The Working Class Joe Story

Posted on October 15, 2020 by thezman

According to Aristotle, the elements of good story telling, in order of importance, are plot, character, theme, dialogue, melody, decor and spectacle. You can be a great story teller, really ham it up for your listeners, but if the story makes no sense and the people are incomprehensible, the story will fall flat. This is also true of campaigns. The candidate has to make sense to people and his story arc has to give the sense that his victory is the culmination of the events leading to the election.

We saw this in 2016 where we were given two competing stories. Clinton was supposed to be a strong woman, the modern heroine. In modern storytelling, these gals always beat the evil white man without much effort. She was the embodiment of the feminist ideal and her election was supposed to be the culmination of the story that began with the suffragettes. That plot made no sense, given her actual story, but that did not matter to the media, dramatically selling her campaign.

The trouble was, her show was out at the same time as a low-budget indie production that was familiar to everyone. Trump was the picaresque every-man, motivated by a sense of duty to transcend his own limitations and do the right thing. He was the voice of the audience, criticizing the other characters and the system they inhabited, not for personal gain, but for the benefit of the audience. He was David and Clinton was Goliath and everyone expects David to win.

In 2020, it appears the official story tellers may have another problem on their hands with the Biden campaign. The story they are selling this time is the public is tired of the tyrant Trump and ready to lift-up world-weary old white man, and his super-smart diverse sidekick, and carry them to the White House. You see, world-weary old white man had a nice run, but now it is time for him to go. His last act will be to vanquish mean old white man and then hand the baton over to diverse sidekick.

It’s a familiar story, one that is the center of so many bad movies it is amazing that they keep trying to sell it. In this case, world-weary old white man is a vegetable that has been in hiding for most of the year, because he has shark eyes and says wacky things suggesting he is not all there. Super-smart diverse sidekick is pretty dumb and reminds everyone of getting their license renewed. It’s a bad story that no one wants to think about and the characters don’t work for the audience.

Compounding it is the world-weary old white man has a son that likes to smoke crack and film himself banging hookers. Fair or foul, people judge people by their children and Hunter Biden is a vulgar degenerate. He lies, cheats, steals and does not seem to have anything resembling a conscience. Worse yet, he seems to be an uncommonly stupid person, getting jammed up over stupid things like leaving his laptop with a repair shop, so the contents can be sold to the tabloids.

If the contents were just an unusual amount of cat pictures, people could possibly generate some sympathy for his parents. They gave it their best shot, but the boy was never right in the head. Instead, it’s videos of him smoking crack with hookers and having them perform unnatural acts upon him. Then there are the e-mails from foreign potentates suggesting he was the facilitator in a bribery scheme involving his father, who was vice president at the time, emphasis on the vice.

That’s a pretty big hole in the plot, so the script writers have responded with plot devices so stupid it suggests they may have learning disabilities. The most ridiculous might be the claim that the shop owner who recovered the laptop in question is really just a cleverly disguised Russian agent. Nothing adds credibility to the story like reminding people that the people telling this story are crazy. Then you have the effort to suppress the story, which doesn’t seem fishy at all.

We’ve come a long way since The Boy From Hope, The Bill Clinton Story. Sure, the hero in that tale was a bit of a degenerate, but his vices were understandable, and given his marriage situation, forgivable. His sidekick was the perfect foil, a stiff block of wood who obsessed over the rules. It was a familiar and natural pairing that tapped into familiar American themes. It was not a perfect story, but it was good enough to carry people along and let them bond with the protagonist.

The Working Class Joe Story is everything that is wrong with modern America, in that it is a constant reminder that the people in charge are not very good at this. The actor playing the main role got the part because the other options were too demanding, so he got the role by default. The character playing the diverse sidekick got the role because the casting director took a bribe. This story is a daily reminder that our ruling class is a cynical blend of incompetence and corruption.

A sad truth of modern story telling is that with a big enough budget, even the worst film can attract an audience. Ghostbusters 2016 was hot garbage, but it made close to $300 million worldwide. The Hillary Clinton Story, which came out the same year, also did a big box office. In both cases, it was not enough to break even, bit it shows you just how easily the audience can be manipulated. Maybe this time the boys from marketing can make The Working Class Joe Story a hit for the ages.

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The Management Problem

Posted on October 14, 2020 by thezman

Media Note: I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around 9:00 PM eastern and runs for a couple of hours. Are you into midgets? Westerns? Maybe midget westerns? Well, I watched Terror of Tiny Town and posted a review to my SubscribeStar page.

A defining feature of the managerial state is that it creates problems that require it to then fashion complex solutions to solve. A group of experts from the managerial class made some reform, which then created unintended problems. The solution is to draft a new set of experts from the managerial class to solve this new problem. Inevitably, this creates new problems and the process continues into forever. A good current example of this is what to do with the tech monopolies.

The reason we have tech monopolies is Congress drafted laws that allowed the firms to turn into behemoths. In gratitude, these firms then showered their favorite politicians with cash, in order to avoid getting the Microsoft treatment. This allowed the firms to get bigger and turn the thank you cash into threats. It is not unrealistic to think these firms are now able and willing to blackmail politicians with information gleaned from their social media, e-mail and mobile devices.

The starting point for this problem is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. Section 230 says that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This means that on-line intermediaries cannot be held accountable for what passes through their network or platform. Specifically, the intent was to protect them from libel claims.

At the time, this made sense for two reasons. One was the government did not want the internet service providers walling off the internet as a collection of private domains that they policed as a private space. They wanted the internet to be open. Second, they were told that it was practically impossible to monitor what was posted on-line in real-time, so it would cripple this new industry to treat them as publishers. To let the industry grow, it had to be the wild west on-line.

So far, so good, but like everything else done by the technocrats, they created new problems they could solve at some future date. This immunity from libel claims, for example, has made it possible for the big social media companies to operate as regulators of the public square. It has allowed domain registrars to violate individual rights under the cloak of immunity. Even banks are getting into the act, claiming their web portals are covered under section 230.

This brings up another feature of managerial state. It is a strange version of Chesterton’s gate that is baked into their thinking. Once their creation is set loose, no one ever looks back to understand why they created it and what it was intended to do. It just becomes this thing that sprang from nothingness, like the organic institutions for which they have so little respect. We see this with Section 230. It’s just this thing that is either treated as a force of nature or a thing that must be destroyed.

The thing is, much of what ails us could be solved by simply going back to the original intent of the law. The tech companies argued that they should not be treated as publishers because they could not regulate what was on their platform and most important, they did not want to regulate the content. They just wanted to act as facilitators that allowed people to come together in the public square. It was not their job or intention to tell anyone what they could say on-line.

Right there is a solution to much of what is happening. If Twitter, for example, is regulating speech on its platform, then it is no longer covered by Section 230, because it is clearly able and willing to act as a publisher. We call a dog a dog because it has all the characteristics of a dog. Twitter is a publisher because it now has the vital characteristics of a publisher. Applying the original logic of the law to Twitter means it either stops censuring people or it transforms into something else.

Another simple remedy that exists in the law is property ownership. It is well established that when ownership of something is in doubt, the law starts at the creator and then establishes a chain of custody. Stolen goods for example, are returned to the last person who can establish ownership, either through a purchase agreement or proof there are the originator of the item. If you made it, it is yours until you agree to sell or gift it to another person, who then becomes the legal owner.

If we treated your information the same way we treat all other property in the western world, the tech companies would no longer be allowed to harvest this information without your permission. They would have to get your permission every time they sold your information. Most people, of course, would refuse and the business models of these firms would more from rentier to retail. They would have to charge you for the service they provide, like every other business.

Way back in the 2016 election, the liberal pundit Mickey Kaus observed that the Republican party could have cut Trump off early if they just adopted some of his ideas, especially on immigration. If they more gracefully advocated for some limits on immigration and maybe a new attitude on trade, Trump would have lost. They did not, so we will never know, but the implication was that they refused to go down that road because nefarious forces behind the scenes were preventing it.

We get similar argument about the tech monopolies. Congress is now conveniently split on how to address the problem. Bill Bar has initiated what will no doubt be a glacial process to file anti-trust claims against the tech giants. We’ll all be dead long before any of these turn into results. The assumption is that it is all just a show, while behind the scenes the pols bath in cash from the tech giants. It is certainly a useful and satisfying conspiracy theory, but it is mostly wrong.

The truth is, the managerial state turns the ruling class into children, always living in the moment and searching for a present distraction. Instead of taking the prudent and mature view of the problem, tracing it back to its origin and then simply applying the law as intended, they turn it into story time. In this story, they are once again cast as the strong female lead, taking on the sinister bad guys. You go girl. In order to defeat the bad guys, they must create a super complicated solution.

In many areas, this is not much of a concern. The issue of tech censorship is one that can largely solve itself. In order for Twitter to exist, they need the state to keep their competitor out of business, but those same children playing make believe in response to the problem are unable to maintain their end of the bargain. People will find a way to meet on-line and exchange ideas. The result will not be ideal or even very good, but it will allow people to communicate on-line.

This is not happening with important stuff like building roads and keeping the hospitals open. All over the country, technocrats agree that we need more new housing, so builder need more power to build developments. That results in the need for more road and more schools, but building roads is boring, so the children of the managerial state use their time dreaming up smart communities and smart transportation plans. They get to pretend they are smart and popular while the rest of us sit in traffic jams.

The observation about bureaucracy is it becomes sclerotic over time. The people inside the system stop caring about the purpose of the system. Something similar happens with the managerial state. The people inside become hyper-educated toddlers, unable to grasp the concept of time. They spend their days trying to impress each other with their highly complex public policy solutions. Governance becomes a giant parlor game where the more ridiculous the idea, the more the children cheer.

The Day After Tomorrow

Posted on October 13, 2020 by thezman

Media Note: I was on the Counter-Currents livestream Sunday. Here is the recorded version of it for your listening pleasure. I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around 9:00 PM eastern and runs for a couple of hours. I’m now posting content to my SubscribeStar page. I’m trying my hand at movie reviews.

The general consensus regarding the future of the American Empire is that it is headed for demise like all empires. The rapidly declining quality of the ruling elite in general and the political class in particular is the biggest sign. Then there is the changing demographics, which will reach a point where the human capital of the empire can no longer support empire. Then there is the life cycle of all empires. This one, while short lived, seems to be in the late phase of that cycle.

Most people focus on the question of when the empire will collapse, as that provides the most thrilling scenarios. The truth is though, empires collapse in slow motion, rather than in a bang. It is like a fall down a long flight of stairs, in which the empire hits some long landings where it seems to right itself for a period. Then it is another tumble down the stairs until it hits another landing. It is only in the fullness of time that the decline and fall of the empire looks like the familiar arc.

A different question worth pondering is what will the decline and fall look like for the average person living in the empire? For the people living in the provinces, it will look like the past, in that Europe and Asia will simply gain their independence. France may become a vassal of Germany or Russia, but that is just the same condition with a different management team at the top. Europe will get poorer and more violent, but that will mostly be due to massive migration from Africa.

In North America, we have some hints as to what post-empire America will look like for the typical person. This post on American Greatness goes into the third world nature of large swaths of current year America. California now looks more like Sinaloa Mexico than the old America of the young empire. There are nice modern parts for sure, but there are backward primitive parts, as well. Just like the Roman Empire, it is the infrastructure that is the leading edge of decline.

Empires that can no longer maintain their borders tend to attract large peasant classes, because long after the empire’s peak, it remains a better place to be poor than outside the empire. America lost control of its borders a generation ago, so something like fifty million people have relocated to America. There may be that many more operating inside the country illegally. The fact that no one knows or cares about the illegal population is one of those signs of collapse.

Another vision for post-empire America, is post-empire Spain. One of the interesting aspects of that period is how power devolved to local power centers. The Visigothic Kingdom ruled over what is now Spain. They were central Europeans who had moved west from the Danube Valley, first under the protection of the Western Roman Empire, but then by conquest after the fall of Rome. The kingdom maintained independence for about three centuries.

The thing is though, the kingdom was a polite fiction in many ways as the Gothic rulers had limited control of their territory. They were dependent on those local power centers that evolved in the late Roman empire. The emerging Catholic Church was one power center, but so were local ruling elites located in cities like Seville and Toledo. This is the root of antisemitism, by the way. Jews were powerful players in Gothic politics, a rival to the Church for influence over the secular authorities.

That’s probably the future of North America. The federal government will carry on long after it can exert control over the whole of the country. We see that today with the inability of the political class to do the obvious with the tech oligarchs. Today, global enterprise, finance and technology are outside the scope of government authority and often the whip hand in the relationship. We’re seeing states and cities in open revolt now, refusing to abide by federal laws.

One question no one in power thinks about is whether or not these new oligarchs can survive without the national government. The oligarchs that emerged from the Soviet empire were rooted in practical things like oil and gas. American oligarchs have power over abstract concepts that exist only because the state protects them. Both finance and technology are able to siphon off the wealth of the middle-class, because the middle-class supports the state, which protects this racket.

Put another way, Bolshevism made the Soviet empire artificially poorer, as it compelled inefficiency in the economy. It also proved to be a costly form of rule. Collapse freed the economy of the empire, allowing the new oligarchs to emerge. Liberal democracy makes the empire artificially richer, as it relies upon financial legerdemain to pull forward the proceeds of labor and capital. The cost of rule is subsidized by the social capital it consumes to perpetuate itself.

Is it possible for local power centers to emerge in North America, when the regions no longer have an identity of their own? Is it possible for local rule, when the local elites are just as inept and corrupt as the national elites? It is hard to imagine California lasting very long as an independent state. Its ruling class is clownish and stupid, a collection of petulant children. How hard would it be for the drug cartels to push them aside and turn the state into another narco-state?

The Soviet system rewarded cleverness and intrigue but it was founded on force, so there was always a role for those willing to act. The American system rewards guile, but increasingly has no role for assertiveness and force. It is why America has become so bad at waging war. It is possible that we now lack the required lions to push aside the foxes, even when the foxes die. It means a long period of chaos in which a new generation of lions can emerge to seize control.

Incorporated America

Posted on October 12, 2020 by thezman

Media Note: I have a column up at Taki. This will be a regular thing, but how regular is unknown at this point. We’ll see how it goes. I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around nine eastern and runs for a couple of hours.

The old left-wing critique of post-war America was that it was rampant consumerism resulting from the embrace of unfettered capitalism. Everything is commercialized and that which cannot be turned into a reason to buy stuff is discarded. The old right-wing criticism is that America is not free enough. Everywhere the tentacles of the state invade the normal activity of society. Both are correct in that America now operates like a giant corporate entity, rather than a country.

A country in the modern sense is a collection of nations. France is not a unified nation, as its regions are quite distinct with unique histories. Those nations are held together by a shared history and a common interest in being French. The same was always true of the United States, hence the name. The states reflected the nations of the country, held together by a common origin story and common interest. Those regional differences turned up in the language and culture.

The distinguishing characteristic of the America that emerged from the Cold War is that it is losing its regional variety in favor of a bland, corporate sameness. Everywhere you go you see the same corporate brands, which are often owned by the same corporate parent, providing the illusion of choice. Housing developments are all based on the same styles and patterns, because the builders are all the same. A new development in North Carolina looks just like one in Dallas or Cleveland.

America is often described by critics as nothing more than a shopping mall, where the only connection the people have to one another is the choice of product. This is not a right-wing critique, even though the dissident right has embraced it. This is more of an old left-wing critique of America. Capitalism is to blame for transforming America into a giant open-air marketplace. Instead of a culture based on organic institutions and a shared experience, it is based on buying stuff.

There is truth to it, but it misses what is really going on. America is now a corporation, rather than a country. It is why the public space is being transformed into something that looks like a corporate training center. You don’t go there to express an opinion or advance your interests, but to learn the latest policies. The person in charge sees herself as a facilitator, using behavioral techniques she learned in graduate school, in order to help you reach your potential an employee.

Just look at how the big social media platforms censure people. It is not traditional censorship we would see in an ideological state. Instead, the first violation gets you a day off to think about what you have done. The next violation gets you a longer bit of time off, which everyone knows means you’re on the list. The next downsizing means you get let go, regardless of your performance. Finally, like an employee that never fit into the corporate culture, you’re fired from the platform.

Note too that the enforcers at these firms clearly share information with one another about violators. One day the problematic user wakes up and his Twitter has been suspended, his Facebook is deleted and his YouTube channel nuked. This happens for the same reason the HR department ticks the box “Not eligible for rehire” when you’re riffed out of the place. It is not about you. You’re dead to them now. It is a service to their peers, so they can avoid hiring the same mistake.

This is why our radicals now sound like every human resource department and our politicians look like everyone at a corporate retreat. The managerial elite is imposing its corporate sensibilities on the country. The dreary sameness we see all around us is what you see inside every corporation. Everything must serve the point of the enterprise, even the aesthetic. Everything is subject to the quest for efficiency, so everything that makes life interesting is removed.

The regions of the country are no longer unique cultures with unique histories, but subsidiaries that must be normalized into the cooperate culture. Movies and television are repetitive and shallow, because corporate culture eschews creativity as risky and embraces banality because it is predictable and safe. Sports are drenched in identity politics because cross-marketing says the way to promote a new product is to attach it to the most successful product in the catalog.

Corporations travel a well-known arc. They start with a frontier mentality, in which the creative and daring control the enterprise. They are trying to develop a new market or subvert an existing market, so they can’t follow old rules. This attracts people who are goal oriented, not process oriented. This is the culture of every start-up, which is why they can find new ways to attack the market and maneuver the company around larger, better established competitors.

That success eventually outgrows the capacity of the start-up culture. Eventually, the people being hired to do the things the enterprise needs doing need to be managed and that means managers and rules. A new type of employee is brought in, the sort who enjoys the process. They enjoy creating employee manuals. Soon they are joined by another type of employee, who values conformity. Her job is to make sure everyone follows the rules and does so with enthusiasm.

This is the current phase of Corporate America. The thing that matters most to the managers is not ideology. In the corporate state, ideology is about as authentic and meaningful as corporate culture. It is just a veneer to decorate the latest HR effort to boost morale. What matters to them is the quest to assimilate the wide range of assets now under corporate control. If you step back and look at the current crisis, it is not an ideological battle, but a war on variety and exception.

This is, in part, why the elites hate Trump. It’s not his politics, as his politics, stripped of the carny act, are rather conventional. They hate Trump because he is the guy who laughed at the white diversity trainer when she shared her painful experiences of oppression at Princeton. They hate him because he just wants to do his job and have a life and an identity outside the company. For the champions of the corporate state, nothing can exist outside the state.

You see this corporate mentality most strongly in foreign policy. Russia is the arch enemy, not because they are a genuine competitor, but because they refuse to embrace the latest fads from HR. If the issue was the alleged authoritarianism, then America would invade China, but that’s an important vendor relationship, so their tyrannical system is no problem. In the corporate state, values and principles are just pretty lies to justify executive bonus packages.

Modern America is now an incorporated entity, run by a managerial elite, policed by the human resource departments of the corporate nodes within it. As the assimilation of all the corporate assets continues, it is increasingly difficult to see the divisions within the managerial class. The media, corporations, the academy and the state are blending into one amorphous blob that sits over us like a dome. Everything is in the corporate state, nothing is outside it and nothing can be against it.

A Peaceful End

Posted on October 10, 2020 by thezman

Media Note: I will be on the Counter-Currents livestream this Sunday. Greg uses these as fundraisers, so if you like hearing people like me on these shows, consider sending Greg a few bucks. You can do that via Entropy.

The Feds announced to great fanfare that they foiled a plot by far-right extremists to kidnap the daffy governor of Michigan. They coordinated this with the governor so she could try to gain some sympathy. Of course, this being the age of lies, the extremists were mostly anarchists and random goofballs talked into this by the Feds. Putting aside the absurdity of this case, it does raise a good question. That is, why has there been so little organized violence in America?

Now, people will point to the left-wing riots over the summer, but that was always intended to be theater. Those people in the streets are not resisting anything or trying to topple the system. They are creatures of the system. As soon as official sanction is withdrawn, they melt away, as we saw in 2016 and now 2020. What we have not seen is violence from people who genuinely wish to topple the prevailing order or strike a blow against it for political reasons.

This is not just a current year issue. The 9/11 attacks were a spectacular example of how an open society is vulnerable to attack. There are plenty of Muslims in America and some portion of them hate the government. The 9/11 attacks should have inspired some of them to do similar attacks. Instead, a few misfits were caught in lone-wolf style efforts, but otherwise, not much. As with the fictional right-wing militias, the FBI was left to arresting on-line losers pretending to be Al-Qaeda.

It’s easy to miss the lack of organized violence, as the media floods the zone with agit-prop about invisible Nazis and peaceful riots. These are campfire stories they tell the true believers so they will remain vigilant. In reality, there has been precious little push-back of any kind, much less the violent sort. They had to turn Gavin McInnes’s goofy fan club into a terrorist group, because they were so desperate for material. The demand for extremists of any type far exceeds the supply.

Consider this. When was the last time someone fired a shot at a president? Despite how hated Trump is by the Left, there has been no Squeaky Fromme. According to Wikipedia, the threats to Obama were humorously ridiculous. The worst thing to happen to Bush was that some Iraqi tossed a shoe at him. Like Obama, the threats to Clinton were random goofballs. The last President to get shot at was Reagan. Assassination has become a thing of the past in our politics.

Going back to the Muslim stuff, the thing no one ever asked is why were these guys so bad at violence? Timothy McVeigh showed how easy it is to make a big bomb from common materials. Instead of hijacking airplanes, they could have had suicide bombers in rental trucks popping up all over the country. Think about how many soft targets there are in a typical city. Think about how many vulnerable choke points there are, like bridges and tunnels. Yet, nothing ever happens.

Now, the Feds will claim that their vigilance is what keeps us safe from this sort of stuff, but that is obviously not true. Their effort to subvert the 2016 elections has revealed that the brain-drain in the FBI reached a critical stage long ago. Like the Michigan incident, their big collars are goofballs they talk into saying dumb things on-line. A real terrorist plot would have nothing to fear from the FBI. The lack of such incidents is due to factors outside of the law enforcement operations.

One possible answer for this is that people engaged in politics are not the sort that see force as a political tool. It is the foxes versus the lions phenomenon. Modern politics is about abstract concepts, not group interests. Union guys a century ago were willing to blow up the company offices because both sides were lions, engaged in a battle for physical stuff. Today, political combatants are foxes, engaged in a battle of wits over complex theories about how best to run society.

Another possible reason is people are becoming more docile and stupid. The latter is fairly well established. Not only is the demographic mix lowering overall intelligence, but the smart fraction is getting dumber as well. Organized political violence needs smart motivated people. Since the Industrial Revolution, western culture has selected against violence and force, in favor of cooperation. The result is a more docile population that is getting dumber with each generation.

Of course, political violence may be a lagging indicator or even knock-on effect of political turmoil at the upper reaches of society. The West is middle-class and peaceful, but in a steady decline. At some point, like a failing business, the impending collapse becomes obvious to enough people that they abandon orderly politics. This rush to the exits of conventional politics leads to an explosion of political violence. Perhaps that is what lies ahead for the West.

Perhaps Steven Pinker was right and the arc of human evolution leads away from violence and humanity is headed to a peaceful demise. Occidentals have become the panda bears of our species, happy to eat and sleep, but too disinterested in their own survival to reproduce or defend themselves. The rest of the world, which seems more violent and aggressive, is simply a few steps behind, as they have always been, on the evolutionary timeline, but they too will go gently into the night.

Election Reset

Posted on October 9, 2020 by thezman

We are a little over three weeks from the most consequential election in the history of the republic, according to the media. In reality, this election will probably not be all that interesting or consequential. Few elections make much of a difference, when viewed in the grand scheme of things. The great fear of democracy was that it would lead to wild swings in public policy. In reality, democracy results in a shadow elite maintaining their preferred course, regardless of the election results.

There are some exceptions. In 1960, the Illinois Democrat Party rigged their election in favor of Kennedy. If Nixon had won, there is a good chance Vietnam would not have happened as it did, which would have changed the arc of the 60’s. The anti-war movement was the energy of the cultural revolution. It also means Johnson’s Great Society would not have happened. Probably something else would have been passed, but it would not have been that program.

Another consequential election was 1976. Ford could have beat Carter, as it was a very close election. The map of that election is very interesting in comparison to what we are looking at in this coming election. If Ford had won, he would have run in 1980, instead of Reagan, and he may have run again in 1984. If not, Reagan would have been viewed as too old at that point and too much of a yesterday man. The conservative movement would never have gotten off the ground.

One possible significance of this election is that a Trump loss puts the near-dead Biden in the White House until they kill him and install Harris. Let’s be honest with ourselves about this. The people who killed Epstein and Seth Rich are not going to flinch at snuffing out Joe Biden. Harris is so obnoxious that she will be voted out in the following election, regardless of who the GOP nominates. Biden/Harris will end up being the Jimmy Carter in this replay of history.

In that regard, the Left should probably hope Trump wins. They got rid of Nixon with the Watergate frame-up and the ’76 election, but that was their high point. What followed was a long decline of post-war liberalism. From the perspective of the Left, the mid-70’s through the mid-2000’s was a long winter. Thanks to the neoconservatives in the Bush years, the conservative consensus shattered and the Left emerged from its long hibernation, but that was never a given.

As far as this election, when you strip away the massive psychological warfare campaign being waged on us, it is rather conventional. Everyone forgets that it was conventional wisdom four years ago that Trump would lose in a blowout. It’s like remembering how you felt about something long after the event. You can remember that you felt a certain way, but you cannot remember the actual feeling. The same is true for elections, it seems. We can recall the facts, but not the sense of it.

When you examine the facts of this election, it is looking a lot like the last election, but maybe more so, with regards to the polling. Look at the final polls from four years ago and the miss in key states was quite shocking. No one but Rasmussen has bothered to think much about why that happened. Odds are, the “shy Trump voter” is more of an issue this time. Four years of Trump voters being assaulted on the streets will make people much less willing to reveal themselves.

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Election Or Referendum
12:00: History
22:00: The Media (Link)
32:00: Polling
42:00: The Battleground
57:00: Closing

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Might As Well Nudge

Posted on October 8, 2020 by thezman

Everyone is familiar with psychological warfare, in which information is used to breakdown the moral of an enemy in wartime. It can also be used on individuals within a community in order to get them to act in a specific way. There’s also propaganda, which is an information campaign used by government to change public opinion or reinforce codes of conduct. This is no different from a marketing campaign, except the people doing it can also use force to get the attention of the audience.

Less known is the use of behavior techniques to subtly encourage or discourage behavior within a population. The idea is to change the environment so that the desired behavior feels like a natural choice. Humans are not fully rational and will make choices that are not entirely in their interests, because of things like peer pressure or assumptions about what everyone else is doing. The Chinese social credit system works on these principles to encourage compliance.

One way this is being done in English speaking countries is through the anathematizing of ideas and concepts the managerial elite wants to discourage. The coordinated and often theatrical banning of people from social media, for example. The people targeted often seem random and nonsensical, but it is not about the people, but about reinforcing an environmental variable. That is, you can be cut off from your in-line community for saying the wrong thing, so you best be careful.

The managerial class has used this tool to great effect. The number of people actually banned from these platforms is quite small, relative to the overall numbers, but the effect has been enormous. Corporate censorship and self-censorship are becoming normalized in America. Note how the term “free speech” is no longer used by anyone but those treated as subversives and trouble makers. They have changed the environment regarding speech and the people are complying.

This is what lies behind the rather weird war on white supremacy the government has been waging since the Charlottesville debacle. We have black mobs, supported by far-left radicals, rioting in cities and the government is telling us white supremacy is our greatest enemy. They are running around arresting alleged white supremacists on spurious charges. The distinguishing feature of these arrests is the pettiness of the campaign against them.

The people being targeted by law enforcement are not posing a threat to the public in the conventional sense. They are not sowing discord in the public or building a huge following of believers. Instead, they are being used by the managerial class to reinforce the concept that there is a hard limit on what one can say and do in politics by normalizing the criminalization of politics. Once this idea gets normalized, the only questions are what is allowed and who decides.

Obviously, the managerial class is working hard to get the evil Donald Trump voted out of office next month. Note that there is very little in the way of a propaganda campaign in favor of Biden and Harris. The former is mostly in hiding and the latter has been completely forgotten, despite the fact she is the actual candidate. The goal of the information campaign is to play a form of three-card Monte, in which the public never actually sees the option placed in front of them.

Instead of a conventional campaign on behalf of the candidate, we have a social proof heuristic through the use of polling and media coverage. Everywhere you turn there are polls telling us how everyone hates Trump. Polling, we’re told, says he is facing a historic defeat next month. The media is full of stories about how this group or that group is angry or disappointed in Trump. They have created an environment in which people are ashamed to say they are voting for Trump.

Another technique being used is to make voting against Trump the default option if you wish to escape the insanity of 2020. Many states, for example, have promised to end the Covid restrictions after the election. The media is injecting the term “return to normalcy” when discussing a Biden victory. In other words, having created a highly unpleasant environment for the public, they are now talking about the one door through which people can escape the madness of the current year.

The people behind this are not particularly adept at using force to maintain their position and compel compliance. This has been clear in the response to the riot campaign waged by the Soros organization this summer. The politicians all the way up to the President were too timid to take on the rioters. Instead, their instinct was to out-clever them until they tired of the violence. These are people uncomfortable with confrontation, so they went with the indirect approach.

This is the nature of the managerial class. These are not the sorts of people who relish the big confrontation. They are not lions. They are foxes. This means that their nature is to use deceit, cunning and now manipulation through the use of sophisticated behavior techniques arising from business and economics. Rather than be faster than the fastest lion, they have removed the lions altogether. They get to rule by being cleverer and more manipulative than any potential rival.

This is why Trump is so hated in Washington. He is a lion, at least in how he presents himself in any competition. He is loud and brash, just like a lion, because it scares off most competitors. The lion is the baddest animal on the savanna because it does not have to fight to prove it. The foxes in Washington fear the very idea of such a person, so they instinctively work to get him removed from their environment. It is not about ideology or policy. The clever naturally hate the bold.

Psychological warfare and propaganda have had mixed results, owing to the nature of the environment and the quality of the people on either end. What works in theory does not always work in practice. The same is true for the new behavioral techniques used by the managerial class. There is also the fact that the evidence supporting their effectiveness is spotty. Manipulating the environment of a grocery store is possible, but applying that to a country is questionable.

There’s also the fact that these techniques are largely the product of the analog age, updated for the digital age. The internet is a force multiplier that the managerial class can exploit, but it is also an obstacle. The massive flow of information appears to be making people less trusting and more skeptical of what comes from the official organs of the managerial class. Every official lie and half-truth is met with a correction or a different lie, creating a low trust information environment.

Put another way, the managerial class maybe extremely clever and adept at accumulating and manipulating information, but in so doing they are annihilating the information by degrading the trust environment in which it is most useful. The more they nudge, the more people resist in unpredictable ways. They generate polling that says Trump will lose in a landslide, but the polling also says most people think Trump will win re-election despite it all.

Fighting Reality

Posted on October 7, 2020 by thezman

From time to time it is useful to pick up the spyglasses and take a look at some of the smaller gatherings on the other side of the great divide. The establishment Left is easy to see, as it takes up so much space and makes so much noise. The same is true to a lesser extent with the professional Right. The smaller subcultures are not as easy to see, but they can be more useful in understanding the nature of the divide and why there is a great divide in the first place.

This conversation between someone calling himself Brendan O’Neil and someone calling himself Bret Weinstein is a good example. It appears this is a regular show hosted by Weinstein, where he invites on guests of “diverse opinion” to discuss issues he thinks are important. The topic of this show, according to the copy, was what he calls the woke war on the Enlightenment. Not much was revealed in that regard, but it is useful in understanding why there is a dissident right.

Now, Brendan O’Neil bills himself as a man of the Left. He is the editor of something called Spiked, which is the successor of something called Living Marxism, the journal of the Revolutionary Communist Party. According to his Wikipedia page, he is a former Trotskyist and communist, but now he self identifies as a Libertarian Marxist. That last bit only makes sense when you know that Spiked is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the guys who bankroll Reason Magazine.

Bret Weinstein is a bit more familiar to Americans. He is a member of the gratuitously self-described “intellectual dark web.” This a group of mostly Jewish writers who churn out conventional opinions for various mainstream sites. Weinstein got famous because he was attacked by a mob on lunatics on his college campus because he lacked enthusiasm for their latest fashions. He became a symbol of mob action on campus. He describes himself as a progressive and left-libertarian.

The first interesting thing to note in this is that both describe themselves as left-libertarian in their own way. No one describes themselves as right-libertarian, as that is something which no longer exists. The so-called conservatives would claim they are now the home of right-libertarians, but that is just another self-serving lie. They pose no opposition to the Left on anything. Conservatism is nothing more than a polite fiction now, a holding place for something yet to come.

Putting that aside, this conversation provides a good example of what happens when you eliminate the right answer. You are left trying to mold the wrong answer into something useful. Here, they refuse to consider biology plays any role in culture and politics. In particular, they refuse to accept that the people toppling statues and running Jewish professors off campus are motivated by race. It can’t be race, so they conjure strained explanations for what is happening.

At about the six-minute mark they get into identity politics. The claim by the British guy is the lock downs broke the British collective identity and that’s what caused mobs of people to go out and tear down statues. He terms it a retreat into group identity, rather than collective identity. The fact that the people doing the rioting were non-white and their targets were white people and culture, seems to be lost on him. It is a good example of what happens when you eliminate the obvious.

The response from Weinstein is amusing. He makes the obvious point that technology has made the world smaller. No matter how narrow your interests, you can find people who share your interests on-line. In the case of politics, it means on-line community around shared identity. He suggests this is a problem, as people falling into these “echo chambers” on-line eventually succumb to identity politics. It looked like he wanted to use the term “false consciousness” at that point.

Later on, they refer to the “murder of George Floyd” which gives the game away, but the show is still worth a listen. These tribes of the old Left are struggling for the same reason that the so-called conservatives and libertarians struggle. They cling to the notion that countries are built around ideas. They think that ideology can replace biology as the building block of human organization. The new man will completely submit to the prevailing orthodoxy of the new society.

The creedal nation was always a left-wing idea and it was always wrong. Like the Soviet Union, creedal America had a good run through the Cold War. For a half a century, most Americans were happy to put aside their natural identity in favor of patriotism, for the good of the country. It was a useful way for the ruling class to organize the public in the great game against communism. The Cold War is over and the reason to put aside those natural identities is gone with it.

It should be no surprise that blacks in America and the new arrivals in the West are the first to embrace this new reality. American blacks never embraced the creedal nation stuff. They have always been the least patriotic group. The new arrivals were never encouraged to drop their natural identity. In fact, they were encouraged to embrace it as they were told diversity is our strength. It is the occidentals that are the last to catch on, but that is changing.

That is what you see in that video. Both men are clinging to the old modes of thought, hoping to find a way to keep white people from embracing identity politics. Nowhere in their discussion do they condemn blacks or immigrants, even though they are the people rioting in the streets. The long post-war period was, in fact, a break from human reality, but now reality is roaring back. Yesterday men like those two in the video cling to their creedal notions, while reality returns with a vengeance.

Us And Them

Posted on October 6, 2020 by thezman

A striking feature of American liberal democracy is the great gap between the reality of the political class and the people. The Cloud People are not just floating above the Dirt People, living different lives, like aristocrats of old. They no longer have a clear vision of the Dirt People below them. Instead, they conceive of the people over whom they rule based on inputs from the managerial class. To the political class, the general public is an abstraction, not a physical reality.

One example of this is in how the political class understands hierarchy. Every Washington politician and appointee lives in a world where hierarchy is well understood and respected. The appointed class have an array of titles that indicate their position in the hierarchy. Elected officials, of course, have their office and their committee assignments, along with their seniority. This is a world every one of them inherited when they entered politics. It is how it has always been.

In this world, a senator tells his staff to do something and he just assumes they will do it, assuming it can be done. If it cannot be done, then he is going to have them find out why it cannot be done and report back to him. An appointee works the same way within the bureaucracy. They have a staff, usually of appointees, and that staff carries out the orders of the director or secretary. Even though nothing of public good is done in Washington, the petty tasks are carried out with precision.

In this regard, the political class is a petty aristocracy. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, commands absolute loyalty from his staff. Not only does his staff do what they are told, they faithfully keep his secrets. He has been in the Imperial Capital for a quarter century, without a hint of scandal, despite the obvious. Congress operates a private slush fund to settle sexual harassment claims. Over 260 claims have been paid, without a word about the details. That’s loyalty.

Scan the biographies of the political class and the thing you will be hard pressed to find is anything resembling real world experience. Few have ever worked in the dreaded private sector. Those that have, worked in the law or maybe finance. These careers were just alternative paths to the place they wanted to be all along. There are no sons of the soil in Washington. The exception is President Trump, which is why he is hated by the entire political class. He is not one of them.

If any of these people had spent time in the world of the Dirt People, they would know that the reality of the petty aristocracy is nothing like reality. In the dreaded private sector, a manager at any level must be conscious of his subordinates. If that manager is going to make his bosses happy, he has to keep his people happy. Otherwise, they will not do what he asks and they will undermine his authority. This is the reason every middle manager sounds like a psychotherapist.

In the military, every officer is trained to know this. There is a strict hierarchy and ethos that says you respect the rank, not the man. Humans are human, so that theory gives way to the reality that men follow men. A good officer is one who commands the respect of his men. Bad officers think they can just issue orders and they will be carried out, no matter how stupid or ridiculous. The officer who acts like a petty aristocrat can find himself with a live grenade in his bunk.

Everywhere in the dreaded private sector, hierarchy relies about a dynamic that is not all that different from a pirate ship. Everyone understands that someone has to be in charge and that there has to be order. The question as to who is in charge and who gives the orders, however, is not written in stone. You earn your position and you keep earning it in the execution of your duties. Unlike in Washington, failure has consequences and people get fired and demoted.

This great gap between the Cloud People and the Dirt People in the nature of human organization and hierarchy is the great source of friction. We see that with the response to the Covid virus. The petty tyrants in the lowest level of the petty aristocracy just assumed the rest of us would happily follow their orders. The striking feature of this pandemic is how the political class is resentful that the public has not celebrated them in song and story for their heroism during these times.

The ruling class sees no danger in their social engineering schemes, because everyone they know thinks they are great ideas. Spend time in the Imperial Capital and it is like visiting a foreign planet. They live in a world that is divorced from the reality of the human condition. It has evolved into something closer to a college campus, where good times or bad, it is always the best of times. It is why critic race theory sounds like a grand idea to them. All of their ideas are grand ideas.

For those old enough to remember, there is a Ceausescu’s last speech quality to what we hear from our political elites and their organs. The gap between us and them has reached such a point it is impossible for us to think of them as us. This reality is slowly creeping into the minds of the dirty people like the fog. The Cloud People, however, remain locked in their old mode of thought. Nancy Pelosi truly thinks she is a beloved and respected figure to the Dirt People.

In such situations, there is always a moment when the people suddenly realize that they are not alone in their thoughts about us and them. That is what happened during Ceausescu’s last speech. The people suddenly realized that everyone else had the same thoughts about their ruler. On that day, that reality was made clear to Ceausescu’s as he gave his speech. The next day he fled the capital and a few days later he was tried and executed.

The Ash Heap Of History

Posted on October 5, 2020 by thezman

In the fullness of time, the most important development in the Trump era will be the collapse of conservatism as a political movement. The official Right had been in crisis for a long time, but the old political dynamic had locked it in place. If you opposed the Left, the only alternative was conservatism. Trump did not usher in a new era, so much as discredit the old. The Left quickly redesigned to self as a defender of the status quo and institutional power, while the Right has collapsed.

Even at this early date, it has become a bit trite to note that American conservatism has collapsed over the last five years. Not only has it collapsed, in terms of its intellectual influence, but it has become a ridiculous joke. Even the jokes about it have started to sound a bit hackneyed, as the absurdity moves beyond satire. When a site calling itself The American Conservative is making “the conservative case” for explicitly anti-white pogroms, the jokes stop being funny.

Even so, it is worth looking at why the American Right has collapsed. The majority of white people in America have at one time or another considered themselves conservative or at least were open to it. There’s never been a majority in favor of Progressive reforms, yet those reformers have always carried the day, despite the opposition of the professional Right. It takes a special skill to lose so much despite having a numerical advantage in a democracy.

One obvious reason for the collapse of conservatism is that it lost all of its intellectual vigor decades ago. We live in an age of pygmies, but nowhere is that more obvious than with the professional Right. Half a century ago, the Right was teaming with serious thinkers. A couple of decades ago, National Review had a half a dozen or more quality thinkers and polemicists. Today, no one can think of a single writer or thinker on the Right that is worth a minute’s time.

That really is the striking thing about what has happened to America in general, but the Right in particular. It is as if anyone with the least bit of curiosity about the world has been driven off and replaced by former postal workers. The distinguishing feature of the American intellectual class is its doctrinaire dreariness. Everyone with anything on the ball and a curiosity about the world operates out on the fringes. The American intellectual class is a as vibrant as the surface of the moon.

Another facet of this, a byproduct of the suffocating dullness, is an inability of conservatives to examine how they came to this dead end. This piece in the American Mind, which is supposed to be the free-thinking outlet for conservatives looking to break free of the old modes of thought, is a good example. On the surface, it is supposed to be an analysis of the administrative state, which should mean the managerial state, but instead it means “big government” in the old hackneyed way.

Note that the writer takes as a given the basic assumptions of the Left. His opposition to what he describes as the administrative state, is that it is anti-democratic, prejudiced and discriminatory. This is the sort of complaint that was popular on the Left a generation ago, when they would attack corporate America. In the hands of conservatives, it becomes a complaint about having to deal with a thicket of bureaucrats down at the local motor vehicle department.

Even more ridiculous, their critique of the administrative state tries to use guilt by association to win over their enemies on the Left. You see, the roots of the administrative state are in the Confederacy! You see that my woke brothers? The thing you now control is every bit as racist and cis-gendered as those statues you are toppling all over the country. It is not just a rhetorical devise. Conservatives truly believe that current crisis is rooted in human preference.

The weird logic of modern conservative thinking is worth noting. Professor Hamburger seems to think the great obstacle to the Progressive dream of an egalitarian paradise are the tools the Left has been using to create that paradise. Not only will they agree to throw down their weapons, they will suddenly stop their aggression. It is a bizarre form of utopian thinking. It is even more bizarre, given that the greatest threat to individual liberty is woke capital, not the government.

What is even more striking about this is just how obtuse this line of thought is, given that within conservative intellectual traditions there are far better critiques. Within living memory, Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried wrote extensively about the managerial state, building off the analysis of James Burnham. Perhaps it is understandable that Francis has been forgotten in conservative circles, but Gottfried is still around and active at publications like the American Conservative.

This gets back to the barren intellectual landscape in general, but the aridity of conservatism in particular. Modern conservatives operate in the lowest tier of intellectual discourse, which is the practical. This is where they debate where to move commas around the tax code and how to tinker with existing structures. The Left operates at the next tier, which focuses on the process. For them, the administrative state is one item in the toolkit they have in the war on the general culture.

What has been lost in this age is anyone that can look down about this dynamic between strategy and tactics and understand the ideas and historical forces that are carrying these combatants along. This should be the role of conservatism. It should be the engine producing a new moral and political paradigm to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, but instead it is just an obstacle in the way of that process. This is why it has collapsed and is headed to the ash heap of history.

While Trump and the people around him are oblivious to his role in this historical period, their anti-intellectualism is the necessary agent to break the old dynamic. Conservatives have no answer for his blunt observations and the Left has had its skin peeled back to reveal its reptilian interior. Trump has been a clarifying event, one that will usher conservatism off the intellectual and political stage. What replaces it is something suited for the demographic age.

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