The Gracchi Principle

Posted on December 21, 2022 by thezman

Note: This is the time of year to be generous to those in need, so if you are looking for a place to give, here is an option. Most certainly know the story, but for those who do not, here is the background.

A feature of a ruling elite in decline is that they no longer respect the rules they have in place to govern their own behavior. Every society has a ruling class and within that ruling class there is competition. Despite what the natural rights proponents argue, there is a natural desire for hierarchy. Some people want to be at the top, while others aim a bit lower. Humans will compete for positions on the status tree in every form of human organization.

That is why ruling elites need rules. These rules are about governing the natural competition that will exist inside the ruling class. These rules also govern how one can enter the ruling class and how one can be expelled. As is true of all human organizations, the first question every ruling class must answer is “who are we?” and the answer to that question is a set of rules that define who is in, how you get in and how you remain in the ruling class.

In a healthy ruling class, as with any healthy human organization, the rules are more of a state of mind than a written set of laws. The early Roman republic had rules and those rules were the spirit that animated the republic. Brutus did not have to be told the rules, with regards to his sons actions in the Tarquinian conspiracy. He stood and watched stoically as his sons were executed for their crimes against the republic, thus making Brutus the ever lasting symbol of republican virtue.

Over time of course, human nature takes over and people begin to nibble away at the spirit of those rules, which inevitably results in some sort of formal codification of the rules, if for nothing else than to make it easier to handle disputes. The spirit of the law gives way to the letter of the law and the enforcement of the rules by the people benefitting from the present interpretation of the rules. It is that last bit that leads to the final phase of every ruling elite.

When the rules are first written down, everyone agrees on the meaning of the text, but over time that comes into dispute. On the one hand, people at the lower end of the status tree seek advantage in any ambiguity. If they can get everyone to agree on some new meaning of a word or phrase, they can maybe arbitrage that ambiguity to their advantage and move up the status tree. On the other hand, the people at the top want to stay at the top, so they soon engage in the same practice.

The fact is, once the ruling elite begins to question their own rules, the ruling elite is dead in spirit, because there is no turning back from this phase. The reason is they no longer have a shared spirit of the rules. The written rules were an effort to recapture that spirit by throwing a net of words over the hole, but that inevitably leads to people looking for holes in the net. Outsiders use the holes to sneak into the elite and insiders use the holes to oust competitors from the elite.

We have a real world example of this happening. The House has dumped Donald Trump’s tax returns into the public. This is probably their final act of spite against Trump, as the Republicans take over next month. Spite is the correct word here. The reason for doing it is they hope something in it will embarrass Trump. This is a remarkable thing in that these people have obsessed over Trump for going on a decade and they have yet to learn that you cannot embarrass Donald Trump.

Putting that aside, it has been a rule in America since the 16th Amendment was passed that a citizen’s relationship with the federal state with regards to his taxes is a private matter, unless a dispute arises about taxes owed. At that point, the matter goes into a court where the necessary evidence is presented. The IRS does not distribute personal tax data and the individual is under no obligation to publish his tax data. In fact, anyone publishing someone’s tax data is breaking the law.

This issue of privacy with regards to tax data is mostly a ruling class privilege, but like all elite privileges, it has been turned into a moral principle. You see, the rich people gaming the tax system do not have to make this public because it is a sacred principle of America that your taxes remain private. Whether this is a good idea is debatable, but for over a century, everyone in power agreed it was a good idea. So much so they ran Nixon off for merely questioning it.

Now, the people releasing Trump’s tax data are not worried about this happening to them if Trump wins the White House in 2024. First of all, the key states have been fortified for democracy, so everyone knows the 2024 result. What they should be concerned with is someone in the system now using this new loophole to leverage their way up the ladder. Normalizing the release of private tax data is a high price to pay for exacting revenge against Trump.

That is the danger of exceptions. They have knock on effects that are not always easy to assess, but they also do something else. Normalizing this sort of gainsaying erodes trust in the rules. If every comma in the law is now up for interpretation, what is the point of having rules? History tells us that the answer to that question is a man on a horse choosing to cross a river. In other words, the rules based society collapses and something or someone replaces it.

In the fullness of time, the historians will look at the Trump business as an example of the steady decline of the American empire. Trump may be cast as the Gracchi brothers, not for what he did but for what he came to represent. The murder of Tiberius Gracchus normalized the use of violence by the elite in defense of power. The grotesque abuse of power by the regime to counter the populist surge represented by Trump has yet to go that far, but there is still time until the next “election.”

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The Case Against Trump

Posted on December 20, 2022 by thezman

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The January 6 committee has finally wrapped up its work with a series of criminal referrals for Donald Trump. Exactly no one is surprised by this result, as this was obviously the point of the charade from the start. The only people surprised by the ending are the cranks and crazies that still bang on about Trump. The one interesting thing about this is that it highlights the defining feature of the people who compose the core of the anti-Trump cult.

There are two big questions with this latest development. The first is whether the Department of Justice will go ahead and indict Trump. Merrick Garland has been under intense pressure from the crazies to throw Trump in jail, but he has so far found a way to avoid deciding. He just appointed one of their favorite goofballs to operate as a special prosecutor. It was a delaying tactic, much in the way that the appointment of John Durham was a way to run out the clock.

Garland is a bloodthirsty fanatic like the rest of his cult, but he understands the danger of bearing his fangs in public. If he makes it too obvious that his cult no longer has any respect for the people or institutions of the country, there could be trouble. These people believe deeply in the power of narrative, so the narrative builders are busy inventing new stories to provide the content creators in the media. These things take time, so the final call is probably months away.

The other big question is whether this is good for us. There are a few schools of thought on the whole throw Trump in jail business. The conventional school is that even though everyone knows this is Stalinist nonsense, it is another blow to his brand, which is dying from a thousand cuts right now. The cumulative effect of these assaults is slowly marginalizing Trump. At some point, Trump will have to agree to go out with a whimper and thus leave his supporters without a leader.

That seems to be the thinking of the anti-Trump cultists. They think they are the white hats with the support of the public. The counter is that Trump is once again blessed with the best enemies. Just when people get tired of his act, his opponents remind the world that Trump stirs the passions of the most loathsome, vulgar people at the center of the current crisis. No man has been blessed with the volume of free media as Trump and this is just more free attention.

There are other scenarios for how this plays out. Garland could formerly charge Trump and then the Republicans mount a “totally spontaneous and authentic” campaign to remove him from primary ballots. In the same way they engineered Congressman Steve King’s exit from politics, they would run the same scam on Trump. By coordinating with the other party, they would pretend they are simply protecting the party from this obviously bad man.

From a dissident perspective, this would be manna from heaven. No one would be fooled by this and it would bolster the case for boycotting the party. The only thing keeping many people engaged with Republican politics is the hope that the highly corrupt leadership could one day be replaced. Trump is their symbol of hope, so his engineered removal by party leaders would be the final straw. Millions of Trump voters would suddenly start thinking about boycotting the system.

Even if the Republican party sits this out, Trump getting hauled away in chains is good news for dissidents. Given what has been revealed about the FBI’s involvement in censuring speech on-line and the DOJ running a domestic spying operation on Congress, it is hard to not see the bananas in this republic. Biden having his political rival thrown in prison on manufactured charges would instantly vaporize support for the system as a whole.

George Washington famously said that the last act of any government is to loot the treasury, but he turns out to have been wrong. In pre-ideological societies, this was probably a fair observation. Like the rest of the Founders, Washington was deeply influenced by the English Civil War. He had ancestors who fought on the side of the king, so it was more than just historical. In the age before ideology, money was what eventually broke the legitimacy of government.

In the ideological age, the final acts of the government are about snuffing out the last flames of love the people have for the cause. The Soviets eventually made even the most loyal communists cynical. Mao had to murder a lot of people, but eventually the ChiComs lost faith in communism. Of course, the final acts of revolutionary France were to bring the Jacobins to meet Madame Guillotine. As with marriage, when the love for the cause fades, the relationship soon dies.

That is the way to look at this Trump business and all the other stuff that has been revealed over the last decade. The loathsome degenerates parading across the political stage rely on public faith in the system. Every outrage undermines that faith until a tipping point is reached. Maybe it is Trump being thrown in a dungeon or maybe it is something else, but the tipping point is always closer than we think. Godspeed anti-Trumpers, Godspeed.

The Murder Itself Phase

Posted on December 14, 2022 by thezman

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A year ago, when the Russians began to assemble forces along the Russia – Ukraine border, Western planners were sure that whatever the Russians were planning could only last a few months. They simply lacked the resources to put an army in the field, especially against a heavily defended opponent, for a long time. The Western response to the Russian advance into Ukraine was predicated on this. By now, the war should have been over due to a Russian withdrawal.

This short time frame thinking is clear in the economic sanctions that were levied against Russia when the war started. It did not require an advanced degree in economics to see that these sanctions would hurt the West. Cutting off a critical vendor has to have a negative impact. Western countries basically went to war with their most important supplier of energy. They were willing to do this because the war would be short and Russia would surrender to the West.

On its face this always looked like a crazy decision, but it was based on two assumptions that have turned out to be even nuttier. The first assumption was that Russia was nothing but a giant gas station run by drunken peasants. Western economic sanctions would send the country into economic turmoil and those drunken peasants would quickly revolt against their stupid rulers. Back in the spring, predictions like this were placed all over Western media.

The second assumption was that China and India would eagerly jump aboard the sanctions train. This has turned out to be the biggest error. China and India have not only refused to join the sanctions regime, but they have also moved closer to Russia and are now integral partners in the anti-Western bloc. More critically, OPEC+ has also moved closer to both Russia and China. Saudi Arabia recently signed critical deals with China, despite Western pressure to the contrary.

These horrible blunders by Western planners have resulted in a long brutal war on the doorstep of Europe. The Russians have slowly reconfigured their systems for a long war, both economic and military. On the battlefield, they are relentlessly pounding Ukrainian positions while minimizing their casualties. The battle for Bakhmut, for example, is being called a meat grinder. The Ukrainians are losing a thousand men a day defending this one place in the Donbas.

No one in the West cares at all about the lives of Ukrainians, but they have to care about the growing economic cost to the West. In parts of Europe, energy costs are five times higher now than before the war. An economic system based on cheap energy is not going to hold for long when the energy costs start to rise. Europe is just at the beginning of this energy crisis, with 2023 promising even bigger price hikes. How much longer before this spills into the political arena?

People who have seen the battle space in this war have described it as something like the trench warfare of the Great War. The Ukrainian army is dug into massive fortifications, surrounded by trench systems. In places like Bakhmut, two thousand artillery shells a day will fall on the defenders. The defenders fire back, but their artillery lacks the range of Russian systems. Even so, much of the fighting is the sort of artillery duels that were common in the Great War.

There is another parallel between the two wars. There is no path forward for a negotiated end to the fighting. In the Great War, both sides were locked into a mode of thought that prevented the necessary compromises. For both sides, the war became an end in itself. Something similar seems to have gripped the West, which has categorically ruled out a negotiated settlement. Repeatedly, Western leaders have declared there can only be one result – total victory.

As if to make sure the Russians also forgo all hope of a negotiated settlement, the West sent former German chancellor Angela Merkel out to tell the world that her prior dealings with Russia were a trick to buy the Ukrainians time. Until that interview, Merkel was one of a few Western leaders Russia thought she could trust. Now they must assume that they can trust nothing from the West. Therefore, Russia can never expect to get a deal from the West at the bargaining table.

All of this leads to another important comparison between this global conflict and the Great War a century ago. A century ago, the British Empire was effectively destroyed by the totally unnecessary war in Europe. Something similar may be waiting for the Global American Empire in this war. Instead of surrounding Russia with enemies, the war will end with the West being surrounded by a league of regional powers committed to defending themselves from color revolutions.

The question that must follow is can the economic and political model of the Global American Empire survive when it is confined to a minority of the world? The West is a little more than a tenth of the global population. How will the GAE function if the EU is in economic ruins? Can the petrodollar survive if the largest energy producers are comfortable dealing in alternative currencies? These are questions that get to the core logic of the American empire.

Perhaps what we are seeing is the same thing that happened to the British Empire at the start of the last century. The Global American Empire is not dying because it has run its course, but because it is run by stupid people who keep making critical errors in vitally important areas of imperial business. Adams famously said of democracy that it “wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Perhaps this is true of democratic empires and America is now in the murder itself phase.

The Great Delusion

Posted on December 6, 2022 by thezman

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Imagine you are the CEO of a large corporation and you have to make a big decision about a critical issue facing the company. Your team in the C-suites have been busy putting together all of the information they can about the issue. There have been meetings and presentations on all aspects of the issue. Experts have been brought in to explain various aspects of the issue. After having digested all of the information on the issue, it is now time to act. What do you do?

Obviously, the right answer, even without knowing any of the details about the issue in this hypothetical, is to put it up to a vote. First, you will have the various sides on the issue make their case to the employees. Maybe have a series of Zoom debates and let the parties put up posters around the offices. Perhaps the principles representing the various positions will have an all hands on deck meeting. At some point, you have the employees log in and cast their vote.

Of course, this is ridiculous. No company would ever do such an insane thing, at least not in this age. In the 19th century there were some efforts to create socialist companies, but they ended poorly. Usually, these democratic companies were part of a utopian society. In the modern age, no one thinks the principles of democracy have any place in something important like a corporation. The truth is the commies were right about American business. It runs on fascist principles.

It is not just major corporations that avoid democracy. There is no military in this world that embraces democracy. The nearest thing to democracy in warfare was the pirate ship, which often voted on where to plunder. Even on a pirate ship, there was a captain who made the big decisions. His men might “vote him off the ship” but they would quickly elect a new captain. Otherwise, every military on the planet has a vertical chain of command and no democratic principles.

A good rule of life is that when any organization reaches sufficient size to employ a full time leader, it employs a full time leader. A small group of men working to a common goal might operate from a consensus, but even in small groups someone is the de facto leader to whom everyone looks for the final decision. It is fair to say that an organization without a leader is unnatural. Human beings, even women, always organize around a leader, even when everyone is agreement.

This natural lack of democracy is most evident in science. If someone comes along claiming that he has discovered a new element, the science men do not call together a meeting and vote on the claim. The claim must be backed with proof and that proof is analyzed and challenged to verify it. Despite what the Gaia worshippers say, consensus only exists within science where proof is not present. The word “consensus” is a signal of doubt, not proof of the claim.

A good rule of life is that anything important is excluded from anything resembling the democratic process. No business runs on democratic lines. Armies do not run according to democratic principles. Those two areas are arguably two of the most important bits of any human society and they run according to fascist principles. Even family life avoids democracy as much as possible. The expression “head of the household” exists because households naturally have a leader.

If one wants to understand why voting is a pointless waste of time, you just have to ask why no important things are ever put to a vote? Immigration is arguably the most important issue facing the country. Politicians avoid it like the plague. Even the “good politicians” speak in tongues when the issue is raised. Meanwhile, they scheme in private to do what they know is against the interests of the people. No one voting for it will dare mention it when on the campaign trail.

The fact is our elections are meaningless. The candidates speak in vague terms about abstract items. It is all in-group/out-group signaling. “We have to secure our southern border” is just echolalic babbling used to titillate a certain population. “We need affordable healthcare for all” is emotive noise for different people. None of the things candidates say while campaigning has anything to do with how they will vote once in office or the policies that will become law.

You could easily replace the people with colored blocks of wood. How would the current Georgia senate election be any different if the choice were between red block of wood and blue block of wood? Alternatively, the candidates could be replaced with lights that flash different colors in response to different noises. Say the word “immigration” and one light flashes green and the other flashes red. The expensive humans could be replaced with cheap robots.

The reason our elections are meaningless, of course, is that no human society ever subjects important things to democracy. The old joke about if voting mattered, they would not let us do it was funny because it is true. There is no correlation between public opinion and public policy. This study from 2014 went through 1800 issues and found no link between what the people told the politicians they wanted and what the politicians eventually did.

If nothing important is ever subjected to democracy and democracy never results in the public will manifesting in public policy, then why are people hooked on the act of voting and why is democracy an object of worship. Based on observation it appears there is no argument that can be made to convince the bulk of the people to end this absurd charade we call voting. Suggest a boycott of the process and the typical suburban peasant gives you a sermon about democracy.

Compounding this bizarre worship of democracy is that most modern people live a third of their lives as fascists. The self-employed person has almost disappeared from the labor market. Small business is following the self-employed into the abyss as big business dominates the marketplace. That means most people work in companies that operate along fascist principles. If half of your waking life is committed to fascism, how in the world has democracy become an object of worship?

Societies can have moments of madness. The 1970’s saw America embrace leisure suits and disco, while cities were turned into war zones. Much of that period has been politely forgotten because no one can make sense of it. Maybe this age and its fetish from democracy is something similar. The chanting about democracy and obsession with politics is another fit of madness. Instead of afros and sideburns we have brain damaged hobos in the Senate and black Nazis.

Alternatively, this great delusion about the importance of participating in elections is a form of escapism. As people become more dependent on the system for the basics of their lives, they need to believe they have some say in how the big machine that is the modern society runs their life. Democracy and the various identity cults are a way to feel like you have control when you are effectively living as a prisoner. Democracy lets the inmates feel they are in charge of the asylum.

Turn Off, Tune Out And Drop Out

Posted on November 9, 2022 by thezman

The votes are in and they have been counted. The great red wave that everyone expected never materialized. The expectation going into the election was that the Republicans would score an easy victory, picking up about forty seats in the House and enough Senate seats to gain the majority. Because America is a haplessly corrupt society, we may never know the final results, but someone will assign final numbers and it will be a slim victory for the GOP.

Of course, the flash analysis will come pouring out of the media, most likely blaming the results on Trump and the insurrectionists. You see, just as the media warned, democracy was on the ballot and this time democracy own. The Republican side of the uniparty will happily go along with it. They will expedite their plans to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 for the good of our democracy. The whole thing is ridiculous but we are ruled by ridiculous people so this is to be expected.

The main question out of this election is about the legitimacy. Should we believe that the brain damaged hobo was the people’s choice in Pennsylvania? This is a good bellwether for this election, because John Fetterman is as close as we have come to putting a horse in a Senate. His opponent is ridiculous by normal standards, but in comparison to Fetterman he is Cicero. We are now required to pretend that a brain damaged hobo won the Pennsylvania Senate race.

The reason this particularly race is key to the legitimacy question is that there is no answer that supports the democratic system. If everything was above board and the people did vote for a brain damaged hobo, then this is proof that the public should never be trusted with such decisions. The openness to voting for a brain damaged hobo should be a disqualification to voting. On the other hand, if the vote is rigged again, then there is no reason for people to bother voting.

Of course, you can shift the question further up stream. What kind of political system produces a brain damaged hobo and a Turkish carny as the two options? Before you even get to the question of election integrity, you have to see that the system has problems far deeper than vote rigging. This turns up all over the ballot. In Georgia, the choice for Senate was between a brain damaged former football player and guy who used to hustle old black ladies for donations.

In Massachusetts, they are celebrating the first openly lesbian governor. Before Maura Healy was famously gay, she was famously stupid. Given the centrality of Massachusetts in the American empire, it is a good representation for how our democracy actually works. Politics in that state have been dominated by drunkards, perverts and degenerates for generations. The system they have imposed on the country selects for increasingly ridiculous candidates.

If we accept wholesale vote rigging is now a feature in many states, there is a limit to how much can be done. Historically, the Democratic machines used to be worth about five percent in the areas they controlled. That is enough in reasonably close elections, but not enough to overcome a wave election. All of the polling and history said this should have been a historic blowout of the Democrats, even when adjusting for the shenanigans that are now a feature of our democracy.

In other words, the results speak to something more than shenanigans. Either people skipped the election, seeing no point in it, or we are now locked into a partisan divide that makes elections pointless. Going back to Pennsylvania, either Oz lost because people thought he was just as ridiculous as Fetterman or partisanship has made elections in the state meaningless. After all, elections pivot on the ability of people to change their minds from election to election.

The current vote totals in Pennsylvania say that about five million ballots were counted in the Senate race. The governors race, which got far less attention, garnered the same number of votes. In 2020, 6.9 million votes were counted. What this says is that close to 30% of the entities that filled out ballots in the 2020 election decided that they had no reason to fill out a ballot this time. This strongly points to the conclusion that voters were given no reason to vote for either party.

Put another way, the polling shows that people are angry about the economy and the culture, but they did not see hope in either party. They were not even moved to strike out at the ruling party. Harry Truman famously said “If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time.” In this age, given the choice between a uniparty zombie and uniparty opportunist, people will choose the zombie.

The people endlessly yapping about democracy will no doubt claim that democracy won this time, but the turnout numbers suggest otherwise. The uniparty offered up a series of ridiculous choices and 30% of the voters stayed home. They refuse to follow the script because the directors showed no interest in the drama. Neither party offered a compelling reason for anyone to vote, so they were left with the partisan zombies and civic nationalist dead enders.

For the people hoping democracy lost the election, this is a good result. The exit polls show that over 75% of the vote was white. Outside of the freaks and crazies, that cohort currently has little or no representation in our democracy. The best thing they can do is boycott the process until they have a party that will represent their interests. Perhaps the midterms were the start of quiet quitting leaking into politics. Turn off, tune out and drop out of a system that has nothing to offer.

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Ivy Day In The Committee Room

Posted on November 8, 2022 by thezman

Note: I will be on the RamZPaul election roundtable tonight. This is for his subscribers, so if you want to be a part of it, pay the man five bucks. If you do not like it you can cancel and you spent less than a Starbucks coffee. It is interactive, so you are not on listen-only mode. You can have a speaking role.

The great day is upon us. It used to be that the media would roll out some long serving geezers to give a lecture about the beauty of democracy. They would wax poetic about the wonderfulness of ordinary citizens doing their civic duty. Even though we may not like the results, we had to respect the process. That was when the results never questioned the elite consensus. These days the media rolls out conspiracy theorists telling us half the voters are actually Russian bots.

That will be the story tonight. The bad guys are expected to take it on the chin as normal people manage to outnumber the dead at the ballot box. The official line now is that the only way to preserve democracy is to have a one-party state. The Los Angeles Times makes this point in their fatwah against the Republicans. The Atlantic tells us that the Republicans will immediately implement a police state after the election, followed by the return of everyone’s favorite uncle.

From a dissident perspective, this is all encouraging. The more that the people who exclusively benefit from the system disparage the system, the sooner everyone will believe them and the whole things becomes unstable. We may be at that point already, depending upon the degree of shenanigans tonight. If we see a repeat of 2020, even the civic nationalists will have to notice. As Tucker pointed out, you will know the election is rigged if brain damaged hobo wins tonight.

Rigging a midterm is much more difficult than rigging a presidential election, so the odds of mass shenanigans tonight are low. In a presidential election, you just have to stuff one ballot box per state. In the midterms, where there are 435 congressional races and up to thirty Senate races, it is a mammoth task. It is why the Republicans gained seats in the 2020 election, despite the claim that Joe Biden was the most popular man since the dawn of time.

Given the mood of the country and the staggering incompetence of the regime the last few years, it is going to be a tough night for the regime. The benchmark for bad nights is 2010 when the regime lost 63 House seats. That is probably not what we can expect tonight, as the GOP gained seats in 2020. In other words, many of the seats the regime would have lost were lost in the prior election. On the other hand, people are unusually angry this time so it could be a wild night.

Of course, from the dissident perspective this is just theater to provide some much needed amusement in these dark times. The Republicans will do nothing useful with their victory once they take control of Congress. They will have some hearings that will produce nothing but more fog to cover up the crimes of the regime. They will sign off on more money for the war machine. There will be ceremonial votes on stupid things that have no chance of success.

The way to think of the Republican party is as punishment. When normal white people get fed up with the regime, they vote against the regime. By default, this puts the Republicans in the majority, which they hate. They return the favor by finding ways to punish the people who voted for them. It is as if the regime says, “You do not like what we are doing? Well then, let the punishment begin. The beatings will stop when you people start voting the right way.”

The fact is, the worst thing to happen to white people in America has been the Republican party, with the conservative movement a close second. It was the GOP that flung open the borders in the 1980’s. It was the conservatives who convinced white people to worship corporates America. It was the Republicans who gave us the police state in the Bush years and a maniacal war machine. Of course, it is the GOP that unleashed the virus known as neoconservatism.

Keep that in mind as you enjoy the salty tears from the maladapted mutants rending their garments and gnashing their teeth tonight. It will be a fun time watching them carry on like idiots, but their sorrow will quickly turn to a venomous rage. By the time the cock crows they will be telling the Republican leadership to have their plans for retribution ready for inspection. Even so, you have to take pleasure where you can in the world, so enjoy the sight of the wicked writhing in agony tonight.

All that said, the voting process is not entirely worthless. The game may be rigged in Washington, but it is still fairly useful locally. The lesson of Covid is that local government matters more than national government. States run by civic minded white people had a much easier time of it than the states run by crazies. Ron DeSantis won his election by a handful of votes over Andrew Gillum, who was later found using meth with a group of gay men in Miami.

The thing with the local races is the margin of error is higher. You can live with a governor who is a good government civic nationalist. In Washington, these guys are turned into weapons against common decency. Locally these guys get the potholes fixed and make sure the schools are free of perverts. They may not get the tragedy that is unfolding in America, but they take care of the small quality of life things that make the road to perdition much smoother.

The other benefit of participating in local elections is it allows our people to exercise the long atrophied muscles of self-determination. The nationalization of politics, along with the financialization of the economy and the homogenization of the culture, have turned most white people into passive actors. Choices are presented on the screen. The user selects one option and hopes what pops out is what they like. The system rewards normie, so normie proliferates.

When you get involved locally, you actually have to get involved in organizing and socializing with other humans. Those old muscles used for organizing in self-defense get some use, as well as the ability to express genuine concerns to your neighbors about the issues that matter to them. For dissidents, involvement in local elections is good practice for learning how to organize. It is those who are best organized who will prosper when the system becomes unstable.

Affirmative Musings

Posted on November 1, 2022 by thezman

The upcoming midterm elections are sucking most of the oxygen out of the newsroom and what is left is consumed by the usual drama, but the big story looming on the horizon is the Supreme Court race cases. The court has been hearing oral arguments on two related cases. One involves Harvard’s anti-Asian admission policy and the other involves North Carolina’s antiwhite admission policies. Both schools are fighting to maintain their race based admissions system.

The makeup of the court and prior statements by current justices on the matter strongly suggest these polices are in trouble. In fact, it has been clear that the court has been skeptical of affirmative action for a long time, but the thinking was that legislatures would eventually solve the problem on their own. There is no way to square these policies with equality before the law, if the law says you cannot discriminate based on race, even in private matters.

People who follow the court have thought for a long time that the Supreme Court has been waiting for the right case to junk the whole regime. Now it has two cases and oral arguments suggest the court is looking to do something dramatic. Even the regime toadies on the bench expressed skepticism. The lawyers defending these policies are struggling to justify them. In this corrupt age, one can never be sure of anything, but it does look like affirmative action is doomed.

Most people assume that the court in this area has been struggling to balance equality before the law with the moral claims about race. These policies were based in good intensions to right past wrongs, but they slammed into the basic principle of equality before the law. Punishing someone alive today for things someone long dead may or may not have done is patently immoral. It is a blood libel. It is the central contradiction of what the progressives call restorative justice.

There is some truth to this but the real issue the court will eventually face with regards to this issue is the private versus the public. Where is the line between what a citizen can do as a private citizen and the duties of every citizen. In other words, where does private action end and public duty begin? Put another way, where does one’s public duty give way to private preference? This is an age old question that every human society must solve in some way.

In the case of racial discrimination, no one thinks you should be required to date outside of your race or have friends from other races. On the other hand, it is considered immoral for a restaurant to deny service on the basis of race. If you put up a sign that reads, “No Asians”, you will go to jail. Why is the first example entirely acceptable but the last is not acceptable? Why must you invite people you do not like into your business, but you can bar them from your home?

The answer, in part, has always been that the business is a public accommodation, but that was simply a way to avoid the issue. This bit of civic theology is not applied to most other areas of business. The tech companies and banks actively discriminate against white people and promote antiwhite bigots. The two universities defending their race based admissions proudly discriminate against whites and Asians in the most public of public accommodations in America.

Clearly, the public accommodation principal is a farce. This is why the court decision next spring to junk affirmative action is just the beginning. The court will probably say that the state cannot discriminate based on race. Harvard is a private college, but they get government grants and their students get government loans, so current law makes them a government entity. At least it makes them subject to the same limitations that the law places on government institutions.

Harvard could simply stop taking government money. Religious schools have taken this road to avoid anti-Christian discrimination. Hillsdale College famously foregoes government money. Harvard could do the same and then fight this fight in the courts all over again, but this time as a private entity. The question at that point would be the question at the core of all of this. Where is the line between private rights and public duties with regards to these moral questions?

If the court were to say that a private college is free to select students by whatever criteria they choose, then they would have overturned the entirety of antidiscrimination laws, including things like hate speech and hate crimes. On the other hand, if they extended the prohibition against discrimination to the private sphere, then that would mean no one can express their preferences in private. Your dinner party would be subject to claims of discrimination.

This gets back to the public accommodation issue. Is a private college really a public accommodation when it is designed for a narrow purpose like religion? How about private clubs, which have been banned due to discrimination? Would a male-only club be allowed if it is private? At some point, a clear line has to be drawn between what is private and what is public. The real issue in these race cases is where does that line exist and how best to codify it in the law.

This raises a much larger issue, in that liberal democracy relies on morality as the spring to motivate the citizens. Aristocratic systems rely upon the desire to attain greater rank and privilege, bestowed from above. Authoritarian systems rely on fear of the people in charge of the state. A republic relies on the willingness to put the interests of the institutions ahead of private interests. Liberal democracy relies on the submission to a common morality.

If there is a line between the private and the public, it rules out a commonly held moral code to which all must submit. After all, simply going along with the latest thing to avoid trouble is different from embracing the new morality. We see this all the time with the various social fads. Being indifferent to antisemitism, for example, is unacceptable because it suggests you may not be enthusiastically opposed to it. You have to show your opposition in a public way.

If all of a sudden, we have a clear line between the public and private, it means you can oppose public morality in private, but play along when out in public. This makes public morality a polite fiction. The fact is morality only works if people either believe it or fear falling outside of it. One does not do the right thing when no one is looking if one does not think it is the right thing or fear it may be the right thing. Simply put, acknowledging the private sphere undermines democracy.

That, of course, leads to another problem. If all of a sudden, colleges have to use objective criteria to select students, everyone knows what will happen. What happens when fire departments and police departments are forced to follow suit? Even if they fashion a way around it, the implication is clear. It means that all men may be equal in the eyes of God, but they are not equal. Some are smarter, stronger, bigger, faster and this tends to track with sex and race.

The entirety of the affirmative action regime rests on the assertion that people are amorphous blobs that can be shaped into anything. Overturning affirmative action exposes this nonsense to public view. All of a sudden, the quest for diversity is nothing more than a private preference masquerading as a public good. It has no basis in reality and often contradicts reality. Another piece of the liberal democratic moral superstructure is yanked away.

No one should be deceived into thinking the court will swing a wrecking ball through the liberal democratic order. Even if they overturn the concept of affirmative action, which seems likely based on the current court, all they will have done is tip over the first domino in the process. Even so, it does suggest we may be nearing an end point to the last surviving ideology of the 20th century. Like the others, its internal contradictions will eventually succumb to the realty of the human condition.

Democratic Police State

Posted on October 27, 2022 by thezman

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If you are over the age of fifty, you remember a time when you would have been corrected, if you said America was a democracy. Conservatives would interrupt you and say that America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Liberals would say that America is a fascist police state, not a democracy. That is a small exaggeration, but the liberals were always going on about the lack of democracy. Both sides of the mainstream agreed that America was not a democracy.

Somewhere along the way, this reversed. Both sides of the increasingly narrow political consensus calls America a democracy. In fact, they compete with one another to be the most outraged by threats to our democracy. Proof that the universe has a sense of humor, our rulers would no doubt condemn all of their prior statements about America not being a democracy. This would never happen as no one would dare bring this up to them, but the point remains.

Of course, when they say democracy they mean liberal democracy, rather than direct democracy, which is impossible outside of small exceptions. By definition this means elections between distinct political parties, the rule of law, open debate about the issues of the day, a market economy, private property and the equal protection of the natural rights of all citizens. In other words, liberal democracy is representative democracy bounded by the natural rights of the people.

That last part is the critical piece. The point of the system is to not only give the people a say in who governs them but to make sure the people in power respect and defend the natural rights of the people. Otherwise, there would be no point in having elections for representatives to a parliament. It would be like giving the condemned the right to choose their executioner. The word “democracy” as currently understood means the defense of your rights.

The thing is, as the use of the word democracy has exploded, respect for the basic rights of citizens has sharply declined. It is not just the in the areas that can be debated, but the most fundamental rights of people. There will always be a debate about the use of private property at the fringes. For example, an you build a factory on your property located in a suburban neighborhood? That is a different matter from your basic right to own your labor and the fruits of your labor.

Take for example voting. Back when we called America a republic or a fascist police state, voting was orderly and mostly above board. You showed up to vote on the day of the election, identified yourself, voted and that was it. Maybe you had to stand in line for an hour if you went at the wrong time. Now that we have democracy, voting is a mess and the results are not known for days, sometimes weeks. Worse yet, no one can trust that the results are on the level.

Probably the greatest violation of our rights in this new fangled democracy is in the area of speech, which is under attack by the people preaching democracy. Kanye West is being systematically destroyed by the defenders of democracy because he says things they do not like. The defenders of democracy tell us we are supposed to cheer their coordinated assault on the man’s ability to exist, because he is a threat to democracy for foolishly sharing his opinions in public.

This war of speech has led to a war on property. PayPal recently announced a scheme to steal the property of their customers if those customers said anything that PayPal does not like. They had to backtrack on that scheme, but the mere fact that they thought they could do it is the point. They are not alone in this. The federal government thinks it can willy-nilly take money from employees of regulated firms if those firms fall afoul of the accounting rules governing public firms.

Before anyone thinks that this extrajudicial seizing of property will not withstand court challenge, take a look at the courts. The high profile police cases in Minnesota provide a clear understanding of how the courts have been corrupted. All similar cases involving police shootings. The results make clear that the foundational liberal concept of equality before the law no longer exists in our democracy. One can find hundreds of such examples that are now the rule.

Of course, the most basic right of all is self-defense. In most of the Western democracies self-defense is now illegal. This is a typical example of how protecting your life in your home is prohibited in Europe. Americans assume this cannot happen here, but Kyle Rittenhouse is a free man only because he drew the right judge and happened to be in one of remaining civilized parts of Wisconsin. If that had happened in a place fond of democracy, he would be on death row.

Self-defense arises from the bedrock belief that you own you. The entirety of the liberal tradition rests on this assertion. Even Karl Marx, a man not fond of private property, argued that the basic right of every man is that he owns himself. The past two years people were forced to take medicines against their will in the name of protecting our democracy from Covid. If you no longer have the right to control your body, then you have no rights at all.

None of this should be surprising. For most of human history people understood that democracy was a nice word for mob rule. In a mob, you have no rights other than those provided by the mob at any one time. You are always subject to the whims of the mob and those who can manipulate them. Therefore, as the talk of democracy has increased, the respect for basic rights has decreased. It turns out that democracy and a police state look a lot alike.

Some Regimeology

Posted on October 26, 2022 by thezman

Regimeology is a concept that needs much broader interest, as it is becoming an essential tool to understanding the current age. As the regime blacks out its windows and boards up the exits, the only way to understand what is happening inside the black box that is the ruling elite is to analyze the actions and media statements to then tease out some explanation for what we can observe. Like Kremlinology, it is the only tool we have to understand what is happening inside the system.

We have something new to analyze. The so-called progressive caucus sent a letter to the White House and the senior members of the inner party suggesting they were not onboard with the Ukraine war. They were careful to not break with official dogma on the war, but they were signaling to their supporters that they may at some point begin to question Ukraine policy. It was a very tepid bit of pushback, but they made the letter public so their fans could see it.

The reason they did this is the antiwar left is freaking out about the war and the fact that no one in the party they support is opposing it. The Bernie Sanders wing is supposed to be opposed to these wars and the machine behind them. Yet in this case they are silently nodding along with the warmongers. A group of antiwar people ambushed Sandy Cortez at an event where she was spouting neocon lines about the war and the resulting video was a huge embarrassment for her.

It was a nice little peak inside how the regime uses the far left to manipulate the various tribes that make up the Democratic coalition. They let these people speak against regime policy as a pressure release, but the unwritten rule is they can never threaten to block regime policy. It is the same theater the outer party uses to keep conservatives showing up to the polls. The guys at Trump rallies wearing tricorn hats are not the only chumps exploited by this system.

The interesting bit here is how quickly the hammer came down. The Biden White House and senior party members held an emergency meeting and then threatened the progressive caucus with death if they did not recant. We do not know the exact nature of the threats, but the speed with which the apostates recanted and their groveling tone suggest genuine fear. Whatever was said to them was serious enough to have them groveling in public within hours.

Just in case anyone missed the point, the regime then sent Bernie Sanders out to chastise the progressives for being wrong. Sanders has spent his life railing against the military industrial complex. He has opposed every military action, even those sponsored by his party. Now he sounds like Bill Kristol after a few too many drinks. Bernie is not just supporting the war; he is supporting the war dogma behind it. He felt he needed to get that out into the public domain.

The old internet meme about knowing who is in charge by thinking about who you are not allowed to criticize works here. If you want to know what it is important to the regime, think about what cannot be questioned. It is clear that they will tolerate no dissent on Ukraine policy, not even from the people they use to manipulate the left-wing activist class. In other words, they are willing to lose the support of their activist base in order to defend their Ukraine policy.

This is why the outer party has been silent on the war. There is no support for the Ukraine war policy, so the opposition party should be waving this around as part of the argument against their opponents. Most Americans would like to see a negotiated settlement to a problem they do not think is our problem. Despite the overwhelming support for a moderate position, everyone in the outer party is just as extreme as everyone in the inner party.

The question is why has the ruling class pushed all of their chips into the middle of the table on this issue? Objectively it is a bad bet. Ukraine is a backward and deeply corrupt country with no real chance of winning this war. The only reason it has gone this far is some version of why Bolshevism succeeded. The old line was that communism was the result of Jewish brains, Latvian swords and Russian stupidity. This war is the product of neocon paranoia, American arms and Russian stupidity.

That may be one clue as to why Washington is obsessed with this war. It is the last stand for the post-Cold War consensus and the neocon place within it. A settlement with the Russians on Ukraine would lead to a settlement on many other issues, like the wars against Syria and Iran. If you can make a deal with the Russians in one area, then there is no reason to not make a deal in other areas. In other words, the neocons need Russia as the eternal enemy in order to exist.

Another possible reason is the general paranoia of the aging leadership. Old people in power naturally get suspicious of the next generation. Look around Washington and across the board you see ossified geezers locked in place. Rather than the paranoia of one or two fossils it is a culture of paranoia among a gerontocracy. The Ukraine war just happens to be the issue through which they are exercising their intolerance of dissent, but it could be any issue.

Of course, there is always graft. Hundreds of billions are flowing into what is now a giant money laundering operation. This is the bust out of all bust outs and every serious player in Washington is getting a taste. The only place more dangerous than the area between a principled conservative and money is the area between a committed progressive and the same pile of money. As the saying goes, never mess with a man’s money or his women. Got that Jack?

Regardless, it suggests that the regime sees this war as one they cannot afford to lose, much in the same way Washington viewed Vietnam fifty years ago. Back then, that worthless backwater was the hill to die on for reasons no one could explain, but no one was allowed to question until it was too late. It is ironic that a generation that was born in the protests against the Vietnam war is closing the show by making the same errors policy makers made with regards to Vietnam policy.

Midterm Musings

Posted on October 25, 2022 by thezman

The midterm election is two weeks away and we are seeing the predictable pattern in the polling and news coverage. Whenever there is a Democrat in the White House, the regime media works feverishly to convince everyone he is the next Lincoln, but the voters think otherwise. Fake polls are released claiming the president is more popular than sex and the media is full of stories about doomed Republicans. Then autumn hits and everything swings the other way.

This pattern started in 1994. Bill Clinton was some weird mash up of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Al Goldstein. Supposedly, everyone loved Bill Clinton, even most Republican voters. In fairness, most people probably did like Bill Clinton as a picaresque character. They feared and loathed his deranged old lady, so they ran to the nearest Republican at the first opportunity. The GOP picked up eight Senate seats and 54 House seats in a sea change election.

This pattern did not hold in 2002, when newly minted president George W Bush went into his first midterm. The media spent a lot of time carefully explaining how this mumbling fellow was Hitler, but no one fell for it. His endless slobbering over Israel was probably the clue. That and the fact that his administration had more Jews in it than an accounting convention. The Republicans actually picked up a few Senate seats and lost just one House seat.

Fast forward to 2010 and they are back to the old tricks. Black Jesus is in the White House and the media is carefully explaining to white people that voting against his party was the most racist thing you could do. Of course, the Republicans agreed with them because that is what they always do. In a rare example of white people breaking from their conditioning, they risked being called racist and voted Republican. The GOP picked up seven Senate seats and 63 House seats.

Here we are with another Democrat in the White House and it is looking like another example of the pattern. The races that were allegedly competitive, like the Florida governor’s race, are not going to be close. Ron DeSantis is going to cruise to victory and probably carry a lot of Republicans with him. Firebrand girl boss Kari Lake was supposedly a long shot, but now it appears she will win that race. In fact, Arizona may go all Republican this cycle.

Then you have the weird races. In 1994 and 2010 there were races in areas no one thought would be competitive that were suddenly competitive. The same thing is happening this time around. Tiffany Smiley is neck-and-neck with grizzled hag Patty Murray in Washington state. The Oregon governor’s race is getting tight and the Michigan governor’s race could be close. The narrative makers are struggling to convince their core audience that the narratives are true.

What all of this points to is a big night for the Republicans and a glum night for the regime toadies and sycophants. The question is the numbers. Demographics and vote rigging probably limit the damage. The best estimate for the Republicans is 40-50 seats in the House and a one or two seat majority in the Senate. Given the condition of the president and the world, this red wave should dwarf the previous red waves, but there is no getting around the demographic issue.

As the New York Times helpfully points out, this election is a rear guard action by white America in response to the Great Replacement. The same people who repeatedly demand you say that demographic replacement is a conspiracy theory are consoling their readers with the knowledge that white people will be gone soon. Of course, their readers are uniformly white, but that is a detail. Hating white people is too important to worry about such trivialities.

They are not entirely wrong, of course. The white portion of the vote is in sharp decline and will be a minority of the vote in a generation. It will remain the biggest bloc so if it becomes racially aware, then it is big trouble for the regime, which is why they are so invested in preventing that from happening. In order to keep this system running, they need whites on opposite sides. That way the other tribes become the deciding vote and they are easy for the regime to manipulate.

There is another thing that is becoming clear. The quality of the options, like the quality of popular culture, is in steep decline. Pennsylvania is leading the way, with a Senate race featuring a brain damaged hobo and a Turkish carny. Georgia is not far behind, featuring two black guys with “colorful” histories. Serious adults are starved for serious choices at the ballot box, so they are left with symbolic ones. Voting Republican is now the same as voting none of the above.

From the dissident perspective, the election results are meaningless, as the first step along the dissident trail is realizing the game is rigged. Elections in a liberal democracy are always heads they win, tails you lose. The Democrats are “heads” and the Republicans are “tails”, reflecting the relationship of the parties. It is another example of how the universe has a sense of humor. White people vote Republican only to be finked on by the Republicans whenever they win an election.

Even so, there is the entertainment quality. Over the next two weeks the narrative shops will be tasked with producing new versions of reality. Fragile old geezers like Nancy Pelosi will be sent out to stumble through the latest message. Joe Biden will be sent out to shake hands with invisible people and fondle little girls in public, while reminding everyone he should be in a home. Democracy is a theater that always ends in the theater of the absurd.

That said, there are little green shoots from the dissident perspective. Guys like J. D. Vance and Blake Masters have managed to shrug off the racism stuff, which suggests it is losing it power over white people. Doug Mastriano is probably as close to a dissident candidate running and he is doing well, despite being called all the usual scare words by the usual suspects. The election results will not matter in the short term, but they point to positive long term trends for dissidents.

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