The Port Strike

Posted on October 1, 2024 by thezman

The International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike as of midnight in the first major port strike in the United States in decades. Twenty years ago, dock workers on the West Coast struck for eleven days. The ILA has not gone on a strike since 1977, so this is a historic event for that reason alone. If the strike lasts more than a few weeks, then it will be much more than a historical event. About half of the cargo that goes in and out of the country flows through the affected ports.

The bankers estimate that the strike will cost the economy five billion per day, but that is a number plucked from the air. What we learned from the Covid fiasco is that American supply chains are extremely fragile, so any interruption will have unpredictable long-term consequences to the economy. This is also when consumer goods for the Christmas season begin flowing into the country, so delays will result in shortages which will disrupt the biggest retail period of the year.

One of the first things that will happen is conservatives will be told by conservative media to blame the dock workers. The reason for this is conservatives are idiots who do what they are told by the people they claim to oppose. The regime would like to turn this into a problem for Trump if possible, so they are busy filling the teleprompters of Fox News with squirrely rants about the greedy union guys. The vegetables that consume that slop will then regurgitate it on social media.

The fact of the matter is there are no good guys or bad guys when it comes to the strike itself, but the port system is an indictment of the economy. There is no reason for one company to control ports up and down the coast. Ports should be controlled by the states and encouraged to compete with one another for cargo. This makes for better port operations and eliminates the prospect of a crippling port strike. It also encourages modernization and efficiency at the ports.

The reason this is not the case is our ports are primarily skimming operations, rather than a part of a manufacturing and export base. What America primarily exports does not require seagoing vessels. Transgenderism, homosexual pride parades and cultural subversion are shipped around the world on the back of the dollar. What comes back are container ships full of consumer goods. A collection of people then skim a little from each container that reaches an American port.

This gets to why the dock workers are striking. They want protection from automation that will eliminate jobs. This will strike most people as nuts as they have been conditioned to think automation is a good thing, because that is what the television has told them, but in reality, most automation is about socializing the costs of business and privatizing the profits. Automating the ports will not result in lower consumer prices, but it will make the port operators richer.

If the point of the American economy were to make things and then sell them around the world, the ports could never be allowed to function as they do today because it would interfere with selling things around the world. That is not the point of the American economy, so the main function of ports is to skim from imports. This is why one main operator controls the East Coast ports. Consolidation makes it easier to institutionalize the skim.

None of this is to suggest that the dock workers are victims. Senior members of the ILA make four and five times what the typical American earns. Most of the guys on strike make six figures plus very generous benefit programs. The reason it is impossible to get a job at the ports is they control the labor force, which means they only allow friends and family to get jobs when they come open. The docks are pretty much a government created medieval guild system.

That is the other thing about the ports. The labor situation is a creation of the federal government over the last half century. In the middle of the last century, the mafia got control of the union pensions and immediately looted them. This brought in the feds who eventually restructured the union, so it was free of gangsters in track suits, but was filled with gangsters from the government. Both sides of the current contract dispute are the result of decades of government management.

Of course, there is a political angle to this. The Biden admin has done nothing to prevent the strike, which is interesting as they moved heaven and earth to head off the rail strike last year. That was when Biden thought he was going to be allowed to run for a second term. Now that he is drifting off into retirement, no one in the admin can be bothered to work on anything other than Ukraine and Israel. Kamala will be left to deal with the politics of a port strike.

This is where things get interesting. Pennsylvania and Michigan are union states, so the white remnant will be watching this strike. These are people who have always voted Democrat for economic reasons but detest the other stuff from the party. They like Trump, but wisely distrust Republicans. There is an opening for Trump the deal maker to take the union side without pandering. Harris, on the other hand, does not have any good options on this one.

In a way, the ports are a good model for our ruling class. Everyone involved in the ports is doing well, better than they should expect, but everyone involved in the ports is sure the system is screwing him. That is because the ports exist in isolation from the rest of the economy. It is a world unto itself that only interfaces with the rest of society, rather than operate within the economy. It is how high-earning people on both sides of this strike can think they are the little guy.

Another reason for this is the bottleneck mentality. Ports are a bottleneck and everything that passes through is taxed. In this way, the ports are just like our banking system or the information system. That means the real competition is over how much you get to tax what passes through the bottleneck. To the people inside a bottleneck system, it always feels like it is a zero-sum game, and their slice of the overall pie is never the biggest slice of that pie.

In the end, the union will get what they want as there is no real reason to not give them what they want. Their cost just gets tacked onto the cost of goods that flow through the port to your local Walmart of Amazon distribution center. Just like those Walmart’s and Amazons, the cost of the ports are socialized. With no fear of competition, there is no concern for the profit margin. You get to pay more for stuff, so the dock worker and his manager get to go boat shopping this spring.

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The Lincoln Exception

Posted on September 30, 2024 by thezman

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The reason the small groups of humans in the hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution started working together was primarily safety. Two groups cooperating could not only better defend themselves from other groups, but they could defend the assets they shared from outsiders. That water source or the good hunting ground could not only be exploited through cooperation, but it could be defended and eventually cultivated by kin groups cooperating with one another.

We do not know why kin groups started to cooperate exactly, the above is logical speculation, but we do know that humans eventually settled down and eventually, the point of their organization was to guard their property. Whether it was to guard their hunting grounds or more easily guard the stuff they created with their labor, the point of organization was to protect the people and their stuff. From this stage forward, the point of human organization became property.

When exactly the concept of private property came into existence is impossible to know, but at some point, humans began to recognize ownership. Logically it started with what we now call personal property, the things that come from labor. Grog’s hunting kit was Grog’s hunting kit, and he had a right to defend it or give it away. Similarly, this land was the land of Grog’s people, and they defended it. Other groups made similar claims and before long their relations were based on respecting this.

Most likely, the concept of private ownership of land evolved from the ownership of personal goods, but we are left to guess. What we know is that as far back as we have records, human societies had sorted the difference between public ownership of land and private ownership of land. The Greeks and the Romans, for example, had laws governing private property. Plato was famously opposed to private property, while Aristotle was strongly in supported of it.

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, private property became the foundation for what would come next in Europe. Large landowners organized to defend their lands and eventually the feudal system evolved. Feudalism was the set of reciprocal relations between the warrior elite, who also happened to be the class who owned all of the land. It was the ownership of land that determined the new ruling elite that would eventually rule Europe.

The model of ownership in the medieval period was one where the king or prince owned the land but granted rights to it. Technically, all of the land in the kingdom was the property of the king, but most of it was controlled by lower members of the aristocratic order and the church. The king was, in effect, the most important landowner among the land-owning class. Property was the basis for relations among the ruling class and between the ruling class and the people over whom they ruled.

Property in the American sense of it has always been tied to labor. The Framers were not only influenced by Locke on this matter, but also by their society that was created by the individual labor of the people. Their reality was based on the observation that you own you and therefore you own your labor, which means by default you own the produce of your labor. In fact, the American concept of rights originates from this Lockean idea of self-ownership.

This is why in the fullness of time Lincoln’s reckless disregard for property rights will be viewed the same as we view Sulla’s march on Rome. It is the abrogation of a central principle that made the republican order unstable. If there is no cost to breaking the most important rules, the future tyrant is born. There is a straight line from Sulla to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and there is a straight line from the Emancipation Proclamation to the wholesale abrogation of our rights today.

We see this with the controversy over publishing the private information of J.D. Vance that was stolen from the Trump campaign. The FBI says it was Iran that stole it, which means it was not Iran that stole it. There is little doubt that the FBI has moles in the Trump campaign, stealing everything they find. It is also certainly the case that the secret police have gained access to their computers. The FBI no doubt handed this to the usual degenerates to publish online.

The “free speech” people argue that this is an essential role of journalism, so they should be free to publish it. In other words, there is a journalist exception to the most fundamental right of property. That is what they never want you to notice. The people trafficking in this sort of material are trafficking in stolen goods. The information in that dossier is the property of J.D. Vance. In good faith he permitted the Trump campaign to use it to evaluate his fitness for the running mate slot.

What “journalists” are claiming is a special right to steal your property and not only use it to profit themselves, but to harm you with it. Imagine you lend your car to a friend and Uber then steals it and uses it to deliver food. Then they claim Uber is an essential part of the economy, so they have a right to your car. You should have been more careful about who you let use it. In fact, because they gave your car to a black guy, you are a racist for wanting your car back.

What we have now is the Lincoln exception to property rights. If people with power can produce a moral cause to justify to themselves the abrogation of your property rights, then for the good of our democracy they not only can take your property, but they also have a duty to do it. We have gone from the government stealing the property of slave owners to save the Union, to the government granting powerful interests the right to root around in your private affairs and publish the results.

In fact, privacy has now become a form of sumptuary law. If you are in favor with the powerful, you do not have to worry about free speech advocates rummaging through your garbage looking for dirt. Notice how so-called journalists are always the last to know about important things. On the other hand, if you are out of favor with powerful people, then you are subjected to the synopticon. The eyes of the regime pierce every aspect of your life, searching for what they can use to ruin you.

In the end, the reason America is increasingly tyrannical is the logic that flows the Lincoln exception to property rights. Once the principle was invented that you are no longer constrained by the ancient rights of property, if you can establish the moral high ground, the relationship between the American people and their government shifted from one of rights based in property to one of privileges based on whatever spurious moral claims are popular with the ruling class at the time.

This is how we got things like the Sullivan doctrine and the Brown standard from the Supreme Court. Once the standard against which everything is measured is the self-righteous indignation of the people in charge, it is no longer possible to have rights or the rule of law. In fact, you can no longer claim to own you, as “our democracy” might require the sacrifice of you, whether you like it or not. The moral tyrants get to decide these things and you have no choice in the matter.

Where this is heading is to a pre-modern concept of society. Instead of private property being the default and communal property as the necessary exception, we are heading to a world of communal property as the default. Everything about you is assumed to be property held in common. The exceptions are those things deemed necessary to keep society functioning. The goal is to narrow the exceptions until we reach some sort of communal singularity in which the individual is obliterated.

Trouble On The Edge Of Empire

Posted on September 24, 2024 by thezman

In the end phase of an empire, there are two political dynamics. One is the intense, internal politics among the ruling class of the empire. These are the people fighting to hold onto the power of the empire, but also fighting with one another to maintain their slice of the shrinking pie of benefits. The other politics are on the fringe where the beginnings of alternative power centers grapple with reality and the decreasing ability of the empire to provide necessary protection.

For the American empire, one of those fringes where politics is happening as a result of the decline of the empire is Europe. The Germans, for example, have had a set of local elections that were all bad news for the provincial rulers, which in this context is the coalition government led by Olaf Scholz. The parties that make up the ruling coalition of Germany did poorly, and in the case of the Greens catastrophically bad, in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg.

Worse yet, the winner, in the public relations sense, was the hated AfD, or Alternative for Deutschland, which came in second in Saxony and Brandenburg and won for the first time in Thuringia. The AfD gaining support is a disaster all by itself, but doing so in Brandenburg is a fascinating development. This is the base for the SPD, and they needed shenanigans to prevent the AfD from winning the election. The CDU threw its support to the SPD to block the AfD.

Another bit of subtext to this is that a new party of former leftists, in the German sense of the word, has created an anti-immigration party around Sahra Wagenknecht, called the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance or BSW. They came in third place. That means two anti-immigration parties are surging. On top of that, the Green Party appears to be losing all of its support everywhere. In Brandenburg they failed to meet the minimum threshold to gain any seats in parliament.

Of course, the German political elite is not taking this well. As we see all over Europe, the parties that pretended to be ideological opponents for years have come together to thwart these outsider parties. Germany, for example, has been ruled by the “traffic light coalition”, which would be like the Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Greens forming a new coalition to fend off the Constitution Party in Congress. It gives the game away to maintain control of politics.

This is the same thing we saw in France over the summer. The anti-immigration party led by Marie Le Pen surged to the lead in the first round of elections for the National Assembly, so all of the other parties teamed up to prevent the Le Pen’s party from winning an outright majority in the second round. Of course, the parties in this grand coalition to stop mean words has immediately started to attack one another because the only thing they have in common is corruption.

As in Germany, the bit above the waterline is the immigration issue, but beneath the surface there is a bigger issue. The political elites of Europe no longer look like European political elites. Instead, they are these weird, cosmopolitan citizens of the world types whose success is pegged to their slavish loyalty to an international economic elite centered in London and New York. There is an alienation rooted in their transnational transactionalism to which the locals are reacting.

Of course, immigration is the tangible manifestation of this. Immigration only makes sense if the immigrants are a net benefit to the locals. This only works in boom times when everyone is feeling generous. It is not boom times in Europe, but the immigrants continue to pour in, which suggests there is another reason behind immigration enthusiasm among the political elites. This is where the sterile, technocratic alienness of the political class comes into play.

It is not just in the heart of the EU where this “us-versus-them” cultural dynamic is turning up in practical politics. Italy has quietly started to limit immigrants while not offending Brussels. The Italian economy relies on transfers from the rich, intelligently managed economies of the north, so the Meloni government has to tread carefully in order to avoid regime change. She has managed to remain popular, while quietly addressing the immigration issue.

At the other end of the EU, the Nordic countries are experiencing something of a revolution in thought on immigration. Denmark has been quietly hostile to immigration, but now Sweden is becoming publicly hostile to it. The Swedish government is now paying immigrants, even those with citizenship, to leave Sweden. This is an enormous change in attitude, as Sweden was the most fanatically pro-immigration country in the EU just a few years ago.

Something that may be working in the favor of nationalist parties and activists in Europe is the lunacy in the Anglosphere regarding immigration. Vulgar simpletons like Keir Starmer are a warning to the continent. Despite having support from just one of every six British voters, the Starmer government is aggressively waging war on the natives on behalf of the immigrants. What is going on in the UK and America is proof that those “far-right” parties are right about what lies behind immigration.

All of this has been helped along by the proxy-war against Russia. After the effects of the initial gaslighting wore off, Europeans started to notice that their political elites were far more enthusiastic for Ukraine than their own countries. They also noticed that their political elites were happy to sacrifice the welfare of their people for Project Ukraine in order to curry favor with Washington. The American empire was happy to inflict misery on Europe if it furthered their petty fights with Russia.

Where this has left Europe is as a collection of provinces that no longer enjoy the protection of the empire but are governed by a provincial ruling class that enjoys the financial benefits of empire. The growing awareness of this reality is causing the clodhoppers of Europe to revolt. The continent is far from breaking free from their Anglosphere masters, but the politics of Europe are opening the gates to parties and politicians who will seek liberation from empire.

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Death By Openness

Posted on September 23, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post why you should fill up your diet with seed oils, a post about losers and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

In the early days of the internet, people started to notice that there was another side to the mass accumulation of information online. The information piling up in databases and data centers was not just public information, but also what had always been assumed to be private information. Pictures of your home and maybe even you outside cutting your grass could now turn up in the public square, without you knowing it. Lots of things about your life were now public information.

Suddenly, a degenerate with free time could figure out things about you that he could not know in the past. Of course, this became a temptation for people to nose around in the lives of coworkers and neighbors. The more information that piled up online, the less privacy everyone could expect. Quickly we were moving into glass houses and subjected to the unwanted gaze. The only place where you can be free of the gaze is in your own mind, and even there the synopticon is hunting for data.

Of course, in typical American fashion, the same people gathering up your private information and making it public now sell services to keep your private information as private as possible in this age. On the other hand, people told by the state to gather your private information for things like banking are reckless with their security, so it is regularly stolen and published by gangsters. Again, in typical American fashion, the reckless people never pay a price for it.

We are quickly reaching the point where nothing is private and anything of private value will be stolen. One result of this is no one cares about the private. The rise of profilicity is a response to the collapse of individual privacy. Since no one has a private life, what distinguishes us is the public profile we create. This profile is just about disconnected from the person playing the profile. In other words, the collapse in privacy has eliminated the value in having private things.

It is tempting to blame this on technology, which is the mistake made by privacy advocates in the last century. In typical American fashion, they assumed there was a mechanical solution to a moral or spiritual problem. In the case of privacy, they assumed new rules to guard your privacy would prevent the people who laugh at the concept of a rules-based society from harvesting your privacy. Unsurprisingly, privacy has collapsed despite the rules.

The reason for the collapse in privacy in America goes back to the civil right revolution in the middle of the last century. When the ruling elites transitioned from a rights-based moral framework to the civil rights moral framework, they had no choice but to abandon the concept of personal privacy, despite claims to the contrary. This is why Europe has been much better at enforcing privacy laws. They never had a civil rights revolution, so they have not fully internalized its moral structures.

The way to understand this is to think about the moral spectrum in the political order of 19th century America. The “good” pole was where the state played no role in the decisions made by the citizens. People were on their own to sort things. The bad pole was where the citizens needed permission to do things. The concept of individual rights was not to carve out a free space for the citizen. It was to carve out space for the state to do the narrow purposes of collective security.

The civil rights revolution in the middle of the 20th century abandoned this old spectrum, which had been discredited, at least in the collective reasoning of the emerging managerial class, in the great struggle against the economic crisis of the 1930’s and the war on fascism in the 1940’s. What the civil rights revolution did was replace this old and largely civic moral paradigm with a new paradigm. The goal of which was not maximum liberty but maximum access.

The open society concept, popularized in America by Karl Popper and now George Soros, is the end point of this new moral paradigm. The new poles are openness, access, and diversity at the “good” end. The bad end is discrimination, which can only come through the mechanism of barriers to entry, so the ultimate bad thing in this new society is the locked door. The goal of the open society is to find every locked door and bust it down in order to maximize openness.

One of the immediate results of this moral revolution at the top was the end of public discrimination through the violent overthrow of the old segregation systems, in both the North and the South. What followed was pogrom after pogrom to breakdown every locked door that could be found in private America. Men’s clubs, for example, were forced to accept women or face endless litigation for discrimination. The Boy Scouts were handed over to pedophiles for the same reason.

Long before degenerates were googling your name looking for private information, the state was hunting around for locked doors on the assumption that there were private people collectively closing themselves off from others. If one wants to look for the logic behind the claim that nonwhites have a right to access white people, it lies in the fundamental logic of the open society. In a world where discrimination is the ultimate evil, everyone has a right to everyone, even their intimate life.

There is, ironically, a private benefit to this. Certain members of the ruling class benefit through the anathematization of preference. In a world where it is immoral for you to prefer not to associate with certain people, it is unacceptable for the masses to prefer that certain people not have access to power. At the same time, the ruling class as a whole benefits from the fact that it is close to impossible to organize opposition when everything must be done in plain sight.

The collapse of privacy is the logical outcome of the civil rights revolution and the synopticon that has involved to enforce it is a practical necessity. Humans are naturally self-organizing and naturally self-segregating. Unconscious bias is not just a weapon to compel submission to the new racial hierarchy but a way to condition the populace to question their own minds. A people who naturally feel in conflict with what they are told is the shared collective morality will remain docile.

Of course, much of the behavior from the ruling elite in the open society is designed to prevent asking basic questions, like who says discrimination is bad? Who or what is the moral authority for this claim? Why is diversity good? Why are my preferences less valid than the person on the television preaching about diversity? The collapse in individual and collective privacy makes it much easier to hunt down those asking these questions before they get too much of an audience.

The ultimate question is can such a system last? There is a reason why there are so few prison riots and history has not been kind to slave revolts. It is not just force that keeps the prisoner under control or the slaves from revolting. In every prison, inmates outnumber guards. Slaves always outnumber the overseers. What keeps them under control are the moral chains that tell them they deserve their position. A nation in such chains is as unlikely to revolt.

On the other hand, if the prisoners know the guards cannot rely on the state to protect them, the prisoners will begin to question the morality of their position. Similarly, if the social structures that make slavery possible collapse, then the slaves quickly overthrow their masters, even if it means their own death. One of the consequences of the open society is a deeply paranoid and conspiratorial ruling elite. They know more than anyone how near run things are for them.

The People They Desire

Posted on September 19, 2024 by thezman

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

In every organization of scale, and society as a whole, the focus of attention has shifted from things that are easily measured and understood in terms of practical impact, to things that are not quantifiable. At the same time, it is increasingly assumed and asserted that these intangibles are more important than the tangibles. The practical impact of inflation on the household budget is not important, but whether a political candidate can show they share your values is monumentally important.

You can see this change in how Harris and Trump present themselves. Trump has rattled off a list of things he says he will do if elected, like eliminating taxes on tips and overtime, which he says will boost the middle-class. These are claims that rest on the agreed upon math of economics. Harris, on the other hand, talks about her plan in soft, intangible terms. What matters to her, and what she thinks matters to you, is that she shares your values as a middle-class person.

Notice that no one ever tries to explain exactly what they mean by “share your values” or describe the actual values. Is it even possible to share the values of another person, since values are subjective? This sort of therapeutic language is deliberately vague, as it is entirely emotive. When someone says she shares your values, she is saying you are on the side of good and she is on the side of good. There is nothing more being communicated with those words.

This shift from the objective to the subjective goes beyond how the political candidates present themselves to the public. Increasingly, people and events are viewed not in practical terms but in the context of an evolving set of normative standards that have no clear truth value. What is “wellness” and why do we care? Ask ten people and you get ten answers to those questions. Wellness is a thing we believe exists and it is either good or not good and good is what we should want.

Another example is the reaction to the Israeli terror attack on Lebanon. Blowing up random people is supposed to demoralize Hezbollah. This is a claim that has been repeated, even by Israel haters. Why would anyone think this and so what if it gives some Hezbollah guys the blues for a few days? What is supposed to happen as a result of this case of the sads? Not only does no one know, no one asks. The practical issue is no longer of interest. It is all about the psychological.

The Ukrainians launched an attack on the Kursk region of Russia last month and according to everyone involved, the main purpose was to “psychologically impact Russian civilians” and embarrass Putin. Again, why would anyone think such a result was likely or would matter? Did they think Putin would delete his Twitter account and call off the war, because he got owned on the internet? The answer must be yes, as this has been a theme in the West since the war started.

What we are seeing is an orientalization of the culture. Saving face and losing face are things that we associate with East Asian societies. An important person is found to have failed in his duties, so in order to avoid losing face and shaming his family and associates, he kills himself in a ritualized fashion. His honorable choice in the end absolves him and his associates of his dishonorable behavior. This means behavior is controlled within this cultural construct.

In the West, this shame/lack of shame concept has been embedded into the binary politics of progressivism. Someone like Hillary Clinton, for example, is terrible at all of the practical things related to politics, but she upholds the honor culture of progressive politics, so she is an honored elder of our politics. Trump brings shame to the democracy and refuses to let himself be killed, so he deserves assassination. The fact that he is good at politics and is right about most things is irrelevant.

One reason for this is the feminization of the ruling class. Relations between men are controlled by honor and duty. Relations between women are based in shame, so as women have taken over areas of the ruling class, the values have shifted from a foundation in honor and duty to one of shame. In a world run by people biologically tuned to care about looking good, how things look is paramount, so it is no surprise that a feminized ruling class now cares about saving face.

Probably the biggest fact, however, is the ruling class of the American empire has not had to worry about the duties of a ruling class for a long time. By the end of the Cold War, the domestic stuff was on autopilot. As long as the Fed controlled the money supply, recession and social unrest were not a concern. The only remaining concern was relations with Russia and once the Cold War ended, foreign affairs stopped being a game controlled by adults.

That last bit is the important part. Along with the feminization of the ruling class has come the infantilization of politics. It used to be said that “politics ain’t beanbag” but now it is closer to dodgeball. Instead of serious men making decisions with practical consequences, politics is now a playground for adult children. The reason our politics reflect the language and attitudes of the academy, is like the academy, the political class is an adult daycare center.

This is why the information space is full of assertions about soft concepts like the morale of guerilla fighters in Lebanon or the political class of Moscow. It is also why facts and charts have no impact on public attitudes. Increasingly, the sensibility of the general public reflects the sensibilities of the adult babies who parade across the screen, pointing and jeering at one another. People may not get the government they deserve, but the rulers get the people they desire.

Jesus Hates Immigration

Posted on September 16, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the demographic collapse playing out in the workforce, a post about how the Tenet Media case looks like a political op and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Would Jesus hate the cat memes that have spread across the internet in response to the Haitian problem in Springfield Ohio? Some people think so. Progressive cranks have responded to this by claiming it is your Christian duty to welcome these people into your homes. Granted, these people are not sincere but people who claim to be Christians of some sort often agree with them. They claim Scripture requires the faithful to treat everyone equally, as God’s children.

This is the official position of the Catholic Church. The Pope is a big fan of open borders and mass immigration. It is not just for theological reasons. One argument is that the migrants from the global south are Catholics or could become Catholic. Protestant churches make similar claims. Immigration is seen by main stream churches as a solution to their empty pews. Some claim that the Haitian migrants have revitalized the churches in the Springfield Ohio area.

Of course, the people making these claims can find in Scripture what they need to support their position as the morally correct one. Ephesians says, “you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.” Leviticus says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”. Hebrews says you must show hospitality to strangers and modern Hebrews say you should never notice this.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The place to start is where Christianity starts. The “open borders Christians” are correct when they say these Haitians are God’s children, no different from the fifth-generation Irish guy or the guy who traces his line to the Mayflower. Fundamental to the Christian faith is that we are God’s creation and humans are made in God’s image. Our ability to understand God at all rests on the assumption that he possesses all the qualities we possess as human beings.

From this we can draw one obvious conclusion. We have reason and free will, thus God intended for us to use our reason and free will. God does not make mistakes, at least this is true for the New Testament God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not as confident, so maybe he was still prone to error. Regardless, God gave us, and only us, free will and reason, so it must have been on purpose and for a reason. The only possible reason is to use them.

The other thing that we know, if we are all God’s creation, is that all men are God’s property for the same reason man can have property. God owns himself, so God owns that which he has created. He gave man dominion over the earth and all of the living creatures on it, but he did not grant ownership. God may be an absentee landlord, as many have asserted, but he is still the landlord, which means he still owns what he created, including mankind.

This is the basis of Christian ethics. What we ought and ought not do is based on the idea that we are all God’s property. Theft is wrong because when you steal the labor of another man, you are harming God’s property. On the other hand, punishing someone for theft, is acting on God’s behalf to right the wrong done to God. It is why we think hunting for food is perfectly acceptable. Man needs to eat, and God gave us domain over the animals. Hunting for sport, however, is complicated.

The logic of Christianity tells us that Jesus would be appalled by what is happening in towns like Springfield Ohio. Rounding up Haitians and dumping them into unsuspecting towns around North America does nothing to reduce the damage done to God’s most precious property, mankind. In fact, it increases the damage. Worse yet, this damage is done for the benefit of the money changers responsible for it. What we see happening with immigration is a deliberate offense to the Christian God.

This is even more obvious when we remember that we have reason and free for the sole purpose of using it. If we wanted to help Haiti, there are ways we could improve the conditions on the island without harming cat owners in Ohio. We could take over the island, set up a local dictator tasked with distributing food and medicine. We could round up the Haitians and send them to Africa, where they have the minimum infrastructure needed to maintain an African population.

The point of all this is that Christian ethics is about reducing the damage to God’s property, which is primarily mankind, but also that which mankind has been granted dominion, the earth, and its inhabitants. Mankind has reason and free will in order to figure out the best way to act in order to minimize the damage to God’s property, so we are free to debate the issue. We must be free to debate the issue. Cherry picking lines from Scripture to shut down debate is therefore immoral.

More important, cherry-picking lines from Scripture so that you can claim a sense of compliance with the will of God, at the expense of God’s property, as in the damage done by immigration, violates the foundational logic of Christianity. If Jesus were here today, he would not only flip over the tables in the offices of the people responsible for unchecked immigration, but he would also whip the people waving around their Bibles in support of it. Jesus would hate them.

Narrative Doubt

Posted on September 12, 2024 by thezman

An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

The War Of Politics

Posted on September 11, 2024 by thezman

“War is a continuation of politics by other means” is a famous quote attributed to Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th century Prussian military theorist. This line is often used to end discussion about the causes of a war, rather than to understand the motivations of both sides, but that is the way to use it. Wars are not just about geopolitics, the disputes between the combatants, but the internal politics of the parties. In most cases, the parties to a war are in the war due to internal political reasons.

We see this with the Ukraine war. For Russia, decades of meddling around the border of the Russian Federation had reached a critical point internally. The pro-Western wing of the Russian political class had maintained that they could deal with elements in the West to address the concerns of Russia. The realist wing argued that there was no dealing with Washington, as they were implacably anti-Russian. The oligarchs sided with the former for financial reasons.

The provocations by the Biden administration along with the superheated rhetoric aimed at Putin changed the internal dynamics of Russian politics. On the one hand, this vindicated the position of the realists. They said all along that there was no way to make a deal with Washington, because Washington was not honest. It is impossible to deal with people who come to the table in bad faith. Any deal you make with them will fall apart because they will never abide by it.

Proof of this was when Angela Merkel said in an interview that the Minsk agreements over the disputed areas in eastern Ukraine were just a stalling tactic so the West could arm Ukraine for a war with Russia. This statement was done to humiliate Putin within the Russian political elite. This was when the West was sure that sanctions would topple the Russian state, so it was a bit of anticipatory celebration expecting that Putin would be out of power at any minute.

Instead, it had the opposite effect. The reason for this is both wings of the Russian political class wanted a peaceful solution to the Ukraine issue. They just disagreed about the best course. Western behavior leading up to the war and throughout the war has convinced both wings that peace can only come through the defeat of the NATO backed army in Ukraine. In other words, Russian politics brought war to their border, but now Russian politics control the prosecution of the war.

That should have been clear to the West in 2022 when the Russians reorganized their army and military industrial complex in response to the collapse of the Istanbul negotiators that were skuttled by Washington. The competition with the West had changed, so the war with the West was changing. The Russians settled in for a long war of attrition against the Ukraine army, society, and the West. The Ukraine war was now part of a larger global conflict with the West.

This is where the war reveals things about politics in the West. It was clear by the end of 2022 that there was no scenario in which the Ukrainians defeated the Russians militarily, so the set of possible outcomes was limited to a total defeat of Ukraine or some sort of negotiated settlement. This is what realists like John Mearsheimer argued even before the war started. The trouble is, there are no realists in Washington or the European capitals, at least none with influence.

Instead, foreign policy is controlled by a coalition of ideological zealots and infantilized managers who are easily led by the zealots. They do this by creating pleasing narratives that always end with the managerial elite coming out as Churchill in this new version of the last world war. Every new scheme to win the war always ends with some Western political figure giving the great speech announcing the triumph of the forces of good over the forces of evil.

As an aside, it is why the usual suspects broke out in hives when Tucker Carlson had on his show a historian who questions the role of Churchill. They immediately started calling Cooper and Carlson Nazis, not because either of them defended Hitler or the Nazis, but because they questioned the archetypical hero of the modern political narrative, the figure every managerial striver sees in the mirror. Cooper did not just question the narrative, but the point of the narrative.

That aside, we see this political dynamic in the conduct of the war. The Western political class is the audience, demanding a good war narrative. The ideologues are the producers, who collaborate with the writers and show runners in Ukraine. Together they create narratives like the Great Ukraine Counter Offensive of 2023 or now The Great Kursk Offensive for the fans in the political class. The military logic of these schemes does not matter, because it is all about the politics of the West.

Now that The Great Kursk Offensive has turned into a military disaster for Ukraine, the series will be cancelled, so the usual suspects are busy working on a new show to put on for the Western political class. This time it will probably include firing long range missiles into Russia to “humiliate the Putin!” You see, despite it all, the main plot line says that in the end, someone in the West will be the idealized Churchill, triumphing over Putin, who they have bizarrely cast as their Hitler.

This war has also altered geopolitics. The Chinese, who had a similar dynamic in their political elite as the Russians, experienced a similar evolution in thought about how they deal with the West, especially Washington. The Chinese have been quite blunt in their assessment of Washington. They have repeatedly told high ranking Biden officials that the constant lying is an impediment to good relations. If the Chinese think your candor is a problem, you have a serious problem with honesty.

Returning to Clausewitz, this war has allowed Russia and China to reorient global politics away from the unipolar, post-Cold war arrangements toward a multipolar world based in regional interests. This has been made possible by the war exposing the superciliousness of Western political leaders, but also the childish ignorance of the people allegedly making policy in the West. The world is starting to see the West as a setting sun and men close their doors to the setting sun.

The Last Debates

Posted on September 10, 2024 by thezman

The first and possibly last presidential debate of this cycle is scheduled for tonight in Philadelphia between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Given the result of the last Trump – Biden debate, this one should get a good audience. Despite the massive marketing campaign on her behalf, people know little about Harris. She has been a colored ornament on the Biden administration and the butt of jokes on the internet, but most people have no genuine sense of her.

That is the reason it could be the last debate of this cycle. Harris has a poor reputation as a public speaker. Her only real debate experience was in the 2020 Democratic primary and she was horrible. Despite having millions in tech money and a favorable media, she used the debate to alienate every constituency in the party and dropped out soon after it. Her recent CNN interview, which was heavily edited, suggests she has not gotten better over the last four years.

It is possible this may be the last presidential debate we see at all. It is assumed that debates are part of the show, but for most of the country’s history debates were not a part of our political process. The first general election debate in our history was the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Prior to that, there were a few debates between members of the Democratic party on specific issues like foreign policy, but those were a rarity.

After the Kennedy – Nixon debates, which were a great success in the sense that they captured the attention of the public, there were no more debates until 1976 when Gerald Ford debated Jimmy Carter three times. The logic behind this series of debates was that neither of the candidates were well known. Carter was the surprise winner of the Democratic nomination and Ford fell into the Oval Office after Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate coup against him.

Since then, we have had debates every cycle, but they stopped being debates in the normal sense, devolving into choregraphed media contests. The candidates come equipped with canned one-liners they practice before the event. They hope to use one of them to win headlines. The moderators do the same thing, usually in collaboration with the Democratic candidate. No one remembers the content of these things because there is no content to our debates. They are emotive gibberish.

This will become clear in the opening statements tonight. Harris will repeat the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to trigger good feelings for the target audience of her campaign. She will quickly chant the abracadabra words and phrases that are supposed to get these same people angry at Trump. In his unscripted way, Trump will attempt to do the same thing. Both candidates could be replaced with lights that flash green for good and red for bad.

If Harris is terrible again in this debate, then they most likely pull the plug on the rest of them, including the Vance – Walz debate. Trump would have no need for a rematch and Harris would have no reason to take another beating. It also may be why the whole general election debate concept ends this year. From the perspective of the regime, there is nothing to debate, so why have debates? It was clear over the last month that the regime was not excited about having these things.

The debate concept we have now was a response to the chaos of the 1960’s and 1970’s, which was created by the ruling class, and then the Watergate coup to remove Richard Nixon. The presidential debates were designed to turn the page on the prior decades of cultural chaos and convince people that the political class had regained its mental stability. The ruling class had settled its difference in the wake of the civil rights revolution and was ready to discuss the new consensus.

Prior to the Carter – Ford debate, there was nothing to debate, at least nothing that required public attention. The legal and cultural battles that often played out on the streets in the 60’s and 70’s reflected the debate within the ruling class. Those first presidential debates reflected the new consensus. Once the issues had been settled, then the public could be allowed to see the results. The result was the presidential debate format within the new moral order.

Something similar to the revolutions from above in the middle of the last century has played out in the post-Cold War period. The triumphalism of the Clinton and Bush years gave way to the collapse in confidence of the Obama years. The chaos of the last decade reflects the collapsing confidence of the ruling class. The abolition of rights, the pogroms and censorship all point to a time when the regime simply decides there is nothing to debate and puts an end to all public debate.

Another way of putting it is that after the radicals within the ruling class won the fight, the debate concept emerged as part of a strategy to normalize their victory. Note that in the first debates, none of the major issues of the prior decade were discussed. Both sides were ready to move on to practical issues like the economy and how best to deal with the Soviet Union. No one mentioned the riots and the violence, much less questioned the new civil rights regime.

At the other end of that story arc which began with the Brown decision, the regime is in full control, but paranoid and insecure. The response to Trump and populism was not to confidently confront it and “set it straight” but to use any means necessary to avoid exposing the logic of the regime to the crucible of reason. If Trump wins in November, you can be sure the response will be a renewed pogrom against white people and the rights they assume to be their inheritance.

Win or lose, the lesson the regime will take away from this election is that there is no reason for debates anymore. There is nothing to debate. More important, maintaining the idea that it is acceptable to question the prevailing orthodoxy just leads to misinformation and disinformation. The only thing left to do is to create a narrative that explains why ending debate is vital to our democracy. If they can say free speech is a threat to democracy, ending debates is no great challenge.

Winners & Losers

Posted on September 4, 2024 by thezman

In sports, when a team prepares for a game, they think about all of the ways they can defeat the other team within the rules of the game. The good teams will be as expansive as possible when it comes to the rules of the game. If something is not explicitly forbidden, then they will assume it is permitted, even if convention and the unwritten rules of the game discourage it. The reason for this is the goal is to win, not uphold the traditions and customs of the game.

This is often the difference between winners and losers. The winners are always “pushing the envelope” when it comes to the rules. These are the guys for whom new rules are created because they discovered a loophole in the rules that gives them an advantage but might undermine the game. The people charged with protecting the game then make a new rule to close that loophole. The losers, in contrast, rarely think about finding loopholes and new interpretations of the rules.

Further, when the winner loses, he immediately begins to think about how to get around the limitations he sees to his success. Maybe it means changing how he or his team prepares for games. Maybe it is a fresh look at the rules that prevented him from doing what he needed to win. The loser, on the other hand, simply accepts that he lost and will often justify it within the rules of the game. The winner was simply better and that proves the rules, traditions or customs of the game are sound.

Put another way, the winners in all forms of competition look at the rules, traditions, and customs as a means to an end. The end is always victory. If the rules serve his ends, then he is a lover of the rules, but as soon as the rules prove inconvenient to his success, then he is an enemy of the rules. The loser is always a lover of rules, as they provide him comfort when he inevitably loses. The rules allow him to think that his role as loser is integral to the functioning of those rules.

This is why slavering works. The modern loser likes to think that slavery died out in America because it was bad economics, but this is nonsense. Slavery was fantastically successful as an economic practice. Slavery ended in America because the winners saw slavery as an obstacle to their success. The slave states wielded power derived from the practice of slavery that the northern states wished to overcome, so they decided to change the rules to rid the country of slavery.

The American Civil War is a complicated topic, but the index card version is familiar to anyone familiar with sports. The North kept losing to the South within the rules of the game of politics as set forth in the Constitution. Therefore, they did what winners always seek to do and that is change the rules. They won the Civil War by not allowing the rules, traditions, or customs of the young country to get in their way. Ever since, they have used control of the rules to secure victory.

Slavery itself is a great example of how winners and losers look at the rules, traditions, or customs as justification for their status. There is no greater lover of slavery than the slave, as the rules of slavery protect him from the whims of his master. The slave knows that as long as he upholds the rules, his master will show him mercy and kindness, so he is the great enforcer of the rules on his fellow slaves. One reason slaves seldom revolt is they prefer subjugation over uncertainty.

For his part, the master understands that the rules of human conduct among the slave owning class are a great tool to maintain the slave mentality of his slaves. His mercy and kindness is doled out like treats to a dog. He is not compelled by the rules to show his slaves mercy or kindness, so he does it as it suits him. This leaves the slave always seeking those things from his master, just as the dog is always ready for the pat on the head or the pleasant sounds from his owner.

In this age, we see this master and slave relationship between the people we call the left and the people we call the right. The former looks at the rules as a means to an end and that end is always getting what they want. Even the rules of physical reality are subject to interpretation if they prove difficult. In the hands of the people we call the left, the rules that supposedly regulate every aspect of life are merely the whip in the hands of the masters, who apply it to ensure obedience.

The people we call the right see the rules as every slave sees the rules, which is as a source of shelter from the uncertainty of their masters wrath. They invest their time in polishing their principles in the same way the house slave makes sure to always be seen busy tidying up the master’s house. This is a sign of subservience. David French is at the New York Times for the same reason the field slave rises to become the master’s manservant. He is the most resolute loser.

This is one reason the regime despises Trump. Unlike conservatives, the slaves of the system, he does not look at the rules as a security blanket. He wants to win so he is willing to reinterpret the rules to suit his needs. The people in charge see this as a challenge because they understand what it takes to win. A charismatic loser is easy to control, but a winner, even a boorish and thumbless one, is dangerous, because winners never stop trying to win.

It is also why the “right-wing influencers” have their panties in a twist over the Trump general election campaign. Despite their pretense to the contrary, the “right-wing influencer” is just another manifestation of the conservative loser. They suffer from the same slave mentality as all conservatives. Doing anything to win offends them because winning terrifies them. People born to be, at best, beautiful losers fear nothing more than winning as it reveals the ugliness of their reality.

Trump is far from a revolutionary character, but within the Trump phenomenon lies the seeds of a future revolt against the regime. That seed is the understanding that what matters is winning. That which serves the cause of winning is used and that which hinders success is discarded. Whatever rises up to topple this regime will not be constrained by the love for rules or the desire to follow the rules. They will be motivated only by winning, by any means necessary.

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