Bad Ideas

Posted on March 22, 2024 by thezman

Intellectual history is generally the study of good ideas or what we currently think are good ideas, but it is the bad ideas that have the most impact. The use of slave labor in the New World, for example, seemed like a good idea at the time but has proven to be a terrible burden on us. If the slavers knew that their descendants would be tormented by the consequences of slavery, would they still have done it?

Of course, the life of a bad idea is the result of the people choosing to embrace the bad idea, often when it is obviously a bad idea. Much of what Marx had to say about economics, even in the context of his age, was obvious nonsense. Further, people knew enough about the human condition to know that communism could never possibly work, but intellectuals chose to embrace it anyway.

Put another way, stupid ideas need a special sort of stupid person. Orwell famously wrote, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Orwell was addressing the educated opinion in England at the time that Germany would win the war. The basic concept is something of a universal, as we see today with our “expert” class.

Even so, ideas matter and this age is haunted by bad ideas that should have been relegated to the dustbin of history. That is the show this week. It is a breezy survey of some of the bad ideas that still vex us. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but the things that came to mind when I cooked up the idea for a show. Feel free to add your favorite stupid ideas to the list.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Equality
Utilitarian
Progress
Marxism
Social Contract
The Social Construct
Individualism
Reason
The Trouble With These Ideas

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Work Until You Die

Posted on March 21, 2024 by thezman

There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Another reason for this sudden interest in poisoning their election chances is that idiots run the Republican Party. The reason the party has been called “the stupid party” for generations is it is run by stupid people. They are clever and scheming, necessary skills for democratic politics, but they are not as cynical as the the other side. As a result, Republican leaders are the forever Charlie Brown, sure that this time the Democrats will let them kick the football.

Then there is the fact that the Republican Party and American conservatism evolved in the 20th century as losers. The GOP’s natural role is as the cleanup crew for the Democrats, who run around smashing things. For their part, the so-called conservatives busy themselves racing in front of speeding trains yelling “stop” while the rest boast about how their principles forbid them from winning. Conservatism evolved to be the consolation prize for the politically inept.

You can probably take a little bit from each column and produce a mix that explains the sudden interest in snuffing out granny. There is nothing about any of these possible answers that contradicts the others. Ben Shapiro is a skeevy little hobbit man who hates Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but he is also a mediocrity who has a habit of stepping on rakes. There is a reason that his handlers make sure to never expose him to adults during his public appearances.

There is another element to this and that is the desire of many people, no doubt many people from the loser party, to get back to debating issues. The United States does have real problems that could quickly become catastrophic problems if they remain unaddressed by the political class. For example, there is a pre-French Revolution vibe to the government’s finances. This post in Chronicles is a good explainer and a good example of the desire to return to real issues.

Now, “experts” have been predicting doom over the national debt for generations and doom is always twenty years off. It is like the collapse of “fiat money” or affordable solar energy in that it is always twenty years away. Unlike the other two, math says there is a limit to how much debt the government can issue. At some point, the appetite for new debt will decline as everyone will be holding as much debt as they need. At that point, new debt comes with new, much higher costs to the government.

As far as how to avoid this debt cliff, the only answer is the one answer everyone agrees must never be debated. That answer is ending the Global American Empire and returning to normalcy. That means reducing the military budget by ninety percent, deporting the tens of millions of freeloaders, and cracking enough rich people’s heads, maybe even lopping off a few of them, to get the economic elites inline. None of that can be debated, so they talk about killing your granny.

For the most part, Social Security runs reasonably well. The big problem, as far as old people programs, is Medicare, which is riddled with fraud, but Social Security is largely free of fraud and waste. Suring up its finances during the great baby boomer retirement should not be a great challenge. If life expectancy continues to decline, then it will be a self-correcting problem. In other words, if you are worried about the looming debt crisis, there are better places to look for answers.

That is what really gives this topic the French Revolution vibe. A big reason for the revolution was the gordian knot of royal finances. France desperately needed financial reform, but the rich people opposed it because they saw no profit in it. The Global American Empire faces the same problem. All the best people agree that we face a looming financial crisis, and they all agree that they will not sacrifice a hair on their heads to avoid it. Instead, they think you should work until you die.

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Bourgeois Minoritarianism

Posted on March 20, 2024 by thezman

Edit: A friend of ours, Judd Blevins, is under attack by the usual suspects and could use some help in his fight. He is a good man trying to serve his community, but the freaks and weirdos are trying to ruin it. Here is his story and a way to send him a few bucks.

The weirdness of this age is a constant topic of discussion, mostly due to the fact that every day brings new weirdness. Ten years ago, if you said men would go to jail for defiling the sodomy flag, people would have thought you were nuts, but this is a thing that now happens in America. You can burn the American flag, but if you get caught insulting the sodomy flag you go to jail. A common side conversation these days is debating what new bizarre and deranged thing comes next.

The question that never comes up in any serious way is why the ruling class spends so much time manufacturing these perversions of reality. Why do these bourgeois people who rule over us embrace bizarre social fads when it is clear they would not incorporate them in their daily lives. Notice, for example, that advertising agencies have almost no diversity, but all of their ads are antiwhite. They promote race-mixing even though they go to great lengths to prevent this in their own lives.

The place to start is how these people see themselves. The people at the top of the various institutions that control society do not see themselves as an elite. Instead, they seem themselves as servants of the elite. Claudine Gay, the former head of Harvard College, never saw herself as part of the elite, despite the position, because she has always had a boss, someone with control over her. Even as Harvard president she had to kowtow to the billionaire donors that fund the college.

This is a reality of our managerial elite. Even though they occupy positions at the top level of critical institutions, they always feel like hired help. The angst of the college president is no different from that of the middle-class manager living in a suburb, but the stakes are much higher. Normal people were outraged that Claudine Gay kept her salary, but her loss of status was the real punishment. In a world controlled by bourgeois status seekers, losing face is worse than death.

For normal people, fear of losing a job or looking bad to your peers is a motivation to conform to expectations. For the managerial elite, this curdles into a resentment of the system over which they rule. These people are the resentful house slave who finds small victories in undermining the master of the house. The embrace of these deranged social fads is a way for the managerial elite to tell their bosses that they have some agency and command their respect.

Managerial angst works another way. The system that allows for the managerial elite has as one of its principles that it is open to everyone. If you do certain things you can rise up the system into the elite. When you strip natural talent from the equation, then all that is left is a recipe for success that anyone can follow. This means that the people at the top can always be replaced by the steady stream of strivers below them who are busy ticking boxes on their resume.

This is the other jaw of the vice that squeezes the worldview of the managerial elite and leads to the proliferation of social rules. In a true meritocracy, the only disqualification from reaching the top is a failure to abide by the rules. The proliferation of arbitrary and capricious rules of conduct replaces what used to allow elites to hold onto their position in the face of more talented challengers below them. The elites can still utter, “He’s not our sort”, but the reason is morality rather than bloodline.

This also breeds resentment of those below the elite level. It is clear that a key motivation behind these degenerate social fads is spite. The managerial elite looks around and they see danger from top and bottom. At the top are rich white-presenting people who seem to live outside the meritocracy. Below are white people who wish to work the meritocracy to climb the ladder. Scandalizing white people in general provides a salve to the fragile psyches of the managerial elite.

This sense of being surrounded on all sides may explain how our elites think of themselves as minorities. It is bizarre to see rich people like Nancy Pelosi carry on like she is an oppressed minority. Many have noted that the proliferation of females in the managerial class has brought with it the victim mentality, but it may simply be that females are more sensitive to it and much more willing to find ways to publicly express this sense of being an oppressed minority.

From the perspective of the managerial elite, they are a minority. When they leave their swank residences, they see miles and miles of Potemkin suburbs, cheap copies of their neighborhoods, clustered around synthetic “town centers” that have the big box retail shops popular with the masses. The managerial elites think these are made possible by their efforts, but they also resent that they are not loved for those efforts, and they rage at the fact their bosses in the economic elite profit from these efforts.

What this suggests is that the conditions that must exist in order to maintain the managerial elite in their positions, by maintaining the system itself, must also lead to the petty degeneracy we see today. A system that values equality, democracy and eschews class distinctions, but exists in contradiction to those things produces a special sort of angst among the managerial elite. Their embrace of degeneracy is, in effect, a slave revolt against a system that is spiritually eviscerating.

Put another way, the the system of values the managerial class must embrace as they rise up the ranks increasingly comes into conflict with the reality of the system as they rise higher in the system. The middle-manager gets the praise of his boss by a selfless devotion to his work, but the people at the top got their position by a ruthless exploitation of those below him. It is this conflict that leads to the boiling hatred of the system that makes the managerial elite possible.

A strong society has a strong elite that works within the set of values embraced by the elite and is manifestly obvious to outsiders. A warrior elite will value the attributes that make a great warrior. An aristocracy will value those qualities that define the aristocratic class like bloodlines. Managerialism, in contrast, has a value system that is in conflict with the requirements of the managerial elite. It is this internal and unresolvable contradiction that leads the elite to attack their own system.

The End Of the Line

Posted on March 19, 2024 by thezman

In his farewell address, George Washington cautioned against the habitual hatred or the habitual fondness toward other nations. The former is easily understood, as hatred for other countries can lead to wars that are against the interest of the people. The latter is less well understood. Having strong relations with another country seems like a good thing, but if taken too far it can easily lead to compromises that harm the people and also create animosities with other countries.

If your country is predisposed to trade with Country A under favorable terms, but not with Country B, the latter is going to assume this is due to some animosity and maybe consider you to be a hostile adversary. On the other hand, the friends of Country A will naturally assume they deserve the same consideration as Country A. The adversaries of Country A, of course, will naturally assume you to be their enemy. When a country makes an ally, it assumes the ally’s enemies.

This was the crux of Washington’s message. relations with other countries must always be measured against the yardstick of national interest. A temporary alliance with another country is good business if it is good for the people and it does not bring with it long term complications with other countries. Open-ended alliance by definition will bring long term complications, which is why they must be avoided. This is where the phrase “entangling alliances” originates.

We may be seeing this play out with the open-ended relations America has had with Israel for the last half century. Both political factions in Washington find themselves lashed to an Israel government committed to a policy in Gaza that most of the world sees as a genocide of the Palestinians. The defenders of Israel will dispute this, but that does not alter the political problem for Washington. Most of the world opposes American support for Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza.

Last October, both factions in Washington were tripping over one another to show limitless support for Israel. Then the growing Muslim population in the United States, imported by the two factions in Washington, started to rebel against the Democrat side with protests and boycotts. The Republican side found that their voters were not all that interested in this project. In fact, there is a growing anti-Israel faction developing within the populist grassroots of the Republican coalition.

That may be why Chuck Schumer just gave a speech condemning Israel Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, demanding new elections in Israel. This is something that was thought impossible six months ago. The Israel lobby’s lock on both parties is such that no one would have dared speak out this way. Clearly, concerns about the impact on the coming election in places like Michigan is part of it. Schumer is trying to split the Israel lobby by isolating and attacking Netanyahu.

Joe Lieberman was quick to condemn Schumer for his “attacks” on Israel. Amusingly, Lieberman is defending the grotesque double standard applied in favor of Israel by claiming that Schumer is not applying the same standard to other countries like Ukraine and Britain that he is applying Israel. Of course, Donald Trump, hopelessly trapped in the last century, is attacking Schumer thinking this pleases his base and it will get Israel money flowing his way.

The trouble for both sides of the political class is exactly what Washington warned against in his farewell address. This open-ended commitment to Israel creates unnecessary enemies and strains necessary alliances. The most important country in the region is not Israel, but Saudi Arabia. Support for Israel in this war in Gaza may be the final nail in the coffin for this long profitable relationship. The petrodollar is the cornerstone of American hegemony around the world.

For a long time, this open-ended relationship with Israel was sustainable because the United States was the lone superpower. Everyone had to do business with the Americans, even if they did not like it. The Saudis needed American protection and financial support, so they had to turn a blind eye to the Israel problem. The rest of the Arab world saw what American power could do in Iraq and to Iran and wanted no part of that, so they looked the other way as well.

The world is quickly changing, and this open-ended relationship is now becoming another liability for the American empire. In fact, Israel is making Washington look feeble by refusing to back off their war in Gaza. The rest of the world sees a pipsqueak country leading a supposed superpower around by the nose. In other words, this is not just bad for business in the Middle East. Washington’s Israel problem is becoming a global embarrassment for the American empire.

This is the problem with empire. Empires function as protection rackets, which means defending weaker powers. Those weaker powers, however, must be tightly controlled or otherwise they will pick fights that must be fought by the empire. We got the Second World War largely due to Britain making an open-ended commitment to Poland, which went out of its way to pick fights with Russia and Germany. Israel is now threatening to start a wider war unless it is allowed to wipe out Gaza.

It is also a great example of what Washington warned against. The habitual fondness for Israel has made America a slave to the policy preferences of Israel. Worse yet, it has institutionalized foreign lobbying in Washington. One reason politicians care more about foreign countries than America is it is far more lucrative. Our “friend” Israel is happy to shower your representative with cash if he puts the interests of Israel ahead of the interests of you and your community.

Washington wrote, “The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.” America has been a slave to Israel for a long time, but even a slave will revolt when his survival is at stake. That may be what we are seeing with the Schumer speech. This open-ended relationship with Israel is threatening American hegemony in the world. Having the most Jewish man in America give this speech was a signal that the slaves are about to revolt.

In the end, this Gaza affair may be the bridge too far. Americans are sickened by the footage and offended by the defense of it. Now the elites are fearing that this affair could undermine their position. Once the politicians see that there is no penalty for opposing this stuff, then the whole arrangement will begin to unravel. Israel’s control over Washington and the public debate over this relationship may have reached a tipping point and may no longer be tolerable.

Our Democracy

Posted on March 18, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about living in a world where you can be jailed for holding the wrong opinions and a post about my used car lot. The Sunday podcast was posted early for a change. Subscribe here or here.

Joseph de Maistre famously observed, “False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.” We get a sense of that in the weekend media drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” in a speech. He used the word in reference to what would happen to the auto industry under a second Biden term, but the media left out the part about the auto industry.

The result was a media frenzy based on the false claim that Trump was promising some sort of homicidal revenge if he did not win the election. One media pinhead after another went to their favorite platform to repeat the claim. In some cases, they did so on video platforms as the video of Trump giving the speech in which he used the word was playing in the corner of the screen with the sound muted. So much for the second half of that de Maistre quote about honest people perpetuating the crime.

It probably would have gone like so many other fake media narratives in that normal people without access to the megaphone would have spent days clarifying what was said but by that point the media would be onto the next lie. This time the world’s richest man noticed and posted about it on Twitter. Joe Scarborough deleted his post about it, but others kept up the lie. Nancy Pelosi made the rounds stammering through the claim that Trump is promising a homicidal rampage.

There is nothing new about this, of course. The entirety of the Trump administration was spent this way, where the media would make up obvious lies and people would spend days correcting the lies. The difference now is the world’s richest man has suddenly started to notice things like this. Elon Musk is an eccentric guy, but when he notices something the world notices it with him. Musk seems to be taking aim at the legacy media this cycle, so it will make for some good drama.

This misses the larger issue we see with this story. The person who initiated this drama over Trump using the word “bloodbath” lied and she knew she was lying when she claimed he said, “there would be a bloodbath if he lost.” Her bosses surely knew she was lying but went along with it because it would get attention. The rest of the media who piled on also knew it was a lie. In other words, everyone involved knew it was a lie, but they kept on lying, even when everyone knew it was a lie.

In theory, the media is supposed to be the arena of public debate, where the political combatants argue for their proposals. In imagination land, the media is just a referee, but in more sober telling the media is a collection of competing entities fighting to gain the trust and attention of the market. The marketplace for information should correct for this constant lying, much as it prevents the one airplane maker from filling up on diversity hires and building planes that fall apart in midair.

Therein lies the problem. Just as Boeing is pretty much a monopoly, the media is also a monopoly and for the same reasons. Over the years, Boeing was able to make the best of friends in government, so that it was able to buy up the competition. Similarly, the media has coalesced around a critical mass of flatterers who have exclusive access to permanent Washington. If you want to buy a commercial plan you go to Boeing and if you want to reach the public, you go to the media.

Just as the free market always seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace, democracy seems to end up with a few players controlling the marketplace for ideas. The reason a nonsense story like the Trump “bloodbath” comment runs wild is that the media is a monolith. The people in it speak only to each other and the people in it are selected for their ideological compliance. The media is a massive hive controlled by the uniparty.

Of course, the fact that we have the expression “uniparty” and everyone understands exactly what it means speaks to the reality of “democracy.” Instead of it being the marketplace of ideas, it collapses like all markets into monopoly. Reformers like Trump are treated like upstarts in any industry dominated by a few players. If a collection of rich guys tried to challenge the duopoly of Airbus and Boeing, they would quickly cease to be rich guys, as they would be crushed.

That is the plight of anyone who seeks to reform democracy. The desire for reform comes only when it has evolved to its natural state of oligopoly, which often appears to the people as a monopoly. Like the upstart challenging the major players in an industry, the reformers get crushed, unless they have friends in government. To get friends in government means making the same deal as the major players. The path forward is always a deal with the devil or death by his minions.

Joseph de Maistre said, “To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government.” That was two hundred years ago before any nation foolishly set about proving him correct. Every day the media reminds us that there is no reforming democracy.

Understanding Our History

Posted on March 15, 2024 by thezman

One of the weird things about the Cloud people is how they talk about history as if it is a spirit force or a god. In his State of the Union speech, Biden kept saying things like “history is watching us” and “history requires us” as if “history” was the name of the guy controlling the simulation. He is not the only one who does this. In fact, he never talked like this until the rest of the Cloud people started doing it.

One reason for talking about history this way is it gives them a false sense of moral authority for their various schemes. They claim that history moves toward some paradise, so if their schemes advance us toward that paradise, then they must be on the side of history. It is all nonsense, of course, but nonsense has been the fuel of fanatics and lunatics since the dawn of time.

Even with a sober-minded ruling class, however, there would still be this need to shape history so that the present feels inevitable. Much of what has brought us to the present crisis is the shaping of history to fit the causes of the moment. Our progressive ruling class has been rewriting history since Gettysburg, maybe even since the Battle of Naseby, because the future is certain, but the past is unpredictable.

That is the show this week. I am taking a brief stab at reframing American history in a way that not only helps us understand how we got here but justifies why we must do that which must be done to restore sanity. I am stealing for another “Z” man, Howard Zinn, and creating a dissident version of American history. Maybe more like taking a first stab at the idea of creating a Dirt People history of America.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
All History Is Bullshit
Real Founding
The Civil War
The American Empire
Democratic Empire

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Missing Lagos

Posted on March 14, 2024 by thezman

This week was the final escape from Lagos, which had been in the works for a few years but took off toward the end of last year. I am not a young man anymore, so I cannot just pack up and leave when the spirit moves me. Not only do I have commitments to fulfill, but I also have stuff. When your stuff fits comfortably inside the trunk of your car, moving is about waiting until the sun goes down. When you need a truck for your stuff then you have to put some thought into it.

Baltimore has been my home for twenty years. I lived there longer than anywhere else so despite the harms of Charm City, there are some things I will miss. The thing I will miss the most is the look when I say I am from Baltimore. One time in Ireland I told some locals I was from Baltimore, and they did not believe me. They had seen the series The Wire and could not accept that I lived in what they saw. I showed them my license and some photos. They were terrified of me.

There are other things I will miss, like the constant sound of basketballs striking the sidewalk at all hours of the day and night. I exaggerate a bit here, but the thud of a ball hitting the sidewalk is like a weird metronome to the place. So much so that I created a special filter for my podcasts to remove the sound. No matter when I record, there is, now was, that sound of a ball striking cement. Oddly, Baltimore produces few college basketball players, despite it all.

Another thing I will miss is the shouting. The first time I was in Copenhagen, I experienced an eerie feeling the first day walking around the city. It struck me that the reason for this is the relative quiet. No one was shouting. The Danes quietly go about their business on the streets. If they need to speak to someone, they go up close to them so they can talk without shouting. Even on public transport the Danes are quiet, not Japanese quiet, but never shouting or blaring music.

Baltimore is the other end of the spectrum. It is perfectly normal for a man to stop on one side of the street and scream at the top of his lungs at another man on the other side of the street. At first it is to get his attention, but after that they will hold forth like it is perfectly normal for two men to be screaming at one another on the street, because in Baltimore it is normal. People also scream at each other from their house windows, open car windows and even rooftops.

One reason for the shouting, but certainly not the only reason, is the constant sound of alarms from emergency equipment. This is another filter I have created for recording podcasts that I may never need again. It is not just the police sirens, which are common, but other sorts of emergency vehicles. Often, I would see the local fire department take their trucks out and blast the sirens for no reason, other than to make a racket and drive the things around the block a few times.

Probably the hardest thing to get used to will be locks. In a place like Lagos, anything not locked up or locked down will be stolen. Even if it is worthless someone will pick it up and carry it away. When we had an office in the city, we would leave old computers on the sidewalk, and they would vanish. The only thing that did not disappear this way was dead bodies, but the scenes from Haiti suggest that this is something that happens in the next stage of social development.

For the last week I have been locking doors after I pass, because it has become second nature at this point. Yesterday was a nice early spring day here in the hills, but leaving the door open to let the air in was too much. Instead, I opened the window of the office so I could keep an eye on things. Perhaps in time I will forget what it was like to live on guard every minute of your life. I may now understand how men who did long stints in prison feel when they get released.

Something I am not sure I will miss is the general stupidity of the place. The best example of this is car inspections. When I moved to Lagos, I had just bought a new truck, but it was registered in the prior state. I learned I needed a safety inspection before I could swap plates. Getting a safety inspection on a new car seemed weird, but how long could it take? It took all day. The guy crawled all over the thing and even wrote up some things that came from the factory as questionable.

I asked the guy why he was doing this as in other states a safety inspection is just a walkaround to make sure every important bit works. The guy told me with compete sincerity that the cars were safer in Baltimore. He could have said it was the law or that his boss required it, thus acknowledging the idiocy of what he was doing, but no, he was fully on board with the policy. Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.

One thing that Baltimore has that I have seen no where else is street walkers, by which I mean people who walk in the streets rather than on the sidewalk. You see it the most when it snows and the cars are less controllable. The locals will walk in the middle of the streets. Even in the summer this is common. They will saunter along in the middle of the road without a care in the world. Of course, they jaywalk at a pace that suggests they take pleasure in holding up traffic.

Finally, the last thing I will miss is the tropical summers. Starting in mid-June Baltimore turns into a jungle. Jungle as in weather. It rains almost every night and is suffocatingly humid all day. Yeah, it is hot and humid in the South during the summer, but that weather in a city is a special form of miserable. Baltimore is below sea level, so it is a concrete heatsink in the summer. In fact, the Baltimore – Washington area is a giant metro area plopped into a swampy jungle.

Lots of people reading this will say it gets miserably hot where they live in the summer, and that is probably true, but hazy, hot, and humid in Lagos is unique. I have been in the South in summer. I have been in Texas during a heatwave. I have spent August in Florida and that is about as close as it comes to Lagos. The big exception is Florida has the beaches and lacks the haze. If you want to know what Hell is really like, spend a summer in Lagos and you will sin no more.

Suicidal Thoughts

Posted on March 13, 2024 by thezman

The French National Assembly approved the security accord with Ukraine struck by Emmanual Macron last month. The vote was largely symbolic and as much to do with the summer elections as policy with Ukraine. The mythical “far-right” has been doing well in the polls due to immigration and the economy, so Macron hopes to make the election a referendum on supporting Ukraine. The opposition sat out the vote, so the bill passed with a wide margin.

The security agreement means little, as it is mostly about sending equipment and money to Ukraine, something France has been doing for ten years, along with the rest of the NATO countries. The new thing here is that it opens the door for France to send troops into Ukraine with the approval of Kiev. Macron has been talking tough about doing this, but he has been cagey about if it will happen. So far, he has been trying to round up support from other NATO countries.

Meanwhile, the Russians have made clear that anything used by Ukraine in their war effort is fair game for Russian strikes. Putin recently made it clear what that means in an interview with Russian media. He said, “It would be right for Macron to remember how it ended for Napoleon and his soldiers, more than 600,000 of whom were left lying in the damp earth.” Obviously, Putin is referring to the famous defeat of the French army by the Russians that brought down Napoleon.

A reasonable question is just what the French could bring to the table if they choose to send troops into Ukraine. The French military is equipped with all the latest high-tech gear and it has over one hundred thousand people, but that includes the Foreign Legion and reserves. Realistically, the French army is about ninety thousand regular military, but how many are combat ready is unknown. France also has troops stationed around the world in former colonies.

Then there is the division of labor. The French military is split in thirds among the Air Force, Army, and Navy. There would be no role for the French navy in this war, so that leaves about sixty thousand people. Of course, they could bring in the Foreign Legion, which has most likely been operating in Ukraine since the start of the war and France can call up its reserves, so using the base of one hundred thousand is about right, using publicly available figures.

Realistically, what this means is the French could put twenty thousand ground troops in the trenches after months of preparation and assembly. Most of the French military, like every military, does not fight. Instead, they support the fighting units, with logistics, equipment repairs, planning and intelligence. To put that number in perspective, Ukraine is losing about thirty thousand men per month and that is according to the optimistic figures provided by Western sources.

Now, the French could bring in their Rafale jet fighters and CAESAR 155-millimeter self-propelled howitzers, which in theory would help Ukraine. The problem with the howitzers is the fact that there are no shells for them, and many have already been destroyed in Ukraine. The jet fighters would have to operate out of Ukraine airfields, which would need new air defenses and upgrades in order to base these planes there without the Russians destroying them on day one.

If you look at the other militaries in NATO, you see a similar story. In most cases, they would not be able to field anything without U.S. help. Even in the cases of countries like France and Poland that have significant military assets, they are not built for what is happening in Ukraine. If the French were to send troops into Ukraine to actually fight the Russians, they would be wiped out in a month. This is something that military planners have known long before the war started.

Surely the French military knows this, so they must have told Macron that his scheme to send in French troops is madness. On the other hand, generals are politicians and that means they tell the politicians in charge what they want to hear. We saw that with General Milley in the run-up to the Ukraine summer offensive. He told the politicians it would work and when it failed, he retired. That could be happening here. They could be telling Macron what he wants to hear.

Another possibility is that this is a bluff. Again, this new security deal is nothing new accept the Ukrainian permission to bring in French troops. Even that is symbolic as we know French troops have been operating in Ukraine. The Russians put a missile inside the hotel where French “mercenaries” were quartered. We also know that French troops were trapped in Mariupol when the Russians captured the city in 2022, so nothing really changes here other than the language.

If it is not a bluff and it is not just domestic political theater, then the most likely plan here is to try to repeat what was done in Syria. When Washington tried to regime change Syria, the Russians came into support Assad, who was able to weather the storm, but faced a Western backed army in the south. The U.S. then put troops, including French troops, in Syria as a trip wire. The idea was to buy time and hope to wear out the Assad regime.

Just because that failed to work does not mean it is not a great idea, so that could be what is happening here. France and some other NATO countries will garrison troops behind the lines, daring the Russians to advance further. Macron seems to have developed an obsession with Odessa, so parking French troops there would be a red line that NATO would draw this summer. This assumes the Russians would not put a missile on these garrisons.

The trouble with this scheme is that time is not on the side of the West. This has been the fundamental mistake from the start. The reason Boris Johnson was parachuted into Kiev to scuttle the peace deal in April of 2022 was that the neocons were sure that Russia could not sustain a long war. All the Ukrainians needed to do was weather the initial storm and then Russia would run out of gas. Instead, the reverse has proven to be true, and it is the West that is being bled white.

This is one of those times when logic says it must be a bluff or merely a political stunt in the context of the elections. Rational people cannot accept the irrational option, but the history of this war says that is the way to bet. For the last two years we have seen Western leaders pick the worst option, as if they have a death wish. Maybe that is the way to understand this thing. It is a long slow suicide of the West, and they will not be stopped until they bring the whole thing crashing down.

Death Of The Middle Man

Posted on March 12, 2024 by thezman

Imagine you are a rich guy, maybe a banker working at an investment house, and your neighborhood starts to have a crime problem. Maybe you get mugged on the way to your car or perhaps you start hearing about break-ins in the area. All of a sudden, your safe world is no longer safe. You think that maybe it is time to hire some private security to enforce the rules, but you find that they do not exist. All of a sudden, your cash is not all that important to maintaining your lifestyle.

That is the position of Western political elites as they come to terms with the reality playing out on the Ukraine battlefront. The West has lots of cash. They can literally create what they need from thin air. Sure, it has created inflation for the Dirt People, but only a sucker cares about them. Ukraine is what matters. Even though Congress is slow walking the next pile of cash, there is still plenty to send Ukraine. The EU and now the U.S. are plotting to “loan” Ukraine the money.

The trouble is dollars and euros are not much use on the battlefield. What Ukraine needs is machines, ammunition for the machines and men to run the machines, but that is something the West is struggling to produce. CNN has a story up that reports the Russians now produce three times the number of artillery shells as America and Europe combined, which is probably an understatement. The production numbers cited are more theoretical than actual for the West.

The industrial aspect of this war has been a topic of discussion around here since the war started, but like the rich guys living in their fantasy world of wealth and access, the political class of the West has not thought about it. Making stuff, inventing stuff and fixing stuff is for the Dirt People. Cloud People need their time and energy to think about new ways to describe the glorious future or turn bits of invented money into more bits of invented money so they can underwrite their lifestyle.

What the war in Ukraine is doing is reminding the world that the strength of a country is not magical numbers in reports that no one reads, but the hard cold reality of making stuff, fixing stuff, and inventing new ways to make and fix stuff. You can probably throw in food production, which is a form of making stuff, but a unique form, along with digging stuff out of the ground, like energy products and minerals. Countries good at these things will be strong countries.

The West no longer does these things. America and Europe still grow lots of food but the war on food production, as part of the Gaia cult, is threatening to kill off whole swaths of farm production. The war on digging up the ground is mostly about aesthetics, as the Cloud People hate seeing people do dirty work like farming or digging minerals out of the ground. Manufacturing employment in the U.S. has dropped by half over the last half century, despite the population growing by a third.

This is why the West is losing this proxy war with Russia. Despite having a far smaller population and smaller GDP, Russia still makes things and has the facilities and work force to make more things. If you can grow your own food in vast excess, supply your own energy needs, plus much more for export and you make things that people around the world want to buy, you are going to be immune from the machinations of the money changers in New York and London.

It goes beyond this though. China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and the world’s biggest consumer market. India is the second largest consumer market, and it is emerging as a manufacturing powerhouse. Russia is now the fifth largest economy in the world, despite the sanctions. What is happening here is the places where things are made and dug out of the ground are getting rich, which means they can also buy things, like the stuff they make for Western markets.

What we are seeing here is the death of the middle-man economy. For the last half century, America has positioned itself to be the money lender, the regulator, and the facilitator of economic activity, rather than the producer. To finance this, much of the manufacturing base was auctioned off and the economy became reliant on the production of credit to the global economy. To a lesser degree, the EU has done the same thing, as the junior partner of the United States.

What the war on Russia is revealing is that in a street fight, the banker has no chance against the guy who works on a factory floor. Sure, the banker has a Brazilian Jujitsu trainer and access to the finest steroids, but the working man knows how to fight and win, so it can never be much of a match. Further, in the contest of countries, it is the rules of the street that matter, not the rules of the boardroom. The competition of nations is always a street fight.

Long ago, the paleos made the point that you cannot have an economy based on everyone doing each other’s laundry. The great transition from an industrial economy to a service economy was cheered by the Cloud People but people like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot warned that it was unsustainable. A generation on and the world is learning that those old guys were right. A country that does not make things, fix things, and invent things is no longer a serious country.

Twenty years ago, Yuri Slezkine observed in his book, The Jewish Century, that the American economy had been transformed into one that primarily served the interests of the facilitators and middle-men. Jews, he argued, were unusually skilled at these tasks and that is why they have been so successful. According to the Atlantic, the golden age of American Jews is ending, and probably taking America with it. It turns out that the middle-man economy is not sustainable.

Burn The Boats

Posted on March 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the Super Tuesday results and a post about my thoughts about moving from Lagos. The Sunday podcast was posted late, as I was tied up on some projects. Subscribe here or here.

One of the things the paleos missed when they began to flesh out managerialism in the last century is how it assumes the qualities of democracy. This is something Robert Dahl picked up in his analysis of American government against the standard of democracy he developed. While the institutions of America were not democratic and could never be democratic, the people in these institutions were motivated by a democratic sense in that they wanted to act according to public will.

This explains, in part, how our institutions have grown increasingly authoritarian over the last three decades, while the people running them have become obsessed with defending what they call “our democracy.” They do not view democracy as a process, but rather as a goal. The truly democratic society is open, and the people freely exchange the right ideas. Defending democracy in this sense means dragging the people to this place, by force if necessary.

This democratic sensibility within democracy is important in understanding the reckless behavior of the people running the institutions. If one were to pick a single word to describe the cause of the current crisis it would be “reckless”. Whether it is reckless foreign policy adventures or poorly conceived domestic fads, the ruling class seems to take pleasure in reckless projects. They operate like gamblers with unlimited credit that they assume will be repaid by others.

The Ukraine war is the latest example. When the Russians threatened war, it was over the Minsk agreements not having been followed. They had a specific set of claims against Ukraine, and they wanted help from the West to enforce those claims, but instead they got bellicose threats from Washington. In retrospect, we now know that the West wanted war with Russia. Deliberately picking a fight with the world’s biggest nuclear power is about as reckless as it gets.

For two years the West has steadfastly refused to have any dealings with the Russians, instead demanding total surrender. Every few months the West seeks some new “red line” to cross, hoping to provoke the Russians. Now the French are recruiting the micronations of NATO to send troops into Ukraine. The whole point of this is to bait the Russians into responding in a way that will then let NATO pretend they are being attacked by Russia so they can invoke Article 5.

Project Ukraine is a pointless and risky adventure, but even as the Russians gain the upper hand, the Western managerial elite remains addicted to it. Like drug addicts, they crave only the next hit of foolish risk in this thing. So much so that they look for new ways to make it so they cannot change course. There is a burn the boats mentality to this project, where they seek out policies that further commit the West to the project in such a way that no one can apply the brakes.

This burn the boats mentality is everywhere. The immigration crisis is not simply about border management, something that could be fixed. It is aimed at making it a permanent crisis, a permanent project for the managerial class. Tens of millions of illegals now roam the countryside, raping and killing Americans. Even if a new president wants to fix the problem, he will still be left with the tens of millions of criminal aliens unleashed on the cities and towns of America.

One of the defenses of aristocratic rule is that it is naturally cautious. The king has an investment in his country and people in that he directly benefits from them. Who he is as a king depends upon the health and welfare of the people and the land on which they live, so he is not going to be quick to risk either of those for novelty. In fact, he is going to be cautious of change, especially in domestic affairs, because he has everything to lose and little to gain.

This is not true in democratic systems where the rulers have no investment at all, as they can be replaced at the next election. Hans Hermann-Hoppe noted that in democratic systems, the people holding office often despise the office they hold, as they gained it only as a steppingstone toward some other goal. The people have nothing but their vote, so they are willing to take great risks. The result is a system that is willing to take enormous risk for theoretical and ephemeral gains.

America is not a democracy, but a sense of democracy is there in the institutions controlled by the managerial class. What we have is a managerial polyarchy, where the elites use the institutions to chase the mirage of the democratic society. Because the goal is not real, it is maximally alluring. This is why the elites are willing to trample the democratic process to defend “our democracy.” What they are defending is not a real thing but the imagined end point of history.

It is that democratic spirit that makes them so risk happy. This burn the boats approach to public policy comes from the sense that this condition of society is temporary and therefore the positions held by the elite are temporary. In a real sense, those positions are temporary, as all managers keep their resume up to date for a reason. Throw in the fact that failure never comes with consequences and the result is a ruling elite that operates like a desperate gambler looking for a score.

The great lesson in democratic risk taking is Athens in the Peloponnesian War where the Athenians were determined to spark war with Sparta. It was the Athenian decision to roll the dice on an invasion of Syracuse that led not only to the end of the war but the destruction of Athens. Given the similarity between America and Athens, it is fair to assume the same fate awaits the American empire. Democratic empire will turn out to be a suicide pact crafted by people addicted to risk taking.

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