Category Archives: Politics

Anarchy in the UK

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Anarcho-Tyranny is when the managerial state either loses the will or the capacity to control real criminals so they harass the citizenry. The best example I can conjure is your car. In most American communities, the cops don’t even bother to look for stolen cars. They take a report and put the car in the system. The car could be on fire in front of the station and they don’t bother to notice. Car theft is simply not their concern. That’s the anarchy.

On the other hand, every street corner and intersection now has a camera for spotting violations. In my two mile commute to the office, I pass through a dozen cameras. Then there are the cops looking for broken taillights, drivers not wearing seat belts and any of an endless list of potential violations that have nothing to do with safety. That’s the tyranny.

In Britain, the process is far more advanced than in the US. There, the authorities truly are game keepers, policing every little thing about the public. If I were located in Britain, this blog would have me rotting in prison because I’m obviously a threat to the progress of mankind.

If that sounds farfetched, consider this from yesterday.

A former Monty Python cameraman has been arrested for harassment over a series of homemade satirical posters mocking local councillors.

John Wellard, 71, said the episode was “completely pythonesque” and told the six police officers who arrived at his home on Friday night: “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.”

The pensioner was questioned by police for two hours after the police received complaints that a series of light-hearted posters appearing in Faversham, Kent, amounted to harassment of members of the town council.

Residents have been locked in an on-going dispute with councillors over fears the town’s historic creek area will be developed into expensive flats.

In the last few months, posters have been handed around local pubs and posted through doors, along with brown envelopes stuffed with copies of old Venezuelan banknotes bearing the note: “If you find this message please return it to your councillor.”

One poster depicts a Tory councillor on a donkey riding through the town, while another describes the town’s mayor and other local figures as “a growing problem in the heart of Kent”.

Mr Wellard, who refuses to confirm or deny any involvement in the posters, believes his name had been given to Kent Police because one of the posters involved a joke from the 1979 Monty Python film Life of Brian.

He told The Mail: “It was completely Pythonesque. Lampoonery and satire have been part of British public life for centuries.

“Why have six policemen threatened to go through my belongings just because a few feathers have been ruffled? Freedom of speech is being whittled away.”

Mr Wellard, who was interviewed under caution at the local police station, chose to give a ‘no comment’ answer to every question.

“It’s irrelevant who’s done what because I do not believe any offence has been committed,” he said.

“I refused to make any comment, not as a measure of my guilt but I don’t believe that I, or anyone else concerned, have done anything wrong.

“In politics people make criticisms and say all kinds of insulting things – if they can’t take the joke they shouldn’t join.

“When the six police were about to search the house I joked that “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition”, but it fell a bit flat.

Of course it fell flat. Authoritarianism is humorless and that’s the heart of managerialism. From top to bottom the system is staffed with the narrowest of narrow minded bureaucrats, who live for the chance to fill out forms about the plenary session of the third department’s planning session for the annual meeting to discuss the last annual meeting.

Managerialism is rule by toll booth operator. Every soulless automaton in the system has one job and they are charged to do it with a ruthless efficiency. That’s how they are measured and that’s how they think. Humor, by its nature, is coloring outside the lines and that becomes a high crime in the managerial state

In Britain, Pakistani pimps are permitted to rape little English girls because that is easier for the custodians than the alternatives. That’s the anarchy. The people in the bureaucracy can never look up from their screens long enough to consider the wider implications of their actions. That risks stepping out of line and being noticed for something other than ruthlessly adhering to the rules.

On the other hand, local cut-ups make sport of the mandarins threaten order and that cannot be tolerated so they send out the cops, probably walking right past some Pakistani pimps, to harass an old man over posters. That’s the tyranny and it is coming to the US like a tsunami of sewage.

The Democrats

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The recent revelations about the Clinton slush fund has reminded everyone that the very worst said about the Clintons is the tip of the iceberg. There’s always more slime under the next stone. They are the Snopes family of the Ozarks. Their vermin-like rapacity is boundless, unimaginably boundless. Official Washington is not exactly the genteel Sartoris clan, but the old order of Washington simply lacks the capacity to deal with a moral nullity like Bill or Hillary.

That’s why I’m a little skeptical of the tut-tutting over the latest shenanigans. The American political class no longer has the will to police itself. The name of the game these days is to sell/steal everything that is not nailed down and that’s how dirt-bags like the Clintons have flourished. It was not that long ago when their kind would not have been welcome in the halls of power. They would have had to feed off the mountain folk in Arkansas.

Still, the chattering skulls are going on about how this opens the door for Fake Indian to run. I guess they have to talk about something, but anyone who knows anything knows she is not running. Even if Hillary quits the field and leaves a wide open race, Fake Indian will not run because she knows how things work in the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

One big reason the Left hates Hillary is she is a loser. In 1992 she was given the job of ushering in a national health care system to replace the semi-private arrangements we have now. She bungled it badly and killed the issue for two decades. Worse yet, the resulting political fallout led her husband to throw the Left overboard to save his skin.

Fake Indian knows that the Left is intolerant of losers. Lose an election and you’re done. If she were to run for president and lose the primary, she would be a loser and the vultures would be circling. There’s a Kennedy warming up on Congress for her seat and you can be sure he would be running in 2018 if Fake Indian were to run for president and lose. It’s not like Fake Indian has the support of the local machine. She’s a carpetbagger who depends on the support of the Left.

Her better play is to let a stooge like O’Malley run against Hillary. Meanwhile, she can rant and rave from the well of the Senate about how her billionaire friends don’t do their fair share. She can run in 2018 with the promise she will step aside to let the next Kennedy take the seat in 2024. That will take her into retirement and she will never fall afoul of her coreligionists.

O’Malley, on the other hand, is the perfect off-cycle stooge. He has nothing to lose and nothing to do right now. Maryland is a small state located next to the Imperial Capital. That means there’s few local shakedowns available for ex-pols. He could run for Senate, but running for president is a better deal right now. It let’s him make connections all over the country, which means a high paying job at a lobbying firm after he loses.

Alternatively, he could raise his profile and set himself up for a Senate run in a couple of years. Ben Cardin is old and ready for the home so that seat will be open in 2018. A famous liberal with lots of rich friends will have no trouble winning that seat. It’s a no-lose proposition for O’Malley so he may as well be the Left’s champion against Hillary.

My bet is Butch ends up as the nominee.

My View on Taxes

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A while back, I took fire for defending death taxes. My failure to enthusiastically decry inheritance taxes was seen as something close to a mortal sin. Maybe just a severe wounding sin. Still, it was a reminder that taxes have become freighted with emotion, particularly outside the Cult of Modern Liberalism. My sense is most liberals think very little about taxes these days. They are the people in charge and therefore take a managerial view of government revenues.

But, the people outside the Cult are another matter. As best I can tell, libertarians imagine a world of no taxes. The respectable libertarians, from what I gather, like the idea of a simple flat tax paid by all citizens. All income is taxed at 15% with no exceptions. I’m sure there are variations on this from other respectable libertarians, but the gist of it seems to be simplicity, but also a minimalist approach. Set the rate low and leave it low to force austerity on Washington.

Conservative Inc. is all over the map when it comes to taxes. The so-called Reformicons imagine all sorts of social engineering that can and should be done through the tax code. Ramesh Ponnuru has been obsessing over child tax credits for years. That’s the heart of the GOP view on taxes. Instead of spending on social programs, they create them in the tax code. They sell them the same way Democrats sell spending programs – free stuff for their voters.

At the heart of all of it is the belief that we can move closer to the promised land if we just arrange tax policy a certain way.

My Tax Philosophy

My first rule on taxes is they must be high enough to pay for government. Borrowing to finance current spending is just taxing the unborn – at best. In most cases it is damaging to the middle-class because excessive borrowing warps credit markets. That quickly leads to the sorts of logrolling shenanigans we see today where banks churn credit activity to skim a profit without providi9ng services.

Pegging tax collection to spending has a clarifying effect on public policy as the bill comes with the services. If everyone’s current tax bill suddenly jumped 50% to close the budget gap, we would be having a different debate about the size and scope of government. Everyone is always in favor of spending the other guy’s money, especially when the other guy has not been born yet.

Of course, the traveling partner with the first principle is transparency. Hidden taxes are a crime against the citizen.The reason governments hide their tax schemes is they know the public would not be happy. If we are going to have self-government, the self better have all the information. Otherwise, the citizens, as well as the rulers, are guessing at public policy.

The most obvious example of this is the business tax. These taxes are always passed onto the employees or their customers. Payroll taxes come out of wages. Corporate taxes show up in the price of the goods and services. If employees saw all of the taxes on their pay stub each week, there would be riots in the streets.

There’s another piece to this puzzle. Taxes are not voluntary. They are collected by force. That’s why the power to tax is the power to destroy. It’s also why powerful people grease politicians to avoid paying taxes. Corporate giants spend millions lobbying Washington and every other Western capital for tax breaks. You can’t have self-government if the rich guys are bribing their way out of their obligations.

Corruption is always a part of human affairs. That’s never going to change no matter how you arrange things. You can limit corruption by removing the temptations that come with the power to exempt some citizens from taxes, regulations or laws. You can’t sell favors if you have no favors to sell. A sensible tax code removes, as much as possible, the favors the pols can sell to their rich friends.

Who Gets Taxed

More than half of Americans avoid paying federal taxes. They pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, fuel taxes and so on, but they avoid incomes taxes, despite having income. This is often pointed out by Conservatives and libertarians as a defect in the current tax code. Liberals, of course, argue that any tax on the poor is unfair because the poor are, well, poor.

What’s missing from tax discussions is who gets taxed and why. The egalitarian fantasy is that every man gets a vote and therefore has an equal stake in society. No such society has ever existed or ever could exist. Human societies are hierarchical. At the top you have the people in charge. At the bottom you have the people who do as they’re told. To pretend otherwise is self-delusion.

The people at the top have the most to lose if things fall apart which is another way of saying they have the greatest investment in the complex social arrangements paid for by taxes. At the other end of the social order, the people at the bottom have the least to lose. Being a peasant for one king is no different, in general, than being a peasant for some other king. The people in a typical American ghetto don’t care who is in charge, just as long as the EBT is charged on time.

Anthropologists have long noted that it is the wealthy who bear the bulk of the costs of social complexity. This spans all cultures and all times. The mathematics of social organization are immutable. In order to have a wealthy ruling class, you need a complex social structure. That social structure will always cost more than you can tax the peasantry – vastly more. That’s why the rich pay the bulk of taxes.

Taxing the rich at higher rates and higher amounts is inevitable, but the poorest of the poor have some stake in society. Taxes are the cost of citizenship. If you are not paying taxes, you are not a citizen. This has been true in all times and all places. No one taxes slaves or beggars. You simply cannot be considered a citizen in a modern society unless you pay taxes and you can’t have non optimo jure cives in a modern society so everyone pays something.

Conclusion

As you can see, I’m amenable to estate taxes because they are transparent, simple and fall predominantly on the rich. The trouble here is the pols can easily auction off exceptions and loopholes. Warren Buffet has been preying on family business for decades, mainly due to the inheritance tax and the many loopholes created in the tax code.

Otherwise, I’m open to any tax scheme that is clear, simple and difficult to corrupt. Government is not free so we have to pay taxes. Taxing food, children, dead people, kittens or whatever is not a moral issue, it is a math issue for me, just as long as the tax is clear, simple, applied to everyone and most important, pays for all of government today.

Open Carry

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A friend sent this to me wondering why anyone would want to open carry. He lives in New Hampshire where open carry is permitted. You need a permit to conceal carry, but any legal gun owner can open carry. Go up above the notches in the fall and it looks like a scene from a Western. Everyone is carrying.

For most Americans, Texas conjures images of gun-toting vaqueros, cowboys wielding six-shooters and epic battles over independence and secession. Gun manufacturers Colt, Mossberg and Magpul call the Lone Star State home, and a concealed carry license grants you a fast-pass into the state Capitol.

All the more surprising, then, that Texas was the first state to ban its citizens from carrying handguns, a restriction that remained on the books for 125 years. Now, 20 years after the Texas Legislature OK’d the carrying of concealed handguns with a license, some lawmakers want to make it legal to carry holstered weapons in plain sight.

The rest of the piece is weeping about how people were mean to blacks in the old days, but no one cares about that. The people interested in this issue wonder why it is anyone would want to carry in the open. I’m a Second Amendment absolutist. If you are allowed to own a gun, you have the right to carry it around with you. I’m against any and all permitting of firearms.

That said, I can’t think of a reason why I would want to open carry. I get why cops do it. It is part of their uniform and we want them to have ready access to their firearm in order to shoot those unarmed, fleeing black people. A a private citizen, I think I’d prefer it if my fellow citizens don’t know who is and who is not armed.

The more I think of it, the more it strikes me that open carry is problematic for a number of reasons. In every state the cops have a right to inspect your firearm. If you are carrying and a cop asks for your gun and permit, you are required by law to produce them. But, cops are not randomly stopping people asking for their permit.

In Virginia I was pulled over for speeding and had my pistol bag on the front seat. The cop came up to the window and I had my permit out, along with my license. That let him know I was a good guy and following the law. That’s all he needed and we went about the business of a traffic stop.

Open carry complicates this. Every cop is going to be on the lookout for a dodgy looking character carrying a pistol. Maybe that’s a good thing, as criminals are stupid. They will end up self-reporting, so to speak, by carrying their illegal gun openly. Still, I’m puzzled as to why anyone would want to open carry, other than small dick syndrome.

The Greatest Taboo

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In my post on Greece yesterday, I came in for withering fire over my statement about elections. OK, that’s an exaggeration. I’m often surprised at what gets the attention of readers in my posts, but also in stuff I read on various sites. The comments sections have become the place where you can take the temperature of that portion of the reading public with similar interest to your own.

Anyway, the objection is that elections are not about problem solving and I can see the point. Often elections are nothing more than beauty contests. When writing that post I was looking at elections as an ongoing process. Individually they may be meaningless, but string a few together and you have a meaningful series that reflects the attempts by a society to solve a problem.

Still, that leaves the other objection, which is that current elections are not addressing the important problems. The country is being overrun by foreigners and the pols debate trivial changes to the tax code or how they look better in a blue suit than the other guys. In America, the 2016 election will have little to say about immigration, even though the public is concerned about it. In the UK, the only guy talking immigration is dismissed as a racist.

That last bit really did not resonate with me until I looked up some polling on immigration in the UK. In the US, the numbers have been creeping up, but immigration is still low on the list of issue important to voters. Americans are still far more concerned with the economy and the general chaos in Washington, than immigration issues.In the UK, immigration is the top issue. It’s not just the top worry, it is the top worry of most people.

The people in charge of Britain, however, are doing everything they can to keep the topic out of the election. So much so that the BBC stacked the audience during the last debate in an attempt to discredit Nigel Farage.

He will take audience questions in a 30-minute programme called Election 2015: Ask Nigel Farage.

The discussion, held in Birmingham, will air after the News at 10 and will be chaired by journalist Jo Coburn.

It will be held at the same time as a Question Time special featuring the Tory, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders who will take turns answering questions from the same audience in Leeds.

A Ukip insider raised questions over the timing of the announcement from the BBC amid a growing bias storm engulfing the broadcaster.

It earlier emerged that Thursday’s debate featuring the leaders of “challenger” parties had an audience where just ONE THIRD leaned towards the political right.

The Ukip leader was booed on the programme when he suggested the make-up of the BBC election debate audience was left wing “even by the left-wing standards of the BBC”.

Host David Dimbleby even insisted the audience had been “carefully chosen” by independent polling organisation ICM to represent the balance between all parties.

But when the make-up of audience members was finally revealed it showed that nearly 70 per cent were left wing.

Think about the people who would risk a scandal in order to get a few more jeers at the UKIP candidate. There’s a level of fanaticism here that goes beyond the normal partisanship. UKIP is not going to win the election. They are taking a bigger bite out of the Tories than the even more leftist parties. Strategically, UKIP is serving the interests of the BBC types. Yet, they cannot stop themselves from attacking UKIP.

The question, of course, is why? Immigration should be no more emotionally fraught than zoning ordinances or garbage collection budgets. It is just another policy that free people must administer. But it isn’t to the people in the charge. Flooding their nations with foreigners has become a holy mission and those who oppose them deserving of the worst they can throw at them.

Immigration, of course, is tied to citizenship. Limits on immigration mean there are benefits to citizenship, which means there is such a thing called a citizen and that’s become the greatest taboo in Western societies. The idea that people are citizens and their government is obligated to protect their interests is a heresy amongst the ruling classes. They no longer see themselves bound to their host countries and the people of those countries.

That’s why immigration may be our greatest taboo now. In the UK, the people in charge desperately want to fold the country into the amorphous blob of Europe. The far less sophisticated rulers of America imagine themselves ruling over it all. The fact that the people may not be willing to go along with it makes the need to sacralize the immigrant and demonize the nativist.

Nixon in a Pantsuit

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When Nixon decided to run for president in 1968, he was a long shot. After all, he had failed in his bid eight years prior and he had lost the California governors race. After that last defeat he uttered the famous line, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” He then left public life and joined a law firm in New York.

By the time he was running again, the country was a different place than in 1960. The media, dominated by the Left, still hated him over Alger Hiss. His brand of politics seemed painfully old fashioned. His appeal to normal people struck the chattering classes as absurd. More important, Nixon had a bad brand, as the cool kids today are fond of saying. There was simply no way to sell old Tricky Dick to the public.

Five years later a young woman named Hillary Rodham was working as a low-level staffer on one of the House committees investigating Watergate. Jerry Zeifman, a counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, later wrote that she was a liar and a fanatical Nixon hater. He claims to have fired her. This claim is hotly disputed by Clinton supporters, because it looks bad for Clinton and it could possibly be true. Even so, Mrs. Clinton is strangely linked to old Tricky Dick.

I say that because here we are 40 years later and a well past ripe Hillary Clinton is trying one last shot at winning the presidency. Like Nixon, she is doing this as the latest Great Liberal Awakening reaches a denouement. As was true then, the current Democratic coalition is falling to pieces. The internal contradictions are ripping it apart. Similarly, there are looming economic and international problems facing the country.

The biggest point of comparison, of course, is personality. Like Nixon, Hillary has a well defined brand. That brand is not a flattering one. Even the most stalwart of Clinton supporters acknowledges that she is physically incapable of telling the truth. They laugh about it and treated as a quirk, but it says something when your best friends think you are a sociopath. Nixon people used to joke about their boss’s reputation for skullduggery, but it was never a compliment.

The differences are there too. Nixon was a very smart man, maybe one of the smartest presidents in the modern era. Nixon was also a foe of liberalism at a cultural level. This was as much personal as anything else, but he really hated the hippies. He could plausibly run as an antidote to the excesses of the Progressives. Clinton is in a very different position as sort of an old school lefty throwback and a member of the Democrat Party.

Even so, you can see how she intends to run as sort of an antidote to the last eight years. She will be Obama without the hatred for whitey. Her initial roll-out features nothing but white people. It is heavy on the homosexuals, young women and mothers. Hillary wants to position herself as a the wise old granny who could possibly be a lesbian, but is not making a big deal out of it.

Long term, the plan is to follow the Nixon model and be the champion of the downtrodden. Her trip to Chipotle is just one of many stunts intended to picture her as a regular person. Politicians often do this, but it is in contrast to Obama’s unrestrained elitism. Obama would show up at an ice cream shop to be flattered by his subject. Hillary shows up at a taco shop to mix with her people.

Whether it will work is hard to know. The Progressives hold all the high ground in American culture. Liberalism is the one true faith and Hillary is a member. If the choice is between her and some raging heretic, all the resources of the political class will swing her way. If the alternative is some accommodating trimmer like Jeb Bush, then I suspect Clinton 2016 looks like a parody of Dole 1996. Perhaps she will take a header of a stage as well.

Another departure from Nixon is that Tricky Dick went into his race fully aware of his reputation. Clinton, so far, appears to believe the bullshit being fed to her by the consultants. That goofy looking logo and campaign video has been the butt of jokes on social media all week. A lot of people hated Nixon, but no one laughed at him.

I think the biggest thing with Nixon is he could plausibly argue that he was right all along. In 1964 Goldwater ran on the slogan, “In your heart you know he right.” By 1968 most people had figured that out and could see it on their TV. Nixon did not have to make the same pitch because it was manifest. Voting for Nixon was, to a small degree, about normal people regaining control of their country.

Hillary, in contrast, has always been wrong. The one and only thing she has gotten right in 40 years is that Obama was not ready for the job. That’s the one thing she can’t say in this campaign. If anything, she is a reminder that the last 25 years have been a disaster and the country went down the wrong path when electing the vulgarians known as The Clintons. Symbolically, a vote against Hillary is a vote for closing the books on a run of very bad choices.

The Left Turns on the Tribe

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Way back in the olden thymes, Democrats loved trotting out liberal Catholics as proof they were down with the folks. It was a common rouse in areas with an immigrant past like Chicago and Boston. They would show up somewhere with the local Bishop and talk about their faith. Some of them were even pro-life, but many finessed it to avoid having to choose, but all of them eventually had to choose and they chose to be pro-abortion.

The last guy to face the choice between his liberal faith and his Christian faith was Bart Stupak. Nancy Pelosi was so mad about his doubts that she made him walk the plank. He was forced to recant at a press conference, promising to never doubt the Progressive faith again. This ended his political career. Today, there are no pro-life Democrats and few who even bother mentioning membership in a Christian church.

That’s how religions work. You can’t be in two of them for long before one or both force you to decide. American Jews are about to learn that truth as their party tilts in favor of the Arabs as opposed to the Israelis. The boys at Vox are scrambling to come up with some way to be anti-Israel and still a member of the tribe in good standing. That means Talmudic hairsplitting about what it means to be Zionist, versus a secular ethnocentric.

Israel has always been more than just a place on a map. From the beginning, it has existed as a series of promises as well as a geographical location: a promise of being a place where Jews can live, a promise of being a place that will keep Jews safe, and a place that secures the Jewish people’s democratic ideals. Implicit in those promises has always been a threat: that if any of them were ever broken, Israel would no longer truly be Israel. It would just be a place on a map that happened to be labeled with that name.

Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of modern Zionism, once told a gathering of Zionist leaders that “those of us who are today prepared to hazard our lives for the cause would regret having raised a finger if we were able to organize only a new social system, and not a more righteous one.” As the American Zionist leader Louis Lipsky wrote in the 1946 forward to Herzl’s 1896 treatise “The Jewish State,” Zionism “had to become a movement of democracy.”

You can see the difficulty. Israel is not just another country. It can never be just another country to Jews or anyone else for that matter. Israel is an ethno-state. If is explicitly for Jews and only Jews. That leaves American Jews in a tough spot, because when it comes time to choose, liberals will demand that Jews embrace the low-IQ violent nitwits in the territories over Israel. In the abstract that’s possible, but not a matter of fact.

Quietly, gradually, an internal crisis has grown so great that it threatens the survival of Israel as we know it today: Jewish, democratic, and an accepted member of the community of nations. If something does not change, then that Israel cannot survive. An Israel that is authoritarian, that is isolated in the world, and that betrays the ideals of its founders will take its place. It will retain the Israeli flag and national anthem, it will stamp “Israel” on its passports, but it will not be Israel as Zionists like Herzl and Lipsky — and millions of Jews who believed and still believe in their vision — hoped and intended.

It’s a fascinating bit of jujitsu. Israel is a functioning democracy. No one has any doubts about the integrity of their elections. For the Left, democracy means something entirely different than it does for normal people. For them, it unity. An election that goes against them is due to divisiveness, so the Left claims it is a threat to democracy. In this case it means claiming Netanyahu as a despot and therefore against democracy.

That, of course, justifies the South Africa treatment Israel is about to get from the American Left. They claim their concern is based on their hope for Israel to thrive as an enlightened democracy, by which they mean a borderless nothing, which is impossible in the Levant. None of makes any sense, but there is no way to make sense of the Progressive concept of democracy and support Israel as an ethno-state.

I’m sure the Vox boys are confident they can make this work, but that’s not the way to bet, given what has happened to Christian churches. The Episcopal Church tried to compromise with Progressives and were devoured by them. It’s now a homosexual freak show. The Catholic Church is going through similar process and may be facing a schism, as the traditionalist recoil in horror at the direction of the Church.

Civic religions always end up having a problem with the Jews. The reason is you can leave the Catholic Church and become a Lutheran. You can be a Lutheran and have loyalty to your countrymen. There’s nothing in your nature that makes you a Lutheran or a Catholic. Jews can’t do the same. You’re born a Jew. It’s literally in your bones and your Jewish identity comes before all else. It’s literally what makes you a Jew.

Steve Sailer thinks that the smarter Jews are figuring out that the Left is coming for them next. I’m less optimistic about it. Civic religions eventually demand absolute loyalty to the state. They also come to doubt anyone that has a history of not professing loyalty to the state. Let’s face it, Jews are always assumed to have dual loyalty. Fair or not, that’s reality and the new Left emerging in America will come to distrust them.

Slimey Limes

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I’ve been reading about the upcoming British elections. Unlike in America, British elections seem to go on forever. It seems that they have been talking about this election for years! I’m kidding, of course, but British election shows are following the same arc as American election shows. As soon as one ends, a new one starts up. I guess it keeps the political consultants off the streets.

For Americans, British elections are a good indication of where things are going in our own lands. Thatcher became the head of the Tories in ’75 and Reagan became the de facto leader of American conservatives in ’76. Thatcher became PM in ’79 and Reagan won the White House in ’80. It’s not a perfect bellwether, but it is useful. We elected the vulgarian Bill Clinton and the Brits followed that with the execrable Tony Blair.Sometimes America is the trend setter.

Even so, it’s worth noting what is going on in the mother country. The fraying of the political parties in Britain cannot have an analog in the US due to our system, but the general disgust with the political class is something we’re seeing on both sides of the Atlantic. That’s the point of this piece in the Guardian last week.

Public mistrust of government is high in Britain, and deference to the political elite has also collapsed as economic woes erode living standards. Amid all that, voters are deserting the Conservatives and Labour, Britain’s two main parties of the right and left since the 1920s, in droves.

In the 1951 election, Labour and the Conservatives – or Tories – shared 96% of the vote. By 2010 they could only manage 66% between them.

At the last election in 2010, Cameron – the first Tory leader since the 1960s to be educated at Eton college and Oxford University, an upper-class combination somewhat comparable to the Ivy League – successfully ousted Labour after 13 years of Blair and then Gordon Brown, but his 306 seats to Labour’s 258 left him 20 short of an outright majority.

The Conservative leader was forced into the first peacetime coalition since the Great Depression, his partners the middle-of-the-road Liberal Democrats who had staged a revival since near-extinction in the 50s and had won 57 seats. A coalition of some kind – or a minority government, rule by a party that does not have a majority of MPs – seems likely again this year.

From where I sit, the Tories look a lot like the GOP in that they have run out of reasons to exist. When you have caved on all of the important cultural arguments, what argument can you offer to voters other than you will wear a tighter fitting eye shade whilst managing the custodial state? How is Cameron different from Blair, other than being taller?

The other issue, of course, is the national question. That’s always the topic when discussing UKIP. It is the thrust of the party and the tool they are using to dig out the innards of the Tory party. I suppose you can add in a healthy bit of economic nationalism as well as economic populism. No national figure in the US has picked up this issue yet, but it is looking like Walker and Cruz are working on their conversion stories, in the hope of repeating what worked for Dave Brat.

It’s convenient to dismiss UKIP as the party of yahoos, just as it has been easy to dismiss Tea Party types in the US. The thing is, I wonder if the appeal of the Scottish Nation Party is really just a veiled and uniquely Scottish protest against immigration. There’s no economic reason for Scotland to break away. There’s not a language or cultural barrier that is big enough to warrant a split.

I looked up SNP’s position on immigration and it is nonsensical, therapeutic state gibberish.The national appeal is by definition exclusive and they make clear they intend to restrict immigration. On the other hand, they moan about being victims and having their feelings hurt by the mean men of Westminster. My hunch is the average Scot hears “Scotland for Scots” when he thinks of SNP.

Demographics certainly plays a role as we see in the US. Scotland is white, very white. The latest demographics say 96% white as a matter of fact. England, in contrast, is 85% white. In America, pasty regions up north love talking about diversity, while diverse parts of the country are more restrained. Diversity romanticism does not sell very well in the Southern states, for example, as everyone there has more than their fill of diversity.

I suspect something similar is at work in Britain. The SNP can wax romantic about immigration and pretend they are treated like foreigners by the English. They can afford such loose talk. Their brothers to the south have to navigate through Londonstan and have a very different view of the rainbow coalition. A couple of muzzies saw off the head of a Scottish soldier in Glasgow and I suspect we get a different tune from SNP.

The old divisions in the Anglosphere were mostly about economics. The Left embraced Fabian socialism and the Right embraced free market capitalism. Today, everyone agrees on economics. Global capitalism is the economic foundation of the ruling elite. Where they differ is on biological reality. The cultural globalism espoused by a Jeb Bush assumes nurture is everything and nature is nothing. At the heart of the nationalist appeal is the implicit assumption that nature, not nurture, is what defines us.

The nurture crowd still controls the high ground in the West. They press on with their program, despite the rumblings of discontent. The fact that these issues are part of the public debate is progress of sorts. I suspect American pols are watching what is happening in the UK with great interest. Gains by UKIP and SNP could change a few minds on this side of the Atlantic.

Iran, The Savage and The Borg

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The other day I saw this commercial on one of the news channels. It was on a talker show of some sort, I don’t remember which one, but the chattering skulls were taking turns being outraged by it. I was not quite sure why they were outraged and not all that interested. I think Taco Bell is on the unapproved list so they are not allowed to employ mockery. Alternatively, maybe they are not permitted to mock central planning.

Regardless, the thing that got my attention was the use of the Ramones song Blitzkrieg Bop. Eventually, anything and everything that is subversive or banned in western culture is absorbed into the Borg and turned into a tool of the Borg. Pop songs from the 60’s that celebrated the rejection of bourgeois society are used today to sell products made by global mega-corporations. Punk from the 70’s and 80’s is seeing the same thing.

The same is true of people. Conservative Inc gets their panties in a bunch when kids wear Che t-shirts or sport other symbols of communism, but they are mistaken. What it shows is that in the path of The Borg, there is no resistance. Everything will be absorbed and put to use in furtherance of The Borg. We are the Borg. You will be assimilated.

If you are reading this, odds are you are from the Anglosphere and you have some familiarity with the fictional Borg, as well as the real one, but the latter is taken for granted so you don’t think about it much. There’s no reason to think about it. Fish don’t think about the sea and birds don’t think about the air. English speaking humans don’t think much about the media in which we are suspended.

The rest of the world, however, thinks a lot about The Borg. They see it from the perspective of both outsiders and potential insiders – unwilling insiders. If you listen to the Islamic fundamentalist, they will tell you why they are so obsessed with killing the West, particularly America. That reason is they fear that their culture will become like that Ramones song in the commercial. It will be just another tool to move product.

The central planners of The Borg are already working on how to make Iran chic so they can move product. Once Obama gets his deal done with Iran, you can be sure Apple will have a Persian iPhone cover and the all-women’s auxiliary of the Cult of Modern Liberalism will be sporting swank hijabs.

In the novel Brave New World, the World State has come to terms with the fact there are parts of the world not conducive to easy living. These are set aside as reservations for the savages. They are not really left to their own devices as they are maintained as amusement parks for the World State citizens. You go there to watch the savages. It is not entirely different from how western tourists run around looking at ruins in third world countries.

The story of John the Savage in Brave New World is relevant here as it shows the torment of being in but not being of two worlds. In the novel, the Savage was never accepted by his fellow savages. Similarly, he was never accepted as anything other than a curiosity by the citizens of the World State. His “otherness” was incorporated as a novelty, like an animal in a zoo.

Muslims who have spent time in the West or been exposed to the West often have the same reaction. They can grow up in and immerse themselves in the West, but they are never truly Western. Islam is simply alien to Western culture. Unlike blacks, they cannot blame slavery. Instead, many come to blame the Borg and decide to make war on it as self-defense.

On the other hand, those in the Middle East often feel shame over their backwardness and inability to compete with the West. Without the West, the Arabs would be living in tents and riding camels. They would live and die as they did in the ninth century. At the same time, they adopt the material goods of the West and feel their culture being absorbed into the Borg, losing its vitality and utility.

In other words, to tie the two themes together, the Muslim Arabs stand facing two options, assimilate of die. It’s why Islamic fundamentalism has ticked up as exposure to the West has ticked up. The communications revolution along with the end of the Cold War brought The Borg to the Middle East and Islamic fanaticism has been the response. In the novel, John the Savage resolves this by hanging himself.

It’s why I think the Iranians will have no choice but to scuttle the deal, hang themselves, so to speak. Normalizing economic relations means a Starbucks across from the mosque, Western music on the radio, Western shows in the TV. It means The Borg is on every corner and in every home. Iran already struggles with the consequences of encroaching Western culture. Assimilation cannot possibly be an answer they accept.

Roman expansion was based on land. They seized the lands of others, held them by force and extracted what they could to profit themselves and maintain their grip on empire. Eventually, the math stopped working. Long before Alaric, the Western Roman Empire ceased to be an ongoing concern. But, the Romans did manage to export a great deal of their culture to the rest of the world.

America has never been a land based empire. Ours is a culture based empire. Instead of seizing the lands, we seize the culture and assimilate it into our own. Even our friends chafe at the stifling cultural hegemony. It is therefore no surprise that the fringes of human civilization would recoil in horror at our materialistic, homogenizing culture. It’s why, in the end, Iran can never make a deal with us. There’s no negotiating with The Borg.

Social Justice League Vexed By Rand Paul

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It’s not hard to see how this will play out in the general. Any opposition to Cankles will be off limits because, well, vagina.

Rand Paul’s first day on the campaign trail was marred by a high-profile fight with NBC’ “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie that raised questions about whether he is ready for primetime.

Video of Paul telling Guthrie how she should do her job went viral on social media, placing his attitude toward female reporters in the spotlight.

The Kentucky GOP senator was ultimately forced to give a partial mea culpa, even as he sought to dispel the notion that his earlier pushback was sexist.

But the damage may have already been done for Paul.

“If this were the first time this had happened, that would be one thing,” GOP strategist Ford O’Connell told The Hill. “But I’m not sure it is all that clear to Rand Paul that, when you’re running for president, it is not a good thing if you launch into a diatribe.”

The incident with Guthrie was reminiscent of a February interview with CNBC’s Kelly Evans when the senator “shushed” the TV host and told her to “calm down.”

I’m not much of a Ran Paul fan, but if the dingbat twat squad is against him, maybe he deserves a second look.