The Night Of The Cobra

Posted on December 7, 2023 by thezman

The fourth and allegedly final Republican debate was held last night, featuring the final four contestants for the right to be the party nominee. The plot of these shows is to showcase the alternatives to Trump. The subtext is the not-so-secret plot by Washington to have the party remove Trump from the ballot, so one of these losers will get selected to fill the slot. What we have been getting instead is a fairly good example of systemic incompetence by the political class.

Last night’s show is a perfect example. To this point, Vivek Ramaswamy, the King Cobra, has been the glib youngster, making fun of the old squares on stage. He is glib and smart, but most importantly, he is plugged into the on-line criticism of the Republicans Party and official conservatism. He pithily says on stage what people say on Facebook and Twitter about the party. He has been the Hindu Muhammed Ali mocking the party at its own shows.

Last night was a perfect example of the staggering incompetence that has come to define not just the party by the political class. No one, including the moderator, was prepared for what the Cobra unleashed on the other three people. At the last debate he gave War Karen, Nikki Haley, the Sean Connery treatment. It was the story of the debate, but this time no one was prepared, so the Cobra rhetorically gave her a good paddling while she purred like a kitten,

The whole point of having War Karen on the stage was to make her the spokes-zombie of the Kagan Cult and thereby re-legitimize their madness as a feature of the Republican Party establishment. Instead, the Cobra has used her as a prop in his general critique of neoconservatism. Most Republican voters never heard the word “neocon” but now they know they are bad people. Like their other project, the War Karen scheme blew up in the neocon’s face.

Another character in this theater of the absurd is Fat Ann Coulter, Chris Christie, who sounds like every man’s ex-wife. His reason to exist in these shows was to be the fat loudmouth from New Jersey who could out-crude Trump, while repeating everything Ann Coulter posts about Trump on Twitter. He came into the show assuming he could fat guy bully the Cobra, but instead he got the Ned Beatty treatment. The only thing the Cobra did not do was make him squeal like a pig.

Where you really see the systemic incompetence is in the campaign of Ron “Bootsy” DeSantis, who was supposed to be Trump’s mini-me. Everything about his campaign has been terrible, because he made the decision to hand his campaign over to party hacks and Washington insiders. As a result, he has spent this year transitioning from the mouthy Italian from Florida into Mike Dukakis. He is so boring dust forms on your monitor whenever someone mentions him on-line.

Last night was a perfect example. DeSantis was programmed to attack Haley, who the dullards think is “surging in the polls.” This gave the green light to the Cobra to unleash his most furious attacks yet on the field and the party itself. His challenge to them to name a single providence in Ukraine, after they chanted the neocon lines about the war, was a thing of beauty. War Karen and Fat Ann Coulter were poleaxed, while Bootsy looked like he was about to poo himself.

The point here is this should never have been allowed to happen. A modestly competent party would have never allowed the Cobra on the stage, much less allowed him to eviscerate their candidates. Of course, even the Stupid Party would have turned Trump 2016 into an asset. The party of Reagan would have co-opted Trump and had him sign off on all of their pet projects. The modern party is run by girls and homosexuals so it is getting shredded by a call center supervisor.

To this point the Cobra has been an amusing warmup act to the big show featuring Trump as the main attraction in 2024. Until these last two debates it was inconceivable that the Cobra could win the nomination. His thorough humiliation of the other actors on the stage suggests anything is possible. Imagine the party eliminating Trump only to get out played by the Cobra at the convention. In a world run by increasingly stupid people, the safe bet is the dumbest idea you can imagine.

From the dissident perspective, we have to hope that Trump remembers why he had urinals installed at his villa in Florida and picks the Cobra to be his running mate after the first few primaries. This would be the ultimate mind rape of the Borg we call the mass media, and it would make for a great show. Trump would unleash some boomer jibes and the Cobra would amplify them with millennial online jargon. It would be like 4Chan became a pollical party and ran for office.

It is a terrible way to run an empire, but given the collection of sissies, entitled women and simpletons that is the alternative, having a collection of shit-posters run things will at least provide some laughs as we careen into the void. Otherwise, it means the collapse is managed by the same people who thought it was a good idea to promote a ball-shriveling shrew like War Karen as an alternative to Trump. Everyone will be praying for sweet death as the empire collapses.

Sadly, that is not the way to bet. There is a reason our literature is not filled with amusing tales of the end of prior empires. The end of the established order is never a good time for the people living it. Collapse is never fun, and the collapse of the American empire will be no exception. It will be War Karen, Fat Ann Coulter, and the rest until the men of the West have had enough, spit on their hands, raise the black flag and begin splitting throats.

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Orphan Child

Posted on December 5, 2023 by thezman

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, John F. Kennedy supposedly said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Whether or not he actually said it is unknown, but the expression has been with us ever since. Supposedly it was an updated version of the Tacitus line, “It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.” Kennedy was pithier but Tactus captures the truth of the matter.

We are seeing this with the Ukraine war. The news from the battlefields is uniformly bad for the Ukrainian army. The West is slowly coming to terms with the reality of the much publicized counter-offensive, which ended in disaster soon after it was launched, but the West spent the last few months in denial. Ukraine does not publish numbers as far as casualties, but independent guessing suggests they lost between seventy and one hundred thousand men in the counter-offensive.

As the overall condition of the Ukraine military comes into focus, the recriminations are beginning to turn up in Western media. This long story in the Washington Post is a good example of the general tone. Washington is looking to place the blame on the Ukrainians, while the Ukrainians are placing the blame on their Western backers or on one another as the situation warrants. Europe has yet to join the blame game, but in time they will no doubt blame the Ukrainians.

Another pithy expression that is useful regarding the Ukraine debacle is “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” Washington never learns from its failures, which is why they have the Ukraine debacle, but the rest of us can gain some insight into how our pollical leaders stumble into these disasters by looking at some of the major blunders in this war. How they managed to reach this point speaks to how they view the world and their role in it.

The first major blunder was getting into a land war with Russia. This is right up there with “Never getting into a land war in Asia” and the slightly less well-known “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” The Russians are bad at many things but when it comes to fighting a land war, they are exceptional. When they view the land war as an existential threat it quickly becomes a great patriotic war and the whole of Russia organizes to defeat the enemy.

This is what the West managed to do in what should have been a low-grade border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The West made this into a game of the world against Russia and the Russians accepted the challenge. The sanctions regime was clearly intended to hurt average Russians, which made it easy for the Russian leadership to recast this conflict as this generations great patriotic war. That war is with the West, not just the Ukrainians.

The question is why did the West do this? The reason is they assumed Russia was too weak to fight an actual war. They came to this conclusion not based on observable facts but on the power of their own rhetoric. They kept saying that Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country” so often that they believed it. Instead of looking at what was happening in Russia, the West told themselves appealing stories about what would happen if they blew hard enough on the Russian house of cards.

This gets to the second colossal error of the West. The Russians crossed into Ukraine with a force of about one hundred thousand men with the assumption the West would demand a peace meeting. They were not prepared for an actual war. Ukraine, on the other hand, had an army of over three hundred thousand regular army troops and another three hundred thousand reserves. Russia, the attacker, was outnumbered three-to-one one by Ukraine, the defender.

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainians had a chance to smash the Russian army if they went on the offensive. It would have come at a price, but they could have pushed the Russian back into the Donbas and maybe out completely. Instead, the Ukrainians dug into defensive positions along the line of contact. This gave the Russians time to reorganize their lines into more defendable positions and begin the process of building a much larger force to take on the Ukrainians.

The reason Ukraine did this is they were repeatedly told by their Western backers that Russia could never sustain an army in the field for long. The best people ran to their favorite media outlets predicting an imminent Russian collapse. The intellectual everyone in the West considers a seer claimed early on that Russia would not just lose but disintegrate as a result of the war. The fact that Fukuyama has not been right about anything in his career has not lowered his status in the West.

Here again we see that the West blundered into a catastrophic mistake not because they misread the evidence but because they confused their own magical thinking about the world and their role in it with reality. People with what passes for impressive credentials in the managerial class spun fabulous tales about the imminent collapse of Russia and those tales became reality for the war machine. Meanwhile, the Russian army used this time to prepare for what we see happening now.

This brings up the third colossal error. Having figured out that Russia was not going to disintegrate in the face of what amounted to an internet cancel campaign, the West prepared Ukraine for a big arrow offensive. They conscripted close to one hundred thousand fresh troops, trained them in NATO tactics and supplied them with NATO weapons for the purpose to driving the Russians out of the Donbas. This was the great spring counter-offensive that kicked off in the summer.

In the early hours of the offensive, columns of Western armor barreled into the Russia outer defensive lines in the south with the aim of driving to the Sea of Azov. Instead, they bogged down in massive minefields. The mine clearing equipment provided by the West turned out to be useless for the task, so the armored columns were trapped in the minefields and obliterated by Russian artillery. A large area in the south is called Bradley Park because it is full of destroyed Bradley fighting vehicles.

It is impossible to overstate the failure here. The Ukrainians not only lost the entire army assembled for the task, but they stripped their lines in order to supplement this army on the expectation that it would smash through the Russian defenses and those reserves would then flood into the breech. Instead, these reserves were thrown into what was called a meatgrinder. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed and maimed in order to capture one tiny village in the south.

What is even more stunning than the enormity of the failure is the fact that Western military planners were so slow to accept reality. Even as it was clear that the Russian defenses were too strong, General Milley was talking like it was just a matter of time before they collapsed and Ukraine rolled to victory. Even after thousands of videos appeared online of burning Western tanks, Western generals kept saying that things were on schedule for a glorious victory.

The result of this catastrophe is Ukraine no longer has offensive capabilities and is struggling to maintain its defensive positions in key areas. The massive losses of men and material cannot be replaced. Ukraine is running out of men to conscript for the war and the West is out of equipment to send them. This is why we are seeing reports in Western media talking about who is to blame. No one wants to be the father of what is going to be a collapse of Ukraine in 2024.

The theme throughout this two-year debacle is that the people making the decisions have substituted a preferred reality for actual reality. These are the type of people John Derbyshire once described in another context as those who are “awfully good at creating elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” For the last two years their version of reality has crashed into a reality that rests on the truth, not narrative.

The Ukraine debacle is a microcosm of what plagues the West. The people in charge are long on credentials that are meaningful only within the artificial reality that is the managerial class. The result is an echo chamber populated with credentialed idiots who compete with one another to produce the most pleasing sounding narrative to describe what they imagine lies outside their reality. They live in a simulation but seek to impose what they experience on the world around them.

These are the same people now operating the court system based on their paranoid fantasies about invisible enemies and staffing the air traffic control system to match their image of the inclusive society. What lies ahead for the West is what we are seeing in Ukraine which is the fantasies of a delusional and deranged ruling class smashing into the reality of the world, all paid for by the common man. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

The Argentine Question

Posted on November 30, 2023 by thezman

The subtext to the improbable election of Javier Milei revolves around a question that has haunted Argentina for generations. Why is this country such a mess? For as long as anyone can recall, Argentina has been synonymous with South American disfunction, to the point where the name of the country is often used as an epithet to criticize first world countries. There was even a Broadway play based on the life of a famous Argentine lunatic named Eva Perón.

The first place to start is the ruling elite. If you do an image search of “Argentine leaders” you get a collection of images that would answers the same question if you replaced Argentina with Italy or Spain. Like most South American countries, the ruling elite looks like the colonial elite that founded these countries. In some of these countries, they have been ruled by a small set of families since the 16th century when their ancestors arrived from Spain.

In other words, you do not see the Venezuela problem. In some of the more dysfunctional countries in the region, you have indigenous leaders rising up to claim some power, which always ends in disaster. They tend to be Marxists, but the illiterate sort that just understand the theft and violence parts. Venezuela is a rich country in terms of natural resources and location, but the smart fraction was chased off long ago by indigenous lunatics, so it is a basket case.

On the surface, Argentina does not have this problem. The most notorious ruler of the place was the Latin fascist Juan Perón. Anyone who has been around international organizations like the IMF or World Bank knows the sort. Perón was a populist and demagogue, but he was also highly educated and sophisticated. His politics were a populist suit her wore to garner support, but he was a man of the European elite that has run the country since forever.

The point is the ruling class of Argentina is not a lot different from the ruling elites you see in better functioning countries. Perón is typical of the ruling class in that his family tree has Spanish, French and English ancestry. Go through the long list of Argentine rulers and all of them trace their roots to the old country. You never see any references to Africans or Amerindian ancestry. The rulers always look like the sort of people who spend their career at places like the UN or now the EU.

In other words, Argentina is a country rich in natural resources, has a prime location on global trade routes and has an educated and sophisticated ruling class. On paper, it should be one of the more prosperous countries in the New World. Instead, it has been defined by government incompetence, corruption, and some of the most outlandishly terrible economic policies on the planet. Argentina has become synonymous with every failed economic policy to come out of the academy.

One clue as to why Argentina is a mess is the people. The average IQ of the population is 87 according to the most recent data. People will quibble about this score, but it is best to think of these numbers comparatively. Japan clocks in at 106, so that means the Japanese are more than a full standard deviation smarter than Argentines. Even if the measures themselves are not precise, which is surely the case, the margin of error will be similar for every country.

To give this gap some clarity, imagine a population full of people who could test into law school or business school. Assume they have not actually attended college or graduate school, but their test scores indicate they could do it. Now take a population of high school dropouts whose test scores indicate they are going to struggle getting their GED while in prison. That sounds a bit extreme, but the typical prisoner in the United States is going to have an IQ similar to the typical Argentine.

Now, take that collection of smart people and make them the talented two percent of the population and the collection of dumb guys is the population. For starters, the average IQ of the population will not change much. The average IQ of the population jumps about one point with this new smart fraction. Make it the talented ten percent and the average IQ jumps three points. In other words, in our experiment, that smart fraction is not going to change things very much.

The way to think of every human organization is to imagine a man carrying a sack full of ro9cks up an incline. The steeper the incline, the slower his pace. The more rocks in the sack, the slower the pace. The smaller the man, the slower the pace. The man is the smart fraction, while the sack in society. The incline will be the natural resources available to that society. The greater the resources, the softer the incline, while fewer resources gets a steeper incline.

Japan is a big man with a small sack, but facing a relatively steep incline due to Japan being an island nation. Even so, Japan is a rich and modern place due to the large smart fraction and the relatively small dumb fraction. On the other hand, Somalia is a tiny man dragging a boulder up a cliff wall. The smart fraction, such as it was, now lives in Minnesota leaving the rest to make what they can from very little. No amount of clever political theory is fixing Somalia.

This explains why Argentina remains an ungovernable mess. Of course, the good times in the country have often been under non-democratic rule. When you combine democracy with a low-IQ voting base, the result is populist demagogues who promise to use their power to overcome nature. The pattern in Argentina is authoritarianism, followed by democracy, followed by populism, which leads to collapse and the return of the authoritarian to restore order.

Javier Milei is toward the collapse portion of the cycle. This enigmatic weirdo, whose first act after winning election was to convert to Judaism and make a pilgrimage to the Hassidic community of New York, is in the populist tradition. He has decorated his populism with libertarian slogans, but what the voters heard was that he will take from the elites and give to the people. Given the IQ of the population, most could probably not be able to tell a libertarian from a rhinoceros.

Given his backers, there is a good chance that Milei will succeed in pushing through his changes, as they have been done before. He will put the economy on the dollar, and this will stabilize prices for a spell. Then the shortage of dollars will lead to borrowing from his backers in dollars. Those bonds will then be passed off onto American pension funds and other institutional investors. This will continue until the Argentine government can no longer make its interest payments.

What Argentina tells us is what every ball coach knows. It is not about the X’s and O’s, but the Jimmy’s and Joe’s. In the realm of sport, a great coach can only do so much with bad players. His great coaching and brilliant strategy will always run into the limits of his players. In the realm of human society, the political and economic systems will always be limited by the available human capital. it is why the Nordic countries made socialism work, while Argentina cannot make anything work.

There is another useful lesson here for people in the West. The people running Argentina have always known the math of their human capital. This is a truth that is spoken about openly in the homes and offices of the ruling class. Despite the limits it puts on their ambitions, this gap between them and the masses is what keeps them in the elite, ruling over those masses. It turns out that being a smart fish in dumb pond is a pretty good path to the good life.

This is one reason Western elites love low-IQ immigration. It is like an acid on the middle-class, diluting the layer just below them. Sure, mass migration means the subways are unusable and much of the cities are too dangerous for cafe life, but it beats having to compete with smart strivers from the middle ranks. Western elites look at Argentina and envy their rulers. No matter how stupid they are, they never have to worry about being displaced by people with genuine talent.

The Israel Problem

Posted on November 22, 2023 by thezman

The founding of Israel seventy-five years ago brought with it a problem that has never been resolved, one that is at the heart of the current troubles. In fact, times of trouble operate as a reprieve from the hard work of ignoring that central issue. Israeli leaders can stimulate Western leaders into worrying about what Israel means to them, rather than what it is. The current war in Gaza lets the American Right forget its troubles and cheer blindly for its favorite country.

That central problem at the heart of it all is the definition of Israel itself. The “Jewish state” is a label used by Israelis, especially those on the Zionist side, and one that should raise some question. No one uses the term “Irish state” or the “German state” when describing those countries. No one would dare call Germany the home of the German people, but Western commentators disposed to Israel comfortably say that Israel is the home of the Jewish people.

Israel is by design, an ethnostate. It is the only self-declared and self-defined ethnostate in the modern world. From the very beginning, the point of Israel was to be the homeland of ethnic Jews. This is the central problem for Israel. To be a citizen of an ethnostate requires one to be accepted into as a member of that ethnicity. You cannot just one day decide to be a Jew and emigrate to Israel. Unlike Western countries, Israel is not an idea. It is a genetic threshold.

This is the problem Israel faced on day one. At its founding, the newly minted Israelites found themselves with lots of non-Jews in their lands. Those non-Jews could never be citizens, as that would violate the logic of the ethnostate. Those non-Jews were not going to voluntarily evacuate for new lands, so it meant Israel had a population of aliens in its midst that could never be assimilated. Like a pebble in your shoe, this non-Jewish population would be an irritant to the Jewish state.

Israel could extend most of the rights and privileges of citizenship to this non-Jewish population in an effort to pacify them, but they could never extend all of the rights and privileges to them. The non-Jews are not citizens and can never be citizens, so therefore they must always be suspect. In any two-tiered status system one class must be superior and the other inferior and this must lead to conflict. From the start, Israel was saddled with a hostile alien population.

Of course, the logic of the ethnostate demands that Israel do what it must to expel this non-Jewish population from its midst. Again, the whole point of the ethnostate is to create a homeland exclusive to your people. The reason Israel exists is to clear and hold the land of Israel for the Jews and only the Jews. Add in the natural hostility of the dispossessed minority population and conflict was inevitable. By definition, Jews can never be at peace with the minority population.

If that minority population were Mongols or Bantus, people with no natural connection to anyone in the region, this would have been an easily solved problem. Obviously, that was never the case, so this inevitable and necessary conflict with the non-Jewish population has defined Israel’s relationship with the Arab world. If Israel were, as Ben Shapiro is fond of saying, a nation of ideas, this would not be the case, but Israel is an ethnostate which sets it apart from all other nations.

This would be true even if the surrounding nations were ethnostates. The logic of the ethnostate starts with the assumption that the people of the proposed ethnostate are superior to other people. A people cannot demand a land of their own unless they think they deserve it. That can only come if those people, at some level, see themselves as superior to others, at least with regards to their claims for a homeland. Exclusivity begins with the claim of superiority in some critical respect.

Compounding things for Israel is the fact that their definition of a homeland includes territories now currently occupied by others. This has been true from the founding of Israel in 1948. Just look at old maps and it is easy to see. Israel is the only country in the modern era to expand its borders at the expense of its neighbors. It does this because the logic of its existence requires it. It is why the first response to the Hamas attack was the call to expel the people from Gaza.

This is the crux of the “Israel’s right to exist” debate. The Arabs understand the logic of the Israeli ethnostate and what that must mean for them. Israel’s right to exist means her right to expel non-Jews from the lands claimed by Israel. It also means using whatever means necessary against those defending those non-Jews. The non-Jews living in those lands can never agree to those terms. Therefore, they can never accept Israel’s right to exists, at least not as an ethnostate.

This also explains the ruthlessness of Israel’s response to Hamas. The unspoken truth of the Israeli – Gaza relationship is the people in Gaza must go away to that this land can be absorbed into greater Israel. Any resistance to that is viewed as a threat to the very idea of Israel, which warrants a maximum response. From the perspective of the Zionists, genocide of the Palestinians is a proportional response to the terrorist raid perpetrated by Gaza last month.

Obviously, this flies in the face of Western political morality, but money can buy a lot of political blinders. That and there is a strong Christian Zionist subculture in the United States that provides easy cover for the political class. Washington can pretend they are catering to public support for Israel, while cashing checks from the Israel lobby on the condition they never mention the reality of the Israel ethnostate. Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees prepare to emigrate to your town.

Send In The Clowns

Posted on November 21, 2023 by thezman

Note: Thinking about doing a mailbag show for Friday. If anyone has an interesting question, post it up here or on Gab.

President Harry S. Truman famously said is a speech at the end of his career that if it is a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article. He was giving a pre-election pep talk to his fellow Democrats who were downcast at their prospects in 1952. His point was that if you proudly give the voters an alternative to the other option, they will at least consider what you have to say and may even vote for you.

It is interesting to note that the two parties were having a uniparty problem way back in the middle of the last century, but it is the nature of democratic systems. Like all markets, they eventually converge on one dominant market player. It is why we have one operating system maker, two mobile phone makers and so on. In the marketplace, people seek safety, which is a form of protection. As Robert Nozick noted, protection must always lead to a monopoly or something close to it.

Like consumers in a grocery store staring at rows of the same product, people will flock to novelty, even if the market prefers predictability. We are seeing this in Argentina where the voters elected what can best be described as an autistic Austin Powers character as their next president. Javier Milei won Sunday’s run-off against Peronist former Minister of Economy Sergio Massa. It was a stunning victory for a man who promises to radically change the Argentine economy.

Javier Milei is the next in line in what has become a tradition that started with Beppe Grillo a dozen years ago in Italy. He was the former television comic who formed a joke party to run for office, which quickly turned into a social phenomenon. Getting back to what Truman said, given the choice between people acting like clowns, the voters in democracies have repeatedly picked the genuine clowns. Trump, Bolsonaro, Meloni and now Milei have come to power this way.

That is not to say that these eccentric candidates have not come with a real platform and a genuine list of issues. It is that their primary appeal is their eccentricity. A more traditional presentation would have failed, even if the issues were popular, because part of the problem for voters is the dreadful sameness of the candidates. One of the ironies of “our democracy” is it produces gold-plated phonies. The least relatable people on the planet are popular political figures.

Of course, it goes deeper than just a desire for authenticity. The unspoken truth of politics for the last thirty years is the sense that something is deeply wrong, despite the relative material prosperity. One reason so many were so quick to embrace the Covid madness is the sense that we were about to get what we deserved. Mother Nature was about to balance the scales with a great plague. These eccentric candidates are something of a search for absolution by the voters.

There is also an end of time issue with many of them. Italy has been convulsed with populism since Beppe Grillo because no one is able to answer the big question that hangs over every human society. Why does it exist? Italians no longer have a reason to exist, which is why they have stopped having children. People like Grillo and now Meloni offer some hope for a purpose. Their anger and eccentricity are a little bit of light in the gathering darkness of their civilization.

This may be the case in Argentina where they have been ruled by a combination of kleptocrats and maniacs for generations. One party steals the nation’s resources on behalf of international interests in the name of fiscal discipline until the people grow weary of it and replace them with the maniacs. These are the socialists who then start printing money to buy happiness until inflation gets out of control and the banks stop lending them money or accepting pesos for debts.

This is where Argentina is now. They currently have inflation at 120%, a swelling debt crisis and a stagnant economy. In addition to being an entertaining weirdo during the campaign, Milei promised to dollarize the economy, de-unionize the private sector, cut taxes, and restore private property rights. He calls himself a libertarian, but he has not promised to give free weed and porn to children or convert to Bitcoin. Perhaps he is saving that for his second act.

This is where Milei will turn out to be like the other eccentrics that have paraded across the stage of democracies over the last decade. There is little chance he will get any of his agenda implemented. The two main parties still control all of the important institutions, so they will collude to block his initiatives. Another feature of democracy is the controlling parties are incentivized to not address genuine problems. The metastasizing social ills are the systems’ defense mechanism.

In the end, that may be the function of these eccentric populist characters that are turning up in democratic politics. They gain support mostly because they are a break from the dreary reality of the system. If voting is not going to lead to good public policy, then at least it can lead to amusing failure. If food prices rise faster than you can count pesos, then maybe having autistic Austin Powers staring back at you through the television will take your mind off things.

So far that has been the result. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement accomplished nothing, other than helping the EU sidetrack genuine reform. Trump and Bolsonaro, of course, were stymied by the system. Meloni’s angry housewife act remains popular, but her administration is the same as her predecessor. What all of these eccentric characters are, in the end, is proof that there is no voting your way out of the problems of liberal democracy.

The Emerging Uniparty

Posted on November 16, 2023 by thezman

Note: I contracted German Ebola on my trip to the Fatherland so in addition to having a rocket high fever, I have also lost my voice. I may post something tomorrow, but it is not looking good right now.

The concept of the uniparty has been around a long time, long before political hucksters started using it as catchphrase. The fear of the major parties conspiring with one another to shortcut the will of the people goes back to the 19th century. On the one hand, the two parties should compromise, but on the other hand they should be competing for the approval of the voters. The line between cooperation and conspiracy is not easy to define, but it is assumed to exist.

In the modern age, the uniparty idea has mostly circulated on the Right, because conservatives keep voting harder but always get more of the same. When the Republicans win, they immediately fink on their voters. When they are in the minority, they bend over backwards to help the Democrats. The uniparty in this context is a way of saying that both parties serve the same master. The master can be whatever you like, but it is not the American people.

The truth is the uniparty has been in control since the end of the Second World War when America emerged as a global empire. The “Cold War consensus” was an agreed upon moral framework in which both parties operated. They could tolerate the eccentric oddball here and there for color, but the two parties made sure the people in important position were fully onboard with the consensus. The disputes within the consensus were about how to reach the shared goals.

This is why Ronald Reagan was so worrisome at first. The consensus on the Soviets had evolved to be a choice between detente and appeasement. Reagan and his team were looking to go back to the hawkish approach of the Kennedy years. It was not just foreign policy that worried Washington. Reagan and his team were full of big talk about rolling back the welfare state. In the end, Reagan and the conservatives agreed to operate within the consensus on everything.

That was not the same thing as the uniparty though. Today it feels like the parties not only collude with one another, but they laugh about it. The new tough talking Speaker of the House just pushed through a continuing resolution to keep funding government at current rates with the help of the Democrats. In fact, more Democrats voted for the bill than Republicans. The GOP went through all that drama about picking a Speaker only to get one who prefers working with the other party.

This is becoming more common. It is not just that the Republicans fink on their conservative voters and the Democrats fink on their crazies. It is that they collude with one another in the finking and do so in the open. Twenty years ago, they put on a big show about this stuff, but now it is as if they are tired of pretending. In a world where incumbents win 95% of the time, why bother with the show? We may be about to see Washington embrace the uniparty concept.

Look at what the neocons are plotting on the Republican side. They are positioning Nikki Haley as the last shrew standing, so that when Trump is disqualified from the ballot, she will be the party nominee. Haley would fit much better in the other party as she agrees with them on the important issues. The only difference between Haley and Biden is Haley is shriller. The Republican Party is plotting to run an orange version of Hillary Clinton and no one in the party thinks this is weird.

Of course, the reason this will happen is both parties locked shields after the 2016 election to block Trump. If the Republicans had provided Trump with the support he needed to get his agenda passed, it would have been a mostly normal presidency and he probably would have won in 2020. Instead, both parties went berserk and what followed was four years of mayhem and now four years of a doddering old simpleton that routinely makes a fool of himself in public.

What we are about to see is the uniparty emerge in full to both end the Biden madness and wall off politics from the bulk of the voters. Both parties will celebrate the election of the first hostile alien as president. Meanwhile, most voters want something entirely different, but that will never be on offer, so you can vote for any candidate you like as long as she is approved by the uniparty. If you complain then War Karen will have the tech companies hand your name to the usual suspects.

The next step from here is to just get rid of the party labels entirely. Not too long ago they meant something, but that is no longer the case. It is not just the disgruntled who think this but the parties themselves. Again, with the system rigged so it is close to impossible to get voted out of office, why would the parties need to keep up this charade of the two-party system? When you think about it, it is insulting. Not insulting to you but to them. No one cares about you.

One party states are common, so a one-party country is not a stretch. Most Latin American countries are one party systems. There are opposition parties, but they rarely win power and when they do, they are soon deposed. France has become a one-party system along with Germany. They have multiple parties, but the main parties all collude with one another to keep power to themselves. For America to follow the same path, but more explicitly, is not hard to imagine.

Trust The Unhappiness

Posted on November 9, 2023 by thezman

One of the few things most everyone can agree upon is that things are not good, and everyone seems to be unhappy about something. Conversations in real life or online revolve around this general sense of unhappiness. In fact, it is fair to say that online life is just one long airing of grievances. Often, people are primarily unhappy with the unhappiness of some group that is using their unhappiness to make demands on everyone else, which makes everyone unhappy.

This is not just a case of the internet skewing perception. Polling on the issue says that people think we are headed down a bad road. Three quarters of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. As you can see in that poll, the last time a majority thought the country was on the right track was right after the January 6 protests, suggesting the people wanted to see a genuine insurrection. Since then dissatisfaction with the direction of the country has climbed steadily.

The funny thing is that most people would not be surprised to learn that record numbers of people are unhappy with the current state of affairs. If anything, they would be stunned to learn that thirty percent are content. How is it possible for these people to exist in the same reality as the rest? If the split were fifty-fifty, it would make sense as it would simply reflect the party divide. When it is seventy-thirty it means something is going on with that thirty percent.

Putting that aside, the question that naturally arises is what is it that is making people unhappy with the direction of the country? Again, polling provides a clue. The number one issue for people is inflation. The thing is the government tells us that inflation is slowly ticking down. It was 8.7% last year and is 3.7% now. If anything, people should be thrilled with the direction of inflation. In fact, they should be cheering the people who control the economy for their great work on inflation.

There is a another small clue. According to official figures, everyone who wants a job can have a job and the economy is humming along. Inflation was a problem, but it is going away, so the economy is officially in great shape. People seem to agree as unemployment is way down the list of concerns. Not only that but consumers keep spending and people keep buying houses. Despite the rise in mortgage rates, the housing market remains strong all over the country.

In other words, the economy is not a particularly good measure of happiness. Another big clue is that the one thing everyone agrees upon is the political situation in Washington is a problem, the main problem in politics. Large majorities of both parties think the endless drama in Washington is a problem. It is just behind health care, which is a serious problem with practical consequences that no one discusses. Health insurance costs continue to rise at multiples of inflation.

The thing is though, politics in a democracy is not supposed to be a polite and cooperative affair. It is supposed to be an ugly food fight. For the most part, it has always been an ugly food fight. Even in times of relative peace and tranquility the two sides torment one another. In the Reagan years, when the quality of life was near a peak, the Democrats tried to impeach Reagan. Under Clinton, when conservative actually got things they wanted, they hated Bill Clinton.

Another clue here is that there are things on the list that are complete nonsense, but they vex people to some degree. A good example is climate change, a thing that does not exist, but it worries 64% of democrats. At the same time, terrorism is not a real concern for most people, but Washington cannot shut up about it. Now they are claiming Hamas is under your bed. Last week it was racists. According to Washington, the next terroristic bogeyman is antisemites.

Put it all together and maybe the reason that the lack of cooperation is number three on the list, just below things that should matter to people, is that the people never see anyone in Washington talking about those things that matter. Not a single candidate has anything useful to say about inflation or health care costs. They have nothing to say about the drug problem or the growing crime problem. It is not that the parties do not get along. It is that they agree to ignore the important issues.

Even so, if things are good in the economy, despite some concerns over things like health care and inflation, people should be mostly content. Not only are people not happy, but there is also a sense of looming disaster in the air. The reason for that is something that is not captured in basic economic data. Things are slowly eroding for the white middle-class and that is what is causing the anxiety. A little here, a little there, middle-class white people are getting poorer.

This coincides with two other things. Once is the browning of American, which everyone sees everywhere they look. When the military put white guys back in their ads recently, everyone started laughing about it. It was assumed they did this because they are plotting a big war and will need competent soldiers. This is one of those data points that does not show up in economic data or polling. People sense the lights going out on their culture and they see signs of it in the household budgets.

Of course, they are not allowed to speak of it. That is the other side of this general unhappiness that does not turn up in polling. The ways you are allowed to express yourself have been reduced to generic economic questions or silly things like how the parties get along on your television. Not only do the people on television avoid talking about what matters to you, you are not allowed to talk about what matters to you and this is extremely frustrating for a growing number of people.

The way to think of it is the public square has fallen victim to the same forces that wrecked internet forums. The point was to create a place for vigorous debate, but certain people did not like the direction of the debate, so they found ways to shut down the debate, which crashed public trust in the system. It turns out you need high trust to maintain a vigorous public debate. With trust at all-time lows, everyone is going to be unhappy, not matter how good things are on paper.

Sailing The Three C’s

Posted on November 8, 2023 by thezman

There are three aspects to problem solving that seem obvious when stated but are not always obvious to philosophers of problem solving. One is that you have to identify that there is a problem, as in an unwanted result. The next step is to then narrow in on the possible causes of the problem. The final step is to then produce a list of possible corrections to these complaints and causes. In the world of problem solving, this is known as Complaint, Cause and Correction.

If you are a working man who does productive things for a living, this is something with which you are familiar. If you fix big scary trucks for a living, every day someone points at a big scary truck, hands you a list of complaints and you then set about finding the causes of those complaints and their corresponding corrections. If you are a philosopher of big scary trucks, then this is a bit of a mystery. You wonder how any of this fits in with your particular school’s philosophy or ideology.

This disconnect is obvious in politics. The Republicans have been vexed by one primary complaint for close to a decade. The people they want to swindle into voting for them do not like them very much. In fact, they went so far as to vote for the one guy the party said was off-limits in 2016, Donald Trump. Despite the party’s best efforts to rid themselves of this troublesome man, the rank-and-file voters still prefer him over whatever the party offers as an alternative.

In other words, the party’s complaint is that the voters refuse to support the blocks of wood the party is selling and they support the guy they hate. This turned up in the local elections yesterday, where the Republican Party underperformed again. They even put up a based black guy in the Kentucky governor’s race, but the Democrat still won, in a state that is reliably Republican. In Virginia, the party failed to win the state house, despite their claims about the governor’s popularity.

Going back to the big scary truck idea, the complaint is that it is the wrong sort of big scary truck, and the driver wants his old truck back. You, the big scary truck fixer guy can certainly figure out the cause of the complaints. The company bought the wrong truck, or the driver is a knucklehead. The trouble is you have no correction for these causes, so the complaint must remain unaddressed. That is the problem for the Republican Party as it sinks into irrelevance.

The philosophers of political problem solving, like the philosophers of big scary trucks, will immediately point to their favorite correction. No matter the complaint, no matter the cause, they will argue that the correction is to do whatever it is they are paid to promote or what their ideological school promotes. They will skip that middle part, the cause, and maybe even recast the complaint to their liking. This is why politic punditry is endless rounds of more of the same.

There will be some who pretend to be smart by focusing on the cause. They will roll out some polls claiming that the party does not appeal to this group of new people or this other newly labeled identity group. They will argue, for example, the GOP lost support among young female Tinder users in Ohio. They failed to capture the one-legged lesbian Elvis impersonator vote in the Northern Virginia suburbs. The point of this analysis is to avoid looking too closely at the complaints and the causes.

The place to start for this result and what will be a similar result in the 2024 election is the complaint portion of the work order. If you asked white people to list their top-5 complaints with the party, none of them can be found in the op-ed section of major news sites or in the talking points of candidates. For close to a decade now these voters have been pilloried by the diversity rackets. The party’s corrective to this in Kentucky, a very white state, was to offer up Jeb Bush in blackface.

That is the problem of the party in a nutshell. It no longer pretends to care about the complaints of its voters. They refuse to even discuss most of them. The reason Youngkin won the governorship is because outside groups and grassroots volunteers were outraged at the diversity stuff in the schools. As soon as Youngkin won, he fell silent on all of this stuff and began dreaming of bigger things. Why would those voters come out and support his party in the next election?

It would be one thing if the party spent time properly discussing the complaints of their voters but failed to arrive at suitable corrections. The voters could at least kid themselves into thinking these guys will eventually land on the right correction, even if it is by blind luck. Here is the campaign website of Nikki Haley, who is the preferred option by the party for 2024. Note there is nothing on site to indicate why she is running or why it should matter to you. It is just stock phrases and photos.

Here is the website of Ron DeSantis, who thinks he is Trump-lite. Like Haley, there is nothing on the site but gibberish. At the top is what looks like a campaign slogan. “I am running for President of the United States because I want to lead our Great American Comeback. Our country is going in the wrong direction. We see it with our eyes and we feel it in our bones…” Lead to where? Back from what? Which direction is it headed and what is the right direction? Who knows?

To shift gears slightly, the salesman for the big scary truck repair facility has a job similar to a politician. He tries to convince people to use his service. As a salesman, he has been trained to rely on logos, ethos, and pathos. That is, he combines logical arguments in favor of his service, with his and his firm’s reputation, along with emotional arguments to close the sale. “You know we can do a good job for you, and you will sleep better knowing you signed with us.”

If the Republican Party were operating the big scary truck shop, the salesmen would be festooned in the flags of foreign countries and showing the prospects pictures of the one black guy they have working in their shop. Meanwhile, the mechanics would be spending their days driving penis pictures on the work orders. No one would do business with them because no one would understand the point of their business or know why they should do business with them.

In fairness, the party leaders probably know this at some level. They are smart and clever in the rat-like way that is common in politics. They surely see that they are running a generational bust out. The demographic that makes the Republican Party possible is sinking into permanent minority status. The goal here is to keep them from noticing while the party squeezes the last drops from the racket. The big scary truck shop will then be set on fire for the insurance money.

A Warning From The Past

Posted on November 7, 2023 by thezman

On August 30, 1918, Vladimir Lenin had just given a speech at the Hammer and Sickle arms manufacturing facility in Moscow. As he was leaving, a woman called out his name and he stopped to see who was calling to him. Why he would have done this is unclear, as by this point Lenin was the most important man in Russia. He had lots of people who wanted a minute of his time. Nonetheless, he stopped to address the woman, who produced a pistol and shot Lenin three times.

The woman was not just any woman. She was Fanny Kaplan, who had been involved in radical politics since she was a teenager. She was a member of the SR’s, a very radical group that had been aligned with the Bolsheviks at times. She had spent time in a Siberian labor camp for having taken part in terrorist bombing attacks in Kiev, as well as other activities. She had been released by the Bolsheviks after the February revolution and gone right back to radical politics.

Lenin survived the assassination attempt, although he was never quite the same physically or psychologically. This was terrifying to Lenin and his inner circle not just due to the attack itself, but what it represented. The Bolsheviks were no longer the revolutionary force from the left, but the established order that had to contend with threats from all corners of the political space. The Bolsheviks had real power so that meant wielding that power to maintain that power.

There was also the issue of how Kaplan was able to get so close to Lenin in order to take a shot at him. Lenin had security, but it became clear that the SR radicals had friends and sympathizers in the security apparatus. The Cheka was filled with people who were not entirely loyal to the Bolsheviks. Many had been aligned with coalition partners, like the SR’s. If revolution was going to stay alive, it meant the system had to be purged and that meant unleashing political terror.

This was an important step, especially given the fact that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were students of the French Revolution. They knew how the terror worked out for the Jacobins and they were determined to avoid the same fate. Yet from the perspective of Lenin lying in a bed with a hole in his neck and a bullet in his shoulder, the only logical path forward was to unleash the forces of political terror. The same logic would eventually motivate Stalin to follow the same course.

The reason this matters at all to those living in this spot on the space-time continuum is that the people in charge of the empire are facing similar choices. In fact, they have been in this spot since the 2020 coup. In the fullness of time, that election will probably be looked at the same way as other radical coups in revolutionary times. Maybe Trump is actually our version of Kerensky, the radical liberal reformer who tried to head off the radical socialists but was eventually defeated by them.

Putting that aside, what mattered to Lenin as doctors patched him up was his perspective on the situation. The same can be said of the regime in the aftermath of the January 6th protests. Like Lenin and the Bolsheviks, the people who engineered Biden into the White House suffered from a similar lack of confidence. They had pulled off the great coup, but they were still unsure of their position. People climbing barricades brought to mind people more radical than themselves.

In other words, the people now in charge of the system see themselves as radicals, facing threats from all sides as they seek to consolidate power. This may sound a bit nuts but radicalism is powered by strong belief. Even when they have total control of the state, radicals will believe themselves to be the underdog, fighting a much more powerful enemy. You see that in this advertisement by a former J6 prosecutor, who seems to think he is David facing the Goliath of MAGA.

Mr. Rollins sounds deranged and delusional, but he believes what he is saying not because the facts support those beliefs. He believes because there are no better beliefs for him to hold at the moment. That is one of those things about political believers that normal people struggle to grasp. These people genuinely believe what they say, and they will not drop those beliefs when you present facts and reason. They will only abandon those beliefs in favor of better beliefs.

This is why it is foolish to think that the people we call the Left are running out of juice or having second thoughts. This is not how the revolutionary mind works. Those polls we now see showing Biden losing to Trump in the key states are not intended to boost your spirits, but to terrify the radicals. It is a reminder that there is always a Kerensky, or a Trump in this case. More importantly, there is always a Fanny Kaplan, so the radicals better not lose focus or let down their guard.

This is why they continue to persecute the J6 people. Almost three years on and they are still hunting for new victims. It is why there will be renewed efforts to eliminate Trump from the ballot. The bizarreness of the New York court case against Trump should be a reminder that that the radicals will never let something as petty as facts or the law get in the way of their efforts. Every setback is a reminder that they must renew their efforts to complete the revolution.

The regime is Lenin, lying on a couch with two holes put there by someone with help from the inside. The reality of that thinking is not important. What matters is the belief that the revolution is in mortal danger. Our revolutionaries are just as aware of the past as the prior revolutionaries, but they are just as trapped by the dynamics of revolution, so they will be compelled to follow the same path. What lies ahead is not a break from the madness, but a renewed assault by the radicals.

The Emotive State

Posted on November 6, 2023 by thezman

Note #1: A young fellow I met at a secret handshake meeting has published his first novel and I would like you to buy many copies and recommend it to everyone. If you are a fan of the fantasy genre, then give it a try and let me know your thoughts. Supporting the people on our side, especially in the arts is the best political thing you can do.

Note #2: Behind the green door I have a post about house hunting, a post about the robot art critics of our future and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If you look back at the government propaganda of the Second World War, you will see that it was rather generic in how it framed the enemy. The propaganda about the Germans was not much different from what was used in the prior war, except this time the Nazis were often portrayed as stupid. The Japanese were portrayed as absurdly Asian looking and monstrously cruel. Both were described as villainous aggressors who had no reason to launch their war on the world.

In other words, there was nothing special about the bad guys relative to prior bad guys, other than some superficial differences. There has always been a circular logic to wartime propaganda, going back to the Greeks. The bad guys are bad because they are the enemy, and they are the enemy because they are bad. What makes them bad, of course, is they do things we would never do, and they never do the things that we know good people are supposed to do.

Fast forward to the present and villains are either Hitler or Bull Connor, who have morphed into a Janus like creature that haunts every conflict. The foreign villains are always going to be Hitler, while domestic villains are the generic racist. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were Hitler, despite the obvious differences, while every white conservative is a fledgling Bull Connor. Donald Trump managed to be both, despite his Zionism and love of black people.

The language of public discourse now sounds like wartime propaganda because we now live in the age of emotivism. The term “emotivism” comes from an early 20th century school of ethics that claimed all ethical sentences are actually expressions of emotional attitude, as in positive or negative. When a speaker says something is good or bad, he is not stating an objective fact, but merely expressing his own emotional attitude toward the object in question.

Like a lot of 19th and early 20th century ideas around ethics and philosophy, this one fell out of favor due to its lack of utility. You cannot build a grand moral theory if morality is a subjective construct that arises from tradition or superstition, so there must be some universal and objective morality. Similarly, you cannot make a career in ethics if ethics are nothing more than conditioned responses. There must be some universal ethical code buried in the desert that must be found.

That does not mean the emotivists were correct when they made their sweeping claim about ethical statements. Just because the war propagandists say the bad guys are bad as a way to generate support for the cause, does not mean everyone who says the bad guys are bad is merely acting on their conditioning. Nor does it mean that everyone saying the bad guys are bad is a propagandist. It is possible to think the bad guys are objectively bad and do so without emotion.

Even so, it is a useful concept when thinking about how modern humans interact with one another in the public space. America is an empire built by war, so it is built for war, and therefore it is always on the hunt for war. As a result, generations of Americans have grown up in a wartime culture, which means the public square has been flooded with what amounts to wartime propaganda. There is always a war, which means there is always an enemy that demands you jeer at it.

Public discourse in this age is not about presenting facts or contesting various claims, but about displaying your allegiance to a perceived moral divide. The white people installing the “Hate has no place here” signs on their lawn would never live within a bus ride of black people, but they feel they must show the world that they are on one side of the racism line, the good side. The yawning gap between their emotive gestures and their lived experience does not register with them.

This is why the people we call the Left love the word extremism. The word is meaningless but in the mouth of a Cloud Person it is ridiculous. They accuse normal people living normal lives of extremism, because those normal people do not want to dress their son as a girl. Logically, it is nonsense, but emotively it is highly appealing as it not only expresses the users state of mind toward the bad people, it amplifies the distance between the speaker and object.

Of course, this is why everyone is Hitler now. It is not that Hitler is the evilest person in history or that he is an outlier in political villainy. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and many others were much bloodier and villainous. Unlike those other baddies from history, Hitler lets the speaker express a clear emotional state. That emotional state, of course, indicates your emotional commitment to a collection of people and ideas. Calling someone Hitler is like violently crying at a North Korean state funeral.

That is the way to think about public discourse in the emotive state. The ambitious and self-conscious are always looking around for a way express their “boo/hooray” instincts to the crowd. When the pro-Israel people rushed to their nearest platform to claim Hamas is Hitler, they were letting the world know their emotional state on this issue, not expressing an ethical or moral position. That is why the language spiraled into the absurd as they competed with one another.

That last part also helps explain the weirdness of public discourse. Since every issue is instinctively understood to be an opportunity to express an emotion, there is a natural competition to see who can be the most emotional. Piety in the emotive state is no longer about adherence to a set of ethical rules, but a consistency in showing the popular emotional response to issues. Instead of sacrificing a bull to the gods, the great and the good have a good cry at a candlelight vigil.

A biproduct of this emotionalism is that politics are purely performative. There is no practical point to any of it, as the primary motivation is to be seen expressing the best emotions at the time. While the mob sorts through their own emotional response to the emotive performances, the people with real power go about exercising that power to maintain and enhance their power. Politics has become the feelies from the novel Brave New World, rather than a marketplace of ideas.

While this is useful to the people with power, it may be short lived. There is a limit to how much raw emotion one can tolerate. Every day there is some new thing that everyone must emote about in public. Just as drug takers find they need increasingly powerful doses to get the desired effect, the emotive need increasingly stronger emotional responses. Like the drug taker, the end of this road is the inability to feel anything other than the lack of agony.

All human societies are moral societies. The rules governing virtue provide meaning and purpose to individual lives. The emotive state, in contrast, channels the natural desire to do the right thing, however society defines it, into the onanistic act of crying in public over violation of the right thing. As a result, the good life has no point, other than an endless crying jag. There is no point to this way of living, which may explain the catastrophic social measures of modernity.

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