The Popular Fanatic

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Note: I have a new post up on Taki today about the Church of Covid. Good to see the headline writer finally took my advice. I also have a new post up behind the green door on the 80’s comedy Back to School.

An old criticism of liberal democracy was that the system would inevitably become less stable, as each election would result in a wild swing in direction. The people would support position X in one election and then support position Y in the next election, with X and Y being opposite positions on some issue. We are getting a sense of that now with Biden’s handlers promising a reversal of Trump’s policies, which were allegedly a sharp break from the policies of predecessors.

One reason for this is that liberal democracies are bourgeois societies, in which the old instinct to dress up interests in objectivity and civic virtue remain strong. It is considered immoral for a group to press their interests in a purely partisan way, so everyone insists that science and the public good are the motivations. The deliberate destruction by the elites of the civic life of societies is not just a naked attempt to remake the world in their image, but an effort to build back better.

Bourgeois objectivity, however, does not work as a brake on the partisanship that comes with democracy. Instead, it works to magnify it. Every issue, instead of being a fight between interested parties, is a fight for eternal truth and cosmic justice. Voting for party X is not about where your bread is buttered, but about where you stand in the moral hierarchy, relative to the people in party Y. The polarization we are seeing today is not about practical politics, but about good versus evil.

Of course, in order to arrive at the point of bourgeois partisanship, you first must arrive at a post-scarcity society. When the threat of extinction is no longer obvious, the people are free to indulge in fantasy and leisure items. In the Cold War, the West avoided this state because the threat of nuclear war was real. The sober-minded had the primary duty of keeping the frivolous under control. Once that was removed, the frivolous and insane were free to run wild through society.

The result is a strange paradox. The issues that rise to the top are increasingly trivial and ridiculous, but the partisanship around them becomes more intense. Two men playing house is a fact of life going back to the dawn of man, but suddenly the embrace of this became a defining issue. If that was not ridiculous enough, what followed was a parade of men in dresses demanding we play along with them. Then it was people with a list of bizarre pronouns demanding validation.

At some level, the bourgeois partisan knows this, but instead of acknowledging the obvious, the demand for public judgement becomes more intense. In the Cold War, the Left had get out the vote drives, by which they meant rigging the voting in major urban areas. Otherwise, there was a quiet understanding that voting should be left to those who pay attention. Today, voting is a moral duty and we are endlessly reminded of it in the months before an election. The truth must be decided.

This is probably the only thing about liberal democracy that makes sense. If everyone votes, then the winners can claim a mandate. If Trump voters, for example, realized the vote was being rigged and boycotted the election last week, the winners could not legitimately claim a mandate. This used to be a tactic in low-trust societies ruled by an elite seeking legitimacy at the ballot box. In modern societies, everyone assumes the truth is fifty-percent-plus-one, so everyone must vote.

Here is where we stumble into another paradox of liberal democracy and another source of partisan anger. All human societies have elites and those elites control the institutions of the society. In theory, popular forms of government either check the power of the elites or place real power into the hands of the people. In one variation, the powerful propose and people dispose. In the other variation the people both propose and dispose. Democracy is about the public will.

In reality, voting is entirely meaningless in a liberal democracy, as the elites control public policy exclusively. The winning side in 1992 thought they were getting a folksy John F Kennedy, when they just got a skeevy Bush I. Bush voters thought they were getting a dim version of Reagan, but got Lyndon Johnson. The people celebrating Biden think they will get reeducation camps and proscription lists, but instead they will end up with a less coherent version of Bush II.

As the researchers in this 2014 study found, those elites that are a permanent feature of all societies control public policy in a liberal democracy, just as they do in every other form of government. In liberal democracy, however, the people are blind to this reality, instead believing that the market place of democracy decides. If elite opinion tracked public opinion, no one would mind, but when elite opinion is at war with the public, it becomes another source of partisan rage.

This leads to the final paradox of liberal democracy. The most rational strategy for minority interests is to withdraw consent, as this strips some legitimacy from the winner of the democratic process. Instead, partisans become more intensely partisan after each electoral defeat and every betrayal. In two years, those red MAGA hats will be a bloody shirt inspiring partisans to vote for the GOP, who will promptly betray those voters at the first opportunity. The anger will keep rising.

The reason that the world appears to be going mad is that liberal democracy, without the brake of thermonuclear war, is a runaway train of partisan fury. Instead of disputes being settled at the ballot box, each election intensifies the dispute. Haldane famously observed that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. That’s because it is his greatest weapon. As partisan fury rises in liberal democracy, the fanatic becomes the most valued participant. It becomes rule by fanatic.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Parable Of Bob

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Imagine someone living in a typical American city. We will call this guy Bob and Bob lives in the city of Metropolis. Bob is a single man living in the city, working at a job while he enjoys his youth, looks for a mate and figures out what to do with his life. Bob does not care all that much about anything else. After all, he has a decent apartment, enough money to go out on weekends and plenty of friends. Like most people starting out in the world, Bob is just a visitor passing through.

Now, Bob has a steady girl now and he is starting to think more seriously about things like where he should live, or maybe where they should live. He’s thinking about what he should do for a career, rather than a job. He’s also starting to notice the world around him a bit more. For example, the bus he takes to the subway stop is always dirty and it stinks a bit. The subway has bums and the toilets don’t work. The trash barrels are always overflowing, no matter the time of day.

Just as Bob is starting to think more about the world around him, the Mayor of Metropolis, let’s call him Mayor Dick, announces he is going to go on a listening tour around the city. He wants to know what is on people’s minds. Mayor Dick says it is time for the city listen to the people and address their issues. He will hold town hall style meetings in every neighborhood of the city. Bob decides he’s going to go to one of these meetings and tell the mayor about the transit system.

To Bob’s surprise, the first meeting has lots of familiar faces. He realizes that these familiar faces are his neighbors, people he sees every day, but knows little about, other than they seem to be around a lot. Even more surprising, he learns that they are there to talk about the transit system too. Like Bob, they don’t understand why the buses are dirty and why they let bums loiter in the subway station. When Mayor Dick arrives, they all take turns telling him about the problems with the transit system.

Now, Bob feels pretty good. For the first time in his life he is involved in his community and beginning to know his neighbors. He was never much for politics, he never voted, but this feels like a good thing. Bob is not naive though. He knows politicians love making promises, but rarely deliver. Still, this Mayor Dick guy seemed sincere and he seemed to understand what was being said about the transit system. He even said he had ridden the subway to their town hall meeting.

Not long after the listening tour ends, Mayor Dick holds a press conference where he announces changes to the transit system. After talking to the community, he has slashed the budget for cleaning the buses. He has had all of the trash barrels removed from the subway stops and he has given the city’s bum population free transit passes so they can ride the buses and subway as much as they like. The city’s main newspaper writes glowing articles about Mayor Dick’s new initiatives.

Bob and all of his neighbors are outraged. How could this be? He was at the meeting and no one said they wanted more bums in the subway. Everyone specifically said they wanted fewer bums. Bob starts to think that maybe people at other meetings may have confused the message. On the bus to work one day, as a naked hobo masturbates in the seat across from him, he hears on the radio that Mayor Dick, after the success of his last listening tour, will hold another next month.

Talking with his neighbors, they agree that they need to get the word out to the rest of the city about the transit problem. After all, there is no way they wanted things to be made worse with the buses and subway stations. Maybe they don’t use the system that much or had other priorities. They all agree to form a group to raise awareness around the city about the shabby condition of the transit system. They will attend every meeting and make their voices heard by everyone.

Along comes the next listening tour and Bob and his people are set. They show up at every meeting wearing red shirts with their slogan on it. “Bus Reform Now!” is their slogan and they bring hats and buttons to every meeting. To their delight, everyone is receptive and peppers Mayor Dick with questions about the problem. Mayor Dick tells the people he has heard what they have to say and he promises to address it. “Now is the time to build back better” he says.

Bob is feeling pretty good at this point. He organized a city wide campaign to raise awareness on the transit issue. He got people all over the city to tell the mayor they wanted the system cleaned up. Not long after, Mayor Dick holds a presser where he announces that the city’s lunatic asylum will be closed and the inmates released, with free passes, into the subway stations. All cleaning will cease, even inside the stations and the toilets will be abandoned to chance.

As Bob and his neighbors watch this, they are stunned. This Mayor Dick guy is either an idiot or up to something. No one could want more bums and no one has ever said they wanted lunatics in the subway stations. Theories begin to circulate about what is really behind the mayor’s action. Meanwhile, the media begins to talk ominously about a secret conspiracy to undermine the city government. They brand Bob’s organization as dangerous subversives trying to undermine the government.

Bob and his neighbor have had enough. There is an election coming up and they are going get Mayor Dick thrown out of office. They agree that Bob is the right man for the job, since he organized the transit awareness group and people now know him. Bob signs up to run for mayor. To his surprise, he is greeted with big crowds all around the city as he goes to speak about his plans for the city. A keystone of his campaign is to reverse Mayor Dick’s changes to the transit system.

Everyone is feeling pretty good about things. The media has mostly ignored Bob’s campaign, continuing to call him a dangerous subversive, but the crowds at his events say that the people want change. The election finally arrives and not only does Mayor Dick win, he wins rather handily. It was not very close at all. Bob and his neighbors can’t believe it. The media claims that Mayor Dick’s listening tour and transit reform was the key to his victory. They hint that maybe he could be president one day.

Days later, Bob is found dead in his apartment. He has two gunshots in the back of the head, so the media declares it was suicide. Bob’s girlfriend, now his fiancé, tells everyone that Bob was not suicidal and he did not own a gun. The media claims Bob had a serious midget porn problem and was mixed up with Russian gangsters, so even if he did not kill himself, he probably deserved it. It is another example of how democracy must always be vigilant against people like Bob.

–The End.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Off The Cuff

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Elections in America have become like a troublesome employee, who is never content to just do the job. Instead she is always creating drama, where none should exist, so that everyone has to stop what they are doing and tend to her drama. Things that should be mundane tasks inevitably become long drawn out affairs where trivial issues require meetings and discussion. While the work eventually gets done, everyone is exhausted by having to deal with the drama queen.

An election should be a simple affair. Eligible voters go to the voting place, verify that they are the person they claim, cast their lot and those lots are counted. American elections are first past the post, meaning the most votes win, so it is not as if we have complex apportionment issues to resolve. Despite the simplicity of the task, our elections have now become pointless drama that ropes in the public, like the story of little Timmy falling down the well. It’s exhausting.

America is a joke country now, well past the point of reform, but if one is looking for something that could be reformed, elections are a good start. A simple change could eliminate most of this drama. Jurisdictions have 12 hours to count their votes or the election is void. The incumbents get another term. In the case of House and Senate seats, the state loses that seat for the term. Right now Pennsylvania would be facing two years with no House members.

Of course, no such rule could be implemented. America is no longer able to patch potholes in roads or keep the schools functioning, so implementing even modest reform is well beyond the capacity of the kleptocrats. That means we are left with the drama that will surely get worse with each election. The only alternative is to tune it out and leave the drama to the drama queens. In fact, the right answer going forward is to just stop voting entirely. The votes don’t count anyway.

Just as feeding into the high drama employee validates her drama, participating in elections now validates the corruption. When the crooks rig the election, they plausibly claim that it was the will of the people. After all, the people were dumb enough to participate in the charade. They must like it. If in the next election, turnout is 30% and the Democrats win with 110% of the vote in Michigan, even the crooks will have to acknowledge that the whole thing is just a ridiculous sham.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Me Talking A Lot
  • 57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/ZPclxRaKdVw

The End Of A Story

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Note: I have a new post up behind the green door. This is a review of the next film on the top-100 greatest movies, Unforgiven. I’m a fan of Eastwood, so I’ll probably be doing more posts on his work.

One of the things that was debated on the fringes of politics the last few years is whether this period was a replay of the late-60’s and early 70’s or a replay of the early and mid-60’s. Were we heading to some new and much worse phase of radicalism or was this a rear guard action as this spasm of radicalism burned itself out? Put another way, was this the dawning of the age of Jonquarius or the sunset of the radical awakening that was kicked off in the 2000 election?

The outright theft of the 2020 election tells us that we are probably witnessing the end point of a radical phase, rather than a beginning. The reason, to stick with the historical comparison, is that Trump is clearly Nixon in this drama. The Left, which controls both the aesthetic and the cultural norms of official Washington, reacted to Trump just as their analogs reacted to Nixon a half century ago. They were willing to break every rule to get rid of him and finally did it.

The way they have rid themselves of Trump is interesting for a few reasons. One is that they did it in reverse order this time. For a backward age, in which everything is a deliberate attempt to reboot old franchises, running the old Nixon playbook in reverse suggests the cosmic forces have a sense of style. Instead of rigging an election to keep Nixon out and then impeaching him after he got into Washington, they impeached Trump first and then rigged the election to throw him out.

Those old enough to remember Nixon will recall that long after Nixon was gone, the Left still groused about the man. They made movies trying to portray him as worse than they painted him while in office. They used him as a pejorative when assaulting Republican political opponents. Everything that made lefty sad in the 1980’s was called Nixonian, as if Nixon was the face of evil in the world. Nixon was a great enemy that served them so well, they could not bear to let him go.

You can be sure this will be true of Trump. In order to keep their conservative toadies in line they will be calling them “Trumpian” whenever they dare speak out of turn or show any signs of life. Republicans, of course, will fully embrace the term to police their ranks for anyone that questions the oligarchs. For the political industrial complex, the Trump era will be like a brush with death. It will color their perspective on everything and modify their politics long after Trump has left their midst.

To further bolster the analogy is the fact that Biden is a vegetable. Carter came in after Nixon, but exactly no one in Washington respected carter. They laughed at him to his face and treated him like a servant. They were slightly embarrassed by him, but he was a necessary place holder, so he was tolerated. That’s Biden. He was installed as the nominee and now president because the political class does not know where they go from here, so they put in a place holder.

With Carter, the promise was that all the professional hacks would get their jobs back and begin to rebuild an activist foreign policy and continue remaking the post-industrial economy, while the establishment found some better front men. This is why the neocons were all on the Mumbly Joe bandwagon. They expect to slither back into the foreign policy side and begin preparing for war with Iran next decade. The bankers will get their men back in to restart the globalism process.

The thing to keep in mind with historical analogies is they are never perfect and only a fool gets hung up on that fact. They’re comparisons, not replications. The reason they are useful is people don’t change all that much from generation to generation. The people who pushed out Nixon in the 1970’s are not all that different from the people involved in the coup against Trump. Many were around back then. That means they will react to the aftermath in a similar way.

That said, the differences are important. There is no conservative movement brewing this time to be a useful gatekeeper for the establishment. Conservatism has been so discredited; few Trump supporters will be fooled by their efforts to legitimize the shenanigans that have gone on during Trump. They will try, of course, but the result will be a further discrediting of themselves. Too many people are wise to that game now for it to work on anyone but the extremely stupid.

Further, there is no new thing on the horizon this time. The reason Buckley-style conservatism got off the ground is the people in charge immediately saw it would be a useful foil for them in the charade of democracy. Buckley’s over-the-top Brahman act legitimized conservatism. A vulgar little dwarf like Ben Shapiro is never going to be able to pull that off. The fact is, the bench of Conservative Inc. is full of misfits and mediocrities, best suited for parody, not legitimacy.

The point here is this era is probably not the beginning of the end as many disappointed dissidents would have you believe. There will be no internment camps for racists or truth and reconciliation commissions. Instead of the beginning of the end it is just the end of a cycle of radicalism. Just as the New Left spent their last bit of fervor ejecting Nixon from Washington, our woke crazies of this age have spent themselves now. Their reason to exist is about to leave town.

Further, this may signal the end of another story. That story is the tale of the American Empire that began in the middle of the last century. After conquering Western Europe and much of Asia, the American Empire engaged in a long face-off with the Soviet Empire. Just as the Peloponnesian was a multi-generational affair, the Cold War spanned close to three generations. It changed the culture of America and cast a long shadow after it was over.

The first truly imperial generation rose up in the middle of the last century too. They remade the culture and economy in their image. The story of the last 70 years has been the story of that generation, but just as the empire is in decline, so is that generation. The weird backward-looking nature of modern politics, the endless cycle of reboots and remakes in Hollywood, the stalling of technological advance, all suggest we have reached an end point.

The multi-generational cycle that was kicked off with the start of the Cold War and the struggle between two global empires may be reaching its end. All the old purposes that drove that cycle are gone now. There are no communists. There are no Nazis to hunt as a reminder to remain vigilant. Every battle in the culture war has been won. There is nothing left to do, so the imperial generation has been replaying old fights in a politics of nostalgia, but now their time has come to an end.

That is probably what we are witnessing. The generation that made a fetish of free speech, good government and democracy, is now closing the show with censorship, corruption and now the undermining of democratic legitimacy. They are not doing this because of Trump or what he represents, but as one last replay of a drama that has outlived its reason to exist. It’s fitting that the capstone of this generation’s nostalgia politics will be a man who cannot remember yesterday.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

What We Learned

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Elections are one of those windows into the nature of a society, like the roads or public transport systems. It is a manifestation of the real nature of society. In the case of elections, it is not about the results, but about how the election is run. Orderly, well run societies have orderly, well run elections. The results are known soon after the votes are cast and no one questions them. In disorderly, low-trust societies, the vote is messy and chaotic and no one takes the results at face value.

You see that with yesterday’s election. Most people voting remember when you stopped off to vote on the way home from work or maybe before work. Office people could vote at their lunch break, because it only took a half hour at most. In most of the country, even big urban areas, it was rare to run into long lines or delays. Today, the opposite is now true. It is rare to experience an orderly, well run polling station. Instead it is long lines, broken equipment and lots of shenanigans.

Of course, those chaotic voting stations are not able to tally the votes in a timely manner, so the count carries on for days in some areas. Back in the days of mechanical voting machines and paper ballots, the vote was counted in hours. If the polls in a state closed at seven, the vote was known by nine. Again, there were exceptions, as nothing is perfect, but they were exceptions. Yesterday’s vote will not be known for weeks and much of it will be decided in the courts.

Now, one big reason for the delay is the people counting the votes need time to rig the results in such a way that makes it hard for the courts to see it. Pennsylvania, for example, is furiously printing up new ballots for people who did not vote. These will be filled out for Biden and other party candidates, then dropped off at post offices around the state so they can be added to the real votes. They now have nine days to make up enough fake ballots to tip the state to Mumbly Joe.

In states like California, general incompetence rules the day. Since most of the voters now are foreign born, the results are known in advance. It’s why no one bothers to campaign in the state. Still, in order to maintain the fiction of democracy they run elections, but it takes them weeks to produce a result. Like everything else about the state, their elections are very third world, which is no surprise as the majority of the population is from primitive societies. Demographics are destiny.

It used to be that America would send international observers to a country to make sure their elections were free and fair. The claim was the government was either too crooked or too inept to manage an election, even if they wanted to do it. A gaggle of experts from the West would be sent in to help organize the voting and make sure everything was done properly. These international observers would supervise the counting so that everyone could trust the result.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot. The UN should probably step in and start supervising American elections, because the government is so corrupt and incompetent, no one can trust them to run an election. Iraq now has more orderly and honest elections than most states in America. Iraq actually requires voters to present an ID and they make voters do the purple finger thing to prevent ballot stuffing. Maybe the Iraqi government can send supervisors to Pennsylvania.

In the coming weeks, as this circus drags on in the courts, lots of people will compare it to the so-called banana republics. That is not fair, as those banana republics did not ask for democracy. It was imposed on them. Left to their own devices, they would have been happy with some form of big-man government. It was Western business that demanded democracy, so they could more easily exploit these countries. It is easier to bribe parliamentary mediocrities than an oligarch or despot.

The United States does not have that excuse. If the people were free of their depots, tyrants and lunatics, they would revert back to moderate self-government. The problems faced today are the result of a crooked and disgusting ruling class. In many cases, the people in charge are genuinely insane. Gretchen Whitmer is becoming a modern day Christian VII of Denmark. Our increasingly bizarre and corrupt elections reflect the nature of the American ruling class, not the people.

It is an axiom of the dissident right that democracies always end in despotism, but that is not really true. After Athens lost the Peloponnesian War and democracy was suspended in favor of the “Thirty Tyrants“, the people still wanted to return to their natural way of governing themselves. Eventually those tyrants were overturned and democracy was restored. The institutions of a people are the product of their biology and their culture. That is the chain of causality.

In 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the son-in-law of John Adams in which he stated, “The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.” Later he asked, “What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion?” This is a question for us now.

If those words sound familiar, they should. In that same letter Jefferson wrote the famous words, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” That is the real lesson of yesterday’s election charade. The time is soon coming when our petty tyrants will be trembling in their homes or slithering across the border. These disgusting piggish buffoons must meet the fate of all tyrants. That’s what we learned yesterday.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Into The Void

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The Great War not only devastated the physical structure of Europe, it destroyed the legitimacy of the political infrastructure as well. Once the legitimacy of the ruling class was gone, their authority was gone with it. After all, the war was not a natural disaster beyond the control of the ruling class. It was a disaster created by a ruling class that could not explain why the war was necessary. When they tried, no one could believe them, because they had lied the world into war.

The people, looking around at the devastation, wanted to understand why this terrible thing happened to them. The trouble was the people they would naturally look to for answers no longer had the trust of the people. They had squandered their legitimacy waging a pointless war. Into the void of authority came the liberal democrats, the communists and the fascists, offering their own narrative to explain the past and define a future better than the present. The rest is history.

This is a useful thing to keep in mind as the current ruling class of America counts the votes in the presidential election. Every election is pitched as momentous, but that is mostly nonsense. The choices put in front of the voters are always vetted by the ruling elite, so the results are known in advance. The exception, of course, was Trump in 2016, which is why we have been subjected to close to five years of shrieking by the ruling class about how Trump is a threat to their system.

This election could very well turn out to be devastatingly important. For starters, this is a rare case where both sides are sure they will win. Usually, both sides know what’s coming long before the vote. The eventual losing side may have some false hope, but when they lose they are not surprised. This time, both sides are not only sure they will win; they think they will win big. This is despite an unprecedented media barrage offering no possible way for Trump to win on Tuesday.

Both sides come at this from wildly different perspectives. The ruling class radicals backing the Biden campaign are sure they are the product of a meritocracy that has earned the right to rule. It is so obvious that no sane voter would choose any other system, but the one that puts them at the top. It’s why they remain convinced that Trump won in 2016 by appealing to the dark forces. There’s simply no way that a legitimate democratic system could have picked Trump.

This time they have used every weapon of the system to make sure those dark forces don’t prevail. They have bullied the pollsters that serve the political industrial complex into giving them useful polling data. They have used their media to flood the zone with fear, uncertainty and doubt. The same tools they use in their color revolutions abroad have been deployed here. If Trump wins, then it means the system, at least the rule-based system, is no longer of any use to them.

Ironically, if Trump wins, the people supporting Trump will conclude that the people in charge are no longer legitimate authorities. The polls, the media, the analysis, will all be viewed as an orchestrated lie campaign. After all, the best and the brightest of the system said Biden was a metaphysical lock. The result of a Trump win will be that both sides agree that the system is rotten to the core. The Left will seek to destroy it while the Right will stand aside and let them do it.

As Stalin said, it is not the votes that count, but who counts the votes and it is the people counting the votes who are the issue on the ballot. If Biden wins, most sensible people will assume shenanigans. Joe Biden has spent the final weeks of the campaign mumbling to empty parking lots, while Trump is speaking to stadium sized rallies in the key states. The same observations that lead people to think the polls are a lie will lead them to think a Biden victory is a lie.

It is heritage America that is the engine of the Trump campaign. These are people who get misty when they hear God Bless America. They believe that they are fighting to maintain the greatest system in the world for the greatest country in the World. All they have to do is vote harder and the bad guys will be driven from the field and the America they love will come back to herself. If their monumental efforts fail, then it means the system has failed. Their America is lost.

The irony of the Left making war on these people is that without these people there can be no Left, as there is no establishment to support the Left. Those huge crowds coming out to cheer for Trump are what makes liberal democracy possible. If they are finally cut off from having a say in how things are run, then the system begins to falter. Many of those people coming out for Trump will simply drop out, but many will look around for an alternative to the corrupt system they now distrust.

One of John F. Kennedy’s script writers said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This is the subtext to this election, as both sides go all in on this election. For the Left, a Trump win means they are free to make total war on the system and the people who support it. A Biden win and the veil of ignorance drops for millions of heritage Americans. One side will decide that peaceful revolution, even peaceful reform, is no longer possible.

The truth of democracy is it makes everything political. Even the smallest act becomes a moral signifier, indicating which side you are on. This is because politics forces everyone to be a partisan. In order for democracy to work, everyone must participate, which means everyone picks a side. Partisanship turns everyone into the enemy of someone, often people they do not know. A country full of enemies is not a country, but a forest full of dry underbrush waiting for a match.

This is an election where one side will ultimately conclude that the system itself is no longer worth respecting or defending. The Biden camp is much closer to that point, maybe even resolved to it, but still pretending. The Trump side is not there yet, but inching closer. There is no result that can leave both sides satisfied that the system worked as intended. Like the period after the Great War, we are entering a crisis of legitimacy, which begins with the election results.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Death of NRx

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Note: I have a new post up on Taki. This is a bigger brain essay on the nature of modern democracy. For something smooth-brained, I have a post behind the green door on the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

A decade ago the left-libertarian, Arnold Kling, coined the term “neo-reactionary” to describe the on-line community calling itself the Dark Enlightenment. These were mostly fans of the blogger Curtis Yarvin, writing under the name Moldbug, but there were others writing about the same ideas. English philosopher Nick Land added some academic legitimacy to the project. He was the first person to use the term Dark Enlightenment in an essay of the same name.

In many respects, neo-reaction was a forerunner of the alt-right movement, in that it made on-line politics fun and interesting to a growing number of young white males dissatisfied with conventional politics. Reading the blogs and participating in the communities turned esoteric topics into a sense of community. Later, the alt-right would follow the same model, drawing in young white males around a more simplistic critique of modern liberal democracy and multiculturalism.

Of course, the alt-right also followed neo-reaction into obscurity. Almost all of the sites and characters from neo-reaction have either moved onto to other things or disappeared entirely. Curtis Yarvin has moved into the nationalist camp, writing for more mainstream sites. Nick Land has moved onto other things, having been exiled from the academy for holding unpopular opinions on taboo subjects. No one flies the neo-reaction or Dark Enlightenment flag these days.

While it is easy to see how the alt-right collapsed, the failure of the neo-reaction movement is a bit of a puzzler. Most of the bigger names writing on those topics were sensible about what they were doing. They avoided the media and did not have delusions of grandeur like so many in the alt-right. They were happy to stick to their blogs and forums. They even tried to practice good optics by avoiding the spicy language that is common in right-wing forums.

The first problem with neo-reaction, the one that probably led it down a dead end, is that they never got to the heart of the problem of democracy. They were good at criticizing egalitarianism and multiculturalism, but those are the leaves, not the roots of the problem of modern liberal democracy. Like all right-wing movements, they made the mistake of thinking that facts and careful analysis would be enough to counter the moral arguments that are the power source of liberal democracy.

Montesquieu observed that the engine of aristocracy in honor, while the engine of despotism is fear. In a republic, it is virtue. The citizen of the republic respects the logic of the political order and the institutions that maintain it. In liberal democracy, the engine is civic morality. Everything must point toward that vaguely understood sense that the arc of history bends toward the perfectly egalitarian society. Anything that opposes this, even reality itself, is assumed to be the enemy of democracy.

Another big problem for the neo-reactionaries is they often sounded like young men who spent too much time playing video games. Their image of aristocracy often sounded like escapism, rather than serious politics. Then you had the writing style of Curtis Yarvin, which gave the movement a cult like vibe. The meandering and cryptic writing style along with the insider language was more about building a cult of personality than trying to fill out an alternative set of political beliefs.

Probably the thing that did the movement in was the embrace of the term neo-reaction, which allowed the Left to define the movement. This is how the Left steals the moral high ground. They assume they are on the right side of history, following the arc to the final destination of society. Anyone that disagrees is a reactionary. The opposition is not based in logic, but in fear and ignorance. This recasts the dispute as good versus evil, smart versus dumb and moral versus amoral.

This is the reason that what we call the Left in America has gone from triumph to triumph since Gettysburg. Holding the moral high ground allows them to frame every argument without having to establish their claims. The choice of the opposition is to accept it and try to find a way to achieve other ends using liberal morality or simply leave the field entirely. The latter is what neo-reaction argued, if not directly, then indirectly through its escapism.

Neo-reaction largely petered out when the big names could not figure out where to go with it. Yarvin dropped out to make money in Silicon Valley and has now re-spawned as a nationalist. Land moved onto accelerationism, while others have moved back to the conventional Right. Much like the right-libertarianism of Hans Hermann-Hoppe and the citizenism of Steve Sailer, these ideas can only work if the Left goes along with them, which can never happen as long as the Left exists.

That said, these failed efforts are useful to anyone working toward an alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy. We learn more from failure than success. What all efforts to counter the Left have in common is the failure to appreciate that they faced a moral framework, not a set of ideas. You don’t talk people out of their beliefs. Instead, you offer a better set of beliefs, a better moral framework, one that allows them to believe they are on the side of angels.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

How Fake Is It?

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An old expression in the collectibles world is that anything that has value will eventually be faked or stolen. Art is faked so often that certain types of art have lost all value, because no one can tell the fakes from the genuine items. It’s not just crooks trying to beat the rules of the game. The people responsible for policing the fraud are often the people perpetrating the fraud. The truth is, anything that does not have objective value, but relies on insiders, will be subject to fraud and theft.

It is something to keep mind when thinking about the future of internet properties like the big socials and media sites. They rely on traffic to generate revenues from advertisers and those interested in their traffic data. Twitter does not make much from actual ads on the platform, but they sell user information to those interested in tracking your whereabouts on-line and in the real world. That traffic data is essentially what makes it possible for internet properties to thrive.

That brings up that old maxim of the collectibles business. Who is authenticating the data and appraising its value? There are sites that claim to measure web traffic. Like the ratings services for radio and television, they claim to have a secret way to sample traffic and then estimate over all traffic. Obviously, the sites themselves have their traffic, which they use to pitch advertisers, investors and in the case of politics, the donors that keep these operations running.

Of course, the ratings systems for radio and television have been subject to shenanigans for the same reason art is faked. Those ratings have value, so if you can fake those ratings, it’s like having free access to the bank vault. The ratings themselves are published so the unscrupulous can make bold claims. “We’re number one among left-handed Korean midgets” becomes “we’re number one in our segment.” It is a bandit market and the ratings help facilitate it.

In the internet world, capturing web traffic is a bit more complex. That’s where services like SimilarWeb and Alexa step in to provide hard data. Well, it is supposed to be hard data, but where they get their data is not easy to know. They are a bit cagey about how they arrive at their numbers. Alexa claims to rely on a browser plugin and site owners installing their script. SimilarWeb claims to get data from a panel of hundreds of millions of web users, as well as a sample of websites.

How accurate is the data? Probably not very accurate at all. Consider the British political site Unherd. The Alexa rankings don’t give us overall traffic, but the SimilarWeb ratings tell us they get 1.6 million visitors per month. Is that real? There’s no way to know based on the data provided. It looks like a lot of their traffic comes from aggregators, rather than real people. Then again, how many of their readers would install an Alexa browser plugin? Probably very few.

For small sites that deal in politics, traffic is not that big of an issue, as their donors are not targeting a mass audience. What about other types of data like YouTube views or Twitter followers? If that data real? It’s clear that Twitter is loaded with fake accounts, but how many are their fake accounts? It could be millions by now. How many are used by Twitter to boost users they like? No one can know, but it is not hard to see how that would be something they do for public relations reasons.

Think about it. Twitter is the preferred social media platform of the establishment media, so it is Twitter’s interest to make them happy. That is, in part, why they are feverishly scrubbing anything that vexes the gentle souls in the press corps. How hard would it be for them to ramp up the follower counts and likes on those same media accounts with their army of robot user accounts? Follower counts have value, so it is a safe bet those follower counts are being faked by all interested parties.

It is not just fraud, which is probably rampant in all of these measures of internet activity, but incompetence plays a role. YouTube views will go backwards, because thousands of accounts have been purged. This happens on Twitter as well. Of course, Google breaking its own search algorithm to prevent you from seeing what you like has probably crippled the view counts on YouTube. In other words, One type of deception is colliding with another type of deception.

The big players who make up the bulk of ad buying are starting to figure out that web traffic is not all it is claimed to be. Placing ads on a social media platform is worse than a waste of money. If a company made a video of the executive burning piles of their cash and then posted it on YouTube, they would get more sales from that video than running a regular YouTube ad. Eventually, this becomes obvious to everyone and the ad market on-line begins to dry up for these sites.

The real value in these internet properties, obviously, is in the data they steal from users and sell to governments and corporations. Like the ad business, the fraud in this data will eventually become an issue. We very well may be seeing the high water point for the big social media players. Like the market for certain types of art, the inability to tell the real thing from the fakes will collapse the market. In the end, it will not be public contempt but their own shenanigans that ends their reign of terror.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than ha

Old News

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A funny thing happens every four years around this time. People get tired of following politics and things get a bit quiet. In the before times, the ad blitz on radio and television is what did it for most people. By the last weekend of the election it was almost all political ads depending upon where you lived. Today, with everyone immersed in mass media, it is just a general fatigue. That’s why the show this week is about everything but the coming election. It’s a bit of a housecleaning show.

Election fatigue may explain why more and more people are voting early. Once they vote they can ignore politics with a good conscience. The civic impulse is strong, even with the crazies on the Left, maybe more so with them, so getting this obligation over with allows for the mind to shut down and stop consuming politics. If someone mentions the election they can just say, “I already voted so it does not matter.” it seems like a good way to head off any proselytizing.

Of course, the Left tends to dominate early voting. There was a survey kicking around that showed that 81% of people who will vote for Biden voted early, while only 32% of Trump voters planned to vote early. This makes some sense. The Left is all about immanentizing the eschaton, so early voting allows them to enjoy the fantasy they are sure will come true on election day. Conservatives, in contrast, approach elections with a sense of dread and foreboding, like going to the gallows.

That is the one innovation Trump has brought to politics. His rallies are like rock concerts, where people go expecting to have a fun with other fans. Holding these in the final weeks of the campaign works as both entertainment relief and social proof to the people still unsure of their choice. The visuals are very good optics. You can be sure that the political consultants will cook up Potemkin versions of these. The difference is they will be completely fake, maybe held on a Hollywood sound stage.

Even so, the election madness is coming to an end. It looks like the story is following the 2016 script with the polls “suddenly getting tight.” Biden plans to spend the final days in places we were told were safe just a week ago. He will be mumbling to an empty room in Minnesota, a state that has not voted Republican in almost 50 years. It has nothing to do with their polling. That’s ridiculous. He is six million points ahead in the polls and a metaphysical lock to win on Tuesday.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: What About Todd? (Link)
  • 12:00: Blacks In The Forest (Link)
  • 22:00: Bloodsuckers (Link)
  • 32:00: Stupid Conservatives (Link)
  • 42:00: Climate Anxiety (Link)
  • 52:00: The Stoop (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/BJCvu4CahPo

 

Partisans and Objectivists

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One way to describe the great divide within mainstream politics is that one side is the partisans and the other side objectivists. The partisans are focused on their objectives and what they think is good for their side. They just want to win and don’t worry too much about how they win. The objectivists are focused on facts and think that truth will prevail eventually. The partisans are what we call the Left and the objectivists are what we call the Right in America.

The partisans are an ends justifies the means mode of thought. They are unconstrained by rules or convention. In fact, they are not limited by what they said last week, as last week was a different time with different goals. In a world where winning is the only thing that matters, everything else bends to serve that end. If being seen as on the science is useful in the moment, they love science. If treating science like magic is useful next week, then next week they will mock science.

Objectivists, of course, find this mind boggling. They look at these contradictions as the Achilles’s heel of their opponents. They spend a lot of time pointing out how the partisans are contradicting what they said last week. Often this is effective, as the public tends to side with the objectivists in most things. The climate change stuff is a good example of how the partisans harm their own cause. Their flexibility with the truth is a liability when asking the public to take their word on science.

For the most part, though, this willingness to transcend facts, and even reality in some cases, is a great advantage in a democracy. Politics in a democracy is immediate, rather than deliberative, so that first impression counts for a lot. If in the fullness of time those initial arguments are found to be full of lies or simply wrong, it does not matter as everyone is onto the next thing. It is rare in a democracy for the debate to circle back and address an old argument or have a do-over.

A good example of how this works is the term “gun show loophole.” This remains a popular catchphrase on the Left. They know gun control is wildly unpopular, so they talk about ending gun show loopholes. The fact that there is no such thing as a gun show loophole does not matter. It sounds good. People don’t like loopholes of any sort as they seem dishonest, so they support ending gun show loopholes. The Left can appear reasonable, despite perpetrating a fraud on the public.

Of course, this summer we got to experience another example of how the truth is no constraint to the partisan. The people burning, looting and attacking people in the streets have been labeled peaceful protesters. Just this week, as video comes out of massive looting and pillaging in Philadelphia, the governor of the state called it a mostly peaceful protest. That strikes the objectivists as insane, but from the point of view of the partisan, it helps their cause and that’s all that matters.

As violence spread around the country this summer, the chant from the rioters was often something like “silence is violence.” In other words, if you did not vocally support them, they could rightfully assume you were plotting violence or supported violence against them, so they were justified in using violence. In other words, to the partisan, their violence is speech, while your speech is violence. The objectivists are stymied by this sleight of hand, so they have remained dumbstruck by it.

This willingness to transcend the rules of language was on display this week as democrats threw a choreographed tantrum over Judge Barrett. They claimed that Trump was packing the court, a term that goes back a century to when FDR tried to increase the number of judges, so he could get his guys on the bench. The fact that Trump was not actually doing anything like that was not a constraint on the Democrats bleating about court packing all week.

Just as their violence is speech, while your speech is violence, the logic of the situation is being turned on its head. They now claim that their plans to pack the court are a justified response to Trump packing the court. You see, when their enemy scrupulously follows the rules it is a gross violation of procedure, but when they overturn procedure it is restoring order and balance. This is not mere hypocrisy. This is the natural detachment from objectivity that is a predicate for the partisan.

This is why the partisans tend to prevail in a democracy. They have a wider range of options because they are not limited by facts and reason. Additionally, the objectivists are self-limiting, often ceding the field because they think the rules require it. One side gets to play dirty, while the other side tries to talk them out of it. The truth is, there is no reasoning with a partisan. There is no way to reason with someone who will not stipulate to the basic facts of life. They exist beyond reason.

This is the story of the last 30 years. As the partisans have become increasingly partisan, which means less constrained by reality, the objectivists have become more certain that reality will step and do the job they refuse to do. They imagine a time when the partisan suddenly realizes the truth of his situation, throws down his weapons and embraces the objectivist as a brother in logic. For the objectivist, reason has become escapism in order to avoid what must be done.

A byproduct of this dynamic is that most people have no voice in the media, government or any other area of public life. The partisans advance their positions on behalf of their cause, while the objectivists fret about factual accuracy. In a democracy, objectivity is not a constituency, so the objectivists end up representing the interests of abstract concepts, rather than genuine people, which means the bulk of the people have no representative.

Another old saying relevant here is that in war, truth is the first casualty. The reason for this is war is a conflict between two sides, neither of which has a reason to see things from the point of view of the other side. It is the ultimate partisan conflict. If there is ever going to be a force to topple the current Left, their first task will be to eliminate those more concerned about truth and reason than the welfare of genuine people.

Promotions: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

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

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.