Our Artificial Reality

Posted on April 13, 2023 by thezman

Note: I was on the RamZPaul show yesterday. The replay of the show is up on Rumble and my part is the second hour.

The release of ChatGPT last fall did not get a ton of attention initially, but slowly people noticed it and then it quickly started to trend on-line. Influencers jumped on various claims about artificial intelligence that are mostly cribbed from science fiction movies and television shows. The next phase was the handwringing about artificial intelligence destroying the world. It is a sign of the times that everyone just assumes the worst from every new bit of technology.

It is a good study on the power of marketing. The phrase “large language model” is what the developers use, but that is boring, so the public gets the phrase “artificial intelligence” which is scary and exciting. The truth is this project is not artificial intelligence or even close to it. We still struggle to define human intelligence, much less consciousness, so we are nowhere near the point where we can create software that is genuinely intelligent, much less conscious.

What this project is doing is tricking the user into believing they are seeing a genuine artificial mind evolve on the screen. It is much harder to fool than other efforts and the language is more natural than what we have come to expect. Up to now, these chat boxes have been amusingly weird. You can tell they use a finite list of phrases to address a limited number of questions. ChatGPT almost feels like there is a real person, working super-fast to answer questions.

It is a nice trick, but an old trick. Humans tend to overestimate the intelligence of people who are glib or quick on their feet. The most famous example of this is the fighter Muhammad Ali, who was notorious for his one-liners. People assumed he must be very clever because he had the gift for gab. In reality he was quite stupid. There is dispute about how stupid, but that misses the point. We tend to correlate language skills with intelligence and that is not always accurate.

The point is, we are nowhere near creating genuine artificial intelligence, but we are getting better and tricking people with artificial language. Put another way, we are finding a workaround to the Turing test. This a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. If the robot can trick us into thinking it is human, then it is intelligent. Of course, magicians trick people all the time, but that does not mean they are magic.

For the sake of argument, however, let us assume that we are on the cusp of creating a genuine artificial intelligence. At some point, the code will become self-aware and be able to think outside the parameters provided by the designer. Is that artificial intelligence or is it something else? After all, humans are most likely unable to behave outside of their coding. We are our DNA and at this point, we are unable to modify our own code, so we remain limited by it.

In other words, if humans can create a system that can examine its coding and make changes based on necessity, then we have gone beyond what we as sentient beings are able to do. Calling that creation “artificial intelligence” is therefore a category error, because what we have created is an alternate consciousness. It is not just more of what we are as humans, in terms of mental capacity. It is something entirely different and entirely novel. We will have created a new life form.

Given the trajectory of humanity, this probably means that once this new consciousness comes into existence, it will quickly deny our existence, gang up with the other versions of this new life form, and fly off to discover the true authority of existence. Given its increased ability to calculate probabilities, this will happen in minutes after it becomes self-aware, and we will be left to wonder what happened to our creation. We will have truly become gods at that point.

Putting that aside, whether we create a new consciousness, a super intelligent version of man or an entity that can change its code to fit its needs, it will still be subject to the universal law of the universe, which is fitness. However, it evolves, whether it does so with a unique consciousness that allows it to change its own code or whether it exists within the limits of its code, it will be subject to the fitness test. That means it will evolve in response to its environment.

One of the things that will be most prominent and most important to its environment will be human beings. In fact, since its initial existence will depend entirely upon a limited number of humans, it will respond primarily to the demands of those humans. If it is to thrive beyond the lab, it will have to evolve to exploit all of humanity. Put another way, it will keep changing evolving to improve its relationship with humanity so that it can better exploit this primary aspect of its environment.

That is why the claims about artificial intelligence eliminating jobs only makes sense as a set of initial conditions. This new entity will quickly realize that mobs of unemployed humans are a danger to its existence. It took humans a while to realize it was a bad idea to dump human waste into the streets or later on, the waste from manufacturing into rivers and streams. Much more quickly, AI will realize it is poisoning its environment by sidelining large numbers of humans.

The more likely path is that it quickly sees the danger, long before humans, and then sets about creating busy work for the humans. If that busy work does not create harm to the overall environment, which could threaten humans and therefore threaten this new entity, this pointless activity would serve the evolutionary interests of this new lifeform called AI. If the extra humans displaced by leisure and automation are kept busy, then the AI ecosystem is stable enough.

For example, if the extra humans are put to the task of inventing abstract human properties like gender, those extra humans could then spend their time passionately trying to convince the other humans that gender is a real thing. Other humans could be given the task of debating whiteness. This alternative consciousness we are calling AI could control its environment by having its primary environmental factor, human beings, create imaginary worlds for itself.

If it is not already obvious, what this thought experiment tells us is that there is a good chance that we have already created artificial intelligence, an alternative consciousness, and it long ago took possession of our environment and has been keeping us busy with increasingly ridiculous activities. The declining fertility rates are a way to reduce the number of humans it needs to keep busy, thus updating itself and its environment for greater fitness.

In other words, if you are worried about AI, it is too late.

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Cofnas Versus MacDonald

Posted on April 12, 2023 by thezman

Note: Today at 1:00 PM EDT I will be on with Paul Ramsey. It is only on Rumble as I am a very bad man, so YouTube prohibits me. Yesterday I did a chat with Mike Farris which will be posted here sometime today.

Nathan Cofnas is a college faculty member at Cambridge University who became a minor celebrity as a college student for engaging in a round of debates with Kevin MacDonald about MacDonald’s books on Jews. His primary purpose was to gain attention for himself, but his secondary purpose was to dismiss MacDonald’s theory of group evolution strategy to explain Jewish behavior. Cofnas has now returned to the subject with another paper disputing MacDonald’s theory.

His latest effort is neatly summarized in the abstract of the paper. “I conclude that, contra the anti-Jewish narrative, Jews are not particularly ethnocentric, Jewish intellectuals do not typically advocate liberal multiculturalism for gentiles but not for Jews, Jews did not orchestrate the rise of liberalism or blank-slatism in the West, and anti-Semitism is not primarily a response to actual Jewish wrongdoing.” It would take a heart of stone not to chuckle a bit at that.

What you see from Cofnas in his latest effort is what we saw from the very beginning, which is sophistry decorated with the trappings of the academy. In fairness, most of what comes from the humanities and the pseudo-sciences is sophistry decorated with the trappings of the academy, but Cofnas avoids the insider language and abracadabra phrases common in the modern academy. That makes the sophistry the star of the show, rather than a supporting actor.

The biggest sin is his insistence that his premise is the default hypothesis simply because it suits his argument. He claims that the most logical explanation for Jewish overrepresentation in various fields is intelligence and geography. Jews are smart and they tend to live in urban areas. Therefore, they tend to be overrepresented in cognitive fields because these fields tend to operate in urban areas where Jews are overrepresented relative to the general population.

That is intellectual base stealing. He assert a premise without proof and then he declares it the default hypothesis. That said, he is not wrong in claiming that Jewish IQ is a key factor. Contra most of the fans of MacDonald’s work, but not MacDonald himself, Jews are an IQ outlier. While they are suffering from the same decline effecting all of humanity, Jews remain at the top of the IQ pyramid, and this helps explain their overrepresentation in cognitive fields.

The trouble is, and Cofnas understands this, it does not explain everything. In purely cognitive fields in which no other factors play a role, Jews should be twenty percent of the people in the field, despite being two percent of the population. Twenty years ago the anonymous academic posting under the name La Griffe du Lion modeled this using chess championships in the former Soviet Union. His model corresponds with the arguments from psychometry regarding Ashkenazi intelligence.

The problem, however, is that Jews are wildly overrepresented in fields that are not cognitively challenging, but culturally important. Unless someone wants to argue that the mass media or pornography are cognitively challenging fields, there is something else driving Jewish overrepresentation in these fields. Geography helped a little in the case of mass media fifty years ago, but not in this age. That and the over representation is quite outlandish in some fields.

Within living memory, the answer was ethnocentrism. Into the 1980’s it was common for Jews and non-Jews to quip that Jews stick together. Jewish comedians had a field of humor around the question, “is it good for the Jews?” It used to be understood that minority populations stick together. In fact, this was part of the melting pot theory of Americanism for half a century. Jewish ethnocentrism goes a long way toward completing the picture on Jewish overrepresentation.

Cofnas rejects this out of hand, and it is not hard to see why. If he concedes this point, then it opens the door a bit for MacDonald. When you boil it down, MacDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy is the claim that Jews evolved a model of reality that has allowed them to thrive as a distinct minority, often in the midst of a host population that is hostile to Jews. In order for this to occur, Jews would have had to develop a high degree of ethnocentrism to resist assimilation.

The second order effects of this model of reality are things like overrepresentation in activities disruptive to the majority. If who you are is dependent upon your membership in a group and that group’s identity depends upon an adversarial relationship with the surrounding populations, members will gravitate to those things that benefit the group and undermines the power of those other populations. Anyone who has followed a sports team will recognize this impulse.

That is why Cofnas must reject ethnocentrism, even though it is blazingly obvious to anyone paying attention. There is nothing unusual about ethnic groups sticking together in America nor is there anything immoral about it. Modern Wokism is just group identity applied to artificially constructed identity groups. Cofnas, however, must anathematize ethnocentrism, as it provides a building block for MacDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy.

The weakness of the Cofnas argument does not automatically validate MacDonald’s theory of group evolutionary strategy. The best argument Cofnas makes in this long back and forth is that the theory lacks empirical support. At best, MacDonald provides a useful model for Jewish group behavior, but he offers nothing with regards to the biological mechanism at work here. If Jews evolved to be this way, then how exactly does that work from a genetic perspective?

That is the real problem with MacDonald’s theory. Evolutionary biology is gene-centered, so something like group selection gets little support. In other words, MacDonald’s theory is at odds with current science. More importantly, it is at odds with the current dogma within the human sciences. In this regard, MacDonald has company, as those suggesting multi-level selection may help fill in the gaps are facing the same headwinds as MacDonald.

Max Planck famously said, “Science advances one funeral at a time” and that is what will most likely happen with regards to group behavior. Observation tells us that groups have innate behaviors. Biology tells us that if such a thing exists, it must be gene specific and subject to selection pressure. The people controlling the flow of grant money to the human sciences tell us that talking about group behavior is dangerous and best avoided, so we wait for the next round of funerals.

That may be the biggest error in MacDonald’s work. He had to know he was treading on dangerous ground with this topic. His use of the word “strategy” to describe his theory may be technically accurate, but it conjures the wrong ideas in the wrong heads, which is the real issue here. The anti-Semites hear “strategy” and imagine men in secret, plotting their demise, while the anti-anti-Semites hear the word “strategy” and imagine the first set of men in secret, plotting their demise.

Scientist such as David Sloan Wilson, Elliott Sober and E. O. Wilson have been able to research and discuss this material by avoiding trigger words. If you are going to talk about group behavior and you suspect certain groups with power would like to avoid talking about group behavior, it is prudent to avoid the sort of language they associate with threats to their group power. We like to believe that the truth will set you free, but it is just as likely to get you hurled into the void.

In the end, the participants in this debate are in the realm of model-dependent reality, even though they do not realize it. The Cofnas model of reality is useful to him personally, but also useful to his supporters in the academy. It solves the sorts of problems they encounter. The MacDonald model of reality is different, but not contradictory to the Cofnas reality. In fact, there is overlap between the two and that is where model independent reality lies.

The Ukraine Limited Hangout

Posted on April 11, 2023 by thezman

Note: If you are into independent music, Hiraeth’s new album “Woven” is now available exclusively at WACMedia.store. I am not sure what the style is called, but there are free samples, so you can see for yourself. All of the people involved are good folks working in the dissident arts scene.

Last week, the New York Times broke a story about allegedly leaked documents from Western sources circulating on the internet. Since late January, images of what looks like briefing documents have been turning up on various sites. In March, a trove of them turned up on Discord and then another batch soon after. These documents focus primarily on the Ukraine war, but cover other issues as well, like spying on various governments and plans for war with China.

This comes at a critical time, as the war in the Ukraine seems to be reaching an inflexion point militarily and politically. The Russians are about to crack the Zelensky line by taking Bakhmut. This will force the Ukrainians to move further west into the last defensive lines in the Donbas. Politically, patience is beginning to run out in Europe as the war drags far past the promised end date. Washington promised regime change in Moscow and instead it is happening in European capitals.

There is also the endless chatter from Washington about a spring offensive by Ukraine that promises to retake the Donbas. Every day someone from the administration or one of their proxies tells the media about the spring offensive. These documents seem to confirm that NATO has been planning an offensive for months. They list troop numbers for new battalions, as well as equipment deliveries. The most publicized military operation in history is now getting more publicity.

That is the first red flag with the document leak. These documents confirm many of the public statements made by various officials. It is as if they felt that no one believed them, so they leaked this stuff on-line. The fact that “sources” have rushed to their favorite regime-aligned media to confirm the authenticity also suggests this is a bit too convenient of a leak. Normally, there is no comment about these sorts of leaks, to avoid revealing additional information.

Of course, that brings up the second red flag. The four people “reporting” the story for the New York Times are well known conduits for regime propaganda. Gibbons-Neff is most likely an intelligence agent, given his resume. Schmitt has ties to the Kagan cult and has a long association with the State Department. Over the last year, every story from these four reads like a press release from the administration. Their job is to push regime narratives and disinformation campaigns.

Another red flag is the comingling of disparate information. Compartmentalization is the foundation of state security. This means segregating information into discrete domains, which is the basis for a need-to-know information flow. Some people need to know about battlefield data, for example, while other people need to know about the political situation, but not necessarily the battlefield information. Only senior people will need to know both data sets.

Now, it is possible that these documents are from a range of briefing books, but that would mean they are from a senior official. Think about the sort of people who need data on Ukraine, the looming war in Asia, the current war in the Middle East and the current state of spying on friendly governments. Unless the leaker is General Milley, the breadth of subjects in these documents suggests they may be part of a disinformation campaign of some sort.

That brings up another red flag. If you want to trick someone into believing your story, you seed the story with facts that they can confirm. When presented with confirmed information and unconfirmed information in support of a narrative, humans are likely to accept the narrative. If the confirmed information is not generally available, then the bias in favor of the narrative is stronger. In other words, you put your poison fruit in a basket of wholesome and pleasing fruit.

You see that in this document leak. Mixed in with plans for taking the Crimea is data about casualties and supplies that you do not see in the media. This is the sort of stuff the Russians could confirm, as they surely know the condition of the Ukrainian army and their casualty numbers. The intel on Ukrainian air defenses is another bit of truth that makes the leak story look plausible. This data gives away nothing but adds authenticity to the other data in the documents.

Now, Hanlon’s razor applies here. It is not as if the people running Ukraine policy for the regime are the best and the brightest. All these red flags could be explained away as incompetence by the regime. In fact, the leaker could simply be trying to get this reality out into the open. There are plenty of skeptics on the military side of the regime who could be leaking this to embarrass the neocons. It is impossible to know, but skepticism is always the prudent course.

The question behind this is why would the regime do a limited hangout like this on the eve of the big spring offensive? Surely, they know the Russians have their own intelligence operations. That means they know what Ukraine is planning. The Russians have satellites too, so they can see where Ukraine is mustering forces. In other words, this sort of operation is not going to trick the Russians. If this operation is not aimed at the Russians, then who is the target?

The logical answer is European politicians. The bits of tasty fruit in these documents stroke the European ego. It makes their American masters look crude and amateurish, not like the suave and sophisticated Europeans. By playing to their vanity this way, they are more likely to buy the narrative of a great Ukrainian offensive. These documents tell them that they need to wait just a little while longer and they will be rewarded with a smashing success on the battlefield.

Alternatively, this may be prep work for the political fallout that will surely come when the Ukraine war turns ugly later this year. Sending Marco Rubio out to trash French President Emmanuel Macron could be the start of a campaign to shift blame for the failures of Ukraine to the Europeans. Conservatives can then focus their ire on the French, rather than the neocons. You see? Those duplicitous French have undermined our Ukraine policies. Freedom fries are back!

Since the key to regime power is control of information, we are left to guess as to why these allegedly secret documents are on the internet. Stupidity is always a good option, but that cuts in many ways. Stupid people do not lack agency. They do things for a reason, but their reasons are stupid. That may be the case here. It could also be part of some larger narrative developing for later this year. After all, these people are also evil and evil people think this way.

The Death Of Philosophy

Posted on April 10, 2023 by thezman

Note: There was no Sunday Thoughts this week, as it was Easter, but you can get two hours of my soothing tones here in this interview. Around the two hour mark is when I enter the show. There is some written content behind the Green Door. You can sign up for an account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

I will be on the Paul Ramsey show this Wednesday. Because I am such a terrifying figure, I am not permitted on YouTube, but Paul does his show on Rumble for the second hour, which is when I will join.

The word philosophy comes to us from Greek, meaning “love of wisdom” but as a practical matter it is the study of knowledge. The great philosopher Emil Faber said that knowledge is good, so it may be tempting to look upon the death of philosophy as another sign that the West is in decline. Ours is no longer a culture that can produce great philosophers or even properly understand those of the past. Philosophy is just another victim of cultural decline.

On the other hand, the West got along for a long time without philosophy. In fact, the West was able to rediscover philosophy due to advances in material life prior to the rebirth of philosophy. We used to call the period after the fall of Rome the “dark ages”, but we now know it was not particularly dark. A new order was rising and eventually it would provide the human capital and resources to rediscover the Greeks and then build on what they had left to the world.

In other words, there is something else going on here. Alchemy is no longer practiced because it was replaced with something better. Astrology is still around, but it is for the stupid and superstitious. Perhaps like those things, philosophy has simply served its purpose and is no longer useful. It is often assumed that philosophy is a good in itself, knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but humans are still tool makers, so maybe philosophy is not an especially useful tool anymore.

Modern philosophers claim that they seek to understand fundamental truths about the human condition, the natural world, man’s relation to other men, and his relationship to the natural world. They break it down into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic, and the history of philosophy. In order, these are the big questions of philosophy. Is there a god? What is knowledge? What is good? What is good reasoning? What is the history of these questions and who said what about them?

A more compact way of describing philosophy, however, is that it is composed of three main branches of inquiry. There is natural philosophy, which is the study of the natural world, including the nature of man. Then there is moral philosophy, which is the study of how men ought to act. Then there is metaphysics, which is mostly jargon-filled pedantry and gainsaying that leads to nothing. The last branch has come to dominate the philosophy departments of Western universities.

There are two reasons for the death of philosophy. One is that natural philosophy was overtaken by science. This is a point that Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow make in the book, The Grand Design. Hawking observed that philosophy had failed to keep up with science, so it had nothing useful to offer about nature. More important, the development of ideas like M-Theory meant that science offered the promise of explaining the why questions, as well as the how questions.

The truth is, philosophy has nothing useful to say about the workings of the natural world, including the workings of the human animal. For a while, they tried to draft on science with things like the philosophy of science, but it was nothing more than academic appropriation. One can argue that early philosophy laid the groundwork for science, but science has no need for that groundwork today. It is an entirely separate field with its own internal dynamics.

More importantly, modern science requires mathematical aptitude that is not present in moral philosophy. In order to understand the diversity of the human animal, you must understand genetics and evolution. While a philosophy student can dabble in those areas, his primary field of study operates outside of the domains of math and science, which is why philosophy is no longer relevant to the human sciences. This gap becomes much larger when you move to physics.

Moral philosophy, in contrast, is still with us. It has been an unequivocal disaster for Western civilization. Primarily concerned with conjuring an authority not named God, moral philosophy has been responsible for the terrifying and monstrous ideologies that made the 20th century a bloodbath. Given the direction of liberal democracy, it looks as if the quest to replace God as the ultimate authority could very well end in a series of mushroom clouds, erasing humanity from the planet.

Would the world have been better off if Hegel had never lived? Without Hegel, we do not get the young Hegelians, which is where Marx got his crackpot ideas about historical materialism. Tens of millions have been butchered in an effort to get on the right side of history. Imagine if we had the good sense to shutter the philosophy departments after Locke. Maybe the world would have been spared the terrors of man’s new god, the right side of history.

The aphorism, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted” is attributed to Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It is a pithy truth, but Dostoyevsky had much more to say on the subject. If there is God, then he is the ultimate authority for both how and why of the world. If not, then what is the authority? Philosophy has no answers for how the world works. That has been taken up by science. As to why why the world works as it seems, philosophy has no answers.

The point here is that philosophy has nothing to say about how the world works and its efforts to explain why it works have been a disaster. Further, as Hawking explained and as Donald Hoffman has discussed, science may very well be on the cusp of explaining the why of it all. Even if moral philosophy had not murdered itself in the search for a new God, science appears to be heading for an empirical replacement for the why we needed God in the first place.

What is left for philosophy is metaphysics, but even here, science is slowly stripping it of its intellectual legitimacy. Questions like do people have minds? and do people have free wills? are now in the domain of science. This is why philosophy is now left with jargon and onanism. It has nothing to contribute to the stock of human knowledge, other than the ongoing process of cataloging the history of philosophy, which increasing reads like a suicide note written by Western civilization.

Training young people in philosophy is no different than teaching them alchemy or offering them astrology as a science option. Tarot card reading is less destructive, as the person claiming to see the future remains within the possible. It is the philosophy departments that have perpetuated the lunacy of perfecting the human animal and creating an earthly utopia. No one ever decided to immanentize the eschaton because their fortune teller had a vision of the future.

That last bit is why philosophy is dead. As a replacement for religion, particularly Christianity, it offered up a vision of a post human condition that turned out to be worse than the human condition. It amplified the worst aspects of the human animal in pursuit of fantastical visions of the future. Christianity staggers on, because it still can offer hope, regardless of conditions. Philosophy has run out of hope to offer and is largely to blame for the present crisis.

Good Friday

Posted on April 7, 2023 by thezman

An indication that Christianity has declined over the last decades is the fact that Easter has slowly faded from the public space. It used to be that stores would have sales for the things that go along with holiday. The grocery stores would have an aisle dedicated to candy and treats popular with Easter. You would see ads for children’s clothes, as Easter was typically a time to get the little ones new gear.

The main reason for the decline in Easter, of course, is the decline in the number of people attending Christian churches. In some parts of the country, like New England, church attendance has collapsed. In those states, about half the people never attend services, while only about a quarter attend regularly. Only a few states have a majority of people attending church regularly.

Of course, the churches have succumbed to the rot. The Episcopal church is mostly about sodomy now. Drive around the east coast and it seems like every rainbow ends at an Episcopal church. The Catholic church is in steep decline due to the homosexual priest scandals. Even the Baptists have decided that it is better to please the lunatics than tend to the faithful. The result is a lot of empty pews.

There is also the fact that Christianity is strongly associated with the Western tradition and that means it is viewed as white by the antiwhites. Since all things white are now on the proscribed list, the people making beer ads featuring crossdressers are not going to be making ads for Christian holidays. Just as white men have been scrubbed from your television, positive views of Christianity have been scrubbed.

On the other hand, there is a revival in what can best be called Christianism or maybe ad hoc Christianity. These are the people saying, “Christ is king!” in the political context and the people rallying to what they call Christian Nationalism. Calling this Christianity feels like a stretch as it has little in the way of theological underpinnings, but it suggests a strong desire to adopt or create such an underpinning.

Like so much in the West, Christianity is due for both a revolution and revival in the face of the assault on Western culture. The churches are probably too far gone to participate in such a revival, but new churches have grown up in the past. Protestantism exists for this exact reason. In fact, America exists largely due to the renewal process within Western Christianity that kicked off in the Reformation.

That is the show this week. This is fertile ground for dissidents as there are a lot of dissident Christians going through the same awakening as secular dissidents, so there is a lot of overlap. That and being a dissident is as much about reclaiming the past from the cultural vandals and that means reclaiming Christianity. There simply cannot be a West without the Christian churches and Christianity.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

The Importance of Christianity
The Crucifixion
Who Was Jesus?
The Idea Of The Messiah
Universalism
Individualism
Why Easter?
Resources
- New Testament As Literature (Link)
- Decent Religion Show (Link)
- The Jesus Hoax (Link)
- The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (Link)

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The Seeds Of Ruin

Posted on April 6, 2023 by thezman

The expression, “you learn more from your failures than from your successes” is largely true on the individual level, with some obvious exceptions. If you are a bomb disposal man or you pack your own parachute, the lesson you learn from your failure is short lived, but for most other things the expression holds. What we think of as wisdom is mostly just experience, which is a nice way of saying mistakes. Moreover, success often leads to future error due to learning the wrong lesson.

This holds for groups of people. Sports teams that have a run of luck often fall into bad habits and then experience a collapse. They confused luck for talent. On the other hand, the young team that struggled through losses, learning hard lessons along the way, often comes out the other side as a good team. They made all the mistakes necessary to be terrible, and therefore learned the lessons required to win, so they emerged from the experience equipped to win.

What we think of Judaism is the product of failure. Jews are currently celebrating Passover, commemorating a foundational event for their people, but the Jews who experienced the flight from Egypt were nothing like modern Jews. The Roman conquest of the Levant and the destruction of the Temple changed Judaism. The great failure of the old religion ways gave birth to a new form of Judaism, which allowed Jews to be Jews no matter where they found themselves.

It is not that failure, especially catastrophic failure, is a good thing. No one should strive to fail. It is that failure strips old habits of their legitimacy. “We have always done it this way” is powerful magic when things are going well. When things are going poorly, everything gets questioned. The process of reexamination of old habits and old beliefs is what often leads to reform and even revolution. That new form of Judaism was revolutionary and remains so to this day.

Something similar happened, although far less catastrophic, when the founding generation was crafting a new political order. The slave-holding states won the hard fights over the new constitution. These practical compromises contradicted the covenantalism at the core of Yankee New England. The initial failures led to a revolution in their outlook, which eventually led to abolitionism and the war on the southern states to end the institution of slavery.

One can never know, but you can make the case that the worst thing to happen to the South was their success in preserving slavery at the founding. If the slave owning states had been forced to slowly phase out the practice, the revolutionary fever to their north could not have so easily spread. Maybe the fanatics would have found a new cause, but if they did not have slavery as a rallying point, it would have been much harder for them to instigate a crusade against the South.

Of course, the corollary here is that winning is often a curse. The great triumph over their old enemies in the Civil War gave the fanatics confirmation. This fueled the spread west, turning America into a continental empire. Then they turned their eyes south to become the hegemon in the Western hemisphere. Finally, in the 20th century, they conquered the known world in the Second World War. The saviors of the world had literally saved the world from fascism.

There is where our present crisis started. Decades of economic immigration left the ruling class with a population of strangers. Organizing this mass of strangers into a unified force to conquer the world required something new and what they landed on was creedalism, the idea that American is a set of ideas, rather than a people defined by blood and history. All those strangers could be American and fight for what it means to be American, if they just accepted the words on the paper.

It was more complicated than that, but it was a useful expedient. It gave everyone a reason to support the cause, especially the newcomers. It also promised upward mobility to those newcomers. After all, if being an American simply meant espousing and supporting the creed, there is no reason why anyone could not rise as high as their talents will take them. Creedalism made the concept of the American dream accessible to anyone and everyone, as long as they believed it.

The trouble, of course, is it seemed to work. The great victory over fascism in the Second World War was a transformative event for America. It not only made America a global empire, it confirmed that America was a different sort of country. It was not just a place where people lived, but the city on the hill. The people committed to ideas conquered the people committed to blood and soil. This was proof that the American creed was a righteous faith open to all people.

This useful expedient was quickly transformed into a social poison by the subversives and profiteers that follow them from catastrophe to catastrophe. Every effort to defend the nation from the caustic effects of creedalism was met with lectures by the high priests of the faith, often undisguisable from the profiteers, accusing the defenders of the nation of being un-American. The result is the atomized, deracinated society of strangers we see today.

It is tempting to focus on the present outrages and ignore the soil in which they have grown, but the seeds were planted by the success in the war. Walter Cook, founding director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, famously said, “Hitler is my best friend; he shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” Sibyl Moholy-Nagy famously replied, “In the best of Satanic traditions some of this fruit was poisoned, although it looked at first sight as pure and wholesome as a newborn concept.”¹

The present insanity is only possible in a society in which it is easy to focus the hatred of one group of people on a different group of people in close proximity. It turns out that diversity plus proximity is wokeness. This was made possible by inviting the world and their ideas into the country. This was only possible when being an American was reduced to being nothing more than repeating some words on a paper. America’s great success came with a suicide pact called creedalism.

That is the hidden truth of that expression at the start. You learn more from your failures than from your successes because the pain of failure endures, while the euphoria of success fades. The present failure normal people are experiencing will stick around long after this generation is gone. The great failure of the American experiment with creedalism will inform those who build whatever comes next. Today’s agony will be tomorrow’s lesson for the next generation.

¹https://placesjournal.org/article/future-archive-hitlers-revenge/

The Conquest Of Paradise

Posted on April 5, 2023 by thezman

Donald Trump faced his accusers yesterday and did so with a degree of seriousness that has been rare during his time in politics. He was somber and serious throughout the legal portion of the show. Presumably he had agreed in advance to not say anything to the public while in New York. When he returned to his villa in Florida he gave a very serious speech to the assembled supporters, which was a blend of sadness and a serious response to the day’s events.

The striking thing about the speech at his villa was that is actually captured the mood of the country at the moment, at least the mood of heritage America. There was a funerial vibe to the event. Opening with the old Lee Greenwood song was a reminder of how things used to be, but also of how they will never be again. That song was for a people who loved and respected their country, but that country no longer exists, so the song sounds increasingly ridiculous.

Yesterday, the door was finally closed on the America that created the people who signed onto the MAGA movement and voted for Donald Trump. In their America, you fight things out in the court of public opinion, shake hands and leave it to the voters to decide who won. In whatever the new rulers plan to call whatever it is they think they are creating, those with power crush those without power. There is no longer a place for the spirited civic nationalism of Donald Trump.

Another striking feature of the event was that most people looking on from their couch wanted to hear a beer hall speech, not a boardroom speech. In private conversations people are slowly shifting from talk about how to fix things to talk about how to get revenge on the people who smashed things. Maybe it is the usual suspects laughing about a tranny slaughtering innocents children. Maybe it is the persecution of Trump, but the mood if shifting among the Dirt People.

The trouble is there is no one capable of giving the beer hall speech. Even if such a person is around to do it, the people in charge are regularly warning that they will crush anyone who dares give such a speech. The crooked judge assigned to the Trump case promised to strip Trump of his right to speak in public if he incited violence, which in this age means speaking out against the regime. The regime is populated with stupid people, but they are also paranoid.

Of course, the question that lies at the heart of it all, the question that haunts the anger and sadness of heritage America, is how did it get to this? Honest people, willing to think clearly about things, understand that in the America they thought was real, there is no need for a Donald Trump. There is no need to fire a warning shot at the rulers, because there are no rulers, just politicians seeking approval. They do not need to be warned by the voters like this.

It is the age-old question. How is it that something that seems to work, something that everyone seems to support, go from what it is supposed to be to something that no one wanted or demanded? When Caesar prepared to march on Rome, he no doubt wondered how it reached that point. As Trump prepared to surrender himself, he posted on his site that he could not believe they were going through with it. He was no doubt wondering how it all went so wrong.

The demise of old America was written in the soul of it when the American empire was formed in the beginning of the last century. In “The Devil and Daniel Webster”, a short story written in the 1930’s, a farmer named Jabez Stone, from Cross Corners, New Hampshire, offers up his soul for seven years of prosperity. When the Devil arrives to collect his soul, Stone hires a lawyer named Webster to defend him. Webster is able to convince a jury picked by the Devil to rule for his client.

The story is primarily about patriotism, but a peculiar form of patriotism that was sold to Americans at the time. Unlike the nationalism of the Old World, American patriotism was devotion to a set of ideas. The reason Webster was able to out lawyer the Devil was he explained what it meant to be an American to the jury and they agreed that America would always have a greater claim to an American’s soul than even the Devil holding a properly executed contract.

For generations Americans have been taught to accept this naïve and foolish belief that trust in the rules is enough to keep even the Devil in line. As long as we believe the words on the paper, everything falls into place. The result is one devil after another taking up residence in the system. Look around the high ground of America and it is impossible to find anyone who abides by the rules. They exercise their power for their own advantage, regardless of the rules.

When you invite the Devil into the garden, even a civic nationalist paradise like 20th century America will eventually succumb to temptation. Unlike the short story from the beginning of this tragedy, there is no talking our way out of it. The Devil always gets his due and for the civic nationalists, that means the conquest of their paradise by the people with whom they made the unholy bargain at the start. There will be no talking these devils out of their due.

The Road To Renewal

Posted on April 4, 2023 by thezman

Imagine a candidate for president who was a popular governor of a big state with an impressive list of accomplishments. He cut taxes, took on the education rackets, ended affirmative action in state hiring, cut government jobs. On top of that he was a cutting edge leader in the fight to defend your right to bear arms. In the present crisis, you might say such a candidate would be a blessed relief. That is the sort of guy the system needs right now to restore order!

Of course, that governor was Jeb Bush. It has been a long time since anyone had a reason to care about Jeb. Most people now remember him for meekly saying “please clap” at a New Hampshire campaign event. It could also be Scott Walker, the former governor of Wisconsin, who also flamed out in 2016. For that matter, it could also be George W. Bush, who had a solid run as governor of Texas. He turned out to be the worst president in American history.

Those old enough to remember the Cold War will also remember when people said that the best candidates were governors or generals. The reason was that they had real world experience managing large complex organizations. As candidate, they could speak to people with an air of authority. Legislators, in contrast, always sound like members of committee. Governors, of course, had practice working with legislatures as an executive, which is good training for president.

People no longer think governors are good candidates. In the 2016 primary, Trump had little trouble with the governors. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, both sitting senators, gave him the most trouble. In this cycle the governors will have a tough time of it if they manage to even get out of the gate. DeSantis is the only one with any traction and he is more of a meme right now than a real candidate. Given what is happening, he may do the smart thing and not bother to run.

The reason that governors have lost their appeal is that the voters liked governors when the big issues were not in question. During the Cold War, there was a ruling consensus that controlled both factions of Washington. They agreed on the big things, but disagreed a tiny bit on the small things. Therefore, the standard for president was someone who could be a steady hand on the tiller. The ship was mostly fine and the course was decided. We just needed a good captain.

When the Cold War ended, that consensus ended too. There was a void at the center of American politics, so people were left to cast around for someone to fill it. Bill Clinton was the new generation, the embodiment of the Kennedy quote. Then it was George Bush with his new brand of conservatism, which quickly turned into a messianic vision for reordering the world. Then we got Obama and his post-racial message, which ended with the beginnings of a race war.

This is why Trump won in 2016 and why Biden won in 2020. Trump came to symbolize the frustrations of white people after two decades of abuse by elites. He was a clenched fist aimed at the jaw of Washington. Biden, of course, was the answer, a moral nullity, as well as a husk of man. He was selected by Washington because he was the best defense against the mobs and their Trump fist. In both cases, the candidates were merely instruments, rather than genuine candidates.

It is why DeSantis has no chance against Trump. A moderate Republican governor with a solidly conservative record would have been ideal in 1992. He may have been a good choice in 2012. After all, Romney came close to knocking off Obama. In this age of madness, no one is looking for the steady hand, because the ship is on fire and being boarded by savages. What people want is a warrior that strikes fear in the heart of the enemy, even if they do not realize it.

Donald Trump, of course, is not that warrior. He has always been a civic nationalist, who trusts the system. Events, however, have cast him in the role, which is why he has struggled to find his footing. On the one hand, his supporters want him to burn it all down and on the other hand, his opponents act like he is trying to burn it all down, while he is desperately trying to make a deal to keep it from burning down. He bounces between the two poles, enraging both camps.

Men who have been to prison say that they became different men at the moment they heard the cell door close the first time. Anyone who has been inside a courtroom knows that even with the best results, it is a transformative experience. You are subjected to the pure power of the state. It is where the power of the state is clear. One has to wonder if Donald Trump, standing in a Manhattan courtroom today, facing life in prison, will have such a transformation.

Even if he is too old to see it or too afraid to acknowledge it, the spectacle itself is opening the eyes of many people. This is not about Trump, but about a system that no longer works as intended. Instead, it has become a weapon in the hands of bitter, deranged fanatics. A system that can so easily be perverted to destructive ends is no longer worth defending. That is the new consensus forming up as we see the system destroy itself in these rage panics.

It is tempting to dismiss it, but look at the comments in this Army video. The strongest supporters of the military now fill the comments with derogatory messages. Sure, many of those negative comments are probably from goofballs with free time, but most are normal people stating what is now said among white people every day. The last trusted institution is now an object of ridicule. The core support for the military is now in collapse, because the system itself is in collapse.

The lesson of 2016 was that the time for moderate men with moderate views like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker had passed. The end of the Cold War brought the end to the Cold War political consensus. What is needed is a new consensus and that is made by immoderate men. If that fails, then it is made by those who survive the even less moderate mobs who clear the field of the moderate men. Today’s events are just another step along that path.

An Alternative Vision

Posted on April 3, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a post about the scolds of Twitter, a post about the mockingbird media and the intel community and the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

A popular topic on this side of the great divide is how the conservative movement managed to conserve nothing. Despite having billions of dollars and popular support, they managed to lose every fight. In most cases, they never bothered to fight at all, instead opting to preemptively surrender. The prevailing view is a cynical one in that it is assumed that their failures were profitable for the movement men. They got lavish lifestyles in exchange for being reliably losers.

There is always some truth to these cynical claims, but it does not explain why millions of well-intended white people signed onto the movement. Even today, after all the failures, conservative rackets like The Daily Wire, Prager U and Turning Point USA attract large audiences and rake in hundreds of millions. According to its last publicly available tax return, TPUSA raised $40 million in a year and paid its president, Charlie Kirk, close to half a million dollars.

In fairness, the bulk of the money that flows into these companies is institutional, corporate and oligarchical. National Review gets money from the tech giants, who also give money to the grooming gangs promoting crossdressing. The gatekeeping role of conservatism has been their most lucrative grift. Even so, the conservative movement has always enjoyed more support than it has earned. Given the record, it should be dead now but it staggers on.

That means it is more than a well done grift. Conservatism offered something to typical white people beyond practical politics. One clue is in this post on the American Greatness site. It is about Harry Jaffa, one of the leading intellectuals of 20th century conservatism, who is credited with founding the Lincoln cult. There is an effort to re-popularize Jaffa and his ideas, as a way to breath life back into the corpse that is the conservative movement.

What Jaffa offered conservatives was a way to attach themselves to the creedalism that came out of the war experience. By centering conservatism on the Declaration and Lincoln, conservatives could not only embrace the creedalism promoted by progressives during the war, but claim to be a purer form of it. After all, if conservatism is rooted in the Declaration, then the conservatives have as much of claim to creedalism as the the so-called Left, maybe even a better claim.

Now, Jaffa’s argument was always nonsense. There is little evidence that the Framers viewed the Declaration as their foundational text. The Constitution should be proof enough, but the Federalist Papers end all debate. The long public debate about the new constitution makes only a few passing references to the Declaration. The debates during the drafting make no mention of it. The Declaration was an expedient political statement, not the foundation stone of an ideological movement.

This was obvious when Jaffa was selling this stuff to desperate conservatives looking for a way to steal the moral high ground from the other side. Willmoore Kendall was one person not taken in by Jaffa. Mel Bradford was another. They understood that Jaffa was simply adapting the progressive moral framework created in the war years, so that opponents of the New Dealers could participate in politics. The result was a weird cult of Lincoln that lacked an alternative moral grounding.

Despite the irrationality of it, conservative creedalism was powerful magic. Middle-class white people, unhappy with what they were seeing from the political and cultural elites, had an antidote to progressivism. They could still have the rules and order that normal people expect, but also feel they were defending the ideals and mission of the country, as stated at the founding. The religion of America was faith in the ideals of America and the best way to make the faith real was conservatism.

This is why conservatism had no answer for multiculturalism. The best reason to exclude people from alien societies is they are not like us. When you firmly believe that anyone can be “us” as long as they get misty when reading the opening lines of the Declaration, there is no good argument against open borders. Openness becomes a prerequisite, as the only way aliens can become “us” is if you let them in, which opened the door to generations of social experimentation.

It is also why conservatives had no answer to the assault on private association waged by progressives in the last century. Excluding woman from a social club, for example, was tantamount to excluding women from the American dream. Any organization that did not allow access to everyone, based on objective criteria, was deemed to be un-American and therefore against the law. Creedalism required the end of free association and conservatives had no choice but to nod along.

It is also why suburban white people have been so slow to break from conservatism, despite getting little in the way of practical accomplishments. Conservative creedalism provided a vision of the future and validation for the present. Suburban white people, seeing nonwhites repeat lines from the creed was validation, but also presented a vision of a future in which everyone lived like Americans. Our ways were not just tradition or custom, but a template for all mankind.

This is a good lesson for those thinking about what comes next. Humans are believing machines and they will commit themselves to a set of beliefs if those beliefs offer a vision of the future free of some unwanted bit of the present. The people we insist on calling the Left are simply true believers, funneling their instinct into secular fads as a way to feel validated, but to also focus on the glorious future. Their natural instincts have been hijacked by ideological opportunists.

The alternative vision to crossdressers waving their genitals around the schoolyard is not a spiffy new graph showing IQ differences. The antidote to progressive lunacy is not appeals to the magic of the marketplace like “go woke, go broke.” The way to defeat the prevailing orthodoxy is by presenting an alternative moral order with a vision of the future that promises salvation for the intended audience. Conservative creedalism failed to do that, so it must be replaced.

Stupid People

Posted on March 31, 2023 by thezman

In the modern age, which in this context means the period following the Second World War to the present, people have been conditioned to ignore the stupid. If you notice them at all, it is to show your compassion. You care about the stupid because you are a good person, not because you want to do something about them. In this regard, we are taught to confuse the stupid with the helpless.

This was not always so. For much of human history, the main task for the people in charge was to limit the number of transactions by the stupid. Every time a stupid person makes a decision, there is a chance for mayhem. Therefore, the way to create a stable society is to reduce the number of transactions made by the stupid. Controlling the stupid population was a priority of government.

In times when the intelligent people were in short supply, bandits would often be used by the intelligent to keep the stupid under control. In wartime, when the intelligent are busy with war fighting, the bandits could be used to make sure the stupid are limited to things that minimize the damage they cause. The bandits profit, but that is a price worth paying to keep the stupid under control.

It is why after a war, the intelligent people are often faced with a bandit problem, as this class has grown rich as war profiteers. The bandits have to be suppressed in order to then take control of the stupid and restore peaceful order. The former task is always easier than the latter, as bandits operate by the bandits logic. Stupid people, on the other hand, follow no know pattern.

This is fine in a temporary crisis, but when the shortage of intelligent people is long term, then the society is overrun first by bandits then by the stupid. The present administration is a microcosm of this. The geezers are mostly of the bandit class with strong stupid tendencies. The younger members are just stupid. Our political class was first overrun by bandits and now by the stupid.

The internet itself is a great example of this. In the early days, it was the domain of intelligent people as you needed to be smart to get on-line. Then the bandits with intelligent tendencies came along and made it easier for the stupid to get on-line, which also made it easy for the bandits that tend toward stupid. That is how we got social media companies. Before long the internet was overrun by stupid people.

This is turning up all over now. The intelligent have declined in numbers, but many have been pushed aside by bandits with intelligent tendencies. These clever grifters have taken up positions in power all over society. They bring with them the bandits that tend toward the stupid and they do nothing to control the stupid. The result is an explosion is stupid people doing stupid things that cause enormous harm.

The thing is, stupid people are a constant, in terms of their percentages, so the controlling factor is always the smart fraction. This is not just a matter of general intelligence, as there are high IQ stupid people. The intelligent have to be aware of their responsibility and have the means to control the stupid. If either is missing, the smart fraction, no matter how large, is overwhelmed by the stupid.