Jesus Hates Immigration

Posted on September 16, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the demographic collapse playing out in the workforce, a post about how the Tenet Media case looks like a political op and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Would Jesus hate the cat memes that have spread across the internet in response to the Haitian problem in Springfield Ohio? Some people think so. Progressive cranks have responded to this by claiming it is your Christian duty to welcome these people into your homes. Granted, these people are not sincere but people who claim to be Christians of some sort often agree with them. They claim Scripture requires the faithful to treat everyone equally, as God’s children.

This is the official position of the Catholic Church. The Pope is a big fan of open borders and mass immigration. It is not just for theological reasons. One argument is that the migrants from the global south are Catholics or could become Catholic. Protestant churches make similar claims. Immigration is seen by main stream churches as a solution to their empty pews. Some claim that the Haitian migrants have revitalized the churches in the Springfield Ohio area.

Of course, the people making these claims can find in Scripture what they need to support their position as the morally correct one. Ephesians says, “you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.” Leviticus says, “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself”. Hebrews says you must show hospitality to strangers and modern Hebrews say you should never notice this.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

The place to start is where Christianity starts. The “open borders Christians” are correct when they say these Haitians are God’s children, no different from the fifth-generation Irish guy or the guy who traces his line to the Mayflower. Fundamental to the Christian faith is that we are God’s creation and humans are made in God’s image. Our ability to understand God at all rests on the assumption that he possesses all the qualities we possess as human beings.

From this we can draw one obvious conclusion. We have reason and free will, thus God intended for us to use our reason and free will. God does not make mistakes, at least this is true for the New Testament God. The God of the Hebrew Bible is not as confident, so maybe he was still prone to error. Regardless, God gave us, and only us, free will and reason, so it must have been on purpose and for a reason. The only possible reason is to use them.

The other thing that we know, if we are all God’s creation, is that all men are God’s property for the same reason man can have property. God owns himself, so God owns that which he has created. He gave man dominion over the earth and all of the living creatures on it, but he did not grant ownership. God may be an absentee landlord, as many have asserted, but he is still the landlord, which means he still owns what he created, including mankind.

This is the basis of Christian ethics. What we ought and ought not do is based on the idea that we are all God’s property. Theft is wrong because when you steal the labor of another man, you are harming God’s property. On the other hand, punishing someone for theft, is acting on God’s behalf to right the wrong done to God. It is why we think hunting for food is perfectly acceptable. Man needs to eat, and God gave us domain over the animals. Hunting for sport, however, is complicated.

The logic of Christianity tells us that Jesus would be appalled by what is happening in towns like Springfield Ohio. Rounding up Haitians and dumping them into unsuspecting towns around North America does nothing to reduce the damage done to God’s most precious property, mankind. In fact, it increases the damage. Worse yet, this damage is done for the benefit of the money changers responsible for it. What we see happening with immigration is a deliberate offense to the Christian God.

This is even more obvious when we remember that we have reason and free for the sole purpose of using it. If we wanted to help Haiti, there are ways we could improve the conditions on the island without harming cat owners in Ohio. We could take over the island, set up a local dictator tasked with distributing food and medicine. We could round up the Haitians and send them to Africa, where they have the minimum infrastructure needed to maintain an African population.

The point of all this is that Christian ethics is about reducing the damage to God’s property, which is primarily mankind, but also that which mankind has been granted dominion, the earth, and its inhabitants. Mankind has reason and free will in order to figure out the best way to act in order to minimize the damage to God’s property, so we are free to debate the issue. We must be free to debate the issue. Cherry picking lines from Scripture to shut down debate is therefore immoral.

More important, cherry-picking lines from Scripture so that you can claim a sense of compliance with the will of God, at the expense of God’s property, as in the damage done by immigration, violates the foundational logic of Christianity. If Jesus were here today, he would not only flip over the tables in the offices of the people responsible for unchecked immigration, but he would also whip the people waving around their Bibles in support of it. Jesus would hate them.

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Narrative Doubt

Posted on September 12, 2024 by thezman

An often-ignored lesson of the Roman Empire is that exhausted institutions can stagger on for a long time on inertia. As long as there is nothing ready or able to replace it, the thing can carry on like a shuffling zombie. The Crisis of the Third Century should have collapsed the Roman Empire, but there was nothing around to replace it, so it could finally right itself enough to stagger on for another two centuries. Even a terrible imperial order was better than no order at all.

The same can be said for American conservatism. It has been dead as an intellectual endeavor for a long time, but it staggers on, trying to play the role for which it evolved in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. The audience for its content is limited to the nursing homes and retirement villages of America. Even in Washington, where it has functioned as a usefully idiotic opposition to the people we call the left, it has fallen on hard times. Conservative Inc. no longer has a raison d’etre.

Superficially, the decline of American conservatism is a remarkable thing, given its status at the turn of the century. Despite the Clinton years, conservatism still seemed to be driving the conversation in Washington. The failure of the first two years of the Clinton administration looked like proof that America was a conservative country and Conservative Inc represented the center of American politics. Today it is a terminal patient living out its last days as relatives look at their watches.

A level below the surface, there is the claim made by the people we still call the left that conservatism lost its reason to exist at the end of the Cold War. The argument they made back then was that Conservative Inc primarily existed as an opposition to communism, at home and abroad. The death of the Soviet Union meant conservatism no longer had an enemy. It was the dog that caught the car. Unless it could find a new purpose, it was following communism into the dustbin of history.

At the time this seemed true enough, but as we know conservatism easily found new bogey men abroad and the people we call the left were happy to produce new sticks for conservatives to chase domestically. We got the war on terror, the police state, and the old bogeyman of racism. What the fall of communism did was remove the veil of ignorance so we could see the true purpose of conservatism. It was the usefully idiotic opposition to the prevailing orthodoxy.

The trouble is conservatism was too good at the role of easily beatable opponent, which is why Donald Trump rose to power in 2016. It turns out that they got so good at being an easily beatable opponent that a flippant real estate mogul and reality television star was able to steamroll through the party’s A-list candidates and did so in a way that discredited the institution they represented. Conservatism was a house of cards and Trump was able to huff and puff and blow that house down.

While it is true that American conservatism is dead as an intellectual and organizational force, it still maintains its institutions and access to billions in donations. The reason for that is nothing has come along to replace it. There are efforts underway to fill that role either as willing punching bag or loyal opposition, but so far Conservative Inc. has kept a firm grip on the money spigot. As long as they have access to billions, they can play the political version of Blanche DuBois for as long as they like.

Nothing lasts forever and you get a sense of it in this post from one of the minor zombies shuffling about the cobwebbed halls of Conservative Inc. It is a version of the point-and-shriek we got from the usual suspects when Tucker Carlson had Darryl Cooper on to talk about historical narratives. We get the ritualized emotivism these guys always put at the top of their posts to let their masters know they are not going to be any trouble and then it is the standard attack on Candace Owens.

What the post reveals is that these people do not see what is coming next. The reason Tucker had Cooper on his show was not to make the case for why Churchill was a villain, but to open the conversation about the official narrative of the Second World War and by extension the American century. In other words, the point was not to provide an alternative history or answer reasonable questions about important events of the official narrative, but to legitimize questioning of it.

The official orthodoxy of this moment rests on the official narrative of the twentieth century and America’s role in it. It is what permits the toppling of statues and the desecration of graves. The narrative of the American century has allowed for a rewriting of the American story in such a way that it not only justifies the official morality of this age but forbids the questioning if it. Once people start questioning the story, it is not long until they question the point of the story.

Candace Owens is not an intellectual or even a serious political actor, but she is enormously popular with the sorts of people who used to follow the lead of conservative stars and who want to believe they are standing on the moral high ground. People like Candace Owens not only validate their oppositions to the fruits of the official narrative, but she also makes them feel good about questioning the narrative itself. Questioning the official narrative strikes at the cultural heart of the regime.

The writer of that post does not understand any of this because he lacks the intellect and the necessary curiosity. The reason conservatism got so good at being an easily beatable opponent is they selected for the type of people who enjoy being on the losing end of every fight. Critical to the slave morality of conservatism is a blinkered shortsightedness focused only on the immediate goal of currying favor with the master, or at least gaining her sympathy.

Like the Roman Empire, conservatism staggers on, mostly on the fumes of past glory, but the signs of collapse are showing. In the third century, it was the slow decentralization of power that foreshadowed the end of empire. In this age, it is the slow awakening from the myth of the twentieth century that foreshadows not only the end of conservatism but the end of the regime itself. That is the thing about collapse. The master does not see it coming, but neither do the slaves.

The War Of Politics

Posted on September 11, 2024 by thezman

“War is a continuation of politics by other means” is a famous quote attributed to Carl von Clausewitz, a 19th century Prussian military theorist. This line is often used to end discussion about the causes of a war, rather than to understand the motivations of both sides, but that is the way to use it. Wars are not just about geopolitics, the disputes between the combatants, but the internal politics of the parties. In most cases, the parties to a war are in the war due to internal political reasons.

We see this with the Ukraine war. For Russia, decades of meddling around the border of the Russian Federation had reached a critical point internally. The pro-Western wing of the Russian political class had maintained that they could deal with elements in the West to address the concerns of Russia. The realist wing argued that there was no dealing with Washington, as they were implacably anti-Russian. The oligarchs sided with the former for financial reasons.

The provocations by the Biden administration along with the superheated rhetoric aimed at Putin changed the internal dynamics of Russian politics. On the one hand, this vindicated the position of the realists. They said all along that there was no way to make a deal with Washington, because Washington was not honest. It is impossible to deal with people who come to the table in bad faith. Any deal you make with them will fall apart because they will never abide by it.

Proof of this was when Angela Merkel said in an interview that the Minsk agreements over the disputed areas in eastern Ukraine were just a stalling tactic so the West could arm Ukraine for a war with Russia. This statement was done to humiliate Putin within the Russian political elite. This was when the West was sure that sanctions would topple the Russian state, so it was a bit of anticipatory celebration expecting that Putin would be out of power at any minute.

Instead, it had the opposite effect. The reason for this is both wings of the Russian political class wanted a peaceful solution to the Ukraine issue. They just disagreed about the best course. Western behavior leading up to the war and throughout the war has convinced both wings that peace can only come through the defeat of the NATO backed army in Ukraine. In other words, Russian politics brought war to their border, but now Russian politics control the prosecution of the war.

That should have been clear to the West in 2022 when the Russians reorganized their army and military industrial complex in response to the collapse of the Istanbul negotiators that were skuttled by Washington. The competition with the West had changed, so the war with the West was changing. The Russians settled in for a long war of attrition against the Ukraine army, society, and the West. The Ukraine war was now part of a larger global conflict with the West.

This is where the war reveals things about politics in the West. It was clear by the end of 2022 that there was no scenario in which the Ukrainians defeated the Russians militarily, so the set of possible outcomes was limited to a total defeat of Ukraine or some sort of negotiated settlement. This is what realists like John Mearsheimer argued even before the war started. The trouble is, there are no realists in Washington or the European capitals, at least none with influence.

Instead, foreign policy is controlled by a coalition of ideological zealots and infantilized managers who are easily led by the zealots. They do this by creating pleasing narratives that always end with the managerial elite coming out as Churchill in this new version of the last world war. Every new scheme to win the war always ends with some Western political figure giving the great speech announcing the triumph of the forces of good over the forces of evil.

As an aside, it is why the usual suspects broke out in hives when Tucker Carlson had on his show a historian who questions the role of Churchill. They immediately started calling Cooper and Carlson Nazis, not because either of them defended Hitler or the Nazis, but because they questioned the archetypical hero of the modern political narrative, the figure every managerial striver sees in the mirror. Cooper did not just question the narrative, but the point of the narrative.

That aside, we see this political dynamic in the conduct of the war. The Western political class is the audience, demanding a good war narrative. The ideologues are the producers, who collaborate with the writers and show runners in Ukraine. Together they create narratives like the Great Ukraine Counter Offensive of 2023 or now The Great Kursk Offensive for the fans in the political class. The military logic of these schemes does not matter, because it is all about the politics of the West.

Now that The Great Kursk Offensive has turned into a military disaster for Ukraine, the series will be cancelled, so the usual suspects are busy working on a new show to put on for the Western political class. This time it will probably include firing long range missiles into Russia to “humiliate the Putin!” You see, despite it all, the main plot line says that in the end, someone in the West will be the idealized Churchill, triumphing over Putin, who they have bizarrely cast as their Hitler.

This war has also altered geopolitics. The Chinese, who had a similar dynamic in their political elite as the Russians, experienced a similar evolution in thought about how they deal with the West, especially Washington. The Chinese have been quite blunt in their assessment of Washington. They have repeatedly told high ranking Biden officials that the constant lying is an impediment to good relations. If the Chinese think your candor is a problem, you have a serious problem with honesty.

Returning to Clausewitz, this war has allowed Russia and China to reorient global politics away from the unipolar, post-Cold war arrangements toward a multipolar world based in regional interests. This has been made possible by the war exposing the superciliousness of Western political leaders, but also the childish ignorance of the people allegedly making policy in the West. The world is starting to see the West as a setting sun and men close their doors to the setting sun.

The Last Debates

Posted on September 10, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winners & Losers

Posted on September 4, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto

Posted on September 2, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Collective Theater Of The Mind

Posted on August 30, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abortion Inc.

Posted on August 27, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Ain’t It

Posted on August 21, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boozy Brown Tinkerbell

Posted on August 20, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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