The Antidote

Posted on December 3, 2024 by thezman

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

While everyone lies, most people are honest. They think the truth matters, even if the truth is unwelcome. You want the doctor to tell you the truth about your health, not because it will have an impact on your health, but because it is your health, and you have a right to know the truth about it. This sense of entitlement with regards to the truth stems from the fact that all humans possess the tools to conceive of what with think is reality and therefore we are entitled to reality.

It is why most people struggle to accept that there are people who are not honest, so they do not struggle with the lie. In fact, they take pleasure in tricking people, even when the truth would serve their interest. Unlike the honest person, the Democratic Man sees truth telling as a weakness. He speaks the truth only when forced into it and seems to see it as a weakness. For him, the truth is bait to lure in the honest to trick them into something they would otherwise resist.

An example of this is in The Atlantic, a publication that has become the symbol of democratic mendacity. In less democratic times, it was a journal for the intellectual class of the WASP ruling elite. Now it is a vulgar tabloid used to insert falsehoods into the media ecosystem. This post from David Frum is a perfect example. Everything about it is a lie from the very first sentence. From there is a clever monument to the art of lying to trick the intended audience.

“For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics” is what someone once described as a lie so colossal that people assume there must be some truth to it because they cannot believe that anyone would lie so infamously. Bill Clinton fired the FBI Director, Bill Sessions, as soon as he came to power. He replaced the capable Sessions with the thoroughly incompetent Janet Reno.

The fact is every position in Washington is political. You cannot be in politics without being political, which means taking a side. David Frum surely knows this, but he likes lying and he has an agenda. One of the funny things about this type is they often start with a kernel of truth around which they wrap their lies. In this case, the kernel of truth is that the FBI helped the media drive off Nixon. The schemers are hoping a similar thing happens (again) once Trump takes office.

This is just one recent example. You can scan the regime media sites and find hundreds of examples on a daily basis. We live in a time when the only reasons to consume mass media are entertainment and to learn what is not true. People like David Frum make being funny on social media much easier. If you see an assertion of fact in the Wall Street Journal, then you know what is not true about that particular subject and can eliminate it from the set of possible truths.

The question, from a sociological and analytical perspective, is whether the system produces the mendacious or whether it simply elevates them. Since Grog sold Trog a bad wheel, lying has been a part of human society. Along with it we have evolved various ways to guard against it, both individually and collectively. Among European people, social rules evolved to sort people between the trusted and the untrustworthy, creating moral societies rather than tribal ones.

Therefore, if liars have always been an issue for human society, it means the proliferation of liars is a product of the current rules. We are becoming a low trust society either because we are conditioning each generation to prize mendacity over the truth or the system rewards the mendacious over the honest, thus flooding the public square with shameless liars. The lack of shame is a critical piece, as moral societies rely on shame to govern behavior.

The counter to this is someone like Tutus Oates. He was an English priest who fabricated a conspiracy to kill Charles II. This was the “Popish Plot” that made him quite famous and wealthy for a time. This was just one of his many lies and schemes that often had no obvious benefit to him. Like Hillary Clinton, he loved lying. Eventually, people caught onto his tricks, but again like Hillary Clinton, he used more tricks to escape the hangman’s noose and continue with his mendacity.

This perfect example of the modern pundit lived in the 17th century when democracy was limited to arguments among nobles after too many drinks. This was the restoration, a time when popular government had a very bad odor. Of course, one could argue that the flickers of democracy under Cromwell fertilized the ground where the seeds of mendacity had lied dormant. Still, in a decidedly undemocratic society a trickster like Oates was able to thrive for a little while.

None of this may seem to matter, but Western people evolved over thousands of generations to exist in high trust societies. Unlike the tribal people of sub-Saharan Africa who organize around the tribe or the people in the Middle East who organize around the clan, Europeans organize around a set of moral codes. The proliferation of liars who have undermined social trust are making Western societies unlivable. The next step is they become ungovernable.

What that means for the reform minded is that for reform to work, Western societies must become hostile to people like David Frum. Either they sink in status to the point where they are nothing more than a warning to others or they find life in a high trust society too terrifying, so they self-deport. In other words, the goal of reform must be elevating candor to the highest quality, as the necessary antidote to the mendacity that has come to dominate the modern West.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb. Just email them directly to book at sa***@mi*********************.com.

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on November 28, 2024 by thezman

Thanksgiving is arguably the greatest American creation, despite being the one thing we have not tried to export. Around the world there are American outposts selling degeneracy of various sorts, along with the supposed ideals of the American empire, but you will never get a sales pitch on Thanksgiving. It speaks to the nature of the current ruling elite that gratitude is not something they think about when trying to change the minds of people abroad.

Regardless, the long holiday that is upon us is special. It is a long weekend of doing little more than giving thanks for the simple things. We do not give thanks to our overlords for anything. We do not give thanks for our stuff. We do not even give thanks for the great fortune of being an American. It is simpler than that. It is a time to look around and appreciate the little things that make life worth living. It is a time to remember the true purpose of life.

What makes the holiday better than most is that it is at least a four-day weekend and is slowly becoming a weeklong affair. Within living memory most people had to work Friday if they wanted to get paid for Thursday, but that is long gone. Most employers give their people Thursday and Friday off, except retailers, of course. Many offices now close early on Wednesday. All week offices are light on staff as people use their personal time to extend the holiday.

If we had any sense as a people, we would make the whole week a national holiday, maybe even shutter retail for a few days. Friday is the start of the Christmas shopping season, so giving the retail people a few days off in advance would be the decent thing to do, but our greed heads will never go for it. Big box retailers now force their staff in on Thursday night to get ready for Black Friday. After the revolution, the people doing this will be sent to a camp, a bad camp.

The funny thing about Thanksgiving is it does not celebrate any of the things that have come to define America. There is no soulless gift giving. Christmas has been turned into an orgy of material self-indulgence. It is reasonable to say that what goes on in this country around Christmas is grotesque. Our other holidays are civic affairs designed to celebrate the government or warmongering. Usually, they are on a Monday, so we get a long weekend, but they have no meaning.

Thanksgiving is unique in that it is about you as a person taking time to think about the good things in your life. The big traditional meal with friends and family focuses the mind on those human relationships. Even in these easy times, life is hard, so taking time to count your blessings is a gift you give yourself. Being grateful is one of those odd things that just makes you feel good. Having a long holiday to eat traditional foods and be grateful is an amazing thing we have created.

It is the gratitude part of it that gets to the heart of the current crisis. All around us are people doing nothing but showing their ingratitude. America is filling up with ingrates who do nothing but complain. One can possibly understand the ingratitude of black people, but the endless complaining from new arrivals is maddening. Even worse is seeing useless weirdos freeriding on society while complaining that the rest of us are not thanking them for being parasites.

Joe Sobran put it best. “The white man presents an image of superiority even when he isn’t conscious of it. And, superiority excites envy.” That is the heart of the matter and probably why we invented Thanksgiving. It is our nature to build and create, which is why we are naturally grateful for what we have. A people who built a great civilization out of nothing have a lot to be thankful for, so having a long holiday to take our time and be grateful makes a lot of sense.

Even now, with all that is going on, we have plenty of reasons to take the next few days to count our blessings. The Good Lord in his wisdom has provided us with enemies who possess none of the qualities we respect. They may have inherited power, but they lack the ability to wield it responsibly. Like men on death row, our betters walk around with an expiry date on them. It is a long struggle, but we know that in the end we will prevail and for that we must be thankful.

Of course, we also have the community of dissidents that is slowly forming up to provide fellowship and support as we struggle though this age. Those of you who were at AmRen last time certainly know what I mean. You come back from such things humbled and grateful, because you have been reminded of how fortunate you are to be alive in this time. To be blessed with a life of struggle, to have a reason to be better each day, is the greatest gift of all.

I want to thank everyone who comes to this site to read what I have written or listen to the Friday shows. Special thanks to the many people who fill up the comments every day with commentary that is often better than my posts. This is one of the best comment sections on the internet. It is something people often say to me. Posting will be light the next few days, but the comment section will be open as always. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone and thank you for all that you do.

Death By Technology

Posted on November 27, 2024 by thezman

Feeling a bit lazy, I decided to see what the world of sports entertainment was offering on a Tuesday before Thanksgiving. In a better age, the answer would have been nothing unless you lived in a city with an NBA or NHL team. They would play their games before the weekend and then take off for the holiday. In this age, the people who run the sports leagues think Christmas is the perfect time to make their mostly black employees perform for them and the rest of us.

A few minutes looking at the sports sites and it was clear it was going to be college basketball or nothing at all, always a good option. It has been so long since I have consumed college basketball, it was a bit confusing. The game that jumped out at me was Midway University versus Bellarmine. Midway is not located on a Pacific island, as the name would suggest. It is in Kentucky and originally called the Kentucky Female Orphan School. Now they play men’s basketball.

One of the things you quickly notice when scanning the college basketball schedule is that we have far too many colleges. Not to pick on the good folks at the Kentucky Female Orphan School, but what is the point? When it was actually a female orphan school, it made some sense. Taking care of female orphans is a good thing, but now it is a university handing out worthless credentials. We could easily shutter half of our colleges, and no one would notice.

That aside, the other thing that caught my eye is the array or weird platforms on which these games are now broadcast. The shift away from traditional television to the internet has led to a proliferation of sites. There was a tournament broadcast on something called FloSports, which sounds like a name created by the con men who run the sports nutrition rackets. It turns out that they specialize in low interest niche sports and the small-timers in major sports.

They charge $30 per month for their service, which seems like a big number for the content they are offering. Perhaps if you love F1 racing and you live in the United States, that is a bargain. They are sponsoring college basketball tournaments on the assumption that the fans of the teams involved will spend the money to watch a few games of their favorite team. It is a clever racket, but it also a form of kidnapping in that they are holding the content hostage.

This is something happening with all sports. The NFL is now posting games on Amazon Prime, thus forcing fans to subscribe to it for games, in addition to whatever they use for other television content. There is a network called Peacock that now has select college football games. If you are a fan of Notre Dame, you now must subscribe to the Peacock thing to see their games. It will not be long before much of the sports content is behind an array of paywalls.

This is a sign of decline. As these pay-per-view schemes proliferate, the ways around them proliferate just as fast. Getting the content from FloSports, for example, is simple if you know where to look. There are lots of overseas operators who are indifferent to the financial dreams of our entertainment schemers. With a VPN you can watch just about any sporting event on earth without paying a dime. In fact, you can get any content you like this way, even new release movies.

What you see forming up is what happened to the music rackets. By the 1980’s, the music industry was dependent on two bottlenecks. One was album sales where you paid for ten songs, even though you wanted just one song. The other was commercial radio where you could listen to that one song, but also hours of ads and live reads from drug-addled disc jockeys. The music rackets charged the crap out of the radio stations for use of their content.

Then the mp3 arrived and that was the end of the music rackets. Suddenly you could get that one song without buying an album. Not only that, but the song was also free, and you could easily make copies for your friends. The music industry fought this, but eventually they lost the fight. Now recorded music is just a marketing expense to promote live shows and sell other product. Bands now make more money selling t-shirts and caps than they make from recorded music.

This is what is happening to sports. People are willing to watch a game made twice as long by the insertion of advertising. They will pay a small fee to watch games with the same ads, but if they have choices. They will pay a higher fee for ad free content and lots of choices. They will not pay high fees for what amounts to a three-hour ad campaign with some sports content sprinkled into it. They will find other ways to see the games or simply stop watching.

The lesson of the mp3 is that you cannot beat technology. The music companies sued people for sharing music, but it had no impact on the process. The sports leagues can try the same thing with the pirate sites, but it will fail too. It is simply too easy to access these sites. What is even funnier about this is most of the pirate sites block the ads during the games. The leagues cannot even say to their advertisers that their ads are getting viewed by the pirate users.

There is a cost to this. Pop music has reached a nadir because the only way to make money is to generate Potemkin stars like Taylor Swift. The reason you never hear anyone talk about the content of a Taylor Swift song is because even her fans do not care about the content. It is simply a thing to be swept up in until she gets too fat to make it work and a new star is generated. The same is true for the butt wigglers who target the black music audience.

This may be why movies and television are terrible now. On the one hand, they need to make going to the theater appealing, which means massive computer-generated worlds that dazzle on the big screen. On the other hand, it means dealing with the reality that content best watched at home is easily pirated. That leaves little motivation to pay for quality writing and directing. Instead, the money goes to attention grabbing nonsense like race-swapping and girl bosses.

That paints a bleak picture for sports entertainment. A model built on the assumption that television revenues will continue to grow at double digit rates is not going to do well when the revenue stops growing entirely. Throw in the fact that owning a team is mostly about tax dodging and rent seeking and you see the problem. Like music in the 1980’s, the sports entertainment world is a massive bubble. Similarly, technology is the pin that will pop that bubble.

Of Two Minds

Posted on November 13, 2024 by thezman

Everyone in every time has thought that his time was crazier and less predictable than the times that came before him. Much of this is due to recency bias, but another cause is the sense that things were better in the past. This sense that the past was better is a part of the human makeup. There is not only a nostalgia for the our own past, but for the past we never experienced. That is because the past seems more certain than our present age and the near future.

People who lived through the Great Depression and the Second World War looked back at those days with fondness. These were people enjoying 1950’s America reminiscing about one of the worst times in American history. Many even lost family members in the war, but those war years felt like the best of times. Our minds seem to have evolved in such a way that we cannot remember pain. That means what we can recall about our past is only the good feelings we experienced.

It also depends upon who you are at the time as well. If you were a black person in the 1950’s then it was a wild time to be alive. The civil right revolution was getting going and the role blacks were given was to riot in the streets. The typical white guy living in California was just enjoying his time. On the other hand, the war years were a good time to be black in America as the war economy needed labor. Millions of black people found lucrative work in northern cities.

That is something to keep in mind while watching present events. It certainly seems like it is a crazy time to be alive. The whole Trump thing is wild, just from the perspective of American politics. People also seem nuttier. This was evident during the Covid panic when millions of otherwise normal looking people revealed themselves to be bitter paranoid cranks. Now the anti-Trump loons are going into hiding, by which they mean the latest alternative to Twitter.

It is not just the usual suspects losing their minds over the election. The British tabloid The Guardian has announced on Twitter, oddly enough, that it is stomping off in a huff, presumably to set up shop on the alternative to Twitter. They claim it is because of the “far-right conspiracy theories and racism.” That means a publication that traffics in conspiracy theories about the imaginary far-right and racism is abandoning the one place they are sure such things exist.

Even putting aside the natural bias described at the start, this is crazy behavior that did not exist just ten years ago. The crazy times ten years ago were both sides meeting in the streets to point fingers and maybe scuffle a bit. More important, the people we call the left had institutional support, so they controlled the battlefield. This fact has been true for as long as anyone has been alive, so seeing them abandon the battlefield and go into hiding qualifies this as a crazy time to be alive.

Of course, the reason this is happening is the big election victory of Donald Trump and the temporary ascendency of his party. It was not just a big win for Trump on Tuesday, but also a big win for the movement that made him possible. The reason that movement exists is the growing insanity of the people we call the left. In other words, we probably do live in a crazy age, even when people have the ability to step back and look at it from a distance. This really is a crazy age.

The thing about this crazy age is that not much is happening. The exciting times a century ago revolved around the Great War. The mobilization of America for war in Europe was unprecedented. The war itself was unprecedented, and its aftermath was also unprecedented. Enormously important things were happening. In this present age, everything happens on the internet and slightly affects events outside the digital space, but only in superficial ways.

Put another way, we live in a crazy time because this new virtual reality we created called the internet has sucked into it many of our least stable people, empowering them to unleash their craziness in this virtual realm. Imagine a version of the past twenty years in which the crazy people were denied access to the internet. Imagine if all the foreign policy debates since the Cold War had been conducted online by people like John Mearsheimer rather than crazies from the Kagan cult.

What makes this a crazy time is we are living in a unique period and what makes it unique is this virtual realm we call the internet. Everyone is forced to one degree or another to live with two minds. There is the mind that exists in the virtual realm and then there is the mind that exists in the physical realm. Note that you rarely discuss with people in the physical realm your life in the virtual realm. These are two distinct worlds that require two distinct minds.

On the other hand, the growth of this new virtual world has had the effect of collapsing the two minds for some people. The crazies online are made crazy, in part, by the invasion of the private space by the public space. Prior to the internet, these people could only do politics by participating in it publicly. Most just avoided politics and remained privately nuts, but free of public politics. Plugged into the internet, the public rushes into the private and the private becomes public.

This may explain the phenomenon of the seemingly stable person heading off into crazy land as they get increasingly online. People like James Lindsay or Keith Olbermann are good examples of people who started out a bit odd, but not so odd that you questioned their sanity. They steadily evolved into crazy people online. When there was separation between their public and private mind, we did not see the madness, because it existed outside of public view.

In the fullness of time, people may look at this time and think it was the calm waters before the terrible rapids. Maybe they look at this is as a gentle adjustment period between the Cold War and whatever comes next. it is also possible that it is the crazy time when people had to adjust to the two-mind problem. The growth of the virtual realm created a need for an entirely novel mode of thought, the mind you activate when inside the internet, along with a way of isolating it from the other mind.

It may be that we arrive at a new way of judging people. At the top of the hierarchy are those who master both minds, deftly balancing them to be high status in both the material world and the virtual world. At the bottom are the people who allow the virtual realm to take over their mind entirely, making it seem that they are as crazy in real life as they seem online. In the middle are the vast majority who struggle to balance their internet mind with their material mind.

The Decline Of Pop Music

Posted on October 16, 2024 by thezman

One of the unexpected consequences of the technological revolution is the death of the popular music industry. The sale of physical content has just about disappeared, outside of the vinyl subculture. Even if you count downloads, the gross sales of music decline more than ten percent per year. On a per capita basis, popular music revenues are a little more than half of their peak fifty years ago. The biggest drop in sales started with the introduction of the mp3.

Unlike the newspaper industry, which thought they could make money giving their content away on the internet, the music industry always saw technology as a threat to their business model. They famously fought the introduction of cassettes because it would make it easier to record and transport music. If you could copy that album and give the copy to a friend, the music industry reasoned, there would be no reason for the friend to buy the album.

The music industry went to extraordinary lengths to protect their cartel, but they simply could not hold off the flood of technology. They treated downloaders like the Israelis treat Palestinian civilians, but it failed to deter people from downloading free copies of the song they wanted. Eventually, the industry gave into reality and started selling single copies of songs, but by that point, the horse had left the barn. There are too many ways to get a copy of a song free of charge.

The hope was streaming services would stem the bleeding. Instead of loading up on free music maybe people would pay five bucks a month to have access to everything all the time from anywhere. That did seem to work for a while, but then it just further cratered the music sales side of the business. There is also the fact that the public does not listen to as much pop music as in the past. Part of it is demographics, but part of it is the collapse in the quality of content.

This is starting to damage the last area where money could be made in the music business, which is the live show. For the first time in a decade, excluding the Covid years, live shows are in decline. The popular excuse is to blame the ticket sellers and the secondary market for pricing people out of the events. The claim is the ticket sellers are gouging the consumer with demand-based pricing, which is like saying no one goes to a restaurant because it is too crowded.

One reason for the decline of live shows is Covid. A weird thing happened during Covid and that is people discovered that they could live without things they suddenly could not have due to the panic. Restaurants never fully recovered from Covid because people got used to not going out to dinner. Something replaced it. Live events are another thing people did not miss as much as expected. Pro sports have had to work hard to regain their crowds and college sports never fully regained them.

Another reason live music is struggling is the quality of the product. As the industry relies more on technology to create listenable content, the less able they are to stage compelling live shows. This is not a new problem. In the golden age of pop music, they often used studio musicians to record the songs. The “band” often could not play their own music at all. This limited the “band” to doing studio shows where they could lip-sync to the recorded music.

This changed in the 1960’s when bands could play their own music and insisted on recording their own music. They also did live shows where they could actually play their stuff and not sound like a bag of cats. Technology has reversed this so that the performers are no longer able to produce the songs live in any way that sounds like the recorded material. Technology has made it easier to make music, but that has resulted in fewer acts that can do live shows.

Here is where you see the damage done by hip-hop. This is content easy to create in the studio, but it is hot garbage when performed live. In a small venue, the tight spaces and use of drugs can result in a good time for the audience, but in an arena it is often hilariously terrible. It looks like that homeless guy who yells at passing cars got on the stage and is yelling at the audience. Whatever the merits, there are none, hip-hop does not make for a compelling live show.

Another issue for live music is young people are not being socialized in the meat space, so live shows fall outside of their comfort zone. A generation used to interacting with their peers through internet platforms is not going to see the live show as an opportunity for socializing and dating like the old days. They would rather hear the music while cartoon characters perform the concert online. For a generation that prefers the indoors, the outdoor music show may as well not exist.

Of course, the music business was always a racket. The golden years of pop was when the music companies ruled with an iron fist. They could make you buy the album when you wanted just one or two songs. They forced radio stations to play the songs they wanted played. Most important, they we free to rob the music acts. Technology nibbled away at the music cartel eventually freeing the consumers and the music creators from the clutches of the music companies.

One result is there is probably more music available now than in the golden age of popular music. Creators can make good stuff from their bedroom and make it available to the world via the internet. The other side of this is the days of the rock star are coming to a close. Taylor Swift is probably the last mega star and her fame is mostly due to her general weirdness. Her songs are popular because she is popular, not the other way around. Her music is secondary to her act.

Otherwise, the golden era of popular music, especially rock music, will be viewed as a strange artifact of the American empire. A generation from now that music may sound as weird and alien to young people as Chinese opera. They will not understand it, because the people and culture that produced it are as alien to them as the people and culture of China. The concept of the rock star will disappear with memories of phone booths and quadrophonic sound.

Death Of The Grammar Nazi

Posted on October 10, 2024 by thezman

A truth revealed by the widescale adoption of the internet was that there were millions of people with a blue pencil desperate to use it. The Grammar Nazi is a thing unearthed and unleashed on the world by the internet. When comment sections were still common, every story or post came with comments correcting the grammar or highlighting a typo. It was clear that the person posting the comment had no interest in the content of the post, other than what he considered to be violations of the rules of grammar.

The Grammar Nazi is something that can only exist online. Sure, he could get a teaching job and terrorize school children or get a job as a copy editor at a newspaper, but where is the fun in that? The thing that brings joy to the black heart of the Grammar Nazi is correcting people who do not expect to be corrected. Finding a post online that has an open comment section and then posting a short note about a missing comma or the incorrect use of “there/their” is the fruit of life.

Unfortunately for the Grammar Nazi, his days are running short because the same forces that brought him to life are about to take away his life. Another thing we will get with AI is the rigid formalization of online discourse. The old fashioned spellcheck and grammar check in Word will soon be replaced by real-time rewrites of your text in the generally accepted form. That means no more grammar errors or spelling errors for the Grammar Nazi to hunt online.

There will be people who holdout and write their own text. There are people who still own pens and pads of paper. It will not be long, however, when the browser simply corrects your “mistakes” and rewrites your copy. Those idiomatic expressions you love so much will be replaced with text that can easily be translated into other languages and understood by new language learners. The same will happen with colorful euphemisms and salty language. None of it will be allowed.

You can see the future in Word. Run text through the old-fashioned spelling and grammar check and it regularly suggests you change the wording of sentences in order to make them less interesting. For example, if you type “There are a lot of mudgets in here”, misspelling “midgets” as you see, it will not suggest the word “midget” as the replacement because that is an offensive term. If you persist, it will warn that it is insensitive language. We know what comes next.

On the other hand, the genuinely stupid will soon be able to present themselves online as they imagine themselves through services like Grammarly that will rewrite their incoherent jibber-jabber into something intelligible. In fact, they will not even need to know how to read and write. They will just speak and the machine will figure out what they should write and write it. This woman will never have to worry that she may be a “magician” rather than a “musician.”

That may be a bridge too far, but you can see how these grammar services can quickly transition from mere grammar services into thinking services. The low-IQ person may not fully understand the resulting product, but the happy face emoji at the end of the process will let her know she did good. In effect, technology will remove the midwit from the internet and replace her with a bot, a bot that never makes a spelling or grammar error to give the game away.

It is easy to dismiss these sorts of claims about technology and the language, but they are based on our history with the printed word. The very idea of grammar as something to debate was made possible by the printing press. The necessary standardization that came with the mass production of text changed how we think. It changed the grammar, punctuation, spelling and even the alphabet. We write a different language as a result, which means we think in a different language too.

Unlike the time when the printing press revolutionized the world, ours is a much darker time with tighter rules on what can and cannot be said. We already see how the internet has narrowed and dulled the public debate. When it can intercede between your brain and what you are trying to write, it is easy to see how we can quickly get to a future that Orwell would have thought impossible. Soon, it may be impossible to post an impure thought or a poorly formed sentence.

Even if it does not reach that point, these writing services will surely strip originality and creativity from the language. The constant hectoring from Word about the use of “write a book” instead of “author a book” will eventually wear down users to the point where this sort of variety is gone from our writing. All nuance and idiosyncrasy will be replaced with the technical manual version that the robots demand. As a result, we will become as boring and stupid as a National Review columnist.

There are signs of this happening. This post about changes in German grammar is a good example of what lies ahead. This change is not to make German more precise to Germans, but to make it more accessible to non-German speakers. That may sound good to English speakers, but language is more than just how people speak. It is how they think and how they think evolved over generations. How they think is their inheritance from their ancestors and the core of their culture.

Of course, the main argument against the Grammar Nazi was that grammar is a fluid thing that changes over time. Obsessive concern for rules of grammar and word usage is a losing fight. After all, what we think of as punctuation is a novelty in the history of the written word. The core features of the current rules were innovations. To put an end to innovation is an effort to kill the spirit of the language. Like the people who speak it, the language must be free to seek its own path.

That is now where things are heading, at least not for the written word. It will not be long before the outlaw is the man who uses outlawed words in outlawed forums using now outlawed word processing software and browsers. Everyone else will screaming into the void that is the Large Language Model version of the software, as it rewrites their text to remove unpermitted thoughts and expressions. The Grammar Nazi will have been replaced by this new, hellish form of spellcheck.

Strange Days

Posted on September 26, 2024 by thezman

A feature of this age is that we are regularly presented with unusual events and then presented with an official explanation that is stranger than the event itself or given no explanation at all for what happened. In fact, you could describe the Trump era as a series of unexplained phenomena that either come with no official explanation or one so ridiculous no one accepts it. Trump is like a modern-day wizard in that his mere existence creates unexplainable happenings.

In this age of mass communications, we are more likely to experience rare events, because those rare events get blasted around the internet by people looking to profit from them, so that is part of it. On the other hand, the same technology regularizes rarity, so rare events should be less frequent. Just as soon as people start to notice some bit of weirdness, the authorities can flood the information space with a plausible explanation, so it is not just a feature of mass media.

For example, this summer a young man managed to get on the roof of the only building near a Trump rally and take shots at Trump. He did this despite Trump allegedly having the best personal security available to an American. For some reason, none of these crack security guys thought it was a good idea to guard the roof. Not only that, but they were also in the building and somehow managed to not hear a man walking around on the metal roof above their heads.

Just that bit of the story is explainable as incompetence. We live in the age of increasing incompetence, especially with the managerial class. Then we learn that the shooter, who was killed on the scene, is the only young person on planet earth without an extensive internet profile. He also happens to be a kid from a tiny town in flyover country that was in a Black Rock ad. Now we learn that an off-duty ATF agent in a suit was there taking pics of the corpse.

Any one of those points are farfetched at face value, but the lack of any explanation from the government makes the whole thing a one in a billion event. At least it should be, but now we have another one to pair with it. Last week we got Ryan Routh crawling around Trump’s golf course with a rifle. How he got there and how he knew Trump would decide to get in a round of golf that day is a mystery. Like the first assassination attempt, this one makes no sense on the surface.

To date, no one has bothered to explain how this penniless kook managed to travel around the world supporting Ukraine. No one has explained how he got to Florida and how he acquired the rifle. He is a resident of Hawaii, so he would not be able to buy a gun in the lower forty-eight. Why did he drop off a box of ammo containing a written confession to an associate months prior? Who was funding this guy and how did he end up in the bushes outside Trump’s golf course?

No one knows and the government is not talking. The same people who cannot shut up about disinformation and misinformation are perfectly happy to let speculation run wild on these two bizarre events. It is possible they do not know. Maybe they are as stumped as everyone else. They could just say they are as baffled as everyone else, but instead they now claim that Iranian hit squads are roaming the country looking for their chance to take out Donald Trump.

To make the Iranian stuff fit in with the bizarreness of the two assassination attempts, the secret police posted this story in their media outlet claiming Trump is nuts to think the Iranians are out to get him. Then in another media outlet, the secret police say they warned Trump about the Iranian assassination attempts. The one thing we know is that everything in the media about the government is written by the government, so why do we have these two conflicting reports from the government?

The general weirdness of these stories and the even stranger handling of them by the regime is not the main topic of conversation because they are not unique. They are part of a general pattern that has become the new normal. We still have no plausible explanation for the pipe bomb story the FBI put out during the election integrity protests of January 6, 2021. All we know for sure is someone planted them while the local police looked on from their marked police vehicles.

In fairness, that is not the only thing we know about the events that day. We have also learned that the Justice Department has been stonewalling investigations into what actually happened on that day. We know this because Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified to it this week. In fact, he volunteered it and promised to keep stonewalling until after the election. The strangest thing about this admission is that no one seemed surprised.

You could probably write a book detailing the bizarre occurrences we have seen over the last ten years since Trump arrived. You would not have to offer an explanation or a conspiracy theory to any of them. Just provide the known facts and maybe a few blank pages for official explanations. That really is the remarkable bit about what has been happening since Trump came down the escalator. It is not the explosion of anomalies, but the silence from official sources.

What this suggests is that maybe there is no general conspiracy at work, but rather a breakdown of control at the top. The reason no one can explain how in the hell that kid got on the roof of that building in Pennsylvania is no one in the regime really knows for sure who is working which caper. In other words, it is not a desperate effort to maintain control by the people at the top, but a breakdown of their own internal control mechanisms leading to seemingly random rogue behavior.

Escape From Reality

Posted on August 13, 2024 by thezman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

Our Code Death

Posted on July 31, 2024 by thezman

Simulation theory is the hypothesis that says what people perceive as reality is actually an advanced, hyper-realistic computer simulation. It sounds like the basis for a cheesy science fiction story, but serious people think seriously about it. This post in Scientific American covers the basics. The very short version is something similar to what was presented in The Matrix series of films, just without the killer computer programs hunting humans who have managed to escape the simulation.

This idea is not new. In fact, it may be one of our oldest weird ideas, if you think of Plato’s allegory of the cave as a stab at simulation theory. It seems that humans have always known that at the minimum we are of two minds. There is the mind that attempts to comprehend objective reality and the other mind that contextualizes reality into things like social order, culture, history, and tradition. Culture is an artificial reality of sorts, but it is often more real to us than objective reality.

The obvious question is how could we tell if we are in a simulation? If the beings running the simulation have fooled us for this long, then surely, they have the ability to hide evidence of their handiwork. On the other hand, maybe there is evidence all around us, but we were initially coded to not be good at noticing it. As we have evolved, we have gotten better at noticing, so perhaps our evolutionary arc is that we finally reach the point where we notice the simulation.

Some people suggest that the drive toward creating artificial intelligence and virtual reality is evidence that we live in a simulation. If humans can create a reality with conscious beings inside of it, then it stands to reason that other intelligence species have reached the same point and we are their creation. That would mean they are a creation of some other species and so on and so on. In other words, “reality” is simulations all the way down.

That still leaves us with the problem of knowing we live in a simulation. One bit of evidence would be limits or shortcuts in the universe. There is some process, for example, that works, despite violating the laws of physics that prevent other similar processes from working. Maybe we find some part of the universe that seems to be off-limits to our observations. We build a super powerful telescope and finally see that door with the sign on it that reads, “No Entry.”

The thing is though, this approach assumes we have correctly noticed everything to this point and have not yet found the evidence we seek. Another way of looking at it is that maybe we have not reached the level of noticing to see the evidence that is all around us in our daily lives. The Mandela Effect is the observed phenomena where large numbers of people believe something false to be true. There are dozens of examples where lots of people collectively share a false memory.

Maybe our brains have been coded to contextualize reality in such a way that anomalies are filtered out along with other useless junk. For example, millions of Trump haters are slowly coming around to the idea that the Trump assassination attempt is a false memory. Facebook is removing the iconic images of Trump raising his fist on stage with blood running down his face. It will not be long before these people are sure it never happened and call it a conspiracy theory.

Along the same lines, we have the Russia Collusion Hoax, which these same people swore was real, but now they swear it never happened at all. The same people who made up that hoax have convinced most of the world that Hunter Biden never owned a laptop and if he did, it was planted in that computer shop by the same people who rigged the 2016 election for Trump. Remember Covid? Of course not, as it never happened, and only crazy people think otherwise.

The Covid event is rather good evidence of one of those systemic shortcuts that point to this being a simulation. For months much of the world literally stopped going to work and yet the economy did not collapse. Everything we thought we knew about the workings of a modern economy said such a thing would plunge the world into a dark age, yet nothing changed all that much. Food got more expensive, but it somehow managed to get on the shelves.

Probably the biggest anomaly that has been at the center of politics for twenty years is the election of Barak Obama. To this day no one can say with confidence that he was born in the United States. In addition to his murky backstory, his total lack of qualifications to do anything, much less be president, should have relegated him to obscurity, but in violation of two hundred years of past practice, it was an asset in his campaign for the White House.

We are seeing another one of these political paradoxes. In 2020 Kamala Harris was as popular as rectal cancer. Despite having more money than any other candidate, she was never able to get any interest. Now, all of a sudden, she is anointed as the favorite to win the November election. As with Obama, we are seeing a violation of rules that have been predictive for many generations. Perhaps what we are really seeing is one of those shortcuts used by the programmers.

The larger point here is that what we are seeing makes no sense in the context of the rules we think govern human society. The reason no one talks about the economy anymore is it no longer makes any sense. The lunacy of the political media that has become the norm is not an effort to warp our sense of reality, but a reflection of the spaghetti code that is generating political media. The simulation is shaking itself to bits because of an accumulation of bugs and bug fixes.

Of course, we know what happens when a software system becomes so buggy that it can no longer be trusted. At least we think we know. You wipe the system and begin with a new code base. When a business reaches a point where it can no longer be reorganized, it is wiped out in what we call bankruptcy. A human society that reaches the point where the bugs are too numerous to fix, like the bad software, it is wiped out in what we call a revolution. We may be at that point.

Ending Strength

Posted on June 20, 2024 by thezman

One of the consequences of youth culture is that there is not a lot of thought put into the fitness of old people. What little there is on the subject is either aimed at peddling drugs or peddling the crackpot idea that you are as young as you feel. The former looks at the swelling population of geezers the same way they looked at Covid. They are just looking for a way to steal more money. The latter tends to promote activities that have dubious fitness benefits and mostly sell good vibes.

The main reason for this is Americans are terrible at being old. The obsession with youth is a core part of the culture. Every political cycle, billions of words are wasted on what the youth have to say about things, as if being young makes you wise and smart, when in reality you are at your dumbest when young. Of course, young people are encouraged to set new trends and then old people are encouraged to adopt those trends so they can pretend to be young.

This was not always the way. For most of human history, youth was a thing humans were quickly ushered through so that they could become productive members of the family and community. Once children could do useful things, they were put on a course to learn to be an adult. In the modern age, it is the reverse. Once someone hits the age of majority, they are put on a course to maintain the illusion of perpetual youth in order to avoid thinking much about what comes after youth.

The thing is though, you will spend most of your life living outside of your physical prime, so preparing for it and maximizing that time should be important. The old Mickey Mantle joke about how if he knew he would live as long as he did, he would have taken better care of himself was funny because it is true. Good fitness habits in the twenties and thirties are what make for good health in the middle years possible. Good habits in the middle years are what set up productive later years.

Instead of a fitness culture aimed at maximizing fitness over the long arc of your life, the focus is on unrealistically preserving youth. Gyms profit from people hoping to attain a physique that they never had in their youth and probably never would have attained in their youth if they tried their best. In their post-youth they are struggling and failing to attain a goal that makes no sense. Worst of all are the weight trainers who strive to look like Greek statues, so they can post shirtless pics on Twitter.

Years ago, a smart guy named Mark Rippetoe wrote a book titled Starting Strength, in which he laid out his scheme for basic weight training. It remains a classic in the weight training world as it explains all of the important exercises and how they strengthen specific muscle groups. It made a lot of money for him, but it would have been better if it were called Ending Strength. The reason is the point of exercise in general is to extend the useful years of your body to the furthers possible limit.

The proposition with regards to fitness is quite simple. If you are thirty years old, would you trade a few years of looking buff right now for not being able to climb stairs in the final ten years of your life. Sadly, most thirty-year-olds would go with looking buff, but no fifty-year-old worried about such an outcome would take that deal. Yet, that is the way fitness culture is structured and the thumb is on the scale to encourage people to take the buff option, long after buff is plausible.

You can probably blame this on the boomers as the obsession with perpetual youth started with that generation. Prior to the post-war years, youth culture was limited to jazz clubs and the degenerates who frequented them. In fairness, boomers did not invent youth culture, but they embraced it, and they still embrace it. Every potion, product and promotion are sold to them as the fountain of youth. It will not be long before lifestyle companies are claiming eighty is the new thirty.

The thing is though, eighty can be a better eighty, if all along the arc of life the person is encouraged to do the things that pay those dividends in old age. Regular weight training in the middle years with the goal of maintaining muscle mass will mean climbing the stairs when you are eighty rather than buying a stair lift. Functional exercise aimed at maintaining cardiovascular capacity in your thirties will mean being able to walk the museum with your grandchildren.

Of course, the reason no one tries to sell a program like this to middle aged people is the target audience fears old age more than death, so anything that reminds them that they will one day be old is a no sale. Still, it seems like there could be some audience for a program that focuses on extended quality years. The typical white person in American is in his fifties. This is a guy thinking about how many quality years he has left and what he can do with them.

That is the warping power of youth culture and a good example of what happens when the wrong people gain cultural power. Peddling potions and programs that promise to make you look young and buff is good for the sort of people who work at card tables in temporary offices where all the cars in the parking lot are left running in case they have to make a quick escape. They do not care about the long-term health of the population, just the short-term profit to be gained from them.

In a way, fitness is a microcosm for the current crisis in that it focuses all of the attention on the here and now, usually on unattainable or pointless goals, without thinking about what comes around the next bend. Most of what ails present day America is the result of not thinking at all about the second order effects of present actions. Youth culture has created a population with no sense of time. Instead of building something to last, it aims for living fast and leaving behind a good-looking corpse.

What this suggests is that the antidote to what ails us in this age is the rejection of youth culture and the short-term thinking that comes with it. Instead of maximizing the moment, the focus must be on ending strength. The long arc of life, politics and the culture is to be the best at the end rather than the beginning. People who live with the end in mind have full lives and a culture full of such people is one that avoids the present troubles and endeavors to sustain itself for the long haul.

The Z Blog

Sports, Culture and Other Stuff

Category Archives: Weird Stuff