Monthly Archives: August 2016

The Misinformation Age

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For most of human history, the natural state of people was to be uninformed about the doings of the great and powerful. Amenemhet the Stone Carver could easily have spent his life chipping glyphs into stones, without ever knowing why or what they were supposed to mean. He was just one of many assigned to work on the latest project commission by Pharaoh. More important, he probably did not care. He had a good job chipping glyphs into stones, which let him have a nice house and send the boy off to chariot school.

For his part, the Pharaoh was not all that concerned that Amenemhet was indifferent to the doings of the state. He wanted his people to do his bidding and remain loyal, but that mostly meant maintaining the grain supply, defending the borders and holding religious festivals where the people were reminded that the Pharaoh was a god. In other words, Pharaoh did not have to invest a lot of time bullshitting his people. Even if wanted to, it was simply not practical, so it was never a part of the ruling toolkit.

Writing the post the other day on millennials, it occurred to me that they are the first mass media generation. In my grandfather’s youth, for example, having a radio was a toy for rich people. He got his first TV in the 50’s. My parents grew up on movie theaters and then later television, but they got their first TV in their late teens, I think.  I had TV as a kid, of course, but I also had outdoors. With just three channels, TV could not compete with outside for the attention of a boy, so I did not spend much time in front of it.

Young people are floating in a sea of mass media and they have never known any other way. It’s perhaps why millennials are so demanding and entitled. Watching TV is a passive exercise. It is up to the show or movie to entertain you, the viewer. There’s no reward for loyalty to a channel, a show or a personality, so there is no loyalty. Consuming mass media is a purely transactional exercise. With so many channels competing for your attention, you have every right to be demanding. Kids raised on TV are certain to be transactional in their daily human relations.

The thing is, our mass media culture is mostly fabricated nonsense. Most of what the news people “report” is made up. As soon as you see the word “sources” you know what follows is invented. Even when someone is named as a source, nine times out of ten we learn that the named source did not actually say what he was claimed to have said. The other day, the news people were claiming Trump got in a fight with a baby at one of his events. It turns out he made some harmless jokes about a crying baby.

It’s tempting to think it is just the ideological bias of the media and that certainly plays a role, but even sporting news is often made up nonsense. Sites like Bleacher Report and SB Nation exist to pump out made up news from writers who never leave their couch. The “legitimate” sporting news is similarly riddled with tales where the word “sources” is featured prominently. The people in the business have to know everyone is just making stuff up, but no one ever says anything. It’s just the way it is.

The question that comes to mind is what this does to the culture. The passive cynicism of the millennials may simply be a result of living in a world of fiction. If most of what you see and hear is bullshit, you’re going to assume everything is bullshit. It is also impossible to have trust in people that lie all the time, so this sea of mass media is self-defeating as a propaganda tool. The Russians during the Soviet era assumed everything told to them was a lie, which made an already cynical people into the first no-trust society.

Something similar may be happening in America as the people producing media feverishly try to break through the noise with ever more outlandish nonsense. Sites like Gawker are simply the logical end point of all mass media. Consumers of mass media are not seeking to be informed, because they assume it is all nonsense. They just want to be entertained. It’s probably why Trump is one nominee and Clinton is the other. Everyone is looking forward to the brash bully tearing into the corrupt old cow. It may be awful for the country, but it will make good TV.

The dynamic since the advent of participatory government has been to increase the number of informed citizens while increasing the franchise. That’s not where we have ended up. The franchise has been expanded to the point where we are now handing ballots to foreigners, but the public is probably less informed than at any time in our history. In fact, it is close to impossible be well informed. That makes popular government nothing more than an entertaining roll of the dice. The characters best able to keep the public’s attention wins, even if she is a sociopath, who kills people.

Doers Versus Talkers

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The other day in the comments, there was a brief exchange about the difference between people that do things and people that say things. Nixon used to divide the political world into those in the arena and those who talked about those in the arena. He even wrote a book about it. This is the same formulation you see in sports. Athletes complain all the time about the press, pointing out that few of them ever played the game at any level, so they can only imagine what it is like to be a player.

Another way to think of it, one that I prefer, is the 18th century salon, where men in elaborate costumes boasted to elaborately costumed women about what they would do if they were ever called to action. These were the guys who were “well schooled” in the art of war, but never made it out to camp, much less a battle. Meanwhile, out on the streets, men of action did the hard work of civilization, including the defense of it. These men had no use for theory because they were judged and they judged others by deeds. Doers versus talkers.

As with all models, it is an artificial construct used to better understand the world. George Washington was both a doer and talker. In fact, he was probably better at talking than war fighting. Washington was not a very good general, but he had a knack for saying the perfect thing at the perfect time in order to get other men to act. Most modern politicians do nothing but talk so calling them doers is a bit of a stretch. Paul Ryan, for example, has spent his life in Washington politics. The only thing he has ever done is promote himself up the ladder of party politics.

Even so, The model of the doer versus the talker is a useful one for understanding the world today. A century ago, almost all men in America were doers. In fact, it was hard to be anything but a doer. Even politicians started out as lawyers or businessmen. The scions of rich men could skip the doing and get to the talking, but there was not much of it. Status for men was tied to deeds so even rich guys joined the military, got into business or argued cases before the court. 32 US Presidents had some military experience.

Today, few of our politicians have ever done anything resembling useful work. Those who did some time in the service were almost always JAG officers, meaning the greatest danger they faced was a paper cut. The commentariat is even more divorced from the world of deeds. Look up the resumes of these folks and you see nothing but stops in think tanks and media jobs. Some spent time in government. As Tucker Carlson put it, these are stupid rich kids largely clueless about the world in which the rest of us live.

The American ruling class now resembles that salon where oddly costumed people engage in elaborate ritualized competitions. Deeds mean nothing, because no one does anything in the conventional sense. Instead, status is achieved by accumulating credentials, occupying government positions and winning verbal jousts with the other members of the meritocracy. Barack Obama is in the White House entirely due to his ability to talk about doing stuff. The meritocracy admires him so much, because he is one of them.

It’s also why all sides of the chattering class are in a lather over Donald Trump. He is not a member of the talking class. For all his faults, he is a man, who does things. He has risen to the top of a rough and tumble field that only rewards doers, particularly doers who like risk. Every day of Trump’s life has been about winning deals and making things happen. While Barack Obama has a trophy case full of participation medals, Trump has a trophy room celebrating the buildings he has built and the casinos he started. He even has a trophy wife and a trophy ex-wife.

There’s another aspect to this. In a world in which deeds count for nothing, words count for everything. Every sentence is packed with multiple layers of meaning, because there are no other ways to signal status, piety, achievement and so forth. The great athlete does not have to be a wordsmith because everyone know his status. The guys talking about the great athletes have to establish status by words. The guys talking about guys talking about guys talking about the great athletes are in a world where every comma carries great import.

A guy like Trump, who lacks these verbal skills, is an easy target of mockery from the talking class. The coin of Trump’s realm has no value in the world of modern American politics. Guys like Trump are supposed to write checks and remain silent. In the view of the meritocracy, Trump is a crude vulgarian. He is poor in the things they value most, even though he is rich in deeds. To make matters worse, Trump seems to get this and take some pleasure in vexing these people. He does not respect them and they know it.

It’s easy to admire men of action, but history is full of such men, who came to bad ends. Politics has always been about words at some level. George Washington’s political acumen counted for more than his military prowess. Conversely, the British generals he faced, lacked the political savvy to take advantage of their superiority in arms and material. Similarly, Trump’s stumbles in the game of words could very well unhorse him in the fight against someone’s wife. It’s why the talkers are so invested in his defeat. For most of them, it will be the only thing they have ever done.

Millenial Solipsism

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Complaining about the millennials has become something of a pastime over the last decade. It probably started in the 1990’s when people began to notice that the young were acting a little weird compared to previous generations. Raised on video games, good economic times and technology, young people coming out of college in the late 90’s seemed to lack anything resembling humility. By the time we got to the 2000’s, someone had come up with a cool new moniker for the next generation and everyone was bashing the millennials.

I noticed the same things as other people noticed about the kids, but my bet was reality would beat the stupid out of them as it has every generation. The fact is, every generation has had it a bit easier than their parents and that means each successive generation has come into the world a little less prepared for reality. My generation certainly had it easier than my parents and grandparents. My grandfather used to tease me by saying his generation was wooden ships and iron men, while my generation was iron ships and wooden men.

The millennials are now in their 30’s, at least the leading edge is in their 30’s, and it does not appear that reality has had much of an impact on this generation. Talk to employers about them and they start reeling off stories about the problems they have had with their young people. I know a number of business owners who have thrown in the towel and no longer hire anyone under forty, even if it means paying above market rate. These are companies that used to hire college graduates and train them for their specific work. Now, they let others do it.

Time waits for no one so whether anyone likes it or not, the millennials will be in charge soon enough. Look around the mass media and you see lots of boys and girls in their late 20’s and early 30’s offering up opinions and commentary about how you people screwed up the world. Since being a chattering skull requires little in the way of talent, it is no surprise this is where millennials are making their first impression. TV skulls just have to read their lines and look concerned. The on-line types just need to do the social justice warrior act.

The thing that you can’t help but notice with this generation is the strange solipsism that is their most highly developed feature. You see this in debates on-line as well as in the media. It usually takes the form of “explain to me why….” and assumes the thoughts and emotions of the person on the other end have no value. Their only reference point is their own feelings toward whatever it is in question. If the counter argument to whatever is under discussion makes them blue, it must be wrong, regardless of its factual accuracy.

This piece by a young writer named Mathew Sheffield is a good example of the new brand of millennial journalism we can expect. Sheffield turns up on mainstream conservative sites so I suspect he is being groomed to be the next big thing. His article features the abundant use of pseudo-data that is popular with millennials, but the distinguishing aspect is it is mostly a long treatise on how conservative media is not paying enough attention to people like Mathew Sheffield. After all, if Fox News is not catering to him, they may as well not exist.

On his twitter profile, you see the catch phrase popular with young educated people. “If you can’t defend your opinions, perhaps you need better ones.” Some formulation of that pops up on social media and internet forums and it is always uttered by a young person. They can’t imagine why someone would not be eager and willing to explain and defend their opinions to them. On twitter you often see old people respond with, “I’m not google. Do your own research.” The response to that is always some form of  “Your unwillingness to indulge me means you must be wrong.”

The thing is, this generation is just as smart and educated as previous generations. You could argue they are better educated. More young people have had exposure to college material than ever before and all of them graduate high school. I grew up with guys who dropped out at 16 and then went into the army when they turned 18. That’s unheard of today. The difference is that the millennials were trained to focus their curiosity inward, rather than outward. Instead of trying to understand the world, they focused all their time understanding themselves.

This very well may be the inevitable consequence to the post-scarcity world. We live in an age when poor people are fat and have gaming consoles and 60-inch flat screen televisions. For middle and upper middle-class young people, the risks in life are not physical in the form of hunger and violence. The risks in life are all emotional in the form of lost status and hurt feelings. Once again, it turns out that Huxley got the future more right than Orwell. In the post scarcity world, everyone is focused on self-actualization, because otherwise life has no purpose.

My Trouble With Libertarians

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I was out on my bike, riding through the countryside, when I came upon a group of deer grazing near the edge of the road. I was riding where it is mostly woods and fields so there’s not much car traffic. As a result, the woodland critters are often in plain sight. I took the opportunity to stop, drink some water and enjoy the magnificent beauty of nature. At these times it is easy to see why men believe in a just and loving God. I was also reminded of why I hate libertarians.

To be fair, I don’t really hate all libertarians. As is the case with “conservative”, the word “libertarian” has been expanded to include things that the original libertarians never would have imagined. The word itself was coined by a French communist from the word libertaire, to mean an advocate or defender of liberty, especially in politics. The guy most consider to be the founder of libertarianism, Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, was a classical liberal in the line of John Locke and Adam Smith.

It used to be that libertarians were property and contract guys. They argued that the state existed to protect property rights and enforce contracts. These were the neo-classical liberals, who believed government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from one another. Since all property was either owned by an individual or owned collectively, the state existed to protect property and sort out disputes that arose over property. There’s really nothing wrong with this as an argument against socialism and communism.

The trouble is that somewhere along the way, this rather sensible rebuke of socialism curdled into a weird fusion of Cultural Marxism and laissez-faire globalist economics. To be a libertarian today means to abandon the field as soon as the Left assaults the culture in some new way. They always have some excuse for hiding under their bed when the Left goes on a rampage. At the same time, they fall into lectures about pencils as soon as the topic of global capitalism is raised. Listen to a modern libertarian and you get the sense they really think the point of life is cheap consumer goods.

Ironically, modern libertarians are fond of talking about the Founders and they even argue that early America was a libertarian country. That’s ridiculous, but it also misses a critical point. The American colonies were doing well economically and the taxes and levies the King wished to impose were minor. Despite this economic realty, the colonies revolted anyway. It was early proof that homo economicus has always been nonsense. Humans as not rational and narrowly self-interested agents. Humans, individually and collectively, are biological.

When the Brits went to the polls and decided to leave Europe, they did not do so with economics in mind. That was part of it, but patriotism, identity, class and other non-economic factors were at the front of their mind. The winners were not waving the Union Jack because it happen to be handy. The Brexit forces were not talking about sovereignty and self-government by accident. Libertarians are so blinkered they could not comprehend what was so blazingly obvious. They remain convinced that humans are just moist robots.

It used to be that libertarians understood this. Murray Rothbard cooked up something he called Right-Wing Populism, which was a not so subtle attempt to hook libertarianism to biology. Guys like Ron Paul and many Paleo-Conservatives embraced something that is the foundation of the emerging Alt-Right. That is, the chain of causality, which is shorthanded this way: Biology->Culture->Politics->Economics. Iceland has the culture of Iceland because it is full of Icelanders. Nigeria is the way it is because it full of Nigerians.

Modern libertarians appear to embrace the Progressive claim that humans are a blank slate so the chain of causality is reversed. They run out of the room as soon as biology is mentioned. Talk about crime, for example, and they break into a sweat and start looking for a way to escape. When it comes to culture, the modern libertarians are too quick to come up with some bit of dogma that prevents them from facing off with the Left. Usually that means another lecture on why we need to legalize weed and prostitution.

Like most sensible people, I like low taxes and limited government interference in my life. I’m a maximalist when it comes to personal liberty, but I also understand that human society is about trade-offs. I give up some liberty in exchange for the benefits of living in a society to my liking. My liking and that of my fellow citizens is not always going to be logical or fit into a tidy economic model. I also know that a certain segment of the population is going to require extra help and extra restraint. That requires trade-offs too.

Those rolling hills where I sometimes ride may one day be slated for development or a chemical plant. Maybe I’ll be all for wiping out Bambi’s playground or maybe I’ll be on the other side. My arguments will be no more rational than why I prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla. The people on the other side will be just as irrational. That’s the way it goes in politics. It is two sides fighting over what to love more and what to hate more. It is about who we will be, together, as a society. It is what we want our kids to remember about us.

Libertarians have nothing to say about any of this, but like a pebble in your shoe, they keep finding a way to be an irritant. In the current crisis, they have plenty to say, but they refuse to pick a side. They have their principles and their well crafted arguments, but most of it feels like a call to inaction. They clearly believe, but faith without works is dead. A faith that can never work because it runs counter to biological reality deserves to be dead. That’s how I feel about libertarianism.

Breaking: Heretic Apprehended

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In case anyone thought the muzzling of dissent was a Continental problem, here’s a story from Britain that is worse than the German story.

An online troll ended up in the dock after posting comments ‘grossly offensive’ to Muslims on a police website.

Dad-of-seven Stephen Bennett, 39, made inflammatory remarks on Greater Manchester Police’s Facebook page, in response to an appeal for information in a sex case with an Asian suspect.

I’ll just note that the internet term “troll” has now been redefined to mean “people who refuse to shut up.” It used to mean “someone trolling for attention.” Now the Progs have defined it to be “the scary little man shouting hate think at the bridge to paradise.”

One comment he made concerned Asian women, another was likely to be offensive to Muslims.

Bennett, of Wythenshawe, also wrote: “Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.”

He made the comments despite his mother-in-law and sister-in-law being Muslims, his lawyer told the court.

The response sparked outrage from Facebook users who feared his remarks would set people against each other.

When Bennett was arrested by officers in an 8am house call, he said: “Is this about that Muslim thing on Facebook? I’m getting locked up for sticking up for my own country.”

Notice how the writer is astonished that this monster does not like Muslims despite the fact his in-laws are Muslims. In the New Religion, diversity is our strength so there must be something really wrong with this guy. He’s getting a full dose of diversity at the dinner table, yet he remains a racist! Some people are beyond repair so I hope they put him down mercifully. Wouldn’t want his sort infecting others!

Bennett later admitted an offence under the Malicious Communications Act.

His Manchester Crown Court sentencing hearing was told that he was a dad-of-seven who was finding it ‘difficult to cope’ at the time because of the loss of his job, but was now back in work as a cleaner.

His lawyer added that his mother-in-law and sister-in-law were Muslims, and that he was not racist.

But web users who read his posts felt his remarks would fuel tensions.

One Muslim witness told police he was concerned the ‘irresponsible’ comments would ‘incite hatred’ and be a ‘potential tool for radicalisation’.

Another Muslim personally offended by the remarks challenged Bennett online, telling him ‘act your age’.

People in the wider community were also offended, prosecutor Gavin Howie told court, with one female Facebook user describing his remarks as ‘offensive to all women’.

Orwell deleted things like this from his own work as he assumed no one would believe it, even in fiction. The suspension of disbelief can only go so far. We used to mock primitives for carrying on like this. We still do. The accused would be charged with black magic and his accusers would claim to have been given the whammy by the accused. The judge would then consult the court shaman, who would read some goat innards or his star maps and offer up an opinion.

The religious aspect of this is clear. In the New Religion, the happiness of the dusky people is the sign of collective morality. If the muzzies are vexed, then it must be the fault of the honkies for failing to embrace diversity. It’s why the good thinkers take the side of cop killers. Even through the cop is doing an important duty, the unhappiness of the killers, the black ones, is a sign the void where God used to be is unhappy with the people.

You’ll also note that one can be indirectly “offended” by a heretic. Why else include in the story that one Muslim was “personally” offended? It means one can be transitively offended, in the same way one can feel shame for the sins of your society. The concept of “offense” has taken on a spirit form like a jinn. How long before the theocrats demand we affix hex signs on our homes and wear talismans to ward off the racist jinn?

 

We’re Doomed

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The Catholics say despair is a sin and perhaps it is, but it is hard to be optimistic about the world when you see stories like this one. Even allowing for the possibility there could be more to the story than what is being reported, how can society survive when this sort of thing  is even plausible?

Thomas Salbey became an internet sensation after footage of him hurling abuse at Sonboly, from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment was posted on Twitter.

But while many praised Mr. Salbey for standing up to the gunman – who aimed shots in his direction – Florian Weinzierl, a spokesman for the Munich prosecutor, has confirmed that Mr. Salbey is to be charged with libel for his comments. It is not known who reported Mr. Salbey to the authorities.

As the attack by Sonboly was already underway, Mr. Weinzierl said that initial investigations have shown that Mr. Salbey’s diatribe did not affect the course of events. The specific charges have yet to be announced, but Mr. Weinzierl said he expected that they would include “insults to the detriment of the dead”.

Detriment to the dead? How is it possible that such a combination of words exists, much less made its ways into the law? Now, loopy nonsense gets into the law for various reasons and maybe this is the case, but civil authorities appear to be ready to charge a man for insulting the dead. How is this different from charging someone with being a wizard? The underlying assumption is that through some magical means, the insult reaches the insulted. I guess the prosecutor will use a Ouija board at trial to get a victim statement.

That’s only half the problem. What sort of person reported the guy? presumably, someone complained. In Europe, it is against the law to hurt someone’s feelings so I would assume that’s the angle. The accused insulted the dead, which made someone sad so the accused must be made to suffer. This is old testament justice for the snowflake age. Instead of eye-for-an-eye, it’s boo-boo for boo-boo justice.  The fact that this exists and people go along with it suggests there no hope for the West. Only a mass die off like the Black Plague can fix this.

It’s not so much that some women called the authorities on this guys. You just know it is a woman who dropped the dime. It is always a woman behind these things. It’s that people in positions of responsibility encourage this sort of thing. For all of human history, the ruling class discouraged this sort of behavior as they knew it could get out of hand quickly. The prosecutors or police who took this call should have politely listened, promised to look into it and then forgot about it. That’s how you’re supposed to handle community cranks.

We’re doomed.

 

The Revolt of the Media

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Way back in the olden thymes, “the media” was the local newspaper, news radio and the evening news on the television. My father would read the paper every evening after dinner, while my mother would watch the evening news. Once in a while my mother would put on the radio and listen to the news channel, but that was rare. If the people in charge wanted to get the attention of the peasants, they had to do it in those small windows when people paid any attention to the news.

We live in a different age, but it is a very new age. We are saturated with media. Young people have no frame of reference so they just assume it has always been thus, but our modern mass media culture is one of those rare things that is truly new. It really was not so long ago when it was easy to be entirely uninformed about the world. It took great effort to be well informed. That’s not to say we are all worldly cosmopolitans, but the world is literally at our fingertips. More important, media is everywhere and it hard to escape it.

This newness means that the people in charge have struggled to put it to their uses. Buying off a few newspaper publishers was easy. Controlling the three TV networks required hardly any effort at all. A free wheeling mass media with millions of bloggers, podcasters and small outlets is a different task. Rounding up the farm’s bull is a hard job, but rounding up all the barn cats is actually much tougher. The former can get you killed, but the latter has a maddening number of variables.

When the masses started to get on-line, the “media experts” said it was ushering in an era of wonderfulness because the people would now have a say. The news would be interactive! It was not that long ago when every Progressive commentator went on and on about the wonderfulness of interactive media. I used to laugh at it as I was on-line long before the media airheads had heard of the internet. I knew those hothouse flowers would not last very long in the rough and tumble world of the internet, but like missionaries headed off to the the jungle, they were sure it was going to be great

I was thinking about that yesterday when National Review announced they had been taken over by Facebook. Like a lot of these sites, they learned the hard way that their audience was not going to just nod along and clap when instructed. Instead, they posted articles and the comments filled up with ridicule and criticism. That led to lots of comments from NR writers about the awfulness of the comment threads. Now that millennial pansies are in charge, they have turned it over to Facebook to police their comments.

It turns out that popular opinion is not all that popular with the people in the media. All over, news and opinion sites are clamping down on comments. They are heavily policed or they are shut down entirely. Twitter has allowed a band of angry lesbians to take over the moderation duties. Reddit hired Chinese grifter Ellen Pao to chase off the bad thinkers. Faceberg, of course, is run by howling lunatics, who ban people for any deviation from the orthodoxy. The media is slowly shutting down public comment in a rather deliberate effort to shut down dissent.

This started a couple of years ago, but the process has been accelerating. The claim from the media is the comment sections are revolting. Coincidentally, it is happening just when the public is revolting. It also coincides with a sudden solidarity among the media. They no longer seem to be divided along ideological lines. Now, they are quite unified. Read National Review, for example, and you could be forgiven for thinking it is New York Magazine or Salon. Glenn Beck, once the scourge of the Left, is now getting a sex change and supporting Clinton.

It’s one of those things you can read different ways. It could be real fear on the part of media over what’s coming their way through the comment sections. This is the sort of thing we associate with reactionaries facing a revolution. The people in charge try to suppress dissent so they can win the public relations campaign. If only one side can speak and they are holding a megaphone, enough people will be swayed to back the regime so that the revolt losses steam. That’s the theory, anyway.

On the other hand, the Cloud People speak a slightly different language than the rest of us. It’s why a crime story using the phrase “Minnesota man” means the man was not from Minnesota or even North America. In the language of the Cloud, interactive may have meant that they yell at you and you obey. These are people who truly believe they are called by the blank spot where God once existed to lead the Dirt People in the right direction. Ask any of them why they chose their career and they say, “I wanted to make a difference.”

There’s also the possibility that the people in media are just very stupid. Spend any time on an elite college campus and it is not hard to figure out that they select for things other than raw IQ. The kids that end up in the soft majors are not selected because they pegged the math portion of their SAT. Way back in the stone age, I was in college with a couple of rich kids who were as dumb as goldfish. But, family money is worth two SD’s on the entrance exams so they were accepted and put into sociology and psychology respectively.

My sense is that the Cloud People are beginning to master the new media tools. Oddly, the lesson they are learning is the lesson the Nazis learned. People naturally follow the herd. Put the herd into a big arena, pump in some emotional content and the herd goes where you tell it. Go to a Dallas Cowboy game and watch the buildup. It’s easy to see what happened in Germany.The 20 minutes before the game is a Nuremberg rally. Even if you’re not from Texas, you want to put on a cowboy hat, pull on your boots and defend the Alamo.

We are social animals that look to one another for guidance and acceptance. Unleashing click farms to promote the Cloud People narrative, while demoting the critics, gets the herd moving in the right direction. It also keeps the people holding the megaphones in high spirits. By having only cheering crowds in their line of sight, they truly feel they are making a difference and therefore redouble their efforts for the cause. That’s the weird thing about propaganda. It’s often more effective on the sender than the receiver.

All of this is fine if your ideal society is one where the bulk of the people are treated like cattle. That’s certainly the way our world has shaped up so far in the mass media age. The “big data” guys start from the assumption that we’re all in the hive. following orders from the queen via subtle signalling and nudging. Alter the composition of the signals and you alter society. The drones have no agency of their own. That’s the theory and maybe they are right. The great success of central planning suggest they may be onto something.

The Tragedy of the Google

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In 1833 the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd published Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, which introduced an idea we later understood as the Tragedy of the Commons. The example used was of a common grazing area and how the interests of the people using this “free” public land would inevitably work at odds with one another in maintaining the public land. Everyone had an incentive to take as much as they could, as quickly as they could, but no one had an incentive to put back.

Today this is best understood in the management of fisheries. You can’t own parcels of the ocean and even if you can assign areas to particular fishermen, the fish don’t pay attention to these boundaries. The fisherman has no incentive to limit his cod harvest because the fish he does not catch will simply swim over to the next guy, who will catch them. In order to maintain the fishery, the state comes in and puts limits on the overall catch and what each fisherman can catch each season.

This fairly well known example is used by certain ideologues to demand socialization of all private property. Environmentalists will claim that the three-toed elephant slug is a common resource so it must be protected by the state. Therefore, anything that impacts the slug, requires permission from the state. That means if you want to mow your lawn or put up a tool shed, you have to file an environmental impact study and spend a bazillion dollars bribing environmental groups. It’s why we can’t build anything of consequence anymore.

Even though the idea has been abused, it is a useful concept when thinking about something like this story in Breitbart. Musicians are quickly seeing their revenue from music sales disappear. Newspapers all over America are near collapse because their content is distributed free on-line. Those that try to charge a fee just see the news given away by someone else, so their efforts to create property lines on-line always fail. Even the pornography industry is being gutted by a flood of free porn.

Now, the music industry has adapted to the fact Google is essentially an open air contraband market. Big shot musicians have teams of lawyers to police this stuff. The small musicians make their money from live shows and selling their music at their events. But, others don’t have this avenue. Photographers, graphic artists and writers just accept that they no longer have property rights to their work. I often see my work posted on other sites and no one from those sites asks my permission. I always give it when asked, but few bother asking.

The big internet operators and their government ignore all of this because they have grown stupendously rich off this racket. Google is essentially operating an open air contraband market with YouTube. Try running a heroin market on your property and see what happens. But, you’re not a billionaire and you can’t afford to buy a government of your own so the rules apply to you. Even banks find they have to report large movements of cash in order to help the government catch drug dealers. Ross Ulbricht is doing life in prison for being the Google of illicit drugs.

When the robot historians look back at the collapse of the West, they may point to the Internet as an institution analogous to slavery in the Roman Republic. Some argue that the flood of slaves in Rome after the victories over Corinth and Carthage altered the economic balance of Roman society. Large farmers could afford to buy up lots of slaves, thus collapsing the market for labor. This also allowed them to crush their smaller competition. The result was the rise of a landed oligarchy at the expense of the small land owners.

The Internet has brought back something that we thought was dead and that is rentier capitalism. This is the economic practice of monopolizing access to any kind of property, and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society. Cable operators are a good example. In my youth, TV was free. It made it’s money from commercials. Today, you pay the monopolist a fee to get access to TV shows, that still run ads. In fact, they run even more ads than when I was a kid. In the case of kid’s shows, the programs are just ads to sell toys.

The other institution is cost shifting. The paint company that dumps its old paint into the river because it is a cheap way to get rid of the waste is shifting some of its costs to the public. Passing laws to prevent it or taxes on the paint maker to pay for the cleanup, is an effort to end the practice of cost shifting. Even today, the smallest mechanical shop complies with environmental rules because the punishments are draconian. These costs show up in the invoice to the customer. When I get my oil changed, I see an entry for oil disposal on the invoice.

The modern Internet giants shift huge chunks of their business cost to the public via all sorts of schemes. The most obvious being the internet providers. In most of the country, technology and/or the law prevents the internet provider from implementing metered service. Everyone pays the same for their internet regardless of usage. That means the guy with three teenagers that spend all day watching YouTube pays the same as the local feminist, who only goes on-line to post pictures of her cats to Facebook.

If the guy with the three kids had to pay for his usage, his bill would be five times that of the local feminist. He would also sharply limit his usage. Google and the other video providers would see their customer base shrink to the point where it may no longer make sense to exist in some cases. My first broadband bill was $12.95 per month. The cheapest in my area is now $69.95 plus a long list of fees and taxes. The service is marginally better, but not five times better. The additional cost is about me subsidizing my neighbors for the profit of the Internet companies.

Similarly, if the suppliers were charged for use of the public roadways, like we tax motorists and trucking companies, they would have to charge vastly more for their product. Instead, those costs end up in your tax bill, because, the government gives tax breaks to the internet providers. If Facebook had to build out a network to supply you their product, the cost would be prohibitive. Instead those costs end up in your cable bill, even if you have no use for Facebook. The internet economy is all about socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

I’m going long here so let me wrap it up by summarizing a bit. We have created this virtual commons, but we have not come up with a way to manage it like a park or fishery. Further, we have permitted the development of rentiers, who skim from the public good, but contribute very little to it. Worse yet, we have massive cost shifting with the profits going to expand and perpetuate a system that works against the interests of the people. When a firm that made its money from cat videos can dictate terms to the US government, we’re well past the tragedy of the commons and into techno-feudalism.

Trump and the New Religion

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The 2016 US Presidential election is shaping up to be one of those inflection points in the nation’s history. At this stage it is hard to know what comes after November, even if you are confident of the outcome. In 1964, the Liberals clobbered the arch-conservative Goldwater, but that turned out to be their last hurrah as 1960’s radicalism was about to blow itself apart. Similarly, many thought 2000 was a shift toward a post-Progressive America, but it was the start of a new Great Progressive Awakening.

I’m fond of calling the prevailing philosophy among our rulers the New Religion because it has all the attributes of a religion, just adapted to the mass media era. For those unfamiliar with this, the New Religion is based on egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. The last part is an outgrowth of the first two, but it is such a key part of the believer’s worldview, it really must be treated as a foundation item. Spend time on social media and you will inevitably run into people calling themselves anti-racists.

As Eric Hoffer observed, mass movements can get along without a god, but they must always have a devil. For the modern Progressive, the arch-demon is racism and everything is organized around fighting it. Abstract concepts make for useful devils, because they can be redefined on the fly to meet new challenges. A racist used to be some who hated blacks. Now it is someone hated by blacks or by the people who do the hating on their behalf.

As much as anti-racism is the star of the show, the other two legs of the stool are important too and we’re seeing that in the election. Trump is running on an explicitly nationalist platform. Nationalism comes with certain assumptions, like “our culture is better than others” and “our people are worth more to us than the people of other countries.” These are value judgments based on a shared history and a shared identity. America is not a blood and soil nation, but it is still a nation. My fellow citizens mean more to me than the people of France or Lichtenstein.

The internal logic of the New Religion excludes parochialism of any sort. All humans are equal, to the point where sex is even counted as a social construct. Therefore, no one can be morally better than another. Since culture is personality writ large and all personalities are equal, all cultures are equal. Anything short of embracing all cultures equally is racism. That means all the people who oppose the one-world globalism of our elites can only be driven by racism. They are evil so they must be fought at any cost.

That’s what we are seeing with Trump. He is a man who is the epitome of color blindness. He opened his first big club in Miami to all races, despite the fact the local residents opposed that idea. Those local residents were very liberal, you should note. His business associates look like the color wheel and his daughter converted to Judaism after marrying her very Jewish husband. Yet, Trump is running as a nationalist so the New Religion casts him as a racist. They even obliquely hint that he is an anti-Semite by calling him “Herr Drumpf” all the time.

The so-called conservatives in the media are just as smitten with the New Religion as their paymasters.  After all, a key part of being on contract at CNN or ABC is to be in the good graces of the fanatics that run those stations. Since the people in charge have defined racism as the worst of sins, no conservative will be caught dead associated with a racist. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of these nancy-boys more than the thought of being cast into the pit alongside guys like John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer.

Years ago, back in the early Bush years, I met Jonah Goldberg at a NRO fundraiser event. We were chatting and I mentioned Peter Brimelow and he turned pale. The look on his face was what you would expect if he just learned Godzilla was approaching. He pulled himself together enough to say, “You should never even read anything they write. It’s very bad.” and then he sprinted away like I was chasing him. It was old fashioned, gut level fear like you see in horror movies. Goldberg is now a unhinged opponent of Trump.

On the scale of certainty, the modern Progressive is quite sure he is an anti-racist. He even has that on the profile of his social media accounts. The old Buckley Right has always existed on the edge of grace, with respect to the Left so they are desperate to prove they are just as anti-racist as their brothers on the Left. It’s why they are so over-the-top in their hatred for Trump. It’s not a case of self-doubt leading to overcompensation. They fear their brothers on the Left do not believe they have cleansed themselves of racism, so their animus toward Trump is their purification ritual.

This is why guys like Erick Erickson are constantly trolling for the attention of Trump supporters on twitter and Faceberg. It’s why NRO has given itself over to anti-Trumpism to the point of self-parody. It’s also why the most over-the-top outrage about the Khan flap was from the so-called Right. These performances are not intended to convince Trump voters. They are intended to convince the Left that the official Right is fully housebroken and ready to live in the master’s house. Anti-Trumpism is a public act of piety by those who wish to be initiated in the New Religion.

The End Times

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

–Some Old White Guy

Spend any time around our nation’s ghettos and you quickly become a believer in Smart Fraction Theory. You often hear people say that the problem in the ghetto is a lack of good role models and most people take that literally, but it’s really just a polite way of saying that there are few smart people. Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others. Often, they take up positions of authority so they can prevent the dumb people from doing dumb things. Someone has to affix those stupid warning labels on products.

Another way to think of it is anti-personnel weapons. Ambush weapons are often designed to wound, not kill, enemy soldiers. A wounded soldier requires medical care. He may also require transport out of the area. Even if it does not halt the advance of the unit, care for the wounded will slow the advance and render the unit less effective. Stupid people have the same effect as wounded soldiers. It’s that they are a non-contributor to society. It’s that they are often a net negative, dragging down society, which is why Ayn Rand wanted to exterminate them.

America, like every Western country, has loads of smart, altruistic people, in addition to lots of middling people. Our Smart Fraction is large relative to places like Africa. This means we can carry a large number of low-IQ violent losers. America is the richest country on earth, despite having a population that is 13% African, because we have recruited the best and brightest from Europe over the last two centuries. Now we are skimming off the best Asians for settlement here.

That’s the theory. People in the cognitive sciences, when drunk or outside the wire, will tell you that you need an average IQ of about 94 to run anything resembling a modern economy. Pakistan with an average IQ of 84 is never going to leave the Iron Age because they lack the human capital. They have some very bright people, but not enough of them. Those smart people are overwhelmed by the teeming hordes of low-IQ hyper-violent mouth breathers from the hills, which is why those bright people flee to Europe.

Even if you reject biology as an explanation, travel a little bit and you soon figure out that there is a limit to the number of dysfunctional people a society can carry before it sinks. The debate, if there is one, is whether this can be arrested or whether technology can mitigate it. In the robot future, for example, the stupid will have their own robot custodian to keep them on the straight and narrow. Or, better training will raise up the stupid making them less stupid. Either way, there is some limit to the number of unproductive a society can carry and everyone gets it. People have always known this.

This long wind up is not in support of sterilizing Hillary Clinton voters, even though that would be a good idea. This is a post about the Zika Virus and similar plagues. What if something like Zika gets lose in the West and dramatically increases the number of pinheads? What if the smart, fearing they may birth a pinhead, further reduce their fertility? It would not take but a generation or two to significantly alter the cognitive profile of society. Further, this weakening of the West would reduce the global carry capacity.

When we think of the collapse of civilization, it is always nuclear war, economic collapse or the zombie apocalypse. What if it happens slower? Some new virus increases the number of unproductive, crazy and violent to the point where they begin to drag down society as a whole. The elites will withdraw behind their walls, but that does not change the facts on the ground. The West would eventually reach the point where it could no longer hold back the barbarian tide. This cascading effect would further reduce global carrying capacity.

It is easy to forget that those billion or so sub-Saharan Africans depend on food and medicine from the West. If that flow stops, they are instantly past their Malthusian limit and you get some combination of mass starvation, Hobbesian violence and mass migration out of Africa. The same is true of the Middle East. Even South America, which has made great strides in food production, still depends on a strong West to remain stable. Just look at Brazil if you want to see how fragile these countries are under the skin.

Here’s another thought. When scarcity was real, people, even the poorest, especially the poorest, had little sentimentality toward the weak. They could not afford to have sentimentality. Newborns with defects were euthanized. The old we left to die. The sick were put out of their misery. It’s a ghastly thing for modern, post-scarcity, humans to contemplate, but it was a necessary reality for most of human history. What if some disease like Zika spreads, resulting in a swelling population of pinheads?

I’m not making any predictions on this. Maybe humanity would quickly respond. Maybe we have lost the capacity to survive when facing real scarcity. There is no way to know. It’s hard to imagine a society that celebrates grief and victim-hood quickly shifting to cold-blooded realism, but maybe nature finds a way. Reality is, after all, that thing that never goes away when you stop believing in it. The reality of life is survival trumps everything, even familial love. Still, one has to wonder if the post-scarcity world is a trap of our own design.