The Tyranny Of The Stupid

Posted on May 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the paradox of tolerance, a post about the growing Ukraine quagmire and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

In The Past is a Future Country, Ed Dutton and J.O.A. Rayner-Hilles, argue that the West is about to be swamped by an unsustainable wave of stupid people. This is not the result of immigration, but rather the culmination of an evolutionary process that began in the Industrial Revolution. Darwinian selection weakened along with the increase in living standards. The result is a steady increase in narcissistic stupid people who undermine the fundamentals of Western society.

In this post, Ed Dutton makes the point that liberal female politicians are getting dumber, as a result of this process he outlined in his book. He relies on two examples, Sanna Marin of Finland and Angela Rayner of Britain, to make his point. Both women are on what we insist on calling the Left and both women are morons. Not only are they stupid, but they appear to have come from stupid parents. They are Nth generation morons who have risen to the top of politics.

It is an amusing and satisfying read for people who think of themselves on the Right, even if he is making sweeping claims from just two examples. For as long as anyone can recall, the people we call the Left have claimed that their opponents are unsophisticated morons who should be dismissed. Having this turned on its head with the use of the human sciences is good fun, but it may be missing the real cause for the great dumbing down of Western politics.

The ideal politician in a liberal democracy has an extremely high verbal dexterity along with an extremely low degree of self-awareness. In fact, the best politicians of this age are glib narcissists who have never done anything useful. Much of the panic over Donald Trump is due to the fact he worked in the dreaded private sector. Having had anything other than a ceremonial position in the real economy is so strange in politics that the political class naturally views it as a defect.

The reason for this is despite the fact we insist on calling it politics, there is little in the way of politics happening in a modern liberal democracy. Everyone in the political system agrees on the moral claims. As Marx noted, when you get the morality settled, there is no need for politics. Put another way, once everyone agrees on the goal, then you are left with a debate about how best to achieve it. The barrier to entry in modern politics is the moral questions.

As a result, the selection pressure in politics is for people who will never color outside the lines and always promote the latest thing. The more natural someone is at conforming to the prevailing orthodoxy, the less likely they are to question what is demanded of them. Of course, if they are especially good at appearing enthusiastic about the latest thing, then all the better. The people in charge are always on the hunt for the glib toady who can really sell the latest thing.

As we see with actors, a lack of self-awareness is key. Someone who is painfully aware of how they look to others, or worries about how they look to others, is not going to be a particularly good performer. Humiliating yourself for laughs or applause works best when you cannot imagine the concept of humiliation. It is why the narcissistic moron is a well-known type in the entertainment world. An idiot who thinks highly of himself, but never questions the script is an ideal actor.

Just as an actor who easily “believes in the project” is always in demand, the politician who is always ready to run with the latest thing is always rewarded. His donors will make sure he is kept in the lifestyle he thinks he deserves. His party will always rely on him to take point on the latest thing. Joe Biden made a long career in politics being a narcissistic simpleton, despite stealing everything in sight. Joe Biden is the perfection of modern democratic politics.

It is not just electoral politics where we see this process, but the politics of the managerial elite as well. David French is a goofy looking buffoon but he has risen to the top of the political media because he has no shame. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to shine amongst the other simpletons. French is the combination of oleaginous rumpswab and narcissistic simpleton that has come to define the chattering classes in the United States.

All of this is the result of democracy. Not the mechanics of voting, but the belief that the general will is the moral authority. Once a society accepts this claim, turns the mob into a god, then moral conformity must follow. After all, if there is no agreement, the general will is unknown, then the people are left with no moral authority. Therefore, the solution is to impose a moral consensus and religiously oppress dissent. The only way democracy can work is if everyone agrees.

This is why Western societies are now policed by a volunteer army of simpletons, prodded along by the autocrats. Democracy collapses if there is not a perceived agreement on the moral questions. Even though the people who rise to the top are stupid, they understand the need for consensus. This is why they so enthusiastically impose the latest thing on the public. Who they are depends upon the belief that everyone supports the latest thing.

None of this is to say that Dutton is wrong about Darwinian selection pressure declining with material prosperity. That is certainly true. Smart people made society safer for stupid people, which allowed the stupid to multiply like tribbles. The reason the stupid are dominating politics, however, is that democracy selects for stupidity because stupid people are much more likely to support the moral consensus. Poverty would not arrest our descent into democratic imbecility.

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Willing Accomplices

Posted on January 3, 2023 by thezman

If one were looking for a reason for why the conservative movement failed so completely you would be spoiled for choice. Most people would point to the fact that despite having billions of dollars and majority support on key issues, conservatives managed to conserve nothing. Others would point out that many of the people claiming to be conservative were more concerned with maintaining good relations with their friends on the Left than advancing conservative policy.

Often this is where you hear some form of the Hoffer quote about great causes becoming religions, corporations or rackets. It is a great observations and certainly true, especially with regards to the conservative movement. Any system that produces a sanctimonious simpleton like David French has long since stopped being a serious political movement. Most of conservatism is a racket, while the rest is just a jobs program for philosophy majors.

While true, these are symptoms rather than causes. The real cause of conservative failure was the race issue. Once they conceded the moral high ground to the Left over the issue of race, the Right was forced to embrace the blank slate and egalitarianism in order to make any sense of it. You cannot agree that unequal results are immoral if you also claim that Mother Nature does not distribute her gifts equally. You have deny nature in order to embrace the moral claim.

Once conservatives accepted the starting premise of the Left, they condemned themselves to forever embracing the Left’s conclusions. You can see this in the fight of the antiwhite pogroms called CRT and DEI. This recent National Review post claims that conservatives can win the race debate. That sounds good until you read the actual text of the post and see that the secret formula for winning is another version of the internet meme, “the conservative case for…”

Here are the key lines. “We must see racial disparities where they exist and acknowledge racial trauma as real, because for many Americans, it is real. Responding to the trauma of racial discrimination by simply expressing a commitment to a race-neutral ideal is a bad move.” In other words, the so-called conservatives have to accept the premise of the Left. They see winning as proving to their masters on the Left that they are properly trained on the issue of race.

Now, the author of the piece is an interesting character. We can be sure that his ancestors did not arrive on the Mayflower. He is an example of what conservatives tell us is the new model American. His people arrived recently and as if by magic they are not only as American as everyone else, but they now have a duty to criticize the errors of your ancestors and explain how you can make things right. South Asians have embraced the skins game with a passion.

There is another name for this. Isaac Willour is a fine example of the Ingrate-American, a new arrival who does nothing but lecture white people for not having done enough to make his stay comfortable. White Americans could be forgiven for wondering why in the hell they need to listen to this interloper about anything. Maybe instead of lecturing us about our ancestors, he should be thanking us for a life that the civilization of his ancestors could never provide to him.

Putting that aside, once you concede that racial disparities require your attention and that they are the fault of white people, you sign onto whatever pogroms the Left launches on white people. There can be no salvation for white people until those disparities are gone, but since that is an impossibility, the only choice left is a forever war on whiteness, which is a war on white people. This is the logical end of the conservative embrace of the blank slate.

One you concede that people are amorphous blobs that can be made into anything, the cause of observable disparity shifts from the individual to society. Once you buy into the idea that all men are created equal, you concede that any observed inequality must be the result of some malevolent force in society. Once conservatives signed onto these two concepts, they committed themselves to a war on the majority population in the name of equality, equity and justice.

This is how conservatives went from Bill Buckley arguing with James Baldwin over the issue of civil rights to a world where recent arrivals lecture the white population about the crimes of their ancestors. After all, if all you have is the claim that all men are created equal, endowed with natural rights, what argument can you have against some guy getting off his flying carpet and claiming to be your equal? As your equal, does he not have the right to judge you and your ancestors?

Of course, this degenerate thinking pollutes everything. After all, how can one oppose open borders when you owe such a huge debt to the world? How can one question the economic arrangements when the world is counting on your sacrifice? How can you oppose community wrecking policies when you wanting to live a peaceful life among people like yourself is clearly white supremacy? Once the blood libel gets going, it becomes the universal weapon.

This is why conservatism has been a failure in America. Once they signed off on the blank slate and egalitarianism, they had no way to dispute any of the claims made by the Left, so they were reduced to being their unwilling accomplices. Eventually, their masters lost patience and now conservatives compete with one another to see who can be the most enthusiastic for the latest progressive fad. Conservatism is a shadow that cheers as the Left flits from one cause to the next.

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Some Regimeology

Posted on October 26, 2022 by thezman

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Regimeology is a concept that needs much broader interest, as it is becoming an essential tool to understanding the current age. As the regime blacks out its windows and boards up the exits, the only way to understand what is happening inside the black box that is the ruling elite is to analyze the actions and media statements to then tease out some explanation for what we can observe. Like Kremlinology, it is the only tool we have to understand what is happening inside the system.

We have something new to analyze. The so-called progressive caucus sent a letter to the White House and the senior members of the inner party suggesting they were not onboard with the Ukraine war. They were careful to not break with official dogma on the war, but they were signaling to their supporters that they may at some point begin to question Ukraine policy. It was a very tepid bit of pushback, but they made the letter public so their fans could see it.

The reason they did this is the antiwar left is freaking out about the war and the fact that no one in the party they support is opposing it. The Bernie Sanders wing is supposed to be opposed to these wars and the machine behind them. Yet in this case they are silently nodding along with the warmongers. A group of antiwar people ambushed Sandy Cortez at an event where she was spouting neocon lines about the war and the resulting video was a huge embarrassment for her.

It was a nice little peak inside how the regime uses the far left to manipulate the various tribes that make up the Democratic coalition. They let these people speak against regime policy as a pressure release, but the unwritten rule is they can never threaten to block regime policy. It is the same theater the outer party uses to keep conservatives showing up to the polls. The guys at Trump rallies wearing tricorn hats are not the only chumps exploited by this system.

The interesting bit here is how quickly the hammer came down. The Biden White House and senior party members held an emergency meeting and then threatened the progressive caucus with death if they did not recant. We do not know the exact nature of the threats, but the speed with which the apostates recanted and their groveling tone suggest genuine fear. Whatever was said to them was serious enough to have them groveling in public within hours.

Just in case anyone missed the point, the regime then sent Bernie Sanders out to chastise the progressives for being wrong. Sanders has spent his life railing against the military industrial complex. He has opposed every military action, even those sponsored by his party. Now he sounds like Bill Kristol after a few too many drinks. Bernie is not just supporting the war; he is supporting the war dogma behind it. He felt he needed to get that out into the public domain.

The old internet meme about knowing who is in charge by thinking about who you are not allowed to criticize works here. If you want to know what it is important to the regime, think about what cannot be questioned. It is clear that they will tolerate no dissent on Ukraine policy, not even from the people they use to manipulate the left-wing activist class. In other words, they are willing to lose the support of their activist base in order to defend their Ukraine policy.

This is why the outer party has been silent on the war. There is no support for the Ukraine war policy, so the opposition party should be waving this around as part of the argument against their opponents. Most Americans would like to see a negotiated settlement to a problem they do not think is our problem. Despite the overwhelming support for a moderate position, everyone in the outer party is just as extreme as everyone in the inner party.

The question is why has the ruling class pushed all of their chips into the middle of the table on this issue? Objectively it is a bad bet. Ukraine is a backward and deeply corrupt country with no real chance of winning this war. The only reason it has gone this far is some version of why Bolshevism succeeded. The old line was that communism was the result of Jewish brains, Latvian swords and Russian stupidity. This war is the product of neocon paranoia, American arms and Russian stupidity.

That may be one clue as to why Washington is obsessed with this war. It is the last stand for the post-Cold War consensus and the neocon place within it. A settlement with the Russians on Ukraine would lead to a settlement on many other issues, like the wars against Syria and Iran. If you can make a deal with the Russians in one area, then there is no reason to not make a deal in other areas. In other words, the neocons need Russia as the eternal enemy in order to exist.

Another possible reason is the general paranoia of the aging leadership. Old people in power naturally get suspicious of the next generation. Look around Washington and across the board you see ossified geezers locked in place. Rather than the paranoia of one or two fossils it is a culture of paranoia among a gerontocracy. The Ukraine war just happens to be the issue through which they are exercising their intolerance of dissent, but it could be any issue.

Of course, there is always graft. Hundreds of billions are flowing into what is now a giant money laundering operation. This is the bust out of all bust outs and every serious player in Washington is getting a taste. The only place more dangerous than the area between a principled conservative and money is the area between a committed progressive and the same pile of money. As the saying goes, never mess with a man’s money or his women. Got that Jack?

Regardless, it suggests that the regime sees this war as one they cannot afford to lose, much in the same way Washington viewed Vietnam fifty years ago. Back then, that worthless backwater was the hill to die on for reasons no one could explain, but no one was allowed to question until it was too late. It is ironic that a generation that was born in the protests against the Vietnam war is closing the show by making the same errors policy makers made with regards to Vietnam policy.

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Stochastic Reality

Posted on August 18, 2022 by thezman

One of the stranger things to come from the collection of sub-cults that make up the modern Left is the concept of stochastic terrorism. In the hands of the believers, it is not so much a concept as an incantation. They chant it online in response to anything that contradicts their beliefs. On Twitter, for example, they believe that if enough believers chant it in response to a tweet they do not like, the gods of on-line moderation will strike down the offending tweet and maybe the tweeter.

Taken literally, it is a meaningless expression. The first dictionary definition of stochastic is random and the second is “involving chance or probability.” The word comes from the Greek word “to guess” and has been used in various fields to describe a range of probabilities within a process. Terrorism, of course, is the use of violence and fear to achieve an ideological aim. Taken together, stochastic terrorism would literally mean random violence to achieve a political aim.

As is often the case, it has two meanings in the cult of the modern Left. One is the purely emotional definition, which is always the primary one. Stochastic terrorism is anything that upsets the user by disconfirming her beliefs. Someone posting crime statistics, for example, is accused of stochastic terrorism because crime statistics contradict left-wing beliefs about society. The phrase is simply a way to mark someone as a heretic or blasphemer.

Just as Eskimos allegedly have many words for snow, the modern Left has many ways to identify a blasphemer. The logic behind the claim about Eskimos and snow is they spend a lot of time around snow, so they have to master the topic. Similarly, the modern Left imagines itself surrounded by demonic enemies trying to hold back the tides of history, so they invest their time in studying those enemies. The result is a long list of words to describe the eyes in the darkness.

In this case, there is a larger meaning behind the incantation. What is meant by the phrase is that people posting unapproved things on-line are setting a range of possibilities by injecting the heresy into the system. Some unknown percentage of people exposed to the heresy will act on it. Some unknowable percentage of those people will commit an act of violence. Posting crime stats will eventually result in a white man killing a black body.

In other words, if a causal link can be imagined between speech and action, then the link is as real as if the speaker commanded the actor. We have quickly moved from the entirely implausible to the probable and then to highly probable. In the mind of the believer, what follows is the inevitable. You posting a graph about crime stats on Twitter will inevitably lead to violence against black bodies, which means you are the cause of crime against black bodies and therefore a terrorist.

This strikes normal people as insane and it is insane. It is another bit of evidence to suggest what we think of as the modern Left is a form of mental illness. The believers are in an imaginary war against imaginary enemies. Instead of walking down a public road, ranting and waving their arms at an invisible entity, they are on the internet harassing normal people just trying to have a conversation, in the belief that the conversation is part of a plot.

This is certainly true of the people on Twitter, which is something of a bug light for the mentally unstable. Mass on-line culture draws in the unstable looking for structure and they find it in the many subcultures. The institutional Left has weaponized these people as a defense against public scrutiny. Wherever normal people gather to talk about what is happening in the world, these weaponized crazies try to prevent it. They have been tuned to think normal people are the cause of their misery.

Further upstream, there is a logic to this idea of stochastic terrorism. The managerial elite struggles to justify their position, so they conjure these ideas as a way to legitimize their defensive actions. If unapproved thoughts can lead to unapproved actions, then their censorship actions are justified. They are not censoring speech. They are protecting the vulnerable from potential violence. No matter how improbable, they must prevent your words from causing the next 9/11.

This fits a general pattern with the American Left. The structure of their thought is to act on the hypothetical, rather than the actual. Look around at the range of issues popular on the Left and all of them are based on a firm belief in the hypothetical. It is possible that climate change is caused by humans. We do not know, but we have to pretend we know and act accordingly. We do not know if racism is a real thing, but we have to assume it is and make war on it.

This gets to something else about the American Left. They firmly believe they can immanentize whatever they can imagine. They create a mental construct, like what is behind the stochastic terrorism incantation. The construct is that speech leads to a range of actions. Then they leap from this model of reality to believing it is reality, more real that observable reality. Rather than interact with the real world, they operate within the constructed world as if it is reality.

This is how entirely novel ideas become bedrock truth in a an instant. Ten years ago, a man in a dress was a crossdresser. Then someone produced an alterative reality in which humans are assigned a gender at birth. Note the replacement of the word sex with the word gender. The former is used on living things while the latter is used for inanimate objects like pipe fittings and electrical connectors. The misappropriation of language is integral to their world building.

Once you cross from the biological reality of sex to the conjured reality of gender, the imaginer is free to reinvent humanity. The man in a dress is another gender and people can choose their genders. Reality becomes a video game where the player can create any character they like. It is a form of escapism, but this alterative reality quickly supplants actual reality for the player. Overnight, normal people find themselves around people who are sure biological reality terrorism.

The question is why now? What has gone wrong in the West leading to this epidemic of delusional madness? Is it a novel parasite that leads some people to slip from the bounds of reality into these imaginary worlds? Is it new at all or just an old part of the human condition we used to control? There is the possibility that mass communication has allowed these deranged people that have always been with us to form up in ways that were previously impossible.

It is hard to know, but what is clear is that these people are much better at conjuring alternative realities than the world is at defending reality. This increased ability to conjure alterative realities and then act on them means the odds of them conjuring a cataclysmic reality has gone up. Put another way, the longer they are allowed to freely create alternative realities, the more likely they are to conjure one that ends in the destruction of the West.

That gets to the universal of the Left. They project onto the world the things they hate about themselves or fear they may be doing. The emergence of stochastic terrorism as an incantation suggests that at some level, they sense their repeated rolling of the dice on reality must come up snake eye eventually. In other words, their very existence will result in some random act of destruction. If the death cult that is the Left rolls the dice enough times, they will get their wish.

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The End Times

Posted on July 25, 2022 by thezman

Note: The Monday Taki post is up. Not entirely related to this post. The Covid stuff does tie into the new religion. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door. There is the SubscribeStar version and the Substack version.

Many commenters have noted that American political discourse is much coarser and nastier today than it was a generation ago. The change can be dated to the arrival of the Clintons on the national stage in the 1990’s. They brought with them a crudeness that has become the norm in national politics. The great interregnum that lasted from the 1980’s into the 1990’s was replaced with an ugly and vulgar brand of politics that eventually led to the nasty and censorious present.

The question that never gets asked is why has public discourse become so nasty and unforgiving over the last three decades? The time for intolerance was the Cold War when mistakes could mean nuclear war with Russia. Instead, it was a time of relative tolerance compared to the present. Technological and material advances have made the margin for error extremely broad, yet the people seeking to shape public discourse carry on like one misused pronoun will end the world.

There can be no denying that the nastiness and intolerance is coming from the people we call the Left. The so-called conservatives continue to carry on like they are at high tea with the queen. The censorship, cancel culture and the harassment of dissenters all comes from the tribes of the Left. They are the ones trying to ruin people for explicitly stating obvious truths that suddenly run contrary to official dogma. The mobs threatening social order are all left-wing.

The funny thing is, the Left should be riding high, given that they control all of the high ground of American society. If the new fad on the Left is for “birthing people” to wear flowerpots on their heads, every news anchor will either have the flowerpot on her head or state in advance that they are not a person of uterus so they are respecting the culture of the birthing people. The Left has never had more power in American society, yet they have never been angrier.

One reason for the nastiness is left-wing politics has always attracted people who are full of self-loathing and have a resentment toward normal society. This was true in the French Revolution and it is true today. The conformity and identity provided by the hive mentality of radical politics is the appeal. Radical politics is by definition anti-social, so it attracts anti-social people. The phrase “happy go-lucky communist” is not a staple of our language for a reason.

Of course, the cult-like atmosphere of radical politics limits the ways in which a member can get attention. To get noticed by senior members of the hive means being more extreme than the rest of the hive. Without a limiting principle, virtue signaling quickly becomes a race to the most extreme position. This is how we quickly went from finding a legal accommodation to cohabitating homosexuals to a world where the Left demands that child molesters in drag have unlimited access to grammar schools.

Then there is the fact that people into left-wing politics tend to live in isolation from normal people. They may interact with normals at work or in daily life, but their political activity is exclusively around fellow believers. These ideas arise in a world insulated from the daily realty of normal society. The people operating like spiritual masters inside these movements are never challenged or questioned. They are never exposed to scrutiny or forced to defend their positions.

Someone like Robin DiAngelo is never going to sit down for a tough interview by a knowledgeable critic of her ideas. All of the thought leaders and influencers on the Left are like stage psychics in that they only ever allow themselves to be tested under conditions that allow for success. This serves to promote their brand, to use a marketing term, but it also legitimizes their ideas to their followers. DiAngelo always sounds authoritative, which serves to give authority to her ideas.

The counter here is that people on the Right do the same thing but the big difference is the institutions are run by the Left. A normal person cannot go about their life without running into left-wing assertions. Watch a TV show and it is full of propaganda about the latest causes. Ads are mostly for cultural ideas, rather than products. The workplace is littered with warning signs about offending the believers. There is no escaping the cult of progressive beliefs.

People on the Left can avoid almost all counter-programming. Normal people are naturally polite and non-confrontational. As soon as they learn that Sarah from accounting is a woke believer, word goes forth to avoid talking current events with Sarah or her friends. On the other hand, if a normal person dead names Barbara, formerly known as Robert, Sarah and her coevals will be all over the poor guy, demanding he be hurled into the void for intolerance.

This tendency toward politeness has the perverse effect of providing social proof to the people in these subcultures. The guy getting thrown into the void must deserve his fate as no one defends him, thus his crime is validated. On the other hand, the lack of pushback from the people around them, plus the intense loyalty of the people inside the subculture, is daily confirmation. There is no social cost to holding extreme ideas so the incentives to holding them are unchecked.

Compounding this is a poverty of information inside these movements. Since the leaders are never exposed to scrutiny, their ideas are never tested. In an environment of conformity, showing any doubt about the ideas risks a loss of status inside the group, so no one dares question anything. In the rare occasion when the members confront someone who directly challenges their belief, it is as if the person is questioning the very nature of reality. There must be something wrong with them.

This leads to the sort of performative confrontation we saw in the Senate between Josh Hawley and Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges. To normal people, the professor came of as obnoxious and unbalanced. To the people in the subculture, she heroically defended the one true faith against the violent attacks of a bigot. In other words, their brief confrontations with reality are quickly turned into confirmation. The normal feedback loop is warped by their general isolation.

All of this explains the increasing weirdness of the Left and the intensity of belief, but it does not explain the nastiness. Fifty years ago, progressives were just as committed to their agenda as they are today, but back then they were prepared to debate anyone in public on their issues. Today, the Left is trying hard to purge anyone from the public square who is not enthusiastic for their cause. Fifty years ago, the Left said you had to be open minded. Today, an open mind is violence.

The most likely reason for this is the focus of belief has shifted from the material world to the spiritual realm. In the 1980’s, lefty was all about economics. Progressivism was a material cause, not a cultural one. Today, the Left does not care about economics or the material wellbeing of people. In fact, they seem to think the material wellbeing of people is a danger to their cause. The evolving assault on food production in the name of Gaia is looking like the actions of a suicide cult.

There is the key to the nastiness. Radical politics has always had a religious vibe because ideology is a secular replacement for religion. Instead of God providing authority to the beliefs, it is the will of the people or the tides of history. Until this age, ideology was rooted in the material world. The door through which mankind would enter paradise was economic relations. Today, the door is cultural relations. Once all cultural barriers are removed, everyone is free to fulfill their potential.

The old ideology of the Left had a tangible vision. They thought that in the future, a man would be able to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and do critical theory at night. He would be free to live as he chose because his material wellbeing would be secure. The new religion offers an image of the present like a haunted house, in which the monsters are normal people. How can you be a happy warrior when you imagine yourself surrounded by spiritual enemies?

What we may be seeing is the end of ideology. Ideology is a new thing in human history, which means it has a beginning and therefore an end. This great replacement for religion as the set of shared societal beliefs may be in an end phase. The reason it is so nasty and violent is the same reason a trapped animal is nasty and violent. Suicide cults choose death over disbelief. This last ideology is looking to destroy this fallen world rather than give up their beliefs.

Shark Sightings

Posted on July 14, 2022 by thezman

The sharks are begging to accumulate off the coast of the Biden administration, as his popularity falls along with his cognitive functioning. The current polling has him at or near the lowest ever recorded for a sitting president. His party is in a panic over the upcoming midterm elections. There is an obvious shift going on in the media where they signal that it is time to think about what comes after Joe Biden. Now the first dorsal fins of potential replacements are showing up in the water.

The first fin to pop up was that of Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California and former mayor of San Francisco. He recently ran an ad in Florida telling the locals that their state is terrible, they smell like feet and the smart ones should leave the filthy place and come to California. Presumably, his team thinks this is a way to pick a fight with Ron DeSantis, who has become a bogeyman for his cult. They seem to have forgotten that Florida is a critical swing state in elections.

Newsom turning up at the White House while Biden is visiting Israel suggests that the people in charge wanted to send a message. A child of extreme privilege, Newsom got richer by partnering with the fourth so of oil tycoon John Paul Getty. They started a winery and then a private equity firm that targeted entertainment properties catering to the managerial elite. Newson got bored with that and bought himself a mayoral office and then the governorship of California.

To his credit, he is one of the few politicians alive today who has ever signed the front of a paycheck and done any sort of real work. Granted, these are silly businesses that look like they were underwritten to make his resume look good. Boutique wineries and hipster restaurants are different from making car parts or fixing refrigeration units, but it at least looks like real work. He will no doubt run as a self-made man who knows how businesspeople struggle in these difficult times.

Another fin in the water is Gretchen Whitmer. She is up for reelection and has been getting lots of favorable news coverage. She gets to speak to important Democratic party groups and was on Biden’s short list of VP choices. He passed on her as she is too ambitious. The people around Biden had him select Harris as a form of life insurance policy. Just as no one would take out Obama with Biden as VP, no one is going to take out Biden with Harris as VP.

Whitmer’s resume is the dreary stuff we have come to expect. She has been on the dole her whole life. Her biggest claim to fame is the kidnapping hoax, which may have started as a campaign trick. It is hard to know, but so far, we know it was orchestrated by the FBI and not the patsies they put on trial. Her former lawyer seems to be involved with the FBI handlers. The whole thing is a seedy example of FBI corruption but also how big a role they play in politics.

The final fin in the water of Kamala Harris. Up until a few weeks ago, she was programmed to chant about how she looked forward to running with Biden in 2024 whenever asked about it. Someone swapped out her response code with a new response designed to give the impression she hopes Biden dies soon. This is probably the only way she ever becomes president. Even with support from Biden she stands little chance of winning the nomination on her own in 2024.

The main reason for looking at this is to note the long term planning that goes on with presidential candidates. Rich people thought Newsom could be president twenty-five years ago so they have been grooming him for this moment. That is a long term commitment to a project. The same is true of Whitmer. The kidnapping hoax is the sort of thing you do when you think she can run ten years hence as a tough independent female who stood up to the patriarchy as a governor.

The other interesting thing about the fins sticking out of the water is the Democrats are going to look for a white person in 2024. Harris ticks the brown boxes, but the wrong brown boxes as far as Democratic voters are concerned. Look around at other potential fins in the water and they all look like great whites as well. The Left’s commitment to diversity is like Pelosi and Biden’s commitment to Catholicism. It is a ceremonial item that has no bearing on how they live or think.

This is something the dullards in conservatism, which is pretty much all of conservatism, never seem to grasp. The chanting about white supremacy, antiracism, diversity and so on is a uniform these people wear to signal their commitment to their class. Fifty years ago, they walked around in brand new work clothes to signal their solidarity with the working man. Today they wear the language of diversity, inclusion and equity to show their solidarity with the swarthy fellows tending their gardens.

Putting all of that aside, the next six months promise some good political entertainment as the number of fins in the water reaches critical mass. While there is no reason to vote for Republicans, there are enough people mad at the economy to switch both the House and the Senate this fall. That will lead to a public debate about what to do with the aging Joe Biden. Do they let him serve out his term or do they push him down a flight of stairs after the election?

A year ago, the way to bet was on the unexpected tumble, but Harris has been so bad that swapping Biden for her is probably a bad bet. The people running the White House need Biden in place as they secure new places in the next regime. That means they put out word that Biden is re-thinking his 2024 plans. Sometime in the winter he announces his retirement after his first term in office. That also shifts the focus from the failures of Biden to the future failures of the next regime.

On the other hand, the 2020 election says that anything is possible so Biden running and winning in 2024 is not unthinkable. The beautiful people love firsts so he can be the first man in a coma to win election. Maybe the first man with a single digit approval rating to win reelection. After all, he was the first man to lose the first four primaries and still win his party’s nomination. He also got eighty million votes in the general election, which says that in America anything is possible.

After Left And Right

Posted on February 10, 2022 by thezman

Categories are useful, which is why humans have been using labels for people and things since the dawn of time. Using generalizations for people, events and things is a handy way of communicating important things efficiently. The political terms Left and Right have been with us since the 18th century for that reason. They are broadly useful in describing people and ideas. In the particular they are often confusing, but when it comes to the big categories, they work.

In 18th and 19th century Europe, the Right was those on the side of the old aristocratic order, while the Left represented some form of liberal alternative. The Right defended the rights of the crown against the demands of the crowd. The Left advocated the rights of the people against the traditions of the crown. The Left was coming at politics from an empirical perspective. They talked about rational government. The Right were traditionalist, often rooting their position in religion.

In the 19th and 20th century, especially in America, the terms Right and Left were redefined around economic concepts. The Left were socialists, embracing Marxist arguments, to one degree or another, about economics and history. The Right was the defender of markets and free enterprise. Those old class concepts, king and peasant, inevitably were incorporated. The Left was on the side of the working people, the new peasants, while the Right was on the side of business.

The limits of this new economically based politics are obvious when looking at the early 20th century, particularly the interwar years. Fascism is considered to be right-wing, even though all of them embraced socialism. They also championed the workers in their organizing and rhetoric. Communism was much more popular with the upper classes than the working classes. Look at 20th century communism and what you see is academics and the scions of the upper classes.

Lost in all of this is the term liberalism. In the 19th century, liberal meant rational government rooted in natural law. The Founders were liberals. They sought to create a political order that reflected the people and history of the new country. They were not basing their arguments in religion or tradition. They were debating the most rational form of government for a land populated as it was at the time. Into the 20th century, liberal was a fairly good stand in for reason.

Fast forward to the middle of the last century and the term liberal had been conflated with the term progressive. They had become synonyms. Progressivism was anything but liberal in the traditional sense of the word. The progressives rooted their ideology in New England public Protestantism and oogily-boogily borrowed from European intellectuals of the Hegelian tradition. Regardless of it claims, Progressivism has always been in opposition to empiricism.

This redefinition of the word liberal is just one example of the larger assault on the common language. It has reached the point today where no reasonable person accepts anything said by the upper classes at face value. The reason is they no longer use the language as defined by the dictionary. The most recent example is the phrase “the science has changed” which has nothing to do with science. In fact, the only thing we can know for sure from that statement is the science has not changed.

The assault on cognitive meaning in the language and the rise of emotional language in public discourse is part of a larger dynamic in American political discourse that has come to redefine Left and Right. To be on the Left is to embrace an ideology rooted in your emotions about the topic and the people involved in the topic. To be on the Right is to engage rationally with a topic. Liberalism has become an assault on reason, while illiberalism is the defense of reality.

In his book After Liberalism, Paul Gottfried points out that what masquerades as liberalism in America is post-liberal. Things like pluralism and democracy are not part of the liberal tradition. 19th century liberals understood that not all men were invested in society, so not all men warranted the franchise. Similarly, they understood that all ideas were not equal or deserving of equal consideration. By extension, the people behind those ideas were not deserving of equal consideration.

Gottfried does not address it in his book, but one could argue that managerialism in America is a response to the collapse of reason in the political order. The formation of the administrative state and the concept of managerialism were the response to the collapse of the old constitutional order in the 19th century. These are not based in reason, but a practical necessity. The labyrinth of bureaucracy, private and public, that control public life exist to provide stability.

What this means is that the terms Left and Right have to reconsidered to fit the reality of the present age. The Left is illiberal, emotional and irrational. It is the rejection of the human condition, not in a spiritual sense, but in an empirical sense. It is not an accident that the people most into life-extension technology and various forms of virtual and hyper reality are on the Left. They seek to transcend human biology by living on forever in a new world created for them on-line.

This is why the term right-wing is cognitively meaningless. Those holding to the old economic definition are culturally and politically irrelevant. They oppose a political force that no longer exists. The traditionalists have a similar problem, because much of what can be defined as American tradition has been defined by the Left. Since Gettysburg, the Left has controlled the culture. So much so that things like abortion have a greater claim to tradition than opposition to it.

The greatest trick of radicalism has been to slowly lay claim to irrationality, things like tradition, emotion and spirituality, incorporating them into their theories of history and human organization. Their opposition has been left with sterile facts and figures or claims to tradition that no longer have emotional energy. The American Left is irrationality in the guise of science, emotion draped in the garb of reason, illiberalism wearing the costume of liberal governance.

Getting back to the terms Right and Left, the great crisis on the Right is rooted in the fact that the Right does not exist. It does not exist because it does not understand what it opposes or even if it opposes the Left. Until people desiring an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy come to terms with the moral and linguistic reality of the prevailing orthodoxy, there can be no cognitive opposition. You have to know what you oppose, before you can explain why you oppose it.

As a practical matter, the West is now in a pre-Enlightenment period. This is why our age looks so much like late feudalism with better stuff. In 17th century France, there was no Right because there was no Left. There were just the way things were. Today, there is no Left or Right for the same reason. There is the prevailing orthodoxy with its established hierarchy and a bunch of disaffected peasants. The Right-Left dichotomy no longer exists practically or theoretically.

The Last Stop

Posted on January 20, 2022 by thezman

Way back in the 1980’s, it was popular for members of the conservative movement to claim that the Left had run out of ideas. It was true to the extent that the Left had run out of policy ideas, having used them up in the preceding four decades. Conservatives were brimming with ideas on how to fix those policies. The big talk of rolling them back was really just a politically astute way of making reform look radical. The Right was always about fixing what the Left had broken.

The truth is though, those old progressive ideas from the early part of the century had run their course, but a new set of ideas were percolating in the academy. What we think of today as cultural Marxism and “wokeness” was coming together in the flophouses and brothels of left-wing politics. After the Cold War ended, these ideas started to take over the Left until we reached the present crisis. This crisis, however, seems to be the end of the line for radical thinking.

You see it with the obsession with Trump. Stable minded people with an agenda, even a nutty agenda, would have erased their old foe from the history books after dispatching him in the 2020 election. Instead, they cannot stop thinking about him and the army of imaginary bogeymen they think he leads. The Democrats have now hatched a plot to charge him with sedition so he cannot run for office in 2024. In reality, it is just a way to keep him alive as an adversary.

To normal people, this looks like madness. The truth is, Trump is old news and by the time 2024 rolls around he will probably not be a lock to win the nomination. This Ann Coulter column is a good indication that many of the people who supported Trump in 2016 are ready for someone new. Coulter’s judgement on these things is not always the best, she was a fan of Mitt Romney, but she speaks for Populist Inc. They are ready to move on and the Democrats would be wise to let them.

That said, Trump is a master marketer and he could very well retool his act as a revenge tour in 2024. Given the state of things right now and the chaos that looms on the horizon, the public could be ready to burn it all down. The GOP will surely win both house this fall then set about finking on their voters. The next presidential election could be a battle to win over factions in a purple-faced rage at the politicians. In that environment, Trump could look like the sober choice.

Still, the Left won the revolution and should be busy enjoying the fruits of victory but instead they long to return to the battle. The reason is the ideology that fueled the revolution is turning out to be nothing but clever words with no truth content. There is no end of history, no promised land of equality. Rather than being a strength, diversity has turned out to be a clever marketing scheme by corporate communists who live like white nationalist while lecturing everyone about race.

What the Left has quickly become is a glaring example of negative identity. They are not for anything that exists. Instead, they are a laundry list of things they oppose, with the claim that these things stand in the way of paradise. The fact that many of the things they rage against do not, in fact, exist, makes the agony all the more severe. It turns out that bellowing about white supremacy, something that does not exist, is not as fulfilling as screaming in the face of someone wearing a red hat.

In the movie Conspiracy about the 1942 Wannsee Conference, one of the actors tells another a story about a man who hated his father and loved his mother. When his mother died, he did not weep at her grave. When his father died, he was inconsolable, crying like a baby. The lesson of the story was that the man had defined his life by his hatred of his father. When his father was gone, he lost that which gave meaning and purpose to his life. That was why he was crying.

The American Left and their political party are now that man weeping at the grave of Donald Trump’s presidential career. This is, in part, why they cannot let go of the Covid madness, despite their party’s efforts. The mask is a reminder of better times when they had a reason to get up every morning. It is why their party is putting on the insurrection show for them. It is a bit of nostalgia for better times. It is why they hope to reanimate the Trump movement with an indictment.

That is the trouble with negative identity. A political movement organized around it can only end in sorrow. If it wins, it loses the reason to exist. If it fails, it runs the risk of retribution from the people it assaulted and it runs the risk of internal dissention over not having defeated the enemy. Negative identity becomes a self-made Alamo, a desperate last stand by people afraid of the future. It is why these movements attract so many weirdos and degenerates.

Unlike in the 1980’s, the sputtering of the prevailing radicalism is unlikely to give way to a new radicalism, at least not from the Left. Cultural Marxism was a reaction to the failing of economic Marxism. There is no next step in the underlying theory of history that animated both ideologies. This really is the end of the road for the theoretical framework that gave birth to Utopian radicalism. What comes next will probably be outside the old model of Left and Right.

The New Segregation

Posted on December 15, 2021 by thezman

Walk around in public and it is increasingly obvious that Americans now live in at least two parallel worlds. For the bare-faced, the masked are a strange and alien people who are starting to fade into the scenery. The weirdness of these people strapping amulets to their faces has faded and it is now just something to be ignored, along with the person wearing the amulet. In fact, the weird collection of beliefs that lie behind the bizarre face-gear are also fading into obscurity.

The mask is no longer about following directions, complying with authority, concerns over public health and so on. It is about membership in a parallel universe that occupies the same physical space as this universe. If you want to know what segregation in the South was really like, go to a grocery store. Jim Crow was mostly two groups of people operating under mostly the same rules but living psychologically apart from one another in the same public spaces.

The masked versus unmasked is just the physical manifestation of the new segregation in current year America. Behind the mask lies paranoia and fear about those not wearing the magic amulet. The bare-faced are Trump supporters, possibly even insurrectionists or white supremacists. They most certainly are not vaccinated and therefore carry the latest letter of the Greek alphabet. These are the people against whom the elect are chosen to wage the holy war.

It sounds insane, but it is a generous description of the people living in the parallel universe that is the Left in America. Theirs is a world of magic and miracles where dark forces are resisted by the forces of light. They cannot explain how this works, but they have plenty of examples. The massive tornadoes that hit the bad people in Trump country were the wrath of Gaia. She is angry over climate change so she sent another warning to the sinners.

Exactly no one in the Gaia cult can explain how any of this works, but that is not how religions work anyway. The rituals and incantations are simple ways for the believer to show she is a believer, without knowing the logic of the belief. The overlap between Gaia worshippers and Covidians is not an accident. Both of these are viewed as supernatural occurrences by the Left. It is why your vaccination status matters so much to them. They have been told it matters, so they believe it.

Behind those masks is not just fear of Gaia, but a general fear of mysterious forces operating in the universe. It is why the Russian collusion hoax still circulates among these same people. They were never able to explain how it works, but they just knew it because that is how they imagine the world works. That is where you see the parallel universes at play. In one universe, hoaxes get debunked and people move on while in the other they become part of the canon.

In the world of normal people, the great struggle of life is the great struggle over the small things like money, family and work. Behind the mask, the great struggle is the defense of democracy. There is a war on democracy waged by those who oppose democracy for some reason. The faithful need Joe Biden to take on the real enemies of democracy in order to save it. Of course, those who criticize Joe Biden, in his noble quest, are threatening democracy by weakening his resolve.

One interesting thing about this new religion is it is mostly a grab bag of old ideas put to less interesting ends. For example, the crazies now have their version of the Inquisition where they will torment suspected heretics. Mark Meadows has been named by the Inquisition and will be brought to justice. He is charged with using the Devil’s own language to direct the armies of Satan. The point of this Inquisition is to finally defeat Old Scratch himself, former president Donald Trump.

To normal people, this obsession with the January 6th protests is completely insane, but lots of people believe otherwise. Behind those masks you will find that many, maybe most, buy into the insurrection myth entirely. Just as their magic amulet is about being on the right side of history, the basket of boutique beliefs swirling around the managerial class are about picking sides in the great struggle. The “insurrection” has become a rallying cry for those covering their faces in public.

Stand around in a public place where you can see a lot of believers and think about something that lies at the heart of it all. Can our societies continue to function when a significant minority of people believe these insane things? What Covid has really done is move this question to the forefront by bringing these people out of the shadows and giving them constant reinforcement. Those magic amulets are not just warding off the evil spirits, but reinforcing their faith in the new religion.

For the last two years the normal portion of the population has been buoyed by the hope that this will all peter out eventually. The madness of the Trump obsession would go away once Biden was in office. The Covidians would move onto something else once the cost of their madness was too much for them. Wait long enough and things will return to normal. It is looking like they can remain irrational for as long as it takes to pull the roof down on all of us.

One of the forgotten bits of truth about the segregated South is that without outside intervention, the system would have carried on indefinitely. The talented ten percent of blacks grumbled about not getting access to the elites and white merchants grumbled about the restrictions on commerce, but most people found it workable. Contrary to the cartoon version of the period popular with the crazies, the system kept the peace and most people saw it as an acceptable compromise.

The lesson is that two different people can live together in peace even if the separation is just psychological or cultural. Perhaps this is where things are heading. There will be no return to normal. One group will walk around with their magic amulets on their faces while normal people simply ignore it and much of what they say. The masked will traffic in their conspiracy theories about insurrectionists and white supremacists, while everyone else gets on with the struggle of life.

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Left-Wing Grifters

Posted on November 15, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday Taki post is up. This week I have some comparisons of our present state to the old Soviet Union. Behind the green door is the Sunday podcast and two movie reviews. If you are a subscriber, thank you for your support. If not, may Allah send the fleas of a thousand camels to nest in your groin.

A popular topic on this side of the great divide is who is and who is not a grifter, a shill or controlled opposition. The general assumption is that the people with perches in Conservative Inc. are working some sort of con. Maybe their racket is to keep people from looking over the great divide. These are the gatekeepers. Others may co-opt a dissident idea and then neuter it. They say things like Critical Race Theory is actually an attack on nonwhites so white people can oppose it.

Often forgotten is that the other side has their fair share of grifters who make a comfortable living working the true believers. Here is an example from the Daily Beast of what can be called woo-woo for the wokies. The writer is telling them that their newly minted hero, Liz Cheney, and an old has-been named Chris Christie, will give Trump a run for his money in the 2024 Republican primary. The Twitter thread on this topic is an amusing window into political mental illness.

The writer is someone calling himself Matt Lewis. He used to play the role of snarky conservative, but that was just an act. At a young age he was harvested and cultivated by the neoconservatives. When the fortunes of the neocons faded, he did what all rats do on a sinking ship. He now peddles his wares as a reformed conservative to a gullible audience at the Daily Beast. It is a trip that so many have made that it has become a stock figure in the American political drama.

As you see with the grifters of Conservative Inc., the left-wing variety sells the true believers the latest items from the one true faith. In this case the item for sale is that Liz Cheney is a folk hero for finking on her party and her voters. She has signed onto the Stalin-esque show trial called the January 6 Commission. This is where the Left gets to claim that normal white people exercising their ancient rights are white supremacist insurrectionists and a threat to “our democracy”.

The main difference between the woke grifters and the conservative grifters is the former works in a world of pure imagination. Say what you want about Ben Shapiro, but he is not wrong about the “constitutional principle” business. If we had a ruling class that enforced the old rules, things would be better for everyone. His grift lies in convincing people that it is still possible with this ruling class. He turns a virtue into the vice of defending the enemies of the people.

Because the left-wing grifter operates in the world of fantasy, he has an easier time of it, but is barred from factual reality. At some level, they must believe the same nonsense as their intended suckers. In the case of neocons like Matt Lewis, he harbors the same hatred for the white people as the true believers. The neocons may be driven by hyperviolent fantasies about world conquest, but they also detest the heritage population every bit as much as the wokest wokie.

It is that blind hatred that allows the crazies to now embrace Liz Cheney. You have to admire the skill with which the neocons have ingratiated themselves with their old friends on the Left. Not long ago the name “Cheney” was spelled H-i-t-l-e-r by the readers of the Daily Beast. He was the master of the Haliburton Hurricane Machine that devastated New Orleans and unleashed hell on the Arabs. It requires a special brand of crazy to do a heel turn like that in such a short time.

Of course, what wads a lot of this together into a slimy ball of hatred for the average American is a sense of class consciousness. The new religion is the religion of the new class, the managerial class that now commands the high ground. The middling celebrities of the commentariat are driven as much by their duty to their own class as they are by genuine belief. To people like Matt Lewis, those Trump voters outside the hive walls are a threat to his people.

It is completely bonkers that anyone would think that Liz Cheney has a future in Republican politics. That is one of those bits of good news, a little green shoot, that should give the good guys a little hope. The people on the other side are increasingly driven mad by the contradictions of their new religion. If the good guys could create and insert chaos agents into the system, Liz Cheney would be a good example. Every time she speaks in public, another dissident is born.

Another bit of good news in stories like this is that the neoconservatives have really fallen on hard times. That cabal now exists on an island off the coasty of crazy-ville, supported by a billionaire Persian who thinks he may be Cyrus the Great. The second generation of neocons squandered the tribal fortune and the third generation makes the Kennedy gene pool like deep. Like so much of the managerial class, neoconservatism now reeks of its own decay.

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