone’s skin crawl. He is saying that having personal preferences is immoral. Since all humans have tastes and preferences, a feature that makes up a large part of our nature, he is hoping to anathematize most of what makes us human. For Musk, the ideal human is a moist robot. This is the thinking that lies behind the culture war. With the right amount of force, people can be re-coded into what society needs or simply eliminated from the population.

Regardless, the point of his post is to foreclose the parsimonious option which is to let people discriminate for any reason they like. Free association was the foundation of America into the last century. The settlers to the New World literally acted on their belief that people should live where they want and with whom they want, which is why they got on boats and came to the wilderness. The immigrants of the 19th and 20th century acted on the same premise.

Of course, the ultimate false choice, the very heart of American conservatism, is the assertion that they cannot use the same tactics as their opponent or exact revenge when they have power, because that would make them as bad as the left. In other words, the choice presented as conservatism is to adhere to a set of rules that guarantee failure or succumb to some abstract conception of moral turpitude that is somehow worse than losing.

In the end, the culture war is not a clash of visions, but rather a struggle among white people about how best to avoid the fight. The winning side in this fight has always relied on some form of the false choice in order to prevent engaging the people called the left in the culture war. This means the path to victory in this civilizational struggle starts with overthrowing conservatism and its spiderweb of false choices. In its place is a new form of identity politics to counter the current identity politics.

DIE Another Day

Posted on January 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: There was no Sunday podcast this week. I got back from the new house and was simply too tired to do it. I may put the Sunday show on ice until I get the house finished, which means doing something else in its place. Behind the green door, there were two written items this week. A post about my trip to the witchdoctor and post about the aesthetics of modern cars. Subscribe here or here.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the massive food fight that erupted among the worst people over how the allegedly best people cheat like crazy. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the egalitarian blank slate religion of the Cloud People. In reality she was as synthetic as their empathy for people of color. Claudine Gay was a modern lawn jockey. Instead of standing on their lawn with a lantern, she held up her diplomas.

Then we have Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund guy who started this when Gay made unpleasant noises about Israel. He first threatened to withdraw funding and when that did not work, he went after her credentials. In a world of credentialism this was a declaration of war on the system. Soon the internet dug into Gay’s background and found examples of alleged plagiarism. Harvard then demoted her to being a million dollar a year political science instructor.

In response, MIT decided to get into the fight, and they leaked dirt to Business Insider about Ackman’s wife, who supposedly had a cut and paste problem too. It is ironic that people who are immune to the charge of hypocrisy thought they could use the charge of hypocrisy against people famously immune from the charge of hypocrisy. It is an example of how the hive mind operates. Once Ackman was declared outside the hive, he was no different from Trump or Hitler to the hive.

For his part, Ackman has declared a jihad against MIT. He is asking for volunteers to scan the academic work of everyone at MIT. He has also offered to fund the use of technology to expedite the process. Interestingly, the MIT president said all the same things as the Harvard and Penn presidents about Israel, but she has been immune from criticism to this point. Perhaps she thought the force field was not enough to protect her, so she launched this preemptive strike.

Again, it is hard not to enjoy this poo-flinging contest, but it obscures a reality at the heart of the whole thing. That is the logic of the egalitarian religion must lead them to these self-destructive ends. The reason for that is there is no way to reach the stated goals of this new religion without dismantling the standards and practices of the Western society that made the modern university possible. In other words, to dismantle whiteness they must dispense with the rules of whiteness.

The only reason Claudine Gay can exist is if the rules of the academy are changed to make it possible for her to exist. All along the way her mostly white advisors cut corners for her so she could move along through the system. They do this because it was the path of least resistance, but also for self-interest. They could subtly mention how they were once the advisor of this shining example of the new religion. This is social capital an academic can use for status seeking.

Systemic rule breaking is not confined to the grievance studies areas. The need to acquire totems of the new religion is everywhere on campus. The chemistry department at Rice University, for example, spends scarce resources on thirty different diversity and inclusion programs. The department now offers a for-credit course in Afrochemistry, which is taught by this woman. She will no doubt be lifted up on the shoulders of academics and socially promoted into a leadership role.

This all sounds fine except that when you populate your new system with people who are both incompetent and entitled, the results of that system will reflect this. The long running discussion about the decline of elite universities is centered around the fact the graduates are often astoundingly incompetent. The truth is, they may be incompetent at traditional things, but they are stars at the rules of the new system. The products of dismantling whiteness are good at dismantling whiteness.

The reason we have a crisis of competence in America is the managerial system is slowly being taken over by people who are only good at gaming the system to produce diverse, equitable and inclusive results. The managerial system is slowly being bent to the goal of denying its own existence. No one would dare hire Brooke Johnson to do chemistry, but she plays a role in who gets hired to do chemistry. Get enough Brooke Johnsons and Claudine Gays and the system begins to fail.

All of this was inevitable as soon as the moralizers of the mid-twentieth century declared a fatwa against nature. Once it was immoral to notice natural inequality and the fixed nature of people, the old system was doomed. The only permissible explanation for the persistent inequality was to blame the system and that meant destroying the system was the only moral path forward. The social promotion system is about maintaining the myth of egalitarianism.

That also means there is no way out for these elite colleges. Bill Ackman can expose all of them as plagiarists, cheats, and fools, but nothing will change because nothing can change as long as the core tenets of the faith remain. Unless Bill Ackman has a new religion for these people to embrace, they will burn the whole system to the ground before abandoning diversity, equity, and inclusion. This means the collapse of the university system is inevitable.

Imperial Outlook

Posted on January 3, 2024 by thezman

One of the many complaints in the brief against conservatives is that they care more about Israel than they do about the southern border. A similar complaint comes up with regards to the war in Ukraine. Professional conservatives do not care about the things that normal people think are important. Instead, professional conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, spend their days convincing normal people that the concerns of Israel or the Kagan cult matter more than the opioid problem.

While this is true, professional conservatives are not the ones spearheading this approach to politics. Look at the other side and you see the same. The people we call the Left spend their time telling the world that the mundane things that can and should be addressed by government must take a back seat to the bogeyman. Joe Biden is kicking off his campaign by visiting places where the bogeyman was seen doing the things they claim the bogeyman does.

In other words, it is not just so-called conservatives who spend their time focused on things over the rainbow. It is that our politics, in general, deliberately shifts the focus from the local and practical to the distant and obscure. No one running for anything talks about the fact that America has a $34 trillion dollar debt and that we spend almost $15,000 per person per year on medical services. America is a sick society that is becoming too broke to mend itself.

In fairness, a candidate who ran on a platform of deregulating the health care rackets and restoring order to the legal system would have no audience. Over several generations the people have been conditioned to care more about the bogeyman and Israel than their own neighborhood. A practical candidate could go into a suburb strewn with trash and illegal aliens promising to clean up both and the locals would demand to know his position on the war in Gaza or abortion.

This was not always the case. Within living memory congressional candidates would show up in their district to ask for votes. The whole “kissing babies” thing was a joke because it was a real thing that happened. Not only did politicians mingle with the voters, but office holders also responded to questions and complaints from them. Not so long-ago elected officials held town-style gatherings where normal people in the area could show up and ask questions.

Nothing like that happens now. The closest you get is Trump flying around to rural airports to hold his raucous rallies. Joe Biden will run his 2024 campaign from his beach mansion in Delaware. Occasionally they will produce a television event that makes it seem like he is in front of real people. Most likely these will be done using modern technology as he is incapable of forming a sentence now. His avatar will talk about the bogeyman and maybe Ukraine or Israel.

What we are experiencing is an inverted version of America. The founding of the country was by people who had the exact opposite view of the world. They came to the new world for selfish reasons. They did not want “freedom” or “liberty” and they did not give a damn about American values. They wanted cheap land and an opportunity to provide a better life for themselves and their family. Their patriotism, if it existed at all, was focused on the things close to them.

Well into the 19th century the typical American had little reason to care about the federal government because it was far away and did nothing that was of a great concern to the average person. The town council, on the other hand, was important because it did important things. People cared about those offices and who held them because those people had the power to do things that mattered locally, and the people were primarily focused on local matters.

The point here is that empire does not just invert the sensibilities of the ruling class but also the people in the empire. Throughout the Cold War, Finland was sandwiched between the two great empires. As a normal country with normal citizens, they focused on what was best for Finland and the Finnish people. They did not worry themselves about communism versus capitalism, other than when they needed to placate one or the other side of the Cold War.

Now that Finland has submitted itself to the empire, the primary focus of the Finnish state will be the bogey man and the enemies of the empire. Finnish politicians will feel the need to have a position on Israel. They will shake their fists at the current enemy of the empire. Meanwhile, the borders will be left open, and the social capital will be monetized and hauled away by the usual suspects, but Finns will feel good about hating the current bogeyman of the empire.

It is the nature of empire to flip the normal relationships upside down so that people focus on what is far away rather than what is near. Right now, conservatives are cheering that Harvard replaced their black lesbian president with someone who looks like he is from an antisemitic pamphlet. Meanwhile the public schools are full of pedophiles and drug dealers. No one should care about Harvard’s president, but they should care about who is running the local schools.

It very well may be that the antidote to the problems of empire is to stop thinking like the subject of an empire. When people care more about the school board elections than the presidential election, it is no longer possible for the beneficiaries of empire to frame elections around the issues of empire. Imagine if the next GOP debate was about the color of crime rather than how much everyone loves Israel. Of course, no one currently in the race would qualify under that system.

This is why empires must always run their course. The empire is born and soon the focus of everyone is on the maintenance of the empire. The people in the empire come to define themselves in terms of the empire. The empire then fades, and the people have to relearn how to be normal again. The empire must end before people can replace their imperial identity with something new. It is why the only true patriots are those who oppose the Global American Empire.

The Myth Of Dual Loyalty

Posted on January 2, 2024 by thezman

Over the holidays, a bit of controversy erupted when in an interview, Tucker Carlson noted that certain people, like Ben Shapiro, are much more concerned about Israel than the people of the United States. The bat signal was immediately lit, and Israel supporters started chanting about how Ben Shapiro is a patriot and Carlson’s criticism smacked of the old dual loyalty “canard” from a mythical time in America’s past when Jews were forced to live under a cloud of suspicion about their loyalty.

Because this is the media age, it was not hard to see the invisible hand of coordination in the responses from the usual suspects. Here we have Andrew Klavan posting the same thing as Ben Domenech, who posted the same thing as Kurt Schlichter who said the same this as Chris Loesch and you get the idea. A memo went out to their Twitter influencers to boost the idea of Ben Shapiro being a patriot. The object of his patriotism, however, is never mentioned.

This is an old trick to avoid the actual question. The pro-Israel lobby is not addressing the issue at the heart of Tucker’s criticism, which is that people like Ben Shapiro and his defenders care more about people in other countries than Americans. Instead, they want Tucker and his fans to address this made-up idea that Jews were subject to bigotry in the past on the grounds they have dual loyalty. Instead of addressing the point, they shift the focus to another topic.

Of course, the concept of dual loyalty itself is the result of a similar tactic used in the past to shield Zionist from criticism. The “dual loyalty” concept is a product of the 20th century, created by the Israel lobby to obscure the fact that we suddenly had this new force in politics that demanded the government care more about the interests of Israel than the interests of Americans. People who raised questions about the Israel lobby got smeared as antisemites.

For most of American history and probably European history, the concept of dual loyalty was unknown, for the simple reason people understood that a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can have only one true loyalty. You may have conditional loyalty to other people and ideas, but those conditional loyalties have to give way to your primary loyalty. You were primarily a Christian, an Englishman, a loyal subject of the empire or a Jew. That is the nature of loyalty.

That was always the criticism of Jews, that their first loyalty was always going to be to their people, no matter their conditions. In America into the 1970’s it was common for people to note, often approvingly, that Jews stick together. The implication was that they cared primarily about their people. Jewish comedians had jokes about this that had a punchline, “but is it good for the Jews” that played on this well-known and generally accepted reality of the Jewish people.

It should be noted that into the 20th century this was same reasoning was applied to Catholics, who were assumed to be primarily loyal to the Church. This was a carry over from the schisms within Christendom. Protestants in Protestant countries could accuse Catholics of being loyal to the Pope rather than the king. Even today, Catholic judges have to answer questions about their faith. Jewish liberals attacked Amy Coney Barrett for being a faithful Catholic, especially on abortion.

The clever trick about this “dual loyalty” stuff is it not only shifted the focus from Jews onto their critics, but it made noticing what everyone, including Jews, had accepted for hundreds of years into a taboo. Noticing that Ben Shapiro was an emotional wreck over the Hamas attack, but he blatantly states that he does not care about the health and welfare of the white people is somehow immoral. It is a form of the motte-and-bailey argument that is so popular with the Left.

Of course, guys like Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak do not have dual loyalty, despite having dual citizenship. It is impossible to have dual loyalty. Their primary loyalty is to their people, which is why they wear the funny little hats. That is the point of the hats, to tell the world they are not of the world, but separate. This is an age-old way people identify with a specific group and show their loyalty to that group by physically separating from everyone else in society.

There is nothing immoral about this and there is nothing immoral about noticing it, but it does raise questions, which is why we have the “dual loyalty” stuff. Tolerating a minority whose primary interests lie outside the majority must be limited. That limit is the interests of the majority, whose primary loyalty is to themselves. It means Ben Shapiro cannot pretend to speak for the interests of the majority. He must appeal to them as an outsider on behalf of outsiders.

This creates an obvious problem, so what people like Ben Shapiro prefer to do is conflate the interest of Americans with the interests of Israel so that questioning the behavior of Israel is equivalent to burning the American flag. To their credit, this rhetorical game has worked on many people. Anyone questioning the proportionality of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack or criticizing the wholesale killing of civilians is unironically accused of being unpatriotic.

The fact that Tucker has not been hurled into the void over this speaks to the changing nature of public consciousness. America and the West are heading into a time for choosing in which people must think about the question of loyalty. Are you more loyal to an abstract concept or to people who look like you, sound like you and share your same concerns about your community? We are entering a time when people begin to think about their hierarchy of loyalties and their identity as people.

It also speaks to the fact that the old pseudo-loyalties are breaking down. When the concept of American has been watered down to the point where it often means caring more for strangers than your own family, it is not hard to see why increasing numbers of Americans are no longer moved by calls to patriotism. Ben Shapiro waving the American flag and Israeli flag in front of the suckers is not working because the suckers are no longer moved by the American flag.

It is natural for minorities to put the interests of their minority group first, as their identity is tied to their minority status. In a society composed of minorities, there can be no patriotism as everyone’s primary loyalty will be to their group, so the good of the whole is always a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all. In other words, America will be populated with people who think about their people, just as Ben Shapiro thinks of his people, but they will just wear different hats.

Ungovernable Costs

Posted on December 28, 2023 by thezman

Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.

One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.

This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.

Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.

It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”

This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.

That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.

Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.

Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.

One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.

Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.

When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.

In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.

In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.

What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.

Liberal Intolerance

Posted on December 26, 2023 by thezman

There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

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