Surviving The War

Posted on September 29, 2022 by thezman

There was a time when normal Americans thought about how to survive a nuclear exchange with the Russians. During the Cold War, this seemed like a real prospect, so there was a reason to think about it. Into the 1960’s school kids had to do the hide under the desk thing, which was mostly about conditioning people to accept permanent war, but it conditioned people to the idea of being nuked. How to make it through a nuclear war became something of an industry.

There were two schools of thought on the subject back then. One said that any hint of a nuclear attack by either side would result in a mag dump by both sides. The United States and the Soviet Union were in a prisoner’s dilemma. If either side showed restraint, then they risked the other side striking first and possibly making it impossible to retaliate, so logic said to send all of your missiles first. Both sides accepted this logic which is why a system was put in place to prevent it.

From a survival perspective, such a scenario made the prospects for anyone living through it extremely low. The arsenals at the time were larger than today and the assumption was they could wipe out all life on the planet. The initial blasts would kill most people, but the fallout and nuclear winter would kill the rest. Even if people survived somehow, the numbers would be tiny. There was simply no point in preparing for what would be instant death for almost everyone.

The other school of thought was more optimistic. War would escalate with an initial exchange that might not lead to a mag dump. Even if the will were there to send all the missiles, many people would refuse to push the button. The disruption from the initial strikes would also render communications useless. The example of Vasili Arkhipov seemed like proof that a full scale exchange was unlikely. That meant it was possible to survive a nuclear war if you were prepared.

Today, that last scenario is more plausible. Nuclear arsenals are much smaller than during the Cold War. No one is really sure that the antique systems on which these weapons rely would work under stress. The American ICBM system still relies upon 1970’s technology. The Russian systems are similarly antiquated. The most likely scenario is that the major powers are no longer functional after a nuclear exchange, so lots of people survive the event.

The first step in surviving a nuclear war is to avoid a direct hit. Washington DC will get several direct hits and the initial flash will vaporize most of the population. The shock wave will level most of the city. By now, the Russians and Chinese know to target Northern Virginia, so it will be a saturation bombing. The five percent that survive the initial blast will be radiated and die soon thereafter. Therefore, the first rule of nuke club is to be outside the target zone.

The safe bet is to be away from the coasts. The Rockies or Appalachia are the best bet for making it through the first stage. Denver will be nuked, for sure, but the damage will be contained to that plateau. People in the mountains will escape the flash and the blast, even if Denver takes multiple strikes. The Green Briar will get hit, for old times sake, but most of West Virginia will be spared. There are lots of places to escape the flash and the blast in the mountains.

Once things settle after the final missile strikes, there will be four key things to surviving the aftermath. You will need water, shelter, food and a way to defend yourself from the people who were not prepared. Imagine a land ravaged by mask wearing Covidians and you get the picture. You will have to be prepared to kill a lot of people in order to avoid ending up like them. This means you need to pick a spot that has access to water, a food source and is defendable.

Since a post-nuclear America is going to look like the frontier as far as you are concerned, you are going to need frontier skills. You will need to know how to make a fire, provide yourself basic medical care and know how to hunt and fish. If your location is near a river, then you can initially get by with fishing and water from the river, but you have to boil the water and cook the fish. The ability to make fire without modern items like a lighter or matches is essential.

Once you have sorted the location and provided yourself with the frontier skills required to live in the wild, you need to think about the defense issue. A man alone is easy prey, even to desperate city people roaming the countryside. It would be better to have a tribe that can work together for common defense. That means you either need the skills to create a tribe from who is left or you have to create a tribe now. One way or the other, survival will depend upon community.

This basic framework of preparedness is just scratching the surface, but it does provide the basis for building a survival plan. For example, you will not want modern firearms for defense in the post-nuclear world. Making your own gunpowder for modern ammunition is not realistic. You can make black powder from raw materials. That means the old fashioned muzzleloader is a good weapon to own and master. Of course, older range weapons like spears and bows are an option.

The same applies to tools. Creating your own electric for powering modern tools is possible, but not very practical. If you assume society takes generations to bounce back from the holocaust, then it makes no sense to rely upon modern tools. They will break and you will not be able to fix them. The same would apply to vehicles. Old cars need gasoline and lubricants. Even if you stock those, they will run out eventually and your vehicles become lawn ornaments.

This is why forming communities in advance of the holocaust is critical. You can plan for the two general scenarios. The first scenario is the world steps back to the pre-industrial age and does not bounce back. The other scenario is the people responsible manage to survive and quickly set about recreating the modern world by bringing things like the power grid on-line. Do you want to play a role in that rebuilding or do you want to seek vengeance on them?

Community building in advance lets you wargame these issues. It also makes survival much more likely. No one man can know everything or prepare for everything, so having help increases your odds of survival dramatically. It also provides the means for surviving what comes after the initial devastation. In a post-nuclear world, tribalism will be the key to survival, which means the best tribe wins. Of course, that is also why the world was blown up, but that is a story for another day.

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The Northman

Posted on September 2, 2022 by thezman

The Northman got a lot of attention when it was released, mostly because the usual suspects were scandalized by the lack of diversity. There are no black people in the film and the protagonist is a man. Worse yet, the female characters are feminine and the male characters are masculine. There are no homosexuals, transgenders or people speaking truth to power. In other words, a crime against the faith.

Of course, this became the story rather than the fact it is one of the best made moves in the last ten years. It is a film made by adults for adults, which has become such a rarity that reviewers struggled to describe it. Compounding it, the film requires some cultural literacy, which is rare among the movie reviewing community. Most of the reviewers think comic books are adult literature.

The Northman is a classic tale. A wronged man commits his life to getting revenge on those who wronged him. He sets out on a journey to exact his revenge, but the journey turns into something else. The black and white world of his imagination gives way to the moral ambiguity in which all of us exist. The story of revenge becomes an exploration of the deeper themes that define the human condition.

In this film, the story is based on the legend of Amleth, which comes from Scandinavian sources that have been lost. What we have comes from the Saxo Grammaticus, a 13th century Danish theologian. Amleth is the young son of a king. He sees his father killed by his jealous uncle, who takes both the crown and his brother’s wife. The son escapes only to return as a man who then gets his revenge on his uncle.

That is pretty much it for the plot of The Northman, but that short trip is one fantastic ride that reminds you that movies do not have to be lectures. They can be incredibly well done stories that leave the viewer thinking about the larger issues raised in the movie, but never explicitly mentioned. That is art. It holds a mirror up to you and your world so you can see things from a different perspective.

It is fair to say The Northman is art. We see Amleth as a young boy, full of curiosity and wonder until he witnesses the murder of his father. Next, we see him as a fully grown man, but more beast than man as his rage makes him a killing machine. We are left to guess what happened to make him into a berserker, but in a few minutes, we have two important plot points of his character arc.

Amleth takes part in a raid in the Kievan Rus and after the fight, he meets a Seeress who tells him that he will take his revenge on his uncle and that his path is intertwined with a Maiden-King. Now we have an important element. Amleth is not just a man on a revenge quest, but a man following his destiny. He no longer has a choice and must wrestle with this as he sets off on his journey.

This is not something you expect to see in a modern movie. Instead, it would have been filled with emotive exposition. Half the film would have been taken up explaining the back story and his emotional state. This film assumes you are mature enough to fill in the blanks and understand the bigger meaning of the story. This is not just a story about a man, but a story about man and his relationship to the world.

One of the clever things about the film is that it blends the dreams and visions with the live action in such a way that you are not always sure if what you are seeing is real or the imaginings of the hero. Toward the end, Amleth faces his mother and comes to realize her role in his father’s death. The way it is shot suggests it could be all happening in his head rather than in the real world. You cannot be entirely sure.

What really makes this movie stand out is the bigger themes. Amleth starts as a man with a lust for revenge. Then he learns that he will get his revenge, but that it is part of a bigger story of which he is only one part. His struggle is in accepting his fate and fulfilling his destiny, even when he seems to have other options and it comes at some cost to those he loves.

This is a theme that comes up often in our literature. If man can have a destiny, does he have free will? If you cannot escape your destiny, then why think at all about the choices that are presented to you? On the other hand, if your revealed destiny is one of many possibilities, are you obligated to fulfill it? Is the revelation part of the calculus or is it a challenge?

This gets to the biggest question of all. What is the point of life? Is it better to live a long and unimportant life or live a short and consequential life? Would you rather die a broken down old or die a young hero? Our nature is to live, but to live for what? This is the choice presented to Amleth. He could have remained a berserker. He could have abandoned his quest for revenge for a simple life. He could accept his destiny.

The Northman is about the oldest questions of human existence. What is the point of our lives and how should we use the time we have? For men, the choice is always between the long quiet life and the short exciting one. If it were only up to men, the latter would be the easy choice, but men cannot be men, or even exist, without women and women naturally want a man to choose the former.

That is what makes The Northman a great film. It presents a classic tale in a way that allows the intended audience to think about the big questions. It is not a lecture or an escape from reality, but a well told story. It is up to the adults in the audience to make of it what they will. That is probably what upset the critics. They no longer have the adult capacity to appreciate this film, so they flung their poo at it.

The Paper Bag Test

Posted on August 26, 2022 by thezman

Note: Since Friday is usually podcast day and there is no podcast this week, I thought it would be good to spring something from the behind the green door. For those with a paywall account, this is a repeat. For the vast majority here, this is entirely new since you have failed to sign up for a paywall account. Perhaps seeing the error of your ways, you will reconsider your decision.

Here in Greater Lagos, there are several grocery chains. The small moonbat community is serviced by Whole Foods, of course. They empty their wallets buying exploitation-free artisanal pickles. A step below that is Wegmans, which targets the same sort of shopper, but a click down the socioeconomic ladder. The Wegman’s customer lives in a nice suburb and supports most of the current fads.

The next step down is Giant, which is owned by the colossal Dutch conglomerate Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize N.V. They also operate other regional brands such as Stop & Shop and Food Lion. Interestingly, the Food Lions in Lagos are positioned near ghettos, so their customer base is the polar opposite of Whole Foods. In the South, Food Lion is the standard suburban grocery store.

After that comes the specialty shops and local players. Aldi has started to turn up, offering a warehouse experience for food shopping. In Europe, an Aldi is like a big convenience store. They are not as big as an American grocery store, but they serve the same function. The ones I have experienced in America are a cross between Dollar Tree and Walmart’s food area.

The point is we have a lot of options. I tend to go to the Wegman’s near my office because of quality and selection. It is a little more expensive than the Giant, which is across the street, but the trade-off is worth it to me. The staff is also nicer than the people who work at Giant. For some reason, the people who work at the Giant stores near me are surly and unpleasant.

Starting on August 1st, Wegman’s has stopped using plastic bags. I found this out the hard way when I hit the checkout. I use the self-checkout. All of the plastic bag holders were empty. I asked the clerk, thinking it may be some weird shortage issue and instead I got a lecture about the environment from a moron. Interestingly, she said it was a new law in the county, which I know is a lie.

That says the lecture was part of her training. She was forced to memorize the official answer by store management, which she repeated when people bitched about the new plastic bag policy. Put another way, this means the company knew their customers would hate it and they knew the policy was not defensible on its own terms, so they had to produce a justification.

The main reason grocery stores switched to plastic bags was that they are superior to the old paper bags. Plastic bags let you carry more stuff. They rarely rip. They also make useful gloves for picking up after the dog. Paper bags rip and they really show their stuff when it rains. Carrying your stuff to the car on a rainy day is an exercise in frustration with paper bags.

Of course, the cranks behind these schemes will counter that you can always use the grimy canvas sacks that have become one of their totems. They apparently believe that if there is a climate rapture while they are shopping, Gaia will be able to home in on their grimy canvas sacks. Gaia also commands them to impose their weird morality on the rest of us, so you better fall in line bigot.

What makes the Wegman’s scheme more ridiculous is the fact that they are now charging for the paper bags. Each one is a nickel. There is a ceremonial reconciliation at the end of the checkout. This is another one those clues that the scheme is driven by something other than business interests. The people behind it want you to know that they are compelling you to obey Gaia.

It was clear that the law of unintended consequences is kicking in. Because packing paper sacks is a hassle, fewer people were in the self-checkout. The lines for regular checkout were longer. This means the store will be faced with staffing up or losing business due to people not wanting to wait all day to checkout. It also means more customer hassles to be addressed by the staff.

The most obvious result will be many people going across the street to the Giant, which is there to sell food, not preach the gospel of Gaia. No doubt the people at Wegman’s will see this as a triumph. They have finally purged those hidden fascists prowling the cereal aisle of their stores. It is the price they are willing to pay for the war on white supremacy and climate change or whatever.

The whole thing is another example of how this stuff works like a religion. The people who produced this crackpot idea are not doing it to make money. They are not doing it to curry favor with a specific audience. It is a public act of piety. This is all about proving their faith because they really do believe this stuff. Rational arguments to the contrary are just seen as proof of their eternal goodness.

It is one thing, but multiply this by hundreds of examples and it is not hard to see why everyone is so salty. We live in a world where a small cadre of lunatics are trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Not only are those beliefs insane, but they keep changing almost as if the point of the religion is to be a nuisance. The Church of the Public Nuisance now controls public life.

Our Weird New Reality

Posted on August 16, 2022 by thezman

One of the great unnoticed things about the current crisis is that the rules that everyone said were inviolable no longer seem to apply. This is most obvious in the economic realm where nothing makes any sense. Things that were said to be impossible a generation ago are now the default. Similarly, politics is now operating by a set of rules that no one can explain. Things that were considered outside of the realm of the possible are the new normal.

Way back in the before times, when Covid got going, the world literally shut itself down in response to the virus. In America, over twenty-five million people were laid off and tens of millions more were sent home to work. The official unemployment rate peaked at thirteen percent and was then restated to be just under seven percent. What the actual unemployment rate was at the peak is unknown. Regardless, it was an unprecedented attack on the economy that should have been devastating.

According to official statistics, the economy shrugged it off. The official figures say the economy contracted by 3.4% in 2020 but all of the decline was contained in the third quarter of the year. The fourth quarter began a massive rebound. The official numbers say the economy grew by 5.7% in 2021. That more than made up for the decline in the prior year due to Covid. It turns out you can literally shut down an economy and nothing serious will happen. No wonder people want to stay home.

It is not just in America where the laws of economics have been suspended. In Europe they are allegedly facing an energy shortage. Since forever we have been told that steep increases in energy prices trigger recession. Germany is literally facing the prospect of having no gas and no one seems to notice. The massive disruptions to the flow of energy into the EU has thus done little to upset the economy. According to the old rules, this should not be possible.

It is possible that the media is simply lying to us. Maybe people are seething at the suffering that has been inflicted upon them. The official media, controlled as it is by state actors, is ignoring this in favor of happy talk. It could also mean that all of those economic rules were just made up. No on really knows why the economy does what it does but like court magicians, economist pretend to know in order to provide authority to the ruling class. The whole thing is a put-on.

It is also possible that we live in a simulation. What we think of as reality is just a bit of software that the creators can tweak as they please. Those old rules had to be abandoned because the system got a computer virus. In order to keep the simulation from crashing entirely they changed the code. It is a temporary patch to the system until the next upgrade. Maybe that is why big events from the past, like the lockdowns, suddenly feel like distant memories. We rebooted.

Politics has the same weirdness. Everyone reading this is absolutely certain that we did not arrest people for speech. That was written down somewhere and everyone agreed that you could say what you like with some very narrow limits. Yet Douglas Mackey faces a decade in jail for making fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. Maybe like the economic rules, there was a patch done to the software, a hard reboot and we are suddenly operating under a totally new set of rules.

This confusion is obvious with the political actors. Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage in New Jersey. All of a sudden, the people dedicating their lives to suppressing speech were bemoaning this attack on free speech. In Britain, Boris Johnson has people thrown in dungeons for using the wrong pronouns, but he was out there decrying this attack on our sacred liberty. Maybe the software engineers forgot the update these guy’s code during the last service pack.

Even taking a step back and looking at things in the most general sense, the rules no longer seem to apply. Politics used to be defined by the three big human motivations, money, power and sex. How does drag queen story hour fit in here? Who is benefitting from this lunacy? The point of this assault on the children seems to be the promotion of general mayhem, which used to be the opposite of what rulers sought. The old rules said order was the goal of the people in charge.

Of course, we know that a tenet of the new religion states that only through mass confusion can we transcend this world. They believe if they get everyone into a state of agitation that we somehow break free from our old thinking. This lets us adopt a new model of thinking which is the passage to the glorious future. The endless “subverting expectations” is a deliberate effort to make everyone crazy. It is hard to accept, but this does explain why the rulers now prefer chaos.

That does not explain why the system trundles on, despite violating all of the rules we have been told are inviolable. We have double-digit inflation, periodic food shortages and record high gas prices. The whiplash effect is now emerging, where price hikes are followed by demand destruction, which collapses prices, only to see demand return and drive prices back up again. In other words, we are seeing stagflation in the economy but no one seems to notice or care all that much.

Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. Maybe it takes us a while to recognize reality after a long absence. Perhaps what lies ahead is a mass recognition of reality and a sudden return of the old rules. Maybe the people running the simulation get bored and shut us down. At this point, given the general weirdness we are seeing, we cannot safely assume anything. For now, at least, we are in a new world with new rules and a new sense of reality.

Deep Thoughts

Posted on August 11, 2022 by thezman

In season four of the 1990’s television drama The X-Files, there is a scene where one of the villains is meeting with his subordinates. Staff members are asking their boss how they should rig things like Hollywood award shows and sports events. The boss says that he will not allow the Buffalo Bills to win a Super Bowl and one of the staffers questions if that is possible. Another staffer then explains how the boss was able to rig the 1980 Olympic hockey tournament.

The villain is a famous character from the show called Cancer Man or the Smoking Man, because he is a chain smoker. No one seems to know his real name. He just seems to be a guy who is at the heart of every conspiracy and coverup, one step ahead of everyone, especially the protagonists. He appears to work for the government, but he also represents the interests of a shadowy group of old white men who may or may not control the governments of the world.

That is what makes that scene memorable. To that point the show was a little dodgy about the nature of the various conspiracies. Most of the time the protagonists are racing to expose a coverup by the government. At other times, it appears they are being manipulated by some shady actors using their investigations as a way to coverup some more sinister plot. In that scene we see that the deep state literally controls the things we take for granted, like sporting events.

The X-Files franchise was a huge success because people like to think that their world is controlled by someone. This is a feature of the human condition. Early man thought the sprits that animated the natural world altered the behavior of man. The ancients thought the gods manipulated the affairs of man. Of course, Christianity starts with the assumption that God created a rational world and he intervenes from time to time to nudge man in a certain direction.

This is why the intelligent design concept is popular. For most people, the idea of a chaotic, purposeless world is upsetting. Even though the basics of intelligent design contradict the fundamentals of Christianity, many Christians would rather believe God is endlessly tinkering with his creation than accept evolution. Even though evolution fits in with the concept of maker’s knowledge and the perfection of God, people struggle with the seeming randomness of the natural world.

This also explains the appeal of the deep state. It is possible that the raid on Trump’s villa was carried out by bit players exploiting an opportunity. A regional FBI officer saw a chance to make a name for himself, got a nutty judge to sign off on the search warrant and now we have a scandal. This is a very unsatisfying explanation for most people, so they reach for the deep state as an answer. This raid is part of some plot run by shady characters who will never let Buffalo win a title.

None of this is to suggest that there are no conspiracies. A central feature of human nature is cooperation, which is another way of saying that it is the nature of man to plot with other men. Politics is defined by the plots hatched and executed by factions within the political system. Court intrigue has been with us since the first man was named the leader of his people. Often, these plots take on a life of their own. The original plot gets away from the plotters and becomes a scandal.

The Russian collusion hoax is a good example. We now know the idea was hatched by Clinton operatives as a political dirty trick. They made up some phony evidence showing Trump was in league with Putin. Then they fed it to the media and the FBI in order to force it into the general conversation. The paranoid bigots of the far-left then turned it into something the JFK conspiracy. The grifter-right then turned that into a moneymaking scheme blaming the deep state.

The Russian collusion hoax is a good entry point in understanding the appeal of the deep state concept. Most of the people who hated Trump could not tell you why they hated him so much. The deep state concept filled that whole. Trump was in league with those dark forces that manipulate the world. On the other hand, Trump supporters could rely on the deep state to explain why the system attacked Trump. Both sides of the Trump story could sense the Cancer Man in the room.

John Derbyshire famously said, “The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.” From that it should be easy to see why the deep state is a popular villain.

Another reason people like the idea of secret actors controlling events is that it is easier to hate a person than a process. Anyone who has worked with big complex systems knows the frustration of not having someone to blame. The people are all doing the right thing, both morally and technically, yet the results are wrong. There is no one to blame but the system and the system is the result of all of those correct and well-intended actions by the people involved.

Blaming the system for American decline is too much for most people. They were raised to worship the idea of America. Blaming the system for why things are getting progressively worse is like burning the flag. It is a lot easier to blame some corrupting forces that are manipulating events. The same phenomenon set in with the Soviet Union after Stalin. Blaming bad actors operating in the shadows of the party was safer than questioning the system.

The deep state is why popular government is a terrible idea. In popular government, in theory at least, policy reflects the popular will. Therefore, bad results must be the fault of the people. How can this be possible when most people never wanted the bad result? It must be something else. Whether communism, socialism or liberal democracy, the people can never blame themselves, so they will find someone to blame, even if they have to invent him.

In personal rule, everyone knows who to blame. If gas prices go up, the people go down to the ruler’s house and demand he lower gas prices. There is no deep state in personal rule as there is no need for one. The motivations behind public policy are real and easily assigned to the people in charge. Popular government needs a deep state onto which the sorrows of the people can be cast. Otherwise, they will figure out who is responsible and abandon the system in favor of personal rule.

From a dissident perspective, the deep state concept is mostly useful as it is a vehicle for normal people to the land of doubt. The millions of Trump supporters who think their man is the victim of the deep state are losing faith in the system. The reckless shenanigans of mostly midlevel players make others wonder if there really is a secret cabal manipulating things. The deep state may simply be a sign that the system is in severe decline and nearing collapse.

Contemplating The Weirdness

Posted on August 10, 2022 by thezman

There is little agreement as to the dating of the current crisis, other than it seems to have started sometime after the end of the Cold War. Dating transitions from one period to the next is a form of sorites paradox. America is culturally, politically and economically different than it was fifty years ago. The point at which the turn began seems to be around when the Cold War ended, but the forces behind the transition may have roots going back a long way.

What can say about this age is that it has been defined by uncertainty. As Tucker Carlson has noted on several occasions, a lot of things have happened that no one thought would ever happen. He likes to use the election of Donald Trump as an example of something so impossible that it forces you to reconsider your biases about what is and is not possible. Anyone old enough to remember when Trump became famous in the 1980’s understands Carlson’s point.

Of course, the Trump election was not the first time something happened in politics that seemed impossible until it happened. In 1990, no serious person thought Bill Clinton could be president. The reason is no serious person knew his name. No one had to as the idea of a corrupt governor from a small state like Arkansas rising to national predominance for something other than crime was ridiculous. Presidents needed to be from big states and appeal to normal Americans.

The Clinton-Trump connection is useful for understanding the weirdness of the current age, because the two of them have a lot of connections. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were golf buddies and bonded over their carnal interests. They both hated Hillary Clinton for the same reasons. Both had a thing for shady land deals and the shady people who operate in that space. Their existence is more a symptom of a larger problem than the cause of anything we see today.

Putting the personal comparisons aside, the transition from the old way of doing things to this new way is evident in this comparison. Bill and Hillary Clinton were spectacularly corrupt politicians, but once they were out of office no one thought it was a good idea to keep pursuing their criminal activity. That was the old thinking. The new thinking has the FBI raiding Trump’s home over a petty issue. In that Clinton-Trump window, much has changed and changed unexpectedly.

That brings us back to the point Carlson likes making and that is we have to reconsider everything in light of recent events. Every day old barriers are falling away to new and bizarre forces. Even in the racial lunacy of the 1970’s, no serious person would have proposed erecting shrines to a dead drug addict. Today, cities all over the world have George Floyd memorials. Putting aside the politics, the weirdness of this suggests some sort of mass psychosis is at work.

Some will be tempted to wave this away as normal. In every age, people complain about change. It feels like the world has gone mad. Romans thought the spread of the weird new Jesus cult was madness. People at the dawn of the industrial revolution saw their lives completely altered by events. This time of great uncertainty was what motivated Marx to look for an explanation for the great upheavals around Europe in the 19th century. Change often feels like madness.

The thing is prior transitions had an obvious point. The Jesus cult was different but it was not that different. Even the skeptics could understand the attraction of this strange new religion that was spreading through the empire. The decline of the feudal order brought increased prosperity, so even though lots of new things were happening, lots of good things were happening. The same was true of industrialization. There seemed to be a logic behind the massive changes.

The current age is simply weird for the sake of being weird. Why are Western leaders trying to destroy the agricultural sectors in the West? They claim Gaia commands it, but what are they getting from this? As far as religions go, this strange new form of animism does not offer the believer much of a return. Christianity not only dangles the afterlife out there, but the promise that the wicked will pay for their sins. Gaia promises vengeance on all mankind, regardless of their righteousness.

The general weirdness is most obvious in our politics. The reaction to Trump by the political class was crazy for the sake of being crazy. The guy was desperate for their acceptance and would have signed whatever they put in front of him. These are people purpose built to fleece the sucker, yet when this opportunity arose, they were suddenly too pure to be spoiled by his presence. Their reaction was the exact opposite of what a lifetime of behavior would have predicted.

The same can be said for the ongoing pogroms against Trumpism. The 2020 election was the ultimate flex. Logic says they should have immediately closed the books on Trump and erased him from the collective consciousness. This is how all ruling elites have handled things. The ancients would remove all public references to a disgraced person and forbid mentioning his name. History said both parties would put Trump on ignore in order to purge him from the culture.

This raid on Trump’s villa is like how Hollywood has an addiction to subverting expectations with casting. They cast a black actor in the smart role and a pixie in the tough guy role. Even though this is now normal, they insist they are subverting the expectations of the audience. The raid on Trump subverted expectations as even the most jaded did not think these people were that stupid. In one move they turned Trump into a martyr and themselves into villains.

Now, the uncertainty and randomness are part of the plan. The belief set of the ruling elite says that subverting expectations is necessary to break the habits of mind that keep humanity from transitioning to the glorious future. A big part of the Gaia cult is the belief that smashing things will free us from the things that vex Gaia. Smashing up political custom and tradition by violating the old rules is another effort to break free from the past in order to ascend into the glorious tomorrow.

This strikes normal people as nuts, but up until a short time ago the idea of Donald Trump being president sounded nutty too. A year before he took the oath of office, the phrase “President Joe Biden” was a punchline. We live in a time when a man with severe dementia is president. If you can accept that then it should not be hard to accept that the motivation of the ruling class is a weird set of mystical beliefs that require them to destroy the foundations of civilization.

Once you wrap your head around the fact that there are no rules, then it is easy to see that all things are now possible. Dostoyevsky famously said, “when God is dead, all things are permitted.” Friedrich Nietzsche, a devoted fan of Dostoyevsky, would notice this and cause a lot of trouble. Nihilism rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence. The West killed God a long time ago, so it is only natural that we have reached the point where all things are permitted.

As an aside, you cannot help but laugh at the fact that the people in charge are obsessed with finding Hitler. They check under their beds every night and have teams scouring the bushes for any signs of Hitler. This is their license to overthrow the laws of the natural world. They attack the very idea that knowledge is possible, because that is white supremacy. Perhaps Hitler’s revenge was to leave a puzzle so frightening that it eventually drove his enemies into madness.

The universe does have a sense of humor, so that could be the answer for the madness, but the universe does not have unlimited patience. Reality is the thing that does not go away when you stop believing it. The only thing nature abhors more than a vacuum is the lack of rules. This spasm of weirdness will eventually slam into this reality and someone will push aside the current ruling class and reinstitute the rules that must govern a society. Weirdness is not eternal.

The Deep State Interface

Posted on July 12, 2022 by thezman

One of the weird things about this phase of liberal democracy has been the normalization of conspiracy theories. Thirty years ago, everyone, regardless of their political inclinations or what they thought of the other side, dismissed the claims of the conspiracy community. At best the deep state conspiracy was a plot device for a fantastical Hollywood script. At worst, it was a sign that the person may be struggling with mental illness.

Today most people think there is a deep state. In fact, the phrase deep state has become a normal part of discourse. In conventional politics it can mean anything from the leaders of both parties to nefarious forces controlling the institutions. George Soros is part of the deep state, even though the deep state is supposed to be a shadowy group of people unknown to the general public. Even secret societies need to be personalized, so the deep state has many public faces.

You do not have to line your clothes with aluminum foil to wonder if there is not something going on off camera that explains what is happening. For example, the berserk effort by Western government to “decarbonize” the West looks like a suicide pact by a collection of cult leaders. How can these people really think it is good idea to shut down Dutch farming to save Gaia? How does returning Germany to using wood for heat make any sense? There must be something else.

Of course, we all know that there is no such thing as a deep state but it is not hard to see why people are open to it. It is sort of like the concept of space-time. That is, it is an invention of mankind to help explain the universe. The fact that it does not exist is not really important because it allows physics to explore the universe. At some point it will be abandoned for a deeper understanding. The same may be true of the deep state in that it works for now, even though it is not real.

For example, when you see an ad for something like plant based milk you are supposed to think, “why yes, I would prefer this over actual milk.” Then your brain reminds you that we have no need for plant-based milk. We have plenty of actual milk. The reason we have lots of real milk is we invented refrigeration so that we no longer have to rely upon things like almond milk. That is when that concept of the deep state fills in the blank and you begin to wonder what they are up to with this.

This is when someone chimes in about lactose intolerance, but you do not build a church for Easter Sunday and you do not build an industry for people who cannot digest milk enzymes. Similarly, you do not invest billions on meat made from twigs and bugs that “tastes almost like real meat!” Similarly, you do not bother inventing eggs made from grass that are almost like real eggs. These are solutions in search of a problem, perhaps a problem contemplated by the deep state.

Now, solutions in search of a problem are not new. The e-book was supposed to replace the real book, but there was never a need to replace the book. It was the result of two thousand years of evolution starting with the early Christians. By the 20th century it was the ideal solution to distributing the written word. That did not stop smart people from pushing the idea of the e-book. Innovation is as much about bad ideas and it is the few good ideas that are genuine improvements on the old ideas.

In the present age, the managerial class plays an outsized role in picking winners and losers, so there is money to be made exploiting their hopes and fears. This has always been the genius of Elon Musk. His projects all tap into the boutique beliefs of the managerial class. He is a futurist selling futuristic solutions to the problems of the future to people haunted by the prospect they will not see the glorious future. They are willing to spend your money to achieve their dreams.

Klaus Schwab is working the same grift. The World Economic Forum is a crackpot idea that appeals to the vanity of the managerial class. It did not get much traction until he was able to hook a few billionaires to attend his event. That was the validation needed to turn the thing into Burning Man for the managerial elite. They go to be seen with their analogs in the other parts of the managerial class. The deep state vibe is part of the appeal to people who spend their days in committees.

What has happened over the last thirty years since the end of the Cold War is the Western managerial class has evolved both a class consciousness and a messianic religion that binds them together. It is why they have become so paranoid about the people over whom they rule. A big part of being a Cloud Person is thinking about how much you disdain the Dirt People. Displaying your cloudiness is often just expressing your contempt for dirtiness.

This is why the concept of the deep state has caught on. From the perspective of the Dirt People, it looks like there is a secret set of hands guiding the movement of the clouds and the people inhabiting them. When all of a sudden, every chattering skull on television is chanting “keev” you cannot help but think it is scripted. The ads for food made from bugs make a lot more sense when you imagine a secret cabal plotting to kill off farming to please Gaia.

Like space-time, the concept of the deep state works because it allows for the further exploration of the environment in which we find ourselves. The fact that it is not a real thing, at least not in the way it is used, does not matter right now. Blaming Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates for the current crisis is fine. Waging war on the people profiting from the system is almost as good as attacking the system itself. For most people, raging against the deep state is comforting.

Just as the reality of the universe lies beyond the interface of space-time, the reality of the managerial state lies beyond the deep state. It is not a collection of super villains controlling the world. It is a system that produces the super villains it needs to control the population over which it rules. If Klaus Schwab did not exist, the system would simply invent him just as physics invented space-time. These bad guys are a necessary interface to the managerial system.

There is another aspect to the deep state interface. It is comforting. The people invited to the soiree’s like WEF and Davos get to think they are influencers, shaping the mind of the deep state actors. The Cloud People can be sure there is a powerful force guiding their hand. The Dirt People get the comfort of knowing there is a rational actor behind the movement of the clouds. Perhaps he is amenable to reason or perhaps he can one day be defeated by the Dirt People.

Maybe like space-time, the deep state interface will be useful in breaking the system open to expose its internal workings. On the other hand, it may come to be a great impediment to understanding the world. There are some who think space-time has inhibited our ability to understand the universe. Regardless, the deep state does not exist, but it is useful. Like electric cars and milk made from bugs, it has a purpose, even if we cannot be sure whose ends it serves.

Individualism

Posted on July 6, 2022 by thezman

One would naturally assume that a book about Western individualism would start with a definition of the term and then provide some examples of how this concept exists in the West, but not in other civilizations. After all, it is a term that is used in various ways and it also carries moral connotations. That is not the case with Kevin MacDonald’s latest book, Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. Instead, it is left to the reader to figure out what the author means by individualism.

There is the first challenge in understanding the main assertion of the book. The claim at various points in the text is that individualism is unique to the West. This is the result of the people who settled in the lands we now think of as Europe. They possessed qualities that made it possible for them to adapt to the harsh climate of Europe, but the climate also selected for those qualities. These behavioral traits are also the basis for what we think of as individualism, however defined.

It is an established fact that the variations in climate and geography create different selection pressures on the life in different regions. Cold climates select for life that can survive in cold climates. Rainy climates select for life that can exist with extremely high average annual rainfall. These selection pressures apply to humans, which is why we can observe the great diversity of people. East Asians were selected for, so to speak, the climate and geography of East Asia.

The first three chapters of the book cover the migration of people into Europe and what we know about the organizational structures. Europe was initially settled by hunter-gatherers with an egalitarian culture. Then nomadic people with an aristocratic warrior class came in from the east. MacDonald argues that the genetic basis for egalitarianism and meritocracy is in these original people. This is not an argument from science, but rather an argument from inference.

It cannot be emphasized enough how marriage patterns and family formation helped define what we think of as the West. The rapid decline in cousin marriage, for example, is arguably the great leap forward for Western people. It naturally lead to the evolution of alternatives to narrow kinship in human cooperation. MacDonald does a good job summarizing how these mating patterns were brought to the West with the aristocratic people who migrated from the East.

In the next chapters the focus shifts to culture and history. Chapter four is about European family formation. The focus is entirely on Europe, so the reader is left to guess why this differs from the rest of the world. Chapters five and six are about Christianity in Europe. Chapter seven focuses on British idealism and then chapter eight focuses on moral communities. These chapters are a long summary of how individualism, however defined, shaped Western history.

Chapter eight is an interesting chapter in that he finally gets around to providing a definition of individualism. He states at the opening that individualist societies are based on the reputation of the individual. Group cohesion depends on the members judging other members on an individual basis. Each member also accepts that he will be judged by society as an individual. This contrasts with other societies where membership in a tribe or clan is the basis for judging people.

This gets to the major flaw in the book. It needs an editor. The parts are here for a straight line argument that individualism has genetic roots and that it was selected for in European people. As humans adapted to the harsh northern climates, they adopted social structures that rewarded the behaviors necessary to survive as a group in the areas we now call Europe. While we cannot locate an “individualism gene” we can infer it through things like marriage patterns and family formation.

This would make for a nice, crisp two hundred page book. Instead, these bits are spread over five hundred pages, mixed with material that is highly debatable. People familiar with the history of the early church, for example, will scratch their head at the assertions made in chapter five. The section on Puritanism often seems to contradict what he said in early chapters about individualism. A professional editor could have pointed this out and forced a rethinking of these chapters.

Another problem with the book is that it is not really about individualism so much as a way to support his theory of group evolutionary strategy. As a result, he reduces group behavior to individual motivations. This sort of reductionism is common among older right-wing writers for some reason. That generation has always had a fetish for assigning base human desires to the behavior of groups. For some reason, emergent behavior lies beyond their intellectual event horizon.

The final criticism of the book is that it fails to explain why individualism has led the West to the verge of self-extinction. It has become an article of faith in certain circles that Western individualism is the cause of decline. Some argue that it makes it possible for tribal minority groups to exert undue influence on society to the detriment of the majority population. If so, then why now and not a century ago or five centuries ago when the West was far more fragmented?

The counter here is that this is not the point of the book. Others will need to pick up from where the book leaves off to make those arguments. The trouble is the book ends with a chapter on individualism versus multiculturalism. That and the intended readership is the sort of people talking about how individualism is at the root of the current crisis in the West. Given the bulk of the book is a review of Western culture, it is logical that this topic should be addressed.

The question in every book review is whether the book is worth reading. Just as every child deserves love, ever book deserves reading. Despite the structural flaws, the book does a good job describing early Europeans. The section on moral communities is probably the best chapter in the book and the most relevant. That is a good reward for slogging through the chapters on religion. The final chapter is a good summation of the White Nationalist worldview, for those interested.

Overall, it is a mixed recommendation. The first three chapters are well worth the time, even though they could use some editing. The chapter on moral communities is another good use of reading time. The chapters on religion will be exasperating for those who have a good religious education. Overall, it fails to deliver on the main topic and its role in the current crisis, but it provides a lot of interesting material that is being carefully avoided by mainstream writers and thinkers.

Holiday Thread

Posted on May 30, 2022 by thezman

Here is my Taki post. I have been doing a lot of commentary on the various struggles within conservatism. Their struggle is interesting as they are feeling around for an answer but first making sure to avoid any of the right answers. It is a lot like how crime is discussed in conservative media. They first make sure to remove all reverences to race and then try to explain crime. The same thing happens in these spats over how to revive the corpse of conservatism…

Here is a very useful map of Ukraine. It shows the military groupings, the various conflicts on the front and the important towns and roads. Once you get the hand of the symbols and legends, you see they the happy talk from the West with regards to the Ukrainian army is nonsense. Like an amoeba surrounding and consuming one cell organisms, the Russian army and local militias has broken up and is now consuming the Ukrainian army operating in the Donbas.

The map also reveals the reckless stupidity of the Kiev regime. They should have pulled out of the Severodonetsk and Lysychansk. Those troops cannot be supported and therefore have no way of surviving the Russian advance. Instead they are left to be annihilated as another “heroic last stand” publicity stunt. Thousands of Ukrainian lives have been lost so that the west can own the Russians on Instagram, which should be a special sort of war crime…

Happy Memorial Day!

The Plague

Posted on April 13, 2022 by thezman

Over the last several years, America has experienced a new phenomenon in which people critical of official dogma suddenly endorse the dogma. An alternative form of this is where people who have made a career debunking claims that appear in the media suddenly become the most faithful consumers of media propaganda. It is as if a new virus has entered the system that causes the victim to switch sides or reveal themselves to be a double-agent all along.

The Trump phenomenon was the first example. When Trump famously came down the escalator to declare his candidacy, many assumed it was just a publicity stunt from a guy known for showmanship. Some went a bit far in criticizing it but Trump is one of those guys who can rub some people the wrong way. Once it was clear that he was a serious threat to be nominated, it also became clear that those harsh critics had contracted this new mind virus.

Granted, we did not know it was a mind virus. When Bill Kristol started waving around Hillary Clinton signs, it was just assumed he was bitter. In fact, that was the assumption about all of the neocons who were ranting about Trump. He had torpedoed their guy Jeb Bush so their attacks were just sour grapes. Jonah Goldberg was sure his old lady was going to land a job in the next Republican administration so Trump was a huge blow to his plans.

We now think that Trump triggered the forgotten Trotsky gene. All of those old neoconservatives and their progeny who had been posing as conservatives for fifty years have the Trotsky gene. Trump triggered it and as a result they instinctively returned to their natural state as hyper-violent leftists. At least it was assumed that Trump triggered it. Further evidence suggests that a virus of some sort was in the air that was the real cause of the neocon reaction.

Ironically, it was the presence of another virus that revealed the presence of this prior virus in the population. The Covid panic, which was fostered by the managerial state, triggered a reaction in some of the harshest critics of it. Instantly, people who had made careers in media criticism, usually around the issues related to the humans sciences, became totally trusting of the media. Everything in the press regarding Covid was treated as holy writ.

Strangely, this uncritical acceptance of media messaging was particularly hard on the old HBD community. These are the people who spend their days thinking about the biological diversity of humanity. As a result, they spent decades picking apart the blank slate claims in the media. Their message for generations has been that you cannot trust the media to talk honestly about biology. Then all of a sudden, they accepted all media claims about Covid without question .

It was not just the HBD people who were gripped by this madness over Covid, but they were the hardest hit by it. This is when the possibility of the cause being a virus started to make some sense. People whose psychological immune systems have been tuned to defeat a specific sort of media agitation were probably most vulnerable to a different form of media agitation. It is why they have never recovered from the infection, despite the revelations.

The war in Ukraine has brought a new outbreak of the virus. Many who chanted “fake news” during the Trump years are now festooned with Ukraine symbols and carrying on like the remaining Biden supporters. In fact, the most fanatical supporters of the regime are people who used to be Trump partisans. Sean Hannity, for example, is demanding nuclear war over Ukraine. He repeats whatever is in the mainstream media regarding Ukraine as if it is gospel.

Granted, the talks show circuit types are mostly carny folk who go where they think they can get an audience, but there are more sober minded examples. Victor David Hanson has been uncritically repeating media claims about the war. He seems to be fond of the narrative that says the Russians planned to sack Kiev, but the Ukrainians heroically defended their capital. He is lending his credibility to nonsense made up by children at the New York Times.

The war in the Ukraine is another clue that we are dealing with a virus that causes the victim to trust the mass media. Many of the people who got Covid all wrong at the start are now on the wrong side of the war in Ukraine. They either have staked out the wrong position or they are accepting media narratives. This madness transcends ideological orientation. The victims, once infected, lose the ability to critically judge what is being presented to them.

Further evidence of a virus, and that it may be deliberate, is the sudden chanting of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” by the media. Maybe the virus has a different impact on sociopaths than it does on other people. Media people infected by the virus become paranoid, sure that a secret cabal is feeding them lies. Perhaps the virus causes a moment of clarity which then induces madness. This is a topic that needs further research.

The cause remains unknown, but the madness we have seen over the last half dozen years points to some common cause. Perhaps this is just a symptom of modernity or maybe this is what cultural collapse causes in people. A mind virus of some sort is always a possibility, given what we have witnessed. Regardless, a plague has spread across society causing the subversives to go public, the skeptics to become trusting and the media to go insane.

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