Monthly Archives: June 2017

Tactics and Money

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Social movements go through phases, depending upon their scale and success at interrupting the prevailing order. If ten people become convinced that devil worship is critical to the survival of mankind, no one will notice until they start sacrificing goats in public. If ten million people take up this idea, then it is different. The movement has to learn to work within the prevailing order, then learn how to alter the prevailing order by infiltration and coercion. Tactics become as important as ideology.

The alt-right, Identitarianism, new right, or whatever you prefer to call the growing dissenter movement that has grown up the last few years, is reaching a point where the people in charge think something must be done. The sacking by Breitbart of Katie McHugh at the behest of a neocon mob looks like an orchestrated hit. There is a secret mailing list for neocon pundits in the media and all of their known members were immediately on-line celebrating, so the scheme was probably hatched by them.

The neocons are putting enormous pressure on their “friends” at Breitbart to abandon Trump and purge their ranks of anyone outside the orthodoxy. Back in the election, the odious carbuncle John Podhoretz accused Brietbart editor Joel Pollack of not being authentically Jewish due to his Trump support. Imagine members of your church threatening to ex-communicate you over your voting habits. Then there are the threats to staffers and advertisers. If they can’t kill the message, they will kill the messengers.

The point of this is that tactics are important. Katie McHugh is a nobody in the grand scheme of things, but her corpse on the sidewalk sends the same message as the Seth Rich bike rack outside DNC headquarters. As the Chinese say, you kill some chickens to scare the monkeys. You can be sure that people inside Breitbart are now working on their resumes and ready to rat on their friends in order to find a safe landing spot. It is the same tactic the Feds are using to fix the leak problem. Jail a nobody and the somebodies notice.

As they say in the crime business, it is all fun and games until the bodies start to drop on your side. That means the good guys better start to learn how to use the rules to their advantage. They are entering into the phase of the game where tactics matter as much, if not more than, ideology. They’ve picked the fight and now it is time to fight. In the context of this culture war, it means waking up every day thinking about how to ruin someone on the other team. It means turning the weight of the orthodoxy against itself.

For instance, when the mentally disturbed woman harassed Richard Spencer at his gym, he made the blunder of not looking for a way to turn this into a weapon. His first move should have been to call the cops on her. Then he should have insisted on filing a report. Then he should have gone to court seeking a restraining order. In other words, he should have used her enormous weight against her. Even if the court declined to grant him the order, he would have had a great chance to get it, the message would have been sent.

Similarly, the habit of Progs to use campaigns against people in order to cause financial harm should be met with legal action. Tortious interference is when one person intentionally damages someone else’s contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm. A phony e-mall campaign, that is intended to intimidate a hotel, for example, from hosting a VDare event, is precisely the sort of thing that should be met with a lawsuit. Worst case is you get it out into the open, where the rats can’t hide.

There’s also the use of public accommodation lawsuits. The Left used Title II of the Civil Rights Act to gut free association. A clever lawyer could use the same law that forces your restaurant to serve ISIS sympathizers, to force Facebook into letting the alt-right have their own page. It would be a tough case to make, but it could be made with the right plaintiff. That’s how lawfare works. The point is to de-legitimize the rules and laws, but also to force the other side to live by their own moral code.

These efforts take money, of course, just as the efforts to build up alternative media require funding. That’s where the dissidents are making the most progress. WeSearchr is still trying to find its footing, but it has worked well as a proof of concept for fund raising outside the orthodoxy. The new site Counter.Fund is a very creative idea that could turn out to be a viable alternative to the establishment crowdfunding sites. By being explicitly ideological and open about its business model, it makes supporting it feel important.

Mass movements of any type have certain thresholds they must pass in order to become credible threats to the prevailing orthodoxy. If you’re building a religion, you better be provocative and you have to live off the land, so to speak. If you are building a political party, it is about working the election laws and getting your message out to a broader audience. Put another way, you have to demonstrate tactical savvy and the ability to finance your war against your opponents. Otherwise, people are reluctant to join.

Whatever your preferred term is for the brewing rebellion among the Dirt People, they have weathered the first punch from the Cloud People. The dismissive name calling that was a feature of Progressive commentary, has given way to attacks on the people on the front lines of the fight. The next step is to start going on offense using the rules against the establishment. That means coordination and that means money. There are some good signs so far, but the Dirt People are still a long way from being a credible threat.

Remember, support your local Dirt Person.

Iceland

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Iceland is one of the weirdest places on earth. In fact, it may be the weirdest, at least that is what many Icelanders will tell you. Some of their weirdness is made up for the tourists, but some of it is made up for their own entertainment. The belief in elves and “hidden people” seems to be mostly for local amusement. The Icelandic Phallological Museum, on the other hand, is harder, so to speak, to explain. But, when you live on a volcanic rock in the North Atlantic, indulging in weirdness is probably to be expected.

The little island republic came to world attention back in the financial collapse when they went bankrupt. Iceland had managed to become a hedge fund with a fishing village attached to it. Michael Lewis wrote a fascinating and humorous piece on them back in 2009. When I was over there last summer, I mentioned this to locals a few times and they had never heard of it. When I mentioned some of the colorful anecdotes from it, they laughed at me like I was an idiot, so Lewis may have been liberal with the truth.

In addition to the Dungeons & Dragons vibe to the place, Iceland is interesting for biological reasons. It is a small and extremely homogeneous population located on an isolated island. That means it makes for a good place to tease out things about the human genome. The genetics company deCode is located in Reykjavik and has been doing a lot of interesting work for decades. The willingness of the population to participate in this research makes it a great laboratory for this type of work.

Another topic of interest is how the people have organized themselves over the last 1,000 years since settlement. Unlike most places on earth, human settlement on the island is very recent and it has been written down. We can only guess about the waves of humans that settled in the Ruhr Valley or along the Thames, but we have written records about who settled Iceland and how they developed their society. It is, in this regard, an interesting anthropological study.

A Norwegian chieftain named Ingólfur Arnarson is usually considered to have been the first permanent settler in Iceland. His legend says he threw two carved pillars overboard as he neared the island, vowing to settle wherever they landed. He then sailed along the coast until the pillars were found. There he settled with his family around 874 and named the place Reykjavík, which means “Bay of Smokes” due to the geothermal steam rising from the earth. As is always the case, historians are not sure if this entirely true.

Eventually, Ingólfur was followed by other Norse chieftains, who brought their families and slaves, settling all the inhabitable areas of the island in the next decades. The Chieftains were Norwegian, while their slaves were Irish and Scottish, according to the Icelandic sagas and Landnámabók, which is a written history of the settlement. This tracks with the findings of modern genetics. That’s what makes Iceland so useful, We have written records and archaeological findings, that are validated by genetic data.

There are two theories for why the Norse fled Norway and settled on a volcanic rock in the middle of the North Atlantic. Legend says it was due to people fleeing the harsh rule of the Norwegian king Harald the Fair-haired. Norway was undergoing a consolidation of power under one powerful family and the losers were heading off for new lands. It is also possible that the western fjords of Norway were simply overcrowded in this period. The general theory for the rise of the Vikings is simple over population.

Once there was enough people to farm the land and create an economy, they set about organizing themselves. In 930, the ruling chiefs established an assembly called the Alþingi that convened each summer. The representative chieftains made laws, settled disputes and appointed juries to judge lawsuits. Because writing down laws could lead to the use of force to interfere with an individual or individual’s property, the laws were instead memorized by an elected Lawspeaker until the next assembly.

Since there was no central executive power, it meant the laws were enforced by the people on an ad hoc basis. A land dispute, for example, would require hiring some third party to act as the judge. Violence against people or property would require the people temporarily banding together to address the problem. This is the sort of arrangement that results in blood-feuds. Consequently,  the writers of the Icelanders´ sagas had plenty of material. Trial by combat was a real thing when it came to disputes.

Iceland did pretty well into the 13th century when the growing power of a few families led to a break down in the system. Rather than adjudicate disputes the old fashioned way, for example, it was easier to go to the head of one of the powerful families for relief. Inevitably, the ruling families began to resolved things, like land disputes, in a way that benefited them over other rival families. This led to other powerful families doing the same in order to check the power of their rivals and soon Iceland was dominated by a few chieftains.

The start of the 13th century known by the very cool name Sturlungaöld, which means “The Age of the Sturlungs.” Sturla Þórðarson and his sons were one of two clans waging war for domination of the the island. This clan eventually won the support of the king of Norway who was looking to exploit the conflict. Sturla Sighvatsson became a vassal of Haakon IV of Norway in 1235, thus allowing the Norwegian king to exercise authority over the island, by backing the Sturlungs against their rivals.

In 1262 Iceland signed the Old Covenant establishing a union with the Norwegian monarchy. It was a nice run as a transactional society, but they ran into the problem of how to deal with inequality once their society was able to amass excess wealth. The rich were not satisfied with being rich, they also wanted power, which means authority over others. It is the natural human impulse and the ad hoc system of governance was unable to respond to this internal challenge. The result was domination by a few.

Of course, they also had the problem of how to deal with powerful neighbors looking to dominate the island. Norway could use a combination of force and political meddling to create the sort of conditions they could exploit. An iron law of the human condition, and of nature, is that the strong come to dominate the weak. In the case of Iceland, Norway was the strong neighbor determined to dominate the island. They were not going to be talked out of it so Iceland eventually fell under her dominion.

Free Speech and Other Stuff

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I was one of the early users of Gab, the open alternative to Twitter, started by a renegade programmer named Andrew Torba. Whether or not Torba is alt-right or simply a normal male sick of the ritualized nonsense that dominates social media is debatable. He’s a Trump supporter, but that does not make him alt-right. He was part of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley “seed accelerator” that helps young startup professionals. He was evicted from the club for being an unabashed Trump supporter and not playing nice with others.

That last bit was his mortal sin. In the managerial class, “being nice” has been weaponized, so that anything that contradicts the tenets of the faith is classified as threatening and harassment.  This allows the most sensitive, almost always women, to function as a canaries in the coal mine. When they begin to cry, it means someone is saying unapproved things and it is all hands on deck to root out the heretic. It’s not an accident that most of the speech enforcers on social media are women.

Anyway, Torba started Gab as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter. I put that in quotes because there is no such thing as free speech. There are always some rules. It’s like censorship. The state will always suppress subversive or revolutionary speech. The public will demand limits on speech that violates taboos. Similarly, Gab bans certain speech like child porn and criminal conspiracies. Otherwise, the goal of the enterprise is to provide an open platform for users to speak freely about their stuff.

Gab is an important experiment for a couple of reasons. One is that it is subtly demonstrating a truth about so-called free speech. That is, you cannot have free speech without freedom of association. Twitter, as the only short chat platform, could justify their crackdowns on users by claiming that other users were upset. In other words, the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, so they started policing what people posted on their platform. Coincidentally, the crackdown broke along predictable ideological lines.

The mere existence of an alternative means that users now have a choice. They can pick the ideological conformity of Twitter and its legion of SJW hall monitors or they can go out to the wild west of Gab. It’s easy to see where this is going. The sort of people who write blogs like this one are on Gab, while the people who fear being ostracized by the good thinkers will stay on Twitter and obey the rules. The result is a perfect example of how free association solves the problem of free speech and removes the need to police it.

The other important thing to watch is how the great blob that is the mass media responds to what it can only view as a threat. The evolution of social media was pitched as an organic, ground up communication medium free from corporate control. That was also the promise of the internet in the early days. Whether it was by design or by serendipity, Facebook and Twitter came to dominate the internet and become megaphones for the managerial state. Now they are trying to be enforcers for the managerial state.

It is not an accident that Facebook is heavy into being the comment platform for establishment media companies. Disqus, which is more open, resulted in a lot of negative commentary, so the big media companies partnered with Facebook to clamp down on dissent. It’s also not an accident that Facebook roots around in your e-mail and browser cache to spy on you. Facebook imagines a day when it is your permanent record, like the one school principles used to swear they had in their desks for each student.

Obviously, the great plans of the social media giants and their managerial class partners are not going to work very well if there are a bunch of alternatives sprouting up. Gab is off to a surprisingly strong start so far, but they are a long way from challenging Twitter, at least in terms of users and social impact. Taking on a Facebook or YouTube is orders of magnitude more difficult. Still, avalanches start with one snowflake so the early success of Gab has to be worrisome to the big social media companies.

Taken together, it could mean the managerial state is vulnerable to its own success. By that I mean the system that makes for rapid technological progress in the business of controlling and disseminating information, may make it very easy for rivals to spring up from within its ranks. The technology at the root of Facebook and Twitter is not exactly ground breaking. In fact, it is fairly crude. The edge for both companies is that they had the resources to scale up. If scale gets cheap, then anyone can scale up too.

Alternatively, what we could be seeing is the evolution of a way to resolve the conflict between the rise of tribalism and the spread of the supra-national custodial state. Big social media platforms will be the safe space that most people crave, while the tribalists will have their smaller silos out on the fringe. The folks who like their news and information with a healthy dose of instruction will get what they need, while the people convinced they are taking the red pill will have alternatives to indulge their needs.

It’s impossible to know how this unfolds. Gab could be a flash in the pan and not last more than a year. Or, it could be the butterfly flapping its wings that sets off a chain of events resulting in a great social hurricane. At the minimum, it is an excellent proof of the basic concept that has eluded us since the 1960’s. That is, free association is the key to maintaining civil liberties like free speech and maintaining social harmony. Once free association is removed, you have a prison and there are no peaceful harmonious prisons.

Barren Cat Lady

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The above is the speech from British Prime Minister Barren Cat Lady after the latest attack by Muslims in Britain. Like all modern political speeches, hers was vapid and stupid in ways that suggest the people who wrote it, and the Prime Minister herself, are suffering from brain damage. The best part of the speech was the airy and frivolous platitudes about the true nature of Islam. Funny how our pols are now all experts on Islam.

It is only five minutes long, but it is tough to take so I’ll cover the key points for you. Barren Cat Lady wants everyone to know that the people responsible for importing millions of hyper-violent savages into Britain are on top of things. That’s something you never hear addressed in public by the pols of any party or the so-called news reporters allegedly charged with grilling them. No one ever asks, “why did you import these strangers into our lands?” It’s treated as if it just magically happened like a freak storm or earth quake.

Of course, someone could start asking these questions, so the Barren Cat Lady promised to ramp up policing of the Internet. No kidding. That was her first big proposal. She wants the British government to further stamp out speech on-line and she wants other countries to stamp out free expression in their countries as well. When your first response to an attack by foreign invaders is to crack down on your own citizens, it is not unreasonable to wonder who Barren Cat Lady is blaming for these attacks.

After she promise to crack down on the Internet, as if it is a thing with agency of its own, she makes noises about properly worshiping the gods of the new religion. She provides an example by informing us that the Muslims doing this are not practicing real Islam. That despite what all the Imams say and their holy books instruct, the real Islam is this wonderful thing that is going to be great for Britain. Even though the corpses are piling up, what’s important is that you don’t notice that all the perpetrators are Muslims.

Humorously, she then declares this mysterious, perverted version of Islam, that looks like all the other versions of Islam, is the great challenge of our time. She then goes on to say that “British values” of pluralistic tolerance are superior to anything offered by the preachers of hate. Well, we will find out soon enough. So far, the British people have not been able to rouse themselves from their drunken degeneracy to do anything about this challenge. The scoreboard says the Muslims are winning in a blowout, pun intended.

Probably the most laugh out loud line in the sermon, and yes, this was a sermon, was when Barren Cat Lady said that “we have to be less tolerant of extremism. And yes, that could mean some embarrassing and difficult conversations.” Embarrassing for whom is never mentioned, but we know. The reason we know is after the last Muslim attack, the one last week, the Brits went around arresting white people for saying mean things about Muslims on Faceberg. Being arrested is embarrassing, even when you’re innocent.

What was revealed by this speech is that outside of the public eye, the people in charge of Britain have no emotional or moral attachment to the British people. As far as they are concerned, the people are just a burden, whether it is the hyper-violent oogily-boogily people that arrive over the channel or the native Brits. Barren Cat Lady sees no difference between a Muslim from Pakistan and an Episcopalian for York. She just sees grasping hands demanding her time when she would much rather be elsewhere.

Prior to watching this speech, I figured that this event would get the sane Brits out to vote next week for the Tories. Labour is led by a deranged lunatic who should probably be locked away in an institution. No matter how bad the Tories have been, incompetent is better than radically deranged. Watching Barren Cat Lady, I think I’d be switching my vote and going with the black pill candidate, Burn it down. The only hope is to wipe out the people who put Barren Cat Lady in charge and then have the final battle with the crazies.

This is the same problem we face in the US. Instead of Barren Cat Lady, we have faggots fools¹ like Caitlyn Graham and Paul Ryan supposedly leading the charge against the nihilistic death cult called the American Left. Trump is the black pill, which is why so many of us voted for him, despite what it most likely meant. The only way the West has any chance of defeating the demographic and ideological challenges facing it is to first hang all of the people currently in charge. Then new leaders can emerge to lead the fight.

¹ It has been brought to my attention that otherwise respectable and sensible gay males will use the term “faggot” as insider language and they would take offense at my use of it here. In short, I was unintentionally insulting faggots by calling Paul Ryan and Caitlyn Graham that name. My sincere apology to all the faggots in the reading audience.

Is the Pope Catholic?

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There’s been a lot of commentary about Pope Francis being a commie, mostly from Official Conservatism, which now holds a puerile understanding of both communism and capitalism. Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), is a 2013 apostolic exhortation by Pope Francis that criticizes neoliberal global capitalism, among other topics. American “conservatives” took this mild critique to mean the Pope opposes the new religion of Globalism, so he must be a Marxist, because Marxists are bad.

The thing is, Catholicism has always been opposed, to some degree, to capitalism, particularly certain aspects of what we now call capitalism. The most obvious example is the opposition to usury. Every lecture on the evils of antisemitism contains some reference to the Church forbidding usury. Less well known is the Catholic Church’s embrace of localist economics and politics, in opposition to the internationalism of Soviet communism. The point being, the Church has never been a fan of global capitalism.

The criticism of the Pope on economic grounds says more about the bottomless ignorance of modern conservatism than it does the Pope or the Church. For the Church, any church for that matter, economics are downstream from theology. In fact, economic positions should only matter in so far as how they advance the particular theological points of the faith. Catholicism long attachment to the sovereign authority of the people, naturally leads it to embrace national economics over global economics.

That bit is sure to get some spergy responses from Catholics and Christians, but we’ll deal with that in the comments. The point to take away is that it is perfectly plausible for the Pope to be within Catholic doctrine and oppose the current fads in global economics and not be a communist. The fact that secular defenders of globalism are more hive minded than the clerical critics, suggests globalism has become more of an all-consuming religion than Catholicism. It is international fascism. 

Whether or not the Pope is a globalist is unimportant. What matters is whether or not he is a Catholic. Look at the response from Francis when Trump announced that he was withdrawing the US from the Paris climate deal. The Pope had heavily lobbied Trump in person on the mysteries of climate. He gave him a book pushing the apocalyptic claims of the most unhinged climate fanatics. It’s not unfair to say that the Pope bet a big chunk of the Church’s prestige on this, so naturally he was very angry at the result.

Now, the Pope had a joint presser with Trump on his home turf. Trump has been divorced a few times, has children from a variety of women. He is, by his own admission, a serial adulterer. The Church, at its core, opposes the way in which Trump has lived his life. At their meeting in Rome, the Pope could have taken the time to admonish Trump on these basic theological issues. At the minimum, he could have made the most powerful man in the world blush a bit about his lifestyle, even if he was not willing to be Thomas More.

Of course, the Pope is more than a theologian and spiritual leader. He is a politicians so it is understandable if maybe he would avoid the personal. He could have, however, weighed in on the oppression of Christians and Catholics in the US. That health care bill everyone says is a mess has provisions that compel Catholics to act in a way that contradicts their faith. That should be pretty damned high on the Pope’s list of concerns to be broached with the American President.

It’s not just a question about the Pope being Catholic, or at least prioritizing Catholic theology over his personal theology. The question is whether the Catholic Church is still Catholic. It used to be that the Church was at the forefront of social issues like abortion and homosexual marriage. Today, it is rare to hear anything from the Church on social issues. Instead, in the US at least, the Church is more concerned with maintaining their refugee rackets and defending Gaia from your lawnmower.

We are in a post-Christian world so perhaps it is inevitable that the Catholic Church would be looking around for a way to remain relevant. Attendance at Christian services continues to drop and the median age of self-identified Christians keeps going up. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to think that maybe what hurts the Catholic Church is that it has stopped being Catholic. There are a million places to hear sermons on Gaia, diversity and other Progressive fads. The Pope is just another voice in the choir.

Do They Know?

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Someone posted a comment in response to a line in this post on frats the other day. The line was “Whatever American Progressivism was in the past, it is now a nihilistic death cult.” The comment was:

I don’t disagree, but could you explain that a bit more? Are progressives even aware of this? I recognize the kind of progressive you describe. They are very helpful. And they leverage their helpfulness in order to impose their ideology, and to control the organization of which they are a part. Death in what sense? How are they not aware of their own nihilism?

Instead of addressing it in the comments, I thought it was a good topic to explore in a full blog post. In fact, I could write a book on it and maybe I am.

There are two issues at work here. One is the self-awareness, or the lack of self-awareness, we see with Progressives. We’re all used to seeing Progs preach against something they are doing to excess. Google “the opposite rule of liberalism” and see what comes up. The other issue is about agency. These tactics we see them employ to corrupt public institutions suggests a level of plotting and scheming that strains credulity. On the other hand, the pattern suggests agency. They plan their work and work their plan.

The first part is probably the easiest one. People in a cult are not sitting around saying to one another, “This is a great cult. I’m really enjoying my time as a cult member.” Similarly, no one sits down one day and says, “I think I want to join a cult.” People in a cult think the beliefs and rules of their cult are perfectly logical and rational. They provide an explanation and framework for understanding the world. People on the outside, however, see the rules and beliefs of a cult as weirdly irrational and maybe even dangerous.

The other thing about people in cults is they join from self-loathing. They hate themselves and seek to swap their hated individual identity with that of the group. It’s why they will savagely defend their group like a mother defending their young. It’s self-defense. The group is them and they are the group. Therefore, any criticism of the group, or the beliefs of the group, is the same as an attack on the member. It is why they consider criticism the same as violence. From their point of view, it is violence, violence against their identity.

As a result, they lack self-awareness. I once had a lefty friend tell me he moved to Arlington Mass for the diversity. Arlington may not be Reykjavik, but it is not diverse. That did not matter. He and his coreligionists talk about diversity the same way vegans always talk about their diet. It’s about signalling. Their revealed preferences are in direct contradiction to the chants, but that’s not their focus. Their identity is defined by their membership in the group that celebrates diversity, not about their personal decisions.

This natural unwillingness to examine their own lives is why they are are always seeking to shift the focus of all debates away from their group or their preferences and onto someone else. For example, my moonbat friend’s reaction, when I started laughing at his claims about Arlington, were met with an accusation. He accused me of being narrow minded with regards to what constitutes diversity. He was shifting the focus from him and his thing onto me. This is instinct, not agency. The Prog fears self examination.

The Progressive success at infiltrating and destroying institutions is a tougher nut to crack. The war on frats is really a proxy for the war on white men. The people who originally struck the financial deals with the frats were probably being practical. It’s later that Progs saw control of the purse strings as a tool they could use in their war on the males. Even so, how is it that the Progs have suddenly declared the white man an enemy of the faith? It does feel like it just happened, all of a sudden, as if it was planned.

The most likely answer is serendipity, which is why the Left is so successful. Progs seek safety in numbers. It’s why they will be very aggressive when they have a numerical advantage, but they will be docile and compliant when outnumbered. We all have Prog friends, who are great one on one, but they turn into something else when they are with their coreligionists. In all probability, their desire for safety is what leads them to focus on getting fellow Progs into the organization until they hit critical mass and take over.

The great puzzle of the Progressive epoch is that they have never been more than 20% of the white population, but they have dominated American life since the Civil War.  Alawites are just 12% of the Syrian population, yet they run the country. An organized and dedicated minority can punch well above its weight, if the majority is disorganized or unwilling to enforce its majority privileges. For this to happen for five generations speaks the power of fanaticism when expressed as a group behavioral trait.