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.

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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.

The Sales Job

Posted on October 24, 2023 by thezman

Note: Last week a friend of ours, Jeff Winston, passed away leaving behind a young wife and a baby daughter. Jeff was the founder of White Art Collective, a group of musicians and artist who collaborated on artistic endeavors. A fund has been set up to help Jeff’s wife and daughter. There is no excuse for not hitting the goal this week, so please kick in a few bucks to the effort.

In the business world, it is rare to encounter anyone who is skeptical about marketing as a general concept. These people do exist, mostly in the accounting department or in the technical support areas of accounting. They have some sense of the real economic benefit of marketing campaigns, so they tend to be a bit more skeptical of the claims, but they have little say in the matter. The boys and girls in the C-suites are all sure marketing is the key to success.

This is why history books are full of bad ad campaigns. Even the dumbest ideas will win over some people, because it is assumed that all attention is good attention, so even a terrible ad can work. It is also why you rarely see marketing people get sacked for terrible ideas. The one notable exception are the white people who run afoul of the morality police. Put one picture of Hitler on your gigantic scoreboard and you will be fired before the game is finished.

A good recent example is the Bud Light controversy. It should have been obvious that hiring a pervert to sell working class beer was a bad idea. The customers for Bud Light are working men who want cheap beer. These are not the sort of people who squeal with excitement over the latest bourgeois decadence. Sure, the friends, colleagues and superiors of the horse-faced woman who cooked up the idea thought it was marvelous, but they would not be caught dead drinking Bud Light.

It took the executives of that beer company weeks to figure out that they had a serious crisis on their hands, primarily because they have been conditioned to think that anything that gets attention is good marketing. It never occurred to them that their customers would not want to be associated with a pervert. Instead, they were caught up in the excitement of having “gone viral.” It was only after the mockery reached the clouds that they fired the people responsible.

The truth of it is, most of what passes for marketing is nonsense. There is little empirical evidence to suggest it boosts sales. If Coca-Cola stopped running television ads, would people stop buying their products? Clearly not as the brand is globally recognized to the point where it is a generic term like Kleenex or Zipper. Coca-Cola could discontinue all advertising for a year and not see a change in sales. In fact, that would be a great marketing idea and it would surely go viral!

The same sort of psychosis grips politics. It is assumed that the formula for success works backward in that you start with having gained power. If you have power, you can do what you want, but you first must get power. That means winning an election, so you have to focus on that project. In order to win the election, you need to get the votes and that means getting the attention of the voters. In order to do that you need to market your candidate to the rubes out in the hinterland.

This is why the Ron DeSantis campaign is now circling the drain. They assumed that they first needed to make him a household name, so they contracted those who claim to know how to do this. Those people then hired lots of “social media influencers” who would talk about Ron DeSantis as if he is their old pal. Never mind that many of them are weirdos and conmen. After all, any attention is good attention and these social misfits have proven to be great at getting attention on Twitter.

Hiring a gold-plated phony like Bill Mitchell sounded like a great idea because he supposedly has half a million followers. It should have taken them five minutes to see that the follower number is fake. His account gets less engagement than many abandoned accounts, but what he does get is usually mockery. Even among the hardest of hardcore Trump fans Bill Mitchell was a ridiculous person when he was pitching himself as super-MAGA man.

The same logic was behind hiring Mexican Bill Mitchell. You can easily imagine the conversation when they made this decision. “He was on Tucker so those mouth breathers will listen to him.” They never stopped to think that it would be rather obvious that his support was purchased. That and his influence with Trump supporters was contingent on his support for Trump and his last name. When he was MAGA, he was the “barrio Nazi” but with DeSantis he is just Pete.

Of course, all of this rested on an assumption that is probably false. That assumption is that Twitter has an impact on public opinion. For those on Twitter every day, it certainly feels like it is the public square. To those not on Twitter every day, the vast majority of people, it is like every other social media platform they ignore. There is a reason that conversations in the real world about Twitter tend to be derisive. Twitter is not reality, but an alternative reality with little impact on reality.

This is probably true of the internet as a whole. Those old enough to have been online before the mouse recognized this reality forty years ago. Going back and forth with strangers on Usenet was a fun diversion from reality. You and everyone else were playing a role in a simulated world. When your internet time was up, you went back to work and forgot about it. Then when you had free time, you would pick up that thread about who is really the Nazi in the debate.

Like marketing in the business world, social media has become an article of faith in politics that is never questioned. Of course, you have to have a social media presence and of course you need to hire social media strategists. Imagine a big company not having a marketing department! It is the same mentality in politics, and it rests on the same assumption which is probably not true. At the minimum, the truth of it is far more limited than everyone assumes.

In the end, reality matters. If you are selling station wagons just when Chrysler introduced the minivan, no amount of marketing is going to change the fact that the minivan was a better family vehicle. If you are selling Ron DeSantis in the age of Trump, no amount of social media influencing is going to change the fact that he is just another conventional politician in an unconventional age. The best marketing is a product that sells itself, whether it is cars or politicians.

The Low Trust Model

Posted on October 23, 2023 by thezman

A little more than two weeks ago Hamas launched their daring raid into Israel, killing many Israeli soldiers and civilians. The Arab – Israeli story has been on the back burner for a long time, due to relative calm between the various sides. The imperial wars in the region have ended, so the American political class has not had a reason to talk about how much they love Israel recently. This attack unleashed a great deal of pent-up Israel enthusiasm from the Cloud People.

Right after the raid, the Israel lobby in the United States swung into action, launching a massive public relations campaign in support of Israel. There was a contest between the chattering skulls over who could be the most extreme in their demands for vengeance on behalf of Israel. Like the response to the death of George Floyd, the reactions from all corners of the managerial class felt coordinated. The usual suspects were all using the same canned lines on social media.

That may explain why this massive public relations campaign has not had the effect the narrative writers expected. Two weeks on and most Americans are more interested in the NFL scores than Israel and Gaza. Then you have the large pro-Palestinian protests breaking out all over the West. Washington had about ten thousand people turn up to wave the Palestinian flag. Famous people like Dave Chappelle and Greta Thunberg have made anti-Zionism fashionable again.

When you look at the polling, support for Israel is just over fifty percent, but this is due to unwavering support from old white people. Outside of that group support ranges from “a pox on both sides” to mild opposition to Israel. Among the young and left-wing, the Palestinians are becoming the cool new victim group. College campuses are suddenly having to deal with students supporting the people their donors are trying to kill over in the Gaza strip. It is, as the cool kids say, problematic.

Clearly, the all-out media blitz has not had the expected result. The political class is still playing its role, as if the people are clamoring for it. Nikki Haley is running around promising to blow up the world if elected president. She wants to rename the Defense Department into the Offense Department. While she is clearly a psychopathic simpleton, her echolalic babbling is falling on deaf ears. It turns out that even the sorts of people who care about GOP politics are not moved by Israel.

One reason for this is that this media relations campaign looks like the public relations campaigns around previous moral panics. This looks like the George Floyd hoax or the Russian collusion hoax or the white nationalist hoax. It is the same actors playing the same roles with a new bogeyman. This style of gaslighting can only work so many times before gaslighting fatigue sets in with the public. These calls to arms over the latest bogeyman are becoming background noise.

There is also the fact that there is simply too much information and too many people skilled in peddling their own reality. The Israel lobby has billions of your money to spend on these campaigns, but there is a massive guerilla army of online volunteers working to counter them. The internet is full of pics showing bombed out buildings and dead Arab children, along with carefully constructed context. The misinformation war has been joined by this volunteer army supporting the Arabs.

Of course, there is the moral problem at the heart of it all. Yes, Hamas killing women and children in that raid is terrible. Yes, Israelis have a right to be angry and want retribution for the terrible act. No, revenge and retribution are not things Westerners have been conditioned to accept. Pulverizing Gaza as revenge for the raid strikes most Western people as barbaric. Appeals to our empathy is not going to change the fact that Israeli is blowing up hospitals now.

There may be another factor, something that underlies all of these other reasons for the failed media campaign. That is the reputation of all public people has collapsed due to their constant lying and tolerance of obvious lies. All the people chanting “Death to Gaza” are people who sat quietly while their fellows told outlandish whoppers about Trump, his voters, white people, Covid and many other topics. Many of these people have enthusiastically held abhorrent positions.

A good rule of life is to assume that people who lied to you in the past are lying to you in the present and they will lie to you in the future. The public square has been so polluted by official lies and people willing to repeat them in public that many people now assume everything is a lie. If Ben Shapiro was happy to lie about Covid, why would he be telling the truth about Israel? Why would anyone accept what the Biden administration has to say about anything at this point?

This is an underappreciated aspect of what happens to people when they transition from a high trust society to a low trust society. Send a middle-class man to prison and he will be victimized by the system until he gets smart. He then goes to the extreme, assuming that he can trust no one. In time, he figures out that he can trust certain people, but he can never trust the system. Low trust societies have the same sort of trust relationships that you will see in a high security prison.

That may be what we are seeing in America. For some people, it is assumed that everything from the system is a lie. Old people still trust the system, but young people have no faith in it. On the other hand, many people are learning to trust those who have earned their trust. All the highly choregraphed media in the world is no match for the word of that guy who has proven to be on the level. In fact, the media campaigns are creating the environment for this trust model to flourish.

This is not a novelty, as much of the world functions this way. In the Arab world, for example, not one accepts official sources at face value. It is assumed that the official story is cover for the real story. Arabs love conspiracy theories. In Eastern Europe, people treat politics as a separate sphere with separate rules. Seventy years of communism taught them to understand that the people in charge serve their own interests, not the interests of the people.

It is only in the West where people came to expect honesty from the ruling class and consistency in the rules of the system. The civic nationalist concept of good government is a WEIRD concept. The term WEIRD here means Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. It works as long as the societies and their ruling elites remain demographically Western. That is obviously no longer the case, so it is no wonder that the West is evolving a new model.

In the end, the aphorism credited to Lincoln, “You can fool all people some of the time and some people all the time. But you can never fool all people all the time” works better as a warning, rather than a description. A ruling class that keeps trying to fool most of the people most of the time ends up fooling themselves into thinking they are fooling everyone all the time. The end result is a ruling class that has the trust of no one and must rule by force until the end.

The Road To Ruin

Posted on October 19, 2023 by thezman

When studying the two great revolutionary events in European history, the thing that always jumps out is how revolution was something of an accident. In both cases, the ruling class had chances to avert disaster. The sovereign had people in his inner circle or just on the edge of it who warned about the brewing trouble. In the case of Tsar Nicholas, his ascent to the throne was due to the ongoing unrest. Yet, in both cases the ruling class never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Dig further into the many unforced errors and the root cause is often a stubbornness on the part of the king, the tsar, or the aristocracy. They looked at every small compromise as a potential slippery slope. Instead of taking advantage of opportunities presented to them by their disgruntled subjects, they dug in their heels and made themselves seem like the unreasonable party. As a result, they left themselves little room to make necessary reforms in order to head off disaster.

We may be seeing something similar in the battle to select a new Speaker of the House, which is now in its third week. Kevin McCarthy was booted from the post to start October because he broke all but one promise he made to secure the job. The one promise he kept was to reduce the number of votes required to bring forth a motion to vacate the chair, as in remove him from the job. Because he broke all of his other promises, this was the avenue to remove him.

The House Republicans are now struggling to find a replacement. The first choice, one supported by the donor class and the Democrats, was Steve Scalise, but he reminded the rebels in the party too much of Kevin McCarthy. Like McCarthy, Scalise owes his existence to his ability to spread donor money around to those who fink on Republican voters on behalf of the donor class. Trading one fink for another would have made the Freedom Caucus complicit in the finkery, so they demurred.

Next up is Jim Jordan, who is not exactly Tiberius Gracchus, but he is a serious man who is a capable political operator. He shares many of the views held by the Freedom Caucus and the back benchers of the party. This is why the people in charge tried to bump him off years ago with a phony sex scandal. They are now trying to revive that smear campaign to derail his Speaker bid. The zombies in the Republican caucus have now been activated against him.

Lost in the jibber-jabber and scheming is the fact that the donor class opposes Jordan primarily due to his politics. The Republicans sell themselves to their voters as a conservative party and Jordan is what you should expect from the sales pitch, but the donors oppose him because he is the sales pitch. They argue that having a Speaker who tries to act on the party platform is bad for business. In other words, they admit the party platform is nothing more than a scam on their voters.

The truth is this is a fight of symbolism, not real policy. A Speaker Jordan will not be substantively different from Speaker McCarthy or Speaker Pelosi. Spending bills will be a bit more transparent, and they will not drop minutes before the vote. The bills themselves will not change. From the perspective of the economic elites who control the political system, they lose nothing with Speaker Jordan, other than a bit of their pride for having had to make this small concession.

That is the core issue. It is the same issue that turned the Trump years from a golden opportunity into an ongoing crisis. The people who are actually in charge could have gotten any deal they wanted from Trump. He would have signed off on amnesty, for example, as long as he got his wall money. The people in charge could not bring themselves to give a rube from the shtetl this tiny concession. Instead, they made war on him and the public as a whole.

We are seeing the same thing in the House. McCarthy’s string pullers were furious that he gave in on those small items to secure the gavel. They were apoplectic when he started to follow through on them. Lost to the mists of time is the fact he promised to release the J6 tapes in full. He gave Tucker Carlson a small taste and official Washington was incensed at this gesture toward transparency. He was forced to fink on the rest of his promises and blow up his Speakership.

Of course, all of this is possible because House elections have no impact on ninety percent of the House members. Only about forty seats are ever in doubt, so the only risk for the other four hundred members is falling out of favor with their party leaders, which means falling out of favor with permanent Washington. Make the donors angry and you get a sex scandal, an N-word scandal or something similar, along with a well-financed primary challenger.

This is what happened to Steve King from Iowa. He was solid on immigration, so the party had him knocked off. Kevin McCarthy colluded with the New York Times to post a fake story claiming that King used the N-word on a call. Immediately, McCarthy stripped King of his committee assignments and sponsored a primary challenger. By the time the truth came out about the call, it was too late for Steve King. Every Republican voting against Jordan has that story on their desk right now.

Of course, there are other issues working against Jordan. He has been skeptical of the Ukraine project. Far too many people in Washington are getting rich off that racket to tolerate skepticism. The reason the neocons have been able to push this project this far is they bolted it too the money laundering machine that is foreign aid. The money goes out to some foreign country and much of it returns in the form of consulting contracts, defense contracts and lobbying deals.

The biggest problem is the oldest problem. Like the ruling elites during revolutionary France and Russia, the ruling elite of the American empire are convinced the state exists solely to guard their interests against the Dirt People. Therefore, any concession, no matter how trivial or symbolic, is a threat to the system. In the hive mind that is official Washington, Jim Jordan leads to Donald Trump which leads to angry mobs erecting a gallows on the Capitol lawn.

History, however, suggests the opposite. Through the nineties, the economic elite got almost everything they wanted, by giving the hoi polloi a few crumbs now and again to perpetuate the myth of American democracy. Then the crumbs were replaced with rat poison, as the ruling class turned increasingly hostile and paranoid. Like the peasants in prior revolutionary eras, the best explanation we have for the behavior of our rulers is they hate us and want us dead.

All of this is a glimpse of what lies ahead in 2024. The people unwilling to budge on the Speaker issue are not going to budge on the Trump issue. The road to ruin for this ruling elite is the same road as that of prior elites. They are becoming increasingly ossified and stubborn. They miss every opportunity to lower the temperature because even small concessions are viewed through the lens of contempt for the people over whom they rule. The end of this road is the gallows.

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