The Colony

Many on the alt-right make references to Weimar Germany and the rise of the NSDAP under Hitler. The Richard Spencer wing is particularly fond of Nazi aesthetics, the haircuts being the most obvious example. Part of it, of course, is owning the insult. If they are going to be called Nazis, they may as well own it. This is a time honored way of signalling a rejection of the prevailing morality. If you are going to be called a dirty hippy, you may as well grow your beard and stop bathing. The alt-right is doing the same thing.

It goes much further than simply adopting the Nazi aesthetics, though. Richard Spencer is fond of drawing comparisons between his thing and the rise of the Nazis in Weimar Germany. He’s not alone. Ryan Landry works from the “Weimerica” motif, in his blogging and his Daily Caller posts. The popular blogger, Brett Stevens, does a lot of this too. The alt-right is not in favor of invading the Sudetenland or partitioning Poland, but they think Weimar Germany is a good analog to the modern US.

I don’t think it works, though. Germany after the Great War was exhausted in every measurable way. It was not just cultural exhaustion. That was certainly part of it, but the heart of Europe was leveled by war. By the end, civilians on both sides were lacking in the necessities of life. The economic base was destroyed. The political classes and social classes were in ruins. Not since The Thirty Years War had Europe been so completely devastated. That does not compare with modern America or even modern Europe.

The utility of such a comparison is mostly on the economic front. Modern America is not suffering from wholesale price inflation due to money printing. We are, however, suffering from asset inflation. The value of homes and businesses, particularly publicly traded companies, has skyrocketed across the West. This is showing up in home owner rates, as young people are finding it hard to buy a home. As Steve Sailer pointed out, affordable family formation is at the heart of what ails modern America.

There’s also the unfathomable public debt. It is not just public debt. Private debt is at record levels and showing no signs of cresting. In fact, it is reasonable to say the world is entirely fueled by debt now. It was the German decision to fund their war effort with debt that led to the economic catastrophe following the war. It was debt that allowed them to make one disastrous decision after another, taking on more risk in a hope of winning a final victory over the Allies, and reaping the benefits of that victory.

The critical missing ingredient, though, is the massive cost of war. America can, if she is inclined, scale back the military-industrial complex, withdraw from policing the barbarian lands and stop playing big brother to Europe. America has good options for averting disaster and no one is dictating policy to us. German after the war had nothing but bad options and the Allies were doing everything possible to maximize the suffering. The soil in which the Nazis blossomed was vastly worse than what is birthing the alt-right today.

A better analogy may be Ireland under British rule or the British Raj. The resistance movements that evolved in those countries were not the result of desperation or a political void. The British, while no one’s idea of generous colonizers, were not ruthless conquerors either. Compared to other European countries, the Brits were sensible and humane administrators. They tried to work with local elites to maintain order. More than a few Indians, for example, were sent to England to be educated and trained.

Even so, they were still foreigners and the natives, like all people, chaffed at being ruled by foreigners. It is a truth of life that most people would rather be ruled by a tyrant from their own tribe than a benevolent king from a foreign tribe.The Irish and the Indians were no different. They wanted the British gone, despite the fact that the Brits were the best thing to happen to them. These nationalists were not motivated by the chaos of cultural collapse. They were motivated by a positive love of their people and their culture.

That’s what makes these nationalist movements a better analogs for what is going on in the West. The people signing onto populist and nationalist movements are not doing so because the state has failed. Ours is not an age of economic dislocation and political chaos. No one is going hungry or being thrown into the streets. What’s motivating these populist revolts is that the people who rule over us are no longer like us. They feel like foreigners, who have no regard for local customs and traditions.

Another reason these are better analogies is the Hindus and Irish were successful, long term movements that brought with them a widespread cultural component. The Nazis, in contrast, were losers whose legacy still haunts the West to this day. Emulating the tactics and philosophy of the Nazis is a good way to follow them into the dustbin of history. It may be a fun taunt, given the nature of the people who rule over us, but in the end, cheap taunts are not going to overthrow colonial rule. Only a legitimate counter culture can do it.

Steve Bannon famously said, “If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you’re sadly mistaken.” This is a long war. The alt-right would be wise to think about how to win a long, low grade culture war. That means building up the intellectual and cultural side, while also systematically throwing sand in the gears of the colonial machine. The path to victory is to make neo-liberalism too expensive to maintain and too unappealing to support. Think Michael Collins, not Joseph Goebbels.

The Servile State

A century ago, Hilaire Belloc wrote in the The Servile State¹ that attempts to reform capitalism will lead to an economy in which the state dictates that certain people will work for others, who likewise must take care of them. Belloc called this the servile state. This is different from early arrangements in which slaves and serfs were the backbone of the economy. In those arrangements, the owner has a choice to not own slaves. It is also different from capitalism, in which everyone is politically free by law.

Belloc was a man of his age so he viewed economics through the goggles of socialism and the newly emergent industrial capitalism. In The Servile State, he was searching for an alternative to the destruction of liberty necessary with socialism and the instability inherent to capitalism. The former results in an inequality of political power, while the latter results in an inequality of material wealth. Eventually, a small number of people rule over the masses, who begin to resent their rulers, seeing them as tyrants.

What Belloc argued is that socialism is inevitably the state dictating to property holders how they can dispose of their property. The state does this either through direct ownership, or through legal requirements for the ownership and use of property. Political freedom is determined by the degree of freedom one has with regards his labor and the results of his labor.. Therefore, socialism must restrict the political liberty of citizens to the same degree that it controls property and labor of the citizens.

Capitalism puts ownership and control of property in the hands of the people. In pure capitalism or what we now call libertarianism, individuals not only control their labor and the results of their labor, they are politically free. In theory, men either labor for their own use or agree to labor for others. The state’s only purpose is to enforce contracts as all of the dealings between citizens is consensual and formalized in a contract. The appeal of capitalism, pure capitalism, is the allure of pure political freedom.

By the time Belloc was writing, it was clear that pure capitalism would inevitably result in the concentration of wealth. A small class of property owners would come to posses the bulk of the nation’s wealth. That means a class of people who were free and a class of people who were not free, because they could not own and control their own labor. This led to social instability and eventually violence. Belloc argued that attempts to reform capitalism through state action would result in something he called the Servile State.

Reforms to capitalism are always through the law. The state places limits on how the owners of property may use their property. This then leads to a negotiation between the state, which has the monopoly of force, and the property class, which has a monopoly of capital. The result is a system in which the state seeks to protect those without property by placing requirement in the capital owners. In return, the state require the masses to labor for the property class, under conditions set by the state.

The result is that the business is forced to hire people it may not wish to hire, but the state also dictates to labor how and when they can sell their labor. Put another way, the poor are forced to serve the rich, but the rich are forced to be generous to the poor, looking out for their welfare. It is a social contract enforced at the barrel of a gun. It has the inequality of capitalism and the lack of political liberty inherent in socialism. The Servile State is the worst elements of both economic systems.

Belloc could not see what was coming in the post-war era and he certainly had no idea what was coming with the technological revolution and the explosion of neo-liberal globalism. He was prescient, however, with regards to how English economic systems would evolve over time. Look around at the modern world and you see the world he described as the inevitable result of “reformed capitalism.” Today, employers hire whole teams of people who makes sure the rich and powerful follow the rules.

What’s been missing in the technological age is the other half of the equation. As the West de-industrialized, the enforcement of labor laws have fallen away. Masses of helot labor brought over from Asia into Silicon Valley, for example, worked under agreements they struck with the business owners. Tech companies love open borders as it gives them a loophole to avoid some of the constraints of the Servile State. The same is true at the unskilled end, where companies rely upon masses of labor from Latin America.

This is an untenable situation in its own right, but the coming automation of the American economy will result in an evolution of the Servile State. The Universal Basic Income is nothing more than a modern implementation of the sort of infringements on political liberty Belloc described a century ago. Property holders will be forced to care for the dispossessed and, inevitably, the state will put behavior rules on the dispossessed. The UBI will come with rules requiring the recipients to act a certain way.

You get a glimpse of this in the efforts to control political speech on-line. Social media companies get exceptions to anti-trust laws, permitting them to run monopolies. In exchange, they are tasked with policing dissent on behalf of the state. The users get “free access” to platforms like Faceberg and Twitter, just as long as they agree to the terms of service and accept discipline when they post subversive things. Imagine this system applied to the universal basic income or to access to your self-driving car.

Belloc’s alternative was something he and Chesterton called distributism. Some have argued that their economic ideas were proto-fascism, but that’s debatable. What Belloc argued for was the inverse of the Servile State. Instead of a strong central state, political authority would be distributed and diffused throughout society, while wealth concentration would be constrained locally though ad hoc arrangements and cultural institutions. The goal is to maximize liberty, while minimizing inequality.

Whether or not this is possible in the modern age is debatable. Belloc and Chesterton argued that this was the natural arrangement of Europe. They also argued that it required a strong and energetic Christian tradition. That ship has sailed in the West, but maybe it does not matter. There’s no getting around the fact that neo-liberalism may be economically stable, but it is wildly unstable culturally. The experience of Europe thus far suggests it is suicidal. How to address it may lie with globalism’s last critics.

The Z-Cast: Episode 1

Here is the debut episode of what I will call the Z-Cast, until I come up with a better name or I am chased off the internet. It is a first effort so it has all the flaws of every first effort, but you have to start somewhere. Every actor has his first role. Every surgeon has his first operation. Every hit-man has his first kill. I have a long way to go between here and good, but I’m hoping it is fun learning how to make the trip. Of course, comments and commentary are encourage.

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Alt-Bot Politics

Recently, the government has seen fit to dump a collection of hobos into my part of the ghetto. For a long time we were bum free, then one day we had four or five camping in shrubbery, behind buildings and so forth. One was completely insane, running into the street screaming at people. The others just look like men down on their luck, as we used to say. They stay out of the way and they don’t panhandle, at least as far as I can tell.

The one guy I see, on my way to and from the office, never seems to move from the clump of bushes he now calls home. It was raining today and he had an umbrella, so he could guard his camp, I suppose. The bum’s life is a mystery to me, but my hunch is the sheer boredom of it alters them psychologically, assuming they are something close to sane before they hit the streets. This one looks like a drunk to me, but that’s a guess.

Still, imagine what it must be like to wake up every day knowing you have no reason to exist. The crazy ones are probably lucky in that regard. The drunks and drug addicts sober up long enough to realize they are just extra people that have no purpose and the world has no use for them. Presumably, their addictions are what landed them on the streets, but that realization is probably what keeps them there. What’s the point?

Once in my life, I was out of work for an extended period. The career I was in had run its course so I was in need of a course correction. I had some money put away that I could use to take some time off to figure out my next move. The first month was great. I enjoyed all the things I never had time to do when working. Then it got boring and my sleep started getting weird. I realized that I was not built for retirement or extended unemployment.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not one of the “work sets you free” types. I like goofing off as much as anyone. It’s just that I need a reason to get up in the morning. I need a purpose and it does not need to be a grand purpose. Even a job stocking shelves would be enough, just as long as I know I’m part of the world. I don’t think I’m an outlier. My general impression is most people have the itch that is best scratched by having a job.

Fear of the robot revolution mostly focuses on the economics of a world without work, but there is that other side and it may be more important. Let’s pretend the robots figure out how to keep us in material goods beyond any reasonable expectation. Without some purpose, lots of people will get bored and then go a little crazy. Crazy bums are a manageable problem. Crazy bored smart people may not be manageable.

That’s the other thing about the robot revolution. It’s assumed that the laboring classes will be hit first. That may not be the case. I was talking with a friend over the holiday and he is fairly sure he will be out of a career soon. He is in the money business and much of what he does is being taken over by software. The algorithms are so good there is no need for the smart guy who trades on math, rather than emotion or experience.

It’s not just that the machines are replacing people. What automation often does is reduce the skills required of certain jobs. In the industrial age, automation replaced the skilled craftsman with a local yokel, who would work cheap. Similarly, smart experienced people in the investment game are being replaced with younger, cheaper people who will push the green button when it flashes and the red button when it flashes, like bond traders do now.

The robot revolution is not going to happen overnight, but a lot of smart people in their middle years, see the writing on the wall. Baby Boomers have not prepared adequately for their retirement, but at least they had a job until retirement. The next generation is facing a great dislocation in the second half of their prime working years. If “greedy geezers” are warping our politics, just imagine what a wave of pissed off middle-aged people will do.

We may be getting a glimpse of it with the alt-right. It’s hard not to notice that the movement is mostly young males. There are plenty Gen-X people, but they are the geezers of the movement. The irreverence and subversiveness are only partially driven by youth. There’s a healthy disdain for the culture too. The alt-right is a rejection of the modern American culture, by people who think the culture has rejected them.

As the middle-aged people begin to wonder what’s the point, many will do like the hobos at the start of this post. They will find ways to lose themselves in drugs, booze and despondency. Some will get into the sort of dissident politics we see with the alt-right, while others may even find more radical ways to find purpose in their lives. Men need a purpose, a reason to get up in the morning. If work is not it, then something else will fill the void. The robot masters may learn that idle hands do the devil’s work.

The Mid-Wife Crisis

Here’s an anecdote to consider. In my most recent travels, I was told by friends about a woman we know. She is about to leave her husband, who we also know. The two of them are in their mid-to-late-40’s and their children are teenagers. The man is just a normie, who was happy to live his live as a conventional man. His wife, in contrast, had sampled the narcotic of feminism in college. In marriage, she went from being a college feminist to being a petite bourgeoisie feminist, living in a comfortable suburb.

The women who never move past college feminism tend toward a strange hypocrisy in married life. They adopt the lifestyle of June Cleaver, but rant and rave about women’s issue to anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot. During elections, for example, they are sure that some candidate is plotting to stuff their uterus with Bibles and sew their legs shut. They also over-indulge in the artsy lifestyle. The women in question was into local theater and visual arts, aping the modern carny aesthetic.

In the case of this particular woman, it also meant embracing the latest Progressive lunacies. Her daughter declared herself a lesbian in high school and is now demanding everyone pretend she is a male. One son was put on female hormones, even though he displayed no signs of insanity. It’s child abuse, of course, but it is the latest thing for middle-aged feminist loonies. Of course, she has gone overboard into social activism, almost all of which revolves around the crotch. Feminism is mostly a crotch fetish now.

We tend to think of feminism as a young woman’s game, but the real damage done to society is by the middle-aged feminists. They are like the post-graduate drug dealers that hang around high school kids, offering them booze and drugs. Not content with having thrown their own lives away, they give meaning to their lives by helping the next generation destroy itself. That’s the modern feminist. Her singular purpose is to pass the virus onto the next generation, while simultaneously ruining the lives of her peers.

When you step back from the rhetoric, feminism has always been a tantrum against biological reality. Nature has assigned narrow roles to the sexes. Men are wired to mate as often as possible with as many females as possible. Women, in contrast, are built to select a high status male and keep him around for protection of themselves and their off-spring. The pair-bonding we see outside of sub-Saharan Africa is a delicate balance that requires a complex social structure to maintain. Feminism is a tirade against this reality.

The reason feminism may have such a strong effect on middle-aged women is a combination of biological reality and modern youth culture. Women usually start having their babies in their mid-20’s. Some wait longer, but by mid-30’s most women are done with babies. This means that middle-aged women, like the one discussed at the start, coming to the end of their biological road in their 40’s. They created life and brought it to the point where it can take care of itself, so hey no longer have an obvious role.

That’s one half. The other half and maybe the real cause of this late onset lunacy we call feminism, is youth culture. Everyone feels the cold shoulder of our youth obsessed modern societies. For the longest time, men were accused of having mid-life crises, where they would get in better physical shape, buy a sports car and maybe trade the old lady in for a younger model. This is not all wrong, Most men reading this who are over 40 know exactly what this means. You’re no longer young and it kinda sucks, but you deal with it.

Women have a much more difficult problem in our modern youth culture. Men can still get women well into their old age. All they need is money and just enough to impress a younger women. There’s a reason old rich guys have young hot wives or girlfriends. Just ask our president about that. Old guys can still make babies too. I know a few men who started having kids in their late 40’s. Their wives were in their early 30’s. Put less delicately, a man still has a reason to exist well into his old age, socially and biologically.

The middle-aged woman therefore runs out of road in her 40’s and looks around wondering why she is suddenly invisible. Young men are not interested, even if she has money. Men her age are lusting after young flesh. That’s the biology. Then there is the fact that there’s no longer an important social role for women in their middle years. In a prior age, a woman would enter these years helping her children prepare themselves for marriage and settled life. Today, those tasks are turned over to schools and pop culture.

Feminism, at least for middle-aged women, may simply be a manifestation of the mid-life crisis. These females are like wasps in fall. The queen wasp has stopped laying eggs and the males are no longer needed to gather food for the hive. So, they go a bit bonkers and that’s why every public trash barrel has a million wasps around it. They have a brief orgy of self-indulgence before they die. Middle-aged women, finding themselves with no obvious purpose, take up the mania of feminism. It is their mid-wife crisis.

Is It Time To Worry About North Korea?

News brings word that the North Koreans finally had a successful missile test, launching what some think was an ICBM, 600 miles into the sea. As is always the case with these stories, the news will be mostly wrong and the “experts” will be saying whatever pays them the most money. All that is known is that it was their most successful missile test to this point. Whether it means more is hard to know, but it could be big.

The North Koreans seem to think it is a big deal. They wheeled out a famous granny to announce the news on state TV. Professional North Korea watchers put a lot of emphasis on this sort of symbolism, but it could simply be counter-signalling. The Norks know the habits of the US media better than Americans, so you can be sure they do things like this, knowing it will trigger a predictable response from the so-called experts in the media.

Whatever the real internal thinking in Pyongyang, they are making an effort to let the world know it was a big breakthrough and they are ebullient about it. National pride is to be expected, but in the context of North Korea, their boasting is assumed to be something more than just a little flag waving. The question no one can answer is whether the boasting is for internal consumption or directed at their neighbors in Asia, including the US.

It would be good news if the Norks were simply poking a finger in the eye of the US and China by continuing on with a pointless missile program. That’s a manageable problem as it would suggest the regime is stable and coherent. There is no good result for the regime in a war with the US. If the Norks are sane and stable, then they will understand this and eventually settle for some sort of cash payment to settle down and play nice for a while.

On the other hand, if this act is aimed at internal elements, then it could suggest the regime is not stable or not acting rationally. No one really knows if Kim Jong-un is mentally stable. Many of the things he has done can be interpreted as either the result of immaturity or insanity. It is rare for a family dynasty to make it past two generations before producing a lunatic or a loser. This Kim was not the first option, so no one knows.

One indication that things may not be good inside the regime is the death of the American student, Otto Warmbier. The kid was either killed on purpose or killed by accident. If it was on purpose, it was done in such a ham-handed way to suggest the shot callers are either amateurs or careless. If it was an accident, it could mean the regime is not in full control of the state apparatus. Kim’s old man would not have made this sort of mistake.

The prior Kim would have had the show trial, but with an eye on using the hostage as a bargaining chip. A nice Jewish boy from a small town is a very good bargaining chip. In prior cases, the regime would grab a US citizen of Korean decent and then release them in a few months. The whole point of the game was usually to get someone back we had grabbed as a spy or that the South Koreans were holding for espionage.

The Warmbier case was bungled from the start and then was bungled further when they killed him in prison. No one believes it was an accident. The US is downplaying the obvious, but Trump now has a bloody shirt to wave around if things get ugly and he decides to pre-emptively attack the Norks. As Derb pointed out the other day, the US cannot tolerate anyone killing our people. Otto Warmbier must be avenged.

This is a massive blunder by the Norks, and coupled with his missile tests, it strongly suggests that either Kim is a nut or he is reckless. If he is a modern day Caligula, then he will not get better at diplomacy. He will get more provocative and unstable and eventually do something that requires action from the US. Imagine a missile test where it lands on Japan or Taiwan. That’s not too far fetched even under ideal conditions.

There is a worse possibility. The killing of Warmbier could be the result of intrigue and turmoil within the regime. These provocative tests are part of an effort by the Kim faction to assert authority over the other factions. Authoritarian regimes are always subject to factionalism and palace intrigue. Strong rulers have subtle ways of dealing with trouble makers, while weak rulers rely of ostentatious displays to intimidate threats.

The good news is that unlike the Middle East, the US has had eyes and ears on the Norks for a long time. In all probability, we have been able to monitor their internal communications for decades. There’s also the fact that the Chinese have an interest in maintaining peace on their border and keeping on good terms with Trump. As much as the swells like to call Trump an oaf, his saber rattling over trade is a great lever in this case.

There’s also the fact that Trump is not surrounded by warmongers looking for a reason to pick a fight. The provocations by the North Koreans can be ignored for now, but also dealt with by more subtle means. The Norks need access to the global banking system and that’s controlled by the US. It’s hard to sell weapons and drugs when you have to do all your dealings in cash. The Bush administration figured this out 20 years ago.

Even so, having a nuclear armed lunatic is never a good result. Even if Kim is not an Asian Caligula, general instability can be very dangerous. Regardless of the cause, the Warmbier case strongly suggests that the current regime in North Korea lacks the professionalism and skill of prior regimes. If they can bungle a simple job like grabbing a hostage and then negotiating his release, they can bungle anything.

Tribal Policing

Allegedly, an old borscht belt gag was for the straight man to describe some terrible calamity and then the comic would ask, “Yes, but is it good for the Jews?” It is a question that Jews claim was common in the early 20th century. Whether or not that is true is impossible to pin down, but the sentence does return a lot of good search results, including a few books and long form articles. It fits into the self-deprecating humor popular with American Jews. It’s a form of “owning the insult” common with ethnics 100 years ago.

Like all stereotypes, this one has some truth to it. Jews in the first half of the 20th century invested heavily in policing their ranks and inculcating this sort of attitude, with regards to politics and society. To a lesser degree, Italians, Irish, Poles and other immigrant groups did the same thing. They formed ethnic societies, had their own newspapers, encouraged the better qualities among their people and so forth. Improvement societies were not passive, either. Ethnic leaders were not afraid to shame those who did not toe the line.

Today, the only ethnic solidarity we see is with blacks and Muslims. The former is the old fashioned sort common in the last century. Blacks shamelessly vote their skin in elections and make demands based on group solidarity. Muslims seem to be following a similar route, embracing the grievance culture in order to extort benefits from society. Otherwise, the overt and positive ethnic solidarity, even among Hispanics, is not a popular thing and in the case of whites, one of the few mortal sins of our age.

It is assumed that ethnic or racial solidarity is good for struggling minorities, terrible for majorities and of no use to successful minorities. Black solidarity is encouraged, while white solidarity is forbidden. Asian solidarity is never considered, because Asians have no trouble assimilating and succeeding in modern America. Jewish solidarity, of course, is a dangerous subject. The surest way to get hurled into the void is to be thought of as something less than enthusiastic for the Jews. It’s pretty close to a forbidden subject.

Some on the alt-right see this as proof of a conspiracy by the Tribe to take over society and rule from their secret lair in Manhattan. Whether or not 2% of the population should be in charge of a big country like America is a topic worth debating, but some of what goes on with the alt-right, however, makes it sound like Jews are super-intelligent space aliens sent to enslave the goyim. Magic Jew Theory is just a nutty as Magic Dirt Theory. Even so, placing Jews outside the realm of legitimate debate is probably not good for the Jews.

The reason, is it makes self-policing nearly impossible. It is impossible to not notice that when the NeverTrump clown car comes to a stop, the guys who pile out are wearing beanies. The whole NeverTrump thing looked like a Chinese restaurant on Christmas, because all of the outspoken members were obviously Jewish. People notice these things, no matter how much you scream at them about the sin of noticing. When guys like Bret Stephens write things like this, it’s as if he is trying to elicit The Backlash™.

Fifty years ago, Jewish leaders would have put the brakes on their members going in for the sort of stuff we see from the neocons. We know this because the guys who invented neoconnery fifty year ago, explicitly rejected this stuff. Communism was bad for the Jews and a strong and free America was good for the Jews, so they signed onto Buckley’s thing and started voting Republican. In other words, worrying about what was good for the Jews resulted in Jews policing their ranks, which was good for the Jews.

Put another way, David Horowitz was probably onto something when he called out Bill Kristol as a “renegade Jew.” The final paragraph of that piece is an explicit appeal to ethnic solidarity in the service of policing the ranks. Horowitz got a lot of grief over it, but he was probably right. Trump is good for the Jews, but reigning in suicidal crackpots is even better for the Jews. The worst possible thing that could happen to Jews in America is if the other 98% think the Jews are not on “our side.”

The predictable retort to this is “How come no one ever says this about the Finns or the Irish? There are people opposed to Trump and the New Right who are not Jewish.” If the NeverTrump cult was 90% Irish, people would notice that too, but it is not and further, the Irish are not wildly over-represented in the ruling class. There is simply no getting around the fact that Jews are unique among American ethnic groups in that they have come to dominate parts of the ruling class and punch way above their weight in others.

There’s little doubt that the culture is shifting with regards to the role of Jews in America and how to discuss it. The alt-right has a lot of well known anti-Semites and the whole Nazi meme thing. The people doing the most to enable and encourage this are the cosmopolitan crackpots like Bret Stephens. They are the anti-Semites best friend as they go out of their way to prove all of their claims. If you were trying to stir up hostility to Jews, you could do a lot worse than having Bret Stephens as your poster boy.

It is not just the Right, which has always been accused of harboring impure thoughts about the Chosen People. The Left are increasingly hostile to Jewish interests. When a Jewish professor is pilloried for not groveling to blacks on his campus, it means that identity politics on the Left will exclude Jews. Democrats are shamelessly hostile to Israel and they are actively courting Muslim voters, even going so far as to try and put Keith Ellison in as chair of their party. The result of this is inevitable.

Not being a member of the Tribe, it is hard to know if a return of self-policing is possible or desirable by those in the Tribe. Jews may simply be facing a different sort of ethnic decay that ended Irish and Italian solidarity. Even so, Jews are different. Unlike other ethnic groups, Jews are wildly over represented in the ruling classes. That means they will inevitably be subject to greater scrutiny. There’s also the natural phenomenon of people mocking and resenting their betters. Exactly no one loves their boss.

It’s why ruling classes have always tried to hold themselves to higher standards. It has always been understood that the trade-off for power and status is scrutiny and public judgement. It also meant public punishment for those who failed to live up to the elevated standards. Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, stood stoically as his two sons were executed for treason in the Tarquinian conspiracy. That is very high price to pay for power, but it is what is required of those who get to rule over us.

The example of Brutus is not simply that sacrifice, often terrible sacrifice, is the price of power. It’s that sacrifice in support of the culture, in support of the common beliefs of the people, is the price of power. The unwritten contract between the rulers and the ruled is that the rulers will do what is required to uphold the cultural structures that define the people, as they are the foundation upon which the elite stand. Brutus could not be Brutus, unless he and his blood were subject to the rules of the Republic.

America has been more than good for the Jews. It has been the greatest place, in the history of man, for the Chosen People. So good, in fact, that the country deserves a place next to Cyrus the Great in the pantheon of non-Jewish heroes of the Jewish people. As a result, Jews have a special obligation to the country. Like ruling elites everywhere, in all times, they have a duty to defend the culture that is the foundation of their status. That means sacrifice. A little self-policing is not too much to ask. It would be good for the Jews.

Diary: June 2017

I’m shamelessly ripping off John Derbyshire here with a monthly diary feature. I’ve been doing semi-regular updates on readership and so forth, but a monthly diary type post seems to make more sense. I can then cover blog related stuff and retread any old ground that needs retreading. With apologies to Derb and anyone else doing the monthly diary bit, I will be doing a monthly diary post going forward…

Like many Americans, I have been doing some traveling. Around here, the schools are done by mid-June so it is the start of vacation season. When I was a kid, Memorial Day was the start of summer. School ended that week and you had the three day holiday. For reasons I have no interest in knowing, schools now stay in session longer and they start earlier. As a result, summer holiday time is packed into the period between mid-June and the end of July. Independence Day is becoming the start of summer.

I’m sure there are statistics available somewhere to test if the result of this creeping school calendar has had some impact on travel in the high season. My experience is that even mid-week travel in July feels like the rush before Thanksgiving or Christmas. I was in Logan Airport and I stood for 90 minutes in line waiting for a rental car. They had plenty of cars, just not enough terminals to process everyone in a timely fashion and their customer service staff is clearly coming from the Epsilon Minus sub-class.

As is often the case, travel provides lessons about our current age. The fellow who waited on me at the Avis counter, for example, was either suffering from a mental illness or he was on drugs. He was in need of a bath and his clothes needed laundering. The other agents were in various states of disrepair. Most were foreigners, judging by the names I could read. My guess, given the ages, is that Avis is gaming the J1 visa program to fill the jobs the unemployed locals refuse to take, at the wages Avis wants to pay.

The argument from libertarian guy is that this results in cheaper stuff. After all, if Avis has to pay higher wages to their people and train them to treat the customers in a decent fashion, they would have to charge more for rental cars. Left out of the discussion is the ever growing tax burden needed to pay for the unemployed locals, as well the social cost of lots of people not working. What’s also left out is the cost of me standing in line for 90 minutes and having to deal with a dirty lunatic. Quality of life counts too…

Another lesson of travel comes from airports. I’ve been in a lot of airports and I have posted about them a bunch of times. Airports are a good way to explain to normal people how central planning must always fail. These schemes always succumb to the limitations of the planners.  Airports are a good example of it. Similarly, the airport is a good place to explain why libertarianism can never scale up, unless you plan to genocide the unreliable elements. Otherwise, the stupid, lazy and selfish will collapse a libertarian system…

Of course, travel is about seeing different places and people. One of the more bizarre contradictions of the blank slate types is they will celebrate the crap out of human diversity, when it comes to travel. They make no effort to hide the fact that people in different places have very different ideas about how to organize themselves. Yet, this reality never occurs to them when the topic is immigration. That’s because they never really experience diversity. They are insulated from it so they know it only superficially.

Anyway, human variety is something you can see within our own lands. It has been a while since I was in New England. As a result, I forgot that the women are crazy and the men are mostly pussies. Not everyone, but the ratio of crazy cat ladies to normal women is jarring. I listened to two women coo over a handful of savages being led through the airport, by their minders from a church group. My bet is it was a church like this one, that is run by feminist nutters and useless homosexuals.

The two cat ladies were carrying on like a couple teenage girls, who just saw members of the current boy band. That’s the thing about feminism. It infantilizes the adherent. Modern feminists have the maturity of teenagers. Feminism is just a way for homely girls to get the attention of boys, so I guess it makes sense at some level. Regardless, it should never be tolerated so I leaned over and said to the two hens, “One day, their kids will be throwing your kids off a roof.” They were poleaxed. I went to get a drink…

As far as plans for the site and other ventures, I’m plotting a refresh of the site for a weekend in July. Nothing crazy, just a little sprucing up to keep things current. Summer is the slowest time, traffic-wise for the site. This is something I’ve actually measured in other areas of the internet. Like with TV viewing, summer drops web traffic to these sorts of sites by up to 25%. That means if I break something while fiddling with the site, fewer people will give me crap about it…

I am working on doing a weekly podcast. Often, the best way to learn new things is to jump right into them and start figuring it out. If you go back to the first few months of this blog, you’ll see it was not very good and nothing like what I’m doing today. I just tried a bunch of stuff until I figured out what worked for me. I’m not doing that with the podcast venture, because I really don’t know anything about the audio stuff, so I need to get a baseline of technical knowledge before jumping into it.

There’s a technical aspect to producing audio that you have to get close to right or the product is worthless. This podcast with Greg Cochran is a good example. Greg sounds like he is on the wrong side of the room from the mic. He is a brilliant and interesting guy, but straining to hear him ruins the whole thing. I have ruined enough lives with the very rare typo in my posts, I don’t need to destroy the audiophile community by posting crappy audio of myself.

To that end I purchased a modestly priced microphone off Amazon. That’s right, I used Amazon and not the local microphone dealer. Actually, I went to the local music instrument store and they only deal in the stuff used on stage. The guy told me to buy a cheap one on Amazon. I’m using Audacity for recording myself, which is easy to use at first, but I have to fiddle with the tuning. The trial run was a bit weird sounding so I have to figure out how to clean that up. With a little luck, version 1.0 will be out next week.

As far as content, I’m going to start with a week in review sort of format. Lots of comments to posts warrant a fuller response than I tend to give so that’s a good place to start. There are tangentially related news items that would not make for a full post, but worth a few minutes discussion. Since I don’t do a lot of political posting, I thought maybe a podcast would be a good place to run my yap about what the pols are doing in the Imperial Capital. That’s enough to start and we’ll see how it goes from there.

I’m not sure I have the voice and speaking style to make it work, but I’m a terrible judge of these things. Mark Levin and Michael Savage have millions of listeners, despite their endless shrieking and yelling. Levin’s voice can break glass when he gets himself wound up. The whole radio guy voice stuff could just be nonsense. Alternatively, the break down of control may have changed public standards. With so many different voices now doing audio and video, the range of acceptable now covers just about everyone…

As far as numbers, the traffic has declined, as it always does this time of year. The estimate on unique monthly visitors is at 90K now, about 10% off the peak. It will drop a further in July and then slowly tick back up as we head into fall. Strangely, March has always been the highest traffic month. I have no explanation for it. It could be a coincidence or maybe humans become more active in the late winter and early spring in anticipation of the arrival of spring.

The number one post in terms of traffic is the page My Theory of Everything. In fact, I still get comments on those posts. Number two is this one. I have no answer for why, but it still gets passed around quite a bit. Another top-10 favorite this one. I should probably compile a greatest hits page or maybe put together an ebook of them. I’m also informed that I’m closing in on one million Google referrals, which means one million times Google as sent someone to this site. I have no idea if that is a lot, but I’ll put on my goriller mindset and say it is yuuuggggge! In all seriousness, for a one man blog it probably is a lot…