The Last Debates

Posted on September 10, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Winners & Losers

Posted on September 4, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto

Posted on September 2, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about our robot overlords and a post explaining how you could have won millions on sports betting over the long holiday weekend, but the was no Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here. Instead, I was on the Coffee and a Mike podcast and the J. Burden Show.

The title of this post comes from On the Laws, a Socratic dialogue written by Marcus Tullius Cicero toward the end of the Roman Republic. The title is from Plato’s famous dialogue, The Laws. In this work, Cicero creates a fictional conversation between himself, his brother and a friend about the law and social harmony. Salus populi suprema lex esto is a famous line that means, “The health of the people should be the supreme law”. Sometimes “health” is translated as “welfare.”

It is a famous phrase that turns up all over America. You can often find it in the official seal of cities and towns. Manassas Virginia has it in the town seal. A number of states have it in their official seal. It is not just in America where you will find it. All across the English speaking world this line turns up in the official branding of tiny villages, big cities, and important institutions. This concept of the ruling class being duty bound to the welfare of the people is near universal.

The reason for the ubiquity is it turns up in the foundational works of what we have come to call Western liberalism. It is the epigraph of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, arguably the most important influence on the Framers. Hobbes and Spinoza, influences on Locke, also used the phrase and embraced the concept as presented by Cicero. The Roundheads in the English Civil War also embraced the phrase and the meaning behind it.

Despite most Americans never having heard of Cicero, the spirit of this age is animated by the simple concept behind that Latin phrase. It is what lies behind the urge to censor speech online, for example. The welfare in question when demanding you get booted from social media is the psychological health of the people. The censors assume that they are the guardians of the mental peace and tranquility, so they must make sure that deviationists like you are silenced.

It is what lies behind the persecution of protestors in America and the UK. The striking similarity between the draconian punishments handed out by the UK government against those protesting immigration and those being persecuted in the United States over January 6 is not an accident. The people doing this are sure they are defending “our democracy” from hooliganism. They can think this because they assume their position requires them to defend the welfare of the people.

Of course, Cicero would have been baffled by what is happening in this age, especially since he was murdered by agents of the Second Triumvirate, for the crime of speaking out against the tyranny of Mark Antony. The modern notion that the state must safeguard the moral health of the people to the point of jailing those who dare question public policy would have baffled the ancients. From the perspective of the ancient world, what we are seeing today is the worst form of government, democracy.

As for John Locke, he was a man of his age and in his age the state, in the person of the king, was responsible for the material wellbeing of the people. It was the duty of the state to defend the lands of the people from outsiders. It defended the people from internal threat through the execution of the laws. The spiritual well-being of the people was in the hands of the church. John Locke would have been as baffled as Cicero at the Roundheadism of the current age.

In fairness to the modern age, the collapse of the Christian churches leaves a void as far as the spiritual guardianship of the people. Even a century ago, most Americans would have shared the same ethical outlook, because their ethics would have come from the Christian churches. Doctrinal differences aside, the ethics of the New England Congregationalist were not all that different from an Appalachian Presbyterian, a Southern Baptist, or a Midwestern Methodist.

The collapse of Christian institutions in the twentieth century meant something had to replace them as far as the ethical instruction of the people. Being the most powerful institution, it was natural that the state should take on this duty. Of course, the state was also responsible for the destruction of the churches. The peculiar composition of the post-war ruling class made Christian ethics a bit of a problem, so the ruling class slowly replaced those Christian ethics with a new set of ethics.

It is why it is important to understand that what we see happening is not merely the desire to hold power, but a religious revolt against the people. The bizarre outbursts we see are on the one hand an effort to demonstrate the weakness of the old ethics and the religion behind it, but on the other hand an effort to clear the path for the embrace of the new religion and its new ethical code. Woke is nothing more than proselytizing on behalf of the new religion, even if they do not realize it.

This is why the state has reacted with increasing ferocity at resistance to the cultural revolution from the top. Your efforts to reason with them or point to tradition are viewed by the ruling class as a radical rejection of their primary duty, which is to safeguard the welfare of the people. In the minds of the people in charge, they are on the side of a long tradition dating to the ancients. It is you and your weird adherence to out of fashion faith and custom that is subversive.

In the end, the present ruling elite of the West will not be judged by how well they upheld the traditions and ethics of the ruling class they displaced. It will not be their authoritarianism or anti-Christian bigotry that is their undoing. It will be how well they safeguard the welfare of the people. Since they have taken on the spiritual wellbeing of the people, they will be judged at how well they perform their priestly roles and the reasonableness of their new religions edicts.

Our Collective Theater Of The Mind

Posted on August 30, 2024 by thezman

A recurring plot line in modern life is the famous person being exposed for some sort of fraud about themselves or their work. For example, the notorious race hustler Robin DiAngelo was found to have ripped off black writers for her PhD thesis. It seems that the only reason we hear about people in academia is when they have been exposed for having broken the rules of the academy. Christopher Rufo has turned this into a cottage industry in service to his campaign for a color-blind America.

We are seeing this in the election campaign. Tim Walz is a serial exaggerator. It seems that all of the important parts of his life story have been enhanced in ways to make him seem like a hero in various narratives. He exaggerated his military service, so he pretends to be a war hero and preach against guns. He likes to call himself “an old football coach” but he never really coached football. He likes to pose as Elmer Fudd, but people who know about such things see that it is just a pose.

Walz is not the first guy to enhance his resume. In fact, it is now the way things are done by the beautiful people. The current governor of Maryland, a guy some think could be president one day, has a stolen valor problem. Note that like Walz, his story about himself is not an outright lie, but more like an exaggeration, in the way a good storyteller fictionalizes events in order to make the tale interesting. For most of our public figures, their life story is “inspired by real events.”

The main reason they do this is they usually get away with it. No one in the media will ask Tim Walz tough questions about his biography. When J.D. Vance pointed out the exaggerations, the media attacked him for questioning the patriotism of Tim Walz, which is such an outlandish thing to say it should be followed with lightning bolts striking the people saying it. Even so, fudging the resume has become the thing people do if they want to make it to the big stage of life.

Part of this is due to the shift from authenticity to prolificity. In the prior age, morality required a person to live an authentic life and present their life honestly. You were a bad person if you faked your resume or faked your public persona. Increasingly, the path to success is in creating a public image that is pleasing to the crowd and disconnected from physical reality. The reimagination of Kamala Harris is an effort to formalize this in the first fully online election campaign.

Another possible cause is the fact that public life has come to be dominated by actors hired by the economic elites to play various roles in public life. The days of a man getting rich and then going to Washington to represent his community or rising up in state politics are long gone. Rich people hire people to play the role of politicians, and they hire people to pressure and influence them in what has become the theater of democracy, a spectacle staged for our entertainment.

For Tim Walz, the most important thing about his otherwise mundane life was getting into the circus of politics. To do that he figured out how to take the facts of his life, reimagine them so they fit the character of a woke prairie populist. This act has taken him from community theater to the biggest stage in the circus. The reason he exaggerated the resume was that the act required it. If the act needed him to become a transvestite, he would do it. There is no dignity in show biz.

This is also why our politics are supercilious and narcissistic. Actors have always been known as supercilious and narcissistic because even the lowest member of the show has had to overcome a lot to get on stage. Often, they have had to degrade themselves in order to get a break. This is possible because they are sure they are the person they imagine on the stage, wowing the crowd. The actor always has an exaggerated sense of self and when it works, they are filled with confidence.

It is why we have Kamala Harris a click away from becoming the first halfwit hapa to become president. There is nothing authentic about Harris, not even her DNA, so she could be viewed as the logical end point of a process that has sought to strip all reality from politics and replace it with emotive narratives. Her campaign is running on “good vibes” because a world detached from reality has only emotion. Kamala Harris is the ideal candidate for a world that can only exist in our imagination.

It is also why we get people like Amanda Gorman, the official poet of the United States, whose poetry is nothing more than emotive nonsense. As John Derbyshire observed, it fails to qualify as poetry. It is why an incoherent simpleton like Kanye West can pretend to be a genius musician, despite lacking a shred of musical ability. Our public life is overrun with carnies who think they are the role they play. The result is a public life not detached from reality, but at war with the concept of reality.

It is tempting to assume this cannot last, but reason says it should never have reached this point, so maybe it can last. The idea that reality may possibly be a figment of our imagination has been with mankind for as long as we know. Perhaps the long arc of humanity ends with proving this correct. The escape from the human condition is the embrace of the collective theater of the mind where all things are possible. Alternatively, maybe the machine just stops and then the theater goes dark.

Abortion Inc.

Posted on August 27, 2024 by thezman

A new trend in the world of internet politics is a reboot of an old trend in actual politics and that is the abortion issue. Abortion was good politics for both parties since Roe because it let them posture without having to do anything. The Democrats promised to defend abortion and Republicans promised to end it. Meanwhile the issue languished in the courts until the Trump court overturned Roe. Since then, both sides of the abortion battle have been trying to revive their money maker.

To some degree, they have been successful. The people we call the left have convinced themselves that the election will turn on abortion. They generate fake polls and fake news stories to goose the online influencer community. Of course, the most gullible of that bunch, the right-wing influencers, take the bait. There is no group less politically astute than the right-wing influencers. The media then uses online chatter to talk about the abortion issue as if everyone cares.

The truth is, no one cares. Just two percent of people list abortion as a major concern going onto the election. As always, economics is what matters. The people who care about abortion are the most predictable voting bloc in America. The pro-abortion people vote Democrat and the anti-abortion people vote Republican. It is why both parties took these voters for granted for fifty years. They knew that these voters would never alter their behavior.

The new wrinkle this time is also a reboot, of sorts. The usual suspects are now running a media campaign online trying to convince people that Evangelicals and pro-life people are abandoning Trump because he opposes a federal abortion ban. The abortion ban idea is a last gasp effort to keep the abortion rackets going. If they cannot pretend to fight over Roe, maybe they can pretend to fight over whatever they will call the bill, if they ever get around to drafting one.

Republicans Against Trump (R.A.T.) have been spinning up fake pro-life and Evangelical accounts on Twitter, now stupidly called X, who do the classic bit of pretending to be a disillusioned former supporter. “I have been a lifelong X, but I will not support Y because he is not 100% in favor of X” is one version. The other version is “I have always voted for Y, but because of X I cannot support Y this time.” The R.A.T. people have invested heavily in this gambit.

The result of this is we have one side pretending abortion is the pivotal issue of the campaign and the other side using abortion to undermine Trump. For his part, Trump has staked out what was the conservative position on the abortion issue since the courts sacralized it in the Roe decision. The American system is designed to send normative issues to the smallest political unit of the country. Therefore, it was un-American for the court to impose Roe on the country.

The stated goal of the pro-life movement for decades was to overturn Roe and then fight it out on the state level. Trump delivered his end and Pro-Life Inc. will never forgive him for it, but the general public is thankful. A dirty little secret of the abortion issue is that people would rather not talk about it. Normal people find crotch warriors to be icky and strange. Moving abortion out of national politics means never having to think about abortion again and for that the public is thankful.

This is, however, another bit of mask dropping for the so-called right. Professional Evangelicals, professional social conservatives and the usual suspects have abandoned their old federalist principles in favor of a national abortion ban, because they think it is good for business. Once again, we see that those “conservative principles” they never shut-up about are relative, relative to their ability to make money off of them. Everything about conservatism is a racket.

The fact is, however, the conservatives of fifty years ago were right to argue that Roe was a terrible decision because it violated the American social contract. For a big, diverse, and complicated country like America, there are few normative issues about which you can get broad support across all regions. Therefore, most issues, like abortion, are best managed locally. Just because they now think it is more profitable to argue against this does not make it less accurate.

It is what makes a federal abortion ban every bit as immoral and un-American as the Roe v. Wade decision. On the one hand, it violates the basic American notion that moral issues should be decided locally. Family issues are decided by the family. Community issues are decided by the community. On the other hand, it is an effort to impose the morality of the minority on the majority. This runs counter to the long held American opposition to minoritarianism.

In the end, the abortion issue is symbolic, in that it represents the old civic nationalist America of the late 20th century. People could argue over abortion, because the much larger issues that come with cultural decline were still far down the road. As those larger issues now appear much closer, abortion, along with the civic nationalist culture, is fading into the history books. As civic nationalist America gives way to tribal identity America, the debate will be tribal, not civil.

This Ain’t It

Posted on August 21, 2024 by thezman

“Once you get the morality right there is no need for politics” is an aphorism generally credited to Karl Marx. Once everyone agrees on how we ought to live, then the only thing left to debate is how best to make sure that it happens. In this context, therefore, politics is the fight over how we ought to live, not how we should achieve the end upon which everyone agrees. This also means that the point of politics is to settle the question, once and for all, as to how we ought to live.

Within the radical framework, this makes sense, but within the framework of reality the opposite has been true. For example, in the West, economic policy has been settled, despite any agreement on how we ought to organize our economies. There is plenty of emotive language about pleasing Gaia, racial equity, and other moral claims, but economic policy follows a corporatist path. The economy is run by technocrats in partnership with corporate interests.

Notice at the American political conventions that there is little talk about things like spending, debt, or the general health of the economy. When was the last time a major politician talked about the debt problem? The best you get is some back and forth on inflation or energy prices. There is never any discussion about what is the morally right goal for economic policy. It is not that the issue has been settled, but that no one thinks it is appropriate to discuss it at all.

You see the same with immigration. Everyone agrees that illegal immigration is bad, not because it is immoral, but because it violates the rules of technocracy. We know this because it has the word “illegal” in its name. It is why conservatives want to make all immigration legal. That way, it does not violate the rules. It also pleases the technocrats who manage the economy. It is also why no one asks if any immigration is moral, as such questions are forbidden.

Contrary to what Marx and most radicals believed, the order of settling has not been to first get the morality right and then sort the details. The order of things has been to first create a complex bureaucracy around the issue so that it is impossible to ever talk about the morality of the issue at all. The great trick of managerialism is that it produces a self-referential morality for everything. The answer to what we ought to do is whatever the managers are doing at the moment.

This is why our politics are content free. The Democrats are putting on their show this week, at which they are introducing their “leaders” and platform. They have dancing bears, bearded ladies and all the other things you see at a circus, but the one thing missing is anything resembling policy. Speaker after speaker promises to boo at the bad things and cheer at the good things. It is a litany of emotive jibber-jabber that is so devoid of content it makes Finnegan’s Wake seem pithy.

The sterility of our political rhetoric is often masked by the emotive preening, but once you get past the pointless emotionalism you find nothing but white space. Note that no one ever provides a detailed answer for why they hate Trump. They hate Trump because he is bad or likes bad things, but why do they think he is bad and what is bad about the things he likes? No one knows. What they do know is Trump is bad and therefore his voters are bad. Boo Trump! Boo MAGA!

That gets to why they hate Trump. For good or ill, Trump represents the fundamental question of politics. That is, how should we live? Once you start thinking about how we ought to live, you then must confront the central question at the heart of every human organization and that is, who are we? This terrifies the managerial class who prefer to operate like a miasma that is just accepted as a default. It also terrifies the oligarchs who sit atop our society as an alien ruling class.

It has become popular in certain circles to quote Stafford Beer, who said, “The point of a system is what it does.” The point of managerialism is to smother the basic realities of human organization in mountains of technocracy so that there is no room to ask, “who are we” and “how should we live?” The trouble is, no society can live at all without answering those basic questions. The current crisis lies in the conflict between managerialism and the fundamental reality of human society.

This conflict provides the energy to this strange dialectic in which each turn of the election wheel results in more bizarre options. The arc of our presidential candidates since the end of the Cold War has led to Kamala Harris. Regardless of how you feel about Trump, he should not be leading a global superpower, but he is now the sober-minded option in national politics. In eight years, he went from the outlandish option to the safe option, simply by waiting for the next turn of the wheel.

In all seriousness, if Kamala Harris is the best the system can produce, then it is perfectly reasonable to think that what lies ahead is something worse. How far are we from having a block of wood at the top of the ticket? If we can be made to pretend that biology does not exist, we can be made to believe an inanimate object is the best choice to lead the government. It sounds ridiculous, but the current president is a vegetable and his handpicked replacement is day-drinking prostitute.

In the end, those questions at the heart of every human society are immutable, so they will need to be answered. The answers will have to be reflected in the elites of our society who eventually rule our society. It is unlikely that the answer to “who are we?” is going to be “deracinated strangers.” That means the answer to how we ought to live is not going to be “by the whims of alien oligarchs and their managers.” Whatever the answer, it will come with a broom that sweeps clean.

Boozy Brown Tinkerbell

Posted on August 20, 2024 by thezman

Anyone who has been part of a failed enterprise or has done a post-mortem on one is familiar with the weird psychology that comes to dominate the leadership of the enterprise as it reaches its final stage. At some point, the people in charge begin to assume their plans to arrest the decline are working as their default position, rather than taking a wait and see approach. A combination of hope and the desire to remain optimistic clouds their view of reality.

This is why the people inside of a failed company are often shocked when the collapse arrives and they are suddenly out of a position. Some people may have noticed that in their small piece of the puzzle things did not look exactly right, but the big bosses maintained a positive outlook, even as they were made aware of the problems. A form of social proof manifests where everyone inside overlooks the problems because management remains optimistic.

The funny thing about this dynamic is that the people at the top are often as shocked as the rank and file when the final collapse arrives. The history books are full of failed banks, for example, scrambling at the last minute to secure additional capital when it should have been clear for months that the bank was toast. The people running Enron had convinced themselves that their shell game could go on much longer if they could just get some additional capital.

Another great example of this is the mortgage crisis. Long before the handful of smart people inside the system realized what was happening, normal people began to wonder how poor people were affording middle-class houses. All of a sudden, the guy riding a leaf blower at your office park is living in your neighborhood. Normal people wondered how the banks could possibly accept the crazy loans at the time. Right up to the last-minute, however. insiders were sure the system was fine.

The mortgage crisis is probably the one to think about as the regime kicks off the biggest gaslighting party in human history. The Democratic convention is something like the lavish parties the mortgage industry threw for itself in Las Vegas in the months leading up to the crash. On the one hand, there are signs of trouble, but on the other hand the party is too much fun to think about those things. The red flags popping up here and there are a reason to party even harder.

One way to look at this gaslighting operation is as the final chapter in a story that started way back in the Trump term. The people chanting “by any means necessary” created a narrative in which Trump was not only defeated, but he, what he represents and who he represents are removed from the narrative. Trump would be in jail, the right-wing extremist MAGA would be on the run and the brown tide would sweep over the lands that produced this threat to our democracy.

The trouble is the narrative collapsed. It is hard for normal people to grasp how terrifying it is to the progressive cult that Trump remains free. They were sure he would be in jail long ago. The fallback to this was that the party would have excluded him due to the lawfare stuff. They were all sure this was inevitable. Like the people running a failing company, they could not bring themselves to see that their schemes were not working, so they just kept pretending they were working.

This explains the unprecedented gaslighting campaign for Harris. Given the choice of accepting reality and creating a fantasy, they have picked the latter. In this fantasy, the boozy Harris goes from a cackling simpleton to a dusky version of Daenerys Targaryen from the Game of Thrones, carried by the masses to her place on the throne. In this version, not only has the wicked orange man finally defeated, but he is also written out of the story altogether.

The excessively online are downing handfuls of black pills this week, as they are the most susceptible to media gaslighting, but reality is not as pliable. The polling in all of the important states has not changed much over the last month. The top issues for the voters are all bad for the regime. It does not help that Harris is sounding like a tanked-up version of Jimmy Carter, proposing wage and price controls, to deal with the inflation problem the regime claims have been fixed.

The regime is now setting up a scenario in which Harris and Walz never take an unscripted question or debate the Trump – Vance ticket. Harris has dropped out of the first debate schedule for the first week of September. There is a good chance that they will pull the plug on all debates and anything that could possibly lead to these two speaking off the cuff. Like the people running the failing bank, the regime has landed on a plan they are so sure will work, so they will pretend it is working.

There is a name for this sort of collective delusion. The Tinker Bell effect describes the idea that something exists because people believe in it. In the fairytale, Tinker Bell is brought back to life by the audience’s belief. This week, the assembled foot soldiers of the progressive cult and the regime toadies are holding hands, telling each other that they believe, as one character after another is brought forth to pretend that the Neverland of the convention is real.

Time will tell if they manage to gaslight this boozy simpleton and her Elmer Fudd sidekick into the White House. Like a failing bank, Americans may prefer the happy talk of their rulers to the reality of their lives. Civilizations in decline often have a series of bizarre rulers at the end. On the other hand, people may decide that a boozy brown Tinkerbell is beyond their ability to suspend disbelief. Regardless, reality remains undefeated, no matter how hard you believe otherwise.

Will And Reason

Posted on August 19, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the microprocessor revolution and its discontents, a post about the drama within the chronically online community and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Many of the leading figures of what came to be known as the Human BioDiversity (HBD) movement are reaching the age where they are no longer producing new work, but instead are part of retrospectives of the movement they created. This post in Aporia by Bo Winegard is a good example. It works as both a summary of Murray’s work and a summary of the hereditarian perspective on the human animal. “Hereditarian” is another word used for the biological realist wing of the human sciences.

It is not entirely accurate to call these people a movement as they have had no impact on how Western societies view human organization. If anything, the West has raced in the opposite direction of what should follow from the realities that have come from the human sciences. Since The Bell Curve was published thirty years ago, the blank slate, fanatical egalitarianism and universalism have become so entrenched in elite thinking that dissent is now criminal in many countries.

That is what you are seeing in the UK. The people being sent off to prison for voicing complaints about immigration are not being punished for opposing public policy, but for violating official orthodoxy with regards to the human condition. Across the West, any noticing of difference between groups of humans is blasphemy. Not only would The Bell Curve not get a publisher today, but it is also something of a miracle that it has not been put on the index of banned books, next to The Camp of the Saints.

Therein lies the most important lesson to come from the HBD scene. Facts and reason can never overcome belief. There is no questioning the science with regards to the human condition. It has confirmed thousands of years of observation that nature does not distribute her gifts equally. That is true with regards to individuals and with regards to groups of individuals. The reason you never take the MLK exist is not because you are immoral, but because you are rational.

Rationality is no match for belief, at least when it comes to politics. The promise of a guilt free future has won every battle regarding biology. Of course, it is the echo of Calvin that embedded racial guilt into the Western mind. Facts and reason had no impact on belief before, during or after the Civil War, because the fanatics behind the abolitionist cause were immune to facts and reason. Like all fanatics, they saw only that which confirmed their fanaticism.

The point here is that the defeat of human biodiversity, hereditarianism, biological realism, or whatever term you have for the facts of the human condition, was simply another battle in the long war between belief and reason. One side, the winning side, believes the human condition can be solved because they believe the cause of human conflict lies in the human mind and can therefore be eradicated. The other side has never had an answer to that claim.

Another lesson from the twilight of the human sciences is that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is a dead end. What matters in the affairs of man, therefore what matters with regards the human condition, is knowledge that leads men to act either on behalf of that knowledge or in opposition to it. Anything else is at best useless and at worst a reason for opponents to act on the claim that this new knowledge is a threat to the wellbeing of society.

In one of life’s great ironies, the HBD people never understood how their work could be seen as dangerously heretical. For all their knowledge about the mechanics of mankind, they have never understood the will that lies behind human action, preferring to believe what lies behind the motivations of their accusers is just as mechanical and sterile as their own understanding of man. Materialism is a terrible way to understand the why of the human condition.

More important, the HBD people could never shake their civic nationalist priors or even question them in light of their own work. The Bell Curve is the argument against liberal democracy, an argument understood long before the HBD people arrived. Despite the obvious conflict between what the science was telling us and what political science was demanding of us, the HBD people never lost faith in liberalism. They remain convinced it is the only political option.

It is not all bad for the HBD scene. It has, at least for a while, provided a moral authority of sorts for resisting the gathering darkness. There remains an “E pur si muove” mental space for dissidents to gather their thoughts about what is happening. Inside the mental space lies the flicker of hope that reality cannot be swamped by the fantastical reality of the prevailing orthodoxy. The foundation of the dissident cause are the people who accept the reality of the human condition.

In the end, however, it will not be men armed with charts and graphs who shall beat back the forces of darkness but the men who know that society is determined by those who understand it is always who shall overcome whom. If the West is to survive, it will be due to those who will it so and use any means necessary to prevail over those determined to turn out the lights on civilization. The only justification needed will simply be the desire to make it so.

An Old Story

Posted on August 14, 2024 by thezman

For a little over a year, it has been clear to people who have followed the war in Ukraine that there is no winning scenario for Ukraine. The sanctions on Russia failed to change the Russian approach to the war. The hundreds of billions in NATO weapons, planning and support were not enough to beat back the Russian army. The great Ukraine offensive of 2023 was a stunning failure that eliminated any possibility of the Ukraine army holding the line in the Donbass.

The question has been how does the war end. For Ukraine, the best outcome is a negotiated settlement that includes a change in Ukrainian attitudes. Maybe NATO abandons the project and the Russians install new leaders. Maybe Zelensky figures out that he is about to be cut loose and cuts a deal with the Russians. Maybe Washington, hoping to save face, backs Zelensky in making a deal with the Russians. No matter how, the best option for Ukraine was a negotiated settlement.

That appears to be off the table now that the Ukrainians have launched this crazy incursion into the Kursk region of Russia. It appears that the plan was to reach the nuclear power plant in Kursk and then use it as blackmail. The Ukrainians would not just demand negotiations but require a Russian withdrawal as a condition for negotiations or they would blow up the nuclear power plant. As ridiculous as that sounds, the other explanations for this gambit are even nuttier.

Of course, this plan sounds like it is from a poorly made Hollywood action thriller, rather than a sober-minded military operation. The reason for that is the people running Ukraine are actors. For going on three years now they have spent far more time crafting creative narratives about the war than thinking soberly about how they can avoid being wiped off the map. For people who imagine reality is just a clever written story, this operation sounded brilliant.

The supreme role of narrative for Western political elites is evident in how they have reacted to this new production. It seems they had no part in its construction, or at least they were not told about it in advance, so they were unprepared to play their role in selling this as the next great event in the drama. Western media was not provided with a script, so they had no idea what to say. Eventually they settled on this being bad for Putin’s narrative, a thing that does not exist.

It is another example of the total lack of realism in our political class. The Ukraine war is an unnecessary venture for everyone involved except the Russians. A thousand years of history says they will not allow Ukraine to fall into the Western orbit. Otherwise, everyone else involved has practical reasons for not having this war, but the good feelings that come from good narratives have been too much to resist. The result is an unfolding catastrophe for the West.

This total lack of realism in the West seems to have finally reached an end point with the Russians after this latest caper. In a recent press conference, Putin said that it is now impossible to deal with Ukrainian leadership. While not closing the door to negotiations completely, he has now ruled out dealing with Zelensky. Other Russian officials are floating the idea of regime change in Kiev as a necessary precondition for any negotiated settlement to the war.

What that means is that the eventual collapse of the Ukrainian army, which is now accelerating due to the nutty decisions made by Kiev, will be followed by a political collapse, by force if necessary. In other words, if the West deciders it is time to make a deal with the Russians, that deal starts by cutting Zelensky loose, which in the context of Ukrainian politics means the whole crew must go. They will not go voluntarily, so it means the end game includes a civil war in Western Ukraine.

The Ukraine war is a microcosm of what is happening in the West. Every decision is based only in the moment without any thought of what comes next. Things are done voluntarily that should have been avoided, not because they are part of a larger strategy but because they fit the current narrative. It is as if once the story is created, the writers are sucked into it, losing all control of the plot. All they can do is respond as if they are now unwitting characters in the story.

This is harmless in the low-stakes world of parlor games in which members of the political class evolve, but in the practical world, it is a disaster. It leads to a scenario in which no one knows if the current president is alive or dead. No one seems to care because his character has been written out of the story. Who is actually making decisions is a mystery. It is the dynamic that created the condition for war in Ukraine and is now pushing it towards catastrophe.

On the one hand, it certainly seems like the West is now governed by emotion and symbolism, rather than practical considerations. The Kamala Harris campaign can be boiled down to a promise of feel goods. The entire production is a collection of symbolic shapes and sounds to transmit the simple idea that it feels good or that the alternative will make you feel bad. To his credit, Trump is offering tangible things that have some connection to practical reality.

The lesson of the Ukraine war, however, is that reality still matters. All the feel-good stories and symbols has not changed the fact that the Russian army is chewing up the Ukrainian army. The clever narratives cannot conceal the massive cemeteries full of dead Ukrainian soldiers. The question that arises from this war is whether Western elites will learn that the clever stories by the managerial class will not keep them from the gallows if things start to crumble.

The great lesson of history is that there is always a price to be paid for failed leadership and that price is paid by the people, then their rulers. Joseph de Maistre famously said that the people get the government they deserve. He was wrong. The lesson of the French Revolution is that the ruling elite gets the people they deserve. A ruling class that is concerned more with clever narratives than practical reality will face a people, who out of practical necessity, decide they must get a new ruling elite.

Escape From Reality

Posted on August 13, 2024 by thezman

The great fear as the internet spread across American society was that things in this virtual world would somehow cross over into the real world. Usually this meant that the machines would get super intelligent and take over society. This is the underlying theme of movies like The Terminator. Alternatively, a being from inside the internet would make the jump into the meat space. This is the plot for the film Virtuosity. A virtual serial killer gets loose in the real world and does his worst.

Nothing like that has come to pass, but something worse may be happening and that is reality is being sucked into the virtual world. More accurately, people are spending so much time online that the virtual world is supplanting reality for them. We are seeing this with the Harris campaign, which is probably the most intensely online political program we have every experienced. Everything about it is based on winning the internet that day, which means it operates by the rules of the internet.

The most obvious example is how the Kamala Harris character has been reimagined by her developers into something disconnected from reality. From the presentation, one would never know she has been Vice President for the last four years or that she has spent those years arguing for the administration’s positions. Like a discarded scene from a video game, all of that is gone now. In its place is the new character whose only connection to the prior character is the name.

The disconnectedness extends to her campaign and its supporters. Trump has been stumping on the idea of exempting tips from income taxes. Whatever the merits of the idea, it is a clever way to appeal to young people. The other day, the Harris character announced its plan to not tax tips, as if it were something totally new that had never been mentioned by anyone. Miraculously, the people playing the Harris character online responded as if it was a total novel idea.

Of course, this being the age of mendacity, the new Harris gameplay comes with manufactured crowds online that cheer for it. There are fake polls that claim this character is now the most popular character in the game. It is destroying all of the orange baddies in this expansion pack. We know this because every day the lie machine we call mass media fills the game space with stories about how Trump is raging in his bunker about the greatness of the Harris character.

This upgraded version of Kamala Harris is now equipment with a lacky to do the things lackies do for the hero. Like the new Kamala Harris, the character called Tim Walz bears little resemblance to the old version. Instead of being a bloviating windbag who bores people with his imaginary tales of heroism in the military, this version is a folksy good old boy who just happens to hold all of the same opinions as the developers who created his character for the game.

What we are experiencing right now is a political campaign that exists only in the virtual world of the highly online. If you are not playing in this part of the game or you live in reality, you may not know about any of this. Maybe one of your favorite “influencers” has gone into panic mode for some reason and that got your attention. Otherwise, if you are not in this part of the game, none of this is real to you. The main reason for that is that nothing about this campaign is real thus far.

This is why the people most affected by this new release are the self-styled influencers who live entirely online. These people spend all day, every day, looking for something they can front-run in order to maintain the illusion that they are not just playing the game, but they are controlling it. The reason they are called influencers is not that they influence anyone, but that they are the most easily influenced. The right-wing influencer crowd cannot stop playing the new Harris character.

The highly online, of course, will argue that this is reality, and it is now changing the meat space, but how would they know? One of the weird aspects of virtual reality is that it is self-affirming to the people who have been sucked into it. For many of them, Twitter is reality and people outside of it do not exist. This is why influencers banned from Twitter were so desperate to get back on the platform. Having your account suspended is what passes for Hell in the virtual world.

That still leaves the question as to whether this is working. More people get their news from online sources than from legacy sources, so if you win the internet then it suggests you can influence people. On the other hand, the internet is a big place and people gravitate to that which confirms the opinions. One reason the undecided voter is a thing of the past is everyone now has an online tribe. Alternatively, they have a cable chat show they watch every night for their opinions.

The highly online like saying that arguing with a boomer is arguing with the television because all of their opinions come from television. Ironically, arguing with the highly online is arguing with the internet. The people playing the Nick Fuentes character right now have no ideas of their own. They have the ideas of the other players in the Nick Fuentes game space. It turns out that right-wing zoomers are just like the right-wing boomers they criticize. They just have a different god.

That is what will be the interesting thing about the Harris game. Eventually, the Harris character will have to step outside the curated world of gameplay and talk to flesh and blood humans, as well as debate Trump. As much as the developers would like to believe the reality they have created has supplanted the old reality, the test of this will be their character leaving the game space for the meat space. The same holds for the lackey with his Elmer Fudd costume and reimagined backstory.

What it will ultimately come down to is whether the voters will prefer the game space reality to the meat space reality. Will they believe the upgraded Harris character is preferable to the meat space Harris and continue to play the game character as a form of escapism or will they experience the meat space version and get turned off by the game itself? That is the central question of this election. This is the first election where people are asked to choose reality versus escapism.

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