Fading Pop

Posted on March 20, 2025 by thezman

If you look at the pop music charts for the last decade or so, one of the things you will not notice is the modern nature of the big bands. The reason you will not notice how bands have changed is that there are few bands on the charts. In fact, bands have just about disappeared from popular music. The few bands you see on the music services are those from a bygone era. The biggest selling bands are often those that no longer exist or still kick around playing for old people.

Instead, what you see are solo acts or the occasional dance group assembled like a Broadway play to perform to manufactured content. Even the “boy band” has faded from the scene for the same reason bands have disappeared. That reason is it is much easier for the music industry to create and produce a solo act than to find a band and then develop it into a top attraction. The same is true of “boy bands” which require some degree of organization and management.

Of course, as the doors to bands have closed in corporate music, the selection pressure for musical acts has changed. If a young person has any musical talent, she is better served investing her time in imitating the corporate acts, using software tools readily available to everyone now. She then posts her material to YouTube, hoping to get a following and then maybe catch the eye of corporate. Learning to play instruments and perform in front of a crowd is pointless.

One reason for this change in popular music is money. The music industry, like every industry in America, is fully financialized. This means everything about it is driven by factors like interest rates, return over time and investment opportunities. A “new act” is not judged on musical ability, novelty, or the personal tastes of the industry people, but by the accepted financial models of the industry. Just as wind tunnels made all our cars look the same, finance homogenized popular music.

For example, now that Taylor Swift is packing on pounds and years, the search is on for a singer who will do the same act for the same audience. The “same audience” in this context is age, sex, race, and economic model. The next wave of that demo is not going to get excited by a portly spinster, so they will find a younger model with a slightly different look to do the role. Even if she is not as popular with the target demo, the math of the model is predictable and safe.

The same sort of math affects the live show business. The people hosting the show want predictable sales and returns. The people producing the tour also want predictable sales and returns. The reason for that is the investors want predictable sales and returns, so the live shows follow a proven model. Since the money comes from the same source in terms of expectations, the effect has been a narrowing of the music industry around highly predictable products.

Another reason for the narrowing of the business around controllable solo performers is the market has changed. People spending hundreds of dollars on live shows want a predictably good time. They are not going to invest in an unknown, because that might mean not having the expected good time. In a culture that prizes safety and security above all else, bands are a high-risk proposition. The culture they represent in popular music is an affront to the culture of the modern audience.

Another fact is the death of radio. Once all the pop music stations were consolidated into a few massive corporations, the result was corporate slop. The first to go were the music directors, then the disc jockeys were chopped. The soundtrack to the modern age is the monotony of corporate radio. The legendary “shock jock” Anthony Cumia talked about this in a speech he gave at American Renaissance. Corporate radio is now as dead as the garage band.

Young people still want to play instruments and make music and the tools for producing good music are now freely available. The days of needing a studio are pretty much over as far as producing professional audio content. That means interested people can create bands and put their content out to the world. In theory, the same democratizing process that we have seen in other forms of content applies to music, but for some reason it has not democratized pop music.

This suggests there is something different about popular music compared to writing, podcasting, or livestreaming. Anyone can make music if they desire, just as anyone can publish a book or create a political talk show, but the latter forms have been vastly more successful compared to the music variety. Music needs social proof to gain an audience and that is manufactured at the same place the music is now manufactured. Without corporate, it is impossible to be a pop star.

There also may be a larger cultural issue at work. The concept of the pop star is a 20th century phenomena. Prior to that, entertainers existed on the fringe of society, generally regarded as low status. The 20th century is when this flipped around, and we got big stars from the entertainment world. We may be reverting to the norm as entertainment declines in both quality and status. The disappearing band phenomena is not just an American thing. It is thing everywhere.

What we may be seeing with pop music, and maybe movies and television as well, is the end of a peculiar cultural phenomena. These forms of entertainment were spawned in the 20th century. As that time recedes into the past, the culture of that time follows with it. The important parts of that culture, like the rock band, are fading away as well, to be replaced by whatever the next culture desires. As the West finally leaves the 20th century it is leaving behind its culture.

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Robed Radicals

Posted on March 19, 2025 by thezman

One way to look at the last ten years is as the struggle of the United States to finally close the books on the Cold War and the 20th century. The reason Trump exists, and the managerial system has reacted in such a violent way toward him, is that he represents the end of the conditions that made it all possible. The return of a strong executive and the normal functioning of government is the end of the managerial system and everything around it.

The comparisons to the late Soviet times are compelling because the Russians went through a similarly violent process to escape their own managerial system and the ideology that controlled it. Like the Soviets, America is now run by old people trapped in the past, lacking the talent to adjust to new realities. Like the Soviet system, the American system barely performs basic functions. Like the Soviets, American political actors can only break things.

That last part is important. Reform by its very nature calls into question the legitimacy of current processes. The reason for reform is that the system is not working to the satisfaction of the users, so it must be changed. Good reformers, however, do not attack the core logic of the system, but focus instead on the parts of it that implement that core logic to maintain the legitimacy of the whole. Maybe it means new people or possibly changes to parts of the system.

Reforms in the late Soviet period undermined the core logic of the Soviet system, resulting in poorer outcomes. We see the same thing in America. The response to Trump in 2016 by conservatives and their party only served to sap the legitimacy of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Trump started as a vanity candidate, but by January of 2016 he had become the champion of the party voters against the ossified party leadership.

Similarly, the behavior of the media cratered trust in the media. Their efforts to cajole, convince and intimidate people into going along with the managerial class eroded all trust in the media. By the end of Trump’s first term, trust in the media had collapsed to the point where only regime toadies trusted it. The same could be said for the people it was defending. Trump won in 2024 because the main tools of his enemies had been delegitimatized by his enemies.

We are now seeing another phase of this as district judges claim authority over vast parts of the executive branch. The last month has seen these inferior court judges claim to have power over the hiring and firing of personnel, the budgets of executive agencies and the conduct of foreign policy. A judge just ordered the military to enlist mentally unstable people. To stop the future, the managerial class is now destroying the credibility of the courts.

Public trust in the courts was already at a nadir because of the abuses we saw in the Obama years and then the Biden years. When the court ruled that mandating medical insurance was right there in the constitution, the rule of law took a sharp turn into absurdity, but when the Supreme Court ruled that two men sharing rent and bed is the same as your parents, then trust in the law was in free fall. It only got worse in the Biden years with the lawfare against Trump supporters.

What we are seeing from the courts now is the breaking point. No one would dare poll on it, because they fear the result, but there is certainly a majority in favor of the Trump administration telling the courts to pound sand. The whiffs of Sulphur the usual suspects are always sure they detect are not real, but rather they are the floral aroma of Caesarism in response to the reckless behavior of the courts. When the rule of law fails, the people always choose the rule of men.

While this may feel like a positive omen, there is another lesson from the end of Soviet Russia to keep in mind. Russia at the end of communism was a poor country, but a lawful country. It had rules that the people tried to respect. It then entered a period where it was a poorer country and a lawless one. When trust in the system collapsed, trust in the rules collapsed with it. It was only when a new elite emerged to impose a new system and new rules that lawfulness returned.

In other words, this dip into lawlessness we are seeing could very well portend a general descent into lawlessness. Like post-Soviet Russia, we could very well be entering a period where we get poorer as the rule of law collapses. Unlike Russia, America is not a homogenous society with a thousand years of history. America is a diverse country which is a polite way of saying it is a collection of people who would just as soon not share a country with one another.

If the elites backing Trump’s reforms wish to avoid a terrible end to their reform effort, they are going to need to deal with these hothouse radicals on the bench who cannot grasp the danger of their actions. The challenge, as with all reforms, is in dealing with the problem while not undermining the legitimacy of the system. These judges think they are heroes defending the system against the monster, when in reality they are a cancer threatening the last functioning part of the system.

It is not an easy task, which is why most reform efforts fail. In the end, it turns out to be easier to scrap the old and replace it with something new, but the problem is no one can predict who will win and who will lose in that process. It is why the reform is always the safe choice, despite the dismal record. It promises predictable winners. If today’s reformers want to be winners, then these judges need to be made into losers, without making the rule of law a loser as well.

Attritional Drone War

Posted on March 18, 2025 by thezman

Prior to the start of the Ukraine war, it was assumed that the Russians, if they desired, could quickly smash the Ukrainian army. Russia is a big country with a big army and Ukraine is not as big, but few understood that it had a big army. At the start of the war, it had an army of 350,000, with a similar number in reserve. Fewer anticipated the hundreds of billions in NATO weapons and money. Everyone, including the Russians, expected a short war, but instead it is a long war.

One main reason for this is technology. The Russians badly miscalculated how the war would unfold, but they also failed to adapt to new technology, specifically the use of drones in frontline battles. Their first taste of drone warfare was the Bayraktar TB2 drones supplied by the Turks to the Ukrainians. This is a medium-altitude long-endurance vehicle that allowed the Ukrainians to precisely aim their artillery at Russian formations, as well as directly attack those formations.

The Russians have proven to be quick learners. They rushed to embrace the new technology and have now taken it in directions few anticipated. First person video drones are now the primary weapon in the Russian arsenal, used to not only attack Ukrainian men and material, but used to shape the battlefield. This new use of drones came to the fore in the Ukrainian Kursk offensive, which concluded last week with a stunning Ukrainian defeat.

The “Kursk incursion” as the Ukrainians called it, was an attack across the Russian border to gain control of the nuclear facilities in the Kursk region. There is a nuclear power plant there and a storage facility for nuclear weapons. It is unclear what weapons, if any, are stored there, but Ukraine wanted to gain control of it as well as the power plant for the purpose of nuclear blackmail. The Russians would either surrender or Ukraine creates another Chernobyl.

The Russians managed to stop the Ukrainian offensive, but instead of it becoming a stalemate or requiring the Russians to spend men and material to keep the Ukrainians bottled up, it became a killing field for Ukraine due to the Russian use of drones to police every square meter of the region. The air over the Ukrainian formations was full of drones twenty-four hours a day. Any effort to move men and material at any scale was detected and attacked by drones.

To understand how drones are now used by the Russian army and to a lesser extent the Ukrainian army, this Turkish YouTube channel provides video of drone attacks with a AI generated voice over. There are three things to notice. One is that the drone operators can fly these things into the tightest of spaces. This allows them to hunt for assets inside of buildings and hidden in wooded areas. These things are like a swarm of birds that have cameras and explosives.

The other thing is they can now operate at night. This is a Russian innovation that Ukraine has not matched. Russian FPV drones have night vision and infrared cameras, so they can spot men moving around at night. The “solution” to constant drone surveillance during the day was to move men and material around at night, but now there is no hiding from the drone swarms after dark. In Kursk, the Ukrainians were under twenty-four-hour surveillance and attack.

The third thing is the drones are essentially networked together either through the tether to the drone operators or through the over-the-air system. Fiber optic drones rely on a fiber optic cable to communicate with the operator. The operator is then connected to the Russian command and control system. The effect is that the drones in the sky have created a twenty-four-hour-a-day information space over the battlefield. This massive data collection system is then used to anticipate changes.

These parts of the evolving use of drones all came together in the stunning rout of the Ukrainians in the Kursk region last week. The Russians could accurately predict where Ukrainian men and material will be at all times, so they could plan the stunning move through the gas pipelines to put troops behind the Ukrainians in Sudzha. They could also be ready for when the Ukrainians reacted to hit them with drones and drone-controlled artillery and glide bombs.

Kursk has become a model for drone attritional war. Filling the sky with networked suicide and surveillance drones is the first step. This prevents the enemy from gathering their forces for an attack. Instead, they are required to spread out and hide everything from the ever-present drones. The next step is to use the drones to shape the activity of the enemy in order to create an opportunity. The final step is to use the drones as part of combined arms assault on the enemy.

Of course, the same rules apply to the attacker. Even though the Ukrainian drones are not as good and numerous as the Russian drones, they still have lots of them, which means the Russians must disperse their resources as well. The battle for Kursk quickly turned into two armies spread thin across a wide area in order to avoid becoming an easy target for drones. This is why it took seven months for the Russians to dislodge the Ukrainians from the area.

To understand how this changes war, imagine if two armies are only equipped with long bows and crossbows. One the one hand, the longbowman can attack any grouping of men on the other side and vice-versa. Everyone must hide in buildings and underground bunkers. On the other hand, small assault groups of crossbowmen go out to hunt the enemy in close quarter assaults. Once they secure an area, more men come into to take up positions.

This is the battlefield in the drone age. Tanks and armored personnel carriers still operate, but they are easily spotted by drones. Even those equipped with electronic warfare countermeasures are vulnerable. Often, they are simply used to transport men on a one-way trip. As soon as the vehicle is disabled by the drone, the men scatter before the drones finish off the machine. Armor is often just an expensive delivery mechanism for small groups of men.

This is why the Ukraine war drags on. On the one hand, the Russians are unwilling to lose men and machines on big assaults due to the threat of drones. On the other hand, they have adapted the new technology to slowly hunt small groups of Ukrainians and individual pieces of equipment. Since Ukraine is fixated on holding territory, this attritional drone war lumbers along at a snail’s pace. In Kursk, the Ukrainians lost about four hundred men a day to these small-scall attacks.

We are, of course, at the cusp of drone war, but it is not hard to imagine how this could change the nature of war. At the start of the technological revolution, technology was the great dis-equalizer. It gave America a massive edge over the rest of the world in terms of military power. Now, at the end of the technological revolution, technology is becoming a great equalizer. Cheap drones are turning expensive, high-tech weapons into liabilities and returning war to a battle of men and wits.

The Ideology Of Ressentiment

Posted on March 17, 2025 by thezman

Note #1: Last Wednesday was the fourth edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 PM which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about why deporting anti-Israel protestors is a good start, a post about the dangers of the Ukraine tarpit, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note #3: Since we are getting signs of spring, it means it will not be long before it is hot, which means t-shirt weather. Just in time for t-shirt season, we have a new shirt for The Occidental Club, which you can buy here.

Over the weekend there was a poll released that said only seven percent of Americans have a high opinion of the Democratic Party. It also said that the party is enjoying its lowest approval rating ever recorded. The events of last week suggest that the party is a disorganized mess at the moment. This is due in large part to the fact that what we call the left has collapsed into chaos. They no longer can explain what they oppose, much less what they claim to offer.

This is due to the transformation of the left over the last thirty years into a grab bag of conspiracy theories and grievances. The American left has always been a conspiracy theory, of sorts, owing to its roots in American Protestantism, but it had a positive agenda through most of the twentieth century. The long list of things it opposed stood in the way of the things it desired. Over the last thirty years, those desires have largely faded, leaving just a list of enemies.

The most obvious example is the antifascist conspiracy theory that was dominant with self-identified leftists for the last decade. The fact that there are no fascists in this age has been used as an opportunity to create them. The same thing happened with conspiracy theories around race. Instead of Hitler hiding behind every bush, it is men in white hoods ready to pounce. The dominant subcultures of the left over the last few decades are all conspiracy theories of some sort.

Another defining feature is that the progressive coalition is all driven by something called ressentiment. This is a sense of hostility towards something or someone that is viewed as a cause of one’s diminished condition. It is frustration at the sense of inferiority and hatred at a perceived external cause. This blend of envy and hatred results in a moral code which delegitimizes the cause of the person’s failure and elevates the status of the alleged victim.

This is what lies behind tabloid news of the rich and famous. The primary appeal is to people who feel they should be rich and famous. The failings of the actual rich and famous allow these people to feel as if they are living better lives or are better people, despite the fact they do not have what they desire. On the one hand they envy the people they follow, but on the other hand they relish their suffering as it allows them to feel morally superior to them.

What we call the left operates the same way. They often target people who are living good lives but hold opinions that the left does not like, and this is what triggers their envy and resentment toward that person. On the one hand, the person “exposing” the bad person is a loser in the conventional sense, while the person they are harassing is successful by conventional measures. Doxing is a formalization of a process by which the loser flings her poo at the winner.

The recent spate of vandalism directed at Tesla automobiles is a good example of how this blend of righteousness and anger works. These people are attacking cars because on the one hand, they envy Elon Musk and what he is doing. He is the man of action they wish they could be, but they are losers, so they hate him for his success as a way to justify their low status. The attacks on the cars themselves are like a child throwing a tantrum when frustrated by a toy.

This is not a surprising development as what we call the left in America is a manifestation of certain aspects of American Protestantism. The progressive ideology is popular Christianity stripped of its Scriptural foundation. What was supposed to console the weak and downtrodden with a promise of everlasting life now seeks to comfort losers with the claim that their betters are not really better. They are bad people because the believers have declared them to be bad people.

The trouble for the people we call the left is that Christianity is a life-denying religion in that what matters is what comes after this life. The faithful navigate this world of sin to reach everlasting life after death. For those who care only about this life, this cannot work, so those Christian ethics at the core of what we call the left quickly curdled into a bundle of resentments and hatreds. The American left is a workshop of resentment staffed by the ugly who live to oppose beauty.

The genius of Christianity is that it offers an image of beauty, the perfectly beautiful, that allows the faithful to catch glimpses of it in the fallen world. Resent and envy toward these glimpses of beauty are sins. Instead of cultivating these qualities among the lower classes, it celebrated those glimpses of beauty to motivate the faithful toward a Christian life with the promise of eternal life after death. Failure in this world was turned into a motivation to strive for success in the next.

The modern left lacks all of this. Instead, it offers the faithful nothing but a sty in which they can wallow in their own crapulence. As a social and political force, it is nothing more than a bundle of incoherent hatreds. While those hatreds provided a rally point for a period, no movement can exist only on hatred. This is why what we call the left is falling to pieces and taking its party with it. The last ideology, American Progressivism, is sinking into the mire of its own hatreds.

Radio Derb March 14 2025

Posted on March 14, 2025 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

01m04s Ireland’s new troubles
16m39s Something to dress up for
27m51s Free Puerto Rico!
31m05s Vance socks it to them
32m13s Too many foreign students?
32m27s Too woke for Disney!
36m11s Signoff: As Irish as it could be

Direct Download, The iTunes, Podcast Addict, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Welcome, listeners and readers. This is of course your gratuitously genial host John Derbyshire with a look at the news.

This week’s podcast is more than usually self-indulgent. Inspired by the coming St. Patrick’s Day, I got talking about the home islands over the water there and couldn’t stop. I beg your pardon, and hope you find something interesting here — I mean, as interesting to you as it obviously is to me.

Here we go. Continue reading →

Trumponomics

Posted on March 14, 2025 by thezman

Lost in all the howling about DOGE, the rogue judges and the Ukraine happenings is the Trump economic policy that is slowly coming into focus. One of the reasons the administration pushed for the continuing resolution was that they needed time to put together budgets and spending priorities based on the cuts they are now making across all agencies of the government.

It is why they were so mad about the grandstanding of Thomas Massie. He is clearly someone who does not understand what they are doing and too addled by the brain-rot of libertarianism to ever understand it. He wanted to waste time and political capital on a pointless fight over pennies. The administration has bigger plans for reorganizing the government that needs time to develop.

The new economic model will be based on cheap energy, cheap money, low taxes on labor, limited regulation, and tariffs on imports. You can hear all of these when Trump seems to speak off the cuff. His plan to eliminate taxes for those earning under $150,000 per year is a good example. That is not just a tax cut for the wage earner, but also a tax cut for the employer.

The point is to make labor relatively cheaper for domestic employers, while using tariffs to make cheap foreign labor relatively more expensive. This is not a lot different from what Reagan tried to do in the 1980’s with Japan. Instead of being limited to trade issues with specific countries, it is to be the general policy. The goal is to boost domestic production in order to lower imports.

That is the show this week. The first part is a summary of the current economic model which no one discusses anymore. Back when it was coming into focus, people debated it and those opposed turned out to be right. The second part is about the schemes to unwind the old model and create a new one. Trumponomics is Abenomics but for a continent sized country with the global reserve currency.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation via crypto. You can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
Post-National Economics
Examples
Trumponomics
Will It Work?

Direct Download, The iTunes, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Was Reagan Great?

Posted on March 13, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night Paul Ramsey and I did a livestream on Reagan, so it is a good companion to this post. YouTube or Rumble.

If you were alive and following politics in the middle of the 1980’s, one of your base assumptions would have been that you were living through one of the great presidencies in American history. Ronald Reagan was a massively popular figure because he was credited with pulling the nation out of the tailspin that began in the cultural and political radicalism of the 1960’s. It was morning in America again and every normal person credited Reagan for it.

Forty years on and the only people who mention Reagan are the yesterday men of what is left of Conservative Inc. In fact, their mentioning of him is usually a trigger for people to heap abuse on them. The same can be said for Bill Buckley, who was similarly famous in the 1980’s. William F. Buckley was the intellectual engine of the conservative movement and Ronald Reagan was the man who made it possible. Like conservatism itself, Buckley and Reagan are fading from our minds.

One cause of this is generational. You must be over fifty to have a clear memory of the Reagan years. That is a lot of people, but younger people tend to drive the debate on the internet. They are going to be much more focused on the present. At the same time, the populist movement is to some degree a revolt against what is viewed as baby boomer culture. This is the singular focus on the economy and the stock market at the expense of cultural and demographic issues.

Another cause is that the big issues of this age have their roots in the 1980’s and may have been caused by Reagan. Immigration is the easy one. Not only did Reagan sign off on open borders policies like amnesty, but he was also instrumental in the romanticization of immigration as a core American value. The same can be said for the toxic individualism that has come to define the white middle-class. Of course, it was the Reagan military buildup that made possible the forever wars.

Of course, recency bias plays a role. In the Clinton years, there were people claiming that Bill Clinton was a great president. These were mostly sociopaths, but there were probably some people who believed it at the time. The biggest example of this is Barak Obama who was treated as black Jesus. Now he is forgotten. The importance of Reagan on the present has faded, so his grip on our minds, even for those alive back then, has loosened a great deal.

While all of this is true, it is generally true for every president. No one alive today remembers FDR. Obviously, no one is reminiscing about Lincoln or Grant, but we still talk about some presidents long after they are gone. Other than the yesterday men of conservatism, you never hear much talk about Reagan. There are far more references here to the Clinton years than the Reagan years. The 1992 election remains an important turning point in our politics.

One possible reason for why Reagan has faded is that the things he ushered in have become so normalized that people just assume they are the natural state of things, rather than an innovation of the 1980’s. Everyone just assumes the stock market is an important part of the American economy. Personal debt is just a normal part of life that one must manage. The dominance of the American military and its respect with the America people is just the way it has always been.

That is why you would have Reagan on the list of great presidents. The things he ushered in have stuck with us and are the new normal. Even though Nixon was president at a critical juncture in the development of what would become the Blob, his policies have had no lasting impact. The same can be said for Clinton, who was the first post-Col War president. While his presidency was an inflection point, no one can remember anything he did while in office¹.

On the other hand, this line of reasoning would put Lyndon Johnson on the list of great presidents because we still suffer from his blunders. The Vietnam war still haunts our foreign policy establishment. The civil rights act continues to torment us. It was Johnson who helped turn the Israel Lobby into the mind-altering force we see today. The fact is, the Lyndon Johnson administration is a nightmare from which we can never awake, so maybe the greatest American of the 20th century was Oswald.

As an aside, Lee Harvey Oswald is another example of how history can often pivot on the actions one anonymous man. Like Gavrilo Princip, Oswald changed what people assumed to be the flow of events in a terrible way. Most think that if he had missed and Kennedy had survived, the 1960’s would not have led to the cultural catastrophe that still haunts us today. Many argue the same with regards to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Speculative history aside, what seemed certain in the 1980’s and into the second Bush presidency, that Reagan was one of the great presidents, is now more open to debate, assuming anyone thinks to debate it. That is one of the most intriguing aspects of Reagan right now. Hardly anyone talks about him. There is more time spent on Clinton, Nixon, or Obama, and no one thinks they were great presidents. Reagan and the 1980’s have become a forgotten bit of our history.

That said, this may be the prelude to a revival of interest in Reagan. Once the geezers leave the scene and the remnants of conservatism are swept from the stage, a new set of eyes can examine that time without the bias of having experienced it. The first passes at history are always self-serving and flattering to the winners. Later passes turn the near past into justification of present agendas. It is further down the line that you get a more candid view of events.

Even if in the fullness of time Reagan is on the list of great presidents and the 1980’s are studied as an important time, what will be lost is the impact the man at the center of that age had on the people. Reagan was a towering figure who changed the culture simply by setting an example with his public presentation. It is a thing to keep in mind as we watch the final act of Donald Trump. Great men are great men because they inspire the great men of their age.

¹Get your mind out of the gutter.

A Time For Choosing

Posted on March 12, 2025 by thezman

There is an old joke about the topic of free will that goes something like, “If free will did not exist, we would have no choice but to invent it.” In addition to the obvious contradiction lies the fact that everything about human society relies, to some degree, on the existence of free will. What is meant exactly by free will is never clear, but there is always the assumption that when people have choices, they choose based on their sense of what is the morally right or wrong option.

At first this might seem wrong because after all, you choosing to have vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate is not a moral issue, but you still go through a process by which you decide one over the other. If, however, you think about it in terms of costs and benefits, then picking a desert is no different from not robbing a bank. You pick vanilla because you like vanilla more than the other choices. Similarly, you choose not to rob the local bank because you like your freedom.

This concept of free will assumes that humans seek that which brings pleasure and reject that which brings displeasure. Of course, this is also the argument against free will as it suggests humans merely respond to the conditions they encounter. If your genetic makeup means you detest the taste of chocolate, then once you are presented with vanilla and chocolate, you do not have a choice at all. The counter here is that you can always choose to skip dessert.

As Steve Stewart-Williams explains in this short post on the topic of free will, there are three states for us humans. There are those in which we can choose while completely free of coercion, those where we choose with some understanding of the potential consequences of each choice and then conditions in which we have no choice, even though multiple options are available. The first is an illusion, the second is useful and the third is probably closest to reality.

This may seem like a pointless topic, but it lies at the center of human society, because in every collection of humans there will be those who choose not to submit to the decisions of the majority. The majority will usually bargain with these people until they reach a point where the will of the majority must prevail. The easiest way to force compliance is to assume the person knows the morally right choice, but refuses to take it, so they must be compelled to conform.

It is why the people called conservatives invest all their time creating elaborate arguments in favor of their opinions. They lack the will and ability to force people to agree with them, but they resort to a form of pleading. It is the slave mentality, which assumes the master can choose to be good to the slave, so the slave must find some way to coax that good behavior from the master. The assumed free will of the master also flatters the slave’s sense of right and wrong.

Of course, democratic politics rests on the assumption that people are both rational and able to choose freely. Collectively, the choices made by the people will reflect the general will and form public policy and the institutions of society. It is why factionalism is a feature of all democratic systems. Like-minded people come together to scheme up ways to trick the rest into going along with them. This game of liar’s poker we call democracy assumes we possess free will.

This is why the people constantly breying about democracy are also the biggest enemies of the human sciences. Even statistical models like the famous “bell curve” offend them because it suggests we may not have absolute free will. If people are not infinitely malleable, then many of the assumptions within what they call democracy cease to make any sense at all. This is why as the talk of democracy has increased, respect for human diversity has decreased.

It is also why AI makes so many people uncomfortable. It is not the image of hyper-violent machines enslaving humanity. We have been subjected to thirty years of neoconservatism and the Israel lobby, so the rise of the machines is not all that violent or terrifying by comparison. What spooks people the most is that AI suggests that we are not all that variable. In fact, we are highly predictable, and that predictability can now easily be modeled and presented back to us.

There is the main appeal of free will. If we are free to choose and we can overcome our biases, prejudices, and the coercion of others, then it means we can individually and collectively choose a different future than the one before us. The existence of free will means all futures are possible. If, on the other hand, our lives are just the result of probability and circumstance, then the future is also going to be the result of the great roll of the dice, over which we have no control.

The good news is that AI is not very smart and is unlikely to become a genuine artificial intelligence, so we are safe to indulge in the fantasy of free will. To test this, ask your favorite AI tool to create an image of a full glass of wine. It cannot do it, because humans have not bothered to create an image of a wine glass filled to the brim, while calling it a “full glass of wine.” There are other tricks like this that reveal AI to be nothing more than a very good search engine.

All of this sounds pointless, but it lies at the heart of the current crisis. The ruling class of the West assumes they can engineer the cultural conditions in such a way that people will choose the “right” options. This is what lies at the heart of every radical political movement. It is not a rejection of the human condition, but the assertion that the human condition is a social construct. Change the social construct and mankind can choose to overcome even his physical limitations.

One response to this is to find new cultural engineers who have more appealing goals and expectations. Fascism was the response to both communism and liberalism in the last century. It is why today’s radicals assume all opponents are fascists. The other option is to accept free will as a useful workaround but that the human condition is immutable and the variety of normative conditions we see are rooted in things well beyond our ability to control. The choice is ours.

Whither Europe

Posted on March 11, 2025 by thezman

In the 2016 election cycle, the majority of the American people signaled that they were done with the ideological politics that had reigned since the Cold War. While Trump did not win a majority in the general election, the election as a whole, including the primaries, made clear that the public was ready to move on. The way to view the last three election cycles is as a long struggle by the public to drag the economic elites out of their isolation and back into politics.

That is what we saw in 2024 and what we are seeing now. What is happening in Washington is both revolutionary and just the start. The cutting of government payrolls is one part of a bigger change in how America operates. The United States is about to end its empire phase and return to being a big powerful country. It is a long overdue transformation that has been made possible by the economic elites realizing things had to change if they were going to remain elites.

Left out of this is what it means for Europe. The issue of Ukraine, for example, has the Europeans on the sidelines, muttering mad ideas to one another about how they will get along as American vassal states without America. They are drawing up grand schemes for re-arming Germany and developing their own nuclear arsenal, so they can pretend Brussels is an imperial hegemon and the political classes of the European states can continue as dysfunctional flunkies.

It is strange to see the Europeans, both their media and their politicians, carry on as if nothing has changed. In the United States, the talk is about the DOGE audits and making deals with the Russians and Chinese. In Europe they are locking people up for speech crimes and looking under their bed for you-know-who, when the closest they will come to seeing him is in the mirror. Suddenly, Europe is a land of poor people wearing yesterday’s fashions.

The problem is most obvious in British politics. The Economist had a cover featuring British Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Winston Churchill. The motivation behind it is the British elites are still suffering from the 1938 disease that used to rage in the United States until the antidote of the 2024 election. If they had made Starmer look like a guest at Studio 54 it would have been less cringe. British politics is a mess of yesterday men looking for a reason to exist.

This post in the Spectator about Nigel Farage inadvertently gets at the problem faced by the Brits and all of Europe. Farage is a generational talent in terms of democratic appeal, but he is worthless as a politician because he accepts the fact that he lacks elite support, especially support from economic elites. As a result, he is always getting close to the important issues facing his people, but he always pulls up just as he is about to engage directly and candidly with them.

What you always sense with Farage is that he desperately wants an invite to the cool kid’s table, so everything he does is aimed at keeping that option open. He could give the ridiculous fops on the continent a tough time, but he never levels the same charges at the local fops, because that would mean giving up forever the chance to sit with them at the cool kid’s table. He may not like their policies, but the dream of being accepted by them still controls his actions.

It is why he is always negotiating with himself when it comes to issues like immigration or Ukraine. Nowhere on earth is there a majority in favor of immigration and in most places, even the thoroughly demoralized portion of the population wants an end to the open border’s madness. This should be a trillion-dollar bill on the ground for Farage to pick up, but he just cannot do it. He gets close, but always has a reason to leave it there, staring up at him.

What Farage lacks is the backbone that comes from elite support, especially from the economic elite. The reason for that is the indigenous economic elite of the UK was transformed into a local office of American Inc. It could act only with the permission of the bosses in the main office, who for decades were happy to leave things to the managers, both at home and abroad. The result is that the economic elites in Europe have the same managerial mindset as the managers.

The problem can be seen in the list of “British” billionaires. We must put “British” in quotes because the man topping the list is Gopi Hinduja. Number three on the list is Sir Leonard Blavatnik from Ukraine. Fifth on the list is Lakshmi Mittal. This feature of the British economic elite is shared on the continent. What passes for the European economic elite are people who gained their opposition by doing business with the Americans by the rules of the Americans.

The reason the UK is becoming a garbage island is because the “owners” have no connection to it. The servants of those “owners”, huddles in the swanky neighborhoods of London, define themselves by their opposition to the British people. The people of the British Isles got better treatment from the Vikings. The reason Farage can never get elite support is because the elites have no interest in a populist, nationalist message, so Farage reduced to being a charming rumpswab.

There are other forces at play, but all of them have their roots in the fact that Europe has been under American rule for eight decades. The reason Farage cannot be the UK Donald Trump is that Farage is not a member of the economic elite. Trump is a billionaire and sees himself as an equal to the billionaires. His perseverance over the last eight years won over the economic elite. Such a thing is not possible in the UK or on the continent, so they cannot produce their version of Donald Trump.

This does not mean things are hopeless in Europe. In fact, the United States suddenly joining the rest of the world in the 21st century is setting the stage for Europe to finally escape the 20th century as well. It will require a longer and more painful process, like what Russia experience after the Cold War. The reason is Europe will need to rebuild its institutions and develop its own elites. That can only happen when America finally kicks Europe out of the imperial nest.

A Weird End For A Weird War

Posted on March 10, 2025 by thezman

Note #1: Last Wednesday was the third edition of a show I am doing with Paul Ramsey every Wednesday at 8:00 which you can watch live on Rumble and YouTube and, of course, watch at your leisure after the fact.

Note #2: Behind the green door, there is a post about Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress, a post about driving in Hell, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

The war in Ukraine will go down as one of the stranger conflicts in American history, mostly because it has been a phony war. That is, the American government spent most of the war pretending to not be part of the war, while supplying the Ukrainians with hundreds of billions in war material. With a new administration bringing realism back to foreign policy, the end of the war promises to be strange as well. While the end is known, the path remains a mystery.

The story over the last few weeks has been the squeeze the administration has put on Zelensky to get him to agree to peace talks and agree to sign over the country’s natural resources as compensation for the hundreds of billions in aid. The process has revealed to the administration that Zelensky is an unreliable partner in a peace deal, so his future is now limited. You cannot make a deal with a guy that no one trusts, so whatever peace comes to Ukraine will not include Zelensky.

You see this with the peace talks coming this week between officials from the Trump administration and a Ukrainian delegation. Saudi Arabia is hosting the talks, and one man has been told not to attend. That man is Zelensky. Not only was he excluded from the meeting, but he was also barred from traveling with the delegation. Zelensky had planned to just hang around Saudi Arabia during the talks. Clearly, these meetings are about life after Zelensky.

The main point of the meeting is to find out if there is any support in Ukrainian politics for a peace deal. Getting rid of Zelensky is not a great challenge. Finding a replacement is not a great challenge. The issue is finding a new leader who can sign a peace deal without the country collapsing into turmoil. The Trump administration needs to find someone that can act as an interim leader, get the political factions to accept a peace deal and then hold elections.

If elections were held today, the most likely winner would be the former commander of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny. While he has the respect of the army and the respect of the public, he is tightly tied with the ultranationalists. There are a lot of pictures of Zaluzhny posing next to iconography reminiscent of a certain period in German history, because he is extremely fond of that time. That means he is probably not a reliable option as a peaceful leader of Ukraine.

Another option is Petro Poroshenko, an oligarch who got rich in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He first got rich in the candy business, which earned him the nickname of the “Chocolate King.” He also owned media companies, natural resources firms and manufacturing concerns. He has lost a lot of his power over the last five years as Zelensky consolidated his own power in Kiev. Poroshenko is also an outlandishly corrupt figure with ties to the ultranationalists.

Another option is Yulia Tymoshenko, who made some headlines in the West when she briefly became the face of the “Orange Revolution.” She is the leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) political party and strongly anti-Russian, but she has been a critic of the war and Zelensky’s handling of it. She is an oligarch as well, having got rich in the energy business. This earned her the nickname “The Gas Princess”, which may be one of the better nicknamed in politics.

Within Ukrainian media, the betting favorite at the moment is Tymoshenko for the simple reason that she does not have the ultranationalist baggage. She has her own party outside the Zelensky machine, and she seems willing to strike a deal. It may also be easier for a woman to sell peace to the public. There are millions of wives and mothers of men who have been killed or maimed in the war. That might be enough to overcome opposition from the ultranationalists.

A major challenge to finding a replacement for Zelensky is Europe. The scheming ladies of Brussels view Zelensky as an essential part of their scheme to turn the EU into a replacement for NATO. This is why they are offering him unconditional support for his efforts to scuttle any peace deal with Russia. Then you have individual leaders like Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, who are trying hard to make Zelensky seem like the most honest man in Europe.

Further complicating matters is the condition of the Ukraine army. They are now being routed in the Kursk region. Thousands of their best soldiers are now trapped in a cauldron with no chance of escape. Thousands of others have surrendered and thousands more have died fleeing toward the border. An army low on morale, hearing that its main benefactor wants a peace deal, is not going to respond well to news that its best units have been routed.

Since everything about this proxy war has been strange, it is fitting that its last acts will be strange as well. Normally in a long war of attrition, the side with the upper hand is willing to press on with the war, while the other side wants peace. In this case, the winning side wants a deal, while the losing side demands to fight on, even as its main benefactor demands peace. It will be another reminder that this part of the world produces nothing but misery for everyone around it.

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