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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The Panic Culture

Posted on June 7, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is the weekly Taki post. It is another take on the Covid panic and ties in well with today’s post. For the audiophiles, there is a Sunday podcast up behind the green door. Of course, if you buy me a beer, you get my secret writings.

Now that the Covid panic is finally winding down, it is a good time to look at how it quickly became a religion for many people. It is fair to assume that most people looked at Covid as a blend of public health and public policy. They do not know much about either topic, so they trusted what they were told. Others, however, embraced Covid and the rules around it like a new religion. The rituals and statistics quickly became the central point around which they organized their lives.

One of the first signs of this happening were the personal testimonials. By the late spring of last year, the Covidian had stories to tell. “I know of four people who have died from Covid this month” was a popular one. Despite the statistical improbability, millions were telling us about their personal war with Covid. The victims became younger as the age realty became apparent. Finally at the end, we are getting stories about the unvaccinated dying despite being healthy.

The joiner always personalizes her latest fetish. On the one hand, it lets her be the star of the story. We saw this after 9/11, where millions of people swore they knew someone in the towers. It is also a personal testimony to show how the believer has now given herself over to the faith. It is a show of piety. Of course, it also insulates the believer from having to explain herself. It is an appeal to authority in which her alleged suffering makes her the unquestionable authority.

Then there is the suffering that comes with every civic religion. Sacrifice is an important part of all religions. Membership is not supposed to be easy as the value of anything easily attained is always low. In the case of Covid, the goofy mask wearing, standing six feet apart and other nonsense was quickly and mindlessly embraced. It was a public sacrament, like taking communion. Of course, this gave the Covidian a chance to lecture the rest of us about the need to respect their piety.

The ascetic is an important part of every religion. The vegetarian makes a big show of not eating meat, because their role requires it. Similarly, the keto adherent will let you know she does not eat carbohydrates. Food-based cults are always popular with ascetics, because all of them require abstention. In the case of Covid, the constant slathering of hand sanitizer was the sign of their discipline. The Covidian never missed a chance to perform the ritual before every activity.

It is not an accident that the same people who tote grimy canvas sacks to the grocery store were the first to embrace the rituals of Covid. All civic religions in the modern age come with these piety symbols, usually with a corporate logo. Public television stations made millions giving members tote bags with the logo on them. Note that American sports teams quickly rushed out branded face masks. In a world of strangers, displaying your corporate overlord is important.

Hoffer famously pointed out that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” He was wrong about this, in that our rackets and cults tend to come with a corporate sponsor. In our highly atomized and corporatized existence, the corporate logo provides legitimacy. The Apple logo replaced the Darwin fish, for example. The Church of Covid became a money making racket, a cult and it was sponsored by our corporate overlords.

Every religion has its apostles, and this was no different. The army of pseudo-intellectual poseurs that spring up in the media are always there to add authority to the latest narratives. All of a sudden, anyone with a connection to medicine or immunology was preaching from a digital street corner. The fact that none of them knew a thing about this disease or public policy did not matter. All that mattered is they were there telling us to repent or fear the wrath of Covid.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of the civic religion is the martyrs. Because democracy turns deadbeats into civil servants and civil servants into priests, every politician quickly became a martyr to the cause. Every state with draconian Covid laws has a governor who publicly nailed herself to the cross. You see, they really hate passing these crazy laws, but they are suffering for all of us in this twilight struggle against the great threat to humanity known as Covid.

It is worth noting that Covid seems to have blended several strains of social pathology into a single event. We have the civic religion, but there is also the primitive fear of nature and nature’s wrath. Then there is the panic. This is what really gave the whole thing its juice. Like the satanic panics or the day care panics or the witch trials, the Covid panic caused most people to suspend their sense of disbelief. The lack of evidence became a weird proof of the danger.

Finally, what the Covid panic may indicate is that these ritualized panics will become more common and intense. If people will believe the flu is an extinction event, then they will believe just about anything. It is the old expression, people who believe in nothing will fall for anything. America and the West is now populated with gullible, deracinated primitives looking for a reason to exist. The future may be one crisis after another, each more bizarre and ridiculous than the last.

The Weapon Of Language

Posted on May 17, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a new post up at Taki. This week the topic is a written version of the podcast from last week, slimmed down for space reasons. There is a review of the 1960’s classic Easy Rider up behind the green door. It is also available to those who buy me a beer. Finally, Sunday Thoughts, a half hour podcast recapping the news of the week, is also up behind the green door. There is also a post up on American renaissance by from the weekend, for those who missed it.

In a world where the end always justifies the means, even when the end is not achieved, truth must always be a secondary consideration. In fact, the truth is often the enemy, as it serves the interests of your opponents. By attacking the truth of something, or even the concept of truth itself, you take away the legitimacy of the opposition to you and your schemes. When morality is determined by who wins, rather than by some objective standard, partisanship is the new morality.

This is the modern age. You see it in the language. The public space is full of people juggling neologisms that have a nice ring to them as a replacement for old words or labels. They sound better and the best people always love hearing new ways of saying old things. It makes them feel smart and sophisticated. The intellectual in a liberal democracy is primarily concerned with appearing to be unconventional and heterodox, so the new words and phrases quickly become popular.

George Orwell said political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, which is almost always the point of the new words and phrases that come to dominate the discourse. The people introducing them are not trying to clarify some point, but rather to obfuscate. The game is to undermine the truth of some concept in order to put something long settled up for debate. The new word changes the old meaning in a way that makes it less settled.

The popular phrase “social construct” is a good example. There is no such thing as a social construct as currently understood. Into the 20th century people would have laughed at the idea of it. There are customs and institutions, for sure, but those are things that evolved within a people over a period of trial and error. The reason a custom has been passed down may have been lost to time or turned into an amusing bit of mythology, but the custom came into being to address a problem.

The social construct, on the other hand, takes the custom or institution and recasts it as an invention, a thing that is true only because of a set of rules. Further, it smuggles in the idea that it was deliberately invented. Men, and it is always men, sat around dreaming up the new social conventions to serve their interests. This strips the custom of legitimacy by casting it as just a partisan interest. The people wishing to change it are just as legitimate as the people who invented it.

The new term for custom disconnects it from truth by shifting the thing from the domain of things that are true on their face to the domain of things that are true only because of a set of logical rules. Humans come in two sexes, male and female, is a thing that is true on its face. The term social construct shifts this from the world of fact to the world of logical rules by insisting gender, another new word, is determined by society. They now claim gender is assign at birth based on antiquated concepts of gender.

What the phrase social construct permits the partisan to do is to smuggle in the idea that something like sex was an invention of men, and it is always men, to serve the interest of the inventors. On the one hand, the roles assigned to those with a uterus served the interests of the patriarchy. Now we are told that those same men made gender binary in order to oppress the non-binary. The concept of the social construct turns objective reality into an intergenerational conspiracy theory.

One of the ways the political neologism smuggles in lies is that it creates a false dichotomy in the minds of the audience. In the case of sex and sex roles, things are either purely nature or purely nurture, with nurture always assigned the default position in the comparison. Sex roles, for example, are either a social construct or a universal fact of nature. Since few things are the latter, the former becomes the default position, as if by magic. Suddenly, the natural world is up for debate.

This happened with homosexual marriage. It was first detached from its natural meaning to be a social construct, rather than an ancient custom. Instead of being defined by the biological necessity of reproduction, it was just an invention to suppress women and manage property rights to the favor of males. Once that transformation occurred, opponents of homosexual marriage were forced make the affirmative argument for something that had been the default for eons.

The truth is, few things in human society are purely the result of nature. Even things like hair color or eye color in Europeans have a cultural angle. Over time, females with striking hair and eyes found better mating prospects. This naturally led to customs in which women tried to show off these features. The environmental conditions made diverse hair and eye color possible, but custom made it desirable, thus striking hair and eye color were selected for over time. Nature and nurture.

This is the deceit of new words and phrases cooked up by partisans. The point is to assault the truth, strip it of its legitimacy. The partisan is at home on the battle ground of “who? whom?” so they naturally seek to shape the ground to fit their need. It traps the bourgeois objectivist into the either/or trap. Once they accept the false dichotomy, they accept the weaker hand, and the results are inevitable. The Left wins every battle by first destroying the weapons the opponent can use against them.

This is why there is no reasoning with a partisan. That lefty aunt thinks what she thinks because she sees the world in binary terms. She greedily adopts the new language because it reaffirms her world view. The partisan sees the truth in the same way the vampire sees a mirror. It’s not the reflection that terrifies the vampire. It is the lack of one, a reminder of a truth of their existence. Facts and clear language have the same effect on the partisan, which is why they hiss at them.

Meat Man Versus Weed Man

Posted on May 13, 2021 by thezman

Often, the natural confluence of events results in something so elegant or complex that people see the hand of design behind the result. Even though the odds of there being a secret conspiracy or master chess player behind the result are very low, that just seems better than the odds of chance getting the result. Most conspiracy theories rely on this sort of logic. The official explanations seem so unlikely that they must be part of some conspiracy to shield the truth from the public.

A good example of this is the last election. No sitting president has seen a double digit increase in his vote, but still lose. In fact, no one has been able to find an example like this in other elected offices. That’s how rare it is. This once in forever thing could be accepted in isolation, but it is just one of such things. There are so many unexplained anomalies that people are naturally skeptical. The invisible hand of design, even without hard proof, seems like the more likely explanation.

We may be seeing something similar happen with food. All of a sudden, we are being bombarded with agit-prop in favor of eating bugs and plant-based proteins, rather than eating beef and chicken. Beef seems to be the primary target, but that could simply be the result of the Left’s long war against cows. The Left believes cows are part of a secret conspiracy against Gaia to poison the atmosphere. The “cow fart” conspiracy is as real to them as the ongoing Russian conspiracy.

A few years ago, the fast food chain Burger King introduced something called an “impossible burger” which is made from grass clippings. The claim was that it tasted just like their regular burgers but was made from plants. Why they did this was never asked or explained. Up to that point, the number of people saying, “Man, I could really go for a burger made from grass clippings right now” was zero. In fact, the number remains stubbornly pegged at zero. No one wants this.

Now, billion dollar companies make dumb decisions. History is full of ideas cooked up in corporate offices that turn out to be laughably stupid. Maybe this grass burger idea is just another example, like new Coke. The thing is though, they did not invent the grass burger or the idea of it. There are two companies pushing this idea. Impossible Products and Beyond Meat are producing fake meat products. It was the former who approached Burger King with the plant burger idea.

Now, it is important to note here that these new fake meat products do not taste like meat as is claimed. They taste like what people who have never tasted meat think meat tastes like to humans. The fake beef has the mouth-feel of oatmeal. It is a weird sort of grainy slime when you eat it. It is not horrible and if you were starving you would probably eat it, but cannibalism would start to look appealing. Like the previous attempts to create fake meat, this new stuff is not very good.

The point is the companies pushing this do not have a better mousetrap. They are not even making that claim. In fact, they make it clear that their products are not better than what they seek to replace. In their public demonstrations they concede that it is, at best, a close facsimile. Instead, they claim their products are morally superior. You see, the burger made from grass clippings and dried leaves pleases Gaia. She will therefore reward the grass eaters and punish the meat eaters.

That is insane, but these products have the backing of the oligarchs. Both of these companies are supported financially by rich people. The troubled Bill Gates is behind the Impossible Burger scheme. He is the guy trying to blot out the sun because he thinks it is part of the cow conspiracy. Other oligarchs are rushing to get in on the fake meat racket as well. All of a sudden, the rich are sure real meat will go the way of the buggy whip and be replaced by bugs and grass clippings.

The question is, why? The fact is there is no market for fake meat. Dozens of efforts to create one, including the current fake burger idea, have flopped. The fact is the public is not going to voluntarily start eating bugs and grass clippings just because the climate loons say Gaia commands it. If the choice is between a real burger and the artificial alternative, people choose the real burger. In other words, there is no business opportunity here that the oligarchs are trying to exploit.

That is, unless the government plans to ban meat. Despite the organized media campaign by the regime to claim otherwise, the regime is plotting to ban meat. They will not do it outright, but instead regulate it out of existence. In the name of climate change, they will make the sale and production of meat products increasingly expensive. This is why the billionaires all see fake meat as an opportunity. It is also why recipe sites are now removing meat recipes from their websites.

In one respect, the highly coordinated media campaign to deny the Biden war on burgers is correct. There is no design behind this. What is driving it is the weird new religion taking hold of the American ruling elite. They really believe that Gaia is angry with us and will unleash her wrath unless we repent. Of course, they mean repent in that you will commit the act of contrition and they will get salvation. They also get to keep eating meat while you dine on spiders and dandelions.

The war on meat is not a conspiracy. It is an example of the Hoffer line about mass movements in America. They become a business, a racket, or a corporation. In this case, the Gaia worship sweeping the ruling class is becoming a business. These grass and twig burger companies are the first wave of companies hoping to capitalize on the artificially created market for fake food. They see the madness in the eyes of their peers and immediately think about how to profit from it.

Of course, all big business in America depends on government. These fake meat companies and the billionaire sponsor will lobby the state to create legislation favorable to them and harmful to their opponents. The political rackets will get a chance to skim some off this new business, as long as the play ball with fake meat. All of a sudden, real meat has to increase the bribes to counter fake meat. The war on meat is just another manifestation of the natural corruption in liberal democracy.

Morality Versus Reason

Posted on May 3, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week it is a take on history possibly repeating itself. There’s a review of the movie After Earth behind the green door. For those who like the podcast, there is a new feature behind the green door. This is a short Sunday podcast on news items from the week. If you would like to buy the hardest working man in dissident politics a beer, you can now do so here.

David Hume observed that there is a difference between statements about what is and statements about what ought to be. Hume’s law or Hume’s guillotine has become an axiom of philosophy ever since. That axiom is that you cannot move from descriptive statements to prescriptive ones. Put another way, there are things that are true based on observation like the movement of the stars. Then there are things that are true based upon a set of rules, like ethics or religion.

Despite the fact–value distinction, people tend to conflate factual truth with moral truth, especially in politics. For example, you could make a solid economic argument in favor of slavery in certain areas of the economy. Your reason could simply be to make a larger point about economics or maybe labor in that field. That would not stop people from condemning you as a heretic. The moral rule says that any mention of slavery must be in a spasmodic condemnation of whiteness.

On the other hand, given the direction of American morality, you could probably cook up an argument for assessing everything in blackness. Since America was built on the backs of black labor, everything should be valued in those terms. It is ridiculous as a matter of fact, but the present morality would probably be receptive. Taken to its logical conclusion, we could very well end up denominating all goods in Africans, because the moral framework has sacralized black people.

No matter how rational and logical the argument, it cannot overcome morality, but moral claims can easily overcome factual objections. In the example above, the facts about labor markets and the reality of servitude will never make a dent on public opinions regarding slavery, because being opposed to slavery is a central part of the moral framework of the current age. On the other hand, if slavery can be recast to fit within that moral framework, then it will be eagerly embraced.

This is the central problem of politics within a liberal democracy. The spring of democracy is morality. The popular will always bends toward the general morality, even when it goes against public interest. In fact, the public is more easily persuaded to do things against their interests than in their interests. The reason is sacrifice is always a part of morality. Asking people to sacrifice in the name of some moral cause turns their sacrifice into piety, which is the coin of the realm.

This is why liberal democracy seems to be shaking itself apart. In theory, liberal democracy is supposed to be a representative government constrained by the principles of liberalism. These principles are enshrined in a constitution or a body of laws that limit the actions of citizens and the government. Since everyone is equal before the law, everyone has the same rights and privilege. Free speech and freedom of association, for example, are inalienable rights of everyone.

In reality, that spring of democracy easily overrides the principles of liberalism, always in the name of same great cause. You see this here in a post from someone calling himself a conservative. He writes, “Racism was such a dark chapter for our country that, in striving for its extirpation, we adopted anti-discrimination, public-accommodation, and even affirmative-action provisions that are in tension with aspects of liberty and the principle of equal protection under the law.”

The word “tension” there is a gratuitous assertion. There is no tension between the moral orthodoxy regarding race and liberal principles. The former overrides the latter and even so-called conservatives celebrate it. He finished that paragraph with “The prudence of some of these provisions is debatable, particularly their effectiveness in achieving their lofty aims. We’ve maintained them nevertheless as a sign of commitment to a society that is repulsed by racism.”

What is the logic behind reorganizing society in such a way that the world knows we are “repulsed by racism”? There is no such argument. There cannot be a rational argument against racism, as racism itself is a social construct, something that only exists within a set of rules created by current society. It is a devil created by progressivism a century ago as one justification for their cause. As God slowly receded from their moral framework, he took Old Scratch with him, so they invented racism.

In a democracy, even a liberal one, “is” must always yield to “ought” because morality is the organizing principle of a democracy. That morality is defined by and expressed as the will of the people. If the people are convinced that Africans are sacred people, they will conjure unlimited arguments in defense of the notion, despite the objective reality around them. To stand against the majority, even one conjured by the mendacious, is to stand against accepted morality.

This is, of course, why various forms of conservatism and libertarianism have all failed to make a dent in Progressivism. In a democracy, you must win elections and that means getting the majority to agree with you. You can do this my changing enough minds to win the election or you can lie convincingly to enough people so that you win the election. Put another way, you can organize people around new moral arguments, or you mobilize people with some version of the old moral arguments.

Obviously, convincing people that their old beliefs are in error is a lot more difficult than flattering them in some new way. Inevitably, conservatism takes the latter course and comes up with some way to flatter people’s existing sense of morality. Their promotion of Tim Scott, for example, is a way to flatter white people on race. The result of this is the people who claim to oppose the Left end up reinforcing the moral claims of the people of the Left and are assimilated into them.

This is why bourgeois objectivism is no match for left-wing ideology. The cold reality of being correct can never overcome the warm satisfaction of being right. Those descriptive statements about reality are cold, while the prescriptive statements about what ought to be are warm and comforting. People will sacrifice everything for the warm glow of self-righteous certainty. The only antidote to the morality of liberal democracy is an alternative moral framework that promises more than sacrifice.

The New One True Faith

Posted on April 26, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week it is a take on the paleo concept of anarcho-tyranny. There’s a review of Patton behind the green door. For those who like the podcast, there is a new feature behind the green door. This is a short Sunday podcast on news items from the week. If you would like to buy the hardest working man in dissident politics a beer, you can now do so here.

Upon assuming the thrown in 568 AD, the Visigoth king Reccared converted from Arian to Chalcedonian Christianity. This led to some unrest in the kingdom, as the Visigoths had always been Arian. The Arians were mostly tolerant of other religions, including paganism, but the Chalcedonians were not so charitable. Reccared put down the unrest and then oversaw the Third Council of Toledo in 589, where he announced his faith in the Nicene creed and denounced Arianism.

The spiritual differences between Arians and Catholics may be of interest to those with an interest in theology, but what matters to us today is that the trinitarians were the winners in the theological debates within the early church. From that point forward, there was one true faith in the Visigoth kingdom. The people were expected to convert to the new faith. Those who refused could expect some form of repression, ranging from extra taxes to expulsion from the kingdom.

Why Reccared converted to Catholicism is not all that clear. The material benefits, if they existed, have been lost over the centuries. His conversion brought with it new conflicts, especially with the Jews of his kingdom. The Arian kings had been disinterested in the faith of their subjects, which meant they could get along with the Jews, who were quite powerful in parts of the kingdom. That ended with the conversion of Reccared, as the Catholics were not tolerant of Jews.

What happened in Spain under the Visigoths would be repeated many times over the centuries in Europe. The ruling class would convert, and the people were expected to convert along with them. In England, which was controlled by many different kings, the Church converted one at time, the same way they converted Reccared. Of course, the same pattern would remerge in the Reformation. The rulers would change religion and the people would be forced to change their religion as well.

If you wanted to pinpoint the birth of universalism and universal intolerance in the West, the early Middle Ages is probably a good place to start. The Romans persecuted a lot of Christians and Jews, but it was mostly because they saw these movements as a direct threat to their power. By the middle ages, persecution of heretics was no longer about threats to power, but about violation of a universal truth. The mere existence of doubters or skeptics was seen as a threat to the one true faith.

The thing is, from the perspective of the common people, these changes at the top probably made little sense. Imagine you are a proud Goth who has served in the king’s army and then one day you are told you have to change religions. The reason is that the old religion was all wrong. In the case of the Visigoths, this happened twice. Once when some guy created a bunch of squiggles he claimed was your language and everyone became Arians. Then again when Reccared renounced Arianism.

People today should be able to relate to this. Within living memory, the rulers made a point of showing they were faithful Christians. Jimmy Carter was an Evangelical who spoke openly about his faith. Reagan salted his language with Christian references and Bill Clinton carried a Bible around with him. Today our rulers worship black people and think men in dresses are the fullest expression of womanhood. The schools now teach us the evils of whiteness and white privilege.

As with the Christian era in the West, this new religion brings with it an extreme intolerance of skepticism and doubt. Men are being fired from their jobs because they are not enthusiastic enough for the new faith. Those who challenge the faith are anathematized in the same way the early Church would anathematize those who challenged them. Our rulers have not started breaking heretics on the wheel or decorating the streets with the crucified, but it is still early.

We also see the universalism of the new faith. The rulers who embrace this new religion are sure it is the only way any human society can live. All of those in the past, the people that made the present possible, we monstrous sinners. Those in the present, clinging to alternative faiths, are monsters that must be destroyed. The ruling class of America wants to have a nuclear war with Russia over homosexuality. The Crusaders were insanely tolerant compared to today’s crusaders.

There are differences obviously. The universal faith that emerged in the early middle ages provided a social structure in which the West could begin to advance materially and intellectually. Whatever its faults, the Church provided a complex moral and social order that eventually resulted in what we think of as Western Civilization. The faith emerging today among our rulers is a step back into barbarism. It is a reversion to some pre-modern mean, corresponding with the collapse of the West.

The other big difference is the rulers converting to or from the Church in the past did so mostly out of conviction. There were material interests, for sure, but most genuinely believed in what they were doing. They thought what they were doing was in the best interest of their people. Today the rulers are guided by what they imagine is in the worst interest of their people. This new religion is not about elevating them or their people, but about harming the people who make their rule possible.

The other big difference between now and past conversions is the people did not have much to lose by going along with the king’s new religion. Life in the early middle ages was not easy, so giving up the old gods for this new thing or changing from one form of Christ worship to another slightly different form was not a huge risk. The conversion we are seeing today threatens the very existence of the West. If our rulers are wrong, the ape historians of the future will puzzle over why we went along with it.

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

The Lefty Devil

Posted on March 11, 2021 by thezman

One of the most important things the Left in America does in the culture war is convince their opponents to play the role of devil for them. The American Left operates like a religious movement, but one without an inherent purpose. That purpose must be supplied from outside the movement. It is like a beehive without a queen, always searching for a queen that will define the threat for them, so they can act on their nature and attack the enemy in what they believe is defense of the hive.

That is what these causes are for the American Left. The cause itself is meaningless, because that is just a plot device in the story. It is why they can be so callous to the people they claim to be championing. The Left is now attacking feminists who oppose allowing men in dresses to play girls’ sports. Progressives used to talk about girls playing sports like it was the most important thing ever, but men in dresses are now providing the devil, so trannies are what matter most.

This is something right-wing people of all types have never been able to accept, because right-wing people are wedded to bourgeois objectivism. There must be some practical reason for why the Left is doing something. Alternatively, in the case of the tranny-feminist conflict, the Right starts hooting about hypocrisy, as if that has ever mattered to the Left on anything. If facts and reason mattered to the America Left, the American Left would not exist.

What the American Left is all about is the devil, the great tempter. That last bit is the important part, because it gets to the heart of the matter. People join causes out of necessity, self-defense for example, or self-loathing. The former is a temporary condition forced on people by circumstance, like an invasion or some terrible natural calamity like an earthquake. The latter is a permanent state of mind. The true believer is always running from himself.

You see this in the latest left-wing fetish for disinformation. They have created a new form of shaman called the disinformation expert. The job of this shaman is to point out targets for the Left to attack. Disinformation, of course, is false information issued by an institution, like the media, which is intended to mislead. To be an expert in this craft is to have been in an institution practicing it. In other words, the point of this disinformation fixation is to shift the focus from the people responsible for it.

That is another thing that the Right has always missed. The reason the Left is always accusing others of things they are doing or have done is they desperately want to avoid having to even think about themselves. They are expert at deflection, because the Left is composed of people riddled with self-loathing. These are people who have organized their lives around avoiding any conversation about their nature. They instinctively shift the focus from themselves to others.

This is why a rich guy comfortably ensconced in the system can go on jihad against a 22-year-old young man on Twitter. Wajahat Ali issuing fatwas on Twitter against a kid working from his basement is ridiculous on its face. Ali works in Hollywood; he writes for the major broadsheets like the New York Times. Fuentes, on the other hand, is a kid working from zero institutional support. Yet, Ali and his wealthy audience are sure Fuentes is powerful and they are weak.

Now, Ali is just a grifter who should never have been allowed in the country, but his marks in the ruling class are true believers. They are rich and powerful people, holding positions of authority in the managerial class. His patrons, who use him like a shaman to direct these people, are also true believers. These people need an enemy, a devil onto whom they can focus their gaze. Otherwise, they are left to contemplate their loathsome selves, which is a fate worse than death for them.

This is why the tech platforms seem so incoherent in their censorship. They ban some people but leave others alone. It never makes a lot of sense until you realize that they want their enemies coming back on the platforms. They need their enemies in the same way normal people need oxygen. They keep creating new versions of their platforms in order to get more devils to attack. The chat site Clubhouse is the latest example of a site created to manufacture more devils to fight.

The reason our side keeps losing is our guys are stupid and keep playing the role of bogeyman for the Left. “They are going to call us [fill in name of bogeyman here], so we may as be [fill in name of bogeyman here]” is the mantra of the perpetual loser. It is the fuel the Left needs to survive. Whether it is responding to left-wing media or playing the role on their platforms, the right-wing response to the Left has been conditioned to feed into the innate desires of the Left and give them purpose.

Counterintuitively, the best weapon against the America Left is to speak clinically of the Left and about what motivates them. It seems like these lefty scolds want attention, but in reality, they fear the spotlight. The last thing they want to do is defend their motivations and actions. Alternatively, the best defense against these left-wing provocations is to ignore them. If Fuentes had not taken the bait, Wajahat Ali would not be flying around on his carpet right now as the coolest djinn on Twitter.

That is the thing the successful right-wing movement will accept. The currency of the Left is the attention from the Right. The Left needs an enemy, a devil, in order to have purpose to their lives. These are starving souls looking for grace, which comes in the form of attention from their enemies, real and imagined. The successful right-wing movement uses this reality to turn the tables, putting the leash on lefty’s neck, using his desire to be a good boy to its advantage.

The Next Phase Of The War

Posted on November 17, 2020 by thezman

Note: I have a movie review up behind the green door. This time it is #97 on the AFI top-100 list, Bringing Up Baby. I must admit, I’me finding it a lot of fun to sample these very old movies. Like reading old books, there is a lot of secondary cultural stuff to be learned from watching old movies.

Very bad people back in the cultural revolution of the 1960’s noticed that radicals were very good at the first phase of their project, but not the second. The radicals wanted to knock down the institutions of society and replace them with something better, but they never managed to pull off that last part. In fact, the thing they cooked up as the new and improved version of what they destroyed tended to create new problems, which required new solutions that created new problems and so on and so on.

An obvious example of this is family life. The nuclear family, with clear and natural roles for the sexes, worked pretty well. The radicals, on the other hand, could not understand why divorce laws and custody laws were as they were. They could not understand why those sex roles existed. They smashed them up and replaced them with family courts, liberal divorce and weird feminist ideas about sex roles. The result has been three generations of family and social dysfunction.

At some point, even the radicals realized that their project was not the best for their cause, so they simply took over the existing institutions. The long march through the institutions was largely over by the 1990’s. The Baby Boomers had taken over and pushed out their parent’s generation. Along the way they made sure that their generation had the right opinions. Those who did not were cast into the outer darkness of dissident exile. The radicals were in charge.

This is what makes the current revolution a shabby and ridiculous version of the cultural revolution of the 60’s. Today’s radicals are the sons and daughters of those radicals, who now are in charge of everything. The street fighters are not attacking “the man” as the man pays their allowance. They are attacking an avatar of the man their parents vanquished generations ago. It is one-part public theater and one-part cargo cult, put on as if it is an initiation ritual for young adults.

There is a more sinister aspect to it. Read what the young radicals in the academy, politics and even in business, are demanding and you see that their assault on the institutions is really an assault on knowledge itself. The radicals of yesteryear were content to embrace the logic of the institutions, just put to use for their purposes. The new radicals want to wreck the logic itself. They want to replace institutional logic with something different, something that does not exist and cannot exist.

This is the heart of the anti-whiteness stuff. When they claim that institutions suffer from whiteness or are Eurocentric, what they mean is the internal logic that operates the institution is coherent and rational. The STEM fields, for example, still abide by the rules of mathematics. Medicine is still rooted in the logic of Western medicine. Because these rules are barriers to all but the talented tenth of non-whites, these rules must be racist and therefore these rules have to be eliminated.

If one is over a certain age and a fan of dark humor, there is an amusing bit of irony to all of this. The people in charge are now getting the same treatment from their pets that they gave to the Occidentals, who they assaulted as youth. After all, the reason whiteness persists is the white Progressives, and white presenting Progressives, have maintained that whiteness for their benefit. It would take a heart of stone not to enjoy the sight of woke females of color screaming at the aging radicals.

Putting that aside, a medical system “disrupted and decolonized” in order to allow for the dominance of non-whites will result in something dangerous and primitive. A world with Africanized math is a world spinning off its axis. Allowing the wrong answer to stand alongside the right answer in the name of equity and equality will result in disorder and chaos within the institutions. In other words, it is not just a threat to the people in charge of the institutions, but the institutions themselves.

In order to maintain the simplest of things, you need to be able to make some simple predictions about the future. Predictions rely upon order, which in turn is the product of rules about the world and how people will act. Imagine a road with no rules. If you cannot know what other drivers will do or how the road surface will be around the next corner, the road becomes useless. You are better off walking through the woods than taking your life into your hands on the road.

This is what the woke revolution is promising and beginning to deliver. Consider the news media, for example. A generation ago it was predictably biased, but it contained some truth in the bias. If you knew the rules, you could watch a chat show or read a newspaper and get a sense of things. Today, in order to strip all that ugly whiteness from it, the news is a random nonsense with no truth value at all. The only point to it is to stimulate the true believers of the revolution.

What the woke revolution and its promise to decolonize Western societies is really promising is a return to a form of occasionalism. The formal definition of this is that created substances cannot be efficient causes of events. Humans are “created substances” which means they live in a world of miracles. There are no rules, only the whims of the creator. In a world without fixed rules, there is no point in knowing the rules and therefore no point in predicting what comes next.

This is a world of primitive oogily-boogily. It is why the people in charge are suddenly getting nervous about the golem they released on white people. The Democrat leaders in Washington are claiming their radicals have gone too far, while the Republicans are cheering them on, as they silently watch Trump be removed from office. Whether or not they can put the golem back into what holds a golem is unknown. The woke warriors are now everywhere in the institutions and they are not ready to quit.

What this means is the next phase of the revolution shifts from attacking normal white people going about their business, to a fight between the rulers and their pets. The political class can probably handle the people in their ranks, but what will they do about woke capital? How do they plan to contend with the suddenly woke intelligence agencies and the foreign-dominated foreign policy establishment? How will they reign in the woke mayors, governors and police departments?

None of this is to imply that the coast is clear for whites. Attacking whites is now an integral part of what makes the new radical. It’s just that the purpose of it will change from pleasing their masters to attacking their masters. The Pretender Biden does not know it, but Team Kamala has stocked up on My Pillows. The war did not end with the removal of the evil Trump. It was just the opening phase. The next phase is between the ideology of the woke and the cupidity of their masters.

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The Oogily-Boogily Men

Posted on October 27, 2020 by thezman

A foundation item of modern Gospel scholarship is something called the Q-document, which is a hypothetical manuscript of Jesus’ sayings. The gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels, because they include many of the same stories, which suggests they share the same source document. There is a theory that all three writers relied upon this unknown source document. The Q-document is the collection of common stories in all three of these Gospels.

It is an interesting theory because it rests upon some things we know about human behavior, in addition to the textual evidence. For example, we know that the first written texts were based on oral traditions. The stories and legends that were passed from one generation to the next were written down at some point. We know the Gospel writers were not firsthand witnesses. The Q-document allows scholars to fill in some missing pieces of the puzzle based on what is known.

A similar sort of detective work can be used in this age to try and understand the beliefs of our ruling class. At first blush, the things they say and do run counter to the normal explanations for political behavior. Often, what they say runs counter to their own interests, suggesting some unknown motivation. Of course, many of the popular fads with the great and good are best described as superstitions. They have no justification other than a primitive fear of the unknown.

The place to start is with the Russian conspiracy myth. What started out as a ham-fisted way for the Clinton campaign to shift the focus from the e-mails being leaked on-line, quickly manifested into a raging conspiracy theory. The FBI and CIA knew there was nothing to it, but it was a useful cover for their shenanigans. This patina of authority, however, allowed it to become something of a cult phenomenon among the chattering classes and their followers. Russia was the bogeyman.

What no one stopped to consider is what it was the alleged conspirators were plotting to do way back in 2016. Supposedly, they were interfering in the election, but how exactly was that supposed to work? No one ever said, but what we can infer is that the plot was designed to prevent the Left from getting something important. It went well beyond Hillary Clinton, as the plot is an ongoing enterprise. The conspiracy is part of a great hidden battle between the forces of light the forces of darkness.

Now we have the panic of the QAnon phenomenon on-line. The various tentacles of the Left are trying to remove all references of it from the public square. People into this hobby are being thrown off social media platforms. Media airheads are demanding politicians denounce QAnon. The Left has anthropomorphized QAnon into a sort of super-villain running a secret army. In fact, Q is now an international super-villain, organizing the bad guys all over the world.

Like the Russian hoax, they never explain what they think this is or why anyone should be concerned about it. To normal people, it is just one of those weird things like believing in space aliens that people do for some reason. To the Left, it is the gathering of all the dark forces in the world into one great heathen army. This dark army intends to stop the Left from achieving their goals. This is why the Left has always been at war with QAnon and must defeat him in the end.

A goofier version is their obsession with the Boogaloo Boys. This is supposedly a secret cabal of men wearing Hawaiian shirts, no kidding. They are supposedly plotting a second civil war for some reason. Of course, the government dutifully feeds into this nonsense, but never bothers to explain how supposed Boogaloo Boys turn out to be members of left-wing groups like Antifa. The power of the Hawaiian should never be underestimated.

The same thing happened with the Proud Boys. The left has been obsessing with these guys for years now. This fan club for Gavin McInnes has been transformed into an invisible army the Left is sure is lurking around every corner. Amusingly, the group is full of gays, Jews and non-whites, but they are called white supremacists. Like the power of the Hawaiian shirt, mere membership in this group can turn a gay Puerto Rican into a Neo-Nazi terrorist. That’s some powerful juju.

Slightly different, but related is the Covid panic. The public’s initial concern was warranted as the media exaggerated what was happening and the government was as inept at handling it as they are at fixing the roads. People were wise to be a bit cautious and take steps to limit their risks. Then, as the reality of Covid became clear, normal people relaxed and the Left turned it into a supernatural force. The same people living in fear of Gaia now check case numbers three times a day.

The Covid panic on the Left combines strains from the other items mentioned into something of a morality play. You see, Covid is not just a manageable virus like so many others that are a part of our world. It is a sign, perhaps even a punishment, sent to cleanse the land of evil. The Left is convinced that voting out Trump will relieve the land of this great plague. Covid is now another manifestation of the great evil opposing the great and the good in their quest to reach the Promised Land.

What these items and many others have in common is a belief on the Left that they are in a great end-time struggle with a mysterious and sinister force. It has the ability to change how people vote and turn them into enemies of their own interests. Like George Soros, ironically enough, it uses its power to turn small groups into powerful armies in the war against the great and the good. The great enemy of the one true faith is not people with different ideas, but evil itself.

Eric Hoffer said, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” Having conquered all known enemies on earth, the Left is now without a natural opponent. It is forced to invent supernatural ones in order to maintain that necessary fiction required of all mass movements. Having rejected Christianity and Western tradition, they are creating an ad hoc set of myths and legends to explain the world and their role in it.

Interestingly, this new oogily-boogily is mystical in an oriental way. The great evil at the center of it is never spoken of directly. It’s as if it is taboo to mention it. Instead, they focus on the manifestations of this evil. What gives the dark forces such power is they cannot be quantified with language. Instead it is just assumed to be the origin of all that they fear. The Left is now bound together by a mystical belief in something they cannot describe, but they are sure exists.

The Ash Heap Of History

Posted on October 5, 2020 by thezman

In the fullness of time, the most important development in the Trump era will be the collapse of conservatism as a political movement. The official Right had been in crisis for a long time, but the old political dynamic had locked it in place. If you opposed the Left, the only alternative was conservatism. Trump did not usher in a new era, so much as discredit the old. The Left quickly redesigned to self as a defender of the status quo and institutional power, while the Right has collapsed.

Even at this early date, it has become a bit trite to note that American conservatism has collapsed over the last five years. Not only has it collapsed, in terms of its intellectual influence, but it has become a ridiculous joke. Even the jokes about it have started to sound a bit hackneyed, as the absurdity moves beyond satire. When a site calling itself The American Conservative is making “the conservative case” for explicitly anti-white pogroms, the jokes stop being funny.

Even so, it is worth looking at why the American Right has collapsed. The majority of white people in America have at one time or another considered themselves conservative or at least were open to it. There’s never been a majority in favor of Progressive reforms, yet those reformers have always carried the day, despite the opposition of the professional Right. It takes a special skill to lose so much despite having a numerical advantage in a democracy.

One obvious reason for the collapse of conservatism is that it lost all of its intellectual vigor decades ago. We live in an age of pygmies, but nowhere is that more obvious than with the professional Right. Half a century ago, the Right was teaming with serious thinkers. A couple of decades ago, National Review had a half a dozen or more quality thinkers and polemicists. Today, no one can think of a single writer or thinker on the Right that is worth a minute’s time.

That really is the striking thing about what has happened to America in general, but the Right in particular. It is as if anyone with the least bit of curiosity about the world has been driven off and replaced by former postal workers. The distinguishing feature of the American intellectual class is its doctrinaire dreariness. Everyone with anything on the ball and a curiosity about the world operates out on the fringes. The American intellectual class is a as vibrant as the surface of the moon.

Another facet of this, a byproduct of the suffocating dullness, is an inability of conservatives to examine how they came to this dead end. This piece in the American Mind, which is supposed to be the free-thinking outlet for conservatives looking to break free of the old modes of thought, is a good example. On the surface, it is supposed to be an analysis of the administrative state, which should mean the managerial state, but instead it means “big government” in the old hackneyed way.

Note that the writer takes as a given the basic assumptions of the Left. His opposition to what he describes as the administrative state, is that it is anti-democratic, prejudiced and discriminatory. This is the sort of complaint that was popular on the Left a generation ago, when they would attack corporate America. In the hands of conservatives, it becomes a complaint about having to deal with a thicket of bureaucrats down at the local motor vehicle department.

Even more ridiculous, their critique of the administrative state tries to use guilt by association to win over their enemies on the Left. You see, the roots of the administrative state are in the Confederacy! You see that my woke brothers? The thing you now control is every bit as racist and cis-gendered as those statues you are toppling all over the country. It is not just a rhetorical devise. Conservatives truly believe that current crisis is rooted in human preference.

The weird logic of modern conservative thinking is worth noting. Professor Hamburger seems to think the great obstacle to the Progressive dream of an egalitarian paradise are the tools the Left has been using to create that paradise. Not only will they agree to throw down their weapons, they will suddenly stop their aggression. It is a bizarre form of utopian thinking. It is even more bizarre, given that the greatest threat to individual liberty is woke capital, not the government.

What is even more striking about this is just how obtuse this line of thought is, given that within conservative intellectual traditions there are far better critiques. Within living memory, Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried wrote extensively about the managerial state, building off the analysis of James Burnham. Perhaps it is understandable that Francis has been forgotten in conservative circles, but Gottfried is still around and active at publications like the American Conservative.

This gets back to the barren intellectual landscape in general, but the aridity of conservatism in particular. Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

What has been lost in this age is anyone that can look down about this dynamic between strategy and tactics and understand the ideas and historical forces that are carrying these combatants along. This should be the role of conservatism. It should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

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