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.

Concepts of The Hive

Posted on November 11, 2021 by thezman

The opposite rule of liberalism says that whatever the Left is saying, you should start with the opposite and that is where you will probably find the truth. For example, if they are accusing one of their bogeymen of something, most likely the target is not doing it and is not the bad guy. Odds are, it is the Left engaging in the activity. Whether it is latent guilt or deliberate distraction, the Left tends to accuse others of the things they are doing or plan to do in the future.

It is not always simple like we learned with the Russian collusion hoax. The Left is fond of creating elaborate and plausible concepts that they can use to frame issues so that they are the default moral position. Homosexual marriage is an example where they inverted the morality of the issue. Normal people felt the need to explain why we should maintain normal marriage, as if it was a novel concept. The opposite, of course, was the truth but it was hard for people to see it.

The idea of the social construct is a good example of how it is not easy to tease out the truth from what the Left is saying. It is tempting to use the opposite rule of liberalism and say that there is no such thing as a social construct. Something like sex is obviously not an invented thing and people are not assigned sex at birth. While their concept of gender is nonsense, there are gender roles in society. These are closely tied to biological sex and the natural differences between the sexes.

Where the opposite rule of liberalism applies in regard to something like social constructs is that it is not the normal world that is a construct but rather how the Left engages with the world that is a creation of their mind. Like the simple example of the Russian collusion hoax, the Left is accusing Mother Nature of creating constructs of the mind when it is the Left that is doing it. In fact, everything about the Left relies on an invented moral framework that does not exist in realty.

A good example of this is the “hate researcher”. There are people running around now with that title. Another flavor of this is the extremism expert. Whenever the media wants to label someone a heretic and have them hurled into the void, they call on people with one of these titles. The target is identified, the hate researcher provides the “data” proving that this person meets the definition of a hater or extremist, and therefore they deserve to be hurled into the void.

The fact that there can be no such thing as a hate researcher, or an extremism expert is never questioned. Hate is an entirely subjective term as used by the Left. It does not actually mean an intense or passionate dislike. Instead, they have created a new definition that means something close to unorthodox and taboo. Most of the people accused of being a hater do not, in fact, hate anyone. They simply disagree from the prevailing orthodoxy with regards to the human condition.

Of course, “extreme” is and must be an entirely subjective term. Extremes are relative, so it all depends upon your perspective. People into “extreme sports” are not all that crazy to the people in those sports. Someone holding an extreme opinion is only considered to be an extremist in relation to others. Researching extremism, beyond explaining the subjectivity of the term and how it is used, is like researching UFO encounters or Big Foot sightings.

What the Left has done is create a moral framework. Inside the framework are the acceptable truths and outside are the taboo ideas. Wrong and right are not determined by factual accuracy but by the rules of the moral framework. Accepting the facts of table 43 of the Uniform Crime Report is wrong even though it is factual accurate. When the Left accuses the world of creating social constructs, it is because everything about their understanding of the world is through a social construct.

The hate expert and extremism researcher are similarly inventions that can only exist within the rules of the moral framework. In actuality there is no such thing and can be no such thing without the warped moral code of the Left. What the Left is doing, what they are expert at doing, is creating the required social constructs that allow them to anathematize things that contradict their current beliefs. It is how something can go from taboo to virtuous in the blink of an eye.

Another good example of this is the concept of “racism”. It is another invention that does not exist in the real world. The Left defines this as prejudice plus power and power is only held by white people. The reason for that is society is a social construct made by and for white people. This mean the lowliest white guy has power, while Barak Obama is his powerless victim. Therefore, by definition, the only people who can be racist are white people, because they have power.

It is only in the matrix of the Left’s fantasy world that this idea can seem real. The moral concept of racism would have been baffling to people a century ago. Prejudice was certainly something people have always known. They also considered it perfectly normal as tastes are subjective. Some people hate lima beans while others love them, but that says nothing about the nature of lima beans. The same applies to people’s taste in other people and other tribes.

This is why clarity of language is such a powerful weapon against the Left, even when wielded by crude people. When a leftist uses the term “hate speech” and someone corrects them with “you mean taboo speech” they will get very nervous. At some level, the Left knows the moral world they inhabit is a fiction. Using clear language to turn the lights on and expose the fiction is horrifying to them. Their fantasy world works only when they can commit to it totally.

Maintaining this fictional moral universe may be why the Left is so prone to accusing others of what they are doing. It is a defense mechanism. By shifting the focus to outside their safe zone, they get to avoid see the reality of their world. It is an extension of their natural self-loathing. The fictional world replaces their hated sense of self and the projection onto enemies of their own fears about themselves provides a necessary distraction from the reality of their condition.

The Blessings Of Covid

Posted on September 15, 2021 by thezman

Long before the Covid panic, it was obvious to many on the dissident right that the main problem in the West was a core of true believers. These are fanatics who are immune to facts and reason, driven by a desire to pull the roof down on society. On every issue, they seem to come down on the side of the society wrecking option. The Covid panic has brought this into stark relief The Covidians are more deadly than even the exaggerated version of the virus.

The Covidian is a useful case study in how the believer engages with the world. Since this started back in the spring of 2020, the true believers have shifted positions, often contradicting yesterday’s deeply held position, without explanation. The cult leaders seem to have moved along an authoritarian scale, which at least provides some rationale for their actions. The rank and file believers, however, have flitted from one position to another like a murmuration of starlings.

The most recent example is their view on vaccines. In 2020 when Trump was promising to accelerate the development of a vaccine for Covid, the true believer was sure vaccine meant “deadly Hitler poison”. Their cult leaders were on their media platforms swearing to Gaia that they would never take the Trump serum. After all, there was no way a safe vaccine could be developed in such a short period. It was just another effort by Trump to destroy our democracy.

Within hours of Biden being installed, they shifted to swearing that these vaccines were a perfect defense, an impenetrable defense, against Covid. If the bulk of the people were vaccinated by spring, the pandemic would be over as we would quickly hit herd immunity or pretty close to it. Everyone could go back to normal. The skeptics with whom they agreed just minutes ago were now QAnon conspiracy nuts. All good people would be vaccinated and only the crazies would refuse.

There you see the mind of the true believer at work. Theirs is not a world of facts, reason, and a vast area of uncertainty, as it is with normal people. Instead, their world is those inside the walls and those outside the walls. The walls are an abstraction created by the good people who lead the faithful. Those who are inside the walls are the good guys, the faithful, while those outside the walls are the bad guys, the undifferentiated other that is always at war with the faithful.

This hive mentality is not easy to maintain in the face of reality, so the faithful need a constant stream of reinforcement. In a prior age, this came from physical gatherings where the believers could affirm their convictions and have those convictions confirmed by fellow members of the collective. Churches have always been social groupings as much as spiritual ones. For those committed to an ideological faith, the need for spiritual and social reinforcement is no different.

In this age, mass media provides the steady stream of affirmation. It is not an accident that the hardest thumping crazies on the Left are also intensively on-line, obsessed with things like Twitter. Social media is their tether to the collective. The more they remain connected, the more intense their need to feel connected. The swarming effect of crazies on social media platforms is not an accident. Like a fish in a school, the believer gives herself over to the collective whole.

Here is an example of how the mass media feeds the true believer. Note the exaggerated language like “hyper-contagious”. The true believer operates in extremes, so this necessitates the over-the-top description of things. In this case, describing the variants as increasing dangerous is a way to maintain the fervor. You see, you must remain vigilant. The evil one is always out there. If you let down your guard, he will get you with one of his hyper-contagious variants!

Note also how the definition of vaccine has changed. Since the advent of vaccines, the concept has been a binary one. If the vaccine worked, your immune system would be ready to handle the specific virus and prevent infection. If not, then you would get infected by the virus. Now a vaccine is something like an amulet. If you are exposed, it protects the faithful from the workings of Old Scratch. You still get infected and are contagious, but your soul is pure so you will be safe.

This line is instructive. “Even the sky-high efficacy rates of mRNA vaccines during clinical trials left a little window of imperfection — and those trials happened long before this virus evolved to replicate quicker, spread faster and infect even more unsuspecting human hosts.” You see, no matter how vigilant you are, there are others who may let their guard down and give the evil one a chance to strike the innocent. This is not about you but about the community as a whole.

This is why Joe Biden said the other day that his administration would protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. The tether to biological reality has been cut and we are now in the world of the true believer. The words vaccinated and unvaccinated no longer have a medical definition. To the true believer, those words now mean the anointed and the benighted. The elect are those who have laminated their vaccine cards and wear eight masks in the car while driving alone.

This is why pointing out the fascism of Covid passports has not effect. The true believer needs that display item. They desperately want the affirmation that comes from holding up their iPhone to be scanned and the god in the machine confirming that they are one of the chosen. This is why they celebrate the death of those the mass media claim were ant-vaxers. Their blood extirpates the evil from the land in the same way a public sacrifice washes away the sins of the guilt in the blood of the innocent.

Counterintuitively, Covid may have been a salvation. The fever-rage of opposition to Trump was channeled into a ridiculous but so far mostly harmless identity cult built around the coronavirus. We saw the destructive power of lunatics in a full rage allowed to seek their own satisfaction. Covid probably saved the country from endless riots and urban warfare. The real blessing of Covid is that it has given our crazies a way to get their fix without blowing up the world in the process.

False Choice Society

Posted on June 14, 2021 by thezman

Note: The weekly Taki post is up. When possible, the Monday post here will be related to the Taki post. Of course, there is the Sunday show behind the green door for those interested.

One of the underappreciated aspects of liberal democracy is that it always pits morality versus objective facts, always creating a false choice. Every public debate is between one camp that demand we do “the right thing” and another camp that insist on doing “the correct thing”. The right thing is defined as the moral thing while the correct thing is the factually accurate or effective thing. The choice is failure while on the moral high ground or succeed and be seen and inhumane or indifferent.

This false choice predates the rise and spread of liberal democracy, so it is not accurate to lay the blame there. The debate that evolved over economics that grew up out of the industrial revolution is the origin. The Marxists were never making an economic argument back in the 19th century. They started with a moral claim that capitalism is built on exploitation of the workers. This was inherently immoral so it must lead to class struggle, crisis and then revolution.

This lack of an economic plan of any sort should have been obvious, but the followers and Marx were not interested in practical matters. The appeal was always the morality of the program. It was the chief selling point. This was made manifest in Russia when the Bolsheviks seized control of the state. Suddenly they were faced with solving the sorts of problem governments are tasked with doing. They had no economic platform from which to work, just gobs of Marxist theory.

The reaction to Marxism was Austrian School economics. Unlike the Marxists, the Austrians had a very detailed analysis of economics. Their model explained the basics of how goods and services flowed through an economy. This factual accuracy made it possible to form public policy and test the result. Over the course of the Cold War, Austrian economics became the primary weapon against Marxism. It stripped communist economics of the claim to empirical authority.

The trouble with Austrian School economics is it also striped morality and group preference from public debate. Every want and desire had to be justified by an economic argument. Rotten results that may make sense according to the laws of economic could not be contested. The out of control consumerism we see, for example, just has to be tolerated. The spread of degeneracy cannot be opposed, because the market dictates what is right in society.

American society has been squeezed in this vice for a long time. One side makes arguments that make some sense from a moral perspective but are completely unworkable as a practical matter. The other side counters with what appear to be factually correct arguments, the results of which are unsustainable. Worse still, neither side has a way to counter the other. The result of this dynamic is a system that is morally indefensible but shaking to pieces by moral fervor.

Ironically, both jaws of this vice are built on false assumptions. The Marxists fall victim to Hume’s guillotine. The value of a good or service is no doubt the sum of the labor it requires to produce it. It does not follow that anyone in society or society as a whole should agree. The other jaw makes a different error, assuming that human beings act from economic self-interest. They can, but they more often act from biological reasons, especially group biological reasons.

The dynamic resulting from this false choice seems to be reaching an end point, where neither side is sustainable. The moral claims made by what is called the Left have veered so far into the ridiculous that it looks like satire. A century ago, it was easy to sympathize with the groups the Left claimed to champion. Workers being ripped off by unscrupulous employers had a strong claim. Men is bizarre outfits claiming to be a third sex are clowns no one can take seriously.

A similar fate has befallen the so-called Right. When massive global corporations are stripping people of their lights, often by funding street gangs to assaults people going about their business, it is laughable to defend the “free market” system that produced these companies. When state sponsored financial concerns are buying up houses to create new renters, in the name of capitalism, the so-called free market is just as ridiculous as the men in dresses.

Liberal democracy has become an octopus with its tentacles wrapped around various parts of society. One tentacle is the moralizers assaulting us with the latest fads from corporate HR. Another tentacle is consumerism strip mining the traditions and history, the social capital, that are the foundation stones of society. Another tentacle is finance capital skimming a bit from every transaction without adding anything back. Every tentacle has a corresponding one to help it fight off attacks.

That is the primary defense of the system. All critics are herded into this set of false choices the system maintains. If you do not like that state-sponsored hedge funds are hoovering up single family homes, you have two choices. One is you can throw in with the loons and their bizarre defense of bourgeoise decadence. The other is you can waste your time making an economic argument claiming that the “market” will solve the problem if we worship it more.

The point of democratic systems is for the public to have a say in how public policy is formulated and a veto over the final result. In reality, it offers false choices controlled by a narrow elite. The narrow elite hides in the shadows of a mythical beast called the general will or the invisible hand of the market. It is a curtain behind which stands the ruling class. In the end, it is looking like what Marxism and liberal democracy have always claimed to oppose.

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