Chipping Away At The Old Order

Posted on January 9, 2024 by thezman

Modern dissidents argue that the chain of causality starts with biology, which bounds the culture of a people. That culture grows the institutions which define the politics and economics of society. Replace half the population of Haiti with Japanese people and you end up with a vastly different society. The Japanese would seize control of the country, impose their will and the result would be a political-economy that is nothing like anything that could exist in an African run society.

While this is a good rule of thumb for general politics, it falls apart when there is a revolution in technology. The Industrial Revolution started in England and spread to the European continent. It quickly resulted in massive cultural changes as people moved from the countryside to the cities to work in factories. It is a great example of how revolutionary technological changes can reverse the flow of the great chain of causality as the new technology is absorbed by the society.

Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not start in England by luck. The slow transformation of the people, resulting in lots of smart people looking to solve old problems, is the counter to this claim. The Industrial Revolution was the result of the changes in the European population that started in the Middle Ages. It was biology that brought about the technological revolution, so one can argue that the great chain of causality holds up even in revolutionary moments.

Putting that aside, the West is at the end of one of those revolutions, which is the microprocessor revolution. The way we live today is very different from how we lived fifty years ago, at least when it comes to how we interact with one another and how individuals interact with society. Fifty years ago, this post would not be written because there would be no way to see it even if it was written. Fifty years ago, information was relatively scarce, while today it is unlimited.

This is what makes the present plagiarism panic in the academy something more than just a tempest in a teapot. Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing. Before publishing, many hands edited and retyped those words. The whole process moved much slower, so getting caught was also much easier.

That changed with technology, but the editing and fact checking process did not change with the new technology. Instead, it atrophied. The new technology turned the flow of written material into a firehose and those old processes were not able to keep up with the volume. Not only that, the bottlenecks were blown open like a raging river blasting through a damn. Today written content flows without restriction and without any serious scrutiny in the modern academy.

There is another issue here. Technology has created a new conception of the public domain that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Wikipedia, for example, is technically not a publisher and it has no authors. It is a crowdsourced repository of information that is explicitly intended to be in the public domain. The internet itself is the repository of all human knowledge now. Again, most of it is intended to be freely available to whoever is interested, because it is the public domain.

Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights. You produce a written work using your labor so you have an ownership claim to it. If on the other hand, you give it away freely on the internet or post it on a site like Wikipedia, do you still own it? Can it be stolen when your clear intent is to share it with the world, perhaps anonymously? Throw in the fact that these sources change over time and the issue gets quite murky.

Then you have the fact that there are only so many ways to state things, especially those that are part of a contextual reality. Claudine Gay got in trouble for repeating what amounts to echolalic babbling that defines her field of study. There are only so many ways to preach against whiteness, so by now every way to state the simplistic ideas within that field have been done many times. No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.

That is what will be revealed by these efforts to scan the works of academics for plagiarism using modern tools. The rigid conformity in most of these fields has led to a narrowing of what is safe to write in a paper. If everyone was fastidious about siting the work of others, all new papers would be so littered with citations that the index would be longer than the paper. The plagiarism hunters will find they are overwhelmed with examples to the point where it becomes meaningless.

This brings up another issue. The culture of the internet from the very beginning was to be open and communal. Long before the scolds were allowed online, the culture of the internet was anarchic. If you posted something online it was fair game. Anyone could use it and modify it to their purposes. Post a pic of yourself on vacation and it could end up being used by someone posting about that vacation spot. No one thought or thinks about who owns a pic, a meme or anything that is online.

In other words, the culture of the internet has changed the culture in general as people spend so much time online. Someone using a picture of your house, for example, only matters if their intent is to cause you harm or they unintentionally create a problem for you, like having a mob show up at your door. No one contacts the real estate sites demanding that old images of their house be taken down. Can you even do this, even if you had the desire? Would a court side with you?

Bill Ackman’s wife allegedly copied from Wikipedia. How can we know this when it is possible the Wiki contributor copied from Mx. Ackman? Maybe she cribbed from some third source that the Wiki author also used. Is this even copying when the whole point of the site is to collect up information for public consumption? Again, can you steal something that is made freely available? Plagiarism assumes intent and the lack of consent, which is missing in this example.

On top of all this, the biggest players in the technology space rely on ambiguous definitions of what constitutes property. They capture all sorts of things about you and your behavior and sell it to corporations and governments. They argue it is theirs to sell because you do not technically own your habits and tastes. An emerging quality of the ruling elite is an abandonment of the old concepts of ownership. You no longer own you, at least not in the traditional sense of it.

Much is said about the ideological nature of the managerial elite, but it may be that their fanaticism is simply a defense mechanism. As technology continues to erode the old rules, their ideological fervor fills the void. The free flow of information is not opening and democratizing society, but instead leading to an authoritarian reaction by the managerial elite to the threats technology brings to the old rules. Like the steam engine, the microprocessor promises to overthrow the old order.

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DIE Another Day

Posted on January 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: There was no Sunday podcast this week. I got back from the new house and was simply too tired to do it. I may put the Sunday show on ice until I get the house finished, which means doing something else in its place. Behind the green door, there were two written items this week. A post about my trip to the witchdoctor and post about the aesthetics of modern cars. Subscribe here or here.

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the massive food fight that erupted among the worst people over how the allegedly best people cheat like crazy. Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard, was supposed to be a proof of concept for the egalitarian blank slate religion of the Cloud People. In reality she was as synthetic as their empathy for people of color. Claudine Gay was a modern lawn jockey. Instead of standing on their lawn with a lantern, she held up her diplomas.

Then we have Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund guy who started this when Gay made unpleasant noises about Israel. He first threatened to withdraw funding and when that did not work, he went after her credentials. In a world of credentialism this was a declaration of war on the system. Soon the internet dug into Gay’s background and found examples of alleged plagiarism. Harvard then demoted her to being a million dollar a year political science instructor.

In response, MIT decided to get into the fight, and they leaked dirt to Business Insider about Ackman’s wife, who supposedly had a cut and paste problem too. It is ironic that people who are immune to the charge of hypocrisy thought they could use the charge of hypocrisy against people famously immune from the charge of hypocrisy. It is an example of how the hive mind operates. Once Ackman was declared outside the hive, he was no different from Trump or Hitler to the hive.

For his part, Ackman has declared a jihad against MIT. He is asking for volunteers to scan the academic work of everyone at MIT. He has also offered to fund the use of technology to expedite the process. Interestingly, the MIT president said all the same things as the Harvard and Penn presidents about Israel, but she has been immune from criticism to this point. Perhaps she thought the force field was not enough to protect her, so she launched this preemptive strike.

Again, it is hard not to enjoy this poo-flinging contest, but it obscures a reality at the heart of the whole thing. That is the logic of the egalitarian religion must lead them to these self-destructive ends. The reason for that is there is no way to reach the stated goals of this new religion without dismantling the standards and practices of the Western society that made the modern university possible. In other words, to dismantle whiteness they must dispense with the rules of whiteness.

The only reason Claudine Gay can exist is if the rules of the academy are changed to make it possible for her to exist. All along the way her mostly white advisors cut corners for her so she could move along through the system. They do this because it was the path of least resistance, but also for self-interest. They could subtly mention how they were once the advisor of this shining example of the new religion. This is social capital an academic can use for status seeking.

Systemic rule breaking is not confined to the grievance studies areas. The need to acquire totems of the new religion is everywhere on campus. The chemistry department at Rice University, for example, spends scarce resources on thirty different diversity and inclusion programs. The department now offers a for-credit course in Afrochemistry, which is taught by this woman. She will no doubt be lifted up on the shoulders of academics and socially promoted into a leadership role.

This all sounds fine except that when you populate your new system with people who are both incompetent and entitled, the results of that system will reflect this. The long running discussion about the decline of elite universities is centered around the fact the graduates are often astoundingly incompetent. The truth is, they may be incompetent at traditional things, but they are stars at the rules of the new system. The products of dismantling whiteness are good at dismantling whiteness.

The reason we have a crisis of competence in America is the managerial system is slowly being taken over by people who are only good at gaming the system to produce diverse, equitable and inclusive results. The managerial system is slowly being bent to the goal of denying its own existence. No one would dare hire Brooke Johnson to do chemistry, but she plays a role in who gets hired to do chemistry. Get enough Brooke Johnsons and Claudine Gays and the system begins to fail.

All of this was inevitable as soon as the moralizers of the mid-twentieth century declared a fatwa against nature. Once it was immoral to notice natural inequality and the fixed nature of people, the old system was doomed. The only permissible explanation for the persistent inequality was to blame the system and that meant destroying the system was the only moral path forward. The social promotion system is about maintaining the myth of egalitarianism.

That also means there is no way out for these elite colleges. Bill Ackman can expose all of them as plagiarists, cheats, and fools, but nothing will change because nothing can change as long as the core tenets of the faith remain. Unless Bill Ackman has a new religion for these people to embrace, they will burn the whole system to the ground before abandoning diversity, equity, and inclusion. This means the collapse of the university system is inevitable.

Fifth Column State

Posted on January 4, 2024 by thezman

No one knows for sure who coined the term “fifth column” but it seems to have originated in Spain during the civil war. Legend has it that Franco said in a telegram that there were four Nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column waiting to attack from the inside. Given that the telegram was discovered long after the phrase was in use suggests another source, but maybe Franco used this phrasing in other formats and that is how it got into circulation.

A fifth column is a group of people that conspire to undermine a larger group from within by disguising themselves as supporters. It is not just random individuals who disagree with official policy, like protestors. The members of the fifth column coordinate their efforts with an outside group, usually an enemy of the group. Unlike spies, who are usually motivated by greed or resentment, the members of the fifth column have a primary loyalty to the outside group for whom they work.

This is all relevant today as the client list of Jeffrey Epstein makes the rounds and is used by partisans in the usual partisan way. Lost in the usual bellowing is the fact that Epstein was an agent of a foreign state. The most likely explanation for his existence is that he was paid to get dirt on prominent Americans. He was running what people in the wilderness of mirrors call a honey trap. He used girls and boys to play on the sexual weaknesses of his targets on his island in the Caribbean.

Of course, the foreign state for whom Epstein worked was Israel. His long-time paramour was Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of Ian Robert Maxwell, whose real name was Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch. Maxwell was a high-level intelligence officer for Mossad his entire life. So high level, in fact, that when he died, all of the living leaders of Israel showed up at his burial. More important, six former heads of Mossad were there, and Maxwell was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

It could very well be a one in six million coincidence that Epstein was hooked up with the daughter of the most prominent spy in Israeli history, but the law of parsimony says that this was not a coincidence. It does not take long to see gaps in Epstein’s official biography, so we know he was not a middling school teacher who suddenly discovered he was an investment genius. Someone was underwriting his operation, and the most likely culprit is the state of Israel.

Espionage is as old as nations, so it should come as no surprise that Israel spies on America and Americans. It relies on American stupidity and generosity to underwrite the Zionist project, so informational asymmetry is important to them. It is why Israel stole nuclear material from a United States company, even though it resulted in a massive contamination of an area around Pittsburgh. The Apollo Affair was just part of a program to use America to further the Zionist project.

The Epstein case and the Apollo affair have another link. Unlike most espionage cases, the people doing the treachery were not motivated by greed. The oldest and most successful way of turning someone into a spy is to give them money. As George Washington said, no man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder. Most men with secrets to sell are not particularly virtuous. In the case of Israeli spying, money was not the primary motivation for these crimes.

This is where the fifth column concept comes into the picture. One of the most aggressive and powerful lobbies in Washington is the Israel lobby. This is something everyone knows, but most people are afraid to discuss. Pat Buchanan was anathematized for pointing out the obvious. The Israel lobby does not limit itself to bribing politicians. It is everywhere in America. These documentaries (here, here) done by Al Jazeera a few years ago are a good primer.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, is one of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbying groups in America. Their primary reason to exist is to convince Americans, especially politicians, that the interests of Israel are the primary interest of America, and therefore can never be questioned. It is right there on their website, so it is not as if they are hiding it. Prominent Zionist like Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro make this precise argument every day.

Up until now, no one has cared about this as the cost of underwriting Israel was small and times were generally good. Times have changed and people are naturally wondering if a luxury item like money to Israel is a good idea. Billions in Israel funding is jammed up in Congress because the line of foreigners demanding billions is getting long and the needs of Americans are not being met. Millions of foreigners are flooding over the border and Biden is worried about Israel and Ukraine.

What all of this points to is a defect of democracy. The American concept of democracy is a continent sized town hall meeting. It is a marketplace of ideas where competing interests hash it out with one another. Since it is a marketplace, it means everything, and everyone is for sale. This is how foreign interests like the Israel lobby are able to turn the instrument of American democracy to their favor at our expense. It is also how economic elites can undermine public will.

Imagine you are the king of a country and one of your advisors, a fellow with unusual headgear, is constantly lobbying you on behalf of a principality. At first you think he just favors that prince but then you learn he is related to that prince. Not only that, but he is also part of a network that is loyal to that prince. You will have that advisor sent to the tower because that person has misrepresented himself and he has worked to undermine you to the benefit of a potential rival.

In American style democracy, this logic is flipped on its head. The people’s representatives all come with a price tag on their chest. Anyone, foreign or domestic, can buy their loyalty. The reason the Israel lobby exists at all is the system rewards those who lavish politicians with money. It is the reason that every congressman quickly moves from representative of his people to Washington to Washington’s representative to the people of his district.

It is why America is a fifth column state, because it is defined by the players who operate like fifth columns. Israel is just one of the best at the game, but every country has a similar operation going in Washington. People forget that the Chinese bankrolled the Clinton operation. Charlie Trie was just a good ol’ boy from Arkansas, when he was not a bagman for the Chinese government. When everything has a price, nothing has any value and that is what we get from our political system.

Imperial Outlook

Posted on January 3, 2024 by thezman

One of the many complaints in the brief against conservatives is that they care more about Israel than they do about the southern border. A similar complaint comes up with regards to the war in Ukraine. Professional conservatives do not care about the things that normal people think are important. Instead, professional conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, spend their days convincing normal people that the concerns of Israel or the Kagan cult matter more than the opioid problem.

While this is true, professional conservatives are not the ones spearheading this approach to politics. Look at the other side and you see the same. The people we call the Left spend their time telling the world that the mundane things that can and should be addressed by government must take a back seat to the bogeyman. Joe Biden is kicking off his campaign by visiting places where the bogeyman was seen doing the things they claim the bogeyman does.

In other words, it is not just so-called conservatives who spend their time focused on things over the rainbow. It is that our politics, in general, deliberately shifts the focus from the local and practical to the distant and obscure. No one running for anything talks about the fact that America has a $34 trillion dollar debt and that we spend almost $15,000 per person per year on medical services. America is a sick society that is becoming too broke to mend itself.

In fairness, a candidate who ran on a platform of deregulating the health care rackets and restoring order to the legal system would have no audience. Over several generations the people have been conditioned to care more about the bogeyman and Israel than their own neighborhood. A practical candidate could go into a suburb strewn with trash and illegal aliens promising to clean up both and the locals would demand to know his position on the war in Gaza or abortion.

This was not always the case. Within living memory congressional candidates would show up in their district to ask for votes. The whole “kissing babies” thing was a joke because it was a real thing that happened. Not only did politicians mingle with the voters, but office holders also responded to questions and complaints from them. Not so long-ago elected officials held town-style gatherings where normal people in the area could show up and ask questions.

Nothing like that happens now. The closest you get is Trump flying around to rural airports to hold his raucous rallies. Joe Biden will run his 2024 campaign from his beach mansion in Delaware. Occasionally they will produce a television event that makes it seem like he is in front of real people. Most likely these will be done using modern technology as he is incapable of forming a sentence now. His avatar will talk about the bogeyman and maybe Ukraine or Israel.

What we are experiencing is an inverted version of America. The founding of the country was by people who had the exact opposite view of the world. They came to the new world for selfish reasons. They did not want “freedom” or “liberty” and they did not give a damn about American values. They wanted cheap land and an opportunity to provide a better life for themselves and their family. Their patriotism, if it existed at all, was focused on the things close to them.

Well into the 19th century the typical American had little reason to care about the federal government because it was far away and did nothing that was of a great concern to the average person. The town council, on the other hand, was important because it did important things. People cared about those offices and who held them because those people had the power to do things that mattered locally, and the people were primarily focused on local matters.

The point here is that empire does not just invert the sensibilities of the ruling class but also the people in the empire. Throughout the Cold War, Finland was sandwiched between the two great empires. As a normal country with normal citizens, they focused on what was best for Finland and the Finnish people. They did not worry themselves about communism versus capitalism, other than when they needed to placate one or the other side of the Cold War.

Now that Finland has submitted itself to the empire, the primary focus of the Finnish state will be the bogey man and the enemies of the empire. Finnish politicians will feel the need to have a position on Israel. They will shake their fists at the current enemy of the empire. Meanwhile, the borders will be left open, and the social capital will be monetized and hauled away by the usual suspects, but Finns will feel good about hating the current bogeyman of the empire.

It is the nature of empire to flip the normal relationships upside down so that people focus on what is far away rather than what is near. Right now, conservatives are cheering that Harvard replaced their black lesbian president with someone who looks like he is from an antisemitic pamphlet. Meanwhile the public schools are full of pedophiles and drug dealers. No one should care about Harvard’s president, but they should care about who is running the local schools.

It very well may be that the antidote to the problems of empire is to stop thinking like the subject of an empire. When people care more about the school board elections than the presidential election, it is no longer possible for the beneficiaries of empire to frame elections around the issues of empire. Imagine if the next GOP debate was about the color of crime rather than how much everyone loves Israel. Of course, no one currently in the race would qualify under that system.

This is why empires must always run their course. The empire is born and soon the focus of everyone is on the maintenance of the empire. The people in the empire come to define themselves in terms of the empire. The empire then fades, and the people have to relearn how to be normal again. The empire must end before people can replace their imperial identity with something new. It is why the only true patriots are those who oppose the Global American Empire.

The Myth Of Dual Loyalty

Posted on January 2, 2024 by thezman

Over the holidays, a bit of controversy erupted when in an interview, Tucker Carlson noted that certain people, like Ben Shapiro, are much more concerned about Israel than the people of the United States. The bat signal was immediately lit, and Israel supporters started chanting about how Ben Shapiro is a patriot and Carlson’s criticism smacked of the old dual loyalty “canard” from a mythical time in America’s past when Jews were forced to live under a cloud of suspicion about their loyalty.

Because this is the media age, it was not hard to see the invisible hand of coordination in the responses from the usual suspects. Here we have Andrew Klavan posting the same thing as Ben Domenech, who posted the same thing as Kurt Schlichter who said the same this as Chris Loesch and you get the idea. A memo went out to their Twitter influencers to boost the idea of Ben Shapiro being a patriot. The object of his patriotism, however, is never mentioned.

This is an old trick to avoid the actual question. The pro-Israel lobby is not addressing the issue at the heart of Tucker’s criticism, which is that people like Ben Shapiro and his defenders care more about people in other countries than Americans. Instead, they want Tucker and his fans to address this made-up idea that Jews were subject to bigotry in the past on the grounds they have dual loyalty. Instead of addressing the point, they shift the focus to another topic.

Of course, the concept of dual loyalty itself is the result of a similar tactic used in the past to shield Zionist from criticism. The “dual loyalty” concept is a product of the 20th century, created by the Israel lobby to obscure the fact that we suddenly had this new force in politics that demanded the government care more about the interests of Israel than the interests of Americans. People who raised questions about the Israel lobby got smeared as antisemites.

For most of American history and probably European history, the concept of dual loyalty was unknown, for the simple reason people understood that a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can have only one true loyalty. You may have conditional loyalty to other people and ideas, but those conditional loyalties have to give way to your primary loyalty. You were primarily a Christian, an Englishman, a loyal subject of the empire or a Jew. That is the nature of loyalty.

That was always the criticism of Jews, that their first loyalty was always going to be to their people, no matter their conditions. In America into the 1970’s it was common for people to note, often approvingly, that Jews stick together. The implication was that they cared primarily about their people. Jewish comedians had jokes about this that had a punchline, “but is it good for the Jews” that played on this well-known and generally accepted reality of the Jewish people.

It should be noted that into the 20th century this was same reasoning was applied to Catholics, who were assumed to be primarily loyal to the Church. This was a carry over from the schisms within Christendom. Protestants in Protestant countries could accuse Catholics of being loyal to the Pope rather than the king. Even today, Catholic judges have to answer questions about their faith. Jewish liberals attacked Amy Coney Barrett for being a faithful Catholic, especially on abortion.

The clever trick about this “dual loyalty” stuff is it not only shifted the focus from Jews onto their critics, but it made noticing what everyone, including Jews, had accepted for hundreds of years into a taboo. Noticing that Ben Shapiro was an emotional wreck over the Hamas attack, but he blatantly states that he does not care about the health and welfare of the white people is somehow immoral. It is a form of the motte-and-bailey argument that is so popular with the Left.

Of course, guys like Ben Shapiro and Joel Pollak do not have dual loyalty, despite having dual citizenship. It is impossible to have dual loyalty. Their primary loyalty is to their people, which is why they wear the funny little hats. That is the point of the hats, to tell the world they are not of the world, but separate. This is an age-old way people identify with a specific group and show their loyalty to that group by physically separating from everyone else in society.

There is nothing immoral about this and there is nothing immoral about noticing it, but it does raise questions, which is why we have the “dual loyalty” stuff. Tolerating a minority whose primary interests lie outside the majority must be limited. That limit is the interests of the majority, whose primary loyalty is to themselves. It means Ben Shapiro cannot pretend to speak for the interests of the majority. He must appeal to them as an outsider on behalf of outsiders.

This creates an obvious problem, so what people like Ben Shapiro prefer to do is conflate the interest of Americans with the interests of Israel so that questioning the behavior of Israel is equivalent to burning the American flag. To their credit, this rhetorical game has worked on many people. Anyone questioning the proportionality of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack or criticizing the wholesale killing of civilians is unironically accused of being unpatriotic.

The fact that Tucker has not been hurled into the void over this speaks to the changing nature of public consciousness. America and the West are heading into a time for choosing in which people must think about the question of loyalty. Are you more loyal to an abstract concept or to people who look like you, sound like you and share your same concerns about your community? We are entering a time when people begin to think about their hierarchy of loyalties and their identity as people.

It also speaks to the fact that the old pseudo-loyalties are breaking down. When the concept of American has been watered down to the point where it often means caring more for strangers than your own family, it is not hard to see why increasing numbers of Americans are no longer moved by calls to patriotism. Ben Shapiro waving the American flag and Israeli flag in front of the suckers is not working because the suckers are no longer moved by the American flag.

It is natural for minorities to put the interests of their minority group first, as their identity is tied to their minority status. In a society composed of minorities, there can be no patriotism as everyone’s primary loyalty will be to their group, so the good of the whole is always a secondary consideration, if it is considered at all. In other words, America will be populated with people who think about their people, just as Ben Shapiro thinks of his people, but they will just wear different hats.

Ungovernable Costs

Posted on December 28, 2023 by thezman

Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.

One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.

This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.

Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.

It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”

This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.

That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.

Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.

Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.

One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.

Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.

When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.

In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.

In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.

What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.

Unfrozen Caveman Conservatives

Posted on December 27, 2023 by thezman

The remarkable thing thus far about the 2024 presidential election is that the so-called conservatives, and therefore the Republican Party, have gone into this process without having prepared for it. They have experienced two presidential cycles that went entirely against their interests, yet they have not done anything over the last eight years to prepare for this cycle. Their plan, if you want to call it a plan, is to pray the other party eliminates Trump for them via lawfare.

We know with a fair bit of certainty that the party told the collection of munchkins showing up at debates that they expected Trump to be disqualified. In the first debate, the zombie-like Asa Hutchinson blurted this out during the questioning. In the last debate, Ron DeSantis said something along the lines that the option for voters is what was onstage due to Trump’s legal troubles. It was long rumored that he decided to run based on the assurance that Trump would be eliminated.

Now, that is a plan, of sorts, but only if you think the only problem you have as a party is this one man wrecking your fun. Get rid of the bad man and the party, along with the so-called conservative movement, can go back to the old times. They are even bringing back the neocon nutters to promote a dingbat. It is as if they think they are just one more court ruling from going back to 2000 when they could pass off a simpleton to their voters as the updated version of The Gipper.

Of course, Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. He exists because of what the so-called conservatives did in 2000 with George Bush. The populist revolt within the Republican Party is the response to the bait and switch, along with massive amounts of lying, by the party and so-called conservatives. The reason millions continue to support Trump, despite all of his well-documented flaws, is that the “party of Lincoln” thought they could fool all of the people all of the time.

The reason the party is unprepared for 2024 is their intellectual engine ran out of fuel back in the Reagan years. In retrospect, the 1980’s were the last gasp of the old bourgeois liberalism that defined America into the 20th century. Buckley style conservatism was a bug fix, a cumulative patch, to the progressive software of the 20th century and once that work was done, conservatism had nothing left. It was a room full of people trained to fix something that was about to be replaced.

It is why conservatism looks like a collection of unfrozen cavemen unaware of the time that has passed while they were frozen. National Review still puts out nonsense about how progressive cultural production is actually conservative. That is when they are not swearing that blacks will start voting Republican any day now. The reason that so-called conservatives are locked into the 1980’s is they evolved for the moment and once the moment passed, they no longer had a purpose.

In retrospect, conservatism of the Buckley sort was a reaction to one narrow set of claims made by progressives in the 20th century. Put another way, it was a delayed response to the reforms of the FDR generation, who were sure that government could right the wrongs of American society. Through force they could fix race, poverty, inequality and the trade-offs of the marketplace. Conservatism was a response to the failure of this project to achieve its aims.

With the end of the Cold War and the arrival of the Clinton machine, the old left of government reformers was replaced by a new generation of reformers. These were the sons and daughters of the managerial elite who were marinated in the ideas of post-Marx culturalism, once called political correctness but now called woke. It is the totalitarian project to cleanse the world of whiteness by harnessing the power of the institutions, like a team of horses pulling the reformers.

Conservatism has no answer to this because conservatism was evolved to fix the bugs of the old progressive software. As a result, the Bush years were not spent addressing the cancer unleashed by the Clinton machine, but instead poured trillions of new dollars on federal agencies as they ramped up the cultural revolution. White people sensed things were getting worse as a result of the Bush presidency. The Obama years confirmed this and thus the populist revolt began with the 2010 election.

What white people in America faced in the 1970’s was a government that was terrible at the basics of government, but focused on righting the wrongs of the world. The antidote was conservatism that promised to reverse this. What white people face today is an army of antiwhite bigots running the centers of cultural production and protected by the federal government. They need a movement and party that promises to reverse all of this, but instead they get unfrozen caveman conservatives.

That is what you see on the debate stage at these debate shows. With the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a Trump catspaw, the rest are some versions of what you can see at the Reagan Museum. They skim over some of the cultural issues, but refuse to address the racial issues. If any of them noticed that there are no more white people in television ads, he would rocket up the polls. None of them mention these things because for all of them, the present is a foreign country.

Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why Trump exists. The system is lucky in that Trump is not very good at politics. A more skillful political animal with Trump’s instincts would be the Red Caesar the system fears. The inevitable failure of Trump to scratch the itch that has needed scratching for decades will not make the itch go away. It will simply lay the groundwork for a more skillful and more cynical version, because in the end no political system can survive making war on itself.

Liberal Intolerance

Posted on December 26, 2023 by thezman

There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

Divorce Court

Posted on December 20, 2023 by thezman

Anyone who has been through a breakup, whether it was a personal or professional relationship, can probably think back and recall the moment when it felt like something changed in the relationship. Your mind went from one mode of thinking about the other party to another way of thinking about them. Maybe the change happened on the other side, and you noticed it, but could not quite explain it. Eventually this realization led to a change in how you viewed the relationship.

It is one of those weird things where you go from not thinking about some potential future, like a divorce or a business breakup, to contemplating it and then all of a sudden it feels like an inevitability. People who quit their jobs always quit in their mind before they quit the actual job. There is a period where you can tell they are no longer committed to their work, even though they go about it as usual. That person is going through that shift from one normal to another normal.

Such a thing happened to the American people in the 2020 elections when the results miraculously changed in the late hours. Millions of people went from thinking that such a thing could never happen in America to realizing that it was actually happening, to now accepting it as a part of the new normal. In a way, those people went through a divorce and on the other side was their idea of old America. They are now in an apartment, perhaps dating new America, while old America got the house.

The same sort of thing may be happening with this election. For a long time now, a few weirdos have been predicting a new round of shenanigans. This time the regime’s schemers would keep Trump off the ballot, rather than risk him overcoming the election schemes to win the general. Some even suggested that the GOP would collude with their friends across the aisle to get Trump jammed up legally to the point where the party would have no choice but to disqualify him.

Your typical middle-class white person, the real core of the Trump voting bloc, dismissed these claims, but now they watch as the system slowly wraps itself around Trump like an anaconda. He was just removed from the ballot in Colorado on the grounds that the judges think Hitler is under their beds. The ruling is a blend of bourgeois hysteria and ideological madness. There are cases like this in other states that will surely end the same way.

Spend time on social media and the MAGA crowd is sure that the Supreme Court will knock these cases down. After all, this is still America. The courts removing parties and candidates is something that happens in the third world or Russia. Like the man who still thinks things can be patched up with his wife, these people are not ready to contemplate the reality of the situation. Old America just moved in a black guy, while Trump supporters keep hope alive in the apartment.

As this process rolls along and the walls close in on Trump, the people still lighting candles for old America will slowly reach that inflexion point where they go from one phase to the next phase. Just as they have come to accept mass election fraud as a feature of the “system” they will come to accept that the system is itself a grotesque mockery of self-government. You get to vote for the regime stooge you like, as long as the permanent ruling party approves her.

This transition in the American divorce will depend upon who the regime decides will “win” the Republican nomination. The biggest of big liars are trying to sell the big lie that voters like Nikki Haley. You would think that these people would have learned by now that the big lie strategy ends poorly, but they persist. It is safe to assume that the majority of the people the GOP expects to vote in November despise Haley, so declaring her the winner will be interesting.

Alternatively, the party could “recruit” Glenn Youngkin, the Gomer Pyle-like governor of Virginia who got some positive media last year when he made pleasing noises about the rage heads peddling pornography in the schools. He is Mitt Romney without the magic underwear problem. The regime loves him. The neocons would get to run his foreign policy and his aw-shucks presentation would fool enough old white people to convince the regime it could work.

Regardless of who the party selects to be the figurehead, the people who vote Republican, especially those Trump loyalist, will enter into that phase where they come to terms with that which they thought was impossible. Not only do the Democrats play fast and loose with election laws, but the Republicans coordinate with them to rig their own nominating process. The last holdouts of old America will suddenly have to accept that old America is gone, and divorce is inevitable.

The phase change one experiences in a breakup happens both fast and slow, in that it feels like a switch has been thrown, but then there is a long slow aftermath. Once you realize the relationship cannot be repaired, there is the process of unwinding it, which is often quite ugly. A terrible truth of the human condition is that it feels good to hate, especially when you need someone to blame. White America’s divorce from old America will be as acrimonious and eventful as any divorce.

The difference here is that half the country is not going to pack up and move to another part of town. Instead, the number of people who accept that it is who is in charge is what matters, rather than how they rule, will continue to grow. The amount of noticing we see online is a great indicator of what is happening. There are things on social media that would not have been uttered in private a decade ago. Again, another sign that old America is never coming back.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but it is reasonable to think that in the long run 2024 will be thought of as the year when national divorce became real. An idea that kicked around the fringe suddenly entered the mainstream. One side, the people who want to live in orderly societies, will come to accept that there is no living with the people on the other side. Even if it is possible, they do not want to live with people who think this is normal. They want a divorce.

White Authority

Posted on December 19, 2023 by thezman

Was the founding generation of America full of white nationalists? This is a claim popular with some white nationalists. They argue that North America was settled by white people who set out to create a new society for white people and once they achieved independence from England, they created a white society. They will point to statements and actions that suggest that early Americans consciously and deliberately planned a society exclusively for white people.

Oddly, this is the exact same claim made by anti-whites in support of the demands for reparations and what they call “restorative justice.” The starting point for understanding the anti-white argument is their take on the social contract. They claim that because civilization was created by white men, it must have been created to serve the interest of white men, which must have come at the expense of non-whites. In other words, they agree with the white nationalists on this point.

Putting aside the claims by the anti-whites, which are all ex post facto arguments to support their current thirst for vengeance, are the white nationalist correct when they claim the Framers as their own? There is no disputing the fact that the European people of the 17th and 18th century had little interest in other races. They certainly did not think the races should mingle. They thought it perfectly normal to own human beings, so their views on equality were, at best, narrow and rhetorical.

The best argument in favor of the white nationalist claim about the intention of the Framers is the preamble to the constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The word “posterity” is critical. Then as now, this word means future generations of the current people and the people who chose that word were white. They chose to capitalize it, which in that age was a form of emphasis. They were making clear to the people of the states that the point of the new government was to protect and promote the people and their descendants. The Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first acts passed by the new government, drives home this point.

The problem here is that Congress repealed this five years later in favor of the Naturalization Act of 1795. They kept much of the original bill, but then three years later they modified it again with the Naturalization Act of 1798. More changes followed as Congress wrestled with how best to solve the main problem, which was the lack of human capital to exploit the country’s natural resources. 18th century America was rich in natural resources, but short of people.

In other words, the point of these acts was not to protect white people or keep out non-whites, but to manage the problem of how to bring in new settlers – and that is what was needed – but to do so without undermining the current population. Race and ethnicity were not the primary reason for these acts. In fact, the people of this age could not image what we think of as a multi-racial society. Such a thing not only did not exist, but at the time it could not exist. It was simply not a consideration.

That brings us to the main problem with this line of reasoning. The people of this time had different conceptions of race. This is not to say race is a social construct, but that the meaning of words change over time. For 18th century man, words like “white”, and “race” were used differently from today. For the Framers, white often meant English, while race meant ethnicity. Our modern idea of “white”, meaning broadly European, would have seemed strange to Thomas Jefferson.

Further, the concept of white nationalism would have puzzled the people of this age because it is a solution to a problem they could not imagine. If you went back in time and told them that millions of non-whites would be flowing into the country every year, they would have thought you were insane. The movement of millions of people, regardless of race, was inconceivable. There were only four million people in America when the Constitution was being debated.

Now, the white nationalist would no doubt argue that if the Framers could understand the problems that modern Americans face, they would certainly embrace the concept of white nationalism as a solution. There is no way to prove or disprove it, so it is merely a gratuitous assertion. It is fair to assume that the Framers assumed and expected, therefore would have wanted, the country to look like them in terms of race and religion, long after they were gone. They wanted this for their posterity.

There is a deeper issue at work here. Like the anti-whites who claim original sin as justification for their present behavior, the white nationalists pointing to the Framers are looking for a moral authority. They think that the Framers are unassailable, in moral terms, so if the Framers were white nationalists, then it follows that white nationalism is a moral good. What are you going to do? Take down the statues of the Framers and strike their names from the history books?

That aside, the mistake is to assume a person can be a moral authority. The Framers were not gods or God’s representatives. They were just men sorting through the challenges of their age with the knowledge of their age. They were not moral authorities then and they cannot be moral authorities now. The challenges of this age will need to be sorted by the men of this age. Their moral authority is simply their collective will to create a safe and prosperous society for their posterity.

Maybe white nationalism, however it is defined, is the right answer. Pinning white nationalist down on what the term means is not always easy, but maybe in there is the right answer for the plight of white people in North America. That will be determined as all such things are determined. Can it actually meet the challenge and are the trade-offs acceptable to the people adopting it? This is not a question for the dead, but for the white people living in the here and now.

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