The New One True Faith

Posted on April 26, 2021 by thezman

Note: The regular Monday post is up at Taki. This week it is a take on the paleo concept of anarcho-tyranny. There’s a review of Patton behind the green door. For those who like the podcast, there is a new feature behind the green door. This is a short Sunday podcast on news items from the week. If you would like to buy the hardest working man in dissident politics a beer, you can now do so here.

Upon assuming the thrown in 568 AD, the Visigoth king Reccared converted from Arian to Chalcedonian Christianity. This led to some unrest in the kingdom, as the Visigoths had always been Arian. The Arians were mostly tolerant of other religions, including paganism, but the Chalcedonians were not so charitable. Reccared put down the unrest and then oversaw the Third Council of Toledo in 589, where he announced his faith in the Nicene creed and denounced Arianism.

The spiritual differences between Arians and Catholics may be of interest to those with an interest in theology, but what matters to us today is that the trinitarians were the winners in the theological debates within the early church. From that point forward, there was one true faith in the Visigoth kingdom. The people were expected to convert to the new faith. Those who refused could expect some form of repression, ranging from extra taxes to expulsion from the kingdom.

Why Reccared converted to Catholicism is not all that clear. The material benefits, if they existed, have been lost over the centuries. His conversion brought with it new conflicts, especially with the Jews of his kingdom. The Arian kings had been disinterested in the faith of their subjects, which meant they could get along with the Jews, who were quite powerful in parts of the kingdom. That ended with the conversion of Reccared, as the Catholics were not tolerant of Jews.

What happened in Spain under the Visigoths would be repeated many times over the centuries in Europe. The ruling class would convert, and the people were expected to convert along with them. In England, which was controlled by many different kings, the Church converted one at time, the same way they converted Reccared. Of course, the same pattern would remerge in the Reformation. The rulers would change religion and the people would be forced to change their religion as well.

If you wanted to pinpoint the birth of universalism and universal intolerance in the West, the early Middle Ages is probably a good place to start. The Romans persecuted a lot of Christians and Jews, but it was mostly because they saw these movements as a direct threat to their power. By the middle ages, persecution of heretics was no longer about threats to power, but about violation of a universal truth. The mere existence of doubters or skeptics was seen as a threat to the one true faith.

The thing is, from the perspective of the common people, these changes at the top probably made little sense. Imagine you are a proud Goth who has served in the king’s army and then one day you are told you have to change religions. The reason is that the old religion was all wrong. In the case of the Visigoths, this happened twice. Once when some guy created a bunch of squiggles he claimed was your language and everyone became Arians. Then again when Reccared renounced Arianism.

People today should be able to relate to this. Within living memory, the rulers made a point of showing they were faithful Christians. Jimmy Carter was an Evangelical who spoke openly about his faith. Reagan salted his language with Christian references and Bill Clinton carried a Bible around with him. Today our rulers worship black people and think men in dresses are the fullest expression of womanhood. The schools now teach us the evils of whiteness and white privilege.

As with the Christian era in the West, this new religion brings with it an extreme intolerance of skepticism and doubt. Men are being fired from their jobs because they are not enthusiastic enough for the new faith. Those who challenge the faith are anathematized in the same way the early Church would anathematize those who challenged them. Our rulers have not started breaking heretics on the wheel or decorating the streets with the crucified, but it is still early.

We also see the universalism of the new faith. The rulers who embrace this new religion are sure it is the only way any human society can live. All of those in the past, the people that made the present possible, we monstrous sinners. Those in the present, clinging to alternative faiths, are monsters that must be destroyed. The ruling class of America wants to have a nuclear war with Russia over homosexuality. The Crusaders were insanely tolerant compared to today’s crusaders.

There are differences obviously. The universal faith that emerged in the early middle ages provided a social structure in which the West could begin to advance materially and intellectually. Whatever its faults, the Church provided a complex moral and social order that eventually resulted in what we think of as Western Civilization. The faith emerging today among our rulers is a step back into barbarism. It is a reversion to some pre-modern mean, corresponding with the collapse of the West.

The other big difference is the rulers converting to or from the Church in the past did so mostly out of conviction. There were material interests, for sure, but most genuinely believed in what they were doing. They thought what they were doing was in the best interest of their people. Today the rulers are guided by what they imagine is in the worst interest of their people. This new religion is not about elevating them or their people, but about harming the people who make their rule possible.

The other big difference between now and past conversions is the people did not have much to lose by going along with the king’s new religion. Life in the early middle ages was not easy, so giving up the old gods for this new thing or changing from one form of Christ worship to another slightly different form was not a huge risk. The conversion we are seeing today threatens the very existence of the West. If our rulers are wrong, the ape historians of the future will puzzle over why we went along with it.

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

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The Mob Rules

Posted on April 23, 2021 by thezman

Every once in a while, you cannot help but notice that the people who rule over us are operating like primitives from another age. A great example is this video in which Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, gives herself an award. The award in this case is for her support of free speech. While accepting the award, she brags about the efforts of YouTube to stifle the speech of anyone with whom she disagrees. You see, slavery is freedom, war is peace, and she is a hero of free speech.

The amazing bit is where she mentions that her family was chased out of Poland because they kept saying and doing things the Poles did not like. She says this experience that she did not actually experience, is what drives her now to drive people off the internet who say and do things she does not like. You see, back then it was bad, but now it is good because she is doing it. More important, she is justified in doing it because Hitler, which makes everything right.

This is, of course, a primitive mindset. When one band of savages sacked the village of another band of savages, they would erect their totem. The presence of their god in the form of that totem made it all good. Everything was seen in terms of the blood feud, so everything was justified. The people being savaged had it coming because somewhere in the past their ancestors did something to deserve it. Today the claim is the bad people are white, so they deserve whatever they get.

What makes the video amusing is she found a shiksa who is literally blind to present the award to her. First of all, a blind video maker is something from a bad script writer or a hacky comic. Putting that aside, the only person unable to see the absurdity of Wojcicki giving herself an award is a blind woman. This is Kim Jung-un giving himself “Humanitarian of the Year” or Nancy Pelosi, after a few jugs of wine, proclaiming herself the most sober person in Washington.

John Derbyshire used to say there is hope in the comments. This is where you see that people are not falling for the lies. This is why most sites have banished their comment sections now. YouTube is about to banish their down vote button for what you see in that video. There are 116 upvotes from YouTube lackeys and thirty thousand down votes from normal people. The comments tell the story. Primitive dirt-bags like Wojcicki can give herself awards, but she is not fooling anyone.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening (Link)
02:00: The Die Is Cast (Link)
22:00: Sikh & Destroy (Link)
37:00: Bronies Man (Link)
47:00: The Sacred Ones (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/tWz7w_VIWU4

Blessed Are The Covidians

Posted on April 22, 2021 by thezman

Back when the Covid-19 panic started, a clever fellow pointed out that one possible way out of it would be a vaccine that did not work, but with enough effort could convince people it did work. The rulers could claim it is 80% effective at preventing infection and there would be no way to know it was a lie based on medical statistics. The vaccinated who got Covid would just be those for whom the vaccine did not work. If the producer could keep the secret, no one would be the wiser.

The reason for this is simple math. The claims about the infectiousness of this virus were always nonsense. A year of aggressive testing has resulted in about 10% of the public having tested positive. We know that the false positives are very high, but we also know many infected people never get tested. Either they have no idea they have been infected or their symptoms are so mild they ignore it. Like the flu, Covid can be expected to infect around 20% of the public in a year.

If your vaccine is 80% effective, then that 20% is miraculously accurate. A clever ruler could roll out a fake vaccine and claim it is doing as it claims. The gullible media and research community would fall for it completely. Unless someone in on the scam spilled the beans, no one would know. In the age where the media is just the marketing department for the corporate state, whistleblowers are ignored. Given the money involved, a fake vaccine program is not a bad bet.

One problem with this scheme is that Covid quickly went from genuine public health concern to lucrative racket. Billions are being made maintaining the panic. It turns out that reorganizing the economy around lock downs is hard to reverse. Then you have the celebrity Covidians. Guys like Dr. Fauci are never going to let go of this thing as it is making him famous and rich. Of course, Covid is now a stock part of the media, like the weather or the previous night’s sports scores.

Then you have the Covidian problem. The fervent, but mentally unstable, have gravitated to the Covid panic as a new religion. The people who used to carry their groceries in grimy canvas sacks in order to show their love of Gaia are now wearing eight masks when alone in their car. They really care and they really care most about making sure you know how much they care. Take away their masks and they have no way to tell you how much they care.

This has created a perfect storm. The racketeers are pushing the vaccine, but also saying that nothing changes. Once everyone is vaccinated, according to people like Fauci, everyone will still have to wear masks, stand an arbitrary distance from one another, and carry on like the atmosphere is poisonous. This pleases the Covidians no end, who arf like seals at this idea. Millions are rushing off to be vaccinated so they can keep wearing masks and staying home.

Since most of the media has now joined the Church of Covid, they are looking for proof that their plans for your future are science! This story from the New York Times says a member of the unclean caused a pandemic among the faithful, despite the fact they had performed the proper sacraments. They were vaccinated and they were wrapped in layers of shrink wrap. Despite that, the mere presence of an unclean made Covid angry and she took out her wrath on the nursing home.

A reasonable person would look at this and wonder why anyone is bothering to get vaccinated when you still get sick. In fact, many people are wondering why we bothered with the vaccine at all, given that everyone will have to keep pretending this is the zombie apocalypse. We stopped using the iron lung and lumbar punctures once the polio vaccine was created. That is the point of a vaccine. You get vaccinated so you are no longer at high risk of contracting the targeted disease.

Of course, the Covidians are never giving up on this new religion, so their take is that the vaccine only works when the sinners are forced to be vaccinated. Again, it is not science with these people, even though they are fond of telling us how much they trust science, peace be upon her. You see, this miracle of science only works when everyone believes in it. If just one heretic refuses the blessed sacrament of vaccination, the whole community, maybe the whole world, is at risk!

Those with a taste for history cannot help but notice the Puritan notion of communal salvation running through this panic. The idea that a community can be brought low by the presence of a lone sinner has been with us since the beginning. It was the justification for the witch trials. Today it is the justification for the media destroying the lives of people who donate money to the wrong sinner. Soon, the unvaccinated will be forced to wear a scarlet letter-C on their chest.

The Covid panic has revealed the real plague on American society. It is the plague of mentally unstable individuals searching for a purpose to their lives. These are people who would have been religious fanatics in another age. In this age, their disordered minds cause them to seek the order of ideology. Toting around grimy canvas sacks, displaying pronouns on their e-mail signature and wearing eight masks in the car are about the need for structure to give them a sense of order.

Does any of this mean the vaccine is fake? Probably not. The drug companies are craven enough to try it. The media is dumb enough and cynical enough to go along with what they are told, but none of these people are creative enough to think of it. The more likely scenario is the drug makers dummied up their studies knowing the FDA was under pressure to play along. These vaccines are probably not all that effective and probably less effective for the old than the young.

Allowing crazy people to call the shots is never a good idea. Time will tell if it was a good idea to vaccinate the public with a hastily conceived vaccine. It took about five years before the monstrous effects of thalidomide became clear. Five years from now the same people lecturing us about mask wearing could very well be lecturing us about the dangers of allowing untested drugs onto the market. The solution to their current panic will be the cause of their future panic.

Another Martyr

Posted on April 21, 2021 by thezman

The Derek Chauvin trial came to a speedy end yesterday with the jury finding him guilty on all counts. What this means is they thought he intentionally caused the death of George Floyd and unintentionally caused the death of George Floyd. To a normal person, this makes no sense, but it is another reminder that America stopped being a rational society a long time ago. In a sensible society, this trial never would have occurred, because George Floyd would never have existed.

Lots of people were jubilant over the result. They do not know why they are happy, as they lack the ability to reflect on their own actions. They just know that their tribe won and that means they should be happy. That is the nature of liberal democracy. It is always about “who” and “whom” because everything is partisan. Those people celebrating are not happy for themselves. They are happy because they believe their enemies, real and imagined, are unhappy at the result.

It is not a lot different than a blood feud. When one side kills a member of the other side, it is not about righting some wrong or solving some problem. It is about adding more blood to the feud. That is how the Left sees white America. It is the people they hate and anything they can do to harm a white person is automatically good. Most of those people celebrating know nothing about the law, policing, crime, or the people involved in the incident. They just know Chauvin is white.

Of course, the other side of this, the sensible white people trying to make sense of what is happening, are not happy. Many were willing to be reasonable and meet the other side halfway on this. Maybe Chauvin was wrong or made a mistake. Maybe he should face some sort of punishment. Maybe he needs to be made an example so other cops are more careful. They thought that was the point of the system. The jury would do the right thing and find a suitable compromise.

Those sensible white people are waking up to the terrible reality of America. The system they have spent their life trusting is now as irrational and deranged as those people celebrating in the streets. America is not the land of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the other Founders. It is not the land of Abraham Lincoln. It is the land of Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez. They not only run the country, but the country also runs by the deranged logic of their minds.

For sure, many will rationalize what happened in order to stick to the old civic nationalist slogans they love so much. “This will be overturned on appeal” or “we have to take our country back from these Democrats” will get a lot of play. This is behavior of people in a cult when the tenets of the cult are disproven. Instead of accepting that beliefs were false, they internalize the disconfirmation into a justification for a more intense commitment. These people will decide to vote harder.

The parasites in Conservative Inc. will fund raise off this, telling those people desperate for answers that they will fight those liberals on their behalf. In a bankrupt society like America, every event is a chance for the grifters to grift a little bit more. You can be sure the conservative talk show hosts were popping champagne last night when the verdict was announced. There is nothing better for the conservative grift than losing, which is why they have been making sure to lose for generations.

Many though will let go of that last reed that was tethering them to the old America they grew up believing was real. Many will go through the stages of grief, maybe skipping to step three by this point. The realization that this is not their country and they are now second class citizens will not bring them comfort. It will free their mind of the frustration of believing in a myth. They will quit Red Team and start the process of looking for a new team, which will lead them to this side of the great divide.

This is the reality of a cultural revolution. The people smashing the system in the name of the revolution are beyond reason. It takes time for the rational, the people who make society function, to come to grips with it. Little by little, one martyr at a time, people do come to grips with this reality. You can be sure that every white cop in America is having the conversation with his wife right now. He may not know what to do, but he no longer sees himself and his job the way he did not so long ago.

It is frustrating, of course, for the people who have been on this side of the great divide for a long time. How is it that white people cannot see what is happening and where this must inevitably lead? The fact that no one was born on this side of the great divide, and we all made our own journey, is easily forgotten. For those on this side, this is the new normal and it is hard to imagine thinking any other way. The other side is a foreign country populated with people living a delusion.

That is the real test in these times. Those who have opened their eyes and see what is happening have to avoid being bitter about it. The job at hand is to wake up as many people as possible, ignore those who cannot open their eyes and help those staggering into the sunlight adjust to this new normal. There will be many more martyrs in the days ahead. Every war has them. The challenge is to give their martyrdom meaning so that one day, there are no more martyrs to our cause.

The Endless War With Russia

Posted on April 20, 2021 by thezman

Without formally announcing it and for reasons no one has bothered to explain, the American empire has declared war on Russia. That is the clear message the Biden administration is sending with the new round of sanctions. They have also kicked out some Russian diplomats. More importantly, the US is telling US banks they cannot have any dealings with companies working on Nord Stream 2, the big natural gas pipeline the Russians are building to supply gas to Europe.

In fairness, the war with Russia started before Biden was installed. You could argue it started back in the Bush years when they convinced the former Soviet republic of Georgia to annex parts of South Ossetia. The Bush people were making noises about adding Georgia to NATO, which did not sit well with Russia. From their perspective, this was a provocative act of aggression. It was correctly seen as an effort to surround Russian with states loyal to the American empire.

Team Obama promised to cool things down with the old enemy. They made a big show of the “big reset” with the Russians. Hillary Clinton did a photo-op with the Russian foreign minister in which they jointly held a big red button labeled “reset” on which each had their hand. Of course, administrations come and go, but the usual suspects that actually run imperial foreign policy never change. By the end of the Obama years, they were claiming the Russians rigged the presidential election.

Under Trump there was a real effort to call off the attacks on the Russians, but the usual suspects responded to that with two impeachment efforts. First there was the coup effort led by the FBI to get Trump removed. The claim was that he worked with the Russians to rig the election. Then there was the effort launched by the usual suspects in the State Department. It is easy to forget but pretty much everyone involved in the first impeachment trial had a connection to Ukraine.

Now of course, Ukraine is at the center of the Biden administration’s efforts to start a shooting war with the Russians. They have encouraged the Ukrainian president to declare his intention to return the Crimea to Ukraine, by force if necessary. Then they offered military guarantees in the event of war with Russia. The Russians have responded by putting their military on high alert. They have moved forces onto the border of Ukraine in preparation for a shooting war.

As if the guarantees to Ukraine are not enough, the Biden people immediately deployed long range nuclear bombers to Norway. They put bombers in Portugal as well and raised the strategic posture at the same time. Russian and NATO air forces are having regular incidents on the border of Russia. These are deliberate provocations. The hope is there is an incident that would warrant escalation. The fact that this happened as soon as Biden took office says it was not the doing of his people.

One obvious conclusion that can be drawn from this now two decade long effort to start a war with Russia is the President no longer controls foreign policy. Obama and Trump tried to normalize relations with Russia, but both were thwarted by the semi-permanent foreign policy establishment. Many of these people now have financial dealings with Ukraine, which goes ignored by Congress. Joe Biden is a vegetable and his family is literally on the payroll of the Ukrainians.

Of course, there is the madness of it all. Why is the American empire trying to start a war with Russia? One reason is money, of course. The usual suspects would like to raid Russia for natural resources. The parasitic financial system of the West is running out of domestic capital to burn, so Russia is seen as a new opportunity for plunder. There is also the grudge they have with Putin, who put an end to the looting. No one holds a grudge like the people running the American financial system.

There is also the fact that the foreign policy establishment is packed to the gills with people who were selected for their hatred of Russia. This goes back to the Cold War when foreign policy was simply about Russia. When the Cold War ended, those people did not retire. They did not stop selecting for people who shared their views on Russia and have the same cultural connections to the East. The maps have changed, but the people who see themselves as map makers has not changed.

One not so obvious reason is the need for liberal democracy to have an enemy. Like the Athenian Empire 2,000 years ago, the American empire is the result of conflict and as such it is designed to have an enemy. For half a century, the Russians were the enemy around which the empire was organized. They tried to replace Russia with Islam, but the Muslims proved to be a poor adversary. Cultural inertia has brought the American empire back to Russia as the enemy they need to survive.

Ironically, this new fight with Russia could turn out to be the disaster that seems to be the natural end of all empires. A shooting war with Russia will end in disaster for the empire because it would be a disaster for Europe. Russia would seize Ukraine in short order and this would result in an air war in the skies over Europe. Then Syria would unleash a million migrants from the south. It would be a catastrophe that would be blamed on Washington, one that would probably end NATO.

This is why the Germans are not rushing to support the empire on this. Germans have been dealing with the Russians for a very long time. they will be dealing with Russians long after the American empire is gone. Backing the yesterday men of Washington does not look like the best move for the Germans. America’s Varian Disaster may not be a military defeat, but instead be a diplomatic catastrophe. This attack on Russia could be what breaks the NATO coalition.

There is also the domestic situation. Despite the blaring from the regime propaganda organs, the Biden regime has limited support among Americans. Half the country thinks he is illegitimate, while the other half is instinctively dovish. They are also more focused on the domestic pogroms against their enemies. A war now would be a disaster domestically for the empire. Half the country would be rooting for the Russians, just because they hate the American government.

Chinese Ethics

Posted on April 19, 2021 by thezman

Note: There is a cornucopia of new items in various places today. There is the regular Monday post on Taki. There is a new feature behind the green door for podcast fans that will be a regular Sunday feature. There is also a review of the classic movie, The Jazz Singer, which may be the most Jewish movie ever made.

One of the interesting side bars to the Covid panic is the extreme lack of interest in the origin of the virus. The story a year ago was that it sprung from so-called “wet markets” where provincials trade exotic meats. One version said it was from bats and another claimed it was the pangolin. Then the story shifted to the lab in Wuhan where the outbreak started. That was dropped as the Chinese Communist Party instructed the American media to stop talking about the lab in Wuhan.

Conventional wisdom says the wet market stuff was always just a way to divert attention from the fact that the Chinese have a bioweapons operation. The Biological Weapons Convention not only prohibits the use of biological agents, but it also prohibits the development of them as well. In light of the worldwide panic over the Covid virus, it is not hard to see why everyone is trying to shift the focus from the lab to exotic meat markets. This public health emergency could easily become a political crisis.

The thing is though, the lab itself and the work that is probably going on there is really just the tip of the iceberg. What the story has revealed thus far is that many Western researchers have had contact with that lab and several others in China. There have been a few arrests of researchers in the West on the grounds they were working on behalf of the Chinese or spying for the Chinese. In other words, there are a lot of Western scientist working in China for some reason.

The reason gets back to that lab in Wuhan. There is no doubt that most Western governments operate biological research facilities. The fact that China is doing the same is no surprise. The difference is Western governments have to worry about whistleblowers who will spill the beans on anything illegal. They also have to worry about anything unethical. The Chinese, in contrast, arrests whistleblowers and harvest their organs. Scandal is not a concern for the ChiComs.

Western bioethics are not a big concern either. Last week, a team of researchers working in China announced they took six-day-old macaque monkey embryos and injected 25 human cells into each of them. The researchers claimed they conducted this study as part of an effort to discover new methods of creating organs. The idea is to use the patient’s DNA to grow new parts. This would not only solve the organ shortage, it would also solve the challenge of finding suitable matches.

The ethics are the obvious concern. In the West, this type of research is considered unethical because it raises questions that we have yet to answer. What if such a hybrid was brought to term? Should a monkey with a significant number of human cells be treated as human or as an animal? Even if it is clearly an animal, deliberately creating monsters just to do it is also unethical. We use animals in lab experiments, but it is not just for the thrill of tormenting them. There needs to be reason.

Again, bioethics are not a concern for China. What matters most to the Chinese is acquiring as much technology as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible. This is why China has become the wild west of bio-research. Western researchers know they can do whatever they want in China. They will be free of Western ethics and get all the money they need. They just have to share their work with their new masters. For many Western scientists, this is not a difficult dilemma.

Of course, they cannot be blatant about it. When the world complained about the use of CRISPR to create the world’s first genetically altered baby, the Chinese arrested the researchers involved and sent them to prison. The message being sent was that the research is fine, but it needs to have a Western face attached. In other words, the imported researchers from the West are not just bringing technical skills, they are providing China with some public relations assistance.

What the Chinese have figured out is they can use the same methods on the Western scientific community as they used to lure Western manufacturers. The promise of cheap labor and loose environmental laws, along with subsidies from the Chinese government, lured business from the West. Sure, it often meant that local Chinese firms pirated the products they were making for Western companies, but that was just a cost of doing business in China. It was still good business.

The tech industry fell for the same deal. They were initially lured to China in order to build out the infrastructure. They got access to a pool of smart engineers, who worked for pennies on the dollar, relative to American engineers. They also got the sweet contracts from the government. The tech companies also got to learn the finer points of population control from the Chinese. This was good business for the Chinese, who were able to accelerate their tech sector.

Some would argue that China is simply freer now than most Western nations, which is why intellectual capital is flowing there. If the Chinese are fine with creating human-monkey hybrids in the lab, then so be it. After all, human medicine advanced to a great degree from grave robbers supply corpses for doctors to dissect. In the 19th century this was immoral, but today we think nothing of it. Bioethics are a social construct and as such they will evolve over time. China is just ahead of the curve.

Whether we like it or not, we will soon learn if those ethical limitations popular in the West are necessary. The Chinese will keep forging ahead, buying Western researchers so they can experiment in the East. Maybe Covid was the wake-up China needed to put some limits on this research. Maybe it was just viewed as the cost of becoming the dominant player in the field. Maybe that cost will be regular pandemics of man-made viruses leaking from Chinese labs.

Most important, what we are seeing is what happens when a society decides that the value of everything is what someone will pay for it. In America, everything has a price, so nothing has value. The elites are happy to trade technology to China, because the only thing that matters is short term profit. From the Chinese perspective, the American empire is not a competitor. It is just a big candy store that she can systematically pick clean until it finally collapses. This is the war China knows it can win.

Feelin’ Groovy

Posted on April 16, 2021 by thezman

Maybe it is the rush of spring, but this felt like a good week. Here in Lagos, the trees are starting to bloom and the weather is just about perfect. For me, anything above 75 is uncomfortable, so temps in the mid-60’s are pretty nice. There is also the fact that the day job has been hassle free lately. Since the onset of the plague, my schedule has been packed with people demanding my immediate attention. The last few weeks it has settled into something of a comfortable pattern for a change.

In the political realm, the absurdity of it all is too much to ignore. I was talking with a friend who was never fond of Trump. He voted for him, at least that is what he said, but he thought Trump was a clown. He said to me, “You’re my age. Did you ever think Joe Biden would be President?” It was one of those moments when the ridiculousness of the age jumps out at you. Normal white people are walking around with the same thought in their head. We live in clown world.

At lunch the other day, the economy was the topic. One person would mention the bad news, like the rising cost of most things. Someone would counter with the stock market or the supposed hiring spike. This went back and forth until someone finally said, “You know, none of this could be true at all. No one knows what’s going on because we can’t trust anything we’re being told.” Again, I detected that detached bemusement that comes when you stop pretending it matters.

I think the thing that did it for me was when I checked out some clips from the Chauvin trial the other day. The state had called a doctor who was supposed to be an expert on cardiovascular issues. The guy was such a ridiculous ham, that it felt like satire. He clearly went to the William Shatner School of Acting. He did a dramatic performance of lifesaving doctor for the jury, but then the defense lawyer asked, “So what you are saying is George Floyd would be alive if just got in the police car?”

I think if I were on that jury, I would have bust out laughing. Everything about that trial feels like a joke on us by the people running this simulation. In fact, that is true about most everything these days. Joe Biden as President would have been a punch line to a joke not so long ago. Men in dresses playing girls’ sports? You just have to step back and admire the absurdity of it all. We cannot know what African scholars will call this time, but it will most likely focus on the silliness of the age.

Reality does not like to be mocked, so you can be sure a corrective, and a very large one, is lying out there in the distance. Maybe the fantasy economy will suddenly slam into mathematical realty. Maybe Russia and China will figure out that our military is a wreck and the leadership is a joke. Maybe Mother Nature decides to send a real plague to teach those mask wearing idiots a lesson. Who knows? For now though, it is spring, the flowers are blooming and clown world is in peak form.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Chauvin & Potter (Link) (Link)
22:00: Propaganda As Validation (Link) (Link)
37:00: Clown Shoe Update (Link) (Link)
47:00: Meme-Gate (Link) (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Be Like Me)

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The Narcotic Of Unreality

Posted on April 15, 2021 by thezman

Imagine that fifty years ago, someone walking along a beach stumbled upon a lamp, out of which popped a genie, offering to give the person a glimpse into the future as a reward for releasing him from the lamp. The person probably would be able to suspend their disbelief and give it a go. Once he got the glimpse of the future, he would be so stunned by what he saw, that he would quickly assume he is having some sort of hallucination and run off in terror. That cannot possibly be the future.

There is no getting around the fact that our present is unimaginably weird, relative to our standards of just a generation ago. People like to laugh at what people a century ago imagined was the future, but those past predictions were based on the assumption that crazy people would not take over the country. They feared that left-wing radicals would win and impose communism. That was a legitimate fear, but mentally disturbed men in dresses was not a concern. Why would anyone think such a thing?

What makes it weirder is that we are not living in an age of bliss. We have real problems that need attention. Yet during the transition from Trump to Dementia Joe, supposedly serious people sat around a conference room table wondering how they could recruit a man in a dress to join the administration. No one in the room, presumably, bust out laughing. Some take comfort in believing that they know it is ridiculous, but there is no evidence to suggest this.

In his confirmation hearing, not a single Senator dared ask Rachel Levine to explain how we test for transgenderism. We have a simple test to determine sex. A mouth swab alone is enough. If we were to come upon the remains of person who claimed to be a third sex, how would we know? What is the difference between someone who thinks they are invisible or imaginary and someone who thinks they are a sex other than what their DNA says? Does Dr. Levine accept genetic science?

The point is, there were any number of ways to politely reveal that this person is either insane or a sociopathic grifter. Richard Levine would never have gone very far on merit, but Rachel Levine could be president one day. No one dared take this approach, because they are not allowed to challenge the orthodoxy. In the case of Senators, they have been selected precisely because they have been conditioned to never challenge the prevailing moral orthodoxy.

This is how our public discourse has become increasingly bizarre. As soon as you exclude realty from the debate, you are left with various forms of unreality. Since none of the unrealistic options can possibly lead to a solution, the debate breaks free from the problem itself. The measure acceptance is no longer about facts and reason, but some other standard. In a liberal democracy, the standard becomes attention, as in what gets you the most attention.

Take the case of Saint George Floyd, peace be upon him. The state put on a medical expert who explained Floyd’s cardiovascular condition. It is hard to know, given the bizarre testimony that followed, but the state probably hoped he would add authority to the claim that the cops were negligent when handling Floyd. On cross, he was asked a simple question. “Would George Floyd be alive today if he had just followed instructions and got into the police car as the cops asked many times?”

If Chauvin is acquitted, that is probably the moment the jury realized the absurdity of the show going on in court. This question never gets asked in any of these traffic stops that go bad, like the latest one from Minnesota. In every one of these cases, the guy getting shot could have avoided the problem by simply not being an asshole. The prevailing moral orthodoxy says you can never question the actions of a nonwhite, so the conversation veers into increasingly weird logic.

Another example is the voter ID stuff. Right now, we have the largest corporations on the planet holding secret meetings to figure out how they can overturn election laws like the one just passed in Georgia. No one dares ask these people why they think blacks are too stupid or lazy to get a driver’s license. The fact that they have no trouble getting a license is another relevant factor. Voter ID is racist because it just is. Not one dares question it, so we have these bizarre public debates.

That is the thing about the time traveling guy from the past. He probably would not notice the trannies and perverts. So much of our public debate operates outside the bounds of reason, those things would be lost in the traffic. The fact that Joe Biden is president would be enough to cause him to question his sanity. In his time, Joe Biden is just a crooked fabulist that was the butt of political jokes. No sane people would put that simpleton in charge of anything.

Twenty years ago, the great John Derbyshire once described pseudoscience as “elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” The fact that the people who are so good at creating pseudoscience have an outside role in shaping society probably explains why we live in a world dominated by boutique ideas untethered from reality. These parlor games are much more fun that facing up to the reality of life.

In fact, reality avoidance may have become something of a narcotic. Anytime reality starts to sneak into the mind of the addict, they demand some new drug or a bigger dose of the old drug, in order to solve the problem. When the reality of sex differences undermines feminist theology, a new drug called transgenderism is cooked up and distributed to the panic stricken members of the ruling class. When the reality of transvestites cannot be ignored, we get a new perversion.

The real crisis in America is not the opioid pandemic, but the unreality pandemic plaguing our rulers. As the range of acceptable debate narrows, they are left with an increasingly bizarre set of choices. In order for them to get attention, which is the currency of democracy, they must outdo the last bizarre idea. Like an addict searching for the next high, our rulers are riding a dragon of depraved reality avoidance, taking the rest of us into the abyss where all addiction leads.

The Spring Of Society

Posted on April 14, 2021 by thezman

Montesquieu observed that different political systems have different internal motivations, an engine that drives the people in it. He used the term principle as the thing that gave the system energy. In aristocratic systems it was the desire for honor that drove people to act. In a republic it was virtue. Instead of serving a man who was the manifestation of the state, the republican man served the institutions. He respected the office, not necessarily the office holder.

The principle of liberal democracy appears to be morality. The language of this age is drenched in moral claims. The mantra of the age is diversity, inclusion and equity, which is shot through with sentiment. How much diversity is a good thing? There is no limit, of course, as diversity is a good in itself. Equity is a purely subjective term as it means distributing resources based on the needs of the recipients. The people who make that decision are those who are at the top of the moral hierarchy.

In addition to echoing and updating sentiments from the beginning of western racialism (liberté, égalité, fraternité), the point of these sorts of slogans is to communicate civic piety between the speaker and listener. Alone they are just echolalic babbling, but when spoken or written for an audience, the speaker feels virtuous, as she assumes the listener, upon hearing these code words, will see that the speaker is pious. These terms are about signaling and confirming piety.

The problem with this is morality needs authority. In a theocracy, like in Iran, this problem is solved with Islam. The mullahs are the defenders and chief promotors of their form of Islam, so they sit atop the moral hierarchy. They provide the limits on democracy and a scale against which to measure piety. Similarly, Puritanism provided the moral authority for the early settlers in what is now New England. They had democratic societies, bound by Scripture.

Liberal democracy does not have or tolerate a belief outside the fingertips of man, so it cannot rely on established religion for moral authority. Instead, it relies upon the marketplace to provide that authority. The will of the people is formalized in elections and the marketplace. This is why the most powerful people work to make sure their opinions seem to reflect popular will. Rigging an election or faking a public opinion poll makes perfect sense when placed in the framework of liberal democracy.

The god of the marketplace has always had one very serious flaw. If Herodotus is to be trusted, the Persians were the first to notice this. They saw the Greek marketplace as nothing more than brothers lying to brothers. The seller misrepresented his products in the hope of fooling the customer. The customer misrepresented his interest in the hope of bargaining down the price. The spirit of the agora was deception, which makes the god of the market a fickle liar.

We are seeing this playout with the Covid vaccine. A mass vaccination campaign requires public trust. After all, letting someone put something in your body that you do not understand is a leap of faith. In a high trust society where the people believe the rulers have their best interest in mind, this is not difficult. In a low trust society, the rulers must search for external sources of authority. In the case of Covid, they have paraded out hundreds of experts from medicine and science.

The problem is those experts are products of the marketplace. They work for pharmaceutical companies, the political system, research outfits supported by the Chinese communist party and so on. These experts are fully democratic men in that they are products of the marketplace. They represent the interests of whoever is paying their salary at the moment, not the interest of the people. We can no more trust them that we can trust the salesman at a used car lot.

Because we are now fully democratized people, we are conditioned to assume that everyone is a product of the marketplace. Their interest in the truth is meaningless as the truth is what the market says at the moment. They are either making the market or following the trends of the market. In the case of Covid, everyone looks at the experts and wonders whose interests they are representing. The moral authority of liberal democracy turns out to be a cynicism without limit.

Something Montesquieu never mentioned, but that is relevant to this age, is the relationship between the principle of the system and its durability. John Adams famously said in a letter to John Taylor, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself”. A republic, it seems, does not do much better. The one Adams helped found was quickly dashed to pieces by his descendants. Monarchy seems to be the most durable, having been with us since the start.

The reason for this is democracy has no room for religion, while republicanism tries to contain religion within the civic institutions. Aristocratic systems, even without religion, reflect the reality of the human condition. They begin with the assumption that there is always someone one charge. The question is how that is decided and blood turns out to be the most predictable. There is no debating lineage. It is far from perfect, but it seems to be the most stable of mankind’s political systems.

Of course, just about any political system can work in a high trust, competent society, which means a homogeneous society. Both of those qualities are inversely proportional to diversity. Liberal democracy, as we see, places diversity as its highest goal, which is why it eventually murders itself. It burns the social capital built up by the preceding system until that fuel is exhausted. It turns out that liberal democracy is the sign that a people are finished and are ready to shuffle off into the history books.

Liberal Democratic Anarchy

Posted on April 13, 2021 by thezman

In theory, the difference between mob rule and liberal democracy is that the former operates outside of authority, while the latter is limited by a set of principles. The former is operating in the moment while the latter is deliberative. Instead of just doing what feels right in the moment, like exacting revenge, liberal democracy has processes and limits, forcing people to think about what they are doing before they act. It is majority rule slowed to a crawl by the ideals of western liberalism.

The problem is that liberal democracy is an industrial age political philosophy that is unsuited for the technological age. Fifty years ago, information flowed primarily by words on a page, carried around by men. Television and radio sped up the flow of information, but the information still got into those networks by foot. Before it could be on television, someone had to go out to the scene, make video, carry it back to the studio and then edit it. It was still a slow world.

Today, information flows at the speed of light. A conspiracy theory can be hatched and promoted to millions on-line in a matter of minutes. As the old expression goes, a lie is around the world before the truth is out of bed. It is why the race hoax has become a phenomenon of this age. By the time the truth of the incident has been revealed, we are onto the third or fourth race hoax. These stories collectively build up in the system to the point where they cumulatively become a truth of their own.

An easy example is the Chauvin case. There are people absolutely sure he stood on the man’s neck for nine minutes. They were convinced of this by the bombardment of lies they experienced on-line. They never bothered to watch the whole video when it was finally released. Why would they? They knew and everyone around them knew that Chauvin stood on Floyd’s neck until he suffocated. It is just another example of racist cops murdering an innocent black body for the crime of being black.

In a mass media society like ours, there can be no deliberation, so the psychology is that of the mob, not liberal democracy. There can be no concern for limits and process, as we are all forced to decide by those around us on-line. That is what happens in a mob of people excited by some event. As with a school of fish or a flock of birds, each person is responding to the actions of those around him. Mob psychology is an emergent property that transcends the mentality of the members.

A very good example is the behavior of corporate America. Supposedly, the heads of the largest corporations have been plotting to undermine what is left of election integrity in America. They had a “first of its kind” conference call about Georgia. They were compelled to act because, well, everyone around them is sure that Georgia has just reinstituted Jim Crow. They know this because everyone around them knows this and all of those people are good people like them.

We live in an age in which the most powerful people on the planet, some are the most powerful who have lived on this planet, truly feel they are in a twilight struggle against forces greater than themselves. The heads of the big banks think they are the little guy facing off against some invisible goliath. Others helpfully anthropomorphize it with pictures of people waving Trump signs. The insurrection hoax is all about validating the very real fear of the most powerful people on the planet.

This is the psychology of the mob. Whatever drove the people to show up on the street is soon confirmed and becomes the identity of the whole. The individual shows up because he is angry about something. Quickly he is just another corpuscle in the organism that is the collective anger of the members. He is now swept up in the mob, like a cork on an angry sea. Even though he could have real power in his own right, he feels powerless as a part of the mob swarming around him.

This is liberal democracy in the technological age. Democracy cloaks the people who are naturally in charge of society with the concept of the public will. Public policy is not the result of one man or a group of men, it is democracy. The price and supply of goods is not the result of decisions made by specific people, but by the invisible hand of the marketplace responding to millions of silent decisions. In a democracy, no one is responsible, because everyone is responsible, so no one is accountable.

In the slow motion world of the industrial age, this headless system can work reasonably well because people have time to stop and think. In the technological age, where no one can think about anything, cooler heads are trampled into the dust by mobs pushed along by forces external to themselves. Worse still, the mob mentality is amplified, so it is not just a mob, but a deafening mob. Those will real power fear the mob, so they lend their power to the mob.

Critics looking at what is happening, assume the people in charge, the people with real power, see some benefit in the chaos. Like liberal democracy, bourgeois objectivism is an artifact of a bygone age. In the technological age, the age of instant communication, the mob mentality is what prevails. What is good for the individual is no different than what is good for a liver cell. Individual good is subsumed into the emergent properties of the whole and the mentality of the individual is the mentality of the mob.

So much of what is happening today is just a replay of mistakes made a generation ago, often by people still in power. The assault on law and order is right out of the cultural revolution of the 1960’s. Most of the people in charge today were young adults back in those days. They should have the wisdom to see what is happening, but they care caught up in the moment like everyone else. They don’t feel like they have power, so they act like they are as powerless as the rest of us.

Liberal democracy in the technological age results in anarchy and mob rule. The consequences are inevitable. America is shaking itself to death over problems that could be mitigated with a little deliberation and respect for limits. No one has time for that as there is always another crisis, another mob demanding immediate attention for the object of their rage. Mob rule always ends in blood, either the blood of the mob or the blood of the innocent. This age most likely ends in both.

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