The Creedal Insult

Posted on May 13, 2020 by thezman

One of the side effects of the bizarre creedal nation theology is that what claims to create unanimity ends up creating friction and hostility. The most obvious and predictable way it does this is the debate over the creed itself. What it means to be an American, for example, will change over time under normal circumstances. Attitudes change, circumstances change, the culture evolves, so inevitably what defines the people will change with it. Everything evolves over time.

Not everything evolves at the same rate, so that definition of the unifying creed quickly becomes many versions of the creed. In a liberal democracy, where radicals are encouraged to dream up novel new social fads, this quickly gets out of hand. We now live in a land where the “unifying creed” of the people in Pennsylvania includes making a mentally unstable Jewish man the head of their public health. In a creedal nation, everyone is encouraged to have their own reality.

There may be a bigger problem with the liberal democratic notion that a nation just needs a unifying set of principles. That is, the implementation of that system cheapens it and eventually mocks it. The simplest way to think of it is this. If everyone can easily become an American, then being an America is not all that special. After all, what makes Harvard the most prestigious college on earth, aside from the human sacrifices and satanic rituals, is that it is difficult to gain admittance.

Liberal democracy flips this on its head and claims that something that is easy to attain is somehow special and unique. If Pablo can just float on over in his inner tube and become an American, then what’s the point of being an American? There is none and we see that in current year America. In fact, citizenship is now a burden. The McMichael case in Georgia is an obvious example. Following the law and being a good citizen is for suckers. It’s why people are abandoning their citizenship.

Putting aside the material aspects of the creedal nation theology, there is another aspect that makes it a lethal poison for a human society. People are tribal, having a natural affinity for their kind. Despite the massive agitation efforts to deny this reality, it remains a reality nonetheless. For example, real estate brokers will now be mentioning the local jogger scene, or lack thereof, when showing houses. The reason is we all know the correlation between joggers and quality of life.

No one wants to think their tribe is a bunch of losers. Another aspect of our tribal nature is to think our tribe has some unique quality that is unique to us. Those stereotypes did not spring from nothing. Blacks think they invented basketball, because they dominate the sport at every level. Italians assume they have a superior sense of style. The French think they are the intellectual masters of the West. Every tribe has cultural items they believe to be unique to them.

This is where the creedal nation theology creates conflict. This piece in Counter-Currents on great Jewish violinists makes the point that Jews dominate the list of great violin players. If Jews had invented the violin or invented the music best performed with the instrument, it would be a great cultural achievement of their people. Instead, it is outsiders mastering the cultural achievements of others. It’s no different than a group of genetically engineered Asians dominating basketball.

That is the unintended insult. The musician that masters the instruments and music of another people to the point where he is superior to their best is committing a great insult to those people. It is a demonstration that their cultural achievements are so little that an outsider can master them better than the natives. This does not necessarily have to be intentional. The virtuoso could sincerely love the instrument or music he is mastering, but the result is still the same.

This is most obvious in popular culture. Movie makers inserting Africans, for example, into movies about the middle ages has become a running joke on-line, because it has become so common. The zeal to prove that people don’t matter has the rulers of popular culture feverishly rewriting popular history to include everyone. The result is the past, our past, is no longer our past. Even if the intent is to be “inclusive” of the new Americans, the result is an insult to white people.

Guarding the culture from outsiders is the natural response to efforts at cultural appropriation, something we see on the college campus. If the kids want to have a party on Cinco de Mayo, they better not wear culturally appropriate costumes. Even if the kids make every effort to avoid mockery or snark, it is still forbidden. The guardians of political correctness will have none of that, as to appropriate the symbols and images of another culture is assumed to be an insult.

Jews, of course, are the most ethnocentric people on earth. They have survived as a guest people for thousands of years. One reason for that is they guard their culture, forbidding outsiders to access it. For example, teaching the Torah to non-Jews is forbidden, unless it is part of a conversion, which is not encouraged. In Israel, religious Jews send their kids to separate schools to avoid being mixed in with Arabs, but also to provide their children with training in their culture.

Even in modern America, where Jews operate at the top of society and dominate the popular culture, few non-Jews know much about Jews or Judaism. Part of it is genuine fear of being called a blasphemer, but a big part of it is that Jews are not all that forthcoming about what goes on inside their culture. By guarding large swaths of their culture and not permitting outsiders to imitate it in anyway, Jews have been able to preserve themselves as distinct people.

The creedal nation theology is the exact opposite of what has worked for Jews and other people. Instead of preserving and protecting the culture of the people, it cheapens it and commodifies it. To be an American, for example, now means occupying some space in North America and having a Netflix account and the newest iPhone. The solution in which a people are naturally suspended dissipated and we are left with a collection of strangers agreeing only on our insults.

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What Lies Beneath

Posted on May 12, 2020 by thezman

An axiom of politics is that scandals are about sex or money. The politician at the center of a scandal got caught with a live boy or a dead girl. The public loves those stories, so it becomes a scandal, even when the politician is from the inner party, as was the case with Bill Clinton. Alternatively, the politician confused his money with public money or someone else’s money and someone blabbed. This is almost always the heart of local political scandals, where political machines run on graft.

It’s something to keep in mind as the years long FBI scandal has apparently entered a new phase during the lock down. The General Flynn cases was surprisingly dismissed, after a document dump by the Department of Justice revealing gross misconduct by the FBI and DOJ. Everyone sort of knew Flynn was setup, as is always the case when people are charged with lying to the FBI, but the extent of the entrapment scheme appears to lead to the inner circle of former President Obama.

Then there is the release of the transcripts of testimony to the House committee investigating the Russian collusion hoax. At the time, everyone in official Washington was required to pretend it was legitimate, so the House brought in over 50 people to answer questions under oath, behind closed doors. Those mostly unredacted transcripts have proven to be revelatory. Everything about the official narrative, according to the sworn testimony of the people involved, was entirely fake.

Probably the most amazing thing in those documents thus far is the fact that all of these people have been able to maintain a complex series of lies. The old adage about three can keep a secret if two are dead does not apply here. It’s not just the people at the core of the story either. Peripheral people, who have plenty of reasons to run to the media and tell their story have maintained a rigid discipline not seen since the heyday of the Italian mafia. Even now, they still refuse to rat out their friends.

That is the part of this that need special emphasis. Why are all of these people risking their freedom to maintain an obvious lie? Take, for example, the story about the Russians hacking the DNC e-mail system and handing the contents to Wikileaks. Just a few months ago they were repeating the claim that they were brought into investigate the crime and found that the Russians had gained access to the server. Yet, they testified under oath that they found no such information.

Putting that aside, the question is what was driving all of this from the start. Sex and money are not the motivators. The other thing that drives political scandal is power, which makes some sense here. The Clinton campaign, like the Nixon campaign in the 1972 election, was not content to just win with their massive advantages. Instead they decided to cheat with help from their friends in the intelligence services and apparently people in the White House. That may be the starting point.

The trouble with that theory is Team Obama really never liked Hillary Clinton all that much and did little to help her campaign. While it is possible that the people in the FBI and CIA were happy to help, it seems unlikely that the White House was going to be enthusiastic for such a caper. The bizarre Susan Rice e-mail to herself regarding the Flynn entrapment scheme suggests the White House really hated Flynn and was willing to do anything to keep him from re-entering government.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that the DOJ in their filing to dismiss the Flynn case left breadcrumbs leading to that memo. There was plenty of information of general misconduct by the FBI and the DOJ, as well as Flynn’s original defense team, to warrant dropping the case. The government could have done one of those dramatic “to protect the integrity of the system” announcements that would leave open the issue of Flynn’s guilt, but close the issue from further discussion.

One possibility here is the Obama administration had been exploiting a workaround to the limits on domestic spying. By making Flynn the target of an investigation, the FBI could monitor his electronic communications and track his movements. This means they could know who he was meeting with as a member of the Trump team and monitor what he was discussing with them. In other words, the entire fraudulent Flynn case was just a way to spy on the campaign and later the transition team.

This would be the second and possibly third example of this play. It is quite clear that they used the same tactic on Carter Page. They faked up a case for him being an international spymaster, so they could monitor him and everyone in contact with him during the campaign. They may have been working the same angle on George Papadopoulos, the low-level foreign policy adviser. In other words, this may be a pattern of behavior that was standard operating procedure.

This ultimately may be what the Durham investigation is about in the end. A domestic spying system had evolved in which private companies worked with public officials to get around domestic spying limits and put the results to use for the inner party. The FBI and CIA would make raw information of their legitimate surveillance available to private contractors, who would leak it to the press or party members. Those press reports were then used to obtain warrants for wider domestic surveillance.

That could be the power motivator behind this. The reason for the Russian collusion hoax was to cover up the operation from the Trump administration. Team Mueller could threaten anyone making the wrong noises about it and the whole thing would remain hidden from the administration and the public. Still, that does not explain the amazing discipline of the conspirators. At this stage, a private party like Crowdstrike should be looking to cut a deal with the Feds. Yet they are sticking to their story.

One possibility is that there really is something much bigger at the heart of this conspiracy than simple spy games. Maybe the Seth Rich assassination looms larger than anyone realizes. Maybe that secret e-mail system running out of Hillary Clinton’s spare toilet is involved. Maybe it is simply ideological fervor. We know from their private communications that most of these people were fanatics. Their Trump hatred was just one aspect of their zeal to serve the inner party.

Government will always be corrupt, as men are not angels. Whether it is the lust for power or the temptations that come with power, corruption is part of the human condition. A much more serious problem is a government overrun by fanatical ideologues. That may be the heart of this scandal. The long march through the institutions has been followed by a radicalization of the institutions. The inner party now operates like a religious cult, rather than a political operation.

Springtime For Joggers

Posted on May 11, 2020 by thezman

Thanks to the relentless anti-white animus, America and the world now has a new colorful euphemism for a certain element of society. The word “jogger” is now the preferred word of choice to describe the young black male creeping around in the neighborhood, looking for trouble. Over the weekend, the funnymen and meme makers had fun with the story of Ahmaud Arbery, the black male shot and killed by two white men in Georgia during a confrontation.

The “jogger” phenomenon is interesting, because it suggests white people in America have turned a critical corner. When this well-orchestrated media campaign was unleashed last week, the first reaction by most whites was to assume it was yet another hoax to libel white people. Instead of the public acts of piety, whites took to social media to laugh at the absurdity of the case. The first instinct was to call it Trayvon Martin 2.0 and mock the ham-fisted propaganda campaign.

Now, not all white people reacted this way. Some older white people in the northeast, conditioned to hate white people from the South, fell for the hype, but they were quickly brought around by others. A lifetime of being told you are a good white, even after you realize you are not, is hard to ignore. Of course, there were plenty of “fellow whites” on social media working their usual scams. Then there were the professional grovelers, who are whites paid to amplify anti-white propaganda.

The most amusing of the bunch was a soy-faced sad-sack calling himself Matt Walsh, who unironically works for Ben Shapiro. In response to new video showing Ahmaud Arbery prowling through unattended building sites in the neighborhood just prior to the confrontation, he made the laughable claim that it is perfectly normal to wander through unattended building sites. In fact, it is one of his favorite pastimes! He went so far as to say that men do this all the time. It’s a “guy thing.”

Within minutes every soft-handed, anti-white bigot was echoing the claim on social media, claiming they spend their free time prowling around work sites. Like the jogger claim, this was met with a deluge of mockery. Maybe if Mr. Walsh was not a prissy little pansy, he could have got away with it, but the image of that guy walking around a building site was too much for most people. The army of sissies that came forth to echo his claims made the whole thing easy to lampoon.

Unremarked thus far is just how quickly this crew came up with this ridiculous rationalization in support of the narrative. Certain people will claim they received instructions from the usual suspects, but in reality, it was as natural a response as pulling away from a hot stove. These organ grinder’s monkeys for the anti-white rage heads in charge of America are so thoroughly conditioned, rationalizing the blood libel is as natural to them as breathing or blinking.

In this time of government-imposed misery, it was a nice bit of fun. The fact that the propagandists have had to retreat from the story is the real story. Unlike prior hoaxes, this one appears to have crashed into a new wall of white skepticism. The police have arrested the two men involved, but the lynch mob that was expected to pressure the authorities into railroading these two men has suddenly gone quiet. All of a sudden, white people are pushing back against the Jim Snow laws.

Of course, the story was greatly enhanced by the fact that as the blood libel machine was cranking up, a black was literally hunting white people in a Delaware veterans cemetery, killing an elderly couple. A jogger named Sheldon C. Francis executed an 80-year old couple as they honored their ancestors. It was a stark reminder that while the Ahmaud Arbery story is entirely fake, the jogger threat is real. White people in America have spent generations trying to avoid joggers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but generations of white people have had to pay the tax, the jogger tax, for sins they never committed and in fact, we never committed. Baltimore would go from Lagos on the Chesapeake to Hong Kong on the Chesapeake if the local joggers all decamped to another land. If not for the jogger phenomenon, alarm companies would go out of business and cars would have normal keys again. Everyone knows this. The jogger tax is the cost of being white.

Another nuance to this is that there has not been much outrage from whites about yet another libel against white people. Instead, it seems as if whites, at least with regards to joggers, have moved past outrage onto mockery. The usual suspects can manipulate the righteous anger of the victims to their ends, but they are powerless to do much in the face of mockery. Odious carbuncles like Matt Walsh will continue to put on their self-righteous face, but it just makes the mockery more powerful.

The elephant in the room, of course, is the race problem. Blacks still think OJ Simpson was innocent, they think Trayvon was executed and they think Michael Brown was the victim of police abuse. They think the father and son at the center of this jogger hoax hunted and killed Ahmaud Arbery. They are absolute sure gangs of whites roam the countryside hunting innocent black bodies. They are sure everyone who voted for Donald Trump is a racist for supporting the racist-in-chief.

Similarly, the usual suspects share most of these beliefs. Two standard deviations to the right of blacks are a class of people whose identity is rooted in the blood libel against white America. Matt Walsh did not rush forth to condemn white people because he is being paid by Ben Shapiro. David French and his goofy old lady did not kidnap an African child as a trophy for career advancement. These self-loathing whites are not just paid flaks for the orthodoxy. This is who they are now.

This means there is no reconciliation possible between the self-loathing whites, American blacks and the rest of white America. No amount of mockery will dampen the enthusiasm for these hoaxes and libels. No matter how many are revealed to be fake and no matter how many joggers roam white neighborhood looking for victims, the people behind this latest hoax will keep at it. Who they are depends on it. Like the oxpecker, they exist to live off the rest of us.

Thoughts On Modern Media

Posted on May 9, 2020 by thezman

One of the things people have always believed about modern media is that video beats audio and audio beats the written word. Before the rise of “new media” on the internet, this meant television was better than radio and radio better than newspapers. In the internet age, the assumption now is that live streamers have greater reach than podcasters and podcasters have a greater reach than bloggers. Mixed in there are people who exist only as entities on social media platforms.

One reason for this assumption is youth culture. In liberal democracy, the young are treated like gods, in the same way novel social ideas are treated as gifts from the gods, so whatever young people like is heralded as pure and beautiful. Young people, especially children, are first drawn to images, then sounds and finally as they mature into adults, the written word. In modern liberal democracies, therefore, video platforms are treated like sacred altars where our most sacred members perform.

The youth culture phenomenon has co-evolved with the rise of mass media. In the days before mass media, young people were at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy. The first flicker of youth culture in America was the jazz age, but even there the people driving it were old by modern standards. The characters in The Great Gatsby, for example, are mostly early middle-aged. It was after the war with the explosion of Hollywood that youth culture blossomed into the centerpiece of modern life.

Another reason why video maintains a privileged place at the top of our social hierarchy is Baby Boomer culture. For Boomers, for whom mass media evolved, video was always the top. In the golden age of television, for example, the whole country would watch popular television programs. No newspaper or radio broadcaster had the reach of a popular television program. Hitting the big time in the field of news or entertainment meant getting on TV or in the movies.

As much as young people, and not so young people, complain about the Baby Boom generation, the Boomers still control the culture. That is plainly obvious with the panic over the Chinese virus. If the Boomers were twenty years younger, the virus would rate a few mentions in the New York Times science section. Since Boomers are now deeply involved in the health care system, anything medical is going to be of utmost importance to everyone. It is why nurses are now heroes.

Putting all that aside, there is a curious truth about these different platforms that has gone unnoticed. The actual reach of video these days is much lower than the past and probably at the bottom of the hierarchy. For example, Tucker Carlson is the most popular cable talker. He gets about three million viewers per night. The regular audience for cable chat shows is probably around ten million people. The New York Times has more readers than that. Same with other news sites.

On the internet, where it is much more difficult to gate-keep the content, the disparities are even more stark. Popular live streamers get a few thousand live views and their replays get 20-30 thousand views. A variation of the Pareto Principle is clear as day as a handful of top streamers dominate the view counts while 90% or more are small fish with small viewer counts. The gamer PewDiePie, for example, probably accounts for half of D-Live’s traffic, maybe even more of it.

In the political realm, the data is starker. Nick Fuentes gets about 30-thousand viewers to his show each night. The bulk of it is the same people, as his subscriber count mirrors his view counts, assuming either number is accurate. When he was on YouTube his numbers were briefly higher, but that was due to the phenomenon of the “groyper war” that got him national attention. Again, these numbers are suspect, but let’s just assume his unfettered reach is somewhere around 50-thousand.

Greg Johnson’s site, Counter-Currents, gets about 300-thousand unique visits every month, according to his reporting. The Unz Review probably gets two to three times that traffic, maybe even more. There are dozens of sites catering to outsider politics that get much bigger audiences than Fuentes and he’s the big dog now. When you drop into the typical streamer, the difference becomes amusing. A “popular” streamer, someone that thinks they are a big deal, gets about 10-thousand views.

Getting back to where we started, in new media, the old rule is in reverse. The written word beats the spoken word and the spoken word beats video. Again, the metrics used in these formats are suspect and the comparisons are not equal. Unz and Counter-Currents have a fleet of contributors, while streamers are solo acts or maybe a team operating a single show. Even so, a blogger like Heartiste probably had over 100-thousand readers at his peak, double that of Fuentes.

There’s something else to throw into the mix. There is a difference between viewership, reach and influence. Take a poll of random Americans and more of them will have some familiarity with Nick Fuentes. They may not know anything about Fuentes, other than he is the “Nazi kid on the internet”, but his name will be familiar to them, because they have heard it on their preferred media. Ron Unz, on the other hand, may as well be witness protection. He is an unknown to most everyone.

The fact is, video is still the format with the greatest reach. People are much more likely to share a video clip than copy text from a site and mail it to a friend. They may share a link on their social media platform, but people are much less likely to click the link than watch the video. That’s how Tucker Carlson is a household name, despite the fact that 90% of American adults do not watch his show – ever. With video, you can become wildly famous even though most people never see you.

Now, reach is a different thing than influence. Does Nick Fuentes influence people with his nightly show? In his case, he probably does. Kids are drawn to his act, then passively pick up his politics. Carlson, on the other hand, plays to an established audience that has always existed. He just makes their priors more fun. That said, the typical Counter-Currents reader was a white nationalist before they found that site, which is the main appeal. Greg caters to that existing audience.

The most likely answer with regards to reach and influence is that the written word is the main driver of opinion. Few people reading this will know the name F. Roger Devlin, but his book Sexual Utopia in Power is largely responsible for the entire “man-o-sphere” genre on-line. If we extend that out to the pick-up artists, anti-feminists and others, Devlin has had more influence on men than all of the live streamers combined. His influence will continue into the next generations.

Finally, one last thing about these media platforms. In the legacy media, the newspaper man dreamed of getting a spot-on radio, as the hours were shorter and the pay better than being a beat writer or columnist. The radio guys dreamed of getting a television gig, because the pay was orders of magnitude better. ESPN hoovered up anyone with the least bit of talent for video, because they paid better. Tucker Carlson abandoned writing for television in order to get rich as a personality.

A similar, but smaller scale phenomenon seems to be working in new media. The reason there are so many live streamers is they make money at it. Nick Fuentes makes over $200,000 from his D-live platform. J.F. Gariepy claims to be making six figures with his live stream. These monetization systems like Stream Labs, Entropy and Super Chats sprung up because they can skim a bit from the flow of cash from viewers to these live streamers. Even the little guys make decent money.

In contrast, blogs and websites remain the ghetto of the internet. Three times a year Steve Sailer has to beg for money just to avoid living in a homeless camp. Greg Johnson is constantly looking for money to keep the lights on. These guys have vastly larger audiences than the live streamers, but a fraction of the income. Readers just refuse to support the writers they like, while viewers will take out a mortgage to pay the cable bill, so they can watch their favorite programs.

The reason for this is the way people engage the creator on these platforms. The old saying about the difference between television and radio is that television is a warm medium, while radio is a hot one. A television personality is like a guest at a party, in that they are engaging, but avoid being loud or animated. Radio guys have to be loud and excited in order to grab the listener’s attention. Most people consume audio content while doing other things, so the host has to get their attention.

What this means is the person consuming video is not really there for the content, but rather the social interaction. Live streaming allows the viewer to feel like they are in a party where the streamer is the guest of honor. Television news is loaded with amiable airheads for the same reason. People will welcome a dunce into their home if he is fun at parties, but not invite the smart guy with the unpleasant demeanor. People are willing to pay a lot to be flattered by a good guest in their home.

Anger Management

Posted on May 8, 2020 by thezman

I don’t know about anyone else, but I am finding that my patience is running thin with everything that is going on with the virus. I’ve never been much of a television watcher, but I still catch Tucker’s monologue a few times a week. I’ve stopped that this week as I cannot take another ad from a corporation telling me how much they care and how hard they are working on my behalf. I can’t take anymore nonsense about hero nurses and doctors. In fact, I’m starting to become a nursist.

Going outside has now become a depressing reminder that we now live in an explicitly authoritarian society. It used to be a very soft, passive-aggressive authoritarianism that you could ignore while enjoying your life. Now it is an in-your-face corporate authoritarianism that is impossible to ignore. On a trip to get supplies, it is a constant reminder of Theodore Dalrymple’s famous quote about communism. Not even the quiet revenge fantasy on the commute eases the burden.

When this started, my sense was the panic would peak around Easter and then begin to decline as the obvious became obvious. The politicians would see the damage they were causing and panic in the other direction. The public would quickly figure out that a disease with a 99% survival rate was a risk worth taking in order to put food on the table and a roof over their head. By now we would be a in mad dash to talk ourselves into believing everything would get back to normal.

I was wrong about that. Some states are trying to break loose from the spell, but most seem to like what’s happening. They are feverishly looking around for reasons to extend these restrictions into the summer. Not only that, they are dreaming up new torments in the name of “keeping us safe.” A local grocer here in Lagos now takes everyone’s temperature before they enter. They also limit the number of people in the store at any one time, which means there is a block long line to enter.

It is tempting to think that people will finally have enough and put an end to this madness, but that is a fantasy. The few brave souls taking a stand are getting support, for sure, but the bulk of the public is happy to be treated like children. You can be sure the majority oppose the protests at state capitals. Until the food runs out and the machine breaks, people will accept unlimited torment. That means we are left to hope for the end times if we want to escape this madness.

Of course, being wrong about the track of the panic means I could be wrong about people’s attitudes right now. Maybe the bulk of the public is quietly seething. It’s hard to know since everyone is locked inside, but it is possible. The support for that hairdresser in Texas suggests some people have had enough. Maybe a few more abuses like that are what it will take to get people angry enough to stop caring about the rules. That’s what it takes in these times. People need to get mad as Hell.

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: Unreasonable People (Link) (Link)
17:00: The Gathering Darkness (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
32:00: Hate Them Back (Link)
42:00: Hitler’s Revenge (Link)
47:00: Boomtown Rats (Link)
52:00: Public Piety (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link) (Link)

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/1v5K83XIRFY

A Very Jewish Movie

Posted on May 7, 2020 by thezman

The Adam Sandler movie Uncut Gems is maybe the most explicitly Jewish movie since the 2002 movie The Pianist. That is a difficult to define category, as there are loads of small independent films never intended for a wide audience. Movies like Uncut Gems and The Pianist are commercial films intended for a general audience, but also intended to reveal things about Jewish life to that general audience. These movies offer a window into the collective psyche of diaspora Jews.

That is the main layer with Uncut gems. The film tells the story of Howard Ratner, who runs a sleazy jewelry store in New York City. Howard is a degenerate gambler, always dreaming of the big score, as he is always in debt to loan sharks and bookies, due to his gambling. That means he is constantly hustling to come up with cash through his jewelry hustle and other means. Superficially, the movie is about his quest to get and sell an uncut rock full of Ethiopian gems.

The story takes us through Howard’s life and by extension through the inner life of New York City Jews. Howard is a sleazy pervert, the anti-Semite’s caricature of the typical Jewish man. His father in-law, in contrast, is a stable, hardworking guy, who has enjoyed a successful life. His wife is the typical Long island Jewish housewife, which means Howard has a gentile mistress. That is permanent dynamic that seems to define the sex roles among Jews, just as it does Italians.

We follow Howard as he interacts with the world in his bid to get the Ethiopian gemstone sold at auction for what he thinks will be his big score. Meanwhile he tries to hustle basketball star Kevin Garnett, places bets on basketball games, hassles with his flaky mistress and gets beat up by his loan shark, who happens to be his brother-in-law by marriage. Eventually, all of his schemes collapse and his entire life rides on a complicated bet on a basketball game in order to clear his debts.

Interestingly, the loan shark is Armenian, having married into the family. Armenians are known for being as aggressively ethnocentric as Jews, so having an Armenian loan shark, especially one that married into the family, as the main antagonist of Howard’s life offers a glimpse into the Jewish worldview. In a world of ethnic rivalry, the life of the individual will be shaped by those ethnic rivalries. In other words, for members of the Tribe, life is a lifelong struggle between ethnic groups.

Another interesting aspect about the non-Jews in the film is how Howard relates to the blacks in his life. On the one hand, he treats them like furniture. They have no connection to him, other than as opportunities for profit. He tries to hustle the basketball star Kevin Garnett. His primary clientele at his jewelry store is inner city blacks, who wish to look like extras from a hip-hop video. It’s clear throughout the film that the blacks in his life have no real meaning to him as individuals.

Despite this, he has an all too familiar deep affection for black culture that even the blacks notice. In one scene, Keven Garnett ask him why Jews have such a love for basketball, which is one of those jokes that only Jews and people who notice things would appreciate. He also has a thing for hip-hop and its culture. He has a deep fear that his mistress will go off with some local rapper, which becomes the source of a rift between the two of them. He fears being cuckolded.

Another aspect of Jewish life on display in the movie is the cultural and ethnic pressure on Jewish men to succeed. Howard is a bum, but what prevents him from embracing that aspect of his life is the need to be seen as successful within his family and within Jewish society. He is a man torn between his desire to live his life as he would prefer to live it and the ethnic duties that largely define who he is as a man. One theme in the film is his possible divorce from his wife after Passover.

This is something that Jewish novelists like Phillip Roth have tackled. On the one hand, Jewish males are driven to succeed. On the other hand, what defines Jews is their permanent outsider status. Therefore, achieving success and status in the larger society in which they live is not an option, as that’s assimilation. That means the dilemma for the ambitious Jewish man is finding the balance between success in the greater culture, while remaining outside of it.

Of course, in this age, maintaining the outsider identity is impossible for a people who are now the ultimate insiders. It’s why Jews are becoming increasingly schizophrenic in modern America. One face is that of Michelle Goldberg, the shrill anti-white columnist at the New York Times. Another is the patronizing Ben Shapiro, who steadily re-writes the origin story of the West to begin with his family tree. Another is the Jew stripped of all but his superficial identity as a Jew, consumed by modernity.

That is what ultimately makes Howard a sympathetic character. Like the Jewish people, he is not built for modernity and is ultimately destroyed by it. This is proving to be true for Jews in modern America, despite the fact they played a key role in developing the modern American culture. Howard meets his demise at the point of his greatest triumph, when everything he sought is within reach. Fittingly, his demise comes at the hands of the other ethnocentric tribe in the film.

That is the ultimate lesson of the film. Just as Howard is not built to survive in the modern world, the Jewish people are not built for it either. This is a topic within Jewish intellectual circles. A highly ethnocentric people evolved to compete as numerical underdogs need the outsider status to maintain group cohesion. Just as Howard needs some hard limitations on his behavior, Jews need that outsider status to maintain their sense of identity and ultimately their existence.

As far a film goes, and ultimately movies are about entertainment, Uncut Gems is an ugly, difficult to watch story at times. Because everyone in the film is described by their failings, you cannot root for any of them. Unless you’re black or Jewish, you cannot identity with them. At the same time, it is like getting a glimpse into a culture that is systematically hidden from view, despite being in plain sight. Unless you are an anti-Semite, it is an interesting cultural exploration.

The Ruling System

Posted on May 6, 2020 by thezman

There are a variety of ways to hold power. Some are better than others and over the history of man everyone one has been tried with varying degrees of success. By far the most effective way of maintaining power is to get those over whom you hold power to think their interests lie in you remaining in power. If you can get your subjects to think that their very survival depends upon you remaining their ruler, not only will they obey your orders, but they will volunteer to defend your position.

Of course, convincing even a majority of this can be expensive and difficult, so a better way to work this is to convince the people at the top. Every society is hierarchical, so if you get the ruling class to think their interests are your interests, then your interests become their interests. Not only will they defend your position, but they will seek to strengthen it when they can, as it benefits them. With everyone’s interest commingled, opposing the king means threatening the system itself.

The best example of this is probably the court at Versailles under Louis XIV. He not only brought the nobility of France under one roof; he created a social milieu for them that transcended their existence. To be a noble meant having a place at court. Your position in the ruling class was defined by your position and status in court. The aristocracy of France, in effect, became a society in itself, isolated from and distinct from the people over whom it ruled. It was a society atop a society.

If you examine the run-up to the French Revolution, it is clear that the system that evolved to that point had overtaken the people in charge of it. It was clear to most everyone that reform was needed. The finances of the king were a disaster and the nobility were being overtaken by changes in technology and economics. Yet, all reform efforts failed as reform was a threat to the nature of the system. Like a sentient being, the system conspired to thwart all reform efforts.

A similar problem vexed the Soviet Empire. The long terrifying reign of Stalin triggered an evolution in the system. Instead of one man ruling with an iron fist, a collection of men at the top of the party would hold power. The man at the top would depend on the party for power and legitimacy, while members would depend on the party for their power within the system. It’s what allowed Khrushchev to outmaneuver Malenkov, but also what led to the fall of Khrushchev and the reversal of his reforms.

One very interesting thing about the Soviet system that evolved after the revolution is how the party became a social organ, rather than a technocratic one. To rise in the party meant to rise in the narrow communist society that ruled over the larger empire, much in the same way the French aristocracy ruled over France. To be outside the party was to be no one. That threat alone was enough for most party members to wake up every morning thinking about how best to serve the party.

The social aspect cannot be overstated. Like Versailles, party members lived among one another and socialized with one another. Their children went to the same schools and eventually married one another. In the case of the Moscow elite, they lived in the same building. The ruling elite was not just a separate class of people, but a separate and distinct society. If it had carried on for long enough, the communist party would have been a separate race of people.

We see the same thing has evolved in the American Empire. If you take time to read up on the Flynn case or the much larger plot around it, you see a large cast of people with one thing in common. They all live together as a social class. Some were having sex with one another. Others had been friends since college. Others developed their relationships when they came to Washington. All of these social relationships transcend the formal positions and titles of the people.

For example, one thing the plotters liked to do is plant stories in the community paper, the Washington Post, which they would then use as evidence of something needing official investigation. This was possible because the people in the FBI had old friends at the Post, who they could grab a bite with and pass on the information. The “reporter” was happy to oblige, because he had the same interests as the FBI man. They were friends indebted to the same system that made their lives possible.

Throughout the scandal, you see people happily going along with what they know is against the rules, possibly even illegal, because they just assume it is the right thing to do for the system. The righteous indignation from these people when questioned is not an act for the cameras. These are products of a social world that defines who they are as people. They see their actions as a defense of a system that makes it possible for them to exist. They think they are heroes.

In a way, they are heroes. The very core of western civilization is the Greek notion of the citizen, as a man defined by his relationship in his polis. In his final hours, Socrates explains to his old friend Crito that he must accept his fate, as to do otherwise would make him an enemy of that which defines him. To flee Athens and escape death would make him an enemy of the law. That would make him an enemy of Athens, and thus no longer part of it and no longer Socrates.

Now, none of the people in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election are Socrates or even capable of pronouncing his name. That’s not the point. It’s that they see themselves as members of a community. That membership not only provides for their material existence, it defines who they are as people. To defend it from a threat, even a duly elected threat, is to defend who they are as people. Even the slightest change in the system, no matter how necessary, threatens their existence.

This is why Trump has run into a stone wall as president. The entirety of the system, like a living organism fighting for its life, has organized itself against him. His failure to grasp this reality has made him entirely ineffective. It’s also why the investigation into the scandals will go nowhere. The system cannot testify against itself. It’s also why the Clintons were protected for so long. Once they were assimilated, they were another node in the system to be defended at all cost.

The lesson from the French Revolution is that once a ruling class becomes a ruling community, reform is no longer possible. The only way to change the system is to decapitate it. The lesson of the Soviet system is that technology can perpetuate the community until it exhausts itself. That is what happened with the Russians. The party eventually was overrun with people willing to ride in the wagon, but desperately short on men capable of pulling the wagon.

How the American system will end is anyone’s guess, but it will not carry on forever, as no organism lives forever. The low quality of the people involved in the FBI shenanigans suggests they are reaching the same point as the Soviets in the 1980’s. No matter how cleverly designed, a system needs capable operators. If John Brennan and James Comey are the elite, the community has a serious inbreeding problem. Still, the fact that it staggers on despite this speaks to the power of societal inertia.

The Negative Mind

Posted on May 5, 2020 by thezman

For a very long time, the radical conception of politics was the struggle between the radicals advancing society forward and reactionaries trying to block the way. In this formulation, the radicals push for reform and the reactionaries concoct an argument against it and the resulting struggle advances society forward. The result is imperfect, so the ideal solution from the radical perspective is to eliminate the reactionaries, who stand in the way of the project and the path of human destiny.

Strangely, the modern Right has also embraced this view. This was not always so, but the conservatism that evolved in the 20th century fully embraced its role as the dancing partner of radicalism. Bill Buckley made this clear when he said, “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Note also the need do the yelling when others are not inclined to do any yelling.

Superficially, this was an effort to own the insult, a pose to signal indifference to the self-righteousness of the radicals. There’s a bit of self-dealing there, as it assumes a bravery on the part of conservatives that has never been observed in the field. At the core, however, is the acknowledgment that conservatism as Buckley and others imagined it in the 20th century could not exist without radicalism. Conservatism was just one prop on a set that was built to feature the radical agenda.

Of course, this is an entirely negative identity. There is no internal mechanism to define Buckley-style conservatism. In isolation, it is like a pathogen looking for a host. It can only be kept alive through artificial means. This reality means that Buckley-style conservatism could never defeat the radicals, as to do so would be to sign their own death certificate. In time, this evolved into a sort of battered wife syndrome, where they needed the radicals to win every fight in order to feel alive.

The thing is, the radicals were not entirely self-determined. If we assume the birth of radicalism was the French Revolution, what defined it at its conception was an opposition to the established order. Radicals opposed tradition and order, seeing those as superstitions and cowardice. The way forward was to abandon those things in pursuit of human destiny, so naturally the radical must always be opposed to convention and orthodoxy. The radical was born to be in opposition.

In the 20th century, as liberal democracy became the norm in the Anglosphere and the nations under its dominion, radicalism blossomed into its own negative identity. To be on the Left meant opposing normalcy. Whatever normal people were doing, the radicals had to oppose and try to wreck it. This is explicit today in the grievance studies rackets, where they endlessly go on about disrupting and overturning what they imagine to be their oppressors. It’s all about opposition to normal human relations.

Modern politics is a dynamic between two co-dependent worldviews that must oppose one other to exist. This dynamic between two entirely negative identities has come to define modern liberal democracy. The radicals search around for things they must oppose and the conservative are constantly examining the radicals for what it is they plan to oppose. Once some novelty is discovered, both sides feverishly engage in well-established dance that always ends in the same place.

Take, for example, the issue with Joe Biden. He has a long reputation for being a guy who gropes women, often in public. He seems to get off on it. He’s not a rapist or a sexual predator. He’s just a weirdo who likes to grope women. According to the current sensibilities of the Left, he should be torn to pieces and fed to the dogs. After all, women have come forward with specific complaints and his behavior. In the Kavanaugh hearings, they said we must believe all women.

Of course, the Left is not all that interested in this. The conservatives are up in arms at the alleged hypocrisy. How can they support the absurd claims about Kavanaugh, while ignoring the quite believable claims about Biden? Predictably, the conservatives are putting on their outrage faces and doing the self-righteous indignation act. Soon, they will be outraged that the Left is not shamed by their own hypocrisy. That’s always the next phase of these political dramas.

The thing is, the Left is not indifferent or ignorant to the obvious hypocrisy. They are energized by it. Seeing the conservative apoplexy is what makes them feel alive, because it means they have disrupted and subverted the status quo. Who they are, what makes them what they are, is entirely dependent on the outrage and anger of the people they oppose. When the conservatives put on their angry face and appear to be confused, the radicals have become self-actualized.

What may have happened over the generations is liberal hypocrisy has evolved into a form of caudal luring. The radicals naturally embrace hypocrisy as it lures in the conservative, causing them to act in a way that validates the radicals. Unlike a snake or shark that uses its tail to lure prey, the radicals are not hoping to destroy their opponent, but rather they are sustaining themselves. As an entirely negative identity, they need the outraged conservatives in order exist.

This dynamic between two co-dependent negative identities that has come to dominate liberal democracy may be at the root of the crisis in the West. With no positive vision of the future and the endless struggle between two political forces with no natural reason to exist, nihilism becomes the default. At some level, both sides feel the despair that must come from knowing the pointlessness of their existence. The result is a manic quest to plumb the depth of cultural despair.

Welcome To America

Posted on May 4, 2020 by thezman

Every once in a while, one of the major polling outfits will ask Americans about their views on freedom and liberty. Most Americans think they live in the freest country on earth and they are pretty happy about it. By freedom, people assume it means being able to go about your business as you see fit, holding whatever opinions you like and saying what you like, within the bounds of decency and common courtesy. Most of all, it means the government is not going to harass or torment you.

There was a time when that was true. If you are over the age of forty, you remember when people were free from coercion, regarding civil rights. People in this country were free to live their lives and speak their minds. For people of a certain age, it feels like it was not that long ago when even the most intolerant people would say “I may not agree with your opinions, but I’d fight to the death for your right to say them.” No one says that anymore, as no one believes, especially no one with power.

In current year America, we ban books. The government does not ban books, but private companies refuse to sell them, so the effect is the same. Of course, almost all books are sold by one company now, a company that laughs at the laws and the political institutions that write those laws. If the people at Amazon decide your book is not to their liking, they will stop selling it. Greg Johnson has been reduced to mailing people copies of his books because Amazon disapproves of him.

Now, the so-called conservatives will claim that major corporations like Amazon just avoid controversy. It’s not about politics but simply trying to avoid getting tangled up in controversial topics. Yet, Amazon is happy to sell books on bizarre sexual predilections and the promotion of self-harm. That sort of material is not a problem, because it is not a problem with the ruling class. Greg Johnson’s politics are a problem for the people in charge, so he is banned from selling books on-line.

Of course, people with unapproved opinions could sell their own books and magazines on-line, but the banks and payment processors refuse to do business with them. It’s not just a few banks and payment processors that refused to do business with people holding unapproved opinions. It’s all of them. Sites like Counter-Currents, VDare and American Renaissance have searched far and wide for a payment processor, but no one will take their business. The banks behind the processors have decreed it.

It is not just a few isolated troublemakers getting the business from corporations. Normal people curious about opinions outside the protected zone have real fear of being harassed, just for the crime of associating with these people. The media, the people who used to proudly say they speak truth to power, are always on the lookout for someone they can destroy, for the crime of associating with people deemed unacceptable. Major media outlets now see themselves as the keeper of orthodoxy.

In fairness, most Americans would dismiss that as the sort of first-world troubles that don’t affect most people. Maybe that’s true, but America is now a country that holds political prisoners. That is, there are people in jail primarily for the crime of holding unapproved opinions. It’s not just political types who lost the game of insider game playing in Washington. Normal everyday Americans are getting jail time for the crime of holding opinions that the ruling class finds unacceptable.

Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman were given four years in a New York penitentiary for the crime of being associated with Gavin McInnes. They were jumped by left-wing street thugs and won the fight. They were arrested, but there was never any effort to find the men who attacked them. There was no effort to find witnesses either. Instead, the police and court relied on material provided to them by Antifa. When he sentenced them, the judge made clear he was doing it for their politics.

That is not an isolated example. Over the last decade this sort of thing has become so common that it is just an accepted part of daily reality. If you belong to a group holding unapproved ideas, you have to go to great lengths to meet in secret in order to avoid being attacked by state sanctioned mobs. If that happens, there is a good chance the police will charge you rather than the mob. The thing political dissidents in current year America fear is that the government will become aware of them.

There used to be a time when Americans associated this sort of thing with totalitarian states or South American dictatorships. The communists would never allow people to hold unapproved opinions. They smashed up illegal printing presses and banished dissident writers. Third world dictators sanctioned mobs to go around harassing people they saw as a problem. The communists are all gone and there are no more South American strong men. America is no longer a free country either.

This reality should be evident to everyone now. Government has spent the better part of the last two months closing shops and forcing people to stay indoors. They are creating bizarre and ridiculous rules for when people must go outside. Cops are pushing people around, harassing mothers at parks and otherwise carrying on like highly feminized goon squads. It’s hard to claim you live in a free country when you need permission from the government go outside to take a walk.

The remarkable thing about this is none of the things described above would have seemed plausible a generation ago. Conservatives liked to claim Bill Clinton was an autocrat, but no one seriously imagined he would so something like this. Left-wingers really thought Bush was Hitler, but even they did not think this was possible. In what feels like the blink of an eye, things we used to think were outside the realm of possibility are now normal. We have slipped into the darkness.

If you are of a certain age, the new normal is particularly tough to fathom. You spent much of your early life being told that the long struggle against communism was all about preventing exactly this. The whole point of America, its reason to exist, was to prevent exactly this from happening. Maybe it was always a big lie. Maybe it is the result of forces too complex for anyone to fathom. It really does not matter. The result is what matters. America is no longer a free country.

A Racket, A Cult And A Corporation

Posted on May 3, 2020 by thezman

In the fullness of time, future historians will write books on their theories about why liberal democracy came to behave so much like Soviet communism. The hallmark of Bolshevism was its intolerance of dissent. It was willing to sacrifice everything in order to prevent individuals or groups from questioning orthodoxy. This is becoming the defining feature of liberal democracy. In the name of individual rights and dignity, western governments are methodically turning into police states.

Take for example this story out of Germany. State media, with a reassuring confidence, has reported that a citizen is under surveillance by the state for holding unapproved ideas and positions. Götz Kubitschek has been labeled “the whisperer of AfD right wing Björn Höcke” so he is officially on a list of people good citizens should avoid. The point of the story and the government action is to anathematize the man in such a way that regular Germans will be afraid to be in his presence.

Notice the language. “The Office for the Protection of the Constitution classified him and his institute as extremists.” If anyone’s is curious, here is the German constitution. It is 74 pages long. Article five reads in part, “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures, and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources.” As is true all over the West, this part of the constitution was destroyed to “save” the rest.

Of course, harassing citizens is not about protecting anything. The Right often makes the mistake conservatives have made for generations in assuming the Left has a practical reason behind their actions. Ideologues do not need a practical motive like money or power. In fact, worldly goods are not motives for ideologues. Rather, they are means to an end. The ideologue seeks power and influence in order to advance his agenda, which often just means crushing his opponents.

That was a feature of communist societies. The people at the top of the party apparatus could count on fanatics and zealots down the ranks to enforce party discipline. It’s why the military had ideological officers in the ranks. this was an innovation discovered by the radicals in the French Revolution. One fanatic willing to report a close friend for unapproved thoughts is worth ten thousand police. Once no one could be sure of even their closest relationships, no one dares speak out.

This is what we see with the West. When the state, in the case of Europe, or Big Tech, in the case of America, declares someone a heretic, it is with the assumption that the auxiliary volunteer army of fanatics will take over the policing. You can be sure that Götz Kubitschek will get the treatment. Germany’s version of Antifa will stalk him, his family and acquaintances. Radical media will use him as an example for endless scare stories about extreme right-wing extremist. AfD will be expected to purge him.

Another feature of the modern liberal democracy and the communist states is in the role of official media. Let’s assume Herr Kubitschek is a potentially bad guy and the state has a legitimate interest in him. Why would they inform the media? They would not do this if he was smuggling women or running a heroin ring. They would do the opposite and not say a word to the media. In the case of ideological offenses, however, the media and the state become partners in policing.

This was a feature of communist societies that has been forgotten. What little is remembered about the Soviet Union, is jammed into the Orwellian narrative of the police state. In reality, the communists figured out that it was cheaper to use soft power than hard power. Sure, they still arrested people and sent them off to camps, but their most effective weapon was the control of official truth. Fear of falling outside of official truth was more than enough to control most people.

As an aside, notice how that whole period is now officially forgotten? Even people offended by the sorts of things happening to Herr Kubitschek will not make a reference to the communist systems? Instead, they may reference you know who, but never the people who perfected the use of terror in an ideological state. The official narrative has slowly removed all references to the Cold War and the role of ideological fanatics from the collective consciousness of the West.

Something that ties the amnesia about communism and the increasing emulation of it by liberal democracy is something Eric Hoffer observed. Ideologies can get along just fine without a Utopian vision, but they must always have an opponent. In the Cold War, liberal democracy could justify its many compromises by pointing to communism. Once communism died, it served no purpose. The new devil is populism and nationalism, so liberal democrats are willing to ape the communist to beat them.

Hoffer also observed, “Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” That was in 1967, so he can be forgiven for not imagining something that was all three of those things. That is what we see in America. Liberal democracy is a racket, a cult and a corporation. The political class operates a racket, the media runs a cult and woke capital systematizes the whole thing.

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