The Diversity Cult

Posted on June 6, 2024 by thezman

The 2023 Irish action thriller, In the Land of Saints and Sinners, is one of those films that offers some insight into the machinations of our cultural overlords. It is one of those small budget adult dramas that does not get a ton of attention but does well on the streaming services after its initial release. It is not that these are bad films, but they are not expected to pack the theaters. These are the new version of the B-Movie that fill up the spaces between the heavily hyped, big budget films.

Anyway, the film is set in Ireland during the Troubles because every movie about Ireland is set during the Troubles. It stars Liam Neeson, who plays Finbar Murphy, a hired assassin who lives in a quiet coastal town. It is not all that clear who is assigning the hits, but they come through a local businessman who gets the assignments and hands them out to men like Finbar. This local businessman is not connected to the Troubles and makes sure to not get involved in politics.

The story arc for Finbar starts during his final assignment when the guy he is about to kill gives him some advice rather than beg for his life. Finbar’s habit is to grab his target off the street and take him out to the woods, where he makes the guy dig his own grave before shooting him with a shotgun. He then plants a tree on the grave. This target is a former contract killer, who urges Finbar to make something of the rest of his life before he ends up in the same place as him.

This leads Finbar to have a crisis of conscience and he decides to retire. Meanwhile, some IRA terrorists have come into town to hide out after having set off a bomb in Belfast that killed some children. They are staying with a relative who lives in the town and that relative just happens to have a run in with Finbar. Of course, Finbar solves the problem by taking the guy out to his favorite killing field. Thus, we have the central conflict of the film as the terrorists face off against Finbar.

This all sounds like the basis for a good old-fashioned thriller. You get some Irish history as a backdrop, and you get to see Liam Neeson use his “particular set of skills” to slowly take care of the bad guys. Neeson has been playing this role since he got super famous for doing it in the movie Taken. He is in his seventies now, but he still manages to make it work, just as long as he does not have to move around too much. In this film he is the wise old version of the lethal weapon.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, there is a black guy. Finbar is in a pub and there is a black guy playing Irish tunes on a fiddle. He is not a black leprechaun, but he is a short guy so that would have made some sense. Instead, he is a refugee from Africa who somehow settled into this tiny coastal town in rural Ireland. He tells Finbar that the reason he picked the town is he wanted to escape the violence of his home country and he once heard Irish music as a kid.

It gets more absurd. Later in the film there is the big show down between Finbar and the terrorists at the pub. The terrorists are shooting the place up and Finbar sees the sacred African hiding under a table, so he rushes over to save him. In other words, the wandering African is not just a ridiculous addition to a film set in 1970’s Ireland, he is now a sacred symbol of the film. In that scene you expect the people to scream, “leave the women and children but save our sacred African!”

Clearly, the quality control committee realized that their film did not have the required amount of diversity, so the script was sent back for a rewrite. The writers probably thought they were okay because they made the head terrorist a sassy girl boss with two thick headed male henchmen. That was not enough so they needed to figure out a way to add some color to story set in rural 1970’s Ireland and they settled on having a peripatetic African midget playing the fiddle in the pub.

We have all become used to the black washing and race swapping that goes on in the culture, but in a film like this you see how mechanical it has become. Somewhere in the process there is a crew of shrews and scolds who make sure there is a girls boss and the proper amount of color. They do not care if it makes any sense. Like people with rubber stamps in a bureaucracy, their job is to make sure the film has enough diversity points before it goes into production.

Eric Hoffer famously said, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” In fact, it often becomes all three and you see it with the diversity rackets that now infest every institution. It is a lucrative racket for those who master the arcana, but it has been embedded in the economy. Like the green rackets, the diversity rackets are now part of the fabric of corporate life. It is assumed to be an essential part of every large enterprise.

The thing that holds it in place, however, is that it is a cult. There is little doubt that many of the people in that film thought it was stunning and brave that they had a little African guy skittering around the set. Those who thought it was a ridiculous addition to the film kept their head down because they did not want the lunatics from the cult of diversity hounding them over it. The result is we now have diversity everywhere when what we need is to have it nowhere.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.

Media And The Cult

Posted on May 23, 2024 by thezman

A mostly unexamined aspect of the ongoing crisis is the role the media plays in keeping the managerial class misinformed. It is always assumed that the firehose of lies that come from regime media is designed to trick the public, but the truth is no one in charge cares about public opinion outside the extremes. Politicians come and go, and the parties take turns pretending to be in charge but the administrative state and the managerial class that runs it are permanent.

One only has to look at the presidential elections over the last thirty years to see that elections have no impact on policy. Bill Clinton was supposed to be a break with the polices of Reagan and Bush, but things changed very little. Bush was supposed to bring decency back to the White House. Instead, he empowered the neocons, who set about making war on the world. Obama was supposed to put an end to all that war making, but instead doubled down in Afghanistan.

If you could map changes in public policy from election to election since the Cold War you would end up with a line that slowly moves upward. The only change we see is slightly more of the same with each change in administration. The same can be said of the changes in the House and Senate. As we have recently seen with the Republicans in the House, they are just a shadow of the Democrats, who shadow the Republicans as they take turns in the majority.

The reason for this is ninety percent of our elected representatives never have to fear the voters. They only have to fear the wrath of their party leaders, who are the representatives of the economic elites that underwrite the system. For the typical congressman or senator, there is no profit in appealing to the voters, if it means going against party leadership. That can only result in a primary challenge, so the rational course is to do what the party tells them.

If the political system is now immune to public opinion, then why are we awash in mass media filling the public square with propaganda? One reason is inertia. There was a time when winning the voters mattered and the media was an essential part of how the parties presented their claims to the public. Listen to media figures talk about their profession and they often sound like museum pieces. The Washington Post hilariously has the line, “Democracy Dies In Darkness” on its masthead.

Another reason for the explosion of agit-prop might be that as the number of safe seats has grown, the consensus between the two parties has narrowed. That means the range of acceptable dissent has narrowed as well. Look around Washington and there is only one acceptable position on most issues. For example, you can wail about the southern border, but you cannot oppose immigration. You can “care about working families” but you cannot oppose finance capitalism.

When a broad range of positions are tolerated, the focus is on winning the public to your side, but when the range of tolerable positions is narrow, the focus must be on keeping everyone inside that tolerable range. That is where the media comes in with its firehose of official nonsense. The point is not to sway or trick a skeptical public, but to enforce conformity of opinion inside Washington. Ironically, this was the primary purpose of the media in the Soviet Union.

Take for example this post at the National Interest. This is one of the many neocon publications used to control official debate on foreign policy. It was founded by Irving Kristol, one of the founding members of the neocon cult. The post reads like it was written by a crazy person, but that is because it is a collection of assertions circulating in the mass media for years. The point of the post is to keep these assertions circulating and therefore the default position on Russia.

Imagine you are a congressman sitting on a committee that serves the interests of the Military Industrial Complex. Image further that you made the mistake of reading unapproved analysis of the war and the war claims. You might be tempted to question the people making the claims, until you run into this wall of official opinion that sprouts from every regime outlet and every regime member. Even if you are skeptical, you will find nothing but hostility to your questions.

In many respects, Washington now operates like a cult. People at all levels are recruited into politics because they conform to the attitudes of the cult. Those who show a lack of enthusiasm are either bullied into submission or expelled. Meanwhile, those inside are subjected to a constant wave of mass media that reinforces the currently acceptable opinions of the cult leaders. The media is an endless chorus praising the cult and the positions held by the cult.

Another aspect of cults is that the people inside them lack the perspective and self-awareness to see themselves as being in a cult. No one ever says “I decided to join a cult” because no one in a cult thinks they are in a cult. Instead, they think the logic of the cult explains everything that needs explaining. To those outside, the logic of the cult seems weird and possibly dangerous. The people inside appear to be painfully divorced from reality, maybe even insane.

This is exactly how normal people see Washington. They see lunatics ranting and raving about imaginary demons, while obvious problems are ignored. One congressman after another swears allegiance to a foreign power, while hooting about China and Russia influencing our elections. This is all amplified by a mass media system that is designed to reward such behavior and punish any hint of skepticism about the narrow set of acceptable opinions.

Our Democracy

Posted on March 18, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about living in a world where you can be jailed for holding the wrong opinions and a post about my used car lot. The Sunday podcast was posted early for a change. Subscribe here or here.

Joseph de Maistre famously observed, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” We get a sense of that in the weekend media drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” in a speech. He used the word in reference to what would happen to the auto industry under a second Biden term, but the media left out the part about the auto industry.

The result was a media frenzy based on the false claim that Trump was promising some sort of homicidal revenge if he did not win the election. One media pinhead after another went to their favorite platform to repeat the claim. In some cases, they did so on video platforms as the video of Trump giving the speech in which he used the word was playing in the corner of the screen with the sound muted. So much for the second half of that de Maistre quote about honest people perpetuating the crime.

It probably would have gone like so many other fake media narratives in that normal people without access to the megaphone would have spent days clarifying what was said but by that point the media would be onto the next lie. This time the world’s richest man noticed and posted about it on Twitter. Joe Scarborough deleted his post about it, but others kept up the lie. Nancy Pelosi made the rounds stammering through the claim that Trump is promising a homicidal rampage.

There is nothing new about this, of course. The entirety of the Trump administration was spent this way, where the media would make up obvious lies and people would spend days correcting the lies. The difference now is the world’s richest man has suddenly started to notice things like this. Elon Musk is an eccentric guy, but when he notices something the world notices it with him. Musk seems to be taking aim at the legacy media this cycle, so it will make for some good drama.

This misses the larger issue we see with this story. The person who initiated this drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” lied and she knew she was lying when she claimed he said, “there would be a bloodbath if he lost.” Her bosses surely knew she was lying but went along with it because it would get attention. The rest of the media who piled on also knew it was a lie. In other words, everyone involved knew it was a lie, but they kept on lying, even when everyone knew it was a lie.

In theory, the media is supposed to be the arena of public debate, where the political combatants argue for their proposals. In imagination land, the media is just a referee, but in more sober telling the media is a collection of competing entities fighting to gain the trust and attention of the market. The marketplace for information should correct for this constant lying, much as it prevents the one airplane maker from filling up on diversity hires and building planes that fall apart in midair.

Therein lies the problem. Just as Boeing is pretty much a monopoly, the media is also a monopoly and for the same reasons. Over the years, Boeing was able to make the best of friends in government, so that it was able to buy up the competition. Similarly, the media has coalesced around a critical mass of flatterers who have exclusive access to permanent Washington. If you want to buy a commercial plan you go to Boeing and if you want to reach the public, you go to the media.

Just as the free market always seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace, democracy seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace for ideas. The reason a nonsense story like the Trump “bloodbath” comment runs wild is that the media is a monolith. The people in it speak only to each other and the people in it are selected for their ideological compliance. The media is a massive hive controlled by the uniparty.

Of course, the fact that we have the expression “uniparty” and everyone understands exactly what it means speaks to the reality of “democracy.” Instead of it being the marketplace of ideas, it collapses like all markets into monopoly. Reformers like Trump are treated like upstarts in any industry dominated by a few players. If a collection of rich guys tried to challenge the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing, they would quickly cease to be rich guys, as they would be crushed.

That is the plight of anyone who seeks to reform democracy. The desire for reform comes only when it has evolved to its natural state of oligopoly, which often appears to the people as a monopoly. Like the upstart challenging the major players in an industry, the reformers get crushed, unless they have friends in government. To get friends in government means making the same deal as the major players. The path forward is always a deal with the devil or death by his minions.

Joseph de Maistre said, “To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government.” That was two hundred years ago before any nation foolishly set about proving him correct. Every day the media reminds us that there is no reforming democracy.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Film As Art

Posted on August 22, 2023 by thezman

Note: The following is green door content. I am posting here as a reminder that you can support my efforts with more than just your pithy comments on the site. You can sign up for a green door account here or here. I am just shy of 700 subs and it would be nice to push through that barrier by the end of summer.

Can a movie be art? It probably depends upon your definition of art. The general definition is “something created with imagination and skill that is beautiful or expresses important ideas.” There are a lot of subjective words there. What is beautiful to one person can be silly looking to another person. Important ideas are not always easy to define and often take a long time before they are seen as important.

Using this general definition, even allowing for variations of taste and perspective, movies can be art in the same way a pop song can be art. It is unlikely that anyone will be performing Madonna songs a century from now but lots of people thought the songs were beautiful at the time. Some people even say that she was a culturally important figure at her peak. But is Madonna in the same club as Beethoven?

Another way of looking at art is that it is something that holds a mirror up to the society that created it. Greek statues speak to the nature of the people who created them in ways that their graffiti and pornography does not. The Greeks had graffiti and crude art produced for the masses, just like this age. They had pornography too, but what stood the test of time was their sculpture, literature, and architecture.

When you look at it this way, pop songs are not art because they do not speak to the nature of the society that produces them. The reason no one thinks about the pop songs of the 19th century, and they did have pop music, is the same reason no one will talk about Madonna songs in the 22nd century. This sort of crude entertainment has nothing important to say about the people who produced and consumed it.

That brings us back to movies. Most films are made for the same purpose most popular music is made, which is profit. You get a decent script and some famous actors, have it made by a competent director and profit! The only films made for reasons other than profit are the small projects by famous stars and directors. The studios let these guys do pet projects as a way to keep them happy.

This is probably why studios are fine with ruining their franchises by making unnecessary sequels and reboots. Star Wars is a punchline now, but it made billions for the studios, so it is all good. The Indians Jones franchise has ended with the thud, because the studio views it as a profit vehicle, not a work of art. You do not reboot Mozart or remake a Da Vinci painting. You can reboot a movie franchise.

This brings us to the classic Disney film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is number fifty on the AFI top-100. There is no need to summarize it or even offer a critique, as everything that can be said about this has been said. Not only is it the greatest animated film of all time, but it is also based on a German fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, thus tying it to the soul of Western man.

Does this film have something important to say? Does it hold a mirror up to the society that produced it? Is it beautiful? The answer to the first question is no, but the second and third questions are not obvious. It does feel like a statement of some sort, but that is mostly because we view it from the perspective of this age. It reflects what we have come to view as a better, more decent age than our own. But is it art?

Probably the best argument for it being a work of art is the response to the news that Disney plans to vandalize this film. They wanted to reimagine it by making it diverse and vulgar, like everything else. Instead of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs it is going to be Nonwhite and the Seven Diverse Weirdos. People were not outraged or offended as it is too late for that now. Instead, everyone laughed.

Vandalizing Star Wars makes people angry because you are destroying a part of their childhood, but once those people are gone, the film, the remakes and the outrage around those remakes are forgotten. When someone says they want to improve on Beethoven or paint a better version of the Mona Lisa, you laugh because you know the person doing it is an idiot and he and his work will soon be forgotten.

In other words, a work of art cannot be remade, rebooted, or even vandalized, as it has deep roots in our cultural consciousness. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are still with us, even though they are long gone, because they made such a deep impression on the people of that time that the memory of them has been preserved. Art not only stands the test of time, but it also transcends time and place.

The one issue with this line of reasoning is that unlike any other form of art, film has to be seen to be appreciated. We can appreciate the Colossus of Rhodes from descriptions and drawings. We know it existed and we can imagine what it was like seeing it at the time. You cannot do that with a film. Once Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is gone, all we have left is the fairytale on which it is based.

That is the reason to watch this film. Given the age in which we live, it could soon be condemned for heresy. They removed Song of the South and now hardly anyone remembers it existed. If you want to see it, you have to watch it on a weird website or download it from the Chinese. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a great film, but it is also a reminder that we have to fight to keep our art.

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory.

Death By A Thousand Lies

Posted on July 6, 2023 by thezman

On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.

In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.

Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.

The response from the media was much different when the Twitter Files revealed the level of cooperation between Twitter censors and the government. The primary response was to ignore the whole thing. This is the real power of the media. They can simply ignore a story and let it be buried under a mountain of nonsense about carny folk or conspiracy theories about things like global warming. The second response was to trash the reputation of Matt Taibbi who did the reporting.

So far, the media response to this injunction is what you would expect. On the one hand, they are treating it as a partisan issue. You see, it is the nasty Republican states that are hassling Biden for no reason at all. On the other hand, this ruling is preventing the government from defending our democracy against election interference. The brave disinformation researchers are now prevented from doing their work to protect you from words and sounds that threaten our democracy.

Disinformation is information that is intended to deceive, usually from an official source, like the media or the government. This is an easily solved problem by having an adversarial relationship between the government and the media so both sides police each other. Instead, the media has teamed up with the state to battle this invisible fiend who is attacking our democracy. It is tempting to call this language Orwellian, but it is too ridiculous and insane to be Orwellian.

This is a feature of managerial polyarchy that does not get attention. An enormous amount of time is spent on imaginary things. The Russian collusion hoax probably cost over a billion dollars in the end. It was something that obviously did not exist, because it could not exist, but for the people in the hive it had to exist, so they treated it as if it were as real as a rose bush. Take a tour through the fever swamps of the hive and you will see plenty of people who still believe in it.

Then you have the innate need to credentialize everything. Since Grog sold a faulty wheel to Trog, humans have been trying to deceive other humans. In fact, the second oldest profession rests on this very idea. Of course, you cannot have public debate without people trying to convince others of things that are not true. The argument in favor of democracy starts with accepting this trade-off. You accept false opinions in order to encourage the free flow of ideas.

Suddenly, the people who used to claim to be the guardians of this idea are obsessed with disinformation. So much so they will help the government crush anyone who dares say anything that has not been approved. Of course, this means there must be disinformation researchers and disinformation experts. Colleges are now offering courses on the subject. How long before we see someone with the title “licensed disinformation researcher” on a cable chat show?

Notice no one ever asks what a disinformation expert does. The most likely reason for this is the people in this racket could not tell you. Here is the Wilson Center’s page on their disinformation project. Nina Jankowicz is listed a senior fellow. Read her bio and you will see that her only gainful employment has been as a professional liar, spreading government propaganda. Perhaps the theory here is the same as the government hiring former criminals to solve crimes.

If you put “disinformation expert” into a search engine you get millions of links to stories featuring them. If you search on how to become a disinformation expert, then you will see tumbleweeds on your screen. Everyone seems to accept that this profession is real, but no one has the slightest idea how you get the title. One would think that someone in the media would do a deep dive into the topic, but that would risk being accused of disinformation and who wants that?

What this reveals is the inherent decadence of managerialism. Since all authority lies with the expert, every opinion must have an expert behind it. The demand for experts is unlimited, so you end up with experts in things like disinformation. The same process unleashed the army of bigots known as antiracism experts. In place of a holy book or the word of the local shaman, moral authority lies with the expert, so the managerial system manufactures an expert for every normative claim.

There is a practical value to this for the system. These make-believe jobs provide work for the swelling army of credentialed mediocrities. There are now millions of people calling themselves “open-source intelligence researchers.” What this means is they spend all day on Google, going past the first couple of pages. This is the town busy body for the digital age. They work with the disinformation experts to get you banned from Twitter for noticing things.

It is tempting to focus on the un-American aspects of these censorship campaigns, but the fact is America stopped being a rights-based society long ago. The important issue is the vulnerability it reveals. The regime is employing armies of people to control information online and failing miserably. It turns out that the unguarded entrance to the Death Star is a well-formed meme. This probably explains why they are treating Douglas Mackey like his public enemy number one.

It is a sweet irony that a regime that is built on a foundation of lies thinks that its vulnerability is clever lies on Twitter. They are not wrong about this. The regime of lies was possible because people trusted the system. People living in a world of lies are not going to trust the system and they are certainly not going to trust the people who are responsible for the world of lies. They will seek out alternatives. It turns out that the answer to the Big Lie is millions of little lies.

Nixon’s Ghost

Posted on June 21, 2023 by thezman

Fifty years ago, Nixon was run out of politics mostly for the crime of having insulted the sensibilities of the new class in Washington. Through the Second World War, Washington had been a provincial backwater in terms of elite culture. The war changed that, turning the city into the imperial capital with a high culture of its own. Richard Nixon was an offence to the sensibilities of the bourgeois radicals who came to dominate what is now known as permanent Washington.

When you read the bill of indictment against Nixon from this point on the time line, it has a quant and innocent feel to it. Other than the Watergate break in, the rest of the alleged misdeeds look like an idealized version of the Clinton years. His accusers claimed he interfered in various executive agencies, which was a spurious claim at the time and laughably ridiculous from the perspective of this age. Nixon was a piker compared the presidents who followed him.

Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is that the the young radicals of half a century ago are now in charge, doing all of the things that supposedly outraged them back in the Nixon years. Joe Biden, who was in national politics fifty years ago, an incredible fact all by itself, was fond of saying of Nixon that he was a singular problem, not a reflection of the system or his party. The argument in favor of defenestrating Nixon was that it was in defense of the system.

It has been clear for a long time now that Biden is personally corrupt. His son is a drug-addicted degenerate who has made tens of millions for the Biden family by selling access to and favors from his father. Fifty years ago, Biden and all of official Washington would have said such behavior is a threat to the system and the offender must be removed from office. Today, they say talking about this is a threat to our democracy and you need to be removed.

Of course, the news of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal brings up another great parallel to the Nixon years. That is the modified limited hangout. A “limited hangout” is a bit of tradecraft used when the official story for an operation is blown. The operative then fully admits that the cover story is fake and volunteers some bits of the real story, but omitting the parts that he wants to conceal. This diverts public attention to the new narrative away from the real story.

In a meeting to discuss the unfolding Watergate scandal, H. R. Haldeman described to President Nixon the new public relations plan to contain the scandal. In the conversation he described it as a modified limited hangout. Interestingly, this is now common practice in Washington. We call it spin. Every day that goofy looking African woman reads the latest narratives to the Washington press zombies who then dutifully repeat the story on their platforms.

The Hunter Biden plea deal is a modified limited hangout. The first phase is the press release describing the deal. Then the media zombies will be fed some juicy details of the crimes in order to shift focus away from the other crimes. Anyone who raises the issue of Biden taking bribes from Ukraine will then get accused of being a conspiracy theorist or maybe a shill for Putin. In other words, the Biden family admits to a small crime in order to shift attention from the big crimes.

Obviously, the difference between now and then is the media. Nixon faced a much smaller mass media, but it was extremely hostile to him. Biden will never be asked about it or have it mentioned in his presence. This is why they went with such a small hangout, rather than something more substantive. In fact, this plea deal looks like a deliberate middle-finger to the rest of us. Even brain-dead zombies in conservative media have noticed this.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the degeneracy of the mass media since the Nixon years is quite a thing to behold. Not only are they defending this crooked deal, they are treating Hunter Biden as a victim. You see, these charges are never brought, but he is the son of the most popular man in human history, so he is being held to a higher standard of justice than mere mortals. The obsequious media rumpswab is the first line of defense for our managerial tyrants.

All that said, the argument against Nixon was fundamentally a republican one, in that his critics demanded that his defenders place loyalty to the institutions over loyalty to party or the man himself. There is no doubt that many of the Republicans who finked on Nixon thought of themselves as a modern Brutus. Even though they had doubts about the motives of his accusers, sacrificing Nixon in order to elevate republican virtue was a trade they made with conviction.

Now that the roles are reversed, those radicals of fifty years ago now demand loyalty to the man in order to defend “our democracy” which simply means the system that allows them to rule unchallenged. It is a good reminder that the lawful can never deal lawfully with the unlawful. That was the mistake fifty years ago. The lawful should have done what was necessary to physically remove the radicals from society. Instead, they thought their loyalty to the law would be enough.

It is an example of the Frank Herbert quote. “When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.” For the radicals of fifty years ago, republican virtue was a bus they rode to power. They made those arguments because they thought they would work. Once in power, they got off the bus and climbed aboard the authoritarian bus.

Managerial Madness

Posted on June 7, 2023 by thezman

One of the lingering questions about the Covid panic is why did the West suddenly go insane over a regularly occurring phenomena? Pandemics hit the West every generation or so with varying lethality. Most are like Covid in that they are bad for the old and the sick, but mostly a bad flu for everyone else. Once it was clear that Covid was not the Spanish flu, much less the Black Death, the response should have been like those of the past, but instead we got a panic.

In the United States, the panic started when Trump announced the cancellation of travel to and from Europe. That was March of 2020. Europe quickly returned the favor and then the race was on to see who could be the most egregious with regards to abusing their subjects in the name of health and safety. In the United States that meant laughably ridiculous policies like mask mandates, social distancing and the forced closure of restaurants and barbershops.

Panics are what they are because they are irrational, so much of what happened at the beginning is just mass insanity egged on by the media. The nonsense stories about bodies stacked up in morgues kept getting recycled because there was an eager audience of panic-stricken people. Social media was full of people needing to feel like part of the story by spinning personal tales to support the narrative. Many people derived psychic pleasure from feeling like the end was nigh.

After the chubby nurses had finished their TikTok videos, someone had to notice that the hospitals were not overwhelmed. Forgotten now, but people got curious, defied the lockdowns, and went to their local hospitals to see what was happening. Contrary to the reports, the hospitals were not panicked triage centers. They were ghost towns because everything had been cancelled except emergency care. At some point, the staff had to know what was really happening, but they remained silent.

That is the biggest concern about the panic. We were getting good data on the reality of the virus by the autumn of 2020, and it was clear the virus was something like the Asian flu or Hong Kong flu at the worst. The doctors and nurses had to know this by late summer and early fall, but the public health officials insisted otherwise. In fact, we now know they colluded with the tech companies and the media to silence anyone pointing out the facts about Covid. Why did they do this?

The most common response to this question is to shout, “money or power” and then move onto another topic. No doubt some people made money from the panic, and it did give the managers a sense of power. The trouble is we had plenty of state governments go the other way on the issue of lockdowns. Ron DeSantis is going to make a big deal of the fact he did not succumb to the panic. He was not alone, but he had all the same incentives as other states but did not follow the herd.

Maybe the way to think of the money and power answer here is to put it in the context of the managerial society in which we live. The millions of administrators and their managerial bosses finally had their war. The people who populate the array of public and private bureaucracies dedicated to managing some aspect of your life were finally being called upon to defend the world from destruction. The army of public health experts were going to have their turn on the big stage.

The managerial madness that set in and stayed with us long past when it made any sense was not the crude form of money and power that is the most popular answer to every question regarding the behavior of our rulers. People were not taking bribes or gaining new authority in the system. Instead, the vast managerial class and their administrative underlings finally had the sense of control they had always imagined they should have over your life.

It is important to understand that the people who populate the big chairs in the big offices of this age have been bred for this life. They are like dogs selectively breed for certain sorts of work. Anyone who has owned a dachshund, for example, will tell you they have an innate need to dig. If you let them, they will turn the backyard into the surface of the moon trying to find whatever it is they think is there. The wiener dog lives to root around and find what lies beneath.

Like a working dog, the people in the managerial class are bred for their role, so they have that same desire. Instead of digging around the backyard, they desire to manage the life of people that fall under their area of management. In a crisis, that desire explodes in a mania of micromanagement. In other times, it expresses itself as an endless need to expand their roles and thus expand their control. The manager is bred to manage, and she will manage something.

This managerial madness also explains the manufactured crisis. The same people who went berserk over Covid made the predictable mistakes with Ukraine war. If who you are is defined by how you handle the unexpected, after all, you are the one your people come to handle the exceptions, then you will be tuned to seek out the situations that need your particular set of skills. A form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy has infected the managerial class resulting in endless crises.

The reason the system often feels like it is shaking itself apart is that we are plagued with people looking for a crisis to manage. That has resulted in people finding a crisis where none exists. The end point of a society run by managers is a society run by females standing on chairs shrieking at imaginary mice. This also explains why females now outnumber males in the managerial class. You see this most clearly in health care, where the demand for crisis managers is the highest.

It must be said that a fair bit of what went on during Covid was driven by corruption, stupidity, and avarice. The vaccine boondoggle was just a scaled-up version of the Sackler family opioid scam. It was not the genocide the Sackler’s committed against poor people, but there is still time. The negative effects of the Covid vaccines will not fully be known for a long time. A competent system would have stopped both, but stupidity and corruption make avarice the coin of the realm.

Even accounting for the simple answers, we are left with the question as to why the managerial class went mad with Covid. The simple answer here is that perpetual panic is the natural end to managerialism. Once your society is consumed by a ruling class that imagines itself as the indispensable answer to every problem, they eventually are consumed with the need for problems to solve. We are being destroyed by an out of control need to manage the next crisis.

Official Madness

Posted on May 8, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Amazon show Clarkson’s Farm, a post about the Republican brown plan and the Sunday podcast. I was on live with Patrick Casey last week and the replay is here. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you were around in the 1980’s and old enough to pay attention to the news, you remember the debate about the news media. One side, the conservatives, complained about the media bias against them. The other side, the liberals, dismissed the claim as something like a conspiracy theory. For its part, the media spent time trying to prove they were not biased at all. They would point to the one conservative story in the back pages as proof they were giving both sides equal treatment.

The funny part about that debate is everyone was right. The conservatives were right in that self-described conservatives outnumbered self-described liberals two-to-one, but the media was almost entirely liberal. The liberals were right in that it was not some sort of conspiracy to silence conservatives. The media simply reflected the opinions of the people who were in the media and politics. The media was being generous to conservatives, given that everyone they knew was a liberal.

Fast forward to the present and the media is insane. Right now, they are claiming a Mexican immigrant, who shot up a Texas mall, is a white supremacist. Here is the Washington Post version of this whopper. Here is Rolling Stone. Here is the Daily Bleat hyperventilating over it. Of course, the volunteer army of regime toadies is uncritically posting this on social media. The thing missing from all of these stories is a picture of the shooter, Mauricio Garcia.

Of course, by the time they get around to showing a picture of the shooter, someone will have doctored the photo to make him look like a German. The previous Texas spree killer, also a migrant from Mexico, was whitewashed so he could look the part, but the real photo was soon on the internet. The media did the same trick with the Uvalde, Texas shooter last year, then they edited their own news articles when the fraud was detected, but by that point it was too late.

Texas seems to be having a problem with migrants going on killing sprees and not just the mass shooting variety. Over the weekend a migrant drove into a group of migrants, killing eight and wounding ten. This does not get the same attention as the Texas mall shooter, because we are supposed to think it is perfectly normal for illegal immigrants to drive cars into pedestrians. Sadly, it is becoming normal as the country is being invaded by tens of millions of migrants right now.

The regime media telling us that brown people are now the face of white supremacy is just the next click of the ratchet in terms of media perfidy. Over the last year they told us the Russians bombed their own pipelines and the Azov battalion, festooned with Nazi iconography, are freedom fighters. Before that they told us the unvaccinated people cause vaccinated people to get Covid. Before that, they said Russians used mind control to alter the 2016 election results.

In other words, there is a pattern here. The lies from the regime have become more common, but also more outlandish. The crossdresser who shot up a Christian school was characterized as the victim. Imagine what it must be like to sit in a room with an editor who is explaining how the narrative position on the school shooter will be that the little kids she murdered are to be ignored, while the shooter is the victim. Imagine that being the new normal in the media because it is.

Lost in the mounting vulgarity is the question at the center of that old debate from forty years ago regarding media bias. Back then, people in the media could not see their own bias because from their perspective, there was no bias. Everyone they knew agreed that the media was playing it fair. If anything, the media was being too generous to those horrible conservatives. We are seeing the same thing about the grotesque dishonesty in the regime media today.

The reason the crew of eight people responsible for that Washington Post story are willing to post nonsense about the brown guy being a white supremacist is everyone they know thinks this is obviously true. When the FBI guy told them on the sly that the shooter was their primary bogeyman, they had no reason to question it. Normal people would have laughed themselves silly, but not Post writers. For them, it was confirmation of everything they know to be true.

Forty years ago, media bias was simply the result of media culture. What had been a working-class profession came to be dominated by credentialed professionals from the same upper-middle-class backgrounds. Media bias reflected the class of people who working in the media. The paranoia and penchant for wild conspiracies involving fictional bogeymen we are seeing in the regime media today also reflects the culture of the people in media. They really believe this stuff.

In fact, it reflects the managerial elite as a whole. These crackpot tales about Mexican white supremacists are not intended to sway the public. They do not care about the public, so they do not care about public opinion. They do care about opinion in the increasingly isolated elite circles. You can be sure that all of the flunkies, seat warmers and coat holders in Washington read that Post story and believed it. They believe because their bosses believe and everyone they know believes it.

That is probably the hardest thing for normal people to accept. Forty years ago, conservatives were sure they could talk their liberal friends in the media out of their obvious bias. Forty years on, normal people still think the media must know what they are doing is madness. They have to know it is fake. The truth is, they think these nutty conspiracy theories and outlandish whoppers are real. Our ruling class is as nuts as they appear to be, maybe even worse.

Tucker Thoughts

Posted on May 3, 2023 by thezman

One of the interesting elements to the Tucker Carlson story is that no one knows why he was fired, but lots of people are sure they know why he was fired. The only thing from Fox so far has been a brief statement in which they announced his departure and thanked him for his service to the company. Carlson made a short video from his home studio telling his fans that everything is going to be fine. Otherwise, there is nothing solid on which to base a theory.

The best reason so far was the first reason. The timing suggested it had something to do with the lawsuit Fox was forced to settle with Dominion over their coverage of the election shenanigans. Facing a rigged trial, Fox agreed to pay Dominion an absurd amount of money for hurting their feelings and the feelings of the crazies who demand we believe Joe Biden is more popular than Jesus. Right after they made the deal, Tucker and Dan Bongino get fired.

Given the nastiness of the people who chant “election denier” it is perfectly reasonable to think they would demand a pound of flesh from Fox. Many of the crazies jumped on this idea because it made them feel like winners. On the other hand, the Murdoch clan may have decided that they were dragged into this mess by people like Carlson, so they were going to purge the ranks of these people. Again, the timing of this is what lends support to the claim Carlson was fired over the lawsuit.

This being the current year, it did not take long for new theories to emerge. One was that Rupert Murdoch was spooked by Tucker’s speech at Heritage. Reportedly, Rupert Murdoch freaks out when people mention God around him. Others said Carlson’s candor about the news media in the speech is what did the trick. The speech covered a lot of ground, so the people pushing this theory were spoiled for choice. The speech was the last straw for the Murdoch family.

A new theory has been dropped that suggests The Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky had Tucker fired. He supposedly had a call with the Murdoch clan just before they made the call on Tucker. The antiwar crowd has seized on this story, claiming that the Murdoch clan are either in bed with the dictator or they were pressured by the regime to get rid of their most prominent war critics. This does not explain the Bongino firing, but maybe that was unrelated.

The New York Times has now created a new theory. Someone at Fox News is leaking confidential company material to regime media. These are texts that were produced in discovery during the Dominion lawsuit. In one of the text, Carlson used the phrase “white men” in a positive way. According to the anti-white bigots at the New York Times, this was such an outlandish threat to “our democracy” the Murdoch clan had no choice but to expel this heretic from their company.

Amusingly, the people the Times is fond of libeling are perfectly willing to accept this as a valid theory for the firing of Tucker Carlson. Here is Keith Woods on Twitter signal boosting the theory. It is a great example of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. If the Times placed this story next to a story denying human intelligence, the same people would point out all of the errors in the latter but accept without question all of the claims in the former, never noticing the contradiction.

The trouble with all of these theories is that they depend on the assumption that Carlson is something different behind the scenes. This is not a bad assumption since most entertainers are horrible people. They play a role on television that is designed to attract an audience. In real life, they are usually terrible people. In the case of Tucker, the crazies think he wears a white sheet in his free time, while his fans worry that maybe he does not wear a white sheet in his free time.

In reality, Carlson is pretty much what you see on television. If anything, his on-air persona is more biting and tough than he is in real life. Unlike most people in the media, he is a normal person in real life. He is rich as hell, but he likes the things normal men enjoy, like hobbies and time with his family. He is a rarity in conservative show business in that he actually lives a conservative life. It is highly unlikely that he says anything in private that is all that interesting.

What is really going on with these theories is that they provide an escape from facing the underlying reality to this story. That reality is the people at the top of American society not only all agree on the important things, but they all agree that you are the real problem. What defines people at the top of the managerial class is their disdain for normal people. As a result, there is a tremendous amount of pressure on members of the elite to conform to current fads.

Since Trump came down the escalator, the Murdoch family has been subjected to the worst sort of social pressure. Despite their great wealth, they still seek approval from their social class. The reason they fired Tucker and will most likely turn Fox News into a gay version of CNN is they simply grew tired of being pariahs. Maybe the lawsuit was the final straw or maybe it was an innocuous thing, but they finally decided they were tired of fighting and submitted to their mob.

This has been the story of the last eight years. Trump and his supporters among the Cloud People have been viewed as traitors. The antibodies of the ruling class have been at work isolating and then expelling them. The Murdoch clan feared expulsion more than submission, so they submitted. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, has been expelled. Soon, Trump and his followers will be expelled, and democracy will have finally been cured of this terrible disease.

The Narrative Industrial Complex

Posted on May 2, 2023 by thezman

One analysis of the Roman Empire says that it reached a point where the cost of maintaining the empire exceeded the benefits of empire. The investments required to maintain the complex social and political structures to maintain the empire continued to rise while the benefits slowly fell to zero. This is the general thesis presented by Joseph Tainter in his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. Complex solutions eventually reach a point of diminishing marginal returns.

We may be seeing a similar issue with the Global America Empire. On the one hand, we have the massive amount of debt accumulation to maintain the global military presence required to maintain the empire. The official United States military budget exceeds the combined total of the other great powers. No one really knows what the actual cost of the military is, as so much of it is off budget. Of course, this allows many of the rulers to get rich in the process.

On the other hand. Enormous amounts of time and energy are invested in maintaining the rationale for the empire. Unlike the Roman empire, which was ruled by a small number of men, democratic empire must continue to provide energy to the spring of democracy, which is moral certainty. Rome conquered because it could, while America conquers because it has a moral duty. “Our democracy” requires an endless war against those who resist being crushed by “our democracy.”

What this means is that in addition to the trillions spent on weapons and armies, trillions are also spent on maintaining the moral framework. This cost is not strictly a government expense, but the system requires it, so corporations are as engaged in narrative maintenance as government entities. Companies embrace degenerate social fads, like crossdressing, because they support the system. They support the system because it is the system that makes them possible.

The most obvious example is the media. Thirty years ago, much of what a newspaper did, even the big broadsheets like the Washington Post and New York Times, was report on the mundane affairs of the world. They promoted left-wing causes on the editorial side, but the news side was the boring stuff of the news. Today, the entirety of the mass media is engaged in the support of narratives. These entities are staffed with content creators and storytellers.

Here is an example in the Washington Post. Three people were assigned the job of creating a story to explain the mass shooter phenomenon. The plot here is that crazy white people are irrationally paranoid about crime, so they are going shooty all of sudden, for no reason at all! You see, crime is just fine. In fact, under the patient rule of Dear Leader, crime is better now. The real problem is these heavily armed white people and their racism.

Of course, the mass shooter phenomenon is a narrative created by the same people now trying to explain it. The fact is, America is a big country. That means there are lots of potential crackpots, compared to a small country like Norway. When you look at the numbers on mass shootings, America is doing better than most. Norway, on the other hand, seems to have a problem. While “per capita” is a racist trope, it is the best way to understand crime data.

Enormous amounts of time and money are directed by the regime into gun grabbing and concealing the color of crime. The Mexican national who went on a killing spree in Texas had his picture whitened by the news media. This is a thing that started with the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman who did the world a favor and killed Trayvon Martin ten years ago. Every media company now has people whose sole job is to whitewash criminals this way.

The color of crime is just one tiny area of the narrative support system. The New York Times had a whole floor full of content creators pushing various aspects of the Russian collusion hoax during the Trump years. Thousands of people in the media are now used to push the Ukraine story. Think about the cost in time and money that is required to fake a Joe Biden press conference. The entire media complex is now employed in the creation and support of narratives.

Again, the media has always been run by regime toadies, but thirty years ago most of what they did was reporting. The bigshot columnists and editors were allowed to put their thumb on the scale in terms of what got promoted. The rest of the people produced mundane news accounts. What we see today is an industrial bullshit machine that exists only to crank out new narratives in support of the regime or new tales to promote existing regime narratives.

This is just one small part of the narrative industrial complex. Tens of thousands of people in government have been repurposed to the task. Corporations have whole floors of people dedicated to the job of pushing the latest thing. Hollywood is just another marketing arm of the regime. Of course, the big tech platforms have dedicated themselves to protecting and promoting regime narratives. More people engage in censoring the internet now than in maintaining it.

The Twitter experience offers some insight into the cost of this. When Musk took over, he fired waves of people. His rule was that if you wrote code, you stayed, but if not then you were gone unless you could explain yourself. He eventually fired eighty percent of the staff. The website was unaffected. The reason is those fired people were employed to police and promote the current narratives. They did nothing to keep the site running or make the business profitable.

What all of this suggests is that the cost of maintaining the rationale for the Global American Empire has reached the point of diminishing returns. Just as the Roman empire’s investment in complex systems to maintain itself reached the point of diminishing returns, the cost of the imperial bullshit system has reached that point and maybe blown way past it. The more they try to sell the latest narrative, the less likely people are to accept the next narrative.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Mass Media